Are We Forming Pious Nestorians? Christology and the Catholic Curriculum

Abstract

Drawing an analogy to the 5th century heresy of Nestorianism, this paper argues that the separation of life from faith in the modern era constitutes a kind of functional Nestorianism, that negates the universality of the Christian claim and renders such a claim. The paper argues that, in their form and function, many Catholic educational institutions unwittingly adopt this functional Nestorianism by means of a structural compartmentalisation of the faith into confined spaces within the curriculum and within the institutional imagination and that in doing so, such institutions risk mirroring—at the level of educational practice—and thus perpetuating, what Pope Paul VI referred to as ‘the drama of our time’, that being, ‘the split between the Gospel and culture’. The paper concludes by offering six Christocentric principles to guide curriculum development and implementation in Catholic educational institutions.

1. Introduction

The unity of the divine and the human in the person of Jesus Christ stands at the heart of Christian orthodoxy. Formally condemned at the Council of Ephesus in A.D. 431, the heresy of Nestorianism, ascribed to the then-Patriarch of Constantinople, held that the divine and human natures was an acquired, “moral” unity and not a union of the two natures in the one Person of the Eternal Word.

In its classical theological meaning, “Nestorianism” names not merely an abstract doctrinal error but a failure to safeguard unity of the person of Jesus, the ‘one lord Jesus Christ’ (1 Cor 8:6). It is a precise Christological claim about who Christ is. Yet, as with many theological categories, it has also functioned analogically—in this way, ‘Nestorian’ can be used in an adjectival sense, diagnosing patterns of division that contradict a professed unity.

In its examination of the endeavour of Catholic education, this essay proposes just such an analogy. While not accusing contemporary Catholic educators or educational institutions of heresy, nor suggesting that such persons or institutions deny orthodox Christological doctrine, this paper argues that much contemporary Catholic education risks embodying a functional or practical Nestorianism: that is, a structural and pedagogical separation of the religious dimension of life from the broader intellectual, moral, cultural, and institutional project of education and of life as an integral whole.

The central thesis of this paper is this: while affirming orthodoxy in doctrine, many Catholic educational institutions unwittingly separate faith from life by means of a structural compartmentalisation of the faith into confined spaces within the curriculum and within the institutional imagination. In doing so, such institutions risk mirroring—at the level of educational practice—and thus perpetuating, what Pope Paul VI referred to as ‘the drama of our time’, that being, ‘the split between the Gospel and culture’ (Paul VI 1975, §20). The burden of this paper then, is not primarily one of doctrinal correction, but to propose a unity of Christological and metaphysical vision and a subsequent mode of curricular integration, so that whether Catholic education can embody in its intellectual and communal life the unity it professes in its creed.

Following the Christological analogy, we will proceed by way of an examination of the orthodox doctrine concerning the one lord Jesus Christ vis-à-vis the doctrine of Nestorius before analysing the nature of modern culture which, in its dominant liberal form can be said, following Aaron Riches, to be ‘broadly “Nestorian” if we take the term Nestorian as descriptive of the normative mode of conceiving the relation of unity and difference, transcendence and immanence, God and the world’ (Riches 2016, pp. 11–13). We will then turn our attention to the Catholic Church’s official pronouncements concerning the nature of Catholic education with respect to the overall goal of ordering ‘the whole of human culture to the news of salvation so that the knowledge the students gradually acquire of the world, life and man is illumined by faith’ (Vatican Council II 1965a, §8).

Our efforts will not only seek so much to bring the various Christological definitions of the councils of Ephesus or of Chalcedon to bear on the problem as we identify it, but to extend the Christocentrism of the teaching of Second Vatican Council and of that as elaborated in the magisterial teaching of Pope John Paul II into our conception of the form and function of Catholic educational institutions.

2. Christological Framework: Nestorianism and Nestorian Tendencies in Modern Thought

The Christological controversy that surrounded Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople, in the fifth century has been the subject of extensive research and discussion. Theologically, Nestorius’ concern was piqued by what he considered to be a theological imprecision in the piety of the people of his Church, particularly the title that had been given to the Blessed Virgin, that of Theotokos, Mother of God. While his concern ostensibly centred on what he saw as disproportionate honour being given to the Virgin as such, his apprehension was primarily focussed on the understanding of the person of Jesus Christ that informed that title which he considered to be erroneous as it pertained to the nature of the divinity. According to Nestorius and those who followed him, the strict interpretation of the doctrine of divine simplicity and of divine impassibility, negated any notion of the Second Person of the Trinity undergoing change, and thus the having of an earthly mother was considered by him to not be fitting to the dignity of the divine. For Nestorius, rather than Theotokos, a more adequate title for the Virgin would have been Christotokos. It is precisely here that we see the erroneous conception of the person of Jesus at play, and where we see the importance of the proclamation of Mary as Theotokos at the Council of Ephesus (A.D. 451) (Denzinger et al. 2012, §251).

