Scott over at Medius Temporis, and currently in deep dialogue with Janet and I in the Balthasar Podcast below, has invited us to a discussion on the Beatific Vision. Please do check it out.
Incidentally, Audacious Deviant has posted a lovely meditative series of Transfiguration icons - The Feast of the Transfiguration was on Monday - that I think goes quite nicely with discussion on Beatific vision.
It seems that according to a strict definition of “immediate presence of the Trinity to the human intellect”, then the event of the Transfiguration couldn’t be Beatific for the apostles present - after all it was still a vision of Christ in human form. But, then that raises the question of whether one would even be able to perceive Christ in an unmediated way, regardless of this or that side of heaven.
Wait a minute! What form do we think Christ is in, in the Beatific Vision! This is the whole point of Dante’s paradiso! This is the ultimate squaring of the circle! (Circle = divine being and motion, rectangle equaling sublunar being and motion). Dante sees through Mary’s line of sight into the heart of the trinity where the God-Man is looking back at Him… Maybe I’m misunderstanding Dan’s point. Yet the whole scandal of Christianity is the bodily resurrection.
Ooops. I “jumped” again….
Well, I guess my previous comment was lost, so I just want to emphasize that Christ is “in human form” in heaven too. Remember Dante’s ultimate beatific vision, in the Pardiso. He finally underestand the ultimate paradox, how to “square the circle.” He gazes along the virgin mother’s loving line of sight, as she looks with her own human eyes into the heart of the Trinity — isn’t this an amazing tribute to the incarnated bodifulness of all human knowing — and then he is able, in a flash, to see Christ. And Christ in his Divine Humanity is gazing back into Dante’s own eyes, and suddenly the universe turns (metaphysically) inside-out and Dante begins to rotate around the Christ in the center of the Trinity, “moved by the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars….” Christ becomes the center of the Universe and everything in the cosmos now orbits around the throne of God.
The circle and its motionless motion, when it rotates on its center, was of course the Greek figure for divine perfection, while motions below the moon were merely rectilinear and imperfect (Aristotle), so squaring the circle was far more than a geometer’s puzzle. (It can’t be done, as was proved in the mdoern period, right?) It means translating Divinity into Human finitude. But God does it, when Christ is made known to the pilgrim Dante as One and the Same Divine and Human Word, in One Person, in the Midst of the Land of Trinity…. It’s so beautiful! But Dante had to get stronger eyes, eyes that could eventually look directly into the sun, and he still needed Mary’s loving human gaze to help him into “knowing” God. See how relationship and Love empower the knowing here — and not cognitive processes. Because this is personal knowing. Relational knowing. “And how can we look on Him, UNTIL WE HAVE FACES?”
If you’ll permit me to meditate on this — The vision of God is always there, but we can’t see it, without asking the Mountains and the Rocks to fall on us and cover us and hide us away from the Light of God’s nature. The Christian life is what the mighty acts of God during Holy Week have provided for us in Christ, so that God could actually in this life build up our love muscles so that we could stand up and face the Real, and also so that we could have eyes strong enough to bear the sight. God has to give us the eyes and faces with which we can see and know Christ’s face. (Thus the transfiguring journey up Mt Purgatory in this life is the only difference between those in Dante’s Inferno and those in his Paradiso.)
I’d venture to guess that the disciplies didn’t have the Beatific Vision at the Transfiguration not because of anything that needed to happen to Christ, but because of what needed to happen to THEM. They didn’t have the Holy Spirit. They didn’t have the sacraments. They were not members of His body. There had been no Cross yet, no Resurrection, for THEM. (Christ was slain before the foundation sof the world…)
Janet, “I just want to emphasize that Christ is “in human form” in heaven too.” This is precisely my point. I guess I was being too rhetorical in the post. Anyway, if I understand you correctly, I think you saying that sense perception does come into the Beatific vision, but the senses of the resurrection body. But, my further point was that whether we speak of resurrected or pre-resurrected bodies, we’re still talking body, right. And in that case, aren’t the experiences of the body _Mediated_ Experiences? In which case, what does it mean to talk about an immediate experience other than to use a pretty idea in pretty metaphors, like Dante’s above. (Sorry for that, Dante. I know it wasn’t fair)
Is this making any sense.?
