KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 29 October
These are they which came out of great tribulation
Chapel undertakes to provide a programme of instruction in the principles of ethics particularly as those are represented in and through religion and philosophy and as they pertain to the ordered life of the School community. At the very least, it should be clear that these questions are of central importance for an education which is serious about character. For character implies a story, “a story about living for a purpose which is greater than the self” as James Davison Hunter notes in The Death of Character.
In Chapel the great story of the Fall was followed by the classic story of Cain killing Abel, the first murder, read on Thursday and Friday of last week, and on Monday and Tuesday of this week. Both stories concern the awakening to self-consciousness. They are about how we are called to account albeit through contradiction and denial, but nonetheless, called to account, to the idea of responsibilities and duties. This is the positive in these stories, we might say. They raise the important question in our own times about what it means to be a self which, they suggest, has altogether to do with our relation with one another and with God. The Cain and Abel story, for instance, is really the negative form of the central ethical teaching of the Judeo-Christian traditions about the inseparable nature of the love of God and the love of neighbour illustrated most movingly in the Parable of the Good Samaritan.
Self-knowledge and the knowledge of God are inseparable as the wonderful words of God to Cain indicate. “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.” As such the story of Cain and Abel provides a critique of reason not unlike Sophocles’ tragedy, Oedipus Rex. Oedipus is driven into contradiction with himself, discovers the negation of his knowing, and as such awakens to the greater truth of himself in the city and for the city. Powerful stories about an ethical understanding.
These stories are the counter to what I like to call the ‘Manichean Moralizing’ of our contemporary world: being told what to think, say and do by the cultural elites of our day. The Manichees were an ancient phenomenon associated with gnosticism, an extreme form of dualism which reduces the world to them and us, to the opposition of good and evil, not unlike the demonization of the other in our polarized political culture of endless division and animosity which proscribes and denies discourse and discussion which is the essence of academic life. The counter is to think more deeply about the nature of our humanity in community.
