The boutique and the gallery: an apologia for a catholic intellectual tradition in the academy.

Muldoon, Tim

MANY TIMES NOW I have witnessed the scene of parents carting suitcases and small refrigerators up the steps of residence halls, offloading from their cars the accumulated detritus of their adolescents' young lives. The busyness and stresses of the moving-in period belie, of course, the deeper feelings of both parents and children, especially families for whom the experience of freshman year at college is new. Yet even for parents who themselves underwent this ritual many years earlier, and whose older sons and daughters have already passed through their college years, the experience of bringing a child to college is significant: it is the passing of trust for their child's development to the people the child will encounter there. (1)

Lost, often, in arcane discussions about mission in higher education or in explorations of the objects of intellectual inquiry is the recollection of how the very enterprise of tertiary education--like all levels of education, really--depends upon acts of trust. In 1871, the future president James A. Garfield suggested that the ideal college was the sainted Mark Hopkins of Williams College on one end of a log and a student on the other. Such an image illustrates how the very decision, by either a parent or a student, to learn from someone else involves trusting him or her to tell the truth. Professors are naturally in a position of power for their students trust them (if even for a short time) with contributing to their development as thinkers. Even amidst the prevalence of an instrumental approach to higher education--an approach shared by many parents, students, and even faculty and administrators, which sees education as merely a means to the end of good employment or social advancement--there is nonetheless a confluence of acts of trust in the one who is to direct the intellectual development of students. The implicit message is this: "Think the way I lead you to think, and you will get what you are after."

Of course it is the second part of that compound sentence that is the issue of debate among many in academia today. What, exactly, are we after? And what ought we to be after? There are really two distinct issues, but in colleges and universities where intellectual work is the engine that fuels both student diligence and capital campaigns, these two issues come together. The first issue is one that preoccupied the earliest thinkers in the West: namely, the question about knowledge itself--what it is, what it strives for, what it can be used for. The second issue has to do with what we want to hand on--the Latins used the verb tradere and its cognate nouns: traditio (a handing on), tradita/traditus/traditum (the feminine/masculine/ neuter "something handed on"). Assuming we know what we're doing when we use our knowledge, what then ought we to hand on to our students? What things ought we to hand on, and what practices ought we to teach them in order that they might continue the work we ourselves have inherited?

Two Images

I propose two images, each of which represents a way in which thinkers today conceive of knowledge, and each of which carries implications for the way thinkers hand on what they are doing to students.

THE BOUTIQUE

The first image is that of the boutique--or better, the cluster of boutiques one might find at a mall or a downtown shopping district. Let us assume that each boutique is run by an expert, a connoisseur (if you will) of the precise items of the boutique's specialty. In a typical boutique, say, "English romanticism," a procurement associate (let us call her a "faculty member") is responsible for working with various vendors--Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats are a few of the more prominent brands--to develop new product lines. Here she develops a new psychoanalytic look at Coleridge; there she offers a postcolonial critique of Frankenstein's monster. Her work is an exercise of both skill and creativity; not only must she have thorough knowledge of each of the vendor's products, but she must also have the ability to develop new ideas, new perspectives, and new insights into how these products might be marketed, adapted for use in new ways, and applied to the needs of the contemporary consumer.

The strength of the boutique is its agility in offering fresh products for its consumers (called "students") through the talent of its assistants and associates who regularly attend the annual product conventions and lead various projects that enhance research and development, visibility, and marketing. The skills of those who work for the boutique are evident in their creative application of both the new and the old, in their ability to attract new consumers, and in their work with proteges who will become future assistants and associates. Most consumers find it delightful to shop there, even if only for a short time, for they find the products interesting and those who work there engaging. They find their time in the boutique part of a satisfying day of shopping, and frequently find items there that they will use to great profit in the future.

In the more prominent shopping areas, one finds a host of brilliant and enticing boutiques, with such names as "Molecular Biology," "Pre-Columbian Central America," and "The Politics of Religion in Contemporary China." Shoppers browse, sample, and dabble, and occasionally go on spending sprees in their favorite boutiques. A few even find themselves entering the first one and becoming so enthralled that they don't even bother to look at the others upon return visits. Of course the more apathetic customers breeze by without becoming particularly interested in any of them.

THE GALLERY

The second image is that of an art gallery, in which is a collection of great works of art both old and new. Here are works from ancient Greece and Rome; there are ancient near Eastern pieces. In one room we find early medieval art, and in another works from the height of the Italian Renaissance or early modern Latin America or late modern Africa. The media are varied: sculpture and bas-relief, oil and tempera, daguerreotype and digital photography. The subjects range wildly from the heroes and gods of the ancient world, to the piety of the medieval period to the explorations of modernity and beyond. The sacred and the secular coexist: robust and colorful explorations of sexuality in the same rooms as contemplative chiaroscuro drawings of the symbols of faith.

