God is absolute mystery, beyond the power of human minds to know or human words to express. The Christian tradition asserts that the least wrong way of speaking about this unutterable mystery of God is to echo the First Letter of John and to say, “Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love” (1 John 4:8). Love carries us more deeply into the divine mystery than the sum of all of our ideas, concepts and logical conclusions about God. God is love, and God draws us to God’s self through the desires and affections of the human heart, through what and who and how we love. Divine love is both the origin and the fulfillment of all our human desires.

The Franciscan tradition places great emphasis on the place of the will and the role of human affections and desires in shaping our lives, particularly our life with God. St. Bonaventure believed that no one can ascend to union with God unless he or she is a “person of desires.” (St. Bonaventure, The Soul’s Journey Into God, Prologue, 3) Certainly, St. Francis was such a person. He was both passionate and compassionate. His writings brim with lyricism and enthusiasm. His emotions are evident on every page. He tells the story of his own conversion as a radical reversal of  his feelings toward lepers: the “bitter” became “sweet,” those he once feared and despised became the special objects of his empathy, solicitude and kindness. (St. Francis of Assisi, The Testament, 1-3) The friars who knew Francis best attested to his passionate love for God and God’s creatures. Francis’s “bias in favor of affection” colored his attitudes toward education. His companions said that “he preferred that they be good through love rather than be dilettantes through curiosity.” (The Assisi Compilation, 47) He spurned “knowledge for knowledge’s sake.” Either knowledge was in the service of love or it was useless information; it was both vain and in vain.

St. Bonaventure said that “great as [the intellect] is in itself, its nature is to move the affect . . . to move a person to love.”(St. Bonaventure, Commentary on the Sentences, 1:13) Franciscan education has as much to do with opening the heart to love as it does with opening the mind to truth. It values interpersonal skills as much as intellectual abilities. It encourages passion for one’s field of study certainly, but it also promotes compassion for one’s neighbor in need. It defines human flourishing not in terms of how much one gains for oneself but how much one gives of oneself to others.