Lehrman American Studies Center

To answer the question of why the good Christian philosopher and the good Christian university need each other, we have examined the essential qualities of the good philosopher. A I shall discuss, these “good” qualities are analogous in the philosophical person and in the philosophical institution, and so, we discover them not only embodied in the individual philosopher, but also portrayed on a larger scale, embodied in that philosophical institution analogous to the philosophical person, the university.

As Alasdair MacIntyre has shown, human knowledge is both “tradition-constituted” and “tradition-dependent,” as well as “tradition-transcendent.” As he suggests in his latest book, God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition, that institution most indispensable for the preservation, sustenance, and development of human knowledge (or, in MacIntyrean terms, an intellectual tradition) is the university. For, as MacIntyre writes,

Philosophy is not just a matter of propositions affirmed or denied and of arguments advanced and critically evaluated, but of philosophers in particular social and cultural situations interacting with each other in their affirmations and denials, in their argumentative wrangling, so that the social forms and institutionalizations of their interactions are important and none more so than those university settings that have shaped philosophical conversation, both to its benefit and to its detriment.

The philosopher is created, nourished, and perfected in and by the university, for the university, and the university alone can effectively preserve, sustain, develop, revise, and transform a philosophical tradition, for the university is its institutional embodiment and the primary locus of philosophical practice, with the individual philosopher serving as the tradition’s personal embodiment, as well as apprentice, interlocutor, and custodian. In short, Christian universities have historically served as the philosophical guilds in which our Christian philosophical tradition has been passed on from masters to apprentices, and it is only through them that apprentices have become masters.

It is no different today, except for the fact that the typical modern university has become a guild for careerism and sophistry, not philosophy, and the guild-character of the university would be denied by both its masters and apprentices. Nevertheless, today’s Christian philosopher requires good Christian universities for not only his philosophical flourishing, but also for his very existence qua philosopher; and, conversely, the Christian university requires good Christian philosophers, for no institution can survive, let alone flourish, absent the personal influence, participation, and oversight of its personal practitioners.

The qualities of the good Christian university are analogous to the qualities of the good Christian philosopher. Just as the good philosopher needs to be a master of the Christian philosophical tradition and adept at the dialectical, analytical, synthetic, and imaginative skills he needs to ply his trade, the good Christian university also requires a rigorous and sophisticated curriculum and pedagogy firmly rooted in the Christian philosophical tradition. Taught without sufficient rigor, the liberal arts become jejune exercises in sentimentalism or self-expression, philosophy becomes sophistry, and theology becomes soft-blasphemy. But just as one’s commitment to Christianity, philosophical erudition, and dialectical skill, without the proper philosophical attitude of metaphysical courage and existential openness, cannot render a philosopher a good one, so a Christian university cannot be good without the right institutional ethos and telos.

The perfection of the intellect, not the emotions or even the soul, is the proper telos for which university disciplines should be taught, around which they are hierarchically integrated, and in the light of which pedagogy is ordered. Taught without the right telos, philosophical disciplines become sophistical and rhetorical linguistic skills to gain power for oneself and over others. If the university is Christian and orthodox, but if its telos has an exclusively spiritual orientation and focus on moral formation, then one ends up with a suffocating Christian moralism, a world-contemptuous and suspicious Jansenism, or an anti-philosophical fundamentalism. If the university is secularist in foundation, this same misguided telos results in something like secular fundamentalism or political fanaticism. St. Thomas Aquinas himself forbade a religiously fundamentalist notion of education, as MacIntyre points out:

[For many thinkers,] intellectual enquiry, like all other secular pursuits, is taken to have no worth whatsoever in itself, but to be worthwhile only as a means to salvation. Contrast Aquinas, for whom many secular pursuits and, notably, intellectual enquiry are worthwhile in themselves and as such to be offered to God as part of that offering that is the path to our salvation.

The ability to think clearly, accurately, deeply, and comprehensively about reality so as to come to a knowledge, and continue to do so throughout one’s life, of the essential truths about the universe in both their unity and diversity is the point and purpose of a Christian university; the university is not directly concerned with saving souls, but minds! The Church and ecclesial communities such as monasteries have the salvation of souls as their primary concern. Now, the Christian university is not meant to destroy souls, as would appear to be the case when observing the contemporary Christian university; but the proper antidote to its soul-destroying tendency is not to react by turning the university into a retreat center or piety and moral training ground! For, when the primarily intellectual end of the Christian university is eclipsed, ignored, or denied, through religious fanaticism or power-pragmatism, the liberal arts lose their character as true arts, philosophy becomes sophistry, and theology becomes something unholy.

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