Q.75 a.7: Are the Soul and the Angel of One Species? Lowest Species, Origen's Error, and Understanding Compared with Reason

Orientation #

He says that next week they start question 76, “the second question about the soul,” on the union of soul to body, before going on to the powers and later the operations; he hopes to do the first two articles, though both are big. Nothing is said about last time beyond continuing q. 75. The previous class treated a. 6 and the next class begins q. 76 with its eight articles.

The class, in order #

1. Objections 1–2 and the puzzle of lowest species (“hard to tell when you come to a lowest species”) #

Point: reading the first two objections raises the logical question whether “to be understanding” (intellectuale esse) is a lowest species or a genus.

• Obj. 1 as read: each thing is ordered to its end by the nature of its species; soul and angel have the same end, eternal beatitude; so one species.
• Obj. 2 as read: the ultimate specific difference is most noble, completing the definition; nothing in angel or soul is more noble than being understanding; so they share their ultimate difference and are one species.
• Distinction: lowest species (cannot be further divided into kinds) vs. species that is still a genus. Members of one division can be on the same level yet differ here:
  • Triangle divided into equilateral / isosceles / scalene: all equilateral triangles have exactly the same shape (differ only in size), so equilateral is a lowest species; isosceles admits different shapes (ratio of equal to unequal side 2:1, 3:1), so it is not.
  • Parallelogram divided into square / oblong / rhombus / rhomboid: all squares one form; oblongs 10×2 and 6×2 are not the same.
  • Drama divided into tragedy and comedy: in Shakespeare there are at least two kinds of comedy, “good-natured comedy” (his favourite) and satire; tragedy too may have kinds, Macbeth (a man knowingly chooses evil and is defeated) vs. King Lear (a man suffers by circumstances more than his mistake deserves). Here, unlike geometry, it is not clear, and sometimes there is no name.
  • Aristotle’s five virtues of reason (Nicomachean Ethics VI): natural understanding, wisdom, reasoned-out understanding, art, foresight. Wisdom is a lowest species (not many kinds, though highest); natural understanding is lowest [of the habits]; but episteme/scientia is a genus (geometry, natural philosophy…), art is a genus (carpentry, cooking), foresight is a genus (of the human being, the father, the king, the general—Douglas MacArthur—as Thomas distinguishes).
• So the question posed: is the soul’s way of understanding and the angel’s “not exactly the same”?

2. Objection 3 and the sed contra (“diverse natural operations, different species”) #

• Obj. 3: soul differs from angel only by being united to a body; body is outside the soul’s essence, so does not pertain to its species; therefore one species.
• Sed contra: things with diverse natural operations differ in species; soul and angel have diverse natural operations, for Dionysius (Divine Names, ch. 7) says angelic minds have simple and blessed understandings, not gathering divine knowledge from visible things, while the contrary is said of the soul.
• Gloss: he recalls Shakespeare defining reason as “the ability for large discourse”: we gather the universal by a large induction; angels do not have to induce, they see the universal right away.

3. Origen’s error (“all human souls and angels were of one species”) #

Point: the body of the article answers Origen, who was influenced by the Platonists.

• Origen’s position as read: all souls and angels of one kind, created together in the beginning; some sinned and got attached to bodies; the diversity of grade among these substances is accidental, coming from free will.
• Compared to Platonist transmigration: the worse you have been, the worse body you go into; purify yourself and you may not have to return to a body.
• Student asks whether this is why Origen thought everyone might be saved; he calls that another mistake of Origen’s.
• He characterises the motive: “kind of democratic thinking”—it would be unjust for God to make us unequal; we must do something to become unequal. (He notes the text: God is equality.)

4. No diversity by number without diversity in kind (“the woman rolls out the dough”) #

Point: the core argument—in incorporeal substances there cannot be numerical diversity without specific diversity.

