Another Afterthought to the Previous Post

   The account of human knowing as a translation of reality into the medium of thought and language may appear to leave emotional, poetic, mythical, or practical engagement outside the scope of truth, as though these belonged only to the associations or connotations surrounding a concept rather than to the being of the thing itself. Yet this would be misleading. From the essence of a thing there flows not only its definitional structure but also a range of intelligible perfections: its powers, relations, goodness, beauty, and fittingness within an order. A tree, for example, is not only a living organism of a certain biological type but also something capable of offering shade, sustaining life, appearing as beautiful, or serving as shelter. These aspects are not projections added by the observer but belong to the thing according to its nature. They are grounded in what it is, even if not exhausted by its definition.

     In Thomistic terms, being and goodness are convertible. Whatever is, is good insofar as it exists. The goodness or beauty of a thing is therefore not an accidental overlay but a way in which its act of being may be apprehended as desirable or fitting. Human love in its purer forms (ego-consciousness filtered out), as a response to the good, may thus disclose real perfections belonging to what is. So love does not transcend the distinction between essence and intelligible perfections by abolishing it. It transcends it by moving from what the thing is to why its being is worthy of affirmation, care, delight, or use. That is to say, love attends to being under the aspect of the good. Just as the intellect receives the intelligible form of a thing cognitively, so the will, informed by love, is drawn to its goodness. Such emotion-laced response does not constitute the being of the thing but may attune us to aspects of it that would otherwise remain unnoticed. Love, in this sense, perfects knowledge by disposing us to attend more fully to what the thing is and can be in itself.

     Again, this does not abolish the distinction between essence and the perfections that flow from it, but situates it within a broader participation in being. The intellect grasps what the thing is; love responds to the goodness grounded in that being. Both are finite receptions of a fullness that exceeds our conceptual grasp. If the divine intellect knows the idea of the tree in its complete intelligibility – God created it –  and the divine will loves it according to that fullness, then human knowing and loving may be understood as partial participations in this knowledge and love. (Again, philosophically, the God/Creation is a way of making sense of the apparent fact that the being even of a tree transcends our ability to fully understand it, even as an original poem may transcends all attempts to translate it.) The plurality of conceptual, metaphorical, practical, and emotion-laden “translations” through which we encounter what is need not imply relativism, provided that they remain measured by the thing itself. Some disclose more fully the intelligible goodness of what actively exists; others reduce it to derivative aspects and thereby obscure it. And what actively exists limits the range of possible experience; to experience a beautiful tree as ‘disgusting shit-like filth’ is absurd. The discipline of truth in finite knowers consists in allowing both thought and love to remain proportioned to the being that gives itself to be known. I think love gives us a compass as to which responses go deepest into the being of that which is loved.

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    The skilled craftsman whose work has become a vocation does not encounter wood merely as a material substrate possessing certain measurable properties. He attends to it as possessing grain, strength, flexibility, resistance, warmth, and a capacity to take form in certain ways rather than others. His trained affection for the material is not sentimentality but a cultivated responsiveness to real possibilities grounded in the nature of the wood itself. He learns to see, through long familiarity, how a particular piece may bear weight, receive a joint, or yield to the plane without splitting. This practical and feeling-laced attunement does not add new properties to the wood but disposes him to receive more fully what it is. His understanding therefore exceeds the grasp of a merely definitional concept without departing from the being of the thing.

   In such a case, love perfects knowledge by orienting attention toward the intelligible goodness of the material: its aptness for certain uses, its fittingness within an order of making, its capacity to serve a human dwelling. The craftsman’s judgments are guided not only by abstract description but by a habituated responsiveness to what the wood can be in itself. His work may therefore be understood as a translation of the intelligible form and possibilities of the material into an artifact that respects rather than violates its nature. A poorly made object, by contrast, often results from treating the wood as though it were indifferent to form, ignoring the grain or forcing it into shapes to which it is not suited. Such making does not merely fail aesthetically but misjudges what the material is capable of being.

    The craftsman’s love thus does not transcend the distinction between essence and the perfections that flow from it but allows those perfections to be more fully disclosed in practice. It becomes possible, through such vocational attention, to receive aspects of the material’s participation in goodness and beauty that would otherwise remain unnoticed. The artifact produced in fidelity to these possibilities may then be seen as a further translation of the material’s intelligible order into a humanly inhabitable form. In this way, craft exemplifies how knowing and loving together participate in the adequation of mind and thing, not by reproducing what is but by allowing its being to guide its articulation into thought and work.

