Sweet and Right: A Psalm Commentary on God's Mercy and Justice, and Whether All Things Fall Under Providence (Summa I, Q.22 a.2)

Orientation #

He says they “just got through a little while back” the article showing mercy and justice in all God’s works, and that “we’d seen the first article last time” of q.22 (that providence belongs to God) (prev. lecture). Because “it’s a hot day” he begins with a scriptural excursion on Psalm texts before returning to q.22 a.2. A text-matching system also reports passages from the handouts “Note for the Second Book of Wisdom” (p. 3) and “Know Thyself” (p. 4) and from two DHB volumes (III p. 524, I p. 7) in this audio; the transcript itself does not name these, so their place in the class is inferred. The previous class concluded justice and mercy and opened q.22 a.1; the next continues the objections of q.22.

The class, in order #

1. Psalm 24: God is dulcis et rectus, and how the metaphor “sweet” works (“God is dulcis et rectus”) #

Point: Thomas reads dulcis as God’s mercy, rectus as His justice, and explains the metaphor of sweetness.

• Figurative speech: the speaker’s meaning is not the words’ meaning but connected to it; in metaphor the connection is likeness.
• Thomas (on Ps 24): sweetness is said properly of bodily things, metaphorically of spiritual things, so spiritual sweetness must be taken by likeness to bodily. Three things in bodily sweetness: it (1) refreshes the taste, (2) quiets it, (3) delights it; likewise spiritual sweetness for spiritual taste.
• He calls this “the best explanation of the metaphor sweet” — even the romantic use: “sweetheart”/“honey” = someone who loves you; being loved is pleasant, refreshing, restful, as being hated (Ockham’s “tenacious ill will” of opponents) wears you down.
• Shakespeare’s “your sweet form”: sweet here a metaphor for beautiful, not love. The beautiful is defined by its effect — that which pleases when seen; “a sight for sore eyes” (refreshes the eye); “how restful” a beautiful scene (quiets). So the three marks apply.
• Applied to mercy: God’s will to remove our misery is pleasing; we rest in it; it refreshes.
• Thomas continues: among men sweetness satisfies self or others often in bad things; in God only in the good — therefore et rectus is joined. Dulcedo → mercy, rectitudo → justice; the same teaching as the Summa question.

2. Proper vs. metaphorical naming, and the order of mercy and justice (“the reverse of the order in the summa”) #

Point: justice is named properly of God, mercy at first metaphorically; the Psalm names mercy first, the Summa justice first, and each order has a reason.

• Justice vs. mercy as names: justice is a virtue in the will; God has a will, so “just” is said properly (distributive, not commutative). Mercy first names an emotion — sadness over another’s misfortune (Aristotle, Rhetoric and Poetics) — and there is no sadness in God; so “merciful”, though it may come to be used properly for want of another word, originally names metaphorically. Compare “anger” for divine justice: a metaphor, which Scripture uses but the Summa need not, since the Summa is not “symbolic theology” (Dionysius’ book on the metaphors said of God) but has its own word. In the Psalm the metaphorical naming of mercy is “even more explicit” (dulcis) than in the Summa.
• Order: q.21 shows (a.1) God just, (a.2) justice called truth, (a.3) God merciful, (a.4) justice and mercy in all His works. The Psalm puts mercy first. Student: mercy is more attractive. His answer: Thomas follows the order of what is more known to us — God has a will and no emotions, so justice belongs to Him evidently, mercy only with difficulty. Aside: the old man in the Republic begins to think there may be “some kind of accounting after death.”
• But in the things themselves mercy is more fundamental: you cannot owe or distribute to anyone unless someone is first there to receive — “prior to justice is mercy.” That is the Psalm’s order.
• Ps 24:8, quoted in q.21 a.4: universae viae Domini misericordia et veritas — the reason a.2 had to show veritas can mean justice. Tobias 3:2 gives the same order, with misericordia rather than the metaphor.

3. Psalm 30:16: sweetness as the substantial goodness of God (“Sweetness is said in spiritual things transumptive”) #

Point: the same metaphor also names the divine goodness.

