Wisdom, Knowledge and Information |
"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? "
[T.S.Eliot, Chorus I from " The Rock " 1934]
Margaret Barker in her exploration of Paradise Lost, meditated upon the two trees in the Paradise Garden - the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge. The fruit of the Tree of Life was true knowledge of the divine creation. This is what the Biblical tradition regards as Wisdom. " Wisdom is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her. " Proverbs 3:18.
What of the Tree of Knowledge? This is knowledge wrenched from its source, which according to the first book of Enoch " caused much bloodshed on the earth " . The knowledge from the second tree is partial. It is knowledge only of a god-forsaken world in which human beings themselves have assumed the role of gods. In the process of course they have discovered that, abstracted from the Creator and Source of Life, they are doomed to die.
The knowledge in Wisdom, springing from awareness of the Creator, [which is the beginning of Wisdom], has power to penetrate our lives and effect a transformation of mind. This transforming power is symbolised in the Bible by anointing. Christ is the anointed one [Christos in Greek means " anointed " ] who possesses the fulness of the Wisdom of God and who is in the world to open up the way to Paradise Regained.
The liturgy, which we shall celebrate tomorrow in Ravenna, is an action in which the Holy Spirit enrols us in Christ's work of regaining Paradise. Paradise will be evoked by the clouds of incense, the perfume of Paradise, taken from trees whose seeds Adam and Eve carried with them when they were exiled from Eden.
Doubtless the innocent eye can still find this account of the relation of wisdom to knowledge, the tragedy of which is expressed in the lines from Eliot with which I began, at once convincing and a call to profound change. For most of us, however, the primal vision is clouded and we must approach the problem of the wisdom that we have lost in knowledge from a different angle and " by indirections find directions out. "
Max Weber, in an analysis of modernity that is still valuable, talks of its essence being the " differentiation of the cultural value spheres " . Among various " spheres " he was referring to art, morals and science. Most pre-modern cultures did not differentiate these spheres clearly but modernity, beginning in the 17th century West, differentiated art, morals and science and let each pursue its own truths according to its own method, free from intrusion from any other sphere. This resulted in a spectacular growth of scientific knowledge, a flurry of new approaches to art, and a sustained look at morals in a more naturalistic light.
Now, however, the distress arising from pursuing these ways to knowledge in isolation from the other spheres is becoming more evident. We are nowhere near even the beginning of a new summa but in so many fields of thought this seems to be the time for expeditions into neighbouring spheres in an effort to find some unitive and integrative concepts. Nowhere is this phenomenon clearer than in the new science of ecology.
There is a peculiar difficulty, however, in the cultures of Western Europe where the differentiation occurred in the context of a radical questioning or even rejection of the divine reference. This was understandable in the light of the European civil wars of the 17th century in which the competing Christian traditions were actually implicated in the devastation of the continent. It always behoves those who dare to speak about divine wisdom, as it has been understood in the Christian tradition, to speak with a humility informed by this failure.
The result has been that Western Europeans and through them much of the rest of the world experienced differentiation with an atheist tendency. Now, however, as many speakers have asserted, we need a community of insight as we face the ecological challenge. I believe that the spiritual dimension is crucial. At the same time, it is also vital to distinguish between the scientific method, to which any modern person is inescapably and properly committed, and the materialist ideology behind reductionist scientism, which was the outcome of particular historical circumstances.
Our generation is characterised by a way of relating to the cosmos that is frankly autistic. There is a certain lack of awareness or recognition, which causes us to waste the beauty of the world.
The crisis we face is not in essence an ecological crisis but a crisis of awareness. We are not dealing with an inevitable conflict between science and religion, but rather a way of being in the world, out of sympathy and communion with the creation. This lack of sympathy is manifested in symptoms of ecological distress.
The modern project of growth without limits and with no end in view beyond the process itself arises, in the perspective of the Abrahamic religions, from choosing the wrong tree. We have lost the knowledge of wisdom in the pursuit of fragmented knowledge.
The pursuit of fragmented knowledge divorced from any consciousness of ourselves as creatures, fashions a knower who looks out on the world about him and sees not an animated nature in which he is a participant but simply matter to be exploited. Choosing the wrong tree progressively degrades a human being into someone who gets used to the dull pain of seeing nature as a lifeless desert and of treating its beauty as a deceptive mask. Dominance is substituted for connectedness in this way of knowing the universe. It is a way of knowledge which leads as Descartes frankly affirmed to a way of being in the world in which man regards himself as " maitre and possesseur de la terre " .
