Truth being under siege, the university — once the Church’s cathedral of the intellect — has become a temple to relativism, technocracy, and soulless pragmatism. The modern university no longer forms souls; it programs consumers. Once the glory of Christendom, our institutions of higher learning now echo with the nihilistic whispers of postmodern despair. It is time to recall the true origins of the university, its ecclesial vocation, and the only worldview capable of restoring it to grace: the biblical covenantal framework.

The University: A Gift of the Church to the World

One wouldn’t guess it from the state of major public universities today, but the genesis of the university is not secular. In fact, universities are a heritage of the Church to the world. They were born as fruits of the Church’s 2,000-year pursuit of the great rapprochement between faith and reason, culminating in sanctuaries for contemplating the highest truths. The entire premise of their founding was to observe the created order, consider natural law, and to bring upon these thoughts the bearing of reason and divine revelation. This is why the first universities — Paris, Bologna, Oxford, Salamanca — were founded by the Church not as assembly lines for functional job readiness but as sanctuaries for the contemplation of the divine. These halls of higher, sublime education were overflows of the cathedral schools which, themselves, were deeply immersed in the Church’s intellectual, sacramental, and liturgical life, all under the spiritual guidance of bishops and the pope. The Church was committed to seeing learning as a path to contemplation of God. Thomas Woods notes:

The university was born in the bosom of the Catholic Church. It was she who nourished it and gave it life, just as she gave birth to the hospital, the orphanage, and the monastery. The earliest universities—Bologna, Paris, Oxford—arose not as secular institutions, but as extensions of cathedral schools, under the patronage of popes and bishops, guided by clerics, and devoted to the study of God and His creation. Theology was called the ‘queen of the sciences,’ and all other disciplines—law, medicine, philosophy—were seen as handmaids to divine truth. The very concept of a universitas implied a totality of knowledge ordered to ultimate meaning, an idea only possible within a worldview that sees all creation as intelligible because it was created by Logos. In a very real sense, the Catholic Church did not merely influence higher education—she invented it.

The historical debt owed to the Church by modern culture notwithstanding, at the fundamental level what is owed is an appreciation for the vision of the founding of universities. Simply put, it is the pursuit of all sciences under the final authority of theology; a system that forms each student lovingly for the sake of their final end: eternal salvation and heavenly beatitude in Christ. The university becomes, in that sense, a kind of nurturing mother. John Henry Newman, in his seminal work The Idea of a University, articulates this vision with crystal clarity: “A University is, according to the usual designation, an Alma Mater, knowing her children one by one, not a foundry, or a mint, or a treadmill.”

Newman’s assertion is that the university exists for the formation of the whole person, his intellect and his will, his reason and his morality. It is a caricaturization of the work of the university that the institution is focused on nothing but the transmission of utilitarian information. The university was founded to holistically unite all areas of study under the aspect of the highest of the studies, the veritable “queen of the sciences,” per Aquinas. Theology is the only science that possesses the capacity to bring order and an objective hierarchy to all other areas of study under the light of their final purpose, their telos: God. This wasn’t per accidens of the intent of the university, this was by design. Far from a kind of medieval exuberance, this was the very core of the idea of universitas — the unity of all knowledge, each to the other and all to the one: God. Theology remained the integrating, unifying substance that bound all schools and subjects of study because it alone, as a science, presented answers to the most powerful, pertinent human questions: Who are we? Why do we exist? What is our end?

The founding of the university was therefore covenantal in nature: it was a spiritual act by the Bride of Christ to educate her children into the Logos –the divine Word through whom all things were made (John 1:3). Education, at its root, is a participation in the covenant between God and man, a formative journey into the truth that sets us free (John 8:32).

The Rationalistic Revolt: Severing Faith from Reason

Unfortunately, with the so-called “Enlightenment” came a willful revolt against the unicity of truth. Figures such as Descartes, Voltaire, Hume, Rousseau, and their heirs all put forth epistemological claims that reason could not only be separated and isolated to function by itself, but that it could be elevated to the place and authority of divine revelation. In short, they posited that man could be his own god. This overtly elevated human autonomy was aimed at the deliberate rejection of the metaphysical and theological order. Man had placed himself at odds with the divine Logos. Universities suffered from this ideological movement. Education ceased to be at the service of God and the contemplation of His created order; it was reoriented to the subjectivization and manipulation of information and “truth” to suit man’s every ebbing agenda. Philosophy was divorced from both theology and the empirical sciences. The natural sciences became entrenched in an abject skepticism that would ridicule the inquiry of anything outside of material consideration. Language arts, literature, and social studies were completely washed of any transcendental and sacramental consideration. Education found itself in the very mire Pope Benedict XVI decried in his 2006 Regensburg Address: “The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie human rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby.”

