The Knowledge of Christ II: Infused and Acquired Knowledge, and Knowing the Same Thing in Different Ways (ST III, q.9, aa.3-4)

Orientation #

He begins directly with the objections of q. 9, a. 3 and refers back to “as has been said above” and to a distinction “we met before” (the two ways a disposition stands to perfection). Verified sources: a. 3 (matched, c. 20 min) and a. 4 (matched, c. 10 min), with a long stretch after a. 4 that is probably discussion between a. 4 and q. 10. The previous class worked through aa. 1–2 (whether Christ had created knowledge and the knowledge of the blessed) and the next opens q. 10 on the beatific knowledge.

The class, in order #

1. Article 3, objections and sed contra (“all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge”) #

He reads the three objections against Christ’s having infused knowledge, then the sed contra.

• Obj. 1: other created knowledge is to blessed knowledge as imperfect to perfect; the perfect present excludes the imperfect, as face-to-face vision excludes the enigmatic vision of faith (1 Cor 13) — “faith and hope, for that matter, disappear.”
• ASR/translation note: inditi — “not innate, but endowed”; from ditare, to endow.
• Obj. 2: the more imperfect knowledge disposes to the perfect, as opinion (the dialectical syllogism, Aristotle’s third book of the fourteen books of Wisdom [ed.: Topics]) disposes to science (the demonstrative syllogism); once the term is had, motion is unnecessary.
• Obj. 3: as bodily matter is in ability to sensible form, so the possible understanding is in ability to understandable form; but matter cannot receive two forms at once, one more and one less perfect — “I can’t be very healthy and not so healthy at the same time.”
• Sed contra, Col 2:3: “against all this nonsense” — in Christ all treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden; “so he’s got it all.”

2. Body: the possible understanding must be in act (“pressed upon the mind of Christ understandable forms”) #

Point: it was fitting (decebat) that the assumed nature not be imperfect, so Christ must have infused knowledge.

1. Whatever is in ability is imperfect unless reduced to act.
2. The human possible understanding is in ability to all understandables, reduced to act by understandable forms (De Anima III).
3. Therefore the Word, united in person to Christ’s soul, impressed on his mind understandable forms for everything to which the possible understanding is in ability — as forms were impressed on angelic minds at their creation (Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram). Augustine’s twofold angelic knowledge, applied to Christ: morning knowledge (things known in the Word, beatific vision — the angels “see God face to face”) vs. evening knowledge (things known in their own nature, through given forms). So in Christ’s soul, besides the uncreated divine knowledge: blessed knowledge (the Word and things in the Word) and infused knowledge (things in their own nature, through forms proportioned to the human mind).

• Aside: you will get such forms from your guardian angel or higher angels when your soul leaves the body — joke: if you are told to “fill out this form,” you are not on the right road.

3. Reply 1: faith’s definition vs. infused forms; digression on brevity (“the substance of things hoped for”) #

Point: faith by its very definition includes the opposite of manifest vision (it is “of things not seen”), whereas infused forms include nothing opposed to blessed knowledge; so “the reason is not the same for both.”

• Heb 11 definition: Greek hypostasis = etymologically Latin substantia; this caused Trinitarian confusion (three hypostases read as “three substances”), since substantia is also used for what a thing is. Aristotle’s usual word is ousia, which lacks that etymology; he distinguishes what a thing is from the individual substance (hypostasis), without using the word.
• “Seeing is believing”: on the contrary, seeing in that sense is not believing.
• Student: does infused knowledge add anything beyond the beatific vision? Answer: in the beatific vision you see everything in seeing one thing, with no discourse; in infused knowledge there are many forms, and a discourse from one form to another (not toward the unknown), as in the angels. Example: a baptized baby who dies has the beatific vision — could he come back and do the Pythagorean theorem? Left unresolved; he compares praying to one’s guardian angel to strengthen the light of the mind when doing geometry.
• Digression, limits in calculus: a square inscribed in a circle, sides doubled, approaches the circle but never becomes it; the circle is the limit — so you know circle and polygon distinctly “by the same thought,” striving to be like an angel who by one thought knows dog, cat and horse distinctly. That people are not struck by this is “the decadence of the modern mind.” Higher angels know more and better by fewer thoughts; God knows all by one.
• His poem: God the Father said it all in one word; when that Word became man he spoke few words and said much; “he was the brevity and soul of it.”
• Great minds say more with fewer words: Locke apologises for his wordiness (too lazy to revise); the Greek orator told he is lengthening his speech replies “no, I’m shortening it”; his own experience teaching two or three sections — the second time better and shorter; “Shakespeare says brevity is a soul wisdom” [ed.: usually “the soul of wit”]; Aristotle in Wisdom VII calls something “a brevity,” which Thomas glosses as small in size but great in power.
• Student: Herodotus — islanders begging Sparta for flour give a long speech (“way too long”), return with “We need flour”: “two superfluous words.” Plato talks of this too.

