First Cause, First Being, and the Order of the Books of Wisdom

Orientation #

He opens: “We’ve talked here before about the great turnaround. Remember that,” and refers back to “the ninth book here of wisdom, which is the one we considered” and to “what we said the other day,” that reason “discourses before it sees before and after” (prev. lecture). The verified sources show he is working from his handout “The Matter and Order of Wisdom” (pp. 7–17). The previous class finished Metaphysics IX on act and potency, and the next turns to Metaphysics II.

The class, in order #

1. The great turnaround and how tight it is (“the end of one is the beginning of the other”) #

Point: the three subjects of wisdom are shown in one order and then investigated in reverse, and each pair is joined because the conclusion of one is a premise of the next.

• Shown, in order: (a) proemium: wisdom is about causes, finally first causes; (b) beginning of Book IV: about being as being, and the one and the many (“almost the same thing”); (c) then: about the axioms.
• Tightness going forward: “wisdom is about first causes” is a premise for “about being as being”; that in turn is the beginning for concluding it is about the axioms.
• Turned around: remainder of “book one” [ed.: he evidently means Book IV] takes up the fundamental axiom of being and non-being; Books V–X being as being and the one and the many; Books XI–XIV find the first causes and confirm them against the Platonists.
• Are the last three as tightly knit? Yes: the axioms are premises from which every science reasons (even geometry); and (Book IX) the order of act and ability is the beginning for reasoning to the first cause as pure act rather than matter (passive ability). “Act is before ability simply” is the premise for “the first cause is pure act.”

2. Does “first” mean the same in “first cause” and “first being”? (“prima causa, primo mens”) #

Point: in SCG I, having proved God’s existence, Thomas says God is first cause and first being (prima causa, primum ens [ed.: heard as “primo mens”]) without explaining; the question is whether “first” is equivocal.

• “Being” and “cause” differ: being is what God is in himself (“I am who am”); cause means being a beginning of something else. Connected, since you must be before you cause (“one reason the creature can’t create himself is that he isn’t”). Compare white man / white dog: man and dog differ, does white?
• “First” = “before all the rest,” so its meaning depends on “before,” which has many meanings (he counts four, with a fifth “crowning” sense, cause before effect, which he puts fourth “because it’s not fifth in order”).
• First cause: Adam the first man is the man before other men; the first cause is before other causes, and would not be unless it caused them; the uncaused cause is before the caused cause as cause before effect. So “first” there takes the crowning sense.
• First being: student answers “second or fourth”: fourth because he is best, second because nothing else can be without him. His two hesitations:
  1. Against the fourth sense: at that point Thomas has not yet shown God is good, goodness itself, good of every good, summum bonum (the five chapters on the good come later); “better than all the rest” is the meaning of summum bonum, not of first being.
  2. Against the second sense (before in being: God can be without creatures, they cannot be without him): this is exactly analogous to the first-cause answer, and Thomas has it in mind, but only in Book II, against those for whom creatures proceed from God naturally (Neoplatonists, Spinoza’s triangle whose angles follow from it, Hegel “I suppose”). Examples of cause-before-effect without before-in-being: two is cause of half-of-four, not the reverse, yet neither is without the other; Aristotle’s example, your sitting causes “you are sitting” to be true, but neither can be without the other; the straightness of intersecting lines is why vertical angles are equal, yet they are together. Thomas must show two different things in Book II, that nothing can be without God and that God can be without them (because he produces by will, not naturally), over “many chapters, most difficult chapters.” Since reason must discourse before it sees before and after, that long discourse makes him hesitate to say Thomas already means the second sense.
• Student: how does he prove God can be without them? Answer: not going into Book II now; only that Book I is God in himself, Book II God as maker.
• Student: do the two “firsts” have the same meaning? He considered it, but then “why bother?” — first being because he is the first cause would be redundant, “unworthy of the master.”
• Student: first because nothing is before him, his being not dependent on another. He grants it is true but it sounds “a little exhortative.”

3. Approach from the continuity: act and ability as a division of being (“the philosopher likes to see the beginning, middle, and end of being”) #

Point: “act before ability” is a before-and-after in being, not in cause and effect as such, so it yields “first being”; yet the two orders run parallel.

• Act vs. ability is a distinction of ways of being (Book IX opened with it, and Aristotle pointed out those who confuse the two), not the distinction of cause and effect. So: act before ability simply → first being is pure act; last being pure ability; middle being composed of both.
• Which is most known to us? The middle. Dante begins the Comedy “in the middle of life”; student: Thomas says somewhere this is because of our nature (we are composed of ability and act). Sign: we define the extremes by negation from the middle: “pure act” is grammatically affirmative but signifies act with no passive ability; first matter is ability with no act (Augustine on it: “something that is nothing, or nothing that is something”). Negatives come after affirmatives.
• Parallel: Poetics defines plot’s middle by two affirmatives (something before and after), beginning and end by one affirmative and one negative. Hence another way the philomuthos is like the philosopher: muthos means first myth, then story, then in the Poetics plot; the lover of plots loves beginning, middle, end, and the philosopher wants the beginning, middle, end of being.
• In cause-and-effect terms the triad is: uncaused cause / caused cause / effect that causes nothing; or unmoved mover / moved mover / moved that does not move.
• So “first being is pure act” is the more natural conclusion from Book IX — yet “notice how close that is” to first cause.

