Summa I q.79 a.1: Is the understanding a power of the soul or its essence? Being and doing, God as pure act, and love as emotion versus chosen love

Orientation #

He opens by saying “now the next time we’re going to start question seventy-nine,” and announces that today they will look at the first two articles of that question; in fact the class ends inside the replies of the first article, before the third and fourth replies. He refers back to the general distinction already drawn between the essence of the soul and its powers, and to the earlier finding that in the senses the power that receives and the power that retains are not the same (prev. lecture). The previous class treated the four interior senses (ST I q.78 a.4) and the next continues q.79 a.1’s remaining replies and moves into a.2.

The class, in order #

1. Overview of the thirteen articles of question 79 (“ask about thirteen things”) #

The point: he walks the class through the plan of the whole question before reading a.1.

• a.1: is the understanding a power of the soul or its very essence? He returns to it for this power “because there are some special questions about it.”
• a.2: if a power, is it a passive one, “acted upon by its object, at least to begin with”? He will conclude it is an undergoing power.
• a.3: then whether one must posit an “acting upon understanding,” an agent intellect (he will argue yes); a.4: whether that agent intellect is something of the soul.
• a.5: there because of the Arab philosophers (Avicenna, “probably Averroes too”) who make the agent intellect one for all men, a separate substance.
• a.6: whether memory is in the understanding, i.e. whether it retains what it receives; a.7: whether memory is another power from the understanding. Contrast with the senses: common sense receives, imagination retains; cogitative receives, memory retains; but in the understanding there is no material organ where what receives and what retains differ, so not different powers.
• a.8: more a question of the name: ratio is named from reasoning, intellectus from understanding; are they the same power? He will argue yes.
• a.9: upper and lower reason, arising “primarily because of Augustine, people like that,” one looking to the divine, the other to lower things; not really diverse powers.
• a.10: whether intelligence is another power besides the understanding.
• a.11: whether speculative (“looking,” from the Latin for looking) and practical understanding are diverse powers; as Aristotle would argue, the same power ordered to a different end: speculative when aiming merely at knowing the truth, practical when directing doing or making. Aside: prudence (foresight, practical wisdom) and art will be virtues of the practical reason; understanding, science (“reasoned out understanding”) and wisdom of the looking reason.
• a.12: synderesis, his word for what we naturally understand in the practical order (“do good and avoid evil”), whether a separate power; same power as reason.
• a.13: conscience, from con and scientia, “with knowledge”: judging something good or bad with some knowledge you have; not a separate power, “maybe not even a separate habit or virtue, but more an act.”

2. Objection 1 and the etymologies of intellectus and mens (“to read within”) #

The point: the first objection, from Augustine, says the understanding is the same as the mind and the mind is the essence, not a power.

• Intellectus, as Thomas understands it, from intus (within) and legere (to read): the eye reads the words on the outside (a man ignorant of Latin can see them), the understanding reads within, the meaning; hence our word “insight.”
• Cymbeline aside: the king, learning what a devil his dead queen was (asking the doctor about poisons, experimenting on animals, giving Imogen a draught the wary doctor had swapped for a sleeping potion, “like Juliet”), asks “who is’t can read a woman?”, i.e. who can understand, have insight into, a woman; he is excusing his naivety, as Samson was led astray by Delilah.
• Mens, they say, from mensura, to measure, because reason counts and measures. So the two words seem to name the same thing from different activities.
• The objection then: Augustine, De Trinitate IX, says mind and spirit are said not relatively but to show the very essence; therefore the understanding is the essence of the soul.

3. Objections 2 to 4 and the sed contra (“man understands with the angels”) #

The point: three further objections, all resolved (later) by attention to how the words are used.

• Obj. 2: diverse genera of powers are united only in the one essence of the soul; the desiring power and the understanding are diverse genera (De Anima II; two of the five genera of powers); yet Augustine, De Trinitate X, puts understanding and will together in the mind (where he finds the image of the Trinity); so the mind is the soul’s essence, and the understanding is the mind.
• Obj. 3: Gregory, homily on the Ascension, says man understands with the angels (as we sense with the animals and grow with the plants, “our little cosmos”); angels are called minds and understandings; so the understanding of man is the soul itself.
• Obj. 4: a substance is understanding because it is immaterial; we find in studying our own understanding that it is not a body, “a clue” that immaterial substances are understanding substances; but the soul is immaterial through its essence, so through its essence it understands, so ability and soul are the same.
• Sed contra: the Philosopher lays down the understanding as a power of the soul, De Anima II. His gloss: the soul is in the genus of substance; the powers are in the second species of quality (he first says third, then corrects to second), so they are accidents, “but natural, necessary accidents.”

