The question of what a religious college or university is for requires that we step back first to ask what education is for. The philosopher Megan Fritts has written about the disconcerting experience of serving on academic AI committees that neglect the question. Then, if the point of education is just assumed to be the student submitting “artifacts,” and AI does a “good enough” job, should students even learn to compose “essays, books, arguments, talks, poems” for themselves?
Of course, Fritts argues that students should still speak and write for themselves. The slow and messy process of learning to use language is how we begin to see the world more clearly. (For instance, elsewhere, Matthew Crawford has described a father struggling to find the right words for a wedding toast for his daughter—“warm but not maudlin”—as disclosing anew to himself who his daughter is.)
As she recognizes, Megan Fritts can’t be on all those now ubiquitous academic AI committees. Perhaps a religious school is where someone like her doesn’t have to be; its members already assume the orientation of education toward learning to speak and write for greater clarity about ourselves and those around us.
I realize other reasons for religious colleges exist, ranging from theology electives to campus ministries to the meaningful presence of students willing to pray for their fellow students wandering late at night. Here, though, I’ll draw on the thought of the philosopher John Haldane to suggest that even introductory non-theology courses at religious schools should be able to educate for self-formation in place of the aggregation of artifacts. This isn’t to deny that religious schools can be manipulative or to put down non-religious schools; I want to suggest that religious schools at best can pursue wisdom in four ways distinctively—two specifically for Christian schools—but not exclusively.
First, perhaps most distinctively, religious schools can help students contemplate the world and people around them. Haldane imagines a possible architecture assignment in which the student must a design a tomb to house the remains of an unknown soldier. This assignment doesn’t just require deciding on the cost and durability of certain dimensions and materials. The student must decide how to show the soldier is “not an unknown soldier but the unknown soldier” for different people, and, significantly, to communicate the reality of death but not evoke thoughts of decay. The elusive goal is for “a kind of transcendent present, a virtual immortal mortality.”
Buildings are not words, but we can imagine the student becoming more attentive to human responsiveness to cemeteries and interior spaces. Further, if the student sees people having transcendent responses to nature as to the tomb, she might not have warrant to declare that God has caused the responses as effects—no design argument here—but rather to interpret them as ciphers or manifestations of divine wisdom.
They are gestures. After all, the world could have been an “austere, qualityless world such as might be represented by physics”—a failed cosmic assignment. But in reality, the world can be seemingly vibrant, even charged with meaning. The student can learn to recognize, in Thomas Reid’s words, those expressions that “indicate like powers of understanding as we are conscious of in ourselves”—here indicating, if surprisingly and fleetingly, divine generativity.
Regarding our fellow human beings, Haldane suggests that we can also learn to sense their depth through their expressions. First, though, a distinction: Haldane notes with Aquinas that we have both proper and non-proper accidents. A proper accident is the ability and inclination to laugh. Risibility is not essential; one can be a human being and never laugh. On the other hand, laughing isn’t as contingent as most of our abilities, and if someone totally lacks a sense of humor, that seems to require an explanation.
Likewise, Wittgenstein speaks of criteria: “We describe a face immediately as sad, radiant, bored, even when we are unable to give any other description to the features.” Of course, someone might have very different and nearly unintelligible facial expressions, but that too seems to require explanation. Placing Reid, Aquinas, and Wittgenstein together means we can understand how an artist, in depicting human bodies and gestures, can manifest something of the mystery of human nature.
Thus, in 1628, Constantijn Huygens wrote of Rembrandt’s painting of “the singular gesture of the despairing Judas,” “I am amazed simply to report this, a youth, a Dutchman, a beardless miller, could bring together so much in one human figure and express what is universal.”
Second, for Haldane, a Christian school might also help us see “what is universal”—not just privately fascinating—in the rituals of other cultures. We should expect to find other cultures intelligible, just as the diversity of cuisines at a multiethnic food festival presupposes a common human conviviality. But going from Aquinas to Confucius means substituting a theologian-philosopher with a sage and setting aside analyses for descriptions of conduct and ritual practices. Nevertheless, by assuming shared ideas of human flourishing and seriously considering assertions of cosmic harmony, the Christian school might see convergence and enrichment.
Haldane cites Herbert Fingarette’s study of Confucius. Fingarette’s Confucius teaches how social life reattunes by becoming a holy ceremony. Before rituals, Fingarette says, Confucius pictures us as raw, without virtue, much like “the new-born wolf boy of the forests or the ‘barbarian.’” Confucius suggests we immerse ourselves in ceremonial roles—Fingarette says the Confucian always looks for what is in performance, remembering that “we detect in the performance confidence and integrity, or perhaps hesitation, conflict, ‘faking,’ ‘sentimentalizing.’” Then, finally, it is “the ceremonial aspect of life that bestows sacredness upon persons, acts, and objects which have a role in the performance of ceremony.” This reshapes our broken selves into “holy vessels.”
