KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 24 September
admin | 27 September 2017Did God say?
The amazing and world-transforming story of The Fall from Genesis 3 was read in Chapel this week along with the equally amazing and apocalyptic story from Revelation about St. Michael and All Angels. “There was war in heaven.”
The connections to the life of the School and to any educational programme worthy of the name are inescapable. We are being challenged through these Scriptural readings about the moral and ethical principles which inform our lives. In other words, these Scriptures speak directly and profoundly to our humanity regardless of our faith or non-faith commitments. They are in some sense the story of our world.
Genesis 3 is the biblical version of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex in the sense of providing a powerful critique of reason itself. Looked at in conjunction with the late September Feast of St. Michael and All Angels in the Christian tradition, we have a powerful commentary on the nature of our beginnings intellectually and ethically.
This is Michaelmas Term following the traditions of both Oxford and Cambridge. I think it is marvellous that our school term should begin with Angels. For it is altogether about the primacy of the intellectual which alone can redeem and perfect the physical and the material. The Angels are the pure thoughts of God in creation. To think is to think with the Angels.
But Genesis 3 reminds us of the cunning of our reason, something of which we must also be aware. Genesis 3 provides a profound and necessary critique of human reason. We are being challenged in two ways: first, not to think of reason as merely being about problem-solving and, secondly, to recognize the cunning and deceit of reason.
We need Oedipus Rex as commentary on Genesis 3 and vice-versa. Oedipus not only thought that he knew who he was but thought that his problem-solving kind of reason was the highest, the truest, if not the only form of reason. In that assumption he anticipates so much of our current world and its discontents. To reduce reason to problem-solving is to reduce reason to a tool and an instrument and to deny to its operations anything intellectual, ethical, and spiritual. Oedipus Rex and Genesis 3 counter that assumption brilliantly and effectively, if only we have ears to hear and eyes to see.
Oedipus discovers through the exercise of his own reason that he is utterly mistaken about who he is and about his form of reasoning. He is brought into contradiction with himself; that is the tragic humanism of Oedipus who is, as the Chorus recognizes, “the paradigm of fate” itself. In other words, Oedipus is everyman. We are in his story and so, too, with Genesis 3, the classical story of the Fall. You are in this story. This story belongs to our humanity regardless of your faith or non-faith commitments. It belongs to your education to ponder at least the question and the paradox of your own self-consciousness.
Genesis 3 presents us with the first conversation and, perhaps, more importantly, with the first questions in the Scriptures. Therein lies the critique and the corrective to human reason.
I know, it seems so bizarre. A talking serpent? And yet the serpent is little more than an image of human rationality which, after all, consists, at least in part, in negation, contradiction, and looking for alternative ways to think about things in spite of what things are. All good we might think, until we ask ourselves, what is the basis of such thinking? What does our thinking depend upon? Not us but God who is the principle of our being and our knowing. The first question in the Hebrew Scriptures is the question of the serpent, “Did God say?” Well, we know what God said, but the question of the serpent seeks to undermine what is said in order to present the pretence of another reality. There is the greatest contrast imaginable between the question of the Serpent and the three questions which God raises.
What is the difference? Questions which seek to undermine truth and understanding and questions which seek to know and understand, such is the profound and wonderful difference between the question of the serpent and the questions of God: the one insinuates doubt and undermines truth; the other seeks to draw out the truth into understanding. “Where are you?” “Who told you that you were naked? Did you eat of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat? Questions which simply elicit the truth and our awareness of our untruth. We need questions but always the right sort of questions relative to what has meaning and truth.
Genesis 3 is about the awakening of our humanity to self-consciousness. The serpent speaks half-truths: we shall indeed become like God, knowing both good and evil. True enough but from the side of the experience of good and evil because we have been brought into collision with ourselves and with the cunning of reason – smooth, clever and subtle – cunning – but forgetting its origins in the truth of things. Such is the Fall, our fall into reason. We confront ourselves and the hideous danger of our humanity.
The story of the Fall does not negate the goodness of creation and even ourselves. It highlights the problem of the ego – ourselves in the false independence of ourselves and, like Oedipus, assuming the completeness and truth of our own kind of reason. We learn differently by being brought into collision with ourselves and discovering the ethical, the spiritual, and the intellectual upon which our thinking and our living truly and properly depend.
In a way, it is all about the questions. Questions which seek to know and understand in contrast to questions which seek to undermine and only lead to cynicism and despair.
The reading from The Revelation of St. John the Divine only heightens the dilemma. Yet it is really a commentary on Genesis. The serpent becomes Satan, the Deceiver, the Tempter, the Devil – all terms that derive from the Hebrew Scriptures and have a kind of concentrated effect here in Revelation; the last book of the Christian Scriptures, and one which is commenting on Genesis, the first book. Powerful stuff that belongs to the life of the School as an intellectual community. We enter into the pageant of learning because of the truth and the goodness and the beauty of God. There “was war in heaven” but all that belongs to negation and denial, to deceit and cunning has been overcome by “the blood of the lamb,” by what belongs to the truth of God in his engagement with our humanity in Jesus Christ. We confront the cunning of reason and its deeper truth. It is about our participation in the life of God.
God’s questions recall us to the truth of all our questions. They draw us out into truth, the beginning of the long and difficult path of learning.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy