by CCW | 13 June 2026 20:00
My congratulations to the grads! I commend you not only on your achievements but for your respect and commitment to the significance of the Encaenia service in the history and life of the King’s-Edgehill School. I thank you and the School for the privilege of speaking to you this morning. I would be remiss if I didn’t say how much I have missed you.
Encaenia is an intriguing concept. It marks both an ending and a beginning. In a few hours you will step up and out of King’s-Edgehill, no longer its students but alumni. That doesn’t mean the end of learning but marks a new beginning in the life-long journey of the understanding. What does the word Encaenia mean? It requires explanation. So, for only the 28th time, let me explain (or at least try to explain)!
A Greek word, Encaenia means a renewal of purpose and dedication (εν καινος), to the idea of end as meaning and purpose, the telos which directs and informs our lives; in short, the idea of living for something beyond self-interest. It belongs to the whole spiritual and intellectual enterprise of education. It has its origins in the annual dedication of sacred shrines and holy places that recall the principles of intellectual and ethical life in ancient Greek culture that contribute to the understanding of what it means to be human. It has become associated with “the annual commemoration of founders and benefactors at Oxford University in June” (O.E.D.). In short, it belongs to the intellectual traditions of the medieval universities of Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, and others which were very much aware of the philosophical and ethical cultures and communities of thought that they inherited and which shaped their life and which they honoured. Truth and beauty tam antiqua et tam nova, ever ancient and ever new, as Augustine says.
It migrated from its Euro-Mediterranean origins to academic institutions throughout the world, such as King’s-Edgehill School here in the Maritimes, that derive in some measure their history and self-understanding from those medieval institutions which carried over into modern times. At the very least, Encaenia recalls us to the long-standing traditions of learning and thus to the foundational principles of the School captured in the mottoes Deo Legi Regi Gregi, “For God, for the Law, for the King and For the People”, and Fideliter, “faithfulness” to the principles that belong to the pursuit of learning. It is in every way a counter to the current confusions that beset our schools and colleges that reduce education to a commodity and you to consumers; in short, education as a private good, as Stefan Collini has recently noted about academia in general (LRB, June 2026), though we might ask, ‘Whose good?’ It should be clear that Encaenia speaks to education as a public good, to learning that contributes to civic and public life beyond entitlement and exploitation and rather to human flourishing and service towards others. Education has an inescapable ethical character as Plato shows at great length, not least of all in The Republic.
The reduction of education to economic ends only compounds the question about who benefits, on the one hand, and discloses the real impoverishment and loss of education, on the other hand, as something ennobling for the individual and the community. Without that vision, it becomes what Plato accurately described as merely “a city of pigs,” as if the end or purpose of education was solely material and economic. In a famous exchange between Socrates and Thrasymachus, Socrates counters the idea that justice is simply “the interest of the stronger” and notes Thrasymachus’s ‘category mistake’ in saying that shepherds do not really care for the sheep but only for their economic benefit in the market-place. But that would mean they are not shepherds but businessmen. More importantly, the dialogue argues, justice cannot be for the interest of the few at the expense of the many nor can justice mean doing harm to anyone.
No doubt you will have to negotiate the data-driven and data-based world of the digital technocracy in one way or another. Some will find in AI an immediate help to ‘getting ‘er done’, whatever ‘done’ means in a utilitarian and pragmatic context; others will be alert to the problem of outsourcing your own thinking and knowing and will question the extent of being made the slaves of a mindless and soulless machine, as Paul Kingsnorth calls it (Against the Machine). But perhaps you will discover in one way or another that data or information is not knowledge and certainly not wisdom. After all, having to engage the world of digital commerce doesn’t mean that you have to become a bot. Education can happen, I hope, precisely in reclaiming your thinking and knowing.
