Sunday, April 9, 2017

"When one believes something to be true [simply] because God is Truth itself[,] . . . one begins to know in a way similar to the way God knows."

"When one believes something to be true because God is Truth itself, one begins to know all the rest in virtue of one’s knowing God.  Thereby one begins to know in a way similar to the way God knows.  For God characteristically knows all that is true by knowing—or rather by being—his own Truth.  His knowing of all truth is not, and cannot be, a second act of knowledge resulting from the act by which he knows himself.  It is rather because the act by which he knows himself is immediately his knowing of all that is, and of all that can be, that God’s knowledge is Life itself.  When it is unrestricted, Life itself is indeed sovereign being, whose nature is intellection and is not determinable by anything else.
     "There is a second, significant aspect to this fourth and last reference to divine faith, which, according to its place in the order of the poem, lies just beyond the threshold that separates bare Truth from Truth that is Life.  As stated, something in divine faith is already eternal life in us.  Faith, however is only its beginning, not its perfection.  God’s eternal life becomes definitively and integrally ours only when vision replaces faith, and only when the resurrection allows us to share corporally in blessedness.  Only then do we re-join Christ, who, as the incarnate and sacramental God, first joined with us, especially by means of the fullness of sacramental grace that is the Eucharist."

     Robert Wielockx, "Poetry and theology in the Adore te deuote: Thomas Aquinas on the Eucharist and Christ's uniqueness," in Christ among the medieval Dominicans: representations of Christ in the texts and images of the Order of Preachers, Notre Dame conferences in medieval studies 7, ed. Kent Emery, Jr. and Joseph Wawrykow (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 166-167 (157-174), underscoring mine.

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