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 kind 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. In fact, I enjoy it so much that I reread it several times
per year. – 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.
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 Vatican II. After all,
it has several advantages. You don’t have to answer to your colleagues for
every utterance emanating from the Vatican; you don’t have to listen to the
carping of rapidly middle-aging “ex Catholic” academics whose fifth-grade
teacher, Sister Mary Aloysius Twardowskewicz,
crippled them for life; you don’t have to defend the central tenets of Catholic
intellectual tradition to teachers or students who aren’t interest in it
anyway, except insofar as it provides more grist for the anti-Catholic mill;
you don’t have to tense up in apology as you explain to doctrinaire pro-choice
liberals why you think people should refrain from destroying their offspring.
But it also carries with it a terrible disadvantage: it reduces Catholicism to
an extracurricular activity. That is to say, it presumes that Catholicism has
no real part to play when it comes to genuine, authentic, hard-core,
nuts-and-bolts academic teaching and scholarship.
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
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.