Life in God (ST I q.18 a.3–4): Perfect Act, All Things as Life in God, and Moving On to the Divine Will

Orientation #

He refers back to “the earlier article” where to be and to live were said to be the same in the living thing (prev. lecture), and to “what we were saying earlier in the class” on the verb in the Peri Hermeneias. At the end he says the divine will (q.19) is next, “I don’t know if we should do that today”, and reads only the prooemium. The previous class worked through q.18 on what life is and whether it belongs to God; the next takes up q.19 aa.1-2 on the divine will.

The class, in order #

1. Review of the word “act” (“act is first of all means motion”) #

Point: “act” is not purely equivocal; it is said first of motion and carried over to form, and perhaps later to being.

1. In the ninth book of “Wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics IX] Aristotle says act first means motion — because our knowledge begins with the senses, and “things in motion sooner catch the eye than what not stirs” (Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida).
2. In the middle of that book Aristotle carries “act” from motion to form by a proportion: wood is to the table before it is formed as the man able to walk is to walking.
3. Thomas, in one of the disputed questions, gives another way: form is the source or end of some motion (as “being” is carried from substance to quantity because quantity is the size of substance).
4. Perhaps later “act” is carried to being in the sense of existence — a third extension; we see form as act before existence (moulding clay into shapes).
5. What Thomas calls operatio and he calls simply “doing” is closer to motion than to being.

2. Doing vs. motion: imperfect and perfect act (“motion is essentially an imperfect act”) #

Point: motion is by nature an imperfect act; sensing and understanding are perfect acts, like motion but complete at each moment.

• Walking home: while walking home you are not yet home; when home, the walking home no longer exists. Growing to five foot ten; becoming hot: each is not-yet while it goes on, and gone when achieved.
• Aristotle (Metaphysics IX) contrasts this with an activity that is complete: when I am seeing you, I have seen you; when I understand what a triangle is, I have understood it. Our grammar reflects motion (hence “perfect” tense): walking home, I have not walked home; seeing you, I have seen you.
• Like motion in that I can start hearing Mozart or seeing the sunset as I can get up and walk; unlike it in being perfect. This is the kind of activity God does, and “motion” is sometimes given to it because of its proximity to motion; form is further removed and would not be called motion.

3. Reply to the first objection: how God “moves himself” (“there is a twofold what action or doing”) #

Point: reading the reply to obj. 1 of a.3 — understanding is called motion by a likeness, so Plato’s “God moves himself” means God understands and loves himself.

1. Twofold action (ninth book “after the books in natural philosophy” [ed.: Metaphysics IX]): one carries over into exterior matter (to heat, to saw), a perfection of the moved not the mover; another remains in the doer (to understand, sense, will), a perfection of the agent.
2. Because motion is the act of the mobile, the second action, as act of the agent, is called motion by this likeness — though motion is the act of the imperfect (full definition, Physics III: act of what is able to be insofar as it is able to be), while this action is the act of the perfect, of something existing in act (De Anima III).
3. In this sense what understands itself moves itself: so Plato spoke, and Aristotle often notes it; Plato laid down that God moves himself because he understands and loves himself. His gloss on the grammar: “understand” and “love” are verbs; a verb (Peri Hermeneias) signifies with time, and time is the number of the before and after in motion — so “I moved the book” and “I understood myself” look alike, and the extension to “motion” is natural. Yet understanding may not be spread out in time; hence the odd situation that understanding, I have already understood; loving, I have already loved. One would not signify form by a verb (“I’m forming the matter” is the motion) — which shows understanding, loving and sensing are nearer motion than form is. Thomas elsewhere: Plato’s self-moving God and Aristotle’s unmoved mover say nothing really different, since Aristotle uses motion strictly (act of the imperfect) and Plato means understanding and loving.

• Aside: the perfect act is less known to us — the professor’s wife sees him reading, then thinking with no outward sign, and takes that moment for small talk, though “he’s doing maybe his most important stuff now.”

