Article Three: Are Animal Souls Subsistent? Sense vs. Intellect, Proportion, and Greek Humility

Orientation #

He opens with “Let’s look at Article Three” and closes: “Next time we’ll try to look at the fourth article, and if possible, the fifth article.” He recalls “the same principle we saw in the previous article” (as each thing has being, so it has operation) and “as we saw in the definition of the soul” (prev. lecture). Verified sources match the Phaedo-talk handout (p. 14) to his Phaedo digression, and a Physics I lectio 13 handout (first matter) to ~20 min of audio; the transcript itself shows only a back-reference to first matter, not a reading from that handout.

The class, in order #

1. The three objections (“Let’s look at Article Three”) #

Point: he reads the three arguments that beast souls are subsistent, noting which book of the De Anima answers each.

1. Man agrees in genus with the other animals; man’s soul subsists; therefore the others’ souls do. He glosses: “putting the souls all kind of on the same level.”
2. Sense is to sensibles as understanding is to understandables; understanding understands without the body; so sense grasps sensibles without the body; beast souls sense; so they subsist “for a like reason.”
3. The soul of the beast moves the body; the body is “not the mover, but the moved”; so the soul has an operation (moving) without the body. He notes this is “one way to play the argument.” He flags: the third is solved by De Anima III, the first two by De Anima II.

2. The sed contra and the Book of Church Dogmas (“the book of what church dogmas”) #

Point: Thomas cites the Book of Church Dogmas: we believe only man has a substantivum (subsisting, substantial) soul; beast souls are not subsistent.

• The book, he says, is in the Patrologia, attributed to Gennadius (a student adds “Maximus”; “falsely attributed to Augustine”). He compares it to the Enchiridion Symbolorum: a collection of texts from councils, popes, fathers, “some book that Thomas had” that we don’t have in that form.

3. The body of the article: ancients, Plato, Aristotle (“made no distinction between sense and understanding”) #

Point: the ancients confused sense and understanding and made both bodily; Plato distinguished them but made both incorporeal; Aristotle holds only understanding is without an organ.

• Ancients (and “modern scientists are something like that too”): no distinction, both attributed to a bodily principle.
• Plato, “the opposite extreme”: distinguishes them, but sensing too belongs to the soul per se; if so, beast souls would subsist.
• Aristotle: only understanding is exercised without a bodily organ; sensing happens with a bodily change (in seeing the pupil is changed by the form of colour). So the sensing soul has no operation by itself; every operation is of the composite (“the conjoint”); hence beast souls do nothing by themselves and are not subsistent.
• Principle repeated from a.2: as each thing has being, so it has operation. Argument form: if beast souls were subsistent, they would have an operation not in the body; they have none; therefore not subsistent — “reasoning correctly, I think, from the negation of the consequent.”

4. Digression: truth between two extremes, Phaedo (“truth is in between two extremes”) #

Point: as in the Phaedo, so here, Aristotle takes the part of truth in both opposed opinions.

• Phaedo: Socrates — soul an immaterial, complete substance distinct from the body, “like a man in a room” or a prisoner, so it exists before and after the body (as he exists before entering and after leaving the room). Simmias — soul the harmony/organization of the body, an accidental form (modern biologists would say the like, without the word “soul”), so it exists neither before nor after.
• The truth, which “Aristotle finally saw”: the soul is a substantial form — substantial (with Plato) but not a complete substance; a form (with Simmias) but not accidental. Hence: not before the body (created for this body, so God creates it when the body is ready — “that’s why your mother and father are important”) but after it (because subsistent). Neither “before and after” nor “neither.”
• Applied here: one extreme says no human soul is immortal; the other says even the souls of animals (“Orange,” the cat) are immortal.
• Aside: student paper implying animals go to heaven; his margin note “Pets, dogs and cats do not go to heaven.” The parent’s answer to a child: if your pet is necessary for your happiness it will be there (i.e. it will be unimportant). A claim about St Pio: “show me the text.”
• Student: did Aristotle have the Catholic conception of the soul coming from God? — Yes: in the Generation of Animals the human soul does not come from the parents; he knew it does not pre-exist but does survive.

5. Digression: reason without faith; providence (“human reason, without the faith”) #

Point: Aristotle, before Christianity and uninfluenced by the Jews, shows reason can reach these truths; providence uses even unbelievers as witnesses.

