Consuming unearned wisdom and fake glory

Issue #151

We become what we worship, and all of life is worship.

All of life is transforming us to be more like — what?

What are we becoming?

Whatever we are fixing our attention on in our daily habits. Whatever we are serving in our weekday liturgy.

So where does this leave us?

In past issues, I have been thinking in terms of the eyes. “Look where you want to go.” But that is not the only symbol that scripture uses; and in fact, it is not the one that it places at the heart of worship. If we think of Sunday worship, rather than daily habits, it is not our eyes which are the most elemental, the most visceral thing.

It is our mouth — consumption of food:

How should we worship? Part 9: the Lord's Supper as the center of life

When I say that eating is more elemental than seeing, I don’t mean that it is more important in some general sense. Seeing is absolutely necessary; fixing our attention on the right thing is how we are able to get to the point of consuming that thing at all. If Eve had not been able to see the tree of knowledge, she would not have eaten from the tree of knowledge. The eyes and the mouth work together; they are not rivals. What I am saying is that if we think only in terms of the eyes, and neglect the mouth, we will not get to the true heart of what worship is, and how fundamentally it changes us. And we will also not discover the patterns that God provides us for pursuing it rightly, and for escaping the many snares that the world has cunningly devised to trap us and devour us.

To put this in stark practical terms: it is obvious that the fall began with the eyes, but it ended in the mouth. It was inaugurated with sight; but it was consummated with consumption. Or, we could say, first Eve took the fruit in with her eyes; then she took the fruit in with her mouth.

And the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and a desirable tree to make one wise, and she took of the fruit thereof, and ate…

And then, as a result of using her mouth, something happens to her eyes. They are opened, and she knows that she is naked. Not her physical eyes, of course; the eyes of her soul are opened, and she sees herself in a new way. The wisdom that she grasped for exposes her; it reveals to her that she was not ready for it, and she is undone.

Now unbelievers love to scoff at Genesis, and especially at the details of it. How absurd that eating a fruit would have such an effect. What is this, a fairy tale with magic apples?

No — it works the other way. Scripture does not draw on fairy tales. Fairy tales draw on scripture. They exist in the same world as scripture — a world where it is possible to do something physical, and to thereby be changed spiritually. A sacramental world. And the most elemental sacramental action is eating. Eating of the tree of knowledge should have been a holy sacrament. When Adam and Eve were properly prepared by obedience, God would have fed them from that tree, and they would have received the kingly wisdom they needed to rule as his viceroys and impress the patterns of heaven into the earth.

They would have graduated from priests to kings.

But instead, they allowed the serpent to prematurely fix their eyes upon that tree, and then what followed came naturally: they ate.

So it is fruitful to think through the relationship between the eyes and the mouth (look, God is not above puns, so neither am I).

Or, to put it in language that we would normally use when it comes to things like media, we should examine the relationship between attention and consumption.

We have seen what happened at the tree of knowledge. If we were to take an analogy with the time-honored example of the fridge, we go to the fridge looking for something to eat. First we find something to fix our eyes upon. Then we put it in our mouths. The mouth follows the eyes. Consumption follows attention. This makes sense given what I’ve said about attention previously. Attention itself is a kind of consumption — we take things in through our eyes just as we take things in through our mouths. But we have to direct our eyes before they can take anything in. (I am speaking in terms of taking anything in substantively. Our eyes are always taking in something, but it is not always substantial. It is not until we fix them, until we focus, until we spend time looking, that we are able to really consume.)

So the first point we must accept is this: it’s up to us to look in the right direction. To choose the right thing to fix our attention on.

This sounds terribly duh, but I think in our modern culture, it is actually terribly profound — because so much of our world is designed to bypass our conscious choice, to avoid having us make a considered decision. We need to be attentive to ourselves. The word scripture would use is watchful:

Watch ye, stand in the faith; be men, be strong; let all your things be done in love. (1 Co 16:13–14)

Persist ye in prayer, watching therein in thanksgiving (Col 4:2)

So, then, we may not sleep as also the others, but watch and be sober, for those sleeping, by night do sleep; and those making themselves drunk, by night are drunken; and we, being of the day, let us be sober: putting on a breastplate of faith and love, and a helmet — a hope of salvation (1 Th 5:6–8)

Be sober, be watchful, because your opponent the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may swallow up. (1 Pe 5:8)

This final passage reminds us that Satan himself is always using his eyes to find something for his mouth to consume. The serpent eats dirt, and what is man made of? Satan has laid many traps for us, and his traps have become increasingly sophisticated.

