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Order of Contents
Articles 3
Quotes 3
Historical 3
Latin 10
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Articles
1200’s
Bonaventure – Commentary on the Sentences: Philosophy of God, eds. Houser & Noone in Works of St. Bonaventure, vol. 16 Ref Buy (Franciscan Institute Publications, 2014), topic 2, bk. 1
35. On the Divine Ideas
q. 1, Should ideas be posited in God?
q. 2, Should a real plurality of ideas be posited?
q. 3, Is there a plurality of ideas according to reason?
q. 4, Are the ideas many, in comparison to the things patterned on the ideas, insofar as these are diverse in species or diverse as individuals?
q. 5, Are the ideas in God numerically finite or infinite?
q. 6, Do the ideas have an order among themselves?
38, art. 1, On the Causality of Divine Foreknowledge
q. 1, Is divine foreknowledge the cause of things?
q. 2, Is divine foreknowledge caused by things?
38, art. 2, On Foreknowledge in relation to Necessity
q. 1, Does the foreknowledge of God impose necessity on the things foreknown?
q. 2, Does God necessarily foreknow the things which He foreknows?
Bonaventure (1221–1274) was an Italian Franciscan bishop, cardinal, scholastic theologian and philosopher.
Aquinas
Commentary on the Sentences of Lombard, bk. 1
35. Divine Knowledge 5 art.
36. The Realities that God Knows
q. 1, The things that are known by God 3 art.
q. 2, The ideas through which God knows realities 3 art.
37. How God is in Realities
q. 1, How God is in all things 2 art.
q. 2, How God is everywhere 3 art.
…
38. The Relation of Divine Knowledge to the Things Known
39. How Divine Knowledge is a Cause
q. 1, The invariability of the divine knowledge 3 art.
q. 2, Divine providence 2 art.
Aquinas (c. 1225–1274) was an Italian Dominican friar and priest, an influential philosopher and theologian, and a jurist in the scholastic tradition.
Summa Theologica – pt. 1, q. 15, ‘Of Ideas’
(1) Whether there are ideas?
(2) Whether they are many, or one only?
(3) Whether there are ideas of all things known by God?
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1500’s
Junius, Francis – in Mosaic Polity
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1900’s
Garrigou-Lagrange, Reginald – Q. 15, ‘Of Ideas’ in The One God: a Commentary on the First Part of St. Thomas’s Theological Summa (St. Louis: B. Herder, 1943), pp. 476-79
Garrigou-Lagrange was a Neo-Thomist and Romanist professor of theology.
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Quotes
Order of
Rutherford on
Essenius
Feser
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1600’s
Rutherford on
Aza Goudriaan, ch. 8, ‘Samuel Rutherford on the Divine Origin of Possibility and Impossibility’ in ed. Aaron C. Denlinger, Reformed Orthodoxy in Scotland: Essays on Scottish Theology 1560-1775 (Bloomsbury, 2016), pp. 146-74
“By his [1] scientia simplex intelligentiae [simple wisdom of intelligence] God knows [according to Rutherford] ‘which creature He could make in this or that order’. [2] The scientia libera [free wisdom] is concerned with the knowledge of ends and means, causes and effects that God chooses to realize. The [3] practica scientia [practical wisdom] is the knowledge ‘by which God forms the ideas of the possibilia and future things’.
Rutherford speaks very carefully about a scientia speculativa [speculative wisdom] with respect to God, because this is a knowledge that ‘presupposes the object’ and, accordingly, it presupposes that God has formed the ideas. God’s knowledge does not depend on anything outside of Him:
‘Nothing intelligible precedes in the proper sense the intellect of God… The infinite intellect either makes [an object] or wills permissively that it comes into being; the finite, however, presupposes its object. Therefore, there is no purely speculative knowledge in God that is separated from all praxis.’”
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Andreas Essenius
‘Theological Disputation on the Image of God in Man’ Download tr. Jonathan Tomes (Utrecht: Johannes Waesberg, 1653)
“Indeed, God is the idea of all things, both created and to be created, as He manifests His simple and perfect essence in them, though not equally or in the same degree. Just as this essence shines more brightly in animate beings than in inanimate ones, so it is most perfectly reflected in man.
While other creatures were given only a trace or shadow of His being, in which His eternal power and divine nature can be read (ἥ τε ἀΐδιος αὐτοῦ δύναμις καὶ θειότης), as Romans 1:20 states, man was endowed with His image, reflecting His most perfect nature, and with faculties and qualities that are somewhat shared with God but not with other creatures. This is why, concerning man’s creation, it is said that not merely a general notion of God was involved, but a deliberate consultation and agreement of the entire Holy Trinity, as Genesis 1:27 indicates.
