De Anima III: The Agent and Possible Intellect, and the Natural Light of Reason versus Faith

Orientation #

He refers back to “the two things we saw,” grasping and judging, and to the undergoing understanding treated “before chapter five” (prev. lecture). He postpones the question why we cannot understand without imagining to “not the next chapter, the chapter after that.” The previous class treated De Anima III.5 on possible and agent intellect; the next continues the immateriality of intellect and moves into chapter six.

The class, in order #

1. The light that enlightens every man (“enlightens every man that comes into this world”) #

The point: St John’s “light” in ch. 1 is not primarily the light of faith but the natural light of reason, which Aristotle here calls the acting upon understanding.

1. Not every man who comes into the world is enlightened by the light of faith; yet the text says every man is enlightened. So some other light must be meant, derived from the same source.
2. Aristotle calls the acting upon understanding a “habit” (a having) and “like light”; so this is “the natural light of reason, this inborn light.”

• Thomas appropriates grasping (knowing what a thing is) to the images, in which the determined natures of things lie; he appropriates judging, “the perfection of knowing,” to the natural light of reason.
• Things judged by the natural light: a whole is not more than a part; a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time in the same way. Some judged immediately, others reasoned out.
• Things not judged by natural light: the Trinity, the Incarnation. “There are three persons in God / there are not”: judgment is separation of true from false, and some separations need the light of faith.

2. Vision and light in the prophet (“three visions that can take place in the prophet”) #

Aside from Thomas’s commentary on Isaiah (following Jerome): the words “vision” and “light” are carried over from sight to prophecy, so prophetic light is a third thing beside faith and natural reason.

• Three visions: with ordinary eyes, in the imagination, with reason. Pharaoh has the imaginary vision but needs a prophet to interpret; Nebuchadnezzar sees writing on the wall (supernatural, but through his own eyes) yet does not understand. The one with intellectual vision has “the full power of prophecy.”
• Comparison Thomas makes: as the human soul has the full power of soul, the animal only some, the plant less.
• Prophet = one who sees things far off (procul).
• He is unsure whether Thomas or Jerome calls Isaiah the greatest prophet, “but he’s suddenly putting him very high.”

3. Student: is the undergoing understanding itself immaterial? (“the very nature of undergoing understanding is to be in potency”) #

The point: the two understandings stand as matter and agent, but within the order of the understandable.

• Undergoing understanding: by nature potency, able to receive. Like first matter “in the first book of the Natural Hearing” [ed.: Physics], but in the understandable order. Acting upon understanding: like the agent, or art (more obvious to us), that puts form into matter.
• “A very important proportion”: our understanding is “the lowest place of all,” like pure matter; angelic understanding like matter and form, partly actual by nature; divine understanding like pure form, pure act. “The more basic proportion”: acting understanding : undergoing understanding :: art/agent : matter.
• Student objection: the proportion is not exact, since the acting understanding does not act on the undergoing understanding. Reply: the images are like a tool; by acting on the images and separating out universal natures, it in a way acts on the undergoing understanding.
• Boundary with art: the artist already has the form of the chair in an understandable way. If the acting understanding already had the determinate natures, no images would be needed and “there’d be no reason for our soul to be joined to the body.” Because it is ordered to what is only potentially understandable, the soul is naturally joined to a body: cooperation of images and act of understanding.
• Postponed: why we never understand without imagining, and how that confuses people about immateriality (“let’s save that”).

4. Student persists: why immaterial? (“its proper object is that what it is is something material”) #

• Reply: immaterial, yes, but in the order of the understandable “only in potency,” as matter is potency in the sensible order. Hence its proper object is the what-it-is of material things; it knows angel and God only by analogy and negation. Student: “but it is a certain immaterial nature.” He: “yeah, you can say that.”
• Aristotle’s reasoning in the text: this mind is separate and impassible; the maker is “always more honorable than the one undergoing, and the principle than matter.” The previous readings showed the undergoing understanding immaterial yet in potency; a fortiori the power that makes its object actual is immaterial, and further (the fourth mark) it is act, hexis.

5. Why not just one understanding? (“nothing gives what it does not have”) #

1. Even an immaterial nature may be “like a tablet,” in potency to its object, as the senses are.
2. Senses need no active sense: material things act on them directly. The early Greeks spoke as if the understanding too were acted on by sensibles, so they did not distinguish it from sense (“both kind of a material body”).
3. Sense must be free of its object to receive it: tongue not salty, sweet, bitter, oily; eye’s liquid free of color. So the undergoing understanding, receiving the natures of all material things, lacks them all; it is mere ability, proportional to matter.
4. “Nothing gives what it does not have”: it cannot give itself the natures any more than the eye gives itself colors. Conclusion: there must be something analogous to art or the natural agent that makes things actually understandable, as light makes the visible.

