The Circle of the Disciplines: Newman’s Vision of the Integration of Knowledge and the Catholic University (David P. Deavel)
In this dicussion with David Deavel, we take up Newman’s ‘Circle of Sciences,’ including the ways in which we bring together old and new disciplines as well as theoretical and applied disciplines in the contemporary university. But what of research? And what of the roles of philosophy and theology? Deavel disabuses us of misunderstandings surrounding Newman’s understanding of the place of research in the university and clarifies the essential work of theology and philosophy in ordering the Circle and the larger university.
Links of potential interest:
“25 Years: Logos and My Catholic Life”
Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West
David Deavel at the Imaginative Conservative
Newman, The Idea of University
Christopher O. Blum, “The Promise of Newman’s Collegiate Ideal”
In this conversation with David Deavel, we take up Newman’s understanding of liberal learning, including the role of interpersonal dialogue, Newman’s distinction between the university principle and the collegiate principle, and common misunderstandings of Newman’s Idea of a University. Finally, we consider the relation between the Catholic university and the Church and the role of ‘letters’ in forming the imagination of undergraduates.
Links of potential interest:
“25 Years: Logos and My Catholic Life”
Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West
David Deavel at the Imaginative Conservative:
Newman, The Idea of University
Christopher O. Blum, “The Promise of Newman’s Collegiate Ideal”
In this conversation with Randy Smith, we consider the role of wonder in liberal learning as well as the challenges and the joys of being an interdisciplinary scholar. We also explore the distinction between wonder, curiosity (curiositas), and a well ordered desire for knowledge (studiositas) as well as the proper ordering of the disciplines—the humanities, mathematics, and the sciences—within the university.
Links of potential interest:
Bonaventure, Reduction of the Arts to Theology
Bonaventure, The Journey of the Mind to God
Bonaventure, Collations on the Hexaemeron
Randy Smith, Reading the Sermons of Thomas Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide
Christopher O. Blum, “Intellectual Charity”
Benedict XVI, “Address to Catholic Educators”
Are the subjects at a university determined by the market and student demand? And is the order between them a bit like the ingredients in a jambalaya? At most universities, the answer to both questions is probably ‘yes.’ But at a Catholic university it should be different and in way that is a great good for the students. In this lively conversation with Randy Smith, we discuss how Bonaventure’s thought can help us coherently order the disciplines within a Catholic University. We consider Bonaventure’s sources (particularly Hugh of St. Victor) and his contemporary Thomas Aquinas. And all of this leads to a consideration of the relation between the non-theological disciplines—including the applied disciplines—and theology.
Links of potential interest:
Bonaventure, Reduction of the Arts to Theology
Bonaventure, Journey of the Mind into God
Bonaventure, Collations on the Hexaemeron
Randy Smith, Reading the Sermons of Thomas Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide
Randy Smith’s writings at The Catholic Thing
Christopher O. Blum, “Intellectual Charity”
Benedict XVI, “Address to Catholic Educators”
In this conversation we discuss the origins of the Center for Thomistic Studies within the context of the Thomistic revival and take up again the question of how one could, following Thomas, order the relation between the disciplines within the university. This time the conversation looks to the particular roles of philosophy and theology in relation to each other and in relation to the seven liberal arts.
Links of potential interest:
Newman famously suggested that the disciplines, or parts of human knowledge, within a university should be complete and coherently ordered. Before turning to Newman in a future conversation, we speak first with Brian Carl about St. Thomas’s understanding of what it means for something to be a ‘body of knowledge’ and how these bodies might be organized within a university. Should bodies of knowledge be distinguished by what they study, by their end, or by their methods (or some combination of these)? How does the traditional ordering of the liberal arts fit within or alongside the Aristotelian ‘division of the scientiae? And what did we lose at the birth of modernity when the priority theoretical knowledge over practical knowledge was reversed?
Links of potential interest:
Thomas Aquinas, The Division and Methods of the Sciences
The Center for Thomistic Studies at the University of St. Thomas
Brian Carl’s ‘Academia’ page
Ernest Fortin, The Birth of Philosophic Christianity: Studies in Early Christian and Medieval Thought
In this conversation with Michael Boler, we learn about how we might follow the Greeks in undertaking an integrated and embodied approach to liberal education. How is liberal education an agon, a struggle, and a "return to the real"? Why did the Greeks emphasize individual physical training (as opposed to team sports)? Why do philosophy students smoke so much? Why is a good teacher so important? How did we become "cacti in a sea of dopamine?" These and other questions animate our conversation.
