Per Caritatem’s first annual Augustine Blog Conference is now underway! Below is the first of a series of posts bringing Augustine into conversation with philosophers and theologians of the Middle Ages, Reformation, Modernity, and Postmodernity. The format of the conference is as follows: an essay will be posted for a two days, then a short commentary on the essay will be posted and will remain on the site for two days or as long as (good) discussion continues.

AUGUSTINE AND THE MIDDLE AGES

Henry of Ghent and the Waning of the Divine Light

By Shane Wilkins, doctoral student of philosophy, Fordham University

The thirteenth century was a time of intellectual revolution. Many of the central debates of the middle and late 13th century focused on how to incorporate the intellectual riches of Aristotelian learning into the traditional framework of Augustinian theology. Of course, there was a wide range of views about how this should be done. On the one hand, were the radical Aristotelians like Boethius of Dacia and Siger of Brabant who believed Aristotle to have proven some claims of received dogma false. On the other hand were the radical anti-Aristotelians like Bernard of Clairvaux who asserted the truth of revealed dogma regardless what the pagan philosophers might have foolishly imagined themselves to have proven.

Thomas Aquinas and Henry of Ghent were two figures who took the middle path. Both attempted to harmonize Aristotle with Augustine, holding on to the key doctrines of the Church while exploiting the intellectual riches of Aristotle. One central concern they both share is to show how Christian theology can be a scientific inquiry along the lines of the Aristotelian sciences (See Marrone Ch. 1). This methodological concern led to questions about the nature of knowledge (epistemology) and the process of cognition which creates knowledge (noetics). The most important disagreement between Thomas and Henry is the place they assign to the traditional Augustinian doctrine of divine illumination. Thomas severely revises Augustine’s theory of divine illumination in a naturalistic, Aristotelian direction. Henry, however, supports Augustine against Thomas, trying to find a more substantial role for illumination within the general Aristotelian explanation of cognition.

Heraclitus to Augustine

One important and interesting way to tell the history of philosophy is to describe it a a story about the nature and possibility of knowledge. Heraclitus famously observed that “everything flows”, a view which we can take as the claim that all the objects of sensation are permanently changing in such a way that there are no sufficient criteria to identify them. And if things have no criteria of identity, then they are not knowable, since how can you a know a thing that is never the same?

Parmenides accepts the Heraclitean claim that the senses are unreliable guides to the truth, but argues that one can, by the light of reason discover the truth of the matter. For instance, the senses tell us that there is change, but through reason we know change to be impossible. (Here’s a brief sketch: suppose x can change to not-x. In order for this to happen at the instant of change both x and not-x would have to be true. But this is impossible, therefore change is an illusion of the senses.)

Plato, too accepts the Heraclitean maxim about the untrustworthiness of the senses, but postulates a second world of supersensible entities, the forms. A thing here in the observable world is what it is in virtue of participating in a form and that form is the principle of intelligibility that allows one to have knowledge.

But how in the world is one supposed to have cognitive access to a supersensible world? Plato has to tell a sort of philosophical fairy-tale about how the immortal soul learns about the forms in between successive reincarnations and then subsequently forgets upon birth. “Learning” is merely the process of sensations jogging the soul’s memory, so to speak.

Augustine picks up this general line of thought about the untrustworthiness of the senses in his treatise On 83 Disputed Questions:

Everything that the bodily senses attain, that which is also called sensible, is incessantly changing…. But what is not constant cannot be perceived; for that is perceived that is comprehended in knowledge. But something that is incessantly changing cannot be comprehended. Therefore we should not expect pure truth from the bodily senses (qtd. in Pasnau).

Augustine does believe knowledge is possible, of course. Augustine thinks that Plato had essentially the right idea: knowledge is possible only by the intellect considering abstract universals separate from the objects of ordinary experience. The difference between Augustine and Plato’s position is that Augustine locates the “forms” not in some supersensible world of experience, but rather in the divine mind as the exemplar ideas by means of which God created the world.

But this raises the question how one is supposed to have access to these ideas in the divine mind? Augustine’s answer is that God shines his divine light into the mind of the individual, illuminating him and giving him access to these ideas. Just as grace is a gift of God to help the will, so too divine illumination is a special act of God’s by means of which he gives knowledge to the intellect.

In his earlier career, Augustine seems to claim that all knowledge as such required such illumination.  “The mind needs to be enlightened by light from outside itself, so that it can participate in truth, because it is not itself the nature of truth. You will light my lamp, Lord.” (Confessions IV, qtd. in Pasnau)

Augustine’s theory of illumination was the received tradition for the scholastics before the Aristotelian revival. Indeed, all the early Franciscan thinkers like Bonaventure had illuminationist explanations of cognition. However, Augustine himself recognized at least one serious problem with the doctrine, in his Retractions. If knowledge comes only through a special gift of God’s and God presumably does not give his gifts to the wicked, then it would follow that no pagan ever “knew” anything, strictly speaking. But this seems absurd.

Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas

Aristotle, of course, took a different path than Plato in attempting to explain how human beings have knowledge. The fundamental maxim of Aristotle’s theory is that all knowledge comes through the senses. The contrast between Aristotle’s position and that of the philosophical tradition beginning with Heraclitus is enormous. This difference in epistemology is also connected to a difference between Aristotle’s metaphysics and that of Plato. For Aristotle, the forms are the still principles of intelligibility, but Aristotle believes these forms inhere within the things of which they are forms rather than subsisting in some separate realm.

