Crisis of University Culture
PUBLISHED IN Gregorianum 85 (2004) 149-171.
University and Culture: towards a retrieval of humanism
Michael Paul Gallagher S.J.
When complications increase,
the desire for essentials increases too. . . . [for a] more comprehensive
account of what we human beings are, who we are, and what this life is for.
- Saul Bellow, Nobel Prize
Speech[1]
When people merely tolerate
one anothers views, they cannot have any common view.
-
Bernard Lonergan, Lectures on Philosophy of Education.[2]
Even in secular circles, at
least in the English-speaking world, it is commonplace to begin an essay on
university education with a reference to John Henry Newman. Authors usually
draw on his Dublin discourses of the 1850s, entitled The Idea of a
University. For this occasion, however, I propose starting from one of his
university sermons, delivered in Oxford during the week of Pentecost 1841. His
title spoke of the contrast between faith and bigotry but his main focus was on
the spiritual gift of Wisdom, exploring it not simply as a fruit of the Spirit
but in its educational dimensions. He announced his intention to treat the
human aspect of Christian Wisdom, including the complex adventure of its
achievements and its difficulties within the developing process of learning. (#
6)[3]
The keyword, constantly
repeated in the early sections of this long sermon, is enlargement: to
enlarge the mind becomes synonymous with wisdom or with a genuinely mental
growth and ultimately with philosophical integration. In his typically concrete fashion,
Newman offers a wealth of illustrations of forms of enlargement – through
travel, science, history, reading, falsely through sin and authentically through
religion. The last offers, even to uneducated people, a new horizon of
meaning and a sense of being anchored within the various and complicated
drama of life. (#16)
A little later Newman
explores the dangers of a narrow education, one which remains on the level of
offers mere information and no stimulus towards the personal convergence that
constitutes wisdom. It is worth recalling that he was speaking a few years
before the celebrated novel of Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1845), with its
satire of rote learning in Gradgrinds slogan facts alone are wanted in life.
Newman, however, has more subtle questions to raise about the dangers of
Christian education falling below its ideal goals and being kidnapped by the
prevailing culture of facts. In this fine example of his prose, which is worth
quoting at some length, we find Newmans characteristic insistence on synthesis
or appropriation as the hallmark of transformative education:
Knowledge itself, though a condition of the minds
enlargement . . . is not the very thing which enlarges it . . . We feel
ourselves to be ranging freely, when we not only learn something, but when we
also refer it to what we knew before. It is not the mere addition to our
knowledge which is the enlargement, but the change of place, the movement
onwards, of that moral centre, to which what we know and what we have been
acquiring, the whole mass of our knowledge, as it were, gravitates. And
therefore a philosophical cast of thought, or a comprehensive mind, or wisdom
in conduct or policy, implies a connected view of the old with the new . . . It
is the knowledge, not only of things, but of their mutual relations. It is
organized, and therefore living knowledge. (# 21)
Newman was to revisit this argument in his Dublin lectures more than ten
years later, stressing that in such expansion of mind lay the formative power
and the connected view at the heart of university education:
The enlargement consists,
not merely in the passive reception into the mind of a number of ideas hitherto
unknown to it, but in the minds energetic and simultaneous action upon and
towards and among those new ideas, which are rushing in upon it.[4]
Such a confident expression of the high goals of intellectual
development can sound innocent and simplistic in the contemporary situation.
Our postmodern culture hardly dares to hope for unity any more. It has
abandoned the anchors of humanism that underpinned universities for centuries.
Likewise most non-religious universities have abandoned their traditional roots
in Christian faith. Newman foresaw this secularisation as a serious danger and
argued that this mutilation would soon break up into fragments the whole
circle of secular knowledge.[5]
This has become true in many ways and indicates the crisis of identity suffered
by the modern university. Its underlying philosophy and relationship with
culture has been radically changed. Indeed, as will be seen, the very meaning
of the term culture has undergone a parallel revolution. In Frank Turners
view, the word University has remained the same from Newmans day to ours
while the reality it describes has not.[6]
It has slowly but surely become
more functional, more economically driven, and less and less a place for the
pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.
Thus the assumptions of
Newman were rooted in a permanence and security of tradition that collapsed in
the century that separates us from him. Can his underlying hopes be retrieved
or positively reinterpreted even if his unified cultural world seems distant
and dead? Is it possible to save personalism and humanism from their older
complacencies? If a university is essentially a form of cultural community,
what happens when the shared basis of community no longer holds people together
and when, moreover, the culture proclaims its own dispersal and even celebrates
its own incoherence? If a university claims religious and Catholic foundations,
how can it do justice both to its faith inheritance and to the perplexing and
fragmented sensibility of today? If, as Newman would stress, a university is a
teaching body before it is a research institute, then what pedagogy is needed
to form students to face the pressures of todays and tomorrows cultures? The
agenda is enormous but the answers will have to be humble. This article aims
simply at gathering some of the strands of the vast debate and indicating some
possible roads of hope.