Throughout the gallery are well-trained tour guides ("teachers") who walk groups ("learners") through the different rooms, explaining the connections between this Greek sculpture and that medieval painting. Those on the tour who are attentive to the guide's lectures come away with a strong sense of the interrelations among the various pieces and how certain shared themes emerge. Also present in the galleries are artists-in-training copying the masters, seeking to learn how this use of color or that turn of shading affects the piece. But there are also others moving through the galleries in a somewhat more haphazard fashion, wandering from room to room without a tour guide and without a strong sense of direction or purpose.

The gallery is both a repository for the old and a training ground for the new. Those who work at the gallery are committed to understanding how earlier artists chose their subjects, selected among different available media, drew from others' work. This commitment informs their own original work, which they hope one day will be deemed worthy of inclusion in this august collection. Some see themselves primarily committed to their work with the learners while others find themselves drawn more to the exchange of ideas to inform their own art.

The Telos of Intellectual Life in the Academy

I propose these two images in order to raise the question of how we in the West conceive of the telos of intellectual life in the academy. (2) In the boutique, the telos is the running of the market and the benefit that the market delivers to the individuals who participate in it. And to be sure, the market does benefit many people; it provides livelihood to individuals and communities and thereby serves the common good. Yet the limitation of the boutique--and therefore of the market that the boutiques serve--is that the benefits provided are in the form of instrumental goods rather than goods in themselves. The boutiques cannot aspire to serve the greater goods of the human family: those goods which involve right relationships between people, and which generate hope and involve the solidarity of love and suffering. The gallery, on the other hand, seeks the telos of beauty, and as such serves both as a good in itself and a good that generates still other goods. I shall argue that intellectual life in the academy is better served with such a conception of its telos. By sketching the historical roots of these different conceptions of the telos, my argument, in brief, is this:

1. The cornerstone of intellectual life in the West was the development from myth (mythos) to philosophy (logos) in the Greek world.

2. This philosophical impulse sees the world as fundamentally knowable and therefore worthy of exploration.

3. The appropriation of this philosophical impulse in the early Church was rooted in a belief that both this impulse and the development of Judeo-Christian theology arose from the same desire to understand the nature of the world (logos).

4. The growth of the Catholic intellectual tradition in the medieval period corresponds to the gallery image above, inasmuch as it sought to preserve both classical (pagan) and Christian logoi.

5. Yet the modern period brought with it critiques of the Catholic synthesis, particularly in biblical criticism and (secular) theories of human progress.

6. In the contemporary academy, there is a fragmentation of disciplines into boutiques and a loss of the telos of the university, yielding instead a "multiversity."

7. A renewed understanding of the Catholic intellectual tradition (hereafter CIT) will involve addressing the impulses toward fragmentation within the larger Christian tradition and formulating a renewed understanding of the university.

In the subsequent sections I shall elucidate this argument, and conclude with an apologia for a Catholic intellectual tradition in the university. With reference to the argument sketched here, I shall suggest that there is a distinct (even if not entirely unique) CIT, the strength of which is its drawing together all disciplines into a rich conversation about the telos of intellectual life itself.

Classical Antiquity

The most significant development in the thought of the Greek world from roughly the eighth through the fourth centuries B.C.E. is the movement from myth to philosophy. (3) The pervasive influence of Hesiod and Homer manifests the extent to which the imaginative world of Greek thinkers was shaped by the myths and stories of gods and heroes. Nevertheless, the development of Greek philosophy showed the willingness of key figures--most especially Plato's Socrates--to question this world and thereby to develop a new method for intellectual discourse.

Of course, before Socrates there were others who, in a spirit of humility and wonder, honestly sought understanding of the cosmos. Yet in Socrates we find such a strong exemplar of the willingness to embrace an attitude of simple obedience to the discovered truths of the world that he stands in stark contrast to those orators who ultimately accused him and sentenced him to a martyr's death. Unlike them, who sought to use the tools of reason to serve personal or political ends--even to the point of denying truth altogether--Socrates represented the willingness to be subservient to the exigencies of reason and the demands of truth.

It is precisely this posture of humility in the face of truth and faith in the capacity of human beings to achieve wisdom that shaped Socrates' disciples and their attitude toward education. According to Plato, education was about eliciting from young people a knowledge of the world of the forms that their souls knew even before coming to earth to be imprisoned in bodies. (4) The highest knowledge was, for him, knowledge of the forms of the good, the true, and the beautiful. For his student Aristotle, education was about forming in young people the habits that enabled them to move from knowledge of particular bodies to knowledge of all bodies to contemplation of beauty itself. (5) And while Plato and Aristotle differed significantly on many things, what they hold in common is the conviction that seeking wisdom is necessary for the happy life and that the search for wisdom culminates in contemplation of eternal truths, the really real. This posture of seeking the real provided the philosophical cornerstone upon which later Christian intellectual life was built.

