Question 14: God's Knowledge
- General comments:
This question explores God's act of understanding, its nature and
modes, God's knowledge of Himself and things distinct from
Himself. It is extremely important to read the whole
question. This will prevent misunderstandings of the sort people
fall into especially about the nature of God's knowledge of the future,
but about other aspects of St. Thomas's account of God's knowledge as
well. I will treat the question by grouping articles together
under common themes. (The treatment below presupposes familiarity
with St. Thomas's general account of cognition; see my commentary
on question 12.
- 14,1: St. Thomas's main argument for the claim
that God has knowledge is based on God's immateriality. For
things have cognition to the extent that they are able to have, in
addition to their own form or esse, the form of other things as
well. But this ability requires faculties that have at least some
distance from pure materiality. Furthermore, God's knowledge can
take on all the names of the best human knowledge, viz., intelligentia
(grasp of evident first-principles), scientia (conclusions
grasped with evidentness on the basis of evident first principles), sapientia
(knowledge of ultimate first causes), and prudentia or
consilium (good reasoning and judgment with respect
to things to be done). In each of these cases, however, we must
exclude from God modes of signification, associated with these terms,
that are in conflict with God's simplicity and perfection.
- 14, 2-4: Here St. Thomas explores the core
nature of God's knowledge. God's primary object of knowledge is
Himself. And, to make a long story short, the response to 14,4
concludes as follows: "From everything that has been said so far,
it is clear that in God the following are altogether one and the same
thing: (a) the intellect, (b) that which is understood, (c) the
intelligible species, and (d) the very act of understanding.
Hence, it is clear that when God is claimed to be an intelligent being,
no multiplicity is being posited within His substance." 14,2
begins with an overview: A cognitive act is just the actuality of
a cognitive species (sensible or intelligible), since the actuality of
such a species is just the act of the faculty it informs or
configures. Thus,
an act of the intellect is just the intelligible species of a given
object insofar as that species is actually informing or configuring the
intellect. Now in our case such an act constitutes a perfection of our
intellect, since the species brings the intellect
from potentiality to actuality with respect to the cognition of the
relevant object. What's more, the object of cognition and its
intelligible
species are both distinct from our intellect; for the first objects of
our
intellection are material substances and their accidents, which
obviously cannot exist in our intellect, and even their intelligible
likenesses, which can exist in our intellect, are not always informing
our intellect and hence are distinct from it. In God, by
contrast, there is (a) no movement from potentiality to actuality, (b)
no perfecting of God's intellect by the intelligible species, (c) no
distinction between the intellect and the object understood,
since God's primary object of understanding is His own intellective
nature, and
(d) no distinction between the intellect and the intelligible
species, since God is, cognitively speaking, fully present to
Himself through Himself insofar as He is actually understanding
Himself. So the act of understanding is not distinct from the
object understood. To
grasp this more fully, notice that if there were an angel that
existed from eternity, i.e., an angel that were created from eternity,
his act of understanding would still be distinct from his substance and
would be everlastingly bringing his substance to perfection. This
is not the case with God. It is not just that God eternally
understands Himself; it is that God's act of understanding is not in
any way distinct from His substance and does not bring His substance --
even eternally -- to perfection. Rather, His act of understanding
is perfect in itself and has itself eternally present to itself as its
intelligible object. This boggles the imagination, since we
naturally think of the intellect and act of understanding as distinct
from the intelligible species and the object understood by means of the
intelligible species. In the case of God all these collapse
together in a perfect act of understanding which is the divine essence.
Because of this, God comprehends Himself, i.e., knows Himself as much
as He is knowable. And since He is perfect actuality, He is
perfectly knowable to Himself, since both His cognitive power and the
object understood by it are infinite or unlimited. (Notice that
in this He surpasses the blessed in
heaven -- angels and saints -- who have a created light of glory and
hence a finite capacity for knowing God, even though God Himself is
likewise their intelligible species. (Once again, see my commentary
on q. 12, 2-11). This is a concrete way in
which beatitude really is the sharing in God's own life, since this
life is a life of knowing and loving.)
- 14, 5-6 and 10-12: In these articles St.
Thomas talks about God's knowledge of created things, i.e., things
distinct from Himself. St. Thomas says that God knows these other
things "through Himself," since in knowing Himself He knows all the
things that He actually causes
and is able to cause.
This will include
every created substance and accident, since God's power is operative
even in the actions of secondary causes. For all the things He
causes have perfections of one sort or another, and these are all
traceable to God as their source and paradigm. So He does not know
these things by a sort of
quasi-perceptual knowledge; rather, He knows them as an efficient
cause. (This will come out more fully in a. 8)
To add more detail, God knows created things through a proper specific
cognition and not just in general as beings (a. 6). What's
more,
He knows each created thing as a
singular thing, since His causal
activity is responsible not just for general characteristics but for
whatever individuates singulars (a. 11). Hence, again, God does not have
some sort of quasi-perceptual
knowledge of things; rather, He
knows creatures from the inside as the divine craftsman who is a cause
-- either by
Himself or with secondary causes -- of all being at every moment of
time. (I will return to this in a. 8, and it is an
absolutely
crucial point for understanding a. 13 on future contingents.) In
other words, He knows things because He knows what He wills to effect
both by Himself alone and by Himself in conjunction with secondary
causes. So He knows, for any moment of time t, which
causes are operating to effect at t whatever is effected
at t.)
