1. On the Acceptation of the Terms ‘Intellect’, ‘To see’, ‘Naturally’

389. I reply to the question by first expounding these three terms: ‘intellect’, ‘to see’, ‘naturally’.

390. For a created intellect is either altogether separate from matter, as an angelic intellect, or similar to it in its operation, namely the intellect of the separated soul and the intellect of the soul joined to a blessed body, which are like angels in operation (as I assume here, and it will be proved below [nn.398-400]); or it is a created intellect joined to a corruptible body, which ‘weighs down the soul’ Wisdom 9.15. And this last intellect only understands things that are imaginable or that are displayed in phantasms of what is imaginable, from On the Soul 3.7.431a14-b2.

391. By the term ‘naturally’ is not meant that the intellect can of its own nature know the object, for the intellect is like a blank slate which can know nothing of itself alone, ibid. 3.4.429b30-430a2. But what is meant is that the intellect naturally knows that which it can know with the concurrence of its natural causes, namely the active and passive intellect.

392. Now ‘to see’ brings in intuitive intellection as it is distinguished from abstractive intellection; and, as was said elsewhere [Ord. II d.3 nn.318-323, III d.14 nn.107-118], intuitive intellection is knowledge of a thing as it is in itself present; abstractive intellection can be of a thing as it is displayed in some likeness, which can be of the thing as existing or as non-existing, or as present or non-present.

393. The question, then, is not about ‘understanding naturally’ but about ‘seeing [naturally]’ because, when one is speaking of abstractive understanding or intellection, it is manifest that the intellect can naturally understand the body of Christ. For it is impossible to form or conceive any proposition whose terms are not conceived, but it is possible for our intellect to conceive this proposition ‘the body of Christ is in the Eucharist’, otherwise it could not form it. Therefore our intellect can, in some intellection, understand both this proposition and its terms.

394. And if you ask how Christ’s body or its existence in the Eucharist can be known by us by abstraction, I reply that Augustine teaches, On the Trinity 8.4 n.7, how we have faith about Christ, although, however, we have not seen Christ, namely that we do so (according to Augustine) in certain general intentions or concepts taken from singulars, as he teaches there at large. For it makes no difference to our faith whether we err in certain sensible conditions we have conceived about Christ, since our faith does not per se regard those proper conditions, but it regards an individual man, knowledge of whom can come to be in us from knowledge of any individual man. So too the existence of Christ’s body here could have come to be in us from some other existence, as the existence of something else contained in a container or signified in a sign or covered with a covering.

Now it is about ‘seeing’, that is, about intuitive knowledge of this existence, that the question here is being moved.