Book of Life (Q. 24, a. 2–3), God's Operations, and Water and Fire as Metaphors for God

Orientation #

He says “we’re up here to the second article on the Book of Life,” i.e. the previous class opened the question (prev. lecture). At the end he announces the divine power (q. 25), then the divine beatitude, then q. 27 and the Trinity. The previous class treated the last articles on predestination and opened q. 24; the next treats q. 25, a. 1 on power in God.

The class, in order #

1. Q. 24, a. 2: the Book of Life only with respect to glory (“the second article on the Book of Life”) #

The point: the Book of Life properly regards only the life of glory, because it is a writing-down of those chosen to life.

Objections as he reads them:

1. The Book of Life is a knowledge of life; God through his own life knows every other life; so it is said especially of the divine life (“that’s an interesting objection”).
2. The life of nature is from God as much as the life of glory; so knowledge of natural life should also be a Book of Life.
3. Some are chosen for grace who are not chosen for glory (John 6, “Have I not chosen twelve of you, and one of you is a devil”); the Book is a writing-down of divine choice; so it regards the life of grace too. He notes the objections “cover all the bases”: nature, grace, God’s own life, glory.

Sed contra: the Book is a knowledge of predestination, and predestination regards grace only as ordered to glory; those who have grace and fall away are not predestined.

Body, as he unpacks it: the key word is choice. (1) One is chosen for what does not belong to him by nature; (2) one is chosen for what has the notion of an end — you choose means with reference to the end. Example: the soldier is not written down that he might be armed but that he might fight, fighting being the proper office of the military. The end above nature is the life of glory; so the Book properly regards glory.

Replies: (1) The divine life, even as glorious, is natural to God, so there is no choice and no Book; “we do not say a man is chosen to have sense.” (2) Same for natural life; aside: Shakespeare, “nature cannot choose your origin” — you do not choose to be two-footed or four-footed. (3) Grace has the notion of what is toward an end, not of an end; those who have grace and fall away are chosen and written “not simply but secundum quid,” in so far as God’s ordering had them ordered to eternal life by participation of grace. He says this reply anticipates the next article.

2. Digression: simply vs. in some way (“runs all the way through philosophy”) #

The point: the simpliciter / secundum quid distinction runs through philosophy and, it appears, through theology; it is the second kind of mistake outside of speech (the first being the accidental).

• Coming-to-be: did you come to be when you walked in this room? In some way yes (you came to be in the room); simply, only when generated. Leaving the room you cease to be only in a qualified sense.
• Chairs in the trees outside: yes, but you must qualify.
• The treatise on fallacies “some people think is by Thomas, some doubt it”: this mistake goes back to the perfect and the imperfect.
• Logic, Meno: the scientist seeking a cure knows in some way what he does not know — otherwise no point paying him to research; if he knew simply, no need to pay him either.
• Ethics: all day long you do something bad because in some way good, or omit a good (getting up for Mass) because in some way bad (loses an hour of sleep); nothing is so good that it does not prevent some other good. Murdering the annoying colleague “gets rid of annoyance” — bad simply, good in some way. Aristotle: the wrongdoer is mistaken, and this is the mistake. Chesterton: a man who can shoot his mother-in-law between the eyes at fifty paces is a good shot, not a good man.
• It “dominates wisdom”: the division of being as being is of this kind.

3. Q. 24, a. 3: whether someone is deleted from the Book of Life (“blotted out from the book of life”) #

The point: no one written simply (by predestination) is deleted; those written secundum quid (by grace only) can be, and the deletion is on the side of the thing known, not of God’s knowledge.

Objections: (1) Augustine, City of God XX: God’s infallible foreknowledge is the Book; nothing is subtracted from foreknowledge or predestination. (2) Whatever is in something is there according to the mode of the receiver; the Book is eternal and unchangeable; so what is in it cannot be deleted. (3) Deletion is opposed to writing; no one is newly written; so no one is deleted. Sed contra: Psalm 68, “let them be deleted from the book of the living” — “that’s pretty definite.”

Body: (a) Some say no one is deleted secundum rei veritatem, but only according to the opinion of men; Scripture often says a thing comes about when it becomes known (“Now I know you love me”). Men think someone written because of the justice they see; when he falls away, he is said to be deleted. So the gloss (Cassiodorus in his edition) on Psalm 68. (b) But since not being deleted is among the rewards of the just (Apocalypse 3:5, white garments, “I will not delete his name”), deletion must also refer to the thing itself. One is ordered to eternal life from two things: from divine predestination, which never fails; and from grace, which by nature is ordered to eternal life (“whoever has grace is worthy of eternal life”) but sometimes fails through mortal sin (“be careful… lest you fall”). Those ordered by predestination are written simply, as going to have eternal life in itself; those ordered by grace alone are written secundum quid, as having it only in its cause, and can be deleted — not because God foreknew and then became ignorant, but because the thing known was ordered and afterwards not.

