wfn.org | ACNS Archbishop of Canterbury: Education based only on reason is incomplete

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Archbishop of Canterbury: Education based only on reason is incomplete

Posted On : September 22, 2009 3:05 PM | Posted By : Webmaster
ACNS: http://www.aco.org/acns/news.cfm/2009/9/22/ACNS4654
Related Categories: Lambeth

As part of his week-long visit to Japan for the 150th anniversary
celebrations of the Anglican Church in Japan, the Archbishop of
Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams gave a lecture on Monday 21sr to students
and academics at Rikkyo Gaukin University, an Anglican university in
Tokyo.

In his lecture, the Archbishop said that the recent record of the purely
rational and secular approach to intellectual and academic life is
problematic:

"...the sober testimony of the twentieth century is that the rationality
of secular thinking is no guarantee of universal understanding and
reconciliation. A rationality that has brought us into the age of
nuclear weaponry and global economic meltdown invites some sharp
questions, to put it mildly ... As the Pope has argued several times in
recent years, the drift towards relativism and pluralism is not the
triumph but the defeat of reason ..."

And he underlines the need to preserve a sense of the sacred:

"However secular our age likes to think it is, the disastrous results of
exploitative habits and of financial obsession bring people back to the
recognition that they need the element of the sacred in their lives - in
the sense that they need the freedom to respond to the beautiful and the
puzzling and the tragic, to all the things that we do not have the power
to manage."

Dr Williams says the rational element within education should work to
place us in the real world and, in consequence, in relation to God:

"It is in this sense that a religiously grounded education is a deeply
'reasonable' one. It communicates the skills we need to inhabit the real
world. That may sound a little strange at first. So often, 'living in
the real world' is a phrase that people use when they want to justify
ruthless competition, mistrust, low expectations. But the reality around
us is not simply one of menace and uncertainty, a place in which the
other is always a source of anxiety. It is a place that nourishes us and
keeps us alive - through material processes and through human community,
from family to society."

He said a purely functional account of education runs the risk of
missing the true nature of that which is not understood:

"Relating to God requires of us a radical acceptance of the fact that we
are dependent beings, that we always stand on the edge of mysteries we
cannot fathom, and that the true direction of our lives is not
necessarily what our own unexamined and selfish ambition might suggest.
Relating to God creates in us the habits of silence and listening, the
willingness to be questioned and to question ourselves. Specifically for
Christians, relating to God means growing into the role of a child of
God, called to maturity, to a life in which dependence and creativity go
side by side, inseparably.

Dr Williams argues that the need to develop a new academic philosophy in
relation to the environment is an example of how a rational approach
could require urgent and radical change:

" ... if we are seeking to shape a humanity that is genuinely rational,
we need to question a very great deal of what has passed as rationality
in our habits of production and consumption for the last century. This
is not simply about how we avoid catastrophe, though that is serious
enough; it is also about what kinds of relationship with the world we
live in are harmonious and proper, respectful of the material
environment in a way that is in accord with the character and purpose of
the creator."

Religion, he says, must not mirror the tendency of its critics to be
inflexibly dogmatic;

"It is one of the most poisonously foolish dogmas of modern intellectual
life that reducing human motivation and reflection to a pattern of
determinism, whether material or psychological, is a mark of liberation
and maturity. And the tragedy is that often the response to this from
some kinds of modern religiousness has been the equally poisonous dogma
that the critical and sceptical sciences of Darwin, Marx or Freud and
their countless followers and revisers must be regarded as destructive
of faith and so to be reviled and rejected."

Dr Williams argues that the place of distinctively Christian places of
education is not the propagation of faith but the nurturing of an
academic environment in which true rational exploration can be
countenanced:

"... what distinguishes a Christian institution is not so much the
doctrine as the outworking of it in the style and ethos of a community.
If the whole tone of the institution is one that gives a message that
risks are worth taking because there is an ultimate reality to be
trusted, that is where the meaning of the doctrine is made plain.
'Faith-based' education is education in the mixture of realism or
provisionality with the courage to act, discover and create, to make
relations and mend them."

Hidetsu Ohashi, president of Rikkyo University said "We proudly bestow
this honorary degree on Dr Rowan Williams to acknowledge the
contributions made by Dr Williams as a global leader working towards
world peace and harmony to realise a universal value for humanity, which
reflects our own university's philosophies and history."

The full text of the lecture can be found below:

Archbishop of Canterbury's Lecture at Rikkyo Gaukin University

The Mission of the Anglican University in our Present Age

I regard it as a great honour to be welcomed here today at Rikkyo
University and to receive an honorary doctorate. The distinguished
history of the University and its current profile are an extraordinary
tribute to the vision of Bishop Channing Williams and to the consistency
with which his successors have maintained and developed that vision.
This University still keeps its distinctiveness. And the statements I
have read about the founding and controlling spirit of the institution
offer several highly important clues as to what is special today about a
Christian and Anglican University in a plural society that is
increasingly secular in its language and habits.

Christian doctrine regards human beings as made in the divine image; and
that has regularly been interpreted as meaning that human beings share
something of the rational nature of God. But to use those words today
instantly gives a false impression. We understand 'reason' as a way of
arguing and testing propositions - usually so as to become better at
manipulating the world round us. Because religious faith is not a matter
of argument in this way, it is then easy to conclude that faith and
reason are enemies, or at least operating in different territory.
Already in the Europe of the early Middle Ages, in the dispute between
St Bernard and Peter Abelard, there was a foreshadowing of this sterile
opposition. Bernard complains that Abelard thought faith was a judgement
that you came to when the arguments were over, an informed opinion,
almost an informed guess, and that reason was no more than marshalling
the evidence and learning how to tell a good argument from a bad one.
But St Bernard himself held to an older and richer understanding of
reason as the way in which we shared in God's vision of an ordered and
connected world. You could not say that God was rational because he was
good at arguing and came to well-supported conclusions: when theologians
said that God was rational, they meant that he was consistent with
himself and that out of his own understanding of the richness of his
being he created a world of astonishing and beautiful diversity which
still had a deep consistency about it.

And perhaps that is where we need to start today in thinking about the
place of reason in a Christian institution. A 'reasonable' or 'rational'
human being, on this understanding, is one who seeks not first and
foremost to master and control a passive universe around, but one who
looks for the ways in which he or she can discover the rhythms and
patterns of reality and so understand themselves more fully. Certainly
it implies that this kind of knowledge will be useful: it is better to
work with the grain of reality in what we do than to work against it.
But if the very first question is always 'What is the use or the profit
of this?' we are training ourselves to ignore everything that lies
outside our own immediate practical questions. That is not the spirit in
which great discoveries are made; and it is certainly not the spirit in
which great human beings are made. The student or researcher who is able
to allow their mind and heart to be shaped by the flow and complexity of
what is around, not prejudging what the important questions are but
letting themselves be carried along by a certain degree of wonder and
uncertainty, is the student who will be likely to arrive at innovative
and creative insight.

Thus one of the central tasks of a Christian institution of learning is
to allow some of the space and freedom for students to become creative
in this way. 'Freedom' is, I know, a word that matters deeply in this
University - freedom of access for people who might otherwise be denied
the advantages of higher education, freedom to choose a wide-ranging
assortment of courses and areas of study, but also freedom to ask and to
explore. This is the kind of freedom that demonstrates what our
commitment to humanity in the divine image really means: we can explain
it in theoretical terms as much as we like, but it will only communicate
its real sense when we can show what sorts of actions and policies,
individual and communal, incarnate the doctrine - what sorts of actions
are appropriate if we truly believe that contemplative and creative
liberty is what is most distinctive in the calling and capacity of human
beings. In a context where short-term results and narrowly functional
models of learning are so favoured (and I am speaking of the entire
context of the economically developed world, not only of Japan), this is
a powerful counter-cultural witness. A university that honours these
principles will be an agent of liberation in all sorts of ways; and in
the rest of my remarks, I hope to suggest what some of those ways may
be.

But to put such questions into context, there is another basic point to
be made. The traditional Christian account of 'rationality' was bound up
with becoming properly attuned to the patterns and rhythms of reality,
as I put it a moment ago. And for St Bernard and the tradition he
represents, the ultimate test of being reasonable was whether you
understood what your place was in the universe. A reasonable person
would grasp how humanity stood between the angel and the animal, how
humanity was called to a very specific way of exercising the mind in
relation to the will of God. The creativity belonging to the divine
image was to be worked out in the 'creation' of a mode of living that
was appropriate to a being created by God - humble, attentive,
responsible, capable of real choice, capable of growing as a self or
soul that was patient and consistent. What would be fatally unreasonable
in such a framework would be to fail to see who you were: to imagine
that you could be either an angel or an animal, or to think that your
life could be made independent of the providence of God and the mercy of
God. The truth is that being reasonable here means being in proper,
self-aware relation to reality, God's reality and the world's; and if
this is so, then an education for the reasonable person is an education
in relationship.

