Christ's Knowledge of the Infinite and His Supreme Vision of God (ST III q.10 a.3–4), with a Digression on 'Simply' vs. 'In Some Way' and the Prologue to Infused Knowledge (q.11)

Orientation #

He continues straight through the objections and body of q. 10, a. 3, then a. 4, and at the end reads the proemium and list of six articles of q. 11 on the scientia indita, saying “we’ll stop there at the proemium.” He says of q. 11, a. 1, “that’s something I wouldn’t know what to say about that, but we’ll see what the Master has to say.” The neighbouring classes treat q. 10 on Christ’s beatific knowledge and q. 11 on his infused knowledge.

The class, in order #

1. The three objections of a. 3 (“it is impossible that the soul of Christ knows what infinite”) #

1. It belongs to the definition of the infinite (Physics III) that of its quantity, taking always, there is always something outside to be taken — as with dividing a line, or a greater number. You cannot separate the definition from the defined without contradictories being true together. So the infinite cannot be known.
2. Knowledge of infinite things is infinite; Christ’s science cannot be infinite, since as man his capacity is limited, being a creature.
3. There is nothing greater than the infinite; but more things are contained in the divine science than in the science of Christ’s soul (already established). So Christ’s soul does not know infinite things.

Aside: a modern heretic’s name (Faribault? [unclear in recording]) gets muddled here.

Sed contra: Christ’s soul knows his whole power and all it is capable of; he can cleanse infinite sins, for “he is a propitiation for our sins… not for ours only, but also for those of the whole world” (1 John). “So if we keep on sinning, he can still cleanse us.”

2. Body of a. 3: being in act and being in potency (“science is not of anything except of what is”) #

Science is only of being, since being and true are convertible — “two of the so-called transcendentals, the most universals.” Being is said (a) simply, i.e. being in act, (b) secundum quid, i.e. being in potency. Example: are there toothpicks in this room? In potency, many — but you would not say simply. Each thing is known as it is in act, not as it is in potency (Metaphysics IX, which he calls “the ninth book of wisdom”); Aristotle shows this from geometry, where you must draw the line, make it actual, to see the proposition.

Hence: as regards the first way of knowing, Christ’s soul does not know infinite things, because there are not infinitely many things in act, even counting everything in act at every time — the state of generation and corruption does not last forever, so there is a definite number even of generable and corruptible things (a number of cats, a number of dogs). But as regards the second way, his soul in the Word knows an infinity of things, since it knows all that is in the power of the creature, and in the power of the creature are infinite things — and this by knowledge of simple intelligence, not by knowledge of vision. He notes the twist: the distinction scientia visionis / simplicis intelligentiae is here applied to what is in the power of the creature, not of God.

3. Reply 1: two senses of infinite (“by reason of form… according to the potency of matter”) #

• Infinite by reason of form: said negatively, a form or act not limited by matter or subject. The “in-” is mere negation, not a lack. Such an infinite is in itself most knowable, being most in act, though not comprehensible by a creature’s limited power. So God is infinite; Christ’s soul knows this infinite without comprehending it.
• Infinite by reason of matter’s potency: said privatively — what does not have the form it is apt to have. This is the infinite in quantity, unknowable of its very reason, “as it were matter with the lack of form” (Physics III), since all knowledge is through some form.

The resolution: taken in its own way of being, part after part, such an infinite could not be known. But just as the intellect takes material things immaterially and many things in a united way, so it takes infinite things not in the manner of the infinite but as it were in a limited way — things infinite in themselves become limited to the understanding of the knower. Christ’s soul knows them “not by running through them singula, one after the other, but in something one”: in a creature in whose power infinite things pre-exist (that power being one), and chiefly in the Word itself.

Asides: a Jesuit’s big book on the infinite; Berkeley disliking infinite divisibility, and Samuel Johnson kicking a stone — “I refute him thus”; “even Bishop Berkeley opens the door to a study before he tries to leave”; Berkeley’s American sojourn.

4. Reply 2: infinite in one way, finite in another (“a surface infinite in its length, finite in its width”) #

Nothing prevents a thing infinite in one way being limited in another. Image: a surface infinite in length, finite in width. So infinitely many men in number would have infinite being according to their multitude, yet not by reason of their essence, since every essence is limited by one species. What is simpliciter infinitum by essence is God. He notes Aristotle’s distinction of the meanings of “perfect”: other things are perfect in their kind, God is simply perfect, lacking nothing — “and even Averroes saw that Aristotle’s talking about God there.”

