Summa I, Q.14, a.13: Does God Know Future Contingents? Eternity, Boethius, and the Composed and Divided Senses

Orientation #

He opens: “we’re up to the thirteenth article, which is another article on these special difficulties of what God knows”; he recalls “as we learned already in this question” that God’s knowledge is his substance, and “the treatise on the substance of God” that it is eternal, and “when we studied the third book about the soul” that reason does not think without images (prev. lecture not needed to resolve these). He points forward to the treatise on the Trinity. Ends: “maybe take a little break here.” The previous class treated a.12 (whether God knows infinite things); the next continues with a.14 and a.15.

The class, in order #

1. The question: what a future contingent is (“what do you mean by contingent”) #

The problem of the article set up from the definition of the contingent.

• Contingent: what is able to be and not be.
• Present contingent vs. future contingent: when present it has “a kind of stability” (you see me sitting, so you know I’m sitting); in the future “you can’t really know that” (will I be sitting or not?).
• Example: in Shakespeare’s plays, before a great battle a man goes to rest not knowing where he will lie tomorrow night; “maybe you’ll lie in your grave.”
• So the problem: how can God know future contingents?

2. The three objections and the sed contra (“From a necessary cause proceeds a necessary effect”) #

He reads the objections, glossing the logic.

1. From a necessary cause a necessary effect; God’s knowledge is a cause of things; ipsa refers back to God’s knowledge; since it is necessary, the things known are necessary, so not contingent. Sense: “how could you have a necessary knowledge of things that are not necessary?”
2. Every conditional (if-then) statement whose antecedent is absolutely necessary has an absolutely necessary consequent, for antecedent stands to consequent as premises to conclusion, and from necessary premises only a necessary conclusion follows, as proven in Posterior Analytics I, Aristotle’s book on demonstration (“the conclusion follows necessarily and is necessarily true”). But “if God knows this to be future, this will be” is true, since God’s knowledge is only of true things; the antecedent is absolutely necessary because eternal and signified as past; so the consequent is necessary.
3. Everything known scientifically by God must be, since everything known scientifically by us must be, and God’s science is more certain; but no future contingent is necessary to be.

• “But against all this nonsense” Psalm 32: he who fashions one by one their hearts, who understands all their doings; the doings of men are contingent as subject to free will (“they say free judgment”); so God knows future contingents.

3. The body: contingent in itself vs. contingent in its cause (“something contingent can be considered in two ways”) #

The general reason, then the key distinction.

• General reason: God knows all things, not only in act but in the ability of the creature; some of these are future contingents for us; so God knows them.
• Aside: Anselm defines theology as fides quaerens intellectum, “seeking” because you never fully understand it.
• Distinction: (A) the contingent in itself, as already in act, is present, not future; though it could be otherwise it is “determined to one” (my sitting now); so it can be infallibly under certain knowledge “as example to the sense of sight”: when I see Socrates sitting. (B) The contingent in its cause is considered as future and as not yet determined to one or the other, since a contingent cause “has itself to opposites” (should I have this for dinner or not); so it is not subject with certitude to knowledge; whoever knows a contingent effect only in its cause has only a conjectural knowledge.
• On the word: cognitio in Latin is broader than our “knowledge”; in English “do you know that, or you just think that?” asks whether you are sure; conjecturalis he would translate “guess”: reasonable, educated, or wild, “but in any case still a guess.”
• Examples of people “paid to guess”: the weatherman, the stock-market man, economists (paid by government and industry), even the doctor guessing what is wrong with you and testing on that guess; Einstein: a scientific theory is a system of guesses, and even when confirmed it is a confirmed guess.
• Example of knowing the effect in its cause: the waitress at the little restaurant in Quebec says “petit steak” as he walks in, a good guess from knowing his will, but “sometimes they just get fed up with it”; you can guess but not know what Berquist orders tonight.

4. God knows contingents as in act: eternity (“remember the definition of eternity”) #

God knows contingents not only in their causes but as each is in act in itself; this requires that God’s knowledge, identical with his substance, is not in time.

• Boethius’s definition (elements already in Plato, who saw there is no before and after in eternity): tota simul et perfecta possessio vitae interminabilis, the all-at-once perfect possession of unending life. It must be understood through the definition of time and the now of time.
• Two negations: (i) no beginning and no end; (ii) no before and after (simul). People who think of eternity as endless time have only part of it. Aristotle in Categories ch. 12 takes up the meanings of before and after and in ch. 13 simul, “hama” in Greek.
• Example: even if he, at seventy-one today, were alive every year before and after without limit, he would not be eternal, since one year would be before another.
• Why hard to understand: our reason does not think without images (De Anima III, as studied); the proper object of our reason is something imaginable, and images involve the continuous and time; every statement has a verb, which as Aristotle points out in the Peri Hermeneias signifies with time. So we know eternity only negatively, as without beginning and end and without before and after, the opposites of what is measured by time.

5. Boethius: truth does not require that we know as things are (“the way we know be the way things are”) #

How God’s knowledge of temporal things can be eternal.

