A Reformation-Era Legacy: The Secularization of Knowledge

Brad S. Gregory
University of Notre Dame

Legacy of the Reformation: Law, Democracy, Education

Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
University of Helsinki, Finland
February 11-12, 2016

My sincere gratitude to the organizers for the invitation to participate in this

conference on the legacies of the Reformation. I am grateful for your willingness to

include a North American interloper. My paper is not at all about Finland or the

Scandinavian countries in particular, but I will discuss long-term processes that affected

them in the domain of higher education and the pursuit of knowledge.

This paper compresses an already tightly argued account of the secularization of

knowledge, one of the six interconnected analytical narratives I take up in my book, The

Unintended Reformation.1 One of the book’s arguments is that the histories of human

desires, beliefs, ideas, practices, and institutions cannot be isolated from one another if

we hope to explain long-term changes in Western Europe and North America over the

past half-millennium. I think we all know this intuitively; in no era or culture is human

life lived in discrete compartments called “political power,” “individual commitments,”

“philosophical ideas,” “economic behaviors,” and so forth. But this basic truth presents

major challenges if we want to explain how we arrived in our current situation on both

sides of the North Atlantic: in societies characterized by liberal political institutions,

pervasive capitalist markets, and an open-ended variety of rival religious and secular

truth claims about matters of human meaning, morality, values, and priorities—ones

which, perhaps most obviously in the US, are frequently expressed in an increasingly
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uncivil public sphere and a deadlocked political process. The book models a different

way of thinking about change over time as it questions deeply embedded philosophical

assumptions ordinarily taken for granted by most historians and other scholars.

Many of the phenomena in my book—such as contemporary consumerism, the

state’s monopoly on public political power, or conceptions of individual rights—might

seem to have little to do with each other and to be far removed from the Reformation or

religion per se. But they tend to be seen this way because “religion,” as a result of the

intractable disagreements in the Reformation era, was incrementally disembedded from

the “rest of life” and theorized as something separable from it.2 Nearly all domains of

human life were affected by the disruptions of the Reformation era, because late medieval

Christianity, with all its diversity and difficulties, was not a discrete part of life separate

from economic, political, social, or cultural realities. For better or worse it was meant to

inform everything, not to be simply a part within the whole.

As part of that institutionalized worldview, the Latin Church’s truth claims about

reality were not separable from the pursuit or transmission of knowledge. In contrast, the

pursuit and transmission of knowledge today in research universities assumes that it is

and must be secular, in principle separate and separable from any substantive religious

claims. As Alasdair MacIntyre has recently put it, “the irrelevance of theology to the

secular disciplines is a taken-for-granted dogma.”3 How are we to explain the change

from Christian theology regarded as the most important of the faculties and the “queen of

the sciences” in medieval universities, to our present situation, in which not only

theology as a discipline, but any and all religious truth claims, are excluded from
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consideration on their own terms in research universities? In short, how were higher

education and the pursuit and transmission of knowledge secularized?

Several outstanding studies of the secularization of American universities are

relevant to this question, but they belong to a late chapter in a much longer story.4

Moreover, the still widely believed narrative about earlier influences on the secularization

of knowledge—that it was the unavoidable result of the rational interpretation of

evidence associated with the rise of science, the recognition of historicism, and the

growing awareness of religious pluralism in the early modern period—will not stand up

to scrutiny. The present-day articulation of sophisticated theology, philosophy of

religion, and critical but non-skeptical biblical scholarship demonstrates the continuing

intellectual viability of many traditional religious truth claims, including belief in the

reality of a transcendent creator-God and the possibility of divinely worked miracles; this

scholarship is available to all who wish to become familiar with it.5 Theology has been

essentially exiled from the secularized academy, but the very existence of such

intellectual work casts doubt on any notion that the truth claims of revealed religion per

se were somehow rendered untenable by the advances of modern knowledge itself.

I’d like now to rehearse briefly the main lines of the received narrative I am

challenging. With respect to science, after the empirical investigation and

mathematization of natural regularities reached an impressive first culmination with

Newton at the end of the seventeenth century, the universe conceived as a vast

mechanism of efficient causes left no room for God’s putative actions in history,

including alleged miracles. As David Hume argued in the mid-eighteenth century, the

evidence for exceptionless natural regularities always outweighs testimony about

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ostensible miracles.6 The seventeenth-century revolution in physics was followed by the

nineteenth-century Darwinian revolution in biology, which undercut the biblical idea of

deliberate design and loving creation by God. It made of Homo sapiens just another

animal species that blindly evolved by processes of natural selection, for which Watson

and Crick later supplied the mechanism in their research on DNA.7 Since then,

extraordinary advances in post-Newtonian physics and evolutionary biology have

confirmed Weber’s “disenchantment of the world,” and left us, in the words of the

philosopher John Searle, with “like it or not” simply “the world view we have”: one

without God, and without any place for truth claims such as those characteristic of the

traditional Christianity that modern science superseded.8 Therefore knowledge, its

pursuit, and its transmission—as opposed to mythology, wishful thinking, uninformed

opinion, or superstitious ignorance—are and must be secular.

A parallel but distinct contribution to the secularization of knowledge, so the story

continues, came from humanistic scholarship. The advent of historicism and critical

philology among Renaissance humanists such as Valla, Poliziano, and Erasmus,

radicalized by biblical critics such as Spinoza and Richard Simon in the late seventeenth

century, led in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to recognition of the extraordinary

contingency of the formation and textual transmission of the Jewish and Christian

scriptures. This led to what Hans Frei called “the eclipse of biblical narrative” and what

Michael Legaspi has termed “the death of scripture.”9 Relatedly, ancient peoples lived

lives utterly different from modern Westerners, based on radically different worldviews,

and any scholar seeking to understand them must grasp this first principle of historicism,

the unbridgeable difference between “us” and “them.” In 1777 Lessing pronounced
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himself unable to cross the “broad and ugly ditch” between historical and moral or

metaphysical claims. This made modern historicism no less a barrier to the claims of

Judaism or Christianity than is disenchantment allegedly born of modern science.10

Anyone who wants a place in the modern research university is supposed to follow

Lessing—and F. H. Bradley, Weber, Troeltsch, Bultmann, and others—and acknowledge

that historicism precludes even considering any religious truth claims derived from

ancient cultures as if they might actually be true.11 So too, historical research beginning

especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries disclosed a vast array of other

ancient peoples with their respective beliefs in gods and supernatural powers, among

whom the Israelites and earliest Christians were only two. Early modern contact with

non-Christian peoples and cultures around the world confirmed the same thing about the

present. Knowledge was thus further secularized by the relativizing recognition that

Christianity’s exclusivist truth claims were merely one set among many rivals.

