Q.75 a.5 Replies: Proportioned Abilities, Angels as Form and Being, and Pride as the Mother of Error

Orientation #

He begins “So let’s look at the reply now to the first objection,” which he restates (God pure act; everything with act partakes of it; therefore anything with ability partakes of pure ability, i.e. first matter). He refers back to what “we said” about matter excluding one form when it receives another (prev. lecture). The previous session covered the objections and body of the article on whether the soul is composed of matter and form; the next takes up whether the soul is corruptible.

The class, in order #

1. Reply to the first objection: no one ability for all acts (“the first act, which is God”) #

The point: the objection’s proportion (pure act : all acts :: pure ability : all abilities) is a likeness that deceives; Thomas solves it differently from the Manichean case because there really is a first matter that is pure ability.

• Aside on the Manichees: they posit a “bad itself”; Plato sometimes identifies bad-itself with matter (a Manichean tendency to watch for in Platonists); Aristotle refutes it in the ninth book of wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics].
• Reading of the reply: the first act, God, is the universal principle of all acts because it is infinite, containing all things virtually; Dionysius’s word praehabens, “having before.” God’s infinity means not lacking any perfection; he is universally perfect but in a simple way.
• “Partaken of not as a part but according to the pouring out of his procession”: two senses of “part” — to take a part of vs. partial (having something of a thing, but not completely). Creatures have something like God in a deficient way; neither God a part of them nor they of God. Illustration: God’s words (to Moses, he thinks) “follow me and I will show you every good,” which Thomas reads as “that is myself” — God is every good, but simply, not as a composite.
• The argument:
  1. Ability, since receptive of act, must be proportioned to act; not just any act is received in any ability (the perfection of the eye is not that of the ear, because the receivers differ).
  2. The acts received, which proceed from the first infinite act and are partakings of it, are diverse.
  3. Therefore there cannot be one ability receiving all acts, as there is one act pouring out all participating acts.
• Application: matter’s ability to receive is other than the soul’s. When matter receives one form it excludes another; when the understanding receives one form it is not prevented from receiving others, so the soul is “in some way all things.” Aristotle in the first book of Natural Hearing calls form something godlike, because it is act. Eye receives color, ear receives sound — each limited.

2. Reason and will as different abilities; man and woman (“My reason cannot be the subject of charity”) #

The point: even within us, diverse perfections of God are received by diverse abilities.

• Reason can receive faith, and gifts like understanding or science; it cannot receive hope or charity as their subject (it can be directed or formed by them). Will receives hope and charity; will cannot receive faith. Knowledge and love are one thing in God, received in us by different abilities.
• Man and woman: Paul VI, making Teresa of Avila a Doctor of the Church (with Catherine of Siena, the first two), quotes Francis de Sales with approval that the woman’s soul is more capable of love than the man’s; contrasts Teresa’s doctorate with Augustine’s argumentative, scholastic kind. So man and woman do not have exactly the same perfection: in marriage the man’s love of the children is confirmed by the woman’s, the woman’s reason by the man’s. Francis de Sales’ treatise on love takes its examples more from female saints than from Augustine or Thomas.
• Aristotle near the end of the treatise on friendship: friendship needs both loving and being loved (if I love you and you don’t return it, we’re not friends); asks which is more. His sign is the woman who cannot nurse and gives the child to another woman, knowing the child will attach to her — she seeks more to love than to be loved. Aristotle gives no reason (thinks it obvious); Thomas supplies it. The sign is taken from the woman because of her perfection of love.
• Mary is called mother of mercy, never mother of justice; Christ is son of justice; apostles on twelve seats judging — judging is more an act of reason. Old medieval commentaries on the Hail Mary: Mary as mother of mercy, with “nothing in the kingdom of justice” — “a little strong.” Shakespeare puts the most beautiful words on mercy in fiction into Portia’s mouth (“falls the gentle rain from heaven”); his last plays are forgiveness plays where it is a woman who forgives. The diversity of man and woman is not only physical but in the soul itself.

3. Knowing takes, loving gives: the will more proportioned to God (“it’s always bad to lose your mind”) #

The point: reason and will are perfected differently, and the will reaches God more directly in this life.

• Reason grasps, takes things in; love gives (popular song: love isn’t love until given away). His TEC lecture line: always bad to lose your mind, not always bad to lose your heart — depends to whom. Why: “where your treasure is, there your heart shall be” — love is in the thing loved; knowing is the reverse, putting the thing inside you.
• Fr. Boulay: the will is more proportioned to God than reason, since reason tries to put God into reason but the will goes out to God; like trying to put the ocean inside you vs. jumping into it. Hence (Augustine, Thomas, the Church) no one believes unless he wants to — God moves reason through the will. We can truly love God as he is in this world, though we cannot know him as he is until the beatific vision (we know more what he is not); we cannot be sure we love him so, only have probable signs.

