Institutio Sui Generis: Searching for a Global Catholic University during the 1970s

Abstract

This study provides a critical look at the Catholic search for a global university of the future during the 1970s. It focuses on proposals and arguments from the Canadian theologian and sociologist Hervé Carrier SJ (1921–2014), who was rector of the Pontificia Università Gregoriana between 1966 and 1978. To understand his idea of the university, three aspects are key: firstly, French and German sociologists’ postwar dialogue on modern secularization; secondly, Karl Jaspers’ (1883–1969) concept of the unconditional search for truth; and thirdly, the lifelong education paradigm as a tool for regaining a supposed authenticity of the individual, conceived as a prerequisite for society and politics. Analyzing these keys brings out a critical evaluation of the limits associated with the subjectivity consciousness development at Catholic higher education institutions.

1. Introduction

The modern university revolves around social inclusion and public recognition. Both gravitational centres are undergoing increasing pressure due to the so-called neo-liberal transformation of higher education, particularly in Europe. Although economy-informed structural changes are not a new phenomenon and indeed represent a crucial accelerator of educational innovation processes from a historical perspective (Harding 2016; Von Vereeck 2001), universities as public institutions are undoubtedly facing an uncertain future (Owen-Smith 2018; Wright and Shore 2017). In this context, recent higher education research has focused again on modern university’s post-World War II elite-to-mass evolvement (Taylor and Pellew 2020; Trow and Burrage 2010). In this regard, functional rationalization impulses of academic structures as an organization are of particular interest (Stichweh 2005). At the same time, the question of individual subjectivity consciousness development remains a crucial issue. In his 1998 Stanford lecture L’Université sans condition, Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) emphasized this core element as the “principle of unconditional resistance” against political, economic, religious, cultural, etc., powers that “limit the democracy to come”. By shifting the Kantian autonomy principle and looking at it through a Vaihingerian lens, Derrida understood resistance as the “unconditional freedom to question and to assert”, that is, “the right to say publicly all that is required by research, knowledge, and thought concerning the truth”, enabling not only the ability to “reflect, invent, and pose”, but also to “performatively” deconstruct, aiming at a permanent regulatory debate on man and mankind (Derrida 2002, pp. 25–26).

Derrida’s university concept is grounded on two impulses that come from a historical perspective closely entangled with the development of the modern self and its subjective consciousness: On the one hand is the early nineteenth-century introduction of the seminarium philologicum, which was the basis for modern research and was rapidly implemented at German universities, where the Humboldtian Einsamkeit und Freiheit paradigm spread. Standardization and professionalization of written texts as a transdisciplinary technique of scientific communication triggered the emergence of a new type of academic persona (Karlsohn 2019). The modern academic seminar became the key engine of social rationalization, boosting a singular form of scientific industrialization and increasing the specialization process in higher education institutes, technical schools, etc. (Stichweh 1984). On the other hand, the modern seminar’s emotional-corporate identity was heavily permeated by Protestant theology’s idea of affective control (Howard 2006), which re-emphasized face-to-face communication (Karlsohn 2016). The interaction between re-disciplined orality and normalized written texts fueled a new (romantic) awareness of individual autonomy as the primary source of this academic persona’s charismatic identity (Ong 2012).

Both the written and the spoken dimensions thereof continue to determine the modern university’s core identity as a resistance-centered development of the self and subjectivity consciousness by feeding a particular matrix of tensions: written scientific texts represent a social practice of recognition whose citation system turns out to generally establish meanings through relational position marks within a specialized disciplinary space (Fišerová 2018). This act of dislocating others through others decentralizes the idea of a sovereign self by inverting the relationship between author and reader. In terms of process, citation techniques reinstall textual production conditions in the scientific field, but a coherent authorship reference in this reinstallation process only comes to the fore by making the author’s individual socialization invisible. At the same time, the constitution of the academic persona continues to be rooted in the practice of physically present speech as a technique of interrupted written text, that is, through singular auditive acts which enable sharing a non-reproducible plurality. Both techniques of modern subjectivity consciousness development finally absorb one another in a translocation practice that marks the innovational surplus of anything newly achieved in terms of an absolutely provisional state. Only this creates space for an academic’s unique authorship by means of (a) distancing from established methodological research access, (b) moving around different higher education environments, and (c) arguing in various specialized debate forums (Jergus 2019).

This study provides a critical look at the Catholic search for a global university during the 1970s. It focuses on proposals and arguments from the Canadian theologian and sociologist Hervé Carrier SJ (1921–2014), rector of the Pontificia Università Gregoriana between 1966 and 1978. During these years, post-conciliar Catholic pedagogical discourse aimed at contributing to transnational debate on Europe, Christian democracy, and international Marxism, framed by new international education policy in the context of the Second Cold War.1 Three aspects are key for understanding Carrier’s idea of the university: firstly, French-German sociologists’ postwar dialogue on modern secularization; secondly, Karl Jaspers’ (1883–1969) concept of the unconditional search for truth; and thirdly, the lifelong education paradigm, which was proposed as a tool for regaining a supposed authenticity of the individual, conceived as a prerequisite for society and politics. Analyzing these keys opens up the possibility of critically evaluating limits associated with the subjectivity consciousness development at Catholic higher education institutions.

