History of Philosophy and Christian Thought - Lesson 34

Dr. Ronald Nash

History of Philosophy and Christian Thought

th620-34

Illumination

Lesson Transcript

[00:00:02] The last thing I want to say about Agustin. He is very famous for, you know, the philosophy of history, his study of God. His book, The Confessions. But he is also very famous for his theory of divine illumination. In that theory, Augustine makes God an absolutely essential component in everything that human beings know. If it weren't for God, and if it weren't for the illuminating activity that God plays in every act of human knowledge, we would have, we would be unable to know any more than a dog or a cat. Maybe we'd be unable to know any more than a bird and an earthworm. The only reason human beings can know anything is because God created us in his image. However, the meaning of Augustine's theory of divine illumination has been a subject of controversy for centuries. And I believe that I've come and forgive the the personal pronoun here. All right. But some of you were going to write your term papers on this. And you can criticize me if I'm wrong. I believe I've come closer to explaining and understanding Augustine's theory of divine illumination than anybody else. And that explanation is the subject of this book, The Light of the Mind. St Augustine's Theory of Knowledge. What I do in that book is I explain the major interpretations of Augustine's theory of knowledge. When you look at those all alternative explanations, it they. They appear ludicrous. One of the major theories. We call it the total mystic interpretation, because it it owes a lot to Saint Thomas Aquinas. One of the major interpretations would, in effect, turn Augustine into an Aristotelian. That's ludicrous. They would turn Augustine into an empiricist who, in effect, approaches knowledge in the same way that we find the empiricists approaching knowledge in Plato's Feito.

[00:02:36] I mean, it's just unbelievable. Not even reputable Catholic scholars today give any credence or credibility to that Aristotelian ism, to that Aristotelian interpretation of Augustine. Another interpretation of the theory of divine illumination is that Augustine had no answer to the question how to human beings know what Plato called forms. How do human beings know these eternal ideas? On the face of it, that too, is absolutely incredible ludicrous. So I, I explore a number of different interpretations, and then I offer the truth, which is this Augustine's theory of divine illumination is equivalent to the Lagos doctrine. For those of you just tuning into the tapes, that's our theme song for this course. That's our theme song for the Lagos Doctrine. If you go back to your notes based upon Plato's Fito, God, God planted in every human mind, contemporaneous with our birth and innate and an implicit understanding of the eternal forms which exist as eternal ideas in the mind of God. When the Bible tells us that God created us in his own image, a major part of the image of God is cognitive. That is, it has to do with knowledge. The potential for knowledge, the capacity for knowledge and human knowledge is possible because our minds are created with cognitive structures that correspond to the cognitive structures of the God who created us. I am not at this moment going to say more about Augustine's theory because you will appreciate his theory even more after we talk about the theory of knowledge of a German thinker named Emmanuel Kopp. Now, let me give you a warning. I do not exalt Kant's theory of knowledge. It is an untenable position. It has been. It has been. It has been attacked from all sides. But nonetheless, one cannot deny that cart was on the right track with respect to something that had to be noted, something that had to be said.

[00:05:33] But the truth is, and this is a truth that you really can't find anywhere else, that there was a philosopher who lived more than a thousand years before COT. In fact, he lived 1400 years before Kant, who actually anticipated what Conte was trying to do but avoided the problems of conscious theory and. Provided a far more adequate theory of knowledge for anybody who is willing to plug Christian theism into his study of epistemology. So one of the reasons why on the final exam there will likely be at least two questions about conscious theory of knowledge is because it provides a kind of culmination to this entire course, and you'll see how that happens next week.