Introduction
Is the Gospel of John the Gospel of witness? This is certainly a designation that could emerge from the architectural structure of the Johannine Gospel, which Albert the Great describes as a series of testimonies. The characterization of the Gospel of John as the Gospel of witness raises the question of the position of its reader and of his reading method. On the one hand, Albert concludes his commentary by registering himself, as exegete, in the tradition of the witnesses who are actors of that Gospel. Moreover, he calls on his readers to continue this testimonial work in their own way.Footnote 1 It seems that, according to Albert, each reader of the Johannine Gospel is meant to become a witness of the events that this Gospel announces. On the other hand, the conception of testimony that transpires from a linear reading of Albert's Super Iohannem, that is, a reading that follows the sequence of the Gospel verses, does not allow such universalization of the testimonial function. Rather, Albert reserves the testimonial function, at least in his prologue and his commentary on the first chapter, to exceptional witnesses, such as John the Evangelist and John the Baptist.Footnote 2 In this, Albert is far from alone; the interpretation of the Johannine function of witness as exclusive to certain characters in the narrative seems to be predominant in the patristic tradition.Footnote 3
The alternatives for the reader, then, are the following: either the role of witness is one reserved for some exceptional personalities and the Albertian hypothesis concerning the testimonial structure of the Gospel of John does not concern the reader, or it is necessary to implement a different reading mode, one that is transversal, in addition to the linear reading mode that leads to this theory of exceptional witnesses. While a linear reading follows the order of the verses and of the discourse of the Gospel and of its commentaries, a transversal reading searches for similar images and expressions within the entire Gospel and the whole oeuvre of any of its commentators.
Indeed, Albert alerts his reader to the need for a change in the mode of reading and of understanding John 1:7. He does so by linking together three quotations borrowed from different authorities: Aristotle on the bat, Dionysius on manuduction, and Greco-Arab cosmology on proportionate light. Bringing together these authorities composes a strange image: that of a light that guides the eye of a bat by the hand.
And though, in itself, it [the light] is very manifest, our intellect is however, in relation to it [the light], like the eyes of the bat in relation to the light [lumen] of the sun. Therefore also, as Dionysius says, he must be led by the hand by means of a light [luce] that is proportionate to him and, for this, he needs a testimony.Footnote 4
Albert does not here explain this surprising figural conjunction of different metaphors (the bat, manuduction, and proportionate light). To decipher its meaning, the reader would have to search for occurrences in the entire Albertian oeuvre, across different textual corpora (the biblical, Dionysian, and Aristotelian commentaries; the Summae, and so on) and across various disciplines (for example, natural philosophy, metaphysics, theology, cosmology, psychology, interpretation of dreams, and mineralogy). One must try to identify the function of these images (bat, manuduction, and proportionate light) in the different modes of discourse in which they are used, especially when they appear together. I designate the reading practice I am proposing as both transversal and figural: “transversal” because it crosses disciplines and textual corpora; “figural” because it employs metaphors. How can we describe the difference between these two modes of reading: linear, on the one hand, transversal-figural, on the other?
In answering this question, it is crucial to avoid the danger of confusing the transversal-figural method of reading Albert's oeuvre with Albert's own method of reading scripture. Does Albert himself give his reader any direct indications of how to conduct a transversal-figural reading of his oeuvre? Unfortunately, he does not: nowhere does he explain in a special treatise the transversal-figural reading method that I claim one must employ in order to understand his interpretation of the Bible in general and the meaning of the strange figural conjunction mentioned above in particular. Does this imply that I am projecting onto his text methodological presuppositions that are foreign to it? If this were so, then the reader's practice would not correspond to Albert's own method of interpretation. My claim is rather that, far from being subjectively projected by the reader, the transversal-figural interpretation has objective foundations in Albert's work and that a theory of transversal-figural hermeneutics is implicit in his writings. This hermeneutic theory is implemented in Albert's practice of the exegetical commentary but is not made doctrinally explicit. I suggest that Albert makes use of a transversal-figural interpretation precisely to express a mode of thought that cannot be grasped by a conceptual rationality. In other words, the transversal-figural reading does not apply to a narrative taken in its linear narrativity, but rather to its implicit structures and to the latent relations that a narrative can have with homologous images belonging to other narrative sequences. In particular, the analysis in this paper of all the occurrences of the images contained in the figural conjunction of John 1:7 across Albert's entire oeuvre will reveal that they are unified by the same question: how is it possible for a human intellect, conjoined with the sensory and imaginative faculties, to know God? This question is tackled from different perspectives in the different parts of Albert's oeuvre. The images of the figural conjunction of John 1:7 are the sign of the presence of this recurrent question.
The reason why this essay focuses on the figural conjunction that appears in the exegesis of John 1:7 is, therefore, not only a hermeneutic one, in the sense that this conjunction of the three images is particularly likely to reveal to us the Albertian understanding of testimony in which, in his eyes, the Gospel of John consists. Rather, this figural conjunction also appears to me as one of the major places in which we are able to clarify Albert's discourse on his own method of transversal-figural interpretation.
Hence, the purpose of this essay is threefold: firstly, to show that the transversal-figural reading of Albert's oeuvre is not a subjective projection by the reader, but rather has objective foundations in Albert's text; secondly, to demonstrate that the transversal-figural reading allows for a way of knowing God, that is, the divine Principle, that relies throughout on sensory and imaginative mediations and is thus an alternative to the metaphysical approach to God; and thirdly, to show that Albert's theory of the transversal-figural reading of scripture is inseparable from the reader's practice of the transversal-figural reading of the Albertian oeuvre. In other words, by reading Albert's works transversally and figurally, the reader discovers not only Albert's hermeneutic theory of transversal-figural reading but also the noetic theory of an alternative way to know God, that is, through sensory and imaginative mediations. I call this alternative path toward God “testimony” because the knowledge that is proper to the Johannine witness is the point in the Super Iohannem where Albert theorizes a mode of knowledge through images. We will see that Albert calls the transversal-figural hermeneutic method used by the human intellect to know God through images “figural intelligence.” In the context of the transversal-figural way of knowing God, “knowledge” does not mean a science relying on universal and necessary propositions, but rather an “art” (technē), in the sense of a singular practice governed by rules that are adapted to each situation. This practice or technē aims at approaching God, without pretending to grasp him scientifically.
From a methodological point of view, since Albert can present the principles of his method only through the interpretative praxis that he implements, I will follow the sequence of texts in which are contained at least one of the sources of the figural conjunction of John 1:7 in order to bring out the principles of the transversal-figural reading. In the conclusion, I will reflect upon the methodological difference between Albert's practice of transversal-figural reading and our own by identifying the characteristics of the method I have implemented following the Albertian texts.
The hypothesis that John 1:7 can be understood neither by means of a dogmatic statement on testimony nor by the chain of interpretations traditionally proposed by the Fathers of the Church on this theme suggests the following questions regarding the framework of the method that is peculiar to figural intelligence:
1. To what extent does Albert propose an aesthetic approach toward the divine Principle that is an alternative to the one taken by metaphysics and that implies a different conception of the human intellect? Here I understand aesthetics in the etymological sense, to designate what concerns sensory perception. In other words, I consider the Albertian way to the divine Principle as having to do with the human intellect taken in its conjunction with the senses and the imagination. In the first part of this paper, I would like to show that Albert understands metaphysics and testimony — that is, the transversal-figural hermeneutics that figural intelligence applies to sensory and imaginative mediations of the divine Principle — as two distinct mediate ways toward the divine Principle. Both rely on sensory mediations but differ in the use they make of these mediations and in the conception of the human intellect they imply.
2. What specific hermeneutic art does the intelligentia figuralis deploy with regard to the images of the divine Principle? In this second part, I will show that Albert's treatment of John 1:7 on testimony constitutes a paradigmatic example of the method of his transversal-figural exegesis. In connection with John 1:7, Albert not only provides the hermeneutic principles of the images of the divine Principle, in general, and of the figural reading of scripture, in particular; he also attributes to figural reading itself a metaphysical status. Indeed, the figural interpretation puts into question the universal system of analogy: the figures that lead to the divine Principle suppose discontinuities in the ascent to the divine.
3. What is the practice of figural intelligence based on — a human skill or the divine imaginatio as a manifestation of the divine Principle in images? In the third part, I will show that the figural interpretation of the images of the divine Principle by the human intellect is part of the process by which the Principle continues to manifest itself in history. From an anthropological point of view, the integration of human hermeneutic activity into the divine manifestation implies a conception of the human intellect conjoined with the senses and the imagination on the one hand, and with the illumination coming from the divine intellect on the other. The transversal-figural exegesis of the notion of testimony in John 1:7 thus allows Albert to elaborate a hermeneutic theory that he places in relation to metaphysics and that he distinguishes from a strict analogy of the created with the uncreated. Furthermore, Albert integrates this hermeneutic theory on the level of the economy of the divine revelation to the process of manifestation of the divine Principle in history. Finally, Albert proposes this hermeneutic theory to the human intellect insofar as it is human, that is, insofar as it is conjoined with the senses and the imagination, as a path of participation and collaboration with the divine manifestation.
Metaphysics and Aesthetics: Two Ways for the Bat toward the Sun?
The image of the bat that cannot look straight into the sun is borrowed from Aristotle's Metaphysics.Footnote 5 Albert writes:
It is clear, then, that as the eyes of the night raven or of the owl or of the bat relate to the light [lucem] of the day, or of the sun, so also the intellect of our soul relates to what is, among all that is knowable, most manifest by its nature.Footnote 6
The figureFootnote 7 of the bat in the Albertian work serves as a synthetic formula of the chiasm of what is most manifest in itself but least manifest for us. In other words, what should be known to us first because it is, by nature, simpler and more obvious — namely, the divine realities — is known to us only finally, at the end of a long path. How then, from an epistemological point of view, might we remedy what appears as a paradox and a limit inherent to our human condition?
The image of leading by the hand (manuductio) is drawn from the Celestial Hierarchy of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. It designates the progressive method whereby the intellect is led, by mediations, from sensory things to knowledge of the divine. This method is based on the assumption that sensory images are in themselves a manifestation of the divine. Therefore, they are by nature worthy to lead the intellect to the divine source they manifest.
Hence Dionysius, in the Celestial Hierarchy,Footnote 8 writes in the first chapter: “And it is not possible for our soul to rise to this imitation and to this contemplation of heavenly hierarchies, which are not material, unless it uses those things that are congenial to it by means of a material leading-by-the-hand, taking visible forms as “putting into images” [imaginationes] of the invisible beauty, sensory sweetness or fragrances as the figures of the invisible distribution, material lights as the image of the immaterial luminosity, and discursive disciplinesFootnote 9 according to the understanding [intellectum] of the contemplative beauty.”Footnote 10
From the catena of texts that combine these quotations,Footnote 11 it appears that Albert distinguishes two ways of knowing the divine Principle by letting himself be “led by the hand” by sensory images. The first is the path that is proper to philosophers and theologians, who conceive the intellect as a faculty that is separate from matter and able to abstract concepts from images offered to the senses and to the imagination. I will call this way “metaphysical.”
I will qualify the second way as “aesthetic” in the etymological sense defined above. The question that lies at the heart of this mode of knowledge is: how is it possible for the human intellect, understood in its anthropological condition, that is, not separate from the body and materiality, to know the divine Principle? Indeed, at the end of my investigation of all the occurrences of the elements of the figural constellation of John 1:7 in Albert's oeuvre, it seems to me that this question constitutes their unity. In other words, when they appear in different contexts, the occurrences of the elements forming the configuration John 1:7 give rise to a latent, recurrent questioning to which Albert never gives a definitive doctrinal answer but that he keeps on raising as a nagging interrogation.
Metaphysics, or How Can the Bat Become an Eagle through Epistemic Manuduction?
Metaphysics, in its peripatetic conception, rests in three ways on mediations that “lead by the hand” toward the divine Principle.
Firstly, with regard to the epistemic structure, the very name of metaphysics indicates that this science comes only after physics and mathematics. That is, the knowledge of the separate beings presupposes that of the sensory beings and the mathematical beings. Physics and mathematics, therefore, lead the intellect “by the hand” to metaphysics.
Secondly, from an ontological point of view, separate intelligibles can be apprehended by metaphysics only if the intellect is accustomed to receive the light of the intelligible being: first, as mixed with matter according to its being and to its definition (ratio), that is, in physics; then, only according to its being, that is, in mathematics. Consequently, physical beings and mathematical beings lead the intellect “by the hand” toward the separate intelligibles.
Thirdly, in the epistemic hierarchy that leads to metaphysics, manuductio is equivalent to an act of the intellect that bends upon imagination, assembles the intelligible light of the intelligibles it has received, and is thus comforted. This act has a mediating function insofar as it accustoms the human intellect little by little to receive an intelligible light that is more and more distinct from matter. Consequently, habituation appears as an essential factor for the progress made by the human intellect from the sensory to the imaginative and, then, to the pure intelligible. Albert seems to think that the noetic mediations that are sensory and imaginative are destined to disappear when the intellect reaches its end, namely, the metaphysical knowledge of the pure intelligible.
Metaphysics, then, rests on mediations that allow the human intellect to know the first Principle, first of all because of the epistemic structure in which it is inscribed as first science; secondly, because of the ontology that it implies; and, finally, because of the intellectual act it involves.
How is the last stage of metaphysical knowledge characterized? It consists in the immediate grasp of the first Principle by the intellect. By virtue of this immediacy, on the one hand, this grasp breaks with the process that leads to the first Principle through a series of mediations. On the other hand, this grasp presupposes that the intellect is conceived as distinct from the sensory and imaginative faculties that at the outset allowed it to receive the light of the intelligible, initially mixed with matter. Accordingly, the end of the progression through the sciences toward metaphysics does not appear homogeneous with the means, or rather with the mediations, it requires.
What are the consequences of such an epistemic structure for the science of metaphysics? The first consequence concerns the conditions of knowledge that arise from the relation between the mediating sciences and metaphysics. According to the words of al-Fārābī, quoted by Albert,Footnote 12 it is only at the end of life that philosophers are able to contemplate the separate intelligibles, and only after having studied physics and mathematics are they able to practice philosophy and a fortiori theology. We can therefore suppose, following Thomas Aquinas,Footnote 13 that it is only through a long and patient labor, with many risks of going astray, that a few attain immediate knowledge of the first Principle.
That is why, for us, this science begins from what is physical and mathematical and ends with the considerations of what is divine. For this reason, it is taught last; and the philosophers who are led by the hand by the other sciences ended their entire life in it.Footnote 14
The second consequence concerns the object of metaphysics. The continuous progression through the hierarchy of sciences does not ensure in any way that the first Principle is grasped in itself. In this understanding of metaphysics, its object lies beyond the distinction between what is complex and what is incomplex. The science of what is complex is acquired by deduction from the self-evident principles, while the science of what is incomplex is the work of the agent intellect. As Albert describes it, it is in fact knowledge of the first Principle in the sense of theos,Footnote 15 the object of contemplation of the blessed. But the human intellect cannot reach it in its very nature, in its quid est, but only from the effect to the cause (quia est).Footnote 16 It is possible, therefore, that this slow and patient passage through epistemic mediations leads to a science of metaphysics that is not able to reach the object in itself, but only its effects.
The third consequence regards the cognitive faculties involved in the knowledge of pure intelligibles. Even if the latter were received directly by divine illumination, their preservation in memory would still require the material intellect.Footnote 17 Just as, according to the Rhetorica ad Herennium,Footnote 18 the rhetor remembers the order of his speech through images, so too the “naked” intelligibles are preserved in memory as they are enrobed in matter and sensory figures. For knowledge from the phantasmata is more connaturalFootnote 19 to our soul, which is conjoined to the continuous and to time.
