Article 10: Intelligentia and Intellectus; Thinking About, Thinking Out, Understanding; Mercy, Hope and the Kinds of Pride

Orientation #

He says he “mentioned before” that the book De spiritu et anima is not by Augustine, and that he has “talked to you before” about the catechisms dividing Christian religion into four rather than three. For next time: article 11 alone, “done very well”, as the foundation for Thomas’s division of the five virtues of reason; then articles 12 and 13 together, with question 80’s two articles to be taken together later. The previous class treated the scientificum and ratiocinativum against Augustine’s higher and lower reason; the next treats a. 11 on speculative and practical intellect.

The class, in order #

1. The question and the two words (“intelligentia names more the what the act”) #

The point: the article asks whether intelligentia is a power other than intellectus; already in the title he notes that intelligentia names more the act, intellectus more the ability (though it can name the act too, or a habit).

• Obj. 1 is from the Liber de spiritu et anima, apocryphally attached to Augustine; “it keeps on cropping up.” Parallel: the Liber de causis was attributed to Aristotle, but is an Arab excerpt from Proclus, and Thomas is the man who said it is not Aristotle. Hence Thomas’s “if we are to receive the authority of the book.”
• Aside, on getting things “from the horse’s mouth”: Heisenberg’s conversation with Einstein — Heisenberg thought Einstein’s theory rested on fitting what can be observed; Einstein: “the theory determines what you can observe,” not the reverse. Heisenberg recalled this when making his own discovery. Scientists’ “observations” in the lab already depend on theory. Warren Murray’s joke: scientists make hypotheses about what Aristotle thought and never verify them in the text.

2. The three objections and the sed contra (“when we wish to ascend from what lower things”) #

1. Obj. 1: the book lists the ascent sense, imagination, reason, understanding, and last intelligentia; imagination and sense are diverse powers, so intellectus and intelligentia should be too.
2. Obj. 2: Boethius, Consolation V: sense, imagination, reason and intelligentia each “see man” in a different way; since intellectus is the same power as reason, intelligentia seems another power, as reason is other than imagination.
3. Obj. 3: acts are prior to potencies — “we know ability only by the act for which it is an ability” (you know you can see through seeing). Damascene lists distinct acts: the first motion is intelligentia; about something it is intention; fixing the soul on what is understood, excogitatio; examining and judging itself, phronesis (wisdom); spread out, it makes cogitatio, interiorly disposed speech, whence spoken language. So intelligentia looks like a special power.

• Digression on phronesis vs sophia: phronesis is more practical wisdom, but sometimes used for wisdom in general; we call our forefathers (Washington) wise, meaning a practical, human wisdom — Scripture: “prudence is wisdom for a man.” Latin lacks a separate word. Folly likewise: usually said of a man’s actions (“a fool and his money”), though “the fool has said in his heart, there is no God” opposes wisdom as knowledge of God.

4. Sed contra: Aristotle, De Anima III, intelligentia is of indivisibles, where there is no falsity — the Latin here renders Aristotle’s word for the first act of reason, understanding what something is; but that belongs to the understanding, so intelligentia is not another power.

3. The body: act divided against power (“properly signifies the very act itself”) #

The point: intelligentia properly signifies the very act of understanding, so it is distinguished from intellectus not as power from power but as act from its power.

• Books translated from Arabic call the separated substances (angels) intelligentiae, perhaps because they always understand in act; books from the Greek call them “understandings” or “minds.”
• The word problem: English has one word, “understanding,” for both act (understanding what a triangle is) and ability; Latin here has two related words, one more the act, one more the power (“intellect” in English leans to the power). Parallel: Greek and Latin have one word (onoma, nomen) where English has “name” and “noun.” “Sometimes you have in one language more explicit words than another.”
• The philosophers’ fourfold division: agent (acting-upon) intellect, possible (undergoing) intellect, intellect in habitu, intellect adeptus. Agent and possible are diverse powers, as active and passive powers always are; the other three are three states of the possible intellect — in ability only (Aristotle’s tablet with nothing written), in first act = science = intellect in habit, in second act = to consider = intellect in act or adeptus. Student asks him to go back over this; he restates it as above. “Don’t worry too much about that; that’s a problem in the Latin.”
• Aside from the same ambiguity (having vs using): he asked his logic students, “Is man an animal using reason or an animal having reason?” They said having. “Rational animal” means having reason, not a developed or exercised reason; people who deny man is rational take it the other way. Oscar Wilde: man is a rational animal that gets angry when called upon to live by the dictates of reason. Kasurik pinning a man at a conference: “You’re in a contradiction.” — “That’s a contradiction I’ve learned to live with.” Photographs of Shiites in Iraq cutting themselves, like the prophets of Baal on Carmel.

