What is Catholic about a Catholic University?
Almost a century ago (1912) G. K. Chesterton commented upon the universities of Oxford and Cambridge: "A puddle," he wrote, "reflects infinity and is full of light; nevertheless, if analyzed objectively, a puddle is a piece of dirty water spread very thin on mud. The two great historic universities of England have all this large and reflective brilliance. They repeat infinity. They are full of light. Nevertheless, or rather on the other hand, they are puddles. The academic mind reflects infinity and is full of light by the simple process of being shallow and standing still" (G.K. Chesterton, Man Alive).
We inhabit another continent and another age than that of Chesterton and the minds of our academics would appear to be anything but stationary: if there is a single problem with academe it is the fragmentation of studies that has occurred due to a frenetic drive toward manipulating, rather than understanding, man and woman and the world that situates us. There might truly be said to be a lack of depth in all this activity. Dogmatic skepticism –and therefore standing still– in the face of ultimate questions is fashionable in our secular institutions and the light that issues from the academy might indeed suggest rays reflected in the face of a puddle.
The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel liked to distinguish questions that are real questions from questions that are really answers in question form. If I ask in what year Columbus arrived in the Americas we answer, 1492. This is not a real question, in that we know the answer or, if we do not, the answer is easily accessible. A real question is precisely one to which I do not know the answer and therefore something that troubles me. The more profound and urgent the question, the more disquieting it will be: In knowing things do we impose our own categories of understanding upon them? To what degree can we speak of a common humanity? Can we ever truly know another?
Such questions are not naïve, unless one holds that the human person is nothing more than a complex of social, biological or neurological determinisms. But this, shallow as it is, is widely held in the contemporary academy. Contrary positions tend to be marginalized, even in institutions that purport to be "of Catholic heritage," whatever that might mean. Attention to fundamental human questions is regarded as futile if not naïve, as is faith, whether natural or supernatural. We have arrived to a society that is secular in the manner that Charles Taylor has described it: one in which it is easier not to believe than to believe.
In response the past four decades have witnessed a burgeoning of intentionally Catholic colleges throughout the country. Many are undergraduate institutions; most follow curricula grounded in the liberal arts; all provide access to the sacraments and a code of conduct consonant with the Church's teaching. But what is it, precisely, that renders such a college or university Catholic?
Certainly, an education in the liberal arts, at least in its present iteration, was a product of Medieval Christendom, but there are non-Catholic institutions that offer the liberal arts superbly, –St. John's, for example. Even institutions that have largely repudiated their Catholic identity still offer access to the sacraments, and a moral code consonant with the Church's teaching is something that we would expect of any healthy institution, Catholic or otherwise.
What is the mark of a Catholic university? I propose that it is an institution founded upon wonder, even as wonder is the first and truest response to the Christian mystery: the Catholic university institutionalizes wonder.
What is "wonder?" "There resides in every man a natural desire to know the cause of any effect which he sees" Aquinas tells us, "and thence arises wonder in men" (S.T. I, Q. 12, 1 c). In another place he explains further, "...when man knows an effect, and knows that it has a cause, there naturally remains in the man the desire to know about the cause, "what it is." And this desire is one of wonder, and causes inquiry, as is stated in the beginning of the Metaphysics (i, 2)" (I-II, Q. 3, Art. 8, c). If we attend St. Thomas closely, he proposes that wonder is a desire or a natural appetite to know things in their causes, which is to say, in their reasons or explanations. What gives rise to wonder is anything that is apprehended as an "effect" –that is, as something that cannot stand alone, something that requires explanation, something that gives rise to what Marcel calls a real question.
The antithesis of wonder is ideology: the attempt to settle questions by means of a normative application of accepted ideas. So, for example, it is almost universally accepted that evolution can account for the differentiation of species in biology, a position which is theoretically plausible. It remains, however, a theory and it is by no means unthinkable that another theory might better account for the same phenomena. But the idea of evolution is now applied as well to human societies and cultures, and even to the realm of ideas, to the extent that it has, for some, become normative as an explanation for every human development. This is not science or philosophy, but ideology, in that the explanation precedes the evidence: that all things evolve is presupposed, and the presupposition remains untested. Given such a habit, all possibility of wonder is precluded, in that the world that we encounter is overlooked.