In the next day or so I will compose a post explaining certain medieval theories of cognition in order to help show the point that I was making in my first post on the Beatific Vision. Once you get the general accounts of human cognition you will then see how they (Aquinas, Scotus, etc.) re-vamp the theory to fit the case of the beatific vision. There is a lot of new work in the scholarship being done on this at present (Giorgio Pini, @Fordham, is currently researching/writing on the BV from Aquinas to Scotus; Richard Cross has been working toward a book on cognition acc. to Scotus; Robert Pasnau started this trend with his book _Theories of Cognition_, and much scholarship has been interacting with it since). Once you understand that ‘intelligible species’ are and their function within the whole process of cognition, then you will see the importance of denying these for giving an acct. of the BV. For those interest to read for themselves, I’d suggest looking through Aquinas’s ST 1a.12.
I’d argue that the Transfiguration is a window into the Beatific Vision which becomes a completely open door with the Resurrection appearances - there the apostles saw the Godhead in Jesus both Man and God. But this window is the first time apostles see Jesus as truly God in their midst.
I’m clearly not a theologian - but I know a few things about vision that someone with a better mind can translate I trust.
But this is what is causing me actual grief. Our very ability to talk about this stuff without falling on our faces. “A pretty idea in pretty metaphors”? Daniel!
Davis is right, of course, about what was being shown the disciplines in the Transfiguration. But they did not “see” it. They saw some uncanny signs of it and were moved to awe. But they didn’t see IT.
And why not? Because they didn’t have eyes yet to see it. The veil was across their vision. Take the veil away and they still couldn’t see much more — they didn’t have the faces or the personhoods for it.
And this isn’t something about intellectual or bodily. This is something about the whole person. I finally see why Heidegger HAD to use the term Da-sein. Otherwise we go blithely off discussing “mind” and body and all these other wonderful distractions of the modern age.
The Beatific Vision is about human Da-sein touching God. Not exchanging letters with God. Not taking a walk in the cool of the evening with God. Not experiencing momentary overwhelming apprehensions of God. This is about face-to-face touching. To touch and be touched by God. What must we become to endure this?
There are no words strong enough. I wish my words could scorch the paper they are written — or rather turn your computer monitors into flames!
And if we were fully realized human beings, we would see the Beatific Vision in this life here all the time because it is here all the time and we are walled off from it, lest it destroy us.
Here’s where it is. The news photo of the little boy bent over in trauma, in a Ruwandhan refugee camp, who is simply frozen on the edge of a huge long ravine, looking into it, and the ravine is filled with the bodies of adults to the horizon, among which are his parents. Or the justly famous photograph of the little girl burned with napalm running toward us on a Viet Nam road. Or any abused and battered child or any ravaged nature. Or Jesus on the Cross.
Don’t you “see”? God is always here and we are always touching God but we can’t bear to know it. If we could we wouldn’t do what we do. God is what is infinitely precious and infinitely vulnerable and moves us out of wherever we were before with its ability to shatter our horizons. It is what we love and pity and go out to from the depths of ourselves spontaneously without being told to, and it shows us that we are and that we must become something more than what we thought we were. Aeshetic beauty does the same thing to us.
At the end of Daniel’s talk on Bathasar, a voice asked, “why does the experience of art for Balthasar mean God and not something about the human experience? (Why is it not consistent with the anthropological view?)
Because Balthasar is starting from trying to find the distinctively central thing about Christianity, Dan said — and the voice said, so that’s why it’s God and not something human. If I am not mistaken, the implication was that Balthasar could view it in non anthropological terms because God was a given for Balthasar.
But there’s more to it. The aesthetic experience is of something that calls us into question. It intrudes upon us and shakes us. When Dante saw Beatrice 9 years old walking along a road, she became a Christ-event for him. Because she made him aware of the deepest longings of his Da-sein for something this world could never give him, not as he was himself anyway, and he didn’t realize that he would have to journey to the depths of Hell and all the way up the Mount of Conversion before he could see her reality with the kinds of eyes that could see — in her and through her and by her — to the ultimate truth of God — as everything we love and would die for gladly if only we could preserve it and save from ourselves.
