Waldo Beach - "Curiosity and Reverence" (October 15, 1961)
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
(piano music) | 0:03 | |
- | Among the many dynamic forces | 0:34 |
that propel us around this campus | 0:36 | |
that drag us out of bed to class, | 0:40 | |
to the library, to the lab, | 0:44 | |
to chapel, is the simple drive of curiosity. | 0:47 | |
This motive is obscured under more | 0:53 | |
immediate organization man motives | 0:57 | |
of the dread of flunking of the push | 1:00 | |
for prestige standard seeking, | 1:03 | |
the political and economic considerations | 1:08 | |
that drive us towards the BA degree. | 1:11 | |
But curiosity is there too underneath | 1:16 | |
luring us into this or that research project, | 1:22 | |
lab experiment, raising a hand in class, | 1:26 | |
teasing us into the library, | 1:31 | |
why, how come, | 1:34 | |
what makes the machine run? | 1:38 | |
The leaves turn, the universe tick. | 1:40 | |
The same curiosity turned Moses aside | 1:46 | |
in the ancient story, our lesson of the morning. | 1:51 | |
Strange thing, the bush is burning | 1:56 | |
but it is not burnt up. | 2:02 | |
Why, while a university lives outwardly on endowments, | 2:05 | |
it lives inwardly on curiosity. | 2:13 | |
And in this week's university calendar, | 2:17 | |
there is something to satisfy every curiosity | 2:20 | |
from lectures on visual learning in pigeons | 2:25 | |
to serial techniques in non tonal music, | 2:30 | |
something for everybody. | 2:35 | |
But it becomes an interesting to ponder | 2:39 | |
the relation of this curiosity | 2:41 | |
to a kind of polar opposite in the university culture, | 2:44 | |
another dynamic which seems to pull | 2:50 | |
in the opposite direction from curiosity | 2:53 | |
and that's reverence. | 2:57 | |
How do these two stand together | 3:00 | |
in our common life if indeed they do. | 3:02 | |
How are we to reconcile outwardly in policy, | 3:06 | |
inwardly each of us in the secret place, | 3:12 | |
the spirit of reverence with a spirit of curiosity. | 3:17 | |
There's one direct answer to this question | 3:24 | |
given often by the devout and the pious, | 3:28 | |
which says the reverence and curiosity | 3:33 | |
are sharply opposed to each other. | 3:35 | |
The curiosity is dangerous to faith. | 3:38 | |
That reverence is the mind set | 3:41 | |
that we should only cultivate. | 3:44 | |
As soon as we become curious, | 3:48 | |
inquisitive, raise questions according to this view, | 3:50 | |
we are starting down a perilous path, | 3:57 | |
which leads to skepticism. | 3:59 | |
Better than keeps safe in the truth, | 4:02 | |
keep the head bowed and the heart faithful, | 4:05 | |
lest the minds questions begin to insinuate | 4:10 | |
themselves into the safe assurance | 4:13 | |
who knows where insatiable curiosity will lead you. | 4:17 | |
If you keep asking but why, | 4:24 | |
and then ask, but why that, far into the night, | 4:29 | |
you'll soon be far into the night of doubt, | 4:35 | |
groping through infinite regresses of reasons | 4:39 | |
to fall finally into the abyss. | 4:44 | |
It's interesting to note that this fear of curiosity | 4:49 | |
is strong in medieval culture. | 4:53 | |
In the 12th century Bernard of Clairvaux | 4:57 | |
describing the steps of humility in monasticism | 5:01 | |
pointed out that the first way word step of pride | 5:07 | |
away from humility is curiosity. | 5:11 | |
"If you see a monk," he wrote, | 5:16 | |
"whom you formerly trusted confidently | 5:19 | |
beginning to roam with his eyes, | 5:21 | |
hold his head erect and prick up his ears, | 5:25 | |
whenever he's standing or walking or sitting, | 5:29 | |
you may know," he says in effect, | 5:33 | |
"that this monk has started down the skid roll | 5:36 | |
to the perdition of unpaid." | 5:41 | |
But this medieval slant which suspects | 5:46 | |
curiosity as inimical to reverence | 5:49 | |
is not just a medieval period piece. | 5:52 | |
It's very contemporary in the mind | 5:56 | |
of the earnest back town, | 6:00 | |
Bible thumbing, Southern Protestant. | 6:03 | |
It was very suspicious of all this | 6:08 | |
fancy book learning at Duke, | 6:10 | |
all this science stuff and critical study of religion, | 6:13 | |
which will come to no good. | 6:19 | |
He may write to the Dean's office | 6:22 | |
