Brian Hamilton

The Unity of Knowledge and Love

It is rare, now, to speak of knowledge and love as somehow one, in part because arguments about such things as the relation between the will and the intellect in the human person seem far too speculative to us, or simply irrelevant. ‘The relation of the will to the intellect’—it could even be one of the stock examples people use to demonstrate the overdetermined character of so much medieval philosophy, like ‘angels on the head of a pin.’ But our failure to consider this question stands at the very root of our failure to say anything coherent about the human person at all, much less to identify her as a unity with a specific telos.* One could probably analyze a whole host of cultural and intellectual maladies, from rational positivism to reckless sexual liberality to the false humility of a principled agnosticism (thinking, for example, of the likes of John Caputo), on the basis of precisely this failure to uphold the unity of knowledge and love.

Karl Rahner has a beautiful exploration of this relationship, which he undertakes in order to show the primordial place of mystery in Christian theology. If we are really to say that knowledge and love are united, he says, it cannot merely be because (for example) reason hands over to our will something good for it to love. Rather, “one must understand the intellect in such a way that love is the perfection of knowledge itself.” And love is a perfection of knowledge itself, because the object of knowledge is not some set of perspicuous truths which are occasionally and unfortunately beyond our grasp and for this reason called ‘mysteries’; the object of knowledge is mystery itself, the primordial and abiding mystery that always lays beyond us. Therefore knowledge must always transcend itself in order to achieve its own end, surpassing itself on its journey towards that mystery in a movement simultaneously preserving and transforming it, a movement which for that reason can only be called love. “It is the mystery,” he says, “that forces knowledge either to be more than itself or to despair.”

* In this way, at least, what holds open the terrible chasm that so often separates Christian confession from a Christian way of life—as when some denounce ‘dogma’ as unimportant so long as love is maintained, or when others resist ‘moralizing’ in order (supposedly) to preserve the integrity of theology—is the lack of a good theological anthropology. Without understanding the constitutional unity of knowledge and love in the human person, one will never understand why doctrine and ethics are also constitutionally one.

27 January 2008 |
tags: Karl Rahner, Theological Anthropology