Christ Church

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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