Metaphorical Theology and the Metaphor 'Sweet'; Q.76 A.6: No Accidental Dispositions Between Soul and Body (Simply vs. In Some Way)

Orientation #

He recalls “that definition of, was it hope, last week” (kingdom of heaven vs. eternal life) and closes “we got two articles this time… I’m going to try to do the next two” — though only Article 6 is read in the recording. The previous class treated q. 76 a. 5 (why the soul is joined to a mixed body); the next treats aa. 7–8.

The class, in order #

1. St. Ephrem against St. Thomas: “two different logics”? (“refreshingly non-dogmatic”) #

A student reports Eastern-Church writers setting the “unhellenized” poet Ephrem, who “respects the mystery”, against Thomas who “dissects God”. Berquist calls this “certainly a fallacy” and answers from the prologue of Thomas’s commentary on Dionysius’s Divine Names, where Thomas divides Dionysius’s works by the kind of name used of God:

• Proper names (the Divine Names): “good” is said of God and of creatures, but is in God first and fully, in creatures only secondarily — even if we know the creature’s goodness first, once we grasp God’s goodness we see He is “the fountain of all goodness” (“God alone is good”).
• Metaphorical names (the Symbolic Theology): “The Lord is my rock” — here the name belongs more to the thing in the backyard; God is “not really a rock”, only a distant likeness.
• A further book on the Trinity, where no adequate creaturely likeness exists. If two men had written these two books, one would say “they just don’t think the same way” — but it is one Dionysius. Likewise Thomas does both: the Scripture commentaries are largely metaphorical theology.

2. The metaphor “sweet”: three likenesses (“taste and see how sweet”) #

Point: no poet or philosopher has explained “sweet” better than Thomas in the (incomplete) Psalms commentary; a metaphor rests on likeness, and he finds three.

1. Sweet is pleasant — every child likes candy.
2. Sweet is restful, quieting — his own children on the 24-hour drive to Minnesota: small stapled bags of M&Ms and Skittles, a “daddy treat” pulled out when the back seat grows restless, and they talk and laugh for half an hour to an hour; the New York police calming a lost, crying child with an ice-cream cone.
3. Sweet is refreshing — people running to the candy machine or coffee when energy fails at the end of the day.

Applied to human things:

• Sweetheart / honey: a heart that loves you is pleasing; by the modus contrarii (argument from the opposite), hostility makes you uneasy even without fear of harm, so being loved is restful; and refreshing — Buckley’s phrase about opponents’ “tenacious ill will”.
• Shakespeare’s “your sweet form” = beautiful: beauty is “that which pleases when seen”; beautiful scenery, ocean, mountains, a garden are called restful; “a sight for sore eyes” is refreshing — his own looking up from Latin at a painting in the college reading room. Applied to God: pleasing to mind and heart; “Come to me all you who are burdened and I will refresh you”; Augustine, “our hearts are restless until they rest in you”. So God is called sweet metaphorically on all three counts.

3. Why Scripture uses metaphors: the imagination made subject (“every part of us should be subject to God”) #

The Summa gives some reasons for scriptural metaphor; the Sentences commentary adds one not in the Summa: every part of us should be subject to God. Primarily reason (believing) and will (hoping, loving, obeying); but even the legs (genuflecting, kneeling) and the hands (folded or raised). The imagination is a higher part than feet or hands, and metaphors bring the imagination into subjection; beautiful churches, stained glass and church music do the same for eye and ear. Prayer is an act of reason, but genuflecting is not opposed to it.

• Aside: the windows of the French church (Notre Dame) in downtown Worcester are much better than the cathedral’s; St. Rose of Lima’s modern ones one “can kind of figure out a little bit” but cannot sit and contemplate.

4. Article 6 read: the three objections and the sed contra (“united to the body through accidental dispositions”) #

Point: the objections locate an accident between soul and body; each takes a different accident.

• Obj. 1 (sensible qualities, third species of quality): every form is in a matter proper to it and disposed for it; dispositions are accidents — heat or cool a man too much and you kill him; so accidents must be understood in matter before the substantial form. He notes the difficulty: something would then come between the substantial form and its subject, though the substantial form is first act.
• Obj. 2 (quantity): diverse forms of one species need diverse parts of matter, which require division of continuous quantity (“dimensive quantity”: line, surface, body). Cookie dough: grandmother can cut several dozen Christmas-tree cookies only because the dough already has dimensions; so to have many men you need continuous quantity to divide up “flesh and blood and bones among us”.
• Obj. 3 (power, second species of quality): the spiritual is applied to the bodily by contact of power, not of dimensions; the soul’s virtus is its power, an accident. He fills this out from the Summa contra Gentiles: touch first means two surfaces in contact, then is extended to one thing moving another (“my misery touched you”, “a soft touch”); the soul has no surface, so it touches the body by its power.
• Sed contra: accident is after substance in time and in definition (Metaphysics VII, “the seventh book after the books of natural philosophy”); accident exists only in another, substance not in another; so no accidental form can be in matter before the soul — just as (recalling earlier) no other substantial form can, or the soul would be accidental. A student says he does not see why anyone would think this. Answer: the soul cannot be joined to just any body — not one dry as dust, wet as water, hot as fire, cold as ice — so one identifies the soul’s subject with a body of certain qualities and treats those as in between.
• Aside: Plato, the Pythagoreans and Descartes make extension the substance of bodies; “Descartes never grew up” — if quantity were substance, the boy knee-high to a grasshopper would not be the same substance now.

