"The highest level of the knowledge of God comes from Love", went on the Pope, who said "this is what happens for man as well: one gets to know intimately the other only if love is there". It’s not by chance that the word "knowing", in Hebrew, is used "to mean the act of human love": "The union with Christ in love explained Benedict XVI provides the truest knowledge: like man and woman are two in one flesh, likewise the believer and God are one in the mystical union". Origen, then, played "a primary role in the history of the lectio divina, which Ambrose the Bishop then brought into the West to hand it over to Augustine and the Christian tradition". Then the Pope quoted John Paul II, who in the "Novo Millennio Ineunte" shows to the congregation "that prayer progresses" from love, until it "makes the human person totally possessed by God’s love". It is, commented the Pontiff as he recalled his predecessor, a "walk that is entirely supported by grace, which calls for spiritual hard work and goes through painful purifications as well but leads to the unspeakable joy experienced by the mystics as a nuptial union".
