Common Doctor, Dividing into Twos and Threes, the Aevum (q.10 a.5-6), and the Philosophy of the Continuous

Orientation #

He is continuing the Summa, question 10: the body and replies of article 5 (on the aevum) and all of article 6 (whether there is one aevum only). He announces next time: “the most universal thing,” the first two articles of question 11 (whether one adds something above being, whether one and many are opposed). The previous class covered aa. 3-4 and the objections opening a. 5; the next class covers q. 11 aa. 1-2.

The class, in order #

1. Heraclitus and the “common doctor” (“must be strong in what is common to all”) #

Point: the life of the mind together, like life in the city, is impossible without something common; this is why “common doctor” is a great title for Thomas.

• Heraclitus’s fragment: those who speak with understanding (by antonomasia, the wise) must be strong in what is common to all, as a city is strong in its law, even more so, since the city’s law is fed by one divine law.
• Teaching: the teacher leads the student from what the student already knows to what the teacher sees; the teacher must also have those starting points, so teaching is possible only on the basis of what is common to both. Conversation between equals: disagreement gets nowhere (“you’re off base because you don’t agree with me”) unless both go back to something common by which to judge.
• The city: driving on the right vs. the left, common laws about time; the one divine law not to take innocent life feeds many laws (speed limits, discharging guns in the city). Judging Nazi Germany’s laws bad requires a common natural or divine law, not merely “they disagree with ours.”
• Aristotle in the Metaphysics does this: takes the axioms common to all men and defends them, and understands the common words (whole, part, being, one) better than anyone; so he too is “the common doctor in a sense.”
• Aside: on a campus teacher and students must show up at the same time in the same room; obvious cases of the same need.

2. The most universals and who understands them (“Plato and Aristotle as the chief philosophers”) #

Point: being, thing, one, true, good are the most universal; only Aristotle and Thomas distinguished and ordered them, and without the most universal one understands nothing.

• Thomas, De Creaturis Spiritualibus ch. 17 (as he cites it), calls Plato and Aristotle the chief philosophers; so Boethius in the Consolation; Augustine knew Plato rather than Aristotle and follows him so far as conforms to faith; Albert the Great says the same.
• Question 11: before “whether God is one” (third article) and “most one,” two general articles: whether one adds something above being, and whether and how one and many are opposed. Question 16 likewise: first article on true, third and fourth comparing true to being and to good. Aristotle and Thomas distinguish the five in meaning, see the order among them, see that each word is equivocal and order its meanings, and see the different kinds of opposites (good/bad, true/false, one/many, being/non-being). “Nobody else has done that.”
• Argument:
  1. You cannot understand the less universal without the more universal — shown even in a definition: square = equilateral, right-angled quadrilateral; each part is said of more than square (equilateral of rhombus, right-angled of oblong, quadrilateral of more still), only the combination of square alone.
  2. Therefore you must understand the most universal before anything.
  3. Only Aristotle and Thomas fully understand the most universals (others cannot even enumerate them). Conclusion (put to a student, who supplies it): they are the only ones in a position to understand anything; that is what “common doctor” means.
• Also found in De Veritate “in different places.”

3. Student’s question: the rule of two or three (“that rule of two or three”) #

Point: divisions come back to two or three; more than three is usually two divisions crisscrossed or a division plus subdivision.

• He adopted the rule (holding “for the most part”) by induction from Thomas. Example: Thomas divides Matthew into three, then subdivides by twos and threes down to chapters, ignoring the 28-chapter division made for reference at the University of Paris.
• Dividing sacred doctrine (commentary on the Psalms): whoever teaches, teaches either things (faith and morals: Summa Theologiae, Summa Contra Gentiles, Compendium) or words (Scripture: commentaries on John, Matthew). Two.
• Dividing Scripture (Thomas’s work on the commendation and partition of sacred scripture): law vs. grace, from John: “the law was given by Moses, but truth came through Jesus Christ.” Christ calls the Old Testament sometimes “law,” sometimes “the law and the prophets,” sometimes “law, prophets and Psalms.” Old Testament: law of the king (Pentateuch plus prophets urging obedience) and law of the father (sapiential books, Psalms) — two, sometimes three with prophets separate. New Testament, three: origin of grace (Gospels), nature of grace (Paul), effect of grace, i.e. the Church (Acts, canonical Epistles, Apocalypse). Vatican II comes close: Gospels first as chief witness to Christ’s life and sufferings, then Paul, then Acts with origin of the Church, canonical Epistles its growth, Apocalypse its final state, though our Bibles put Acts between Gospels and Paul.
• Teaching things, two ways, both into three: (a) the two Summas: God in himself, God as maker, God as end and his providence — explicit in SCG, less clear in ST because moral theology expands the third part (his second-part volumes twice as big); Psalm 99 gives the same three (“know that the Lord is God, he made us, we are his flock”); (b) for people in general, following Augustine’s “Credo in Deum” on faith, hope and charity: Thomas’s catechetical instructions (Naples sermons) expound the Creed (faith), the Our Father and perhaps Hail Mary (hope), the two commandments of love and Ten Commandments (charity). Trent and the Catechism divide into four because sacraments are so important; Thomas told the Bishop of Panormitanum the sacraments pertain to one article of faith but may be expanded. Childhood catechism “way, truth, life” = commandments, creed, sacraments/prayer — same three.
• Why then five parts in the treatise on the substance of God? He toys with grouping them by two and three but “I’m not going to force the thing”; notes that in the Compendium unity of God sits among the chapters on simplicity. Likewise quality has four species in Aristotle.
• His own four kinds of students (want/able crisscrossed: pity those who want but cannot; not those who can but don’t; the rare one who both wants and can) = two divisions into two crisscrossed. Thomas’s four orders in comparison to reason (not made by reason; made by reason in its own acts, in acts of will, in matter) = two, then one subdivided into three; Thomas sometimes combines divisions “because you need fools to be able to see,” and most don’t.

