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JAPAN: Canterbury delivers lecture on education at Anglican university in Tokyo
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," he said. "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."
Williams underlined 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," he said.
Williams said 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," he said. "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."
The archbishop said that 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," he said. "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."
Williams argued 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," he said. "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 said, 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," he said. "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 skeptical 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."
Williams also said that the place of distinctively Christian institutions 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," he said. "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."
The full text of Williams' address is available here.
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