Departure at De Paul

"Serenity may be the fruit of wisdom," allows Gerald F. Kreyche, chairman of De Paul University's philosophy department. "But it can also be the symptom of sleep."

Since its founding 57 years ago, Roman Catholic De Paul taught philosophy with the serenity of somnambulism. Its curriculum rested comfortably on the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas, the 13th century Italian theologian who established Aristotelian philosophy as a rational basis for Christian belief. At Chicago's De Paul, as at most U.S. Catholic colleges, modern thinkers were studied to be refuted rather than understood, as if philosophy were a kind of secular theology. Now the university has adopted a radically different approach. Firmly backed by the president, the Very Rev. John R. Cortelyou, a noted comparative endocrinologist and the first natural scientist to head the school, Kreyche's department has just introduced four new philosophy courses that study Aquinas as a man to be boldly challenged, not a saint to be blindly followed.

Straw Men. De Paul's innovation is probably the most significant attempt to overhaul Catholic philosophy teaching in the U.S. since 1789, when Georgetown, the nation's first Catholic university, opened its doors. Kreyche, 37, bravely prepared the change last year. In three hard-hitting speeches to Catholic educators, he derided "closed-system Thomists who still shadowbox the ghosts of the 13th century," insisted that new times demand a new approach to philosophical problems. Reasoned Kreyche: "St. Thomas himself, many of whose views were condemned after his death, would be appalled at the blind way we shamble in his huge footsteps. The magnificent company of non-Catholic thinkers--Spinoza, Kant, Kierkegaard, Sartre--are too often presented in our texts as straw men to be knocked down with a pat phrase and a smirk for the stupidity of those who don't agree with us." Kreyche's goal was "a classroom in which professor and student can move easily from Socrates to Sartre, from Plato to Planck, from Aristotle to Ayer."

Such notions violently divided the university's 17-member philosophy faculty. "It is selling your philosophical birthright for a mess of existential pottage," protested the Rev. Joseph Delia

Penta, one of seven Dominicans who teach philosophy and who have a special interest in St. Thomas as a patron saint of their order. Warned another of De Paul's Dominicans: "We are skirting canon law." However, the five laymen in the department, joined by some other priests, backed Kreyche's experimental curriculum.

Aggiornamento. On a voluntary basis, and with a minimum of formal lectures, De Paul students can now enroll in four courses that explore "man's encounter" with man, God, the world, and morality. The readings are intensive and far-ranging, include Materialist Ludwig Feuerbach, Existentialist Paul Tillich, as well as the doctor angelicus, St. Thomas.

Kreyche has received dozens of inquiries and letters of congratulation from Catholic educators across the U.S., praising De Paul's new philosophy program. The response, he hopes, signifies an aggiornamento, or updating, in U.S. Catholic philosophy, to match the aggiornamento in theology. Otherwise, Kreyche says, "we would soon beget the nonprofessing professor, the nonintellectual intellectual, the non-Christian Christian. Without academic freedom, neither the student, professor, nor the college could fulfill their respective natures within the church."

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