1. Plato saw this in the world of forms (though mistaken about what those immaterial forms are): each form differs in kind from the next.
2. The only reason there can be many things of one kind is matter subject to continuous quantity, part outside part, so it can be cut up.
   • The form of chair in this metal and that metal.
   • Christmas-tree cookies: one shape, many cookies, because there is enough dough (“which I’m all in favor of”).
   • Euclid’s first theorem (constructing the equilateral triangle): two circles exactly the same, even in size, but one centred here and one there.
3. Without part outside part, two things would have to differ as circle, square and triangle differ, not as two circles differ. That is how immaterial substances differ.

• Confirmation from modern science: in quantum theory, particles that come together lose their definite position, the blurring is in the thing, “in principle, not just in practice,” so they lose individuality, as Schrödinger says in his essays—you cannot say one is here, one there.
• The text’s own argument: if they are not composed of matter and form but are subsisting forms (which he thinks is the truth), a separated form can only be one of a kind—if whiteness were separated there could be only one, since this whiteness differs from that only by being of this or of that.

5. Specific diversity brings natural inequality (“contraries have themselves according to perfect and imperfect”) #

Point: diversity of species always carries natural inequality with it.

1. Differences dividing a genus are contraries; contraries stand as perfect and imperfect (e.g., among the species of colours one is more perfect than another).
2. First glimpsed in Natural Hearing I [ed.: Physics I]: Aristotle finds his predecessors all spoke of change by contraries, and one contrary lacks something the other has—Democritus’ full and empty, love and hate, hot and cold.
3. Developed more perfectly in Metaphysics X (“tenth book of wisdom… first philosophy”): the beginning of contrariety is lack and having.

• Alternative covered by Thomas: even if these substances were composed of matter and form (some hold a “spiritual matter”) but were not bodies with the continuous: either form is the principle distinguishing the matters—then diversity in kind and natural inequality still follow—or matter distinguishes forms, but this matter is other than that only by quantitative division, which has no place in bodiless substances. Hence angel and soul cannot be one species; and one angel cannot be of the same species as another.
• Aside: his joke of the angels in convention: “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all angels are created unequal”—no democratic government up there.

6. How many souls are of one kind: made for this body (“your soul was made for your body”) #

Point: the text defers this (“will be shown below”), but he sketches it and takes a long run of student questions.

• Matter and form are like relatives; not any form can be in any matter; my soul could not fit into your body. This individual soul is adapted to this individual body.
• Consequence: had your parents not met, or not produced your body, God would not have created your soul. Kierkegaard’s strange thought that one’s parents might never have met; the huge number of seeds makes one’s chance small—yet God’s providence extends to the parents’ meeting and to conceiving you; existence is gratuitous on God’s part, I have no more right to be than the countless others my parents could have generated; thankfulness in heaven will be much more obvious; also a debt to one’s parents.
• Student: how can the soul be modified to one body without being a different species? Answer: it is something individual, not a different kind, but peculiar to your body.
• Student objection: the distinguishing differences came only from being in bodies; if souls were never in bodies there would be one soul—and some held that once separated there is only one soul, denying personal immortality. Answer: even separated, my soul is still a soul proportioned to that body, so at the resurrection each gets back his own body. Student: how are souls kept separate after death, before the resurrection? He: still relative to its body, “just like a nut and bolt”—they need not be together to be relative to each other. “Don’t try to understand it too distinctly now.”
• Student: is one man more intelligent than another because of matter alone, or form and matter? Answer: a bit of both, but you start from the body; not because of the kind of thing the soul is, but this soul was made for this body—Thomas’s body got a very good soul; some proportion, individual differences hard to specify.
• Extension: the difference between woman’s body and man’s body has something to do with a difference in their souls. He recalls Paul VI, making Teresa of Avila (with Catherine of Siena) a doctor of the Church, speaking of how they are doctors differently from Augustine, and quoting Francis de Sales with approval that a woman has a greater capacity for love than a man. Aristotle showing friendship consists more in loving than being loved gives a sign from the mother rather than the father (as Thomas notes). Francis de Sales’ treatise on love takes examples from Teresa and women saints rather than Augustine or Thomas. Teresa: “I don’t know what more I could have in heaven than I have now… our union is already complete”—a union of love; Augustine: the vision is the whole reward—a different emphasis, though neither neglects the other. Christ’s saying that he is found “in the heart of virtue” [unclear in recording]; Shakespeare understands the man/woman difference in terms of reason and love.
• Student: two unions, one for this life and one for the next? Answer: charity remains, faith is replaced by vision; seeing God face to face you love him more than possible here, but the degree of vision depends on how much you loved—Hosea “I have espoused you in faith” (quoted by Thomas): faith a betrothal, the wedding to come; the more the soul loves God the more God unites himself to it and the more clearly it sees, since one sees God through God in the soul, “that by which we understand as well as what we understand”; “star differs from star” in magnitude. Union of bodies in marriage is less intimate than God’s union with the soul in the vision, and as bodily union is repugnant except between lovers, God will not so unite himself without pure love—hence purgatory for most; like a rash at honeymoon time one wants passed before the wedding, the soul wants to be purged first.

