Some time back my wife was involved in a discussion online which produced some rather startling results. Recently she had occasion to revisit some of the themes in that discussion to see what gains further reading and experience had provided. In helping her to look something up, I came across this rather remarkable paragraph at the website of her former contrincant.
From the beginning and throughout our entire lives, we are what we love far more than we are what we know. Loving the right thing is almost the whole way to knowing the right thing, and love will push the car the rest of the way. I know this to be true.
Now this is problematic conceptually and methodologically. In order to sympathize with the functioning of this epistemology, let us imagine a genial person of great goodwill and perhaps greater ignorance. Without knowledge or discrimination (since loving is the way to knowledge) it seems that he can have no recourse but to love any object presented to his affections: without divine grace making the arrival at the narrow way remarkably smooth, this would almost certainly involve the loving of a great many things that ought not be loved: presumably, when once they are thoroughly known through love, their badness is discerned and they are cast aside. The poor fellow must constantly be in love with some je ne sais qua (by definition this is what it must be) which turns out, on the knowledge brought about by love, to have been totally unworthy of his sincere affection. Of course, this in itself is a problematic construct, because it requires that behind and above all other loves, this person should love a goodness which he somehow recognizes without, ex hypothesi, having yet known it. Otherwise, why should our gentle fool cease loving anything at all, even if that something should be Harlequin romance novels? So Dissidens has a conceptual problem intertwining with his methodological problem. If blind affection (because knowledge is acquired through love and so love must come first) leads a blind soul (because knowledge can’t be born in it prior to love), shall they not both fall into a ditch? In order to avoid this, we have to postulate that one or the other is not really blind. That, of course, is the contention.
And even divine grace will not provide an easy solution for his dilemma. For if divine grace gives us a love of goodness it must give us a knowledge of goodness also. It must, even if subconsciously, teach us the taste of good that we may recognize where it is found. That would already contradict the idea that love precedes knowledge absolutely: but even if that point may be temporarily passed over, it does not solve the problem that according to this theory in order to know whether an object has good in it to be loved, it must be loved first of all. Because this intervention by divine grace still leaves the goodness in the several objects presented to the soul to be discovered only by loving them, and finding often that one has thrown one’s heart away on inadequate, sublunary, perhaps even fundamentalist, things. Had divine grace preserved our exemplary affectionate ignoramus from this awkward method of loving everything in order to discern its good or evil nature, then that grace has functioned by giving them an antecedent knowledge. So that grace clearly will not function as a deus ex machina to remove the self-referential incoherences of Dissidens’ epistemology.
But there is another conceptual obstruction. Love must be love of something, or it is simply geniality or gas. But when there is an object to love, I can see no way to divorce at least a minimum of knowledge from that encounter: when all is said and done, surely the noble lover at least sees that the object of his affection exists? Or must we conclude that poor old Boswell had “always loved strong liquors” before encountering, not merely any particular liquor, but even the idea of it? I am not the only one who senses this difficulty: Jonathan Edwards also addressed himself to this point in his little work on Christian Knowledge, saying:
So there can be no love without knowledge. It is not according to the nature of the human soul, to love an object which is entirely unknown. The heart cannot be set upon an object of which there is no idea in the understanding. The reasons which induce the soul to love, must first be understood, before they can have a reasonable influence on the heart.
There is another point. We ought to cultivate the art, lauded by Barfield, of applying what we are saying to the statement we are currently making and to the fact of our making it. So Dissidens can say in the quotation introduced above that he knows “this to be true”. But according to his own just enunciated epistemology, how does he know it to be true? The answer can only be that he loved it first. But this requires us to conclude that he loved a theory of knowledge without having any distinct conception of what it was. But since a theory is an intellectual construct, it requires formulation in order to exist. Mirabile dictu, in order to put Dissidens’ epistemology into practice, we must through love give existence to an intellectual object of our affection: and then we can rest, knowing that we have discovered the truth.
There is another ground on which to meet this claim. The epistemology which Dissidens claims so firmly to know is not found in Scripture: indeed, it is unscriptural. 1 John 4:9, justly famous for its concluding phrase, speaks to this epistemological concern: He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. A lack of love is a sure sign of a lack of knowledge. If we truly know the God who is love, we will love: because such knowledge will be transformative (on the transforming effects of knowledge notice 1 John 3:2). Knowing God produces love (compare also 1 John 4:7). There is another, negative, confirmation that Dissidens is wrong to be found in 1 John 4, this time at vv.2&3. We do not discern false spirits by loving them, but by checking their confession: by learning what they teach on a certain critical point. One could also raise the rather obvious point of 1 John 4:20. Loving God whom one has not seen is taken to be harder, less likely, than loving one’s brother whom one has seen. More familiar knowledge results in more facility of affection. Love and knowledge, in that order, are clearly not related as cause and effect, in the Scriptural account of the matter.
None of this is to say that love does not enter into the further development of knowledge, but only to set out clearly that there must be (by reason, experience, tradition and Scripture) a logical priority of a certain amount of knowledge to love. Making love antecedent to knowledge is an error of the same kind as making birth precede conception �until something is conceived there is nothing to be born.
Nor is any of this to deny that Dissidens has leveled some just criticisms at the quality of fundamentalist attempts at art, or that he knows what sort of items in the realm of church music and literature have a better claim on our affection than most of what we hear in our churches today. But aesthetic correctness is not the same thing as a coherent epistemology or as the exercise of charity.