When even what is divine has been received without symbols, so that we may better inspect it, we are leading it again back to the sensory, to which we are accustomed and which is connatural to our knowledge.Footnote 20
This third consequence entails the following paradox: at the end of the long progression, climbing up through the sciences, the human intellect must be separate from its material (that is, sensory and imaginative) powers while at the same time remaining attached to them, in order to preserve the pure intelligibles which it can, finally, access at the end of its study.
There is therefore an urgent need to propose an alternative way toward the first Principle, one that corresponds to the anthropological conditions of the knowledge of the Principle for the human intellect. In fact, our intellect, according to the noetic chiasm indicated by the figure of the bat, knows first from what is mixed with time and the continuous.
Testimony, or the Exercise of Figural Intelligence, in the Conditions of Human Existence
Testimony, an Alternative Way toward the Divine Principle
By reading Aristotle's Metaphysics in the light of Averroes's commentary, Albert seems to adhere to the noetic ideal the Commentator proposes: through the studyFootnote 21 of physics and mathematics, the batFootnote 22 — that is, the human intellect mixed with the darkness of matter — becomes an eagle,Footnote 23 able to look straight into the sun, in other words, capable of knowing the divine Principle, the cause of everything.Footnote 24 Yet the specific nature of the exegetical corpus, as opposed to the Aristotelian corpus, allows Albert in his commentary on the Gospel of John to offer another path, one that is free from the obligation of making explicit the words of Aristotle. I propose the term “testimony” for this way of knowledge of the divine Principle because of the Johannine verse in which it appears. In fact, the problem of the impossibility for the human intellect to have direct knowledge of what is most manifest in itself appears precisely in Albert's commentary on John 1:7, with reference to the figure of the bat, taken from Aristotle's Metaphysics. This indicates that, in Albert's eyes, the testimony of John the Baptist encounters a problem that it holds in common with metaphysics, namely, the question of the knowledge of the first Principle understood as theos.
The question of the possibility of knowing the divine Principle directly in the conditions of human existence is given a solution in the prologue of John, one that differs from that offered by Peripatetic metaphysics. The noetic characteristics of this mode of knowledge and of its metaphysical foundations represent, for the history of this problem in philosophy, a rupture that is analogous to that which, according to Albert's interpretation, constitutes the ruptureFootnote 25 of the verses relating to John the Baptist in the Gospel of John. There is, indeed, a “before” — John 1:1–5, which concerns what is from eternity in the divine Principle — and an “after” — from John 1:6 to the end of the fourth Gospel. This Gospel is throughout constituted by testimonies: first of all, that of John the Baptist concerning the incarnate Word; then that which the Word gives to himself, starting from the pericope of the wedding at Cana. In the same way, with regard to the knowledge of the divine Principle, in contrast to the metaphysical way employed by natural reason, the era of testimony that is opened by the incarnation of the divine Word allows the human intellect to let itself be “led by the hand” by sensory mediations, which are recognized as images of the divine Principle — that is, as ways by which the divine Principle puts itself into images or offers itself to a sensory and imaginative knowledge in a process of creation. Creation, in fact, is understood as a manifestation of the divine Principle through its creatures, according to the Albertian gloss on the second chapter of De ecclesiastica hierarchia: “Certain [things] that are sensorily holy,”Footnote 26 that is, sensory holy [things], “are put into images” (imaginationes), that is, figures, “of the invisible [things].”Footnote 27
Testimony, a Type of Mediate Knowledge
The main characteristic of testimony, in the sense of a way of knowledge directed toward the divine Principle, is that it concerns the intellect in the conditions of its existence, that is, insofar as it is conjoined with the senses and with the imagination. This way does not presuppose the prior separation of intellect from matter. On the contrary, according to the Metaphysics, it is through mediations that the human intellect can rise to what is most intelligible and can look straight into the sun. What functions as mediation is the materiality of images, defined as sensory and imaginative formations (format imaginabiliter et sensibiliter).Footnote 28 The manuductive function of images relies on the connaturality of their materiality with the human intellect itself, taken in its material dimension, that is, in its receptive capacity. Thus, Albert's theory of the necessity of sensory mediations in the knowledge of the divine Principle is based on a conception of the human intellect that emphasizes its anthropological specificity rather than its resemblance to the divine intellect.
“For it is not possible for our soul,” that is, [our] intellect, “to ascend to that non-material imitation and contemplation of the celestial hierarchies,” since by contemplating them we imitate them, “unless it makes use of that material leading-by-the-hand that corresponds to itself” — that is, by the representation of material things connatural to itself.Footnote 29
It is in the context of his Dionysian corpus that Albert deploys another conception of images: images that are not destined for the activity of the intellect that is proper to the metaphysical way. What function, then, does the human intellect have in relation to the manuductive images? It consists in being a figural intelligence in which shines forth “with an immaterial light … that which is most simple and most manifest” and that which is “figuratively and materially depicted in the senses or in the imagination.”Footnote 30 How does Albert deploy such a function? In other words, which scientific disciplines does figural intelligence apply to?
According to the occurrences in Albert's corpus that I am taking into account, figural intelligence is used particularly in the interpretation of scripture, dreams, sacraments, and prophecies. Since the method of inquiry in this paper is to explore the transversal textual sequences of the different textual corpora of the Albertian work in the context of biblical exegesis, I begin by examining the first analogon of the mode of interpretation that Albert implements in the exegetical framework: that of the interpretation of dreams. Then I will explore the aspects of figural intelligence that Albert develops in the context of the interpretation of the sacraments and of prophecies. What, according to Albert, is the art of figural interpretation of dreams?
The Art of Interpretation by Means of Figural Intelligence
The Examination of Similarities by the “Judge of Dreams”
When describing the activity of the human intellect in relation to manuductive images, Albert compares it to the interpretative work of the “judge of dreams” mentioned by Aristotle in De divinatione per somnum. Footnote 31 The iudex somnorum must examine the similitudes of what first appear, in the simulacra of dreams, as elements that are “distorted” and “torn in all directions.” Likewise, the human intellect must be attentive to the metaphorical similarities of the manuductive images. Aristotle attributes to the judge of dreams the function of linking, by relations of resemblance, what first presents itself in dreams as diverse, disparate, and deformed. It is up to the interpreter of dreams to identify what the simulacra of dreams mean by referring them, in particular, to what they represent.
And it seems that Aristotle says that he will be able promptly to judge the meanings of dreams who can quickly perceive what is torn in various senses and inspect what, of the images, is distorted, [that is,] that this belongs to a man and that to a horse.Footnote 32
But do all the images allow in the same way a figural interpretation apt to give some knowledge of the divine Principle? What, according to Albert, are the various modalities of these metaphorical similarities, understood in a broad sense of metaphorical shifts or displacements?
According to the causal relation,Footnote 33 the simulacra of dreams relate to the complexion of the dreamer; for example, they relate to the warmth or the cold felt in one of the parts of his body. Likewise, when they are considered on the basis of what is proper to them, Albert says, certain images need to be traced back to the divine Principle as to their efficient cause or to their formal principle. Other images need to be traced back to their principle as its signs,Footnote 34 insofar as the principle is both common and close. The sign relationship analogically relates to the influence of stars or climatic elements on dreams, as they modify the dispositions of the body, without, however, accounting for human voluntary acts as their direct effects.Footnote 35 Finally, some images belong to the ensemble of accidental connections with what is both common and distant, such as “a future naval war, the subversion of a kingdom, or the entire future state of the world, as in Nebuchadnezzar's dream.”Footnote 36 As regards our investigation of testimonial knowledge, the analogy with the premonition in dreams of future contingents represents precisely what exceeds the capacity of the human intellect. Since Albert reserves the strict sense of metaphorical transfer to this last model of metaphorical relations,Footnote 37 I will retain this model to pursue our study of a way toward the divine Principle that is alternative to metaphysics.
