January 28 marks the Feast Day of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the Roman Catholic priest who authored Summa Theologica and Summa Contra Gentiles, shaping Catholic Church and philosophy for centuries to come. Below, writing on a different subject in Commentary on Sentences, Aquinas explores the issue of “whether knowledge is higher than love.”

In all things there is a twofold perfection: one by which the thing subsists in itself, the other by which it is related to other things. And in material things each one is limited and bounded insofar as it has one determined form through which it is merely one species; and also through a power directed to those things proportionate to it, it has an inclination and order as has a heavy thing toward its center. In both ways, however, immaterial things have a certain infinity because they are somehow all things insofar as the essence of the immaterial thing is the exemplar and likeness of all things either by act or by potentiality, as happens in angels and souls; in this way they have knowledge. Likewise they also have an inclination and order to all things, and in this way they have will, by which all things are pleasing or displeasing either by act or potentiality. And by this they participate in some immateriality, which allows for knowledge and will. Whence animals know insofar as they receive the species of sensible things immaterially in the organs of the senses, and they are inclined to different things through the sensible tendency according to the intentions spiritually perceived from things. It is therefore evident that knowledge pertains to the perfection of the knower by which in himself he is perfected; however, the will pertains to a thing’s perfection by its relation to other things. And likewise the object of the knowing power is the true, which is in the soul, as the philosopher says: ”The object of the tending power, however, is the good, which is in things, as already said.”

Therefore the knowing power can be compared to the tendency in three ways. First, in respect to order, and in this way the cognitive power is naturally prior because the perfection of anything in itself is prior to its perfection as related to another. Second, as to capacity, and by this they are equal, because the knowing power is related to all things, and so too is the tendency, whence they also are mutually inclusive insofar as the intellect knows the will and the will seeks and loves those things pertaining to intellect. Third, they can be compared according to excellence and rank; and so they are to each other as transcending and transcended, because if the intellect and the will are considered as well as those things pertaining to them as certain properties and accidents of that in which they are, then the intellect is more excellent and so are those things related to it. If, however, they are considered as capacities, i.e., as ordered to acts and to objects, then the will is more excellent, and so are those things related to it.

But if it is asked which of these is absolutely of higher rank, it must be answered that some things are superior to the soul and some are inferior, whence although through will and love a man is somehow drawn into the very things willed and loved, through knowledge, however, conversely, things known are through their likenesses made into the knower. In respect to those things that are above the soul, love is nobler and higher than knowledge, whereas in respect to those things that are beneath the soul, knowledge is more important. Whence also it is good to know many things that it would be evil to love.

Excerpted by Jodie C. Liu