Noetic Union

An excerpt from my new book, Affective Knowledge in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas

Despite the stark difference Aquinas articulates between his own Aristotelian account of the mode of knowing and that of the Platonic tradition, he maintains with the same insistence that what is known is the reality itself. While knowledge is possessed according to the mode of the knower—and in our case the knower is a hylomorphic composite—it is a genuine possession of that intellectual reality. And, with the same force as the participatory Platonic tradition, Aquinas insists that knowledge is constituted by a genuine union of known and knower.

When Pascal remarks that “by thought I comprehend the universe” and when Aristotle asserts that “the soul is in a sense all things,” they speak to the capacity of the knower to unite any known reality to himself in a most intimate and profound union—to be that which he knows. For Aquinas, no created union is as intimate as that between knower and known. Epistemological union entails an ontological union. Once I come to know Michelangelo’s Pieta, I am (for all eternity) more that I was— “amplitude and extension,” contends Aquinas, are the results of knowing. The additional intentional existence of the Pieta in my mind is now an indissoluble part of me: As Yves Simon puts it, “The object introduced into the soul and the soul that has become that object are bound in the tightest of unions in a single act of existing.” A remarkable fact: I am what I know.

Gilson wonderfully expresses the “amplitude and extension” that results from the union of the esse intentionale and the knowing subject:

The being of the object itself is imposed on the being of the knowing subject. If to know a thing is to become it, it is absolutely necessary that at the moment the act of knowing takes place a new being is constituted, a fuller being than the first, because it envelops into a richer unity the knowing being as it was before the act of knowing and as it has become since enlarged by the accretion of the object known. The synthesis thus produced involves, therefore, the fusion of two beings which fall together at the moment of their union. The sense differs from the sensible, and the intellect differs from the intelligible; but the sense is not different from the object sensed, nor the intellect from the object which it has actually come to know. Thus it is literally true that the sense, taken in its act of sensing, becomes one with the sensible taken in the act by which it is sensed, and that the intellect taken in its act of knowing is one with the intelligible taken in the act by which it is known.

The knowing creature is a type of omnivore, capable of taking all things within himself. However, the other taken as food ceases to be other; it becomes a part of the one eating. The knowing omnivore, by contrasts, retains the otherness of that which it has comprehended within itself. Herein lies the profound paradox of cognition: the other, because it is possessed as an intentional and spiritual being (esse intentionale et spirituale), is part of me without altering me. (Reading the patient’s temperature, writes Simon, does not raise the doctor’s temperature.) The known retains its alterity even while wholly subsumed by the knower:

[The knower] becomes the other without becoming other, without undergoing any alteration, precisely because the unique specifying function of the pure object of knowledge leaves intact the otherness of the subject who apprehends it. To know is to be the other as other.

The metaphysics of Aquinas’s epistemology redound to being itself (i.e., what I know, I am). Blankenhorn expresses this as an “ontological-intentional union.” If the distinguishing feature of the knowing being is the capacity to possess another form in addition to his own, we would have to admit that, in some, way the knowing subject is enlarged by the possession of that new form (while, paradoxically, not being altered by it). In the words of Simon, “The intentional being of knowledge appears thus as manifestation of a superabundance by which the divine generosity permits some creatures to be more than they are.” To discover the mimus polyglottos is to come into possession of new reality; my existence is amplified—I am richer, fuller, more complete on account of union with the new intellectual form of the bird.

As we have seen, this involves the process of sensory engagement with the material quiddity of the object and the agent intellect’s subsequent abstraction from the particular to the universal. However, at the end, what is possessed by the intellect is nothing less than the bird. More exactly, it is the species of the bird. While Aquinas speaks of the species as the intellectual image of the reality known, it remains the reality that is known, not something else. Gilson is right to insist on this score:

The species of an object is not one being and the object another. It is the very object under the mode of species…. It is not the species of the object that is present in thought, but the object through its species. And as it is the form of the object which is its active and determining principle, so it is the form of the object which the intellect which knows it, though its species, becomes. The whole objectivity of human knowledge depends in the last analysis upon the fact that it is not a superadded intermediary, or a distinct substitute which is introduced into our thought in place of the thing. It is, rather, the sensible species of the thing itself which, rendered intelligible by the agent intellect, becomes the form of our possible intellect.

Gilson highlights an essential feature of Aquinas’s epistemology, namely, that the known in the knower (esse intentionale) is the very same reality, in a differing existential mode, as the extramental object. This forfends any idealist tendencies. It bears repeating that knowledge entails the very same species in the knower: the form of the object becomes the intelligible form of the thing known. Shorn of matter, it is the “promotion” or “prolongation” of the reality now known.