I. …the phrases “man created in the image of God” and “the image of God in man” essentially mean the same thing. The former suggests that the Divine Essence, which knows the nature of man as a species that can be expressed or imitated, serves as the model or objective image. The latter indicates something consequent to that model, which will be called the subjective image, in which the Creator willed His glory to be seen as in a mirror, as Calvin states in his Institutes (Book 2, Chapter 12, Sections 5-6).”
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2000’s
Edward Feser
Five Proofs of the Existence of God (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2017), ch. 3, ‘The Augustinian Proof’
“…Grim’s objection also seems to assume a model of divine knowledge which would be rejected by those who hold (as, again, Scholastic realists do) that God is absolutely simple or noncomposite. In particular, it seems to assume that the truths God knows correspond to discrete ideas in the divine intellect, which together form a set.
But given divine simplicity, what we describe in terms of such discrete ideas is really one and the same thing in God. There is in God something analogous to what we call, in the case of our own intellects, a grasp of the proposition that all men are mortal, something analogous to what we call a grasp of the proposition that Socrates is a man, and so forth.
But these are different ways of describing what, in God, is really one and the same thing.”
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Historical
On the Medieval Church & Before
Article
2000’s
Doolan, Gregory T. – ch. 11, ‘Divine Ideas & Divine Simplicity’ in eds. Jonathan Fuqua & Robert C. Koons, Classical Theism: New Essays on the Metaphysics of God (Routledge: 2023), pp. 211-32
Doolan gives a survey of the history of divine ideas and then explains Aquinas’s account of the them. Doolan gives Aquinas’s solution to the issue with divine simplicity in the chapter’s last sentence.
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Book
Vater, Carl A. – Divine Ideas: 1225–1325 PhD diss. (Catholic University of America, 2017) 595 pp.
Absract: “A theory of divine ideas was the standard Scholastic solution to the question ‘How does God know and produce creatures?’ Such a theory was only held to be successful if it upheld the nobility of God’s perfect knowledge without violating his supreme simplicity and unity. The theories of divine knowledge coming from philosophers like Aristotle, Avicenna, and Averroes, which posit no divine ideas, uphold divine simplicity, but seem to compromise the nobility of divine cognition because they are forced to say either that God does not know creatures at all, or that he only knows them in a universal (and therefore imperfect) or indeterminate way. They also seem to compromise divine causality because they have to posit either necessary (as opposed to voluntary) or mediated (as opposed to immediate) creation. Yet, positing multiple ideas in God as Augustine does seems contrary to divine simplicity.
Faced with these difficulties, the medieval Schoolmen were forced to articulate very precisely how God can know and create a multiplicity of creatures without jeopardizing the divine simplicity. A complete explanation of how God knows and produces creatures requires the Schoolmen to answer a number of questions… These questions cause Scholastics to articulate clearly, among other things, their positions on the nature of knowledge, relation, exemplar causality, participation, infinity, and possibility.”
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On the Post-Reformation
Muller, Richard – ‘Calvinist Thomism Revisited: William Ames (1576-1633) & the Divine Ideas’ in From Rome to Zurich—Between Ignatius & Vermigli: Essays in Honor of John Patrick Donnelly, S.J. (2017), pp. 103-20
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Latin
1100’s
Lombard, Peter – Four Books of Sentences 2nd ed. (c. 1150; Florence: College of St. Bonaventura, 1916), vol. 1, bk. 1, ‘On God’
35. God’s Knowledge
1. On God’s knowledge, foreknowledge, providence, disposition and predestination
2. What does his foreknowledge and/or foresight concern?
3. What does his disposition concern?
4. What does his predestination concern?
5. What does his providence concern?
6. What does his wisdom and/or knowledge concern?
7. Whether foreknowledge and/or disposition could belong to God, if there were no future things?
8. That God’s knowledge concerns things temporal and eternal.
9. In what manner are all said to be “in God” and to be “life in Him”?
36. How the Realities that God Knows are in Him
1. Whether all ought to be said to be in God’s Essence as they are said to be in God’s Cognition and/or foreknowledge
2. By what reckoning are good things said to be in God, and not evil ones
3. Whether it is the same that all are “from God” and “through Him” and “in Him”
4. That all are in any of the three, both through Him and in Him
5. That not all which are ex Deo (from God), are also de ipso (of Himself)
37. How God is in Realities
1. In what manners God is said to be in things
2. That God does not dwell, wheresoever He is, but the other way around
3. Where God was before there was a creature
4. That God, though He is in all things essentially, yet is not completely befouled with sordid things
5. Since God is everywhere and always, yet does not belong to a place, He is moved neither according to place nor according to time
6. In what manners is something said to belong to a place, and/or be circumscribable
7. What is it to be changed according to time
8. Whether created spirits belong to a place and are circumscribable
9. That God is everywhere without local movement
38. On the Causality & Ineffability of the Divine Knowledge
1. Whether the knowledge and/or foreknowledge of God is the cause of things, and/or the other way around
2. Whether God’s foreknowledge can fail
39. How God’s Knowledge is a Cause
1. Whether God’s Knowledge can be increased and/or lessened and/or in any manner be changed
2. Whether God can newly either know in time and/or foreknow something
3. Whether God can know more than He knows
4. That God, both always and together, knows all
Lombard (c. 1096–1160) was an Italian scholastic theologian and bishop of Paris. For background on the Sentences, see Wikipedia.
