day no. 15,802: better ignorance

“'I see it well,' said Ransom. 'Though in my world it would pass for folly. We have been evil so long' and then he stopped, doubtful of being understood and surprised that he’d used a word for evil which he had not hitherto known that he knew, and which he had not heard either in Mars or in Venus."

“'We know these things now,' said the King, seeing Ransom’s hesitation. 'All this, all that happened in your world, Maleldil has put into our mind. We have learned of evil, though not as the Evil One wished us to learn. We have learned better than that, and know it more, for it is waking that understands sleep and not sleep that understands waking. There is an ignorance of evil that comes from being young: there is a darker ignorance that comes from doing it, as men by sleeping lose the knowledge of sleep... Maleldil has brought us out of the one ignorance, and we have not entered the other. It was by the Evil One himself that he brought us out of the first. Little did that dark mind know the errand on which he really came to Perelandra!'” -- C.S. Lewis, Perelandra

Adam and Eve were born ignorant of evil. They partook of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil and became a deeper kind of ignorant. Before they were naive, afterward they were numb. The knowledge of good and evil had been for them like a language they didn't speak, but afterward it become like a language they'd forgotten. You can be ignorant to the intoxicating effects of alcohol through tee-totaling or through drunkenness, either will suffice. Whether your lips have never had a sip or you've have too much to sip, your lips cannot add an intelligible word to the discussion. The abstinent and the indulgent share the same ignorance. Neither one is capable of describing intoxication, albeit for different reasons. The sober, however, can be made to understand drunkenness. There is more hope for the clear-headed to comprehend than for the drunk. The good man, in the end, understands good and evil better than the wicked. It is not that the good understands goodness and the evil understands evil. The good understands both better than the evil understands anything for there is a knowledge of evil that is lost by participating in it.

The ignorance of evil, then, is not eradicated by experience, but obedience.

Adam and Eve were born ignorant and never gained knowledge. They did not, as promised by the serpent, become wise to good and evil by breaking God's good rule. They learned something, but it wasn't something good; and it didn't make them wiser. It taught them a deeper ignorance than they had previously known. It educated them in sin, which is not an advance in knowledge, but a corruption. Had they but held out, they would have perhaps, like Tor and Tinidril in Lewis' Perelandra, gained a knowledge better and wiser than ignorant innocence and better than experienced indulgence.