Summa I, Q.14, Article 2: Does God Understand Himself?

Orientation #

He opens by turning to “the second article here” of the question on God’s knowledge, and refers back to act and ability in “the ninth book of Wisdom” and to first matter known by proportion “in the first book of Natural Hearing,” which “you may remember.” He closes with “I guess we have to kind of stop now here.” The previous class began Question 14 with Article 1, the next continues with Articles 3 and 4.

The class, in order #

1. Three objections against God knowing Himself (“It seems that God does not understand Himself”) #

The point: the article asks what God chiefly knows, and the objections all draw on how we know.

• Objection 1, from the book De Causis (aside: long thought to be Aristotle’s, in fact an Arab’s contraction of Proclus; Thomas commented on it; “like the last books of philosophic wisdom”): whoever knows his own essence returns to his essence by a complete return; God does not go outside Himself nor is moved; so He does not return to, hence does not know, His essence.
  • His gloss: even we return to ourselves imperfectly: we first know things around us, then our knowing them, then what kind of mind and animal we are. Reason thinking out the definition of reason (Shakespeare’s “large discourse, looking before and after”) is like the Word of God; loving what one understands is like the Holy Spirit: the image of the Trinity in us.
• Objection 2: to understand is a certain suffering or undergoing and being moved (De Anima III); science is assimilation to the thing known, which perfects the knower; nothing is moved, undergoes, is perfected by, or is like, itself.
• Objection 3: we are to the image of God according to our mind (Augustine); but our understanding understands itself only in understanding other things (De Anima III); so God too would know Himself only in knowing other things.

2. Sed contra and a remark on Scripture’s way of speaking (“no one knows except the Spirit of God”) #

• 1 Cor 2: the things of God no one knows except the Spirit of God; so God knows Himself.
• Aside: as with “no one knows the Father except the Son,” Scripture attributes what belongs to the divine nature (common to all three) to one person; the Son and Spirit also know the Father, the Father and Son also know what “the Spirit of God” knows. Heretics use, or rather misuse, such texts.

3. The body: immanent operation and pure act (“the sensible in act is a sense in act”) #

Conclusion: God understands Himself through Himself.

1. In operations going out to an outside effect the object (term) is outside the operator; in operations remaining in the operator the object is in him, and as it is in him, so is the act. Hence Aristotle: the sensible in act is the sense in act, the understandable in act is the understanding in act. Example: your colour and shape must act on my eye before I see; my eye actually seeing is, in a way, your colour and shape.
2. Sense and understanding differ from sensible and understandable only insofar as both are in ability: my eye at first is an ability to know your shape, your shape able to be known; later they become one.
3. God has nothing of potentiality but is pure act. He stresses the ninth book of Wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics IX]: after distinguishing kinds of ability and act, its third and culminating part treats their order; what goes from ability to act does so because of something already in act, so act is simply prior, and the first cause must be pure act.
4. Therefore in God understanding and understood are altogether the same: He neither lacks the understandable form (as we do when understanding in ability) nor has a form other than His substance (as we do when understanding in act); the form of the divine mind is the divine understanding itself.

• Distinction: angels understand themselves through themselves but do not understand everything through themselves as God does; we understand other things first, then return: I know the triangle, a universal; a universal must be separated from matter; so my understanding must be immaterial (he says “material,” a slip); I cannot know my knowing is immaterial before knowing the triangle.
• Corollary he draws: if God understood by a form other than Himself He would be in ability to it and not simple; so He understands primarily that of which He has the form, Himself; and in seeing Himself, “as we’ll learn later,” He sees other things, as their cause and as they are like Him.

