A president's view: academic credibility.

At a September 1998 meeting of faculty representatives of eight Chicago-area Catholic universities, Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, and Bishop Joseph Imesch of Joliet, broad agreement emerged about some basic issues concerning the religious identity (or lack of it) in nominally Catholic institutions. One developing point of consensus seemed to be that our institutions have become over-secularized and are, to put it simply, too little Catholic. In the words of Cardinal George, "the price of engagement with the world on terms set by government, business, and the foundations has been, perhaps, too great." The vast majority of the several hundred faculty and administrators meeting at Loyola University's Madonna della Strada Chapel agreed that the structures of learning and teaching that prevail at all American universities are too fragmented and too narrow for students, and that their religious and spiritual needs would be better served with greater integration of the academic disciplines and the creation of a cross-disciplinary curriculum.

Enthusiastic as we were after that meeting, I left thinking about what Catholic university presidents could do to effect helpful change. Over the past fifteen years, in most Catholic universities administrators have worked in concert with faculty to enhance Catholic identity. But as our September meeting suggested, we have a long way to go. When so many are convinced that this issue needs to be addressed, why is the task so arduous? No surprise, of course, the rub comes when we put generalities aside and begin to address specifics. This is where reasonable people can strongly disagree, and do.

Those of us who want to revitalize the religious dimension and ethos in the Catholic university must take care how we present ourselves and our message. We must be, and be seen to be, mindful of modern academic culture and the very real advances science and scholarship have made in our knowledge and understanding. If, in the accomplishment of a laudable agenda to witness to "Truth," we seem, even implicitly, to scorn, disdain, or fail to grasp in all its complexity "truth" as the modern scholarly and scientific world routinely understands it; or, if our posture is mainly to condemn and carp about truths with small t's, then, quite honestly, we won't even get a hearing from our own faculties, nor can we expect our universities to be received as places of "higher learning" in any accepted sense in the larger society and culture.

For Catholics this is a hard saying, because we revere and need Truth. Cardinal John Henry Newman, who certainly was committed to the pursuit of both Truth and truths, intended his Catholic university to be evangelical, but in a way consistent with the academy's mission of transmitting and exploring knowledge. He noted, with a wonderfully Newmanesque touch, that a main function of a Catholic university was not to prepare converts to enter the church but rather to prepare the church to welcome converts. We could do a lot worse than to keep his modest, appreciative tone and inclusive style in mind.

Cardinal George rightly summoned the Catholic academy to be "accountable to" and "share responsibility with" the encircling faith community that historically brought it into life and whose needs it serves, and which is led by its teacher-pastors, the bishops. Rather than construe the hierarchy as meddling in their affairs, the cardinal advised the faculty to think about how to articulate the Catholic university's role in, and contribution to, the church. A Barat College sociologist, while agreeing with George, asked at what point the hierarchy must, for its part, be accountable to "academic developments." It is that dual challenge I want to examine in this essay.

One of the great achievements of the modern university has been the scientific clarification that followed upon the creation of academic disciplines. Though sometimes considered a retrogressive move because it "fragmented" knowledge, this cognitive division of labor is the reason that universities have been the arenas of great advances in the physical, social, and psychological sciences. The church should welcome these achievements. I could not expect my faculty to heed any words I might say about Loyola University's modern identity if I were not also seen to be taking seriously modern contributions to knowledge, from literary deconstruction to sociobiology.

In short, the features of the academic terrain as we find it are the slopes on which the Catholic university will renew its religious identity. And it is on these slopes that questions about the contribution of Catholic universities to the Catholic community will be answered. So while it is undeniable, as Avery Dulles writes in a recent essay, that Catholic universities should make greater attempts to unite "integrating disciplinary truths into a larger vision of Truth," we must do this in ways that respect the accomplishments and processes of modern society.

