Divine Illumination

Abstract

Divine illumination covers a group of doctrines accounting for the human mind's knowledge of truth and cognitive certitude. All of these doctrines rely on the notion of divine influence on normal human processes of knowing and are usually linked to the image of a certifying or concept‐forming intelligible light streaming from the divinity into the human intellect. Developing from Platonic and Neoplatonic roots, a version of divine illumination appears early among Christian thinkers in the writings of Augustine. In the twelfth century, Scholastic thinkers drew upon Ibn Sīnā to work their way towards a theory of divine illumination articulated in precise, technical language, a process that culminated in what can be considered the classic form of the doctrine in the latter half of the thirteenth century, as, for instance, in Bonaventure. The fourteenth century marks for most Scholastics a rejection of that classic view.