Link to the audio file of the service of Encaenia 2021
And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying, Blessed … are you”
You’re here! How wonderful to see you and to be together at last for this rather historic Encaenia service, unfortunate as it is that not all of the graduating class are able to be here. We miss them even as we think of them as being present with us in spirit. It is historic because this is the first Encaenia service to be held in the Chapel not in June but in August. Last year, too, Encaenia was held in August, again owing to the COVID-19 restrictions, but it was held at Christ Church (a slightly bigger barn than this more modest stable!).
Encaenia is a Greek word (εγκαινια) meaning the renewal of purpose and rededication belonging to the intellectual life of sacred places and institutions of learning. It is found, for instance, in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Jewish Scriptures, in Apocryphal texts such as 2 Esdras, and in the New Testament in John’s Gospel. A feast of the renewal of beginnings or principles, it has become associated with “the annual commemoration of founders and benefactors at Oxford University in June” (O.E.D.), and to schools such as our own, which derive their origins from the great medieval universities of Oxford and Cambridge. But we meet in August. Well, if the Tokyo Olympics of 2020 can be held in 2021, then surely the June Encaenia can happen in August! Guess what, you’re here!
The blessing lies in our being here together and in being reminded of the principles which shape the life of the School and all of you who are actually now graduates. The blessing lies in what you have gone through and in what way. Instead of ‘the woe is me’ syndrome, the endless whine of complaints and grievances which turns us all into perpetual victims, there is the deeper sense of perseverance and accomplishment belonging to the principles of education which has been your experience in this place. At issue is how you take a hold of those things and make them your own.
“I have become a question to myself,” Augustine remarks in his Confessions (Mihi quaestio factus sum, Bk. X, xxxiii). And so, too, for all of us in the contemporary world. It is less about the external circumstances of global and local concerns, the fears and anxieties about the pandemic, the climate, or the economy, all of which we face and will continue to face, and more about how we think about things. Only on that basis is philosophy, the love of wisdom, and education, its pursuit, even remotely possible.
Our gathering is profoundly counter-anticulture by which I mean that it goes against the levelling forces of the ideology of liberalism, the governing worldview of our times, which corrodes and dissolves the reason and truth of the institutions which embody human freedom and dignity and which constitute culture through the cultivation of character. This ideology assumes a false anthropology, the idea of the utterly autonomous individual freed from all and every constraint of nature and authority, which in turn leads to the destructive technocratic mastery of both non-human and human nature and thus the antithesis of culture.
The great blessing of this year is, just perhaps, the discovery of the importance of being together in a purposeful community of learning in which the ideals of service and sacrifice, of care and compassion, and of serious intellectual inquiry and debate are more than empty nostrums, mere clichés, and windy words. It means an education which doesn’t succumb to the presentism which looks at everything only in terms of itself. It means rather the capacity and willingness, as the poet Horace puts it, to “interrogate the writings of the wise.” Such an interrogation means the willingness to question and to be open to the real engagement of thought with the past in the present.
The lessons highlight this idea of “interrogat[ing] the writings of the wise.” Ecclesiastes is the most philosophical book of the Jewish Scriptures. The Preacher literally interrogates everything “under the sun” which is thought to provide purpose and meaning to human life. In the recurring refrain, “vanity of vanities” which frames the entire argument, he finds that “all is vanity and a vexation of spirit,” as the King James version puts it, capturing the psychological and subjective aspect of this sense of futility. The more literal translation is “a striving after the wind” which expresses more concretely the sense of the Hebrew and Jewish understanding. The whole argument can be captured in the form of a syllogism.
All toil and labour is under the sun;
Everything under the sun is vanity;
Therefore all toil and labour is vanity.
Vanity here refers to the discovery of the emptiness and meaninglessness of the activities in which we invest ourselves. The Preacher in Ecclesiastes interrogates five toils or labours “under the sun” which belong to our human pursuits in this world. He finds them all unsatisfactory. What are they? As the philosopher Peter Kreeft suggests, they are wisdom, pleasure, wealth and power, duty and service, piety or religion which in themselves leave us empty in worldly terms. Why? Because what lies “under the sun” depends upon something prior which is the ground of these pursuits. Like Plato, Ecclesiastes points us to the idea of the Good, imaged in the Republic as the Sun, which unites all forms of being and knowing and which is the principle of them.