4. Replies to the second and third objections (“he does not have a what source or cause”) #

Point: God’s life differs from ours in having no source, and does not presuppose the fundamental life of plants.

• Obj. 2 reply: living bodies have a beginning or cause of their life; God is his very existence and act of understanding, so his very to-live; he has no source of his life any more than of himself. Our natural life has a cause; so a fortiori our supernatural life — even the beatific vision has the light of glory as its source.
• Obj. 3 reply: life in these lower bodies is received in a corruptible nature needing generation (conservation of the species) and food (conservation of the individual); hence here life is never found without the vegetative soul — but this has no place in incorruptible things.
• Aside: a break; a passing mention of Isidore [unclear in recording].

5. Article 4 put: whether all things are life in God (“Whether all things are life in God”) #

Point: the question arises from the Latin Fathers’ punctuation of John 1, but what matters is whether it is true.

• Sed contra: quod factum est, in ipso vita erat — Thomas reads with Augustine, Jerome and the Latin Fathers; Chrysostom and the Greek Fathers put the stop after sine ipso factum est nihil. All things apart from God are made; therefore all things in God are life — “quod erat demonstrandum.”
• Objections: (1) Acts 17, “in him we live and move and are” — but not all things in God are motion, so not all are life. (2) Things are in God as in the first exemplar and must conform to it; not all things live in themselves. (How can a stone be life in God and not in itself?) (3) Augustine, On True Religion: living substance is better than non-living (tree over stone); so things would be more truly in God than in themselves — false, since in themselves they are in act, in God only in ability. (4) God knows bad things and things he could do but never does; if being known makes them life in God, these too would be — unfitting.
• Body: God’s life is his understanding; in God the understanding, what is understood, and the act of understanding are the same; so whatever is understood in God is his very life; all things made by God are in him as understood, hence are the divine life itself.

6. Reply 1: two senses of “in” (“creatures are said to be in God in two ways”) #

Point: Acts 17 uses “in” in the sense of power, not the sense in which things are in a knower.

• A: in God as contained and conserved in the divine power, as things “in our power” — the seventh sense of “in” in Physics IV (“it’s out of my hands”, no longer in my power). In this way creatures are in God even as in their own natures, for they still depend on him; this is how “the apostle’s” word is to be understood: our living, moving and being are caused by God.
• B: in God as in a knower — not one of Aristotle’s eight senses, though maybe run off one of them (form and matter?), “nevertheless a different sense.” So things are in God through their proper reasons, not other than the divine nature, and thus are the divine essence, which is life not motion: in this way things in God are life, not motion.
• Taken as an objection to the body, the first objection commits what “the philosopher says is the most common mistake” — the class supplies it [unclear in recording; the reference to a book of “refutation” suggests the Sophistical Refutations (inferred)].
• Student asks for Thomas’s commentary on “in him we live and move and are”: he has none on Acts (Chrysostom has homilies); the text shows up in many places but he has not yet seen a full explanation, tied to the earlier point that to be and to live are the same in the living thing, and to “without me you can do nothing.”
• Asides: “the apostle” = St Paul by antonomasia, though not the twelfth elected (Matthias); Thomas calls Peter and Paul the apostles by antonomasia, John Paul II “princes of the apostles”; feast June 29, the two basilicas.

7. Reply 2: conformity to the exemplar (“according to the what notion of their form”) #

Point: the exemplated conforms to the exemplar in the notion of the form, not in its way of being.

• The form of the house in the artist’s mind has immaterial, understandable being; in the house outside the soul, sensible and material being. So the reasons of non-living things are life in the divine mind because there they have the divine being, which is the divine life.

8. Reply 3: truer in God or in themselves? (“truer being simply in the divine mind”) #

Point: natural things have more being in God, but are “this” (a man, a horse) more truly in themselves.