Despite being widely believed and reinforced through repetition, this narrative is

flawed—not because any findings of the natural sciences are somehow untrustworthy,

nor because historicism is unimportant as a safeguard against anachronism, nor because

there are not many rival and incompatible religious traditions past and present, but rather

because of the inferences to which these recognitions have typically led. In brief: the

findings of the natural sciences do not preclude the possibility that a transcendent creator-

God is real and acts in history, including actions outside the course of natural regularities;

the contrary belief is based on the transmutation of the fruitfully legitimate

methodological precept of naturalism into a metaphysical dogma about reality—as if God

is a fiction because the sciences do not find evidence in space and time of what is by
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definition beyond space and time.12 So too, that extraordinary things are alleged to have

happened among ancient peoples with different worldviews does not mean they could not

have occurred. In both of these instances, the intellectual work is being done by logically

unrelated dogmatic assumptions of metaphysical naturalism or its equivalent: skepticism

about all claims of revealed religion.13 Finally, relativism follows neither unavoidably

nor obviously from the fact of religious pluralism. The globetrotting Jesuits collectively

encountered more contemporary and ancient non-Christian peoples than any other early

modern group, yet they did not thereby conclude that Catholicism was simply one

relativized religion among others (nor did the Second Vatican Council in 1965).14

The historical processes through which knowledge was eventually secularized

were more convoluted and paradoxical than the dominant narrative would have us

believe. Here we come to the Reformation. It was neither science nor critical humanistic

scholarship but rather the Protestant Reformation that laid the foundations for the

eventual secularization of knowledge, by unintentionally introducing an enduring

doctrinal pluralism within Latin Christianity. But only after centuries. First there was a

long interlude in which theology became more important in the confessional universities,

academies, and seminaries of early modern Europe. Ironically, the political protection of

theology insulated it in almost all early modern universities, thus setting theologians up

for a fall from which they have never recovered institutionally. The eventual

secularization of knowledge happened as a long-term, unintended result of the

Reformation’s doctrinal contestation, plus the privileging of theology in the

confessionally divided higher educational institutions of early modern Europe.

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So much for the thesis; now for the condensed narrative. Circa 1510, knowledge

in Latin Christendom was not secular. It included Christian claims about God’s actions

in history, most importantly in the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of

Nazareth. Different kinds of knowledge—of natural regularities, the historical past,

ancient texts, and the first-hand experience of Christian life—were interrelated within a

diverse, vibrant, and sometimes contentious intellectual culture (visible in the clashes

between scholastic theologians and humanists, for example, in universities such as Paris,

Louvain, and Cologne in the 1510s15). Social practices, morality, and the uses of

knowledge were not separated from knowledge as such.

The seed for the eventual secularization of knowledge was planted by enduring

doctrinal disagreement and unintended Western Christian pluralism. This was not simply

a matter of “Protestantism” versus “Roman Catholicism,” as though “Protestantism”

designated something with coherent doctrines, practices, and institutions analogous to

Catholicism, rather than being an umbrella term designating an open-ended range of

competing anti-Roman reformers, groups, and views. Reformation historians have

tended to separate the magisterial Reformation from the radical Reformation, just as they

have tended to conflate biblical interpretation with the exercise of political power in the

sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This has had two distorting consequences. First, it

has tended to conceal what the shared commitment to the principle of sola scriptura,

supplemented by claims about the testimony of the Holy Spirit, actually produced.

Second, it has led many scholars to identify the claims of the only two Protestant

traditions that secured lasting political support (namely, the Lutheran and Reformed) with

doctrinally normative Protestantism, as though the exercise of power was somehow

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intrinsically related to the articulation of Christian truth. But the Reformation as a whole

produced not even a rough consensus about what God’s Word meant or implied, as a

wide range of radical Protestants made clear.

With respect to the transmission of knowledge in universities, however, the

implications of Protestant heterogeneity long remained muted, because so few

Reformation-era forms of Protestantism won political backing from secular authorities.

In fact, until the establishment of the dissenter academies in Restoration England, no

European institutions of higher education were affiliated with radical Protestants.16

On the doctrinal issues about which Christians disagreed, it was logically

impossible for all of them to be correct, and therefore impossible for them all to have the

knowledge of God’s teachings they claimed. Theological controversialists understood

this, well aware of the principle of non-contradiction. Hence the massive proliferation of

doctrinal controversy in thousands of publications from the 1520s through the

seventeenth century and beyond. To little avail: socially divisive doctrinal disagreement

became and has remained a basic feature of Western Christianity since the 1520s. As we

shall see, by the late nineteenth century this unresolved disagreement would foster the

exclusion of all substantive religious truth claims from research universities. In modern

contexts of politically protected, individual religious freedom that produced so many

conflicting claims, how could one arbitrate among them?

Another—deeply ironic—factor that laid the foundation for the eventual

secularization of knowledge derived from early modern states’ control of churches. This

was the privileging of theology in the confessionalized universities of the Reformation

era among Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed Protestants (including the Church
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of England). In contrast to the treatment of the many marginalized radical Protestant

groups, only Catholic and magisterial Protestant churches were protected—and

overseen—by secular authorities in their respective confessional regimes. For good

reason: the Peasants’ War of 1524-26 showed what could happen when “the Gospel” was

let loose among the “common man.” Higher education was dangerous because some

ideas could inspire the subversion of political order, God’s truth, or both, on which the

salvation of subjects and God’s providential favor depended. Yet rulers needed

universities to train the lawyers, jurists, secretaries, diplomats, physicians, pastors, and

educators needed to staff growing bureaucracies and dutifully to maintain good order.

The only way forward was clear: just as biblical interpretation and churches had

to be controlled, universities, academies, and colleges had to be regulated. Higher

education had to be enlisted to serve God’s truth. Sovereigns relied on church authorities

as partners in confessionalization, including theologians to articulate Christian truth and

to establish parameters for the pursuit of knowledge in other university faculties.17

Theology therefore remained the privileged subject in virtually all universities in the

sixteenth century. Rulers’ concerns with doctrine were linked to the virtue of obedience,

so universities had to be socially and morally stabilizing, and intellectually conservative,

institutions. The curricula in nearly all Reformation-era universities were therefore

circumscribed by confessional criteria and directed principally toward teaching.18

Universities were far from intellectually moribund, but the various sorts of knowledge

were employed to serve doctrine in ways consistent with the confessionalizing ambitions

of Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed Protestant authorities.

