Religious Roots of University Renewal Returning to Scripture and Tradition

In 1808 Friedrich Schleiermacher, writing in favor of establishing the University of Berlin, used the opportunity to tell his readers what a university is for. He argued that while in lower school it was permissible to teach subjects without regard to the whole, the critical thing at a university is for the student to acquire a grand overview of the totality and cohesion of knowledge. He referred to that big picture as the encyclopedia. Schleiermacher must of course have been thinking partly of the Encyclopedie ou dictionnaire des sciences, des arts et des metiers, that vast summation of knowledge which had been the culmination of a century of liberal and revolutionary thinking in France. But he was also adapting the concept of an encyclopedia to a university setting, something the editor of the Encyclopedie (Diderot) and his collaborators would have been slow to do. Schleiermacher knew that beyond the practical significance which the French had given to the notion of encyclopedia, that term of art reflected in the core of its meaning whatever was included in the circle of culture (en kyklo paideias). The aim of university was not to be a compendium of all that was known. It was to impart a comprehensive understanding of all that belongs within the circle of high culture — of all that was best.

In advocating such an encyclopedic approach to university, Schleiermacher was doing no more than concurring in the sentiments of the best thinkers of his time. Friedrich Schelling, for example, had written several years earlier, once again concerning the founding of the university of Berlin: “The dominion of the sciences is not a democracy; much less is it mob rule. It is an aristocracy in the best sense of the word. The finest are to dominate within it.” And other luminaries of German romanticism such as Fichte, Humboldt, and Hegel were all saying similar things at the same time.

Perhaps the most famous specimen of the university mind of the 19th century, who illustrated in high degree both its virtues and its faults, was G.W.F. Hegel. In 1807, in his preface to the dauntingly entitled Phenomenology of the Spirit, he characterized truth as a whole in which all the parts must be held together at once. As the parts whirl around us like Bacchanalian revellers, he said in a rare poetic flourish, the whole circle becomes transparent to us and as if perfectly still. The truth is the whole, and only in terms of the whole does what is true become clear.

No doubt Hegel would have excluded such things as the dithering of deans or the politic proposals of university presidents from the whirling truths that would ultimately be clear. When he spoke of the whole it was not in any such inclusive, or quantitative sense. Instead he meant something selective, but nevertheless representative, whose parts are all that is excellent, all that is of enduring significance. This was the whole truth which universities had a duty first to pursue and then to distill to purity. Their final duty was to profess it.

Such unanimity and lofty conviction in an entire generation of eminent thinkers can only provoke wonder and envy today. Why, we sometimes ask ourselves, do our own academics lack both the solidarity and the unwavering commitment to excellence of former times? And yet the answer is near at hand. It is because our university is not theirs. Indeed, our institution, if compared to theirs, is not deserving of the same name, but is more accurately termed, as some have already begun to call it, a “multiversity.”

A number of changes have taken place since the 19th century to justify a different name. For one thing increasing professionalization (to which the philosophical worthies just cited contributed mightily) has had the effect of turning most disciplines in upon themselves and so cutting them off from any direct connection with other types of inquiry or with a reading public.

Second, an increasing number of professors are either mentally or emotionally unable to discipline themselves in traditional ways, and therefore are working, if not always intentionally, to destroy traditional disciplines. Typically these levellers move forward under the banner of diversity, whether it expresses itself in the watering down of the curriculum or in support for affirmative action in hiring. The result is a rainbow coalition of closed minds and vulgar matters, dedicated to the degradation of the whole academic system.

Third, in the recent years of shrinking education budgets and decline in the relative numbers of faculty, vigorous real growth has been experienced at the level of administration. Just as Hamlet thought maggots generated spontaneously in dead dogs, so have new and expensive deanships, vice-presidencies, and other offices proliferated within the carcass of the university. Still, the worst thing about them is neither their unnecessary expense nor the troublesome meddling in which their duties often consist. It is that, like the parasites to which I have just compared them, their function is to consume the remains on which they feed. Sexual harassment officers, vice-presidents for equity, and others of this kind exist to implement final solutions to largely imaginary problems.

Fourth, there has been over the last half-century an enormous expansion in student admissions, recently swollen to avalanche proportions by affirmative action in that sector. It has resulted in the presence in most institutions of a sizable body of students who, even under conditions more favorable to serious study, would not have been attracted to the circle of the best, as the last century understood it.

Fifth, there have arisen within the multiversity departments and faculties which, though sometimes useful, are of an unequivocally practical orientation, and are designed to intercept the superfluous students now flooding the system. Such programs as nursing, business, and engineering absorb those who are talented and ambitious, while pseudo-programs like communication, cinema studies, and semiotics soak up the rest.

The fat in a university system may be ugliest in its extremities, but it is most dangerous around the heart. Thus, while it is bad to permit cinema studies, it is worse to allow the philosophy of film. Homosexuality is merely ridiculous, when considered as an academic specialization, whereas gay literature, taught as such in departments of literature, is an insidious abomination. That the system of higher education could have allowed these concerns such undue recognition is evidence that an alarming amount of the dangerous fat has already settled in the brain.

