Summa I, Q.76, Art. 1: Is the Understanding Soul the Form of the Body? The Objections, and Words for Beginning, Mode and Happiness

Orientation #

He begins by saying he still owes the class the passage from the Pope on St Teresa of Avila (prev. lecture), which he will show “if we have some time left”, and says the passage is “not exactly the way I quoted it” but defensible from the text. He warns this is a long article and doubts they will finish one today; in fact he gets only through the three objections of a. 1. The previous class finished q. 75 a. 7 (soul and angel not one species) and the next continues q. 76 a. 1 with Thomas’s response.

The class, in order #

1. Prologue to Q. 76: the eight articles (“there are eight things that are asked”) #

He reads the prologue and glosses each article with the historical position it answers.

• a. 1: whether the intellectual “beginning” (principium) is united to the body as form.
• a. 2: whether it is multiplied according to bodies, or there is one understanding for all men — the position Averroes made famous; hence Thomas’s De Unitate Intellectus contra Averroistas.
• a. 3: whether there is some other soul in the body — Plato spoke as if there were a plant soul, an animal soul and a human soul. Aside: this feeds heresies about Christ (a Word plus an animal soul for his body), treated in the Third Part, not here.
• a. 4: whether there is some other substantial form in the body besides the soul.
• a. 5: what sort of body the understanding beginning ought to be the form of.
• a. 6: whether it is joined by some other body as a middle — Descartes’ pineal gland.
• a. 7: whether joined by reason of some accident.
• a. 8: whether the whole soul is in each part of the body. He flags this as “very interesting” but hard: people either imagine the soul as an air-like body (then a part of the soul would be in each part of the body) or as a point with a location in the body; “the soul is neither one of those things.”

2. The word principium (“the difference between a principal … and principal in an art”) #

Point: intellectivum principium means the beginning or source whence we first understand, and “beginning” in Latin/Greek is wider than in English. He lists the meanings of principium / arché in order:

1. The beginning of a thing, as a point is the beginning of a line, the beginning of the table.
2. Where one conveniently begins a journey: leaving from the middle of the table, not walking to its end; taking Route Nine to Boston from where you are, not from its start in western Massachusetts.
3. The fundamental part: foundation of a house, keel of a ship — closer to sense 1, because it is inside that of which it is the beginning.
4. The mover or maker: art is the beginning of artefacts, the prince or general of those he commands, parents of the child — these are outside what they begin.
5. The beginning in knowledge, the starting point in the mind, “which we sometimes compare to efficient cause”.
6. The general sense: any cause can be called a beginning. The Fifth Book of the Metaphysics (“book of wisdom”, “first philosophy”) opens with this word; archaeology, monarchia, archai (princes and principles alike) come from it.

• Aside: the grade-school principal at St Joseph’s who told him, when he looked down while answering about his sick brother Mark, “Look at the person to whom you are speaking”; despite the English spelling, principal and principle are one Latin word.

3. Objection 1: the understanding is separate (“the philosopher says in the third book about the soul”) #

Point: “the Philosopher” (Aristotle by antonomasia) says in De Anima III that the understanding is separate, not in a body, not the act of a body; therefore the understanding beginning is not united to a body as its form. He calls it “a very good objection.” The pattern of error: those who mistake go to extremes.

• First extreme: understanding taken as bodily, like a sense, “the brain or something”, so man is little different from beasts; then the soul is not subsistent, incorruptible or immortal.
• Opposite extreme: having seen that understanding the universal, the what-it-is, cannot take place in a body, they make the soul an angel — a complete immaterial substance, complete in nature, with the body accidental to it, “a prison.” Platonists tend to speak so; Origen held that souls were created as complete immaterial substances, some sinned, and were imprisoned in bodies for their choices.
• A student: “So they’re thinking of it more as angelic?” — Yes: not only subsisting but complete in nature.
• The second and third objections, he says, only develop this first one and recall Aristotle’s reasons.
• Aside: Thomas asks how the fallen angels can be afflicted by bodies (not by fire as we are); they are forced by God to be bound to something below them — a fitting punishment for pride.

