Monday, May 01, 2006

Q14 A14: Whether God knows enunciable things?

Yes. God knows all enunciations that can be formed because by understanding His essence, God knows the essences of all things, and also whatever can be accidental to them.

Now just as He knows material things immaterially, and composite things simply, so likewise He knows enunciable things not after the manner of enunciable things, as if in His intellect there were composition or division of enunciations.

Instead, He knows each thing by simple intelligence, by understanding the essence of each thing: as if we by the very fact that we understand what man is, were to understand all that can be predicated of man.

Enunciatory composition signifies some existence of a thing; and thus God by His existence, which is His essence, is the similitude of all those things which are signified by enunciation.