Summa I, q.2, a.3: Objections Against God's Existence and the First Two Ways (Motion and Efficient Cause)

Orientation #

He says “we’re up to question two, article three” and recalls “as I mentioned before” the Charles de Koninck seminar on the five ways and Thomas’s remark on the need of faith because of “the weakness of our mind” (prev. lecture). He also refers back to the natural-philosophy question “whether nature acts for an end”, which “I think we did it in here”. The previous class treated Q.2 aa.1-2 (self-evidence and demonstrability of God’s existence); the next continues the third, fourth and fifth ways and begins the first objection.

The class, in order #

1. Thomas on Psalm 21 and the sense of the letter (“David is just there as a figure of Christ”) #

An aside on Thomas’s exposition of Psalm 21 (“correct numbering”; he calls it the first and major of the penitential psalms) that adds a subtlety to the sense of the letter.

• The psalm contains Christ’s words on the cross in Matthew and Mark (“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me”), the dividing of garments, and the prayer said before the crucifix after communion.
• Thomas says the psalm is about Christ; David is there as a figure of Christ. Theodore of Mopsuestia (known to him from the scholion of Conradius [name uncertain in recording]) was condemned at a council for denying the psalm is about Christ.
• Distinction: in “God is a rock” the sense of the letter is not the false sense (God is a rock) but what the metaphor represents by likeness. Usually with Old Testament figures the sense of the letter is the man written about, who in turn signifies Christ. Here Thomas seems to say the letter is Christ, and David is more like a metaphor, “because he’s called a figure there”. He leaves it as “a subtle thing”, to be checked in the text again; it shows “how careful a writer Thomas is”.

2. Psalm 24: via and semita (“the semita is the brief road”) #

Thomas distinguishes the two roads the psalmist prays for.

• via = the main, common road everyone must take = the commands; semita = the short road that gets you there quicker = the counsels. (Frustration noted: the English text does not match Thomas’s Latin, so one hunts for the Latin words.)
• Thérèse of Lisieux (his new granddaughter’s name): a very short life and a long way, a semita, because she took the counsels to heart.
• Applied to study: a pope quotes someone to the effect that one learns more from a year of Thomas than from many years of the Church Fathers; Albert the Great calls a summa a brevis via. Not that one should not read the Fathers, who are “spread out and a little more loose”.

3. The two objections and the sed contra (“this is enough to explain what we see”) #

The article’s frame: two objections against God’s existence and the text on the contrary.

• Obj. 1, from evil: if one of two contraries were infinite it would totally destroy the other; “God” means an infinite good; so if God were, nothing bad would be found; but something bad is found; therefore God is not. He calls this what Thomas elsewhere treats as the chief objection; in Thomas’s division of Scripture the Book of Job is ordered to faith and its defense against this objection (example: Jews who lost faith because of the Holocaust).
• Obj. 2, from fewness: what can be completed through fewer causes does not come to be through many; everything that appears can be explained without God, natural things reduced to nature, voluntary things to reason and will; why bring in another cause? Parallels: the last objection against nature acting for an end (someone thinks it can be done with fewer principles); Newton’s Principia, “nature is pleased with simplicity and affects not the pomp of superfluous causes”.
• The “beginning of fewness” (some say “principle of simplicity”; he prefers “fewness”): fewer causes are better if they are enough. The objection claims nature and art are enough.
• Sed contra: Exodus 3:14, God to Moses, “I am who am” — “a pretty definitive text”.

4. The five ways here and in the Summa Contra Gentiles (“the five arguments are not exactly the same”) #

How the two summas differ in the arguments and their development.

