Q88 a1–a3: Knowing immaterial substances through material things, and whether God is the first thing we know

Orientation #

He begins in mid-article (“so the second objection here”) and refers back to “the objection from Augustine in the previous article” (prev. lecture: a.1 objection on self-knowledge as a path to immaterial reality). Verified sources: the class treats ST I q.88 a.2 (~20 min) and a.3 (~14 min), with the opening stretch probably the replies of q.88 a.1 (inferred); four minutes are read from the handout “What Is Good & What Is Better,” p. 4. The next class finishes a.3 and opens q.89 on the separated soul.

The class, in order #

1. a.1 ad 2: likeness of nature is not enough (“like is known by like”) #

Point: our mind’s being immaterial does not make it know immaterial things better.

• Objection: like is known by like; the mind is immaterial; so it should know immaterial things more than material ones.
• Reply as he reads it: (1) likeness of nature is not a sufficient reason for knowing, otherwise Empedocles would be right that the soul must be of the nature of all things to know all things; (2) what is required is a likeness of the thing known in the knower, as a form of the knower; (3) our possible understanding, in the present state, is informed by likenesses taken from images; therefore it knows material things more.
• Contrast: the angel’s likenesses come from God at its creation; our possible understanding is “a blank tablet,” and its likenesses are drawn by the agent intellect acting on images.
• Historical aside, tied to the same point: Aristotle in Physics IV says the ancients thought whatever is must be somewhere in a place, so what they first know is bodies; in Physics I (second reading) he says for them the inquiry into natural things and the inquiry into what is were the same. Only with Anaxagoras (a mind not mixed with matter), and then Plato and Aristotle (reasons that the soul can exist without the body; an unmoved mover that cannot be a body, since a body does not move without being moved), does one reason out that “what is” is broader than bodies. Most people stay at the first level and imagine the soul as a fine air-like body in human shape.
• Dante’s Divine Comedy: he recognizes souls by their shape and tries to embrace them, and cannot hug air — an image of the popular error; the soul, and God, have no length, width or depth, except metaphorically (“depth of the divine wisdom”).

2. a.1 ad 3: what is more understandable is less understandable to us (“excellences of sensible things corrupt the sense”) #

Point: immaterial substances are not proportioned to our understanding in this life.

• Objection: excessive sensibles corrupt the sense (his father’s factory: men banging metal had gone deaf to it), but excellent intelligibles do not corrupt the understanding (De Anima III); immaterial substances are more understandable in themselves, since material things must first be made understandable by separation from matter; so they should be more understood by us — and a fortiori God.
• Reply: a proportion of object to power is required, as active to passive and perfection to perfectible; excelling sensibles escape sense not only by corrupting the organ but by being unproportioned (dogs hear what our ears do not); so immaterial substances are unproportioned to our present understanding.
• His two ways of showing Aristotle’s claim that the more understandable is less understood by us:
  1. Cause vs. effect: the cause illuminates the effect, so is more understandable; yet men often know the effect and not the cause, or are sure of the effect and unsure of the cause. The effect is fully knowable only in the light of its cause, but we know it more by itself.
  2. Confused vs. distinct: “that’s a wooden chair” is more known to me than what kind of wood; dry red wine is what I’m surest of, less sure it is Cabernet Sauvignon, least that it is from Napa Valley, 1985 — yet the last is the thing more known. What is more known to us (vague, confused) is less known in itself.

3. a.1 ad 4: the separated substances would not be in vain (“this is the argument that”) #

Point: their not being understood by us does not make them idle.

• Reply, “deficient in many ways”: (1) not understood by us does not mean not understood by any understanding — they understand themselves and each other; (2) being understood by us is not their end, and only what fails its end is in vain.
• His example: “geometry is in vain because my cat can’t understand it.”

4. a.1 ad 5: sense sees all bodies, but understanding does not work that way (“our sight can see all bodies”) #

Point: the sense/understanding parallel breaks down over the mode of knowing.

• Objection: sight sees higher (sun, moon, stars, then thought incorruptible) and lower bodies alike; so understanding should know higher and lower understandable substances alike.
• Reply: sense knows both in the same way, by the change of the organ; but material substances are understood by abstraction from sense and imagination, and immaterial ones cannot be, because there are no images of them.
• Applications: there is no picture of your guardian angel, nor of God the Father or the Son; Isaiah’s God on the throne is metaphor, not God in himself. Break.

5. a.2 objections and sed contra (“led by the hand by material things”) #

Point: whether knowledge of material things can bring us to understanding immaterial substances.

