Thomas' epistemology

Every act of cognition, says Thomas, is a composite operation of the sensory system and the intellect (I.77.5).Footnote ¹⁰ So to render any object intelligible, I must first have a sense-impression (e.g. a visual image) of the object. For ‘it is natural to man to attain intellectual truths through sensible objects, because all of our knowledge originates from sense’ (I.1.9). Consider the matter this way. While walking through the woods I spy my first red-bellied woodpecker; in this moment, I apprehend the woodpecker as a ‘mental image’ (phantasmate) – an immaterial ‘intention’ which is not formally identical with or reducible to the bird itself.Footnote ¹¹ Here we may note that Thomas' epistemology opposes the late modern ‘Myth of the Given’.Footnote ¹² For Thomas, knowing ‘involves a real creation of a new form by the conceptual powers of the mind itself, so that the concept of “what the object is” (its true nature) is never merely “given” in sense experience’.Footnote ¹³ The ‘real form’ of the external object, to quote Preller, ‘does not inform the intellect – the intellect informs itself, on the basis of sense experience, of that which sense experience does not actually contain – the nature of the external object’.Footnote ¹⁴ Thomas holds that, from the very first moment of cognition, sensible objects do not show up as so many mere givens of sense experience. Rather, they are produced by the soul itself and ordered to the operations of the intellect (I.78.1).Footnote ¹⁵

Notice though what this does not mean: for Thomas, my ‘mental image’ of a woodpecker is not yet a ‘conscious state’ or that of which my ‘mind’ is conscious.Footnote ¹⁶ ‘For vision [of an object] is made actual only when the thing seen is in a certain way in the seer’ (I.12.3). To be seen ‘in a certain way’ – i.e. to be understood as a woodpecker, a second ‘moment’ of cognition is required: my agent intellect must correlate the mental image of the sensible object with its concept (conceptio intellectus) (I.78.1; 84.6).Footnote ¹⁷ Also note that Thomas would not construe the concept ‘woodpecker’ – or any concept for that matter – in terms of an innate form or species of the mind (I.84.3). Following Aristotle, he holds that the intellect derives its concepts from repeated interaction with sensible reality. Call this process ‘composition and division’ – the finer points of which I shall return to shortly (I.84.4; 85.5).

Now since all of our knowledge is derived from (1) the apprehension of sensible objects and (2) the conceptualisation of those objects, it follows that ‘in the present state of life . . . immaterial substances cannot be known by human investigation’ (I.88.1, s.c.). And since God is immaterial, it would seem that we cannot know God (I.3.2). An apparent lesson, then, of Thomas' epistemology is that we cannot know the divine essence in this life.Footnote ¹⁸ So Thomas: ‘It is impossible for any created intellect to see the essence of God by its own natural power’ (I.12.4). ‘For knowledge’, he continues:

Knowledge of God and the language of faith

I take it that the foregoing represents an uncontroversial reading of Thomas' epistemology. It is one with which Hector, at any rate, registers no complaints. His disagreement ‘lies in the conclusion which Preller draws from this reading’.Footnote ²⁰ How Thomas' epistemology redounds on the question of meaning and God-talk – that is where the road begins to fork. According to Hector, Thomas judges that we can make meaningful statements about God.Footnote ²¹ To be sure, that is not a conclusion I wish to dispute. The point where Hector runs foul of Thomas' position – a point which Preller, on the other hand, maps out so clearly – is that, according to Thomas, God-talk is also unintelligible. This simultaneous affirmation of meaning and denial of intelligibility may strike us as a paradox. It need not, however. For, as we shall see, the intelligibility and meaning of God-talk are two separate matters. A further look at some of the crucial moves in Preller's reading helps make sense of this distinction.

