PREFACE:
This is a labor of love. I am not a good typist,
but I have nevertheless spent several hours retyping this journal
article so
that I may, by permission of Communio, post it on my faculty web page.
It is one
of the richest reflections on the nature of Catholic higher education
that I
have ever read. If ever an analysis hit the nail on the head, I think
it would
be this one. – Robert Kloska
Eruditio without
religio?:
The
dilemma of
Catholics in the Academy
Michael
J. Baxter
and
Frederick
C.
Bauerschmidt
What we are losing, and
are therefore called to
recover, is an
understanding of our vocations
as scholars dedicated
to glorifying God.
Duke
University, where for the past five years we have studied and sometimes
taught
theology and ethics, has as its motto “Eruditio
et Religio.” The university recently
inaugurated its thirteenth president, Nannerl Keohane, who took the
occasion of
her inaugural address to speak about this motto, which, she admitted,
left her
immediately “uneasy” when she learned about it after taking
the job. She noted
that, “The motto has an archaic sound if one provides a literal
translation –
erudition and religion.” But it was not only the archaic
vocabulary that made
Keohane uneasy. “[T]he emphasis on religion,” she
confessed, “seemed hard to
square with the restless yearning for discovery, the staunch and
fearless
commitment to seek for truth wherever truth may be found that is the
hallmark
of a great university.” Religion, in other words, is hard to
square with good
scholarship.
Such
a view is common in the modern academy- overtly in secular colleges and
universities and covertly in many Catholic institutions. However, the
best of
the Catholic tradition does not share Keohane’s instinctive
uneasiness at the
thought of putting religio in the
same motto with eruditio, nor does it
find the “restless yearning for discovery” to be stifled by
an “emphasis on
religion.” On the contrary, Catholics believe that religion
(correctly
understood) provides the necessary direction for living out “the
restless
yearning for discovery.” For, as Augustine observes in the
opening of his
Confessions (I,1), our hearts are restless until they rest in God.
This
puts Catholics out of step with the modern academy in general. It is
simply
assumed by most faculty and administrators in the academy today that
religion
constitutes an impediment to learning. The memory and myth of Galileo
is so
alive in the hearts and minds of the rank and file of academia that his
name
need not be explicitly invoked in order to deliver the point: if you
mix
religion and higher education, you end up creating more martyrs for
science,
for enlightenment, for “the restless yearning for
discovery.” We live in an era
in which there has been a divorce between Christian discipleship and
the
practice of scholarship.
Historically,
this is a relatively recent development. In this country, almost every
college
and university was founded under Christian auspices. But over the past
century,
with very few exceptions, they have succeeded in detaching themselves
from the
tradition and authority of their founding ecclesial bodies. This has
cleared
the way for new traditions and authorities, and a new overarching set
of
institutional arrangements: the modern academy.
The
driving assumption behind scholarship in the modern academy has been
that true,
authentic scholarship can flourish only in an environment of
“academic
freedom,” commonly understood as freedom of intellectual inquiry
from all prior
assumptions about nature, the world, human society, human destiny, and
especially God[1]. The
paradigm of academic inquiry in the modern academy has become the
natural
sciences, since their declared method is to renounce all
presuppositions and to
attend only to empirical evidence. This empiricism has also been
vigorously
pursued in the social sciences, with the result that there has been a
stunning
proliferation of new disciplines over the past 75 years, each
corresponding to
newly developed, discrete models of empirical analysis.
Thus
the mode of inquiry which now prevails in the modern academy is shaped
by the
specialized needs of particular disciplines. Professors invest little
if any
energy toward developing a comprehensive philosophy of education.
Graduate
students are rarely encouraged to develop interests in other
disciplines,
unless they be cognate fields that will sharpen their particular
expertise. The
vision of learning which most faculty members and graduate students are
likely
to espouse is one that is committed, first and foremost, to preserving
the
autonomy of that most scared of unions, “the department.”
The modern academy
thus produces scholars who are professionally trained in discrete
disciplines
and are further trained in a highly specialized area within those
disciplines –
scholars who have relatively little to say about the activity of other
disciplines and virtually nothing to offer in the way of an overarching
vision
of the intellectual life. Hence, the increasing irrelevance to higher
education
of anything associated with “religion.”
