Recent Thomistic Epistemology and Philosophy of Religion

Recent Thomistic Epistemology and Philosophyof Religion

Paul Macdonald*Bucknell University

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to show the contribution of recent Thomisticepistemology – that is, an epistemology rooted in the philosophical theologyof Thomas Aquinas – makes to contemporary philosophy of religion. In particular,I show how recent philosophers and theologians (most of them of a distinctly analyticpersuasion) are appropriating insights in Aquinas’s philosophical theology in orderto address perennial epistemological issues: most broadly, how it is that humanpersons know the world as well as the divine. One of the main conclusions of thearticle is that recent Thomistic epistemology (including the various species of recentThomistic epistemology) offers powerful resources for properly understanding boththe mind-world and mind-God relationship.

Introduction

The purpose of this article is to show the contribution of recent Thomisticepistemology – that is, an epistemology rooted in the philosophical theologyof Thomas Aquinas – makes to contemporary philosophy of religion. Inparticular, I will show how recent philosophers and theologians (most ofthem of a distinctly analytic persuasion) are appropriating insights in Aquinas’sphilosophical theology in order to address perennial epistemological issues:most broadly, how it is that human persons know the world as well as thedivine. Drawing on those insights, I will exposit Aquinas’s realist accountof cognition, his realist epistemology of the beatific vision, and his realistepistemologies of reason and faith. One of the main conclusions of the articleis that recent Thomistic epistemology offers powerful resources for properlyunderstanding both the mind-world and mind-God relationship.

Realism and Cognition

To begin, we need briefly to acquaint (or remind) ourselves of the basictenets of Aquinas’s overall epistemology. ‘Knowledge’, for Aquinas, cannotbe univocally defined, given that there are different forms of knowing onthe Thomistic schema, which is itself Aristotelian in inspiration andorigin. The most basic and broadest form of knowledge is cognitio, by© 2007 The AuthorJournal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Philosophy Compass 2/3 (2007): 517–533, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2007.00077.x

which one apprehends, most notably, the sensible and intelligible featuresof the external world (and we could add, propositions concerning the sensibleand intelligible features of the external world). Intellectus is a further form ofknowing: it furnishes an immediate, penetrating apprehension or under-standing of the basic propositional truths or ‘first principles’ that constitutethe various ‘sciences’, which for Aquinas includes (for example) logic,mathematics, as well as the natural sciences. One gains scientia, the highestform of knowing, by being able to demonstrate scientific truths (orconclusions) on the basis of those truths already known by intellectus. AsScott MacDonald defines it, scientia is therefore ‘the paradigm for knowledge’given that it furnishes ‘complete and certain cognition’ of the truth – anexplanatory knowledge only gained by demonstration and specificallysyllogistic reasoning based on at least some propositional truths (epistemicfirst principles) that are known immediately ‘of themselves’ (per se) byintellectus (163).

So understood – and it is worth noting this to start – Aquinas’sepistemology may initially seem unable to accommodate any robust modelfor the knowledge of God. Aquinas himself denies that there can be anyknowledge of God, properly speaking, at least in this life, given that thefinite human intellect cannot know, by intellectus or scientia, any propositionsabout God’s true nature (or the divine essence itself).1 Not only do suchtruths exceed the grasp of the intellect (given that the divine essence exceedsthe grasp of the intellect), thereby prohibiting any knowledge of the divineby intellectus; but they also clearly exceed the intellect’s powers of reasoningor demonstration, thereby prohibiting any knowledge of the divine byscientia. What, then, becomes of knowledge of God on Aquinas’s account,and of what benefit is Thomistic epistemology to contemporary philosophyof religion more generally?

In order to properly answer this question, and thereby begin toappreciate the contribution of Thomistic epistemology, we need first toexplore Aquinas’s account of cognition, or what we call empirical knowledge:knowledge of the world gained through the senses. Most broadly,cognition for Aquinas is the actualization of a cognitive power or capacity:a capacity, which, when suitably acted on (or actualized) by its properobject – an external object’s sensible and intelligible features or forms –actually unites its possessor (cognitively speaking) to that object. On onelevel, sensory cognition of the empirical world requires that the sensiblefeatures or accidental forms of a perceived extra-mental object (for example,color, considered as a sensible feature of an object of sight) impress or inform(that is, ‘in-form’) the senses – albeit immaterially, as ‘sensible species’ orforms devoid of matter. Once our senses have been suitably informed bysensible species or forms, then we can be credited with possessingworld-intending sensory states – that is, sensory states directed at (or unitedto) the sensible features possessed by perceived extra-mental objectsthemselves.

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© 2007 The Author Philosophy Compass 2/3 (2007): 517–533, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2007.00077.xJournal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

On a higher level, intellective cognition of a perceived extra-mentalobject’s intelligible features, and more specifically its substantial form (theinner structuring or ordering principle of a thing) requires the operation ofthe intellect. Just as sensory cognition requires that the sensible features ofan extra-mental object be immaterially present in the senses, so as to informthe senses about the world, and consequently conjoin our senses to theworld; so intellective cognition requires that the intelligible features andspecifically the substantial form of an extra-mental object (that is, an objectabstractly conceived as a form-matter composite) be immaterially orintentionally present to the ‘possible intellect’, so as to inform the intellectabout the world, and consequently conjoin our minds to the world. Oncethe intellect has been suitably informed by ‘intelligible species’ or forms ofextra-mental things (‘abstracted’, we should add, by the ‘agent intellect’from ‘phantasms’, or retained sensory experiences), and the intellect in turnforms concepts of those things, then we can be credited with possessingworld-intending thoughts – that is, thoughts directed at (or united to) theworld itself.

