The Cross, Modern University and Existential Questions of Life

 

The last three weeks have been moments of learning, busyness, and reflections for me. The weeks were punctuated with significant lessons about existential questions. The first was about why are we here? The second was how should we live in the world today? And the third was whom do I belong?

All these morphed in why the Cross, the university and the existential questions of life – what strings them together?

I was upbeat about giving a seminar paper at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology on March 30, 2022. The paper was/is about my deepest reflections on the role of religion in human civilization. After exploring the fate of religion in a pandemic world, I decided to give a seminar presentation on the topic: “The political economy of heaven and earth: A review of religious theories and praxes in a pandemic world”.

As part of inviting as many people as possible to share my considerate understanding of religion with, I shared the flyer which was nicely designed with my profile picture widely. On one platform, where I shared my flyer, a young man promptly responded to my flyer: “We need money, you are giving a talk.”

I responded tersely to the young man with the words, “Please that is why you need to sit in the seminar.” But the response of the young man reminded me of one of my cherished philosophies in life. If I choose what everyone considers irrelevant, I will hardly be competed or feel the need to compete.

Two weeks ago, I accepted the task to provide pro bono service as a Scribe to a group of young women on a project. As part of the project, several renowned scholars were similarly offered the chance to help. But to my surprise, these accomplished scholars wanted to be given juicy positions and remunerations before they rendered service.

Again, this incident reminded me that if we make what we get from what we do the basis of our identity, then we are deeply in crisis.

The third incident was last night. From about 10 pm to midnight, I was helping a friend to draft a proposal. And to help him understand how to frame his research question, I asked him a question about the difference between truth and fact.

The question was quite tricky because he had almost, like all of us, not paid close attention to the philosophical undercurrent of what I wanted him to do. As he kept stammering, I decided to ease his tension with a question. “If I tell you, human beings are ontologically good, will you say that statement is true or fact?”

My friend quickly responded that that was a fact. Unfortunately, he got the answer wrong. But his answer was a good entry point for us to begin a journey of epistemic madness on the Cross, modern university and the existential questions of life.

I explained to him that the difference between “Truth” and “fact” is a difference between “what is” and “what ought to be”. In other words, the truth is what ought to be, while the fact is what is. The truth is the ideal; the fact is the real. The Truth is our aspiration, the fact is what is dissent. But why don’t we look for the truth?

I took him on a long journey of explaining the historical genealogies of the university, highlighting the reason for research as the signifier of a modern university. I told him that in the premodern world, the logic of university was to pass on conventional truth; in the medieval era, the reason was to incorporate the training of courtiers in university education, and in the modern world, to research.

After about an hour of lecture on the above, I asked him why he thought research is the focus of the modern university. This time, he got the answer right: The needs of human beings are insatiable.

Given that it is simply axiomatic that human beings are hardly satisfied with anything, I followed up with a question: Why are human needs insatiable? At this point, he realised that if he didn’t say he was tired, I would take him on yet another journey of epistemic madness.

So, he simply said, the Bible said so. Unfortunately for him, that was not a satisfactory answer. So, I followed up with another question: Why did the Bible say our needs are insatiable?

Knowing that I would stretch him further, he simply said: Sir, this one, help me.

With his own admission, I asked him whether he thinks a dog cares about being anything other than being a dog? He simply said no. I asked him whether in all of creation, he finds any creature, apart from human beings, that is unhappy?

That was a tricky question at face value. How would he know? But I interrupted him by simplifying the question: have you found any of the creatures of God fundamentally improving their ontological function? Do you find ants building warehouses or storage houses so they rest from their labour and go on a holiday trip?

With strong “no” answers, I told him I decided to talk about the Cross as research for research in a modern university. Research is primarily about re-searching or searching again. The sagacious King Solomon said to us that there is nothing new under the sun. He was more than right.

Everything we do today is not fundamentally different from what our ancestors knew. More importantly, while we have more information than our ancestors, we are hardly wiser than our ancestors in answering the existential questions of life.

That we are hardly wiser than our ancestors explains our constant reading of philosophy and by extension the Humanities in our universities. Incidentally, civilizations begin to collapse when we forget about ancestral wisdom (the Humanities) to focus on science and technology alone.

I pointed out to him that research is, therefore, part of human beings re-assessing the conventional knowledge that our ancestors passed on to us. The difference in the responses we get is not that we are any better than our ancestors. The difference in our responses to the questions we are re-searching is the methodological approach we use.

This brought in the issue of methodology in research. I told my friend that the reason every university research requires a detailed methodological approach is to test the validity of what we have already known, away from the approach our ancestors used.

Our ancestors asked the existential questions by relying on observation, accumulated experiences and God to arrive at cogent and durable axioms, proverbs, and maxims – concretised in sociogenic activities of an world based on order rather than rights. But in our modern university, we have chuckled the religious aspect and relied entirely on rationality.

