Faith, Hope and Charity in Jude; Is God's Knowledge Discursive? Is It the Cause of Things? (Summa I, q.14, aa.7–8)

Orientation #

He refers back to “the previous articles” showing that God knows things other than himself (prev. lecture), and closes by proposing a break “before we do the ninth article.” The previous class treated q.14 aa.5–6 (whether God knows others, and particularly); the next treats God’s knowledge of non-beings and of evil.

The class, in order #

1. An aside from Jude: faith, hope, charity, eternal life (“building up yourselves in the most holy faith”) #

Point: Jude 20–21 ties the three theological virtues to eternal life in one sentence, the order of the third way of presenting sacred doctrine.

• Reading the Golden Chain on Matthew 10 (the list of apostles): Mark orders the first four Peter, James, John, Andrew — the fathers say by dignity, since those three were at the Transfiguration, Gethsemane, the raising of Jairus’s daughter. Thaddeus/Jude, brother of James (the lesser, of Alphaeus), wrote one short epistle, the last one.
• Three orders of sacred doctrine: (a) the order of the books of Scripture; (b) the Summa order — God in himself, God as maker, God as end; (c) Augustine’s Enchiridion order, followed by Thomas in the Catechetical Instructions (the “Naples sermons”) and the unfinished Compendium of theology written for his brother: faith (the creed), hope (the Our Father, sometimes the Hail Mary), charity (the two commandments of love and the Ten). This order is most appropriate for a beginner; by these three virtues, which have God himself as object, we are ordered to eternal life — the same order in the proemium of Dei Verbum, quoting Augustine (“by believing we come to hope, by hope to love”).
• Greek read word by word: humeis de agapetoi (but you, beloved); epoikodomountes — from the word for building a house, generalised to building upon; tē hagiotatē humōn pistei (in/by your most holy faith); en pneumati hagiō proseuchomenoi (praying in the Holy Spirit — no word “hope,” but Augustine and Thomas connect prayer with hope); heautous en agapē theou tērēsate (keep yourselves in the love of God); prosdechomenoi to eleos tou kyriou hēmōn Iēsou Christou eis zōēn aiōnion (awaiting the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life).
• Psalm 126 “unless the Lord build the house” in the fathers: the house is the Church, or the soul — foundation faith, walls hope, roof charity; hence his interest in Jude’s house-word.
• Aside: economics from oikos, the household science; the married pair of economists at the school.
• A student reads the English of vv. 20–21.

2. Understanding God and loving God (“understanding God should help you to love God”) #

Point: the two are not the same, but each should feed the other.

• Understanding gives reasons for loving; Francis allowed theology in his order provided it not extinguish devotion. Conversely real love makes you want to understand as far as you can; one can love God more in this life than understand him.
• Aside: don’t throw the parish straight into this.

3. Setting up a.7: “in knowing himself,” not “from knowing himself” (“there’s no shadow of change in Him”) #

Point: aa.5–6 could be misread as if God draws conclusions about creatures from himself, as we know a conclusion from premises.

• Better to say God knows other things in knowing himself; “from” implies movement in God, and another catholic epistle says there is not even a shadow of change in him.
• Discourse: he defined reason before by Shakespeare’s “large discourse, looking before and after”; medieval logicians use discursus almost as a synonym for reasoning; from discurrere, to run from one thing to another (same root as race course, “course of human events”), but here a movement inside reason, especially from what you know to what you don’t.

4. Article 7, objections and sed contra (“likeness is a dangerous thing”) #

• Obj. 1: God’s knowledge is in act, not habit; per Aristotle, Topics II (a book on dialectical reasoning), one knows many things habitually at once but understands only one in act — he knows all 48 theorems of Euclid I in habit, one at a time in act; so God runs from one to another. His comment: this draws God down to our mind. Aside: Thomas on the Trinity says likenesses for generation in God must be taken from the higher creatures (intelligible generation, as John’s prologue), and even then only a likeness.
• Obj. 2: to know effect through cause is the discourser’s way. His gloss: Thomas distinguishes four discourses — cause to effect, effect to cause (more often), like to like (any analogy, “this is to that as…”), opposite to opposite (his own defining of comedy from tragedy: tragedy moves to pity and fear, so comedy to the contrary emotions).
• Obj. 3: God knows creatures more perfectly than we, and we know effects in created causes by running from cause to effect.
• Plato in the Sophist: likeness is slippery, easily upsets you.
• Sed contra: Augustine, De Trinitate XV — God sees all things not bit by bit (first here, then there) but together at once; the opposite of “before and after.” He thinks De Trinitate Augustine’s greatest work, though the Confessions is the popular one.

5. Body: two kinds of discourse, neither in God (“one by succession only”) #

Point: this is the distinction he always uses with Shakespeare’s definition.

