An excerpt from St. Thomas Aquinas’ Compendium Vyomingae covering the reasoning behind the traditions and culture of Wyoming Catholic College. Today, the question of how Michael Dolson can properly sit at the junior’s table.
We must now consider how this is possible. Manifestly, since the sophomore intellect knows nothing except the material in the WCC curriculum which a sophomore has been told, the sophomore cannot attain to the essence of the junior’s knowledge in the mode in which a junior possesses it. The more distant the species through which the intellect knows is from the thing known, the less perfect knowledge our intellect has of that thing’s essence. For example, if the sophomore should claim to know junior statistics by means of having seen their reading packets, he would have an imperfect knowledge of the essence of the junior’s knowledge of statistics, indeed, it would only be of statistics as revealed by the cover of the Science 302 Reading Packet. His knowledge would be still more defective if he were to know of the junior’s knowledge of statistics through the medium of the course title alone, Science 302, because then he would know it by a more remote genus. And if his knowledge were gained through the species of a thing that did not agree with the science in any genus, he could not know the essence of the junior’s knowledge at all.
It is clear from the previous discussion that no sophomore intellect’s shares a genus as to the perfection of his intellectual apprehensions with any of the elevated upperclassmen. Hence the essence of a junior intellect cannot be known perfectly through any written work whatever. Accordingly, if a junior mind is to be known as it is, in his essence, the sophomore intellect itself must become united to the location of the junior’s intellects in such a way that the junior’s intellect’s themselves become the intelligence of the sophomore’s intellect. Now, this can only happen through some sort of elevation whereby the sophomore is invited to sit at the junior’s table and share through proximity in the junior’s intellect itself. For the juniors, who are their own class, have their own table, and that table is the only place they can be found and the only place in which any sort of connection to their intellects can be made by those of another genus.
Whoever is received to the junior table must first acquire a disposition of knowledge and perfection to be permitted to sit at their table which by its essence is limited to the seating of those possessing a junior’s intellect. A sophomore intellect does not by its very nature have the disposition toward that form which is junior’s possession of truth; otherwise it would be in possession of that knowledge from the beginning. Consequently, when it does attain to the junior’s level of knowledge, it must be elevated by some disposition newly conferred on it. And this we call the “permission of Jeremiah”, with which Jeremiah, the class dictator of the juniors, permits the sophomore to sit with the juniors at their table. This is the table spoken of in the sophomore quotebook (pg. 35) “In thy table, we shall see the juniors, and the juniors shall become one with us by the will of Jeremiah, and we with them, and we shall converse with them sharing in their intellect and becoming one in their knowledge qua junior.” For Jeremiah as the spokesperson for the juniors is their dictator and thus the one mediator between juniors and other classes.
To the best of IIT’s knowledge only one sophomore so far, Michael Dolson, has so far achieved unto this disposition from Jeremiah. However, Michael’s reception of this permission, analogous to the Light of Glory discussed by Aquinas in Question 105 of the Compendium Theologiae, was received only by a sort of indirect means, insofar as Michael has never yet been kicked out of the juniors’ table.