Paul VI, Via Negativa, and the Meanings of the Word 'Nature'

Orientation #

He refers back to “the distinction between common and private experience I bring up on this page” and to Heraclitus’s “nature loves to hide,” which he “mentioned before” (prev. lecture); he says the definition of eternity will be looked at “later on” as a footnote to the definition of time, and that Aristotle will now define nature in the third sense. The previous class developed common vs. private experience with examples from Bohr and Heisenberg, and the next works through Aristotle’s definition of nature at the opening of Book II.

The class, in order #

1. Paul VI on formulas “adapted to men of all times” (“universal and necessary experience”) #

Point: the dogmatic formulas of the councils hold for all time because the concepts in them come from what Paul VI (Mysterium Fidei) calls universal and necessary experience — which he takes to be the same as his own “common experience.”

• “Universal” = an experience everyone has, common to all; “necessary” = you can’t avoid it.
• He reads the passage: such concepts are not tied to one civilization, one stage of scientific progress, or one theological school, but express “what the human mind, by universal and necessary experience, grasps as realities.”
• Extension: what Paul VI says of dogma can be said more generally of the eight books of Natural Hearing and the three books about the soul, which are tied to common experience, for theology as a whole. The rest of the first half of the class gives the reason.

2. Theology knows God more by what He is not (“via negativa, or the via negationis”) #

Point: in theology we know more what God is not than what He is; the vision — “we shall see Him as He is” (1 John 3:2, taken over in the Mass; Paul’s “face to face” is the more metaphorical version) — is not theology.

• Examples of the negations: unmoved mover (negation: unmoved); unchanging; immaterial; simple — grammatically positive, but Thomas’s question on the simplicity of God shows He is not composed in this way, this way, this way… and finally not composed in any way; infinite (not limited); one (indivisible).
• Even our knowledge of the likeness of creature to God is perfected by negation: the Fourth Lateran Council (correcting Joachim of Flora, who “got a little carried away” extending the likeness) says one can never note a likeness of the creature to God without noticing a greater unlikeness. Paul VI first drew his attention to this text. Scripture: “Who is like God?” (a Psalm; the meaning of the name Michael) — because it is more a difference than a likeness.
• Aside: a Saudi student objected to Shakespeare calling reason “God-like”; he showed him the Lateran text — there must be some likeness, since every agent makes something like itself, yet there is an infinite distance.

3. Affirmative vs. negative knowledge run in opposite directions (“negate the general than when I negate”) #

Point: by affirmation I come closer to a thing by affirming the more particular; by negation, by negating the more general. “That’s a very important thing you have to see.”

• Affirmative, descending: you are a body → a living body → an animal → a man: each step closer to what you are.
• Negative, ascending: you are not an oak tree (separates you from oak trees) → not a tree (from all trees) → not a plant: each step closer.
• Math case: seven affirmatively: number → odd number → prime odd number (general to particular, closer). Seven negatively: “not four” vs. “not even” — not even is closer, “starting to narrow it down.”
• Theology case: “God does not have two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen” is true, but “God has no parts” is closer; if I can give a good reason that God has no parts (as I can), the chemistry of water is useless to the via negativa.
• Argument for the importance of natural philosophy:
  1. In theology we negate the general rather than the particular (from the above).
  2. To understand a negation you must know what you are negating.
  3. So theology needs a distinct understanding of the general: not “He doesn’t melt, freeze, fall, run, grow,” but “He doesn’t change” — which requires understanding change in general.
  4. And understanding change in general is what lets one syllogize to God being unchanging (“as we’ll see later on”).

4. Providence, Thomas at Naples, and the definition of eternity (“could not have written the Summa”) #

Point: a chance event under providence — Thomas was at the University of Naples, then the only place in Europe where Aristotle’s eight books of Natural Hearing could be had (Aristotle’s works were coming back through the Arabs and more directly from the Greeks) — and without them the Summa Theologiae as we have it could not have been written.

• Example: Thomas’s explanation of God’s eternity takes the definition of eternity from Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, but explaining it involves several negations of what is in Aristotle’s definition of time and of the now of time. Without a distinct understanding of time in general and the now, the via negativa knowledge of eternity could not be explained. To be returned to when time is defined.

5. Why the common/private distinction is on the page (“based on the common experience of the natural world”) #

Point: what will be studied from Natural Hearing is based on experience — common experience — “not just a game of thoughts”; the distinction also explains experimental science (based on private experience, hence the division of labor) and matters for theology.

