Summa Theologiae I, Q.3, Articles 3–4: God is His own nature and His own existence

Orientation #

He begins “up to the third article, I believe,” and argues from “the previous article,” that God is not composed of matter and form, so a.3 follows a.2 “because the nature of the thing is like the form to the individual” (prev. lecture). He says the question of concrete and abstract names will be treated “more formally and completely” in questions 12 and 13; “we’re kind of anticipating here.” Verified sources also flag q. 93 and a handout page (“The Before and After in the Acts of Reason”, p. 5, probably the beginning/middle/end material) though the transcript names neither. The next class takes up articles 5 and 6 (genus, accidents).

The class, in order #

1. Article 3, the question: you and what you are (“you and what you are are not identical”) #

The question is whether God and his essence or nature (what he is) are the same, as they are not in us.

• Socrates is a man, but Socrates is not what a man is: otherwise he would be the only man, and to be a man would be to be Socrates.

2. Objection 1 and why we have two kinds of names (“nothing is in itself”) #

Obj. 1: nothing is in itself (Aristotle, “Natural Hearing, which the rude multitude call the Physics”, book 4, where he distinguishes the eight senses of in, in none of which is a thing in itself); but the nature of God, his deity or Godhood, is said to be in God; therefore God is not his nature.

• His question: is that how it is in God, or in our knowledge?
• Why healthy/health, sick/sickness, wise/wisdom, good/goodness? Reason’s own object is the what-it-is of a thing sensed or imagined; these are all composed of matter and form, and form is that by which something is something, so we have one word for the concrete thing and one for the form by which it is. We cannot avoid this way of thinking even about God; we negate the imperfection when we speak of him.
• “God is whatever he has, but I am not what I have”: I have human nature, health, some knowledge, but am not human nature, health, knowledge.
• Why “have”? Because we know God from creatures. The abstract name brings out his simplicity; the concrete shows he is perfect (if God were not wise he would not be perfect). Lest wisdom seem added to God, we say he is wisdom itself; lest that seem to make him merely that-by-which, we add that he is wise. Dionysius: both ways of speaking are “limping”.

3. Objection 2: effects are like their cause (“every agent makes what is like itself”) #

Obj. 2: the effect is assimilated to its cause (a statement that recurs in Thomas); but in created things the individual substance (suppositum) is not the same as its nature (Socrates is not human nature); therefore neither is God his divine nature.

• He notes there is “quite a distance” though we are like God.
• Aside: teaching Shakespeare’s exhortation to use reason, which calls reason “godlike”, a Saudi student objected that nothing is like God; he cited the Fourth Lateran Council (no likeness between creature and God without a greater unlikeness), which he once heard Paul VI quote, to show they were not far apart.

4. Sed contra: life itself, not only living (“just as life has itself to the one living”) #

Of God it is said he is vita, life itself, not only living (our Lord in John: “I am the road, the truth and the life”; as man he is the via, as God truth itself and life itself). As life is to the living, so Godhood (deitas) is to God (Deum); therefore God is his deity.

5. Responsio: essence vs. suppositum in things of matter and form (“humanity comprehends in itself those things”) #

God is the same as his essence, because the reason essence and suppositum differ is matter, and God has none.

1. In things composed of matter and form, nature differs from suppositum: the essence comprehends only what falls in the definition of the species (humanity = that by which man is man, nothing else).
2. Individual matter with its individuating accidents does not fall in the definition: this flesh and these bones, whiteness or blackness, are not in what a man is (“otherwise a black man wouldn’t be a man”); yet they are included in the man.
3. So the man has something human nature does not have; man and human nature are not wholly the same. Human nature signifies as a formal part of man, since defining principles stand as form to the individuating matter.

• Aristotle’s definitions: matter is that from which something comes to be, existing within it; form is “the definition of what was to be”. Form completes the thing, making it what it is: this table is a table not because it is wood but first because of its form. Hence the link form / what-a-thing-is, and hence a.3 follows a.2: “these things are very well ordered” in Thomas.

