1 Corinthians 2:11

“For what man knoweth the things of man, save the spirit of man which is in him? Even so the things of God hath no man known, but the Spirit of God.”

To make intelligible to his readers this inward activity of the Divine Spirit, the apostle invites them to contemplate the working of man's spirit in man himself. For man is made in the image of God, and that precisely in virtue of his spiritual nature. There is in every man a life hidden from all eyes, a world of impressions, anxieties, aspirations, and struggles, of which he alone, in so far as he is a spirit, that is to say, a conscious and personal being, gives account to himself. This inner world is unknown to others, except in so far as he reveals it to them by speech. Such is the likeness of what passes in the phenomenon of revelation between God and man.

In thus appealing to what we call in philosophical language the fact of consciousness, Paul knows well that he is teaching nothing new. Hence the interrogative form: “What man knoweth...?” He adds, when speaking of the spirit of man, τὸ ἐν αὐτῷ, which is in him. He did not express himself so when speaking of the Spirit of God. No doubt because he would not have it supposed that in his eyes the analogy was complete. The Spirit is not in God, as if God were for him a place.

In the second proposition we must read, with almost all the Mjj., ἔγνωκεν, not οἶδεν, which has undoubtedly been imported from the first sentence. The difference is, as Edwards well puts it, that the latter denotes the knowledge of a fact, the former the knowledge of the inner nature of the thing. The latter is well rendered in Latin by cognitum habet. After this short explanation (1 Corinthians 2:11), the apostle, in 1 Corinthians 2:12, connects with the principal idea that of the ἀπεκάλυψε, 1 Corinthians 2:10: “There was in our favour an act of revelation.” And as, in 1 Corinthians 2:6-7, he had contrasted worldly wisdom with Divine wisdom, he contrasts, in 1 Corinthians 2:13, the revelation of the Spirit from above with all earthly knowledge.