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Authorities privileged theology in universities, protected orthodoxy from

scholarly challenges, and policed intellectual inquiry. They thus curtailed interactions

between religious claims and other domains of human knowledge. Wittingly or not, the

large majority of early modern universities thereby fostered complacency in their

theology and arts faculties by prohibiting doctrinally sensitive inquiry—whether

philological and historical questions about the relationship between biblical manuscripts

and the canonical text, or questions about how Christian doctrines related to new

discoveries about the natural world. So too, time spent on doctrinal controversy was time

not spent keeping abreast of new knowledge, or seeking to understand God in relation to

all things, the broadest intellectual ambition of Christian theology.

Meanwhile, intellectual inquiry was not standing still; far from it. But it

increasingly migrated outside universities—and this too at the behest of the same rulers

who oversaw their confessional universities. Such universities did not satisfy all the

ambitions of early modern rulers. So they fashioned a symbiosis between intellectually

inquisitive and socially striving men who wanted the rewards of patronage, and rulers

who gained new knowledge from them to run their lives and their confessional states.19 It

was not the late twentieth-century’s military-industrial complex, but we can see here a

distant ancestor of the modern relationship between knowledge-making and state power.

In early modern Europe the most important sites for this symbiosis were rulers’ courts,

and, from the later seventeenth century, new scientific academies.

The courts of rulers brought novel responsibilities and opportunities in the

sixteenth century. The religious divisions opened by the Reformation entailed new

necessities of military defense and new prospects for war. The stakes were far from
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academic: matters as seemingly arcane as the mathematization of motion and neo-Stoic

philosophy, for example, could influence the prosperity of states through ballistics and

better disciplined armies.20 The discovery of the New World meant an increasing flow of

new knowledge to early modern courts about hitherto unknown peoples, fauna, and flora

from previously unknown continents.21 Rulers funded commercial and missionary

expeditions that brought back the new data and physical specimens—and the prospects of

exploitable mineral resources, medicinally valuable plants, and slave labor.22 With the

conservative training of useful professionals and transmission of knowledge being met by

confessionalized universities, rulers made their courts the site for producing new

knowledge to serve their desires for prestige, power, and obedience to God. The

stabilizing function of higher education safeguarded by orthodoxy coexisted with new

knowledge liberated from curricular constraints and authoritative texts. Thus rulers

assembled the intellectual talent, libraries, botanical gardens, observatories, natural-

historical collections, and laboratory facilities right in their own palace complexes.23

Small wonder, then, that “technical expertise, novel procedures, and the critique

of ancient traditions stand out prominently within court environments, in contrast with

universities, as means appropriate for acquiring knowledge of nature.”24 Small wonder,

too, that so many major contributors to the new science never taught as university

professors: not only Brahe and Kepler, but also Copernicus, Descartes, Bacon, Mersenne,

Hobbes, Pascal, Boyle, Leibniz, Christiaan Huygens, and Leeuwenhoek. Indeed, Pascal,

Boyle, and Leeuwenhoek never formally attended a university.25 The new mechanistic

model of nature arose almost entirely outside universities; Gassendi was its only first-

generation advocate who held a university professorship (at Aix-en-Provence), before

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Cartesianism spread.26 Aristotelian natural philosophy in universities remained flexible

into the seventeenth century, but it didn’t generate new knowledge that rulers could use,

in contrast to descriptive, experimental methods and information gathering at their courts.

The longer that rulers championed rival Christian doctrines in their universities

and shielded theologians, the less prepared would theologians eventually be to answer

questions about the relationship of their respective claims to the ever-growing mass of

new knowledge being made elsewhere. By the mid-seventeenth century, the situation

didn’t look good for the epistemological status of theology. Despite more than a century

of controversies among university-trained theologians, doctrinal disagreements were no

closer to resolution than in the 1520s. Quite the contrary: unfettered anew during the

English Revolution, Protestantism demonstrated the same sort of open-ended doctrinal

contentiousness that had characterized the early German Reformation, among, say,

Reformed Protestants, General Baptists, Diggers, and Quakers.27 As their respective

protagonists knew, not all of the competing claims could be correct; therefore not all of

them could belong to knowledge. Nor was it apparent how the disagreements could be

resolved so long as each Protestant protagonist functioned as a de facto authority.

Understandably, enduring Reformation-era Christian pluralism prompted some to draw

skeptical conclusions about religion per se, which meshed with the revival of Pyrrhonism

in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.28 Nor is it surprising that thinkers

such as Thomas Hobbes, John Wilkins, and John Locke began to distinguish between

what was merely believed as a matter of faith and opinion from what could be known on

the basis of observation and reason—a distinction with a highly influential future.29
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In contrast to contested Christian doctrinal claims, it was clear by the mid-

seventeenth century that knowledge gained through observations in botanical gardens,

dissections in anatomy theaters, and experiments in alchemical laboratories was different.

It did not depend on one’s theology of the Eucharist or interpretation of Paul’s letter to

the Romans. It looked to be the same in Lutheran Sweden as in Catholic Italy. It was

universal and useful. It could be concretely applied to serve the desires of rulers and

subjects alike, “able,” in Bacon’s words, “to produce worthy effects, and to endow the

life of man with infinite new commodities.”30 And disagreements about it could be

resolved through shared, empirical attention to the matters at hand, regardless of one’s

religious views. By the end of the Thirty Years War and English Revolution, the

conflicts of the Reformation era had proven hugely expensive, destructive, and

inconclusive. What had they accomplished? God’s providence had frustrated ruler after

ruler; all failed to achieve their principal objectives in lasting ways. The concrete

devastation understandably dampened enthusiasm for further rounds of military

engagement intertwined with religious commitments. It fostered interest in types of

knowledge geared toward goals about which antagonistic Christians were more likely to

agree, such as the comforts that accompanied the acquisition of more and better

possessions in the “industrious revolution.”31

Throughout the eighteenth century theology remained firmly in place in most

universities. Rulers still needed it for training clergy and other officials to serve their

confessional states. But its privileged position was no longer obvious. By the mid-

seventeenth century, what had university theologians done for rulers lately? Their

continuing shelter made most of them less likely to be able to cope intellectually with the
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knowledge produced outside universities. The most important new institutions for the

pursuit of new knowledge in the later seventeenth century were the Royal Society of

London (chartered in 1662) and the Académie Royale des Sciences of Paris (1666), the

first of a wave of such institutions established in many European cities, both of which

maintained a self-conscious distinction between theology and scientific knowledge.32 In

expounding orthodoxy, safeguarding souls, battling opponents, and abandoning

theology’s medieval aspiration to integrate all truth about God and creation, Lutheran,

Reformed, and Catholic theologians had been living in a vulnerable refuge. Theological

protagonists of long-insulated confessional orthodoxies lacked the ability to see how their

respective claims might fit with so much new knowledge. And the universities that best

accommodated new knowledge were those with the fewest confessional strictures: Leiden

in the seventeenth century, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Halle, and Göttingen in the eighteenth.33

As a result of their long-standing protection, few eighteenth-century theologians

could respond convincingly to rationalist criticisms of revealed religion. They lacked the

intellectual ability to see how, for example, their respective claims might cohere with

Newtonian physics or the existence of peoples who long antedated the creation accounts

in Genesis. Nor could they distinguish the empirical gains of the new knowledge from

the tendentious metaphysical, moral, and historical beliefs with which Enlightened

protagonists almost always conflated them, under the ideological banner of “reason.”