So, whereas our ancestors were clear that “for us to know anything, we need to add together experiences, reasoning, and the supernatural,” the modern approach relies on rationality and experiences only. This approach is a relapse to the pagan Greek philosophy of epistemology, in which Protagoras stated: “Of all things, man is the measure.”

The problem with the modern Protagoras’ approach is that “The man” who is the measure is an exceptional man. If that “man” says we must all speak as neoliberals in responding to the existential questions of life, we must do so. If that “man” says that the other voice is not worth considering, we must throw it away. In the end, the “man” as the measure of all things canonises the zero-sum game in epistemological production.

In sum, we are often left with the idiocy of relativism: “One man’s wisdom is another man’s idiocy.” Literature review becomes a reason to shoot your previous professor down to centre yourself.

With the above foundation of futile rationalism, I decided to introduce the Cross into the conversation. Historically, human beings have been aware of life’s imperfections. We have always known that life is far from perfection. The imperfections affect every facet of life. It is either caused by human beings or naturally induced.

Concurrently, historically, human efforts have been directed at overcoming the imperfections of life. For this reason, in the modern university, we never get a degree or title until we demonstrate relatively new knowledge in a form of a re-search.

But after about 200 years of the modern university, it appears we are yet to beat our premodern ancestors down to the responses to the existential questions of life. Doubtlessly, we have made some progress materially. Technology has enhanced the quality of life.

But technological improvement has hardly taken away the deepest quest of human beings: A quest for a perfect life. We always appear to run in circles: We solve one problem, only for another problem, sometimes more complex than the previous ones, to stare us in the face. The cyclical nature of imperfection led me to conclude many years ago that:

“We live in a world that is woefully incapable of giving us 24 hours of uninterrupted peace.”

Following that we appear to dance in circles, as we find answers to the existential questions of life, we have become highly competitive beings. We are always in a rat race to undo others. By othering others as inferior, we marginalise, malign, and create pariahs for them.

Our eagerness to undo the other is enhanced by technology. Through social media, more recently, we have crystallised our self-centredness in the axiom of “selfie”. It is about “Me, myself, and I”.

This antinomy of technology means that while social media helps us to claim to be free from communal oppressions of the premodern world, we become oppressors of the “self” and others. We also become very discontent in centering ourselves. So, technology gives us a world of “alone together”.

What then is the answer to all these? Charles Darwin in the 1830s thought the answer to this was very difficult to find, because of his theory of natural selection which is only possible by selfishness as opposed to altruism.

Alexis de Tocqueville, the French aristocrat, who also went to the United States of America, around the same time in the 1830s that Charles Darwin went on nature-sight-seeing, concluded that the answer to the rat race is altruism which for him rested in religion.

In other words, as the nineteenth century marked an important recession in religious role in the public sphere, the question these two outstanding thinkers wanted to know was about: the role religion would continue to play and how human beings were to live their lives without religion.

Today, in the twenty-first century world, we are still dealing with the same question: Can we do without God? The Jewish-British philosopher, Isaiah Berlin was right in arguing about the three main sources of knowledge: Rationalism, empiricism, and the third one that is not based on the first two and yet very true as well.

For me as a Christian, the answer to all the troubling issues of the world, including the systemic inequalities that the current pandemic has rendered more visible, is the Cross.

Apart from the theological significance of the Cross as a salvific symbol, the Cross reminds us of the reason for life.

Jesus Christ is the uncreated Creator. He never wronged anyone. And yet, He left His glory to live with human beings. He “suspended” His deity and became a servant of humanity. He never competed with the political authority of His time. He never went after money or riches. He never competed for attention. He rather lived an unassuming life, including refusing to be crowned a king.

Instead, Jesus took the path of service. He served everyone who came His way. He was/is God who could judge everyone and yet, He exercised compassion more than condemnation. He even deferred ultimate judgment to the end of time, so that everyone would get the chance to review Him and accept Him.

Eventually, Jesus accepted the way of the Cross. While He was/is ontologically good with His accusers admittedly seeing no evil in Him, He did not protest the human evil plot to have Him hanged.

He accepted the way of the Cross, instead of a material crown. He was crucified. And even when He was dying in excruciating pain, He asked His Father to forgive His creatures. For He knew that the real enemy was Satan, whom He decidedly came to conquer on behalf of His elect. Jesus solved the human question of “selfie”.

As I reserve the issue of the resurrection to Sunday, God willing, I want to bring out the lessons in the Cross.

• First, the Cross reminds us to see the existential imperfection in the world as real

• Second, the Cross reminds us to do what we could to relieve human beings of the existential imperfection

• Three, the Cross reminds us to be selfless

• Four, we must embrace forgiveness as the heartbeat of life

• Five, let us embrace the life of contentment through renunciation of opulence

• Finally, the Cross reminds us to really look at Christ as our ultimate hope and source of inspiration – “For my sake, He became poor, so I will be rich in doing good.”

This Easter, I will forgive, reconcile, and give a cup of water to someone in the name of Jesus Christ. I will forsake religious rituals and live to serve humanity in faithfulness to God.

What about you?

Satyagraha

By Charles Prempeh