Remembering That We Understood: Replies on Intellectual Memory, the Definition of Eternity, and the Beatific Vision

Orientation #

He opens “Let’s look at the replies now to the objections,” having already treated the body of the article; he says the next couple of objections (of the following article) will show another way to admit memory in the understanding, “but we’ll see that when you get there.” He refers back to the via negativa “I talked about this earlier in the course.” The previous class treated the agent intellect and began this article on memory in the intellective part against Avicenna; the next treats the following article on whether memory is a power distinct from understanding.

The class, in order #

1. Reply to the first objection (“the soul is the place of the species”) #

Point: memory as conserving universal species is not common to us and the beast, so Augustine’s remark about the superior part of the soul stands.

• The objection came from Augustine: the superior part of the soul holds nothing common to us and the beast.
• Thomas: species are conserved in the sensing part, and that is common to us and beasts (I remember where the food is; Moppet the dog remembers where the food is; “I guess the ants do too”). But there they are conserved in the conjunctum, since the memorative power is the act of some bodily organ. The understanding conserves species without any bodily organ.
• Hence the Philosopher in the third book about the soul: the soul is the place of the species; he corrects: not the whole soul but the intellect. Species here in Plato’s sense, the universal forms (rather “forms” than “ideas”); Aristotle says they are not in the world by themselves but in our understanding: “man himself,” “dog himself.”
• Boundary case: recognizing a face I have seen before is sense memory of an individual; my universal ideas do not fit you in particular.
• Aside/parallel: “my dog loves me” - the dog shares affection in the emotions (mourns at the owner’s casket), not the love in the will, which is charity; we share emotions with the dog, the will with the angels and God.

2. Reply to the second objection: pastness of object vs. of act (“pastness can refer to two things”) #

Point: memory as knowledge of the past is saved in the understanding on the side of its act, not on the side of its object.

1. Pastness can refer to the object known or to the act of knowing. In sense these are joined: the animal remembers both that it sensed and the past sensible thing.
2. For the understanding, pastness is accidental on the side of the object, because the direct object is universal, “quasi eternal”: my grandfather is past, my great-grandchildren future, but “man” is neither. To man as man it is accidental to be present, past or future; knowing the universal I do not know the past, which is singular.
3. On the side of the act, pastness belongs per se: the act of understanding is a particular act, now or yesterday or tomorrow; this is not repugnant to intellectuality because, though particular, it is immaterial (I understand what a triangle is, and I know that I understand it; I know that singular because it is immaterial).
4. Conclusion: as the understanding understands itself though a singular, it understands its own singular act as past, present or future. So the definition of memory is saved: it understands that it has understood this before, not the past “in so far as it is here and now.”

• Example: returning to a Euclid theorem after months - hazy, but “I thought that before”; sometimes he forgets and the same thought ends up twice in his notes.
• His observation: here Thomas goes “a little bit over what he does in the body of the article,” which admitted memory only as retaining the forms (the ordering of which is habitual knowledge); now he admits a knowledge of the past, though not of the here and now.
• Exchange: “when did you first understand the Pythagorean theorem?” - the student knows he has understood it before; to get “then and there” (first year at TAC) he must go to sense memory; but without the senses he would still know it is not new to his understanding. “Very subtle things here.”

3. Reply to the third objection: the middle state (“between potency and act”) #

Point: against Avicenna, the understandable form can be in the understanding in a middle way, and this is habit.

• Aristotle already said these forms can be between potency and act: first act vs. second act. The sleeping man has the ability to see (is not blind) but is not actually seeing; he must open his eyes. Likewise I must turn myself, want to and attend, before the forms are fully in act.
• Text: the form is sometimes in the understanding in potency only (understanding in potency); sometimes according to the ultimate completion of act (understanding in act); sometimes in a middle way (understanding in habitu), and so it conserves species even when not actually understanding them.
• Argument: once you admit the received is received according to the way of the receiver, the forms are kept in the understanding; but by experience we are not always understanding by them; therefore they are in a middle state.
• Mark of habit (Aristotle): when you want to think about it, you can. Before the habit, wanting is not enough: wanting to understand the Pythagorean theorem (Book I, proposition 47) requires going through all 47; after, you understand it when you want, “like the senses … just open your eyes.”
• Aside: students, stuck at the stage of wanting and not being able, get a false idea of the life of the mind; he himself, after twenty or thirty years, walks in and thinks again what he habitually knows.
• Aside: on rereading Aristotle or Thomas you understand a few more things each time; De Koninck at Laval, finishing a book of the “natural hearing”: if you think you have understood everything, you have understood nothing.

4. Digression: before, after, together; equal; the Phaedo (“more and less are before equal”) #

Point: definitions by negation, and what that does to Socrates’ recollection argument.

