There's a good reason why Deaf people ordinarily do not frequent bars--they are usually dark places and we need light, lots of it, in order to see each other signing with our hands. We are endlessly fussing over lighting.
Take, for example, the sign CAT--it is signed in such a way as to resemble cats' whiskers. The sign LION calls attention to the lion's mane. There are also signs which very closely resemble each other, such as the numeral '6' and the letter 'W/w.' In order to perceive what is being signed, two things are then required: Sufficient lighting in order to see the sign-er's hands and facial expressions, and (usually) knowing the sign's resemblance to the thing being referred.
You and I know what a "cat" is because we've experienced them, whether by seeing them and their whiskers, by petting them when they insist, or sneezing if we're allergic to them. In all these cases, our knowledge of "cat" is based upon sensory experience. This is why the Scholastics used to say that "There is nothing in the intellect that was not first perceived by the senses." With the five senses we collect information; with sight, touch, smell, hearing, and taste, we are accumulating "intelligible species" of various things we've experienced.
The form of "cat," after experiencing them, or at least being told about another's experience of them, has its resemblance impressed in the mind. Thus, we have in our minds what Scholastics called an "intelligible form" of a cat, that is, an impression left in our intellect that is not the same thing as the cat(s) experienced. If "cat" in our experience is the same thing as the "cat" in our minds, then the object and the intelligible species would be identical and we would somehow share in that cat's nature.
Now, suppose there is some thing that completely evades our senses. It is touchless, tasteless, soundless, without smell, and invisible. How can that thing be knowable? What, then, would be its likeness? Without a likeness, it has no "intellectual species" whereby its likeness is impressed upon the mind.
One such thing, as Lewis Carroll might suggest, is the Jabberwock. What is a Jabberwock? Well, "it did gyre and gimble in the wabe"; its "borogoves" were "all mimsy." The only thing we seem to know that it has claws. "But," as Alice said, "it's rather hard to understand!" And why?--simply because it has no likeness to anything we know and thus we have no basis of comparison in order to form an impression in our minds of what a Jabberwock is. In other words, we cannot conceive of an intelligible species of a Jabberwock.
If the Jabberwock completely eludes our experience of all knowable things, and if there is absolutely nothing we can compare it to, the next best thing towards figuring out just what a Jabberwock is would be to be a Jabberwock.
Let's kick things up a notch, as Emeril Lagasse would say.
What is God? Or rather, what is the divine essence? On the basis of the Theophany at Sinai, "I AM who I AM," the most anyone can say about the essence of God is that he is very existence itself. You and I are 'existence plus human nature plus accumulation of experience.' God, on the other hand, is pure existence or, as St Thomas Aquinas was oft to say, ipsum Esse subsistens, "self-subsistent Essence." But by the fact that God is "pure" existence means there are no attributes whereby we can describe him. (Theologians call this the "simplicity" of God.)
Without attributes, we have nothing to compare God with, and therefore no likenesses. Nothing in all of Creation can be used as a basis of comparison of the divine essence. We may use analogies to describe processions and persons in the Trinity, and the Lord Jesus Christ has revealed the Father, but, as St John the Evangelist said, "No one has ever seen God..." (Jn 1:18). This is the basis of the precept against making images of God: Since God's essence is pure existence, there is nothing with which we are able to depict him. It is as the holy prophet Jeremiah said, "O most mighty, great, and powerful, the Lord of hosts is Thy Name. Great in counsel, and incomprehensible in thought" (Jer 32:18, 19).
Now we have a real challenge. St Thomas agrees with Aristotle that we, as rational creatures, "by nature desire to know." The only things we can know are true things (or at least things which seem to be true, which is why some people believe lies). More than that, human minds desire to know the causes of things. Since (1) God is very Being, and 'being' and 'truth' are interchangeable terms, it follows that God is very Truth, so human minds naturally desire to know God, and since (2) God is the uncaused Caused all things that were, are, and evermore shall be, the human mind naturally desires to know this Cause.
But how are we to know this First Truth and Cause of All Things if we are unable to have an intelligible species impressed in our minds? The total lack of any likenesses whatsoever to the divine essence means that we desire to know the essence of this Truth and uncaused Cause, but we have a dead end, a desire with no apparent way of satisfying that desire.
St Thomas has an answer to our question. In the first place, the only way something is knowable is to have an intelligible species in the mind, but without any likeness as a basis of comparison, God must, as it were, 'turn on the lightswitch':
Previous discussion has brought out the fact that no creature is associated with God in genus. Hence the essence of God cannot be known through any created species whatever, whether sensible or intelligible. Accordingly, if God is to be known as He is, in His essence, God Himself must become the form of the intellect knowing Him and must be joined to that intellect, not indeed so as to constitute a single nature with it, but in the way an intelligible species is joined to the intelligence. For God, who is His own being, is also His own truth, and truth is the form of the intellect.
Whatever receives a form, must first acquire the disposition requisite to the reception of that form. Our intellect is not equipped by its nature with the ultimate disposition looking to that form which is truth; otherwise it would be in possession of truth from the beginning. Consequently, when it does finally attain to truth, it must be elevated by some disposition newly conferred on it. And this we call the light of glory, whereby our intellect is perfected by God, who alone by His very nature has this form properly as His own. In somewhat the same way the disposition which heat has for the form of fire can come from fire alone. This is the light that is spoken of in Psalm 35: 10: “In Your light we shall see light” (Compendium theologiae, §105, emphases added).
St Thomas tells us that this is the true meaning of the Psalm: "In Your light," that is, the brightness whereby we can see You, "we shall see light," that is, see You Yourself. It is precisely this joining of the graced soul to God such that it becomes "connatural" to him that so illumines the soul to behold the Lord's glory: "The faculty of seeing God, however, does not belong to the created intellect naturally, but is given to it by the light of glory, which establishes the intellect in a kind of 'deiformity'" (S.th. 1a, q. 12, art. 6, resp.).
After the Last Day, this will be our experience (if we persevere in the following of Christ!), as that is the meaning of the Seer of Patmos' vision describing the Heavenly Jerusalem with all of those glittering stones--they each refract the light of glory that we will experience from God:
And I saw no temple in the City, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no nee of sun or moon to shine upon it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light all nations shall walk... (Apoc 21:22-24).
This is why St Thomas was able to say:
Now this increase of the intellectual powers is called the illumination of the intellect, as we also call the intelligible object itself by the name of light of illumination. And this is the light spoken of in the Apocalypse (Apoc. 21:23): "The glory of God hath enlightened it"--viz. the society of the blessed who see God. By this light the blessed are made "deiform"--i.e. like to God, according to the saying: "When He shall appear we shall be like to Him, and [Vulg.: 'because'] we shall see Him as He is" (1 Jn. 2:2) (S.th., 1a, q. 12, art. 5, resp.).
I'm reminded of one of my favourite praise-and-worship songs, and perhaps this is where it would be best to close this post, though there are many more things to be said about the lumen gloriae, especially Christ's experience of it during His life. And so:
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