Listing these three metaphorical modes cannot exhaust the rules of interpretation of dream images or of manuductive images in general. Similarly, the multiplicity of terms used by Albert to designate these shifts indicates that it is not his intention to establish a precise nomenclature of what a metaphor is. What seems to be important to him, following al-Ghazālī,Footnote 38 is to promote a multiplicity of interpretations as soon as they are adjusted: “the exchanges of phantasmata are not retained only in one mode, and hence, the modes of interpretation are multiplied and vary according to particular things and according to the dispositions, the properties of the craft, the times of the year, and the infirmity of the one who dreams.”Footnote 39 Thus, consequent to the analogy provided by the interpretation of dreams, the work done by figural intelligence consists in making metaphorical shifts according to various modalities of relations that are particularly relevant to the cause, to the sign, or to the accident, so that these displacements reveal within the material figurations what belongs to the divine Principle, which is one and immaterial. Yet what is the specificity of these metaphorical displacements when applied to the divine Principle?
Disproportion, a Characteristic of the Manuductive Image toward the Divine Principle
Are all the images suitable to the work of figural intelligence that aims to approach the divine Principle? In commenting on the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, Albert specifies, as mentioned above, that the images capable of “leading by hand” toward the divine Principle are imaginationes in the sense of sensory figures that put into images the divine realities and give them definite contours. I will return at the end of this paper to the question of the origin of these images. I will now try to describe their characteristics.
Johannine testimonial knowledge differs from the interpretation of dreams in that it not only approaches the divine Principle as a cause but also bears the trace of its incommensurability. The images that Albert deems apt to lead the intellect “by the hand” to the divine Principle bear the mark of the incommensurability of the Principle — even within the figurations that represent it and are proportionate to the senses and to the imagination. How are the terms of the testimony of the infinite or of the uncreated inscribed in the manuductive images?
By invoking a light that is proportionate to the human intellect, the exegesis of John 1:7 refers to the conjunction of the human intellect with the other faculties of the soul, namely, the senses and the imagination. More fundamentally, this exegesis refers to the conjunction of the human intellect with what is continuous and temporal. The image is, therefore, apt to lead the human intellect “by the hand” toward the divine Principle insofar as it offers itself to the perception and to the work of the imagination. However, in order to “lead by the hand” toward the divine Principle, the manuductive image also includes a disproportion, or something “torn in various senses” and “distorted,” which is the mark of what cannot be captured by what the image tries to circumscribe.
In other words, the function exerted by the manuductive images consists in holding together two heterogeneous dimensions: on the one hand, the proportion offered to the senses and to the imagination, as a condition of possibility of knowledge for the human intellect, and, on the other hand, the surpassing of all human categories by which the divine Principle manifests itself. So the manuductive images are able both to ensure the continuity of the movement of the human intellect from the senses and imagination toward the divine Principle and also to let the human intellect make the leap toward the divine Principle that is necessary to designate the created images as metaphorical.
The paradox of this specific function of manuductive mediation as presented in the Dionysian context finds in the scriptural context a precise description with Isaiah's prophecy (Isa. 6:9–10) — “while seeing, they do not see.” These words are taken up in Matthew 13:13 to explain why Christ speaks in parables. By offering an analogy for the divine Principle according to the capacity of the human cognitive faculties (“secundum ipsorum facultatis analogiam”),Footnote 40 the manuductive images appear as the condition for the human intellect to perceive what is by nature disproportionate to its capacity of apprehension. However, what is specific to the manuductive image is that it, in a sense, darkens the eye in order to prevent the temptation of an understanding that would reduce the divine Principle to categories that are appropriate only to what is known.
Is it possible, then, to describe the regulated practice whereby the interpreter allows himself to be “led by the hand” by certain images, so that he is led to make a leap toward what is inherently disproportionate to any attempt of figuration?
Similarity of Proportionality regarding the Divine Principle
The “Allegorical or Metaphorical” Understanding of the Similarity of Relations
What art of interpretation does figural intelligence deploy before such manuductive images? To use an example: By what metaphorical similarities does the water of baptismFootnote 41 constitute a manuductive image toward the divine Principle? From the causal perspective, the baptismal water would be traced to its chemical elements, namely hydrogen and oxygen, or to its physical source. From the perspective of the water's function as sign, the baptismal water could be considered as the sign of baptism in the way in which the linguistic sign signifies the concept “baptism.” From the perspective of the so-called accidental connection between two distinct orders, the created and the uncreated, the baptismal water represents the divine grace, insofar as both the baptismal water and divine grace have the same quality of purifying by washing.
Boethius reminds us in his De differentiis topicis that “similarity is the same quality among different things.”Footnote 42 How, then, could there be a similarity between radically heterogeneous bodily and spiritual realities? In other words, how can one think that the quality of purification by washing possessed by water and that possessed by divine grace are identical in species? The metaphorical relations that are appropriate to the divine Principle cannot correspond to mere similarities of proportion, here based on the category of quality. The work of interpretation performed by the figural intelligence is rather to elaborate, on the basis of what is both common and distant, similarities of proportionality, that is, to identify the resemblance between two relations, not two qualities. Thus, the water of baptism is to washing clean what grace is to the purification of sins. But the passage from the notion of proportion to that of proportionality, or from the category of quality to that of relation, is not enough. In fact, the rule of proportionality that allows the leap between two orders that are disproportionate to each other, that is, the created and the uncreated, is not itself to be understood as a norm but rather likewise “according to the metaphor,” as Albert the Great suggests.
As for the other [point], it must be said that the similarity is taken here according to proportionality. This is, in fact, according to Boethius in the second book of Arithmetic: Similarity is the same quality among different realities, and proportion is the similarity of the relation between two; proportionality, in contrast, is the similarity of proportions between four. And we will say, then, that we must take the property of the external element to the effect that it has in the body in one part and the property of grace by the effect it has in the soul in another part. And we must put the similarity between these two proportions allegorically or metaphorically. Just as the element in the refreshing and purifying force refers to the body, so too grace [refers] to the soul according to the metaphor. And then the objection is resolved.Footnote 43
In what sense does Albert intend that these similarities of relations are to be understood in an “allegorical or metaphorical” manner (allegorice vel metaphorice)? The truly disproportionate element in the water of baptism as sensory image is the act of the divine grace itself and its capacity to renew the being of the baptized. On the one hand, the sensory image fulfills its manuductive function insofar as, by the humidity and freshness of the water, it offers a figuration proportionate to the interpreter's perceptive capacity. On the other hand, the image fulfills its manuductive function by allowing the interpreter to construct a similarity of proportionality that represents, in the relationship between these two relations, the disproportion inherent in divine grace. The only metaphorical modality that is appropriate to the knowledge of the divine Principle would then be, according to Albert, that of “the similarity of proportionality in which we must do four things,” which I mark in Albert's text with the letters [a] to [d]: “[a] take the property of the sensory thing, [b] compare it to its act, and discover the same comparison of the property of the spiritual thing [c and d] to its act.”Footnote 44 To be precise, the third activity [c] consists in taking the property of the spiritual thing and the fourth activity [d] in comparing it to its act. The operations [a] and [b] concern the sensory thing, the operations [c] and [d] the spiritual thing. The operations [a] and [c] consist in abstracting a property from the thing, the operations [b] and [d] in comparing the property and the act of the thing, that is, comparing what belongs to two different categories: quality and action. The accidental connection, here illustrated with the connection between water and grace, thus makes possible that the metaphorical similarity does not refer term-by-term the material to the spiritual by the categories of substance, quality, or quantity, nor the multiple to the one, nor the created to the uncreated. The reduplication of the category of relation allows us, in a way, to multiply, between the image and the divine Principle that it represents, the veils that are capable of “leading by the hand” toward the Principle, in the manner of the Dionysian symbol. According to the Celestial Hierarchy, “it is impossible for the divine ray to shine on us in any other way than enveloped by the variety of holy veilsFootnote 45 and by what suits us, properly and connaturally prepared for us by the paternal providence.”Footnote 46
Therefore, the continuity ensured by the manuduction of sensory images gives the figural intelligence the impetus to make a leap toward what is by definition incommensurable. This leap, in which it seems to us that the hand hitherto conducted is dropped, is perhaps, on the contrary, the point in which figural intelligence is most intimately touched. In fact, approaching divine grace, even in figures and through the medium of a similarity of proportionality, implies the reexposure of one's very being to the act by which the divine Principle gives being and vivifies. Consequently, just as not all images are necessarily manuductive and not all dreams appeal to an interpretation based on accidental connections, so too the act of figural intelligence when applied to images in philosophy is different from when it is applied to images in poetry.
Knowledge of the Divine Principle or Art of Images? Figural Intelligence between Philosophy and Poetry
With its art of building relations of proportionality between certain manuductive images and the divine Principle, figural intelligence opens toward the Principle a path that is proper not to a science but rather to an aesthetics, in the sense of a regulated method adapted to the senses and to the imagination. But how can the constant recourse to images as the medium through which figural intelligence acts lead figural intelligence toward a certain knowledge of the divine Principle? Does not philosophy, according to Albert, aim to know what is clear for the human intellect, while poetry remains in the images and does not claim to procure a knowledge of the divine Principle?Footnote 47
Indeed, insofar as the object of philosophy is proportionate to natural reason, the use of images in philosophy leads to the obscuration of the purpose of natural reason. Philosophy, therefore, invites the intellect to abstract from images their intelligible character.
This is why theology, which deals with the incomprehensible light, uses such, as it were, poetic [means], properly according to its mode. The other philosophical sciences, however, which deal with the light that is proportional to us, do wrong if they use such [means], for the things they aim to manifest clearly are obscured by such [means]. What is clearer is, in fact, proposed in itself rather than in enigmatic figures. In theology, in contrast, such [means] are proposed not because of what it (theology) aims to manifest clearly, but rather because of our material intellect, which gradually assembles light in what is connatural to itself and, so strengthened by the assembled light, finally rises to contemplate what is most clear.Footnote 48
The use of images in poetryFootnote 49 is thoroughly in proportion to the purpose of poetry, which according to Albert consists in pretending, or even lying,Footnote 50 in order to produce in its addressee the passions of pleasure or horror.Footnote 51 Both those passions are equally proportionate to the human faculties.Footnote 52 Hence, according to its end and its means, poetry is entirely proportionate to the human intellect considered in its conjunction with the senses and with the imagination. The poet does not aim at inviting his addressee to free himself from the images but rather to remain in them in order to satisfy the sensory desires of his soul.
Symbolic theology, in contrast, resorts to images and calls on the addressee to develop similarities of proportionality. But the reason for the necessary mediation of images is precisely that theology aims at an object that is disproportionate to the capacity of the human faculties.Footnote 53 Since we know of God more truly what he is not than what he is, “what comes out of a more obvious withdrawal from him is more fitting for our return to God.”Footnote 54 In this, symbolic theology is opposed both to poetry and to philosophy. Thus, the use of images to which figural intelligence is invited consists at once of two movements: on the one hand, withdrawing from them, going beyond them,Footnote 55 because of the incommensurability that characterizes the similarity of proportionality; and on the other, always returning to them as the proper place where the divine Principle manifests itself. In this sense, for figural intelligence, to interpret means to imitate the act by which the Principle “imagines” itself, in the sense that the divine Principle puts itself into images.
Albert, then, distinguishes three modes of relation between the human intellect and images. Philosophy seeks to detach itself from the images, which it opposes to concepts that present the form of the targeted reality insofar as the conceptual form is abstracted from matter. Poetry remains in the images as the means to obtain the pleasure or the displeasure of its addressee. Symbolic theology, in which figural intelligence is exerted, practices an incessant return to the images, within which symbolic theology operates as in its proper environment. By doing so, it benefits, on the one hand, from the continuity that the images offer with the sensory and imaginative faculties of the human intellect and, on the other, from the characteristic disproportion of the divine Principle that, so to speak, “imagines” itself in the images; this disproportion allows symbolic theology to leap toward the divine Principle. In this movement of manuduction by images, theology differs from philosophy in that it does not attempt to seize noetically its object, but rather to enter into an incessantly renewed movement that allows it to be “led by the hand” from proportions to proportions until it becomes able to leap toward the divine Principle according to a disproportion. Touched in its senses and in its imagination, “led by the hand,” figural intelligence is able to offer a certain knowledge of the divine Principle — a knowledge conceived, perhaps, as a touch. Constituted by similarities and dissimilarities, the activity of figural intelligence resembles the movement by which the divine Principle “imagines itself” by the act of interpretation, always renewed and singular, which figural intelligence offers to the divine Principle, in response to the continued manifestation of the latter in natural realities and in artificial images, through the mediation of human technē.
How does the recourse to images by symbolic theology, which I characterized in the first part of this paper as the aesthetic way toward the divine Principle as opposed to the metaphysical way, correspond to the activity of the human intellect insofar as it is conjoined with the senses and the imagination?
In the practice of figural intelligence, the anthropological conjunction that occurs in the interpretation of the divine Principle on the basis of sensory signs takes place on both the psychic and ontological levels. On the psychic level, the activity of the intellect does not aim at abstracting the concept out of the particularity that belongs to the senses and to the imagination. On the contrary, it finds its fulfillment in the constant conjunction of the data of sensibility and imagination with the capacity of figural intelligence to produce rules of proportionality with the divine Principle and to produce images. To interpret, therefore, is to work toward the integration in actu of the faculties of the soul united in their tension toward the divine Principle.
In addition, on the ontological level, the hermeneutics of the divine Principle results in the implementation of a conjunction of the intelligible with two categories of being — time and the continuous — the latter of which, in turn, subsumes those of space and quantity. Consequently, the expression in via applied by Albert to this modality of the knowledge of the divine Principle designates the process of the knowledge of the Principle in the sense of what is in act in a temporal dynamic, implying the multiplicity of relations I described above regarding the similarities of proportionality. According to Albert, the knowledge of the divine Principle in a constantly renewed dynamic of singular interpretations takes place in time and space, and not in the Eckhartian nunc aeternitatis, that is, the moment of eternity. By implementing its conjunction with space and time, the interpreter situates his activity in a continuous movement that cannot be locked in a logical system. To interpret, therefore, is to integrate the particular knowledge of the divine Principle thus elaborated into the singularity of the spatio-temporal conditions in which this knowledge is acquired. Hence, the temporal flow and the possibility of traversing the space of knowledge in all directions characterize the very structure of the knowledge thus produced, as a hermeneutics that goes from beginning to beginning.
We now turn to the question raised above regarding the origin of these images and the productive role played by figural intelligence beyond its hermeneutic function.
Does Figural Intelligence Imitate the Divine Imaginatio?
Is This Art of Interpretation a Fiction of the Human Imagination or a Mediated Production of Higher Intelligences?
The Activity of Figural Intelligence: Art or Science?
The hermeneutics applied to manuductive images is, on the one hand, identified with an intellectual virtue, in the sense that it offers a certain knowledge of the divine Principle. It also has a productive dimension, insofar as it actively constructs similarities of proportionality; or rather, insofar as it invents them, in the sense that it finds and discovers them. On the other hand, the hermeneutics applied to manuductive images by figural intelligence is similar to an art, insofar as it does not deal with universal and necessary propositions.Footnote 56 Rather, it deals with particular images and finds, in their very materiality, the similarities of proportionality that “lead by the hand” to the divine Principle. Thus, the art of figural interpretation is related to mnemonics in that it connects the relations of resemblance that preside over the production of images. For example, imagining a dark place allows the speaker to remember the idea of darkness. Thus, in his memory, the succession of thoughts is preserved as a rebus of images, the sequence of which restores that of his successive thoughts. In the same way, the judge of dreams or the interpreter of manuductive images knows, in and through their materiality, the sequences proper to the genesis of images and their order. However, both judge and interpreter go through this process in reverse order, so to speak, since they do not produce the images, but dispose of them, as of what is first given to them, in order to trace them back to their cause: a created cause for some dreams, the divine Principle for others. The materiality of images is, therefore, essential to the work of figural intelligence. The point is not to detach oneself from them, but rather unceasingly to come back to them in order to discern the singularity and the disproportion that are characteristic of the divine Principle itself.
