Summa I, Q.75 a.5: Is the Soul Made of Matter and Form? Objections, the Answer, and Form Received Universally

Orientation #

He opens with “the fifth article now,” continuing the article-by-article reading of the question on the soul; he refers back to “the article where he showed that the soul is subsistent” (prev. lecture is a.4; the subsistence article is earlier). No announcement of next time. The previous class treated whether the soul alone is man; the next treats replies on the composition of angels from act and potency.

The class, in order #

1. Objection 1 and Dionysius: “teaches either things or words” #

The article is “kind of a strange” one, because some earlier writers spoke of a spiritual matter for the soul; not much of a question for us, but it comes up.

• Objection 1 read: potency (“ability”) is divided against act; all things in act partake of the first act, God, by partaking of whom all things are good, beings and living, as Dionysius teaches in the Divine Names.
• Aside on Thomas’s commentary on the Divine Names: Thomas in the Psalms commentary says “whoever teaches, teaches either things or words.” Teaching faith and morals = teaching things (the Summa: about God, the Trinity, the soul; only occasionally stopping to talk about the words). Teaching Scripture = teaching words (commentaries on John, on Paul: everything revolves around the words in front of you).
• Cornelius a Lapide (in his office): commenting on all of Scripture, every time “good” or “fire” is said of God he would have to repeat the explanation; so in one place (perhaps Acts, the Holy Spirit as fire) he is expansive and elsewhere refers back — beginning to gather everything about “fire” in one place.
• Divine Names is in between: it takes the names said properly of God (good, just, beautiful) and explains them for the whole of Scripture, not in the context of one book. A student: “it’s the attributes of God.” He insists: the title is Divine Names, so he talks about names, but in a way like Thomas talks about God — a transition from commenting on Scripture to talking about these things outside it. In the Summa he can point to where “God is good” is treated: questions four, five and six.

2. Objection 1 continued: “the first potency is the first matter” #

The point: the objection argues by analogy from participation in pure act to participation in pure potency.

• Student: non-living things exist by participation too, so why “living”? Answer: he said bona, entia — beings includes everything. God is “I am who am,” so all that is partakes of God insofar as it is; “God alone is good” (Christ), so good things partake of divine goodness; God is life itself, so living things partake of life.
• Then: whatever is in potency partakes of the first potency, which is first matter; the soul is in some way in potency (a man is sometimes understanding in potency); so the soul partakes of first matter as a part of itself.
• David of Dinant, who “most stupidly” taught God is first matter (Thomas’s words, not gratuitous insult): first matter is what is furthest from God — God pure act, first matter pure potency considered by itself, everything else part act, part ability.
• Parallel with the Manicheans: God is goodness itself, so they imagine a badness itself, a good God and a bad God, everything between sharing in both. But badness is a lack of something you are able to have when you should have it; it always presupposes something good even in the bad thing; badness itself would be nothing. Yet there is a first matter that is pure potency — so the objection has more bite than the Manichean one: “interesting argument.”

3. Objection 2: “the properties of matter” #

Where the properties of matter are found (being subject to, being transformed), there is matter; the soul is subject to knowledge and virtue and changes from ignorance to knowledge, vice to virtue; so there is matter in the soul.

• You should be prepared from the De Anima: Aristotle said sensing and understanding are an undergoing, but distinguished that from the undergoing of matter; the likeness can deceive. Expect Thomas to say these words are not univocal.
• The standard example: in matter, receiving one opposite loses the other — body receives health, sickness is out; becomes sick, health expelled. But when the soul understands sickness, understanding of health is involved; understanding abnormal blood pressure includes normal blood pressure, though I cannot have both pressures at once. Matter receives the form of another as its own and loses what it had; in the soul, understanding one contrary helps understand the other — “the same knowledge of opposites” (doctor knows health and sickness, moral philosopher virtue and vice).
• So the objection is the fallacy of equivocation on “receive.” But the word is equivocal not by chance but by reason: a real likeness of meanings. One is more deceived by such words than by chance equivocals — nobody confuses “bat” (flying mouse / baseball bat), but “undergo” or “receive” is harder to separate.

4. Objection 3: “eighth book of the metaphysics” #

Things without matter have no cause of their being (Metaphysics VIII); the soul is created by God, so has a cause of its being; so it has matter.

• You need the context: Aristotle is thinking that in material things matter has existence through the form it receives, and receives form by being acted upon by an agent. A form not in matter does not come to be by transformation of matter, so does not depend on another in that sense — it might depend on a creator, but not on one transforming matter.

5. Objection 4: “form only is pure act and infinite” #

What has no matter but is form only is pure act and infinite; this is God alone; so the soul has matter.

