At the end of his celebrated work, A River Runs Through It, the post-Protestant writer Norman Maclean includes the following bit of dialogue between himself and his pastor father as the two of them struggle with grief and bewilderment in the aftermath of the death of Norman’s younger brother, Paul:     

“Are you sure you have told me everything you know about his death?” [my father] asked.
I said, “Everything.”
“It’s not much, is it?”
“No,” I replied, “but you can love completely without complete understanding.”
“That I have known and preached,” my father said.

One might argue that the whole of A River Runs Through It is an exploration of the complex relationship between love and understanding, of what it means to be a brother’s keeper when one never adequately understands the brother or what the brother needs.

Probing the complications of love in relation to understanding is not just a problem for characters within literary texts; it is also a problem for those who seek to interpret such texts. Good reading, according to Alan Jacobs, in his book A Theology of Reading, requires a “hermeneutic of love.” Both Christian thinkers like Jacobs and more secular ones like Martha Nussbaum have long insisted that understanding of many of the issues that literature raises depends upon appropriate feelings and virtues, not simply upon the exercise of critical reason.

Few Christian thinkers have extended their inquiries into the relationship between love and understanding beyond the domain of literary criticism into the territories of other disciplinary practices within the academy and the learned professions. However, an effort to do so might serve to begin the development of a robust Christian theology of higher education. Pondering the interplay between Christian friendship and Christian charity on the one hand and the pursuit of truth and understanding on the other would be a first step toward a systematic consideration of relationships among Christian spiritual virtues and intellectual virtues. It would be impossible to offer here a properly nuanced and compelling account of either Christian love or the intellectual virtue of understanding, but several examples will help to illuminate the connections among these virtues as a first step toward a future program of thought and action for the church-related academy.

Consider first Christian friendship. As Paul Wadell has argued in his book Friendship and the Moral Life, friendship is the very condition for the rest of the moral and intellectual virtues. Or, to put this matter in a way that directly addresses the matter of love’s relationship to understanding, without right relationships and a determination to sustain and renew them, places like Valparaiso or Notre Dame or Baylor would not be universities at all. In the present educational environment, church-related universities have the great opportunity to show the world that friendship and the comprehension of truth, love and understanding, are mutually dependent, that the primary purposes—truth-seeking and the cultivation of virtue—of any university worthy of the name cannot live without right relationships. Christianity has a rich understanding of community and the practices that constitute community. It also has developed a long tradition of education that stresses formation as well as information, the development of character as well as mind. Even so, Christians have not yet fully explored and elaborated, in both words and deeds, a tight, inextricable, and necessary connection between love and understanding, Christian friendship and comprehension of truth.

Here is one way to express both the major problem and the major opportunity. In one of the oldest comments in the Western philosophical tradition on the right relationship between friendship and truth, Aristotle suggested that friendship and truth may from time to time be in tension with one another and that there may arise irreconcilable conflicts between them. When such conflicts arise, he argued, we must always choose truth over friendship. Here is the full passage, where Aristotle is beginning to formulate a critique of the view of the good propounded by his teacher and friend Plato: “This sort of inquiry is, to be sure, unwelcome to us, because those who introduced the Forms were friends of ours; still, it presumably seems better, indeed only right, to destroy even what is close to us if that is the way to preserve truth. We must especially do this as philosophers, for though we love both the truth and our friends, reverence is due to the truth first.”

Perhaps Aristotle means only to suggest that people ought never to abandon their sense of what is true simply because a friend disagrees with their view of matters. However, he speaks here of being willing to “destroy even what is close to us” if we thereby preserve truth. The right ordering of our loves requires love of truth over love of friends. If and when common agreement between two friends about the truth of important matters cannot be found, the friendship should probably end. Disagreements with friends might well be “unwelcome,” but should Christians countenance the dissolution of friendships as the result of disagreements over what is taken to be at a given time the truth of matters under dispute? Losses of friendships, should they occur, should surely be regarded as worse than “unwelcome.”