So understood, Aquinas’s account of cognition is unequivocally realist,and more than that, a paradigm example of direct realism. As Aquinas putsit, just as ‘the likeness of a sensible thing is the form of the sense inact’, so ‘the likeness of the thing understood is the form of the intellect [inact]’.2 Or more simply, ‘the thing actually understood is the intellect in act[my emphasis]’ (ST I.85.3 ad 1). Direct epistemic access is guaranteed inboth cases because both sensory cognitive acts (sensation) and intellectivecognitive acts (apprehension) are configured by the same forms that configurethings. We can explain this further as follows. Through direct sensoryencounter with the sensible features or forms possessed by externalobjects, cognitive subjects are also able to apprehend, by way of intellectiveabstraction (which illuminates phantasms) and subsequent conceptualization,the intelligible features or forms possessed by those objects – and specifically, thenatures of those external objects as form-matter composites. For example,through direct sensory encounter with the sensible features or formspossessed by stones (‘proper sensibles’ such as color and weight and‘common sensibles’ such as shape and size), cognitive subjects are also ableto apprehend, by way of intellective abstraction and subsequent concep-tualization, the specific nature (what we could call ‘stone-ness’) that makesall stones what they objectively are. Thus, through direct sensory encounterwith external objects of sense and subsequent intellective acts, cognitivesubjects are also able to form thoughts whose intentional constituentscorrespond directly to the intrinsic features possessed by external objectsthemselves.

Now, this account itself requires further explanation and defense; and itis my task now to offer further explanation and defense, relying inlarge part on recent work in contemporary philosophy of mind that is itselfbroadly Thomistic in orientation. The specific claim which requires


Recent Thomistic Epistemology and Philosophy of Religion . 519

explication and defense, and which expresses the heart of the Thomisticview under consideration, can be expressed as follows:

[For the Thomist/Aristotelian], both the intellect and the senses are powers ofreceptivity. In both intellectual understanding and (proper object) perceptionwe submit ourselves to being in-formed (as we still say) by the very objects wereceive information about. When a cognitive state is wholly determined by itsobject, sensible or intelligible, the result is objective truth. (Burnyeat 141)

In this passage, Miles Burnyeat not only underscores the Thomistic/Aristotelian commitment to direct realism, he also underscores theimportance of form, which is the concept driving that commitment. It isbecause our most basic cognitive states (whether sensory or intellective) arecausally informed and thus ‘wholly determined’ by their respective objects(form) that those states are objectively true – in the sense that they objectivelycorrespond or conform to the world. And it is by virtue of objectivelyconforming to the world (and specifically the sensible and intelligible featuresthat constitute the world) that our most basic cognitive states conjoin us tothe world, granting us direct epistemic access to the world itself. All of thisis possible, again, because the senses and intellect, qua cognitive capacitiesand powers, are causally informed by the world itself.

To better understand how the world informs the intellect, we must begin(where Aquinas begins) with the principle that ‘mind’ is simply a capacity(and moreover, a reliable capacity) for being informed by the world. Forexample, John Jacobs and Jonathan Zeis write, ‘[Mind] is a capacity to beinformed by what it causally interacts with, and in such a way as to makethe individual so informed aware of the object as a specific kind of thing’(545).3 Intellective cognition occurs, therefore, when the intellect isactualized by taking in (and even better, taking on) the form of externalobjects; and this process is intelligible because objects cause thought to takein or take on intelligible form, which is suitably processed as conceptual form.4

Thus, through abstraction, the intellect neither extracts intelligible formfrom sensible form (which is only potentially intelligible), nor does itarbitrarily produce intelligible form. Rather, the intellect generates intelligibleform in direct response to external object’s causal influence on the senses,so it is the world, and not the mind that initiates the cognitive actualizationof form.

Moreover, the intellect abstracts the specific forms and then generates thespecific concepts it does in direct response to the world’s causal influenceon the senses, because on Aquinas’s own view, concepts and mind-independent objects (the external causes of thought) are structurally andhence formally identical. So it is because the intellect ultimately can formthe right concepts – concepts that correspond to the intelligible featurespossessed by external objects – that there can be direct and immediateintellective cognition of the empirical world. Therefore, Jacobs and Zeisconclude:



That human cognition can begin with what is presented by the senses and yetcome to an adequate understanding of the structure of the real would be whollymysterious unless the intellect were in some way naturally capable of constructingintelligible forms via reflection on and abstraction from sensible objects. And theconstruction of such intelligible forms would in no way be adequate to theattainment of knowledge unless the concepts constructed by the intellect werein some sense identical with objects. And of course, as the Aristotelian/Thomistsees it, there is an identity: it is an identity of form. (551)

Again, mind is answerable or accountable to the world because the sameforms that constitute things also constitute thought.

John Haldane argues in line with Jacobs and Zeis that if external objectsmerely efficiently caused cognitive subjects to have certain sensations, anddid not also formally cause thought to take on their own intrinsic formconceptually, then it would be a mystery how thought could be directlyand immediately related to those objects. Given the vast number of causallines that extend from a thinker to an object even in cases of veridicalsensation, none of which obviously determine ‘a reciprocal relation betweenthinker and object of thought’, it becomes impossible to determine ‘whichcould constitute a privileged class sufficient to ground reference’ (‘Returnto Form’ 269). Thus, Haldane writes:

In sensation the sense is (efficiently) caused to change and is formally reordered.But in ‘taking on’ the form of the original object it still does so under materialconditions (those of the organ of sense) and so one has particularised qualities:the sensation of redness deriving from that patch of objective redness in theenvironment. In thought, however, general concepts or universal forms areoperative . . . and this implies that at the intellectual level of information formmust be exemplified without empirical instantiation. (270)

