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Education Based Only on Reason is Incomplete
Rowan Williams
Archbishop of Canterbury
Lambeth Palace, Canterbury, United Kingdom
Lecture given 21 September 2009 at Rikkyo University, Tokyo, Japan
Reprinted with Permission
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 (21 September 2009) to students and academics at Rikkyo Gaukin University, an Anglican
university in Tokyo. The Archbishop also received an Honorary Doctorate (Doctor of Humanities) from Rikkyo University.
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.
Copyright © 2009 by Rowan Williams
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