iv. Teaching Wisdom
Ultimately, the purpose of all education is to save us time and spare us errors. It is a mechanism whereby society — whether secular or religious — attempts reliably to inculcate in its members, within a set span of years, what it took the very brightest and most determined of their ancestors centuries of painful and sporadic efforts to work out.
Secular society has proved itself ready enough to accept the logic of this mission in relation to scientific and technical knowledge. It sees nothing to regret in the fact that a university student enrolled today on a physics degree will in a matter of months be able to learn as much as Faraday ever knew, and within a couple of years may be pushing at the outer limits of Einstein’s unified field theory.
Yet this selfsame principle, which seems at once so obvious and so inoffensive in science, tends to be met with extraordinary opposition when applied to wisdom; to insights related to the self-aware and moral stewardship of the soul. Here, remarkably, the defenders of education, who would ridicule the notion that a class of freshly enrolled physics students ought to be left to work out the theory of electromagnetic radiation on their own, will declaim that wisdom is not something that one person can ever teach another.
This prejudice has so subsumed the teaching of culture as to have more or less stamped out the ambitions of Mill and Arnold, as well as the magniloquent hopes of Rilke, who in the last line of his poem ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’ surmised that it was the ultimate wish of all great artists to admonish their audiences, ‘Du musst dein Leben ändern’ (‘You must change your life’).
It is to religions’ credit that they have never sided with those who would argue that wisdom is unteachable. They have dared directly to address the great questions of individual life — What should I work for? How do I love? How can I be good? — in ways that should intrigue atheists even if they find little to agree with in the specific answers provided.
As this chapter has suggested, culture is more than adequately equipped to confront our dilemmas without having to rely on religious dogma. The errors that wreak havoc on our personal and political lives have been supplying subject matter for cultural works since antiquity. There is no shortage of information about folly, greed, lust, envy, pride, sentimentality or snobbishness in the canon; all the clues we need can be found in such oeuvres as those of Freud, Marx, Musil, Andrei Tarkovsky, Kenzaburo Oe, Fernando Pessoa, Poussin or Saul Bellow. The problem is that this treasury has seldom been effectively filleted and skilfully served up to us due to unfounded biases against the use of culture in the service of our griefs.
No existing mainstream secular institution has a declared interest in teaching us the art of living. To draw an analogy from the history of science, the ethical field is at the stage of amateurs tinkering with chemicals in garden sheds rather than that of professionals conducting well-structured experiments in research laboratories. University academics, the obvious candidates for any soul-focused pedagogical task, have distanced themselves from demands for relevance by retreating behind a pose of a priori importance. They have shunned the responsibility of seducing their audiences, they have been fatally frightened of simplicity, they have pretended not to notice how fragile we are and they have been blind to how readily we forget everything, however significant it may be.
Religion is laden with ideas for correctives. Its example proposes a new curriculum: a scheme for arranging knowledge according to the challenges to which it relates rather than the academic area in which it happens to fall; a strategy of reading for a purpose (to become better and saner); an investment in oratory and a set of methods for memorizing and more effectively publishing ideas.
In case some of these educational practices should to certain ears sound too Christian, we should remember that they frequently far preceded the birth of Jesus. The Greeks and Romans had long been interested in how to calibrate knowledge to inner needs: it was they who first founded schools for disseminating wisdom, compared books to medicines and saw value in rhetoric and repetition. We should not let atheism get in the way of appreciating traditions that are part of a shared non-denominational heritage that was historically stamped out by secularists from a misunderstanding of the real identities of those who had once created it.
Religions do not, as modern universities will, limit their teaching to a fixed period of time (a few years of youth), a particular space (a campus) or a single format (the lecture). Recognizing that we are as much sensory as cognitive creatures, they understand that they will need to use all possible resources to sway our minds. Many of their methods, though remote from contemporary notions of education, should nevertheless be considered essential to any plan to render ideas, be they theological or secular, more effective in our porous minds. These techniques deserve to be studied and adopted, so that we stand a chance of making at least one or two fewer mistakes than the previous generation in the time that remains to us.
V
Tenderness
1.
A fifteenth-century chapel in a backstreet of an unnamed northern European town. It is early afternoon on a sombre winter’s day and a middle-aged man shakes down his umbrella and steps inside. The space is warm and dark, lit only by several rows of candles that throw a dance of shadows across the limestone walls. There are comfortable, well-worn pews and, on the floor, prayer cushions, each one embroidered with the words Mater Dolorosa. An elderly woman kneels in the far corner, mumbling to herself with her eyes closed.
The man is exhausted. His joints ache. He feels weak, vulnerable and close to tears. No single event has brought him to this point, just a run of minor humiliations that have cumulatively contributed to an overwhelming sense of mediocrity, superfluousness and self-hatred. His career, once so promising, has for a long time now been in descent. He knows how unimpressive he must appear to others, how keen they are to move on from him in social gatherings and just how many of his proposals and letters have gone unanswered. He no longer has the confidence to push himself forward. He is appalled by the seams of impatience and vanity in his character which have led him to this professional impasse. He is stricken by feelings of remorse, foreboding and loneliness. He knows, however, that he couldn’t possibly bring these worries home with him. The boys need to believe in his strength. His harried wife has too much on her plate already — and he has learned from experience how badly things turn out when he presents himself to the household in this mood.
He wants to fall asleep and be held. He wants to cry. He wants to be forgiven and reassured. There is music playing through concealed speakers in the chapel, the aria ‘Erbarme dich, mein Gott’ from Bach’s St Matthew Passion. He searches for ideas he can cling to, but nothing seems solid. He is unable to think logically and even making the effort to do so has become more than he can bear.
Having fallen to his knees, he looks up at the painting that hangs above the altar. It shows a tender, sympathetic, gentle young woman with a halo around her head. She gazes back down at him with infinite care — and, without his having to say a word, seems to understand everything.