In
the earlier part of the twentieth century many of the debates about
universities centered around a tension of priorities. The German model gave
pride of place to research and highlighted the role of a specialized
professor.[7] By contrast
the British model, echoing the world beloved of Newman, put more emphasis on
the teaching of undergraduates in order to foster their moral and intellectual
development. Voices were raised to defend a third and larger goal, what Ortega
y Gasset called the transmission of culture, in the sense of a traditional
repertory of convictions which became the effective guide for human
existence, especially necessary within the tangled and confused jungle of modernity. In the early thirties the
Spanish thinker insisted that culture is not science; instead it meant the
vital system of idea of a period. He diagnosed a danger that universities were
abandoning this task and descending to the more pragmatic goals of professional
education and research. In his view, unless universities retained their role as
guardians of culture, the world would sink into uncultured barbarity.[8]
In
somewhat less apocalyptic tones, the history of universities through the
centuries is now seen as reflecting a series of cultural changes and academic
institutions have been both parents and children of cultural movements. What
Alasdair MacIntyre has called the pre-liberal university was born from a relatively
unified culture where religious values were not only central but strong enough
to exclude dissenters from roles of influence within the university system.
Looking back now, it was an enforced and artificial uniformity. With the
arrival of modernity in its various guises including the rise to power of a
liberal elite, that situation was reversed. Increasingly the religious
dimension was marginalised or at least viewed as a matter for private
allegiances; faith became merely a background possibility in the new dominant
culture, a kind of present absence.[9]
Gradually all the old familiar metaphors, such as the house of knowledge,
emptied themselves of significance, and only what was rationally defensible was
credible. The story of how universities lost their Christian origins has been
told many times and in different tones. Older moral-cum-theological dimensions
of learning gave way to a new core philosophy, the premise that rationality,
once freed from the constraints of such stifling traditions, would produce not
only progress in knowledge but a new consensus between educated people.
In
MacIntyres judgement the increasing disarray of the liberal universities was
due to that initial error, and, one might add in Newman-like style, from the
shrinking of rationality to a positivistic shadow of itself. Another stage
arrived with the postliberal university symbolically associated with the
upheavals of 1968 and ideologically aligned with Nietzschean post-modernism.
This sought to undermine the assumptions of humanism that were at the heart of
the liberal philosophy but apart from its own perspectivism and its typical
unmasking of power games, it had no replacement philosophy to offer for
universities. If these two academic cultures are locked in a confusing night
battle, what hopes are there of finding a fruitful way forward? MacIntyres
proposal, in simple terms, involves a retrieval for today of what he calls the
Thomist approach and in particular of its capacity to confront and integrate
conflicting traditions. Therefore a central responsibility of higher education
would be to initiate students into conflict,[10]
through some contemporary version of the contrast between the lecture and the
disputation practices of thirteenth-century Paris. Systematic encounter and
debate would avoid the suppression of rival voices that has so marked the
history of universities in recent centuries. But to what degree is this hope
utopian? Where is the willingness or the energy for these exchanges to be
found? More recently Macintyre has portrayed higher education as so
heterogeneous that there seems to be nothing to understand in a unified if
complex way.[11] Without
some shared philosophy or theology universities, in his view, give students the
impression of a world without order.
Indeed, in recent decades,
other commentators on university education have diagnosed a serious crisis of
identity. On grand occasions such as graduations, eloquent speeches are made
more or less in the tradition of Newman: universities are praised as vehicles
of personal formation and not just of professional training. But apart from
these moments of special rhetoric, universities seem increasingly unsure of
their role in contemporary culture. In this period of specialisation (in
academic practice) and fragmentation (in both postmodern theory and practice)
are there any real grounds of unity for the organisation called a university?
In one account the present perplexities stem as much from the wealth of
specialist inquiry and from the poverty of general discussion, and the
university sub-culture is accused of pervasive, archaic hyperindividualism.[12]
According to Bill Readings, universities are in ruins because the historical
project of culture, on which they depended for centuries, is no longer
tenable.[13] That legacy of the Enlightenment, which
had translated and secularised the medieval inheritance, is itself in deep
trouble. Where a crucial connection had flourished between culture and
university, now we are experiencing parallel versions of crisis in both fields.
Readings defines this situation as posthistorical and asks how we are to
imagine a posthistorical university:
once transnational
capitalism has eroded the meaning of culture, and once the institutional system
begins to show itself capable of functioning without reference to that term,
then the role of education cannot primarily be conceived in terms of cultural
acquisition or cultural resistance.[14]
This divorce between culture and university provokes some large
questions. Will the university be content with fostering thought as a shared
process without identity or unity? How can one preserve a sense of social
responsibility once the old basis of legitimation has been abandoned?[15] These are some of the terms in which
todays debate in secular universities couches itself.
Those
with a more religious perspective appear to be equally worried about questions
of direction and identity. A few years ago George Marsden, a historian at Notre
Dame University, opened his study of the possibilities for Christian education
with these provocative words:
Contemporary university
culture is hollow at its core. Not only does it lack a spiritual center, but it
is also without any real alternative. Although many of the most prominent
academics are preoccupied with politics, they are unable to produce a
compelling basis for preferring one set of principles over another . . .
