Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000

RAMANAM
In the Name of The Father, and of The Son and of The Holy Spirit, Amen.

Countrymen,

ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT

Academe is ever trying to distinguish or even separate itself from The Church (ecclesia). This is like the brain trying to separate from the heart or the clouds from the ocean.

Plato tried to go it without Delphi. Pharisees without Jesus the Christ. Plotinus without Origen. Abelard without Bruno. The Friars at Bologna without Francis or Anthony. Erasmus without Luther. Rousseau without Pascal or Guyon. Oxford without Newman. Union and Madrassa Harvard without Tillich. New Harmony without Graham.

It does not work. It cannot work. It will not work. … It won’t happen, either.

Update 1: Steven Hayward:  I’d say that the problem he described [pride and group-think among academics] is at least an order of magnitude worse in universities today.

I commented:

I must disagree with that assessment. I remember Murray and I was in the universities at the time he published these quotes of his.  The problem Murray described is no worse now than it was then, just more widely visible and remarked, because of the web.  And the cause of the problem is the pride of scholarship, the hardest of all types of pride to disappear.

The prides of youth, beauty, wealth, gender, accomplishment and prestige fade away on their natural course in time.  The pride of scholarship does not.  It is like ego, ever young unless deliberately crucified.  Its surcease requires actual breakage and that only by a scholar harboring the disease.  Thus St. Francis was appalled when some Brothers opened a college in — I think it was ?? — Bologna, who already had their own old and famous one.

Someone composed this paraphrase some years ago:

In days of old,
When knights were bold,
And teachers still loved learning,
They told the truth,
Even if uncouth,
And went on unconcerning.

AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA