Lobkowicz, Meeting di Rimini, 27.08.04

Dear friends,

if you would make an inquiry among university presidents and ask them whether their institutions stimulate their students to grow in human and cultural maturity, you probably would receive one of four answers. One would be a flat “No”; “We train for professions and do not educate; we neither want to nor are able to replace parents”. Another answer would be: “Yes, of course. The studium generale is since decades an integral part of our programme”. A still another would be: “We are discussing this problem since many years but still have not found a satisfactory solution”. Finally, the fourth would run thus: “I just spoke about it at the dies academicus and of course I have mentioned John Henry Newman´s Idea of a university”.

Each of these four answers is in its own way dishonest or, to put it more mildly, misses the point if one considers the chance that a university training might offer more than professional training, i.e. that it might lead beyond pure knowledge and professional skill to something that reminds of wisdom. Let me begin with the fourth answer. Of course at celebrations the President or another speaker often invokes an idea of the university that includes education and implicitly also an education to human maturity and wisdom. During my twenty three years as President of two German universities I have done so many times. However, to put it ironically, the more impressive this festival lecture will be the farther away it will be from the realities. It is easy to remind an audience of an ideal; but festival lectures are not expected to be realistic. They are nothing but one of the many ridiculous rites that universities like to celebrate. Moreover, as beautiful as the famous text by Cardinal Newman may be, the times when a university could define as its aim the education of Catholic gentlemen is long past.

The first answer, on the contrary, indicates an almost ideological blindness. It suggests that the transmission of value neutral knowledge and professional skills does not educate. It presupposes that language can be value neutral; this may be possible in the case of mathematical formulae but does not work in ordinary language that no teacher can avoid using. Moreover, this first answer overlooks that students usually are young people who are still looking for what is true or false, right and wrong. A teacher, especially a good one, educates whether he wants it or not. By excluding everything that is existentially relevant he implicitly suggests to his students that science and/or learning, of course connected with the professional skills, is the only thing that really counts. He conveys the point of view defended by the German sociologist, Max Weber, hundred years ago. There is on the one hand, the idea goes, the realm of empirical facts and scientific laws; this is the only thing about which we can have reliable objective knowledge. And there is the realm of religions, world views, values that may be important for one´s individual life but about which a rational discussion is not possible. This kind of attitude considers itself realistic; but in reality it is totally unrealistic since it overlooks that the knowledge of facts and laws is nothing but an instrument that one can use for good as well as for bad actions, for a meaningful life as well as for a life that leads nowhere..

The second answer, the one referring to a special kind of courses open to, and at some universities imposed upon, all students is of course more honest. But one has to make a distinction. At most universities the studium generale is nothing but an attempt to look beyond the specialization a student has chosen. It this sense, it contributes to something one might call “cultural maturity”. But rarely if ever it stimulates a growth in human maturity. Moreover, the overwhelming majority of students is not particularly interested in this kind of general lectures since each of the teachers will speak only about his own subject. A synthesis never emerges. And young people instinctively look for a synthesis, a view of reality that gives their life a meaning. If the university does not offer them anything reminding of such a synthesis, does not remind them that all of us ask themselves what our life is for, they will either succumb to one of the many ideologies of the day or become cynics, people who do not care about what is human and what is contrary to our human nature.

Thus there remains the third answer, the one of a president who says that he together with his professors are trying to find a way but found none that seems satisfactory. It is by far the most honest of the three answers but it holds back a crucial point. Since the end of World War II universities have become distribution systems for the many professions that a knowledge or science based society needs. Of course they do not transmit only knowledge but also teach skills and thereby train what one might call “professional virtues”: the willingness to work hard, the awareness of the danger of acting without thinking, tolerance for ideas one disagrees with, thoroughness, scrupulousness and the like. Quite often the teachers also will emphasize the importance of finding out the truth and warn of ideologies. But as I said, even this third answer usually overlooks a crucial point. Universities almost inevitably reflect their social milieu and this milieu has in modern societies become extremely pluralist. Some of the students may be devout Christians, or for that matter Jews or Muslims, but the majority of them, in any case in our highly developed countries, either are not interested in religion at all or have cooked up for themselves one of the many intellectual cocktails contemporary society produces. This creates for the teacher a situation that makes it very difficult to communicate or even only to mention his personal convictions, not to speak of the possibility to make of it a part of his teaching. Moreover, the contemporary understanding of tolerance has in many quarters resulted in the awkward misconception that it is better to have no firm convictions at all. The result is that at most universities the overall atmosphere is one of agnosticism, of a vague scepticism, indifference, in any case as far as issues of existential relevance are concerned.