In reacting to Apollinarian conceptions of the unity (and confusion) of the divine and human in the person of Jesus, Nestorius introduced what is effectively a dualistic Christology, conceiving of a Christ whose divinity is not adequately integrated into his humanity and vice versa. Of course, as Thomas Joseph White O.P. notes, ‘“Nestorianism” as a doctrinal idea is inherently complex.’ And while, ‘there exists a tendency in modern Christology that is of a decidedly Nestorian character’ (White 2015, p. 76), our purposes in this essay are not to tease out these complexities, but to demonstrate the analogy between this dis-integrated understanding of the God-man Jesus Christ and the dis-integrated manner in which the gospel and culture are understood and lived in the contemporary Western cultures, even in contexts which are putatively coloured by a sincerely held faith such as Catholic schools and institutions of higher education. Use of this concept in this manner is appropriate because, as White notes, ‘it [“Nestorianism”] has a theoretical content that subsists independently of the original ideas of Nestorius and is employed by the church for the purpose of her own doctrinal self-definition’ (White 2015, p. 76).

In his important and provocative work, Ecce Homo: On the Divine Unity of Christ, Aaron Riches also argues that the theological pattern of division and separation which characterises Nestorius’ doctrine is unconsciously reproduced in modern Christological discourse. He demonstrates the affinity between Nestorius’ doctrine, ably engaged by St Cyril of Alexandria and refuted at the council of Ephesus in A.D. 431, and a raft of contemporary dualisms which effectively separate divinity from humanity, grace or supernature from nature, faith from reason, and within theology proper separate a “God centred” Christology “from above”, from ‘a variety of “human centred” Christologies “from below”’ (Riches 2016, p. 49). All of these dualisms operate according to a Nestorian logic, or what Riches labels at times a ‘quasi-Nestorian’ or ‘Theodorian tendency’ (referring to Theodore of Mopsuestia, Nestorius’ teacher) (Riches 2016)1. As Riches describes it, this is a logic or a tendency that effectively externalises relations which has become paradigmatic, not only in Christology textbooks, but more broadly in modern liberal cultures, manifesting itself in an ontological atomism and an epistemological fragmentism.

In his own study of contemporary modern culture, particularly in its dominant liberal form, David L. Schindler speaks of this externalisation of relations and fragmentation as a key or perhaps the defining aspect of the dominant logic of modern culture. Schindler articulates his conception of this using the notion of what he refers to as the ‘principle of simple identity.’ As he describes it, this is the ‘principle according to which x, whatever be the content of x, has its identity in itself, apart from or outside of relation to non-x… the relation of x to non-x is first external; x and non-x are first turned in on themselves, closed to each other’ (Schindler 1990a, pp. 172–73; See also Schindler 2008). As it operates in the modern conception of reality, ‘the assumption (however tacit) of the principle of simple identity leads to patterns of thought marked by extroversion (turning outward, staying on the surface), power, domination, and fragmentation’ (Schindler 1990a, p. 173). What we have been referring to as a Nestorian logic or tendency is a simplistic binary mode of thought where identity and difference are considered to be mutually exclusive and contradictory. According to Schindler, ‘if x is truly distinct from y, x must just so far share nothing in common with y’ (Schindler 2008, p. 411; Also cited in Riches 2016, p. 49). It is noteworthy for the present study that this kind of reasoning is inimical to any use of analogy. Within this understanding of reality any distinction between concepts or beings must always and in every instance be a complete and thorough separation, and any unity must be always and in every instance a conflation, or erasure of difference—there can be no mutual indwelling.

Schindler’s academic project was one which was characterised by efforts to articulate the particular aspects of contemporary culture which are inimical to the realisation of the full force of the Gospel. This saw him characterising the fragmentary, and in his terms mechanistic, and technological logic of being—which he saw as paradigmatic of modern liberal cultures—as a form of ‘semi’, or ‘ontological Pelagianism’. It is worth noting here that Schindler is not arguing that this is a strict theological Pelagianism, in the sense of the heresy condemned at Carthage in A.D. 418, or again Ephesus in A.D. 431. What he describes was:

an ontology or philosophy or worldview that, however unintentionally, assigns to man the wrong sense of priority in actualizing his relation to God that most properly characterizes his meaning as a creature, and thereby assigns to man the wrong sense also of what it means to be a creature and to act in and by himself and hence in a legitimately autonomous way (iusta autonomia)

(Schindler 2011a, p. 246).

