Jesuit education links many disciplines with faith and vision

As 1,952 students with exuberant cheers graduated from Seattle University last weekend, we Jesuit educators trusted they would carry forward not only their high degree of professionalism, but also the vision and spirituality that informed their Jesuit education.

The spiritual vision underlying Jesuit education arises from the mystical experiences of the founder of the Jesuits, Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556). Its ultimate source is the Catholic belief that God created the universe out of love, and subsequently that God became human in the person of Jesus. This vision provides the foundation for four pillars of Jesuit spirituality:

1. Finding God in all things. Jesuits are world-affirming because God continues to labor in the world, loving creation into its fullness. Jesuits are not hermits who shun the world. They are not a sect that considers the human race racked with sin. Rather they are open to all reality and to all truth found in every discipline and in every possible nook and cranny of the world. The Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins captures this well: "The world is charged with the grandeur of God."

2. Exploring faith and reason, faith and science. Faith and reason are mutually compatible and each sheds light on the other. Consequently, from their earliest beginnings, Jesuits sought the best possible education for themselves and their students. They needed to explore their faith; they needed to explore the world. They received their advanced degrees from the prestigious University of Paris. And they were the founders of the first comprehensive system of education in the world.

Jesuits have not always followed through on this principle of the complementarity of faith and science. During the trial of Galileo in the 17th century, for instance, Jesuits, who knew better, stood passively by while the papal inquisition condemned Galileo's scientific theories.

At their best, Jesuits believe that a genuine faith must be comprehensive and willing to risk exploration and innovation. Genuine faith cannot be isolated from the totality of God's creation.

3. Affirming the dignity of every human being, realized in community. At the core of the Catholic faith is the belief that every human being is created in God's image. Each of us has features of the divine. The third-century theologian Irenaeus exclaimed, "The glory of God is a human being fully alive."

The long history of Catholic social teaching affirms that injustice, racism, sexism and any form of oppression harms us all. The Catholic vision, with its Jesuit focus, does not espouse a privatized individualism or a laissez-faire economic view of the human person. Rather, it affirms that a healthy, just community is vital to the realization of individual human dignity.

This vision leads to a kind of "soul" education in the Jesuit tradition in which people learn to trust their experience as a source of revelation and direction, guided and directed by the wisdom of the Church community, distilled and sifted over many centuries.

4. Embraces and engages all cultures and welcomes interreligious dialogue. The early Jesuits (1540-1599) incorporated all the new avenues of knowledge into an integrated Jesuit education. They enthusiastically delved into humanistic letters, rhetoric, mathematics, science (especially astronomy and physics), geography and spiritual formation.

Thirty craters of the moon are named after Jesuits, who also created the first botanical garden in Europe (at Padua). Quinine, retrieved from the Incas in Peru to treat malaria, was known in Europe as "Jesuit bark."

The Jesuits fully updated their mission in 1995 by describing this vital engagement of faith with the world as a faith that does justice; a faith that engages cultures; and a faith that welcomes interreligious dialogue. Within this vision, they seek to educate the whole person.

These elements reside at the heart of Jesuit education today, and we hope they reside in the hearts of all our graduates as they sally forth with all their accomplishments.

Fr. Patrick Howell S.J. is the rector (religious superior) of the Jesuit community at Seattle University and professor

of pastoral theology.

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