Speaking About God: Wise vs. Wisdom, and the Two Objections on Undergoing

Orientation #

He opens “I was giving a little consequence of this for theology, right? And just come back to that moment now”: the consequence of Aristotle’s point that the proportioned object of our reason is the what-it-is of a sensed thing (prev. lecture). He announces that the active understanding / agent intellect is “for the next chapter”, “next time”. The previous class read De Anima III on intellect as receptive and on a thing vs. “what it was to be” it; the next continues with 334–335 and the division of speculative philosophy. A text-matching system found Summa Theologiae I, q. 2 over about ten minutes of the audio; the transcript itself names only the Summa Contra Gentiles for the God-is-good / God-is-goodness chapters.

The class, in order #

1. Matter and form in our natural way of knowing (“Divina Substantia, Forma est”) #

Point: our reason’s proportioned object is always a composite, so a non-composite God is beyond its natural way.

1. In natural things there is matter and form; in mathematics too, since Aristotle sometimes says there is “understandable matter”, the continuous, “the imaginable matter”.
2. God is not such a composition: Avicenna, Divina substantia forma est; pure act, no matter.
3. Matter is what can be something, form that by which it is that thing: the wood is not the chair by being wood but by the shape received; “the shape is not the chair, but the shape is that by which the wood is a chair”. Conclusion: we think of being something and that by which one is something as different, and carry that into speech about God.

2. Abstract and concrete: health and healthy (“health is that by which the body is healthy”) #

Point: the concrete name signifies the haver, the abstract the had, and this implies a real distinction.

• health vs. healthy: the body is healthy by health; health itself is not healthy. Body = subject/matter, health = form.
• wise vs. wisdom: the mind of Aristotle is wise by the wisdom it has; the wisdom is not wise. A student tried “the wisdom it has is wise”; he corrected: no, the mind is wise.
• sugar is sweet, not sweetness; the haver and the had are not the same.
• this book is coloured, not colour; colour is “that by which the coloured is coloured”. What all four show: the haver is like matter, the had like form, and the two are really distinct.
• Aside: Pythagoras, called wise for his theorem, said “don’t call me wise, God alone is wise”; the Greek philosophers either say God alone is wise or only God perfectly. Heraclitus may be reaching for the same when he says the divine nature has judgment and the human does not.

3. Affirm and deny: God is wise and God is wisdom (“God is whatever He has”) #

Point: neither word fits God, so with Dionysius and Thomas we must both affirm and deny each.

1. Could God be wise with no wisdom? No; that “doesn’t even make sense”.
2. But if God has wisdom as Socrates does, we admit composition in God.
3. So affirm “God is wise” (He is), deny it insofar as “wise” implies the haver–had distinction.
4. Affirm “God is wisdom” because God is altogether simple and “is whatever He has” (Thomas “often says”); deny it insofar as “wisdom” would make Him only that by which something else is wise and not Himself wise, “just like health is not healthy”. Same for just/justice, merciful/mercy. Harder to see grammatically with love: St John’s “God is love” is like “God is wisdom”; in me there is a distinction between my loving you and that by which I love you, in God none.

• Same for an angel: “does Gabriel have a nature?” Yes in some sense, but “has a nature” seems to make the angel and what it is non-identical, as Socrates and human nature are.
• Summa Contra Gentiles has one capitulum showing God is good and another showing God is goodness itself.
• Can we invent an adequate word? Only “words without any thoughts to correspond”; in this life we cannot transcend our natural way of understanding, so we use both ways and “see a defect in both”.

4. Why many true statements about one simple God (“the multiplicity in meaning there is in our mind”) #

Point: the difference of meaning in “God is good / just / merciful / knowing” is in us, not in God.

1. If these statements teach us something, subject and predicate do not have the same meaning; otherwise we are saying “a rose a rose a rose”.
2. Yet in the thing they are identical. “What’s one in God is multiplied in the creature.”
3. Thomas quotes a prophet (he cannot locate the book): in that day there will be only one name for God, i.e. the beatific vision, where even our knowledge has no multiplicity, “because then you wouldn’t be seeing God as He is”.
4. In this life we know God through creatures, hence through their multiplicity. The circle: many radii start from one centre and end at different points; the end points are the creatures. Our mind, “as Sherlock Holmes says, naturally backwards”, goes from the many end points to the one origin, defining the one point as “the beginning of this line”, “the beginning of that line” — God as beginning of all true love, all true knowledge, all true justice. This is how Thomas, “going back to what Aristotle said here”, sees why the names are many and why, with Dionysius, we affirm and deny them.

5. Plato’s world of forms, what it got wrong and what it saw (“the universals exist only in the mind as universal”) #

Point: Plato’s separated forms are a false picture of immaterial things but suggest a true one.