Schindler spoke in more depth on this idea in an interview given to the Slovenian edition of the Journal Communio in 1994, when he said that ‘a Pelagian always has a Nestorian savior—a savior, that is, whose humanity is not adequately integrated into his divinity, and whose mother therefore is not the theotokos.’ (Schindler forthcoming; See also Williams 1939, p. 69). Here he was explicitly pointing to an insight gleaned from his reading of the Inkling, Charles Williams who, in his 1939 book The Descent of the Dove was himself quoting the observation by 19th century Anglican churchman Charles Gore whose insight on this matter is instructive.He wrote that,

inadequate conceptions of Christ’s Person go hand in hand with inadequate conceptions of what human nature wants. The Nestorian conception of Christ as practically one individual man to whom God gradually united Himself on account of his excellence—the conception of a man gradually deified—qualifies Christ for being an example of what a man can do, and into what wonderful union with God he can be assumed if he is holy enough; but Christ remains one Man among many, shut in within the limits of a single human personality, and influencing man only from outside. He can be a Redeemer of man if man can be saved from outside by bright example, but not otherwise. The Nestorian Christ is logically associated with the Pelagian man… The Nestorian Christ is the fitting saviour of the Pelagian man.

(Gore 1883, p. 298)

This link between Pelagian anthropology and Nestorian Christology and logic both theologically and historically was picked up by Riches and detailed in his book (Riches 2016, pp. 45–49). The focus of the present study seeks to draw the analogy between the Nestorian tendency in Catholic Christology to modern culture generally, and more specifically to the contemporary Catholic educational enterprise. It is to Catholic education then, that we now turn our attention.

3. καθόλου (According to the Whole): Ideal of Catholic Education

A key task of Catholic education is the enculturation of the students into the life of faith. The Second Vatican Council’s declaration on Christian education, Gravissimum educationis teaches that the Catholic educational institution is thus ‘to order the whole of human culture to the news of salvation so that the knowledge the students gradually acquire of the world, life and man is illumined by faith’ (Vatican Council II 1965a, §8). This vision of reality which should guide Catholic educational institutions and teachers, and which students are to be formed in is what Pope Leo XIV refers to as the ‘cosmology of Christian paideia’ (Leo XIV 2025, §1.2). Such a view recognises that there is no thing outside of creation, and thus no thing that can be understood without reference to the Trinitarian God who creates and who holds creation in existence.2

Since the promulgation of Gravissimum educationis in 1965 each subsequent pope, along with the relevant ecclesial body, the (Sacred) Congregation—now Dicastery—for Catholic Education have issued a number of statements, addresses, as well as official documents that have helped clarify certain aspects of the vision and purpose of Catholic education.3 These documents address a wide variety of issues, including everything from affirming a universal ‘right’ to education, through to the role of education and of educational institutions in promoting the common good in society and across the world. But while these documents do pay due attention to the ‘Catholic culture’ of the educational institution, be it a primary or secondary school, or tertiary institution, much of the academic discourse that has been spawned or directed by these interventions has focussed on the nature and purpose of this catechesis, or ‘religious education’ or ‘instruction’, and particularly its meaning and purpose in increasingly pluralised and secularised contexts.

The focus on this classroom discipline of ‘religious education/instruction’ (R.E.) has led many to neglect the other crucial aspects of the Catholic educational project. What becomes evident in any examination of the functioning of Catholic education, specifically in the Western anglophone context, is that the focus on excellence and orthodoxy in this subject area has resulted in what could be argued to be a widespread acceptance of the Nestorian logic detailed above, insofar as R.E., as it is often called, comes to be considered as the often sole residence of the school’s Catholic faith as it pertains to matters of curriculum. To stress, this is in no way to impute accusations of guilt concerning the formal heresy of Nestorianism, but rather to demonstrate that this Nestorian logic of extroversion is evident in the functioning of these institutions.

It will be illustrative to examine a particularly prominent example of this Nestorian tendency in thought is found in the work of the tremendously influential Holy Cross Fr Theodore Hesburgh CSC, who led the University of Notre Dame, Indianna for 35 years, from 1952 to 1987. Fr Hesburgh’s clear commitment to the Church and his formidable work in building up the University of Notre Dame and Catholic higher education generally has been well documented. Upon his death in 2015, it was noted that,

the accomplishments of the Hesburgh era at Notre Dame are reflected in statistics comparing the Notre Dame of 1952, when Father Hesburgh became president, with the University he left in 1987. The annual operating budget went from $9.7 million to $176.6 million, the endowment from $9 million to $350 million, and research funding from $735,000 to $15 million. Enrolment increased from 4979 to 9600, faculty from 389 to 950, and degrees awarded annually from 1212 to 2500. The two major changes during the Hesburgh era were the transference of governance in 1967 from the Congregation of Holy Cross to a two-tiered, mixed board of lay and religious trustees and fellows, and the admission of women to the undergraduate program in 1972.

