The Holiness of Unknowing
“A wicked and perverse generation seeks after signs.”
—Matthew 16:4
Ours is a generation of information junkies. We have 24-hour-a-day news shows and Internet sites dedicated to keeping us informed with up-to-the-minute details of the world’s events. Through our keyboards, we have countless encyclopedias available at our fingertips to tell us anything we wish to know. In fact, we have a sector of our society dedicated to information technology, which is concerned not with the quality of the information we receive, but with our access to it.
One great assumption of our day is that the accumulation of information is a virtue. We know from Adam and Eve’s experience with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that this is not so. That is why King David sang in Psalm 131:
My heart is not proud, O Lord,
my eyes are not haughty;
I do not concern myself with great matters
or things too wonderful for me.
David realized that piety required knowing what things one should be content with not knowing, and being content with not knowing them. This applies to things both spiritual and secular.
Regarding knowledge of spiritual things, Jesus spoke out against those who would seek after signs and said that no one could know “the day and the hour.” St. Anastasios of Sinai described the importance of not seeking to know unknowable spiritual things when he wrote:
Regarding those things which are passed over in silence in the Divine Scriptures, it is manifest that they must not be sought out. The Holy Spirit revealed to us those things which it is to our profit to learn, and again as for those things which are not profitable, he kept them hidden.
Being content with not knowing spiritual truths is a part of the apophatic tradition of the Church—the theological approach to understanding Truth by what we do not know. Of the major Christian traditions, Orthodox are particularly content with unknowing.
There are also secular truths that we should be content with not knowing. I am not arguing that we should be ignoramuses. Knowledge is a good thing, and advancements in science and technology have allowed us to better understand how to cure diseases and how our world—the world God made for us—works. But our quest for knowledge should have bounds—just as God created bounds in the garden. Some things we should not strive to know, for they belong to God, or our neighbor, or their acquisition requires the violation of moral law, or we would misuse the knowledge when we got it.
Just because a thing can be known, does not mean it is a good thing to be known. For example, while hiring a detective to learn intimate knowledge about a friend can be done, that does not mean that it should be done. Scientists refused to use the scientific knowledge on hypothermia acquired through human experiments at German concentration camps in the 1940s because they knew that the knowledge should not have been obtained that way.
We should all be content with our state of unknowing, and not concern ourselves with matters too great or things too wonderful for us. We need to know what knowledge is out of bounds for us and avoid it. Let us be careful lest we crash and burn while traveling on the information superhighway.
Thomas S. Buchanan is the George W. Laird Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Delaware. He has studied at UCSD, Northwestern University, and MIT, and has held visiting professorships at the University of Western Australia and the University of Aix-Marseille. He has served as department chairman, deputy dean, and institute director, president of the American Society of Biomechanics, and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Applied Biomechanics. He is on the Board of Trustees of Saint Katherine College, the editorial board of Touchstone, and the board of The Fellowship of St. James.
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