The more we know, the more we don’t know. It takes a lot of living to recognize our peculiar predicament. Even so, there are dissenters. Skeptics say that we don’t know what we think we do. Ideologues insist that they know what they don’t know.

But why is it that our expanding knowledge reveals its profound limits? And recognizing our limits, should we lament our condition or embrace it? The wise 20^th-century German Thomist Josef Pieper (1904-1997) answers both questions in the context of Creation.

But before citing Pieper, let’s reflect a bit on our own. Consider the world around us. We know something about it because it is intelligible. Scientists engage in their inquiries because their experience tells them that there are answers to be had. The scientific enterprise makes progress and both satisfies and further whets our curiosity. Plus, science is the seed bed of technology. Do you like your computer? Well, you’ll like AI. Knowledge is power— even if it emboldens plagiarists!

But why is the world with all its objects intelligible? Why don’t things just pop into, and then out of, existence? And why are there scientific laws that describe the nature of things? Why don’t balloons, instead, turn into boulders and caterpillars into cats? Everything is what it is and not another thing, right? But why not, instead, a cosmic cascade in which nothing is what it seems to be and we (whoever we are!) never suppose otherwise?

Enough, already. In the beginning was the Word, the Word was God, and all things came into being through Him (John 1: 1-3). God, moreover, saw that all that He made was very good (Gen. 1: 31). In that the whole of creation is good, it has an intelligible structure. Because it has such a structure, the objects of our ever-expanding environment can be objects of our knowledge. But because every object of our knowledge begins from God, God knows it in a way that we can never know it. So it is that the more we know, the more we can recognize the dimension of mystery from which everything came and which keeps it in existence. Our finite horizon points us to an infinite horizon.

Now we return to Josef Pieper. In his splendid book The Silence of St. Thomas, he writes that “Things have their intelligibility because God has creatively thought them.” Citing Thomas’s own words, he adds that “The measure of the reality of a thing is the measure of its light.” Yet sometimes the light overwhelms us. Insofar as things are creatively thought by God, Pieper continues, they have two properties that dialectically interact: “On the one hand, their ontological clarity and self-revelation and, on the other hand, their inexhaustibleness.” They are at once knowable and unknowable.

So where does this dialectic leave us? Pieper’s answer is that “hope is the condition of man’s existence as knowing subject,” and in hope, as pilgrims, we are “on the way.” Only when we come to share in God’s life will we understand the paradox that, at the deepest level, “things are inaccessible to human knowledge precisely because they are all too knowable.”

Still, one could wonder whether even now we might have just a peek at that which is to come. Chesterton, a master of hopeful paradox, was not averse to poking fun at himself. Forgive me, gentle reader, if I follow suit. The late great Ralph McInerny of Notre Dame, a Thomist of the Strict Observance but an inveterate punster, would on occasion refer to “peeping Thomists.” Count me in their number!