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

Transcript
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Just as in the species of man, we understand what? Animal and rational, the definition. And in the species of house, the wall and the roof. I was talking to the students last night and I said, now, you understand what a dog is a little bit? Okay. And you understand what a triangle is. Now, when you understand what a dog is, are you understanding what a triangle is? When you're understanding what a triangle is, are you understanding what a dog is? Because a dog and a triangle are not something one, right? And I was talking about the statement that what Aristotle says in, I think, the fourth book of Wisdom, that who understands must understand something one, right? Okay. But now, is there a way to understand dog and triangle together? Yeah. Now, if you form a statement, a dog is not a triangle, then you must understand dog and triangle together, but they become one by what? You can make the subject and the predicate in one statement, right? So you've got to make it one in some way, right? But if you're understanding them not by one form, just understanding a dog by the definition of dog and a triangle by the definition of a triangle, you can't understand them at the same time. You can go quickly from one to the other, but you can't understand them together, right? Well, if I'm understanding what a triangle is, I'm not understanding what a dog is, am I? And when I'm understanding what a dog is, I'm not understanding what a triangle is. But can I understand at the same time what a dog is and what a triangle is? Not by knowing them each by their own form. I can only know them, know both successively, right? But in the Vedic vision, we're knowing whatever we know in God by the same, what, form, divine substance, right? And so we know them all together, right? It's quite an improvement upon our mental state, huh? What it is now, right? Okay. Now, the second objection was taken from the idea that Augustine says that God moves the spiritual preacher through time, right? And even the angels, in a way, there's a kind of discrete time. To second, it should be said that the angels, as regards their natural knowledge, right? Now, not their knowledge in seeing God as he is, by which they know things through, what, diverse species that are innate to them, or, yeah. They do not at once know all things, right? And thus, they are moved by understanding through time, right? But according as they see things in God, they see them together, right? So I wonder if we'll make use of all these thoughts that we have here from Euclid and other people. In heaven, right? But they'll be around there, you know, for free of our mind, huh? Okay, now you really want to get that vision of God as he is, right, huh? So now we've got the next start, right? It comes up naturally, right? Whether someone in this life is able to see, what, God, huh? I think we have to stop now. Yeah. We're through to you. So it's going to be three weeks before we find out whether we're able to know this. God, but... God, but... Mine's loose, that's covered. It's raining into the throat and it keeps it infected. Yeah, we're working. Should I start over again? Yeah, there it is. Okay. We'll start the 11th article, the 12th question. To the 11th, one proceeds thus. It seems that someone in this life is able to see God through his essence. For Jacob says in the 32nd chapter of Genesis, I have seen God face to face. But to see face to face is to see through the essence, as is clear by what is said in the first epistle to the Corinthians. We see now through a mirror and in darkness or enigma, then we see, however, face to face. Therefore, God in this life is able to be seen through his essence or his very nature. Moreover, in Numbers chapter 12, God says about Moses that I speak mouth to mouth to him and openly and not through enigmas, not through enigmas and figures. He saw God. But this, again, is to see God through his essence. Therefore, someone in the state of this life is able to see God through his very nature. So the first two arguments are what? Arguments from the text of Scripture, right? Authoritative Scriptures. And the third one, though it brings in the authority of Augustine, it also brings in a certain understanding of how we know. Moreover, that in which we know other things and by which we judge about other things is something known to us as such, known to itself. But all things, even now, we know in God. For Augustine says in the 12th book of the Confessions, if we both see that to be true that you say, and we both see that to be true that I say, where, I ask, do we see that? Not I in you, nor you in me, but both in that which is above our minds, the unchangeable truth. It's like you see it in God, right? And that's whereby we agree that what you say is correct and what I say is correct. Also, in the book on true religion, he says that we judge about all things by the divine truth. And finally, in the 12th book of the Trinity, it belongs to reason to judge about these bodily things according to bodiless and eternal reasons which, unless they were above our mind, would not be able to be, what? Unchangeable and so on. Therefore, also in this life, we see, what? God, huh? Was it some of the Franciscans cut off in that, you know? God is the first thing we know, and we know other things by knowing God and so on. And Augustine's words seem to indicate this, huh? Finally, the fourth argument. Moreover, according to Augustine in the 12th book on Genesis to the letter, we see by a, what, understandable vision those things which are in the soul through its very essence. But an understandable vision is about understandable things, not through some likenesses, but through their very natures, as he himself says there. Therefore, since God is, through his very nature in our soul, through his very nature he is seen by us, huh? So the third and the fourth objections are a