And
yet, there are plenty of Catholics in the modern academy, nowadays more
than
ever before, who fall heir to an intellectual tradition which looks
upon
scholarship as inquiry into the ultimate nature and purpose of
God’s creation –
into the good, the true, and the beautiful – and which calls for using academic
skills in order to glorify God. So what is a Catholic scholar to do?
One
option is to keep your Catholic intellectual tradition to yourself.
Self-censorship has become the personal policy of many, perhaps most,
Catholic
scholars, particularly the ones of the generation after
When
people refer to “spiritual life on campus,” they are all
too often speaking of
activities which are, quite literally, extracurricular, which occur outside the sphere of academic teaching
and scholarship: Mass and other liturgies, informal prayer groups and
Bible
studies, programs concerning drug and alcohol abuse or sexual activity
on
campus, volunteer social service projects, and any number of other
activities
commonly associated with campus ministry offices and Newman Centers.
While such
activities can be crucial to campus life, they become peripheral when
pursued
in isolation from the central mission of colleges and universities,
which is to
promote intellectual inquiry. Thus, attempts to develop a
“spirituality of
academic life” that focus on these kinds of activities tend to
underwrite the
assumption that these terms refer to two separate realms of human
activity: a
sphere for “academic life,” which pertains to the
hustle-bustle of the academy,
and sphere for “spirituality,” which pertains to some other
place – and as we
see it, to make this assumption is already to distort the true nature
of both
“spirituality” and “academic life.”
Accordingly, in the following reflections
we do not intend to lay out a “spirituality” of academic
life. Rather, we
intend to show that one must get beyond the notion that there exist two
distinct domains, “spirituality” and “academic
life,” if one is even to arrive
at an understanding of religio and eruditio
that regards religio as more than a quaint term that
has no place in the academy other than its appearance on archaic
university
mottos.
II.
When
Teresa of Avila wasn’t busy reforming her network of Carmelite
communities
throughout sixteenth-century Europe or tending to her troubled
relationship
with God (she says she went seventeen years without a religious
experience),
she studied, taught, and wrote books whose publishing life continues to
this
day. When Thomas Aquinas wasn’t eating, sleeping, or praying the
liturgy with
his Dominican brothers, he studied, taught, and wrote scores of
commentaries on
Aristotle and Scripture, plus of course the Summa Theologiae. When Augustine
wasn’t managing the administrative affairs of the diocese, ruling
on legal
disputes that came up through the region surrounding Hippo (which many
days
took from sunup to sundown), or keeping the Manicheans, Donatists, and
Pelagians at bay, he studied, taught, and wrote books, so many books in
fact
that Isidore of Seville once remarked that anyone who claims to have
read all
the works of Augustine is a liar.[2]
These
people hold several things in common. For one thing, they all were (and
are)
saints. For another, they all were members of religious communities of
one sort
or another. Moreover, their lives as scholars and teachers were
understood as a
crucial part of their overall service to the Church. And finally,
religion for
them was in no way an impediment to learning, but was, on the contrary,
the
only true means by which they could ultimately fulfill their restless
yearning
to know. And the same could be said of Anselm of Canterbury, Hildegard
of
Bingen, Bonaventure, Catherine of Siena, Julian of Norwich, Thomas
More, Robert
Bellarmine, as well as many devoted Christians scholars who were not
saints.
Certainly these figures put forth different visions of the relationship
between
Christian revelation and other areas of inquiry (sometimes profoundly
different, as in the case, say, of Augustine and Thomas More), but all
of them
saw religio as the central ingredient
of eruditio.
A
glimpse of this vision of the relationship between religio and eruditio is
vividly portrayed by the late Dom Jean Leclerq, O.S.B., in The
Love of Learning and the Desire for God. The title alone
suggests a profoundly different world of scholarship than that which
most of us
currently inhabit. Leclerq shows that after Saint Benedict established
the tiny
lay community at Monte Cassino in the sixth century, Christian
scholarship was
embedded within a Christian culture, that is, within a complex web of
practices
and beliefs encompassing every aspect of the life of the Christian
monastic
community. One’s “spiritual
life” was
simply one’s life in all its myriad activities. Within this
monastic culture,
every activity was shaped by what at that time was considered to be the
only
pursuit worth devoting one’s life to – the pursuit of the
good, otherwise known
as God. Praying throughout the hours of the day, working in the cellar
or in
the fields, eating at common table, welcoming visitors into the
community,
every activity was oriented to the praise and service of God. So too
with
intellectual activity.
