Replies to the Objections, Knowing the Composed Before the Simple, and the Catechism's Definition of Hope

Orientation #

He picks up in the middle of the replies to objections of the article on the intellective soul as the only substantial form; the objection he starts from “was based on the definition of the soul in the second book about the soul”, and he refers back to “what we talked about a little bit before” on grades of perfection (prev. lecture). He says nothing about next time; the recording cuts off mid-sentence. The previous class treated the body of this article and the simpliciter / secundum quid distinction; the next takes up a. 5.

The class, in order #

1. Reply to the first objection: the definition of soul includes the soul (“such potency does not what exclude the soul”) #

Point: Aristotle’s definition (“act of a natural body composed of tools, having life in potency”) does not name a body already a body without the soul; the body named already includes the soul, and the definition says which part of the living composite the soul is.

• The objection: if soul is one thing and body another, the body must already have its own substantial form to be a body.
• Thomas’s reply as he reads it: Aristotle does not say act “of a body only” but of a natural organic body having life in potency; that potency is non abjiciente animam, not excluding the soul. The body is not a not-yet-living body but one in potency to the operations of life (first act in potency to second act, which is operation). “Through the soul it is a body and it is organic and it is having life in potency.”
• Parallels he gives for this way of speaking: heat is the act of the hot; light is the act of the lucid (not that the lucid is lucid apart from light; it is lucid through light); health is the act of the healthy body (“healthy includes health”); existence is the act of the existent (the existent is the composite of what it is and its existence); a point is the limit of a finite (limited) line, and “limited line” already includes the point, yet the definition distinguishes the point from the continuous line.
• Why define the soul this way: the composed is more known to us than the simple, so we make known which part of the composite is the soul, i.e. the form (act), not the matter.
• Student: is this like sanctifying grace in the soul, and its operations as second act? Answer: if you say “holiness is the grace of the sanctified soul”, the sanctified soul includes grace; yes, “in a sense” the first act. Student: is this only a logical distinction? Answer: no, “it’s a distinction in the thing”, a real distinction.
• He notes there may be another way of understanding the definition, “but this one is sufficient for resolving the objection.”

2. Why the composed is known before the simple (“the composed is more known to us than the simple”) #

Point: because what we first know is something sensed or imagined, which is always composed, we know the simple by negating something of the composed.

• Mathematics: body is length, width and depth; surface is length and width without depth; line is length without width; Euclid’s point “has no parts” (position only). Going from body to point is going from composed to simple, and you keep negating.
• Hence it is not strange that God, altogether simple, is known negatively.
• “Substantial form” itself means a form of a substance, a form within the genus of substance, so the composite is thought first.
• Act and ability: what we know best is the composite of act and ability. “God is pure act”: pure negates passive ability. “First matter is pure ability”: pure negates act. Both extremes are known by negation from the middle.
• Poetics comparison: middle is what has something before and after; beginning has something after but nothing before; end is after something but before nothing. Beginning and end are defined by negating part of the middle. Appetizer (before, not after), dessert (after, not before), main course (after and before).
• Time: the now that begins time is not after any now; the now that ends time is not before any now; every other now is both. Those who argue by reason that the universe always was assume every now is after a now; but if there is a first now, “in the beginning” of the Bible, that now has no now before it.
• David of Dinant said God is first matter; Thomas says he “most stupidly taught”, and this is not rough language: you could take nothing further from the truth, since God is pure act and first matter pure ability; “if you said God is a stone, you’d be closer.” Aristotle (first book of natural philosophy) says form is something godlike, the common understanding of Plato and Aristotle, because form is act.
• So the living body is a composite of act and ability, form and matter, and the soul is the form in it.

3. Reply to the second objection: the soul moves the body through a power (“does not move the body through its being”) #

Point: the soul does not move the body by the being through which it is united to it as form, but through the motive power, whose act presupposes the body already actualized by the soul.

• From De Anima III as he recalls it: the good known and desired; the knowing power (reason or imagination); the desiring power (will or emotions), like moved mover; then an organ of the body moved by desire, which moves the other parts. So the parts of the body must already be informed by the soul before the soul uses one part to move another.
• Student: where does the motive power begin in the soul? Answer: the soul is the source of many powers; most (digesting, growing, reproducing, and likewise the motive power) are in some part of the body the soul informs; some (understanding, will) are not in a body.
• Student: does the disembodied soul have the motive power? Answer: not the actual power, since it can exist only with a body; the root is there, so when joined to the body again it gives rise to those powers again. Likewise the separated soul does not actually have senses.

