The Soul in the Summa: Introduction to Question 75

Orientation #

He says “since I saw you” he had been thinking again about the Hail Mary, the Psalms and the Rosary, and about “the symmetry I was explaining” of the sung parts of the Mass (prev. lecture). Today begins q.75 “but not going to go through the whole thing”; q.90 on (production of man) will not be studied. The previous class treated music, Thomas on the Psalms (prayer vs. praise) and the Mass; the next takes up q.75 a.1, whether the soul is a body. (The matching system flagged a “Note on the Eight Books of Natural Hearing” handout p.7 and DHB Vol III p.404; nothing in the transcript shows him reading either, so the class is taken as treating the q.75 proemium.)

The class, in order #

1. The proemium: angels, bodies, then man (“after the consideration of the spiritual creature”) #

Point: Thomas situates man after the angels and the bodily creature because man “brings the two together.”

• The Summa’s order (angels, material world, man) is the order of the canticles of praise: the three boys in the furnace (“Bless the Lord, all your works of the Lord…”) and a Psalm “in the late 140s… one forty-eight” begin with angels, go down to the irrational material world, end with man. This order is “peculiar to theology.”
• Hail Mary / Rosary aside: 150 Hail Marys imitate 150 Psalms; the Hail Mary’s two parts correspond to the two ways the Psalms proceed. Thomas’s Psalms commentary: everything is per modum orationis vel laudis, prayer or praise. Broad sense of “prayer” has four kinds (asking goods, asking forgiveness, thanking, praising); he groups the first two as prayer strictly, the last two as praise.
• Mass symmetry A B C B A: Kyrie and Agnus Dei (A) are prayer for mercy; Gloria and Sanctus/Benedictus (B) are praise; Credo (C) is neither but confession of faith.
• Question put: which is closer to faith, prayer or praise? A student first says prayer is closer to hope. His answer: praise, because even the way praise is divided is the way faith is divided: the Gloria divides by Father, Son, Holy Spirit like the Nicene Creed; Sanctus (divinity, Trinity) and Benedictus (humanity of Christ) divide as the Athanasian Creed and Thomas’s Compendium do. The Our Father divides by goods asked and evils to be freed from, “not really the division of faith.” Both prayer and praise presuppose faith, but praise is closer, and stands closer to the Creed in the Mass.
• Why God became man and not an angel or a dog: among the reasons, in uniting human nature He unites the whole of creation, man being composed of spiritual substance and bodily nature.
• Man more like a beast or an angel? A text of Thomas: by body more like the beast (angels have no liver; cats do); by spiritual soul more like an angel; and, citing Aristotle Ethics X, “something is what it’s most of all,” so the soul is more man than the body. Evidence: when someone dies “even the common man says he’s gone” though the body is still there.

2. What the theologian considers about man (“from the side of the soul”) #

Point: Thomas’s treatment of man (q.75–89 nature; q.90 on production, going back to Genesis and Adam) considers the soul, and the body only in its relation to the soul.

• Contrast with Aristotle, who after the De Anima goes “more and more down into the body” of man and the other animals; the theologian doesn’t care about that, or only secondarily.
• Reason: the soul is made in the image and likeness of God, and everything in theology is considered in reference to God. Augustine’s Soliloquies: just two things, God and the soul, “interesting emphasis.”

3. Dionysius’s three: essence, powers, operation (“three things in spiritual substances”) #

Point: q.75–89 divides by Dionysius’s essence (nature), virtus (powers, abilities) and operation.

• Citation: Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy ch. 11. Aside: Albert the Great commented on the Celestial Hierarchy, Thomas on the De divinis nominibus, which he says he has and has read more than once.
• Student’s objection: “my mind just rebels… why not two? why not four? who is Dionysius to tell us?” His reply: Thomas could have quoted Aristotle, since De Anima II has the same order: first define the soul (with the divisions and then the demonstration of the definition), then the powers (feeding, shared with plants; sensing; understanding; local motion).
• Difficulty he raises: this exposition order looks like the contrary of what Aristotle and Thomas teach, that we know powers through operations and nature through powers. Solution: in treating the nature, he already refers to powers and operations; when Aristotle demonstrated the soul is the first act of the body, the middle term was taken from the operations. So one comes to know what the soul is through some knowledge of its powers and activities, and only afterwards takes each power up more distinctly and completely, thereby knowing the plant, animal and human soul more fully. Example: Aristotle first shows the understanding immaterial because it knows all material things (reasoning from operation), and only later details the difference between understanding what a thing is and understanding true or false. “You’re going to see that all along.”
• Aside: teaching the De Anima he has sometimes begun with the powers to avoid this misunderstanding; did it help? “as much as they ever catch on.”
• q.84 proemium: only the acts of the understanding and appetitive powers are considered; digesting etc. do not pertain directly to the theologian, and the appetitive acts belong to moral science, treated in the Second Part. Hence “moral theology” is more the Second Part, “dogmatic” more the First.

