Augustine on Illumination
- Posted by Andrew Bailey on Saturday, August 11, 2007 at 2:00 PM
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I shall here present Augustine’s arguments for the doctrine of divine ideas and divine illumination.
Augustine is a platonist. That is, he thinks that there are perfect and immutable objects of knowledge in virtue of which ordinary objects have the features they do. But unlike early platonists (and unlike Plato himself, if we may be so bold), Augustine doesn’t think that these perfect and immutable objects transcend literally everything. Rather, Augustine says that they’re ideas in God’s mind. (It is unclear to me whether Augustine thinks that these divine ideas are abstract or concrete in nature).
Augustine’s argument for the doctrine of divine ideas proceeds as follows:
1. All things are made by God for a reason and in accordance with a form
2. If God found his reasons for creation and patterns after which to create outside himself, he would be less than perfect.
3. But God isn’t less than perfect.
4. So God found his reasons for creation and patters after which to create in himself. These men call Forms (ideas).
Premise one follows from Augustine’s platonism, his theism, and a sort of incohate principle of sufficient reason. Things have their properties in virtue of participation in some form. So the act of creation involves God making matter and imposing patterns or ideas into it in accordance with these forms. Premises two and three follows from broadly Anselmian concerns about divine perfection (it was from Augustine, in fact, that Anselm inherited the notion of God as the being than which none greater could be conceived).
Platonists have long faced a problem: if there are immutable and perfect forms and these are the objects of knowledge, how do we get in touch with them? The forms cannot enter into causal relations, after all--so how is it that we know anything at all? Augustine’s doctrine of divine illumination can be seen as a theistic solution to the problem.
The doctrine of divine illumination says that all instances of knowledge involve God revealing or illuminating the object to knowledge to the knower. Knowledge is not a two-place relation holding between objects and knowers, so to speak, but rather a three-place relation holding between objects, knowers, and God himself. His argument for this doctrine looks something like this:
1. The objects of knowledge are perfect and immutable (from platonism).
2. Knowledge requires acquaintance (direct contact).
3. So if we know anything at all (and we do), we’ve had direct acquaintance with perfect and immutable objects of knowledge.
4. Direct acquaintance relations obtain only when the knower acts on the known.
5. But the lower (we humans) cannot act on the higher (perfect and immutable objects of knowledge).
6. And higher than the divine ideas is one thing only: God.
7. So every act of knowing involves God acting on the forms and thereby placing us into direct acquaintance with perfect and immutable objects of knowledge.
Thus illumination. Premise two of this argument is the Principle of Acquaintance. It's worth noting that Plato of the early and middle dialogs probably subscribed to something like it; and it was this commitment which drove him to the doctrine of recollection. I end by noting that Augustine doesn't say much about what the process of illumination consists of--but it's hard to see how he could so do.
