Summa I, Q.17, a.4: True and False as Contraries; Q.18 on the Life of God and the Grades of Life

Orientation #

He begins directly at “Article four” (of q.17) and, with “a little time left,” goes on to q.18, De vita Dei, stopping in the body of a.1: “We’ll come back to that body of that article a little bit next time, and then go to the reply to the objections.” Back-references: “as I mentioned before” his paper on the five attributes of God in the two summas, and “our profound study of the three books about the soul” (earlier course, not the previous class). The previous class covered q.17 a.3-4 on falsehood in the intellect and the kinds of opposition; the next continues q.18 on life and the life of God.

The class, in order #

1. Objections and sed contra of a.4 (“the tragedian is a false actor”) #

The point: three objections say true and false are not contraries; the authority against is Aristotle.

1. True is “that which is” (Augustine); what is and what is not are opposed as contradictories, not contraries.
2. One contrary is not in the other, but the false is in the true: Augustine’s tragedian is a “false actor” only because he is a true actor (Soliloquies).
3. There is no contrariety in God, who is not in a genus (City of God XII); yet falsehood is opposed to God, since the idol is called a lie in Scripture (Jeremiah, “they grasped the lie,” gloss from Jerome). Sed contra: Aristotle, second book of the Peri Hermeneias (“the book about statement”), lays down that false opinion is contrary to true opinion.

2. Body: negation, privation, contrary (“neque ponit aliquid”) #

The point: true and false are contraries, “and not as affirmation and negation,” which is his way of saying not as contradictories.

• Negation neither posits anything real nor determines a subject; so “not seeing” is said of being and of non-being alike.
• Privation posits nothing but determines a subject: “a negation in a subject” (Metaphysics IV). Blindness is the unbeing of sight in what is apt to see: the chair is not blind, you would be.
• The contrary does both: vice is not the mere non-being of virtue but a real habit, and in the same subject as the virtue (reason, will, or the irascible appetite: courage and cowardice). Hence contraries are species of one genus (black a species of colour).
• The false posits something: per Metaphysics IV it is when “something is said or seems to be what it is not, or not to be what it is”; as the true is an adequate taking of the thing, the false is a taking that is not adequate. Therefore contraries.

3. Reply to obj. 1: statements vs. thinkings (“we’re both thinking something”) #

The point: “truth of the thing” is what is in things; the “true of the understanding,” where truth is first, is what is grasped (truth primarily in the mind, good primarily in things, the point Aristotle makes briefly in the sixth book of Wisdom). The false is what is not as it is apprehended; and to apprehend a thing to be and not to be has contrariety (Peri Hermeneias II): the opinion “good is good” is contrary to “good is not good.” Distinction: statements vs. opinions.

• Statements “two is half of four” / “two is not half of four” are contradictories.
• If I think the one and you the other, we are both thinking something; you are not merely lacking my thought (that would be ignorance, not mistake) but positing a real thinking. So the opinions are contraries.
• Test: contradictories force one or the other. “Either you think two is half of four or you don’t”—one must hold; but not everyone thinks either that it is or that it is not; some never thought about it. Same with nine choirs of angels and the chambers of a frog’s heart (“three, isn’t it?”). “This is a dog or it is not”: one or the other; “everything is either justice or injustice”: no, because these are not contradictories. Aside on the square: contradictory of “every man is white” is not “no man is white” (both can be false) but the diagonal “some man is not white”; two particulars can both be true. Aside on custom over-reading: “I don’t think he’s a good man” does not say I think he is bad, I may know nothing of him; “some of you passed” is taken to mean most failed, though half the exams may be uncorrected; “some women are beautiful”; in logic “some men are animals” does not say some are not.

4. Reply to obj. 2: false founded in true (“everything false in something true”) #

The point: the false is not founded in the true that is its contrary, as the bad is not in the good that is its contrary (injustice not in justice, but the vice is in the will, which is a good God gave). This holds because true and good are most common, convertible with being: every privation is in a subject that is being (blindness is in the man, not in sight, whatever the Sophists play at), so every bad is in some good and every false in some true. The false Hector is a true tragedian. Hence there is no “bad itself” as God is goodness itself (the Manichaeans had one); something can get close to totally bad but not be so.

