Restoring the Soul of the University

Unifying Christian Higher Education in a Fragmented Age

Perry L. Glanzer, Nathan F. Alleman, Todd C. Ream

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780830891634
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

- Christianity Today's 2018 Book of the Year Award of Merit - Politics/Public LifeHas the American university gained the whole world but lost its soul? In terms of money, prestige, power, and freedom, American universities appear to have gained the academic world. But at what cost? We live in the age of the fragmented multiversity that has no unifying soul or mission. The multiversity in a post-Christian culture is characterized instead by curricular division, the professionalization of the disciplines, the expansion of administration, the loss of community, and the idolization of athletics. The situation is not hopeless. According to Perry L. Glanzer, Nathan F. Alleman, and Todd C. Ream, Christian universities can recover their soul—but to do so will require reimagining excellence in a time of exile, placing the liberating arts before the liberal arts, and focusing on the worship, love, and knowledge of God as central to the university. Restoring the Soul of the University is a pioneering work that charts the history of the university and casts an inspiring vision for the future of higher education.

PART ONE

BUILDING THE
UNIVERSITY

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IN PART ONE, WE ADDRESS how educational leaders of the past built universities with soul. The mixing of metaphors in this phrase is purposeful. The metaphor of the university as a body with a soul was less dominant during the medieval period. Instead, one of the dominant metaphors scholars drew on during the first half millennium was the idea of learning as a structure—such as a castle, tower, palace, or house for the queen of wisdom.1 This metaphor was especially appropriate when the university was yet in the initial “construction” phase. During this period, early thinkers were particularly interested in ways that curricular structures and institutions could help organize and further a person’s learning. This building was to occur inside the student and provide a place for God (often described as Wisdom) to dwell.

We think both metaphors, the university as a structure and the university as an organic body with a soul, are legitimate and helpful ways to think about the university (although we will focus on the latter in the second part of this book). As we will demonstrate in part one, however, picturing the university as some kind of structure means that it is vitally important to establish the proper foundation (akin to the importance of the soul for the body). Unfortunately, the early blueprint of the academic building resulted in a particular weakness with regard to how it approached theology and what today we might describe as the role of faith in animating learning. Theology only implicitly and not explicitly served as the foundation of the university. The discipline of theology itself served more as the palace or peak of the structure. This approach had important consequences for the university, particularly when the unified theology of the Roman Catholic Church broke further apart during the Reformation. As a result, the foundation of the university, which had never been firmly established in its dependence on God and the study of God, was replaced by other foundations. This first part tells this important story, a story that is somewhat different from the common secularization story.

1

CREATING THE
ORIGINAL BLUEPRINT OF A UNIVERSITY

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Let no man excuse himself. Let no man say, “I am not able to build a house for the Lord; my poverty does suffice for such an expensive project; I have no place in which to build it.” . . . You shall build a house for the Lord out of your own self. He himself will be the builder; your heart will be the place; your thoughts will supply the material.

HUGH OF ST. VICTOR

The more we are conformed to the divine nature, the more do we possess Wisdom. . . . We find many who study but few who are wise.

HUGH OF ST. VICTOR

FEW HUMAN CREATIONS LAST for any significant period of time. Universities, however, have proved to be an exception. The oldest universities in Europe, North and South America, and Asia have lasted longer than the governments of the nations in which they reside and virtually every other institution minus the church.2 Interestingly, among the many purposes suggested for a university education today is that it is essential for defending liberal democracy.3 While understandable, the fact that many older universities preceded the rise of liberal democracies raises the question of what universities were for in the thirteenth century when they began.

The thinkers who provided the intellectual scaffolding on which the earliest universities were built did not compose mission statements. Nevertheless, these scholars still offered rationales for the unique project in which they were engaged. Within these justifications one finds a unique way of thinking that departed from earlier Greek and Roman justifications for what today we call a liberal arts education. This distinctive vision, we contend, is crucial for understanding the larger identity, story, and purposes that nurtured the creation of the university and the development of its soul.

Hugh of St. Victor

We begin our story with Hugh of St. Victor, who died in 1141. Unfortunately, we actually know very little about Hugh’s life, including his birth date. He described himself as an earthly resident alien (“From boyhood . . . I have dwelt on foreign soil”4). He later came to Paris, France, where he studied and began to teach and write. Eventually he became a master and head of the school at St. Victor from 1120 to 1141. Hugh’s position at this school proved important for a number of reasons. As European cities grew during this time, centers of education began moving from monasteries to cathedral schools in the cities. A tension soon developed, however, between the monastics and those teachers now educating in the cities. The strain arose because monastics believed that educators in the new city-based schools placed too much emphasis on the nuggets of intellectual gold acquired through the pagan writings independent of faith in God and downplayed the importance of both orthodox belief and virtuous living for gaining wisdom.5