Knowledge today is oriented increasingly toward the practical; at the same time
in most fields the vast increases in information render our expertise more
fragmentary and detached from the larger issues of life. . . Even the liberal
arts are havens for fads that often obscure what was originally attractive
about their subjects. Wisdom is hardly a term one thinks of in connection
with such studies, nor with our system of higher education generally.[16]
This account of the inner culture of todays state universities seems
sadly accurate. Pragmatism reigns. Commercial values are often hiddenly
dominant. Gender studies are likely to be promoted with passionate intensity,
whereas any whiff of theology immediately provokes allergic reactions. What
Newman would call principles are looked on as impossible. Where a fashionable
postmodernism takes hold, as in literary studies, personalist humanism is
sneered at. Genuine communities of learning seem to be non-existent. And from a
religious point of view the underlying theory in most disciplines is that the
universally accessible naturally phenomena are all there is.[17]
If this is the dominant philosophy, it is not surprising that universities fall
into a type of corporate agnosticism, characterised by a notorious shyness
about posing fundamental questions.[18]
The
sources of this lack of foundations are not new. More than fifty years ago
Bernard Lonergan identifies the problem of specialization in these pithy
words: the new knowledge is mountainous, divided, and unassimilated.[19]
He also recognised a second major difficulty for any Christian philosophy of
education and one that has intensified with the years: when the question of
truth is not even raised any more, the reestablishment of truth as a
meaningful category is also a liberation of intelligence and reason.[20]
These two pressures, coming from the assumptions of the culture around,
constitute a serious challenge for all universities. There is no escaping the
reality of academic specialisation with its almost inevitable impact in terms
of fragmentation and even incomprehension between those working in different
fields. Also, unless there is some way of overcoming the relativism latent in
the flight from the question of truth, universities are condemned to drift
anchorless in ever more complex oceans.
Official
Catholic approaches to universities have noted these challenges. Thus a 1994
document entitled The Presence of the Church in the University and in
University Culture remarked at the outset that within the last half century
university institutions had undergone radical transformation and in some respects
had lost their previous prestige. Their roads towards renewal seem increasingly
uncertain.[21]
Nevertheless the Churchs ideal for universities has been restated on many
occasions and Catholic universities in particular have been called to be a
privileged place for fruitful dialogue between Church and culture as well as
a place of reflection on the diverse cultural traditions existing within the
Church itself.[22] To mention
just a few of the many papal statements on this theme, the Holy Fathers discourse
to university teachers on the occasion of the Jubilee year, called on
universities to foster a new Christian humanism by becoming cultural
laboratories - in the sense of places of constructive dialogue between
disciplines and especially between faith and culture. Such a humanism would
focus on the human person, would defend human rationality from contemporary
doubts about its capacity for truth, and would open to the transcendent without
reducing faith to the merely intimate or emotional. Since faith does not
flourish on the ashes of reason, universities, in spite of their various
upheavals during recent decades, remain indispensable in the task of constant
re-discovery of cultural identity.[23]
The same stress on a defining link between university and culture appears in
numerous other speeches of John Paul II, as was exemplified in 2003 on the
occasion of the 700th anniversary of Romes La Sapienza university. Just
as medieval humanism offered a synthesis between theology and others branches
of learning, so today universities have an irreplaceable role in building a
cultural perspective for the future. If they were to fall into the temptation
of reducing their horizon to the needs of the market, universities would
thereby lose their own predominantly cultural profile. Instead they are
called to preserve a creative remembrance of history in order to serve
constructively in the forming of the cultures of tomorrow.[24]
In this way Catholic universities are urged to confront the new cultural
challenges of today. Their research will seek to discover in its profundity
the roots and causes of the serious problems of our time, paying special
attention to their ethical and religious dimensions.[25]
In recent years a keen debate
has arisen, especially in the United States, concerning the role and
self-identity of Catholic universities. Although the problems are deeply
connected with the two major issues already mentioned – specialisation
and relativism - they are more specifically cultural. From one side of the
debate comes the accusation that Catholic universities have become
acculturated in the negative sense of overwhelmed and seduced by the value
system of the dominant academic culture around them. If so, they have lost
their bearings and their courage to be different because they were tempted to
take secular universities as normative models to be emulated. Cardinal Avery
Dulles has commented sternly on such failures of nerve:
In the United
States, Catholic universities have been very apologetic, almost embarrassed, by
their obligation to adhere to the faith of the Church. . . . Surrounded by
powerful institutions constructed on principles of metaphysical and religious
agnosticism, the Catholic universities of this nation have too long been on the
defensive. . . . Shifting the burden of proof to their secular counterparts,
they should challenge the other universities to defend themselves and to show
how they think it possible to cultivate the mind and transmit the fullness of
truth if they neglect or marginalize humanistic, philosophical, and theological
studies.[26]
From the other side, the
defence argument claims that any movement toward meaning and truth is
inchoatively religious and that the variant lines of Catholic tradition and
thought can intersect with all forms of human culture in order to shape a
reflective unity.[27]
This position echoes the affirmation of the Second Vatican Council that through
universities the Christian vision should have a public influence in the whole
process of the promotion of higher culture (Gravissimum educationis, No. 10). Since
the Church is not an alien outsider in the world of learning, its presence and
impact need to be interpreted in a non-extrinsic fashion: the fullness of
intellectual culture is essential if the gospel is to achieve both its
reflection depth and union with all that is human.[28]
The Catholic university, in particular, can offer a unique service to the
Church, precisely because it provides a zone for pluralism in intelligent and
open conversation: a place in which the sweeping experience of the Christian
faith can be analyzed comprehensively in both its opposition and its support.[29]
The Catholic university today is burdened inevitably with a complex fate.
