Summa I, Q.14, aa.14–15: God's Knowledge of Statements and Why It Never Changes; Does Truth Require We Know Things as They Are?

Orientation #

He opens “Now it should be a little easier,” continuing straight into a. 14 from the previous article; no explicit reference to last time except “as has been said above” (Thomas’s own phrase) and recalling “our study of logic.” At the end he says he should “open this now here or not here” (moving to what follows). The previous class treated a. 13 on future contingents and eternity; the next finishes q. 14 with a. 16 and begins q. 15 on ideas.

The class, in order #

1. Article 14: does God know statements? (“It seems that God does not know”) #

Point: God knows all enunciables, but by one simple understanding, not by composing and dividing.

• Recall from logic: Thomas following Aristotle divides the acts of reason logic directs into three in order: (1) understanding what something is (what a man, a dog, an animal is); (2) composing or dividing, forming an affirmative statement (“man is an animal”) or a negative (“man is not a dog”), each an enunciable; [third act not spelled out].
• Obj. 1: knowing enunciables belongs to our understanding as it composes and divides; God is altogether simple; so he doesn’t know them. His gloss: this only shows he doesn’t know them the way we do.
• Obj. 2: all knowledge is through likeness; God is simple, enunciables are composed (subject, predicate, copula, “is / is not”); so no likeness in him.
• Sed contra: Psalm 93, God knows the thoughts of men; some thoughts are statements (“I think that man is an animal”), so he knows them.
• Response, as he reads it: (1) to form statable things is in the power of our understanding; (2) God knows whatever is in his own power or the creature’s (said above); so (3) God knows all statable things able to be formed. But the way he knows is not the way the thing is, and there is no falsehood in that.
• Preparatory point, “you have to really see it in human knowing first”: we know in separation what does not exist in separation. Philosopher / grandfather: students know him as a philosopher without knowing him as a grandfather; the nurses know him as a grandfather without knowing him as a philosopher; neither is false, though the two do not exist apart in him. We can even know things in the reverse order of their coming to be, without falsehood. Once seen in us, it is “not so strange” that God’s way of knowing is not the way things are.
• Student interjection: everything is known because he created it; his correction: God knew them before they were created too.
• Just as he knows material things immaterially and composed things simply, so he knows statables without making statements: through simple understanding of the essence of each thing. Our case contrasted: we understand what a man is but not everything that can be said of man, because our understanding “runs from one thing to another” (Shakespeare quoted: “large discourse, looking before and after”). Triangle: from the form by which I understand what a triangle is I do not see the Pythagorean theorem; I must reason to the interior angles equalling two right angles. Hence, knowing things apart, we must recompose them by statement. God’s understandable form is his essence and suffices to show all things: knowing his essence he knows every essence and whatever can happen to it.
• Reply 1: the argument would hold if he knew enunciables in the manner of enunciables.
• Reply 2: the composition of a statement signifies some being of the thing; God, through his being (= his nature) is the likeness of all things signified by statements. Every affirmative statement says something is something; God is being itself; knowing his being perfectly he knows every way it can be partaken of; “he wouldn’t know himself perfectly if he didn’t know he could be partaken of.” “Marvelous mind there.”
• Aside: Macbeth’s “life is a walking shadow” set beside a church father in the “golden chain” [ed.: Catena aurea] calling this mortal life an umbra, a shadow of life; Macbeth’s despair, but “a certain aspect” of truth.

2. Natures are like numbers (“the natures of things are like numbers”) #

Point: illustrates how knowing himself fully God knows all that partakes of him more or less.

• Aristotle, eighth book of “Wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics VIII]: natures are like numbers. Shakespeare’s “chief good and market of his time… a beast, no more”: body + life = plant (2), + sensation = animal/beast (3), + reason = man (4). Transposed: “what is three, if it be half of four? a two, no more.”
• Two is contained in three, three in four; if four knew itself completely it would know three, two, one. Likewise in knowing myself I partly know the cat: he has sensation and some emotions; the fear he felt in the shaking cat he picked up is something he too has.
• So God, being itself (“I am who I am”), knowing himself fully knows everything that could in any way share his being.

3. Article 15: is God’s knowledge variable? (“Does he ever change his mind”) #

Point: three objections, sed contra, and the two-premise answer.

• Obj. 1: knowledge is said relative to the knowable; what implies relation to creatures is said of God “from time” (Creator); such things vary with the creature; so his knowledge varies.
• Obj. 2: what he can make he can know; he can make more than he has made; so he could know more than he knows: growth and diminution.
• Obj. 3: God knows Christ has been born; he does not now know Christ is to be born; so not everything he has known does he know.
• Sed contra (“against all this nonsense”): James (Jacob) 1:17, no change in God, nor shadow of a change.
• Response is a syllogism: minor, God’s knowledge is his very substance; major, his substance is altogether unchangeable; therefore his knowledge is altogether invariable.
• Asides: “Doesn’t he get bored? Always the same.” God must be infinite for us never to be bored in the vision; Origen (as he recalls) imagined souls eventually restless and wanting to return to this kind of life—“another reason why [that view] is inappropriate.”

4. Reply 1: Lord and Creator vs. knowledge and love (“imply relations to creatures according as they are in themselves”) #

Point: names of transitive acts vary with the creature; names of immanent acts do not.

• Background he adds: these relations to creatures are not real. Aristotle first saw both that some relations exist only in the mind and the mixed case: real from one end, not from the other. Knower and known: I am affected by and really related to what I know; the thing is not really related to me, though we understand it by a “return relation.”
• Thomas’s first answer: Lord, Creator imply relations to creatures as they are in themselves; God’s knowledge implies relation to creatures as they are in God (the thing understood is in the one understanding; “even Empedocles” saw the known must be in the knower somehow); creatures in God are in him invariably.
• Distinction underlying it: creating is an activity with an external product; knowing and loving remain in the doer. So God is not Creator before creatures exist, but can know what does not yet exist in itself.
• Thomas’s second answer: Lord/Creator follow on acts understood to terminate in the creatures themselves, hence are said variously of God with the variation of creatures; knowledge and love follow on acts understood to be only in God, hence predicated without variation. He notes Thomas does not here go into the point that the relation is not real.
• Aristotle, beginning of Nicomachean Ethics: the distinction of transitive act with external product vs. act without one; English “doing” divided into doing and making. Not irrational to divide a common name against a species that gets a new name, as animal is divided into man and beast (biology professor vs. girlfriend calling you “an animal”), or two into two and two-plus-one (three). The member that adds something noteworthy gets the new name; the other keeps the common one. Stock example: “four fingers and a thumb”—the opposable thumb stands out (for holding your beer). Making adds a product, not a more perfect doing: the philosopher finishes his doing with nothing to show, the carpenter has a house or chair. Creation is like making; understanding and loving like doing. If I know and love you and you don’t know it, you are unaffected (“he doesn’t even know I exist”); but it is not accidental to making that it affects something outside.

5. Reply 2: can God know more than he knows? (“knowledge of vision”) #

Point: he knows also what he can make and has not made, so no growth in knowledge.

• From being able to make more it does not follow he can know more, unless “know” is referred to the knowledge of vision (of what is, was, or will be, known in act according to some time) as opposed to knowledge of simple intelligence (what he or we could make but never will).
• Knowing that things able to be are not, or able not to be are, shows not variable knowledge but knowledge of the variability of things. Knowledge would be variable only if he first did not know then knew; impossible, since whatever is at any time he knows in eternity all at once; so what is posited at some time has eternally been known. Hence do not concede “God can know more than he knows,” since it implies a before and after. Aside: “so he has no joy of discovery.”

6. Reply 3: the nominalists and “Christ is born” (“the ancient nominalists said”) #

Point: the same enunciable is not preserved across tenses, yet God’s knowledge is not thereby variable.

