Pius X on the Causes of Error: Pride, Curiosity, Likeness, False Imagination, and the Road of Inquiry

Orientation #

He returns to the passage where Christ tells the Sadducees they err “through” not knowing the Scriptures and the power of God (prev. lecture), and to the etymology of “error” as wandering (prev. lecture). He calls today “a little bit excursion” and says “maybe we’ll get to the proemium next time.” The previous class compared the Synoptic accounts of the Sadducees and the etymology of error; the next takes up the passions of the soul in the proemium.

The class, in order #

1. Pius X on the causes of Modernism (“Pius the Tenth on the Causes of Error”) #

He hands out a Latin/English text from Pascendi Dominici Gregis and reads the English, mapping it onto Thomas’s division of causes of error.

• Proximate and immediate cause: “an error of the mind.” Remote causes: curiosity and pride — remote because they are in the will, not in reason. He compares Thomas in the commentary on Timothy, who divides causes of error ex parte appetitus (on the side of desire) and ex parte intellectus (on the side of the knowing powers).
• Curiosity: Pius quotes Gregory XVI, Singulari Nos (1834), on “the aberrations of human reason when it yields to the spirit of novelty” — curiosity always seeks the new. He notes “aberration” has the wandering root in it. Aside: Shakespeare on fashion, “one touch of nature makes the whole world kin,” all praising new-born gawds made of things past, dust that is a little gilt more loved than gilt o’er-dusted (Troilus and Cressida, inferred).
• Pride: “exercises an incomparably greater sway.” Thomas likewise calls pride mater erroris (“mother of error”) in the Summa Contra Gentiles. He reads the list: self-assurance, vainglory (“we are not as the rest of men”), embracing novelties, disobedience, reforming others but not themselves.
• Pius then passes “from the moral to the intellectual causes”: moral = on the side of appetite (the moral virtues are in the appetite), “so it’s really the same thing” as Thomas’s division. First intellectual cause: ignorance — like Christ’s planasthe… dia touto, not knowing the Scriptures and the power of God. Modernists embrace modern philosophy and despise scholasticism because ignorance of the latter leaves them unable to recognise confusion and refute sophistry.
• Latin gloss: ex connubio falsae philosophiae cum fide — connubium means marriage. Thomas’s theology is the marriage of Greek philosophy at its best with the faith; from the marriage of a false philosophy with the faith come errors “so many and so great” (tot tantisque erroribus).

2. Ignorance is not error: what kind of cause is it? (“the bad can have only what is called”) #

He asks how ignorance, which is not the same as error, causes it, and answers with the senses of accidental cause.

1. Everyone desires the good as such; so the bad can have only an accidental cause.
2. In the “fifth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics V] Aristotle gives many senses of accidental cause. He lays out four:
   • Coincidence, a cause only in men’s estimation: he walks into the house and an earthquake happens — “Berquist, you caused the earthquake.” His relative who visited the Twin Cities twice and each time a relative died: “don’t come down anymore.”
   • What happens to the cause said to be the cause: the pianist who happens to be a cook, so “the cook played the piano”; being taught by a white man — “so what?” These two “are not very important.”
   • Luck or chance: something other than what you intended happens, rarely, but through what you did. Digging to plant a tree and striking treasure; aiming at the target and hitting the tree, or the arrow going through the wood and killing someone — “wasn’t trying to kill you.”
   • The unintended that happens frequently: Thomas’s example of the man with a sweet tooth who, with no candy in the Middle Ages, drinks sweet wine for its sweetness and gets drunk — not by chance, but not what he intended.
   • Causa removens prohibens, “the cause removing what prevents,” “very important”: he knocks over the pillar and the roof comes down; the roof comes down as such by its weight, but he removed what held it up. Samson pushing the pillars.
3. Conclusion: ignorance is a causa removens prohibens. If the Sadducees had known Scripture and God’s power, that would have prevented the error; if one sees the two senses of “in” in the apparent syllogism, or his students knew the senses of “part” and “whole,” they would not be deceived by the sophistical argument.

3. Pride and curiosity as causes, in two ways (“pride is a cause of error in two ways”) #

Thomas gives two ways pride causes error, and he sorts each under the kinds above.

• First way: pride takes away learning from others greater than us; it removes the humility needed to be under a teacher, a master, the Church, the pope, the magisterium. Teachers “call you back” from errors (“watch out for this”). So pride, remotely, is also a causa removens prohibens.
• Second way: pride leads us to apply the mind to something above our powers, where we easily deceive ourselves. Curiosity likewise: applying oneself to what is new and fashionable in the intellectual world, which is often erroneous.
• Student: “as a mover?” He answers: rather like the wine drinker. One does not apply oneself to high things in order to be deceived, but because they seem interesting or confer dignity; yet error is “almost necessarily attached” to considering something above you. “So it’s a cause of deception in another way. Think about that a little bit.”

4. Aristotle: likeness is the cause of deception (“likeness is the cause of deception”) #

In the Sophistical Refutations, a book about error, Aristotle assigns a different cause than ignorance.

