Worship as catechesis: Knowledge, desire, and Christian formation

Theology Today, Oct 2001 by Murphy, Debra Dean

"[Tlhe knowing person can never quite catch up with how he or she knows in achieving knowledge he or she is always already beholden to assumptions, antecedent interests and tacit procedures which are not themselves known-if to be known means to be fully available for inspection and certification by consciousness."1

"Now desire, not Greek `knowledge,' mediates to us reality."2

How do we know what we know?

In answering such a question, our first impulse might be to say that to know is to be taught--to engage in a process of learning. Commonly, in the modern industrialized west, such teaching and learning occur within the structured environment of a classroom, with various pedagogical tools and techniques at the disposal of the teacher. To be schooled in such a way is to participate in the transfer of educational content from teacher to pupil. We often speak of this way of knowing/learning as the "educational process," by which learners--through the skill of the teacher and their own receptivity to the didactic methods at hand--acquire knowledge, master concepts, accumulate data, absorb information. Understood this way, knowledge is perceived as a kind of repository of neutral facts, and the mastery of these facts constitutes the process and the ultimate goal of coming to know.

This "objectivist" view of knowledge/learning, which is deeply embedded in our current educational practices (despite numerous challenges to it), is rooted, of course, in the larger philosophical project of modernity: the quest for truth and autonomy and the concomitant privileging of a self-transparent reason. While the philosophy born of this pursuit was a "flight from authority,"3 (from tradition, history, community), it was also a "flight to objectivity." As Descartes himself proclaimed, "I concluded that I was a substance whose whole essence and nature consists only in thinking, and which, that it may exist, has need of no place, nor is dependent on any material thing; so that `I', that is to say, the mind by which I am what I am, is wholly distinct from the body and is even more easily known than the latter, and is such, that although the latter were not, it would still continue to be all that it is."4 This flight to objectivity required, as Descartes made clear, the devaluing of historical contingency, the material world, and bodily existence. Susan Bordo suggests that Descartes's entire epistemological project marks a "retreat from the medieval world of connectedness and interdependence--of organic unity-- into the modern, clinical universe of purity, clarity, and objectivity."5 "The Cartesian knower," she points out, "being without a body, not only has `no need of any place' but actually is `no place.' He therefore cannot 'grasp' the universe-which would demand a place 'outside' the whole. But, assured of his own transparency, he can relate with absolute neutrality to the objects he surveys, unfettered by the perspectival nature of embodied vision. He has become, quite literally, objective."6

While Bordo's (and others') critiques of Enlightenment epistemology reveal the flawed and fatal character of this way of knowing/learning, our contemporary pedagogical practices continue to be "lured by technique,"7 preoccupied with method, and seduced by the false promises of objectivity.8 As educator Parker J. Palmer observes, "There are plenty of pedagogical experiments around these days, many proposals for innovative and engaging ways to teach and learn, but most of them deal only with techniques. They leave the underlying epistemology unexamined and unchanged; they are not well grounded in an alternative theory about the nature of knowing."9 Indebted as such experiments and proposals are to the scientific method and rationalism of Enlightenment thought, they purport neutrality as to their rationale and motivation and assume an instrumentalist logic by which particular methods and techniques can be "applied" within and across a variety of settings and contexts; indeed, any such model of learning is regarded (approvingly) as context-free. When the mastery of data is the primary goal of learning and what it means to know, then the process or practice by which that putative mastery occurs is not connected to nor dependent upon any particular social, cultural, or linguistic context for its intelligibility. The model is designed to meet with equal success, no matter where or when it is employed.10

KNOWLEDGE AND CONVERSION

Our sensibilities about the "educational process" continue to be shaped by these (highly questionable) claims of efficiency and neutrality. What is suppressed or denied in the uncritical embrace of objectivism is the truth that such pedagogy is, in the end, a "strategy for avoiding our own conversion."11 If, on the most basic level, the knowledge that Christians aspire to is, as it was for Augustine, knowledge of God and knowledge of self, then such knowledge will not leave us unchanged. Like Augustine, we will come to know that the self is disclosed only in and through the doxological--the praise and adoration of God.12 As long as our understanding of what it means to know and learn remains wedded to the modern fiction of the cool, clinically detached observer and to a view of the end of knowledge as the technical mastery of information, we fail to recognize that to learn, to know, is to be transformed--it is to implicate our selves, our very bodies in the actions and practices of learning and coming to know. "There are settings," Joseph Dunne notes, "in which people invariably not only know but act; where their knowledge is intimately connected with ways of conducting themselves, relating with others, getting things done."13 In these settings, I would add, such knowledge demands our transformation--not in the sense that our minds are changed or our intellects are conditioned (though this is certainly part of it), but in the deeper, Augustinian sense that we are constituted differently. That is to say, knowledge's intimate connection to action, to doing, to practice, to habit, and to ritual means that what we know cannot be separated from who we are or within the confessional language of the church, who we hope to be. Thus, the original question How do we know what we know? should now be recognized as deeply indebted to the Cartesianism under scrutiny here and to the objectivist view of knowledge that needs dismantling. In other words, a doxological, liturgical, eucharistic account of knowledge--as I am attempting to develop here-- assumes that we can never be at any distance from the knowledge we need. 14 Perspective--what objectivism demands and proponents of method rigorously pursue--is impossible and pointless, a hopeless fiction. There can be "no transition from `knowing that' to `knowing how."' 15 Thus, we move from epistemology to ontology, for I will not be suggesting that it is the eucharist that answers the question How do we know what we know? (for this is an unanswerable--and undesirable-question), but simply that the eucharist gives us God.