A colleague and friend, Don Palmer, kindly let me borrow a book on theological thinking a few weeks ago (he will get it back one day!) One of the many good things in that small volume was this little gem from St Bernard of Clairvaux who wrote:
“There are those who seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge; that is Curiosity. There are those who seek knowledge to be known by others; that is Vanity. There are those who seek knowledge in order to serve; that is Love.”
Bernard did have a serious run in with Peter Abelard over Peter’s book on the Trinity, and got him to burn it, which just goes to show that we should always be prepared to interrogate our heroes! Nevertheless, Bernard’s comments are worth holding on to. Because the temptation to seek knowledge to serve self-interest lies at the heart of how we relate to God.
You see it most obviously in the story of the fall in the book of Genesis, where humanity striving for knowledge, misses the point of what it means to be created in the image of God. Some people misunderstand this passage and interpret it to mean that God has a downer on the acquisition of knowledge. To strive after knowledge, they argue, is to put ourselves in the place of God and behave like Icarus (and we all know what happened to that proud individual!) As a result of such thinking, folks such as scientists and theologians are viewed with equal suspicion. Too much knowledge is a dangerous thing, they say. Just ask Adam and Eve.
But this, as I say, misses the point. The point is not the acquisition of knowledge as such, but the acquisition of knowledge in the proper context of loving dependency. Adam and Eve were not cursed because of their desire for knowledge but for their faithlessness. They had striven for knowledge without reference to their Creator. They had lost touch with the font of all knowledge. They had set themselves adrift from the one who sustained them and provided for them. That is the point of the story – their desire for knowledge was not motivated by love.
In the other great story about knowledge (or, rather, the lack of it) - the book of Job - we find our hero, Job, questioning the purposes of God when he suffers for no apparent reason. At the climax of the book, God responds, but in his response he does not give what we would like to call a definitive answer. God appears in the whirlwind – he offers himself to Job and to his comforters (who incidentally, have been attempting to provide a definitive answer throughout the entire book) but he doesn't offer an answer, because God does not give answers – he gives himself.
What this means for us is that in all our dealings with God and other human beings, knowing the right answer is never going to be enough. God and people aren't so many Sudoku puzzles to be solved. Rather, we are to present ourselves as available, vulnerable people who seek the truth in love. Not for what we might get out of such truth, but simply that we might be truly present to the other person in love, not in judgement or condemnation.
As we move into the season of Lent, may we recognise the importance of a loving search for truth which is never carried out for its own sake, but for the sake of our fellow human beings and so for the sake of the one who for our sakes became poor, that we might become rich.
