The quotation comes from St John's gospel and the evangelist was reporting Jesus talking of the truth about god the father:
Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on him, If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed;
And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
John 8;31-32
Yet it has become almost a secular motto for our age and, I suspect, comes to many minds as 'Knowledge shall set you free', prescriptive or revealed versions of the truth being now less popular.
Does it set us free? Free from what?
Free from superstition, would often be the first answer, showing how far the quotation has been turned against itself. Superstition after all is commonly held as almost the opposite of knowledge, as the adherence to unreasoned and unchallenged belief that prescribes behaviour and inhibits choice: something that 'stands over' knowledge.
Free from fear, would often be added next; fear of transgressing, fear of retribution (real or imagined), fear of the unknown. Yet it seems, in our time, that what we fear is coming to be more often the known than the unknown - those 'known knowns' almost crowding out the 'known unknowns'. And so we may reflect that in the history of human society a cultural, or authoritarian, restriction on the seeking of knowledge has been the norm rather than the exception, including of course, and conspicuously, western European Christian society, against which the thread of individualism and enquiry in our culture has struggled so long and, eventually, so successfully.
Some would claim that our culture of the pursuit of knowledge is itself only a rebranding of a prescriptive and excluding form of experience and that cultural limits on the range of knowledge that is acceptable are not just the norm but humanly and socially inevitable. Yet in its more disinterested expression it must have been, in some ways, good for the soul; it may have set us free from many forms of stupidity and corruption; it has undoubtedly generated an unprecedented growth in material well-being and in technical capability and thereby overwhelmed other societies, from the far east and the Pacific to south America, which were based on a more settled concept of the world; but whether, ultimately, it is sustainable, comfortable or even tolerable is another matter.
So perhaps what sets one free is the truth, a core from which one's life can grow,even, perhaps,a belief, and the truth is not the same for everyone. Some truths are probably better than others, although one cannot say which is 'best', as if one could choose the best buy in some global supermarket of verities.