• The book will give thirteen causes of deception, on the side of language and not (equivocation among them); but at the start, following Plato’s Sophist, Aristotle says likeness is the cause of deception, with examples of things that look like gold or silver.
• Examples attached: fool’s gold “deceives the fool”; zircons that look like diamonds (his joke with his wife); poisonous mushrooms eaten for good ones; the actor who imitated Montgomery so the Germans thought him in Africa while he was in England — “if they put me there, they wouldn’t be deceived.” The bad resembles the good, the false the true, so we mix them up.
• The apparent syllogism “happiness is the end of life; the end of life is death” resembles a syllogism but has no one middle term.
• His refinement: seeing a likeness would not deceive unless we were ignorant of the difference — so ignorance is behind likeness. Those who said the soul is fire were deceived by likeness (fire grows, spreads, “digests,” like a living body); likewise those who said it is air.

5. Error as wandering: ignorance of the road (“what kind of ignorance is the cause of the mind wandering”) #

The etymology suggests a particular kind of ignorance behind error.

1. “Error” comes from “wander,” a word not invented by philosophers but from common experience.
2. The mind wanders because it does not know the road to follow; if it knew it, it would follow it.
3. All our knowledge is somewhere along a road — from the senses into reason, from reasonable guesses toward reasoned knowledge.
4. Taking the manuductio from the opposite — God cannot be deceived because all-knowing — there is a particular connection between wandering and ignorance of the road.

6. Back to the proemium: the road, and before and after (“what road should we take”) #

The excursus lands on what Aristotle asks first.

• Aristotle begins with the difficulty about what road, what methodos, leads to defining the soul: one road for all things, or each its own — even before asking the genus.
• Paragraph 5 (his numbering): if there are not many souls (as Plato spoke, a plant soul and an animal soul in us) but parts, i.e. powers or abilities, should we seek first the whole soul or the parts; the parts or their works (understanding, sensing, growing — growing is not the ability to grow); the works or the things corresponding to them, “what we sometimes call the objects” (color before seeing, sound before hearing, food before eating and growing)?
• All these are questions of before and after, and the road in our knowledge is nothing other than a before and after in our knowledge. Is seeing “sensing color,” so you must know color first, or is color “what is seen”? Must you know the mind before understanding, or understanding before the mind?
• The more fundamental order: from more known to us to less known. Which is more known, digesting or food? Food — so object before act. Do we know we see or that we have the ability to see? — act before power. What the body is able to do through the soul is more known than the soul. Paragraphs 4 (first part) and 5 explicitly ask the order of our knowledge; otherwise the mind wanders.
• Hint: if the soul is “something of another,” investigating it by divisions in Book II — on the side of the soul and of that of which it is the soul — is connected with this.

7. False imagination; friend as second self; King Lear (“woes by wrong imaginations lose the knowledge”) #

On the side of the knowing powers Thomas often names false imagination rather than ignorance; Shakespeare has a phrase for it.

• Aside on the same thing stated in different ways: “what it is” is called nature and substance; the Greek proverb ho philos estin allos autos, “a friend is another self” (love your neighbour as yourself), which Shakespeare renders “second self” — showing an order, before and after, between the two.
• King Lear: Gloucester, seeing the mad king, says “better I were distract,” for “woes by wrong imaginations lose the knowledge of themselves.” One can imagine truly or falsely; madness is like nature taking us away from what we cannot face.
• Connection to likeness: The Comedy of Errors (from a Latin comedy, from a Greek one) turns on twins mistaken for each other — likeness as cause of error known to the poet as well as the philosopher. “Image” is almost a synonym for “likeness”; imagination delights in likenesses, reason wants to see differences; so imagination is a source of deception.
• Book III will show we never think without imagining in this life; if we judge by what we imagine, or try to imagine what cannot be imagined — the soul — we are necessarily false. Poets picture the soul as a ghost with the body’s shape: Odysseus recognises the dead by shape and cannot hug them. We must negate the image: God is not a body, thought is not continuous, the soul is not continuous. Natural philosophy judges by sense, mathematics by imagination, but the soul can be neither sensed nor imagined — so imagination is a cause of error “in another connection,” via likeness.

8. “Mistake”: aiming, guessing, and imagination (“the word aim is often used as a synonym for guess”) #

The other word for error yields another way of being deceived.

• “Mistake” = to miss in taking; Plato’s image of reaching and taking the wrong thing, like knocking over a wine glass at table.
• In Shakespeare “aim” often means “guess”; when one guesses one aims at the truth and often misses.
• Imagination and guessing: a good disposition of imagination enables one to guess well (Aquinas). Einstein, whose three 1905 papers he calls each worth a Nobel prize, says hypotheses are freely imagined; scientists discover in their twenties and thirties because imagination declines then, while reason improves “until the age of forty-nine at least.” Sherlock Holmes guesses before the evidence.
• Aside: his brother Mark’s joke of the three acts of prudence divided among three men in Quebec — the imaginative one who saw all the possibilities, Mark who judged, and a third who commanded and got them going.
• Guessing is apt to go wrong: wild guesses, but also the economist’s and weatherman’s educated guesses. This is like the wine drinker: aiming at one thing, another happens. From curiosity or pride one aims above one’s powers and easily fails.
• Socrates in the Euthyphro: piety seems a form of justice, a quid pro quo between man and God; but unlike justice one cannot repay the equivalent — Cicero says a son is always in debt to his father. His mother’s father and his own parents: “you’ll say you haven’t done nothing.”