Although the choice of truth over friendship will seem to many a noble expression of intellectual integrity, the whole discourse seems disquieting, and it is worth wondering why. I think uncomfortable feelings arise not necessarily because many Christians would choose friendship over truth—reversing the order of Aristotle’s loyalties or loves—but because they harbor a different picture of the relationship between friendship and truth, a picture that may not be completely clear and distinct but one that needs careful articulation and description.

Here is one account of that picture, painted in words in the sixth century CE, about 1000 years after Aristotle, by Dorotheos, abbot of the monastery at Gaza:

Suppose we were to take a compass and insert the point and draw the outline of a circle. The center point is the same distance from any point on the circumference. . . . Let us suppose that this circle is the world and that God is the center; the straight lines drawn from the circumference are the lives of human beings. . . .To move toward God, then, human beings move from the circumference along the various radii of the circle to the center. So the closer they are to God, the closer they become to one another; and the closer they are to one another, the closer they become to God.  

Put God in Christ at the center and bear in mind that Christ is the Truth and that all truth of whatever kind—empirical, poetic, theological, moral, forensic, narrative—is God’s truth. If this is a compelling picture of the relationship between Truth and friendship, the problem that so agitated Aristotle cannot possibly arise in the deep sense he outlined. On the contrary, deepening friendship and moving toward truth are two ways of describing the same process. Truth on this account is primarily relational, not propositional. Strengthening right relationships and moving toward Truth implicate and enable one another.

This formulation will seem persuasive and even familiar to some, sentimental to others, mystical to a few, and muddled to several. So let me offer particular cases in the interest of greater clarity and plausibility. One might wonder, for example, why many Roman Catholic campuses have more successfully included Muslim students as members of their communities of inquiry than some than some of their Protestant counterparts. Protestant campuses, especially evangelical schools like Wheaton College, have special difficulties managing this, in part because for many evangelicals Christian faith means primarily if not exclusively assent to a series of propositions. Those propositions are thought to represent fundamental and absolute truth, and unless individuals subscribe to them they cannot be fully admitted into the community. The practice that manifests this view of faith and truth on some evangelical campuses is the required subscription by all faculty to a so-called “faith statement.” But if truth is relational, not propositional, then friendship with those of different views and different faiths may be considered essential to the quest for truth, and, as we have said, all truth is finally God’s truth. One therefore lives in a community of friendship with those who differ, sometimes in seemingly irresolvable ways, in the reasonable hope that there will come a day where everyone is fully included in the widening circle of friends and all dwell together fully in Truth. Remember again Dorotheos’s picture: the closer we come to the truth, the closer we come to one another, and the closer we come to one another, the closer we come to the truth.

Let me be clear here: I am not attempting to suggest that evangelical schools like Wheaton are somehow less credible or less excellent than schools like Xavier or Gonzaga. Such global comparisons are almost always imprudent. Moreover, the genius of church-related higher education stems from a diversity of charisms: different strands of the Christian tradition have different gifts. And some of these gifts cannot be privileged or highlighted concurrently within the same institution. Thus, for example, Calvin’s philosophy department can probe more deeply than many other departments into certain philosophical questions precisely because the members of that department share a common faith and a common set of assumptions that they do not have to recurrently defend. Yet the department lacks a certain kind of internal diversity of opinion that might make other philosophical goods less available to it, such as the goods available to the philosophy department at Boston College, for instance. In my own view, the best way to assess Christian higher education is to consider all such institutions as a whole, not to expect that any one of them is going to achieve complete diversity while retaining a robust sense of distinctive identity. So this case of hospitality to Muslim students based on a certain conception of Christian friendship is meant only to show how certain theological assumptions about, for example, the nature of faith are integrally connected to certain social and intellectual practices.

Returning now to the subject of Christian friendship in relation to truth and understanding, Paul Wadell, whose book I have already mentioned, acknowledges the historical tension within Christianity between agape (charity) on the one hand and philia (friendship) on the other. Agape is non-reciprocal, universal, all inclusive, and non-preferential. Philia is both preferential and reciprocal. Wadell acknowledges that in our actual Christian communities today, our friendships, in the Aristotelian sense, will remain preferential and reciprocal, but he insists that the salutary pressures of agape push us in the direction of steadily widening the circle of our friends: the trajectory of Christian friendship is inclusive, not exclusive. So here again, we discover a strong theological warrant for the practice of friendship among those of many and various beliefs and backgrounds on the campuses of an increasing number of church-related colleges and universities.

