Replies to the Objections, the Central Question of Philosophy, and Thessalonians 5 and Psalm 99: Rejoice, Pray, Give Thanks

Orientation #

He begins by “looking at the reply to the objections here” of the article begun last time (prev. lecture: q.76 a.2, whether one intellective soul for all men). He says “maybe try look at Article three” after a break, then instead gives “a lecture on Thessalonians” and the psalm. Verified sources place this class between q.76 a.2 and a.3, with about seven minutes matched to the text of a.2 itself; a handout (“The First Statement and King of Statements”, p. 3) and DHB Vol. I, The First Philosophers, p. 103, were also detected, probably underlying the “central question of philosophy” passage. The previous class worked through the body and objections of q.76 a.2; the next takes up a.3 on the unity of the soul.

The class, in order #

1. Reply to the first objection (“many angels of the same species”) #

Point: a complete immaterial substance cannot be many in one kind, but the soul is the form of some matter.

1. Thomas concedes: if you have a complete immaterial substance there cannot be two of the same kind.
2. But the understanding soul, though subsistent (able to exist by itself) and having no matter “from which it is” (in that way like the angel), is nevertheless the form of some matter, which does not belong to the angel.
3. Therefore, according to the division of matter, there are many souls of one kind — proportioned to bodies — whereas many angels of the same exact kind is altogether impossible.

2. Reply to the second objection (“has unity in which it has being”) #

Point: the souls remain multiplied when the bodies are gone, because unity follows being.

• Objection recalled: if souls are multiplied by bodies, the distinction of souls would vanish with the bodies.
• His comparison (from last time): nuts and bolts. The bolt is made for this nut, but the bolts do not cease to be distinct from one another if the nuts are gone; still, each keeps its proportion to its own nut.
• Thomas’s principle: each thing has unity in the way it has being (Aristotle will show unity and being go together in “the fourth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics IV]); so things try to preserve their unity as they try to preserve their being — divide a thing and you destroy it. Hence the same judgment holds for a thing’s being one or many as for its being.

1. The soul is according to its being united to the body as form, yet (previous question) it is subsistent, so with the body destroyed it remains in its being.
2. Likewise the multitude of souls is according to the multitude of bodies, yet with the bodies destroyed the souls remain multiplied in their being.
3. Since unity follows being, the soul’s unity, like its being, is shared by the body but had by the soul itself; multiplicity is a number of many ones, so many souls means many existences and many unities, independent of the body — while still made for and proportioned to that body.

• Aside: at the resurrection you need not worry about my soul getting into your body, “like I have these stupid TV dramas sometimes.”

3. Reply to the third objection (“does not exclude the understanding universals”) #

Point: what impedes knowing the universal is materiality, not individuality.

1. The individuation of the one understanding, or of the form by which it understands, does not exclude understanding universals; otherwise separated substances, being subsistent and therefore individual, could not understand universals either — so positing one separate intellect for all does not escape the objection, since that substance is an individual too.
2. It is the materiality of the knower and of the form by which it knows (being in this or that part of matter) that impedes knowledge of the universal.
3. Reason: every action is according to the mode of the form by which the agent acts (heating according to the mode of the heat); so knowledge is according to the mode of the form by which the knower knows.
4. The common nature is distinguished and multiplied by individuating principles on the side of matter. If the form by which we know were material, not separated from the conditions of matter, it would be a likeness of the nature as distinct and multiplied, and could not know the nature in its community. If the species is separated from the conditions of individual matter, it is a likeness of the nature without what distinguishes and multiplies it, and so knows the universal.
5. Hence it makes no difference whether there is one understanding or many: even if only one, it must be some individual, and the species it understands is something individual.

• Example: the definition of circle (a plane figure contained by one line, every point equidistant from an interior point, the centre). Is it the definition of the circle on the left or the one on the right? In a way both, in a way neither: what separates here from there is left out. So my definition, though an individual definition in my mind, is a likeness of what is universal; a material likeness would have to be a likeness of an individual only.

4. Reply to the fourth objection (“the stone is not in the soul”) #

Point: whether the understanding is one or many, what is understood is one.

1. What is understood is not in the understanding by itself but according to its likeness: “the stone is not in the soul but the form of the stone” (Aristotle, De Anima III). Yet the stone is what is understood, not the species of stone — except by the reflection of the understanding on itself; otherwise the sciences would be about understandable forms, not things.
2. Diverse things can be assimilated to one thing by diverse forms — cookie press: all the cookies are like the one cutter. So many things can be likenesses of the same thing.
3. Knowledge is by assimilation of knower to known, so the same thing can be known by diverse knowers, as in the senses: many see the same colour, hear the same music, by different likenesses. Likewise many understandings understand the same thing understood.

• Difference between sense and understanding, on Aristotle’s position: a thing is sensed according to the disposition it has outside the soul, in its particularity; the nature understood is outside the soul, but not in the way of being in which it is understood, since we understand the common nature leaving aside individuating principles. The thing is universal in the understanding, singular outside it.
• On Plato’s position the thing understood exists outside the soul in the way it is understood: natures separated from matter and from our soul. This leads him back to the central question.

5. The central question of philosophy (“the way we know be the way things are”) #

Point: “Does truth require that the way we know be the way things are?” — he calls this the central question of philosophy.

• Why central: as all radii meet at the centre, everything the philosopher talks about (the way things are — soul, natural things, political things; or the way we know — logic) and his goal (to know the truth) come together in it. Two answers, yes or no: Plato yes, Aristotle no; down the history of philosophy Plato probably has more followers.
• Why one is apt to say yes: we think of truth as agreement or harmony of mind with things. Truth is when reason says what is, is, and what is not, is not.
• Aristotle’s first touching of it in natural philosophy: mathematical abstraction — can reason truly know in separation things that do not exist in separation? Yes.
• Thomas’s way of explaining, starting from accidental joinings: I am a philosopher and a grandfather; the nurse can know me truly as grandfather and nothing of philosopher, and vice versa; or my being white without my being a philosopher. Beforehand in the senses: the eye knows the whiteness of sugar without its sweetness, taste the sweetness without the whiteness. Incomplete knowledge is not false; falsity would be saying the sugar is not sweet.
• Mathematics: cube understood without ice, wood, plastic; sphere without rubber ball, steel ball, marble — though no such sphere exists in the world. Different from white/sweet: sphere is understood without rubber ball but not rubber ball without sphere (one without the other, not vice versa).
• Universals: I can know what a white man and a black man have in common leaving aside colour; falsity would come only in concluding that in reality there is a man of no colour.
• Order: can I know things truly in the reverse order? Sherlock Holmes to Watson, reasoning backwards from effect to cause (a murder — who did it?); I know you before your parents, your parents before your grandparents; water before hydrogen though if water is H2O hydrogen is before water. Falsity comes only if you attribute the order of knowing to things — “that’s what Hegel does.”
• Spinoza: the order of thoughts and of things is the same; Hegel takes it over, and since we know the general before the particular he makes the most general and most confused idea, being, the beginning of all things — identifying our most confused thought with the one who said “I am who am,” confusing two senses of “general” (recalls the Shakespeare puns discussed earlier).
• Plato: since we truly know by definitions, and the definition is of the universal in separation from singulars, the universal must exist in separation; likewise a mathematical world corresponding to geometry and arithmetic — the “three-decker world”: sensible, mathematical, forms. Answer yes and, given truth in geometry and in Socratic definitions, you must conclude to it.
• Ockham (14th c.) also answered yes but knew there was no world of forms, so concluded we know nothing: the scandalous skepticism of the 14th-century universities (outside the mind only singulars, all scientific knowledge universal, so no truth). Found in less radical form in the English empiricists.

6. Fifth objection and Augustine (“in a way learning is what recalling”) #

Point: the reply is brief because it is taken up in q.117.

• Science is numerically other in student and teacher; how it is caused will be shown in q.117, involving Socrates’ claim that learning is recalling and his role as intellectual midwife, helping give birth to knowledge already in you at least in potency.
• Augustine’s text only denies many souls differing in kind; he will not deny many individual souls.
• He proposes a.3 after a break, then instead gives the following.

7. Psalm 99 (100) and the division of theology (“Sing joyfully to the Lord, all you lands”) #

Point: the psalm’s structure maps onto faith and charity, each prefixed by joy.