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1200’s
Aquinas
Commentary on the Sentences of Lombard, bk. 1
35. Divine Knowledge 5 art.
36. The Realities that God Knows
q. 1, The things that are known by God 3 art.
q. 2, The ideas through which God knows realities 3 art.
37. How God is in Realities
q. 1, How God is in all things 2 art.
q. 2, How God is everywhere 3 art.
…
38. The Relation of Divine Knowledge to the Things Known
39. How Divine Knowledge is a Cause
q. 1, The invariability of the divine knowledge 3 art.
q. 2, Divine providence 2 art.
Aquinas (c. 1225–1274) was an Italian Dominican friar and priest, an influential philosopher and theologian, and a jurist in the scholastic tradition.
Summa Theologica – pt. 1, q. 15, ‘Of Ideas’
(1) Whether there are ideas?
(2) Whether they are many, or one only?
(3) Whether there are ideas of all things known by God?
.
1300’s
Scotus, John Duns – The Ordinatio: Oxford Commentary on the Four Books of the Master of the Sentences in Opera Omnia, new ed. (Paris: Vives, 1891), vol. 10, bk. 1, God ToC
35. Whether in God are eternal relations for all knowlable things, and so cognitions of whatness 536
36. Whether the creature so far is a foundation of the eternal relation to God so knowing that it may truly have the being of essence out of this, that it is under such a respect 564
37. Whether God being present everywhere according to power, one may infer Him to be everywhere according to essence, that is, whether omnipotence may infer immensity 595
38. Whether the knowledge (scientia) of God in respect of creatable things may be practical 603
39. Whether God may have determinate knowledge of all things, reaching unto all conditions of existence 612-79
Scotus (c. 1265/66 – 1308) was a Scottish priest and Franciscan friar, university professor, philosopher and theologian. He is one of the four most important Christian philosopher-theologians of Western Europe in the High Middle Ages, together with Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure and William of Ockham, and has been known as Doctor Subtilis.
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Thomas of Sutton – The First Book of the Sentences contra Johannes Scotus (d. 1320; 1523)
dist. 35. 113b
36. 115
37. 116b
38. 117
39. 118-121b
Thomas (1230-1320) was an English Dominican theologian and an early Thomist who opposed Duns Scotus.
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Gregory of Rimini – On the First & Second of the Sentences, vol. 1 (Giunta, 1522), bk. 1 reprint: Franciscan Institute Publications, Text Series no. 7, ed. Eligius Buytaert (St. Bonaventure NY: Franciscan Institute, 1955)
dist. 35-36. fol. 144
[37 not existant]
38. 147
1. Whether any singular enunciation of God is categorical of the future in the matter of contingency unto whatever is the truth 147
1. Shows what was Aristotle’s opinion 147
2. What [???] truth ought to be held 148
3. What contingency is a contingency opposing this sense: All that is which is necessary is being. 149
2. Whether God may know all future things 151
1. Distinctions on God and future things are premitted 151
2. Is of the way in which God knows future things 152
3. Whether with the prescience of God [???] future things may be put forth as contingently future 153
39. 156
Whether the knowledge (scia) or prescience of God may be able to be augmented or lessened by any premissed distinctions 156
1. Contains six conclusions by which are shown whether God… 156
2. On the knowledge [scientia] of enunciations 156
Gregory (c. 1300–1358) was one of the great scholastic philosophers and theologians of the Middle Ages. He was the first scholastic writer to unite the Oxford and Parisian traditions in 14th-century philosophy, and his work had a lasting influence in the Late Middle Ages and Reformation. His scholastic nicknames were Doctor acutus and Doctor authenticus.
His views strongly influenced some of the Protestant Reformers. Gregory adhered to Augustine’s predestination and had a unique take on traditional nominalist views. He believed that mental objects are used strictly for convenient social conventions and nothing else.
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1500’s
Luther, Martin – Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, bk. 1 in D. Martin Luthers Werke (1510-1511; Weimar: Hermann Bohlau, 1893), vol. 9
dist. 35. p. 55
36. 55
37. 56
38. 57
39. 59
Luther (1483-1546), a German, composed this commentary on Lombard in becoming a doctor, as was the standard requirement at the time. Luther would later be a protestant reformer, post-1517.
