“Is it Wrong to Mourn What You Do Not Know?” On Satisfaction and the End of Learning

Many faculty professional development days, hallway dialogues between colleagues, and programs for the integration of faith and learning exist because of the common question: how can we motivate our students to desire learning? Although scaffolded course objectives and early alert systems for struggling students are designed with the ostensible end of effective teaching in mind, I find myself often wondering whether we are using the best metrics for evaluating pedagogical effectiveness. This is not simply because I encounter under-performing and apathetic students. Rather, it is because I know many students who get decent grades and who navigate the demands of course expectations with adeptness, but who still do not exhibit the curiosity endemic to—and necessary for—deeper transformation.¹

Given these considerations, together with the fact that we are approaching the end of a semester and fatigue seems to be occupying its own chair in most of my classes, my assumptions about low levels of student engagement were swiftly arrested when a student recently asked me:

“Is it wrong to mourn what you do not know?”

This question offers me hope that although we are frequently re-evaluating “learning objectives,” we may be making real progress toward the true objective of learning.

My first response was to ask her for more context, in order that I could understand which part of this question was most pressing in her consideration. Like all very good questions, this question requires the close attendance of many more good questions.

As she elaborated, she described that she was learning many things that excited her in her mathematics and computer sciences courses. I also know her to engage earnestly and with intellectual excellence in my philosophy of aesthetics course. In each of these contexts, she indicated that she felt overwhelmed by all there was to know, and she admitted experiencing a kind of sadness in the face of her own limitation when confronted by what seemed to be infinite knowledge. Clarifying her inquiry further, she followed her initial question by asking: “Is my sadness at not being able to know all there is to know the same as being jealous of an all-knowing God?”

We discussed the nature of the first sin in the Garden, as the serpent craftily presented Eve with the possibility of being “like God” with respect to what she knew.² We considered, too, the ending of Ecclesiastes, when the author writes: “Of the making of many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh…Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.”³ We then arrived at a new iteration of the question: “Is it wrong to want to know everything?”

At this juncture, I believe a consideration of motivation is most helpful: why might one want to know everything? And, if one did somehow arrive at “everything,”⁴  what would be the nature of the satisfaction attained?

At the root of much longing is an often indistinct but motivating belief that one, having arrived at the object of one’s desire, will no longer feel the restless discomfort of separateness. In this earthly city, the promise of home beguiles us, in both true and false ways—as the journeys of both Homer’s Odysseus and Bunyan’s Christian both demonstrate.

This restlessness is the subject of much of St. Augustine’s teaching. His Confessions instructs with a disarmingly personal and devotional quality. But another one of his writings, De Doctrina Christiana, or “On Christian Teaching,”⁵ addresses some of these same tensions by contrasting the key notions of “use” and “enjoyment” as he instructs the reader regarding the proper understanding and interpretation of Scripture.⁶ In so doing, he distinguishes between the nature of “use” and “enjoyment” through the consideration of different objects of our attention, rather than simply our own attitudes toward a thing. This is mostly because—in his estimation—we do not always respond with affection that justly accords with the nature of an object.

As such, he states, “There are some things, then, which are to be enjoyed, others which are to be used, and some whose function is both to enjoy and use.”⁷ As he clarifies which objects belong to which categories, he determines that the only thing that can serve as the object of our enjoyment is the Triune God. The reason for this is because enjoyment, as he defines it, is the ability to “hold fast to [something] in love for its own sake.”⁸ And, God is the only object that can actually satisfy the deep demands of this love.

To “use” something, however, is not a bad thing, in and of itself. Rather, in Augustine’s estimation, to use something is simply to “apply whatever it may be to the purpose of obtaining what you love—if indeed it is something that ought to be loved.””⁹ Thus, if rightly ordered, the use of something is meant to serve the more ultimate species of enjoyment. The difficulty arises, however, when we mistake these functions of use and enjoyment for one another, and instead set out to “enjoy those things we ought to use.” When this occurs, Augustine warns that we may become “reluctant to finish our journey quickly, being ensnared in the wrong kind of pleasure and estranged from the homeland whose pleasures could make us happy.”¹⁰

In much the same way that Christian and Odysseus were enticed to delight in various pleasures amidst their respective journeys, it is thus easy to become distracted by seeming goods—some of which are, in fact, good, but lesser, nonetheless. In part, this points to the gracious reality that God has ornamented our path with beautiful things. But, like the pilgrim in Dante’s Paradiso, we may need the same assistance, given by Bernard of Clairvaux, as he prompts Dante to turn his gaze toward the utmost Light of Truth.¹¹ So, too, must our souls be “purified so that they are able to perceive that light and then hold fast to it.”¹²

As I thus consider whether it is “wrong to mourn what one does not know,” it seems that we must practice occupying a sacred middle place in our search for satisfaction. On the one hand, and faced with our finitude, it might be tempting to succumb to the temptation of sloth—saddened by the difficulty of pursuing a difficult good. But let us also remember: “If we wish to return to the homeland where we can be happy, we must use this world, not enjoy it, in order to discern ‘the invisible attributes of God, which are understood through what has been made.’”¹³ It is then that our learning may give way to blessedness.¹⁴

1. I perceive a lack of curiosity to be characteristic not only of students but also of many of us who teach. I hope we might increasingly become the kind of teachers who continue to “discover,” as described by Newman when he writes, “To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts and are not commonly found united in the same person. He, too, who spends his day in dispensing his existing knowledge to all comers is unlikely to have either leisure or energy to acquire new.” [John Henry Newman, The Idea of the University (London: Yale University Press, 1996), 5.
2. Genesis 3:1-6 (English Standard Version).
3. Ecclesiastes 12:12-13 (English Standard Version).
4. We acknowledged here the philosophical difficulty of reconciling “everything” and infinitude.
5. The first three books of which were written contemporaneously with his Confessions.
6. For another consideration of the dichotomy between “use” and “enjoyment,” I’d encourage one to listen to Episode 16 from Opening Question, the podcast of the Torrey Honors College at Biola University.
7. Augustine, On Christian Teaching, trans. R. P. H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, reissued 2008), 9.
8. Augustine, On Christian Teaching, 9.
9. Augustine, On Christian Teaching, 9.
10. Augustine, On Christian Teaching, 9-10.
11. “Bernard smiled, motioned me to turn my view upward—but I had turned it on my own, was doing what he wanted me to do, For as my sight grew pure and whole, alone it plumbed more and more deeply into the ray of Truth, the utmost Light.” See Dante Alighieri, Paradise, translated and edited by Anthony Esolen (New York: Modern Library, 2004), 353.
12. Augustine, On Christian Teaching, 12.
13. Augustine, On Christian Teaching, 10. Augustine referring here to Romans 1:20.
14. The beauty of this captured in the conclusion of Dante’s Paradiso: “Within that brilliant and profoundest Being of the deep light three rings appeared to me, three colors and one measure in their gleaming…O light that dwell within Thyself alone, who alone know Thyself, are known, and smile with love upon the Knowing and the Known!” See Dante Alighieri, Paradise, 357.