The Preposition Problem
What’s wrong with a “Theology of” Anything
On September 1737, a grand collection of students, faculty, and dignitaries wound through the narrow streets of Gottingen. The processional headed for St. Paul’s Church to mark the official founding of the University that would be named for the city. Behind the students and dignitaries were the university faculty, arranged in the four-fold hierarchy determined by the medieval ranking of university disciplines. First came philosophy, the “lowest” of the four disciplines. Next came medicine and law, with theology bringing up the very last of the domains. The theologians made up the “august ‘first faculty’, bearers of divine knowledge inaccessible to human reason alone’.1
This four-fold ordering of the disciplines- medicine, law, theology and philosophy- is seen already in the thirteenth century, where the criteria for such a hierarchy was the “social usefulness and intellectual dignity” of each discipline.2 Theology, which sought to speak of God, was indisputably the “Queen” of the sciences. The purpose of theology, wrote Thomas Aquinas, “is eternal beatitude, to which as to an ultimate end the ends of all practical sciences are directed. Hence it is clear that from every standpoint it is nobler than other sciences.”3 Universities in the thirteenth century were directed by ecclesiastical guidance and authority. It was the churchmen who granted the authority to credential students even outside of the religious disciplines. So the hierarchy of knowledge with theology at the top was reinforced by a social hierarchy that oversaw the administration of the medieval university.
The observance of such a hierarchy of knowledge was unassailable for five hundred years, from the founding of the University of Paris in 1215 to the processional in 1737 for the University of Gottingen.4 What this meant was not simply that theologians had endless material and symbolic entitlements. The symbolic and material entitlements of the theology faculty- their place at processionals, the funds to endow chairs and appointments in theology- followed a shared understanding of the discipline of theology as a social good. Mind you, this was not because theologians bothered terribly much to make theology a social good by explaining how its existence was “relevant” to its hearers. It was simply reflective of a shared social understanding that the study of “divine things” was a higher good than the study of “human things”, and so theology should accrue to itself a proportionate honor among the disciplines. The good in theological study was, for a time, self-evident.
By 1810, with the founding of the University of Berlin, the tides of the theologian had shifted. Though they would still don the medieval caps and robes that granted them institutional approval, Berlin was the first German university marked by “its entire repudiation of attachment to any particular creed…[I]t professed subservience only to the interests of science and learning”.5 This repudiation was seen as a newfound freedom for the German university, “the first European university founded under purely national, secular auspices, bearing the imprimatur of neither emperor nor pope.”6
In such a university, though theology retained its place in the university and so its symbolic honor, the intellectual and ontological legitimacy of the theological discipline came into question. Between 1741 and 1782, more than twenty works on Deism were translated into German.7 Though the processional at Gottingen tells us that theology was still Queen in the 18th century, her reign would be shortlived. But theology’s unseating was not mere progress borne on the winds of human enlightenment. The “unprecedented” state centralization of the Prussian Reform Era (1807-15) meant that it was the Prussian authorities who controlled academic appointments, state examinations, and most importantly, the flow of money to the universities.8 The diminishing of the theological disciplines in the era of the modern university is not a simple story of Wissenschaft over dogma- scholarly inquiry over theology. Rather theology’s diminishment tells the story of a carefully calculated judgment- that philosophy would better serve the ends of state control than the dogmatic demands of theology, which always served a higher power. “As Humboldt famously put it, one should simply ‘live for science’ at the new university”9
But “living for science” may not be such a freedom after all. In The Conflict of the Faculties, Immanuel Kant makes an argument for why the four-fold organization of the university should be inverted with philosophy as the new queen. Philosophy, he writes, should be the reigning discipline because it would serve as a better watchdog than theology:
“A university must have a faculty of philosophy. Its function in relation to the three higher faculties is to monitor (controlliren) them and in this way, be useful to them, since truth (the essential and first condition of learning in general) is the main thing, whereas the utility the higher faculties promise the government is of secondary importance.”10
According to Kant, philosophy had a “free spirit” as it was subject to reason alone and not “external legislators”. It is independent, “free to evaluate everything”. The other three branches- theology, medicine, and law- were “tools of the government”, insofar as their maintenance of the social order afforded the government legitimacy. Only philosophy was free of such a utilitarian function- “its only task was to tend the flame of rationality by looking after ‘the interests of science’”.11 Because it was the true “free spirit”, philosophy should be the guardian of the university.