protesting that he didn't send his child to college | 6:25 | |
to have his faith tampered with. | 6:27 | |
It's not right to ask questions of the Lord, | 6:31 | |
just accept his ways and trust. | 6:35 | |
All this mindset may be present in one | 6:39 | |
or other of you in this congregation. | 6:44 | |
A sophomore whose religious faith | 6:49 | |
is a precious sacred object to be revealed, | 6:53 | |
but excused ahead of time from inquiry | 6:59 | |
from curiosity who is judged badly | 7:03 | |
by class discussion of miracles in religion 51, 52, | 7:08 | |
doesn't square with what he's been taught | 7:14 | |
at church in home | 7:18 | |
who may come to chapel to have | 7:21 | |
his weakening faith showered up. | 7:23 | |
But this answer, a reverence prohibiting curiosity | 7:30 | |
is wrong hearted as it is wrong headed. | 7:35 | |
It's not the appropriate frame of mind | 7:40 | |
for any university culture or university student. | 7:43 | |
Reverence without curiosity is blind, docile, stupid. | 7:48 | |
It bows the head but in fear not understanding | 7:56 | |
its faith is closed, all finished and settled | 8:02 | |
no more questions to ask. | 8:08 | |
And such a reverence is a violation | 8:11 | |
of the fact that we are by nature inquisitive animals. | 8:13 | |
The only animals that can ask why | 8:19 | |
and proof of this is seen in the fact | 8:23 | |
that as soon as one prohibits inquiry | 8:26 | |
and puts a fence around a sacred object | 8:30 | |
saying no trespassing, | 8:33 | |
such a sign is very invitation to heightened curiosity | 8:37 | |
and trespass. | 8:43 | |
`So it was with Adam in the garden, | 8:46 | |
so has it always been in history | 8:49 | |
wherever church or sectors are tempted by up fences | 8:52 | |
to keep out the curious in defense of the faith. | 8:57 | |
Second answer to the question of how reverence | 9:04 | |
is related to curiosity is much more typical of our day | 9:07 | |
and this community than the first. | 9:14 | |
This opposite answer calls for curiosity without reverence. | 9:18 | |
If curiosity was the first vice of medieval man | 9:25 | |
leading him away from truth, | 9:31 | |
it was the first virtue of Renaissance man | 9:34 | |
leading him toward it. | 9:38 | |
The university is in a sense | 9:42 | |
the length and shadow of Renaissance man, | 9:44 | |
who was infinitely curious about why | 9:50 | |
and builds his realms of knowledge | 9:53 | |
on this insatiable search. | 9:56 | |
No domains of truth are close to debate an investigation, | 10:00 | |
whether it's the question of the theologian | 10:06 | |
about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin | 10:08 | |
or the nuclear physicist about how many atoms | 10:14 | |
condense on the head of a pin. | 10:17 | |
Angels and Adams, stars and souls all are equally subject | 10:21 | |
to the master question why. | 10:28 | |
And according to the faith of Renaissance man, | 10:33 | |
curiosity avidly pursued prying into the matter | 10:36 | |
supposedly sacred and holy | 10:41 | |
shows them up often to be pious, spoofs, | 10:44 | |
gigantic, dreary, opiates and delusions | 10:49 | |
to keep the people quiet. | 10:55 | |
Yeah this answer, curiosity without reverence | 10:59 | |
has too its dangers. | 11:03 | |
For a curiosity that has lost all mystery, | 11:07 | |
all sense of humility in the presence of the inscrutable, | 11:14 | |
all sense of hush in the presence of transcendent grandeur. | 11:20 | |
He says, "Perilous as a blind reverence | 11:27 | |
which asks no questions." | 11:29 | |
Curiosity without reverence can become jaunty, | 11:33 | |
brittle, reckless, morally insensitive, | 11:39 | |
and at the last morally destructive. | 11:45 | |
There's a curious kind of arrogance that can develop | 11:50 | |
in a mind which is inquisitive with no respect | 11:54 | |
for the holy and the awesome mysterium tremendum | 12:01 | |
that surrounds our little life, the great power, | 12:07 | |
the great wisdom that lie before | 12:12 | |
and after our petty powers and wisdoms, | 12:16 | |
the overwhelming beauty that lurks in the open fifths | 12:23 | |
of a chest and a cough anthem. | 12:30 | |
Such a jaunty curiosity is really a little pathetic. | 12:36 | |
A student wrote a letter to the Chronicle last year, | 12:41 | |
suggesting that since the main library | 12:46 | |
