Contemplation and The Knowledge of God

Extract

This is not an exhaustive study of contemplation, and I omit severa important aspects of the subject; most drastically, I omit any discussion of Christ as the ultimate revelation of God. I feel entitled to do so for two reasons: first, that Christ characterized himself as ‘the way’, and it is therefore permissible to make a preliminary enquiry, such as this present one, into what, in general, one is looking for in an approach to God. And secondly, we no longer know Christ himself in the flesh. To see Christ is to see the Father: but how do we see Christ? To some extent we may re-assimilate the problem of knowing Christ to that of knowing God (though since the Incarnation, one cannot leave it at that, obviously; otherwise the Incarnation would have no enduring revelatory significance, which it clearly has).

In English we are unfortunate in having only one word ‘know’ for both savoir and connaître; for the distinction is very important between knowing a fact, and knowing a person, and it is easy to create devastating problems for ourselves by tacitly assimilating contemplation of God to savoir rather than connaître.

The most obvious distinction between knowing a fact and knowing a person is that the former is abstract and general, while the latter is particular. The object of the former type of knowledge, being an abstraction, only exists in my mind. In Buber’s terminology, there is an I-It relationship, an It always being only a part of my world.