University Sermon on the Sin of Pride”
preached by Provost Jonathan Bate in Worcester College Chapel,
23 November 2014
The preacher of the University sermon on the Sin of Pride is given a selection
of texts upon which to expatiate. I have chosen, you will be relieved to hear,
the shortest of them, the second half of the first verse of your second reading:
“Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth.”
In Book VII of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the affable archangel
Raphael delivers a lecture – a sermon – to Adam, on the subject of the revolt
of Satan in heaven and God’s creation of the world. Adam asks some
questions about astronomy and metaphysics – the business, much debated
by philosophers, theologians and natural scientists, of what moved the prime
mover, how the creator was created. Raphael encourages him not to push too
far. He has been commissioned from above to answer Adam’s desire for
knowledge but to keep it within bounds. To go beyond bound would be to
trespass into the dangerous territory of Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus.
‘Beyond abstain / To ask, nor let thine own inventions hope / Things not
revealed’. Human knowledge must have limits. There are certain areas where
the language of reason and inquiry is inadequate, inappropriate. As a later
philosopher from Milton’s university – the other one, not ours – put it, whereof
one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. (Thus Wittgenstein, in the
seventh proposition of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.)
” Enough is left besides to search and know, reiterates Milton’s
archangel:”
“But knowledge is as food, and needs no less
Her temperance over appetite, to know
In measure what the mind may well contain,
Oppresses else with surfeit, and soon turns
wisdom to folly, and nourishment to wind.”
Milton is allowing himself a pun here, a bit of a joke: if you eat to much you
may become flatulent; if you are too indulgent in your appetite for learning,
you may end with an analogous intellectual afflatus, a lot of academic hot air.
Moderation in all things, he is saying: with surfeit comes sickness.
This sequence in Paradise Lost subtly alludes to our verse in St Paul’s
letters to the Corinthians: the idea of knowledge puffing up. It perhaps helps
to explain the oddity of this chapter of the epistle, which begins with the
question of knowledge and then proceeds to some rather detailed musings
about diet.
It was a passage that drew the attention not only of John Milton but
also, a generation before, of Sir Francis Bacon (like me, another Cambridge
man, I am afraid). What interested Bacon was Paul’s repeated imagery of the
worshipping of idols. What is the proper balance, he asked, between the
Advancement of Knowledge and the Sin of Pride? You will recall his great
meditation on the four idols, in his 1620 Novum Organum Scientiarum (‘new
method of science’), that foundation text of modern academic method
(inductive reasoning as opposed to presumption from a priori principles).
The idols and false notions which are now in possession of the human
understanding, and have taken deep root therein, not only so beset
men’s minds that truth can hardly find entrance, but even after entrance
is obtained, they will again in the very instauration of the sciences meet
and trouble us, unless men being forewarned of the danger fortify
themselves as far as may be against their assaults.
There are four classes of Idols which beset men’s minds. To these
for distinction’s sake I have assigned names, calling the first class Idols
of the Tribe; the second, Idols of the Cave; the third, Idols of the Market
Place; the fourth, Idols of the Theatre.
The formation of ideas and axioms by true induction is no doubt
the proper remedy to be applied for the keeping off and clearing away
of idols. To point them out, however, is of great use; for the doctrine of
Idols is to the interpretation of nature what the doctrine of the refutation
of sophisms is to common logic.
Idols of the Theatre: the limitations imposed by particular systems of thought,
traditions, customs of belief.
Idols of the Marketplace: the limitations imposed by the insufficiencies
of human language. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
Idols of the Cave: the limitations resulting from the quirks of every
individual mind.
Idols of the Tribe: the limitations of all human knowledge, bound as we
are by our senses (“by far the greatest hindrance and aberration of the
human understanding proceeds from the dullness, incompetency, and
deceptions of the senses; in that things which strike the sense outweigh
things which do not immediately strike it, though they be more important”) and
equally bound as we are by the pattern-making of our brains (“The human
understanding is of its own nature prone to abstractions and gives a
substance and reality to things which are fleeting”).
It is pride to suppose that in our quest for knowledge we can transcend
the limitations imposed by these idols.
So Bacon and Milton can tell the modern university much about the need to
accept limit in the quest for research novelty, can warn us of how Knowledge
Puffeth Up. As for the contrasting clause in the rhetorical chiasmus, we do not
need seventeenth-century scientists, poets or divines to tell us that charity
edifieth. This university and this college, all our colleges, are charities. We
came into being through charitable enterprise, through philanthropy on which
we still depend. Here at Worcester, once the home of Benedictine monks who
had taken vows of poverty, and always a place of poor scholars, lacking the
resources of our grander neighbours, we continue to rely upon – not the
kindness of strangers – but the charity of friends, in particular of our
philanthropic Old Members who in the Tercentenary Year of our re-foundation
are building a new endowment to see us through the storms of the next three
centuries, in which the world of knowledge will change beyond all our
imaginings.
But the particular verse says that Charity edifieth. Edify, as in edifice, a
building. The Greek text reads ἡ γνῶσις φυσιοῖ, ἡ δὲ ἀγάπη οἰκοδομεῖ.
Oikodomei: “(the act of) building, building up; metaphorically edifying,
edification; the act of one who promotes another’s growth in wisdom, piety,
happiness, holiness.” The metaphor comes, of course, from oikos, that
resonant word meaning a home, a dwelling-place, a household, a community,
the word from which we get economy and ecology – the nomos and logos, the
laws and the words, of the oikos. To teach and to learn with charity and
humility is to build a college and a university into a home, a dwelling-place, a
household, a community.
I am constantly impressed, meeting our students today, at how many of
them wish to put the knowledge they have gained here in Oxford to use that
is truly charitable: in public service, in the third sector, in development and
the developing world, in the quest to make our world a better dwelling-place,
whether through the alleviation of poverty and inequality or the addressing of
climate change and ecological crisis. They are a special generation, of whom
we should be proud in a good way.
And that’s a thing to remember. There is a thin dividing-line between
the celebration of excellence, the quest for the best (the Greek ideal of
Ἀρίστων), and the arrogance of pride. As someone who has witnessed
wonderful students passing through other universities in which I have taught –
Liverpool, Warwick, the University of California Los Angeles – I am sometimes
troubled by the thought that Oxford can be guilty of the sin of pride, or worse,
of a complacent assumption that our history and our reputation are enough,
that we can still be among the best without embracing some of the
innovations of our peers. Is it a sin of corporate pride to disdain the MOOC –
the massive open online course, available for free to the entire world – that is
now part of the charitable mission, the outreach, of Harvard, Stanford and
MIT? Are we puffing ourselves in a belief that Oxford will always be the best
place to gain knowledge?
What should our attitude be to our teaching and learning? We should
not, our text tell us, be like Milton’s Satan, “Blown up with high conceits
engendering pride.” We should instead approach knowledge with the kind of
humility that Eve shows towards Adam. Times have changed and we no
longer wish for submission on the part of females, far far from it, but an
approach to knowledge that doth not puff up might very well have a tone such
as this: “And by her yielded, by him best received, / Yielded with coy
submission, modest pride, / And sweet, reluctant, amorous delay.”