Many of our contemporaries presume that all attempts to rationalize human experience are necessarily ideological – somewhat arbitrary impositions of thought upon experience – and, in that presumption, regard the Catholic faith as an ideology in competition with their own. They are abetted in this by our unfortunate tendency to make use of the word, "Catholicism." When we use the word we mean to refer to the Catholic faith or the Catholic tradition. In current English usage however, any "ism" smacks of ideology, of a closed theoretical system or an explanation that precedes the facts, and people will relate "Catholicism" to Communism, republicanism, socialism, Marxism, Darwinism, or whatever other "ism" we might invoke.
Our Catholic universities are not immune from such presumptions, especially to the degree that they take as their model their secular counterparts, as they have tended to do since the Land O' Lakes conferences of 1967 and 1968. I have suggested elsewhere that what appears to have been their paramount concern was to present the Catholic university as having come of age –by which they meant: the Catholic university can now stand as a true university in the manner of Harvard or Stanford. But this implies that the secular universities were their models. Small wonder that they fell prey to the prevailing intellectual fashions of the time. And, to the degree that their desire is to integrate seamlessly with the secular universities of our own time, they still continue to do so.
Students who participate in the Eucharist are subjected to what Pope Benedict has called a sort of schizophrenia: in the practice of their faith they encounter the ineffable God and then are offered a world view –reinforced through their education – stripped of mystery. Other young people simply cease to practice their faith, in that there is no cultural support for what the tradition claims and, often, the faith has been presented to them in the manner of a competing ideology.
What is to be done? I propose, once again, that we consider what is wonder, but in two quite different senses. There is a natural wonder, the disposition that St. Thomas describes according to which we seek the causes of things. But there is also a wonder that is born of the faith, that requires to be awakened in us by the in-breaking of God, and that we might regard, to use the language of St. Thomas, as an obediential potency for the grace that perfects our nature. It is the awakening of wonder of the second sort that, I would argue, defines what is explicitly Catholic.
There is, indeed, a natural wonder, born of a natural fidelity. What is it to be faithful? It is not, in the first instance, thinking rightly; rather, it is staying with some other, and the attentiveness according to which we look and do not look away. This disposition corresponds with courage. When I grasp that something truly requires explanation –when it presents itself to me as an effect that requires a cause– I do not flee in the face of it, or hide behind conventional answers, but stay with what I do not understand in order that, by my attentiveness, I may come to grasp it or, at least, to see it further.
In order to foster this natural disposition we offer the liberal arts: students are presented with the observations and theories of those who have themselves sought an explanation for things to assist them to observe and to formulate their own questions.
The great objection to liberal studies is that they are not "practical", by which we likely mean that they are not immediately useful for the sake of manipulating our environment for the sake of our own ends. But it is "practical" education that is destructive of wonder and is, moreover, an almost certain guarantee of mediocrity in all of the realms of human enterprise. Those who seek only a practical end for education will tend to be ideologues, incapable of staying with reality as it presents itself, settling always for the popular explanation. Therefore, ironically, they will rarely be among those from whom real innovation comes.
The liberal arts foster a natural disposition that is wonder and many Catholic colleges have built their curriculum around the liberal arts. But, as we have remarked, there are non-Catholic colleges that do the same. What of the wonder that is born of the faith?
Many of our contemporaries regard the Catholic faith –or any faith– as hostile to wonder. The faith, they think, is a pre-scientific attempt to give an explanation for things. To hold the Catholic faith means to abandon the search for explanations, in that the explanation for things is already given. What they fail to understand is that, far from undermining human inquiry, the faith inculcates wonder. How so?
