Christ Church

“What is written? How readest thou?”

“The end of the matter?” Can it be? Is it really all over? Certainly, there is a kind of ending, the ending of your high school career certainly. This is the last Chapel service for you as students, to be sure. Tears of sorrow; tears of joy. Or both! We are both glad and sad to see you go and, perhaps, it is the same for you. In a short while, you will step up and step out of King’s-Edgehill, no longer students but alumni! You have made the grade, gradus, to being graduates. On this day, you are the pride and joy of the School, of your parents and grandparents, guardians and friends, family and neighbours, teachers and staff, and I hope, of one another. An end, indeed, it would seem.

Yet there is a different sense of ending signalled in this service and the events of this day. Encaenia is a Greek word that refers to renewal of purpose and dedication, to end as purpose and meaning, telos, we might say. Originally an annual dedication of sacred shrines and holy places, it has become associated with “the annual commemoration of founders and benefactors at Oxford University in June” (O.E.D) and extends to those academic institutions which derive their origin and raison d’être from the mediaeval universities of Oxford and Cambridge throughout the English speaking world, including King’s-Edgehill. Thus “the end of the matter” recalls us to our beginnings, to the foundational principles and ideas that belong to education. At the very least, the word suggests the necessary connection between religion and education that is certainly an integral part of the history and life of the School.

Encaenia marks a redire ad principia, a return to a principle, a kind of circling back and around and into the ideas that belong to the educational project. In that sense, it is an ending that has no end. The mottoes of King’s and Edgehill remind us of an education that is about character and service: Deo Legi Regi Gregi – for God, for the Law, for the King, for the People – and fideliter – faithfulness in the life-long pursuit of learning.

We may wonder whether education is even possible in our technocratic culture. This is not new. There is no wisdom in techné, in the various skills and arts of human life, as Plato taught, and likewise so for technology. There is an abundance of knowing how to do but perhaps not so much of knowing what is. “Where is the life we have lost in living?” T.S. Eliot asked ninety years ago in his verse pageant “Choruses from the Rock.” He was not referring to Newfoundland. He notes the modern loss of the vital connection between living and wisdom. “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” Data or information is neither knowledge nor wisdom. This is an ancient commonplace.

Wendell Berry, the Kentucky poet, farmer and environmentalist, reminds us that “to have a lot of power should not make it impossible to use only a little.” The challenge of our times is about learning “to accept and live within limits; to resist changes that are merely novel or fashionable; to resist greed and pride; to resist the temptation to ‘solve’ problems by ignoring them; accepting them as ‘trade-offs’ or bequeathing them to posterity.”

You are more than your devices, more than the digital tools which we allow to master us. So too with AI where information masquerades as knowledge but without a knower, no intelligence. It is yet another instance of what Iain McGilchrist calls “too much left-brain thinking that is destroying us all.” There is no wisdom in technology though, just perhaps, wisdom might be discovered through it. “A good solution” for our present dilemmas, Berry suggests, “must be in harmony with good character, cultural value, and moral law.” These are the lessons that belong to ethical reasoning, to the relationship between knowing and doing, to the balance and interplay between theoria and praxis; in short, between contemplation and activity.

The Roman poet Horace, writing in the 1st century BC in exile from Rome, bids us “interrogate the writings of the wise.” Only so might we learn, he says, how to “get through life in a peaceable tranquill way.” Only so we might find some solace that counters “the anxious alternation of our minds,” which arises from the schlechte unendlichkeit, the bad infinity of our desires for this thing and that thing. “Where is it virtue comes from? Is it from books?” he asks. “Or is it a gift from Nature that can’t be learned? What is the way to become a friend to yourself? What brings tranquillity? What makes you care less?” Such great and perennial questions speak to the anxieties and fears of our world. He is echoing Plato’s dialogue, The Meno, while anticipating Eliot’s prayer in Ash Wednesday (1930). “Teach us to care and not to care;” in other words, to care in the right way.

“Can virtue be taught?” asks Meno, “or is it acquired in some other way?” Socrates replies “how can I know whether virtue can be taught, if I don’t know what virtue (or being good) is?” His response launches the quest for definition and for virtue as a form of knowledge. “Where shall wisdom be found? Job asks in his distress, “and where is the place of understanding?” noting that it is not in us nor in the world. Wisdom belongs to God, a point made ever so clearly in the School Prayer: “Almighty God, of whose only gift cometh wisdom and understanding.” Job concludes, “behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom, and to depart from evil is understanding.”

The lessons read by Spencer and Ava illustrate Horace’s point about interrogating the writings of the wise. Ecclesiastes is the most philosophical of all of the books of the Hebrew Scriptures. “Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, all is vanity and a vexation of spirit” is its recurring refrain, or, to put it more concretely, “a striving after wind.” It is an image of futility and emptiness, an absence of purpose. Vanity means more than self-obsession, more than your selfies which, of course, are not you but only the imagined and projected images of you. Vanity is the awareness of the emptiness of ourselves, the deeper narcissism that Christopher Lasch saw as being the inability to distinguish between self and the world, a kind of solipsism of the soul in thinking that reality is just what is in your mind; a knower without knowledge, empty.

Ecclesiastes interrogates all the forms of human enterprise – our toils or labours are the things in which we invest ourselves to find meaning. He interrogates or examines human wisdom, pleasure, wealth and power, duty and honour, piety and personal devotion. All of these are found wanting “under the sun,” empty. They disappoint and all the more if we have over-invested ourselves in them.

