Summa I q.75 a.6: Why the Human Soul Is Incorruptible (Per Se and Per Accidens, Form and Existence, No Contrariety in the Understanding)

Orientation #

He says “we’re going to look at articles six and seven here in question seventy-five today”, but the class gets only through the body of article 6 (the replies are not reached). He refers back to “the earlier article where we said the soul was subsisting” and to what “we saw in the third book about the soul” and in “the first book of Natural Hearing” (prev. lectures, not resolved by the context block). Verified sources: Summa Theologiae I q.75 a.6 matched against the text; a “Paper on the Phaedo” handout, p. 12, is listed as read; the Phaedo material in the transcript is given orally. The recording opens mid-sentence on an unrelated remark (reason as “a calculating machine” vs. the glory of imagination in science) before the prayer. The previous class treated Thomas on angels composed of act and potency; the next continues q.75 a.6 with the natural desire to exist forever and the replies to the objections.

The class, in order #

1. The three objections and the sed contra (“It seems that the human soul is corruptible”) #

He reads the objections as they stand, without yet answering them.

1. Obj. 1: things with a like beginning and like progress have a like end; men and beasts are both made from earth and “in like manner all breathe” (Ecclesiastes), man having nothing more than the beast; so the dissolution of both is one. Brute souls are corruptible; therefore the human soul is.
2. Obj. 2: what is from nothing can be turned back into nothing, since the end should correspond to the beginning; Wisdom says “we are born from nothing”, true of the soul too since it was created; so afterwards we “will be as those who had not been”, even according to the soul.
3. Obj. 3: nothing is without its proper operation; the soul’s proper operation is to understand with an image (phantasma, “the Latin and Greek word”); the image is not without the body (De Anima III, as “we saw”); so the soul cannot remain when the body is destroyed.
4. Sed contra: Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4.

• Aside: Dionysius was thought to be the one Paul converted at Athens, hence his authority; modern scholars are no longer sure. A student asks when they changed their minds; he thinks it was Gregory the Great who, as papal legate in Constantinople, brought his works back and made him known in the West.

2. Corruption per se and per accidens (“in two ways something is corrupted”) #

The body begins with a distinction: a thing is corrupted per se when the thing itself is corrupted, per accidens when it ceases because something else is corrupted (a student’s phrasing, which he accepts).

• Premise: it belongs to something to be generated or corrupted in the same way as it belongs to it to be, because generation acquires existence and corruption loses it. So what has existence by itself can only be generated or corrupted by itself; what exists only in matter (accidents, material forms) comes to be and is corrupted through the generation and corruption of the composite.
• Rubber ball: the spherical shape does not come to be by itself, is not created from nothing, and does not come to be from the rubber (if it did, every other shape would come from the rubber too, and why would they differ? you would need a form of the form, and the question recurs). It comes to be per accidens, when the rubber ball comes to be. Squashing the ball eliminates the shape the same way.
• Health: when a sick body becomes healthy, what comes to be is a healthy body; health “comes to be” only per accidens.
• Dog, tree: subsistent things come to be and die themselves, not because something else does.
• He notes the shape of the argument: “a disjunctive syllogism”. If the soul is corruptible it must be so per se or per accidens; since subsistent (shown earlier), not per accidens; the rest of the article asks whether per se.

3. Why brute souls perish and the human soul does not (“the souls of the brute animals”) #

Brute souls are not subsistent, so they are corrupted per accidens when the animal is; the human soul, being subsistent, could only be corrupted per se.

• Reason the sensing soul is not subsistent: it has no operation not in and through the body; even sensing, its highest operation, involves the body — “the excess of the object corrupts the senses”.
• Human soul: understanding (and later, willing) is an operation not in the body; so it has existence by itself and not only in the body; the body “shares” the soul’s existence “but not completely”.
• Image: the soul is “not immersed in the body”, like something floating with part under and part above the water.
• The Arab philosophers: man is “on the horizon” between the material and immaterial worlds, a foot in both — understanding and will shared with the angels, senses and emotions with “the cats around here”; we have sense life in a higher way than the beast, intellectual life in an inferior way to the angel. C. S. Lewis: the love of the angels is ferocious; we are lukewarm, divided; only in great saints (Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila) does one see something of that intensity.

4. What belongs to a thing as such is inseparable (“belongs to something secundum se”) #

The human soul cannot be corrupted per se because it is a form only, and what belongs to something secundum se is inseparable from it.

• A composite subsisting thing can be corrupted because its matter can lose the form through which it exists; a form only has nothing from which the form could be separated.
• Illustration of the principle “in something easier to see”: two vs. number — two cannot fail to be a number, since through being two it is a number; two vs. half of four — an inseparable property, belonging to two because it is two; a green triangle — green is separable, being neither in the definition of triangle nor following on its nature (as interior angles equal to two right angles do).
• Application: existence (esse) belongs as such to form, which is act; matter acquires existence in act by acquiring form. Seen first in accidental forms: rubber becomes a ball through a form, the body healthy through health, reason wise through wisdom. Corruption happens to matter by the form being separated from it; but a form cannot be separated from itself; so a subsisting form cannot cease to be.

