Aim Even Higher

By Randall Smith I gave a talk on the Eucharist recently at a wonderful conference organized by the Cardinal Newman Society that brought together administrators from Catholic colleges and universities across the country. Someone said to me later: "Maybe we're talking too much about the Eucharist. It's the Body and Blood of Christ. Go to Mass. That's it." True. But I had fifty minutes to fill. So instead, I said that Catholic schools should have an incarnational, sacramental, and eucharistic worldview. If God has created the world and reveals Himself to us through His Creation, then we have the possibility (as St. Paul tells us) of coming to know the invisible attributes of God through the visible things of Creation and to be thankful, celebrating and rejoicing in them. Just as in the visible, earthly elements of the Eucharist, we are meant to see the real presence of Christ, the Word made flesh, so also, in the visible, earthly elements of Creation, we are meant to see the real presence of God's creative Word and Wisdom. A similar theology of Incarnation and sacramentality allows the word and wisdom of God to become incarnate in actual, human language and, by extension, present and embodied on a written page such as the Scriptures. Thus, we must learn to read both the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture, for they are not mutually exclusive. Rather, they will ultimately illumine each other because both have the one God as their Author. Thus, in an authentically Catholic education, all the disciplines should be present and effectively integrated. This was the vision that inspired the nineteenth-century theologian and saint, John Henry Cardinal Newman to write his important and influential book, The Idea of a University, although it was a vision he had nurtured for years. In one of his earlier sermons, for example, he wrote: Here, then, I conceive, is the object of. . .setting up universities; it is to reunite things which were in the beginning joined together by God and have been put asunder by man. . . . It will not satisfy me, what satisfies too many, to have two independent systems, intellectual and religious, going at once side by side, by a sort of division of labor, and only accidentally brought together. It will not satisfy me, if religion is here and science there. . . . I wish the intellect to range with the utmost freedom, and religion to enjoy an equal freedom, but what I am stipulating is that they should be found in one and the same place and exemplified in the same persons. (Sermon I of Sermons on Various Occasions) That passage should be prominently displayed at every Catholic university. What is especially poignant in this passage is the marriage imagery: the notion that in setting up universities, our goal should be "to reunite things which were in the beginning joined together by God and have been put asunder by man." The rule in many contemporary universities is to insist that students plug themselves into one discipline to the detriment of - perhaps even the exclusion of - the others. It is perhaps not inaccurate to say of the faculty and staff of the modern university that they are like the orphaned children of a sad divorce: a divorce not only between human knowledge and divine wisdom but also between the disciplines themselves. The job of a Christian university, then, is to do what secular culture cannot: unite what has been put asunder by man. Afterward, a friend reminded me of something important: "I don't like it when we try to sell Catholic education solely on the idea that at Catholic universities, we have faith and teach the virtues. That is fine in one sense, but we should be telling students and parents that they should come to a Catholic institution because there, they can get a real education. They can study actual math and physics and biology, not woke math, physics, and biology. They can get real history, not The New York Times version of history. They can study the classics. They can l...