There is no sign that these trends are going to stop. The result, if they continue, will be that the multiversity will give way to the last stage in publicly-funded education — the “omniversity.” Two characteristics will distinguish it. First, absolutely no one will be excluded on principle from either its faculty or its student population. Second, every type of research, even those which would not meet current standards of methodology, will be acceptable.

If I am right in believing that the multiversity is on a dead-end course, then the pertinent question is how the useful functions which have ceased to perform can be carried on elsewhere. A clue to the answer may be discovered by returning once again to the founding of an encyclopedic liberal university in Berlin. What did it have that was good, and could that good thing be recovered, perhaps in a new form, today?

Hegel’s inaugural lecture in the new Berlin university, delivered in the fall of 1818, struck an uplifting note, but he dealt harshly with the intellectual dereliction of his own time. In a noteworthy passage he wrote:

European thought has degenerated to the level of the Roman proconsul Pontius Pilate who, when Christ spoke of Truth, answered with the question “What is truth?” He spoke in the tone of one who has got beyond such concepts, knowing that there is no such thing as knowledge of what is true. To abandon the search for truth, an offense which from time immemorial has been thought shameful and unworthy, has been raised in our day to a glorious attainment of the mind. At first the hopelessness of reason was met by grief and pain, but soon came religious and moral frivolity, followed by a narrow and shallow knowledge which called itself “Enlightenment.”

Although this passage was written in 1818, the resemblance of that time to today makes it prudent to examine what our German precursors did right, as they ushered in the last great heyday of the university. Hegel’s analogy with Pontius Pilate captures metaphorically both his diagnosis of the problem and the direction in which the university should go. He complains that the Enlightenment has taught intellectuals to believe that truth is unattainable, and then encouraged them to settle for shallow skepticism. The remedy, Hegel thinks, lies in a serious, renewed attempt to pursue the truth, especially as it was incarnate in Jesus Christ.

In the actual development of the 19th-century university in Germany, and of the many universities inspired by it in North America, theology did not occupy as central a place as Hegel suggests it should. I believe it would be more accurate, however, to say that Christianity remained the occluded center of that university, around which, like a ring of planets, the circle of culture turned. As with Hegelian philosophy, so it was with 19th-century culture in general: Christianity was at the center because it furnished the indispensable narrative and ethical foundations for an otherwise secular world- view. But it was occluded because the central fountain of religious truth could find no outlet there, at least not through the mechanism of liberal studies, whose fundamental methodology was naturalistic and secular. Christianity was thus the center which could not hold, as Yeats wrote a century after Hegel. And as our society was pried away from it, mere anarchy was loosed upon the world, anarchy whose final academic expression is the rough beast of the omniversity, now slouching toward its birth.

Prior to the 19th century, the university had one heyday at its inception in the high middle ages. At that time Christ’s Truth was the unoccluded center of the curriculum. Universities grew chiefly out of the need for educated clergy, for readers of the Book which mattered, the Bible. Out of the disputes which arose concerning the meaning of biblical passages emerged the formally debated “question,” which was characteristic of medieval pedagogy. With the disputed question came the need of a master who could determine the proper answer; and around the masters grew up the original universitas, a sort of teachers’ guild. The “uni” (the unifying center) of this university was thus biblical truth. It was not until Renaissance humanists successfully petitioned for the claims of other great books to equal university attention, and the new science vindicated the importance of “the book of nature,” that the slow decline of the scholastic university began.

It is of course true that neither the scholastic nor the German liberal university would serve our needs today, even if they could be reconstituted. But both point to one thing as an indispensable component in any institute for the serious pursuit of truth: the central truth of Christ. An institution which is not in its own way dedicated to pursuing this is not a university at all.

Even if my pessimistic suggestions about the inevitable withering of the multiversity and its successor, the omniversity, are granted for the sake of argument, the idea of founding authentic universities at the present time may seem unrealistic for two good and mutually reinforcing reasons. First, it will be thought imprudent to contemplate beginning anything capital-intensive in a time of diminished economic expectations. Next, it appears to be unnecessary in any case, given the large number of Bible colleges and Christian universities already in existence, which are dedicated to the study of the Bible and the proclamation of the truth of God.

Both these points are important and must be partly conceded. But since the financial question does not arise unless the need is established, the latter should be dealt with first. There are indeed a good number of Bible colleges and Christian universities whose prospects appear excellent for the foreseeable future. Though enrollment in all post-secondary programs has been high during the most recent recession, Christian institutions, generally speaking, have experienced more dramatic growth than have their secular counterparts. This, coupled with an increasing and gratifying demand by students for traditional, orthodox teaching, which in the long run will discourage curricular waywardness, shows that there is a strong market for what they have to offer. But it is arguable that there is still an unmet need for something they do not offer: a curriculum centered on the Bible and yet adequate to the highest academic standards.