5. Entelecheia, the organic body, and the body as tool (“first act of a body composed of tools”) #

A student asks whether “form as entelechia” is what is meant; this opens a digression on the body as the soul’s tool.

• Entelecheia is just Aristotle’s (coined) word for act; soul is “the first act of a body composed of tools”.
• “Organic body”: English hides that organon means tool; a body organikon is a body made up of tools for the operations of life. A dog’s body has more diverse organs than a tree because a higher life needs more tools.
• Creed (he thinks the Athanasian): nothing is more like the union of divine and human nature in Christ than the union of soul and body. Not as form and matter — that is “the heresy of the Arians” [ed.: as he says it], the Word in place of the human soul — but as tool: the human nature is a tool of the divinity.
• Joined vs. extrinsic tool: the hand is a tool that is part of you; the ballpoint pen, hammer, saw are used from outside. Christ’s human nature is a tool joined in the same person, hence its unique efficacy (Dionysius’ “theandric”, from theos and andros).
• Tertia Pars, a dialectic from Augustine: man should repair Adam’s sin but cannot for the whole race; God “saw” (not “found”) the solution: God becomes man, so man repairs for man, and as tool of the divinity it can redeem the whole race. The Adoro te devote: one drop can cure the whole world.
• The saints are also God’s tools, but not joined to his person; the Son of God is a man but is not Francis, Dominic or Peter, so their acts cannot have that efficacy.
• Aristotle against transmigration (Platonists, Pythagoreans): the anecdote of Pythagoras stopping a man beating a dog because he recognised a dead friend’s soul in its yelping; Aristotle: a man’s soul entering a dog’s body would be like the carpenter’s art entering the violinist’s tools — soul is to body somewhat as art to its tools, here joined tools.
• Aside on words: the Anglo-Saxon word is often more meaningful than the Latin-derived one — “first principles” means just first beginnings; “desiccation is a greater problem for land animals” puzzles people until you say “drying out … for fish”.

6. Socrates’ argument in the Phaedo compared (“Socrates in the Phaedo”) #

Socrates, pressed by Simmias and Cebes for a necessary reason, comes “very close” to Thomas’s point.

• Setting: three arguments with some interest and some weakness; all are satisfied except Simmias and Cebes, whose objections come “out of the blue”; Cebes pushes for a necessary reason.
• The argument: one opposite cannot admit the other; if one opposite is in the definition of a third thing, that third can in no way admit the other. Odd vs. even: three, which is odd as such, can never be even. Wet vs. dry: the wet cannot be dry, but a cloth can become dry because wet is not in its definition. Virtue vs. vice: justice can never be a vice. Living vs. dead: a living body can die because living is not in the definition of body; the soul is the cause of life in living bodies, so life is in its definition; therefore it is deathless, “immortal”.
• The problem he raises: brute souls are also causes of life to the composite yet have no life or operation by themselves. The human soul has an operation by itself not in the body, so it has existence and life by itself, not only being that by which the composite lives. If “life” means not just the operations of life (a sign) but the existence of the living thing, then existence belongs to form as such and cannot be separated from a subsisting form — “very close to what is being said here”, but “a few distinctions have to be seen”.

7. Even if the soul had matter: the heavenly bodies (“composed of some kind of spiritual matter”) #

Thomas adds a complication for those who think the soul composed of spiritual matter, comparing it with the incorruptible heavenly bodies.

• Aristotle thought sun, moon and stars incorruptible — a reasonable guess since they never seem diminished. In the commentary on De Caelo et Mundo Thomas remarks Aristotle’s reason is only probable: the time they take to corrupt may far exceed many men’s lives.
• Parallel on light: Aristotle and Thomas thought light propagates instantaneously and so is not a locomotion; they could have said instead that its speed (186,000 miles per second) is too great to perceive — “the hand is faster than the eye”, so light may be faster than the eye.
• Aristotle’s two conclusions: celestial matter is a different kind from ours; and its form completes the whole potentiality of the matter. Contrast the clay sphere, still able to be a cube or cylinder, hence in potency to another form and able to cease being a sphere; a form exhausting all the matter’s ability could not be lost.
• Anaxagoras: the sun is a stone on fire — probably from a burning meteor; the crater in the southwest United States the Indians told the white man about, once thought a fable, now studied from the air. Aristotle saw that a stone on fire would long since have been consumed; Weizsäcker, Heisenberg’s pupil, explained how the sun gives out so much energy and lasts, something quite different from ordinary fire — “Aristotle was … on the right track”. “So don’t worry too much about this.”
• Aside: the great fire of London under Charles II, described by Defoe (as he recalls), the churches rebuilt by Wren.

8. No contrariety in the understanding soul (“corruption except where there has found contrariety”) #

Even granting matter and form in the soul, it would still be incorruptible, since corruption is found only where there is contrariety, and there is none in the understanding.

1. From Natural Hearing I: changes are between contraries — wet dries, dry is moistened, hard softens, soft hardens; generations and corruptions are from and into contraries.
2. Hence the celestial bodies, lacking matter subject to contrariety, are incorruptible.
3. The understanding soul receives things according to the way of its own existence, and what is received in it is received without contrariety; the sign: even the definitions of contraries are not contrary in the understanding.