The proper object of the understanding is the what it is (De Anima III), to which belongs the notion of species, defined by genus and difference. So Christ’s soul, of limited capacity, attains but does not comprehend what is simply infinite in essence; but the infinite found in creatures is in potency and can be comprehended by it, because it is met by reason of what it is, on which side it has no infinity. Even our own mind knows universals — nature, genus, species — infinite in some way inasmuch as they can be said of infinitely many. “I know what a number is… so I’m knowing an infinity of things in a finite way.” So too “no odd number is even” states something about infinities.

Aside: this is one explanation of Shakespeare’s “reason is the capability for a large discourse” — the universal covers a large area, being said of many.

5. Digression: simpliciter vs. secundum quid (“all day long you’re mixing up these two”) #

The point: this kind of distinction runs through the whole of Aristotle and underlies both ethics and logic. Aristotle calls the corresponding fallacy a sophism secundum quid — not simply a sophism, but having something of one. It is the second of the fallacies outside speech in the Sophistical Refutations, the first being the fallacy of accident.

• Ethics: you do something bad because in some respect it is good, or omit a good because in some respect it is bad. Nothing is so good that it does not prevent something else, and so can be seen as bad. Killing someone who annoys you does remove the annoyance; missing Mass gets you the rest you feel you deserve; abortion avoids embarrassment or saves a career; horrible things get done to win a presidency. Aristotle on the man who follows his passions: what is good here and now is not good simply. Relativism — “there are no absolutes” — is itself an absolute statement.
• A student asks whether today’s confusion is a twisting of real philosophy; he answers by way of Anaxagoras, whom Aristotle praises as “a sober man among drunk men,” who attributed to mind the distinction and ordering of things.
• Logic, via the Meno: Meno objects that you cannot investigate what you do not know. If sound, that would destroy logic and the art of calculation, both of which lead from the known to the unknown. His counter-example: “I don’t know how many students are in class today,” yet he directs himself to 23 with the greatest ease — because he knew he was looking for a number, so he knew to take the road of counting; had the question been “what is a student?”, the road of defining. So in a qualified sense he did know 23. Contrast: asking directions at a filling station — “where?” — you cannot be shown the way to what you do not specify at all.
• The classroom joke: “Do you know my brother Mark?” — “No.” — “Do you know who a man is?” Then in secundum quid she knows every man in the world. The wise guy who tells his father “Professor Berquist says I know everything”: knowing the difference between something and nothing, you know everything in some sense, not simply.
• Socrates makes the same mistake more subtly in reply: the slave boy, who never studied geometry, is led by questioning to double the square, and Socrates concludes he already knew it. But he did not know it — he was mistaken, thinking you double the side. He knew things from which he could know it. “To know something in ability is not to know it.” Otherwise a student would already know at the start what he is going to learn and needn’t pay to stay. Crude version: a man and woman have a baby in ability, not in act.
• Why we pay people to look for a cure for cancer: they must in some way know what they seek, or nothing they do could be relevant to finding it.
• Aside: a monk in a Meno class who said the teacher simply told him what letters were — answer: he already knew the sounds; the letter is a sign for this sound.

6. Reply 3: many infinites in one way (“to the infinite there is not something greater”) #

What is infinite in every way can only be one — whence the Philosopher (De Caelo I, “the first book about the universe”) argues there cannot be many infinite bodies, a body being infinite in every dimension. But of what is infinite in one way only, there can be many: many infinite lines extended in length on a surface finite in width — parallel lines extended to infinity, never meeting. Since the infinite is not a substance but happens to things called infinite (Physics III), the property of the infinite is multiplied with its diverse subjects. So in one infinite line there is nothing greater than its infinite parts; yet another line has more parts besides those. Likewise in number: the species of even numbers are infinite and so are the odd, and yet even-and-odd together are more than the even alone — “contrary to Bertrand Russell, right?” (a student: “they kind of refuted that”).

Conclusion: to the infinite simpliciter, as regards all things, nothing is greater; to an infinite in some determinate order, nothing is greater in that order, but something greater can be taken outside that order. So there are infinite things in the power of the creature, yet more in the power of God; and Christ’s soul knows infinite things by simple intelligence, but God knows more in that way.

He closes: “each encounter with the infinite is something to relish or sigh for, or say that you’ll understand it better the next time you see it.”

7. Article 4, objections (“whether the soul of Christ sees the Word more perfectly than any other creature”) #

His own first word: “Well, I bet he does. We’ll find out.”

