Contending with Modernity by Philip Gleason The crisis of identity in Catholic universities coincides with a larger crisis of purpose in all higher education Can Catholic institutions offer a way forward for all?
Liddy, Richard
Can Lonergan replace Aquinas? Richard Liddy Book discussed in this essay Contending with Modernity: Catholic Higher Education in Twentieth Century America by Philip Gleason Oxford University...
...American universities today have their own pressing identity problem...
...III In this light, some Catholics might feel that the only rem-edy is to repent of our sins and to return to the neo-scholasticism of old...
...Gleason refers to G.K...
...Neoscholasticism's metaphysics was anti-Cartesian, anti-Kantian, an-tipositivist, antirationalist, antideter-minist...
...Gleason presents a very sympathetic account of the developments that led Catholics at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to accommodate their educational institutions to the practices of the burgeoning American educational system...
...Happily, the University of Toronto Press is currently publishing the twenty-two volumes of the Canadian philosopher-theologian's Collected Works...
...And (3) How does what we are knowing in our specialization relate to everything else, that is, to all the other questions people ask...
...Was a "Christian humanism" possible...
...It tended to subsume the central epistemological questions of modernity under metaphysics and indeed, quite often, it dismissed outright not only modern answers, but modern questions as well...
...Even a contemporary writer such as David Tracy recently paid tribute to the pre-Vatican II commitment to Catholic philosophy in higher education: "...it was the philosophy departments of Catholic universities that kept philosophy pluralistic in this country...
...Such a discovery would enable interdisciplinary communication in pursuit of the common good of the university and of society...
...Neoscholasticism set before the world the image of another world, though with medieval accents, where politics allowed reason full play and reason pointed to the living God...
...made it possible to institutionalize the intellectual revival in the colleges, while the revival in turn reinforced the Catholic identity of the colleges at a time when they were undergoing a process of institutional modernization...
...The scholarly ideal of that tradition, which he describes as "that of the disinterested inquirer engaged in the quest for objective knowledge that will have universal validity" is precisely what is now under attack in the campus culture wars...
...We meet regularly to analyze and relate the specific questions raised in our own specializations to our common drive for meaning, truth, goodness-and God...
...They weren't taken over, as so many secular departments in this country were until recently, by analytical philosophy...
...As the Jesuit and philosopher Bernard Lonergan put it, our human questioning reveals "the spark in our clod, our native orientation to the divine...
...It is essential for the health of the university today that these questions be raised in an explicit and interdisciplinary way, for these are questions that concern the very "circle" of the academic disciplines...
...2) Are we in fact knowing anything through doing that, and if so, what...
...for it was precisely that commitment that was questioned by some Protestants and secularists...
...My experience there has been of a group of people from various specializations- law, business, politics, economics, theology, etc.-laboring together to have a common mind at the same time as we work in our own areas of expertise...
...The last sentence of Gleason's very fine book sets this out as precisely the contemporary issue: "The task facing Catholic academics today is to forge from the philosophical and theological resources uncovered in the past half-century a vision that will provide what neoscholasticism did for so many years- a theoretical rationale for the existence of Catholic colleges and universities as a distinctive element in American higher education...
...They were conscious of being part of a movement to make that remedy a shaping force in the restoration of a better social order: an order more human because more Christian...
...A more positive orientation toward American life and achievement came to be accompanied by a growing awareness of the shortcomings of Catholic intellectual life...
...Such a language can help us build bridges to men and women who are laboring in so many specialized fields and who need a philosophical language with which to speak to each other about what it means to be people as well as people of faith...
...Within this cultural context, Gleason points out, Thomistic philosophy was "a school" in the proper sense of the word having its own problems, its own method, and a deposit of common doctrine acknowledged by all its representatives...
...Typically, Catholic thinkers felt that modern culture was in crisis and the source of this crisis was rejection of God, the supernatural order of things, and the Catholic church...
...Here and there I see signs of that renewal taking place...
...a defensiveness...
...This question, I believe, can be shown to underlie all our other questions...