4. In things not composed of matter and form, where forms are individuated through themselves, the forms are themselves subsisting supposita; suppositum and nature do not differ.
5. Since God is not composed of matter and form (a.2), God is his own deity, his own life, and whatever else is said of him.

6. Why matter and extension make many of one kind (“it is only because of the matter”) #

In natural and mathematical things the what-it-is is not altogether the individual; the reason is matter subject to extension.

• Two circles or two isosceles triangles of the same size differ only as here and there; the two endpoints of a line differ not in nature but in position.
• Many windows of the same kind: because there is enough glass; Christmas cookies: enough dough, cut off by division of the continuous; your flesh is cut off from your neighbour’s flesh likewise.
• In math the matter is the continuum, which Aristotle calls “intelligible matter” but “might be better named imaginable matter”. Euclid’s first theorem (equilateral triangle): one circle here, one circle there.
• Take away matter and extension and each thing differs in kind and is the same as what it is; this is what a.3 deduces from a.2.
• Plato “in a way saw this” first, though he erred by putting what-a-man-is by itself in another world: there is only one what-a-man-is there, anticipating what is said of God and the angels, no two of the same kind. Thomas: would angels love each other more if of one kind? No: the more intellectual, the more one loves the common good, and there is more common good in the diversity of species.

7. Student remark on “inclusive language”; names across languages (“you work with the language that you have”) #

A student links the concrete/abstract point to “humankind”; his answer: languages simply differ in how many words they have.

• In English “name” is common to noun and verb; Greek and Latin use one word (onoma, nomen) for both, so Ammonius Hermeiou on the Peri Hermeneias (whom Thomas followed a lot) must keep saying “here onoma is common to onoma and rhema; here opposed to the verb”. Aristotle’s definitions: both are vocal sounds signifying by agreement, no part signifying by itself; the verb signifies with time in addition, and so gets a new name.
• Reversed for man: Greek/Latin have homo / vir / femina, English has “man” for both. He says “mankind” and doesn’t bother; C. S. Lewis’s Four Loves on Greek’s several words for love shows the translation problem.

8. Reply to obj. 1: the simple known through the composed (“we are not able to speak except in the manner of composed things”) #

Of simple things we can speak only in the way of composed things, from which we get our knowledge.

• Aristotle (De Anima III): reason’s own object is the what-it-is of something sensed or imagined, all composed. Even Euclid’s point, more known to us than God, is known negatively (“that which has no parts”).
• Thomas says David of Dinant “most stupidly” taught God is first matter; not gratuitous: nothing is further apart than God, pure act, and first matter, pure passive ability; everything between is composed. “God is a stone” would have been less stupid. Yet both extremes are simpler than the composed middle, and “pure” in both is a negation: ability without act, act without passive ability. So the extremes are known by negating something found in the composed middle. The whole of question 3 works this way: not composed this way, or this, then in no way, then not entering composition with others.
• Same pattern in Aristotle’s beginning / middle / end: the middle has something before and after; beginning and end are defined by negating one of these.
• Boethius (De Trinitate): you cannot lead God back to the imagination; but one never thinks without imagining, so one imagines and negates: “God is not a body” uses the image of a body.
• The reverse of God: he knows composed things by knowing himself, the simple cause; we know the cause through the effect, and the first cause “at the end of the fourteen books of Wisdom” (Sherlock Holmes: “we’ve got to reason backwards”).
• Hence concrete names to signify his subsistence (only composed things subsist before us), abstract names to signify his simplicity. Dionysius: all these names can be affirmed and denied of God. Homo / humanitas: human nature signifies that by which, not what is; man signifies what has human nature and so is composed. Both carry a defect.
• Aristotle: truth does not require that the way we know be the way things are; but distinguish the two, and here we know God more as he is not.
• Thomas quotes a prophet: “in that day you shall have one name” — in the direct vision one name, not the concrete and abstract pair nor a multiplicity of attributes. (He cannot find the passage in his English Bible.)
• So “the Godhood is in God” refers to diversity in our mind’s way of taking things, not to any diversity in the thing. The beginning of the trouble of our mind is not seeing some distinction or misunderstanding some distinction. Real distinction in God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit (unusual, but real). Distinction between God and the divine nature, or between God’s knowledge and his love: in our knowing only, corresponding to its imperfection. Sabellius (heretical): Father, Son, Spirit just three names of one.

