John Carroll Society Lecture
Thank you Elizabeth for that kind introduction and for your dedicated service on our board of trustees.
First, I would like to thank our President and Catholic University law alumnus, Andy Cook and our Chaplain, Msgr. Vaghi, for inviting me to join you all this evening. As you may know, Msgr. Vaghi serves as an important voice on Catholic University’s Board of Trustees. I am so grateful to him for welcoming Nancy and me to DC with open arms in July and continuing to share his wisdom and advice throughout my first year as President.
Finally, I want to recognize and thank our performers this evening from the Rome School of Music, Drama, and Art. You heard Madelynn Washburn sing the National Anthem earlier this evening. She is a senior at the University graduating next month. Thank you, Madelynn.
The string quartet you enjoyed throughout dinner are all graduate students from our Rome School of Music, Drama, and Art. Please join me in thanking Rizwan Jagani, Carolina Pedroza, Yun Kang, and Chiara Pappalardo for their performance.
Tonight, I would like to share some thoughts on the nature and meaning of a Catholic University. What is a University? How did they evolve, or devolve? What are they typically today? Are they living up to their promise? And how do we, at The Catholic University of America, attempt to incarnate the meaning and purpose of a Catholic University?
As the name implies, a “university” must be something that is united, uniting, and universal. What exactly is that theme that creates that unity of a University? As Christians and Catholics, we believe that Jesus Christ is “the way, the truth, and the life.” Moreover, He is the logos, the very intelligent principle by which the universe and all creation was made (as John’s Gospel tells us). “All things were made through Him, and without Him was anything made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.” Thus, at root, a University can and must be united by Jesus Christ, or it cannot be a University.
The origin or roots of education, of the liberal arts, and of universities can be traced back to the Greek philosopher Socrates. His teaching, summarized in the Phaedo (or “On the Soul”) by Plato, lays out the principles for true education, which were that the nature and calling of the human person is to know, and specifically to know truth, being, wisdom, goodness, and virtue, i.e. the forms or the highest causes. These forms or highest causes defined by Socrates and his students came to be understood as the qualities of God, or the transcendentals. Later, beauty was added to this list of transcendentals.
The study of these forms is the origin of the liberal arts, the trivium (three ways) and the quadrivium (or four ways), which were developed and refined by Marco Varro, St. Augustine, Boethius, and Cassiodorus. The trivium or three ways are grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic (or logic), and are considered the basis for sound deductive reasoning. The quadrivium or four ways are arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, or pure number, number in space, number in time, and number in space and time, respectively. And, again, the purpose of the liberal arts, as the name implies, was to liberate us or to free us to be fully human. This makes sense in the light of Jesus as the unifying theme as we can only be free if we are free from sin. The liberal arts served as an organizing principle to study all knowledge and to do so in an integrated fashion. The very first universities – Paris, Bologna, Salamanca, Oxford – were all based on the liberal arts.
But nominalism, the view that the universals or transcendentals have no actual reality and are simply ideals, undermined this integrating principle of the first universities. Later, the rise and success of the scientific method, in which material observations are accumulated and from which testable hypotheses about the behavior of nature and the world, led to a displacement and decline in the privileged use of deductive reason, to the extent now that many believe that material reality is all that exists in the universe and that there is no transcendent reality (despite all the evidence to the contrary). These philosophical forces have led to a serious fragmentation of the unifying principles of a university, to the extent that many philosophers and others have bemoaned the fact that, in their view, there is no such thing anymore as a University, but rather they have devolved into multiversities. One can see this fragmentation readily in the ways that many academic programs and disciplines in the university do not engage or talk to each other.
So how exactly can a University recover its unity, its universality, when the intellectual space occupied by scientism and materialism are so pervasive? Surely by returning to an intentional infusion of the transcendentals into its curricula. This has been demonstrated repeatedly in educational experiments around the country. One excellent example is the Integrated Humanities Program, also known as the Pearson Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas in the 1970s. The program had the motto “Let them be born in wonder” or “Nascantur in Admiratione” and led to numerous conversions to Catholicism. The program attempted (and I would argue succeeded) in instilling a sense of awe and wonder by engaging in numerous activities like folk dancing, stargazing, poetry citing and others designed to educate the students in beauty.
The merits of such a principle, namely educating for beauty and wonder, are that this can be readily applied to all the disciplines. Because the transcendentals ultimately originate in the Person of Jesus Christ, an education for beauty is necessarily also an education for truth, goodness, being, wisdom, and virtue. But what exactly is beauty?
The dictionary defines beauty as “a pleasing quality associated with harmony of form or color, excellence of craftsmanship, truthfulness, originality, or other, often unspecifiable property.” St Thomas Aquinas in his discourse on beauty identifies three key qualities of beauty: integritas or wholeness (related to harmony), consonantia or proportion and symmetry, and claritas or radiance (the revelation of the interior form or whatness of a beautiful creation). We easily recognize and appreciate the properties of wholeness, proportion, and symmetry. Symmetry is the basis of so much of our scientific understanding of the universe. We also recognize the importance of symmetry and proportion in our understanding of beauty in living creatures and human persons. But what about the originality, the radiance, and the “unspecifiable property” of beauty?
