Summa I, Q.21 (Arts. 2–4): Justice as Truth, God's Mercy, and Mercy as the Root of Justice

Orientation #

He opens with what he was reading “this morning” in the Summa Contra Gentiles on the devils’ sin, then says “you’re up to article two” of the question on God’s justice and mercy; the class ends mid-way through the body of article 4, with objections still unanswered. He refers back to the four-way distinction as “we mentioned before” (Avicenna on liberality) and “what we saw before” (God wills things other than himself freely) (prev. lecture). The previous class covered q. 20 a. 4 and q. 21 aa. 1-2; the next finishes the replies of a. 4 and begins q. 22 on providence.

The class, in order #

1. Opening aside: the sin of the devils (“stopping at their own excellence”) #

Point: a reading from the Summa Contra Gentiles on what the devils’ sin consisted in.

• They did not retulit (his gloss: “bring back”) their own perfection to God; they stopped at their own excellence, not wanting to be subject to higher things. Other faults (hatred of God, envy of man) arose from that pride.
• “Kind of frightening to read about”: so excellent a creature can go wrong.

2. Art. 2: is the justice of God truth? (“justice of God is not truth”) #

Point: the objections rest on two other senses of “truth”; Thomas’s sense is things made equal to the divine understanding as rule.

• Obj. 1: justice is in the will (rightness of the will, Anselm); truth is in the understanding (Ethics VI). Obj. 2: “truth” in Ethics IV is a moral virtue (veracity) other than justice.
  • Aside on Ethics IV’s last three virtues: truth, friendliness (not friendship; you have it even to the clerk in the store), and eutrapelia, “easily turned”, our “sense of humor”; Shakespeare’s “within the limit of becoming mirth” gives exactly the Greek word.
• Sed contra, Psalm 84: “mercy and truth have met together”, truth standing for justice.
• Body, as he reads it:
  1. Truth is the equalling (adaequatio [ed.: standard term; he says "making equal"]) of understanding and thing.
  2. When things measure the understanding (as in us), truth is the understanding made equal to the thing: “from this that the thing is or is not, our opinion is true or false” (he refers this to the Categories, chapter on before and after).
  3. When the understanding is the cause and rule of things (as God’s is), truth is the things made equal to the understanding, as an artist makes a “true work” when it accords with the art.
     • Examples: “this is not really a true symphony” (not according to the rules of the art); “this is not really a crêpe Suzette” (shortcuts taken, doesn’t measure up to the recipe).
  4. As artificial things are to art, so just doings are to the law. God’s justice constitutes an order conformed to his wisdom (his law); hence it is fittingly called truth; so too we speak of “the truth of justice”.
• His observation: since truth connects with the understanding, justice seems closer to the understanding than mercy, which is more a perfection of the will or heart; note we use “just” to mean “equal, just so, truly so”.
• Ad 1 (not merely “different meanings”): justice as regards the ruling law is in reason; as regards command, by which works are ruled by law, it is in the will. Cf. the treatise on law: law is first something of reason (as against Hegel, something of the will). Cf. liberum arbitrium, “free judgment”, translated “free will”: the free judgment makes the will free, a kind of praedicatio per causam [naming the effect by the cause]; justice is in the will only when reasonable.
• Ad 2: Aristotle’s truth is the virtue by which one shows himself in words and deeds as he is (Iago lacks it); conformity of sign to signified, not of effect to rule as in justice. Open question he raises: how can that virtue be a moral virtue, if truth is in reason? “You’d have to point out what you mean by truth.”

3. Art. 3 objections: mercy as a species of sadness (“mercy does not belong to God”) #

Point: the structure of the question (justice, mercy, both together; article 1 subdivided) and the two objections.