(Brown 2015)

While Hesburgh’s vision of Catholic education was admittedly focused on his context in the university, a close reading of his writings on the nature of the Catholic university particularly with respect to his understanding of university education more broadly as it was in his time betrays a particular approach to Catholic education generally that is not uncommon across the contemporary Catholic education sector to this day. In 1970, Hesburgh wrote that,

the Catholic university has too often been looked upon by many Catholics as Catholic first and university second. University is the substantive noun in this combination, and the world judges clearly enough whether or not an institution, whatever else it claim to be, is in fact a university in the commonly accepted meaning of the word. One can similarly speak of a Catholic person, but he must be a person before he can become a Catholic. Catholic here is an adjective. So, too, in the case of a Catholic university.

(Hesburgh 1970, p. x; Cited in Schindler 1996b, p. 144)

The reduction of the Catholicity of the institution to a mere adjectival descriptor is a telling indicator of the operative or functional Nestorianism that we have detailed above. Rendering the Catholic university in this manner effectively separates the ‘Catholicity’ from the ‘university’ proper. The Catholicism of the institution is viewed as a merely voluntaristic gloss or ‘value statement’ understood to be a fungible accidental property of, and thus not adequately integrated into, and thus truly separate from, the fact or the substance of the university proper. The problem that this presents is that it does not allow the fullness of the Catholic (that is universal) claim to be felt across the institution as a whole, and particularly in the areas which are definitive for the institution as a school or university.

This is not simply a formulation of Hesburgh’s early thinking on this matter as such sentiments are repeated nearly two and half decades later, where Hesburgh argues that, ‘one may add descriptive adjectives to this or that university, calling it public or private, Catholic or Protestant, British or American, but the university must first and foremost be a university, or else the thing that the qualifiers qualify is something, but not a university’ (Hesburgh 1994, p. 4; Cited in Schindler 1996b, p. 143). While this might seem to reflect the teaching of the Sacred Congregation for Catholic Education’s 1977 document, The Catholic School, which insists that ‘that which does not reproduce the characteristic features of a school cannot be a Catholic school’ (Sacred Congregation for Catholic Education 1977, §25), such a statement does not in and of itself afford any particular primacy to the secular form of the school or university as secular. Evident in Hesburgh’s own language here is an inherent assumption that the form of the modern (secular) university is somehow a value free mechanism, ready for any value laden or metaphysical content to be added that will then contribute its particular character, Catholic or otherwise.

This begs a fundamental question concerning what it is that makes a Catholic university or school Catholic. Is it simply the case that a Catholic university or school can operate in much the same way as other universities or schools, but with a mandate from the local bishop? Is it addition of a chapel to the school’s facilities? Does the Catholicity of the school reside in the classes of catechesis/religious education (or theology in a tertiary context), or is it manifest in assistance in the form of bursaries or scholarships for those in need, or service learning and social outreach opportunities for students to be trained in acts of Christian charity? As David L. Schindler argues, perhaps these attributes—necessary though they are—are in themselves, and even taken together, insufficient. ‘All of these things are indispensable for a college or university that would be vibrantly Catholic. But the point is that none of them yet informs us what specifies a Catholic institution as a university. To have a Catholic university, in other words, it is necessary (also) to develop a Catholic mind’ (Schindler 1996b, p. 147).

Schindler’s concern here is that none of these indispensable aspects of a Catholic university or school outlined above reaches into the substance of the university or school as a university or school. They are like ‘Catholic sprinkles’ on the otherwise secular cake of the university or school, or perhaps a more accurate analogy would be to say that such aspects are like chocolate chips in the cookie, important elements to be sure, but elements that are not adequately integrated into the whole—we see here the analogy to the heretical doctrine of Nestorius whose own conception of the person of Jesus Christ was of one whose divinity and humanity was not adequately integrated and whose mother therefore could not be Theotokos.

