Summa I, Q.15 aa.1-3: Ideas in the Divine Mind (Whether There Are Ideas, Whether Many, and Whether of All Things God Knows)

Orientation #

He refers back to “what has been said above” about God knowing all things in himself and knowing things that neither are nor will be (prev. lecture), and looks forward to “when we take up the making of the world”, the Trinity, and divine providence. At the end he says he will be away two weeks. The previous class finished q. 14 a. 16 and introduced q. 15’s Platonic/Augustinian background; the next opens q. 16 on truth.

The class, in order #

1. Prologue to q. 15 and Thomas as heir of the Fathers (“remains considered about the ideas”) #

The point: three questions — whether there are ideas, whether one or many, whether of all things God knows — and the topic is here “because of Augustine”.

• Aside: rereading the treatise on the Trinity he wonders whether Thomas says anything Augustine had not said first; Cajetan: Thomas “seems to have inherited the mind of all the Church Fathers because he so reverenced them”. Same day he was reading the Golden Chain on Matthew (Chrysostom, Hilary, Ambrose, Jerome). Likewise Aristotle inherited the mind of the Greek philosophers before him.

2. Article 1, objections and sed contra (“It seems that the ideas are not”) #

The point: three objections that look very strong — “How’s he going to defend poor Augustine?”

1. Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 7: God does not know things by an idea; ideas are posited only so that through them we know things; therefore no ideas.
2. God knows all things in himself (said above); he does not know himself by an idea; therefore neither other things. “Sounds very, very good.”
3. The idea is posited as a beginning of knowing and doing; the divine essence is a sufficient beginning of both; why posit ideas?

• Sed contra: Augustine, Eighty-three Questions — so great a force is in the ideas that unless they are understood no one can be wise (“really stretching to defend Plato”).
• His warning on the respondeo’s thesis (ideas must be laid down in the divine mind): “you got to be very careful” — no composition, no accidents in God’s mind.

3. The word “idea”: eidos, species, form (“Latine would mean what? Form”) #

The point: the Greek word does not mean “idea”; the best English is “form”.

• Logic recall: genus, difference, species, property, accident; species names the thing defined, genus begins the definition, difference completes it. Greek eidos = Latin species; “we dummies in English” borrow the Latin. Porphyry’s text: genus, diaphora, eidos.
• Etymology: eidos relates to the eye (eidenai, to see), as species relates to speculativa — “the looks of a thing”, “the seen form”; but the basic notion is form. Thomas takes forma rather than species.
• Idiom shows it: democracy is a species of government, but more idiomatically “one form of government”; epic and drama are “forms of fiction”. So better “Plato’s theory of forms” than “theory of ideas”.
• Why “idea” is bad: in English it means thought or image, “because English philosophers can’t distinguish between the two” — Locke confuses them. “Idea” is a transliteration, carrying over letters with little meaning; “form would be more”.

4. Article 1, the body: form as exemplar or as source of knowing (“the forms of other things existing apart”) #

The point: a form existing apart from its thing can be either an exemplar (a model to imitate) or a beginning of knowing it (form of the knowable in the knower); on both counts ideas must be posited. Argument as he gives it:

1. In everything generated not by chance, some form is the end of the generation.
2. An agent acts on account of a form only insofar as a likeness of that form is in the agent (Aristotle, “seventh book of Wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics VII]).
3. That likeness pre-exists in two ways: according to natural being (man generates man, cat a cat, dog a dog, tree a tree, fire fire — the son’s form pre-exists in the father) vs. according to understandable being (the likeness of the house pre-exists in the housebuilder’s mind — art, not chance). The latter “can be called the idea of the house” — “now he’s starting to get a little closer to what we call idea”.
4. The world was not made by chance but by God acting through understanding (to be shown below); therefore in the divine mind there is a form to whose likeness the world is made — “in this consists the ratio of idea”.

• Plato’s Timaeus has something like it: the Demiurgos looks at the forms and makes things like them.
• His caution, anticipating a. 2: not a multiplicity of thoughts (chair, dog, horse, ant) added to his substance; in understanding his substance he understands every way it can be imitated, more and less perfectly — “those would be said to be the ideas”.

