Kontemplasi dan Pengetahuan akan Allah: Belajar dari Rikard St. Viktor

Abstract

Can human being experience the divine reality and know God? he/she can know and experience God through faith and contemplation. This study draws attention to the two essentials in Richard's idea of St. Viktor, which are about human contemplation and knowledge of God. Contemplation is the way to arrive at the divine (or eternal) reality by departing from the contingent reality. Human being can attain divine realities through imagination, rationality, and intuition. Through contemplation that includes imagination, human reason and intuition, human being can reach three levels of heaven, a heaven filled with human spirit, namely immortality, a heaven filled with angelic spirit, the incorruptible and heaven inhabited by God, and the eternity. In order to achieve an understanding of eternity it takes faith as a precondition. Richard says faith is the foundation and source of all good, and knowledge is a manifestation and a perfection