Category: KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

The Gentleness of Wisdom

“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.

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Let me sing for my beloved a love song

Isaiah’s beautiful and haunting love song (Is. 5.1-4, 7) brings to conclusion a kind of pageant of ethical thought that has been before us in Chapel over the past several months. We have pondered the mystery of Creation and the Fall, locating the ways in which those foundational stories in Genesis challenge many of our modern assumptions that separate our humanity from the Creator and creation and from one another even as they awaken us to self-consciousness. We have thought our way through the wisdom of the Ten Commandments as a comprehensive system of reasoning about the freedom and dignity of our obligations and duty towards God and one another. We have looked at the wisdom of Leviticus, at once a commentary on creation, and the biblical source for loving your neighbour as yourself and for loving the stranger as neighbour. We have considered Jesus’ words about loving our enemies! We have weighed the great mystery and wonder of the Beatitudes which recall us to who we are in the sight of God, come what may in the ups and downs of human experience. We are, it seems, more than the externalities which so often claim to define us. In short, there is a blessedness in all these teachings.

What makes Isaiah’s love song so poignant and powerful is that it imagines God speaking to our humanity as the beloved and the lover: beloved of us and the lover of our humanity which is imagined as the vineyard of creation. There is the love of God for his creation, his vineyard, and there is the sad reality of our violation and destruction of creation and one another. The song imagines God’s dismay and distress at human folly in ways that are meant to move our hearts and minds. It convicts us. “What more was there to do for my vineyard, that I have not done in it? When I looked for it to yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes?” It is a moving indictment of human sin and its consequences; the ‘barbarism’ which makes a ruin of culture and thus, of life itself. “Every culture is a culture of life,” as Michel Henry notes (Barbarism, 1987), but we have become disconnected from our lifeworld through the devaluation of human life and culture by way of the quantifying logic of science reduced to technology.

The song makes it clear that the vineyard is “the house of Israel” which takes on a universal significance, especially in Isaiah, as the human community and in terms of the theme of justice. God “looked for justice, but behold, bloodshed; for righteousness, but behold a cry!” Such is our betrayal and contradiction of ourselves and the good order of creation. Yet the love song is a wake-up call to the truth of our humanity as ultimately defined by the justice and holiness of God such as we have seen in the great ethical teaching not only of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures but by way of Buddhism and Hinduism or what C.S. Lewis called the Tao, invoking the wisdom of the Far East as a collective term for the necessity of the ethical. “But the Lord of hosts is exalted in justice, and the Holy God shows himself holy in righteousness” (Is. 5. 16)). We are brought low and humbled in order to be raised up in knowledge and love. Such is the blessing of “the poor in spirit,” the humble ones who are open to the truth and beauty of God and his creation; such is the blessing really of “the kingdom of heaven.”

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Greater love

“You will love again the stranger who was your self” (Love After Love). The Caribbean writer Derek Walcott’s words help to bring together the interplay of love and law which has been a large part of the ethical reflections in Chapel over the last month or so. We have had the reading of the Ten Commandments, of Christ’s command to love your enemies, of the Leviticus command to love your neighbour as yourself, and now as belonging to the vision of the Communion of Saints, the Beatitudes of Christ.

November is the grey month of our remembering: the remembering of the unity of our humanity as a community of love – such is the meaning of All Saints, the remembering of our common mortality – such is the meaning of the Solemnity of All Souls. This week brings us to Remembrance Day, the sad remembering of the horrific loss of life in the conflicts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. “I had not thought death had undone so many”, T.S. Eliot observes in The Burial of the Dead, the first part of “The Waste Land”, written exactly one hundred years ago. It is an allusion to Dante’s comment about the souls in the Vestibule of Hell in the Inferno of The Divine Comedy, imaged as chasing after this and that banner of ideological fads and fancies, souls worthy of neither heaven nor hell. If you don’t stand for something, you fall for everything, it seems.

Remembrance Day challenges us about our histories and about our life in community. In doing so it challenges us about ourselves and our assumptions about ourselves. The School on Remembrance Day marches as the Corps, meaning body, down to the Cenotaph in Windsor and back again to the School’s Cenotaph. A cenotaph is an empty tomb symbolic of the many, many young soldiers who never came back from campaigns in distant lands and places. Our students and faculty sit in Chapel in the very pews where those from King’s College and King’s Collegiate School once sat before they went off to war. We remember them by name even though they are in some sense complete strangers to us. But in another way they are part of us and we are part of them in the life and community of the School.

