Can we have non-comprehensive knowledge of the divine essence?
Concerning the postulate in this video that “non-comprehensive knowledge of God’s essence is poppycock”
[We can have non-comprehensive knowledge of God that isn't abstracted from Him as part from whole] because knowledge only requires the removal of one part from another where intelligible principle is composed with matter or potency.
It is not essential to knowledge or the concept that it is abstracted (as form from matter, part from whole), it is essential that in knowledge the mind exercises the same form as the thing known.
Given that the being of creatures is an absolute perfection; given that their being is not exhausted in them, that being is a "polyvalent transcategorical superformality" which actually includes its own differences; given this, there is something in creatures which is formally verified in God.
We can have non-comprehensive knowledge of God's essence that is not abstracted from him because in knowing the being of creatures there is a real (albeit analogous, essentially-varied) factor of identity between the mind & God.
The whole question turns on if there is in fact such a thing as a "polyvalent, transcategorical" concept of being; if we can know being at the "3rd degree of abstraction", in such a manner that it doesn't apply simply to the being where we find it.
Gilson, Kanssas & friends say no; being is individually-diverse on a case by case basis, not "polyvalent". It's intelligibility is restricted to the mode we find it in. It necessarily follows that we can have no positive (or non-comprehensive knowledge of God); everything we affirm of Him would be equivocal, there would be no possibility of the mind sharing a form with God [Gilson says as much; our knowledge of God isn't "QUITE equivocal only because we know our affirmations about Him are true" in absence of any ratio whereby this is verified. Lol].
Orthodox Thomism in the lineage of Cajetan, Poinsot, Garrigou-Lagrange & Maritain conversely says that being is polyvalent, an intelligibility found in things that outstrips them all. Since it is intrinsically diverse, act, potency, men, trees, substance & accident are all being.
Moreover we know this well before we know God exists; being must be INTERNALLY diverse, its differences must still be itself (or they would be nothing). That is, if being meant "men" but not trees, trees would be no-thing. This knowledge of being's internal diversity is prior to all logic & derived metaphysical reasoning, as the condition for affirming the reality of many, limited & changing things.
It is this knowledge of the intrinsic diversity of being whereby non-comprehensive knowledge of God is possible, the "evidentiary basis" of our causal reasoning to God (since we know the being we find in creatures is verified formally in Him; we can say "God exists" and not equivocate).
A better question might be "how could we fail to know an actuating cause via the potency it actuates? How could God cause creatures without there being a non-comprehensige factor of identity between them & Him?" It only sounds like "poppycock" to someone who hasn’t heard of potency & act, or who brutally misunderstansthem according to a spatial metaphor, as two slices of a pie (whereas potency is really nothing but an intrinsic reference to, unequal participation in the act which specifies it).
It seems case of the beatific vision is even more simple: God, intelligible form itself, is both "species impressa & expressa" of the beatific vision.
Even our average species expressa of univocal, special forms never exhaustively convey the content of a respective species impressa or the essence it conveys. The species impressa of ANYTHING is a nigh-inexhaustible wellspring of intelligible aspects which the mind can return to time and again to form new concepts with, while never exhausting their source.
If this is true for any rank species impressa, all the more so for the beatific vision.
That is to say, if the simple difference between known thing & its countless thinkable aspects renders even a finite form inexhaustible re human knowledge, all the more so when an infinite form, the form of all forms, is the basis for the species impressa of the beatific vision. Though God actuates the human mind directly, what He is cannot be comprehensively conveyed by a species expressa.
There is no abstraction because, to reiterate, God Himelf, not an abstraction of Him, is the form whereby intellection in beatitiude occurs.. & He has no matter to "leave behind" in abstraction! Yet the knowledge is non-comprehensive insofar as the knower/known, impressa/expressa, act/potency dynamic remains; only the second person fully comprehends, as identical to, God's essence.
Further considerations:
Non-comprehensive knowledge of something in itself infinite is possible because the non-comprehensiveness is on the side of you, the knower (in the same way that universality accrues to your concept of “man” according to the mode of its existence in knowledge; your concepts of physical beings are universal, the beings are not). This non comprehensiveness characterizes even your knowledge of OTHER things (in the relation of the species expressa to impressa, and the impressa to the essence known). The [infinite] knowability of the thing is on the side of the thing known (which “infinity”, since it is an infinity of actuality or intelligibility, does not compromise knowability, quite the opposite).
All knowledge involves a factor of identity between knower & known. But known things are "only ever grasped as objects" everywhere the act of knowing is distinct from the thing known (ie everywhere outside the inner life of the Trinity). This is the first sense in which our knowledge can never fully comprehend even a creaturely essence.
A similar dynamic obtains once the known thing has actuated the intellect as the intelligible seed for the formation of explicit concepts (we call this the "impressed" species or intelligible). The intellect then forms the "species expressa", the acts of thought which articulate the content of the species impressa. There are literally inexhaustible aspects to any-thing that can comprise the object of a species impressa; as Maritain describes in Degrees of Knowledge (& Deely picks up on after), the same species impressa can be the seed for uncountable expressa.
