The vision of God is one of the key topics of Western philosophy and is frequently linked to a model of intellect derived from the Platonic tradition. This panel invites papers that explore how images of ‘vision’ relate to strictly epistemological and metaphysical concerns? These are issues that have captivated philosophers from Plato, to Nicholas of Cusa, to Spinoza, to Hegel and beyond. The notion of divine vision has generated numerous difficulties, as evinced by the critiques of many recent philosophers writing in the wake of both Heidegger and the twentieth century empiricists, both of whom have often been unsparing in their critiques of such metaphysical models. Analysis of some recent reflection on this topic from philosophers such as Jean-Luc Marion or Stephen Clark would be welcome. Papers are invited from both a historical and systematic perspective.
This paper examines Pope Gregory the Great's ascetic epistemology historically and systematically. By treating Gregory's sources, both Latin and Greek, it establishes multiple lines of monastic influence on Gregory's approach to the knowledge of God in a Neoplatonic key. It does this by looking closely at Gregory's treatment of the gift of tears across his corpus. For Gregory, tears are a necessary precursor to the vision of God, they make growth in the knowledge and love of God possible, and they accompany the one seeking the vision of God throughout earthly life. By investigating sources of influence less commonly attributed to Gregory and tracing their effect on his picture of human knowledge of the divine, this paper offers a portrait of an understudied figure's inheritance and synthesis of multiple strands of the Christian Platonist tradition in the Late Antique period.
John Smith’s Select Discourses (1660) speaks often of the change of orientation required to come to a proper understanding of, and communion with, God. Moral, imaginative, and intellectual purification, mark a “conversion” from the material world to the realm of spirit and truth, plays a central role in Smith’s epistemology (clearly displayed in his “True Way or Method of Attaining to Divine Knowledge”), natural theology (“Of the Immortality of the Soul”), and in his soteriology (most obviously presented in his “Excellency and Nobleness of True Religion”). In this paper, I will call attention to Smith’s explicit use of fourfold degrees of knowledge derived from Plato’s Divided Line as a “map” or “guide” for moral and intellectual conversion. Above all, the concern here is for the relationship between the theoretical and the practical.
My paper will primarily attend to the question of how Plato and Weil each conceived of writing as related to the vision of God, considering the tension between the abstract form of the Good in Plato with Weil’s distinctly Christian notion of grace, as well as the implications of their differences in approach to reading and writing.
The most distinctive aspect of Thomas Gallus’ theology is his theological anthropology, which derives from Dionysius, where all created reality is governed by a threefold metaphysical dynamism of procession, remaining, and return. With respect to rational creatures, these dimensions acquire distinct expression. Metaphysical “procession” takes the form of a descending movement within the soul and a radical receptivity for receiving the divine self-communication. Metaphysical “return” for its part finds its anthropological expression in an ascending, ultimately self-transcending movement of the soul toward and into God. Gallus concretely expresses this dynamic anthropology by conceiving of the soul as a hierarchia in the specific Dionysian sense of the termthe goal of which is union with God. With this hierarchical anthropology, Gallus works out a sophisticated account of the soul's cognitive encounter with God, entailing both "intellectual cognition” and "affective cognition," which interact with each other to bring about a deifying union.