by CCW | 24 November 2022 16:00
“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.
I love Advent not simply in its sense of expectation and anticipation of Christmas but in terms of what it is in itself. Advent is God’s Word and Wisdom coming to us in the darkness as light and life. We attend upon the motions of God’s Word coming to us as the principle which properly defines the real truth and dignity of our humanity. It corrects the Victorian or 19th century forms of sentimentality and sensuality that have come to dominate our ‘Christmases’, both sacred and secular. Advent reminds us instead of the strong objectivity of God’s Word. It highlights the intellectual and the spiritual over and against the dominance of the late nineteenth century focus on the sensual and the sexual.
Nowhere is that strong coming of God’s Word more clearly seen than in the Advent Service of Nine Lessons and Carols, established at King’s College, Cambridge in 1918 just after the end of the horrors of the First World War and the long legacy of horrors that belong to its aftermath in the 20th and 21st centuries. It is a wonderful pageant of Scriptural readings that awaken us and open us to truth and wisdom.
For “both we and our words are in his hand,” the Wisdom of Solomon reminds us (7.16), the ‘hand’ of the wisdom of God. What is wanted is that God’s Word should take shape in us. “Who is wise and understanding among you? By his good life let him show his works in the meekness of wisdom” (James 3.13). In mansuetudine sapientiae, in the gentleness of wisdom, really. It is a wonderful phrase which captures beautifully the point of Wisdom’s prayer: “May God grant that I speak with judgment and have thoughts worthy of what I have received” (Wisdom 7.15). Is that not our prayer, too?
The gentleness of wisdom requires a certain attitude of mind. It requires an openness to that constant coming of God’s Word to us as “that which we have received.” It is precisely the idea of something coming to us that challenges us to receive it and make it our own. Such is education at its best. Such is the gentleness of wisdom in which we can, perhaps, “find the way to be a friend to ourselves” and to a tranquil life. Such is the peace of Christ. T.S. Eliot’s classic poem, The Waste Land, ends with the Sanskrit words, Shantih, Shantih, Shantih, words which end the Upanishads in the Hindu spiritual tradition. As Eliot notes, Shantih is equivalent to “the peace which passeth knowledge”. Such is the peace of Christ which Advent signals.
Parents and Guardians are invited to the Junior School Advent/Christmas Service of Lessons and Carols at 2:15pm on Friday, December 2nd, to the Grade 12 Advent/Christmas Service of Lessons and Carols at 7pm on Sunday, December 4th, followed by a reception in the Stanfield Hall, and to the Service for the Grades 10s and 11s at 2:30pm on Monday, December 6th, 2022; space permitting for all services. All three services will be held in the School Chapel.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, Head of English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2022/11/24/kes-chapel-reflection-week-of-24-november/
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