Micah Tillman

Below the fold, you’ll find the text of my address for Mt. Sophia Academy’s commencement ceremonies.

If you were there, you may notice that some of the jokes are missing. Sorry. One sometimes does a little ad lib-ing (libbing) when one actually delivers a speech. . . . (And then, sometimes, one has things one wants to say, but isn’t sure whether one is going to say them, and therefore one doesn’t include them in the text of one’s speech.)

For those of you who weren’t there, the very beginning and very end deal with Mt. Sophia, its grads, and my connection thereto. The rest, however, should be more broadly applicable.

[ Introduction | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | Conclusion ]

INTRODUCTION

Ten years ago I was sitting exactly where you are sitting now, as one of four people in Mt. Sophia’s first graduating class. I’ve learned some things in the decade since, but I won’t tell you everything. Instead, I’m going to let you in on the most important thing I’ve learned so far.

I can express it in one sentence:

“Being an excellent person means practicing presentation and perspective-taking.”

There it is. “Being an excellent person means practicing presentation and perspective-taking.”

That’s it. Thanks a lot for coming. See me again in ten years and I’ll have two sentences for you. Have a nice evening.

Actually, I’m a philosopher, so it’s going to take me fifteen minutes to explain to you what that one sentence means. Bear with me for a bit.

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[ Introduction | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | Conclusion ]

PART I: What “Excellence” Means

“Being an excellent person means practicing presentation and perspective-taking.” Let’s start with what I mean by “excellent person.”

Aristotle had a theory. The theory was that being excellent meant being what you are. An excellent horse is a horse that is a real horse, and does all the things that horses are supposed to do. It doesn’t have to fly or be a unicorn. It just has to do horse things, and do them well.

An excellent penguin is a real penguin. He doesn’t have to tap-dance or sing, he just has to do penguin things, and do them well.

An excellent person is a real person. She doesn’t have to be an Empress or an Angel. But she does have to do human things, and do them well.

To be fully yourself — not just the physical side of yourself, or the emotional, or the mental, or the spiritual side of yourself — to do human things, and to do them as humans are supposed to do them, is what it means to be excellent.

When the Scholastic philosophers started to study Aristotle, they translated the Greek word for “excellence” as “virtus,” or “virtue.” To be fully human means to be “virtuous.” Now, virtue in Latin means the same as we mean by “power.” If you want true excellence, if you want true power, you must learn to be truly human.

Nowadays, very few people realize that “virtue” means “excellence” and “power.” They just think that being “virtuous” means “being nice.” Which is incredibly wimpy.

No, virtue is excellence; it is learning to use all your abilities and faculties so that you live as humans were meant to live.

The question is: How are humans meant to live? What does it mean to be human?

I’ve claimed, if you remember, that being an excellent person — being truly human — means practicing presentation and perspective-taking. But Aristotle never said that was what being human is. Where did I get such a silly idea?

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[ Introduction | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | Conclusion ]

PART II: What Does Human Excellence Look Like?

Since being human requires practice — since we’re all born potentially-excellent, not actually-excellent — it is highly likely that you’ve never met a real human. You’ve probably only ever met people on their way to being human, on their way to excellence and virtue.

So how do I know what excellence looks like?

Well, I’ve read CS Lewis, for one. He said:

It is a serious thing to . . . remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would strongly be tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. – CS Lewis, The Weight of Glory (New York: HarperOne, 2001), 14-15 [h/t Warnock]

And I’ve read the Apostle Paul, who put it this way:

And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. (2 Corinthians 3:18, NRSV)

And then there was the time I was reading the Apostle John, who said something very similar:

Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. (1 John 3:2, NIV)

So I decided that if I want to know what it means to become human, to see, as John says, “what we will be,” I have to see God. To see ourselves, we must see God.

But how do we see God? In his gospel, John gives us a pretty good place to start.

Jesus said, . . . “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9, NRSV)

To become human, to be virtuous, to achieve excellence, we must look at Jesus.

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[ Introduction | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | Conclusion ]

PART III: Jesus Shows Us How to Become Who We Are

But why? How can Jesus show us God, show us what it means to be human? What’s so special about Jesus?

Well, other than the fact that Paul says Jesus “is the image of the invisible God . . . [in whom] all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (Colossians 1:15, 19, NRSV), there’s not much special about Jesus at all.

Or. Wait. . . .

Jesus is not only the image of God, and thus a good way to see God, but has “all the fullness of God” as well.

And if you’ll remember, all humans are made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26-27), and Paul hopes we will all have “the power . . . be filled with all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:18-19, NRSV) too.

In other words, Jesus was exactly what we are supposed to be. (Except for the actually being God part. We don’t have to do that any more than a penguin needs to learn to tap-dance.) Jesus was the excellent person, the virtuous man, the real human.