The Christian West

It is no surprise that in his pontificate, Benedict XVI has underscored the centrality of the Greeks in Christian history. For him, the Hellenic influence is more than an early kind of inculturation. (6) Instead, from the Greeks early Christians inherited the very concept of logos--perhaps best translated as "word" or "reason." En arche ein ho logos--in the beginning was the word, writes John the Evangelist, appropriating a term already holding great currency in the Greek world. For Benedict, the Christian reliance on the Greeks is a sine qua non of Christian theology. To put it more starkly: without the Greek notion of reason attaining to truth about the world, there is no difference between Christian theology and mythology. Christian theology is, for Benedict, essentially rational--at least to the extent that it is not contrary to reason. Of course this is not to say that Christian faith attains to full knowledge about God, but rather that in its exploration of Scripture and of the Church's unfolding understanding of that text, there is an underlying logic, a rationality. (7)

An example of the transition between the Greek world and the early Christian world is the second-century figure Justin Martyr, the philosopher-turned-Christian apologist. Trained by both Platonists and Stoics, he probed into questions about God and eventually found himself persuaded that philosophy cannot lead one to knowledge of God, but only through divine revelation can a human being have such knowledge. For Justin, then, both philosophy and Christianity share in the pursuit of the logos, the truth about the world. (8) Justin's work as an apologist was an attempt to show the Roman world the rationality of Christianity and to defend Christians against unjust persecutions. Unlike many religious movements of the day, Christianity (he sought to demonstrate) was not a mystery cult reserved only for the initiated. It is, rather, an embrace of the truth of the world as it is and as such represents that for which any authentic logos ought to strive.

A similar posture toward the knowability of the world and of God is evident in other influential early Christian thinkers. Tertullian (160-235) sparred with the Greek philosophers over such issues as the preexistence of the soul. He is credited with the famous question, "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" underscoring his belief (like Justin) that human reason alone (Athens) cannot attain to knowledge of the divine, and that only divine revelation (Jerusalem) can give human beings a true knowledge of the world. The Neoplatonist Origen (185-254) was admired even by his adversary Porphyry for his mastery of the Greek philosophical system, which he employed for the sake of challenging the Gnostic tendencies toward mythology. For him, Christian theology was continuous with philosophical investigation, evident in his work On First Principles. (9) Augustine (354-430), similarly influenced by the Neoplatonists, was dissatisfied with both their and the Manicheans' approach to questions about God. In his younger years he was moved by Cicero's Hortensius, and came to see his own work as a rhetorician as masking a deeper love for philosophy. (10) Boethius (480-524) wanted to translate the works of Plato and Aristotle into Latin, and composed many philosophical works and commentaries before writing his Consolation of Philosophy, which was translated many times and became one of the most influential texts of medieval Europe.

All of these figures give evidence of the way that early Christian thought appropriated what may be described as a philosophical impulse. It was an impulse rooted in faith: that the world is knowable, and that both human reason and divine revelation cooperate to shape the human understanding of the world. Christian theologians were unlike the Sophists, whose agnosticism toward questions of truth was a by-product of their realpolitik, their (pre-Nietzschean) belief that power in the world was the only real telos of intellectual discourse. They were also unlike their contemporaries the Gnostics, who claimed a secret knowledge of the world unavailable to the masses of the uninitiated. For early Christian thinkers, the philosophical impulse was rooted in the conviction that the logos made flesh revealed more fully what was already the object of Greek philosophy. Revelation, in other words, complemented and perfected human reason, but did not abolish or marginalize it.

One need look no further than the medieval trivium and quadrivium to recognize the nonsectarian trajectory of Catholic intellectual life. (11) Those religious communities who educated their students in the trivium and quadrivium were neither bible schools nor madrassas; their aims were not solely religious. They can be described as humanistic in the sense that their pedagogy was rooted in the classical and early Christian understandings of the ordering of wisdom. (12) Of course for both the Greeks (e.g. Pythagoras, Plato) and the Scholastics, the liberal arts were a preparation for the more advanced study of things eternal, and they found in them their ultimate meaning and integrity. The love of wisdom, the true philosophia, demanded openness to exploring the hardest questions at the edge of human understanding: those that dealt with life and death and things eternal. The liberal arts enabled human beings to understand themselves in order that they might come to more critical appreciation of the extent and limits of their understanding.

