Summa I, Q. 26, a. 3–4 and the Opening of the Trinity Treatise (Q. 27): God's Beatitude, True and False Happiness, and Dividing into Two or Three

Orientation #

He returns to “that old distinction coming up again” (simpliciter vs. in a genus) and to Boethius and Augustine from before; at the break he says “we’ll take a peek at the proemium… what we’re going to do when we come back, I guess, in the fall,” and ends “we’re going to meet in the fall.” The previous class introduced the article on whether God himself is beatitude, and the next takes up q. 27 on procession in God.

The class, in order #

1. Whether God is the beatitude of everyone blessed (“star differs from star in clarity”) #

The point: God is the beatitude of every blessed one as object, but the act of understanding Him is created.

• Objection 1: God is the highest good (shown “way back” in the treatise on the substance of God); there cannot be many highest goods; beatitude is by its notion the highest good; so beatitude is not other than God.
• Objection 2: beatitude is the last end of a reasonable nature; to be that end belongs to God alone; so the beatitude of anyone blessed is God alone. He asks whether Thomas will agree or distinguish: “in one way that’s true; another way, it isn’t.”
• Sed contra: 1 Cor 15, “star differs from star in clarity” (he recalls Paul VI quoting it, he thinks about St Francis de Sales); one saint’s beatitude is greater than another’s, but nothing is greater than God, so God would be greater and lesser than Himself.
• Aside on the Dominican saying “never affirm, seldom deny, always distinguish”: he knew him a little; “he kind of liked to affirm some things.” Being mistaken usually means you are mixed up because you do not see a distinction.
• The answer: the beatitude of an understanding nature consists in its act of understanding, in which two things can be considered: the object (the understandable) and the act itself. What a triangle is vs. my understanding it; Mozart’s music vs. my hearing it — object against act. On the side of the object, God alone is beatitude, “because from this alone is someone blessed, that he understands God” (Augustine, Confessions V: blessed is he who knows You, even if ignorant of other things — Thomas quotes in part what he quoted more fully earlier). On the side of the act, beatitude in creatures is something created; in God it is something uncreated, His own understanding.
• Reply 1: as regards the object, beatitude is the highest good simpliciter; as regards the act in blessed creatures, the highest good not simpliciter but in the genus of goods creatures can partake of. “Oh, these guys without that distinction.”

2. Will anyone in heaven be imperfect? (“a very good Rossini”) #

A recalled Thomas text: no one in heaven will lack anything he should have, reconciled with “star differs from star.”

• A lack strictly is not having what you are able to have and should have. God calls you to a place in heaven, higher or lower than another’s; if you reach it you lack nothing God intended you to have for all eternity.
• Rossini, who listened to Mozart twice a day, asked why he didn’t write like Mozart: “I’d be a very poor Mozart, but as it is I’m a very good Rossini.” So in heaven: “I’d be a very poor St Paul, a very poor St Thomas.”
• Student: St Thérèse on the different-sized cups in heaven, all full. He: a little glass of beer and a big mug — “yours is full too.”

3. Reply 2: the end cuius and quo (“use and fruition”) #

• The end is twofold: cuius and quo — the thing itself and the use of the thing; the avaricious man’s end is both money and the acquisition of money. So God is the ultimate end as res, the thing; the created beatitude is the use, or rather the enjoyment, of that thing.
• Augustine’s famous distinction of use and fruition: everything we do wrong is enjoying things we should use and using things we should enjoy.
• Summary: as object, God is the beatitude of everyone; your seeing or even loving God is created, not God Himself, but nevertheless seeing and loving God.

4. Whether every beatitude is included in God’s beatitude (“false happiness is more known”) #

• Objection 1: some beatitudes are false, nothing false is in God, so God’s beatitude does not embrace (“complectitur”; he offers “embrace”) every beatitude. He connects: this is one reason Thomas says beatitude cannot consist essentially in love — you can love the bad as well as the good; you may enjoy a wrong end, but that is not true blessedness; it is the mind that knows what is truly blessed.
• Objection 2: some place beatitude in bodily things (pleasures, wealth), which cannot belong to God, who is bodiless.
• Boethius in the Consolation takes up false happiness first because it is more known to us; “broad is the road” to false happiness, few find the way to true. Zachary on John the Baptist leading us “in the way of peace”: peace, properly understood, is the end of man.
• Sed contra: beatitude is a perfection; divine perfection includes every perfection.
• Answer: whatever is desirable in any beatitude, true or false, exists more eminently in the divine beatitude. Of contemplative happiness (the highest, per the Philosopher), He has continual and most certain contemplation of Himself and all else; of the active life, the governance of the whole universe — better than Alexander, who had only the known world; “no more worlds for God to conquer.”

