I acknowledge that if I had been in Eve’s place, it wouldn’t have taken a serpent to convince me to eat fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. I would have wanted it all on my own.
Being in a state of not knowing is difficult for me. Not in the sense that “I need to know how my life is going to turn out,” but because I’m driven by this deep, unexplainable curiosity—I know that all these separate ideas are actually connected, I just need to figure out how. Spotting the pattern, connecting the threads, putting the last puzzle piece in place. This is what it’s like in my brain 90 percent of the time.
It’s not surprising that I ended up in a master’s program about spirituality.
My theory is that many people who are drawn to the spiritual realm have a similar sense of curiosity. The never-ending quest for how all the world’s ideas and sciences and natural wonders tie together lead us, inevitably, to the divine. This is true of Catholics and Protestants, Buddhists, Sikhs, Agnostics, and vehement non-Christians alike.
But the thing about spiritual people and intellectuals both is that we have a tendency to live in our minds and neglect the real world.1
More and more often in my studies, I’m confronted with the truth that knowledge without action is its own particular sin. We’re not just mind and spirit but embodied people living in a physical world among other embodied people and creatures.
In our assigned reading last semester, I came across the four types of knowing. The specifics aren’t important for what I’m getting at here, but I’ll list them to satisfy your curiosity in case you’re like me and you simply must know what they are:
Participatory knowing: Understanding how to participate in the world and having agency as a person willing to do so.
Perspectival knowing: Seeing the world from your unique, embodied perspective.
Procedural knowing: Knowing how to do something.
Propositional knowing: Knowing that something is true.
I’m inclined to live in propositional knowing. This type of knowledge leaves me free to examine ideas and viewpoints from the safety of my own mind. I could easily fall into the false belief that propositional knowing, the seeking after of truth, is the highest form of knowledge.
But just as important as knowing truth is what we do with it.
Do we bring our propositional knowledge to the other types of knowing, willingly taking agency and engaging in the world in a physical, boots-on-the-ground kind of way so that it actually helps and affects other people?
Or do we keep it in our heads, content to live the safe life of intellectualism without action?
This isn’t a rhetorical question; it’s a daily struggle for me. What’s the point of earning a degree in Christian spirituality if I don’t allow the things I’m learning to change me and the way I move throughout the world?
All these thoughts were rolling around in my head, a draft of this essay already half-written, when a book I was proofreading challenged me yet again. (That’s how God pokes and prods at me most often—through the written words of others.)
The book is The Love of Thousands by Christine Valters Paintner (publishing in August 2023); I loved working on it and am sure I’ll talk more about it here after I buy my own copy. At one point in the book, Paintner shares that we learn just as much about God from learning about him and knowing him as we do from the unknowing.
When we don’t think we hear from God, when we’re confused about something, when we’re not sure where to go next, when we’re lost in the dark and silence is pressing in on us . . . we’re coming to know God in a way that isn’t possible through the usual classroom methods.
Sometimes I think our culture, with its emphasis on knowledge and scientific discovery, thinks we can learn everything there is to know about everything through just the one type of knowing without touching the others. Without walking in the dark.
And once we learn it, once we can point to Truth (or the closest we can get on earth) and say, “There it is,” our work is done.
Because I’m prone to this attitude, I have to actively reject it. I have to work hard to remind myself of the knowledge that lives in my body and in the natural world and in the people who have lived before me. I have to take what I’ve learned and unlearned and ask myself, every day, “Knowing what you know, what then will you do?”2
That’s a large part of the reason I started writing here. It’s one small way to process and share what I’m learning. Because if I were left to my own devices, I would’ve sat at the base of the Tree of Knowledge, having eaten my rotten fruit and learned “all,” and stayed there in shame. That’s not who I want to be.
I want to be someone who wanders out of Eden, lost in the dark, and stumbles upon truth rather than stealing it in one fell swoop. I want to feel the humanity of my aching feet rooted in the earth. I want to learn from books and the wind, dreams and ancestors, from the gentle guidance of my own body.
Then I want to walk, wandering and unsure, and talk about everything I do and don’t know with everyone I meet.
A heightened focus on gaining knowledge while neglecting the body and/or regarding the body (and all matter) as evil is the heresy of gnosticism. This podcast episode of The Ezra Klein Show includes a fascinating discussion of AI, modern gnosticism, and the growing disconnect from our bodies and our humanity.
This quote is repeated throughout Visions of Vocation by Steven Garber. It’s been ringing in my ears since the day I read it three years ago, and I expect it’s a question I’ll be asking myself for a lifetime.