Day: February 27, 2022

“Then shall I know even as also I am known”

Quinquagesima Sunday makes explicit the logic which underlies the ‘gesima’ Sundays and which runs through the whole pageant of Lent which begins with Ash Wednesday this week. “We go up to Jerusalem”, Jesus says to the disciples, and explains exactly what that means. Yet, the disciples, as Luke points out, “understood none of these things”.  This captures what Paul means by saying that “now we see in a glass darkly”. The hope of Lent as the journey of the soul to God is that “then” we may see “face to face”, that beyond “know[ing] in part”, we shall “know even as also [we] are known”. It gives a deeper meaning to the strong petition of the blind man on the wayside who simply wants to “receive [his] sight”.

The deeper significance of this is that we might see ourselves as God sees us, to see ourselves in Christ; in short, to know even as we are known in God. This highlights Lent as the season of the mystical journey of our souls to God. It emphasizes two themes which stand in complete opposition in our dystopian world: knowledge and will or power.

The great lesson of 1st Corinthians is about wisdom in love, the counter to the delusions of our  technocratic culture which is utterly and entirely bereft of wisdom, of virtue, and is anti-life and anti-intellect. Know-how skills do not provide us with the knowledge of what belongs to character, to the virtues of the soul, which concern ends and purposes; in short, meaning which goes beyond techne or technique. Knowing what something is or knowing that it exists for a purpose extends far beyond the know-how skills of our digital devices which reduce us to machine-like things who think like our devices. We make the machines that make and unmake us. To know even as we are known is to reclaim our humanity from the disastrous projects of its being re-engineered, as Brett Frischmann & Evan Selinger pointed out in Re-engineering Humanity (2018).

Such is the paradox and the perversion of the famous Turing-test devised to see if a computer is capable of thinking like a human; now it is about whether humans can be made to think like computers. “I am not a robot,” we are sometimes asked to check but that only confirms how conditioned we are to being essentially technobots, mere cogs in the machinery of algorithms which work for purposes that are entirely remote and hidden from us but serve the interests of the technocratic elites. Such examples serve only to highlight the divide between power and knowledge.

(more…)

Print this entry