Summa Theologiae I, Q.2 aa.1–2: Is God's Existence Self-Evident, and Can It Be Demonstrated?

Orientation #

He opens continuing the division of the Summa “we saw” (prev. lecture): God in Himself, God as beginning, God as end, and the prologue’s division of Question 2. Simplicity, and the names of God (qq. 12-13), are pointed to as “later on”; the third way is mentioned as where one proves a necessary being. The recording ends mid-question on the ontological argument. The previous class finished Question 1 and previewed the prologue to Question 2; the next takes up Article 3 and the five ways.

The class, in order #

1. The division of the Summa and of Question 2 (“the fundamental division into God and Himself”) #

Point: the whole Summa, and Question 2 within it, is ordered by God in Himself, God as principium, and God as end.

• Unlike the Contra Gentiles, whose three books correspond to those three, the Summa puts the first two in the First Part; the Second Part (return of the rational creature) and the Third (Christ, who as man is the road to God; the sacraments) all pertain to coming back to God. Aside: Benedict XVI on baptism in Rome, “why baptism? eternal life”.
• First Part: divine essence, distinction of persons, procession of creatures. The first two both concern God in Himself, but the distinction of persons is singled out because it is so “above reason”.
• On the divine essence: (1) whether God is; (2) in what way He is, “or more in what way He is not” (later called the consideration of God’s substance); (3) what pertains to His operation: knowledge, will, power. This is the circle he drew on the board.
• Student: why parts, if they are the same in God? Answer: because we know God through creatures; there is multiplicity in our thinking, not in God. In the vision of God as He is there is no multiplicity, no change.
• Question 2’s three articles: is God’s existence per se known (answer no); is it demonstrable (yes); is God (proved).

2. Truth between two extremes (“truth is between two mistakes”) #

Point: on God’s existence, one extreme makes it obvious, the other makes it unknowable and unprovable; the middle, Vatican I’s position (anathema if you deny it can be known through reason), is that it can be proven.

• Trinity: those who say three persons, so three natures (too much); those who say one nature, so one person under different names (too little); the truth, one nature, three persons.
• Incarnation is the reverse: two natures, one person. Nestorius (two natures so two persons; Mary not Mother of God but of Christ) vs. one person so one nature.

3. Digression: Christ king, teacher, priest (“Is Christ a king as man or as God”) #

Student question; his answer: king both as God (a psalm: “The Lord is King”) and as man; likewise teacher both ways; but priest only as man, seen most clearly in the most priestly act, dying on the cross, which the divine nature cannot do.

• Students add: “priests of the Most High God, like Melchizedek”, “priests of Christ” (conformity to His priesthood), but “priests of the Holy Spirit” does not seem a proper use; the priest is alter Christus.
• Prayer likewise: to pray would make one inferior, so God does not pray; Christ prays as man. The Holy Spirit is said to “groan in us”, which Thomas has to explain as: He makes us pray.

4. Article 1: the objections and sed contra (“something must be known to itself”) #

Point: what is known through another presupposes what is known through itself; coffee is not sweet of itself, sugar is.

• Obj. 1 (Damascene, beginning of his book): knowledge that God exists is “naturally inserted” in all. He links natural and per se: per se is “through itself” but also “as such”; what belongs to you by nature belongs to you as such. Most people do believe in God, a “very confused” knowledge.
• Obj. 2: per se known = known as soon as the parts are known (Aristotle, Posterior Analytics I): knowing whole and part, you at once know every whole is greater than a part. Aside: nobody tries to enumerate all the axioms; e.g. nothing is the beginning of itself, nothing is before or after itself. God signifies “that than which nothing greater can be thought”; what is in reality and in the understanding is greater than what is in the understanding only; so understanding the name, it follows God is in reality. Note: “reality” comes from res; the Greeks say ontōs, from being.
• Obj. 3: that truth is, is per se known, since denying truth concedes it (“if truth is not, it is true that truth is not”); God is truth (“I am the way, the truth, and the life”). His parallel: “statements exist” cannot be denied without making a statement.
• Sed contra: no one can think the opposite of what is per se known (Metaphysics IV, Posterior Analytics I); but “the fool said in his heart, there is no God” (Psalm 52).
• On insipiens: Thomas explains sapientia as sapida scientia, “savory knowledge”; devotio, dulce sapere, “to sweetly savor”. Shakespeare’s Romeo, taking the poison, compares himself to a foolish captain running on the rocks: “come, bitter conduct, come, unsavory guide”, unsavory = insipiens. He finds sapientia more interesting than sophia or “wisdom”: you savor good wine, not soda.

