by CCW | 17 June 2023 16:00
And so, at last it ends! And yet, begins. Today you are the pride and joy of the School, of your parents and grandparents, friends and peers. Today, at last, you step up and step out of the School. In a few hours you will have been transformed from being high school students to becoming alumni. There is, I am sure, a tremendous sense of accomplishment and, no doubt, some great sighs of relief. Yet parting is such sweet sorrow, too, for you, perhaps, and for all of us. We are at once both glad and sad to see you go. Why? Because of the intensity of our abiding together in the pursuits and challenges of education. That, I hope, is something that never ends.
This is the paradox of the Encaenia service: An ending that is a beginning. “Be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds,” as Paul says. Encaenia is the renewing of our minds upon the principles that belong to our abiding and being together as a School. Such is the paradox of truth itself. The coming together of opposites, as the great 20th-century physicist Niels Bohr noted, signifies the approach to a deeper level of truth. We “give voice to our opinions,” Augustine remarked more than fifteen hundred years ago, “but they are only opinions, like so many puffs of wind that waft the soul hither and thither and make it veer and turn. The light is clouded over and the truth cannot be seen, although it is there before our eyes” (Conf. IV. 14). Yet the truth is there, “before our very eyes.” We are not simply left with the muddle of endlessly conflicting opinions. Perhaps there is a way to think through the divisions and conflicts of our divided world of partial truths and competing assertions.
Encaenia is a Greek word (εν καινος) that refers to renewal, the re-dedication to certain ideas and principles that define institutions. Originating in the dedication of holy places, such as ancient temples and churches, it became associated with “the annual commemoration of founders and benefactors at Oxford University, held in June” (OED), and has extended to Schools and Universities which derive their origins from the medieval universities of Oxford and Cambridge, such as King’s-Edgehill. It reminds us that we are part of something larger than ourselves and recalls us to the foundational principles, to the telos, the end or purpose, of the institutions which in some sense shape our thoughts and actions.
Encaenia in this sense complements what has been an abiding feature of Chapel, namely, a form of critical self-reflection about the ethical principles that belong to our thinking. It is about “interrogating the writings of the wise,” as the poet Horace puts it, by way of the intellectual and spiritual traditions of our humanity, what C.S. Lewis called the Tao, the path of ethical wisdom, conceived “in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike”. This was in a series of lectures delivered in Durham, England, in 1943; in other words, at a time of conflict and division, of great fear and uncertainty. How do we face the difficult things that belong to the divisions and conflicts of our divided world?
I love the story told by the former Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, Jonathan Sacks: “A faithful man finds in the scriptures that Rabbi X said that a certain thing was true. Later he finds that Rabbi Y said that the very same thing was false. He prays for guidance: ‘Who is right?’ God answers: ‘Both of them are right.’ Perplexed, the man replies: ‘But what do you mean? Surely they can’t both be right?’ To which God replies: ‘All three of you are right’”.
Beautiful, but to what extent and in what way are each right? “To have seen it [after all] only from one side is not to have seen it,” but how to think from both sides? The challenge of education is how to negotiate our way between the Scylla and Charybdis of relativism and dogmatism; the one believing that because there are different perspectives they are all equal and thus there is no truth; the other mistaking a partial truth for the whole truth. Both belong to a kind of intellectual despair and leave us trapped in our divided opinions.
How to think about the relation of partial ‘truths,’ limited and incomplete each in their own way, let alone the relation of opposed ‘truths’? One could explore “the coincidence of opposites,” to use a late medieval term, something which some of you have encountered in the metaphysical poetry of John Donne. The grotesque image of Christ crucified, perhaps depicted with the marks of the plague as in Matthias Grünewald’s famous Isenheim altarpiece (1515), becomes “this beauteous form [which] assures a piteous mind”. But, perhaps, a better way or at least another way is through the metaphor of dance. Take, for instance, Leonard Cohen’s Dance Me To the End of Love:
Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic till I’m gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance Me To The End Of Love…
What makes this rather beautiful song at once poignant and disturbing is that it points to the triumph of love in the face of the greatest of horrors, the holocaust. It was inspired by the story of Jewish musicians in the death camps being forced to play classical music, Mozart and Haydn, for instance, while their people were being led to their deaths and their bodies to the burning. It is a haunting image. A string quartet plays with passionate intensity for those whose fate is their own, playing with passionate intensity the music which belongs to human dignity and beauty in the face of unspeakable and utterly inhuman indignities and horror. I thought about that song in relation to what I like to call the two ‘Allies,’ Allie Dennet and Allie Pape, one speaking and the other dancing about a kind of triumph of love in their own lives in terms of loss and grief, of deep hurt and harm. They showed us something of what is accomplished by way of suffering through hardship and difficult things. This is the kind of wisdom the American psychologist and philosopher William James meant by the twice-born; those who attain to a kind of joy achieved only through suffering and even misery.
