by incompleteness; it needs, it demands, human participation to complete it:
Mysterium Christi. Only this unique mystery possesses infinite depths, and the mind of each of the faithful has varying capacities for comprehending it. From this there results for every spiritual understanding, as we have seen more especially for anagogy, an incurable character of incompleteness. But, as the Gregorian term volatus for anagogy has already indicated, this fatal incompleteness is to be considered above all in its positive and dynamic aspect. The Word of God does not cease to create and to hollow out within the one who readies himself for it the capacity to receive it, with the result that the faithful understanding can increase indefinitely. By allegory the old text can always let more novelty shine through;25 the new mystery can always be more interiorized and introduce eternity more deeply into the heart.26
The poet Ezra Pound charmingly characterizes the process of meaning as “the dance of the intellect among the words.” The mysterious accomplishment of that mystical interiorization and completion comes about via the sensus communis of the body and has been practiced for millennia by the poets. The common sense that Aquinas discusses, the sensus communis, is itself an interior sense, the interior aspect of the sense of touch, of which all of the other bodily senses are extensions or articulations.27 The common sense is as it were the etymology of each and every one of the exterior bodily senses, just as anagogy is as it were the etymology of each and every one of the other Scriptural senses. St. Thomas makes the same observation: “The interior sense is called ‘common’ not by predication, as if it were a genus; but as the common root and principle of the exterior senses.”28
That is, the common sense is the “place” where the exterior (“proper”) senses meet: it is identical with touch, for us the enveloping sense, the environment of the whole body.
The proper sense judges of the proper sensible by discerning it from other things which come under the same sense; for instance by discerning white from black or green. But neither sight nor taste can discern white from sweet: because what discerns between two things must know both. Wherefore the discerning judgment must be assigned to the common sense; to which, as to a common term, all apprehensions of the senses must be referred: and by which, again, all the intentions of the senses are perceived; as when someone sees that he sees. For this cannot be done by the proper sense, which only knows the form of the sensible by which it is immuted, in which immutation the action of sight is completed and from which immutation follows another in the common sense which perceives the act of vision.29
Touch, then, as all of the bodily senses at once, is the locus of what we call synesthesia;30 equally, anagogy is the locus of intellectual synesthesia, the scriptural sense that is home to, and that consists of, all of the senses of Scripture taken together. Ergo, just as the bodily senses are particulars of the common sense of touch, so the other scriptural senses are particulars of the anagogical sense. The home of both modes of synesthesia is of course the human soul, that which animates the body and makes it human. There, the two modes of synesthesia are in active interface, active interchange.
Gilson argues that “there are not two conceivable solutions of the problem of knowledge, one for the [physical] senses, another for the intelligence”:
Sensible knowledge and intellectual knowledge can be, and indeed are, two different species or two different steps of the same kind of operation, so they rest inevitably upon a single explanation. If it were necessary to introduce an ideal cleavage in universal order, it would fall between the animal and the plant, not between the animal and man. Restrained as is its field of operation, the animal is still increased by the being of others through the sensation it experiences. It is, therefore, sharply, though still incompletely, disengaged from pure materiality.31 Hence we have to explain cognitive operations in such a way that we can attach both intelligence and sensation to the same principle and judge them by the same rules.32
We have five exterior senses: sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell; they are articulations of / divisions of tactility, the common sense.
Five is the number for expression, for the exterior world. The science of rhetoric has five divisions. Words are modes of experience,33 and are themselves experiences; a language is an organ of perception (poetic knowledge).
Aquinas equates the common sense with the soul,34 the “common” sense, meaning all of the senses at once. I now take this understanding to apply to the four inward senses: together they form a complementary kind of common sense.
It is essential to bear in mind that there are not two human souls, one inward and one outward, but one human soul with twin sensitivities. St. Thomas deals with this and the related matters in the Summa Theologica as follows:
According to the Philosopher, Metaphysics viii (Did. vii. 2), difference is derived from the form. But the difference which constitutes man is rational,which is applied to man on account of his intellectual principle. Therefore the intellectual principle is the form of man.35
Then the Respondeo:
We must assert that the intellect which is the principle of intellectual operation is the form of the human body. For that whereby primarily anything acts is a form of the thing to which the act is to be attributed: for instance, that whereby a body is primarily healed is health, and that whereby the soul knows primarily is knowledge; hence health is a form of the body and knowledge is a form of the soul and as life appears through various operations in different degrees of living things, that whereby we primarily perform each of all these vital actions is the soul. For the soul is the primary principle of our nourishment, sensation, and local movement; and likewise of our understanding. Therefore this principle by which we primarily understand, whether it be called the intellect or the intellectual soul, is the form of the body. This is the demonstration used by Aristotle (De Anima,ii, 2).... It follows therefore that the intellectual principle is the proper form of man.36
Latin had no single word for the Greek word logos, so the phrase ratio atque oratio was used, and with this translation the alliance of Grammar (literary encyclopedism) and Rhetoric (transformation) was cemented. De Lubac positions Grammar as follows:
“The art of Donatus,” indeed, that “fundamental discipline,” “the origin and foundation of the liberal arts,”37 was more than a simple technique concerned with language, more too than that “explication of the poets” about which Saint Isidore of Seville was still talking. In the form of culture that prevailed in the first Middle Age, as a result of a process to which christianity was otherwise alien, the whole life of the mind develops, so to speak, under its sign. “Grammar” here has become a “tool of intellectual research,”38 comprising the totality of the rules that govern discourse and thereby those that govern thought. “It is necessary,” says a capitulary of charlemagne, whose influence was immense, “to know the figures of words and thoughts to comprehend the mysteries of Holy Scripture.”39 The discussion instituted about the modi significandi therefore extended, in fact, albeit in a still indirect manner, implicit or ill-perceived, to the modi intelligendi. The “science of speaking correctly” was close to the “science of speaking truly.”40 Under Grammar, “the most elaborated form of profane knowledge,” logic was concealed,41 and the latter was already heavy with metaphysics.42
The grammatical logos43 (the logos spermatikos), on the one hand, has four divisions: the four senses of Scripture-historical, allegorical, moral, and anagogical—and, on the other hand, has four causes: formal, efficient, material, and final (for reading and interpreting the Book of Nature).
The soul is as it were a medium, so structured to accept, to house, the logos of faith. That the soul is the formal cause of the body can