5. Article 1 body: per se known in two ways (“known to itself in two ways”) #

Point: a statement is per se known when the predicate is in the ratio of the subject (“man is an animal”), but it is per se known to us only if we know what subject and predicate are.

• Known to all: first principles whose terms everybody knows, being and non-being, whole and part. Nobody can live without experiencing whole and part (unless you eat your steak in one bite); if a student claims not to know it, give him part of his salary, or a few pages for a whole book, and he reveals he knows the difference.
• Known only to the wise: his example, “a perfect number is a composite number”, obvious to him, not to students who lack the notion. Perfect = equal to the sum of what measures it evenly: 4 is not (1+2), 6 is the first (1+2+3, not measured by 4 or 5); a prime is measured only by 1, so no prime is perfect.
• This is Boethius’s distinction: some “common thoughts of the soul” known to all; some known apud sapientes only (those with some education), e.g. “bodiless things are not in a place”. Aside: “where’s God? where’s heaven?” thought spatially; the Soviet cosmonaut radioing “there is no God up here”.
• Conclusion: “God is” is per se known in itself, since predicate and subject are the same (I am who am; God is His own to be, shown later under simplicity); not to us, since we do not know what God is, so it must be demonstrated through what is more known to us and less known by nature, i.e. effects (Aristotle, “second book of Wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics II]).

6. Reply 1: God confusedly known as our beatitude (“naturally inserted in us”) #

Point: knowing God in some common way “under a certain confusion” is natural, insofar as God is man’s beatitude, naturally desired and so naturally known; but this is not knowing simply that God is, “just as to know the one coming is not to know Peter, although Peter is coming”. Many take beatitude to be wealth, pleasure, power.

• Power: the new biography of Mao, sacrificing whole communist armies to keep his own under control, exporting food while millions starved, and at the end, losing power, self-pityingly identifying with all who had fallen (Nixon after Watergate, Napoleon): likeness is the cause of love. Khrushchev moping after his fall.
• Socrates’s recollection argument, an exaggeration of this: we judge tables not truly flat, and one flatter than another, so we have knowledge of flatness not derived from them; as you cannot judge a portrait “not quite like him” without knowledge of the man beyond the portrait (he cannot judge Lord Salisbury’s nose at the Worcester Art Museum; Lafayette could judge the Washington statue in the Virginia State House). Hence Socrates puts it in a previous life.
• Happiness: end of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, “who in this life ever gets what he wants?”; we call some year “the happiest of my life” yet know it imperfect, so we measure it against a perfect good, a confused knowing of God. Romeo thinks it is Juliet; as a boy he thought his father foolish for not filling the refrigerator with soda, and even had he got it he would not have been happy.
• Boethius, Consolation: true happiness (ultimately God) vs. false, false taken first “because it is more known to us”. Thomas, end of Contra Gentiles I: even taking each part of false happiness (fame: God has the admiration of every mind that knows Him), God is supremely happy.
• Contra Gentiles on the end of man: to know God, then how: the confused knowledge everybody has (not satisfying), demonstration (imperfect), faith (not sufficient), vision face to face, the true end. There Thomas is explicit about the confused knowledge; here “more reticent”.

7. Replies 2 and 3: the name and the thing (“just because it’s in your mind”) #

Point: the objection from the meaning of “God” (“not the strongest objection”) fails twice.

