Summa I q.16 a.4–5: Is the true before the good? Is God truth? (Simply vs. in some respect; appropriation; 'through itself')

Orientation #

He opens: “So up to the fourth article and the sixteenth question,” and recalls that Thomas argued earlier that one is before true, that God was shown perfect before good, and that true and good were earlier tied to reason and will. Looking ahead: question eighteen on the life of God follows this discussion of truth; the treatise on the Trinity will take up appropriation. The class ends inside a.5, before the reply to the third objection. The previous class treated aa.1–3 (truth in the intellect, the two acts, convertibility of true and being); the next continues with the objection that God would be cause of sin.

The class, in order #

1. Order among the transcendentals (“the most universal words, thoughts in a sense”) #

Point: a.4 asks the order secundum rationem (in definition) between true and good.

• The most universal words, “some call them the transcendentals, for want of a better name,” have an order in definition: being and something are most fundamental; one adds to being (“undivided being”); true and good are others. The article asks about the order of the last two.

2. Objections and sed contra of a.4 (“true is a particular good”) #

• Obj. 1: the more universal is before in definition, as animal is before dog (animal is in the definition of dog, not vice versa); true is a particular good, “the good of the understanding,” alongside health and other goods; so good is before true. “Nice little argument.”
• Obj. 2: good is in things; true is in the putting together and dividing of the understanding (“man is an animal”; “man is not a stone”); what is in things is before what is in the understanding.
• Obj. 3: truth is a species of virtue (Aristotle, Ethics IV: a man shows himself in words and deeds as he is), and virtue is under good (“a good quality of the mind,” Augustine). He flags this as “probably easiest to answer”: that truth is not the transcendental truth said of all things.
• Sed contra (“kind of the reverse of the first objection”): what is in more things is before; true is in mathematics, where there is no good.
• Student: how is there no good in mathematics? Answer: good is the same as end or purpose; means are good because they lead to the end (medicine → health); end is not a cause treated in mathematics. Joke: the circle is not smooth so it can roll out of danger, nor the triangle pointed to protect itself. Yet mathematics has things very true, so true seems broader.

3. Thomas’s two reasons (“true is closer to what being”) #

Point: good and true are convertible with being in subject (A and B convertible if every A is B and every B is A), hence with each other, but differ in definition; true, speaking absolutely, is before good.

1. True is closer to being than good, because true regards being simply and immediately, while the notion of good falls on being as in some way perfect (thus desirable). Sign: we showed God perfect before we showed him good; perfect adds something to being, but “just being is enough for truth. Truth is saying what is is.”
   • Further sign (“may be the same argument”): the per se division of being into necessary and contingent, which enters the arguments for God, seems a division of the true rather than of the good: “two is half of four” is necessarily true; “triangle is green” contingent. Hence the importance in logic of distinguishing necessary and contingent.
   • Recalled: Thomas earlier argued one is before true, since you can’t understand something unless it is one in some way.
2. Knowledge naturally comes before desire. Will follows reason; emotions follow sensation (so animals have emotions but not will). True was tied to reason, good to will; so true is before good.

• Aside: this matters for the Trinity—why the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through/and the Son rather than the reverse: the good must be known before it is loved.
• “So you all convinced by Thomas’s two reasons?”

4. Reply to obj. 1: simply vs. in some way (“man’s mind is infinite”) #

Point: will and understanding mutually include each other (the understanding understands the will; the will wills the understanding to understand), so in the order of desirables good is universal and true particular, in the order of understandables true is universal and the truth about the good particular; from “the true is a certain good” it follows only that good is before in the order of desirables, not simply.

• The objection’s mistake: confusing what is so simply with what is so in some way—“the same kind of mistake Feuerbach made”: man’s mind is infinite; the infinite is God; therefore man’s mind is God. But God is simply infinite, our mind infinite only in some way. (Marx, preface to his doctoral thesis: “the highest divinity is the human mind.”)
• “My brother Mark”: a girl says she doesn’t know him, but knows what a man is—so in some way she knows Mark and every man, while simply she does not.
• Someone knocks; you don’t know who is at the door; it is your mother: simply you know your mother, in some way (as the one knocking now) you don’t (“unless you’ve got Alzheimer’s”).
• The same distinction “perhaps the key thing in wisdom”: in Metaphysics IX Aristotle says ability is in some way before act (what goes from ability to act is an ability first), but simply act is before ability, so the beginning of all things is pure act (as seen earlier about God). Taking what is in some way before as simply before makes matter—most in ability, least in act—the beginning of all things; this lies behind materialism and evolutionist “random gradualism.”
• Where to teach the distinction in logic: at the start as a kind of distinction, or in the book on fallacies as a mistake from overlooking it.
• Moral examples: murder someone annoying—simply no, in some way good (rids an annoyance); staying home Sunday—in some way good (more sleep); studying prevents the party. “Nothing so good that it doesn’t prevent something else good,” so anything good is in some way bad and vice versa; “you’re making this kind of mistake all the time”—it is behind all your not doing what you should and doing what you shouldn’t.