4. Reply 2: disposition as road and as effect (“as a road leading to perfection”) #

Point: a disposition relates to perfection either as a road to it or as an effect proceeding from it — a distinction “we met before.”

• Example from ancient science: heat disposes matter to the form of fire (paper heats, then bursts into flame); when fire arrives the heat does not cease but remains as effect of the form.
• So opinion from the dialectical syllogism is a road to demonstrative knowledge (knowing the cause, that it is the cause, and that it cannot be otherwise), yet after demonstration is acquired the dialectical knowledge remains, “following upon” it: one who knows the cause is better able to know the probable signs from which dialectic proceeds.
• Applied to Thomas: the Summa’s objections are the dialectic of a man who has already arrived at the truth — e.g., the definition of eternity, each objection aimed at a part of the definition, preparing you to see the whole. The disputed questions have twenty or fifty objections that add less; the Summa keeps the essential ones, ordered more directly to the end.

5. Reply 3: God is the form by which we see him (“the divine essence itself is united to the blessed mind”) #

Point: blessed knowledge is not through a species that is a likeness of the divine essence (as in the First Part) but of the essence itself immediately, united to the blessed mind as understandable form to the one understanding — “we see God by God”; otherwise we would not see him as he is. Since that form exceeds the ratio of any creature, nothing prevents forms proportioned to human nature from being present at the same time.

• Why obj. 2 is “given first”: the dialectical solution is imperfect compared with demonstration; Aristotle often gives a strong reason and then a sign — Msgr. Dionne: partly to bring you back to your senses, and he can select the sign better because he sees the truth. Nicomachean Ethics: the virtuous amount to eat differs (young, active, inactive), then the example of Milo eating an ox daily — not the main argument, but “I can see that now.”
• Student: many Protestants believe the same things as Catholics but not for the same reason (God revealing and the Church proposing); they accept the Scriptures without knowing it is because of the Church (EWTN converts). Vatican II: magisterium, Scripture, tradition — none stands without the other two; “a good example of three being enough, like Aristotle says.” Thomas gives reasons, but tradition and Scripture stand behind or in harmony with him.

6. Article 4: objections, sed contra, body (“God and nature do nothing in vain”) #

Point: “experimental” here means experiential, not the modern sense. Whether Christ had knowledge acquired by experience.

• Obj. 1: whatever belongs to Christ he had most excellently; but he did not study letters (John 7: “how does he know letters, since he has not learned?”) — “the man was unlettered.”
• Obj. 2: nothing can be added to what is full; Christ’s soul was filled divinely with forms, as the angels’ — though he notes the acquired species would be of a different kind.
• Obj. 3: one who has the habit of a science acquires no new habit from what he senses (two forms of the same species cannot coexist); the habit is confirmed and increased.
• Sed contra, Heb 5:8: since he was a son, he learned obedience from what he suffered; the gloss: expertus est.
• Body: (1) nothing God planted in our nature was lacking to the assumed nature; (2) God planted not only the possible but the acting-upon understanding [ed.: agent intellect] — Aristotle, against Plato’s separated universal forms, realized what a man is does not exist apart from men, so posited a power to separate the universal from singulars, which then acts on the undergoing understanding, “like art and matter, in the spiritual order”; (3) God and nature do nothing in vain (De Caelo I), much less in Christ’s soul; what has no operation is in vain, everything being for its operation (Wisdom IX, De Caelo II); (4) the agent intellect’s operation is to make understandable forms in act by separating them from images (De Anima III, “which we studied”); (5) therefore there were in Christ forms received in the possible understanding through the agent intellect — acquired, “which some name experiential.”
• “Although elsewhere I have written otherwise” (quamvis alibi aliter scripserim): Marietti footnote to Sentences III, d. 14 and d. 18; a famous case of Thomas changing his mind — “might have grown.”
• Three modes: acquired knowledge is proper to the human mode on the part of both receiver and cause (the connatural light of the agent intellect); infused, from a light infused from above, is proportioned to the angelic nature; blessed knowledge is proper and natural to God alone (First Part). “He’s got it all” — the thesauri of Col 2:3.
• Aside: physicists would like Christ to illuminate them, but he teaches sparingly, what is necessary for salvation — not the electron, not what Caesar was really like.

7. Student: did Descartes short-circuit this? Certitude vs. precision (“dialectic proceeds from what is probable”) #

Point: Descartes built on a different foundation; he rejected dialectic because proceeding, even necessarily, from the probable yields no knowledge.

