Tractatus de Deo uno secundum naturam

The agreement of St Augustine with the doctrine of the other Fathers is demonstrated.

« The doctrine of the Fathers as declared is by no means contradicted by the opinion of St Augustine concerning our intellectual knowledge and concerning the manner in which we know God; for, first, Augustine taught that for the present state of life there is no other knowledge of God than mediate and analogical, from previously known perfections of the created order and from truths of the metaphysical order, which in themselves are wholly different from the substantial perfection and truth of God; second, he taught that God is the light of knowable things and the light of minds exemplarily and efficiently, not formally; whence, third, what he said, that every truth is known by us in the unchangeable truth and in the eternal reasons, is to be understood not of the means of knowledge but of the cause of intellectual light. »

According to the doctrine of the Fathers expounded in the preceding thesis, the older theologians also used to explain St Augustine, whom some more recent writers (since the waning of the seventeenth century) contend to have claimed for the human mind an immediate intuition of God as the norm and principle of all intellectual knowledge; and they do so with such confidence that they say they are amazed that this fact, which they hold evident in the history of philosophy and theology, has been called into question by anyone. But there is above all a threefold prejudice which compels us to doubt that alleged evidence. For a) we do not readily believe that Augustine dissented from the other Fathers who discussed this matter theologically. b) It is even more incredible that the Scholastics, if this opinion were so evident, did not see it in Augustine, whom they always held as guide and prince of Doctors, and whose teaching they all strove to derive faithfully into their own streams. c) The same learned men who speak of this evidence heap up citations from other Fathers to persuade the same opinion, in which, however, we have seen that they were most manifestly deceived. Let us therefore examine, as briefly as can be done, the very teaching of Augustine.

Augustine distinguishes a threefold knowledge or vision: the first he calls corporeal (i.e. the perception of present bodies through the bodily senses), the second spiritual (i.e. the representation of absent bodies through the imagination), and finally a third, intellectual, which is more excellent and proper to the mind. Of each of these kinds he sometimes speaks as they are natural knowledge, and sometimes, and indeed more frequently in the second and third kind, as they are supernatural knowledge or vision. Gen. ad. litt. l. XII. c. 6-31 ; de Trin. l. IX. c. 6; XII. c. 2. Cf. de Ordine l. II. c. 14. sq.; de Civ. Dei. l. VIII. c. 7. etc. We have no need now to say anything about the distinction and essential difference between sensible perception and the understanding of the mind; nor is there any controversy about what St Augustine insists on against the Greek materialists, that we judge sensibles not by sense but by reason, and that intelligibles, and God himself especially, are objects knowable only by the intellectual faculty. The whole inquiry concerning the sense of Augustine is concerned only with those three heads which we have indicated in the thesis.

I. The first question therefore is this: whether Augustine held that the divine Being, insofar as God is truth itself and goodness itself, is exhibited immediately, through itself and in itself, to our intellectual gaze? Or whether he agreed with the other Fathers, as the masters of the Schools always interpreted him, in the doctrine that the divine Being cannot, in our present state and by our natural faculty, be intuited immediately in itself and through itself; but that, the creatures and the perfections of creatures being immediately understood, human reason, by concluding from these (ἀναλόγως Sap. XIII. 5.), attains to the knowledge of God, and conceives the divine perfections, not through ideas derived from the divine essence seen itself, but by concluding from created and creatable perfections understood to the perfections of the Creator, which are eminent not only ontologically above all creatable perfections, but also, for the immediate vision, logically above our intellect?

