Wisely and Slow: Friar Lawrence, Shakespeare, and Seven Places Where the Wise Man Proceeds Slowly

Orientation #

He does not refer to last time or next time. He opens by saying he “begins by telling them” (his students) about Shakespeare’s religion, “by way of introducing the words of Friar Laurence.” The verified handouts “Friar Laurence on Stumbling” and “A Note on Practical Philosophy” are read from during this class; the transcript itself gives the loci below. The next class continues with Friar Laurence’s speech on plants and with equivocal versus analogous terms.

The class, in order #

1. Shakespeare’s religion (“more and more little bits of evidence”) #

Point: nobody knows for sure, but the evidence puts Shakespeare close to Roman Catholicism.

• His father’s will, found concealed in the walls of the house, is in the form of St Charles Borromeo imported for the use of English Catholics.
• His daughter, who was left most of the property, refused to take communion and was fined.
• Having never owned property in London, at the end of his career he buys the Blackfriars “Tower” [ed.: as heard; usually the Blackfriars Gatehouse] and installs a man to watch it — the most notorious London hideout for hidden masses (later a floor collapsed under the crowd at a mass there).
• In the plays, Catholic priests are represented favourably, Protestant divines as bumbling fools: “his sympathies are with this.”

2. The line and its coupling of wise and slow (“Wisely and slow, they stumble that run fast”) #

Point: Friar Laurence’s reply to Romeo’s “I stand on sudden haste” (Act II scene 3) couples wisdom with slowness, and the line is close to the second half of Proverbs 19:2; he notes its ten syllables. Before taking the whole line, three kinds of slowness must be separated:

• The slowness of stupidity or dumbness vs. the slowness of wisdom, which are sometimes confused — the fellow students of Thomas under Albert the Great calling him “the dumb ox”; Albert’s debate, Thomas’s win, and Albert’s “his bellow will be heard around the world”; Chesterton’s biography titled The Dumb Ox after this anecdote.
• Foolish slowness: being slow to act when one should act. Commonplace of prudence: deliberate carefully, especially in hard cases, but once you see what should be done, do not hesitate. Examples: the years of examination before ordination (wise deliberation); the church scandal and “poor Cardinal Law” giving a deposition today — hard to tell whether slowness is deliberation or failure to act.
• Hamlet as the illustration of both: (1) the ghost’s report of murder by poison in the ear — caution is reasonable, since the devil can assume the appearance of an angel of light; (2) the inserted play to “catch the conscience of the king,” with Horatio watching him; when the king rises and leaves, deliberation should stop. Hamlet has his chance to kill the king and does not take it; stabbing through the curtain kills Polonius instead, and from that delay follow Ophelia’s madness and death, Laertes’ plot, and the deaths of mother, king and Hamlet. His three grounds (mother’s quick remarriage, ghost, play) were sufficient deliberation — “that was the wise slowness. But now it’s time to act.”
• MacArthur at Inchon: deliberated, concluded, then went ahead despite Washington dragging its feet; delay would have let the North Koreans reinforce.
• Aside: the child running into the street; putting off the check-up at the doctor.

3. Why wisdom goes with slowness: savoury knowledge (“Come, bitter conduct, come, unsavory guide”) #

Point: Shakespeare teaches what wisdom is through its opposite, in Romeo’s words before taking the poison.

1. Romeo compares his reason to a pilot who runs the ship on the rocks: “Come, bitter conduct [= conductor], come, unsavory guide, thou desperate pilot, now at once run on the dashing rocks thy sea-sick weary bark.” Then Juliet wakes — too late.
2. Thomas explains sapientia as sapida scientia, from sapor: savoury knowledge. The foolish guide is bitter, unsavoury, insipid; wisdom is sweet and savoury.
3. Wisdom is ultimately knowledge of God, the end of all our knowledge — Augustine: miserable the man who knows all things else but not God; blessed who knows God even if nothing else; the man who knows God and other things is not the happier for the other things.
4. What is to be savoured is not gone through fast: wine; a child’s hard candy that you “pull on” rather than chew; Augustine savouring the Trinity through the De Trinitate, Thomas through the treatise on the Trinity or the Incarnation. So wisdom, being about things to be savoured (God, even the angels), is characterised by slowness — “why turn away from that?”
5. Adoro te devote, fourth quatrain: O memoriale mortis Domini, panis vivus vitam praestans homini, praesta meae menti de te vivere, et te illi semper dulce sapere — to sweetly savour Christ, who is truth itself. Wisdom is “the sweetest knowledge, and the most savory.”