Central to Aquinas’s understanding of intelligible and conceptual form, then,is the distinction Aquinas make between a natural exemplification of form(esse naturale), which occurs when form is individuated by matter, therebygenerating a material ‘case’ or ‘instance’ of form, and an intentionalexemplification of form (esse intentionale), which, in the case of intellectivecognition,‘involves the occurrence of the form as such in thought, and notthe generation of a case’ (‘Forms of Thought’ 163). Direct intellectivecognition of external objects is possible, then, because ‘through experienceand reason the subject comes to acquire concepts that are intentionalcounterparts of naturally existing substantial and accidental forms;’ and this,in turn, establishes ‘an intrinsic connection between mind and world’ (163).5

Of course, the ‘intrinsic connection between mind and world’ Haldanespeaks of could not be sustained if concepts (rather than external objectsthemselves) were the proper objects of cognition. But according to Aquinas’saccount of cognition, concepts are not objects: by virtue of informing theintellect, they furnish thought with presentational content – content thatmakes thought structurally isomorphic with its external formal cause. Thus,as John P. O’Callaghan points out, concepts for Aquinas ‘do not constitute



a third realm of mental things or objects interposed between the mind’sactivity and external thing; they are the informed activity of the mind inuniting itself to those extra-mental things’ (‘Problem of Language’ 544).6

O’Callaghan notes that it is true for Aquinas that the concept can be anobject for the intellect in a self-reflexive act of intellect; but he argues thatthe intelligible species only can be known qua object secondarily, ratherthan primarily. That is, for Aquinas, ‘by our cognitive awareness andattention, we are primarily and by nature directed to others, not uponourselves or our concepts’ (535). Moreover, the existence of concepts inthe intellect is causally dependent on the existence of formed objects outsidethe mind, given that there is an intrinsic connection between mental andmaterial form presupposed in all acts of human knowing. On the Thomisticview, then, the (subjective) conceptual content of thought is determinedby the (objective) structure of the world impressing itself on thought (albeitconceptually): so informed, thought is ‘intrinsically representational’ and theworld is ‘intrinsically intelligible’ (Haldane, ‘Mind-World Identity’ 26).Direct realism is ensured at both the sensory and intellective levels ofcognition.

We should add that knowledge of the empirical world does not end, butin fact only begins, with a direct intellective grasp of the natures of things.By acquiring knowledge (cognitio) of the natures of things through the senseswe are also, in turn, able to acquire knowledge (intellectus) of first principles(propositions) concerning the natures of those things. Initially, thoseprinciples are not known to us by intellectus (as they are, for example, inmathematics); but they can be known as such – and therefore form the basisof scientia – when we reason (through what Aquinas calls a demonstrationquia) from beliefs concerning the effects of things to beliefs concerning thecauses of things. By discovering the empirical causes of things – hidden tous, initially, by their sensible effects – we are in turn able to reason (throughwhat Aquinas calls a propter quid demonstration) from beliefs concerningcauses of things (first principles) to beliefs concerning their effects(conclusions). This process entails what John Jenkins calls ‘cognitiverestructuring’ or a

re-arrangement of our cognitive structure, so that the causes, which were formerlyless familiar, become more familiar and better known; and the effects, formerly betterknown, come to be believed on the grounds of our belief in the cause. (46)

And this process by which something that is ‘better known in itself ’ becomes‘better known to us’ is essential for gaining knowledge (scientia), in a specificallyrealist sense: ‘it requires’, Jenkins says, ‘that, in some sense, our doxasticstructure comes to mirror the causal structure of the world’ (47).

Realism and the Beatific Vision

Thomistic epistemology, so rooted in a realist account of cognition, clearlyprovides an intelligible and attractive basis for understanding how human



persons, as endowed with specific cognitive capacities or powers, are capableof accumulating knowledge about empirical reality, or the world they inhabit:a world populated by objectively perceivable sensible qualities and objectivelyknowable natures as well as the causal relations that hold between them.But on Aquinas’s larger theological view, it is precisely because humanpersons are endowed with specific cognitive powers – specifically powersof mind – that they are also capable of accumulating knowledge about divinereality.7

Concerning our knowledge of God in its paradigm form – the beatificvision itself, as enjoyed by the blessed in heaven – Aquinas remainsunequivocally realist. It is precisely because the intellect is capable of beingintentionally and immaterially in-formed by the natures of extra-mentalobjects that it is also capable of being in-formed by the divine essence itself(which is, of course, also immaterial). Aquinas’s remarkable claim, then, isthat in the supernatural cognitive state of beatitude, ‘the essence of Goditself becomes the intelligible form of the intellect’ (ST I.12.5), which meansthat ‘those who see the divine essence see what they see in God not by anylikeness, but by the divine essence itself united to their intellect’ (STI.12.9). Thus, in the supernatural cognitive state of beatitude, God is directlyand immediately present to the intellect as its intelligible form, and it isbecause God is directly and immediately present to the intellect as itsintelligible form that the intellect enjoys direct, unmediated epistemic accessto God. Or put another way: it is because God unites God’s self to theintellect as its intelligible form that the intellect is in turn united to God inthe act of knowing or ‘seeing’ God. In their beatified state, therefore, theblessed know God by way ‘simple understanding:’ given that God is directlyand immediately present to the intellect ‘by presence, essence, and power’the blessed do not properly ‘think’ God at all: they ‘see’ God, which meansthat thought gives way to pure intellective ‘vision’ or perception (ST II-II.1.2ad 3; ST I.12.11 ad 4).8

