Life Worth Living: Christian Faith and the Crisis of the Universities

It appears that universities – at least, the world’s top tier universities – are flourishing. They contribute to our understanding of the world more than other institutions and, often in collaboration with businesses, they help improve the human condition, particularly in the fields of medicine and communications.

The wider public holds top tier universities in high regard; people across the globe are in awe of brand names such as “Oxford,” “Cambridge,” “Harvard,” “Yale,” and “Princeton,” to name a few. Parents go to extraordinary lengths – foolishly extraordinary lengths, I think – to ensure that their children are admitted to these universities and are willing to pay, what seems to me, ungodly prices to keep them there. Though those of us who work at such universities often grumble about faculty meetings, the contamination of university culture by a corporate mentality, and bureaucracy - especially about bureaucracy – most of us enjoy working where we do.

A happy workforce, highly reputable brand, great and publicly significant product, and an abundance of eager customers looking for a scarce commodity – any institution in which all this were true would be flourishing, wouldn’t it? Nevertheless, though flourishing in many ways, universities – even top tier ones – are also in a crisis that touches the very core of their mission.

Where did universities go wrong?

Anthony Kronman of Yale Law School has offered the best analysis of this crisis that I know, ominous entitled Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life. The title states his thesis tersely: higher education (in the United States) is on a dead-end street because we have given up on university-based discussion of questions of deepest human concern: “What does it mean to flourish, not in one or another endeavour, but as a human being?” or, put even more succinctly, “What is a life worth living?”

Kronman’s main purpose, however, is not to complain.Education’s End is principally about the “end” understood as goal rather than termination. It is a defence of the humanities, an argument that serious reflection on human nature and a rigorous probing into the character of life worth living belong at the core of university education. Only when universities take up these tasks again will university education return to its proper end.

What was the right path from which universities have strayed to end up on this educational dead-end street? Where and why did they take a wrong turn? Kronman distinguishes three phases in universities’ relation to the meaning of life in the history of United States higher education:

• The first phase, which began with the establishment of Harvard College in 1636, was “the age of piety.” The entire college education “rested on the premise that the ends of human living are not merely a fit subject of instruction but the one subject, before all others, that young men must study and learn.” Students wrestled with the issue within an uncritically accepted religious account of the meaning of life; its goal was to understand such life better and to translate it into everyday pursuits. The “dogmatic program of the antebellum college” had to be given up, Kronman believes; it was too narrow (not pluralistic enough) and irrational (reason stopped at one point and gave way to the authority of revelation).
• The second phase was that of “secular humanism.” It lasted from 1869, the year of Charles Eliot’s appointment as the president of Harvard, to 1968. This was the golden age of humanities. Under the assumption that it is “possible to explore the meaning of life in a deliberate and organized way even after its religious foundations have been called into doubt,” life’s meaning continued to be an organized subject of instruction, but it now became the “special responsibility of the humanities to provide such instruction.” A more pluralistic approach to the subject was adopted, “based on a critical study of the great works of Western literature, philosophy, and art.” Students reflected on paradigmatic accounts of meaningful lives by engaging in a great conversation about compelling alternatives.
• The third phase, in Kronman’s opinion, is where disastrous wrong turns were taken. It began after 1968, the “year that rocked the world,” as Mark Kurlansky termed it, and continues until today. “In this third phase, the question of life’s meaning has ceased to be a recognized and valued subject of instruction even in the humanities.” What was once the main goal of university education now completely disappeared from it.

Why did universities abandon grappling with the meaning of life? Kronman identifies two major reasons, or wrong turns. The first is related to the dominance of the research ideal in the university. Since the nineteenth century, first in Germany and then elsewhere, university professors began seeing themselves primarily as scholars, bracketing questions of purpose and values and striving methodically “to make an incremental contribution to the endlessly expanding knowledge in their fields.”

The research ideal was key to the success of the natural and social sciences, Kronman thinks, but its adoption was pernicious for the humanities. Seeking the “clout” of producers of genuine knowledge, professors in the humanities began to act as “scholars,” “specializing” and “making original contributions” in describing and explaining the bits of the world they were studying. Their professional self-understanding had no room for a conversation about life worth living with the thinkers from the past – Socrates, Jesus, Paul, Augustine, Dante, Luther, Shakespeare – as if these thinkers were each others’ and our contemporaries. Such an ahistorical and decontextualized conversation sat uneasily with the research ideal, and professors in the humanities abandoned it as edifying discourse, more akin to pious sermonizing than to the rigorous business of advancing knowledge.

