KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 24 September
Did 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.