Councils on the soul as form of the body; the five kinds of powers, four grades of life and three souls

Orientation #

He refers back to an earlier point that an eye that does not see is an eye only equivocally (“remember, I was speaking about that”), and to the two council texts “I mentioned”; he looks ahead to the third book (inward senses, reason not being a body) and to a possible future study of the Trinity. The previous class treated “in Him we live, and move, and have our being” with Thomas’s threefold division, and the next takes up Aristotle’s division of the appetitive powers (epithumia, thumos, boulesis) with Plato’s soul-city analogy.

The class, in order #

1. Hosea’s idols and the equivocal eye (“they have eyes but they see not”) #

The morning reading (Hosea, “I think the eighth chapter”) on idols with eyes that see not, ears that hear not, is “exactly what Aristotle’s talking about.”

• If the eye is a natural body in potency, its soul is its power of seeing; lacking that, it is an eye only equivocally.
• A dead man vs. a white or black man: “white man” and “black man” are man in the same sense; “dead man” is man equivocally, not in the same sense as a living man.

2. Two council texts on the soul as form of the body (“the substance of the rational or intellectual soul”) #

Before chapter 3, he reads (in English) the church’s two chief texts on the soul as form of the body; a student asks whose doctrine was at issue and how to spell the name.

• Sources: Denzinger’s Enchiridion Symbolorum; a little Latin handbook of the previous twenty ecumenical councils put out around Vatican II; an English edition arranged by order of doctrine, with Rahner involved (Neuner-Roos).
• Council of Vienne (“Vienna or Vienne”), 1311-12, against Peter John Olivi (Olieu): a leading Spiritual in the Franciscan poverty struggle against the Conventuals; after his death his doctrine of the relation of body and soul was indicted and came before the council. The text rejects “as erroneous and contrary to the truth of the Catholic Faith” any doctrine asserting or doubting that the substance of the rational or intellectual soul is truly and of itself the form of the human body; whoever presumes to assert, defend or obstinately hold this is censured as a heretic. His gloss: it is both an error and against faith; “you got to be obstinate to be a heretic”; since Vienne it is heretical not to accept this.
• Fifth Lateran Council, eighth session, 1513, about 200 years later, involving Pietro Pomponazzi, influenced by the Averroists: condemns all who assert the intellectual soul is mortal, or one soul common to all men, or who doubt that it is truly, of itself and essentially the form of the body “as stated in the Canon of Clement V” (Vienne); affirms it is immortal and multiplied according to the multiplicity of bodies into which it is infused.
• He believes both are repeated in the Catechism; offers the Latin if wanted.
• Conclusion he draws: some things are known both by natural reason alone and by faith; the soul as form of the body is illuminated by both lights.

3. Chapter 3, n. 139: five genera of powers and their Greek names (“of the aforesaid powers of the soul”) #

Aristotle distinguishes five genera of powers (genera because each has more than one kind under it); all are present in man, some in some, one alone in some. He goes through the translator’s names and proposes more familiar English.

1. threptikon: translated “nutritive”; the Greek can mean feeding or growing, so “the feeding or growing power” is clearer. Under it fall feeding, growing and, “last but not least, but actually greatest,” reproducing. Plants have this genus alone; animals and man have it plus others.
2. aisthetikon (aisthesis): “sensitive”; he prefers “sensing power.” A student notes “aesthetic” comes from it; he calls that a “terrible word,” a modern invention putting the emphasis on the senses of the knower rather than the object. This genus includes the outward senses (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching) and inward senses, to be treated at the start of Book III.
3. orektikon: Latin “appetitive” (appetitus = desire); “the desiring powers.” Some desiring powers follow sensation and are common to all animals (hunger, thirst, sexual desire); one desiring power follows upon reason.
4. kinetikon kata topon: “motive according to place,” going from one place to another. Higher animals (dog, cat, horse, even insects) have it; some animal life fixed to the ocean floor, hard to distinguish from plants, has touch and maybe taste but does not move. Those that move also have the senses that know things at a distance (sight, smell, hearing). Later (Book III) the knowing and desiring powers will be shown to move this power. [ed.: he twice says “the fourth” in passing; the thinking power is the fifth.]
5. dianoetikon: “thinking power.” Same adjective as at the beginning of the Posterior Analytics: all knowledge that is dianoetikē is from pre-existent knowledge, shown by induction there (geometry from axioms, postulates, definitions and theorem to theorem; dialectic from opinion and induction; rhetoric by example and enthymeme, from likelihoods and signs). Like Shakespeare’s “discourse” = running: coming to know the unknown through the known, the mind running from one thing to another. Not all the mind does, else it could never begin: Aristotle also names nous, understanding, intellectus. Plato in Republic VI distinguishes four kinds of knowing, with something close to nous at the top, dialectic leading to it, then geometry, using the same word dianoia. So “discursive power,” though “discursive” is less familiar now.

