According to certain views, God has no knowledge. Perhaps He is just a great world process that grinds on without knowing what it is doing. Or perhaps God is the All, which is not intelligent, but contains intelligent parts – that is, us. Or perhaps, although God does not have knowledge from the first, He may acquire knowledge. It is not difficult to refute such opinions. But where does all this leave us? Can He know anything? Does He know anything? What does He know? And how well does He know it?

In his discourse On Gluttony, the Syrian metropolitan Philoxenos of Mabbug shows that a glutton’s behaviour and attitude towards food and drink are rooted in false epistemologies of the self and God. This chapter shows that within this discourse Philoxenos tells the story of a gluttonous monk. By studying this embedded narrative of an imagined gluttonous monk, this chapter uncovers how Philoxenos uses rhetorical strategies to advance his thesis about the danger of gluttony: it perverts the monk and prevents the knowledge of God. Gluttony leads to heresy and death.

In this chapter I explore a number of different proposals for how to define ‘divine determinism.’ I settle on one to guide the rest of the book, which was first offered by Heath White. On this account, divine determinism is the conjunction of two claims: (i) The facts about God’s will wholly determine every other contingent fact and (ii) the facts about God’s will explain every other contingent fact. I then turn to a brief overview of some motivations for divine determinism. I begin with philosophical motivations, including motivations arising from consideration of the principle of sufficient reason, divine sovereignty, divine power, divine knowledge, divine aseity, and divine providence. I then turn to motivations that are more closely tied to particular religious traditions, including ones related to prophecy, scriptural authorship, and specific scriptural passages. Finally, I investigate two different varieties of divine determinism: primary divine determinism and Edwardian divine determinism.