9. Reply to obj. 2: imitation as far as able (“cannot be represented except through many”) #

Effects of God imitate him (image and likeness), but not perfectly, only as they are able; what is simple and one cannot be represented except through many, hence the composition in which suppositum and nature are not identical.

• “I’m not exactly and wholly the same as what I am — a very strange thing”; Plato’s seeing it was a great accomplishment, whatever mistakes in unfolding it. Boethius, Albert and Thomas call Plato and Aristotle the chief philosophers; Augustine praises the Pythagoreans.

10. Article 4, the objections: common being, and knowing that vs. what (“the common being which is said of all”) #

Obj. 1: if God’s essence were his being, nothing could be added to the divine being; but the being to which no addition is made is the common being said of all; so God would be the being said of all, which is false (Wisdom 14: they gave the incommunicable name to wood and stones).

• Hegel, in the Logic, explicitly identifies the being said of all things with God, even quoting “I am who am”; the Summa Contra Gentiles has a chapter devoted to showing God is not the being said of all — “apparently Hegel never read that”.
• Shakespeare’s pun (Troilus and Cressida): Cressida “kissed by the general, but not kissed in general”. General MacArthur is a universal cause but said of no one; “soldier” is said of everyone in the army. Two senses: universale in causando vs. universale in praedicando; people confuse them.
• His Wisdom exam: why is the man of art or science wiser than the man of experience? Aristotle (proem) gives two differences: experience knows singulars, art the universal (said of many), from which the man of experience may even do better since action is in the singular; second, experience knows only that, art knows why, the cause, and from this he argues to art’s superiority. Students ran the two together, the same confusion. Obj. 2: we can know whether God is but not what he is; so being and quidditas (whatness; Shakespeare mocks the scholastic “quiddities”) cannot be the same. Sed contra: Hilary, De Trinitate VII (after Augustine, perhaps the most quoted in Thomas’s treatise on the Trinity): being is not something that happens to God but the subsisting truth of God himself.

11. Responsio: three arguments that God is his being (“God is not only his own essence or nature, but also his own being”) #

1. Whatever is in a thing besides its nature is caused, either by the essential principles (as a property: risibility follows on man, the stock logic example) or by something outside (heat in water from fire, as when you make tea). If being were other than nature, it would be caused by outside (then God is an effect, not first efficient cause) or by the nature itself (then the nature would exist before it exists, a contradiction). So in God being and essence are not other.
2. Being is the actuality of every form or nature: goodness or humanity signify nothing in act unless signified to be. So being other than essence stands to it as act to potency. Like form and matter but not the same (SCG shows of angels, where existence differs from what they are, that this distinction is not matter-form, though both are act and ability). God is pure act (shown above), so no such composition; his essence is his being.
3. What has fire and is not fire is on fire by participation; what has being and is not being is a being by partaking. God is his essence; if not his being, he would be a being by partaking, not essentially, hence not the first being, which is absurd.

• “I am who am”: SCG calls it the sublime truth taught to Moses; now the reason. Hilary the convert read Exodus and this was a motive of credibility for a philosophically thoughtful man. He is surprised Thomas does not quote Exodus here (a student: he does at q. 12).
• Thomas stops at three where SCG gives ten or twelve (“the lady doth protest too much”, the student gets lost); three is enough, per Aristotle, and “Heisenberg sees that too”. Exercise: recall the three at night. He recalls the pure-act argument first (“I’m a pure act man”: act is simply before ability, so the first being is pure act); a student recalls the participation argument; the class reconstructs the first (caused by another, or nature before itself).

12. Pantheism aside (“living off the corpse of Hegel”) #

Identifying God’s being with the being said of all identifies God with all things: Hegel is in the pantheistic tradition.

• Tocqueville, Democracy in America (second volume, first book, ch. 7): democratic customs give men pantheistic notions, visible in French literature and German philosophy; his example for students: “the force be with you”, becoming part of the force after death. Nineteenth-century church pronouncements repeatedly correct professors for pantheism; a cardinal noted passages in Rahner and Küng that sound pantheistic. Joke: philosophers after Hegel live off his corpse like maggots.

