Knowledge or Experience?

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Once on a botany field trip in college, after the objects for the course were met, I stood with the professor in a field of mountain flowers in full bloom. “What’s the name of this one?” I asked. “What is this one called?”

He answered my questions patiently, but finally suggested that we simply stand and enjoy the colorful flowers and the majestic mountains.

That memory came to mind last night, when I read the discussion question for the class I’m taking on the Pentateuch. The lecture said that Western thinking on the Book of Genesis focuses on explaining how creation came about, while the ancient Hebrews viewed the narratives from the perspective of experiencing creation as intended by the Creator. In today’s world, the professor asked, is the ancient perspective relevant?

Now, I’m the first to defend the necessity of learning more about the faith, the story of which is told in the Bible. “Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ,” St. Jerome proclaimed, and who can argue with the man who translated the Old Testament from Hebrew, who is known as one of the four Great Latin Fathers of the Church?

The problem with an intellectual approach to the Bible is that once you go down that rabbit hole you find an endless warren of side passages. For example, I recently found that whole forests of trees have been sacrificed to provide paper for the commentary on the first three words of the Bible alone.

Here’s a portion of what the Catechism of the Catholic Church has to say about ‘In the beginning:’ “Three things are affirmed in these first words of Scripture: the eternal God gave a beginning to all that exists outside of himself; he alone is Creator (the verb ‘create’ – Hebrew bara – always has God for its subject). The totality of what exists (expressed by the formula ‘the heavens and the earth’) depends on the One who gives it being.”

Then there is the New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary, which explains that “The word beginning probably does not refer to the absolute beginning of all things, but to the beginning of the ordered creation, including the temporal order. … The author does not deny that God created all things, but God’s creative work in this chapter begins with something already there, the origins of which are of no apparent interest. Also, the writer presupposes the existence and basic character of God.”  

This train of thought goes far back in history. The Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, a contemporary of Jesus of Nazareth, says that, in the context of Genesis, the word ‘beginning’ is not to be taken “in a chronological sense, for time there was not before there was a world. Time began simultaneously with the world or after it. For since time is a measured space determined by the world’s movement, and since movement could not be prior to the object moving, but must of necessity arise either after it or simultaneously with it, it follows of necessity that time also is either coeval with or later born than the world. …”

Time in terms of hours and minutes is an experience I struggle with daily. I never seem to have enough of it. The hours devoted to homework last night meant I never got to my current stitching project. That may molder even longer, because I could easily spend days wandering through thoughts on “in the beginning” from the likes of Augustine and Aquinas (both of whom probably wrote reams on the subject). But by doing so I’d be in danger of missing all the action described by the rest of the sentence: “… God created the heavens and the earth.”

Ah, yes. God’s glorious creation. Knowledge is necessary to fully appreciate this world, but to limit myself solely to facts and figures means I don’t venture out and experience creation, which, as the ancient Israelites were aware, has lessons to teach that aren’t written on any page.

Marie Mischel is editor of the Intermountain Catholic. Reach her at marie.mischel@dioslc.org.