An introduction
[In the following excerpt, Tugwell investigates Albert's theological writings on epistemology, especially those that concern human knowledge of God.]
In 1241 William of Auvergne, by now bishop of Paris, together with the Masters of the University, issued a formal condemnation of several propositions, of which the first is that "the divine essence will not be seen in itself either by any human being or by any angel." The ninth proposition is that "whoever has better natural endowments will of necessity have more grace and glory," which almost certainly reflects a Neoplatonist doctrine of hierarchy, apportioning divine illumination strictly according to ontological status. The other condemned propositions do not directly concern us here but, as M. D. Chenu has shown [in Melanges Auguste Pelzer, 1947], they all seem to derive from an essentially oriental theology.
Exactly who was the author of the condemned propositions is not known for certain, but they are presented in some sources as emanating from mendicant circles, and it is clear that the Dominicans were immediately affected. Successive Dominican chapters insisted on the books of the brethren being corrected to eliminate the condemned doctrines, and the manuscripts of Hugh of St. Cher show various attempts to implement this ruling. Guerric of St. Quentin, who had previously maintained that God's essence, as such, is not known to the blessed, made a sort of public retraction by presiding over a new disputation on the subject and pronouncing the opposite conclusion.
The condemnation of 1241 represented a victory for those who were disillusioned with the attempt to accommodate the Christian hope of the beatific vision to a general, philosophical epistemology. The conviction that we can have a real knowledge of God was taken to be a primary datum; if philosophical epistemology could not cope with it, so much the worse for epistemology. Before the condemnation William of Auvergne denounced the "Aristotelian" doctrine that there can be no true knowledge of individuals on the grounds that "this error prevents and altogether denies the glory of human souls, which is the most complete and clear vision of the Creator," since, in William's view, the Creator is "very individual" (singularissimus). Some years later, probably in the mid-1250s, St. Bonaventure alludes to the epistemological problem posed by the lack of proportion between God and the soul and, instead of trying to deal with it, he simply dismisses it, on the grounds that "if proportionality were necessary for knowledge, the soul would never reach the knowledge of God … by nature, by grace or by glory." This is tantamount to saying that it must be possible for us to know God, even if there is no way that we can know God…
When Albert came to Paris in the 1240s, the issue of "Eastern" theology was a live and delicate one in Dominican circles. The attempt to provide a viable epistemological account of how we know God had apparently reached an impasse and had, in the process, brought negative theology into a certain disrepute; the only form of negative theology that was quite unaffected was one which posited a non-intellectual way of knowing God by love, which by-passed rather than settled the epistemological problem.
Albert, it is quite clear, was not prepared simply to abandon the attempt to interpret Christian claims to present or future knowledge of God in terms of some coherent epistemology, and it is precisely on the subject of epistemology that he found himself most seriously at odds with the Latin tradition. On just the issue that had provoked the "anti-oriental" backlash, he aggressively opted for a frankly "oriental" view. For a full statement of his doctrine of how the intellect functions and how it comes to the knowledge of God—and it is evident that his position is Aristotelian with a strong dose of Neoplatonism, both Dionysian and Islamic—we have to wait for books written after the completion of the Dionysian commentaries. But at least in germ the same doctrine is already contained in the commentary on the first book of the Sentences and in the Dionysian commentaries themselves, so there does not seem to have been any essential change in his attitude.
At the beginning of the section of his De anima devoted to the intellect Albert announces emphatically that "in settling these questions we utterly abhor what the Latin doctors say." His objection to the Latins is that they follow Plato too much and suppose that the mind somehow contains within itself all that is needed for knowledge, with its own private supply of universals. Albert makes fun of these private universals, which could never be the basis for any objective knowledge of reality as it exists outside the soul and which would mean that no two individuals could ever be said to have the same knowledge. And against the idea of knowledge being somehow innate he affirms the Peripatetic doctrine that the mind acquires knowledge from things, not from itself.
One of the main points of controversy arising out of this concerns the soul's self-knowledge. The Augustinian tradition maintained that the soul has, in principle, a direct, immediate knowledge of itself and all that is in itself, including God. This theory is mentioned in the commentary on the Mystical Theology, and Albert opposes it firmly. He insists, with Aristotle, that we acquire knowledge of our own minds in the same way that we acquire knowledge of anything else. What we are is not intrinsically luminous to us, it has to become an object of understanding to us.
On certain crucial points, then, Albert is a loyal Peripatetic. But this is far from being the whole of his epistemology, as we see in his fascinating treatment of Augustine's recantation of the claim that "any truth that is known is inspired by the Holy Spirit":
Four things are needed in the soul if it is to receive any knowledge of truth: the possible intellect, which is ready to receive it; secondly the agent intellect, by whose light the abstraction occurs of the forms in which the truth or the particular truth resides; thirdly the reality (res) which is present as an object either through an image of itself or in its own right— this is what the truth is about; and fourthly the principles and axioms which are as it were the instruments which arrange in due proportion the possible, impossible and necessary connections and separations, on the basis of which the particular truth is received. Of these four the first is purely receptive, the second is simply a source of light, the third is what receives light from the agent intellect and gives to the possible intellect the light of a specific truth, and the fourth is moved as an instrument and in turn moves the conceptual connections and separations with regard to the matter in which truth is known or sought. Some philosophers have concluded that these four things suffice for the knowledge of any truth which is subject to our reason. But we must rather say that the light of the agent intellect is not sufficient by itself without being directed by the light of the uncreated intellect…This can happen in two ways, depending on whether there is simply a twofold light or whether there is a threefold light. The light is twofold if the mind is joined to the light of the uncreated intellect, and that light is the "interior teacher." But sometimes the mind is joined to an angelic intellect as well as to the divine… This is what Dionysius calls the leading back of our hierarchy through the hierarchy of the angels. Augustine says this happens in many ways. And this is what some philosophers call the "link-up of intellects," because they too said that nothing is seen except by way of the first light.
So, to return to the question whether a new grace is needed, we must say that if any gift freely given by God is called "grace," then no knowledge comes about without grace. Indeed one philosopher has said that even if we have a habitual knowledge of something, that knowledge will not become actual unless the mind turns to the light of the uncreated intellect.
Even without identifying all the sources of this remarkable passage, we can see at once that its doctrine is essentially Neoplatonist, though Albert himself may have been unaware of this; and Albert seems to have remained faithful to it throughout his life.
The combination of this Neoplatonist illuminationism and the Aristotelian denial of any immediate and primitive intellectual self-knowledge gives Albert a philosophical basis for a very rich and profound Christian intellectualism, such as we find in several passages in the De Intellectu et Intelligibili, in which we are surely entitled to recognize his own convictions, not just his interpretations of what he took to be Peripatetic doctrine:
Our intellect is more closely joined to imagination and the senses than it is to the first agent intellect, and so it is dark and, with regard to things which are in principle thoroughly separate from matter, it is like the eye of a bat with regard to sunlight. For this reason it has to be imbued with physics first, and then with mathematics, so that once it has been strengthened in this way by many lights coming from many intelligibles it can rise to the understanding of the things of God. And in all these intelligibles, when it becomes an effective understanding of any of them, it discovers both itself and the agent intellect… But though it is closer to physics and mathematics because of its connection to the body, it is really more akin by nature to the things of God, and so it discovers more of itself in the intelligibles which pertain to God than it does in those which belong to mathematics and physics.
Furthermore it seems true to say that, since anything which is only potentially a knower actually knows nothing at all, the intellect knows nothing at all unless it becomes effective. And from this it follows that anyone who does not study philosophy knows nothing at all, neither himself nor anything other than himself… As long as the intellect remains potential and in no way effective, it is impossible to know anything other than oneself or oneself or even to know that one does not know … So Hermes reproached the uneducated in antiquity, saying that such people paid no attention to anything human in their lives, but spent their days like pigs…
The possible intellect is potentially everything that can be understood. So it is not actually received except in as much as what is potentially understood becomes effectively understood, and it is completely obtained and received when it attains to the effective realisation of all the intelligibles which it potentially is. This is how human beings take possession of their own intellect.
Plato accordingly said that the truest definition of philosophy is "knowledge of oneself," and Alfarabi said that the soul is placed in the body in order to discover and know itself, and he claims that Aristotle said this, but I have not found where he said it… The reason for all this is that the first image of the light of the first cause to be joined to space and time is the human intellect, and so it must be a kind of likeness of everything that comes into being through the light of the first cause, it must enfold all these things, being a receptacle of some in as much as it is an image of the first cause and of others in as much as it is joined to space and time; in both it has to take possession of itself…
This makes it evident that the contemplation of wonderful truths is the highest delight and the most natural occupation, in which people's whole human nature, precisely as such, blossoms, particularly in the contemplation of the things of God, because it is particularly in these that the intellect discovers itself in its proper nature, because human beings, precisely as human, are essentially intellect … This reveals how it is by study that the intellect takes possession of itself.
