If God Does Not Know Us, We Are Doomed to Despair

     While reading Existence and the Existent by 20th Century Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, which is an amazing book covering the depth of esse in the thought of Thomas Aquinas, the author put forth quite a beautiful line of reasoning for the nihilistic entailments of atheism. That form of reasoning is not novel nor particular to Maritain, but it is Maritain's particular formulation that struck me as profound. I say "line of reasoning" over "argument" because it is written more as a stream of consciousness as opposed to providing justification and defenses for premises, so this presentation may not even be what Maritain himself would agree with or what he was trying to say; it is only an interpretation with some of my own insights. If the reader wishes to see the original prose, I would implore them to purchase the book.

   Maritain first begins with the fact that the human subject knows in an objective manner, i.e., by objectizing the subjects presented to him, and this applies to a man's knowledge of himself as well, whereby he objectizes his own subjectivity (Maritain would concede that we have a self-knowledge of our own subjectivity qua subjectivity, although he prefers to call it something "felt" and presupposed in the act of knowing rather than something known per se, since that would simply objectize the subject). Maritain's particular justification for this would be embedded in Thomistic epistemology and psychology, but given that they are defensible on their own and that this view is accepted by other philosophical traditions, I'll take it for granted here.

     Given that the human being knows a thing as an object presented to him and thus knows things in their objectivity, it follows that it does not know a thing in its subjectivity, or as a subject (subject of the act of existence, a.k.a. supposit).

     If the human does not know in a subjective manner, then he will only have imperfect knowledge of whatever supposita he knows, because there would be some aspect of the subject's being that is not grasped by or revealed to the human's intellect. Therefore, human knowledge will not be proportional to the being of a thing but fall short. This is why Maritain terms this kind of knowledge "unjust," because justice is essentially due proportionality, and given that human beings have a natural desire to be fully known and understood, human beings who are known only in an objective manner will not be known in proportion to their total being, and so will not be known in a way they are due given that natural desire (for more on the relation between justice and natural desire, see my previous post "Some Arguments on the Nature-Grace Debate"). That we have this natural desire seems very plausible to me given that by nature human beings cannot find complete satisfaction in anything finite or incomplete, and that it seems quite strange to think that such a desire would be the result of individuating principles rather than flowing from human nature (since a desire which does not flow from nature or is supernaturally infused is one had by an individual due to their individuating principles).

     Maritain then invokes the concept of a tribunal, which deliberates on the actions of an accused and passes judgment upon them. Calling it a "masquerade," he points out that, "The more the judges stray from the crude outward criteria with which formerly they contented themselves, and strive to take account of degrees of inner responsibility [which inform the subjective components absent from objective knowledge], the more they reveal that the truth of him whom they judge remains unknowable to human justice."

     Not only does the imperfect knowledge of one man of another signify an injustice in itself, it also translates to a shortcoming in the justice of positive law, the judgments that men dole out to each other. Maritain then reasons that if this "masquerade" is the end of justice, then there is no true justice for anyone, and if there is no true justice for anyone, there is no hope for anyone, and if there is no hope for anyone, the following experience of isolation can only result in the desire for death, even "total annihilation."

     I sympathize with this. One can say that they believe that there is no real justice, no hope, but to truly believe there is no hope is just to fall into complete despair definitionally, yet many who would say they believe this do not act as if they do; they live an illusion possible from a cognitive dissonance, a disconnection from intellect and body, from theory and practice. A life without hope is a life with no future, since hope is for things beyond the now, but a life with no future is a life that has ended, and the end of a life is nothing but death, if only symbolically.

     It could only be God that saves us from this abyss. Maritain says that God knows us qua subject and has no need for objective conceptualization. As I see it, this is at least partly due to the fact that God is pure actuality. For the Thomist, intellectual knowledge is inseparable from the senses in the human being, as "nothing is in the intellect prior to the senses." In Kantian terms, the content of intuition is formally identical to the content of thought. It is the subject's contact with external substances through the senses by which the subject forms an inner material representation of those substances (called "phantasms") from which the intellect abstracts the universal form of the substance known. The kind of objective knowledge by conceptualization that we humans have is in virtue of our material being, in virtue of our passivity to the world, our reception of it. Not only are we subjects to acts of existence, but we are also subjects (or rather subject) to the world. God is a subject in the former sense (although only analogically, since He simply is His own act of existence), but not in the latter. He cannot be subject to anything extrinsic to Him, because He is the ultimate cause of anything extrinsic to Him, so He does not know by the same objective conceptualization that we do, and so the exclusive nature of that objective knowledge explained in the second paragraph does not apply to His knowledge. 

     God must know the absolute depths of our being, because as pure actuality, He is the cause of the existence of creatures, and given that existence is the "act of all acts," all actuality in any being really distinct from the thing's act of existence is derivative of that act of existence. There is no actuality that escapes Him, since esse is the cause of all other actualities in a being, and God is the immediate and direct cause of esse in creatures.

     Contrary to mere subject-object knowledge, wherein the fullness of a thing's being is not known, God's unique subject-subject knowledge as the cause of esse leaves no actuality unknown. It is only in God's knowledge of us that we are truly known, known in every fiber of our being, the only truly just knowledge. Even more, as purely simple, God is His act of knowledge, and thus God's knowledge is the cause of things, God's knowledge being properly of the divine essence. Those who are saved will experience the beatific vision which is a supernatural knowledge of the divine essence. Then too, will we know things in the fullest depths of their being, know things not merely as objects but as subjects, since we will no longer need to know through objective conceptualization, but rather through the divine essence itself.