Now, however, things are even more serious. The habit of regarding everything as a material or mental object has even infected our good opinion of ourselves. Beneath much of the rhetoric about human dignity, lurks a reductionist suspicion that we are little more than upright animals or, even worse, rapacious bipeds with a selfish genetic make-up, whose happiness lies in consuming the world and treating other people as commodities which exist for our pleasure.
Just as incense is the perfume of Paradise so smoke is the symbol of this debased world view. Professor John McNeill in his excellent book " Something New Under the Sun " , a history of how we have abused the earth during the 20th century, quotes a business man near the beginning of the period actually celebrating " smoke as the incense burning on the altars of industry. It is beautiful to me. It shows that men are changing the merely potential forces of nature into articles of comfort for humanity. "
Of course, even if our vision is profoundly skewed, we can still recognise the survival of a quality in some human beings which would commonly be described as wisdom. This quality does not depend on any conscious relationship with God. There are people who live their lives in a balanced and peaceable spirit, accepting what comes with a seasoning of philosophy derived from wide experience.
This is not, however, the Wisdom which comes from the Tree of Life. This Wisdom, together with some reflection on how one might enter into the knowledge which comes with Wisdom, is my theme and a central theme of this Symposium. It is a central theme because the knowledge which comes with Wisdom, does not merely describe the world and leave things where they were before but it transforms human life and the world of which we are a part.
I am discussing nothing less than participation in the Wisdom of God, symbolised by the Tree of Life which is planted in Genesis and bears leaves for the healing of the nations in the Book of Revelation. I do not mean to excommunicate other ways of approaching divine wisdom but it behoves us all to attempt to plumb and appropriate our own tradition before presuming to pronounce on any others.
The wisdom that comes from above is marked by a creaturely awareness of the Creator and a consequent respect for the balance and limits proposed by the deep structure of created life. Dwelling in this wisdom leads to a fresh and reverent ways of being in the world.
The wisdom is present in all of us as potential and indeed it is a gift held out to us but a profound appropriation of this wisdom is not a given, it is a task.
For those seeking a way to Paradise Regained, work is required, not merely conceptualisation. Work, public work is what the word liturgy means. The liturgies of the ancient world were public works in which citizens were assembled to build a road or a temple. Liturgy is the " Consummation of Philosophy " as the sub title of an important recent book by Catherine Pickstock expresses it. Liturgical work begins by leaving home and setting out. If we contemplate our present ecological distresses then we must long for transformation. The partial god-forsaken knowledge which comes from the Tree of Knowledge easily slips into a rejection of otherness and openness by taking refuge in the circle I form with myself. This is refusal to cast out into the deep and genuinely leave home. By contrast the experience of the scientific method is that it frequently offers a vital detour to wisdom since science can open up the world by de-centring the self and distancing ourselves from ourselves in the search for a more genuine holism. The observer can never of course be excluded from the equation but the self can be de-centred. Wisdom finds itself by losing itself.
Liturgical life proceeds as we lay hold on life, symbolised by the bread and the wine, and pronounce a blessing in giving thanks for them. In this act, we make our protest against the various forms of reductionism which reject openness and otherness by taking life, not with thanksgiving, but " for granted " as nothing beyond the obvious. In pronouncing this thanksgiving, we cry out, not to some confected divinity of our own, but to the pre-comprehensible, open to the mystery of which we are a part.
All closed systems, ideologies which purport to describe absolute totality, [we think of the materialist ideologies which until recently held sway in the countries through which we have been passing], suffer from the defect that it is impossible to postulate such a system without to some extent surreptitiously putting " myself " in place of the whole. Wisdom is open to mystery which is to be distinguished from the kind of puzzle which ultimately yields to the " little grey cells " . Mystery is the only appropriate designation of the totality of which we form a part so that we cannot achieve an independent standpoint from which we can view the whole as an object, get behind or fathom it. The appropriate approach to mystery is a cry, Lord! Open thou our lips.
