Aquinas on Life (ST I q.18 a.1–3): Moving Oneself, Life as Being, and the Grades of Life up to God

Orientation #

He refers back to “last week” on the four grades of life from De Anima II and on why the Summa Theologiae attaches the divine life to the divine understanding whereas the Summa Contra Gentiles puts it after the will (prev. lecture). Verified matching finds the class on ST I q.18 aa.1–3 (a.2 the longest stretch), with reading from handouts “Note for Book One of Natural Hearing, Reading I”, “The Proemia to Logic” and “Causes of Love”, and the closing digression probably lying between a.3 and a.4 (inferred). The previous class finished q.16 a.4 and opened q.18; the next continues q.18 aa.3–4 and moves toward the divine will.

The class, in order #

1. Article 1, reply to the first: motion as the “life” of natural bodies (“motion is said as it were the life”) #

Point: Aristotle’s saying that motion is the life of natural bodies holds only by likeness, not properly.

• Thomas: the philosopher’s word can be taken of the first motion (the heavens) or of motion in general; either way it is “as it were” life.
• Heavenly motion is to the universe of natural bodies as the heart’s motion is to the animal (aside: circulation of the blood; in the older physics the heavens’ circulation was thought to cause motion below).
• Every natural motion is a likeness of vital operation: “the fall of a stone to the ground is the life of the stone — not very elevated life.”
• Hence if the whole bodily universe were one animal, its motion would be from an intrinsic mover, as some laid down.

2. Reply to the second: locomotion, growth, and rest (“outside the disposition of their nature”) #

Point: heavy and light bodies move only when out of their natural disposition; living things move precisely when in it.

• The objection: locomotion is prior and more perfect than growth (Physics VIII), and all natural bodies have a source of locomotion, so all would live.
• His gloss on the order of the natural books: eight books of Natural Hearing on motion in general, book V dividing motion into place, quality, quantity; then On the Universe (place), Generation and Corruption (quality), the books on life (growth). Growth needs chemical change, chemical change needs bringing things together; so place is in a way cause of quality, quality of growth (hence the old biology major took more chemistry freshman year). Also: what moves in place is not being affected intrinsically, so it is “more in act” than what grows or is altered.
• Thomas’s reply: the stone, when it has what its nature should have, is at rest; the plant, when fully in its nature, is growing. Heavy and light bodies are moved always by an outside mover, the generator giving the form or the remover of the obstacle (move the pillar and the thing falls, but the cause is outside). Living things move themselves; the plant builds itself up.

3. Reply to the third: living waters (“waters are said to be alive”) #

Point: flowing water is “alive”, stagnant water “dead”, again only by likeness.

• Cistern and pond water is called dead; running water alive because it seems to move itself; but the motion is from the generating cause, as with heavy and light things.
• So the notion of life is “moves itself”: walking in the woods you kick a stone and it rolls (not alive); you step near something and it shoots across the path (alive).
• Aside: the joke about the first automobiles, “where’s the horse?” — automobile means “as if it moved itself,” but it is one thing moving another.

4. Article 2: is life an operation or the being of the living thing? (“Vivere viventibus esse”) #

Point: he frames the article as the choice between life as what the living thing does and life as its very existence, and leans to the second.

• Death is not simply “not doing these things” but loss of being; sleep is not death; trees in winter do nothing, yet one waits to see whether they “revive” — the life was hidden, not resurrected.
• Objection 1: nothing is divided except by what is of its genus, and Aristotle (De Anima II) divides living by four operations: to use food, to sense, to move in place, to understand (plants the first, all animals the second, higher animals the third, man all plus the fourth “except the sloth”). He repeats last week’s point: because understanding is a grade of life, “God understands” leads at once to “God lives”; hence the Summa Theologiae places the divine life after the understanding, the Contra Gentiles after the will (which pertains to life but is not a grade); the Summa’s order helps read “I am the way, the truth and the life,” truth and life coupled and appropriated to the Son, who proceeds by the Father’s understanding himself. Descartes “could have said: I think, therefore I am alive.”
• Objection 2: active vs. contemplative life differ only by operations (Martha and Mary).
• Objection 3: to know God is an operation, and “this is eternal life, that they know thee” (John 17:3).
• Sed contra: De Anima II, to live is for living things to be — “when I cease to be alive I will not be any more; my soul might be, but I won’t.”

5. The corpus: names taken from outside, placed on the nature (“we name something as we know it”) #

Point: because our understanding knows the what-it-is through the senses, which know only outward accidents, names are taken from outward properties but imposed to signify the nature.

