Life & Wisdom Quote by Jonathan Swift

Swift lands the blade with a neat inversion: theology advertises itself as revelation, yet so much of what it “reveals” is negative space. We’re supposedly shut out from heaven’s real operations, but clergy can speak with suspicious certainty about heaven’s prohibitions, its paperwork, its pet peeves. The joke isn’t just that the faithful don’t know; it’s that the institution claims expertise precisely where evidence is thinnest. Ignorance becomes tolerable when it’s packaged as instruction.

The subtext is classic Swift: a distrust of authorities who convert metaphysical mystery into social control. Telling people what angels do would invite imagination, which invites questions. Telling people what angels don’t do is safer: it turns the afterlife into a moral surveillance system. The line ridicules that asymmetry. “We are ignorant” is inclusive, almost modest; “we are told expressly” snaps into passive voice, exposing the pipeline of power. Someone is doing the telling. Someone benefits from the certainty.

Context matters. Swift is writing in an England and Ireland roiled by sectarian conflict, where churches compete not only over doctrine but over governance and obedience. As an Anglican clergyman himself, he’s not firing from outside the walls; he’s diagnosing a professional hazard: the temptation to replace humility with policy. The wit works because it’s small and surgical, not a rant. Swift makes you laugh, then notice the real target: the religious bureaucrat who can’t map heaven, but can always draft rules for earth.