4. The body of the article: the argument from proportion (“the immediate principle of operation”) #

The point: the immediate principle of an operation is the very essence of the thing only when the operation is the thing’s being.

1. Proportion: as the ability stands to its operation (its act), so the nature stands to existence; in his words, “to be is to the nature as to do is to the ability to do.” He flags “being” here as the equivocal word: not “what is,” but “to be,” existence.
2. If being and doing were the same, the nature and the ability would be the same; if not, not. Illustration: “seeing is to the eye as hearing is to the ear”; if seeing and hearing were the same, eye and ear would be the same.
3. In God there is no real distinction between his being and his doing, since he has no composition, is simple, pure act; if to be and to understand differed in God, his understanding would stand to his nature as act to ability and he would not be pure act. So in God to be and to understand are identical.
4. In us they are not: “we are and don’t understand anything”; “I’ve been trying to understand at least for some time,” but my understanding is something more than my being.
5. Conclusion: therefore what is proximate to each act, the nature and the ability to understand, are not the same in us.

• Aside: a fragment of Heraclitus, “the divine nature is understanding, but not the human”; he wonders what Heraclitus understood by it.

5. Student question: how God’s being is also his action (“act is before ability”) #

The point: the same reasoning applies to God’s will, and rests on the order of act and ability.

• If God’s nature and his willing differed, nature would be to willing as ability to act, an additional act, and the divine nature would not be pure act.
• Where this is learned: act and ability are met in natural philosophy in a narrower way, and universally in the ninth book of “Wisdom,” what we call metaphysics (meta ta physica, after the books on nature). There one finds act is before ability in almost every way; only in the thing that goes from ability to act is ability before act, and that thing goes to act because of something already in act (air able to be hot becomes hot through something actually hot). Hence the first cause must be pure act.
• From pure act follow almost all the attributes of the divine substance: simple (not composed), not a body, perfect, infinite, unchanging, altogether one.
• Why the Summa has separate treatises on divine substance and divine operation: we approach God through creatures, in whom substance and operation differ, so we have two sets of thoughts; in God, “like the center of a circle,” they are one, and we must negate the real distinction. “No one of these thoughts is adequate to express the simple perfection of God.”
• Application to the Trinity: the Word of God is God because the understanding of God is the being of God and the Word exists in God’s understanding; if God’s understanding were other than his being, the Word would not be God. Likewise the Holy Spirit proceeds by way of love; if God’s willing were not his being, the Spirit would be an accident of the Father rather than God. In us, being, understanding and loving are three things; in God one.
• Further reason we differ: understanding opens us to everything understandable, while our being is contracted to the being of man; the same holds of our love. Even in angels to be and to understand, to be and to love, are not the same. So in God alone the power of understanding is the divine essence; in angels and men it is a power of the one understanding.

6. The understanding as a quality, a property of the nature (“two is half of four”) #

The point: the power is a natural result of the nature, “like an effect of it, a property,” not the nature itself.

• Example: two is actually and necessarily half of four (and a third of six), but to be two is not to be half of four; two is in the category of quantity, half-of-four in the category of relation. So the soul’s nature is in substance, the power to understand in quality, second species, innate ability.
• In God there are no accidents; all these are the substance of God.
• He restates the basic reason: first the proportion, second that to be and to understand are not the same in us; likewise to be and to love: “sometimes we love and sometimes we don’t… All the time we are.”

7. Reply to objection 1: how words name power, act, soul (“sensus is taken sometimes for the power”) #

The point: the objection turns on a use of words.

• Latin sensus names sometimes the power, sometimes the sensing soul itself, the soul being named from its chief power. Compare: he calls the plant soul the reproducing soul, since Aristotle in the De Anima ends with reproduction as its highest activity, though it also feeds and grows; the sensing soul’s highest activity is sensing. He sees “sense” used for the sense soul in Aristotle and medieval authors.
• English “understanding” names sometimes the act, sometimes the ability: Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding, act or ability? “Maybe you ought to get it clear from the title.”
• “Taste”: one of the five senses (the power), the act of tasting, and even the object (a sweet or bitter taste). So one word names object, act and power equivocally.
• Latin adds a use English lacks: intellectus names the soul that has the ability, “from its more principal power”; hence De Anima I in the Latin translation, intellectus est substantia quaedam, i.e. there is a substance capable of understanding, and angels are called intellectus in this way. So Augustine’s “the mind is a spirit” means the immaterial substance or essence. Thomas is not inventing this: other Latin authors use it so.

