Summa I, Q.14 a.16 and Intro to Q.15: Is God's Knowledge Looking (Speculative) or Practical? Plato's Forms and Whether Truth Requires That the Way We Know Be the Way Things Are

Orientation #

He says the class is “up to the sixteenth and last article here of Question fourteen,” recalls “our chapter question on the simplicity of God” and the question “on the operations of God,” and mentions the proemium to wisdom “which I think we did one time.” Near the end: “we’re up to question what fifteen here.” The previous class treated q. 14 aa. 14-15 and the next treats q. 15 in full.

The class, in order #

1. Two compositions negated in God (“two different kinds of composition found in creature”) #

Point: the two fundamental books, first of natural philosophy and first of logic, each teach a composition in creatures, and both are negated in God.

• Composition A: matter and form (first book of Natural Hearing; body and soul in us). Negated in God.
• Composition B: substance and accident (the Categories, first book of logic, from “the father of logic”). Negated in God.
• Question to class: when we say God is not only good but goodness itself, which negation? Student answers “logical”; he corrects: matter and form, because if God and His goodness were not the same, goodness would be a form in a subject. Hence “God is whatever He has”: if He has existence, He is existence itself.
• When we say God’s actual understanding is the same as His substance (q. on the operations of God: for God to be is to understand; “definitely not the case for me, I can be for a long time without understanding something”), the composition negated is substance and accident.
• Same pair recurs in the Trinity: the Father and His fatherhood being the same is like negating matter/form; the other things said to be the same as Him is like negating substance/accident.
• Aside: Thomas does not speak of God being alive until he reaches God’s operation of understanding, attaching life to operation, not substance, which agrees with how we first think of life in material things (the living thing moves itself).

2. Article 16 objections and sed contra (“God does not have about things a speculative knowledge”) #

Point: reading the objections and the contrary of a. 16, with a note on translation.

• Obj. 1: God’s knowledge is the cause of things (shown above); speculative knowledge is not a cause of things; therefore God’s knowledge is not speculative.
• Translation: he renders speculativa as “looking,” since “speculative” in English now suggests the stock market or guessing. The Greeks called wisdom “theoretical,” the Greek word for looking; knowledge for the sake of seeing, opposed to practical (for the sake of doing). Latin speculativa translates theoretical, but transliterated into English neither keeps its sense.
• Obj. 2: speculative knowledge is by abstraction from things (“at least Aristotle said so”), which does not belong to divine knowledge. His gloss: if God’s knowledge is His substance and were derived from things, God’s being would be derived from things.
• Sed contra: whatever is more noble ought to be attributed to God; looking knowledge is nobler than practical, as is clear from the philosopher at the beginning of the Metaphysics (the proemium to wisdom), since it is for its own sake while practical is for the sake of doing; therefore God has looking knowledge of things.
• Aside: “rarely affirm, seldom deny” — so Thomas distinguishes; people have written doctoral theses on these ways.

3. Three ways a knowledge is called looking (“some knowledge is looking only”) #

Point: Thomas’s division into looking only, practical only, and looking in one way and practical in another, grounded on three ways knowledge is called speculative. “You never make this kind of distinction anybody other than Aristotle or Thomas.”

1. From the side of the things known, because not doable by the knower: man’s knowledge of natural things (whose cause is nature, not man) or of divine things; a fortiori of angels (“I can’t make an angel or affect him very much”).
2. As regards the way of knowing, even of a doable thing: the builder considering a house by defining, dividing, and considering its universal predicates. Example: an art appreciation course teaches you to tell a portrait from a landscape but not how to paint. Reason from the text: a thing is doable by applying form to matter, not by taking the composed thing apart into its universal formal principles.
3. As regards the end: practical understanding differs by its end from speculative (Aristotle, third book On the Soul); practical is ordered to operation, speculative to the consideration of truth. Aside: Thomas divides the virtues of reason a little differently from Aristotle: practical, art (right reason about making) and foresight (right reason about doing); looking, natural understanding, reasoned-out understanding, and wisdom. Example: the builder curious how a house could come about, without intending to make it, like being curious how a computer is made.

• Resulting grades: knowledge looking by reason of the thing known is looking only; looking by its way of proceeding or by its end is in some way speculative and in some way practical (being about a doable); doable, considered as doable, ordered to doing, is practical without qualification.

4. Application to God (“the knowledge which God has of Himself”) #

Point: after the distinctions, the answer.

