Summa Theologiae I, Q.16 aa.7–8: Is Created Truth Eternal? Is Truth Unchangeable? (with Aristotle's convertible terms: being, one, true, good)

Orientation #

He says “we saw before” that true is among the most universal things with being and one, and “we talked about this before” of the kinds of opposition and of non-being (prev. lecture). At the end he says the next question is on falsehood, and that Thomas will treat the life of God after truth. The previous class treated De Veritate on God as cause of truth, the four oppositions, and whether there is one truth; the next covers ST I q.17 on falsity.

The class, in order #

1. Opening: Sirach 40:20 and the word agapesis (“wine and music gladden the heart”) #

He reads the Greek of Sirach 40:20: oinos kai mousika euphrainousin kardian, kai hyper amphotera agapesis sophias — wine and music gladden the heart, but above both, the love of wisdom.

• agapesis shares its root with agape, the word for charity (cf. C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves); it is also the word at the opening of Aristotle’s “fourteen books of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics I] for men’s love of the senses, especially sight, for the sake of seeing and not only doing.
• The big Greek dictionary gives it a note of choice; he links this to the Latin pair amor (more sense-love) vs. dilectio (love of the will, from the word for choice), which he translates “chosen love”. Agapesis is a love of the will, not an emotion.
• Aside: the Polish-French professor who asked whether he had “an emotional attachment to the syllogism”; he loves its rigor but not with the feeling he would have for a girl.

2. Article 7, objections: does created truth seem eternal? (“nothing is more eternal than the ratio”) #

He reads the four objections.

1. Augustine, De libero arbitrio: nothing is more eternal than the definition of the circle and that two and three are five; but these truths are created; so created truth is eternal. Aside on the title: liberum arbitrium is “free judgment”, not “free will”; our freedom is rooted in judgment not being determined, since we can see something good even in the bad. Cats, though they know him as the man who feeds them, cannot help judging aggressive behaviour as a threat — their judgment is determined.
2. What is always is eternal; universals are everywhere and always; true is among the most universal (with being and one); so it is eternal. Example: Mr. Berquist began in ‘35 or ‘36 and can end, but what man is seems to be always.
3. What is true in the present was always true as future; the truth of a present statement is created; so some created truth is eternal.
4. What lacks beginning and end is eternal; the truth of enunciables lacks both: if truth began, it was true before that truth was not, so truth was before it began; if it ended, it would be true that truth no longer is.

• Aside: Aristotle’s opening of Metaphysics II — knowledge of truth is in one way difficult, in another easy; every professor down the hall would say “difficult, if not impossible”, only the door marked Aristotle would say “in one way easy”. A modern philosopher would begin by asking whether man can know truth; but that inquiry already assumes he can, since if he could not he could never know the truth of that statement. Some truths are plainly known: four is double two, the whole is more than the part, nothing is before or after itself.
• Sed contra: God alone is eternal.

3. Article 7, body: the truth of stateables is the truth of the understanding (“urine is called healthy”) #

Point: created truth is not eternal because no created understanding is eternal.

1. The truth of enunciables is nothing other than the truth of the understanding.
2. The stateable is in the understanding and in the vocal sound that signifies it; as in vocal sound it is called true insofar as it signifies some truth of the understanding, not from a truth in the statement as in a subject — as urine is called healthy not from health in it but from the health of the animal it signifies. (He corrects himself mid-reading here.)
3. Things are denominated true from the truth of the understanding; so if no understanding were eternal, no truth would be eternal. Only the divine understanding is eternal; and its truth is God himself, so nothing other than God is eternal.

• Digression on the sensible tool: the Peri Hermeneias says it is about the statement in vocal sound, though everyone knows the statement in reason is the primary interest — man needs a sensible tool. Can you pray without words? Perhaps, but Christ taught the apostles the words of the Our Father, and without words it is hard to teach and hard to tell daydreaming from prayer. Likewise the logician can only direct thinking through words; grace is given through sensible signs in the sacraments as a harmony with man; Arabic numerals serve calculation better than Roman. We order our thoughts by ordering the words that signify them.

