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In the thirtieth episode of the third season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Peter Harrison, Professor of History and Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Queensland and Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Notre Dame Australia. Harrison opens by exploring the popular perception that the narrative concerning the relationship shared by science and religion is one defined by conflict. Harrison contends, however, such a narrative is predominantly constructed and perpetuated by individuals with little understanding of theology. Compounding the challenge is that the narratives to which those individuals gravitate are often ones taken out of context and/or ones from which only select details are recounted. A longer view of history recounted by individuals with deep appreciations for science and theology offers a narrative populated by scientists of deep faith whose theological commitments often animated their scientific investigations. Harrison then shifts to discussing his own formation as a scholar, the challenges scholars with interdisciplinary interests face, and the sources of optimism and hope those scholars can pursue. For Harrison, those sources of hope and optimism came while studying as a graduate student at Yale University with Hans Frei and George Lindbeck and then as a young scholar in the writings of Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre. Those sources of hope and optimism left their marks on Harrison’s own efforts—efforts which eventually led him to deliver the Gifford Lectures in 2010-2011 at the University of Edinburgh. Harrison concludes by reflecting upon the roles that virtues such as charity and gratitude play in the lives of scholars called to grapple with questions—often the largest of questions—defying the disciplinary strictures populating academe.
Todd Ream: Welcome to Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. My name is Todd Ream. I have the privilege of serving as the publisher for Christian Scholar’s Review and as the host for Saturdays at Seven. I also have the privilege of serving on the faculty and the administration at Indiana Wesleyan University.
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Our guest is Peter Harrison, Professor of History and Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Queensland and a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Notre Dame Australia. Thank you for joining us.
Peter Harrison: Thanks, Todd. It’s a pleasure. I’m looking forward to our conversation.
Todd Ream: All too often the popular narrative concerning the relationship shared by Christianity and modern science is the two are adversaries, existing in a history of conflict. A review of your work dating back to some of your earliest efforts such as The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (published by Cambridge University Press in 1998), indicates you may have an understanding that’s more complicated than that.
When peering into the origins of this relationship, what, if anything, might surprise individuals for whom the conflict narrative is one that’s assumed to be true?
Peter Harrison: Yeah. Well, basically the fact that the conflict narrative is false, I think would be a surprise to people that the fact that, you know science and religion have not been throughout history typically opposed to each other, and that it’s not the case that science, that religion, or Christianity has tempted to suppress scientific ideas. I think, you know, more specifically if people give consideration to the fact that the key figures in, in the development of modern science from the 17th to the 19th centuries were for the most part committed religious believers, then even if we take that premise, we have to either think that they are somehow engaged in cognitive dissonance or somehow separating out in their own minds their religious commitments from their science. And studying their biographies shows that that’s not the case.
So what we know that is historical figures, for the most part, didn’t have a problem with the relations between their beliefs and science. I think one reason people that tend to buy into the conflict myth is that there are, you know, emblematic historical instances of what looked like conflict. And Galileo would be an instance and Darwin would be another. And I think all I’d say in the Galileo case is that once you look at the history closely, it, it emerges that that’s not really a conflict between science and religion at all, but it’s really a case of competing scientific claims that the Church unwisely perhaps took a particular side on.
And the Darwin affair, I think again, what we tend to do is we tend to read back modern controversies back into the history so that we do have religiously motivated opposition to, to Darwinism and evolutionary theory. That, that is a fact. So we do actually have instances of conflict in the present, but I think it’s a mistake to project those back onto the past.
Um, and probably one last thing I’d say on, on that point is that if we look at what the, the scientific actors themselves argued they, in fact, not merely was religion, not in conflict with their scientific pursuits, but in fact their religious beliefs supported them, motivated them. In fact, there’s aspects of a positive connection between science and religion. So I think all of those things, some people would find surprising.
Todd Ream: Thank you. In terms of those contributions, then would you provide some examples perhaps of Protestant, as well as, say, Catholic figures who made those contributions?
Peter Harrison: As you noted, I’ve written about the connections between Protestantism and science. And I, I should probably clarify, my argument is not that Protestantism uniquely contributed to scientific development in a way that Catholicism didn’t. And I think part, part of the reason for that is if, if we think about the origins of Protestantism is originally, it emerges from within a Catholic context. Um, and the polarization between Catholics and Protestants is, is comes after the Protestant Reformation so that there are elements of Christian thought common to both Catholicism and Protestantism.
