The Button-Down Hair Shirt

When Nathan Marsh Pusey took over the presidency of Harvard five years ago, he was a new broom that swept in religion. An even newer if considerably smaller broom is now trying to sweep some of it out again. Pusey and his emphasis on religion were being breezily challenged by a second-year graduate student in philosophy, William Warren Bartley III ('56). Vehicle of his attack: an 8,000-word Crimson article on Harvard's "button-down hair shirt."

Even before his installation as president, Pusey used an address at the Harvard Divinity School (TIME, Oct. 5, 1953) to criticize the spiritual outlook of Harvard's President (1869-1909) Charles William Eliot as badly out of date, placing "its greatest reliance on increased knowledge and good works." Pusey beefed up Harvard's anemic Divinity School from a $1,000,000 endowment to $7,000,000, corralled a dazzling collection of theological big-leaguers, including Paul Tillich, Richard R. Niebuhr, Amos Wilder, Georges Florovsky, Douglas Horton, George A. Buttrick, George H. Williams. Memorial Church, once sparsely attended, now teems with students who come Sundays to hear Presbyterian Buttrick fulfill his official function as Preacher to the University. Bartley's quarrel with all this: religion in a university should not subordinate thinking to commitment or individual, disciplined analysis to "Big Answers."

Committed Teaching? There is a wide division among faculty and administrative officers at Harvard, says Bartley, on two Pusey tenets. The first is that religion should be taught by men who are committed to it. Against this he cites Philosophy Professor Morton White in a speech at Hillel House: "There have been great Catholic students of Catholic theology and great non-Catholic students of it. There have been great Protestant students of Jewish theology. There have been great Jewish students of Catholic theology ... A scholar and teacher must insist that it is possible to understand a statement without accepting it, to understand a style of literature without admiring it, to understand the motives of Napoleon, Caesar or Stalin without praising them."

The second Pusey position with which Bartley takes issue is that religion should be "a unifying force in the curriculum." Christianity is certainly unfitted to play this role, Bartley contends. "There are too many different Christianities--even at Harvard Divinity School--for Christianity to act as a system on which Western men might practically agree today, whatever its unifying power half a millennium ago . . . The greatest of those who are 'trying to bring it up to date,' Paul Tillich, is regarded as a heretic by many others who wish to return it to fundamentalism or Thomism."

Who Is a Wind Bag? Bartley would return to President Eliot's "minimum" faith of "love and service to one's neighbor" and war against "the evils which afflict humanity." These tenets he would buttress with President Emeritus James B. Conant's basic answer to the challenge of the Soviet or fascist view of life--a faith in a "wide diversity of beliefs and the tolerance of this diversity."

President Eliot's cautious humanism was not so unrealistic, says Bartley, as the "latterday optimism" of President Pusey, which expects help "from only one kind of contemporary thinker: the flashy existentialist or teutonic theologian who ministers to the 'Big Questions' with big answers and bigger 'systems.' " Harvard is in a worse way, says Bartley, since "it has become forward to look backward and to call perverse those dry and analytical philosophers who deflate the wind bags of our time instead of blowing up more themselves."

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