• Augustine (he thinks) on the unconverted Jews: their hostility makes them witnesses to the authenticity of the Old Testament prophecies on which Christians reason, so pagans cannot say the books were forged.
• Likewise on homosexuality: not opposed “just because I’m a Catholic” — Plato’s Athenian Stranger in the Laws proposes a law against it as contra naturam, in a society that tolerated it.
• Porphyry’s Isagoge: written by a violent anti-Christian (books burnt by Christian emperors, per Augustine, City of God), yet paraphrased by Albert, commented by Cajetan, used by Thomas in the Summa Contra Gentiles; pagans, Mohammedans and Christians all see it as fundamental.
• Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics: adultery always wrong (his clear examples); Topics: one who says you shouldn’t honour father and mother “doesn’t need an argument; he needs punishment” — the fourth commandment reachable by reason.
• Aside: the Alabama judge and the Ten Commandments statue.

6. Reply to the first objection: genus and species (“some things pertain to the genus”) #

Point: man agrees with animals in genus but differs in species, and species difference follows difference of form; not every difference of form makes a difference of genus.

• “Rational animal”: animal taken from what is material in man, rational from the form.
• The division of soul into understanding, sensing, feeding/reproducing is, in Thomas, sometimes a division of a potestative whole: the whole power is in the understanding soul; the animal has some of it, the plant only some of what the animal has.

7. Reply to the second objection: like in potency, unlike in organ (“in a proportion there’s always some likeness”) #

Point: sense and understanding are alike in both being in potency to their objects (both an undergoing, as Aristotle said), but unlike in that sense undergoes with a bodily change.

• Sign: excessive sensibles corrupt the sense — too bright a light blinds; factory noise (“bang, bang, bang”) and rock bands deafen (doctors concerned); men burn out taste more than women with salt, pepper, hot food.
• The opposite in understanding: having understood the greatest understandables one understands lesser things better. His own experience: after the treatise on the Trinity lesser things seem easy; TAC students returning to Euclid after higher math; solid geometry then plane geometry (“it’s all plain, it’s all explained”). “That’s why all the good philosophers I’ve known have appreciated Mozart” — music representing what is understandable by participation, since the emotions partake of reason.
• Taste contrast: no Cabernet Sauvignon with pepperoni pizza or spaghetti (only a strong Chianti); wine-tasters want white bread, nothing potent. So reason “is not bodily in the way the sense organs are”: no organ destroyed by the greatness of the object.
• Aside: “pepperoni is the soul of pizza.”

8. Digression: seeing in what way things are alike (“in what way they are alike”) #

Point: in a proportion, especially between things far apart, one must see wherein the likeness consists.

• 4:6 as 2:3 — not in being even-to-odd (someone once concluded 4:6 is even-to-odd), but in 4 being the same parts of 6 that 2 is of 3.
• First matter is to man and dog as clay to sphere and cube (back-reference): not in clay being an actual substance and shapes accidents (man and dog are substances; first matter is substance in ability), but in clay being able to be either shape, not both at once, and while one still able to be the other; first is to second as ability to act.
• So here: senses and understanding alike in being at first in potency (understanding “like a tablet on which nothing is written”), unlike in that senses receive in a bodily organ.
• Plato: likeness is a dangerous, slippery thing. Metaphor: Christ the lion of the tribe of Judah (king of beasts, Christ a king; C. S. Lewis’s Aslan) vs. Paul’s devil as a lion seeking whom to devour (cruel like the cat to its victim). “Not a stony heart” vs. “the Lord is my rock.”

9. Reply to the second objection, end: fatigue of the body (“the body is fatigued, this is by accident”) #

Point (a student asks him to finish the reply): if the body is fatigued in understanding, this is by accident — not the understanding but the organs supplying the object, the images, insofar as understanding needs the sensing powers to prepare phantasms.

• Imagination in thinking is “a slave of reason,” and tires because of its organ. Aside: read a little Shakespeare to refresh the imagination.

10. Reply to the third objection: the moving power is twofold (“the moving power is twofold”) #

Point: neither moving power operates without the body.

• The commanding power is the appetite, and its operation is not without the body: anger, joy, all the passions come with bodily change — hence English “emotions” (motion of the body) and “feelings.”
• The executing power is obviously bodily: the members obey the appetite, and their act is to be moved, not to move.
• Examples: your own thumping heart when angry or afraid; the kitten’s body trembling on his shoulder when the dog comes.
• Emotions rise above ordinary matter (involve the sensing soul) and are higher in us than in beasts; but the will, following on reason (taken up later), is immaterial — choice is not in the body. We share emotions with animals, will with God and angels. C. S. Lewis calls angelic love “ferocious,” metaphorically.

11. Question period: did the Greeks know humility? (“the ancient philosophers … humility”) #

Point: against a spiritual author, he holds the Greeks had a natural humility, i.e. placing oneself under God.