4. Reply to the third objection: the most perfect form is immediate to matter (“diverse grades of perfection, as to be, to live, to sense”) #

Point: in matter there are grades (to be, to live, to sense, to understand), each later one more perfect; the form that gives only the first is most imperfect, the form that gives all is most perfect, and nevertheless immediate to matter.

• Student brings St Paul: charity does all these things (believes, hopes). His answer: the cases differ. The lower virtues remain with charity because they do not give being simply; charity commands the other virtues rather than replacing them, giving them a perfection they would not have. Hope is perfected by charity: we hope to receive good things from friends, charity is friendship with God, so with charity one’s hope is much stronger. If charity were a substantial form it would have to replace hope.
• The new Catechism repeats Thomas that charity is the form of all the virtues; “but it’s not a substantial form”, so one must understand what he means.
• Aside: reading St Gertrude, and his daughter’s copy of St Catherine’s Dialogue (the traditional divisions do not fit the text); the strong sense there of friendship with God, “a friend is another self”, the Greek proverb ho philos esti allos autos.

5. Reply to the fourth objection: Avicenna, Averroes, and true mixture (“minima juxta seposita”) #

Point: elemental forms remain in the mixed body not in act but only in their power; the resulting quality of mixture is the proper disposition for the substantial form of the mixed body.

• Avicenna: the substantial forms of earth, air, fire and water remain whole in the mixed body, mixture being the reduction of contrary qualities to a middle. Impossible: diverse forms of elements require diverse parts of matter, which requires dimensions, which is found only in body, and diverse bodies cannot be in the same place; so the elements would be distinct by place, and it would be not a true mixture (according to the whole) but one “to the senses”, minima juxtaposita. His example: cinnamon and sugar mixed for the kids’ toast: tiny pieces alongside each other, still two things, not one new thing; Thomas uses “mixture” for a really new thing.
• Averroes (commentary on De Caelo III; Thomas gives no reference): the forms of the elements, because of their imperfection, are between substantial and accidental forms, so they receive more and less and are reduced in the mixture to a mean, one form being blended from them. Thomas: even more impossible: (1) the substantial being of each thing consists in something indivisible, every addition or subtraction changing the species, as with numbers (Metaphysics VIII); so no substantial form receives more or less (“I can’t be more a man than you, that’s really the way in which we’re equal”); (2) there is no middle between substance and accident, an exhaustive division: a substance exists not in another, an accident in another, and there is no third.
• The truth, per Aristotle, De Generatione et Corruptione I: the forms remain only in their power; the proper qualities of the elements remain in reduced form, in which the power of the elementary forms is; this quality of mixture is the proper disposition for the form of the mixed body, a stone or a soul. Heat a man up too much or cool him, make him as wet as this water or as dry as this paper, and you finish him off.
• Aside on the title: the Greek word can mean caelum or the universe as a whole; the work should be understood as “about the universe”, and since Aristotle also treats the earth, the Latins added “et Mundo”; Thomas here just says De Caelo.

6. Hope: the six parts of the Catechism’s definition (“hope in the middle gets kind of what”) #

Point: hope is the “neglected child” among the theological virtues (faith stressed as first, charity as greatest); the Catechism’s first paragraph on hope contains a definition he breaks into six parts, on the model of how Thomas unfolds a definition part by part (Boethius on eternity, person, law with an article per part; his own work on the definition of comedy for the lost part of the Poetics).

1. A theological virtue: the genus. Powers and habits are distinguished by acts, acts by objects (Aristotle on the soul and on virtue); the theological virtues have God himself as object, which is perhaps why they are called theological, since the subject of theology is God and everything else is referred to God.
2. by which we desire: stop here before naming the object, because this is where hope differs from faith (by which we believe) and charity (by which we love).
3. the kingdom of heaven and eternal life: not synonymous but connected. Eternal life is defined in John 17: to know the Father and him whom he sent, seeing God as he is, face to face. The kingdom of heaven, per Thomas, is the ordered society of those who see God. Using both lets the mind connect: Thomas also speaks of eternal beatitude; Augustine and Thomas divide theology by creed (faith), Our Father (hope), commandments (charity); the Catechism later says the Our Father both expresses and nourishes hope; the seven petitions teach what to ask for, what to desire, and in what order; “Thy kingdom come”, with “Thy” referring to “Our Father who art in heaven”, ties to “kingdom of heaven”.
4. as our happiness: a precision on how we desire it, not as one great good among others but as our very end, beatitude, chief good of an intellectual creature. The Catechism’s later paragraph on the New Testament opens with the Beatitudes and ends with the Our Father: the Beatitudes instruct us in hope, what our beatitude is and something of how to get there.
5. trusting in the promises of Christ: the part he would not have come up with himself; the Beatitudes are part of the promise.
6. relying not on our own strength but on the grace of the Holy Spirit: the part everyone has been taught, hoping for this good through God’s help.

