44. XLII. Partial and Complete Knowledge

XLII. Partial and Complete Knowledge

Now, as to perfect knowledge and partial knowledge, how are they related to one another in the mind of Paul? It is true that he expressed a very low opinion of partial knowledge: it has to be eliminated and done away with: it must be replaced by another quite different kind of knowledge. This partial knowledge feeds the vanity of man (1 Corinthians 8:2): it tends to make him proud and conceited, and is therefore an extremely dangerous quality. There is nothing Paul dreads more in the nature of man than his tendency to think too much of himself and to put himself in the place of God instead of giving God the glory, (Romans 1:21f.) in other words, to make himself the centre of his universe instead of regarding God as at once the centre of his being and the goal of his development. The result of this is that he loses his perception of the nature of God and his love of God, whom he misrepresents more and more completely in his own imagination. (Modern experience confirms the judgment of Paul that great danger lies in over-estimation of oneself. It is well known that an exaggerated estimate of one’s skill and power proves in many cases to be a sign of incipient insanity. In an asylum for lunatics there is no symptom so widespread as the preoccupation with oneself, one’s powers, one’s rights and one’s wrongs. The patient lives in a world of his own, created by his individual fancy. In the thought and view of Paul, to mistake one’s true relation to the world involves a misapprehension of the nature and the purpose of God. If the mistake and misapprehension goes too far in a certain direction, it takes a form which we now label by the title insanity. I knew of one case in which a lunatic believed himself to be God, and wrote out his edicts in that character and with that signature; and an experienced physician told me that this same delusion was far from being unparalleled in asylums.) In the Corinthian congregation Paul recognised that there existed a certain tendency towards self-complacency, and especially towards an over-estimation of their knowledge. This tendency to self-confidence is deep-seated in the Greek character: it has often led to bold action and success, but far more frequently it is the cause of failure. The Christians in Corinth were very conscious of, and confident in, their knowledge, whereas they had as yet not acquired any true and real knowledge. Paul has in his mind as one of the guiding purposes of the first Corinthian Epistle the desire to put clearly before his readers the difference between the lower and the higher knowledge, and to make them look on towards the higher and never rest contented with the lower.

Yet even in the same Epistle where he warns his readers so often and so emphatically of the danger of partial knowledge it is characteristic of Paul that he pictures true and perfect knowledge in the most entrancing fashion. As Dr. Harnack says, “he contemplates it in trembling emotion and in ardent impulse “. . . as “the absolutely best”. He does not warn the Corinthians against knowledge, but only against a danger that is connected with knowledge. He lauds it as “the absolutely best,” provided that the true knowledge, perfect and face to face with God, is understood as the object of his panegyric.

According to Dr. Harnack’s interpretation, “this perfect knowledge is not to be expected till that which is perfect has come, that is when (through the second appearance of Christ) this temporal life suddenly comes to an end”, Hence he finds that Paul draws an absolute line of separation between the partial knowledge and the perfect knowledge. The “perfect will suddenly appear” through “a future event,” viz., “the second appearance of Christ”. (Expositor, June, 1912, p. 493.) The present partial knowledge can never grow into the perfect: “no bridge leads from the partial to the whole”. The imperfect must be cast aside before the perfect knowledge can come. This interpretation of Paul’s doctrine is not in harmony with the view which we take of his attitude towards the problems of life. It regards Paul’s doctrine as static and unphilosophic; whereas in our view the world is to Paul always changing, and the purpose of God rules the world towards development or growth. All that we have just quoted from Dr. Harnack is said quite truly; but it states only one side of the truth, and it requires to be completed. There are two sides to the phenomenon of growth; there is always a past and a future, but the present is only an abstraction; the present has no sooner been observed than it has disappeared and become a thing of the past, while a new stage, which was previously in the future, has taken its place, destined in its turn to pass away forthwith.

