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1 The Gift of Illumination The PRINCIPIUM of Light In the late spring of 1256, a young Dominican priest stepped in front of his colleagues at the University of Paris to give his inaugural lecture, Rigans Montes, as a Master in Theology. While his intellectual talents were already well known and some of his work had already been made available to his contemporaries, as the young Thomas Aquinas stepped to the lectern he was formally embarking upon a public career that would shape the theology of the church for the next eight centuries. In this first public lecture Aquinas would describe an understanding of theology and the task of the teacher—what we might think of as his “teaching philosophy”—that he followed for the rest of his career, so that “in this exposition we can see luminously the ideal he is setting himself for his life’s work.”1 One of the key themes of his talk, and a theme he would develop for the rest of his career, was that of light and divine illumination. The purpose of this book is to follow that theme and attempt to understand the theology of Thomas Aquinas with regard to the light language he deploys throughout his work. One of the key features of Aquinas’s work that quickly becomes evident is how important beginnings are to him. Most of his works have substantial prologues in which he details either what he is doing, with regard to his original works, or what he thinks another author is doing with regard to his scriptural and philosophical commentaries. One ignores Aquinas’s introductory comments and his division of the text of a work at the risk of misunderstanding what follows as he expounds on his introduction.2 Further, with regard to how one comes to deep knowledge (scientia) of a subject, Aquinas thinks one must work toward an understanding of the key principles from which one begins. 1. Simon Tugwell, Albert & Thomas: Selected Writings, The Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist, 1988), 270. 2. John F. Boyle, “St. Thomas Aquinas and Sacred Scripture,” Pro Ecclesia 4, no. 1 (1995): 100–101. 13 Principles are a kind of intellectual beginning or starting place in the “order of teaching”3 for Aquinas, even if he acknowledges that we often have to work backward to get to them. It is worth noting, then, that the technical name for Aquinas’s inaugural lecture was principium, a word with a variety of implications for Aquinas. In his Trinitarian discussion of whether it is adequate to call the Father the principium, Aquinas pithily suggests that “anything from which something proceeds in any way is said to be a principium.”4 In a more extended discussion of the term, fittingly found at the beginning (principium) of his commentary on the Gospel of John, Aquinas notes five possible meanings for principium, but all of them imply “an order of one thing to another,”5 and so can be found in ordered things such as quantity, time, teaching, and the production of things, and in the mind of those who generate things. The key principium here is the third one, of teaching. For Aquinas our very ability to learn is Christological, proceeding from both Christ’s divinity and his humanity. With respect to Christ’s divinity, “the beginning and principle of our wisdom with respect to our nature is Christ,” since our natures are formed by the “Wisdom and Word of God”; with respect to Christ’s humanity, Christ is our principium of teaching through his incarnation.6 Any learning that we have finds its beginning in Christ’s divinity, through our created natures, and through his humanity, that is, through his teaching of us in the flesh. With respect to teaching, the principles from which Aquinas starts are decidedly Christological. Indeed, as Aquinas tells us in Rigans Montes, Christ is “the teacher of teachers.”7 One of my key theses is that Aquinas’s understanding of illumination is not just broadly theistic, but primarily Christological. Philosophers and theologians have for too long focused on Aquinas’s discussions of illumination in his 3. ST prologue. 4. ST I 33.1: “[T]he word ‘principle’ (principium) signifies only that from which another proceeds: since anything from which something proceeds in any way, we call a principle; and conversely.” 5. In Ioh. I.1, §34: “Since the word principium implies a certain order of one thing to another, one can find a principium...

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