And there is the dance metaphor that is woven into the very fabric of one of the greatest works of the self-critique of reason, Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex. The chorus is divided into strophe and antistrophe, originally groups of dancers each moving in opposite directions, the one right to left and the other left to right. They represent the human community in its divided opinions about the action of the play and especially about Oedipus himself. They are part of the dialectical reasoning whereby Oedipus comes into contradiction with himself about himself and his form of knowing. The paradox is that through discovering that his form of knowing is partial and limited he also learns how it belongs to a more complete understanding.
In between Cohen’s Dance Me To The End of Love and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex there is the great medieval dance metaphor, la doppia danza, the double dance, of the doctors in Dante’s Heaven of the Sun in the Paradiso. Two groups of thinkers are represented as two circles of stars, one moving in one direction and the other in the opposite, but in each group there is the most marvelous portrayal of each thinker praising their intellectual opponents; a beautiful image of the greater reconciliation of opposites. Dominicans praising Franciscans, Thomas Aquinas praising Bonaventure, for instance, and vice versa. There is, too, “the eternal light of Sigier,” Thomas says, “hammering home invidious truths as logic taught him to.” Opposed in their teaching about Aristotle in light of the Arabic commentary by Averroës, they are now “reconciled among the stars”.
The lesson which Levi read from Leviticus is the locus classicus for what belongs to the ethical understanding, namely, the love of neighbour which complements the love of God; again, a unity of opposites, God and humanity. Levi – Leviticus, well, I confess. I couldn’t resist! This is probably the only Encaenia service anywhere which has a lesson from the Book of Leviticus, the least read and most misunderstood book of the Hebrew Scriptures. But note the range of ethical thinking about the care and concern for others that it presents. Simon Fraser spoke powerfully about the dignity of farming as a vocation and here in Leviticus are powerful ethical teachings about providing for the needs of others that challenge many of the forms of our global economic order. The love of neighbour in Leviticus includes the stranger. “The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.” Once again, there is the idea of the transcendence of opposites that belongs to a deeper appreciation of our humanity. The stranger and the neighbour are one.
This was complemented by the lesson from John’s Gospel which Lucy read. It is the last and one of the most powerful of the famous “I am” sayings of Jesus which open us out to the forms of our incorporation or participation in the truth. “I am the vine; ye are the branches,” “abide in my love.” How? Through our attention to what is said and written, to what belongs to the dance of the understanding. In a way, it is about the deeper sense of reconciliation and unity that comes from the awareness of our own incompleteness.
Contraria sunt complementa. Contraries often complement one another and reveal the necessary tension that belongs to harmony, not only in matters academic but also in athletics and the arts. “Harmony is the reconciliation of things that contend with one another”. This is the ancient teaching of Heraclitus on the bow and the lyre, “an attunement turning back on itself”. The tension between the opposite ends of the bow gives power to the flight of the arrow; the tension in the strings of the lyre gives rise to the beauty of melody. Think of sports; think of the singing of Hannah and Lucy.
It is something which you, too, have experienced in singing The Lord of the Dance; itself a story of the coincidence of opposites, of the triumph of love over suffering and death. It is all a kind of circling around and into the wonders of learning: “I am the dance and I still go on.”
You leave the School but there are things that abide and dance in you. Others too are leaving with you, others for whom the School, too, has been the place of their abiding in so many different ways and in some cases for so many, many years. We give thanks for you and for them: for Mr. John Kennedy and Mr. Jeff Smith after 43 years of teaching, for Major Keith Hynes, for Ms. Janet Naugler in administration and school records after so many, many years, for Marilyn Redden in Finance, for Mr. Andy Field, for Mr. Mike Pledger and Ms. Yvonne Pledger, for Mr. Marcus Weber and for Ms. Emma Oehl. All have brought so much to the life and purpose of the School.
I would be remiss not to thank the Grade Twelve class for your leadership in this past year in every aspect of the School, for the excellent leadership and service of Levi, Head Boy, and Lucy, Head Girl, and for the outstanding service and commitment of the Chapel Prefects, the coolest group in the School, at least in my opinion and I am sticking with it, operating under the splendid leadership of Sean Hurley, Head Chapel Prefect and Bagpiper par excellence. Adieu, Adios, amigos. Auf Wiedersehen, Grüß Gott. Go with God and go in wisdom and peace. Go in the dance that never ends.
Rev’d David Curry
Chaplain
Encaenia 2023
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