Here is a puzzle. Saint Teresa’s Soliloquies open,

O life, life! How can you endure being separated from your Life? … You, Lord, are wisdom itself. If my intellect busies itself with this wisdom, my will complains. It wouldn’t want anything to hinder it from loving You, because the intellect cannot reach the sublime grandeurs of its God.

Yet at the same time, she writes a little further on,

Whoever does not know You does not love You.

Is it a contradiction?

No, of course not. It is abundantly true that we cannot love what we do not know. But the full knowledge of vision is reserved to the Beatific Vision, to the Church of Heaven. Here below, we have glimpses, known, not with the full sight of the intellect, but through practice and action and experiences. It is not first and primarily through the intellect that contemplation occurs in this life. It is first and primarily through the will, through a union of love.

Contemplation, which is a union with God, is a union with his will, for God’s will is God and God is one. So long as we do not see God, it is through love that this union takes place. If the intellect wanted to busy itself with more and more analysis and concentrate less on simply loving and thus, when strengthened enough to know Love, doing the will of the beloved, then the will would be unhappy. The will wants to love. That is contemplation in this life of faith, when we can’t yet see also.