Humility as a Way of Life: Sir John Templeton’s Centenary
Humility lies at the heart of a better human future, urged Sir John Templeton, who was born one hundred years ago last month and is the founder of the John Templeton Foundation. He advocated the vital need for both spiritual humility, because we comprehend so little of the nature of God; and for scientific humility because what we know of the universe to date does not rule out a sustaining Ultimate Reality (“God”), but may be quite plausible depending on future discoveries. “For Sir John, the greatest mental, moral and spiritual framework for discovery in all matters of the intellect and the spirit is humility,” said Dr. Jack Templeton, in a recent lecture at the Science and Religion Dialogue conference.
Individuals who pursue both the spiritual and scientific quests are often alike in that they sustain this humility, not least by cultivating attitudes such as wonder and gratitude. In his book, The Humble Approach, Sir John wrote: “Let us humbly admit how very small is the measure of men’s minds. This realization helps to prevent religious conflicts, and obviates attacks by atheists against religion. Moreover, humility of this kind opens more minds to the idea that science supports and illuminates religion.” Humbleness makes for a transformative dynamic in life, opening the human mind and soul to love.
This stance was sustained by two key theological strands that shaped the mind of Sir John. First was his Presbyterian upbringing, in the Reformed tradition, informing a skeptical and hopeful realism about human nature. As a teenager, in 1927, Sir John became the Superintendent of the Cumberland Church Sunday School in Winchester, Tennessee. “From very early on, perhaps even by age ten, John Templeton is reported to have expressed a profound sense of gratitude for the miraculous fact that God could love him and everyone, unconditionally,” said Stephen G. Post, president of the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love, echoing comments made in June of 2012 by Dr. Jack Templeton, at a celebration of Sir John’s life at the Cumberland Presbyterian Church in Winchester, TN.
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| VIDEO: Dr. Jack Templeton speaks at the Science and Religion Dialogue conference |
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This Presbyterian upbringing underlies Sir John’s reflections about his life's purpose, published as Agape Love. He wrote: “Agape love means feeling and expressing pure, unlimited love for every human being with no exception. Developing such divine ability has been a goal for me almost all of my eighty-six years on earth.”
The second theological strand came from New England Transcendentalism, via Charles Fillmore and the Unity School of Christianity, based in Kansas City, MO, and available to Sir John as boy through radio broadcasts and the Unity booklet “The Daily Word” that his mother received. In this wide-ranging and intellectual tradition, he discovered the notion of “spiritual principles” and the possibility of progressing on the spiritual quest. “Sir John held that the human mind included a very small piece of Divine Mind, and that we have been given our minds so that we might love and participate in the continuing co-creativity of the Divine Mind that is in us,” Post explains. Unity also taught him that the spiritual life welcomes friendships between individuals across religious traditions. Sir John was an expansive thinker and an avid collector of insights from traditions that he felt made love their centerpiece.
All tended towards similar conclusions, he thought. “So, if there is a phenomenal universal force, for example, in gravity,” he wrote in Pure Unlimited Love, “can there not also be a tremendous unknown, or non-researched, potency, or force, in unlimited love?”
Sir John knew about life’s pain, too. The death of his first wife was untimely. But he felt that human suffering has its purposes and saw life on earth as an opportunity to grow in spirituality and virtue. “Maybe the earth was designed as a place of hardship because it is the best way to build a soul—the best way to teach spiritual joy versus the bodily ills,” he suggested in The Humble Approach.
Joy, purpose, hope, creativity, loyalty, forgiveness, and the other virtues that he celebrated followed naturally from the cardinal spiritual assets that are closely interlinked in Sir John’s mind: gratitude for the universe in which we live; participation in an enduring, unconditional and universal love; and deep humility before nature and the God that sustains reality.
Inside the Mind of a Wall Street Legend
Those prudent enough to have invested $10,000 in the Templeton Growth Fund when it was first established in 1954 would today have over $7 million to their names, had they left those funds alone. Few mutual funds can match such spectacular and consistent performance. So how did Sir John Templeton, the founder of the fund that bears his name, do it?
Sir John is remembered as a generous man and in The Templeton Touch he shared the wisdom he deployed to achieve such extraordinary investing success. The book explores his global focus, his relentless curiosity, his future-mindedness, his personal touch with clients, his willingness to take reasonable risks, his reliance on deep research and fundamental analysis—everything that set him apart from the crowd.
A new edition of the book, published this month by Templeton Press, has been expanded and revised from the original publication in 1983. Edited by Sir John’s authorized biographer, William Proctor, it includes new interviews with several financial titans who were influenced by Sir John. The interviews, conducted by Scott Phillips, offer the reader an inside view of the mind that became a Wall Street legend. As several noted, Sir John impressed them not just for his financial genius but for his outstanding character. In the words of Mason Hawkins, “He was the gold standard and set the bar very high for ethical behavior—not only as an investor, but as a business person.”
Making Sense of Who We Are
What happens if you bring together the novelist Marilynne Robinson and the astrophysicist Marcelo Gleiser and encourage them in a wide ranging conversation with Krista Tippett, host of the American Public Media program, On Being? You create a fascinating radio discussion about the mystery that we are.
The exchange was part of the Center of Theological Inquiry’s symposium on spiritual progress. Both interlocutors are gripped by science while also being wary of the modern piety towards science. Gleiser described science as “courting with the mystery of the unknown.” This is inevitably the case because the measurements made by scientists, and the tools that they use, can only grasp part of the world. “To put it another way, a Theory of Everything is an illusion,” he continued.
Robinson agreed, also wanting to celebrate the beauty of scientific discovery. It cultivates a sense of wonder that recognizes the diverse nature of science, while also acknowledging the power of religious myth, which Robinson described as struggling towards the mystery of who we are. Gleiser added that “to think of science as separate from spirituality to me is a big mistake,” and summarized, “The mythic narratives and the scientific narratives both ask the same question: Where did everything come from?”
