Juliet's Beauty and God's Self-Knowledge; Reading 6 on Proximate Ability; Opening of Reading 7 on the Senses of 'Before'

Orientation #

He is continuing through Book IX of the Metaphysics (“the ninth book of Wisdom”), finishing reading six and beginning reading seven, which opens the third and last part of the book. He says that after the ninth book they will go to the Summa Theologiae. He opens by returning to the five senses of before he had been using (prev. lecture). The previous class worked through readings five and six on act in its most universal sense.

The class, in order #

1. Juliet’s beauty and the senses of before (“the beauty of Juliet is before”) #

He tests the senses of “before” on a case: Juliet’s beauty and Romeo’s seeing it.

• Before in time: her beauty precedes his seeing.
• Before in being: her beauty can be without his seeing, not conversely — and in the “crowning” addition to this second sense, her beauty is a cause of his seeing, acting on his eyes.
• Before in definition: to define his seeing her beauty (as against seeing his friend Benvolio) you must bring in Juliet’s beauty; her beauty is in the definition of the act.
• But the fourth sense, before in goodness — is her beauty better than his seeing it? He doubts it. A student says the end is better, and knowledge would be higher.

2. The beautiful is for the sake of being seen (“for the sake of being seen”) #

Point: the beautiful seems ordered to being perceived, so the seeing is the end and therefore better. Examples, each showing the same thing: a beautiful painting on the wall, a beautiful stained-glass window in the chapel, the music of Mozart — each would lose its purpose if no one saw or heard it. Shakespeare on Sylvia: “Heaven meant such grace that you might admire her be.” Since the end is always better than what is for the end, Romeo’s seeing would be better than her beauty. A student objects: Romeo would refuse to say Juliet exists for the sake of his seeing her. He accepts the correction — he is not saying Juliet is for that, but her beauty seems to be there to be seen; a Juliet alone on an island without even a mirror would make little difference. He notes later this is “not exactly the same thing” as saying the beauty is for the sake of the seeing.

3. The problem carried up to God (“the beauty of God is for the sake”) #

The argument that goes wrong: if the beautiful is for the sake of being seen, God’s beauty is for the sake of our seeing; the end is better; God’s beauty is God (no distinction in God); therefore we would be better than God — “obviously something wrong.” Digression on Plato: in the Republic the good itself, in the Symposium the beautiful itself, seen at the end of the ascent. He thinks the two are the same in Plato, but Plato does not (in the dialogues he has seen) say that the good itself knows and loves itself. So “the good itself” does not necessarily mean God as we mean it, and on that hypothesis only we would know and love His beauty — which would give us a certain superiority: absurd.

4. Substance and operation in God (“the divine substance and the divine operation”) #

In the Summa Theologiae Thomas proves God exists (q. 2), then treats the divine substance — simple, perfect and so good, unchanging, infinite, one — then a treatise on the operations (understanding, loving), then the Trinity. Why two treatises if God is altogether simple and substance and operation are the same in Him? Because we know God from creatures.

• The circle image: from the one centre many radii go out to really different points on the circumference; what is one in God is multiplied in proceeding to creatures. Knowing God from creatures we travel the reverse direction — “the way up and the way down is the same” (Heraclitus) — so one point is known as end of line X and end of line Y: two notions, one point.
• In creatures the distinction is real: “Duane Berquist and my understanding of what a triangle is are not the same thing”; my walking and Duane Berquist are not the same. We carry the two notions back to God and then negate any real distinction there.
• So we know the one and simple through the composed and the many; God knows the composed and the many through the one and simple — the better way of going. He cites a prophet Thomas always quotes (he could not find it in his English Bible): in that day there will be one name — when we see Him as He is, one name suffices. Plato, he suggests, stopped at the substance; Aristotle in the twelfth book of Wisdom goes on to the operation, seeing that God must understand, and chiefly Himself.

5. The answer: God knows and loves His own beauty infinitely (“as much as they are knowable and lovable”) #

Resolution: God knows and loves His own goodness and beauty as much as they are knowable and lovable, and they are infinitely so; He alone can. So our knowing and loving add nothing to His being known and loved, and His knowing is not the end of His beauty, because an end is always really distinct from that of which it is the end — and God’s knowing is not distinct from His substance. We are “kind of superfluous”; that He lets us in is pure generosity.