Now let us talk about the understanding which some of the oldest philosophers call "assimilative" or "assimilating," and in doing so let us also clarify the soul's perfection, which arises from all the kinds of understanding alluded to. "Assimilative understanding" is that in which human beings rise to the divine intellect, which is the light and cause of everything, insofar as it is possible and lawful and in a way which is proportionate to them. This comes about when the intellect has become fully actual and has taken possession of itself and of the light of the agent intellect and, on the basis of the lights received from everything and of its self-knowledge, it reaches out in the lights belonging to the intelligences and so gradually ascends to the simplicity of the divine intellect. From the light of its own agent intellect it passes to the light of intelligence and from there it reaches out to the intellect of God…
Strengthened in that light (of intelligence) the intellect rises to the divine light, which has no name and is unutterable, because it is known by no name of its own, becoming known only as it is received. And it is received first in intelligence, which is the first effect to be caused, and when it is uttered it is uttered with the name of intelligence, which is the effect it causes, not with any name of its own. So Hermes said that the God of Gods is improperly grasped by a name which is not properly his own… So the human intellect is joined to its final goal and its light and united with that light it shares in somewhat of his Godhead…
Notice that in all these kinds of understanding the possible intellect is as it were primary and the foundation. The light of the agent intellect is a disposition in it and a kind of basis for the understanding of principles, and the understanding of principles is the basis for effective understanding, and effective understanding is the basis for taking possession of the intellect, because here particularly the soul acquires knowledge of itself; and possession of one's own intellect is the basis for the assimilative intellect, which rises step by step from lower light to higher light up to the light of the divine intellect, and there is stops as having reached its destination. Since everyone naturally desires knowledge, the goal of everyone's desire is to come to rest in the divine intellect.
There is a similar message in the commentary on the Metaphysics:
Since all human beings naturally desire knowledge and desire is not unlimited, it must be possible to bring this desire to an end in some form of knowing. And this can be nothing other than the knowledge of that which is the cause and light of all beings and all objects of knowledge, and this is no other than the divine intellect…This is why Averroes says in his comment on book XI of the Metaphysics of Aristotle that the question of the divine intellect is the one which all human beings desire to know.
The human intellect becomes aware of itself by understanding other things, and by an "analysis" (resolution) of its own light (once it has discovered this through coming to understand things) it comes to the "first, pure intellect." "This is what is most pleasant and most desirable in contemplation (theoria), this is what every being that has an intellect naturally desires to have actual knowledge of and to contemplate." The "first, pure intellect" is, of course, God.
In these writings Albert is not expressly developing his own views, and he objected to people supposing that he endorsed all that he said in his expositions of what he took to be Peripatetic philosophy. But so much of the same doctrine of the intellect recurs in his other works, and his comments are sometimes so enthusiastic, that it is difficult to believe that he would really insist on disowning it.
The highest thing that the soul can have while it is in the body is at least sometimes to reach the pure intellect in its mind. And if, once it is freed from the body, what it sometimes fleetingly attains in the body becomes continuous, that will be supreme joy and the kingdom of heaven.
The intellectual nature of beatitude is affirmed already in the early work De Resurrectione with the same quotation from Averroes that we find in the Metaphysics commentary, and it is reaffirmed in the commentary on Dionysius' Divine Names, again with the same text from Averroes.
The hypostatized "intelligence" that is the primum causatum, mentioned in the text cited from De Intellectu et Intelligibili, is easily identified with suprahuman intellectual beings, that is, the angels,… Albert is quite willing to ascribe an important role to the angels in the illumination of the human mind, so the passage through the light of "intelligence" to the divine light needs little comment, if any, to make it acceptable to him.
Above all, Albert's illuminationist doctrine of the intellect allows him to develop a theory of how we come to know God. In the early De Resurrectione he was content to say, like William of Auxerre, that God "is in the intellect in his own right, that is, substantially, because he is in every essence. So for him to be seen all that is needed is the removal of any obstacle that is in the way. And there are two such obstacles: the imperfection that goes with this present wretchedness and our being turned in another direction. Since both of these are removed by beatitude, in beatitude we shall see him as he is."
In the commentary on the Divine Names Albert gives us a much more precise account of how God is in the soul, and it presupposes already the doctrine later expounded in De Intellectu et Intelligibili: "God is essentially present in the soul, not as any kind of nature of the soul, but as a certain light of the intellect, and this is sufficient for him to be known by the intellect; indeed because of his being in the soul like this he is known under the appearance of anything that is understood, as the philosophers say about the agent intellect. In the same way we know of God 'that' he is by way of our knowledge of any creature."
We know God through his works, then, essentially because he is implicitly present in our actual knowing of creatures. The divine being of God is the principle of all knowledge, because it is the "first light"; our intellect receives him as a "principle," and if we could know him perfectly (which we cannot) we should be able to derive a knowledge of everything from our knowledge of him. All knowledge derives from God's own knowing, the light which is the causal principle of all knowing; but actual knowledge is received by different creatures in different ways, and our human way is laborious and circuitous.
The divine intellect is the "cause and light of all beings," the "intellect which is the mover in all of nature," and for Albert this does not just mean some remote Aristotelian deity moving all things simply by attracting them, without in any way being concerned for them, nor does it mean a remote Platonist principle acting in all things, but not deigning to be cognizant of individuals or particulars: it means the creator God whose knowledge is the source of the whole reality of all things in all their particularity.
God is the source of the existence of all things, and at the same time, as the primordial Intellect, he is the source of the intelligibility of all things, and it is this latter which most interests Albert. Our minds approach God by way of the intelligibility of his creatures, discovering themselves and the light that is in them in the process. Bit by bit, as they exercise their own intellectual powers, they move toward an ever simpler, more comprehensive view of things, in which the light, which comes from God and enlightens angelic and (in a more diffuse and obscure way) human intellects, is apprehended more clearly.
The Aristotelian principle that it is only in understanding other things that the mind takes possession of itself is, of course, an admirable justification for Albert's own wide-ranging interests. He evidently took seriously and found congenial the belief that the intellect takes full possession of itself only when it realizes to the full its capacity to understand all that can be understood. But this is not simply a justification of curiosity; it is an application of the Dionysian principle that God, who is not adequately named by any name, must be given all names. Any narrowing of our intellectual interests would in fact shut out ways in which we are meant to be led to God. Precisely because the light of God is discovered only indirectly through the intelligibility of his works theology cannot profitably be un-dertaken as a narrow specialization. The link between negative and affirmative theology is fully restored in all its amplitude.
Albert's view of how we ascend to the knowledge of God leaves no room for any kind of shortcut. Nor does it leave room for any kind of specialized faculty for union with God, such as Gallus posited. And the idea that there might be some kind of non-intellectual knowledge of God receives very short shrift from Albert: if we cannot know God by the intellect, "it is clear that we cannot know him in any other way." And if we are to know God by the intellect, it must be by the whole, ordinary process of intellection, beginning with the "possible intellect." (Albert cannot really accommodate the popular distinction between a "higher" intellectual power directed toward God and a "lower" power directed toward creatures.)
If all intellectual activity depends on an illumination that comes from God, it is obvious that there can be no radical division between natural knowledge and faith. The proper object of faith is the First Truth, which is the source of all knowledge, not just knowledge of the truths of faith, so the distinction between faith and natural knowledge is a distinction within an essentially coherent illumination from God: "Without a light to enlighten the intellect our possible intellect cannot receive any knowledge; it is by this light that the pos-sible intellect becomes an eye to see with. This light is natural with regard to our receiving knowledge of natural things, it is freely given (gratuitum) with regard to our receiving the objects of belief, and it is glory with regard to our receiving what beatifies us." And the illumination of faith functions in the same way as any other illumination: light enables us to see but does not determine what we see, and the light of the agent intellect enables us to know but does not determine any particular object of knowledge; in the same way the light of faith enables us to believe, but does not of itself specify any object of belief. The actual content of faith comes to us, like any other kind of knowledge, through the senses—through hearing sermons, reading the bible and so on. This is why, as Albert says in the Mystical Theology, there is need both for the inward teaching of God and for an "external teacher."