• His analogy: pointing out something on the horizon — “see the tree? the bush to the right? just left of it” — the tree and bush lead you to see the man without your seeing him through them; so dialectic leads you to see, not by proving.
• Descartes identifies certitude with precision, as he used to say when teaching the opening of Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics]; Pierre Duhem, around the turn of the century: inverse ratio between certitude and precision, like two pans of a scale.
• Examples: “How old am I? Over twenty? forty?” — sure; which decade (eighth, born 1936), which year, month, hour (his mother never told him) — more precise, less certain; the birth certificate does not settle it: his father’s records disagreed (1891 or 1892), the newspaper said 55, and the clerk “might have had a drink that day.” Weight: home scale vs. doctor’s office; state-fair guessers; the college dance scale where a boy pressed his finger to add pounds to the girl’s weight.

8. Reply 1: discovery and learning; wits, dimwits, nitwits (“best of all is the man who”) #

Point: science is acquired by discovery (invention, the chief mode, since someone must discover before teaching) or by learning from another (discipline, secondary).

• Ethics I, from Hesiod: best is he who understands by himself; next, he who listens to one speaking well; he who can do neither is useless — Thomas: useless for acquiring knowledge. His names: wits (discover by themselves), dimwits (learn from the wits), nitwits (neither).
• So it belonged to Christ to acquire knowledge more by discovery than by being taught, especially as given by God to all as teacher (Joel: “a teacher of justice”).
• Aristotle in his two culminating works (Wisdom for looking philosophy, Politics for practical) examines his predecessors: if someone is already wise, the reasonable thing is to learn from him; refusing means wanting the glory of discovery over the quickness of knowing. Bohr’s essay: quantum theory not one man’s work (Planck 1900, 1905, Bohr 1913, Heisenberg early twenties). His own example: the eight senses of “in” in Natural Hearing IV, which Aristotle does not order there; Thomas orders them in the commentary as Aristotle teaches in Wisdom V — “nobody else could have done that.”

9. Reply 2: the mind’s twofold relation (“one to superior things”) #

Point: relative to what is above it, Christ’s soul was full through infused knowledge; relative to what is below — the images, which move the mind only through the agent intellect — it also had to be perfected; the first fullness sufficed for the mind in itself, not in comparison to images.

• Aristotle: the proper object of our mind is the what-it-is of something sensed or imagined; even after understanding dog or triangle, to understand it again you imagine one.
• Why prophets’ visions come in dreams (Thomas): cut off from the senses, one is more open to what is above; Aristotle’s books on dreams and on prophesying by dreams admit the possibility. Thomas’s ordering after the three books on the soul: sense (present), memory and reminiscence (past), dreams (something of the future). Human cases of dreaming a meeting or a storm; animals sense coming storms — “watch out for Lucy,” the golden retriever (a picture for the newsletter).

10. Reply 3: different ratio of the two habits (“I don’t get another habit”) #

Point: acquired habits, defined by the mind’s comparison to images, admit no second habit of the same definition; the infused habit descends from above, not according to the ratio of images, so the reason is not the same.

• Rereading Euclid gives no second geometry, only the former habit more perfectly — “just one theorem up there”; he used to write the Pythagorean theorem on the board during exams.
• Student: does Christ’s possible intellect go from potency to act in acquiring? Yes, “but by a different form”: infused knowledge may know all plane figures by one thought, whereas thoughts from images need a different thought for triangle, circle, square. Thomas apparently did not admit this in the Sentences. Student admits not understanding the nature of infused knowledge; he agrees it is difficult.

11. Same thing known in different ways: sight and touch (“the eye knows some things that touch doesn’t”) #

Point: opponents of the Church on abortion say “that’s a matter of faith,” assuming what is known by faith cannot be known by reason; but the same thing can be known in different ways — Aristotle had two ways of knowing the earth is round.

• Sight vs. touch: touch knows no colour; sight does not really know wetness (the toy “spilled ink” that is hard metal); but both know shape — touch through hardness and resistance, sight through where the blue stops. Knowing the shape by touch does not prevent sight knowing it, though one does not have two seeings at once.
• Applied: what Christ knows by beatific, infused and acquired knowledge he does not know in the same way, and one does not destroy another; as there are things touch knows and sight does not, so some things are known by infused and not acquired knowledge, and God himself by vision alone. He may know what a triangle is by all three.
• Student: “so the knowledge he acquires he already has?” — careful: feeling a rectangle with eyes closed, then opening them, is not duplicated knowledge but knowing the same thing another way. Student’s parallel: taught universally, then meeting the singular — “scandals.”
• Student stories: the seminary lesson on too much water in the chalice, which happened the next day in a dark church (now a ribbon on the wine cruet); remedies (new chalice beforehand; go back to the consecration of the chalice; if bread not consecrated, return to that part, without drawing attention); Fr. Miceli stopping at the Our Father to ask a server whether he had said the consecration.