• Thomas: as bodily sweetness delights the taste of the flesh, so what delights the mind inwardly is called sweetness. But a badly disposed taste delights in a corrupt savour — false delight; so a disordered affection delights in what is not truly delightful, a well-disposed one in the true good, the divine good. Hence God’s substantial goodness is called His sweetness (Wisdom 16:21).
• Or: as someone has a “bitter affection” who thinks how to sadden others (Eph 4:31), so sweetness of soul is proposing to console others; God’s sweetness is His will that all men be saved (1 Tim 2:4). Ps 33 “taste and see”; back to dulcis et rectus.
• However taken, sweetness contains delight; God, one and simple, is root and fountain of all goodness, so “whatever delights in the world, the whole of it is in God.”

4. Wine and the many things sweetness can name in God (“the wine of justice, the wine of wisdom”) #

Point: one metaphor can stand for several divine things, each by a different likeness.

• Wine running short (Cana, as explained before): literal sense, they ran out; spiritual sense, wine of justice, of wisdom, of charity — three likenesses: wine bites and stings → justice; it rejoices the heart of man (a text “the French corrected”; Wisdom says there is no bitterness in wisdom) → wisdom; it warms and intoxicates → charity.
• So sweetness is a metaphor for: mercy (Ps 24); goodness (Ps 30) — in symbolic theology the goodness treated in the treatise on God’s substance could be called His sweetness; Augustine, “our hearts are restless until they rest in thee” (rest), “come to me and I will refresh you” (refresh), and it pleases: the only thing that quiets the heart; beauty — Augustine’s “too late have I come to know thee, thou ancient beauty,” fitting Socrates’ discourse on the higher love leading to the beautiful itself, which is God; the divine beauty a fortiori pleases (“torrent of delight”), rests, and refreshes without tiring; love (student suggestion) — “sweetheart” has two figures: synecdoche (person named from a part) and metaphor (the heart is sweet because it loves you), with the same three marks.

5. Questions: can divine truth or divine justice be called sweet? (“Is God’s justice not sweet”) #

• Student: can sweetness be said of divine truth, given that veritas stood for justice? His reply restates his two points: (1) dulcis is metaphorical, rectus proper, matching the Summa’s mercy/justice; (2) per the article in q.1 on why Scripture uses metaphors, metaphor is a sign the thing is beyond us, less known — as if we grasp divine justice better than divine mercy. “Truth” for justice is a peculiar use; truth proper comes up in the treatise on God’s understanding. Christ speaks properly (“born to bear witness to the truth”) and metaphorically (“I have come to cast fire” — “he’s come with a box of matches”).
• Student: is God’s justice sweet? He: “not apt” — the text keeps sweetness for mercy; one would rather say justice is sweetened or moderated by mercy. Student: Dante’s saints delight in God’s justice seeing sinners suffer, because they see the whole providence; for us now mercy is more aptly called sweet, though strictly justice too. He: Greek poets say revenge is sweet; he prefers to avoid that way of speaking.

6. Justice, truth, mercy; hope and fear (“provoked to fear”) #

Point: mercy is the object of hope, justice of fear, and the spiritual life needs both.

• Ps 31: mercy will surround “the one hoping in Him.”
• Ps 35:2: mercy in the heavens, truth to the clouds, justice as the mountains — here veritas is a third thing. Thomas: God acts in us from justice (renders for merits), from truth (renders what He promised), from mercy (exceeds merits and promises). Justice is high (no one merits so much that God does not give more), truth higher (He promises what we never merited, e.g. the Incarnation and the redemption), mercy highest (“eye has not seen”). Hence mountains, clouds, heavens; a parallel in Isaiah. “That’s a beautiful text.”
• Ps 27:5: man frequently sins and incurs guilt; the works of divine justice provoke fear, of mercy provoke hope, and so he is converted to penance. Scripture and Church prayers usually follow this, occasionally reverse it.
• From the Psalm commentary (locus he could not recall): hope in mercy without fear of justice → presumption; fear without hope → despair. A confessor must supply the balance: strengthen hope for a woman who despairs after an abortion; check the “he’s a good guy, he’ll let us all go home” attitude (at a wake, “his suffering is over” — “I hope so”).
• Other balances of hope and fear: the Phaedo, hope of finding truth vs. fear of being mistaken; Socrates leads his friends out of despair, knocks down Simmias’ premise with three syllogisms, warns Cebes will not be so easy, then convinces him; Simmias still says the matter is difficult — “I can’t today, I got to die.” Monsignor Dionne encouraging students in class but slowing the diligent one in his office; Dionne’s proposed change to his thesis outline (“I don’t have any evidence” — but the improvement was obvious). A politician must “run scared” yet have hope.
• Ps 39:2: unless there were hope with fear, man would flee from God; fear makes him flee sin, hope makes him approach God.
• Aside: Aesop’s defense of the official who had already made his money — the wedged animal who kept the sated bugs lest hungry ones come; “society is an animal that’s fallen between rocks.”
• Student before the break: is sweetness tied to predestination of the elect and justice to the reprobate? He: hell is by justice tempered by mercy (less punishment than deserved); heaven more mercy than justice, though some reward for merit — neither is only one, but one predominates.