For Thomas, to have a science ‘of’ something – be it woodpeckers, politics, God or otherwise – the subject of inquiry must be expressible in words. And in order to talk about something, we must be able to refer to it in a meaningful way (I.1.7).Footnote ²² Our overt linguistic acts (verbal and written utterances) are able to signify because they express ‘intellectual concepts’ (conceptiones intellectus) which, as we have seen, are themselves about things.Footnote ²³ ‘To have a significant concept of an object is’, as Preller puts it, ‘to possess an intention of that object’. So when a significant concept is used to refer, the agent intends the object to which it refers.Footnote ²⁴ Hence, to intend an object one must at least know what kind of thing it is. Any significant reference to an object must therefore ‘imply that at some level of analysis it is a sort of thing’ – that it belongs to at least one general class of possible referents.Footnote ²⁵

Here a difficulty arises: Thomas considers theology (theologia) – or more colloquially, ‘talk about God’ (sermo de Deo) – ‘the science of God’ (scientia Dei) (I.1.7 s.c.).Footnote ²⁶ But in order to refer to God, it seems that we must be able to ‘intend him’ – to have a concept of God ‘in mind’. To have a concept of something is at least to have some vague notion of what it is. And as we have seen, Aquinas thinks that we cannot know ‘what God is’ (Deo quid sit) because we have no means for considering ‘how God is’ (Deo quomodo sit) (I.3, int.).Footnote ²⁷ Just so, God cannot be located within a general class (I.3.5). Since the world of sense-experience is what ‘anchors’ the concepts we use to refer, all existential references – if they are to be significant for us – must be formed with recourse to sense-experience. But God transcends the world of sense-experience and so is unrelated to our concepts and the conceptual frameworks in which they occur (I.13.1). Thus, it seems that there can be no conceptually significant intention of what God is, how he is or of how he relates to things.Footnote ²⁸ ‘It is not clear, then’, writes Preller, that ‘we can intend [God] or (intelligibly) intend to refer to him’.Footnote ²⁹

At this stage, Preller's reading runs the risk of sounding strange if not patently false. After all, Thomas goes on to say quite a lot about God. In point of fact, Preller insists that Thomas is never interested in anything less than theological truth, that even when interpreting Aristotle he writes not as a philosopher but as catholicae veritatis doctor.Footnote ³⁰ But how can Preller square these claims? On the one hand, he seems to suggest that Thomas thinks it impossible to talk meaningfully about God. But on the other hand, Preller says that proper theological discourse is Thomas' sole motivating concern. The puzzle dissolves with a distinction, a grammatical reminder of sorts: Thomas thinks God-talk is unintelligible – not meaningless. Overlook the difference here and you miss Thomas' point, says Preller. Making sense of Preller's distinction calls for a closer look at Thomas' account of concept formation.

Recall Thomas' view that we render sensible objects intelligible by pairing their mental images with concepts, which are derived from repeated interaction with sensible objects. This process, what Thomas calls ‘composition and division’, is a comparative affair: ‘the human intellect . . . necessarily compares one thing with another by composition or division; and from one composition and division it proceeds to another, which is the process of reasoning’ (I.85.5). In other words, we specify a concept by grasping a collection of syntactic rules for relating it to various other concepts. Take the case of a circle. I come to grasp the conceptual content of the concept ‘circle’ by understanding a collection of rules for relating it to a larger conceptual framework, a stock of concepts including those which name four-sided shapes, figures whose interior angles add up to 180 degrees and so forth. Preller's shorthand way of putting the matter is that we find ourselves using a ‘conceptual system’ – a constellation of ‘syntactical interrelations’ which describes a ‘logical space’.Footnote ³¹

To this we may add a corollary claim: the marks and sounds of our overt linguistic acts (scriptura and vox) are significant insofar as they express concepts within the logical space of our conceptual system.Footnote ³² A word or family of words signifies a concept just if it holds a specifiable syntactical status, if it can occur in some statements (or families of statements) but not others.Footnote ³³ The intelligibility of language is in other words a formal or syntactical matter. If we did not use language to refer to things, then the meaning of a word would also be a point of mere syntax. Of course, we use words to refer to things all the time; the meaning of a word or family of words is therefore determined both by its status in the conceptual system and

Earlier I said that, according to Thomas, God cannot be intelligibly defined in terms of our conceptual system. Hopefully, the above remarks have lifted some of the fog surrounding this claim: it just means we do not have access to the syntactical rules by means of which something significant could be said of ‘God’. That is, within the context of our conceptual structure we simply do not know what it could mean to say something like ‘God exists’.