The
intellectual activity of the monastery came in two basic forms. First,
there
was the intellectual activity in which most every monk participated.
Praying
the liturgy, for example, was a time for memorizing and ruminating over
the
Scriptures. Working was a time for meditating on the presence of God,
and it
was routinely punctuated by short prayers in order to enhance this
practice. Eating was a
time for continued reflection on whatever book was being read aloud at
meals.
In other words, this form of intellectual activity was distributed
throughout
the various aspects of monastic form of life.
Second,
there was the pursuit of knowledge that we would associate with
scholarship or
higher learning. The Rule of St. Benedict states that the monastery is
to be “a
school in God’s service,”[3] and over
the centuries this service came to be seen as including scholarship,
which at
length was fully integrated into the overall mission of the monastery.
This
meant that no specialized knowledge, no skill, was seen as an end in
itself;
its end was always the service of God. Accordingly, a scholar might
attain a
certain technical competence in a narrowly circumscribed area, such as
the
curative powers of herbs, the classifications of animals, or the
intricacies of
translating Greek or Arabic manuscripts into Latin, but a full and true
understanding of any single field of knowledge fell within a
comprehensive
theological context. Everything relating to scholarship was envisioned
in a Christological light; as Leclerq puts it, “to understand
things is to realize
the relationship they have to Christ.”[4] Properly
understood, every creature was seen as a sign of its Creator. Of
course, as
Leclerq himself points out, deep tensions were encompassed within a
vision of
the universe which made for a profoundly optimistic attitude toward
learning.
Anything in the world that reflected the true, the good, or the
beautiful,
drawn from whatever source – oriental scientists or Greek pagan
literature –
was welcomed as part of the handiwork of God (the intellectual
equivalent of the
Benedictine charism of hospitality. It
was no coincidence that the monks preserved the philosophies and
literature of
antiquity.
During
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, there was a shift in the locus of
higher
learning form the monasteries to the large universities of medieval
In
monasteries and medieval universities, then, there persisted a vision
of
intellectual inquiry in which there was no division between
“spirituality” and
“academic life.” This vision saw the life of the mind as
the single, yet
multifaceted endeavor of serving God through intellectual inquiry, an
endeavor
that was intrinsically “spiritual” because it was carried
out in the context of
a vast, complete web of Christian belief and practice, and because,
when
properly carried out, it would prepare one for beatitude, the gift of
beholding
the mysteries of God.
III.
So,
how did this separation between “spirituality” and
“academic life” emerge? It
was, in a word, constructed. The separation began to emerge in the late
Middle
Ages, when the standard thirteenth-century distinction between nature
and
supernature widened into an unbridgeable chasm, so much so that by the
fourteenth century thinkers such as William of Ockham posited a
fundamental
separation between knowledge gained on the basis of reason and
knowledge gained
on the basis of faith. In this theoretical scheme, it is possible to
grasp the
operations and purpose of nature through the exercise of the intellect
without
reference to supernatural realities. Conversely, it is possible to give
assent
to doctrines such as the Trinity or transubstantiation solely through
“faith,”
an ungrounded movement of the will that need not refer to reason and
experience
and sometimes contradicts it.[7] Herein
lay the first flowering of the division between faith and reason that
would
eventually become the hallmark of the modern secular academy.
With
“faith” severed from “reason,” theology’s
interaction with philosophy and the
arts diminished. By the sixteenth century, this estrangement was
institutionalized in the curricula of the major European universities.
The most
influential of these was the Ratio
Studiorum, a voluminous set of pedagogical and curricular
guidelines
developed by Jesuit teachers and administrators that in 1599 became the
standard curriculum for all Jesuit universities.[8] Designed
to convey both Ignatian spirituality and the humanistic learning of the
Renaissance, the Ratio (as it is
called) was structured along three general tiers: the first tier
consisted of
studies in the arts (grammar, the humanities, and rhetoric) and was
geared for
the youngest students, many of whom went no further; the second tier
consisted
of the study of philosophy, under which were subsumed all branches of
science,
a comprehensive treatment of the liberal arts, plus philosophy and
morals, and
was designed for more advanced students; and the third tier consisted
of a
broad instruction in theology, which was normally pursued by religious
or
diocesan seminarians preparing for the priesthood. This kind of
segregated
educational scheme in effect produced two separate spheres of
knowledge, one
sphere associated with “academic life,” and the other
associated with
“spirituality.”