Remarkable as it is, supernatural cognition of the divine in the state ofheavenly bliss remains the actualization of a cognitive capacity or power:the created intellect itself, then fully perfected and actually made deiformby what Aquinas calls the ‘light of glory’ (ST I.12.6). Beatific knowledgeof God is therefore nothing more than the actualization of the glorifiedintellect by divine form, which means that God, on analogy with the world,is the formal cause of that knowledge. Drawing on Burnyeat’s insight above,we can say that the supernatural cognitive state of beatitude is ‘whollydetermined’ by its object, the divine essence itself, and ‘the result is objectivetruth’, namely knowing or ‘seeing’ God directly. Thus, as the formal causeof the knowledge of God, God not only causally elicits such knowledge, inthe manner of an efficient cause; God also wholly determines the content ofsuch knowledge. And God wholly determines the content of such knowledgebecause God is the content of such knowledge: as the intelligible form ofthe intellect, God constitutes the very content of the intellect’s ‘vision’ of



God; and by constituting the very content of the intellect’s ‘vision’ of God,God also constitutes what the blessed ‘see’ in God: the very essence of Goditself!

According to Aquinas, the only cognitive limitation the blessed are subjectto in their beatified state is creaturely finitude: God cannot be knowninfinitely, and hence cannot be comprehended, because ‘it is clearlyimpossible for any created intellect to know God in an infinite degree’(ST I.12.7). But again, even though God cannot be known infinitely orcomprehensively, God can still be known directly – and moreover,objectively – given that there is no ‘region’ of the divine reality that can beintelligibly located outside or beyond a cognitive boundary that enclosesthought (or the mind), and hence located outside or beyond the scope ofthe intellect’s ‘vision’ of God. Aquinas very clearly affirms that ‘God is calledincomprehensible not because anything of Him is not seen; but because Heis not seen as perfectly as He is capable of being seen’ (ST I.12.7 ad 2). Oragain, he writes, ‘Therefore, he who sees God’s essence, sees in Him thatHe exists infinitely, and is infinitely knowable’ (ST I.12.7 ad 3). Aquinas’sremarkable claim here, then, is that God’s infinitude, far from constitutinga bounded region of the divine reality from which the intellect is deniedepistemic access, is in fact interwoven into the very fabric or layout of divinereality that is ‘visually’ impressed on the intellect in beatitude. That is, onAquinas’s view, God’s infinitude is directly and objectively manifest or ‘inview’ for the blessed in the intellective ‘vision’ of God they enjoy in theirsupernaturalized cognitive state.

For Aquinas, the beatific vision clearly represents the height of creaturelyknowledge or (in MacDonald’s terms) ‘the paradigm of human knowing’that furnishes ‘complete and certain cognition’ of the divine, or God as theFirst Truth. The knowledge of God furnished by the beatific vision, then,is not only cognitio but also scientia, even though it surpasses any form ofearthly scientia (or scientific knowledge here below). While earthly scientiais gained through discursive reasoning (and in particular, a propter quiddemonstration whose premises give the cause or explanation of theconclusion), scientia dei is gained through the direct presence of God to themind. In this sense, the beatific vision of God also closely resembles intellectus,insofar as the knowledge it furnishes is thoroughly immediate andnon-discursive. Most properly, scientia dei is participation in God’s ownself-knowledge (still according to the finite mode of the intellect), by whichGod knows all created things directly, as their uncreated cause. UsingJenkins’s terms, we can say that in the beatific vision, our minds are subjectto massive ‘cognitive restructuring:’ given God’s direct presence to the mind,the nature of God, supremely knowable in itself, also becomes supremelyknowable to us!

So understood as grounded in a realist account of cognition and realistepistemology of the beatific vision, Thomistic epistemology also offers acompelling alternative to the distinctly modern view, which plagues much



modern and contemporary philosophy of religion and theology, that affirmingGod’s transcendence and incomprehensibility also requires rendering Godultimately unknowable. In fact, I argue that Aquinas, as properly interpretedand pressed into the service of offering a realist philosophical and theologicalepistemology, should be read as issuing a clear challenge to the distinctlymodern view – itself a form of heterodoxy, I claim – that God belongsoutside or beyond an outer boundary that encloses the conceptual schemesor cognitive space that human persons, by virtue of possessing minds,occupy. This assumption is deeply embedded in modern thought; so muchso, in fact, that it can seem like acknowledging or honoring God’stranscendence and incomprehensibility requires locating God outside orbeyond such a boundary. But Aquinas clearly does not share this assumption:were God so positioned in relation to a boundary – on the far side of acognitive interface that separates the intellect and God, and entirely insulatesdivine objectivity from human subjectivity – then God could not be knownor ‘seen’ objectively, or ‘as God is’. The very intelligibility of the intellective‘vision’ of the divine essence that Aquinas defends as the paradigm case ofcognition and the height of intellectual actualization presupposes that mindand God can and do ‘meet’, not merely at a boundary, or (to use anothermetaphor) at the ‘edge’ of human subjectivity, at an interface, but directly,or ‘face-to-face’.

Realist Epistemologies of Reason and Faith

As a Christian philosophical theologian, Aquinas indeed holds to theScriptural principle that we ‘see’ God ‘face to face’ in the next life; however,he also holds to the Scriptural principle that in this life we ‘see’ God, at best,‘in a glass darkly’ (1 Corinthians 13.12). More specifically, he argues thatwhile in the next life, we ‘shall see [God] by a form which is His essence,and shall be united to Him as something known’ in this life, ‘our mostperfect knowledge of Him as wayfarers is to know that He is above all thatour intellect can conceive, and thus we are united to Him as somethingunknown’ (ST suppl. 92.1 ad 3). Thus, on Aquinas’s view, no living humanperson in his or her current truncated cognitive state can ‘see’ the essenceof God; consequently there can be no knowledge of the essence of God inthis life. In fact, according to Aquinas, we know God most perfectly in thislife when we know that God is beyond anything we can conceive – that is,beyond anything we can know or ‘see’.

