By RAYMOND DE SOUZA, KM
Part 2
The knowledge of Our Lord Jesus Christ is a fundamental part and parcel of salvation. In His prayer to His Heavenly Father for His disciples, He said, “Now this is eternal life: That they may know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent” (John 17:3).
In our apologetics course we endeavor to know more about Jesus Christ, in order to love Him more.
So we ask this question: How did Christ know things? With a divine mind? With a human mind? How were the two combined?
This is a topic that requires a very close scrutiny, because there are modern-day “theologians” who slither a new doctrine among Catholics, aiming to cast a doubt about the divinity of Christ without falling into the ancient heresy of Arianism.
Let us start off with two concepts: Christ’s divine knowledge and Christ’s human knowledge. The first one is comparatively easy to understand: The knowledge which Christ had through His divine nature was infinitely perfect. Being a Divine Person, the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity, He knew everything with the utmost perfection. No problem here. God is omniscient, all-knowing, and that’s the end of it.
But the knowledge which Christ had through His human nature was not infinite. It was finite, limited, because the human nature is limited. And here things get rather tricky to figure out. His finite human knowledge was of three kinds, namely: experimental, infused, and beatific.
All human beings have experimental knowledge. It is proper to our nature. Your experimental knowledge is the knowledge you acquire by your own experience. You learned that fire burns when you as a child touched the oven; you learned what a rainbow was when you saw one after a rain shower; you learned the difference between the musical styles of Tchaikovsky and Vivaldi when you listened to both of them and compared your impressions about their styles. You learned that the square root of 49 was 7 when you studied in school. And so on.
This is called experimental knowledge. Because of His human nature, Christ’s soul had the ordinary knowledge which men obtain in everyday life from the use of their senses and reason, by observing, listening, analyzing, meeting people, reading, and so on. So Jesus had no experimental knowledge of very intense physical pain until He was scourged; He learned to speak Aramaic from Mary and Joseph; He learned to make furniture from His adoptive father at the carpenter’s shop.
Now, Christ’s infused knowledge is another matter: As God the Son, in His human knowledge, Christ also showed the divine ability to know the secret thoughts of men’s hearts. Thus He knew, for example: the unspoken objections of the Pharisees to His deeds; what the disciples were arguing about in His absence; the history of the Samaritan woman He met for the first time at Jacob’s well; the death of Lazarus; the fact that the widow at the Temple was putting in her last coins; Simon Peter’s future denials, repentance, and martyrdom; His own death and Resurrection; the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple within a generation; and the signs accompanying the end of the world.
That was his infused knowledge.
But Christ had yet another kind of knowledge: The Beatific Vision! It was and is the continuous heavenly knowledge of God’s infinite Beauty. From the first moment of its existence, already in the sacred womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, His human soul enjoyed, like the angels and the blessed, the immediate vision of God, and in that vision beheld all things past, present, and to come.
Being true Man, He, like you and me, made use of His faculties of sense and understanding. He used His eyes and ears; He observed facts, and drew conclusions from them. His experimental knowledge grew from day to day, like that of any ordinary man. However, and this is a most important thing to bear in mind, all the knowledge so acquired was already in His possession through other channels.
Now can you see that Heaven has got to be eternal? Our puny human minds will never be able to fully comprehend the magnitude of the Godhead, of the hypostatic union, or of transubstantiation. Heaven will be the continuous contemplation of the infinite Beauty of God’s mysteries, which I like to compare to a marvelous kaleidoscope the size of the universe, presenting infinite beauties and joys that never end!
Now let us take a look at Christ’s knowledge of us, you and me, as well as every man, woman, and child in history, from Adam and Eve to those who will fight the Antichrist at the end of time: Jesus knew and loved us each and all during His life, His agony, and His Passion, and gave Himself up for each one of us: The Son of God “loved me and gave Himself for me.” He has loved us all with a human heart. The devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus is the best way to know, love and serve His love for us. “He knew and loved us all when He offered His life” (Gal. 2:20).
Christ’s knowledge of Himself: Those who say that Christ was divine but was not aware of it, utter the biggest idiocy conceivable. Of course Christ knew who He was, and knew that He was true God and true Man! It is impossible that He who came to save us should Himself not know His own identity.
Thy Will Be Done
So far we have spoken about Christ’s knowledge. What about His human will?
Being true Man, Christ had a human will like ours. He had the power of loving what His human mind represented to Him as good. Being true God, He also had a divine will. He had the power of loving what His divine mind represented to Him as good. His human mind was limited; so too His human will.
His divine Mind was unlimited; so too His divine Will. With His divine Will, He loved the Godhead with an infinite love; with His human will, He loved the Godhead, not with an infinite love, but with the highest love of which His sanctified human nature was capable. His human will was ever and in all things subject to His divine will: “I have come,” He said, “not to do my own will,” i.e., His human will “but the will of Him who sent me” (John 6:38).
In the face of suffering, His human will naturally shrank from it: In the garden He cried out against the bitter chalice of pain and degradation, but He said, “Not my will, but thine, be done” (Luke 22:42).
Although in Christ there were two distinct wills, each acting in its own proper way, there was but one Worker; there was but One Person, the Son of God to whom the acts of both wills belonged. Hence, His least human act while He was on earth was the act of a divine Person, and therefore of infinite value.
Next article: Answering objections against Christ’s knowledge and will.
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(Raymond de Souza is an EWTN program host; regional coordinator for Portuguese-speaking countries for Human Life International [HLI]; president of the Sacred Heart Institute, and a member of the Sovereign, Military, and Hospitaller Order of the Knights of Malta. His website is: www. RaymonddeSouza.com.)
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