Showing papers by "Rowan Williams published in 2001"

What does love know? St Thomas on the Trinity

Abstract: ly in common, not with the personal act of the Father (165-6). But if we have been reading attentively, I think it should be clear that there is no discourse about the divine esse in relation to creation that is not also about the actual life of the three persons. To say that creation is the work of the three is not to say that it is the work of nature rather than person. But the confusion is easily made unless you take care to keep the discussion of the divine verbum firmly in view when thinking about divine knowledge in general. This is reinforced when we turn to the account of the third person, initially in xxvii.3 and 4, then in xxxvi to xxxviii. The treatment of the divine perfections in general has already alerted us to the inseparability of intellect and love in thinking life, and so pre-eminently in God: the presence of what is known in us as knowers is always complemented by the presence of what is loved in us as lovers. The discussion of divine bliss reinforces this. We never ‘just’ know; in Thomas’s vocabulary, we ‘tend’ or ‘incline’ to what is known. That is to say, in encountering an intelligible object, we do not simply conform our action to its action in the production of an inner word, we regard it in the light of whether it serves the good or the flourishing of our life. Knowledge is followed by habitudo ad bonum, the disposition of the mind relative to its good; in plainer language, knowledge brings with it a set of issues about what I am to do in respect of the known object so as to meet my desires or fulfil my purposes (see, e.g., xix. 1 c). Aquinas, like Augustine, does not believe in strictly ‘disinterested’ knowledge, knowledge that can be wholly abstracted from a real or potential attitude to the known. We can speak either of the will’s relation to the object or the will’s ‘projection’ of actions in respect of the object that will realise my purposes through the object. Thus Thomas is able to make an important distinction in xxvii.4. Knowledge produces an image of the known; the verbum is the other reality living in the knowing subject and the act of the subject follows, so to speak, the contours of the act of the object. What Thomas calls intellectual procession results in a sort of repetition in another medium of the known. But the relation of love or will does not produce an image; it produces an inclinatio, almost a ‘programme’ for action that is not a repetition of the act of the object, yet is no less a kind of living of the object in the subject, a presence of the beloved in the lover. Something known continues its structured activity in the knower by living in the knower as an intelligible structure. Something loved continues its life in