Category: KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

Written for our learning

A defining feature of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is that they are more or less explicitly logocentric, word-centered. For all three of these religions of ethical monotheism, God is understood largely in terms of Logos, the Greek word for reason or word. Thus the Word as Law defines Judaism; the Word made Flesh is central to the Christian understanding; and the Word as the Will of Allah is a major feature of Islam. All of the world’s great religions to one extent or another give priority to written texts: the Vedas and the Upanishads of Hinduism; the various Buddhist texts in pali or sanskrit, the commentary traditions in philosophy, to give but a few instances. There is something inescapably significant about written texts, the scriptures and the writings of religion and philosophy.

This calls attention to the mystery and the wonder of reading and writing, one of the most profound of all human abilities and one which speaks to the idea of civilisation. The ancient Sumerians were among the first to do so many things practically speaking in terms of technology that gave them a power over nature: such things as sailing – using wind and therefore not necessarily determined by the flow of water; irrigation – being able to redirect water to where it can be used for agriculture; and a host of other practical inventions. But perhaps the most important invention was writing: cuneiform script, wedge-shaped marks in clay, that probably originated in a warehouse. Why? There is a necessary connection between numbering and naming things which then leads on to stories and ideas. Reading and writing signify civilisation.

“Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning,” St. Paul famously says. He is referring to the Hebrew Scriptures but paradoxically his remark will extend to the inclusion of his own writings which comprise the greatest part of the Christian Scripture, the New Testament. What is written is written for our learning. This speaks to the prominence and the significance of reading and writing, to the significance of books.

This is a particular concern and challenge for our age as Maryanne Wolf wonderfully explains in Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (2018). Following upon the success of Proust and the Squid (2008), she has written an engaging book about what has transpired in the last ten years in terms of neuroscience and the impact of the digital culture on our reading. Far from being a technophobe, she nonetheless seeks to alert us to the dangers of losing the capacity for “deep reading,” for a kind of collectedness, “a place of stillness,” that belongs to Aristotle’s idea of contemplation as the highest form of human life. This complements the theme of our attention to ethical principles which alone can properly shape our lives. Sitting and listening like Mary is necessary for Martha’s activity, too. Without it, we are the endlessly distracted in a culture of distraction, unable to focus and at the mercy of digital overstimulation and manipulation. The theologian John Dunne notes that wisdom is “but contemplation in action.” Wolf wants to show this in part through literature and philosophy and in part through neuroscience.

(more…)

Print this entry

One thing needful

Martha and Mary represent action and contemplation respectively and belong to a long and rich tradition about the forms of spiritual life. Following Plato and Aristotle, contemplation is the highest form of human activity, an inner activity of spiritual and intellectual reflection, but that is not at the expense of outward activity which belongs to our lives physically and with one another. There is, after all, something spiritual, intellectual, and ethical about our interactions with one another, even necessary. At issue is the interplay between action and contemplation; in short, between Martha and Mary.

I am often struck with the ‘counter-culture’ aspects of our School in such things as Chapel, especially with such things like the story of Mary and Martha. It challenges the assumptions and attitudes of our culture. That is an important feature of religious philosophy. There is no greater contrast than between ‘being distracted’ and ‘being collected.’ That is the challenge of the story of Mary and Martha which connects powerfully to the theme which we have been exploring in Chapel about our recognition of a need for an ethical principle that shapes and governs our lives and that is alive in us.

The story of Mary and Martha follows directly upon the parable of the Good Samaritan. That is intriguing and suggestive. Is the story of Mary and Martha the counter or the complement to the concluding injunction of the parable to “go and do thou likewise” towards those in need? We are, it seems, to act with compassion rather than indifference towards those who are suffering. That might seem to imply the priority of action over contemplation.

(more…)

Print this entry

Law and the Ethics of Compassion

Two outstanding passages in the whole of the Scriptures, Jewish and Christian, were read in Chapel this week: the one, the Ten Commandments; the other, the parable of the Good Samaritan. They complement each other and lay out in a very intense way the ethical principles upon which our lives radically depend.

We have been exploring in Chapel the need for an ethical principle for our humanity. Thinking back to the compelling story of Cain and Abel, the story of the first murder, we have wrestled with the profound idea that left to our own devices we are in a world which, in Thomas Hobbes’s famous 17th century words, is “the warre of every man against every man.” Human life in the hypothetical state of nature, Hobbes argues, is “solitary, nasty, brutish and short.” This leads to his form of the modern state as a social contract. Out of the fear of death, we contract with the Sovereign for safety and peace in return for service to the State. The whole idea is a kind of commentary on the Genesis story of life after the Fall. Left to ourselves we are deadly or dead.