• Misericordia: translate “mercy” or “pity”. Obj. 1: mercy is a species of sadness (Damascene); no sadness in God.
  • Three kinds of sadness, from his work on the emotions and the Poetics: pity = sadness over another’s misfortune, so by nature seems good; envy = sadness at another’s good fortune, so by nature bad (“through the devil envy came into the world”; the novelist: harder to bear the good fortune of one’s friends; the roommate’s handsome boyfriend, the classmate who lands the job); melancholy, in between = sadness over one’s own miserable state, or that of the family, city, nation, world one belongs to. Tragedy purges pity and fear; comedy moves to mirth and hope and purges melancholy (Shakespeare and the English comic muse). Envy is excluded from God for other reasons; God cannot be melancholy.
• Obj. 2: mercy is a relaxation of justice, but God cannot omit what pertains to his justice: 2 Tim 3, “he remains faithful, he cannot deny himself”, gloss: he would deny himself if he neglected his own sayings. “Something Calvin might go for.”
• Sed contra, Psalm 110: God is merciful and takes mercy.
• Pity vs. mercy (student’s suggestion, accepted): pity names simply sadness at another’s misfortune, which you can feel at the news of a soldier dead in Iraq, twenty, recently married, and do nothing; mercy customarily implies you can do something to relieve the misery. Shakespeare’s late “romances” (Cymbeline, Tempest, Winter’s Tale, Pericles) he calls “mercy and forgiveness romances”: something can be done, unlike Othello.

4. Art. 3 body: mercy according to its effect (“most of all be attributed to God”) #

Point: mercy belongs to God maxime, according to its effect, not the affection of passion.

• Analogy with anger: God has no feeling of anger, but since the angry man punishes, God insofar as he punishes is said to be angry, a metaphor for his justice. Difference he draws: for anger there is another word, “justice”, for what is properly in God; for mercy there is no other word, so a word originally naming an emotion (hence metaphorical) has become, for want of another, the name of God’s will to relieve our defect and misery.
• Liturgical aside: Kyrie eleison keeps the Greek word for pity (as in Poetics and Rhetoric); Agnus Dei … miserere nobis is the same word in Latin; both prayers appeal to mercy.
• Etymology: misericors = one having a miserum cor, a heart affected by another’s misery as if his own. Misery names not the sadness but the opposite of happiness.
  • Words for happiness: “happy” from hap, luck (bona fortuna); felicitas from felix, fruitful, a better name, since happiness is the fruit of virtuous acts (“virtue is the road to happiness, vice to misery”; fruits of the Holy Spirit); eudaimonia, “having a good demon”, implies guidance from above; in the Poetics Aristotle uses a word like bona fortuna. Is happiness luck, fruit of deeds, or a higher one’s direction? “Some truth in all of these.” Opposite: miseria; native English “wretched”, related to shipwreck (Pius XII: to disbelieve is to suffer shipwreck; Shakespeare’s life as a voyage to port).
• Conclusion he reads: to be sad over another’s misery does not belong to God; to repel another’s misery most of all belongs to him, taking misery broadly for any defect (strictly, misery is opposed to happiness; Aristotle: the dog with a good meal is not called happy). Defects are removed only by the perfection of some good, and God is the first origin of goodness.
• Aside: no prayer appeals to God’s justice (“Oh God, do me justice”); he cringes at petitions crying for justice; Portia’s argument to Shylock.

5. Four ways of bestowing perfections (“for another and another reason”) #

Point: Thomas’s distinction among goodness, justice, liberality, mercy, secundum aliam et aliam rationem.

• Communication of perfections considered absolutely: goodness (diffusive of itself). According to the proportion of things: justice (distributive; the dog and you do not get the same). Not for God’s usefulness but on account of his goodness: liberality (Avicenna: God alone is liberal; he gets nothing from what he gives, whereas we get at least the good deed). Insofar as they expel every defect: mercy.
• Not synonyms, though in God one thing; four thoughts. “A very beautiful text.” SCG I treats God’s justice and liberality, not so much mercy; Ethics IV has liberality and justice, no virtue of mercy.

