Paths to Contemplation - 6

What does the knowledge of God mean?

What does it mean to know something?  In one sense, to know something is to be able to describe it so that others will also know it.  In this sense, I can teach others what I know.  In the case of some object, if I know the object, I will recognize it when I encounter it.  The abilities to describe and to recognize, to know in the sense just outlined, are mental or intellectual abilities.    They are powers of the natural mind.

When we refer to the “knowledge of God,” we are not referring to knowledge in an intellectual sense, as something of which our natural minds are capable.  God, in God’s infinite and uncreated Being, totally surpasses the natural mental abilities of even the most intelligent human being who has ever lived.

No writer can describe God in words.  No artist can draw a picture of God.  God cannot be contained within the finite boundaries of our imaginations or reason.  This is not to say that we cannot talk about God with some degree of accuracy.  After all, Jesus himself taught about God in an authoritative way.  Rather, anything we say about God in whatever natural medium we use is necessarily incomplete, and, to some extent, misleading.  Jesus also said, “Whoever sees me sees the Father.”  It is through Jesus that we can come to see God since Jesus is both created and uncreated being, both human and divine.  When we truly see Jesus, we will see God.

I am not suggesting that there is no value to good theology or good preaching since we cannot, in this life, “look into the face of God and live.”  We do what we can do with the resources available to us.  We must, however, also be wary of mistaking our images of God for God, or what we say about God as adequately describing God.   God is, and must always remain, the Ultimate Mystery.

Knowledge through experience

There is also a sense of knowing that relates to experience.  To experience something is to come to know that thing.   But I can know something intellectually without ever experiencing it.  I can talk intellectually about human love, but this is markedly different from actually experiencing human love.  Once I have experienced human love, I will recognize that my intellectual knowledge was woefully inadequate.  If someone who has experienced deep human love is asked to describe that love, he or she may well reply, “If you have to ask, you would not understand.”

Our most profound human relationships are often indescribable.  They take place at some deep level of our being and are so personal that no one but ourselves can truly know them.

Suppose I ask myself the question, “What does it mean to know my wife?”   I could, of course, think of characteristics that would enable anyone who encounters my wife to recognize her, but this trivializes something that ought not to be trivialized.   My relationship with my wife is both profound and unique.  There is a union of lives.  There is the love we exchange and the experiences we share.  My wife, like any human being, is extraordinarily complex, someone about whom I am always learning new things.  I experience my wife on a daily basis in ways that define and modify our relationship.  To try to convey what it means to know my wife is an impossible and inherently frustrating task.  My rambling about my wife would bore others, not enlighten them, and would not, in any case, adequately describe what it means to know my wife in the sense that I know and love her.

So it is with the knowledge of God, but infinitely more so.   To know God, we must experience God as God is.  We must somehow live into the “mind” of God to understand God as God understands himself.  We must be so attuned to God that we can comprehend God as God comprehends us.   Such knowledge cannot come about through our intellects or through any capacity that comes from human nature alone.  How then do we acquire such knowledge?

Since we have no power within us to come to the knowledge or experience of God, we must rely entirely on God to gift us with that knowledge.  That is, the knowledge of God can come only from God.

Three questions immediately pop to mind?  Why would God allow us to know himself?   Will God indeed allow us to know him?   What must we do to come to this knowledge of God?

The answer to the first question - why would God allow us to know him - is a mystery buried in the heart of God.  God is love, and it is the nature of love to pour itself out generously.  Although God is sufficient onto himself and has no need of creatures to be God, God is the very essence of love, and love must be shared.  Two expressions of God’s love are creation in general and humanity in particular.  Humans are beings who can know, who are self-conscious, who can recognize that there is a higher order than just the natural order.  Thus prepared, humans are ready to receive the greatest proof of God’s love God has to give, the experience of himself through sharing in his own divine life.  God wishes to share his life and self-knowledge with us because of the love that he has for us.

But will God give us this knowledge?  After all, the direct experience of God is hardly something that we dare hope for, much less something we can demand.  What proof have we that God desires to share this wonderful gift with us?

The proof of God’s desire that we know him through loving union is Jesus Christ, at once both fully God and fully human.  If God had no desire that we share in his life, he would not have shared in ours.  Through our union with Christ, as members of the Mystical Body of which St. Paul speaks so eloquently, we share in the life of Christ, and, through Christ, we share in the life of God.  And through sharing in that life, we can hope someday to know God, not merely know about God.  As Christ and the Father are One, so the more we are conformed to Christ, the more we also become one with the Father.  Though we always remain created beings, we are drawn by God’s grace and power into a relationship with God that would be impossible without Christ.  Christ is both the promise and the means that God provides to prove to us that we can come to know God directly.  But how is this happy goal to be achieved?