• Aside: in grade school, pretending to eat peanuts during a geography lesson on a peanut country; sister: “stop pretending to eat peanuts.”

4. Why powers are named from the act most like motion (“things in motion sooner catch the eye”) #

The desiring power and the thinking power are both named from the act that is more like motion, not from the more basic act.

• Desiring is like reasoning: both are for something you do not have. But liking/loving is more basic than desiring: I like a thing; if I lack it I desire it; if I get it I am pleased or joyful. I would not want beer, wine, candy, steak unless I liked them. So desire supposes liking.
• Shakespeare: “things in motion sooner catch the eye” than what not stirs. Thinking is like motion, understanding like rest: Eureka (the Greek jumping out of the bathtub) marks the end of thinking. So long as I think, my mind is in motion; Thomas’s ratio / ratiocinari when the mind continues in motion, vs. epistēmē, “coming to a halt or a stop” (as said before).
• Summary of his renderings: feeding or growing power; sensing; desiring or wanting; moving according to place (unchanged); thinking, understood as knowing one thing from another, or discursive.

5. Reason vs. imagination by the discursive act (“I have to have some reason to think”) #

When Aristotle first distinguishes the fifth power from imagination (still a sense power), he does so by its discursive act, not by singular vs. universal.

• Imagination is free to imagine almost anything; reason is not free to think just anything but needs a reason.
• Example: I can imagine a terrorist out there with machine guns, or John Paul II walking in the door; I cannot think either, having no reason to think there is a terrorist or that the Pope is visiting Holy Trinity. To have a reason for thinking is to go from one thing to another.
• Boethius’s “a thing is singular as sensed and universal as understood” comes later; a harder thing to see.

6. Thomas’s reason why there are five genera (“a kind of material being and a kind of immaterial being”) #

Thomas’s commentary gives a reason for the number, which he calls unusual, starting from the fact that a thing’s most fundamental feature is its being.

1. The higher souls have two kinds of being: material (we are a body needing water etc., like plants) and immaterial (man’s understanding), which non-living things wholly lack.
2. To preserve material being: the feeding and growing powers. To immaterial being in the full sense: the thinking power (Book III will give reasons that understanding is not a body, not the brain).
3. Student answer: the sensing powers are material, dependent on an organ; he adds there is something immaterial too. My eye receives the shapes of everything in the room, stored in memory; but not materially: my eye does not become round looking at the fan, as clay or Michelangelo’s marble takes a shape; cut open my head and you find no bone or flesh bearing your shape. I receive others’ shapes and colours without losing my own, and as a shape of something else, not my own. Yet received in a bodily organ, so sensing is in between.
4. What is received in the immaterial way is like a form, and “following upon every form is some kind of inclination”: hence the desiring powers.
5. Knowing and desiring a thing, you go for it: hence moving according to place.

7. Five powers, four grades of life, three souls (“three, four, five”) #

Aside first: the first right-angled triangle in whole numbers is 3-4-5, not 1-2-3 (1+4 ≠ 9) or 2-3-4 (4+9 = 13 ≠ 16); apparently known to the Egyptians. He uses 3-4-5 as an image for the reduction.

• Four grades of life, in mortals, by an order of “one can be without the other, not vice versa”: feeding without all the rest; feeding and sensing without moving and thinking; feeding, sensing and moving without thinking; thinking in mortals not without the other four. So: things with only feeding (growing, reproducing); those with sensing but not moving; those with the higher senses and moving; those with understanding and reasoning.
• Why desiring gives no separate grade (student: “it always goes with sense”): where there is sensation there is pleasure or pain, hence desire for what is agreeable and aversion for what is painful; where there is thinking there is will. Conversely, sense powers do not necessarily bring locomotion (touch and a little taste only), though movers have the lower senses too; feeders do not necessarily sense; sensers do not necessarily understand; those who understand, “in mortals” (he is careful, being aware of angels and God), have senses; all who understand have will, even with no “willpower.”
• Three souls, by three degrees of rising above mere matter. The soul rises above nature even in plants (growth in opposite directions, unlike nature limited to one). Feeding powers hardly rise above matter but do: their chemical changes are ordered to growth and reproduction, not “blind chemicalism”; Heisenberg on a living organism’s order and stability not making much sense from physical science alone. Sensing rises further; understanding further still. The leap from non-moving to moving animals is not of the same kind, so it gives no separate soul.
• Trinity parallel, “getting ahead of ourselves”: five notions (fatherhood, sonship, common breathing, the proceeding of the Son, and the Father’s being unborn, a negation, not an explicit relation) give four relations (Father to Son, Son to Father, Father and Son to Spirit, Spirit to them) give three persons, since common breathing distinguishes Father and Son from the Spirit but constitutes no separate person.

8. Student: could one soul cover two grades? (“melted into air, into thin air”) #

A student asks whether one soul covers two of the four grades; yes, the second and third grades are both the animal soul. He explains why souls are counted by immateriality.