What he stresses: once you have the distinction, in each matter you must find what makes it to be simply so. Ethics parallel: a pleasant human act is good in some way; a reasonable act is good simply. Here, predestination is what makes one written simply.

Replies: (1) the deletion is not on the side of foreknowledge, as if there were changeableness in God, but of the things foreknown. (2) Things in God are unchangeable in an unchangeable way, yet changeable in themselves; God knows changing things unchangingly. Aside: the definition of time is timeless, the definition of motion unchanging; change seems unlimited, and “definition” comes from “limit” — yet we know things in a way different from how they are without falsity; one can have a good knowledge of the bad (Boethius: you cannot avoid the bad without knowing its cause), and the sinner’s bad opinion of the bad, even that is good. (3) In the way one is deleted, one can be newly written: either in men’s opinion (that view not wholly excluded) or as newly ordered to eternal life through grace, which God’s knowledge comprehends though not newly to him — “God doesn’t newly know what’s new, as we know newly what’s new.” Aside: Benedict XVI’s pilgrimage to Augustine’s remains at Pavia; a student mentions the arm relic at the Augustinian monastery of St Anthony of Padua. Aside: Socrates “always says the same things about the same things,” his opponents opposite things about the same thing.

4. Transition: what comes next (“now we’re up to the divine what power”) #

Divine power, then divine beatitude, then q. 26 ends and q. 27 begins the Trinity. He remembers 27 because, as Thomas says of Scripture, the square or cube of a number keeps the original number’s symbolism: 27 = 3×3×3. Aside: the Trivium graduation of “seventeen” (in fact sixteen) graduates and the symbolism of those saved and those who fell short.

5. The prologue to q. 14: substance and operation (“look for a second back to question fourteen”) #

The point: after the divine substance (simplicity, perfection, infinity, unchangeableness, unity — the same five in the Summa Contra Gentiles in a different order) comes the divine operation.

• In every creature (angel, man, dog, tree) substance and operation are really distinct; we start from creatures, so we have two thoughts; in God they are one, and we must negate the distinction as real while it remains a distinction in our knowledge.
• His mathematical comparison: two points, S and O, in the creature; lines from each converge on one point in God — going from the many to the one.
• Order in both Summas and the Compendium of Theology: existence of God first (“if God doesn’t exist, forget theology”), then substance, then operation, then the Trinity, which needs the operations; this order “seems to me unchangeable.”

6. Two kinds of operation (“remains in the doer”) #

Distinction (Aristotle, ninth book of Wisdom): operation remaining in the doer (seeing, hearing, loving, understanding) vs. operation going out to an exterior effect (cutting, pounding, making). Making perfects the thing made, not the maker as such; teaching perfects the student, not the teacher as such.

• Objection from experience: doesn’t the carpenter improve, doesn’t the teacher learn each time? Answer: the mistake of the accidental (first mistake outside speech; “even the wise are deceived by the accidental”). The man making the same chair or Texas barbecue all day learns nothing yet makes well; a maker of different things improves his art, but accidentally. The teacher as such knows what he teaches; to the extent he is learning it he is not teaching.
• Marx locates man’s perfection in acting on things outside; Dewey, “we learn by doing”; plausible because the non-assembly-line worker improves — still accidental.
• Immanent activity perfects the doer: hearing Mozart perfects my ear, not the music; understanding Euclid’s theorem perfects my understanding; seeing Titian’s Assumption perfects my eye. Seeing God face to face and loving him perfects the knower and lover, adds nothing to God — like adding a point to a line, which is no longer than it was (student question clarified here). So our beatitude consists in the most perfect immanent activity with the most perfect object; Mary “has chosen the better part,” which will not be taken away, since the practical ceases with this life.
• Euclid VI: the mean proportional B between lines A and C (A:B :: B:C); between numbers not always possible (9:6::6:4 works, 9 and 7 not); between lines always: join A and C into one line, construct the semicircle, the perpendicular at the join is the mean, resting on the right-triangle proportion and equiangular triangles.
• Back to the prologue: knowledge and will first (understanding is in the one understanding, willing in the one willing), then power as the beginning of operation proceeding to an exterior effect. In SCG book I treats understanding and will, book II God as beginning of things; here they follow one another. The things attached to understanding — life, truth and falsity. In God the two operations are “not as distinct as in us.”