5. Article 1, replies; likeness of creature to God (“likeness of the creature to God”) #

• Ad 1: God does not understand things by a form existing outside himself, as Plato has it in the Timaeus; Aristotle disproves Plato’s forms as existing by themselves, not in an understanding — that is what Dionysius has in mind.
• Ad 2: through his essence God knows himself and other things, but his essence is a principle of doing other things, not of doing himself; so it has the notion of idea as compared to other things, not to himself — God knows himself “as imitable … in this way, and in this way”.
• Ad 3: God by his very essence is a likeness of all things; the idea is nothing other than his essence, not something added. Reason: every agent makes something like itself because it acts through its own form.
• Fourth Lateran Council text Paul VI called to his attention: no likeness of creature to God without a greater unlikeness — the text he used when a Mohammedan objected to Shakespeare calling reason godlike.
• Examples of knowing oneself as imitable: Mozart knowing that others imitate him imperfectly (someone said J. C. Bach is “Mozart with something missing”); Charles De Koninck’s hand gestures picked up by the professors who studied under him; his own quirks after sessions with Monsignor Dion; a good ballplayer watching kids who “have something of what he has” but fall short. But the distinction stands: God knowing what he is vs. knowing how he can be imitated, the second being involved in the first.

6. Article 2, objections and sed contra (“whether there are many ideas”) #

1. The idea is God’s essence; the essence is one; therefore one idea. (His preview: the essence is understood as imitable in many ways.)
2. Idea, like art and wisdom, is a beginning of knowing and doing; God has not many arts or wisdoms; therefore not many ideas — “that makes sense”.
3. If ideas are multiplied by respect to diverse creatures: the plurality of ideas is eternal, creatures temporal, so the temporal would cause the eternal.
4. These respectus (his gloss: a word for relation) are either secundum rem in creatures only (then not eternal) or in God (then a real plurality in God besides the Persons — against Damascene: in God all is one except ingeneration, generation and procession).

• Sed contra: Augustine, Eighty-three Questions — ideas are chief forms or reasons, stable, unchangeable, unformed, eternal, contained in the divine intelligence; they neither come to be nor cease, yet by them everything that comes to be or perishes is formed.

7. Article 2, the body: idea of the whole needs ideas of the parts; simplicity (“he orders the army from the leader”) #

Argument:

1. In each effect the last end is properly intended by the chief agent — the army and its leader (Aristotle, “twelfth book of Wisdom”, the books after natural philosophy; “the philosopher” by antonomasia).
2. The best in existing things is the good of the order of the universe.
3. That order is intended by God per se, not by accident through a succession of agents (the view that God created only the first thing, which created the second, etc. — on which God would have an idea only of the first thing).
4. So God has the idea of the whole universe; and the ratio of a whole cannot be had without proper rationes of its parts (the builder cannot conceive the house without the thought of each part). Augustine: each thing is created by God by its own reason. Therefore many ideas. Simplicity: the form of the thing to be made is in the maker’s mind as what is understood, not as the species by which he understands (the form putting the understanding in act). The form putting the divine understanding in act is the divine substance; the many ideas are many things understood by one. Knowing his essence perfectly, he knows it in every way it is knowable — not only as in itself but as able to be partaken by likeness by creatures; each creature has its own form by which it partakes a likeness of the divine essence (Aristotle, Physics I: form is something God-like; Plato said the same; God is pure act, every form a kind of act). Insofar as God knows his essence as imitable by such a creature, he knows it as the proper reason and idea of that creature.

• Aside: Thomas uses “imitable” — “I got the way of speaking from Thomas somewhere”, maybe another text.

