Summa I, Q. 26, a. 2: Is God Blessed by His Understanding? Knowledge, Love and Pleasure

Orientation #

He opens by saying he has “started reading again” the De Potentia and notes its first question parallels what the class has been doing on God’s power. The class takes up “the second article here in the twenty-sixth question” on the divine blessedness, “good place to end the consideration of God,” and ends as he announces “the third article: whether God is the beatitude.” The previous class covered q. 25 aa. 5–6 and opened q. 26 a. 1; the next finishes q. 26 and introduces the prooemium to the Trinity.

The class, in order #

1. All-knowing as all-powerful: God does not know the unknowable (“two is half of five”) #

Point: Thomas in De Potentia q. 1 makes about the knowable the point already made about the makeable.

1. God’s being all-powerful does not mean He can make a square circle; He can make anything makeable.
2. Likewise God is all-knowing: does He know that two is half of five? A creature could think it, but no creature could know it strictly; it is not knowable, “maybe thinkable.”
3. So “all-knowing” means all-knowing with respect to whatever is knowable, just as all-powerful is with respect to the makeable.

• Aside (student): “God doesn’t know modern philosophy then?” — he laughs and mentions an obituary of Rorty, “big shot in American philosophy,” for whom there was no truth and the pursuit of wisdom is “just a conversation.”

2. The two objections: beatitude by essence, or by will? (“beatitude is the highest good”) #

Point: he reads the objections of a. 2 against saying God is blessed by His understanding.

• Obj. 1: beatitude is the highest good; good is said of God by His essence, since good regards being (Boethius, De Hebdomadibus, on which Thomas has a commentary); therefore blessedness is said of God by essence, not by understanding.
• Obj. 2: blessedness has the notion of an end; the end is the object of the will, just as the good; therefore by the will, not the understanding.
• Good and end go together: first definition of the good, “what all want”; definition of the end, “that for the sake of which.” If something is good people aim at it, and mainly at the end, since the means is aimed at for the sake of the end. In the Physics (“the natural hearing”) Aristotle says the end is the same as the good; in the second book of wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics II], if you do away with the end you do away with the good.
• This is why modern philosophers, having given up the end, no longer talk about the good but about “value.” Rorty quote from the obituary: no difference between “it works because it’s true” and “it’s true because it works.”

3. Sed contra: Gregory and Augustine (“the vision is the whole reward”) #

Point: authorities place blessedness in enjoyment by understanding.

• Gregory, Morals book 32: he is glorious who, enjoying himself, needs no praise from outside; to be glorious signifies to be blessed.
• We enjoy God by understanding, because “the vision is the whole reward” (Augustine) — “a pretty strong statement.” So blessedness is said in God by His understanding.

4. The body: the perfect good of an intellectual nature is its understanding (“the soul is in some way all things”) #

Point: Thomas’s argument that beatitude belongs to God according to His understanding.

1. Beatitude signifies the perfect good of an intellectual nature (said already in a. 1).
2. As each thing desires its own perfection, the intellectual nature naturally desires to be blessed. Hence once you see God as He is you cannot change: you realize this is blessedness, and you naturally desire to be blessed.
3. What is most perfect in an intellectual nature is its operation of understanding, by which it in some way takes in all things. Aristotle, On the Soul III, after the senses (book II), the internal senses and the understanding: the soul is in some way all things. Grasping the nature of the dog, the cat, the circle, I have them “in my head”; hearing Mozart, seeing a Titian, I have them in my ear and eye; senses open to all sensibles, understanding to all understandables.
4. Therefore the beatitude of any intellectual nature consists in its understanding.
5. In God, to be and to understand are not other secundum rem, only according to our way of understanding. So beatitude is attributed to God according to His understanding, as to the others who are called blessed by being made like His beatitude.

• “So, you convinced of this or not?”