4. The replies (“if one ought to receive that authority”) #

• Ad 1: if the text has authority, intelligentia there stands for the act of understanding, divided against intellectus as act against power — “almost impossible to translate into English.”
• Ad 2: Boethius takes intelligentia for the act of understanding that transcends the act of reason; hence reason is only of the human genus, intelligentia only of the divine — God understands all things without investigation. He adds Heraclitus: the divine nature has understanding, the human does not.
• Ad 3: all Damascene’s acts belong to one power, the understanding: first it simply grasps (intelligentia); orders what it grasps to knowing or doing something else (intention); persists in investigating (excogitatio, “thinking out”); examines what it has thought out in the light of certain things — to know with certitude, be wise, phronesis, for it belongs to the wise to judge (Aristotle, Metaphysics I); then thinks how to manifest it to others, the disposition of interior speech, whence exterior speech. Principle: not every difference of acts diversifies powers, only one that cannot be reduced to the same principle.

5. English: thinking vs knowing (“do you know that, or you just think it”) #

The point: English draws a similar act-distinction with ordinary words.

• Thinking contrasted with knowing: “I think Bush will have a second term” — opinion, not certain; knowing involves being certain.
• Complication: “Do you think two is half of four?” Yes — so thinking is common to both, and the certain case “gets a new name,” knowing. Everyone who knows also thinks, but not everyone who thinks knows: his students think the Pythagorean theorem is true without having gone through the demonstration; he knows it, they think it.

6. Thinking about, thinking out, understanding (“MacArthur says, No, I do not understand it”) #

The point: “thinking about” goes around a thing without penetrating it; “thinking out” penetrates and ends in understanding.

• Example: West Point professor on special relativity asks MacArthur, best in class, “Do you understand this?” — “No.” — “Neither do I. Class dismissed.” You can think about something and still not understand it.
• “Thinking out”: with Monsignor Dionne, using Aristotle’s eight senses of “in” (Physics IV, with De Koninck) — eight senses of “out,” so many senses of thinking out: thinking out the parts of a whole, the definition, the particular kinds, the order, a conclusion. Dionne: “That was good, but you can’t say that in French.”
• So science (episteme) he calls “a reasoned-out understanding”, “reasoned-out” including all the prior thinkings-out; the last is thinking out the conclusion, also called reasoning out. Thinking about is necessary to understand; only a few very general things are understood without being thought out.
• Excogitatio is closer to “thinking out”; cogitatio to thinking. Augustine defines to believe as assentire cum cogitatione — assenting (to three persons in God) while still thinking about it, without fully understanding.
• Aside: Dionne and Boulay, native French speakers, held English superior to French for both poetry and philosophy; Dionne: French is to English as Latin to Greek — Latin, and French especially since Descartes, more abstract. Laval classes were taught in French; he could understand the Parisian de Monléon [ed.: transcript “Jacques de Molay”] but not one Franciscan.

7. A thought in God: Thomas’s conjecture (“we can conjecture that there is a thought in God”) #

The point: from a text in the De Potentia, Thomas says we may conjecturare that when God thinks about himself a thought proceeds from him.

1. When we imagine, an image proceeds from the imagination; when we think about something, a thought proceeds from understanding or reason.
2. If God’s understanding is like ours, we might guess a thought proceeds from him — a guess, not knowledge; Thomas always held the Trinity cannot be known by natural reason (the Holy Spirit hardest of all).

• John’s Gospel: the Word was “towards God” and was God — not the spoken word but a thought, in some way distinct from and proceeding from the thinker; this is revealed, but the guess has “some likelihood.” God understands everything by one act, so one thought expressing everything. His poem: God the Father “said it all in one word,” so when the Word became man he spoke few words and said so much — “a brevity and so a wit.” “Aristotle never guessed that one.”

8. Plan for next time (“we’ll just do eleven then”) #

Article 11 alone, because it grounds Thomas’s division of the virtues of reason (Aristotle’s five in Ethics VI; the speculative/practical distinction from De Anima III; Thomas divides them in the Prima Secundae by speculative vs practical reason). Then 12 and 13 together; question 80’s two articles together.

9. Mercy as the only source of hope (“there is no other source of hope for mankind”) #

The point: John Paul II’s homily at Łagiewniki (17 Aug 2002) makes explicit a connection between hope and mercy.

• Faustina’s diary (no. 951): mercy, “greatest attribute of God Almighty,” “the sweet hope of sinners”; the Pope “repeats these simple words,” approving them, and more precisely: apart from the mercy of God there is no other source of hope for mankind — “very strong.”
• The catechism’s definition of hope (desire eternal life as last end, relying not on our strength but on Christ’s promises and God’s aid) does not, as he recalls, make the mercy link explicit, but the aid is from mercy.
• The catechisms of Trent and the new one divide Christian religion into four; Thomas and Augustine into three — he sees a reason, but sacraments and prayer both connect with hope: reliance on divine help. No one has a right in justice to be baptized.
• Thomas’s prayer after communion: Gratias tibi ago, Domine sancte, Pater omnipotens, aeterne Deus, qui me peccatorem indignum famulum tuum… nullis meis meritis sed sola dignatione misericordiae tuae — “almost like the words of John Paul.”

10. Three dispositions of will for prayer (“three things in the will that necessary for prayer”) #

Thomas, in the exposition of the Our Father, always names three; all three appear across the Enchiridion of Indulgences.

