Origins

Arma Liturgica began as Experimental Philosophy, a college club co-created by Timothy McClennen and John Paul Asija at St. John's College in Annapolis (the original Great Books school). The setting was classical, not specifically Catholic, and the participants were college students. The foundational essay from that period (a dense philosophical argument about embodied formation, combat as pedagogy, and the body's role in moral knowledge) remains in this repository as the theoretical grounding for what happens on the training floor.

The Catholic evolution has been JP's, with help from several Catholic members of the original group. The audience moved from college students to 7th–12th-grade boys at Catholic classical schools, and the governing framework became Thomistic: fortitude as primarily endurance (ST II-II Q.123), hylomorphism as the anthropology of the body, just-war proportionality as a technique principle, defense of the weak as telos. The model is the knight, not the samurai, not the cage fighter. The training calendar became the liturgical calendar, not a secular calendar with feast days added on.

The thematic content shifted with the framework. Experimental Philosophy was primarily Hellenic: Homer, Herodotus, the vocabulary of arête and thumos. Arma Liturgica is primarily medieval: Malory, the saints, the chivalric tradition, Aquinas. The Hellenic roots remain because the medieval tradition is built on them. The relationship is the same as Aquinas's to Aristotle: not displacement but completion.

The new name, Arma Liturgica (Latin for "liturgical weapons" or "weapons of the liturgy"), names the integration. Martial practice is ordered by the Church's calendar, shaped by the Church's moral tradition, and aimed at the virtue of fortitude as the Catholic tradition understands it. It is not a secular martial art with Christian decoration. It is a Catholic formation program whose pedagogy happens to run through boffer combat.

The Experimental Philosophy essay remains part of the intellectual grounding. The argument about why embodied formation works is still the argument. But the essay no longer speaks for the program's explicitly Catholic identity. Arma Liturgica is the living form.