2. Weberian Intellectual Socialization?

In 1961, Carrier published part of his 1960 doctoral thesis Psycho-sociologie de l’appartenance religieuse (third edition in 1966) in a new French sociology journal. He had defended this research at the Sorbonne Université Paris two years earlier under the supervision of Jean Stoetzel (1910–1987) (Warren 2014). Analyzing American students’ religious values, Carrier particularly underlined the “pluralism of American religious milieu”,2 which he described through a meticulous variety of concepts and meanings (religious interest, religious preference, religiosity, tolerance, etc.) (Carrier 1961, pp. 101–2). A year later, in 1962, at the Seventh International Conference of Religious Sociology in Königstein, Carrier presented this linguistic-analytical approach of religious affiliation, which resulted in a discussion with Walther Menges (no biodata available), of the Katholisches Internationales Soziologisches Institut für Flüchtlingsfragen, on the antinomy of supposedly real psychological identifications and the sociological idea of religious affiliation (Maître 1965).

The Königsstein meeting represented a high point in French–German post-war religious sociological dialogue, which particularly materialized in the 1959 and 1960 issues of the Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions (ASSR). Following an introductory contribution by the Plessner disciple Dietrich Goldschmidt (1914–1998) (Goldschmidt 1959, 1960), this journal published the first modified translation of Max Weber’s (1864–1920) 1920 Einleitung of Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen (Weber 1960, 1989). Weber’s reception in the French-speaking world was already under way a year earlier with Julien Freund’s (1921–1993) translation, which was edited by Raymond Aron (1905–1983) in rather dissociative terms due to the persistent Schelerian impact stemming from his 1930/1931 research stay in Cologne (Weber 1959; Breiner 2011). The ASSR’s 1959/1960 issues focused on German, French, Scottish, and Dutch Protestantism (including questions of Mediterranean diffusion), deepening as well its coverage of Protestant piety through a specialized study authored by Friedrich Fürstenberg (born 1930), later a prominent West-German Weberian (Lucke 1990). This study analyzed the “social conditioning of certain types of piety” from an interdisciplinary perspective in order to specify the “determining factors of alteration” caused by secularization, focusing on practical life changes (Fürstenberg 1959, pp. 71–72).3

As we shall see, Fürstenberg’s study holds important arguments with respect to Carrier’s understanding of the university and academic socialization concept. It focused on pietism’s “continuous emancipation of the individual from the Church as an institution” as characteristic in nuclear faith groups opposed to popular religiosity. According to Fürstenberg, this was mainly caused by “declining objective forms of piety materialized as habits, giving way to subjective private relationships with God”, which he then identified with enlightened secularization of the world through “Protestant structural elements” (Fürstenberg 1959, p. 73). Fürstenberg insisted here (with Weber) on a demystification process as the descriptive framework of structural secularization tendencies, stressing new empirical data on the “diversity of Protestant piety’s social types” and rejecting the idea of “secularized and rationalized consciousness as the exclusive trigger” (Fürstenberg 1959, p. 76). On the contrary, for him, “traditional-ecclesial piety” was marginalized based on increasing dominance on the part of “purely subjective and non-institutionally anchored private piety”, which he identified as a “de-ecclesialization process” (Fürstenberg 1959, p. 78). Following the Troeltschian metaphor of the “Kingdom of God as internalized in us” (Troeltsch 1923, pp. 968, 986), Fürstenberg understood this declining ecclesial social function as a growing “alienation of the Church’s popular bases” caused by disproportionate relevance of “exceptional religious situations” versus the “habitual faith practice” (Fürstenberg 1959, p. 79). By identifying this emptying out of religious experience within real life as the main reason for piety’s social stagnation, Fürstenberg offered a sociological approach beyond Protestantism’s structural elements. This analytical key could be applied, in general, to the Western secularization process that clashed with the traditional Church’s claim to authority. Significantly, Fürstenberg’s analysis pointed out a crucial practical impact of modern life regarding the relationship between increasing secularization and de-institutionalization dynamics.

Upon changing to the Pontificium Consilium de Cultura during the early 1980s, Carrier began to mainly focus on understanding secularization in terms of a practical de-institutionalization of religious affiliation. Projecting a return of the sacred, which he considered deeply rooted in modern Western cultural history’s religious pluralism, Carrier defended the “priority of non-material values” in terms of an educational foundation for a “new culture of solidarity”. This ideal was meant to strengthen the practical “organic link between faith and culture”, especially by promoting a novel “collegiality” of real-life dialogue among young people (Carrier 1988a, pp. 27–32, 69–72, 137–38, 140–44, 152–55, 181–84). Here, Carrier insisted on “pragmatism’s functional rationality” hoping to overcome academic community’s “corporate mentality”. From this perspective, only “institutional leadership” could enable the university’s modern functioning “as an organization”, i.e., as institutionalized educational responsibility, destined at spreading civilizing values (Carrier 1988b, pp. 61–62, 64, 66–67, 71).