Wadell discusses another trajectory as well. He argues the movement from Christ as prophet, priest, king, and teacher—the one who has listeners, subjects, and disciples—to Christ as friend represents, especially in the Gospel of John, a movement toward equality. Now if the character of right relationships is a kind of friendship or philia propelled toward full inclusion and equality by the distinctively Christian love agape, there is a perfect alignment between what is most desirable for truth-seeking at a university and what is most essential to the Christian life. Surely an ideal community of inquiry is constituted by a diverse and steadily enlarged circle of friends who are equal and alike in virtue.

Those who remain skeptical about this line of inquiry might well object that even hostile rivals can discover truth together. It happens all the time. True enough, in the same way that it is true that there is honor among thieves. Even so, we need to admit once again that there are different kinds and levels of truth within any university community and that their particular connections to right relationships will be differently calibrated. To complicate matters further, there were, for Aristotle at least, three kinds of friendship based respectively on pleasure, usefulness, and virtue. So a full account of the relationship of Christian friendship to understanding will need to be highly nuanced and contextual. Any such account must be deeply informed both by the university’s understanding of itself as an intentional community and by the Christian account of truth as relational under the aspect of philia enlarged by agape.

Finally and perhaps most important, the quality of the relationships among students and faculty and staff directly affect the quality of thinking done at the university. One of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s most influential insights was that all thought is public before it becomes private. I first learn as a child to argue with others on the playground and around the dinner table. I later internalize those arguments in the form of private thought, what Plato called the hushed dialogue of self with self. Wittgenstein would have called it the hushed dialogue of self with other internalized selves. Thus, if our personal relationships are characterized by arrogance, spite, envy, and suspicion, our thought will be similarly crippled. The student affairs staff member who shapes students to treat one another more charitably and humbly is contributing directly to those students’ capacity first to think well together and then to think well within the confines of their own library carrels.

Two very different but instructive cases facilitate a move from consideration of Christian friendship to a consideration of Christian charity. Though the cases are both singular and intricate, they will provide a basis for venturing larger and more abstract thoughts about the relationship between charity and understanding. First, consider the case of Frank Laubach, a Congregationalist missionary to the Philippines, who lived from 1884 until 1970. Laubach’s first fifteen years in the mission field were deeply frustrating, since very few of the Moro people, the Muslim population of the Philippines, had converted to Christianity. Sometime in 1930, as he wrote in a letter that year, he went up to a mountain near the village where he was living on Mindanao, to pray. There, God spoke to him and chastened him for his aversion to the people he had been sent to serve. “You have failed because you do not really love the people. You feel superior to them because you are white.” God told Laubach that if he could forget his American whiteness and act only out of love for the Moro people, they would respond.

Laubach decided that loving the Moros meant studying their Scriptures, the Qur’an, engaging in sympathetic dialogue, and discovering ways to help the Moros to lead more flourishing lives. In other words, he lived out the virtue of charity by abandoning efforts to proselytize and concentrating on what the Christian ethicist Gene Outka calls a minimalist description of Christian charity, “to aid a person or persons in distress.” This initial decision launched Laubach on what became an astonishing vocation. What the Moro people needed most, he concluded, in order for them to flourish, was literacy. So he set about teaching them how to read. He went on from there to become the twentieth century’s most accomplished promoter of literacy as a way to understanding and, beyond understanding, to general human flourishing. He began by rendering the Moro tongue into Roman characters and then establishing a vast network of schools to teach people to read it. He then created an organization to promote literacy around the globe and eventually produced language primers in 312 languages. When he died in 1970, he had enabled millions of people to read and understand one another in more than one hundred countries. In sum, Laubach loved in order to understand and to enable others to understand as well.

Laubach’s story was not an isolated episode within the larger history of Protestant missionaries abroad during the twentieth century. This makes his example all the more instructive. Laubach represented one small thread in the remarkable narrative tapestry woven by the historian David Hollinger in an important new book entitled Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America. If Hollinger is right, mainline Protestant missionaries and their children, more than any other group—more than the mass media, more than American commerce and industry, more even than the foreign service—mediated the many cultures and religions of the globe to the American people from about 1890 to 1960, especially during the formative period of World War II and its aftermath, from around 1940 until 1960.

