Chance, Evil and Free Will Under Divine Providence; God Plans Everything Directly but Acts Through Other Causes (Summa I, Q.22 aa.2–3)

Orientation #

He opens mid-article, “the first objection was the one drawn from fortune”, i.e. the replies to the objections read last time (prev. lecture), and closes: “we’ll start with Article Four next time.” He also recalls “this text last time about the wine of wisdom.” The previous class turned in its second half to q. 22, a. 2 on whether all things are subject to providence; the next continues with q. 22, a. 4 and opens q. 23.

The class, in order #

1. Reply 1: chance escapes the particular cause, not the universal (“the running together or coming together of two servants”) #

The point: what is fortuitous with respect to a particular cause is foreseen with respect to the universal cause.

1. Something goes outside the order of a particular cause only through another particular cause impeding it (water keeps the wood from burning).
2. All particular causes are contained in the universal cause; so no effect escapes its order.
3. Conclusion: an effect is truly by chance relative to the particular cause, foreseen relative to the universal.

• Thomas’s two servants sent to one place by a master, each ignorant of the other: chance for them, foreseen by the lord.
• His wife’s first teaching job: a friend arranged a party of married couples with only two singles; they met “by chance” as far as they were concerned, married within a week or so.
• Worcester newspaper: a man hit a woman’s car; repeated court appearances before “no fault insurance”; they married and the case was dismissed. Chance for them, not for God. (Joke: you still have to pay for the car.)
• “God’s causality is so strong that what he foresees takes place, but also takes place in the way that he foresaw”: some by necessity, some by chance, some by contingency.
• Aside: the fundamental text on chance and fortune is Physics II, after the four causes, where the obscure causes are reduced to the four.

2. Reply 2: the particular vs. the universal provider (“lest the good of the whole be impeded”) #

The point: a particular provider excludes every defect he can; the universal provider permits defects in particulars lest the good of the whole be impeded.

• Corruptions are against particular nature but within the intention of universal nature: the corruption of one is the generation of another, by which the species is conserved.
• If all evils were impeded, many goods would be lacking: no life of the lion without killing of animals (student: does that mean meat-eating in paradise? he: same as no cows without killing of grass); no patience of martyrs without persecution of tyrants.
• Heraclitus: not good for men to get all they want; hunger makes food pleasant.
• Augustine quoting Paul, “it is necessary that there be heresies”: heretics denying an article from misread Scripture or bad philosophy forced the Fathers to understand the article better. Same in philosophy: refuting a mistake is how the mind goes forward; De Koninck lecturing on the prooemium of the “natural hearing” [ed.: Physics], with asides on Descartes, who thinks the distinct is more certain for us than the confused; refuting Descartes you understand Aristotle better.
• Augustine, Enchiridion: God would allow no evil in his works unless he were so omnipotent and good as to make good even out of evil.
• Thomas’s footnote: these two objections (chance, evil) moved those who withdrew providence from corruptible things, not necessarily deniers of providence altogether.
• Aside on Scripture: in Thomas’s division of the sapiential books, Job is ordered to faith (answering the main objection to faith, the evil in the world), Psalms to hope and prayer, Song and the precepts to charity. Jews who lost faith after the Holocaust; his exchange with an atheist at BC (see segment 4).
• Aside: the Enchiridion (on faith, hope and charity) is a third way of dividing sacred doctrine, besides the order of the Summas and the order of Scripture; Thomas follows it in the Naples sermons and the unfinished Compendium of Theology, which got only to the beginning of the Our Father. Appropriate “to us”: justice and mercy come down to hope and fear.

3. Reply 3: necessary things and the difference between God’s foresight and ours (“man is not the institutor of nature”) #

The point: human foresight is about contingents (Ethics VI: steak or no steak tonight, up at six or not), so it does not extend to what comes about by natural necessity; God’s does, because he is the author of nature, while man only uses natural things in works of art and virtue.