3. Defending the University’s Institutional Idea

In 1968, French education minister Edgar Faure (1908–1988) promoted a structural change to universities in terms of research and teaching by replacing traditional faculties with so-called Unités d’Enseignement et de Recherche (Aust 2016). In this context, Carrier started delving into the traditional university’s changing role in modern post-industrial society. In opposition to Clark Kerr’s (1911–2003) multiversity idea, he demanded new “social responsibility” (Carrier 1972, pp. 14–34, 125, 130, 207–12, 226–28), stressing increased independent scientific research as the future model for Catholic universities with reference to both French (Desroche, Aron, etc.) and German sociologists (Schelsky, Weber, etc.), including in particular West German university rectors (Carrier 1972, pp. 22–27, 42, 86, 134, 160, 213, 151 etc.). Carrier supported the French “loi Faure” and insisted on the university “as a place for research and teaching at the same time” following the “German university tradition… from Wilhelm von Humboldt to Karl Jaspers”. Moreover, he defended the need to recognize “at least a certain priority when it comes to research”, although how exactly to harmonize research and teaching remained under the university’s corporate control (Carrier 1972, pp. 196–97). Referring to Karl Mannheim’s (1893–1947) critical function notion, he even demanded that the university “increasingly become a forum ouvert where social criticism is required due to new ways of research and learning” (Carrier 1972, pp. 30, 33). Rejecting positions that defend teaching as the university’s exclusive nucleus (Newmann, Maritain etc.), Carrier insisted on innovating the “Catholic University ideal” by synthesizing critical and spiritual functions. This argument followed the Jesuit prioritization of The Land O’Lakes Statement (1969) (Horell 2009), which aspired to systematic transformation of the university into a pluralistic forum for scientific debate (Carrier 1972, pp. 181–82, 192–96, 233–34).

Aiming at this transformation, Carrier underlined two dimensions: on the one hand, a “living dialogue between religious sciences and other human knowledge”, by emphatically recalling the “long experience of… public universities in Germany”, which preserved “within the university community, theological faculties of various Christian confessions” (Carrier 1972, p. 116), and on the other hand, Carrier explained in great detail (following Luyten and Lonergan SJ) the paradigmatic rupture caused by an “accelerated expansion of knowledge” in terms of “successive approximations in our knowing of reality” that turn all “modern scientific discoveries” into merely provisional achievements. Against this background, and although skeptical of the empiricism associated with educational techniques, Carrier relied on the so-called New Learning program, identifying the “transformation of teaching methods” as a way to alter the “university’s inner core” (l’íntérieur même) and to “help each individual progress at their own pace”, that is, “reveal and promote original, innate differences” (Carrier 1972, pp. 71, 75, 83–85).

Re-emphasizing the crisis in science as a common thread in post-industrial knowledge society, in his second monographic study Rôle future des universités in 1975, Carrier specified the topic of research planning by the Church, stressing “freedom of investigation” in terms of “free and voluntary cooperation” between Catholic institutions. Here, he referred particularly to the Strasbourg archbishop Jean-Julien Weber (1888–1981), who had earlier founded the Secrétariat Catholique pour les Problémes Européens in 1950 in order to increase interdisciplinary collaboration coordinated by the Fédération Internationale des Universités Catholiques (Carrier 1977, pp. 95–96, 98–99, 102–3, 105–6). Significantly, Carrier explicitly related Max Weber’s idea of science as a profession (understood inadequately in terms of vocation) with Michael Polanyi’s (1891–1976) identification of the essence of science as “love of knowledge”, defining the “way of conceiving and carrying out science” as an activity that “raises questions about the superior values of man” (Carrier 1977, pp. 55, 61–62, 87). In his introductory discussion on “institutional imperatives or norms” classified according to universalism, communitarianism, disinterest, or organized skepticism, Carrier rejected as an ideological error Weber’s claim of a “new type of rationality” characteristic of modern society. According to Carrier, Weber’s thesis was based on “unconscious prejudices” about the type of scientific freedom found in “the advent of a new culture, marked by secularization, rationalism, relativism, Protestant puritanism and democratization” (Carrier 1977, pp. 16, 19, 22).

