Reno on "The Loving Intellect"

Rusty Reno wrote, recently:  

What does it mean to be an intellectual? The word comes from the Latin word for understanding, intellego. Lego has dense, multifaceted meanings: to choose, select, collect, and gather. It also means to read. When inter gets added, which means “between,” we get a compound meaning, something like “to read between the lines.” Intellego translates the Greek wordkatanoesis, which can be translated as “knowing across.” If we put these clues together, we come up with a basic working definition of an intellectual. He is someone who can see the differences between things (choosing) and the connections between them (collecting). He attends to reality as it presents itself, but penetrates deeper as well. An intellectual can read not just words and books, but reality and the world. He knows the stories things tell or the ideas they express. In the case of the Christian intellectual, he knows how reality directs us towards the logos, which is the person of Christ.

The goal of the intellectual life, therefore, is to see things as they are, in themselves and together. The fullest kind of knowing knows across as well as about, among as well as in. The same applies to reading, the lectio in the word “intellectual.” We are always reading across words; we read individual words in relation to the others. Discerning an ­argument or message requires synthesis, a “­knowing across.” . . .

Nice.