In the De Anima, Aristotle outlines a theory of cognition to explain the claim that all knowledge begins in the senses. On Aristotle’s theory, a sense like sight receives a likeness (L. species) of the form of the external object, then a faculty called the “common sense” assembles these species into a sort of composite mental picture called the phantasm. Then the active intellect abstracts the form from the phantasm and impresses that form in the passive intellect. According to Aristotle, the cognition of a tree is simply the result of a causal process that begins in sensation and ends with the intellect receiving the form of the tree. To be sure, there are still a few black boxes here which need further explanation, but what is remarkable about Aristotle’s theory is that it seems quite naturalistic.[1]

Thomas accepted Aristotle’s theory of cognition, but Pasnau argues that Thomas still tried to make a little room for illumination by identifying God’s gift of divine light with his bestowing the soul with the agent intellect. Here is the relevant passage which Pasnau cites:

The soul forms in itself likenesses of things inasmuch as, through the light of agent intellect, forms abstracted from sensible objects are made actually intelligible, so as to be received in the possible intellect. And so, in a way, all knowledge is imparted to us at the start, in the light of agent intellect, mediated by the universal concepts that are cognized at once by the light of agent intellect. Through these concepts, as through universal principles, we make judgments about other things, and in these universal concepts we have a prior cognition of those others. In this connection there is truth in the view that the things we learn, we already had knowledge of (De veritate 10.6c)

Even if Pasnau is correct that this passage constitutes Thomas endorsing illuminationism, it is clear that the theory is present in a sense very much restricted from the one which Augustine gave it. Whereas Augustine (and the early Franciscans) suggested that the process of illumination was an ongoing occurrence, Thomas seems to say that the illumination happens all at once “at the start” of life.

Henry of Ghent

Henry of Ghent’s Summa quaestionum ordinariarum begins with a long series of questions about the nature of knowledge and what is required for theological knowledge specifically. He is the first scholastic author I know of to begin his treatise with an epistemological prolegomenon in this way. Like Thomas, Henry attempts to weld Augustinian illumination into the Aristotelian picture of cognition. Henry, however, has a much more robust understanding of illumination than Thomas.  Although Henry’s theory is not absolutely consistent and his view develops over the course of his career, Marrone has shown that Henry never gives up the view (cf. Marrone, ch 1.).

The basic move behind Henry’s position is to draw a distinction between (i) the truth of the thing and (ii) the thing’s truth. There are also two different sorts of cognition corresponding to these two different kinds of truth, which we can call simple cognition and cognition through an exemplar.

Simple cognition of (i) is thoroughly naturalistic and Henry believes that through this kind of cognition Aristotle and the other pagan philosophers were able to acquire knowledge. This is knowledge based on the senses-I see the tree, and by means of the cognitive process more-or-less as Aristotle laid out, I gain knowledge of “the truth of the tree”, namely a veridical likeness of the tree in the mind. Henry thinks we have to allow that this level of knowledge can occur naturalistically because to claim otherwise is derogatory to the goodness of God’s creation (Cf. SQO a. 1, q. 1) and leads to the absurd consequences which Augustine had to retract that no pagan ever knew anything.

Nevertheless Henry thinks that there is good reason to believe that this kind of knowledge, though important, still falls short of the “pure truth” (syncera veritas) or the knowledge of “the thing’s truth”. Knowledge of the “pure truth” of the tree is knowledge of the eternal, unchanging exemplar in the divine mind by means of which God created the tree, and obviously, as Augustine says in the quote from 83 Questions, that sort of knowledge is not available through the senses, but rather through illumination. (SQO a. 1, q. 7). Indeed, without illumination, there would be no truly scientific knowledge (SQO a. 1, q. 2, responsio).

The actual process of illumination, on Henry’s view, goes like this. First, through the ordinary process of cognition, I attain a veridical exemplar in my own mind of the object I’m cognizing. Then, through the light of divine illumination, I can see the divine exemplar in the mind of God and conform my own mental exemplar to that divine one. Only in this way can one obtain the certain, clear and indubitable knowledge of truth required for a science of theology.

Scotus responds to Henry’s view

Henry’s view was immediately subjected to intense criticism. The later Franciscan thinkers Peter John Olivi and John Duns Scotus found much to fault in the position. Scotus, interestingly argues that there is something fallacious in Henry’s idea about how the divine illumination is supposed to cooperate with the fallible human intellect to produce certain knowledge.

When one of those that come together is incompatible with certainty, then certainty cannot be achieved. For just as from one premise that is necessary and one that is contingent nothing follows but a contingent conclusion, so from something certain and something uncertain, coming together in some cognition, no cognition that is certain follows (Ordinatio I.3.1.4 n.221, qtd in Pasnau).

If Scotus’s argument here is correct, then if the human intellect is so fallible as to be unable to have knowledge without divine illumination, then it cannot even have knowledge with divine illumination, since the combination of fallible (human mind) and infallible (illumination) still yield fallibility. On the other hand, Scotus argues, if you accept that the human mind is of itself able to attain certain knowledge, then illumination is simply an extraneous hypothesis.

Scotus’s arguments against Henry seemed to put the last nail in the coffin of the Augustinian theory of illumination. However, the way in which Henry provokes these questions-raising epistemology and skepticism as foundational issues-set the agenda for theology in the 14^th century.

Bibliography

Henry of Ghent, Summa Quaestionum Ordinariarum, Ed. Badius, Paris, 1520.

Marrone, Truth and Scientific Knowledge in Henry of Ghent, Speculum Monographs, 1985.

Pasnau, “Divine Illumination” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

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[1] Alexander of Aphrodisias and some of the Islamic neoplatonists tried to make the ‘agent intellect’ somehow separate from the soul, but this seems not to have been Aristotle’s own intention, cf. Pasnau.