Despite this criticism, Carrier’s second systematic study on the university was deeply permeated by French and German sociology. His 1975 arguments were inspired by the unpublished 1973 doctoral thesis Mode de gestión facultaires et changement de l’Université, which Arthur Frischkopf (no biodata available) defended at Leuven University. The research results therefrom were immediately published in specialized German, Dutch, Belgian and French journals (Frischkopf 1974a, 1974b, 1974c, 1974d, 1974e). Carrier’s (1975) book—in the introduction and again at the beginning of the first chapter—introduced the Frischkopfian concept of “organized science as structural power sui generis” (meaning explicitly institution sui generis), using it to support his main hypothesis’s key element on the university as a “highly vulnerable institutional idea” (Carrier 1977, pp. xi, 1, 152).4 This key refers to Frischkopf’s Weberian approach to analyzing actions and practices according to an “ideal type”, differentiating (A) “strong social contextualization and the corresponding way of understanding science in terms of a rationality type that considers action as aimed at achieving a certain result” against (B) “weak social contextualization and the corresponding way of understanding science in terms of a rationality type that considers action as such as a value”. The former type (A) is characterized by rational management logic (leadership) and dominated by criteria of utilitarian productivity and competitiveness, which are present in applied research disciplines made operational through external funding (medicine, engineering, jurisprudence, natural sciences, etc.). The latter type (B), on the other hand, is characterized by a logic of institutional collegiality (notabilité) and dominated by criteria of social prestige and corporate commitment, which are present in non-applied research disciplines made operational through internal funding (philosophy, humanities, cultural sciences, etc.). Frischkopf had conducted his sociological analysis based on data collected from the Belgian university system, which was characterized by a strongly non-hierarchical system of fixed academic positions and professors’ total lack of national mobility (organization tout à fait sui generis). Against this background, he defended a model open to diverse practices capable of adapting to modern universities’ heterogeneous expansion (Frischkopf 1974a, pp. 55, 62–63, 66; Frischkopf 1974d, p. 357).

In his first French journal publication, Frischkopf made extensive use of Talcott Parsons’s (1902–1979) work in order to more explicitly explain his Weberian approach. In this regard, he particularly highlighted an opposition between two so-called superior functional types, which, according to Parsons, had prevented Weber from understanding collegiality as a rational form of socialization among equals, i.e., in terms of type (B) notabilité (Frischkopf 1974d, pp. 342–43).5 Quoting Jean Ladrière (1921–2007) among others, Carrier emphasized this “social rationality principle” precisely (Carrier 1977, p. 80) when defending the university’s “extremely important role… in maintaining, diffusing, and promoting values which are fundamental to Western rationalism” (Ladrière et al. 1974, p. 19). Following this group of Leuven professors (Carrier 1977, pp. 44, 80), he specified the university’s critical mission by underlining the positive nature of criticism. This consisted of both, “priority always given to the rational method” (conceptual analysis, mathematical language, empirical proof, etc.) and critical attitude towards “anything based on faith, sentiment or passion”, including the possibility of directly rejecting “arguments based on tradition and authority” (Ladrière et al. 1974, p. 19).

However, Carrier’s Leuven-inspired idea of intellectual freedom of research clearly maintained its basic conditioning through the social rationality principle, encompassing “only secondly an initiation into specific disciplines”. According to the Leuven academics, the main objective was to provide a called “real culture” related to a “certain body of knowledge”. This rooted in a specific type of multidimensional self-knowledge which included (a) “locate oneself in relation to others and the world”, (b) “express oneself and to communicate with others in the main forms of language available”, (c) “understand different points of view”, (d) “assimilate new points of view in the future”, etc. (Ladrière et al. 1974, p. 25; Carrier 1977, p. 56). Importantly, Carrier associated this self-knowledge type with both the love of knowledge (Polanyi) and the idea of science as a vocation (Weber), conceiving of the university as a place that ultimately initiates “young people into the universality of knowledge, based on a certain conception of man”. According to this perspective, the university mainly represents an institution of service to the community, conceived of as harmony through a “common interpretation of the great principles of unity”, and achievable only through transforming the scientist into a creator (Carrier 1977, pp. 54–55). This university concept in terms of a moral community impregnated by the “ideal of freely serving the truth” culminated in Carrier’s reference to Jaspers who, in the first 1972 study, had already figured as an outstanding Humboldtian renovator. Specifying the hypothesis of the university’s considerable vulnerability as an institutional idea, Carrier explicitly quoted Jaspers’ “fundamental right to search somewhere for the truth as such, freely”, which, according to the Jesuit, goes against the “fearsome challenge” of science turned into an “object of ambition and competition”. This Jaspersian key for understanding the university as humanity’s existential space identifies its institutional goal mainly with disinterested service described as “growth of integral, individual and collective man” (Carrier 1977, pp. 81–82).