• This third objection withdraws the incorruptible, necessary things from providence; the first two withdrew the corruptible; together they would remove everything.
• Those so moved: Democritus and other ancient natural philosophers, attributing nature to the necessity of matter. Democritus: “where there’s necessity, don’t look for a cause.” Incorrect: in a demonstration the conclusion is necessary yet has a cause (the premises). “Kind of marvelous that Aristotle saw that.”
• Student: what about God? He is per se necessary; other things are necessary through another. Developed more in SCG I than ST I, but present in the third way, which he reads (q. 2, a. 3): from things that can be and not be to something necessary; every necessary either has a cause of its necessity or not; no infinite regress; therefore something per se necessary, cause of necessity to others, which all call God. “That goes back to Aristotle.”
• Aside: the parallel difference between God’s love and ours. My love is aroused by goodness I find (or think I find) in others; God’s love causes the goodness. “God doesn’t love me because I’m good, but if I’m good, it’s because He loves me.” Thank God for the good in you, ask forgiveness for the bad; you are responsible for the bad, not the good, “unfair to a democratic mind.”

4. Student objection: must Thomas prove the goods outweigh the evils? (“if I can’t see the reason for the Holocaust”) #

Student: doesn’t reply 2 require showing, by some calculus, that goods from permitted evil outweigh the goods lost? His answer: you cannot go down to every particular; Job shows no one can see all the reasons God permits this or that evil, and Job is put down by God when he wants to penetrate more. But we can see that it must be so and why.

• Student: how does that satisfy the Jew after the Holocaust or the modern atheist? He: the atheist’s argument rests on “if I can’t see the reason, there is no reason.” Put boldly, the man wouldn’t own it, but that is what he was doing. It doesn’t follow.
• Heisenberg and Bohr: experiments seeming to contradict each other, “can nature be as absurd as it seems?”; they did not conclude it cannot be understood; Bohr went skiing in Norway, Heisenberg stayed in Copenhagen, each found a solution, compatible; Heisenberg so excited he made stupid mistakes calculating until he calmed down.
• The early Fathers held the articles of faith without understanding them well, and did not say “cannot be understood because I don’t understand it.”
• High-school French class: “How do the French kids ever learn this?”; “I’ll never be able to dance / parachute”: from “I can’t” to “no one can” doesn’t follow.
• Otherwise you measure God by yourself, what Job finds he cannot do. Chesterton on “What I Think About God” by Joe Smith: more interesting would be “What I Think of Joe Smith” by God.

5. Reply 4: “in the hand of his own counsel” (“the natural power is determined to one”) #

The point: God leaving man to himself does not exclude him from providence; it shows he was not given a power determined to one, as natural things are.

• Distinction (Aristotle, “ninth book of Wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics IX], after active vs. passive ability): natural power determined to one vs. rational power open to opposites. Fire can only heat and burn the paper; the doctor can heal or sicken, deliver or abort; he can cook a pink steak or burn it; he can make a good mug of tea or ruin it (not by strength, which could be diluted, but because different chemicals are released after about seven minutes). “Art is an ability for opposites.” Shakespeare, Coriolanus: nature not able to be more than one thing.
• Natural things are led to the end by another; rational creatures lead themselves through free judgment, taking counsel and choosing; hence “in the hand of his counsel.”
• But the act of free choice is reduced to God as cause, so what comes from free judgment is subject to providence: man’s providence is under God’s as a particular cause under the universal.
• God provides for the just more excellently, permitting nothing that would finally impede their salvation (Romans 8:28); he is said to “dismiss” the impious because he does not withdraw them from the evil of guilt, not because he excludes them, else they would fall into nothing unless conserved. Conservation is treated under providence in SCG III (as opposed to under creation).
• Moved by this objection: “Tullius,” the great Cicero, who withdrew from providence the human things we take counsel about.
• Restatement: God’s causality extends to all things and to the way they are, by necessity, chance, contingency or freedom. In heaven you will see the role each event and person played; Thérèse of Lisieux on the obscure person praying for her whom she will only meet on the other side; all these errors were an occasion for Thomas to see providence more profoundly; Catherine of Siena on providence, “see how Dominican she is.”