Rousseau in the 18th century will famously argue that it is society itself which constrains and binds. Man in the hypothetical state of nature is pure and innocent, the antithesis of Hobbes. It reflects a view of man before the Fall perhaps but argues that human life has to be brought under the General Will which seeks the good of all. All of these early modern considerations illustrate Scriptural insights into the human recognition of the need for an ethical principle. We have explored the biblical narrative in terms of the Noahic covenant, the Abrahamic covenant, and now we come to the Mosaic covenant as concentrated in the Ten Commandments.

Presented in Exodus and again in Deuteronomy, the Ten Commandments are the universal moral code for our humanity. They challenge us by making us think more deeply about the ethical principles which underlie law and order, regulation and restraint. They are a comprehensive set of ethical principles and while they appear to be given simply authoritatively (which in a Jewish view is important as a check upon human presumption), they are also known by human reason. John Chrysostom, in the late fourth and early fifth century, argued that nine out of the ten commandments were able to be known through natural reason. Maimonides, the great Medieval Jewish theologian writing in Arabic in Cairo in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century, argues that the first two commandments – the existence of God and the unity of God – are known not just by prophetic authority but by natural reason.

(more…)

Print this entry

Ye are my friends

This week brings us to Remembrance Day, always a remarkable part of the educational programme of the School. The largest team that any of you will ever be on is the Cadet Corps. It is the School as a corps, a body, a living body, and not a corpse, a dead body, I hasten to add! Though, to be honest, that partly depends on all of you stepping up and keeping in step with one another; in short, honouring and respecting one another as part of something bigger than yourselves, a community defined by certain principles and ideals. In a way, the corps is the School on parade.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the armistice that finally ended the Great War. It is so significant that November 11th marks our remembrance of the Second World War as well, itself a continuation in many ways of the first. There is something powerful and arresting about the First World War that remains with us and rightly disturbs us as imparting the legacy of something profoundly disquieting about ourselves. We are only beginning to begin to come to terms with the horror and the evil of our humanity. There was something cataclysmic about the First World War which I fear we still struggle to comprehend and have yet to understand fully let alone from which to begin to learn.

Remembrance Day is not about the glorification of war. The Great War, after all, unleashed a wealth of literature, poem after poem, novel after novel, that is profoundly anti-war, opposed in a deep and fundamental sense to the glorification of war. That we should have to be reminded of this points to a deep forgetting and a profound literary ignorance if not insouciance in our contemporary culture, as if we were above and beyond such things, superior and better than those who have gone before us. I fear the arrogance of a progressivism that is so convinced of its own self-righteousness and so oblivious of its own hypocrisy especially in the face of the atrocities of our own times.

Remembrance Day is a sober remembrance of the senselessness and the madness that our humanity in its disarray and evil is capable of unleashing against one another and against our world. It forces us to look within, to look at the evil of our own hearts and to realize with a fall of own hearts that we are not very different from those who have gone before us. Even more, it should provide some critical self-reflection about our technocratic exuberance that instead of providing the solution are simply part of the problem. It is that possibility of a deeper thoughtfulness that is the most necessary and significant feature of our Remembrance Day observances.

(more…)

Print this entry

The Blessings of Tribulations

I always approach the week of Halloween and its festivities at the School with a certain trepidation and uncertainty. I am never quite sure culturally speaking exactly what we are celebrating, never quite sure what it means to want to be frightened or to frighten others by way of costume or haunted houses. What does trick or treat really teach? How to be jihadis or beggars? Just not sure what to make of it. Yet I get the idea of play and especially the play of our imaginations with respect to identity.

Beyond that there is something quite wonderful and profound in the meaning of All Hallows’ religiously and philosophically considered especially in the doom and gloom of our culture and, indeed, in the grey darkness of nature’s year. In a world which confronts us with so many awful and frightening events, such as the horrific shooting at the Synagogue in Pittsburg, it is wonderful to have before us the vision of heaven from The Revelation of St. John the Divine and the Beatitudes, the Blessednesses, from Matthew’s Gospel. These are like light in the midst of an worrying darkness.

