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172 Chapter 5 Realist Epistemologies of Reason and Faith As a Christian philosophical theologian, Aquinas holds to the scriptural principle that we ‘see’ God “face to face” in the next life; in this life, however, we ‘see’ God, at best, “in a glass darkly.”1 Thus the following question presents itself: if our ability to think about God or direct our thoughts on God in this life is intrinsically limited and inadequate, then must God also remain unknown to us? Aquinas is, of course, well known for answering this question in the affirmative: while in the next life, “we shall see [God] by a form which is His essence, and we shall be united to Him as to something known (quasi noto),” in this life, “our most perfect knowledge of Him as wayfarers is to know that He is above all that our intellect can conceive, and thus we are united to Him as something unknown (quasi ignoto).”2 Thus, on Aquinas’s view, no living human person in his or her current truncated cognitive state can ‘see’ the essence of God; consequently there can be no direct knowledge of the essence of God in this life. In fact, according to Aquinas, we know God most perfectly in this life when we know that God is beyond anything we can conceive—that is, beyond anything we can know or ‘see’. At bottom, then, Aquinas claims that human persons live largely in ignorance of the divine in this life: we walk more in darkness than we do in light. So what does this suggest about the mind’s relationship to God? In 1. I Corinthians 13:12. In this chapter, I will continue using single quotes when using terms that are important in Thomistic epistemology. 2. ST suppl. 92.1 ad 3. realist epistemologies 173 the last chapter, I argued that even though Aquinas affirms that God infinitely transcends the mind, he does not place God outside or beyond a cognitive boundary that encloses the mind: the intelligibility of the beatific vision as cognitive union with God prevents us from picturing the mind and God as ever meeting at a cognitive interface in the state of supernatural beatitude . And yet, the question remains whether God can still be pictured as lying outside or beyond a cognitive boundary in this life: does human ignorance of the divine also entail that our cognitive powers are bounded on the outside, implying that God must remain, in this life, totally hidden and unknown —that is, utterly beyond what we can think or believe? According to Aquinas, the answer to this question is a resounding “no.”3 We can use reason, for example, or our natural intellectual light, to know something of God qua uncreated cause, on the basis of God’s sensible effects in the created order—most notably, that God exists, as well as “what must necessarily belong to Him, as the first cause of things, exceeding all things caused by Him.”4 Moreover, we can also know something of God through faith, which operates, not by the ‘light of reason’, but by a “higher” light infused by grace. Thus faith grants us access to revealed truths that cannot be known by reason alone; faith also grants us access to truths that can be known (at least potentially) by reason alone, but which also have been “fittingly proposed” by God through revelation for our belief.5 Of course, Aquinas reminds us that even the knowledge afforded by faith does not afford us any knowledge of the divine essence. Even in faith, we remain united to God as to one ‘unknown’.6 In advancing these claims, Aquinas points towards a truth and tension that lie at the heart of Christian philosophical theology: whatever knowledge 3. Brian Davies claims that “when [Aquinas] denies that we know what God is he clearly does not intend to suggest that we can claim no knowledge of God at all.” More specifically, what Aquinas denies is that God is something like a material entity that we can single out and define within the conceptual nets of our own understanding. See Brian Davies, “Aquinas on What God is Not,” in Thomas Aquinas: Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives, 227–28. 4. ST I.12.12. 5. SCG I.4. As we will see, Aquinas argues that there are indeed some truths about God that can be known by way of rational argument or demonstration, rather than revelation. Aquinas therefore differentiates these “preambles of faith...

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