Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: The Trinune God: Systematics

Titel: The Triune God: Systematics

Stichwort: Divinarum Personarum; Wissen - Bilderdenken; Scotus

Kurzinhalt: noch nicht

Textausschnitt: 8 Response to the Scotist Position on Formal Distinction on the Side of the Reality1

789a I reply that God's knowledge is one kind of knowledge, our knowledge is another, and imagining both divine and human knowledge is still another. (Fs)

In God understanding and being are absolutely identical; hence, the truth of divine knowledge is not a similitude between knowing and the known, for similitude supposes duality; it consists, rather, in the absence of dissimilitude. (Fs)

789b In us, however, since we progress from understanding in potency to understanding in act, we know insofar as through inquiry we understand, and through understanding we speak inner words, and through words spoken interiorly as through means-in-which we contemplate beings.2

Still, since we are not only rational but also animal, we not only investigate the proper nature of our knowledge so as to understand what we discover, speak in inner words what we have understood, and through true words contemplate the reality of our knowledge, but we can also forgo this arduous and lengthy task, so that by picturing someone who is seeing and the object of sight we think we know for certain what knowledge is. (Fs)

789c This picturing of knowledge, once it is admitted, leads necessarily to a formal distinction. For since looking at looking cannot be clearly and distinctly pictured in the imagination, it is impossible for us to think even about divine knowledge without separating the object as displayed on the side of the object and the subject which truly knows because it sees everything that is presented to it on the side of the object and sees nothing except what is displayed there. (Fs)

This picturing of knowledge is clearly the basis of the major premise of the first objection. For it posits as if they were two, God the Father as knowing and God the Father as displayed objectively prior to all operation of the mind. We set up a trilemma concerning this object: either two realities are displayed or only one is displayed; and if only one is displayed, either there is a nonidentity of formalities on the part of the thing itself or there is not. If this is granted, then since knowledge is supposed to be nothing else than a facsimile of the object being seen in the subject seeing it, the necessary conclusion is either the Sabellian or the Arian heresy, or an intermediate formal distinction. (Fs)

791a The gnoseological foundations of this argument must be denied. For we know real things inasmuch as we know beings; and we know beings inasmuch as we utter true judgments by means of which beings become known to us; and true judgments are both either affirmative or negative, and either simple or compound, so that judgment is necessarily either (1) A is, or (2) A is not, or (3) A is B, or (4) A is not B. (Fs)

791b Now, those things are distinct when one is not the other, and therefore it is only through true negative compound judgments (type 4) that distinctions are known. Besides, a true negative compound judgment is either of the first intention that makes judgments about things or of the second intention that makes judgments about concepts. If there is a judgment of the first intention, then A as real is not B as real, and the distinction is real. If, on the other hand, the judgment is of the second intention, then concept A is not concept B, and the distinction is conceptual. Finally, because our mode of conceiving is not the same as our mode of existing, it is possible for a conceptual distinction to arise, either solely from our mode of conceiving, or also from the mode of existence of things; and therefore conceptual distinctions are further divided into purely conceptual distinctions and conceptual distinctions with a basis in reality. (Fs)

To add to these distinctions another, a formal, distinction is to sin by an excess of realism, as if things themselves were not constituted by their own real principles but also by our conceptual formalities. For unless there is posited in real things themselves something else that is called formal, most certainly there cannot be in addition to a real distinction another distinction that is called 'formal on the side of the reality.' If formal is something besides real, it is not real; if it is not real, it does not exist among things. On the other hand, if formal is not something besides real, then it is real; and if formal is real, surely a formal distinction coincides with the real. (E11; 19.03.2011, Fest des hl. Josef)