The question is not just one of ‘integration across the curriculum’, as though the Catholic faith provides a discreet body of knowledge that needs to be extrinsically inserted into the program of studies as a ‘cross-curriculum priority’, but of a deeply Catholic approach to each of the disciplines as such. Raising this proposal is often met with accusation of a kind of thoughtless fundamentalism or sectarianism. In a Christological register, advocates of a clear separation between the school’s faith commitment and the putatively secular disciplines would likely express some concern that approaches such as this would fall into a kind of undifferentiated Christomonism, a charge that we will address below. While the proposal that Catholic schools teach a Catholic mathematics or physics or literary criticism is one that needs to be investigated and likely at some length, an exhaustive treatment of this line of inquiry, however, sits outside the scope of the present investigation.4 Our purposes here are to propose a manner in which one might approach reality, and thus the treatment of an educational curriculum, that would enable one to see all of created reality in a more capacious manner, that is in a manner more adequate to the truth of things as created and redeemed in Christ.

4. An Integrated Christocentrism

The disintegrated or quasi-Nestorian manner in which the Catholic faith and world-view is incorporated into many modern Catholic educational institutions described above is, as previously noted, a simple casualty of the operative onto-logic of modernity particularly in its liberal form. This is in many respects a manifestation of the separation between faith and life which Pope Paul VI spoke of as ‘the drama of our time’ (Paul VI 1975, §20), and which was one of the principal reasons for the convocation of the Second Vatican Council (John XXIII 1966).

In his magisterial interpretation and implementation of the council, Pope John Paul II taught that the hermeneutic key for the council as a whole was located in one of the more hotly contested of the conciliar documents, Gaudium et spes: The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, which in Section 22 reads:

The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a figure of Him Who was to come, namely Christ the Lord. Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear… He Who is “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15), is Himself the perfect man. To the sons of Adam He restores the divine likeness which had been disfigured from the first sin onward. Since human nature as He assumed it was not annulled, by that very fact it has been raised up to a divine dignity in our respect too.

For the Polish Pontiff, it was precisely this Trinitarian Christocentrism which helps make sense of the difficulties facing the Church and the world in the modern era, and it is precisely this approach to the human person and to reality as such that I will argue provides the antidote to the malady which this functional or quasi-Nestorianism gives rise to.

We find John Paul II’s insistence on the centrality of Christ in everything throughout his vast teaching corpus. For example, we read in the opening words to his first encyclical Redemptor Hominis, that ‘Jesus Christ, the redeemer of man, is the centre of the universe and of history’ (John Paul II 1978, §1) Or in even more detailed manner, in his Dominum et vivificantem:

The Incarnation of God the Son signifies the taking up into unity with God not only of human nature, but in this human nature, in a sense, of everything that is “flesh”: the whole of humanity, the entire visible and material world. The Incarnation, then, also has a cosmic significance, a cosmic dimension. The “first-born of all creation,” becoming incarnate in the individual humanity of Christ, unites himself in some way with the entire reality of man, which is also “flesh”-and in this reality with all “flesh,” with the whole of creation.

(John Paul II 1986, §50)

It is important to note, that this Christocentrism was the object of some criticism. The moral theologian Charles Curran argued that this approach led to a ‘very narrow Christology or Christomonism that give little or no independent room or importance to the human’ (Curran 1999, p. 31; Cited in Melina 2001, p. 113). However John Paul II, and those who followed his lead, were eager to articulate a Christocentrism that carefully followed the Christology of the early councils, and which thus not only respected but guaranteed and perfected the legitimate autonomy of earthly affairs called for in GS § 36, and 59 (See Scola 2012; See also Losinger 1997).

In order to safeguard against the kind of fideistic christomonism that Curran was rightly concerned about, and which Cardinal Scola argued could only really be the result of a ‘careless lack of rigour’ (See particularly, Scola 1991, pp. 326–27), Livio Melina has argued following von Balthasar, that this Christocentric approach is methodological in nature: ‘Christocentrism does not account for the whole material content of theology, but “it indicates the point of view from which to contemplate the form of Revelation”’ (Melina 2001; Cited in Scola 1995, pp. 45–46; See also, Albacete 1993).

The articulation of this Christocentrism as ‘methodological’ is instructive precisely inasmuch as it assists us in recognising the manner in which the revelation of God in Jesus Christ comes to bear on the realities which are the objects of study in a school or university. In no sense is the teaching of Gaudium et spes, John Paul II, or these other thinkers advocating for the collapsing of all things into the person of Jesus, as though one can come to an advanced understanding of molecular biology by meditating on the Gospel of Mark. Created entities do indeed have an autonomy, and are worthy of study in and of themselves, it is important to attend to them as they are. But one’s conception of these things ‘as they are’ must always be cognisant of the reality that all things are created entities, truly distinct from the Triune God, but always in relation to God in Christ Jesus. This methodological rendering then is reminiscent of C. S. Lewis’ articulation of his experience of how his faith not just colours but enables his engagement with reality: ‘I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else’ (Lewis 2001, p. 140).

