Summa I, Q.21 Art. 4 Replies and Q.22 Art. 1: Mercy in Every Work of God; Providence as God's Foresight

Orientation #

He resumes with the replies to the four objections of q. 21 a. 4, whose first two “as we said” attribute some divine works to justice, others to mercy (prev. lecture). At the end he announces the next article: “now we got to see what’s subject to his foresight” — whether it reaches “all the way down” to the details. The previous class worked through q. 21 aa. 1-4 on divine justice, truth and mercy; the next continues with Psalm commentaries on mercy and justice before q. 22 a. 2.

The class, in order #

1. The Anaxagorean way of naming (“we call it for what it is most of”) #

Point: before reading the replies to objections 1 and 2, he supplies the principle that solves them — things are named from what predominates in them.

• Anaxagoras: everything is inside everything, an infinity of little pieces of everything else; yet we call this a dog, that a cat — “for what it is most of.” He calls this the Anaxagorean way of naming things and says it is “not an unheard of way of speaking”; to deny we ever speak this way is “artificial.”
• Examples, each showing the same predominance-naming:
  • Market vs. command economy: the Inca command economy (everyone gets new shoes and pants at intervals; the reader wears out pants, the walker wears out shoes; they trade — “that’s market”) is still not called a market economy; Gosplan in Moscow (a thousand engineers, a thousand economists “misplanning”) vs. our “market economy” which still has government interference by monetary policy.
  • Comedy of Errors called a comedy despite the very serious scene where the father is to be put to death; Macbeth called a tragedy despite bits of humour.
  • Thomas dividing the books of the Bible: Psalms is a book of prayer though it contains history and prophecy; history books may contain a prayer.
  • The Gospels proceed by the modus narrativus, narrating Christ’s words and deeds, though commands, prayers and much else are inside.

2. Reply to obj. 1: damnation and justification (“not as if they’re due to that alone”) #

Point: works are attributed to justice or mercy because one “more vehemently appears,” not because the other is absent.

• Damnation of the reprobate: mercy appears, not relaxing justice entirely but alleviating it — God punishes them less than they deserve.
• Justification of the impious (attributed to mercy): justice appears, since God relaxes guilt on account of a love which he himself poured in most mercifully. Magdalen: her many sins dismissed “because she loves much” — “kind of a justice there.”
• His illustration: we forgive more easily one who is very sad at having offended us, “if he deserves to be forgiven.” Student exchange: the appeal against a capital sentence because the man has repented and reformed — “he deserves it.”

3. Reply to obj. 2: Jews and Gentiles (“saved on account of the promises made to the fathers”) #

Point: both justice and mercy appear in both conversions, but a reason of justice appears in the conversion of the Jews that is absent for the Gentiles — the promises to the fathers, “kind of an obligation.”

• He refines the Anaxagorean principle: named from what it has most of either absolutely or in comparison to another. Even if there is more mercy than justice in the Jews’ conversion, there is an element of justice not found with the Gentiles, who are not the promised people.

4. Reply to obj. 3: afflictions of the just (“so press us that they compel us to go to God”) #

Point: in the afflictions of the just, both appear: light things in them are purged (justice) and they are raised from affection for earthly things toward God (mercy).

• Gregory’s text quoted: the bad things of this world press us so that they compel us to go to God — “that’s beautiful.”
• Aside: Weisheipl’s life of Thomas (read at the centennial) — Thomas’s memory for texts; he preached sometimes in Latin, sometimes in Italian vernacular, and in ten years in Paris never learned French; Berquist’s own poor French after more than ten years in Quebec.

5. Reply to obj. 4: creation (“he took pity on my not being”) #

Point: creation presupposes nothing in rerum natura (“in the real world,” his gloss) — no creature to whom something is owed — but it presupposes something in the knowledge of God, so the ratio of justice is saved.

• Justice: things are produced in being as befits the divine wisdom and goodness. He recalls that earlier Thomas used debitum in two ways, debitum to the creature and debitum to God; here it is debitum to God, “because there’s nothing the creature yet.”
• Mercy: a thing is changed from non-being to being — “that’s quite a defect, not being.”