Rather as David Tracy has argued concerning the role of theology, it needs to
serve three different publics, the Church, the academy and the society or
culture. In the Ireland of the 1850s Newman had difficulty persuading the
Church authorities that a university was not akin to a seminary; so today the
service that a Catholic university offers to the Church is a two-fold witness
at the cultural crossroads and frontiers of learning. To the universal Church
it communicates how humanity is struggling for meaning in various disciplines.
To the academic and socio-cultural worlds the Catholic university seeks to make
intelligible and credible the convergence between faith and culture today.
Of course there remain
tensions between a positive emphasis on necessary pluralism and a more
communitarian emphasis on the distinctive differentness of a Catholic
institution.[30] Underlying
these debates are conflicting views and theologies of the relationship between
faith and culture in todays situation. The pluralist side tend to ground
their thinking in a theology of correlation between gospel and history. The
communitarian school would imply a more dialectical theology of confrontation
with culture. Indeed recent times have witnessed a certain shift of attitude
among theologians from the more dialogic approach towards culture to a more
aggressive discernment and even quite definite counter-cultural stances.
Relevance of Ignatian Pedagogy
In
the last decade or so there has been an immense amount of writing and group
reflection on the relevance of the so-called Ignatian Paradigm in education.
In the sixties and seventies, there had been an initial rediscovery of the
wealth of the Spiritual Exercises as grounded in one-to-one guidance and hence
the explosion of the practice of directed retreats. The later application of
the process thinking of St Ignatius to the field of education is an expansion
of those developments in spirituality. Common to both is an emphasis on the
experience of the individual, to be fostered towards self-ownership and towards
responsible life decisions. To stress the centrality of active learning and the
formation of the whole person implies a critique of many accepted priorities in
education, even in philosophical and theological institutes. In spite of what
is said eloquently in mission statements and at graduation ceremonies, the
constant temptation of professors is simply to provide ideas, theories,
histories and to do so in a clear and professional way. But this easily forgets
that education has to do with personal growth and hence the working philosophy
of Catholic academics may be subtly tainted with the values of mere pragmatism
that reign in practically all secular universities.
The Ignatian ideal of
personal appropriation assumes more urgency in view of the new disorienting
impact of so-called postmodern culture. This phenomenon presents itself in at
least three forms: as a philosophical theory (postmodernism), as a contemporary
life-style, and as a sensibility of searching (negative and positive wings of
postmodernity).[31] One can
argue that all three need to encounter the wisdom of Ignatian pedagogy because
all three remain fragile because of their lack of roots. This pedagogy is
essentially one of ownership or self-appropriation, whereas a danger lurking,
and largely unrecognised, in all three versions of the postmodern is a tendency
to see everything as temporary and provisional. Ignatian pedagogy is ultimately
an avenue towards commitment, whereas all three postmodern families seem
allergic to any permanent engagement of the self.
What
is the particular contribution that this pedagogy could make in rethinking
university formation today? Our suggestion is that in an environment marked by
postmodern dispersal and lack of cultural roots, the retrieval of the Ignatian
tradition offers a definite, humanistic methodology that can heal some of the
typical wounds of our time. Many authors have proposed that there are five
constant pillars in Ignatian pedagogy: attention to cultural contexts; priority
to experiential and imaginative bases of learning; subsequent reflection to
clarify the meanings and values implied in ones experience; a stage of action,
involving inner attitudinal options and outer commitments; constant evaluation
of the growth in learning and of its fruits in practice.[32]
Although their application may seem more obvious and easy at pre-university
levels of schooling, they have new relevance when university students suffer
from the more destabilising aspects of postmodern culture, both in its
theoretical and existential dimensions. In the words of Peter-Hans Kolvenbach,
Ignatian pedagogy focuses
upon formation of the whole person, heart, mind and will, not just the
intellect; it challenges students to discernment of meaning in what they study
rather than rote memory.[33]
The full implications of this agenda for counter-cultural education will
become clearer if we examine first the complexity and power of culture and
later the application of the Ignatian tradition of discernment to cultural
issues..
Dimensions of culture
I propose a three-fold
division of the complex field called culture: culture as conscious creativity;
as unconscious codes; and as hidden conflict. At first glance once might be
inclined to identify the universitys sphere of influence with the creative
branch of culture and undoubtedly it is the main interest of universities to
engage in a conscious study and creative shaping of human meaning. But, as has
been argued here, in todays situation to focus exclusively on that dimension
of culture risks both elitism and evasion of responsibility. The
anthropological or lived version of culture (culture as a set unconscious
codes) is the one that has most influence on most peoples lives and especially
on their way of imagining the meaning and goal of existence. The third family
of culture breaks from the common illusion that culture is a neutral field;
instead it highlights its often dangerous power and its inevitable collusion
with the rulers of this world. This less innocent interpretation of culture finds
support in the writings of Ren Girard who sees culture as constituting a huge
school of rivalry. Its conflictual mimesis is contagious and is capable of
obsessing an entire community.[34]
In Girards view culture is shadowed with violence from the beginning, remains
secretly addicted to hostility, but through the gospels the deceptions that
dominate culture unconsciously are finally revealed and overturned. Hence this
analysis of culture as a deep battlefield is of particular relevance for religious-based
universities.
