Augustine on angelic knowledge

Angelic beings are spiritual intellectual beings. They possess knowledge; however, they are not omniscient. They are spiritual beings with limited knowledge in comparison to God, which means they are not like God who is the fullness of knowledge, they acquire knowledge. So, how do angelic beings acquire knowledge? What is the source of their knowledge? What is the nature of the angelic beings’ knowledge? What can angelic beings know and not know? What do these spiritual beings do with their angelic knowledge? Is there any difference between the fallen angels’ knowledge and the upright angels’ knowledge? What is the object of these spiritual intellectual beings’ knowledge? Augustine answered these questions in his theology of angelic knowledge. Augustine treated the nature of the knowledge the angels can acquire with their natural angelic faculty and the nature of the knowledge they acquire through the grace of God. Divine illumination is equally enjoyed by the angels and even more than humans do. The angels are lovers of the truth and they seek the truth either with the appropriate or inappropriate use of their will. The kind of knowledge they pursue determines their relationship with the creator. Augustine outlined how knowledge separates the good angels from the bad angels. These and more are what this paper seeks to explore.

Why Am I a Muslim? Investigating the Truth of Faith Based on Ghazālī's al-Munqidh Min Al-Ḍalāl

It should be acknowledged that the man's beliefs are often based on their prejudices. Probably, some people have not even asked themselves "which religion do I believe in? and why?, let alone attempt to find answers to them. However, there are some who delve into these questions and strive to find convincing answers. Ghazālī was one of the thinkers who asked such questions when he was a teenager, and suffered from the resulting skepticism for a while. In Al-Munqidh Min Al-Ḍalāl, Ghazālī reports how he came across these questions and how he overcame the crisis of the skepticism. He criticizes those saying: "I am Muslim because I was born in a Muslim family", and presents a basis for the true faith, which is based on resorting to mysticism and abandoning the philosophical reasoning. Ghazālī does not view the true faith as the result of the combination of the major and minor premises, rather considers it merely as the Divine Illumination and providence. Using analytical-logical method, the present study examined the basis presented by Ghazālī and concluded that considering the Illumination as the basis of faith, and abandoning the philosophical reasoning may lead to some consequences which cannot be ignored. For example, in explaining the faith, by abandoning the philosophical reasoning, one cannot distinguish between the true faith and the false faith originating from the satanic temptations.

The Blessings of Blindness: Divine Illumination as Spiritual Health

Summary Among early Christian writers, Didymus of Alexandria occupies an unusual position being a theologian who garnered renown while enduring a significant physical disability, since he became blind in early childhood. Scholars of Didymus have frequently bemoaned the lack of biographical information concerning this famous teacher, and some suggest that Didymus never expresses regret for losing his physical eyesight in his own writing, arguing that he considered spiritual insight more valuable. Most recent monographs on Didymus have been content to cite traditions about Didymus’ blindness, but few have sought to track the emergence of the few traditions about him and how these sources might relate to each other and have conflicting theological agendas. This paper seeks to address these lacunae by closely examining references to Didymus from his own contemporaries, all of whom personally met him, in order to make some suggestions of how this might open some new avenues for better understanding attitudes toward physical disability in early Christianity and particularly Didymus as a blind Christian theologian.

Kilwardby, Robert (d. 1279)

Robert Kilwardby is one of the most remarkable thinkers of the thirteenth century. He is the champion of the traditional approach to philosophy and theology, which developed the body of doctrines worked out by Augustine. His activity is set in the very crucial period of middle scholasticism, when the diffusion of Aristotle’s philosophical system and its utilization for Christian theology caused a sharp conflict between the followers of the Patristic tradition, such as Kilwardby or the members of the Franciscan school, and the new theologians, such as Thomas Aquinas, who tried to express the contents of divine revelation within the Aristotelian paradigm. Kilwardby used all of his intellectual resources and ecclesiastical authority in fighting against this new trend and in defending Augustinianism, whose main theses (for example, a plurality of substantial forms in composite substances, the presence of seminal reasons in matter, universal hylomorphism, individuation by matter and form, a conceptual distinction between the soul and its faculties, and the necessity of divine illumination in order to grasp the eternal truths) he supports in his writings.