The salient characteristic of faith, as distinct from ordinary knowledge, is that by it we believe certain things to be true that are not susceptible of rational proof, though it is important to note that they are not susceptible of rational refutation either: if they could be refuted, we should have to believe the refutation as well as the refuted article of faith, so two contradictories would have to be true at the same time, which is impossible. Natural knowledge is limited in its scope, but it is not, in Albert's view, unnatural for the mind to be carried beyond the limit of its own resources. The abandonment of intellectual activity recommended in the Mystical Theology is interpreted by Albert to mean only the abandonment of the intellectual activity which is "connatural" to the intellect, that is to say, the activity which is sustained by the powers with which the human mind is born. But it is precisely the intellect that is carried beyond its innate capacity by the higher illumination it receives from God, and this does not involve any essential change in its nature. It is, as Albert makes clear in his commentary on the Mystical Theology, an intellectual union with God that is our final goal.
The light of faith is not an alternative to, let alone a negation of, the mind's natural way of functioning, it is precisely a strengthening of the mind, enabling it to do better and more surely the very thing that it is naturally designed to do.
The bodily vision of some creatures, like the bat, is totally shattered by the light of the sun, but the vision of other creatures, like human beings, is capable to some extent of looking at the sun, but because it is weak it cannot do so without the eyes trembling; other creatures, like the golden eagle, have their vision so strengthened that they can see the sun in the round. In the same way the mental vision of people who are held down by earthly affections and bodily images is material and is totally rebuffed by the divine radiance, but if their vision draws away from these things into intellectual speculation then it becomes immaterial, but it is still trembling, because it looks upon the things of God from afar, as it were, with the principles of reason. But if it is strengthened by the light of faith it ceases to tremble."
There is a fine passage in the commentary on the Divine Names that develops a similar point:
"This reason" (divine reason) "is the simple truth of what exists, which itself exists…and divine faith is about it" (it is the proper object of the faith we have about God). "It is pure," by contrast with the truth there is in other sciences, inasmuch as some impurity overflows into them from the things on which they are based; "it is not erroneous," as against the truth which is derived from reasoning, which is often liable to error because of the way things shift around. "It is knowledge of all things," in that it pours out knowability on all things, which is the situation of the first truth.
Next he defines faith, of which this truth is the object. First he gives the definition and comments on it, then he explains why he said, "If knowledge unites those who know…"
So first he says that "faith is an abiding" and firm "establishment of believers," and this is interpreted in two ways: it "establishes" believers "in the truth" through their assent to it and it establishes the truth in them, placing it in their minds, in the minds, that is, of "believers who have a simple knowledge of the truth" in the first truth, "in unalterable steadfastness," inasmuch, that is, as someone remains unalterably in the one faith which also unites all the faithful. And the cause of this unchangeable steadfastness is indicated next: it is of the nature of knowledge to be "unitive," and this is understood in two ways: of the object of knowledge, because perfect knowledge makes us stand firm in the one, simple "whatness" of something, and also of the act of knowing, because at first the act of knowing is unsteady and wanders round various ideas, but once it gets a probable idea of something it sticks to one idea, but is nervous there because it is afraid of its opposite; but when it has perfect knowledge and enters into the proper and essential cause of something, then it stands firmly in one place, and this is the reason why all those who know something are at one in a single knowledge of the truth.
Neither Dionysius nor Albert would actually want to claim that faith gives us "perfect knowledge" in this life, but it is clearly implied that faith does give us the same kind of solidity as perfect knowledge. Whereas opinion is always unsettled because of its "fear of the opposite," both faith and knowledge give us a kind of certainty, and faith has at least some advantages over any other kind of knowledge, because of its direct reliance on the "first truth." And Albert seems to have no hesitation in treating faith as a kind of knowledge: although faith and reason differ in us, "they belong to the same genus, namely natura cognoscitiva"
Faith, however, cannot be regarded simply as a "given," allowing us to rest on our laurels. It shares with the investigation of truth the responsibility for bringing our reason to perfection, presumably by sharing in its own way the task of reason, which is to explore reality so that the general principles known by our intellect are applied and we come to a real understanding of things. By faith we have access to more material, which we can explore; and theology is the exploration of it. In his commentary on St. John, Albert says he likes the "ancient" view of faith, found in St. Gregory, which differentiates between two facets of faith: "believing is thinking together with assent" (cogitare cum assensu). As assent, it is simply a given, a "changeless foundation"; but as "thinking" it is clearly open to all kinds of development. "In faith…we first assent to the first truth for its own sake, then we look for reasons, so that we can to some extent understand what we believe."
The wonderful humane and intellectual perspective opened out to us by faith is indicated by St. Albert in his comment on John 8:31-2, "Jesus said to the Jews who believed in him, 'If you abide in my word, you will truly be my disciples and you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.'":
"Jesus said to those who believed in him." They were already beginning to be free, in that they had been called to faith. "You have been called into freedom, brethren, only do not make freedom an occasion for the flesh" (Gal. 5:13). Faith is the beginning of freedom because it makes people know what freedom there is in grace. Therefore he speaks to these believers as to people who already understand freedom. "Let people with understanding speak to me, let a wise man hear me" (Job 34:34). "If you abide" with perseverance, intelligence and obedience "in my word." With perseverance, so that you meditate on it by study; with intelligence, so that you understand the mystery of the Holy Spirit in it; with obedience, so that you fulfill it by practicing it in what you do. On the first of these it says, "Persevere in discipline; God offers himself to you as to his children" (Heb. 12:7), and God's children are free. On the intelligibility of the words it says, "Understand what I say, for the Lord will give you understanding in everything" (2 Tim. 2:7), and "I will give you understanding" (Ps. 31:8). On obedience, "Cursed is anyone who does not abide in the words of this law and who does not accomplish them in practice" (Deut. 27:26), and "If you hear the voice of the Lord your God in order to do and to keep all his precepts, which are my command to you today, the Lord your God will make you higher than all the peoples who live on the earth" (Deut. 28:1), than those who live in earthly desires, that is, because you will be free and will be master of them. See how it is the beginning of true freedom thus to abide in the Lord's word.
"You will truly be my disciples." A true disciple is one who is truly imbued, without any error, with the teachings of his master. And this is how freedom grows. As the philosopher says, we call people free if they are their own cause. And as it says in book ten of the Ethics, a human being is just intellect— all the rest that is in us is not human but animal. And the intellect is perfected in the study of the things of God, not in anything else. "If you are outside the instruction of which all have been made partakers, then you are bastards and not children" (Heb. 12:8), as if to say, "You were not born of free stock, but of a bastard, servile stock." "The Lord God opened my ear and I do not contradict, I have not gone away" (Is. 50:5). "In this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another" (John 13:35), because it is love which makes you hold to my instruction. "If anyone loves me, he will keep my word" (John 14:23). A true disciple is one who holds to the instruction he received, just as it was imparted by his master. "Learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart" (Matt. 11:29).
"And you will know the truth." This brings true liberty to perfection. Knowledge of the truth is the knowledge of that by which things truly are what they are, and this is no other than the divine art and wisdom which is proposed to us in the words of God. It is by God's art and wisdom that things truly are what they are. Because of certain other principles things fall from the truth of their being, inasmuch as they are material and mutable and inclined to sag away from what is true. "Sanctify them in truth; your word is truth" (John 17:17). And it says of the Word in John 1:14, "Full of grace and truth." "I am the way and the truth and the life" (John 14:6)."Truth abides and is strong for ever" (3 Esdras 4:38)."Truth prevails over everything" (ibid. 3:12). And so it frees us from the futility of changeability and is the principle which makes freedom itself perfect.
There follows, "And the truth will set you free." And this is the completion of true liberty. "Creation itself will be set free from enslavement to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God" (Rom. 8:21). "The Jerusalem which is above is free, and that is our mother" (Gal. 4:26). So the word of the Lord, as being the truth, frees us from the coercion and constraint of futility. As the word of grace, it frees us from enslavement to guilt and sin. As the word of almighty God, it frees us from enslavement to wretchedness. First it gives us the freedom of nature, then it gives us the freedom of grace and thirdly it gives us the freedom of glory.
If the study of the liberal arts already gives us a certain freedom, faith leads us into a far greater freedom, because it gives us access to the word of God, the study of which, if undertaken perseveringly and obediently, will eventually bring us to the complete fulfilment of our intellectual nature and to complete moral freedom. The theological study, which alone is fully satisfying to our minds, cannot be isolated from the study of the arts though. At the end of his life Albert is still insisting on this. "Theology in itself is the first of all sciences, but it comes last in the order of our study and investigation. This is why Alfarabi says that it is in the study of theology that the philosophers have ended their lives."