4. Reply 1: returning to one’s essence means subsisting in itself (“nothing other than a thing to subsist in itself”) #

• A form perfecting matter is “poured out” upon it; insofar as it has being in itself, it returns to itself. If our soul had being only in the body it would be limited to the body; but it does not: one must exist before acting, and understanding the universal is not in the body, for what is in the continuous is here or there and so singular; matter is the source of individuation, so knowing natures apart from matter shows the mind is immaterial.
• Knowing powers that are acts of bodily organs do not know themselves: the eye does not know what an eye is, nor the ear an ear; only reason knows what reason is.
  • Aside on the Seven Wise Men’s Gnothi sauton (Thales, Solon, Chilon): “Know thyself” is addressed to what can know itself but does not, or not well: not to animals, plants, stones, nor to angels or God who know themselves primarily; so to man, more to soul than body, most of all to reason. Thomas’s comparison: reason’s thought of itself is like the Son proceeding as Word (Adoro te devote: nil hoc verbo veritatis verius), and reason’s love of reason seen as lovable is like the Spirit’s proceeding.
  • Aside: “Spirit of God” as a neglected name of the third person, parallel to “Son of God”; occasionally “Spirit of the Lord.”
• Per se subsistent knowing powers know themselves; to subsist per se belongs most of all to God, so in this way of speaking He most of all returns to His essence; but insofar as “return” implies motion it is not proper to God. Comparison: God “resting” on the seventh day, a way of speaking fitter for a creature whose operation is other than its substance.

5. Reply 2, part one: the equivocation of “suffering” and “undergoing” (“taken equivocally”) #

Point: to be moved and to undergo are said equivocally when applied to understanding (De Anima III; even sensing as undergoing is equivocal).

• Greek paschein, Latin patior, first mean suffering: being acted upon destructively. The word then moves by dropping part of its meaning: (a) being acted on with change but not for the worse: clay moulded from sphere to cube loses its shape but nothing contrary to its nature; (b) the senses, acted on by objects and thereby perfected, receiving another’s form while keeping their own, still bodily (eye, brain); (c) reason, acted on and perfected, with no body involved: seeing the nature of triangle, dog, cat. English “suffering” is stuck at the first meaning (the professor whose students’ faces say “why are you doing this to me?”); he uses “undergoing,” which still connotes suffering (“he’s undergone a lot” = he’s suffered a lot), though senses can be harmed (too bright a light blinds, too loud a sound deafens) or perfected (Mozart perfects the ear, a painting the eye).
• Aside: “understand” itself means “stand under,” as if acted upon.

6. Reply 2, part two: motion of the imperfect vs. act of the perfect (“the act of the perfect existing in the one acting”) #

• Motion in the first sense (Physics III, “the third book of Natural Hearing”): the act of what is able to be, insofar as able, incomplete, from one thing into another. Understanding is the act of the perfect existing in the one acting (the distinction from Wisdom IX, “it’s amazing what he does”).
  • Test he puts: while walking home, have I walked home? building a house, built it? making apple pie, made it? No; and once done, no longer doing. But understanding a triangle, have I understood it? Yes. Loving someone, have I loved them? Yes. Both are called motions, in different senses.
• Being perfected by, or made like, the understandable belongs to an understanding that is sometime in ability: it differs from the understandable and becomes like it through the understandable form (my eye is not like your shape until it receives it). The divine understanding, in no way an ability, is its own perfection and its own understandable. In God what is understood, what understands, and that by which it understands are one; in us all three differ: the triangle is not my understanding, nor is that by which I understand it. “Quite something, this guy’s understanding.”

7. Reply 3, and first matter known by proportion (“as the first matter in the order of actual things”) #

Point: our possible understanding is in the order of understandables what first matter is in the order of natural things: “a beautiful proportion,” first seen by Averroes if not earlier.

• First matter by itself is pure ability, unknowable in itself; Aristotle (Physics I, “the first book of Natural”) makes it known by proportion: first matter is to man and dog as clay is to sphere and cube. A proportion is a likeness of ratios; a ratio the order of one thing to another; and the likeness is distant, so do not make them more alike than they are.
• Mathematical warning, 4:6 as 2:3: (i) 2:3 is even to odd, so 6 must be odd? (ii) 2 and 3 are prime, so 4 and 6 must be prime? Both misread where the likeness lies; Euclid: 4 is the same parts of 6 as 2 of 3 (two of three twos, two of three units).
• The same misreading of the clay proportion: clay is a substance and sphere and cube accidents (shape, fourth species of quality), while man and dog are substances and first matter substance only in ability. The likeness lies rather in this: clay can be sphere or cube, not both at once, and to become the other ceases to be the one; so first matter can be man or dog, not both, and becomes the other only by ceasing to be this (the dog eating the man).
• Application: our understanding is understandable only in ability, made actual by receiving the natures of other things first, as first matter exists by receiving a form. Hence we are at the bottom of all understandings; God, pure act, at the other extreme; angels between, partly in ability, partly in act.
• The reply proper: natural being belongs to first matter only as reduced to act by a form other than itself; our possible understanding is likewise in potency to understandables, cannot operate except perfected by another’s understandable form, and so understands itself through an understandable form as it understands other things: from understanding the understandable it knows its own act, and through the act, the power.