1. Not everyone hearing the name understands “that than which nothing greater can be thought”; some believe God a body.
2. Even granting that meaning, it follows only that the thing is in apprehension, not in rerum natura (“in reality”). To argue it is in reality you must already be given that there is in reality something than which nothing greater can be thought, which is exactly what the denier does not grant. You cannot assume that because that is what you mean by the word; it is what you have to prove.

• Student: is it that we cannot see there is no opposition between something existing by its essence, so we assume no contradiction? His answer: rather, one confuses the meaning of the word with the existence of what it means. Same with “by God I mean what necessarily exists of itself”: you must take things you know exist and show from them that something necessary through itself exists, “the way you do in the third argument”. Student: so it is assuming what you are trying to prove. “Yeah.”
• Reply 3: that truth in general is, is per se known; that the first truth, God, is, is not per se known to us. The truth you cannot deny is truth said of all truths, not the cause of all.

8. Extremes cannot explain each other; Anselm unnamed (“extremes can’t explain each other”) #

Point: he is glad some think God’s existence obvious, since it gives the other extreme, and the middle explains both while the extremes cannot explain each other.

• Contra Gentiles II on immortality: those who say no soul is immortal, the Platonists who say every soul (even animals’) is immortal, Aristotle’s middle, only the human soul. If no soul were immortal, why would anyone think all are, and vice versa? As with the Trinity: one nature, three persons contains the element of truth in both extremes. Aristotle: a sign you have the truth is that you can also see why others thought as they did.
• Thomas does not mention Anselm, “a sign of his respect”; students: controversy whether Anselm meant it as taken; Bonaventure takes it up and falls on the “obvious” side. Anselm lacks Augustine’s authority; Thomas often spells out what Augustine really means. Likewise Aristotle refutes what Plato said, though Plato may not have meant it, because people are deceived by it.
• Aside: to a student who says “I didn’t mean that”: “I correct what you say, not what you mean”; correcting words clarifies. Eastern liturgy: “so-and-so is baptized” rather than “I baptize you”, and the Church says what it means by accepting it.
• Aside: Benedict XVI’s Vatican biography, theses on Augustine and Bonaventure.

9. Article 2: objections and sed contra (“Whether God to be is demonstrable”) #

• Obj. 1: God’s existence is an article of faith; demonstration makes us know, faith is “the substance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Paul). On the translation “evidence of what is not seen”, a seeming contradiction: what is meant is that you see that it should be believed, not the thing itself.
• Obj. 2: the middle term is the what-it-is, but of God we know only what He is not (Damascene, the same man as in a1 obj. 1).
• Obj. 3: it could only be from effects, but finite effects are not proportioned to the infinite; no proportion of finite to infinite.
• Aside: the story that Voltaire took the objections from the Summa to embarrass Catholics without the answers; objections are not to be given to those weak in faith, but studied with their answers by the persistent.
• Sed contra: Romans 1:20, invisible things of God understood through what is made, the same text Vatican I used; the first thing to know about anything is whether it is (Aristotle: whether it is, then what it is).

10. Article 2 body and replies (“demonstration is of two kinds”) #

1. Demonstration propter quid (“on account of what”), through the cause, through what is prior simply; demonstration quia (“that it is so”), through the effect, prior to us, since the effect is usually more known to us. Natural philosophy and ethics proceed from effect to cause; only mathematics tends to begin from the cause.
2. From any effect more known to us its cause can be shown to exist, since positing the effect the cause must exist.
3. So God’s existence, not per se known to us, is demonstrable through effects known to us.