7. Symbolic theology: God as water and as fire (“a little bit of symbolic theology”) #

The point: taking the two contrary metaphors together shows they are metaphors, since water is wet and cold, fire hot and dry, and both cannot be said of God properly. Metaphor is based on likeness. Water: (1) life-giving — the three psalms of thirst, one in each part of the Psalter (the hind, “my flesh pines and my soul thirsts… like a land without water”); Thales’ “water is the beginning of all things,” which Aristotle traces to water’s importance for life and seeds — a theological footnote: not water but the beginning of all things is called water metaphorically; (2) washes away sins; (3) satisfies the thirst of the soul (“thou hast made us for thyself”), which Thomas uses to argue God’s infinity, since natural desire is not in vain. Aside: Heisenberg’s student on the physicist who “just can’t stand the idea that the universe is finite”; the Renaissance gave up theology and with it the finite universe, the infinite universe becoming a substitute for God, while 20th-century physics found limits everywhere. Fire: applies to substance, operation and persons. Empedocles’ four elements, with fire the active one against the three passive (Aristotle, first book of Wisdom) — so fire figures the divine substance as pure act. Its light, the divine understanding; its warmth, the divine love; its power to transform, the divine power — matching the three-part order of operations. For the Trinity: from fire proceed light (the Word) and warmth (the Holy Spirit); the sun enlightens before it warms, as faith precedes charity, and the Spirit proceeds from Father and Son. The burning bush: fire the divine nature, bush the human nature (“I am the vine”), the unconsumed bush the wonder of the Incarnation — as Aristotle says an infinite fire would destroy the other elements, so one would expect the divine to swallow the human like a drop of water in fire. Break announced before the divine power.

His words #

• Book of Life: the writing-down, in God’s knowledge, of those chosen to (eternal) life.
• choice: of what is not by nature, and of what is toward an end, not of the end.
• simply / secundum quid (in some way, in an imperfect way): the distinction that “runs all the way through philosophy.”
• second mistake outside of speech: confusing simply and in some way; the first is the accidental (as such vs. by happening).
• deleted / blotted out / rubbed out: his renderings for deletion from the Book.
• secundum rei veritatem: according to the truth of the thing, vs. the opinion of men.
• de novo: newly written.
• premium [ed.: proemium, prologue]: the introduction before q. 14.
• ninth book of Wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics IX]; first book of Wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics I].
• operation remaining in the doer vs. going out to an exterior effect [ed.: immanent vs. transitive].
• mean proportional: line B such that A:B :: B:C.
• symbolic theology: metaphor as its main kind, based on likeness.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 24, a. 2 (objections, sed contra, body, replies).
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 24, a. 3 (objections, sed contra, body, replies).
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I, prologue to q. 14 (reviewed) and prologue to q. 25 (opening sentence).

Mentioned

• John 6 (chosen twelve, one a devil); Psalm 68 (deleted from the book of the living); Apocalypse 3:5; Psalm 62 and the two other psalms of thirst; Luke, Martha and Mary (inferred); the burning bush (Exodus, inferred).
• Augustine, City of God XX; Cassiodorus gloss on Psalm 68.
• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX (two operations) and I (Thales, Empedocles); treatise on fallacies attributed doubtfully to Thomas; Plato, Meno.
• Summa Contra Gentiles I–II; Compendium of Theology.
• Euclid, Elements VI; Boethius on knowing the cause of evil; Chesterton; Shakespeare; Marx; Dewey; Heisenberg’s student, The Physicist’s Conception of Nature.

His questions #

• Do you choose to be white or black, two-footed or four-footed? No; natural life is not chosen, so no Book of Life regards it.
• Did you come to be when you walked in this room? In some way yes, but not simply; simply only when generated.
• Are there chairs in the trees out there? Yes, but you have to qualify — in some way.
• Does the scientist looking for a cure know what he doesn’t know? In some way, otherwise no point paying him; not simply, or no need to.
• If someone annoys you at work, should you murder them? No, bad simply, though “in some way good” — it removes the annoyance.
• What makes a human act good simply? Being reasonable; a pleasant act is good only secundum quid.
• Does making a chair perfect the carpenter? Only accidentally; making as such perfects the thing made.
• Is there always a mean proportional between two lines? Yes — join them, draw the semicircle, take the perpendicular; between numbers not always.
• Does God get anything out of our loving him? Nothing; like adding a point to a line.
• Why is God said to be water? To be fire? Water: life-giving, washing sins, satisfying the soul’s thirst. Fire: pure act; light, warmth, power for the three operations; and the Trinity.