• A. discourse by succession only: after understanding one thing in act, turning to another (his move from Jude to this article; imagining scene after scene of the Pickwick Papers; looking from one card to the next).
• B. discourse by causality: the first thing is the cause of coming to the second — syllogism: “speech in which some statements being laid down (firmly in the mind), another follows necessarily because of those laid down.” Example: every mother is a woman, no man is a woman, therefore no man is a mother. The last clause matters: Shakespeare’s “it must follow as the night the day” — night follows day necessarily, but not because of day; the cause is a third thing (sun or earth’s rotation). In the syllogism the second follows because of the first. I don’t see the second card through the first, but I know the conclusion through the premises — so B is what defines reason, since senses and imagination share A.
• Angels have no discourse either (his old teacher liked to talk about angels); Isaac, whom Thomas often quotes: we live in the shadow of understanding — we think much to understand a little; the angel understands at once, which is why the angels chose or refused God straight off.
• A cannot belong to God: what we understand successively considered singly, we understand together if in something one — parts in a whole, diverse things in a mirror. His example: thinking what a man is and what a stone is are two acts; but thinking “man is not a stone” knows both together in the one statement, else I could never know it. God knows all things in one, himself, so together (simul: at the same time / together), not successively.
• B cannot belong to God, reasons: (1) it presupposes A — premises first, then conclusion; (2) it goes from known to unknown, so the second is not known in the first but from it; the discourse ends when the second is seen in the first, effects resolved into causes — hence the names Prior and Posterior Analytics, a kind of circle, conclusion taken apart back into premises. God sees effects in himself as in a cause, so no discourse. Added: change from ignorance to knowledge would be change in God, and God is simple, his knowledge himself — knowledge itself ignorant would be like whiteness itself black, heat itself cold.

6. Replies to a.7 and consequences (“in primo, not ex primo”) #

• Ad 1: one understanding in God, but many understood in something one. He points to the body’s language: the conclusion is not known in primo but ex primo — so say “in knowing himself,” and be careful with “through.” Marvel of the syllogism: both premises must be in mind at once, or no conclusion follows; a kind of unity.
• Ad 2: God knows effect in the cause, we by discourse — the imperfection of our mind (Isaac again): knowing the cause we don’t at once see its consequences; Euclid’s surprising conclusions from what you already knew. Thomas: our understanding is by way of a little motion.
• Ad 3: God sees effects of created causes in those causes better than we, but his knowledge of effects is not caused by knowledge of the causes.
• How then is reason “godlike” in Shakespeare? Only insofar as reason understands; the more you understand, the more like God, especially understanding God — though in this life only a consoling understanding (Thomas), before we see him as he is (Augustine, who wanted to understand what he believes). Believing before seeing is natural: to learn the Pythagorean theorem (Euclid I.47) you must believe that the 46 prior theorems lead there, or you won’t get there.

7. Digression: Euclid III.17, tangent from an outside point (“draw four lines in a certain order”) #

Point: how to find, among infinitely many points on the circle, the one to which a line from the outside point will be tangent — “very subtle.”

• Known already: a line at right angles to a radius at its endpoint touches the circle. Construction in order: (1) straight line from the centre to the point; (2) with it as radius, a second circle; (3) a perpendicular to the first line at the circle; (4) a line from where that hits the outer circle down to the centre, which cuts the inner circle at the wanted point. Proof: two triangles equal (common angle, equal sides), so the angle at the point corresponds to the constructed right angle, hence tangent by the prior theorem. Each step uses something already had (the first line gives the radius of the second circle) — student remark.
• Books III–IV are the circle books. Aside: he meant to write “Tragedy and Geometry”: both work on imagination, tragedy making a likeness, geometry imagining constructions while reasoning.

8. Article 8: is God’s knowledge the cause of things? — setup and objections (“three possibilities”) #

• Conformity of mind and things: either things cause knowledge (our mind, through senses — hence “does that make sense,” “come to your senses”), or knowledge causes things (God’s mind and things), or a third causes both (the angels: God creates their minds already formed with thoughts and creates things — a “pre-established harmony,” Einstein’s phrase).
• Obj. 1: Origen on Romans — a thing is not future because God knows it, but known because future. Obj. 2: cause posited, effect posited; God’s knowledge eternal, so creatures from eternity. Obj. 3: Metaphysics X, the knowable is prior to knowledge and its measure; what is posterior and measured cannot be cause — again submitting God’s knowing to ours.
• Sed contra: Augustine, De Trinitate XV — creatures spiritual and bodily are not known because they are, but are because he knows them.

