Aquinas’s point is always that we humans are down here, while the ideas and celestial beings and the supreme eternal truths are all up there. Everything that Plato and Neoplatonists and Saint Augustine said were the most intelligible and true are also the most removed from our experience. Why? Maybe because the human mind tends to be dazzled and confused by too much divine wisdom.23 Maybe that’s why God decided to put us in the cave in the first place, Aquinas is hinting. He didn’t want us overwhelmed by too much light at once.