8. Article 2, replies: what is understood vs. that by which (“Brevity is the soul of what”) #

• Ad 1: “idea” does not name the essence as essence but as likeness and reason of this or that; many likenesses understood from one essence, so many ideas. Things are more or less like him, at infinite distance.
• Ad 2: wisdom and art signify that by which God understands (he made the universe by his wisdom, by his art); idea signifies what he understands. God understands many by one, and not only things as in themselves but as understood — the artist understanding the house in matter understands the house; understanding the form as looked upon by himself, he understands himself to understand it, i.e. the idea of the house. God understands himself to understand many things through his essence. “You got to not confuse what he understands with that by which he understands.”
• Ad 3: the respects multiplying ideas are not caused by things but by the divine understanding comparing its essence to things — he needn’t have the things “out there”.
• Ad 4: the respects are in God, but not real relations like those distinguishing the Persons (Trinity later); they are respects understood by God.
• Aside: “brevity is the soul of wit” — quoted by radio commentators; he inculcated it in students, who yelled it from dorm windows; Thomas opens the Compendium of Theology with scripture’s verbum abbreviatum.

9. Article 3, objections and sed contra (“Whether of all things which are known by God”) #

1. No idea of the bad in God, else the bad would be in God; yet God knows bad things.
2. God knows what neither is, was nor will be (said above); Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 5: exemplars are the divine willings, determinative and productive of things — so no ideas of these. (“Going to require some distinction.”)
3. God knows first matter, which has no form, hence no idea.
4. God knows genera, singulars under species, accidents; Plato, who first introduced forms (so Augustine), gave no ideas of these.

• Sed contra: ideas are reasons existing in the divine mind (Augustine); of all he knows God has proper reasons.
• Aside: the Eighty-three Questions is “kind of a quodlibetal” — questions in random order.

10. Article 3, the body: exemplar vs. ratio (“it can be called a what exemplar”) #

Since Plato posited ideas as beginnings both of knowledge and of generation, the idea in the divine mind is both: as beginning of making, an exemplar (practical knowledge); as beginning of knowing, properly a ratio (can pertain to speculative knowledge). As exemplar it extends to all things God makes at some time; as ratio to all he knows even if they never come to be, and to all things known by their proper reason and by way of speculation.

• On translating ratio: not only mental; English “reason” sometimes means something in the thing — “the reason why” the sun’s light is cut off is that the moon has come between.

11. Article 3, replies: the bad, the non-existent, matter, genera and individuals (“the bad is known by God not through its own reason”) #

• Ad 1: the bad is known through the reason of the good, because the bad is a lack — blindness known through sight, ignorance through knowledge (a lack in a subject able to have it). So the bad has no idea in God, neither as exemplar nor as ratio (neque secundum quod exemplar neque secundum quod ratio — he corrects a translation that read “but only insofar as it denotes ratio”). Comparison: we understand “nothing” through something; Augustine exaggerates (“sin is nothing”, the sinner becomes nothing) — strictly sin is privation, a non-being of something in a subject. Joke from his old teacher: philosophy is the only class paid for talking about nothing.
• Ad 2: of what never exists God has practical knowledge only in his power; so an idea only as ratio, not as exemplar.
• Ad 3: Plato, according to some, held matter uncreated, so no idea of matter but of the concausa — what is caused with matter, form in matter, or the composite (as in the Timaeus). Because we hold matter created, though never without form, matter has an idea in God, but not other than the idea of the composite. Matter by itself can neither be nor be known; Aristotle, Physics I: first matter is known by proportion — as clay to sphere and cube, so first matter to man and dog; but the likeness must not be misunderstood: sphere and cube are accidents and clay an actual substance, whereas man and dog are substances and first matter no actual substance; the analogy holds in that clay can be either but not both, and when it becomes the other ceases to be the former. The difficulty of knowing matter is in the thing, not in us (Aristotle, second book of Wisdom): a distinction applicable elsewhere — wisdom is not hard to love, cancer is (no defect of heart); not loving rock and roll is not a defect, not loving Mozart would be. Heisenberg: we know matter only through its forms — “something like what Aristotle said”. Matter is not non-being like the bad, but not being in act by itself; only in potency.
• Digression on Marx and Engels’ division of all thinkers into materialists (matter the beginning of all, even thought — Lenin: thought the highest product of matter; the first philosophers with Mother Earth, water; Empedocles: blood around the heart is thought) and idealists (thought the beginning of all, even matter — St John’s Gospel, the logos; Hegel starting from logic). “As a Christian, I ask: is that a good division?” The middle position omitted: Anaxagoras (first to see mind as immaterial, the greater mind moves matter but is not responsible for its existence) and Plato in the Timaeus (Demiurgos and matter) — dualists. Omitting it (by intention or ignorance) is “diabolical” in Kierkegaard’s phrase, because one must first see mind as immaterial before coming to a mind responsible even for matter.
• Ad 4: genera have no idea other than the species’, as exemplar, since a genus never comes to be except in a species (no animal made that is not dog, cat, horse); likewise inseparable accidents, which come to be with the subject; accidents supervening on a subject can have a special idea — the artist makes the house’s properties through the house’s form but pictures added later through another form (“you get an interior decorator”). Individuals, for Plato, have no idea other than the species’, since individuated by matter, which he held uncreated; nature’s intention is at the species. To be revisited under divine providence, which extends to singulars, “especially for us as individuals”.