In this light our argument is quite simple: although
universities may specialise in the older sense of culture as human development
and self-expression, if they neglect the other two dimensions today they run a
risk of living in a new version of an ivory tower. This is not to say that
these additional two interpretations of culture are without their own
imbalances. The danger lurking in the anthropological approach is a certain
relativism, which holds that any cultural expression can only be described and
evaluated from within its own world. In other words there is no standard
beyond culture from which a particular cultures practices may be judged.[35]
This assumption of immunity from outside would mean that any discernment or
critique of culture in the light of religious values becomes impossible. A
different and unrecognised danger can exist among some of those who stress
culture as a power-game. Because they are so alert to the distortion of values
by a dominant culture (usually seen as capitalist, consumerist and military),
they tend to judge everything both negatively and ideologically. In its
religious expressions this viewpoint can give voice to some necessarily
aggressive discernment of the sicknesses of the surrounding culture. Thus the
scripture scholar Walter Brueggemann speaks of the shadow of an antihuman
empire over todays lived culture, showing itself in technological
individualism and unbridled corporate power. In his Christian judgement,
there are times when church and cultural context can live in some kind of
mutuality; but this is not one of those times, for gospel rootage requires
resistance to such dehumanising influences.[36]
The evaluation may be justified but in arguments less subtle than Brueggemanns
the underlying attitude and tone can be wrong. If such religious judgements are
rooted merely in hostility, they do not deserve the title of discernment. As
will be seen, genuine cultural discernment calls for a sifting of the lights
and shadows and as a prior step towards any judgement, it needs a certain
consoled trust that goodness as well as evil can be found in the always
ambiguous terrain that is human culture.
A
key argument of this article is that the new plurality of meanings of culture
has yet to be taken on board in theological and ecclesial reflection on the
theme of university and culture. The stress on high culture remains crucial
and there is no quarrelling with that. If universities are involved in the
forging of new humanism, a concern for the frontiers of reflection and
knowledge has to be central. But even here another imbalance lurks: there is a
tendency to interpret the high sense of culture in an exclusively
intellectualist way with priority to the
human and natural sciences including philosophy. This can forget or
marginalise creative culture in the sense of artistic production. Some years
ago Archbishop Weakland voiced a serious criticism of Catholic universities as
failing to foster creative forms of Catholic culture. Commenting on the decades
after Vatican II he diagnosed a lack of creativity in faith expressions through
art and aesthetic experience:
We have not created a
Catholic culture for our day and thus are at a loss on how to transmit our
faith to the next generation. We have not given form to our beliefs. In the
constant search for those qualities that are essential for Catholic identity,
we have often focused on the transmission of precise verbal formulas . . . They
remain but intellectual formulas and ideas if they are not somehow incarnated,
given living form in the culture of the age.[37]
.
If
high culture, as understood in the contemporary university, needs to be
expanded to include imaginative creativity, the other two levels of culture
also require more serious attention. There is what we have called ordinary
culture in the sense of the cluster of lived assumptions and images that
powerfully shape peoples practical vision of existence, giving them priorities
that are either humanising or not. There is also the more post-modern sense of
culture as a battleground of ambiguities and of powerful forces in our world.
Since both of these dimensions can often remain concealed and unrecognised, it
is surely part of a universitys calling to bring these hidden persuaders into
the open and to examine them in a critical light. Obviously such reflection
will usually form part of the agenda of a department of sociology but that is
not enough to do justice to the complexity of our contemporary cultural and
educational contexts. A university can remain simply an academic zone of
research, with little or no commitment to the human formation of its students;
and this limited self-understanding, as we have seen, represents the failure of
most secular universities today. If, however, something of Newmans hope is
still tenable, then a university will want to care for the quality of mind and
for the human development of its students. In this light it would be
irresponsible to avoid the lived and conflictual aspects of culture, and it is
not sufficient to relegate this to the often narrow horizons of sociology.
It will not be out of place
to offer some words on the Ignatian practical wisdom called discernment of
spirits and how it can be applied to the reading of culture. One of the best
entry points for understanding discernment is offered by Blessed Peter Faber in
a comment on his directing the Spiritual Exercises for Saint Peter Canisius.
There he stresses the irrelevance of a persons ideas and reflections, the
thoughts that arise in prayer, as against the crucial importance of the
presence or absence of the Spirit in a persons feelings and moods: the Spirit
shows through desires, motions, ardour or despondency, tranquillity or
anxiety, joy or sorrow.[38]
Discernment is essentially an art of recognising roots through fruits on the
level of affectivity and felt attractions. Recently I have suggested a way of
summarizing the key elements of discernment as a triad of three Ds.[39]
To recognise the Spirit we
need a disposition of openness and freedom. It requires eyes of faith
and an avoidance of mere demonizing or prejudiced evaluations. It rests on a
trust that Gods revelation continues and can be perceived in our responses to
the situations around us.
To discern any movement of
feelings, in a personal or cultural context, we need to ask about the direction
in
which it moves peoples hearts and lives: is it leading us towards what is
humanizing, or is it crushing our freedom and closing us to compassion?
Thirdly, discernment exists
not just for interpretation but for decision: it is a path towards lived
priorities and commitments. Its hope is to insure the Christian quality of our
choices. What practices could embody a Christian way of life within todays
cultural complexity?