The development of Scholastic philosophy followed the lead of the early Christian thinkers. The former rhetorician Augustine had observed in De doctrina christiana that study ought to incite young minds to the love of truth, but that the study of words ought not to obscure the truths to which they give witness. (13) And for the Scholastics, the culmination of study was sacred Scripture itself, which was perceived as the science of God (theologia) distinct from philosophy. Thomas Aquinas states this very directly when he wrote in Question I of his Summa theologiae that there is a knowledge revealed by God distinct from human reason (I.1.1). This position was continuous with the positions held by earlier thinkers such as Tertullian and Augustine. It is also, arguably, consistent with what we find in Plato: Socrates' description of the afterlife depends upon the story recounted by one who was granted permission to return to earth after a sojourn among the dead, illustrating his own belief that human reason could go only so far before needing the help of a kind of divine revelation. (14)

In the scholastic model, philosophia and theologia were complementary: the one being an exploration of all truths accessible through observation and reason, the other an exploration of all truths revealed by God in scripture and Church tradition. In the medieval universities--which arose from religious communities seeking to give authoritative structure to the education of their members--those who progressed through the course of study would be granted the legal title of studium generale, the right to teach anywhere (jus ubique docendi).

The development of degrees and structures of what today would be called "accreditation" were matters of both civil and canon law. As such, they derived their juridical power from those civil authorities (e.g. Paris, Bologna) and ecclesiastical authorities who could certify that they learned the right things and were capable of teaching the right things. What is important for our observations today is that there was necessarily a structure of power built into the very enterprise of education: that is to say, certain people were responsible for determining what knowledge was essential and salutary for society.

Modernity and Critical Consciousness

In the modern period it was precisely this structure of power that was the object of critique. From Descartes' famous method of universal doubt to Nietzsche's description of the "will to power"; from Kant's turn away from the Scholastic interest in transcendence to the subject in his or her limited ability to know ultimate truth; from Marx's historical dialectic to Freud's unpacking of the human psyche--the four-hundred-plus-year sweep of modernity amounted to a refutation of the Church-state-academy power hegemony. In short: during the modern period, key thinkers perceived a danger in the Church's holding the power to determine the nature and relevance of all knowledge. The Galileo story has become iconic in this regard, for in it we see the apparent clash between ancient religion and the ascendant science.

The unfolding of modernity was predicated on two key factors: the persistence of Scholastic philosophy in the Church and the rise of scientific method. At root, modernity is an epistemological crisis, the question of how human beings come to know the truth of the world and themselves. The Church's position remained unchanged from the time of the Scholastics until the twentieth century: human beings know the truth about the world through revelation, and the Church's magisterium is given the grace of Jesus Christ to rightly interpret that revelation. From the time of Galileo, though, it became increasingly evident to many modern thinkers that this epistemology was no longer tenable. For if empirical observation and scientific method could lead to right conclusions about the world, did it not call into question the Church's exegetical a priori method for teaching ultimate truth?

The epistemological question was exacerbated by the rise of (Protestant) biblical criticism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As scholars began to dissect the sources of the biblical text through various forms of historical, literary, and redaction criticism, a more sophisticated science of hermeneutics emerged that called into question the very nature of divine revelation. It was possible to imagine God speaking directly to the Church when the stories of the Old and New Testaments were naively regarded as words from the lips of God himself; it became more complicated when various stages of construction of the biblical text--for example, the Yahwisic and Priestly strands of the Torah or the multiple sources of the gospel stories--were seen as coming together over many stages of scribal interpretation. The foundation for the Church's claim to divine truth seemed to be less than solid.

During the same period, the rise and proliferation of secular disciplines led to a remarkable development of practical knowledge, manifested (inter alia) in the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century and the development of human rights doctrines in the twentieth. Many perceived the progress of the human community to be dependent not on the Church, but rather the scientific community, which showed that it was capable of curing disease, increasing food production and quality, and creating machines that enhanced the quality of life. "Progress" was the modern replacement for "salvation," in the sense that it was a transcendent ideal that gave hope to societies. (15) And what fed progress were the related goods of specialization and division of labor, both in the academy and in the emerging modern marketplace.

One academic consequence of these developments was the research university, first in Germany and then in the United States and around the world. Specializing in precise and discreet areas of scientific research in the sciences--both those which arose from the older discipline of "natural philosophy" (e.g. biology, chemistry, physics) and the newer, developing disciplines now called the human sciences (e.g. psychology, sociology)--these universities sought to contribute to the progress of society by training scientists in the most cutting-edge research in the midst of those who were themselves engaged in it. Academic boutiques thus emerged in part as a consequence of the need for precise specialization in a field of research.

The Contemporary Academy

Two dimensions of the classical and medieval syntheses have been lost in the boutique model of intellectual engagement in higher education. The first is the overarching sense of the unity of knowledge; the second is the sense that there is a complementarity of reason and faith. With academic specialization, what is prized is research and publication, both of which bring outside funding and prestige. Yet practitioners in each boutique do not as a rule seek to build bridges among the various boutiques. On the contrary, many are suspicious of grand metanarratives that seek to bring a sense of continuity or unity to the unfolding of the Western cultural tradition. Perhaps there is a lingering (post-Kantian) agnosticism about the capacity of human understanding to grasp such broad observations about the progress of knowledge, or perhaps instead there is a (post-Nietzschean) suspicion that such attempts mask more subtle posturing of those seeking power.