5. Replies to obj. 2 and obj. 3 (“grasps before being itself”) #

• Reply 2: something is before in definition as it falls before in the understanding. The understanding grasps first being, second that it understands being, third that it desires being: so the thought of being is first, true second, good third—“even though the good is in things.”
• He adds what Thomas doesn’t here: one would come between being and true, since you cannot understand the many except as one in some way. Man and stone are not one thing, but made one statement (“man is not a stone”) they are understood together; understanding what a man is and what a stone is separately, you can’t understand the two at once.
• Reply 3: the virtue Aristotle calls truth (Ethics IV) is not the common truth of this article but that by which a man shows himself as he is—“a virtue that Iago doesn’t have,” pretending to be Othello’s friend. Also particular meanings: truth of life (man fulfils in his life what he is ordered to by the divine understanding); truth of justice (man observes what he owes another according to the laws). From these particular meanings one ought not proceed to common truth.

6. a.5 objections and sed contra; Christ as way, truth and life (“I am the road”) #

• Obj. 1: truth consists in putting together and dividing; in God, who is completely simple, there is none; so no truth. Aside: Voltaire is said to have gone through the Summa collecting objections that his friends couldn’t answer.
• Obj. 2: truth (Augustine, On True Religion) is a likeness to the beginning; in God there is no likeness to a beginning.
• Obj. 3: whatever is said of God is said as first cause (his being cause of all being, his goodness of every good); if truth is in God every truth is from him; but that someone sins is true; so God causes sin—“clearly false.” (Reply not reached this class.)
• Sed contra: John 14:6, “I am the road [hodos], the truth and the life.” Context: Philip’s question where you are going and how to get there; Christ answers both—“I am the road,” and the destination is truth itself and life itself. So the text touches Christ as man and Christ as God: in the Third Part Thomas says Christ as man is the via to God; veritas and vita pertain to his divine nature.
• Student asks whether truth and life are personal or substantial in God. He answers: they are attributes of the divine substance, but here appropriated to the Son by way of likeness, as love (common to all three) is appropriated to the Holy Spirit who proceeds by way of love/will, and truth to the Son who proceeds as Word. Sign: right after truth Thomas treats the life of God (q. 18); in philosophy the grades of life run plant, animal, understanding, so life attaches to divine understanding—hence Peter’s “the Son of the Living God.” “The divine substance is truth itself, as we’re going to find out in this article”—it is the time of the divine substance, not yet of the Trinity.
• Dividing the articles of faith: the Athanasian Creed divides by the humanity and divinity of Christ, as Peter’s profession does (“the Christ” = anointed as man; “Son of the Living God” = divine nature/person); in Thomas’s brief expositions of the articles, six on the divinity and six on the humanity (sometimes seven and seven; “six and six is probably the best”), also in the Compendium of Theology; he thinks Lateran IV [recollection hedged by him]. The Apostles’ Creed divides by Father, Son, Holy Spirit, with creation appropriated to the Father (not as if he alone creates), incarnation to the Son (he alone was incarnate), communion of saints and the Church to the Spirit.
• Appropriation is “very subtle”: power to the Father by likeness (power is the beginning) and by opposition (fathers grow weak with years); wisdom to the Son as Word and by opposition (the young are foolish—“to play the young man” means to play the fool).
• Aside: Reagan on his age—he would not exploit “the youth and inexperience” of his opponent.

7. Response: God the highest and first truth (“highest and the what first truth”) #

Point: truth is in the understanding as it grasps the thing as it is, and in the thing as its being is conformable to the understanding; this is most of all in God, whose being is not merely conformed to his understanding but is his very act of understanding, and whose understanding is measure and cause of every other being and understanding; so he is the highest and first truth.

• Summa Contra Gentiles gives separate chapters (that he is truth itself, the pure truth, the first truth)—“much more developed,” but “for you beginners this is enough.”
• Notice: in God, being altogether simple, there is no distinction of abstract and concrete, of “the have and the had”: whatever God has, he is (has knowledge → is knowledge itself; has goodness → is goodness itself). Not so for us: “I have some geometry in me, but am I geometry?”
• Bernadette: the lady said “I am the Immaculate Conception”—a way of speaking she could not have invented, which puzzled the priest. De Koninck’s Ego Sapientia on abstract words attributed to Mary in the sapiential books, “not for exactly the same reason” as of God; related to Dionne’s article “The Grace of Mary is of the Hypostatic Order”; a Church Father calls Mary the neck (one head, Christ; one neck)—if all grace comes through her, she is like grace itself. “Very striking” that Mary confirmed this a few years after the doctrine was declared; a Father had petitioned the Pope for it long before.