6. Providentia is foresight (“reason is ability to look before and after”) #

Point: the English word for providentia is “foresight,” and the question could be titled “on the foresight of God.”

• Secunda Secundae, integral parts of prudence: providentia is one of the eight; an objection there says prudentia is etymologically a contraction of providentia, so it is the same word — like saying foresight is an integral part of foresight. Thomas replies that prudence is named from its chief or principal part.
• Churchill tended to use “foresight”: political foresight (foreseeing the consequences of courses of action) and military foresight (MacArthur foreseeing the results of the Inchon landing) are the virtue itself.
• Shakespeare: reason is the ability “to look before and after”; foresight is taken from “before.”
• Aside: confusion over a late student’s name (Ignatius / Isidore).

7. The prooemium of q. 22 and the order of the treatise (“regard together the understanding and the will”) #

Point: he is “kind of dumbfounded” by the prooemium and traces the order.

• Back-reference to the prooemium of q. 19: after divine knowledge (finished in q. 18), the divine will is considered in three parts — (1) the will of God; (2) what pertains absolutely to the will (love, mercy, justice); (3) what pertains to the understanding in order to the will. Q. 22 begins this third part: foresight with respect to all things; predestination and reprobation and what follows them with respect to men in particular, in order to eternal salvation.
• Thomas compares his order to moral science: after the moral virtues comes prudence, to which providence seems to pertain. Nicomachean Ethics: second half of Book III, Book IV, Book V (justice) treat moral virtues; Book VI, foresight.
• In the Ethics commentary Thomas gives two reasons the moral virtues come first: they are more known to us, and by them we are disposed for the virtues of reason, especially foresight — “your passions are all wacky, you don’t have that much foresight.”
• Secunda Secundae is in reverse order of the Ethics: faith, hope, charity, then prudence, justice, courage, temperance. His reason: in theology what is closer to God comes first. Theological virtues have God as object; prudence and justice are closer to God than fortitude and temperance, which concern emotions God does not have (justice is in the will, God is a will; prudence is in reason, God has mind); and as God’s knowledge was treated before his will, prudence before justice.
• Summa Contra Gentiles: providence is in the third book (its three parts: God the end of all things, cc. 1-63 roughly; providence directing things to that end in general; providence over rational creatures). Here in the Summa, providence belongs to the consideration of God in his operation, which SCG does more in Book I.

8. The four articles (“is it so, or does it exist”) #

Point: whether providence belongs to God comes first, as “whether God exists” precedes “what God is”; the other three divide against it.

• a. 2: whether all things fall under providence — stubbing my toe, losing hair combing in the morning.
• a. 3: whether providence is immediately about all things — some thought God extends generally but leaves details, like a president in charge of the executive branch who cannot attend to every detail. Does God attend immediately to this conversation, the leaves falling? Gospel: a sparrow does not fall to the ground, the hairs of your head are numbered — “really getting down to the details.”
• a. 4: whether providence imposes necessity — if it reaches all things and details, is it not imposing necessity? “No, he’s not. It’s a little hard to understand.”

9. Article 1: objections and sed contra (“providence, according to Tully, is a part of prudence”) #

• Obj. 1: Tully (= Cicero; his text gives De inventione) — providence is a part of prudence; prudence is bene consiliativa (Ethics VI); God takes no counsel, having no doubt. Aristotle’s three parts of prudence: taking counsel (deliberation: “you could do this, or this”), judgment (“better to do this, for this reason”), command (“now let’s do it”). Brother Mark’s joke: of three friends in Quebec, one imaginative but without judgment, Mark with judgment but unimaginative, both lethargic, the third got them going — they divided the three parts among them. Churchill had the third part most. The president calling people in about Iraq, then judging, then commanding. The first part clearly does not belong to God.
• Aside on giving people different names: Nathaniel in Thomas’s John commentary — apparently not one of the apostles; Christ chose fishermen so the Church’s success would not be attributed to a learned man; yet Nathaniel is present at the last chapter of John (the catch of fish). Is he Bartholomew? “I don’t know.”
• Obj. 2: whatever is in God is eternal; providence is about existing things, not eternal (Damascene, De fide orthodoxa).
• Obj. 3: nothing composed is in God; providence includes will and understanding.
• Sed contra: Wisdom 15 (he says verse 3; the book is in Greek): “You, Father, govern all things by providence.”

