Summa I q.79 a.7: Is Intellectual Memory a Separate Power? Augustine, Peter Lombard and the Authority of Aquinas

Orientation #

He says he was “rudely interrupted by exams” since the last class and resumes at “Article Seven, Question Seventy Nine.” He refers back to “last week” for the receive/retain reason in the senses (prev. lecture). He says the will “doesn’t come up yet until the next question.” The previous class worked the replies of a.6 on intellectual memory, and the next continues a.7–a.8 on memory, intelligence and reason. Verified sources place most of this class on q.79 a.7, with a handout page (“Note for Book Two About the Soul, Readings 5-6”, p. 5) read at some point.

The class, in order #

1. Exam anecdote: philosophy as practice of death (“the practice or exercise of death”) #

Point: a student’s exam answer illustrates the common fallacy of mixing up senses of “end.”

• Socrates in the Phaedo defines philosophy as melete thanatou, the practice of death, arguing (i) from moral virtue: courage, temperance, mildness resist the body’s inclinations, a kind of separating soul from body, as death is; (ii) from the mind: concentration (his mother’s counsel to students) withdraws from the body, the source of distraction, its opposite; (iii) from the forms: the soul turns from the material world to know the forms.
• Christian “mortification” = to make dead; the soul “dying to itself” is very much like Socrates’ argument.
• The fallacy: a student wrote that the philosopher is interested in “the end of life” (ethics), the end of life is death, therefore death is central to the philosopher. Same word, different sense.
• Parallel: “endless” vs “infinite” get mixed up too, “like Feuerbach did, and like Melissus did, and one’s own students will do.”

2. Objection 1 and the word mens (“memory, intelligence, and will”) #

Point: Augustine (De Trinitate X) places memory, intelligence and will in the mind; memory manifestly differs from will, so also from intellect.

• He notes a misreading of Augustine gives rise to the article: many, including a man writing a doctoral thesis, think Augustine makes memory a separate faculty; Thomas will deny this in reply 1.
• Student: the Latin has mente, English gives “soul,” not “mind.” Answer: English “mind” is too narrow (a synonym for reason), or too loose (a newspaper column “Mirror of Your Mind”: anything you are conscious of, emotions included). Augustine’s mens is nearly a synonym for spirit: the soul insofar as it transcends matter, has understanding and will, is common with angels and God. “Not altogether a bad translation.” Student expected animus; he adds that even Aristotle uses “intellect” for the whole immaterial, organless part of the soul. That is where the image of the Trinity is found.

3. Objection 2: the sense-part parallel (“The dry soul is wisest and best”) #

Point: the same reason distinguishes powers in the sense and intellectual parts; sense memory is a distinct power; so should intellectual memory be.

• Reason recalled: what receives easily does not retain; the moist receives, the dry retains. Heraclitus, “the dry soul is wisest and best”: the dry soul retains what it has heard (worth retaining), the wet soul holds nothing. He jokes about it, but the phrase is tied to the bodily nature of the sense powers.
• Example: clay or dough easily takes a shape and easily loses it; marble is hard to shape but keeps it. Same analogy, so, the objection says, separate powers above too.

4. Objection 3: one arises from another (“one of them arises from another”) #

Point: Augustine says the three are equal and one arises from another, impossible if memory were the same power as understanding.

• Mover and moved must differ: Aristotle’s imagining is a motion made by sense in act; reason moves the will to love by considering goodness. So if one arises from another, distinct powers.

5. Sed contra: the treasure house (“the soul is the place of the forms”) #

Point: memory by definition is a treasure house conserving species, but the Philosopher (De anima III) attributes this to the understanding.

• For Aristotle universals do not exist in the world by themselves but only in the mind; so the understanding itself retains the forms, not a separate faculty.

6. Body, first principle: powers distinguished by the notion of their object (“its ability for a large discourse”) #

Point: each power’s definition consists in its order to its object.

• Seeing is ordered to color, the digestive power to food; “powers distinguished by their acts, acts by their objects.”
• His illustration from Shakespeare, “large discourse, looking before and after”: the first sense of “large” is from what the discourse is about. Two senses: the universal, said of many, covering a large area; and the great, opposed to “small” as in small talk, which is called small from its object. So the philosopher’s discourse is larger than other men’s: more universal, and about the greatest things (the soul, the universe, God). The metaphysician’s is largest of all: what is said of all things (being and one), and the first causes (angels, God); the moral philosopher considers all human goods, not all things.

7. Body, conclusion: agent and possible intellect are the only division (“as act is to ability”) #

Point: a power ordered to its object under a common notion is not diversified by particular differences; hence only the agent/possible distinction remains.