• Thomas on Averroes: Averroes said the separated substances would be purposeless if we did not know them; Thomas replies they know themselves.
• Two ways Thomas shows creatures add nothing to God’s goodness: (i) our goodness compared to His is not a shorter line to a longer line but a point to a line, and a point adds nothing to a line; (ii) whatever goodness we have is a partaking of the divine goodness, and a whole plus its part is no more than the whole. If we added, God plus us would be better than God alone and God would not be goodness itself. Applied: our seeing adds nothing to God’s being seen, as the point adds nothing to the line. Asides: Augustine, Confessions I — “too late have I come to know Thee, ancient beauty”; Francis de Sales (he is unsure of the place) calling on the angels and finally on God Himself to glorify Himself, since praise is clara notitia cum laude (St. Ambrose) and we cannot know Him as much as He is knowable; Avicenna quoted by Thomas, that God alone is truly generous, gaining nothing by giving. A student extends the case: with works of art there is the artist’s intention — Mozart wanted the beautiful thing heard; with natural beauty, nature is for the sake of man, created by God for us, so the same holds of Juliet, though not of God. He agrees.

6. Reading six: when a thing is strictly “in ability” (“one step away from being it”) #

Point of reading six (less important than five, but very good): you are able to be something strictly when you are one operation away from being it.

• Euclid example: a man ignorant of plane geometry is “able” to know solid geometry only loosely, since a sphere is defined by rotating a circle about its diameter — no circle, no sphere; no square, no cube. Within plane geometry: you are able to know proposition 47 (Pythagoras) when you know the 46 before it; if you must still demonstrate something first, you are not yet able in the strict sense.
• Aristotle’s own cases, read from the text: is earth a man in ability? Only after many steps — more when it has become the seed, and perhaps not even then. Not everything can be healed by the medical art; the healable is what will become healthy by reason when the doctor wills it, nothing outside preventing and nothing in the patient preventing.
• House: matter is a house in ability when nothing in it prevents it and nothing must first be removed or changed. Standing trees are not yet a house in ability; boards, ready to be nailed together, are.
• The beginning outside (artificial things) vs. inside (natural things): the seed is not yet in ability, for it needs another and a change; earth is not yet a statue in ability — change it and it will be copper, then it can be taken to be a statue.

7. Why we say “wooden,” not “wood” (“the chair is wood, or wooden”) #

Point: matter and accident, being incomplete, are predicated denominatively (derivatively).

• Would you say this chair is wood or is wooden? Wooden — for the wood is a chair only in ability, not in act; to say the chair is wood would say the wood is already a chair.
• The likeness with accident: I am not colour but coloured; to say “I am colour” would make colour substantial. Man is not whiteness but white; not music but musical; not motion but moving.
• He insists these are two different cases — being a subject of an accident, and being in ability — though the way of speaking is similar. Both matter and accident are “something, but indeterminate by themselves, rather than something complete by themselves.”
• Aristotle’s series: if earth were made of air we would say it is airy, not air; if air were of fire, fiery, not fire; but of the first matter we would not say this. And generally we do not say things are matter but that they are material. He remarks Thomas says this point follows the Greek idiom more than ours.

8. Digression: the thankless task of translating (“there isn’t always an exact equivalent”) #

Occasioned by the denominative forms; prompted by his brother Richard’s translation of the Posterior Analytics.

• Augustine wanted to refuse the word substance of God, since sub means “under” and nothing is under anything in God; yet Thomas, Boethius (divina substantia forma est) and the creed (homoousion, consubstantial) use it. So: yes and no.
• Dionysius the Areopagite preferring eros to agape to show the intensity of love, though the name sounds more sensual — and Scripture uses it.
• Caritas: “charity” in English has come to mean good deeds and sounds weak; so people now say “love” — but “love” suggests emotion or romance. Asked “what is love?” on the first day of class, the answer is always “an emotion” — “so is anger.” The love of God is not an emotion but an act of the will, though there may be emotional concomitance. Yet “love” does convey the intensity.
• C. S. Lewis on the love of the angels as ferocious: their love is unified, ours divided between emotion and will; the fallen angels went all the way at once, whereas we sway up and down through life. Lewis’s The Four Loves: eros, agape, philia, storge — all rendered “love” in English; a “lover” suggests romance, though the philosopher is a lover of wisdom.
• Translating Greek fragments: sometimes the English word is better and richer than the Greek, and then you risk reading into the author.

9. Reading seven: distinction before order (“the order of act and ability”) #

The remaining readings, seven to the end, are the third part: having distinguished act and ability and their kinds, Aristotle now treats their order, chiefly which is before.

• Distinction comes before order: order in the strict sense means before and after, and there can be distinction without before and after (the Trinity — the Athanasian Creed; Thomas is always clear there is no before and after in God, but a real distinction of Father, Son and Holy Spirit), but no before and after without distinction, since nothing is before or after itself.
• Applied back to Juliet: first see the distinction — her beauty is in Juliet, “beauty is not in the eye of the beholder. That was a great mistake there, foisted on the human mind” — while Romeo’s seeing is an immanent operation and so in him. Then ask about before and after: her beauty is before in at least four of the five senses (time, being, definition, causality); the problem is only the fourth, which is better.

