Gevoel and Illumination: Bavinck, Augustine, and Bonaventure on Awareness of God

This essay offers a reflection that seeks to clarify and complement Steven Duby’s God in Himself, especially on the natural awareness of God. First, in response to Duby’s assessment of Bavinck’s critique of certain forms of natural theology, I draw particularly from Cory Brock’s recent monograph on Bavinck’s critical appropriation of particular strands of post-Kantian romantic philosophy in order to articulate the affective dimensions of general revelation. This explains Bavinck’s preference for the term “general revelation” over “natural theology,” for the former emphasizes humanity’s pre-categorical dependence on God’s revealing work internal to the human psyche, manifesting as the feeling (gevoel) of dependence. Second, then, following Bavinck’s own connection of Schleiermacher to Augustine’s turn to the subject, I provide a retrieval of Augustine’s and Bonaventure’s accounts of illumination, which escalates the agent’s dependence on God’s revelation to a maximal degree.