4. Beauty partaken by the senses; the reply concluded (“Too late have I loved thee”) #

• Augustine’s Confessions: the class corrects “too late have I come to know thee” to “too late have I loved thee, ancient beauty.”
• Beauty is partaken all the way down to the higher senses: sunset, mountains, Mozart, Palestrina are imperfect partakings of God’s beauty. Pius XII on sacred music: it should be beautiful; Shakespeare — sacred music sung out of tune is worse than priests that lie. The eye cannot receive the beauty of the music, the ear not that of the sunset: different abilities proportioned to different acts, all partaking the divine act. “It’s kind of really marvelous.”
• Text: otherwise the receptive potency would equal the active power of the first act. So the receptive potency of the understanding soul is other than that of first matter, “as is clear from the diversity of the things we see”: first matter receives individual forms, the understanding receives forms universally. Such a potency in the soul does not show it composed of matter and form. This sets the stage for reply 2.

5. Reply to the second objection: “undergoing” is equivocal (“another definition of being subject to”) #

The point: since abilities differ in kind, so do the definitions of being subject and being transformed.

• Asides on the equivocation of “undergoing/suffering”: a philosopher friend of his brother Richard describing students’ faces (“why are you doing this to me?”) — confusing being acted on to understand with being harmed; his California student who invented at night objections Aristotle and Thomas had already solved, visibly relaxing when answered — “beautiful to see a student like that”; the student who wanted to be an accountant to buy a boat.
• Text: to be subject and to be transformed belong to matter as in potency; but as the understanding’s potency is other than first matter’s, so the definition of being subject and transformed is other. (Thomas also uses “transforming,” Shakespeare “metamorphosis,” of love — yet another meaning.) The understanding is subject to and changes from ignorance to knowledge as in potency to understandable forms, which are universal, not singular.
• Boundary: the understandable forms of contraries are not contrary in the soul — the definition of virtue (a habit in the middle, determined by right reason) does not kick out the definition of vice (a habit in the extreme); one helps me understand the other.

6. Reply to the third objection: Metaphysics 8 and subsisting forms (“the philosopher concludes”) #

The point: Aristotle’s text must be read as proceeding from material substances toward immaterial ones.

• Material substances are produced from matter and have existence through the form received and the agent transforming matter; immaterial substances are form alone, so proceed neither from matter nor from an agent transforming matter. Some thought Aristotle did not know creation; Thomas makes a good case that he did.
• Text: form is cause of being for matter and the agent; the agent, reducing matter to the act of form by transforming it, causes being. A subsisting form does not have existence through some formal principle — else a form of a form, and so on — nor has a cause transmutans (changing over) it from potency to act, since it is not generated. So the philosopher concludes: things composed of matter and form have no other cause than what moves them from potency to act; things without matter are simply and truly beings, through themselves.
• Antonomasia: Thomas calls Aristotle “the philosopher,” Paul “the apostle” (the other apostles don’t call themselves apostles as Paul and Peter do); John Paul II calls Peter and Paul “princes of the apostles.”
• Angels are “elegant beings.” His paraphrase: the angels gathered and declared “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all angels are created unequal” — no two of the same kind, since without matter all differences are formal. Kasurik: “God hates equality.” We are closer to equal, but in heaven unequal — “star differs from star” (Paul VI’s encyclical on Francis de Sales). Plato: after democracy comes tyranny.
• Political aside: surveillance instruments, once established, are ready for a tyrannical mind; students mention Hillary Clinton and Gore (Bush 65% favourable, Gore 18%).

7. Reply to the fourth objection: only God is his own being (“I am who am”) #

• Kasurik on ascending the wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics]: at each stage “this is God” — no, something better: angels, archangels, up to seraphim, none God but marvelous creatures. Roll together Einstein, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Plato, all the doctors: not equal to the lowest angel; your guardian angel watches you deciding “like an anchor down there.”
• Argument: (1) everything partaken is to the partaker as its act; (2) every created form subsisting by itself must partake of being — even life itself partakes of being itself (Dionysius, Divine Names book 5); (3) the being partaken is limited to the capacity of the partaker; therefore only God, who is his own being, is pure act and infinite. In understanding substances there is composition of act and potency, not matter and form but form and partaken being — “by some” called quod est and quo est, since being is that by which something is.
• Hilary of Poitiers (whom Thomas quotes most after Augustine), originally a Greek philosopher, met “I am who am” in Exodus and it was a motive of credibility for him. Aristotle in the second book of wisdom shows being and truth go together, the cause more true than the effect; had he lived to hear “I am truth itself,” a philosopher would have made the connection — but you never know: Augustine speculates pride kept Porphyry out of the church.