The
sphere of “academic life” was actually an outgrowth of
theology’s diminished
interaction with philosophy and the liberal arts. Implicit in the
structure of
the Ratio was the assumption that classical humanities and philosophy
could be
taught and understood without integral reference to theological
categories. By
reserving theological studies for the final and most advanced phase of
learning, an unprecedented measure of autonomy was given to the
humanities and
especially to philosophy. At length, it came to be understood that
philosophy,
not theology, supplied the unifying intellectual vision and overarching
context
of all knowledge. And with philosophy, rather than theology, providing
the
integrating vision of all higher learning, the arts and sciences became
the
domain of secular modes of inquiry and discourse. Thus, an intellectual
enterprise emerged that was largely uninformed by Christology,
pneumatology,
eschatology, or any other theological categories.
The
sphere of “spirituality” was likewise created by the
severance of theology from
the other disciplines, an estrangement that was institutionalized with
the rise
of the seminary system after the Council of
The
specialized study of “spirituality” drew heavily from the devotia moderna, a movement of the late Middle Ages which
understood prayer as a purely affective activity that could be enhanced
through
techniques of introspection.[9] The best
example of the devotio moderna is
probably Thomas a Kempis’s Imitation of
Christ, but this was just one of a series of quasi-scientific
manuals that
focused on the how-to aspects of prayer while paying scant attention to
the
life of the intellect. The eventual result was the construction of an
autonomous sub-discipline of “mystical” or
“ascetical” theology, later to be
known as “spiritual theology.” Thus by the eighteenth
century we have, on the
one hand, scholarship in philosophy and liberal arts abandoning
theology, so as
to be shaped by the rationalistic standards of academia, and on the
other hand,
a spirituality which increasingly divorces itself from theology so as
to become
an entirely different mode of competence pertaining to human
affectivity. This
structure remained remarkably intact for the next several centuries,
leaving
theology to degenerate into a dry scholasticism that was both
intellectually
and spiritually moribund. [10]
Leo
XIII’s call for a revival of Thomism in the encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879)
sparked a major effort to reintegrate the different segments of
knowledge into
a comprehensive whole, but the unifying framework was still to be
provided by
philosophy, not theology. Catholic scholars saw philosophy as providing
the
principles upon which all other forms of intellectual inquiry were
grounded, a
comprehensive vision of how each discipline bears upon the others.
Thus, in
this country in the 1920s and for several decades thereafter, the study
of Thomist
philosophy comprised the centerpiece of the typical curriculum in a
Catholic
college or university. The standard philosophy course was designed to
integrate
the entire breadth of learning under a single, unifying worldview, to
supply
the ligaments which made scholarship intelligible as a whole. This
so-called
“Thomistic synthesis” left a profound mark upon
intellectuals who were trained
and formed at Catholic schools in the
However,
by the late fifties, secular standards of scholarship demanded
increased
specialization, particularly in the natural and social sciences, and
disciplines and departments sprouted up accordingly. This left
philosophy with
the burdensome chore of providing theoretical unity to expanding and
increasingly disparate modes of knowledge. The entire framework broke
down in
the sixties, leaving Catholic institutions of higher learning without
an
overarching perspective that could guide and harness the vibrant
intellectual
activity they had come to sponsor. At the same time, many Catholic
scholars
began doing their graduate work at the country’s best secular
universities,
where a Catholic intellectual vision, to put it mildly, enjoyed little
currency. By the seventies, Catholics had begun to heed John Tracy
Ellis’s
famous challenge to Catholic intellectuals to move out of their
intellectually
cloistered status and into the academic mainstream of the
The
problem has been that in the process of moving into the mainstream,
Catholic
intellectual life has lost its identity and purpose. On
the personal level, Catholic scholars, whether at Catholic or
non-Catholic
schools, are becoming incognizant of the fact that their scholarship
can be
seen as a devoted pursuit of learning in the presence of God. And
institutionally, Catholic colleges and universities have become
indistinguishable from their secular counterparts, vocational centers
for
training in democratic ideology and capitalist theory and practice:
hence, the
nervous search for identity in Catholic higher education. Catholic
scholarship
– the very idea sounds quaint these days – has come
to mirror the
disarray of the contemporary academy, a chaotic marketplace of clashing
values.
