“Now there are also many other things that Jesus did,” begins the final verse of the immemorial Gospel of John, “Were everyone of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written” (English Standard Version, John 21.25). These words may, at first glimpse, be read as a mere aside by its author – as a note of reverence to Jesus or a metaphorical gasp of sheer wonder at the numerous marvels he had performed. Yet, what lies beneath this simple closing line to John is a deeper and more astute observation: that human knowledge is ever limited and incomplete, and that man will never be able to attain the whole truth embodied by the divine.
Starting with the omniscient Word of God and ending with the finite word of man, the Fourth Gospel is as much an epistemological critique as it is a religious text in its negotiation of the relationship between knowledge and faith. For inherent in faith is the quest for truth, the text’s function to elicit belief essentially leads it to posit a progressive model of gaining knowledge such that its reader “may believe that Jesus is Christ, the Son of God” (20.31). This method, however, proves problematic on the surface since knowledge is presented as both an intermediary and hindrance to belief, thereby creating an almost paradoxical narrative in which the learned deny faith while the untaught embrace it. Hence, in this essay, I will attempt to reconcile this apparent contradiction by drawing on Keats’s theory of “Negative Capability”, and argue that because human knowledge is never certain, the gospel at its very core proposes the modern idea of Negative Capability – that is, the ability to live with uncertainty and remain open to a constant renewal of knowledge – as the ideal mode of attaining faith.
As noted by John Gabel, “In the distinctive language of John, the teaching of Jesus seems to revolve around a small number of crucial terms, frequently repeated”, among which are the verbs “to know” and “to believe” (226). Both are intrinsically connected, and a superficial reading of the Gospel of John may go as far as insisting that the former is a logical requisite for the latter, for one can only believe in something one knows – even if only of its existence.
The very notion that knowledge precedes belief is established in chapter 2 of John, where its author explicitly states that “many believed when they saw the signs that [Jesus] was doing” (2.23). Here, sight – and personal experience – is a means for one to acquire knowledge, following which one’s belief may begin. This provides the fundamental framework that the instances of faith in John are built upon, one of which is illustrated in chapter 4, in Jesus’s encounter with the Samaritan woman.
The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ). When he comes, he will tell us all things. Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am he.” … So the woman left her water jar and went away into town and said to the people, “Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?” (4.25-29; emphasis added)
As her intangible knowledge of the prophetic “Messiah” had been materialized prior to this exchange with her witnessing of Jesus’s miraculous telling of her past, the Samaritan woman, therefore, appears to be naturally set on the trajectory towards faith. When Jesus reveals his identity to her, she does not doubt it for her experiences urge her to believe – by contradistinction, without such knowledge, her faith would seem less likely. Such a progression from experience to faith is repeated in the blind man episode, in which the unnamed blind man attests to Jesus’s abilities and, consequently, believes in Jesus’s revelation under the very specific conditions of having beheld the miracle which gifted him sight. He tells the Pharisees, “We know that God does not listen to sinners, but if anyone is a worshipper of God and does his will, God listens to him … If this man were not from God, he could do nothing” (9.31-33). Like the Samaritan woman, the blind man’s experiences, when coupled with his basic awareness of religious ideology, provides the foundation for him to later “believe in the Son of Man” (9.35).
It would then seem that the Gospel of John advocates knowledge as a basis of belief, but such an assertion is as readily repudiated as it was proposed by the instances of unbelief in the Fourth Gospel. This is best evident in the way the Pharisees denounced the blind man’s testimony on his regaining of sight, and judged the spectacular sign as sin, for Jesus’s act had contradicted their religious knowledge. Perceiving the keeping of the law of Moses as the definitive mark of one’s righteousness, the Pharisees declare that Jesus could not be “from God, for he does not keep the Sabbath”, thereby denying faith in Jesus’s revelation (9.16). Therein lies a crucial paradox, as Sandra Schneiders points out, since it appears “that the very requirement God has established, namely, obedience to the law, is leading its adherents into unbelief, while breaking the law seems to be a sign of doing God’s will” (31). Shouldn’t knowledge be a stepping stone to belief, ought it not be the case that the knowledgeable – the Pharisees, Nicodemus, Pontius Pilate – are those who are most ready to accept Jesus’s revelation? This episode demonstrates otherwise. “Moses or Jesus? The law or the gospel? Human knowledge or divine revelation?” Schneiders questions, as if John presents knowledge and belief as necessary oppositions to each other (31).
