Summa Theologiae I, Q.79, Articles 4-5: The Agent Intellect and the "Father of Lights" of James 1:17

Orientation #

He refers back to “the earlier article” on the powers flowing from the soul and to the Jude 19 passage “I was quoting” (prev. lecture), and says “we’ll come back to that text again” of James 1:17. The verified sources place the class in q.79 a.4 (and report a short a.5 match), but the transcript shows only the body and five replies of a.4 being read. The previous class treated q.79 a.3 on positing an agent intellect, with the light analogy; the next treats a.5, whether the agent intellect is one in all men.

The class, in order #

1. Why Thomas adds “unchanging”: James 1:17 and the overshadowed mind (“not even the shadow of a turning”) #

Point: Thomas’s reason that our mind’s light is derived from God includes that our mind understands by motion (discourse), so it depends on an unchanging higher light.

• James’s Greek: parallagē (change) and aposkiasma (shadow of turning); the pairing of light and shadow is “beautiful”.
• Earlier thinkers quoted by Thomas (in the Sentences) call ours an intellectus obumbratus, an overshadowed understanding; that is why we need discourse. Angels are not so called: they understand at once without discourse. Our mind is in the dark, gradually lightened “in the cracks” as we reason.
• Aside: Aristotle says each science has its own tropos, way of turning; Washington Irving’s Mountjoy shows a young man whose “poetic turn of mind” makes him mistake fine rhetoric for wisdom. People’s minds turned the wrong way cannot understand philosophy or theology.

2. Body of a.4: three reasons our understanding is derived from a higher one (“proceeds from potency to act”) #

Point: our understanding (1) only partakes of understanding, unlike the angel, “intellectual, period”; (2) understands by motion (Shakespeare’s “large discourse, looking before and after” is a very good definition); (3) does not understand all things and is in potency even to what it can understand. Therefore some higher understanding must aid the soul.

• Aside: he always prays to his guardian angel before trying to understand; Plato’s Timaeus says to pray before discoursing on the whole universe; modern academics would mock praying before study; students who pray without studying “challenge God in the wrong way”; even Thomas prayed before study.

3. Some go astray: the separated agent intellect (Avicenna) (“necessary to posit in the human soul itself”) #

Point: some confuse the soul’s own ability to make images understandable in act with the superior understanding from which that ability derives.

1. Even granting a separated agent intellect, a partaken power must be in the soul, because perfect natural things have their own powers besides the universal agents: the sun generates man, yet man has his own generative powers, as do the other perfect animals; and nothing among inferior things is more perfect than the human soul.
2. His aside: without such a power there would be no liberum arbitrium, since our understanding would simply depend on an exterior substance. But Thomas appeals not to this but to experience: we perceive ourselves separating universal forms from particular conditions (learning the parallelogram and rhombus in geometry).
3. No action belongs to a thing except through a principle formally inhering in it (as said for the possible intellect); so the principle of this action is in the soul.

• Aristotle compares the agent intellect to light in the air; Plato compares the separated intellect impressing things on the soul to the sun (Themistius, commentary on De Anima III). For our faith the separated intellect is God, creator of the soul, in whom alone it reaches beatitude; Psalm 4: the light of your face is sealed upon us.

4. Reply 1: partaking of the divine light (“that true light illumines as a universal cause”) #

Point: the true light illumines as universal cause; the soul partakes a particular power, its natural light “kindled by the word of God”.

• Student: is our light a part of the divine light, induced like heat? Answer: partaking does not divide the divine light; “part” means imperfect, as Paul uses “in part” and “in a mirror, darkly”: we receive something like it imperfectly.
• “The light which enlightens every man coming into this world” can be read of the natural light of reason, since not everyone has faith. Both lights are from God, so reason and faith cannot really contradict, however it may appear; one must respect both.

5. Reply 2: “sometimes understands, sometimes not” (“not speaking about the act of understanding”) #

Point: the Greek of De Anima shows Aristotle passes from possible intellect to agent intellect, then to the combination of the two, the intellect in act; and in that state we are not sometimes understanding and sometimes not.

• Second solution: if the words refer to the agent intellect, the intermittence is due to the defect of the possible intellect, in potency (and perhaps of the images), not of the agent, which is “already always active”.
• Related text of Thomas: of the two things in knowing, grasping is attributed more to the images (they give something to grasp), judging more to the agent intellect; so the perfection of knowing (judgment) comes more from the agent intellect, the content more from the images.

6. Reply 3: why we do not understand everything at once (“not have itself as the object”) #

Point: if the agent intellect stood to the possible intellect as visible object to sight, we would understand all things at once; but it is not the object, it makes objects in act, so it also requires the images, good disposition of the sense powers, and exercise.