It used to be different at Catholic universities. But the invitation of the Second Vatican Council to engage in a dialogue with the contemporary secular world has in many if not most Catholic universities resulted in an adjustment to the spirit of secular universities. When in the sixties of the last century I was teaching at the University of Notre Dame in the United States we were reminded each year (and had to sign a text indicating that we had read it) that if we would teach something that contradicts the doctrine of the Church or publicly behave in ways that the Church disapproves of we would risk to be fired without notice. Hardly any Catholic university dares to continue this practice, in part because it might loose the ensuing lawsuit. In fact, at many Catholic universities the problem is even deeper. One of the unexpected consequences of the Council´s invitation to open-mindedness was and is that the mentality of the secular world sloped over into the Church; today, you find little that is common to secular universities that a president of a Catholic university would not have to complain about. This certainly has helped Catholic universities to be less isolated but from the point of view of the Church the costs are so high that one sometimes wonders whether it might not be better if faithful Catholic professors would look for employment, or stay, at secular universities. It does not seem to me to be an exaggeration to say that the great majority of the faithful, in particular we intellectuals, were not well enough prepared for what the Council invited us to do. They had not realized what Hans Urs von Balthasar, before the Council one of the great fighters for what he himself called Die Schleifung der Bastionen, “The pulling down of the bulwarks”, wrote a few months before the Council ended. I quote: “The opening towards the world, aggiornamento, a widening of the horizon, the translation of what is Christian into a thought-language that today´s world understands, is only one side of the task. The other side is at least as important. Only a reflection upon the Christian spirit, the purification, deepening, centring of its idea will enable us to represent it in a trustworthy way, to radiate it, to translate it … Who desires more action, needs a deeper contemplation; who wants to form more, has to listen and to pray in a more intensive way; who wants to succeed better, must have grasped the basic unprofitableness of the Eternal Love in Christ and therefore also of all Christian love”.[1]

Let me then now try to say what at a university it might mean to lead from knowledge to wisdom. It is obvious that for an intellectual wisdom does not exclude knowledge and professional competence. It entails it. I emphasize this because pious maxims connected with incompetence only bring us Christians into discredit. In this sense Max Weber certainly was right: except in the office of the university chaplain a university is not a place for sermons. In fact, one of the motives for Weber´s relativism was his observation that too many professors misused their teaching for broadcasting their private value judgements. But knowledge, even if it is highly cultured, is as such still not wisdom. One can be culturally mature and at the same time be an absolute twit as far as human maturity goes.

Now it is of course not easy to say what exactly we mean by “wisdom”. The word has a long tradition and therefore, as it often happens with such words, is used in a variety of meanings that reach from cleverness through an enlightened mellowness rooted in a peaceful scepticism to the awareness of the deepest issues man is confronted with. Perhaps the simplest and most honest way to say what universities would have to do in order to lead their students beyond knowledge and skills to wisdom is that they should confront them with the truly important because deeply existential issues. You probably remember the four famous questions by which Immanuel Kant used to introduce his lectures on metaphysics: “What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope for? What is man?”.[2] To lead to wisdom basically means to encourage those who listen to you to ask themselves what is man´s destination, for which way of life they should opt, and which consequences the answer has for their life here and now.

You will perhaps object that, on the one hand, these are question that only theologians and philosophers ask, and to which, on the other hand, there are many wrong and only very few correct answers. Now it certainly is true that the questions mentioned are, or at least should be, professionally discussed by theologians and philosophers. But as already Aristotle wrote in one of his early dialogues, you cannot avoid philosophising. Either you do it or you have to explain why you are not willing to do it; in both cases you discuss philosophical issues[3]. They are questions that puzzle us simply because we are what we are, human beings. And they puzzle, indeed torture us because of the consequences of the answers for our daily life. Of course we can evade them – by making fun of them, by shrugging our shoulders, by returning to our daily busyness. The main problem of our time consists in our unwillingness to face ourselves and the issues that really count. We are surrounded by, and live in, a culture the main feature of which is to look for how to escape from what truly counts.