• Health in the body excludes sickness; normal blood pressure excludes abnormal; but in understanding high blood pressure is my understanding of normal. One knowledge of contraries: I know vice better knowing virtue, falsity by truth, ignorance by knowledge (ignorance is defined as lack of knowledge). In things and matter one contrary excludes the other.
• Conclusion: if corruption is from contraries and even contraries are not contrary in the soul, it has no contrary to corrupt it; “it is impossible, therefore, that the understanding soul be corruptible.”
• Symposium: at the end only Socrates and the two poets, Aristophanes (comic) and Agathon (tragic, in whose honour the party was) are awake; Socrates’ last audible point is that if they knew what they were doing each could write both tragedy and comedy. Shakespeare wrote both very well; Homer’s lost comic Margites is to comedy what the Iliad is to tragedy (Aristotle), so Homer may be like Shakespeare; lesser poets like Molière write only comedy. Actors: Alec Guinness played comic and tragic roles (Tunes of Glory; the cardinal role that led to his becoming a Catholic); an actor at the San Francisco artists’ workshop, seen by him and his brother Mark, played the Alchemist (Ben Jonson) and then Lear, and failed as Lear by making him too senile and so too comic. The same knowledge of opposites shows the understanding has no contrary.

His words #

• per se / per accidens corruption: the thing itself corrupted vs. ceasing because something else is corrupted.
• subsisting: having existence by itself, not only in another.
• generated per accidens: comes to be when something else comes to be (the ball’s shape, health).
• disjunctive syllogism: his name for the article’s structure (per se or per accidens; not per accidens; therefore examine per se).
• not immersed in the body: the soul’s existence not wholly surrounded by the body.
• on the horizon: the Arab philosophers’ phrase for man between material and immaterial.
• secundum se / as such: what belongs to a thing in this way is inseparable from it.
• esse, existence: belongs as such to form, which is act.
• entelecheia: Aristotle’s coined word for act.
• body composed of tools: his rendering of organikon [ed.: organic body].
• joined tool vs. extrinsic tool: hand vs. ballpoint pen.
• theandric (theos + andros): Dionysius’ word for Christ’s God-and-man acts.
• Natural Hearing: [ed.: Aristotle’s Physics].
• deathless: his gloss of “immortal” as a Latin word.
• ability: [ed.: potency], as in a form exhausting all the ability of the matter.
• contrariety: the condition of corruption; absent in celestial bodies and in the understanding.
• one knowledge of contraries: the sign that definitions of contraries are not contrary in the understanding.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 75, a. 6: objections 1-3, sed contra, and the body (replies not reached; a. 7 announced but not begun).

Mentioned

• Dionysius, Divine Names, ch. 4 (sed contra).
• Ecclesiastes and Wisdom (as quoted within objections 1 and 2).
• Aristotle, De Anima, book III (soul understands nothing without an image); definition of soul as first act of a body composed of tools.
• Aristotle, Physics (Natural Hearing) I: change between contraries.
• Thomas Aquinas, commentary on Aristotle’s De Caelo et Mundo (Aristotle’s reason for incorruptibility of the heavens is probable).
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Tertia Pars (dialectic from Augustine on reparation), locus not given.
• Athanasian Creed (as he recalls) on the union of natures in Christ; Adoro te devote (one drop).
• Plato, Phaedo (Simmias, Cebes, the argument from opposites); Plato, Symposium (ending).
• Homer, Margites (Aristotle’s comparison with the Iliad); Ben Jonson, The Alchemist; Shakespeare, King Lear.
• C. S. Lewis (love of the angels is ferocious); Acts of the Apostles (lukewarm), as he cites them.

His questions #

• What is the distinction between being corrupted per se and per accidens? Whether the thing itself is corrupted or it ceases because something else is corrupted.
• How does the shape of a rubber ball come to be — by itself, from the rubber, or from nothing? None of these; it comes to be per accidens when the rubber ball comes to be.
• If the shape came to be from the rubber, why would one shape differ from another? It would not; you would need a form of the form, and the question recurs.
• Could there be a two that is not a number? Could two not be half of four? Could green be separated from a triangle? No, no, yes — number and half-of-four belong to two as such; green is neither in the definition nor a property of triangle.
• How does rubber get to be a ball, a body healthy, a reason wise? Through a form — sphere, health, wisdom; existence belongs to form as act.
• Can the odd be even? Can three be even? Can a wet cloth become dry? No; no, since odd is in the definition of three; yes, since wet is not in the definition of cloth.
• Why can a living body become dead while the soul cannot? Living is not in the definition of body, but the soul is the cause of life, so life is in its definition — with the caveat about brute souls that he raises.
• Does being one contrary in my body exclude the other, and does knowing one contrary exclude knowing the other? In the body yes (health excludes sickness); in the understanding no — there is one knowledge of contraries.
• Why did the San Francisco actor fail as King Lear? He made Lear too senile, hence too comic, so not tragic enough.