Our remembering is and should be a solemn and sober affair. It is not a celebration but a serious reminder of the ambiguities and complexities of life and about facing the past in all of its grandeur and misery, both the good and the evil which implicates us all. The blanket condemnation of everything before yesterday is the conceit of the naive and the self-righteous. How will those after us look upon us, after all? Our history is part of the life of our institutions and of ourselves. One of the great challenges of education is to help students to have a thoughtful relation to the past; for instance, to make sense of the senselessness of the great wars. It is easy to judge but much harder to understand.

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That time of year

November begins with All Saints’s Day just after the ‘revels’ of Halloween, All Hallow’s Eve. Hallow means Holy, as in the Lord’s prayer, “hallowed be thy name”. “Be ye holy as I am holy”, as God says in Leviticus. The ‘holy ones’ are the Saints, from the Latin sanctus. Shakespeare’s sonnet (#73) always reminds me of November and of All Saints: “that time of year … when yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang upon those boughs which shake against the cold, bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.” For In the barren greyness of the dying of nature’s year, there is a gathering into the fullness of life. Such is the vision of the Communion of saints. It is about our lives as embraced in God’s love.

A vision of our redeemed humanity, All Saints speaks to our world of scattered souls which are like so many fallen leaves scattered on the wind. It celebrates instead the gathering into wholeness and blessedness of our fractured and fragmented selves. It is about our wholeness, our holiness, as found in God and in company with one another, a counter to our fractured and fragmented selves in a fractured and fragmented world. Such is the “Unreal City” of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, written exactly one hundred years ago just after the devastations and madnesses of the First World War.

All Saints offers a profound critique to a fragmented world in which we have turned ourselves into objects. The French author George Bernanos observed that “between those who think that civilization is a victory of man in the struggle against the determinism of things and those who want to make of man a thing among things, there is no possible scheme of reconciliation.” The Kentucky poet and environmentalist, Wendell Berry, remarks that “it is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” To be a machine is to be a thing, where even our bodies have become objects, things, to ourselves, as the French philosopher, Michel Henry noted, things that we can manipulate as we see fit.

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Love God … Love one another

Love and law go together, as strange as that may seem. The Summary of the Law captures the Jewish and Christian sensibility brought to a kind of completion in the figure of Jesus Christ. What is the Summary of the Law? “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength”, in short with the whole of our being, and “thou shalt love the neighbour as thyself” (Mk. 12. 29-31). Powerful words which bring out the spirituality of Jewish and Christian thought quite wonderfully. It concentrates for us the essential content and meaning of the Ten Commandments. Love of God and love of one another go together.

The Summary of the Law is taken from passages in Deuteronomy and in Leviticus: the one about the love of God, the other about the love of one another; in short, the other as neighbour – not as stranger, not as enemy. The Book of Leviticus is the most formidable and least read of the five Books of Moses which comprise the Torah in the Jewish understanding. I don’t think there has ever been a reading in Chapel from Leviticus.

It is a rather forbidding and challenging book seemingly dominated by a great collection of rules and regulations about human behaviour in relation to God and to one another that seem, at first glance, perplexing and strange. Yet it has been modern forms of study, such as sociology, along with the wisdom of the commentary traditions, that have helped to reclaim something of Leviticus’s radical teaching. It is in part a kind of extended commentary on the Genesis story of Creation. One thing is different from another but within an order of relation. Clarity rather than the confusion of boundaries between one thing and another is the paramount concern. The proscriptions and demands of The Book of Leviticus are really about that fundamental idea. Thus it is not a collection of arbitrary regulations but instead a profound reflection on Creation and on the Holiness of the Law. No book of the Hebrew Scriptures speaks more frequently of God as ‘I Am Who I Am’, for instance. Here in this remarkable work we have the further extension of the idea of our human vocation to the service of God in prayer and praise. “Be ye holy as the Lord your God as holy.”

