The relativism which Harvard fosters is reflected also in Faculty members' views on courses on religion. While there is enthusiasm for courses about religion, there is agreement that courses in religion would be abhorrent to the spirit of the modern, secular Harvard.
In his new book, Religion, Politics and the Higher Learning, Morton G. White, professor of Philosophy, emphasizes the differences between inculcating any type of belief and discussing religion in the same critical spirit with which philosophy is taught. White claims that teaching religion in any meaningful manner involves teaching a particular religion. Since the non-sectarian college is not prepared to do this, he argues that it must confine its instruction to teaching about religion, which "no more constitutes teaching people to be religious...than teaching about Communism amounts to propagating it."
Professor Demos also approves of courses about religion, but he replies that students are not merely taught about democracy. "Don't we teach democracy and science in the sense of indoctrination? Certainly this is a valid point; American youth learn the democratic method through student government and the democratic hagiography in their history courses. Democracy, however, is an ideology almost universally approved in the United States, and its wide-spread acceptance leads many to overlook the fact that education about democracy has been replaced by indoctrination in democracy.
To teach religion, on the other hand, is to deal with issues which arouse division. To teach at most about religion thus seems a necessity in a college which desires to maintain diversity without strife and to provide a haven for many points of view. Buttrick recognizes this necessity. In his course on the New Testament, Humanities 124, he is concerned with showing the influence of Biblical "categories of thought." He states that "a university is for understanding. Our concern is not to say whether you should believe or not believe." Buttrick thus provides another example of the split that exists in the University teacher who is a committed man--the instructor who does believe and is convinced that his belief is one which is tremendously meaningful, but who must demur from advocating it.
Tillich Sees Spiritual Realms
Whereas professors like Morton White and Buttrick emphasize the difference between teaching religion and teaching about it, Paul Tillich, University Professor, sees an essential spiritual unity in all attempts at scholarship. In a disquisition last November to the Overseers on "Religion in the Intellectual Life of the University," Tillich concluded: "In many realms of the scholarly work of a university the religious dimension is revealed, independent of a concrete religious tradition." For Tillich, "the religious question is the question of human existence generally."
Since in all the various areas of learning--sociology, psychology, the sciences, history, philosophy, even business administration--ultimate question about existence are involved, these studies represent practical actualizations of a vast and embracing spiritual realm. In the Tillichian transcendental realm there can be no divorce of preaching and pedagogy; each discipline is a partial manifestation of the Meaning of Being.
For Tillich, then, a University must by its very nature transcend mere secular considerations; it is an institution dedicated to matters of ultimate concern. For teachers with less of the Tillichian "vision," however, the questions of religion in education appear more controversial, for they are bound to earthly considerations of sect and creed.
General unanimity seems to exist that Harvard is secular, despite its Protestant Divinity School. Harvard's present secularist position, though, represents the end product of a long evolution, and the vestiges of earlier evidences of a sectarian and religious past have sometimes caused friction.
Probably no one has been more concerned with the role of religion in a secular university than President Pusey. In his Divinity School address in 1953 and his Baccalaureate sermons, Pusey has stressed that the twentieth century has destroyed earlier illusions about man's nature, that the Christian psychology provides better comprehension of the nature of man than did nineteenth century liberalism. President Pusey is evidently a sincerely devout man; and with the issue of faith so important in his own thinking, resolving the tensions between the role of a secular university embracing diverse beliefs and what he believes to be the central truths of human existence must be especially challeenging.
In his Baccalaureate sermon of 1954 he declared: "This relationship to God--the attitude of reverence--this is the paramount thing. All of us stand perpetually in need in our lives of that basic affirmation which is the essence of faith." In his 1957 address, President Pusey disavowed any tie between faith, and sectarianism in the University: "In my judgment the people who are speaking for religion in universities today should not be understood as speaking in favor of a particular church. They are not asking for a special privilege."
In 1958 President Pusey turned to the problem of secularism and tried to resolve the conflict between what he saw as the deleterious elements of secularism and the fact that Harvard was a secular university. Pusey clarified, "There can be no quarrel in a university with secularism itself, but only with it as it comes hubristically in its turn to pretend to speak for the whole of life." For Pusey, therefore, there is no absolute resolution of the dichotomy, but rather a balancing of religious and secular forces, each of which has its proper role in the University's tradition.
Such a balancing, however, seems an unstable equilibrium; it depends very much on a great deal of restraint and tact by both the opponents of religion and the advocates of it.
Moreover, there is not even a simple dichotomy between secular and religious forces in the University. For Harvard itself is based on a faith--summed up by the term Liberal Education--which is in potential conflict with other faiths. Perhaps at Harvard more than any other school the belief in liberal education is inculcated; however, its tenets are seldom recognized as the credo of a faith, which rests on assumptions as unprovable as any other faith. Knowledge through scholarship is justified and constant questioning become the chief paths to this summum bonum. There are of course all the institutional trappings of a visible church; the hierophantic gamut running from teaching fellow to full professor; the sacraments of grades and commencement, the semi-monastic existence of acolyte graduate students, and ordained faculty.
More than this, however, there exists a clear pervasive spirit of questioning, skepticism, tolerance--in sum, an apotheosis of relativism and tolerance. At Harvard the values of relativism are quickly transformed from means to ends, from mere method to metaphysics. They become the "practical postulates" of a University which wants to embrace spokesmen for opposing views in a harmonious institution. Even the religious person, moreover the believer in salvation through a particular church, must divorce his role of believer from his role of teacher. If he would teach he cannot by direct methods fish for souls.
The pupil too must become in some sense a split person if he holds some truths, explicitly or implicitly, as sacrosanct. He must adopt the methods of Descartes, who wished to examine all truths, yet simultaneously set aside certain ethical and religious maxims for everyday life. The University demands a perpetual examination, a faith in nonfaith, a paradoxical commitment to noncommitment which produces an academic dualism that reflects well the conflicts of the twentieth century.