KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 13 November
admin | 13 November 2019They desire a better country
The reading in Chapel on Tuesday from Hebrews 11 & 12 provided an opportunity for further reflection on the significance of Remembrance Day, something which perhaps we are only beginning to understand. It is really about contemplating the devastations and destructiveness of the technology of war in its global extent, on the one hand, and the idea of sacrificial love, on the other hand. These are ethical considerations about the overarching nature of the Good. Contemplating the miseries of our humanity in its destructive disarray actually belongs to our felicity, to blessedness, such as the Beatitudes show.
In a post-Christian, and even anti-Christian, culture and even more in the climate of anti-intellectualism, I am struck by the paradox of the hold that an older and principled ethical and philosophical discourse still has in our current world. “They desire a better country” is the motto of the Order of Canada, the highest honorific in our country. The phrase comes from the King James Version of Hebrews, itself translated into English in the 16th and 17th centuries from the Greek. The motto has been latinized (but not by reference to the Latin Vulgate translation): Desiderantes meliorem patriam.
That idea of a desire for a better country catapults our thinking into a reflection upon the Good and to the ways in which the ethical shapes our thoughts and actions. This is a fundamental feature of the great philosophical and religious traditions of the world. It is about the challenge of acting in accord with virtue as Aristotle says. The traditions of moral philosophy presuppose our openness to what is transcendent, to what comes into us through, for example, illumination, purgation, and perfection that belong to our lives as “strangers and pilgrims” seeking “a better country, that is an heavenly.” We are reminded of “a great cloud of witnesses” of those who have sought to will the good and were willing to sacrifice themselves for principles and ideals which they considered worth dying for because they belong to what dignifies life.
“I had not thought death had undone so many,” T.S. Eliot says in The Waste-Land, echoing Dante in the Inferno of The Divine Comedy. The phrase captures something of the massive loss of life occasioned by the First World War and which extends to the Second World War and other conflicts, not to mention the obscene numbers of human lives destroyed by the totalitarian regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and others, and the lingering legacies of technocratic destruction with the memories of the bombing of Dresden and other European cities by the Allies, not to mention the bombing of Tokyo, let alone the dropping of the Atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. All of this contributes to what the Canadian author, Robertson Davies called the “collective madness” of war.
But Dante the Pilgrim is speaking about the throngs of souls in what Dante the Poet names as the Vestibule of Hell. It is a unique feature of his ethical vision. They are those “who against God rebelled not, nor to Him were faithful, but to self alone were true.” Hell is, in Dante’s vision, the place for the miserable race of “those who have lost the good of intellect.” Not to will at all is part of the loss of intellect. It means an aimless life following this and that fad of the moment, what Dorothy L. Sayers calls “the weather-cock mind, the vague tolerance which will neither approve nor condemn, the cautious cowardice for which no decision is ever final.” Even more, as she suggests, they chase aimlessly after the whirling banners “stung and goaded by the thought that, in doing anything definite whatsoever, they are missing doing something else.” They are worthy of neither Heaven or Hell! It is a contemptible and pitiful picture of an aspect of our humanity in its disorder and disarray, and yet one which in its inability to commit, to will at all, is part of our world and day.
By way of contrast, the Remembrance Day parade was about commitment and the willingness to commit by the School as a Corps. I commend the Corps for their effort and deportment. To strive to will the good is the constant struggle of education, an educational programme that is grounded in the ethical. “They” – we – “desire a better country,” I hope, and that should change our approach to all and every challenge, particularly the challenges that belong to the end of Michaelmas term.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy