Relations of Reason, Eternity as 'Whole at Once', Motion Among the Post-Predicaments, and an Introduction to the Second Act of Reason

Orientation #

He returns to “page four” of the short texts, the objections on God’s priority to the world, continuing the treatment of “before” (prev. lecture). At the end he says he will “come back to this next time” and that next time is about “the second act and the statement”; a student (Joshua) has a presentation coming. The previous class worked through Aristotle’s four oppositions and Aquinas on “before”; the next treats senses of before and after, active and passive ability, and the eight senses of “in”.

The class, in order #

1. Objections 15 and 16: is God’s priority a real relation? (“from eternity, God was before the world”) #

Point: two objections try to make God’s priority to the world an eternal relation in the nature of things.

• Obj. 15: God was before the world from eternity; that relation of priority in God was eternal; laying down one relative lays down the other; so the world’s posteriority to God was from eternity; so from eternity there was something outside God to which truth belonged. (“Same as before.”)
• Obj. 16: you say priority and posteriority are not in rerum natura but in reason only; but Boethius (end of Consolation of Philosophy) says God is before the world by nature, even if the world always was; so the relation is of nature, not of reason only. Aside: “Drives me crazy this distinction.”

2. Reply to 15: the four relations of reason (“place something in rerum natura”) #

Point: relation, unlike the other genera, does not as such put anything in reality, so some relations are in reason only; four ways, drawn from Aristotle and Avicenna together (“Thomas brings these together… a pretty sharp guy”).

1. Other genera as such place something in rerum natura (quantity, just by being quantity, says something real); relation alone does not.
2. Hence four kinds of relation of reason:
   • (i) a thing referred to itself (“the same as itself”): if real, the relation would itself be the same with itself by another relation, in infinitum. Aristotle’s kind; example: Socrates is Socrates.
   • (ii) a relation referred to another (Avicenna’s): paternity is not referred to its subject by a middle relation, or the middle would need another middle forever; so the relation of fatherhood to its subject is in reason only.
   • (iii) one relative depends on the other, not conversely: knowledge depends on the knowable (Aristotle’s example); knowledge’s relation to the knowable is real, the knowable’s to knowledge is in reason only.
   • (iv) being compared to non-being (Avicenna’s): we are “before” those who come after us; otherwise, if generation went on forever, infinite relations in one thing.
3. From the last two (his reason for ordering them so): priority places nothing in rerum natura but in the understanding only, since God does not depend on creatures, and such priority compares being to non-being.
4. Conclusion: no eternal truth follows except in the divine mind, which alone is eternal and is the first truth.

• Aside: we have no text of Aristotle fully distinguishing relations of reason, “but we don’t have all the words of Aristotle”; “he doesn’t say he didn’t know it.”

3. Reply to 16: prior by nature, yet not a relation of nature (“the knowable is before by nature the knowledge”) #

Point: God is by nature prior to creatures, but the relation is not thereby of nature: it is understood from considering the natures of what is called prior and what posterior. Parallel: the knowable is by nature before knowledge, yet the relation of knowable to science is not something in nature. “Very subtle.”

4. De Potentia: generation without motion, and why eternity goes with unchangeability (“in which one thing is produced by another by motion”) #

Point: it is hard to think the Son’s generation because we are used to natural production by motion, where the product begins to be at the beginning of the motion before it is at the term; but the Father generates the Son in eternity, with no movement.

• Thomas attaches the eternity of God (in treating the divine substance) to God’s being unchangeable; God is unchangeable because pure act, and change is the act of the able-to-be insofar as it is still able to be; so no change, hence eternal.

5. Boethius’s definition of eternity as three negations (“tota simul et perfecta possessio vitae interminabilis”) #

Point: we know God more negatively than affirmatively, so the definition works by negating what belongs to a life in time: three negations, the third being “my idea anyway.”

