Mysticism of Thomas Kempis: Nature and Grace

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Namaste All Advaitins,

 

Two Thomases have been mentioned in the list of late, Thomas a Kempis and

Thomas the Apostle aka Doubting Thomas. His gospel is regarded as

containing some genuine elements mixed in with the purely apocryphal. Prof

VK regards his gospel as having nondual inspiration but it is a third

Thomas who has the clearest most intellectually satisfying expression of

the purest nondual intuition drawn from the same well as Advaita. He is

Thomas Aquinas, the mediaeval interpreter of Aristotle. The modern

champion of Thomism is Jacques Maritain, the distingusihed French

philosopher who helped to draft some of the United Nations Declaration on

Human Rights. He writes in 'The Range of Reason' :

 

"Hence, one understands how, in the act of intellection, dependency with

respect to the object is reconciled with active spontaneity, how in this

act all the vitality comes from the faculty or the subject, all the

specfication comes from the object, so that the intellection proceeds

entirely from the intellect and entirely from the object, because at the

instant when it knows, the intellect is, immaterially, the object itself;

the knower in the act of knowing is the known itself

in the act of being known; before knowing our intellect is like a formless

vitality, waiting to be shaped; as soon as it has recieved from the

senses, by means of its own abstractive power, the intelligible impression

of the object, the intellect becomes that object, while carrying it,

through the concept it produces of it, to the ultimate degree of formation

and intelligible actuality, in order at the same time to raise to the

supreme point its own immaterial identification with the object."(pg.14)

 

What underlies the capacity for knowledge is what Thomas Aquinas calls

connaturality - knowing implies we are that which we know, in an

immaterial sense of course. This is what underlies, for him, all the

various orders of knowledge from sense awareness to Divine Contemplation

in which we know by participation. In this way they complement and do not

displace each other. Maritain particularly deprecates the modern heresy

of empiricism or logical positivism in which scientific knowledge is the

criterion by which all knowledge is judged. 'The meaning of a statement

is the method of its verification' was their slogan. He notes that at

different times different forms of imperialism in the field of knowledge

held sway - in the time of Plato

and Aristotle, metaphysics and philosophy; in the Middle Ages before

Aquinas there was a theological imperialism and since Descartes, Kant and

Comte science rules.

 

Best Wishes,

Michael