4. “Run” is equivocal by reason (“The word run, of course, is equivocal”) #

Point: the line looks back to the first sense of “run” while meaning the second.

• First sense: the well-known act of the legs (not defined; you know it). Second sense: our action — Latin cursus, “the course of human events,” “so runs the world”; Laurence warns against acting in haste. The saying is true in the first sense too: run up the stairs or through a cluttered or dark room and you stumble.
• Third carrying-over: reason, defined as the ability for large discourse, “looking before and after”; discursus is running — so the running of the mind. This is what he will now explain: where does the wise man proceed slower than other thinkers so as to avoid the stumbling all others make?
• He found the places to be seven, “appropriate because seven is a symbol of wisdom.”

5. Places 1–2: many things to consider; things hard to know (“where many things must be considered before a judgment”) #

First place — where many things must be considered before a judgment: the Pythagorean theorem is Euclid I.47, and most if not all of the 46 preceding theorems are presupposed; likewise a difficult course of action, where all circumstances must be weighed. Monsignor Dionne on the Vatican II birth-control commission enumerated all the discourses needed before a decision — some belonging to the theologian, some to the philosopher, some to the scientist (e.g. whether a given pill regularises the woman’s cycle or prevents implantation; you must know what one is doing before the moral philosopher can judge). Others jump to conclusions without those discourses.

Second place — where something is difficult to know. Aristotle (second book of Wisdom): two causes of difficulty —

• in the thing itself, which is hardly understandable because hardly actual: first matter, motion, time;
• in the weakness of our mind: the angels and a fortiori God (“God dwells in light inaccessible” — most knowable, but not to us). Example of the first: Aristotle spends a long time reaching the definition of motion; Descartes quotes it garbled, says “who understands that?” and dismisses it; Locke follows him and says motion cannot be defined; eventually the moderns say nothing can be defined. Consequences: no distinct understanding of motion, hence not of nature (defined by motion), hence not of the argument for the unmoved mover. They are “stumbling over motion.” Example of the second: Augustine in the De Trinitate goes slowly but so thoroughly (marshalling nearly every relevant Scripture passage) that one is convinced; he speaks of some with “an immature and perverse love of reason” — those who run fast over the mystery and make mistakes. The chief difficulty, Aristotle says and Plato before him, is the weakness of our mind.

6. Place 3: a beginning small in size, great in power (“small in size but great in its power”) #

Point: because a small mistake at the beginning is multiplied through everything after, the wise man is slow there.

1. Example: the axioms of being and non-being — impossible to be and not be; necessary to be or not be (“To be or not to be, that is the question” is a question for both reasons). Aristotle spends much of Metaphysics IV defending them: who else would? But they extend to all the rest of knowledge.
2. Aristotle and Thomas: a small mistake in the beginning is a great one in the end — the fork in the road, little distance at first, ever further apart.
3. His suspicion: this is a primary reason Thomas got the reputation of dumb ox — slow on what everything depends on, then “unstoppable.” Poe, The Purloined Letter: the small mind is like a small body, easily moved and easily stopped (a ping-pong ball); the great mind like a large body, hard to set moving, hard to stop.
4. The first logic course at Laval, “in the good old days when the wise were in control”: Albert the Great’s ~200 pages on Porphyry’s Isagoge — named an introduction (Greek eisagoge) to Aristotle’s Categories, but seen as introduction to the whole philosophy; Porphyry’s proem: knowing genus, difference, species, property, accident (genos, diaphora, eidos, idion, symbebekos) is useful for the Categories and necessary for definition, division, demonstration. Thomas in the Summa Contra Gentiles reasons from the Isagoge to no name being said univocally of God and creatures — the end of theology still draws on the beginning. Modern philosophers have not heard of it.
5. In theology the Trinity is the beginning: logically before the Incarnation though we usually meet the Incarnation first (John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word” before “the Word was made flesh”). Augustine, De Trinitate (which he regards as Augustine’s greatest work): nowhere is it more dangerous to err, nowhere more fruitful to see something of the truth.

• Student: would it not be wise to make logic a lifelong avocation, given how much depends on it? Reply: great thinkers like De Koninck and Monsignor Dionne came back to these fundamentals from time to time and saw more; Dionne, revisited a year later, would always see something more about the beginnings.

7. Place 4: knowledge over a road (“all of our knowledge is along a road”) #

Point: you must know the road before following it, and most do not stop to know it.