Protestant missionaries and their children, because of their sustained and intimate engagement with peoples around the globe, and because they were disposed to regard such people lovingly as they sought to understand them, became the precursors of the most defensible aspects of what has in our own time been called “multiculturalism.” Many of them began with narrowly evangelistic ambitions, seeking only to convert or proselytize, but then, under the pressures of other aspects of their own formation, many of the mainline Protestant missionaries came to regard those to whom they had been sent as their own teachers, allies, and friends. They opened themselves fully to the cultural and religious riches these other peoples had to offer, and they in turn brought those riches back to the United States just as it had begun to assume its role as the pre-eminent power on the globe. As Hollinger summarizes it, “During the middle decades of the twentieth century, missionary-connected individuals and groups broadened the perspectives of the American public and influenced the operation of many institutions, including federal agencies, universities, churches, foundations, and political advocacy organizations.”

Hollinger is himself something of a post-Protestant thinker (he was raised in the Church of the Brethren), and he has long been an outspoken advocate of secularity, especially of the secular academy. His deep and sympathetic appreciation of Protestant missionaries and their achievement is all the more compelling for that reason, even though it is to some extent limited. Thus, on the one hand he repeatedly insists that missionaries were not simply transformed by the peoples they found but that they were disposed to receive and to comprehend other cultures in certain ways on the basis on their own earlier formation in their churches at home. He says of Laubach, “There is no doubt that his experience in the field had a deep effect upon him, but he illustrates well the ways in which dispositions brought to the missionary experience could render individuals responsive to the redeeming qualities in foreign cultures. He was prepared to see in Filipinos and Muslims qualities that some others were slower to celebrate.”

On the other hand, Hollinger does not probe very deeply into the nature of these “dispositions,” which are doubtless Christian virtues, especially the virtue of charity. Though Hollinger would perhaps not wish to make the claim himself, his own evidence shows that especially during the period of history he describes Christian love really did in many positive ways transform the world. (Lest I leave a wrong impression here, I should say that Hollinger also acknowledges and attends to some of the less attractive, even deeply troubling, aspects of some missionaries’ influence around the globe.)

Our second case study of love in relation to understanding could not be more different from Laubach and the Moros. It involves a solitary, sometimes isolated, individual, not a mass movement of sorts. It involves the effort to understand plants, not human beings. It emerges within the field of biology, not anthropology, much less missiology. So it invites us to wonder whether the character of the love changes depending upon what it is that one seeks to understand. This is the case of Barbara McClintock, one of the most distinguished cell biologists of the last century who, on the basis of her determined and sometimes misunderstood work in the field of cytogenetics, became in 1970 the first woman to be awarded the National Medal of Science. Thirteen years later, in 1983, she received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, the first woman to win that prize unshared.

McClintock spent her entire professional life working on the cytogenetics of corn. Her painstaking research led to a series of remarkable discoveries, some of which were not understood or recognized until many years after she had originally sought to present and explain them. One discovery in particular was based simply upon her close and careful observation of changes in the phenotypes within strains of maize. From these observations, she was able to infer that various regulated changes had taken place in the positioning of some of the genetic material within the cells of the plants she was studying. This led her to develop a theory of transposition, of controlled repositioning of genetic elements, sometimes in response to environmental stresses. This theory challenged some of the newer orthodoxies in genetics, views that had virtually constituted the emerging new field of molecular biology in the middle years of the twentieth century. As a result, McClintock’s theories of the 1950s were not fully comprehended, much less fully appreciated, until the 1970s when new technologies allowed scientists to observe at the molecular level the very processes that McClintock had long before hypothesized and supported with substantial empirical evidence.

