“Thinking and speaking of creation as the gift of being from nothing, and of creatures as recipients of and participants in that gift, suggests some things to say about what it is for creatures to know — or, better put, to perform the act of knowing. By definition, this act must establish a relation between knower and known, and this relation will inevitably be, if participation is the right category to use to specify the relation between God and creatures, a relation between one participant in God and another. This means, to begin with, that knower and known share a fundamental likeness and intimacy because each participates in God. This intimate likeness at the level of being is what makes knowledge both possible and desirable for those capable of it. Most creatures are of course not capable of it: they can be known but they cannot know. But for us, who can know other creatures, which is itself a rare gift, a radiant trace of the being of the creator, such knowledge is a lure: it draws us as the scent of a fox draws foxhounds, kindling our desire and delight and ordering our action. A little more precision about what this act of knowing is like will show why.
“Any act of knowing by one creature of another is an intensification of their shared creaturely intimacy as participants in God. This shared intimacy is a prerequisite for knowing’s intensification of it. You, because you are already related to any creature you may know or seek to know by the fact that you too are a creature (I leave out of account here the question of God’s knowledge of us and of our knowledge of God), can intensify and deepen that intimacy of being by intentionally making your likeness to and difference from the known a matter of admiringly interested reflexive delight. ‘Reflexive’ is the key term here. Every creature enters into relations with particular other creatures of a peculiar intimacy: this bee extracts pollen from just that sunflower, burrowing deep to get it; that particular ficus religiosa strikes its roots deep into the drily acidic soil of exactly this place; Anna, my siberian husky, recognizes me as among her significant human others. These are all particular relations between individuals, and they are all in some sense intentional intensifications of the ordinary creaturely intimacy each creature shares with all others, which is to say that they are all in some sense sought, moved toward, actively pursued. Even the blindly desperate light-seeking of the green plant in a dim room is intentional in this relaxed sense. All living creatures, certainly, intentionally seek intensified intimacies in these ways, and there is a case to be made, too, for extending this description to the performances of nonliving creatures: for the fire’s seeking of fuel, and so on. This way of talking does not, of course, imply or suggest that plants or insects (and much less fire or water) have consciousness of the intimacies they seek, or of the delight they produce. It implies only that intensified intimacies are sought by all living creatures.
“Admiringly interested reflexive delight in such intensified intimacies, however, is a much rarer possibility, and this is what knowledge is: it is distinguished from other creaturely intimacies by being potentially or actually reflexive. Reflexivity, in turn, includes the knower’s awareness of herself as being acquainted with some particular other in just this admiringly delighted way: knowers are aware (or could be aware) of themselves as creatures who are ecstatically intimate with that, whatever it is, and of exactly that as being the recipient of their intimately ecstatic acquaintance. ‘Ecstatically’ here bears its precise etymological sense of ‘standing outside’ (ek-stasis): all intimate acquaintance with a creature other than yourself involves leaving yourself behind in order to go out and meet the other. The act of knowing, then, always bears upon both the creature known and the knower, and specifically upon the former as intimately intended by the latter, and the latter as intimately intending the former. Understood in this way, the relation established in an act of knowing comes in degrees, as do all intimacies: a particular knowledge of any creature by another always occupies a place on a gamut running from complete ignorance, utter lack of acquaintance, to full and complete admiring delight in everything about the known other. This last is of course available only to God.
“Knowledge understood in this way is itself an instance of the participation-relation. You, as knower, gain from the creature known a property you could not have had without the known’s being what it is, which is not merely your delightedly reflexive intimacy with it, but also your awareness of yourself as delightedly intimate in just that way. Your knowledge of any creature is therefore a kind of participation in it, as is its being known by you a participation of it in you. In both cases, the participation in question is derived from the more fundamental participation present in the order of being — participation in God, that is — shared by knower and known. And finally, your acts of knowing are in a limited sense creative acts. They make actual a good that without them was only potential: the dual good of your knowing something you can know, and of something’s being known as it is by one who can so know it. Both goods make richer and deeper the ordered harmony that is the cosmos, healing the damage of ignorance and spreading the light of knowledge. In this, human acts of knowing bear the vestigial trace of God’s knowing act of creatio ex nihilo.”
— from Paul Griffiths, Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar (The Catholic University of America Press, 2009)
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