The Problem of Christ’s Acquired Knowledge

Thomas Aquinas is universally applauded for his “courage and perspicacity” in eventually admitting an acquired knowledge in Christ. According to this doctrine, Christ, through the experience of his senses, came to know what he previously did not know. Problematically, however, Aquinas also taught that Christ was maximally perfect in this knowledge. Christ would have known all that could and should be known at each stage of his human development; at “the perfect age” he would have known all that could be known naturally by the human intellect, simpliciter , without ever having learned from others. Understandably, many theologians have blushed at this latter aspect of Aquinas’s account and have sought to scale back some of Aquinas’s more ambitious claims based on the assumption that these are, in fact, rooted in influences external to Aquinas’s thought. Accordingly, the maximal perfection of Christ’s acquired knowledge can be excised without much ado. In this article I challenge this assumption. For Aquinas, inasmuch as Christ’s maximal perfection in grace and knowledge (“full of grace and truth”) forms the very explanatory basis for his distinctive teaching regarding Christ’s humanity as the universal, instrumental cause of grace (“from his fullness we have all received”), it is necessary that any imperfection in knowledge, including Christ’s acquired knowledge, be excluded. After charting out the development of Aquinas’s teaching on Christ’s acquired knowledge against its thirteenth‐century backdrop, I highlight the internal difficulties the doctrine introduces into Aquinas’s otherwise coherent account of Christ’s headship, showing that his motive for positing maximal perfection in Christ’s acquired knowledge is soteriological. I conclude by offering an alternative account, based on Aquinas’s own principles, showing how one might deny the maximal perfection of Christ’s acquired knowledge without prejudice to Aquinas’s account of Christ’s headship.