In describing the role of divine illumination in the cognitive process of the human intellect, Henry is always careful
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To specify that God functions only as ratio cognoscendi and not as obiectum cognitum. From another perspective, however, God is also the first known object of the human intellect, according to one of Henry’s most famous and characteristic doctrines (Summa, art. 24, q. 7; Laarmann 1999; Goris 2007). More precisely, God is not the first but the last concept in the order of rational knowledge, after the knowledge of creatures, but He is the first object of natural knowledge, which concerns the first and most general intentions. In this kind of knowledge, our intellect always proceeds from what is most indeterminate. God, as subsisting and absolute being, is contained within the indeterminate concept of being, and it is for this reason that every time an ens is conceived, the ens primum, God, is also conceived, at least on more general levels of knowledge.
Between creatural being and divine being there is, of course, no real identity, but only a form of community originating precisely in the indeterminacy of the most general concept of being. Divine being is indeterminate and indeterminable; in itself, it eludes all possibility of determination. Being in general initially seems just as indeterminate, though not because it is indeterminable: the process of human knowledge aims at an ever more complete determination of being as a given thing. Nevertheless, at the level of our first, confused knowledge, our intellect is not able to distinguish between the negative indeterminacy of God (indeterminatio per abnegationem) and the privative indeterminacy of creatures (indeterminatio per privationem), and so it forms a single concept.
The equivocal term ‘‘being’’ is thus interpreted by our intellect as a univocal term, and this gives rise to a peculiar form of analogy. As a matter of fact, the first concept of being is both equivocal and univocal at the same time: it is equivocal in itself, since it signifies two completely heterogeneous realities (finite and infinite, being in potency and being absolutely and purely in act); it is univocal for the human intellect, since at this initial level the distinction remains hidden to our comprehension.
Yet it is this peculiar form of analogy, or community, that offers the only positive starting point for a metaphysical demonstration of the existence of God, a demonstration that, in appealing to Avicenna and to Augustine’s De trinitate, proceeds by investigating this falsely univocal concept of entity in order to isolate the notion of God as pure, necessarily existing Being (Summa, art. 22, q. 5; art. 24, q. 6). To this demonstration Henry also adds some a posteriori proofs - in the order of efficient, formal, and final causes - that nevertheless refer exclusively to the existence of God de complexo, in other
Words, to the truth of the statement ‘‘God exists’’ (Summa,
Art. 22, q. 4).
World History
