Annotatio CXXXIX

”Whether his sons be noble, or ignoble, he shall not understand [it].” — Job 14:21

Gregory, in book 12 of the commentaries on Job, chapter 13, speaking concerning the knowledge of the blessed, seems to disagree from the opinion of Augustine,¹ saying that the souls of the saints, seeing God, behold all things which are done here among us. For thus he speaks: “The dead know not how the life in the flesh, [lived] after them, is disposed — because the life of the spirit is far from the life of the flesh; and as corporeal and incorporeal things are diverse in kind, so also [they are] distinct in cognition. Yet concerning the holy souls this is not to be thought; because those who within behold all things by the charity of the omnipotent God, it is in no way to be believed that outwardly there is anything of which they are ignorant.” But Augustine, in the book On the care to be had for the dead, chapter 13, writes diversely, affirming that the dead — even the saints — know not what the living do, even their own children, as among Isaiah the Israelites complain, saying, “Abraham hath not known us, and Israel hath been ignorant of us.”² Which he confirms also by the example of his own mother Monica, saying: “If the souls of the dead were present in the affairs of the living — to say nothing of others — my own pious mother would in no way desert me, [she] who followed me by land and sea, that she might live with me; for far be it that she has been made, by a happier life, cruel. But if parents are not present, who are those other of the dead who [might] know what we do, [or] what we suffer?” St. Thomas, in the first part of the Summa of Theology, question 89, article 8, judges that Augustine brought these things forth by way of doubting, not of asserting — which Augustine himself also indicated, when he said, “Let each one take, as he will, what I [shall] say.”