It is quite true that perfect knowledge is a thing of the future. But Paul can always say the same about all perfecting, all attaining, and all Salvation: they are in the future. Yet he can say equally emphatically (and even more frequently so far as Salvation is concerned) that they are in the present; they are here and now. The whole of life is a process of attaining, of reaching forward to that which is beyond, of constantly apprehending and then of finding that the Divine towards which one strives is still beyond, and that one must strive onwards towards it by a fresh effort. Paul fully recognises that on the one hand Christ is in him, and that his life has been merged in Christ and therefore has been perfected; but on the other hand he equally and even more emphatically recognises that his life is a struggle against the evil which constantly besets him; “I myself with the mind serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin”; and therefore he longs and prays to be “delivered out of the body of this death”. (Romans 7:25;Romans 7:24.) He is made perfect, and he is not yet made perfect: he is saved, and yet he is only in process of being saved, and is working out his own salvation with the whole energy of mind and will and effort.

Perfect knowledge, then, is a thing of the future: it lies ever before us; but I cannot persuade myself that Dr. Harnack is wholly right in positing as the Pauline doctrine that this knowledge is irreconcilable with our progress in this life, and is attained only in the final cataclysm by a stroke from without at the second coming of Christ. Are we not (according to Paul) attaining towards it in this life? Is not the knowledge of God something towards which we are growing? Is it not implied in Salvation? Can man be saved except through knowing God? Is not the whole of life either, on the one hand a process of losing right conception of God, and passing through stage after stage of idolatry and falsehood towards utter separation from Him and ignorance of Him, or on the other hand a process of learning to know God as He is? Paul prays “that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him; having the eyes of your heart enlightened that ye may know” the hope, the will and the power of God. (Ephesians 1:18f.) In these words the Apostle evidently is picturing a process of gradual enlightenment, i.e. of partial knowledge growing towards perfect knowledge. This partial knowledge does not require to be cast aside before the perfect can come: it is antiquated and set aside through growing into the perfect. Borrowing the words of Dr. Harnack, we believe that “a bridge leads from the partial to the whole”.

It is true that this quotation is from Ephesians, which some hesitate to accept as fully Pauline; (Dr. Harnack was doubtful when he wrote Chronologie der altchr. Litt., i. p. 239, I think that he feels now less hesitation.) but to the judgment of the present writer it expresses plainly and characteristically the law of right life as a development towards wisdom through revelation, the end of the development being the perfect knowledge of God, attained finally only in the coming of Christ, but yet in process of being acquired in every step of right knowing. In 1 Corinthians 2:9 f the same truth is expressed emphatically, for it lies at the basis of Paul’s thought: “Whatsoever things God prepared for them that love Him: unto us God revealed them through the Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God . . . we received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things which are freely given us of God”. Paul here speaks in the first person; but what he says is fully applicable to all the saints. The life of the saint is a gradual process of attaining, through the continuous steps of revelation, unto the knowledge of God and the deep things of God.

It is true that Paul might differ from some modern opinion, perhaps from modern views generally, as to what knowledge is worth attaining, and what knowledge leads on towards a right conception of God. The purely verbal and worthless speculation to which the age was given seemed to him, beyond doubt, to be empty, useless, false and bad, because it did not clarify men’s minds about God. But was he wrong in that? He condemned, as one cannot doubt, all the science of the time; but that pseudo-science was false in method and devoid of results. It only spread idle fancies through the “educated” world of that time: the more men learned about nature from the popular teaching of the time, the less they knew. No condemnation could be too strong for the current methods of substituting knowledge of words for the study of things. In this judgment Paul was not wrong.

It would, of course, be absurd to say that Paul would have distinguished between right and false scientific method in the study of nature, if the question had been put to him. He knew and condemned the false: he did not know or dream about the true. He would save his own people from empty and foolish speculation. It was not his province, nor did it lie within his power, to teach true method in science. He would turn men from idle talk to study the nature of God in the love of God: he knew nothing else worthy of attention in the world.

It would, however, be equally absurd to argue that, because Paul condemned all the scientific speculation of his time, and because he did not make any exception in favour of the right study of nature, about which he knew nothing, therefore he condemned all that he did not know. There can be little doubt that Paul accepted the principle that he who learns to know the works of God, is learning to know partially the nature of God; (That is implied in repeated statements of his: God has in His works shown His nature and His goodness. Through them the pagan world had the opportunity of learning something about Him in the simple contemplation of His good gifts to men; and some pagans had made good use of this opportunity.) but, for himself, he had never come into contact with any formal scientific study conceived in the spirit of truth; and probably he may have disbelieved in the possibility of right method in such study. We must not, however, transform a negative into a positive prohibition, when we try to state fairly and understand rightly the teaching of Paul. In our modern application of the teaching of Paul we have to ask whether or not any modern institution is in accordance with the essential spirit of his thought, and not whether he condemned a contemporary makeshift which was lacking in all the quality that makes the modern institution worth having.

