Summa Theologiae I, Q.79, Articles 3-4: The Agent Intellect, and Whether It Belongs to the Soul

Orientation #

He opens mid-sentence finishing a point from the previous article (something passive may be nobler than something active), then says the third ability of the soul is “what I’m going to be talking about starting today in this article.” He defers the act/potency objection “to the next article” (a.4) and the Scripture (James) “later”; the class ends just after he begins James 1:17. The previous class worked through q.79 aa.1-2 (understanding as a passive power); the next continues the agent intellect and James 1:17.

The class, in order #

1. Jude 19: “psychikoi”, having not the spirit (“these bad men are sensual”) #

Point: a scriptural use of “soul” (psyche) in a bad sense, contrasted with “spirit” (pneuma).

• Jude 19, Greek psychikoi … pneuma me echontes: one translation “sensual, having not the Spirit” (capital S), the interlinear “natural … spirit” (small s). There is no article in the Greek, so it need not be the Holy Spirit (which the next verse, on praying in the Holy Spirit, names explicitly).
• Reading he draws out: psychikoi taken in a bad sense (it need not be: “my soul magnifies the Lord”); the soul insofar as it informs the body, someone “concentrated in this bodily sense” (what “sensual” carries), not cultivating the immaterial powers not in the body, the pneuma. Student: “they’re beasts.”
• Aside: he was hunting for a different passage and “ran across” Jude; the next verse “is very twisting, but I don’t want to get into it.”

2. The three abilities of the understanding soul not in the body (“only the human soul, the understanding soul”) #

Point: the plant soul and sensing soul have all abilities in the body (the sensing ones “not as depressed” as the plant ones, per Thomas); the human soul has abilities not in the body. He lists them on the board:

1. The ability to understand what something is, which is always universal (what a circle is is common to all circles; cat, chair). A definition is a distinct grasp of what something is, but one may understand it vaguely before defining. Why not in the body: whatever is in the body is in the continuous, here or there, hence singular.
2. The ability to choose: the will (treated later in the course).
3. A third, “often neglected”: the ability to make understandable in act what is in the image (student: “to illumine the phantasm”). An imagined triangle or circle is individual, not yet actually understandable; this power abstracts the universal from the singular.

• The light comparison: light makes the colours in the room actually visible (without it they are visible only in ability), so they can be seen by the eye; the third ability makes something actually understandable, so it can be understood by the first.

3. Article 3, the three objections (“it seems that is not necessary to lay down”) #

Point: reading the objections against positing an “active” or “acting upon understanding” (he flags the translations “agent intellect”).

• Obj. 1 (a likeness): as sense is to sensibles, so understanding is to understandables; sense is in potency to sensibles yet no “active sense” is posited, only an undergoing one; therefore only the possible understanding (the second power on the board; “possible” because it undergoes in order to understand; at first understanding only in ability).
  • His comment: Plato (the Sophist, “I think”) says likeness is a slippery thing, especially between distant things. Example: 4:6 :: 2:3; but 2 and 3 are prime, so 4 and 6 are prime? No. 2:3 is even to odd, so 4:6? No. Understanding a proportion means seeing in what way they are alike: 4 is the same parts of 6 as 2 is of 3. This is the fourth tool of dialectic, the tool of likeness; Aristotle calls it skepsis of the likeness, consideration of the likeness. Scientists’ “wave”: water, sound, light waves are alike, but propagated differently.
• Obj. 2: if one says sense too has an agent, namely light, against this: light is required for sight only to make the medium lucid in act; colour of itself moves the lucid; but understanding has no medium (you see through air, smell through it; you do not understand through a medium). So no agent understanding.
• Obj. 3: the likeness of the agent is received in the patient according to the way of the patient (“whatever is received is received according to the mode of the receiver”); the possible understanding is immaterial, which suffices to receive forms immaterially, and a form is understandable in act by being immaterial; so no agent is needed.
  • On “mode”: the same lecture given to thirty students yields a perfect answer, a partial one, a wrong one; butter and a rock in the fire receive differently. Student asks if mode means “way”: the Latin has the etymology of measure, as Thomas and Augustine take it, like cups of different measure under the same pouring. Is the mode an act in the receiver? No, an ability, capacity or disposition. All in heaven are filled by God, but each according to disposition (student: “as we die”). Disposition is reduced to the genus of material cause, since matter receives. The Hail Mary: “full of grace” is a disposition whereby “the Lord is with thee”; the Holy Spirit is given with charity, disposing us to receive Him.
• His preview: if forms understandable in act were already out there proportioned to our mind (Plato’s world of forms), no agent understanding would be needed; but what is understandable only in ability cannot act upon the understanding.

