The University and the Church

A collection of essays written by my mentor, Dr. Don Briel, was just released by Cluny Media. I was privileged to assemble and edit this collection, unified by the theme of the University and the Church, particularly the needed renewal of the university through the influence of the Catholic tradition. Briel founded the first Catholic Studies program to initiate a renewal through smaller, faithful communities within the larger university.

The university is a cultural artifact of the Catholic tradition, formed by a union of groups of students and teachers who arose out of the traditional monastery and cathedral schools. Colleges were added later to complete the formation of the student through moral and spiritual discipline. I offer here the beginning section of my introduction to the book, The University and the Church: Don J. Briel’s Essays on Education.

The University and The Church

The bond connecting the modern university and the Church may appear tenuous, but the university finds its ultimate origin within the Church’s mission to form disciples. The word for student (in Greek, mathetes; in Latin, discipulus) appears two hundred and forty-two times in the Gospels and Acts, including the climax of Matthew’s Gospel: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matt. 28:19–20). Jesus clearly commanded his own disciples not only to engage in evangelization (the proclamation of the Good News of salvation), but also to teach and initiate by forming disciples in the Christian life.

As the Church grew in the ancient world, it expressed this mission, in part, through education. Christians formed catechetical schools, most famously in Alexandria, and recognized the classical liberal arts as an ally in the study and teaching of Scripture. With the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, the Church served as a beacon of liberal education, preserving manuscripts and forming centers of learning at monasteries and cathedrals. As these flickers of light coalesced, the flame of the university arose, forming major centers of learning for the study of philosophy and the terminal degrees of theology, medicine, and law. Pope St. John Paul II bore witness to this origin in his apostolic letter, Ex Corde Ecclesiae: “Born from the heart of the Church, a Catholic University is located in that course of tradition which may be traced back to the very origin of the University as an institution. It has always been recognized as an incomparable centre of creativity and dissemination of knowledge for the good of humanity” (§1).

In his efforts to found a new university in the 1850s, the Catholic University of Ireland, John Henry Newman traced the origin of the university, as it built upon the traditions of Athens and the monastery. As part of this study in the third volume of his Historical Sketches, he offered the definition that “a University seems to be in its essence, a place for the communication and circulation of thought, by means of personal intercourse, through a wide extent of country.” Newman recognized in the university a privileged place for the formation of the mind, ordered toward the good of society. He describes the relation between these two ends within his Idea of a University, stating how the university aims at the “training of the intellect, which is best for the individual himself, best enables him to discharge his duties to society.”  Newman explains further how

a university training is the great ordinary means to a great but ordinary end; it aims at raising the intellectual tone of society, at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national taste, at supplying true principles to popu­lar enthusiasm and fixed aims to popular aspiration, at giving enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age, at facilitating the exercise of political power, and refining the intercourse of private life. It is the education which gives a man a clear conscious view of his own opinions and judgments, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them. It teaches him to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought, to detect what is sophisti­cal, and to discard what is irrelevant.

This cultivation of mind and personal refinement should translate into a well-ordered society as politics, law, business, education, and the Church herself bear within them the imprint of the proper judg­ment imparted by the university.

The university may have arisen at the heart of the Church, but the two have since experienced a painful separation. Many now con­tend that the Church’s religious mission should have no part in guid­ing an institution that shapes public life and, further, stands in the way of its attempt to communicate objective truth. Even Catholics fall into a dualism that holds no essential connection between the Church’s mission and the purpose of the university: one shapes pri­vate opinions and the other serves practical ends for the good of society. The Church, however, recognizes no such separation, find­ing any attempt to segregate faith and reason as a fundamental distor­tion of them both. As Newman persuasively argues, if the university teaches universal knowledge, it must express the fullness of truth, including theology, and must inform character and conscience.