This is why I do not believe that there are many different answers to the really important existential questions. If you would make a public inquiry about how a wise woman or man should act in this or that situation you would of course receive a number of different answers. Such inquiries are nothing but a looking for opinions. If, however, somebody induces you to put this question to yourself and to ask it as radically as you can, the number of honest answers is very small. In the end, either nothing makes sense and you could as well commit suicide or else we have a destination that transcends us, transcends the whole of humanity and its history, invites us to what Luigi Giussani has called “the religious sense”[4].

And a university, even if it may be problematic to teach at it a definite variety of wisdom, certainly is a place where such questions emerge. Each good poem, each great book, each work of art, each important film is an invitation to raise them. And it can be incorporated into each subject of studies. I study e.g. chemistry. Why? Because as a chemist one finds well paid jobs. But why is it important to have a lot of money? Aren´t there other values that are more important? O.K., so I want to become chemist to help mankind. But why should I help mankind and what is the best way to help it? What is important in life and what does in the end not count? And what is the sense of all of this?

These are questions. One can answer them in different ways. But the more radically one asks them the deeper they lead us. If he has an interest in wisdom, in communicating a wisdom that reaches beyond mere knowledge, a university teacher should be willing to incite his students to ask them. There are hundreds of occasions for this at a university: a public discussion, a moral question raised by research and its progress, a personal tragedy, a beautiful day, a quotation of a silly headline in a newspaper, an intelligent joke.

In other words, the way from knowledge to wisdom is at first not more or deeper knowledge, are not doctrines but questions that we have to ask ourselves, existential inquiries about myself. In Gaudium et spes you find an interesting passage indirectly alluding to it. The traditional way to define man consisted in saying that he is the zoon logon echon, the animal rationale, the living being that has reason. The pastoral constitution does not deny this. But it somehow pushes it in the background by saying that the deepest hidden centre and indeed holy shrine of man is his conscience[5]. The way from knowledge to wisdom is an invitation to face and to follow conscience. Not the kind of conscience we so easily refer to when we try to justify and to gloss over something wrong that we have done. But the real conscience, the one that makes us shiver when we face it, since it confronts us with a Personal Absolute, with God about whom we know that he expects something from us.

Let me conclude with the following remark. If Christian faith were not the answer to our deepest yearnings, if it were something coming to us from the outside as an alien message, it would not be much worth, would be nothing but one of the many ideologies. St. Paul knew this and therefore his apostolate was so successful. But our situation today is in a way more difficult than that with which St. Paul was confronted. We have behind us a long history of Christianity and the Church. We should be grateful for and interested in it, and indeed we should love it. But we should not overlook that it is also a terrible burden. Everybody knows what the Christians believe, what they consider true wisdom. And it bores them, bores also many believers. It seems to contain no challenge, to be immune to fresh winds, constantly repeating the same. In this situation it has become quite difficult to teach Christian wisdom. But to induce people to address to themselves the questions that might lead to this wisdom has remained easy. They are an invitation to let oneself in for, to get involved in, a spiritual experiment that cannot remain hypothetical because it concerns ourselves in a radical way. Knowledge turns into wisdom when it becomes personally, existentially relevant. And there is no knowledge and no skill connected with it, there is no scientific or scholarly subject, in which this cannot happen.

Probably it will be the task of your generation to introduce this perspective into our universities. Your parents and grandparents and many of your older teachers were so busy in adjusting to a changing world and indeed a changing Church that they did not find the peace of heart and mind to achieve the synthesis, both theoretical and practical, that wisdom consists in. Some of you will become university teachers. But as you know quite well yourself, you can start this course already as students. Challenge politely the teachers and sooner or later many of them will be on your side, trying to help you.

[1] H.U.v.Balthasar, Zu seinem Werk, Einsiedeln 2000, 44 f.

[2] I. Kant, Vorlesungen über die Metaphysik, Erfurt 1821, reprint Darmstadt 1964, 5 f.

[3] Cf. the Berlin edition of Aristotle´s works, Berlin 1831, reprint Darmstadt 1960, II, 1484 a 4 ff.

[4] L.Giussani, Il senso religioso, German translation: Der religiöse Sinn, Paderborn 2003. The book has been translated into many languages.