However, just because our conceptual system cannot intelligibly refer to God does not mean that none could do so. For Thomas, nothing tells against the possibility of modes of experience and ‘inner states’ radically unlike our own. Nor is there any reason why these modes of experience could not form the basis for an alternate conceptual system which might enable descriptions of various objects which radically differ from our current descriptions. More, such a conceptual system could engender an ‘ideal language’ in terms of which one might more adequately know and experience said objects. Further still, all this could engender the knowledge and description of certain objects which exist in reality but which we do not now experience.Footnote ³⁶ By Thomas' lights, it is actuality which implies these possibilities. That is, Thomas knows of a bona fide alternate conceptual and linguistic system, namely the one possessed by the blessed (beati). Unlike the believer in via who cannot see God, by the light of glory (lumen gloriae) the blessed ‘see Him as He is’ (1 John 2:2) (I.12.1 s.c. and ad. 1). They know God not by ‘mental images’ but rather ‘through the Divine essence alone [which is] present to the intellect, by which also God himself is seen’ (I.12.9). The blessed, then, possess a mode of experience and intellection radically unlike our own. Seeing God ‘as He is’, they have an adequate intention of the very nature of God by which they can conceptualise what we cannot – the ‘whatness’ or form of God.Footnote ³⁷

But precisely what does this have to do with those who are still in via? Quite a lot, actually. Thomas understands scientia dei as primarily and radically ‘God's own eternal act of knowing, both as possessed immanently of God, and as directly and intrinsically participated by the beati through the visio dei’.Footnote ³⁸ Though the visio dei is an exclusively eschatological reality, there is a sense in which humans in via can already participate in such knowledge. This possibility is, however, strictly a divine possibility. Only by faith, which God moves in us ‘inwardly by grace’ (II-II.61.1), may we ‘believe God’ (credere in Deum) (II-II.2.9). Only thus may the believer assent to the ‘matters of faith’ (II-II.2.3, ad. 2) revealed by God in the sacred doctrine of holy scripture, which itself participates in the scientia dei. Footnote ³⁹ Even so, the lumen fidei of the believer in via is not yet the lumen gloriae of the blessed. Bereft of this latter light, the believer cannot yet grasp intellectually or conceptually what she asserts ‘in the light of faith’. No, she only possesses non-intelligible ‘articles’ of faith, which she believes to be ‘created analogues’ of the scientia dei shared by God and the blessed.Footnote ⁴⁰

‘Created analogue’ is Preller's term of art. What he intends by the concept, however, is vintage Thomas. That the language of faith consists of created analogues means that the conceptual system of the blessed contains words and expressions whose roles are ‘syntactically isomorphic’ – somehow similar in form and relation – with ours.Footnote ⁴¹ It does not imply, however, that the believer understands this isomorphism. For to understand how the language of faith makes real claims, she must understand how scientia dei ‘works’ – i.e. the believer must understand the syntactical rules which govern ‘blessed language’. But this she cannot do. To say then that the believer ‘understands’ is to ‘claim that there corresponds to his faith-propositions a reality in God, but it is not to say that the believer understands how his faith propositions make a real claim about the nature of God’.Footnote ⁴²

To be clear, Preller does not suggest that Thomas denies the possibility of meaningful God-talk. Rather, Preller argues that, by the gift of faith, the believer possesses a supernatural ‘intention’ by which her affirmations of the language of faith are meaningful – i.e. have ‘real referential and descriptive power’. The meaning of such statements, however, is only intelligible to God and the blessed.Footnote ⁴³ The intelligibility of God-talk for those in via is thus a matter of eschatological hope.