7. Reply to objection 1 (“about the proximate end, the natural end”) #

• The species–end correspondence holds of the proximate, natural end, tied to the kind of thing; eternal beatitude is the last, supernatural end, so shared supernatural end does not make them naturally the same. Our natural understanding turns to images; the angel understands through his own substance and infused forms, not through the senses at all.
• Student asks about Dionysius’ “simple and blessed”: simple = knowing all at once and completely; blessed = the infused aspect? He is unsure whether Dionysius means supernatural blessedness or just natural; their mind is “completely formed,” filled with forms.
• His son Marcus asking why we can’t be born knowing everything: “you want to be an angel?” We are born, as Aristotle said, a blank tablet; Thomas’s letter to students, the mind as an empty vessel to be filled; in the Sentences Thomas uses Isaac (the philosopher, not the prophet): man has an intellectus obumbratus, an overshadowed understanding.

8. Reply to objection 2: “understanding” is still a genus (“the ability for large discourse”) #

Point: intellectuale is generic, common to many grades, not the ultimate difference.

• Naming: “understanding” here names not the act but the ability (intellectus); intellectus common to man and angel is divided into intellectus (angels) and reason (man). This is a name equivocal by reason where the common name is kept by one particular and a new name given to the other—the kind where only one has fully what the common name means and the other has it imperfectly and deficiently; “we’re the one that has the deficient one.”
• Shakespeare’s definition of reason: ability for large discourse, “looking before and after,” not “seeing”—discourse is not understanding but a way to arrive at it. Even natural understanding (nous), a habit of reason, depends on sense experience and induction; episteme (geometry) needs definitions and syllogisms. To say reason is simply the ability to understand would make it like the eye’s ability to see—but “stop using my reason the right way, I understand”? No: his students on next week’s exams, his own long reading of Thomas, Augustine on Scripture (more he does not understand than does). So we are an intellectus defectivus, a different kind.
• Angels differ from one another in kind too: the first thing an angel understands is his own substance, but not everything by it, so he has other thoughts; the higher the angel the fewer thoughts and the better he understands by them; the lower, the more thoughts and the worse. A likeness among men (Thomas): the more intelligent gets the point quicker and better—grade-school “extra exercises for those who needed them”; multiplying examples and comparisons for some, others understand at once with few words; the ancients say much in few words, one must learn to read again. God above all angels “said it all in one word”—his own little poem (when the Word became man he spoke few words and said so much); “brevity is the soul of wit” from Shakespeare: the wise man says more in fewer words.
• The human mind is most manifestly different: more particular thoughts than even the lowest angel, and it must turn to images while in the body—“probably the reason why our soul is naturally the soul of a body.”
• Text: the ultimate difference is most noble insofar as most determined, as act to potency; intellectuale is not most determined but generic, like “sensible” to grades of sensible being; not all understanding things are one kind.

