KNOWLEDGE source of the light by which we see And it implies that there are objects of vision that may be concealed by darkness as well as revealed by light It is hard to Xesh out Augustine’s account of illumination in a way that gives a coherent set of counterparts to the items involved in the metaphor The clearest element, of course, is that God is the source of intellectual illumination, just as the sun is the source of visible light This divine illumination is supposed to explain how we humans possess ideas corresponding to the Platonic archetypes But the Ideas are not shady entities that need lighting up: they are supposed to be the most luminous entities there are If we accept that there are such things as Ideas, why is any medium needed to access them? Why not say—as Descartes was later to say—that God simply creates replicas of them within our minds when he brings our minds into existence? In evaluating Augustine’s account, let us forget what we know, or think we know, of the physics of light; let us simply consider the banal facts of (literal) illumination, facts that were as familiar to him as they are to us Light helps us to see things when light shines on the object to be seen Light shining directly in our eyes—above all the light of the sun—does not help but hinder vision Yet the divine illumination, as represented by Augustine, shines not upon the objects of intellectual vision, but on the eyes of our reason Intellectual inquiry, as this metaphor represents it, seems as hopeless a venture as driving a car at night with the headlights turned backward to shine through the windscreen The language of illumination also throws into confusion the distinction, so important for later Christian philosophers, between faith and reason It became customary to distinguish between what could be known about God in this life by unaided natural reason, and what could only be believed about him, in response to revelation and supernatural grace Illumination, in Augustine, is clearly intended to be something distinct from creation, which makes it appear to be supernatural rather than natural On the other hand, illumination seems to be necessary to enable the mind to grasp not only mysteries like the Trinity but also the most basic truths of everyday experience Augustine has much to say about faith ( Wdes) but he does not restrict the word to the later, technical, use in which it means belief in a proposition on the basis of the revealed word of God At one point he oVers a deWnition of faith as ‘thinking with assent’ (DPS 5) This deWnition became classical, 160