Chapter 11.—That the Image or Begotten Word of the
Mind that Knows Itself is Equal to the Mind Itself.
16. But all knowledge according to
species is like the thing which it knows. For there is another
knowledge according to privation, according to which we speak a
word only when we condemn. And this condemnation of a privation is
equivalent to praise of the species, and so is approved. The mind,
then, contains some likeness to a known species, whether when
liking that species or when disliking its privation. And hence, in
so far as we know God, we are like Him, but not like to the point
of equality, since we do not know Him to the extent of His own
being. And as, when we speak of bodies by means of the bodily
sense, there arises in our mind some likeness of them, which is a
phantasm of the memory; for the bodies themselves are not at all in
the mind, when we think them, but only the likenesses of those
bodies; therefore, when we approve the latter for the former, we
err, for the approving of one thing for another is an error; yet
the image of the body in the mind is a thing of a better sort than
the species of the body itself, inasmuch as the former is in a
better nature,
viz
. in a living substance, as the mind is:
so when we know God, although we are made better than we were
before we knew Him, and above all when the same knowledge being
also liked and worthily loved becomes a word, and so that knowledge
becomes a kind of likeness of God; yet that knowledge is of a lower
kind, since it is in a lower nature; for the mind is creature, but
God is Creator. And from this it may be inferred, that when the
mind knows and approves itself, this same knowledge is in such way
its word, as that it is altogether on a par and equal with it, and
the same; because it is neither the knowledge of a lower essence,
as of the body, nor of a higher, as of God. And whereas knowledge
bears a likeness to that which it knows, that is, of which it is
the knowledge; in this case it has perfect and equal likeness, when
the mind itself, which knows, is known. And so it is both image and
word; because it is uttered concerning that mind to which it is
equalled in knowing, and that which is begotten is equal to the
begetter.