12. Is acquired knowledge redundant? (“he learned obedience from what he suffered”) #

• Student: Christ knows much by infused knowledge he never acquires — “he was more blessed without knowing computers.”
• Student: as God he knows the whole future, including his acquired knowledge — is acquiring it redundant? Reply: if your reason knows what seeing, hearing, tasting are, is it redundant to see and taste? Acquired knowledge includes what Heb 5:8 names: knowing the drill will hurt is not the pain at the dentist; knowing he would suffer the passion is not suffering it, which as God he could not do — so he became man. Student: tasting wine for the first time. He warns against assimilating God’s understanding to ours: God and the angel know the singular directly; we must go back to the senses (“I don’t know what my son is doing”).
• Student: then was there something God did not know before the passion, limiting his omniscience? Reply: not by experiential knowledge, but by another knowledge — as angels know bodily suffering without bodies. On God knowing evil (Thomas): in knowing himself he knows all goods partaking of his goodness, and in them their opposites. Aristotle: “good” is equivocal, since some goods have an opposite and God has none — “smart guy there, still.”

His words #

• “science of the Blessed” / “blessed knowledge”; knowledge of the Word and things in the Word [ed.: scientia beatorum]
• “inditi” — “endowed,” from ditare [ed.: usually “infused”]
• “the fourteen books of wisdom” — Aristotle’s Metaphysics; “third book” of the Organon on the dialectical syllogism [ed.: Topics]
• “ability” — [ed.: potency]; “everything that is an ability is imperfect unless reduced to act”
• “possible / undergoing understanding” and “acting upon understanding” — the agent intellect, “as they call it from the Latin”
• “morning knowledge / evening knowledge” — Augustine’s twofold angelic knowledge
• “hypostasis” = etymologically “substantia”; “usia” — Aristotle’s word for substance
• “disposition as a road / as an effect” — the two relations of disposition to perfection
• “demonstration” — syllogism making us know the cause, that it is the cause, and that it cannot be otherwise
• “experimental” knowledge — “experience,” not the modern sense; “expertus est” (gloss on Heb 5:8)
• “decebat” — it was suitable
• “quamvis alibi aliter scripserim” — although elsewhere I have written otherwise
• “invention” (discovery) vs. “discipline” (being taught)
• “wits, dimwits, nitwits” — his three grades of mind
• “Natural Hearing” [ed.: Physics]; “De Caelo et Mundo” — “the first book about the universe”
• “looking philosophy” [ed.: speculative/theoretical]
• “certitude vs. precision” — Duhem’s inverse ratio

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 9, a. 3 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 9, a. 4 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Colossians 2:3 (sed contra a. 3); Hebrews 5:8 with gloss (sed contra a. 4); Hebrews 11:1 (definition of faith); John 7 (the Jews wondering); Joel, “a teacher of justice”

Mentioned

• 1 Corinthians 13; Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram; Aristotle, De Anima III; De Caelo I and II; Metaphysics (“Wisdom”) V, VII, IX; Nicomachean Ethics I (Hesiod; Milo); Topics (“third book,” inferred); Physics IV (eight senses of “in”); Aristotle’s books on sense, memory, dreams and prophesying by dreams; Thomas, Sentences III, d. 14 and d. 18 (Marietti footnote); ST I on the beatific vision and the definition of eternity; Descartes; Locke; Duhem; Bohr; Herodotus; Plato; Vatican II on magisterium, Scripture, tradition; his poem on the Word.

His questions #

• Was there some knowledge in Christ besides the science of the blessed? Yes: infused knowledge, since the possible understanding in ability would be imperfect.
• Does infused knowledge add anything that wouldn’t be present with the beatific vision? (student) It knows through many forms with a discourse from one to another; the vision knows all in one without discourse.
• Could a baptized baby who died do the Pythagorean theorem from the beatific vision alone? left open
• How can opinion remain once demonstration is had? As heat remains after fire arrives: a disposition can be an effect of the perfection, not only a road to it.
• Did Christ, an unlettered man, have acquired knowledge? Yes — by discovery rather than by learning from another, as befits the teacher of all.
• Is Christ’s possible intellect going from potency to act with acquired knowledge? (student) Yes, by a different form than the infused.
• Can the same thing be known by faith and by reason, or by three knowledges at once? Yes, as shape is known by both touch and sight, in different ways, neither destroying the other.
• Isn’t acquired knowledge redundant given divine knowledge of the future? (student) No more than seeing is redundant for one whose reason knows what seeing is; knowing the passion will hurt is not suffering it.
• Was there something God did not know before the passion? (student) Not by experiential knowledge, but he knew it by another knowledge, as angels know bodily suffering without bodies.