5. Reply to obj. 3: nothing contrary to God (“lies opposed to divine truth”) #

The point: contraries and privatives are apt to come about in the same thing; so to God in himself nothing is contrary, by his goodness or his truth, and in his intellect no falsehood. But in our grasping there is a contrary: the false opinion about idols is contrary to the true opinion about the unity of God, both in us; that is how idols are called lies.

6. Back to the Peripatetics: which opposites are which (“the furthest apart”) #

The point: contrariety belongs to opinions, and to universals as “furthest apart.”

• Socrates is / is not an animal: contradictories, one true one false. Every man is / no man is an animal: both can be false, yet Aristotle calls them contraries because furthest apart, as black and white are the species furthest apart, or tragedy and comedy with plays in between. One who thinks every man good and one who thinks no man good are further apart than the man who thinks some good, some bad.
• Two men, “the soul is immortal” / “not immortal”: their thinkings are contrary, each thinking something other; the statements alone are affirmation and negation, and Aristotle sometimes calls contradiction “affirmation and negation.”
• Recap of the pairs: being/non-being (and perhaps something/nothing) contradictory; one/many [answer given by class, unclear in recording]; true/false contrary; good/bad primarily as privation.
• Augustine’s “sin is nothing” is hyperbole Thomas would not use: sin is a real act lacking what it should have. His class example: house on fire, I get my books, then the baby; disordered as to before and after. Paying myself in the corner instead of from corner to doorway [ed.: his image, sense unclear] is bad too, less seriously.
• Reason, per “the definition of Shakespeare,” is the “ability for large discourse, looking before and after,” so it orders; and mens is from mensura, so it measures. Good simply for man is the reasonable; the sense-pleasant is good only imperfectly, sometimes reasonable to pursue, but the extra drink that interferes with duty is “too much of a good thing.”

7. Question 18: where the life of God goes (“De Vita Dei”) #

The point: the two summas differ in order. In the Summa Contra Gentiles life of God comes after both understanding and will; in the Summa Theologiae it comes after understanding (q.17) and before will (q.19). His paper on the five attributes concluded it is presumptuous to call one order correct or simply better; each shows what the other does not. Student’s reason for SCG order: life is the fullness of a living thing, understanding and will together; he agrees, since God’s life consists in understanding and loving himself and other things.

8. Refresher from the books about the soul (“five genera of powers”) #

The point: the numbers five, four, three explain why life goes with understanding.

• Five genera of powers, in Aristotle’s order in De Anima II-III: vegetable (digest, grow, reproduce; Thomas uses these for baptism, Eucharist, confirmation), sense, understanding, desiring, locomotion (last because knowing and desiring enter into it).
• Four grades of life: sense presupposes vegetable, understanding presupposes sense; but desire follows on sense (emotions) and on understanding (will), so it gives no separate grade. Locomotion does: the marine biologist’s bottom-dwelling animals sense (prick them, they react) but do not move and have only touch or taste, food coming to them.
• Three kinds of soul: soul is a rising above matter; senses receive shapes and colours immaterially (my eye takes on the chair’s shape without becoming a chair), understanding still more so.
• Conclusion: understanding is “greater and more basic,” will proceeds from it (God’s will is his understanding, we will because we understand, animals lack will because they lack understanding); so life is taken up with understanding, a much higher life than ours, and the desiring powers need not enter. Aside: these are books read all your life; C. S. Lewis on the man who says “been there, done that” of a great book: he is lost for higher things.

9. “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (“I am the Hodos”) #

The point: the coupling of truth and life here illuminates the Gospel text (John, Philip’s question where and how). Thomas’s commentary: Christ as God is the goal, truth itself and life itself; as man he is the road to himself as God; Greek hodos, Aristotle’s word for road, Latin via in the Tertia Pars. Since this treatise is on the unity of God, each Person is truth itself and life itself; yet, as goodness (object of love) and love are appropriated to the Holy Spirit though God is love (St. John), truth (object of understanding) and life are appropriated to the Son, who proceeds as Word, “the light that enlightens every man,” light referring to understanding, without denying that Father and Spirit enlighten. “So I love this.”