1. All knowledge is along the road from the senses into reason; reasoned-out knowledge especially. Logic is the common road; each science has to some extent its own private road.
2. Aristotle (second book of Wisdom): you cannot at the same time acquire knowledge over a road and knowledge of the road — but one must know the road before following it well.
3. Plato saw this: Timaeus’ proem on how he will speak about the universe turns to Socrates: “you have paideia tōn hodōn,” education in roads; Socrates praises the proem. The Greek is close to the proem of the Nicomachean Ethics. So the two chief philosophers (as Thomas and Albert call Plato and Aristotle) stop to know the road; most men jump into the more interesting subject matter.
4. The distinction and order of all the roads in looking knowledge [ed.: speculative knowledge] was worked out explicitly by Dionne, implicit in Aristotle and Thomas — as the Isagoge gathers what Aristotle touches on in scattered places. Dionne lectured on Thomas’s commentary on Boethius’ De Trinitate, where Boethius, following Aristotle, distinguishes the three parts of looking philosophy and the road of each: natural philosophy proceeds rationabiliter, mathematics disciplinabiliter, wisdom intellectualiter [ed.: transcript garbles the Latin; readings as standard]; Thomas has a whole article on what that means. He is likewise careful about the road in the Summa Contra Gentiles.
5. Gilson (read in high school): his introduction to philosophy follows the order of the Summa Contra Gentiles — but Thomas says there that philosophy and theology are in reverse order (theology begins with God; in philosophy God comes last). “A gross misreading.”
6. A philosopher does one of three things: follows the right road, follows the wrong road, or wanders; most do the last two — “I don’t know which is worse.” Wandering is a disordered movement of reason, hence error (“out of order” on the Coke machine). Latin error from errare, to wander (knight errant); Greek planē from wandering (whence “planet”); Christ to the Sadducees with their seven-brothers case: “you err” (planasthe), knowing neither the power of God nor the Scriptures. Descartes follows a rule, but the rule of mathematics everywhere — a serious mistake, since that rule does not fit everything.

8. Place 5: general before particular (“we naturally know things in a confused or indistinct way”) #

Point: the wise man goes from confused to distinct on the level of the general before descending to the particular.

1. Physics I (the eight books of Natural Hearing): consider the general before the particular, because we know things confusedly before distinctly, and the general is indistinct relative to the particular (“those two little disturbers were animals” vs. “cats”).
2. But Aristotle stays in the general in the eight books — so does he not go from confused to distinct? There is another way, mentioned in that first chapter: from the name to the definition, or from a whole to its parts.
3. Euclid: from triangle to its definition (staying general) vs. from triangle to equilateral, isosceles, scalene (descending). Which first? Class answer: the definition — unless you see distinctly that a triangle is a plane figure contained by three straight lines, you cannot see the basis of the division (all three sides equal, two, or none); same for quadrilateral before square, oblong, rhombus, rhomboid, trapezium.
4. Most thinkers jump from confused general to distinct particular; the wise man seems slower because others are already down at the particular.
5. Ethics: people discuss courage, moderation, justice, foresight, art without understanding virtue in general; or rank the goods of man without understanding “better” in general. In general, better = the end is always better than what is for the sake of the end (shown by induction and by syllogism). Then the Apology: Socrates vs. the Athenians on which goods are better; outside goods are for the sake of inside goods (induction), so inside goods are better; the same for body and soul if one first has the end of man as the act of reason.
6. Virtue in general: the kitchen plaque “Much virtue in herbs, and in men”; Christ’s “salt of the earth” losing its strength; the virtue of a knife; Aristotle on the virtue of money (“wealth is the virtue of money”). Virtue is as broad as a thing’s own act: the quality that makes a thing good in its own act — the knife’s act is to cut, its virtue sharpness. Most who talk of chastity or another virtue lack this.

9. Place 6: words equivocal by reason (“distinguish the central senses of the words”) #

Point: the wise man distinguishes and orders the central senses of the common words everyone uses.

1. Metaphysics V is wholly devoted to the central senses of the words equivocal by reason used in wisdom, the axioms, and everywhere. Nobody else in history does this except Thomas, taught by Aristotle: in Physics IV Aristotle distinguishes eight meanings of “in” without ordering them; Thomas orders them the way he learned in book V (the class once did this). Student: “Didn’t Albert do it?” — “Albert might do it.”
2. Mileage from it: “to fall in love” = the sixth sense of in, being in someone’s power — to come under the power of love; “to think out” — from the meanings of in and out he distinguished seven meanings of thinking out.
3. The father of logic: the most common mistake in thinking is mixing up the senses of a word. We are not deceived by a word equivocal by chance (Roger Maris’s 61 home runs with a bat; the bat as flying rodent — both sensible); we are deceived by a series of meanings running from a very sensible one to ones far removed.
4. Students’ fallacies: “if nature acted for an end, all things would come to an end; they have not; therefore nature does not act for an end”; his wife’s parallel: happiness is the end of life, the end of life is death, therefore happiness is death.
5. Run, stumble, reason (“reason gives reasons”) are all equivocal by reason; in, out, being, one, part, whole, end, limit cannot be avoided — so everyone is subject to stumbling over them.

