Summa I q.14 a.11: Whether God Knows Singulars – Practical Knowledge, Fiction and the Likeness of Matter to God

Orientation #

He opens “Up to Article Eleven, I believe” and prays before reading. A student refers to “last time” when he explained Aristotle’s argument against Plato that form is godlike (prev. lecture); he does not announce next time. The previous class treated whether God knows non-beings and evil; the next treats a. 12 on whether God knows infinite things.

The class, in order #

1. The three objections and the sed contra (“It seems that God does not know singulars”) #

The point: all three objections transpose our way of knowing into God.

• Obj. 1: the divine understanding is more immaterial than ours; ours, on account of immateriality, does not know singulars; “as is said in the second book about the soul, reason is of universals, sense of singulars”; Boethius on Porphyry: a thing is singular when sensed, universal when understood.
• Obj. 2: only powers that see forms not separated from material conditions know singulars; in God things are most separated from materiality.
• His gloss on 1 and 2: both rest on the fact that our mind gets its knowledge from things; things in their material conditions cannot be received in an immaterial understanding, so they are separated from what makes them singular, one differing from another. Even in math: if I imagine a square but understand what it is, I understand something universal.
• Obj. 3: all knowledge is through likeness; the beginning of singularity is matter, which as being in potency only is altogether unlike God, pure act. He links this to Aristotle, first book of Natural Hearing: form is something godlike because form is act.
• Sed contra (“against all this nonsense”): Proverbs 16:2, all the ways of men are clear to his eyes.

2. Respondeo, first argument: perfections preexist in God (“God knows singular things”) #

1. All perfections found in creatures preexist in God in a higher way.
2. To know singulars pertains to our perfection, especially the perfection of practical knowledge.
3. Therefore God knows singulars.

• Sign from Aristotle: he finds it “inconvenient”, something that does not fit, that something be known by us and not by God; he argues so against Empedocles in two places, first book about the soul and third book of Wisdom, that God would be “most foolish” if ignorant of discord.
• Empedocles’ position, as he sets it out: four elements (earth, air, fire, water; “the longest-lasting chemical theory in history”, still alluded to in Shakespeare) plus two movers, love and hate, “a little bit like attraction and repulsion”. As a good Greek he made God immortal, so God has the elements and love but no hate, which would make him corruptible; “you have to admire him for seeing that”. He also held we know things by having them in us (aside: you know the fear of the cat shaking in your hands because you have fear in yourself). Consequence: we know hate, God does not: something known by us and not by God, “where starts all the ridiculous”. So the position must be wrong though it had reasons.

3. Divided in us, one and simple in God (“large discourse, looking before and after”) #

The point: what is divided among lower things (reason for the universal, sense for the singular, different powers) is in God “simpliciter et unite”, so God through his simple understanding knows both; angels too are more unified than we.

• Shakespeare’s definition of reason, “large discourse”: large because the universal can be said of an infinity of things; but to know this man, this dog, this mug, you go back to sense.
• Digression on fiction (he attributes it to Aristotle “in the thing on music”, garbled in recording): fiction is not the highest thing man attains but the most pleasingly proportioned to him, because the writer singularizes the universal or universalizes the singular, appealing to both reason and sense; philosophy addresses reason and the universal, history the singular. Romeo and Juliet: not “a pair of lovers in fourteenth-century Verona” but young lovers; the chorus at Oedipus’ fall says not “Oh Oedipus” but “Oh you generations of men”; two ex-Navy men laughing at a Navy film recognising “the type”; people are sometimes converted more through fiction than philosophy; critics on Shakespeare expressing one’s emotion better than oneself, the universal concretized in a character.

4. Two insufficient explanations of how God knows singulars (“Thomas is very sophist”) #

• First: God knows singulars through universal causes, as an astronomer knowing the universal motions of the heaven can predict eclipses. Thomas: not enough, because singulars get forms and powers from universal causes, but however you join these they are not individuated except through individual matter. His examples: many chairs of exactly the same kind in the room because there is enough wood; many identical window panes because enough glass; Grandma stamping many Christmas-tree cookies: matter as subject to extension is why there can be many.
• Second: God knows singulars by applying universal causes to particular effects. Thomas: “this is nothing” (aside: at a university today he would be saying “sophist” almost all the time), because no one can apply one thing to another unless he already foreknows the other; the application presupposes knowledge of singulars.

5. The real solution: God’s knowledge causes things, matter included (“as far extends the knowledge of God”) #

The point: God’s knowledge is the opposite of ours: ours is derived from things, his causes them, and causes matter as well as form.