4. SCG I.16, the six arguments that there is no passive ability in God (“no potencia passiva, no passive ability in God”) #

Point: the chapter shows how first cause and first being are used almost interchangeably in reasoning to pure act.

• Preliminary: in SCG the arguments from motion are far more developed than in ST (two from motion; the first has “three middle terms for this premise and three for that”), so ch. 14 takes God’s unchangeableness almost as a corollary, ch. 15 reasons to eternity (same order as ST: unchangeableness before eternity).

1. From ch. 15 (Thomas’s habit: conclusion of the previous chapter as premise of the next).
2. God is first mover / first efficient cause (from the existence proofs) + act before ability simply (Book IX) → first cause is pure act.
3. The argument from necessity and contingency: the third way of ST, not among SCG’s five, given here as a preliminary; then, act before ability and the first cause before everything → pure act. “More complete, in some ways,” than ST.
4. God is first maker (from the third existence argument); one makes insofar as in act (Aristotle, “perhaps more in the seventh book”); if not pure act he would partake of actuality, and the partaker is subsequent to the partaken; the first maker is subsequent to nothing. “Kind of beautiful.”
5. God is unmoved mover, not movable at all; it is always by passive ability that one is movable; so no passive ability.
6. Things here go from ability to act but cannot give themselves the act they lack, so because of something already in act; no infinite backup; so something is pure act — a separate argument for God’s existence, not in terms of a particular kind of cause: “God is the first being.”

• Gloss: if “act before ability simply” meant only in time, God would be before things in time, which he is not; so the second (grounding) sense and the cause sense come in: ability cannot go to act without act, and cannot be without act, so act is in some sense the cause of ability.

5. Necessary and contingent as a division of being as being (“something that necessarily is through itself”) #

Point: the third argument works from a distinction that Thomas calls a division of being as being, yet crosses with cause.

• Argument as he gives it: you and I are able to be and not be; being open equally to both, what determines which must be other than themselves, something not able not to be, necessary. Subtle point Aristotle touches “in the second book” [unclear which work]: a necessary being may be necessary through another (like a demonstrated conclusion), so there must be something necessary through itself; that is God; and what has passive ability would be able not to be.
• Is necessary/contingent a distinction of cause and effect or of being? Student: of being, since it concerns whether you have ability. Contingent = able to be and not be; necessary = not able not to be; impossible = not able to be. He has a text where Thomas calls it a distinction of being as being; in the third way it is crossed with cause (the necessary that is caused). Thomas reasons that God, as cause of being as being, causes both necessary and contingent things (“contrary to the Marxists”).
• Why isn’t it given among the divisions of being in Book V (substance/accident, act/ability)? Student: it is explained through act and ability. He: so maybe not as fundamental as act and ability.

6. Where “necessary” sits in Book V (“is it necessary to consider the sense of necessary”) #

Point: “necessary” is filed among the names of causes, though necessary/contingent divides being — a sign being and cause are almost inseparable.

• His tongue twisters: “What sense of before can be before another sense of before?” (there is an order among the meanings, in one of the four senses); “In what sense of necessary is it necessary to consider the senses of necessary?”
• Thomas’s division of Book V: words used most in wisdom as episteme; every episteme has a subject and shows properties through causes, hence three groups: names of causes (beginning, cause, element, nature, necessary), names of the subject (one, being, substance, parts of one, parts of being), names of effects (anchored by perfect and whole; good and true as perfections/properties of being, though transcendentals).
• Senses of necessary, tied to causes: (a) that without which one cannot be, or be well — breathing, eating; reading Aristotle and Thomas to be wise; Thomas’s horse for a journey; his own plane or car (“I could have come here on my feet… probably we’d all be gone by that time”); (b) forcing, like the efficient cause; (c) intrinsic causes, matter and form: you necessarily die.
• Conclusion: being and cause are “almost continuous”; and “act before ability” is stated in terms of act and ability, not cause and effect, yet cannot be wholly separated from the actual being the cause of the able coming to act.

7. Book V as end of the axioms and beginning of being as being (“the whole is always more than the part”) #

Point: the same continuity appears at the join between axioms and being as being.

