Imagination in God's service, 'one' and being, and Q.82 a.1: Does the will will anything by necessity?

Orientation #

He opens with “let’s go look at the third objection again” of the previous article (q. 81 a. 3, on the sense appetites obeying reason) (prev. lecture), then after a break turns to q. 82 a. 1 (he says “eighty-three article one”, an evident slip or mis-hearing for 82). Verified sources place the first third of the class between q. 81 a. 3 and q. 82 a. 1, and the second half on q. 82 a. 1 itself. He does not announce next time. The next class treats q. 82 a. 2, whether the will wills necessarily whatever it wills.

The class, in order #

1. Reply to the third objection: why the imagination obeys reason (“the exterior senses need for their acts”) #

Point: the exterior senses need an exterior sensible to be changed by, whose presence is not in reason’s power (I want to taste wine, there is only water); the interior powers, apprehensive and appetitive, do not, and so are subject to reason’s command, which can instigate or mitigate the affections of the sense power and form the images of the imagination (dirty thoughts: imagine something else).

• Link to Summa I q. 1, the article on whether Scripture should use metaphors; the same question is raised in the Sentences, with a reason not given in the Summa: even the imagination of man should be subject to God. Metaphors of Scripture appeal to the imagination and so bring it into God’s service.
• Universal principle: genuflecting brings even the knees into God’s service; church music the ear; a statue of Mary or an icon the eye. This is a reason separate from the exterior act stimulating the interior (genuflecting stimulates humility). If the knee, how much more the imagination, a much higher faculty.
• The imagination leads us into error and sin, so it must be trained; good fiction does this. Shakespeare on the young dying: “Golden lads and girls almost, as chimney sweepers, come to dust” — gold and dust appeal to the imagination.
• Scriptural metaphors please the imagination less than poetry does but still appeal to it and lift the mind. Fire as metaphor: for the divine nature (simplicity, light = divine mind, transforming power = divine power); for the Trinity (from fire proceed light and warmth: the Son as light, the Holy Spirit as warmth); for faith and charity (the sun enlightens the earth before it warms it: God enlightens us by faith before we can be warm with love of him). He has seen all these in the Fathers and Thomas.
• Aside: “idle mind is the devil’s workshop” is really about the imagination; kids get into trouble whose imaginations were not preoccupied with Homer, Shakespeare, C. S. Lewis or the fairy tales rather than pornographic literature.

2. Student question: “one” said of God (“one doesn’t add any reality to being”) #

Point: a preview of the metaphysics of the one, given at a student’s request during the break.

• One is either the beginning of number or the one convertible with being. One adds no reality to being but a negation: undivided being. So when Thomas takes up God as one he goes back to God as maximum being (“I am who I am”) and altogether simple, hence in no way divisible, hence most one. In the Summa he first asks the general question whether one adds something to being, then that God is one.
• Convertible in logic: A and B are convertible if every A is B and every B is A. Aristotle explains the convertibility of being and one in Metaphysics IV (“fourth book of Wisdom”); most inductively: if you divide a thing it ceases to be, so things resist division as they resist being put out of existence — an army (as opposed to a crowd) needs order to exist; a smashed chair is no chair; divorced, no marriage; letters C, A, T divided are no word “cat”.
• De Veritate q. 1: Thomas, following Avicenna, distinguishes the transcendentals, the things equally universal with being; they add nothing real to being but signify what “being” does not signify explicitly. One, good, true. Good and true are explained through the study of the soul: Aristotle in De Anima III, the soul is in some way all things, so the mind and the will are open to all things, and relative to them true and good cover everything.
• Student: what is it for two things to be distinct? One is not the other — negation is involved. Thomas sometimes takes one as mainly negation of division within a thing, sometimes as also including distinction from others; either way negation.