1. God is the cause of things through his knowledge (as said earlier), so his knowledge extends as far as his causality.
2. His active power extends not only to forms, from which the universal thought is taken (as our art does: we take wood from nature and give it a form, but do not produce the matter), but all the way down to matter, which he creates.
3. Therefore his knowledge extends to the singulars individuated by matter.

• Supporting idea: every agent makes what is like itself (Grandma already has the tree shape in the metal cutter); he knows other things through his own essence as a likeness of all things, as their active beginning; so his essence suffices for knowing all that comes to be through him, in the singular as well as the universal, “similar in the knowledge of the artist if it were productive of the whole thing and not just of the form”.
• Further: even potency is a kind of being; if God is not only pure act but “I am who am”, whatever is in any way is in some way like him and knowable through his knowing himself.

6. Reply to obj. 1, and why thoughts are like numbers (“thoughts are like numbers”) #

Reply: our understanding separates the understandable form from the individuating principles, because our knowledge is derived from things and must be separated from matter to get into an immaterial mind; a gradual dematerialising, senses to imagination to images to thoughts. Hence our intelligible form cannot be a likeness of the individual principles, and our understanding does not know singulars directly: “I can think about what a man is all day long, and won’t know you.”

• Digression: what our thoughts are like. Take the definition of square (equilateral, right-angled quadrilateral). It has parts, but do they meet at a common boundary as parts of a line meet at a point, of a surface at a line, of a body at a surface? No; Aristotle says a definition is more like numbers: seven into two and five or three and four, the parts do not meet.
• Second sign: thoughts, like numbers, are not divisible forever (five to three and two, to one and one, “that’s it”), whereas a line divides always into shorter lines. If every part of a definition needed defining there would be an infinity of definitions before any definition and you would never learn what anything is; showing there are highest genera shows definition does not go on forever.
• Third sign: there is no next longest line (always one between), but there is a next thought: add quadrilateral, equilateral, right-angled and you are at square with nothing in between, as nothing between three and four (“unless you’re a mixed-up model”); and in the syllogism, every mother is a woman, no man is a woman, the next thought is no man is a mother.
• Aristotle’s senses of before and after: the first, in time, reduces to the continuous; the second, before in being, exemplified by one before two, drawn from arithmetic as geometry and arithmetic are the sciences most proportioned to us (Euclid: books 1-6 continuous, 7-9 number); the next meaning, before in the discourse of reason, is like numbers. So “put two and two together” is closer to what thinking is than “a line of thinking”. Student: “line of reasoning” refers to the discourse from this to that. He: the Greeks used “road”, taken from the continuous; carried to the mathematical line you drop the asphalt but keep the continuous; carried to the mind you drop even the continuous and keep before and after in a different meaning.
• Aside: he once meant to write “Tragedy and Geometry” (chosen for the rhyme), both connected with imagination, differently used; we never think without images.
• Reply resumed, “this is the important difference that the objection is overlooking”: the intelligible form of the divine understanding, the divine essence, is immaterial not by abstraction but through itself, being the source of all principles entering the composition of a thing, of the species and of the individual; so through it God knows singulars too.
• Practical knowledge: if it does not descend to the singular it is imperfect, so in God it would be “very imperfect”. Parents: each child is different; military art fights the last war though each is different; MacArthur admired for Inchon, having observed the Japanese land there in the 1905 war (a student confirms); higher ground, sun in the face decide battles; marriage: you marry this man, this woman, not “woman”; the two well-matched philosophy couples in California who would be chaos if swapped; the science-fiction film where an extraterrestrial takes the groom’s body the night before and the bride writes “John doesn’t seem at all like the man I married”.

7. Reply to obj. 2: species, eidos, form (“by its power, it extends”) #

Reply: though the form of the divine understanding according to its being has no material conditions, as the species received in imagination and sense do, by its power it extends to both material and immaterial things.

• Translation aside: species (Latin) and eidos (Greek), the name of what is defined by genus and difference in Porphyry’s five predicables, both etymologically related to seeing (speculation; idein); in English best rendered “form”, as in “one form of government”; Plato’s “ideas” should be “Forms” with a capital F, since idea now means a thought or image; compare “the looks of somebody”.

8. Reply to obj. 3: matter’s distant likeness to God; what the bad is (“some likeness of the divine being”) #

Reply: matter recedes from likeness to God according to its potentiality, but insofar as it is such being it retains some likeness of the divine being; God created matter and every agent makes something like itself.