In the Gospel of Luke when the Angel Gabriel appears to our Lady and announces the miraculous birth of Our Lord, our Lady replies, "How can this be....?" Luke means for us to contrast Our Lady's reply to Gabriel with that of Zechariah in the parallel announcement of the birth of John the Baptist, "How can I know that this is so?" The two responses appear, at first glance, to be similar, but there is a vast difference. Zechariah doubts the words spoken to him. "How can I know this is so?" On what basis, in other words, can I accept what you say?" Our Lady, in stark contrast, does not doubt what is said to her, but wonders: "How can this be?" Her wonder is only possible because she accepts as fact what is spoken to her. Therefore Gabriel's answer to each is markedly different: he answers Our Lady, although in terms that she could hardly understand, "the power of the Most High will overshadow you." To Zechariah he responds that he will be struck dumb until what he has spoken will come to pass. Apparently it is not prudent to irritate an archangel by doubting his word.
Here faith is not merely a natural fidelity, but what we call a "religious submission of intellect and will," a staying with what is not able to be comprehended, because –and only because– the revelation has God as its source. What is revealed concerns the vocation itself of the human person. This was the constant teaching of Blessed John Paul II:
The man who wishes to understand himself thoroughly–and not just in accordance with immediate, partial, often superficial, and even illusory standards and measures of his being–he must with his unrest, uncertainty and even his weakness and sinfulness, with his life and death, draw near to Christ. He must, so to speak, enter into him with all his own self, he must "appropriate" and assimilate the whole of the reality of the Incarnation and Redemption in order to find himself. If this profound process takes place within him, he then bears fruit not only of adoration of God but also of deep wonder at himself. How precious must man be in the eyes of the Creator, if he "gained so great a Redeemer", and if God "gave his only Son "in order that man "should not perish but have eternal life (Jn. 3:16)."
In reality, the name for that deep amazement at man's worth and dignity is the Gospel, that is to say: the Good News. It is also called Christianity. This amazement determines the Church's mission in the world and, perhaps even more so, "in the modern world". This amazement, which is also a conviction and a certitude–at its deepest root it is the certainty of faith, but in a hidden and mysterious way it vivifies every aspect of authentic humanism–is closely connected with Christ (Redemptor Hominis, 10).
This is the wonder that the Catholic university institutionalizes: the deep amazement at the worth and dignity of the human person that is called Christianity. Notice that this wonder also, Bl. John Paul II insists, takes into account the "unrest, uncertainty and even ... [the] weakness and sinfulness" of the human person. It is, in fact, the only disposition toward the human person and the world that is fully open to permitting the whole of the creation to be examined for its own sake, inasmuch as wonder of this character insists upon an encounter with the world as it is, and not as it could be or as it ought to be.
How can wonder such as this be incorporated into a curriculum? The answer from my own (Dominican) tradition is to be found in the interface of philosophy –in the broadest sense, in which it organizes every branch of learning that has natural reason as its source– and theology. This for two reasons.
First, philosophy, and with it the sciences grounded in nature, needs theology in order fully to investigate the natural order. Because of the confidence born of faith that God, whom we dare to call Father, has revealed himself to us through the incarnate Word, we are free to philosophize: no questions are forbidden to us, no questions dismissed in advance as futile. St. Thomas Aquinas dares to ask whether there is God –and the question is a real question, a question that needs answering. Because we hold that there is truth, and that the truth is, through Christ, accessible to us, if only in a partial manner, we are free to interrogate every aspect of human experience, and can tolerate the fact that philosophy, even when aided by the revelation, will never present to us a fully adequate account of our life in the world. Philosophy remains worthwhile, inasmuch as through philosophical study the horizons of our natural understanding are illumined, and the questions most needed to be answered are made apparent.
On the other hand, theology, because it is born of wonder, requires philosophy to make certain that the questions that need answering are not short changed. The faith insists that the truth we seek, the truth toward which the tradition points us, is a person, a divine Person: the Word of God incarnate. To meet the Word Incarnate does not provide us solutions to problems, but opens us to wonder, to questions that need answering –Marcel's real questions– that arise because of the encounter with Christ. There is no faith, no belief, which does not occasion problems, opposition, doubts and urgent questions. A faith that truly seeks understanding –a faith that gives rise to theology– insists that the whole of human experience be examined. Here we realize that ideology does not merely oppose wonder, but stands against the faith itself, for faith insists that problems not be too soon resolved, harmony not cover up real opposition, certainties not be feigned in the face of doubt or urgent questions dismissed with facile answers. To sustain the living tradition that is born of the faith requires of us that we pursue philosophical study for its own sake.