Lest this ‘methodological Christocentrism’ be understood as a mere voluntarism, an epistemic posture adopted by the particularly pious, Giacamo Biffi argued that this Christocentrism is best understood as an ‘objective Christocentrism’, that is, a ‘vision of reality that makes the humanity of the incarnate Son of God the foundational ontological principle of the whole creation, in all its levels and dimensions’ (Biffi 2021, p. 11; Cited in, Melina 2001, p. 114; See also Scola 1991, pp. 326–27). This is echoed in the work of David L. Schindler, who contrasts this objective, or in his words ‘ontological’, Christocentrism with a subjective or merely moral Christocentrism. According to Schindler, ‘a moral Christocentrism makes Christ the center of one’s existence, but primarily by way of intention. That is, the revelation of Jesus Christ leads to the addition of important elements in the final (i.e., eschatological) content of one’s anthropology; but it nonetheless makes little difference in the original (i.e., creational) content of that anthropology’ (Schindler 1996a, p. 172; See also, Scola 1991). The objective or ontological Christocentrism that is advocated for in the teaching of the Second Vatican Council, as articulated in the magisterial interpretation of the Council provided by John Paul II is, I propose, the only adequate remedy to the quasi-Nestorian extrinsicism endemic to modernity and which is manifest in many Catholic educational institutions.

In Section 7 I will argue that the Nestorian logic of externalising relations is one which needs to be addressed not only at the level of doctrinal clarity concerning the particular character of the relationship of the two natures in the Second person of the Trinity (for which of course Cyril of Alexandria and the Council of Ephesus (AD 431) remain our loadstars, as does the clarification reached at Chalcedon (AD 451)), but also at the level of our understanding of reality in the light of what is revealed in the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, that is in light of the Christological and Christocentric ontology proposed by Gaudium et spes, and John Paul II. To do so we will turn our attention to an oft neglected aspect of Christ’s person and activity, that is of Christ’s role in the ongoing act of creation, which of course is inextricably linked to his Incarnation in the flesh some 2000 years ago in the womb of the virgin, and his resurrection from the dead in the flesh.

5. All and in All: Christ, Creation, and the Curriculum

While space precludes anything near a broad or comprehensive survey of this rich theme, it is worth noting that this line of reasoning is not novel in the Church’s tradition, despite the fact that we so often simply speak of the activities of the persons of the Trinity as discrete in and of themselves: The Father as creator, the Son as redeemer or liberator, and the Holy Spirit as the sanctifier or sustainer. In reality the Church’s teaching concerning the persons of the Trinity and their activities is more complex than this—no one person of the Trinity acts alone in anything. And the act of creation is in fact attributed by St Thomas to the divine essence itself, which is common to the three persons, even though Thomas does not fail to speak of a certain causality ‘appropriate’ to each person (Martinez Camino 2001, p. 3).

We are all no doubt familiar with the book of Genesis which begins with the powerful Word of God calling distinct creatures into existence. The writings of Paul, of course, are replete with references to creation through, and for, and ‘in Christ’ (see Col 1:16; 1 Cor. 8:6, for example), and the magnificent prologue of John’s gospel offers us much to contemplate along these lines.

Within the tradition we see the action of the Son in the work of creation as an object of the Church’s faith incorporated into the ancient creeds. We read, for example in the creed of Nicaea and Constantinople, of the Son ‘through whom all things were made’ (Martinez Camino 2001, p. 2). More recently, the pastoral constitution on the Church in the Modern World Gaudium et spes, of the Second Vatican Council, without developing any specific doctrine of creation notes this Trinitarian and specifically Christocentric aspect of it, when it teaches that:

God’s Word, by whom all things were made, was Himself made flesh so that as perfect man He might save all men and sum up all things in Himself. The Lord is the goal of human history, the focal point of the longings of history and of civilization, the center of the human race, the joy of every heart and the answer to all its yearnings.

