KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 9 February
Charity never faileth
“Never that which is shall die,” is a fragment from a lost play by Euripides. It serves as an epigram for Timothy Findley’s classic anti-war novel, The Wars. It complements Paul’s wonderful hymn of love in 1 Corinthians 13 which was read in Chapel this week which happens to be Spirit Week at the School and includes the Valentine’s Dinner and Dance. Love is in the air, we might say, but what do we mean by love? “Never that which is shall die” highlights the idea that love conquers all, that love is forever, that love is stronger than death; in short, that love never faileth. Charity means love.
Paul is talking about the divine love which is transcendent and transformative. It seeks the perfection of our human loves which are invariably limited and incomplete, partial like our knowing. We know in part. Here is love as wisdom which is about our being open to what is greater than ourselves and which seeks to better us not destroy us. Here is the idea of a love which does not make us other than ourselves but seeks the perfection of our humanity individually and collectively. Paul uses the metaphor of the body to talk about the human community where each part of the body plays its role for the good of the whole body. No one part is to be despised but each is to be respected. He recognizes that we all have different gifts, different talents, that are to be used for the good of all. But he ends the previous chapter with the phrase that introduces his famous hymn to love. “I will show you a still more excellent way.” That still more excellent way is charity, an Englishing of one of the Latin words for love, caritas, itself a translation of one of the Greek words for love, agape.
That still more excellent way does not negate our humanity by making us other than human which is one of the struggles of our times in relation to technology and AI which sometimes risks turning us into bots or machines, training us to think like machines. There is the danger of outsourcing our own thinking which negates the idea that we are fundamentally knowers. This is the reverse of the Turing Test. Instead of making computers that can be mistaken for being humans, we turn ourselves into machines, into thinking like machines. This is the point made in “Re-engineering Humanity,” the 2018 book by Brett Frischman and Evan Selinger. But Paul was already countering the things that dehumanize us in a tradition that looks back to Plato and which belongs to a whole way of ethical thinking. It speaks to the truth of our humanity in terms of our being open to wonder, to wisdom.