Thus far Preller's reading of Thomas. In what follows, I want to shore up the textual plausibility of this reading by paying close attention to some key passages in the Summa. Here too Hector remains an instructive conversation partner – not because I agree with everything he writes, but rather because precisely at the point where Hector's reading lacks textual support, Preller's emerges as all the more convincing.

Signifying God's essence

Hector correctly notes that Thomas thinks we can properly signify God's essence, even though only certain terms suffice for doing so. Thomas argues that ‘negative names’, for example, ‘do not at all signify [God's] substance, but rather express the distance of the creature from him or his relation to something else’ (I.13.2). In other words, to say what God is not is not yet to say what God is. Footnote ⁴⁴ Terms of perfection, for example, ‘good, wise, and the like’, on the other hand, do ‘signify the divine substance, and are predicated substantially of God, although they fall short of a full representation of him’ (I.13.2). Setting aside for a moment the question of why they ‘fall short of a full representation’, we may note that terms of perfection substantially signify God because ‘God prepossesses in himself all the perfections of creatures, being himself simply and universally perfect. ‘Hence’, Thomas continues, ‘every creature represents him, and is like him so far as it possesses some perfection; yet it represents him not as something of the same species or genus, but as the excelling principle of whose form the effects fall short, although they derive some kind of likeness thereto’ (I.13.2). As Hector explains, this means that the significance of a positive, ‘substantial’ predication about God is grounded in the ‘fact that all creatures tend toward God as the telos of their being’. To say, then, that ‘God is wise’ is to suggest that ‘insofar as any creature is wise, that wisdom depends upon and tends toward that wisdom which is proper to God’.Footnote ⁴⁵ And so it goes for other terms of perfection: ‘[a]s regards what is signified by these names, they belong properly to God, and more properly than they belong to creatures, and are applied primarily to him’ (I.13.3).

Caution is needed at this point, here where the interpretative thorns thicken. Thomas is not suggesting that a term of perfection can be applied to God tout court. Lest we think so, Hector rightly insists on a major qualification: whereas perfections exist severally in creatures, according to Thomas ‘they preexist in God unitedly’. Just so, ‘when any term expressing perfection is applied to a creature, it signifies that perfection distinct in idea from other perfections’ (I.13.5). That is, when applied to God a term of perfection ‘leaves the thing signified as incomprehended and as exceeding the signification of the name’ (I.13.5). One can by now imagine how Preller might interpret this last quotation. Contrast this with Hector, who takes it in a nearly opposite direction: according to Hector, Thomas thinks the difference in applying a term to God is precisely not semantic but rather ontological – and only merely that.

Evidence of Thomas' ‘ontological, not semantic’ distinction is supposedly borne out in his treatment of divine love:

For both God and creatures, to love means to will good to the object of one's love. There is of course a major difference between divine and creaturely love: whereas our love is called forth by the things we deem good, God's love creates a thing's goodness. The difference here, Hector insists, is grounded solely in the ontological difference between creator and creature.

In sum, Hector attributes to Thomas the following claims: (a) we can make positive predications about God's essence by affirming the pre-existence in God of some creaturely good. In doing so, we may (b) apply ordinary concepts of these goods with their usual meanings to God, though (c) we must recognise the ontological, not semantic difference between talk about the creaturely and the divine. And now I want to say: doubtless, Thomas holds to some version of (a). Claims (b) and (c), however, nearly get things backwards. In fact, Thomas teaches that we can apply ordinary concepts to God so long as we do not use their usual meanings. More, he holds this position precisely for semantic reasons, which, as we shall see, are not unrelated to ontological concerns. A brief tour of Thomas' distinction between the ‘thing signified’ (res significata) and the ‘mode of signification’ (modus significandi) sheds light on these matters.Footnote ⁴⁸

