“Gifted Knowledge”: An Exception to Thomistic Epistemology?

The Thomist 63 (1999): 173-90 "GIFTED KNOWLEDGE": AN EXCEPTION TO THOMISTIC EPISTEMOLOGY? CARL N. STILL St. Thomas More College Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada THE PROBLEM that the following essay aims to explore concerns the knowledge treated by Aquinas as one of the intellectual gifts of the Spirit, and its relation to the much-better-known types of natural human knowledge. Aquinas accepts that the intellect's natural power is strengthened by a graced gift of spiritual illumination, and therefore that "we have a more perfect knowledge of God by grace than by natural reason."1 For convenience, the knowledge made possible by spiritual gifts, although differentiated by Aquinas into specific functions, may be designated by the generic term "gifted knowledge ."2 What is at issue here is the coherence, or lack thereof, between natural and supernatural types of knowledge, which as a matter of consistency must be expected of any thinker who admits both. I shall argue that, without forgetting the limitations of natural cognition, Aquinas shows how intellectual gifts make a distinctive contribution to knowledge of God. In previous scholarship on Aquinas, the intellectual giftswisdom , understanding, and knowledge-have usually been treated in their own right or in the larger context of the life of 1 Summa Theologiae I, q. 12, a. 13: "Dicendum quod per gratiam perfectior cognitio de Deo habetur a nobis, quam per rationem naturalem." Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the Summa Theologiae are my own. 2 The concept that there are seven gifts of the Holy Spirit has a biblical source in Isaiah 11:2-3. The intellectual gifts of the Spirit comprise wisdom, understanding, and knowledge. In the precise but artificial Scholastic categorization of the gifts, each gift is linked to a power of the soul and characterized as contemplative, practical, or both. Aquinas treats all seven gifts in detail in STh 1-11, q. 68. 173 174 CARL N. STILL faith.3 Only rarely has their relevance to his theory of knowledge been explored.4 In contrast to this tendency, I shall focus on Aquinas's epistemological claims for gifted knowledge, especially as these appear in light of the most basic of conditions that he accepts for all human knowledge: namely, that no knower can actually understand without recourse to an image.5 As we shall see, Aquinas incorporates into gifted knowledge the suggestion made by some of his Neoplatonic predecessors that there can be a type of cognition that, while requiring images, remains unaffected by certain limitations typically attributed to knowledge by images. The precise textual evidence that I shall cite pertains to the gift traditionally designated by the term intellectus, usually translated as the "gift of understanding" (donum intellectus). Even among the intellectual gifts, the gift of understanding seems especially to promise a mode of knowledge exceeding the cognitive limits ordinarily imposed by the analysis of mind Aquinas accepts from Aristotle. This forcing of noetic limits seems especially apparent in the Scriptum on the Sentences, and if it were found only there, it might be dismissed as a forgettable instance ofyouthful overstatement. Yet essentially the same claims made for gifted knowledge in that early work reappear in the mature Summa Theologiae. Without forgetting the development in Aquinas's thought between the two works, I shall treat these 3 Aquinas's thought on the gifts has been studied in 0. Lottin, Psychologie et Morale aux Xlle et XIIIe siecles (Gembloux, 1954), vol. 4, pp. 667-736; M. M. Labourdette, "Dons du Saint-Esprit: Doctrine Thomiste," in Dictionnaire de Spiritualite, vol. 3, cols. 1610-35; M. Llamera, "Unidad de la teologfa de los dones seglin Santo Tomas," Revista Espanola de Teologfa 15 (1955): 3-66, 217-70; M. M. Philipon, "Les dons du Saint-Esprit chez St. Thomas d'Aquin," RevueThomiste 59 (1959): 451-83; and A. Kelly, "The Gifts ofthe Spirit: Aquinas and the Modern Context," The Thomist 38 (1974): 193-231. On the gift of understanding in particular, see J. McGuiness, "The Distinctive Nature of the Gift of Understanding," The Thomist 3 (1941): 217-78. 4 A discussion remarkable for integrating the gifts into a theory of knowledge is found in Jacques Maritain, The Degrees ofKnowledge, trans. Gerald B. Phelan...