Newman Studies Journal

Powerful forces of disintegration plague universities and colleges, which reflect and reinforce the wider forces of social disintegration in the church and in the world: the fragmentation of disciplines, compartmentalization of daily experiences, divorce between objective truth and subjective perspective, separation of faith and reason, rupture between the natural and supernatural, and the list could go on. Thus, any attempt to renew the Catholic "multiversity" today must reckon with such forces. This is precisely what the reader will find in this collection of essays by the late Don J. Briel, which is quite ably edited and introduced by R. Jared Staudt. Perhaps the significance of these essays might best be summed up by Newman himself when commenting on the purpose of the Catholic Church in setting up universities: "to reunite things which were in the beginning joined together by God, and have been put asunder by man."¹

The eleven essays of the book are grouped into three parts. The essays in part one purport to lay down "Foundational Principles," fundamental themes of Briel's vision of education: imagination open to mystery (chapter one), faith and reason (chapter two), and nature and essential ends of the university (chapter three). The first essay—perhaps one of Briel's more demanding essays stylistically, and therefore perhaps not ideal as an entree into the book—illustrates the import of the "sacramental" imagination and what James Taylor has called "poetic knowledge" as the font of a true education. Though Newman is not cited in this first essay, the Newman scholar will see the implicit connection to the Grammar's "illative sense." Perhaps the strongest of the three essays in terms of a direct connection to the main title of the book, The University and the Church, is the third chapter: "The Idea of the University and the College," in which Briel summarizes fundamental claims in Newman's Idea of a University and points to their application and significance for the Catholic university today. Combined with the second essay ("Newman's Personal Approach to Faith and Reason"), the third essay does indeed lay a solid foundation for the rest of the book, which returns many times to nearly all fundamental aspects of Briel's (and of Newman's) educational philosophy.

Part two is indeed the heart of the book and is worthy of serious reflection [End Page 117] for those working in Catholic higher education. In the second part, Staudt effectively gathers four essays that together powerfully convey "The Church's Vision of Higher Education" (the title of part two), a thick Catholic approach to university education and the obstacles facing universities today. In his essay on "The Second Vatican Council's Declaration on Christian Education" (chapter four), Briel outlines developments of magisterial teaching on Catholic higher education and affirms the necessity of such developments in light of Joseph Ratzinger's early post-conciliar criticisms.² Chapter five, "The University Needs the Church," largely explores Ex Corde Ecclesiae's claim that the Catholic university's task is to unite the two orders of reality typically understood in opposition: "the search for truth and the certainty of already knowing the font of truth" (98).³ Contrasting Theodore Hesburgh and Newman's visions of the university, Briel suggests in this essay that the "only way" to renew the Catholic university today is to recover "both the work of the College and its complex relation to the Church" (120)—especially by retrieving a more integral religious and moral formation and by faculty playing more the role of "tutor" in their work with students.

Even before reading part three, which is focused more on how ideas in earlier essays embodied in concrete ways Briel's Newmanian pragmatism stands out in these four middle essays. For after diagnosing the pathologies of today's "tragic culture," which the university both reflects and reinforces, he offers creative, practical suggestions...