Near the end of the past winter quarter, one of the courses I’d
been teaching for the classics department was taking its usual,
peculiar toll. The course is titled “The World of Augustine.” It’s
about St. Augustine of Hippo (A.D. 354-430), the most influential
and prolific of the Church Fathers, who wrote during a tumultuous
era broadly similar to our own: the dissolute century issuing in
the collapse of the western Roman Empire.
In some ways, it’s my favorite course. It draws above-average
students who don’t flake out under a heavy reading load:
Augustine’s Confessions, the massive City of God,
the treatise On Christian Doctrine, and, through most of
the quarter, Peter Brown’s chunky biography of Augustine. Each
student also has an assigned research project requiring further
reading in one or another of Augustine’s many treatises.
Amid all this intense study, the time-honored maxim of good
teaching kicks in wonderfully: if you expect a lot, you get a lot.
By the third week, I start getting lucid little commentaries and
startling insights in the written responses I assign for each day’s
reading.
Yet, as I said, the class takes a toll, partly of the sort I had
dreaded several years ago when my department chairman asked me to
work up the course. I tried my best to get off the hook, but there
was no course in Augustine anywhere in the university’s curriculum,
and my chairman was eager for the classics department to fill the
gap.
“Why me?” I recall asking. My own graduate concentration was in
Greek. I had no formal training in patristics, no expertise in late
antiquity, mostly zero of the formal qualifications the department
would reasonably expect of anyone it might hire from outside to
teach the course.
The chairman listened quietly. “Well — yeah, I’m asking a lot,”
he said, “but this is still down the road a ways — you’d have two
years to prepare the course. Besides, Augustine is like any other
topic; it takes a certain … instinct as well as raw knowledge and
training.”
I looked at him blankly before he nailed me with his clinching
argument: “You’re the only Catholic in the department.”
So I spent the next two years, on a two-hour daily regimen among
normal duties, preparing my course on St. Augustine and his times,
reading deeper and deeper into a capacious and manly kind of
Christianity, with growing dread at the prospect of teaching all
this to a class of postmodern, jaded undergraduates.
TRY THIS, FOR EXAMPLE, AS A QUICK taste of the Augustinian
worldview: The moral order is absolute, woven into the very fabric
of creation. Personal sin, therefore, is never merely a private
psychological event; owing to ignorance or stupidity or an
idiotized upbringing, the sinner may be subjectively without blame,
but the sin itself has objective consequences that claw at the
well-being of the sinner and of others around him and of still
others yet to be after him.
Imagine juggling such thoughts, day after day, with a class of
bright 20-year-olds marinated all their lives in a culture of moral
relativism. For most of them, the course seems to be their first
encounter with the feebleness of their own culture. They don’t
necessarily buy into all of Augustine (predestination, anyone?),
but they respect him, and they want to talk about these ideas they
had never before heard of.
No doubt I should feel privileged to enjoy their alertness, but
the course always takes a peculiar toll, and by the ninth week of a
twelve-week quarter, I want it to be over. In the tenth week of
this past quarter, I learned why.
Down in the stacks at the main library on campus, I pulled a
copy of Jacques Maritain’s memoir The Peasant of the
Garonne, a book I hadn’t read in years. Published early in
1966, just a few months after the close of the Second Vatican
Council, Maritain’s reflections drew liberal fire in those days for
bemoaning the “foolery” already evident in the wake of the
Council.
Maritain, who died in 1973 at age 91, was a prominent
Neo-Thomist philosopher, one of several Catholic thinkers I had cut
my intellectual teeth on during my college years in the 1960s.
Paging through the book, I noticed that the due slip in the back
recorded a steady stream of check-out dates until 1971. Apparently,
no one in the university had looked at this famous book for 32
years.
On a hunch, I looked up a few other Maritain titles. Then I got
into it, and spent the next hour combing the stacks and pawing
through the library’s huge collection of, to me, familiar Catholic
writers: Knox, Guardini, Newman, Chesterton, Belloc, Gilson,
Pieper, Benson, Dawson, Lunn, Dimnet. With few exceptions (often as
not, a date when I myself had checked out the book), the due slips
told the same story, again and again: a long series of check-out
dates stopping, suddenly, in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Dazed by this discovery, I sat at a reading table to gather my
thoughts. How many thousands of students, I wondered, have passed
through this school since 1970? Is it even mathematically probable
that these worthy, well-thumbed books would suddenly, at about the
same time, stop being read?