It is rather surprising, at first sight, that Albert was not prepared to regard theology as essentially and simply a speculative science, for all his intellectualism. Both in the early commentary on the Sentences and in the late Summa Theologiae he cites Titus 1:1-2 to identify theological truth as being secundum pietatem, inseparable therefore from the practice of the Christian life and the hope of salvation and everlasting bliss. In the Summa he concludes that theology is a practical science, in the commentary on the Sentences that it is neither speculative nor practical, it is an "affective science," bringing both mind and heart to their proper perfection. This does not mean that theology is not a genuine science; it is a science, an organized body of knowledge with its own proper consistency. And even in the commentary on the Sentences it is indubitably correct to say that Albert's view of beatitude is an intellectual one: the "truth which beatifies" beatifies precisely by being the truth which fully satisfies the intellect. What Albert is concerned to deny is surely the tendency we have noticed in the twelfth century for theology to become just another specialization which could, in principle, be mastered by anyone who was competent, without its engaging and shaping a whole human and Christian life. In calling theology an "affective science" Albert is by no means proposing to subject theology to the control of that affective piety that was already beginning to define itself against learning and intellectualism. On the contrary, he is refusing to concede that there is any tension between piety and theology; he is locating piety in the heart of the intellectual discipline of theology…
One of the crucial problems involved in the attempt to determine the nature of theology was the very vexed question of the precise nature of faith. The traditional data made it difficult for early thirteenth-century scholastics to see faith precisely as a form of knowledge. St. Augustine had insisted on the voluntary nature of belief, which suggested that faith had to be located in the will. Faith had also to be interpreted as a virtue, and it was generally accepted that the object of all virtues was some practical good, whereas the object of knowledge was always some truth. In accordance with this problematic Albert locates faith, in the commentary on the Sentences, as not being a kind of scientia, because the knowledge (cognitio) it involves comes more from affection than from reason, from love in the will rather than from rational proof. Faith is situated in "affective" rather than speculative understanding. Knowledge may be the "matter" of faith, but it is affection that actually makes it faith and has the dominant role in faith. Faith is a kind of virtue, rather than a kind of scientia. If it is objected that faith's object is truth and that therefore it belongs to the domain of the speculative intellect (and could therefore not be a virtue unless we are prepared to say that all speculative achievements count as a virtue), Albert proposes in reply a distinction between the kind of truth that is the goal of speculation and the kind of truth that "beatifies the intellect." Speculative truth consists in "the complete account of something" and involves a "kind of movement from the thing to the intellect." Beatifying truth, by contrast, is outside the mind and is not an "account of something" but a "something" (res), "a light of eternal happiness" that is the "goal of an understanding which is moved by love for this truth."
Albert is well aware of the awkwardness of this position. It seems to entail that the object of faith is not truth as such, but truth viewed as good (secundum rationem boni), and this was indeed the doctrine, for example, of Philip the Chancellor and of the first Dominican Master in Paris, Roland of Cremona. But in Albert's judgment this is "no solution," because the truth has to be valued in its own right, precisely as truth. Otherwise it is difficult to see how we can escape saying that we believe something to be true just because we find it attractive (or "helpful," as people say these days), which would be a disastrous concession to wishful thinking. But then it is hard to see how Albert has not already made such a concession in declaring that the light of faith "convinces the reason by a kind of love in the will."
In the Dionysian commentaries we find Albert telling a very different story. The essentially cognitive nature of faith is affirmed there, as we have seen. He can still allude, without comment, to the voluntary quality of faith as a virtue that informs our conscience rather than persuading us with arguments, so that we are not constrained to believe by any rational proofs. But there is no longer any question of our being "convinced by love" to go beyond what can be demonstrated by the principles of reason. The divine light is not a proposition, it is true, but "it is a reality (res) which convinces the intellect." It convinces the intellect directly, it seems, by its sheer actuality.
On one point, at least, the development of Albert's theory of the intellect enabled him to come to a clearer understanding of faith. In the commentary on the Sentences one of his concerns was to insist that faith directs us toward a reality outside our own minds, in which our hope of beatitude is vested, and he contrasts this with the "account of a thing" that is the goal of intellectual speculation. But when he turned his attention to the subject of the intellect, he acquired…a hearty distaste for the "Latin" theory, which made the whole intellectual process a purely private, internal affair going on within the individual mind. His own view gave the intellect itself more of an outward orientation. What makes our understanding an understanding of some specific reality is the reality itself which is being understood (ipsa res). On this view it is precisely as an intellectual virtue that faith directs us to something outside our own minds, and this is no doubt why Albert is now able to say that faith unites all believers, which he was earlier not prepared to say.
The orientation of the intellect toward that which is outside itself means that there is no essential contradiction between the "ecstatic" structure of its natural workings and the "ecstatic" nature of faith, on which the text of Dionysius obliges Albert to comment. Exploiting the ambiguity of the word ekstasis Dionysius remarks that many people will suppose the believer to be "beside himself (to have suffered an "ecstasy"), not realizing that he has indeed undergone an "ecstasy" (in a good sense) in "stepping out" quite properly from error. Albert, willfully or otherwise, misconstrues the sentence and takes extasis in a stronger sense than was intended here by Dionysius: "The believer has undergone an ecstasy for truth, that is, he has been placed outside himself in divine truth." This is the excessus referred to in Mystical Theology 1, on which Albert comments that it means "not holding oneself back within reason's own principles"—it does not, as Albert explains at some length, necessarily involve excessus in the sense of rapture or ecstatic trance.
The insertion of faith into a more general account of the working of the intellect does not mean that Albert has lost interest in the affective component in our knowledge of God. Even apart from his lifelong conviction that knowledge of God is our highest and most satisfying joy, he still wishes to ascribe a certain role to our affections in the very process whereby we come to know God; but his more developed intellectual theory allows him to state more precisely what this role is. "There is a kind of science which is about things beyond the reach of reason, so the knowledge of these things has to be received from some higher nature by participating in its light… Although science is the perfection of our understanding, yet it is by the perfec-tion of our affectivity (affectus) that we draw near to God and participate in his light; this is how our understanding is brought to perfection with regard to things which cannot be had simply by human reason. There is no question of affectivity taking over the role of the intellect, but if we are to get beyond the limits of our own rationality we need a greater share in the divine light than is given to us in purely natural knowledge, and there are moral presuppositions for such a sharing. Purity of heart is what immediately disposes us to receive the vision of God.
There is also an affective coloring to any genuinely Christian knowledge of God. In a famous passage in the Divine Names Dionysius refers to Hierotheos as "not just learning about the things of God, but undergoing them…" Albert comments on this: "'Also he was perhaps taught the things of God by a diviner inspiration,' diviner than teaching or study, that is, 'not only learning' from others 'but also undergoing divine things,' being moved in his affection about them, 'and by his very sympathy for them,' by his affection for the things of God…'he was made perfect for union with them,' union with the things of God in heart and mind, 'and for faith,' that is, for the certain knowledge of spiritual things… This is called a diviner way because thus the things of God are perceived, in a way, experientially, just as someone who is suffering from a wound has a more certain knowledge of what a wound is than someone who only hears about it or sees it, and someone who tastes wine has a better knowledge of its pleasant flavor." A text like this does not contradict Albert's conviction that our union with God is fundamentally intellectual, it draws out one aspect of what intellectual union with God means: the certainty of faith is not like the certainty that a cogent rational argument produces, it is much more like the certainty which comes from a direct perception of something. What convinces the mind to assent to the first truth is not a proposition but a reality, and the reality of God cannot properly be apprehended dispassionately. In the commentary on the Mystical Theology Albert distinguishes between the ability to form propositions and real knowledge (realis scientia), that is, knowledge which actually touches in some way the res the reality, of God, and this knowledge is "part of beatitude" and so cannot be divorced from its affective component. The idea that we could have a real knowledge of God that was not, to some extent, beatifying is simply incoherent.