4. Article 5, body: how the aevum differs (“a middle existing between them”) #

Point: the aevum is a middle between time and eternity, and the true difference is degree of recession from permanence of being.

• Difficulty of naming it (like “tragicomedy” for an intermediate form) is a sign the middle is less easily seen. Compare Aristotle treating oligarchy and democracy before the republic in between, and virtue as a middle between extremes.
• First opinion: eternity no beginning or end, aevum beginning but no end (angels did not always exist), time both (Apocalypse: “time will no longer be”). Thomas: per accidens, since even if aeviternal things always existed, or failed (possible to God), the three would still differ.
• Second opinion: eternity no before and after; time before and after with innovation and aging; aevum before and after without them. His illustration of what they mean: thinking one theorem, then another, then back — before and after in my thinking, nothing new, no aging. Thomas’s refutation: if innovation is referred to the measure, before and after cannot be together, so the later part is new — innovation as in time; if referred to the measured, a temporal thing grows old because its being is changeable, and before/after in the measure comes from changeableness of the measured (Physics IV); so if the aevum has no aging, its being is unchanged and its measure has no before and after — contradiction.
• Thomas’s answer: eternity measures permanent being; things recede from eternity as they recede from permanence. (1) Being that consists in change (motion) or is subject to change (corruptible things): time. (2) Being neither consisting in nor subject to change but with change joined to it in act or ability: celestial bodies (unchangeable substance, changing place — “we may not agree with Thomas there”) and angels (unchangeable being, changeable in choice as to nature, in understandings, affections and places in their own way): aevum. (3) Being neither changeable nor joined to change: eternity. So time has before and after in itself; aevum not in itself but joinable to it through something other than its being; eternity neither.
• Aside: Thomas distinguishes fixed stars from errantia, wanderers; Latin “err” and Greek “planet” (planan) both from wandering; Christ to the Sadducees, “you err, knowing neither the power of God nor the Scriptures.”
• Aside: “Does God love us because we are good, or are we good because God loves us?” — the latter; our goodness is an effect of his love, “a humbling consideration.”

5. Article 5, replies (“through time to be moved”) #

Point: the first two objections pull opposite ways (aevum is just time / just eternity); the angel is measured three ways.

• Ad 1 (Augustine, Genesis ad litteram VIII, “to the letter” — exactly to the words — God moves the spiritual creature through time): as regards affections and understandings, where there is succession, angels are measured by time (“to be moved through time is to be moved by one’s affections”); as regards natural being, by the aevum; as regards the vision of God’s glory, they partake of eternity. Joke: his guardian angel — sees God, gets things out of his way in time, being measured by aevum.
• Ad 2: the aevum is totum simul, but not eternity, because a before and after of operations is compatible with it.
• Ad 3: in the angel’s being itself no past or future, only in the changes joined to it; “is / was / will be” differ by our understanding comparing it to parts of time; “is” or “was” supposes something whose opposite is no longer subject to divine power (God cannot make it not be when it is, or not have been); “will be” supposes nothing, since God could still make the angel not be.
• Ad 4: the aevum is infinite in that it is not limited by time; for a creature not to be limited by something else is not inconvenient.

6. Article 6, objections and sed contra (“whether there is one evum only”) #

Point: four objections for many aeva; sed contra for one.

