A. Its Nature.
By knowledge is meant the intellectual apprehension of truth. It supposes a subject and object; an intelligent subject that apprehends, and something true that is apprehended.
So far as we are concerned, knowledge is either intuitive or discursive. Our senses give us immediate knowledge of their appropriate objects; the understanding perceives intuitively primary truths; our moral and æsthetic nature gives us the immediate cognition of things right or wrong, and beautiful or deformed. Most of our knowledge, however, is derived ab extra, by instruction, observation, comparison, deduction, etc. In all cases there is the distinction between the mind which perceives and the object which is perceived.
Such being the nature of knowledge, can there be knowledge in God? Can there be this distinction between subject and object in an absolute and infinite Being? Not only are the wicked and the worldly disposed to think that God cannot know; that either He is too exalted to take cognizance of earthly things; or that it is impossible even for an infinite mind to embrace the universe and all its perpetual changes in his mental vision; but the possibility of knowledge, in the ordinary and proper sense of the word, is expressly denied to God by a large class of philosophers, and virtually even by many theologians of the highest rank in the history of the Church.
The Pantheistic Theory precludes the possibility of Knowledge of God
- As, according to the pantheistic theory, the universe is the existence form of God, as the infinite comes to intelligent consciousness and life only in the finite, there is and can be no knowledge in the infinite as distinguished from the finite. God lives only so far as finite beings live; he thinks and knows only so far as they think and know. Omniscience is only the sum or aggregate of the intelligence of the transient forms of finite beings. All this, as even Hamilton and Mansel admit, necessarily flows from the idea of an absolute Being which precludes the possibility of any such conditions or relations as are involved in consciousness or intelligence. Strauss therefore says:1 “Not in Himself, but in finite intelligences is God omniscient, which together constitute the fulness or completeness of all the possible forms or degrees of knowledge.” And Spinoza says:2 “Intellectus et voluntas, qui Dei essentiam constituerent, a nostro intellectu et voluntate toto cœlo differe deberent, nec in ulla re, præterquam in nomine, convenire possent; non aliter scilicet, quam inter se conveniunt canis, signum cœleste, et canis, animal latrans.” This subject was considered in the chapter on Pantheism.
Knowledge and Power not to be confounded.
- The possibility of knowledge in God is virtually denied by those who deny any distinction between knowledge and power. Knowledge, which is power, ceases to be knowledge; and therefore if omniscience is only a different name for omnipotence, it ceases to be a distinct attribute of God. It makes little difference whether we expressly deny a given perfection to God, or whether we so determine it as to make it mean nothing distinctive. It is deeply to be regretted that not only the Fathers, but also the Lutheran and Reformed theologians, after renouncing the authority of the schoolmen, almost immediately yielded themselves to their speculations. Instead of determining the nature of the divine attributes from the representations of Scripture and from the constitution of man as the image of God, and from the necessities of our moral and religious nature, they allowed themselves to be controlled by à priori speculations as to the nature of the infinite and absolute. Even Augustine, as before stated, says: “Nos ista, quæ fecisti videmus, quia sunt: tu autem quia vides ea, sunt.”3 And Scotus Erigena says,4 “Voluntas illius et visio et essentia anum est.”5 … . “Visio Dei totius universitatis est conditio. Non enim aliud est ei videre, aliud facere; sed visio illius voluntas ejus est, et voluntas operatio.” Thomas Aquinas also says,6 “Deus per intellectum suum causat res, cum suum esse sit suum intelligere. Unde necesse est, quod sua scientia sit causa rerum.”