In short this art of
discernment is dispositional, directional and decisional and it is just as
applicable to the influence of culture as to more personal situations. It asks what is really going on?, not
superficially but in the depths of our cultures. In this way it offers a
religious basis for what is called cultural agency. Towards what is our communal imagination being moved? That is a key
question for spiritual or cultural discernment. In the Ignatian understanding
central to the discernment process is a contrast between consolation and
desolation, and this too can be reinterpreted in order to identify and sift the
complex impact of culture on our meanings and values. In the light of Fabers
distinction, both fall into the
affective rather than the reflective category of our responses. Consolation is
a faith-based experience, a sense of expanding in harmony with what is deepest
in us, the Spirit in us. In large options and in small reactions, consolation
is an experience of being-in-tune-with-Christ and of moving towards gospel
vision and values. Desolation is the contrary experience of disharmony,
disconnection, distance, and distrust. Whole cultures can experience these
contrary tendencies, which reveal themselves in the dominant moods and
dispositions of a people. But to practise
this specifically Christian way for reading cultures involves a major shift of
agenda from describing external influences and trends, or listing the pros and
cons of a given situation. It aims at identifying the deeper responses the
culture provokes in people. To exercise this spiritual and hermeneutical skill
can be part of the calling of a Catholic university. Obviously it would be
practically impossible in a secular setting because the faith basis for such a
reading of reality is not present in the academic sub-culture.
The
fact that this article will appear during the centenary year of the birth of
Bernard Lonergan, probably the most illustrious intellectual who taught at the
Gregorian University during the twentieth century, makes it appropriate to draw
on his wisdom here. But that is not the main reason for including him. He
devoted special if intermittent attention to questions of education and the
university, and what he said still seems fresh in this context. Besides,
although he rarely refers explicitly to the Ignatian tradition, Lonergans
constant emphasis on self-appropriation and interiority echoes one of the main
pillars of the Ignatian method in spirituality and in education.
In
an earlier section mention was made of Lonergans analysis of the fruits of
academic specialization. He also pondered the capacity of the university to
resist the inherited distortions in history of higher culture. As early as
1951, before he came to the Gregorian as a professor of theology, he offered
this precise account of the nature and priorities of universities:
A university is a reproductive organ of cultural community. Its constitutive
endowment lies not in buildings or equipment, civil status or revenues, but in
the intellectual life of its professors. Its central function is the
communication of intellectual development.[40]
From this perspective Lonergan offered some fairly severe and even
pessimistic judgements on the capacity for what he calls aberration and
sociocultural decline in intellectual institutions. He viewed the worlds of philosophy and the two
families of sciences (positive and humanistic) as infected by various forms of
bias and ambiguity present in the surrounding culture. There is the pull of
mere practicality as well as the distortions of pride and fashion. There is the
complex inheritance of decline that passes for wisdom and the impact of
counter-positions that pretend to be the truth (if one dares to aim at truth
at all). More existentially the
people governing and guiding the cultural community that is a university may be
dangerously and innocently unconverted in three major dimensions of their lives
– intellectual, moral and religious. They may not even advert to the need
for conversion and so they will unconsciously confuse myth and reality. In
Lonergans early and perhaps over-idealised view, a Catholic university enjoys
liberation from the ambiguity of practicality and from the ambiguity of human
culture, but he immediately suggests that the ambiguity of Catholic
intellectuals is to bury their talents in ghetto ground and not really to
engage with the complex culture.[41]
Several
years later, in his 1959 Cincinnati lectures on the philosophy of education,
Lonergan pondered the impact of the secularisation of culture on schooling at
all levels. If one sees human reason and human freedom as ultimate, such
rationalism allows no space for the guidance of life by divine revelation. The
outcome of this cumulative process in modern culture can lead to the
negation of the notion of value, and education will then ignore or block the
higher aspirations of the human spirit.[42]
Some
thirteen years later Lonergans first words in his Method in Theology run as follows: A theology mediates between a
cultural matrix and the significance and role of a religion in that matrix.
For him the core of an intellectual calling now involves being an
interpretative intermediary between what is received in a living tradition and
what is evolving in a changing culture. This is the opposite of the ghetto
stance: it is frontier work of a creative and demanding kind. The tone is less
judgemental or hostile to secular culture and the whole approach indicates an
ambitious agenda for the relationship between university and culture. In this
spirit Frederick Crowe, Lonergans most distinguished interpreter, has placed
the challenge for education today in the setting of a changing world, where the
Newmanian ideal of a connected view is now confronted with an unprecedented
explosion of complexity:
My
own position is that the medieval way of Thomist wisdom is not possible in this
age of specialization, that the renaissance way of the uomo universale is only a dream now, but that the modern way of
interdisciplinary procedures can effect an advance on Newman in the direction
he desired us to go.[43]
In his view
interdisciplinary cooperation is not a simple matter of some mutual listening.
