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The University News

The Student News Site of Saint Louis University

The University News

The Student News Site of Saint Louis University

The University News

Giving the Devil his Due

For Christmas, my son gave me a copy of Natan Safransky’s The Case for Democracy (2004). It opened with the provocative accusation that in “the world of freedom . the primary challenge is finding the moral clarity to see evil” (p. xxii). This set me to thinking about the origins of this obfuscation of evil. My thinking has led me to conclude that the chief culprit is the modern university.

The modern university arose out of the ashes of the Middle Ages. Martin Luther destroyed the medieval unity of Christianity by his religious rebellion against papal authority. Politically, the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 gave birth to the sovereignty of the nation-state, separating religion from politics. The French and American revolutions went even further, by grounding government in popular consent rather than in a ruler’s divine right. Medieval cathedral spires pointing to heavenly salvation were replaced by gleaming skyscrapers trumpeting an earthly paradise of material wealth. The modern university undergirded this tectonic transition by articulating a new culture of secular humanism.

At first, the early universities tried to integrate this new creed of humanitas with the timeless, spiritual revelations of the church. In the New World, this translated into Harvard College’s Veritas pro Christo et ecclesia (“Truth for Christ and His church”). John Harvard, as a Congregational minister of substantial means, “dreaded to leave an illiterate ministry to the Church,” and left half his estate to the college “to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity.” His goal, of course, was not to replace revelation with reason, but to supplement revelation with reason. This dynamic tension that came to characterize Western higher education was later emblemized by the 20th-century motto of Duke University: Eruditio et Religio. Harvard later simplified this tension by stripping down its motto to Veritas, or truth. Ever in Harvard’s shadow, when Professor Nannerl Keohane assumed the presidency of Duke University in 1993, she professed, in her inaugural address, to be embarrassed by the Religio bit in the motto and proposed to similarly simplify Duke’s motto to just Eruditio.

When the Duke Divinity School raised a howl, Keohane partly retreated by permitting both words to remain in the motto, but only if it were understood that Religio was merely a synonym for Eruditio. The subject was politely dropped. SLU, I should acknowledge, remains clear in its divine purposes with the unabashed motto: ad majorem Dei gloriam (“for the greater glory of God”).

Speaking of God, despite the secularism dominant in these modernized mottoes, God has survived well in the modern world, or at least in the United States. Virtually all polls show that between 80 and 90 percent of Americans believe in God, and nearly half the population attends church on Sunday morning. But it is the Devil I worry about. Almost co-equal with God in the Middle Ages in inspiring fear and belief, it just took a thunder storm to make Martin Luther a believer in the Devil. Today, even with category-five hurricanes, no more than 20 percent of the American public believes in a Devil as an evil being. So what killed this belief?

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In the modern university, God is tolerated because secular humanism’s fundamental tenet is human perfectionism through knowledge, Eruditio. God, then, can be a useful symbol of this goal. The barrier to this perfectionism, however, is ignorance, not evil; and the Devil is not a helpful symbol of ignorance because ignorance, to the secular humanist, is a blank, a big nothing-not anything like a personal being. Moreover, this void can be progressively overcome by filling it up with the enlightenment of a university education-and perhaps even with a Ph.D.

But for those who see Veritas as also encompassing Religio, evil is not just ignorance, it is also sin. Sin is what cuts us off from God and can ensure our damnation, if we do not repent of our sins. Sin has its agency in the Devil, who infuses mortal souls with hate and envy just as God fills the repentant sinner with His love. Under secular humanism, however, evil is represented by ignorance; and, as a big blank, the Devil, unincarnate, has been rendered invisible in the Gnostic ivory towers of academe. As the French poet Baudelaire warns us, “The Devil’s deepest wile is to persuade us that he does not exist.” The modern university has become so well persuaded of this “ignorance is evil” principle that Lucifer himself is completely out of the Luce (“light”). Ignorance, indeed, may be overcome by knowledge, but not evil. Sometimes all knowledge does is to make evil more sophisticated.

In his bequest, John Harvard sought to establish an institution that would provide knowledge for life and faith for salvation: Eruditio et Religio. In the joining of these two spheres, Harvard College would proclaim its Veritas, or truth. How Harvard promoted erudition, we know well enough. But salvation’s Religio required overcoming the Devil, who seduces us to sin and brings us damnation.

We succumb to sin in two ways. The Devil, first, is an external being, a force in the world that promotes evil actions. These actions, however, come, second, by the Devil entering into the hearts of individuals who then become his agents. The Devil’s portal to our hearts lies in the vulnerability of our egoism, in those spots where we think we shine the most brightly. For the spiritually devout, this gateway lies in the confident belief in their own goodness.

For brilliant professors, the sluice gate to perdition opens up in their actual belief in their own brilliance. Goodness and pride are celebrated by egoism (and the Devil), and its false and damning belief that this goodness and erudition comes solely from human agency. Egoism sees no Devil here, and it is in this dangerous self-worship of erudition and perfectionism that people can cut themselves off from God. Only Religio can see and believe in the Devil for what he is: the father of all lies, whose temptation of human autonomy through reason (what Luther called “the Devil’s whore”) blinds us from our desperate need for God’s love and salvation.

If all human service, including education, truly is ad majorem Dei gloriam, then we can serve this glory by believing in the Devil in order to avoid his snares and to submit ourselves utterly, including our prideful goodness and brilliance, to God. There is no better force for understanding the operations of this temporal world than Eruditio. But Eruditio can tell us nothing of the intersection of the spiritual world with the temporal, nor can it show us the way to salvation or how to overcome the Devil. To give God the glory, the modern university must reintegrate Religio into everything it does, whether it is in campus ministry, administration, public relations, development, residential life or even academic departments. Putting on “the full armor of God” will work only if we begin by giving the Devil his due. Herein lies Veritas.

Timothy J. Lomperis, Ph.D., is a
professor of political science at Saint Louis University

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