• Theology sometimes uses private experience and reaches something very particular: moral theology on whether this or that pill is moral — you must know exactly what it does, aborting the baby or regularizing the woman’s period.
• But for the most part theology uses knowledge from common experience, because it is mainly about God, mainly by the via negativa, negating the general — and the general is known from common experience. Even about creatures (the soul), it rests on our common inward experience of being alive.

6. Aristotle himself goes down to private experience (“the most balanced mind in history”) #

Point: Aristotle did not stop at common experience but first perfected that knowledge and then descended to the particular.

• Natural: he cut open animals and plants (History of Animals, Parts of Animals); Alexander’s men sent him specimens not found in Greece.
• Political: the general (“man is by nature a social/political animal”) alongside examining 150 Greek city-states and their revolutions — the fifth book of the Politics on how governments are overthrown and preserved, private experience from historical research.
• Contrast: Plato does not do this; scientists do not do the general. Aristotle ranges from logic to anatomy.
• Student: a scientist says descending to the particular goes on and on; is the common-experience level ever completed — did Aristotle complete it? Answer: “you got to be careful about saying that,” but someone has said so; Warren Murray’s hypothesis: Aristotle entrusted the school to Theophrastus — not the greatest philosopher, but a very good experimental scientist — because the substantial work based on common experience was done and more remained in private experience. Compare Albert the Great: Aristotle does nothing in geometry because it was already developed, while natural philosophy, ethics, politics, logic especially, and wisdom still needed developing.
• Student: a common error even in the Church, as if all theology were private. He: “No — Paul VI says that.” Aside: “heretic” means chooser — picking which articles to believe is giving up the faith.

7. Page three, reading one: drawing a line around nature (“draw a line around this cause”) #

Point: the first reading (the very beginning of Book II) is where Aristotle defines nature — not a perfect or complete definition, but drawing a line around the cause called nature, since natural philosophy is about things whose cause is nature. Heraclitus: nature loves to hide.

• The word “nature” is equivocal “by reason”: one goes back to the first meaning and follows the meanings out. Aristotle does this in the fifth book of Wisdom (after beginning, cause, element); it belongs there because one meaning of nature is universal enough to concern the wise man.

8. The root N-A-T: birth, and “within” (“prenatal, postnatal, nativity, native”) #

Point: the root of natura and of phusis is birth; we name sensible things first, and birth strikes the senses.

• English survivals: prenatal/postnatal care; nativity (= birthday; his home parish in St. Paul, Minnesota, “Nativity of Our Lord”; “my nativity is January 18th”); a native of Worcester = born here; Europeans called the Indians “natives” — those born here vs. those from abroad. In “nature” itself the root is no longer visible.
• “If you don’t understand that, you understand nothing about the word nature”: in birth the baby comes from within, and “within” is kept in every meaning of nature. This is the fundamental reason nature loves to hide — what is within is hidden.
• His translation of the first reading: the road from the more known to us to the more known by nature he renders “inborn,” to keep the concrete character of the Greek/Latin.

9. The meanings of nature, and which one counts here (“it’s this middle sense, it’s number three”) #

He gives four of the meanings (he says he will not go through all the others):

1. Birth.
2. The source of birth (of the baby) within the mother — refers back to (1); also something within and hidden.
3. Generalizes (2): any source within a thing of any change. The sense concerned here.
4. Eventually, what a thing is — the nature of a poem, of God, even of grace (as Thomas says), of government.

• Why the others fail to characterize natural philosophy: (1) and (2) are appropriate to it but too particular (the natural scientist talks about birth, but not only that); (4) is too general — every science asks what something is.
• Student: do we use sense (2) in English? No — again we borrow Greek/Latin words in their later meanings and use “nature” in the fourth sense right away, so our mind is out of order. Two remedies: extend the English word “birth,” or go back and learn the earlier meanings of the Greek/Latin word.
• Shakespeare extending “birth”: Friar Lawrence in Romeo and Juliet — nothing so vile that lives on earth but gives some good, nothing so good but, “strained from that fair use, revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse.” “True birth” there = nature. For ethics: we go wrong by misusing our parts (sexual organs; the mind, on unimportant things rather than God); the parts are beautiful, “fair use” is their right use; why should man be reasonable? because he is an animal with reason — unreasonable, he is in revolt from his true nature.
• Parallel with “road”: method comes from meta + hodos (road), but the English word hides the road; he prefers to take the English “road” and carry it over to the road in our knowledge, as the Greeks did with hodos and the Latins with via. Odometer measures the road. “I am the way, the truth, and the life” is “I am the hodos” — “I am the road.”
• Student: is the fourth sense synonymous with essence? Yes — essence is a very abstract word (people used to make fun of it; in French it is used for [unclear in recording]).

