Learning from Langland: theo-poetic resources for the post-Hind ...

Theology and philosophy’s mediating role to discern the telos and unity of the
different disciplines has almost disappeared, so that fragmentation, competitive
professionalism and utilitarianism in the universities have no check. 32
A more generous reading comes from Mike Higton, whose article ‘Can the University and
the Church Save Each Other?’ suggests a more mutually enriching relationship. 33 Higton
argues that the Church can be saved from the danger of instrumentalisation – the desire to
make all learning serve a practical purpose, be it mission or responding to a local context –
by the University’s continued insistence on the ‘disruptive strangeness’ of the sources of
that learning in Scripture and the tradition. 34 Recovering learning as a contemplative rather
than instrumental discipline is a task where both Church and academy can help each other
in the face of the secularising pressure to make learning a product:
In other words, academic study, if it is good academic study, is formational –
spiritually formational. It plays a part in the process by which we are properly
disillusioned, in which our self-understanding and understanding of the world are
brought up against that which is beyond them and broken open for the sake of new,
truer growth. The quality of academic study is so caught up with questions about
overcoming pride and security and delusion that we might say that a good academic
32 Gavin D’Costa, Theology in the Public Square, Blackwell, Oxford, 2005, p. 19. From a
Catholic perspective, D’Costa can see no future for theology within the university, because
the epistemological precondition for theology is the community of the Church and the
Spirit, with prayer as its heartbeat, and he ultimately concludes that only a Catholic
University can enable such a vision.
33 Mike Higton, ‘Can the University and the Church Save Each Other?’, Crosscurrents,
Spring 2005, pp. 42-53.
34 Ibid., p. 42.
28