The perfunctory view that knowledge is a stepping stone towards faith is further problematized when one begins to examine the precise nature of that which leads one to believe, as presented in the Fourth Gospel. At this point, one must recognize the distinction between the two main categories of knowledge as theorized by the philosopher, Bertrand Russell in his article Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description. The former, he argues, requires “direct cognitive relation [of an individual] to the object” unmediated by any external mechanism, whereas the latter is acquired through secondary means (108). Knowledge by Acquaintance would hence be that which is achieved by the Samaritan woman and the blind man for they had been in the presence of, and experienced, miracles that they know to be true. In contrast, the “woman’s testimony” (4.39) and Jesus’s “word” (4.41) is mere Knowledge by Description to the people of Samaria as their awareness is based on inference; more importantly, they cannot confirm the validity of what they “know”.
By Russell’s vein of argument, this second form of knowledge poses an issue as it is oft abstruse and incomplete. In fact, the gospel itself raises issues with knowledge drawn from pure language for it is, quite substantially, a text rife with misunderstandings. Schneiders notes that John’s “vocabulary is concrete in that everyone knows what the words mean, but abstract in that the words carry whole realms of significance”, such that it creates a conducive environment for misunderstandings to emerge amongst the diegetic characters of John (27). In cases where the everyday object is used to represent divinity, such as when Jesus claims to be the “bread of life” (6.35) and the bringer of “living water” (4.11), literal interpretations – or misinterpretations – of these terms arise in the text, thus elucidating the unreliability of what one may derive from external conveyers of information. Yet, it is this very Knowledge by Description that is held up as the exemplary means of gaining faith in the gospel for at the end of the Samaritan episode, the people of Samaria discard the need for physical signs and choose to believe based on the intangible phenomenon of words – “for we have heard for ourselves […] we know that this is indeed the Saviour of the world” (4.42). Given that the model of belief that John promotes is based on uncertain “knowledge”, it becomes questionable as to whether the gospel genuinely sees knowledge as the basis of faith.
Additionally, the “Knowledge by Acquaintance” that observers of Jesus’s signs have is not without its own problems when one regards the lack of complete understanding in such knowledge. The blind man’s testimony of Jesus’s feat can easily be characterized by his lack of knowledge of who his healer was, or of how or why the sign was performed – he claims, “I do not know” several times in his conversation with the Pharisees (9.12, 25, 30). Similarly, the Samaritan woman responds to Jesus’s miracle only with amazement rather than insight. Both characters base their faith on a single, incomprehensible event. As Kass notices of Genesis, wisdom in John, too, “comes not from wonder but from awe and reverence, and the goal is not understanding for its own sake but rather a righteous and holy life” (3). One could, hence, make the claim that all knowledge that had inspired belief in the Gospel of John is neither wholly true (Knowledge by Description) nor complete (Knowledge by Acquaintance). Consequently, it would be inaccurate to simply assume that knowledge is vital for one to believe, for the diegetic characters that do so do not seem to know wholly or truly.
Thus, in considering the above, there remains, perhaps, a lesson in Negative Capability to be learnt here. The term was coined by the Romantic poet, John Keats, to mean the ability to “[be] in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”, and although the poet might have eschewed religion himself, this theory perfectly encapsulates the crux of the Fourth Gospel. In John, where extensive teachings were futile in allowing the Pharisees to see Jesus’s identity, imperfect knowledge spurs belief – it matters not the type or amount of knowledge one has, but what one does with it. The Pharisees had let their “partial truths masquerade as truth entire” and were thus unable to accept any opposition to what they already knew (Kass 87). In contrast, those who remained open to new ideas, regardless of how abstract they may be, were the ones who accepted Jesus’s revelations. Given that faith is, in essence, a belief that holds steadfast in uncertainty, the gospel’s evangelical message for its reader to “have faith” also means for one to believe regardless of the necessary limitations to human knowledge. Negative Capability, the acknowledgement that man’s understanding of the cosmic universe is limited and the broad-mindedness it subsequently brings, is thus counselled by the gospel.
Fundamentally, the Gospel of John serves not only as an instruction to its reader but also as a practice for one to receive revelation and gain faith. It is self-reflexive in its understanding of the circumstances under which it presents its testimony – through mere, fallible words – and therefore draws upon its narrative to encourage belief in the most unbelievable miracles and believe hereon now. For human knowledge is never whole, John, ultimately, calls for one to be stay open to new ideas, knowledge, and revelation, and to believe in uncertainty.
Works Cited
Gabel, John B., Charles B. Wheeler, and Anthony D. York. The Bible as Literature: An Introduction. New
York: Oxford UP, 1986. Print.
Holy Bible: English Standard Version. London: Collins, 2012. Print.
Kass, Leon. The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis. New York: Free Press, 2003. Print.
Keats, John. “Selections from Keats’s Letters (1817).” Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, 3 Oct. 2009.
Web. 2 Apr. 2016.
Russell, Bertrand. “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description.” Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society 11.1 (1911): 108-28. Print.
Schneiders, Sandra Marie. “The Fourth Gospel as Text.” Written That You May Believe: Encountering Jesus
in the Fourth Gospel. New York: Crossroad Pub., 1999. 23-47. Print.