little more, although they use the authority of a custom, they try to argue that by reason to some extent, not just by authority, that we know God as he is. But against this is what is said in Exodus chapter 33, a man will not see me and live. And the gloss there, huh? And the gloss apparently in my note here says it comes from what? Great, really great, huh? From Moralia. So long as we live here in this mortal life, we're able to see God through certain likenesses, but one is not able to see him through the very, what? Nature of his essence, huh? So now Thompson's going to reply. I answered that it should be said that by a pure man, now what does he put that qualification in there? Abhominei Puro. God is not able to be seen through his essence. Why does he add that Abhominei Puro? Who's he excluding from that? Would this be like from Moses or St. Paul? Man is both God and what? And man. Christ, yeah. So he said, I answered, it should be said that by one who's just purely a man, right? God is not able to be seen through his essence unless he be, what, separated from this mortal life, huh? And then Thomas gives a reason for this. The reason for this is because, as has been said above, the way of knowing follows the way of the nature of the thing knowing. But our soul, so long as we live in this life, has existence in bodily matter, right? Whence, naturally, it does not know things except those things that have a form in matter or which are able to be known, what, through these, huh? Because that's going to be very important later on when you talk about why we have these two kinds of names we talk about God. We say God is good, and we say God is, what, goodness itself. And goodness seems to signify the form by which the good is good. And so we say God is good because he really is good. But in saying he's good, we seem to be saying that he has goodness, right? And therefore he'd be composed. He'd be the haver and the had, right? And so then we take this other way of speaking and say God is goodness itself to bring out his, what, simplicity, right? But why do we have those two names, neither one of which is, what, adequate to expressing God, right? Because goodness signifies that by which something is good, right? And so if we say God is goodness, we don't seem to be saying that God is good. And we want to say that God is good, right? But if we say that God is good, we seem to be saying that he has goodness, right? And therefore there's some kind of composition in him between him and his goodness, and that's false, right? So every name has a certain defect, but the defect goes back to the way of knowing that it's natural to us, whereby we know material things which have a form that is not what they are. And so we have all of these, what, concrete and abstract words, right? We have health and healthy, right? And healthy signifies that which has health, right? And health signifies the form by which the healthy is healthy. We can't transcend that way of thinking in our natural knowledge, huh? But it's manifest, he says, huh? That through the natures of material things, that the divine nature, the divine essence, is not able to be known. For it has been shown above, that the knowledge of God through any created likeness is not a vision of his very, what, nature, huh? There are many reasons you gave for that before. Like one reason was that any created likeness is going to be limited, right? Why God is unlimited, huh? So through a created likeness, you cannot see, through a created likeness that is limited, you cannot see something that is unlimited by its very nature. Or in any created likeness, the likeness and its existence are not the same thing, huh? But in God, his nature, his substance, and his existence are the same. Same thing, I am who am, as he says, right? So no created likeness is adequate to seeing God as he is. Whence it is impossible for the soul of man, living according to this life, to see the essence of God. And then Thomas, after the reason, he gives a sign. And a sign of this is that our soul, the more it is separated from bodily things, the more it becomes capable of what? Understandable things that are separated from matter. Whence in dreams and in being alienated from the body, the senses of the body, we more perceive what? Divine revelations. And prophecies or pre-visions of future things. That therefore the soul would be elevated to the what? Highest of all understandable things, it had to be what? Entirely separated from the body. So in order to be elevated to the highest of things understandable, which is the divine nature, the divine essence, it's not possible for it to be so long as it uses this what? Mortal life. So that shows the appropriateness of, for instance, the dream of St. Joseph, that mode while the God had chosen. You can see this with the saints, you know, when they go into kind of an ecstasy, they're not aware of their surroundings, right? They're kind of withdrawn from their senses, right? But I think you're going to read in the reply to some of the objections here something very special about Moses and St. Paul, according to Augustine, and Thomas, who agrees with Augustine as your parent. Okay, now going back to the first objection, where Jacob says, I saw God face to face, right? To the first, therefore, it should be said that according to Dionysius, of course, Dionysius is the great authority of Thomas, because Thomas, like a lot of people in his time, thought that Dionysius was the, what? Dionysius converted by St. Paul in the Areopagus. So he's called Dionysius the Areopagite. And then people think, well, no, he's not that guy, really. So he's the pseudo. To the first, therefore, it should be said, according to Dionysius, in the fourth chapter of the Celestial Hierarchy. Thomas didn't comment on that book, but his teacher over at the Great did, huh? Thomas didn't know the divine names. According to Dionysius in the fourth chapter of the Celestial Hierarchy, thus in scriptures someone is