10. Place 7: the words of a wise man (“carefully, frequently, and with reverence”) #

Point: the wise man reads a wise man’s words slowly — as he himself first stopped over “wisely and slow” before the whole line.

• Thomas: read the words of Aristotle carefully, frequently, with reverence; the same for Augustine; otherwise you are not teachable by that wise man. A fortiori the words of Christ — Thomas in the commentary on Matthew: one never completely unfolds all the meaning of Christ’s words.
• Aside: the anecdote of Thomas told an elephant was passing the window — he would rather believe it than that a brother was lying — offered as the wise man’s caution. A reference to “fire alarms” here is [unclear in recording].

His words #

• wisely and slow; the slowness of wisdom vs. the slowness of stupidity (dumbness) vs. foolish slowness (not acting when one should)
• sapientia as sapida scientia, from sapor: savoury knowledge; opposite: bitter, unsavoury, insipid
• dulce sapere: to sweetly savour
• run: (1) act of the legs; (2) action (cursus, “course”); (3) the running of the mind (discursus)
• reason: the ability for large discourse, “looking before and after”
• second book of Wisdom, fourth/fifth book of Wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics II, IV, V]; eight books of Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics]
• immature and perverse love of reason (Augustine)
• the road; looking knowledge/philosophy [ed.: speculative]; paideia tōn hodōn; rationabiliter, disciplinabiliter, intellectualiter
• wander vs. follow the right/wrong road; error from errare; planē, planasthe
• confused vs. distinct; general vs. particular
• better in general: the end is always better than what is for the sake of the end
• virtue in general: the quality that makes a thing good in its own act
• equivocal by reason vs. equivocal by chance; fallacy of equivocation
• to fall in love: the sixth sense of in (in one’s power); to think out: seven meanings

Texts #

Read in class

• Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, II.3: “I stand on sudden haste” / “Wisely and slow, they stumble that run fast”
• Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Romeo’s “Come, bitter conduct, come, unsavory guide, thou desperate pilot…”
• Thomas Aquinas, Adoro te devote, fourth quatrain (Latin quoted)
• Augustine, “miserable the man who knows all things else but not God”; De Trinitate, “nowhere more dangerous… nowhere more fruitful”
• Plato, Timaeus, proem (paideia tōn hodōn)
• John 1 (“In the beginning was the Word… the Word was made flesh”)
• Gospel, Christ to the Sadducees (“you err,” planasthe)
• Porphyry, Isagoge, proem (the five predicables)

Mentioned

• Proverbs 19:2 (second half)
• Shakespeare, Hamlet
• Chesterton, The Dumb Ox
• Aristotle, Metaphysics II (two difficulties; knowledge of the road), IV (axioms), V (senses of words); Physics I (general before particular), IV (eight senses of “in”)
• Euclid, Elements I.47
• Descartes on the definition of motion; Locke
• Albert the Great, commentary on Porphyry’s Isagoge
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles; commentary on Boethius’ De Trinitate; commentary on Matthew
• Gilson, introduction to philosophy
• Poe, The Purloined Letter
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, proem
• Plato, Apology
• Matthew, “salt of the earth” (inferred)

His questions #

• Is there in the great idea of wisdom a connection with slowness? Yes: wisdom is savoury knowledge, and what is savoured is not gone through fast.
• Where does the wise man proceed slower than other thinkers so as to avoid stumbling? Seven places: many considerations, hard things, beginnings, the road, general before particular, equivocal words, words of a wise man.
• Since Aristotle stays in the general in the Physics, does he not go from confused to distinct? He does — from name to definition and whole to parts, on the level of the general.
• Should I move from triangle to its kinds, or to the definition of triangle first? Definition first; otherwise the basis of the division cannot be seen.
• In general, what is better? The end is always better than what is for the sake of the end.
• What is the general meaning of virtue (“much virtue in herbs, and in men”)? The quality of a thing that makes it good in its own act.
• What does it mean to fall in love? To come under the power of love (sixth sense of “in”).
• Didn’t Albert do it (order the senses of “in”)? (student) “Albert might do it.”
• Would it be wise to make logic a lifelong avocation? (student) The great thinkers did keep returning to the fundamentals and saw more.