Now, on this question, Augustine, like the other Fathers, constantly teaches that the intellectual soul is indeed destined in the present order to the vision of God, who is Being itself absolute, truth itself, goodness itself; but that this immediate vision is supernatural, to be attained as the reward of merits in eternal beatitude; and that there is no other mode, at least natural, of knowing God, except mediately, from previously known created things and created perfections. The most perfect knowledge, he says, is when, in the truth itself already known, through which all things are created and in which are the eternal reasons of all created things, all the other things that are known are known. This is the proper mode of the blessed Angels, and ours will be when we are made equal to the Angels. But now, in the present state, the human mind can attain to knowing those eternal reasons to some extent, but only from creatures already known, and (since what is at issue is knowledge of the eternal reasons, and so already of a more cultivated kind) only after a long time and not without great difficulty (cf. supra p.98.). There is therefore certainly an immediate knowledge of the supreme truth, which is God, through which and in which the other things which have a participated truth are known; but Augustine, like the others, knows of no other such immediate intuition of the mind besides the beatific vision. For us the mode of knowing that supreme truth, which contains all the eternal reasons of the whole metaphysical and physical order, of essences and existences, is none other than to labour toward it, as toward the exemplar, from other truths as shadows and expressions already known; although afterwards, from it known either naturally or most of all supernaturally, there lies open a return to a more perfect knowledge of the whole created and creatable order. This second, as it were, mode of recognition is indeed a certain image of the beatific vision, in which, through the essence of God seen, the created order is seen; and this again, known in itself, is referred wholly to the praise and glorification of God.

Let the words of Augustine himself be read. « There is a great difference between the knowledge of a thing in the Word of God and its knowledge in its own nature (of the thing itself), so that the former rightly pertains to the day, the latter to the evening. For in comparison with the light of that Word which is beheld in the Word of God, every knowledge by which we know any creature in itself can not undeservedly be called night.... Wherefore the holy Angels, with whom we shall be made equal after the resurrection... undoubtedly first knew in the Word of God itself the whole creature in which they themselves were principally created, in which are the eternal reasons of all things, even of those made in time... and then in the creature itself, which they so know as looking down from below and referring it to the praise of him in whose unchangeable truth they principally see the reasons according to which it was made. » If, however, Augustine goes on, the angels see all these things at the same time, « yet not without order, by which the connection of preceding and following causes appears. For knowledge cannot come about unless the things to be known go before, which are likewise prior in the Word through which all things were made, than in all the things that were made. The human mind (this is the inference of the twofold way of knowing God from the aforementioned connection of order between Creator and creature) first experiences through the senses of the body those things which were made, and grasps their notice according to the measure of human weakness; and then it asks for their causes, if in some way it can arrive at those which remain principally and unchangeably in the Word of God, and so beholds his invisible things through the things that were made, understood. How slowly and with what difficulty it does this, and with how great a delay of time on account of the corruptible body which weighs down the soul, even for one who is most ardently swept along by study, so that it may do this instantly and perseveringly: who does not know? But the angelic mind, cleaving to the Word of God with pure charity, after it was created in that order to precede the rest, first saw in the Word of God the things to be made before they were made... which likewise, when made, it also knew in them, with less knowledge indeed, which is called evening » de Gen. ad litt. l. IV. n. 40. 41. 49. See also the passage cited above, p. 110, from Serm. 141. Distinctly in the book de vera relig. n. 52-67, and l. VII. n. 23. Confess. describes the steps by which the human mind comes to understand, in some measure, the invisible things of God through the things that were made, « step by step from bodies to the soul that senses through the body, and from there to its inner power, to which the senses of the body announce external things, and as far as beasts can reach; and from there again to the reasoning power, to which belongs the judging of what is taken from the senses of the body. This power, finding itself in me to be changeable, raised itself to its own understanding (by which metaphysical and absolutely necessary truths are understood), and drew itself away from custom, withdrawing from the contradicting crowds of phantasms, so that it might find by what light it was sprinkled, when without any doubt it cried out that the unchangeable is to be preferred to the changeable, whence it knew the unchangeable itself, which unless it knew in some way, it would in no way set surely before the changeable. And it arrived at that which is in the instant of a trembling glance. Then indeed I beheld your invisible things, understood through the things that were made, but I could not fix my gaze. » The last step is in a way twofold in this contemplation of Augustine: he understands that he understands the unchangeable; he therefore seeks that from which this understanding of the human mind comes, and in which every unchangeable truth has its ultimate foundation. And so from this step he « arrived at that which is in the instant of a trembling glance, » namely to God, the supreme intelligence, whose created image is the understanding soul, and to the supreme substantial truth, in which are the reasons of every truth. Certainly the objective metaphysical truth which is abstract and universal, or that which is the object of the judging mind concerning the essences of things, is far different from substantial wisdom and truth, although the intellect is from it as from a creating cause and is made like it as to an exemplar, and in it every knowable truth has its foundation. When therefore Augustine says in the same place: « seeking whence I judged, when I so judged (this ought to be so, that not so), I had found the unchangeable and true eternity of truth above my changeable mind, » he certainly did not think either that his own intellect judging thus, or the object itself of his metaphysical judgment, was God; but from the consideration of his own intellect and of metaphysical truth he ascended by the intellect to God as to cause and exemplar. The passage which many are accustomed to abuse should be understood in exactly the same way, Gen. ad litt. l. XII. n. 59, where the mind, caught up and withdrawn from the carnal senses, is presented to the vision more expressly, and is said « to see above itself also that by which, being helped, it sees whatever it sees even in understanding itself, » if the discourse there were about natural knowledge; but from the context it is evident that it is not about this, but about a vision such as God granted by extraordinary elevation to Moses, to whom he « spoke mouth to mouth, » and to the Apostle caught up into the third heaven. See there n. 54. 55. 56. 69.

Furthermore, that the object of metaphysical judgment, when the mind judges about the essences of things which are, or can be, outside God, is not God himself for Augustine but a step from which one ascends to God, the substantial truth, must without controversy be held as most certain, even if the holy Doctor did not say so expressly. Nevertheless he himself declares this principle expressly. Thus in Soliloq. l. I. c. seq. he shows that the contemplations of the disciplines (say metaphysics and mathematics) and God himself are understood by the same mind; yet God is by far different and altogether other, and so is what the mind gazes upon in these truths, although God himself is the first light, from which the light of the mind is derived, and from which is every objective truth that can be known. « I am led to agree that, as far as earth differs from heaven in its own kind, so far do those contemplations of the disciplines, true and certain, differ from the intelligible majesty of God.... Each most certain of the disciplines is of such a kind as those things which are illuminated by the sun, so that they can be seen, as the earth is seen; but God is he himself who illuminates¹.... God is indeed intelligible, and those contemplations of the disciplines are also intelligible, yet they differ very much » ib. n. 11. 12. 15. The same distinction is in l. II. de lib. arbitr.: « As true and unchangeable are the rules of numbers, whose reason and truth you said are present to all, unchangeably and in common, so true and unchangeable are the rules of wisdom... Therefore in no way will you deny that there is an unchangeable truth containing all these things, which are unchangeably true (as cause and exemplar)... as a light that is secret and public in marvelous ways » ib. n. 29. 33. Hence from the contemplations of the disciplines, from the unchangeable truths understood, the ascent of the mind to understanding the substantial truth which contains the reasons of all of them is plain. « If anyone should reduce all the things which are spread widely and variously through so many disciplines to one simple, true and certain thing, he would not rashly then seek those divine things which are not only to be believed, but also to be contemplated, understood and retained » de Ord. l. II. c. 16. See also the admirable teaching in l. XV. de Trin. n. 16.

II. A second question, connected with the former, presents itself: in what sense is to be understood what Augustine approves in Platonic philosophy²: « that the one same God, by whom all things were made, is the light of minds for learning all things » (Civ. Dei VIII. c. 7.).