10. Question 18 prologue and a.1 (“life is hidden in the plants”) #

The point: because understanding belongs to living things, life follows knowledge; four articles, the first two on life in general, the last two on God’s life (Thomas is “considerate to his students,” repeating what is in De Anima and Metaphysics). Objections that all natural things live:

1. Physics VIII: motion is “as a certain life” in all things; nature is the beginning and cause of motion and rest in that in which it is per se. Students asked “what is life” answer “motion”; Max Born’s “restless universe.”
2. Plants live by having in themselves a cause of growth and decrease; but local motion is prior and more perfect (Physics VIII: bodies must be brought together for change of quality, the sun’s change of place warms and cools, quality precedes growth), and all natural bodies have some cause of local motion.
3. The elements, most imperfect, are said to live: “living waters.” Sed contra: Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 6, plants have life by “the last echo” of life; inanimate bodies are below plants. (His wife’s plants each “has got a soul.”) Body: from what is manifestly alive we learn what lives. Life is manifest in animals, hidden in plants (the unwatered plant may or may not “revive”). Sign: animal is named from anima, soul being the first cause of life in a living body, even though “animate matter” is said of plants. Hence in De Anima I the predecessors sought soul through locomotion or sensation, which belong to animals: the first philosophers began with what is more known to us, whereas we begin with whatever professor or book we happen on. So living is distinguished from non-living as animals are said to live: we say the animal lives when it begins to move from itself (“quickening”), judge it alive while such motion appears, dead when moved only by another. Properly living things move themselves by some species of motion. Distinction begun: motion properly (Physics III: act of the imperfect, of what exists in potency) vs. motion loosely (act of the perfect, as understanding and sensing are said to move, De Anima III). Living things are those that bring themselves to motion or operation; what cannot is called living only by metaphorical likeness. Stopped here.

His words #

• contradictories / affirmation and negation; opposition of being and non-being, one must be true, the other false
• negation; “neque ponit aliquid,” posits nothing and has no subject
• privation / lack; a negation in a subject apt to have the form (blindness)
• contrary; posits something and has a subject; contraries are species of one genus
• truth of the thing vs. the true of the understanding; truth first in the mind, good first in things
• Peri Hermeneias; “the book about statement”
• book of wisdom / Wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics]
• mens from mensura; reason as measuring and ordering
• large discourse, looking before and after; Shakespeare’s account of reason
• De Vita Dei; q.18
• five genera of powers, four grades of life, three kinds of soul
• hodos / via; road, Christ as man
• appropriation; attributing to one Person what is common to the three
• antonomasia; “the philosopher” for Aristotle
• Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics]
• quickening; the animal’s first motion from itself
• act of the imperfect vs. act of the perfect; motion proper vs. loose
• metaphorical likeness; how non-living things are said to live

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I q.17 a.4, whole article
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I q.18 prologue and a.1, objections, sed contra, first half of body Mentioned
• Aristotle, Peri Hermeneias II (opposed opinions; square of opposition)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics IV (privation in a subject; definition of the false); Metaphysics VI (truth in the mind)
• Aristotle, Physics VIII (motion as life; priority of local motion); Physics III (definition of motion)
• Aristotle, De Anima I (predecessors), II-III (powers, sensing and understanding as “motion”)
• Augustine, Soliloquies; City of God XII; “sin is nothing”
• Jeremiah, “they grasped the lie,” gloss from Jerome
• Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 6
• Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles (order of the attributes); Summa Theologiae I q.19; Tertia Pars (Christ as via); Thomas’s commentary on John (inferred)
• John 14, “I am the way…” (inferred); John 1, the Word and the light; 1 John, “God is love” (inferred)
• Max Born, The Restless Universe; C. S. Lewis on rereading

His questions #

• What is and what is not are opposed as what? Contradictories.
• Everybody thinks there are nine choirs of angels or doesn’t; but does everybody think either there are nine or there are not? No; some have no opinion, which is the sign the first pair are contradictories.
• Everything is either justice or injustice? No; only “justice or not justice,” since virtue and vice are not contradictories.
• Why take up the life of God after both understanding and will (SCG), and why between them (ST)? SCG: life is the fullness, understanding and love; ST: understanding is more fundamental, will proceeds from it.
• Five genera of powers, four grades of life, three kinds of soul: why the discrepancy? Desire follows knowing and gives no grade; soul is counted by degrees of rising above matter.
• Is truth and life peculiar to the Son? No, common to the three; but appropriated to the Son as proceeding by understanding.
• Is sin nothing, or a real act lacking what it should have? A real act with a lack; Augustine’s phrase is hyperbole.
• Where is life manifest, and where hidden? Manifest in animals (anima), hidden in plants.
• To live belongs manifestly to what? Animals; hence life is judged by motion from oneself.