Modern man has labored to solve the mystery of how our minds reach out to the world, but what if, in addition, things reach out FOR US ? A mutual co-inhereing communion of illumination.
John Milbank, Norris Clarke, Pul Tyson, and David Bentley Hart all speak about Being AS communion, to be real is to be giving and to be receiving.
In the modern mechanistic universe, knowledge occurs when the subject directs his mind toward objects that are passive awaiting the subject’s gaze. In a world alive with spirit, the object is not passively waiting to be known, but must make itself known. As Milbank puts it,
“it is not that mind simply beams a light upon things; for while it does illuminate, it is only able to do so because it meets an answering beam coming from things themselves. If we are conscious and aware of being conscious, then we cannot separate this power from the power of things to come to consciousness. Consciousness, then, like psyche, is prior to the subjective-objective division, and is an ontological, before it is a psychological or epistemological matter . . . . “External” things as well as minds contribute to consciousness, and bodies mediate this double source.”
Milbank is anticipated in this regard by Augustine. In his treatise On the Trinity , Augustine says that things and the mind are “co-generators” of thought: “Evidently . . . we must hold that every single thing whatsoever that we know co-generates in us knowledge of itself; for knowledge issues from both, from the knower and the thing known”
Similarly, sensible experience is a product not merely of the senses, but of the thing sensed:
So sight is begotten of the visible thing but not from it alone; only if there is a seeing subject present. Sight then is the product of the visible object and the seeing subject, where the seeing subject of course provides the sense of the eyes and the intention of looking and holding his gaze; but the information of the sense, which is called sight, is imprinted on it only by the body which is seen, that is by some visible thing.
Notice in both quotations that the object makes an “active” contribution to the knower’s knowing.
These seem to be obvious points perhaps but they strike at the foundations of modern philosophy. Descartes’s pure subject, a subject abstracted from every object, a mind that is nothing more than a thinking thing that is thinking of nothing in particular, is impossible.
*This is the idea of illumination: the light of truth can be received only under the forms of a creative and poetic capacity in consciousness, perhaps, but that very capacity also already participates in Being’s light, and receives it from without. Consciousness is an openness to the radiance of things.
Being is an analogical and expressive medium, whose structures of meaning coincide in the transcendentals of beauty, goodness, truth, and unity.
As opposed to the positivistic view of truth so prevalent today, the more ancient Platonist model of truth is one of disclosure: the radiance by which the object of reflection really shows itself–gives itself–to the subjective intention. Such a model of truth makes room for the notion of revelation, for the idea of a transcendence that declares itself, that is Word and light and meaning, appearing gratuitously, even if it does so necessarily under the forms provided by a human creativity.
David Hart calls this the "covenant of light" - a trust in the evidence of the given, an understanding of knowledge as an effect of the eros stirred by the gift of the world's truth.
He uses the language of Maximus the Confessor, “it attempts to see in everything its logos: that is, its essential openness to the Logos, to the transcendent light of infinite being - an openness that gives every being its being, an openness "displacing" the nothingness from which every being is called (though, as Maximus would say, only perfect love is capable of such vision).”
This requires an initial trust in the goodness and veracity of being, and a self-surrendering availability before the testimony of creation.
Here’s Hart from Beauty if the Infinite,
“….and a more searching attention to the conditions of knowledge, would not begin from this crudely mechanistic model of thought, or admit into its logic this idea of a magical transaction between world and consciousness.
*The event of the world and the event of thought cannot be so brutally separated; the self occurs as the manifestation of the world, the event of being;
*….all knowledge is indeed intentional, which means, precisely, not only that all thought has an object, but that, as a consequence, thought belongs to being's disclosure of itself.
Before the subject can be a conqueror of the other's alterity, then, in what would be a strictly secondary moment of violence, the subject is already a recipient and, so, creature of a gift: an aesthetic effect.
This is cognition's "phenomenological circle": the intention that "precedes" all perception is also an intention already "invited" by the splendor of concrete form, already awakened by the aesthetic exteriority of otherness, the beauty of the other, which informs intention in the intentional act, shapes and summons it, as an obsecration of a subjectivity that is only in being opened - formed - by the light of the other; one's "self" is that "matter" in which beauty impresses itself, self, that "place" where the light of the other, and of all being, shines, gathered in a reflective surface of incalculably various sensitivity (the physical senses, thought, imagination, anticipation, memory, desire, fear ...).
*What is given in any knowledge is not only the "thing known," as delivered over to the "knowing mind," but the entire circle of the event that is being and knowledge (what theology calls the gift of illumination, flowing from the supereminent coincidence of knowledge and being in the God).*
Norris Clarke inspired by Aquinas offers this breathtaking vision :
"This can either be in the ontological order by active tendency, or in the cognitive order in the form of a natural sign or image which points back to the source which it manifests and represents.
Intentionality understood in its full richness as including both of the above is indeed the key to knowledge for St. Thomas.
It includes a double movement of intentionality, only one aspect of which has been recovered by Brentano, Husserl, and contemporary phenomenology.
There is first the incoming ontological intentionality of action itself into the knower, which tends naturally to produce a self-expression, a similitude, of itself in an apt receiver.
This similitude, which is a self-expression of the agent projected through its form, leaving the being’s matter and actual existence behind, is not the physical or natural being (esse naturale) of the agent, which remains within itself, but a projected similitude, (an esse intentionale) received in the knower according to the mode of the knower, and, when recognized as a natural similitude, image, or sign of its source, points back by the whole dynamism of its relational being to the source from which it came and of which it is the projected self-image.
The second, complementary movement of cognitive intentionality now occurs when the consciousness of the knower, fecundated or informed by the image brought into it by the incoming intentionality of action, recognizes it explicitly as a sign or message from another and reaches out dynamically in the cognitive order, through the mediation of the sign, to refer it by an intending relation back to the thing itself from which it came.
Thus, it retraces the incoming path of ontological intentionality by its own cognitive movement within consciousness, pointing back to the thing through the referential act of judgment.
*St. Thomas even sums up the whole activity of the universe in a dazzling synthetic vision under the image of the great circle of intentionality, which proceeds from God to the universe, through the universe’s action into man as knower, and from man back again to God its source.
*God by his creative action first projects his own divine ideas by ontological intentionality into created things, where they become the substantial forms of active natures; then the latter project themselves by self-communicative, self-imaging action into apt conscious receivers such as ourselves, again by ontological intentionality; we, then, recognizing the projected intentional similitudes within our consciousness as signs and intentional similitudes, retrace by cognitive intentionality the incoming ontological intentionality of things back to their original sources in the active natures of the beings themselves, and then further trace these by causal inference back to their own original Creative Source, recognizing and paying homage to it as such.
Thus, the great circle of intentionality begins from God, passes through the created universe to us, then through us as knowers and lovers back to its Source again.
Such is the dynamism of action, as it originates in the order of consciousness, passes into the ontological order, then transforms itself again into the order of consciousness, thus synthesizing being and consciousness into a single unified cosmic process of self-manifestation. To be, once again, is to be self-communicative."
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