Figure of Speech in Aquinas: the Trinity as One Principle, Forms Mistaken for Substances, and Why We Err

Orientation #

He begins mid-handout (“now a little different thing here”), having just finished a run of examples of the same fallacy, and ends by saying “go on to page eight next time”; he also recalls having mentioned “the other day” that Aristotle in the De Anima says the early Greeks gave a reason for knowledge but not for error (prev. lecture). The previous class treated figura dictionis with digressions into the categories and the De Anima; the next opens on Shakespeare’s definition of reason before turning to the fallacy of the accident.

The class, in order #

1. The drunk who kills: discrete to continuous (“mutatur discretum in continuum”) #

Point: an early text of Thomas (Scriptum super II Sent.) names the fallacy explicitly in a moral case.

• The drunk Hebrew who kills sins by two sins, drunkenness and homicide, and per se merits two condemnations; yet nothing prevents the quantity of what follows (the homicide) being lessened through ignorance from what went before (the drunkenness).
• If you argue from “two sins, two punishments” to a doubled total, “hence in the process of the argument is figura dictionis, quia mutatur discretum in continuum”: the discrete “two” is treated as if it were “more” in the continuous sense.
• His gloss: being drunk might make you less inclined to the killing than striking out sober from anger, so the second is diminished; that diminishing is a different matter from counting two.
• He notes the “technical term” is the name of the third kind of fallacy, “the one from imagination”.

2. Denomination from a form, and relations in God (“per modum formae grammatice loquendo”) #

Point (De Potentia, objection and reply to the eighth): a grammatical form is not a real form.

• Objection: all denomination is from a form (a word “we learned at the beginning of the categories”); a form inheres in that of which it is; God is named by relations to creatures; therefore these relations are something in God.
• Reply: that from which something is denominated need not be a form secundum rei naturam; it suffices that it be signified per modum formae grammatice loquendo. Man is denominated from an action and from his clothing, which in reality are not forms. “Are you being deceived by forma dictionis?” He stresses how hard the doctrine of relations of reason in God is, “one heck of a thing”.
• Aside, from a text he read recently: when a mistaken man comes to know the truth there are two real changes, corruption of the error and generation of knowledge, which correspond. But when an ignorant man comes to know, is there a corruption of ignorance? That would be non-being becoming non-being, different “species of non-being”, a being of reason, the negation of a negation. “This is actually amazing when Thomas goes through these things”; one has to see he is correcting somebody.

3. Father and Son one beginning of the Holy Spirit (“confused supposition to determine one”) #

Point: three objections against the Church’s saying that Father and Son are one beginning of the Holy Spirit, each dissolved by watching how “beginning” supposits.

• Objection 4: the one beginning is either the one that is the Father or the one that is not the Father; if the first, the Son is the Father; if the second, the Father is not the Father. A student: “Maybe she’s wrong.”
• Before the reply, an aside on knowing vs. loving: Empedocles said we know earth by earth, water by water, love by love, hate by hate; some truth there, since the thing known must be in the knower (Aristotle, sixth book of First Philosophy: the good is primarily in things, truth primarily in the mind). So in learning I bring things into my mind, but in loving God I go out of myself into God; “where your treasure is, there your heart shall be”; “I left my heart in San Francisco.”
• Reply 4: the two, “one beginning that is the Father” and “one beginning that is not the Father”, are not contradictorily opposed, hence neither must be given. Contradictories have no third alternative (drunk or not drunk; “partially drunk” is drunk). In “the Father and the Son are one beginning”, beginning has no determinate supposition; it supposits confusedly for two persons together. “Hence in the proceeding there is a fallacy of the figure of diction from a confused supposition to a determinate one.” He marvels: “who would see that except Thomas… I’m glad he wrote it down”; compared to Thomas, “I got the brain of an egg”.
• Objection 5: then conversely “the one beginning of the Holy Spirit is the Father and the Son” should be true, but “beginning” stands either for the Father or for the Son and both ways is false. Reply: it is true, because “beginning” stands not for one person only but indistinctly for two.
• Objection 6: one in substance makes the same; so Father and Son would be the same beginning, “which is negated by many” (“this may be an orthodox objection”). Reply: it can be said that they are the same beginning, insofar as beginning stands confusedly and indistinctly for two persons. The ability to breathe the Holy Spirit is common to Father and Son (the Holy Spirit does not have it). Husband and wife as “one beginning of the child”: there is some sense to it, “but careful about that”.