4. Objection 2: form is proportioned to matter (“every form is determined by the nature of the matter”) #

Argument as read:

1. Every form is determined by the nature of its matter; otherwise no proportion between matter and form would be required — a basic principle of natural philosophy: not just any soul in any body.
2. Every body has a determined nature.
3. So if the understanding were the form of a body it would have a determined nature and would not be “knowing of all things”, which is against the definition of the understanding (Aristotle’s first point, repeated by Thomas: the understanding is in potency to the forms and natures of all material things). Examples for premise 1, each showing form fitted to its matter:

• The soul is to the body as an art to its tools: the art of sewing (his wife, his daughter — scissors and needle) cannot use the carpenter’s hammer and saw, and his brother-in-law cannot build a house with scissors (“a cardboard house, but not the house we’re going to live in”); the glassblower cannot use the carpenter’s tools.
• Political philosophy: Aristotle says not every form of government can be realized in every people; the United States naively transplants its government to underdeveloped countries — names are plastered over, but the people are not proportioned by education and customs.
• The perfection of the eye is not the perfection of the ear: each form has its own matter.
• Physics II (“Natural Hearing”): the same science considers matter and form because there is one knowledge of opposites, and matter and form are opposed as relatives — one science of fathers and sons, of double and half. Examples for premise 3, the receiver must lack what it receives: a salty or sweet tongue could not taste all flavours; a coloured eye-fluid could not receive all colours; if Mozart were always sounding in his ear he could hear nothing else (“some people think I can’t”).

5. Objection 3: received according to the mode of the receiver (“whatever is received is received in the receiver”) #

Point: whatever potency receives the act of a body receives the form with matter and individually, by “the old principle” that what is received is received according to the mode of the receiver.

• Example: the same words said to thirty students come back on the exam received fully by some, not at all by others.
• A student asks what “mode” means. Answer: modus in Latin is something determined by measure; his most concrete example is the Italian restaurant where one draws wine from kegs into carafes of different sizes and pays by the carafe — each receives according to its capacity. He remarks some doctoral theses have been done on the word modus.

6. Excursus: happiness, felicitas, eudaimonia (“happiness actually comes from the word hap”) #

Point: synonyms across languages carry different etymologies, each with some truth.

• Happiness from hap, luck: the common man is joyful when lucky. Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen: Proteus to Valentine, “when you meet good hap … wish me partaker in thy happiness”; alluded to again at the play’s end. In the Poetics Aristotle uses eutuchia (good luck), the more plebeian word.
• Felicitas from felix, fruitful: fruit is last and pleasant, so it names the end of life; “by their fruits you shall know them”, the fruits of the Holy Spirit. This is closest to the Nicomachean Ethics, where a man is happy or miserable by what he chooses to do. Misery, in English wretchedness, goes back to shipwreck; Pius XII, declaring the Assumption in 1950 [ed.: he first garbles this with the Immaculate Conception a hundred years earlier], said one denying it would suffer shipwreck of faith (St Paul’s phrase). Shakespeare’s “life’s uncertain voyage”; how old voyage insurance was a wager on one’s return. Macbeth’s doctor: “unnatural deeds do breed unnatural troubles” — breed means generate; misery is the natural offspring of evil deeds.
• Eudaimonia from daimon, a superior being like an angel (not yet “demon”); eudaimon = a good angel, as in Lincoln’s “better angels”: happiness depends on being well guided from above.
• Summary: luck, our choices and a superior being all bear on happiness; the Ethics stresses choice because we do not control luck or the higher being, “though we can pray.”
• Aside: in the Politics the best government simply is kat’ euchen, “according to a prayer”; Aristotle distinguishes the best government period, the best most men are capable of, and the best for this people.

7. Excursus: modus, tropos, way, road; words better in one language (“the way of going forward”) #

• Modus procedendi = tropos (Greek), “way of proceeding” or in “Italian English” the way of going forward; there is a common way (logic) and private ways (geometry, natural philosophy, wisdom, ethics). Tropos originally means turning — a “turn of mind” (Washington Irving’s Mountjoy; the mathematician’s turn of mind); Plato in the Republic speaks of turning the mind from sensible things to mathematical things to immaterial substances. Modus is fixed by measure: the way of proceeding is measured by the matter — we do not talk of triangles as we talk of virtues. Way in English is nearer road; “I am the way” translates hodos, road (odometer), the word Aristotle usually uses.
• Modi essendi are proportional to modi praedicandi (Thomas, on Aristotle’s “figures of predication”); in English he would say “ways”.
• Monsignor Dion taught that a word can be better in one language. Episteme means coming to a halt — knowledge at the end of a movement of reason; scientia lacks this. A student asks whether Latin is ever superior to Greek: generally Greek is; Dion and Boulet’s proportion — French : English :: Latin : Greek, Greek and English better for both philosophy and poetry. Yet sapientia is beautiful: Thomas explains it as sapida scientia, savory knowledge; sophia and wisdom lack this.
• Understanding is better than intellectus (intus legere, to read within), which is better than nous: to understand is to see what stands under; Shakespeare puns on it twice; substance and “ground” as English for cause share the etymology; impositio nominis — a name is put upon a thing, so to understand a name is to know what stands under it. “The English word understanding is really absolutely marvelous”: the wise man most of all understands — first causes, axioms and substance stand under everything.
• Example: in logic it means (i) a singular used to illustrate a universal (“this is a hand, for example”), (ii) an argument from one singular to another of the same kind (appeasing Hitler at Munich, so appeasing this dictator). Dion compared it with sample, a piece cut from the whole cheese: English is very concrete there.
• He translates episteme by a phrase, “reasoned out knowledge”: knowledge for certitude against guessing, reasoned out for the end of a movement.
• A student asks about “reading within.” Thomas derives intellectus from intus + legere; some etymologists read it “read between”, but read within fits, since reason’s proper object is the what-it-is, which is within — hence “nature”, and Heraclitus, “nature loves to hide.” So insight; Cymbeline, deceived all his life by his evil queen: “Who is’t can read a woman?” (the doctor, the feigned poison, Imogen).

