A Rationale for Material Elements of Christ's Human Cognition: Reading Aquinas within His Dominican Theological and Political Context

Abstract

Historians of philosophy have often discussed Aquinas's view of human knowledge as it appears in the first part of theSumma theologiae.They have observed that he represents a more philosophical view than the Augustinian account of divine illumination. Yet little attention has been paid to the relation between this discussion of human knowledge and the account of Christ's knowledge in the third part of theSumma theologiae.One reason for this neglect is that scholarship is often practiced within the spheres of intellectual inquiry that were framed during the modern period. We ignore issues present in primary texts in order to construct proof texts that respond to present-day philosophical interests. In pursuit of questions having to do with epistemology, logic, metaphysics, and ethics, rarely do historians or philosophers attempt to unravel the historical and theological context of specific texts. In regard to human knowledge, rarely do we read beyond questions 84 through 86 on the human knowledge of material objects, and even more rarely do we consider what Aquinas has to say about the knowledge of Christ. Rather, we treat questions on the human knowledge of material things as if they concerned issues raised today in epistemology or philosophy of mind.