I’m sorry, folks, but I was so angry last night and this morning I knew I had to say something. These aren’t words and theories we are throwing around here. These are the substance of Christ’s body. Only through Love can we enter into this truth. This is not cognition. This is transfiguration of our humanity through embodied thoughts hard-earned and preserved through centuries of living and dying.I just can’t stand how reductive and blase our attitudes can be. The thoughts are powerful and alive and can pierce between our everyday souls and the Spirit and show us the difference. But we can’t treat them as though they aren’t thick and full and enfleshed and suffering just like we are, always, in our deeper levels of being, if we are aware of the unspeakably terrible stuff that’s going on all around us and inside of us and our habitual indifference to it.
Janet:
I very much sympathize with what you are saying. Talking about God is not the same thing as talking about some human made construct. I absolutely agree with you. The thing is, I already know my, or Aquinas’s, or Scotus’s accounts of the Beatific Vision are not themselves this vision. They’d all agree with this. But, given that we (or at least, my medieval friends) are Christians who value Anselm’s ‘faith seeking understanding’ program, and believe that God does not create or love ‘by chance’, but acts with divine reason and love. Elaborating an account of the BV, is a human way to understand the BV in the best way that seems available. We are in a different position than the medievals to discuss this as our context is different, but I (for one) very much value the care, rigor, and faithfulness that my medievals monkish friends thought and wrote with. Please don’t consider what I say as though I’m ‘just doing math’. I very much value poetic discourses and respect the witness of the saints about such matter–Dan could vouch for my E. Spenser obsession while at our ‘common institution’. There is a certain point, at least for me, where poetic discourse becomes unpoetic, and the discourse of the scholastics becomes poetic–but this has to do with my own engagement with these discussions. Others may find Scotus a dunce b/c of obscure language and the like, or they may find Aquinas a big dumb ox b/c he’s not a phenomenologist. Still, as with Shakespeare plays, sometimes the fool has something really important to say even if unheard by the other characters on the stage.
Maybe a distinction btwn. spirituality and theology is unhelpful here, but it’s been helpful for me–insofar as locating the ‘living’ discourse of Christians, and the slow, mind-drooling, boring and provocative discourse of the theologians. (Just look at JT’s ‘Boring Things’ blog, linked from mine.) I once joked about the idea of a book series called ‘BO’ for Boring Orthodoxy– it’s the careful and rigorous exploration of the Christian faith that is seemingly irrelevant to the reader, but very relevant to the one actually doing the work. Anyways, what I’m doing is theology and not spirituality per se. Maybe theology in this sense is of no interest, and that is ok- b/c spirituality is more relevant for life.
I think my use of “bodily” has been misleading - by bodily I meant not the mind/body dualism, sense experience versus some abstracted intellectual process. Rather, I meant what you (Janet) called the “whole person”, although I would call it a creaturely experience. So, creaturely=bodily. Still, you seem to distinguish a whole person experience as one not had on this side of heaven. Regardless, though, my point is that all of our experiences as creatures are mediated. This doesn’t lessen our experiences, rather it affirms them. They happen within the created order. In other words, our experiences are mediated by creation. I don’t think the mediation of creation will change on the other side, but will be perfected. My objection, Janet and Scott, is not with the idea of meeting Christ face to face. Rather my object is speaking of that face to face as if it IS a metaphor and not a description of what will actually transpire: a physical meeting under physical conditions between created beings and their creator in the flesh. That doesn’t sound like the philosophers idea of immediate to me, imho.
Thanks so much Scott. I kinda needed to hear that from you!
You say: “Anyways, what I’m doing is theology and not spirituality per se. Maybe theology in this sense is of no interest, and that is ok- b/c spirituality is more relevant for life.”
I know what you mean about others finding boring what seems of the most vital interest to us in our theoretical work! So I’m looking forward to your posts on Henry and Duns and the Ox!
And Dan, yes, you and I ARE saying exactly the same thing about the IMPORTANCE of the bodily mediation. But why do I still feel in both of you two this unwillingness to confront questions of knowing as questions of the being of the one who knows, which is utterly there in Thomas as in Dante. I mean, this is WHY the medieval paradigm is a JOURNEY! or pligrimage to God. It’s not a change in place (earth or heaven) but a change in the pilgrim.