Here, I thought, was a kind of archaeological evidence for the
collapse of Catholic identity at an historically Catholic
university. Santa Clara’s collection of Catholic authors from the
19th and 20th centuries is fabulous — 157 volumes of Chesterton
alone. Yet for all the use to which these volumes are now put, they
may as well be sealed in plastic wrap and stored away in packing
crates.
Barely two years after the close of Vatican II, in the summer of
1967, the secularization began in earnest at a meeting of 26
prominent Catholic educators in Land O’Lakes, Wisconsin. The
consequent “Land O’Lakes Statement” declared: “The Catholic
university today must be a university in the modern sense of the
word…. To perform its teaching and research functions
effectively, the Catholic university must have a true autonomy and
academic freedom in the face of authority of whatever kind, lay or
clerical, external to the academic community itself.”
In retrospect, this absurd boilerplate set the college tone for
a generation of wrangling between the Vatican and a majority of the
240-odd Catholic colleges in North America. Taken literally, the
statement would mean that the Catholic leaders were declaring total
independence for their schools: no more pressure from accrediting
agencies, donors, federal mandates, state licensing commissions,
local fire marshals. We’re autonomous!
BUT OF COURSE THERE WAS JUST ONE authority of a particularly
religious kind that the educators had in their sights. The
statement was not meant to be taken literally, any more than the
historically Catholic colleges have bothered to take literally
Ex Corde Ecclesiae, the apostolic constitution finally
issued by the Vatican in 1990 — defining what the Holy See would
thereafter recognize as a Catholic college or university.
The past thirteen years of dithering — mostly between weak
bishops and stonewalling secularized colleges mysteriously clinging
to the Catholic moniker — turns principally on a “general norm” of
Ex Corde requiring that Catholic theologians be faithful
to Church teaching. But another section of the same norm (Article
4, Section 4) requires more concretely that “non-Catholic teachers
should not be allowed to constitute a majority.”
A faculty poll taken some years ago by our political science
department of “attitudes” about religion and politics showed more
than 60 percent of the faculty at Santa Clara professing no belief
whatever in any transcendent order. Fewer than 20 percent are
practicing Catholics. Forget theology. All you need is arithmetic:
Santa Clara is no longer a Catholic university as defined by the
Roman Catholic Church.
Yet the dithering continues, and in the past few months, the
administration, inexplicably, has delivered to a puzzled or
indifferent faculty yet another working paper on Santa Clara’s
Catholic identity. It’s all starting to remind me of a comment by
Monsignor Ronald Knox, the Catholic chaplain at Oxford in the
1930s.
In the first chapter of his Enthusiasm, a celebrated
anatomy of religious faction published in 1950 (last check-out date
at Santa Clara: 1972), Knox explains his theme: “There is, I would
say, a recurrent situation in Church history — using the word
‘church’ in the widest sense — where an excess of charity
threatens unity. You have a clique, an élite, of
Christian men and (more importantly) women…. More and more, by a
kind of fatality, you see them draw apart from their
co-religionists, a hive ready to swarm…. Then, while you hold
your breath and turn away your eyes in fear, the break comes;
condemnation or secession, what difference does it make? A fresh
name has been added to the list of Christianities.”
Now ponder this garland of committee prose in the current
working paper on Catholic and Jesuit identity: “Jesuit education is
distinguished by praxis, or the integration of the intellect and
faith with practice and an intelligent foundation for active
engagement in the promotion of social justice. It seeks a more just
and humane world through personal commitment; whereas Catholic
education tends to be more parochial, more doctrine-based, and less
actively concerned with change.”
Which reminds me: Cheap ideas, Augustine likes to say, often
come dressed in gaudy patter. But he also allows that the motives
behind the ideas are inscrutable.
And so the Augustine course takes a peculiar toll of a sort I
didn’t precisely anticipate back when I agreed to teach it. It
casts the secularization of an erstwhile Catholic university into a
relief of painful clarity. Think of it. In just over a generation,
a great many influential American Catholics, inscrutably, have
traded a heritage of nuanced and soaring thought for a pottage of
murky bromides and gummy jargon.
What would St. Augustine say if he were zapped forward from his
own era of widespread apostasy, half-baked pagan resurgence, and
shallow cosmopolitan pretense? Always more interested in the
personal backdrop, he would, I suppose, pick through the historical
details carefully and then brush them aside to get at those
inscrutable motives behind the events. And I suppose I could cap
this essay with any number of apt quotes from the Doctor of
Grace.
Instead, let me try to get into the spirit (so to speak) of
secularization by quoting Jake Holman, the Steve McQueen character
in his dying gasp at the disastrous climax of the 1966 movie
The Sand Pebbles: “What the hell happened?”