5. Reply to obj. 1: same thing, understood differently (“kind of a subtle thing”) #

Point: God is blessed by His very essence, yet blessedness belongs to Him not according to the definition of the essence but by reason of the understanding.

• In God, to be, to understand and to be blessed are all the same thing; nevertheless we understand Him to be blessed by understanding that He understands Himself, not by His substance, “even though He is.”
• Parallel from De Potentia q. 2: the ability to create and the ability to generate are one and the same in reality, distinguished only as to the act; then why does the Son lack the ability to generate? Thomas: the ability of God insofar as found in the Father is the ability to generate — “you have to think twice about what you’re saying there.”
• Hence why beatitude is taken up after God’s understanding and operation, and not attached to His being perfect and good: since whatever is in God is the divine essence, which is goodness itself, He must have the perfection of beatitude by His essence; but to understand what it means to say God is blessed you must understand that He has perfect understanding of Himself primarily, and of other things by understanding Himself.
• Augustine, quoted “always”: blessed the man who understands God even if nothing else; miserable the man who understands other things but not God; blessed also the man who understands God and other things — but for understanding God alone.
• Aside: wondering whether in heaven he can talk to Thomas, Augustine, Peter and Paul, or whether he will be “preoccupied” with God “all in all”; a friend’s view that friendship is defective in this life partly because we are separated, so heaven should recompense with more perfect friendship; but no mistakes or ignorance remain to talk over.

6. Why you cannot want anything else once you see God (“where the tree falls, there it lies”) #

Point: the only way to want something else for your happiness after seeing God would be by mistake, and then you are incapable of mistake.

• Thomas’s two standard quotes: Proverbs, those who do bad are erring; Aristotle Ethics III, the man who does bad is mistaken. Once you see God your mind is so clear you cannot be mistaken; and you are completely satisfied — “no more room in your heart.”
• Student: how does this relate to the bad angels? Answer built from Thomas: we naturally want to be happy but do not at first see in what happiness consists; if we saw it clearly we would naturally want to see God as we naturally want to be happy. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics: “such as a man is, so does the end appear to him.”
  • Don Giovanni with his hand in the statue’s hand, given a last chance to repent, cannot change: habituated to pursuing women as his end. Attachment to a false end by emotion passes quickly; attachment by habit is not easily unseen.
  • After death you are no longer in this changeable state; whatever disposition the soul is in, “where the tree falls, there it lies” (scripture). Chopping the tree in his backyard: while standing it can fall toward or away from the house; once fallen, it lies.
  • Angels did not go through time; their mind is fully formed at creation, so their choice is “instant habit” and they cannot change. We are in that same state once we die.
  • The wisdom of the Church in the Hail Mary: “now, and at the hour of our death” — the moment when the will falls toward God or away.

7. Student question: can a dog be happy? Pleasure and the three kinds of pleasure (“the pleasures that are private to man”) #

Point: pleasure is related to happiness but is not it; the pleasures proper to man are the fine arts.

• A dog has pleasure. Aristotle, NE X, takes up pleasure before the final consideration of happiness; most men are mistaken about the end, but in seeking sense pleasure there is an element of truth, since whatever happiness is it will be pleasant; they mistake lower pleasures for higher. Thomas: no man can live without pleasure, so without a taste for higher pleasures he seeks the lower — which is why sensual sins are more grievous in those who can taste the higher things.
• John Stuart Mill against the objection that Epicurean pleasure is “a philosophy for beasts”: “you’re the beast” if you think man has no pleasures the beast lacks — a point, though not a full answer.
• His own step further, three kinds: (a) pleasures shared with beasts, though refined (“wine sauce”); (b) pleasures shared with angels and God, of understanding, which we have inferiorly; (c) between them, pleasures private to man: the fine arts, mixing sense with reason — you cannot appreciate Mozart without ears, but the cat has ears and cannot appreciate; Shakespeare needs imagination but reason too; likewise painting. His cat Tabitha would come for sandwich meat, and “seemed to understand” when told there’d be steak.
• An essay “towards an evaluation of music” [author unclear in recording]: it is a mistake to call fine-art pleasures the highest, but they are the most proportionate to man: he can enjoy a Mozart opera for two or three hours but cannot enjoy eating for that long (the body limits — Thanksgiving); and in the pleasures of understanding the body gets in the way by fatigue, after which it’s “words, words, words,” as Hamlet says.
• The fine arts are what we normally pass through from the beasts’ pleasures to the angels’; the joy of seeing God is a sharing in God’s pleasure.
• Aristotle does not say the end of man is the pleasure of understanding: pleasure is a perfection of understanding “in the way that beauty is a perfection of youth” — not its definition, but it tends to go with it.
• Aside: professional philosophers have given up the love of wisdom for “the conversation.”

