College Updates Crest, Adopts Motto: “Faith Seeking Understanding”

Over the years, Thomas Aquinas College has used various slogans to highlight particular facets of its unique program and mission. Using phrases such as “The True, the Good, and the Beautiful,” “Forming Leaders in the Service of the Truth,” and “Truth Matters” in its promotional materials, it has sought to convey certain aspects of the College’s unique academic program, its alumni, and its intellectual community. With the addition of the New England campus in August, the College had reason to revise its official crest and, as a result, it has adopted — for the first time — a motto.

Unlike an advertising slogan, which is tailored to a particular audience and time, a motto is a timeless expression of the essential nature of an institution. Accordingly, the College has chosen for its motto a quotation that its founders and faculty have long used to describe its program of Catholic liberal education: Fides Quaerens Intellectum, or “faith seeking understanding.” The words now appear at the bottom of the College crest, replacing “California – 1971.”

The phrase “faith seeking understanding” was coined by the medieval bishop, philosopher, and Doctor of the Church St. Anselm, whose Proslogion — an ontological argument for the existence of God — is read by the College’s students during their sophomore year. Not only does this motto attest to the profound confidence the College has in the compatibility of faith and reason, it declares succinctly the nature of the pursuit of truth under the light of faith in which the College’s students and tutors are engaged: a desire to understand more perfectly, to see, as much as is possible, what is first believed.

St. Anselm beautifully explains the desire of the Catholic thinker:

Lord, I am not trying to make my way to your height,
for my understanding is in no way equal to that,
but I do desire to understand a little of your truth
which my heart already believes and loves.

I do not seek to understand so that I can believe,
but I believe so that I may understand;
and what is more,
I believe that unless I do believe,
I shall not understand.

Here, St. Anselm claims not only that the believer seeks to understand what he holds by faith, but that his belief is itself an aid in the pursuit of the truth. In the College’s founding and governing document, A Proposal for the Fulfillment of Catholic Liberal Education, the founders state in prose what St. Anselm so poetically says. In speaking of faith as a light which, because it illumines understanding, serves as an indispensable guide in the intellectual life, they say:

Contrary to what is often assumed, liberal education does not take place in spite of or even apart from the Christian faith. Rather, the Christian student, because of his faith, can be liberally educated in the most perfect and complete way.

Says Dean John Goyette, “Faith seeking understanding — fides quaerens intellectum — is embodied in the efforts of our patron, St. Thomas Aquinas, who labored his whole life to show how the mind, illuminated by faith, could attain some understanding of the mysteries of faith.” “St. Thomas,” he adds, “more than any other Doctor of the Church, shows us how sacred theology could assume the nature and form of a science by employing philosophy as a handmaiden to theology. This science is the one most worthy to be called wisdom. It reaches its ultimate completion in the vision of God enjoyed by the blessed in heaven, where faith gives way to sight, and the desire to know Him is perfectly satisfied.”

The College’s mission is a high calling, one according to which its faculty and students strive each day to live. By pursuing the truth under the light of faith, they are fulfilling the exhortation of our first pope, St. Peter:

Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who
asks you to give the reason for the hope that is in you …
with charity and respect.” (1 Peter 3:15)

In so doing, may they be a source of encouragement and hope to all who come their way.