said to see God, insofar as there are forms, certain, what? Figures, right? Either sensible ones, or in the imagination, representing, according to some kind of likeness, something divine, right? What, therefore, Jacob says, I saw God face to face, she referred not to the very, what, divine nature itself, but to a figure or likeness in which God is in some way, what, represented to them. And this pertains to a certain, what, eminence of the gift of prophecy that one sees the person of God speaking, although by an imaginary, what, vision, right? As will be clear below when we speak about the grades of prophecy. Whence what Jacob says to designates, or Jacob says this to designate a certain, what, eminence of an understandable contemplation that's above the common status of, what, most men, right? Okay. Well, we talked about the equivocation of the word to see, right? And what are the three meanings of it? You have, well, the basic one is seeing with your eye. Yeah. Then you have seeing with the imagination. Yeah. Then seeing with the intellect. Yeah. So I can see you, right, now, but I can see a square now, right? I can see my grandchildren now, right? That's the imagination, and then finding to understand. So he's taking the words to see by Jacob there in Genesis 32 as referring to seeing not in the sense of, what, seeing God as he is with the understanding, but seeing him, right, in a sense of representation or an imaginative representation, huh? Okay, now the second objection, speaking about Moses here, huh? Now, this is an interesting position of Augustine and Thomas, and I don't know that the church has ever, what, said yes or no to what Augustine, but those are the two greatest minds we have in the church, so it has a great deal of probability. And so this is being applied now to the objection taken from Numbers about Moses, right? To the second it should be said that as God does something supernaturally in bodily things, right, so also supernaturally and apart from the common order of things, right, the minds of some living in this flesh, but not, what, using the senses of the flesh, he elevated them all the way up to a, what, vision of his very essence, huh? As Augustine says in the 12th book on Genesis to the letter and in the book on seeing God, one of these great books that Augustine has, as Augustine says about Moses, right, who was the magister, the teacher, right, of the Jews, right, and Paul, who was the magister, the teacher of the Gentiles, huh? And about this, we will treat more fully when we talk about rapture, right? Okay? What happens to say more explicitly there when he talks about this is in a transitive way, in a passing way, both Moses and what? St. Paul saw God as he is, right? Not in a permanent way, but in any kind of passing way. And this is because of the eminence as being the master of the Jews and the master of the Gentiles, huh? So, St. Paul talks about this, an old man, right? He speaks in the third person about himself, but carried up to the third heaven, right? And, of course, there's a lot of discussion of what it means by the third heaven, right? But one of the interesting explanations of it is that refers to he saw God, although temporarily, with the clarity that the, what? The seraphim and the cherubim see God, right? The third heaven, right? But there are other explanations of what the third heaven might mean, too, huh? Okay? And then when he came back, and no longer saw God as he is, but there was left certain, what? Um, uh, images and certain thoughts in his head as a result of this vision, huh? Which were extremely elevated, huh? And things about which he said was not proper for him to speak, huh? So, um, you can say that, uh, Augustine, and Tom seems to be following Augustine in this opinion, uh, that this is true about Moses and what? And St. Paul, right? And this is by a special, right? And St. Paul says, you know, whether in the body or not, he didn't know, right, huh? It's like Augustine's soul had been, what? Really drawn from his body. I'm not completely, but, you know. But you see something, you know, going in that direction with some of the saints, you know, where the body becomes kind of lifeless, you know, and they're not there. Who was that saint that used to, I think he was in the country side, but he'd say mass for the pheasants, and, uh, when he got to the, to the, uh, consecration, he'd go into ecstasy. And, of course, he did ecstasy for about an hour. Well, he can't just, you know, they gotta go out and do the works. They go out and do some more work in the field and come back an hour later, and then he'd come out of the ecstasy and continue and, and, and complete the mass. I forget who that was, but it was... Huh? Yeah. It was kind of interesting. What is it to read about those things? Okay. Now, the third ejection's a little bit different, right? And it shows you kind of the need that maybe Thomas has to explain sometimes the meaning of what? Augustine's words, right? And Augustine has sometimes an exuberance in the way he speaks. But people have kind of, what? Misunderstood these things, huh? It's interesting, you know, when Thomas comments sometimes on Aristotle's words and when Aristotle's criticizing Plato, right? And, you know, Thomas and some of the commentators before him say in some cases Aristotle is attacking what Plato meant here, right? Other times he's attacking not what Plato meant but what people take him to mean. Because people are being allowed to stay by, right? Well, in a sense, Augustine, St. Thomas usually doesn't disagree with Augustine, right? But sometimes he will say this is what Augustine really means, huh? Okay. And, you know, there's also that passage I was mentioning how in Thomas' commentary in the 12th book of the Metaphysics, Aristotle speaks as if the only thing God knows is himself, right? And some people misunderstand the text as if God knows only himself. And Thomas says, well, that's not what Aristotle means. And Aristotle, you