4. Article 7, replies 1–3 (“has eternity in the divine mind”) #

• Ad 1: the definition of circle and two and three are five have eternity in the divine mind, not in mine, since my mind was not always — “just as Mr. Berquist was not always”.
• Ad 2: to be always and everywhere is said two ways: (a) having in itself that whence it stretches to every time and place, as God is everywhere and always; (b) not having in itself what determines it to a place or time — as first matter is called one not by having one form (as a man is one by his form) but by the absence of all distinguishing forms. Universals are always and everywhere in way (b), abstracting from the here and now; this makes them eternal only in an eternal understanding.
• Ad 3: what is now was future because it was in its cause; take away the cause and it would not be future. Only the first cause is eternal, so things were always future only in the eternal cause, which is God.
• Digression on the eternity of the world: Thomas’s work on the eternity of the world holds that the arguments for and against are at most probable, none demonstrative; we know the beginning only by faith (Genesis). In the book on dialectical reasoning [ed.: Topics] Aristotle gives “whether the universe is eternal” as an example of a probable question, as if admitting he had no demonstration. Two readings of Aristotle: he took eternity as more probable; and/or, like Euclid (as Heath notes), who proves only the hardest case and leaves the easier ones “for us nincompoops”, he demonstrates God’s existence on the harder supposition that the universe always was — for a universe that began obviously needs a cause, an eternal one less obviously.

5. Article 7, reply 4 and the soul’s grip on the indestructible (“nothing is not something except by the mind”) #

• Ad 4: our understanding is not eternal, so neither is the truth of statements we form; “the whole is more than the part” was not always put together, since God does not know it by putting together and before a mind existed nothing was put together. Before such truth was, it was not true to say it was not, except in the divine understanding; now it is true to say “truth was not”, by the truth now in our understanding — a truth about non-being, which has truth only from the understanding grasping it (as nothing is not something except by the mind that takes it as something). We must be there to grasp the non-being as preceding, and we were not always there.
• Digression, Socrates’ argument for immortality (Phaedo, inferred): if what is less apt to survive death does, what is more apt will. Through the body I touch this chair, destructible; through reason I touch what a chair is, which cannot be destroyed; so the soul is closer to the indestructible. The body in a way survives death — at least the bones (Egypt; “Alas, poor Yorick”); so a fortiori the soul.
• A second argument from the same starting point, which Socrates does not develop: the destructible chair becomes indestructible insofar as known by reason; not because of the thing known (that is destructible), so because of the knower — what is received is received according to the receiver. Example: the shape of the cup is held longer by clay than by water, and since the shape is the same, the difference is due to clay and water. Sign that reason is something indestructible.
• People misread Augustine’s first objection: he means there is something indestructible about what a circle, a sphere, even a chair is, though this material sphere is destructible.

6. Article 8, objections: truth seems unchangeable (“truth is not equal to the mind”) #

1. Augustine: truth is not equal to the mind, else it would be changeable as the mind is. Aside: “You change your mind” — careful: my mind is changed; I changed.
2. What remains after all change is unchangeable, as first matter is ungenerated and incorruptible; after every change it is true to say that it is or is not; so truth is unchangeable.
3. If a statement’s truth changed, it would change most of all with the thing; but Anselm defines truth as rightness, insofar as something fulfils what was decreed about it in the divine mind; “Socrates sits” has from the divine mind that it signifies Socrates sitting, and signifies that even when he is not sitting.
4. Same cause, same effect; the same thing causes the truth of “Socrates sat, sits, will sit”; one of them must be true; so their truth remains unchangeably.

• Aside: is the faith of the prophets the same as ours? They believed Christ will become man, we that he has; in some sense the same event — “we’ll see how Thomas handles that”.
• Sed contra: Psalm 11, truths are diminished by the sons of men.

7. Article 8, body: two ways conformity varies (“it has conformity to the things understood”) #

1. Truth is properly in the understanding alone; things are called true by the truth in some understanding — the word is not used in one sense, but the primary meaning is in the mind.
2. So changeableness of truth is considered in regard to the understanding, whose truth is conformity to the thing understood.
3. Conformity, like any likeness, varies by change of either extreme: (a) from the side of the understanding, the thing remaining the same, one takes another opinion; (b) the opinion remaining, the thing changes. Both ways give change from true to false.
4. An understanding in which no alternation of opinion is possible and which nothing escapes would have unchangeable truth — “I wonder who he’s talking about. It’s not about us.” Such is the divine understanding; its truth is unchangeable, being God himself.
5. Our truth is changeable, not as itself the subject of change but insofar as our understanding changes from truth to falsity, “as forms are said to be changeable” — a strange way of speaking, like natural philosophy. The truth of the divine understanding as natural things are said true is altogether unchangeable, since they always conform to the divine mind.