• The same paragraph has two quotations (he thinks from St Paul, cannot recall which), one linking hope with Christ’s promises, the other with the Holy Spirit’s grace; a later paragraph links hope with joy. He recalls the end of Thessalonians, “rejoice always, pray always, give thanks always”, and Thomas’s reason: one can always rejoice in God, whose goodness outweighs what bothers us; since all three theological virtues are about God, all give reason to rejoice always.

7. Three desires: wonder, natural desire for happiness, hope (“the third tool of dialectic”) #

Point: using the third tool of dialectic (finding differences) and the fourth (finding likenesses), compare wonder, the natural desire for happiness, and hope.

• Aristotle: dialectic is useful first to exercise the mind; the mind is exercised more in finding differences between things close together, and likenesses between things far apart.
• Wonder: the natural desire to know, not for making or doing but for understanding; to know what and why, the cause, the cause of the cause, ultimately the first cause, i.e. wisdom.
• Natural desire for happiness: Ethics I, happiness is activity according to virtue; Ethics X, the highest is the activity of reason according to wisdom, so knowing the first cause. The Catechism quotes Augustine that the desire for happiness is placed in all men. So what is the difference between wonder and this desire, if both end at the first cause?
• Hope: supernatural; a desire for eternal life, which is to know God, as our happiness; the text says hope elevates and purifies our natural desire for happiness from the dross of seeking it where it is not found.
• Student: wonder is a beginning, happiness an end, hope a middle. He begins to respond (“if our happiness is ultimately to know God…”) and the recording breaks off; the comparison is left open.

His words #

• “composed of tools” [ed.: organic]; his rendering of organicum in the definition of soul.
• “having life in potency”; the body of the definition is already alive, in potency to the operations of life.
• “first act” / “second act”; second act is operation.
• “act” and “ability” [ed.: act and potency]; God is pure act (negation of passive ability), first matter pure ability (negation of act).
• “the composed is more known to us than the simple”; his rule explaining definition by negation.
• “motive power”; the power through which, not the being through which, the soul moves the body.
• “root”; what remains of bodily powers in the separated soul.
• “true mixture” vs. mixture “to the senses”; minima juxtaposita.
• “the third tool of dialectic” (difference), “the fourth tool” (likeness).
• “wonder”; natural desire to know the cause, ultimately the first cause.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 76, a. 4, replies to objections 1, 2, 3, 4 (read and translated).
• Catechism of the Catholic Church, first paragraph on hope (definition), and its later paragraphs on Scripture, the Our Father and joy (paraphrased from memory).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, De Anima II (definition of soul); De Anima III (soul moving the body).
• Euclid, definition of point.
• Aristotle, Poetics (beginning, middle, end); his work completing the lost part on comedy.
• Aristotle, Physics I (“form is something godlike”).
• Thomas on David of Dinant.
• Averroes, commentary on De Caelo III; Aristotle, Metaphysics VIII; De Generatione et Corruptione I.
• St Paul on charity; St Gertrude; St Catherine of Siena, Dialogue.
• Greek proverb ho philos esti allos autos.
• John 17 (eternal life); Thomas’s definition of the kingdom of heaven; Augustine and Thomas on the Our Father; Thessalonians “rejoice always”.
• Boethius on eternity; Thomas on person and on law.
• Aristotle, Ethics I and X; Augustine on the desire for happiness.

His questions #

• Which is more known to us, the simple or the composed? The composed; we know the simple by negating part of the composed.
• When I say “limited line”, do I include the point? Yes; the definition of point picks out which part of the limited line it is.
• Is the distinction between soul and living body only logical? No, “a distinction in the thing”, a real distinction.
• What do we know first: pure act, pure ability, or something that has both? What has both; pure act and pure ability are known by negation.
• Does the disembodied soul have the motive power? Not actually, only as root; it arises again when the soul is rejoined to a body.
• Why can you still have hope when you have charity? Because they are not substantial forms; charity commands hope rather than replacing it.
• Can a substantial form receive more or less? No; substantial being is indivisible, like a number; hence no man is more a man than another.
• Is there a middle between substance and accident? No; the division is exhaustive.
• What is the difference between wonder and the natural desire for happiness, if both end in knowing the first cause? And how does hope differ from both? left open (recording ends).