6. Plato’s forms, the soul’s turning, and supernatural knowledge (“the soul is the place of forms”) #

• Plato: separate forms could act on the undergoing understanding as exterior sensibles act on sense. Aristotle saw that what-a-man-is does not exist apart from men, matter, and mind; it is separated from this and that man “only in the understanding part of the soul.” Hence his approval of those who call the soul the place of forms, i.e. of universals.
• The images cannot give the universal either: they hold the natures under material conditions, not actually understandable until what-it-is is separated. So Aristotle “was forced by the truth itself” to a second power.
• Republic: the soul turns from material things to the mathematical, then to the forms. Aristotle: the natural way is through sensibles, reasoning to immaterial things, known that they are, by likeness, and mostly by negation. “We can’t know them very well.”
• Supernatural exceptions: St Paul caught up to the third heaven (in the body or not, he does not know); Augustine and Thomas say he saw God face to face, transitorily. St John of the Cross, Dark Night: mortification, withdrawal from attachment; saints putting ashes in their food; levitation as an outward sign; but one is “pulled up by God,” not by the natural light.
• Attraction and danger of Plato for Christians: a likeness to supernatural elevation, but he speaks as if the soul turns itself around and knows immaterial things directly in this life, which is naturally impossible: “a temptation to pride.”
• Student: distinguish turning the mind from sensible things and turning the will from attachment. He agrees, and adds that God can illumine the soul without images, though the Apocalypse and Isaiah 6 (the Lord sitting) are full of images.
• Aside: Thomas, on Jerome’s prologue, quotes Dionysius on the necessity of sensible images; Isaiah excels in images (as our Lord teaches by parables) and in clarity, so some fathers call him “like a fifth gospel.”

7. Paragraph 338: the two together, and act before ability (“science in act is the same as the thing”) #

The point: after the undergoing understanding (before ch. 5) and the acting upon understanding (first two numbered parts), this paragraph treats “that part of the soul whereby we actually understand,” involving both.

• The text: science in act is the same as the thing; according to potency it is before in time in the one; “yet universally is not before in time.” “Very subtly.”
• The “ninth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics IX] has three parts: ability (passive sense), act, and their order. Act is before ability in definition and in goodness. In time: in the thing that goes from ability to act, ability is first (senses, reason, every student: “sometimes that’s a long time”); but simply, act is before any ability.
• Argument: what goes from ability to act does so by something already in act, since what is only in ability cannot give itself the act; if that too went from ability to act, something prior again; so in the beginning something is in act without ever having been in ability. True in the order of being and of knowing: ultimately the divine mind.
• Aristotle keeps the end of philosophy in view even in the biology, where the order of parts is studied “to admire the mind that designed” it.
• Aside: his teacher Kasurik [name as heard] quoted Albert the Great: to study anything for any reason other than to know God, unless forced by necessity, is a perverse attitude to knowing. Thomas: I study the body for the soul, the soul for the angels, the angels for God. Bernard of Clairvaux: the reason God should be loved is God.

8. Same as the thing: the soul is in some way all things (“my ear is all Mozart”) #

• Student asks “same in what sense”: same in form [transcript: “same number form”]. He receives the natures of things, so “in some sense I become all things,” spiritually, not materially. Material things have only their own nature; he has dog, cat, horse.
• Anticipating: the soul is in some way all things because the senses are all sensibles. Matter receives one color and must lose it to take another; the eye is all colors, the tongue all flavors, the ear all sounds, “all Mozart,” though not all at once.
• Anecdotes: Mozart B-flat sonata, Köchel 570, on the radio (102.5) driving up; his daughter playing its second movement at the Trivium school recital, the teacher’s “Mr Berquist always has a Mozart piece”; the second melody emerging underneath the first, then the return; a remark about a last piano sonata [unclear in recording]. Fall foliage, museum paintings that become part of you; his freshman English professor’s son writing letters from the Prado. “Even more so by the reason,” which becomes the nature of all things.
• Close: “yet universally it is not prior in time” hints at a mind that understands without ever having been able-before-actually-understanding.

His words #

• acting upon understanding; the active part, a habit/having, like light [ed.: agent intellect]
• undergoing understanding; by nature in potency, able to receive, “like a tablet” [ed.: possible/passive intellect]
• natural light of reason; inborn light, appropriated to judging
• light of faith; needed to judge what natural light cannot separate
• prophetic light / vision; carried over from sight; procul, far off
• Natural Hearing (heard “actual Hearing”) [ed.: Physics]
• ability; potency, here in the passive sense [ed.: potency]
• hexis; the fourth mark, “as act”
• “nothing gives what it does not have”
• soul as place of forms; place of universals
• ninth book of wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics IX]
• science in act; the same as the thing (same in form)

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, De Anima III.5, with Thomas’s commentary, paragraph 338 (“science in act is the same as the thing…”)
• John 1 (“this was the light that enlightens every man”) Mentioned
• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Isaiah, prologue/Jerome’s prologue; Isaiah ch. 6
• Aristotle, Physics I (first matter); Metaphysics IX (inferred, “ninth book of wisdom”); biology books
• Plato, Republic (turning the soul)
• St Paul, Epistle to the Corinthians (third heaven); Augustine and Thomas on it
• Daniel (Nebuchadnezzar’s writing on the wall) (inferred); Pharaoh’s dreams (inferred)
• St John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul
• Apocalypse; Dionysius on sensible images; Albert the Great; Bernard of Clairvaux; Thomas on studying body, soul, angels, God

His questions #

• “Was every man that comes into this world enlightened by the light of faith?” No; so John means the natural light of reason.
• “Is the undergoing understanding itself actually immaterial?” (student) Yes, but in the order of the understandable it is only in potency, like matter.
• “Why can’t there just be one understanding?” (student) Because what is in ability cannot give itself what it lacks; something in act must make the object actual.
• “Which is true? There are three persons in God, or not?” Natural reason cannot judge; the light of faith is required.
• “Science in act is the same as the thing — same in what sense?” (student) Same in form: the understanding receives the natures of things and so becomes all things spiritually.
• “How does something go from ability to act?” By something already in act; so ultimately by something never in ability, the divine mind.
• “Why don’t we understand without at the same time imagining?” Left open, saved for the chapter after next.