Though a part of the initial resistance to some of McClintock’s work arose from what she called the “fixed assumptions” of a conceptual scheme in some ways incommensurable with her own, another part of that resistance stemmed from an inability to grasp, much less to appreciate, the way in which McClintock thought and observed. She always seemed a bit peculiar to her colleagues, though none of them doubted that she was a rigorous scientific thinker. Even so, as one of her biographers tells us, whereas most of McClintock’s fellow students of maize were interested in what some isolated feature of any given plant might reveal about maize generally, she sought “intimate and total knowledge about each and every plant. One of her colleagues remarked that she could write the autobiography of each plant she worked with. Her respect for the unfathomable workings of the human mind was matched by her regard for the complex workings of each and every plant, but she was confident that, with due attentiveness, she could trust the intuitions the one produced on the other.”

Later studies of McClintock’s work have superseded in important ways the biography by Evelyn Fox Keller that I have just quoted, but no subsequent study has contested its account of the singular blend of love and understanding that characterized McClintock’s research. The very title of the biography, A Feeling for the Organism, suggests that the source of McClintock’s genius was as much in the affective as in the purely cognitive relationships of the scientist to her subjects. As McClintock began to examine the chromosomes in the nuclei of maize cells in order to understand something that had for a great length of time eluded her, she said, as she reflected on the process of discovery,

I found that the more I worked with the chromosomes the bigger and bigger they got, and when I was really working with them I wasn’t outside, I was down there. I was part of the system. I was right down there with them, and everything got big. I was even able to see the internal parts of the chromosomes—actually everything was there. It surprised me because I felt as though I were right down there and these were my friends. . . . As you look at these things, they become a part of you. And you forget yourself. The main thing about it is that you forget yourself.

Intense attention to particular organisms, self-forgetfulness, a feeling of friendship for, even unity with the subjects under study: all of these taken together begin to fill out McClintock’s own way of understanding the natural world. When she was asked to explain what enabled her to see deeper into the mysteries of genetics than many of her colleagues, she answered that she took the time and had the patience to listen to what each and every individual plant was telling her, that she was “open” to what the organisms “had to say.” This openness to “the other” resembles the openness that many of the missionaries had to their host cultures, and, like McClintock’s love for her subjects, the missionaries’ love for those different from themselves opened up possibilities for understanding that never would have been realized without that love. For McClintock, “organism” was a kind of code word not simply for a particular plant or animal but for a living form, an object-as-subject.

Though these two case studies can only be suggestive at best with regard to the large topic of the relationship of love to understanding, they do suggest some of the contours that future more comprehensive and systematic studies might well follow. For one thing, under the intellectual pressure to consider Christian love in relationship to knowledge or understanding, it will not be helpful to work with a concept of charity or agape that distinguishes it sharply from either eros or philia. We have seen how Paul Wadell develops a concept of philia enriched and enlarged by caritas without losing the warmth of friendship. Alan Jacobs elides Christian friendship and charity throughout his book on the theology of reading. And we have seen in the example of McClintock an affective relationship to the subjects she sought to understand that is more akin to eros than to charity. The kind of sharp, even antagonistic, distinction between agape and eros that was developed at great length by the Swedish Lutheran theologian Anders Nygren almost a century ago shaped much of Protestant thinking about love for many years during the middle of the twentieth century. But as the English Jesuit priest Martin D’Arcy demonstrated in his careful book The Mind and Heart of Love, written shortly after Nygren’s Agape and Eros appeared, self-regarding and other-regarding loves are finally complementary, not all together conflicting. And of course the work of the twentieth-century Jesuit Bernard Lonergan might well be considered the best starting point for comprehending the human spirit and the relationship between love and understanding within it and between the human spirit and both the natural and the divine. Lonergan’s work is much more sympathetic to D’Arcy’s than to Nygren’s on the matter of love.

In order to have any prospect of success, however, the effort to comprehend the relationship between love and understanding must be more than ecumenical; it must be inter-religious. When McClintock sought a religious vocabulary for expressing the sense of spiritual kinship she felt for her subject, she turned not to the religion of her distant forebears who had come over on the Mayflower but to Buddhism. And, as Fox Keller notes, a number of the great physicists who were contemporaries of McClintock—Bohr, Schroedinger, Einstein, and Oppenheimer—turned to Hinduism and Buddhism for the conceptual and spiritual resources they needed to understand their own understanding. Similarly, St. Augustine relied heavily upon the Hebrew Scriptures, especially the book of Genesis, for guidance in understanding his own soul. Few other books represent such a tight and complex relationship between knowledge and intimacy, understanding and loving. In other words, like the Protestant missionaries, we too must increasingly rely upon other spiritual traditions to enrich and expand our own, especially in the case of attempting to consider knowing and loving, since both of these activities are intrinsically multicultural in one dimension, universal in another.

