Teaching as Believing: Faith in the University

5: Moving Beyond the University

139 Chapters 1 and 2 were grounded in Newman’s momentary concession that a “line” exists between the way of the university and the way of faith. The last two chapters have been grounded in his rejection of that idea. God is too big, God is everywhere, he says, overflowing, and so nothing is free of his presence and his urgings and his structures, not even the work of a chemist or a linguist. But in the end, there is a line after all. In the end Newman makes his most important point, that intellect alone is never enough and so the university is never enough. Though the university is not at odds with faith, it can’t save us: Knowledge is one thing, virtue another; good sense is not conscience, refinement is not humility, nor is largeness and justness of view faith. [. . .] It is well to have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life— these are the connatural qualities of a large knowledge; they are the objects of the University; I am advocating, I shall illustrate and insist upon them; but still, I repeat, they are no guarantee for sanctity or even for conscientiousness. (89; 1.5.9) In this central passage from The Idea of the University, there is distinction after distinction, boundary after boundary, and it’s the same boundary that I have been trying to describe. Liberal education is a good thing. It cultivates a discerning intellect and a delicate taste, and intellect and taste are good and necessary. “I am advocating, I shall illustrate and insist upon them,” Newman says. But they are not virtues, in themselves. They c h a p t e r 5 Moving Beyond the University Anderson.Teaching 9/30/04 4:21 PM Page 139 Teaching as Believing 140 do not lead to salvation, necessarily. However important the university is as training ground and preparation and foundation, “liberal education makes not the Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman.” Ricouer would say that the purpose of the university is to point out the provisional nature of our interpretations. But finally: we have to choose. We have to name our experience in a specific way—we all do, whether we admit it or not—and as Christians we name our experience Christ, and as Christians we believe that this choice and this name are a response to a reality. Or the cross. Because the beams of faith and the university are broad and wide, their intersection is broad and wide. The Odyssey exists in that intersection and the Confessions exists in that intersection and from within that intersection a critique can be made that might help to reform the university. But ultimately that vertical beam continues past the borders of the classroom and extends out of sight. The vertical beam of faith is a road, it is a way, and it arrives at somewhere in particular. It is the road to Emmaus, and it ends at a table in the evening where two friends and a stranger sit down to break bread. Then the stranger is revealed, and vanishes (Luke 24:13-35). The next two chapters explore the creative tension between faith and the university, returning to the theory of education in the second chapter, now with more nuance and qualification, and to my own experience as a believer, at the seminary and in my everyday life. They also carry forward my discussion of what orthodoxy means in Augustine and in the whole tradition. I begin in this chapter with a representative story, which then gives rise to a sequence of related claims, which then leads to the argument of the final chapter, to the central paradox of the book: that Christianity can contribute to the university only by staying apart from it. The story is about my crossing of a street. It is also about the cross itself, as all stories are. Teaching Good Friday It’s Good Friday, the day that we crucified the Lord, and I have returned for a moment to the Gospel of Mark and his description of the crucifixion , though it is spring in the Literature of Western Civilization and we have gone on to read Tolstoy and Kafka and the moderns. Spring fever has broken out and there have been problems lately with attendance and sloppy work. Several new students have joined the class, students with an intellectual chip on...