Averroes' Mistakes, the Soul Not Wholly Immersed in the Body, and St. Teresa, Mother of Spiritual People

Orientation #

He is continuing q. 76 a. 1: “the first thing he did was to repeat the demonstration of Aristotle in the second book on the soul” (prev. lecture); now “some of the futile attempts to understand this union,” then the replies to the objections. He refers back to “the third book of the soul there” on the moving power, and to Plato’s confusion of matter with lack of form, “we saw.” The previous class worked through the objections and Aristotle’s demonstration that the intellectual soul is the body’s substantial form; the next takes up a. 2, whether there is one intellect for all men.

The class, in order #

1. Averroes’ union through the intelligible form (“the commentator has some misunderstandings”) #

The point: an intelligible form with two subjects, the possible intellect and the phantasms in bodily organs, does not make Socrates understand.

• “The commentator” = Averroes, an example of antonomasia (he commented on all Aristotle’s works; “Thomas should be called the commentator”).
• His position: understanding is a separate, angel-like substance; it is tied to us because it understands what we imagine.
• Thomas’s refutation through the proportion of Aristotle (De Anima III): images are to the understanding as the exterior sensible is to the senses. Example: the black of a student’s clothing is seen, but the seeing is in the eye, not in the clothing; “does your clothing see?” So the image is what is understood, not what understands. Read: as colours are in the wall whose likenesses are in sight, we do not say the wall sees but that it is seen; so it does not follow that Socrates, in whom the images are, understands, but that he or his images are understood.
• Aside on the fuller treatment: Thomas says Averroes is deceived by the fallacy of accident, first of the fallacies outside speech in Sophistical Refutations, the one that “deceives even the wise” (Plato made the same mistake confusing matter with lack of form). What a triangle is is in the image singularly and in the understanding universally; “insofar as it’s in one, it’s not in the other”; in the image it is understood only in potency. Here, for beginners, Thomas uses the easier proportion.

2. The soul as mover: Descartes and the four reasons (“united to the body as a mover”) #

The point: if the understanding soul were united to the body only as mover, understanding could not be attributed to Socrates.

• He identifies this as Descartes’ way: res extensa and res cogitans, joined through the pineal gland. Example against it: a swordsman or violinist seems one with his instrument, but the violin out of tune is not the same as your body being sick.
• Thomas: “this is in many ways vain”:
  1. The understanding moves the body only through desire, whose motion presupposes understanding; so Socrates is not understanding because moved, but moved because he understands (cf. De Anima III on the moving power: desire and imagination or reason, united in the good desired and understood).
  2. Socrates is one individual in nature with one essence of matter and form; if the soul were not his form, understanding would be outside his essence, and understanding is an action remaining in the agent, not passing over like heating; so it could not be attributed to him from being moved.
  3. The mover’s action is attributed to the moved only as instrument (carpenter and saw); but the Philosopher showed understanding is not through a bodily instrument. His example: “could you say that your ballpoint pen understands because it’s writing very understandable words?”
  4. The action of a part is attributed to the whole (eye to man), never to another part except by accident (“we do not say that the hand sees”); if the soul were only a motor, Socrates would not be one simply, “like a man in his bike,” and so not a being simply, “for something is a being in the same way that it’s one.”
• Conclusion: the only way, Aristotle’s, is that this man understands because the understanding principle is his form. He notes the structure: Aristotle’s demonstration, elimination of other unions, and now a third way.

3. Third way: from the human species (“by reason of the human species”) #

1. The nature of each thing is shown from its operation.
2. The proper operation of man as man is to understand (he transcends other animals by it; “Shakespeare’s exhortation to use reason”; Ethics places ultimate felicitas in it).
3. Man obtains his species from the principle of this operation; each thing has its species from its form (species and difference taken from form). Conclusion: the understanding principle is man’s own form.

4. The nobler the form, the less immersed (“as a form is more noble”) #

The point: “very important to see what he’s going to bring out here”: the scale of forms exceeding matter.

• Mixed body: an operation not from the elementary qualities of earth, air, fire, water; plant soul more than a metal’s form; sensing soul more than plant soul. His example: I recognize cat, dog, man, table by their shapes “in my head,” without “a bunch of old bony statues” of everyone I know, so sensing already almost rises above matter.
• Human soul, “the last word” in nobility: a power in which bodily matter in no way communicates, the understanding (intellect as the power of understanding); “the same thing could be said about the ability to choose.”
• Against the soul composed of matter and form: form is act, matter potency only; a matter-form composite cannot by itself be the form of another; what is formed is the soul, what it is the form of is the first thing animated.

