S'UNIR À L'INTELLECT, VOIR DIEU. AVERROÈS ET LA DOCTRINE DE LA JONCTION AU CŒUR DU THOMISME

Abstract

AbstractThe article examines the relation that Aquinas' theory of the beatific vision maintains with Averroes' noetics as presented in hisGreat Commentary on the De anima. Starting with hisCommentary on the Sentences, in which the young Thomas Aquinas offers an explicit transposition of the philosophical intellection of separate substances into the Christian theological order, through to his later works where no mention of it is found, we will endeavour to present the exact nature of these borrowings and to evaluate their accuracy by questioning the conceptual coherence of Aquinas' gesture: could Aquinas base his conception of a vision of God by essence on a noetic construction which was originally part of a system judged both erroneous and contrary to faith? Can one concede theologically, concerning the relation between divine essence and intellect, what one refuses philosophically, concerning the relation between the separate intellect and the body? Although Aquinas and his followers, in the incipient quarrel, assert it to be so, we will indicate how the original paradoxical borrowing maintains something conceptually problematic at the heart of Aquinas' thinking.