In the Dominican tradition we consider the interface of philosophy and theology to be a graduate and not an undergraduate project. Indeed, without some background in philosophy, theology cannot be undertaken: for St. Thomas theology is a habit whereby an intellect already disciplined in philosophy and informed and guided by faith, seeks to understand the things that are revealed. Therefore, the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology is, as a graduate institution, precisely defined by the interface of these two disciplines. From an institution such as ours will come the faculty who are committed to the wonder that is the hallmark of the Catholic university.
But what of undergraduate programs? It is my conviction that many of our Catholic universities ceased to be Catholic when they abandoned the requirement of philosophical study. That study was not always done well. Etienne Gilson, the great lay Thomistic philosopher, spoke of a "decadent scholasticism" in the schools and, alas, also in the seminaries, in which the conclusions of St. Thomas were taught without sufficient reference to the questions that gave rise to them. And, as Cardinal Congar was fond of insisting, an answer without a real question behind it answers nothing. In a sense, this approach could be said to have been "ideological" in that the explanation preceded the questions. Even so, students at a Catholic university prior to 1968 had some introduction to the very questions that sustain our natural wonder and open us to the wonder that is born of faith: What is a human person? What is the nature of a human act? Can we speak of things common to humanity, and therefore of a common good? The fact that we might have treated these questions poorly was surely no reason to abandon the questions, save that the secular institutions that we set out to copy had long since despaired of pursuing them.
I do not suggest that we return to the curriculum that once we had. I would, in fact, insist that we do not. While some questions are as old as mankind, there are new questions that we must now confront, and even the venerable questions appear in different guises throughout the ages. What we must insist upon is that the wonder that is born of our encounter with the world and then the deeper wonder that is born of our encounter with Christ guide our educational theory and praxis.
How is this achieved? Here we might have recourse to John Henry Newman. Certainly, Newman emphasized the importance of a liberal education for the sake of cultivating the whole intelligence of a student. But more important to Newman than the course of studies was the significance to education of those who taught:
... the general principles of any study you may learn by books at home: but the detail, the colour, the tone, the air, the life which makes it live in us, you must catch all these from those in whom it lives already. ...We must come to the teachers of wisdom to learn wisdom, we must repair to the fountain, and drink there. Portions of it may go from thence to the ends of the earth by means of books; but the fulness is in one place alone. It is in such assemblages and congregations of intellect that books themselves, the masterpieces of human genius, are written, or at least originated.
If we are to inculcate wonder in our students then we must raise up teachers who can communicate "the color, the tone, the air, the life which makes [the study] live in us." Clearly, there is no such thing as Christian mathematics or physics or, for that matter, Catholic political science. Neither is there, strictly speaking, Catholic philosophy, nor should there be. The wonder that is born of our encounter with God insists that we permit the different studies to have the independence of content and method that is proper to each.
This is, in fact, the point: there is an approach to the world that, marveling at the dignity of the human person and his or her pursuits–whether mathematics, or physics or political science or philosophy– eschews all ideology and communicates or, better, seeks and professes, the knowledge that is illumined by each discipline. One who would teach in a Catholic institution must truly be a professor.
For this I think two things are necessary: first, that the majority of professors, presuming their academic qualification and competence, are rooted in the practice of the faith, specifically as it is expressed and manifested in the liturgy. The wonder of which we speak is born of the Eucharistic encounter with God incarnate, and the Eucharistic liturgy is the first means by which the Catholic faith is handed on in a living tradition. Those who are challenged in the liturgy to believe –and recall that this is, in Jesus' words, to do the "work" of God– will be those who truly wonder. Second, there must be an opportunity for students to probe fundamental questions concerning their personal vocation and to reflect upon its relation to their study. In an undergraduate program, this is best achieved through courses in philosophy, but a philosophical study that is open to our theological tradition, not in order to limit enquiry in any way, but to give it room in which to live.
I cannot, in the end, define a Catholic university, but perhaps I might attempt to designate one: a community of scholars, both professors and students, engaging a study born of a wonder rooted in the encounter with God, through which the personal vocation of each member becomes clearer and from which human knowledge is advanced.
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