Honors Program, the University of Saint Thomas
Michael Boler, An Introduction to Classical and New Testament Greek: A Unified Approach
Michael Boler, “Screwtape’s Remedy for Love: C.S. Lewis and Ovid.”
Michael Boler, with Felisa V. Reynolds, “Aristotle and Zazie.”
Michael Boler, “The Violence of Autonomy: The Significance of Matthew 11:12 in Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away”
In this conversation with Michael Boler, we learn about his intellectual journey as a “late bloomer,” the dynamics and pitfalls of a great books approach to education, and the joys and challenges of teaching students in our own age. Along the way we consider the virtues of intellectual humility, wonder, and the importance of the perennial questions. And in an age in which higher education has become captive to values foreign to it, we consider why an apparently inefficient approach to learning might have the most permanent consequences.
Honors Program, the University of Saint Thomas
Michael Boler, An Introduction to Classical and New Testament Greek: A Unified Approach
Michael Boler, “Screwtape’s Remedy for Love: C.S. Lewis and Ovid.”
Michael Boler, with Felisa V. Reynolds, “Aristotle and Zazie.”
Michael Boler, “The Violence of Autonomy: The Significance of Matthew 11:12 in Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away”
In this rich conversation, Elizabeth Corey introduces us to the thought of Michael Oakeshott and what we can learn from him about being human and the practice of liberal education. Oakeshott’s unique voice is needed more than ever and touches not only the life of liberal learning but on almost every sphere of human flourishing.
Elizabeth Corey, Michael Oakeshott on Religion, Aesthetics, and Politics
Elizabeth Corey, “Michael Oakeshott’s Conservative Disposition”
Elizabeth Corey, “No Happy Harmony”
A.G. Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods
Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture
John Paul II, Laborem exercens
In this wide ranging conversation with Elizabeth Corey, we take up the fundamental question that has animated this podcast series: What is liberal learning? Along the way we consider the challenges faced by those who would liberally educate students today (including our brightest students), the higher purposes of liberal education, and consider liberal education's future. We also reflect on how liberal education can inform our approach to work, how the life of the academic and liberal education might become illiberal (while looking liberal from the outside), and the conditions—particularly the habits of reading and mind—that are necessary for liberal education to take place.
Elizabeth Corey, Michael Oakeshott on Religion, Aesthetics, and Politics
Elizabeth Corey, “Michael Oakeshott’s Conservative Disposition”
Elizabeth Corey, “No Happy Harmony”
A.G. Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods
Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture
John Paul II, Laborem exercens
In this conversation we take up Shakespeare’s nearly infinite capacity to educate liberally all who encounter his works in deep and sustained ways. We also consider how Shakespeare liberally educates us in ways that complement how Dante teaches us. With particular attention to As You Like It, we examine how play—the play of supposition and the play of analogy—can be transferred to the classroom by the best teachers. Along the way, we consider the contributions to this topic made by Pieper, Huizinga, Gadamer, Sister Miriam Joseph, and Altman.
Links of Potential Interest:
John Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture
Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture
Hans Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays
Sister Miriam Joseph, Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language
Joel Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama
In this conversation with Dr. Clint Brand, we explore what we can learn about liberal learning from Dante’s Divine Comedy. Taking Scott Crider’s recent essay on Dante as our point of departure, we explore how we might read the Commedia as “a series of pedagogical encounters.” What can we discover about the roles of humility, wonder, love, the soul, dialectic, piety, poetry, and “submission to the real” in the growth of metamorphosis of liberal learning? What lessons from Dante might we as teachers take into our own classrooms?