But nonetheless I think, Protestantism does have a, a kind of de-sacralizing tendency, I would argue that we, we see in a number of aspects of Protestantism. And there are elements of Protestantism’s attempt to desacralization the world that prove to be congenial to, to the emergence of modern science. But to speak more broadly across the traditions, I think, you know, a key concept would be the idea that there are laws of nature, which we tend to take for granted, but turns out to be a very modern idea.
Um, and it’s not the case that people didn’t think there were regularities in the natural world, but the idea that these regularities could be understood as laws is a 17th century idea. It coincides with the scientific revolution, and the, the, in, in its original conception laws of nature were divine edicts that God had imposed on the natural order. And so there’s a sense in which, in so far as the conception of laws of nature is fundamental to our modern scientific worldview that worldview rests on what was originally a set of theological assumptions about how God operates in the natural world. So that’s one example of how religious ideas underpin the scientific endeavor.
We can also say that religious considerations motivated individuals, and this, this goes back to the first point, that certain figures in the scientific revolution argued that their religious commitments were precisely the things that motivated them to study the natural world because in doing so, they’re uncovering aspects of, of God’s creation.
And perhaps the last thing we can say is that, that the whole notion of, you know, experimental science as a socially useful and, and legitimate enterprise originally rested on a set of religious assumptions about science, that science was really a way of embodying the injunction to love our neighbors, that science could actually improve human welfare. And in historically, in the 17th and 18th centuries, science was thus presented as a kind of moral project that a moral and religious project, one that was intended to improve human welfare in a way that answered to the biblical injunction to love our neighbors.
Todd Ream: By challenging the conflict narrative then and bringing these kinds of contributions that you’re talking about closer to the surface or closer to the front of how we understand this relationship between science and religion, in what ways do you believe that, for example, human flourishing and our understandings of the contributions that science can make would be clearer or perhaps even more pronounced?
Peter Harrison: So there are complications within the complications, I think, Todd. So I, I think one, one thing, you know, you might, you might say is, and this is a kind of this, this might introduce the possibility of an element of critique, we might say that the particular conception of human flourishing that emerges out of an understanding of science as an embodiment of the Christian virtue of charity, actually leads to a particular conception of human flourishing.
And you might say at, you know, at an extreme, the marriage of science and, and a conception of human flourishing leads to an emphasis on material welfare. And so, you know, I suppose what I’m trying to say here is that we tend to construct these relations between aspects of, say, Protestantism and the emergence of modern science as largely positive, but we can say that it, that there’s the possibility of certain downsides to this type marriage if it infringes on our conception of what genuine human flourishing consists in.
And, and I think the extreme version of that I don’t, I’m not attributing this directly to Protestant thought, but the extreme version of this is the, the kind of transhumanist, post humanist visions that look to the technological perfection of human nature. And I think that kind of scientific understanding of what human flourishing consists in, it turns out ultimately to be at odds with a robust Christian conception. And so the historical trajectory can actually move us in a certain direction. And we take for granted, I think, that material flourishing is really what it’s about. Whereas if we were to stand back and think more deeply about it, we would also be worried about, or more concerned about where the material flourishing has kind of displaced our conception of a more robust, deeper understanding of, you might say it’s the spiritual dimension of human nature.
Todd Ream: And thus challenge the ways that materialism has come to captivate, at least the ways we think about or orient modern science.
Peter Harrison: Exactly, because I think there’s a tendency to, there’s a tendency to think that modern science underpins a kind of reductionistic, materialistic approach to the world. And I, I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. And interestingly, I think developments within the sciences themselves point to that.
But nonetheless, I think at a very general level, there’s often an association between a kind of materialistic reductionism and modern science as if modern science makes that approach inevitable. And I don’t think it does.
Todd Ream: Thank you. I want to ask you a couple of details now, a couple of questions about your own vocation as a scholar and how it developed. You earned a Bachelor of Science and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Queensland. You earned a master’s from Yale University and then returned to Australia to earn a PhD at Queensland.
Would you begin by describing how your interdisciplinary arrangement of interests emerged over the course of your years as an undergraduate student and then also as a graduate student?