Similarly, very few theologians had the astuteness necessary to distinguish philological

achievement from philosophical assumption.

Once Newtonianism had triumphed in most continental universities by the 1750s,

confessional theologians were more vulnerable than ever. Yet they could not articulate in
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persuasive ways why it was problematic to try to explain human morality, politics, and

social life on the basis of empirical observation and efficient causality alone. They could

not see (as contemporary thinkers such as Peter Winch and Alasdair MacIntyre have) that

once intentionality and linguistically mediated meanings are extruded from human

actions they cease to be intelligible as human actions at all, and thus cannot in principle

be understood on the model of the natural sciences.34 Theology’s place in universities

had afforded theologians safe harbor from the turbulent waters of early modern

knowledge-making. They had been spared hard questions about how so much new

knowledge might fit with their doctrinal claims. Instead, they were mocked by Voltaire,

jeered by the Encyclopédistes, and ridiculed in the Enlightened world of European

learning. Nothing symbolizes the rejection of Christian theology better than the

exclusion of the Jesuits—the religious order that had epitomized Catholic erudition—

from Catholic countries beginning with Pombal’s Portugal in 1759 and concluding with

the papal suppression of the order in 1773.35 Theology’s rejection was also symbolized

by the anti-Catholic destruction of the French Revolution, and by the suppression of

universities and seizure of monasteries by political leaders in Catholic Europe.36

The French Revolution and Napoleonic era were devastating for European higher

education: where there had been 143 universities in 1789, there were only 83 in 1815.37

These years comprise a major caesura in the relationship among universities and

theology, knowledge-making, the state, and human desires. Their subsequent interactions

unfolded in a wide range of contingent ways in the particular institutions of different

European countries and in North America. With the exception of Catholic universities,

which followed suit later, by the early twentieth century universities both in Europe and
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North America had arrived in largely the same place, with religious truth claims excluded

in principle from the pursuit and transmission of knowledge in the secularized academy.

The founding of the University of Berlin in 1809-10 inaugurated the era of the

modern research university. It brought knowledge-making definitively back into the

university setting. Berlin became the model for the reform of existing and the

establishment of new universities in Germany. German universities then became the

model for universities in other countries in Europe, North America, and eventually

around the world.38 But Berlin in the 1810s differed from later research universities no

less than from early modern confessional universities. The “new Romantic university” at

Berlin in its early years intensified institutional structures and ideological emphases that

would endure. Their transformation, combined with other historical realities, would

produce the secularization of knowledge that is largely taken for granted today.39 The

most consequential structures and emphases were the sequestration of theology, a

commitment to research, an emphasis on the self, and a reliance on the state.

Berlin differed most obviously from confessional universities in the dethroning of

theology from its place of privilege. Extending a pattern pioneered by Leiden and

Göttingen, theology retained its own faculty but had no influence on other academic

subjects in the philosophy faculty (the ancestor of modern university schools of arts and

sciences). This shift institutionalized Kant’s argument in his Streit der Fakultäten (1798)

that philosophy—as the expression of autonomous reason and human freedom—should

be liberated from the constraints of theology.40 In the long term, this move contributed to

the secularization of knowledge by allowing other disciplines to ignore religious

questions entirely as they conducted their inquiries. Emancipated from Christian

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dogmas, the aim of the Romantic research university was not knowledge for knowledge’s

sake, nor the pursuit of discoveries that would add to the sum total of knowledge, nor the

Baconian pursuit of useful scientific knowledge, but rather Wissenschaft oriented to

Bildung: the full self-development of the individual student’s interests, capacities, and

personality as the subjective realization of his freedom and autonomy.41

Research in the Romantic university did not mean the pursuit of specialized

knowledge within a discipline. Rather, it concerned “the inculcation of unified principles

of scientific inquiry” that retained a commitment to the unity of all knowledge in a

manner formally analogous to the same in medieval Christianity.42 But this enterprise

resembled medieval Christian theology as little as the Romantic cult of the self-directing

individual concerned habituation in Christian virtues within a shared way of life. The

unity of knowledge no longer meant theology as God’s relationship to all things. It

meant the subjective vision of the autonomous individual within the sublime whole of the

cosmos conceived as Naturphilosophie, which had replaced creation understood in

Christian terms.43 Like Romanticism as a worldview, the Romantic research university

disappeared from Germany in the nineteenth century, but some aspects were adopted in

the United States, combined with Emersonian individualism and transcendentalism.44

By 1900, the principal aim of research had changed dramatically, and had taken

root in universities inspired by the German model in countries on both sides of the North

Atlantic. No longer focused on student self-realization, the aim of research had become

the increase of new knowledge per se as the defining activity of professional scientists

and scholars. Beginning in the 1870s, that new American adaptation of the German

system, the “graduate school,” expressly dedicated to the pursuit of specialized

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knowledge, was grafted onto the “undergraduate” colleges of existing institutions such as

Harvard, or was made the centerpiece of new institutions such as Johns Hopkins.45

Greater specialization was reflected in increasingly distinct disciplines, including many

familiar now in the division of the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities.46

After Justus von Liebig (1803-1873) demonstrated the utility of laboratory

chemistry in a university setting at Giessen in 1824, universities began increasingly to

emphasize the natural sciences and medicine. Within a few decades they overshadowed

the philology and philosophy that had animated the Romantic research university.47 By

the end of the nineteenth century, the cumulative character of natural-scientific

knowledge and its successful applications had secured the dominance of the natural

sciences (including engineering and medicine) in research universities that they have held

ever since. Engineering and technology applied the scientific discoveries that fostered

capitalist production, augmented state military power, stimulated agricultural yields, and

fed consumer acquisitiveness during the second industrial revolution. Observation,

measurement, quantification, and experiment could be used to formulate theories in the

quest to discover the laws of natural regularities, which could be used to make

predictions capable of verification. Then these findings could be applied through

instrumental rationality in the service of human desires. The sciences worked and were

transformatively powerful regardless of what their practitioners thought about God, or

indeed whether they thought about God at all. They showed that methodological

naturalism was a fruitful assumption and empiricism the necessary method in the attempt

to grasp natural regularities, whether in Pasteur’s microbiology or Helmholtz’s physics.