More precisely, what has been lost is not only an intellectual commitment to the unity of reason and faith, but also a commitment to teaching as an act of diakonia, service in the sense of a sacred mission to love God through the love of the neighbor or student. The origins of the medieval universities were in religious communities, which involved elements of both spiritual and intellectual formation. They were intentional communities that lived with and cared for one another and therefore had to practice the sometimes hard work of love of neighbor. But with academic specialization, such a wedding of the intellectual and the personal/spiritual/affective is less common. When students are seen only in their ability to produce certain kinds of work, much is lost. The perceptive reader will note that the parallel between the boutique as a place of commerce and the academy as a place of training is that both are predicated on a limited view of the clientele, a truncated anthropology: persons are seen only for what they consume or produce. In practice, many professors see themselves as responsible for only the academic development of their students, leaving questions of personal and spiritual growth to others in areas of student life or campus ministry. Such a practice is different from the more "pastoral" approach to education that someone such as John Henry Newman reflected upon in his experiences in mid-nineteenth-century Oxford. (16)

Structurally, the modern academy is built upon assumptions about intellectual life that are very different from those that prevailed in the medieval universities. State-funded institutions must constantly argue in a more-or-less utilitarian fashion why their state's funding benefits the commonwealth. The U.S. News and World Report's ranking hegemony--touted on many, many institutions' websites and annual reports--is based very little on the complex question of how teachers form students, but rather on whether or not the education generates social capital. (17) Discussions about the commodification of higher education abound, particularly with the rise of new for-profit institutions and the corporate branding of endowed chairs, centers, and schools. (18) In the boutique model of education, the worthiness and longevity of the boutiques are based on their products. Thus can an observer of the New York State Commission on Higher Education's funding priorities remark that prioritized funding for the arts and humanities will be justified "when a poet creates a vaccine or a tangible good that can be produced by a Fortune 500 company." (19)

To be sure, there is phenomenal intellectual life at boutique institutions. Many boutiques engage talented, creative thinkers who are expanding our knowledge of the world. They are pioneering our understanding of the human body, the cosmos, the workings of the global market, and so on. And there are certainly points of convergence across disciplines--chemists with physicists, sociologists with psychologists, anthropologists with historians, and so on. But these convergences are rather like corporate partnerships that yield new products or avenues for research and development. In very many contemporary institutions, there exists more a multiversity than a university--a host of discreet departments or centers and little (if any) guidance to students on how to navigate them for the sake of an integrated intellectual development. (20) In a university--an institution that seeks to promote a shared process of inquiry about what Newman called "universal knowledge"--there must be a shared telos, a sense that the intellectual life and the curriculum itself moves the community of inquiry toward a fuller understanding of the world. And the gallery institution is more apt to encourage such inquiry.

The Renewal of the University

The contemporary boutique university/multiversity will continue to produce outstanding research, it will develop sophisticated critiques of fine literature, it will enable growth in developing countries, it will contribute to increased food production. In short, it will contribute to human flourishing to the extent that it seeks to produce outstanding scholarship and to educate students effectively. There is, however, a dark side to the contemporary multiversity. To the extent that a boutique has little or no connection to--or interest in--the fundamental questions that face all human beings, it runs the danger of producing great harm. A market-driven imperative in the academy not only elides difficult ethical issues, but also largely ignores the questions that preoccupy human beings in their most vulnerable moments: Why do we suffer? How ought we to face death? How are we to love?

What the multiversity does very poorly (when it does it at all), in short, is raise questions of transcendence. At its best, it can offer courses that explore the great philosophical traditions of East and West; it can explore even the literature of mystics and sages. Each of these boutiques is, to be sure, welcome at the multiversity: the spirituality of the Carmelite tradition, the Analects of Confucius, Islam and Christianity, Kabbalah and Medieval Mysticism, and so on. Yet what the contemporary multiversity cannot offer is a holistic invitation to that which the medieval university was predicated upon: namely, a unified vision of knowledge that embraced both the liberal arts/humanities and sacra doctrina, "sacred doctrine." In the contemporary world, of course, such a privileging of Christian tradition is not permitted, because doing so is perceived as marginalizing the other great wisdom traditions, religious and secular, and is predicated upon a hegemonic and even imperialistic view of Western culture. In the logic of the multiversity, the age of globalization demands a leveling of transcendent claims to truth, allowing them to play on a level field and allowing students to judge for themselves the source(s) of truth.