• Plato posited a mathematical world and a world of universal forms because he held that “the way we know” must be “the way things are”: we know the universal apart from singulars, so it exists apart. Forms exist apart from singulars and from our mind; matter somehow partakes of them, our mind somehow contacts them.
• Republic: we face sensible things; the soul must be turned around, the mathematical world (more immaterial, but still the continuous) being the midway point, then all the way to the forms. Hence Plato’s attraction for the Church Fathers speaking of the dark night of the soul — but that is supernatural knowledge; the natural way is reasoning from sensible things.
• Aristotle in the Physics: what a man is cannot exist outside the mind by itself, for then no matter, so not “animal with reason”; bring in matter and you bring back the individual. Likewise a triangle outside the mind must be in the continuous and singular.
• What Plato saw: in the world of forms there is only one of each kind (a form of man, not of Socrates). So too in real immaterial things the individual and the nature would be identical, and no two of one kind. “Plato, in some sense, is always mistaken. Other ways, is seeing something.”
• Aristotle’s “biting criticism”: Plato imagined immaterial natures as material ones “elevated”, like Homer making Zeus a Superman — Zeus and Hera on opposite sides of the Trojan War, Zeus worried about domestic friction; Xenophanes [ed.: transcript “Xenophon”]: if horses could make statues their gods would look like horses.
• Student: are angels then perfectly simple? No: no matter–form composition, but a composition of what they are with their existence. In us a double composition (matter/form, nature/existence); in angels a simple nature not identical with its existence; only in God nature and existence are the same — “I am who am”. “Way ahead of ourselves. Another part of philosophy.”
• Asides: his old teacher Kasurik: at death you will take your guardian angel for God and be told “I’m way down”. One of Thomas’s reasons for the Incarnation: so we won’t have devil worship, since the devil’s nature is tremendous though his will is evil; God became man to give proper respect for human nature.

6. Preview: two objections as a bridge to the active understanding (“there’s another piece here in the jigsaw puzzle”) #

Point: 331–335 raises two objections and answers both, but the answers open the need for the agent intellect.

1. Universals do not exist out in the world to act on our reason directly; images and sensations are all of the singular.
2. Material singulars cannot directly act on the immaterial understanding.
3. Having rejected Plato’s world of forms that could act on reason as sensibles act on sense, Aristotle is left with a “hiatus”, a gap. Conclusion: man needs another ability, active, to separate the universal from the singular and make actually understandable what is only potentially so — “active understanding”, Latin agent intellect. Deferred to next chapter.

7. First objection (331): how can what has nothing in common be acted upon? (“some kind of suffering or undergoing”) #

Point: if the mind is simple, impassible, unmixed (like Anaxagoras’s greater mind), how can it undergo, since a thing acts on another “insofar as there is something common present in both”?

• One body acts on another because both are material: a cookie press on dough, a seal stamped in wax; the harder imprints its shape on the softer by contact. An immaterial thing has no surface; how can it even come in contact?
• His reply is partly that “suffering/undergoing” has more than one meaning and the reason undergoes neither as matter does nor exactly as sense does; but “a little bit of a problem” remains — how a material thing acts on an immaterial one — cleared only when there is something active in the soul, since what is in sense or imagination is not actually universal, so not actually understandable, so not able to act on reason; once actually understandable it is already in a way immaterial.

8. Second objection (332): why doesn’t everything understandable understand? (“the soul is in some way all things”) #

Point: if understanding in act is the understandable in act, why isn’t understanding found everywhere, and how does reason understand itself?

• Manifesting “the soul is in some way all things” (anticipated from the section on sense): what has the nature of a dog is a dog; having the definition of dog and cat in my reason, I have their natures, so I am in some way both. In sensing, what has red is red; seeing red I have red in my eye, so my eye is in a way red, green, etc. Hence the soul appears more like God than anything material, since God is in some way all things — Thomas on “I will show you every good”: “that is myself”.
• The puzzle: if what understands and the understandable are one, why doesn’t the understandable understand? If reason understands itself by becoming understandable, why doesn’t everything else that becomes understandable understand itself?
• Text of 332 read: either mind will be present in the other understandables (if it is not understandable due to something else, the understandable being one in species), or it has something mixed with it that makes it understandable like the rest.

9. Reply to the first: the many meanings of suffering/undergoing (“the English word suffering seems to be stuck”) #

Point: paschein / passio first means suffering (destructive of nature: the passion of our Lord), then is carried over to receiving what is not destructive, then to receiving what perfects; English “suffering” is stuck on the first meaning.