How do you trap an animal?

One way is to figure out where it’s going to walk, and lay a trap there. So Satan observes the things humans like to do, and lays snares along the paths he sees us walking.

But another way, a more effective way, is to use bait. Tempt the animal with something to eat, so that you may catch it and eat it. Satan knows this. He lays all kinds of bait before us. So if we are not sober and watchful about what we consume, we will be consumed. Scripture bids us to give careful thought to how we use our eyes, and to be diligent in their use, lest they be captured by our own lack of attentiveness, lest we be caught sleeping.

We must be a bit “meta” — we must look at what we are looking at.

I am laboring this point because it is the hardest thing to actually do. I’ve talked about how you need to look where you want to go. But what I actually should have said is, you need to look where you ought to go — because one of the ways that Satan baits us by giving us all kinds of things that we want to look at. All kinds of places that we want to go. All kinds of ways to capture our attention that seem innocuous, harmless — ways that feel good or make us want them — but are actually designed to kill us.

What does Satan tempt Eve with? Knowledge, wisdom — but more particularly, he tempts her with fruit that will make her wise. The knowledge comes packaged in an appealing format, you might say. She doesn’t have to work for it. She can just take it. Reach out and put it in her mouth. She consumes the knowledge in a single gulp. Boom! — she’s all wised up. Just like that.

But it didn’t give her what she thought it would.

Does Satan still tempt us with the tree of knowledge today? Are you kidding me? What do you think the device you’re reading on is? Easy knowledge. Knowledge without discipline. Knowledge without work. Knowledge without obedience. Have you ever looked at a visualization of the internet? It’s literally a tree. It looks like a dense tree of trees. A circular forest. Symbolism happens.

Now, is the tree of knowledge evil? No. It’s the tree of kingly wisdom. It’s not bad to have kingly wisdom. But we know that it’s fatal to have kingly wisdom before you’re ready. We know that it’s terrible to take kingly wisdom without earning it. Without working to develop the discipline necessary to use it. Without actually becoming a kingly receptacle for it.

But Satan offers it all, right now.

He tempts us to take it, rather than earn it. To grasp for godlike knowledge, rather than subordinating the attainment of that knowledge to God’s will.

Again the Devil taketh him to a very high mount, and showeth to him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, and saith unto him, All these to thee I will give, if thou mayest fall down and bow to me. (Mt 4:8–9)

You think I’m over-reaching, that my symbolic instincts have gone mad. At least, if you don’t know how the people developing the internet talk, that’s probably what you think. But men like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk literally talk about this in religious terms. They think they can become gods through technology. They think Big Data is omniscience, and that if they can harness it, they will become omnipotent. If they only know enough about everything, if they can only track everything and analyze it correctly, they will be able to control everything.

They think they can consume the whole world as data — take the whole world into themselves, and so make the whole world part of their body…and so exercise complete dominion over it.

They tempt us with the same basic idea. You can consume any part of the world you want, quickly and easily. You can get dominion over a topic in a few minutes of reading. It used to be a few hours, because you might have to read a bunch of articles or something. But now you can just ask some predictive algorithm — remember, AI doesn’t exist, it’s just a predictive text algorith — you can ask it to summarize the thing you want to know. Hey ChatGPT, summarize the key themes of scripture for me. Wow, that was easy. Look how knowledgeable I am.

But actually, no, I am not knowledgeable. Someone else is knowledgeable and I have gulped down a summary of their knowledge, but if anyone asks me something about it, they will discover I didn’t earn it. They will expose me. I will be naked. They want to know about the relationship between the fall of Adam and the fall of Cain and the fall of the sons of God in Genesis 6. Well, I never thought about that before. I didn’t even realize there were multiple falls. I know, I’ll ask ChatGPT for a summary again. Keep taking more from the tree of knowledge. Eventually I’ll be able to cover my nakedness.

I think that’s what Adam and Eve did. I think they took leaves from the tree to cover themselves. I’m not going to hang any doctrine on this, but it makes intuitive sense. And Israel is represented multiple times in the gospels as a fig tree. Why a fig? It has something to do with the coverings of Adam and Eve; I mean, how could it not? Israel was supposed to be a tree of knowledge to the nations. They were given the fruit of the tree, weren’t they? Isn’t that what scripture is? Doesn’t Solomon tell his son to consume scripture? What does Lady Wisdom say?

