Incomprehensible Certainty

<p><b>Thomas Pfau's study of images and visual experience is a tour de force linking Platonic metaphysics to modern phenomenology and probing literary philosophical and theological accounts of visual experience from Plato to Rilke.</b></p><p><i>Incomprehensible Certainty</i> presents a sustained reflection on the nature of images and the phenomenology of visual experience. Taking the image (<i>eikōn</i>) as the essential medium of art and literature and as foundational for the intuitive ways in which we make contact with our lifeworld Thomas Pfau draws in equal measure on Platonic metaphysics and modern phenomenology to advance a series of interlocking claims. First Pfau shows that beginning with Plato's later dialogues being and appearance came to be understood as ontologically distinct from (but no longer opposed to) one another. Second in contrast to the idol that is typically gazed at and visually consumed as an object of desire this study positions the image as a medium whose intrinsic abundance and excess reveal to us its metaphysical function--namely as the visible analogue of an invisible numinous reality. Finally the interpretations unfolded in this book (from Plato Plotinus Pseudo-Dionysius John Damascene via Bernard of Clairvaux Bonaventure Julian of Norwich and Nicholas of Cusa to modern writers and artists such as Goethe Ruskin Turner Hopkins Cézanne and Rilke) affirm the essential complementarity of image and word visual intuition and hermeneutic practice in theology philosophy and literature. Like Pfau's previous book <i>Minding the Modern</i> <i>Incomprehensible </i><i>Certainty</i> is a major work. With over fifty illustrations the book will interest students and scholars of philosophy theology literature and art history.</p>