Response to Linda Zagzebski’s “Omnisubjectivity: Why It Is a Divine Attribute”

Abstract

Response to Linda Zagzebski’s “Omnisubjectivity: Why It Is a Divine Attribute” Bernhard Blankenhorn, O.P. Linda Zagzebski has made a strong case for the need to expand the list of divine attributes. In my view, she has successfully taken the philosophy of divine knowledge one step further. I agree with her main thesis: I think that omnisubjectivity follows directly from a classical Christian notion of God’s perfect knowledge coupled with a modern notion of human subjectivity. My comments will therefore focus on ways in which Zagzebski’s proposal might be nuanced or developed. Her stimulating insights deserve our closest attention. Zagzebski nicely distinguishes between human and divine empathy. In a human relationship, we try to represent for ourselves what another person experiences. But divine knowledge is direct, as Zagzebski affirms. God does not try to copy our consciousness within himself. That is, Zagzebski rightly warns us to recognize the immense difference between human and divine modes of knowing. I would like to take this approach a bit further by integrating the scholastic notion that God is present in all things as their cause. God’s knowledge of our conscious states and our first-person perspective is somewhat like a kind of direct window into the depth of the human self, yet it is also much more. For, God’s way of knowing individual creatures follows directly from his relationship to them as their Creator. Thus, God’s cognition occurs by his being the first cause of our conscious states, first-person perspectives, and acts of knowing, yet without violating [End Page 451] human freedom.1 Any actuality and goodness that can be found in our mental acts utterly depend on the constant operation of the Creator God within us. According to Thomas Aquinas, God is the first cause of every human act (except for the evil element in human acts, though evil can never deprive an act of all metaphysical goodness). Consequently, God is also the first cause of our mode of knowing and of my way of perceiving my surroundings right now. If we do not give some account of divine knowledge as essentially causal (Thomistic or otherwise), then we end up making God’s knowledge reactive to our activity. This approach leads to endless metaphysical and theological problems and ultimately renders a Christian account of the divine life incoherent.2 Now, if we propose that God possesses omnisubjectivity as the first cause of all human subjectivity, then we move even further away from the notion that God’s knowledge involves an external perspective whereby he tries to climb into our heads and our emotions. In this way, God can precisely be aware of how Mary is aware of being Mary. Yet, because he is aware of Mary’s self-awareness as her Creator, God’s so-called conscious awareness remains distinct from hers. That is to say, God can have each of Mary’s thoughts and know them from her perspective, but because he always knows them as her primary cause, those thoughts remain distinctly hers. God’s knowledge as cause goes hand-in-hand with divine simplicity. The latter notion also helps us to grasp omnisubjectivity in a more coherent way. In himself, God does not have multiple thoughts, but only a single infinite thought whereby he knows all things, events, persons, and the whole of our lives. This single divine thought is identical with the divine essence. Now, when we posit God knowing things as cause and in an utterly simple way, we further transcend the problematic notion that divine cognition remains limited to the objects [End Page 452] of propositional or factual knowledge, an idea that Zagzebski rightly rejects. Indeed, the latter model would seem to reduce the divine mind to some type of supercomputer. Now, the cosmos is filled with fascinating elements that can ground divine naming, such as love, beauty, and power, but computers make for very bad analogies when it comes to our way of conceiving and speaking about God, just as computers make for terribly misleading analogies for our way of conceiving the human mind. Thus, overall, omnisubjectivity deserves to be integrated more fully with a notion...