4. Equal and unequal: measure, simplicity and perfection (“simplicissimum et perfectissimum”) #

Point: the next text on equality leads into how the simplest and most perfect in a genus is its measure.

• Equal and unequal are said according to quantity: one in quantity is equal, one in quality is like, one in substance is the same (fifth book of Metaphysics). Quantity implies measure, found first in numbers (why number is first among species of quantity), secondarily in magnitudes, and in some other way in all genera (first book of Metaphysics): in each genus the most simple and most perfect is the measure of the rest; in colour, whiteness; in motion, the daily motion, the sun’s apparent motion, which we use for time. The perfection of each thing, observed as it approaches the first of the genus, is its measure and quantity.
• Digression: Thomas treats God’s simplicity and perfection next to each other in both Summas, simplicity first. His reason: in material things the more perfect is more composed. Stone is simpler than tree, but tree is more perfect and more like God (“Do you agree, Barnabas?”). Defence: “The Lord is my rock” is only a metaphor, based on some likeness; but Peter’s confession, “the Son of the living God”, puts life in God. The tree is alive though life is hidden in it (which is why the plant, unlike the animal, is not named from anima); animal more composed than plant, man more than cat or dog. Knowing God via negativa from creatures, one would think simplicity and perfection do not go together, so Thomas corrects that right away. In the immaterial world it is the opposite: a Dante-esque ascent through the nine orders of angels finds them simpler and more perfect, preparing one to expect at the top something altogether simple and universally perfect.
• Aside: his teacher’s picture of first seeing your guardian angel and saying “this is God”, and the angel saying “No, I’m not God”, again and again up the ranks; Augustine, “too late” did I come to know the ancient beauty.
• Augustine, De Trinitate VI: in his quae non mole magna sunt, the same is melius quod maius [transcript has “melius quod melius”; likelier reading “idem est melius quod maius”]. So “God is more than me” means: better.

5. How forms are unequal (“like numbers”) #

Point: for a non-subsisting form, whose being is to be in a subject or matter, its quantity or perfection is considered two ways: according to the ratio of its species, and according to its being in matter.

• According to the species: forms of diverse species are unequal, because the specific beginning is taken in something indivisible, and addition or subtraction there varies the species; hence Aristotle, eighth book of Wisdom (on substance; the seventh leads from logic to substance, the eighth from natural philosophy), says species are like numbers, “some little truth in what Plato said”. Illustration by soul: plant (feeding, growth, reproduction) is one; lower animals add sensation, two; higher animals add senses at a distance and local motion, three; man adds understanding and willing, four. Shakespeare: “What is a man if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more” - take away reason and will and you are back at the beast.
• Within a species, three cases: (a) forms specified by something of their essence (all substantial forms, and accidental forms considered absolutely) admit no more or less in themselves - one whiteness is not more whiteness than another; (b) forms specified by something extrinsic to which they are ordered, as motion by its term, so one motion is nearer its term than another (the salesman with his foot in the door has come more into the house); (c) dispositions ordered to something, as health is a commensuration of humours ordered to the animal’s nature (“very simple biology”): a grade that is health in a lion is infirmity in a man, and in the same animal one health can be greater than another; likewise science, one in the unity of its subject, so one man has more geometry than another by knowing more conclusions ordered to magnitude.
• According to being in the subject: some forms are in their subject more or less, some not; no substantial form receives more or less, nor relations like double (“one thing more double than another? No”); whiteness and blackness, courage and temperance, do.
• Summary as Thomas gives it, four kinds: (1) inequality neither in themselves nor in the subject - substantial forms; (2) not in themselves but in the subject - whiteness, blackness; (3) in themselves but not in the subject - triangle (a greater triangle by its lines, but one surface is not more triangular than another); (4) both - health, knowledge, motion: motion unequal by greater distance or greater speed, knowledge by more conclusions or knowing the same things better, health by the grade of commensuration or holding that grade more firmly. “Are they making distinctions or not?” This text is here because it clears up things later.

