Grounding Identity and Mission in Catholic Universities: A Relational Approach

Abstract

Since at least the 1960s, responding to changes both in the world and in the Church the project of Catholic university education in the United States and elsewhere has undergone a significant alteration in structure, and subsequently of its own sense of identity, purpose, and mission. Concerns about the integrity of Catholic universities both as Catholic and as university abound and have done for some time.

Providing a brief review of some of the existing literature, this paper argues that the contemporary discussion regarding identity and mission for Catholic colleges and universities suffers from a decidedly modern inability to the address first order questions. This failure to properly treat questions pertaining to metaphysics render Catholic institutions of higher learning locked within the superficial plane in terms of how they address their own sense of identity and mission.

In response to this, this paper argues that there exists within the Catholic tradition adequate metaphysical richness that can and should more faithfully ground the essence of the Catholic college or university. Drawing on the metaphysical work of such figures as David L. Schindler and others, the author argues that a relational ontology, characterized by an understanding of the metaphysics of gift can not only save the project of Catholic university education but is in fact central to its mission.

Introduction

The contemporary Catholic university is beset with what seems to be an interminable identity crisis. Since at least the 1960s, responding to changes both in the world and in the Church the project of Catholic university education in the United States and elsewhere has undergone a significant alteration in structure, and subsequently of its own sense of identity, purpose, and mission. Concerns about the integrity of Catholic universities as both Catholic and university abound, and have done so for some time now. In an address to representatives of Catholic universities in the United States, given at Xavier University in 1987, Pope John Paul II noted that, ‘undoubtedly, the greatest challenge is, and will remain, that of preserving and strengthening the Catholic character of your colleges and universities—that institutional commitment to the word of God as proclaimed by the Catholic Church.’ ¹

In an attempt to address these concerns, university boards of governance along with university presidents or vice chancellors have overseen the establishment of offices, at times even with significant resources put at the disposal of the directors of said offices, to manage the maintenance and improvement of the university’s mission and the alignment of faculty and staff to the institutions ‘values.’ This has seen the proliferation of a significant body of work, including the establishment of specialized journals and book publications, as well as international conferences and workshops aimed at helping those responsible for the governance of Catholic universities articulate, maintain, and strengthen their institutions’ Catholic character. Further to this, organizations such as the International Federation of Catholic Universities (IFCU) and its regional affiliated subgroups, along with their many other goals, remain focused on offering assistance to their member institutions in their goals to articulate, animate, and grow their respective institutions’ Catholic character.

When attempting to articulate what it is that makes a university a ‘Catholic university,’ recourse is often made to the fact of the university’s operation as such with the consent of the competent ecclesiastical authority, the institution’s membership of and contribution to the ‘Catholic intellectual tradition,’ its subscriptions to so-called Catholic ‘values,’ or to the presence of a robust and faithful theology faculty along with the number of required courses in theology and philosophy. Further, references are made to the various programmes of social outreach that are encouraged by the administration and devotedly undertaken by faculty and students, and of the scholarships and support programmes made available to persons for whom a university education would otherwise be considered unachievable. The vibrancy of the sacramental life in the campus chapel(s) and prominence of lively campus ministry/chaplaincy programs are often touted as a further indication of the university’s Catholic character as are additional layers of ethics approvals for research. All these are cited as positive indicators of an institution’s faithfulness to its identity and mission. Of course, all these are vital elements of the life of a Catholic university, and yet they lack a substantive account of the nature of the institution as a Catholic university. ²

What is often evident in various formulations seeking to express a Catholic University’s character as Catholic and as university is a hard separation between the objective fact of the institution as a university, and the subjective value animating the institution as Catholic. Even in the instances where the Catholic values reach into the objective fact/structure of the institution, such as within the discipline of theology or in programmes of Catholic studies, the problem continues insofar as the Catholic faith remains on the surface as a kind of voluntaristic gloss on the substantive reality of the particular institution as a university. What becomes evident is that the failure to adequately articulate the ontological ground upon which the institution stands cedes the territory to prevalent and often unexamined metaphysical assumptions about the nature of reality that inform the university’s primary work of teaching and research.

It may be observed that modern reason, in its dominant liberal and technological form, has tended to shy away from metaphysical claims about reality in an attempt to remain neutral and thus keep the peace in a pluralist society, and to maintain a putative objectivity in culture wherein modern positivistic science is taken to be the paradigmatic form of reason. ³ Such claims to neutrality and objectivity have been shown to be, of course, fundamentally metaphysical claims themselves. Metaphysics is simply unavoidable, and the cultural tendency to avoid explicit metaphysical claims has left professors and administrators at universities, Catholic or otherwise, unable to recognize and engage with the metaphysical assumptions which animate much of the discourse within their respective fields of research.

Despite the modern reluctance to engage in metaphysics, it is certain that metaphysics itself is implied in the task of education, no less Catholic university education. ⁴ A Catholic university that is cognisant of the ontology implied in the truth of Revelation, and which is prepared to utilize that ontology as the point of departure for all of its inquiries into being and existence, will be operating from a more capacious understanding of what actually is, broadening the scope of reason and providing a thoroughgoing universality to the university itself. ⁵ Faith in the Logos is, in itself, necessary to sustain a commitment to reason as something other than merely technological and pragmatic or instrumental. Instructive here is the vast work of Joseph Ratzinger, perhaps most adequately represented in his Regensburg address of 2006. ⁶

It is the contention of this paper that the modern unwillingness or inability to engage in metaphysical discourse, which affects even the Catholic university, inadvertently relegates faith in Christ Jesus exclusively to the realm of subjective value. Further, we will argue that a metaphysical foundation that takes seriously the claims of Christian revelation is itself not only more adequate to the educational endeavours of the Catholic university, but may well save the endeavour of university education as such.