But what does that mean? Simply put it is about our wholeness, about the integrity of our being and life as a gift of God and as the gift which defines our relationships with one another just as we have seen in the Ten Commandments.

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Law and Love

We have gone this week in Chapel from the radical ethical teaching to “love your enemies” to the giving of the Law to Moses in the Ten Commandments, the universal moral code of our humanity. The idea of loving your enemies has to do with seeking the good rather than the harm of others. That idea turns upon the knowledge of being part of an intelligible and moral universe, something grasped both by natural reason and by way of revelation. In either case, it is about something known by all according to their capacity to know. It is fundamentally about the knowledge of good and evil in each of us. The law of nature, as Thomas Aquinas suggests, is nothing else than the participation of the eternal law in the rational creature.

All law is grounded in the law of God. “Thou shalt have none other gods” is the First Commandment which contains all the rest. In a way, the Ten Commandments stand between the first word of Genesis and the first word of John’s Gospel. “In the beginning God … in the beginning was the Word”. The Law is given first on tablets of stone but then, in the prophetic tradition, as written on our hearts. In the Christian understanding, Christ is “the Word made flesh”.

But the commandments begin and end with God. God is God, not some fiction of our minds in this view. We are made in the image of God, not God in our image. Aristotle famously said of Anaxagoras, who grasped that intellect or reason (νους – mind) was the ordering principle of reality rather than the material elements, that he was like “a sober man in the company of drunks”. This emphasis upon reason as that which grasps the nature of things is contrary to our current solipsisms in which the mind is the only reality, the only existent. But that is to live a fiction.

Because God is God, the First Commandment, there can be no confusion between Creator and created, hence the Second Commandment against “any graven images” that confuse and conflate image and reality. It is not by accident that the proscription against idolatry features so prominently in the Judeo-Christian and Islamic understanding, albeit in different registers of emphasis. Something similar might be said about our fixation with images in ‘the culture of selfies’. They are images of you but not the whole truth of you. The distinction is crucial.

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Love your enemies

This powerful passage, read in Chapel this week, from Luke’s Sermon on the Plain complements Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount. The latter begins with The Beatitudes. In the last Beatitude, Jesus says “blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake” and, as if to drive the lesson home, he adds “blessed are you when men shall revile you and persecute you and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake.” Or, as Luke more simply puts it, “blessed are you when men shall hate you.” Wow. Yet how is this even remotely possible to think let alone do?

How do we deal not only with “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” (Shakespeare, Hamlet) but with slander, with character assassination, with those who seek to harm us? In short, with enmity? Well, it is, to be sure, not at all easy especially when you are such a target. Yet here is one of the most radical of all ethical teachings. We are bidden not to be indifferent, not to ignore the enemy, as if they did not exist, nor to succumb to the pressures of subservience by giving in to bullies and cowards. Neither are we to retaliate in the spirit of revenge, the false justice of ‘getting even’, as it were. We are bidden instead to love our enemies. Why?

It is not just that we are to see a blessing for ourselves in being persecuted, itself a troubling concept. It is much more radical. The command to love our enemies bids us seek the good of those who seek our harm. This is a complete reversal and completely counter-culture though it belongs to the wisdom of other spiritual traditions. There is, for instance, Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita of the Hindu tradition, caught in an ethical dilemma about fighting those who are his own relatives, and there is Plato, in The Republic, arguing that justice cannot mean ‘doing good to your friends and harm to your enemies’. Doing harm to any ‘other’ negates justice and truth. You remain caught in the binaries of contradiction, of them versus us.

The American writer and social, gender, and anti-racist activist, Roxanne Gay, notes that we have made “a fetish of forgiveness.” She has in mind, I think, apologies that are not really apologies. What does it mean, after all, to apologize for the faults of others while ignoring your own? We don’t need to worship “at the altar of forgiveness,” she says, “to live full lives”. Yet this is the opposite of what Jesus is saying. He counters the phenomenon of nemesis, the idea of retribution. In its place is the radical meaning of forgiveness. Instead of seeking the harm of another we are bidden to seek their good even in the face of their enmity towards us: “to do good to those who hate you.” Wow.

