Reading From Within

An excerpt from my new book, Affective Knowledge in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas

The gift of understanding has a preeminent place in Aquinas’s account of the Christian’s knowledge of the mysteries of the faith. By this gift, the mind apprehends the mysteries of the faith in a penetrating, experiential, and connatural manner. As such, the gift of understanding is intimately tied to the virtue of faith. Faith regulates the gift of understanding, since faith first unites the soul with truth, which the gift of understanding penetrates. This gift, writes Aquinas, is “ordained chiefly to the certitude of faith.” The certitude that is the fruit of the gift of understanding is the crowning of faith.

Understanding, explains Aquinas, denotes an “excellence” of knowing inasmuch as it “penetrates into the heart of a thing” (excellentiam cognitionis penetrandi ad intima). The penetration proper to understanding is evident even in the etymology of the word intelligere (to understand). The verb is a compound of intus and legere (to read inwardly), Aquinas points out. The etymology invites a contrast between sense knowledge, which remains external, and understanding, which reads its object from within.

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The contrast between sense knowledge and intellection is analogous to that between faith and the gift of understanding. Sense knowledge remains exterior; it generates data by sustained sensory engagement with an extra-mental object. Intellection discloses the essence of the object. Consider a child picking up a tubular piece of wax threaded down the center with a cotton string. He looks at it: it’s white, glossy, and long. He bites it; it’s not savory. He pulls on the string: it remains firmly embedded in the wax. He does not yet know what it is. The senses deliver only “effects and properties.” Into the room walks his mother. She tells him: “candle” and proceeds to light it. That is the moment of intellection. At once the child has quiddative knowledge that grasps the essence of the thing. He has a definition of “what the thing is.”

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[F]aith is obscure; it sees through a veil, in the dark. Faith does not see the reality of that to which it gives assent. It accepts the testimony of others without seeing for itself. “Above the human mode” proper to the virtue of faith, is the gift of understanding, which is luminous and attains to “spiritual things themselves.” … The experience of turning on a light in a dark room is the material equivalent of how the gift functions—in an instantaneous moment of perception everything you knew to be there is lit up, seen “quasi naked.”