8. Boethius’s syllogism (“the middle term there is summum bonum”) #

Point: obj. 1’s premise is true and Boethius uses it well, but it does not settle how we understand God’s blessedness.

• Consolation of Philosophy: beatitude is summum bonum; summum bonum is God; therefore blessedness is God, and any blessedness of ours is by partaking of God’s life. “Kind of a Platonic way of arguing,” but it makes sense; the middle term is summum bonum, and the first sentence of obj. 1 supplies the first premise.
• Thomas: all true, but understanding what it means to say God is blessed involves understanding that He understands Himself, the most perfect operation there can be — “that distinction” is important.

9. Reply to obj. 2: the object is before the act; the first love is not love (“that can’t be the first letter”) #

Point: beatitude, as good, is the object of the will, but the object is understood before the act of the ability [ed.: power]; so the divine beatitude is prior to the will resting in it, and what is other than the will’s act can only be the act of understanding; hence beatitude is to be noted in the act of understanding.

• From man: the first thing you understand is not your understanding; you understand a cup, a book, a triangle, a dog, then that you understand.
  • His mother as the common source of news among the brothers: she wrote letters about what was in other letters. The first letter ever written could not be about what is in a letter; now that letters exist one can write about them (as people now write about Einstein’s letters newly come to light).
  • Likewise love: is the first thing you love, love? He loves the fact that he loves wisdom, but could not love that before loving wisdom. The first thing you love is the end, not means; so the first love cannot be the will’s act; the end cannot be love or joy; for an understanding creature the only other thing is the act of understanding, perfect because by it you are in some way all things.
• Faith, hope and charity dispose to the end, but on seeing God faith and hope disappear while charity remains and grows — a difference of degree. Scripture: man does not know whether he is worthy of love or hate; but the saints in this life already love God as they should, yet had not reached the end. Some saints may love God more on earth than he will in heaven. So love of God cannot be the end. By faith you see “in a mirror darkly” (Paul) — confirmation that the end is seeing God.
• Augustine sometimes speaks of the end as gaudium de veritate, an act of the will, because it is connected.
• His own case: Euclid VI, “the thirtieth, I think” theorem [ed.: VI.31]: not only the square, but any equiangular figures similarly arranged on the sides of a right triangle equal the one on the hypotenuse; the note cites Proclus that Euclid himself discovered this extension of the Pythagorean theorem. Brother Mark joked one shouldn’t take too much of such delight, “like candy.” But the goal is substantially the understanding, the joy perfecting it as beauty perfects youth, “an added thing.”
• Thomas also speaks of the end as understanding and loving God, which is fine. Wanting the vision in order to love God more is not a bad will, “but you don’t want to see God as He is just to love Him more”: you want it for its own sake, the perfection of your mind.

10. Which is better, knowledge or love? (“all knowledge, as such, is good”) #

Point: a different but illuminating point — in general, knowledge is better than love, since love depends on knowledge for being good.