So faith has a necessary affective component precisely because it is concerned with the reality of God, not just with words about him; but this very insistence on the reality of God means that the status of our talk about God has to be examined carefully. If, as several twelfth-century theologians maintained, the relationship between theological and non-theological use of words is one of equivocation, then theology will tell us nothing about the reality of God unless we can unscramble the equivocation and determine what the words actually mean when they are used theologically. And if we can do no more than say that they have "miraculous new meanings," then all we shall be able to achieve is the arrangement of more or less coherent verbal patterns, without having the remotest idea what we are actually talking about. If the only kind of bank that I am familiar with is the kind that deals in money, and have no acquaintance with the other kind "whereon the wild thyme blows" (and perhaps try to arrive at some idea of what "wild thyme" is by imagining a nightmarish world in which savage clocks chime irregular hours according to some scheme of chronometry untamed by arithmetic), then I shall quite strictly not have a notion what the bard is talking about, and shall not be any the wiser for being told that he is using words in miraculous new senses. Similarly if all theological language is metaphorical, theology will at most be a vaguely suggestive expression of people's religious aspirations; it will not have any capacity to tell me anything about what God really is. If none of our language properly applies to God and all we can do is transfer words to him without the "things" (res) they signify, then we can never be sure we are really saying anything about God at all. And it is no good appealing to some kind of direct experiential knowledge of God, which would render words superfluous, if it is true, as Albert believed in common with most of his contemporaries, that in this life we never have a direct encounter with God unmediated by creatures. In Albert's view the res that convinces the mind to cleave to the first truth is the divine light itself, but this does not in itself present us with any specific object. It would be more correct to say that it is like the sheer fact of daylight than that it is like direct perception of any particular thing. You cannot argue with daylight (though you can draw the curtains and shut your eyes, if you want to); it "convinces the mind." But if we actually want to see something, there has to be something there for us to see. The light of faith enables us to believe, but it does not of itself give any content to belief, and the content comes largely from words (the words of the creeds, the words of the bible, and so on). So if faith does in some way confront us with the reality of God it must be, in this life, largely through the medium of words. And these must, then, be words that really do succeed, however inadequately, in putting us in touch with God himself.
Thirteenth-century theologians had learned from Aristotle at least one linguistic gambit they could use to escape from the twelfth-century dilemma. Instead of having to decide simply whether theological usage was univocal, metaphorical or equivocal, they could also consider the possibility that it might be analogical. Barclays and Chase manhattan are both banks in the same sense (univocally). The bank where I keep my overdraft and the bank where I keep my wild thyme are banks in two quite unrelated senses, apparently connected only because of a linguistic accident, so here "bank" is equivocal. As for yon Cassius' lean and hungry look, he may indeed have been dieting and he may be pining for his lunch, but his look is "hungry" with reference to a different appetite and can properly be regarded as metaphorically hungry, a use of language justified by the evident similarities between different kinds of appetite. But what about that shockingly fine specimen, the Earl of Blandings' brother? He has a healthy look, a healthy body and a healthy appetite. Here, according to medieval Aristotelianism, we have a case of analogy. The look and the appetite are certainly not healthy in the same way as the body, but they are called healthy with reference to the same health that makes us call the body healthy.
This notion of analogy suggests a promissing way of upgrading theological language. If we say (in the manner of Alan of Lille) that words like "good" are applied to God causally (we call God "good" because he causes goodness), then it is not clear that they really tell us anything about God, though Alan evidently wanted them to do so. But in the Platonist perspective of an Augustine or a Dionysius any goodness in creatures is not just caused by God, it is a participation of some kind in God's goodness. We certainly cannot say that God is good in just the same way that a sausage is good. Sausages, unfortunately, can be bad, so being a sausage is not the same as being a good sausage, whereas for God to be God and for God to be good are exactly the same, in accordance with that most basic of medieval theological rules that God is whatever he has. But could it not be the case that there is some real common referent involved in both God's goodness and that of the sausage, like the common referent involved in the healthy appetite and the healthy body? Albert is not prepared to go so far as that. Full-fledged analogy requires that there be something in common, and there is nothing that is strictly common to God and creatures; it would never be proper to cite God and a creature as two instances of the same thing, even with all the refinements introduced by the notion of analogy. But there is a kind of halting analogy, after all: even if there is, strictly, nothing in common between God and creatures, creatures do, in their various ways, "im-itate" God. We call a sausage good with reference to its being a sausage, not with reference to the divine nature; but a good sausage is still, in its own dim way, a reflection of the goodness of God. There is something in God that is responsible for there being a world in which things like sausages can attain to excellence. Creatures are obviously unlike God, but they are also, however palely, like the God who made them. Albert therefore concedes that there is an "analogy of imitation" between God and creatures, even if there is no full analogy.
On this basis we can now take a further step. Of course all our language is human language and, as such, is inadequate for talking about God. But does that mean that we are confined to transferring words to God without the reality which they signify? If in at least some cases the link between our talking about creatures and our talking about God is an "analogy of imitation," that suggests that in some cases God has a prior claim on certain words. Albert therefore makes a distinction between what words mean (the reality they signify) and the way in which we learn how to use them. It is from God the Father that all fatherhood is named, according to St. Paul (Eph. 3:15), but it is obviously from the fatherhood we encounter among creatures that we learn to talk about fathers. So the meaning of the word can be said to apply properly to God; what is inadequate is its modus significandi, the way it functions in our human language. This means, then, that we must distinguish between words that properly refer to creatures, which can only be used metaphorically of God, and words that really do indicate genuine attributes of God. And when negative theology bids us negate all that we say of God, we must distinguish between different kinds of inadequacy in our language: in some cases we are not denying that the reality indicated by the word belongs to God; we are just reminding ourselves that we cannot properly state what it means for it to belong to God.
Instead of a simple declaration, then, that all human language is inadequate, Albert gives us a rather more nuanced doctrine:
Divine names are formed in two ways: (1) from things which in reality belong to God first and only secondarily to creatures, and these are the names which blessed Dionysius calls "mystical," such as "being," "life," "intellect," "wisdom," "goodness." "Mystical" in Greek is the same as "secret" in Latin, and a "mystical name" is so called because (owing to the character imparted to words by the way they are instituted) it signifies imperfectly and partially something that exists in God perfectly and totally, and sometimes it suggests that something is an accidental property which exists substantially in God and is the divine substance. Because of this the divine reality which it names remains hidden from us, because we know that the reality is higher than the name and that our tongues fall short of declaring it … Affirmations are inadequate because the way that names function in our language (their modus significandi) is at odds with the divine reality, particularly in three ways: they present as complex a reality which is of infinite simplicity; they present imperfectly what is absolutely perfect; and they sometimes present as an accident something which is really substance. So Anselm says that "Father" and "Life" and so on actually come down to our level from God, but we are more at home with "father" meaning a human, fleshly father than we are with "Father" meaning God. (2) In the case of symbolic names God is designated by transferring some property that belongs to bodies to a spiritual sense. He is called "stone," for instance, because stone is solid and provides a solid basis for building on, so in a spiritual sense God's truth is solid and is the foundation for our whole spiritual edifice.
So only some names of God are metaphorical, and in their case negative theology has the simple task of reminding us that God is not really a stone or a lion, that he is not really angry or drunk. But some names of God are not metaphorical, they are "mystical" and apply primarily to God; in their case negative theology comes in to insist that they do really apply to God, and that therefore we cannot fully know what they mean. It is particularly with reference to these mystical names that the importance of holding together negative and affirmative theology is apparent: affirmative theology must not exaggerate its competence in talking about the reality of God, but negative theology must not degenerate into pure negation, its aim is to clarify how we are talking about God, not simply to stop us talking about God. The mystical names of God are, according to Albert, the subject of two books of the Dionysian corpus, the Divine Names and the Mystical Theology, corresponding to the two ways in which these names can be considered: "They can be viewed in terms of the flowing out from the cause of the effects it causes, which participate in a secondary way in the content of some name, and this is how they are dealt with in the Divine Names; or they can be viewed in terms of the way in which an analysis of the caused effects traces them back to their cause and the meaning of the name, as it exists in the cause, is left unknown because of the transcendence of the cause, and this is how the names are dealt with in the Mystical Theology" These are obviously complementary approaches: one emphasizes that we are talking about God and explores the manifestation of God in the intelligible structure of creation, while the other emphasizes that we are talking about God and so leads us back from creation to the transcendent mystery that lies hidden within the whole process of revelation.