It needs to work from shared epistemological foundations and if so, it can hope
to become a contemporary form of tradition. Indeed university education, in
Crowes view, invites students to a constant interplay between the world of
tradition (what one receives from others) and the world of achievement (what
one appropriates and develops oneself). In more religious terms, there is the
gift of revelation and the innovative understanding of that gift in order to be
faithful to the calls of history. If, in Crowes formulation, the Catholic
university is a specialized learning arm of a learning church set in the midst
of a learning human race, a recurrent danger is a reluctance to learn
associated with traditions of dogmatism.[44]
There can result, In the light of Lonergans two phases of theology, first
receiving and then rethinking, both a crisis of scholarship and a crisis of
creativity. And the crisis of creativity has to do with a failure of theology
to take the surrounding culture seriously – and in all its dimensions.
Hence
both Lonergan and Crowe stress the necessity for an education that cares
equally for the cognitive and the existential, facing the challenges of new
knowledge and new values. Few secular universities, in spite of many
disagreements in their fundamental philosophy, would deny that they are
involved in research, interpretation and history, and all in the service of
truth. It is usually only religious institutions of learning that raise the
further questions of dialectic and critical examination of ones own
horizons.[45] This
entails a qualitative leap from a functional view of university education to a
focus on human transformation. To highlight this second dimension is to embrace
some positive version of humanism, in the sense of a philosophy of the
developing and responsible person. It implies that universities are not mainly
books and courses, but people and also that the attempt to make higher
education value-free is a contradiction of what human beings are.[46]
It is an evasion of the omnipresence of values or anti-values in our cultural
contexts and histories. We come back to the crucial issue of how we interpret
culture. In Lonergans view it is the meaning underlying a social way of life
and is embedded on several levels at once: in intellectual and moral
habits, in artistic and reflective forms, and in the complex existential
history and memory of a people.[47]
More importantly still, culture is on the move in history and because human
cultures are man-made, they can be changed, indeed should be changed.[48]
Universities can therefore be located as crucially formative institutions in
the cultural superstructure, where meanings are elaborated and values are
discerned in a far more reflective, open-eyed, critical, coherent manner.[49]
They are involved in the drama and dialectic of changes in the control of
meaning, which is inevitably the work of a group and not just of an
individual.[50] There is a
necessary and positive sense in which a university has to be an ivory tower in
order to confront this dialectic of culture. Real thinking requires a certain
withdrawal but it has a mission to change the culture. Intellectuals need detachment that
they can see how things could be different but when they return, they
transform the world.[51]
Or, in Nicholas Boyles more recent formulation, universities have a duty to
their surrounding culture but paradoxically this at its heart is a duty of
detachment.[52]
All
of this provides an additional and ambitious backdrop to the more limited
concerns of this article. I tried to describe the history and the confusion
surrounding contemporary debates on universities. I came to the reluctant
conclusion that in general secular universities are victims of their own
(positive and necessary) complexity and their own (negative and historical)
lack of spiritual foundations and of genuine community. The focus of these
pages has been on university and culture, and a working hypothesis has been
that the slow divorce between universities and culture is a main source of
their fall into functionality. Religious universities have not suffered that
separation to the same extent, but serious questions arise as to whether they
have found the creative courage to embody their own identity in todays
language, and to do justice to the different dimensions of culture as now
understood.
Summarized
with such brevity, the picture looks bleak. Drawing, however, on some practical
wisdom embodied in the Ignatian tradition, we have found hopeful ways of
reading the challenge to universities in a postmodern moment and of a pedagogy
that could help students (and professors) towards a more integrated and
integrating humanism. Today many no longer dare to use some of the old words such
as coherence, system, wisdom, synthesis and so on. Nevertheless a university
would be abdicating its whole inheritance if it forgot its formative and
humanistic goals. St. Thomas Aquinas, that great patron of cross-cultural
explorations in a university setting, saw the height of spiritual achievement
as consisting in overcoming fragmentation and retrieving a unity of life: ex
partita vita in unitam consurgere.[53]
Playing with the possible etymological echoes of university one hopes that it
can still serve such unity even while exploring the universal and ever
expanding fields of human knowledge.
[1] SAUL BELLOW, It All Adds Up: a nonfiction collection, Viking, New York, 1994, pp. 93, 96.
[2] BERNARD LONERGAN, Topics in Education (Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Vol. 10), ed. R. M. DORAN AND F. E. CROWE, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1993, p. 65.
[3] JOHN HENRY NEWMAN, Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford, Rivingtons, London, 1872, Sermon XIV, Wisdom, as contrasted with Faith and with Bigotry, pp. 278-311. In order to facilitate readers using other editions, references to the numbered paragraphs will be given in the text.
[4] JOHN HENRY NEWMAN, The Idea of a University, ed. FRANK M. TURNER, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1996, pp. 97-98.
[5] Ibid., p. 29.
[6] Ibid., p. 291.
[7] DEREK BOK, Beyond the Ivory Tower: Social Responsibilities of the Modern University, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1982, p. 61.
[8] JOS ORTEGA Y GASSET, Mission of the University, Kegan Paul, London, 1946, pp. 43-45.
[9] ALASDAIR MACINTYRE, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encylopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, 1990, p. 217. This paragraph echoes other ideas in the books final chapter, entitled Reconceiving the University as an Institution and the Lecture as a Genre.
[10] Ibid., p. 231.
[11] ALASDAIR MACINTRYE, Catholic Universities: Dangers, Hopes, Choices, in Higher Learning and Catholic Traditions, ed. ROBERT E. SULLIVAN, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, 2001, p. 5.
[12] DAVID DAMROSCH, We Scholars: changing culture in the university, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1995, p. 208.
[13] BILL READINGS, The University in Ruins, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1996, p. 5.
[14] Ibid., p. 119.
[15] Ibid., p. 192.
[16] GEORGE MARSDEN, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, Oxford University Press, New York, 1997, p. 3.
[17] Ibid.,
p. 91.
[18] ALEJANDRO LLANO, Repensar la Universidad: La Universidad ante lo nuevo, Ediciones Internacionales Universitarias, Madrid, 2003, p. 128. My translation.
[19] BERNARD LONERGAN, Topics in Education p. 18.
[20] Ibid., p. 67.
[21] This text was published in May 1994 by three Vatican dicasteries: the Congregation for Catholic Education, the Pontifical Council for Laity, and the Pontifical Council for Culture.
[22] The Apostolic Constitution, Ex Corde Ecclesiae (1990), No. 43.
[23] Acta Apostolicae Sedis, Vol. 92, 2000, pp. 864-5 (my translation from Italian).
[24] LOsservatore Romano, English Weekly Edition, 23 July 2003, p. 3.
[25] Ex Corde Ecclesiae, No. 32.
[26] AVERY DULLES, Newmans Idea of a University and its Relevance to Catholic Higher Education, Conversations on Jesuit Higher Education (No. 22, Fall 2002) p. 18. This text is reprinted from PETER STRAVINSKAS & PATRICK REILLY (eds.), Newmans Idea of a University: the American Response, Newman House Press, Mt. Pocono, 2002.
[27] MICHAEL J. BUCKLEY, The Catholic University as Promise and Project: Reflections in a Jesuit Idiom, Georgetown University Press, Washington, 1998, pp. 15, 21.
[28] Ibid., p. 21.
[29] Ibid., pp. 137-8.
[30] DAVID B. BURRELL in The Challenge and Promise of a Catholic University, ed. THEODORE M. HESBURGH, Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, 1994, p. 42.
[31] These distinctions are developed in my Clashing Symbols: An Introduction to Faith-and-Culture, Revised edition, Darton, Longman & Todd, London, 2003, Chapter 8.
[32] These five
steps are mentioned in many commentaries, for instance in La Pedagoga de
los Jesuitas, Ayer y Hoy, ed. EUSEBIO GIL, Universidad Pontificia Comillas,
Madrid, 1999, pp. 23-24.
[33] PETER-HANS KOLVENBACH, Characteristics
of Jesuit Education, in La Pedagogia della Compagnia di Ges, a cura di F. GUERELLO & P.
SCHIAVONE, E.S.U.R., Ignatianum Messina, 1992, p. 103.
[34] REN GIRARD, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, Athlone Press, London, 1987, p. 26.
[35] CHRISTOPHER CLAUSEN, Faded Mosaic: the emergence of post-cultural America, Ivan Dee, Chicago, 2000, p. 28.
[36] WALTER BRUEGGEMANN, Always in the Shadow of Empire in The Church as counterculture, ed. MICHAEL L. BUDDE and ROBERT W. BRIMLOW, State University of New York Press, Albany, 2000, p. 39.
[37] REMBERT G. WEAKLAND, Aesthetic and religious experience in evangelization, Theology Digest (Vol. 44, 1997), 319-330. Quotation from pp. 319-320.
[38] Quoted from MHSJ Faber, by GERARD W. HUGHES, Forgotten Truths, in The Ways of Ignatius Loyola, ed. PHILIP SHELDRAKE, Institute of Jesuit Sources, St. Louis, 1991, p. 31.
[39] The next few paragraphs are adapted from my book Clashing Symbols, 2003 edition, pp. 141-142.
[40] BERNARD LONERGAN, The Role of the Catholic University in the Modern World, in Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Vol. 4, ed. F. E. CROWE and R. M. DORAN, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1988. 108-113. Quotation from p. 111.
[41] Ibid., p. 112.
[42] Topics in Education, pp. 18, 47, 63.
[43] FREDERICK E. CROWE, Old Things and New: a strategy for education, Scholars Press, Atlanta, 1985, p. 122.
[44] FREDERICK E. CROWE, The Role of a Catholic University in the Modern World – an Update, in Communicating a Dangerous Memory, ed. FRED LAWRENCE, Scholars Press, Atlanta, 1987, p. 2.
[45] Old Things and New, p. 117.
[46] FREDERICK E. CROWE, Appropriating the Lonergan Idea, ed. MICHAEL VERTIN, Catholic University of America Press, Washington, 1989, p. 171.
[47] Topics in Education, p. 262. See Note 13.
[48] BERNARD LONERGAN, A Second Collection, ed. W. F. RYAN and B. J. TYRELL, Darton, Longman & Todd, London, 1974, p. 93.
[49] Ibid., pp. 97-98.
[50] BERNARD LONERGAN, Collection, ed. F. E. CROWE, Darton, Longman & Todd, London, 1967, p. 256.
[51] Topics in Education, p. 52.
[52] NICHOLAS BOYLE, Who are we now? Christian Humanism and the Global Market from Hegel to Heaney, T. & T. Clark, Edinburgh, 1998, p. 63.
[53] In I Sententiarum, d. 17, q. 2, a. 2. As quoted by CROWE, Old Things and New, p. 90.