His words #

• ideas — Greek eidos, Latin species/forma; “form” the best English; “idea” a transliteration.
• species, genus, difference — species names the thing defined, genus begins the definition, difference completes it.
• eidenai — to see; species akin to speculativa, “the looks of a thing”.
• exemplar — a model that can be imitated; the idea as beginning of making (practical).
• ratio — “reason”; the idea as beginning of knowing (speculative); hard to translate, sometimes “in the thing”.
• “seventh/twelfth book of Wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics VII, XII]; “second book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics II].
• “Natural Hearing” [ed.: Physics].
• natural being vs. understandable being — how the form pre-exists in the agent.
• imitable — his and Thomas’s word for the essence as able to be partaken by creatures.
• respectus — “a word for relation”.
• that by which vs. what is understood — species/wisdom/art vs. idea.
• antonomasia — “the philosopher” for Aristotle.
• concausa — what is caused with matter.
• privation — a non-being of something in a subject able to have it.
• quodlibetal — “what you will”, questions in random order.
• verbum abbreviatum — scripture quoted at the start of Thomas’s Compendium of Theology.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 15, prologue, a. 1, a. 2, a. 3 (read and translated throughout).
• Augustine, Eighty-three Questions (as quoted in the sed contras). Mentioned
• Dionysius, Divine Names, ch. 7 and ch. 5.
• Aristotle, Metaphysics VII (likeness of form in agent), XII (army and leader; good of the order), II (difficulty in the thing or in us); Physics I (form God-like; matter known by proportion).
• Plato, Timaeus (Demiurgos, forms, matter).
• Porphyry (genus, difference, species).
• John Damascene (all one in God except the notional acts).
• Thomas, Catena aurea on Matthew; Compendium of Theology; Cajetan.
• Fourth Lateran Council (greater unlikeness).
• Anaxagoras fragment on mind — handout “Natural Fragments”, p. 48 (verified source); Empedocles; Marx and Engels; Lenin; Hegel; Kierkegaard; Heisenberg; John’s Gospel prologue; Locke.

His questions #

• Can God have ideas without composition or accidents in his mind? Yes: the idea is his essence known as imitable, not something added.
• What does eidos mean in Latin and English? Forma; “form”, not “idea”.
• Does the world’s being made by God require a form in the divine mind? Yes, because it was made through understanding, not by chance, like the house in the builder’s mind.
• Does God know himself by an idea? No: his essence is a principle of doing other things, not of himself.
• Are there many ideas, given one essence? Yes, as many things understood by one form, not many forms by which he understands.
• Are the respects multiplying the ideas caused by creatures? No, by the divine understanding comparing its essence to things.
• Is there an idea of the bad in God? No, neither as exemplar nor as ratio; the bad is known through the good.
• Does first matter have an idea? Yes, but not other than the idea of the composite; matter alone is neither being nor knowable.
• Is Marx and Engels’ division into materialists and idealists a good division? No: it omits the middle, dualist position of Anaxagoras and the Timaeus.
• Do individuals have ideas distinct from the species? Not for Plato; for Thomas left for divine providence.