4. Sed contra and the Plato/Aristotle response (“something by which is able to become all things”) #

Point: Aristotle, De Anima III: in the soul as in every nature there is something by which it becomes all things and something by which it makes all things.

• “Becomes all things” is the ability to understand (power 2). The soul is in a way all things: by sense it receives all sensible forms, by understanding all understandables; having the definition of dog I have dog in a way in my mind. This shows the superiority of the knower over what has no knowledge, which is limited to its own nature; a kind of anticipation of God, “in a very simple way”: Thomas on God’s words to Moses, “I will show you every good”: “it is Himself.” And the mind “takes into account everything” confusedly in knowing something is not nothing.
• Response: for Plato no necessity (except perhaps to give understandable light to the one understanding, “let’s leave that aside”), because the forms of natural things subsist without matter and so are understandable in act; he called them species, eidos, badly rendered “idea”, better “Forms” with a capital F; by partaking of them bodily matter is formed into individuals of their species and the intellect informed to know genera and species.
• His comment: though rejected, Plato’s position has a likeness to the truth about God and the angels: God’s ideas by which He makes things and puts ideas into angelic minds. Three ways thought and material things can be in harmony: the thought produces the thing (God); the thing acts on the thought (us); one thought produces both the thing and the thought (angels). “Covered all the possibilities.”
• Why Plato posited the forms, two routes (“maybe a little bit off here”): (a) his answer to the central question, that truth requires that the way we know be the way things are; since we know truly by definitions, universals in separation from singulars, they must be that way (hence a mathematical world for the mathematical sciences, and the world of forms for definitions); (b) what is so through another presupposes what is so through itself: coffee sweet not through being coffee must be sweet through another, eventually something sweet through itself; no one is a man through being himself (else only Socrates would be a man), so there is “man himself through himself.” Aristotle: how can there be man himself, when it is the nature of man to have a body? A student presses that the principle itself is true; he grants “a lot of truth to that”: I am a man not by soul and body in general but by this soul and this body; “I’ll leave that to wisdom.”
• Aristotle’s argument as Thomas gives it: (1) natures do not subsist without matter; (2) forms in matter are not understandable in act; (3) nothing is reduced from potency to act except by something in act (as sense comes to act through the sensible in act); therefore a power on the side of the understanding is needed to make understandables in act by separating forms from material conditions.
• “This is a very subtle thing on Aristotle’s part”; “sort of his own discovery.” We have some awareness of it (studying new geometrical figures and separating what they have in common), but it is obscured in inward experience. Forced “by the truth itself” once man-himself was rejected.
• Consequence: the universal is universal only in our mind; hence Albert the Great says the first thing to consider in logic is the universal, since logic is about things as they are in our mind and what happens to them there; the Isagoge of Porphyry begins with names said of many (made more sensible because of our dependence on senses), and the syllogism (“if A is said of all B …”) presupposes universality.

5. Reply to obj. 1 and the summary of powers (“sensibles in act are found outside”) #

Point: sensibles in act exist outside the soul, so no agent sense; an actually understandable man does not.

• Whatever we say of someone is universal and could be found in another; Hegel’s problem, trying to get the singular by piling up universals (“Berquist is a philosopher, Christian, husband, grandfather, brother”): still universal. To get this one you go back to the senses (pointing; “you went to this school”, taking someone’s word).
• Thomas’s summary at the end of ad 1: in the nourishing part all powers active; in the sensing part all passive (both senses and sense desire); in the understanding part one active, one passive. His ordering: digesting, growing, reproducing (active); seeing, hearing (acted upon); then the two of De Anima III.
• Student: what of the interior senses in action? Answer: an effect of reason being already somewhat in act (reason commanding imagination to form figures, as in reasoning); basically we are acted upon at the beginning, as the heart is first acted upon and then loves a means because it loves an end.
• Abstraction as metaphor: not taking the very thing out and leaving something behind; more like taking an image on paper, “not exactly the same.” The image is an instrument of the act of understanding in making the understandable in act.
• Preview of a.4: some said the agent intellect is another substance, an angel; the objection is that the soul would be in potency and act to the same thing; “leave it until you get to there.”

