Year: 2017

And God said … and God saw that it was good

It is a recurring refrain that frames the first Chapter of The Book of Genesis and opens us out to the mystery of existence. As Meister Eckhart (early 14^th c.), following a long tradition of philosophical inquiry into the nature of things, notes, “creation is the conferring of existence”, following the pagan neo-Platonic philosopher Proclus’ proposition that “all beings” – every that exists – “proceeds from one First Cause” (5^th c.). Heady stuff but that is really what the account of creation in the first Chapter of Genesis is really all about. It is about the intellectual principle upon which all knowing and being depend. Wow.

How do we think nature, and, indeed, how can we think at all? Is there only one way to think the natural world and, by extension, our place within it? Is ‘modern science’, whatever we mean by that, the only way to think nature? Is ‘religion’, whatever we mean by that, the only way to think about reality? It would be a huge mistake, I think, to suppose that modern science negates religion or that religion negates modern science; in short, that there is only one way to think nature, only one way to think period. In a way, Genesis opens us out to the very assumptions that underlie the possibilities of our thinking and knowing anything. The Genesis account understood philosophically identifies a principle essential to our activity as students and learners. We can only think and come to know anything if things are in principle knowable.

We begin with God, with what can be called an intellectual principle. Everything is in God and comes from God. The great Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria, writing in the time of Jesus, and drawing directly upon Plato and Aristotle, emphasizes “that in all existing things there must be an active cause … and that the active cause is the intellect of the universe,” echoing Plato’s idea of a world soul. Creation is in the mind of God first, as it were, and only then made perceptible to the senses; the sensible world as modeled upon the intelligible idea. The world has its origins in “that good which is founded in truth”. For the metaphysical traditions primacy is given to formal cause in order to explain the ‘what-it-is’ of things, not material, efficient, or even final cause. As Boethius (6^th c) expresses it, God “bear[s] the beauteous world in [his] mind and form[s] it to be like that image.”

Genesis 1 is not science however much it belongs to the possibilities of science, both ancient and modern. It is a poetic and philosophical way of thinking. It presents us with an ordering intellectual principle. “When creation was begun, when God spake and it was done,” as the hymn we sang on Monday and Tuesday puts it. God speaks creation into being. But “unlike us,” as Eckhart notes, “God’s speaking is his making and also unlike us his speaking is the cause of the entire work and its parts.” After all, we too only come after.

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In the beginning God… In the beginning was the Word

And so it begins, again and yet again. For as T.S. Eliot puts it “in my beginning is my end” even as “in my end is my beginning”. There is far more to beginnings than a linear sequence, first this, then that. In a profounder sense, there is a philosophical, a theological beginning that is about ends and purposes, about truth and meaning that we can only enter into and begin to learn more and more about the mysteries of life.

To be sure, we are at the beginning of a new school year, the beginning of term. And for students and faculty alike there is all of the excitement and anxiety that comes with expectations and wonder. We make a beginning. Yet we can only do so because of the far more radical nature of beginnings and ends which are signalled in the Scripture readings for the first two Chapel services.

It has become a tradition to have the Head Boy and Head Girl read sequentially Genesis 1.1-5 and John 1.1-5. It takes no great wisdom on my part to note that these readings complement and comment upon one another. They are some of the profoundest and most philosophical passages in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures and they open us out to the mystery of God and the created order which is clearly and emphatically intelligible in principle. It is not science but the presupposition upon which science and all our studies depend. In the beginning God…in the beginning the Word.

In the beginning God what? God created. Begin with God and everything else comes after. We begin with God who is without beginning, eternal, and everything begins to be seen in God and from God. This, too, is John’s great insight. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God.” And as in a comment upon Genesis, John’s Prologue adds, “all things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made.” This too has its complement in Islam. The “Originator [Badi] of the heavens and earth. When He decrees a thing, He says only ‘Be!’ And it is” (Qur’an 2:117).

Chapel is an integral part of the educational programme at King’s-Edgehill School. It belongs at once to the School’s honouring of its religious and philosophical origins – Christian and Anglican – but just as importantly to the role and place of religion in education, something which is often overlooked and ignored in the dogmatic forms of our secular culture. The point is rather simple. There is not a single area of study or discipline of learning that is not profoundly shaped and informed by religious and philosophical thought. The task in Chapel is to engage seriously and respectfully with the questions which religion philosophically raises.

Students and faculty come from all manner of cultures and places religiously and non-religiously. Chapel is not simply about people’s individual faith or non-faith commitments precisely because of that obvious plurality of cultures. It is about speaking faithfully out of a Christian perspective but in ways that reflect upon and engage the different aspects of our world in all of its confusions and glory and particularly with the different religions of the world such as Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism as well as the forms of secular atheism.

It is primarily about respect for another way of thinking than what belongs to the distresses and strains of contemporary culture, what Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, refers to as “the currents in our peculiar contemporary society” such as “an instrumentalizing and managerial spirit, an anxious shrinking of language into cliché and formula, a nervousness around emotional risk and exposure that is balanced by profound and fluent sentimentality, a desperate not-knowing-how-to-cope faced with a nightmare world of mass atrocity that sits alongside the acquisitive fevers of our economy.” Quite a comprehensive description! O brave new world – with all of the allusions to Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Huxley’s dystopia.

At the very least, we endeavour to engage and to think humbly and critically, responsibly and respectfully, not presuming to have the answers but refusing to despair of thinking ethically and intellectually.

David Curry

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