• The ancient nominalists held “Christ will be born / is born / has been born” to be the same enunciable since they signify the same thing (the birth), so whatever God knows he has known and will know. Thomas: false, (a) because diversity of parts of the narration causes diversity of enunciables, and (b) because a statement once true would be always true, against the Philosopher in the Categories: “Socrates sits” is true while he sits, false when he rises.
• His logic point: two divisions of statement, into affirmative/negative and into true/false; which divides the genus into kinds? The same statement (same subject, predicate, copula), “Berquist is sitting,” passes from true to false when the thing changes, but an affirmative never becomes negative. So affirmative/negative are the kinds (one joins, one separates Berquist and sitting); true/false, though “in some sense more important” (Aristotle treats the opposition of true and false in that book), are not kinds. Three cases: always true (“two is half of four”), always false (“two is half of five”), sometimes each (“Berquist is sitting”).
• Conceded: “whatever God knew he knows” is not true if referred to the enunciables themselves. Yet no variation: as he knows without change that one thing sometimes is and sometimes is not, so he knows a statement is sometimes true and sometimes false. His knowledge would vary only if he knew enunciables by way of enunciables, as we do; our knowledge varies (i) in truth and falsity, keeping the same opinion while the thing changes (I still think Berquist sits after he stood), or (ii) by diverse opinions (I now think he stands: no falsehood, but a different thought). Neither in God. Aside: in logic class, “if God were present he’d say, I don’t make statements, although I know them.”

7. The central question of philosophy (“does truth require that the way we know be the way things are”) #

Point: the answer is no, seen first in our knowledge; this runs through the whole.

• Aristotle, books of Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics], second book, natural philosophy vs. mathematics: the mathematician knows quantity in separation from sensible matter and is not false, though it does not exist so. Plato held he would be false unless quantity exists apart, hence posited a mathematical world beside the sensible. Aristotle: the question is whether quantity is knowable without sensible matter; if so, no falsity, unless the mind says (as Plato) that it exists apart.
• Same question about universals: no man appears in the definition of man (two-footed animal having reason), so man is known apart from all men, who alone exist. Plato posited the world of forms corresponding to the definitions Socrates had shown to be the road to certainty (no odd number is even, no prime is even—known through definitions). Argument reconstructed: if we know truly through definitions, and definitions give the universal apart from singulars, and truth requires knowing as things are, then universals exist apart. Aristotle: you can know what Socrates and Plato have in common apart from their differences without falsity, unless you say it exists apart.
• Thomas commenting on that passage goes to something easier: philosopher and grandfather in the same individual; each knowable without the other; incomplete is not false (one is false only if one denies the other: “this philosopher is not a grandfather”). Email correspondents who don’t know whether he is white or black; a blind student who knows him as philosopher but not as white, “not knowing me falsely.” Principle: if something is knowable without another, it is not false to know it without the other, even if it cannot be without it. Thomas’s easy case is accidental (one can be a philosopher without being a grandfather); Aristotle then applies it to harder cases where the thing cannot exist apart (man and individual men). “One of the greatest discoveries in the history of human thought.”
• Boethius (c. 480–525, “one of my teachers”), opening the fifth book on God’s eternal knowledge of temporal things: Lady Wisdom introduces Aristotle as her true follower—fitting, since the question is about truth itself.

8. Digression: knowing by making (“we only can know what we make”) #

Point: modern scientism’s chain from “we know by experiment” to “we are God” fails at the first step, because the way we know need not be the way things are.