What would such a university’s Bible-based curriculum look like? When fully developed it would have to include the Biblical languages, meaning at least Hebrew, other Semitic languages, and Greek. To keep alive the knowledge of the Church Fathers, the scholastics and their theology, Latin would be needed, as would at least French, Spanish, German, and Italian, for modern theology and biblical criticism. It is easy to see that even institutional competence in all these languages would only begin to open the field of potential historical and theological resources and that eventually other languages would also be needed. Nor could these languages be properly maintained except by scholars of their respective literatures, who understood them profoundly.

Theology, philosophy, archaeology, church and secular history would also have to be professed by men and women who understood them in depth, rather than by narrow specialists of the type often found in the warrens of the multiversity. And it would probably be necessary for such a college to make a place at least for the history of science, and for mathematics, if it were to equip its students to challenge today’s secular consensus in a way that would be worthy of notice. For such a university to function at its best it would also be necessary for a spirit of collegiality to be encouraged among both students and professors, so that each one could be enriched by the training and experiences of the others.

An important criterion for the success of an institution of this kind would be that it would re-create the tie between high and low culture that was lost with the professionalization of the disciplines in the 19th century. Allan Bloom once movingly described the harmony which had existed in living memory between the biblically-literate community of his grandparents’ generation and that of biblically-minded scholars. “My grandparents were ignorant people by our standards,” he wrote,

and my grandfather held only lowly jobs. But their home was spiritually rich because all the things done in it, not only what was specifically ritual, found their origin in the Bible’s commandments, and their explanation in the Bible’s stories and the commentaries on them, and had their imaginative counterparts in the deeds of the myriad of exemplary heroes. My grandparents found reasons for the existence of their family and the fulfillment of their duties in serious writings, and they interpreted their special sufferings with respect to a great ennobling past. Their simple faith and practices linked them to great scholars and thinkers who dealt with the same material, not from outside or from an alien perspective, but believing as they did, while simply going deeper and providing guidance. There was a respect for real learning, because it had a felt connection with their lives. This is what a community and a history mean, a common experience inviting high and low into a single body of belief.

Most readers will recognize the loss of which Bloom speaks. However, we often exonerate ourselves of any responsibility for it by invoking the fable of a “knowledge explosion,” which somehow makes impossible a link between high and low culture, among the disciplines, and between writers and a reading public. But without denying that there is much to know, it is easy to see that this fact explains nothing. There has always been too much to read and think about in a single lifetime. That is a characteristic of civilization, not of the 20th century in particular. The ancient library of Alexandria had hundreds of thousands of volumes, far more than any single scholar could have read with care. What we chiefly lack, in comparison to earlier generations, is a principle of selection, one that would permit us to discriminate between the high and the low, the central and the peripheral, the great and the inconsequential. But this is precisely what the Bible once furnished to past generations who have believed it and what it would furnish to us also, if we made it central to a new university.

As long as there are serious Christians, there will be a demand for institutions in which biblical matters can be studied at the required depth. That seems unquestionable because the alternative is that the basis of our faith will be forgotten. It is legitimate to wonder, however, whether it is or should be part of the mandate of existing Bible colleges and Christian universities to facilitate the depth of study needed in some fields. Until recently, at any rate, they have tended to concentrate on pastoral training instead, leaving advanced linguistic and theological inquiry to the theology departments of large secular universities. Moreover, because demand for the current offerings of Bible colleges will in all likelihood continue to be strong, they may have little real incentive to make changes, even when secular institutions can no longer be relied upon to perform the more academically challenging tasks. It appears probable, then, that there will be a small but perceptible demand for institutes of advanced biblical studies with a curriculum similar to that sketched earlier.

At present it is unclear how great and how firm that demand is likely to be. In one respect it would be excellent if it were small. That might mean that the Christian community would be denied the luxury of denominational schools. One new ecumenical school of the quality of the 17th- century Jesuit college of La Flêche, if it were supported by all Christian denominations, could be the greatest impulse to church union that providence has bestowed since the Reformation, not to speak of its purely scholarly contribution.

Once the need is established, the question of cost must finally be faced. However, there is no reason to think that the bill would ever have to exceed what grassroots Christian communities could afford. And in the beginning it might be very modest indeed. For one thing such a school would require neither the bloated administration nor the myriad political leeches that drain the resources of the multiversity. By giving thought to its location, it could also dispense with residences, cafeterias, and gymnasia.

Further substantial economies would also be possible. Strictly speaking, the new university would not even need its own building. In urban centers classroom requirements could be met at little or no cost through the cooperation of churches. In theory this should be to the advantage of all concerned, since the school could put to use during the week facilities which otherwise might stand empty, while drawing a number of potentially active members to reside in the area of the participating churches. It would also return to the churches the educating function which was exemplified by our Lord, commended by St. Paul, and carried out with distinction in earlier centuries.

Furthermore, these new schools could manage without major library holdings, if they were located in centers where large libraries are already in existence. Working out borrowing or consulting privileges of some sort with existing collections would permit them to concentrate on buying only books pertinent to their own courses.

The point here is of course not to work out a detailed plan for a new university, but rather to challenge Christians to reflect on the need for one and the promise it would hold. The coming omniversity will not long sustain us. It is time to consider what we shall do after we graduate.

Author

  • Graeme Hunter

    Graeme Hunter is professor of philosophy in the University of Ottawa.

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