First it must be explained what the very metaphor of light means. God is called light in himself (in opposition to darkness), and the highest good, the highest perfection, in almost the same sense in which he is called pure act: « God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all » 1. Io. I. 5. Most of all, however, in the order of knowledge, which (its name being taken from the senses) is a certain vision, he is called light in himself as infinite intelligible essence, in which are the supreme reasons of all true things, and as infinite intellect comprehending his own essence, inasmuch as he is identified with it, and on whom all created understanding depends. « Because for God it is the same to be and to understand, and he is the cause of understanding for all, therefore he is said to be light » S. Thom. contr. gent. l. III. c. 53. In himself God is shining light; hence it can be deduced in what sense he is illuminating light, « the light of things to be known » Civ. Dei VIII. 9. Insofar as the divine essence is imitable outwardly, it is the reason of all things, both possible and existing, or of the whole being outside God, in which it extends widely; whence the same essence, as the supreme true intelligible, is the reason and foundation of every intelligible truth: and so it illuminates the very objects of our knowledge, which signifies nothing other than this very thing that we say, that God is the supreme reason of all knowable things: « each most certain of the disciplines is of such a kind as those things which are illuminated by the sun, so that they can be seen; but God is he himself who illuminates » Aug. l. c. superius. But God is not (even in the opinion of Augustine) a light for us in the present state, perhaps in that sense that, having seen God intellectually in him as supreme truth, we see the remaining true things, the reasons of which the divine essence itself certainly contains in itself. This mode of knowing is without doubt most perfect, essential to God himself, who is the substantial truth itself, and is communicated supernaturally by participation, according to manifold degrees, in the beatific vision. To us, at least naturally, and also according to the ordinary charisms of supernatural elevation, only a certain imitation of this kind is possible: that, having come to know God from creatures and above all through faith, we descend from that knowledge to a more perfect recognition of creatures and of truths in the physical, logical and ethical order, all of which have their supreme reason in God: thus also the philosophers, « having known God, found where was the cause of the constituted universe, and the light of perceiving truth, and the fountain of drinking happiness » Civ. Dei VIII. 10. All that we have said in n. I demonstrates that these things are according to the opinion of Augustine.

But certainly Augustine regarded not only, nor principally, this illumination of the things to be known, but above all the illumination of the knower: « God is the light of minds. » It is asked in what sense this is to be understood. The light of the mind is spoken of in many ways: the natural power itself of understanding is an intellectual light; there is the light of the natural habit of the first principles, which the intellect understands first, and according to which it judges of other truths as evident in themselves; there is the light of the natural habit of science; there is the light of a supernatural cognitive habit, that is, ordered to supernatural knowledge of the true, as is the habit of faith, and also actual transient grace, by which the mind is raised to actual supernatural knowledge; and as the ultimate perfection, to which faith stands as a beginning, the light is that supernatural disposition of the soul by which it is raised and made apt for the immediate vision of God in himself, which is called the light of glory; the living act of understanding itself, whether natural or supernatural, can be called light. Now all these things are certainly not God, but are created light as a form or act inhering in the created mind itself. But God is the partly sole efficient cause and partly the first cause of this light, and so it is light derived from God; and the rational creature through this intellectual light itself (from the essential intellective faculty, which is presupposed as its foundation, through all the degrees up to the light of glory) is the image of the infinite intellect of God and of substantial wisdom. Namely, just as God according to infinite essence is the first cause and exemplar of all being, according to absolute life is the first cause and exemplar of all life, according to justice is the first cause and exemplar of all justice in creatures, etc.; so according as he is wisdom and absolute intellect, he is the first cause and exemplar of all intellect and of all knowledge in creatures. According to this twofold reason of dependence and imitation, one understands that as participated being, life, justice and the other participated perfections, so participated intellectual light is from God, who as light is absolute, as from the first efficient and exemplar cause. Therefore just as God is e.g. our justice, not as if he were the justice by which we are formally just and which each of us receives in himself as his own, nor the justice by which God himself is just; but in that God is the first cause and exemplar of our justice (Conc. Trid. sess. VI. cap. 7.), so according to the same reason of cause and exemplar God is the light of minds, both in the natural order and much more perfectly in the supernatural order. Augustine himself declares this matter, naming it, with regard to the supernatural and most perfect participation in the divine light, almost no less distinctly than was later done by the Scholastics. « Let the human mind remember its God, to whose image it was made, and let it understand and love him... and not by its own light but by the participation of that highest light it will be wise, and where he is eternal, there it will reign blessed. For that wisdom of man is so called, that it is also of God... but not in such a way is it of God, by which God is wise. For he is not wise by participation in himself, as the mind is wise by participation in God. But just as he is also called justice of God, not only that by which he himself is just, but which he gives to man when he justifies the wicked³, which the Apostle, commending it, says of certain people: "being ignorant of the justice of God, and wishing to establish their own justice, they have not submitted to the justice of God"; so also it can be said of certain people: "being ignorant of the wisdom of God and wishing to establish their own, they have not submitted to the wisdom of God" » Aug. de Trin. l. XIV. n. 15.

