The Mind of Christ, Thomas Aquinas and the Church Fathers on Christ's human knowledge and our salvation.

St. Thomas Aquinas holds that in addition to the divine knowledge of the eternal word,

which does not pertain to Christ's humanity,

there are three types of knowledge in Christ's human mind.

Beatific knowledge, an immediate vision of the word himself,

a vision that infinitely transcends all created images, and renders the highest part of his soul blessed at every moment,

then infused supernatural knowledge, knowledge like prophetic knowledge, or the evening knowledge of angels, possessed

by Christ's soul according to intelligible species proportioned to the human mind, and

then acquired or experiential human knowledge gained through his senses and the operation

of his intellect in his daily life.

Aquinas' account, as you know, was extremely influential,

and for centuries was nearly universally accepted

by Catholic theologians.

In the middle of the 20th century, however,

many Catholic scholars increasingly began to disagree with it.

Often, a principal objection,

is that Aquinas portrays Jesus with an unrealistic or even inhuman

knowledge during his earthly life. Critics see it as an excessive application of what is

sometimes called the principle of perfection, the presupposition that Christ's humanity must

have the absolute best of everything.

Some Catholic theologians regarded even as theologically dangerous,

implicitly monophysite, that's Jean Gallo, or implicitly Nestorian,

...