• Boethius, Consolation book V: Lady Wisdom comes to console him and calls Aristotle her true follower; Boethius must go back to Aristotle, “the first man to really think out” that truth does not require that the way we know be the way things are.
• A shadow of this in us: we truly think about the past now, though the past is not now and does not exist; our knowledge is now, the known is past. So one can know truly when the mode of knowing is not the mode of the thing.
• Applied: the future is present to God in his eternal now, as my sitting, uncertain before I came in (“a lazy old son of a gun, he’d be sitting”; “he gets carried away and jumps up”), is known for sure now it is present.
• Boethius’s contrast: the now that flows makes time; the now that stands still makes eternity.

6. Reading on: God does not know successively (“God does not know contingent things successively”) #

Contingents come to be successively, but God does not know them one after another as they are in their own being, which is how we know them (we read the news “day after day”; “what’s new?”); he knows them semel [ed.: the text’s simul; he uses “semel”].

• He finds it “kind of marvelous” that Aristotle takes up before/after and then together both in Categories 12-13 and again in “the fifth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics V]: we know “together” by negation of before and after, as Aristotle says we know equal by negation of more and less (two lines, neither longer nor shorter, are equal). So we know God’s eternity by negating before and after.
• Aside toward the Trinity: Thomas will explain why the Athanasian Creed says there is no before and after in God though the Son proceeds from the Father and the Spirit is breathed by both, eliminating every sense of “before” Aristotle distinguishes; Shakespeare’s “looking before and after” is what reason does, but for God we must negate it, and “you still got to understand before and after to negate them.”
• Student question (Kevin’s): are Father, Son and Spirit one thing or three? Answer: both, but not in the same meaning of “thing”; the Categories distinguish an absolute thing (substance, quantity, quality) from a relative thing; there are actually four relations but three persons; as relation, three things; as the substance or nature of God, one. Without seeing the equivocation Aristotle saw, “you can’t understand Kevin’s question.” “It’s not by chance that Thomas calls him the philosopher.”
• Aside on figurative speech: “are we reading Thomas now?” We read the words of Thomas; in figurative speech the meaning of the speaker’s words is not his meaning; he thinks this is metonymy (container for contained).

7. Reading on: all things present to God; the circle; prophecy (“all things which are in time are to God”) #

Because his knowledge, like his being, is measured by eternity, which tota simul takes in the whole of time, all things in time are present to God, not only because he has the reasons of things before him, “as some say,” but because his sight bears from eternity on all things in their presentiality.

• Likeness: the nows of time are points on the circumference of a circle, each before and after another; the now of eternity is outside, related to each in the same way, so things not present to each other are all present to God.
• Conclusion: contingents are known infallibly by God as subject to the divine sight in their presentness, yet are future contingents compared to their causes.
• Application: hence the fulfilment of prophecy is a motive of credibility; that God can reveal with certitude what is contingent in its causes is a sign he is speaking; recalled from the first Vatican Council (miracles and prophecies), and the Bible’s “declare to us the future, and we’ll call you gods.”

8. Reply 1: necessary first cause, contingent proximate cause (“on account of the contingent cause that is proximate”) #

Though the highest cause is necessary, the effect can be contingent through its proximate contingent cause.

• Example from the old science: the germination of the plant is contingent through its proximate cause, though the motion of the sun, the first cause, is necessary. So things known by God are contingent through proximate causes though God’s knowledge, the first cause, is necessary.
• Reverse in us: a thing necessary in itself is known by us only with probability, because things cause our knowledge and by our defect we do not know necessary things as necessary; in God the necessary knowledge has contingent effects.

9. Reply 2: the conditional and the “sophism” (“the consequent ought to be taken”) #

Thomas’s long reply, which “there’s a sophism easily made here.”

• Opinion 1 rejected: some say the antecedent “God knows this future contingent” is contingent, since though past it implies a respect to the future; but respect to the future does not remove necessity: it is necessary that it have had respect to the future, even if the future sometimes does not follow.
• Opinion 2 rejected: others say it is contingent because composed of necessary and contingent, like “Socrates is a white man”; but the contingent stands there only as the matter of the verb, not a principal part of the proposition, so its contingency has nothing to do with the proposition’s being necessary, contingent, true or false. Example: it can be true that I said “man is an ass,” just as that I said “Socrates ran” or “God is.”
• So the antecedent is absolutely necessary. Opinion 3 rejected: some grant this but say the consequent need not be absolutely necessary because the antecedent is a remote cause and the proximate cause is contingent; “but this is nothing,” for a conditional with a necessary remote cause as antecedent and a contingent effect as consequent would be false: “if the sun moves, the plant will germinate” does not follow, since in an if-then the then-part must follow necessarily.
• Thomas’s answer: when the antecedent contains something pertaining to an act of the soul, the consequent is to be taken as it is in the soul, not in itself, for the being of a thing in itself differs from its being in the soul. As “if the soul understands something, that is immaterial” means immaterial as in the understanding; so “if God has known something, it will be” means as under the divine knowledge, in its presentness, and thus it is necessary like the antecedent, “because everything that is, when it is, necessarily is,” Peri Hermeneias I.
• “That’s very subtle, huh? You got to think about that for a while.”

