A story is told about Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936), the English man of letters who wrote newspaper columns as well as essays, novels, and poems. In 1909, he was invited to give a talk to members of the London Times book club. After the talk, his admirers in the audience hurried forward to speak with this literary celebrity.
One of them, a woman, gushed: “Mr. Chesterton, you seem to know everything.” “No, Madam,” the great man replied. “I know nothing. I am a journalist.”
This reply gives me some solace for my own ignorance. Being a journalist does in fact offer me a fine perch for appreciating how little I know. As I move from one topic to the next, week by week, opportunities arise for realizing the vast extent of my nescience, if you will allow me knowledge of a somewhat pedantic Latinism meaning “lack of knowledge.”
According to the Chestertonian standard, journalists have got a head start over other people. We can glory in our superiority by reason of not knowing a whole lot more than do our friends and acquaintances. So, if you often find ignorance in this column, please take it as a strength rather than a weakness.
I have often fantasized about being suddenly dropped, like a dead weight, back into the 13th century. Were that to happen, I could dazzle people of that era by telling them about all the marvelous modern inventions we have in the 21st. Hearing of computers, airliners capable of traveling around the world, cell phones (with the social nuisance they often cause), television, indoor plumbing, plus thousands of other devices, would surely stir them to wonder.
But, if these people of the 13th century took the next logical step and asked me how these technologies are made, I would suddenly lapse into uncomfortable silence. The shocking fact is that I know practically nothing about how they work. Like most other people living in this modern age, I remain ignorant about almost all of the marvelous inventions by which my contemporaries and I live.
The advance of years has brought me an increasingly deeper awareness of ignorance. One great difference has come with this increase, however. Unlike my condition when younger, I now feel free to admit ignorance. At last, it does not bother me to face the vast sea of what I don’t know.
Of course, there is a subtle irony about this situation. The irony lies in the way in which acknowledging ignorance comes close to wisdom. Knowing what you don’t know means that you are advancing toward this virtue, so long associated with the aged. By this standard, some of the people who are aware of their ignorance are the wisest.
My doctrine on not knowing, however, should not be understood as a failure to appreciate learning. Learning something new is one of the best remedies for what ails us, whenever we get down on ourselves and the world. In fact, I love to learn and always recommend it to people at every stage of life.
One of the continuing pleasures of my life is to meet young people who are discovering new fields of knowledge and finding joy in exploring them.
When you get older, learning becomes a somewhat different experience. You do not run the risk of becoming prideful because, by this time, if you have any sense you have learned how much you do not know.
The highest form of not knowing is, of course, not knowing God. As the French social activist Madeleine Debrêl once provocatively wrote: “Faith is the knowledge of our basic ignorance.”
The way of negation, of approaching God, by denying in Him everything merely human, is a time-honored kind of theology. “My ways are not your ways,” says God to the people of the Hebrew Bible, words that the New Testament would surely endorse also.
Though God must inevitably be described by the use of human language and imagery, still the spiritual traditions of the world are at one in denying that we can ever capture God in our words. Theologians who know too much about God are not to be trusted.
No wonder that the distance between belief in God and atheism is so narrow. Serious believers and atheists have more in common than they commonly realize.
Richard Griffin