9. Close: how common error is (“the diversity of opinion is enough to show you”) #

He ends on the frightening commonness of error and defers the proemium.

• Like his brother Richard’s psychiatrist friend to whom everyone seemed on the brink, the passage on error shows most philosophers mistaken, “maybe all of them” — hence the need to proceed wisely and slowly. “Maybe we’ll get to the proemium next time.”
• Aside on Arden editors who say “if I was born in India I’d be a Hindu”: seeing a likeness (born in Ireland, Catholic; in Saudi Arabia, Mohammedan) but not the difference between being Christian and being Mohammedan.

His words #

• proximate vs. remote causes of error: error of the mind vs. curiosity and pride, remote because in the will
• ex parte appetitus / ex parte intellectus: Thomas’s division of causes of error, on the side of desire / of the knowing powers
• moral causes: Pius’s term for causes in the appetite, “the moral virtues are in the appetite”
• mater erroris: pride as “mother of error” (Thomas, SCG)
• planasthe… dia touto: “you err… through this,” Christ’s diagnosis of the Sadducees
• ex connubio falsae philosophiae cum fide: “from the marriage of a false philosophy with the faith”
• accidental cause: the only kind of cause the bad can have, since all desire the good as such
• luck or chance: something other than what you intended, happening rarely, through what you did
• causa removens prohibens: “the cause removing what prevents”; ignorance is a cause of this kind
• “fifth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics V]
• likeness: cause of deception (Plato’s Sophist, Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations), operative only with ignorance of the difference
• manuductio from the opposite: God cannot be deceived because all-knowing
• methodos: the road to a definition; “the road in our knowledge is nothing other than a before and after in our knowledge”
• powers or abilities of the soul [ed.: potencies]; works [ed.: acts]; “the things corresponding to these, what we sometimes call the objects”
• false imagination: Thomas’s usual cause of error on the side of the knowing powers; Shakespeare’s “wrong imaginations”
• ho philos estin allos autos: “a friend is another self”; Shakespeare’s “second self”
• mistake: to miss in taking; aim = guess in Shakespeare
• quid pro quo between man and God: what Socrates seeks in piety

Texts #

Read in class

• Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, on the causes of Modernism (Latin and English handout), including the quotation from Gregory XVI, Singulari Nos (1834)
• Aristotle, De Anima I proemium, “number 5” of his numbering (soul, parts, works, objects), with reference to number 4
• Shakespeare, King Lear, Gloucester’s speech “The king is mad…”
• Shakespeare on fashion, “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin” (Troilus and Cressida, inferred)

Mentioned

• Thomas Aquinas, commentary on the Epistles to Timothy (causes of error, two-way division; pride’s two ways)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles (pride as mater erroris)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics V (inferred), senses of accidental cause
• Aristotle, Sophistical Refutations, opening and the thirteen fallacies; Plato, Sophist
• Gospel passage on the Sadducees (prev. lecture)
• Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors; Homer, Odyssey (souls of the dead); Plato, Euthyphro; Cicero on the son’s debt; Aristotle and Plato on the friend as another self
• De Anima II (divisions) and III (no thinking without imagining)

His questions #

• Why does Pius call curiosity and pride remote causes? Because they are in the will, not in reason itself; the proximate cause is an error of the mind.
• In what way is ignorance a cause of error, since ignorance is not error? As a causa removens prohibens: knowing the Scriptures, or the senses of “in” or “part,” would have prevented the deception.
• Who is responsible for the roof coming down, the one who knocks the pillar or gravity? The roof falls by its weight; he is the cause by removing what prevented it.
• In what way is pride, or curiosity, a cause of deception? In one way removing what prevents (learning from others); in another, like the sweet-toothed drinker who gets drunk — aiming above one’s powers, error almost necessarily follows.
• In what way is likeness the cause of deception? Only together with ignorance of the difference; seeing the resemblance of the mushrooms does not deceive unless you fail to see how they differ.
• Why does the mind wander? Because it does not know the road to follow; a particular ignorance, ignorance of the road.
• Which is more known to us, digesting or food? seeing or the ability to see? Food; seeing — so object before act, act before power.
• What is Shakespeare’s phrase for “another self”? “Second self,” which shows an order between the two.
• Is there a connection between imagination and likeness, and between imagination and guessing? Yes: image is almost a synonym for likeness; a good disposition of imagination enables one to guess well, and guessing often misses.