6. Reply 5: no care for oxen (“through free will, dominion over his act”) #

The point: the rational creature, having dominion over his act, is subject to providence in a special way, so that guilt or merit is imputed and punishment or reward given; in this respect Paul removes God’s care from oxen, not because individuals of rational creatures fall outside providence “as Rabbi Moses” [held; unfinished in the transcript].

• SCG III has three parts: God as the end of all, especially of us; providence in general (about chapters 64-110, “something like that”); providence over rational creatures in particular, who by nobility of end and nature need special providence, denied of cat, dog, ox, tree.
• Break aside: last time “the wine of wisdom,” now the aqua sapientiae; someone said Thomas diluted the wine of theology with the water of philosophy; Thomas: “No, I’m changing water into wine.”

7. Article 3, objections and sed contra: does God provide immediately for all? (“It seems that God does not immediately provide for all”) #

The point: Thomas will give the same distinction as in SCG between God’s foreknowledge reaching down to singulars and his use of other causes to carry it out.

• Obj. 1: a king’s dignity has ministers. Obj. 2: each agent cause is a cause of effective providence, so immediate providence would remove second causes. Obj. 3: Augustine (Enchiridion) and Aristotle (Metaphysics XII): better not to know vile things.
• His note on the third: in the Metaphysics Aristotle is speaking of what God knows chiefly, himself, by which he knows other things; Aristotle argues repeatedly against Empedocles that a position implying we know things God does not know is absurd. Thomas, “being a wit,” reads him rightly.
• Sed contra: Job 34, who constituted one over the earth; Gregory: he who constituted the world through himself rules it through himself.
• Not like a department head who gives general direction because he cannot foresee everything; the German army letting subordinate officers decide what generals could not foresee. God uses causes not from need but to share his causality.
• Aside: to be “mixed up” is to be mistaken or near it, usually for not seeing a distinction; students call a distinction “confusing,” but the only way out of confusion is the distinction.

8. Article 3, body: plan vs. execution (“the reason or knowledge of the order”) #

Two things belong to providence: (1) the reason/knowledge of the order of things to their end; (2) its execution, called gubernatio.

• As to (1) God provides immediately for all, “all the way down to the hair I lost this morning combing my hair”: the reason of all things, even the least, is in his understanding, and whatever causes he sets before effects, he gives them their power, so he must have the order of effects beforehand.
• As to (2) there are media: he governs the lower through the higher, not from defect of power but from abundance of goodness, to communicate the dignity of causality to creatures. The end of providence is that creatures become like him, even as causes. SCG adds: this gives an order among causes, not only among effects, and since a cause is better than its effect, a higher order.
• Excluded: Plato’s threefold providence as narrated by Gregory of Nyssa: the highest God over spiritual things and the world as to genera, species, universal causes; second, the gods moving the heavens (separated substances) over individuals of generable and corruptible things; third, the demons, middle between us and the gods (Augustine, City of God IX), over human things. Demon here without our bad sense.
• Socrates’ daimon warned him of danger; in the Apology (he corrects himself from Phaedo) no warning before the trial, so maybe death is not the evil we think. Paul VI spoke respectfully of it; something like our guardian angel.
• Words: English “happiness” (from hap, luck), Latin felicitas, Greek eudaimonia, “get a good demon”; eutuchia in the Poetics stresses luck, eudaimonia in the Ethics perhaps a higher cause; daimon sometimes understood as the soul, and ethics is about having a good soul, as the doctor is about a good body.