5. Replies 1–3: the last of natural forms (“the last of natural forms”) #

• Reply 1 (Physics II): the human soul is the last natural form, where natural philosophy ends. He explains: natural philosophy’s subject always involves matter; the soul as form of a body belongs to it, but insofar as it can be without the body it belongs to wisdom; so the soul, like the unmoved mover, is the limit, end of natural philosophy and beginning of wisdom (Metaphysics VI, “the sixth book of wisdom”: if nothing apart from material things, natural philosophy would be wisdom). It is in matter because “man generates man from matter and the sun” (Aristotle’s phrase); separated by its understanding power, not the act of a bodily organ as sight is of the eye; hence De Anima III says the intellectus is separated.
• Replies 2 and 3 follow: understanding all things, and understanding immaterial and universal things, need only that the power is not the act of the body.
• “Kind of amazing”: form of the body, yet a power not in the body. Because the soul’s existence is shared by the body but not fully attained; “not entirely immersed,” like a body floating partly above the water.
• Asides: St Thérèse of Lisieux with tuberculosis, unable to breathe in this world and not yet in the next; Father Innes Fertan (Assumption, the man who hired him), whose last words were of seeing something beautiful at the border of the next world.

6. Reply 4: not immersed, not comprehended (“the fourth objection here is very important”) #

The point: the soul is not immersed in or totally comprehended by matter, on account of its perfection; so nothing prevents some power of it not being the act of the body, though by essence it is the body’s form.

• We reach this from the effect: we are soul and body, yet understand and choose not in the body; if the soul were fully immersed it would have no activity except in and through the body (cf. De Anima III on understanding, “we’ll take it up here again later”).
• Aside: a Canadian brain scientist (told him by Bobo Gross) concluded from stimulating parts of the brain that no part is responsible for choosing.
• Hamlet, “since my dear soul was mistress of her choice, and could of men distinguish”: the soul is what chooses, and chooses when it can distinguish. Applied: Planned Parenthood resists informed choice, not wanting the woman to know what she is doing.

7. Reply 5: the soul’s own being, shared by the body (“that being in which it itself subsists”) #

The point: the human soul communicates the being in which it subsists to the body, so the being of the composite is the soul’s own; material forms are not subsistent.

• Cat (Lucy, “Orange”) vs. you: the cat’s soul is only that by which the cat is, no existence by itself; your soul is that by which the composite is and has existence by itself, so it remains when the body is destroyed.
• How we know: operation by itself, understanding and choice not in the body; we reason “backwards,” like Sherlock Holmes. Later in the treatise: the separated soul knows itself through itself, like an angel, so “know thyself” need no longer be said to man.
• Plato’s mistake: beast souls immortal because he thought sensing or imagining not in the body; Aristotle corrects him, distinguishing the central sense from the outward senses without confusing it with reason.

8. Reply 6 and a student’s question (“just as it belongs to a light body”) #

• It belongs to the soul secundum se to be united to the body, as to a light body to be above; separated, it keeps its being with an aptitude and natural inclination to the body. Hence the resurrection is reasonable; Plato and the Manicheans must reject it (reunion is imprisonment or return to evil), and so deny the Word made flesh, “heresies because of a bad philosophy.”
• Student: “the soul is the first act of a natural body” sounds as if body comes first and soul is derived. Answer: soul and body, like matter and form, are relative and defined by reference to each other, like father and son; even the separated soul is as such the form of a body.

9. Digression: knowing God through loving Him (“do we love God through knowing Him”) #

Occasion: a text (Paul VI on St Teresa) quoting St Francis de Sales that women have a special capacity for mystical prayer.