1. Perfection of knowledge is according to the medium of knowing — knowledge by demonstrative syllogism is better than by dialectical syllogism. But all the blessed see the Word immediately through the divine essence itself, God being joined to the mind not only as what is seen but as that by which one sees (“in His light we shall see light”). Same medium, so equal vision.
2. The perfection of a vision does not exceed the seeing power; but the power of the rational soul is below the intellectual power of an angel (Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy ch. 4). — Aside, from his teacher De Koninck: take all human minds, Einstein and Aristotle together in one huge mind, and it is still unequal to an angel’s.
3. God infinitely sees the Word more perfectly than the soul; and there are infinite grades between God’s mode and Christ’s soul’s mode, so no creature’s superiority should be asserted. He glosses the motive: it seems meant to avoid envy — the difference between the wisest philosopher and the peasant is nothing compared to the distance from the human to the angelic mind.

Sed contra: God constituted Christ above every principality, power, virtue and dominion, and every name that is named, in this age and the future (Ephesians 1:21); and in celestial glory one is higher the more perfectly he knows God.

8. Body of a. 4: nearness to the Word (“the Word of God on high is a fountain of wisdom”) #

The sight of the divine essence belongs to all the blessed by partaking a light derived from the fountain of the Word of God (Ecclesiasticus 1:5). But Christ’s soul is joined to that Word more nearly than any creature, being united to it in person; therefore it receives more fully the inflowing of that light and sees the first truth — the divine essence, the object of faith — more perfectly than any other creature. Hence John 1:14, “full not only of grace but also of truth”; he notes both gratia and veritas can be applied to Christ’s human nature, and that in the Catena Aurea some Fathers refer one to divinity and one to humanity.

His summary: “the closer you come to God, the more you are enlightened; you can’t get closer to God than to be joined to him in person” — so more enlightened than all, even the angels, who are not united in person.

Aside on the many readings of a text: a cousin objects that the average Catholic will be confused by Fathers saying different things about the same text; the answer is the richness of the text. He mentions Benedict XV’s Spiritus Paraclitus on St. Jerome and the layers of meaning in Scripture, and Augustine’s saying there is more in Scripture he does not understand than he does. “You might have another way of explaining this, but you can’t say this is wrong.”

9. The three replies of a. 4 (“on the side of the one knowing… according to his potency or habit”) #

1. Perfection of knowledge is measured by the medium on the side of the thing known, but on the side of the knower according to his power or habit. So among men, through one and the same medium one knows a conclusion more perfectly than another. Christ’s soul, filled with a more abundant light, knows the divine essence more perfectly though all the blessed see through the same essence. His examples: he is acquiring the habit of first philosophy by reading Metaphysics VII–VIII–IX, but his habit is not perfect — he can follow a proof, not always reproduce it at the board; and having read every word of the Summa Contra Gentiles, he still thinks Thomas understands the conclusions better, though he has the same middle term.
2. The vision of the divine essence exceeds the natural power of every creature; so the grade in it is measured by the order of grace, in which Christ is most excellent, not by the order of nature, in which the angelic nature is above the human. — Aside: a teacher’s playful idea that the Blessed Virgin’s guardian angel was a low angel raised by the job.
3. As there cannot be a greater grace than Christ’s with regard to the union with the Word, so of the perfection of divine vision; though, absolutely considered, a more sublime grade is possible according to the infinity of divine power. He stresses the “absolutely considering”: no creature can see God as clearly as Christ sees him, and the two statements are compatible.

Student exchange: “How do you decide where to stop? Because it could have gone…” — and the same for the Blessed Virgin, so exalted yet not infinite. He answers: one can always love God more and receive more grace, but this ignores that Christ has the grace fitting to the one who is joined to the divine person, so any increase in us stays below it. A student: “We’ll never catch them — they have such a huge head start.” His homelier version: he can always understand the Metaphysics or the Summa Contra Gentiles better, but never as well as Thomas or Euclid.

Aside: De Koninck, whom he had in 1958–60, had been teaching the eight books of the Physics (“Natural hearing”) since the thirties and said “I still see something new every time I go through those.” Cicero said the like. De Koninck would come to the Twin Cities and said of the group there that they were all at the same level as before except for one man, who kept understanding better. “We call it the plateau of mediocrity” — some may even be going backwards. Rereading your own old papers you find them pretty good, but now the matter has become easy.

10. Proemium of q. 11 (“then we ought to consider about the scientia indita”) #

He reads the six articles to be asked about Christ’s infused knowledge — “in between now, the more human knowledge and the vision”:

1. Whether through this knowledge Christ knows all things.
2. Whether he could use it without turning to the phantasms. — He explains Aristotle’s point: we not only get our thoughts from images, but when we think again about what a triangle is we must imagine a triangle; the proper object of our mind is the what it is of something imagined. That is why what cannot be imagined is hard to understand — yet if you try to imagine it, you can no longer understand it.
3. Whether this knowledge was collativa. Albert and Thomas speak of our knowledge as collativa et discursiva: collativa means bringing together (the major and minor premise — every mother is a woman, no man is a woman, therefore no man is a mother), discursiva going from what you know to what you do not; the two get somewhat mixed together. Again Shakespeare’s “reason is the ability for a large discourse” — the discursive is characteristic of human knowing.
4. The comparison of this knowledge to angelic knowledge, since the angel does not know by getting things from images as we do.
5. Whether there was habitual science in Christ.
6. Whether it was distinguished by diverse habits.