• Of Himself: looking knowledge only. “Can God change Himself? There’s no New Year’s resolutions.” He is not doable.
• Of all other things: speculative as regards mode, since whatever we know by defining and dividing (and distinguishing, “I might add”) He knows much more perfectly.
• Of things He is able to make but at no time will make: not practical as practical is named from its end. Student prompted to name it: the scientia simplicis intelligentiae, from before, as opposed to the knowledge of vision (things He has made, is making, or will make).
• Of things He makes at some time: practical knowledge.
• Evils (mala): not doable by Him, yet under His practical knowledge as He permits, impedes, or orders them, as sicknesses come under the doctor’s practical knowledge, not that he makes you sick but that his art cures them. Aside: “willy-nilly you’re going to praise God”: behave and you praise His mercy, misbehave and you glorify His justice.
• Aside: his old teacher (name unclear in recording) said experimental science, where you learn how to make things, is more like God’s knowledge of natural things; natural philosophy is more purely speculative.

5. The replies (“the knowledge of God is a cause, but not of Himself”) #

• Ad 1: God’s knowledge is a cause, but not of Himself. Warning: God as causa sui in an affirmative sense contradicts the axiom of before and after (nothing is before or after itself). So His knowledge of Himself is entirely looking; and since His self-knowledge is the best in His knowledge (He knows Himself as much as He is knowable, but not as doable, being wholly necessary and unchangeable), this is a sign that looking knowledge is the highest thing there is. Of other things He is cause: some in act (what comes to be at some time), some only in His power (never made), and only the former are fully practical.
• Ad 2: being taken from the things known belongs to looking knowledge not as such but per accidens, as it is human, because our knowledge begins from the senses which things act upon. The objection commits the fallacy per accidens, first fallacy outside of speech, which “deceives even the wise” (Aristotle, Sophistical Refutations).
• To the contrary: perfect knowledge of doable things requires knowing them as doable; God’s knowledge is in all ways perfect, so He knows what He can do as doable and not only as seeable. “An important distinction.” Yet He does not recede from the nobility of looking knowledge, because all other things He sees in Himself, and Himself only by looking; thus in the looking knowledge of Himself He has both looking and practical knowledge of all things. God’s knowledge is primarily looking.

6. Is theology looking or practical? (“looking philosophy and practical philosophy”) #

Point: back to the first question of the Summa, God’s knowledge and our theology transcend the philosophical dichotomy.

• Philosophy: looking (mathematical, natural, first philosophy or wisdom) vs. practical (ethics, domestics, political); logic sometimes added as a tool.
• Boethius, Consolation: Lady Wisdom’s dress bears theta (theoretical) above pi (practical), because theoretical is higher.
• God’s knowledge is primarily looking because primarily of Himself, yet extends to practical; so our theology, sharing in divine wisdom, is primarily looking (knowledge of God, hence the name) but extends to practical. So dogmatic and moral theology are not two disciplines as looking and practical philosophy are.
• History: the first philosophers (Thales, geometer and natural philosopher) contributed to natural and mathematical philosophy; Socrates marks the turn to practical philosophy, and Plato’s dialogues are more about practical than looking philosophy; Aristotle balances both, looking forward at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics to political philosophy completing the philosophy of human things, as opposed to wisdom about divine things.
• Martha and Mary: Mary at Jesus’ feet “hath chosen the better part, and it shall not be taken away from her”; commentators read it as looking over practical knowledge, and since practical knowledge ceases at the end of this world (no eating, drinking, marrying, clothing, “putting gasoline into our automobiles”), what she chose is not taken away but completed.
• Aside: Matthew 26, the passion: a church father says the Father wants Christ to die out of mercy, the Pharisees out of envy, Judas out of avarice, the devil out of fear for his kingdom, “not realizing that his kingdom will be even more overthrown by the death of Christ.”

7. Question 15: the word “idea” and the famous question (“does truth require that the way we know”) #

Point: “idea” is a transliteration, not a translation, of Greek eidos (species); “forms with a capital F” would be better.

• The fundamental question: does truth require that the way we know be the way things are? Yes or no. The chief philosophers (as Albert and Thomas call them), Plato and Aristotle, give different answers: Plato implicitly yes, Aristotle no.
• Aristotle first raises it in Natural Hearing II, distinguishing natural from mathematical philosophy; fully resolved only in the last two books of wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics], Thomas’s commentary expanding it.
• Why most of the history of philosophy sides with Plato: truth is the conformity of the mind with things, so if the way we know is not the way things are, the mind seems false. Resolution: what the mind says about things must agree with them, but the way we know need not be the way they exist. “Kind of a subtle thing,” to be understood bit by bit.
• Example: sphere is knowable without rubber, steel, wood, snow, earth, any sensible matter, though no sphere exists without them; one is not false in knowing it so. Falsity would come only in concluding that because I know sphere without sensible matter, spheres exist outside the mind without it.