The School of St. Victor, overseen by Hugh, became one of the schools that addressed this tension. It existed just outside the city walls, less than a mile from the royal residence. In the words of Jim Halverson, the school did not represent “the flight to the desert by a weary ecclesiastic.”6 Its founders played a central role in the political and ecclesiastical life of the city. They opened the school to the wider public in the hopes of attracting some of the top minds coming to the city. The priests who ran the school were not monks but a group known as canons regular. They combined the disciplines of a monk with the active ministerial life of priests in urban churches. They saw their educational work of preparing students for various worldly callings as part of their ministerial work.7 This unusual combination of monastic spiritual disciplines and leading academic work built on previous educational approaches, but it also proved groundbreaking in important ways.

Both the continuities and the distinctives can be found in Hugh’s Didascalicon, which contains his ideas about how to justify and organize education. Although earlier Christian thinkers such as Augustine, Boethius, Varro, Cassiodorus, and Isidore had also created classification schemes for knowledge, these types of organizational schemes started to blossom during Hugh’s time.8 In the century preceding the rise of the university, the fields of academic knowledge began to expand rapidly. As a result, systematizers such as Hugh arose within the various types of monastic and cathedral schools and tried to organize both old and new forms of knowledge. These scholars began writing manuscripts known as didascalicons, which sought to introduce students to the various writings they should read to be educated.9 These documents were basically instruction manuals for building the substantive content of what they called the academic house or palace for wisdom.

Although Hugh’s Didascalicon was clearly influenced by early Christian scholars in how he thought about education, particularly Augustine of Hippo, his blueprint for learning departed from previous approaches in one important way.10 Previous Christian classifications had often been written as a critical response to pagan systems of knowledge. For instance, in On Christian Doctrine, Augustine created a classification of knowledge in order to help Christians discern which pagan liberal arts were suitable for Christians and which arts were not (e.g., medicine—yes, magic—no). In contrast, Hugh created a positive vision and classification of learning that, while taking pagan knowledge into account, focused more on the creative endeavor of placing the whole educational enterprise within the expansive Christian narrative.11 In other words, he set forth a comprehensive blueprint of how to build the academic structure that answered questions about who we are, why we should learn, what we should learn, and how we should learn it.

The Foundation: A Grand Reason to Discover Wisdom

As with any building, the foundation remains vitally important. During Hugh’s time, two foundational concepts were used. Some organizers simply classified their system under the word scientia (knowledge), but others used the term philosophia (which in Greek means the love of wisdom).12 The latter term drew on both Greek thought as well as Hebrew Wisdom literature such as Proverbs. Philosophia, or philosophy, would be the term that won the day at the time when universities began. For example, for Hugh philosophy served as the overarching category on which to build the academic house since he considered it “the art of arts and the discipline of disciplines.”13 In contrast to contemporary conceptions of philosophy, this wide-ranging view of philosophy included what today we would consider theological questions. “Philosophy” was an all-encompassing term. For example, Hugh believed that “philosophy is the discipline which investigates demonstratively the causes of all things, human and divine.”14 This comprehensive use of philosophy still persists as part of contemporary universities. The highest level of graduate students in the fields of arts and sciences receive a doctorate of philosophy, or PhD. Most students, and even many professors, do not understand why someone receiving the most advanced degree in chemistry should receive a doctorate in philosophy. This language points to the earlier means of conceiving and constructing knowledge that developed during the time leading up to the establishment of the universities.

Yet we have completely lost two important understandings of philosophy that proved central to Hugh’s blueprint for education. First, according to Hugh (as well as other early Christian thinkers), philosophy involved the pursuit of wisdom and not merely the pursuit of certain technical skills such as the use of logic. Echoing Proverbs he opened his first chapter with the claim, “Of all things to be sought, the first is that Wisdom in which the Form of the Perfect Good stands fixed.”15 A second important point is that wisdom for Hugh was found in the ultimate perfect Good—the persons of the Trinity. Consequently Hugh spoke in relational terms about philosophy (i.e., wisdom), since it involved pursuing and getting to know a Being and not simply abstract truths.

Philosophy, then, is the love and pursuit of Wisdom, and in a certain way, a friendship with it; not, however, of that “wisdom” which is concerned with certain tools and with knowledge and skill in some craft, but of that Wisdom which, wanting in nothing, is a living Mind and the sole primordial Idea or Pattern of things. This love of Wisdom, moreover, is an illumination of the apprehending mind by that pure Wisdom and, in a certain way, a drawing and a calling back to itself of man’s mind, so that the pursuit of Wisdom appears like friendship with that Divinity.16

In other words, just as friendship involves getting to know the thoughts of another person and drawing closer to each other in the process, Hugh believed the study of philosophy required developing an intellectual friendship with God. Only by getti...