• Pythagoras coining “philosopher”: “Don’t call me wise. God alone is wise … call me a lover of wisdom” — humility in the origin of the word.
• Heraclitus (teacher of Cratylus, Plato’s teacher): as ape to man, so man to God; as child to man, so man to God.
• Socrates in the Apology: the oracle meant wise as a man can be, knowing he doesn’t know.
• Aristotle in the proemium to wisdom: either God alone is wise, or God most of all; we not at all, or imperfectly. Anaxagoras’s greater mind behind the cosmos vs. our lesser mind.
• Aristotle attributes errors to alazoneia (boastfulness, the basic form of pride) — in the Rhetoric, men with political rhetoric think themselves politically wise through lack of education and alazoneia. He links to 1 John: epithumia sarkos, epithumia ophthalmōn, alazoneia (“pride of life”).
• Student: does he name the opposite virtue? — Not in the Nicomachean Ethics; Thomas’s reason: the Ethics gives virtues for living in the city (courage, moderation, friendliness, justice), while humility is primarily with respect to God. But philosophy needs “the humility of the slave boy” who admits his mistake to Socrates; most men, shown mistaken, get angry out of pride.

12. Question period: a merciful God; thanking vs. praising (“thanking him more for his mercy”) #

Point: he recalls no explicit Greek discussion of God’s mercy and justice, and turns to a reflection of his own.

• In heaven we would thank God more for his mercy (forgiveness, Incarnation) and praise him more for his justice (punishing the unrepentant) — thanking him for punishing the wicked “sounds kind of strange.” People who find hell hard forget God is just as well as merciful. He is “more sure about the first one”; one could thank for justice too. The recording cuts off mid-sentence.

His words #

• subsistent / substantivum: a soul “able to exist by itself.”
• understandables: objects of the understanding [ed.: intelligibles].
• the ancients: attributed both sense and understanding to a bodily principle.
• Book of Church Dogmas: Thomas’s source, attributed to Gennadius.
• accidental form vs. substantial form: Simmias’s harmony vs. the truth about the soul.
• composite, “the conjoint”: subject of every operation of the sensing soul [ed.: coniunctum].
• negation of the consequent: form of Thomas’s argument.
• potestative whole: division of soul in which the whole power is in the highest member.
• undergoing: sensing and understanding as receiving from the object.
• ability: [ed.: potency], as in “substance in ability,” “ability as to act.”
• tablet on which nothing is written: understanding in potency.
• contra naturam: Plato’s reason against homosexuality.
• vis motiva: the moving power, commanding (appetite) and executing (members).
• emotions / feelings: passions named from bodily motion and sensible change.
• alazoneia: boastfulness, “the basic form of pride.”
• epithumia sarkos, epithumia ophthalmōn: lust of the flesh, of the eyes.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 75, a. 3 (objections, sed contra, body, replies).

Mentioned

• Book of Church Dogmas (Gennadius; in the Patrologia); Enchiridion Symbolorum.
• Plato, Phaedo (Socrates, Simmias); Laws (Athenian Stranger); Apology; the slave-boy dialogue (Meno, inferred).
• Aristotle, De Anima II and III (inferred from “second and third book on the soul”); Generation of Animals; Nicomachean Ethics; Topics; Rhetoric; “proemium to wisdom” (Metaphysics I, inferred).
• Porphyry, Isagoge; Augustine, City of God; Albert the Great’s paraphrase; Cajetan’s commentary; Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles.
• Thomas, treatise on the Trinity (Summa Theologiae, inferred).
• Euclid; 1 John 2:16 (inferred); Acts of the Apostles; Isaiah; Psalm “Into his gates with thanksgiving”; Paul on the devil as a lion; C. S. Lewis (Aslan; angelic love); Shakespeare; Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Anaxagoras.

His questions #

• Why would anybody think the souls of the beasts are subsistent? Because, like Plato, one thinks sensing as well as understanding belongs to the soul by itself.
• Does the truth about the soul lie between Socrates and Simmias? Yes: substantial form — not before the body, but after it.
• Did Aristotle have the Catholic conception of the soul coming from God? Yes; in Generation of Animals the human soul does not come from the parents.
• In what way is 4:6 like 2:3? Not as even to odd, but 4 is the same parts of 6 that 2 is of 3.
• In what way is first matter to man and dog as clay to sphere and cube? As ability to act: able to be either, not both at once.
• Do very powerful objects corrupt the understanding as they do the sense? No; understanding the greatest understandables makes lesser ones easier.
• Did the Greeks have any understanding of humility? Yes, natural humility under God (Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Socrates, Aristotle).
• Does Aristotle treat humility as a virtue in the Ethics? No; per Thomas, the Ethics gives civic virtues, humility regards God.
• Did the Greeks have a concept of a merciful God? He recalls no explicit text; left open.
• In heaven, will we thank God more for his mercy or his justice? Thank him for mercy, praise him for justice; he is surer of the first.