Perhaps the most preposterous thing I have ever read on Twitter – a high bar to clear – is the suggestion that the “ethos of religion” was “fundamentally hostile to learning”. What made this particularly absurd was that the person who wrote those words, a columnist at The Times, had been educated at New College, Oxford, founded by a bishop six and a half centuries ago. It is, frankly, beyond me how any intelligent person can end up believing such a thing. Even if you do not believe in Christianity, the statement above is obviously nonsensical if you consider the great artists, poets, painters, architects, musicians and scientists who have been inspired by the faith, and whose work is in many cases inextricably linked to their beliefs.
Were the men who designed and built Chartes Cathedral – an intimidatingly complex edifice which could probably not be reproduced today, even with all our advantages – hostile to learning? What about the medieval monks who painstakingly reproduced hundreds of thousands of words from the ancient world? Or Fr Georges Lemaitre, the priest and astrophysicist who first theorised the Big Bang? I could go on – I might mention TS Eliot, one of the great critics and poets of the twentieth century, or Thomas Tallis and William Byrd, whose glorious polyphonic liturgical music will be sung as long as there are humans around to sing it. I have seen with my own eyes the twin domes of the Vatican Observatory, high above Lake Albano outside Rome. Indeed, the very possibility and coherence of the scientific enterprise is itself evidence for the truth of the Christian religion, because science takes as its basic premise an orderly, predictable, intelligible universe. The striving for beauty and truth which marks the best art presupposes that those concepts are real, and not simply convenient constructs or rationalisations.
Christianity has an irreplaceable function in education, because without a recognition of the underlying reality of the universe and the meaning of life, both science and the humanities falter. We see this in the relentless march of dehumanising technologies and medical procedures – such as embryo experimentation and screening, and the mutilation of healthy bodies in the name of gender ideology – and in the collapse of much of literature and philosophy into self-referential politicised word games, riven by a radical scepticism about the possibility of ever really knowing anything.
That is why we should all feel a deep sadness at the closure of St Benet’s Hall, of the University of Oxford, as lamented recently in the Catholic Herald. I don’t wish to go over the details again; suffice it to say that a small beacon has been lost. Dominus Illuminatio Mea – “The Lord is my light” – proclaims Oxford’s motto, but secularisation is a seemingly unstoppable force in the university at present. St Benet’s is the second Christian permanent private hall (PPH) to close in the last fifteen years, after Greyfriars, although Blackfriars Hall, run by the Dominicans, and the Jesuit Campion Hall remain.
These closures may seem irrelevant to the wider world, a concern only for a small minority. But this is not the case. For good or ill, Oxford continues to be one of the main forming grounds for British elites. Just as with many other institutions, the spiritual atmosphere that students imbibe there really does matter for the future of the country.
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