St. Paul’s College: Historical Background
In 1874, when St. Paul's College was founded, Japan was in the midst of the Meiji era rush to catch up to the West. Higher education at the time was utilitarian, centering on developing Japan's nascent economic, industrial, medical, legal, and political institutions. In contrast, Bishop Williams founded his small school, teaching English and Bible study, with the firm belief that the young people of Japan needed spiritual education.

Williams emphasized that education based on spiritual growth would allow young people to walk into the world of the future and seek the truth. He believed that utilitarian education could provide practical knowledge, but what was needed was the ability to search on a higher plane. Only students taught to know the meaning of truth would be able to make what they had learned useful for human beings and society. Thus, from its foundation, Rikkyo has been a university that develops human resources: people who work for the benefit of others, and to improve society.

Bishop Williams was a studiously humble man, who Rikkyo graduates honored with the commemorative phrase "michi o tsutaete o nore o tsutaezu," which means roughly that the teacher should teach the way and not the self. Williams avoided any ostentation or false displays of goodwill. The spirit of Christian values in education that has come down to Rikkyo in the present day is still one of unadorned pursuit of truth and concern for the well being of others. The Christian value in education practiced at Rikkyo is that true Christianity frees humans to search for the truth unhindered.

In the early 1900's, Bishop Reifsneider, who was chancellor when the campus was moved to Ikebukuro, said that the university's philosophy of education was based on three important points: physical education, intellectual education, and spiritual education. However, the foremost of these was spiritual education. He encouraged humanitarian education based upon Christian belief. He warned that too much intellectual education would alter a person's balance such that they could not love other people and sympathize with their pain. Under Reifsneider's leadership, Rikkyo developed not only a firm physical and organizational foundation, but also developed a reputation as a liberal arts school that educated students to a high moral standard.

The Presiding Bishop’s Address to Rikkyo University
Thursday, October 20, 2005
Tokyo, Japan

In 1854, twenty years before the founding of the small school that was to become this great university, a series of lectures and essays entitled The Idea of a University was published in England. The author was an Anglican vicar in Oxford, John Henry Newman, who later became a Roman Catholic. Newman was a leader in what was known as the Oxford Movement, and had a profound influence on Anglican thought. Given the passion for education of Bishop Channing Moore Williams, the father of this university, I think we could safely surmise that he was well acquainted with Newman’s writings and likely influenced by them.

Looking through Newman’s lectures in preparation for this address, I found that there is much of Newman’s thought that is relevant today. His observations have confirmed and expanded my own thinking about the nature and purpose of a university, and most especially one that has a religious foundation. With this in mind, let me offer some reflections.

Ours is an age of information overload. This is certainly true in the United States and I suspect in Japan as well. In many ways the acquisition of information has become a form of addiction. The capability of the Web to yield more and more information, even about subjects in which we may have no particular interest, has led many of us into an all absorbing fascination, particularly given we can even get to the Web on a cell phone! "All things in moderation," the Ancients tell us; this applies not only to eating and drinking but to our use of such things as the Internet as well.

"One does not live by bread alone," we are told in Scripture: neither does one live by information alone. Some years ago a friend of mine who was teaching at the Harvard Divinity School was summoned to a meeting of the administration of the Business School to discuss a glaring lack detected in the members of the incoming class. Brilliant and capable they were beyond all imagining, but they largely lacked any framework for making ethical decisions. They knew a great deal and had all sorts of information at their fingertips, but they had no way of ordering what they knew beyond the demands and strategies of the market place. It is not that they were evil or had a penchant for dishonesty, there simply was no larger perspective to inform the decisions and choices they were obliged to make as part of working through the case studies presented in class.

This raises the question: What is the nature and purpose of a university? John Henry Newman describes a university as a school or place of universal learning or knowledge, "a place for the communication and circulation of thought, by means of personal intercourse, through a wide extent of country." He points to books as "one special instrument," (and we, in our own day, might add electronic forms of transmitting information). At the same time, he is very clear about what one might call the incarnational dimension of learning: that is the interaction, and in some sense the mutual education, that occurs between student and teacher.

Interestingly, my own education began at a school named St. Paul’s, a name this institution once bore. As I look back on those days, it was the passion of certain teachers for what they taught, and their desire to share that passion with me and my fellow students, that engaged me and drew forth a desire and fascination for the subject at hand. This capacity of the teacher to draw forth and to engage the student, as well as to welcome and be expanded by what one receives from the student, lies at the heart of mutual education.

