Book I, Chapter 16

CHAPTER XVI. Against certain people who say that things known are causes sine qua non of divine knowledge, but not a cause.

There are some who limp in two directions 1, saying that things known are a cause sine qua non of divine knowledge, but not a cause. They give this argument: "God does not know without things known; therefore things known are causes sine qua non of his knowledge." This seems to be the opinion of Peter Lombard in the first book of his Sentences, dist. 38, and some others follow him. But these men limp away from the paths of truth. For when they say that the thing known is a cause sine qua non of divine knowledge, either they understand by this word "cause" what the word signifies among the Philosophers, the Theologians, and all the lettered, and even the unlettered, who speak of Cause, namely that which in some way causes, at least as a partial cause and co-cause. Or they do not understand it so, but in some other way hitherto unheard of, perhaps calling a "cause sine qua non" of something everything without which that thing is not, whether it causes that thing, or is caused by it, or is irrelevant to it in every way. If they understand it in the first way, then, since every partial cause or co-cause of anything whatever is some cause of it (otherwise the Father would not be the cause of the Son, because a man begets a man, and the Sun too; nor would wood or stones be a cause of a house), it follows that the thing known is some cause of divine knowledge. C1 This they deny. Again, according to the Philosopher in Physics 2 and Metaphysics 5 2, there are four principal kinds of causes, and many more modes of causes; but

every mode of any cause is reduced to some principal kind of cause. If, therefore, they speak of cause as he does, it follows that this mode of cause, the cause sine qua non, is reduced to one of these kinds. The thing known is therefore an efficient, material, formal, or final cause of divine knowledge, and so they must concede without qualification that it is a cause. But if they concede that the thing known is a partial cause or co-cause, and so in some way a cause of divine knowledge, all the arguments of the preceding chapter come back against them. Again, they must then concede that as the thing known is a cause of human knowledge, so it is of divine; for the thing known is only a partial cause and co-cause of human knowledge, not a principal one. The exterior and interior senses, and our possible intellect, and the agent intellect are its principal causes; yet the opinion of the Philosophers and Theologians cited above does not concede this of divine knowledge, but denies it. Again, things known would then be a cause of such a knowledge, namely the knowledge of approbation, or approbative knowledge, of God, which beyond simple cognition adds the good pleasure of the will. And since this knowledge is a cause of things, as the ninth chapter proves, the same thing, in respect of the same, in the same kind of cause, namely the efficient, is both cause and caused, and prior and posterior naturally, by the same species of priority, in respect of the same. Again, according to the same Peter in the same place, the knowledge of God, which is simple cognition, E2 is only a cause sine qua non of things known, and things known are likewise a cause of it; therefore the same thing is, in the same way, both cause and caused in respect of the same. But if they understand it in the second way, they must say in consequence that everything willed is a cause of the divine will and of his approbative knowledge, although the contrary must be said, as is clear from the ninth chapter, and from Peter in the place cited before, and from dist. 45 following. Again, against their argument: either they understand it thus, that this is not without that in fact, and therefore it is a cause sine qua non of that; or that this is not without that of necessity, but they are necessarily joined. If the first is granted, then they have likewise

to say that the barking of a dog, or the wonder of an ignorant man, is a cause of this kind of an eclipse, and of God; indeed, universally, that anything whatever is such a cause of anything whatever, and causes 3; for all these things coexist. If the second is granted, then the Son of God is the cause of the Father, and of the divine essence, and begotten wisdom is the cause why the Father is wise, and so the Father is wise by begotten wisdom; and every attribute, and whatever is necessarily in God, would be a cause of each of these others. No Theologian doubts that these are false. And if a foot had always necessarily stood in the dust, the footprint would have been the eternal cause of the foot. The same holds for the radiance caused by fire, and the image caused in a mirror by the object, whether temporal or eternal; and universally for everything caused that necessarily accompanies its cause, as a passion necessarily follows an action, an effect its efficient cause, and every thing caused, universally, its causing; all of which are absurd to all.