The Catholic University As Promise and Project Reflections in a Jesuit Idiom

The Catholic University as Promise and Project Reflections in a Jesuit Idiom Content made available by Georgetown University Press and Digital Georgetown Content made available by Georgetown University Press and Digital Georgetown The Catholic University as Promise and Project Reflections in a Jesuit Idiom MICHAEL J. BUCKLEY, S.J. GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY PRESS/WASHINGTON, DC. Content made available by Georgetown University Press and Digital Georgetown Georgetown University Library OCT i 4 2008 Georgetown University Press, Washington, D.C. 20007 © 1998 by Georgetown University Press. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. 10 98765432 1998 THIS VOLUME IS PRINTED ON ACID-FREE OFFSET BOOKPAPER. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Buckley, Michael J. The Catholic University as promise and project: reflections in a Jesuit idiom / Michael J. Buckley, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Catholic universities and colleges—United States. 2. Jesuits— Education (Higher)—United States. I. Title. LC501.B627 1998 378'.0712'73—DC21 ISBN 0-87840-711-1 (cloth) ISBN 0-87840-710-3 (pbk.) 98-16019 Content made available by Georgetown University Press and Digital Georgetown To the Community of Holy Cross and the Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame in gratitudey admiration, and friendship Content made available by Georgetown University Press and Digital Georgetown Content made available by Georgetown University Press and Digital Georgetown And what you thought you came for Is only a shell, a husk of meaning From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled If at all. Either you had no purpose Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured And is altered in fulfilment —T. S. Eliot, "Little Gidding" Content made available by Georgetown University Press and Digital Georgetown Content made available by Georgetown University Press and Digital Georgetown Contents Preface xiii Acknowledgments xxiii PART ONE CRISIS, CHOICE, AND THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY l CHAPTER ONE The Catholic University and the Promise Inherent in its Identity 3 The Question and Its Urgency 3, Extrinsicism 11, The Integrity of the Academic and the Religious 15, Christ as Paradigm 17, The Catholic University and its Definition 20, Ex corde Ecclesiae 22 CHAPTER TWO The Church and its Responsibility to Foster Knowledge 26 To Specify the Question 27, Thesis 131, Thesis 2 36, Conclusion 39 CHAPTER THREE A Conversation with a Friend 40 Professor David O'Brien 40, Response 44 Content made available by Georgetown University Press and Digital Georgetown x Contents PART TWO 'THE UNIVERSITIES OF THE SOCIETY" 53 CHAPTER FOUR Ignatius' Understanding of the Jesuit University 55 The Fusion of Horizons 55, Universities and the More Universal Good 57, The "Universities of the Society" 63, The Constitutions as Resource and Challenge 70 CHAPTER FIVE Humanism and Jesuit Theology 74 Introduction 74, Three Aspects of the Problem 75, The Human Defined by the Divine 81, The Human United with God: Instrumental Causality 84, Renaissance Transformations in Humanistic Education 89, Humanism and Theology: The University of the Society 94, Theology and the Influence of Humanism 98, In Summary 101 PART THREE CONTEMPORARY SIGNS OF CONTRADICTION 103 CHAPTER SIX The Search for a New Humanism: The University and the Concern for Justice 105 The Issue 105, The Humanistic Education 111, Deficiencies in the Contemporary Settlement 116, Reformulation of Liberal Arts and Humanities 118, Academic Strategies 121 Content made available by Georgetown University Press and Digital Georgetown Contents xi CHAPTER SEVEN The Catholic University as Pluralistic Forum 1 29 The Issue and Its Situation 129, Internal Contradiction 134, Discussion 136, Order 139, The Identity of the Catholic University 141, An Objection and Conclusion 144, PART FOUR TOWARDS THE LOVE OF WISDOM 149 CHAPTER EIGHT Philosophic Grammar and the Other Disciplines 1 51 The Problem 151, Three Additional Dimensions of the Problem 153, Patterns in American Education 156, Introduction through Disclosure 161 CHAPTER NINE Wisdom, Religion, and the Liberal Arts: Towards the Construction of Theology 1 72 Part One: Theology as Architectonic 174, Part Two: The Liberal Arts in Theology 178, Part Three: The Religious Question 181 Notes 183 Index 2 1 5 Content made available by Georgetown University Press and Digital Georgetown Content made available by Georgetown University Press and Digital Georgetown Preface Antinomies in Higher Education Two events gave the fall of 1854 peculiar promise. August had seen the young Henry Adams, led by "custom, social ties, convenience and, above all, economy," cross the Charles River to enter upon his freshman year at Harvard College.1 Harvard already figured among his earliest memo- ries from childhood. One of the "singularly gloomy winter afternoons" had brought him and his mother to call upon his formidable aunt, Mrs. Edward Everett, whose husband served solemnly as President of the College.2 But the autumn