• SCG also has five ways, but its first two are from motion; only one is given here. Second way here (first efficient cause, maker) = third in SCG. Third way here (possible and necessary) is not among SCG’s five but is given a chapter or two after the chapter on God’s existence — student asks which; he answers: the one on whether there is any passive potency in God (also, in that chapter, an argument just from act and ability without going down to motion). Fourth and fifth are somewhat similar in both.
• Backing of premises: in SCG the premises of the argument from motion are backed with three reasons, here with one; for the third way the reason backing one premise differs in the two works, so the two could be combined.
• The arguments from motion in SCG show their dependence on the whole Physics (Natural Hearing), middle terms drawn from Books VI and VIII.
• Brevity does not fix chronology: earlier works are sometimes more developed than later, and vice versa. Joke: those who argue Mark must be the first Gospel because it is the shortest would have to say the Summa Theologiae came before SCG. His own experience: sometimes he restates something more briefly later, sometimes expands it later. (Aside: the parish chose Mark for a Gospel study because it could be finished in the time available.)
• Consequence for order: in SCG the first of the five attributes of the divine substance considered is that God is unchangeable, natural after the full unmoved-mover argument; here it is not until the fourth attribute.
• Aside: a journal article he reviewed on the third way; Thomas is brief there, and one could go through six lectios of the first book on the universe [ed.: probably Aristotle and Thomas on De Caelo I (inferred)] for a better grasp of the premise.

5. A caution: understanding the arguments (“Descartes had misunderstood the major premise”) #

Seminar memories as a warning against overconfidence.

• De Koninck’s seminar on the five ways (advanced students) began with faith: he believed in God’s existence more from what his mother told him than from the arguments; some people look for more than they can get from the arguments — hence the need of faith Thomas mentioned, from the weakness of our minds.
• Each student presented a modern Thomist’s or modern philosopher’s treatment of one way; he did Descartes and found he misunderstood both the major and the minor premise of the very argument he treated; that finding was “unanimous” across the modern Thomists examined too. Anecdote: a dignified Monsignor at a conference, staying in an argument he had not understood.
• Stress: one must “fully understand these arguments”, not the “naivete” of Catholic colleges teaching freshmen the five ways to convert the world. Most of these arguments were originally stated by Aristotle. The class will try to understand, not to be exhaustive.

6. The first way: its rank and its two premises (“the first and more manifest way”) #

Why motion comes first, and the shape of the syllogism.

• Why “more manifest”: Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida — things in motion sooner catch the eye than what does not stir; our knowledge begins with the senses, and motion most catches them. The argument depends on having senses: “it is certain and stands by sense that some things are moved in this world.”
• The two premises of the main syllogism: (1) omne quod movetur ab alio movetur, whatever is moved is moved by another; (2) not every mover is a moved mover — you cannot go on forever (A moved by B, B by C, C by D…). Everything else in the text backs up these two.

7. Backing premise one: potency, act, and the definition of motion (“the act of the ability to be in the room”) #

Nothing is moved except as it is in (passive) potency to that to which it is moved; this goes back to the definition of motion in Physics III.

• Coming into the room: “the act of the ability to come into the room” is true but defines the thing by itself; “the act of the ability to be in the room” avoids circularity but seems false, since being in the room is that act; yet coming through the doorway is in some imperfect way already being in the room — an imperfect act. Boundary case: a man standing in the doorway (checking IDs), one foot in, is partly in the room but not coming in — it is accidental to him that he is ever more in the room. So Aristotle adds “insofar as it is able to be”: this separates motion both from the full act and from that partial being-in, and shows it is essentially ordered to being further in; once I will not be more in the room, I have stopped.
• Same for other changes: water becoming hot; “becoming hot is the act of the ability to become hot” is like “a rose is a rose”; becoming hot vs. being warm — the mother heating the milk bottle wants it warm, and it is accidental to being warm that it is ever hotter, whereas as long as the water is becoming hot it will be hotter. So the moved thing has an ability being gradually actualized.
• The mover moves as it is in act (the stove gives the water the act it has); “to move is nothing other than to lead something from potency into act”, and something is reduced from potency to act only through a being already in act.
• Link to the ninth book of Wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics IX]: in the thing going from ability to act, ability is before act; but it goes to act through something already in act, so simply act is before ability — the beginning of concluding that the first of all things is pure act. Those who make the mistake outside words of confusing “simply” with “not simply” conclude that matter, most in potency, is the beginning of all things.
• Basic reason: what is in ability does not have the act, so cannot give it to itself. Seminary professor to students who could not answer: nihil dat quod non habet.
• Thomas’s example: fire hot in act makes wood hot in potency to be hot in act, “and through this it moves and alters it” — motion here includes alteration and growth, not only change of place.
• The same thing cannot be in act and in ability according to the same thing, only according to diverse things: wood actually wood, hot in ability; what is hot in act is not hot in ability but is, one might say, cold in ability. So nothing moves itself in the same respect: everything that is moved is moved by another.
• Then the question arises: if the mover moves because it is being moved, what moves it — a moved mover; can that series go on forever? That is the other premise.