8. Powers known through acts, acts through objects (“you know the powers of the soul through their acts”) #

• Sight and hearing differ because seeing and hearing differ, and these because colour and sound differ. Ethics likewise: chastity and sobriety are both moderations, distinguished by their objects (a woman, wine or beer), then their acts, then the virtues. Walking and talking: one can do either without the other, neither is a kind of the other, so the abilities differ.
• God is the exact opposite: pure act in the order of natural existence and of understandables, so He understands Himself through Himself: “that’s the way to go. That’s not the way for us to go.” We know ourselves through other things first, as the baby refers to himself in the third person.

His words #

• ability; his rendering for potency, throughout [ed.: potency].
• ninth book of Wisdom; [ed.: Metaphysics IX], on act and ability and their order.
• Natural Hearing; [ed.: Physics]; the first book on first matter, the third on motion.
• operation going outside / operation in the one operating; term outside vs. within the operator [ed.: transitive / immanent].
• understanding in ability / in act; lacking the understandable form vs. informed by it.
• return to one’s essence; = to subsist in itself; not proper to God insofar as it implies motion.
• poured out upon the matter; a form that has being only as perfecting matter.
• Gnothi sauton; “Know thyself,” addressed to reason.
• undergoing; his stand-in for paschein / patior, a word that has “moved” from destructive suffering to being perfected.
• motion, act of the imperfect vs. act of the perfect existing in the one acting; walking home vs. understanding, loving.
• possible understanding; the understanding as opposed to the act of understanding [ed.: possible intellect].
• proportion; a likeness of ratios; ratio; the order or relation of one thing to another.
• understanding, understood, that by which it understands; one in God, three in us.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 14, a. 2 (objections, sed contra, body, three replies).
• Handout “Note for Book One, Reading Thirteen,” p. 4, on Aquinas’s commentary on Physics I, lectio 13 (verified): first matter known by proportion.

Mentioned

• Book De Causis (from Proclus via an Arab; Thomas’s commentary).
• Aristotle, De Anima III (understanding as undergoing; the understanding knows itself through other things; sensible in act is sense in act).
• Aristotle, Physics III (definition of motion).
• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX (kinds and order of act and ability).
• 1 Corinthians 2; Gospel “no one knows the Father except the Son.”
• Augustine on the image of God in the mind; Thomas on the image of the Trinity.
• Shakespeare on reason (“large discourse, looking before and after”), from an earlier class.
• Adoro te devote (nil hoc verbo veritatis verius).
• Euclid on “the same parts” (ratio).
• Averroes on the possible intellect as first matter.
• Printed volume DHB Vol III, “The School of Aristotle,” p. 364 (verified source; not named in the transcript).

His questions #

• What do we first know, and how do we come back to ourselves? Things around us; then our knowing them; then the kind of mind and animal we are.
• If God understands by the form which is Himself, what does He understand primarily? Himself, that of which He has the form; other things in seeing Himself.
• To whom is “Know thyself” addressed? To man, not animals or angels; more to the soul than the body; most of all to reason.
• Does the eye know what an eye is? No; only reason knows what reason is.
• If somebody has “undergone a lot,” what do you understand? He has suffered a lot; so “undergoing” still carries the first meaning.
• When I’m walking home, have I walked home? When I understand a triangle, have I understood it? No; yes: motion of the imperfect vs. act of the perfect.
• What is a proportion, and what is a ratio? A likeness of ratios; the order or relation of one thing to another.
• Four is to six as two is to three: is six therefore odd, or four prime? What went wrong? I misunderstood where the likeness lies; 4 is the same parts of 6 as 2 of 3.
• Is first matter to man and dog as clay to sphere and cube, given clay is a substance and shapes accidents? Not in that respect; in that each can be either, not both, and becomes the other by ceasing to be the one.
• Are the ability to walk and the ability to talk the same ability? No: each act occurs without the other and neither is a kind of the other, so the powers differ.