Paul had a right conception of the growth of knowledge. He did not think that it consisted in adding part to part, and unit to unit. It was, in his view, not a process of simple addition, but a process of creation. The whole is more than the collocation of the parts: there is something vital and spiritual imparted to it beyond the sum of the parts, which makes it a new creature. At every step in the path of knowledge, one eliminates and does away the old, and remakes one’s vision of the world: one learns and knows that the old vision was inadequate and therefore false: one sees facts in a new correlation: something of what had been dark in the world around becomes illuminated and clear. This is not a mere addition of a new element: it is the introduction of a transforming element. In Pauline language it comes, not in word, but in power; and “out of three sounds one makes, not a fourth sound, but a star”. This principle Paul applied only to moral and religious growth in knowledge, for there was in the world of contemporary thought no other department in which it could be applied. (An exception should perhaps in some degree be made in regard to medicine, which, however, though growing, was largely empirical and not scientific in its method.) In the progress of thought the same principle is now employed far more widely than Paul dreamed of; but such wider application of Pauline principle is not unPauline; it was simply outside of his range and his interest. But an objection may be brought against the view which we have stated: is it not an essential condition of the perfect knowledge that it comes through revelation? Does not this make an impassable division between the perfect and the partial? The perfect knowledge is the intuition of God: the partial knowledge is a study of details in nature.

One may define revelation too narrowly. Revelation is proportioned and suited to the character of different men. God speaks in many voices. The act whereby the human mind, after combining detail with detail, adds to the parts that indescribable element which vitalises the whole into a new creation and a new stage in knowledge, is essentially creative and spiritual. Does it come wholly from within the man? Is it not the result of the firm grasp of the Divine unity and plan in the world, and therefore in a sense given by a power without, which seizes and holds the mind of the discoverer? It may be said that the process and growth of the partial knowledge is essentially different from the gift of the perfect knowledge, which is recognised intuitively by the Divine spirit within the man. But does not the Divine plan of the universe, as comprehended to some degree in the process of partial knowledge, place some knowledge of God within the mind? It is true that some have refused to see this, and have denied the existence of God, while they study nature. They deny they know not what.

It may be said, also, that the process of acquiring partial knowledge is different, not in degree, but in kind from the process of perfect knowledge. But one may well be doubtful about the distinction. We know too little to justify us in distinguishing degree from kind in such process; and it is always uncertain whether difference of degree may not be intensified until it becomes difference in kind. This all hangs on the meaning and nature of development.

One thing seems certain, that it was impossible at that time to apprehend the scientific spirit in knowledge. The world of the Mediterranean lands had entered on a period of deterioration in the realm of thought. The great period of Greek progress had passed away, and centuries had to elapse before a new time of progressive thought was to begin. In a time of such deterioration, the spirit of progress seemed to have almost wholly disappeared. This spirit is hostile to the selfishness and the arrogant conceit which Paul dreaded so much in the nature of men. In the ardour of discovery all thought of self perishes; and there remains only the eagerness of the search for the truth. The happiness of discovery contains an element of the Divine quality: in its highest manifestation it is unselfish and wholly directed to the unseen, the eternal, and the law of the universe: it does not conduce to self-glorification and self-congratulation, but rather to the recognition of the infinite external power that moves through the processes of nature: it strengthens the love of truth and the zeal for truth within its own range: it makes the discoverer of knowledge set truth above self: it raises men above the sordid glories of international strife and the vulgar struggles of political contention, and places him in the serener atmosphere of eternal truth and the laws of nature.

We cannot for a moment suppose that Paul was aware of this side of knowledge; but we do maintain that he stated principles which are applicable forthwith to this and every other new aspect of a life wider than that which Paul knew. The development of modern study has widened our knowledge of the works of God, and shown sides of the Divine action and purpose which formerly were not dreamed of. Yet the principles laid down by Paul, when rightly understood, remain as true about the new methods as they were about the old.