Peter Harrison: I mean, I’d like to say there was a deep plan to all of this, Todd, but, you know, there are a lot of uh, a lot of just blundering around in the dark. But look, I, you know, I’d always been interested in both scientific questions and in broader, the broader questions of the humanities. Um, when I, you know, when I was in secondary school, and I’m not sure whether this is still the case, the idea was that the smart kids did science and, and the less gifted did the humanities. Um, and I think that that’s deeply unfortunate. But I was encouraged as a consequence of that.
And I’m not saying I was particularly bright secondary school student, but I was nonetheless encouraged to pursue science and I really enjoyed it. Uh, I very much enjoyed my undergraduate education in the sciences. And then I taught science in secondary schools in Australia for several years. I was a high school science teacher.
But I had always been always been interested in historical, philosophical, and religious questions, particularly in relation to science. And that’s what motivated me to go back to to study religious studies in essence and um, and that took me then back to the University of Queensland that took me to Yale for a master’s there in religious studies. And then back to UQ for a PhD, that was essentially in history. So I was meandering around, but I’d always had this broad range of interests and was fortunate that I was able to pursue them.
Todd Ream: In terms of how, for example, the University of Queensland was organized and Yale University was organized in terms of its disciplines and then sub-disciplines, how did you manage to navigate these university structures in order to obtain the education you did and nurture these interests?
Peter Harrison: Yeah, it’s, it’s a good question. I mean, I think, I think the disciplinary structures of our universities tend to militate against working across disciplines. And I think that’s an inevitable consequence of the high degree of specialization that characterizes our disciplines and the different disciplinary formations.
Again, I was really fortunate when I was studying science at UQ. They introduced a history of science course, a year long history of science course, which I was able to undertake. And I had a very indulgent lecturer in, in zoology who, who, who, who allowed me to, you know, work, work on an independent thesis on evolution and ethics. And this was in the context of a science degree. So UQ at that time was very open to these kinds of interdisciplinary possibilities. I think less so now.
And when I went to Yale, I was struck by the fact that I was there at a time. I, some of you, some of your listeners may know George Lindbeck was in place then, and Hans Frei, who was the person who I was interested. And they were both quite influential in terms of their theological approach. What I learned there was that theologians in a sense have to, have to be interested in everything, that they need to, they need to be on top of developments in the sciences and sociology and so on. And so theology is, in a sense, I think demands a level of interdisciplinarity.
And then as, so I went back to UQ and I did, you know, studies in religious studies there, but essentially historically oriented. Um, so as I go back to your question, I think the disciplinary structures make it challenging to do the connections. And I do think, I do think it’s important to operate out of a disciplinary framework. I don’t think you can succeed in modern academia unless you can identify yourself with, you know, a particular discipline. And I tend to identify myself now with history and philosophy. Um, and so my approach to the science and religion questions, I think, comes out of those disciplinary arrangements. And I think if you’re doing science and religion, it’s important to do that.
But again, to go back to your question, I think, you know, one of the issues confronting us is that the big, the really big questions that confront us can’t be answered from within a single disciplinary framework. And you either have to try and get your head around different disciplines or you have to work collaboratively with people in order to get, you know, the necessary range of perspectives for the problems that confront us.
And I think that to go back to your previous question about human flourishing, I think that’s a relevant consideration. If you take human flourishing from a very narrow perspective, say science or medicine, you are only looking at part of the problem.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. mentioned Hans Frei and George Lindbeck. You also mentioned a particularly charitable or generous lecturer in zoology at the University of Queensland. Were there any other sort of mentors that helped guide your interests and help you sort of navigate these worlds in which you were striving to live?
Peter Harrison: Yeah, look, I think there are lots of people to whom I feel indebted. My PhD supervisor, who’s a historian, still working at University of Queensland, Philip Almond his name is he was a great inspiration, had a terrific work ethic and I learned a lot from him about how to write and how to do research. Um, and he’s still a close friend, and I see him every week. We have conversations about his various writing projects.
Um, but I’ve also been inspired by, you know, people who I’ve read. And if you’ve, if you’ve read my own work you know, people like Alasdair MacIntyre are, I greatly admire his work and the way he approaches things. And you know, very interestingly, early on, MacIntyre, again, as your listeners probably know, his most famous book is After Virtue, which I think revolutionized how we think about morality these days. But, but interestingly, you know, MacInture going back had a range of interests, including the philosophy of science, which I think was quite influential on how he came up with his ideas.