It is, incidentally, interesting to contrast Albert's inter-pretation of the distinciton between mystical and symbolic names with that of William of Auxerre. Accord-ing to William, "Mystical theology, which is called 'mystical,' that is, 'hidden,' names God by means of what it hiddenly perceives about God through some intellectual vision or contemplation, as when it calls God 'sweet,' 'beloved,' and so on. In both symbolic and mystical theology God is named by means of crea-tures, but in symbolic theology he is named from ex-ternal creatures, whereas in mystical theology he is named by way of inner, hidden and more worthy ef-fects which the soul receives above itself from the contemplation of God, and the soul imposes such names through the gift of wisdom, to which it belongs espe-cially and properly to know experientially what God is like (qualis sit deus)"
Albert's much more objective understanding of what the mystical names signify is patently facilitated by metaphysical considerations, but it would be wrong to see it as a purely philosophical doctrine. At the beginning of the Divine Names, as in the Celestial Hierarchy, Albert points out that the habitus regens in this science is faith, and specifically "the faith, as it is passed on to us in sacred scripture." And, following Dionysius, he interprets this strictly. "Our intellect might think that, though it has to be guided by the practice of sacred scripture in its exposition of the divine names, it could legitimately discover something about God by reason beyond what is in scripture. Dionysius excludes this and says that we must say and think nothing about God except what is passed on to us by sacred scripture, so that we reserve to God himself the knowledge of himself in anything which is not given to us in scripture." Every science has its own basic principles, and in the case of theology its "principles" consist of scripture. And it should not be forgotten that in this period any intellectual discipline was intimately associated, if not identified, with its "set books," so that the very word scientia could be used to refer to such authoritative writings. Theologia as a science is inseparable from theologia as the word of God in scripture. In the case of other disciplines it would be a sign of intellectual weakness to follow "authority" too uncritically. But in theology the "authority" in question is not just human authority; it rests on the infallible "reason" of God, and so it is rational for us to submit to it unhesitatingly, even if we do not always understand the reason for what is said. It is this submission to scripture that gives theology its special solidity and certainty.
Intellectual speculation has no right to try to supplement or to criticize the data of revelation. But scripture is meant "to enlighten our intellect," and this calls for sustained and intelligent study, and this is where we may benefit from the tools supplied by philosophy and other disciplines. A naive devotion to the mere text of scripture will lead only to "childish fancies." It may be true, as St. Gregory said, that "sacred scripture is a river in which sheep paddle and elephants swim," but this does not justify even the simple faithful in resting content with the mere symbols in which the scriptural message is often clothed, because even the literal meaning of the text should be located, not in the symbols themselves, but in what they signify.
Mystical theology, then, is located firmly within the enterprise of Christian reflection on the word of God, and it is an intellectual discipline, even if it requires a mind strengthened by a supernatural light so that it can go beyond its natural limits in the "ecstasy" of faith.
Albert's analysis of theological language leads him to a relatively optimistic view of our ability to say things that do really apply to God, to ascribe the substance, the res, of at least some of our words to him, and not just the words without their res. But at the same time he is keenly aware of how little we actually know God, and he is clearly far from unsympathetic to the "oriental" theology that provoked the condemnation of 1241.
The epistemological problem of how any created intellect can know God, which Bonaventure could dismiss so breezily in his quaestio disputata, was for Albert a very serious question.
In the De Resurrectione Albert makes a valiant, if not very successful, attempt to deal with the issues involved in the claim that we shall see God directly in heaven, a claim which the 1241 condemnation made it necessary to endorse, and in any case Albert seems to be persuaded that if we cannot ever attain to a genuine knowledge of God then our whole intellectual life (and therefore our whole life) will be eternally doomed to frustration. But there are problems. Only an infinite act of understanding could cope with an "infinite intelligible," and that is what God is; and our intellectual capacity is finite and so there seems to be an irremediable disproportion between it and God. We also need to show that there is some procedure whereby our minds could know God without either actually being God (which would bring us back to the pantheism condemned in 1210) or needing some intelligible form of God, which would leave us with a knowledge of God by way of something which is not God, and that would be merely a "vision in theophanies," such as Hugh of St. Victor had reprobated and which some people believed to have been condemned as heretical in 1241.To evade the second kind of difficulty Albert falls back on an Augustinian notion of immediate knowledge of God by virtue of his real presence in the intellect, which we cannot see now because of the conditions of life in this world (particularly the flesh and sin) and because our attention is turned elsewhere, hindrances which will both be removed in the hereafter. Our immediate knowledge of God is thus to be understood on the model of our immediate knowledge of ourselves, and Albert even goes so far as to say "God will present himself to us without any medium, just as he sees himself without any medium."
To deal with the problem of disproportion and with the patristic authorities marshalled against the possibility of any direct vision of God, Albert resorts to distinctions in true scholastic vein. Taking up a phrase from 1 John 3:2 he distinguishes between seeing something "as it is" and seeing what something is, the latter meaning an exhaustive vision of all that something is. Clearly in this sense we cannot see what God is, and in this sense, as Damascene says, God is "incomprehensible and boundless, known by none, the sole contemplator of himself." But we can see God "as he is," Albert maintains, and seeing something "as it is" means "seeing its existence (esse) or being (essentia)." This rather underdeveloped distinction seems to rely heavily on the analogy of bodily vision: when the longawaited visitors from Alpha Centauri eventually decide to land, we shall no doubt see many exotic pieces of equipment "as they are," without having the remotest idea what they are.
This still leaves the problem of disproportion. The only possibility of coping with something infinite, Albert suggests, is by finding some way in which it is finite. There is no chance of our intellect being able to delimit what God is, but it can handle God's attributes, and in reality any of God's attributes is God, so if our minds can reach any of them they will in fact be reaching God's essence. This also provides the answer to the problem raised by Chrysostom: if God's essence is simple, then all those who see it must be seeing the same thing, yet "one praises it as glory, another as majesty, another as holiness and another as wisdom." The answer is that "though any attribute, as it exists in God, is the divine essence, yet as perceived by the intellect the attributes are distinguished by what they connote. And that is why one praises God as glory, another as wisdom and another as majesty." What is "connoted" by the divine attributes is their derivatives in creation (their reality in God being what they denote), and if this is the source of their distinction it might be felt that Albert has not sufficiently established that knowledge of God by way of his attributes is any different from knowledge of him through creatures, and his implied suggestion that the attributes of God are somehow "finite," which must mean that we can "define" them in a way that is impossible with the question "what" God is, surely prompts us to wonder whether it is not at the level of their created counterparts that they are thus definable, rather than at the level of their existence in God. And if these anxieties are legitimate, we may further suspect that Albert has not sufficiently distinguished between the vision of God that we shall have in heaven and the knowledge of God we can have by faith here on earth.
In his account of the "mechanics" of the vision of God, at this stage, Albert is essentially at one with the Augustinian critics of "oriental" theology, but in his account of what we shall be able to see he stops a long way short of the utterly complete and clear vision of God to which William of Auvergne aspired, and he concedes a great deal to the Dionysian contention that "complete ignorance is the way to know him who is above all that is known": "'Complete ignorance' means 'ignorance of the complete,' that is, ignorance of what God is; the most perfect knowledge of God is the vision of him together with the recognition that we are powerless to reach 'what' he is. He is thus known to be above all knowledge and all mind. And this is what Job says, that all who see him look on him from afar" (cf. Job 36:25).
In the commentaries on the Sentences and on Dionysius' Celestial Hierarchy we can see that Albert's position has already matured considerably. He now repudiates the suggestion that the divine attributes might provide a way round the problem of God's infinity: God is "infinite in any one of his attributes." Precisely as infinite he cannot be known, except in the sense that we can know that he is infinite. But because he is simple and because we are not talking of any kind of infinite bulk, knowing God incompletely does not mean knowing just a "part" of God (as we might see just the tail of a mouse, which would not of itself tell us much about the rest of the animal). So there is no radical impossibility about our knowing God (who is infinite), even though we cannot know him precisely in his infinity—only God can have that kind of through knowledge of himself. God, according to a phrase inspired by Damascene, is "an infinite ocean of substance," entirely eluding any attempt to say what he is. So our minds are rather in the position of people gazing out to sea: they are definitely looking at the sea, but at the same time they are not looking at anything precisely defined.
The question of proportionality was largely sidestepped inDe Resurrectione by means of the Augustinian doctrine of knowledge by presence in the intellect. If God is really there the whole time and it is only the nuisance of this present life that prevents us from seeing him, then clearly the soul just is, as Augustine claimed, capable of God (capax Dei). Our inability to see him is no more than a temporary, if tiresome, fact about us. In the commentary on the Sentences Albert becomes less and less happy with this scenario. In book I he is still essentially relying on the model of the intellect's awareness of itself: "The divine substance is seen by all the blessed; as to how it is seen, without wishing to preempt further discussion we say that it is seen unmediatedly by conjunction, in such a way that God offers himself to our intellect in his own substance, just as the intellect does to itself." But there is no longer any hint that this immediate vision of God was all along a possibility lurking within the soul. The lack of proportion between God and us has to be taken seriously, and Albert now maintains that naturally there really is no such proportion; it is only "by the help of God" that our minds can rise up to become capable of seeing God.