8. Reply to obj. 1: knowing the composed simply (“knows all these complex things”) #

• Though in the divine understanding there is neither composition nor division, by his simple understanding he judges of all things and knows the complex things; so there is truth in him.
• God knows composite things in a simple way; we know simple things in a composite way, often by more negations as things get simpler: body has length, width, depth; surface no depth; line neither width nor depth; point none. “Not the way to go, but that’s the way we go.” God knows statements without putting together and dividing; material things immaterially. “The way you know doesn’t have to be the way things are, but in the way you know you have to know the way things are.”

9. Reply to obj. 2: resolving the affirmative into the negative (“resolve the affirmative into the negative”) #

• True in our understanding is as conformed to its beginning, the things it takes knowledge from; truth of things as conformed to their beginning, the divine understanding. Augustine’s phrase cannot properly be said of divine truth except as truth is appropriated to the Son (who has a beginning)—“confirmation of what I was saying.” Said essentially, it can be understood only by resolving the affirmative into the negative, as “the Father is from himself” means he is not from another. “Very important to see.”
• Examples of the same resolution:
  • “Substance exists in itself”: nothing can affirmatively be in itself; it means “not in another.”
  • God as causa sui: a cause is before its effect, and nothing is before itself; so understood negatively. Sartre (Being and Nothingness, end): God is causa sui, a contradiction; man tries to be God; so man is a useless passion—“destroying his own philosophy” by taking it affirmatively.
  • Axiom on the board: the through itself is before the through another and is its beginning or cause. Sugar is sweet through itself; coffee sweet through another. In the second of the four senses of before (what can be without the other but not vice versa), sugar’s sweetness is before coffee’s, and is the greater cause. “You can use that in talking about God.”
  • In logic: conclusions are known through premises; not all statements are known through others, so some are per se nota—Boethius’s per se nota omnibus (the whole is more than the part) and per se nota sapientibus (spirits are not in place); these are the common beginnings of reasoned knowledge. “Known through itself” cannot mean the statement proves itself; it means known, but not through another.
  • Likewise definitions: not everything defined is known through another definition, so something is known but not through another (not: it makes itself known). Words: not all learned through other words in the dictionary; the first words are known through the senses, associating a sound with something sensed—which is why one speaks of the “senses” of a word.
• Applied: divine truth is a likeness of the beginning insofar as his being is not dissimilar to his understanding.

His words #

• secundum rationem — “in definition,” “by reason”
• transcendentals — “for want of a better name”; being, something, one, true, good
• one — undivided being
• convertible — every A is B and every B is A
• good — the same thing as the end or purpose
• simply / in some way — the distinction the objection (and Feuerbach, materialism) overlooks [ed.: simpliciter / secundum quid]
• ability / act — “in some way ability is before act… simply act is before ability” [ed.: potency / act]
• book of wisdom, ninth — Aristotle’s treatment of act and ability [ed.: Metaphysics IX]
• hodos / via, veritas, vita — road, truth, life (John 14:6)
• appropriation — an attribute of the divine substance assigned to one Person by reason of likeness (or opposition)
• the have and the had — abstract and concrete, not really distinct in God
• causa sui — cause of himself, to be understood negatively
• through itself before through another — the axiom on the board; per se nota (omnibus / sapientibus, Boethius)
• four senses of before — the second: what can be without another, but not vice versa

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 16, a. 4 (whole article)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 16, a. 5 (objections, sed contra, response, replies 1–2)
• John 14:6 (quoted as sed contra)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics IV (virtue of truth)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX (act and ability)
• Augustine, De vera religione (truth as likeness to the beginning); Augustine on virtue as good quality of the mind
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 18 (life of God); Third Part prologue (Christ as man the via); Summa Contra Gentiles chapters on God as truth; Compendium of Theology (division of articles of faith)
• Athanasian Creed; Apostles’ Creed; Peter’s profession (Matthew, “Thou art the Christ”)
• Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity; Marx, preface to doctoral thesis
• Sartre, Being and Nothingness
• De Koninck, Ego Sapientia; Dionne, “The Grace of Mary is of the Hypostatic Order”
• Shakespeare, Othello (Iago)
• Handout “On the Natural Fragments” p. 40 / DHB Vol. I The First Philosophers p. 153 — reported by source-matching; he does not name it in the transcript, likely the passage on “through itself before through another” and the senses of before (inferred)

His questions #

• How is there no good in mathematics? Good is the end; end is not a cause treated in mathematics.
• What did we show before we showed that God was good? That he is perfect—perfect adds to being; being alone suffices for truth.
• Is necessary/contingent a division of the true or of the good? Of the true.
• The mistake in the first objection is a mistake of what? Simply and not simply (in some way).
• Pure act or matter—which is the beginning of all things? Pure act; those who say matter make the simply/in-some-way mistake.
• Are truth and life personal or substantial in God? Substantial, but appropriated to the Son in this text.
• Why is power appropriated to the Father, wisdom to the Son? By likeness (power is beginning; Son is Word) and by opposition (fathers weak, the young foolish).
• Is “the Father is from himself” to be understood affirmatively? No—he is not from another.
• Does a per se nota statement prove itself? No; it is known, but not through another.
• Are all words learned through other words? No; the first are known through the senses.