THINGS ARE UNFATHOMABLE BECAUSE THEY ARE CREATED
In the judgment of St. Thomas, we can, therefore, in the realm of created natural reality, speak of “truth” in two different senses.
Firstly, the truth of things can be implied, and this means primarily that these things, as correspond with the archetypal creative thought of God; it is this correspondence which formally constitutes the truth of things. Secondly, we can speak of truth with reference to knowledge (of man), which again is true in so far as it “receives its measure” from and corresponds to the objective reality of things. It is in this second correspondence, in turn, that the truth of human knowledge consists. These two concepts of truth are formulated in the same article of the Summa Theologica and are there contrasted with one another:
“When things are the norm and measure of the intellect, truth consists in the equation of the intellect to these things . . . but when the intellect is the norm and measure of things, then truth consists in the equation of things to the These sentences express, from yet another point of view, the structure of all created Being—essentially situated between the creative knowledge of God and man’s imitative knowledge: an idea we can never fully exhaust.
Between these two relationships (that of mind to reality and, on the other hand, of reality to mind) which both, as correspondences signify in different ways “truth,” there is only one fundamental distinction: one can be the object of human knowledge, the other can not; one relationship, but not the other, can be known by man.
Man is certainly in a position not only to know things, but also to understand the relationship between things and his concept of them. In other words, over and above his spontaneous perception of things, he can have knowledge by means of judgments and reflections. To put it in another way, human knowledge may not only be true, it can also be knowledge of the
It is very different, however, when we turn to the relationship between things and the creative mind of God, in which the truth of things primarily and properly consists, and which in its turn first renders human knowledge possible. est quidam veritatis effectus; this again is a revolutionary sentence of St. Thomas, of the kind that stands our more normal formulae on their heads: “Knowledge is a certain effect of truth,” . . . indeed of the truth of This relation on which the truth of things is fundamentally based—the relation between natural reality and the archetypal creative thought of I insist, be known formally by We can of course know things; we cannot formally know their We know the copy, but not the relation of the copy to the archetype, the correspondence between what has been designed and its first design. To repeat, we have no power of perceiving this correspondence by which the formal truth of things is constituted. Here we can notice how truth and unknowability belong together. This thought now calls for a more exact statement.
The term “unknowable” is literally capable of several or at least of two meanings. It can indicate something that “in itself” is capable of being known, but which a particular knowing faculty is unable to grasp because it lacks a sufficient power of penetration. In this sense, we refer to objects which “cannot be observed by the naked eye.” It is a question rather of a deficiency of vision than of any special property of the object. Stars that we are unable to perceive are “in themselves” quite capable of observation. In this context, “unknowable” denotes that the particular faculty is not powerful enough to realize and make actual the possibility of being known which certainly exists. But this term “unknowable” can have another significance, namely that no such possibility of being known is given, that there is nothing to be known; that not only on the side of a particular subject is there a defect of apprehension and penetration, but that on the side of the object there is no possibility to be known.
Unknowability in the latter sense, namely that something real should in itself be unknowable, would be for St. Thomas simply preposterous. Because Being is created, that is to say creatively thought by God, it is therefore “in itself” light, radiant, and because it Accordingly, for St. Thomas, the unknowable can never denote something in itself dark and impenetrable, but only something that has so much light that a particular finite faculty of knowledge cannot absorb it all. It is too rich to be assimilated completely; it eludes the effort to comprehend it.
It is in this latter meaning that we are now considering the term “unknowable.” And I insist that it belongs immediately to the idea of the truth of things. What I want to emphasize is the following: According to the doctrine of St. Thomas, it is part of the very nature of things that their knowability cannot be wholly exhausted by any finite intellect, because these things are creatures, which means that the very element which makes them capable of being known must necessarily be at the same time the reason why things are unfathomable. This calls for closer analysis.
The statement “things are true” indicates primarily, as we saw, that things are creatively thought by God. This sentence, as I have previously said, would be totally misunderstood if it were taken merely as a statement about about a divine activity directed toward things. No, something is said about the structure of It is another way of expressing the view of St. that things exist because God sees them (whereas we see things because they exist). This means that the reality and character of things consist in their being creatively thought by the Creator. “True,” as I have said before, is an ontological name, a synonym for “real.” Ens et verum convertuntur; it is the same whether I say “something real” or whether I say “something creatively thought by God.” The essence of all things (as creatures) is that they are formed after an archetypal pattern which dwells in the absolutely creative mind of God. in Deo est creatrix the creature is in God creative essence.” This is how St. Thomas speaks in his commentary on St. The Summa Theologica contains a similar passage: “Every existing thing possesses the truth of its nature to the degree in which it imitates the knowledge of
As we have said, St. Thomas, in his study of the truth of things, which means the nature of things, was obviously unable to ignore or “leave out” this correspondence between things and their divine exemplars. This is revealed, for example, where he reads it into texts in which our minds can discover no trace of it. The following example is an instance of that “tendency to jump,” that “unevenness” in the development of an argument, in which as though through a rift in the texture, the unstated and unexpressed is revealed. In the second article of the first Quaestio de St. Thomas sets forth clearly his notion of the truth of things: “What is real is called true in so far as it realizes that toward which it is ordained by the mind of God,”—to phrase it differently, an existing thing is true to the extent that it reproduces the pattern of divine knowledge. This is clearly brought out continues St. Thomas, by a famous definition of Avicenna. Yet in this definition our minds would detect nothing of the kind. What then does this definition of Avicenna say? It became almost classical during the Middle Ages: “The truth of every individual thing is the special character of its Being that has been given to it as its abiding St. Thomas reads into this text a confirmation of his own thesis that the truth of things consists in their being creatively thought by God. It would never have occurred to us to notice any connection between the two statements. This evident “gap” in his line of argument can only mean that St. Thomas was unable to separate the idea that things have an essence—a “what”—from the other idea that this essence of things is the fruit of a designing and creative knowledge.