5. Student: any significance in felicitas rather than beatitudo? (“happiness is named from hap”) #

Three names touch three opinions about what happiness depends on.

• English “happiness” from “hap” (still in its original sense in Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona, “good hap”); Greek eutuchia, Latin bona fortuna — luck, being in the right place at the right time, the average man’s view.
• Latin felicitas from felix, fruitful: fruit is the last thing the plant produces, sweet and desirable; happiness as the natural result of good deeds, as misery of bad ones — Macbeth, “unnatural deeds do breed unnatural troubles,” noting “breed.” So felicitas names better what Aristotle treats in the Nicomachean Ethics, achieved by virtue; as Shakespeare [sic] describes it, “that part of philosophy that treats of happiness by virtue especially to be achieved.”
• Greek eudaimonia from daimon, a superior being (no pejorative sense): being well directed by one above you. “Beatitude/blessed” similarly suggests being blessed by someone.
• Parallel with “love”: English love ≈ amor, even eros; Greek and Latin have philia, agape/caritas (C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves); in the night course on love and friendship people took love to mean sex.
• Parallel with “perfect”: from factum, made — the etymology does not fit God but the meaning does; God is perfect without being made perfect, unlike us and the table. “You got to be sensitive to those words.”
• Here Thomas uses felicitas almost as a synonym; beatitudo names more specifically the rational nature — used more for angels, but properly of man too.

6. The two happinesses and the five parts of false happiness (“God has lots of money”) #

• Aristotle, Ethics X: the more human happiness, whose perfection is ruling the city (Churchill “was happy” when he got where he did), and the more divine happiness of philosophy, ultimately understanding God by wisdom. God has the perfection of both — not one country but the whole universe.
• Earthly, false happiness in five parts (Boethius, Consolation III): pleasure, wealth, power, dignity, glory/fame. God has joy about Himself and all else (pleasure); all-sufficiency, which wealth promises (wealth); omnipotence (power); rule of all (dignity); the admiration of every creature (fame). The Summa Contra Gentiles, at its end, does the same “even more beautifully”: true happiness first, then what false happiness seeks.
• The more you understand God the more you admire Him; even a little understanding starts wonder — his mother: “with this little finger He can move the whole sun and the stars”; also “God has lots of money.”
• Reply 1: a beatitude is false insofar as it falls short of the notion of true beatitude, and so is not in God; whatever likeness to true happiness it has, however tenuous, pre-exists wholly in God’s. Aristotle: those who seek happiness in sense pleasure are not entirely mistaken, since some pleasure follows on happiness — a higher, different pleasure, and they mistake the higher for the lower.
• Reply 2: the goods in bodies in a bodily way are in God in a spiritual way, His own way.
• “These things said suffice about those things which pertain to the unity of the divine essence.” Break.

7. Proemium to q. 27: mnemonic and the two-fold division (“De Deo Uno and De Deo Trino”) #

• Mnemonic only, “no great significance”: 27 is the cube of 3, and the treatise on the three persons begins at q. 27; likewise SCG IV’s last part runs ch. 79 to 97 (“seventy-nine, ninety-seven”), and there are seventeen questions.
• Thomas’s division: having considered what pertains to the unity of the divine essence, it remains to consider what pertains to the Trinity of persons — everything said so far divided against what follows: two parts.
• Contrast with the SCG: there the Trinity does not come up until Book IV, and God’s existence, substance and operation are all in Book I, because the four books divide into two: Books I-III, what can be known of God by reason as well as by faith (Thomas says use both); Book IV, what is known only by faith. Both parts have the same subdivision — God in Himself, God as Maker in what He makes, God as end directing all to Himself; in the first part these are the three books, in Book IV Trinity, then Incarnation with sacraments attached, then last things (79-97).
• The Summa Theologiae does not divide the whole work that way; what reason can know and what only faith can know are put together, so here Trinity follows immediately on what in the SCG lies between Book I and Book IV. Something to be seen in both orders: the SCG makes explicit the important distinction between what the philosophers (the greatest, with difficulty and some mistakes) could know and what only faith can; the ST order “is more like God’s knowledge,” since God knows everything by knowing Himself — so everything about God in Himself first, including the Trinity, then the rest.

