The More We Know The Less We Need To Know

Much knowledge has much advantage, and the best of it is the knowledge of being that has its centre in unknowing. The more we know, the more we know we don’t know. Or, put another way, the more we know, the less we need to know, for knowledge is a farce without the wisdom to handle our knowledge properly.

Many ‘learned’ people make an ass of the law of knowledge. They make something that was supposed to free us into something tyrannical. They lord their ‘knowledge’ over people in great swabs of ignoble snobbery.

Now that might be okay in the secular line of things, but it’s not of the Kingdom.

Much knowledge brings us to another idea. It brings us to challenge every conception of dogma that isolates and doesn’t include. It brings us into a space where pride over intellectual conquests makes way for a calm, humble, and sociable maturity.

What other use is knowledge — and much of it — other than to genuinely refine us, which is the polar antithesis of an outcome breeding a superiority complex?

The more we know — actually know — and are comfortable knowing — the less we need to prove what we know. We may easily and often give way to the one who insists they know better. Proving what we know is beside the point. Getting a point over on someone, because we can, is neither loving nor beneficial for anyone.

The more we know, the more comfortable we are that we will never know everything. And the more we know, the more palatable a fallible memory will be. Who of us knows if we’ll have Alzheimer’s a year from now? We think we are so immune to any such thing — but that’s what the sufferer thought not long back now. None of this happens to us. Or would you prefer some strange aneurism?

Much knowledge is nothing to be prideful about. Chances are we are born into the sorts of opportunities our knowledge has afforded us.

Knowledge is nothing without love. But love and her virtues make a meal of knowledge, putting it to good use for the Kingdom.

Knowledge is great, but not if we are a know-it-all. Then our knowledge is a source of obnoxious tolerance, at best, and ridicule, at worst. No good thing comes from that.

But when we use our knowledge to build people up, we bless everyone who witnesses such a thing. That’s a refined and humbled and most worthy knowledge.

Knowing much is most about knowing that we don’t need to know so much.

© 2015 S. J. Wickham.