Amazing knowledge, amazing grace

Perhaps one of the most remarkable and widely misunderstood words in the modern world is “to know,” or its cousin, “knowledge.” The Latin word for “knowledge,” scientia, gives us our word for “science,” a quintessentially modern way of generating a vast body of “knowledge.”  Yet, the way Adam “knew” Eve in Genesis 4:1 reflects something quite different.

In fact, there are many kinds of knowing: to know a friend, to know a spouse, to know how to ride a bicycle, to know that 2+2=4, to know about Mendeleev’s Periodic Table of the Elements that underlies modern chemistry and even molecular biology, to know the Bible, to know God …

Yet, it is almost breathtakingly wondrous that we human creatures of the earth (which is what adam means) actually know anything at all, that our brains are capable of sustaining understanding.  Knowing is something special.  By it we can comprehend the whole universe.  Yet it is simple and basic.  Who is not touched by the growing awareness conveyed through the eyes of an infant?  Perhaps most deeply, we can share our hearts and innermost thoughts and come to a knowledge of another human being—another like ourselves, yet of unfathomable depth and mystery.  We can know love.

Knowledge connects us to the world outside ourselves through perception, understanding, and memory.  It enables us to relate to other human beings, as we come to “know” them in the various aspects of their relationships with us, for better or for worse.  It relates us to the wider world through literature and “science” as we learn about the world around us from reading and study, or just from living in it.  All knowledge is in some way mediated through the communities in which we live and work.  Children pick up basic knowledge of the world from their families, friends, and the social situations in which they live.  Later they learn in schools and universities.

Knowledge is a very important word in scripture, with the Hebrew verb yada, to know, occurring 923 times in the Old Testament and the related noun, da’at, knowledge, occurring 91 times.  Biblical knowing is more concerned with action than with abstraction.  In the Scriptural narrative human beings are made in the image and likeness of God.  They are made the way they are so they can “know” one another and “know” and “be known” by God.   “Knowing” and “love” are not unrelated.  Yet knowledge has its good and its ill aspects, as the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” in the garden demonstrates. Adam clearly “knew” something of the world and of Eve before they ate of the fruit, but the story first speaks of human knowing in Genesis 3:5-7: after they ate the fruit “the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked.” 

There is something key about getting a good grasp on what “knowledge” is all about, and why it plays such a major role in scripture and culture.  It has many dimensions, and John Paul II’s reflections on knowledge through the perspective of Genesis opens up a window on the depths of meaning behind the simple act of “knowing.”   It is an aspect of God's good gift (grace) in creation: it takes us out of ourselves and connects us with the world, with others, and with God.  Knowing involves our bodies, surely at least our minds and hearts, and clearly comes within the scope of the Theology of the Body.

What it means “to know” is something that will take some time to explore, something I hope we can begin to do on this blog in the coming weeks and months.