The relationship between knowledge and love is both delicate and complicated. Each needs the other. In this column, I want to offer a reflection on the knowledge-love relationship in the Christian life as part of the preparation for Christmas and as an intrinsic element in our response to the universal call to holiness.

Faith knowledge

Catechetical ministry in general and adult education in particular have received significant and ongoing attention by Church leadership in its effort to make post-conciliar renewal and lifelong catechesis a reality in the Catholic community.

In the Caribbean Church, the bishops have issued two teaching documents on catechesis and the dioceses in the Conference have made a serious commitment to implement the teaching.

In the Archdiocese of Port of Spain, the Archdiocesan Catechetical Office has used correspondence courses, an adaptation of the Alpha Programme, the concept of Total Parish Catechesis, faith formation for teachers, the use of media for catechesis, religious formation in Catholic primary schools, developing a syllabus for secondary schools and through the Children on Fire for Christ Programme religious formation in government schools.

The Archdiocesan Programme of Adult Education/Formation, which is just completing its first cycle, combines radio, television, the Internet, the distribution of DVDs and the availability of the text of the presentations on the DVDs through a special Catholic News Supplement to communicate the Faith.

What is explicitly stressed in all these programmes is that faith knowledge is not enough for mature Christian life. What is needed is the lifelong interaction of the elements of the “Think Four Formula” (knowledge, formation, commitment and mission).  

Knowledge and love

In a recent lecture to the faculty and students of Rome’s Gregorian University, the Holy Father said that “knowing God is not enough. For a true encounter with God, one must love God. Knowledge must become love.”

The Holy Father then emphasized that unless knowledge of God becomes love of God, the human person cannot respond to the fundamental questions of life that will always trouble her/his heart. However, when knowledge does become love, hope replaces despair even in situations when we must face personal and social evil.

The pastoral application of the teaching of the Holy Father that love generates the ability to hope is particularly relevant during the season of Advent when the Church proclaims the importance of hope. 

The First Commandment

The teaching of the Holy Father invites us to reflect on whether the first Commandment holds a priority position in our lives. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.”

The context of the commandment is the fact of salvation history that God has loved us first. The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains that the commandment communicates the value of loving God and makes explicit the response of love that we are asked to return to God.

Can love be mandated?

There are three issues to be considered in answering this important question raised by the Holy Father in his encyclical letter, Deus Caritas Est.

1) No one has ever seen God as God truly is so how can we love God? The response to this aspect of the question is that in truth God is not totally invisible to us nor is God totally inaccessible to us. In Old Testament salvation history, people began to know God through God’s works and through God’s interventions in history on behalf of the chosen people. In New Testament salvation history, God did become visible to us in Jesus.

2) In one sense, love can be commanded because it has first been given. Contact with the visible manifestations of God’s love can awaken in us a feeling of joy born of the experience of being loved. Acknowledging the living God is one path toward the love of God. It creates an open-ended communion between God and us and leads to an identification of wills. As a result, what had been imposed on me from without by commandment is now my own will because God has gradually made himself more present to me than I am to myself.  My “self” has been surrendered to God.

3) For the sake of clarity, the Holy Father then considers the other side of the question about whether or not love can be commanded. He says in a real sense love cannot be commanded. It is ultimately a feeling that is there or it is not. It cannot be produced by the will.

God does not demand of us a feeling that we are incapable of producing. What God does do is he loves us and makes us see and experience his love. In the process of this gradual encounter, we move from the commandment to love God from without to a freely experienced love from within. By its nature this love must be shared.

The lives of the saints

The experience of the love of God can be heightened by reflecting periodically on the lives of the saints. The saints are people who grew in their awareness of the love of God, deepened their appreciation of love of God through prayer and Eucharist and shared their love with others whom they saw as the image of God.

They teach us by their lives that unless we open ourselves to the love of God and use that love to motivate our relationship with God and others, we run the risk of fulfilling our vocational duties faithfully, but in an arid and loveless manner.

Conclusion

Advent helps us prepare for Christmas and at Christmas we celebrate God’s visibility and the incarnational nature of God’s love for us. Our knowledge of God must become love or that knowledge is just information about God. 

A well-educated atheist is capable of such knowledge. To be a mature Christian who is fully alive we must love God, grow in our appreciation of the meaning of God’s love and understand as we share God’s love with others that love only grows through love.