6. Reply to obj. 2: two opinions on light; three lights (“about the effect of light, there is a twofold opinion”) #

Point: on either view of light the comparison holds, but differently.

• First opinion: light makes colours themselves visible in act; then the agent intellect is like light in the same way, the likeness “very great.” Second (the Commentator, Averroes, De Anima II): light only makes the transparent lucid in act; then the likeness is only that each is necessary for its act. He prefers the first; either way the word “light” is used.
• Distinction he adds: natural light of reason, light of faith, light of glory. Faith is like reason: it makes something understandable that would not be (reason: a whole is more than a part; faith: three Persons, God made man). Glory is different: not making God understandable (He is most understandable in Himself, though not to us; Lux vera, in the communion prayer) but a disposition of our understanding to receive God as the form by which we see Him: “in your light we shall see light” (Psalms). Student: are both extensions by proportion? “What is necessary before you can see something is called light”; on the first opinion the likeness is “much more a proportion.”
• Student: doesn’t “light of reason” sometimes mean the first principles? They partake of the agent intellect’s light: first things understood are seen in that light, tools of the agent intellect; we are enlightened by principles, the principles by the agent intellect.

7. Reply to obj. 3 (“if the agent doesn’t pre-exist”) #

Point: granted the agent, diverse dispositions receive diversely; but if the agent does not pre-exist, the disposition of the receiver achieves nothing. The understandable in act does not exist in the nature of sensible things, so the immateriality of the possible understanding does not suffice without the agent, which makes understandable in act by abstraction.

• Thomas elsewhere explains “abstraction”: not cutting it out and taking it with you; like a tracing over a gravestone, taking away the form but not the material. The agent intellect gets the particular likeness from the image (not understandable there, being singular) and gives actual universality, hence actual understandability.

8. Article 4, the objections (“whether the acting upon understanding is something of the soul”) #

• Obj. 1: its effect is to illumine, but that belongs to what is higher than the soul, John 1:9 (the Word, “the true light which enlightens every man”). His remark: “very interesting”; there is a connection between the agent intellect and the Word; “in part by giving us a light which is the act of understanding” (anticipating the reply).
• Obj. 2: De Anima III attributes to the agent intellect that it does not sometimes understand and sometimes not; our soul does. His comment: a famous, much-misunderstood text; Aristotle treats the ability to understand, then the agent, then the combination of both, and it is the combination that always understands; go back to the Greek. Thomas’s De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas is the definitive refutation, word by word; Thomas marvels quam leviter errant. To be teachable one applies the mind to the words of the wiser “carefully, frequently, with reverence.”
  • Aside: a John Paul II text on an anniversary of Augustine, “very well written,” a good urging to read Augustine.
• Obj. 3: agent and patient suffice for acting; if both are in the soul, man could understand whenever he wills, which is false. His answer: the agent intellect has no likenesses of sensible things, only understandability; it needs particular likenesses from sense or imagination, hence experience (of cats before “cat”).
• Obj. 4 (“your objection, Father”): the agent intellect is a substance in act; nothing is act and ability to the same thing; so both cannot be of the soul. “A good objection” that forces Thomas to state its exact role.
• Obj. 5: if of the soul it is a power (not a passion, not a habit, which follows from acts); every power flows from the essence of the soul; so it would not be by partaking from a superior intellect. His reply: the soul too comes from God, so the power flowing from it still derives from Him who enlightens all.
• Sed contra: De Anima III, the same passage as in a.3.

9. Article 4, the response begun (“some superior understanding, from which the soul obtains”) #

Point: above the human soul there must be a superior intellect from which it obtains the power of understanding.

1. What partakes, is mobile, is imperfect presupposes what is such by essence, immobile, perfect: the partaking presupposes the essential; the mobile depends on the immobile (Aristotle’s mouse cannot cross the pile of grain; you cannot walk on water “unless you’re Christ”); the imperfect on the perfect, as potential on actual.
2. The human soul partakes of intellectual power. Signs: not the whole soul understands (we have sensing, digesting, reproducing powers; not purely intellectual; Augustine’s bad tooth interfering with the higher life); and it reaches truth with discourse and motion (Shakespeare’s reason as “large discourse”; discourse from running); so it depends on a mind that knows without discourse, angels and a fortiori God.