was so badly overcrowded with books | 12:48 | |
and since this chapel isn't used very much | 12:52 | |
except by tourists, | 12:56 | |
it should be converted into storage space for books. | 12:59 | |
His proposal amounted to suggesting that the campus | 13:05 | |
realm devoted to curiosity should take over | 13:09 | |
the campus realm devoted to reverence. | 13:13 | |
Well he was proposing a very profound educational issue | 13:19 | |
but his answer was not very wise. | 13:25 | |
He represented renaissance man called Beatnich. | 13:29 | |
He had missed out on a deeper dimension of his education | 13:36 | |
failed to catch what this university attempts to be about | 13:42 | |
in its total philosophy of education. | 13:47 | |
If medieval man catholic or protestant | 13:52 | |
is in distrusting curiosity | 13:56 | |
and Renaissance man of the 15th or 20th century | 14:01 | |
in rejecting reverence, | 14:08 | |
perhaps one could say that biblical man has a better grasp | 14:11 | |
of the relation of these two great factors. | 14:17 | |
Moses could stand here for biblical man | 14:22 | |
and the strange folk story of the burning bush | 14:27 | |
dramatizes the connection. | 14:32 | |
Moses had something | 14:36 | |
apparently what we call scientific spirit. | 14:37 | |
He was curious to figure out why the bush was not consumed. | 14:43 | |
He was led into an encounter with truth | 14:50 | |
by an oddity that just piqued his curiosity. | 14:53 | |
But the outcome of the encounter | 14:59 | |
was not the dispelling of mystery | 15:03 | |
but the reverence which accompanies mystery. | 15:06 | |
Put off your shoes from your feet | 15:12 | |
for the place on which you are standing | 15:16 | |
is holy ground. | 15:18 | |
Led by curiosity into an encounter with ultimate reality, | 15:23 | |
he discovers that the desert place | 15:28 | |
is the dwelling place of the Most High. | 15:32 | |
That the immediate question of curiosity's why | 15:36 | |
leads him to the ultimate question of existence | 15:41 | |
which is who and to the answer, | 15:46 | |
the God of his fathers. | 15:52 | |
The original query of the mind leads | 15:56 | |
to a final acknowledgement of awe and about it | 16:00 | |
or when thinks of another biblical man | 16:07 | |
in whom also has represented a more profound joining | 16:13 | |
of reverence with curiosity | 16:17 | |
than either a docile part by a tear | 16:22 | |
or an arrogant secularism could possibly see. | 16:24 | |
It's significant that one of the first glimpses we have | 16:29 | |
of the boy Jesus, is when He is found | 16:33 | |
by His distraught parents in the temple | 16:37 | |
sitting among the teachers. | 16:43 | |
It says, "Listening to them and asking them questions | 16:45 | |
in a kind of pickup seminar on the Torah." | 16:51 | |
The significance of this glimpse is that for Jesus, | 16:57 | |
the temple is the place where curiosity is proper, | 17:01 | |
where questions are not forbidden but raised. | 17:05 | |
If Moses found the desert place to be after all | 17:10 | |
the kind of temple, Jesus found the temple | 17:15 | |
to be a kind of classroom where the searching spirit | 17:19 | |
could give and take in the exciting directive with mind | 17:24 | |
and recall too that in the rephrasing of the law, | 17:31 | |
Jesus reminds his hearers that we are to love God | 17:36 | |
with all our minds, | 17:40 | |
which certainly includes the exercise of curiosity, | 17:45 | |
the critical faculties. | 17:50 | |
Curiosity and reverence | 17:54 | |
should be our normative stands of faith | 17:58 | |
in the whole life of this university, | 18:02 | |
if we are to abide by the aims of its original trust | 18:05 | |
and acquire wisdom. | 18:11 | |
This means it seems to me that in curricular policy, | 18:15 | |
the critical analysis of the religious tradition | 18:21 | |
of Western culture is indispensable to humane education. | 18:25 | |
It means that the kind of class brittle secularism, | 18:32 | |
which in class delights to scorn all reverence | 18:38 | |
and obliterate all holiness is inappropriate. | 18:43 | |
It means that all the way across from medical school | 18:50 | |
to the athletic fields, | 18:52 | |
the ground on which we stand and walk | 18:56 | |
and work is holy ground. | 18:58 | |