Dan,
I agree. If you thought I was implicitly denying that the blessed would physically stand before the risen Christ, then that was a wrong inference to make. Unlike Ricoeur, I do believe in the physical resurrection of Christ and of the saints. I just happen to think that standing physically before the risen Christ is not strictly the same thing as the beatific vision. The road to Damascus story illustrates a similar point, that physical proximity is not strictly equivalent with cognition of God in Christ, let alone the beatific vision of the divine Trinity. I would submit that something else needs to be stated, namely, what I know and how I know this, when this happens. Often, the scriptural passage cited is ‘now we know in part, but then in full’ (I saw Henry cite this when I was reading several weeks ago). So, what is this other thing that we need to state? Well, Aquinas says that it is an entirely distinct sort of cognition–b/c all other cognition is by means of naturally conceived concepts or by supernaturally given concepts (i.e. the Church’s knowledge of God as Trinity, or God the Son as incarnate)–which also are created concepts (Aquinas, contra Anna Williams, does hold that grace is created. Grace just is a ‘new _creation_’.) So, the BV differs from both of these because instead of some concept, which is a quality that inheres in the human soul, it is the very thing known which is present to the intellect for cognition. Namely, the divine essence is itself present to the human intellect. From here Aquinas makes several interesting distinctions which I won’t get into here b/c it complicates the issue here beyond what is needed here. Scotus’s acct. is yet more intriguing precisely b/c it is this question in which he began to develop his theory of intuitive cognition–where cognition of some object happens without some ‘intelligible species’ (i.e. a concept that is a quality inhering in the intellect) which imitates/participates in that original physical object. Anyways, once I get a chance I’ll write out a proper post on cognition acc. to Aquinas.
Dan, this is Janet, fresh from revisiting Aquinas, and I’d like to offer a final meditation of the subject of the Beatific Vision here. You’re going to hate me for the length. But this is it and then I’m done. I’m going back to when you said:
“Anyway, if I understand you [Janet] correctly, I think you saying that sense perception does come into the Beatific vision, but the senses of the resurrection body. But, my further point was that whether we speak of resurrected or pre-resurrected bodies, we’re still talking body, right. And in that case, aren’t the experiences of the body _Mediated_ Experiences? In which case, what does it mean to talk about an immediate experience other than to use a pretty idea in pretty metaphors, like Dante’s above. (Sorry for that, Dante. I know it wasn’t fair)”
I’m going to try to talk about this so very delicately, because the part I’m interested in the most is so beautiful and nourishing to us, as Aquinas develops it. (I.e. the change in the knower’s capacity.)
Yes, even in the Beatific Vision, for Aquinas (and Dante), yes, yes, yes the experience is still in an important sense “mediated,” and you and Scott sketch this out by talking about the “bodily” and “human” Christ in heaven and the “bodily” and “human” “we” in heaven. But this isn’t what I meant (or was only a part of what I meant) when mentioning Mary’s line of sight, for instance. So let me enlarge on that if I can.
It seems as though you and Scott are concerned to rule out the idea that the mind alone might experience God, as spirit to spirit, so to speak, rather than a mind-and-body experiencing God “face to face” and person to Person. In this respect, of course yes, the Beatific Vison means a “seeing” by ensouled flesh and a “seeing” by the infleshed soul. And this is the case for ourselves and for the Christ with whom we engaged “in seeing face to face” and “knowing as we also are known.”
But I want to get at A DIMENSION of this that is different from simply whether or not we are in a body when we are seeing, or whether we see in a way that is mediated by the physical or not. I want to get at the way the Beatific Vision is mediated because it depends upon the kind of knower we have become. The way it is something we experience to the degree that we have participated in a finite, bodily, human, time-and-space process of being changed as knowers, matured and ripened and strengthened as knowers (even as Christ has been by his human experiences, “made by sufferings he endured fit to be the captain of our salvation” In Hebrews). And this inward change and development as a knower derives from every kind of experience of knowing we have had, and from every true kind of being that we have encountered and known.
It is in this sense that I called attention to the importance of Mary’s line of sight for Dante’s “vision” — what’s important here is not simply that her eyesight is physical, and she has a body in heaven that sees, but that hers is the line of sight possible only to the eyes of one who had been changed into a mother, by becoming a mother. Her “natural intellect” was changed by this history, giving her an additional power to see, and to this extent, all human mothers and all human lovers have particpated in just such a kind of change in their intellects and thus in their powers for knowing. They have acquired a new “habitus,” or something like an additional “faculty,” for seeing and knowing the kind of object that mothers and lovers see and know.