The following paper will proceed in three parts. First, it will examine some of the key contemporary literature concerning the maintenance and growth of the Catholic identity and mission of Catholic universities, highlighting the metaphysical lacuna and articulating the manner by which this omission inadvertently undermines the stated goals of such literature. The second and most substantive part of this paper will demonstrate how a metaphysics worked out in ‘dynamic union with faith’ ⁷ —namely, a metaphysics of gift and a coincident relational ontology—can inform not only the rhetoric by which a Catholic university might articulate its identity and mission, but also its primary activities of teaching and research. We will argue not only that faith in Jesus Christ does not impinge on the particularity of whatever study is being undertaken, but that this faith rather elevates and promotes this study. The third final section of this paper will address some objections to the proposal of the widespread adoption of this relational onto-logic into the structures and systems of the Catholic university and provide some examples of where this is currently being undertaken.

Identity and Mission of Catholic Universities: Contemporary Discourse

There is a growing body of literature that concerns the maintenance, growth, and development, and increasingly assessment of the identity and mission of Catholic universities. In the United States, which globally dominates the Catholic higher education sector with over 200 Catholic institutions of Catholic higher education, this conversation has been developing for some time. The focus of these discussions particularly pertains to the evident cultural drift away from the practice of formalized religion and the coincident diminishment of the Catholic character of these institutions over time. ⁸ This discussion took on renewed interest in the 20th century, most particularly in light of the discussions at the Second Vatican Council pertaining to the position of the Church vis-à-vis the modern state. Importantly however, as Philip Gleason notes,

Even before the [Second Vatican] Council ended in 1965, commentators on Catholic higher education were beginning to point out that a new formulation of its fundamental reason for being was needed in the light of the growing acceptance of ‘secularity’ and increasing discontent over academic weaknesses, authoritarian procedures, and forms of thought widely regarded by Catholic intellectuals as outmoded and embarrassingly parochial. ⁹

In 1967, in response to the call of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), ¹⁰ under the leadership of the Fr Theodore Hesburgh CSC, then-President of Notre Dame University, a blue-ribbon commission of the International Federation of Catholic Universities (IFCU) met to discuss the nature of the Catholic university in the modern world. The commission, which comprised of a select group of 26 leaders in Catholic universities and colleges, eventually issued what has come to be known as the ‘Land O’ Lakes Statement.’ Under the official title ‘The Idea of the Catholic University,’ the statement set out a vision of Catholic education that sought to address the concerns which Gleason later named (above), particularly regarding academic weakness, authoritarian procedures, and the putatively ‘parochial’ thinking that they felt was preventing Catholic universities from taking their place alongside the premier research universities in the country. The statement reads, in part, that the ‘Catholic University today must be a university in the full modern sense of the word, with a strong commitment to and concern for academic excellence.’ The document continues claiming that, in order to perform its functions, the Catholic university ‘must have true autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical, external, to the academic community itself.’ It mentions, too, that at the Catholic university, ‘Catholicism is [to be] perceptibly present and effectively operative’ ¹¹ — though without explaining what this might mean.

Gleason notes that the document itself reads as something of an ‘institutional declaration of independence’ of Catholic universities from their ecclesiastical patrons. ¹² Indeed, the assertion of a particular (liberal) understanding academic freedom and the shedding of ecclesiastical oversight seems to have been among the key goals of the document’s drafters.

Explaining his guiding philosophy in these matters, Fr Hesburgh, one of the principal framers of the document wrote in 1970:

The Catholic university has too often been looked upon by many Catholics as Catholic first and university second. University is the substantive noun in this combination, and the world judges clearly enough whether or not an institution, whatever else it claims to be, is in fact a university in the commonly accepted meaning of the word. One can similarly speak of a Catholic person, but he must be a person before he can become a Catholic. Catholic here is an adjective. So, too, in the case of a Catholic university. ¹³

Operative here is a heavy distinction or separation between fact and value that subtlety negates the cosmic claim of Christ, as is illustrated in the context of the poorly chosen example, which effectively downplays or denies the ontological significance of baptism. Now, one surely cannot conceive of sacramentally baptizing a university institution, but the analogy used by Hesburgh is indicative of a deeper problematic in his thinking in this regard.