1. Understanding’s own object is the what-it-is (quidditas — “terrible word”, Shakespeare mocks “quiddities”); more precisely, De Anima III, the what-it-is of something sensed or imagined.
2. It takes this from the senses, whose objects are exterior accidents; so we reach the essence from what appears outside. Heraclitus: nature loves to hide — because it is within.
3. Aside on English: “thinking about” (going around) precedes “thinking out” (bringing out); hence definition may be called speech bringing out what a thing is. We know other people outwardly first — the “moment of truth” reveals character. “Outward sign” in the Baltimore Catechism’s definition of a sacrament nearly means “sensible.”
4. Therefore names are often placed on natures from outward properties; taken properly they signify the nature, minus proprie the property. Thomas’s standard example: lapis, “hurts the foot” (maybe a false etymology).

• Thomas’s comparison: “body” imposed to signify the substance apt to have three dimensions, but also used for a species of continuous quantity (line, surface, body). Body in substance and body in quantity are not the same thing; one identifies that substance by what the senses know. Aside: Descartes identified material substance with extension — trouble for the Eucharist, since the substance of bread and wine is transubstantiated while the dimensions remain, preserved by God, and Christ’s body is there by those dimensions, not its own. (He was reading that morning the SCG arguments, “about eight”, that spiritual substances are not bodies.)
• Applied to life: the name is taken from something appearing outside, self-motion, but imposed to signify the substance to which it belongs by nature to move itself or lead itself to operation. To live is to be in such a nature; life is the same in the abstract, as cursus is to run. Hence vivum is a substantial, not accidental predicate: substance divides into living and non-living. Minus proprie, life is taken for the operations, as Ethics IX: to live is chiefly to sense and understand. Joke: “I’m going to live it up this weekend — I’m reading about God.”

6. Replies of Article 2 (“to be is to sense or to understand”) #

• To 1: Aristotle either takes “live” for operation, or better, “to sense” and “to understand” are sometimes taken for the very being of things operating so, i.e. having a nature for sensing or understanding — esse is not sentire in us, though in God they are the same. The four grades are four genera of living things: nourishing (with growth and generation), sensing (oysters, sea-bottom animals that react to a pin but lack the distance senses), moving in place (perfect animals), understanding (men). Cutting a branch draws no scream; cutting a dog’s leg draws a reaction.
• Aside on homines: Greek onoma names both “name” and “noun” against rhema; Latin nomen likewise, English separates name/noun; conversely Greek and Latin have homo common to vir and femina, while English must use “man” both as common and as opposed to “woman.” (From teaching the Peri Hermeneias the night before; Ammonius explains the shifting use.)
• To 2: works of life are those whose source is in the doer; habits added to natural powers act in the manner of nature and make operations delightful; what a man delights in and orders his life to is called his life (“C’est ma vie”; luxurious vs. honest life). So active and contemplative life, and so knowing God is called eternal life.
• Student: so “this is eternal life, to know thee” is the less proper sense? — Yes; substance is primary, but in God being and operation are the same.
• What he stresses: both senses are legitimate; being is first in the thing, operation first in our knowing. Example: whether the soul survives death depends (De Anima I) on whether it does something not in the body; it understands the universal, and what is received in the continuous is singular; the soul is “not completely immersed” in the body, like something floating partly above water. Shakespeare: “things in motion sooner catch the eye than what not stirs” — motion stands out, but is not most fundamental.

7. Article 3: does life belong to God? objections and sed contra (“Exult in the living God”) #

• Obj. 1: things live as they move themselves; God is unmoving. (“A good objection.”)
• Obj. 2: in all living things a source of life can be taken, the soul being cause of the living body (De Anima II); God has no cause.
• Obj. 3: the source of life in bodies is a soul, only in bodily things; so nothing bodiless lives.
• Sed contra, Psalm 83:3, “my heart and my flesh exult in the living God” (a preparatory psalm before Mass). Also Peter’s confession, “Son of the living God” — John’s ending, “that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God,” lacks the word “living.”
• The SCG divides this more: God is alive, then God is life itself.

8. The corpus: grades of self-motion up to God (“life most properly is in God”) #

1. Things live as they operate from themselves and not as moved by another; the more perfectly, the more life.
2. In mover and moved three things are ordered: the end moves the agent; the chief agent acts by its form; the instrument acts only by virtue of the principal agent, for carrying out — a moved mover, so not alive.
3. Plants move themselves only as to carrying out; form and end are in them by nature (growth and decrease).
4. Animals move themselves also as to the form, taken by sense: the cat at the window desiring the bird, moved by the bird’s form in its senses. Touch-only animals (oysters) move by dilating and contracting, little exceeding plants; those with distance senses move by progressive motion (birds, animals finding their way home). But animals do not set the end before themselves; that is innate, by instinct.
5. Above them, those that set the end before themselves, which needs reason to know the proportion of end to means: “belongs to the wise to order,” wisdom being the highest perfection of reason. Sign: in one man understanding moves the sense powers, which move the organs — “you are most of all alive by your reason”: a lame leg loses less life than blindness, less still than losing one’s mind. Comparison from the arts: the governor’s art commands the shipbuilder, who commands the one disposing matter (“the chef is more alive than the guy who peels the potatoes”).
6. Yet our understanding is moved by another as regards first principles (the whole is more than the part) and the last end (one cannot not will happiness).
7. Therefore that whose nature is its own understanding, with nothing determined by another, has the highest grade of life: God.