1. All knowledge as such is good, even how to make a bomb (bad only with a bad will), even knowledge of the bad; Plato and Aristotle: there is the same knowledge of opposites, so if knowledge of the bad were bad, all knowledge would be.
2. Not all love is good: love of the good is good, love of the bad is bad.
3. So the man who does bad is mistaken (Proverbs, Aristotle): he thinks here and now this is the thing to do. If knowledge were perfected, love would be perfected; knowledge is never fully perfected until you see God as He is.

• Thomas’s reason: seeing God you cannot help but love Him; lovers want to do each other’s will; so you can only do the will of God, the measure of all good — “you’re all set.” A sailor’s deathbed: “in a few moments I will no longer sin.”
• He announces the third article, “whether God is the beatitude,” and stops.

His words #

• “makeable” / “knowable”: the ranges of omnipotence and omniscience; two is half of five is thinkable, not knowable.
• “the good is what all want”; “the end is that for the sake of which”: first definitions of good and end.
• “natural hearing” [ed.: Physics]; “second book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics II].
• “blessed” / “blessedness”: his rendering of beatus / beatitudo throughout.
• “understanding nature” [ed.: intellectual nature].
• secundum rem: in reality, as opposed to “according to the way of understanding.”
• “ability” [ed.: potency, potentia]; “ability to generate.”
• “instant habit”: the angels’ irrevocable first choice.
• “pleasures private to man”: the fine arts, mixing sense and reason.
• summum bonum: middle term in Boethius’s syllogism.
• gaudium de veritate: Augustine’s phrase for the end as joy in truth.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 26, a. 2: objections 1–2, sed contra, body, replies to 1 and 2.
• Aristotle, On the Soul III, “the soul is in some way all things” (paraphrased).
• Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, the syllogism that beatitude is God (paraphrased).

Mentioned

• Thomas Aquinas, De Potentia, q. 1 (God’s knowledge of the knowable) and q. 2 (ability to create and to generate).
• Boethius, De Hebdomadibus, and Thomas’s commentary on it.
• Gregory, Morals, book 32.
• Augustine: “the vision is the whole reward”; “blessed is the man who understands God…”; gaudium de veritate.
• Aristotle, Physics; Metaphysics II; Nicomachean Ethics III (“the man who does bad is mistaken”), X (pleasure before happiness), “such as a man is, so does the end appear.”
• Proverbs (those who do bad err); scripture on the tree that falls; “whether he is worthy of love or hate”; Paul, “in a mirror darkly.”
• Mozart, Don Giovanni; Shakespeare, Hamlet (“words, words, words”); Titian.
• John Stuart Mill on Epicurean pleasure.
• Essay “towards an evaluation of music” [author unclear in recording].
• Euclid, Elements VI, theorem extending the Pythagorean theorem, with Proclus’s remark; an Einstein biography on his letters; Rorty obituary.

His questions #

• Does God, being all-knowing, know that two is half of five? No; it is not knowable, so not knowing it takes nothing from being all-knowing.
• Blessedness is said in God by His essence — so why not simply say so? He is blessed by His essence, but we understand Him to be blessed by understanding that He understands Himself.
• “So, you convinced of this or not?” left open.
• Once you see God, how could you want anything else for your happiness? Only by mistake, and then you can no longer be mistaken; your heart is filled.
• How does this apply to the bad angels? Their mind is fully formed at creation, so their choice is an instant habit, as ours becomes at death.
• Can a dog be happy? It has pleasure, of the kind shared with beasts; happiness belongs to the rational creature.
• What is the first thing you understand — your own understanding? Is the first thing you love, love? No: something else first, then reflection; the first love is the end, so the end cannot be love or joy.
• If the saints already love God as they should, is love the end? No; their love only grows in degree; the end is seeing God as He is.
• Is my goal the joy in understanding a theorem, or the understanding? Substantially the understanding; the joy perfects it as beauty perfects youth.
• Which is better, knowledge or love? In a general way, knowledge: all knowledge is good, but love is good only if of the good.