(Vatican Council II 1965b, §45)

While this line of inquiry can instantiate a certain nervousness in some, particularly when in recent times some would posit an argument that would simply equate or conflate creation and incarnation— and we certainly maintain that the incarnation really does introduce something new into creation and thus into history—in contemplating the nature of the Son’s activity in the act of creation itself, noting that the Persons of the Trinity never acts alone, we see that there is latent within creation itself, always and already something which is indicative Christ’s abiding presence. Martinez argues that:

the Incarnation of the Word is certainly a novelty with respect to the Creation. But the Creation, made possible by the same Word Incarnate, draws its life from this novelty. It would be illegitimate … to reduce the grace that gushes forth from the side of Christ simply to the most elevated level of gratuity shown in the act of creation. But it is equally impossible to consider God’s creation as a mere “nature” alien to the communion that the creator offers his creatures in Christ. If the Incarnation is the plenitude of creation, then the creation tends on its own towards the Incarnation. All creatures, which exist in virtue of the Word, tend toward the Incarnation before its appearance in the flesh, and come from [it] in an eschatological time.

(Martinez Camino 2001, p. 16)

This means that all creation, every creature, exists in fact only as related to God in Jesus Christ. This relation already orders nature and thereby gives nature a new form, a new shape or pattern of intelligibility. This, of course is always pure gift, in no way required by our nature or able to be claimed by it. This relation to God is, to quote Schindler, ‘fully actualised only by means of participation in the Church which is the body of Christ and indeed finally, in the unrestricted communion with God which can occur only in the next life’ (Schindler 1990b, p. 15).

This understanding of Christ’s abiding presence in creation, not only historically through the Incarnation and then through the ongoing presence of Christ in his body, the Church, but of creation in Him, overcomes the mechanistic and technological ontology described above and the Nestorian logic that Riches describes as concomitant with it as it reconstitutes our understanding of identity and relation. At the same time, however, such a conception safeguards against a temptation to over-correct in the direction of a kind of fideistic christomonism or, to again rely on the Christological analogy, a Monophysitism that might conflate the two natures of Christ, effectively obliterating difference between Creator and creature. While we must indeed be grateful for the achievement of the definitions of Chalcedon the adverbial descriptions of which help us to mediate these poles of unity and distinction, a right understanding of creation in Christ that allows for a deeper understanding of distinction always and already within a prior and ever greater unity.

Reflecting on the revelation of Christ’s mediatory role in the act of creation—of creation in Christ—sheds new light on the relationship between the Creator and the creature, providing something of a way through a number of issues including any claims that might seem to negate the gratuity of grace. Martinez notes that,

God creates in the Son and for this reason without any obligation towards the creature. The Son is the principle of alterity in God Himself. This alterity is not based upon the appearance of a world before God [that is, not in a Hegelian sense]; rather the converse is the case. The world exists before God precisely because God Himself contains the basis and fountain of alterity: the procession of the Son from the Father.

(Martinez Camino 2001, p. 11)

As Balthasar will point out, this notion of creation in Christ does not negate the difference between the Creator and the creature—‘The infinite distance between the world and God is grounded in the other, prototypical distance between God and God’ (Balthasar 1990, p. 266).

All this helps us to conceive of or understand the distinction between Creator and creature, and the autonomy that the creature enjoys, as well as the creature’s identity as distinct within the order of creation—and all this without presupposing a radical individualism that is paradigmatic of the modern Nestorian onto-logic identified earlier. This is precisely how we can best understand the legitimate autonomy of earthly affairs recognised by Gaudium et spes (§36 & 59) noted earlier. Far from impinging upon the freedom of the creature, this deep and abiding relation to God in Christ ‘grants it a “new” and expanded meaning’ (Schindler 2001, p. 407). Or as Adrain Walker will note, ‘the world comes into its “own,” not by defending itself from God, but by accepting itself to the core as a gift that the persons of the Trinity give to one another within their infinite otherness-in-unity’ (Walker 2001, pp. 436–37).

What does all this mean then for the development of a curriculum which has as its goal the formation of the Catholic mind, which Schindler argued was necessary for a Catholic educational institution to indeed be adequate to its nature as a Catholic educational institution? I propose that the task before Catholic education today is to recover a Christological form or ontological grammar and allow this to shape the curriculum of Catholic educational institutions so as to provide these institutions with the capability of resisting the Nestorian separation of faith and reason without reverting to confessional reductionism. What follows then are not pragmatic or managerial strategies, but are principles proposed for curriculum design arising from the ontological Christocentrism, or perhaps better Christological ontology, advanced in this essay.

6. Christocentric Principles for an Integral Catholic Curriculum Design

6.1. Christological Priority of Form over Content

Curriculum must be shaped by Christological form, not merely populated with explicitly Christian content. The Catholicity of a school or university does not reside exclusively in what topics are taught, but in how reality is conceived as intelligible: as gift, as relation, and as participation ordered from the Father and, through Christ (in the unity of the Holy Spirit), back to the Father (exitus-reditus). A curriculum that presumes an ontology foreign to the Incarnation cannot be rendered Catholic by catechetical supplementation alone. This Christological form is not separate to the content of the curriculum, but is ontologically prior to it—form and content exist in a mutually reciprocal but asymmetrical relationship.

