Can Love Know?

An excerpt from my new book, Affective Knowledge in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas

Aquinas’s exegesis of Romans 8:16, John 14:21, and Philippians 1:9 invert the typical order of classical (and Thomistic) metaphysics in which knowledge causes love. Here, instead, love causes knowledge. An intuitive, experiential knowledge of (1) God as “Abba Father,” (2) Christ’s divine nature, and (3) the demands of the moral order are consequent upon the gift of God’s own love (caritas). Aquinas’s exegesis of these texts comports with the theological structure he gives the gift of wisdom, which “has its cause in the will, viz., charity, but … has its essence in the intellect.” The connatural knowledge that belongs to the gift of wisdom issues “from the affection of filial love” because “from the affection itself for divine things comes forth their selfsame manifestation.”

How should we understand this claim? Is it possible for love to know? First, we need to avoid misconceiving the relation between intellect and will as if they were isolated from each other. Undoubtedly, Aquinas distinguishes between apprehension and appetition, between the powers of knowing and loving. Such distinction is predicated on the mode according to which each comes to possess the form of another, that is, the distinction between an intentional and real union. Nevertheless, Aquinas often reminds his readers of the immediacy of the will to the intellect and vice versa. They operate inseparably, in one motio. The soul is one indivisible and immaterial substance. While we rightly speak of “faculties” of knowing and loving—and it is, indeed, necessary to distinguish intellectual and volitional powers—the soul and its powers are per se indivisible. Indeed, the will itself is a rational appetite. And, as we saw in the chapter three, all appetition—natural, sensual, and intellectual—involves apprehension. “The act of the will,” remarks Aquinas, “is nothing else than an inclination proceeding from the interior principle of knowledge.” We might say that willing is “built into” knowing. And so, the love of the will is also experienced by the intellect.

Still the question stands: what could it mean for love to know? The answer lies in considering the causality of love. Experiential and connatural knowledge of God is certainly a type of knowledge, but it is a “loving knowledge”—a knowledge of divine love and knowledge by means of divine love. It entails the propulsion of the intellect by a will inflamed by caritas in such an intense and abiding way that it decisively alters the cast of intellect’s apprehension. Marín-Sola expresses this beautifully:

Love excites and concentrates our attention, it makes one dwell on the loved object more constantly and with greater fixedness. This concentration of attention is tantamount to an increase in cognitive power…. The lover fixes his gaze intensely, and even exclusively on the beloved; he thus receives impressions with great force and greater purity, and discerns more quickly certain properties or features that others fail to notice, or come to notice much more later. It is the Beloved Disciple who before all others recognizes the risen Christ on the shore, and exclaims: ‘It is the Lord.’

While it belongs to the intellect to illumine, it belongs to the will to move the intellect. Love pulls the object of affection to itself; it focuses the intellect, giving it greater attention and interest in the object of its delight. We might say that the “loving taste” of the will carries the intellect towards its object as something experienced.