Elsewhere, and over 20 years later, though on a point still pertinent to the thinking that informed the drafting of the Land O’ Lakes statement, Hesburgh asserts that:

The church did not create the modern university world as it had helped create the medieval university world. Moreover, the church does not have to be present in the modern world of the university, but if it is to enter, the reality and the terms of this world are well established and must be observed . . . One may add descriptive adjectives to this or that university, calling it public or private, Catholic or Protestant, British or American, but the university must first and foremost be a university, or else the thing that the qualifiers qualify is something, but not a university. ¹⁴

For Hesburgh, the concern that clearly animates his vision for Catholic higher education is that the institutions understood to be Catholic universities are in fact recognizable as universities by the other institutions bearing the title. The desire to conform the project of Catholic university education with what is offered at largescale and prestigious secular research universities is, of course, problematic on a number of fronts, and begs the question regarding the definition of a university in the first place. To illustrate this, one could highlight the critique developed by prominent philosopher and vocal critic of contemporary university education Alasdair MacIntyre, who argues that, ‘from a Catholic point of view the contemporary secular university is not at fault because it is not Catholic. It is at fault insofar as it is not a university.’ ¹⁵ Returning to the example of Hesburgh, one can see a clear disjuncture operative here between what Hesburgh recognizes as the objective fact of the university institution—an institution that he sees as having a structure and a form free of any ontological baggage—and the subjective value given it by the confessional character of the institution or any other ‘descriptive adjective’. This fact-value distinction, which is endemic to liberal modernity, is exemplified in Hesburgh’s influential vision for Catholic universities and is echoed in almost all the subsequent discussion concerning identity and mission at Catholic universities. ¹⁶ What is evident in any review of the extant literature on the subject is the notion that faith in Christ Jesus can only come to be brought to bear on the subjective aspects of the university institution. Any argument or assertion otherwise would likely be dismissed as parochial (using the term parochial in an oddly pejorative sense), dangerously sectarian, or both. This is why we see, for example, the Catholic faith coming to bear on both teaching and research in an extremely limited way excepting explicit teaching concerning the Catholic faith, which is the exclusive remit of the faculty of theology or religious studies, or members of the founding order. ¹⁷

In a thoroughgoing 2006 survey of the mission statements of Catholic colleges and universities, researchers Estanek, Jones, and Norton found that the institutional understanding of Catholic identity is ‘culturally imbedded in a number of factors including: foundational heritage and sponsorship; the groups of constituents it serves currently and historically; and how the institution defines its educational enterprise.’ Their paper found that,

Specific outcomes such as intellectual development and the education of the whole person, service, leadership, and citizenship may characterize all institutions of higher education, but when they are taken together and coupled with the statements of Catholic identity and sponsorship they articulate the basis for a distinctively Catholic education and can form the basis for assessment. ¹⁸

The researchers then present their work in a matrix that positions student outcomes as they are identified in university mission statements against ‘specific outcomes related to Catholic identity,’ ‘experiences related to Catholic identity outcomes,’ and finally, ‘who is responsible?’ ¹⁹ While the results from such surveys might provide something of a useful metric in efforts to maintain and grow the Catholic character of the universities who choose to utilize it, sociological tools such as this one along with the others referred to avoid philosophical judgements about the nature of education per se, let alone an education that is adequately Catholic. ²⁰

There is much that is praiseworthy in these attempts to articulate, maintain, grow, and measure the Catholic identity of Catholic universities. ²¹ However, the vast literature rarely if ever addresses the ways in which a Catholic university could be considered Catholic in its essential rather than merely in its accidental nature—philosophically or ontologically Catholic, rather than merely sociologically so.

Another useful and perhaps more authoritative list of criteria that can be utilized to ascertain the ‘Catholicity’ of a university is to be found in the apostolic constitution on Catholic universities, Ex Corde Ecclesiae, promulgated by Pope John Paul II in 1990. ²² This papal text may be read as addressing the Catholic university as it had emerged little more than two decades after the Land O’ Lakes Statement. In this document, John Paul II listed four ‘essential characteristics’ for a Catholic university:

1) a Christian inspiration not only of individuals but of the university community as such; 2) a continuing reflection in the light of the Catholic faith upon the growing treasury of human knowledge, to which it seeks to contribute by its own research; 3) fidelity to the Christian message as it comes to us through the Church; 4) an institutional commitment to the service of the people of God and of the human family in their pilgrimage to the transcendent goal which gives meaning to life. ²³

These essential features have been fundamental to the ongoing conversation regarding the institutional identity of Catholic colleges and universities and yet here too there seems to be something missing.

Notwithstanding his forthright claim that the Catholic university is in fact different in kind from the modern secular research university, ²⁴ even John Paul II’s Ex Corde Ecclesiae fails to drill down into the metaphysical realities at stake here. ²⁵ His efforts were directed towards the ecclesial home of the discipline of theology by way of the requirement of the mandatum—contextually important in a post-Humane Vitae Church. ²⁶ Instead of contributing to a broader discussion directed at articulating the ontological basis from which to engage in the work of teaching and research across the university disciplines, theology was effectively siloed off from the other substantive aspects of university life, namely teaching and research in all the other disciplines. The document further neglected the architectonic role that philosophy plays for the very conception of the university.

