Inaugural Address - September 30, 2005
Rev. Brian J. Shanley, O.P.
12th President of Providence College

The story goes that when Thomas Aquinas was informed in the spring of 1256 that he had been chosen to assume the office of magister in sacra pagina at the University of Paris ("master of the sacred page" was the technical term for a theologian in those days), he immediately began to pray fervently about the theme of his inaugural lecture.  The next night he experienced the apparition of a venerable Dominican-in one version St. Dominic himself-who answered his prayer by proposing the following line from Psalm 104:13 as his starting point:  Rigans montes de superioribus suis: de fructu operum tuorum satiabitur terra (in those days Dominican apparitions spoke in Latin).  An English rendering of the verse in your program reads: From thy high pavilion thou dost water the hills, the earth is enriched by thy provision.  The first sentence of the lecture articulates a core conviction about divine providence that permeates Aquinas's entire theological oeuvre and that I first learned as a student here: The king of the heavens, the Lord, established this law from all eternity: that the gifts of providence should reach what is lowest through intermediaries.  God's loving plan for creation is mediated by the ministry of creatures.  Specifically, Aquinas argues that the human activities of teaching and learning, the heartbeat of this campus, are integral parts of divine providence, for it is through teaching and learning that we appropriate God's own wisdom and thereby our happiness. That means that what we do here is not simply located geographically at a place called "providence", but rather finds its ultimate significance as part of God's own providence.  I offer these inaugural reflections on the meaning of being teachers and learners in the unfolding of the providence of God as the fruit of reflecting on themes that Aquinas goes on to develop in the rest of his inaugural lecture. Thus while I do not claim to be the beneficiary of a vision of a venerable Dominican, reading a venerable Dominican was an answer to my own prayer about what I should say today. By going back to our earliest Dominican university roots, we can re-appropriate what is perennial and central to the Dominican university vocation as our touchstone for the future.

The first theme that Aquinas develops is the exalted nature of theology as the ultimate form of wisdom.  Ingredient in this claim is the assumption that all of human knowledge can be integrated into an organic whole with theology at its summit.  Needless to say, this idea is not much in fashion at universities these days.  What many people do not know, however, is that even in Aquinas's own day it was thought by some to be a dubious assumption.  The raging intellectual question in 1256 at the University of Paris concerned whether Aristotelian philosophy could be reconciled with the Christian faith.  At stake in this debate was not simply whether or not Aristotelian philosophy could be brought into the service of theology, but also the very unity of the medieval university: if Aristotle and revelation could not be reconciled, then the Faculty of Theology and the Faculty of Arts could not be harmonized and the unity of the university would destroyed.  Without a unified whole of truth, there really is no university because there is no unum versus, no unity with respect to something one.  Following in the footsteps of his teacher Albert the Great, Aquinas spent his life demonstrating that when the philosophical works of Aristotle (which were then considered to be largely coterminous with rational truth itself) were properly understood, they were in harmony with the revealed truths of the Christian faith.  Aquinas's ultimate argument for the unity of truth and the corresponding unity of all disciplines at a university is relatively simple: the source of all truth is the one God who is both (1) the creator of our minds and the world that they are designed to know and (2) the source of all revealed truths believed in faith.  What is known to be true on the basis of reason cannot contradict what is revealed to be true in faith because both are ultimately grounded in the mind of God.  Truth-veritas, the motto of the order--is one and the ally of faith.

This foundational claim has important ramifications for thinking about the search for truth on a Catholic and Dominican liberal arts campus.  As Alasdair Macintyre has written, the greatest contemporary threat to the traditional conception of a catholic university education is posed not by some rival alternative view of the whole, but rather by the widespread view that there is no such thing as an ordered view of the whole.  If there is no ordered view of the whole, then a college education involves exposing students to a variety of disciplines with their own distinctive methodologies, leaving students with the feeling that truth is at best relativized to disciplines or at worst non-existent.  On this scenario, if there is to be a view of the whole, it will be what I choose to create for myself.  By contrast the catholic view of a university education is marked by a belief  that, at least in theory, it should be possible to see how all truths fit together into a single whole.  Cardinal Newman expressed the view thus: "That only is true enlargement of mind which is the power of viewing many things at once as one whole, of referring them severally to their true place in the universal system, of understanding their respective values, and determining their mutual dependence."  This capacity of mind is classically called "wisdom," and that is what a catholic education aims to inculcate.   

