Chapter 7. God’s Knowledge (SCG 1,44–71)
CHAPTER 7. GOD’S KNOWLEDGE (SCG 1,44–71)
1. See Summa Theologiae 1a,17,3.
2. For this line of thinking Aquinas clearly owes a debt to Aristotle. See De Anima 2,5,418a3–6; 2,12,424a17–21.
3. ND, 1, 171 [3].
4. ND, 1, 171 [3].
5. ND, 1, 171 [3].
6. ND, 1, 171 [4].
7. In Summa Theologiae 1a,14 the only reason given for there being knowledge in God hinges on God being nonmaterial. So Aquinas’s discussion of why there is knowledge in God is more complex in the SCG than it is in the Summa Theologiae.
8. ND, 1, 171 [5].
9. For Aristotle here, see De Anima 3,8,431b21. Aristotle speaks of the intellect being in a sense all things since it can contain all things intellectually.
10. ND, 1, 172 [7].
11. ND, 1, 172 [8].
12. ND, 1, 172 [8].
13. ND, 1, 173 [2].
14. I say “at least partly” because Aquinas thinks that more enters into us coming to understand or know than mere physical contact with physical things. He maintains that we have an intellectual power to organize incoming sense data as we come to know.
15. Aquinas uses the word species in different senses, but I agree with Anthony Kenny that, when Aquinas speaks of intelligible species, the word is best rendered as “idea.” See Anthony Kenny, Aquinas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 69. For a sketch of the idea of intelligible species, see SCG 1,53.
16. ND, 1, 175 [2].
17. ND, 1, 176 [6].
18. ND, 1, 176 [2].
19. ND, 1, 176 [2].
20. ND, 1, 178 [2].
21. The phrase per se, which recurs in SCG 1,48, literally means “through itself.” So, when he says that God only knows himself per se, Aquinas means that what God knows through his essence has first and foremost to be the divine essence (i.e., God), even if God’s knowledge in fact extends to what is not divine. Note that Aquinas holds that God does not have to create anything for him to know. Given that he thinks that this is so, Aquinas naturally supposes that God can exist without knowing or understanding anything other than God.
22. Note that Aquinas does not think that God is essentially the cause of all creatures since he thinks that God might never have created anything. But Aquinas does think that God is the cause of all creatures and must, therefore, understand himself as being so.
23. ND, 1, 180 [2].
24. ND, 1, 180 [2].
25. ND, 1, 181 [4].
26. ND, 1, 181–182 [1 and 2]. By “what is common” Aquinas means “what it shares with other things.” By “what is proper” he means “what belongs to it alone.”
27. ND, 1, 194–195 [2].
28. ND, 1, 195 [3]. What Aquinas says here, of course, implies that God cannot be said to have knowledge since he remembers what he once learned. It also implies that there can be no forgetting on God’s part.
29. ND, 1, 196 [2].
30. ND, 1, 197 [3].
31. ND, 1, 197 [7].
32. ND, 1, 204 [2] and 205 [2].
33. ND, 1, 216 [9]. Here Aquinas is saying that God knows things by being their maker and that he must therefore have in him what is reflected by what he creates, this including what is singular even though it also includes what is shared by things that are singular.
34. ND, 1, 219 [7].
35. ND, 1, 221 [2]. You should note that in SCG 1,67 “contingent” and “necessary” do not mean “logically contingent” and “logically necessary.” A proposition is logically contingent if it is true but could be false, and a proposition is logically necessary if it could not possibly be false. In SCG 1,67, however, Aquinas is thinking of what is contingent as being not in itself necessitated by causes and of what is necessary as being necessitated by causes.
36. ND, 1, 225.
37. ND, 1, 225 [2].
38. ND, 1, 225 [3].
39. ND, 1, 225 [4].
40. ND, 1, 228 [5].
41. ND, 1, 232–233 [3, 4, and 5].
42. ND, 1, 239 [14].
43. Perhaps the most famous philosophical idealist was George Berkeley (1685–1753). In this context, of course, “idealist” does not mean “someone who pursues noble principles.”
44. Aquinas’s approach to knowledge would be described by philosophers as a “realist” one since it holds that we can know what exists other than our thoughts or ideas. Since I take it that most people think that we can know what is other than us and our ideas, I presume that Aquinas’s “realism” is not unusual or manifestly absurd. Indeed, one needs to be a certain kind of philosopher if one’s position is that all that we know are our ideas. In fact, one would need to be a philosopher who thinks that it makes sense to say “I know my ideas but I have no knowledge of dogs or cats existing independently of me, and of what they are considered as such.” But can we make sense of this conclusion?
45. For more on this, see chapter 11.
46. Aquinas thinks that people are essentially physical since he thinks that people are human beings and that being human is to be physical. Yet Aquinas does not think that people are nothing but physical objects since, as I have shown, he takes them to be able to receive forms immaterially.
47. P. T. Geach, God and the Soul (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), 36. Norman Malcolm (1911–1990) was a distinguished philosopher who taught at Cornell University and was a close friend and interpreter of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
48. God and the Soul, 37.