• Form is an act, so one might think a form-only thing (angel, soul) is in no way in potency, hence God. But in God what he is and his existence are the same; in angels and in the soul the substance and its existence are not the same — the soul is to its existence as ability to act, so there is composition of ability and act even in angels. “That’s kind of a hard thing to see.” Compared to us they seem pure act (form only); compared to God they are not “I am who am.” Composition of substance and existence is not the composition of matter and form; the Summa Contra Gentiles has a whole chapter on their differences.
• Anaxagoras’s greater mind: students take it for the divine mind (certainly not ours). But it moves, orders and separates matter without being responsible for matter’s existence — that is an angelic mind. Compared to us it seems divine.
• Pythagoras refused “wise”: “God alone is wise… call me a lover of wisdom.” Scientists call man homo sapiens; is that a contradiction? Homo now used broadly for a man-like thing, so the scientific name is “the wise ape.” Heraclitus: “as an ape is to a man, so is a man to God”; “as a boy is to a man, so is a man to God.” Compared to the ape or to the little boy, man seems wise; compared to God, he knows practically nothing. So no contradiction. Likewise the angel seems godlike compared to us.
• Kasurik (his old teacher): when your separated soul meets its guardian angel you say “Ah, this is God”; the angel, like Paul refusing sacrifice from the Ephesians [ed.: Acts places it at Lystra] and tearing his clothes, says no. Danger in not realising how excellent the angel is: Thomas thinks with probability (nobody knows for sure) that Satan was the highest angel, enamoured of so magnificent a creature.
• Applied: the human soul subsists by itself, is form only, so seems act only, so seems what God is.

6. Sed contra: “Genesis to the letter” #

Augustine proves in book 7 of On Genesis to the Letter (written after being criticised, he thinks by Jerome, for sloppiness) that the soul is made neither from corporeal matter nor from some spiritual matter. Some Fathers speak of spiritual matter: they are searching for a way to say the soul is not pure act and don’t know how to express it — “but Thomas does.”

7. Reply, first way: “from the definition of the soul in general” #

The soul has no matter; shown first from the definition of soul in general (true of sensing, even feeding-and-reproducing souls): it is of the definition of soul to be the form of some body.

1. Either it is form by itself as a whole, or by some part of itself.
2. If as a whole, no part can be matter, since matter is being in potency only and form as form is act; what is in potency only cannot be part of an act, potency being divided against act. (Aristotle often uses “act” for form: “the soul is the first act of a natural body composed of tools” [ed.: organic] — one could also say substantial form.) The whole ninth book of “Wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics IX] is about act and ability; we can study it after the soul; one first meets ability and act in matter and form and in motion, in Natural Philosophy.
3. If form by a part, that part is what we would call the soul, and the matter of which it is first the act is the first thing animate.

• Student asks him to go through it again: he is excluding the second possibility — if part were form and part matter, the form of that composite would be the soul and the matter would be the subject, the living body.
• “Cat” and “act”: both made of the letters C, A, T, so there is something in the word besides the letters — the order. Two words from the same letters by different order. Are the two orders made of the letters too? If so, insofar as made of the same letters they don’t differ, so you need an order of the order, a form of the form — infinite regress. So the order is not made out of the letters; the matter of the word is not part of the order. So the matter the soul is in is not part of the soul.
• Clay ball and clay cube: same material, differ by shape; if the shapes were made of clay they’d need another form — forever. Better to say at the start the shapes are not made of clay. Plato saw this but got carried away: form just “comes to” matter; Aristotle saw the form comes into existence when you transform the matter.

8. Reply, second way: “according to the way of the receiver” #

Special way from the definition of the human soul as understanding (Shakespeare: “my understanding soul”); a different argument from the subsistence article, one Aristotle develops in De Anima I.

1. Whatever is received in something is received according to the way of the receiver. (Teacher’s aside: a lecture to ten students is received very differently — “I don’t know where they got that.”)
2. Each thing is known as its form is in the knower.
3. The understanding soul knows a thing in its nature absolutely — universally, as such: stone insofar as it is stone; so the form of stone according to its formal definition is in the understanding soul.
4. Reductio: if the soul were composed of matter and form, forms would be received in it as individual, since matter is the source of individuation (the sphere shape in this clay and in that clay: individual spheres) — it would know only singulars, as the senses do, receiving forms in a bodily organ. But it receives them universally: its proper object (De Anima) is the what-it-is of something sensed or imagined, man separated from individual men.
5. Conclusion: the understanding soul, and every understanding substance, lacks composition of form and matter.

• Precision: matter as extended, continuous, quantified is the source of many individuals of one sort — many identical window panes because there’s enough glass, many identical chairs because enough metal. Boethius: the thing is singular when sensed, universal when understood.
• Compare Aristotle’s first argument: it understands all material things, so must lack the nature of any of them to receive all their forms, as the senses lack what they are in potency to receive.

9. Why the question at all: “whatever is must be somewhere” #

Student: isn’t this excluded already by the soul not being a body? Answer: even Church Fathers are confused here; you don’t realise how hard it is to rise above matter in thinking. Physics IV (“Natural Hearing”): the common opinion that whatever is must be somewhere — “if this is true, place would be the first of all things”; Hesiod: first the yawning gap, then broad-bosomed earth, then love — a place before anything can be. That is still the opinion on the street.