Finally, the interpretation exercised by figural intelligence is like an art insofar as it imitates the divine Principle by contemplating it, according to the paraphrase of Dionysius. Contemplating the divine Principle amounts to imitating the very act by which the Principle “imagines” itself and puts itself into figures in manuductive images.Footnote 57
In what sense is this act of interpretation not a mere reverie of the producing imagination about the divine Principle, which would be consistently within the natural reach of the human faculties?
The Divine Origin of the Imagining Activity as a Manifestation of the Divine Principle
To answer this question, Albert makes three arguments. The first is based upon the authority of Aristotle, who asserts that the interpretation of premonitory dreams about future contingents exceeds the capacity of our understanding (synesis, translated into Latin as prudentia) and is, therefore, akin to a divine art.Footnote 58 Indeed, says Albert, “Aristotle calls” the separate intellect “divine intellect and this intellect, from a slight study, receives illumination for propheciesFootnote 59 and for the most truthful interpretation of dreams.”Footnote 60 Consequently, when the human intellect interprets the manuductive images and relies on these images to penetrate toward what is disproportionate in them, then it is — even if this happens in an obscure way — akin to the divine intellect. The obscurity comes from the figural representation — a view Albert adopts from MaimonidesFootnote 61 — according to which the intellect that is the interpreter of dreams would have “fallen from prophecy.”Footnote 62 Albert calls the interpreter the “intermediate intellect” insofar as he mediates between the divine intellect and the addressee of the interpretation of dreams. In the treatise De intellectu et intelligibili, Albert describes the intermediate intellect as “the one that is helped by some teaching to understand easily both the physical and the divine.”Footnote 63
The second argument Albert makes is that the interpretation of premonitory dreams presupposes the mediation of higher intelligences.
There are, in dreams, true understandings that have not the account of dream, but rather are oracles arising from the flow of higher intellects into the intellect of the soul. As a matter of fact, their reception is only according to the conformity of the human soul to the higher and celestial intellects, and not according to any dependence on the body.Footnote 64
In dreams, the soul is conjoined with the higher intelligences that are called angels, and it receives from them pure, simple, and immaterial intellections that are true dreams by which the imagination prepares the images, which are sometimes suitable and sometimes contrary. Because of the latter, the dream needs interpretation.Footnote 65
Hence dreams are equivalent to the formation of particular images that are made by the imagination on the basis of simple forms that are infused by superior intelligences, that is, by angels. Angels have the peculiarity of being simple intellects while acting “in the matter of the world.”Footnote 66
The third argument Albert offers is that the higher intelligences have the precise function of diffracting the unity of the ray coming from the source of light, and thus their function consists in participating in the manifestation of the luminous source in a multiplicity of rays. As the flow of light moves away from its source, what is still united in the separate intellects appears multiplied in the intellects that are inferior to them. It follows that multiplicity is no longer simply the mark of what is furthest from the One; on the contrary, multiplicity is what allows return to the One. Multiplicity comes from the One itself, through the mediation of the angelic intellects; it enables the return of the human intellect when it can no longer know by syllogism.
What is divine cannot be grasped by probable or necessary conclusions from the first principles. Consequently, the human intellect must be given the light of an angelic intellect, which in the human intellect multiplies species in which the divine realities are seen, whereas in the angelic intellect these species are more united.Footnote 67 In the same way, “the PhilosopherFootnote 68 says of the divinations of dreams that, because they cannot be concluded from the first principles by the mode of speculative science, our intellect is united to higher motors in order to receive them.”Footnote 69 In other words, Albert elevates the art of interpreting dreams and the multiplicity of interpretations to which this art gives rise to the rank of analogon, of a kind of knowledge of the divine Principle that is an alternative to speculative science and its syllogistic method, when, as regards what is divine, speculative knowledge is not possible for the human intellect.
As a result, the act by which figural intelligence develops similarities of proportionality rests, on the one hand, on a primordial passivity, since it receives the illumination of higher intelligences. This illumination suggests to figural intelligence the proper metaphorical shifts. On the other hand, figural intelligence requires an essential activity so that this reception becomes a participation in the act in which the divine Principle manifests itself. Active imitation, the operation of the interpreter, thus consists in taking in reverse order the path by which the higher intelligences infuse the divine manifestations in the lower intellects and communicate this gift.
The Correlational Constitution of Figural Intelligence
In what way does the practice of figural intelligence contribute to the constitution of the human intellect, understood in its contingent existence, in its relation to the divine Principle within the act of knowledge? In every act of its hermeneutic activity, the human agent is in fact constituted as a particular interpreter of the divine Principle, insofar as the Principle manifests itself in and through images. As the witness of the divine Principle in these particular theophanies, figural intelligence becomes the mediation through which the Principle interprets itself. In this hermeneutic act, the human intellect is constituted both as a channel for a particular appearance of the divine Principle and as the mediation of a divine act of manifestation of the Principle by itself.
The meaning of being implied in the practice of figural intelligence involves an operative sense of being, insofar as figural intelligence is constituted through its own act of interpreting the images of the divine Principle. Applied to figural intelligence, “being” means that figural intelligence produces hermeneutic relations. In other words, figural intelligence is in actu an operator of relations. Moreover, the alternative path to metaphysical science in the knowledge of the divine Principle would not be intelligible to us without the metaphysics of the correlationality that this alternative path implies, which can be described in the following manner. Figural intelligence is in fact not defined in an absolute way, that is, prescinding from the actual and potential relations that it produces through the interpretation of the images of the divine Principle. Thus, it implements an art of interpretation of the images of the divine Principle that is able to produce its own rules of proportionality in each particular case in order to relate these manuductive images to the divine Principle from which they come. As a result, figural intelligence and the divine Principle characterize each other correlatively in each act of interpretation, insofar as figural intelligence actively interprets the sensory signs of the divine Principle; and, at the same time, figural intelligence receives the objective manifestation of the Principle in the specific images that figural intelligence recognizes as images of the divine Principle, given that some disproportion leaves its special mark within the many analogies that these images contain.
Thus, the manifestation of the divine Principle in the images it displays to make itself known to the human intellect results both from the Principle itself and from the human interpreter. It is, in fact, a co-action in which each interprets the other, rather than defining each other in the sense of a scientific knowledge. Their interpretation is a co-action in that, on the one hand, the human intellect does not attempt to produce an affirmative theology, in other words, dogmatic knowledge, of the divine Principle that it would thus claim to enclose in a conceptual discourse; on the other hand, the divine Principle interprets the human interpreter, who gives a singular reading of the Principle. In a sense, the divine Principle interprets itself in the interpretation that it gives to the interpreter to accomplish. In this interpretation, the interpreter is singularly constituted each time in his being as interpreter of the Principle. Interpreting the divine Principle, then, appears as a correlational act. This, it seems to me, is the philosophical sense contained in Albert's theory of the angels that mediate the divine Principle in the interpretation of premonitory or prophetic dreams.
It follows that the art of the interpretation of manuductive images makes figural intelligence witness of the divine Principle. What does this noetic function consist of from an ontological point of view?
The Vase of Light: Figure of the Ontological Status of the Witness of the Divine Principle
Albert compares the witness to a vase of light whose whole being, according to John of Damascus,Footnote 70 consists in diffusing the light that it receives. Albert identifies this luminous function with the celestial bodies that stand closest to the sun, which, as the source of light, is the only active source in his cosmological system. The consistency of these celestial bodies in vicinity to the sun is a mixture of density and transparency, combining the receptive passivity due to their translucent nature with the particularity of the refraction of the ray of light that is determined by the material compound of each body. Mars diffuses red light, Venus green light, the moon a milky light. The term refraction is not entirely suitable, however, since if it were refraction properly speaking, then this would constitute a relation to the light that would remain external. Rather, the light of the sun penetrates to the innermost part of each vase of light and touches its very being; thus, each vase of light diffuses light from its own interiority.