Jaspers had elaborated his university concept during the post-World War I German debate revolving around outsourcing any teaching associated with professional and technical disciplines, which Max Scheler (1874–1928) defended above all starting in 1919 (Scheler 1982). Jaspers explicitly rejected this modification of the Humboldtian tradition in 1931/1932, arguing as well against Martin Heidegger’s (1889–1976) uptake and further development of this university reform (Mehring 1998). Instead, starting in 1923, he began to insist on the Weberian dictum of “science as a profession” (Weber 1992) in order to recall a necessary “pathos towards objectivity”, which, in his view, completed the triangle of a “pathos of ‘accuracy’” (Descartes), a “pathos of ‘fruitfulness’” (Klee), and a “pathos of ‘truthfulness’” (Nietzsche) (Jaspers 2016a, pp. 16–17, 81, 459, 461–62). Following Weber closely, Jaspers emphasized two additional key aspects (Henrich 1988): firstly, a so-called “Chinese stagnation” due to the lack of free competition caused by misguided organization, that is, total orientation towards what “defines the institution in an absolute and definitive way” (Jaspers 2016a, pp. 30–31, 465; Weber 2018a, p. 194), and secondly, he highlighted that “via sheer will, that is, through organization on purpose, it is impossible to create personalities” (Jaspers 2016a, pp. 37, 466). This argument apparently stressed Weber’s criterium of “unrestricted dedication to a problem” as the only way to become a personality, “maybe!” (Weber 2018b, p. 452). Delving into the idea of a “struggle in love”, which he first elaborated in his manuscript Individuum und Einsamkeit (1915/1916) (Jaspers 1983, p. 397), Jaspers defended the university’s nucleus as found in prioritizing the Socratic model above scholastic and teacher-centered traditions. This model consists of unguided communication through “infinite disputative dialogue” (practice of fighting love), allowing for the revelation of the “reflective self within the other reflective self” (Jaspers 2016a, pp. 34, 463). Opposed to the community service notion centred on an alleged priority of social values, Jaspers’ university concept focused on this dialogical tool of self-differentiation aiming at the individual’s autonomy.

Unlike his first 1923 essay, which revolved around professors’ and scientists’ ethics, Jaspers’ 1946 reflection on the university focused on the so-called original and existentialist impulse of wanting-to know (ursprüngliches Wissenwollen) (Immel 2016, p. xxxii). By means of this impulse, the university is transformed into a place beyond science and its transmission. Here, certainly, it encompasses a critical socio-political dimension that Jaspers called “unconditional investigation of truth” identified as “man’s legitimate claim according to his nature” (Anspruch des Menschen als Menschen)6 that borders on an “unconditional wanting to know” (Jaspers 2016b, pp. 109–10, 117–19, 121, 133, 140–41, etc.). This “unconditionality of scientific wanting to know”, conceived of as an “inescapable condition of the will that aspires to the truth”, corresponds to the “attitude of scientificity” (Jaspers 2016b, pp. 121, 123, 127). Jaspers anchored this attitude in Weber’s postulate of not making value judgments. While not denying the possibility of subjective positions, this anchor consisted of prioritizing a debate on values, i.e., depressurize the opposing world views’ relativism, by replacing conflictive-ideological struggle with competitive-rational dialogue (Abellán 2020). As a privileged space for man’s “unconditioned impulse”, the university lives precisely off this “ability to suspend, for the moment, all value judgments in favor of objective knowledge”, that is, “free knowledge, as such” (sachlich freie Erkenntnis) through “impartial analysis of the facts”, allowing for transformation of “subjective affiliations attached to certain positions” (Jaspers 2016b, pp. 121, 123, 127–28).

Through this Weberian-inspired notion of scientific attitude in terms of a “condition of truthfulness”, Jaspers turned philosophy into the exclusive guarantor of “the scientific way of thinking”, explicitly identified as an “essential condition of human dignity” (Jaspers 2016b, p. 125). Elaborated already in his 1923 essay, Jaspers specified this dignity concept in terms of the original source of value for all other types of knowledge. In so doing, he was paraphrasing Kantian Logik’s (1800) “absolute value” notion (Jaspers 2016a, pp. 41, 466), that is, the “idea of a perfect wisdom that teaches us the ultimate ends of human reason” (Kant 1800, pp. 23–24). In this way, he reconnected with Weber’s skepticism about personality forming conceived of as the core of the university, stressing the scientific attitude as the only way to overcome value judgments through knowledge’s asymptotic progress.

This Kantian echo in Jaspers was informed by a broad turn-of-the-century pedagogical–philosophical discussion that revolved around the idea of personality. Among others, Wilhelm Schmidt (1884–s.d.) deepened this discussion aiming at a teleology of the person in terms of an absolute value, conceived of as an end as such. In this regard, he distinguished between the “personality as a goal”, and the “personality as nature” (Persönlichkeit als Zielpunkt und Persönlichkeit als Anlage), defending the later in terms of a “moral personality”, characterized by “real causality presence” beyond the regulative dimension, against the “ethical-abstract personality”. Explicitly referencing the Catholic theologian Franz Sawicki (1877–1952) (Sawicki 1906, 1907), Schmidt thus contributed to converting the Kantian idea of the person as an ethical goal (Seinsollendes) into an ontological mandate (Seiendes) focused on creating personalities through moral convictions (Schmidt 1911, pp. 71–72). Making traditional Christian moral philosophy compatible with neo-Kantianism was emblematically accelerated by Scheler’s 1913 material ethics of values, which represented an important reference in the German postwar debate on the national reform of the education system (Blosser 2002; Vandenberghe 2008). Through his Weber-inspired critique, Jaspers rejected precisely this inversion of Kantian ethics which aimed at establishing as an end of the university the creating of moral personalities. According to Jaspers, only the scientific attitude orients man as man in the search for truth, that is, sans practical or any other kind of conditioning ends.