Once a more active role is ascribed to God in making it possible for us to see him, the question of "theophanies" begins to demand more attention. The use of this term was integral to the Eriugenist interpretation of the Dionysian hierarchical worldview, and had been interpreted to involve (a) that God is seen, even by the angels and the blessed, only indirectly by way of "images," and (b) that the vision of God is accorded to the angels and saints strictly in accordance with their position in the hierarchy of being, so that lower beings receive only the illumination that passes down to them through higher beings and therefore do not actually see God. Both conclusions were condemned in 1241 and "theophany" became a word to be avoided. But Albert is now no longer prepared to leave the word in the hands of its enemies, whom he accuses of "insulting holy books" and "presumption." His own maturing theory of the intellect makes possible an interpretation of theophanies that allows for a direct vision of God: in intellectual as in bodily vision there has to be some kind of light to make things visible (or intelligible), but there has also to be a specific visible (or intelligible) object, and it is this that determines what in particular is seen (or known). A created intellect needs to be reinforced by a light from on high if it is to see God, and this light may come either directly from God or through the mediation of higher created beings, but the role of intelligible object, which determines the content of the act of understanding, is God himself, God's own substance. So Albert distinguishes between purely symbolic theophanies, which have no place in the beatific vision, and theophanies that are perfectly compatible with the beatific vision: We may see an object which is truly God in a divine light that is not God (that is, a light which flows to us from God through created intermediaries, which fortifies the mind to see God himself). We may also see an object which is truly God in a divine light which is God: "God himself is in all the blessed as a kind of light, making them into a likeness of himself through their participation in him." In this way Albert is able to revive the Eriugenist doctrine that we see God by participating in God and to allow room even in heaven for a process of illumination that respects the structural interdependence of created intellects, without any denial of the immediacy of the vision of God. The spiritual solipsism which can, even if rather unfairly, be deduced from Plotinian or Augustinian doctrine, is thus shown to be unnecessary: the richly coherent cosmos of later Neoplatonism in which all beings are connected with each other in multiple ways does not exclude the possibility of direct intellectual union between any created mind and God.
In the commentary on the fourth book of the Sentences Albert formally and finally rejects the Augustinian knowledge by presence: substantial presence of something in the soul is not a sufficient basis for understanding. The mind understands itself in the same way that it understands anything else. Albert concedes this, but with an unexpected reservation: there is no other way of interpreting understanding, "provided we know what we are saying or understanding. But in heaven it will not be like this. There the unbounded light of the Godhead, which is God himself, is united with the agent intellect and poured out substantially over the whole soul and fills the soul, and in this way the soul will be full of God who is its bliss." It is by being united directly with God like this that the blessed soul will "understand" him, but it seems to be a rather odd kind of derstanding, if it excludes knowing what we are talking about or understanding. In fact Albert seems to be proposing to us a state of complete, but rather vague, luminosity, in which nothing in particular is understood.
In the later Dionysian commentaries Albert moves with much greater confidence toward a coherent and surprisingly Eriugenist doctrine, in which the notion of theophanies plays an important part. It is in terms of theophanies that Albert manages to do justice to both sides of the dispute that resulted in the 1241 condemnation, showing that it possible for a created intellect to have a direct vision of God's essence, that such a vision is not ineluctably confined to the natural capacity of any given being, and that in spite of the simplicity of the divine essence it can truly be seen directly by different intellects in different ways.
Let us look at some texts from the commentary on the Divine Names:
"Seeing" means actually making contact with the thing seen…It also means running your eye over something. As Euclid shows, anything that is seen is seen from the vantage point of the corner of a triangle, whose apex is in the eye and whose base is in the thing seen…The thing is seen along a line dividing the triangle, and so it is not seen all at once, but by passing from one point to another. When we have run our eye over the whole thing, we can be said to have seen the whole thing. In this sense God cannot be seen by running our mind's eye over all that he is.
…Although God is simple in his substance, he is multiple in his attributes, whose principle (ratio) exists truly in him without any real plurality. If we saw God by surveying his substance with the knowledge of "what" he is, then all who see him would see and praise him in the same way. But as it is he is seen only in the sense of an immediate contact with his substance, in whatever way he makes himself present (se obiicit). And since he makes himself present to one in one light (secundum unam rationem) and to another in another light, one sees what another does not see, although they are all seeing his substance, because knowledge and goodness and everything that can have a ratio [i.e., more or less, everything that can properly be predicated of God] is God's substance.
…A created intellect has no proportionate capacity to know God by its own natural endowments, but it is made proportionate inasmuch as it is helped by enlightenments or theophanies coming down to it from God; even so it is not made capable of seeing "what" God is, but only of seeing him by a real contact with his substance, in accordance with whatever way he makes himself present in one or another light (sub tali vel tali ratione).
The life of glory is a perfection above nature, in which nature without grace is incompetent; so since it is not granted in accordance with the power of nature, since it increases the capacity of nature, though without destroying nature, it can come about that a being whose nature is lower can be brought to the level of some being of a higher nature or even beyond it.
The intellect, making contact with God's substance, knows him either in some image, as in this life in which we know God in a mirror and enigmatically, or immediately, as in heaven. The intellect is not proportionate just by its nature to this contact, but it is made proportionate by the light of glory coming down to it and strengthening it and raising it above its nature; and this is what is meant by saying that God is seen by way of theophany and participation, inasmuch as different intellects are strengthened in different ways to see God.
Albert's whole scheme presupposes that no created intellect can see "what" God is, so that we are all entirely dependent on the various ways in which God strengthens our minds and the various lights in which he proposes himself to our thus strengthened minds. And Albert's doctrine is quite unambiguous on this point. Even the highest angels do not know "what" God is. All that is proportionate to our understanding is "that" God is (quia est). And even this is perhaps going too far: "A created intellect cannot perfectly reach God in such a way that no knowledge of him remains outside it; it is joined to him as to something transcending its capacity, indistinctly (sub quadam confusione) because there can be no knowledge 'what' he is, since he is unlimited, or of 'why' he is, since he has no cause, or even a distinct knowledge 'that' he is, since he has no remote cause or effect proportionate to him, so neither on earth nor in heaven can anything be seen of him except an indistinct 'that he is' (quia confusum), although God himself is seen more or less luminously according to different kinds of vision and different kinds of seer."
The knowledge "that" God is apparently "proportionate" to our minds, and this calls for a more precise statement of what is meant by saying that our minds do not naturally have any "proportion" or capacity for the knowledge of God. There was a tradition, going back to St. Paul, that some kind of knowledge of God is possible to us by way of his creatures, independent of the gift of faith. St. John Damascene specified that the knowledge "that" God is is implanted in us by nature, and Albert accepts this. Such a claim is entirely coherent with Albert's belief that God is present in us as a light in our minds, so that he is known, implicitly, in our knowledge of anything, as the ground of all intelligibility. But if knowledge "that" God is is natural to us, and knowledge "that" God is is all we shall have even in heaven, what becomes of the alleged "strengthening" of our intellect by some supernatural influx of light?
In response to a suggestion that our knowledge of God is perfected in heaven and must therefore move on from knowledge "that" to knowledge "what" or "why," Albert replies very firmly, "Our knowledge will not be perfected with a different kind of knowledge, either knowledge 'what' or knowledge 'why,' but with another way of knowing 'that': we shall have an unmediated vision 'that,' where now we have only a veiled and enigmatic vision in a mirror." The supernatural reinforcement of our minds does not enable them to do something quite different from what they could do naturally; it enables them to do more fully what they could already, to some extent, do. Albert is fully serious in his concern that the supernatural should not be envisaged in any way that jeopardizes the natural. However much a created intellect may be enhanced by grace or glory, its understanding will always be conditioned by its own nature. Albert does not believe that some miraculous change will overtake our intellectual or perceptual powers in heaven. The text in the pseu-do-Augustinian De Spiritu et Anima, which suggests that in heaven our senses will be turned into reason and our reason into intellect and our intellect into understanding (intelligentia), is interpreted by Albert to mean only that the lower powers turn to the higher powers and receive a kind of overflow from them so that they too can share in their enjoyment; he explicitly denies that they are "drawn out of their own natures."
All that our minds are capable of, then, is an indistinct knowledge "that" God is, a knowledge which is, to start off with, simply implicit in the sheer fact that we can understand anything at all. This purely natural and indirect knowledge of God can be enhanced in various degrees, for instance, by the light of faith, that res convincens intellectum, the sheer fact of illumination contained in the fact that we find the articles of belief credible. Inasmuch as we are united with the light of God, we can come to know the unknown God more and more, but even in heaven, even with the light of glory, we cannot get beyond an indistinct knowledge "that" God is; he remains for us an "infinite ocean" of which we know more truly what it is not than what it is. What is new in heaven is that we shall meet this brute fact of light directly, instead of meeting it indirectly in its reflection in the intelligibility of God's works, whether of grace or of nature. But does this mean, then, that there is nothing for us to see except a vague, unbounded luminosity?