Aquinas’s commitment to epistemological and theological realism istherefore conjoined to his further commitment to apophaticism. On thisside of eternity or the eschaton, our knowledge of God must take the formof ‘unknowing’ because comparatively speaking, such knowledge ischaracterized more by darkness than by light. But for Aquinas, apophaticismis not equal to agnosticism. In expositing the knowledge of God availablein this life,Aquinas begins with the fundamental theological principle that



there are certain truths about God that God has revealed. Some of thosetruths (for example, God exists and God is one) can be attained by humanreason based on what God has revealed of God’s self in the world God hascreated; here,Aquinas admits that there can be non-paradigmatic scientia ofcertain truths about God based on demonstrations quia that begin frompremises about God’s created effects, known to us by the senses. However,those same truths, along with other truths that exceed what human reasoncan attain (for example, God is triune) have been revealed by God withinwhat Aquinas calls sacra doctrina – the sacred teaching of the Christian church,itself based on Christian Scripture – which itself qualifies as a subordinateor subaltern scientia, insofar as it derives its principles from the conclusionsof the scientia dei possessed by God and the blessed.9 On Aquinas’s view,given that the human intellect is both inherently weak and continually proneto error, it was necessary that God reveal the truth about God’s self inspecifically propositional (or linguistic) form in sacra doctrina, which is thedistinctly human mode of receiving truth in this life (ST II-II.1.2).

So while Aquinas does not deny that persons can come to know certaintruths about God by way of rational investigation, he insists that the mostcommon way persons come to know those truths (as well as all other truthsthat God has revealed) is through faith, which, as a supernaturally infusedtheological virtue – a good, reliable cognitive disposition or habit (habitus)– strengthens the mind so that persons of faith can assent to those truths (asspecifically proposed for their belief ) and consequently form beliefs aboutGod with true propositional contents (ST II-II.2.1; ST II-II.4.2). And it isby forming beliefs about God with true propositional contents that personsof faith come to enjoy a provisional form of knowledge of God thatanticipates, and more than that, actually participates in the full knowledgeof ‘vision’ of God that they will enjoy in the life to come, when they ceaseto believe in God and actually ‘see’ God ‘as God is’.10

Aquinas’s claims here about the knowledge of the divine available to usin this life – even if they are tempered by his commitment to aphophaticism– may still strike us moderns as audacious or hopelessly naïve; but Aquinasclearly thinks that such knowledge is possible, even if it is severely limitedin content and scope. How, then, should we understand the nature of suchknowledge? To help answer this question, we once again can draw oninsights in recent Thomistic epistemology. Denys Turner argues on Aquinas’sbehalf that properly defending the knowledge of God available to reasonrequires reconceiving (or rediscovering) reason as a God-given capacitywhich, when ‘stretched to the end of its tether’ and put into the service ofits highest end – achieving the truth about the existence of God – ushersthe mind into a new realm of knowing, or what Turner calls ‘unknowing’,where it confronts, paradoxically, the ‘uknowability’ or incomprehensiblemystery of the God it seeks to prove. Turner writes:

For Thomas, what lies at the end of reason’s tether is a demonstratedunknowability, an opening up of possibilities of knowing, not a closing down



of those possibilities, not a final truth – for how could a truth be known to be‘final’ except from a standpoint which is already on the other side of it? On thisside of its limits reason knows only the existence of a mystery whose depths itknows – demonstrates – it cannot know, for its character as mystery consistsin its lying beyond reason’s reach. In that ‘unknowing’ lies reason’s self-transcendence as intellect. And the act by which it thus self-transcends is proofof the existence of God. (88)

Central to Turner’s defense of the rational demonstrability of the existenceof God is his claim that on Aquinas’s view, reason is remarkably open tothe transcendent. It is capacity not for comprehension but contemplationand wonder; a capacity which, when suitably actualized in contemplationand wonder of the contingency of the world as a whole (again, the ‘effects’of God in creation) leads the mind ineluctably towards something whichexists and answers to the term ‘God’ and more specifically ‘Creator of allthings’, the causal ground of all that is.

For Tuner’s Aquinas, then, reason, at the height of its actualization, asksa question it is compelled to ask – ‘why is there something rather thannothing, or anything at all’? – from within language; but in doing so, pointsto an answer which cannot possibly be contained within language: atranscendent referent or reality which reason can demonstrate and name butnever comprehend. Here, Turner says, Aquinas unites the cataphhatic andthe apophatic in his theological epistemology of reason; an epistemologywhich therefore cannot be equated, on the one hand, with the idolatry of‘onto-theology’ (which makes God into a being among beings, a part ofour linguistic world), or with Kantian agnosticism, on the other hand.Regarding the latter,Turner says the following:

whereas Kant’s agnosticism is the proposition that God is unknowable to reasonin the sense that no speculative inference from the world could get you to God,Thomas’s apophaticism begins with the proposition that God can be demonstratedto exist, but that what such inference to God succeeds in showing is preciselythe unknowability of the God thus shown. (254)

Aquinas’s strategy, then, in demonstrating the existence of God throughreason is from the start inescapably theological. Fergus Kerr puts the samepoint this way:

From the start, the ‘theistic proofs’ are the first lesson in Thomas’s negativetheology. Far from being an exercise in rationalistic apologetics, the purpose ofarguing for the existence of God is to protect God’s transcendence. (58)