• He recites the psalm from his memorised English (numbered 99 or 100); once thought it a good song for his small children.
• First part (“serve the Lord with gladness”): obeying the commandments, tied up with loving God (“if you love me, you do my commandments”) — charity.
• Second part: “Know that the Lord is God” = God in himself (SCG book I); “he made us” = God as Maker (book II); “his people, the flock he tends” = God as End and provident shepherd (book III). This is the basic division of theology, Alpha and Omega — and the Summa Theologiae is based on it too. Theology is the science by which faith is engendered, nourished, strengthened and defended (Thomas quoting Augustine at the start of the Summa); so this part refers to faith.
• Old catechism: God made me to know him and love him — both; the psalm says do both with joy (“God loves a cheerful giver”). “Joyfully read the Summa Contra Gentiles.”
• Third part, “enter his gates with thanksgiving, his courts with praise”: an order — asking thinks of your need; thanking is “a little less me” but looks to what you received; praise asks and thanks for nothing, it is for his goodness in himself, going beyond yourself. Thanksgiving and praise are often nearly interchangeable in psalm exposition, but the psalm builds. Where is hope? — left for the next text.

8. Augustine’s Enchiridion and catechesis (“divided according to faith, hope, and charity”) #

Point: Christian doctrine summarised by the three theological virtues.

• Augustine, asked by a layman for a summary, writes the Enchiridion (something in the hand; “brevity is all with” [ed.: sic in recording]) divided by faith, hope, charity — not as the Summa is divided. Thomas follows him in his catechetical instructions, the Naples sermons at the end of his life: faith → the creed and articles; hope → the Our Father (perhaps the Hail Mary), since in prayer you rely on God; charity → the two commandments of love and the ten commandments.

9. 1 Thessalonians 5:12–18 (“Rejoice always. Pray constantly.”) #

Point: three exhortations toward God, in the same order as the psalm, now for hope.

• Verses 12–15: gentle instructions toward others — respect and love those over you in the Lord, be at peace, admonish the idle, encourage the faint-hearted, help the weak, be patient, repay no evil with evil.
• Verses 16–18, with the Greek: pantote chairete (always rejoice); adialeiptōs proseuchesthe (unceasingly pray; euchē can mean asking or prayer — Aristotle says the best city exists “according to a prayer,” i.e. its circumstances are more to be prayed for than brought about); en panti eucharisteite (in everything give thanks; Eucharist = thanksgiving, because our Lord gives thanks at the institution).
• Thomas’s commentary divides: what to be toward the brethren, then toward God — these three.
• These pertain to hope (prayer). Thomas in II-II, under religion, last article on the integral parts of prayer: one part is asking, another giving thanks, because only if you give thanks are you disposed to receive more.
• What struck him: the order is the same as the psalm’s, joy preceding — joy before serving (charity), joy before knowing God (faith), and here joy before praying and thanking (hope).
• Why rejoice always, amid evils in the world and troubles in the Church (Cardinal Law)? Thomas’s commentary: the goodness of God, infinite, outweighs everything — rejoice in the Lord; more explicit in the psalm (“sing joyfully to the Lord”); the whole world, good or bad, seems nothing compared to God.

10. Love aroused by love; joy in a friend (“nothing more arouses love in us”) #

Point: a secular parallel to rejoicing in God.

• Augustine, De catechizandis rudibus: the primary intention of catechesis is to show God’s love for us, because the aim is to get the catechumen to love God, and nothing more arouses love than the experience of another’s love for us — Augustine goes all the way down to sexual arousal to fit the principle; Thomas uses it in SCG IV.
• Shakespeare’s sonnets on friendship: depressed with everything wrong, “but then, if I think of you, dear friend,” joy is restored; so thinking of God in our troubles restores joy — but always.
• Asides: “Deo gratias” — no prayer shorter or grander; Thomas’s prayer after communion begins gratias tibi ago. Prayer in the narrow sense is asking God for suitable things, distinguished from giving thanks as in vv. 17–18; the whole psalm is itself a prayer.

11. Thanksgiving, praise, music and the virtues (“music is a natural sign of love”) #

Point: how praise and thanksgiving relate to the three virtues.