6.2. Unity as an Ontological a Priori, Not Simply as a Pedagogical Goal

Curricular unity must be presupposed as ontologically given in Christ, not pursued as a subsequent volitional act of interdisciplinary synthesis. Integration is not achieved by the wilful assemblage of discrete knowledges, but by teaching from within a vision of reality already unified in the truth, in the Word, that ‘creative reason’ through whom all things were made (Ratzinger 2010, pp. 104–5).

6.3. Disciplinary Autonomy as Participatory

The autonomy of each discipline is to be affirmed as participatory rather than self-grounding. Mathematics, physics, biology, literature, history, and the human sciences all possess a genuine integrity and autonomy, yet their intelligibility remains creaturely and relational and thus relative. Curriculum design must therefore resist both positivist closure and propagandistic theological intrusion, cultivating instead approaches to the disciplines that are set against a transcendent horizon by virtue of both their created form and their eschatological destiny.

6.4. Methodological Christocentrism Across All Disciplines

Christocentrism must function methodologically rather than thematically in the putatively secular disciplines. A Catholic curriculum does not require that every discipline speak explicitly of Christ, but that each discipline be taught within a transcendent horizon shaped by the realities of creation and of the Incarnation—where being precedes function, relation precedes, grounds, and guarantees autonomy, and truth precedes utility.

6.5. Curriculum as Participation in Creation-in-Christ

To learn is to participate intellectually in a reality already ordered to and by Christ. Education should therefore be conceived not as mere information transfer or skill acquisition, but as initiation into a participatory intelligence of the real, an ‘introduction to reality’ (See Spaemann 2015; See also Giussani 2019, p. 25).

6.6. Institutional Forms as Theologically Significant

Curriculum cannot be abstracted from institutional structures. Assessment regimes, disciplinary silos, managerial metrics, and governance structures each carry within them a logic shaped by metaphysical conceptions of reality and of knowledge, whether they are explicitly understood and articulated or not. The design and delivery of a truly Catholic educational experience must therefore include a critical and ongoing discernment of inherited and assumed educational and institutional forms in light of the unity confessed in Christ.

7. Conclusions

This paper has sought to retrieve classical Christology—not simply in its doctrinal integrity, but as an ontological grammar—capable of illuminating the shape of Catholic education as such. In demonstrating certain Nestorian tendencies in modern liberal thought and practice, this essay has argued that these tendencies are unwittingly operative within the structure and the function of many Catholic educational institutions, and that this problem cannot simply be resolved at the level of doctrinal and catechetical refinement, nor at the level of doubling down on Catholic symbols and practices within the institution more broadly. The problem facing Catholic education is not that it takes doctrine too seriously or that it is flippant with respect to that doctrine, but that doctrine is seldom allowed to function as appropriately c/Catholic—that is, it is inhibited from truly disclosing the form of reality and thus of the conditions of knowing. What is at stake is the forgetting of the catholicity—that is universality—of the Christian claim and thus of the Christological form of reason and reality as such.

The retrieval of the Christocentrism of the Second Vatican Council, particularly as it was articulated and developed by Pope John Paul II, and especially as it pertains to Christ’s mediatory role in creation proves decisive at this juncture. To confess that all things are created ‘in, and through, and for Him,’ (see Rom. 11:36, and Col. 1:16) is to affirm that no creaturely reality enjoys either its existence or its intelligibility apart from relation to Christ, even as that relation safeguards and perfects the creature’s proper distinction. Such a Christological ontology resists both modern extrinsicism—where faith in Christ Jesus becomes a mere addition to an otherwise closed account of reason and of nature—and fideistic christomonism, which collapses the Creator-creature distinction entirely. Instead, it retrieves a Chalcedonian logic of unity-in-distinction that grounds the legitimate autonomy of the disciplines precisely a relative autonomy, rather than a radical autonomy that presupposes an ever-prior isolation and atomism.

If Catholic education is to be Catholic as education, then the elements of its curriculum that pertain to the putatively secular disciplines cannot be conceived as neutral vis-à-vis the Gospel. These disciplines are not simple value-free structures awaiting the imposition of externally generated values, or metaphysical or theological preferences. Curriculum is never metaphysically or theologically innocent. It always presupposes an account—whether it be expressed explicitly or whether it is merely tacit, hidden, or implied—of what is real, what is knowable, and what knowledge is for.