Res significata and modus significandi

Thomas' distinction between the res significata and the modus significandi finds its feet in a more complex web of distinctions between the ‘mode of being’ (modus essendi) and ‘mode of understanding’ (modus intelligendi).Footnote ⁴⁹ In Thomas' day, the latter three notions constituted a conceptual triad, a series of theoretical links between ontology, epistemology and philosophy of language. In broad contours, the triad suggests that, for any given object, the modus essendi pertains to the ‘thing itself’ (res significata), which is intended by an intellectual concept (conceptus) as determined by the agent's modus intelligendi. An intellectual concept, when verbalised by an overt linguistic sound (vox) is called a word (dictio) insofar as its use in linguistic practice confers on it a determinate mode of signification (modus significandi). In other words, it is only in connection with its use in judgement and action that a concept has the conceptual content it does have. Notice also that, for Thomas, the way a word signifies is directly related to the concepts of the intellect, which are intentions of reality. It follows that the modus significandi of a word is contingent upon our modus intelligendi, by which we apprehend an object's modus essendi – not as ‘a given’ but rather by way of intention.

When ‘naming God’, Thomas employs these concepts to claim that every positive, proper term which we apply to God must be considered from three perspectives: (1) the thing it signifies (res significata) – which in the case of God is the divine essence, (2) the meaning of the term (ratio nominis) as it is ordinarily determined within a particular language, which is grounded in our modus intelligendi, and (3) its mode of signification (modus significandi), the way it signifies, which is determined by its application in linguistic practice. A clearer picture of how Thomas uses these concepts emerges in two key passages which directly bear down on the larger matter at hand. First this:

In the above respondeo, Thomas leads off with a typical distinction between the modus essendi, modus intelligendi and modus significandi. Having already established God's eminent perfections (I.4), here he sets in relief the way we may know and speak of them. It seems plain to Thomas ‘that in this life we cannot see the essence of God’ – that, in other words, in this life we do not have immediate access to the divine modus essendi (1.13.1).Footnote ⁵¹ No, our knowledge is determined by our human modus intelligendi and so we can only apprehend God's perfections ‘as they are in creatures’. Neither then may we transcend our creaturely modus significandi. Since ‘words are signs of ideas, and ideas the similitude of things’, it follows that words relate to the meaning of things signified through the medium of the intellectual conception (I.13.1). We must bear in mind, says Thomas, that a term of perfection stands for a concept whose meaning (ratio nominis) is determined by the intellect's intention of sensible reality. So for any putative res significata we must not forget that the way – to be sure, the only way – we can refer to it is with the determinate meanings of the concepts at our disposal. ‘Therefore as to the names applied to God, there are two things to be considered – viz. the perfections which they signify (perfectiones ipsas significatas) . . . and their mode of signification (modum significandi)’ (I.13.3). As regards ‘what is signified by these names’, we know that perfections ‘belong properly to God, and more properly than they belong to creatures’ (I.13.3). In other words, considered from the perspective of God's modus essendi, God just is eminent perfection. Insofar as the ordinary meanings of our concepts and terms of perfection could refer to God's essence, they could be ‘applied properly to him’. But that is precisely what Thomas says the ordinary meanings of our words and concepts cannot do: ‘as regards their mode of signification (modum significandi), they do not properly and strictly apply to God; for their mode of signification applies to creatures’ (I.13.3). And again: ‘affirmations about God are vague . . . or “incongruous” inasmuch as no name can be applied to God according to its mode of signification’ (I.13.12, ad. 1).Footnote ⁵²

What, then, is Thomas up to? If the ordinary meanings of our words do not apply to God, then exactly what is Thomas doing when he says ‘God is wise’? He insists that such propositions are true (I.13.12). But how does he know this? Might he be suggesting that we do not know how such propositions are true, that our words refer to God in ways beyond what we now understand? The answer, I think, is clear enough when considering passages like this one:

Thomas could hardly put a finer point on the matter. Pace Hector, Thomas clearly states that our concepts do not mean the same thing when applied to God and creatures. Ordinarily, what we mean by ‘wise’ is the concept formed by repeated interaction with sensible objects (I.13.4). Grandfathers, red foxes, and discerning spouses – we call these things wise and, if pressed, we can give an account of how the term is being used. Things go differently with God. One must use ‘wise’ and suchlike terms ‘without any indication of how these perfections are possessed’ (I.13.3, ad.1).Footnote ⁵⁴ For what these terms ‘signify does not belong to God in the way they signify it, but in a higher way’ (I.13.3, ad. 2).Footnote ⁵⁵ This is because, for Thomas, it is the use of the concept ‘wise’ in judgement and action which confers its conceptual content. Given the constraints on human knowledge of God which Thomas assumes, it seems that applying the concept ‘wise’ to God loads it with content which we cannot grasp. We may use the concept in this way, with respect to God, but in doing so its conceptual content is transformed in ways which render it unintelligible to us – even though by faith we consider such uses thoroughly appropriate.

Also notice – again pace Hector – why this is so: precisely for semantic reasons! A word's syntactic relation to other words determines the way it ordinarily signifies. But in the context of God-talk, the ordinary syntactical meaning of a word is ‘exceeded’. Granted, this semantic distinction comes packaged with important ontological and epistemological distinctions as well. The disparity between the modus essendi of the res significata – the divine essence – and our creaturely life engenders two very different sorts of modi intelligendi and therefore also two very different sorts of modi significandi. Our words are verbal signs of intellectual concepts, formed exclusively by repeated interaction with sensible reality – which the being of God transcends. The difference then in applying a term to God and creatures is semantic precisely because of the ontological distinction between these referents.

An example helps to illustrate these points. Take the case of the concept ‘love’. According to Hector, Thomas holds that ‘love’ when applied to God means ‘just what it means when predicated of creatures . . . To love means to will good to the thing loved – and this holds true whether we predicate love of God or of creatures.’Footnote ⁵⁶ Supposedly, the only difference is that ‘when I love something’, writes Hector, ‘my love is a response to that thing's goodness, but when God loves something, that love generates the thing's goodness. I love, and God loves, and “love” means the same thing when predicated of either – but my love responds, whereas God's love creates’.Footnote ⁵⁷ This difference aside, ‘the conceptual content is just the same. When we apply the concept to God, the concept itself does not change.’Footnote ⁵⁸ But of course it does! It is doubtful that we could even ‘sort of’ know what it means to love as God does, in a way which actually creates the goodness of things. Again, words express concepts – i.e. intentions of sensible reality. We can formulate the concept ‘love’, followed by the concepts ‘create’, ‘thing’ and ‘goodness’ according to our creaturely modes of being, knowing and signifying. But we cannot conceive of how to use these concepts in such a way as to render ‘love creates a thing's goodness’ intelligible. Granted, the gracious love of one human being for another may indeed create good in that other. Likewise, we mark the absence of love by noting the negation of its creative effects. The point here, however, is that God's love creates good out of nothing and, perhaps no less mysteriously, extends to those whom we cannot imagine loving – those whose wickedness has reduced them to nearly nothing. We just do not know what it would be like to love something and so create its goodness ex nihilo. We have simply never had the occasion to use ‘love’ in that way. Still less could we explain those propositions which would render this use of the term intelligible.

Thus, Hector's reading misses the mark. Thomas knows that the propositions ‘God is wise’ and ‘God is love’ are true. He does not, however, know how they are true because one of our concepts when applied to God cannot mean ‘the same thing it always does’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Contrary to Hector's reading, Thomas teaches that we can apply ordinary concepts to God so long as we do not use their usual meanings. And this is for semantic reasons, judgements about language which are of course bound up with ontological judgements as well.