Adoration of the Magi by Charles-André van Loo
First, regarding His intellect, Father Pegues notes that Christ possesses three kinds of knowledge: beatific, infused, and acquired. Christ has “the knowledge which the blessed have in heaven through the vision of the divine essence; infused knowledge which is the infusion of all ideas by God into the soul at its birth; and lastly, acquired knowledge which is gained in the ordinary way by the human faculties with the aid of the senses.”
Christ’s beatific knowledge “surpasses that of all the blessed, whether angels or men. From the first instant of conception, by the beatific knowledge Christ was able to see everything in the divine Word, which is Himself as God, in such wise that there is absolutely nothing in the past, present, or future which Christ as man does not know; and He had this knowledge from the moment of the Incarnation.”
By His infused knowledge, Christ knows “all that which the human mind can know by its natural power, and also whatsoever revelation can make known to a created intelligence whether it have reference to what can be known by the gift of wisdom or the gift of prophecy, or any other such gift of the Holy Ghost; and Christ had this knowledge in a supereminent degree above angels and men.”
Christ also acquired knowledge. “By this knowledge He knew whatsoever the human mind can know by reasoning upon the data given by the senses; in this knowledge it was possible for Him to make progress according as His human mind had occasion to reason about new data attained by His senses.”
As for Christ’s human will, Father Pegues states that it possesses “all the power that is connatural to a human soul which is the substantial form of the body; further, all the power that can belong to a human soul in the order of grace in so far as out of its fulness it had to communicate grace to others dependent upon it. Further, in Christ’s Soul there was the instrumental participation of the divine power through which the Word of God performed all the marvels of transformation that were in accord with the end of the Incarnation, which is to re-establish all things in heaven and earth according to the plan of restoration determined by God.”
Quotations from Thomas Pegues, Catechism of the “Summa Theologica” of Saint Thomas Aquinas, trans. Aelred Whitacre (New York: Benziger, 1922).
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