• Ad 1: Augustine was speaking of the divine truth.

8. Article 8, reply 2: true and being are convertible (“every A is B, every B is A”) #

Point: truth is corrupted only as this or that truth, per accidens.

• “Convertible” has a sense for automobiles, for the sinner converting, and in logic: A and B are convertible if every A is B and every B is A.
• Aristotle’s four predicates in the book about places [ed.: Topics]: said non-convertibly — accident (outside the nature: green and triangle, white and man) and genus (inside the nature but wider: every man is an animal, not every animal a man); said convertibly — definition (brings out the nature: square = equilateral right-angled quadrilateral) and property (convertible but not the nature: two is half of four, four is double two). A definition not yet convertible is not yet a definition — “a dog is a four-footed animal” would not satisfy Socrates (Posterior Analytics II on definition). Each of the four has its book of places.
• Aristotle first saw that the most universal thoughts are convertible: being, thing, one (as undivided and distinct from others), and harder to see, true and good. Objection “aren’t some things bad?” dissolves once bad is seen as a kind of non-being; hence everything, insofar as it is, is like “I am who am” and good. Augustine exaggerates — “sin is nothing” — strictly bad is not pure negation but the non-being of something a subject can and should have.
• The oppositions from the Categories: contradiction (sees / does not see — the bookmark does not see), having and lacking (blind — only what can and should see; his calf-leather Italian bookmark lacks nothing a bookmark should have and is not blind), contraries (both real, one lacking something relative to the other but not simply its lack: vice is a habitual inclination to the unreasonable, not mere absence of virtue — a newborn is neither chaste nor lustful, we are one or the other), relatives. In the mind: ignorance is a lack (the bookmark is not ignorant of theology), error is the contrary of knowing; “I don’t know” is not mistaken, “I say something” likely is. The Manichaeans’ two principles would be a problem only if bad were fundamentally a being.
• Being and knowable are likewise convertible; yet I know my plate is empty, that I am ignorant — non-being gets a kind of being of reason from the mind. “Nothing comes of nothing” (early Greeks; Lear to Cordelia; Julie Andrews): do we understand something or nothing by the word “nothing”? — the sophist’s tangle.
• Metaphysics V distinguishes being: in act and in ability; by the figures of predication; according to the truth of a statement (beings of reason); accidental being — white grandfather, Christian geometer, black magician. There is a way to become white and a way to become a grandfather, no way to become a white grandfather, so it is “hardly being”, though in some way white grandfathers exist; Thomas says not to ignore it, since our perfection (being a cook, geometer, Christian) depends on such being; God needs none of it.
• Reply proper: as being is not generated or corrupted per se but per accidens, insofar as this or that being is (Physics I: Parmenides — change is not from being to being or non-being to being but from this kind of being to that; the sophist who says dog-to-cat is animal-to-animal and so no change), so truth is changed not so that no truth remains, but the truth which was before does not remain: “I am sitting” true now, false later — Aristotle’s example in the Categories.

9. Article 8, reply 3: the statement’s two truths (“Socrates rising, there remains the first truth”) #

The statement has truth as other things do (fulfilling what the divine mind ordered it to signify) and in a special way, as signifying the truth of the understanding, which is conformity of understanding and thing. Take away the conformity and the truth of the opinion, and consequently of the statement, changes. “Socrates sits” while he sits is true both ways; when he rises the first truth remains (same statement, still signifying what it signifies) but not the second — “I’ve got to reject it now”. Aside: Plato thought the way we know must be the way things are, as if conformity required that — “a very subtle thing”. Three kinds: always true (two is half of four), always false (two is half of five), sometimes true (Socrates is sitting).

10. Article 8, reply 4: same cause, differently disposed (“does not have itself in the same way”) #

Socrates’ sitting, cause of the truth of “Socrates is sitting”, is not the same way while he sits, after, and before; so the truth it causes is diverse, as signified by present, past and future propositions; that one of the three is always true does not mean the same truth remains unvarying. He will return to this for whether Isaiah or Abraham had the same belief as ours (which goes through God’s knowledge).