know, in two or three places, you know, when he's criticizing Empedocles' position about God, and he criticized it because Empedocles' position would make man know something that God doesn't know. And that's just ridiculous to Aristotle, right? So obviously Aristotle doesn't mean that God knows only himself. What Aristotle is doing there is determining what it is that God knows chiefly and primarily, right? And he knows all the things as well as himself, but he knows all the things only by what? Knowing himself. He sees all the things in himself. Because they're all like him in some way, and he's their cause, and so on. So, again, you know, a lot of times I think, given Thomas' understanding of the profundity of Plato or Aristotle or Augustine, you know, he will get, I think, the true meaning of these words, huh? So what does it mean to say we see all things in the light of the divine truth? What does that mean? Well, it means that the truth in which we see and judge about all the things is nothing other than a partaking of the divine truth, huh? But it's not the divine truth in itself. To the third, therefore, it should be said that we are said to see all things in God and to judge about all things according to him, or by him, rather, insofar as by partaking of his light we know all things, right? And judge all things, huh? For the natural light of our reason is a partaking of the divine light, huh? Now, and this is what's said in the beginning of John's Gospel, right? This was a light that lightens every man that comes into this world, right? So we're said to see all things in the divine light because we see all things in the natural light of reason, which is nothing other than a, what, partaking of the, what, divine light, huh? Okay? Just as all sensible things we are said to see and judge in the sun, that is through the light of the sun. Once Augustine makes this comparison in the silicoids, huh? The spectacles, the disciplines, we are not able to see except they be enlightened or illustrated by some sun, to wit, what, God, right? Just, therefore, 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, what? The essence of that, huh? Okay? This reminds me a little bit of the great fragments of Heraclitus, huh? And Heraclitus insists upon following what is common, huh? And so like in one of the fragments, he says, those who speak with understanding must be strong in what is common to all. And then he goes on to say, and makes a little comparison, as much as the city is strong in its law. And even more so, he says, than the law of the city. Because they are fed by, what? The divine law, which is more than sufficient for all, right? See? Now, it's a beautiful comparison he makes there, huh? If you take what's more known to us, he compares it to. Is it possible for us to live in a city together, for us to have a common life in the city, without some kind of common law or rule? Even something as simple as the rule we have of driving the right side of the street, right? Well, I wouldn't want to go out on this road here, on the way home today, if everybody was following his own private law. Some people drove on the left, some on the right, some in the middle, and so on, right? You see? So life together in the city, or in any community, you could say, right? Is not possible without certain, what? Something common, right? Okay. But, as Heraclitus points out, sometimes the laws of one city may disagree with the laws of another city, right? And the laws of the city ought to be, what? Fed by the divine law, right? So, eventually he's going back to something divine there, as common to all of us. And what he's calling divine there, though, is not revelation. Heraclitus doesn't have revelation, right? He's talking about what we would call the, what? Natural law, right? And he's seen the natural law as something divine, huh? It's a little bit like you have in a poet there in Antigone, huh? Where Antigone is protesting the written law of the city, right? Which is saying that her brother cannot be buried, right? And she appeals to the, what? Unwritten law, huh? You see? And nobody quite knows where unwritten law comes from, but it's hinted at that there's something being divine, huh? So, in a way, you're judging the written law, you're judging the law of the city by the unwritten law, the natural law, the divine law. In a sense, you're seeing it in the divine, huh? In the same way, in philosophy, you have to go back to something, what? Common, right? And it's not possible for us to live the life of the mind together without something common. Now, there's two ways that we live the life of the mind together. One is unequals, like the teacher and the student, right? And the other is more like an equal, like in conversation, discussion. Now, as far as the teacher and the student is concerned, the teacher has to lead the student to know something the student doesn't know, but he has to lead him to know something he doesn't know to something he does know. Just like Euclid, you know, leads me to the new theorem, to the other theorems I already know. And the teacher can't lead you to know what you don't know to what you do know if he doesn't know it, too. So it's impossible for the teacher and the student to have a life of the mind together without something that both the teacher and the student knows, right? Now, there's something, presumably, the teacher knows the student doesn't know. He's going to lead the student to that through things that the student already knows and the teacher himself, of course, knows. The same way in conversation, if we disagree, as people often do in conversation, and I say, well, you're mistaken there because you don't agree with me. And you return the cop of it and say, you're mistaken, no, because you don't agree with me. We get nowhere, right? So we have to find something that the two of us have in common that we can use to decide whether I'm right or you're right or we, what, disagree. And, you know, even to say,