"WISDOM NOT FOR WISDOM'S SAKE"

Baccalaureate Sermon

May 19, 1974

by

Dr. C. Eric Lincoln

Marsh Chapel

Boston University

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At a time when there are reputed to be so many modes of truth, we may still be able to learn from legend. There is embedded in the folklore of medi-eval Europe the legend of Dr. Faustus, a man who in his insatiable pursuit of power bargained away his soul. But for a brief passage, a specious moment in the flux of human experience, Faust had everything. He could propel himself through space and make his home among the stars; he could sununon up the shades from the nether world, spend his holidays in Hell, summon Helen of Troy to rise and be his mistress since only the fairest woman who ever lived could satisfy his lust. All power was his for a time ex-cept the power he coveted most--the power to know. The power to know everything. The power of consum-mate intellection. The power of omniscience. His obsession was to be done with the fragments of ac-cunulated wisdom man had garnered over the centuries, and to eat afresh from the tree of knowledge. It was an idolatrous obsession.

The great sin of Dr. Faustus was not that he wanted to know; for knowledge is virtue and the pur-suit of wisdom is a sign of the nobility of the human spirit. But Faust wanted to know only for the sake of knowing. His lust for learning was a sterile and selfish ~ sciendi. Though his knowledge raised him far above the capabilities of other men, there is nothing in his life to suggest that that life, or any other was modified by what he was privileged to learn. He was an intellectual filYJ!-!!!l!!£; a jouster with windmills. His wisdom gained at so great a price was wisdom for the sake of wisdom. It made no impact whatever on the world.

When Sir George Mallory set out to climb Mount Everest, the world was titillated by the notion of such a feat. When someone asked Sir Mallory~ he wanted to climb the mountain, Sir Mallory is said to have replied, "Why? Because it is there." And thus did Mallory irnnortalize himself by giving a civilization obsessed with inanity a reason for doing whatever it is that we do. But Sir Mallory, like Dr. Faustus, made the tortuous ascent up from below, laid his hand on the handle of possibility and then let it recede from his grasp without ever realizing the possibilities inherent in his accomplishment. He stood, as it were, at the pinnacle of truth and learned nothing, and when he made his descent he could report no better reason for his efforts than that the mountain was there--a challenge to his ego and to his pride. Presumably he encountered nothing on the way up which might induce him to climb other mountains for other reasons. A mountaintop is an usual place to gain perspective on the world. It is a vantage point achieved at great cost, from which one can view the terrain through which one oust still travel to find relevance in this life. The climb itself should be an experience in human relations,

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in cooperation and trust and planning together, experience so vital to the human co1111Unity as to alone constitute a valid reason for climbing any mountain. The opportunity to learn from nature, to see first hand the logic and the perfection with which the natural world is put together; to see the evidence and ponder the reason why the trees, the grasses the insects and the wildlife --even the very ro~ks and bould;rs exhibit a logi-cal distribution as one progresses from the base of the mountain to its peak. To reflect on the wonder of all this and to experience the awe that comes with the recognition of human clumsiness in the midst of the superior order which constructs and relates the universe and governs it. This is a reason to climb.

But the ultimate reason is that the mountain has another side, and it is the far side of the mountain which symbolizes man's destiny. The climb up is for preparation. The pause at the top is for reflection and planning. The top of the mountain is for strategizing, for perspective. On the other side is the inevitability of human involvement--a course from which we must not shrink if ever we ·~ould drink of the purer waters which bring rele-vance and satisfaction to this life. As a college student I read something by Tacitus, the ancient Roman historian, which was so challenging and mean-ingful to me that I copied it and gave it a promi-nent place among my possessions, and in my philosophy of lif'e, It goes like this:

Thus far you have known only adversity; Prosperity tests the spirit with sharper goads For we endure misfortune, But we are corrupted by success.

I know that for the sake of argument I may be taking liberties with what Sir Mallory meant in his famous dictum, but the truth is that there is a wearisome accumulation of evidence that the spirit of Dr. Faustus and the spirit of Sir Mallory have come in-creasingly to represent the raison~ of con-temporary human achievement the principal motiva-tion for struggle and for s;crifice, if any, in America. We are too often characterized by what I call a ''hickory - dickory syndrome":

Hickory dickory dock I think I'll run up the clock When the clock strikes one Why, down I'll run Hickory, dickory dock?

Why run up the clock and not the chimney? Why run do1m at one and not two? We don't seem to know why, and of far more troublesome implications the rea-son or the absence of a reason doesn't se;m to be i~rtant. It is expected that we should do some-t ing. And so we do what we do for the sake of the doing. We do what we do for kicks. Like Dr. FauSt us ,

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we may pursue learning just to be learned; like Mallory, we climb too many mountains because they are there. None of this frantic activity brings us any satisfaction because we by-passed the hard $11~stion of motivation. We missed the point of I y?" To you who are members of the Class of 1974,

have to say to you that whether you will it or not, you are an elite company of men and women. You rep-resent this society's harvest of wisdom and intelli-fnce for 1974. What is more, America needs you

Thesperately. Now. America needs you involved. is is not a time for whimsey. This is not a time

to climb mountains for the sake of climbing. This is not a time for the accumulation of wisdom for ~isdom's sake. This is a time for honest, ethical, ~telligent, compassionate, confident involvement.

ere are people out there dying who might live · through your efforts and your concern.