11. Closing: falsity next, and the same knowledge of opposites (“appropriate to talk about falsity after truth”) #

Truth and falsity are known by one knowledge — Plato’s Symposium ends with Socrates arguing to Agathon and Aristophanes that one who knew what he was doing could write both tragedy and comedy; Homer wrote the Iliad and the (lost) Margites, a comedy per the Poetics; Shakespeare wrote both (his brother Richard surprised at how funny), Molière only comedies — by nature more than knowledge, since nature is determined to one opposite, knowledge open to both. Ethics teaches virtue and vice, logic (Albert on the Sophistical Refutations) good and bad reasoning, grammar correct and incorrect speech, medicine how to make sick as well as healthy — not that the intention is for both. Thomas then treats the life of God after the mind, whereas the Summa Contra Gentiles treats it after the will; cf. “I am the way, the truth and the life”: God is alive because he understands, the Word proceeds, and that is a kind of life.

His words #

• agapesis — love of the will, a “chosen love”, not an emotion; cf. dilectio from the word for choice, vs. amor (sense-love)
• liberum arbitrium — “free judgment”, not free will; the root of freedom is undetermined judgment
• ratio — “the thought” or definition (of the circle)
• enunciable / stateable — what is able to be stated; “the statements”
• fourteen books of wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics]; “book on places” [ed.: Topics]; “natural hearing” [ed.: Physics]
• everywhere and always (ubique et semper) — in two ways: by positive reach (God) or by abstraction from here and now (universals)
• convertible — in logic, every A is B and every B is A
• accident, genus, definition, idion (property) — the four predicates of the Topics
• being, thing/something, one, true, good — the most universal convertible thoughts [ed.: transcendentals]
• having and lacking — the lack is non-being of what a subject can and should have [ed.: privation]
• being of reason — the being the mind gives to non-being, e.g. nothing, ignorance, an empty plate
• accidental being — white grandfather, Christian geometer: “hardly being”
• per se / per accidens generation and corruption — of being and of truth
• rightness (Anselm) — truth as fulfilling what the divine mind decreed about a thing

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 16, a. 7 (whole article, read and translated)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 16, a. 8 (whole article, read and translated)
• Sirach/Ecclesiasticus 40:20 (read in Greek)
• Summa Contra Gentiles IV, ch. 15 (verified match, brief; the closing remark on the Word and God’s life)

Mentioned

• Augustine, De libero arbitrio (objections of aa. 7 and 8); Augustine, “sin is nothing”
• Anselm on truth as rightness (obj. 3, a. 8)
• Psalm 11, “truths are diminished by the sons of men”
• Aristotle, Metaphysics I (love of the senses), II (knowledge of truth difficult and easy), V (senses of being); Topics (four predicates; eternity of the world as a probable question); Categories (oppositions; “sitting” example); Physics I (Parmenides); Peri Hermeneias (statement in vocal sound); Posterior Analytics II (definition); Poetics (Margites a comedy)
• Thomas Aquinas, On the Eternity of the World; Genesis 1:1
• Plato, Symposium (end); Socrates’ immortality argument (Phaedo, inferred)
• Euclid, and Heath on Euclid’s practice of proving the hardest case
• C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves; Shakespeare, Hamlet, King Lear; Albert [the Great] on the Sophistical Refutations
• John 14:6 (inferred), “I am the way, the truth and the life”

His questions #

• Is the knowledge of truth difficult or easy? In one way difficult, in another easy (Aristotle); a philosopher who first asks whether man can know truth already assumes he can.
• Can you pray without words? Can you think without words? In some sense yes; but you cannot easily be taught or directed without a sensible tool, as Christ gave the words of the Our Father.
• When does man begin or cease to be? What man is seems to be always — but only in an eternal understanding (ad 2).
• Did you change your mind? My mind is changed; I changed.
• What does convertible mean? In logic, every A is a B and every B is an A.
• Is everything either seeing or blind? No; blindness is a lack, and only what can and should see (man and animals) is blind — not the bookmark.
• Do you understand something or nothing by the word “nothing”? Something: the mind gives non-being a kind of being of reason.
• Is there such a thing as a white grandfather? In some way yes, but it is hardly being; there is no way to become one.
• Are the prophets’ faith and ours the same? Left open; to be seen in the light of reply 4 (the same cause differently disposed).