Gadamer and Aquinas on Language, Being, and the Beauty of Truth

Abstract

In this article my intention will be to consider briefly how Aquinas’s discussion of the interior word serves as an analogy for the intelligible emanation of the Word from God. Creation through the Word explains the truth of things, as well as their beauty and light. Had Gadamer been more sympathetic to Thomistic thought in its original texts and not simply in what he considered to be “the dogmatic overlay superimposed on Aristotle... by Neo-Thomism”, he would have perhaps seen in Aquinas an ally in his recovery of the truth of things. I will relate the expressive character of language to being, as is found in Gadamer’s own exposition, and I will insist on the beauty of being and its light. I also refer at some length to the light of nous and of the agent intellect, which are simply mentioned by Gadamer without further development. And finally, I will end this article with a consideration of truth, whose manifestation is related to the light of beauty. Truth is explained as an event and as light.