HOPE AS THE STRUCTURE OF CREATURELY KNOWLEDGE
We have referred to the “negative element” in the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. A formula of this kind can be easily misunderstood and requires a more precise statement, and perhaps even some correction.
This “negative” character is not to be understood in the sense that the Being of things cannot be attained in human knowledge. usque ad rei the mind makes its way to the essence of remains a valid proposition for St. Thomas, in spite of his assertion that the intellectual efforts of the philosophers have never been able to grasp the essence of a single fly. These two sentences belong together. That the mind does attain to things is proven precisely in the fact that it enters into the unfathomable light; because and to the extent that it does attain to the reality of things, it discovers that they cannot be fathomed. As Nicholas of Cusa said in his explanation of the Socratic “learned Only when a man comes into visual contact with light does he realize that the sun’s brightness altogether transcends his power of vision.
With St. Thomas there can be no question of agnosticism, and Neo-Scholasticism is perfectly right in insisting upon this. But it is not possible, in my opinion, to bring out clearly the true reason for this fact, without formally bringing into play the concept of creation, i.e., the structure of things precisely as creatures. In other words, things in so far as they are creatively thought by God possess these two properties: on the one hand their ontological clarity and self-revelation and, on the other hand, their inexhaustibleness; their knowability as well as their “unknowability.” Unless we go back to this basic position, we cannot, I submit, show how the “negative element” in the thought of St. Thomas is safeguarded from agnosticism. Anyone who endeavors to pass this by runs the inevitable danger of interpreting St. Thomas as a Rationalist, and therefore of misunderstanding him even more, as is illustrated by the example of some Neo-Scholastic authors who tried to reduce his teaching to a system.
It seems to me that St. Thomas’s doctrine means that hope is the condition of man’s existence as a knowing subject, a condition that by its very nature cannot be fixed: it is neither comprehension and possession nor simply non-possession, but “not-yet-possession.” The knowing subject is visualized as a traveller, a as someone “on the way.” This means, from one point of view, that the steps he takes have significance, that they are not altogether in vain, and that they bring him nearer to his goal. Yet this thought has to be complemented by another: as long as man as “existing being” is “on the way,” just so long is the “way” of his knowing uncompleted. This condition of hope in every philosophizing search after the nature of things, may it be said once more, is based upon the “createdness” of the world and of the knowing man himself.
Because hope is much closer to affirmation than to denial, the “negative element” in the philosophy of St. Thomas, which we set out to formulate, must be envisaged against the background of an embracing affirmation. That the essences of things are unknowable is part of the notion of the truth of Being. But so little does this denote objective inaccessibility, the impossibility of cognition, or darkness on the part of things, that there is, on the contrary, this striking paradox: In the last resort, things are inaccessible to human knowledge precisely because they are all too knowable.
There is a well-known sentence of Aristotle which says: “As the eyes of bats are dazzled by sunlight, so it is with human intelligence when face to face with what is by nature most In his commentary on this sentence, Thomas thoroughly accepts its whole significance, but goes on to underline its positive aspect in this magnificent formulation: etsi non videat oculus nycticoracis, videt tamen eum oculus though the eyes of the bat do not avail to behold the sun, it is seen by the eye of the eagle.”