God is Truth (an Excerpt from “A Companion to the Summa Volume I,” Part 1 of a Book Review)

         A set of 4 volumes of which everyone should read is called “A Companion to the Summa” by Walter Farrell first published by Sheed & Ward in 1941.  The following is a short except punctuating that God is Truth page 80:

         To say that God knows all possible things, things that could have been but will not be, is only to insist on God’s knowledge of the extent of His power, His comprehensive knowledge of His own perfection; for unless He knows in how many ways His perfections can be shared, imitated, mirrored by creation, He does not fully know Himself.  There is absolutely nothing that can escape the mind of God.  The thoughts of men and angels run the length of an endless road with a speed beyond measure; but the road is not long enough, nor the speed great enough to out distance the divine mind upon which every thought, like every other reality, depends, intimately, ceaselessly, ultimately.  Evil is a gaping hole in reality; unless that hole be known, reality itself is not perfectly known. Obviously, we do not know a man’s face if we do not know the hole in the middle of it, we do not know a fence unless we are also cognizant of the boards missing from it here and there.  Evil is a defect, a privation of good; God’s perfect knowledge of good necessarily includes a knowledge of the way in which good can be or is defective.

         Even the knowledge of those future conditioned things that might happen but do not is at the fingertips of God.  The debutante of five years ago had her mind made up for years to devote herself to marriage, if some one asked her; as the years go on, with the condition still unfulfilled, hope does not die in God’s heart.  He has not ben on tenterhooks all this time; the very condition which hides in the halls of the future depends upon the first cause of all that is or can be, not only upon its own proximate causes.

      If God is completely above all change, as He certainly is, then He does not forget thing, His knowledge does not ebb and flow, He does not acquire new knowledge by keeping His eyes open, through long periods of concentration, or by eavesdropping.  In a sense there are many ideas in the mind of God, in the sense, that is, that God knows many, indeed, all things; but He knows these things through His own divinely simple essence, not through a multitude of concepts.  More accurately, He is His intelligence, His knowledge; and He is the immutable first.

      We can sum up all this doctrine on the knowledge of God in the one profound statement: God is truth,  For truth is in and intellect when that intellect knows a thing as it really is; truth is in a thing when it measures up to the intellect which caused it;  God’s essence not only measures up to His intellect, it is His intellect; God’s intellect not only knows His essence, it is His essence.  This is the immutable first truth, the foundation of all other truths.  Every other truth participates in this firs truth or ceases to be truth: the world of reality as it measures up to the divine exemplar; created minds when, measuring up to the world of reality, they get a glimpse of the divine exemplar.  When we touch upon truth we are in the shadow of divinity; when we embrace it, we are ennobled by the contact to a degree easily recognizable by all men.  In the world of reason, love of truth produces the philosopher; in the world of affairs it produces the gentleman; in the world of grace it produces the saint.  The respect given these men is the spontaneous tribute given to divine messengers, Humanity doffs its cap or makes its curtsey and goes its way with renewed hope; God is truth.

Every chapter begins with an outline. This is from chapter IV: Vision of God and specifically 3.(B) from the outline shown below:

                                                    CHAPTER IV

                                                     (OUTLINE)

1. End of the myth of mans’s omniscience:
2. The fact and its causes.
3. Laymen and this fact.
4. Philosophers and this fact.
5. Answers to the question of God’s omniscience:
6. Negative answers:
7. The lazy answer – Agnosticism.
8. The timid answer – Naturalism.
9. The Cowardly answer – Psychological mechanism.
10. The proud answer – Idealism.
11. Affirmative answer.
12. The knowledge of God:
13. He knows Himself:
14. The fact.
15. The manner of this knowledge.
16. He knows everything else:
17. Actual and possible things
18. Evil
19. Infinite thoughts of angels and men.
20. Future conditioned things.
21. Man’s knowledge of God:
22. Triple source of this knowledge:
23. The effects of God.
24. Revelation
25. Direct vision of God:
26. Possibility of this vision.
27. Object of this Vision:
28. The divine essence and all formally contained in it.
29. The perfection of creatures
30. The achievement of this vision.

Conclusion:

1. Significance of the affirmative and negative answers:
2. Freedom and slavery.
3. Inspiration and despair.
4. Humility and conceit.
5. Courage and fear.
6. The vision of God and life.

       Hopefully this taste of the contents of this book will inspire you to read the rest of this book and indeed the rest of the series.  The specifics such as the jacket cover introduction, page count, approbations and table of contents, of it will be given in my next blog.