Foundations of Culture

...The new culture, when it arrives, will it be charged through and through with Christian ethics, or shall it continue to limp along, as it has been doing the last hundred years, on the wornout crutch of a pragmatic and naturalistic view of right and wrong...

...no less satisfying is the story of missionary endeavor in the discovery and upbuilding of the country...

...Since the rise of science in the nineteenth century, the disagreement between civilization and Christianity has almost reached the breaking point...

...What the ideal Catholic university does need, and imperatively, if all its efforts are not to come to nought, is a distinguished, well-trained staff...

...Contemporary civilization is naturalistic, secular and, in some cases, frankly materialistic...

...Can it be restored ? Is it possible to recreate a Christian civilization, to bring to this modern world a new and a higher culture which, recognizing the achievements of science and accepting its true spirit, will build upon such foundation a civilization in which the best elements of science and philosophy can be fused with the dogmatic and moral truths of Christianity...

...A true aesthetic lives upon the spiritual...

...it is the meaning, purpose and end of life and nature which art tries to capture and to reproduce in ever-varying forms...

...This is particularly true of a Catholic university whose prime function is to cement the union between Christianity, which is of the past, and science, which is so distinctively of the present...

...And the very forces responsible for modern culture, conscious of its defects, inanities and crudities, are groping about for something which only Christianity can supply...

...But the spirit, that of the religion of Christ, must be the same throughout...

...Science is of nature...

...But I cannot believe that the Holy See and our appointed rulers, the bishops of the United States, were wrong when they established the Catholic University of America...

...The story of the arts is to a large extent but the story of Christianity itself...

...Moreover, what historians recognize as the dominant elements in the culture of one age may not be looked upon as of value in another and subsequent century...

...Professors whose lives are devoted entirely to scientific investigation and to the training of students who will follow in their footsteps constitute a university, and no substitute for professors has been or can be found...

...It is to the high and unquestioned quality of its staff, it is to their scientific productivity that the ideal Catholic university must look if it is to exercise a profound influence on the intellectual world of today...

...That Jefferson, for example, was influenced by Catholic ideals of democracy is to many a satisfying fact...

...American culture appears to many to be closer to the older ideals than is the culture of modern Europe...

...This is particularly true in present-day Europe where the pendulum has swung farthest away from the Christian centre-which was accepted almost universally and without serious reservations well on till the end of the eighteenth century...

...Educators have the story of Mark Hopkins and the log continually on their lips...

...Individual Christians may continue to make scientific discoveries...

...In the following paper the rector of the Catholic University of America argues, however, that there are "by-products" of Christian belief which "would constitute the starting point for a cultural undertaking the very magnitude of which overwhelms imagination...

...Practically every Catholic cultural movement of large significance has had its origin with us, and is still directed by members of our staff, many of whom have given an unselfish devotion to the intellectual interests of the Church in this country that is beyond all praise...

...It is scarcely necessary to recall what the Christian spirit has actually produced in the realms of music, painting, sculpture, architecture and literature...

...It must strain every nerve to make that university what it should be under pain of seeing the efforts which it has already put forth result in but a series of more or less futile gestures...

...We speak of ancient, of mediaeval, of modern culture...

...We must have history, roots in the past, if we are to grow now and in the future-every university recognizes this simple law of life and of thought...

...Through the centuries Christianity and civilization have been almost one...

...Ethics is a field, the sorry state of which every one recognizes...

...The modern world, despite the complexity of its economic, political and social structure, looks to the university as to the fountainhead of those ideas out of which civilization flows and from which civilization takes its course...

...every one recognizes in general what is meant...

...It is what we are doing today and what we can do tomorrow that will tell most if we are to bring to American culture those elements of strength, beauty and truth which the Church has in her possession and of which she is the divinely constituted guardian...

...A university must be in close touch with the present, no less than with the past...

...Is such a Catholic university possible, one from which will flow into American thinking and living those elements which slowly but surely will permeate the whole and change the direction of our culture so that some day it may be said truly that we have achieved a Christian American civilization...

...there exist among us a feeling and respect for Christianity, especially for its ethical principles, which separate us from the profoundly secularistic attitude of many continental thinkers...

...Now, interpretation is of the intellect, not of the body...

...Can we, however, present a dualistic realism which will be acceptable, which will team up with the dominant scientific spirit of the age and go along with it in the advances it is making...

...Philosophically, moderns have been tossed backward and forward on the horns of an extreme idealism or extreme materialism until they are almost ready (many, like Bergson, have done so) to cast discredit on thought itself...

