Is Ignorance Bliss?
May 5, 2026
Hello! How is each and every one? As I mentioned in last week’s post, we will be starting the month of Mary starting with the feast of St. Joseph the Worker. How I would like to go and see our Lady of Manaog in Stella Orientis Oratory at the University of Asia and the Pacific (UA&P), Ortigas Center while she is there visiting. I expressed my wish to her and entrusted her to do something about it as I also try my luck to arrange a car service.
Early in the morning of May 1, I received the text that I can go. I was lucky that a car and driver could be provided albeit at quick notice on the day itself. The night before I already decided not to go out and just settle to do the pilgrimage around the area but you know the saying “omnia in bonum” ( All (things) for the good), I took it as a desire also of Our Lady as I did express my wish to see her particularly, Our Lady of Manaog, who is presently visiting Stella Orientis Oratory in the University of Asia and the Pacific in Ortigas Center.
Hence I thought I better go and find out who among friends and relatives would be available, ready and would want to do the same, that is, go out and meet Our Lady in Stella Orientis while she is there rather than go to Pangasinan, where she really stays. I asked three persons and fortunately the fourth one who I know very well would refuse, thought for a while and after considering her situation, replied she can in an hour’s time make it. All for the good, right? Our Lady, when she wants, makes sure it will be done. The hour comes for her will to be done, right?
So off I went to Quezon City to pick up my sister and make it to Our Lady by almost 12 noon. On the way, my sister mentioned that at least two of her friends visited Our Lady and shared her image life size. Soon as we arrived in Stella Orientis we were looking for Our Lady and could not see her in life size. We saw instead a smaller golden image of Our Lady. So we asked around for the life sized image and the person in-charge said, “She was meant to stay for only three days; she is back in Pangasinan Province”.
Since the Mass was going to start we moved to the Blessed Sacrament Oratory to start the Rosary of the day and there as we opened the door was a life sized image of St. Joseph with the child Jesus welcoming us. Golly gee great balls of fire! What a double treat!!! I never thought of that! The Holy Family is a family of surprises, don’t you agree? Indeed, they cannot be outdone in generosity.
The next day was the day off of a junior staff and we agreed to do a pilgrimage at 4:00 in the afternoon to Our Lady on the fourth floor sports area and then to her in her shrine on the first floor Our Lady of the Roses.
Let us do our best to bring as many young and not so young persons to Our Lady and we can be sure she will always bring us to Jesus. Following now let us continue with the first word of Jesus from the Cross (From The Cries of Jesus from the Cross, A Fulton J. Sheen’s Anthology).
The Value of Ignorance
One thousand years before Our Blessed Lord was born, there lived one of the greatest of all poets: the glorious Homer of the Greeks. Two great epics are ascribed to him: one, the Iliad; the other, the Odyssey. The hero of the Iliad was not Achilles, but Hector, the leader of the enemy Trojans, whom Achilles defeated and killed. The poem ends not with the glorification of Achilles but of the defeated Hector.
The other poem, the Odyssey, has as its hero, not Odysseus, but Penelope, his wife, who was faithful to him during the years of his travels. As the suitors pressed for her affections, she told them that when she finished weaving the garment they saw before her, she would listen to their courtship. But each night she unraveled what she had woven in the day, and thus remained faithful until her husband returned. “Of all women,” she said, “I am the most sorrowful.” Well, might be applied to her the words of Shakespeare: “Sorrow sits in my soul as on a throne. Bid kings come and bow down to it.”
For a thousand years before the birth of Our
Blessed Lord, pagan antiquity resounded with these two stories of the poet who
threw into the teeth of history the mysterious challenge of glorifying a
defeated man and hailing a sorrowful woman. How, the subsequent centuries
asked, could anyone be victorious in defeat and glorious in sorrow? And the
answer was never given until that day when there came One who was glorious in
defeat: the Christ on His Cross and one who was magnificent in sorrow, His
Blessed Mother beneath the Cross.
It is interesting that Our Lord spoke seven times on Calvary and that His Mother is recorded as having spoken but seven times in Sacred Scripture. Her last recorded word was at the marriage feast of Cana, when her Divine Son began His public life. Now that the sun was out, there was no longer need of the moon to shine. Now that the Word has spoken, there was no longer need of words.