6. Art. 3 replies; mercy the fullness of justice (“mercy does not take away justice”) #

• Ad 1: the objection rests on mercy as sadness (tragic and comic masks). The tyrant weeping at a tragedy while pitiless in real life; Augustine’s criticism of theatre: tears do you no good unless practiced in virtue.
• Ad 2: God acts mercifully not against but above his justice: one owed a hundred denarii given two hundred; remitting an offense is a kind of giving (Ephesians 5, as he cites it). English “forgive” and “thanksgiving” both contain “give”, differently: thanks for a good received, forgiving a bad done to you; German vergeben, “give completely”. So mercy is “a certain fullness of justice”: “That’s a very subtle thing.” James 2: mercy exalts judgment; Portia on perfecting justice by mercy.
• Mary: Mother of Mercy and Mirror of Justice, never Mother of Justice; women by nature more merciful (Shakespeare); the first coming of Christ, in mercy, is through Mary; the second, in justice, is with angels, not through her. Commentary: nil habens in regno justitiae; Mary at the cross calls down no justice.
  • Anecdote: the disciplinary committee, FBI handwriting identification; the father accepted the son’s guilt, the mother would not. Would more men than women favour the death penalty? “I don’t know.” In the romances it is the woman who forgives.
  • Student’s remark: women are stronger than men in living life, so men sin more and women forgive; he replies Christ as man is the exception, “influenced by his mother.”

7. Art. 4 objections (“in all the works of God mercy and justice”) #

• Lead-in from the Lectura on John, “the wine of justice”: the Good Samaritan as Christ, the man going to Jericho as the human race deprived of natural goods; Christ heals through justice, tempering its severity with the oil of mercy. Thomas will treat this universally.
• Obj. 1: some works are attributed to mercy (justification of the impious), some to justice (damnation; James 2, judgment without mercy to him who has not done mercy). “A good objection.” Obj. 2 (Romans): conversion of the Jews to justice and truth, of the Gentiles to mercy; the two objections are alike. Obj. 3: many just men afflicted, which is unjust (was Christ’s death on the cross just?). Obj. 4, “more universal”: justice renders what is owed, mercy relieves misery; both presuppose something, but creation presupposes nothing. “Pretty strong.”
• Sed contra, Psalm 24: all the ways of the Lord are mercy and truth (why article 2 was needed).
• Reflection: is it chance or reason that “just” means equal (courts of equity, “a fair deal”)? Truth too is an equality of mind with things, so truth and justice go together, while mercy “goes over the top”, not observing equality (“more than I deserve”); liberality is closer to mercy than to justice. No answer to the objections is reached in this class.

8. Art. 4 body: mercy as removal of any defect (“removal of any defect”) #

• Thomas says mercy and truth are in every work, if mercy is taken for removal of any defect, not misery strictly: a stone, tree, dog cannot be miserable; only what can be happy, the rational creature. Miseria opposed to felicitas, fruit of deeds; Macbeth’s doctor, “unnatural deeds do breed unnatural troubles” (“breed” = give birth); chance and something above have influence but are more hidden.
  • Poetics: change in a play is from happiness to misery (tragedy, fear) or the reverse (comedy, hope; the classical scholar’s “hope is the greatest”). Women of Trachis: Deianira’s fear at the enslaved princess, “what could happen to me”.
  • Example of broad mercy: rain when crops need it.
• Reason for the necessity: the debt rendered by justice is owed either to God or to the creature, and neither can be lacking in any work. God cannot do what is unsuitable to his wisdom and goodness (owed to himself); he acts in created things by a suitable order (distributive justice).

9. Justice presupposes mercy; its first root (“presupposes the work of mercy”) #

Point: the two are not parallel; the work of justice always presupposes and is founded on mercy.

1. Nothing is owed to a creature except on account of something already in it or foreseen by God.
2. If that is owed, it is on account of something prior; this cannot go on forever.
3. So one arrives at what depends only on the goodness of the divine will: God chose you to be, no more deserving than countless others who could have been (Rush Limbaugh aside on naming the next child).