I shall not risk the presumption of suggesting to you that a civilization in which the leadership ·classes lose, or cannot seem to discover their rea-son~ whatever it is they do or decline to do, is a civilization presently in danger of losing its ~. Nor shall I presume to tell you that the refusal to engage the forces of dissolution and evil which are abroad in this world, and to call upon every resource of learning and intelligence in the effort, is to be allied with those forces in a silent and insidious partnership. You know that. You~ that while the imbalance of forces may be on the side of what is good, and true and beautiful, the j.ungle forever hovers on the edge of the clearing, and the call of the wild haunts the night and beckons all through the day. You yourselves are heirs to an uncertain civilization whose genius has produced for us the finest IIUSic the greatest literature, the best art and the mo;t useful and efficient tech-nology the world has ever known. But it is the same civilization that produced and orchestrated Buchen-wald, Dachau, Hiroshima, Viet Nam, Selma, Alabama, and Watergate. Some of you are old enough to have meaningful memories of the Savage Sixties, a brutal and bloody decade of murder and mayhem in America. Where the men and women who tried to push back the jungle were shot down like so many pigs, and where little children were terrorized and maimed for no greater crime than wanting to go to school in America with other Americans.

I shall not dwell on these things for I know you are weary of remembering. You, no less than I, are probably already cloyed with the stench of blood let on one occasion or another. You no less than I, are dismayed by the continued dehumanization of the powerless, and outraged by the cold calculated desecration of truth apprehensive over the mounting ignominious retreat from responsibility which seems to characterize this society of allegedly sane and rational men and women.

- ~ -I know, too, that you do not want me to chal-

lenge you to go out and save this world, for you are too sophisticated to put much credence in so banal and traditional a suggestion; perhaps you do not think the world as presently constituted is worth saving.

Nonetheless, my brothers and my sisters, it is mine to remind you.that this world, such as it is, is our world. It is the only one we know by direct knowledge and palpable experience. It is the world we made. It is the world we have to make. It is not a world irretrievably conditioned by the past. It is not a world to be consigned to the future. It is a world of living, sentient beings, persons like you, like me, like others you know, who by the grace of God share together the opportunity to live, to be relevant and to know why. It is the world on which you must lay your hands. Today you stand at the crossroads of life and on the threshold of rele-vance. For the fortunate minority you represent today is the celebration of one of the most signifi-cant rites of passage; the recognition of achieved learning; the celebration of accumulated wisdom; the commencement of responsibility to put what you have learned to constructive use. Learning however achieved, is a luxury; and wisdom is learni~g set in the perspective of usefulness.

You are the favored ones. You are the men and women in whom society has invested the best that it has. You are the hopes and the dreams of a world gone wrong that things may yet be set aright. Today you are commissioned to commence. You cannot demur. It is not yours to decline. For every one of you who gained admission to the sacred halls of academe, ten thousand were left to glean for knowledge and scratch at understanding in the hard, uncertain tun-dra of experience. Wisdom is not for wisdom's sake; wisdom is a coT1111itment to the people. It is the fullest and the best expression of man's response to the perfection of God and the limitations of man. Mere learning may be a personal attainment, but wis-dom begins with the recognition of man's finitude and the responsibility to put man's full capacity to work with God in the ordering of human life and fulfillment of human possibility.

These are times when the perversion of knowledge is the pastime of charlatans for the comfort and amusement of fools. These are times when the anxieties we have created through our very wantoness haunt us like shades from Hell, threatening our sanity and composure and sending us in frantic search of some pill, some palliative, some dervish-like activity to dull our minds and postpone reality. The amuse-ments we contrive; the fun and games we devise and the shrillness with which we proclaim satisfaction and fulfillment suggest instead a continued flight from vacuousness and inanity. These are times when

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we are co!llllanded under pressure of alienation and threat of ostracism to believe or to pretend to believe that down is up and up is down; that black and white are the same, and that crooked is no different from the straight. Yes, these are times when truth is often drowned out by the clamor and the fury of militant anti-truth which has raised its own champions to a dubious respectibility by the default and retirement of the right, grown weary under the continuous onslaught of the popular.

There are times when doubt begets doubt, and doubt is compounded by doubt, for in the absence of faith even the certainty of doubt is conjectural. But doubt is a waster of men. It is the father of lassitude, the mother of despair, the primogenitor of every deed undone, every word unsaid, the con-summate paralysis of all who see in part, who under-stand in part but have no will to venture beyond the limits of imperfect vision and partial under-standing.

There is a world of possibility beyond that world we know in part. It is that world for which there are no handy print-outs for problems that are difficult and obscure. It is the world in which ego-centricity and self-indulgent hedonism are not the principle values. It is the world of thou-I rather than I-thou. It is a world waiting for your love, your concern, your understanding and your participation. It is not a world waiting for your conquest. Alas! There are no more worlds to conquer--except the inner world of the self. If you can accomplish this, the possibility of meaning for your life and for the lives of those which intersect with your own will be strengthened and magnified.

"Wisdom hath builded her house She hath hewn out her seven pillars."

You are the house that wisdom built. But wisdom is not for wisdom's sake. You are the salt of the earth. May God add understanding to your wisdom, savor to your salt, love to your relations and success in all you do to promote His kingdom and your inheritance. Amen.

* * * * * * * * Our Baccalaureate speaker -DR. C. ERIC LINCOLN, chairman of the Department of Religious and Philosophical Studies, Fisk University. Dr. Lincoln holds many academic degrees, including the Ph.D. from Boston University in 1960. He has held teaching and administrative positions in several colleges end universitiea, including Union Theoloiiical Seminary, and has lec-tured on ellnoat 100 campuses across the country. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was founding president of the Black Academy of Arts and Letters. Dr. Lincoln is the author of ten volumes including three books to be published this year; among them ie 1•n.e Black Experien<·e in Religion", He is listed in Who's Who in America and in Who's Who in the World, ond is a Trustee of Boston University.