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[ Introduction | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | Conclusion ]

PART IV: Who We Are: (Moving) Images, Actors

Okay, so if Jesus is the image of God, is who we humans are supposed to be — if Jesus shows us excellence — then we need to be imitators of Christ (1 Corinthians 11:1, NRSV; see also, 1 Corinthians 4:16; Ephesians 5:1; 1 Thessalonians 1:6, 2:14; Hebrews 6:12).

To become human, to be excellent, requires acting like Christ. People always say you shouldn’t play God. But they’re wrong. You should play God: act like God would act, think what God would think, do what Christ would do, feel what Christ would feel.

We have to playact, to “[p]ut on . . . Christ” (Romans 13:14, NRSV), to be copycats, just like Jesus said He did: “Very truly, I tell you, the Son can do nothing on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise” (John 5:19, NRSV).

But what’s this got to do with being an image of God? Well, imitators, actors are living, breathing, moving images. Shakespeare was right when he said, “All the world’s a stage / And all the men and women merely players” (As You Like It, Act 2, scene 7, 139–40). We just have to make sure we’re playing the right character.

Being human means being an image come to life, a moving picture. Being human means being godly, acting like God.

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[ Introduction | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | Conclusion ]

PART V: How Humans Go Wrong

Humans are the only beings in the universe who, to be themselves, have to act like something else.

Let me say it again: Humans are the only beings in the universe who, to be themselves, have to act like something else.

So humans get in trouble two ways:

First, they forget that being a person means being a picture. They think they are something all by themselves, that they’re the real deal, that they are God.

Or second, they forget what they’re supposed to be pictures of. They try being a picture of themselves, or of other people. They become obsessed with the “American [kind of] Idol.”

They think they’re supposed to act like irrational animals. Or they think they’re supposed to act like merely-rational Vulcans.

And in the process, they miss out on truly being human. They miss out on getting to be an image — a representation — of God.

Therefore, if we want to be excellent, virtuous, powerful, human, we must practice being pictures or representations of God. We must be imitators of Christ, representations of Christ.

But think about that word, “representation.” It’s “re-presentation”: something that makes something else present again.

To be fully human is to be a presentation of God, and that’s why I said, “Being an excellent person means practicing presentation.”

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[ Introduction | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | Conclusion ]

PART VI: Learning to Practice Presentation

The human’s role is to present God to each other, to the animals, to the earth, to the universe. Jesus was serious when he said: “where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them” (Matthew 18:20, NRSV). It’s our job to be Christ’s body in this world, as Paul said (1 Corinthians 12:12-26).

To be human, then, requires practicing presentation. We’re not there yet, so we must be “transformed by the renewing of [our] minds” (Romans 12:2, NRSV). We’re not there yet, so we must be “conformed to the image of [Christ]” (Romans 8:29, NRSV). We’re not there yet, so “we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ” (Ephesians 4:15, NRSV).

To be a human — to be a person — means to practice presenting God, to — as Brother Lawrence would say — “practice the presence of God.” But if you want to figure out exactly how to do that, there are some books you need to read.

You need to read the Gospels, because it’s there we get the stories about, and teachings of, Jesus, that help us understand who God is and what we should be imitating. And you need to read the Epistles, because it’s there that Jesus’ disciples tried to answer all the questions the first generation of Christians had about how to practice presenting Jesus.

And you need to read Dallas Willard’s books. He’s a philosopher, like I am. In fact, Dallas Willard does the same kind of philosophy I do: phenomenology. But he’s much further down the road to becoming a real human than I am. Dallas Willard will help you learn about being fully human through being Christlike.

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[ Introduction | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | Conclusion ]

PART VII: Presenting God by Taking God’s Perspective

But you also need to do something else too. “Being an excellent person means practicing presentation and perspective-taking.” I’ve just been talking about how practicing presentation leads to excellence. Now let’s see how “perspective-taking” fits in.

If you study Genesis 1, 2, and 3 carefully, you’ll see that after God creates Adam and Eve, God begins teaching them to see how He sees. Remember how God will create something, and then see that it’s good? (Genesis 1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31). When God gets to the humans, He creates them in His image, then starts to teach them how to imitate Him through seeing like He sees, through recognizing good where they couldn’t see it before.

People were made to imitate God. They learn to act like God acts — and an important part of that is learning to see as God sees. Persons practice taking God’s perspective. To be an excellent person means practicing perspective-taking:

But how does God see? Well, He knows how to see good. But what else can God see? How else should we see if we want to take God’s perspective?

God insists that He sees things differently than humans normally do. God told Samuel that He “does not see as man sees; for man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7b, NKJV).

In Scripture, you see over and over that God knows people’s hearts and thoughts. (E.g., 1 Chronicles 28:9; Psalm 139:2; Isaiah 66:18; Luke 16:15; Hebrews 4:12.) And you see time and again how Jesus — the person who first perfectly played the role we are all supposed to be playing — knew the thoughts of the people he was talking to (Matthew 9:4, 12:25; Luke 5:22, 6:8, 11:17).