“In Kant’s judgment”, Tal Howard writes, “the state therefore had a vested and historically pivotal interest in seeing that the hitherto queen of the sciences was unseated. In order to accomplish this, the state must shift its loyalties from “theological” varieties to “philosophical” ones…while agreeing to recognize the philosophical faculty’s claim of accepting no master but reason itself- reason, ‘independent of time, place, and historical circumstance.’ That reason might find it hard going to transcend time, place and historical circumstance- indeed that it could function as a mere expression of them while insisting otherwise- was not a thought that Kant and his intellectual progeny, including many founders of the University of Berlin, entertained as seriously as one might have wished”.12
That theology remains among the university disciplines is in part due to the work of Frederich Schleiermacher. Schleiermacher called for a new “scientific theology” that “best served the church by fostering close relations with other branches of knowledge”.13
Schleiermacher was not only a systematic theologian but the “principal intellectual architect of the modern German university”.14 Though he certainly could not have predicted it, Schleiermacher in calling for a theology that could best serve the church by relating itself to “other branches of knowledge” within the university is responsible for the preposition I have concerned myself with- the “of” of the “Theology of” or “Theology and” cottage industry. I mean not to indict all such enterprises, though if this is the effect of this line of inquiry I will not be terribly disappointed. For theology’s place within a university that, at least since 1810, sought to free itself of earthly control remains a rightful question.
Properly speaking, theology is the study of divine things. Though it speaks of creatures, too- theological anthropology is included among the traditional loci of the discipline- its concern in doing so is to relate creaturely things to God. In the modern era especially, one might rightfully question whether the desire to do as Schleiermacher suggested and “foster close relations with other branches of knowledge” might unwittingly serve as an apologetic for theology’s presence in such company. At its best, theology demonstrates its good to the university by being about something other than the what the university’s other disciplines are about- God and his ways. But increasingly, theology struggles to retain its place within such a narrow economy by demonstrating it serves not God but philosophical reason, too. As the Prussian secularization of the University of Berlin demonstrates, any freedom that philosophy advertises likely is indebted also to the state and its interests. In asking theology to speak to questions outside of its purview, one risks making theological discourse incoherent to itself. At its worst, one threatens to undermine it entirely by bearing merely utilitarian goods. As Kant wrote, “The question remains whether the servant is the mistress’s torchbearer or trainbearer?”15 By asking theology to speak to anything other than divine things, theology risks losing its distinctiveness as it comes to be evaluated by its relevance to the university or the secular world for which it was never intended. Such is the problem of asking for a “theology of” anything other than God. In this way, philosophy as servant may serve as torchbearer of the Queen of the Sciences, settling alight theology’s claims to speak of another country. This, as I see it, is the problem at hand with the prepositional “of”, and the challenge before us to speak of a “Theology” of Anything other than God.
Thomas Albert Howard, Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University. Oxford: OUP, 2006: 45.
Jacques Verger, A History of the University in Europe: Volume 1, Universities in the Middle Ages. Germany: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 42.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica.
The university of Paris was recognized in 1215 by Pope Innocent III, though it existed previously to this. Historians might quibble with the 1215 date, which functions for me simply as a placeholder.
Encyclopaedia Brittanica, 9th ed, xxiii, 848.
Howard 131.
Howard 46.
Howard 132.
Howard 131.
Immanuel Kant, quoted in Howard, 126.
Howard 126, quoting Kant.
Howard 128-9.
Howard, 6.
Howard 9.
Kant quoted in Howard, 127.