Despite the importance of symmetry, harmony, proportion in beauty, all natural creations in the universe, including all human persons, are absolutely and undeniably unique. For example, snowflakes, which all appear to be hexagonal crystals, have unique defect patterns on close microscopic examination. The Standard Model of subatomic particle physics was ultimately based on super symmetry, but on close examination, the symmetry is always broken. Each and every human person, while they might appear similar to others, on close examination has a unique personality, appearance, and character, and DNA structure. The richness of the creation that God has made is beyond measure, something we marvel and wonder at. And hence the “unspecifiable property” of beauty is what we Catholics call “mystery.” Thus, the study of the natural world and the study of the human person, and the study of the transcendentals, is always steeped in mystery and wonder.
One great temptation for us as human persons who begin to know and understand the book of nature is that we can begin to believe that everything in the universe is knowable. The element of mystery should caution us to be humble and grateful for those things that we do understand but appreciative and awestruck by the mysterious.
Here are some noteworthy examples of this mystery from science. At the turn of the 20th century, the scientific world and the world of physics believed we were on the verge of being able to completely describe all the workings of the universe through the fundamental laws of Newtonian mechanics, i.e. a world in which if we simply knew the locations, velocities, and accelerations of all “particles” in the universe, we could predict precisely all future locations and motions. That world view was completely and irreversibly upended by Albert Einstein and Max Planck with their important work and papers on the wave properties of light and the discovery of quantum mechanics. Nearly 120 years later, we still have no unifying theory of Newtonian mechanics and quantum mechanics, despite the very best efforts by thousands of scientists.
In the 1980s, the scientific world believed that all forces and energies could be explained through the four foundational forces: electromagnetism, gravity, the weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force. All the talk of science was that we would soon have a unified force field theory. But then it was discovered that the observed rotational velocities of galaxies did not fit these forces or theory and it was postulated that there are forces, energies, and matter that are as yet undiscovered and unstudied called dark energy and dark matter, and that this energy and matter makes up the majority of energy and matter in the universe. Again, a complete upending of much of what we thought we knew about the universe. And so the theory of dark energy and dark matter is now a dogma in science despite the fact that we still have no direct evidence of either.
What are we to make of the mysteries of the universe that science seems to continue to uncover as time goes on? Simply that we do not have all the answers and that we should continue forward in humility as we continue to uncover the truth, which we know can never contradict itself. We should therefore have confidence that belief in God, belief in Jesus Christ, the way, the truth, and the life, and the truths that we discover in nature and in our uncovering of the truths of the human person can never be at odds with each other. In fact, they reinforce each other, as Pope St John Paul wrote in Fides et Ratio, in which we learn that “faith and reason are two wings upon which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.” Reason makes our faith more luminous and intelligible and faith makes our reason more open to the ultimate questions of reality. Truncating or diminishing one or the other impoverishes our ability to understand the truth about the universe and ourselves.
How is The Catholic University of America approaching this important integration of knowledge and of learning? We are doing so in many ways and I will share a few examples.
The study of business and the creation of new corporations with new value propositions typically entails the study of what I would call traditional business topics such as finance, accounting, strategy, management, and marketing. Curricula at universities will often combine some collection of these topics with general education topics such as mathematics, science, and the humanities. Our Busch School of Business at The Catholic University of America has seamlessly integrated these traditional business topics with philosophy, theology, virtue ethics, and entrepreneurial thinking, all within a unified curriculum. This is an excellent example of what it means to take the transcendentals as the organizing theme for a University.
Another example is our current investigation of artificial intelligence at Catholic University or AI. Technology companies have developed so called generative language models of machine learning that appear to do many of the same things that human persons do. For example, Chat GPT (or Generative Pre-training Transformer application) appears to be able to write texts and even code software programs on command with queries using natural language programming. But in reality these programs can only mimic or interpolate that which has been programmed as the hundreds of billions of parameters of training data using to code the transformer would dictate. This naturally raises very important questions about the technological products of humankind (like Chat GPT) and the nature of the human person:
What does it mean to be human? What is the human mind and of what is it capable? What are the intrinsic limits of computational cognitive computing?
And based on the answers to the above questions:
What is the most effective and ethical way for humans and machines to interface and engage with each other?
The answers to these questions require a proper anthropology of the human person and a proper understanding of the limits of machines. Human persons have infinite dignity and their minds are more than simply “material particles.” Indeed, one of the most important qualities of human intellection is what Aquinas and Dun Scotus called intellectus, or holistic, contemplative gazing. This is in stark contrast to “ratio” or discursive reasoning. Intellectus is the ability to take in and contemplate the “big picture,” in its totality, something a machine simply cannot do.
Our University is bringing the disciplines and ultimate questions of philosophy and moral theology to bear on the challenges posed by computer science and AI to create a wholly new interdisciplinary field of “ethical AI,” a critically important area that can only be done at a Catholic University.
In summary, a University can only be a University if it is unified by a single principle which must be a belief in the Way, the Truth, and the Life, namely Jesus Christ. This belief broadens, deepens, and unifies all the disciplines and enables us to truly be a University. It combats the enervating qualities of the false philosophies of nominalism, scientism, and materialism. It facilitates the study of the ultimate forms of truth, beauty, goodness, wisdom, being, and virtue, the highest causes or transcendentals. These ultimate forms must be at the center of any education worthy of the name and they must be the organizing principles of an integrated curriculum.
As the Apostolic Constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae (From the Heart of the Church) teaches us the privileged task of the Catholic University is to “unite existentially by intellectual effort two orders of reality that too frequently tend to be placed in opposition as though they were antithetical: the search for truth and the certainty of already knowing the fount of truth.” This is our earnest and most important aim of the Catholic University of America.