Let me now turn back to our proper problem. We can never properly grasp this correspondence between the original pattern in God and the created copy, in which formally and primarily the truth of things consists. It is quite impossible for us, as spectators, so to speak, to contemplate the emergence of things from “the eye of God.” Since this is so, our quest for knowledge, when it is directed toward the essences of things, even of the lowest and “simplest” order, must move along a pathway to which there is, in principle, no end. The reason for this is that things are that the inner lucidity of Being has its ultimate and exemplary source in the boundless radiance of Divine Knowledge. This condition is included in the concept of the truth of Being as formulated by St. Thomas; its real profundity, however, is only realized when we understand it in its interrelation with the concept of creation, an interrelation which St. Thomas takes for granted.
In this concept of truth, understood as I have outlined it, the negative element of “unknowability” has its proper place and origin.
We are concerned here only with the philosophia negativa of St. Thomas, although he has also laid down the principles of a theologia It is true that this latter fact, also, is not prominent in the traditional presentations of Thomistic doctrine; often enough it is omitted altogether. Mention is rarely made of the fact that the teaching about God in the Summa Theologica begins with this sentence: “We are not capable of knowing what God is, but we can know what He is I know of no textbook of Thomistic thought which contains the notion expressed by St. Thomas in his commentary on the De Trinitate of namely, that there are three degrees in our knowledge of God: the lowest, the knowledge of God as He is active in creation; the second, the recognition of God as mirrored in spiritual beings; the third and loftiest, the recognition of God as the Unknown, tamquam Or consider this sentence from the Quaestiones Disputatae: “This is what is ultimate in the human knowledge of God: to know that we do not know God,” quod sciat se Deum
As we turn to the “negative element” in St. Thomas’s we come across the passage about thinkers whose quest for knowledge has not succeeded in finding the essence of a single fly. This passage occurs in an almost popular exposition of the Apostles’ yet it stands in intimate relation with many other similar sentences.
Some of these sentences are astonishingly “negative.” For example: “The essential grounds of things are unknown to us, principia essentialia rerum sunt nobis This formula is in no way so untypical or exceptional as it at first glance appears. It would be easy to set alongside it a dozen similar passages (from the Summa the Summa Contra the De and the other Quaestiones
substantiales per se ipsas sunt we do not know substantial forms as they are in themselves. Differentiae essentiales sunt nobis essential differences are not known to us.”
All these sentences indicate that we have no proper means of knowing the distinctive element in things, and this means the essence of things. This is the reason, St. Thomas urges, why we cannot give them a name conveying their true Being, and have to attach names to them from casual circumstances. (In this context, St. Thomas frequently makes use of the absurd etymologies current in medieval times: e.g., lapis (stone) from laedere “what hurts the foot when it stumbles against
Not only God Himself but also things have an “eternal name” that man is unable to utter. This is meant precisely and not “poetically.” And on this point the traditional wisdom of the West agrees with the quotation from the Chinese, which I introduced at the beginning of this study.
What is the precise reason, asks St. Thomas in one passage, why it is impossible for us to know God perfectly through creation? His reply has two parts, and it is the second that is the more interesting. The first maintains that creation can represent God only in an imperfect manner. The second adds that our minds are too crude and obtuse intellectus to read in things even that information concerning God which they really
To understand the force of this expression, we must remember that in the opinion of St. Thomas the special manner in which the Divine Perfection is imitated is what constitutes the special essence of a thing.
“Every creature has its own proper species according to which it participates in some way in the likeness of the Divine Essence. Therefore, as God knows His Essence as so imitable by such a creature sic imitabilem a tali He knows it as the particular model and idea of that This thought points the way to a new and complex problem; nevertheless it has a close relation to our present theme. What it states is just this: the ultimate reality of things is something to which we can never finally penetrate, because we can never fully grasp these likenesses of the Divine Ideas precisely as likenesses.
This twofold reply has a definitely dialectic structure. It reflects the structure of created reality which, by definition, has its origin from God and also from nothing. For St. Thomas not only insists that the reality of things is their light; he also says: est tenebra inquantum est ex created things are darkness in so far as they proceed from nothing.” This sentence comes not from Heidegger but from the Quaestiones Disputatae of St. The reply to the query why we cannot know God fully from creation has the same curiously dialectic structure. What does it in fact assert? It declares the following.
Things through their essence express God only in an imperfect manner. And why? Because things are creatures and the created cannot wholly express the Creator. Nevertheless, the answer continues, the fullness of light even in this imperfect expression surpasses our power of comprehension. Again, why? Because man is himself a creature, but still more for the reason that things in their reality refer back to a divine design. And this means once again, because things are creatures.