So, and I mean Charles Taylor would be, be another person. And it’s not that I am wholly a hundred percent on board with the ideas of these thinkers, but, but their comprehensive approach, their willingness to tackle significant questions that, that I think are, are of great importance, I’ve found that they were quite inspiring.
Todd Ream: Thank you. As you look back over the arc of your career as well as now, consider people who also inspired you from whom whose work you drew in your own, what advice would you offer to graduate students in particular interests don’t exactly fit within one particular disciplinary or subdisciplinary area?
Peter Harrison: I’m reluctant to dispense too much advice, Todd. Um, and it, but partly because I think, people’s individual circumstances are unique in certain respects. And so I’m not sure I can generalize too much from my own experience to, to generic advice. But, and the other thing, I think that the situation facing grad students now is very, very different from from when I was, when I was a grad student. And as I say, I think I’ve been very fortunate in, in the, the opportunities that have presented themselves to me.
But your, your point about, you know, if, if you don’t find yourself quite fitting into the narrow disciplinary confines, I’d say terrific. That’s great. I think push on in your own direction. The key thing though, I think, is that it’s really crucial to stay in touch with where the current conversation is. Uh, otherwise you, you just don’t have a point of connection with the current discourse. So I think it’s a, it’s really a matter of, you know, resisting the current fads and fashions. And as a historian, you know, I’m, I’m acutely conscious of these and it can be quite hard to know what’s a, you know, what’s a fad and a fashion and what’s an enduring significant change to the discipline. And that requires, I think, a degree of discernment.
So I guess my advice would be, you know, steer a course between the fashionable that everyone is, everybody is doing and being so idiosyncratic that you’re not in contact with that conversation anymore. But I think working across the disciplines is a way to do that. And if you can speak to audiences in different disciplines, then that’s a great attribute to develop.
Todd Ream: Thank you. In terms of those opportunities that you experienced, your career includes service on the faculties of Bond University, the University of Oxford, and then at Queensland. While at Oxford, you served as the Andreas Idrios Professor of Science and Religion and Director of the Ian Ramsey Center and a fellow of Harris Manchester College. At Queensland, you served as director of the Center for the History of European discourses and then director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the humanities. You now, of course, as I mentioned at the outset of our conversation, serve as a professorial research fellow with the University of Notre Dame Australia.
As you look back over your career, what discernment process led you to embrace certain opportunities, perhaps in comparison to others?
Peter Harrison: Uh, discernment is perhaps too sophisticated a term, Todd. You know, I, I mean, I do think there was a degree of discernment. I think there was also a degree of a providential provision as well. So I think discernment is, discernment is tricky. I think some opportunities that present themselves are, in a sense, obvious. And I think, so if you’re offered a name chair at Oxford, I won’t, I won’t say that’s a lay down misere that you just accept, but yeah, that’s an opportunity that I think you tend to grasp with both hands, right.
Um, but you know, by the same token, I did choose to leave that and to come back to Australia and I think that process required a degree of discernment and that, that was partly about, it was partly about family circumstances. And I think, you know, part of our understanding of vocation, I think it’s important that we don’t construct our conceptions of vocation narrowly in terms of what, what the professions the expectations of a profession tend to dish up, because I think it’s broader than that.
I think you can do good work wherever you are really. Um, and I was able to do good work, I think at this fairly obscure private university, Bond University many, many more opportunities at Oxford, but in a sense, the opportunities and the rich environment there can also lead to a diffusion of focus. So although I think I was able to do some good work at Oxford, I think I did even better work when I came back to Australia. So that’s, that’s part of it.
I think the other thing, I mean, you’ve mentioned my service roles. I was a kind of reluctant administrator, I have to say. It’s not, it’s not something that I aspired to. But, you know, I do think that these service and administrative roles are crucial, not least because they’re often done badly. And I think it’s important that academics take them up if they have the opportunity. And again, particularly back, I think in the Australian context where it has quite significant administrative roles I found it enormously rewarding even though it took time away from what I’d otherwise think is my primary goal of doing research and writing and so on.
But I found working with particularly postdoctoral and, and doctoral students, I found it very enriching for my own work and very, very positive. And I think being able to create an environment where, where other academics can flourish is, is, is a really important part. If we go back to that vocational question, it’s an important part of a vocation of a senior researcher, I think.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. You’re the author or editor of twelve Books, beginning with Religion and the Religions and the English Enlightenment published by Cambridge University Press in 1990.