13. Replies of a.4: two ways of “no addition”; two senses of “to be” (“to be is said in two ways”) #

Reply 1: “that to which no addition is made” is twofold: (a) of its nature it excludes addition, as irrational animal excludes reason; (b) it does not include addition, as animal in general is without reason but not of its nature lacking it. Divine being is without addition the first way; common being the second: when Aristotle divides being by the figures of predication (substance, quantity, quality…) he adds to being in general. So an equivocation in the objection. Reply 2 (“even more surprising”, from Aristotle’s Wisdom V on the senses of being): to be signifies (a) the act of being, (b) the composition of a statement the soul makes joining predicate to subject. In the first way we do not know God’s being, any more than his nature, since they are the same; in the second we know that the statement “God is” is true, from his effects. “That’s a very subtle thing”; “chew it around in your mind for a while.” Break.

His words #

• essence or nature: “what he is”; deity, Godhood: the nature of God
• Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics]; “which the rude multitude call the Physics”
• ability [ed.: potency]; pure ability in the passive sense = first matter; pure act = God
• individual substance, the suppositum, “the underlying thing”
• form: “the definition of what was to be”; matter: “that from which something comes to be, existing within it”
• formal part: what human nature signifies with respect to the man
• intelligible / “imaginable” matter: the continuum in mathematics
• limping (Dionysius): imperfect, of both concrete and abstract naming of God
• fourteen books of Wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics]; ninth book “on ability and act”
• being said of all things, common being: not God (against Hegel)
• universale in causando vs. universale in praedicando
• quidditas: “the whatness, the what it is”
• being (to be) in two ways: act of being; composition of a statement
• motive of credibility: Hilary and “I am who am”

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 3, a. 3 (objections, sed contra, responsio, replies)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 3, a. 4 (objections, sed contra, responsio, replies) Mentioned
• Aristotle, Physics IV (eight senses of “in”); De Anima III (reason’s object); Metaphysics I proem (art vs. experience), V (senses of being), IX (ability and act); Peri Hermeneias (noun, verb)
• Ammonius Hermeiou, commentary on the Peri Hermeneias
• Euclid, Elements, def. of point; proposition I.1
• John: “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (ch. 14 inferred); Wisdom 14; Exodus “I am who am”; an Old Testament prophet, “one name” (locus not found by him)
• Dionysius (names affirmed and denied of God); Boethius, De Trinitate; Hilary, De Trinitate VII
• Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles (God not being-said-of-all; angels’ existence vs. matter-form); Summa I qq. 12-13
• Fourth Lateran Council (likeness/greater unlikeness); Sabellius; David of Dinant
• Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida; Hegel, Logic; Tocqueville, Democracy in America II.1.7; C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves
• Verified sources list Summa I q. 93 and handout “The Before and After in the Acts of Reason”, p. 5 (probably segments 8-9), not named in the transcript.

His questions #

• Is Socrates and what a man is the same? No: he would be the only man.
• Why do we have abstract and concrete names (health/healthy, wisdom/wise)? Because reason’s object is the what-it-is of composed things: one word for the thing, one for the form by which it is.
• How can you have two circles or two triangles exactly the same kind? Only because of matter subject to extension: one here, one there (enough glass, enough dough).
• Would angels love each other more if they were the same kind? No: the more intellectual, the more one loves the common good, which is greater in diversity of species.
• Is the point known positively or negatively? Negatively: “that which has no parts”.
• What does “pure” mean in “pure ability” and “pure act”? A negation of something in the composed middle: ability without act; act without passive ability.
• Is “the Godhood is in God” a distinction in God or in our knowing? In our way of knowing; the real distinction in God is Father, Son, Spirit.
• Can you remember the three arguments that God is his being? Pure act; participation; being other than nature must be caused, by another or by the nature before itself.
• How can we know whether God is but not what he is, if being and essence are the same? We know the statement “God is” is true, from effects; not the divine act of being in itself.