10. The body: the ratio of order to the end (“no substitute for the divine goodness”) #

Argument as he reads it:

1. Every good in things is created by God (shown above).
2. Good is found in things not only as regards their substance but as regards their order to an end, especially the last end, the divine goodness. He notes the distinction: the good of substance (creation) vs. the good of order, “more in what they do” — matching SCG, where goodness of substance is in creation and providence in Book III.
3. So the good of order is created by God; but God causes through his understanding, so the reason (ratio) of each effect pre-exists in him — “this is important to see,” and the way SCG reasons too.
4. Therefore the ratio of the order of things to the end pre-exists in the divine mind; and that ratio is properly providence. Military foresight is a way of achieving the end, victory — MacArthur: “no substitute for victory”; God: no substitute for the divine goodness.

• Providence is the chief part of foresight, to which the other two integral parts are ordered: memory of the past and understanding of present circumstances, from which we conjectamus — guess — about providing future things. Lincoln: if we knew where we came from and where we are, we could see what to do.
• Aristotle, Ethics VI: prudence orders other things to an end, either for oneself (ordering one’s acts to the end of one’s life) or for others subject to one — family, city, kingdom. Secunda Secundae distinguishes four species: individual, father of the family, military commander, king; practical philosophy has only three parts (ethics, domestic, political), so military foresight is “a very elevated thing” placed between father and king. MacArthur’s administration of Japan regarded by some as greater than his campaigns (a colleague at Saint Mary’s who had served under him).
• City vs. kingdom: Aristotle stops at the polis, an independent city; Paris to him would be a “conglomeration.” Thomas naturally distinguishes the kingdom — Louis IX protected the mendicants in Paris when arrows were being shot at them. Machiavelli, influential but “not so good,” writes of the city as Aristotle did.
• Matthew 24:45, the faithful and prudent servant set over his family.
• In God nothing can be ordered to an end, since he is the last end: God does not direct himself to his end but directs other things to his own goodness. So the ratio of the order of things to the end is named providence in God. God’s foresight is “much more universal than the foresight of the king.”
• Boethius, Consolation IV (his last work; source of the definitions of eternity and of providence): providence is the divine reason constituted in the beginning of all things, which disposes all things. Disposition is both the reason of the order of things to the end and of the order of parts in the whole; the order of parts to each other is on account of the order of the whole to the end — the parts of a chair are ordered to each other on account of sitting; creatures among themselves on account of their order to God. A commentary on the Consolation, not by Thomas but mixed with his works, is “pretty good.”
• Aside: writers on Thomas’s life say Urban IV brought Thomas and Moerbeke (Archbishop of Corinth) together at Orvieto to translate Aristotle accurately from the Greek and comment; not exactly so, but Thomas encouraged what Moerbeke was already doing, putting Aristotle into circulation despite the Averroist suspicion.

11. Reply 1: prudence is praeceptiva; dropping the genus (“drop the genus and keep the difference”) #

• Ethics VI: prudence is properly praeceptiva, commanding those things about which eubulia takes counsel and synesis judges — the last, culminating part is most of all called prudence. Counsel as inquiry about doubtful things does not belong to God; to command what is to be ordered to the end, of which there is right reason, does — Psalm 148: he laid down the precept and it will not pass away.
• Rule: carrying names over to God, drop whatever is imperfection — that our foresight is a habit, an accident, that it takes counsel.
• Second answer: “counsel” in God names the reason of things to be done, not the investigation but the certitude to which those taking counsel arrive — needed for Ephesians 1, “who does all things by the counsel of his will,” “a daring way of speaking.” MacArthur before Inchon: went over the plan with his second in command, then read his Bible.
• Parallel with scientia (translating episteme): in the Posterior Analytics episteme is the effect of a demonstrative syllogism — a syllogism making us know the cause, that it is the cause, and that it cannot be otherwise. Carried to God: not that he syllogizes, but he knows the cause and that it cannot be otherwise. So drop the genus, keep the difference: in material things genus is from matter, difference from form and act, so the difference carries over to pure act; Boethius: in the divine substance forma est, the material part dropped. The dialectical syllogism cannot be carried over at all — no probability in God’s knowledge. Aside: Fr Bochenski “dropped nothing”; teaching logic on a Euclid theorem last night.

