At a university, we are expected to produce all kinds of explanations for the positions we hold. The idea is that we will understand the connections amongst things and be able to move from one to the other. This kind of reasoning, according to Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman, is evidence of wisdom. In what follows, I hope to reflect a little on Blessed Newman’s conception of faith and wisdom in some of his “Oxford University Sermons” and on how that relates to our lives as university students.

Newman writes, “Philosophy, then, is Reason exercised upon Knowledge; or the Knowledge not merely of things in general, but of things in their relations to one another … Wisdom is the clear, calm, accurate vision, and comprehension of the whole course, the whole work of God.” Cultivating wisdom seems to be the project that a university grounded in the tradition of the liberal arts aims to accomplish: to help its students see reality as a sort of mosaic, where each thing one knows is like a single tile that bears a definite relationship to every other tile and to the coherent whole that is the mosaic.

Yet, surely this is a project that can never reach completion. We can never claim to comprehend the world in one sweeping glance, in its immensity and its detail. Our picture of things always will have gaps and rough edges.

What, then, do we do when we cannot come up with a well-articulated response to a pressing issue, one concerning which we must make a judgment? What when these questions have to do with our behavior in daily life, our ways of interacting with others and God? We face questions concerning what a good life is. We face questions concerning how this or that political issue should be solved. What do we do when we cannot perceive with that utmost clarity of wisdom the way these things are and how we should respond to them, even while we must respond?

Well, we use what tools we have at our disposal, and we make use of all sorts of more or less reliable things: indication, probability, associations, received laws, testimony, popular impression, inward instinct, and obscure memory are all things Newman identifies.

Surely, these are human and fallible. We may make mistakes when we use them, but paralysis being no less serious a mistake, we of course use them. Nevertheless, given the darkness surrounding these, might we hope that a light would shine on things?

For the Christian, faith enters here. Here the infallible Divinity reveals how we are to relate to one another and to Him. This act of faith itself, surely, is a casting out on uncertain grounds. Few believers have dug through all the evidences for Christianity and found that they cannot but intellectually assent to it. Rather, we encounter some measure of evidence that this revelation is from God and, based on the resonance of the proclaimed truth with the deepest desires of our human hearts, based on our antecedent expectations of what sort of thing might be revealed; based, ultimately, on a complex disposition that is finally the gift of God, we assent to these truths. Once we grant that these truths come from God, they can be lived with great confidence, since they come from Him Who is Truth itself. By wisdom we see the connections between things. Faith, considered strictly in itself, accepts things discreetly and cannot justify one thing based on another. It is hard to see this distinction clearly in ourselves, because we often possess various mixes of wisdom and faith on closely related matters.

While we are at a place whose goal is to cultivate wisdom, we might forget that wisdom is something that we can never possess in its entirety. We might feel expected always to be able to offer an explanation for why we hold such and such position, and we might even be tempted to feel guilty or irresponsible when we cannot. Newman would say that in many instances we are just doing the best with what is given to us. In other instances, where we trust that we have received some truth from God but do not yet understand it, we cannot give a reason that argues from other things but can only point to the Word that has been spoken to us. And that is okay.

Another difficulty that I know I struggle with is actually making an effort to cultivate wisdom. I struggle to have a disposition as a student that leads me not just to swallow up and regurgitate information—be that what is written in a text or even a professor’s interpretation of it—but actually to work to integrate it into a coherent view of reality. Newman himself saw this difficulty: “Students who store themselves so amply with literature or science, that no room is left for determining the respective relations which exist between their acquisitions, one by one, are rather said to load their minds than to enlarge them.” This, I think, requires thinking hard about and even praying over what we study. If we take the time to remove ourselves from daily hustle and bustle and to bring what we learn to God, He surely will send His Spirit to lead us into truth, and ultimately bring us closer to Him. This will take work, but the fruit is well worth the effort.

Shaun Evans is a sophomore theology and philosophy major living in Stanford Hall, where he can be found trying to play the keyboard or doing, he hopes, a comparatively better job of translating Greek texts. Contact him at sevans5@nd.edu.