James Robb: The Unity of Adequate Knowing in St. Thomas Aquinas

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In trying to understand St. Thomas� doctrine on the unity of adequate knowing, one has to locate what he has said on this topic within a larger framework, what he means by being a human being. His personal doctrine, as it is classically interpreted, centers around what I refer to as the unity of a human being or a human person. In general St. Thomas has been interpreted as saying that the human soul has subsistence in its own right, but it is incomplete in nature, and it is related to its body in the unity of a human being as part to part.
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What has intrigued me for many years is the difficulty in trying to understand what is the meaning of an intellectual substance which subsists in itself and yet at the same time has incompleteness of nature. How is one to understand this incompleteness of nature? If the soul were incomplete in existence as well as in nature, there would be no question of its being joined to its body; it would be impossible for it to be joined. What continues to interest me is that area of incompleteness in the human soul which its union with its body completes. This is an area in the doctrine of St. Thomas in which much work remains to be done. What I shall try to do in this article is to sketch the background of the issue, that is, to give the intellectual setting for my reflections on the unity of adequate knowing. Then I shall focus on selected texts where the issue of what constitutes adequate knowing is treated by St. Thomas.
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As is well known, many of the most significant things that St. Thomas has to say about being human are stated in texts in which he is comparing angels and human souls. An early text is from his Commentary on II Sentences.^�1 In this text St. Thomas, in talking about personality as found in angels and in human souls, points to three differences in the way in which personality is found in them. From the point of view of subsistence, an angel subsists in its simple nature; on the other hand, a human being subsists in his or her parts. Take the question of intellectual knowledge. In an angel we apparently have an intellectual light that is pure and unmixed. In comparison with that, the light of the human intellect proceeds discursively and by inquiry. And we act in our thinking through an intellectual light which is darkened by space and time, (lumine intellectuali obumbrato per continuum et tempus).^�2 In short, St. Thomas is saying that there is no pure intellectual knowledge in human beings, no intellectual knowledge without the imagination; one might say, for him, the imagination is the permanent condition for all human knowledge.
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Thus our intellectual light depends upon the material world; after all, what is surprising in this since St. Thomas holds that all human knowledge naturally comes from sensible things. And since it comes from sensible
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things, and since it begins with the help of matter, is it not to be expected that all human knowledge must have spatial and temporal relationships?
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It is at this point that St. Thomas makes a decision that poses problems for those who interpret him. Since the soul is joined to its body, and since the body in the world is subject like the rest of matter to all the conditions and imperfections of its status, it seems that it is a soul that is joined to its body that has a darkened light, and if the soul were free from its body, its light would not be darkened; but that is not what he is saying.
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Another text from the Sentences^�3 helps us to see this. Far from being darkened by matter, the soul�s light goes to matter to be enlightened. In this text St. Thomas points out how the soul holds the last rank in the realm of spiritual substances; its existence is so near to material things that its material body can share in the soul�s existence, namely, when the soul is joined to its body in one act of existence, when I first read these texts, I found them very disturbing. Until then I held that something was either material or immaterial. Immateriality was immateriality; immateriality had no degrees, but here St. Thomas is maintaining that the very immateriality of the human soul is an immateriality of a lower grade than that of angels. He is insisting, as he does, especially in Question 8 of his Questions on the Soul, on the fittingness of the union between soul and body.^�4 But this fittingness of a soul to its body as form, mover and end is not the central point. If the reason why the human soul has sensible powers within itself were because it is joined to its body, the problem would be less difficult, but a bad problem. The reason why a soul is joined to a body that has sense organs is that the soul has sense powers by its very nature. That an intellectual substance should have intellectual powers is not strange; but here we have an intellectual substance which has in its very nature sense powers. Since it has them, we can, of course, understand the fittingness of its being joined to the kind of body that the human body is, that is, a body with the necessary sense organs. The point to be understood is this: the nature and operations of an intellectual substance which is endowed with sensibility.