This classical view of an integrated edifice of knowledge poses challenges for us as a campus community.  First, what sort of curriculum best achieves such educational goals?  As we begin to do curricular review, we have to ask ourselves how we put together a unified view of the whole.  How do we balance the need to develop specialized competencies in a particular discipline (the major) in a way that also educates the whole person for an appreciation of truths in other domains?  How do we devise philosophy and especially theology courses that are truly integrative and architectonic?  In educating our students to integrate faith and reason, it is not enough to make some broad theological claims about the ultimate compatibility of truth and leave it at that level.  Aquinas himself demonstrated that you have to take on the contentious issues and show how apparent conflicts between the various bodies of knowledge, and especially between science and theology, can be resolved.   He himself worked through the debate in his own day between those who held that the world must have had a beginning in accord with the biblical account in Genesis and those who argued that science shows that the world cannot have had a beginning.  Aquinas endeavored to show that those on both sides of the question erred in claiming demonstrative status for their respective positions; neither science nor faith could prove its point. Historically what were thought to be genuine conflicts between faith and science have been largely generated by exaggerated claims by one side against the other.  While Aquinas himself seems to imply that the error would always be on the scientific side, his position allows for the possibility that an apparent conflict could be resolved by a re-interpretation of a theological claim when the scientific claim does have demonstrative force or even great probability.  In our own day we need to equip our students to parse through the debates about intelligent design versus evolution, for example, in a manner that involves the integration of science, philosophy, and religion.  The same can be said about the most contentious moral issues of our day: stem cell research, the nature of death, and the value of a human life in a mother's womb.  Public discourse on all these questions is impoverished because the participants usually approach the question from a narrow perspective that does not integrate scientific, philosophical, and theological distinctions.  A student educated at a Catholic and Dominican college ought to be able to integrate all the perspectives in the pursuit of the truth. 

In order to do that, however, they need to have good teachers.  And this is the subject of the second part of Aquinas's inaugural lecture.  He says that teachers need to be "lofty" like the mountains.  Now we all know that professors do not need to be reminded to be lofty, but what should that mean?  First, it means that teachers and students are not equals; there is an inherent hierarchy implied in Aquinas's comparison of teachers to mountains and students to the earth below.  Hierarchies are not as fashionable in our own day as they were in Aquinas's.  Yet given the contemporary pressures on the academy to conform itself to the marketplace, there is something salutary and corrective in reminding ourselves that teachers know more than students.  They are therefore entrusted with the responsibility of guiding students toward what they need to know rather than what they want to hear.   Universities and their teachers should not treat students as consumers whose demands have to be met for fear of losing market share.  It is rather that professors need to teach students to want to know what they need to know so that they can come to see the truth for themselves and choose what is worthy of choice.

There is a second sense in which teachers need to be "lofty": they have to have some sense of the whole and the place of their own discipline in that whole.  There is enormous pressure in our graduate educational system and in our system of tenure to encourage and indeed pressure professors to specialize in a narrow area.  The result can be a fragmented and compartmentalized faculty that often cannot relate its own domain of knowledge to the larger whole.  We cannot expect our students to integrate their own knowledge if their professors cannot help them.  While not everyone can master everything worth knowing, as Aquinas seems to have done, we need to foster a climate on this campus where professors are encouraged to go outside the bounds of their own disciplines and dialogue with colleagues in diverse fields.   The success of the Development of Western Civilization program that lies at the heart of our curriculum is directly attributable to the effort of the faculty to model for students the kind of integrated thinking that lies at the heart of a Catholic and Dominican liberal arts education.   The same modeling goes on in other interdisciplinary programs.

The third way in which teachers are to be "lofty" is that they need to inspire their students.  Despite the hierarchical nature of the teacher-student relationship, no teacher can force a student to learn.  Aquinas's understanding of the causal role of teachers in divine providence is dispositive:  a teacher cannot put his or her knowledge into the student's mind, but rather can only help the student to come to see things for him or herself.   In the best Socratic tradition, the teacher usually does this by first disabusing students of their own prejudices.  Once students know that they do not know, then they need to be inspired by the teacher's own passionate inquiry to make the effort themselves.  Teaching and learning is therefore fundamentally a collaborative endeavor: the teacher cannot teach if the learner does not learn, and the learner cannot learn if the teacher does not teach.  They need each other's complementary activity to engage in their own proper activity. 