From the above albeit cursory examination of the literature and assessment practices, it becomes evident that the metaphysical lacuna in the present discourse around identity and mission of Catholic universities is apparent in both the putative conservative and progressive sides of the discussion. This lack effectively renders the discourse itself sterile in its attempts to strengthen the identity and mission of Catholic higher education in a substantial way. As David L. Schindler argues, despite its putative neutrality toward value propositions and religious beliefs, the proceduralism of liberal modernity always already comes laden with a metaphysical character that positions all claims to ultimacy, including that which is implicit within Catholicism. More than this, and again drawing on the work of Schindler, liberalism’s dominant yet unstated metaphysical presuppositions have a tendency to usurp all others, thus infecting the minds of all who inhabit its structures. We see this evidenced in the realm of Catholic higher education of which Hesburgh is only emblematic. ²⁷ Lest one dismiss Hesburgh and those who follow him as merely liberal and/or accommodationalist, this is evident too, also in views thought to be more ‘conservative’ than Hesburgh’s outlined above. In such instances one often witnesses a similar reduction of Catholicity to a rigorous list of criteria. This is exemplified in the Newman Guide produced by the Cardinal Newman Society, mentioned above. ²⁸ What both these positions fail to realize, however, is how the totalizing and indeed ontological claims of the Gospel should be brought to bear upon all facets of university life, not simply those pertaining to the ethical or explicitly theological dimension, but in particular the teaching and research that occurs in the university and which thus lies at the heart of what it is to be a university at all.

Thus, and again following David L. Schindler, the task of the Catholic academy, then, is twofold: first, to demonstrate, ‘from within each discipline and in the terms proper to each discipline, how that discipline is being guided by a worldview—in the case of liberalism by mechanism and subjectivism’; and, second, ‘to show how a Catholic worldview (of the cosmos as created in the image of Christ’s [eucharistic] love, hence of a cosmos wherein order and love are mutually inclusive) leads to a more ample understanding of evidence and argument, already within the terms proper to each discipline.’ ²⁹ Further and perhaps even more basic to this is the notion that the Logos, the Logos who is the Second person of the Trinity made man, is at the foundation of reality and imparts both meaning and order to it. Reason undergirds, imbues, and sustains all of reality. Without this notion the trust in reason that is necessary to sustain a university as a university and not as a polytechnic or centre for political indoctrination, ultimately collapses. What follows in section two will briefly demonstrate ways in which a relational ontology can assist in this essential task.

Relational Ontology and the Catholic University

The Christian claim is a bold one with vast metaphysical implications. We see St Paul, in his letter to the Colossians, noting the revealed truth—a truth that cannot but bear profound metaphysical repercussions—that ‘Christ is all, and in all.’ ³⁰ Commenting on this passage, St Maximus the Confessor writes:

It is he [Christ] who encloses in himself all beings by the unique, simple and infinitely wise power of his goodness. As the center of straight lines that radiate from him he does not allow by his unique, simple and single cause and power that the principles of beings become disjoined at the periphery but rather he circumscribes their extension in a circle and brings back to himself the distinctive elements of beings which he himself brought into existence. ³¹

The Christian doctrines of God and the Trinity, of creation ex nihilo as well as the Incarnation and redemption are far-reaching and comprehensive in their ramifications. The Christian claim cannot abide the relegation of God to a mere corner of reality—God does not share being with created entities in some univocal manner. Nor is Christianity merely a list of ethical duties or intellectual propositions. ³² In the abstract this teaching is uncontroversial, orthodox Christianity. Yet in practice, particularly within the rhetoric pertaining to identity and mission in Catholic colleges and universities, the Christian claim is continually relegated to an extrinsic and subjectivist element of the entire project. Why is this so?

Modern reason, particularly in its paradigmatic form of modern positivistic and technological science, has taken upon itself a mantle of putatively objective scientific neutrality, a neutrality that purportedly protects its academic integrity and veracity. Science, it is claimed, looks merely at the ‘facts,’ at the particulars, examining discreet things abstracted from their pollutant web of inter-relations, the most noxious of which is understood to be the observing human eye. Thus, science purports to make no claim at all about the whole of reality, focusing only on the specific part, nor does it venture into the realm of moral claims, deemed to be merely subjective. However, as Adrian Walker argues, ‘the sciences cannot evade judgements about the ultimate nature of reality or the cosmos, because such judgements are constitutive of the explicit attention that they pay to the objects, or set of objects, that fall within their delimited domain of inquiry.’ ³³ In other words, ‘science is an answer to a question that precedes science.’ ³⁴

The unwillingness or inability to articulate a clear metaphysical or ontological vantage point from which the Catholic university operates, particularly where it pertains to its tasks of teaching and research in areas outside of theology, is, at its best, the result of a desire to remain objective, neutral, and non-sectarian. If no metaphysics is explicitly claimed, so it is supposed, then none are assumed and the whole enterprise is taken to be neutral and objective. Individuals are then supposedly granted greater freedom to choose their own ‘value system’ based on personal preference or some other subjective criterion.

The desire to remain impartial on metaphysical matters however unwittingly cedes the ground to a putatively neutral liberal, mechanistic, and technological metaphysic that brings with it a conception of reality which is deeply fragmented, wherein things are deprived of any interiority. ³⁵ This presupposes a metaphysical state of atomized particularity, wherein entities bear no relation to one another aside from external interactions. Stated or not, such a metaphysic always already bears a logic of being wherein things have no interiority, and love is entirely marginalized. This positions professors and administrators of Catholic universities such that faith in Christ Jesus can then only be brought to bear externally, as a kind of subjective-value gloss, on the primary operations of the institution itself. A robustly articulated and theologically informed metaphysics of relationality, on the other hand, offers to professors and administrators at Catholic universities, as well as their students, a broadened reason, a vision of reality that is more capacious, one that is open to ‘reality according to the totality of its factors.’ ³⁶

