One Soul in Man: Predication, the Sign from Intense Activity, and Souls Compared to Numbers

Orientation #

He refers back to “the first argument” already treated, and to “last time, we were talking about Saint Teresa of Avila” (prev. lecture). The class sits between the start of the article on whether man has several souls and the replies to its objections.

The class, in order #

1. Second argument: what kind of predication is “man is an animal”? (“Things which are taken from diverse forms”) #

Point: if man were man by one soul and animal by another, “animal” could be said of “man” only per accidens or per se in the second mode, and both are manifestly false.

1. Predicates taken from diverse forms are said of each other either per accidens, if the forms have no order to each other (the same thing is white and sweet; “the white is sweet”; his own example: a triangle happens to be green), or per se in the second mode, if one form is presupposed to the other, the subject being placed in the definition of the predicate (surface is a praeambulum to color; a body with a surface is colored; color as we experience it is always spread over a surface, so it is not accidental to color to be on a surface, and surface is the subject in which color is).
2. So if the form by which something is an animal differs from that by which it is a man, “animal” is said of “man” either per accidens (no order between the souls) or in the second mode of per se (one soul presupposed to the other).
3. Both are false: animal is said of man as such, not by accident; and man is not placed in the definition of animal, but the reverse.
4. Therefore it is the same form through which something is an animal and a man; otherwise man would not truly be that which is an animal, and animal would not be said of man per se.

His three-way test: is animal said of two as number is said of two, as “half of four” is said of two, or as green of triangle? Green of triangle is clearly not it; “half of four” (a property) would put man in the definition of animal, whereas in fact “what an animal is enters into what a man is”. So you are “forced to the third”: when you say animal of man you say what man is, only “in a more general, in a more vague way”.

Lucy the cat (the class cat): Lucy is a cat, Lucy is an animal, Lucy is four-footed: not three different things about her, since a cat is by definition a four-footed animal, and her being an animal “is not something other than her being a cat” in reality. Lucy is a cat and Lucy is orange: two different things in reality. Same for “I happen to be a man; I happen to be white,” which is not the relation of man to animal.

Student: “you can’t get something greater out of something less, which is why animal has to be part of man” and not the reverse. Accepted.

He restates the threat: with two souls “you’re almost back in saying the thing is white and sweet; it’s not really one thing anymore”, which “is going back to the first argument”.

2. Logic presupposed to theology; kath’ hauto (“Aristotle distinguishes those senses”) #

Point: the argument depends on the senses of per se, which Aristotle distinguishes in the first book of the Posterior Analytics (he corrects himself from “second”) and the fifth book of the Metaphysics; Plato made the idea of kath’ hauto popular. An epistēmē, science, is about the parts and properties of a thing kath’ hauto: so the geometer never talks about a triangle being green; you could not reason it out, it is “at best a matter of sensation”.

3. Third argument: a sign from impeded operations (“one operation of the soul, when it becomes very intense”) #

Point: when one operation of the soul becomes intense it impedes another, which would not happen unless the principle of the actions were one in its very nature.

• If the sensing soul were an entirely different thing from the understanding soul, emotional upset (something bodily, of the animal nature) would not impede thinking; but by experience it does.
• “That’s a very important sign.”
• St. Francis of Assisi, giving the Franciscans permission to study theology, on condition they not extinguish “the spirit of prayer and devotion”: devotion is an act of the will (the principal act of the virtue of religion, “the act before prayer”), and the intensity of the act of reason in theology could impede it. St. Paul’s scientia inflat is another way knowledge gets in the way (pride), but “more basically” it is simply the intensity of the activity.
• The reverse also: the intensity of devotion may impede reason. Aside on the liturgical phrase “the devout female sex”, which he first took as saying women are more devout than men but which refers to religious women (nuns), named from devotion, an act of the will; Francis de Sales on the woman’s more loving nature.
• Student: why is study not an act of the will? It is commanded by the will, but the act itself is one of reason.

4. Digression: the “contrariety” of love and knowledge (“love is chiefly in the thing loved”) #

Point: love goes out to the thing, knowledge brings the thing into the knower; so they run in reverse directions (the subject of his first talk at Thomas Aquinas College; Aristotle in “the sixth book of Wisdom” [ed.: probably Metaphysics VI]).