The persons with whom we deal are infinitely | 19:02 | |
precious and sacred because sacred to the infinite person. | 19:05 | |
And the truth is about which we contend | 19:13 | |
are facets of an eternal truth. | 19:17 | |
What either way, a reverence curiosity | 19:22 | |
or curious reverence, it is the whole mark | 19:26 | |
of a liberally educated person. | 19:32 | |
Note that the relation of curiosity | 19:38 | |
and reverence does not mean | 19:43 | |
a division of territory of two concentric circles. | 19:47 | |
The inner circle of curiosity and investigation | 19:54 | |
earning an empirical knowledge | 19:58 | |
which gradually moves out over the outer circle | 20:00 | |
of mystery and the unknown. | 20:06 | |
So that eventually in time, reverence is the fear | 20:10 | |
of the unknown will be dispelled by knowledge. | 20:16 | |
This was sort of the 19th century way | 20:22 | |
of reconciling science and religion or so it was thought. | 20:25 | |
But a biblical outlook is different from this | 20:32 | |
in Genesis and Job, in the Psalms | 20:36 | |
and in the mind of Christ. | 20:41 | |
It is not knowledge bounded by mystery | 20:43 | |
but knowledge infused with mystery. | 20:49 | |
The sense of wonder does not begin at that point | 20:54 | |
beyond which curiosity cannot reach. | 20:59 | |
It permeates all that we know. | 21:04 | |
Philosophy begins in wonder, ends in wonder, | 21:08 | |
is sustained throughout by wonder. | 21:13 | |
The immediate whys of 'cause of connection | 21:19 | |
in the economic text or in the lab | 21:25 | |
always point beyond themselves to the ultimate questions | 21:29 | |
of the source, the goal, the who, | 21:33 | |
who gives the rhyme or reason to it all. | 21:38 | |
In whom do all these little bits of data cohere. | 21:42 | |
These religious questions haunt all technical question. | 21:48 | |
The moral answer to the problem, | 21:54 | |
how am I to use all the technical answers for good | 21:57 | |
or for ill? | 22:04 | |
This arises from the sense of reverence. | 22:07 | |
The sense that the ground on which I am standing | 22:12 | |
is Holy ground. | 22:17 | |
The moral problems about the uses of knowledge | 22:20 | |
are answered from the side of reverence | 22:25 | |
not curiosity in a universe | 22:28 | |
which gives us a dreadful freedom | 22:31 | |
to choose between life and death. | 22:35 | |
To be sure, curiosity and reverence never fit | 22:41 | |
quite neatly together. | 22:47 | |
There's always some pull and haul between them, | 22:50 | |
which makes for the exciting collision of ideas | 22:54 | |
and the outer forums of debate | 22:57 | |
and the inner agony of making up your mind. | 22:59 | |
And you can be sure that the faculty of this institution | 23:05 | |
are not of a single persuasion | 23:10 | |
as to whether a reverent mind, | 23:11 | |
as well as a curious mind should here be fostered. | 23:16 | |
But the norm of a reverent curiosity holds good. | 23:23 | |
And if sought commonly, | 23:28 | |
it would preserve our motto or UTDO at religio. | 23:31 | |
From being a statement only of an uneasy truce | 23:40 | |
between two warring champs of the reverence | 23:43 | |
and the curious for a wind held somehow together, | 23:48 | |
curiosity protects reverence from a crowd, | 23:55 | |
an abject fear without removing the wonder. | 24:00 | |
Reverends keeps curiosity from arrogance | 24:05 | |
without removing the quest and the question mark. | 24:11 | |
This spirit would constitute our integrity and health | 24:19 | |
and sustain us as we go our rounds of seeking | 24:25 | |
and finding and losing and seeking again, | 24:31 | |
which is education. | 24:37 | |
Amen, let us pray. | 24:43 | |
All Mighty God, always hidden, always revealed. | 24:55 | |
The unseen source and goal of our searching, | 25:04 | |
the answer to our last question, | 25:08 | |
the questioner of our last answer, | 25:13 | |
grant us by thy grace, | 25:19 | |
such open curious and reverent minds | 25:22 | |
as they come to wisdom in obedience before Thee, | 25:30 | |
in knowledge of whom standeth are eternal life. | 25:36 | |
Now may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, | 25:43 | |
the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit, | 25:48 | |
be with you all. | 25:53 |
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