On indita: a student looks it up — indo, indere, “to put in or on, introduce” — “that’s closer to infused,” near-synonyms.

Closing aside: his freshman English professor could hardly restrain himself from getting off the introduction and into the play itself. “That’s why I have this text — I’ve got to see what Thomas says, and pretend I don’t know what he says, so it’s new again.”

His words #

• transcendentals — being and true, convertible; “the most universals.”
• simply / secundum quid — being in act vs. being in potency; the toothpicks in the room.
• the ninth book of wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics IX] — “after the books in natural philosophy.”
• ability [ed.: potency] — used throughout for potentia; “to know something in ability is not to know it.”
• scientia visionis / scientia simplicis intelligentiae — knowledge of vision vs. of simple intelligence; here applied to what lies in the power of the creature.
• infinite negatively / privatively — by reason of form, most knowable; by reason of matter’s potency, unknowable as matter lacking form.
• simpliciter infinitum — infinite by reason of essence: God alone.
• sophism secundum quid — his rendering of Aristotle’s sophismos tis; the second fallacy outside of speech.
• singula — running through infinite things one after the other, which Christ’s soul does not do.
• Natural hearing [ed.: the Physics] — the eight books De Koninck taught.
• scientia indita — infused knowledge, from indo, indere, “to put in, introduce.”
• collativa et discursiva — bringing together (premises) and going from known to unknown.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 10, a. 3 (objections, body, replies) — verified.
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 10, a. 4 (objections, sed contra, body, replies) — verified.
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 11, proemium (the six articles).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Physics III (definition of the infinite; infinite as matter without form; the infinite not a substance).
• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX (each thing known as it is in act); Metaphysics VII–VIII–IX as his current reading; the meanings of “perfect” (inferred: Metaphysics V).
• Aristotle, De Anima III (the proper object of the intellect is the what it is); Aristotle on knowledge and phantasms.
• Aristotle, De Caelo I (“the first book about the universe”): no many infinite bodies.
• Aristotle, Sophistical Refutations: fallacies outside speech — accident, and secundum quid.
• Aristotle’s praise of Anaxagoras (“a sober man among drunk men”).
• Plato, Meno: Meno’s objection; the slave boy and doubling the square.
• 1 John: “a propitiation for our sins… but also for those of the whole world.”
• Ephesians 1:21; Ecclesiasticus 1:5; John 1:14; Psalm “in His light we shall see light.”
• Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy ch. 4.
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae Prima Pars (the infinite, the vision of God exceeding created nature); Catena Aurea; Summa Contra Gentiles.
• Benedict XV, Spiritus Paraclitus (on St. Jerome and Scripture); Augustine on not understanding Scripture.
• Averroes on Aristotle’s God; Berkeley; Samuel Johnson; Bertrand Russell; Shakespeare (“reason is the ability for a large discourse”); Cicero; De Koninck.

His questions #

• Do we have any toothpicks in this room? In potency yes, in act no — and so being is said in two ways.
• Can the soul of Christ know infinite things? Yes, by knowledge of simple intelligence — all that lies in the power of the creature — but not by knowledge of vision, since things in act are finite in number.
• How can the infinite be known, if to know it you must always take another part? Not in its own manner, part after part, but as limited to the knower’s understanding, in one thing: a creature’s power, and chiefly in the Word.
• How did I direct myself with such great ease to 23, when I didn’t know 23? Because I knew I was seeking a number, so I knew to take the road of counting; I knew 23 secundum quid.
• Do you know my brother Mark? In secundum quid yes (you know what a man is), simply no.
• Did the slave boy already know how to double the square? No — he was mistaken about it; he knew only things from which he could come to know it.
• Whether the soul of Christ sees the Word more perfectly than any other creature? Yes: being united to the Word in person, it receives the inflowing light most fully, above even the angels, since the grade is measured by grace and not by nature.
• If all the blessed see through the same medium, the divine essence, how can one see better? The medium measures on the side of the thing known; on the side of the knower it is his power or habit — as men differ with the same middle term.
• How do you decide where to stop, since God could always give more? Absolutely considered a more sublime grade is possible, but no creature can have the grace fitting to one joined to the divine person, so none catches Christ (or Mary).
• Whether Christ through infused knowledge knows all things? Left open — “that’s something I wouldn’t know what to say about; we’ll see what the Master has to say.”