In response, it must be said that the light [lux] is twofold. One is the first, which is the source of light [lucis], which illuminates without being illuminated. And this is the divine light [lux]. The other, in contrast, is like a vase of light [lucis], which both illuminates and is illuminated. And this is the light of perfect men, as of John and others. And this is the light from which the light emanates [emanans lucem] that is infused to it; Phil. 2 [15–16]: “Among whom you shine like luminaries in the world.”Footnote 71
The figure of the vase of light thus makes us understand the extent to which the art of the interpretation exerted by figural intelligence on the basis of manuductive images affects the very being of the witness: it actualizes the translucent being of the witness, making him able to receive the flow of light emanating from the divine Principle and to transmit it. This transmission occurs according to the particular degree of reception of each witness, which is itself determined by his place in the cosmos. What figural intelligence imitates, then, is not such or such an image of the divine Principle, but the very act of producing light through each of the singular manifestations of the Principle.
In what sense does figural intelligence, like a vase of light, constitute a mediation between the divine Principle and what is not the divine Principle? In Albert's eyes, each human intellect is not an interpreter of the divine Principle only for himself. Rather, Albert describes the human intellect as a witness. As a witness, it addresses an audience, which implies that the human intellect differs from the recipients of its interpretation. Either, like the Aristotelian judge of dreams, the human intellect deciphers the dreams of others, or, like the Dionysian interpreter, it transfers symbols and sensory images by means of specific rules of proportionality to their divine origin; in either case, the knowledge of the human intellect has the function of “leading by hand” those to whom it is transmitted and of allowing them to journey together toward the divine Principle. In other words, the hermeneutic knowledge of the divine Principle is correlational in its social effects and opens the field to a politics of testimony: by spreading, it produces a human community of interpreters of the divine Principle. The recipients, in turn, become interpreters, since they receive the testimony of the interpreter and are “led by the hand” in the process of figural intelligence. Playing at the same time the role of interpreter and receiver of interpretation vis-à-vis the divine Principle, figural intelligence functions thus as a witness in relation to recipients who receive its interpretation.
Beyond the social and political level of the testimonial community, the correlationality that defines the human intellect in relation both to the divine Principle and to the recipients of the testimony rests on the inseparability of its own identity and of its place in the whole cosmos. On the cosmological level, because the human intellect is a mediation in the flow of being and of intelligibility that comes from the divine Principle, it understands itself correlatively. Just as a planet, before being defined as a singular being, is understood as a vase of light capable of transmitting the light of the source of light according to its own complexion and radiance, so too the human intellect is immediately, by virtue of its constitutive integration into the cosmos, a witness of the divine Principle of which it delivers an interpretation that is each time singular. Thus, “witness” appears as a doubly correlational term: figural intelligence is correlatively defined not only in relation to the Principle of which it is a witness, but also to the recipients of its testimony.
This dual correlation proper to the witness reveals the nature of the knowledge of the divine Principle indicated by Albert as an alternative way to metaphysics. It is not only theoretical, without being dogmatic, but also practical, insofar as it produces a hermeneutic community that actualizes the unity of the universe in each witness in a particular way.
The hermeneutics of the divine Principle thus implements a sense of being in actu, understood as the operator of mutually constitutive relations. It thus implies a metaphysics of correlationality in terms of the human agent, of the divine Principle as it manifests itself in sensory signs, of the testimonial community that is formed from this act of interpretation, and finally, of the entire cosmos.
Conclusions and Methodological Considerations
What have we learned from the two ways toward the Principle described by Albert the Great: metaphysics and testimonial knowledge? They have in common that they proceed from manuductive mediations, even if metaphysics culminates in an immediacy with the first Principle. However, metaphysics requires an activity that consists in assembling the intelligible that is devoid of matter. This activity gradually allows the human intellect to receive the pure intelligible, separated from the continuous and from the temporal in which the intelligible is initially grasped. Furthermore, this activity allows the human intellect to detach itself from the sensory and imaginative faculties. Testimonial knowledge, in contrast, is addressed to the intellect insofar as the intellect is conjoined with the senses and to the imagination and insofar as it considers the manuductive images not only as the point of departure but also as the medium in which the testimonial knowledge is at home. The witness does not pretend to the deification that Peripatetic metaphysics promises to the human intellect considered as separate from materiality. Rather, the witness remains in the place assigned to him in the cosmos of mediations whereby the divine Principle manifests itself. But the witness's art of interpretation achieves the transparency that constitutes him in the manner of a vase of light. The transparency of the witness enables him not only to diffuse the light of the divine source he receives, but also, by the particularity of his complexion and by his act of communication, to imitate in a singular manner the act whereby the divine Principle manifests itself in “imagining” itself, that is, in putting itself into images. In Albert's thought, therefore, both the metaphysician and the witness depend on mediations that “lead by the hand” toward the divine Principle. But what is specific to the images that lead figural intelligence by the hand is — within the continuity between the sensory and imaginative faculties and the human intellect that these images ensure — a disproportion that is characteristic of the divine Principle itself. Disproportion prevents a continuous path toward the divine Principle; instead, the human intellect has to make a leap toward the divine. But this leap is not irrational, for it is based on numerous proportionalities, that is, on the similarities of proportionality that figural intelligence has found, allowing it to connect created images to the uncreated Principle. The activity of the figural intelligence is founded in the act by which the divine Principle “imagines itself” in the created beings and, through mediation, interprets itself in and through the act by which figural intelligence interprets the manuductive images of the Principle. Manifestation of the divine Principle and constitution of the human intellect in its conjunction with the senses and the imagination thus appear as correlational acts.
In what way does the path to the divine Principle that is proper to figural intelligence offer a conception of sacra doctrina as aesthetics rather than as a theological science? It seems that the way toward the divine Principle opened by figural intelligence is more hermeneutic and aesthetic than theological, in the Scholastic and Albertian sense of theology as a science. What Albert suggests is that theology rests, at least for one of its modes, on an art of interpreting sensory signs as images of the divine Principle. Figural intelligence is called an art, insofar as it is concerned with the particular, rather than with the universal. Figural intelligence is a singular act and regards the particular in three ways: as to the interpreter, as to the images that are given to him, and as to the rules of proportionality that he elaborates for each case. These rules of proportionality, in turn, are unique as to its different modalities (for instance, according to the cause, to the sign, to the accidental connection, and according to the category of quality or of relation), as to the objects to which it is applied (that is, the different sensory and imaginative mediations), and as to the various disciplines in which figural intelligence operates (for example, natural philosophy, metaphysics, theology, cosmology, psychology, interpretation of dreams, and mineralogy).
The integration of the sensory and imaginative data with the knowledge of the divine Principle is reflected in the very method of the knowledge of the Principle implemented by Albert. He did not make this method of knowledge the object of any theoretical treatise. The method of figural intelligence appears only in light of a transversal and complete reading of his oeuvre in its different literary genres and in the various traditions he explores (for example, the Aristotelian, Neoplatonic, Dionysian, or biblical tradition), and in the various sciences he goes through. Thus, it appears that the method of transversal reading I have applied in this paper to Albert's oeuvre, in order to study his theory of testimonial knowledge, is inseparable from the alternative way of knowing the divine Principle Albert suggests: an aesthetic way in contrast to a metaphysical way. How can we distinguish Albert's method of interpreting scripture and, in general, the images of the divine Principle, from our own method as interpreters of Albert's works?
Finally, I will now try to identify the main characteristics of Albertian figural intelligence as they are revealed in this study.
Figural intelligence starts with sensory images: natural, artificial, linguistic. The linguistic images are rooted in a tradition that makes their identification possible (in the framework of this study: Aristotle, Pseudo-Dionysius, and the expression “vase of light,” borrowed from Greco-Arab cosmology, as an example of proportionate light).