...Into this vacuum rush various forms, literally, of irrational philosophies...
...Still, it will be incomplete if it is not accompanied by a unifying and critical philosophy adequate to our day...
...That encyclical enshrined Aquinas and "the scholastic method" as the focal point for Catholic philosophical renewal...
...I could have no greater hope for our Catholic college administrators and faculties than that they would reflect upon and discover, with Lonergan's inspiration and guidance, the basic human cognitive processes which underlie all disciplinary methodologies...
...Technically, the discipline that deals with this question could be called "the methodology of the disciplines/7 "general methodology/' "the science of cognitive methods/' As long as philosophy roots itself in the analysis of human knowing and human living, it deals with the central questions: (1) What are we doing when we are knowing...
...Other voices began to be heard cautioning Catholics against a "ghetto mentality" or a "siege mentality...
...Gleason states his thesis regarding Catholic higher education in lapidary fashion: "The organizational modernization...
...Integration" became the big word...
...In this postmodern age their operative philosophy is that there is no philosophy, no possibility of a common language with which persons from various specializations could speak to each other about what it is to be human...
...Is there still any possibility of infusing into the wide world of modern culture, not an imposed philosophy with an archaic vocabulary, but a genuinely "catholic" philosophy that can speak to men and women of our day...
...Such philosophy was also "a philosophy of life" and contributed to Catholic culture...
...Lonergan has been our inspiration...
...There is no consensus on the very meaning of "knowing" and how human knowing in one area of specialization is related to every other area and to the rest of human living...
...It was considered the integrating discipline behind Catholic theology and other aspects of Catholic life...
...As John Henry Newman wrote in The Idea of a University, unless one knows something of this "science of the sciences," then one's own specialization will only lead to knowing more and more about less and less...
...So prevalent was the Thomistic world view behind all of this that Virgil Michel, the pioneer of the liturgical renewal in the United States, considered himself a convinced Thomist...
...This neoscholastic vision of things provided the core in-teerating content of Cath-olic higher education prior to Vatican II...
...To do today what Aquinas did in his day we must engage the scientists and scholars of our own day and encourage interdisciplinary dialogue about the meaning and role of the various specializations within the whole of human knowing and human living...
...Gleason identifies several: a "formalism" that considered the world as already comprehended and conceptually classified in one's scholastic system...
...How could the genuine achievements of modern scientific and scholarly culture be integrated into Christian faith...
...Where else could Catholics look than to the medieval period, newly discovered by many romantic writers, and to the towering figure of Thomas Aquinas...
...After all, law, business, politics, science-each is an area of human activity in which God's Word would "have a say...
...He reminds us of all the positive elements that accrued to Catholic life in general and Catholic higher education in particular through the church's official commitment to scholastic philosophy...
...Gradually, a battle emerged at Catholic universities between those advocating an overarching integrating vision that tended to be "imposed from on high" and, on the other hand, those eager to embrace the products of modernity: individual autonomous departments with scholarly competence in specialized disciplines...
...These are questions about human in-teriority, about the possibilities of truth, and about the basic structure of the universe that human questioning seeks to plumb...
...Nor were thought and prayer unconnected to action, as movements for social justice began to appear that appealed to Thomistic principles...
...In fact, I have seen the integrating power of Lonergan's philosophy in action...
...It involved a certain "view of the whole" in the light of which the various aspects of life made sense...
...Finally, the accreditation of Catholic teachers and of schools according to modern American standards left Catholics wondering what was "Catholic" in their educational programs...
...At the same time, they felt that Thomas provided the means of analyzing the prevailing malaise and offered a remedy...
...It was, in fact, a very large and important school which at its height supported twenty-five specialized journals throughout the world and engaged the commitment of thinkers the quality of whose work makes it impossible to dismiss the whole phenomenon as party-line philosophizing, however much that characterization might apply to many of those who taught it to American collegians...
...Gleason characterizes the problem of the Catholic university as follows: "The identity problem that persists is...not institutional or organizational, but ideological...