Furthermore, Mary’s experiential history of being a mother, which changed and increased her intellectual capacity to see in heaven, was derived uniquely from a history of being the mother OF THIS particular Person. Mary has (in her natural intellect) a special capacity to “see” Christ, because she has known him as her own baby, small boy, and grown son. Also, she traveled through the same human history he did, in a local time and place, along with Him. This is a deeply conditioned, mediated, human, relational knowing, and this is the knowing that the human intellect specializes in, because by it, it is transformed into the intellect it is — by all that it has come to know.
Other eyes might look on the very same baby or person, but they don’t see what the primary caregiver or the lover can see in the same baby or person, because they haven’t been changed in that way and don’t have the capacity to do see as a lover can see. The intellect’s natural and supernatural capacity to see is limited to what the history of its formation has enabled it to see. So we are talking about the powers of the personal human intellect, with its capacity for knowing that is built upon a personal human history of knowing (and not knowing) many things and in many ways.
And every one of us, like (an unlike) mary, has had our own history with Jesus, one that is uniquely our own, and with everything else we have ever opened up to knowing, and by which accordingly we have been changed into a knower thereof. (It raises the question of being negatively changed by Evil, doesn’t it? The absence of power and capacity to see.)
So once again (and after this I’m done) the specialness of the Beatific Vision is akin to every lesser experience of knowing, only more so. Aquinas says that our humanly formed and informed intellects are personally lifted up and enabled in a special way for the Beatific Vision. Our intellects have been already lifted and enabled by every previous natural (and supernatural) experience of knowing in our previous lives (because they all change our intellects into more mature agents for knowing). But then, in this special case, there is the addition of a divine and grace-given heavenly “illumination” to our intellects, to close the gap that yet remains, so that we can be knowers able to see the essence of God, face to face, up close and personal. (That’s why God became human, so that human intellects could come to know God. An intellect is the capacity for knowing of a finite and embodied being.)
I was pleased to discover that I remembered Aquinas’ beautiful theological calculus pretty well, when I revisited the Summa, and especially the central point, to me, that all knowing changes the knower as a knower. The intellect of the human person opens, basically, to knowing an object — yes, as Scott says, based on animal sensory knowing of the particular object and then on intelligible knowing of the intelligible kindness of the sensible object, a knowing that works from the sensory — and thus the object becomes a cause of change in the knower; seriously knowing it can cause a “habitus” in the intellect of the knower.
This is a reflexive dynamic of inward growth and transformation that is strictly “not there” in modern rationalism, where it’s only a question of whether the “ideas” of the “mind” are accurate or not, and how many such accurate ideas the knower possesses, and how sure the knower can be that they are accurate. That’s why modern rationalism provides an insufficient universe of discourse for reading and understanding premodern thinkers.
So, to come to the final point, I noticed a couple of places in which Aquinas addresses Dan’s gut-level questioning of “unmediated” knowing (which I share) — even when it’s in heaven, face-to-face. After a citation of the great Augustinian biblical paradox — “in Thy light, we see light,” where “what we see” is exactly commensurate with how much enabled we are to see it, since Light in this case is both the how and the what of seeing — Aquinas writes in ST 12.5, “I answer that everything which is raised up to what exceeds its nature must be prepared by some disposition above its nature” and therefore to see the essence of God “it is necessary that some supernatural disposition should be added to the intellect” and that “its power of understanding should be increased by divine grace.” This “increase in the intellectual powers is called the illumination of the intellect.”
God furthermore creates for each of us such a light or illumination, “not in order to make the essence of God intelligible, for it is already intelligible in itself, but in order to enable the intellect to understand [God’s essence], ” as a “habitus” strengthens any power of knowing, just as “corporeal light” strengthens the faculty of “sight.”
Finally — and this right to Dan’s query — “This [gift of created] light is required to see the divine essence, not as a likeness in which God is seen [like a mirror], but as a perfection [a full maturity] of the intellect, strengthening it to see God. *Therefore it may be said that this light is not a medium IN which God is seen, but one BY which God is seen; and such a MEDIUM does not take away the IM-MEDIATE vision of God.” !!!
You see how Aquinas makes his way dialectically, by posing one possible conceptualization against another and gradually working his way through to a paradoxical resolution that is extraordinarily lucid and suggestive. So, Dan, it is a “mediated” yet “immediate” vision! It’s mediated in that we have to have special powers of seeing given to our intellects in addition to where they’ve arrived through their natural and supernatural growth, and it’s immediate in that we are seeing and knowing God’s essential being face to face.