Yet the argument is not a counsel of despair. He is not saying that the world is chaos and that things are inescapably random and arbitrary. Rather he is saying that everything “under the sun” does not and cannot satisfy the human spirit. Everything “under the sun” shows itself to be limited. In this awareness, we realise that we are constituted for something more than just what is “under the sun.” At the very least, the work points us to what is ‘above the sun,’ to something like the Good which is beyond (επεκεινα) in Plato’s famous image of the divided line. The Good unites the being and the knowing of all things. This, too, is the ground for our ethical thinking and doing, of wisdom or philosophy as a way of life. That turns on what is read and how we read.

“Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh,” to be sure, and yet there is something that can be learned in and through it all. “The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God, and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.” Duty here means not so much a form of external compulsion as inner virtue and character, to follow one’s dharma, as Sri Krishna advises Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. It speaks to the idea of what belongs to us as knowers, as those who, as Aristotle puts it, “desire by nature to know” in some way or another. There can be no education without respect for learning and without the eros or passionate desire to know.

But all this has to be lived. The reading from Luke begins with a question about action. “What shall I do to inherit eternal life?” asks a certain lawyer, seeking to put Jesus to the test. It ends with the command: “go and do thou likewise.” Like what? Like the one who showed mercy. Action, yes, but as grounded in knowledge and wisdom. Jesus responds to the lawyer’s question in good Socratic fashion with two questions: “What is written in the Law? How readest thou?” These questions draw out of him, in spite of his intention, the great ethical teaching about the love of God and the love of neighbour, a gathering together of teachings from Deuteronomy and Leviticus. This comes to be known as the “summary of the Law.” “This do and thou shalt live,” Jesus says to him. But “who is my neighbour?” the lawyer cynically and dismissively asks, as if to deny the very truth which he has stated.

This launches the famous parable of the Good Samaritan. It illustrates wonderfully what belongs to the truth and dignity of our humanity and to our respect and compassion for one another, regardless of differences and identities, not because of them. Jesus uses “a certain Samaritan,” the outsider of the outsiders in the Jewish context, to show what belongs to our common humanity. But, in another way, the whole passage teaches the powerful ethical lesson of acting out of what we have learned; literally, out of what has been written and read in the ethical teachings of the world’s religions, what C.S. Lewis called the Tao, meaning the way. We are meant to find ourselves in the meaning of the parable. It describes the human predicament. We are like the “certain man” on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, lying wounded and half-dead, unable to save ourselves. The care of the Samaritan is classically understood in its Christian context as the care of Christ and the Church. We are bidden to act out of what we have read and heard. Such is the way of wisdom and understanding.

Knowing and doing. This story is immediately followed in Luke’s Gospel with the story of Martha and Mary which illustrates the interplay and interdependence of activity and contemplation. Mary sitting at the feet of Jesus and listening to his words, has the better part, unum necessarium, but that doesn’t negate the business of serving. As Aelred of Rievaulx beautifully puts it: “You should in no wise neglect Mary for Martha; or again, Martha for Mary. For, if you neglect Martha, who will feed Jesus? If you neglect Mary, what use is it for Jesus to come to your house, when you taste nothing of his sweetness?” Our life and death are bound up with one another.

This captures something of the deeper meaning of the bond between the love of God and the love of neighbour. It catapults us beyond the endless divisions and divides of our world and day which inevitably privilege some at the expense of others and at the loss of ourselves, to boot. Learning and serving go together in our life together.

One last image in an attempt to bring this all together. Lady Philosophy famously appears to Boethius in his 6th century classic, The Consolation of Philosophy, to recall him to wisdom and understanding from his despair at the ruin of his life and culture. She appears at once as human and yet as reaching to the heavens. Her dress is embroidered with the Greek letters, Π and Θ, practical and theoretical wisdom respectively, but with a ladder reaching from the lower to the higher. Yet this is where her dress is torn, having been ripped by ignorant and violent hands. It is an image of the separation and division, at once ancient and modern, of what belongs together; in short, the integration of our knowing and our doing, of activity and contemplation, of the practical and the theoretical. But it can only happen through those intellectual and spiritual labours that belong to interrogating the writings of the wise.

Interrogating the writings of the wise has been the challenge of Chapel and of the educational programme of the School. We have been through so much together whether it has been one year or seven, whether it has been ‘rock, rock, rappin’ with the Rev down in Con Hall, dancin’, dancin’ the King’s-Edgehillian rag’ or sweating it out up in the Academic building, whether it has been ‘IB or not to be,’ whether it has been on the courts, on the ice, or on the track and fields of athletic endeavour, or on the stage in musicals and plays, whether it has been on parade in Cadets or sitting and maybe even singing in Chapel, whether in laughter or in tears, there have been, I hope, moments of learning and an awakening to the deeper truth and dignity of our humanity in the pursuit of wisdom and understanding.

My thanks to all of you for your patience and respectful consideration, for the leadership and direction of our Head Boy, Spencer Johnson, and Head Girl, Ava Shearer, and, especially, for the Chapel Prefects under the leadership of Samantha Mayer and Warren Ma who have made the morning miracles happen. Not only do we say farewell to all of you but with you go a whole cadre of faculty and staff, some of whom have been here at the School for decades upon decades, and who have shown such dedication and service to the life of learning and compassionate care. We bid Godspeed and many thanks to Mrs. Taya Shields, Mrs. Michelle Belliveau, Mr. Paul Hollett, Mr. Kim Walsh, Ms. Nathalie Hardy, and nurse, Sue Cole, among others, who have wondered with you about “what is written?” and “how do you read?” And that, dear friends, is the “end of the matter.”

(Rev’d) David Curry
Encaenia 2024