The Blackberry Walk

Two white doves fly upwards interweaving one another towards the sky. Their names? Knowledge and Wisdom. Over the course of the history of the West, however, Wisdom has become ill and injured trying to keep up with Knowledge; all the while, Knowledge attempts to make up for Wisdom’s absence, flying ever faster, only dizzying himself in the process. The Church has left a whole in the culture. The tradition the Church maintained was a wisdom tradition: an institution aiming to spread wisdom to far off parishes, posh or poor, urban or rural, through the faith. But trust in the Faith to spread wisdom has been injured by the Cambrian-like explosion of knowledge. ‘Through knowledge, we can understand what is right’, they may say. Can science truly show us how to be moral? You can take statistics and organise case studies, but will your findings figure out a new morality, or merely shine light on the ghost of the Church, leaving a Christ-shaped shadow? Whilst knowledge may give us insight into the truth of how the world is, it has no value in showing how the world ought. How should one live and interact with the world? The climatologist could say “kill yourself – you’re merely a drain on the environment”, whilst the psychologist could say “go insane – then we’ll be able to collect more knowledge on insane people”. But they wouldn’t, would they. Wisdom gives us the map of value, the intelligibility, or logos of the world. The Church is wise because they are followers of Jesus Christ: logos manifested in this world. Only through His example can the meaning and value of the world be fully understood. Granted, many have grasped the world before Him – it’s not as if the Confucian Chinese in the 4th century BC had no good ideas on ethics – but they only witnessed glimpses of the truth, fragments of wisdom. We’re each born with the fragments of an ancient map from before the fall, a map representing how one should live. But when Christ – the full map of the globe with every dell and mound – is presented to us, should we not study His life and learn from Him? In our “post-Christian” world, we have the hubris to think that stapling together the world’s map fragments along with our own cultural doodles will guide us and give us wisdom. Granted, Christendom never followed Christ all too perfectly – symbols are inexhaustible and bottomless, so they can’t fully be understood – and like with any institution there was corruption in the Church. But as C. S. Lewis said, we are ‘men without chests’, and we suffer from a cross-shaped hole in our hearts. Knowledge begins to falter, exhausted at his Icarus-like heights. But will Wisdom be well enough to catch him?