...The varying shades of meaning which may be given this elusive term, the complexities of the subject, the prejudices oftentimes of the one who is doing the defining, combine to make difficult a precise statement on which general agreement may be expected...

...Other important factors outside the university exist, operating toward the building up or destroying of cultural levels, and this is particularly true in the modern world...

...For We clearly understand how much a Catholic University of high repute and influence can do toward spreading and upholding Catholic doctrine and furthering the cause of civilization...

...But it is no less true that it is on the present and toward the future that our eyes must be fixed...

...RARELY do we find people agreeing on the exact connotation of the word "culture...

...Christianity has little, outside of interpretation and that is philosophy, to contribute to the splendid and continuing achievements of modern science...

...Grounded on principles which right-thinking people cannot but accept, this ethics presents a systematic and structural completeness, a harmony with the facts of life as it should be lived, and a workable idealism, all of which should appeal strongly to the scientifically trained modern man...

...The identity, it must be confessed, is becoming fainter and fainter with each succeeding generation...

...they may help to turn science in the direction of friendship with and away from warfare on religious thinking...

...Pluralism was then held before their eyes as a ladder by which they might climb to sanity and to understanding...

...Is such a university wanted, and are we ready to join together in the development of this, the most certain medium for achieving the Christianization of contemporary culture...

...It is men, in the last analysis, who make a university, not buildings, equipment or endowment...

...If we can rethink and restate in modern terms a philosophy which was the glory of the thirteenth century and upon whose truths the best in mediaeval civilization rested, and if we can make ourselves heard, the first forward step in the recreation of a new civilization will have begun...

...Christianity is of the supernatural...

...Leo XIII, Pius X, Benedict XV, and as recently as October 10, 1929, Pius XI pointed out the "absolute necessity" of developing the Catholic University and even went so far as to forbid the establishing of another university in the United States until such time as the present Catholic University had reached its full development...

...Since the days of Kant, thought has drawn farther and farther away from Christian principles and influences...

...they point, directly, unwaveringly and constantly to the already established Catholic University of America...

...Now, if there is any one thing sound in Christianity, assuredly it is the Christian system of ethics...

...History points unerringly to one agency which has guided the cultural advances of mankind- the university...

...That there is culture, and that there have been cultures, all will agree...

...But some may say, as an editorial writer did say a few weeks ago, that "no arrows point to any particular spot...

...The consistent Catholic follows the guidance of the Holy See in all matters, and in few with more security than when the Popes speak about education...

...The arrows point, arrows of whose wisdom and authority no Catholic can doubt...

...They have spoken on university education in the United States...

...and it was by interpreting facts in a Christian sense that art reached its highest levels...

...Nor is the Christian spirit dead...

...That it must be equipped adequately for its limited tasks, every one will appreciate...

...Now, it is not difficult to sketch the outlines of a Catholic university which would fulfil all hopes and make of itself the centre of a cultural diffusion which, in a few years, would alter radically the complexion of American philosophy, art, literature and politics...

...The achievements of the University, in the short forty years of its existence, leave no doubt in the mind of an unprejudiced observer what particular spot should receive united support...

...Pius X, in January, 1912, wrote: We are fully determined on developing the Catholic University...

...Amid the ever-changing conditions of the modern world, the Church has something permanent and unchanging, which no other society possesses, to hold out to the artist and upon which the aesthetic faculty may sustain itself to the achieving of great artistic products which will challenge, in the sublimity of their conception and the masterfulness of their execution, the universally admired works of the past...

...They have shaped, colored and even made civilizations...

...There is a great deal of eighteenth-century orthodoxy underlying our American viewpoints...

...Modern culture looks toward the creation and development of the non-religious or lay type, both individual and societal, as to the full flowering of its contribution to world advance...

...No culture of the past has produced, and we make bold to affirm that from no philosophy of the future may we expect anything comparable to the high sanity and concrete workability of the system of ethics which has been Christianity's greatest gift to a sorely tried world...

...Whether or not this fact is to be regarded as proof of cultural backwardness depends on what one's views are as to the nature of true culture...

...Such a university need not be large, either in endowment or student body, as American universities go...

...Modern philosophy has not accepted a workable dualism and a scientific realism, the philosophy on which Christian culture is based, for the simple reason that it is still laboring under the prejudices and illusions which it inherited from Kant and his followers...

...I venture to dissent, and most emphatically, from that statement...