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St. Thomas grounds the unity of a being in existence, but the unity of existence should have as a counterpart a unity of nature. Consequently, unless one can somehow grasp the reason for the reality of the unity of nature within a human being, one will not see adequately the meaning of a human being as one being. Part of this problem is the following: to understand why it is that the human soul, though complete from the point of view of subsistence, is nevertheless incomplete from the point of view of its nature, and the point of incompleteness is that the soul has powers that can be exercised only through bodily organs.
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This means that the soul has an affinity, a nearness to matter. Furthermore, when matter enters into the constitution of a human being, it does not darken him; it completes him and makes it possible for a human being, using its powers, to know in its own distinctive way. In short, our intellectuality
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by nature is of a lowly kind. The measure of our lowliness as an intellectual being is our incarnateness.
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It is my conviction that for too long students of St. Thomas in this area of his thought did not see the issue correctly. The problem is to see how a human being, composed of what is spiritual and what is material, does not have two natures but rather one. How do the spiritual and the material unite to form one nature? As far as we know, we are the only example of this in the universe. If the union is a natural one, it should be natural in the sense of constituting a whole nature. What is the unity and economy of nature within a human being?
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This is a problem at many levels. The problem of the unity of a human person is first of all a problem in the order of existence, a problem of explaining how a human being is one being. Secondly, there is a problem on the level of the unity in nature. Now unity in nature for a living being means unity in life. Thirdly, since in a human being unity of life is expressed through the functioning of multiple powers, intellectual and sensible, one must see how the original unity of a human being�s existence translates itself into a unity which is an order among the powers which constitute human nature. The cooperation of these powers, their existence for one another, this unity of order among the various powers must be present if a human being has the unity of existence and of life. Fourthly, a human being must have a unity of activity. First of all a human being must have a unity of activity of knowledge, and one can pose this question: What is the human activity of knowing as seen within this problem of the unity of a human being in nature, in life, in powers and in action. Secondly, one ought to ask what is the human activity of loving?
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Reading and reflecting on these issues over the years, I have come to see St. Thomas developing certain attitudes. Human knowledge is discursive; human choice is deliberative. This discursiveness in the human way of knowing is a kind of knowledge that is uniquely human, and this �process� kind of choice, where human knowing and human loving are in a state of continual becoming, never fixed, is distinctively a human choice. We seem to be the kind of beings who have to work out the truths that we come to know and the decisions we come to make. In other words, for a human being to become a complete reality, each person must spread his life out in a whole series of actions, one after another. This phenomenon of a need for an incarnate duration is part of the meaning of a human being as an incarnate intellectual being. Our history is part of our being; it is not something going on outside of us; it is that which we are enduring. History is our becoming. To understand St. Thomas� doctrine of being human, we must interiorize human history, put history back as part of each human being�s being.
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In order to locate the issue with which we are dealing, the full adequacy of the fact of human knowing, we should examine a great many texts. A key
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text, because it sums up so much and serves almost as a chart for studying St. Thomas� anthropology, is Question 1 of his Questions on the Soul.^�5 Here, following a unique formulation of the question of whether a human soul is both substance and substantial form, he concludes that the soul is both; it is a substance within whose depths lies an urgent need to be united to its body as its form. One should study his profoundest text on knowledge, Summa Contra Gentiles, IV, 11; one would find him asserting that any intellect, as a power, no matter in which being it is found, is open to the fullness of being. Every intellect has as its object the totality of being (universaliter omne ens.) One would follow him as he explores the infinity of any intellect, and discover that St. Thomas holds that there are degrees, innumerable degrees, of immateriality and of intellectuality.^�6
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One should reflect deeply on what he means when he says that knowledge is by likeness. This means that unless an intellect, of itself, actually and adequately, is the likeness of all things, something more than intellect is needed for adequate knowledge. The very actualization of an intellect, which goes from not knowing to knowing, occurs through forms that are other than the form of the intellect. This means that when one raises questions about the range of knowledge of the human intellect, the range of the intellect will be determined by the intelligibility through which it actually comes to know. The human intellect is actuated only through forms that come from outside it. Can the soul of a human being know itself? Only through intelligible forms that are derived from material things. Apart from such forms the human intellect is completely potential.