Daneau, Lambert – A Threefold Commentary on the First Book of the Sentences of Peter Lombard (Geneva: Eustathius Vignon, 1580)
dist. 35. God’s Knowledge
Lombard 563
art. 5. 569
Censure 570
36. How the Realities that God Knows are in Him
Lombard 574
1. 580
4. 580
5. 582
6. 583
Censure 583
37. How God is in Realities
Lombard 587
1. 601
2. 604
3. 605
4. 605
5. 606
7. 606
8. 606
9. 606
14. 607
Censure 609
38. On the Causality & Ineffability of the Divine Knowledge
Lombard 613
1. 619
3. 620
4. 620
Censure 621
39. How God’s Knowledge is a Cause
Lombard 625
1. 630
2. 632
4. 633
Censure 633
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1600’s
Voet, Gisbert – Appendix: ‘Of Ideas in God’ in Syllabus of Theological Problems (Utrecht, 1643), pt. 1, section 1, tract 2, I. ‘Of God’, 2nd Kind, (1) Intellect or Knowledge [Scientia] of God Abbr.
“Are there ideas? It is affirmed.
Whether by necessity there are posited ideas in God? It is affirmed.
Whether they are in God, or rather outside God? The prior is affirmed.
Whether they are things themselves produced by God, so far by the divine intellect, is objected, that is, whether they have the rule of an object, in which, as it were, they are things known in the imagination by a creature? It is denied.
Whether they are the effective causes of things, and indeed are first things and principles simply in their genus? It is affirmed.
Whether every knowing or cognition of God indicates an idea? It is denied.
Whether ideas are rightly divided into speculative and practical? It is denied.
Whether ideas pertain to the speculative or rather to practical knowledge? The latter is affirmed.
Whether the distinction of ideas into act and potential rightly explained is possible? It is affirmed.
Whether all ideas in God are one and really the same with God? It is affirmed.
Whether they are really the same amongst themselves or are really and intrinsically one idea? Affirm with a distinction.
Whether ideas in God and in themselves are able and ought to be understood or investigated by us? It is denied.
Whether ideas which are in the divine mind, through the first thing respect, so far, the singular nature, or the nature of the species? The latter is affirmed.
Whether ideas are all which are known by God? It is denied.
Whether evil may maintain an idea in God? It is denied with a distinction.
[The reason is because evil is not a thing, or the form, species or genus of a thing, but a deficiency therefrom.]
Whether impossibilities have ideas in God? It is denied.
Whether prime matter [matter without form] has an idea in God? It is affirmed.
Whether in God may be the idea of things which neither are, nor were, nor will be? It is affirmed.
Whether accidents have an idea in God? It is distinguished.
Whether singulars have an idea in God? It is affirmed.”
Rutherford, Samuel – A Scholastic Disputation on Divine Providence (Edinburgh, 1649), Metaphysical Inquiries, that may perhaps bring forth a Measure of Light to the Doctrine of Providence, 9. Whether God’s free good pleasure is the cause of essences, of grades of essence and of specific forms in natural things, moral things, supernatural things, and artificial things?
– What is in potential and what is in any act is by the same mode, according to the Scriptures. 563
– An act is a prior power. 563
– A thing materially creatable and a created thing are distinguished 564
– God, having freely made that creature [man], materially took up a rational soul 565
– It being necessary, we demonstrate the truth of the first thing spoken 565
– By the same action of God to freely create, God created Adam, a human man, etc. 566
– The most supreme liberty of the Supreme Worker proves that He freely creates a thing out of any agreeable essence 567
– It is not necessary for God to create things of such an essence 567
– The ideas of things have been formed in the mind of God according to his free good-pleasure, therefore so have the ideas of even the essence of things also 568
Heereboord, Adrian – Philosophical Outlines [Meletemata], in which Most Things in Metaphysics are Ventilated... 2nd ed. (Leiden, 1659), pt. 2
27. On Agreement & Distinction 276
28. On Agreement, especially Simply 280
29. On the Distinction of Things 283
30. On the Distinction of Things 286
31. On Ideas, pt. 1 289
32. On Ideas, pt. 2 291
33. On Ideas, pt. 3 294
34. On Ideas, pt. 4 296
35. On Ideas, pt. 5 299
36. On Ideas, pt. 6 302
37. On the Eternal Essences of Things 305-8
van Mastricht, Peter – 4. ‘On the Existence & Knowledge of God through Ideas’ in The Gangrene of the Cartesian Innovations… (Amsterdam, 1677), Section 2, the Particular Points of Cartesianism are Exhibited, pp. 198-217
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Related Pages
Of God, the Knowledge of God & of his Attributes
Lombard’s Sentences & Commentaries on