Respect for one another and the possibility of friendship are integral to this kind of learning. Without mutual respect a student can become a passive receiver of information. So, I am delighted to know that this university, by which I have been so honored, is characterized by warm relationships and mutual respect between students and faculty. Mutual education is therefore occurring in this place.

This dynamic of mutual education, grounded in mutual respect, is deeply rooted in the religious tradition upon which this university was founded. According to that tradition, we have been created in the image and likeness of God. We are mediators of God’s own life and truth to one another. This is not so much because of what we say. It is because of who we are. Compassion, trust, fidelity, affection are not abstractions. They are lived truths. We experience them through the webs of relationship that bind us to one another and constitute our humanity. And as such they reveal something of that sacred mystery we name as God.

For Christians this bearing of life and truth to one another is predicated upon baptism whereby we become limbs of Christ’s risen body, the Church. As such no limb can say to another, "I have no need of you," without doing violence to the body as a whole. We are, however, not passive or limp appendages. Each limb is imbued with a particular gift or grace with which it is called to build up the body and serve the common good. Mutual education is a process of drawing out and sharing gifts of knowledge, experience, inquisitiveness, imagination, acuity of thought and perception not primarily for the sake of one’s personal advancement, but for the sake of the common good. I speak here of my own culture when I say that though the notion of the common good is valued it is not always pursued. Too frequently it is made subservient to individual success or gratification.

Mutual education involves not only the mind, but also the heart. The heart here is understood not simply as the seat of emotion, but in the ancient sense as the core and center of the human person. "Acquire a heart and you shall be saved," declared one of the Desert Fathers of the 4th century. Saved from what? Saved from that terrible state of inversion and self-preoccupation in which we become prisoners of ourselves. The acquisition of a heart opens us to others and to the world.

And this chapel, which I have learned is part of the two original red brick campus Quads designed in 1911, is at the heart of life at Rikkyo. Passed many times in the day, entered occasionally or frequently for the purpose of worship or simply to be alone, the chapel is sign and symbol of that larger and deeper purpose to which this university bears witness.

And what is that larger purpose? Here I turn again to Newman. In defining what he means by Liberal Education, Newman describes a "process of training, by which the intellect, instead of being formed or sacrificed to some particular or accidental purpose, some specific trade or profession, or study or science, is disciplined for its own sake, for the perception of its own proper object, and for its own highest culture." This training of the intellect involves the whole person, mind as well as heart, because universal knowledge or learning is about wisdom: wisdom understood as a deep and all embracing kind of knowing in which disparate dimensions of truth are unified and brought together and are transformed into what can only be called insight.

In Scripture, Wisdom is brought forth as the first of God’s creative acts, she is personified as God’s companion in the work of creating the world, and in Jesus Wisdom is made flesh and lives among as. In the Psalms, we are told: "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." Fear, in this case, means awed availability to the wild mystery we name as God and encounter in Christ—Christ, whom the 16th century Spanish poet, John of the Cross, describes as "Los insulas extrañas" that is "strange islands" never before seen because the ways of Christ, experienced in an intimate encounter of the heart, are always surprising and unfamiliar and larger that any of our imaginings. Fear of the Lord also means a willingness to listen to the voice of the Spirit who speaks in our hearts, speaks to our very depths, saying, "Seek my face — seek me as wisdom, love and the deepest truth of who you are and are called to be."

Wisdom, therefore, is not a body of information we can possess, but a relationship to be lived with the One who is wisdom — a relationship that expands and unifies and reconciles our minds with our hearts. Such is the process of training the intellect and the highest culture that determines a truly liberal, that is an all-embracing, education.

When we look to the founding by Bishop Channing Moore Williams in 1874 of a small school of five students we see that the larger purpose spoken of by Newman was shared by the founder of this institution. Bishop Williams was concerned not only with the propagation of Christianity but also with providing for the whole person: their intellectual development and also their ethical and moral foundation and growth. He clearly understood the need for a relationship with the One who is wisdom.

His ideals endure and, through the continuing efforts of other visionaries that small school has grown and developed over these 131 years into an exemplary institution of higher learning. Those here present and now responsible for Rikkyo’s life can take great pride not only in the legacy you have been given but in the present day vitality and witness of this outstanding university.