It is well known that the Western university gradually evolved from the monastic stadium via the cathedral schools of the twelfth century to become the remarkably vigorous and interdisciplinary European institutions of higher learning that transformed Christian intellectual culture in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It is equally well known that subsequent disciplinary developments in higher education, including the founding and flourishing of many of the most prestigious of North American universities, owe equally to the Protestant and perhaps particularly Calvinist influence. But that the secularized modern university that descended from these developments is now in something of an identity crisis is becoming widely and often awkwardly apparent. The reason most often given for the crisis is our general failure to produce a morally or spiritually persuasive substitute for the authority that undergirded the intellectual culture of our predecessors. This is frequently also a reason for the discomfort many experience in trying to address the problem, for it requires an acknowledgement, at least, that the secularization hypothesis has proven inadequate as a basis for the sustaining of coherence and general intelligibility in the university curriculum.