Here
we have all the ingredients of a collective spiritual and vocational
crisis for
Catholic scholars. Today, Catholic scholars stand to spend their lives
reading,
writing, teaching, publishing, sitting on committees, and so on,
without a
clear sense of the end to which all this intellectual activity is
directed. In the midst of the disarray
of the modern academy, they may well become scholars without a telos.
IV.
There
has been an attempt in the twentieth century to restore a broad,
overarching
theological framework within which intellectual inquiry could proceed.
Catholic
thinkers such as Maurice Blondel, Henri de Lubac, Karl Rahner, and Hans
Urs von
Balthasar have sought to overcome the neo-scholastic legacy of theology
severed
from philosophy and the other disciplines through a renewed
understanding of
the capacities of human beings as dynamically oriented toward
supernatural life
with God. The task of reintegrating intellectual inquiry within a broad
theological vision has proved difficult because the divisions of
secular academic
inquiry, theology, and spirituality have been written into the very
curricula
of Catholic institutions of higher education. Moreover, in secular
institutions
theology and spiritually are altogether absent from the curricula.
Nevertheless, as we see it, the antidote to the aimlessness and
disintegration
of modern academia is for Catholic scholars to recover a sense of their
intellectual endeavors as dynamically ordered toward their end in God.
Catholic
scholars, in other words, need to recover a vision of what St.
Bonaventure
called “the journey of the mind of God.”
Though
it might seem strange or, worse yet, quaint to invoke a
thirteenth-century
scholastic theologian as a model for contemporary Catholic academics,
it is
crucial to remember that Bonaventure lived in an era not unlike our
own, with
many scholars bent on divorcing faith from scholarship. This is why he
so
persistently criticized intellectuals who, in his words, “think
that mere
reading will suffice without fervor, speculation without devotion,
investigation
without admiration, observation without exultation, industry without
piety,
knowledge without love, understanding without humility, study without
grace,
the mirror without divinely inspired wisdom”[13] – or, in
other words, those who sought eruditio
without religio. Similarly,
Bonaventure warned his colleagues at the University of Paris not to
indulge in
idle speculation, because the world about which they speculated was in
fact a
mirror (speculum) in which the
God who created it could be seen. All reality,
for Bonaventure, and therefore all intellectual inquiry, is imbued with
the
presence of God.
Perhaps
because of his Franciscanism, Bonaventure possessed a keen sense of the
grace-sodden character of the material world. The natural world, for
Bonaventure,
is marked by the footprints (vestigia)
of its Maker and, as such, serves a
ladder ascending to God.[14] The
reason we tend not to see the material world this way is that sin has
blinded
us, turned us in upon ourselves, and obscured our understanding of it
in
reference to the God who is its origin, exemplar and end. Thus for
Bonaventure,
our human capacities, including our intellects, have been deformed, and
must
therefore be reformed by Christ. Then we will be able once more to
mount the
ladder of nature and ascend to God.
The
wisdom of Bonaventure’s vision for those involved in the natural
sciences is
unmistakable: we must relearn the proper use of the natural world, not
as
something to be exploited for human gratification, nor even to be
investigated
only for its own beauty and wonder, but ultimately as assign of
God’s glory.
Moreover, questions of how we are to use our knowledge of the material
world,
e.g., nuclear fission or the replication of DNA, are not to be deferred
until
after that knowledge is obtained; rather, the proper use of the
material world
is intrinsic to our knowledge of it. Bonaventure’s vision thus
challenges the
currently accepted distinction between “theoretical” or
“pure” science and
“applied” science. If we do not understand the proper use
of our world, then we
do not really understand it all.
What
about the human person? For Bonaventure, the human person’s
apprehension of
nature as a mirror of its Maker leads to a further apprehension: the
human mind
(mens) as a trinity of memory,
intellect, and will which bears the image of the triune God. [15] But,
as with
our apprehension of nature, sin has so deformed our faculties that they
must be
reformed in order for the image of God to be restored, a reformation
that is
achieved by the virtues of faith, hope, and love. Of these, it is above
all
love, love of God and love of neighbor, which reforms the soul
according to the
image of Christ, who is at once, Bonaventure writes, “our Make
and Re-maker
(reformator).”[16]
Think
of what Bonaventure’s vision has to say to Catholic scholars in
the humanities
and social sciences. We must, he says, recover a sense of the human
person as
an image of God, and more specifically, we must recover a sense of
human
possibility redefined in terms of our new creation in Jesus Christ.