1. If matter were no part of the definition of natural things, they would be in all ways more truly in the divine mind — hence Plato’s separated man is the true man and the material man is man by partaking; this assumes matter is outside what a man is (Aristotle takes this up in the seventh book of “Wisdom”).
2. But matter is of the definition of material things; so natural things have truer being simply in the divine mind (uncreated being) than in themselves (created being).
3. Yet to be this — a man, a horse — is more truly in its own nature, since matter pertains to the truth of man. As a house has nobler being in the artist’s mind but is more truly a house in matter: the one in act, the other in potency.

• “So I’m more truly a man in myself than in God; nevertheless I have in God more being than I have in myself.”
• Student: St Ignatius of Antioch, longing for martyrdom, says something like “when I get there, then I’ll truly be a man” — he: strange; “gotta be careful about that”; check the Greek.

9. Reply 4: bad things, and things that never are (“Sin is not life in God”) #

Point: bad things are in God’s knowledge but not as created, preserved, or having a reason in God, since they are known through the notions of good things; so they are not life in God.

• Blindness is known through sight, sight without blindness; the bad is known through the good because of its defect — going back to what Thomas said earlier on how God knows bad things.
• Things that are in no time can be said to be life in God insofar as “to live” names only to understand, not insofar as it implies a principle of operation.

10. “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (“close relation between life and truth”) #

Point: truth and life are paired because life here belongs to the treatise on divine knowledge, and both are appropriated to the Son.

• Student: the way refers to the humanity, truth and life to the divinity. He confirms from the prooemium of q.14: after the divine substance (the questions on knowing and naming God) come the operations; operations that remain in the doer (knowledge, will) are treated first, divided against the power of God, principle of operation going to an exterior effect; and “because to understand is a certain to-live,” after knowledge comes life.
• Appropriation: everything before the Trinity is common to the three persons, so the Father or Holy Spirit could say “I am life itself”; an essential attribute is appropriated to a person by likeness to what is proper to it. The Son proceeds as the Word, God’s thought; truth and life are tied up with thought; hence appropriated to the Word. Yet John 5: “the Father has life in himself” — so it is by appropriation, not said privately of him.
• Catechisms of his youth divided the text into three: as truth, the creed; as life, the sacraments; as way, the commandments — matching teacher/prophet, priest, king. Thomas, following Augustine, allows more than one sense of the letter; this seems an example.
• In the Gospel context (Philip, or someone, asking where he is going and how to get there) Christ answers two questions: the road is how to get there, truth and life is where — so the twofold division by human and divine nature “maybe fits the context more,” and this casts light on that; in the tertia pars Thomas takes Christ as man as the road to the Father.

11. Prooemium to q.19 and the map of the treatise (“go on to the what divine will”) #

Point: how the questions from 19 on are divided, and why understanding and willing are divided against power.

• Why mind before will: in the Trinity we have more names for the procession of the Son than of the Holy Spirit (which has no proper name); we name as we know, so it is more known — perhaps analogous here.
• Division: (1) the divine will itself (q.19); (2) what pertains to the will absolutely — love (q.20; the desiring power has passions like joy and love, and habits of moral virtue), justice and mercy (q.21); (3) what regards intellect and will together — providence, predestination and reprobation (qq.22-24); then the divine power, looking back to the original division.
• Doing vs. making: in English he divides “doing” into doing and making; a thing can be divided into itself because one member keeps the name, nothing being added. Making, though the less perfect act, stands out because it has a product apart from the making (“production-minded men,” an old U.S. News advertisement), so it gets a new name; the doing that remains in the doer has none. Under doing: God’s understanding, willing, loving; under making: q.24 or 25 [ed.: he is unsure of the number], the power of God.
• Summa Contra Gentiles: understanding and willing in Book I; Book II reopens the distinction (“for a full knowledge of God” both doings are needed) and treats God making the universe; providence in Book III. Here all is in the first part, with providence under understanding-and-willing together. His puzzle: God’s plan in his mind remains in God, but God guiding us seems to have an exterior effect — “a little subtle differences.”
• Asides: Catherine of Siena’s book on divine providence; Providence College and the Dominicans’ reputation for placing men where they are best; providentia an integral part of prudence (secunda secundae), named from the principal part, prudentia a contraction of providentia, so “foresight” (Churchill’s word); Abraham and Isaac — “God will provide,” the mountain named from God seeing; the acquaintance who brushed up his Spanish and was then called on to use it — God, or a guardian angel, arranging things; Thomas on being illuminated sometimes as to why, sometimes only that you should; the proportion God : our events :: dramatist : the characters’ events.

