3 results
Chapter 7 - Alexander of Hales
- Edited by Paul L. Gavrilyuk, University of St Thomas, Minnesota, Sarah Coakley, University of Cambridge
-
- Book:
- The Spiritual Senses
- Published online:
- 05 December 2011
- Print publication:
- 10 November 2011, pp 121-139
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
‘Do not touch me.’
Jesus to Mary MagdaleneTouch consummates knowledge.
AugustineIntroduction
Near the end of Proslogion, Anselm of Canterbury invoked the language of spiritual sensation to mourn the absence of the God whose existence, though perhaps proved certain, eluded his experience:
Still you are hidden, O Lord, from my soul…For it looks, and does not see your beauty. It listens, and does not hear your harmony. It smells, and does not perceive your fragrance. It tastes, and does not recognize your sweetness. It touches, and does not feel your pleasantness. For you have these attributes in yourself, Lord God, after your ineffable manner, who has given them to objects created by you, after their sensible manner; but the sinful senses of my soul have grown rigid and dull, and have been obstructed by their long listlessness.
As often with Anselm, his remark looks back to his patristic forebears, East and West. Seven centuries earlier, Augustine of Hippo had confessed an opposite experience, though in similar terms:
Yet there is a light I love, and a food, and a kind of embrace when I love my God – a light, voice, odour, food, embrace of my inner man, where my soul is floodlit by light which space cannot contain, where there is sound that time cannot seize, where there is a perfume which no breeze disperses, where there is a taste for food no amount of eating can lessen, and where there is a bond of union that no satiety can part.
Anselm's reference to the ‘senses of the soul’ also recalls the doctrine of the spiritual senses of the soul inaugurated in the east by Origen of Alexandria. Commenting on Leviticus 6: 3, conveyed to medievals by the Glossa ordinaria (at Lev 7: 5), Origen said:
The five physical senses are able to be redeemed, as they are converted to good acts, just as are the five interior senses: so that with a pure heart we may see God and hear what he says to us, and smell the good odour of Christ and taste him. Concerning which the Psalm says, taste and see that the Lord is good (Ps 34 [33]: 8); and we will touch with Saint John concerning the word of life (I Jn 1: 1).
After Origen, this teaching found varied expression in the East with Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudo-Dionysius and Maximus the Confessor.
Chapter 8 - Thomas Gallus
- Edited by Paul L. Gavrilyuk, University of St Thomas, Minnesota, Sarah Coakley, University of Cambridge
-
- Book:
- The Spiritual Senses
- Published online:
- 05 December 2011
- Print publication:
- 10 November 2011, pp 140-158
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
While in respect of all the other senses we fall below many species of animals, in respect of touch we far excel all other species in exactness of discrimination. That is why man is the most intelligent of all animals. This is confirmed by the fact that it is to differences in the organ of touch and to nothing else that the differences between man and man in respect of natural endowment are due; men whose flesh is hard are ill-endowed by nature, men whose flesh is soft, well-endowed.
AristotleIntroduction
In the unfinished opus of Bonaventure's mature career, his Collationes in Hexaëmeron, the Franciscan describes the nature of contemplation: ‘Just as fruit delights both sight and taste, yet it delights the sense of sight principally by its beauty and loveliness, and [delights] the sense of taste by its sweetness and suavity, so do these theoriae nourish the intellectus by their loveliness and the affectus by their suavity.’ That Bonaventure should invoke the language of sensation to characterize contemplative experience is not surprising. Since the work of both Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar in the mid-twentieth century, his teaching on the spiritual senses has been well known, if also intensely debated. But two issues are noteworthy here. First, his alignment of sight with intellectus and taste with affectus, while not original, is an important feature of scholastic theorizing regarding the spiritual senses. The distinction between intellectus and affectus and the alignment of each with distinct spiritual senses imply, on the one hand, a specific anthropology with two basic and (perhaps) irreducible modalities in the soul. The fact, on the other hand, that these modalities are nonetheless united within a single, spiritual sensorium prevents too radical a divorce between them and raises the tantalizing question of their precise relationship: how discontinuous are these two ‘modes of apprehension’? Second, the object of apprehension for both intellectus and affectus is theoriae – which I intentionally avoid translating for now. What precisely does Bonaventure mean by theoriae? Does the apparent assumption that these can be both seen by the intellectus and tasted by the affectus imply that there is some continuity, overlap or direct interaction between these two modes?
Whatever the case with Bonaventure, his text recalls an earlier thirteenth-century precedent for his approach to this matter, which raises the same set of questions, namely, the writings of the Victorine Thomas Gallus (d. 1246). Though the terminology and the corresponding distinction between intellectus and affectus precede him, Gallus appears to be the first to formulate the nature of mystical contemplation thus: by aligning intellectus and affectus with a different pole of the spiritual sensorium, but orienting both towards the theoriae as a common object. The burden of what follows, however, is neither to argue for Gallus’s originality in this regard nor to claim his direct influence on Bonaventure, but to explicate Gallus’s own teaching on the spiritual senses, which teaching is, in fact, ‘essential to all that [Gallus] has to say on the knowledge which is unitive contemplation’. Gallus’s doctrine on this matter sheds crucial light on the contentious issue of his conception of the highest mode of relation to God available to created minds. That is, Gallus uses the notion of a spiritual sensorium to posit a continuum of created apprehension of God (cognitio Dei).
Pulchrum esse: The Beauty of Scripture, the Beauty of the Soul, and the Art of Exegesis in Hugh of St. Victor
- Boyd Taylor Coolman
-
- Article
- Export citation
-
Pondering the narrative of creation given in Genesis in his De sacramentis Christianae fidei, Hugh of St. Victor (d. 1142) raises the question of whether creation was instantaneous or required a literal six days. Hugh opts for the latter. Though instantaneous creation was of course possible, he argues that God created in six days, proceeding gradually through increasing degrees of form and beauty, so that the rational creature “might discern how great was the difference between esse and pulchrum esse,” between “being” and “beautiful being.” God's intention, Hugh declares, was that rational creatures would be “warned not to be content with having received being [esse] from the Creator,” but would strive for “beautiful being” (pulchrum esse). The primary task of the human being in Eden, therefore, was twofold: first, a discernment, an exegesis that rightly interpreted the pulchrum esse of creation to be a manifestation of divine Beauty; second, a realization of pulchrum esse within itself. In large measure, for Hugh, the ensuing Fall entailed a failure to fulfill this original exegetical and ethical calling.