Predictably, professors in the humanities gained no clout in the wider university by adopting the research ideal, mainly because in the humanities no clear link could be established between research and the actual advancement of knowledge. So they ended up trading “a valuable and distinctive authority” for one based upon values they could “never hope to realize to anything like the degree their colleagues in the natural and social sciences.”

By the early 1970s, “the humanities were floundering.” The “culture of political correctness” – the second wrong turn, argues Kronman more controversially – has put them “in danger of becoming a laughingstock, both within the academy and without.” He continues with rhetorical bluster: “Looking to build a new home for themselves, they have instead dug a hole and pitched themselves to its bottom.”

“Political correctness” is an ideologically laden term. By it Kronman means three interrelated ideas, and (if I read him correctly) only their extreme articulations: diversity (“enthusiastic affirmation of a deep connection between judgment and race”),multiculturalism (a conviction that “the ideas and institutions of the West, and the works that embody them, have no more value than those of other, non-Western civilizations”) and constructivism (stressing “the artificiality of all human values and the absence of any natural standards by which to judge them”). Any impulse to explore the meaning of life that remained in the humanities after their ill fated marriage to the research ideal had now completely dissipated: as reason and truth lost value and as all ways of living were pronounced a priori of equal worth, the great conversation about what makes life worth living no longer made sense.

Now, I am more favourably disposed toward “diversity” and “multiculturalism” (though not toward “constructivism”) than is Kronman. They are not the culprits. To the contrary, exploration of specific experiences, practices and perspectives of people of different races, cultures and religions - especially religions – can strengthen interest in humanities. In my judgment, the culprits lie elsewhere.

One is the denial of human nature, a problem Kromnan mentions in passing. Today, many in the humanities are convinced that there is “no such thing as humanity or human life to be contemplated,” as Terry Eagleton. If that is true, we cannot explore what it would mean to flourish as human beings, but only what it would mean to live authentically as particular individuals, to express or craft our own authentic selves by pursuing various culturally conditioned, individually inflected, and changing life projects. On this account of the self, there are as many “meanings of life” as there are individuals. The teachings of Socrates, Jesus or Nietzsche make no claim on us as human beings with a force of truth; they may only inspire us as exemplars of authenticity and self-construction – or they may not. If this is so, it is difficult to know why they would be objects of serious reflection at the university.

The second (and, I think, more important) development falls under the rubric of “preferences.” In Western cultures – and, in the wake of globalization, elsewhere – decisions about life worth living are increasingly shaped by the way we make decisions about consumer goods. So, to be specific, consumption is squeezing out reflection about life worth living by insinuating itself into the place of such reflection. A new consumer good offers itself to our imagination before we can ever grow dissatisfied with the old one, and the endless stream of new goods and services, a veritable opiate for the people, becomes for us as a cornucopia of mystery, protection, and salvation. Chasing after consumer “highs,” we rarely reflect on the character and purpose of our lives.

Furthermore, when we do take time to reflect, we decide between major options about flourishing in life in a way analogous to how we decide between a Ford and a Honda, or between Coke and Pepsi. For instance, we speak of our “religious preferences.” But, as Peter Berger noted in A Far Glory, “preference,” the way we use it today, belongs to “the language of consumerist culture,” not to the language of deep and informed commitments, and certainly not to the language of ways of living that matter to us more than life itself. “Preferences” are not formed in prayerful contemplation, through careful reading of sacred texts, or through judicious processes of considering options in a “great conversation” spanning centuries. They emerge as a blend of inchoate longings and calculations of benefits directed at sleek and cleverly advertised goods. You don’t read and discuss Socrates, Buddha and Jesus, or Luther, Spinoza and Nietzsche to determine your “preferences” – you listen to what your gut tells you and read consumer reports.

When possible accounts of life worth living become mere “preferences,” the great conversation about that issue grinds to a halt. We can explore with intellectual vigour what makes life worth living and the values that guide us in life only if we abandon the sphere of “preferences” altogether and realize that visions of what makes life worth living and the values that guide us are, in the words of Hans Joas, “reflexive standards by which we evaluate our preferences [rather than preferences themselves], emotionally laden ideas of the desirable rather than desires as such.”

The imperialism of inchoate preferences

What is lost when the exploration of life worth living gets squeezed out of the university? For one, the university’s character changes. In terms of the main thrust of what universities are about, they become a combination of research institutes and vocational schools. As research institutes, universities seek to explain how the world and various swaths of it function and to apply the knowledge gained to mastery over the world. As vocational schools, universities prepare students for jobs, which are increasingly knowledge based.