4. The seven articles of q.75, and articles 1–2 (“whether the soul is a body”) #

Point: q.75 considers the soul secundum se, q.76 in its union with the body; seven articles (“seven is a symbol of wisdom,” though not every question has seven).

• a.1: soul not a body; the objections show why people think it is. Most imagine the soul as an air-like continuous body: Homer; Dante, who knows better, still shows souls in Purgatory with the man’s shape, recognisable but unhuggable — “how can you hug the air?” Beyond the negative conclusion, a.1 argues the soul is a form.
• a.2: whether subsistent. Substance vs. accident: an accident exists only in a subject; a substance is that to which it belongs not to be in another. Why “subsistent” rather than “substance”? Because he will show the human soul is not a complete substance. So a form that is subsistent: a substantial form.

5. The Phaedo’s two probable opinions (“the harmony of the body”) #

Point: the two most probable pre-Aristotelian opinions each hold part of the truth, and Aristotle puts the two parts together.

• Simmias, from the Pythagoreans: soul is the harmony, i.e. the order or organisation of the body — an accidental form. The modern biologist says the same without the word “soul”: living and non-living bodies are the same materials, differently combined; piano in tune vs. out of tune, car needing a tune-up (same parts, different arrangement). They think a living cell could be made by combining the right materials in the right ratios.
• Socrates: the soul is a complete immaterial substance imprisoned in the body.
• Student asks for an example of accidental form: health, shape. “Form” means act of matter, not just shape: shape, disposition, ratio, order. Manhattan: rye whiskey and sweet vermouth (matter), two to one (form). Carbon monoxide 1:1 kills you, carbon dioxide 2:1 is fine — same matter. “cat” and “act”: same letters, different order; the order exists only when the letters are brought together, not subsistent.
• The truth in each: Simmias — the soul is a form, an act (but not accidental); Socrates — the human soul is substantial, even subsistent (but not a complete substance). Whole truth: substantial form of a body. What shows the human soul substantial is its having an activity not bodily. Aristotle kept the truth of each and left out the falsity of each. Having seen a.2, one tends to the opposite extreme of a complete substance.

6. Articles 3–4: animal souls; is man only a soul? (“does the soul do anything not in the body”) #

Point: a.3 excludes the Platonists’ view that brute souls subsist; a.4 excludes the view that man is his soul.

• Aristotle’s proemium of the De Anima: whether the human soul survives death depends on whether it does anything not in the body. A thing must exist before it can do something, but we know what it does before what existence it has; so existence only in the body would mean operation only in the body. Understanding, an operation not through a bodily organ, shows an existence not immersed in the body (shared in by the body, not immersed). Animals have nothing higher than sensing, always in an organ, so their existence is tied to the body.
• Phaedo’s last argument: not quite perfect, many difficulties, but approaching what Aristotle does, under Cebes’s prodding for a necessary argument; an instance of “the second road,” from reasonable guesses toward reasoned-out knowledge.
• a.4: an early Plato dialogue (he forgets its name; authenticity questioned, he thinks it authentic) asks whether man is soul, body, or both, and concludes man is just a soul. Phaedo: Crito’s “where shall we bury you?” — “you have to catch me first.”
• His answer from inward experience (the way we know the soul): the one who feels pain in his body and the one thinking how to relieve it are one and the same; therefore the body is part of us.
• Socrates’s argument: user and used differ; we use our body for good or bad; so the body is not me. “A lot of people are uneasy… but have a hard time answering.” A student suggests: we use our soul to think, too. His reply: distinguish a tool joined to me and part of me (the hand, “the tool of tools”) from an extrinsic tool (knife, fork). Aside: Albert, following Boethius, on whether logic is part or tool of philosophy — a tool can be a part. Thomas uses the same distinction for the Incarnation: Christ’s human nature is the joint tool of the divinity, hence a universal causality no human nature could have. So Socrates is right about one kind of tool; the body may be the other.
• Order of the articles restated: after a.2 one may think all souls subsist (a.3 excludes) or that soul is the whole man (a.4 shows man composed of soul and body), making explicit the angels / bodies / man scheme of the proemium.

7. Articles 5–7: spiritual matter, incorruptibility, not an angel (“you’ll be like the angels”) #

Point: a.5 excludes the early Christian writers’ “spiritual matter”; a.6 incorruptibility follows from subsistence; a.7 the soul is not of the angels’ species.