...Gleason's book is magnificent in pointing out all the positive and indeed wonderful elements in this neoscholas-tic "glue" that in the minds of so many seemed to provide the intellectual and integrating dimension of Catholic life...
...In this light, Gleason's book sounds a somber note, indeed, as it points out the monumental institutional changes Catholic higher education underwent to adapt to modernity in America-only, it seems, with the collapse of neoscholasticism after Vatican II, to lose its soul.The Catholic institutions of higher learning are still there, but any distinctive Catholic intellectual culture seems to have largely disappeared...
...Although especially in Louvain, Leo's efforts resulted in a Thomism that was "more a beacon than a boundary," the Americanist and later Modernist crises resulted in much more of a mandated and "imposed" scholastic philosophy...
...It is to this question-the question of who we are at the deepest level-that the specialization of Catholic theology responds...
...Threatened by the Resorgimento and by the Enlightenment currents that had spawned it, Catholic philosophers in nineteenth-century Italy initiated a recovery of Saint Thomas's philosophy that culminated in Leo XIII's Aeterni pa-tris in 1879...
...The institutionalization of "credit hours" that accompanied the increasing specialization of knowledge and departments is another example...
...That synthesizing view involved a culture-molding power that attempted to see things, as much as possible, sub specie aeternitatis, that is, from "God's point of view...
...Neoscholasticism brought to the fore the classic philosophies of Plato and Aristotle and the classic Christian writings of Augustine and Thomas...
...Keeping these questions alive and central to higher education might very well be the providential role for Catholic higher education today...
...It would certainly not be true to the example of Thomas Aquinas who met the contemporary Aristotelian scientific world on its own turf...
...In addition, these questions implicitly contain the question of God, the ultimate meaning of meaning...
...Neoscholasticism could not win the support of the powerful specialized departments of the universities to be their integrating language...
...Gleason recalls that in the 1950s 5,000 students at Notre Dame were expected to take anywhere from eighteen to forty credits in scholastic philosophy...
...all you have to do is take a good look at it...
...Did Catholics understand America...
...It had little appreciation for the complex structure of human experiencing, human understanding, and human judging...
...To my mind no Catholic has written of these methodological questions and, within them, the question of God, more clearly than Lonergan...
...Indeed, where else could Catholics look for a model of an "integral and integrating" education than to Thomas's summae...
...My father used to tell me, "Have a reason for the faith that is in you"-and at least at times I found some "reasons" in the works of the neoscholastics...
...Thomas Merton was not atypical of those who were aided in their journey to Catholicism after coming across a coherent articulation of the meaning of "God" in the writings of Etienne Gilson...
...More briefly put, the crisis is not that Catholic educators do not want their institutions to remain Catholic, but that they are no longer sure what remaining Catholic means...
...They found an answer in the fervent embrace of neo-scholasticism, a philosophy that also encouraged "a philosophy of life," a culture...
...Philip Gleason's new history of Catholic higher education, Contending with Modernity: Catholic Higher Education in Twentieth Century America, evoked many dormant memories for me: not just the shortcomings of the intellectual life of pre-Vatican II American Catholic culture, but its positive side as well...
...What other philosophy could link faith and life...
...Neoscholasticism was not just a creed or a code or a cult...
...a moralism...
...Against the latter, the church's massive commitment to neoscholasticism could not hold its own...
...In fact, at that very time John Henry Newman was suggesting another approach and trying to point to modern ways of handling philosophical issues by highlighting the structures of personal experience...
...John Searle, the distinguished philosopher at the University of California at Berkeley, recently highlighted this situation, arguing that contemporary postmodern and deconstructionist influences undermine our attachment to the Western tradition of reason itself, the basis for all modern scholarship and science...
...That is, it consists in a lack of consensus as to the substantive contents of the ensemble of religious beliefs, moral commitments, and academic assumptions that supposedly constitute Catholic identity, and a consequent inability to specify what that identity entails for the practical functioning of Catholic colleges and universities...