His words #

• Wisdom — Aristotle’s Metaphysics [ed.: Metaphysics]; “ninth book of Wisdom” = Book IX, “seventh book” = Book VII.
• ability — potency, in “act and ability” [ed.: potency].
• Natural Hearing — the Physics [ed.: Physics].
• doing — his word for operatio; the second action, remaining in the doer; divided into doing and making.
• imperfect act / perfect act — motion vs. activity complete in each moment (walking vs. seeing).
• verb signifies with time — from the Peri Hermeneias; time the number of before and after in motion.
• intelligere — to understand; “in this way intelligere is a motion.”
• to live of God — God’s vivere is his intelligere.
• seventh sense of in — being in the power of another, Physics IV.
• the apostle — St Paul, by antonomasia.
• exemplata — the things exemplared; conformed to the exemplar by notion of form, not way of being.
• partaking — Plato’s material man is man by participation.
• appropriation — attributing an essential attribute to one person by likeness to what is proper to it.
• sense of the letter / spiritual sense — Thomas following Augustine; more than one literal sense possible.
• making — doing with a product apart from it.
• providentia / prudentia / foresight — providence as an integral part of prudence; prudence named from its principal part.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 18, a. 3, replies to objections 1-3
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 18, a. 4, whole article (verified: ~20 min)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 14, prooemium
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 19, q. 20, q. 22, prooemia
• John 1, “quod factum est in ipso vita erat” (in the sed contra); Acts 17, “in him we live and move and are”

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX (act and ability; twofold action) and VII (Plato’s separated man)
• Aristotle, Physics III (definition of motion), IV (eight senses of “in”)
• Aristotle, De Anima III; Peri Hermeneias (verb); Sophistical Refutations (inferred, “most common mistake”)
• Thomas, a disputed question on act carried to form (unspecified); Summa Contra Gentiles I-III; secunda secundae on prudence; tertia pars on Christ as the road
• Augustine, On True Religion; Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida; John 5 and John 14 (inferred); Chrysostom’s homilies on Acts; Ignatius of Antioch; Catherine of Siena on providence; Genesis, Abraham and Isaac

His questions #

• What is the difference between doing and motion? Motion is by nature an imperfect act (walking home is incomplete while it exists); understanding and sensing are perfect acts, complete while going on.
• Why is understanding called a motion at all? By likeness: motion is the act of the mobile, this action the act of the agent; and we signify both by verbs, which signify with time.
• Why doesn’t God have the fundamental life the plants have? Because that life is received in a corruptible nature needing generation and food; no place in incorruptible things.
• What two senses of “in” does he distinguish in the reply to Acts 17? In God’s power (seventh sense, Physics IV) vs. in God as in a knower (not among the eight senses).
• What mistake does the first objection make if taken against the body of the article? The most common mistake the Philosopher names — the class answers, but the word is unclear in the recording.
• Am I more truly a man in myself or in God? More truly a man in myself; but I have more being in God (uncreated) than in myself (created).
• Would you explain “I am the way, the truth, and the life”? Way = humanity, truth and life = divinity; truth and life go together because life falls under divine knowledge, and both are appropriated to the Word.
• How do you divide doing into doing and making, and why does making get a new name? One member keeps the name because nothing is added; making has a product apart from it.
• Why does Thomas take up the mind before the will? Perhaps as with the processions: the Son’s is more named and more known; suggested, not settled.
• Is providence a doing that remains in God or one with an exterior effect? Left open — “a little subtle differences here.”