Omniscience

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /ɑmˈnɪʃəns/

Definitions

  1. The quality of possessing complete or unlimited knowledge about all things, including past, present, and future events, without any gaps or limitations in understanding
  2. the state of knowing everything that exists or could exist without limitation
  3. absolute and total awareness of all facts, events, and truths across all times and circumstances

Etymology: Tucked inside the word for God's perfect knowledge is "science." To the medieval scholars who used it, there was no tension in that: "scientia" simply meant knowledge, and the Medieval Latin "omniscientia" meant, quite literally, all-knowledge, the sum of everything that could be known. The parts are plain Latin. "Omni-" comes from "omnis," all, and "scientia" from "sciens," knowing, the present participle of "scire," to know. That verb may go back to a root meaning to cut or split, which would make knowing, at bottom, the act of telling one thing from another. The compound itself, however, was a learned Medieval Latin formation rather than a classical word, used in theology for one of God's attributes, like omnipotence. The problem the word named was old. Around 524, awaiting execution, Boethius wrote in "The Consolation of Philosophy" about the puzzle that has shadowed the idea ever since: if God already knows everything you will do, in what sense are you free to choose? Medieval schoolmen argued over it for centuries in Latin, and English borrowed their vocabulary along with their dilemma. Omniscience appears in English by the early 1600s, with the adjective "omniscient" arriving at about the same time, both firmly in the language of theology. Then the word found a second, smaller deity. Novelists came to occupy a godlike position over their invented worlds, seeing every thought and knowing every ending. Flaubert put it plainly in an 1852 letter: the author in his work should be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere. Critics took up the theologians' term, and the "omniscient narrator" became a standard label in the vocabulary of fiction.

Synonyms: all-knowingness

Antonyms: ignorance