Unawakened

How do we learn?  Pagan thought considered that all learning is recollection: we already know it.  It just has to be drawn out of us.  Socrates says as much to Meno - "the soul, then, as being immortal, and having been born again many times, and having seen all things that exist, whether in this world or in the world below, has knowledge of them all...for all enquiry and all learning is but recollection."  Meno asks Socrates to explain this: "what do you mean by saying that we do not learn?"  Socrates gets mad at Meno for trying to trick him: "I told you, Meno, just now that you were a rogue, and now you ask whether I can teach you, when I am saying that there is no teaching, but only recollection; and thus you imagine that you will involve me in a contradiction."  In other words, Meno must think Socrates is a pretty big fool to ask him to give him new information about how human beings can't learn new information.  Shame on you, Meno. (Plato, trans. Jowett, 361)


Socrates goes on through a lengthy demonstration to seek to prove his point, asking only questions.  Not giving new information, but deriving information from the pupil.  The boy's knowledge is elicited.  It is not new, it is a recovery.


From a more Christian perspective, Glenn Clark reflects on the love of a friend: "Do you love the spirit of your friend, or do you just love the outside of him?  If you love his clear complexion, his baritone voice, his straight Greek profile, his splendid figure, and stop there - then your love is not the true penetrating heavenly love.  But if you love the deep wells of quietness, deep, deep down inside of him, if you love the Christlike quality of his compassion, or his yet unawakened capacity for intelligence, for endurance, for heroism, then you are beginning to get to the roots of him." (Benson, Disciplines for the Inner Life, 107)  This reflects more of a Christian understanding of spiritual gifts: the Holy Spirit comes to live in the Christian.  There is something real and powerful there, but it may be asleep, unawakened, and the Christian friend seeks to awaken it.


Finally, P.T. Forsyth explores Jesus' seeming messianic modesty: "Christ never told His disciples He was Messiah till it was borne in on them by contact with Him.  He never told them till, by the working of the actual Messiahship upon them, they found it out.  Revelation came home to them as discovery.  It burst from experience.  So gracious is God with His revelation that He actually lets it come home to us as if we had discovered it.  That is His fine manner - so to give as if we had found.  His shining may even be forgotten in our seeing." (The Holy Father, 17)  What is it about our learning that feels new?  It feels like we didn't know it before.  Socrates suspected we forgot we knew it.  Forsyth suspects that our Father graciously lets us "discover things" that he already has for us.