Turning our attention to yet another facet of Aquinas’s theologicalepistemology, we need to ask, what is the nature of the knowledge of Godthat is available through faith? Does faith for Aquinas give us a surer, morepenetrating grasp of the divine? Clearly, faith for Aquinas grants us epistemicaccess of a sort to divine truths that surpass the demonstrative powers ofreason; truths about God that are unique to Christian revelation in sacradoctrina. But faith too, for Aquinas, even as supernaturally generated and



informed, unites us to God not as one known or ‘seen’ but as one unknownand ‘unseen’. Turner explains this as follows:

unaided reason’s is the less powerful theological capacity, for it knows only thehalf even of our ignorance. For through revelation [and faith] we know that there ismore to the unknowability of God than reason could ever have suspected. (76)

Insofar as it deepens knowledge of the divine, then, faith leads the mindfurther into the mystery of God, rather than away from it. But faith remainsutterly unique in this sense: in leading the mind further into the mystery ofGod, it also leads the mind towards the beatific vision itself. Faith, unlikereason, affords salvific knowledge of God: it sets the mind on a trajectorythat extends beyond this life into eternity with God. In other words, theknowledge of God that is available through faith in this life is fully realizedin the next life.

Given the importance of such knowledge, it is not surprising that Aquinassays it only can come from God: God gives us the capacity, the ‘light offaith’, by which we are able to recognize, immediately and non-inferentially,what it is that God is calling us to believe. Thus,Aquinas claims:‘Unbelieversare in ignorance of things that are of faith, for neither do they see or knowthem in themselves, nor do they know them to be credible. The faithful,on the other hand, know them, not as by demonstration, but by the lightof faith which makes them see that they ought to believe them (ST II-II.1.5ad 1). The light of faith therefore takes the place of rational demonstrationor the light of reason as the primary means by which the propositions offaith are known. But the light of faith is by no means inferior to rationaldemonstration or the light of reason; in fact, Aquinas argues that the lightof faith ‘is more capable of causing assent than any demonstration’, giventhat it, unlike the light of reason, ‘cannot fail, anymore than God can bedeceived or lie’ (Expositio Super Librum Boethii De Trinitate 3.1 ad 4). Hence,the light of faith, which is ‘divinely implanted by God’, cannot fail indirecting the intellect to assent to the divinely revealed propositions of faith(3.1 ad 4).

Interpreting Aquinas’s account of faith along contemporary epistemologicallines – which enables us to start identifying faith as a form of knowledge inthe contemporary epistemological sense – John Jenkins has argued that faith,and specifically the beliefs we form about God in faith, are warranted (andhence have a positive epistemic status), at least in part, because

(A) the individual’s cognitive faculties have been heightened so that they haveacquired a design with which he can discover the truth about divine revelations(i.e. as to whether or not they are genuine) and because (B) the individual’s assentto the articles was produced and is sustained by such heightened cognitive facultieswhen operating properly. This interpretation is externalist, for the individual hasno privileged access to whether his cognitive faculties have the appropriate designand were operating properly in producing assent. It is supernaturalist, for thecognitive abilities in question are . . . divinely given graces over and above his[natural cognitive abilities]. (197)



Furthermore, according to Jenkins’s ‘supernatural externalist’ interpretationof Aquinas, when one’s supernaturally heightened cognitive faculties arefunctioning properly, one assents to the propositions of faith, illumined bythe infused light of faith, on the basis of non-discursively grasping thosepropositions (through the additional supernatural gifting of the Holy Spirit,who furnishes what Aquinas calls the donum intellectus) according to or underthe idea (ratio) of being divinely revealed. Thus, in the light of faith, infusedby the divine itself, one sees that the propositions of faith ‘are to be believedand that for no reason is one to deviate from adherence to them’ (193).

Even more recently, John Lamont has offered a broadly Thomisticepistemology of faith that is based in a robust virtue epistemology andepistemology of testimony. According to Lamont, an intellectual virtue isa capacity (such as memory, sense experience, and deduction) for infalliblyacquiring true beliefs and therefore knowledge. Consequently, the truebeliefs that are acquired through faith, insofar as they are infallibly produced,also furnish knowledge. (Central to Lamont’s defense of this robust virtueepistemology is the claim, which he derives from John McDowell, thatknowledge is a factive state: if you know something, you cannot be wrongabout it). Furthermore, for Lamont, the virtue of faith operates on analogywith the virtue of testimony: when it is properly exercised by God’s grace,it yields true beliefs about God on the basis of God’s testimony – that is,God’s speaking directly to the Christian believer through the revelation (orutterance) God has offered, such that the believer is able non-inferentiallyto recognize that revelation (or utterance) as coming from God. So just asbelief in the testimony of others can yield not only probable opinion buttrue belief and knowledge (solely on the basis of our observing that a telleris trustworthy, presuming we are being ‘doxastically responsible’ about whatwe observe), so belief based on divine testimony – which is itself infallible– can yield not only probable opinion but true belief and knowledge. Thebeliefs formed and held in faith derive both their truth and their rationality(or positive epistemic status) from the divine itself!