10. Reply 3: composed and divided sense (“everything known by God is necessary to be”) #

• He notes the objection uses cognitum rather than cognitio, the stricter word, whence “science.”
• Reply: things reduced to act in time are known by us successively in time, by God in the eternal now above time; so we, knowing future contingents as such, cannot be certain, only God whose understanding is above time.
• Second likeness (besides the circle): one walking along the road does not see those coming after him; one on the mountain top seeing the whole road sees at once all passing along it.
• So what we know must be necessary even in itself, since future contingents in themselves cannot be known by us; what God knows must be necessary as it stands under the divine knowledge, not absolutely in its proper causes.
• The distinction: “everything known by God is necessary to be” is divided and false if understood of the thing (everything God knows is a necessary thing); composed and true if understood of the saying (this thing said, known by God to be, is necessary).
• He connects this to the fallacy of composition and division. Example: can a man sit when he is standing? In the composed sense, no; divided (“at that time when I’m sitting, I could be standing”), yes. “In one sense it is, since it isn’t. I’m not sure what I’m saying.”
• Student: if something is foreknown by God, must it be? Yes taken as a whole; taken in itself, no. If God knows I’m going to sin, must I sin? The student adds the difficulties: then I’m not free or responsible, and God is author of sin. Answer: in the composed sense true, in the divided sense not; “a very, very difficult thing to not get caught up on.”
• Further objection reported: the distinction holds for forms separable from a subject (“the white is able to be black”: false of the saying, true of the thing) but not for inseparable ones (“the [unclear in recording; a thing necessarily black] is necessary as black”: false in both senses); and to be known by God is inseparable, since what God knows cannot be not known. Thomas: this would hold if “known” implied a disposition inhering in the subject; but it implies the act of the knower, so what can be attributed to the thing by itself is not attributed to it except as under the act of being known: as to be material belongs to the stone by itself but not as it is understandable.
• To fully understand these objections one must go to the Sophistical Refutations and the kinds of mistakes people make. Break.

His words #

• contingent: what is able to be and not be.
• conditional statement: an if-then statement; antecedent = the if-part, consequent = the then-part.
• free will: “they say free judgment” [ed.: liberum arbitrium].
• ability: what things are “in the ability of the creature” [ed.: potency].
• cognitio: broader than English “knowledge,” which implies being sure.
• conjecturalis, conjectural knowledge: a guess (reasonable, educated, or wild).
• fides quaerens intellectum (Anselm): belief seeking understanding.
• eternity: tota simul et perfecta possessio vitae interminabilis, all-at-once perfect possession of unending life; two negations, of beginning/end and of before/after.
• simul, hama: together, known by negation of before and after; he also says semel.
• the now that flows makes time; the now that stands still makes eternity (Boethius).
• presentiality, presentness: things as present to God’s eternal sight.
• motives of credibility: miracles and fulfilment of prophecies.
• absolute thing vs. relative thing (Categories) applied to “one thing / three things” in the Trinity.
• metonymy: container for contained (“reading Thomas”).
• composed sense vs. divided sense; fallacy of composition and division.
• “everything that is, when it is, necessarily is” (Peri Hermeneias I).
• cognitum vs. cognitio: the stricter word, whence “science.”

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 14, a. 13 (objections, sed contra, body, replies 1-3), translated and commented throughout.
• Psalm 32 (sed contra), as quoted.
• Boethius, definition of eternity, quoted in Latin.

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Posterior Analytics I (necessary conclusion from necessary premises).
• Aristotle, Categories chs. 12-13 (before and after; together); Metaphysics V (inferred, “fifth book of wisdom”) on prior/posterior and together.
• Aristotle, Peri Hermeneias (verb signifies with time; “everything that is, when it is, necessarily is,” book I).
• Aristotle, De Anima III (reason does not think without images).
• Aristotle, Sophistical Refutations.
• Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, book V.
• Plato (no before and after in eternity).
• Anselm, fides quaerens intellectum.
• Athanasian Creed; Thomas’s treatise on the Trinity; First Vatican Council on motives of credibility.
• Shakespeare (the night before battle; “looking before and after”).
• Einstein on scientific theory as a system of guesses.

His questions #

• What do you mean by contingent? What is able to be and not be.
• In the future, will I be sitting or not sitting; can you know that? No; a future contingent cannot be known, only guessed.
• Whoever knows a contingent effect only in its cause has of it what? A conjectural knowledge, a guess.
• Can you know what Berquist is going to order tonight? No, only guess (the waitress’s “petit steak”).
• Do you remember the definition of eternity, from what great thinker? Boethius: tota simul et perfecta possessio vitae interminabilis.
• Are we false in thinking about the past now? No; the way we know need not be the way the thing is.
• Are the Father, Son and Holy Spirit one thing or three things? (student) Both, in different meanings of “thing”: three relations, one substance.
• Can a man sit when he’s standing? Composed sense, no; divided sense, yes.
• If God knows I’m going to sin, must I sin? (student) True in the composed sense, not in the divided sense.