The reform of the curriculum which Hutchins foresaw and for which he labored was a great and generous idea destined always to go wrong because Hutchins lacked the courage to follow truth where it must lead. How understandable this is. When Hutchins wrote that in modernity theology cannot be the crown of the liberal arts curriculum, he clearly meant that in the institutions created in America and Europe since the Enlightenment, giving theology, hence revelation, hence God, the intellectual due that belongs to the highest reality is politically impossible. The eighth century is upon us again, the world in which the barbarians rule just beyond the frontiers of our mind, in which learning is a flickering light in a dark and disorganized world. We have been there before.
Theology is a discipline in the curriculum like other disciplines.
Some students will find it more engaging than others, but all will find the fact of its existence a testimony to the importance of the subject. And it ought also be remembered that in a place which professes to teach the liberal arts, the method is ever intellectual. Newman thought the school in which philosophy was the highest discipline, the Hutchins project fulfilled, would produce gentlemen. We now know Newman was wrong. The classical curriculum, shorn of reference to God, produced gentlemen only while the idea of God lurked effectively in the corners of our culture.