8. Plato’s mathematical bent and Aristotle’s answer (“separated in thought, but not in things”) #

• Plato left Athens in disgust after Socrates’s death, went to the Greek cities of southern Italy and imbibed Pythagorean teaching; theorems attributed to him: between two square numbers one mean proportional, between two cube numbers two.
• His reasoning as reconstructed: the Pythagoreans know truly; they know sphere in separation from sensible matter; if truth requires the way we know be the way things are, there must really be spheres, cubes, numbers in separation, a mathematical world alongside the sensible one.
• Aristotle: “no, no, no, Plato,” separated in thought, not in things; the mind is not false, since in knowing sphere apart from sensible matter it does not say it exists apart, but knows what is knowable without something else.
• Thomas’s commentary leads in by something easier: in one individual several things are together yet one is truly known without the other. His stock example: he is both philosopher and grandfather (also father, husband); nurses know him as grandfather, students as philosopher. Is either mind false? Incomplete, not false (the student “wouldn’t know I’m going to do this Friday”); it would be false only to say “this philosopher is not a grandfather.” Otherwise one must know everything about someone before knowing anything truly. Reason: being a philosopher is knowable apart from being a grandfather and vice versa (though not apart from having reason). Mathematics differs: earth is perhaps not knowable without sphere, but sphere is knowable without earth.

9. Socrates, definition, and the world of forms (“the universal is what separated”) #

• Plato’s other influence: Socrates, always trying to get someone to define something. Definitions give sure knowledge even in math: no odd number is even, no prime number is composite.
• In the definition the universal is separated from singulars: “animal that has reason” includes neither you, me, Socrates, nor Winston Churchill. If the way we know must be the way things are, we know truly through definitions only if universals really exist separated. Hence Plato’s world of forms: man himself, dog himself, in which this dog and that dog partake “in some hard to explain way.”
• Something like this exists in the angels: God made the material world and also the angels with thoughts about material things, so both go back to God.
• Augustine knew Plato far better than Aristotle, regarded the Platonists as the greatest philosophers, and (as Thomas says) uses Plato so far as compatible with Christianity; hence the “idea of ideas.” But Augustine does not have the forms exist by themselves; somehow they are in God, “but how do you understand this exactly?” Augustine is probably the great influence on this question: the sed contras of aa. 1 and 2 are both from his Eighty-Three Questions. The class ends here.

His words #

• “Natural Hearing”: his rendering of Aristotle’s title [ed.: Physics].
• “looking knowledge”: speculativa / theoretical, knowledge for the sake of seeing, vs. practical, for the sake of doing.
• “doable”: operabile, what can be made or done by the knower.
• “foresight”: the practical virtue of right reason about doing [ed.: prudence].
• “reasoned-out understanding”: the looking virtue alongside natural understanding and wisdom [ed.: science].
• “scientia simplicis intelligentiae”: God’s knowledge of what He can make but never will; vs. “knowledge of vision,” of what He makes at some time.
• “causa sui”: God as cause of Himself, contradictory in an affirmative sense.
• “axiom of before and after”: nothing is before or after itself.
• “fallacy per accidens”: first fallacy outside of speech, deceiving even the wise.
• “eidos”: the Greek behind “idea”; species; “forms with a capital F.”
• “the chief philosophers”: Albert’s and Thomas’s name for Plato and Aristotle.
• “dialogues”: Greek for conversations.
• “domestics”: the second branch of practical philosophy [ed.: economics].

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 14, a. 16 (objections, sed contra, body, replies, translated as he goes). Mentioned
• Aristotle, Natural Hearing I (matter and form) and II (truth and the way things are; natural vs. mathematical).
• Aristotle, Categories (substance and accident).
• Aristotle, Metaphysics, proemium on wisdom; the last two books of wisdom.
• Aristotle, On the Soul III (practical vs. speculative understanding by end).
• Aristotle, Sophistical Refutations (fallacy per accidens).
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, ending (looking toward political philosophy).
• Thomas, commentary on Natural Hearing II (philosopher/grandfather lead-in).
• Summa I, q. 1 (is theology looking or practical); q. on the simplicity of God; q. on the operations of God; the Trinity.
• Summa I, q. 15, aa. 1-2, sed contras from Augustine, Eighty-Three Questions.
• Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy (theta and pi).
• Gospel: Martha and Mary; Matthew 26.

His questions #

• When we say God is not only good but goodness itself, which composition are we negating? Matter and form (the student’s “logical” corrected).
• When we say God’s understanding is the same as His substance, which composition is negated? Substance and accident.
• Speculative knowledge is not a cause of what? Of things.
• Can God change Himself or do something with Himself? No; He is not doable, so His self-knowledge is looking only.
• What do you call God’s knowledge of things He is able to make but never will? Scientia simplicis intelligentiae, as opposed to knowledge of vision.
• Does truth require that the way we know be the way things are? Plato implicitly yes, Aristotle no; what the mind says must agree with things, the way of knowing need not.
• Is the mind false in knowing me as a philosopher while leaving out that I’m a grandfather? No, incomplete; false only if it says the philosopher is not a grandfather.
• Are you and I and Socrates part of the definition of man? No; the universal is known in separation from singulars.
• How exactly are the forms in God, on Augustine’s view? Left open (the next articles take it up).