• Thomas places Book V as the first book about being as being: being and one have many meanings, so they must be distinguished; he refers back to the objection at the start of Book IV (how one knowledge of what doesn’t mean one thing?) and its answer: the meanings are linked to one, as “political” leads back to polis, being to substance.
• But (other texts of Thomas) the wise man does not prove the axioms, known of themselves; he clarifies them by distinguishing the words in them — the same words as in being as being (first axiom: cannot both be and not be at the same time in the same way). So Book V completes the distinct knowledge that lets one defend the axioms against fallacies from mixed senses.
• His sophism: “man is an animal — only part of what man is — but animal includes dog, cat, horse, elephant; so sometimes the part is more than the whole.” Students “think they don’t know what they do know.” Resolution: animal is part of man as part of the definition; animal includes man as universal whole to its parts. Every whole is either put together from parts (more than any one) or said of parts (said of more than any one); since whole and part have more than one meaning the axiom “isn’t altogether one in meaning.”
• So Book V is at once end of the axioms and beginning of being as being, like continuous syllogisms in Euclid where the conclusion is the next premise, and nothing can be inserted between. Likewise understanding the order of act and ability “seems to involve almost understanding of the first cause,” so nothing comes between being as being and first cause. This is why Thomas can move both ways: from before-and-after in being to the first cause, and from first cause to pure act. “Nobody quite like this”; Thomas is, as De Koninck says, Aristotle’s “most humble and faithful disciple.”

8. Back to Book IX: the three ways act is before ability (“act is before ability in definition or knowledge”) #

Point: Aristotle’s “simply before” is not limited to before in time.

1. In definition/knowledge: we know an ability through its act; hearing and seeing are distinguished by their acts, not by “ability.”
2. In time, both ways: what goes from ability to act is able before it is actual; but it goes to act because of something already in act (it cannot give itself the act it lacks), so on the whole picture act is simply before, and what is before everything is pure act.

• Why he starts with time: the example is the univocal maker, a man generating a man, before in time. But the cause sense is implied (the thing already in act is cause), and before in being too: first matter cannot exist except under a form, while there can be act without ability — Aristotle does not elaborate. Before in being and before as cause “lead back to that second sense,” the closest of the five to before in time; so as you go from ability toward the first act you get before in time, then in being and cause. He could not mean only time when he reaches God as pure act, since God is not in time.

His words #

• the great turnaround; the reverse order in which wisdom investigates what the proemium and Book IV showed it is about.
• wisdom; [ed.: Metaphysics], “the ninth book of wisdom.”
• ability; [ed.: potency]; “passive ability” = potentia passiva.
• axiom of being and non-being; the fundamental axiom, “you can’t both be and not be at the same time in the same way.”
• prima causa, primum ens; God as first cause and first being in SCG I.
• crowning sense of before; cause before effect (he numbers it fourth, “not fifth in order”).
• second sense of before; before in being: can be without the other, but not vice versa (the “grounding sense”).
• summum bonum; God as better than all, shown in the five chapters on the good.
• caused cause / uncaused cause; middle and beginning in cause terms.
• philomuthos; lover of muthos: myth, story, plot.
• episteme; science, with subject, causes, properties.
• universal whole vs. whole of the definition; the two senses of whole in the sophism.
• necessary through another / through itself.

Texts #

Read in class

• Berquist handout, “The Matter and Order of Wisdom”, pp. 7–17 (verified; the order of wisdom’s subjects).
• Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles I.16 (six arguments for no passive potency), summarised argument by argument; I.14–15 referred to.

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics: proemium; beginning of Book IV; Book V (division into names of causes, subject, effects; “necessary”); Book IX (act before ability); Books XI–XIV; “seventh book” on making as in act.
• Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles II (creation; God can be without creatures); the five chapters on the good.
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae, five ways, third way; unchangeableness before eternity (inferred locus q.2 a.3; q.9–10).
• Aristotle, Poetics (plot: beginning, middle, end).
• Aristotle, “the second book” on necessary through another (work unstated).
• Dante, Divine Comedy opening; Augustine on first matter; Spinoza’s triangle; Neoplatonists, Hegel; Marxists; De Koninck on Thomas.

His questions #

• Are you saying the same thing about God when you say first cause and first being? Being and cause differ; whether “first” differs is the question.
• Does “first” mean the same, or is it equivocal? Student: equivocal; it depends on the senses of “before.”
• What sense of before is in “first cause”? The crowning sense, cause before effect (uncaused before caused cause).
• What sense of before is in “first being”? Student: second or fourth; he hesitates over both — left open, though he leans to a sense in being via act and ability.
• Is the distinction of act and ability the distinction of cause and effect? No: a distinction of ways of being.
• Of pure act, pure ability, and the composite, which is most known to us? The middle; we define the extremes by negation.
• Is necessary/contingent a distinction of cause and effect or of being? Of being as being (Thomas’s text), crossed with cause in the third way.
• Why does Aristotle not give necessary/contingent among the divisions of being in Book V? Student: it is explained by act and ability; perhaps less fundamental — left tentative.
• What do we mean when we say act is before ability simply? Before in definition, in time on the whole, and implicitly in being and as cause; not only time, since God is not in time.