What Encaenia means is complemented by the readings from the Wisdom of Solomon and The Gospel of Luke. They offer a larger and more comprehensive view of education in the connection between thinking and doing. The passage which Ray-Ray read provides a splendid sense of the wisdom that moves in and through a great range of activities at once high end and intellectual, knowing the forces and principles of nature and human society, and the dignity and importance of things that are more hands-on, the things that belong to the crafts and the trades. All belong to Wisdom and Wisdom belongs to God. “She reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other and orders all things well.”Fortiter et suaviter. Strongly and sweetly.
This text is one of the few explicit scriptural references in Boethius’ great spiritual and intellectual 6th century classic The Consolation of Philosophy, having been awakened out of his despair by Lady Philosophy to reclaim the life of the mind and the soul. O qui perpetua mundum ratione gubernas: “O thou who dost govern the world with everlasting reason.” She sings about a reasoning that is more than simply a human or social construct but which participates in the divine understanding; an everlasting reason. He was writing while in prison falsely accused and on trumped up charges, awaiting execution. To be awakened to wisdom is the life that translates us beyond the contradictions and limitations of mere power and dominance that reduce us to things to be used, manipulated, and destroyed. This suggests that education can happen whatever the ups and downs, the confusions and disarray of our institutions in the nihilism of their iconoclastic and deconstructionist impulses.
The lesson which Adaure read from Luke shows the necessary interrelation between our knowing and our doing critical to the ethical principle embodied in the parable of the Good Samaritan. It is framed by the questions of Jesus in response to the cynical question of a certain lawyer about eternal life. “What is written in the Law?”, Jesus asks, and “How readest thou?” In other words, ‘how do you think?’ In spite of himself, the lawyer reiterates the love of God and the love of neighbour, known as the Summary of the Law derived from Deuteronomy and Leviticus, as the ethical answer and demand. Love of God and love of neighbour are inseparable.
“You have answered rightly,” Jesus says. “This do and thou shalt live.” But he “seeking to justify himself”, and thus negate the very truth which he has acknowledged, asks dismissively, “And who is my neighbour?” This is the setting for the Parable of the Good Samaritan that identifies the ethical principle of seeking the good of one another whether stranger or friend, regardless of ‘identities’, religious or otherwise. The certain Samaritan not only symbolizes the outsider at least in its Jewish context but also God in Christ, the Good Samaritan par excellence.
The whole parable illustrates what belongs, in the Christian understanding, to the Incarnation of Christ whose sacrifice heals and redeems our broken and wounded humanity. We are bidden to go and do likewise; in short, to act as the certain Samaritan has acted in going to the one who was wounded and left half-dead on the road between Jericho, the symbol of the earthly city, and Jerusalem, the symbol of the heavenly. The question is, I suppose, in which direction are we going? The deeper point is about how we learn to love and care about one another; in short, about our reading and thinking.
The meaning of the whole passage lies in the interplay of contemplation and action shown explicitly in the story which immediately follows and book-ends the Parable. It is the story of Martha and Mary, the symbols of the active and practical life and the intellectual and contemplative life, respectively. They are intertwined and mutually interdependent, the lower form participates in the higher and the higher redeems the lower. “Mary hath chosen the good portion,” sitting at the feet of Jesus and listening to his teaching. For only so can we act properly on what we have learned in service and care for one another. Only so can we ‘feed’ Christ in one another.
Education is about a learning that embraces a great range of distinct areas of thought and different forms of knowing. If that sounds like ToK, it is! And more, even Chapel. What is shown in these readings is wonderfully captured in a 17thcentury poem, The Agonie by the metaphysical poet George Herbert. It speaks powerfully about the nature of education and learning.