Benedict warned that by reducing reason to mere empiricism and calculation, we have amputated the soul of education. What remains is a university that excels in data but falters in wisdom, that celebrates diversity of thought yet recoils from truth itself. The “dictatorship of relativism,” as Benedict called it, reigns supreme. What this rationalistic turn accomplished was the disintegration of the university’s covenantal identity. Without a unifying vision of the human person, the university became a dismembered body: faculties no longer speaking to each other, disciplines at odds, professors without shared telos, and students with no idea why any of it matters beyond a paycheck. As Brad Gregory so astutely points out:

The Enlightenment did not elevate reason; it restricted it. By confining reason to the empirical and the observable, it amputated the soul from the intellect. The great universities, once animated by the search for divine truth and the formation of the whole person, became factories for the production of technical expertise. Theology, once queen of the sciences, was exiled. Philosophy, once the handmaid of faith, became the servant of ideology. In severing knowledge from wisdom, the Enlightenment reduced the university from a sanctuary of integrated truth to a fragmented marketplace of information. The result is not liberation, but alienation—a generation trained in skills but starved of meaning.

It would be bad enough if this impoverishment ceased at the level of the academy. The issue is that universities don’t function as silos. They shape society and civilization. When universities jettison the divine, the sacramental, and the transcendental, they do more than redesign courses, they virtually shoot civilization in the foot. When universities serve as sanctuaries of wisdom, they order civilization to truth. When they become consummately utilitarian and functional, they cannot help but create an academic order akin to the assembly lines popularized by the early industrial revolution, except that the product being assembled is the human person, reduced to yet another functional cog in a grander economic mechanism. Universities cease to form for the sake of the eternal, becoming instead a machine for producing technocrats, activists, rebels, and skeptics, but not saints, scholars, or sages. Severing the university from the divine means disintegrating even the cohesion of a culture rooted in divine and natural law. The results are no surprise: marriages fall apart, families fracture, truth becomes relative, and society loses any semblance of a shared moral grammar. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn prophetically chided in his Harvard Address, “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” R.R. Reno, following this line of reasoning, accurately comments:

The modern secular university, having divorced itself from the theological and metaphysical foundations that once gave it coherence, now flounders in a crisis of purpose. It produces graduates fluent in technique but ignorant of truth, trained in ideology but unformed in wisdom. By exiling God from the academy, it has exiled man as well—reducing the human person to a consumer, a statistic, or a utility. The disciplines no longer converse; they compete. The curriculum no longer forms souls; it fragments them. The result is a civilization intellectually adrift and morally unanchored. A university without God is not merely incomplete—it is dangerous.

Universities, in abandoning metaphysics, have not made the world more rational; they have made it more irrational, more cynical, more suicidal. The rise of depression, confusion, and identity collapse among students is not an anomaly but a logical consequence of education stripped of transcendence. A culture that trains minds but not souls produces brilliant barbarians — minds with no moral compass, hearts with no heavenly hope.

The Crisis of Public Education

The American public and secular university is the exemplar of this. Any language of nobility and refinement is completely absent there. Instead, it’s become a pantheon of ideologies, an arena of progressivist political narratives. George Weigel notes, in the National Catholic Register (“A Catholic Fix for American Higher Education”) that colleges today “saddle students with debt, give them little clarity on what it means to be human, and produce polarized graduates.” So, yes, Christian parents are right to be deeply concerned about sending their children into public universities that, under the guise of academic freedom and progress, often are crucibles of willful secular indoctrination designed to dismantle every vestige of faith, virtue, and identity that parents have tearfully and painstakingly cultivated over 18 years at home. In far too many institutions, the classroom is absolutely not a neutral space for inquiry but a battleground where the faith is pointedly mocked, moral absolutes are scorned, and the Church is caricatured as archaic or oppressive. Courses in philosophy, social theories, literature, and even the sciences are increasingly shaped by ideologies that directly contradict biblical anthropology, natural law, and revealed truth. Courses on feminist narratives, Marxist doctrine, queer and gender theories, and virtually every area of frivolous intersectional progressivist ideology permeate the curriculum today. Worse still, the cultural environment, fueled by moral relativism, hypersexuality, and a celebration of radical autonomy, undermines the conscience formation and covenantal worldview that faithful parents labor to instill. To send a child into such an environment unprepared is not merely risky — it is, in many cases, tantamount to permitting spiritual sabotage. As St. Paul warned, “Do not be conformed to this world” (Rom 12:2). Yet modern universities often excel precisely in conforming young souls to the spirit of the age rather than the mind of Christ.