Furthermore, He knows evils because He knows the good that created
things ought to have (a. 10), and He knows infinitely many singulars,
not only by His knowledge of simple understanding, by which He
knows metaphysically necessary truths about Himself and other things,
including truths about what could
exist at any
point in time, but even by His knowledge
of vision, that is, His knowledge of contingent truths, including
truths about what does exist
at each point in
time (a. 12).
- 14, 7 and 14: These articles have to do with
the mode of God's knowledge. In art. 7 we learn, unsuprisingly,
that God's knowledge is not discursive. That is, God does not
have to reason to conclusions in order to know truths about creatures;
nor does he have to deliberate and make judgments about how to act.
Both of these features of our cognitive life are signs of
finitude. So God has scientia
without having reasoned His way to it.
- 14, 8-9 and 16:
- 14, 13 and 15:
Question 15:
God's Ideas
Question 16: Truth
- General Comments:
The first point to see here is that in the proper sense 'truth'
attaches to the content of
propositions. (God does not compose and divide, but He
does know the content of any possible proposition we might form.)
Hence, a proposition is true iff the world is as the proposition
says it is.
Notice that in God's case, all contingent truth is true because He
wills it to be true. (Issues surrounding created freedom need to
be dealt with separately.) So whereas there are certain truths,
viz., the metaphysically necessary ones about His own essence and the
possible entities He might create, that God sees with His knowledge of
simple understanding (scientia
simplicis intelligentiae), all the contingent truths that He
knows by His knowledge of vision (scientiae
visionis) are such that He knows them because He wills them to
be true. Once again, His knowledge of these truths is not akin to
perceptual truth, at least as regards the connotation that perceptual
knowledge has among its causes the things themselves. God's
knowledge is not caused in this way by the things themselves. He
knows the truth about things by virtue of His having willed a
meticulous providential plan for the created world.
The second point is that things
themselves are true or false to the extent that they conform to
the practical idea according to which they were made. Hence,
a created
thing is true insofar as it conforms to the idea according
to which God creates
it.
Question 17: Falsity
Question 18: God's Life
Question 19: God's Will
Question 20: God's Love
Question 21: God's Justice and Mercy
Question 22: God's Providence
- 1: Providence
(or disposition) is nothing other than the plan God has adopted for the
created world. (St. Thomas distinguishes between the plan itself (providence) and the execution of
the plan (governance).)
Just as God's love, justice, and mercy are analogous to our
virtues of the will, so providence is analogous to prudence, the virtue
of the practical reason or intellect -- at least insofar as one can
have prudence with respect to those persons things that fall under
one's care. So prudence is the plan by which God (a) orders all
things toward their end and (b) orders the parts in the whole universe
to one another.
- 2: The
objections single out five classes of things that one might have reason
to think do not fall under God's providence, viz., (a) that which
happens randomly or fortuitously or by chance, (b) defects and evils;
(c) that which happens by a necessity of nature; (d) the free actions
of rational creatures; and (e) the acts of non-rational creatures.
The body of the question begins by citing those who believe that there
is no providence and thus that everything that happens is in the end
incidental or by chance. (Democritus and Empedocles are cited, but this
is a very contemporary view as well, associated with the likes of
Richard Dawkins.) Next St. Thomas cites those who believe that
corruptible things are subject to providence only in general
("according to their species") and not as individuals. (Here he
names Rabbi Moses.) In contrast, St. Thomas asserts that God's
causality is universal and thus extends to everything. Now let's
see how St. Thomas replies to the objections:
(a) In the realm of human affairs it is a common enough
phenomenon that, say, someone arranges for two people to meet who might
not otherwise have met. The first agent in such cases might hope
or expect that a certain result will follow. (On the dark side,
this is also the stuff of manipulation.) In such cases, the
result falls outside the intention of the two "particular" agents,
but not outside the intention of the first "universal" agent. So,
too, St. Thomas contends, God as a first and universal agent adopts a
plan for the world in which nothing happens by chance from His
perspective. It's all part of the plan, even if it falls outside
the intentions or tendencies of particular agents. This is a very
powerful claim. It allows for the possibility that even when
certain particular effects occur randomly or by chance vis-a-vis their
particular causes, they still do not fall outside of God's providence.
This would include effects whose immediate causes are
indeterministic, as well as the effects of causes that just happen to
intersect (as seems to be the case in the case of
biological evolution). So St. Thomas holds that chance or
randomness is a relative notion, and that what is a chance effect with
respect to one order of causes might not be a chance effect with
respect to some other order. More specifically, nothing is a
chance effect with respect to the order of divine governance.
Every created effect is included in God's eternal plan for the
world.
(b) While particular agents strive for effects that are free of
defects, a universal agent might well allow certain defects or evils to
occur in order to promote the good of the whole. For instance,
sometimes parents will overlook a given small misstep on the part of
their child if they judge that bringing this small transgression
to the child's attention would, say, lead to results that damage the
common good of the family. (This happens a lot with teenagers.)
In the world of nature, many things that are bad for particular
things are good for other particular things. So such goods would
be absent if no defects or evils were permitted. The same holds
for the moral sphere.
Question 23: Predestination
Question 24: The Book of Life
Question 25: God's Power
Question 26: God's Happiness |