Knowledge, Love, and Ecstasy in the Theology of Thomas Gallus

Eternally Spiraling into God: Knowledge, Love, and Ecstasy in the Theology of Thomas Gallus provides the first full study of Thomas Gallus (d. 1246) in English and represents a significant advance in his distinctive theology. Boyd Taylor Coolman argues that Gallus distinguishes, but never separates and intimately relates two "international modalities" in human consciousness: the intellective and the affective. Both of these are for Gallus quite explicitly forms of cognition. Coolman shows that Gallus conceives these two cognitive modalities as co-existing in a mutually and reciprocally interdependent manner and that this interdependence is given a particular character by Gallus' anthropological appropriation of the Dionysian concept of hierarchy. Because Gallus conceives of the soul as "hierarchized" on the model of the angelic hierarchy, the intellect-affect relationship is fundamentally governed by the nature of Dionysian hierarchy. A Dionysian hierarchy is a dynamic state of being that has two simultaneous valences: ascent and descent. Two crucial features are noteworthy in this regard: firstly, in ascending the valence, the lower is subsumed by the higher; secondly, in the descending valence, the higher communicates with the lower according to the vapacity or nature of the lower. When Gallus posits a higher, affective cognitio above an intellective cognitio at the highest point in the ascending valence, accordingly, this affective form both builds upon and subsumes/transforms the intellective form. This means that affectivity is a form of cognition, even as it differs from intellective cognition, and that the character (intensity and profundity) of this higher, affective cognition is, to some extent, a function of the character (intensity and profundity) of the lower, intellective cognition. Conversely, the character of the higher, affective cognition in accordance with its intellective modality. That is, its capacity for intellection is increased by the intensity of affection.

Boyd Taylor Coolman is Associate Professor of Theology at Boston College. His research interests are in the history of Christian theology, particularly in the medieval period. He is especially interested in the life and thought of the Victorines in the first half of the twelfth century and in developments in early thirteenth-century scholastic theology at the Universities of Paris and Oxford. His publications include The Theology of Hugh of St. Victor: An Interpretation (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Knowing God by Experience: The Spiritual Senses in the Theology of William of Auxerre (Catholic University of America, 2016).