Some Reflections on Knowledge
From the Desk of Chris Kuebler, Intern (and 2023-24 Fellow, 2024-25 Fellows Co-leader)
Last semester I had the privilege of leading the Fellows’ discussion on John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University, in which Newman outlines his model for what a university ought to be. He argues that the university exists for “teaching universal knowledge” (p. xxxvii) and that theology, as a branch of knowledge, ought to be taught at such an institution. Whether or not you agree with Newman’s thesis (which the Fellows heartily discussed), I don’t think I am being controversial in asserting with Newman that the diffusion of knowledge—i.e., the spread of knowledge from one person or source to other people via teaching and learning—of whatever branch, whether it be chemistry, philosophy, or linguistics, is a cardinal function of a university. And I’ve been reflecting on what this diffusion of knowledge entails and why we should care about it: Is it just a mechanistic transmission of information (spoiler: I don’t think it is), or is it something more personal and spiritual? Does it matter how we go about such diffusion of knowledge, whether in the university or other educational communities such as Cambridge House?
If you’ll pardon some formal language, it seems to me that the diffusion of knowledge involves (at least) three elements, to which I’d like to direct your attention: (1) the object of knowledge, which is truth, (2) the subjects of knowledge, i.e., the teachers who know and the students who are yet to know, and (3) the act of coming-to-know, or the way by which one moves from unknowing to knowing.
Reflecting on each of these categories, I think, can help reveal the dignity of this diffusion of knowledge as something more than, say, dissemination of data. For example, the object of knowledge–that is, the truth–is worthy of our consideration because the nature of the truth is intimately bound up with God. Wherever we find the truth in a historical event or a fact about a flower, for instance, there we may come to know the creatures and works of God, which point to God himself. Even further, if we are inclined to agree with Aquinas, then God is the truth itself (Summa Theologica I, q. 16, a. 5). After all, Jesus has made the proclamation: “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). The truth, then, is sacred in some respect.
And since knowledge does not exist without its knower, it is good to appreciate the worthiness not only of the truth, but also of those who stand under the truth, including the members of any academic community. By this, I mean in one sense to acknowledge professors as knowers and students as those who seek to know, cherishing the special capacity of human beings to know things rationally as God has created us to know things. In another sense, however, I mean to acknowledge people not as intellects floating in a vacuum but as embodied creatures who live in a specific place and time. Indeed, W. B. Yeats wrote, “God guard me from the thoughts men think / In the mind alone” (“A Prayer for Old Age”), lines by which Wendell Berry brought up a similar point. Our incarnation is integral to our selves and thus to the nature of our rational power as it is exercised in the classroom or wherever else we find ourselves.
Consideration is due also to the ways in which we, these embodied knowers bearing God’s image, go about acquiring knowledge. How do we normally come to know things, and how ought we? To illustrate, consider that the act of coming-to-know can be borne of vice or of virtue, an idea I’m borrowing from theologian John Webster’s essay “Curiosity.” An unchastened appetite for new knowledge, Webster states, is a vicious curiosity—or intellectual greed—that does not recognize knowledge’s proper end in God and that may inflame the ego, as it inhabits the intellectually arrogant person. Whereas a humble and grace-filled searching for the truth marks a virtuous mode of learning, one in which our minds rest in the truth as a gift illumined from above. If the act of coming-to-know has such a moral aspect, then how might we ensure that we don’t fall into intellectual sin? Can we identify our intellectual limits as finite creatures to guard against hubris?
I offer these brief thoughts not to prescribe action but rather to give the sense that the diffusion of knowledge is a theologically rich occurrence, and thus it is good to reflect on what we learn, who we are as learners and teachers, and how we learn. Whether at a university or a Christian study center, attending to such theological underpinnings can help us appreciate whatever academic activity we are called to conduct.