Is what I see in Chapel each morning something ‘heavenly’? On Tuesday, many students and faculty were in costume: Asians as blonde Goths, Canadians as Ninja warriors, others as dragons and bunnies, eleven apostles (!), and even a Calvin and Hobbes! I always feel obliged to comment on the ambiguity of masks. They both conceal and reveal. Your costumes may say more about your personality than perhaps you realize! Something which Shakespeare knew only too well. There is something equivocal about masks. On the one hand, “there is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face;” outward appearances can’t simply and completely reveal our inward thoughts. On the other hand, as Lady Macbeth says to Macbeth,“your face, my thane, is as a book wherein men may read strange matters.” Sometimes we reveal ourselves in more ways than we realize even when we think we are concealing ourselves and our thoughts. Macbeth crowns his fatal decision with the words, “false face must hide what the false heart doth know,” recognizing that we can “make our faces vizards to our hearts, disguising what they are.” For all of the fun of dressing up in costume these are important things to consider.

(more…)

Print this entry

God will provide himself

Two outstanding and profound stories were read in Chapel this week. The first was the intentionally disturbing story of the binding or sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham. The second was the revelation of God to Moses in the burning bush. Both stories relate to the theme of covenant which we have exploring.

The story of Cain and Abel shows us what human existence looks like on our own without  law and order, without an ethical principle. The theme of covenant develops from the Noahic covenant symbolized in the sign of the rainbow apres le deluge, to the Abrahamic covenant of the promised land and promised son, and then to the Mosaic Covenant expressed in the Ten Commandments. The revelation of God to Moses as “I am who I am” is the basis of that covenant. The idea of covenant is rooted in the nature of God who is utterly incommensurable in relation to human experience and life.

That is the strong take-away point of this most disturbing story where Abraham is tested by God, a test of faith, by being asked to sacrifice his only son, Isaac, the promised son through whom “all the nations of the earth shall bless themselves.” It seems perfectly horrible and barbaric and raises a conflict between our relation to God and our ethical obligations towards one another. Yet it does so in order to place the ethical upon its proper divine foundation. That it does so in such a troubling and challenging way is part of the intensity and the point of the story. I fear that we are often only too complacent about it and fail to feel its deeper significance.

A covenant is not the same thing as a contract though it reveals the principle upon which all contracts ultimately depend. Two parties contract with each other about what each owes to the other. That presupposes a principle of rationality, an ethical principle about being held accountable to our words. That principle is presupposed and is prior to us. We don’t create it; we can only recognise it or assume it. The covenant, on the other hand, is that principle as established by God which then informs and underlies the possibility of our ethical duties and obligations towards one another.

(more…)

Print this entry

“What have you done?” God asks Cain, “Your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.” There is darkness at the heart of our humanity. It is one of the important take-away points from the infamous story of Cain and Abel. It is part of the fall-out from the Fall. We tend to read this story moralistically and as such largely misread it. It is really about the primordial and mythological state of our humanity outside the Garden of Eden. It is what our humanity looks like withoutmorality,withoutlaw and order. As such it points us to the absolute need for a moral order, for justice and truth.

We forget that Cain is actually the first farmer, the first to found a city, the first to inaugurate sacrifices – an attempt from our side to negotiate between ourselves and God, however understood – and that in Cain’s lineage are the originators of the arts and technology. Jubal and Tubal-Cain arise out of the seventh generation of Cain. And yet the point is that at the heart of our humanity, at the heart of civilisation, there is darkness, the darkness of the human heart.

What we are given to see are the primordial emotions of revenge, of fear, and of anger. What we are given to see are the forms of pride and self-regard that negate and deny our common humanity. It is, to be sure, about fratricide and it begets, if you will, the long, sad and sorry tale of all of the ‘cides’ of human history: patricide, matricide, regicide, homicide, genocide, and the much later (1648) modern Latin word, suicide. There is no word interestingly for the killing of sisters – sororicide? just doesn’t work. It comes under fratricide.

We know and in many ways celebrate various kinds of rivalries especially in the sports world. We hope that the morality of good sportsmanship will be dominant and not the ugliness of violence and bloodshed. Here is a story about the most primordial form of rivalry, sibling rivalry. In a way, the whole Book of Genesis is about sibling rivalry, mostly brothers against brothers but also including some sisters: Cain and Abel, Abram and Lot, Isaac and Ishmael, Leah and Rachel, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers.

(more…)

Print this entry

Why did it yield wild grapes?

Isaiah 5. 1-7 is a wonderful love-song and a lament. It serves as a commentary on the creation stories of Genesis 1 & 2 and the story of the Fall in Genesis 3. “Let me sing for my beloved a love song concerning his vineyard,” it begins. The poet is singing a song for God, the beloved, concerning his vineyard; the triple reflexives are poignant and moving. A most powerful passage, it reveals to us in an affective manner the contradictions of our humanity.