The Church recognizes that its mission of salvation not only touches the soul but also extends to the good of society and human culture. The Son of God became man and entered into human expe­rience not to withdraw humanity from the world, but to transform and perfect it by his grace. The Second Vatican Council articulated that “Christ’s redemptive work, while essentially concerned with the salvation of men, includes also the renewal of the whole tem­poral order. Hence the mission of the Church is not only to bring the message and grace of Christ to men but also to penetrate and perfect the temporal order with the spirit of the Gospel.” The Church served as midwife in the rise of universities because of her concern for the education of both clergy and laity for the renewal of society. According to the Catholic vision, the proclamation of faith necessitates a development of reason as its foundation, and the flourishing of Christians in the world depends upon proper educa­tion and the right ordering of society itself.

The Catholic university has born much fruit through the ages through its dedication to the truth, drawing upon both faith and reason: extraordinary works of learning, contributions to the devel­opment of law, medicine, and science, and the formation of saints, such as St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Ignatius of Loyola, and Bl. Frédéric Ozanam (all alumni of the University of Paris). Despite this heri­tage, Catholic universities now experience a crisis of identity, unsure of their relationship to the true alma mater, the Church.

The Land O’ Lakes declaration of 1967 serves as an often-cited declaration of independence from the Church: “The Catholic University today must be a university in the full modern sense of the word, with a strong commitment to and concern for academic excellence. To perform its teaching and research functions effectively the Catholic university must have a true autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself.” Catholics were slow to recognize the implications of this new autonomy of Catholic universities and uncertain in how to respond to them. As the effects became clearer, new universities arose in the United States to recreate the lost sense of fidelity and mission to the Church, as well as new centers for Catholic thought and culture within more established institutions.

Not long before the Land O’Lakes declaration, one British con­vert, the historian Christopher Dawson, proposed a path of renewal for the Catholic university through a focus on Christian culture. Like Newman, Dawson examined the origins of the university and the Church’s role in transmitting the classical tradition. His book, The Crisis of Western Education (published in 1961), described the breakdown of the liberal tradition and the spiritual void created by a new pragmatic and technocratic approach to education. Dawson contended that to address this new climate, in addition to teaching classical liberal arts, the Church needed to transmit the legacy of Christian culture in a holistic and organic fashion to initiate stu­dents into its living reality.

Dawson proposed that “the study of Christian culture is the missing link which it is essential to supply if the tradition of Western education and Western culture is to survive, for it is only through this study that we can understand how Western culture came to exist and what are the essential values for which it stands” (CUA Press edition, 103). The study of Christian culture would entail an interdisciplinary explora­tion of the Catholic tradition in its great intellectual achievements, but even more so in the transmission of its social and cultural reality through time. Dawson wanted students to learn about the Christian tradition and to experience it as a culture-forming community, which could shape the West again. This vision drew upon Dawson’s deep understanding of the nature of education itself:

The essential function of education is “enculturation,” or the transmission of the tradition of culture, and therefore it seems clear that the Christian college must be the cor­nerstone of any attempt to rebuild the order of Western civilization. In order to free the mind from its dependence on the conformist patterns of modern secular society, it is necessary to view the cultural situation as a whole and to see the Christian way of life not as an isolated precepts imposed by ecclesiastic authority but as a cosmos of spir­itual relations embracing heaven and earth and uniting the order of social and moral life with the order of divine grace. Christian culture is the Christian way of life. As the Church is the extension of the Incarnation, so Christian culture is the embodiment of Christianity in social situ­ations and patterns of life and behavior. It is the nature of Christianity to act as a leaven in the world and to trans­form human nature by a new principle of divine life (ibid., 115).

Dawson recognized the essential connection between the university and the Church. The Church educates for the good of humanity, but its unique approach entails the formation of a complete way of life. The Church, as a communion of faith and grace, penetrates the totality of life. Catholics cannot accept a divide between spiritual and earthly realities because human beings are rational animals, rooted in the material world, yet ordered toward goods that transcend it. The Catholic university transmits the Church’s life to its students by communicating the true human good in its fullness, as a way of life that should shape the world as well.