This means
that, for Catholics, all accounts of “human nature” which
lock humanity into a
cycle of violence, greed, and lust for domination must be rejected in
the belief
that now it is Christ who defines the concrete possibilities of human
nature.[17] The
implication is clear: Catholics must reject the cheap, ironic cynicism
and
phony sophistication that so often pass for “realism” in
the modern academy.
Instead, they must learn to see Christ in all people. As Gerard Manley
Hopkins
put it:
To the Father through
the features of men’s faces.
For
Christ plays in ten thousand places
Lovely
in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the
Father through the features of men’s faces.[18]
Bonaventure
stresses that in its journey, the mind will never be content in
contemplating
itself. Rather, it ceaselessly yearns for contemplation of its ultimate
other:
the self-diffusive goodness of the life of the Trinity. Only in this
contemplation of the self-diffusive, self-transcending goodness and
love of the
Trinity can God be truly known; and only here is the human intellect
truly and
finally humbled. It is at this point, before the consuming fire of the
living
God, that we “die and enter into this darkness,” and
“with Christ
crucified…pass out of this world to the Father.”[19] Thus for
Bonaventure, we must know things not only by virtue of their
“mere existence,”
but also by virtue of their goodness in creation and their destiny. And
this
goodness and destiny can finally be known only through the
self-diffusive love
of God as displayed in the story of
Bonaventure’s
intellectual vision is of crucial importance to Catholic scholarship
today, for
it calls for the development (or re-development) of Catholic
institutions of
higher learning in which specific philosophical and theological
convictions
permeate and transform the curricula, departmental structures, faculty
membership,
and even the specific content of a core of courses. It calls for
Catholics in
secular institutions to break their silence and abandon their false
humility,
to draw on the riches of Catholic tradition in order to offer their
students
and colleagues an alternative to the reigning ideologies of secular
liberalism
or nihilism. In short, Bonaventure’s vision invites Catholics in
the academy to
allow their convictions about God, the Church, and the moral and
intellectual
life to inform their own scholarly work.
On
a formal level, it will involve coming to see how, when understood
within a
broad vision of the Christian life, the meticulous attention demanded
by good
scholarship can hone our attentiveness to God, so that scholarly
endeavor can
become a form of prayer of the Church.[21] On a
material level, it might mean that it would be incumbent upon Catholic
scholars
to bring their beliefs about God and God’s creation more directly
into their
intellectual inquiry. For example, in light of the tradition of
Catholic
reflection on wealth and poverty, it might mean curbing the advancement
of
neo-capitalist economic theories that currently predominate in the
economics
departments of Catholic schools in favor of cultivating approaches to
economics
which are grounded more deeply in what Christian faith says about the
supernatural end of the human person. On this score, Virgil
Michel’s contention
that economics should be understood in terms of the Mystical Body of
Christ is
important because it places questions about the distribution of goods
in an
economy within the context of the distribution of the Body of Christ in
the
Eucharist.[22] In
this way Michel’s work represents an
instinct within Catholicism against confining theology to a separate
sphere,
called “the supernatural,” and then divorcing it from
economics which is
confined to the sphere of the “the natural.” Of course,
Michel’s “Eucharistic
economics” runs counter to the kind of Christian capitalist
economics that has
been espoused in recent years by Michael Novak.[23] Now it
is our contention that the disagreement between the two must be
understood as a
theological dispute over ultimate ends, and not simply a question of
neutral
descriptions of market forces. The issues involved here are many and
complex,
and we do not propose to go into them in detail. But we do want to
suggest
that, while accuracy of description is crucial for economic analysis,
it is
equally important to locate those descriptions within a broader
theological
vision of the final destiny of producers and consumers. Thus the
relationship
between the natural and the supernatural is of central importance to
Catholic
economic theory, and it should be brought to bear in the debates now
occurring
among Catholic economists over whether capitalism, socialism, or some
form of
mixed economy is more just. This, we submit, is the sort of concrete
discussion
that is now needed in the economics departments of Catholic colleges
and
universities.