3. Aside on Thomas’s order in treating the substance of God (“divides that consideration … into five parts”) #

• In both Summas Thomas divides the substance of God into five parts, an exception to his rule of two or three, and correctly so.
• Vatican I’s dogmatic constitution, chapter on God: things about the divine substance, operation and creation are “all tumbled up” — “eternal” among the first words, “unchangeable” much later; Thomas puts them together because eternity follows on unchangeableness. Nothing in the council that Thomas does not say, but Thomas distinguishes and orders it.
• Vatican II on the education of priests in dogmatic theology: Scripture first, then the Fathers of East and West, the councils (often addressing errors of their era), and finally speculation “with Thomas as a teacher” to understand the mysteries and their connection.

4. Prologue to q. 82: five things asked about the will (“whether the will desires something from necessity”) #

1. Whether the will wills something of necessity; 2. whether all things of necessity — he notes Thomas asks the same about the divine will, which wills some things (himself) necessarily and others (us) freely, gratuitously. 3. Whether it is a more eminent power than the understanding — the controversial one in theology. 4. Whether the will moves the understanding (I think about something because I want to). 5. Whether irascible and concupiscible are to be distinguished in the will — it will not be so; the will is one power, as reason is one and not five like the senses.

5. Article 1: the objections and the sed contra (“if something is necessary, it is not voluntary”) #

• Obj. 1: Augustine, City of God V: if necessary, not voluntary; all the will wills is voluntary; so nothing willed necessarily. He flags: the most common mistake in thinking is permutation [ed.: equivocation], per the father of logic; “necessary” is among the equivocal words Aristotle treats in Metaphysics V.
• Obj. 2: rational powers are to two opposites (the Philosopher); the will is a rational power since “the will is in reason” (De Anima III); so it is to opposites and determined to nothing of necessity. Background: Metaphysics IX, natural power determined to one (fire will burn my hand, not cool it) vs rational power to opposites (the doctor can cure or sicken; I can cook or burn the steak by the one art). Some misunderstand this as the distinction between reason and will; still “a very good objection”.
• Obj. 3: by the will we are lords of our acts; of what is of necessity we are not lords. The modern existentialists, e.g. Sartre, hold the will wills nothing of necessity and would side with these objections.
• Sed contra: Augustine, De Trinitate XIII: all with one will desire beatitude. Does anyone really want to be wretched? Everyone wants to be happy though he may not know what it consists in — as a boy he thought his father foolish not to fill the refrigerator with grape soda, orange soda and root beer and be a happy man. If the will were not necessary but contingent it would fail in at least some.

6. Respondeo: the senses of necessity (“necessity is said in many ways”) #

Point: the necessary is what is not able not to be (contingent: able to be and not be; impossible: not able to be); this belongs to a thing from an intrinsic or an extrinsic principle.

1. Intrinsic, material: everything composed of contraries necessarily corrupts (it can take on a contrary form; all change is between contraries, first pointed out by Heraclitus). Intrinsic, formal: a triangle has three angles equal to two right angles; two is half of four. This is natural and absolute necessity.
2. Extrinsic, from the end: conditional or hypothetical — food is necessary, but you do not necessarily get or eat food; if you are to live you must eat, must breathe. Two grades: what cannot be achieved without (food for life) and what cannot be achieved well without (a horse for a journey; logic for philosophy). Epictetus’ story: asked to prove logic necessary, he asked the student how he would know whether the proof was any good. Compare q. 1 on the necessity of theology: man directed to an end above reason needs knowledge of it; but this does not make everyone believe, unlike two being half of four. So “it is necessary to love God” is conditional: the devil does not love God; but if you are to be joined to God you must love him. Spiritual life: things of necessity (the Ten Commandments) vs of advenientia [ed.: likely garbled; the counsels] — the rich young man told first the commandments, then “if you wish to be perfect, sell everything”.
3. Extrinsic, from the agent: coerced so he cannot do the contrary — necessity of force (coactionis).

