Chasing Omniscience

Podcasts can't get you a degree

About a year ago, I saw a post pop up in my LinkedIn feed (why do I care about LinkedIn, I ask myself) from someone I attended college with, talking about why people shouldn’t go to college. I think the college question deserves a lot of attention and nuance, and I know plenty of people for whom it is not the next logical step because of their desired line of work—this piece isn’t about that. Irony aside, his post had me irked, not because of his dismissal of college from the privileged seat of being a college graduate, but because of a particular line: “Besides, you can get the theology or philosophy degree you want by listening to podcasts.”

Maybe at first glance, this phrase might seem ridiculous to some, but I find it becomes more and more a belief held in the subconscious than we want to recognize. It certainly indicates a form of the death of mastery, but perhaps more intricately, the death of the nature of education itself.

I’ve thought about this post and many statements from others similar to it for the better part of a year, pondering why they irk me so. Perhaps the theology graduate in me desires justice—the one that pored over books and agonized over papers for hours on end, and openly cried on the library floor while cramming for a Triune God final exam. I recently watched my husband complete his masters in Catholic Studies after agonizing greatly himself (and he juggled obtaining a masters while working and being a father to young children, as many parents do—a feat that would certainly have had me doubled over). I watched, from the position of his spouse, how his degree went far beyond a piece of paper or quotable factoids. I watched it reshape him, as my studies reshaped me.

One of my professors taught a fantastic course on C.S. Lewis that is a true staple of Ave Maria University lore (our whole 17 years of lore…come at me). In his first lecture, he used Lewis’ own image for grace; that it’s not akin to looking directly at a beam of light, but looking at how that beam of light illuminates everything else. “Lewis himself is a beam,” my professor said. “If you look at life through the light he shines on it, it will never be the same.”

So it was with Lewis for me, that class being the catalyst—his thought deeply shaped my own. He is truly a beam of light through which I look at a variety of topics. But even more deeply than Lewis, so it was with my education.

My choice to study theology was not one made flippantly, though if it was, I hope the effect would have been the same. Studying theology intentionally for several years, as my full-time job (young and immature though I was…am) defined the course of my mind’s path. It did not accomplish many things for me. It did not teach me just facts and quotes, or carve pseudo-Thomistic javelins for me to throw in comment wars. It did not guarantee me strength of faith or conviction, and it certainly didn’t make me more on the straight and narrow than my peers—education “makes not the Christian, not the Catholic,” says Newman. It also was not as easy as pressing play on Spotify, not even close. As Newman also suggests, the liberal arts education as a whole “brought my mind into form,” teaching me to, ultimately, find the truth. It taught me, in a word, to think, as only I can.

Education is not meant to be vacuous or digitized, reduced to only the most crucial points and rifled through as quickly as possible. It is also not meant to come through the mind of just one person (read: podcast host, even if they are a Dominican). One of the greatest components of how my mind was brought to form through my time of study was not in the moments of quiet personal study, but rather through the embodied process of that form being born in both me and my peers. I learned more true theology through debates over beers at the town pub (yep, there is literally one pub) or with cigars in hand on back porches than I did in the classroom. My education was deepened with every red pen mark my professors put on my papers, telling me I wasn’t quite there, or that I had more…that it wasn’t about just getting the facts straight, it was about letting the facts seep into you and shape you. Or, more than anything, it was about recognizing that the journey is lifelong, and not about having all the facts to begin with.

Perhaps this can happen with a podcast to a certain degree (pun unintended), and it can certainly happen with an intentional read of a good book in any discipline. I know many self-made scholars who dedicate themselves to study in a particular discipline (

Jamie Rindler

is a great example of this.) But listening to an hour-long recounting of someone’s fruit of study is not the same thing as studying. A.G. Sertillanges defends that to truly study, one must both say “yes” to a particular discipline (or perhaps a choice few) and thereby reject other paths of potential wisdom:

“It is a painful thing to say to oneself: by choosing one road I am turning my back on a thousand others. Everything is interesting; everything might be useful; everything attracts and charms a noble mind; but death is before us; mind and matter make their demands; willy-nilly we must submit and rest content as to things that time and wisdom deny us, with a glance of sympathy which is another act of our homage to the truth.”

We live in a world (and certainly in an education system) that fears being caught in an unknowing; maybe the posture that thinks listening to a podcast is the same as earning a degree, or even that earning degrees in certain disciplines is a waste, is more about chasing omniscience than anything. We want to know all, we want to have it in our hands to use at will. I know I’m not alone in hating the feeling of not knowing; it’s a vice of mine I have yet to overcome. But in refusing to not know many things, are we truly knowing even one thing well? In refusing to be denied any wisdom, how can we actually become wise?

This chasing of omniscience is the vice of curiositas—the desire to know so that we may crush unknowing, so that knowledge can be at our disposal. Saying we can know what only comes as the fruit of years of study by listening to podcasts, or yes, even sometimes just reading a book is curiositas on full display. The postmodern idolization of hurry and expediency crushes true scholarship, which is a dedication to lifelong learning. Podcasts, articles, anything aimed at summarizing can have a role in this lifelong learning, but they are a mere tool in a much, much larger kit—if they’re seen as the sum total, study is reduced to mere regurgitation of factoids (a disposition that infects much of our education system). If that’s the view of what getting a degree or study is—something that can be accomplished by passive listening—then the motivation isn’t truly to learn the truth so as to love it, it’s about learning the truth so as to possess and use it.

I can feel this viscerally in online discourse—when people wield theology like a weapon built of facts that can crush an argument because they’ve spent a bit of time with it. I feel this because this is the area I’ve chosen as my discipline; I can imagine those who deeply study psychology, philosophy, or just about anything else feel it when people wield their discipline as if they’ve dedicated themselves to it. I can tell when people think they have all the answers because they think that’s all an education is. I am tacitly uninterested in that: I want to talk with people who want to keep learning, who are in pursuit of a wisdom none of us yet possess.

Wisdom doesn’t come from knowing a stream of facts—wisdom comes from riding the truth down to the bottom, discovering its vastness, knowing what you don’t know. I walked out of grad school not feeling like I knew more, but rather that there was so much more to learn—that I had a long way to go on this ride. Omniscience can never be mine, degree in hand or no. Education, whether formal or self-motivated, is not about collecting facts to place at our disposal; it’s about placing our minds more and more at the disposal of the only One Who is omniscient, and letting Him bring them into form.