何为大学（七）

何为大学（七）

课程导读

上节课我们讲到了，在学术集会上，人们亲切友善，交流思想，拓展社交，仿佛这样的场景才是大学的样子。但事实并非这样，这样的周期性会议只能代表一部分大学的理念。本节课，作者将为我们介绍一种不易被觉察，但就在你我身边的教育方式，请继续解读。

英文原文

Such meetings, I repeat, are but periodical, and only partially represent the idea of a university.

The bustle and whirl which are their usual concomitant, are in ill keeping with the order and gravity of earnest intellectual education.

We desiderate means of instruction which involve no interruption of our ordinary habits; nor need we seek it long, for the natural course of things brings it about, while we debate over it.

In every great country, the metropolis itself becomes a sort of necessary university, whether we will or no.

As the chief city is the seat of the court, of high society, of politics, and of law, so as a matter of course is it the seat of letters also; and at this time, for a long term of years, London and Paris are in fact and in operation universities, though in Paris its famous university is no more, and in London a university scarcely exists except as a board of administration.

The newspapers, magazines, reviews, museums and academies there found, the learned and scientific societies necessarily invest it with the functions of a university; and that atmosphere of intellect, which in a former age hung over Oxford or Bologna or Salamanca, has, with the change of times, moved away to the center of civil government.

Thither come up youths from all parts of the country, the students of law, medicine, and the fine arts, and the employees and attachés of literature.

There they live, as chance determines; and they are satisfied with their temporary home, for they find in it all that was promised to them there.

They have not come in vain, as far as their own object in coming is concerned.

They have not learned any particular religion, but they have learned their own particular profession well.

They have, moreover, become acquainted with the habits, manners and opinions of their place of sojourn, and done their part in maintaining the tradition of them.

We cannot then be without virtual universities; a metropolis is such: the simple question is, whether the education sought and given should be based on principle, formed upon rule, directed to the highest ends, or left to the random succession of masters and schools, one after another, with a melancholy waste of thought and an extreme hazard of truth.

Religious teaching itself affords us an illustration of our subject to a certain point. It does not indeed seat itself merely in centers of the world; this is impossible from the nature of the case. It is intended for the many, not the few; its subject matter is truth necessary for us, not truth recondite and rare; but it concurs in the principle of a university so far as this, that its great instrument, or rather organ, has ever been that which nature prescribes in all education, the personal presence of a teacher, or, in the theological language, Oral Tradition. It is the living voice, the breathing form, the expressive countenance, which preaches, which catechizes. Truth, a subtle, invisible, manifold spirit, is poured into the mind of the scholar by his eyes and ears, through his affections, imagination, and reason; it is poured into his mind and is sealed up there in perpetuity, by propounding and repeating it, by questioning and requestioning, by correcting and explaining, by progressing and then recurring to first principles, by all those ways which are implied in the word “catechizing.” In the first ages, it was a work of long time; months, sometimes years, were devoted to the arduous task of disabusing the mind of the incipient Christian of its pagan errors, and of molding it upon the Christian faith. The scriptures, indeed, were at hand for the study of those who could avail themselves of them; but St. Irenæus does not hesitate to speak of whole races, who had been converted to Christianity, without being able to read them. To be unable to read and write was in those times no evidence of want of learning: the hermits of the deserts were, in this sense of the word, illiterate; yet the great St. Anthony, although he knew not letters, was a match in disputation for the learned philosophers who came to try him. Didymus again, the great Alexandrian theologian, was blind. The ancient discipline, called the Disciplina Arcani, involved the same principle. The more sacred doctrines of Revelation were not committed to books, but passed on by successive tradition. The teaching on the Blessed Trinity and the Eucharist appears to have been so handed down for some hundred years; and when at length reduced to writing, it has filled many folios, yet has not been exhausted.