Although this is part of the universal heritage of historic
Christianity, the formative generation of Anglican writers showed a
specially keen appreciation of this relational aspect of reason. Richard
Hooker, writing at the end of the sixteenth century, addresses some of
the political and church-political controversies of his time by going
back to first principles, to the connection between the action of God
and his nature, to the idea that the universe is grounded in the wisdom
of God, so that our own rational maturity must be a growth into openness
to God's nature in its beauty and harmony. John Donne the poet, a few
years later, uses the ancient language of reason as a 'viceroy', a
deputy within us for the sovereignty of God: our confusion and suffering
are the result of this sovereignty being compromised through our
breaking of relation with God, so that we are left without defence
against the destructive powers that imprison our true humanity. Reason
properly understood here is what ought to deliver us from this shrinking
and defacing of what we are in our full dignity. At a time when many
forces in the intellectual world in Europe were moving towards a more
impersonal and functional view of rationality, many of the greatest
minds of the Anglican family held fast to the conviction that we could
make no sense of the idea of reasonableness without reference to its
connection with right relation to God.

The development of a reasonable human being is the development of a
human mind and heart and imagination capable of right relation. So a
Christian - and especially an Anglican - University will offer
opportunities for reflection on relation with others, with the whole
environment and with the ultimate truth of God. It will help students
understand their place and potential in society. Or, in more provocative
terms (as I have argued in other places), it will make the connection
between learning and political liberation: not in propagandising for or
imposing any political system, but in reminding students that part of
the task of the reasonable man or woman is being a citizen, exercising
human creativity in the word of shared social life and policy making. As
students acquire the skills of testing arguments and evidence, as they
master different areas of study and research, they need also the time
and encouragement to think of how these skills help them judge the needs
of their society and the claims of their leaders. To be reasonable is to
have a positive but critical approach to public life, opening up
questions and possibilities that may not always be obvious or even
welcome but doing so for the sake of the well-being of the whole social
body. The rational educated person doesn't have to be a political
activist in the usual sense, but does need to have a questioning and
hopeful engagement with what is involved in being a citizen.

This education in public and political reasoning is of course
inseparable from a mature awareness of interpersonal relations - how
justice and mercy, reconciliation and the nourishment of each other's
growth as human beings become natural parts of a reasoning life. A
Christian institution is not necessarily one where everyone is drawn
into the same patterns of moral life or discipline, but it is one where
people are constantly being exposed to the challenge of living in such a
way that justice and mercy and mutuality become visible. No-one should
be allowed to forget that - at the very least - these things are
possible for human beings; ideally, no-one should be able to forget that
they have been held to be central for any lasting human well-being.
Bishop Channing Williams' axiom, 'teach the way, not the self', is
specially apt here: there is a moral climate in education that has
nothing to do with authoritarian policies and the attempt to enforce
conformity but has everything to do with making something visible, a way
of being that is presented to people as inviting and possible for them.

And this is a way of being in the world, not only of being with other
people. Few moral issues are as desperately urgent today as that of our
responsibility for the environment. And if we are seeking to shape a
humanity that is genuinely rational, we need to question a very great
deal of what has passed as rationality in our habits of production and
consumption for the last century. This is not simply about how we avoid
catastrophe, though that is serious enough; it is also about what kinds
of relationship with the world we live in are harmonious and proper,
respectful of the material environment in a way that is in accord with
the character and purpose of the creator. A Christian institution has to
be engaged in rigorous self-questioning about its own practical polices
as regards ecological responsibility. But equally it must be a context
where people see, once again, what is possible for them in terms of a
style of living that is fundamentally at peace with the world. Rikkyo
University has long been a place that deliberately stands aside from a
narrow preoccupation with material rewards, from just preparing students
for the job market and rewarding obsessive and competitive patterns of
learning behaviour. Just at the moment, in the wake of last year's
financial crisis, people throughout the world are asking about what
kinds of behaviour are life-giving and sustainable, now we have seen the
effects of greedy, individualistic, self-absorbed and obsessional
practice. More than ever we need educational practices and educational
communities that open the door into other possibilities.

However secular our age likes to think it is, the disastrous results of
exploitative habits and of financial obsession bring people back to the
recognition that they need the element of the sacred in their lives - in
the sense that they need the freedom to respond to the beautiful and the
puzzling and the tragic, to all the things that we do not have the power
to manage. A context that helps us see something of this in our relation
with the material world at large is a place of real hope. But this is,
of course, only one aspect of that most comprehensive question about
relation or relatedness, within which all the others find their place.
In the history of this University, Bishop Reifsneider's insistence on
the priority of spiritual education underlines this point. Unless the
whole work of the institution somehow prepares the way for the final
issue of what it is that all reality relates to as its source and ground
of meaning, there is nothing substantial to provide a rationale for all
the other kinds of education going on. For the Christian, as for
believers in other religious traditions, it is when we are rightly
related to this source of all things that we learn how to relate to one
another and to the world. Relating to God requires of us a radical
acceptance of the fact that we are dependent beings, that we always
stand on the edge of mysteries we cannot fathom, and that the true
direction of our lives is not necessarily what our own unexamined and
selfish ambition might suggest. Relating to God creates in us the habits
of silence and listening, the willingness to be questioned and to
question ourselves. Specifically for Christians, relating to God means
growing into the role of a child of God, called to maturity, to a life
in which dependence and creativity go side by side, inseparably. Called
to mature into a life that reflects that of Christ, the Christian
believer seeks to live at once in a deep humility that is constantly
aware of the possibility of failure and the reality of not-knowing, and
in a sense of liberty, dignity and worth, grounded in the trust that God
looks at each human person with an endless loving respect and a desire
to nourish and fulfil that person.  Out of this comes a whole scheme of
ethics, a patient respect for one another and for the material world, a
realism and a sense of the provisional that never simply gives way to
cynicism or despair.

It is in this sense that a religiously grounded education is a deeply
'reasonable' one. It communicates the skills we need to inhabit the real
world. That may sound a little strange at first. So often, 'living in
the real world' is a phrase that people use when they want to justify
ruthless competition, mistrust, low expectations. But the reality around
us is not simply one of menace and uncertainty, a place in which the
other is always a source of anxiety. It is a place that nourishes us and
keeps us alive - through material processes and through human community,
from family to society. We cannot survive on a diet of fear, however
much we rightly register the frailty and danger of our situation
(including the frailty of families and societies and the risks that
personal relationship involve). We are bound to step out in trust,
otherwise we shall starve, physically, emotionally and spiritually.
Perhaps what an education in being reasonable means is an education in
the unavoidable nature of risk and of trusting our environment.

We speak a great deal in Europe about 'faith-based' education, 'faith
schools' and so on. What most people hear in this phrase is the notion
that this is an education in fixed religious principles. But this is not
quite the point. Religiously grounded schools and colleges and
universities certainly have at their basis a number of clear doctrinal
commitments; as I've suggested, the belief that we are made in God's
image is a clear and specific doctrine, and the Christian creed simply
spells out some of what such a belief implies, by telling the story of
how God is so deeply committed to the image he has made that he spares
no cost in restoring that image in the life and death and resurrection
of Jesus. But what distinguishes a Christian institution is not so much
the doctrine as the outworking of it in the style and ethos of a
community. If the whole tone of the institution is one that gives a
message that risks are worth taking because there is an ultimate reality
to be trusted, that is where the meaning of the doctrine is made plain.
'Faith-based' education is education in the mixture of realism or
provisionality with the courage to act, discover and create, to make
relations and mend them.

Sadly, there are many in our contemporary culture who believe that
because religious faith is not rational in their sense - simply a
judgement based on evidence and argument - it is bound to be something
that breaks relations and nourishes violence. But the sober testimony of
the twentieth century is that the rationality of secular thinking is no
guarantee of universal understanding and reconciliation. A rationality
that has brought us into the age of nuclear weaponry and global economic
meltdown invites some sharp questions, to put it mildly; which has
something to do with the revulsion in some quarters against the very
idea of reason, against science and the notion of universal values and
much else besides. As the Pope has argued several times in recent years,
the drift towards relativism and pluralism is not the triumph but the
defeat of reason; and as he has also insisted, the response of religious
faith should not be to glory in the overthrow of rationality but to
reclaim the idea and set it on its ancient foundations once more. To go
back to where we started: for the Christian, the idea of the reasonable
person is bound up with the conviction that humanity is in the image of
God, capable of real and intelligent action, not merely instinct. And
that intelligent action is fully itself when it is rooted in
self-awareness - which in turn includes the awareness of where we stand
in relation to the rest of the universe and, most importantly of all, in
relation to what gives the universe itself coherence and harmony, the
wisdom of God. Once grant this, and much else follows - the possibility
and the significance of the scientific method, the possibility of
critical and flexible politics, the possibility of something like
truthful, however incomplete, self-knowledge. Darwin, Marx and Freud all
have their debt to Christian theology in this sense. Each on their own,
with their different kinds of reduction of human complexity, will
eventually cut off the branch on which they are sitting; but their
insights can find a place within an intellectual world framed by trust
in the wisdom of God and the destiny of God's created image.

It is one of the most poisonously foolish dogmas of modern intellectual
life that reducing human motivation and reflection to a pattern of
determinism, whether material or psychological, is a mark of liberation
and maturity. And the tragedy is that often the response to this from
some kinds of modern religiousness has been the equally poisonous dogma
that the critical and sceptical sciences of Darwin, Marx or Freud and
their countless followers and revisers must be regarded as destructive
of faith and so to be reviled and rejected. In response to both sorts of
intellectual tyranny, there remains a powerfully necessary role for what
is often called 'Christian humanism'. This is not a vague liberal
affirmation of the goodness of the human self or the genius of the human
imagination, though it has sometime been used to mean this. A Christian
humanism is a perspective that cuts against all such illusions and faces
the tragic and the unresolved in human affairs with honesty. It is
'humanistic' simply in that it recognises utter and lasting worth in
human beings because of how God has dealt with them. But because it is
based in this way on God's dealings, it appeals to some comprehensive,
absolutely free and transcendent reality about which - astonishingly -
we can make some true statements. It challenges both the humanism that
claims an absolute value for humanity to be self-evident and the
relativism that makes such a statement of value no more than a strong
expression of emotions of solidarity. It implies that what is good for
humanity is truly a universal destiny, on which the minds and hearts of
all people can converge; and thus it is a fundamentally non-violent
humanism, seeking the grounds for reconciliation by insisting that what
is good for one person, community or civilisation has somehow to be
integrated with what is good for another. Friendship and converse
between persons, justice and peace between communities, between ethnic
and national groups are the fruits of this universalism.

And this surely is the 'reasonable' world that is an appropriate home
for persons made in God's image. The Christian school, college or
university in our world, by nurturing trust, the capacity for relation
to God and the world, and the confidence that the future of the human
family may yet be convergent not fragmented, has a vital part to play in
the health of every society. It sets before that society a picture of
the genuinely rational person a one capable of intellectual searching
and innovation, just as much as any secular account of rationality might
do; but it adds the essential extra insight that rationality is about
reverence, healing, humility and, ultimately, love. Universities can't
teach love; yet an institution that stifles all the things that nourish
love would be a menace (and there are some of those around in our
world). Education is properly to do with the growth of an emotionally as
well as intellectually mature self, and the nurture of the rational
person needs at least to point to what love might mean, not as a
particular passing state of feeling (our Buddhist friends have some very
perceptive questions to ask about love if this is all it means) but as
an entire environment for thinking and relating. And this is where a
university like this one, with its persistent but gently understated
commitment to Christian faith, has a great gift to offer, in that it
rests its hopes and visions on the ultimate definition of love - what we
might call the self-definition of love itself, in the self-emptying of
the divine into the form of our humanity so that we might be restored in
divine likeness.

Perhaps you may feel that there is a great distance between this raw
theological claim, with all its intellectual mysteriousness and all the
devotional elaboration that has grown around it, with all the further
questions it raises about the relation between the Christian claim and
those of other faiths - between this and the day to day business of
organising an institution of higher education, the struggles for
funding, the planning of courses, the refinement of admission policies.
Yet from the beginning of Rikkyo University, these things have not been
seen here as belonging in different worlds. And if universities work, as
in some degree they must, for the sake of the shared good of their
societies, then it matters that at least some of them bring to that work
a clear and radical sense of what that good is and where its foundations
are to be sought. So we acknowledge gratefully what has been done here
to give body and presence to that vision of the good; and we commend the
future to God's hands in rational confidence.

> (c) Rowan Williams 2009

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