Letter #22: What Do You Know?

A chasm in the heart of man.

Hey, you know what I just realized, reading your last letter? The problem of unknowing is actually why we’re here. I mean, the reason we’re talking about any of this is the scientific revolution, right? We feel this conversation is necessary because humanity is approaching a point where we can move computer cursors with our brains but we can’t understand our own minds. We can feed millions of bodies, but our souls are starved. And there’s no question that both conditions—the physical power and the spiritual loss—arose slowly but surely out of changes set in motion during the 16th and 17th centuries, in the heat of the scientific revolution. 

Usually, that revolution is defined by its discoveries—it’s presented as the time when we learned that the earth revolves around the sun, that gravity moves the planets and not angels. When the light of knowledge broke in on the dark of Medieval ignorance.

But I’ve studied the period pretty intensely, and in fact it was an agony of unknowing, a collapse of all the things we once felt sure were true. The printing press and the Protestant reformation called Church authority dramatically into question. Aristotle’s physics and metaphysics, which reigned supreme in the Medieval universities, buckled under the weight of internal contradictions and new observations. Suddenly an old question that once seemed settled came roaring vengefully back from the mouth of Pontius Pilate: what is truth?

The definitive thinkers of the time were hunting, sometimes desperately, for an answer. As you pointed out in your essay, Shakespeare identified the source of the catastrophe when he made Hamlet, prince of uncertainty, come from Wittenberg, the city of Luther. The Hamlets of real life made history by trying to make knowledge secure again. René Descartes famously thought he could be sure that his mind existed, even if every sensory experience was an illusion: “I think, therefore I am.” In England, Francis Bacon argued almost the opposite: that direct sense experience should be the starting point, the sure and certain source of physical facts.

Gradually what this did was open up a chasm in the heart of man, a dividing line between body and soul: there were physical facts, known by the senses. And there were pure ideas, known by the mind. That middle space, the region of the embodied soul—that vale of soul making you wrote about and that living word I mentioned—that crucial third term was lost from the equation. 

And I think that’s about where we are: approaching the natural endpoint of our five-hundred-year crisis of unknowing, where brains abstracted into code will toy with bodies of meat and steel. The devil’s offer was an offer to gain knowledge that would make us like gods. But it has made us unlike ourselves, and cut us off from the true God. Our salvation must lie in becoming ourselves again, those creatures who live in the meeting of spirit and flesh.

Love,
Spencer