I shall propose an alternate vision of how the Catholic intellectual tradition seeks to organize knowledge according to a shared telos. In short, what the CIT offers is immersion in a self-correcting language of transcendence that gives order and purpose to all knowledge, thereby liberating a person to learn how to learn and how to use knowledge both for its own sake and for another good. To be sure, there are sectarian trajectories within this tradition--trajectories that to many appear hegemonic and imperialistic because, frankly, they are. Such trajectories are not representative of the tradition; they are rather defections within it. The CIT as a whole is rather like an invitation into a community where head and heart--the whole person--are engaged both for the sake of the good of the person and the communities of which he or she is a part. At its best, it is neither sectarian nor imperialistic; rather, it strives to be obedient to the truth about the world and therefore responsive to the needs of the human family.

History is Not a Straight Line

From at least the time of Hegel, modernity was characterized by a belief in progress: a belief that knowledge grows in more or less a linear fashion from the irrational to the increasingly rational, from religion to science. Thus could nineteenth-century historians regard the Middle Ages as "dark" for their reliance on religious language to explain a world that became increasingly intelligible through empirical scientific method. (21) The marginalization of religion, I have suggested above, was primarily rooted in a development in epistemology. It was a necessary development brought about because Scholastic methodology was limited.

Yet after the twentieth century it is no longer possible to regard the modern understanding of progress without suspicion. The Industrial Revolution yielded vast advances in the quality of life in the West, but it also yielded sweatshops and labor riots. The developments in technology yielded advances in medicine, automation of the workforce, and taming of the forces of nature, but it also yielded nuclear weapons, ecological destruction, and vast migration of labor. Political philosophy initiated a period of hope-filled dialogue about human rights and cooperation among nations and races, but yet it was still inadequate to the task of preventing genocides and world wars. The global family is still plagued by the perennial specters of famine, warfare, crime, desolation, and sickness. Less convincing to many is the notion of progress as a substitute for the transcendent hope for salvation. It is clear that in many parts of the world, modernity has yet to be achieved; but in the United States, at least, a generation has grown up cynical about the potential for modern notions of progress to generate an integral flourishing of the human family.

We therefore ask with Qoheleth: Is there anything new under the sun? Can intellectual boutiques in themselves--or even in occasional partnership with others--rise to the task of solving the problems that plague us? We can certainly rejoice when a new vaccine eliminates the next polio or when the next cooperation between scientists, financiers, and CEOs bring forth a product that revolutionizes the standard of life for millions. We can be thankful when an artist helps us to see the world anew or when a writer brings piercing insight into the way we think. What we need, however, is serious conversation about the perennial question of salvation and about the very meaning of human life amidst suffering. For only with such conversation can we engage in serious thinking about whether and how our various disciplines enable us to live better lives. History is not a straight line; it is rather the place where we encounter people across time and cultures who can help us to understand how we live through comparison and contrast to the ways they lived. (22)

An Apologia for a Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Academy

There is need for a commitment to the Catholic intellectual tradition in the contemporary academy--and in the contemporary world--because it is a tradition that can articulate its raison d'etre, its telos, and thereby guide students (young and old) in an integral exploration of reality. It is a tradition that exists because many generations of men and women have sought to understand the world as a good creation of a loving God revealed in Christ; and they have worked to understand the world precisely because they believe it is knowable, and because they believe that in knowing the world they come to greater understanding of its creator. It is a gallery in which artists and thinkers across the ages come together to challenge us, to shine light on the wonderful and awesome mystery of human life and help us navigate the boundaries of our understanding. It is a locus of questioning all truths--those unfolded through the exercise of reason and those discerned through prayer and reflection upon a God whose ways are mysterious.

It is an inclusive tradition; it is not limited to those who practice Catholic faith. For it is rooted in even more ancient sources, from Jerusalem and from Athens. Moreover, it is a tradition in which people have engaged thinkers from many different traditions, and that continues to draw wisdom from both religious and secular sources. (23) To be sure, it is rooted in the faith of the Catholic Church, and as such has been greatly influenced by the language, symbols, and doctrines of the faith. Yet the CIT is not the Church; it is rather the way that people in the Church think about the world and teach others to think about the world--it is fundamentally a way of participating in a community that seeks to order their understanding of the world in ways that sometimes enhance, and sometimes challenge, their articulation of faith.

When it is narrow and uncreative, it looks like little more than religious propaganda: "the magisterium has always been and always will be right." Certainly, there are those in the tradition--like those threatened by Galileo's or Darwin's writings--who have narrowed their theology to fit within the scope of their ability to think about the world. There are currents of failure of both faith and creativity--currents that limit the practitioners of the CIT to invite and persuade others to participate in it. But such currents do not change the fact that the tradition as a whole is self-correcting, creative, and liberating--in the sense that ultimately it tends toward a vision of the world in which divine will and human freedom meet. Not all Catholics are intellectuals; not all Catholic intellectuals are sufficiently authentic; but the Catholic intellectual tradition as a whole represents the trajectory of the very best human thinking reaching for an understanding of what is real.