10. The four senses of before in the Categories (“in how many ways before is said”) #

(After a prayer to the Holy Spirit, guardian angels and St. Thomas.) Aristotle refers back to Book V of Wisdom, but he prefers to begin with the Categories, where before is taken by itself; there are four chief senses:

1. In time: today before tomorrow.
2. In being: one before two — this can be without that but not conversely. Also bricks before the brick wall; the letter C before the word “cat.”
3. In the discourse of reason: proemium before tractatus, the prologue before Romeo and Juliet, premises before conclusion.
4. In goodness: the better is before. Is “before” equivocal by chance or by reason? By reason — by a likeness of ratios, as with “beginning” and with “in.” The ratios are alike, some more closely than others, and that allows ordering; but order depends on something first. Why is time first? Thomas’s principle: we name things as we know them, so the order of naming follows the order of knowing, and our road is from sense to reason — so the most sensible meaning comes first. Time is the numbering of before and after in motion, and as Shakespeare says in Troilus and Cressida, “Things in motion sooner catch the eye than what not stirs.” The before and after on the road up to the monastery is most known to us.

• Even reason is better recognized by reasoning than by understanding: Shakespeare defines reason as ability for discourse; discourse is from running, going from one thing to another; reasoning looks like activity, understanding looks like doing nothing. He was reading in the Summa Contra Gentiles that God’s knowledge is not discursiva, one reason being that there is no motion in God.
• Being is less sensible than motion: the cars parked outside his window did not catch his attention; a car coming in or going out did.
• To the third sense one reduces “before in knowing,” for as some things can be without others and not conversely, so some can be known without others and not conversely.
• The fourth, before in goodness, is the most remote. Finally, Book V does something different: having already treated beginning and given a common notion of it (first in being or in becoming or in knowing), Aristotle there distinguishes the senses of before by the senses of beginning, leaving out goodness as less familiar. That is more sapiential — seeing before through its source, order — but not dealing with the word directly. He recalls this because Aristotle is about to use it.

His words #

• “ninth book of Wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics IX]
• “ability” [ed.: potency]; “in ability” [ed.: in potency]
• “the crowning sense that we attach to the second sense” — cause, attached to before in being
• “immanent operation” — seeing, which is in the seer
• “denominatively” / “derivatively” — wooden, coloured, musical, moving
• clara notitia cum laude (St. Ambrose) — clear knowledge with praise, his definition of glory
• divina substantia forma est (Boethius)
• homoousion / consubstantial
• “discursiva” — of God’s knowledge, denied
• “equivocal by reason of a likeness of ratios” — how “before,” “beginning,” “in” are said

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX, reading six (earth and the seed; the healable; the house; the seed and the statue; wooden, musical, white, moving; matter and accident said derivatively), from his handout, p. 7–8.
• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX, reading seven, opening line (“since it has been determined in how many ways before is said”).
• Aristotle, Categories ch. 12, the four senses of before, from his handout, p. 5.

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics V, on “beginning” and on “before”; Metaphysics XII, on the substance and operation of God.
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, order of the questions on God’s substance, operations, Trinity (inferred loci); Summa Contra Gentiles, God’s knowledge not discursive; a text on Averroes and the separated substances; two texts in the Sentences read that day, on Augustine refusing “substance” of God.
• Plato, Republic (the good itself) and Symposium (the beautiful itself).
• Augustine, Confessions I; Dionysius the Areopagite on eros; Avicenna on divine generosity; Francis de Sales, Treatise on the Love of God (he is unsure).
• Euclid, plane and solid geometry, definition of sphere, proposition 47 (inferred).
• Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet; the line on Sylvia; Troilus and Cressida.
• C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves, and on the ferocious love of the angels.
• The Athanasian Creed.

His questions #

• Is the beauty of Juliet before Romeo’s seeing it in all four senses of before? In time, being (with causality), and definition yes; in goodness, no — the seeing seems to be the end.
• Is the beautiful for the sake of being seen? Yes for paintings, windows, music and natural beauty, which would lose their purpose unseen.
• Then is our seeing better than God’s beauty, since the end is better? No: God knows and loves His own beauty infinitely, His knowing is not distinct from His substance and so is not its end, and our seeing adds nothing, as a point adds nothing to a line.
• If God is altogether simple, why two treatises, one on the divine substance and one on the divine operation? Because we know God from creatures, where substance and operation really differ; the distinction is in our mind.
• When is a thing strictly able to be something? When it is one operation or doing away from it, nothing outside and nothing in it preventing.
• Would you say this chair is wood, or wooden? Wooden — the wood is only a chair in ability; matter and accident are said denominatively.
• Can there be distinction without before and after, or before and after without distinction? Distinction without order, yes (the Trinity); order without distinction, no.
• Is “before” equivocal by chance or by reason, and why does time come first? By reason, by a likeness of ratios; time comes first because naming follows knowing and the sensible — what is in motion — is most known to us.