7. Q.22 a.2: providence as foresight (“looking before and after”) #

Point: providentia = prudentia, and “foresight” is the proper English name, intelligible from what reason is.

• In the II-II on the integral parts of prudence, an objection says providence is not a part of prudence because it is the same thing; Thomas quotes Isidore, but this is a true etymology: prudentia contracts providentia. Churchill and such speak of men of “foresight.”
• Foresight perfects reason; Hamlet describes reason as “large discourse looking before and after”; an 18th-century editor called the phrase “almost Homeric,” and the Iliad has “looking before and behind.” Two great poets characterize reason the same way — needed to see the appropriateness of foresight in God. “For your penance, read two books of Homer.”

8. The five objections and the sed contra (“nothing foreseen is fortuitous”) #

Point: an unusual number of objections signals a difficult matter.

1. Nothing foreseen is fortuitous; if all is foreseen, chance and fortune vanish — against common opinion (and the truth).
2. Every wise provider excludes defect and evil as far as he can from his charges; there are many evils; so God either cannot prevent them (not omnipotent) or does not care for all.
3. Necessary things need no providence/prudence (used as synonyms); per the Philosopher, Ethics VI, prudence is right reason about contingents, matters of counsel and choice; many things happen of necessity — this understands divine providence like ours.
4. What is left to someone is not under the governor’s providence; God left man “in the hand of his counsel” (Ecclesiasticus 15), and lets the wicked go after their hearts’ desires.
5. The Apostle (1 Cor): God has no care for oxen; likewise other irrational creatures.

• Sed contra: Wisdom 8:1, divine wisdom “disposes all things sweetly”; sapientia from sapida scientia, savory knowledge.
• Aside on “the Philosopher” (and “the Apostle”): the figure antonomasia — general name given to a particular or the reverse: Bible (“the book”), Gospel, Romeo for a lover, Homer “the poet” for Aristotle, Shakespeare “the poet” for our forefathers. Names of figures were invented by rhetoricians and mostly do not illuminate the figure. Peter and Paul call themselves apostles; “the Apostle” is Paul by antonomasia; his wedding day, June 29, their feast.

9. The body of the article (“all things are subject to the divine providence”) #

Point: providence reaches every singular because God’s causality does.

• Positions denying it: Democritus and the Epicureans (world by chance; some moderns too); others: only incorruptibles, corruptibles at most by species (Job: He walks the poles of heaven “nor considers our things”); Rabbi Moses excepts men “on account of the splendor of understanding” — “don’t know how splendid it is.”
• Argument 1: (i) every agent acts for an end (SCG III, beginning); (ii) the ordering of effects to the end extends as far as the agent’s causality; a limited agent’s effect may fall outside its intention because it comes from another cause; (iii) God, first agent, causes being as such — species principles and individual principles, incorruptible and corruptible; so all that in any way exists is ordered by Him to an end; (iv) providence is “the reason of the order of things to their end”; therefore all things are subject to providence insofar as they partake of being — “the very hairs of your head… are numbered.”
• Argument 2: God knows all things, particulars too (shown above), as the artist knows his artifacts; so all come under His order as artifacts under the art.
• So there must be an answer to the five objections; the replies are not reached in this recording.

10. Closing anecdote: objections and the three kinds of minds (“wits, the dimwits, and the nitwits”) #

• A St. Mary’s College student came each class “thinking I was going to get you today,” not knowing how common his objections were and how often Thomas had answered them.
• Hesiod’s three kinds (followed by Aristotle in the Ethics, Thomas, Basil, Machiavelli): those who discover great things themselves; those who cannot but learn them from the great; those who can neither — “useless wits,” Thomas moderating: useless for acquiring knowledge. His names: wits, dimwits, nitwits; upper dimwits know who the wits are (e.g. Thomas), lower do not; he is an upper dimwit. Student: “upgraded to half wit?”