4. Lifelong Education and the Limits of Catholic Subjectivity Consciousness

Before leaving the Gregorian University’s rectory, Carrier dedicated an extensive essay on lifelong education understood as a “new phenomenon of civilization”. Referring particularly to the 1972 Faure report from UNESCO, entitled Learning to Be, he presented this educational concept “as an existential continuum, whose duration is misidentified with life’s duration”, determining it (in Jaspersian terms) to be “a right for everyone” and, consequently, a substantial “requirement for this new culture” (Carrier 1976). Three years later, with a new title and translated into English, this essay announced lifelong education as a socio-political paradigm in order to democratize the future university and society (Carrier 1979). Carrier integrated his reflections on the “existential continuum as long as life” as a separate chapter (eight) of his 1982 study Higher Education facing New Cultures. Following the Leuven value program associated with Western rationalism, this study stressed the goal of shaping and promoting Christian identity through Catholic universities’ pluralistic dialogue (Carrier 1982, pp. 44–48, 161–65, 177–80; Carrier 1984, pp. 39–45, 32–136, 145–48). Regarding the future university’s programmatic foundation (chapter two), Carrier emphasized and defended Jaspers’ demand for existential truth. From this perspective, the university as the “pre-eminent place” of “emerging scientific society” consisted of an “intellectual community that intends to direct knowledge towards a genuinely human purpose”. Carrier identified the “greatness of the university” not only (in Jaspers’ Weberian terms) with the “ideal of promoting the truth freely and without any partisan servility”, but also explicitly anchored it in the Kantian tradition (Carrier 1982, p. 49; Carrier 1984, p. 45).7

Carrier established this Kantian connection with reference to the social anthropologist Ernest Becker (1924–1974) speaking of a “decisive turn” towards international cooperation and, eventually, a “super-university”. In this context, he identified a supposedly paradoxical enlightenment ideal in Kant’s “famous formula”, which simultaneously demands “maximum individuality and maximum community” (Carrier 1984, p. 225; Carrier 1982, pp. 269–73; Becker 1968, p. 141). Becker aimed at rescuing the Kantian system as a “brilliant attempt to keep radical science and Christian morality” by breaking down transcendental critique to a simple “psychological construct” of the solipsistic, “introspective ego” (Becker 1968, pp. 106, 122). This rescue attempt projected modern democracy as an “unfinished ideal-type” whose key consists in arguing for a new ethical man as “ideal-type” (Becker 1968, pp. 292, 301). Becker’s attempt to reorient the university on communitarian grounds by fusing Kant with Christian ethics represented an important trend in international higher education discourse, and led to the distortion of Jaspers’ Weberian background through a so-called “Christian gentleman ideal” based on Newman and others (Wyatt 1977, pp. 129, 134; Wyatt 1982, p. 25).8

When Carrier started to work for the Pontificium Consilium de Cultura in the early 1980s, Catholic interest in lifelong learning increased considerably. This increase happened as part of a broader debate on European educational policy and cultural identities during the second expansion of the European Communities (EC) in the mids-1980s. Although the lifelong education movement was harshly critized for implying a coercive dimension which turned individuals into human capital and served in accelerating public education’s economizication, including corrosive effects on the quality of higher education, the first wave of policy debate in the 1960s and 1970s was clearly marked by utopian optimism (Field 2009). In this context, the science historian François Russo SJ (1909–1998) emphasized lifelong learning’s “properly human” character, underlining (beyond technical issues of adult “self-education”) the “person’s development” in reference to the “possibility of managing one’s own destiny by accessing culture”. This approach was conceived of as the “real democracy’s core” in terms of community development through “group members’ increased participation in decision-making and activity management at various levels”. Russo stressed, in this regard, lifelong learning’s “deficit in not allowing sufficient space for a more profound and essential formation of the person, especially in moral and religious terms” (Russo 1983, pp. 241, 243–44). At the same time, backed by an ethno-psychological approach, Catholic experts openly argued in favor of “attaching the Mediterranean basin to the integration of Europe” by means of so-called Integrated Mediterranean Programs. According to this perspective, European mentalities are rooted in historical, cultural, and religious community values that become manifest at the social level, primarily in terms of degrees of extra-family affective tolerance described as a sort of increasing “psychological resistance to massification”. Aiming at a Mediterranean type associated with a particular pluralist mentality and in contrast to “Germanic Europe, an Anglo-Saxon, a Slav, a Scandinavian Europe”, this argument pointed at a “European unity” as opposed to the EC. Importantly, this allegedly underlying unity was conceived of as “from its long history” giving “birth to a European man carrying in his blood an ancestry of many nations and races” (Reguzzoni and Vaniscotte 1986, pp. 14–15, 18).

