Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture

Introduction

Universities are often referred to as ivory towers from which academics supposedly look down upon the common, workaday world and make their pronouncements about people and culture and the appropriate functioning of society. The image of the university as a tower is one that is resonant today, but perhaps less as a tower of ivory, but more as a tower of Babel (see Gen 11). Indeed, the nature of academic activity and discourse in the academy of advanced/late modernity is such that academicians are no longer able to communicate meaningfully with their academic colleagues across disciplines, or indeed even with colleagues of the same discipline.

This kind of disciplinary fragmentation strikes at the very heart of the nature of university as university. Indeed, Clark Kerr, the influential president of the University of California, spoke of the need for education leaders to be resolved to the (putative) fact that, in the future, because of the nature of the growth in knowledge and the kind of precise specialization required for this growth in particular fields and technical training, that there should be an embracing of the development of “multiversities”—that being institutions of higher [End Page 83] learning that do not offer a universal understanding of reality that orders learning and the development of new knowledge.¹

While Kerr and others like him seem to celebrate the achievement of this kind of disciplinary fragmentation, others—particularly those from a Catholic-Christian faith background—bemoan this development as a perversion of the university, particularly as many Catholic institutions are following this path.

Despite the great success of modern scientific and technological reason and the multitude of conveniences it brings, this hyper-specialization, which is both an outworking of a fragmentary epistemology and a contributor to it, is one manifestation of the triumph of technical over contemplative reason. This has become the source of tremendous uncertainty and has led to a great many social and environmental ills. Describing this development, Martin Heidegger noted how modern science has developed such that its “way of representing pursues and entraps nature as a calculable coherence of forces.” He continues: “Modern physics is not experimental physics because it applies apparatus to the questioning of nature. Rather the reverse is true. Because physics, indeed already as pure theory, sets nature up to exhibit itself as a coherence of forces calculable in advance, it therefore orders its experiments precisely for the purpose of asking whether and how nature reports itself when set up in this way.”² The Catholic theologian Romano Guardini makes a similar point when he writes that “the technological mind sees nature as an insensate order, as a cold body of facts, as a mere ‘given,’ as an object of utility, as raw material to be hammered into useful shape; it views the cosmos similarly as a mere ‘space’ into which objects can be thrown with complete indifference.”³

Catholics and Christians involved in higher education are not immune to this ascendant fragmentary conception of knowledge. Those concerned with remedying this situation are correct to look to theology as the discipline that can give order to knowledge and the relationships between the disciplines. But the place of theology in this contemporary fragmented academic milieu is somewhat fraught. [End Page 84] On a most common secular level, it might seem a discipline that is easy to ignore—indeed it often is.⁴ In Catholic institutions, however, the importance of the discipline is widely acknowledged (or at least tolerated), as its presence in the institution itself is required.⁵ While some scholars, notably those influenced by the theological sensibility known as Radical Orthodoxy, have valiantly sought to reassert theology’s importance in the academy and to have the once-deposed queen of the sciences recrowned, mainstream Catholic theology is perhaps more humble or at least uncertain about the role that theology is to play in the academy generally.⁶ Whereas John Paul II’s apostolic exhortation on Catholic universities is clear that...