Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas

Titel: Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas

Stichwort: Mystisches Erlebnis, Erfahrung der Seele von sich selbst; Gott im Gedächtnis; memoria

Kurzinhalt: the soul is present to itself in rational consciousness, that from the divine presence in the soul intellect receives the light necessary for understanding, Taste and see how the Lord is sweet

Textausschnitt: mystical experience. Early in the Sentences, in discussing the imago Dei in the human soul, it is asked whether knowledge and love of God and of self are constantly in act. In the Summa this question is answered negatively for the peremptory reason that everyone now and then goes to sleep. But in the early work the answer is affirmative, and it is given in two forms - first ...
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It amounts to saying that the soul is present to itself in rational consciousness. But from that presence to oneself it is not too easy a step to the presence of God to oneself. ... Now it is true that, apart from prying introspection, self-knowledge within rational consciousness is neither a discernere, nor a cogitare, nor an intelligere with a fixed object. But must one not enter into the domain of religious experience to find this awareness of one's spiritual self prolonged into an awareness of God?
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A similar, if less acute, question arises in the De veritate, where one reads that the presence of God in the mind is the memory of God in the mind.
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A necessary condition of understanding is within nature, and we are told that from the divine presence in the soul intellect receives the light necessary for understanding. Further, if one goes back to Aquinas's explicit accounts of the term memoria, one finds that it is habitual knowledge, and even that the mind is present to itself and God present to the mind before any species are received from sense, so that the human imago Dei has its constitutive memoria before any conscious intellectual act is elicited. To the casual reader it may seem that a presence of God which is a memory must be a known presence; but Aquinas's own explanation of his terms does not substantiate that conclusion.