• Setting: De Koninck taught Natural Hearing IV (place and time) as two courses, ending the time course with the definition of eternity. Thomas takes the definition from Boethius (“I guess it’s in the Consolation”): “the greatest mind in the church between Augustine and Thomas”; Boethius learned from Augustine, Thomas from Boethius.
• (a) interminabilis negates beginning and end. His own life: born 18 January 1936 in Minnesota, in the womb from about April 1935, and it will end (a friend just died; he guesses at his own remaining years). “End” is broader than “beginning” (Aristotle): a line has two ends, we don’t speak of two beginnings. De Koninck to Pius XII on the Assumption: had her body not been assumed, Mary would not be in heaven, only her soul; Peter is there when his body is raised.
• (b) tota simul negates before and after: between my beginning and end there is before and after; time is the number of the before and after in motion. Mozart: he attended the 200th anniversaries of both birth and death; died in his 36th year with some 620 Köchel numbers of large works.
• (c) perfecta possessio vitae negates the imperfection of life in the now of time. The now in the strict sense includes nothing past or future and is indivisible, like a point; in it one cannot syllogize, say a definition, eat candy, drink wine, utter a sentence—“practically no life at all.” Heraclitus: the now that flows makes time; the now that stands still makes eternity. A possession is held firmly (a car, a house); the now of time cannot be possessed, it is like the thing in motion (the thrown stone never in one place). In the eternal now God has the fullness of life—even heaven will not have it as He has.
• Summary: no beginning or end, no before and after, perfect possession of life. Thus Thomas attaches eternity to unchangeability, as he attaches infinity to being everywhere and perfection to being goodness itself.
• Aside on fairy tales: read to your children (his son Paul propping up teddy bears with a book); the witch’s curse freezes everyone until the prince’s kiss—an image for life stopped in a now.

6. “Simul” as a post-predicament and a negation (“together is negation of before”) #

Point: simul is the third post-predicament and is itself a negation. In the tenth book of Wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics X] equal is the negation of more or less, and together the negation of before: “you and I came here together, one was not before, not after.” Last line of Comedy of Errors: the two brothers go together.

7. “Before Abraham was, I am” (“Before Abraham was I am”) #

Point: Christ speaks according to his divine nature, and a funny sense of before: in duration, not time. Had he said “I was,” he would be before Abraham in time; eternity is before time. Past, present and future are all present to God: the centre of a circle to which all points of the circumference, though before and after one another, are directly related.

• Student: have some saints experienced eternity? Augustine and Thomas say Paul, taken to the third heaven, saw God as He is in a transitory way; the same seems said of Moses—partaking of eternity. The next life is called eternal life because it partakes of eternity; seeing God will not be in time.
• Asides: how would one get a friend’s attention in heaven when all are absorbed in God? Thomas: charity is chiefly loving God, and loving the neighbour in God. Bonaventure [ASR “Saint Boggess”, inferred]: human compassion relieves misery because the other is like me; piety (gift of the Spirit) sees the image of God in need—the image is the focus.

8. Motion as a post-predicament and its kinds (“why did motion show up as a postpredicament”) #

Point: motion is a post-predicament because it is found in more than one genus but not in all.

• Aristotle’s kinds follow the order of the categories: generation and corruption (substance), growth (quantity), alteration (quality), locomotion (where). Not in time: “motion in motion.”
• Natural philosophy orders them otherwise, by causality and by what is most known: change of place first (to burn papers, bring paper and fire together), then alteration (food chewed and digested), then growth (flesh and bone). Hence physics (mechanics: Galileo, Newton), chemistry (alteration), biology (growth, common to plants, animals, man) go back to Aristotle.
• The early Greeks admitted only change of place: Marcus’s bitter coffee sweetened while he is out—Parmenides says no quality came from nothing, sugar was and is sweet, coffee bitter, only sugar moved in “too small for you to see”; cold water heated is molecules moving faster.
• De Potentia on procession in the Trinity: “procession” names change of place first, so Thomas must explain the word. Words equivocal by reason first mean something sensible and, more precisely, continuous; change of place is most clearly continuous, so we borrow its words for the rest (“the water became hot”, “coming to be” as into the house of being).
• Atomic physics should belong with chemistry, not mechanics; Heisenberg puts them together; custom kept Aristotle’s names without the basis (Natural Hearing V). Order goes general to particular: change of place most general, alteration in living and non-living, growth peculiar to living things; a Greek philosopher: learning makes the mind grow (“mental constipation”).