• Fits what was seen before: God wills nothing other than himself except freely (prev. lecture).
• Example: a hand is owed to man because of his rational soul (Aristotle against Anaxagoras: man has a hand because he is most intelligent, the tool of tools fitting the infinity of mind); a rational soul is owed to him to be a man; to be a man, on account of divine goodness. So mercy appears “as regards the first root” (“a beautiful concrete word”). Question to the class: is this in Sister Faustina’s writings? Not known.
• Mercy’s power is saved in all that follows and operates more vehemently, as the first cause flows in more than the second (Liber de Causis). Michelangelo vs. the hammer and chisel: both involved in the Pietà, but Michelangelo more vehemently. So too God dispenses even what is owed largius, more generously (cf. Shakespeare’s reason as “large discourse”; Thomas’s prayer before communion appealing to God’s abundance [word unclear in recording]): less would suffice for the order of justice than divine goodness confers, “which exceeds every proportion of the creature.”

His words #

• retulit: “bring back” (of the devils not referring their perfection to God)
• justice is truth: things made equal to the divine understanding as their rule, as a work is “true” when it accords with the art
• friendliness: had toward everybody; distinct from friendship
• eutrapelia: “easily turned”, sense of humour
• liberum arbitrium: free judgment, foundation of what is in the will; “free will” for want of a better translation
• praedicatio per causam: naming the effect by its cause
• pity vs. mercy: pity = sadness at another’s misfortune; mercy adds being able to relieve it
• envy: sadness at another’s good fortune; melancholy: sadness over one’s own or one’s community’s misery
• misericors: having a miserum cor
• felicitas / felix: happiness as fruitful, fruit of virtue; eudaimonia: good demon; bona fortuna; miseria; “wretched” from shipwreck
• liberality: giving not for one’s own use but from goodness; “God alone is liberal” (Avicenna)
• mercy as “fullness of justice”, acting above not against justice
• misery broadly: any defect; strictly, the defect of the rational creature
• “first root”: mercy as that on which justice is founded
• largius: more generously (he says “large use”)

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 21, a. 2 (objections, body, replies); a. 3 (objections, body, replies); a. 4 (objections, sed contra, body to “exceeds every proportion of the creature”)
• Psalm 84 (mercy and truth have met); Psalm 110; Psalm 24; 2 Timothy 3 with gloss; James 2; Ephesians 5 (as he cites); Romans (conversion of Jews and Gentiles)

Mentioned

• Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles (sin of the devils; book I on justice and liberality); Lectura on John (wine of justice, Good Samaritan); treatise on law; prayer before communion
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics IV (truth, friendliness, eutrapelia, liberality) and VI; Categories; Poetics (pity and fear, change of fortune); Rhetoric; on the hand vs. Anaxagoras
• Anselm (justice as rightness of will); Damascene (mercy a species of sadness); Augustine on theatre; Avicenna; Liber de Causis; Calvin; Hegel; Pius XII; Sister Faustina
• Shakespeare: Othello (Iago), Merchant of Venice (Portia), Macbeth, the romances; Sophocles, Women of Trachis

His questions #

• Does Iago have the virtue of truth? No; that virtue is conformity of sign to signified, and he lacks it.
• How can Aristotle’s “truth” be a moral virtue if truth is in reason? left open (“you’d have to point out what you mean by truth”)
• Are pity and mercy synonyms? Mercy adds the ability to do something to relieve the misery (student’s answer, accepted).
• Does God’s will to relieve our misery have a name other than mercy? No; unlike anger/justice, mercy for want of another word names God’s will itself.
• What is the native English word for the opposite of happiness? Wretched, related to shipwreck.
• Who acts more vehemently on the marble, the hammer or Michelangelo? Michelangelo; so mercy is to justice as first cause to second.
• Is it just that Christ died on the cross? left open (raised against objection 3, not answered in this class)
• Does the idea of mercy as first root come out in Faustina’s writings? Not known to those present.