Catholic universities that have unwittingly capitulated to a modern, liberal conception of reality with its concomitant positivistic and technological scientistic conception of reason, which essentially cordons God off from nature, will struggle to re-join God and nature through moral effort alone, as such effort simply does not address the root of the division. These efforts are predicated upon the assumption ‘that the central realities of Christian revelation no longer shed light on the basic order of the “real world,” which, for the same reason is perceived, indeed, constructed, as if those realities had no intrinsic pertinence to it whatsoever.’ ³⁷ In the Catholic context this logic has something of a self-secularizing effect, which is evidenced in what could be called a crisis in identity and mission in Catholic universities and colleges. More broadly this logic bespeaks of a loss of faith in reason per se, contributing to the increasing fragmentation of university disciplines, and the reduction of the university to either a credentialing polytechnic, or a school for political indoctrination. Our proposal then, is to turn away from the false neutrality of modern secular reason and its hidden ontology and instead hold to an ontology that is informed by an encounter with the risen Christ given in faith. Not only will such a return to reality assist professors and administrators of Catholic universities in articulating, maintaining, and developing their identity and mission as Catholic universities, but as we will argue, such an ontology will provide fresh resources to help them address the problems which perpetually plague not only Catholic universities in modern liberal and supposedly pluralistic cultures, but the whole enterprise of university education more broadly. In fact, as we argue, it is precisely the Catholic-Christian faith in the Incarnate Logos which provides the only adequate foundation for a university education as such. Only a theology of the Incarnate Logos, the Son of God, adequately undergirds reason and truth.

Beginning from what is: Relational ontology in the disciplines

In his 1998 encyclical, Fides et Ratio, Pope John Paul II wrote of the great need to demolish the artificial barrier that had been erected between faith and reason, and of the need to recover a robust metaphysics which, he argued, must be worked out ‘in dynamic union with the faith.’ ³⁸ A particularly rich vein of metaphysics that has developed in this respect is that which has come to understand love itself, not so much as a phenomenon situated in the human (and Divine) will, but more properly on the level of being itself.

The metaphysical speculation carried out under the title of a metaphysics of gift, a relational or even Trinitarian ontology, draws from the basic doctrines of the Christian faith to demonstrate how the substantive relations of the revealed persons of the Trinity can be located analogically within creation. It presents an understanding of how the gift (and-therefore-given) character of created being is complimented by an equally primordial receptivity, and that this denotes a relationality that is constitutive of being as such. ³⁹ ‘Love,’ to quote a prominent thinker in this tradition, David L. Schindler, a theologian and a philosopher whose work is representative of much of that done in this regard—‘is the basic act and order of things.’ ⁴⁰

This metaphysics relies heavily upon the use of analogy in describing the nature of created things vis-à-vis the creator God. Such an understanding of things then allows for the world to come ‘into its “own,” not by defending itself from God, but by accepting itself to the core as a gift that the persons of the Trinity give to one another within their infinite otherness-in-unity.’ ⁴¹ This is important for teaching and research at Catholic universities as it allows for created things to have their legitimate autonomy, always already within the context of a deeper relation—where the relation does not impinge on the autonomy, but rather grants it.

Overcoming Disciplinary Fragmentation: The False Remedy of Interdisciplinarity

Disciplinary fragmentation is a widely acknowledged reality within the academy. In some places such fragmentation is acknowledged as a mere side effect of the tremendous advances of knowledge that has occurred since the jettisoning of final and formal causality at the beginning of modernity, and thus it is to be celebrated or at least viewed with a fatalistic ambivalence. ⁴² Elsewhere this radical fragmentation, which diminishes any reasonably unifying concept of reality, is understood to strike at the very heart of a university as university. Many acknowledge that the separation of technological disciplines from the disciplines that allow for deeper reflection lies at the heart of concerns surrounding large-scale environmental degradation, invasive biotechnologies, and issues of global security. ⁴³ The problems inherent in such fragmentation are becoming increasingly evident. ⁴⁴ To address this problem many universities, bereft of the metaphysical vantage point outlined above, are investing in interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and even postdisciplinary research. ⁴⁵ Without wading too deeply into these vast and complex waters, the work that is being undertaken in these areas remains marked by either an inability to effect its goal of bringing some sort of unity to knowledge, or the achievement of a unity that is reductive and ideological. This is because such disciplines as well as those efforts directed at addressing the respective boundaries of said disciplines are predicated upon a metaphysics, most often unstated, that presumes an ontology best characterized by the machine wherein the parts interact with one another only externally.

Only the reintroduction of an explicit metaphysics adequate to reality, however, is able to assist in bringing together these fragments in a manner which is not merely will-full or extrinsicist. Rather than a conception whereby the disciplines are understood from within as being constituted of isolated and unrelated methodologies, examining discrete and unrelated parcels of reality, the disciplines—understood in an Aristotelian sense of the study of being qua x, y, or z—are opened up once again to the study of the truth of being as it pertains to, or from the perspective of, each relative area of study. Thus, the disciplines themselves are at once both enlarged and chastened: enlarged, to see that the discipline surpasses itself in connecting with reality beyond its own confines; and chastened, to see that the discipline by itself it cannot account for reality in toto.

