Bliss is Ignorance

As the adage has it, ignorance is bliss. This may be so when related to the innocence of young children who, still unexposed to evil, are content in their trustful openness to the world and its wonders. For the rest of us, though, ignorance is not bliss. It is intellectual blindness.

It is a blindness we let develop as we willfully accede to the abandonment of truth. Like Esau trading his birthright for a pot of porridge, we surrender our dignity as seekers of the truth for the security of the sterile comfort cocoon spawned by technology and hawked by relativism.  Consider how supinely we tolerate academia’s abandoning the humanities, society’s quelling of free speech, and Hollywood’s lampooning religion.

It isn’t that we don’t hunger for the truth. We yearn for something beyond ourselves, a yearning that is as ancient as man himself. But we allow this hunger to be dulled by the soothing effects of materialism and the reassuring falsehood of modern Gnosticism. Like the power of a mother’s lullaby on an infant, the power of rationalism lulls us into a soporific trance that shields us from the invigorating challenge of truth, the source of reason.  As we fall more and more from the pursuit of truth we  persuade ourselves that we are blissful. But in fact, like the proverbial frog in boiling water, we are ignorant of our own ignorance. 

We sacrifice our own liberty while ignoring that most powerful biblical injunction: “the truth shall set you free’.  But we are not frogs. We are men, and ‘for us men and our salvation’ the Incarnation occurred.  The grace of the Incarnation infuses our longing for freedom and therefore for truth. While we can be temporarily satisfied by other allurements, our desire for truth will not be fooled. The words of two visionaries encourage our hopes. In the writings of Isaiah we read: “…for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord (truth) as the sea is full of water”. Over two millennia later Teilhard de Chardin predicts that mankind, inevitably faced with the choice between governing systems based on involuntary totalitarianism or based on voluntary charity, will choose the latter. 

Catholic philanthropy – really all philanthropy rooted in the Jewish and Christian scriptures – promotes and supports the pursuit of truth. It understands that this immutable, eternal force is the font from which we draw the waters of purpose, dignity and freedom. For Christians, the understanding is even more profound. Christ said: ‘Anyone committed to the truth hears my voice” (Jn.18:36) and those who do so may come to believe that he is ‘the way, the truth and the life’ (Jn. 14:6). 

The meaning and implications of ‘hearing his voice’ will become ever more clear as the Kingdom advances and our blissful ignorance transforms into our joyful awareness.