...Thus, the culture of twentieth-century society is in many respects as far removed from the ideals of Christianity as was the culture of Rome or of ancient Greece...

...Every age has its Zeitgeist, a gathering together of tendencies, currents and achievements which, taken cumulatively, may be said to characterize a period of history or a race of people...

...It is not fair, however, to expect Christianity to make of itself a huge laboratory for the discovery of natural facts or for Christians to become a body of scientists whose sole purpose would be to study and theorize about the facts discovered...

...We look upon a university as the home of culture for a university is natura sua dedicated to the discovery of truth, to its propagation and to the training of men who will become living embodiments of the best thought of the age...

...While featuring this and an allied article, the editors wish it to be understood that they are not championing any one institution at the expense of any other...

...It will, of course, vary in degree as do all other human attainments...

...When we pass to the field of the arts, broadly accepted, it is here that Christianity can make such contribution to cultural development that only the insane or the wildly prejudiced would dare to spurn its offerings...

...Universities have always been at the centre from which radiated intellectual and cultural influences to the periphery of a country's population...

...Monism has plunged thinker after thinker into the abyss of despair...

...it is a work of reason...

...Of course, that this Zeitgeist need not be bad goes without saying...

...To protect it therefore and to quicken its growth is in Our judgment, equivalent to rendering the most valuable service to religion and to country alike...

...in practice they are too ready to sacrifice lasting results and certain influence to the passing applause of the market place...

...Granted that Christianity can contribute to modern culture elements of the highest significance and value, granted that a wedding between Christianity and culture is possible, who, then, is to perform the ceremony, who is to bring the two together, and particularly here in America, for it is in the final shaping and continued progress of American culture that we are most interested...

...they have found its principles no less unsatisfactory than those of monism...

...What Christian ethics can contribute to sound government, to democracy, to correct ideals of liberty, to the upbuilding of the social life, to the art of individual living, are beyond price, as they are outside dispute...

...As Newman pointed out, Christianity waited till the orbis terrarum attained its most perfect form before it appeared, and it soon coalesced, and has ever since cooperated, and often seemed identical with the civilization which is its companion...

...Whatever the dominant characteristics of modern culture are, one thing is certain, they are not Christian...

...If money is what is most needed, and that seems to be the prime requisite, it would be little short of shameful for a Church which possesses such great financial resources to fail to meet its patent duty to Catholicism and to the future of American culture by not endowing adequately, in men and money, that university upon which so much of its real success will depend...

...A fully developed Catholic university is, for the Catholic mind, both an ideal and an agency for the attainment of other ideals...

...In doing this, the university helps, both directly and indirectly, to raise the cultural level of a nation...

...The Editors...

...If the Church in the United States is interested vitally in recreating the intellectual milieu in which we must live, it cannot afford to neglect the assistance which a rightly conceived and organized university will unquestionably bring...

...The important thing to recognize is that in both cases the results achieved are of supreme value to cultural advance, that both religion and science make for civilization, each contributing something which the other does not possess...

...It need not possess the equipment, the laboratories or the libraries of a Columbia or a Harvard...

...Cultural progress cannot be assured by failure to recognize that religion and science occupy diverse fields, use different methods and attain different results...

...Viewed theoretically, it presents a bedlam of clashing views which, because of their very practical consequences, cause what approximates despair in the future of civilization itself...

...it is a work of faith...

...In our country, a democracy, culture must be a quality not of the few but of the many...

...In insisting on the past, even of our American culture young in years as that is, and what part Christianity has played in its development, we must not lose sight of the accommodations which must sometimes be made in order to align it with the present...

...This is an educational truism, but one, unfortunately, which we have too often ignored or forgotten in our efforts to keep up with the merely physical growth of other American colleges...

...I do not wish to be understood as making a selfish plea in the interest of developing an institution over which I happen to preside...

...As a matter of fact, we may well estimate the level of culture reached by our people by the mere fact of their appreciation of the need of such a university...

...The hierarchy of the country, in practical unanimity, has followed the leadership of the Popes...

...Though the university plays a dominant role in the making of culture, we must be warned against expecting too much of it or of exaggerating the part it is to play...

...I believe, taking it by and large, that we in this country are more nineteenth century than we are twentieth century...

...Leaving to one side what Christianity may contribute to modern culture in the field of religion and of dogma (its contribution being that of true religion) there are by-products of her beliefs which, if the world would accept and attempt to mold them along modern lines, would constitute the starting point for a cultural awakening the very magnitude of which overwhelms imagination...