We Are Educated and Still Illiterate

The Alphabet the Desert Knows and Modern Christianity Has Forgotten

We live in a time drunk on credentials. Degrees stacked like armor. Screens glowing with answers that arrive faster than desire can form a question. Artificial intelligence promising mastery without submission. Even theology is often treated this way now, a system to be analyzed, optimized, defended. God spoken about fluently, while remaining untouched.

Abba Arsenius stands in the middle of this illusion and quietly exposes it.

He had everything our age worships. The finest education of the empire. Latin and Greek on his tongue. Rhetoric, philosophy, prestige. He moved among emperors before he ever fled to the desert. If holiness were produced by brilliance, Arsenius should have towered above everyone.

Instead he says something humiliating enough to wound us if we let it.

We get nothing from our education.

Nothing.

Not because learning is evil, but because it cannot give what it promises. It can sharpen the mind while leaving the heart untouched. It can multiply words while starving the soul. It can teach you how to speak about God without ever teaching you how to stand before Him.

The peasants he speaks of were not impressive. No libraries. No theories. No platforms. Their hands were cracked from work. Their backs bent. Their prayer clumsy by academic standards. But they knew something Arsenius did not. They knew how to labor for virtue the way a man labors for bread. Slowly. Painfully. Without applause.

Hard work. Obedience. Silence. Repentance. Staying put when everything in you wants to escape. These are not concepts. They cannot be automated. They cannot be accelerated. They cannot be simulated.

And so Arsenius, the great mind of Rome, goes and sits before an old Egyptian monk and asks him about his thoughts. Not for information, but for healing.

When questioned, Arsenius answers with devastating honesty.

I know Latin. I know Greek.

But I do not know the alphabet of this peasant.

The alphabet.

Not advanced theology. Not mystical visions. The alphabet. The first letters of the spiritual life. Humility. Self knowledge. Watchfulness. Tears. The courage to see yourself without decoration. The patience to remain small.

Our age skips this alphabet entirely. We want fluency without infancy. Illumination without purification. Authority without obedience. We want to speak before we have learned to listen. We want insight without conversion.

So we talk endlessly. We publish. We analyze. We debate. We build systems that can answer questions about God while we ourselves remain strangers to Him.

Arsenius fled not because learning was false, but because it had become a refuge from repentance. He discovered that brilliance can become a hiding place. That knowledge can protect the ego from ever dying. That the mind can be filled while the heart remains untouched by grace.

Grace does not visit the clever.

Grace rests on the lowly.

Faith is not comprehension. It is consent. Humility is not ignorance. It is truth. The peasant knows his need. The educated man is still negotiating with his self importance.

The tragedy of our time is not technology itself, but the phronema behind it. A way of seeing that assumes control, mastery, and distance. God reduced to an object of study rather than a fire before which one trembles.

The desert says something else.

Sit down.

Be silent.

Work.

Repent.

Learn the alphabet.

Only then does real knowledge begin.