Hans Urs von Balthasar urged Christians to avoid easy criticism of contemporaries for their reluctance to make absolute claims to "universal and abiding truth." Many years ago, the future cardinal praised the sharp edge (and, to some, the less attractive edge) of modernity's thought: "Modern man in his solitude seeks passionately as every other generation for the absolute. But he will not let himself be caught either by absolute denominational claims or by idealistic and cosmological enthusiasms. Hence his silence...[which] springs from the probity of a man who will not say a word for which he is not prepared to risk his life." In sum, without genuine acknowledgment of the advances represented by modern thought and methods, we cannot create a meaningful religious identity for our universities.

To further its own mission, the church must attend to "academic developments," which include change and variation in perception, in thought, in meaning, in our understanding of the concept of truth. Put differently, we are all, including the church, caught in history and constantly wrangling and reasoning with history. Modern knowledge and understanding is irretrievably historical, and this encompasses all institutions, including religious ones. If I strongly recommend a tone of humility as we work toward our agenda to revitalize a Catholic identity in our university, I do so from a recognition of our church's historical complicity in creating the current state of affairs, where reason is routinely heard in opposition to faith. Clerical reproofs, such as Avery Dulles's criticism of "the proud boasts of autonomous reason, setting itself up as a substitute for faith" are well and good, but they would ring louder with my faculty, I am quite certain, if they came preceded by self-reproach at the defensive and offensive postures taken by the nineteenth-century church, striking out blindly against the "errors" of "modernism." When John Paul II writes, "Truth and freedom either go together hand in hand or together they perish in misery" (Fides et ratio), he is not wrong, of course - far from it. But his words pointedly remind us that our church, our popes, have not always spoken thus. On the contrary, the hard-won insights of intellectual history teach us that the often-invoked "Truth" isn't simply a pure and abstract notion some imagine it to be, but an engaged historical player In whose name powerful institutions, including the church, have committed outrages on truth, as well as on truth's human discoverers and defenders.

For historical as well as religious reasons, the Catholic university must shun the role of patriarchal scold. If we seek to wield reason critically on, say, rationalism, we must be prepared to have it used on religion. The language of prophecy and judgment has its place, including in the university, but it is received more readily from those who are prepared to have prophecy and judgment wielded upon themselves and the policies of their ecclesiastical institutions. Our first word when addressing the academy, our own or the secular one, should, perhaps, be a word of contrition.

Next, we in authority in the church and the Catholic university cannot be seen to overlook or denigrate the advances represented by the "many" and "pluralistic" truths that prevail among scholars and scientists. Assertions about the "objective truth that is knowable to us" are more productive if they are made by educators who are themselves both familiar with the briar patch of difficulties associated with the idea of objectivity and recognize the genuine advance which the concept represents. Unqualified praise for "the idea of the university in the classical sense" must not seem to bespeak a yearning for a medieval past. Like it or not, the great majority of our faculties and students are "moderns." They might respect Cardinal George's "Truth," as they respect the man himself. They might even sympathize with his sense of mission for the Catholic university, as well as admire the bold statements he is able to make. But he speaks with the conviction of faith, whereas the faculty wants truth to emerge from the critical evaluation of evidence and arguments. These faculty members do not share his exact language and statements of mission. When he speaks of the "classical university," they may thrill to its resonance, but they are apt to respond, "Isn't it in the past, and for good reason?" Culture is not only "fragile," as the cardinal says, but culture also changes, and with it, so do language and meaning.

Most scholars and scientists are seriously committed to the search for truth in their own disciplines. However, for their own satisfaction as well as to satisfy the yearnings of their students, many faculty members (especially if they are themselves parents of college-age children) would love to connect the small truths that they identify in their research to the larger and more significant "Truth." They may strive to offer visions and versions of a reality that extend beyond the discipline in which they are trained. But easy extrapolations from truth to Truth are no longer available to us, and this, on balance, I would submit, is a good thing.

