Chapter Xlvii
THE SUMMA CONTRA GENTILES
proposes faith sees the truth immediately, as when we beHeve Christ, or whether he receives the truth from him who sees it immediately, as when we believe the Apostles and Prophets.
Since, then, man's happiness consists in the highest knowledge of God, it cannot consist in the knowledge of faith.
Moreover. Since happiness is the last end, the natural desire is set at rest thereby. But the knowledge of faith does not set the desire at rest, but inflames it ; for everyone desires to see what he believes. Therefore man's ultimate happiness does not consist in the knowledge of faith.
Further. The knowledge of God has been declared to be the end inasmuch as it unites us to the last end of all, namely, God. Now the knowledge of faith does not make the thing believed to be perfectly present to the intellect, since faith is of absent, and not present, things. Hence the Apostle says
{2 Cor. v.
6, 7) that so long as we walk by faith, we are pilgrims from the Lord. Yet faith makes God to be present to love, since the believer assents to God voluntarily, according to the saying of Ephes. iii. 17: That Christ may dwell by faith in our hearts. Therefore the knowledge of faith cannot be man's ultimate happiness.
CHAPTER XLVII
THAT IN THIS LIFE WE ARE UNABLE TO SEE GOD IN
HIS ESSENCE
If, in this life, we are unable to understand separate substances by reason of our intellect's connatural relation to phantasms, much less can we see the divine essence in this life, since it is far above all separate substances.
We may take it as a sign of this, that the more our mind is raised to the contemplation of spiritual things, the more it is withdrawn from sensible things. Now the divine substance is the ultimate term to which contemplation can reach, and hence the mind that sees the divine substance must be wholly freed from the corporeal senses, either by death or by rapture. Therefore it is said in God's person {Exod. xxxiii.
20) : Man shall not see me, and live.
If it is stated in Holy Scripture that some have seen God, we must understand this to have been either through an
OUR KNOWLEDGE OF GOD'S ESSENCE
imaginary vision—or even a bodily vision, when the presence of the divine power is shown by corporeal species, whether appearing externally, or formed internally in the imagination, or by gathering some intellectual knowledge of God from His spiritual effects.
A difficulty, however, arises through some words of Augustine which would seem to imply that we are able to understand
God in this life. For he says that with the sight of the soul we see in the eternal truth, from which all temporal things have been made, the form according to which we are and according to which we effect something, in ourselves or in bodies, with a true and right reason; and it is from the same source that we conceive and possess a true knowledge of things.^ Again he says: // we both see that what you say is true, and that what I say is true, where, I ask, do we see this?
Surely, neither I in you, nor you in me, but both of us in the immutable truth itself which transcends our minds? Again, he says that we judge of all things according to the divine truth,^ and again: We must first know the truth by which other things can be known,^ referring, it would seem, to the divine truth.
It would seem, then, from his words, that we see God Himself Who is His own truth, and that through Him we know other things.
Other words of his would seem to point to the same conclusion. In Be Trin. xii he says: It is the office of reason to judge of these corporeal things according to the incorporeal and eternal ideas which, unless they were above the human mind, would surely not be unchangeable.^ Now unchangeable and eternal ideas cannot be elsewhere than in God, since, according to the teaching of Faith, God alone is eternal. Accordingly it would seem to follow that we can see God in this life, and that, through seeing Him and the ideas of things in Him, we judge of other things.
Yet it is not to be believed that Augustine, by these words, meant that we are able in this life to see God in His essence.
We must therefore inquire how, in this life, we see that unchangeable truth, or these eternal ideas, and how we judge of other things according to this truth.
''De Trin., IX, 7 (PL 42, 967).
''Confess., XII, 25 (PL 32, 840).
^De Vera Relig., XXXI (PL 34, 148).
^ SoUL,
I, 15 (PL 32, 883).
^De Tnn., XII,
2 (PL 42, 999).
THE SUMMA CONTRA GENTILES
Augustine allows that truth is in the soul,^ and therefore it is that he proves the immortality of the soul from the eternity of truth. Now truth is in the soul not only in the same way as God is said to be in all things by His essence, or as He is in all things by His likeness (in so far, namely, as a thing is true according as it approaches to a likeness of God), for then the soul would not be higher than other things in this respect. It is therefore in the soul in a special way, inasmuch as the soul knows truth. Accordingly, just as the soul and other things are said to be true in their nature according as they are likened to that supreme nature, which is truth itself, since it is its own understood being, so too, that which is known by the soul is true so far as it contains a likeness to tliat divine truth which God knows. Therefore a Gloss on Ps. xi.
2, Truths are decayed from among the children of men, says that as jrom one man's face many likenesses are reflected in a mirror, so many truths are reflected from the one divine truth. '^ Now although different things are known, and different things believed to be true, by different people, yet some truths there are in which all men agree, such as the first principles both of the speculative and of the practical intellect, inasmuch as a kind of image of the divine truth is reflected in the minds of all men.
Consequently, when a mind knows with certitude anything at all, and by tracing it back to the principles by which we judge of everything, comes to see it in those principles, it is said to see all such things in the divine truth or in the eternal ideas and to judge of all things according to them. This explanation is confirmed by Augustine's words: The speculations of the sciences are seen in the divine truth, even as these visible things are seen in the light of the sun.^ For it is evident that these things are not seen in the body of the sun, but by the light, which is a likeness of the solar brilliance reflected in the air, and cast upon such bodies.
Therefore, from these words of Augustine we cannot conclude that God is seen in His essence in this life, but only as in a mirror ; and to this the Apostle witnesses as regards the knowledge of this life (/ Cor. xiii.
12): We see now through a glass in a dark manner.
"' Cf. St. Augustine, Enarr. in Psalm, ^SoliL, II, 19 (PL 32, 901). super XI,
(PL 36, 138) ; Peter Lombard, In Psalm., super XI,
(PL 191, 155).
^Soia., I, 8 (PL 32, 877). i