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Because the natural sciences were so successful, pioneers in the social sciences

sought to imitate them. If social scientists were to make similar progress, they should

adopt the same methodological naturalism and empiricism, so as to discover the

objective, universal laws that govern human behavior, social life, political relations, and

economic activity. Thus might they realize the Enlightenment aspiration to apply

Newtonianism to human life, albeit with a rigorous empiricism, the fulfillment of what

Comte called a “social physics.”48 Indeed, the implications of sociology and psychology

were far from purely theoretical—if their practitioners could discover invariable laws,

human behavior could be predicted and managed, and maybe even controlled.49

By 1900, the success of the natural sciences had made their epistemology the

paradigm for knowledge as such. Whatever was to count as knowledge had to be

universal, objective, and independent of divergent, personal, individual beliefs. This

contrasted dramatically with Protestantism as an empirical, social reality, as had been

evident since the early 1520s. But the intellectual implications of Protestant

heterogeneity had been minimized in early modern Europe because only Lutheran and

Reformed Protestant regimes had universities. The confessional character of Protestant

universities had permitted politically privileged theologians within a given regime largely

to ignore doctrinal pluralism, deferring the confrontation with the knowledge being

produced outside universities. By design the United States was never a confessional

country, but before the American Civil War the widespread adoption of Scottish

Common Sense philosophy in Protestant American colleges served as a shared

intellectual framework analogous to Aristotelianism in the Reformation era. It also

functioned in crypto-confessional ways, veiling the implications of Protestant doctrinal

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disagreements. Despite the proliferation of Protestant groups in the US during the early

nineteenth century, Protestant professors at American colleges continued to rely on

inductive, Baconian science and Scottish Enlightenment philosophy to sustain their

commitment to the unity of knowledge.50

After 1870 or so, their epistemological mirage was exposed: American Protestant

theologians were ill-equipped to handle the intellectual challenges of Darwinism, German

biblical criticism, and historicism, just as Aristotelian natural philosophers had been

unprepared for Newtonianism in the eighteenth century.51 More fundamentally, they had

no answer when confronted with the principle of non-contradiction concerning their rival

doctrinal claims. They could only insist on the correctness of their respective views

(which underscored the problem),52 or attempt to determine some lowest common

denominator that all Protestants shared. Those in higher education, public life, and

industry who desired the secularization of knowledge seized their opportunity. Through

deliberate efforts from the 1870s through the 1920s they gradually changed the status quo

of higher education in what Christian Smith has called “the secular revolution.”53

In the end, knowledge and teaching in leading American universities was

secularized because the diversity of Protestant truth claims could not be reconciled with

the epistemological demands of science for universality and objectivity. In this sense

knowledge did not merely happen to be secularized because Protestant theologians

lacked the ability to handle new intellectual challenges; it had to be because of the

unintended and unwanted consequences of the Reformation itself. Despite centuries of

claims about scripture’s perspicuity, there had never been anything close to a consensus

about what the Bible said. The institutionalization of individual religious freedom,
21

pioneered in the United States, revealed what the Reformation produced without the

power of political authorities standing behind hermeneutic authorities: the aggregate of

whatever individuals preferred. This clashed irreconcilably with the criteria for

knowledge, once research on the German model with the natural sciences as the

epistemological standard became the aspiration of American universities. Knowledge

had to be secularized and religious truth claims excluded from universities just as

religious convictions had to be privatized, indeed regarded as subjective beliefs and

opinions regardless of their content. Theologians and skeptical biblical scholars who

hitched their intellectual wagon to post-Kantian philosophy found its cargo progressively

lightened until it was unclear how their Christianity could consist of anything more than

post-Schleiermacherian pious sentiments. If natural scientists studied the material world

from which miracles were excluded, history covered the ancient Near East and the rest of

the human past, psychology analyzed human interiority and behavior, and anthropology

explained rituals and their functions, what was left for theologians to do?

In the past two centuries the secularization of knowledge has been largely born of

Protestantism, from the German Romantic research university to the leading American

institutions that have become the world’s pace-setting institutions of higher education.

The secularization of Catholic higher education followed a different path, one not

determined by the incompatibility between rival doctrinal claims and the epistemological

demands of scientific universality. Instead, the main curricular weakness of Catholic

theology from post-Revolutionary ultramontanism to Vatican II was institutional and

differently intellectual: its isolation in seminaries, and its narrow focus on philosophical

issues at the expense of relating Catholic doctrines to the exponential increase in new
22

knowledge. The neo-scholasticism institutionalized in Catholic higher education

especially after Leo XIII’s Aeterni Patris (1879) downplayed knowledge-making in other

disciplines. It continued the early modern pattern already discussed, keeping research in

academic disciplines at a distance from the Thomistic philosophical categories that

underpinned the theology. This distancing was reinforced by papal encyclicals such as

Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907) and Humani Generis (1950) which, as a symptom of

Catholic theology’s insulation from the wider world of knowledge, lumped together

many-stranded and complex intellectual issues under conflationary labels such as

“Modernism.”54 Partly for this reason, with the possible exception of Louvain, no

Catholic institutions were among the world’s leading research universities in the early or

mid-twentieth century.55

The neo-scholastic curriculum of Catholic higher education evaporated within a

decade beginning in the 1960s. This was not simply because Catholics were eager to

“embrace the modern world” after Vatican II’s aggiornamento, but because of the

papally reinforced gap between what Catholicism claimed to be and the cutting-edge

pursuit of knowledge.56 Beginning in the 1960s self-critical Catholic universities had

much intellectual catching up to do amid dramatic social changes and political turmoil.

But in “accepting modernity” almost as eagerly as preceding popes had denounced it,

their leaders tended uncritically to embrace many tangled, hidden assumptions embedded

in the history of the secularized institutions whose structures and practices they

adopted.57 Even when refracted through certain Catholic lenses, these assumptions

unwittingly fostered the secularization of knowledge.