Nota bene, I am not saying that modern intellectuals must uncritically swallow all change, nor praise rampant consumerism, nor simply debate the "finer points" of the culture of death. But then one need hardly be a Catholic, or even a believer, to see the religious longing, to condemn the spiritual emptiness, or to deride the religious gullibility of our time. What I am saying is that the church and its university must be heard to recognize that pluralism is not always "promiscuous," that subjectivism is not regularly "solipsistic," that pragmatism and eclecticism need not be "opportunistic," that instrumentalism should not be equated with "unprincipled," and that nominalism may rank higher than "unsavory." Similarly, "Cartesian doubt" is not invariably "masquerading as critical intelligence," while doubt itself is far from always being bad, even in faith. Homo faber, in sum, is not everywhere and always trying to stymie or do an end run around Homo sapiens.

It is in the nature of academic disciplines to narrow their focus; it is how they advance. The restoration of what Dulles calls philosophy's "sapiential character" - in his view its "original vocation" - would not be a wise development if it were purchased by the demise of contemporary philosophy's capacity for cogent and exacting analysis. A discipline can develop without violating its past or incurring the censure of the church. We do not say that relativity and quantum mechanics have turned against either classical Newtonian physics or church doctrine. To the contrary, theologians celebrate modern physics' embrace of the uncertainty principle and chaos theory because they point to the mystery at the heart of creation. Why, therefore, cannot analytic philosophy point to the mystery at the heart of words, or logical positivism deepen our appreciation of the brain/mind dichotomy?

Consider academic pluralism and specialization, which in certain religious circles enjoy bad reputations. The low esteem is unwarranted. In many areas - computer science, neuroscience, history, philosophy - the intellectual division of labor has led to clear benefits. Economics, my own discipline, affords a good example. By assuming that all firms maximize profits as their sole goal and compete intently with one another only with respect to this variable, economists, using rigorous mathematical models, have examined how efficient and fair such markets really are. After patient and rigorous research over decades, economists know better and appreciate more what are the limits, including the moral boundaries, of profit maximization.

Another criticism leveled at universities is that, because principles are taught tentatively and subject to revision, students are not given a firm foundation. Universities engender, rather than resolve, doubt. Let me be frank: In our day, doubt is the normal way to faith, not corrosive of it. Young adults are unlikely to come to belief if their personal doubts, or the doubts expressed by society's leading cultural voices, are not freely and fully aired. At any university worth its salt, therefore, the pervasive role of doubt is routinely acknowledged. However, at a Catholic institution, one may expect more; one may anticipate coming to see spiritual benefit and potential in doubt. In his preface to the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius Loyola writes, "Every good Christian ought to be more ready to give a good sense to the doubtful proposition of another than to condemn it." When Thomas the Apostle was incapable of believing in the risen Lord, his confreres did not throw him out of their community, but accepted him with good will, in the patient expectation that his doubt would be resolved, as indeed it was, in beneficial fashion for subsequent generations. In this sense I hear Saint Ignatius's adjective "doubtful" as meaning more than just "thought-provoking" or "iconoclastic." In our age I hear it as carrying a prophetic and evangelical potential. In a world which "doubts in fear yet fears to doubt" - as M. Holmes Hartshorne wrote in a time that did not use inclusive style - "the 'grace of God' can again become meaningful when through the experience of doubt a man is able to accept the fate that relativizes all his truths yet grants him reverence for Truth together with the will to serve it."

I understand that bishops sometimes doubt whether Catholic universities are up to the enormous challenge history and divine providence have set them. The tasks are daunting, and the bishops have done well to outline the dimensions of the problem. But resolution will not come easily or through appeals to proclaim the Truth. Rather, in accepting the historical situation which is given to universities, those of us laboring in Catholic universities will have to work patiently, in doubt, and with doubt to get glimmers of the Truth that saves us all and which emerges from connections made among myriads of lesser truths.

John J. Piderit, S.J., is president of Loyola University Chicago.