The imagery is remarkable. Creation is imaged as a vineyard; even more, as the poem unfolds, our humanity, viewed in terms of “Jerusalem,” “the men of Judah” and “the house of Israel,” is described as a vineyard. “The vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel.” The agricultural imagery takes us back to the themes of thanksgiving for the harvest which can only happen when we work in concert with the goodness of the created order. What this poem also reminds us is that we only too often make a mess of the created order.

Here that is imaged in terms of a divine lament. “My beloved had a vineyard”– us. God looks to his vineyard to bring forth grapes but, instead, “it yielded wild grapes.” The story of the Fall has cosmic repercussions. We turn the goodness of the vineyard of creation into a wilderness. This is part of the human condition that is beautifully but convincingly set before us. The failure lies not with God and his vineyard but with our humanity. How? By denying the will and purpose of God for our humanity and our world.

(more…)

Print this entry

Deo Gratias

The story of the Fall in Genesis 3 almost eclipses in its power and influence the intellectual grandeur of the pageant of creation in Genesis 1 and the gentle intimacy of the creation story of Genesis 2 that affirm the essential goodness of everything in creation and establish the dignity of our humanity in its relation to both God and everything else. The story of the Fall connects most clearly to the account of Michael and his angels fighting the dragon, “that old serpent, called the devil and Satan,” and overcoming them. Unde malum? From where does evil come? This is the question to which Genesis 3speaks so powerfully and movingly. But I have set for myself a problem. How to connect this story with the theme of this week, the theme of thanksgiving?

Perhaps through a wonderful 15th century English lyric. “Adam lay ybounden, bounden in a bond, Four thousand winter thoughte he not too long;/ And al was for an apple, an apple that he took,/As clerkes finden writen, writen in their book./ Ne hadde the apple taken been, the apple taken been,/ Ne hadde nevere Oure Lady ybeen hevene Queen./Blessed be the time that apple taken was:/ Therfore we moun singen Deo Gratias.” It is a recounting of the story of the Fall.

There it is. Deo Gratias! Thanks be to God for this story, for the Fall of our humanity from an original harmony and unity with God and the created order. What can that mean? O felix culpa, which means O blessed fault or fall. The carol is a commentary on Genesis 3 but is arguing a profound and ancient theological idea well expressed by Augustine to the effect that God wills to bring good out of evil rather than not to have evil at all. A greater good is realized through the pageant of redemption which this chapter inaugurates, pointing us in the Christian understanding to Mary and Christ.

(more…)

Print this entry

Dust from the Ground and War in Heaven

You are dirt! And so am I. It is not meant to be an insult! Instead it complements the idea of the dignity of our humanity through the necessary corrective of humility. We are “of dust from the ground,” the dust into which God has breathed the breath of life and “so ‘adam’ became a living being.” From the dignity of our humanity to the dust of the ground, such is the shift in perspective in what are clearly two distinct creation stories set side by side in Genesis.

The challenge is to appreciate and evaluate each of them, first, in their own integrity and, only secondly, to consider in what ways they might complement and correct each other. Genesis 2 offers a very different and much more mythological account which focuses primarily on the nature and place of our humanity as distinct from the cosmic perspective of creation as an orderly and intellectual affair in Genesis 1. Genesis 2 is undeniably anthropomorphic in its descriptions of the Lord God forming adam out of the dust from the ground much like a potter shapes his clay. Yet the passage complements the idea of our being made in the image of God at the same time as it offers a kind of corrective.

There is always the danger of over-emphasizing and misconstruing exactly what our dignity really means, the problem of getting too ‘puffed-up’ about ourselves and losing sight of the real nature of our connection to everything else in the created order. We are formed of dust from the ground. The very word for man here, meaning humankind is adam which is not yet a proper name. It is etymologically connected to the word for ground, adamah.

Just as Genesis 1 counters the idea of the divinization of our humanity emphasizing that our dignity is God-given rather than man-made, so too, Genesis 2 connects us intimately both to the dust and the ground and to God. There is, we might say, ‘the dignified dust of our humanity’. It provides a kind of corrective to Genesis 1, we might say, by emphasizing our connection to the dust and the ground. It counters our tendency to think more highly of ourselves and our relation to others than we should. It humbles us and thus suggests that the true dignity and worth of our humanity is found through humility. Humility incidentally come from the Latin and has as its root, humus,which also refers to the ground. In a way these lessons ground our humanity in relation to God and the created order wonderfully.

(more…)

Print this entry