When you look back over the arc of the work that you have produced over the course of your career, in what ways do you see the questions that you were asking perhaps build one to the next, or provide uh, and yield questions that then needed to be answered in subsequent efforts?
Peter Harrison: I think, look, looking back, it does look as if there was a bit of a plan in retrospect, I can say that. I mean, in prospect looking forward. No, it was, you know, I won’t say quite the drunken walk, but it was, you know, it was, it was far less planned. I mean, I think, you know, one to get, and this takes us back to your original question about the interdisciplinary side of things, what, you know, one, one thing I noticed about the history of science was that given that all of these individuals historically, so, and I’m speaking say 17th, 18th century, they were embedded in a deeply religious culture. They had deeply felt religious commitments.
And yet people doing the history of science were, for the most part innocent of knowledge of the theological, theological understandings that going back in time just would’ve been universal and commonplace. So my thought was that the history of science really needed people who were theologically and religiously literate to do that history. And that would bring an added dimension to the history of science, and I think that’s true.
Now, having said that, this is not to be critical of my colleagues in the discipline of history of science, who I think are probably more than any other group of historians, very acutely attuned to the, you know, the kind of the non-scientific aspects that feed into, and very, very open to the possibility of the role of religion in shaping how science develops. But even with that willingness, it requires a certain degree of theological literacy, I think, to get into the heads of the historical actors. And I think that was one thing that I was able to bring to the discipline.
But to go back to the broader question so what I, you know, one way I think things have linked up, my, my PhD dissertation, which was published as Religion in the Religions in the English Enlightenment was really about how the modern concept religion emerged in the early modern period. So before then, we don’t have a strong idea of there is a generic thing, religion, and there are historical religions that we understand in terms of their beliefs and practices.
So that first book was about how the idea of religion emerges and how it shapes the way we think now. And to some extent it how holding onto that concept distorts our understanding of the past, but also distorts our understanding of other, other religious cultures to some degree because they don’t tend to subscribe to that Western conception. Um, and as I worked in the history of science, I realized that the same was true for our modern conception of science, that it too was a relatively modern construction that tended to distort our understandings of pre-modern engagements with nature and also the way in which other cultural traditions have engaged with the natural world.
So it was clear that there was a pattern developing that conceptual history, the history of the concepts that were used to understand, especially religion and science if we look at these critically or if we understand how they emerged historically it gives us a real insight into the present relations between say, science and religion or the present relations between the so-called religious traditions.
So, as I say, providentially, it turned out that there was a, a kind of master plan that, that that started with, you know, historically looking at this concept religion and applying that approach to other aspects of, of Western history, which is to say that once we understand that things that we tend to assume are generic, universal aspects of human culture like science and religion once we understand they have a history, it gives us a new way of understanding them.
Todd Ream: Those efforts then however formal or informal the plan may have been then garnered a considerable number of fellowships and honors, including the 2019 Bampton lectures at Oxford, a Dilworth Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in 2005, and then, of course, from 2010 to 2011, you were the Gifford lecturer that year at the University of Edinburgh. efforts were eventually published as the Territories of Science and Religion by the University of Chicago Press.
Would you offer an overview of the argument you sought to offer in those lectures and then in that book?
Peter Harrison: Yeah, so look, I should say that the, it was, it was such an honor to be asked to do the Gifford Lectures. I couldn’t have believed in my wildest dreams as a young graduate student that I’d ever be asked to do the Gifford Lectures. I mean, you think the list of names of people who’ve done those lectures is really very, very impressive. Um, so I was so delighted to be able to do that.
And I think one of the things that being asked to do a lecture series enables you to do or prompts you to do, is to try and present your work in such a way that it’ll actually be comprehensible to, I won’t say, well, a well-educated general audience. And so that discipline I think was important for both the Gifford lectures and the Bampton Lectures because it made me acutely conscious of the question of audience, which I think is really important for writers, think about who it is you’re trying to appeal to. Who do you want to convince? Um, and how are you going to make your arguments comprehensible to them?
But to go back to your question about the general argument, look, in a sense I’ve kind of outlined the, the, the broad parameters of that. It’s the territories of science and religion. And the, the premise of the book, which I set up at, at the beginning of the lectures is, you know, if a historian would’ve try and argue that there was a conflict between, say, Israel and Egypt in say the 16th century, no one would take that seriously because the entities, Israel and Egypt didn’t exist then. So the geography was there, right. And then there’s no problem with that. In one sense, they’re real, but they’re not real in the sense of there being a discreet entity, Israel and discreet entity Egypt, that can have that kind of relationship, because they were both part of the Ottoman Empire then.