• Student: Newton, God as place? Answer: he speaks of space as the sensorium of God, God spread out in space; confused; his theological works show him an Arian; suspicion that Milton was too. “You go astray when you don’t have Rome.”

10. Closing digression: languages and translation “traduttore traditore” #

• Dionne’s observation: the mysteries of faith were first defined more carefully in Latin than in Greek though Greek is the better language — attributed to the presence of Rome, the papacy.
• Dionne and Father Boulay, native French speakers, both firm that English is much better than French for philosophy and for poetry; Dionne approved his choice words but said “you can’t speak that way in French”; story that Dionne first read Shakespeare in French and De Koninck gave him an English copy (a Shakespeare from De Koninck was on his shelf, so maybe true).
• André Gide, preface to the Pléiade Shakespeare: difficulty of translating any poet (a poet adapts himself to his language), and especially Shakespeare into French, “presque antipoétique” — strong from a master of French prose.
• Untranslatables: alliteration (“full fathom five thy father lies”); rhymes (dove/love serves the poets in English only); Augustine’s rhetorical style (the soul is more where it loves than where it animates: ubi amat quam animat), which Thomas can do but doesn’t in the Summa (the elegant dedication of the Golden Chain to Urban IV); Adoro te devote in rhyming quatrains, seemingly trochaic — exact meaning and rhyme can’t both survive.
• Student: the proverb traduttore traditore — translators are traitors. Even Aristotle from Greek is done badly; Moerbeke’s Latin so exact one could reconstruct the lost Greek; occasionally Moerbeke lacks the right word and Thomas still understands rightly. Thomas probably had no direct access to Plato, yet understands him well through Aristotle and Augustine.

His words #

• ability — his word for potency, “potency or ability is divided against act” [ed.: potency]
• things vs. words — Thomas’s division of teaching (Psalms commentary): faith and morals teach things, Scripture teaches words
• first matter — pure potency considered by itself [ed.: prime matter]
• badness — a lack of something you are able to have when you should have it
• the same knowledge of opposites — the doctor knows health and sickness together
• equivocal by reason vs. by chance — words with a real likeness of meanings (receive, undergo) vs. “bat” [ed.: analogous vs. purely equivocal]
• composition of ability and act — substance to its existence in angels and soul; distinct from matter and form
• first act of a natural body composed of tools — Aristotle’s definition of soul [ed.: organic body]
• Wisdom, ninth book — [ed.: Metaphysics IX] on act and ability
• received according to the way of the receiver — Thomas’s principle for the second argument
• absolutely — his gloss: universally, as such, separated from individual men
• matter as quantified / extended as continuous — the precise source of individuation
• Natural Hearing — [ed.: Physics], fourth book
• presque antipoétique — Gide on French

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q.75 (inferred), a.5: objections 1–4, sed contra, and the body of the article
• Augustine, On Genesis to the Letter, book 7 (via the sed contra)
• Heraclitus, fragments: ape/man/God and boy/man/God (quoted)
• Shakespeare, “full fathom five thy father lies” (quoted for alliteration)
• Augustine, ubi amat quam animat (quoted)

Mentioned

• Dionysius, On the Divine Names, and Thomas’s commentary on it
• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Psalms (“teaches either things or words”)
• Cornelius a Lapide, Scripture commentary (Acts, Holy Spirit as fire)
• Summa Theologiae I, questions four, five and six (on God’s goodness)
• Thomas Aquinas on David of Dinant
• Aristotle, De Anima (sensing and understanding as undergoing; proper object of intellect; the first argument for immateriality)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics VIII (things without matter have no cause of being)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, a chapter on the difference between substance/existence and matter/form composition
• Aristotle, Physics IV, with Hesiod
• Boethius, singular when sensed, universal when understood
• Thomas Aquinas, dedication of the Catena Aurea to Urban IV; Adoro te devote
• André Gide, preface to the Pléiade Shakespeare; Pléiade Descartes
• Newton’s theological works; Milton (suspected Arian)
• Moerbeke’s Latin Aristotle

His questions #

• Why does the objection say “beings and living” if non-living things also partake of God? Beings includes everything; all that is, is good, or lives partakes of God as being, goodness, life itself.
• Are you in contradiction with Pythagoras when you call man homo sapiens? No: man is wise compared to the ape (or as daddy to a boy), not compared to God.
• Is Anaxagoras’s greater mind the divine mind? No: it moves matter but doesn’t give it existence — an angelic mind, which only seems divine compared to us.
• Are the two orders of C, A, T made out of those letters too? No; otherwise a form of the form, and so on forever — the order is not made of the letters.
• Is the shape of the clay ball made out of clay? No, or the two shapes would not differ; the form is not made of the matter.
• If the soul were composed of matter and form, how would forms be received in it? As individual, since matter is the source of individuation; but it receives them universally.
• Why can you have many window panes exactly the same? Because there’s enough glass: matter as quantified is the source of many individuals of one sort.
• Isn’t the question already excluded by the soul not being a body? Even Fathers are confused; it is hard to rise above matter — “whatever is must be somewhere” is still the opinion on the street.