• He points out that the four causes (matter, form, mover, end) all enter this division; in Metaphysics V “necessary” is taken up right after the words for cause, in the first group (beginning, cause, element, nature, necessary) before the names of the subject of wisdom (one, being) — “so beautifully set up”.
• Necessity of force is altogether repugnant to the will, being violence, i.e. against a thing’s inclination; the motion of the will is itself an inclination, so “voluntary” is to the will’s inclination as “natural” is to nature’s. A stone let go falls naturally; thrown up, its motion is violent; the same motion cannot be natural and violent, nor violent and voluntary.
• Necessity of the end is not repugnant when the end can be reached only one way: willing to cross the sea, one necessarily wills a ship.
• Natural necessity is not repugnant: as the understanding necessarily adheres to first beginnings (a thing cannot both be and not be; the whole is more than a part), so the will necessarily adheres to the last end, beatitude. Aristotle’s proportion: the end is in things to be done as the principle is in speculative matters — as Euclid proceeds from “whole is more than part” to theorems and postulates, the will proceeds from the end to the means.
• The general reason: what belongs naturally and unchangeably to a thing is the foundation and origin of all else, since nature is first in each thing (“first” is in the definition of nature) and every motion proceeds from something unmoved: Aristotle’s mouse unable to walk in a pile of grain; Archimedes’ “give me a place to stand and I’ll move the earth” (a fulcrum at rest). Thomas often notes we acquire the non-natural through the natural: tools through the hands (the first man finding a suitable rock); Poetics, man the most imitative animal — speaking English is not natural, imitating is, so we acquire the one through the other (language tapes). Likewise what reason naturally understands (no one remembers learning that a whole is more than a part; you sensed and remembered wholes and parts) is the beginning of understanding everything else.
• Geometry examples: the postulate that all right angles are equal — laid one on another, if the lines do not coincide you get an angle both greater than and equal to another, contradicting “whole is more than part” and non-contradiction; “no odd number is even” rests on non-contradiction (both having and not having a middle); Euclid’s sixth theorem (equal angles, equal sides) rests on the axiom since one triangle would be part of the other.
• A mind that fluctuates between two sides must be determined by something known better; John Stuart Mill’s essay on liberty of thought bases it on the mind never knowing anything (something may show up later — like revisionist history); for Mill nothing immobile in the mind, for Sartre nothing immobile in the will. But the mobile cannot be without the immobile: the baseball knocked out of the park changed place only because the ball remained; “my, you’ve changed, you’re gray” presupposes you remained.

7. Reply to obj. 1: Augustine meant the necessity of force (“natural necessity does not take away the liberty”) #

Augustine’s word is about necessity of force (from the efficient cause); natural necessity does not take away the will’s liberty, as he himself says in the same book (his footnote: Augustine was not deceived, others are). People hear “free will” and think free is opposed to necessary. The distinction of will (or reason) from nature is like three from two: in three there is two, but three is not just two — “it’s a very subtle distinction”; his mother corrected “man is an animal” to “he’s not just an animal”; Shakespeare’s “a beast, no more” is like saying “what is three if it be half a four — a two, no more”. Nature is determined to one, so there is something of nature in will and reason where they naturally will or understand; regarding things “down the road” reason reasons to both sides and the will can will more than one means — I want to be wise, but there are many things I could read.

• Aside: giving a student his one-page division of Matthew (Thomas’s commentary subdivides down to the chapters), to be copied; his own contingent choices of reading — Matthew tonight with the division in mind, the papal document on the Eucharist from The Pope Speaks, Sophocles in the Chicago four-volume translation (“warped past care”, “our happiness depends on wisdom”, “I cannot love a friend whose love is words”).

8. Reply to obj. 2: reason as nature and reason as reason (“more intellectual power than a rational power”) #

The will as naturally willing corresponds more to the understanding of natural principles (his “natural understanding”) than to reason, which is to opposites; so in this respect it is more an intellectual than a rational power. Elsewhere Thomas says “reason as a nature” vs “reason as reason” — like thinking of three insofar as it includes two vs three as three (three is half of six, not of four). Reason considered as naturally understanding is a kind of nature; considered as investigating, weighing “maybe so, maybe not”, it is reason as reason. Thomas uses intellectus for natural understanding and scientia for reasoned-out understanding; Berquist calls the latter episteme, following the Greek etymology.

