Divine Illumination

Divine Illumination is an idea which has been abandoned by most thinkers as a viable source of cognition, and this is a shame, because Divine Illumination is the only theory of cognition which would allow noumena, or things-in-themselves, to be understood by the mind as they actually are.

In modern philosophy, the empiricism of Francis Bacon, Humean skepticism, and the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant were influential ideas, all of which in some way disallow the mind from seeing things as they actually are, either because knowledge is obtained via the senses, and the senses are imperfect (empiricism), all things are subject to doubt (skepticism), or because the mind cannot grasp noumena, but only appearances of things.

What is missing from these theories is that there may actually be a God, and if there is a God, then this God can reveal what things actually are to the mind. In that light, these philosophies which state that one cannot understand things as they actually are the products of either deliberately shunning God, or of God deliberately keeping the person in the dark.

Starting with St. Thomas Aquinas, philosophers started to emphasize the individual, limited intellect more than Divine Illumination, which was a theory not only espoused by St. Augustine, but also Platonist and Neo-Platonist philosophers. By modernity, Divine Illumination had been almost completely abandoned and replaced by various forms of naturalism, empiricism, skepticism, and other philosophies which create the idea in human beings that they cannot know reality as it actually is.

These modern inventions are for the most part something like a negative hubris, the product of human minds consumed by fear of the Divine and deceived by evil surreptitiously keeping themselves and deliberately keeping others in the dark about the true nature of things. Human beings believe that there are rules, limitations which keep themselves in the dark, and shun the light of God, who being omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent can of course reveal and illuminate anything to any mind He desires.

It would be unwise to put limitations on human knowing; if God is involved in the process of human understanding, then there are no limits!