6. Errors about forms: judging them as substances (“per modum substantiarum”) #

Point (De virtutibus in communi, “the reason why this horrible text was before us”): many errors about forms come from judging them as one judges substances, because forms are signified abstractly, per modum substantiarum - albedo, veritas; “this is the fallacy of formae dictionis again”. Someone said the same about grace: God’s “treasure house of grace” that he dumps on us.

• From this come the errors of those who posit a latency of forms and those who posit forms to be created: thinking a form comes to be as a substance does, and finding nothing it is generated from, they say it is created, or pre-existed hidden in the matter.
• Clay sphere moulded into a cube: where did the cube-shape come from? “The world of forms”? Created? Or hidden in the sphere? Michelangelo: “It was in there, I just chipped away the waste.” Either way you imagine the form as existing by itself, like a substance. The question to ask: are you giving existence to a form, or forming the matter? If the former, it must be created or hidden “like opening a Christmas present”. “Terrible… this can rise to all these crazy ideas.”

7. Socrates: learning is recalling (“coming to know what he didn’t know”) #

Point: a “beautiful mistake” of the same family, and what discourse really does.

• Socrates and the slave boy: how do you double a square? Double the side - Socrates shows this gives four times the square; lay four such squares together, draw the diagonal, and the boy sees the diagonal is the side of the doubled square. Socrates concludes learning is recalling.
• His correction: the boy came to know what he did not know through what he knew. Syllogism: “every B is A, every C is B” contains in power “every C is A”, but “every C is A” is not one of the premises; recalling the premises, I see the conclusion for the first time, I do not recall it. Socrates confuses the two: you learn by recalling what you know, and then come to know something new through it.
• Bonaventure, Itinerarium: the beginnings of number and magnitude are in the memory; not all conclusions, but the beginnings, and from these one goes forward.
• Editions of Euclid, and some of Thomas, give in brackets the theorem or chapter being used, so you can recall it. In the Summa contra Gentiles he argues first from the immediately preceding chapter when he can: ch. 13 proves God exists from motion (two arguments, more developed than in the Summa Theologiae); ch. 14 that we know rather what God is not, beginning with his being unmoved; ch. 15 eternity, from unchangingness (to begin or cease he would have to change; no time in God); the next, pure act, recalling eternity; then back to earlier chapters. “Kind of helping you tie things together.”

8. In what sense a form comes to be (“non quia ipsa sit”) #

Point (bottom of page seven): form is said to be a being not because it itself is, si proprie loquamur, but because by it something is; and so form is said to come to be.

• Clay cube moulded into a sphere: what comes to be? A sphere of clay, strictly speaking. The spherical shape comes to be only in the sense that it is that by which the clay is a sphere; not per se, since then the shape itself would need a matter to come to be from.
• He stops: “go on to page eight next time… shows how subtle these things are, just with that one kind of fallacy.”

9. Error and mistake: two names for reason going wrong (“disordered movement of reason”) #

Point: the Greeks (De Anima) assigned the reason for knowledge but not for mistakes, which is “the usual state of the human mind” - so their account is incomplete; you should first learn how not to play golf.