D. C. Schindler explains:

To say that a discipline studies being qua ‘x’ is to say that it studies not a part, but the (transcendent) whole, though from a particular perspective, under a particular aspect. The particularity, in this sense, is not the matter itself being studied; it is rather a qualification of the actual subject of study, which is shared by every discipline. This means that, understood as true in the ontological sense, the different disciplines will bear an analogical relationship to one another, that what differentiates them does not compromise their unity. It also means, moreover, that, insofar as philosophy is, among other things, a study of the whole in the sense of being concerned with being qua being, that each discipline is essentially philosophical in itself, at its heart. ⁴⁶

As the disciplines themselves are structured modes of study into reality under one aspect or from one perspective or methodology or another, they each exist in an analogical relation to one another that is intrinsic to its being as such. This relation rests not on a kind of moral or willful voluntaristic assertion from within the disciplines, or imposed by university professors or administrators. Rather, it rests upon a deeper metaphysical and ontological vision whereby gift, and subsequently relation, takes primacy alongside or as constitutive of substance in the operative understanding of being which is under examination qua ‘x’, ‘x’ being whatever particular perspective or aspect which is proper to the discipline in question.

We turn now briefly to some anticipated objections to what has been laid out above.

Responding to Objections

Theoretical Objections

The major theoretical objection to any decision to ground the teaching and research of Catholic universities in the abovementioned metaphysical conception of reality is the assertion that such a metaphysical claim will impinge on the distinct autonomy of the created order. Such a metaphysical starting point, so it could be claimed, effectively collapses all disciplines into theology destroying the integrity of the individual disciplines and destroying whatever unique contribution to knowledge that they each make. This objection is echoed in related interventions pertaining to the freedom of academics to pursue their research unfettered by external oversight, from university administration or ecclesiastical authorities. We will address these concerns in what follows.

The Autonomy of the Disciplines

As it pertains to the autonomy of the disciplines, the relational ontology which we have been arguing for does not impinge upon any legitimate autonomy, but rather protects it. This may be difficult to recognize at first blush as modern reason, following Descartes, is unable to account for the complete integrity of created entities if said entities remain dependent upon a creator. Modern reason suffers from an inability to make a distinction without implying a radical separation. As Schindler describes it, according to this modern mode of thinking, ‘if x is truly distinct from y, x must just so far share nothing in common with y.’ ⁴⁷

Properly understood however, the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, which is an outworking of the Christian doctrine of God-the Trinity, holds that created entities insofar as they are created, are truly distinct from God, albeit continually held in being by and for God and therefore, always already in relation with God. This paradoxical notion of creaturely dependent independence is unthinkable for the modern liberal mind. It is useful here to have recourse to the work of Kenneth Schmitz who, in addressing this point argues that,

The dependence of the creature is absolute because it is dependence upon that very generosity that in its turn is the original condition of the creature’s very being. If the creature were humiliated by this, then its very being would be in a totally deprived and absolutely abject state; so that the creature would be nihil, that than ex nihilo . . . The creature is ex nihilo, that is, it stands outside of absolute privation by virtue of the creative generosity. This creative generosity is the ground for the absolute inequality between creator and creature, that very inequality that has raised the threat to the creature’s integrity. But that same creative generosity is also the ground for the very being of the creature. ⁴⁸

That a created entity has being at all is due to its being gratuitously created and held into being by the creator God. As W. Norris Clarke has demonstrated, ‘to be is to be substance-in-relation.’ ⁴⁹

This metaphysical proposal—namely that all entities which exist are created in, and through, and for God, ⁵⁰ and therefore constitutively related to God, and to other created entities in and through God—is not an extrinsic will-full imposition of a fundamentalist or virulently sectarian mind, but is in fact a recognition of things as they are. All things are constitutively relational and therefore intrinsically embedded within a web of relation, beginning with their relation to God who sustains the existence of each thing. There is no-thing which exists independent of relation. Further, it is precisely this fact that provides created things with their integrity—this creaturely integrity and autonomy is itself theologically granted. ⁵¹ Rather than restricting one’s view of what is really real, the relational perspective that is brought to light in this scripturally engaged metaphysical work instead broadens the scope of reason itself to see more of reality. ⁵²

Further to this, relational ontology also provides something of a corrective to a commonly understood extrinsicist reading of the traditional doctrine of the subalternation of the sciences. The traditional rendering of this teaching would hold the relationship between the disciplines to be exclusively external, thereby preserving each discipline’s particular autonomy. The work achieved in relational ontology rather offers a more intrinsic and mutual (though at the same time asymmetrical) reciprocity between the disciplines. ⁵³

This notion of intrinsic subalternation is of particular importance for two reasons. First, it shows, contra the liberal conceit, that metaphysical judgments are not really extrinsic to the various disciplines at all. The question then, as we have noted above, is not whether metaphysics, but which. The mechanistic metaphysics of liberal modernity described above is one that cannot sustain anything but a technical/instrumental or political/ideological conception of reason. Hence the crisis of reason at the heart of the crisis of universities.

By contrast this paper proposes a notion of a reason rooted in the Logos and in a love more basic than power. This makes being intelligible and makes reason the (albeit partial) apprehension of truth, not merely an outcome of experimental activity or the will-to-power.

