When you are in the dark, you cannot see what is around you. If you’re in a strange place,
looking for the way out, you might grope around by using your sense of touch,
but when you finally find a light, you immediately grasp what is around you and how to move forward.
Some people think that, when we’re talking about our search for the truth,
only the light of reason, or only science, can be trusted on our way forward. Some have
even claimed that religious dogmas, or even faith itself, involves a kind of darkening of the mind.
Is that true? Is faith a cause of darkness, or of light?
In the 18th century, Carl Linneaus classified human beings as “homo sapiens.” That literally
means “the wise man” or perhaps “the knowing human.” St. Thomas Aquinas didn’t use this
classification of course, but he would agree that the name expresses something at the core
of what it means to be human: we are made TO KNOW. It is our most characteristic activity.
And this is because we are endowed with the light of reason.
Aquinas would add that this is precisely where the image of God is rooted in us: we are like God
because we have minds capable of knowing the highest truths -- and
thus of loving what is truly good – in a way that distinguishes us
from nonrational animals, who have only lower forms of cognition of material things.
So our minds THIRST for knowledge – we wonder about things, and we seek to understand them.
We marvel at the stars and the planets, we build telescopes to study them, and
develop sophisticated scientific theories about them, and even send spacecraft to explore them.
But what is this natural “light” of the mind? Aquinas thinks we can understand it by analogy.
Physical light is what makes a physical object VISIBLE or see-able by our eyes.
When physical light is present, it gives us, through our eyes,
a certain access to the reality around us, by a sensation – vision – that is essentially
different from touch and hearing. That is why a picture is worth a thousand words.
Our mind, too, has a kind of light, the light of natural reason, as its own stable
possession. But this is not a physical light, and it does not come from anything material.
Aquinas thinks it must have a higher and immaterial source,
because it makes us able to abstract from matter and to transcend individual particularity.
We’ve covered this in earlier videos. In brief, when we experience something through our senses,
our mind generates a mental image from what we perceive. When the light of reason “shines” on
that image, we grasp something of an essentially different order than our bodily senses: the mind
“sees” what is intelligible in the thing. The light of reason really does give us something new
and of a different order than sense perception, and there is no explanation or justification
on which the “evidence” of this intellectual grasp rests, beyond the light of reason itself.
This dynamic is constantly at work in science, and, indeed, in any activity of reason. For
example, scientists carefully observe individual things – like the mass of the sun and of the
planet Mercury, and the peculiar shifting orbit of Mercury around the Sun – and then
scientists set their minds to grappling with the intelligibility of their observations:
what they mean, and how to put them together in a broader theory
that accounts for the causes of what they’ve seen and attempts to explain it.
This is a high achievement of the human mind. But can we go even higher? According to Aquinas,
our minds are not only made to know material things that we encounter in the world,
but above all, to know the creator and source of them all: God himself.
Now this raises a difficulty, because we can't observe God or the things of
God with our bodily eyes, or detect him with scientific instruments. How,
then, can we gain access to the truth about God? How can we encounter him?
To be sure, we can perceive God’s effects in the world, and then, using the natural
light of reason, we conclude that a first cause of all these effects must exist – and
that this is God. But even so, our unaided minds cannot say WHAT God is – or WHO he is.
To put it another way, reality is greater than what we can perceive with our senses,
and what we can know by the light of natural reason alone.
And this is especially true when we are speaking about the most real being of all, God himself.
If knowing God is the most important thing for us to do – and the Christian faith says that
it is! – then how are we to do it? Aquinas’s answer is that we come to know something of
God – indeed, that we come to know God himself, when God grants our minds a share in a light
that is higher than the light of reason – namely, the light of faith.
How does that work?
Aquinas explains that the highest light – light in the most full sense – is the purely intellectual
light that is God himself. And that we are able to receive a participation or a share in this
perfect divine light in three degrees: by nature (that is to speak of the light of natural reason),
by grace (that is the light of faith and other special graces), and finally,
the Saints in heaven receive the light of glory by which they see God directly, face to face.
How are these three lights related to each other? Aquinas speaks of them as having different
“strengths.” The natural light of reason is strengthened by the infusion of the light
of faith, so that the mind can grasp a supernatural dimension of reality
that exceeds what natural reason can know by itself.
This means that there is no competition between the light of reason and the light of faith,
nor is their relation “horizontal,” as if the domain of reason is here and the domain of faith
is there. Rather, Aquinas portrays the relation between them as hierarchical and complementary.
As we ascend by faith, reason is able to do its work even better,
as we come to understand reality in an even higher light.
Likewise, the light of faith cannot be reduced to the light of reason.
Just as reason “sees” deeper into reality than sense perception alone is capable of doing,
so also by the supernatural light of faith,
we grasp something of a different order than both what sense and natural reason can access.
The light of faith refers more specifically to that supernatural illumination by which
the believer’s mind is able to give an unqualified and unconditional
assent to what has been proposed for belief. It puts the mind in living contact with God himself.
There are many famous examples. Think of the young St. Augustine, who describes his
conversion in his famous work, The Confessions. After a long journey of searching for the truth
in different philosophies and religions, and after considering the Christian message for a long time,
the decisive moment for Augustine came one day when he was moved to pick up the Gospel.
He read a page of its saving message as if he was reading it for the first time,
because he was seeing it in a new light. Its promise of the forgiveness of sins and a life of
holiness in God’s sight became real to him. By a special grace of God, his mind grasped its truth,
and in that moment, he began to believe -- by the light of faith.
What was going on in Augustine that moved him to believe? Aquinas would explain it this way: God
was infusing a new and higher light of faith into Augustine’s mind. By that light, Augustine was
able to “see” that God was speaking the truth to him, even though Augustine did not see God
himself, nor any definitive proofs for the truths of faith. Rather, Augustine acquired a new “sense”
for divine truths and for God’s truthfulness, and so, moved by grace, he made an act of belief.
We might then ask: if the mind does not see directly the truth that is to be believed,
in what sense is faith truly a light?
This is an important question, and it will be the subject of our next video.
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