Theology as the Unifying Principle of the University Faculties

Introduction

Back in November, I attended a lecture at the Pascal Institute in Leiden on the purpose of a university, following which I wrote some reflections on how the pursuit of ‘liberal knowledge’, traditionally the objective of a university education, depends upon a healthy community of academics with a right understanding of the relationships between the faculties of knowledge. A liberal education is so-called because it intends to liberate us from reducing the world to the terms set by one field of knowledge, as a biologist might tend to reduce the human person to a product of chemical reactions or a psychologist to the sum of his or her past actions. I made an exception for theology, however, considering that, without some unifying framework, the ‘critical mindset’ which keeps us from reducing phenomenon to a single perspective seems liable to degenerate into mutual suspicion. Here I’d like to better justify this exception by considering how it brings together various oppositions in modern thought, preeminently the opposition of facts and values. 

The problem of the fact/value dichotomy

Nowhere is this dichotomy of facts and values more apparent, and the division it precipitates within the universities more clear, than in the apparent opposition of science and humanities subjects. That science presents an account of deterministic facts, the humanities these extraordinary narratives of virtue and vice which intimate to us what the world ought to be like, presents a difficult contrast to reconcile — a contrast between facts and values, determinism and freedom, what is and what ought to be. It is true that this is a characteristically modern division of knowledge; it would not have been recognised prior to the C19th, as it was only with the advent of institutes of higher education offering specialisation in sciences exclusively, an early example being what is now Humboldt University, that the distinction came to carry any cultural significance. Yet it was in effect a reinterpretation of a much older division of human experience into reason and faith. It is not obvious that these terms were treated historically as conflicting, but rather as complementary to one another: thus you have the great Summa Theologica of Saint Thomas Aquinas, an immense work which applied systematically the metaphysics of Aristotle to the doctrines of the Catholic Church and the problems of theology, with the general aim of demonstrating the reasonableness of faith. From the perspective of modern science, however, the two terms — reason and faith — cannot be reconciled, because they merely differentiate the empirical and the non-empirical, or what is demonstrable versus what is merely speculative — fact versus opinion. It is in the context of such distinctions that the substance of religion, and thus the relevance of theology, have come to be discredited in the eyes of many. 

I do not want to suggest that the division of sciences and humanities is entirely due to language; the Summa Theologica investigates how reason may vindicate faith, but it does not thereby reduce faith to reason. It was important for Aquinas to maintain that there were certain facts about God which could not be established by reason alone. So, reason and faith were always distinct, but this did not mean the one could not support the other; in today’s culture this seems less plausible, for we understand by empirical and non-empirical, fact and value, object and subject, is and ought, things which are defined in opposition to one another. Until these underlying assumptions are addressed, we will be unable with our present language to articulate a new synthesis of facts and values, and so neither of the sciences and the humanities. 

We cannot simply return to the theology of Thomas Aquinas, for the language of Aristotelian metaphysics is unable to accommodate modern science, which is why early modern philosophers such as Descartes rejected it. For a start, Aristotelian metaphysics describes things in terms of qualities which make them exist a certain way or which give them a certain purpose; modern science, by contrast, deals with quantities, magnitudes. Science is not interested in what things should be, but what is, what could be, or what will be, and these can be represented numerically. Any revival of rational theology predicated on Aristotelian metaphysics will only confirm this difference. 

Science cannot do away with values

Yet, the right understanding of what science is and does is illustrative of what a new synthesis could look like. For science is not objective, if by objective we mean free from value-judgements. On the contrary, science is founded upon positive claims about values, including a commitment to the intrinsic goodness of searching for truth, confidence in the essential commensurability of the way the mind understands reality and the way reality actually is, decisions about what is measurable in phenomenon and what is qualitative and thus to be excluded, and day-to-day evaluations of what facts are relevant to hypotheses, which already depends on an often inexplicable conviction that such a hypothesis is worth investigating in the first place. In this way, encounters with empirical facts are always value-mediated: this is a relatively recent discovery upon which fields as diverse as AI, literary criticism, and various schools of psychology have converged, and it seems to me integral to the reconciliation of the sciences and the humanities, inserting as it does the idea of value back into the heart of science. 

Moreover, when scientists make value-judgements they are not doing science but philosophy; and a philosophy which holds that truth is good, and that those hypotheses most conducive to enhancing our public infrastructure or enabling advances in medicine ought to be prioritised over those which will enable us to harm others through biological or chemical warfare, for instance — that philosophy is clearly founded in a distinctive worldview, one which says that reality is fundamentally ordered and intelligible, not arbitrary, and that love is more fundamental than power. 

Theology as the science of worldviews and the possibility of objective values

The evaluation of worldviews is, in my view, a basic definition of theology, one which can help us to understand why, irrespective of the decline of religiosity, theology may still be necessary to give unity to our knowledge. Thanks to the social sciences, we understand well the relationship between worldviews and human motivation, especially the ways in which this relationship goes ideologically awry. It must be said, however, that we are much more confident in saying where a worldview is wrong than where it is right. Thus, although there has been an enduring interest in the meaning of religious and theological ideas, in their subjective and symbolic significance, and although there have been respectable attempts to reconstruct the significance of such ideas on their own terms, their truth has been a matter of indifference — again, because we are no longer certain about the relationship between facts and values, truth and meaning. If theology is indeed the key to recovering this relationship, how so? How exactly can we positively evaluate the truth of the foundational propositions of a worldview, beyond their meaning? How can we get our values straight? 

This is more of an empirical matter than we tend to admit. It is possible to examine, in literature and in life, how certain lives are led and the consequences which accrue to certain behavioural patterns. Perhaps these patterns are isolating, or attract a bad crowd, or are not conducive to good health, or encourage us to lie to others, or make us ashamed of ourselves; and perhaps others make us respectable to ourselves and others, enjoin us to others through channels of service which turn out to be meaningful and reciprocal. In this sense, there is nothing arbitrary or subjective about values, as they are expressed in action, for what we value has tangible consequences, biologically, socially, intellectually, psychologically, and spiritually. Values are made empirical precisely through their consequences; to become aware of this demands patience, prudence, discernment, and radical honesty with oneself. We can move through meaning to truth because their is truth in meaning. 

This is the pattern which theology lays down for us. It is the reason that Christian theology has always stressed a distinctive understanding of the human person founded upon an event known as the Incarnation — the revelation of God in the person of Jesus Christ. The idea that God became man provides a remarkable foundation for an anthropology in which the unity of the material and the spiritual — or facts and values, if you prefer — is central to man’s existence. One can see the relevance of such an image to what I have sketched above, not only in relation to science, but to self-examination. 

Patristical theology as an accessible introduction to the possibility of objective values

I said earlier that the intimate relation of facts and values, of the bearing of values on facts, had emerged in several theoretical contexts of late. In truth, its roots can be found in a branch of theology known as patristics, originally in reference to early Christian writings on the application of the Church’s teachings to practical living, but now encompassing all writings on this subject regardless of when they were written. These writers considered how our lives are a continual struggle with values or 'passions' that impose themselves upon us; they show us that it is in the moral life that the theoretical and speculative theological problems become concretised and gain clarity. They have much to complement our modern interest in worldviews, and their approach to theology through lived experience may encourage us today to see both the truth in meaning and the meaning of truth. 

Patristics is theology for those who seriously want to know how to live well — without fear, without denial, full of hope and charity. It is as relevant today as it was to the ancients and medievals, for although the world appears to change, human relations and motivations remain the same in form and function. More basically, it offers a practical theology for recovering the interdependence of facts and values and by extension the complementarity of the sciences and humanities.