As a prominent defender of cultural-identity pedagogy, Mario Reguzzoni SJ (1926–s.d.) contributed to the founding of the Organizzazione per la Preparazione Professionale degli Insegnanti in Milan (Reguzzoni 1983). Riguzzoni’s vision of multicultural-European education consisted of a polycentric-communitarian school concept expressly formulated in socio-organic terms of “sovereignty” within “global society… and of the five historical communities that constitute it: family community, local authority, state community, professional community, and ideological community” (Reguzzoni 1975, pp. 163–64). This pre-social foundation of school’s autonomy and self-government consisted of a natural-community concept conceived of as rooted in psychological values (Reguzzoni 1969). Importantly, Reguzzoni explicitly relied, in this regard, on Weberian Wert- and Zweckrationalität to identify a “common ground” (sottofondo comune) that enables a “recurring pattern of behavior, that is, a certain common way of acting and thinking, without the need to first rigorously define the related modality as, instead, happens within associations” (Reguzzoni 1970, p. 284, notes 6, 7; Weber 1961, vol. 1, p. 38). In other words, for Reguzzoni, school lays the foundation for the “conscious belief that certain behaviors have their own, absolute value (ethical, aesthetic, religious value or whatever it may be)” (Weber 2006, p. 101). From this communitarian perspective, Reguzzoni demanded “greater harmonization of education policies”, synthesizing against the backdrop of the first EC expansion his doctoral thesis’s comparative analysis of Western Europe’s primary and secondary education systems (Reguzzoni 1974, p. 53).

Another lifelong education expert, Lorenzo Del Zanna SJ (no biodata available), a member of the Copenhagen Catholic mission since 1974, delved into this paradigm’s connection with Nikolaj Grundtvig’s (1783–1873) anti-Kierkegaardian momentum in terms of an “incomparable discovery” (Kvist 2005, pp. 39–40). This dictum referred to Christian orality’s supposedly original authenticity, which Grundtvig identified as the Church’s true basis (“the community of the baptized, and not the Bible”) and the only way to harmonize the individual’s personal and divine dimensions through becoming a member of a “people’s community spirit” (folkelighed). Set against the “notionism of Scholastic texts”, Del Zanna emphasized the “living word, in dialogue and song” as the only source of “love for one’s own language, culture, history” by which “each individual shall discover their own roots and national identity” (Del Zanna 1984, pp. 212–14).

This relied on Grundtvig’s distinction between an innate human quality and one renewed in the act of baptism. The latter consisted of a material pact with God through language, i.e., not as a symbolic-ritual equivalent but as an absolutely physical reconnection through words, expressed as an oath. By breaking with Luther’s sola scriptura principle, Grundtvig prioritized the renewal of this pre-biblical oral faith authenticity, thus transforming baptism into a permanent process throughout life. Here, the practical confession’s exemplariness and charisma, i.e., the permanent habitual transformation through faith in light of Christ’s divine grace, was key to strengthening religious life’s active dimension (Jørgensen 2016, pp. 43–44, 47–48). According to Grundtvig, baptism as an original-material pact with God and permanent dialogue of faith through which individuals take on a communitarian identity represents the foundation of a popular enlightenment pedagogy. Del Zanna identified this precisly as a “true and peaceful cultural revolution.” Aiming at discovering and enhancing “one’s own roots”, this “school for life” consisted in the “popular classes’ ever wider and more conscious participation in managing public affairs”, including as well “women’s participation in these popular universities” (Del Zanna 1984, pp. 219–20). Del Zanna’s approach relied on Grundtvig’s understanding of theological doctrines as merely provisional based on belonging to a dialogical process between the sacraments of baptism (divine act) and of the eucharist (apostolic creed). Here, freedom in teaching allowed for new argumentative forms and even separate ecclesial institutionalizations (Jørgensen 2003, pp. 321–22, 326, 331).

Post-conciliar Catholic pedagogical discourse was emblematically led by Jacques Maritain (1882–1973), who was a renovator of the neo-Thomist Leuven school (Chenaux 1997). Significantly, three years after his death, he was commemorated with a large symposium in Venice (Ivaldo 1977). Throughout the 1940s, Maritain distanced himself from his earlier affiliation with the French right by readapting Carl Schmitt’s (1888–1985) political theology (McCormick 2013). However, he remained faithful to a problematic fusion between Thomistic natural law and Kantian ethics, which not only skipped phenomenological anthropology’s and neo-Kantian realism’s transformations (Scheler, Messer, etc.), but also ignored Kantian transcendental criticism’s anti-Leibnizian core (Kraynak 2001, pp. 148–64; Kraynak 2004). In the same year as Maritain’s death, the Venetian political scientist Vittorio Possenti (born 1938) specified the idea of an “evangelical democracy” set in a “pre-political space where intelligence can rethink… to discover the intelligible principles that command history’s movements”. Following Maritain, he referred to the “concrete historical ideal of a new Christianity”, which he understood as a “fundamental requirement of any authentic politics” in terms of the absolute “political primacy of moral value, of the truth”, and as a unique, exclusive and “valid proposal for the future”. Said proposal should be defended in political combat by a new organic elite and its prophetic awareness of the modern Western secularization process’s end (Possenti 1976a, pp. 12, 21, 26–28, 30–32). From this perspective, Possenti expressly understood the “future eventual European Federal State” in terms of “overcoming the international problem created by the existence of nation states”, envisioning a “global world government truly universal in its pluralism and differentiation” according, precisely, to Maritain’s “ideal… of inserting a new teleology in the action for peace” set against Marxism (Possenti 1976b, pp. 638–40; Possenti 1977). Political personalism’s demand for Christianity’s renewal through integral Maritainian humanism (Possenti 1981, 1986) thus became Catholic education’s key reference. This demand consisted of creating “emerging Christian leaders”, not merely seeking “Christian values defense”, but, moreover, in terms of authentic “individualism and personal autonomy”, the mystery of divine creation’s “objective truth” (Duminuco 1996, pp. 122–23).