The second reason that this notion of intrinsic subalternation is important is that it preserves the necessity of philosophy and theology as organizing principles of the curriculum.

Academic Freedom

As it pertains to the related point of academic freedom, it must be acknowledged that such freedom is required if the enterprise of academic research is to be of any value whatsoever, and the framers of the aforementioned Land O’ Lakes statement were right in articulating the need for it within the Catholic university context. However, the claims of the drafters of the statement betray a conception of freedom that is more liberal than it is Catholic, and which bears within it a latent metaphysical vantage point that prioritizes an ontological independence and fragmentation, namely a liberal rather than a Catholic or relational logic of being. ⁵⁴

The assertion of absolute independence from all ecclesial authority is accompanied by an assertion of independence from all supernatural revelation, for which the Church is the exclusive mediator. ⁵⁵ This betrays an a priori assumption that such authority and revelation is of no objective value outside of the subjective framework of the Church. More than this, such an assertion betrays an assumption that such claims of faith do not bear upon objective reality at all.

In making this assertion, the framers of the statement betray an acceptance, ignorant or otherwise, of the hidden metaphysic of liberal proceduralism. Paying attention to metaphysics allows one to see the bogus neutrality that liberal conceptions of freedom (academic, religious or otherwise) entail. Relation, as it has come to be understood from within a metaphysics of gift, does not entail a loss of autonomy; it merely makes evident the reality that the autonomy of created entities is always and everywhere relative.

In describing the relation between God and the world, and the nature of creaturely autonomy, David L. Schindler makes use of a nuptial/spousal image which is pertinent to the present discussion. ‘The world,’ he argues,

has its integrity as the (intended) spouse of God in Jesus Christ. The world, created in the image of God, is destined to open itself ever more to the communio revealed historically by God in Christ through Mary-Church. As a spouse, the world can and must respond to this invitation to communio through its own initiative—which, in the decisive case of human beings, means through its freedom . . . precisely because the intended relation is spousal, the freedom of the world-human partner will continue to increase rather than to decrease. But the needed qualifier is crucial: the increase of freedom, insofar as it would be a freedom consistent with its creaturely-spousal nature, presupposes a correspondingly deeper union with God as its necessary, anterior condition. ⁵⁶

Adherence to the relational—though not relative—truth of being commits one’s freedom, while at the same time paradoxically sets freedom free to truly know the truth of being.

Schindler goes on to show how the neutrality posed by those who would claim otherwise is in fact bogus. For him, ‘having always-already been invited by God to a spousal union, the creature is no longer, in its being or its actions, without relation to God: the creature can act for God or against God, but it can never, even for a moment, act as though it were without a destiny for spousal union with God.’ He emphasizes this particularly with regard to Anglo-American liberalism and its claim of a metaphysically empty freedom. ‘The creature need not be fully conscious of rejecting God for its actions to imply a rejection of God.’ ⁵⁷

The relationship between truth and freedom is one which has long been the source of Christian contemplation. ⁵⁸ In an address to the Roman Curia in 2005, Pope Benedict XVI laid bare the issues at stake regarding the discussion concerning certain notions freedom which obfuscates truth and which, as we have been arguing, conceals the crisis of reason now threatening the university. In this context he was speaking specifically of religious freedom, though the principle applies to freedom considered more broadly, including academic freedom. He taught:

If religious freedom were to be considered an expression of the human inability to discover the truth and thus become a canonization of relativism, then this social and historical necessity is raised inappropriately to the metaphysical level and thus stripped of its true meaning . . .

It is quite different, on the other hand, to perceive religious freedom as a need that derives from human coexistence, or indeed, as an intrinsic consequence of the truth that cannot be externally imposed but that the person must adopt only through the process of conviction. ⁵⁹

Benedict XVI notes the important epistemological notions at stake in this discussion, describing how freedom untethered from truth amounts to a manifestation of a deeper relativism, both concealing and exacerbating the crisis of reason now threatening the university. On the other hand, freedom understood more adequately is both a consequence of and a requirement for any understanding of truth as adaequatio rei et intellectus. ⁶⁰

The importance of freedom for the academic pursuit of truth was acknowledged at the very birth of the university as an institution. As is widely known, the earliest universities were established in the early to mid-13th century and were originally founded as masters’ guilds or corporations of masters of the arts (as well as students). These were established purposefully to be different and separate from the monastic and cathedral schools which were under the direct control of abbots and bishops respectively. In seeking separation from ecclesiastical oversight, the masters sought control of their teaching and research, as well as their curriculum, standards, and membership. ⁶¹

Freedom was understood by the earliest university faculties to be necessary if they were to undertake the work of research appropriately and to seek the truth according to the totality of its factors. It was never understood, however, to be something that set the faculties in opposition to the truth made available by means of special revelation and extrapolated by the theological efforts of the Church. Indeed, the work of the faculties was carried out from within a metaphysical and cosmological vantage point that was itself theologically established and acknowledged.

In this light, academic freedom comes to be seen always already as relative to, while fulfilled in truth. Freedom is recognized as essential to both the pursuit and apprehension of truth—ultimately convertible with love. This stands at odds with liberal notions of freedom defined as merely the absence of restraint, restricted only by the limits of possibility. ⁶²

Addressing the pragmatic objection

The final objection that we will address here is pragmatic. There may be those who follow this argument, and who agree with many if not all of its major premises and conclusions but then balk at the implications, declaring that it is all merely theoretical and will not work in the ‘real world.’ For those of this mind the objection is as simple as it is powerful, such a proposal is not adequately based in the cold light of reality.