Henry of Ghent (early 13th century–1293)

Perhaps the most influential theologian between Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure in the third quarter of the thirteenth century and John Duns Scotus at the beginning of the fourteenth century, Henry of Ghent stands at a turning point in scholastic philosophy. He was a defender of traditional Neoplatonic positions and has often been seen as the epitome of thirteenth-century Augustinianism. Yet his convoluted metaphysics and a theory of knowledge weaving together Neoplatonic and Aristotelian strands inspired novel philosophical trends in the fourteenth century, particularly among Franciscan thinkers. His work thus constituted the point of departure for scholastic giants like Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, who not only used him as a foil against which to articulate their own system of thought but also absorbed much of his fundamental philosophical outlook and terminology. Characteristic of Henry’s metaphysics was an essentialism so pronounced that critics accused him of positing a realm of essences separate from worldly actuality. In his defence, Henry insisted that essences, though prior to actual existence, were separate only as grounded in the divine exemplars of things, but the Platonism of his approach struck his contemporaries as extraordinary nonetheless. Ironically, Henry’s understanding of essence as congruent with intellectual coherence provided an opening for a more logic-based analysis of modality, especially possibility, in succeeding thinkers such as Duns Scotus. The emphasis on essence re-emerged in Henry’s theory of knowledge, and at least in his early writings he offered a vision of knowing truth through divine illumination often taken as paradigmatic of medieval Augustinianism. Even his later attempts to cast epistemology in a more Aristotelian light retained the insistence that true knowledge somehow entails access to the exemplary essences in God’s mind. The same essentialism led Henry to formulate what he called an a priori proof for God’s existence, best approximation in the thirteenth century to Anselm’s ontological argument. Again, however, Henry’s Augustinianism provided an unintended springboard for innovation, leading to Duns Scotus’ theory of the univocity of being and metaphysical proof of God’s existence.

Antropologijska strujanja u novijoj teologijskoj misli

Apart from the traditional, orthodox comprehension concerning revaled, suprarational religious truth and supernatural, divine religion origin according to which faith is a gift of heaven and of divine grace mediated by divine illumination through God’s sign, anthropological comprehensions appear recently in theological thought concerning the origin of religion (e. g. bishop and theologian J. A. T. Robinson (; according to these comprehensions religion is a product of mankind originating in human nature, from its need to transcend into infinity. This is in fact foundation of theology in anthropology, of theism in humanism. Ideational presence of some contemporary philosophical trends is obvious in contemporary Christian theology, and especially the presence of phenomenology and existentialism interceded with influence of M. Heidegger’s thought. Moreover Marxism is treated by recent theology in a new, more open and more realistic way. Since mentioned theological trends move necessarily towards philosophy (man and his salvation become subject-matter of religious thought), it is easier then to actualize a philosophical dialogue with them, even from a Marxist point of view, too. New tendencies appear especially between the wars due to liberal and dialectical protestant theology, but this article exposes K. Rahner, possibly the most important among respected contemporary catholic theologians, who are also concerned with these new tendencies,

Duns Scotus’s Epistemic Argument against Divine Illumination

Theories of “divine illumination” were popular from St Augustine through the Middle Ages. Henry of Ghent is traditionally thought of as providing one of the last and most sophisticated theories of Divine Illumination. This chapter examines one of John Duns Scotus’s main arguments against Henry’s theory of Divine Illumination. The chapter reads Scotus as claiming that Henry’s theory aims, but fails, to avoid skepticism—the conclusion that we can’t have any knowledge on the basis of sensation. It shows how this argument can be understood formally on the basis of an analogy with modal logic, which Scotus explicitly calls attention to. The chapter argues that this way of understanding Scotus’s argument points toward some important refinements that contemporary anti-risk principles in epistemology will need to account for.