Franciscan Studies

THE HUMAN MIND AND THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD REFLECTIONS ON A SCHOLASTIC CONTROVERSY Few questions in the field of philosophy admit of such a variety of answers as that which concerns the human mind's ability to know God. In a way this should not be a surprise, since we are dealing with a Being that not only is beyond all sense experience but transcends all empirical reality. To confine ourselves to the modern and contemporary scene, we have, on the one hand, the view of those philosophers who claim that no knowledge of God is possible or, if a reaUty of some sort can be shown to correspond to our mind's idea of God, no knowledge whatsoever can be had of the nature of such a reality. This is what has come to be known as agnosticism, with its different shades of meaning. A similar, and in some respects more pessimistic view, is the position of the logical positivists and of some linguistic analysts, according to which any talk about God is meaningless . Thus, in the words of one of their best known exponents, "the labors of those who have striven to describe such a reality [i.e., God], have all been devoted to the production of nonsense."1 This production would, of course, include the philosophical thinking of some of the greatest minds from Plato and Aristotle down to the present time. We have, at the other extreme, the view of the so-caUed ontologists , who maintain that the knowledge of God is not only possible, but is in fact, in one way or another, the necessary means for the knowledge of all other beings or realities. We refer here especiaUy to the position of Malebranche, Gioberti, and, to some extent, Rosmini. A new trend of thought has developed in the early part of this century, but with roots that go beyond that period, to the effect 1 Cf. Alfred Jules Ayer, Language. Truth and Logic (New York: Dover Publications , [1957I. P- 34· BERNARDINO M. BONANSEA that man's approach to God and his reaUty is mainly a matter of experience with little or no rational foundation for it, although no agreement exists among the defenders of this view as to the nature of such an experience. This approach, which is part of a large movement in phUosophy and theology known as modernism, has become very popular lately under the form of what has been termed neomodernism and seems to compete with another equaUy widespread movement that makes faith in revelation the only basis for man's knowledge of God. It is not the purpose of this article to discuss the various attitudes toward the problem of man's knowledge of God in modern and contemporary times. If we have mentioned them here, it is simply to point to the importance and relevance of the problem even to presentday philosophers. What we want to discuss is the different attitudes toward the problem at issue of the leaders of the two major schools of scholastic philosophy, St. Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus. Hopefully this survey—for that is what it is meant to be—will give us a picture of the variety of approach of two great minds to one of the most complex issues in the field of natural theology. To begin with Thomas Aquinas, one cannot help being a little bit surprised to see that after having proved the existence of God as the Unmoved Mover, the first efficient Cause, the necessary and most perfect Being, as well as the final Cause of all things, and immediately before engaging in a long series of purely philosophical arguments to prove that God possesses aU the perfections attributed to him by Christian theology, he makes a statement to the effect that our knowledge of God is purely negative. In fact, in the very introduction to question 3 of the first Part of the Summa Theologiae, he states that "we cannot know what God is, but only what he is not."2 Moreover, in his Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans he asserts even more emphatically that "there is something about God that is entirely unknown to...