8. The three-fold division and “secundum ordinem doctrinae” (“the order in which I teach”) #

• “Because the divine persons are distinguished by relations of origin” — “quite a sentence”: personae divinae, secundum relationes, originis — so the treatise divides into three “secundum ordinem doctrinae”: first origin (i.e. procession, “de processione”), second the relations of origin, third the persons. Because the Son is born of the Father he proceeds from Him, and as a result of the proceeding you say Father and Son; because they breathe the Holy Spirit, He is the Holy Breath. In the questions: one on processions, one on relations, fifteen on persons (persons in general and in particular — “we’ll see how he divides it in the fall”).
• Keep a finger here and go back to the proemium of the whole work, second paragraph: beginners are hindered because things are repeated, because of the multiplication of useless questions, articles and arguments, and because what is necessary is not treated secundum ordinem disciplinae but as the exposition of a book (even books of the Bible) or the occasion of disputing requires — the De Potentia’s order is not the same as here; “that’s disputatio.” Note the different word: doctrina is the teaching, in the teacher; disciplina is learning — but they are the same order: “the order in which I teach is the order in which you should learn.” Sometimes we also say the order of teaching should imitate the order of discovery — harder to see, but basically true too. The q. 27 proemium is “a beautiful example” of what he meant at the start.

9. Dividing by two and by three: Our Father, sacraments, John 13-17, Psalms (“into two or into three”) #

The mind cannot grasp a division into seven, so ask whether to divide into two or three.

• Our Father, seven petitions, into two: a student says “God and man”; he: the more obvious basis is good and bad, since a division into two tends to be by opposites (habits into virtues and vices). First four (hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, daily bread) are about the good; last three (forgive, lead us not, deliver us) about the bad. The four then divide into two: end (hallowed be Thy name, on God’s side; Thy kingdom come, our end) and means (doing God’s will, the chief means; daily bread, the help).
• Augustine’s other division into two, three against four: the first three are fully fulfilled only in the next life (“on earth as it is in heaven” characterising all three), the last four concern this life (daily bread, material or Eucharist; the bad things). As a boy the priest led “Our Father… on earth as it is in heaven” and the congregation began “Give us this day” — fits Augustine’s division, whatever physical reason for the pause; like priest reading the gospel, another the epistle.
• Into three (not by opposites): Thomas does — end (two), means to the end (two), impediments to the end (two, with the removing of them). Aside: daily bread is the present, forgive trespasses the past, lead us not into temptation the future — like his Sacrum Convivium, recalling Christ’s death, fullness of grace, pledge of eternal life. So the petitions divide sensibly both into two (two ways) and into three.
• Seven sacraments: into two — orders and matrimony (ordered to the community) against the five (ordered to the good of the soul receiving them); he sees no way to divide seven into three; then the five into three and two.
• John 13-17, Christ preparing the apostles for his death: Thomas divides five chapters into three — example (13, washing the feet), instruction by words (14-16), prayer (17). His application to fatherhood and to a priest or head of the church: give good example, instruct by word (spoken, maybe written), pray that both bear fruit. Aristotle: three is the first number of which we say “all”; everything Christ said and did is an example for us.
• John 17 into three prayers: for Himself (though not needing it), for the apostles, for all who will believe the apostles — first your own salvation, then those close to you, then everyone; these are the biggest prayers of Christ in the Gospels besides the Our Father, though not analysed as much.
• The prayer for the apostles is in two: first against the bad (that in the world they not be corrupted), then for the good (their fullness as apostles) — the reverse of the Our Father. Thomas: Scripture says both “do good and avoid evil” and “turn from evil and do good”; the first is the order of intention (you avoid evil because you aim at the good), the second the order of execution (stop killing, fornicating, stuffing yourself, then turn to the good). The Psalms, divided by Augustine and Thomas in agreement (“two pretty good minds”), have three parts corresponding to the three parts of the Our Father in exact reverse order: the first fifty ending in the penitential Psalm 50 (Teresa of Avila’s favourite), Psalm 100 a psalm of good action, the last psalms resting in God — fitting because we carry things out, and the Psalms are lengthy, the Our Father concise. His favourite psalm, “Unless the Lord build the house… unless the Lord guard the city,” is in the Our Father’s order: for the good, then against the bad; the prayer for the apostles has the same two parts reversed.
• The prayer for the faithful: not good and bad but all good, in two — unity, then eternal life; cf. Psalm 132, “how good and pleasant for brethren to dwell in one,” the oil coming down, “for there the Lord announces blessing, life forever.” The unity of Christ’s members is primarily by love, and by love He gives His beloved eternal life. So within a division into three, two of the parts happen to divide into two, each stated then elaborated in the same order.
• Closes: “we’re going to meet in the fall… we got to visit the grandchildren.”

