St. Thomas on the Psychology of Advent

The phrase lumen fidei, the light of faith, is becoming a familiar part of our lexicon. The phrase plays a key part in the psychology of St. Thomas. As the season of Advent is now approaching, I decided to meditate, with St. Thomas Aquinas as my guide, on how it is that a baby in a manger, or a personal act of selfless love, could draw us intellectually into the truth of the mysteries of faith.

The Natural Light of Reason

The word light in its everyday sense seems like a good entry point.

In the context of the senses, light for the eyes is the helpful energy that allows us to see things. A nightlight for example helps you to see that you are reaching for aspirin and not your dog’s vitamin pills.

In the context of intellect, light is a metaphor that denotes an aid to understanding. A stroke of genius is illustrated by a light bulb over one’s head. We say that our children are bright, meaning they get the point quickly, that they can make sense of things. In the most general terms, intellectual light is a helpful energy that gives us confidence that we understand things as they are. It is an instrument that facilitates our access to the truth.

It would be a mistake to treat the word light strictly as a metaphor. Thinkers both religious and non-religious, in philosophy and in science, have puzzled over how it is that human beings take in material energy from the outside world and transform it into thoughts and ideas. It is a definite something. The question is, what exactly is it?

The psychological experience is familiar to all of us. We hear tweeting, as we notice a shadow flitting around from flower to flower in our visual field – that little bundle of sensations get recognized by us as a bird. Our minds move naturally from sense data to concept, from sensation to understanding.

But notice this: Sensation is particular and fleeting. Understanding is general and enduring. Sensation is tentative, while understanding is certain, for all times and places. In other words, Intellectual understanding is a grant of security. If you know for certain that the fuzz ball in your garden is a bird, you know more than you could have known by seeing with the eyes alone. You know for example what this little creature can do, what might be expected from it in the future.

When you know something intellectually, you can anticipate things about your world. There is an increase in trust between you and your surroundings. You become more at home in the world. This is why we like to know things. I might note here that we just landed space probe on a two-mile wide comet over 300 million miles away from us. It looked effortless, and in a certain sense it was because the achievement was grounded on our uniquely human pattern of understanding.

St. Augustine, the first great Western philosopher of Christianity, first used the term illumination to describe this spiritual act, this grant of security that takes place in this act of intellectual creation. Understanding, in Augustine’s teaching, comes directly from God who illuminates our minds. Other brilliant saints such as St. Bonaventure found this view just as compelling as St. Augustine did.

A dramatic depiction of illumination as St. Augustine describes it can be seen in the movie Amadeus. There, a piano composer named Salieri is at his keyboard writing a musical piece for his archrival Mozart. Young Salieri struggles to find each note. He needs help. It is painful to watch. As the final note falls into place, the composer glances at the crucifix whispering, Grazie Signore! — Thank you Lord!

The illumination theory, while inspirational, was modified and perfected by St. Thomas Aquinas, who described this light not as direct or supernatural contact with the mind of God, but a natural capacity called the active intellect. We are naturally created to understand. St. Thomas posits a natural light of reason, the lumen naturale to describe how we know universal principles.

There are two elements: the mediating form of the insight, and the material concept that we grasp. The mediating form of the insight can be a syllogism, or a simple geometrical theorem like the Pythagorean Theorem. We may survey a particular lay of land and wonder what the shortest driving route is from point A to point B. We can take highway 6 to county road 3, then turn left, etc. But we suspect we can get there faster following a diagonal shortcut. This is to know the answer “intuitively.” But we can invoke the Pythagorean Theorem as a mediating principle that grants this flash of certainty of the concept that the shortest distance between two points is the straight diagonal line.

The Pythagorean Theorem, this geometrical tool, is the formal aspect of how we gain the insight. Through this form, we grasp the material concept as true. This form gives us the ultimate and solid ground for our belief.

The Light of Faith

How do we come to embrace supernatural truth beyond our capacity to grasp, such as the truths of faith?

St. Thomas did not limit the formal aspect of knowing to the realm of syllogisms and geometric theorems. By analogy, any intelligible form that causes the conclusion to stand out as a figure against the ground, a form that gives the conclusion its certainty, is a mediating form.

Love itself is such an intelligible, mediating form.

The framework that St. Thomas invokes in ST II-II, Q1, A1 shows us just how we become grounded in the ultimate truth we seek. The formal mediator of knowledge here is not a geometrical theorem, but an encounter with the First Truth itself. We encounter him personally through grace. Can we get a visual on this? Maybe not a universal one, but Catholics have always had a clear grasp that the face of Christ itself is such a form. God became man to give us a form to embrace concretely, and it all begins with a warm, heart-melting, and radiant image of an infant in Bethlehem.

The ground of our faith is a personal experience that holds together so completely, that resonates with us and our human condition so perfectly, that we are led to believe the truth it points toward in the very same way that a geometrical principle assures us we have found the answer we seek, that we can land a space probe on a distant comet.

There is a scene in the movie Ben-Hur, in which the lead character, Judah Ben-Hur is being led as a slave in a Roman chain gang through a desert. When the procession reaches a town with a well, villagers naturally come out of their homes to offer water to the slaves, whose lips are desperately parched. The Roman guard has a particular hatred for Judah Ben-Hur, so he cracks the whip at the townspeople shouting – no water for him! One persistent young man – it is the young Jesus Christ himself – defies the guard, kneels down and holds Judah’s head as he pours water on Judah’s lips.

It is all about the facial expressions now. Judah squints his eyes and peers at the face. There was something about the face of Jesus. We never see it. We only see that Judah only moments earlier believed he was about to die, but is now bewildered by this human form that offers him a drink, and he accepts the living water being offered to him. What we know in the light of our faith is that Judah was simply loved in that moment with a perfect love. The light of faith is mediated by seeing the form. The form is love itself.

The light of faith is often unexpected, but the ground of this faith occurs over and over again in our everyday lives. If our hearts are open, we can recognize it, in an experience that perhaps seems destined just for us. The pieces fit together like a syllogism, and all we know is that we must begin again.

Advent is coming.