• Truth is chiefly in the mind, love chiefly in the thing loved. We give love; the mind takes (you “take the genus”); the first act of reason is called simple apprehension, grasping, and what is grasped is contained in the hand or the mind. We never call love “grasping”; “love isn’t love until it’s given away”.
• Thomas on the name donum Dei for the Holy Spirit: everything else we give, we give because we love; therefore love is the first gift.
• “I left my heart in San Francisco” (no heart transplant meant); Christ on where your treasure is; Augustine: the soul is more ubi amat quam animat, more where it loves than where it animates. The lover is in the thing loved.
• Hence the will, especially in this life, is more proportioned to God than reason: “I can more easily jump into the ocean than put the ocean inside of me.”
• Knowledge of opposites is the same (to know sickness is to know health), but love of sickness and love of health are incompatible, as health and sickness exclude each other in reality; one can know vice and virtue at once but not love both.
• His line to students: it is always bad to lose your mind; not always bad to lose your heart, “it depends on who you lose it to”.
• Student: love of a subject makes one more engaged intellectually, so they are compatible. Reply: “contrary” is in quotes; you can love to know and love what you know; but their ways of operating differ: the student takes the subject apart, the lover does not take the beloved apart (psychologists said to have the highest divorce rate, “they take apart people rather than love them”).

5. Absorption in one power: examples and practical balance (“the intensity of one faculty gets in the way”) #

Point: many cases show one faculty’s intensity crowding out the others; the practical answer is balance, not abandoning either.

• Mozart, “the whole man was in his ear”: listening to good music his other operations are impeded. Aside: Mozart’s revision of Handel’s Messiah and the controversy whether he improved it; Christmas hymns such as “Joy to the World” come down from Handel.
• Painters “completely absorbed in their eyes” (his brother Mark’s artist friends in Detroit, seized by a shade of red or blue).
• Most people would rather go deaf than blind, a sign they value eyes over ears; an organ-playing student preferred blindness.
• The Frenchman told wine will blind him: J’ai assez vu (I have seen enough), “but I haven’t drunk enough”; Parker the wine reviewer, absorbed all day in tasting and sniffing.
• Student: did some Franciscans run with Francis’s words to avoid theology? Reply: Francis was giving approval, seeing the need (if not as much as for Dominicans), only wanting devotion not extinguished; “there’s a time for things”.
• A friend’s Dominican Sundays: a quiet meditation mass, then a high mass with singing; singing to edify others can distract from what Thomas calls dulce sapere [garbled; his gloss: “sweetly savour Christ in the Eucharist”].
• The film of John Paul II praying briefly before each subject: combining devotion with intellect at intervals (“why don’t we all do that?”). Scripture read as lectio and oratio, not as a dry modern scholar; he prefers St. Alphonsus, who supplies the prayer after the meditation, to Francis de Sales, who explains but leaves you to pray.
• Himself: Shakespeare gives him too much to think about to be relaxing; imagination and reason differ, and one intense, the other diminished. “This is the good argument Thomas has here.”
• Vegetative examples: the legend that Aristotle died of chronic indigestion brought on by overwork (thinking interferes with digestion); his old cat sleeps relaxed while his thinking keeps him awake; Father Boulet’s chronic insomnia, “surely because of his mind”; Aristotle going two or three days without sleep, and the (fictitious) brass ball and basin story showing his intensity. Conclusion: these are powers of one soul, not distinct souls.

6. Thomas’s conclusion: species differ like numbers (“likens the species of things to numbers”) #

Point: the same soul in number is the sensing, understanding and feeding soul in man; this is understood from the fact that species and forms differ as more and less perfect.

• Living things more perfect than inanimate, animals than plants, men than brutes, with diverse grades in each; so Aristotle, following Plato, in the eighth book of the Metaphysics likens species to numbers, which differ in species by addition or subtraction of a unity.
• Add life to body: plant; add sensation: animal; add reason: man. Take reason from man, nothing but animal; take sensation, nothing but plant. We do this spontaneously: the dying who have lost reason and senses are called “a vegetable”, because the higher things no longer appear.
• Shakespeare (Hamlet): what is a man if his chief good is but to sleep and feed, “a beast, no more”; his paraphrase: “What is a three if it be half of four? Two and no more.” Such a man is worse than a beast, which is as much as it can be; he is less than he is.
• Aside: this bears on how God knows; Thomas will allude to it later.