These images require the continuity of the human intellect, which considers them with the sensory and imaginative faculties. Yet these images are also characterized by a disproportion that imprints in them the seal of the divine Principle. In this study, the use of images appears in the surprising knotting of three textual corpora of different origin (Aristotle, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Greco-Arab cosmology), which moreover combine two distinct senses (sight and touch). This knotting provokes astonishment in the reader.
This strange combination of the three images in Albert's exegesis on John 1:7 invites us to move from a linear reading to a transversal reading that makes us cross different fields of knowledge and different realms of reality. In doing so, that is, in gathering the scattered occurrences of this figural conjunction in Albert's work, we eventually reach a unifying question. This question does not identify itself with a doctrinal issue that can be addressed through demonstrative discourse. It is rather a recurring, almost throbbing, question, to which perhaps there is no definitive solution. In the context of this study, the question that emerges from the texts we read is this: how is it possible to know God in via, in other words, in the anthropological conditions that characterize the human intellect, that is, through its conjunction with the senses and the imagination? These images, or constellations of images, thus gain the status of figures, by virtue of their recurrence and their use as arguments possessing a specific function in different discursive contexts.
How do such constellations of images of the divine Principle transform the being of the interpreter? According to the figure of manuduction, the reader, taken by the hand, is touched by the manuductive images during the practice of his art of interpretation. He is led into a movement toward the divine Principle and continuously accompanied until he has to leap toward the Principle. The figure of the vase of light leads one to conceive the practice of figural intelligence as a diffusion of the light of the Principle, which continues to “imagine” itself through the interpreter and thus constitutes the interpreter as figural intelligence. As a result, the interpreter of the manuductive images receives them inasmuch as he produces and interprets them.
Thus appears the aesthetic way toward the divine Principle as an alternative to the metaphysical way, which also relies on images as starting points but abstracts the intelligible from the matter of the images so as to produce concepts and to seize the pure intelligible. Figural intelligence, in contrast, takes images not only as its starting point, but also as its operating environment, and it constantly returns to them by exercising an art of interpretation that is characterized by the singularity of the interpreter and by what he interprets, each time he interprets it. For each constellation of images, the interpreter produces new relations of proportionality on the basis of those provided by the original images, in order to make possible the transfer of those images to a new textual context.
How is this method specific to Albertian practice and how can it be called matrix? A first Albertian specificity is metaphysical. For Albert, “manuductive image” designates a material sign that contains a principle of disproportion. In other words, created reality, which as such could be definable, that is, could be circumscribed within the categories of the human intellect, turns out to be intersected by relations between orders of reality — the created and the uncreated — that are not accessible to mathematical rationality. This intelligible gap is likely to make the human intellect waver in its own epistemic practice.
From this follows a second Albertian specificity: in the universal system of analogy, gaps appear that prevent the continuous passage from object to object, from being to being, from domain of knowledge to domain of knowledge, according to an adjusted proportionality. This disproportion in the analogical system compels figural intelligence, trained in this dance of proportional associations, to leap toward the divine Principle. In our study, the figure of proportionate light that “leads by the hand” places the reader in a movement of interpretation. Yet the transparent diffusion of light in a body that should be opaque, induced by the figure of the vase of light, startles the reader, who must confront the scandal of a corporeality of the incorporeal. The leap beyond the created order to the divine Principle, implied by the images, is induced by the relation of the vase to the sun. Likewise, in the Aristotelian figure, the leap is induced by the relation of the eye of the bat to the sun. Thus, it is not that figural intelligence forces the introduction of this discontinuous jump toward the divine; rather, the image itself includes the leap toward the divine Principle.
How, then, does the finite lead the reader to infinity? The sun pertains to the finite, that is, to the created order, but it represents the function exerted by the divine Principle. The paradoxical character of the image that combines the opaque and the transparent, the material and the immaterial, the bodily and the luminous, arouses in the reader the leap from the created to the uncreated. The manuductive function of the images consists, therefore, in being the sensory mediation though which an incorporeal principle takes the reader “by the hand.” The reader is thus led into a movement that implies a discontinuity, a change of order and of ontology. The function of the knotting together consists in relating what, by nature, cannot be related to another. The figure is, therefore, the powder that explodes universal analogism. It removes the divine Principle from the set of objects that are within the reach of the human intellect.
Albert's thought is, therefore, to a certain extent, that of discontinuity, of grace, of leap, yet without being comparable to an ecstasy. The ever-renewed practice of figural intelligence in the midst of manuductive images is indeed discontinuous. Following the movement of interpretation of the manuductive images, figural intelligence leaps toward the disproportion that is proper to the divine. Does Albert then shatter the system of universal analogism? Or does not, rather, strict analogism dissolved by a disproportion that opens toward grace point to a certain conception of Christianity? I would maintain that the latter is the case. Insofar as it is split by a disproportion that opens to grace, Albert's analogism can no longer be called strict. Instead, it corresponds to a conception of Christianity that is based on the category of event. Here, Christianity is not conceived of as a religion that consists in using human means to build a higher tower, that is, in order to build continuous access to the divinity or offer a sacrifice that may be more acceptable to the divinity. Rather, Christianity is understood as the advent of someone who comes to take others by the hand, marking their flesh with the seal of disproportion, in order to lead them to their Father, that is, to the divine Principle from which they come. In this sense, Albert's critique of analogism elaborates an alternative model to strict analogism, inasmuch as his pattern inherently implies a discontinuity as a condition of possibility to lead to the divine Principle.
A third Albertian specificity rests, therefore, in a metaphysics of correlationality and a sense of being that is understood as operative. The Albertian metaphysical system universally establishes analogical proportions and splinters them at certain points so that the manifestation of the divine Principle in its creatures makes possible an anthropologization of the divine through the mediation of the activity of figural intelligence. In other words, the practice of figural intelligence proves to be the act by which the divine Principle interprets itself and thus constitutes the human interpreter in the vase that receives, contains, and transmits the light of the divine Principle. This happens in a correlational way: the interpreter is the correlate of the continued manifestation of the Principle.
This gives rise to a fourth Albertian specificity, which concerns the constitution of the knowing agent: created-creative imagination.Footnote 72 The created imagination is “creative” insofar as it projects the divine ray and produces images, for it is itself based on the direct intuition of a divine illumination that is mediated by angelic intelligences. While angels diffract the divine ray, the soul colors it and offers it back to the divine Principle through contemplation and through the activity of producing images. Therefore, figural intelligence is to be conceived of more as a prophetic than as an Aristotelian agent.
In what way, finally, does the reading practice I have implemented differ from the figural method developed by Albert? Throughout Albert's writings, we have followed the resonances of figures such as the Aristotelian bat, the Dionysian manuduction, and the vase of light and its proportional light, derived from Greco-Arab cosmology. I have based my reading praxis objectively on the Albertian texts. Yet our praxis is also already an act of interpretation. In other words, the description of the Albertian art of interpreting the sensory signs of the divine Principle is also based on a correlational understanding: definition and method are mutually explanatory. The method of reading I have used in my research to understand and characterize Albert's method of interpretation of scripture is, in turn, determined by Albert's praxis of reading the Bible and interpreting the images of the divine Principle. Both Albert's praxis and my method implement a hermeneutic circle that is inherent in what, ultimately, this art of interpretation seeks to highlight: the incessant correlative constitution of the divine Principle and of the interpreter, as well as of all the correlates involved in this knowledge. The aim is not the fixation of the human nature of the interpreter or the divine nature of the Principle in a definition that remains encircled in concepts. Rather, through figural reading, we consent to the manifestation in act of the Principle and to the constitution of the interpreter, both of which arise only in the hermeneutic act that is always singular, always begun again. This movement has no end other than the very life of the one and the other correlate in a correlational dynamic. Meister Eckhart would perhaps describe such a correlative life as he does poverty: a life without knowing, without having, without exerting power. On this very point of absence of external finality — in the sense of theoretical or practical control — the Master of Cologne and his Thuringian Disciple would certainly think as one.