St. Luke records five of the seven words that he could have known only from her. St. John records the other two. One wonders, as Our Blessed Lord spoke each of His Seven Words if Our Blessed Mother at the foot of the Cross did not think of each of her corresponding words. Such will be the subject of our meditation: Our Lord’s Seven Words on the Cross and the Seven Words of Mary’s Life.
Men cannot stand weakness. Men are, in a certain sense, the weaker sex. There is nothing that so much unnerves a man as a woman’s tears. Therefore, men need the strength and the inspiration of women who do not break down in a crisis. They need someone not prostrate at the foot of the Cross, but standing, as Mary stood. John was there; he saw her standing, and he wrote it down in his Gospel.
Generally, when innocent men suffer at the hands of impious judges, their last words are either: “I am innocent” or “The courts are rotten.” But here, for the first time in the hearing of the world, is one who neither asks for the forgiveness of His sins, for He is God, nor proclaims His innocence, for men are not judges of God. Rather does He plead for those who kill him: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).
Mary beneath the gibbet heard her Divine Son speak that first word. I wonder when she heard Him say “know not” if she did not recall her own first word. It, too, contained those words: “know not.”
The occasion was the Annunciation, the first good news to reach the earth in centuries. The angel announced to her that she was to become the Mother of God: “Behold thou shalt conceive in thy womb and shalt bring forth a son: and thou shalt call his name Jesus. He shall be great and shall be called the son of the Most High. And the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of David, his father: and he shall reign in the house of Jacob forever. And of his kingdom there shall be no end. And Mary said to the Angel: How shall this be done because I know not man?” (Luke 1:31–34).
These words of Jesus and Mary seem to suggest that there is sometimes wisdom in not knowing. Ignorance is here represented not as a cure, but a blessing. This rather shocks our modern sensibilities, which so much glorify education, but that is because we fail to distinguish between true wisdom and false wisdom. St. Paul called the wisdom of the world “foolishness,” and Our Blessed Lord thanked His heavenly Father that He had not revealed heavenly wisdom to the worldly wise.
The ignorance that is here extolled is not ignorance of the truth, but ignorance of evil. Notice it first of all in the word of Our Savior to His executioners: He implied that they could be forgiven only because they were ignorant of their terrible crime. It was not their wisdom that would save them, but their ignorance.
If they knew what they were doing as forth a son: and thou shalt call his name Jesus. He shall be great and shall be called the son of the Most High. And the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of David, his father: and he shall reign in the house of Jacob forever. And of his kingdom there shall be no end. And Mary said to the Angel: How shall this be done because I know not man?” (Luke 1:31–34).
These words of Jesus and Mary seem to suggest that there is sometimes wisdom in not knowing. Ignorance is here represented not as a cure, but a blessing. This rather shocks our modern sensibilities, which so much glorify education, but that is because we fail to distinguish between true wisdom and false wisdom. St. Paul called the wisdom of the world “foolishness,” and Our Blessed Lord thanked His heavenly Father that He had not revealed heavenly wisdom to the worldly wise.
The ignorance that is here extolled is not
ignorance of the truth, but ignorance of evil. Notice it first of all in the
word of Our Savior to His executioners: He implied that they could be forgiven
only because they were ignorant of their terrible crime. It was not their
wisdom that would save them, but their ignorance.
If they knew what they were doing as they smote the hands of Everlasting Mercy, dug the feet of the Good Shepherd, crowned the head of Wisdom Incarnate, and still went on doing it, they would never have been saved. They would have been damned! It was only their ignorance that brought them within the pale of redemption and forgiveness. As St. Peter told them on Pentecost: “I know that you did it through ignorance: as did also your rulers” (Acts 3:17).
Why is it that you and I, for example, can sin a thousand times and be forgiven, and the angels who have sinned but once are eternally unforgiven? The reason is that the angels knew what they were doing. The angels see the consequences of each and every one of their decisions with the same clarity that you see that a part can never be greater than the whole. Once you make that judgment, you can never take it back. It is irrevocable; it is eternal.
