Question Four. Whether Christ knows Everything in its own Proper Genus Perfectly

124. Lastly I pose about this distinction, without arguments, the further question of whether Christ’s soul or Christ knew everything most perfectly in its own proper genus.

125. I reply: knowledge can be understood either as habitual or as actual.

126. I say that in the first way Christ knew everything most perfectly in its proper genus, because just as his soul was posited (in d.13 nn.28-30, 45-48) as being able to have the highest grace possible for a creature, so it is probable on this ground that he does thus have the most noble of intelligible species, whereby most perfectly and habitually he knows species or things with abstractive knowledge.

127. But if the question is about actual knowledge then a distinction must be made between abstractive actual knowledge and intuitive actual knowledge:

As to abstractive knowledge, Christ cannot know most perfectly when one takes the intellect as it is partial cause of understanding, for his intellect is not the most perfect created intellect, and the more this partial cause is imperfect the more its understanding is imperfect (for this knowledge, in the absence of special miracle, is elicited according to the power of the intellect and of the present object). But if an infused intelligible species of some object is posited in Christ’s soul [n.110] which as much exceeds in perfection the species infused into any other intellect as the intellectuality of Christ’s soul is exceeded by the intellectuality of the other intellect, then the whole totality, namely the intellect of Christ’s soul along with its more perfect species, can equal the whole of the other intellect with its species. And if whole cause equals whole cause, even though the partial causes taken separately are unequal to each other, an equal effect can follow, or an unequal effect can follow if the species in Christ’s soul exceeds in nobility the species of the angel much more than Christ’s intellectuality is exceeded by the angel’s. In another way too can an unequal effect follow, if one supposes that, in the first way, whole cause equals whole cause because of a nobler principal cause.

128. About intuitive knowledge too: if the object does not act as it is in the species but is, as being present in itself, the same object and works in the same way with any intellect, then the intellect that has a more imperfect actuality will have a more imperfect intuitive act.

129. But as to intuitive knowledge in the Word, Christ’s intellect can be said to have as supreme a perfection of vision as it has also of the Word [nn.25-30].