This insistence safeguards us from wrongly imagining that what is known is something else, an intermediary, a carbon copy, of reality rather than reality itself. As Nicholas Lombardo puts it, Aquinas does not imagine that knowledge is the mind’s grasp of a “miniature mental image of the object.” Rather, the mind attains to “the object itself through the intention.” If the species were  another thing—such that we actually know only a facsimile—then knowledge would never really touch the actually existing order. Instead, thinking would always rebound on itself; we could only know our own interior representations of the world. We would be trapped in our heads; forever thinking about our thoughts. In short, knowledge would no longer be of things, but of the ideas of things.

As often been pointed out, Aquinas seems to have anticipated the Cartesian problem. According to one particular theory, he writes, “the intellect understands only its own impression, namely, the intelligible species which it has received, so that this species is what is understood.” This is false conception. Such an account precludes the very possibility of any genuine knowledge of extramental reality: “It would follow that every science would not be concerned with objects outside the soul, but only with the intelligible species within the soul.” Further, such an account reduces all truth claims to opinion, to subjective judgements. This was the position of the ancient Skeptics, Aquinas points out, who held that knowledge is that which seems true. Such an account cannot distinguish between the sick man who wrongly judges honey to be bitter and the healthy man who rightly judges honey to be sweet. Both would be equally true. In sum, the intelligible species is not what one knows, but rather that by which one knows (quo intelligit intellectus).

That the union of knowledge is at its base an ontological union should not surprise a theist. After all, creaturely knowing is an imitation, an image, of divine knowing. And, God’s knowing is identical with his being. Whereas creaturely knowing involves the union of the knower with the intentional species of the known, the perfect union of God’s knowledge with himself transcends any such intentional species. Simon is perspicuous on this point:

The divine knowledge does not involve an intentional existence added to a natural existence. It is by His very being that God knows Himself and all things since He is by Himself supereminently all things. In God, knowledge loses its intentional character because in Him existence has no trace of subjectivity. Objectivity reigns here in a sovereign way, the known being in no sense other, the knowing totally innocent of intentionality. Absolutely indistinguishable from the essence of God, the divine existence is in no respect possessed in a subjective manner. To say that in God essence and existence are really one is to say that His whole being is transsubjectivity—which is the same as saying that His being consists in an act of knowledge.

The hierarchy of creatures endowed with cognition evinces distinct ways of participating in God’s perfect knowing. Human and angelic knowing is a sign, pointing up, signs that culminate in their archetype, the “First Knower,” in whom the union of knower and known is one of perfect identity.

God’s knowing is infinite in the way that he himself is infinite. However, the “amplitude and extension” of creaturely knowing evinces a share in the infinity of divine knowing. The infinite capacity of finite ideas—“by thought I comprehend the universe” (Pascal) and “the soul is in a sense all things” (Aristotle)—is an image of (or creaturely share in) God’s knowing. God endows the universe, writes Simon, with “certain superabundance that allows privileged natures to overcome their natural limitations—and even approach a kind of relative infinity.” By the divine ideas, God’s creative causality imbues all things with life—with himself. Which is to say, God knows his creatures into existence and holds them in being by his knowledge of them. Such perfect knowing, constitutive of creaturely being, has as its image finite knowing according to which we have the capacity to hold the existence of another being within ourselves.

Aquinas’s epistemology—his affirmation that cognizant beings are capable of knowing another—rests, finally, on the affirmation that the intellect can possess and unite itself to the immaterial form of another being. “We are not enclosed in our own being, but are capable of becoming the being of others by way of representation.” A knowing being is one capable of expanding itself to contain another, indeed, transforming itself into the form of the other. Such spiritual communion is the ground of all knowing.

All knowing is, then, in a certain way connatural knowing—it takes the form or nature of another as its own. The knower comes to possess a new, second nature by the intentional possession of another species. And, all natural experiences of human knowing are, therefore, at root experiences of spirit, of a union of the human spirit with the immaterial species of a thing. This spiritual communion lying at the root of all natural human knowing suggests an openness, a possibility for a communion of spirit in the order of grace—of the union of God’s Spirit with our own. In this case, the “amplitude and extension” of the mind by its connatural union with divine realities known is of a supernatural order. Here we are in the theological ambit of the unique movement of the soul possessed by the gifts of the Holy Spirit and the doctrine of divine indwelling. And, we should add, the natural experience of human knowing, saturated as it is by spirit—of an immaterial union of known and knower so that to know a thing is to become it—is the natural ground on which we can begin to speculate fruitfully about the mystery of our graced participation in the divine nature.