Links of potential interest:
Scott Crider’s “Saving Pedagogy: Dante as the Poet of Education” at Public Discourse
Dante’s Commedia (Paradiso)
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy
C. S. “Men Without Chests,” in The Abolition of Man
Plato’s Seventh Letter
Newman, Rise and Progress of Universities
Jean Leclercq O.S.B, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God
Clint Brand, ed., St. Gregory’s Prayer Book
In this conversation with Rachel Fulton Brown, we begin with Mary, the Seat of Wisdom, as a medieval symbol of liberal learning at the University of Paris, and all that she can teach those who desire to become wise. From there we consider how a Marian thread unites things as disparate as iambic pentameter, rose windows, and the highest—albeit unexpected—gifts of contemplative grace. Along the way the works of St. Augustine, John of Garland, Richard of Saint-Laurent, Tolkien, and Josef Pieper illuminate our path.
Links of Potential Interest
Brown's U. Chicago Website
Rachel Fulton Brown, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800-1200
Rachel Fulton Brown, History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person
Rachel Fulton Brown, Mary and the Art of Prayer: The Hours of the Virgin in Medieval Christian Life and Thought
Rachel Fulton Brown at First Things
Fencing Bear at Prayer and here
"The Forge of Tolkein" (Lectures)
St. Augustine, De musica
Tolkien, Mythopoeia
Ecclesiasticus 24 (Mary as Wisdom)
John of Garland, Epithalamium beatae Mariae Virginis
Josef Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation
In this conversation with Rachel Fulton Brown, we undertake a wide-ranging conversation about history and liberal learning, ranging from Herodotus, Augustine, and Martianus Capella to McLuhan and MacIntyre with many stops in between. Among the questions we consider: How does the Christian approach to liberal learning—and history within it—stand both at odds and in parallel with the ancient understanding? How is history always opposed to abstraction? And what are the frames that can guide (or derail) the writing of professional history and our personal histories?
Links of Potential Interest
Brown's U. Chicago Website
Rachel Fulton Brown, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800-1200
Rachel Fulton Brown, History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person
Rachel Fulton Brown, Mary and the Art of Prayer: The Hours of the Virgin in Medieval Christian Life and Thought
Rachel Fulton Brown at First Things
Fencing Bear at Prayer and here
"The Forge of Tolkein" (Lectures)
Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession
Marshall McLuhan, The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time
In this conversation with Margarita Mooney, we consider what can we learn from the Benedictine tradition—as communicated by Newman—as we seek to cultivate a university that is animated by liberal learning. What kind of ethos should emerge within a university from a liberal education that (1) integrates the full range of disciplines--including metaphysics and theology--(2) that seeks to form the full person (understood to have both a created nature and transcendent telos), and that (3) understands that for liberal learning to reach its highest aims it must be integrated within a liturgical and spiritual tradition? Within this discussion we also consider the difference that beauty, as a constitutive element of our education and our lives, can make as seek a fully human existence. And on a note that is more important than it might seem at first, why should wee have good food and drink at faculty and academic gatherings?
Links of Potential Interest:
Margarita Mooney Suarez’s writings, via her personal website
Mooney et al., The Love of Learning: Seven Dialogues on the Liberal Arts
David Brooks, “The Organization Kid”
Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God
Newman, The Benedictine Essays
What is liberal education? And what is it not? In this conversation Margarita Mooney Suarez introduces her vision of liberal learning by considering the nature of the person whom we educate, the means of liberal learning, and the challenges that liberal learning faces today. Along the way, we consider what role imitation, play, humor, and imagination fulfill in liberal education and what we might continue to learn from Maritain, Newman, Huizinga, and St. Benedict. And how do all of these elements and sources enable us to (1) educate the integrated human person who possesses both a transcendent dimension and telos, (2) attain an integrated vision of all things, and (3) enter into the dance that transports us between focused forms of knowing—through the disciplines—and the contemplative vision of the whole?
Links of Potential Interest:
Margarita Mooney Suarez's personal website
Newman, The Idea of a University, Rise and Progress of Universities, and The Benedictine Essays
Huizinga, Homo Ludens
Maritain, Education at the Crossroads
In this conversation Prof. Mirela Oliva takes up the big question of how we can come to know the meaning of life. She suggests that there are three questions bound up in one: (1) the cosmic question, “What is the meaning ‘of it all’?”; the ethical question, “What can I do to make my life meaningful?”; and the aesthetic question, “What is the story of my life?” (And who “writes” this story?)