The rise of policies like DEI and pro-LGBTQ, misanthropic, anti-Christian undercurrents are by design. They are the logical and axiomatic results of rejecting the natural, metaphysical, theological, and moral foundations of human existence and education. Anthony Esolen rightly notes this corollary,

The contemporary university has become the chief factory of the progressive project, churning out graduates catechized not in the truths of faith or reason, but in the creeds of relativism, critical theory, and identity politics. The biblical vision of man as made in the image of God has been replaced by a constructivist anthropology that sees gender, truth, and morality as subjective and malleable. This intellectual apostasy is not merely academic—it is civilizational. When the institutions charged with forming the minds and consciences of the next generation abandon objective truth, what results is not liberation but dissolution. The university no longer safeguards civilization; it deconstructs it.

The results are dire, and this doesn’t require prophetic foresight. It simply calls for objective observation of the declining culture. As C.S. Lewis observed: “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.” For Lewis, the chest — where heart and reason meet — is precisely what classical education is designed to cultivate through its sacramental, covenantal anthropology. To be very honest, numerous modern self-identified Catholic institutions presently fail at this as well. But remove that and you reduce man to a machine, a cog in an industrial mechanism, a will-to-power, a consumer, or worse, a god in his own eyes. The modern university now mirrors biblical Babel: a confusion of tongues with no common moral and teleological grammar. It teaches facts without wisdom, information without end, empowerment without virtue, identity without essence, achievement without purpose, and rights without responsibilities. These institutions laud the mediocre, celebrate the mundane, encourage the perverse, veil the vice, and self-congratulate at every commencement. This is not merely bad pedagogy. It is spiritual deformation.

Education as Participation in Covenant Life

The antidote to this malaise is not just better funding or curriculum reform. It is a total recalibration of purpose. And I mean total. Education must be reclaimed as a covenantal act — an ordered relationship between the Creator and His image-bearers, one that forms the intellect to seek the truth and the will to choose the good. The biblical covenantal worldview provides precisely this framework.

First, it grounds the dignity of the human person in being imago Dei — not a construct of race, class, or gender, but a being with a rational soul called to communion with God because he mirrors the divine God. Second, it restores theology to its rightful place as the integrating principle of all learning. Third, it re-binds education to virtue, linking truth to love and knowledge to moral responsibility. St. Augustine saw this clearly: “Let knowledge be used as a kind of scaffolding, which we remove once the edifice of love is complete.” In other words, education is not an end in itself. It never was. Education is a means to charity: caritas in veritate.

This vision is not nostalgic fantasy. It is incarnated in institutions like Ave Maria University, Hillsdale College, the University of Navarra, Franciscan University of Steubenville, Liberty University, and Thomas Aquinas College. It is the pulse behind the Catholic classical education movement sweeping America. It is what Pope John Paul II called for in Ex Corde Ecclesiae when he wrote: “A Catholic University’s privileged task is to unite existentially by intellectual effort two orders of reality that too often tend to be placed in opposition: the search for truth and the certainty of already knowing the fount of truth.”

This is not mere integration. It is covenantal synergy. Catholic education does not just teach theology; it breathes it. It is nourished by it, sustained by it, and shares it forward. Catholic classical education shapes communities where liturgy, sacraments, prayer, philosophy, and science converge in divine revelation and, ultimately, the person of Christ.

The Role of the Family

But let us go further: the restoration of education begins not in ivory towers but in domestic churches. The family is the first school of virtue, the original classroom of the covenant. As the Catechism teaches: “Parents have the first responsibility for the education of their children.” Thus, the revival of universities, especially Catholic universities, must be matched by the revival of Catholic homes as places where children learn to think with the Church, to love the truth, to worship, and to wonder. Without this foundational covenant, no university can succeed, no matter how faithful its mission statement.

Hope on the Horizon

There are signs of renewal in view. More Christian colleges are re-embracing the liberal arts. More students are fleeing public universities in search of truth. More faculty are rejecting ideological conformity in favor of fidelity to reason and Revelation. We would be mistaken if we viewed this as just pedagogical preference. It is a cultural necessity. As philosopher Étienne Gilson once wrote, “The only way to restore unity to human knowledge is to recover its lost center—God.”

And so we must. The crisis in education is a crisis of metaphysics. It is a crisis of anthropology that has engendered widespread nihilistic self-loathing. It is ultimately a crisis of worship. For when man ceases to adore God, he adores the state, the self, or the market — and his universities reflect this idolatry. But the Church, the ever-young Bride of Christ, has the antidote. She offers not merely information but formation, not merely diversity of thought but unity of truth. Her covenantal worldview has withstood empires and ideologies and will outlast an atrocious ideological age as well. The modern university may be crumbling, but the idea of the university — the Church’s idea — still stands. It was born not in revolution but in covenant, not in relativism but in Revelation. It is time we reclaimed it. Let Catholic families renew the domestic church. Let Catholic educators teach under the kingship of Christ. Let universities be what they were always meant to be: temples of truth, sanctuaries of the Logos, schools for saints. Then, and only then, will we see a new renaissance, an age of Christian humanism, where every lecture is an act of love, every classroom a chapel of wonder, and every diploma a pledge to live for the glory of God.