The Person in Relation: An Analysis of Great Catholic Education via Thomistic Personalism

Abstract

This essay seeks to show the usefulness of the philosophy of Thomistic personalism in determining the type of education most beneficial to the human person’s highest development by building on St. Thomas Aquinas’s idea of personal relation according to both first act (esse) and second act (operari). Because the richness of this philosophy involves the use of Thomistic metaphysics and metaethics, anthropology, political philosophy, phenomenology and aesthetics and is meant to be applied (as in Pope St. John Paul II’s theology of the body), we discover a unique and fitting tool by which Catholic education may be considered and planned for based on what is most fundamental to the human person’s reality—the act of his existence and subsequent personalistic act, according to truth and love. Real applications are included in this essay.