great post

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’.

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.

“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.

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.

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.