12. Replies 2 and 3; closing (“the will and the understanding in God are the same thing”) #

• Reply 2: to care belong two things — the reason of the order (providence, disposition), which is eternal; and the carrying out of the order (governing), which is temporal. “Interesting the way he settles it.”
• Reply 3: providence is in the understanding but presupposes the will of the end — no one commands about means unless he wills the end; prudence presupposes the moral virtues by which the appetite is rightly toward the good (Ethics VI). Moral virtue defined: a habit with choice, in the mean relative to us, as determined by right reason (= foresight). Example: I want to eat and drink moderately; reason considers circumstances — a class to give or an operation to perform vs. an evening with friends — so the moderate amount differs. Second answer: even if providence regarded will and understanding equally, no detriment to simplicity, since in God they are the same.
• Closing: “now we know God is foresight”; next, what is subject to it — whether like President Bush’s, reading details, or like the German army in the Second World War, which gave subordinate officers freedom to act on circumstances that could not be foreseen once battle starts. “It would be interesting to find out.”

His words #

• Anaxagorean way of naming things: naming a thing from what it has most of, absolutely or in comparison to another.
• modus narrativus: the Gospels’ narrative mode of proceeding.
• in rerum natura: “in the real world.”
• debitum: what is owed, to the creature or to God.
• foresight: his English for providentia [ed.: providence]; also his usual rendering of prudentia [ed.: prudence].
• bene consiliativa: taking good counsel.
• eubulia: good counsel; synesis: judgment, “sensible man”; praeceptiva: commanding.
• conjectamus: “we guess” about future things.
• scientia / episteme: certitude from a demonstrative syllogism; in God, the difference kept, the genus dropped.
• forma est (Boethius): the divine substance is form.
• disposition: the reason of order to the end and of parts in the whole.
• governing: the temporal carrying out of the order.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 21, a. 4, replies 1-4
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 22, prooemium and a. 1 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 19, prooemium
• Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy IV (definition of providence, as quoted in a. 1)
• Wisdom 15 (v. 3, as he gives it); Ephesians 1; Psalm 148; Matthew 24:45 (as quoted in a. 1)

Mentioned

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, integral parts and species of prudence (no article given)
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics III-VI; Thomas’s commentary on it
• Aristotle, Posterior Analytics (definition of demonstrative syllogism)
• Aristotle, Politics (the polis)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles I and III
• Thomas Aquinas, commentary on John (Nathaniel)
• Cicero, De inventione; Damascene, De fide orthodoxa; Gregory (as cited by Thomas)
• Shakespeare, Comedy of Errors, Macbeth; Weisheipl’s life of Thomas; Machiavelli

His questions #

• Why call this a dog and this a cat if everything is inside everything? Because we call a thing by what it has most of.
• Is there mercy in the damnation of the reprobate? Yes: God punishes them less than they deserve.
• What justice is in the conversion of the Jews that is not in the Gentiles’? They are saved on account of the promises made to the fathers.
• How is justice saved in creation, where there is no creature to whom anything is owed? It presupposes something in God’s knowledge: things are produced as befits divine wisdom and goodness (debitum to God).
• What is the English word for providentia? Foresight; the question could be titled “on the foresight of God.”
• Why does the Secunda Secundae reverse the order of the Ethics? In theology what is closer to God is treated first.
• Does the president attend immediately to everything? Does God? The president does not; whether God does is a. 3 — left for the next classes.
• Does taking counsel belong to God? Not as inquiry about doubtful things; command does, and “counsel” in God names certitude.
• When a name is carried over to God, what do you drop? The genus (from matter) and every imperfection; keep the difference (from form).
• Is providence, involving will and understanding, composed? No: it is in the understanding presupposing the will; and in God will and understanding are the same.