7. The nested figures: the higher contains the lower (“as the pentagon contains the tetragon”) #

Point: as in the second book On the Soul one figure contains another (pentagon contains and exceeds the tetragon; a parallelogram contains two triangles), the understanding soul contains in its power whatever the brute’s sensing soul and the plant’s feeding soul have, so a separate tetragon beside the pentagon would be superfluous.

• Friendship: Aristotle’s friendships of usefulness, of pleasure, of virtue; the virtuous friend is also more useful and more pleasant, since two cowards get along by likeness in something not pleasing, two courageous men (Hamlet and Horatio) by likeness in something naturally pleasing; two saints have more reason to enjoy each other’s company than two sinners.
• J. C. Bach (youngest son of J. S., on whose lap young Mozart played) described as “Mozart with something missing”; Dryden, who as a young man saw two plays of Fletcher for one of Shakespeare, came to call Fletcher “but a limb of Shakespeare”. Ferdinand on Miranda in Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage: she combines the excellences divided among other women.
• Angels: the higher the angel the fewer ideas and the more and better it understands; God understands everything with one thought (Thomas will explain).
• “Brevity is a soul of wit” (Shakespeare puts it in the mouth of a tedious man “like me”): the wiser a man, the more he says with fewer words, while the fool multiplies words (sapiential books). His poem: God the Father said it all in one word; when that Word became man he spoke few words and said much.
• Closing: as there is a tetragon in the pentagon, so Socrates is a man and an animal not through another soul but through one and the same.

His words #

• per accidens; predication from unordered forms (“the white is sweet”).
• per se, second mode; the subject is placed in the definition of the predicate (surface in the definition of color).
• praeambulum; his rendering “preambula, something presupposed”.
• kath’ hauto; “as such”, Plato’s popular term for per se.
• epistēmē; “science”, which is about parts and properties kath’ hauto.
• “understanding soul”, “sensing soul”, “feeding soul” [ed.: intellective, sensitive, nutritive/vegetative soul].
• devotion; principal act of the virtue of religion, an act of the will, “the act before prayer”.
• scientia inflat; St. Paul, knowledge puffs up.
• simple apprehension; first act of reason, “simple grasping”.
• donum Dei; gift of God, a name of the Holy Spirit.
• ubi amat quam animat; Augustine, the soul is more where it loves than where it animates.
• lectio and oratio; reading and prayer.
• dulce sapere (garbled); “sweetly savour Christ in the Eucharist”.
• tetragon; four-sided figure; pentagon, five-sided.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, the article on the unity of the soul, second and third arguments of the body and its conclusion on species as numbers and figures (Summa Theologiae I q.76 a.3, inferred).
• Shakespeare, Hamlet, “what is a man if his chief good… be but to sleep and feed”.

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, first book (senses of per se; science is kath’ hauto).
• Aristotle, Metaphysics, fifth book (senses of per se); eighth book (species like numbers, following Plato).
• Aristotle, On the Soul, second book (souls compared to figures).
• Aristotle, “sixth book of Wisdom” (love and knowledge) [ed.: probably Metaphysics VI].
• Aristotle on the three friendships (Ethics, inferred).
• Thomas on the names of the Holy Spirit, donum Dei.
• St. Francis of Assisi’s permission to study theology; St. Paul, scientia inflat; Augustine, ubi amat quam animat; Christ on treasure and heart; the sapiential books on the fool.
• Shakespeare, The Tempest (Ferdinand and Miranda); “brevity is the soul of wit”.
• St. Alphonsus; St. Francis de Sales (treatises; women’s loving nature).

His questions #

• Is animal said of man as number of two, as half-of-four of two, or as green of triangle? As number of two: it says what man is, through the same form.
• When I say Lucy is a cat, four-footed, an animal, am I telling you three different things? No; but “cat” and “orange” are two different things in reality.
• Does the geometer ever talk about a triangle being green? No; that would be a matter of sensation, not science.
• Would intense sensing impede thinking if they came from two different souls? No; that it does is a sign the principle is one.
• Why is intellectual study not an act of the will? It is commanded by the will, but the act itself is of reason.
• Are love and knowledge really incompatible, since loving a subject helps study? “Contrary” only in quotes: they help each other but operate in reverse directions.
• Did Francis mean theology diminishes devotion? No; he approved its study and only warned against extinguishing devotion; there is a time for each.
• What is a three if it be half of four? Two and no more; so a man whose chief good is a beast’s is a beast, no more.