5. The body of the article: matter is in potency to acts in order (“what is first simply among acts”) #

1. If the soul were united to the body only as mover, intermediate dispositions would be not merely possible but necessary: a power on the soul’s side, a suitability (habitudines) on the body’s side to be movable.
2. But the soul is united as substantial form (shown above).
3. Matter is potency to all acts in a certain order; what is first among acts must be first understood in matter; first among acts is being (esse).
4. So matter cannot be understood as hot or so large before it actually is; and it actually is through the substantial form, which “makes it to be simpliciter”. Conclusion: no accidental disposition, giving being only “in some way”, can pre-exist in matter before substantial form, hence not before the soul.

6. Translating simpliciter as “absolutely”: absolute vs. relative distinctions (“absolute with relative”) #

Students find their English renders simpliciter “absolutely”; he doubts it, since Thomas usually contrasts absolute with relative, i.e. in itself vs. towards another.

• Odd/even: absolute — no number is both. Double/half: relative — four is double of two and half of eight, though not both toward the same number.
• Genus/species: relative — quadrilateral is a species of rectilineal plane figure and a genus of square and oblong; odd number a species of number, a genus of three, five, seven.
• Father/son, mother/daughter: relative — he is son of Reno Victor Berquist and father of Paul Berquist. Man/woman: absolute.

7. Simpliciter vs. secundum quid across philosophy (“simply, but in some way”) #

Simpliciter = Greek haplōs, usually contrasted with secundum quid, “simply” vs. “in some way / in some respect” — a distinction that “takes people a long time to see” but recurs everywhere.

• The good: “Daddy, is it good to drink this delicious poison?” — you say “bad”, period (simply), though it is good in some way (good-tasting). “We’re doing something bad because in some way it’s good, or not doing something good because in some way it’s bad”: mass vs. more sleep; murder eliminates an annoyance; bank robbery increases your money (“Why do you rob banks?” “That’s where the money is”); adultery is pleasant; study prevents the party. Nothing is so good it prevents nothing else good.
• Knowing (Meno): Meno’s sophism “how can you look for what you don’t know?” fails to see the unknown is known in some way. His classroom trick: “Do you know my brother Marcus?” — “No.” “Do you know what a man is, what a brother is?” — then in some way you know him; per Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations an apparent, not real, contradiction. “Knock knock — is that the door?” — you know your mother, but not as the one knocking; the unannounced dinner guest.
• Act and ability: a wooden chair is in this room simply; in the tree outside only in potency, “in some way”. Socrates errs here with knowing: the slave boy is able to know how to double the square, so does not yet know it — as a student able to learn does not thereby know, nor does knowing earlier Euclid theorems mean knowing the next.
• Substance and accident: substantial being is being simpliciter, accidental being is being in some way; “we’ve got to be before we can be in some way” — exactly what the objections run up against.

8. The three replies (“the more perfect form, in its power, contains”) #

• Ad 1: the more perfect form contains virtually whatever the lower forms have, so one and the same form perfects matter by diverse grades: one form by which man is a being, a body, living, an animal, a man — not four or five substantial forms. Each genus is followed by its proper accidents; so if matter is understood as perfected in being before bodiliness, accidents proper to being are pre-understood before bodiliness — dispositions before form “not as regards all its effect, but as regards the posterior”. Like the number four: one may understand two before three before four, but it is one number, not 2+3+4=9.
• Ad 2: dimensions are accidents following on bodiliness; matter understood under bodiliness and dimensions can be understood as divided into parts receiving diverse forms by further grades. The form is the same in essence but differs “according to consideration of reason”: we may consider the soul as making the body a body before making it organically diverse, before making it understanding — as we consider “animal” common to dog, cat, horse leaving aside their differences. Geometry: the same four equal lines make the figure a square, a quadrilateral, a rectilineal plane figure; reason separates the general from the particular, but it is not as if four lines were there before four equal lines — they are equal or unequal “right away”.
• Ad 3: a spiritual substance united to a body only as mover is united through its power; the understanding soul is united as form, to its own existence which it shares with the matter — yet “administers and moves it through its power and virtue”. Student (Jake Clare) asks about potentiam et virtutem / vel virtutem in the two sentences; texts differ (vel then et). He explains: power and virtue are almost but not quite synonyms — virtue is sometimes defined as ultimum potentiae, an excellence of power, hence Thomas’s hesitation; the word is also used of things without moral virtues.