1. Sight regards color as such, so is not diversified by white and black.
2. The understanding regards its object under the common notion of being (“to be or not to be extends to all things”); the possible (“undergoing”) understanding is quo est omnia fieri, the agent (“acting upon”) quo est omnia facere.
3. So the possible understanding is not diversified by any difference of beings.
4. Yet agent and possible differ, by another division of being, act and ability: with respect to the same object one principle must make the object actually understandable (active), another be moved by the object existing in act (passive). The agent stands to its object as being in act to being in potency (images are understandable only in potency; it makes them actually understandable); the possible stands to its object the reverse way, as potency to act.
5. Therefore no other difference of powers in the understanding; memory is not another power, since to the definition of a passive power it pertains to conserve as well as to receive.

• He stresses the subtlety: the sense powers have particular objects (eye to color, ear to sound, nose, tongue, touch), and the common sense, terminus of the outward senses, is one; but in the spirit there are three powers (agent, possible, will) all with a completely universal object, “so that’s more subtle the way they’re going to be distinguished.” He asks the will be left aside until the next question.
• Why two here and not one? If Plato’s forms existed we would not need the agent intellect; but our soul, form of a body, is turned to images, understandable only in ability, so by nature we need a power to make them actually understandable.

8. Student pushback: is Thomas speaking fully? (“To receive and to retain”) #

Point: the sense powers are also passive, yet there receiving and retaining are different powers; so the last clause must be shorthand for a passive power of the incorporeal soul.

• He grants “maybe Thomas is not speaking as fully as he could”: the reason for the split in the senses was the quality of matter, not the notion of passive power. The class hunts the text: not exactly in a.6’s body (“in the sensitive part… acts of bodily organs, in which species are conserved without actual apprehension”), but in q.78 a.4: recipere autem et retinere are reduced in corporeal things to diverse principles; the moist receives well and retains badly, the dry the reverse; so where a power is the act of a bodily organ there must be one power that receives the species and another that conserves.
• Both sense powers are receptive in a broad sense; the only question is whether one power exactly does both, and matter is why not in the senses. No organ in the understanding, so the same power receives and retains.
• Against Avicenna (from earlier): the understanding is more stable than sense; if the senses retain, a fortiori the understanding.
• Student on terms: what Thomas calls imagination acts like memory. Answer: English words differ; Thomas uses “memory” for what retains the intentions of the estimative or particular reason, “imagination” for what retains what the common sense perceives (per se sensibles); we use “imagination” for tricks done with memory and “memory” indifferently for either retaining power. Examples of intentions: the cat frightened by a belt as by a snake; small birds crouching when the big bird flies over; animals recognizing an enemy in a shape, colour or smell. A student’s dog Rosie, once stumbled over, now moves whenever he comes: “you mistreat an animal, and they’ll remember it.”

9. Reply 1: Augustine does not mean three powers (“not according to the intention of Augustine”) #

Point: Lombard’s Sentences I d.3 says memory, understanding and will are three vires, but Augustine’s own text (De Trinitate XIV) says otherwise.

• Aside on Lombard: the Sentences, largely Augustine quotations gathered ad hoc with other fathers, was the standard theology textbook for centuries (lecturing on it was part of one’s training); Thomas commented on it and wrote the Summa rather than revise that commentary; Lombard, a good mind, bishop of Paris (as he recalls), is sometimes disagreed with by Thomas, e.g. his opinion that charity is the Holy Spirit: with charity the Holy Spirit is given, but the Spirit is not a theological virtue.
• Augustine: taken as always present to the soul whether thinking or not, the three pertain only to memory; intelligentia he takes as that by which we understand in thinking, i.e. the act; will or dilectio (the chosen love of the will) joins offspring and parent. So Augustine means memory = habitual retention, understanding = act of understanding, will = act of will. Thomas reads Augustine as Augustine understands himself, Lombard’s reading is the common one.
• His rule of thumb: “Aristotle means what Thomas Aquinas says he means” (exceptions perhaps where Thomas lacked the Greek). A student asks whether to apply it to Augustine; he is “willing to give it a try,” admitting it is more questionable.
• Parallel misreading: Metaphysics XII read alone seems to say God knows only Himself. But in De anima I (ten difficulties in one lectio) Aristotle attacks Empedocles’ “by earth we know earth… by love love, by hate hate” (we would always be knowing, never in ability, never acted on by the object), and adds: Empedocles elsewhere says there is no hate in God (perhaps because hate separates and God must be incorruptible; perhaps moved by the truth, cf. St John “God is love”), so God would not know hate and we would know something God does not, which is laughable. Repeated in the dialectical book of the Metaphysics (III or I, he is unsure). So XII cannot mean God knows nothing else; Thomas: the primary object defining God’s understanding is Himself, and by understanding Himself He knows all else (otherwise He would be undergoing, against pure act). Most readers take it as a denial of providence, though Aristotle elsewhere calls it very probable God has something to do with our happiness.
• Cajetan’s mistake: commenting directly on Aristotle rather than on Thomas’s commentary, he ends up saying Aristotle denies immortality of the soul and Thomas invented it.

