“But you will say that there is no doubt of this too, whether there can be any foreknowledge of things which have not results bounden by necessity. For they do seem to lack harmony, and you think that if they are foreseen, the necessity follows; if there is no necessity, then they cannot be foreseen; nothing can be perceived certainly by knowledge, unless it be certain.
“But if things have uncertainty of result, but are foreseen as though certain, this is plainly the obscurity of opinion, and not the truth of knowledge. For you believe that to think anything other than it is, is the opposite of true knowledge.
“The cause of this error is that every man believes that all the subjects, that he knows, are known by their own force or nature alone, which are known; but it is quite the opposite. For every subject, that is known, is comprehended not according to its own force, but rather according to the nature of those who know it.
“Let me make this plain to you by a brief example: the roundness of a body may be known in one way by sight, in another way by touch. Sight can take in the whole body at once from a distance by judging its radius, while touch clings, as it were, to the outside of the sphere, and from close at hand perceives through the material parts the roundness of the body as it passes over the actual circumference.”
—from Book 5, Prose 4
Perhaps I am slowly zooming in on the ultimate source of my confusion here, when I can consider not only what it means for me to be the immediate cause of my own actions, but then also what it means for God to know what I will do, just as He knows what I am doing right now.
With my apologies to Douglas Adams once again, the difficulty of a finite human mind trying to understand the workings of an infinite Divine Mind is something akin to “having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.”
I am looking at it with a squint, seeing only tiny bits and pieces instead of the whole, and struggling to come to terms with it indirectly and incompletely; I am weakly pointing to what I can’t know by means of the little that I can know.
It still bothers me that I am making my own decisions, and the results are open-ended to me, while God knows those decisions with certainty, and they are like a done deal for Him. This is only happening because my awareness is limited to specific bounds, and Providence is completely boundless; the disconnect is in my own weakness of apprehension, not in the order of Nature itself.
Though it may seem rather technical and obscure, one of my favorite passages from the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas tells us that “the thing known is in the knower according to the mode of the knower.” On its own, that doesn’t seem to help much at all, and may even seem to make the matter worse, but some patience is once again in order.
A more accessible way of saying it is that we see things just as much by what we are as by what they are. These things are present to us, and their identities are the objects we are working with, but how we go about receiving those identities is determined by the scope of our own powers.
Lady Philosophy’s example is quite helpful in bringing such an abstract concept down to earth. A ball may have the property of being a sphere, and I can certainly learn about that property, yet the means I use to come to that awareness will all have their own distinct strengths and weaknesses.
Using my eyes will give me an image of the whole before me, though I will still only be seeing that image from this or that perspective.
Using my hands will give me a more immediate sense of its curvature, though I will still only be in contact with one part of the ball at any given moment.
Vision discerns in one way, and touch in another, and neither reveals all of the aspects that can be perceived in the ball.
I am reminded of the old Hindu story about blind men running their hands over different parts of an elephant, and each man comes to a different conclusion about what is in front of him. There is no need for any skeptical panic here, since all of them are aware of the elephant, and their senses are not deceiving them, even as they allow their imaginations to run away with them.
I also think of Flatland, that wonderful book by Edwin Abbott. How, for example, might beings living in a two-dimensional world perceive beings from a three-dimensional world? How do lower planes of existence look up to the higher, and how do the higher look down to the lower? Things may well be as they seem, but they are often far more than they seem.
Who I am as a human being sets the conditions for how I can come to terms with my experience. This is only a burden if I fail to become aware of my own mode, of my own parameters.
“But if things have uncertainty of result, but are foreseen as though certain, this is plainly the obscurity of opinion, and not the truth of knowledge. For you believe that to think anything other than it is, is the opposite of true knowledge.
“The cause of this error is that every man believes that all the subjects, that he knows, are known by their own force or nature alone, which are known; but it is quite the opposite. For every subject, that is known, is comprehended not according to its own force, but rather according to the nature of those who know it.
“Let me make this plain to you by a brief example: the roundness of a body may be known in one way by sight, in another way by touch. Sight can take in the whole body at once from a distance by judging its radius, while touch clings, as it were, to the outside of the sphere, and from close at hand perceives through the material parts the roundness of the body as it passes over the actual circumference.”
—from Book 5, Prose 4
Perhaps I am slowly zooming in on the ultimate source of my confusion here, when I can consider not only what it means for me to be the immediate cause of my own actions, but then also what it means for God to know what I will do, just as He knows what I am doing right now.
With my apologies to Douglas Adams once again, the difficulty of a finite human mind trying to understand the workings of an infinite Divine Mind is something akin to “having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.”
I am looking at it with a squint, seeing only tiny bits and pieces instead of the whole, and struggling to come to terms with it indirectly and incompletely; I am weakly pointing to what I can’t know by means of the little that I can know.
It still bothers me that I am making my own decisions, and the results are open-ended to me, while God knows those decisions with certainty, and they are like a done deal for Him. This is only happening because my awareness is limited to specific bounds, and Providence is completely boundless; the disconnect is in my own weakness of apprehension, not in the order of Nature itself.
Though it may seem rather technical and obscure, one of my favorite passages from the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas tells us that “the thing known is in the knower according to the mode of the knower.” On its own, that doesn’t seem to help much at all, and may even seem to make the matter worse, but some patience is once again in order.
A more accessible way of saying it is that we see things just as much by what we are as by what they are. These things are present to us, and their identities are the objects we are working with, but how we go about receiving those identities is determined by the scope of our own powers.
Lady Philosophy’s example is quite helpful in bringing such an abstract concept down to earth. A ball may have the property of being a sphere, and I can certainly learn about that property, yet the means I use to come to that awareness will all have their own distinct strengths and weaknesses.
Using my eyes will give me an image of the whole before me, though I will still only be seeing that image from this or that perspective.
Using my hands will give me a more immediate sense of its curvature, though I will still only be in contact with one part of the ball at any given moment.
Vision discerns in one way, and touch in another, and neither reveals all of the aspects that can be perceived in the ball.
I am reminded of the old Hindu story about blind men running their hands over different parts of an elephant, and each man comes to a different conclusion about what is in front of him. There is no need for any skeptical panic here, since all of them are aware of the elephant, and their senses are not deceiving them, even as they allow their imaginations to run away with them.
I also think of Flatland, that wonderful book by Edwin Abbott. How, for example, might beings living in a two-dimensional world perceive beings from a three-dimensional world? How do lower planes of existence look up to the higher, and how do the higher look down to the lower? Things may well be as they seem, but they are often far more than they seem.
Who I am as a human being sets the conditions for how I can come to terms with my experience. This is only a burden if I fail to become aware of my own mode, of my own parameters.
Written in 1/2016
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