23

Even among Catholic institutions that did not replace theology with Religious

Studies departments, theology’s integrative potential would be lost if it was regarded

simply as one discipline among others. The same was true of philosophy, if it was

thought that the answer to intellectually staid neo-scholasticism was simply the imitation

of philosophy as it was done in secular universities. So many contestable modern moral

and metaphysical assumptions were interwoven with social scientific and humanistic

disciplines that many of these assumptions were bound to conflict with Catholic truth

claims. In a rush to “make up for lost time” and to narrow the gap between the level of

research in Catholic institutions and in leading universities, university leaders unwittingly

invited in an intellectual Trojan horse bearing many subversive assumptions. No wonder

American Catholic universities, at least, have been in a perpetual state of hand wringing

and endless debates about “Catholic identity” ever since.

Ironies abound in the history of the secularization of knowledge no less than in

the intersection of the contemporary intellectual and institutional realities to which it has

led. We are unlikely to be alert to either if we continue to believe the usual story about

how increasingly powerful scientific accounts of nature, growing historical knowledge,

and/or the fact of religious and ideological pluralism per se account for the secularization

of knowledge. Despite the reality of sophisticated theology and philosophy of religion

today, their virtual exile from research universities means that relatively few scholars or

scientists even know that some religious thinkers not only have addressed the intellectual

weaknesses of their predecessors, but have been insightful critics of modern

philosophical assumptions that are still widely taken for granted. Conversely, the failure

of modern philosophical foundationalism to deliver on its centuries-long ambition of

24

answering in any consensually persuasive, rational way questions about human morality,

meaning, and purpose—in short, to provide an ideologically neutral and rationally

justifiable replacement for religion—has left much skeptical detritus in its post-

Enlightened wake. (Montaigne redivivus, only now without recourse to custom.) Reason

alone, deliberately divorced from authority or tradition, has not led to anything close to

agreement about what is true, right, or good, what we should care about or how we

should live. It has produced open-ended, conflicting claims that, based on the history of

modern philosophy and philosophy’s current state, are apparently irresolvable.

What follows? At the very least, as scholars we should stop uncritically repeating

versions of a nineteenth-century story about how science superseded superstition and

reason replaced religion. In intellectual, institutional, and social terms this story is false.

What has long been considered an intellectual inevitability was in fact a highly

contingent and longer-term process born of the Reformation era, the institutionalization

of which is more accurately regarded as the imposition of an ideological imperialism.

Correlatively, if the academy is consistent with its own commitments to academic

freedom, the open pursuit of intellectual inquiry without ideological restrictions, critical

rationality, the importance of rethinking and reconsidering, and the questioning of

assumptions, then it should become less ideologically narrow and permit a wider range of

beliefs for consideration on their own terms in relationship to the rest of human

knowledge. Without in any way reconfessionalizing, it should unsecularize itself.

25

N O T E S

1
Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society
(Cambridge, Mass., and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), with Chapter 6,
“Secularizing Knowledge,” at pp. 298-364.
2
The seminal work about this distinctly modern and Western conceptualization of religion was William
Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1962); see also Peter Harrison,
‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990),
and for an excellent recent analysis, see William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular
Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 57-122.
3
Alasdair MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical
Tradition (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), p. 135.
4
George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established
Nonbelief (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Julie A. Reuben, The Making of the
Modern University: Intellectual Transformations and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Jon H. Roberts and James Turner, The Sacred and the Secular
University, intro. John F. Wilson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000); Christian Smith,
“Secularizing American Higher Education: The Case of Early American Sociology,” in The Secular
Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life, ed. idem
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 97-159.
5
For a few examples of such intellectual work that bear especially on Christianity, see David Bentley Hart,
The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, Mich., and Cambridge:
Eerdmans, 2003); Robert Sokolowski, The God of Faith and Reason: Foundations of Christian Theology
(Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1982); John M. Rist, Real Ethics: Rethinking the
Foundations of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); the entire oeuvre of Alvin
Plantinga, including most recently Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2011); C. Stephen Evans, The Historical Christ and the Jesus of Faith: The
Incarnational Narrative as History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); and the monumental (and ongoing)
study by John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, 4 vols. (New York: Doubleday;
and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991-2009).
6
David Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding [1748], ed. Stephen Buckle (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), section ten, “Of Miracles,” p. 97. For recent philosophical critiques of
Hume’s argument against miracles, see J. Houston, Reported Miracles: A Critique of Hume (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994), esp. pp. 121-207; Evans, Historical Christ and Jesus of Faith, esp. pp.
153-156; David Johnson, Hume, Holism, and Miracles (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999); John
Earman, Hume’s Abject Failure: The Argument Against Miracles (New York: Oxford University Press,
2000).
7
See, for example, Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). For a superb recent account of the discovery of the mechanism of
genetic inheritance, see James Schwartz, In Pursuit of the Gene: From Darwin to DNA (Cambridge, Mass.
and London: Harvard University Press, 2008).
8
John R. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 1992), p. 90.
9
Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1974); Michael C. Legaspi, The Death of Scripture and
the Rise of Biblical Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). See also Jonathan Sheehan, The
Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005).
10
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, “On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power” [1777], in Philosophical and
Theological Writings, ed. and trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 87.
11
See F. H. Bradley, “The Presuppositions of Critical History” [1874], in The Presuppositions of Critical
History, and Aphorisms, ed. Guy Stock (Bristol, U.K.: Thoemmes Press, 1993); Max Weber, “Science as a
Vocation” [1919], in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright
Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 129-156; Rudolf Bultmann, Kerygma and Myth: A
26