And the reason we don’t experience this beatific seeing on earth, even when God is physically present (and even when God is “transfigured” for us to see) is that our intellects aren’t yet strong enough to handle the fullness of what we would be seeing. For the person who wants to be on the road to the Vision of God, all of this carries a message for the here and now. It seems so important to me that our personal histories with the disciplines of philosophy and theology have their own power to change and strengthen our intellect’s natural (and supernatural) habitus or power of knowing, even thought that change is not sufficient for the Beatific Vision, or necessary for it.
After all, Aquinas goes on to say that everyone in heaven sees God’s essence, and is filled to capacity by seeing it, yet each does so to a different fashion, according to the particular capacity to which the intellect has arrived. Well, I would like to experience the Vision from an intellect filled with philosophical and theological paradigms, ones that have already nourished my intellect naturally (and with supernatural food too) in its power to know and love God.
All in all, I’m trying to strike that note of caution — perhaps unnecessary? — that knowing is something very different in Aquinas from what “reasoning” is in modern rationalist philosophy. Aquinas’ “intellect” isn’t the modern’s “mind,” and the difference is more than the mind being situated in a physical body, whether or not it’s a resurrected body. The “intellect” represents the personal human potentiality for knowing that is developed by our experiences and our relationships and everything we do and feel — and this gives our personal histories a grateful fascination for us. We are being made into those who are personally able to know and love, and this is true of our formal studies as much as of any other activities and experiences, and in the same way, by the concommitant changes inside of us in how we are empowered to know.
Aquinas, ST 1a.12.9: Respondeo dicendum quod videntes Deum per essentiam, ea quae in ipsa essentia Dei vident, non vident per aliquas species, sed per ipsam essentiam divinam intellectui eorum unitam. = I respond that it must be said that those who see God through [God’s] essence, they see those things that are in the very essence of God, they do not see [them] through some species, but through the divine essence itself united to the intellect of those [who see the divine essence].
In other words, although it is true that grace is a ‘light’ that enables people to know the conclusions of faith, it does not enable them to know what God is. Aquinas constantly denies that in this life or by means of any created species which is a similitude of the thing cognized (i.e. an intelligible species, sense species) we can cognize God’s quiddity [essence]. It is only God’s making God’s own essence present to the blessed person in heaven’s intellect that they have the beatific vision properly speaking. All sense knowledge is of course present, but it is too weak and ontologically cannot enable us to see what God is, only by God allowing Himself to be the means by which we see God’s essence can the beatific vision happen.
But Dan asks, or implies, does Aquinas’s view then denigrate the nobility and worship of Jesus Christ in heaven? I imagine Aquinas would say, ‘by no means’. In a similar way to how the Holy Spirit enables Christians to love Jesus as God’s Son, it must be Godself who enables and in this case, not by means of some supernatural grace that inheres in the believer’s soul, but we shall see God by means of God Himself.
This view, naturally, goes against most pomo theology that wants to say that all knowledge is mediated knowledge. It is this one case, the beatific vision, where Aquinas explicitly denies this. Though as Janet says, our personal history (or more accurately, our virtues both natural and theological) gives us stronger cognitive powers to see ‘more in God’, but the crucial point is that even these are totally insufficient to see God’s essence. What is required, acc. to Aquinas, is that God makes God’s very own essence present to the intellect and so it itself is the means by which we cognize the divine essence.
Perhaps then, it is an Eastern Orthodox acct. of the beatific vision that is in more acord with pomo theological claims: namely, a denial that such an immediate vision of God is every granted to the blessed believer, whether in this life or the next.
Jenet, “And this inward change and development as a knower derives from every kind of experience of knowing we have had, and from every true kind of being that we have encountered and known.” I understand that you’re trying to get away from the mind(soul)body vocabulary altogether, and I respect that. I also agree with you on this matter, or should I say the results of your reading of Aquinas.