• People commonly think of the soul as something immaterial, air-like: the word spirit comes from air; Scripture’s God breathing into the clay; the Tempest’s actors “all spirits” melting “into thin air.” The Greeks placed the soul among air or fire, the less material elements, the body among water and earth; Othello’s “put out the light” as he goes to kill Desdemona, the flame as life. Modern scientists’ matter vs. energy is a like contrast. A true materialist has no pretence of talking about the soul.
• Distinguished so, there are three noteworthy souls: the plant soul barely above matter, though its control over matter is amazing (thousands of oak leaves of the same shape; raking leaves as a boy; coordinated cells); the animal soul, aware of surroundings and retaining colours, sounds, shapes; man, with understanding.
• Second-grade animals, from Aristotle the marine biologist after Athens: like plants growing in the ground, but stuck with a pin they contract, as a tree does not. (Ents are fiction.)
• Higher grades include lower plus more, like 1, 2, 3, 4: “the natures of things are like numbers,” some truth in Plato, though they are not numbers.
• Latin: appetitus sensitivus for sense desire; the will as appetitus intellectivus “or something.”

9. Two kinds of order among the powers (“the second sense of before”) #

A student notes that linking desiring to sensing links it to feeding too, since sensers feed. He replies the orders differ.

• Feeding, sensing, moving, understanding: the “second sense of before” (as Aristotle said, one can be without two, not vice versa).
• Sensing to sense-desire, understanding to will: more like cause and effect. Even for God we first understand that He has understanding and then see He must have will, though His will is His understanding, not as in us.

His words #

• eye or ear “equivocally”: lacking the power of seeing, an eye only in name, like “dead man”
• genera of powers: five, each a genus with more than one kind under it
• threptikon: “nutritive”; his “feeding or growing power” [ed.: nutritive/vegetative]
• aisthetikon, aisthesis: “sensing power”
• orektikon, appetitus: “desiring” or “wanting powers” [ed.: appetitive]
• kinetikon kata topon: “moving according to place” [ed.: locomotive]
• dianoetikon, dianoia: “thinking power,” “discursive power” (Shakespeare’s “discourse” = running)
• nous, intellectus: understanding, as opposed to thinking
• dianoetikē knowledge: from pre-existent knowledge (Posterior Analytics)
• ratio, ratiocinari: mind continuing in motion; epistēmē: coming to a halt
• “following upon every form is some kind of inclination”: Thomas’s ground for the desiring powers
• four grades of life / three souls: by “one without the other, not vice versa” and by degrees of immateriality
• five notions, four relations, three persons; “common breathing” [ed.: spiratio communis]
• appetitus sensitivus, appetitus intellectivus
• “the second sense of before”: one can be without the other, not vice versa

Texts #

Read in class

• Council of Vienne 1311-12 (canon of Clement V), against Peter John Olivi, on the soul as form of the body
• Fifth Lateran Council, session 8, 1513, against Pomponazzi, on the soul’s immortality, multiplicity and being form of the body
• Aristotle, De Anima ch. 3, n. 139, “of the aforesaid powers of the soul” (Thomas, lesson 5; Bk. II inferred)
• Thomas’s commentary on the same, the reason for five genera

Mentioned

• Hosea (ch. 8, he thinks), idols with eyes that see not
• Denzinger, Enchiridion Symbolorum; Neuner-Roos English collection; Catechism of the Catholic Church
• Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, beginning (induction on dianoetikē knowledge)
• Plato, Republic Bk. VI (four kinds of knowing, dianoia)
• De Anima Bk. III (inward senses; reason not a body; knowing and desiring move locomotion)
• Boethius, singular as sensed, universal as understood
• Shakespeare: “discourse” in defining reason; “things in motion sooner catch the eye”; The Tempest (spirits melted into thin air); Othello (“put out the light”)
• Heisenberg on the order and stability of living organisms
• Plato on natures as numbers (Aristotle: like numbers, not numbers)

His questions #

• Is a dead man a man? Only equivocally; not in the same sense as a living man, unlike “white man.”
• What is the Greek word for the first power, and what can it mean? threptikon, feeding or growing.
• In what sense is desiring like reasoning? Both aim at something you don’t have; both are more like motion.
• Where do you put the sensing powers, material or immaterial? Student: material, organ-dependent; he: something immaterial too, so in between.
• Does my eye become round when I look at the fan? No; shapes are received not as my own shape but as another’s, unlike clay or marble.
• What’s the first right-angle triangle in whole numbers? 3-4-5.
• Why don’t the desiring powers give a separate grade of life? They always accompany sensing (pleasure/pain, desire/aversion) and thinking (will).
• Why four grades of life but only three souls? Souls are distinguished by degrees of rising above matter; locomotion is no such leap.
• Could one soul cover two of the four grades? Yes: the second and third grades both belong to the animal soul.
• Why is the order of sensing to desiring different from the order among the four grades? It is more like cause and effect, not “one without the other, not vice versa.”