9. Article 3, replies (“every operative science is more perfect”) #

• Ad 1: having ministers belongs to the king’s dignity; not having the reason of what they do is a defect of his knowledge. Every operative science is more perfect the more it considers particulars, in which there is act. Metaphysics prooemium: the man of experience may heal better than the man of art, since you heal this man. His freshman psychology professor: patients classified by type get the stereotype treatment and often get worse; you may get your child out of a depression better than the psychologist. Politics: better to speak of the virtue of a woman and of a man than of virtue in general.
• Ad 2: immediate providence does not exclude second causes, which carry out his orders; the objection confuses foreseeing immediately with executing immediately.
• Ad 3: for us knowing bad and vile things is worse because it impedes consideration of better things (we cannot understand many things at once) and sometimes perverts the will; neither holds for God, who knows all by one insight and whose will cannot be bent.
• De Anima, beginning: all knowledge as such is good, even knowledge of the bad (knowing sickness is a perfection as much as knowing health); not all love is good. So knowledge is better than love in this respect, against students, “especially girls,” who say love. Sex education is bad on the second ground, perverting the will, not because knowledge is bad; a man wanting to shoot his wife: telling him where the gun is doesn’t follow from knowledge being good. St. Alphonsus and the manuals left the sixth and ninth commandments in Latin, prudentially.
• Aside: at the College of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Albert the Great’s De Praedicabilibus, De Praedicamentis and Gilbert’s De Sex Principiis (on the last six categories); walking around with a book titled De Sex Principiis when things about sex were kept in Latin. Next time: Article 4.

His words #

• “particular cause” / “universal cause”: what escapes the former is chance to it, foreseen by the latter.
• “foreseen” for provisum; “foresight” for providentia.
• “particular provider” / “universal foreseer”: excludes all defect he can vs. permits defects for the good of the whole.
• “natural hearing” [ed.: Physics].
• “per se necessary”: having no cause of its necessity elsewhere.
• “ninth book of Wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics IX]; “twelfth book of Wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics XII].
• “ability” [ed.: potency]: “active ability and a passive ability.”
• “free judgment” / “free will”: rational creatures who take counsel and choose.
• “dismiss”: God is said to dismiss the impious, not exclude them.
• “Tullius”: Cicero.
• “gubernatio”: governing, the execution of the order.
• “media”: intermediates in the execution of providence.
• “demons” (daimon): Plato’s middle beings; eudaimonia, “good demon,” also read as good soul; eutuchia, good luck.
• “mixed up”: mistaken or near it, from not seeing a distinction.

Texts #

Read in class

• Summa Theologiae I, q. 22, a. 2, ad 1-5 (inferred locus).
• Summa Theologiae I, q. 22, a. 3, objections, sed contra, body, replies.
• Summa Theologiae I, q. 2, a. 3, the third way.

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Physics II (chance and fortune); Prooemium of the Physics (De Koninck lectures).
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics VI (foresight about contingents); eudaimonia in the Ethics.
• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX; Metaphysics XII; Prooemium to the Metaphysics (man of experience); Politics (virtue of woman and man); Poetics (eutuchia); De Anima, beginning.
• Augustine, Enchiridion; City of God IX.
• Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles I (necessity); III (providence, conservation, threefold structure, order among causes); Naples sermons; Compendium of Theology; division of the sapiential books.
• Job (book) and Job 34; Romans 8:28; 1 Corinthians on heresies (locus inferred); Gregory on Job 34; Gregory of Nyssa on Plato.
• Plato, Apology and Phaedo (Socrates’ daimon); Shakespeare, Coriolanus; Heraclitus; Democritus; Empedocles; Cicero; Rabbi Moses; Descartes; Thérèse of Lisieux; Catherine of Siena; Paul VI; Chesterton; St. Alphonsus; Albert the Great, De Praedicabilibus and De Praedicamentis; Gilbert, De Sex Principiis.

His questions #

• What is the fundamental text on chance and fortune? Physics II, after the four causes.
• Does “no lion without killing of animals” imply meat-eating in paradise? He deflects: same as no cows without killing of grass.
• Democritus says where there is necessity, don’t look for a cause; correct or not? Incorrect: a demonstration’s conclusion is necessary and has a cause.
• What about when God is necessary? Per se necessary; other things necessary through another (the third way).
• Must Thomas prove the goods from permitted evil outweigh the goods lost? (student) Not in particulars; we can see it must be so; “I can’t see the reason, so there is none” doesn’t follow.
• How does that satisfy the Jew after the Holocaust or the atheist? (student) Only by showing the inference fails; otherwise one measures God by oneself.
• What does it mean to be mixed up? Mistaken or near it, usually from missing a distinction.
• Which is better, knowledge or love? Knowledge: all knowledge as such is good, not all love.
• Should you tell a man where his gun is so he can shoot his wife? No; but the knowledge as such is still good.