And the argument was that our modern concept science and religion are like that. If, if we argue that, that there’s some sort of conflict between science and religion in the past, we are making the same category mistake that a historian would make if they argue about the past conflict in the 17th centuries in Israel than Egypt. As I say, it’s not that the territories aren’t there, but they’re not understood in such a way that can give rise to conflict. And so the broad argument is, well, let’s have a think about then how did people conceptualize religion and science.
And, and not merely that, I think the issues are not merely antiquarian, but what does it say about their present relationships? And again, we can think about the history of Israel’s relations to its neighbors is really a function of a set of quite distinct historical contingencies in the present. And I think the same is true for science and religion. And it’s also the case I think that thinking about how people conceptualize these activities in the past can help us ask questions about whether we’ve got it right in the present and whether there might be ways in which we can think about the boundaries as they presently exist because they’re not set in stone. They’re the development of historical processes and of human decisions, and that means that they can change.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Your most recent book then, one which many scholars have argued is your most ambitious and in turn, important book to date is Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age (published by Cambridge University Press in 2024).
Would you offer an argument offer an overview of the argument that informed that work? And then in what ways, perhaps did you need to wrestle with some of the questions in previous works before you could get to this one?
Peter Harrison: Yeah, it took a long time for me. It took a long time for me to write this one, Todd. And it’s partly, as you say, wrestling with questions from the previous books. So it does build on, it does build on the approach of previous books, which looks at how the concepts that we currently take for granted shape, you know, our view of really crucial things and religion would be one. We say what we tend to think about religion is that religion involves belief in the supernatural. That’s a pretty standard view.
And, and I think part of what’s crucial about that is that modern naturalism, which tends to be the dominant paradigm I think in academe, denies that there is a supernatural realm or what it does is it says that when we seek knowledge, we, we need to bracket out any reference to the supernatural. So the book, there are a lot of moving parts, but a key aspect of it is to look at the development of our modern conception of belief and look at the development of our modern conception of the supernatural.
And the basic argument is that, as with the previous books, you know, our modern idea of belief doesn’t map directly onto say the idea of belief that the first Christians had. It doesn’t map on to how those in other, say, traditional religions in particular, understand what it is that they’re all about. And so too, the idea that of a natural realm that’s discreet or distinct from the, the supernatural realm, that’s distinct from the natural realm, such that, and that the natural order has its own completely independent way of operating such that, for example, if God is to act in the natural world, it has to be in terms of a kind of intervention or a contravention or a violation of that intrinsic natural order. That’s a very recent understanding of that divide. And if we look back in the past to how people divided the territory of reality and understood God’s relation to the world, they didn’t tend to understand it but in terms of this disjunction between the natural and supernatural.
And so in relation to that distinction then, modern naturalism itself requires that we have that disjunction. Uh, but when we examine the roots of that disjunction, we find that it’s, it’s a set of theological distinctions. And, you know, ironically then, there’s a kind of ironic aspect of this, that modern naturalism ends up reinforcing a set of theological assumptions that it probably wouldn’t want to own up to if it knew, if it really knew what it was doing.
Todd Ream: And brought clarity to that and understood it, yes. Thank you.
Before we run out of time today for our conversation, I want to ask you now as a scholar who pursues an interdisciplinary arrangement of interests and questions, how have you come to understand and perhaps even define the academic vocation? What is its end or the good and what practices have you found critical to nurturing it?
Peter Harrison: Yeah, it’s a good question, Todd. And it’s one, I’m still really it’s one I’m still coming to terms with. I think the second part might be easier than the first part. So let, let me, let me speak to that. Well, if we’re talking about the virtues, I think charity actually as the pinnacle of the virtue charity is, it, it gets, doesn’t get much of a run in, in discussions of the, you know, intellectual virtues or the virtues of the academic profession. But I actually think it’s crucial.
Um, and it, it’s, it’s crucial because I think it’s important, especially when you’re dealing with people you disagree with, to construct their arguments in the best possible light, to treat them as human beings who, you know, rational human beings, who have something important to say. And I think there’s a way of responding to people with whom you disagree that I think is appropriate and often not on display in the academic context.
