[notabene] The 2020 Commencement Address by Dr. Andrew Talbert:
I would be remiss not to quote that famous line of Aristotle, especially at a classical school graduation. So, I will get that out of the way immediately: “the roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.”
Though perhaps the oddest of recent years to graduate, you have made it: Chloe, James, Sarah, Ben, Sydney, Zeke, Elise, and Sawyer. Now what? You are at a threshold, like wanderers in the old fairytales, weighing the options of crossing into the strange forest of the future that lies before you and that Tolkien would have called the “perilous realm.” How will the eight of you fare? Will you enjoy the sweetness of your education and what will that look like?
“the roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.”If I might be permitted, I would reflect on the serendipitous and coincidental number of your class to assess the state of things and your future from a biblical perspective. When most people think of significant numbers in the Bible they call to mind 7, 12, or 666. But most people overlook eight. Now eight, in the bible, speaks deeply of the way of things are and, as this class knows my old trope, what is a human nature. Let’s go to the beginning.
In Genesis, everyone knows the sevenfold pattern of the creation account, which sets up a pattern for the rest of Scripture (and even our modern division of time into weeks): God creates for six days, then he rests from his work on the seventh. What Old Testament scholars and rabbis have pointed to for years, however, is the importance of the implied eighth day that sets up another biblical pattern. On the “eighth day” God sets Adam and Eve to cultivate and rule their Garden, to rest with Him as he has so summoned them. They have been placed at the pinnacle of creation, a story that, if we didn’t know the ending, looks like it might have an amazing pair ruing as a king and queen with their God. Yet the eighth day sees the catastrophic failure of humanity to live into the wisdom of God when Eve sees the forbidden fruit is to “make one wise” in their own eyes and she and Adam choose to take and eat, and thereby define wisdom, good, and evil for themselves. Their fruit turned out bitter. Will this be your eighth day? Will it define your foray into a new world?
The eighth day appears again in the command for circumcision, the handing over of children to God in a pattern that mirrors the creation mandate. These children are called to live into the rest and rule of God. They are humans set free to fulfill God’s mandate, reliving that creation pattern. How will they fare? Biblical history is replete with mixed results.
After Moses leads the Israelites out of Egypt, God commands him to establish the priesthood, a process that takes eight days of preparation and hearkens back to Genesis 1 and 2. The first ordination sets Aaron and his sons apart with specific tasks in the tabernacle to lead the community of Israel in worship, but, like Genesis 3, it ends in catastrophe on the “eighth day.” Aaron’s sons are struck down by God for approaching him without any instruction to do so. They treated God like a tool, like the nations around them would with their own. They chose to do what was right in their own eyes and repeated the eighth day pattern of their ancestors.
We could go on to other examples of Israel’s calendar and festivals, which are designed to annually live into this pattern with the hope that, someday, they would get the eighth day right; or of Saul’s failure and fall from grace on the eighth day because of an unlawful sacrifice; or of Nehemiah reestablishing the nation in their land with an eight day procedure. Through all of these examples, the point becomes abundantly clear that humanity is summoned to reign and rest with God, but it must look a certain way. Through all of these examples, the point becomes abundantly clear that humanity is summoned to reign and rest with God, but it must look a certain way.That this way of ruling is a summons to obedience, to the wisdom of God, to patience, and that the process may be bitter, but the fruit is indeed sweet, because it is how we become truly human. And God sets us free to become this on the eighth day.
The good news, quite literally, is that this eight-day pattern materializes powerfully in the New Testament and humanity gets a long-needed upgrade in the person of Jesus Christ. In the first five chapters of John’s Gospel, we find Jesus re-living, so to speak, the creation pattern of Genesis 1— he is the light, receives baptism in the water, calls Peter “rock” or “land,” and John’s repeats the phrase “on the next day” or even “on the third day,” all of which culminate in a healing on the Sabbath. He gives content to God’s Creation call that we be truly human as he has summoned us: Jesus speaks truth to power, ministers to the neglected and marginalized, sets in motion the subversion of the systemic sins of an empire, foregrounds the centrality and depths of love of God and neighbor, and opens up a way of salvation to humanity stuck in the patterns of choosing to define good and evil for themselves. But he takes it further: his death and burial take place before and during the Sabbath, only to see him raised the following day, the eighth day of the week, if you will. In that day, Jesus opened up the possibility of being truly human, as God has called us, but in a way no longer impeded by sin and death; a humanity that still encounters the bitterness of that tree in the Garden long ago, but that reaps the fruit of the tree that stood on Golgotha. And as a Christian community we live in and rehearse this pattern of celebrating the eighth day every week: we are to be a humanity transformed by the eighth day.
as a Christian community we live in and rehearse this pattern of celebrating the eighth day every week: we are to be a humanity transformed by the eighth day.
Nothing can just go on in the same way after the eighth day.