8. Backing premise two, first way: no infinite series of moved movers (“one grand pulled puller”) #

If the mover is also moved, it is moved by another, and this cannot go on to infinity, because then there would be no first mover and consequently no other mover, since second movers move only as moved by the first — the staff moves only as moved by the hand.

• Where Aristotle shows this: for the mover in Physics VIII; for form in the Posterior Analytics; for the end in Nicomachean Ethics I; universally for all four causes in the second book of Wisdom, “the second book of what the rude multitude call the Metaphysics”.
• Student’s reason: they depend on each other and you never reach the first, so the last would never move. His version: a moved mover is by definition a middle — it necessarily has something after it that it moves and something before it that moves it. Train: the caboose is pulled but pulls nothing; the car before it is a “pulled puller”; add another car and you have a longer pulled puller; one or many, limited or infinite multitude, still one grand pulled puller with nothing before it — in which case nothing moves. So there must be a mover before that is not a moved mover: a first mover moved by no one, “and this we all understand to be God”.

9. Backing premise two, second way: through itself before through another (“before the through another, there is a through itself”) #

A second way, from axioms, of manifesting the same premise; he was working it up in class with students that day.

• Axioms are understood when their parts are understood: knowing whole and part, one knows a whole is more than one of its parts. Axiom of before and after: nothing is before or after itself — today is before tomorrow and after yesterday, but not before or after today; in the second sense of before (in being: this can be without that, not vice versa), something before itself could be without itself being, absurd. Thomas uses this in the Sentences; reason that sees order (before and after) must see the distinction of things.
• Through itself vs. through another (fifth book of Wisdom): is coffee sweet through itself, i.e., through being coffee? No; then if sweet, sweet through another. Would anything be sweet if everything were sweet through another? No. So before the through-another there is a through-itself.
• Applications: those who say every statement must be proven make everything known through another with nothing through itself — nothing would be known. Words: some are learned from a dictionary through other words, but not all; the baby knows no names, not even “mummy” or “daddy”, so the first names are known by associating a sound with a sensed object (his tape of teaching his son Paul “cookie”; the family question which word a baby says first — he was “a diplomat”).
• A moved mover is a mover through another; a mover through itself cannot be a moved mover; so there must be an unmoved mover, and that is God.

10. The second way, from the maker (“an order of efficient causes”) #

Reading of the second way, with the axiom of before and after doing the work.

• “Via” translates Greek hodos, road, as in “I am the way” and the “natural road” at the opening of the Physics; he prefers “road” to the abstract “way”.
• Efficient causes = makers (facere, efficientium), more concrete in English. In Aristotle’s four causes the third is defined first as the mover (“whence first the beginning of motion”) and then as “in general the maker of the made”. The maker is more cause of form and existence; but motion is more sensible than being or form, so mover comes before maker in Aristotle, the argument from motion before the argument from the maker here, and Thomas calls the first way manifestior.
• Premise: nothing is found, nor is it possible, to be the efficient cause of itself, since it would be before itself — the axiom of before and after. Senses of before from the Categories: in time, in being, in knowing (discourse of reason), in goodness; then the crowning sense, most like the second, cause before effect. “Self-made man”: not strictly true of his father; Marx makes history the process by which man makes himself, “I made myself” against the catechism — a contradiction; Sartre sees man trying to be cause of himself, impossible, hence “a useless passion”. Always some distinction between maker and made.
• Premise: no infinite series in ordered efficient causes: the first causes the middle, the middle causes the last, whether the middle be one or many, limited or unlimited; remove the cause, remove the effect; so no first, then no last and no middle, which is clearly false. Therefore one must posit some first maker, “which all call God”.
• Student: “remove the cause, remove the effect” recalls the saying that if the Creator withdrew, the creature would disappear; he agrees, as when the sun disappears and all is dark.
• He announces the third argument as the episode ends.

