The truth shall make you free

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.

A kaleidoscopic picture

I must confess that, on occasions, I have resorted to the largest picture library not on earth, Google images, to illustrate this blog. To make my offense worse, I have then sometimes attached rather facetious captions to them. In this way I may be contributing to the peculiar muddling of knowledge and history effected by the web.

When one searches Google images one sometimes finds some rather unexpected results. Not only is one provided with the expected western  Christian images of the heavenly father, along with Thor in his chariot, Osiris and others, but also portraits of Charles Darwin, George W Bush, Bob Dylan, Osama Bin Laden, Richard Dawkins and Barack Obama. It may be unlikely that anyone is lead into a false belief that the second coming has already taken place, although some of the above mentioned, including Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins do have an uncanny resemblance to our stereotypical views of the deity.

Richard Dawkins

Thor in his chariot

Osiris and friends

Yet, in more recondite areas, misattribution amongst the ignorant (such as myself) is highly likely and must certainly have taken on the false authority of publication.

Knowledge shall set you free

What can be at once more gratifying and more frustrating than viewing a book online?

There on your screen is some book from a distant library that for reasons of remoteness, rarity and cost one would probably never be able to hold as a physical copy. The pages turn, floating across your screen, in an unreal, cinematic fashion, remote, efficient. There is an electronic equivalent for flipping through the pages and the finger stuck in page twenty-seven. Now this page, now that; never quite convenient.

The screen is both a window on vast possibilities and a cruel restriction: always a window, never a door. There is somewhere, unseen, ungraspable, a logical step-by-step equivalent of the tottering pile of books on your desk.

We have recreated our own - far superior - version of the medieval chained library.

Hereford Cathedral library

"Quand je me joue à ma chatte, qui sçait si elle passe son temps de moy plus que je ne fay d'elle?"
Michel de Montaigne, Essais Book II, ch. 12

"As thus: lately in a wreck of a Californian ship, one of the passengers fastened a belt about him with two hundred pounds of gold in it, with which he was found afterwards at the bottom. Now, as he was sinking — had he the gold? or had the gold him?"
John Ruskin  "Ad Valorem" Unto This Last 1860