The Tragedy of Knowledge
This post was not written using AI.
This morning before dawn I was listening to a version of the old Orkney ballad, “The Selkie of Sule Skerry.” (Sule Skerry is a remote Hebridean rock in the vicinity of North Rona, once Britain’s remotest inhabited island1 — and if the romance of the outlying islands of Scotland has never touched you, I send prayers it does soon.) I felt how rich this song is, like all the old magical ballads; there are folksongs, however old, and then there are the songs like this one that are more than old. They touch the Otherworld; they’re a witness to ways of the soul that we’ve forgotten. Consequently they are unfathomable and inexhaustible. However many of the prismatic meanings they contain you’re able to feel and express, there are more, and in each of those meanings, there are depths that forever escape you. This is why they enchant us, this is why we return to them again and again, this is why they give us tears that we can’t explain, this is why they make our hair stand on end (and this, by the way, was Robert Graves’ definition of real poetry, that is, poetry that atavistically recalls the origins of poetry in the cult of the Goddess).
My younger daughter, my “late lamb,” turned four recently, and she was given some books. It was a late night for me yesterday so my dear wife took on story reading duties for the evening as I went to bed, and I heard the beginning of one of these new books. I knew immediately where it was going: it was a lovely illustrated expression of the old Sagan trope that the universe is magnificent, and we’ve made of stardust. How my child’s heart loved that message back when Cosmos first fired my imagination (please, if you watch this, watch the original and not the ghastly new version starring the physicist who shall not be named).
We’re made of stardust… But Carl, who cares? Why does that make us magnificent? I’ve learned what makes us magnificent: the fact that we can marvel at being made of stardust. The human heart is greater than the whole physical universe. Galaxies may physically dwarf us, but our hearts spiritually dwarf the galaxies.
All bodies, the firmament, the stars, the earth and its kingdoms, are not equal to the lowest mind; for mind knows all these and itself; and these bodies nothing. All bodies together, and all minds together, and all their products, are not equal to the least feeling of charity. This is of an order infinitely more exalted. From all bodies together, we cannot obtain one little thought; this is impossible and of another order. From all bodies and minds, we cannot produce a feeling of true charity; this is impossible and of another and supernatural order.
Pascal, Pensée 793
And thus my knowledge — real knowledge, mind you, spiritual knowledge, a deep, deep truth — shuts the door to the wonder that child felt watching Sagan take flight in the starship of his imagination: because I can see the falsehood in his story. And again, not an incidental falsehood: a fatal, distorting falsehood that is part and parcel of a web of lies that today threatens to devour the deep culture of the human heart and lays waste to the creation of God: one element in the creed of reductive scientism.
And I thought, this morning under the moon: this indeed is the tragedy of the knowledge of good and evil. Even if we do no evil, our mere knowledge of good and evil separates us from innocence.
How then, if God knows all things, is God pure? Is there a purity that remains unspotted, shining beneath all things?
No answer to that is forthcoming but the question rests in my heart.
Perhaps there is an answer that can be felt but not spoken in the depths of some magical old ballad.
In 1680, Reverend Daniel Morison reported of these islanders that there were five families living there who take their surname from the colour of the sky, rainbow, and clouds, and that they repeat the Lord’s Prayer, Creed, and Ten Commandments in the chapel every Sunday morning. They have cows, sheep, barley and oats, and live a harmless life, being perfectly ignorant of most of those vices that abound in the world. They know nothing of money or gold, having no occasion for either.