The first word Our Blessed Mother spoke at the Annunciation revealed the same lesson. She said: “I know not man.” Why was there a value in not knowing man? Because she had consecrated her virginity to God. At a moment when every woman sought the privilege of being the mother of the Messiah, Mary gave up the hope and received it. She refuses to discuss with an angel any kind of compromise with her high resolve.
If the condition of becoming the Mother of God was the surrender of her vow, she would not make that surrender; knowing man would have been evil for her, though it would not have been evil in other circumstances. Not knowing man is a kind of ignorance, but here it proves to be such a blessing that in an instant the Holy Spirit overshadows her, making her a living ciborium privileged to bear within herself for nine months the Guest who is the Host of the World.
These first words of Jesus and Mary suggest there is value in not knowing evil. You live in a world in which the worldly wise say: “You do not know life; you have never lived.” They assume that you can know nothing except by experience — experience not only of good but of evil.
It was with this kind of lie that Satan tempted our first parents. He told them that the reason God forbade them to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was because God did not want them to be wise as He was wise. Satan did not tell them that if they came to a knowledge of good and evil, it would be very different from God’s knowledge.
God knows evil only abstractly, that is, by negation of His goodness and love. But man would know it concretely and experimentally, and thus would to some extent fall captive to the very evil that he experienced. God wanted our first parents to know typhoid fever, for example, as a healthy doctor knows it; he did not want them to know it as the stricken patient knows it. And from that day of the great lie, down to this, no one is better because he knows evil through experience.
Examine your own life. If you know evil by experience, are you wiser because of it? Have you not despised that very evil, and are you not the more tragic for having experienced it? You may even have become mastered by the evil you experienced. How often the disillusioned say: “I wish I had never tasted liquor,” or “I regret the day I stole my first dollar,” or “I wish I had never known that person.” How much wiser you would have been had you been ignorant!
Over and over again, when you broke some law that you thought arbitrary and meaningless, you discovered the principle that dictated it. As a child, you could not understand why your parents forbade you to play with matches, but the burn convinced you of the truth of the law. So the world, by violating God’s moral law, is finding through war, strife, and misery the wisdom of the law. How it would now like to unlearn its false learning!
Think not, then, that in order to “know life” you must “experience evil.” Is a doctor wiser because he is prostrate with disease? Do we know cleanliness by living in sewers? Do we know education by experiencing stupidity? Do we know peace by fighting? Do we know the joys of vision by being blinded? Do you become a better pianist by hitting the wrong keys? You do not need to get drunk to know what drunkenness is.
Do not excuse yourself by saying, “Temptations are too strong” or “Good people do not know what temptation is.” The good know more about the strength of temptations than those who fall. How do you know how strong the current of a river is? By swimming with the current or by swimming against it? How do you know how strong the enemy is in battle? By being captured or by conquering? How can you know the strength of a temptation unless you overcome it? Our Blessed Lord really understands the power of temptation better than anyone, because He overcame the temptations of Satan.
The great fallacy of modern education is the assumption that the reason there is evil in the world is that there is ignorance, and that if we pour more facts in the minds of the young, we will make them better. If this were true, we would be the most virtuous people in the history of the world, because we are the best educated.
The fallacy of sex education is assuming that if children know the evil effects of certain acts, they will abstain from those acts. It is argued that if you knew there was typhoid fever in a house, you would not go into that house. But what these educators forget is that sex appeal is not at all like the typhoid-fever appeal. No person has an urge to break down the doors of a typhoid patient, but the same cannot be said about sex. There is a sex impulse, but there is no typhoid instinct.
Sex wisdom does not necessarily make one wise; it can make one desire the evil, particularly when we learn that the evil effects can be avoided. Sex hygiene is not morality. Soap is not the same as virtue. Badness comes not from our ignorance of knowing, but from our perversity of doing.
That is why in our Catholic schools, we train and discipline the will as well as inform the intellect, because we know that character is in our choices, not in our knowing. All of us already know enough to be good, even before we start school. What we have to learn is how to do better.