9. Reply to obj. 3: lords of our acts as choosing means (“choice is not about the end”) #

We are lords of our acts insofar as we can choose this or that; Aristotle treats choice at the start of Ethics III because in II he defined moral virtue as a habit of choosing what is in the middle towards us as determined by right reason, and treats right reason (prudence, practical wisdom) in VI. Choice is not about the end but about things towards the end; so desire of the last end is not among the things we are lords over.

• Comparison to God: God necessarily loves himself, freely loves us; his love is caused by no goodness in us, our goodness by his will. Avicenna (quoted by Thomas): God alone is liberal, since only he gets nothing from giving. Your parents could each have married someone else and you would not have been; of the millions of sperm none had more right to be; God’s providence extends down to such chance events (his mother almost did not go where she met his father) — existence is altogether free and gratuitous, “pretty humbling”.
• Thomas: our goodness is to God as a point to a line (no longer) or a part to a whole (Duane Berquist plus his arm is no more than Duane Berquist; God in us no more than God alone). Dionysius: for man to be good is to be reasonable — so unreasonable not to be thankful, to God above all, then parents and teachers.
• A student’s pending question is deferred as the recording ends.

His words #

• “Wisdom”, fourth/fifth/ninth book of: [ed.: Metaphysics]
• convertible: A and B such that every A is B and every B is A
• one: undivided being; adds a negation, not a reality, to being
• transcendentals: the most universal things, equally universal with being (De Veritate q. 1, after Avicenna)
• permutation: the most common mistake in thinking [ed.: equivocation / fallacy of equivocation]
• necessary: not able not to be; contingent: able to be and not be; impossible: not able to be
• natural / absolute necessity: from matter or form (intrinsic)
• conditional / hypothetical necessity: from the end; “to be” vs “to be well”
• advenientia: his term for the counsels as against the commandments [ed.: transcript uncertain]
• necessity of force, coactionis: from the agent; violence, against inclination
• “the end is in things to be done as the principle is in speculative matters”
• natural understanding: what is understood without reasoning it out (Thomas: intellectus)
• reasoned-out understanding: his episteme; Thomas: scientia
• reason as a nature vs reason as reason
• liberal: gives expecting no return; God alone is liberal (Avicenna)

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I q. 81 a. 3 ad 3 (verified: prev. article’s reply, called “third objection”)
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I q. 82 prologue and a. 1 (verified: objections, sed contra, respondeo, replies)

Mentioned

• Thomas, Summa I q. 1 (article on metaphor; article on the necessity of theology); Thomas, Sentences (on metaphor); Summa (questions on the one and on God’s unity; on the divine will)
• Thomas, De Veritate q. 1 (transcendentals); Thomas’s commentary on Matthew (division)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics IV (being and one convertible), V (words for cause, necessary, one, being), IX (natural vs rational powers); De Anima III (soul all things; will in reason); Ethics II, III, VI; Poetics (imitation); biological works (mouse in grain)
• Augustine, City of God V; De Trinitate XIII
• Euclid, Elements I: postulate on right angles, theorem 6
• Vatican I, dogmatic constitution, chapter on God; Vatican II on the formation of priests
• Shakespeare (two lines quoted); Sophocles (Chicago translation); John Stuart Mill, essay on liberty (section on liberty of thought); Sartre; Epictetus; Avicenna; Dionysius; Heraclitus; Archimedes

His questions #

• What does one add to being? A negation: undivided.
• What do we mean by “convertible”? Every A is B and every B is A.
• Does anybody really want to be miserable? No; everyone wants happiness, though not knowing what it consists in.
• Why does he say “composed from contraries” necessarily corrupts? Because all change is between contraries.
• Does theology’s being necessary mean everybody must have faith? No; it is conditional necessity, unlike two being half of four.
• Is it necessary to love God? Not as two is half of four (the devil does not); but if you are to be joined to God, yes.
• Can the same thing be natural and violent? No; nor violent and voluntary.
• How do you acquire what is not natural, e.g. speaking English? Through what is natural: imitation.
• What is it for two things to be distinct? One is not the other; negation.