of 1854 had a different purpose. It was to initiate the four years of collegiate education Adams would one day remember and measure in his masterpiece, The Education of Henry Adams. Two months later in Dublin, John Henry Newman with some twenty residential students inaugurated the Catholic University of Ire- land, proposing to advance into institutional practice theories already framed and published as the Discourses on Scope and Nature of Univer- sity Education? Adams and Newman were to tower over the world of education through works remarkable for their disciplined sensibility and percep- tion, the cogency of their prolonged argumentation, and the suppleness of their language. Both men were prodigious in their range of interests and exigent in the standards by which they evaluated human achieve- ments. They diverged profoundly, however, in academic histories and ecclesial commitments. As students and as teachers, both engaged the university education of their times, but what they found or hoped to form in these institutions of 1854 marks off even for the university of today many of its questions and antinomies. 'The chief wonder of education/' wrote Adams, "is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught." He softened the harshness of this pronouncement with the concession that the Harvard of the mid-nineteenth century proved "probably less hurtful than any other university then in existence." Admittedly during his four years, the content of the teaching was little and the manner of teaching poor, but "it left the mind open, free from bias, ignorant of facts, but docile. The Content made available by Georgetown University Press and Digital Georgetown xiv Preface graduate had few strong prejudices. He knew little, but his mind re- mained supple, ready to receive knowledge" like an empty sheet of stationery—blank, writes Adams, before the impressions it would receive, imprinted only with the Harvard watermark upon it.4 Collegiate years fashioned an intellectual character more negative than positive, cleansing the mind from partisan narrowness and political—not to say, religious—enthusiasms. The Calvinism for which previous generations once claimed Harvard had long since faded into a pale Unitarianism. This doctrinal evanescence did not turn Adams towards Concord and its Transcenden- talists. For this young student, the material world was both too real for him to adopt Emerson's Nature, and at the same time too demanding to leave him satisfied with the education offered by the College. Theologi- cal education would not figure among the courses and conversations to be remembered. With a prose steeped in weariness, Adams judged that neither the president of the College nor the students took collegiate education all that seriously. "For them all, the college offered chiefly advantages vulgarly called social, rather than mental/'5 The spring of 1859 came and with it graduation. Adams spoke as Class Day Orator. A distinguished relative protested that "as the work of so young a man, the oration was singularly wanting in enthusiasm." This young man wondered to himself whether "this absence of enthusiasm was a defect or a merit, since, in either case, it was all that Harvard College taught, and all that the hundred young men, whom he was trying to represent, expressed."6 This was the calm, dispassionate, and, above all, critical habit of mind, one distant from inflamed convictions and "slipping away from fixed principles."7 There is a paradox here. His was a generation, taught by the lecture system to question, but not to profess. Within the decade its graduates would be felling one another over the murderous fields of the Civil War, but even their fierce commitments, tested by the horror of those years, issued more from a Southern social instinct and a Northern moral judgment that were, if "beyond appeal, not an act either of intellect or emotion or of will, but a sort of gravita- tion."8 Before such a cultivated reserve, Newman's Catholic university with its articulate Catholic commitments could seem little more than vulgar, like the immigrant Irish roughs playing before their betters in the streets of Cambridge. To prepare for this short-lived institution, Newman had delivered, between 10 May and 7 June 1852, the first five of his lectures on the idea of the university. The next five were destined never to be presented as lectures but to appear that autumn initially as pamphlets. The complex of these lectures and pamphlets was published as a single Content made available by Georgetown University Press and Digital Georgetown Preface xv volume in the subsequent year.9 If Adams' great work was to display and weigh one form of higher education as it actually existed and had been experienced, Newman's was to argue the university as it was defined in theory and desired in intention. However attenuated Christian commitments might be found at Harvard, they were the source of the integrity of the university for Newman.10 He could speak of the university as the product of the Church and of this in its turn as the issue of faith, but for Adams that could not be.

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