• Would praise relate to faith? Student: seems so, learning what God is and has done leads to praise (and to thanksgiving).
• Paul VI’s address on the feast of St Cecilia, patroness of music, “a golden chain from Augustine”: music belongs in liturgy because liturgy concerns charity, a love, and about the one we love we want to sing; Augustine’s amare et laudare, laudare et amare (love and praise, praise and love) go together, speaking of heaven. Secular cases: loving Mozart’s music, Shakespeare’s plays, Thomas’s text, one goes on praising; a man who loves a woman praises her (“Who is Sylvia, that all our swains do commend”). Kierkegaard on Don Giovanni as the opera of operas (content and form in harmony). Honour uses music: “Hail to the Chief,” the conquering hero’s march, the triumphal march of the Italian opera [ed.: Aida, inferred], the national anthem; the Bible’s book most devoted to love is the Song; “If music be the food of love, play on.”
• His conclusion, not pressed too far: praise is closer to charity, thanksgiving closer to hope (prayer; in II-II the four parts of prayer: ascent of mind to God, why he should hear us, the petition, thanksgiving); human parallel — ingratitude discourages further giving, thankfulness makes us want to give more. “Joy seems to be common to all three, faith, hope and love.”
• Asides: his son’s rented van totalled by the Hudson flood at West Point, and the insurance still running on a car that no longer exists — “nothing to rejoice about there”; the scandals and activists “going after” bishops; Mother Teresa’s sisters rejoicing because they meet Christ in the beggars.
• Recording ends mid-sentence on the liturgy as a service.

His words #

• complete immaterial substance: an angel; cannot be two of one kind — vs. the soul, subsistent but “form of some matter”.
• subsistent: able to exist by itself.
• unity follows upon being: each thing has unity in the way it has being; multiplicity is “a number of many ones”.
• fourth book of wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics IV]: where Aristotle shows unity and being go together.
• individuating principles: on the side of matter; what distinguishes and multiplies the common nature.
• understandable form / species: the likeness by which we understand; a likeness of the universal if immaterial.
• reflection of the understanding upon itself: the only way the species, rather than the thing, is what is understood.
• assimilation: knowledge as the knower’s being made like the known.
• the central question of philosophy: “Does truth require that the way we know be the way things are?”
• know in separation / in distinction: knowing truly apart what does not exist apart.
• three-decker world: Plato’s sensible, mathematical and form worlds.
• intellectual midwife: Socrates helping knowledge already in you in potency to be born.
• science by which faith is engendered, nourished, strengthened and defended: theology, Augustine’s definition quoted by Thomas.
• Enchiridion: “something you can have in your hand”.
• pantote chairete / adialeiptōs proseuchesthe / en panti eucharisteite: always rejoice / unceasingly pray / in everything give thanks.
• according to a prayer: Aristotle on the circumstances of the best city.
• integral parts of prayer: ascent of the mind, reason he should hear us, petition, thanksgiving.
• amare et laudare, laudare et amare: Augustine’s linking of love and praise.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 76, a. 2, replies to objections 1–5 (translated and commented)
• Psalm 99 (100), recited from memory in English
• 1 Thessalonians 5:12–18, English with the Greek of vv. 16–18

Mentioned

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 117 (on teaching and learning)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 1 (Augustine’s definition of theology, “beginning of the Summa”)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles I–III (division of theology), IV (love aroused by love)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, on religion, last article on prayer (parts of prayer)
• Thomas Aquinas, commentary on 1 Thessalonians; Naples catechetical sermons; prayer after communion
• Aristotle, De Anima III (“the stone is not in the soul”); Metaphysics IV (“fourth book of wisdom”); Physics on mathematical abstraction (inferred); Politics on the best city “according to a prayer” (inferred)
• Augustine, Enchiridion; De catechizandis rudibus
• Plato (world of forms); Socrates (learning as recalling); Ockham; English empiricists; Spinoza; Hegel
• Paul VI, address on the feast of St Cecilia; Kierkegaard on Don Giovanni
• Shakespeare: sonnets on friendship; “Who is Sylvia” (Two Gentlemen of Verona, inferred); “If music be the food of love” (Twelfth Night, inferred)
• Song of Songs; the old catechism

His questions #

• Are they able to be many angels of the same species? No; but many souls of one kind, according to the division of matter.
• Is the definition of circle the definition of this circle or that one? Both, and in a way neither: what separates here from there is left out.
• Does truth require that the way we know be the way things are? No (Aristotle); Plato says yes.
• Is the eye’s knowledge of the sugar false because it leaves out the sweetness? No; incomplete is not false.
• Am I false in knowing you before your parents? No; falsity would be attributing the order of knowing to things.
• What’s there to rejoice about always? The goodness of God, which outweighs all the evil in the world.
• How are thanksgiving and praise related to the theological virtues? Thanksgiving closer to hope, praise closer to charity; joy common to all three.
• Would praise be related to faith? Student: it seems so, since learning what God is and has done leads to praise.