Love as Principle of Knowledge in the Eastern Fathers
Love as Principle of Knowledge in the Eastern Fathers

Summary/Abstract: The Eastern Fathers underlined the specifi city of the christocentrical knowledge asknowledge in and by love, that is the knowledge of the love which binds the onewho knows and the one who is known. In love and by love, one can discover theway of Truth and of the real knowledge. In this knowledge, love appears truly as thebound of fulfi llment. Also, this characterization of love, as the bound of fulfi llment,refers to the wholeness of knowledge through love, in which knowledge becomesan event or an open and partakable fact. In this way, knowledge becomes a realitywhich is dynamic, open and relational, instead of a closed process, oriented towardsthe self or external to man. Of course, it is neither strictly human, nor exclusivelydivine, but a divino-human reality. Saint John the Evangelist stated the principle ofChristian knowledge: “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the onlytrue God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent” (Jn 17, 3). This phrase points outthat the essence of knowledge is a spiritual, relational divino-human fact, whichidentifi es itself with life and asserts life, so that both can be united with God’s love,in Jesus Christ. The main characteristic of the neotestamentary knowledge is thecoincidence between knowledge and love

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