9. Digression: eternal life, kingdom of heaven, ointment and dew (“ordered society of those who see God”) #

Prompted by the near-synonyms, he recalls last week’s definition of hope: eternal life (John 17: “this is eternal life, to know you… and him whom you have sent” — to see God face to face) vs. kingdom of heaven (Thomas: “the ordered society of those who see God”), which includes eternal life and adds community.

• Psalm 132: ointment on Aaron’s head running down the beard and robe = the ordered society — Christ the Anointed, flowing down to apostles/priests/laity; Vatican II’s Christ as King, Priest and Prophet shared in different degrees and kinds by bishops, priests, laity (the lay priesthood differing in kind). These offices match Matthew (king: Magi, descent from David, “make disciples of all nations”), Mark (prophet), Luke (priest: sweating blood, begins and ends in the temple, temple named most often — Thomas’s observation).
• “Dew of Hermon upon the mountains of Zion” = not order but the vision itself. Shakespeare’s “golden dew of slumber” helps; Psalm 126, “he gives to his beloved in sleep” — the sleep of death, or of contemplation (good and bad senses of sleep): one receives from God, then has something to give others. “Like the dew I have begotten you” — perhaps a metaphor for the eternal generation of the Son, since dew comes from within the flower rather than falling like rain; he admits he is “not sure I fully understand the metaphor” and does not know the Hebrew. Water is a symbol of life (baptism; Thales’s water, whom Aristotle says was influenced by living things), so dew is nearer eternal life. Zion is usually interpreted as vision; Hermon’s particular significance he leaves unsure.
• Student: the Maronite liturgy has Christ letting the dew of his mercy drop on the dead so they rise.
• Asides: the beard is “also an argument against the female priest” (“unless you go back to the bearded lady”); his brother Mark on bearded priests: fine “if they’re man enough to wear one”.

His words #

• divine names / symbolic (metaphorical) theology: Dionysius’s works divided by names said properly vs. metaphorically of God
• modus contrarii: arguing a likeness from its opposite (hostility → uneasiness)
• the beautiful: “that which pleases when seen”
• dimensive quantity: his gloss for continuous quantity — line, surface, body [ed.: quantitas dimensiva]
• virtus / power: virtue “sometimes a synonym for power”; also defined as ultimum potentiae, excellence of power
• habitudines: “some suitability” of the body to be moved
• ability: his rendering of potency [ed.: potentia]
• simpliciter / secundum quid: simply vs. “in some way, in some respect”; Greek haplōs
• absolute / relative: in itself vs. towards another (Thomas’s usual contrast; English “absolutely” for simpliciter questioned)
• kingdom of heaven: “the ordered society of those who see God”

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 76, a. 6 (objections, sed contra, body, three replies)
• Psalm 132 (Vulgate) vv. 1–3 (quoted); Psalm 126 (Vulgate) vv. 1–2 (quoted); Psalm “like the dew I have begotten you” (Ps 109 Vulgate, inferred)

Mentioned

• Thomas, commentary on Dionysius, Divine Names, prologue; Dionysius, Symbolic Theology, work on the Trinity
• Thomas, commentary on the Psalms (“taste and see how sweet is the Lord”)
• Thomas, commentary on the Sentences (reasons for scriptural metaphor); Summa on metaphor
• Thomas, Summa contra Gentiles (senses of “touch”)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics VII (accident after substance); Sophistical Refutations; on Thales and water
• Plato, Meno (Meno’s paradox; the slave boy)
• Augustine, “our hearts are restless”; John 17; Vatican II documents on bishops, priests, laity; Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke; Shakespeare (“sweet form”, “golden dew of slumber”); Euclid

His questions #

• Does the name “rock” belong more to God than to the thing in the backyard? No — to the creature; said of God metaphorically.
• What is “sweet” saying about a sweetheart’s heart? Is it restful to be loved? Pleasing; yes, by the opposite — hostility makes you uneasy.
• Which is a higher part of us: feet, hands, or imagination? Imagination — and metaphors bring it into subjection to God.
• How do they translate simpliciter in English? “Absolutely”; he prefers “simply / without qualification”, since Thomas contrasts absolute with relative.
• Is genus/species an absolute or a relative distinction? Father/son? Man/woman? Relative; relative; absolute.
• “Daddy, is it good to drink this delicious poison?” Bad, simply — good only in some way (good-tasting).
• Do you know my brother Marcus? Not simply, but in some way — you know what a man and a brother is.
• Is there a wooden chair in the tree out there? Not simply — only in potency.
• Is the square a quadrilateral by another set of four lines? No — the same four lines, considered by reason without their equality.
• What is the particular significance of Hermon? Left open.