• “Passions” of the soul: Beatrice to Benedick, “which of my good qualities did you first suffer love?” — acted upon against his will, yet not contrary to his nature.
• His translation “undergoing” = being acted upon; still carries some of the first sense (“under the weather” = the elements made you sick; “he’s undergone a lot in life” = suffered), but less tied to it.
• Gabriel Marcel rightly criticised Sartre for taking all undergoing as destructive of one’s integrity or freedom, and all acting on another as “imposing” (an English word whose first sense is bad): then no friendship, father and child, teacher and student; friends act on each other when one is “down in the dumps”. Monsignor Dionne: such people “can’t move the word” from its first meaning.
• “Loss”: bad to lose your mind or heart — “depends upon to whom you lose it”; to lose your heart to God is a gain, being fulfilled.
• Senses: an object too strong ruins the taste buds — that is suffering; receiving an object so as to know it fulfils the sense. Reason cannot be corrupted as an organ can, so its undergoing is simply a perfecting.
• Parallel translation problem: dunamis, first an active power (dynamo, dynamite), rendered potentia / “power”; “power” is stuck on the active sense (Cassius Clay beating Berquist, who seems to have no power). He prefers “ability”: the pianist has ability, but the piano is “able to be played”; Berquist “is able to be hit, able to be beaten” — breakable, beatable, malleable. “Ability” and “undergoing” carry over to the later meanings; “power” and “suffering” do not. Sometimes there is no word at all.

10. The mind is nothing in act before it understands: the writing tablet (“I come to class, and I race the boards”) #

Point: undergoing “according to something common” was distinguished earlier; mind is in potency to the understandables and nothing of them in act before it understands.

• He reads: “we see that the mind is somehow in potency to the understandables, but before it understands, it is nothing in act”, referring back to the senses, which undergo in a way not contrary to their nature — receiving, and receiving what perfects.
• Clay before receiving sphere or cube is none of them in act, but in receiving one shape it loses the one it had; the senses do not, and “even more so” the reason does not. Hence the comparison to a writing tablet, paper, slate, blackboard before anything is written — his joke of erasing the boards each class.
• This “in a way solves the objection”: reason does not receive as body receives from body. What remains: how a material thing, not actually understandable, acts on the immaterial — what makes it actually understandable is “another ability of man”, the act[ive] understanding of the next part. Class ends: “not yet been clarified”.

His words #

• “proportioned object” of reason: the what-it-is of a sensed or imagined thing, always matter and form.
• “understandable matter”: the continuous, “imaginable matter”, in mathematics [ed.: intelligible matter].
• haver and the had: the subject that has (matter) vs. the form by which it is such.
• “God is whatever He has”: Thomas’s formula for divine simplicity.
• affirm and deny: Dionysius’s and Thomas’s double use of every name of God.
• “the mind is naturally backwards”: from many creatures to one origin (attributed to Sherlock Holmes).
• undergoing: his translation of paschein / passio [ed.: being acted upon, passion]; three meanings — destructive suffering, receiving, receiving what perfects.
• ability: his translation of dunamis / potentia / potens, covering the passive sense (able to be hit) as well as the active [ed.: potency].
• “active understanding”: agent intellect; the ability to separate the universal from the singular and make it actually understandable.
• “the soul is in some way all things”: by sensing and understanding it is what it senses and understands.
• “Divina substantia forma est”: Avicenna, God is pure form, pure act.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, De Anima III, 331 (first objection: simple, impassible, nothing in common), 332 (whether mind is itself understandable), and the reply “undergoing according to something common… nothing in act”, writing tablet.
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 2 (verified by text-matching over ~10 min; not named in the transcript). Mentioned
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles: one capitulum that God is good, another that God is goodness itself; the passage on statements about God; the prophet quoted, “in that day there will be only one name for God” (book not located by him).
• Avicenna, Divina substantia forma est.
• Plato, Republic (turning the soul around; the mathematical midway).
• Aristotle, Physics (what a man is cannot exist outside the mind).
• Anaxagoras (mind unmixed); Pythagoras; Heraclitus; Xenophanes (horses’ gods); Homer (Zeus and Hera).
• St John, “God is love”; Exodus “I am who am”; God to Moses/Abraham “I will show you every good” with Thomas’s gloss.
• Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing (Benedick and Beatrice); Gabriel Marcel on Sartre; Monsignor Dionne; his teacher Kasurik.

His questions #

• What’s the difference in the way health and healthy signify? Health is abstract, healthy concrete; the body is healthy by the health it has.
• Is health healthy, or something else healthy? Something else — a body — is healthy by having health.
• Would you say that sugar is sweetness? No; it is sweet because it has sweetness; haver and had are not the same.
• Could God be wise if He had no wisdom? No, it doesn’t even make sense; but “has wisdom” seems to admit composition, so we affirm and deny both “wise” and “wisdom”.
• Can you invent a word that would be adequate to God? No; you’d use words with no thoughts corresponding; in this life we must use both ways and see the defect in both.
• When we say God is just, merciful, good, do subject and predicate have the same meaning? No; the multiplicity is in our mind, not in God; what is one in God is multiplied in creatures.
• Does that mean the angels are perfectly simple and not composite? (student) No: no matter and form, but a composition of nature and existence; only in God are they identical.
• Why doesn’t everything that’s understandable also understand? Raised as Aristotle’s puzzle in 332; left open in this class.
• What does it mean to say you’re under the weather? The elements have acted on you so as to make you sick — the first, harmful sense of undergoing.
• Is loss something good or not? Depends on to whom you lose it; losing your heart to God is a gain.