Theological Debate, ed. and trans. Reginald H. Fuller (1953; New York: Harper & Row, 1961); and Van
Harvey, The Historian and the Believer: The Morality of Historical Knowledge and Christian Belief (1966;
Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), which is heavily indebted to Bradley and Troeltsch.
12
See Brad S. Gregory, “No Room for God? History, Science, Metaphysics, and the Study of Religion,”
History and Theory, 47 (2008), 495-519; idem, “Science versus Religion? The Insights and Oversights of
the ‘New Atheists,’” Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, 12:4 (Fall 2009), 17-55.
13
On the exclusion of God in modern science based on univocal metaphysical assumptions, Occam’s razor
applied to the relationship between natural and supernatural causality, and the deadlocked theological
controversies of the Reformation era, see Gregory, Unintended Reformation, pp. 25-73, with the conflation
of historicism and metaphysical naturalism analyzed at 413-414 n. 116 and 527 n. 164.
14
For two important collections of articles indicative of the wide-ranging interests and multicultural
contacts among early modern Jesuits, see The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540-1773, ed.
John W. O’Malley et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), and The Jesuits II: Cultures,
Sciences, and the Arts, 1540-1773 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006). For the Second Vatican
Council on the relationship of Roman Catholicism to other religious traditions, see “Declaration on the
Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions” [Nostra aetate], Documents of Vatican II, ed. Austin P.
Flannery (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1975), pp. 738-742. The document was issued officially on
October 18, 1965.
15
See, for example, Erika Rummel, The Humanist-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and Reformation
(Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1995).
16
In the absence of a recent monograph, see David L. Wykes, “The Contribution of the Dissenting
Academy to the Emergence of Rational Dissent,” in Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in
Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp.
99-139, as well as older scholarship by J. W. Ashley Smith, The Birth of Modern Education: The
Contribution of the Dissenting Academies, 1660-1800 (London: Independent Press, 1954); Herbert
McLachlan, English Education under the Test Acts: Being the History of the Nonconformist Academies,
1662-1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1931); and Irene Parker, Dissenting Academies in
England: Their Rise and Progress and Their Place among the Educational Systems of the Country
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914).
17
On confessional control of higher education in the Reformation era, see Notker Hammerstein, “Relations
with Authorities,” in A History of Universities in Europe [hereafter HUE], vol. 2, Early Modern
Universities (1500-1800), ed. Hilde de Ridder-Symoens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),
pp. 117-121, 125-129, 130-131, 132-133, 134-137, 139, 140, 143, 147-148, 150-151; Peter A.
Vandermeersch, “Teachers,” in ibid., pp. 226-227; Rosa di Simone, “Admission,” in ibid., p. 293; Hilde de
Ridder-Symoens, “Mobility,” in ibid., pp. 419-421, 424-425, 429, 446; and Pedersen, “Tradition and
Innovation,” in ibid., pp. 478-480.
18
Indeed, for most universities this concern extended throughout the early modern period; see Laurence
Brockliss, “Curricula,” in HUE, vol. 2, ed. de Ridder-Symoens, p. 586.
19
Those who sought such patronage and served rulers in this way were overwhelmingly male, but for
mention of female alchemical adepts in the Holy Roman Empire, see Tara Nummedal, Alchemy and
Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 2, 18,
as well as her forthcoming book on the female alchemist Anna Maria Zieglerin; in England, Lady Grace
Mildmay (1552-1620) is an example of a noblewoman who turned rooms in her house into a de facto
pharmaceutical distillery. See Alix Cooper, “Homes and Households,” in The Cambridge History of
Science, vol. 3, Early Modern Science, ed. Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), p. 227.
20
See Olaf Pedersen, “Tradition and Innovation,” in HUE, vol. 2, ed. de Ridder-Symoens, pp. 468-469;
Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450-1800
(Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1991), 114, 115, 129-130, 236; Gerhard
Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State, ed. Brigitta Oestreich and H. G. Koenigsberger, trans.
David McLintock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 77-79; Geoffrey Parker, The
Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988), pp. 18-23.
21
Anthony Grafton with April Shelford and Nancy Siraisi, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of
Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Belknap Press of Harvard
27

University Press, 1992); Klaus A. Vogel, “European Expansion and Self-Definition,” in Cambridge History
of Science, vol. 3, ed. Park and Daston, pp. 818-839.
22
Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007); Steven J. Harris, “Networks of Travel, Correspondence,
and Exchange,” in Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3, ed. Park and Daston, pp. 341-362.
23
See the diverse case studies in Patronage and Institutions: Science, Technology, and Medicine at the
European Court, 1500-1750, ed. Bruce T. Moran (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell Press, 1991).
24
Bruce T. Moran, “Courts and Academies,” in Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3, ed. Park and Daston,
p. 271.
25
Steven Shapin, “The Man of Science,” in Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3, ed. Park and Daston, pp.
181-183; for Leibniz, see Maria Rossa Antognazza, Leibniz: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 67, 80.
26
Brockliss, “Curricula,” in HUE, vol. 2, ed. de Ridder-Symoens, p. 583.
27
See The humble advice of the Assembly of Divines, now by authority of Parliament sitting at
Westminster, concerning a confession of faith . . . (London: Stationers’ Company, 1647); T. L. Underwood,
“Denne, Henry (1605/6?–1666),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and
Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, January 2008,
http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/7497 (accessed 28 July 2012); The Complete Works of Gerrard
Winstanley, 2 vols., ed. Thomas N. Corn, Ann Hughes, and David Loewenstein (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2009); Leo Damrosch, The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus: James Nayler and the Puritan Crackdown
on the Free Spirit (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1996).
28
Richard Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2003); Zachary Sayre Schiffman, On the Threshold of Modernity: Relativism in the French
Renaissance (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). For some seventeenth-
century English examples of religious skepticism born of interpretative individualism and doctrinal
pluralism, see Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (London:
Penguin, 1993), pp. 225-238.
29
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan [1651], ed. Richard Tuck, rev. student ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), 1.7, pp. 47-49, and 3.33, p. 267; for Wilkins, see Barbara Shapiro, John Wilkins,
1614-1672: An Intellectual Biography (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969),
pp. 228-234; John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding [1689], ed. Peter H. Nidditch
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 4.1-3, 4.16-18, pp. 525-562, 657-696.
30
Francis Bacon, “Of Tribute; or, Giving That Which is Due” [c. 1592], in idem, Major Works, ed. Brian
Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 34.
31
Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the
Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
32
With its close ties to the French crown, the Paris Académie in particular served as a model for national
and regional scientific academies established in subsequent decades, including those in Berlin (1700), St.
Petersburg (1724), Stockholm (1739), and Göttingen (1751). See James McClellan III, “Scientific
Institutions and the Organization of Science,” in Cambridge History of Science, vol. 4, Eighteenth-Century
Science, ed. Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 90.
33
On Leiden, see Karin Maag, Seminary or University? The Genevan Academy and Reformed Higher
Education, 1560-1620 (Aldershot, U.K.: Scolar Press; Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 1995), pp. 174-182;
Anthony Grafton, “Civic Humanism and Scientific Scholarship at Leiden,” in Grafton, Bring Out Your
Dead: The Past as Revelation (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 118-
137. On Halle and Göttingen, see Charles E. McClelland, State, Society, and University in Germany, 1700-
1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 35-57; Thomas Albert Howard, Protestant
Theology and the Making of the Modern German University (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp.
87-121; Ian Hunter, “Multiple Enlightenments: Rival Aufklärer at the University of Halle, 1690-1730,” in
The Enlightenment World, ed. Martin Fitzpatrick et al. (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 576-595; and
Legaspi, Death of Scripture, pp. 27-51. Neither eighteenth-century Glasgow nor Edinburgh required a
profession of faith in the Church of Scotland; see Hilde de Ridder-Symoens, “Mobility,” in HUE, vol. 2,
ed. de Ridder-Symoens, p. 438.
34
For two examples of arguments that human behavior cannot in principle be understood on the model of
the natural sciences, which explains the social sciences’ “absence of the discovery of any law-like
28