• Obj. 1: Esdras (apocryphal), “the power of the aeva” in the plural. Obj. 2: diverse genera have diverse measures; heavenly bodies and spiritual substances differ in genus. Obj. 3: aeviternal things do not all have one duration, some coming after others, clearest in souls. Obj. 4: things not depending on each other have no one measure; all temporal things have one time because the first motion is cause of all; but one angel is not cause of another. Sed contra: aevum is simpler than time and nearer eternity; time is one, so much more the aevum.
• Aside: “nobody else does this” — as in SCG IV, Thomas raises philosophical objections against the Incarnation and answers them; Aristotle in the book on dialectic gives exercising the mind as the first use of dialectic, and other minds, unexercised, are easily deceived.

7. Digression: our words go back to the continuous (“through bodily things”) #

Point: since we know spiritual things through bodily things, Thomas settles the unity of the aevum from the unity of time; occasion for a long aside that our first meanings are in the continuous.

• Thomas in De Potentia: all our words in their first meaning go back to the continuous, tending to place. Examples: difference = diaphora / differentia, “carry apart,” one here, one there; “understand,” to stand under; “above”: God is above us, but first the roof is above us; in logic the genus is above the differences, hence the tree of Porphyry (substance into material/immaterial, material into living/non-living — “like a Christmas tree”; Laval logic professor given one at Christmas). “Before and after” goes back to the continuous (magnitude, motion, then time); “discourse” of reason is a running.
• Physics VI is the philosophy of the continuous: divisible forever, not composed of indivisibles. De Koninck’s article, Paradoxes du devenir par la contradiction: the puzzle of what-is-not-a-circle becoming a circle: if the last instant of not-circle is the first instant of circle, contradiction; if not, there is a time between, in which it must be either — so no time between; hence Hegel concludes becoming is a contradiction, whence the Marxist idea that all change is contradiction. The same problem in Eucharistic theology: if the last instant of bread is the first instant of the Body, heresy; if not, a time with neither, and the Eucharist impossible. Aristotle’s “very subtle” solution: there is no last instant of not being a circle, only a last time, but there is a first instant of being a circle; the theologians could not solve it until Thomas used Aristotle, and the moderns repeat refuted mistakes.
• Falling back on the continuous breeds false imagination: God is not indivisible as a point is (a point has location in the continuous); God is indivisible outside the whole genus of the continuous — the first thing learned of God’s substance after his existence (q. 3, a. 1: God is not a body) is that he is not continuous.
• “Road” in thinking: road is first something continuous; Aristotle (On the Soul III) says thoughts are like numbers, not the continuous — you keep before and after, drop continuity. Between premises and conclusion no thought lies between (“every mother is a woman, Socrates is not a woman” — next thought: Socrates is not a mother), as three has a next number, but a line has no next longer line; thoughts not divisible forever. Jab at moderns who think the one divisible.
• Apocalypse: God is Alpha and Omega, archē and telos; first meaning of beginning is the beginning of this table, in the continuous; Aristotle in Metaphysics V starts there and works through the meanings to reach God as beginning. First meaning of “in” is in place. We call meanings “senses” because first meanings come from the senses; a child learns words by joining a sound to something sensed (“cookie” — taped with his son Paul).

8. Article 6, body: the cause of the unity of time, then of the aevum (“from the cause, the unity of time”) #

Point: time is one from the first motion, and the aevum is one because aeviternal things are measured by the first and simplest of them.

• Opinion 1: one time because one number of all numbered things, time being a number (the Philosopher, by antonomasia). Insufficient: time is not abstract number but number existing in the numbered — numbered number vs. numbering number; otherwise time would not be continuous and divisible forever. Continuity comes from the numbered, not the number (Latin measure examples: a span of cloth, cubit from elbow); and the number in the numbered is diverse for diverse things (six or seven of us here). Aside: his undergraduate teacher’s thesis on number; John of St. Thomas “passing over the vulgar distinction” the students should know.
• Opinion 2: unity of eternity, beginning of all duration — durations one in their beginning, many in the receivers. Opinion 3: first matter, first subject of motion. Neither suffices: what is one in a (remote) principle or subject is one only secundum quid.
• Thomas: the unity of time is from the unity of the first motion, the simplest, by which all others are measured (Metaphysics X, on one and many; property of the one to be a measure). Time is compared to the first motion as measure to measured and as accident to subject, whence its unity; to other motions only as measure, so not multiplied by them.
• Spiritual substances, two opinions: all proceed from God in equality (Origen, and some for many of them) — then many aeva, as many equal first aeviternal things; or in grade and order (Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy ch. 10: first, middle, last, and within each order) — then one aevum, since each thing is measured by the simplest in its kind (Metaphysics X). Second opinion truer, to be shown in the treatise on angels; so one aevum.
• Ad 1: aevum there means age — equivocation. Ad 2: heavenly bodies and spirits differ in genus but agree in unchangeable being (old opinion — “we can forget about that”; Thomas elsewhere allows the heavens may simply take longer to change than men’s lives, as Aristotle wrongly thought light instantaneous — “amazing how fast light is”). Ad 3: temporal things do not all begin together, yet one time, on account of the first measured; so with aeviternal things. Ad 4: the one measure need not be cause of the rest, only simpler.

