When Thomas Aquinas considered the attributes of God in the first part of
the Summa, one of the attributes he discussed was God's knowledge.
God knows things, lots of things.
Indeed, God knows everything.
But the interesting point is that God's knowledge is so very different from our own.
God does not know things in the way you or I do.
He knows things in a much higher way than you or I do.
So the big question is, what is this higher way in which God knows?
The answer is that God's knowledge is mysterious, and we should not expect to fathom his way
of knowing, but we can still say some things about his knowledge.
We can catch a glimpse of his knowledge.
Let's start by considering what his knowledge is not.
First, God does not know things by sensation.
Since he does not have a body, he doesn't have physical organs for sensation.
That also means God does not imagine or remember things like you or I do.
Since, for Aquinas, imagining and remembering are works of physical organs.
Second, God does not learn things from nature, since learning is a form of change and God
doesn't change.
Third, God does not form judgments or reason or figure things out like we do, since that
too is a form of change.
In fact, God does not have a whole bunch of ideas or concepts in his mind like we do,
since God is simple.
At this point, you might be asking, what in the world is God's knowledge?
The answer is that God's knowledge is not in the world or from it.
God's knowledge is beyond ours and of a different order than ours, and the knowledge of God
would be what it is even if there were no world.
How can we make sense of this mystery?
For Thomas Aquinas, the knowledge of God is an eternal, simple gaze.
God sees all in one glance and when God knows all in this one eternal simple gaze, what
does he see first?
He first of all sees himself.
Even before the foundation of the world God knew himself, and in this eternal self knowledge,
he knew that he would create the world and what he would create and each feature of each
thing that he would create.
And he knew all this by knowing that he would create each thing that way.
And in this fountain of simple self-knowledge, he knew that he would create each thing with
a nature and a purpose and the power to make a difference in the world for better or for
worse.
He knew that he would create causes, the sun warming the earth, water giving hydration
to living things, gravity attracting bodies to each other.
He knew that he would create persons in particular as a special sort of cause, each with the
power of free choice.
And he knew our ability he would give us to make things go one way or another in the world
by our choices.
He knew what our choices would be and that we need not have made those choices and that
we could have chosen otherwise by the power he gave us to choose.
All of this and more God sees in one simple, unchanging and eternal glance upon himself
as creator of the world of natural causes and free persons.
In the eternal gaze upon himself, he sees you, for you are one of his works.
Thomas Aquinas gives an analogy.
Let us think of an artist who wants to paint a portrait.
Before putting anything on the canvas, the artist first forms an image or understanding
of what he wants to put on the canvas.
Similarly with God.
Before the foundation of the world, from all eternity, God knew in his own mind what he
wanted to create.
He knew the whole of creation in all of its details, from the beginning through the middle
to the end.
And in this knowledge, he also knew what could have been otherwise and what should have been
otherwise but was not otherwise due to the free choices of persons.
There's only one difficulty with this analogy.
The analogy can make it sound like God has lots of things in mind like human beings do.
When he sees things in his mind, so to speak, he's not seeing his own conceptions or ideas
or images of things.
That's not how it is with God.
The things in the world around us are not modeled on conceptions, ideas or images in
the mind of God, rather, they're modeled on God, who's all simple and without a multiplicity
of thoughts and images.
Let's say a bit more about the divine ideas.
To provide an analogy not found in Aquinas, we can think of a man who is modeling the
human form for a studio full of painters.
The model stands in the middle of a circle.
The painters stand in fixed positions on the perimeter of the circle around him.
Each painter portrays what the model is and appears to be given the painter's location
on the perimeter.
If the model knew everything about himself, he would know himself as portrayable in one
way by a painter at this position, as portrayable in another way by a painter at that position,
et cetera.
And if the model could know everything about himself in one unchanging glance, he would
know all at once all the ways he is portrayable.
Aquinas himself uses similar language in his question on the divine ideas.
"God knows his essence as so imitable by such a creature and knows it as the particular
model and idea of that creature."
The divine ideas are God seeing his own simple being as susceptible to participation or imitation
in various ways by various creatures.
The plurality is in the many creatures that imitate and in the various ways they imitate,
not in the one whom they imitate.
Now we can see how God's knowledge is the criterion of truth for all things.
So let's say a word about truth.
What is truth?
Aquinas speaks of things as existing between two minds, God's and ours.
A thoroughbred horse, for example, stands between God's understanding of what a thoroughbred
is and our understanding of what a thoroughbred is.
Our judgments about thoroughbreds may be called true when our judgments match what a thoroughbred
is in reality.
But thoroughbreds themselves may be called true when they match God's understanding of
what a thoroughbred is.
A weak limping, thoroughbred cannot be called a true thoroughbred because it does not match
or live up to God's understanding of what a thoroughbred is.
But a strong coordinated thoroughbred does live up to God's understanding of what a thoroughbred
is.
And that's why we would call a strong coordinated one a true thoroughbred.
Our understanding of things is true when it matches what things are, but things are true
when they match God's understanding of what they are.
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