• Both: we must know God before loving Him (faith precedes and can be without charity, not vice versa); but after loving Him we know Him through the impression He makes on the heart.
• ST I q. 1 a. 6 ad 3 (objection: this doctrine is by study, wisdom by infusion): judgment belongs to the wise (savory knowledge, taste), in two ways: by inclination, as the man of moral virtue judges what is to be done (Ethics X, the virtuous man is measure and rule; the chaste man rejects things simply by inclination), or by knowledge, as one instructed in moral science judges even without virtue. The first way about divine things is wisdom the gift (1 Cor 2:15, the spiritual man judges all; Dionysius on Hierotheus, doctus non solum discens sed et patiens divina); the second is this doctrine, had by study from revealed principles. Goethe: we are shaped and fashioned by what we love.
• Teresa’s title Mater Spiritualium fits spiritualis homo, one who judges by inclination of the habit. Reason: charity loves God as He is in Himself; faith and theology know Him not as He is but as He is not (via negativa); “we shall see Him as He is” is beatific vision; faith will be replaced, charity remains (St Paul). So in this life the will’s inclination gives a higher knowledge than theology; woman’s special gift for mystical prayer means a special gift for charity (Aristotle on woman as more loving, merciful; Mary mother of mercy).
• Contrast: Paul VI at the Augustinianum quoting Augustine, intellectum valde ama, a different emphasis from Teresa. The read text on Teresa: her doctrine came not only from her culture and discipline but from things “undergone by her,” the same word as Dionysius’ patiens; both Teresas received love as a wound (the angel, the painting; Lisieux pierced carrying the cross); mystical action as espousal, divine love descending to human love ascending, becoming wisdom, in the first of Thomas’s two senses.

His words #

• antonomasia: the figure by which Averroes is “the commentator”
• possible understanding: “the one that is able to understand” [ed.: possible intellect]
• images: phantasms in the bodily organs
• the proportion of Aristotle: images to understanding as exterior sensible to sense
• fallacy of the accident: being deceived because what is one with the image is not, as such, one with the understanding
• res extensa / res cogitans: Descartes’ extended thing and thinking thing
• action remaining in the one doing it vs. passing over to another (heating)
• felicitas: ultimate happiness placed in understanding
• immersed / comprehended: the soul wholly in or surrounded by matter, which the human soul is not
• shared existence: the body shares in the soul’s being “but not fully”
• intellectus: here the power of understanding, “separated”
• “the sixth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics VI]
• subsistent: having being by itself; material forms are not
• secundum se: by itself
• savory knowledge: wisdom as judging, “taste”
• judging by inclination vs. by knowledge: two wisdoms
• patiens divina: undergoing divine things, said of Hierotheus
• via negativa: knowing God as He is not
• intellectum valde ama: Augustine, “love the understanding very much”

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, ST I q. 76 a. 1, body (Averroes’ union; soul as mover, four reasons; way from the human species; nobility of forms) and replies 1–6
• Thomas, ST I q. 1 a. 6 ad 3 (two ways of judging) [ed.: a matching system flagged q. 12 for this stretch; the transcript says q. 1 a. 6, followed here]
• handout “Nature and Kinds of Love,” p. 23: Paul VI on St Teresa (Francis de Sales on women and mystical prayer; things “undergone by her”; mystical espousal) Mentioned
• Aristotle, De Anima III (Averroes’ commentary; images to intellect as colours to sight; intellect separated; the moving power); De Anima II (the demonstration repeated); beginning of De Anima (the study of the soul is among the best)
• Aristotle, Sophistical Refutations (fallacy of accident); Physics II (human soul last of natural forms); Metaphysics VI; Nicomachean Ethics (felicity; book X, virtuous man as measure)
• 1 Cor 2:15; Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 2; 1 John “we shall see Him as He is”; St Paul on faith and charity (inferred: 1 Cor 13)
• Shakespeare, Hamlet (soul mistress of her choice; exhortation to use reason)
• Goethe; Augustine via Paul VI at the Augustinianum; Descartes on the pineal gland

His questions #

• Does your clothing see, because the black in it is seen? No; it is seen. So what has the images does not thereby understand.
• Could you say your ballpoint pen understands because it writes understandable words? No; the mover’s action is attributed to the moved only as instrument.
• Is the human soul the form of the body, yet with an ability not in the body? How can that be? Because the body shares the soul’s existence but not fully; the soul is not entirely immersed.
• How do we know the human soul has existence by itself, unlike Lucy the cat’s? From its operation by itself, understanding and choice not in the body, reasoning backwards.
• Does “first act of a natural body” mean the body comes first? (student) No; soul and body are relative, defined by each other, like father and son.
• Do we love God through knowing Him, or know God through loving Him? Both: knowing (faith) first in generation; then through love, knowing God as He is.
• Can someone judge about acts of virtue without having virtue? Yes, by knowledge, one instructed in moral science; “difficult, but possible.”
• Why would woman have a special capacity for mystical prayer? Because she has a special gift for charity, and mystical knowledge is knowing through loving.