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Giving thanks

Luke’s story of the one who turned back giving thanks is the classical and quintessential thanksgiving story. In Canada, the Thanksgiving Weekend is associated with Harvest Thanksgiving as well as the forms of National Thanksgiving. With the first, we give thanks for the harvest and with the second, we give thanks for the spiritual and rational freedoms which properly belong to our lives as citizens. Both forms of thanksgiving point us to the radical nature of thanksgiving as something spiritual and intellectual. A check on the idea of taking things and one another for granted.

Thanksgiving is the counter to all of the forms of privilege and entitlement, to the idea that somehow we are owed things like life and pleasure. It is profoundly about giving not getting and only through a recognition of what the American theologian and novelist Marilynn Robinson wonderfully calls “the givenness of things.” Thanksgiving recognises the spiritual nature of the natural world and of human affairs. As such it opens us out to a larger understanding of our humanity universally considered regardless of the particular cultures from which we come. It is an interesting point. We can only arise to things universal through the particularities of our cultures and lives. Thanksgiving reminds us that we are embodied beings and embedded in certain cultures with their distinctive histories and characteristics.

Thanksgiving, like learning, cannot be forced. It can only come from within as a result of a recognition of things without which belong to life itself. In the theological understanding it is really about God as life and the source of all the forms of life in which we find ourselves.

I am reminded of St. Francis of Assissi’s lovely Canticle of the Sun (c. 1225), one of the earliest literary works written in Italian. It is a lovely hymn of “praise to God with all his creatures”, Brother Sun and Sister Moon, Brothers Wind and Air, Sister Water and Brother Fire, Sister Mother Earth and even Sister Death. The canticle looks back to Genesis, to creation understood as distinguishing one thing from another, as well as echoing the ancient Greek ‘physicists’, like Empedocles who saw nature in terms of a combination of complementary material elements: Earth, Water, Air and Fire, for example. The canticle reminds us of the deep connection between the Creator and creation in ways that complement many of the indigenous cultures of Canada. There is a kind of intimacy and warmth to St. Francis’s Canticle of prayer and praise. It is humbling. “Praise and bless my Lord and give him thanks and serve him with great humility”, it concludes.

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Unde malum?

Whence cometh evil? Why, if everything is so good in the Genesis accounts of creation, are things, well, so often so bad? The Judeo/Christian/Islamic understanding offers a way to think about the question of evil, of suffering and death that speaks, perhaps, to our contemporary world in its certainties and uncertainties.

Simply by beginning with the idea of creation as an orderly process whereby things are called into being and distinguished from one thing and another, order as good is strongly affirmed. This changes the whole perspective on the question of evil because the problem can’t be with the created order, with the world itself, as it were, nor with God, the intellectual and spiritual principle of the being and knowing of all things. In some cosmogonies – accounts of reality – order arises out of primordial chaos but, as a consequence, there is always a sense of uncertainty about the order of things, always the fear that chaos might overturn the order of the world. This ancient fear has its counterpart in the fears and anxieties of our own world. It is part of the contemporary disconnect from the world and from our own embodied being. Evil, it seems, is somehow ‘out there’, somehow external to us.

Genesis suggests to the contrary that the problem is not simply ‘out there’ in the fabric of the world nor is it simply ‘other people’ whom we demonize. The problem is with us, at least in terms of an aspect of our humanity. Are we not part of that good order of creation? To be sure, as made in the image of God, as the dust into which God breathes his spirit, at once connected to everything else in creation and yet distinct and having the responsibility of care for the order by acting out of the image and spirit of God that properly defines us. Unde malum, then? Whence evil? The poet John Milton offers an answer in his great poem, Paradise Lost. “Of man’s first disobedience and the fruit of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste brought death into the world and all our woe”.

‘Adam in the garden is given a commandment not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The commandment has to be seen as also being good, as being part of the good order of things. At issue, then, is how do we come to know good and evil? Or to put it in another way, how do we come to know that we know? Milton names the problem as disobedience. We learn but through separation, through contradicting the basis of our own knowing and being, through the experience of suffering and death, quite unlike God who knows evil through knowing the good Yet we learn and indeed embark upon the arduous journey of education, not to return to the Garden, for there is no going back, no unthinking what we have thought and done. There can only be our learning through repentance – metanoia – literally, our thinking after the things of God. We learn the good in part by learning and experiencing evil.

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