So there is a participation of the divine light, which God is as absolute truth and wisdom: it is the assimilation of the rational creature to that uncreated light through a created light, that is, through the power of understanding, both natural and supernatural, up to the light of glory, by which « we shall be like him, since we shall see him as he is; » and God is an uncreated sun communicating this created light, not indeed by emanation but by efficiency, to the likeness of himself.

St Thomas declares this matter in many places. « It is necessary that above the human soul there be some intellect, on which its (the soul's) understanding depends... because whatever belongs to something by participation is first in something substantially; as if iron is ignited, there must be in things something which is fire according to its own substance and nature.... It is therefore necessary that there be something higher than the soul, which is intellect according to its whole nature, from which the intellectuality of the soul is derived, and on which its understanding depends... But it cannot be said that this higher intellect makes intelligible things actual in us immediately, without some power which our soul participates from it... For every agent, whatever action it performs, has formally in itself the power which is the principle of such an action. Whence it is necessary that the intellect be something formally inhering in man... We say that the light of the agent intellect (the power of the mind to abstract intelligible reasons from sensible things) is impressed immediately on us by God, according as we discern the true from the false, and the good from the evil; and of this it is said in Ps. IV. 6: "many say, who will show us good things? The light of your face, O Lord, is signed upon us, by which good things are shown to us." Thus what makes intelligible things actual in us, by way of participated light, is something of the soul and is multiplied according to the multitude of souls and men. But that which makes intelligible things by way of the illuminating sun is one separate thing, which is God⁴. But this one separate principle of our knowledge cannot be understood through the agent intellect of which the philosopher speaks, because God is not in the nature of the soul (he is not formally the power of the soul, but efficiently giving and conserving the power of the soul, and cooperating with it as first cause); but the agent intellect is named by Aristotle the light received in our soul from God... It is proper to God to illuminate men by impressing on them the natural light of the agent intellect, and above this light the light of grace and of glory » S. Th. de spiritual. creatur. a. 10; Summae 1. q. 12. a. 2; q. 79. a. 4; q. 84. a. 5; q. 88. a. 3. ad 1.

It is plain from these very things that what St Thomas sometimes says, that the divine ideas or the divine light are impressed on our souls, and which (using a locution taken from Ps. IV. 7) he calls the sealing of the divine light in us (1. q. 84. a. 5. cf. Aug. Trin. XIV. n. 21.), is nothing other than that same communication of intellectual light in the order of nature, grace and glory, to which on the part of the creature corresponds what is called participation. This impression and sealing of habitual light is, moreover, perpetual in us through divine conservation and cooperation in every actual understanding. St Thomas proves, in Boëth. de Trin. prooem. q. 1. a. 1., that we do not need for natural knowledge any other light superadded by God, because the mind is already illuminated divinely by the natural light, namely by the natural intellectual power; yet, he says, that very natural light perpetually depends on the operation of God, and so the natural illumination is derived continuously from God. « Augustine says (Genes. ad litt. l. VIII: n. 26.) that as the air is illumined by a present light, which if it be absent is immediately darkened; so the mind is illumined by God, and so God also always causes in the soul the natural light, not one thing after another but the same; for he is the cause not only of its becoming but also of its being. In this, then, God works continually in the mind, that he causes the natural light in it and directs it; and thus the mind proceeds to its operation not without the operation of the first cause » S. Th. ib. ad 6. Hence it also appears in what sense Augustine said that, through illumination, especially that which is supernatural, many truths result from one first truth, although they are diminished in created spirits. « The truths are diminished by the sons of men. There is one truth by which holy souls are illumined, but since there are many souls, many truths can be said to be in them; as from one face many images appear in mirrors » Aug. in Ps. VI. 2. Cf. S. Th. de spir. creat. a. 10. ad 8; 1. q. 16. a. 6; contr. gent. III. c. 47; de verit. q. 10. a. 11. ad 12; 4. dist. 49. q. 2. a. 7. ad 9; Quodl. 10. a. 7.

