KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 24 November
The Gentleness of Wisdom
“But where shall wisdom be found?” It is Job’s great question (Job 28. 12) and yet it is a question for the ages. It is really a question about character, about the qualities of the soul known classically as the virtues. Religion is about philosophy as life. Thus, in Chapel we have attended to some of the great ethical teachings that belong to our religious and philosophical traditions. The great Latin poet, Horace, bids us “interrogate the writings of the wise” in the pursuit of a tranquil life even in the midst of a world of distractions and disturbances. He asks “where is it virtue comes from, is it from books? Or is it a gift from Nature that can’t be learned? What is the way to become a friend to yourself? What brings tranquility?” (trans. David Ferry).
The question about from where virtue comes echoes Meno‘s question in Plato’s dialogue by that name. He wanted to know whether virtue can be taught or is it acquired through practice or by some other means? Socrates famously replies that he can’t answer the question because he would have to know what virtue is and, as he explains, neither he nor anyone else seems to know exactly what virtue is. The point of the dialogue is to consider what would make for a proper definition, a question about the adequacy of the categories of our discourse and understanding. Certainly a question for our times. Yet if virtue can be taught, Socrates suggests, then somehow it belongs to knowledge and thus to something teachable. But the deeper insight of the ethical traditions, it seems to me, is that to be able to teach virtue is not the same thing as to make people virtuous. Thinking it is one thing, doing it is another.
For Aristotle virtue requires good habits of life, good practices, but as Plato had already pointed out in the Myth of Er that concludes The Republic, that is not quite enough. You can, after all, be brought up in a virtuous state but if you don’t know what virtue is then you may make huge mistakes. You may in fact choose the life of a tyrant! In short, you may choose evil over good.
This is, perhaps, why we need to hear the great lessons about ethical life over and over again. One of the definitions of the word religion, as Cicero observed, is about re-reading, re-legere. The great ethical teachings are inexhaustible in their wisdom and understanding.