His words #

• dulcis / dulcedo; sweet, sweetness: metaphor for mercy (Ps 24), for God’s substantial goodness (Ps 30), also beauty, love.
• rectus / rectitudo: right; stands for justice.
• metaphor: figure whose connection between word-meaning and speaker-meaning is likeness.
• symbolic theology: Dionysius’ book on what is said metaphorically of God; the Summa is not it.
• distributive vs. commutative justice: divine justice is distributive.
• mercy: originally an emotion, sadness at another’s misfortune; later the divine will to relieve misery.
• veritas: in q.21 a.2 a name for justice; in Ps 35 a third thing, rendering what was promised.
• transumptive: said by transference (of sweetness in spiritual things).
• synecdoche: naming from a part (“sweetheart”).
• antonomasia: general name for a particular or reverse (“the Philosopher”, “the Apostle”, “the Bible”).
• providentia / prudentia / foresight: prudentia a contraction of providentia; “foresight” the proper English word [ed.: providence/prudence].
• sapientia: sapida scientia, savory knowledge.
• providence: “the reason of the order of things to their end.”
• wits / dimwits (upper, lower) / nitwits: his names for Hesiod’s three minds.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, Commentary on the Psalms: Ps 24 (dulcis et rectus; v.8 universae viae Domini), Ps 30:16, Ps 35:2, Ps 27:5, Ps 31 (misericordia circumdabit), Ps 39:2 (Vulgate numbering).
• Thomas, ST I q.22 a.2: five objections, sed contra (Wisdom 8:1), body. Mentioned
• ST I q.21 (four articles); ST I q.1 (why Scripture uses metaphors); II-II, integral parts of prudence; treatise on God’s substance (goodness), on God’s understanding (truth); SCG III, beginning (every agent acts for an end).
• Tobias 3:2; Wisdom 16:21; Eph 4:31; 1 Tim 2:4; Ps 33 “taste and see”; Isaiah (mercy, truth, justice); Ecclesiasticus 15; 1 Cor (oxen); Job (He walks the poles); Matthew, hairs of the head; John (bear witness to truth; Cana); Luke (cast fire).
• Aristotle, Rhetoric, Poetics (mercy as passion), Ethics VI, Ethics (Hesiod’s three minds); Plato, Republic (old man), Phaedo (Simmias, Cebes), Socrates’ discourse on the higher love; Augustine, Confessions; Dionysius, Symbolic Theology; Dante, Divine Comedy; Shakespeare, Hamlet, sonnets (“sweet form”); Homer, Iliad; Hesiod; Basil; Machiavelli; Isidore; Rabbi Moses; Ockham; Aesop.
• Verified by text-matching (place in class inferred): handouts “Note for the Second Book of Wisdom” p. 3, “Know Thyself” p. 4; DHB Vol III p. 524; DHB Vol I p. 7.

His questions #

• Why does the Psalm name mercy before justice, and the Summa justice before mercy? The Summa follows what is more known to us (God has a will, no emotions); in the things themselves mercy is prior, since someone must first exist to receive what is due.
• Why does Scripture use a metaphor (dulcis) for mercy but a proper word for justice? Metaphor signals what is beyond us; divine mercy is less known than divine justice, which names a virtue of the will.
• Can sweetness be a metaphor for anything else in God? Yes: goodness, beauty, and (student) love; in each case the three marks — pleases, refreshes, quiets.
• Is God’s justice sweet? Not aptly; justice is rather sweetened by mercy; the saints in Dante may delight in it — he avoids the poets’ “revenge is sweet.”
• Where does the word providence come from, and what is reason? Foresight; reason is “looking before and after” (Hamlet, Homer).
• What figure of speech is “the Philosopher”? Antonomasia.
• Is sweetness tied to the elect and justice to the reprobate? Damnation is more justice tempered by mercy, salvation more mercy than justice; one predominates, neither is alone.
• Does providence extend to singulars, even corruptible ones? Yes: God’s causality of being as such reaches every individual, and ordering to an end extends as far as causality.