Both Jenkins and Lamont offer compelling epistemologies of faith,especially insofar as they help us distinguish faith, from a distinctlycontemporary philosophical point of view, as a form of knowledge. Butinsofar as they claim to root their epistemologies in Aquinas’s own accountof faith, they fail to take adequate account of the necessary role of the willin Aquinas in enabling faith.11 We can explain this as follows. On theThomistic schema, faith is not knowledge properly speaking: in our currenttruncated cognitive state we neither apprehend the truth of the propositionsof faith by intellectus, nor do we apprehend the truth of the propositions offaith by scientia, as the conclusions of a demonstration or syllogisticreasoning. What causes the assent of faith, therefore, is not knowledge ofthe truth of propositions of faith, but what Aquinas calls the ‘inward instinctof the divine invitation’ which inclines the intellect to believe what it cannotknow or ‘see’ (ST II-II.2.9 ad 3). God indeed illuminates the mind regarding



the status of the propositions of faith as genuine revelations from God (orutterances from God); here, Jenkins and Lamont rightly agree. But Godspeaks to the mind by way of the will: under the graced influence of thewill (whose proper object is goodness rather than truth) the intellect is drawnto assent to the propositions of faith given that those propositions depictdivine truth and hence God as a good (the ‘Divine Good’, taken as a finalend) to be desired; and more specifically, hoped for and loved.12 On Aquinas’sview, therefore, if God persuades the intellect to assent to the propositionsof faith, it is not because God renders the truths expressed by thosepropositions transparent to the intellect (an act which would presumablyonly damage rather than elevate the finite human mind), but because Godrenders those truths attractive to the intellect by working specifically through thewill: under the influence of the will, the intellect sees that divine truth – asof yet ‘unseen’ – is itself desirable, and consequently should be believed oradhered to with certainty.

So understood,Aquinas’s epistemology of faith is really an epistemologyof the heart. Bruce Marhsall says the following:

Lit by grace, the heart (as we might now say) finds in the triune God of whomthis [revealed] teaching speaks its true desire, and so cleaves to this teaching notonly as true, but as the first truth. . . . Thus faith’s distinctive certainty. It reposesin the church’s teaching as our only way of apprehending in this life, where wemust think discursively and in words, the first truth in whom our ultimate good– our salvation – consists. . . . So faith holds to the articles as the most certainstatements there could be, even though they seem less obvious to us than manyother beliefs. (13)

Marshall considers the objection that locating the motivation for faith in theheart rather than the head potentially undermines the epistemic value offaith. But Thomistic faith, Marshall argues, springs not from wishful-thinkingbut ‘from a prior intimacy with the God who makes himself available to usin the articles of faith as our last end’ (14). Faith is grounded in the rationaldesire, wrought in the believer herself by God, to know God even moreintimately as the True and the Good.

To fully appreciate Aquinas’s rich epistemology of faith, therefore, weneed to give proper credit to the positive epistemic role the will plays incausing and motivating the assent of faith. As we have already seen, the will’sdesire for God as its Divine Good, which Aquinas adds is intensified byhope for our salvation and love of God as the author of our salvation, drawsor inclines the intellect to assent to the propositions of faith on the basis ofdivine authority, thereby strengthening and deepening the intellect’smotivation or ground for making that assent. And yet, on Aquinas’s view,we also can say that the will’s desire for God as its Divine Good manifestsitself more broadly – especially when it is perfected by hope and love – asa motivation that aims at achieving knowledge of God, and specifically theintellective ‘vision’ or full knowledge of God that is promised to the believeras a future supernatural good.13 In other words, the believer’s graced desire



for supernatural beatitude, which begins as a habit in the will, and isintensified in hope and love, habituates the believer into the practice ofassenting to the propositions of faith and thereby forming true beliefs aboutGod in faith, with the ultimate goal of habituating her into knowing or‘seeing’ God fully. Of course, on Aquinas’s view, this epistemic process doesnot end in this life: it ends in the next life, when faith gives way to pureintellective ‘vision’ of the divine. Thus, given Aquinas’s commitment to thebeatific vision as the end of faith (both as goal and completion), it seemsboth the capacities (the intellect and the will) that enable the believer to assentand form true beliefs about God in faith in this life must be engaged by Godin order to ensure that the believer successfully reaches her intended cognitivedestination – the beatific vision of God – in the next life.

I argue in conclusion, therefore, that Aquinas’s epistemological account of faithis only intelligible given Aquinas’s theological and specifically eschatologicalcommitment to the beatific vision as the end of faith (both as goal andcompletion): God infuses faith in the mind of the believer in this life in orderto ensure that she successfully reaches her intended cognitive destination in thenext life. So even though faith falls woefully short of intellectus or scientia onthe Thomistic schema, it constitutes a form of knowledge – what we properlycan designate for Aquinas as cognitio – given that it directs the mind of thebeliever to the very reality (God’s own reality) on which the true beliefs sheforms and holds in faith directly bear (ST II-II.81.5). I conclude on Aquinas’sbehalf, therefore, that as possessors of faith, who have had the virtue of faithsupernaturally infused in their intellects (and a corresponding desire infusedin their wills) by grace, persons of faith occupy an intrinsically excellent andprivileged epistemic position vis-à-vis the divine: under the direction ofGod’s grace, they habitually form and hold true beliefs about God andthereby achieve a true apprehension of God that anticipates and resembles thefull knowledge or ‘vision’ of God promised to them in the life to come.

Conclusion

In this article, I have explored central facets of recent Thomistic epistemology,rooted in the thought of Thomas Aquinas but interpreted through the lightof contemporary philosophical and theological analysis. So interpreted,Aquinas offers a compelling epistemological framework for dealing withperennial questions concerning the mind-world and mind-God relationships.In conclusion, then, I argue that Thomistic epistemology, and more broadlyThomistic philosophy and theology, offers an important, viable platform fordoing religious epistemology within the philosophy of religion – a platformon which to pursue further questions and address further issues in the field.

