KNOWLEDGE ONLY PUFFS UP; IT IS LOVE WHICH BUILDS UP.... IF ANYONE LOVES GOD HE IS KNOWN BY HIM. St. Paul was a lifelong scholar, a student of the law for whom study of God's revealed word was an act of worship. He speaks from experience when he writes these words. Having received the grace of conversion upon encountering the risen and glorified Christ, Paul came to realize the limits of knowledge and to appreciate the primacy of love. Yet, as this text reveals, he well appreciated the fact that love is more than desire, more than benevolent concern for the good of the beloved; love itself is a form of knowledge. And so, he explains to the Corinthians that "IF ANYONE LOVES GOD HE IS KNOWN BY HIM."

A more careful consideration of the nature of knowledge notes that there are different types of knowing, each with its proper and distinctive features. Technical knowledge, whether of a practical or abstract kind is concerned with more objective data and confers a certain power and control over matter and even of people. It can be taught and learned in all its particulars by any one possessing the skill. Military tactics, surgical technics, business strategies, law and even the principles of ethics- these are examples of the kind of knowledge Paul refers to here that "puffs up". They create a particular relationship to things or people that is largely manipulative and have influence of a more exterior kind. The other type of knowledge is personal and intuitive, it arises from within, is highly subjective and cannot be transmitted by teaching. At its purest it is transcendent, in that it passes through even the hidden levels of the imagination and affective life to the heart of the person known. This is the kind of knowledge the Bible is most concerned with. To know another, to know God is to experience him precisely as person. Such knowledge of the Lord is always a saving knowledge. It is possible only to love.

St. Gregory the Great understood this kind of knowledge and wrote about it in commenting as follows on Jesus' words "I have called you friends because whatever I have heard from my Father I have made known to you."

What are all those things that he heard from the Father which he wanted to be known to his servants to make them his friends except the interior joys of charity, except that feast of the heavenly homeland that is daily imprinted on our minds through the aspiration of its love? For when we love the heavenly things we have heard we already know what is loved for love itself is knowledge. (Homilia XXVII.4 in Evangelia PL 76: 1206, 1207)

This truth that in our dealings with God he always and necessarily takes the initiative is a source of encouragement that we can profit from repeatedly recalling. The fact that we know and strive to serve God is a clear sign that he has first known us. "You would not seek him had you not already found him" said St. Bernard. As we see St. Gregory earlier pointed out that had God not first sought us, we would not seek him. His knowing us is an accepting of us; he knows us as chosen for himself. This is the truth that underlies Paul's statement to the Corinthians; it applies to us today as much as it did to them in the first century.

Our Cistercian Fathers were particularly taken by this manner of viewing our relation with God, as we see especially in the thought of William of St. Thierry. He further refined this doctrine in that he maintained that not all love for God is real knowledge of him, but only that love which is a gift of the Holy Spirit. "Men may teach how to seek God, and angels how to adore him, but he alone teaches how to find him, possess him and enjoy him (The Golden Epistle, 266 Cistercian Fathers 12, Kalamazoo 1971)." It is the grace of the Spirit that gives what William calls "the understanding of enlightened love." (Exposition on the Song of Songs, 94 Cistercian Fathers 6, Kalamazoo 1970)

As we offer the Eucharist today we are invited to take part in a banquet of divine love that is ordered to an experience that imparts to us some measure of this same enlightened love that sanctified saints such as John Chrysostom and William of St. Thierry. At this time of national distress when our country suffers from the destructive violence resulting from hatred, let us seek in this sacrament and in the inspired words of the apostle communion with the risen Christ whose love is undying for it transcends all passion and overcomes death itself.

© Abbey of the Genesee