• He then reads Metaphysics XII (Lambda, “eighth reading”) in Greek: kai zoe de ge huparchei — life belongs to God; the energeia of nous is life; God is a living being, eternal, best; life and continuous eternity belong to God; “and that is what God is” — not just alive but life itself. “Pretty good, this whole pagan Greek.” (Aside: Diocletian’s wife named Zoe.)

9. Digression: the mistake of an imperfect first beginning (“act is before ability”) #

Point: Aristotle’s attack on those who deny the kalliston and ariston to the beginning exposes a mistake running through all philosophy: confusing what is so simply with what is so in some way.

• Metaphysics IX: act is before ability in knowledge, perfection and goodness; in time in one way not, since a thing is in ability before act, but it passes to act because of something already in act; so simply act is first, and the beginning of all is most actual and most perfect.
• The end of knowledge is to know the first cause and to know the best; if the first cause were most potential, “an insoluble problem”; with Aristotle, “with the truth all things harmonize.” Lenin: mind is the highest product of matter.
• This is the second kind of mistake outside speech in the Sophistical Refutations; also at the beginning of logic, Meno’s objection (we cannot seek what we do not know). His counting example: he does not know how many are in class, counts to twenty-three “with the greatest ease,” having known what he sought as the number of students, which told him to take the road of counting (contrast the gas station: no directions without a destination).
• Same mistake in life: we do the bad because it is in some way good, omit the good because it is in some way bad. If Meno’s objection held there would be no logic and no art of calculating; at the end of philosophy the materialist/immaterialist divide turns on it too. Knowing kinds of mistakes helps, though it does not make one immune.

His words #

• Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics]; “books on the universe”, “on generation, corruption”, “books on life”
• move itself: his basic gloss of what life is
• Vivere viventibus esse (De Anima II): for me to be is to be alive
• what it is / whatness: quidditas
• minus proprie: not incorrect, but the less proper use of a name
• imposed = placed upon (of a name); taken from (of its source)
• cursus / to run: abstract and concrete, as life / to live
• praedicatio accidentalis vs. substantial predication of vivum
• onoma / rhema, nomen / verbum; homo common to vir and femina
• moved mover: the instrument
• progressive motion (going forward) vs. dilating and constriction
• ability [ed.: potency], act
• zoe, energeia, nous, aion, ariston, kalliston (from the Lambda text)
• ninth book of Wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics IX]

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, ST I q.18 a.1, replies to obj. 1–3
• Thomas, ST I q.18 a.2, whole article
• Thomas, ST I q.18 a.3, objections, sed contra, corpus
• Aristotle, Metaphysics XII (Lambda), lectio 8, Greek text on God’s life
• Handouts (per verified sources): “Note for Book One of Natural Hearing, Reading I” p. 9; “The Proemia to Logic” p. 11; “Causes of Love” p. 18 Mentioned
• Aristotle, De Anima I (soul’s existence depends on its acting apart from body), II (four grades; soul cause of living body), III (object of mind)
• Aristotle, Physics V and VIII; Ethics IX; Metaphysics IX; Sophistical Refutations (mistakes outside speech)
• Plato, Meno; Ammonius on the Peri Hermeneias
• John 17:3; John 14 “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (inferred); Psalm 83:3; Peter’s confession; John’s ending
• Summa Contra Gentiles (life of God after will; spiritual substances not bodies)
• Baltimore Catechism definition of sacrament; Descartes; Shakespeare; Heraclitus; Lenin

His questions #

• Is being alive what I am doing, or the existence of a thing able to do these things? Fundamentally the existence; operation is life minus proprie.
• Is death simply that I’m not doing these things? No, death is loss of being (sleep and winter trees are not dead).
• Is body in the category of substance the same as body as a species of quantity? No; and Descartes’ identification leads to trouble with the Eucharist.
• What does “to be is to sense or to understand” mean? To have a nature for sensing or understanding; esse is not sentire in us, though in God they coincide.
• Is “this is eternal life, to know thee” a less proper definition? Yes, in creatures; in God being and operation are the same.
• How do you know the soul is not immersed in the body? Because it does something not in the body: it understands the universal.
• What kind of mistake is it to think the beginning of things is not the most perfect? Confusing what is before in some way with what is before simply.
• How did I know the road to twenty-three when I didn’t know I was going there? I knew it in some way, as the number of students in class, which told me to count.