As sites of research, application of knowledge, and training, universities are immensely important. But if this were all there was to them, they would be seriously deficient. In research and vocational training, the most basic question is “How?” – how things (from galaxies to subatomic particles, and everything in between) work, and how to make things work for our benefit. Reason is employed for explanatory and instrumental purposes. Answering “How?” as we seek to achieve our goals is important. So is answering “What?” as we stand in wonder before the world. But perhaps the most characteristic question for humans is neither “How?” nor “What?” but “To what end?” To what end do we seek to advance knowledge and invent new technologies? To what end do we work from dusk to dawn, whatever our jobs are?

Centred on research and vocational training, universities are about cognition and instrumental rationality only, not about moral norms and meanings. They teach students how to achieve whatever ends they themselves or others set for them, but not how to evaluate and chose wisely among possible ends. Experts in means, they then remain amateurs in ends. With cognitive and instrumental prowess, they blindly follow their “preferences” bereft of reflexive standards or norms with which to evaluate them; they seek to satisfy their desires without having explored what is genuinely desirable and why.

In Plato’s dialogue Georgias, Callicles, an advocate of natural rights of the strong against the weak, derides Socrates for doing philosophy. In response, Socrates tells him: “There is no nobler enquiry, Callicles, than that which you censure me for making, – ‘What ought the character of a man to be, and what his pursuits.'” But even Callicles, a man of action out to satisfy his appetites, concedes that the youth who neglects philosophy is an “inferior man” and “will never aspire to anything great or noble.” Callicles’s judgment may have been too harsh, but not by much. When universities give up reflecting and teaching on the meaning of life, they fail their students because they withhold from them the noblest of all enquiries.

Individual students are, however, not the only ones who lose when universities devolve into research institutes and vocational schools – the public loses as well. Anthony Kronman believes that the failure of universities to engage the problem of life’s meaning contributes to the raise of fundamentalism. Science and technology, though making our lives easier and longer, leave us empty and with a deep yearning. Left alone with our desires and ignorant of the purposes of human life, we become “leaky vessels,” to use the image from Socrates’ polemic against Callicles. That emptiness, argues Kronman, is “the nursery bed and a cause of upwelling of religious feeling, of the surge of fundamentalist belief.” He suggests that the humanities, with secular humanism as its guiding ideology, can counter the spread of religion and fundamentalism. That’s the public benefit of the humanities.

Kronman fears fundamentalism and proposes to fight it with secular humanism. I, on the other hand, think that secular humanism contributes to the void in human souls rather than filling it, and that the fear of fundamentalism is often exaggerated. Religious extremism combined with political exclusivism is a problem, but so are secularist forms of authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Strong religious convictions are not. Robust accounts of life worth living as they are, religions only become a public problem when people from diverse religions and secular humanists cannot engage each other in a meaningful way because they have never mastered the art of conversation about alternative accounts of what makes life worth living and what values should guide it.

In a globalized world, people of diverse and deeply held convictions live side by side under the same political roof. Major issues that rend states asunder – about the nature of democracy, the right to proselytize, the rights of women and gays, abortion and euthanasia, the distribution of goods, climate change, and so on – are largely about what constitutes the life worth living and the values that articulate it. But we have lost the ability to deliberate about them.

Among other things, the loss of this deliberative capacity has turned what ought to be public debates about alternative visions of the good life into shouting matches about unreflective personal preferences! If universities fail to take up the great conversation about these issues – a great conversation that, in an age of globalization, should not be limited to the Western religious tradition – they will fail to provide an indispensible public service, the one they are in a unique position to provide – namely, of teaching the art of reasoned conversation about what concerns us the most.

There is one more loss, a strange loss, one might think. If universities give up on the meaning of life, it is not only that they will fail reflectively to illuminate and help steer the desires and preferences of individuals and societies. Universities themselves will – seemingly paradoxically – become servants of these reflexively opaque desires and preferences. “Reason,” wrote Hume famously in his A Treatise of Human Nature, “is, and ought only to be the slave of passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”

Something analogous to what Hume, one of the progenitors of the tradition of absence of rational reflection on ends, said of reason can be said of universities today. If universities give up on serious reflection about life worth living, they will become slaves of human passions, whether these are the passions of chauvinism and nationalism of whole collectives or the passions of narcissism and greed in individuals. Just imagine: Oxford and Yale, Harvard and Cambridge, citadels of reason, now turned into tools of inchoate desires and knee-jerk preferences.