Come, eat of my bread,
And drink of the wine I have mingled. (Pr 9:5)

Eat my son, honey that is good,
And the honeycomb—sweet to thy palate.
So is the knowledge of wisdom to thy soul (Pr 24:13–14)

Why does Solomon tell his son to consume scripture?

To know wisdom and instruction;
To discern the words of understanding;
To receive instruction in wise dealing,
In righteousness and justice and equity (Pr 1:2–3)

After all, by these kings rule, and princes decree justice, and nobles, even all the judges of the earth (Pr 8:15–16). The scriptures are the true tree of knowledge. Figs and honey are symbols of sweetness in scripture, and so they are associated with the spiritual sweetness of wisdom. What was the promised land flowing with? Milk and honey. How is scripture described? 1 Peter 2:2 calls it pure milk, and Psalm 119:103 calls it sweet honey. In the promised land, every man would sit under his own vine and his own fig tree. How does Lady Wisdom call? “Drink of the wine that I have mingled,” and, “better is my fruit than gold,” (Pr 8:19) So the wisdom of scripture is the tree of knowledge, the sweetest of the trees.

Satan tempts us with artificial sweetener. Not only unearned wisdom, but simply trivia. When you are doomscrolling, you are looking for something new — some little tidbit of knowledge; some idea that makes you feel like you have learned something, gained something, added value, increased your capacity for dominion. You are seeking meaning in distraction, trying to get the benefit of the tree of knowledge without doing the hard work required to make use of it.

It is the technological and spiritual equivalent of continually reaching into a packet of chips because you want to be full, but cooking a meal is too hard.

But let’s take a step back for a moment. Why was the tree of knowledge in the garden in the first place? Many people are skeptical that it was there to actually confer kingly wisdom — that it was there to be eaten in due time. But this is an easy inference to make, because we know that the knowledge of good and evil is what Solomon asks for when God offers to give him any gift, as he is taking over from his father:

Give thy servant therefore an understanding heart to judge thy people, that I may discern between good and evil; for who is able to judge this thy great people? (1 Ki 3:9)

And God is hardly angry with Solomon at asking for this, is he? On the contrary, he is very pleased, and he gladly gives Solomon not just the knowledge of good and evil, but everything else besides. Solomon learned from his father not to grasp for kingship as Adam did, but to rather trust God to give it in due time.

So the knowledge of good and evil is kingly knowledge — and what goes along with kingship? Look back to how Satan tempts Jesus: he showed him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them. Kings get glory. Everyone looks up to them. Everyone loves them. Everyone wants to be them. So grasping for the tree was not just grasping for wisdom; it was grasping for glory.

It wasn’t just unearned knowledge that they took into themselves.

It was unearned honor.

It’s easy to think they didn’t actually get any glory from eating. Didn’t they get the opposite? Didn’t they realize how naked they were? Weren’t they left afraid and exposed, feeling small and vulnerable? Isn’t that the opposite of honor and glory?

It is, and yet God also says: “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil” (Ge 3:22). By eating of the tree, man really did become like God and his angels in some new way. And that really is glorious. But because he was not ready for it, the glory was tainted; grotesque; like putting a gold ring in a pig’s nose.

Or, to use the actual picture in Genesis 3, like putting the skin of a dead animal on the image of God. Remember, in scripture, hair represents glory.

[S1E7.5] Hair, trees, crowns, angels & glory-clouds

Because of Adam and Eve’s sin, because of grasping for glory, the glory they get is the bloody glory of a rough fur-skin tunic.

Does Satan still tempt us with cheap, unearned glory today? You might not have thought about it in these terms before. But why do you feel a little thrill every time you get a notification on your phone? Every time someone likes a post or a photo? Every time someone posts a complimentary comment? Why do you keep going back to check if you’ve got any new likes?

It’s because they represent glory. Status. Honor. Recognition.

But like the glory that Adam and Eve got, it is tainted. It is all empty. A cheap fake of the real thing. We’re really just looking at other people looking at us.

And if the mouth follows the eyes, then we are eventually consuming other people consuming us.

Does that sound like the way to life, or the way to death?