• Answering a student’s earlier question about science: the experimental way of knowing, once customary, is taken as the only way; Kant begins, Marx concludes that we know only what we make, are the beginning and end of what we make, hence know ourselves as God, the external maker having been a fancy. Each step is a jump; Heisenberg noted complications at the subatomic level, yet by making one may still discover how things are.
• Examples that making a situation reveals a man as he is, not as you made him: Parolles in All’s Well That Ends Well, captured by disguised friends, spills the battle plan: “Who cannot be betrayed by a plot?” (Parolles = “words” in French). Joke: the million-dollar hypothetical, then twenty dollars—“we already know what you are, we’re just dickering about the price.” Othello: Desdemona, truly chaste, cannot conceive doing it “for the whole world”; Iago’s wife would, and deny it next morning—innocence can’t grasp evil in others. “Every man has his price”; “an offer you couldn’t refuse”; “the moment of truth.” CIA movie: candidates left waiting two weeks are secretly observed; those who fall for the woman are not spy material. Plato (“I guess the Republic” [ed.: his attribution, uncertain]): young men at drinking parties observed for weakness of character. You made the party, not the man’s weakness to booze or women; you know him as he is by what you made.
• Closing: the first time through theology one doesn’t understand everything, and each pass shows how it depends on things learned first in philosophy—Natural Hearing II, other parts, finally the last books of Wisdom—as one theorem in geometry builds on another all the way back.

His words #

• enunciable / statable things: Thomas’s enuntiabilia; he prefers “statements” [ed.: propositions]
• composing or dividing: the second act of reason, forming affirmative or negative statements
• understandable form: the species by which we understand [ed.: intelligible species]
• likeness: what all knowledge is through; God’s being is the likeness of everything signified by statements
• Wisdom (eighth book of, last books of): [ed.: Metaphysics]
• Natural Hearing: [ed.: Physics]
• knowledge of vision vs. knowledge of simple intelligence: of what is/was/will be vs. of what could be but never will
• doing vs. making: act remaining in the doer vs. act with an exterior product (transitive); creation is like making, knowing and loving like doing
• return relation: how we understand the non-real relation of the known to the knower
• golden chain: [ed.: Catena aurea]
• the central question of philosophy: does truth require that the way we know be the way things are? Answer: no
• real relation / relation only in the mind / mixed relation (real from one end only)

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 14, a. 14 (objections, sed contra Psalm 93, response, replies 1–2)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 14, a. 15 (objections, sed contra James 1:17, response, replies 1–3)
• handout “The First Statement and King of Statements,” p. 3 (verified source; probably the division of statement in segment 6, not named in transcript)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Categories (statement true then false as the thing changes)
• Aristotle, Physics (Natural Hearing) II, natural philosophy vs. mathematics
• Aristotle, Metaphysics (Wisdom) VIII, natures like numbers; “last books of Wisdom”
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, beginning (transitive vs. immanent act)
• Thomas’s commentary on the Physics passage (inferred)
• Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy V, opening
• Plato, Republic (as he recalls) on observed drinking parties
• Shakespeare: Macbeth (“walking shadow”), Hamlet (inferred: “large discourse,” “chief good and market of his time”), All’s Well That Ends Well (Parolles), Othello (Desdemona and Emilia)
• DHB Vol I – The First Philosophers, p. 103 (verified source; place in the class unclear)

His questions #

• Does God know statements? Yes, all statable things that can be formed, but by simple understanding of his essence, not by composing and dividing.
• How can the simple God bear a likeness to composed statements? Every statement signifies some being; God is being itself, so his nature is the likeness of all that statements signify.
• Does God ever change his mind—is he stubborn? His knowledge is his substance, which is unchangeable; so his knowledge is invariable.
• Doesn’t he get bored, always the same? God must be infinite for us never to be bored; Origen’s restless souls are inappropriate.
• Why does man get a new name while beast keeps “animal” (and three a new name while two keeps “two”)? The member adding something noteworthy gets the new name; likewise making vs. doing.
• Can God know more things than he knows? Not to be conceded, except as “knowledge of vision”; it would imply a before and after in him.
• Which division of statement is into kinds: affirmative/negative or true/false? Affirmative/negative; the same statement passes from true to false, never from affirmative to negative.
• Does truth require that the way we know be the way things are? No; seen first in our own knowing (mathematician, universals, philosopher/grandfather).
• If we know by making, do we know only what we make? No; you can make the circumstances that reveal a man as he is, not as you made him.