When I arrived in Lviv at the end of August, I expected to see evidence of the war everywhere. Press reports had given me the impression of a country tottering from repeated blows by an overwhelmingly superior enemy. Some friends seemed surprised I was traveling to Ukraine at all.
For the first few weeks, the news from the front was distressing. On Freedom Boulevard, a burned out SUV anchored rows of stands and kiosks where donations were collected for the armed forces and the families of servicemen. Even now, when Russia has turned its attention to Syria and the Donbas is relatively quiet, one constantly hears stories about friends or relatives serving in the anti-terrorist operation or ATO (a term I initially thought contrived, but which I have come to see as quite accurate). All over town one sees groups of men in camouflage. The need for rehabilitative medicine, improved prostheses and therapy for post-traumatic stress syndrome are topics of everyday news and conversation. This year, for the first time, the Feast of the Intercession of the Mother of God on October 14 was a state holiday. It had a double significance: not only does it commemorate the protection of our ancestors from foreign invaders (or of the Byzantine Greeks from our ancestors), but it honors those who defend Ukraine today.
And yet, even in a country at war, civilian life goes on more or less normally. In my case, that has meant teaching history at the Ukrainian Catholic University’s Faculty of Philosophy and Theology. This was my idea of helping Ukraine: nothing dramatic like volunteering for the army – just a modest contribution to strengthening the nation’s intellectual resources. The teaching itself is not fundamentally different from teaching in the United States, though 80-minute classes take some getting used to. One has to break up the lectures with Socratic questioning and hand-outs for reading and discussion. The students, both male and female, are pleasant, cooperative and reasonably attentive. A few have overcome their post-Soviet reticence and learned to ask questions. There is one American and one Russian.
In some ways, however, UCU is different from other universities in Ukraine or the United States. It is a bribe-free zone. It is a genuinely Catholic institution. It aspires to education in the full sense, including “formation.” The fall semester opened on September 14, the beginning of the church year, with a liturgy at an overflowing Church of the Blessed Martyrs of Ukraine. At the new cafeteria-cum-auditorium, benefactors handed scholarships directly to their beneficiaries, establishing at least a momentary relationship of trust. One senior student spoke of his experiences not just in terms of goals and achievements, like his contemporaries worldwide, but of sin and reconciliation. At my faculty, students are required to engage in social work. One chilly October evening, I accompanied some of them to a state-run home for abandoned children, many of whom suffer from developmental disabilities.
But it is in the residential life of the first- and second-year students that “formation” begins. The Collegium (on one of three campuses on the outskirts of Lviv) houses not only students, but faculty, visitors, priests, nuns and at least one developmentally handicapped person. This gives students an experience of life fundamentally different from the “student culture” of binge-drinking and casual sex so typical of American universities.
Naturally, liturgy is an integral part of everyday life at UCU. While the 7:30 a.m. services generally attract only a couple of nuns and faculty, the Collegium is so configured that students pass by the doorless chapel on their way to breakfast or class. While few 18-year-olds may fancy spending an hour in prayer before breakfast (at that age, I certainly would have balked at the notion), witnessing an early-morning liturgy in passing may plant the seeds of spiritual growth. The midweek evening services that I witnessed were packed, and there are regular matins and vespers.
Many UCU students, I imagine, come from homes where the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church survived the Soviet years in the hearts and minds of their grandparents and parents. But what is it like for post-Soviet or Western-educated scholars to teach at such a university? Those who were formed in the Soviet tradition, where the Communist Party claimed a monopoly on truth, may (depending on temperament) find it either all too easy – or entirely impossible – to accept a Church that likewise claims access to the truth. Yet the Church rather claims to know the source of truth – not all of the truth itself. There is thus no lack of space for intellectual inquiry and scholarly research.
Still, for those of us educated in the Western liberal tradition, particularly in its post-modern phase, the habit of disbelief may have deadened our receptivity to the transcendent. Some will argue that there should be no difference between a secular and a Christian scholar. The discipline of history, or physics, or literature is the same, they would insist, regardless of one’s personal beliefs. Yet the philosophical assumptions underlying a scholar’s approach, whether acknowledged or not, are determinative. It is not easy to see the limitations of the philosophy in which we have been educated, and still harder to overcome them. It may take years of study and reflection to grasp the bracing openness to truth of the Christian intellectual tradition, and to parlay that into one’s own teaching and research.
From my window in the Collegium I see a large construction site. On the left, the future university church of St. Sophia (or rather, Holy Wisdom) is rising into the sky. On the right stands the steel and concrete framework of the new library. Faith and reason – fides et ratio – are growing up together. That, I believe, is the future of education. And education, more than guns and tanks and rockets and planes, is the future of a free Ukraine – impervious to corruption, lies and deception, wherever they may originate.