• Exercise: his cardboard icosahedron and dodecahedron hanging from the kitchen light for months to train his imagination for solid geometry; plane geometry gave no such trouble.
• One thing understood leads to others: terms to propositions, principles to conclusions, the three acts of reason; here it makes no difference whether the agent intellect is of the soul or separate.
• Msgr Dionne on Metaphysics V “beginning”: the first meaning of such words is sensible, and later meanings depend all the way back on it: our dependence on the image. Contrast: seeing God face to face, where God is not making something else understandable but is himself seen.
• Student: how much does the collating power work before the intellect? Answer: reason’s discursive influence already appears in the interior senses, the cogitative power or “particular reason” (hence “universal” reason); experience is a collatio of many images, and recollection is almost reasoning from image to image (working back to what you did yesterday at four; recognizing a former student outside chapel). Aristotle even uses “syllogism” of it in the book on memory and reminiscence. Order: sense, memory, experience (a collection of many memories of the same sort; beware “experience” used for sensation), then the universal, as in the proemium of wisdom. His image from Posterior Analytics II (first said “rhetoric”, corrected): fleeing troops, one makes a stand, then another, until a whole army stands.
• Words: phantasm is the Greek-derived word for image, preferred because Latin “image” also means statue or painting; “fancy” comes from it (imagination and romantic love).

7. Reply 4: act and potency, but not to the same (“in act immaterial, but in potency”) #

Point: the soul is immaterial in act but in potency to determinate likenesses; images are the reverse, actual likenesses but only potentially immaterial; so one soul can have a power making things immaterial in act (agent intellect) and one receiving them (possible intellect).

• Student: so the agent intellect has the forms in act and the passive in potency? Answer: no; the soul has actual immateriality, not the actual forms; the images have the actual likenesses, not universal. “Really kind of a tricky thing”: images give the definite universals, the agent intellect their universality.
• Locke’s “general idea of triangle”: trying to imagine a triangle neither isosceles, scalene nor equilateral, he confuses image and thought; we understand what is common to the three but cannot imagine a triangle that is not one of them. That we understand universals is shown by universal demonstrations: the reason the interior angles of a triangle equal [two right angles; ASR “equilateral”] is tied to what a triangle is, apart from equal sides (Euclid’s parallel through the vertex, or the exterior angle).
• English “idea” means sometimes image, sometimes thought; joke: a philosopher’s idea should be a thought, your girlfriend’s “getting ideas” means images. Poetry aims at pleasing the imagination; Scripture’s images (“the Lord is my rock”) are ordered to the mind rather than to pleasing the imagination, more like Aristotle’s or Empedocles’ four roots than like “untimely frost upon the sweetest flower”.
• Student: so the immaterial idea is in the image? Answer via De Anima’s distinction of thinking and imagining, which even those who know it use interchangeably (Henry V choruses; “I think” / “I imagine” when unsure). Aristotle distinguishes first in the third act: I can imagine a terrorist outside, or winning the sweepstakes, without any reason, but cannot think it without a reason (no ticket); and merely imagining brings little emotion, thinking it brings fear. Easier also in the second act: imagining you with Cyrano’s nose is not saying you have it. Hardest in the first act: what a triangle is, is universal; the imagined triangle is singular, though connected.

8. Reply 5: powers flow from the soul (“the soul itself is created by God”) #

Point: objection that we would get the light from the soul, not God; answer: the soul’s essence is immaterial and created by God, so the partaken power proceeds from its essence like the other powers; either way we are “all set”.

9. James 1:17-18 in Greek: the Father of Lights and the word of truth (“every good giving and every perfect gift”) #

Point: the text is as explicit as possible (pasa dosis agathē, pan dōrēma teleion, the universal affirmative), and “Father of Lights” indicates that among these perfect gifts coming down are the lights he gives.

• Good and perfect go together: in the Summa the five attributes, simple, perfect, infinite, unchanging, one, with goodness attached to perfection, being everywhere to infinity, eternity to unchangingness; Wisdom 9 also joins good and perfect.
• Three lights we might get: reason (which all have and must nourish and respect), faith, glory; “lights” is plural because there is one light that is God and many given. Aristotle explicitly calls the agent intellect a phōs, a great gift to be thankful for.
• Augustine (mentioned by John Paul II): after despairing of truth like Descartes, the Cassiciacum dialogues: Contra Academicos against skepticism, then avoiding presumption, then De Ordine, badly translated as “divine providence and the problem of evil”, whose point is that the question must be taken in order. James’s preceding words, mē planasthe, do not err, from “to wander”: a disordered movement of mind, like a machine “out of order”.
• Verse 18: boulētheis, of his own will (God produced us by will, not nature); apekyēsen, brought forth; logos alētheias, word of truth, matched with Thomas’s Adoro te devote (visus, tactus, gustus in te fallitur; sed auditu solo tuto creditur; nil hoc verbo veritatis verius): faith is ex auditu. Aparchē, first fruits or forefront of his creatures: we are at the forefront because of the light received, the agent intellect.