This is the danger of smartphones and their ilk. Certain apps are especially dangerous, and indeed are designed by evil men to draw us down evil paths. All tools have a telos, a purpose, objective, an end: they tend in a certain direction. By nature, smartphones want to serve your independent will, rather than God. They are designed to turn us toward our own wills, to reflect back our most surface-level, transient, fleshly desires. And so they easily enslave us to our own flesh. There is a reason that the term “black mirror” has become so popular. That screen is reflecting back to you your own will. Your own impulse in the moment.

This is the difference between a phone and, say, a book, or a newspaper. You could say: well, I use my phone to read, I use my phone to catch up on news. But a book will only ever show you one set of words about one specific topic. A newspaper will only show you one set of stories about whatever the editor deemed important enough to print. Your phone is an infinite well. It’s not even that it can summon up any information you want to know. That’s actually a good thing in principle; the ability to learn anything is like having a library in your pocket. That is the tree of knowledge, and it can be eaten of virtuously. But a phone is also more than a library. It isn’t designed to sit passively and wait for you to ask it about a specific topic that you want to learn about. It isn’t like going to an old-fashioned card index and flipping through to see what books are available, and then selecting some of them to read. A phone works on algorithms, and the algorithms are designed to do one thing, which is get you to keep paying attention to the phone.

It isn’t designed to teach you.

It isn’t designed to advance you in your knowledge of the truth.

It isn’t curated by a librarian or an editor or an author to present what they believe is the highest-quality knowledge.

It doesn’t care about any of that.

It is designed only to keep your attention.

If that is best served by showing you things that are false, it will show you things that are false. If it is best served by showing you things that are ugly, it will show you things that are ugly. If it is best served by showing you things that are wicked, it will show you things that are wicked.

So what do you do?

Throw your phone away?

That’s one option. Seriously, it should be an option. I think there will be people for whom a smartphone is actually a net negative; that when you weigh up everything it does, the sum is tilted toward evil. It draws them toward evil more than it benefits them. They serve it more than it serves them. It has its good uses, but overall the bad outweighs the good. I really think we should be more willing to consider that possibility.

But I am postmillennial. I believe that the wealth of the wicked is stored up for the righteous.

I know that Cain was the first city-builder, and that the sons of the devil perfected technology in the pursuit of evil. I know there will always be towers of Babel; ziggurats built as staging-platforms to storm the heavens. But I also know that the New Jerusalem is a garden city on a pyramid. What the wicked meant for evil, God gives to his sons to use for good.

So probably there are ways to redeem smartphones.

But if we are to find the way, then we need to return to the question of where we are going to look, and what we are going to consume. Are we going to be watchful, or are we going to let an algorithm dictate where we look? Are we going to thoughtfully choose where to place our attention, or is someone else going to thoughtfully choose for us? Are we going to proactively make our phones serve God, or are we going to passively serve them? Are we going to use them to feed upon the true and the good and the beautiful, or are we going to devour our own flesh through our reflection in that black mirror?

Remember, to know what is good and what is evil is a very different thing than to choose what is good and what is evil. Solomon was the wisest man ever to live. But he was turned aside to serve other gods by his wives. And I don’t know if this is an insult or a compliment to my lady readers, but…smartphones are way more manipulative and seductive than you ever could be.

So we need more than just a knowledge of the danger, and good intentions about avoiding it. We need a practical plan to actually turn our smartphone use toward virtue. As it turns out, scripture gives us just such a plan, in the form of a pattern we can impose on everything we do in our lives. There is a reversal of the pattern of eating that caused the fall.

Ten times in the gospels, Jesus shows us this pattern, specifically with respect to eating; with respect to communion or sacramental food.

So my logic is simple: if modern life is tempting us with the tree of knowledge, with wrong sacramental consumption, then the antidote to that is right sacramental consumption. And Jesus instructs us very specifically in what that looks like. So it must apply to using a smartphone. If we are going to understand how to safely consume content, we must understand how to safely consume anything.

But that is a topic for next time.

Notable:

A good little reminder on the dangers of the cool-table:

Sanballat is Calling

Some great advice on reforming the singing in both your church, and family worship:

How does a Fellow Get There?

An interesting take on how the movement toward modernity requires a kind of feminization of culture:

81. Contest, Sexuality and Consciousness: Present Issues and the Life of a Culture

Thoughts worth reading on the aesthetic and moral problems of what I call the rawbles (red avatars with blue laser eyes):

STILL Young, Restless, and Red-Pilled

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Until next month,

Bnonn