10. Even “what a thing is” is within (“definition is speech bringing out what a thing is”) #

Point: sense (4) keeps “within” too — what a thing is is inside it; hence his definitions of definition: speech signifying / making known / bringing out / “thinking out” what a thing is — before you think it out it is inside.

• De Koninck’s talk “Cogito ergo sum” (rendered “I sit, therefore I am”), from the 1950s: the importance of touch — in natural philosophy the sense of the inside, the interior, of substance, of sympathy; the eye is the sense of the surface.
• Heraclitus again: colleagues offered abstruse explanations, but the basic reason nature loves to hide is that what is within is hidden. Iago on “the native act and figure of his heart” hidden from Othello and revealed only later by what he does — “native” there is a metaphor, since what Iago is is a matter of choice, not nature, but it is something within and hidden; our heart is hidden even from ourselves (“God scrutinizes our hearts”) and more so from others; Othello finds out too late.
• Close: Aristotle will define nature in the third sense, the sense meant when we say natural philosophy is about things that are by nature.

His words #

• common experience — his term for Paul VI’s “universal and necessary experience”: had by all, unavoidable
• via negativa / via negationis — the negative way / way of negation; knowing God by what He is not
• via affirmativa — knowing by affirmation, closer by affirming the particular
• Natural Hearing — the eight books [ed.: Physics]
• the three books about the soul [ed.: De Anima]
• Wisdom, fifth book — [ed.: Metaphysics V]
• equivocal by reason — a word whose meanings are ordered from a first meaning
• phusis — Greek for nature; root sense birth; source of “physics”
• inborn — his rendering of “natural” in “the natural road” (first reading)
• heretic — “chooser”
• hodos — road; via (Latin); method = meta + hodos
• definition — speech signifying / making known / bringing out / thinking out what a thing is
• nature (fourth sense) — what a thing is, = essence (student’s word, he accepts)

Texts #

Read in class

• Paul VI, Mysterium Fidei, passage on dogmatic formulas and “universal and necessary experience”
• Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Friar Lawrence’s garden speech (“revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse”)

Mentioned

• 1 John 3:2 (“we shall see Him as He is”); St. Paul, “face to face”
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, question on the simplicity of God; treatment of the eternity of God
• Fourth Lateran Council, on likeness and greater unlikeness (against Joachim of Flora); a talk of Paul VI citing it
• Psalm, “Who is like God?”
• Shakespeare’s “exhortation to use reason” (reason as “God-like”)
• Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy (definition of eternity)
• Aristotle, definition of time and the now of time (Natural Hearing, later reading)
• Aristotle, Natural Hearing, first reading of Book II (“page three”); Wisdom Book V on beginning, cause, element, nature; History of Animals; Parts of Animals; Politics Book V
• Heraclitus, “nature loves to hide”
• Albert the Great on Aristotle and geometry; Warren Murray on Theophrastus
• John’s Gospel, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6, inferred)
• De Koninck, talk “Cogito ergo sum”
• Shakespeare, Othello (Iago, “native act and figure of my heart”)

His questions #

• Am I as close to you when I say you’re not an oak tree as when I say you’re not a tree? No — negating the general (not a tree, not a plant) is closer.
• Seven negatively: am I closer when I say it’s not four, or not even? Not even — it narrows it down.
• Am I as close to God saying He lacks two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen, or that He has no parts? No parts; the particular negation is useless once the general is proved.
• What does the root N-A-T refer to? Birth.
• What would it mean to be a native of Worcester? To have been born here.
• Do we use the second meaning (source of birth within the mother) in English? No; we take over the later, fourth meaning right away.
• What does Shakespeare mean by “true birth”? Nature — the true nature.
• Is the fourth sense synonymous with essence? Yes, what a thing is; but even so, something within.
• Why does Heraclitus say nature loves to hide? Because what is within is hidden.
• Is the common-experience level ever completed, as Aristotle may have completed it? “Got to be careful” — some say so (Warren Murray’s Theophrastus hypothesis); left open.