Philosophers have measur’d mountains,
Fathom’d the depths of seas, of states, and kings,
Walk’d with a staffe to heav’n, and traced fountains:
Those three short lines encapsulate the Platonic and Aristotelian ordering of the philosophical sciences as well as the Scriptural vision of the same in our readings. They are a concise statement of those things as reworked by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century: Physics, Ethics, and Metaphysics. Measuring mountains and fathoming the depths of seas is natural philosophy or science; fathoming the depths of states, and kings is ethical and political philosophy, the practical sciences; walking with a staff to heaven and tracing fountains is metaphysics or natural theology in the quest for the causes and reasons of all things. Yet this summary of the different arts and sciences that belong to human learning is not enough for the realization of the highest good of our humanity. Something more is needed, another science that is not a human construct but which does not deny those sciences. There is an end, as Aquinas puts it, that exceeds the activity or grasp of human reason on its own. Thus, there is an important “but”.
“But there are,” Herbert says, “two vast spacious things, / the which to measure it doth more behove:/ Yet few there are that sound them”. Something more is needed to be known, measured, and sounded in our thoughts. What are those “two vast spacious things”? They are, he says, “Sinne and Love.” How are they known? They are known through Sacra Doctrina, through what is revealed in the language and images of the Scriptures and through our thinking upon them.
The two stanzas which follow teach us about how we learn and know about “Sinne and Love.” The first is through the images of Christ’s agony of soul in the Garden of Gethsemane expressed viscerally in anticipation of the Cross: “Sinne is that presse and vice, which forceth pain/ To hunt his cruell food through every vein.” Luke’s Passion illustrates this in the moving image of Christ’s tears in Gethsemane “falling like great drops of blood.” The second, in the third stanza, takes us to the Cross which makes known the radical love of Christ. Love is what flows out from the side of the Crucified Christ, his love communicated and expressed sacramentally. “Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,/ Which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine.” Herbert’s poem alludes to the actions of the Good Samaritan who pours in “wine and oil” and provides the “two pence” for the continuation of his healing and care, symbolic in the commentary tradition of baptism and communion.
The poem illustrates the features of education classically understood. It complements the readings and counters the diminishing tendencies of our times that undermine the integrity of the natural sciences and the human sciences, among others. Yet the quest for wisdom and understanding remains with us despite all the confusions in the conflicts between our uncertainties and our claims to certainties. As Dante tells us, it was in the “dark wood” of human experience that he learned a great good. It is found not in the forms of ‘subject chauvinism,’ the conflict narrative of ‘sciences’ competing for dominance, but in the complementary interplay between the forms of our knowing and the areas of thought as gathered into unity in the wisdom of God. Such is theology and the place of real religion in any system of education worthy of the name.
We can only ‘go and do likewise’ in terms of our service and care of one another and our world if we are willing to learn and to read and to think, again and again, about the things that belong to the traditions of learning and ethical life of which we are the inheritors. My hopes and prayers are that some of these things have belonged to your time at King’s-Edgehill and that they will stay with you and grow in you.
Let me end with an image that captures something of these ideas. It is a baptismal font carved in the 13th century in the Church of San Giovanni Fuorcivitas in Pistoia, Italy, by Giovanni Pisano. The pedestal upon which the bowl sits is carved with the images of the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity; the font itself is carved with the images of the four cardinal or classical virtues of temperance, fortitude, justice, and prudence. It is summed up best in the words of one of the most outstanding scholars to come out of King’s Collegiate School and the University of King’s College, the Rev’d Dr. Robert Darwin Crouse. He says:
It’s a very humanistic statement, in that the new life at baptism is seen as a renewal of the natural human virtues; but at the same time, it’s a powerful affirmation that the restoration of authentic humanity depends upon and is sustained by, the supernatural virtues of faith, hope and charity.
This suggests an education that is alive to the grace which perfects but does not destroy what belongs to nature and to human reason and which shapes and guides ethical life and service. As Wisdom says, “both we and our words are in his hand, as are all understanding and skill in crafts”. Only in knowing this can we, in the words of Jesus in Luke, “go and do likewise.”
I wish you every blessing in the continuing of your journey in the pursuit of understanding and learning and in your service and care of others. For one last time, dare I say, Yay, God!
(Rev’d) David Curry
Encaenia 2026
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