• He exclaims over how the text “illuminates it”: “Stop the press!”

10. James 1:17 (“the Father of Lights”) #

Point: the scriptural text he wanted, read in Greek: pasa dosis agathe kai pan dorema teleion anothen esti katabainon apo tou patros ton photon — every good giving and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights — par ho ouk eni parallage e tropes aposkiasma, with whom there is no change nor shadow of turning.

• We ask everything from “Our Father”; here He is “Father of lights”. Thomas often quotes the last clause for God’s immutability, the authoritative text; in the Contra Gentiles he gives reasons where reason can, then the Scripture. Why the epistle joins perfect gifts to the Father of lights: left open, the recording ends here.

His words #

• psychikoi; “psychic”, soul-ish, the soul insofar as it informs the body; taken in a bad sense in Jude 19.
• pneuma; spirit, the part of the soul with powers not in the body.
• ability; his word throughout [ed.: potency, power].
• the ability to understand what something is; the possible understanding, “possible because it undergoes in order to understand” [ed.: possible intellect].
• the ability to make understandable in act what is in the image; “active understanding”, “acting upon understanding”, “agent intellect” (translators’) [ed.: intellectus agens].
• skepsis of the likeness; consideration of the likeness, Aristotle’s phrase for the fourth tool of dialectic.
• mode; not merely “way” but “measure”, as Thomas and Augustine take it; a disposition to receive, reduced to material cause.
• species / eidos; Plato’s forms; “idea” a bad translation; “Forms” with capital F.
• man himself through himself; his rendering of Plato’s Greek for the form of man.
• the Commentator; Averroes, by antonomasia; “the philosopher”, Aristotle.
• Lux vera; true light, from the communion prayer, of the beatific vision.
• light of glory; a disposition of the understanding to receive God as the form by which we see Him.
• quam leviter errant; how lightly they err (Thomas on the Averroists).
• large discourse; Shakespeare’s definition of reason; discourse from “running”.
• Father of lights; patros ton photon, James 1:17.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, q. 79, a. 3 (objections, sed contra, response, replies).
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, q. 79, a. 4 (objections, sed contra, response begun).
• Epistle of Jude, v. 19 (Greek and two English translations).
• James 1:17 (Greek, word by word).
• handout “Follow the Common”, p. 6 and DHB Vol I, The First Philosophers, p. 49: verified sources; the transcript does not say which passage they carry.

Mentioned

• Aristotle, De Anima III (become all things / make all things; “not sometimes understands”; the soul in a way all things).
• Aristotle, Metaphysics (against separate forms; locus not stated).
• Plato, Sophist (“I think”) on likeness being slippery.
• Porphyry, Isagoge (names said of many).
• Averroes, commentary on De Anima II (light makes the medium lucid).
• Thomas Aquinas, De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas.
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles (method: reasons, then Scripture).
• John 1:9; Psalms “in your light we shall see light”; Exodus, God to Moses “I will show you every good” (book inferred).
• Albert the Great on the universal as first in logic; Augustine’s toothache; a John Paul II text on Augustine; Shakespeare on reason as “large discourse”; the Hail Mary; the Our Father.

His questions #

• How many abilities does the human soul have that are not in the body? Three: to understand what something is, to choose, to make understandable what is in the image.
• What does it mean to understand a proportion (4:6 :: 2:3)? To see in what way they are alike: 4 is the same parts of 6 as 2 is of 3.
• Does “mode” mean some kind of act in the receiver? No, an ability, capacity or disposition, reduced to the genus of material cause.
• Which ability is that “by which the soul is able to become all things”? The second, the ability to understand.
• Why is there no necessity for Plato to posit an agent intellect? Because subsisting immaterial forms are already understandable in act and can act on the mind.
• Why did Plato posit the forms? Two routes: truth requires the way we know be the way things are; what is so through another presupposes what is so through itself; the second “has a lot of truth”, left to wisdom.
• What about the interior senses that are in action? An effect of reason already somewhat in act commanding the imagination; basically we are acted upon first.
• Does the second opinion on light drop part of the meaning? No; it keeps “necessary in order to see” but not “makes colours actually visible”; on the first opinion the likeness is much more a proportion.
• Doesn’t “light of reason” sometimes mean the first principles? The principles partake of the agent intellect’s light and are its tools.
• Why does James join every perfect gift to the Father of lights? Left open (recording ends).