Amongst other potential and actual difficulties, the ‘real world’ Catholic university struggles to attract both staff and students who share this basic metaphysical outlook. In many places, it would simply not be possible to staff the Catholic universities with sufficiently qualified, actively engaged faithful Catholic faculty and support staff. Thus the norms outlined by John Paul II’s apostolic constitution, namely that ‘the number of non-Catholic teachers should not be allowed to constitute a majority within the Institution,’ ⁶³ remain aspirational at best. Additionally, it is feared that a university with such blatant confessional and metaphysical commitments may well deter prospective students beyond the already intensely committed faithful whose number amongst university-aged persons is steadily decreasing in Western cultures. Further to this, such a stance might complicate the already intricate relationships that need to be managed between the university and the various external stakeholders, not to mention the increasingly vast regulatory framework established by government and industry partners.

In response to these objections one could first agree. It may simply be the case that the institutional footprint of the Church in the realm of university education is much larger than can reasonably be sustained, especially in those Western cultures that might be described by some as post-Christian. The notion of strategically decreasing the size and scope of individual Catholic universities, or even the Catholic university sector in toto is likely to be perceived as defeatist, but it is worth remembering that homely wisdom that success is simply not a gospel category. Whereas the Oxbridge or Ivy League universities are almost universally held up as the standard by which to measure the success of the modern university, serious questions should be asked regarding whether this is the yardstick that should be applied when assessing the success of the Catholic university. Of course it is of tremendous importance for university administrators to attend to the many and varied practical considerations incumbent upon them for the good governance and stewardship of Catholic university institutions, but such considerations should not be primarily measured against worldly standards, but rather against the standard of the Cross of Jesus Christ.

By way of a final response to the pragmatic objection, we offer here two concrete examples of Catholic universities who have, in albeit unique ways, offered clear and robust articulations of a theologically informed metaphysic that they propose for the adoption of the academic staff. Obviously space precludes the possibility of a thoroughgoing analysis of these institutions, the socio-political conditions within which they exist, or the myriad of other factors that come to bear on the good functioning of so complex an institution as a university. While these are being proposed as exemplary of the above explicitly metaphysical approach, they are but two ways in which an approach of this kind could be incarnated into time and space.

The first of the two universities which will be presented is a work rooted in the experience of the Focolare movement, the Sophia University Institute, based in Loppiano, Italy. Inaugurating its first course in 2008, this university grew out of what was known as the ‘Abba School,’ a research group comprised of scholars of a wide variety of disciplines who came together with some frequency from 1989 until 2008 when the Sophia University Institute opened its doors. The purpose of the multi-disciplinary study group was to investigate the effects of the charism of unity of Chiara Lubich (foundress of the Focolare movement) in a range of academic disciplines. ⁶⁴ The offerings of the Sophia University Institute are all graduate study opportunities, with offerings in cultural studies, political science, economics, and an integrated program of philosophy, theology and science, operating under the name of ‘Trinitarian ontology.’

As David L. Schindler described it, the task of the Abba School, and by extension, the Sophia University Institute is ‘to show how the whole of reality is open to the logic of Jesus’s prayer as the Son.’ He continues, stating that ‘this task does not deny the legitimate autonomy of the academic disciplines. Rather, it shows how this autonomy is itself best understood in terms of the form and activity of filial love as revealed in Jesus (in both its supernatural and its natural meaning) in terms of a love that is first received as a gift.’ ⁶⁵

The other university of note in this regard is Universidad Francisco de Vitoria, based in Madrid, Spain. In examining its own mission as a Catholic university in the context of increasingly secular times, one of their professors María Lacalle authored a remarkable short work entitled In Search of the Unity of Knowledge: A Proposal to Rethink University Disciplines. The aim of the paper, a manifesto of sorts, is to help recover the mission of the university as truly Catholic. According to Lacalle, ‘what makes a university Catholic is primarily the specific way in which it uses reason in all facets of university life and, therefore, in the way it seeks truth and love.’ ⁶⁶

In order to assist academics to think through how they approach their research and teaching, Lacalle offers four questions which pertain to the anthropological, epistemological, ethical, and meaningful or purposeful aspects of the nature of any given study or research. ⁶⁷ The university has embedded these questions in its approach to the rethinking of all the disciplines. University administration ensures that senior academic mentors are available from within the university to assist in a collegial manner in the development of teaching and research projects which exemplify this approach across the university.

Conclusion

The difficulties experienced in the ongoing efforts to express, maintain, and grow, let alone assess the Catholic identity of our institutions of higher learning will remain insurmountable if those charged with addressing these difficulties neglect the ontological root of the problem. The mechanistic and technological ontology of liberal–scientistic modernity has usurped a more adequate and capacious ontology and has brought with it a harsh fact–value distinction, and which has thus relegated faith, worship, and truth to the realm of subjective value alone, and ignored the ontological realities at play.

It has been the contention of this paper that only a metaphysics of gift and a coincident relational ontology are sufficient to the task that faces Catholic universities in the 21st century, and perhaps universities more broadly.