...Richard Liddy Book discussed in this essay Contending with Modernity: Catholic Higher Education in Twentieth Century America by Philip Gleason Oxford University Press, $35, 496 pp...
...The work of John Courtney Murray, S.J., met the need for a "public language" with which to explain Catholic faith and understanding to modernity...
...It was also severely hampered by an intuitionist view of knowing: reality is "out there...
...Neoscholasticism was not able to speak to our age because its practitioners had little or no understanding of modern scientific and scholarly ways of questioning...
...Leo's mandate resulted in the founding of various institutes engaged in the scholarly recovery of Thomas, including the Institut Superieur de Philosophie at Louvain under the future Cardinal Desire Mercier...
...It's been the philosophy departments of the great church-related, chiefly Catholic, institutions that kept alive philosophic forms that can help one think about religion and give one ways to approach theology" (America, October 14,1995...
...A call for full academic freedom in Catholic colleges and universities emerged in the 1950s and '60s, with some even questioning whether it was a mistake to think that genuine research and graduate-level work could develop under the aegis of the Catholic system...
...This was a school of philosophical "realism" with a robust belief in the power of the human mind to know...
...I am not saying that such a philosophy of itself will be capable of filling the present void...
...Gleason emphasizes the fact that the collapse of neoscholastic philosophy has left a vacuum in Catholic higher education...
...Even for people who were not at all philosophically inclined, this scholastic philosophy provided basic terms and relations to employ in answering fundamental questions: questions about God, creation, spirit, body and soul, immortality, natural law, virtue, etc...
...There is a long road ahead...
...Even the move from the European six-year secondary school-college to the American four+four+graduate school came to symbolize Catholics taking on the American educational template...
...However, after Al Smith's run for the presidency, and again in the late 1940s, Catholics found themselves having to defend their commitment to American presuppositions...
...a clericalism that did not value the genuine questions and contributions of the laity...
...an authoritarianism that inhibited questioning...
...Chesterton's fictional "Father Brown" spotting an impostor by observing that a person passing himself off as a priest spoke disparagingly of reason...
...One could always point to "the greats"-chiefly Augustine and Thomas-and their present-day interpreters-for many, the laymen, Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson...
...But although Leo XIII made Newman a cardinal, the philosophical direction pointed to by his Grammar of Assent was little understood or accepted by scholastics...
...Various dimensions of Catholic culture came to be seen as inhibiting the genuine human and intellectual development of Catholics...
...The last year-and-a-half I have been a fellow of the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University...
...It was an important element in the inspiration of many to enter the Catholic church, and, I can testify for myself, it encouraged vocations...
...What he does not equally emphasize is that this is only part of a larger vacuum in university education as such: a vacuum of meaning...
...Gradually, the scholastic "synthesis" could not even enlist the support of the administrators of Catholic colleges and universities...
...As Gerard Ellard wrote in 1934: "The Catholic Revival is placing before a world sick and weary the picture of the Mystical Body of Christ vivifying Catholic culture...
...Would that we, members of the Body of Christ, could point out to them in contemporary ways the humanistic and theological dimensions of what they are doing...
...Eventually this "Catholic renascence" in America called attention to the Catholic literary revival in Europe, such as the writings of Sigrid Undset and Francois Mauriac...
...Cardinal Newman said that the church is always beginning again in each new age and, after reading Gleason's book, I am certain that we are in a new age in which we need to begin again to seek a common language with which we can speak to each other and to the world about life and God and the truths of faith...
...That, I believe, would be a profound mistake...
...In the lives and work of some, such as Jacques and Raissa Maritain, philosophy was closely connected to the practice of contemplation...
...It was part of "the feel of the things" for Catholics...
...II he Catholic revival of the 1920s and 30s was self-con-sciously countercultural...
...This process has been of enormous help to each of us in drawing out the theological implications of our academic specializations...
...For any philosophy to be truly effective, it will have to be linked to efforts to attain religious and moral renewal as well...
...Were the two compatible...
Vol. 123 • June 1996 • No. 12