9. The last post-predicament: to have (“to have is to motion like”) #

Point: having stands to motion somewhat as simul to before and after: he grew to five foot eight and stopped, now he has a height; alteration leaves a quality. So the last two post-predicaments go together, as the second and third do. (Tall basketball players aside.) Distinction is based on before and after.

10. Logic of the second act: three acts, three speeches (“Logic is divided into three parts”) #

Point: Thomas divides logic in his proemium by three acts of reason (joke: Gaul divided into three, Caesar).

• First act: understanding what a thing is (square, circle; a dog or cat less well). Second act: Aristotle’s words, composition and division—affirming (square is a quadrilateral) or dividing (square is not a circle; inscribing does not make one the other). Thomas says both first acts are understanding, so Berquist calls the second understanding the true or the false (a square is a circle: understanding something false). Third: reasoning.
• Three speeches: name vs speech. Name: vocal sound signifying by custom or choice, not nature (a baby’s cry), no part signifying by itself. Berquist, Johnson (daughter not a son, father not John), Bergquist (Swedish berg mountain, quist branch: what a name is taken from is not its meaning), Hugo, Duane’s two syllables. Speech has at least two parts signifying separately: definition (helps understand what a thing is, as eternity above), statement (he prefers “statement”; “proposition” etymologically means placed before, a premise, though Thomas sometimes uses it), argument. Austin [ed.: Augustine, inferred] has logic as the art of defining and reasoning, omitting the middle act.

11. Understanding one thing at a time, and the later acts (“Is a square a circle?”) #

Point: understanding what a square is is not understanding what a circle is (kicking you is not kicking him), so one cannot understand both at once in the first act; yet the second act understands square and circle together in one statement, and the third act understands premises and conclusion together with order.

• Puzzle left standing: “a square is a quadrilateral” and “a square is not a circle” are two truths—one understanding or two? “Strange.” Angels understand in one form what a cat or dog is, “maybe more than one.”
• Student: Rain Man’s savant—angelic perception of the whole? Answer: the basic point is one thing at a time; the statement has its own unity (one thing said of another); reasoning has three statements with order, a unity like an army, which broken becomes a crowd. “We’re very angle wormish.”

His words #

• in rerum natura: “in the nature of things”, real vs “in reason only”
• relation of reason: relation that places nothing in rerum natura
• Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics]
• tota simul et perfecta possessio vitae interminabilis: Boethius’s definition of eternity, three negations
• the now that stands still / that flows: Heraclitus, eternity vs time
• Wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics]
• simul: together, negation of before
• to have: last post-predicament
• understanding the true or the false: his name for the second act (composition and division)
• name: vocal sound signifying by custom, no part signifying separately
• speech: parts signify separately; definition, statement, argument
• statement [ed.: proposition/enunciation]; he rejects “proposition” as meaning premise
• equivocal by reason: first meaning something sensible and continuous

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, short text page four, objections 15-16 and replies (relations of reason; priority by nature)
• Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, definition of eternity (God before the world by nature at its end)
• Thomas, De Potentia, on generation of the Son and on procession Mentioned
• Aristotle, Natural Hearing IV (place, time), V (kinds of motion)
• Aristotle, tenth book of Wisdom (equal, together as negations)
• Thomas, proemium (three acts of logic)
• Thomas on charity (chiefly loving God, neighbour in God)
• John 8, “Before Abraham was, I am” (inferred)
• Shakespeare, Comedy of Errors, last line
• Avicenna on relations of reason

His questions #

• Is there an eternity without movement? No—so the Father generates the Son without motion.
• Is my life eternal or measured by time? In time: a beginning, an end, and before and after between them.
• How much time, how much life, is in the now in the strict sense? Indivisible like a point; practically no life at all.
• What does “simul” negate? Before (as equal negates more or less).
• Is “Before Abraham was, I am” said of the human or divine nature? Divine; before in duration, not in time.
• Why did motion show up as a post-predicament? Found in more than one genus but not all.
• Is understanding what a square is the same as understanding what a circle is? No, so not both at once in the first act; yet the second act has both in mind.
• Two truths about the square—one understanding or two? left open (“strange”).