Christ's Infused Knowledge: The Agnoetae Controversy

The Argument from Tradition

Ecclesiastical Tradition firmly supports the claim that Christ’s soul had inerrant knowledge of all things past, present, and future, wholly excluding ignorance — though it is less decisive on whether this knowledge came from the beatific vision, from infused knowledge, or both. The exact point of contention between the Agnoetae and the Church has never been fully resolved,¹ but the history of this heretical sect still supports several important conclusions.

The Agnoetae

A form of Agnoetism appeared already among the Arians² and the Nestorians,³ but the name “Agnoetae” is usually applied to a sixth-century sect whose central claim was that Christ was ignorant of certain things — especially the date of the Last Judgment.⁴ It remains uncertain whether they attributed this ignorance to Christ’s human nature as such, or to some fictitious Monophysite compound of Godhead and manhood. The Monophysite opponents of Themistius (the sect’s founder, also called Themistians after him)⁵ — Timothy and Theodosius among them — present Agnoetism as thoroughly Monophysite in character, while the Severians and Nicephorus Callistus⁶ understood the Agnoetae as attributing ignorance to Christ’s sacred humanity directly. Either way, the champions of orthodoxy against them firmly excluded all error and ignorance from Christ’s human soul, attributing to it a relative omniscience regarding everything actually existing, grounded in its Hypostatic Union with the Logos — and treated Agnoetism as a genuine heresy.

The ablest of these champions was Eulogius, Patriarch of Alexandria,⁷ who, according to Photius, taught: “Neither the humanity of Christ, admitted into the one Hypostasis of inaccessible and substantial Wisdom, can be ignorant of anything, whether of things present or of things to come… For whoever ascribes ignorance either to His Divinity or to His humanity will never escape the charge of the most reckless presumption.”⁸ St. Sophronius calls Themistius “the most wicked father, begetter, and sower of ignorance.”⁹ Pope St. Gregory the Great, in two letters, praised Eulogius as a brave and skillful defender of the Catholic faith: “Concerning your teaching against the heretics called Agnoetae, there was much to admire and nothing to displease me… Your teaching agrees so entirely with the Latin Fathers on every point that it would not surprise me if the Spirit were not different across different languages… This much is entirely clear: whoever is not a Nestorian cannot possibly be an Agnoete.”¹⁰ That last sentence matters a great deal. Though Monophysite in origin, Agnoetism reduces, at bottom, to either Arianism (denying Christ’s Divinity) or Nestorianism (rejecting the Hypostatic Union): if Christ were a mere creature, as the Arians held, He would necessarily be subject to ignorance and error; the same follows from the Nestorian claim that He is a person distinct from the omniscient Logos. This is likely why, well before Themistius’s time, the African bishops had already compelled the suspect Gallic monk Leporius to abjure Agnoetism as heretical — among his other errors was the claim that Christ was “ignorant according to His manhood,” a position he later formally anathematized.¹¹

Since, on the Church’s constant teaching, Christ’s relative omniscience as man has its source and measure in the Hypostatic Union, that omniscience must have begun at the very moment the Hypostatic Union itself began — the instant of His conception.¹²

Mark 13:32 and “The Day and the Hour”

The Fathers differed on how to read Mark 13:32: “But of that day or hour no man knoweth, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but the Father.”

So long as the main task was refuting the Arian claim that the Logos was subject to ignorance because He was a creature, the Fathers focused on defending Christ’s divine nature against the charge — and some of their statements can leave the impression that they did so at the expense of His sacred humanity. Leontius of Byzantium, in his own controversy with the Agnoetae, went so far as to concede that the testimony of certain earlier Fathers¹³ was practically worthless on this point, since they had made exactly this mistake. Eulogius excused them: “If various Fathers have admitted ignorance in our Savior’s humanity, they did not set it down as an article of faith, but only to refute the folly of the Arians, who transferred every human attribute to the Divinity in order to prove the Divine Logos to be a mere creature.”¹⁴ Petavius takes a similar view,¹⁵ while Suarez,¹⁶ Kleutgen,¹⁷ and Stentrup¹⁸ vigorously defend the earlier Fathers’ orthodoxy outright.

Some Fathers read Mark 13:32 mystically, applying Christ’s “ignorance” to His mystical body, the Church.¹⁹ Others hold that when Christ said He did not know the day, He meant He had no knowledge He was free to communicate (scientia communicabilis),²⁰ or no knowledge derived from His human intellect considered apart from the Hypostatic Union.²¹ Of these three readings, the second and third are natural and straightforward; the first feels contrived. It fits well with the wider economy of salvation, as Christ Himself indicates elsewhere,²² that the timing of the Last Judgment should be reserved to the Father’s own official domain, and that the Son accordingly had no mandate to reveal it.²³ At the same time, it is obvious that Christ’s humanity, being a creature, could not of itself know the hidden counsels of Providence — though our Lord certainly possessed this knowledge through the Hypostatic Union, being the “Son of man” destined to judge the living and the dead.²⁴

The Theological Argument

The theological case for this thesis rests on the fact that Christ, though truly man, was not a mere man but the God-man, with a formal claim, as such, to the most perfect knowledge His soul was capable of receiving.²⁵ As a wayfarer, He cannot have been less perfect than Adam, who possessed infused knowledge,²⁶ nor less wise than Solomon, whose mind was directly enlightened by God.

St. Paul teaches that Christ, from the very instant of His conception, was raised to headship over the angelic creation,²⁷ and so it was fitting that His soul should know the purely spiritual beings subject to His rule not through concepts borrowed from elsewhere, but through their own proper infused species — so far, at least, as this angelic mode of knowledge can be supernaturally communicated to a human soul at all.

Notes