5. Conclusions

Carrier’s idea of the university presents an important instance of innovation in higher education based on its defence of a systemic increase in research at future Catholic universities and its prioritization of theology’s dialogue with modern science(s). Concerned as a theologian with Catholic educational institutions’ growing social disconnect (fuelled by pervasive secularization during the post-conciliar period), Carrier meticulously argued as a sociologist in favour of this systemic shift. In doing so, he was strongly influenced by French–German sociological dialogue. Analytical approaches such as Fürstenberg’s study of Protestant piety and de-ecclesialization processes impacted his arguments in view of the (Weberian) differentiation of faith as a continual life practice rather than as a set of religious experiences. Carrier’s concept of the university was also significantly informed by the West German Humboldtian tradition, which allowed him to start breaking away from the Catholic renewal of Scholastic traditions (found in the work of Newman, Maritain, etc.).

Despite his marked critique of Weber’s Protestant ethics as the origin of a new type of modern rationality, Carrier supported an implicitly Weberian approach, analyzing the university by stressing Frischkopf’s sociological differentiation between a rational leadership logic and institutional collegiality (notabilité). Carrier assumed this understanding of the university as a singular institutional idea (sui generis). From this perspective, the university’s critical function in modern society is essentially based on a social rationality type (Parsons). Following Leuven sociologists, Carrier identified the university’s socio-egalitarian substratum as the original foundation of Western rationalism. For Carrier, modern science’s origin and essence is a question of (pseudo-Weberian) vocation, that is, a profoundly human love of knowledge threatened by technical-utilitarian corruption. Thus, along with Jaspers, he defended the university as the exclusive locus of the unconditional search for truth. The university’s truth-centred nucleus corresponds to a fundamental right grounded in human nature’s teleology. As an original institutional idea, the university’s primary goal consists in extracting and educating human nature’s moral personality (Schmidt, Sawicki, Scheler). Carrier maintained an existentialist rhetoric and delved into the lifelong education paradigm as a driving force of democratization, which he understood as an appropriate modern tool for the religious realignment of mass education. However, inverting Kantian ethics, Carrier prioritized the university’s institutional dimension in line with certain community values, which marks an anti-Jasperian turn. The underlying argument here refers to a supposedly Kantian synthesis between the individual and the community, projected (according to Carrier’s sources) as an ethical democracy ideal type that is rhetorically associated with Weber (Becker).

Throughout the 1980s, Catholic discourse on European educational politics rapidly distanced itself from the German sociological background of Carrier’s concept of the university. This primarily occurred through simplifying Weber’s sociological approach as exclusively identified with an absolute value rationality (wertrational). That was, in turn, seen as a way to defend primary and secondary education’s main goal, i.e., historical-cultural identities and their supposedly religious core (Reguzzoni). In this context, the lifelong education paradigm took on a significant religious charge derived from Scandinavian civil theology and was received as compatible with Catholic–Marian spirituality (Del Zanna, Grundtvig). This ecumenical shift was fed by the idea of a pre-biblical oral authenticity within the Christian faith, seen as a perfect synthesis between a more practical faith lived in the day-to-day and exceptional religious experiences. In this way, lifelong education became an important accelerator of post-secular evangelization trends, which were further elaborated in specialized debates on Christian democracy and international Marxism. Maritain’s concept of evangelical democracy was the main reference in this instance and projected a new politics of Christian authenticity meant to defend absolute moral and religious values (Possenti) by exclusively identifying objective truth with the divine creation (Dumenico).

Analyzing Carrier’s idea of the university permits an identification of two boundary-concepts that limit the Catholic idea of subjectivity consciousness development at higher education institutions: First is a Weberian objectivity pathos, which Jaspers reanimated as an attitude of scientificity. Accordingly, the modern university’s nucleus demands unconditionally approaching a problem in terms of Einsamkeit und Freiheit. Second is a Kantian personality pathos, which represents the modern university’s regulative principle in terms of unconditional freedom. Repelling these two boundary concepts marks an attempt to preserve a synthetic identity ideal, to which the conditioned university’s absolute value priorities aim (institutio sui generis), against fragmented identities that result from the unconditioned university’s autonomously differentiated value spheres (educatio sui iuris).