Letter #21: The Burden of Unknowing

We Cannot Bear that We Cannot Know

Yes, yes, yes, exactly, my lad, this is the heart of it. “The space between.” This is where the humanity happens. This is the factory where souls are made.

One of the hardest weights for the heart to carry is the burden of unknowing, that distance between ourselves and the ultimate truth of things. In life, we cannot know that truth in all its glory. Emmanuel Kant got this right. We can know our human perceptions of things, but not the things in themselves.

Think how often this troubles our theology. The questions of predestination and free will, for instance. We torment ourselves with wondering whether we are damned unfairly without appeal — damned before we’ve even made our choice for good or evil. Do we even have such a choice, or is everything determined from the start?

But these concerns are beyond us. God lives in eternity where all time exists at once. There is no “pre” in such a consciousness. There are no causes, no effects. These are human matters because we live in time and cannot even imagine reality without it. How does judgement work? How can mercy and justice be reconciled, or God’s dominion and our freedom be made one? We cannot know and we cannot bear that we cannot know. We see through a glass darkly, and long to see face to face.

As a result, we are plagued with two species of foolishness: the belief that there is no spiritual truth and the belief that we always know exactly what that truth is. We fall prey to the tolerance of evil, yes, but also to intolerance of the eccentric varieties of God’s dazzling creation. Of course — of course — there are stark and obvious spiritual truths. But there are small-minded pieties too that masquerade as truths, and harden our hearts against pity and forgiveness. At the crisis point, we can only strive in love toward the source of love through this present darkness.

But here’s the thing. This has to be what flesh is made for, this very odyssey of body and mind. John Keats, in one of his brilliant speculative letters, said that this world is a “vale of soul-making,” where “sparks which are God… have identity given to them.” Surely, this transformation occurs through the embodied individual’s struggle to connect with the living Truth across the gap that separates us, across “the space between.”

This is the dilemma you and I are talking about. This is why innovations threaten us, and what it is we are struggling to preserve.

We want more knowledge. We want more health. We want more pills and gizmos to give us comfort and joy and maybe even wisdom. No one wants to suffer. No one wants to die. But take away our flesh and the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to and you take away the map of the territory through which we make the journey to our souls.

Xx Dad