I also think another part of charity is, is properly acknowledging the sources to which you are indebted. And I think all of us, particularly if we, as I do range widely, chronologically, and in a discipline sense, we accumulate numerous debts and I think it’s really important to, to acknowledge those debts. So perhaps gratitude is another aspect. So charity and gratitude.
And if I were to add another one, I would say what for Augustine famously was a vice and that is curiosity. Or, or let, let me, let me perhaps give a more positive valence. Perhaps it’s wonder, but I think. Um, you know, following the questions to, you know, being curious, particularly what I found, you know, studying historical documents is that when you read things that are puzzling, it, it, you can either just dismiss them as idiosyncrasies or you can, you can say, well, you know, what’s, what’s actually going on here.
And, and I think treating people in the past as again, treating them charitably as agents who are just as intelligent and sophisticated as us. And when they seem to hold weird, weird beliefs, you know, that’s, that’s really something that’s worth following up. So I think a kind of curiosity about things that would otherwise we would tend to dismiss out of hand can often lead to very fruitful historical insights. So there they’re some of the things I would say about academic virtues.
The question of vocation I think is, as I said, it’s one I’ve, I’ve struggled with partly because I think in an institutional setting, you always find yourself answering to the criteria of what counts as a successful academic career, and I don’t think you can survive in academe unless you do that. If you’re completely otherworldly, there’s no, you’ll find it very difficult to make your way. So I think it’s really a question of attempting to hold true to a broader conception of vocation and, and finding where that overlaps with the sorts of demands that are placed on you, particularly in a secular institutions, which I’ve tended to work in for, for most of the time, where there’s no conception of a religious vocation that enters into the picture.
So, you know, when I said to you, I’m still kind of navigating that, I think that’s quite difficult to do that because you know, there are certain conceptions of the academic office and what the office entails and requires if you, in terms of its formal requirements and marrying that up to a broader conception of, of the vocation it, it’s really a matter of finding the areas of overlap and attempting to, to work within where the circles of the Venn diagram intersect.
Todd Ream: Thank you. For our last question today, I want to ask you about the relationship that scholars share with the Church and the Church shares with them, particularly scholars who invest in interdisciplinary pursuits.
In what ways can the Church be more supportive of them moving forward, but also in what ways can they be more supportive of the Church?
Peter Harrison: Uh, good, good question, Todd. And it partly, I think, goes back to the previous question that, that the spheres of the spheres of the Church and of academe, certainly in secular institutions there’s very little, very little overlap. I would say at a very, at a base level, what the Church can provide is a nourishing environment that enables spiritual growth for individuals, whatever their profession. And, and so that, that’s a kind of generic answer.
But I think it’s because we live in a secular, for the most part, secular, disenchanted world with, and I think, Weber, Max Weber was right to describe it in these two that highly specialized and professionalized it’s very difficult to line those things up with an ecclesiastical framework. So I think your question is a real challenge.
And as to, as to, you know, and, you know, what can scholars contribute to, to the Church, I think because the Church is marginalized, again, speaking in my own context, extremely marginal in Western secular modernity, I think what scholars can do is to help show that what the Church represents is not just a kind of ignorant holdout from a kind of medieval past, that there is an intellectual respectability to what the Church represents.
I think the Catholic Church does this better than others because it’s got, and if you think about, you know, various, you think about a present Pope for, for example, who, who, who I think, you know, emulates this degree of intellectual sophistication with religious commitment. But you know, the, the Catholic Church also has movements like the Jesuits who traditionally have always been very strong on education, and I think that this is where I think the Catholic Church has something to show the Protestant traditions where it’s not as clear that there’s such a strong tradition of intellectual commitment in, in the Protestant traditions as there is, is in Catholicism.
And you know, I think the hierarchical structure of Catholicism lends itself to that in a way. Um, so again, I think it’s a challenge for, especially for how Protestant churches might better align themselves with the idea that what they represent has considerable intellectual substance, a long history of that.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Thank you very much. Our guest has been Peter Harrison, Professor of History and Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Queensland and a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Notre Dame Australia. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights and wisdom with us.
Peter Harrison: Thanks, Todd. It’s a great pleasure.
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Todd Ream: Thank you for joining us for Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. We invite you to join us again next week for Saturdays at Seven.
