49. The Vision of God: Essence vs. Effects in This Life

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Lecture Notes

Main Topics #

• The Vision of God’s Essence vs. Knowledge Through Effects: Distinction between seeing God as He is (beatific vision, impossible in this life for purely human souls) versus knowing God through created likenesses and divine illumination
• Unity of Understanding and Multiple Objects: How the intellect understands things—whether it can understand multiple distinct objects (dog, triangle) simultaneously or only successively through forming statements
• God’s Vision in the Beatific State vs. Mortal Life: In eternal vision, the angels and blessed see all things together in God’s essence through divine substance; in this life, even angels know through diversity of innate species successively
• Scripture and the Claims of Special Visions: Objections from Genesis 32 (Jacob), Numbers 12 (Moses), and implication regarding St. Paul’s rapture
• Augustine’s Illumination Teaching: The third and fourth objections based on Augustine’s claims that we judge all things by divine truth and see divine things through the soul’s essence
• The Exodus Passage and Gregory’s Gloss: The counter-authority from Exodus 33 that “a man will not see me and live”
• The Nature of Creaturely Knowledge and Its Limits: How the soul’s union with matter determines its mode of knowing; immaterial things can only be known when the soul is separated from bodily matter

Key Arguments #

Arguments FOR Seeing God’s Essence in This Life #

• Jacob’s Vision (Genesis 32:30): “I have seen God face to face” - face-to-face vision signifies seeing through essence
• Moses’s Vision (Numbers 12:8): God speaks “mouth to mouth…openly and not through enigmas,” indicating knowledge of God’s essence
• Augustine’s Illumination (Confessions 12; On True Religion; Trinity 12): We know all things in God; we judge all things by divine truth; therefore we must see God
• The Soul and Immaterial Things (Augustine’s position): What we understand without images and by the soul’s very essence must be known through God’s essence

Arguments AGAINST Seeing God’s Essence in This Life #

• Exodus 33:33 (with Gregory’s Gloss): “A man will not see me and live” - so long as living in mortal life, one sees God only through likenesses, not through His essence
• The Nature of Human Knowledge Follows the Nature of the Soul: The soul exists in bodily matter in this life; therefore it naturally knows only things with form in matter or knowable through such things
• No Created Likeness is Adequate to God: Any created likeness is limited; God is unlimited; therefore no created likeness can show God as He is
• The Body-Soul Union as a Limitation: Signs that the soul separated from bodily sensation becomes capable of higher intellectual things (prophecies, dreams, ecstasies) suggest that full vision of the divine essence requires total separation from the body

Thomas’s Resolution #

• Pure humans (not God and man like Christ) cannot see God’s essence while living in this mortal life
• Exception: By supernatural action, God can temporarily elevate the minds of certain individuals (Moses, St. Paul) to vision of His essence while still using the flesh, but not using the bodily senses
• This elevation is transient (passing), not permanent
• When the vision ceases, images and elevated thoughts remain

Important Definitions #

• ἀβόμινει πυρό (abhominei puro / “purely man”): A qualification excluding Christ and indicating that the restriction applies only to those who are merely human
• Eminence of prophecy: A special grade of prophecy involving imaginative or imaginary vision representing God rather than seeing Him directly
• Immaterial vision (visio intelligibilis): Vision of immaterial intelligible things not through likenesses but through their very natures (as Augustine defines it)
• Divine rapture: Supernatural elevation of the soul in which it is withdrawn from the bodily senses to receive divine vision
• Participation in divine light: The soul’s natural reason as a partaking (participatio) of the divine light, not the light itself

Examples & Illustrations #

• Prophecy Grades: Jacob’s “face to face” vision refers to an imaginative representation of a figure speaking, representing God—a high grade of prophecy but not vision of the divine essence
• Moses and St. Paul: Augustine and Thomas hold that these two figures (as teachers of Jews and Gentiles respectively) were granted transient vision of God as He is by special divine grace; St. Paul alludes to being “caught up to the third heaven” in 2 Corinthians 12, possibly referring to seeing God with the clarity that seraphim and cherubim see Him
• The Saint Saying Mass: Berquist mentions (identity forgotten) a saint in the countryside who would enter ecstasy at the consecration, remaining withdrawn from bodily awareness for an hour while others completed fieldwork, then returned to consciousness to finish the Mass—illustrating how separation from bodily sensation corresponds to elevated intellectual contemplation
• Seeing in Sunlight: Augustine’s comparison: just as we see all sensible things in the sun’s light without seeing the sun’s substance itself, we know all intelligible things in divine light without seeing God’s essence
• Common City Law: Following Heraclitus: just as a city cannot function without common law, the life of the mind cannot proceed without something common to all participants (teacher-student, conversationalists); this common ground is the divine law or natural law

Notable Quotes #

• “But in the Vedic vision, we’re knowing whatever we know in God by the same form, divine substance, right? And so we know them all together.”
• “The way of knowing follows the way of the nature of the thing knowing.”
• “The natural light of our reason is a partaking of the divine light.”
• “Just as for seeing something sensibly, it is not necessary that the very substance of the sun be seen, right? So to seeing something intelligibly is not necessary that there be seen the essence of that.”

Questions Addressed #

Question: Can Someone in This Life See God Through His Essence? #

Resolution: No, except in extraordinary cases. A purely human soul cannot see God’s essence while living in this mortal body because:

1. The soul’s existence is bound to bodily matter, so it naturally knows only things with material form or knowable through material things
2. No created likeness can adequately represent God’s infinite essence
3. The vision of God’s essence belongs properly to eternal life

Exceptions: By God’s supernatural action apart from the common order, Moses and St. Paul were temporarily elevated to vision of God’s essence while in the flesh (but not using their bodily senses), as Augustine testifies. This is transient and belongs to their role as teachers of the people of God.

Question: How Should We Understand Augustine’s Teaching That We See All Things in God? #

Resolution: Augustine means that we see all things in the divine light insofar as the natural light of our reason is a participation in divine light—not that we see God’s essence. The comparison: we see sensible things in the sun’s light without seeing the sun’s substance; similarly, we know intelligible things in divine light without seeing God as He is.

Question: What Do Jacob’s “Face to Face” Vision and Moses’s “Mouth to Mouth” Vision Mean? #

Resolution: These refer not to vision of God’s essence but to imaginative or imaginary visions in which God appears through figures and forms. This is a high grade of prophecy—an eminence of contemplation—but not direct vision of the divine nature. Dionysius clarifies that “seeing God” in Scripture means seeing figures or likenesses in which something divine is represented.