• Angel vs. human soul: an angel is a complete substance, the soul not. If the soul were complete, the resurrection would make no sense; it is necessary that the whole man be there, and the body shares in good and bad deeds and so in reward or punishment, though the soul is the primary culprit.
• His little cousin’s death: the aunt in confession, “wasn’t she an angel?”; the priest, sober, doesn’t disturb her. Christ to the questioners about the woman who married seven brothers: you’ll be like the angels, not angels — still a soul incomplete without the body.
• “Saint Peter, pray for us”: Thomas explains as synecdoche, name of the whole for the part; not synecdoche for Christ (risen) or Mary — because of the Assumption. Aside: “Decarie” [ed.: as transcribed; possibly De Koninck, inferred] is said to have had an audience with Pius XII before the 1950 definition and given impressive arguments for it.
• “I’m an Augustinian, I don’t believe… the soul’s an incomplete person”: this gets you in trouble with the resurrection, an article of faith (“communion of saints, the resurrection of the body, life everlasting”). A student asks whether Augustine held soul-is-the-whole-man; he thinks Augustine knew both, so it is a false excuse.
• Manichaeans and to some extent Platonists: matter evil, so separation from body is escape from evil and rejoining it a defeat — an even greater impediment to the resurrection. St Paul against those taking resurrection spiritually: it would make our faith vain, and ours is included.
• a.7: taking the soul as an angel comes from likeness; likeness is the cause of deception, “a slippery thing, as Plato says.”
• Closing: I study the body to study the soul, the soul to study the angels, the angels to study God; each more like God than the one below.

His words #

• proemium; Thomas’s introductory paragraph situating the part in the whole.
• per modum orationis vel laudis; the two ways the Psalms proceed.
• praise vs. prayer; praise closer to faith because divided as faith is.
• “something is what it’s most of all”; his rendering of Aristotle Ethics X.
• virtus; “powers, its abilities” [ed.: potencies].
• the second road; from reasonable guesses toward reasoned-out knowledge.
• subsistent; substantial but not a complete substance, existing by itself.
• accidental form; shape, disposition, ratio, order of the matter; “act of the matter.”
• substantial form of a body; the whole truth about the soul.
• immersed in the body; existence tied to the body, as with animals and plants.
• joint tool vs. extrinsic tool; hand (“tool of tools”) vs. knife.
• synecdoche; name of the whole given to the part (“Saint Peter, pray for us”).
• likeness is the cause of deception; his gloss on the angel/soul confusion.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I, q.75 proemium (read and glossed through).
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I, q.84 proemium (opening lines read).
• Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy ch. 11 (as quoted in the proemium).

Mentioned

• Psalms of praise: “one forty-eight”; canticle of the three boys in the furnace; Thomas’s commentary on the Psalms.
• Nicene Creed; Athanasian Creed; Thomas, Compendium (theologiae, inferred); the Our Father.
• Thomas, “a text” on man more like beast or angel (locus not given); Aristotle, Ethics X.
• Augustine, Soliloquies.
• Albert the Great, commentary on the Celestial Hierarchy; Thomas, on De divinis nominibus.
• Aristotle, De Anima I (opinions of predecessors), II (definition, powers), proemium (survival question).
• Plato, Phaedo (Simmias, Socrates, Cebes, Crito); an unnamed early dialogue on whether man is soul or body [ed.: Alcibiades I, inferred].
• Homer; Dante, Purgatorio.
• Albert / Boethius on logic as part or tool of philosophy.
• Thomas on the Incarnation, human nature as joint tool.
• Gospel: the woman married to seven brothers, “like the angels”; St Paul on the resurrection.
• Pius XII, definition of the Assumption (1950).
• Flagged by the matching system but not evident in the transcript: “Note on the Eight Books of Natural Hearing” p.7; DHB Vol III p.404.

His questions #

• Which is closer to faith, prayer or praise? Praise, because it is divided as the creeds are (Gloria: Trinity; Sanctus/Benedictus: divinity/humanity).
• Is man more like a beast or more like an angel? By body more like a beast, by soul more like an angel, and a thing is what it is most of all, so more like an angel.
• Why does the theologian consider man from the side of the soul? The soul is made in the image and likeness of God, and theology considers everything in reference to God.
• Why three things in spiritual substances — why not two or four? (student) Aristotle’s De Anima follows the same order: nature, then powers, then operations.
• Doesn’t this order contradict the teaching that we know nature through powers and powers through operations? No: the nature is known through some knowledge of powers and operations, then each power is taken up more distinctly afterwards.
• Why does Thomas say “subsistent” rather than “substance”? Because he will show the human soul is not a complete substance.
• Does the human soul survive death? It depends on whether it does anything not in the body; understanding is such an operation, so its existence is not tied to the body.
• If user and used differ, and we use our body, is the body not me? A tool can be joined and a part of me (the hand), unlike an extrinsic tool (the knife); inward experience shows the one who feels pain and thinks is one.
• Is the separated soul an angel? No: like the angels, but a soul incomplete without the body; hence the resurrection.