Читать книгу The Craft of Innovative Theology. Argument and Process онлайн

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The second example is Thomas Aquinas. In the Summa Theologiae, he gives sustained attention to the issue of the knowledge of Christ. For Aquinas, the Eternal Word assumed a human nature that was perfect and integral. The question in the Tertia pars is this: How exactly did Christ possess these perfections? For Aquinas, “Christ had beatific knowledge,”⁷ which Aquinas explains is embedded within “the soul of Christ, which is a part of his human nature.”⁸ However, Aquinas also wants Jesus to learn and grow in knowledge; so he develops a distinction between “experimental knowledge” – knowledge from experience, which is acquired – and imprinted, divine knowledge. With the latter, Jesus is omniscient or as Aquinas puts it, “Therefore it would seem that by the knowledge infused by the Holy Spirit Christ knew everything.”⁹ With the former, Christ had an active intellect which led to learning of human activities. So Aquinas writes:

The human mind looks in two directions. It looks to what is above it – and it was in this line that the soul of Christ was filled with infused knowledge. But it also looks to what is beneath it, to the data of the imagination, which is meant to move the human mind by the power of the active intellect. The soul of Christ had also to be filled with knowledge along this line; not that the previous complement of knowledge would not of itself be enough for the human mind, but because the mind had also to be filled through its dealings with the imagination.¹⁰