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 word katanoesis, 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.”
To a great degree, this putting together and knowing across come naturally. Our brains have evolved to recognize grammatical structures in sentences, which is why small children learn to speak so quickly when they reach that stage of development. Human nature provides us with an aptitude for synthesis. See Spot. See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Nobody needs to tell the child about the imperative mood, or point out the shift in whom the imperatives are addressing. Even small children can follow the words. Reading between the lines comes more slowly, but kids eventually figure that out as well, as any parent knows. They come to know that a weary “yeah, yeah” really means “forget about it.”