His words #

• sense of the letter; what a metaphor is meant to represent by likeness, not the false surface sense.
• figure; David as figure of Christ, as opposed to a metaphor.
• via / semita; common main road vs. short road; commands vs. counsels.
• brevis via; Albert the Great’s name for a summa.
• beginning of fewness; fewer causes are better if they are enough [ed.: principle of parsimony/simplicity].
• Natural Hearing; [ed.: Aristotle’s Physics].
• ninth book of Wisdom, fifth book of Wisdom, second book of Wisdom; [ed.: Metaphysics IX, V, II].
• ability; [ed.: potency]; passive potency, “the act of what is able to be insofar as it is able to be”.
• simply vs. not simply; act before ability simply, ability before act in the moved thing.
• nihil dat quod non habet; nothing gives what it does not have.
• moved mover / pulled puller; a mover that moves insofar as it is moved; essentially a middle.
• axiom of before and after (axiom of order); nothing is before or after itself.
• through itself vs. through another; a through-another presupposes a through-itself.
• hodos / via; road, rather than “way”.
• maker; his rendering of efficient cause (facere).
• manifestior; Thomas’s word for the first way.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Ia q.2 a.3: objections 1-2, sed contra (Exodus 3:14), first way, second way (translated from the Latin as he goes).

Mentioned

• Thomas Aquinas, exposition of Psalm 21 and of Psalm 24 (his numbering); Thomas’s commentary on Job (vol. 18 of his edition).
• Matthew and Mark (the cry on the cross).
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles: chapter on God’s existence and the chapter “whether there is any passive potency in God” (a chapter or two after); its five ways; order of divine attributes.
• Aristotle, Physics III (definition of motion), VI and VIII (middle terms; unmoved mover); the “natural road” at the beginning of the Physics.
• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX (act before ability), V (through itself / through another), II (no infinite series in all four causes).
• Aristotle, Posterior Analytics (no infinite series for form); Nicomachean Ethics I (for the end); Categories (senses of before).
• Thomas Aquinas, Sentences (before and after) — no locus given.
• Newton, Principia (nature affects not the pomp of superfluous causes).
• Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida (Ulysses on things in motion).
• Marx (man makes himself); Sartre, “individual nothingness” as transcribed [ed.: presumably Being and Nothingness (inferred)] (man a useless passion).

His questions #

• What is the sense of the letter of the 21st Psalm — David who then represents Christ, or Christ directly with David as figure? Left open; he says to look at the text again.
• Why does Thomas call the argument from motion the first and more manifest way? Because our knowledge begins with the senses and motion most catches the senses (Ulysses’ line).
• On what two premises is the argument from motion based? Whatever is moved is moved by another; there is some unmoved mover, since moved movers cannot go on forever.
• Isn’t coming into the room in some imperfect way an act of the ability to be in the room? Yes — when coming through the doorway you are already somewhat in the room.
• Is there something partly in the room without coming into the room? Yes, the man standing in the doorway; his being more in the room is accidental to him.
• Which is before in time, ability or act? In the thing going from ability to act, ability; simply, act, since it goes to act through something already in act.
• Would you get any motion for the caboose, or for the pulled puller, if there is nothing before it? No; however many cars, you have one grand pulled puller with nothing before it, so nothing moves.
• Would anything be sweet if everything were sweet through another? No; there must be something sweet through itself.
• Is that the way all words are learned, through other words? No; the first words are learned by associating a sound with something sensed.
• Is “self-made man” strictly speaking true? No; nothing is the maker of itself, or it would be before itself.
• In what chapter of the Summa Contra Gentiles is the argument from necessity? (student) The one on whether there is any passive potency in God, a chapter or two after the chapter on God’s existence.