generalizations whatsoever,” see Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy
(1958; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), and Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral
Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), pp. 79-108, quotation on 88.
See also Christian Smith, What Is a Person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from
the Person Up (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
35
In the absence of a comprehensive modern monograph, see the brief overview in Jonathan Wright, “The
Suppression and Restoration,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits, ed. Thomas Worcester
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 263-272, as well as the relevant articles in Part 6 of
Jesuits II, ed. O’Malley et al.
36
See Derek Beales, Prosperity and Plunder: European Catholic Monasteries in the Age of Revolution,
1650-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Lehner, Enlightened Monks, pp. 227-228.
37
Walter Rüegg, “Themes,” in HUE, vol. 3, Universities in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
(1800-1945), ed. idem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 3.
38
On Berlin’s founding, primacy, and influence, see McClelland, State, Society, and University in
Germany, pp. 101-149; Howard, Protestant Theology; Rüegg, “Themes,” in HUE, vol. 3, ed. idem, pp. 5,
13-23; and Theodore Ziolkowski, German Romanticism and Its Institutions (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1990), pp. 286-308. On the far from straightforward influence of the “German model” on
American universities with particular reference to the University of Michigan from the 1850s into the
1890s, see James Turner and Paul Bernard, “The ‘German Model’ and the Graduate School: The University
of Michigan and the Origin Myth of the American University,” in Turner, Language, Religion, Knowledge,
pp. 69-94. For the adoption of the Western research university model and assumptions around the world in
the twentieth century, see David John Frank and Jay Gabler, Reconstructing the University: Worldwide
Shifts in Academia in the 20th Century (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006).
39
The quoted phrase is Ziolkowski’s, in idem, German Romanticism, p. 293.
40
In this work, Kant devoted more attention to the relationship between philosophy and the theology
faculty than to the relationship between philosophy and the law and medical faculties combined. Immanuel
Kant, Der Streit der Fakultäten [1798], in idem, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königlich Preußischen
Akademie der Wissenschaften, vol. 7 (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1917), pp. [13]-116. See also Howard’s well-
contextualized discussion of the work in idem, Protestant Theology, pp. 121-129, as well as the broader
context of German university reform initiatives at Jena in the 1790s in Ziolkowski, German Romanticism,
pp. 237-252.
41
McClelland, State, Society, and University, pp. 104, 110, 111-112, 118, 124-125; Howard, Protestant
Theology, 131, 138, 141, 174, 181.
42
For the quotation, see McClelland, State, Society, and University, p. 132; on the importance of the unity
of Wissenschaft in the Romantic university, see Ziolkowski, German Romanticism, pp. 239-240, 247-249,
251-252, 253-254, 288.
43
Richard G. Olson, Science and Scientism in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Urbana, Ill., and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 2008), pp. 87-121; Terry Pinkard, German Philosophy, 1760-1860: The Legacy
of Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 178-183; Christophe Charle, “Patterns,” in
HUE, vol. 3, ed. Rüegg, pp. 47-49.
44
“Emerson provided an American version of the German idealist celebration of the self and creativity.”
Marsden, Soul, p. 187.
45
“The Germans invented the research ideal. The Americans invented an institution to house and
perpetuate it. . . . The ever narrowing gyre of specialization was no accidental spinoff from the modern
fragmentation of knowledge, but the flight plan of the graduate school from its launching.” Turner and
Bernard, “German Model,” in Turner, Language, Religion, Knowledge, p. 94. On Gilman and the research
emphasis at Johns Hopkins, see Marsden, Soul, pp. 153-156.
46
For Europe, see Konrad H. Jarausch, “Graduation and Careers,” in HUE, vol. 3, ed. Rüegg, pp. 363-389.
For the United States, see Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991); Roberts and Turner, Sacred and Secular University; Thomas L. Haskell, The
American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (1977; Baltimore and
London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); and Christian Smith, “Sociology,” in Secular Revolution,
ed. idem, pp. 97-159.
47
On Liebig, see William H. Brock, Justus von Liebig: The Chemical Gatekeeper (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997).
29

48
On Comte set in a broad intellectual context, see Olson, Science and Scientism, pp. 62-84; on the
pervasive influence of Comte’s positivism and the reception of his starkly supersessionist conception of
history in the United States beginning in the 1850s, see Christian Smith, “Introduction: Rethinking the
Secularization of American Public Life,” in Secular Revolution, ed. idem, pp. 54-55.
49
Christian Smith, “Sociology,” in Secular Revolution, ed. idem, esp. pp. 121-126, 147-149; see also
MacIntyre, After Virtue, pp. 79-87, 106-108.
50
Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1989); Marsden, Soul, pp. 90-93; Reuben, Making, pp. 19-23.
51
See especially Noll, Scandal. “When [Protestant] Christians turned to their intellectual resources for
dealing with these matters, they found that the cupboard was nearly bare.” Ibid., p. 106.
52
The same dynamic played out in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the
first decade of the twentieth century, “one has the phenomenon in Germany of a series of competing
religious groups, each claiming to overcome the fragmentation and division of which they were in fact
symptoms.” George S. Williamson, “A Religious Sonderweg? Reflections on the Sacred and the Secular in
the Historiography of Modern Germany,” Church History, 75:1 (2006), 152. On the tendency of many
Protestant colleges (including those run by Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians) to emphasize their
denominational distinctiveness after the mid-nineteenth century, see David B. Potts, “American Colleges in
the Nineteenth Century: From Localism to Denominationalism,” History of Education Quarterly, 11
(1971), 363-380.
53
Smith, “Introduction,” in idem, Secular Revolution, p. 75.
54
On the central importance of neo-Thomism to American Catholic higher education in the late nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, see Philip Gleason, Contending with Modernity: Catholic Higher Education in the
Twentieth Century (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), with discussion of Pascendi
Dominici Gregis and Humani Generis at pp. 13-17 and 280-281, respectively.
55
Although the Catholic University of America was among the fourteen charter members of the
Association of American Universities in 1900, it “failed to fulfill its promise of providing a national locus
for advanced scholarship with a distinctive Catholic perspective.” John R. Thelin, A History of American
Higher Education (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), pp. 110-112, quotation
on 112.
56
Kathleen A. Mahoney, Catholic Higher Education in Protestant America: The Jesuits and Harvard in
the Age of the University (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), pp. 243-247; on
some of the internal intellectual and pedagogical reasons for the demise of neo-scholasticism, see Gleason,
Contending, pp. 297-304.
57
The quoted phrase is Gleason’s in idem, Contending, p. 318.