Backward Ho! – The Catholic Thing

Good news! Owing to a combination of demographic realities and public scandal, universities are progressing into a phase-out, around the United States and the world.

The cause of their extinction will be that they are no longer attractive to anyone, and too expensive even to consider. Their former beneficiaries are thus abandoning them out of self-interest, and with luck, they should soon cease to clutter our educational landscape.

They are not, of course, completely worthless. Nothing is truly worthless in God’s green world, and much can be recycled. But they are nearly worthless in comparison to the extraordinary “investments” poured into them from public (taxpayer) and private sources.

Indeed, not even a degree from, say, Harvard University, is entirely worthless, for it will be printed on one side only, so that the reverse side will serve as superior notepaper.

These are developments that were devoutly wished for – although not by quite everyone – at least since the beginning of the XIIIth century, when Oxford and the University of Paris were being officially incorporated.

Bologna (or “Baloney” as we say in America) was founded more than a century before that, but only as the pre-eminent medieval law school. Its pretensions were thus limited, at first. To seek the deeper sort of wisdom, one generally became a monk.

Thus, “objectivity” was encouraged, nay imposed, by the Church. To look more completely into truth, one had to stand with one’s mind outside it. That’s why the “higher” education of the learned took place outside the catastrophic mess in which the world was always entangled. Colleges were confined within cathedrals and monasteries, where seminarians could be guided, and not left loose to become a public danger. Heresy was not to be encouraged.

While daggers and swords date (according to the archaeologists) to several thousands of years before the medieval past, cannons had not yet been invented (in China!), and the outer world was at least free of the noisier sort of anthropogenic explosions.

But secular universities put the world on the path to A-bombs. Learning was put at the service of psychotics, seeking political power, and has been increasingly dedicated to their convenience, in the time ever since.

It was discovered that the young, when partially and later completely freed from religious discipline, were truly “kids,” who tended to run wild on university campuses. Then, as now, they became the psychological playthings of the worst kind of professors.

We have had eight centuries or more of student riots, as even a casual review of the history will affirm. But we have had as much experience of morally corrupt faculty.

These universities were, again, from the beginning, secular institutions, even though some of the better ones fell under the influence of the Church, and were told sometimes to follow religious, and Christian, decrees.

Or to be perfectly candid, they were created by liberals, often within the Church, bent upon experimenting with young minds, and with the confidence that this would serve a liberal agenda.

“Reactionaries,” i.e., those without a liberal agenda, were slower off the mark, crippled by the fear of hubris.

This agenda hasn’t changed very much since the Xth century. It will not change until the original cause of decline has been removed: the reckless spread of “learning.”

This was a departure, in spirit, from the intentions of the old “Black Monks” of the Benedictine tradition, and even of the first Cluniac reformers, who longed for nothing more than actual reform, which, as the literate used to know, is a return to first principles.

By comparison, the sometimes dangerously proud, “cool” men in black from the new monastic orders, could be damnably “open-minded.”

They were the notorious first begetters of these new universities, yet they did not start them with demonic intentions; they were just a bit naive.

Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas were all very well, but did not really typify academic behavior.

And by the time the Jesuits came along, the bad academic habits were fully ensconced. Ignatius Loyola’s most significant formation was unquestionably a divine calling, but it reached him in the heart of university life in Paris.

That is to say, it began in university life, not in the Church. This was an affliction to the Jesuits from the start, for they were at risk of becoming an intellectual, rather than a mystical, religious body.

And when THAT becomes twisted about by the world, there is Hell to pay.

Veritably, the whole “Reformation,” including the Counter-Reformation, could be dismissed as an intellectual movement and counter-movement, that threatened the Church’s mind from within.

Through the intervening centuries, and to the present day, the Jesuits have again and again got themselves into trouble, not perhaps intentionally, but simply by acting like Jesuits, and doing what they imagined was necessary. “Intellectualism” makes them arrogant by disposition. It gets them banned, even from Paris.

Dominicans and Franciscans may likewise enjoy a new life, a “Vita Nuova,” when they, too, are freed from their bureaucracies, and resume serving God, instead of the task of building powerful organizations.

To be fair, their universities, and even some of the un-Christian or “post-Christian” ones, retain features that ought to be, if possible, preserved, “back-folded” into the Christian way of being, and into the customs of the monastic schools which they “outgrew.”

They are the prodigal sons of Christendom. Let us prepare to welcome their members home.

There is, of course, no other practical way forward – technically, backward – for the monks must once again be surrounded by monks, if they are to resume their Catholic (not Protestant) mission of prayer for the world.

Even the pope must be surrounded by religious, if he is not to be corrupted by worldly events. Too, the sciences which have a place in religious teaching, must be re-oriented to Godly understanding, rather than to the ungodliness that now prevails.