Knowledge and the Transcendent: An Inquiry into the Mind's Relationship to God

6. Rehabilitating Objectivity in the Knowledge of God

231 Chapter 6 Rehabilitating Objectivity in the Knowledge of God The main purpose of this chapter is to continue to defend claims I advanced in the previous chapter and so to further explicate and support what I take to be Aquinas’s theologically realist understanding of knowledge of God here below. First, I address what I expect is the most pressing theological suspicion or concern raised by my analysis so far: by emphasizing (or perhaps overemphasizing) our ability to gain knowledge of God here below by way of reason and faith, I have blurred the essential epistemological distinction between knowledge of the ‘unknown’ God here below and the intellective ‘vision’ of God afforded to the blessed. Not surprisingly, I think the objection, while indeed important, is misguided, since it reflects a distinctly modern bias and tendency to compartmentalize our knowledge of God here below in an effort to reduce that knowledge to a purely subjective and vacuous cognitive attitude or state of mind—a move I argue Aquinas would find to be theologically abominable. My response to this objection, then, goes as follows: the knowledge of God we enjoy here below only appears to be in danger of being conflated with the knowledge or ‘vision’ of God enjoyed by the blessed if we presuppose that there is an “absolute conception of God” with which beatific knowledge of God can and should be identified. If we refuse to entertain the idea that there is such an absolute conception of God, given that it (on 232 applications in thomistic epistemology analogy with an “absolute conception of reality” or “God’s-eye view” of the world) can be shown to be unintelligible, then the knowledge of God afforded by reason and faith, while certainly analogous to beatific knowledge of God insofar as it directs our minds on God, ceases to threaten to overtake such knowledge, for it refuses to be dualistically set over against it. Moreover —and this is my most important claim—by refusing to equate beatific knowledge of God with an absolute conception of God, we can locate an element of objectivity, previously thought to be the exclusive property of beatific knowledge of God, in the knowledge of God we enjoy here below by way of reason and faith. In the second part of the chapter, I consider a further objection to my view, an objection which denies that knowledge of God here below is possible given that human persons (and minds) are irrevocably situated in the natural world. In response, and in line with claims I advanced in the fourth chapter, I argue that achieving knowledge of God does not require transcending the natural world or our own human subjectivity in order to reach some alien state of mind; rather, it requires inhabiting our own human subjectivity more fully and hence acquiring the requisite cognitive capacities by becoming more fully (rather than less) humanly minded. Becoming more humanly fully minded requires receiving the right sort of upbringing as well as pedagogical training within the requisite communities of reason and faith. Thus we are able to know God by way of reason when we have acquired (or grown into) an elevated second nature; we are able to know God by way of faith when we have acquired (or grown into) a graced second nature. Perhaps most importantly, if we refuse to set “nature” dualistically over against “supernature ,” or “nature” dualistically over against “grace,” then we can affirm that knowledge of God is obtainable within the natural world, given that nature is itself always already incorporated within supernature and hence always already graced. In the final section of the chapter, I return to reemphasize a fundamental theme from Aquinas’s philosophical theology: in this life, God is both known—in the sense that reason and faith really direct the mind to God and thus afford us a true apprehension of God—and ‘unknown’, in the sense that the true apprehension reason and faith afford, on Aquinas’s eschatological scale, is characterized more by darkness than by light. And yet, even on this side of the beatific vision, human knowledge of God here below is not bounded. In this life, we truly remain cognitively united to God as to one ‘unknown’. rehabilitating objectivity 233 The Absolute Conception of God in Theology Through our investigation of modern philosophy and theology in part one of this book, we came to see how as...