Take life with thanksgiving and cry out to the mysterious source of life, the etrenal Wisdom which dwells in silence, this constitutes the primary affirmation in our search for living Wisdom. One of the major themes that has dominated the philosophy of the modern era is how we know anything at all. The search for living Wisdom and this holds true for the practice of science proceeds in the words of Paul Ricoeur as " a second order elucidation of a nebula of meaning that has a pre-philosophical character " .
With our crying out and the thanksgiving comes liberation from the hermetically sealed bubble of the self which many non-philosophical moderns experience as a prison house.
There is further transformation in store. Descartes' way of knowing makes of man, " a master and possessor of the earth " with all the consequent problems of domination and exploitation in our relations with the earth and with one another. In our liturgical work, following the way of Jesus Christ, the expression of the Wisdom of God, we offer up and hand over our life and our things to the Source of All Life and Wisdom. By this action of handing over, the master of the feast becomes the guest of divine Wisdom. As we hand over our things and offer up our possessions the way is opened for them to be transformed by the Holy Spirit, the Communication of the Wisdom of God and received back as gifts of divine Love. The master becomes a guest. The possession becomes a gift. Divine Wisdom transforms the self and the world it inhabits.
There are a number of concepts in modern science which seem to me to make the recovery of an authentically Biblical and spiritual awareness of living Wisdom more of a possibility and this liturgical work of entry into Divine Wisdom more plausible.
The man-centred and reason dominated world view of the Enlightenment, to which scholastic theology contributed not a little, has been challenged by Darwinism which, whatever its other reductionist tendencies, has returned human beings to their organic place in nature. This has restored the perspective which informs the symbolism of Genesis II in which God forms " adam " , the earth creature out of the very dust - " ha'adam " . I can think of other illuminating concepts as well as areas which are more problematical and I shall listen to what Rupert Sheldrake has to say with great interest.
The experimental liturgical life has been refreshed in the course of the 20th century. The beauty of the liturgical life is the signature of Divine Wisdom and it continues to be alluring. It is still sometimes difficult, however, to discern real action, movement and desire for transformation in liturgies which can appear to resemble either cultural fossils or dreary audio-visual aids to acquiring knowledge of Christian doctrine. The truth is of course that we have turned so much of our own traditions into mere knowledge in the pejorative sense. The poet Auden sadly reflected that even the early Christians saw their agape decline " into a late lunch with Constantine " . The scribes are still with us, picking over the tags and bones of dead men's thoughts as a substitute for engagement with living Wisdom.
The need for a further revival of liturgical work as a way of responding to the crisis of awareness which lies at the heart of the ecological crisis, is very pressing. Liturgical work has the potential to create a powerful and salvific ethos in the context of which ethics can be energised. We must find a way through the puzzle that we know a lot but we seem, especially those of us who live in the richer countries, unable to effect the transformation of heart and mind which is needed if we are to live with self restraint and a joyful spirit of sacrifice. This will be the theme of the Patriarch's address at the conclusion of this Symposium. There is a great cry in the Orthodox Liturgy when the gospel is about to be read, Wisdom! Let us attend! It is good counsel.
This is a time of great confusion. In many parts of the West there is a deconstructionist establishment where it counts in education and the media. The assumption is that there is no possibility of universally valid truth - always of course with the ironic exception of that particular truth.
In the midst of this confusion, and partly as a reaction to it, there has been a retreat to literalism in religions of all kinds and in some parts of the religious world a re-affirmation of exclusive boundaries. " Ecumenical " has even become a term of abuse in some quarters. There is at the same time a new credulity and a disparagement of the rational.
The Economist carried a story about a tabloid newspaper, embarrassed by the non-appearance of its regular astrologer the editor handed the job over to a cynical hack. He relieved his boredom by writing under one sign, " all the sorrows of yesteryear are as nothing compared with what will befall you today. " He was sacked when the switchboard was jammed with panicking readers.
Scientific method and religion should be allies in the search for Holy Wisdom. Our search should be at once respectful of the divine gift of reason but chooses the Tree of Living Wisdom not the Tree of Fragmented Knowledge. We need to educate a generation of everyday, matter of fact mystics, contemplatives who recognise that Divine Wisdom in the person of Jesus Christ did not drop out of this world into some fantasy world but who dropped in and dwelt amongst us.