Can religion save the humanities?

Universities are heirs of the morally serious Socrates, but when it comes to the exploration of the life worth living, they have fallen below the level of the appetites satisfying Callicles. Universities are also heirs of the Christian faith’s search for understanding, but they have abandoned the pursuit of a central question that animates the faith and its search for understanding – namely, “What is the life worth living”?

One way to think about the Christian faith – and the same is true of all major world religions – is that it is an account of the self, social relations and the good in the context of an overarching interpretation of life. This way of putting the main concern of the Christian faith has the advantage of explaining the centrality of the question of the meaning of life and why the Christian faith might be a contributor to restoring the exploration of this question to the humanities.

Anthony Kronman wants no such help, whether it be from the Christian faith or from any other religion. Humanities should save us from religion; religion cannot help save humanities. He gives two reasons: “First, no religion can be pluralist in the deep and final sense that secular humanism is”; and, “second, every religion at some point demands a ‘sacrifice of the intellect’.” Let me briefly examine these two claims.

Kronman claims that “no religion can accept the proposition that there are [true but] incommensurably different answers to the question of life’s meaning, among which no rank order can be fixed.” That’s true with regard to the rock bottom convictions about the meaning of life, which for the Christian faith is instantiated in the dual command to love God and neighbour or in the call to “follow Jesus.” But within the framework of these rock bottom convictions, there may well be incommensurable answers as to how to go about leading a meaningful life – such as the life of contemplation and the life of action, both modalities of love of God and neighbour or of following Jesus, but incompatible as dominant life orientations.

It is no different, I would argue, when it comes to secular humanism given that it must operate with a normative account of human nature and that it cannot afford relativism (which Kronman explicitly rejects, but which his formulation seems to court). Plurality of religious forms of life within a single religion is, I would contend, a match to the legitimate diversity within secular humanism. Just think of the varieties of Catholic “religious” and “lay” orders. Equally importantly, even if Kronman were right and secular humanism were pluralistic in a way religions cannot be, why would such pluralism “in the deep and final sense” be an undisputed good and the condition for contribution to the humanities? Would not an account of the humanities that excludes religious accounts of meaningful life from the grand conversation be exclusivistic?

The answer to the last two questions depends on what we do with Kronman’s second contention – namely, that religions always entail a “sacrifice of intellect.” Here, too, the categorical difference between secular humanism and the Christian or other faiths is not obvious. First, the decision in favour of rationalism is inescapably a moral rather than a strictly rational (in a narrower sense) decision. Second, as Nicholas Wolterstorff has argued in his Taylor lectures, thinking out of a particular faith tradition has a legitimate place at a university, provided universities understand themselves as pluralistic rather than as exclusively secular institutions.

How the Christian faith marginalised itself

Even if we reject Kronman’s two critiques of religion’s role in the humanities, there are other obstacles to the Christian faith’s contribution to restoring the question of the meaning of life to the humanities. The obstacles are internal to the contemporary Western expressions of the Christian faith itself, as well as to reflection about it.

Early in his book, Kronman stated, not without chagrin, that churches “now enjoy a near monopoly” on “the institutionally organized provision of instruction in the meaning of life.” He need not worry, alas. In the West at least, the Christian faith is undergoing a subtle transformation: instead of sketching a life worth living and offering an orientation for life’s pursuits, it often serves merely to energize and mend people as they pursue their preferences formulated without reference to the faith they embrace. Faith then degenerates to a “performance enhancing drug” and “religious band-aid” – or, in the words of Christian Smith, God functions as a combination cosmic therapist and divine butler. A faith that has itself abandoned serious engagement with the question of what kind of life is worth living can hardly nudge universities to return to this question.

One might think that theological schools would offer an antidote to such a bastardization of faith. Yet, for the most part, they don’t. Reasons for this are many, but the primary one is that theological schools find themselves in a predicament similar to that of the humanities themselves. This is particularly true of divinity schools at our major research universities.

The research ideal with its emphasis on advancing knowledge and the consequent need for increased specialization is exerting an almost irresistible pull. Now, for professors at theological schools, motivation for “advancing knowledge” does not come merely from outside – from having internalized the values of the research ideal while pursuing advanced degrees, from the expectations of the guild, or from the pressures of the tenure system – it comes also from the faith’s own internal demand for understanding, and therefore from the need for knowledge about its origins, development, and the plausibility of its claims.