Some of the most important philosophical work on love’s relationship to understanding has been done, over the course of the last twenty years, by women. So we must consider not only multicultural but also gendered accounts of these matters. Martha Nussbaum, for example, has a sure grasp of pagan, Jewish, and Christian traditions. As a result, her several essays, some of them gathered together in books with pertinent titles like Love’s Knowledge, should be essential reading for those who seek to fashion a Christian theology of higher education. And perhaps her best book, The Fragility of Goodness, develops an extended and compelling argument that defends the cognitive power of emotions.

The point here is not to develop a reading list but to demonstrate that the next phase of inquiry into matters of virtue and knowledge as part of a larger theological project must be collaborative. What we need to know and think about far exceeds any one person’s learning. And indeed, collaboration has come more and more to be a favored mode of inquiry into the whole range of subjects mentioned here. The Defining Wisdom project at the University of Chicago provides one such example, as do the several inter-religious conversations about knowledge and wisdom, some of them recorded in publications under the auspices of the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies at the University of Southern California.

Finally, might further inquiry within the Christian tradition into matters of love and understanding find a starting point or inspiration other than meditations on the nature of the Trinity? From Augustine to Aquinas through Lonergan at least, a large amount of inquiry into the nature of understanding and its relationship to love has been prompted and guided by an effort to understand the Trinity through analogies to the various parts of the human soul or spirit. For, so the argument has gone, if we are made in the imago Dei, we should find by looking within ourselves a faint image of the Trinity itself in, for example, the relationships among being, knowledge, and will, or, to take another triad, among love, understanding, and truth. I have modestly proposed by contrast here that we might begin by attending to various academic practices and habits that have developed over the centuries in order to secure understanding or to various large-scale movements designed to enable human beings to understand one another more deeply.

Doing justice to these practices and intentions will require sooner or later a spiritual vocabulary in order fully to comprehend them. And it may be that any such vocabulary will have to be to some degree syncretistic in order to be functional and compelling. I know that syncretism is a scare word to some, but I mean nothing more by it here than the kind of creative energy that is sometimes unleashed by the confluence of two traditions of spirituality. George Saunders, author of the latest Booker Prize winner, Lincoln in the Bardo, was raised as a Roman Catholic and eventually became a Buddhist. The genius of his book derives in part from his own creative fusion of these two traditions on matters of love, loss, and compassion.

However we begin the project I have outlined, it is important to get it underway, even though it is but a small part of a larger enterprise. But it is especially pressing, since the stakes are very high. As Boston College philosopher Patrick Byrne, a student of Lonergan, has put it, “Love without understanding is insipid, mere romanticism. Understanding without love is what characterizes our age, an age of so-called rational control and technological advance which so often is insensitive. The need for an integration of love and wisdom, expertise, and know-how is the urgent need of our time.”

This essay began with the question of whether we can love rightly and completely without right and complete understanding. Perhaps we can, as Normal Maclean’s father preached. But it is highly doubtful whether we can understand rightly and completely without loving rightly. Nicholas Wolterstorff put it this way: “Augustine believed that only if one departs from the condition of generic humanity and adopts that highly particular stance which consists of loving God above all else can one genuinely understand the fundamental structure of reality. Misplaced love and hostility hinder knowledge; loving the truly lovable enables knowledge” In other words, however much we must and should extend the range of our sources and enlarge collaboratively the scope of our ideas, any true account of the relationship between love and knowledge must end, even if it does not begin, with God and with our love of God above all else.

Mark R. Schwehn is professor of humanities in Christ College, the Honors College of Valparaiso University. This essay is an expanded and revised version of a talk delivered at Baylor’s Institute for Faith and Learning on November 6, 2017.