8. Reply to objection 2: the desiring power straddles understanding and sense (“partly comes together with the understanding”) #

The point: appetitive and understanding powers are diverse genera by diverse definitions of objects, but the desiring power partly meets the understanding (the will) and partly the sense powers (the emotions, tied to a bodily organ).

• Back-reference: five genera of powers but four grades of life, because upon sense knowledge and upon understanding a desire follows; sense appetite/sense desire and intellectual appetite/reasonable desire, the will.
• Emotions are bodily: fear brings a thumping heart and chill, embarrassment reddens the cheeks; they are desire following sense knowledge, while the will is desire following understanding. Thomas in general: desire follows apprehension (he points forward to the treatise on love, whether good and whether knowledge cause love). Animal tastes something pleasant and desires it; we smell food and desire it when hungry; choice follows reason.
• The average person hardly distinguishes love as emotion from love as act of will. Hamlet on Horatio: “since my dear soul was mistress of her choice… her election hath sealed thee for herself”; mistress because soul is feminine in Latin; a child is not held so responsible because reason is not developed to compare and weigh; Horatio takes fortune’s buffets and rewards with equal thanks, is not “passion’s slave,” whereas most men are slaves of some passion (the coward of fear, the glutton, drunkard, adulterer, the irascible man of anger). That love follows reason; Latin dilectio, from choice, “a chosen love.”
• The poets’ love (“whoever loved that loved not at first sight”; “love and reason keep little company nowadays”) is an emotion. Proteus in Two Gentlemen of Verona, well named after the shape-changing sea god: betrothed to Julia (a solemn promise, almost marriage) with “twenty thousand soul-confirming oaths,” sees Sylvia and pursues her, betraying Julia and his friend Valentine, who plans to elope with her: a sudden love, an emotion, a passion.
• In his love and friendship course, “what is love?”: first an emotion, since our knowledge starts from the senses; the word is then borrowed for an act of the will, then carried over to God. God’s love is not an emotion or feeling (feeling is taken from touch) but chosen: “he chose us in him” (St Paul). God’s love for us is merciful, gratuitous, he owes us nothing and we are not there to be loved before he loves us (“because God is good, we are”); our love for God and neighbour is a just love, a debt (St Catherine of Siena: “pay the debt of love to your neighbour”), which is why it can be commanded, while God obeys no command.
• Aside: the Pope’s address in Poland, dedicating a church to Our Lady of Mercy, opening from Faustina, on mercy as the only reason for hope; the Hail Holy Queen joins “Mother of Mercy” with “our hope”; God’s justice is more a reason to fear him.
• The emotional love is more known to us and seems more real; C. S. Lewis calls the angels’ love, though not an emotion, “ferocious”; the seraphim are named from burning.

9. Student question: can we ever fully love? (“do you have an emotional attachment to the syllogism”) #

The point: our love is mixed and divided; the angels’ love, being undivided, is more intense.

• Student: if God is pure act and love, are we never fully loving? He agrees we can never love as much, and adds that in us emotion and reason go on together and are hard to distinguish.
• Anecdote: a Polish professor asked, “Mr. Berquist, do you have an emotional attachment to the syllogism?”; he answered he could have one to a girl but not to a syllogism, since his love of it rests on reason recognizing the only argument whose conclusion follows necessarily from the premises.
• Student asks whether that is the angels’ kind of love: yes; we might think angels’ love less intense for lacking emotion, but ours is divided (flesh warring against spirit, “divide and conquer”), theirs intense; your guardian angel’s love is more intense than any human love you have known. A student suggests the angel’s reply to Zachariah showed such intense love rather than anger; he assents.
• Philosopher named from love of wisdom; Aristotle in the Metaphysics: philosopher and sophist differ by their choice of life, the sophist loving the honour of appearing wise; so the philosopher’s love is a chosen love in the will, unlike his love of candy, which pleases the senses.
• Those who know both say the pleasures of the mind are greater (Aristotle, “even Mill”); most never get past bodily pleasures. Thomas: the educated man who sins by the flesh sins worse than the common man; no man lives without some pleasure, so without taste for higher pleasures one goes to excess in the lower. Anecdote: a high-school acquaintance spent a Saturday at his co-workers’ amusements, one park after another, and came home exhausted. Students add: the man who knows higher things is more guilty when he succumbs, and “idle mind” has some truth; one recalls co-workers who “couldn’t stand to be alone” every weekend. The recording ends here.