This is why Cajetan says "it is not of the essence of actual distinct knowledge that the object be known by resolving it into parts of the essence, but rather that the intellect penetrate to what is actually found in the object". Though "every being can be understood by us, not every being can be penetrated by the intellect down to its ultimate differences". In relation to the video, we can say that truly knowing something whole in itself does not require knowing it as whole. There are many thinkable aspects to anything, especially to being-itself; your thinking of something in multiple ways does not make those ways unreal or do violence to the ontological wholeness of the known.
So we have a clear reason here to affirm our knowledge of God in beatitude is non-comprehensive
But is He knowable? The question of how an infinite essence can be participated directly in knowledge is a piece with the questions "how did God create" or "how did God become incarnate"? God is actuality itself. He eminently possesses all the perfections of creatures... so He can, say, create dogs, cause you to have spontaneous enlightenment, turn wine into blood, impose a special form with His causal action. In all cases there is participation of potency in His act, actuation of potency by His act.
But despite being Himself infinite, nowhere does he communicate the fullness of his actuality to anything. His causality is not (cannot be) restricted to affording the full actuality of the divine essence when He acts. Potency-act relationality nowhere assumes that potency must be afforded all the actuality its cause possesses (which seems in any case to destroy the act/potency distinction). This applies alike to the beatific vision.
So we have the reason why non-comprehesive [intentional] participation of man in God is possible: God is knowable as pure act, while every participation of potency in act is non-comprensive. Insofar as they remain distinct, potency only ever participates partially in the actuality that specifies it. Far from non-comprehensive participation in the infinite implying a contradiction as kappes believes, this is exactly the fundamental feature of Thomistic metaphysics, how the diversity of being & knowledge itself is explained. "All antinomies are exchanged for one" Lagrange jokes, for potency, non-being which yet has some being!
To summarize; all creaturely knowledge is non-comprehensive. Meanwhile God is intrinsically knowable, able to actuate your mind & anything else insofar as you are potency & He is pure act. The way potency relates to act is why there is no contradiction in an infinite, simple thing being non-comprehensively known: exactly as how, in creation, miracles or the incarnation (anywhere outside the Trinity) God's infinite essence is not perfectly participated, so when that same essence is the very form we think with in beatitude, we only participate in, ie receive non-comprehensively, what God exhaustively is. There is no abstraction, just God's infinite form actuating your mind, which form your mind doesn't think in parts but rather cannot think "at once" or "penetrate to the ultimate difference of".
All this follows from the fundamental division of being into act & potency i think. This is what needs to be challenged to disrupt the idea of beatitude/direct knowledge of God's essence, since these are the terms it is postulated in.
Misc points relevant to the video above
-rational capacity for knowledge is potentially infinite. Our intellects now are not infinitely actuated, no doubt. But it is exactly the lack of limit to their capacity to be intentionally actuated which makes us intellectual. It is incorrect to say "the intellect can only hold a finite amount of 'data'". To my estimation, the finite capacity of the intellect isn't the formal reason for the non-comprehensiveness, nor God's infinitude, but the knower-known distinction and potency-act relation behind knowledge metaphysically.
-This was touched on above too, but the lack of abstraction poses no issue since God (or even a separate substance) is pure form. We cannot abstract their form from matter they do not have, but luckily they are knowable as such and can be the very forms we think in. Similarly, they are intrinsically knowable or "thinkable" in many ways without the need for separating their parts out (thus Thomas says an angel can think physical beings through its own essence).
-non-comprehensive is best read as "ever-new", or "always fresh". An apt analogy might be to how you truly know your wife or parents. Yet their personalities are a perpetual source of fresh intelligible aspects; you will never finish knowing (or loving) them.
-most importantly note that all the above can do is show that the idea of the beatific vision is not contradictory. There is no proof that there will in fact be beatitude.
-as I mentioned in the first comment, if we know an effect, "ignorance" of its cause is impossible. It's not that the Latins are more optimistic, its that they are better at metaphysics lol. Causality just is a (formal, final, efficient) transmission of what the agent is. Ignorance of the cause through its effect (indeed the inability to derive knowledge of any being as such through any other being) would imply the external diversification of being (true "poppycock").
This is exactly what the palamite essence-energy distinction implies: that being is equivocally predicated of the essence and everything else, that being is extrinsically diversified, as if by addition of the differences "essence" vs "everything else". It is an ad-hoc attempt to philosophize about God having already accepted a philosophically-incorrect notion of being (and so of God).
This is most powerfully indicated by the implication that a being characterized by a real, non-relational distinction (as between "essence" & "activity") would itself, as composite, require a cause: the factor of identity between its parts would not be due to those parts, would have to be extrinsically imposed. This is no "god".
The palamite would no doubt retort that the Thomist immanentizes God or eternalizes creatures [when he says they share some positive perfection with the Divine Essence]. I have encountered many who resort to "modal collapse" arguments against God's simplicity (in favor of the palamite distinction in God) for this reason.
But this is just to ignore the entire doctrine of participation above (as ALWAYS involving asymmetry, distinction, inequality between act & potency). Causation & participation always involve a factor of identity between agent & patient; yet the very difference between act & potency guarantees there will always be an inequality & unbridgeable difference between them.