Our tour of
the gifts of the Holy Spirit has taken us to gift number five, which is the
gift of knowledge. Or as I prefer to
call it, based on its Latin name, the gift of science.
Now I
realize that in our modern use of the word ‘science’ we don’t exactly experience
it as a mystical gift of the Holy Spirit. The word science has been degraded
(yes) from its rich and full medieval expression to a much more circumscribed
and limited usage—namely the experimental physical sciences by which we learn
through a disciplined process (the scientific method) the verifiable properties
of physical objects of various kinds.
This was not
unknown in the medieval world, although the silly historical illiterates called
the New Atheists like to pretend it was. Scientific research and progress, and
the technical innovations that arise from that, were part of the High Middle
Ages, more often than not happening in the monasteries that were the locus of
intellectual life in that era.
The
medievals had a much broader concept of scientia
than that, however. Their concept of science and knowledge was broad enough
that they could speak of its highest expression in the gift of the Holy Spirit
of knowledge.
The science
yielded by the physical experimental sciences is of tremendous value, as far as
it goes. It tells us how things work, and how they work in concert with one
another. Because of that, it tells us how we can make things work for us to
achieve purposes of our own design. All of which is good, very good indeed.
What the
physical sciences cannot tell us is what things are, and what things are for.
And any real scientist is quite happy to acknowledge that. We know quite a
bit about how oak trees work—photosynthesis and root systems and all that. The
experimental sciences have not a word to tell us about what an oak tree really
is, or what an oak tree is really for.
Now, if we
were content to leave it at that—yes, botany cannot tell us these things—that
would be fine. But in our modern utterly illogical and unscientific thought
processes, we declare more often than not that because botany cannot tell us
these things, these questions are meaningless and cannot be answered by any
other science, any other knowledge.
That this is
a statement that derives from no scientific experiment (and cannot) and is as
thorough-goingly metaphysical and indeed theological in its scope and claims
utterly eludes the poor modern materialist who (I hate to break it to him) is
not nearly as smart as he thinks he is. Indeed, if the question is declared
meaningless and void, then the claim is that all physical objects, which
includes you and me, are nothing but assemblages of atoms in various
patterns—there is no inherent reality to things, and certainly no purpose.
I am going
on at a bit of length about this because we cannot understand the Spirit’s gift
of knowledge without challenging something of the inadequacy of our modern
notion of ‘science’. But that’s enough about that.
Knowledge is
that gift of the Spirit by which we come to see all created beings as God sees
them. Instead of our narrow and limited human view, by which we only see other
creatures as either serving our purposes or impeding them, as giving us delight
or causing us sorrow, and in which we see our own selves even more dimly and
inaccurately, God wants us to share in His own God’s-eye-view of creation.
To see that
the oak tree is a thing that gives glory to God, that in its beauty and
strength it speaks of the beauty and strength of God, His protection, His
goodness manifest in a tree. And a tree is one thing; my brother or my sister,
the stranger on the street is quite another. Knowledge allows us to penetrate
the veil of appearances and reactions, our own selfish and limited perspective
of one another, and see the person as God sees them. Knowledge also gives us
the ability to put creation in its proper place—a good and delightful thing,
given to us to manifest God’s glory and serve our real needs in this life, but
not the ultimate good, not the ultimate point.
Knowledge
allows us to love creation with making it into an idol, to affirm the goodness
of everything God has made while holding that goodness to be very little and
unimportant compared to the goodness of God.
From
knowledge, then, we have the wisdom to apply our mastery of the physical
sciences, our insights into how things work, so that we use them not simply to
do whatever we think is best, but to really serve the good of humanity.
The Spirit’s
gift of science, then, orders all the other sciences of our human intellect so
that they serve the true good, the true dignity and value of the human person. In
our world today when science is used to pour poisons into the earth, air, and
water, when it is used to kill unborn children and the elderly, and mutilate men
and women confused about their genders, we need the science of the Spirit to
show us the truth of things, and of people.
Come, Holy
Spirit.
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