Short Biography

Paul Macdonald conducts research in the area of philosophical theology.One of the main goals of his research is to reinterpret and reappropriate© 2007 The Author Philosophy Compass 2/3 (2007): 517–533, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2007.00077.xJournal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd


classical philosophical and theological insights in order to address perennialphilosophical and theological concerns. His current research focuses onreinterpreting and reappropriating insights in the philosophical theologyof Thomas Aquinas in order to help explain God’s relationship to the mind,or human knowledge of the transcendent. He has authored essays in ReligiousStudies and Modern Theology. Currently, he serves as Assistant Professor inthe Department of Religion at Bucknell University; previously, he heldfellowships at Villanova University and the Center for the Study of Religionat Princeton University. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia,an M.A. from Yale University, and a B.A. from Wheaton College, IL.

Notes

* Correspondence address: 13 Coleman Hall, Department of Religion, Bucknell University,Lewisburg, PA 17837, USA. Email: [email protected] As I will note below, there can be non-paradigmatic scientia of certain propositional truths aboutGod (most notably, that God exists) based on knowledge of God’s ‘effects’ (evident to the senses)in creation.2 Summa Theologiae (hereafter ST) I.85.3 ad 1, translated as Summa Theologica by the Fathers ofthe English Dominican Province.3 In a more recent article, Jacobs puts the same point even more strongly: ‘There is nothing formind to be except as it is informed by features of reality through the interaction of perception’(114).4 The contemporary authors I cite in this part of the article tend to equate intelligible species orforms with concepts, whereas Aquinas makes an explicit distinction. Nevertheless, their pointsstand, insofar as the concept for Aquinas seems to be a suitably processed intelligible form.5 It is important to note that while the primary object of the intellect is the essence or ‘quiddity’of a material thing, accidents are objects of the intellect in a secondary sense, insofar as they tooconstitute external objects.6 See also O’Callaghan, Thomist Realism and the Linguistic Turn.7 For a development of this view, see Macdonald, ‘The Eschatological Character of OurKnowledge of God’.8 I use scare quotes when using terms typically associated with acts of sense in order to depictunique acts of intellect.9 See Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Book I, chs. 3–5. See also ST I.1.1.10 Following Scriptural precedent (Hebrews 11.1),Aquinas defines faith as ‘a habit of our mind, bywhich eternal life begins in us, and which makes our understanding assent to things which are notevident’. Faith thus constitutes an ‘initial participation’ of the knowledge or ‘vision’ of God enjoyedby the blessed in heaven. See Aquinas, Quaestiones Disputatae De Veritate 14.2 and in particular14.2 ad 15.11 For a development of this view, see Macdonald,‘A Realist Epistemology of Faith’.12 Hope and love are the two other theological virtues infused by grace in the will. In hope, thewill is directed to God as the guarantor of a future good, everlasting life, which the will desiresto acquire; in love, the will desires God for God’s own sake as an intrinsic good (ST II-II.23.6).13 I am influenced here, in part, by Zagzebski’s Virtues of the Mind.

Works Cited

Aquinas, Thomas. Expositio Super Librum Boethii De Trinitate. Translation in Faith, Reason, andTheology: Questions I–IV of his Commentary on the De Trinitate of Boethius.Trans.Armand Maurer.Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1987.

——. Quaestiones Disputatae De Veritate. Translation in On Truth. Trans. James V. McGlynn.Vol. 2. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994.



[email protected]

——. Summa Contra Gentiles. Book I. Trans. Anton Pegis. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P,1975.

——. Summa Theologiae.Translation in Summa Theologica.Trans. Fathers of the English DominicanProvince. 5 vols. New York, NY: Benziger Bros., 1948.

Burnyeat, Miles. ‘Aquinas on “Spiritual Change” in Perception’. Ancient and Medieval Theories ofIntentionality. Ed. Dominik Perler. Boston, MA: Brill, 2001. 129–53.

Haldane, John. ‘Forms of Thought’. The Philosophy of Roderick M. Chisholm. Ed. Lewis EdwinHahn. Chicago: Open Court, 1997. 149–70.

——. ‘Mind-World Identity and the Anti-Realist Challenge’. Reality, Representation, and Projection.Ed. John Haldane and Crispin Wright. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. 15–38.

——. ‘A Return to Form in the Philosophy of Mind’. Ratio 11.3 (December 1998): 253–77.Jacobs, Jonathan. ‘Habits, Cognition, and Realism’. Mind, Metaphysics, and Value in the Thomistic

and Analytic Traditions. Ed. John Haldane. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 2002. 109–24.—— and John Zeis. ‘Form and Cognition: How to Go Out of Your Mind’. The Monist 80.4

(1997): 539–57.Jenkins, John. Knowledge and Faith in Thomas Aquinas. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.Kerr, Fergus. After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002.Lamont, John. Divine Faith.Aldershot:Ashgate, 2004.Macdonald, Paul. ‘The Eschatological Character of Our Knowledge of God’. Modern Theology 22

(April 2006): 255–76.——. ‘A Realist Epistemology of Faith’. Religious Studies 41 (December 2005): 373–93.MacDonald, Scott. ‘Theory of Knowledge’. The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas. Eds. Norman

Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. 160–95.Marshall, Bruce. ‘Quod Scit Una Uetula: Aquinas on the Nature of Theology’. The Theology

of Thomas Aquinas. Eds. Rik Van Nieuwenhove and Joseph Wawrykow. Notre Dame: U ofNotre Dame P, 2005. 1–35.

O’Callaghan, John P. ‘The Problem of Language and Mental Representation in Aristotle andSt. Thomas’. The Review of Metaphysics 50.3 (1997): 499–546. (Reprinted as 1–27).

——. Thomist Realism and the Linguistic Turn: Towards a More Perfect Form of Existence. Notre Dame:U of Notre Dame P, 2003.

Turner, Denys. Faith, Reason, and the Existence of God. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004.Zagzebski, Linda. Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations

of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.



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