His words #

• object vs. act of understanding: what a triangle is / the music of Mozart, against my understanding or hearing it
• simpliciter vs. in the genus of partakeable goods: “that old distinction coming up again”
• lack (strict definition): not having what you are able to have and should have
• cuius and quo: the end as the thing itself and as the use (enjoyment) of the thing
• use and fruition (Augustine): sin is enjoying what should be used, using what should be enjoyed
• complectitur: “embrace,” his rendering of Thomas’s “contain/bring together”
• more known to us: why Boethius treats false happiness first
• hap / eutuchia / bona fortuna: happiness as luck
• felicitas from felix, fruitful: happiness as natural fruit of good deeds
• eudaimonia from daimon: direction by a superior being
• beatitude/blessed: being blessed by someone; names the rational nature more specifically
• perfect from factum: etymology does not fit God, meaning does
• more human vs. more divine happiness (Ethics X): ruling the city vs. understanding God by wisdom
• terrena felicitas, five parts: pleasure, wealth, power, dignity, fame (Boethius)
• De Deo Uno / De Deo Trino: the two-fold division of the treatise on God
• relations of origin: what distinguishes the divine persons
• Holy Breath: his rendering for the Holy Spirit as breathed
• ordo doctrinae / ordo disciplinae: order of teaching (in the teacher) / of learning; the same order; also should imitate the order of discovery
• disputatio: an order of occasion, as in the De Potentia
• order of intention vs. order of execution: “do good and avoid evil” vs. “turn from evil and do good”

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 26, a. 3 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 26, a. 4 (objections, sed contra, body, replies, closing sentence)
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 27, proemium
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I, proemium of the whole work, second paragraph

Mentioned

• 1 Corinthians 15, “star differs from star in clarity”
• Augustine, Confessions V (blessed is he who knows You)
• Augustine on use and fruition; Augustine’s division of the Our Father; Augustine and Thomas on the three parts of the Psalms
• Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, book III (five parts of false happiness)
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, book X (two happinesses); Ethics on sense pleasure (loc. not stated); “three is the first number of which we say all” (loc. not stated)
• Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles, book I; book IV, chs. 79-97; its end on true and false happiness
• Thomas, Quaestiones Disputatae de Potentia (order of a disputation)
• Thomas, commentary on John 13-17 (division); Thomas, Sacrum Convivium
• Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona (“hap”); Macbeth (“unnatural deeds”)
• C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves
• Psalm 50 (penitential), Psalm 100, Psalm 132; “Unless the Lord build the house” (Psalm 126, inferred)
• Luke 1, Zachary on John the Baptist, “way of peace” (inferred locus)
• Matthew, “broad is the road” (inferred locus)
• St Thérèse on the cups in heaven; Paul VI quoting 1 Cor 15

His questions #

• Is Thomas going to agree with the objections, or distinguish? Distinguish: on the side of the object God alone is beatitude; on the side of the act it is something created.
• Will anybody in heaven be imperfect, lacking something he should have? No: a lack is not having what you can and should have, and each has what God intended for him — “a very good Rossini.”
• Is there any significance in his use of felicitas instead of beatitudo? (student) Here almost synonyms; felicitas fits Aristotle’s happiness by virtue, beatitude names the rational nature more specifically.
• Is the consideration of God divided into two or into three? The whole into two (unity of essence / Trinity of persons); the Trinity into three (processions, relations, persons).
• Would you divide the seven petitions of the Our Father into two or three? Both: four good / three bad (or, with Augustine, three next-life / four this-life); or end, means, impediments.
• Would you divide the seven sacraments into two or three? Two: five for the soul receiving them, orders and matrimony for the community; then the five into three and two.
• How does Thomas divide John 13-17? Three: example (washing feet), words (14-16), prayer (17); the prayer into three: for Himself, the apostles, those who will believe.
• Why does Scripture say both “do good and avoid evil” and “turn from evil and do good”? Order of intention vs. order of execution; the Psalms follow the latter, the Our Father the former.