• Categories: Aristotle gives the meanings of before and after, then hama (Latin simul, English “together” or “at once”). Why define together after before and after? A student: together is a negation - neither before nor after; he agrees (two things together in time when one is neither before nor after the other).
• Tenth book of “Wisdom”: more and less are before equal in definition. Before class he asked a student what it means for two straight lines to be equal, hoping for “neither longer nor shorter.” He thinks Aristotle right but “not altogether sure that I fully understand why.”
• Phaedo, argument from recollection: the squares in the floor seem equal, on inspection are not; to judge that things approach equality yet fall short we must recall equality itself, not derived from them. Socrates’ manuductio (his word garbled “monoductio”): a painting of Berquist - you could judge the hair greyer, the nose shorter, only if your knowledge of Berquist were not derived from the painting. Lafayette, returning to an America full of Washington’s paintings and statues, judging “not really like him” or (the Virginia statue) “very close” - he could not unless he knew Washington apart from them. “A pretty good argument.”
• Application: if equal is defined by the negation of more and less, and bodies around us are plainly more and less (Empire State Building taller than his house), then equal could be got from more and less, and there is “a weakness in Socrates’ argument.” Left as a question, with the note that the two definitions are “similar.” Equality requires the same kind of quantity (two straight lines).

5. Eternity as four negations (“Tota simul et perfecta possessio vitae interminabilis”) #

Point: Boethius’ definition of eternity (Consolation V; taken over by Thomas in the prima pars, on eternity) works by negation, as the via negativa requires; how many negations? “three, maybe four.”

• Students imagine eternity as endless time. Even if time were beginningless and endless, as the Greeks thought, it is not eternity; Plato (Timaeus) saw this though he held time interminabilis, because time has before and after.
• Against life in time: (i) interminabilis - Mozart’s life had a beginning and end (his own life is longer, “not productive, obviously”; he attended the 200th anniversaries of Mozart’s birth in 1956 and of his death); the divine life has none. (ii) tota simul - even a Mozart who always was would have one year before another; in God no before and after. This may be why Aristotle puts before and after first in definition.
• The now of time (strict sense, dividing past from future, indivisible) has no before and after, so in that respect it resembles eternity more than time does; Boethius: the flowing now makes time, the standing now eternity. Against the now: (iii) possessio - the now is always other (a point moving along a line), fleeting, never possessed (“all good things must come to an end, time to go to bed”); the eternal now is always the same. (iv) perfecta - if you could freeze the now (the fairy-tale spell, servant frozen mid-sweep until the prince’s kiss), you could not play, eat, drink a beer, or think; practically no life; God has the fullness of life.
• So two negations of life in time, two of the now. “Beautiful to see”: as to no before and after, the now is more like eternity; as to full life, time is; God has perfect life all at once.
• Beatific vision: eternal life is partaking of the divine eternal life, all at once, no before and after or change in the vision. Student: won’t there be the feeling of flow? He: no - the vision itself won’t move, “like a pillar in the temple, you never go out again.”

6. Morning and evening knowledge; natural and supernatural desire (“they go from evening to morning”) #

Point: the beatific vision does not eliminate natural knowledge but stands to it as morning to evening.

• De Potentia, Thomas on Augustine: the angel’s evening knowledge is its natural knowledge (evening tends to darkness, the creature left to itself); morning knowledge is seeing God face to face (morning is the beginning, and the beginning is God). Saved angels refer themselves back to God and go from evening to morning; the fallen did not.
• Objection: Scripture says evening and morning are one day, as if the angel had both at once - impossible? Thomas: two understandable forms of the same kind could not both be in perfect act, but if ordered, yes; evening knowledge is a disposition for morning knowledge. Likewise Christ has the beatific vision from the incarnation and other kinds of knowledge too, so he can wonder at the centurion.
• Question put: is the philosopher’s natural wonder, the inborn desire to know the cause and the cause of the cause (which led Aristotle toward the first cause), in conflict with the desire to see God as He is, or a disposition for it? Student: it perfects it, “because you see the cause.” He agrees.
• Parallel: love of the beautiful (church music; Pius XII’s encyclical on church art, name not recalled; Augustine’s Confessions, “too late have I come to know thee, thou ancient beauty”) disposes toward the love of Beauty itself; St. Gertrude in the Benedictine garden (“all that’s missing is someone to share this with”) and Christ appears; Plato’s Symposium ascent from bodily to spiritual beauty to the beautiful itself. Danger: resting in the lower.
• Exchange: will we still know the Pythagorean theorem in heaven? Yes, the vision perfects, does not destroy, Euclidean geometry; everything naturally desired to know will be known. A student: and how to carry a tune? Thomas is explicit there will be laus vocalis in heaven, though the vision is the whole reward.

7. The vision as marriage; purgatory; time after death (“we’re going to see God by God”) #

• Student: does it depend on our interior knowledge at death? He: on how much we love God. The vision is metaphorically a marriage; bodily intimacy is superficial (bodies touch only at surfaces); God unites Himself to the mind, so we see God not through a created understandable form but “by God.” God will not unite Himself to a soul that does not love Him by charity; the more intensely you love, the more He unites Himself.
• Purgatory: like a bride who breaks out in a rash before the wedding and would want to delay - the soul wants to be cleansed of its stains.
• Student: is a baptized infant who dies predestined to a lower beatitude? “We don’t know”; his soul is innocent, unpurged but never sinned. Left open.
• Student: time when we get our bodies back? Not time in the ordinary sense; there will be motion, but the Apocalypse proclaims the end of time; now the body dominates and even thinking is in time through images, then the body is conformed to the glorified soul. A student proposes evening knowledge keeps a time factor while the vision has none; he: “I don’t know … interesting thing to think about.”