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[ Introduction | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | Conclusion ]

PART VIII: Presenting God by Seeing Into Other People’s Hearts

If we are truly to represent God, if we are to be real humans, therefore, we have to learn to see as God sees. And God not only sees good, but God sees through the immediate and apparent, to the hidden (Matthew 6:1-18) and to the heart. God sees the intentions and thoughts behind the words and show.

To be a proper presentation of God, you’re going to have to practice doing the same. You’re going to have to learn to see past what people say to why they say it. You’re going to have to look beyond your immediate reactions, and discover why people act the way they do.

It is not enough for you to quit at the surface in your quest to see as God sees. When someone tells you something you know is wrong, stopping with knowing they’re wrong is not enough for an image of God. It is your task to see into the hearts of everyone, to figure out why they would come to the conclusions they do.

This quest to move beyond knowing what other people believe, to knowing why they believe it, is perspective-taking. To truly understand another person, you have to not only know what she believes, but be able to see things through her eyes.

Only when you can do this, only when you can see things from another person’s perspective, can you help the other person change his perspective. You have to be able to figure out where a person is coming from before you can give her directions to where she should be.

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[ Introduction | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | Conclusion ]

PART IX: Presenting God through “Open-Mindedness”?

Some would call this “being open-minded.” And it is. But it’s different, too.

Most people think being open-minded is being open to letting other people’s opinions in. Perspective-taking, however, is being open so you can get outside your own head, and get inside other people’s heads.

Open-mindedness is not being willing to change what you believe, so much as it’s being willing to try to fully understand what other people believe.

But why? Why would you want to be open-minded in this way? What’s the goal of trying to see things through other people’s eyes?

The answer is that we try to take other people’s perspectives because we’re trying to take God’s perspective. We’re trying to see as God sees. And God sees “how people see”; God sees their hearts and thoughts. So if we want to imitate God, we not only have to learn to see the good God sees, but we have to learn to perspective-take with our fellow humans.

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[ Introduction | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | Conclusion ]

PART X: What Perspective-Taking Does for You

Three things can happen when you figure out someone else’s perspective:

The first thing is you might be able to help him see why he’s mistaken. You might be able to figure how to express the truth in a way he can easily understand. You’ll not only be able to tell him that he’s wrong, but why he’s wrong, and what he can do to see the truth.

You can’t have a real argument with someone until you can take her perspective, can see why she sees things the way she does. If you can’t see that deeply into her heart, you’ll just be dealing with the “outward appearance” of her opinions. And arguing with appearances gets you nowhere.

The second thing that might happen when you practice perspective-taking is that you might discover you were mistaken about something. Seeing an issue from a different angle might reveal an error you hadn’t noticed before. And this can help you correct your own opinions.

In other words, perspective-taking doesn’t just help you understand others. It can show you the log in your own eye, as Jesus said (Matthew 7:3-5, NRSV). Perspective-taking can help you perceive the world more accurately.

And third, perspective-taking might help you see some good or fact you’d never noticed before. There’s always the chance you’ll learn something. You might find something you can use to make your own perspective even better, even more complete.

Most people aren’t completely insane, after all. And even stupid people have had experiences you didn’t. Even if someone is completely wrong about the topic you’re discussing, you might discover something else about which she is right (and which you hadn’t noticed before) when you take her perspective.

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[ Introduction | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | Conclusion ]

CONCLUSION

“Being an excellent person means practicing presentation and perspective-taking.”

Your mission is to be human, to be excellent, to be an image and representation of God to the world. And part of that is perspective-taking: it’s learning to see how God sees, and therefore imitating God in seeing how other people see.

Your mission is both to make God present to people, and to try to understood them. That way you can not only help them, but learn from them, and argue with them more effectively.

But helping and learning always come before arguing. As the Epistle of James says, “let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak” (James 1:19, NRSV). Of course, I’ve been doing just the opposite of that this evening. I’ve been talking, you’ve been listening.

One thing we have in common, however, is we’ve all put in our four years in high school. And I want to welcome you now as fellow members of the prestigious company of Mount Sophia gradates.

But while I’m at it, I’d also like to invite you to join me in working towards becoming even more excellent, even more virtuous, even more human — towards becoming what we are. We are Mount Sophia grads, after all. Let’s show the world how it’s done.

[ Introduction | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | Conclusion ]

Tags: Aristotle, C.S. Lewis, Colossians, Corinthians, Dallas Willard, Ephesians, Excellence, Genesis, humans, James, Jesus, John, Luke, Matthew, Mount Sophia Academy, Paul, Perspective, Phenomenology, Presentation, Psalms, Samuel, Scholasticism, Shakespeare, Virtue