Critics will object that in a pluralistic world, any tradition of thinking that is rooted in a faith tradition is bound to be limited. That is true, in the same way that using any one language is bound to be limited. The key question is whether that language, or that intellectual tradition, allows for critique and self-correction for the sake of achieving greater understanding. And the CIT has shown that it does. At root the issue remains epistemological and, ultimately, pedagogical: what shall we teach? From the CIT comes a compelling answer: above all, we must teach a language which enables people to constantly raise the most compelling questions that face human beings. For only with an ability to talk about such fundamental questions--about the meaning of death and suffering, of joy and hope, of God and God's potential revelation to human-kind--does any intellectual exercise contribute to a vision of the good. Of course Catholic tradition has developed a superstructure of doctrines, philosophies, theologies, laws, and so on. We can envision this superstructure as a kind of forum within which people address ultimate questions. Many colleges and universities won't even touch these kinds of questions--they are too controversial--but those shaped by the CIT will engage them with relish, inviting both those whose faith commitments are shaped by the superstructure and those for whom the superstructure is irrelevant. Because the CIT is not coextensive with the Church, it has the flexibility to engage all people on their own terms.

In the end, what makes the CIT an imperative for the contemporary academy is that it has not only carried the intellectual heritage of the West for centuries, but also kept it within its proper context. Jesus was not an intellectual; human beings are not merely minds; and an intellectual tradition is not only a good for its own sake. The CIT is an intellectual tradition in service to the human family and as such it is motivated by love. And those institutions and educators who seek to participate in this tradition understand that the life of the mind and the outcomes of the life of the mind are ways that they render praise to God through service of that family. For parents, the message that their children are invited to participate in such a vision of intellectual life is a potentially liberating one.

Notes

(1.) In her piece "The Commodification of Wisdom" (Chronicle of Higher Education, July 13, 2007), Mary Kupiec Cayton writes,

 I want to be sure that the huge sums of money my husband and I send
 annually to the colleges where our daughters matriculated mean
 that they are getting something more than a piece of paper and a
 four-year, parentally subsidized opportunity to grow socially.
 But because we know through our own experience in higher education
 what those institutions value and how their faculties are trained,
 we trust. We don't need more by way of assurance unless we find our
 trust abused.

(2.) I use the term in the Aristotelian sense, often translated as "end" or "goal," but with the implication that such an end gives meaning to the very activity itself. For a recent discussion of Aristotle's understanding of the telos of education, see Elizabeth C. Shaw, "Philosophers for the City: Aristotle and the Telos of Education," in Modern Age (Winter 2005).

(3.) Eric Voegelin's Order and History (3 volumes, Louisiana State University Press, 1957), traces the development of this shift from myth to philosophy.

(4.) Plato's theory of the forms is developed in several places, especially Republic, books 5-10.

(5.) See especially Nicomachean Ethics, X.

(6.) In his address at Regensburg on September 12, 2006, Pope Benedict XVI articulated at length what he perceived to be the proper understanding of the relationship between Christian faith and Hellenistic reason. In one place, he writes:

 The New Testament was written in Greek and bears the imprint of the
 Greek spirit, which had already come to maturity as the Old
 Testament developed. True, there are elements in the evolution of
 the early Church which do not have to be integrated into all
 cultures. Nonetheless, the fundamental decisions made about
 the relationship between faith and the use of human reason are part
 of the faith itself; they are developments consonant with the nature
 of faith itself.

The entire address can be found on the Vatican website http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2006/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060912_university-regensburg_en.html.

(7.) Elsewhere in the Regensburg address Benedict writes, "The faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real analogy, in which--as the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 stated--unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language."

(8.) St. Justin Martyr: The First and Second Apologies, trans. Leslie William Barnard (New York: Paulist Press, 1996), at I, v, 4; I, xlvi; II, viii; II, xiii, 5, 6.

(9.) Online version at http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0412.htm (accessed August 6, 2009).

(10.) See Augustine's Confessions, III. He writes "My spirit was filled with an extraordinary desire for the eternal qualities of wisdom. ... I was on fire then, my God, I was on fire to leave created things behind and fly back to you, nor did I know what you would do with me; for with you is wisdom. But that book filled me with the love of wisdom (which is called philosophy in Greek)."

(11.) The 1907 Catholic Encyclopedia gives an excellent overview of the history of the seven liberal arts and their roots in classical antiquity, online at http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01760a.htm (accessed August 6, 2009). See also Lowrie Daly, The Medieval University 1200-1400 (Sheed and Ward, 1961), which cites Gregory of Tours' (538-593) description of the seven liberal arts.

(12.) Plato, for example, contrasted polypragmosyne and dikaiosyne in his critique of the Sophists. They practiced the former, which he describes in Phaedrus as the tendency to "engage in multifarious activities that are not one's proper business" (Eric Voegelin, Order and History [edited with an introduction by Dante Germino, University of Missouri Press, 1999], 118). Dikaiosyne, on the other hand, represents right order at all levels (personal, social, political). It was this latter term that St. Paul appropriated to describe the moral life: cf. Leland Jamison, "Dikaiosyne in the Usage of Paul," in Journal of the American Academy of Religion 21, no. 2 (1953): 93-99.

(13.) Augustine's treatise dealt with the question of how to properly interpret sacred scripture, and he observes in book two that the arts and sciences of the pagans (i.e., Greeks) can help the person develop the skills necessary for proper exegesis.

(14.) The story is in Plato, Republic, X. My point is to underscore that even Socrates, who reasons extensively about life and death, recognizes that there is knowledge that is not accessible by human reason and that can be known only by a kind of revelation by those who know more.

(15.) On this point, cf. Pope Benedict XVI, Spe salvi (2007), 17-22. He writes:

 Without doubt, [progress] offers new possibilities for good, but it
 also opens up appalling possibilities for evil--possibilities that
 formerly did not exist. We have all witnessed the way in which
 progress, in the wrong hands, can become and has indeed become
 a terrifying progress in evil. If technical progress is not matched
 by corresponding progress in man's ethical formation, in man's inner
 growth (cf. Eph 3:16; 2 Cor 4:16), then it is not progress at all,
 but a threat for man and for the world.

(16.) On this topic, see Michael Buckley, "Newman and the Restoration of the Interpersonal in Higher Education" (Bannan Center lecture, 2006), online at http://www.scu.edu/ignatiancenter/events/lectures/archives/upload/w07_buckley.pdf (accessed August 6, 2009).

(17.) The ranking system weights heavily the "cash value" of education, that is, what it is worth in the marketplace. For example, "the U.S. News ranking formula gives the most weight (25 percent) to peer assessment scores, because a diploma from a distinguished college helps graduates get good jobs or gain admission to top-notch graduate programs." This article, no longer online, was retrieved on January 14, 2008, from http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com.

(18.) See, for example, Mary Kupiec Cayton, "The Commodification of Wisdom," Chronicle of Higher Education 53, (45) (07): B16; Elspeth Collins and Ruth Dineen, "Killing the Goose: Conflicts between Pedagogy and Politics in the Delivery of a Creative Education," in International Journal of Art and Design Education 24, (1) (02): 43-52; John Hess, "The Entrepreneurial Adjunct," in Academe 90, (1): 37-41; Bruce Horner, "Politics, Pedagogy, and the Profession of Composition: Confronting Commodification and the Contingencies of Power," in JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory 20, (1) (01): 121-152; Christopher Nelson, "Accountability: The Commodification of the Examined Life," in Change:The Magazine of Higher Learning 39, (6) (Nov-Dec): 22-27; Jan Parker, "Reconceptualizing the Curriculum: From Commodification to Transformation," Teaching in Higher Education 8, (4) (10): 529-43; Wesley Shumar, College for Sale: A Critique of the Commodification of Higher Education (Routledge, 1997).

(19.) Cited in Stanley Fish, "Will the Humanities Save Us?" New York Times, January 6, 2008.

(20.) The consulting group Funderstanding articulates a cogent critique of the core curriculum: "The core curriculum movement assumes there is a uniform body of knowledge that all students should know. Presumably, this curriculum will produce educated and responsible graduates for the community. Unfortunately, there often isn't much consensus on who is the community and who speaks for the community." Available at http://www.funderstanding.com/core_curriculum.cfm (accessed August 6, 2009).

(21.) In his book The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization (Oxford University Press, 2006,) Bryan Ward-Perkins explores the question of whether post-Roman Empire Europe ought to be characterized as "dark" by attending to the social impact of the fall of the Empire. His discussion raises complex questions about how to evaluate culture and, by extension, whether it is possible to judge the merits of cultures at different historical periods.

(22.) For this image I am indebted to Michael Himes, "Living Conversation: Higher Education in a Catholic Context," in Conversations in Jesuit Higher Education, Fall 1995.

(23.) I am thinking, in particular, of the Vatican II document Nostra aetate and its recognition of the insights from other traditions. But I am also mindful of how key Christian thinkers across the ages have drawn from non-Christian sources: Augustine from Neoplatonism; Aquinas from Aristotle, Maimonides, and Avicenna; and a host of contemporary leaders and thinkers from Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger (Judaism) to Anthony DeMello (Buddhism) to Francis Clooney (Hinduism).