• Obj. 1: Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy ch. 1 — the human mind cannot be raised to contemplation of the celestial hierarchy unless led by the hand by material things. (He notes Albert the Great commented on this work; Thomas commented on the Divine Names but often cites the Celestial Hierarchy for angels.) He compares it to Augustine’s objection in the previous article: some knowledge, that they are and what they are not, and something by likeness to our own mind, but not what they are.
• Obj. 2: science is in the understanding, and there are sciences and definitions of immaterial substances — Damascene defines “angel”; angels are treated in theology and philosophy.
• Obj. 3: the soul is in the genus of immaterial substances and is understood through its own act of understanding material things; so other immaterial substances can be understood through their effects in material things.
• Obj. 4: only a cause infinitely differing from its effects cannot be comprehended through them, and that is proper to God; so created immaterial substances can be known through material things. His gloss: knowing through an effect requires an effect proportioned to the whole power of the cause; the objection says only God’s effects fail to reveal his whole power — “but we’ll see about that.”
• Sed contra: Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 1 — we cannot grasp understandable things by sensible, simple by composed, bodiless by bodily.

6. Respondeo: Avempace’s ladder of abstraction (“according to the true principles of philosophy”) #

Point: abstraction from material quiddities never arrives at an immaterial substance.

• Averroes reports (De Anima III) Avempace (“another Arab philosopher, not as eminent as Averroes or Avicenna”) holding that through understanding material substances we can, by true philosophical principles, reach immaterial ones. (He corrects his own misreading of the sentence.)
• Avempace’s argument: (1) our understanding naturally separates the what-it-is of a material thing from matter; (2) if that what-it-is still has something of matter, it abstracts again; (3) this cannot go on forever; therefore it arrives at a what-it-is altogether without matter, which is to understand an immaterial substance.
• Thomas: this would suffice if immaterial substances were the forms and species of material things, as the Platonists laid down; but since they are of an entirely different definition from material quiddities, however much we abstract we never arrive at anything like them. Conclusion: through material substances we cannot perfectly understand immaterial substances — he stresses Thomas says “perfectly,” not “entirely.”

7. a.2 replies: imperfect knowledge, by negation, relation, common notion (“some knowledge of immaterial things”) #

• Ad 1: from material things we can ascend to some knowledge, not perfect, because there is no sufficient comparison; likenesses taken from material things are “much unlike” (Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy ch. 2). Knowledge by likeness, hence deficient.
• Ad 2: in the sciences the higher things are treated most of all by negation (removal). Aristotle makes the heavenly bodies known by negating properties of lower bodies: no weight, not corruptible. A fortiori immaterial substances, as the word “immaterial” itself shows. We do not grasp their quiddities, but treat them by negation and by some relation to material things. Same for God: “unmoved mover” — “mover” is relation to material things, “unmoved” negation.
• Ad 3: the soul understands itself through its own act, and that act perfectly shows its power and therefore its nature; but neither through this nor through anything found in material things do we know the power and nature of immaterial substances, because these do not equal their powers. A fortiori God: Romans 1:20, which the Church reads as knowledge of God through creatures, speaks of his virtus, but what he has made does not equal his whole power, so gives no adequate knowledge of his substance.
• Ad 4: the objection concedes God but not angels. Created immaterial substances do not share a natural genus with material substances (no same definition of potency, since no matter in them), but share a logical genus: the common thought “a thing that exists not in another,” as opposed to an accident, the category (predicament, from the Latin for the categories) of substance — since their what-it-is is not their being. God shares neither natural nor logical genus, being in no genus. Hence something can be known affirmatively of angels by a common notion, though not what particular kind they are; of God, in no way. “So we can know the angels a little bit more than God.”
• Asides: Kassirik (quoted before) — after death you first see your guardian angel and say “this is God,” and the angel says no; the angels will be far superior to anything known here. Miranda in Shakespeare’s Tempest, raised on the island by her old father, sees a young man from the shipwreck: “brave new world, that has such creatures in it” (source of Huxley’s title); her name comes from the Latin for wonder. He finds it strange that his separated soul will live entirely in the immaterial world before the body, then wholly subordinate to the soul, is returned; Hamlet’s “shuffled off this mortal coil.” Break.

8. a.3 obj. 1: is God the first thing known? (“first thing known by us”) #

Point: Augustine’s talk of judging all things by the first truth does not mean we see God first.

• Objection (“a common opinion of some in the Middle Ages”): that in which all else is known and by which we judge is first known, as light by the eye and first principles by the understanding; we know all things in the light of the first truth and judge by it (Augustine, De Trinitate — he corrects himself: the book on True Religion); so God is first known.
• His explanation: Augustine speaks less precisely than Thomas; what actually judges, naturally speaking, is our natural understanding.
• Boethius’ proportion: reasoning is to understanding as motion is to rest — reasoning goes from one thing to another; “understanding,” as the name says, stands. Most of our understanding is a result of reasoning: “reasoned-out understanding.” He translates Aristotle’s epistēmē this way, since it comes from the verb for coming to a halt: a rest after motion.
• But rest can be before motion as well as after (he stands still, moves, stands still). Argument for an understanding before reasoning: if all understanding resulted from reasoning, there would be nothing to reason from. This he calls natural understanding — Aristotle’s nous, Thomas’s intellectus.
• All knowledge goes back to natural understanding, which (as Thomas will explain) is a partaking of the divine understanding; that is how Thomas takes Augustine’s truth — we have a likeness of the divine understanding, not a seeing of God in himself. Pious medieval readers took Augustine to mean we judge by looking at God.
• Examples of natural understanding: the statements known to themselves by all men — something cannot both be and not be, must either be or not be; the whole is more than the part; nothing is before itself.
• Euclid’s theorem (Elements I.6, inferred): if angles are equal the sides are equal; suppose AB longer than AC, cut off from B a length equal to AC, draw across; triangles DBC and ACB have an equal angle, a common side and an equal side, so are equal, so part equals whole — impossible. The proof rests on natural understanding that the part cannot equal the whole.