But
what troubles us is that Catholic scholars are too often not engaged by
such
issues. They have achieved a remarkable level of professional
competence in a
relatively short time, but in the process they have also taken on as
their own
the modern academy’s specialized, departmentalized vision of
knowledge. The
institutions in which we have been trained and in which we perform
our
scholarly work are organized in such a way that there exists a wall of
separation between academic life and spirituality, intellect and
affectivity,
knowledge and love. Academic performance has become a matter of
rational
calculation or, particularly in the humanities, virtuoso interpretive
practice
– tasks which in either case are essentially unrelated to
one’s passions. And
spirituality has become a matter of mastering our interior lives, a
hobby to be
indulged in after hours, when we turn off our minds. Hence, we have
grown
accustomed to university scientists designing bigger and better nuclear
warheads during the day while learning the art of centering prayer in
the
evenings, or to professors in public policy churning out utilitarian
cost-benefit
analyses for health-care providers during the week and retreating to
Trappist
monasteries on the weekends.
We
think that many Catholic scholars experience this loss of purpose. They
experience it personally and profoundly in their struggles to find a
“spirituality” of the “academic life.” They
experience it communally and
ecclesially in their bewildered search for Catholic institutional
identity.
What we are losing, and are therefore called to recover, is an
understanding of
our vocations as scholars dedicated to glorifying God. As Catholics –
and
perhaps this is unique to Catholics – we have the resources
needed to recover
this kind of tradition in scholarship. It will entail exploring
seriously how
our beliefs can shape the way we write history, analyze date in
economics,
debate with cynical Nietzscheans in philosophy, or contend with the
latest fad
of critical theory sweeping through English departments.
V.
What
we envision as central to a “spirituality” for Catholic
scholars is an extended
conversation with scores of interlocutors: Augustine, Aquinas,
Bonaventure,
Pseudo-Dionysius, Teresa of Avila, Thomas More, Hildegard of Bingen,
Julian of
Norwich, Roger Bacon, Nicholas of Cusa, Alphonsus Liguori, Joseph
Pieper, Edith
Stein, Karl Rahner, Dorothy Day; a conversation which includes all
Catholic
scholars from all branches of inquiry, the humanities, the human
sciences, and
the natural sciences.
We
are aware that some people will find our perspective narrow,
reminiscent of the
Catholic intellectual ghetto of decades past. The objection will be
that we
have depicted a role for Catholic scholars and Catholic institutions of
learning that neglects the importance of taking up the challenges
confronting
modern society and helping to find solutions to them. We have, in other
(all
too familiar) words, presented a so-called “sectarian” role
for our
institutions that takes up a narrowly conceived religious task at the
expense
of developing a foundation upon which a common ground can be built so
that we
can address the larger pluralistic society in “public”
terms which can be
understood by everyone, regardless of religious belief.
To
which we respond: meeting modern society on its own terms was the
self-appointed
agenda of the mainline liberal Protestant schools in the later decades
of the
last century and the results have been disastrous. These schools are
barely
recognizable as having been founded by Christian denominations.[24] In
recent
decades, Christian belief and practice has had virtually no impact on
curricular development, faculty hiring, and daily administration.
Actual
religious practices and traditions are reserved to Sunday mornings, if
at all.
The main chapels serve as little more than museums that arouse
sentimental
recollections of a religious past in the hearts of incoming students or
significant donors.
Catholic
higher education is headed in the same directions.[25] And
Catholics will repeat the blunders of liberal Protestant scholars if
they
persist in some generic intellectual vision, garnished around the edges
with
vague talk about how well they promote volunteer service programs and
other
religiously inspired “values.” We think that following the
kind of vision we
have sketched out is and will be difficult. Developing
a strong, vibrant Catholic intellectual
vision and then institutionalizing it in our colleges and universities
will
distance Catholics from the central forums of the political and
cultural, not
to mention academic, mainstream in the
If
it is difficult to envision how our religious convictions can transform
scholarship in the arts and in the natural and social sciences, if what
we have
suggested seems like a wistful vision of an irretrievable past –
when Christian
faith permeated the humanities and when the leading scientists were
Franciscans, Dominicans, and other committed Christians – then we
would like to
suggest that this may be a sign not of the impractical or utopian
nature of our
proposal, but of how far we have strayed form our true vocation, and of
how
much works needs to be done in retrieving the unity between scholarship
and
discipleship, between eruditio and religio.
Communio
22 (Summer,
1995)
Copyright
by Communio
International Catholic Review.
Posted
here with
permission.
[1] Such a view has been ridiculed by Bernard
Lonergan as
“the principle of the empty head.” See his Method
in Theology (New York: herder and Herder, Inc., 1979; repr.,
Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1990), 156.