If we forget the burden of our fallen nature and the accumulated proneness to evil that comes from submitting to it, we soon become chained as Samson was, and all the education in the world cannot break those chains. Education may conceivably rationalize the chains and make us believe they are charms, but only the effort of the will plus the grace of God can free us from their servitude. Without those two energies, we will never do one jot or tittle beyond that which we have already done.
Train your children and yourself, then, in the
true wisdom, which is the knowledge of God, and in the ignorance of the things
that are evil. The unknown is the undesired; to be ignorant of wickedness is
not to desire it. There are no joys like innocence.
Here on the Cross and on its shadow were the two most innocent persons of all history: Jesus was absolutely sinless because He is the Son of God; Mary was immaculate because she was preserved free from original sin, in virtue of the merits of her Divine Son. It was their innocence that made their sufferings so keen.
People living in dirt hardly ever realize how dirty dirt is. Those who live in sin hardly understand the horror of sin. The one peculiar and terrifying thing about sin is that the more experience you have with it, the less you know about it. You become so identified with it that you know neither the depths to which you have sunk nor the heights from which you have fallen.
You never know you were asleep until you wake up, and you never know the horror of sin until you get out of sin. Hence, only the sinless really know what sin is. And since here on the Cross and beneath it, there is innocence at its highest, it follows that there was also the greatest sorrow. Since there was no sin, there was the greatest understanding of its evil. It was their innocence, or their ignorance of evil, which made the agonies of Calvary.
To Jesus, who forgave those who “know not,” to Mary who won God because she could say “I know not,” pray that you may know not evil and thus be good.
Honestly, if you had the choice now either of learning more about the world or of unlearning the evil you know, would you not rather unlearn than learn? Would you not be better if you were stripped of your wickedness than if you were clothed in the sheepskin of diplomas?
Would you not like to be, right now, just as you came from the hands of God at the baptismal font, with no worldly wisdom yet gathered to your mind, so that, like an empty chalice, you might spend your life filling it with the wine of His love? The world would call you ignorant, saying you knew nothing about life. Do not believe it — you would have life! Therefore, you would be one of the wisest persons in the world.
There is so much error in the world today, there are such vast areas of experienced and lived evil, that it would be a blessing if some generous soul would endow a University for Unlearning. Its purpose would be to do with error and evil exactly what doctors do with disease.
Would you be surprised to know that Our Lord did institute such a University for Unlearning, and to it all devout Catholics go about once a month? It is called the confessional! You will not be given a sheepskin when you walk out of that confessional, but you will feel like a lamb because Christ is your Shepherd. You will be amazed at how much you will learn by unlearning. It is easier for God to write on a blank page than on one covered with your scribblings.
— Seven Words of Jesus and Mary
Socrates firmly believed that ignorance
is not bliss, but rather the root of evil, vice, and a meaningless life. He
famously claimed that "the unexamined life is not worth living,"
arguing that seeking truth and wisdom is the highest good, despite the
discomfort it brings. He believed only knowledge leads to virtue.
Socrates on Knowledge:
He viewed knowledge as the highest good and essential to human life. For him, a
life without questioning (ignorance) is fit only for a "beast".
·
Awareness of Ignorance:
Socrates famously claimed he was wise only because he knew that he knew
nothing. According to, he believed, "Awareness of ignorance is the
beginning of wisdom."
·
The Conflict:
"Ignorance is bliss" implies comfort in not knowing, while Socrates
believed that true happiness comes only through the challenging pursuit of
self-knowledge and understanding, often preferring death over a life of
ignorant silence.
As always the challenge is to consider and reflect on the above thoughts and ideas in your quiet moments of dialogue in prayer with Our Lord, Our Lady, the Holy Spirit, Jesus. Ask each one of them for the wisdom and understanding you and I need to live our lives according to the divine plan and to be happy even now in this life and after.
Second Sunday of this month, May 10, is Mother’s Day. Allow me to take advantage and greet each one
of you a Happy Mother’s Day!!! Do
celebrate the day in a special way expressing words left unsaid and deeds left
undone to Mother Mary in Heaven, to your mother on earth, and to each and every loved
one in the family.
See you in the next post, “May tomorrow be a perfect day; may you find love and
laughter along the way; may God keep you in his tender care; ‘til He brings us
together again.”
Affectionately,
Guadalupinky
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