8. Boethius’ circle; God knowing the past now (“the way we know doesn’t have to be the way things are”) #

• The Consolation is filled with gems the medievals took over. The circle: points on the circle are the nows of time, one before another; the centre is the eternal now, not on the line, equally across from all, all present to it.
• To hold that the past is present to God’s knowledge one must follow Aristotle: the way we know need not be the way things are for knowledge to be true. Boethius, having announced himself of the Academy, has Lady Wisdom introduce Aristotle in book V as her true follower - his signal that Aristotle is needed here.
• Our shadow of this: knowing the past now - is there falsity in the past being present to me now (the two articles you read)? No. Falsity would come from attributing the when or how of my knowing to the thing. “When Aristotle discovered that, he was the wit, and all the rest of us dimwits have to learn from him.”
• Student: John Paul II’s Eucharist encyclical on the Mass making Calvary’s sacrifice present. He: the pope warns against reducing it to a community meal, which is easy given the difficulty of understanding the Eucharist; Aristotle is the way to understand it, though Aristotle learned much from Plato too.

9. Closing asides (“mental sparring”) #

• Plato’s name means “broad”; the legend he was an unbeaten wrestler; Socrates’ image of stripping and wrestling in the dialogues as showing your mind; a TAC (heard “TSC”) student “loading up my ammunition” for class; Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Orlando throwing the wrestler and Rosalind “wrestling with her affections”; Jacob wrestling.
• John Paul II’s letter (1984 or 1986) on the anniversary of Augustine’s conversion, and Paul VI on the Confessions, as accounts of a wrestling conversion; Pearce’s Literary Converts, which his wife is also reading; Alec Guinness, a French boy taking his hand while he was costumed as a priest, his son converting first. The recording cuts off mid-story.

His words #

• conjunctum; the soul-body composite in which the memorative power acts through an organ
• species; the understandable forms, “the universal species,” Plato’s forms rather than “ideas”
• pastness; being past, taken from the side of the object or of the act
• quasi eternal; the universal as abstracting from past, present, future
• first act vs. second act; the middle state of the form between potency and full act
• in habitu; understanding habitually, able to think when it wants
• natural hearing; the books of the Physics [ed.: Physics]
• hama / simul; “together” or “at once,” defined by negation of before and after
• tenth book of Wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics X]
• manuductio (heard “monoductio”); Socrates’ leading by the hand with an example
• via negativa; we understand more what God is not than what He is
• Tota simul et perfecta possessio vitae interminabilis; Boethius’ definition of eternity, read as four negations
• now of time; the indivisible now dividing past from future, flowing; vs. the standing eternal now
• evening / morning knowledge; the angel’s natural knowledge vs. seeing God face to face
• laus vocalis; vocal praise in heaven

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 79, a. 6, replies to objections 1-3 (verified source; number not stated by him)
• Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy V, definition of eternity (quoted in Latin)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, De Anima III: the soul (intellect) is the place of species
• Aristotle, Categories: before, after, together
• Aristotle, Metaphysics X: more and less before equal
• Euclid, Elements I.47
• Plato, Phaedo (recollection, equality); Timaeus (time); Symposium (ascent of love)
• Boethius, Consolation V: flowing vs. standing now; the circle; Lady Wisdom introducing Aristotle
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, on eternity (locus not stated); De Potentia on Augustine’s morning and evening knowledge
• Augustine, Confessions; 1 John (“we shall see Him as He is”); Genesis; Apocalypse
• Pius XII, encyclical on church art (name not recalled); John Paul II, encyclical on the Eucharist and letter on Augustine’s conversion; Paul VI on the Confessions
• Shakespeare, As You Like It; Pearce, Literary Converts

His questions #

• Does conserving species belong to memory in the understanding as something common with the beast? No: sense memory conserves individual images through an organ; the understanding conserves universals without one.
• When did you first understand the Pythagorean theorem? You know you have understood it before by understanding; the when and where need sense memory.
• Why does Aristotle define “together” after before and after? Because together is the negation: neither before nor after.
• What does it mean that two straight lines are equal? Neither longer nor shorter - more and less before equal in definition.
• How many negations are in the definition of eternity? Four: of beginning and end and of before and after (against time); of fleetingness and of defect of life (against the now).
• Which is more like eternity, life in the now or life in time? The now, as having no before and after; time, as fuller life.
• Are the natural desire to know the cause and the desire to see God face to face in conflict? No; the natural is a disposition, and the vision perfects it.
• Will we know the Pythagorean theorem in the next life? Yes; the vision does not destroy natural knowledge.
• Is there any falsity in the past being present to me now? No; falsity would come from attributing the mode of knowing to the thing.
• Is a baptized infant who dies predestined to a lower beatitude? left open (“we don’t know”).