8. Digression: De Koninck, Dion, and humility (“that’s the kind of humility”) #

Stories illustrating humility against pride: Kasurik arranging his first meeting with De Koninck, who answered all his questions and told him to write up his ideas on Mozart; De Koninck sending him back to Dion for his thesis question, yet answering; De Koninck, at Vatican II with Dion, stopped by something in the philosophy of nature he had missed “after all these years”; Mrs. De Koninck (twelve children) told Mary Shane that Charles made clear Dion was the greatest mind there; Dion pacing before their discussions; his own unconverted brother who nonetheless holds Aristotle and Thomas the only really great philosophers (“faith is a gift”); Kasurik who had abandoned dogmatically taught philosophy until he met De Koninck; De Koninck fixing the microphone himself.

• Pride: Thomas in the Summa Contra Gentiles calls it mater erroris; in the commentary on Paul’s epistles false imagination and pride are roots of deception. Pride deceives two ways: overestimating your ability, so you judge beyond your capacity; and not respecting the teacher you should (like Thomas), who would call you back from errors — it makes you unteachable.

9. Student question: modern philosophy’s preference for will (“as if being forced by the truth itself”) #

• Student: is the modern emphasis on will, putting will above reason, connected to pride? He: yes; partly democratic customs, love of freedom as absolute. Hegel (c. 1770–1831): the end of all history is freedom; Sartre, influenced by him: what matters is not what you do but that you do it freely — good in defending freedom’s reality, but freedom is not absolutely the greatest good. It is the will, not reason, that is free.
• Aristotle, first book of Natural Hearing: all the natural philosophers explained change by contraries without giving reason, “as if forced by the truth itself” (his own addition when teaching it: the Chinese with yin and yang, modern scientists with attraction and repulsion, unbeknownst to Aristotle). Thomas takes the phrase over in the Summa Contra Gentiles. That is the perfection of reason — “forced,” not free.
• They also prefer imagination to reason, since imagination is freer: Aristotle contrasting them says I can imagine something good or bad without reason, but cannot think it so without some reason. His example: he can imagine terrorists coming to rub out monks and philosophers and feel no fear; if he thought it, he’d look for the way out. Experimental science reinforces this: the hypothesis is freely imagined (Einstein), testing is mere experiment and calculation. Recording ends mid-sentence.

His words #

• ability — his rendering [ed.: potency, potentia]
• pure ability — first matter, in the objection
• praehabens — “having before” all things in itself (Dionysius)
• partake — literally “take a part of,” but here “partial,” having something of God deficiently
• Natural Hearing — [ed.: Aristotle’s Physics]
• wisdom — [ed.: Metaphysics]
• undergoing — [ed.: pati]; the equivocal term of objection 2
• transmutans — “changing over” from potency to act
• antonomasia — calling Aristotle “the philosopher,” Paul “the apostle”
• quod est / quo est — “what is” and “that by which it is,” of angels
• mater erroris — pride, as Thomas calls it in the Summa Contra Gentiles

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I q.75 a.5 ad 1, ad 2, ad 3, ad 4 (inferred)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics book 8 (as quoted by Thomas in ad 3)
• Dionysius, Divine Names book 5 (as quoted in ad 4)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics book 9 (refutation of bad-itself); book 2 (being and truth)
• Aristotle, Physics book 1 (form as godlike; “forced by the truth itself”)
• Aristotle, on friendship: loving vs. being loved
• Aristotle on imagination vs. reason (no locus given)
• Augustine, Confessions (“too late have I loved thee”); Augustine on Porphyry
• Paul VI, address making Teresa of Avila Doctor; encyclical on Francis de Sales
• Francis de Sales, treatise on love
• Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice (Portia on mercy); the late romances
• Pius XII on sacred music
• Exodus, “I am who am”; Hilary of Poitiers, On the Trinity
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles; commentary on the epistles of Paul

His questions #

• Why is there no ability that can receive every act partaking of God? Because ability must be proportioned to act, and the acts partaking of God are diverse; otherwise the receptive potency would equal God’s active power.
• Can my reason receive hope or charity? No; they are received in the will, as faith is received in reason and not in the will.
• Does friendship consist more in loving or being loved? More in loving — the sign of the mother who gives her child to a nurse.
• Why is it always bad to lose your mind but not always bad to lose your heart? Because love is in the thing loved (“where your treasure is”), while knowing puts the thing in you.
• Are the understandable forms of contraries contrary in the soul? No; the definition of virtue helps me understand the definition of vice.
• What comes after democracy, according to Plato? Tyranny.
• What is the figure of speech in calling Aristotle “the philosopher”? Antonomasia.
• Is the modern emphasis on will connected with pride? Yes — will (and imagination) are free, whereas reason is “forced by the truth itself”; answer cut off at the end.