• Aristotle and Plato agree form is godlike (Physics I); Thomas explains: matter is potency, form act, God pure act with no passive potency. But taking God as “I am who am”, whose nature is to be, any being, even in potency, has a distant likeness, much more distant than form’s.
• Student asks him to restate last time’s distinction in Aristotle’s argument against Plato. His answer: from the shared understanding that form is good and desirable, matter can be said to desire form, meaning it is perfected by form; the lack of form cannot desire form, since it would be eliminated, not perfected; so matter is in some way good, and privation, opposed to form, is opposed as bad to good. Hint at what badness is: a lack of what something is able to have and should have. Augustine’s “sin is nothing” is a slight exaggeration: not strictly non-being, but non-being of what a capable subject should have; blindness is bad, but this cup is not blind (“I can’t complain that you gave me no sight in this”). True of moral badness: my love, anger, fear are bad if unreasonable.
• Aside: is his love of wisdom reasonable? Wisdom is the highest perfection and good of reason, so yes; God is wisdom itself, so there is an affinity between love of wisdom and love of God, with the caution that first philosophy is not exactly God; Aristotle’s proemium to the fourteen books: God alone is wise, or only God fully; likewise love of truth and love of God, “I am the way, the truth, and the life”, “for this I came… that I might give testimony unto the truth”.

9. Grades of sonship: q. 33 a. 3 (“who is the father of rain”) #

He reads from the treatise on the Trinity, q. 33 a. 3, the article asking which is called Father first: the Person is called Father first, then God is Father with respect to us. In a reply Thomas distinguishes four fatherhoods, since creatures have sonship not by perfect reason (no one nature of creature and Creator) but by likeness, and the more perfect the likeness the nearer to true sonship: (1) likeness of the footprint or vestige only, irrational creatures, Job 38, “who is the father of rain… who generated the drops of dew”; (2) likeness of the image, the rational creature; (3) likeness of grace, grace being a sharing of the divine nature, with Romans quoted: the Spirit renders testimony to our spirit that we are sons, if sons then heirs (not yet inherited); (4) likeness of glory, possessing the inheritance, Romans 5:2, glory in the hope of the glory of the sons of God: seeing God as he is, we are most of all his sons.

• So St Francis calling the rain and snow “brother” has a scriptural basis (“Where you been, brother? It’s January”), but with different grades; a student: Francis called his body “brother ass”; he: “that’s putting it in his place.”

His words #

• “about the soul”: Aristotle’s De Anima.
• “Natural Hearing” [ed.: Physics].
• “Wisdom” / “first philosophy”, “the third book after the books of Natural Philosophy”: Metaphysics.
• “inconvenient”: something that doesn’t fit [ed.: inconveniens].
• “simpliciter et unite”: one and simple, of the perfections in God.
• “ability” or “power” [ed.: potency, faculty].
• “beginning” [ed.: principle]; “active beginning” of things.
• “understandable form” [ed.: intelligible species]; species / eidos rendered “form”; Plato’s ideas better “Forms”.
• “sophist”: Thomas’s “this is nothing”.
• highest genera: where definition stops, so thoughts are like numbers.
• “I am who am”: God’s nature is to be, ground of matter’s likeness.
• vestige / footprint, image, grace, glory: the four grades of sonship.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, ST I q. 14 a. 11 (objections, sed contra, respondeo, replies 1-3).
• Thomas, ST I q. 33 a. 3 (reply on four fatherhoods).
• Proverbs 16:2; Job 38; Romans 5:2 and the “Spirit renders testimony” passage (Romans 8, inferred). Mentioned
• Aristotle, On the Soul II (reason of universals, sense of singulars) and I (against Empedocles); Metaphysics III (against Empedocles); Metaphysics proemium (God alone wise); Physics I (form godlike, matter desires form); senses of before and after (Metaphysics V, inferred).
• Boethius on Porphyry; Porphyry, five predicables.
• Euclid, Elements I-VI and VII-IX.
• Shakespeare, Hamlet on reason as “large discourse” (inferred locus); Romeo and Juliet; Sophocles’ Oedipus.
• Augustine, “sin is nothing”.
• John 14 and 18 (inferred), “I am the way, the truth, and the life”; “for this I came into the world”.

His questions #

• Both objections are based on the fact that our mind gets its knowledge from what? From things, which must be separated from their material conditions to enter an immaterial mind.
• How can there be many chairs or window panes of exactly the same kind? Enough wood, enough glass: matter as subject to extension.
• Is a definition continuous: do its parts meet at a common boundary? No; like numbers, whose parts do not meet, and not divisible forever.
• What’s the next longest line? What’s the next thought after “every mother is a woman, no man is a woman”? There is no next longer line; the next thought is “no man is a mother”.
• If God’s practical knowledge didn’t descend to the singular, it’d be very what? Imperfect.
• Is this cup blind? No; it is not able to have sight, so the lack is not bad in it.
• Is my love of wisdom a reasonable love? Yes, wisdom being the highest good of reason; and it has an affinity with love of God.
• Which is called Father first, the Person or God with respect to us? The Person; then God as our Father, in four grades of likeness.