III. From all that we have said so far, there is also deduced the answer to the last question proposed: in what sense the teaching of St Augustine is to be understood, that we see every true thing which we see « in that unchangeable truth which is above our minds » Confess. l. XII. c. 25; de vera relig. n. 55. 56. 57; de Trin. l. XIV. n. 21. etc. (Vid. S. Th. cont. Gent. III. 47.)

This can be taken in three ways. 1° In such a way that we immediately see that very truth which God is, and in it, as known beforehand, we see all the true things which we see apart from God. This mode and order of knowing has its place only in the beatific vision, and in this life only through the charism of extraordinary elevation; this is attested and ratified in the teaching of Augustine, as we have sufficiently shown. Let it be noted, however, what we have already warned, that Augustine frequently in his philosophy descends from the eternal reasons in the divine mind, either already known through faith or understood from the consideration of creatures, to a deeper understanding of creatures and of every truth which is derived from God. 2° That opinion can be understood in such a way that all truth which we understand to be thus and cannot be otherwise is derived from the unchangeable and substantial truth and has its foundation in it⁵, and so that the human mind, from the abstract ideas of truth, goodness, beauty, justice, etc., which it has pre-conceived from creatures as perfections involving in their notion no imperfection, can ascend immediately to absolute and substantial truth, goodness, etc., and to the grasping, in some measure, of its spiritual nature, in which alone created perfections have their cause and absolute exemplar⁶. 3° Finally it can be understood that we see all things in the first truth, in that the very power of seeing which is in our mind, namely the intellectual faculty itself, is as a certain imitation and derived image, and depends on that substantial truth as on an exemplar, efficient, conserving and concurrent cause; and thus the mind sees the true in the substantial truth itself, not indeed as in a known medium, but as through the principle and cause both of the knowability of things and of the light in the knower. That in the second and third sense the intellectual vision of every truth in the first truth, which is God, is taught by Augustine, has likewise already been demonstrated above.

In this manner St Thomas interprets the opinion of Augustine. « Augustine, in 83 Questions (q. 46.), put in place of the ideas which Plato posited the reasons of all creatures existing in the divine mind, according to which all things are formed, and according to which also the human soul knows all things. When therefore it is asked whether the human soul knows all things in the eternal reasons, it must be said that something is known in something in two ways: in one way as in the object known, as someone sees in a mirror those things whose images appear in the mirror; and in this way the soul in the state of the present life cannot see all things in the eternal reasons, but in this way the blessed, who see God and all things in him, know all things in the eternal reasons. In another way something is said to be known in something as in the principle of knowledge; as if we say that in the sun are seen those things which are seen by the sun: and thus it is necessary to say that the human soul knows all things in the eternal reasons, through whose participation we know all things. For the intellectual light which is in us is nothing other than a certain participated likeness of the uncreated light, in which the eternal reasons are contained... That Augustine did not understand it so, that all things are known in the eternal reasons or in the unchangeable truth, as if the eternal reasons themselves were seen, is evident from this, that he says in 83 Questions (l. c.) that the rational soul, not every soul and whatever soul, but the one which is holy and pure, is asserted to be fit for that vision, namely of the eternal reasons, as are the souls of the blessed » S. Th. 1. q. 84. a. 5; contra gent. III. c. 47; de spir. creat. a. 10. ad 8; in Boëth. de Trin. prooem. q. 1. a. 3; de verit. q. 10. a. 11. ad 12. etc.