This week I have been thinking about American higher education, the arena of my professional career and the vantage point from which I continue to view our rather alarming national political tensions. Higher education is, of course, a vast topic, and even in a short blog essay it invites personal divagations and subordinations of a probably annoying kind. Eventually I shall arrive at what I have most been thinking about, which is a spirited debate between prominent biblical scholars, one Catholic and one Protestant, around the hinge of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
This has been the week of the Princeton Class Reunions, a very big deal around here, and one in which I have traditionally participated in a low-key way. But this year for the first time I eschewed the campus entirely. I simply wasn’t up to it—physically or spiritually. The solvent of passing time—I retired from teaching nearly twenty years ago—has eroded the vivacity of my felt connections with current faculty and current students alike. I am now, like others, an observer. And every observer will have his or her own sense of the symbiosis between our educational institutions and national political and cultural trends. In my view the dangerous hostility of the quarrel now in many instances approaches the fervor of odium theologicum, the intense, bitter, mutual loathing of the churchmen of the sixteenth century. So that is the odd context in which my disparate subjects have been related in my mind.
Our nation’s signal contributions to the history of higher education are numerous, and from the very start they reflect important aspirations of the young nation. The great scholars and teachers involved in their foundations were, in my opinion, among the many heroes of the Heroic Age. Harvard, Yale, Princeton and a few other institutions were already established before the Revolution. The first half of the nineteenth century and the post-Civil War period saw the foundations of new institutions that in their variety and founding conceptions would typify a distinctively American cooperation, or symbiosis, of national aspiration, spiritual vision, and practical requirement, a model that has persevered to this day. At a time when the states had little cash but lots of empty land there emerged a new kind of institution—the land-grant college—that remains, in my opinion—one of our nation’s great cultural inventions. Among the leaders of what was in retrospect a great national movement was Andrew Dickson White, one of the two co-founders of Cornell University and Cornell’s first president.
Like many other early educational leaders, White was animated by intensely held Christian religious motives. He recognized, along with nearly the entire educational establishment of his age, both the historical and the spiritual affinities of traditional western education and religion. But he was also much interested in the natural sciences and the promise of their practical application. And of course he was aware of the obscurantist traditions of some Christian thought. The title of his most famous book, A History of the Warfare of Science with Religion in Christendom (1896), will give you an idea of his view of intellectual progress.
The most famous episode of this “warfare”, especially for Protestant historians, was the Roman Church’s persecution of the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei in 1615 on account of his maintenance of the Copernican theory of heliocentrism. By a somewhat circuitous route I have been reviewing scenes from this ancient war from a literary point of view.
I begin with the supposition that whether we know it or not we are by now all Copernicans. Nikolaus Copernicus was the genius astronomer who in 1543 published a book entitled On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, explaining in its essence the basic astrophysics of our solar system. The importance of this book in the history of thought would be difficult to exaggerate. We have been taught (and convinced) that the earth is a planet, that it is in constant and quite regular motion, and that the diurnal phenomena of our visual experience (that is, alternating periods of sunlight and darkness) are the results of our residential orb regularly circulating around another orb, the sun. But we do not have the felt experience of whirling about in space. Our experience is of a sun that “rises” and “sets”. We have dawn; we have dusk. Earthlings are the center of a large cosmic drama moving in a stately sarabande around them. This was an “image” potentially comfortable for our self-importance. To be told that, No, not at all, our bailiwick is a flyspeck in an infinite universe not merely immeasurable but actually unimaginable, one which beggars the concepts of finitude and infinitude alike—you may not find all that good news for the superego of the human species.
The “Galileo episode” is among the most famous episodes in the history of science. It has also remained an indelible stain upon the Roman Church’s magisterial claim. But the “history of science,” for us a clearly delineated topic with its own scholarly monuments and protocols, did not in the sixteenth century exist as such. The natural lens through which conventional thought approached most questions was a literary lens. The astronomical problem was a literary problem since the formulation of its issues were bookish. The book, naturally was The Book—that is, the Bible, which had quite a bit to say about what we now call astronomy and cosmology, beginning with its first verse: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
The debate to which I referred in the first paragraph was between Robert Bellarmine, a learned Jesuit who was one of the ornaments of the Roman Catholic counter-Reformation, and the Anglican William Whitaker, a profoundly erudite English scholar who spent much of his life at Cambridge. Whitaker was the author of A Disputation on Holy Scripture (1588)—the original of course in Latin, the international language of learned discourse. The dispute is often if indirectly about the nature of figurative language; I hope I might one day explore this debate as an episode in the history of literary criticism. The prospects are dim, however. Though the intellectual issues are perennial and at times even still vibrant, the stench of the odium theologicum cannot be perfumed away. The learnedly unreliable Oxford antiquary Anthony Wood (or as he called himself Anthony à Wood), a late seventeenth-century literary gossip indispensable to students of the literature of his age, claims that though Bellarmine hated the heretic in Whitaker, he admired the scholar in him. Indeed, he went so far as to keep a portrait of the Puritan polemicist in the Jesuit studium in Rome! We may regard this anecdote as “of uncertain authenticity.”
(Saint) Robert Bellarmine