My almost daily walk to my work place, Mater Dei Hospital, makes me wonder about the significance and role of the university in today’s world. Christianity has a lot to say on this interesting and ever-evolving subject.
The Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, defines university as “an institution of higher education and research which grants academic degrees in a variety of subjects and provides both undergraduate education and postgraduate education”. The Latin derivation of the word “university”, ‘universitas magistrorum et scholarium,’ practically means a community of teachers and scholars. This description implies that knowledge is discovered and shared communally. In his address to European Professors, on June 24, 2007, Pope Benedict XVI reminded the participants of the first European Meeting of University Lecturers, that human knowledge develops on the principle of unity in diversity. Our European education system needs to be purified from every sort of senseless fragmentation.
“The university, for its part, must never lose sight of its particular calling to be an ‘universitas’ in which the various disciplines, each in its own way, are seen as part of a greater unum. How urgent is the need to rediscover the unity of knowledge and to counter the tendency to fragmentation and lack of communicability that is all too often the case in our schools!”
In order for universities to preserve and deepen their intellectual and spiritual soul they must urgently go back and retrieve their authentic humanism. But what kind of humanism are we talking about? Certainly not the one that detaches itself from the transcendent and, instead, makes itself its own God. Human history has been amply showing the disastrous effects of such pseudo-humanism, which tragically gave rise to and sustained some of the most horrendous forms of dictatorships.
Since books provide ideas, they were seen as a threat in giving alternative answers that ran counter to the propaganda of the regime in question. They contradicted the things the regime wanted the people to believe in. By suppressing or having direct control over universities, despotic rulers managed to keep the population in check, dictating what people should know and learn to their advantage.
Obviously, these restrictions prevented rebellion which could cause autocrats to lose their power over their subjects.
Within this perspective, Blessed John Paul II insisted that universities’ major role is that of becoming ‘cultural laboratories’ in which the human person is deeply discovered and promoted. In his speech to University Professors on September 9, 2000, the Holy Father said that universities need to recuperate that kind of humanism which gives society a vision “centred on the human person and his inalienable rights, on values of justice and peace, on a correct relationship between individuals, society and state, on the logic of solidarity and subsidiary. It is a humanism capable of giving soul to economic progress itself, so that it may be directed to ‘the promotion of each individual and of the whole person’.”
Speaking within a European context, Pope Benedict XVI suggested that this noble vision can be realised if one seriously takes into consideration the following three foundational issues.
First, there is “the need for a comprehensive study of the crisis of modernity”. Unfortunately, modernity has been misinterpreted as a separate reality from its ontological basis. It is erroneous to consider that divine law and human freedom are in fact diametrically opposed to each other.
Second, rationality must broaden its horizons. Faith expounds not limits the scope of human reason.
Third, Christianity’s contribution towards a humanism that is transcendent and open to the absolute is essentially decisive.
Can our university continue to address these pivotal issues critically?
■ Fr Mario Attard OFM Cap