1. Hope — the theological virtue by which we desire eternal life relying on God, not ourselves.
2. Humility — Scripture: the parable of the two men praying in the temple; “God hears the prayers of the humble.”
3. Devotion — more the name of an act; the primary act of religion, prayer the second; religion the moral virtue closest to the theological, tied especially to charity. “Father” is a name of love; “give us,” not “give me.”

11. Pride against humility: Gregory’s four kinds (“claim to have some excellence that you don’t have”) #

The point: Thomas follows Gregory the Great’s four species of pride, sometimes as three with one subdivided; humility is specially connected to the middle two.

1. Claiming an excellence one lacks (boasting): the Assumption College rumour that he has a PhD in physics because he quotes Einstein and Heisenberg — “whatever calculus I knew, I forgot.” Aristotle: political rhetoricians claiming political wisdom.
2. Having an excellence but as from oneself: he does know some logic and philosophy (the Wall Street Journal article praised), but from Thomas and Aristotle, not his own discovery. “There but for the grace of God go I” — the saint’s virtue is real, but to think it came by his own powers without grace is pride; Augustine against Pelagians and semi-Pelagians; God’s grace and motion always precede our action.
3. Granting it came from grace, but claiming to have deserved it. Using grace well makes it “suitable” to receive more (parable of the talents), “quote unquote deserving,” but strictly no right in justice; some in religious life level off while Thérèse of Lisieux passes them. Thomas groups 2 and 3 together: one denies the help, the other claims to merit it. “Ask and you shall receive” gives no right; even asking does not merit — one is at most disposed.
4. Wanting to be above everyone, holding goods uniquely: “I think alone” vs “I alone think” — not the same: to say I know the Pythagorean theorem is not pride; to say I thought it out myself is kind 2; to say I am the only one who knows it these days is kind 4.

• Humility opposes all four, but specially 2 and 3: relying on God’s help expected from his mercy, not one’s merits — back to nullis meis meritis. Why was I born of Catholic parents and taught by men of strong faith (Kasurik, De Koninck, Dionne) rather than in Saudi Arabia or India? Did I merit baptism? Closing joke: daily mass does not make communion “owed you because of this wonderful act of getting out of bed.”

His words #

• intelligentia — names the act of understanding; intellectus names the power (can also name act or habit)
• “understanding” — English word covering both act and ability; “intellect” leans to the power
• name / noun — English two words where Greek onoma, Latin nomen have one
• agent intellect / possible intellect — “acting upon understanding” and “undergoing understanding”
• in habitu — first act, science; in actu / adeptus — second act, consideration
• rational animal — animal having reason, not animal using reason
• intention — ordering what is grasped to knowing or doing something else
• excogitatio — “thinking out”; cogitatio — thinking
• phronesis — practical wisdom, sometimes wisdom generally; “to know with certitude or to be wise”
• thinking about vs thinking out — going around vs penetrating to understanding
• reasoned-out understanding — his English for science, episteme
• assentire cum cogitatione — Augustine’s definition of believing
• conjecturare — “to guess” that there is a thought in God
• nullis meis meritis sed sola dignatione misericordiae tuae — from Thomas’s prayer after communion
• devotion — primary act of religion; prayer the second act
• boasting — pride of claiming an excellence one lacks

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 79, a. 10 (title, objs. 1-3, sed contra, body, replies)
• John Paul II, homily at the Shrine of Divine Mercy, Kraków-Łagiewniki, 17 Aug 2002, quoting St Faustina’s diary no. 951
• Thomas Aquinas, prayer after communion (Gratias tibi ago)

Mentioned

• Liber de spiritu et anima; Liber de causis (Proclus excerpt)
• Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, book V
• John Damascene (via obj. 3)
• Aristotle, De Anima III; Metaphysics I; Physics IV (eight senses of “in”); Nicomachean Ethics VI
• Thomas Aquinas, De Potentia (locus not given); Prima Secundae on the virtues of reason; exposition of the Our Father; treatise on religion; on pride following Gregory the Great
• Augustine, definition of believing
• John 1 (inferred)
• Catechism of the Council of Trent; Catechism of the Catholic Church (on hope); Enchiridion of Indulgences
• Heisenberg on Einstein; Oscar Wilde; 1 Kings 18 (prophets of Baal) (inferred); parable of the talents; parable of the two men praying

His questions #

• Is man an animal using reason or an animal having reason? Having reason; “rational animal” does not mean a developed or exercised reason.
• Do I know George Bush will have a second term, or only think it? Only think it; knowing involves certainty.
• Does the man who knows two is half of four also think it? Yes; thinking is common, but not everyone who thinks knows.
• Do “I think alone” and “I alone think” mean the same? No; the second implies pride, the first only solitude.
• Does Dwayne Berquist have a right to be baptized? No — not in justice.
• What are the three dispositions of will necessary for prayer? Hope, humility, devotion.
• Could we know by natural reason that a thought proceeds from God? No (Thomas), but we may conjecture it.
• Do you have a right to communion because you got out of bed for daily mass? No — it is still out of divine mercy.