9. a.3 obj. 2: “on account of which each, that more” (“the famous thing I spoke to you about”) #

Point: the principle propter quod unumquodque et illud magis, expanded, and applied to God as cause of knowledge.

• Expanded form: when the same belongs to two things, but to one because of the other, it belongs more to the cause. Examples (read from handout, inferred): sweet of sugar and coffee, coffee because of sugar, sugar sweeter; wet of water and dishcloth; hot of fire and the air around it; known of premises and conclusion — if premises were not more known you could not use them to prove the conclusion; good of health and medicine, medicine because of health.
• Aristotle in the Metaphysics calls something a breve in the Latin — “that’s a short”; Thomas glosses: a beginning small in size but great in power. The principle is such a compressed word, so he expands it.
• Application begun: God is the cause of all our knowledge, as “the true light that enlightens every man coming into this world” (John’s Gospel). The class ends here, mid-objection.

His words #

• possible understanding: the intellect as blank tablet, informed by likenesses from images [ed.: possible intellect]
• agent intellect: draws likenesses from the images
• Natural Philosophy / “the Physics”: Aristotle’s work; “second reading” of book I [ed.: lectio]
• more understandable in itself vs. more known to us: cause vs. effect; distinct vs. confused
• led by the hand: Dionysius’ manuducere, material things leading to contemplation
• what it is: quiddity, nature
• perfectly (not “entirely”): the qualifier in Thomas’s conclusion
• negation / removal: how higher things are treated in the sciences
• predicament: the Latin word for a category
• natural genus vs. logical genus: sharing a definition of potency in matter vs. sharing a common thought (substance: thing existing not in another)
• reasoned-out understanding: his rendering of epistēmē (from the verb for coming to a halt) [ed.: science]
• natural understanding: understanding before reasoning; nous, intellectus; a partaking of the divine understanding
• statements known to themselves by all men: first principles (cannot both be and not be; whole more than part; nothing before itself)
• propter quod unumquodque et illud magis: “on account of which each, that more”; the cause has the attribute more
• breve: “a short,” Aristotle’s word for a beginning small in size, great in power

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, ST I q.88 a.1, ad 2, ad 3, ad 4, ad 5
• Thomas, ST I q.88 a.2, objections 1–4, sed contra, respondeo, replies 1–4
• Thomas, ST I q.88 a.3, objections 1 and 2 (ends mid-objection)
• handout “What Is Good & What Is Better,” p. 4 (the propter quod examples, inferred)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Physics IV (ancients: whatever is, is in a place); Physics I, second reading (inquiry into nature = inquiry into what is)
• Aristotle, De Anima III (excellences of intelligibles do not corrupt); Averroes’ commentary on De Anima III reporting Avempace
• Aristotle, Metaphysics (breve), with Thomas’s comment
• Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy ch. 1 and ch. 2; Divine Names ch. 1; Albert the Great’s and Thomas’s commentaries
• John Damascene’s definition of angel
• Augustine, De Trinitate / De vera religione (judging by the first truth)
• Boethius, the proportion reasoning : understanding :: motion : rest
• Romans 1:20; Isaiah (God on the throne); John 1 (true light)
• Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Plato, Avicenna
• Dante, Divine Comedy; Shakespeare, Tempest and Hamlet; Huxley, Brave New World; Kassirik
• Euclid, Elements I.6 (inferred)

His questions #

• Where do the angel’s likenesses come from, and where do ours? From God at creation; ours from the agent intellect working on images, the possible intellect being a blank tablet.
• Why are excelling sensibles not grasped by sense? Not only because they corrupt the organ but because they are not proportioned to the power.
• How do we show that what is more understandable is less understandable to us? Through cause and effect (effect more known to us, cause more illuminating) and confused vs. distinct knowledge (wooden chair, dry red wine).
• Would the separated substances be in vain if we never understood them? No: they understand themselves and each other, and being known by us is not their end.
• Can Avempace’s repeated abstraction reach an immaterial substance? Only if immaterial substances were the Platonic forms of material things; since they differ in definition, never.
• How are angels and God treated in the sciences, then? By negation and by relation to material things (“unmoved mover”).
• Do angels share a genus with material substances? Not a natural genus, but a logical one (substance); God shares neither.
• Is there an understanding before reasoning? Yes, natural understanding — otherwise there would be nothing to reason from.
• Which is sweeter, the sugar or the coffee; which more known, premises or conclusion? The cause: sugar; the premises.