A. First Opinion

1. Exposition of the Opinion

98. A distinction is drawn here [Aquinas] between infused knowledge and acquired knowledge.

99. And the statement is made that as to infused knowledge Christ’s soul knew everything through certain principles infused into it (namely through intelligible species infused by God), and that, to this extent, it could not advance; but it could advance as to acquired knowledge.

100. The proof is that Christ’s soul had a possible and agent intellect just as we do, and the proper operation of these intellects is to abstract intelligible species and take them in; so these powers in Christ’s soul had this ability; but an intelligible species is either knowledge of an object or a necessary principle of knowing.

2. Rejection of the Opinion

101. Argument against this conclusion [n.99] is drawn from the statements of him who thinks it, because according to him ‘two accidents of the same species cannot exist in the same thing’; but infused and acquired knowledge of the same thing in its proper genus are of the same species.

102. If it be said that they can be distinct in species, as ‘morning’ and ‘evening’ knowledge are distinct in species - on the contrary: knowledges are not distinguished into species by the intellect (according to those who hold this view), nor according to the proper idea of the object, that is, as the object is present in itself and in the Word. Therefore the two knowledges, acquired evening knowledge and infused evening knowledge, must have the same object, and their difference is only as to their efficient causes (as in the case of a man created and a man generated naturally) - but such a distinction of causes does not distinguish the form itself of knowledge,a according to Augustine, Letters to Deogratias q.1 n.4, and Ambrose, On the Incarnation ch.9 nn.102-105: ‘difference of origin does not produce difference of nature’, as is plain in the case of Adam and ourselves.

a.a [Interpolated note] for the object is the same; but the distinction is in the diverse means and principles of knowing, which are efficient causes of the distinction.

103. Further, against the conclusion in itself [n.99] I argue as follows: even if two knowledges of the same species could be in the same thing at the same time, yet two perfect knowledges of the same species and in accord with the same idea could not be; for either the object, to the extent it is knowable, would be known perfectly by either of the knowledges and then the other would be superfluous, or it would not be perfectly known and then neither knowledge would be perfect.

104. There is argument too against the reasoning for the conclusion [n.100], because then someone blessed, since he has an agent and a possible intellect, would be able to acquire knowledge; and the power too of growth and the other powers, which in the blessed will be of the same nature as they are in us, will be able to perform their acts; and so someone blessed is now able to grow, just as Adam too in the state of innocence could have grown.

103. From these instances and others like them it is plain that the proposition is false that ‘powers are, wherever they are, perfectly able to perform their acts’; for this proposition is true only of something imperfect that is in potency to the term of the actions of the powers; but if some agent anticipates those powers and induces the terms which the actions of those powers had the ability to attain, then those powers will not be able to act to attain those terms -not because of any imperfection in themselves but because of the positing of the term by the anticipating agent; nor for this reason should those powers be denied to exist in the nature of the thing, for they are perfections of the nature simply, whether they have reached the terms of their perfection through that nature or in some other way.