9. Body of a.8: the artist’s knowledge, plus will (“the same knowledge of opposites”) #

• God’s knowledge is to creatures as the artist’s to artificial things (things made by art). Use in the Trinity: the Word proceeds from God knowing himself, which seems against being first cause; but the first cause causes as an artist, through thought — the Word is the thought through which all things are made (John). The artist works through understanding, so the understood form is the beginning of operation as heat of heating (Metaphysics VII); even Marx: the house is made in the head before in wood and stone.
• But a natural form is a source of action only as inclined to the effect, and the intelligible form only if joined to an inclination — the will. So the Greek philosophers who said love is the beginning, and the one who said mind is, each had part of the truth: mind gives rise to nothing without will.
• Reason (Metaphysics IX): the same knowledge is of opposites — the doctor can heal or sicken; his logic lets him reason rightly or fool students on exams; grammar, “I am / I is your professor”; the rhetorician persuades either way “depending on who’s paying.” Plato’s Symposium ends with Socrates telling Agathon (tragedian) and Aristophanes (comic) that one who knew could write both; Homer wrote the Iliad and the lost comic Margites (a worthless one), which Aristotle’s Poetics says is to comedy as the Iliad to tragedy; Shakespeare does both, Molière only comedy, Alec Guinness plays both. Student: knowledge of high blood pressure is necessarily knowledge of normal — yes, in the very definition. The bright student’s objection that ethics shouldn’t be taught because it teaches how to be bad — “some truth in the objection.”
• Conclusion: the form open to opposites produces a determined effect only if determined to one by desire; God causes through understanding since his being is his understanding; so his knowledge causes as will is joined to it — called the science of approbation (approval).

10. Replies to a.8 (“cause of consequence, not cause of being”) #

• Ad 1: Origen attended to the notion of science, which causes nothing unless will is joined. “Foreknown because future” holds as cause of consequence: if things are future, it follows God foreknows them; but their being future does not cause his knowing, his knowing causes their being.
• Ad 2: knowledge causes things as they are in his knowledge, and there they are not such as to be from eternity. Boethius takes this up in the last book of the Consolation (Lady Philosophy): the way we know need not be the way things are — his “central question of philosophy,” to which most answer yes and Aristotle no. What you say about things must be as they are; how you know needn’t: I know the glass’s shape through colour and eyes, or without; I know the past now without being in the past.
• Ad 3: natural things lie between God’s knowledge and ours — we take knowledge from them (they are prior and the measure of ours), God’s knowledge is prior and their measure; as a house is between the artist’s knowledge and the knowledge of one who comes on it already made. Our mind is like the man coming upon the finished house — “art imitates nature.” Aristotle in Metaphysics X speaks of our knowledge.
• Break proposed before the ninth article.

His words #

• three orders of sacred doctrine: Scripture’s order; God in himself / maker / end; faith, hope, charity
• epoikodomountes: building up, from building a house
• discourse: running from one thing to another (discurrere); in reason, from known to unknown [ed.: discursus]
• discourse by succession only vs. discourse by causality: the second is when the first thing is the cause of reaching the second
• syllogism: “speech in which some statements being laid down, another follows necessarily because of those laid down”
• “the shadow of understanding” (Isaac): thinking much to understand a little
• simul: at the same time, together
• in primo / ex primo: known in the first vs. from the first
• consoling understanding: what we have of God in this life
• “the Wisdom” / “First Philosophy”: [ed.: Metaphysics], “the ninth book after the books of natural philosophy”
• artificial things: things made by art
• science of approbation: God’s knowledge as cause, will joined
• cause of consequence vs. cause of being
• the central question of philosophy: does truth require that the way we know be the way things are?

Texts #

Read in class

• Epistle of Jude, vv. 20–21 (Greek, then English)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 14, a. 7 (whole article)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 14, a. 8 (whole article)

Mentioned

• Golden Chain on Matthew 10; Mark’s list of apostles
• Augustine, Enchiridion; De Trinitate XV; Thomas, Catechetical Instructions, Compendium of theology
• Dei Verbum, proemium; Psalm 126
• Aristotle, Topics II; Metaphysics VII, IX, X; Poetics; Prior and Posterior Analytics
• Plato, Sophist; Symposium; Homer, Iliad and Margites
• Euclid, Elements I (48 theorems, I.47), III.17
• Shakespeare’s definition of reason (“large discourse”); “it must follow as the night the day”
• Origen, commentary on Romans; Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, last book
• Dickens, Pickwick Papers; Karl Marx on the house in the head

His questions #

• Which kind of discourse was my move from Jude to this article? Succession only — not drawing conclusions from faith, hope and charity about God.
• Every mother is a woman, no man is a woman — what follows necessarily? No man is a mother, because of those laid down.
• Is day the cause of night following it? No; some third thing, the earth’s rotation.
• Is there any distinction between God and his knowledge? Could knowledge itself be ignorant? No; like whiteness itself being black.
• How can Shakespeare call reason godlike if it is defined by discourse? Only insofar as reason understands, and so becomes like God.
• Could there be knowledge of abnormal blood pressure that wasn’t knowledge of normal? No; the same knowledge of both, in the very definition.
• Does knowing the glass’s shape without colour, or the past now, make it false? No: the way we know needn’t be the way things are.