St. Albert was Great, but what are we?
Today is the feast of Albertus Magnus, St. Albert the Great, patron saint of scientists. This week I listened to the recent Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World episode on "St. Albert the Great & Magic," which is a representation of a Justin Sledge episode.
The episode contained the statement, which I've heard many times before, that Albert was probably the last person who knew all of human knowledge at the time. It's a credible statement. But I think it's not only a statement of how remarkable St. Albert was and of how much our knowledge has grown since his time, but also an implicit commentary on how poor the academy has become at integrating its knowledge. Everything today is simply so hyperspecialized, everyone off in their own silo drilling down deeply and narrowly into their itty-bitty subject.
Medieval universities would regularly put on disputations that would call together all the faculties of the institution to debate a given topic. Can you imagine such a thing happening today? Absolutely not! That would take away professors' time from pursuing the purposes of their grants that bring money into the university. Why would they do something so liberal (as opposed to servile, not as opposed to conservative)? But it is supposedly a single universe that all fields of a university study, so light from many different angles should help to illuminate the integral whole. That is presumably why the university is called a university. These days, we don't have universities so much as diversities.
In the past it would have been philosophy that ultimately integrated all knowledge. But philosophy has been dethroned in prestige by physics, which is too busy analyzing the world into parts to do any real integration. (Even its efforts at a Grand Unified Theory suffer too much from the reductionism inherent in its methods.)
So we're left with disintegrated, illiberal institutions of higher learning setting the tone for human society. Hence the fascinating modern world we live in.
St. Albert the Great, pray for us!