8. Return to the mode of the receiver: how much and how well (“according to the mode of the receiver”) #

Point: the principle means the degree and the quality of reception depend on the receiver.

• How much: St Thérèse of Lisieux and the St Joseph sisters — in heaven all are full but the buckets differ in size; at dinner one is satisfied with less than another; restaurants serve more than he can eat, since “no one should leave a restaurant hungry.”
• How well: the same wine received better by a discriminating taster (Parker’s newsletter; Brother Mark alone detecting Ron McCarthy’s switched bottles); Mozart fainting at a trumpet yet hearing what we do not; painters seeing a new shade of yellow, women naming aqua where he sees blue; his father-in-law for whom all wines taste the same.
• Acquired taste: he could not read Homer until a good edition and the right turn of attention; C. S. Lewis on approaching each kind of fiction differently. The recording ends here; Thomas’s reply is not reached.

His words #

• beginning — principium / arché; six senses as listed above; he uses “beginning” throughout for principium.
• understanding beginning — intellectivum principium, “whence first we understand” [ed.: intellectual principle].
• by antonomasia — “the Philosopher” for Aristotle.
• Natural Hearing — his name for the Physics.
• book of wisdom / first philosophy — the Metaphysics.
• proportion — matter and form as relatives, “this form in this particular matter”.
• mode (modus) — something determined or fixed by a measure; “the mode of the receiver”.
• happiness / felicitas / eudaimonia — from luck, fruitfulness, a good daimon.
• wretchedness — shipwreck; misery as natural result of evil deeds.
• kat’ euchen — “according to a prayer”, the best government.
• way of going forward — modus procedendi, tropos; tropos = turning, “turn of mind”.
• road — hodos, “I am the way”.
• modi essendi / modi praedicandi — ways of being / ways of being said.
• reasoned out knowledge — his rendering of episteme (halting) / scientia.
• savory knowledge — sapientia as sapida scientia.
• to read within — intus legere, intellectus; “insight”.
• imposition of a name — impositio nominis, putting a label upon.
• example — singular illustrating a universal; also argument singular to singular; vs. sample, a piece of the whole.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 76, prologue (the eight articles) and a. 1, objections 1–3.
• Handout, “Reasoning and the Four Kinds of Argument”, p. 2 — matched by text to this episode, probably the passage on example as argument from singular to singular. Mentioned
• Aristotle, De Anima III (understanding is separate).
• Aristotle, Physics II (one science of matter and form).
• Aristotle, Metaphysics V (opens with arché).
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics; Poetics (eutuchia); Politics (kat’ euchen, three grades of best government).
• Thomas, De Unitate Intellectus contra Averroistas.
• Plato, Republic (turning the mind).
• Shakespeare: Two Gentlemen of Verona, Macbeth, Cymbeline; Washington Irving, Mountjoy; Heraclitus, “nature loves to hide”; Pius XII on the Assumption; Origen; Descartes; Thérèse of Lisieux; C. S. Lewis.

His questions #

• Is that whence we first understand joined to the body as a form? Not yet answered; only the three objections are read.
• How can the whole soul be in each part of the body? Left open; he notes the false imaginations of soul as airy body or as point.
• What is the fourth meaning of beginning? The mover or maker — art, prince, parents.
• Can the art of carpentry use the tools of the tailor? No; form is proportioned to its matter as art to its tools.
• Why does the same science consider matter and form? Because there is one knowledge of opposites, and matter and form are relatives (Physics II).
• What does “mode” mean in “the mode of the receiver”? Something determined by measure — the carafes receive according to capacity.
• Is the Latin ever superior to the Greek? Generally not, but sapientia (savory knowledge) is an example where it is.
• Who is’t can read a woman? Cymbeline’s line, used to show understanding as “reading within”.