Aquinas then turns to students in the third part of his lecture and says that the first quality of a good student is humility.  Now humility is not a popular virtue in our day, yet it lies at the heart of the Christian life in general and education in particular.   Humility is the virtue that enables us to accept the truth of our own condition, including its cognitive limitations.  In students, humility is the realization of where one is ignorant and the openness to listen to another with a different point of view in order to be pointed towards the truth.  I t is the precondition for the wonder that Aristotle understood to be at the root of human inquiry.   Aquinas quotes Proverbs 11:2: Where there is humility, there is wisdom.   Wisdom begins with humility.

Aquinas makes it clear, however, that humility is not uncritical passivity.  Aquinas admonishes students that they need to assess critically what they hear.  He himself was a man willing to ask uncomfortable questions and weigh competing arguments.  The worst kind of learning is the passive regurgitation of what has been reported by the professor.  Students have to ask questions, compare diverse claims, weigh the evidence for themselves, and arrive at their own conclusions.  As Aquinas goes on to say, they must be fertile like the earth, able to discover new things for themselves on the basis of what they have learned. Precisely because it is God who promises to fill the earth, students should be optimistic that their capacity to know will be fulfilled.  They will know that this is so when they are able to explain to others how things fit together as a whole.  In this lies wisdom. 

Those of us involved in Dominican education constantly face the challenge of articulating what it is that is distinctive about our tradition as opposed to the Jesuit tradition.  I would propose that the answer to that question lies in what we have talked about today.  Dominican education should above all else seek to cultivate students who are contemplatives.  I know this is a counter-intuitive and counter-cultural claim; I do not expect the marketing people of the college to make this our new slogan on the web site.  Yet it expresses the core conviction of the Catholic and Dominican educational ideal: both faith and reason are a means to contemplation of truth about God, and it is precisely for the contemplation of truth that we were made; in grasping this truth about truth-seeking, we come to know who we are as human beings created in the image and likeness of God.  If knowledge of truth is the purpose for which we are created and our ultimate end in the beatific vision, then it is vital for our students to come to understand the contemplative vocation as the heart of life.  In a world where human identity is in danger of being reduced to social or commercial value, and the role of education correlatively rethought in instrumental or market-place terms, it is a prophetic educational message to assert that the ultimate goal of education is contemplative wisdom.  In educating our students to lead contemplative lives we are at the same time educating them to make good choices:  it is not possible to know what is worth choosing, and even dying for, apart from an appreciation of the truth of the whole.   Moreover, no one who thinks about the truth of the whole can keep it to him or herself.  That is why another motto of the Dominican order is contemplare et aliis tradere-- to contemplate and to give to others the fruits of contemplation.   In educating our students to be contemplatives, we are educating them to be prophetic agents of social change.   The most powerful force for transforming both self and society is the contemplation of truth.

Let me conclude, as Aquinas does, with one last question: How do we realize what we have been talking about?  Aquinas's answer, not surprisingly, is the grace of God.  In recognition of this we began the formal part of the inauguration ceremonies in St. Dominic chapel with a prayer service.  Our chapel is nestled in the midst of residence halls, classrooms, and the library.  It is not a luxury:  it is the place where we make the ultimate connection between what we learn and how we live.  It is where our contemplative gaze finds its clearest focus and its deepest illumination.  If we are to become who God calls us to be as teachers and students of contemplative truth, then we must rely on the providence of God to guide our communal activity.  In formally assuming the office of president this day, I am keenly aware that I am a minister of divine providence.  As unworthy as I am, I conclude by making Aquinas's final inaugural words my own: However, although no one is adequate for this ministry by himself and from his own resources, he can hope that God will make him adequate.  "Not that we are capable of a single thought of our own resources, as if it came from us, but our adequacy is from God (2 Cor. 3:5).  So the teacher [and the president] should ask God for it.  "If people lack wisdom, they beg for it from God and it will be given them" (James 1:5).  May Christ grant this to us.  Amen.