Catholic Faith and the Secular Academy

I AM GRATEFUL FOR THIS GATHERING and grateful also for the opportunity to discuss this topic, "The Catholic Faith and the Secular Academy." It is a subject about which I have thought a great deal and to which I have not yet been able to bring a fully developed personal synthesis; but I hope that we might together come to a better understanding of the relations between the Church's faith and the secular academy as it exists today.

The Distinction Between Faith and the World

My first observation is that the relation between Catholic faith and the secular academy presupposes a distinction between them--a distinction therefore between faith and the world, the saeculum. This difference opens up a realm of discourse in which we ask how they can be related to each other.

The relationship between faith and the world or between faith and culture is at the center of the Church's debate, conversation, and understanding of her mission in a new way since Gaudium et Spes and Lumen Gentium of the Second Vatican Council. Some people speak today, following Max Weber, of a disenchanted world, which presupposes that at one time the world was holier or friendlier to faith than the world we inhabit now. There are others who claim that a new sacralization is as much a phenomenon today as secularization; and there are people on all sides of that debate. But the distinction between faith and culture or faith and world, however we draw it, permits us then to examine a worldly or secular academy as a subculture within the world, unrelated, at least institutionally, to the major visible carrier of faith, the Church, and unrelated to many of the carriers of a sacred kind of subculture that are part of the Church.

This obviously secular academy is nonetheless still engaged in a kind of a dialogue with faith because of faith's influence, at least historically, on academic disciplines that find a home in the academy--theology or divinity, philosophy, history, literature, cultural anthropology, psychology. Even a reaction is a kind of influence, for to be the object of rejection can be a way to be present to a discipline. And faith, less obviously but no less really, continues to exercise influence in fields such as physics, cosmology, biology, and the like. This gathering at a distinguished private university is itself evidence of such interrelationships. There is a mutual influence between any academy, including the secular university, and faith.

The distinction then between faith and culture and between faith and the academic subculture that is the secular university allows us to examine the academy not only intellectually but also sociologically as a cultural milieu that has its own relationships, its own divisions, its own hierarchy, economic and ideological. Recently, Gerald Graff wrote in Beyond the Culture Wars: "An undergraduate tells of an art history course in which the instructor observed one day, 'As we now know, the idea that knowledge can be objective is a positivist myth that has been exploded by postmodern thought.' It so happens that the student is concurrently enrolled in a political science course, in which the instructor speaks confidently about the objectivity of his discipline as if objectivity had not been exploded at all. 'What do you do?' the student is asked. 'What else can I do?' he says, 'I trash objectivity in art history and I presuppose objectivity in political science.'" ¹

To some these days, the moral of such stories would be that students have become cynical relativists who care less about convictions than about grades and careers. In fact, if anything is surprising, it is that more students do not behave in this cynical fashion, for the established curriculum encourages it. The disjunction of the curriculum is a far more powerful source of relativism than any doctrine preached by any member of...