William of auxerre’s doctrine of the spiritual senses receives its fullest elaboration in his descriptions of the beatitude experienced by the blessed in the next life (in patria). For William, beatitude is realized precisely through the activity of the spiritual senses; the doctrine, in fact, stands at the heart of his understanding of the visio Dei. Furthermore, his conception of beatitude through the spiritual senses contains the fundamental structure and constitutive components of William’s general conception of human knowledge of God and is thus paradigmatic of all such knowledge.

William’s treatment of beatitude occurs in the fourth and final book...

As argued above, William envisions knowledge of God in patria as an apprehension of the manifold delectabilia divina through the soul’s spiritual senses. In addition, his conception of beatitude is not unrelated to the knowledge of God possible in via. In fact, the apprehension of God in patria is the culmination—literally, the fruition—of the knowledge of God begun in via. As such, it is the perfection of a kind of knowing that can be generalized to include other preliminary forms: knowledge of God, both in this life and the next, is the apprehension (cognoscere, percipere, sentire) of uncreated...

In his treatise on beatitude, a central feature of William’s doctrine of the knowledge of God is the assumption that the spiritual sense(s) have multiple objects. He described these objects variously, as pulchritudo, simphonia, odor, dulcedo, and suavitas, among others, and referred to them collectively as delectabilia divina. Yet, he also emphasized the singularity of the divine object of knowledge: though encountered in manifold ways, God nevertheless remains in William’s view a single object of spiritual perception. In that treatise, William offers no justification for this “manifold singularity.” In his ex professo treatment of the divine nature in Book I...

For william, the possibility of knowledge of God through God’s created effects is grounded in his doctrine of exemplarity,¹ which he introduced while describing the personal properties of the Son. William’s exemplarism posits an analogy between created and uncreated reality, on the basis of which he justifies predicating of God characteristics found in created reality. To speak, as he did in discussing beatitude, of divine suavitas, dulcedo, calor, pulchrum, or symphonia as the objects of the spiritual senses is, of course, to take up language and concepts drawn from creation. William’s doctrine of exemplarity will be examined here in detail,...

As we have seen, for William beatitude is the apprehension in the next life of the Trinity, its manifold delectabilia.¹ More precisely, fruitio consists in the acts of cognitio and dilectio, and these three are the endowments of the beatified soul. Cognitio and dilectio are the perfected acts of the rational and concupiscible powers,² acts which are enabled by the virtues of faith and charity, respectively. Into this framework, William introduced his doctrine of the spiritual senses, relating their activity directly to the virtue of faith.³ In a particularly lyrical passage that bears repeating, he proposes diverse, faith-enabled acts of...

For william, as noted at the outset of the preceding chapter, beatitude entails a role for dilectio, for the affectus or concupiscible power and its perfecting virtue, charity: “beatitude occurs in the concupiscible power through affectio or perfect dilectio.” At the same time, faith is primary, both in this life and the next, because charity depends upon faith: “charity does not delight in God nor does it have fruition of God except by faith.” This dependence, however, does not relegate charity’s role to insignificance. Rather, William will argue that ultimately charity consummates faith’s fruition, for charity’s act culminates in contact,...

Creation finds its ultimate purpose as a partial, finite expression of infinite plenitude and as a fragmentary manifestation of the fullness of divine glory: this is a conviction that William shares with later scholastic thinkers.¹ In various places throughout his Summa Aurea, most notably in his treatment of the six days of creation,² he elaborates this intuition into a profound vision of creation’s capacity, not only to reflect the self-communicating goodness of the Trinity, but in so doing to be a source of knowledge of the Creator. In this regard, as with other topics, William initiates a scholastic tradition of...

A fundamental principle in William’s theology is that all knowledge of God is mediated through created things. As noted at the end of Part II, in a seminal discussion of this principle early in the Summa Aurea, William took up the Dionysian distinction between symbolic and mystical theology in order to distinguish two kinds of created effects and two corresponding forms of theology. As described in the previous chapter, symbolic theology knows God through external creatures. Mystical theology also pertains to creatures, but to those which William calls the “interior, hidden and more worthy effects” (interiores et occultos et digniores...

As seen throughout the preceding chapters, for William the goal of human life is an experiential apprehension of God that subsumes within itself the human capacities for spiritual cognition and perception, its intellectual and affective dimensions. In that apprehension, faith’s delight and charity’s desire collaborate to find fruition in the delectabilia divina; in that apprehension, creedal scientia is taken up through the gifts of the Holy Spirit into theological intellectus and finally into an experiential sapientia. To capture the fullness of this apprehension, William has employed the ancient doctrine of the spiritual senses of the soul. Thus, faith’s visus moves...