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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 September 2024
This article should be regarded, perhaps even more than others in this series, as the expression of a very personal point of view. Dons are individualistic people, liable to hold highly original and sharply divergent views on questions both of principle and policy within the university, and I am very conscious that I have no right whatever to speak as representing any considerable body of opinion among Catholic senior members of universities in this country; indeed it cannot be said at present that any such coherent body of opinion exists, though the sort of subjects about which I am going to write are certainly being increasingly seriously considered and discussed.
The appearance of a body of Catholics playing any noticeable part in the life of the universities of this country is a very recent phenomenon. It was the great movement of liberalism (in Newman’s sense of the word ‘liberal’) in the middle nineteenth century which opened the universities to Catholics; and they were permitted to take advantage of the new possibilities only after what must now seem to us an unnecessary and regrettable delay. It was regrettable, not only from the point of view of the standards of taste and intelligence of the Catholic body, but from the point of view of the university: for, though some sort of university reform was certainly urgently needed, the reform which actually took place broke the connection between religion and learning which still existed in the ancient universities ana effected a thorough-going secularisation of university life which has had very far-reaching consequences.
1 An excellent starting-point for discussion and stimulus to thought about the problems of the modern university is the new Pelican edition of Redbrick University, by ‘Bruce Truscot’, which includes die whole of die original Redbrick University (first published in 1943) and the major part of These Vital Days, its sequel dealing widi problems which arose out of the war and commenting on some animated discussions which resulted from proposals put forward in Redbrick University.
2 Josef Piepcr's Musse und Kult (Kosel, Miinchen 1948) is an admirable modern exposition and application of this doctrine.
3 Cf. on this point Fr V. Wilkin's excellent article in Crux, Vol. 5, No. 2 (January 1951)Google Scholar.
4 The lay theologian or religious philosopher has, both in Byzantine and modern times, played an important and valuable part in the intellectual life of the Eastern Orthodox.
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