10. Jude 20-21 and the theological virtues ordered to eternal life (“building up yourselves on your most holy faith”) #

Point: like the proemium of Dei Verbum, which links eternal life to faith, hope and charity, Jude’s one verse names faith, hope (praying in the Holy Spirit, since hope is that whereby we pray) and love of God, then eternal life.

• Faith as foundation: the house of Psalm “unless the Lord build” read of the soul, foundation faith, walls hope, roof charity; Hebrews defines faith as hypostasis, substance, of things hoped for.
• 1 Cor 13 context: face to face vs mirror (esoptron) in enigma; “in part” means imperfectly; “know as I am known” because God joined to the mind is its very form, as he knows all by knowing himself; then the three remain.
• Catechism definition of hope: desire of eternal life relying on God’s grace. Faith: Thomas divides the articles by Christ’s divinity and humanity, from John 17’s definition of eternal life; the good shepherd’s sheep going in (divinity) and out (humanity). Charity remains and is perfected; faith replaced by vision, hope by possession; “hallowed be thy name” hints at it since praise proceeds from love.

11. 1 John 3:2, Paul’s thanksgivings, the end of Matthew (“we shall see Him as He is”) #

• 1 John 3:2: we shall be like him and see him as he is (theology sees him as he is not: not composed, not limited); he goes on to hope purifying.
• 1 Thess 1:3 and Col 1:3-5 both open by thanking God for the readers’ faith, hope and charity; Thomas: these are our chief goods. Matthew’s ending: make disciples (faith), baptizing (hope, as sacraments rely on God’s help; Mother Teresa would lose her way without daily communion), teaching the commandments (charity). Timothy likewise must first establish faith, hope and charity of the flock. The class ends mid-sentence.

His words #

• intellectus obumbratus: overshadowed understanding, needing discourse.
• tropos: a science’s way of turning; “turn of mind”.
• partake: receive something like it imperfectly, not a division of it.
• light which enlightens every man: read of the natural light of reason.
• ability to make understandable in act [ed.: agent intellect]; ability to understand [ed.: possible intellect]; understanding in act: their combination.
• grasping / judging [ed.: apprehension / judgment].
• collatio: bringing together of images; experience.
• particular reason: the cogitative power, as against universal reason.
• phantasm: Greek-derived word for image; “fancy”.
• idea: in English both image and thought.
• mē planasthe: do not err, from “to wander”, disordered motion of mind.
• aparchē: first fruits, forefront.
• esoptron: mirror; “in part”: imperfectly.

Texts #

Read in class: Thomas, ST I q.79 a.4 (body, replies 1-5); James 1:16-18 (Greek); Jude 20-21 (Greek); 1 Cor 13 (mirror, face to face, three remain); 1 John 3:1-3; 1 Thess 1:2-3; Col 1:3-5; Adoro te devote, second and third quatrains; Psalm 4 (as cited in the article). Mentioned: Aristotle, De Anima III (agent intellect as light; thinking vs imagining); Themistius on De Anima III; Aristotle, Metaphysics V “beginning” (via Msgr Dionne) and proemium of wisdom (inferred: Metaphysics I); Posterior Analytics II (troops image); Memory and Reminiscence; Thomas on the Sentences; Plato, Timaeus; Wisdom 9; Hebrews (definition of faith); John 17; Matthew’s ending; Timothy; Catechism on hope; Dei Verbum proemium; Augustine, Contra Academicos, De Ordine; Locke on the general triangle; Shakespeare (Hamlet’s “large discourse”, Henry V choruses); Irving, Mountjoy; Empedocles; Euclid.

His questions #

• Why does Thomas add that God is unchanging here?
  Because our mind understands by motion and depends on an unchanging higher light.
• Is our light a part of the divine light, like induced heat?
  No; “partake” means to receive something like it imperfectly.
• What does Aristotle mean by “sometimes understands, sometimes not”?
  The intellect in act, the combination; or if the agent intellect, the defect lies in the possible intellect.
• If the agent acts on the possible intellect, why don’t we always understand everything?
  It is not the object but makes objects in act; images, sense dispositions and exercise are also needed.
• How can the soul be both in act and in potency to the same?
  Not the same: actually immaterial, potentially the determinate forms; the images the reverse.
• How is thinking distinguished from imagining?
  Third act: no reason needed to imagine; second: an image is no statement; first: universal vs singular.
• Why is God called the Father of Lights?
  Because the lights he gives, reason, faith, glory, are among his perfect gifts.
• Why are we the first fruits of his creatures?
  Because of the light, the agent intellect, received from him.