She also takes up related questions such as “Is the meaning of life outside of me?” “Is the purpose of my life given to me, or do I create my own?” And finally, we discuss the question, “Is there a Catholic philosophy?” and what Plato might teach us about a philosophy that requires the exclusion of the Divine.
Resources to consider:
Plato, Republic
Augustine, On the Trinity
Aquinas, Summa Theologiae
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method
Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
Robert Nozick, The Examined Life: Philosophical Explanations
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue
John Martin Fischer, Our Stories: Essays on Life, Death, and Free Will
Films: Truman Show, The Story of Adele. H.
Mirela Oliva, "Gadamer and Theology"
Mirela Oliva, "Causation and the Narrative Meaning of Life"
If Plato's Cave had Wi-Fi and Netflix, would we leave it?
In this conversation with Prof. Mirela Oliva, we consider what it is that a philosopher "does" and the famous Allegory of Plato's Cave. Are we all trapped in this Cave? Under what conditions might we be willing to stay?
We also consider: How can the search for knowledge and wisdom lead to a better life? And what role does humility play in our search? How is knowledge of reality—philosophy broadly understood—the basis of every other enquiry and form of professional knowledge? That is, how is it that we cannot know the part (i.e., our particular discipline or profession) without knowing the whole (i.e., a broad philosophical vision)? And finally, what does it mean to approach a discipline philosophically? (The last question is of critical importance for all who aspire to be liberally educated.)
Resources to consider:
Plato, Republic
Augustine, On the Trinity
Aquinas, Summa Theologiae
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method
Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
Robert Nozick, The Examined Life: Philosophical Explanations
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue
John Martin Fischer, Our Stories: Essays on Life, Death, and Free Will
Films: Truman Show, The Story of Adele. H.
How can the study of history, understood as a branch of liberal learning, become a liberating education? Prof. Francesca Guerri offers an initial answer by giving us an account of her own intellectual and spiritual pilgrimage and the role of the study of history in that pilgrimage.
Then, opening the discussion to more universal connections, Dr. Guerri takes up the themes of friendship, the nature of the human person, and the role that community and companionship play in teaching and the intellectual life of the university. She also considers how history relates to the sister disciplines of liberal learning and how historical study can be a point of entry for students into a larger vision of reality that is coherent, intelligent, and ultimately teleological. History, approached as a discipline within the Catholic intellectual tradition offers meaning and vision that can liberate us and for which we are ultimately responsible as caretakers.
Links of Potential Interest:
Dr. Guerri’s website
Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire
Chris Blum, “The Historian’s Tools,” Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 13, no. 4 (2010): 15-34.
What is one of the chief motivations for the study of history? Prof. Francesca Guerri suggests that it is “a passion for humanity.” But this is not a passion for abstractions. It is rather a passion for particular people, at particular times, in particular places, ordered to a particular end.
In this conversation, Dr. Guerri introduces us to Matilda of Tuscany and her role in the investiture controversy as well as her own studies of Renaissance mercantile life and the larger (Benedictine) vison of work as potentially sacred.
Dr. Guerri also takes up the question of the nature of liberal learning by considering a statement that Dante gives to Ulysses in the Inferno: “Consider your origins: you were not made to live as brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.” Is this an accurate description of liberal learning and its aims? What does it mean that Ulysses uses this statement to exhort his men to transgress divine bounds, leading ultimately to their death and his own damnation? (Are there dangers lurking with liberal education that is unmoored from a divine and regulative vision?)
Along the way, Dr. Guerri also considers the virtues—including patience and studiositas—that should animate the life of the historian and the discipline’s relationship to the other liberal arts, especially rhetoric as it is understood in of the works of Cicero, St. Augustine, and Dante.
Links of Potential Interest:
Dr. Guerri’s website: https://www.francescaguerri.com/
Crossroads Cultural Center: http://www.crossroadsculturalcenter.org/
Christopher Dawson: http://www.christopherdawson.org.uk/
St. Augustine, The City of God: https://www.newcitypress.com/the-city-of-god-11-22-library-edition.html
Dante’s Inferno: https://www.amazon.com/Inferno-Divine-Comedy-Dante/dp/034548357X.
A popular introduction to Matilda of Tuscany: https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/matilda-of-tuscany-the-warrior-countess