But the external pressures of the research ideal have reversed the order of priorities. The main focus is no longer on the character of life worth living, but on specialized knowledge whose relation to reflection about life worth living has become either non-existent or obscured. Reflecting on the life worth living requires viewing life as a whole and that in turn requires viewing the Christian faith as a whole. The research ideal is undermining both endeavours.

Moreover, what I have called “the imperialism of preferences” has left its mark on divinity schools, not just on the humanities. There is a creeping sense that we ought to assume that all comprehensive accounts of life, particularly all religions, are roughly equally true and equally effective as paths to the divine. Indeed, since we are prone illegitimately to transfer to ideas what are legitimate egalitarian sensibilities when applied to persons, there is a presumption that something is wrong with those who don’t make such an assumption. Which one of the accounts of life worth living floating around in the marketplace of “spiritualities” we chose is a matter of mere “preference,” a matter of what we are “into” today and what we might no longer be into tomorrow. As a consequence, rigorous debates about alternative accounts of the life worth living internal to the Christian faith, as well as those embodied in other religions, have almost disappeared from divinity schools.

Not long after 9/11, I had extensive conversations regarding theology, religious studies and divinity schools with Larry Summers, then the president of Harvard University. In the course of these conversations he told me: “You know, Miroslav, if Harvard were being founded today, it would have no divinity school.” As so often was the case, Larry Summers’s proverbial bluntness had the virtue of focusing the discussion. Ever since those conversations, the question of what divinity schools and theology are good for in universities has stayed with me. As a member of the search committee for the dean of Yale Divinity School, I’ve asked that question of every candidate we interviewed. Given the dominance of the research ideal in the university and the imperialism of preferences in the wider culture, this is a critical question for divinity schools.

It would not have helped my case against Summers much had I responded that in a globalized world of resurgent and politically assertive religions we need to understand religions and their relation to their environments. This is true, but there is no need for divinity schools in order to pursue that kind of study of religion. If knowledge of religion is the goal, we can dispense even with religious studies departments; indeed, an argument can be made that one studies religions and their role in contemporary societies best in the context of a variety of other departments, such as sociology, philosophy, psychology or biology.

I took a different tack with Summers. My argument was that the primary function of divinity schools is to engage constructively with religious traditions, to reflect on the account of the self, social relations and the good inscribed in a given religion and relate it to the challenges of living in today’s world. Professors at a Christian divinity school (such as Yale) or professors of Christian studies at a multi-faith divinity school (such as Harvard), should understand their work as a contribution to a sustained critical reflection about life worth living as inscribed in the core convictions of the Christian faith.

If this were to happen, their endeavours could feed into and stimulate reflection on the same issue in the humanities and thus contribute to the central educational mission of the university – teaching students not just to understand the world and achieve their goals in it, but, perhaps even more importantly, to make wise judgments about what those goals should be and how to pursue them in intellectually and morally responsible ways.

Christian faith and the university – a modest proposal

The Christian faith can help universities build robust humanities programs in which the question of life worth living figures prominently. This may in fact be the most important contribution that the Christian faith has to make to the flourishing of universities, just as participating vigorously in the public debate on life worth living might be the most important contribution to public life more broadly. Whether the Christian faith will in fact make this contribution depends on at least two conditions.

First, universities have to come to see themselves as pluralistic rather than secular institutions – secular here in the sense of being committed to secular humanism. They ought to be committed to the rigorous use of reason, not to a particular worldview. Correspondingly, Christians at the universities must see the Christian faith as one of many legitimate perspectives at the university, all of which are important not just to the university’s mission but to the integrity of reflection about the Christian faith itself.

Second, academic theologians (and more broadly, those who reflect actively on faith, such as historians and philosophers) must resist letting the research ideal dominate the scope of their intellectual engagement and they must reject the notion that the accounts of life worth living can be properly treated as mere unreflected “preferences.”

Mindful that at the heart of the Christian faith is an account of self, social relations, and the good, they should channel most of their energies into giving an account of a meaningful life and explicating how such a life looks in the context of multiple and ever new challenges of living in the contemporary world.

Miroslav Volf is Henry B. Wright Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School, and Founder and Executive Director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. He is the author of A Public Faith and Allah: A Christian Response. He is currently teaching (with Ryan McAnnally-Linz) a course on “Life Worth Living” at Yale Divinity School.

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A course he teaches at Yale on this topic asks students to compare the conceptions of the good life promoted by the Buddha, Moses, Mohammed, Jesus, John Stewart Mill and Nietzsche.