Far from being a counsel of despair, Ecclesiastes interrogates the assumptions that drive our endeavours in order to bring out the principle upon which human freedom properly depends. “Of the reading and making of books, there is no end,” even in the digital world, and “much reading,” to be sure, “is a weariness of the flesh” but that is part of the challenge, then and now and always. Yet “the end of the matter is to fear God and keep his commandments.” That means to hold in awe and wonder the principle upon which the natural or created world and our humanity depends. It is to make the logoi, the words or commandments that are the embodied thoughts of God, ours, and to find in our lives together real meaning and purpose. This counters the empty vanities of the autonomous individual, alone in his/her/its/zir/their splendid isolation, utterly bereft of the ethical wisdom which belongs to the philosophical cultures of the world’s religions which understand that we are fundamentally and essentially social and spiritual beings.
The Beatitudes push this idea even further to suggest that meaning and purpose is not only not measured in the worldly terms of what lies “under the sun” but is found regardless of such circumstances through our orientation and participation in the divine understanding.
Thus it is about a wisdom and a blessing found in humility rather than in our pretensions, for “blessed are the poor in spirit,” the humble; a wisdom and a blessing found even through the experience of suffering and loss, like Gilgamesh’s quest for wisdom that arises precisely from the death of his friend, Enkidu, for whom he grieves, “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted”; a wisdom and a blessing found in our “hunger and thirst after righteousness,” for the very quest for justice does not assume our own righteousness, our own completeness, but rather the awareness that what we seek is something more; a wisdom and a blessing found in the meek precisely because they do not presume to lord it over everybody and everything, a wisdom and a blessing found in the higher form of justice that is mercy, the quality of which, as Portia says, in The Merchant of Venice, “cannot be strained,” limited or held back and which “seasons [perfects] justice”; a wisdom and a blessing found in “the pure in heart,” in the honesty of souls who are without guile or deceit, a “true Israelite” indeed as Jesus says about Nathaniel; a wisdom and a blessing found in “the peace-makers,” in whom moves the peace of God which is not of this world, not a human construct, for “they shall be called the children of God”; and finally, a wisdom and a blessing found even in times of persecution and oppression, “for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
With the first and last Beatitude we come full circle. “The kingdom of heaven” is opened out to us through the humility of learning in the face of the injustices of the world. The eight Beatitudes not only come full circle but apply personally. “Blessed are you” in the face of all manner and forms of the misrepresentation of truth, of wrongful persecution and oppression. The wonderful lesson of the Beatitudes is the hard lesson that there are and there will be struggles and trials and tribulations. “Blessed” are they “who going through the Vale of Misery use it for a well” (Ps. 84.6).
Augustine’s observation that “I have become a question to myself” alludes to the primary task of “interrogat[ing] the writings of the wise” so that we may learn from them, pressing on in and through the ups and downs of the year and of our uncertain times. Rather than focus on the disappointments of the year, I encourage you to embrace the great blessings of our being together socially and intellectually, refusing in some sense to be defined by disappointment and finding ways not only to make the best of things but to flourish and to grow in maturity, intellectually and spiritually. Make no mistake, that is what this School is really all about, if it is true to itself.
We have been through so much together. The great lesson of the pandemic may be that we have learned something of the necessity of our lives as social and spiritual beings. As Ringo Star and the Beatles put it, “Oh, I get by with a little help from my friends.” I will forebear singing the second line about getting high with a little help from my friends, except of course as intellectual and spiritual ecstasy! You know, ToK and Chapel, Yay, God, and all that jazz! I am most grateful for the student leadership of Righo and Sarah and for the outstanding work of the Chapel Prefects under Sarah Hilborn’s excellent command. I commend the graduating class for your commitment and dedication with respect to the principles which define King’s-Edgehill in its truth to which Encaenia recalls us, knowing full well our failings and limitations, but knowing the far greater grace of God’s mercy.
In the Tempest, Shakespeare’s great figure for the aboriginal peoples of the so-called ‘new world’ is Caliban who speaks for the whole play and for all peoples everywhere in his attainment of true freedom. “I’ll be wise hereafter and seek for grace,” he says. For that is “the end of the matter,” namely, ”to “fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.” Such is the blessing through what has been taught and, I hope, in some sense, learned in this place and in our time together. Such is our ethical freedom, our blessedness.
“And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying, Blessed … are you”
Rev’d David Curry
Chaplain & Teacher, King’s-Edgehill School
Encaenia, August 20th, 2021