[2] These lines are placed above the cupboard
containing
the works of Augustine in the library of Seville: Migne, Patrologia
Latina, 83, col. 1109; cf. Possidius, Vita Augustina,
xviii, 9, quoted in
Peter Brown, Religion and Society in the
Age of Saint Augustine (London: Faber and Faber, Ltd., 1972), 25.
[3] The Rule of
Saint Benedict, ed. Timothy Fry, O.S.B. (Collegeville, MN: The
Liturgical
Press, 1981), 165 (Prologue, n. 45).
[4] Jean Leclerq, O.S.B., The Love
of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture,
trans. Catherine Misrahi (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982), 39.
[5] For an account of these various disputes, see
Fernand
Van Steenberghen, The Philosophical
Movement in the Thirteen Century (New York: Thomas Nelson and
Sons, 1955).
[6] Not all parties, of course, joined in this
theological
task. For example, certain members of the Arts faculty at the
[7] As Marilyn McCord Adams puts it,
“Ockham’s method is
thus to subordinate reason and experience to Church authority, while
keeping
violations of reason and experience to a minimum” (William Ockham
[Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1987], 1009).
[8] The following description of the Ratio Studiorum is based on John W. Donahue, S.J., Jesuit Education: An Essay on the Foundation of Its Idea (New York: Fordham University Press, 1963), 32-62.
[9] For an account of this development of
“spirituality,”
see Philip Sheldrake, Spirituality and
History: Question s of Interpretation and Method (New York:
Crossroads,
1992), 40-47.
[10] This shift in academic understandings of
“intellectual
life” and “spiritual life” is imbedded in larger
cultural shifts which are
sketched by Michel de Certeau in The
Mystic Fable, vol. I, The Sixteenth
and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago:
University of
Chicago Press, 1992), esp. 79-112, 241-70.
[11] For a wonderful description of the worldview that was forged in this intellectual setting, se Philip Gleason, Keeping the Faith: American Catholicism Past and Present (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987), ch.7, “The Search for Unity and Its Sequel,” 136-51.
[12] John Tracy Ellis, American
Catholics and the Intellectual Life (Chicago: The Heritage
Foundation,
Inc.,1956)
[13] Saint Bonaventure, The
Journey of the Mind to God, trans. Philotheus Boehner, O.F.M.,
intro. And
notes by Stephen F. Brown (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co. 1993),
2
(Prologue, n.4).
[14] Ibid., 5(I,2).
[15] Ibid.,21-22 (III,5).
[16] Ibid.,25(IV,5).
[17] John Paul II, Veritatis
Splendor (n.103): “Only in the mystery of Christ’s
redemption do we
discover the ‘concrete’ possibilities of man.”
[18] Gerard Manley Hopkins, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire, Dragonflies Draw Flame,” in The Poems of Gerard Manly Hopkins, ed. W.H. Gardner and N.H. MacKenzie (London: Oxford University Press, 1972),90.
[19] Bonaventure, Journey
of the Mind to God, 39 (VII,6).
[20] For a recent example of a similar argument,
this time
in a “postmodern” mode, see Jean-Luc Marion, God
Without Being: Hors-Texte,
trans. Thomas A Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
[21] For an understanding of the theological importance of “attention,” see Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” in The Simone Weil Reader, ed. George A. Panichas (Mt. Kisco, NY: Moyer Bell Ltd., 1977), 49-50.
[22] For a brief but vivid account of the
interconnection
between the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ and economics, see
Virgil
Michel, “The Mystical Body and Economic Justice,” in The Social Question: Essays on Capitalism and Christianity,
ed.
Robert L. Spaeth, intro. R. William Franklin (Collegeville, MN: St.
John’s
University Pres, 1987), 55-63. For a fuller account of Michel’s
social theory,
see Christian Social Reconstruction
(New York: The Bruce Publishing Co., 1937). For a summary of
Michel’s economic
theory, see John J. Mitchell, Critical
Voices in American Catholic Economic Thought (New York: Paulist
Press,
1989),77-105.
[23] See for example, Michael Novak, The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: the Free Press, 1993). The phrase “eucharistic economics” is taken from Mitchell, Critical Voices.
[24] Geroge Marsden, The Soul of the
[25] James T. Burtchaell, C.S.C., “The Alienation of Christian Higher Education: Diagnosis and Prognosis,” in Schooling Christians: “Holy experiments” in American Education, ed. Stanley Hauerwas and John H. Westerhoff (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.,1992),129-183.