Christ Church

“Master, we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing; nevertheless,
at thy word I will let down the net.”

Knowledge is power, it is commonly said. It serves as the defining cliche or mantra for our modern technocratic world, a world dominated by our assumptions of power over nature through technology and, paradoxically, over ourselves. But it is a dangerous and destructive mantra and one which is largely false. What kind of knowledge and what kind of power? To ask the questions is to begin to be more critical about human reason and to realise our limitations.

The phrase “knowledge is power” is usually attributed to Sir Francis Bacon, the father of empirical philosophy in the early sixteenth century. Certainly the question for him was about how our knowledge could be used to better the human condition but he was under no illusion about how false and falsifying our claims to knowledge, either through the physical senses or through the mental operations of our minds, could be. His was a cautious interrogation of nature, forcing her to give up her secrets through careful experimentation. Marx would later take up the scientific idea to say that the point is not to know nature but to use nature for our ends. With industrialization and now digital automation, we confront the dark side of these assumptions and their realizations.

We are no longer at ease in a world of human domination of either nature or ourselves. The narratives of progress are equally fraught with the conditions of loss and destruction: the seas have been overfished; the land diminished and destroyed by pesticides and machines belonging to the industrialization of agriculture. We have lost our connection to land and sea; in short, to creation.

We also have got the narratives all wrong. For Bacon, the world was God’s creation and he did not say that knowledge is power but that God’s knowledge is power. Therein lies an important distinction and one which belongs to the insights of our religious and philosophical traditions. They provide a counter to our hubris and destructive domination of nature and ourselves.

Nautical, sea-faring and fishing images complement the more abundant agrarian, agricultural and farming images in the Gospels. They belong not to our domination and manipulation of nature and our humanity, not to the dynamics of power, but to the truth of our incorporation into the life of God in Jesus Christ. They recall us at once to our necessary and inescapable connection to the created world and to the God in whose image we are made. As such they provide a self-critique of human reason without which there is only loss and destruction, a loss and a destruction that is entirely our doing.

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“What manner of child shall this be?”

“What manner of child shall this be?”the neighbours of Zacharias and Elizabeth ask, highlighting the strange and yet compelling character of John the Baptist whose nativity we celebrate today and whose feast day marks the anniversary of the landing of Giovanni Caboto, englished as John Cabot, perhaps, though by no means for certain, in Newfoundland in 1497. Thus he has become the patron saint of what later became Canada.

To state this obvious fact of history is regarded by some as politically incorrect; regardless, it is a feature of this country of displaced peoples which is about more than just the encounter between various European cultures and the so-called indigenous peoples, a term which historically would be utterly meaningless to those whom it is meant to describe. That history is about more than just economic and cultural exploitation though that is inescapably part of the story. That is hardly new as one can see from Bartholomew de Las Casas 16th century work, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, or Voltaire’s classic critique of his own 18th century European culture in Candide. There is no right side of history which is not to say that there aren’t lessons to be learned about good and evil and about right and wrong. History as an intellectual discipline is inherently revisionist which requires, I think, a recognition of the complexities and the vagaries of the contingent world of human actions and motives rather than forcing history into some sort of ideological strait-jacket such as the idea of progress. Such things on all sides are really a kind of blindness, a lack of awareness and a failure of the ethical imagination. It is invariably a kind of judgmentalism.

There are the ups and downs of history but there are also those moments of the breakthrough of the understanding into “the fullness of time”, an awakening to the truth of our lives in God. There are profound and providential things that happen in the course of history even in and through our follies and sins, despite all our certainties.

Thus the conjunction of this feast with the Gospel for The Fourth Sunday after Trinity about the parable of “the blind leading the blind” is particularly compelling. It concerns our awareness, our vision of the mercy of God, which alone counters our self-certainties and self-assurances, our judgmentalism. This is our blindness. Instead, we are called to Christ who, theologically speaking, is not simply the icon of any one particular culture as the native peoples of Canada themselves amply show; they are, after all, largely Christian. Abusus non tollit usum is an older medieval principle; the abuse of something does not take away from its proper use. Therein lies the real question with respect to the historical interaction of cultures past and present, something articulated very well in Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease about the clash between British Imperial culture and the Igbo tribal culture in parts of Nigeria in the twentieth century.

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