Confucius pays little attention to inner lives. But, through its attentiveness to virtue, the Christian school may discern a compatible—if gestural and never fully unveiled—path to re-formation in the Confucian rituals. This commonality allows the Christian school to not only appreciate but learn from other traditions. Haldane recognizes an expanded list of virtues emerging from ritual practice: attentiveness, circumspection, decency, empathy, determination, dignity, discernment, generosity, graciousness, hopefulness, humor, loyalty, moderation, modesty, patience, piety, resolution, refinement, resourcefulness, simplicity, and sincerity.
Third, if counterintuitively, students in a religious school should be able to learn from those with whom they disagree. This isn’t because the religious college holds that there is no truth, but because its students recognize dissenters as fellow travelers on a windy path. As Haldane writes, the language we use for our errors signifies lack (mis + take), suggesting “our positive powers come ahead of our weaknesses.”
Further, Haldane notes that those in error are often sincerely wrong, pursue what is to them an apparent good, and may have taken the wrong path for understandable reasons. This orientation to the good means we can find common foundations with those with whom we disagree, trusting our common origins in “a creative and sustaining source” who also unites all of us in openness to common fellowship.
If this sounds optimistic, Haldane recognizes another source of solidarity: there’s companionship based on the shared experience of fallibility, paired with existential fragility. Put simply, We’ve been there. Here, Haldane cites Jacques Maritain’s argument for tolerance based on the distinction between an idea (“ideas deserve no forgiveness if they are false”) and a human being, whom we must forgive because of “regard to the condition of him who travels the road at our side.”
The inescapable fallibility and vulnerability of human beings means that we remain “utterly forbidden to judge the innermost heart, that inaccessible center where the person day after day weaves his own fate and ties the bonds binding him to God.” We can only trust in providence, as we trust that others have done for us.
Fourth, and finally, Haldane imagines Christian education fostering the “idea that amidst the ordinariness of life there are channels of transcendence.” A bit brusquely, he criticizes contemporary forms of spirituality, asserting, “no occult incantations, no esoteric diagrams, no strange exercises, no theatrical props.” The problem with “inner growth” is that our efforts, however sincere, may become “entitlements” or “consumer rights” so our oh-so-deep reflectiveness and spiritual development are imagined as drawing God to us.
Instead, Haldane reads Jean Pierre de Caussade to suggest that ordinary religious practices—reading the Scriptures, participating in the liturgy—create a “structure” within which we become receptive to God’s will. If we are on a spiritual journey, we are not called to geoengineer our surroundings or chart our progress.
Caussade even writes, “It is no use trying to see where we are, look at maps, or question passersby.” Wherever we are, whatever the moment, we only become more responsive to providence through trust in a divine guide outside our control. Similarly drawing on Caussade, a hospital chaplain has written that our question must shift from “What is happening to me?” to “What is God’s purpose for me?” The Christian doesn’t cease to move altogether but begins to continually “adapt to the movement of the sea” that surrounds her, which now appears as the hidden operation of the Holy Spirit.
What might this “structure” look like in higher education? Haldane points us to a short article by Brian Wicker on adult education in which he describes converting to Catholicism in 1950 as entering into a different world and becoming a dissenter like Thomas More (or, differently, John Bunyan). Paradoxically, then, Catholic education in its difference shares the goal of some forms of workers’ education to be an “irritant to the system itself, a kind of anti-body to counter the infections it inevitably produces—the false values, false hopes, dead ends of every sort, which the system naturally creates.”
Generally speaking, religious education must not only register grades but also evoke the experience of attending Mass for the first time—“crossing a definite boundary into another world, … venturing into an unknown territory where there are no safe paths mapped out, and booby traps may be strung at any moment.” Consequently, the student may become unreliable, especially politically, as her collegiate environment lets her become gradually more responsive to what would otherwise remain imperceptible.
So, what is education for? If it is, as Megan Fritts suggests, the formation of human persons, the religious, especially Christian, college may provide a further answer. We are formed as we see nature and other people as more than interesting, for they are mysteries, the rituals of other cultures calling forth learning and not just fascination, disagreement as the opportunity for the exercise of attentiveness and charity and not exclusion, and ordinary campuses as where we recognize the Spirit operates secretly and never at our behest. All this affects our language and becomes clearer as we speak and write for ourselves.
In short, education is more than just clicking a button to submit artifacts.
Neil Dhingra, PhD is an academic adviser at the University of Maryland.