Vistas of infinite and indeterminate light no doubt appeal to some people, and if that is all that there is to be known about God, the comparative mysticists will have no difficulty in proving that all religions are really one and that the systems of doctrine that divide them are no more than hopeless attempts to formulate the ineffable. There have presumably always been people who prefer their religion to provide uplift and inspiration, without requiring them actually to believe anything in particular. In the Middle Ages Eriugena could perhaps be read (inaccurately, to be sure) as recommending a rather nebulous deity, when he announced that even God does not know what he himself is, because he does not have any particular "what" to know. This doctrine was duly passed on in Honorius Augustodunesis. Avicenna also denied that God has an essence or quiddity.
William of Auvergne had little sympathy for any such imprecise divinity. In his view it is impossible to speak either about God or to God unless God is "intelligible and nameable as an individual (singulariter)," unless he can be clearly picked out and distinguished from everyone and everything else. Any philosophy that could not accommodate this clearly locatable individuality of God was automatically disqualified. If we cannot identify God as an individual, to whom shall we pray, whom shall we worship, how shall we know we are not worshipping the wrong God?
St. Albert is definitely not happy about calling God "individual." Apart from the problem that God is not "an individual" (he is three Persons), the term individual suggests only improperly the real uniqueness of God. In principle, wherever there is one individual there could conceivably be more than one; even if in fact we have only one sun in our sky, there is no absolute reason why we should not have half a dozen. To call God "an individual" (singularis) suggests that he might always turn out to be merely one God among several, and "God," according to St. Albert, properly has no plural. On this view William of Auvergne's anxiety is somewhat misconceived. The problem is not how we identify the right God, so that we do not worship the wrong one, but how we make sure we do not worship anything which is not God. And if this is the right way to formulate the problem, it is not really necessary to "pick out" God, so long as we remember not to worship anything that we can pick out. But this still leaves the other side of William's anxiety, which was mentioned earlier on, that if we cannot know God as an individual, our whole hope of beatitude collapses. Are we really looking forward only to an eternity of gazing out into (supernatural) space?
Albert certainly does not accept that God actually is indeterminate. The contention that God has no quid est is explicitly repudiated: God is "a kind of quiddity and essence"; there is something "intrinsically intelligible in God, by which he is distinguished from others." Although God "is infinite in every way, in his essence, in his power and in every other way that is conceivable in him," Albert does not want this to be understood as implying that God is fuzzy at the edges: "Though God is not measured or limited by anything created, he is measured by himself and so in a way he is finite to himself, though not to us."
The trouble is that God is "infinite" as far as we are concerned and "what" he is is therefore indeterminate in our minds. He is not properly to be thought of as an "object" to any created intellect. All the same, Albert is not prepared to leave us simply with a vast, unfocused luminosity to gaze at. In his commentary on Dionysius' fifth epistle he formally raises the question: If it is God who enlightens us, then how can it also be God who perfects our intellect, since the perfection of the intellect requires that it should have some definite object to know? And it is not light that provides the mind with any definte object; the mind comes to intellectual fulfilment in the form of actual understanding because its intellectual light is particularized by the thing understood.
Albert answers that God brings the intellect to its fulfilment by acting in two ways. He enlightens the mind (this picks up the doctrine formulated in the commentary on the fourth book of the Sentences that God unites himself with our agent intellect), but he also "brings it to a particular knowledge, inasmuch as he is something particular (quiddam determinatum), particularized not by matter, but by his nature and the attributes of his nature and inasmuch as there are Persons with their own particular properties."
So God is not in any ordinary sense an "object" for the intellect, yet he takes the place of the things known. How are we to understand this? In the commentary on the fifth epistle Albert refers us back for the rest of his discussion of the vision of God to the commentary on the first epistle, where Dionysius makes the devastating comment, "If anyone who sees God understands what he has seen, then he has not seen God himself, but only something that is his.… Perfect ignorance in the best sense is how we know him who is above all that is known." Since understanding and mental vision are essentially the same thing, Albert takes Dionysius to be propounding the startling paradox that "anyone who sees God does not see God, but only something that is his," that is, something that derives from him, and he comments accordingly:
When he says that anyone seeing God does not see him, this must be understood in terms of a vision of "what" God is or a distinct vision "that" he is, and God is not seen in either of these ways; all there is is an indistinct and inadequate vision "that" he is, and this is true both on earth and in heaven, as we have already said.
When he says, "but only something that is his," this must be understood with reference to the startingpoint of vision, because vision always begins with some effect of God's, either one in which the intellect sees, as in a mirror, or one by which it sees, as with light. But the intellect is fixed on God himself as the goal (terminus) of its vision, because the intellect receives God's effects and plunges itself in him and sees God himself…
The "perfect ignorance" Dionysius recommends is taken to mean that "we know ourselves to be failing completely to comprehend God because of his excellence.
…And so it is clear that Dionysius does not mean that God is not seen in any way, but that he is seen precisely in our ignorance of him."
If we put these comments on the epistles together with the passages cited earlier from the Divine Names, it is reasonably clear what Albert's doctrine is. God unites himself with our minds as light; he also confronts us with himself, indirectly on earth and directly in heaven, but our minds cannot really take him in as an "object" because we can only attain to an indistinct knowledge "that" he is. But God presents himself to us, obiicit se, almost "objectifies himself" for us, "under this or that ratio," as goodness or wisdom or whatever. These are surely the "somethings that are his" that we see and that are a way of reaching a real vision of God, which begins with some effect of his. It is through God's effects that we have a distinct grasp of his attributes (which in him are simply himself). And in as much as it is by participating in God that we know him, it is surely not least by discovering the effects of his attributes in ourselves that we see him in the light of them. Thus we do have a real and immediate vision of God in heaven, but simply as such it provides no specific content for our intellect. Inasmuch as God provides the content as well as the light for our intellect, it is in terms of his attributes, on which we can get some intellectual purchase because of their visibility in God's effects. Starting from these effects, we see through them to God who is presenting his substance to us (which is not really distinct from his attributes) precisely by knowing that we are not capable of comprehending what God is. It is quite literally in our ignorance, our not-knowing, that we actually see God in himself, because it is the not-knowing that takes us beyond the intelligible effect of God to the reality of the attribute of God that it manifests, and so to the essence of God, that sheer presence whose very transcendence delights the intellect supremely.
If this interpretation of Albert's doctrine is correct, then the position he has reached by the end of his Dionysian commentaries is, as I have suggested, surprisingly Eriugenist. Unlike Eriugena he does formally allow for an unmediated vision of God's esence, but as such this unmediated vision is unintelligible to us. What makes it intelligible is that God presents himself to us in the light of his attributes, which are distinct and intelligible to us because of their manifestation in creatures. So what actually gives intelligible shape to our vision of God is the vision of God's effects become entirely transparent to himself, and this is precisely what Eriugena believed. It is God who is seen, but he, as it were, nuances the vision of himself in different ways for different people, so that it is in terms of theophanies that the vision of God becomes, as it were, manageable to them. And this is just how Eriugena's twelfth-century follower, Honorius Augustodunensis, interprets the "many mansions" of John 14:2.
It is clear that any theory like this of how we see God requires the sort of theory we were looking at earlier of how we talk about God. If theophanies are to provide a real, direct vision of God, then it must be possible to ascribe real attributes to God which, in him, actually are his substance but which are at the same time real in their own right, so that the affirmation of them does genuinely succeed in saying something about God, even if, because of the inadequate modus significandi of all our language, the affirmation needs to be capped by a negation.
We can also see how important the Mystical Theology is in Albert's view of the Christian life. There is real continuity between the vision of God in heaven and our attempts to develop our faith into a theological science on earth. Even in heaven we have only an indistinct vision of God's essence, as such, and whatever distinctness there is comes from an increasingly perspicuous knowledge of how the attributes of God are manifested in his works. Thus there has to be a rich affirmative theology, culling signs and riddling disclosures of God from all his creatures and all his words. But if this elaborate and no doubt lengthy process is to debouch into a vision of God himself, every light has to be transcended. If it is "transcended" without first being affirmed, there will be no revelation, no theophany; but equally if it is affirmed without being transcended, then we shall stop short of the knowledge of God that is possible to us.
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