• Two sayings he puts together: Aristotle, to be mistaken is usually a condition of the human mind; Thomas, to be mistaken is a great part of misery (he thinks the context is whether we can be happy in this life; “I’m not too sure about the reason I gave”).
• Error from the Latin for wander (knight errant, erratic): the name suggests error comes from a disordered movement of reason, tied to Shakespeare’s “discourse” (running) and “looking before and after”. Mistake: taking this for that (he complimented the actress’s sister); taking is nearer to grasping, understanding, so a mistake is a mis-grasping, and misunderstanding is closest in etymology - perhaps the end product of a discourse of reason.
• God makes no mistakes; angels in natural knowledge make none. Thomas denies discourse in God (at least negatively) and, strictly, in angels, who know through knowing themselves and through forms already given; hence no coming to know what one did not know, nor the disorder that yields mistakes. His son Marcus: “Why can’t we be born knowing everything?” - “You want to be an angel.”
• Close: the two definitions of reason harmonize. Shakespeare’s “large discourse” does not mention understanding, but you must reason from something understood (“if you understood nothing, would you have anything to reason from?”), and “looking before and after” implies seeing distinctions. Hugo’s “directing itself and others” is tied to order, and so includes looking before and after. Both make understanding something reason does.

His words #

• figura dictionis / forma dictionis: the fallacy “from imagination”, third kind; his name “figure of diction”
• discretum in continuum: the discrete (two sins) taken as the continuous (more)
• denomination: naming from a form; “we learned at the beginning of the categories”
• per modum formae grammatice loquendo: signified as a form only grammatically
• relations of reason: God’s relations to creatures, “one heck of a thing”
• species of non-being: the ignorance that is not corrupted when one comes to know
• confused vs. determinate supposition: “beginning” standing indistinctly for two persons
• breathe the Holy Spirit: his rendering of the ability common to Father and Son [ed.: spirate]
• First Philosophy / Wisdom: his names for the Metaphysics
• commensuration of humours: health
• specific beginning [ed.: principle] taken in something indivisible
• per modum substantiarum: forms signified abstractly (albedo, veritas)
• latency of forms: “hiddenness of forms”; forms hidden in matter vs. created
• discourse: running of reason; error from errare, to wander; mistake as mis-taking, mis-grasping

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, Scriptum super II Sententiarum (the drunk who kills; locus not stated)
• Thomas, Quaestiones de Potentia, reply to the eighth (denomination from a form); objections and replies 4-6 on Father and Son as one beginning of the Holy Spirit; the text on equal and unequal (work not named, “the next one”)
• Thomas, De virtutibus in communi (errors about forms; pp. 7-8 of handout)
• Augustine, De Trinitate VI (non mole magna sunt)
• Shakespeare, “What is a man if his chief good…” (Hamlet, inferred)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics I, V, VI, VII-VIII; De Anima (Empedocles; the Greeks on knowledge not error)
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae and Summa contra Gentiles I ch. 13-16 (inferred), on simplicity and perfection and the order of chapters
• Plato, Meno (inferred), the slave boy
• Bonaventure, Itinerarium
• Peter’s confession; “where your treasure is”; “The Lord is my rock”; Augustine’s “too late”; Dante; Michelangelo

His questions #

• Are you being deceived by forma dictionis when you call God’s relations to creatures something in God? Yes: they are forms only grammatically, like naming a man from his clothing.
• If an ignorant man comes to know, is there a corruption of ignorance? Only as non-being becoming non-being, a being of reason, not a real change.
• Are “one beginning that is the Father” and “one beginning that is not the Father” contradictorily opposed? No, so neither must be given; “beginning” supposits confusedly for two persons.
• Is the tree more perfect than the stone, though more composed? Yes; life is in God, and rock is only a metaphor.
• Can one thing be more double than another? No; relations like this admit no more or less.
• Is one surface more triangular than another? No; a triangle is greater only by its lines.
• Where did the cube-shape come from when the clay sphere was moulded? Neither created nor hidden; you formed the matter, not gave existence to a form.
• Is the slave boy recalling how to double the square? No; he comes to know what he did not know through what he did know.
• What comes to be when clay is moulded into a sphere? A sphere of clay; the shape comes to be only as that by which the clay is a sphere.
• Does Shakespeare’s definition of reason leave out understanding? Discourse includes it, since you must reason from something understood.