9. Reply to objection 3 and close (“the soul holds the lowest grade of understanding”) #

• The body is not of the soul’s essence, but the soul by its very nature is apt to be united to a body; properly the soul is not any species, the composite is. Needing the body for its operation, not as organ but as object, shows the soul holds the lowest grade of understanding, below the angel—“even the great Anaxagoras saw that” [ed.: ASR “Exeges”], speaking of the greater mind, responsible for order in natural things, as opposed to the lesser.
• Next week q. 76, the union of soul to body; two articles a session, eight articles.
• Aside on condensing: the St Mary’s College joke that with less time you drop the minor premise, with a third of the time you give only the conclusion; like defining square as “equilateral right-angled quadrilateral” and dropping words—something essential is lost. Euclid to the king who wanted a short way: no royal road to geometry [ed.: he says “no wrong road”]; without both premises he gets no conclusion.

His words #

• lowest species; a species that cannot be divided into different kinds [ed.: infima species]
• good-natured comedy vs. satire; his own names for two kinds of Shakespearean comedy
• natural understanding, wisdom, reasoned-out understanding, art, foresight; his names for the five virtues of reason in Ethics VI [ed.: nous, sophia, episteme, techne, phronesis]
• intellectuale esse; “to be understanding,” able to understand
• Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics]
• tenth book of wisdom / of first philosophy; Metaphysics X
• spiritual matter; the strange notion Thomas also covers
• intellectus obumbratus; overshadowed understanding, from Isaac (the philosopher) as used in Thomas’s Sentences
• intellectus defectivus; his own coinage for man’s deficient understanding
• equivocal by reason; a name kept by one particular while the other gets a new name [ed.: analogous name]
• large discourse, looking before and after; Shakespeare’s definition of reason

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 75, a. 7 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Dionysius, On the Divine Names, ch. 7 (within the sed contra)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics VI (five virtues of reason); the passage on friendship consisting more in loving (Ethics, inferred), with Thomas’s comment on the mother
• Aristotle, Physics I (change by contraries); Metaphysics X (contrariety as lack and having)
• Euclid, Elements I, prop. 1; the anecdote of Euclid and the king
• Shakespeare: Macbeth, King Lear; reason as “large discourse” (Hamlet, inferred); “brevity is the soul of wit”
• Schrödinger’s essays on loss of individuality of particles
• Origen; Plato’s forms; Anaxagoras on the greater mind
• Kierkegaard on one’s parents never meeting
• Paul VI on Teresa of Avila and Catherine of Siena as doctors; Francis de Sales, treatise on love; Teresa of Avila; Augustine on Scripture and on the vision as reward
• Hosea, “I have espoused you in faith” (as quoted by Thomas); “star differs from star”
• Thomas’s letter to students; Thomas’s Sentences commentary (Isaac’s intellectus obumbratus)

His questions #

• Are equilateral, isosceles and scalene lowest species or not? Equilateral is (one shape); isosceles and scalene are not (many shapes).
• Do all oblongs have the same form? Ten by two and six by two? No.
• Is comedy a lowest species? In Shakespeare at least two kinds, good-natured comedy and satire; not clear as in geometry.
• Is “to be understanding” a lowest species, or are the soul’s and the angel’s ways of understanding not exactly the same? Not the same: intellectuale is generic, common to many grades.
• Why can many things be of the same kind at all? Only because of matter subject to continuous quantity, part outside part.
• How can the soul be adapted to one body without being a different species? It is individual, peculiar to this body, not a different kind.
• Is one man more intelligent than another from matter alone, or form and matter? A bit of both; you start from the body, this soul was made for this body.
• Is the union of love for this life and the vision for the next? Charity remains, faith yields to vision; the degree of vision is proportioned to love at death.
• What does Dionysius mean by “simple and blessed” understanding? Simple: knowing all at once; whether “blessed” is natural or supernatural he leaves open.