Scott and Janet: My original question about “mediation” was mostly me scratching an itch; that is, I really don’t like the whole mediation/not mediation language to begin with. Even in your reading of Aquinas - “it is necessary that some supernatural disposition should be added to the intellect” and that “its power of understanding should be increased by divine grace.” This “increase in the intellectual powers is called the illumination of the intellect.” - we still have a physical being whose intellect is being supplemented in a way, or augmented, let’s say. But it’s still the same infleshed intellect, which by modern accounts means we have an intellect that by necessity will be mediated by the body. Now, don’t misunderstand, I’m not arguing for this account. I’m merely trying to show the kind of baggage the words mediation, body, intellect, etc.. have now. We can’t just ignore that baggage and continue using those words - on a blog that caters to readers of all disciplines, mind you - as if we just came back from an overnight with St. Thomas and the Philosopher themselves. Hope my tone sounds more rhetorical than harsh, as it’s intended in good fun.
My reason for one of my latests posts on Theosis is that it’s a term that is gaining readership, even as earlier in the English speaking world as the late 17th century, yet suffers far less baggage as it’s not a term that carries much store with the modern or pomo crowd. Therefore, I think recouching the discussion in these, or along these line - pick whatever word you will - will be far more fruitful. Further, it has a heritage with Aquinas, so his methods, conclusions, what have you, can still be employed. My problem is not with Aquinas, but what’s been made with select philosophical vocab that more recent scholars have sullied.
Dan: As much as I agree with you that all human souls are embodied souls, I don’t think (perhaps) you appreciate the standard Aristotelian line that Aquinas follows to his death: that the senses know particular things, and the intellect knows universal things. And this is b/c the senses are material (eyes, ears, etc.), and the intellect is immaterial. There is no bodily organ for the intellect acc. to Thomas (and Aristotle). So, yes, when human think, the whole person (body and soul) think. But if you ask if the body explains why the thinking happens, it will only do half the explaining, as it were. Aquinas thinks that the fact that the human intellect is immaterial is precisely what allows it to cognize other things without the person who is doing the thinking becoming that which he/she thinks about (e.g. to think about 100 degrees is not to become 100 degrees). Aquinas says this time and time and time again throughout his corpus. So yes, the body does play a role for cognition, but for Aquinas the intellect is the most noble power b/c it is immaterial, even if an immaterial power of a body.
Scott, ok, that’s how it is for Aquinas… It’s not that I don’t appreciate the “standard Aristolian line” as if I’m Aristolelian and just don’t get this part of his corpus.. Rather, I’m simply not Aristotelian… in case anyone was wondering.
And this: “But if you ask if the body explains why the thinking happens, it will only do half the explaining, as it were” is proving the point, only in reverse, for as the body can only do “half” (as if we can split bone and marrow), so to the intellect is limited by it’s being infleshed, as Janet put it. Point being, the two need each and - as far as humanly known - can not operate independently.
Well, let it be known that Dan is not an Aristotelian. :o)
From what you say regarding intellect and body, I don’t think this is necessarily contra the Aristotelian program. It is just that there are certain technical arguments going on with Aquinas and others that ought to be more fully understood before opposing oneself to them.
A case in point is how Aquinas construes the ’separated souls’ of believers. I.e. can the dead person ‘think’ even though their body is dead? Aquinas thinks that the soul does exist after the death of the body, but that any action the soul does is not properly speaking the action of that person who died. In other words, my dead grandma, if she is thinking at present it is not properly my grandma who is doing the thinking–b/c her body is necessary for it to be my grandma doing the thinking and not just any old separated soul. Aquinas would say that the separated soul’s end is to be re-united with its body. So, its not that Aquinas doesn’t think the body has a necessary role to play in human cognition, it is just that it has a particular role, and that the immaterial intellect also has a particular role. But, this may sound like the causal connections btwn. these are not as intimate as Aquinas actually teaches. To say the soul is the form of the body, means that when a _human_ body does some action, it does it rationally. As one Prof. put it to me, there is a difference btwn. a human drinking good White Burgundy and a dog drinking the same White Burgundy. The human will drink (or at least has the power to drink) in a way that is self-conscious of the flavor/smell/texture of the wine, whereas the dog would appreciate these less (or less self-consciously). It is not a ‘layer-cake’ model of soul being stacked onto a body (Descartes picture?), but rather the better model for Aquinas is with light; a certain color, say orange can bleed into another shade of orange. So, e.g. ‘being orange’ is like ‘being an animal’, but ‘being dark orange’ is like ‘being rational’. You still have the ‘orange’ in ‘dark orange’, it is just that there is another feature in the ‘dark orange’ that is not in the plain ‘orange’.