Faith and reason: two wings

St. John Paul II opened his 1998 encyclical Fides et Ratio with an image many students remember: “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.” He continued: “God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself.”

The image explains why Catholic colleges have traditionally required philosophy as well as theology. Philosophy trains reason to ask the largest questions: what is real, what is good, what a human person is. Theology receives what God has revealed and reflects on it with the same rigor. A bird with one wing doesn’t fly far.

What this means when you compare colleges

• Look at how many philosophy and theology courses every student takes, not only majors.
• Ask whether the core curriculum is designed to connect disciplines, so that science, literature, and ethics talk to one another.
• Ask how professors in other fields relate their subjects to questions of meaning and faith.

Our Theology and Core Curriculum pillar records exactly these things from each college’s own catalog. See any Catholic college’s scorecard for the evidence.