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    The awe of the astrophysicist before the beauty, complexity, and apparent improbability of the universe may be understood in a similar way. His scientific concepts allow him to grasp certain definable structures: mass, curvature, stellar evolution, the distribution of matter, or the mathematical regularities governing cosmic expansion. Yet his work often occasions a response that exceeds the content of these determinations. The intelligibility of the universe as ordered, elegant, or astonishingly coherent is not reducible to the equations by which it is described. Such responses are not merely subjective reactions added to an otherwise neutral object but may disclose the goodness and beauty belonging to what is insofar as it exists in ordered form. The capacity of the universe to be known at all, and to exhibit lawful structure accessible to finite intellects, may itself appear as a real perfection grounded in its being.

    This loving response does not replace scientific knowledge but deepens it by orienting attention toward aspects of reality that definition alone does not exhaust. Awe may dispose the knower to attend more carefully to the fittingness or intelligible unity of what is studied, guarding against the reduction of the cosmos to a mere aggregate of quantifiable events. As in craft, distortion arises when derivative aspects (predictability, manipulability, or calculability) are treated as though they exhausted what is. The universe then appears only as an object of control or explanation, rather than as an intelligible whole in which order, beauty, and the possibility of knowledge itself belong to what is.

     In this way, the astrophysicist’s contemplative love of the intelligibility of the cosmos may be seen as a response to real perfections grounded in its being. His theoretical models translate certain structural features of reality into mathematical form; his awe registers, however partially, the goodness or beauty of an order that exceeds complete conceptual grasp. Human knowing thus remains a finite participation in a universe whose full intelligibility, if known at all, would be known only in the divine intellect. Scientific understanding and contemplative delight may therefore be understood as complementary translations of what is, each measured by the same reality and capable, in different ways, of disclosing its participation in being.

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   Wendell Berry’s love of his farm may be understood as a form of attunement to the intelligible goodness of a place known through long familiarity and care. The farmer does not encounter the land merely as acreage or yield potential but as soil of a certain character, as sustaining particular grasses, as retaining water in one season and needing rest in another. Over time, the farm appears not simply as a tract of usable ground but as possessing fertility, resilience, vulnerability, and a capacity to flourish under fitting forms of cultivation. Such recognition is not the projection of value onto an indifferent substrate but a response to real possibilities grounded in the nature of the land itself. The farmer’s affection for the place disposes him to perceive when it is being exhausted, when it needs rotation or renewal, or when a field is better left fallow. Berry has often commented on the beauty of a well-tended farm. 

    This love does not alter the essence of the soil but may disclose the perfections that flow from it: its aptitude to sustain life, to support certain crops rather than others, to enter into patterns of use that preserve rather than diminish its fecundity. A mode of agriculture that treats the land merely as a stock of resources available for extraction abstracts from these intelligible features and may thereby obscure what the place can be in itself. The practices of good husbandry may thus be seen as a translation of the land’s intelligible order into patterns of cultivation proportioned to its nature. Berry’s attachment to his farm is therefore not epistemically irrelevant but may be understood as a condition for receiving and articulating aspects of its participation in goodness and beauty that would otherwise remain unnoticed. As in craft and science, love here perfects knowledge by disposing the knower to remain answerable to the being of what is known, rather than to the immediate demands of use.

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   The notion of amor mundi, or love of the world, as articulated by Hannah Arendt, may be understood as an extension of this same structure from particular beings to the order of human reality in which they appear together. The world in Arendt’s sense is not identical with nature but consists in the durable network of practices, institutions, artifacts, and relationships through which human beings share a common life. To love the world is not merely to prefer it or to feel attachment to its present arrangements but to affirm its intelligibility as a space of meaningful action and responsibility. Such love disposes one to attend to the goods internal to common life: the stability of institutions, the reliability of promise, the endurance of works, the plurality of perspectives within which truth may appear.

   Here again, love does not constitute what is loved but orients perception toward real perfections grounded in the being of the world as a humanly constructed yet objective order. The practices and artifacts that compose this world possess their own intelligible structure and fittingness: a law may sustain justice or undermine it; a public square may invite encounter or enforce isolation; a tradition may preserve memory or distort it. To encounter these realities merely as instruments for private ends is to abstract from their role in sustaining a shared space of appearance. In this sense, the reduction of the world to a field of utility represents a form of forgetfulness analogous to that which treats the tree as mere timber or the land as mere resource.

    Amor mundi may therefore be understood as a cultivated responsiveness to the intelligible goods belonging to the human world: its order, fragility, and capacity to support meaningful action across generations. Such love perfects knowledge by disposing the knower to remain answerable to the reality of the common world rather than to ideological or instrumental reinterpretations of it. Human understanding of social and political life thus becomes, like craft or science, a finite translation of the intelligible structure of what is into judgment and action. Fidelity to the world requires that these translations remain proportioned to the goods they seek to preserve. In this way, love of the world participates in the same discipline of adequation, allowing what is given, whether natural or humanly made, to guide its articulation into thought, practice, and common life.