"Omnia cognoscentia cognoscunt implicite Deum in quolibet cognito."
–– St. Thomas Aquinas, De Ver. q. 22, a. 2, ad 1.
"All knowers implicitly know God in whatever they know." To know 'this' is 'this' is implicitly to know 'this' is not 'everything else', and is therefore implicitly to bracket it off from 'All'. If any objects were ontologically self-sufficient, as the All is, then no object would be 'this' or 'that'. "The understanding," Henri de Lubac writes in The Discovery of God (p. 70), "is open to an infinity of objects; a sign, surely, that it is open to the infinite itself." Nonetheless, he adds the following quotation from St. Thomas (ST Ia, q. 79, a.2) as a qualification: "No created intellect can be like an act with respect to the whole universal being; because in such a case it would have to be an infinite being. Wherefore every created intellect, by reason of the very fact that it is what it is, is not the act of all intelligible beings."
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