And it is this understanding of the eighth day that has been infused into your education— a unifying thread that intersects and explains all areas of knowledge, doing, and making, but that is most interested in who you are as a person in relation to your Creator. Every art project, math fact, sonnet, paradigm, experiment, virtue of the month, yes, even rounds of pterodactyl, have been in some way grounded in the importance of the eighth day.
This period of education has been your induction into God’s human calling— your seven days of understanding what creation and this Creator is— to set you free on day eight to be his humanity. And you are entering a challenging time. Divisions and upheaval manifest sharply economically, politically, racially, medically, and ecclesiologically (that’s a fancy word for Church), and, if most of us are honest, we do not really know what the future will look like, even though we believe the future is secure in Christ. You may find yourselves thinking about the current challenges like Frodo, saying, “I wish it need not have happened in my time,” only to have Gandalf respond “So do I… and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide.” Instead of wishing we can reflect on the tools, the fruits you have cultivated for clarity of vision and strength of character for the eighth day.
From Plato and Aristotle come the relentless torrent of questions about reality and argumentation. Has that person begun their argument in the right place? Have they used that term correctly? Doesn’t that constitute a fallacy? Is knowledge possible and how? What is a human nature? Is it possible to deploy rhetoric without being manipulative? On this last question Aristotle says yes, if it is articulating truth about reality. Augustine says yes, if it is a fastidious path that leads you to the person who is the Truth. You have been given questions.
The great medieval theologian, Thomas Aquinas follows his predecessors’ mode of discourse and interest in the deep questions of reality. He provides us with the famous five ways to know God through natural reason and a thorough method of inquiry and refutation. Like the psalmist he agrees that denial of the existence of God would mean to disavow the beauty of Creation, the truth of being, and the very ability to reason. To take an analogy further it is like cutting off your head to spite your face. But more than this, the entire last part of his work in the Summa Theologiae is dedicated to understanding the person and work of Christ who is the Way. Or, to take the words of Jesus, “What is eternal life? To know you, the one true God.” Reason is limited in relation to God’s revealing himself in Jesus Christ, who explodes our vision of reality. We attain a kaleidoscopic view of the cosmos, established in the nature of God, who is love. Another sweet fruit.
Or Dante, though I rarely repress giggles at some of the punishments in the inferno, we also witness a profoundly Christian insight into human nature within the reality described by the philosophers: humanity inverts with vice; turns itself inside out; becomes supremely irrational— no, even worse, it becomes bestial. The virtues of faith, hope, love, temperance, prudence, fortitude, and justice, however, enable us to live into the true humanity of Christ as we are joined to him by his Holy Spirit. And Chesterton joins his voice in this discussion, looking at the modern virtue of “progress,” a term now devoid of content because it really seems to mean “doing something because we can” and disregards the looming “should.” Humanity has shifted from grounding itself in the solidity of the Creator and his seven-day pattern, which would have seen progress as ongoing conformity to the nature of God. “Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision.” In a world dislocated from the vision, we see the ongoing deformation of humanity in the name of progress, yet without any clear idea of a goal. Will the fruits of education help you to see this with clarity?
John once had a vision, and the book of Revelation is designed to give its readers a vantage, a divine point of view on reality. Seeing with the eyes of God, how do empires affect and shape the world in their image? How do they even co-opt Christian language and symbols for their own aims, like the Romans once did? Are the bitter roots worth it when you are able to articulate with precision what the Good is because you have been outfitted with tools to see, reason, and reflect? Can you perceive the glowing white heat of God’s kingdom as it wars with a kingdom of darkness that masquerades as light— an insidious kingdom that attempts to claim all realms of reality— knowledge: subjective; truth: subjective; love: subjective; god: subjective. Yet against all of this— what I want to call stupidity, but realize more deeply, is simply lostness— you have been equipped for years and in ways that will unfold for you only as time marches on. Are the bitter roots worth it when you are able to articulate with precision what the Good is because you have been outfitted with tools to see, reason, and reflect?You enter your eighth day when much of the world is still stuck in the eighth day of Adam: chaotic and broken because it has been dislocated from its source. Yet you— with an educational foundation in the transformational reality of God dead and raised, a foundation that must touch all areas of knowing, doing, and making— you can see creation, order, beauty, and the necessity of knowing all things in relation to Christ.
You’ll forgive me for quoting an extended parable by C. K. Chesterton as I come to a close, because I think it intersects with you on your venture into the eighth day:
Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, “Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good–” At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their unmediaeval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.
What is the philosophy of light? Well, it takes us at least back to the first day of the garden. I will leave the rest to you. You eight, you medieval monks (or nuns), you with knowledge of the philosophy of light (or at least the beginnings), you stand on the threshold of something great. I know the process of getting here has been, at times, bitter, but I assure you, it will prove itself most certainly worth it. God bless you all.