9. Closing: God as measure of all things (“the measure of all things”) #

Point: if the simplest measures, God is in some sense the measure of all (Plato, the Laws — he corrects himself from another dialogue).

• The treatise on God’s substance has five parts (simple, perfect, infinite, unchanging, one); to perfect he attaches goodness, to infinite being everywhere, to unchanging eternity, but nothing to simple or one. A consideration of God as measure could be attached to either, since it is a property of the one to measure, and here the simple measures; in the Compendium unity and simplicity are together anyway. Left as a question.
• The one first measures number, then by analogy in other genera: Mozart the measure of musicians, Shakespeare of poets, Aristotle of philosophers.
• Next time: q. 11, first two articles.

His words #

• common doctor: Thomas’s title; understands what is common to all better than anyone except Aristotle.
• antonomasia: “those who speak with understanding” = the wise; “the Philosopher” = Aristotle.
• the most universals: being, thing, one, true, good; distinct and ordered.
• rule of two or three: divisions come to two or three “for the most part”; more = crisscross or subdivision.
• law of the king / law of the father: Thomas’s two parts of the Old Testament.
• evum [ed.: aevum]: the middle duration; “for want of a better name.”
• per accidens: of the beginning/end difference.
• innovation / growing old: his rendering of innovatio and veterascere.
• Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics].
• permanence of being: what eternity measures; recession from it grades the durations.
• errantia: wanderers, the planets; err = wander.
• totum simul: all at once, said of the aevum in ad 2.
• philosophy of the continuous: Physics VI.
• numbered number vs. numbering number [ed.: numerus numeratus / numerans]: time is the former.
• secundum quid: one in a remote principle or subject is one only in a respect.
• measure: property of the one; first in number, then by analogy in other genera.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, ST I q. 10 a. 5, body and replies 1-4.
• Thomas, ST I q. 10 a. 6, objections, sed contra, body, replies 1-4.
• Heraclitus, fragment on what is common to all (quoted in full).
• John 1 (“the law was given by Moses…”) quoted.

Mentioned

• Thomas, De Creaturis Spiritualibus ch. 17 (as he cites it); Compendium of Theology; Summa Contra Gentiles (division into three; book IV on the Incarnation); commentary on the Psalms (Psalm 99); commentary on Matthew; work on the commendation and partition of Scripture; catechetical instructions / Naples sermons; letter to the Bishop of Panormitanum; De Veritate; De Potentia (words go back to the continuous); ST I q. 3 a. 1; q. 11 aa. 1-3; q. 16 aa. 1, 3, 4; Thomas’s discussion of celestial change “in the book on universe” [unclear reference].
• Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy; Augustine, Enchiridion “Credo in Deum” (inferred title), De Genesi ad litteram VIII; Albert the Great; Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy ch. 10; Origen; Esdras (apocryphal); Apocalypse (time no longer; Alpha and Omega); Matthew, Christ to the Sadducees; Vatican II on Scripture; Trent; Catechism of the Catholic Church.
• Aristotle: Metaphysics (axioms; V on beginning; X on one and measure); Physics IV, VI; On the Soul III; Categories on quality (inferred); Topics on dialectic (inferred); Politics on oligarchy, democracy, republic (inferred); Ethics on virtue as a mean (inferred).
• Plato, Laws (God the measure); John of St. Thomas on numbered number; De Koninck, Paradoxes du devenir par la contradiction; Hegel; Marxists.

His questions #

• Is teaching, or conversation between equals, possible without something in common? No; only on a common basis can one lead or judge who is right.
• If you must understand the most universal first, and only Aristotle and Thomas understand it, who can understand anything? Only they (and those who learned from them) — the sense of “common doctor.”
• Would you divide sacred doctrine into two or three? Things vs. words (two); things into God in himself / maker / end, or faith, hope, charity (three).
• What is the aevum, on the second opinion, like? Thinking through theorems back and forth: before and after without novelty or aging — but Thomas shows this contradictory.
• Does God love us because we are good, or are we good because God loves us? We are good because God loves us.
• Is the last instant of not being a circle the first instant of being a circle? No last instant of not-circle, only a last time; there is a first instant of circle.
• What is the first thing learned about God’s substance after his existence? That God is not a body, hence not continuous.
• Is there a next thought? A next longer line? Yes a next thought (like numbers); no next longer line.
• If the simplest measures, is God the measure of all things, and where would you attach that — to simple or to one? Yes in some sense (Plato, Laws); attachment left open.