His words #

• understanding powers: his rendering of the intellectual powers; “understanding” for intellectus throughout.
• ability / power: his terms for potentia; “innate power ability” for the second species of quality [ed.: potency].
• passive or undergoing power: a power acted upon by its object.
• acting upon understanding: agent intellect.
• looking reason / looking understanding: speculative (from the Latin for looking) [ed.: speculative intellect]; “doing” reason for practical.
• foresight: prudence, practical wisdom.
• reasoned out understanding: [ed.: science, scientia].
• synderesis: what we naturally understand in the practical order, e.g. do good and avoid evil.
• conscience: from con and scientia, “with knowledge”; judging with some knowledge one has.
• intellectus: from intus and legere, “to read within.”
• mens: from mensura, to measure.
• immediate principle of operation: what is most proximate to the act, nothing between.
• to be: being in the sense of existence, distinguished from being as “what is.”
• pure act: God, in whom there is no composition.
• ninth book of Wisdom: Metaphysics IX; metaphysics as meta ta physica, “after the books on natural philosophy.”
• intellectus est substantia quaedam: De Anima I in the Latin translation, “the understanding is a certain substance,” i.e. the substance capable of understanding.
• sense desire / reasonable desire: sense appetite and intellectual appetite (the will); emotions, passions, feelings as bodily desires following sense knowledge.
• dilectio: “a chosen love,” love following reason.
• merciful love vs. just love: God’s love for us (owed to no one) vs. our love for God (owed, a debt).

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 79, prologue (the thirteen articles, paraphrased)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 79, a. 1: objections 1-4, sed contra, body, replies to objections 1 and 2 (replies 3 and 4 not reached)
• Shakespeare, Hamlet, Hamlet’s speech to Horatio (“since my dear soul was mistress of her choice”) (inferred: Act 3)

Mentioned

• Augustine, De Trinitate IX and X (via the objections)
• Gregory, homily on the Ascension (via objection 3)
• Aristotle, De Anima I (“intellectus substantia quaedam”), De Anima II (understanding as a power; the genera of powers), De Anima (speculative and practical; the reproducing soul)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX (act and ability); Metaphysics on philosopher and sophist
• Heraclitus, fragment on divine and human nature
• Shakespeare, Cymbeline (“who is’t can read a woman”); Two Gentlemen of Verona (Proteus, Julia, Valentine, Sylvia); “whoever loved that loved not at first sight”; “love and reason keep little company”
• John Locke, Essay on Human Understanding
• St Paul, “he chose us in him”; St Catherine of Siena on the debt of love
• The Pope’s address in Poland (Our Lady of Mercy; Faustina); Hail Holy Queen
• C. S. Lewis on the angels’ love; Mill on the pleasures of the mind
• Thomas on love (the four articles on the causes of love) and on the educated man’s sin (loci not stated)

His questions #

• Is my reason and my understanding the same ability? Why two different words? Same power, named from reasoning and from understanding; treated in a.8.
• What does the word conscience come from? Con and scientia, “with knowledge”; not a separate power, more an act.
• Is any real distinction in God between his being and his doing? No; no composition in God, he is pure act, so to be and to understand are identical in him.
• If seeing and hearing were the same, would the eye and the ear be the same? Yes; and since they differ, eye and ear differ, as nature and ability differ in us.
• Is to be two and to be half of four the same thing? No; two is quantity, half of four is relation, a property following upon being two.
• Was Locke talking about the act of understanding or the ability to understand? Left open; the title does not make it clear.
• When is the soul mistress of her choice? When reason is developed enough to compare and weigh, which is why a child is not held so responsible.
• Is the love God has for us an emotion, a feeling? No; a chosen love, merciful and gratuitous, whereas ours for God is just, a debt that can be commanded.
• Would you say we are never fully loving, since to love fully you must be pure act? (student) We can never love as much as God; our love is a mixture of emotion and reason, divided and so weaker than the angels'.