Wisdom Withholds Her Knowledge

On the Necessary Occulting of Information for Pedagogical Purposes, and my Misguided Compassion.

“I still have many things to say to you,
but you cannot bear them now.”
—Jesus Christ

Club Gnosis: Members Only

I remember years ago I heard multiple celebrity Orthodox Christian leaders characterize “Gnosticism” (and everything “esoteric” in general) as a “secret club.” You know, like a club for the “cool kids.”

When explaining this, it became clear that, in their imagination, these Gnosis Folk would gather behind closed doors and laugh at the rest of the world for not knowing what they withhold from them.

“Why not just tell everyone everything they think instead of hiding it?” the apologists reasoned to themselves.

This is, of course, a cartoonish portrait of reality.

Don’t these priests have any self-awareness left amidst the all-consuming polemics? Do they not, every Sunday, force the catechumens to “depart,” and let “no catechumen remain?”

Why not just tell the catechumen everything?

What do you have to hide?

Do they not say, “I will not speak of thy mysteries to thine enemies?” Why not speak of the mysteries to friends and enemies alike?

Do they not veil the Eucharist behind an iconostasis? Why create such a “cool kids club?”

It is self-evident that all of these things are the very same act of occulting information—that selfsame thing they suppose only their enemies do.

Why not just give pearls to swine and meat to infants?

The older I got, and the more conversations I had, the more I realized that the withholding of certain information—far from being a pretentious act of mere exclusivity—becomes a pedagogical necessity, and is at times the wise thing to do.

This is what Jesus meant by warning about “casting pearls before swine, lest they trample them underfoot and turn to attack you.”¹ This is why he remained silent before his persecutors:

Wisdom withholds her knowledge.

Beginning with the nuclear family, the mature coexists with the immature; as Paul says, some have no teeth and live on “milk” and others who are more grown live on “meat.”² This is also why there is a rating system with television, separating “kids” from “mature,” or why you lock the cabinets by the sink so your toddler doesn’t go drinking the dish detergent.

The point is not everyone has the same spiritual diet—not because of some malicious intent by the mature to withhold what is good (as the infant polemicists imagine the Gnostics to have done)—but because the immature do not even have the capacity to eat “meat.” They would simply choke on it and think it was in their mouth to harm them and that the adults were evil.

There were many times when, in a conversation with catechumen, I saw their thought process; the books they were reading; the reasons they left their former abode, and I could project with high accuracy where they would go in the next few years. I desperately wanted to save them from making the same mistakes I did or saw others do.

I wanted to utilize my experience to help accelerate their spiritual progress by having them not waste their time falling into holes in the road if they can know where they are from the start. I hear the words, “The prudent foresees danger and takes precautions, but the simple go on blindly and suffer the consequences.”³ I genuinely wanted to prevent those consequences.

It never worked.

Compassion’s struggle with silence

I realized that everyone is on their own journey, and I can’t offer unsolicited help. Whenever I tried, they never actually listen to me, and instead usually misinterpret my compassion as the villainous intent to derail their irreversible course that is surely 100% correct in all they think.

I became viewed as a “satan” to them, and in one sense (though not the sense they thought), that’s probably what I was.

Eventually, I learned the hard way that they are actually supposed to fall into the ditches, and my compassion is misguided—for it is at odds with the spiritual learning curriculum which has been allotted to them since before they were born.

There seems to be a cosmic law in place here and I’m slowly learning the rules: I am allowed to help people get out of ditches, but I’m not allowed to prevent them from falling. With experience one learns the mystical truth that there is a kind of compassion that is misguided and met with the words, “Get behind me, Satan.”⁴

“There is a time to keep silence and a time to speak.”⁵ Indeed, “Whoever restrains their words has knowledge.”⁶ It’s easy to forget that, “the prudent one conceals knowledge.”⁷

1. Matthew 7:6.

2. 1 Corinthians 3:2.

3. Proverbs 22:3.

4. Matthew 16:23.

5. Ecclesiastes 3:7.

6. Proverbs 17:27.

7. Proverbs 12:23a.