• Reply 1: God’s existence and what natural reason can know of God (Romans 1:19) are not articles of faith but praeambula, “what walks before”; faith presupposes natural knowledge as grace nature and perfection the perfectible. Nothing prevents what is demonstrable being believed by one who does not grasp the demonstration, “most of us”. Descartes said he believed God exists more from his mother than from the five ways.
• Reply 2: demonstrating cause through effect, the effect stands in place of the cause’s definition; for proving existence the middle term is what the name signifies, not the nature, since “what is it” follows “is it” (you need a meaning, not the full nature). God’s names in this life are from effects (qq. 12-13), so the middle term is “unmoved mover”, “first cause”.
• Reply 3: unproportioned effects give no perfect knowledge of the cause but do show that it is; from God’s effects we demonstrate He is, not His essence. Angels by natural knowledge, being closer and more like God, know Him far better, yet even they are not effects proportioned to God, unfolding all He can do. His teacher Kasurik: when you die and see your guardian angel and cry “Oh God!”, the angel says “no, no, he’s higher up”.
• Student: does Thomas say angels in the Old Testament did not stop men worshiping them, but in the Apocalypse refuse? His reply: not that they accepted worship, but the Incarnation changed things; they treat us more as equals.
• The recording ends with a student beginning another question on the ontological argument: whether one could know there is no opposition between something existing by its essence… [unclear in recording].

His words #

• principium: the beginning, “the maker, the creator”.
• known to itself / per se known: “through itself”, also “as such”; what belongs to you by nature [ed.: per se notum, self-evident].
• first beginnings: first principles of demonstration (whole greater than part; cannot both be and not be).
• reality: from res; Greek ontōs, from being; in rerum natura, “in the nature of things”.
• insipiens: the fool; unsavory; against sapientia = sapida scientia, “savory knowledge”.
• devotio: dulce sapere, “to sweetly savor”.
• ratio of the subject: the predicate included in it (animal in man).
• common thoughts of the soul: Boethius’s per se known statements, some to all, some apud sapientes only.
• perfect number: equal to the sum of what measures it evenly; composite.
• more known towards us / less known towards nature: effects vs. cause (“less known simply”).
• praeambula: “what walks before” faith.
• demonstration propter quid: “on account of what”, by the cause; demonstration quia: “that it is so”, by the effect.
• “fourth book of wisdom”, “second book of Wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics IV, II].

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 2, prologue (division of the treatise on the divine essence)
• Summa Theologiae I, q. 2, a. 1 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Summa Theologiae I, q. 2, a. 2 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Psalm 52, “the fool said in his heart” (in the sed contra)
• Romans 1:20 (sed contra), 1:19 (reply 1)
• Hebrews 11:1 (inferred), “substance of things hoped for”, quoted within obj. 1

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Posterior Analytics I (first principles; two kinds of demonstration); Metaphysics IV (cannot think the opposite of first principles); Metaphysics II (more known to us vs. by nature)
• John Damascene, beginning of his book (knowledge of God naturally inserted; we know what God is not)
• Boethius (per se known to all vs. to the wise); Consolation of Philosophy (true vs. false happiness)
• Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles I (end, God’s happiness), II (immortality of the soul), III (end of man: kinds of knowledge of God); Summa Theologiae I qq. 12-13 (names of God); question on simplicity
• Vatican I (anathema on denying God can be known by reason)
• Anselm (unnamed by Thomas), Bonaventure, Augustine, Plato
• Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (“come, bitter conduct”); Thackeray, Vanity Fair (ending)
• Biography of Mao; Benedict XVI’s Vatican biography; the Apocalypse (angels refusing worship)

His questions #

• Why three parts about the divine essence if they are the same thing in God? Because we know God through creatures; the multiplicity is in our thinking, not in the vision.
• Is Christ king as man or as God? Both; also teacher both ways; but priest only as man.
• Can everything be known through another? No; through another presupposes through itself (coffee sweet through sugar).
• Is “a perfect number is a composite number” obvious? To him yes, to students no: per se in itself, not to those ignorant of the subject.
• Does understanding “that than which nothing greater can be thought” show God exists? No; it shows it in apprehension only; you assume such a thing exists, which is what must be proved.
• Why should anyone think every soul immortal if none is, or vice versa? They cannot explain each other; only the middle explains the extremes.
• Is God’s existence an article of faith? Strictly no, a preamble; but it may be believed by those who do not grasp the demonstration.
• How can we demonstrate without knowing what God is? The name (unmoved mover, first cause), taken from effects, serves as middle term.
• Can angels know God perfectly by natural knowledge? No; they know Him much better than we, but are not effects proportioned to Him.
• Could one know there is no opposition between something existing by its essence… ? left open (recording ends).