10. The authority of Thomas (“penetrate the mysteries of faith as much as possible”) #

Point: texts on Thomas’s standing, prompted by a student’s report that a homily called Thomas “unsurpassable.”

• A student recalls papal statements: follow the fathers insofar as they agree with Thomas; depart from Thomas only for a very grave reason.
• His preferred text, Vatican II’s decree on priestly education: Scripture first; then the Church Fathers for what they contributed to understanding particular articles, an ad hoc theology (this heretic denies this article, so it is defended); likewise councils (Trent against Luther; earlier councils against Arius, Nestorius); finally, to penetrate the mysteries as much as possible and see their connection, under the guidance of Thomas, who orders these ad hoc gains as in the Summa, as Lombard partly anticipated.
• Recalls the pages he gave on the role of contradiction in theology: Matthew, where our Lord leads the Pharisees into a contradiction; Augustine, that heretics help us by forcing consideration of an article, and his growing accuracy against the Pelagians and Semi-Pelagians; and Thomas, whose every article begins from a contradiction (sed contra), abbreviating the quaestiones disputatae.
• Opening aside: non-Catholic boys in the school; “a lot of them have become converts.”

His words #

• melete thanatou: practice or exercise of death, Socrates’ definition of philosophy.
• mortification: “to make dead,” the soul dying to itself.
• mens / mente: nearly a synonym for spirit, the soul as transcending matter.
• “the dry soul is wisest and best” (Heraclitus): the soul that retains.
• treasure house: the definition of memory as conserving species.
• large discourse (Shakespeare): large by object, in two senses, universal and great; opposed to “small talk.”
• “undergoing understanding” [ed.: possible/passive intellect], quo est omnia fieri.
• “acting upon understanding” [ed.: agent intellect, intellectus agens], quo est omnia facere.
• ability [ed.: potency].
• recipere et retinere: to receive and to retain, reduced to diverse principles in bodies.
• particular reason / estimative: what apprehends intentions; “memory” retains these, “imagination” retains what the common sense perceives.
• vires: powers, Lombard’s word for the three.
• dilectio: the chosen love of the will, joining offspring and parent.
• rule of thumb: “Aristotle means what Thomas Aquinas says he means.”
• ad hoc theology: the Fathers defending an article against a particular heretic.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, Summa theologiae I, q. 79, a. 7 (objections, sed contra, body, reply 1).
• Thomas, Summa theologiae I, q. 79, a. 6 body (looked up) and q. 78, a. 4 (“recipere autem et retinere…”).
• Augustine, De Trinitate XIV, as quoted in reply 1.
• Handout “Note for Book Two About the Soul, Readings 5-6”, p. 5 (verified source; place in the class not clear from the transcript).

Mentioned

• Augustine, De Trinitate X; Peter Lombard, Sentences I, d. 3; Aristotle, De anima III (soul the place of forms), De anima I (Empedocles), Metaphysics XII and the dialectical book (III or I); Plato, Phaedo; Heraclitus fragment; Shakespeare, “large discourse”; Empedocles fragment; St John, “God is love”; Vatican II decree on priestly education; Gospel of Matthew (Pharisees); Cajetan on De anima; Thomas, quaestiones disputatae; printed volume DHB Vol III p. 426 (verified source).

His questions #

• What does “mortification” actually mean? To make dead; the soul dying to itself, like Socrates’ separation of soul from body.
• Why is memory a different power from sense in the sense part? What receives easily (the moist) does not retain; the dry retains, because of the bodily organ.
• What does it mean to speak of a “large discourse”? Large from its object: universal (said of many) or great (opposed to small talk).
• How can there be two powers, agent and possible, whose object is both universal? By the division of being into act and ability: one is to the object as act to potency, the other as potency to act.
• Why is there not only one power here, as with the common sense? Because our soul, form of a body, is turned to images understandable only in potency, so needs a power to make them actually understandable.
• Where does Thomas give the reason that receiving and retaining are different sense powers? Not in a.6 but q.78 a.4: in corporeal things they are reduced to diverse principles.
• Does Augustine take memory, understanding and will as three powers? No: habitual retention, act of understanding, act of will (De Trinitate XIV); Lombard’s reading is the misreading.
• Should “Augustine means what Thomas says he means” be a rule too? More questionable than for Aristotle, but he is willing to give it a try.
• Is Thomas not only unsurpassed but unsurpassable? Left open; he answers with the Vatican II text on proceeding under Thomas’s guidance.