Hildegarde

So, it’s the day after Easter, and I’m still on John Henry Newman’s book, and  notmuch farther in than I was on Saturday.  I had people over, and they took down part of a tree and an enormous parasitical vine that was eating half my house, so that was good.

But as to the book–

At the beginning, at least, it is not what I expected it to be.  I’ve spent so much of my life hearing about this thing that I assume that the things I’ve heard will come to fruition in the second half.

But the first half is a set of discourses in which Newman argues against what was then called “mixed education.”  This was not a matter of the mixing of races, and it wouldn’t have occured to anybody at the time to let women into a university, never mind to mix them in classes with men.

Newman is responding to a proposal to build a university in Ireland that would admit both Protestant and Catholic students.  This was an era in which Oxford and Cambridge did not admit Catholics, and Newman, who was a graduate and fellow of Oriel College at Oxford, was forced to resign when he converted to the Catholic Church.

What he wants for Ireland is a Catholic university, not a “non-sectarian” one, and the reason he doesn’t want a non-sectarian one is that he knows that there is only one way to get it–to take theology out of the core of the curriculum and treat it not as a science but as a mere matter of opinion.

And that, Newman believes, makes a mess of the entire university curriculum, because it leaves that curriculum without an organizing idea.

Give me a minute here.

First, you’ve got to understand that what Newman thought of as a university education is not what we’re used to.  It isn’t even what we were used to before this age of narrowly focused vocational training we’ve relabeled “college.”

Newman rejects the aims and organization of the German research university in their entirety.  He does not expect a university to train scholars in particular fields, or to become the home of “departments” which parcel out bits and pieces of knowledge into separate little classifications and areas.

“The view taken of a University in these discourses,” he says, “is the following:–That it is a place of teaching universal knowledge.  This implies that its object is one the one hand intellectual, not moral; and, on the other, that it is the diffusion and extension of knowledge rather than its advancement.  If its object were scientific and philosophical discovery, I do not see why a University should have students; if religious training, I do not see how it can be the seat of literature and science.”

In other words, when Newman talks of  “a University,” what he’s referring to is something closest to our great books colleges, like St. John’s in Maryland. 

And the way he formulates the problem–that he is talking about the necessity of theology having a central place in such an institution, and it therefore being a bad idea to teach Protestants and Catholics together (because they do not share such a theology)–is interesting, because he obviously isn’t using the word “theology” as a code word for teaching religion. 

That is, what Newman wants students to learn in theology is not how they should behave or worship. 

The question then arises, though–if this is not what Newman wants, why does he want theology at the center of a university’s curriculum?

The answer, I think, is that what he’s actually looking for is a single “subject” that provides the structural and intellectual framework for all the others, the eggshell into which the egg will fit. 

Newman was not only an academic and a convert to Catholicism, but eventually a Cardinal in the Catholic Church, and for him–as for a number of other people in his time–theology was the eggshell, not just for university education, but for virtually everything else.  Theology, by teaching us about the Creator of the Universe and the purpose for which He created, provided the franework through which all other ideas could be understood.

If you look at theology that way–as a framework, what I’d call a master narrative–not only the book, but a lot of modern academic life, makes a lot more sense.

I think Newman was right on at least one level:  we do need a master narrative which provides the interpretive framework for all the rest of what we study.  Without such a master narrative, what we have is just a lot of chaotic detail that doesn’t necessarily make sense and doesn’t necessarily make logic, either.

And I think that every individual person finds such a master narrative for himself, somewhere, because I don’t think that we are capable of functioning witout one.  We take the master narrative presented by our country or our religion or our politics, or we invent one for ourselves, but we all build prisms that separate and organize the light around us.

I think that a lot of the political silliness we see on college campuses these days–the speech codes that punish “inappropriate laughter,” the “diversity training” orientation seminars that resemble the more abusive forms of Eighties poppsych scams, the periodic hysterical paroxyms over deadly threats that don’t actually exist–is a symptom of a culture in search of a master narrative and an attempt to impose such a narrative by force.  For the American university of the twenty-first century–or at least a certain kind of American university–these things are its theology working itself out in day to day particulars.

I think the same is the case with our political discourse–everybody is hysterical all the time, because nobody has a master narrative that he can actually trust.  I think that’s true on the right and on the left, and more true the more stridently each side insists that it has The Answer without question. 

I will say that I don’t know, off the top of my head, whether this situation is a good thing or a bad one.

My instinct says that it’s a bad one–that no society in history has ever survived without a generally shared master narrative, and that the lack of such a narrative has had consequences for education that are–well, that make it not really education. 

A lot of my frustration with the “professional priniciples” some posters would like to substitute for such a narrative, and with things like Good Social Work Practice, are directly the result of people in various fields being unable to see how what they know is connected to everything else there is to know, or how what they know is challenged by everything else there is to know. 

The reason no one has noticed that rehab is a failure has less to do with entrenched interests than with the fact that most clinical psychologists and MSWs don’t understand the criteria for success as established by the hard sciences.   If they did understand that criteria, we might get past methods with 95% failure rates to look into new approaches to the problem of addiction. 

Instead, we start with our premises–addiction is a disease–and then just go with it, and the evidence of failure is explained away by saying  “addictions can’t be cured.”

Really?  Because I know of several people who do, in fact, seem to be “cured.”  I’m just not too sure if “cured” is the right word for it.

I’m still of the opinion that we’d all be better off if psychologists and social workers and teachers were required to read and understand a lot of Homer, Shakespeare and Dickens–although Freud was required to know the first two, and made a mess of them anyway–but in the end I understand Newman’s point. 

If we do not have a framework for understanding the whole as a whole,  then we’re like the guys in that story about the elephant.  Each of us thinks our own narrow area of expertise is the whole animal, and in the end we’re wrong not only about the whole animal, but about our narrow area of expertise.

And yet.

There’s a part of me that can see some good in all the contentiousness, maybe because I’m the kind of person who likes contentiousness for its own sake.  I hate the entire us-and-them nature of contemporary politics, which isn’t really about politics at all, but about our lack of a shared moral vision.  On the other hand, I think that lack keeps the culture from getting stale, and I fear staleness–and the stiffling strangulation of conformity (see half the EU)–more than I do all the yelling we do at each other.

And now I’m going to go get lunch.