Order of Teaching About God, and Whether There Is Procession in God (Arius and Sabellius)

Orientation #

“Since we haven’t been together for a while, let’s come back to something we were touching upon at the last class”: the prooemium of the treatise on the Trinity (prev. lecture). He mentions that over the three-week break he read Augustine’s De Trinitate and that the class will “come to” Augustine’s account of the persons as subsisting relations. He says the whole of q. 27 presupposes the treatise on God’s understanding and willing already covered. The previous class closed the questions on beatitude and began the prooemium to the Trinity before the summer break.

The class, in order #

1. Order of teaching and order of learning (“according to the order of teaching”) #

Point: the two phrases Thomas uses, ordo doctrinae (prooemium of the Trinity treatise) and ordo disciplinae (prologue of the Summa), name the same order.

• He reads the prooemium (he says “this question twenty-eight” [ed.: the prooemium stands at the head of q. 27, verified]): since the divine persons are distinguished by relations of origin, “according to the order of teaching” one must consider first origin/procession, second the relations, third the persons.
• Prologue of the Summa: beginners are impeded (a) by the multiplying of useless questions, articles and arguments, (b) because what they need to know is not treated “according to the order of learning”.
• Argument: the teacher ought to teach in the order in which the student can best learn; therefore order of teaching and order of learning are one thing, though teacher and learner are two persons. “It runs through the whole Summa.”
• Aside: prologus is etymologically “foreword” but more precise; many of Thomas’s scripture commentaries have one.

2. Augustine to Thomas as Plato to Aristotle (“Augustine is to Thomas a bit like Plato”) #

Point: Augustine’s De Trinitate mixes in the Incarnation and much else; Thomas keeps the Incarnation for the Tertia Pars, yet keeps pulling material from Augustine. Likewise, the more one knows Aristotle, the more one sees in Plato things Aristotle later ordered; Plato’s conversational form drifts from subject to subject.

3. The necessary order in learning about God (“existence of God before the substance”) #

Point: existence, then substance, then operations, then Trinity; this before-and-after he takes as “pretty necessary”.

1. Existence first: if God does not exist the whole of theology is removed.
2. Substance before operations: you would not know God’s understanding and willing without knowing his substance; the treatise on the operations “borrows” from that on substance (simplicity means his understanding is simple, not discursive; pure act means nothing can be unknown to him, no reasoning in him).
3. Operations before Trinity: the Son proceeds by God’s understanding himself, so that God is in himself as understood; since God’s understanding is his very being, God as understood must be God. The Holy Spirit proceeds by God’s loving himself. So only by knowing there is one act of understanding in God (unlike my three understandings of triangle, dog, justice) do you see why there is only one Word, one Son; and only one act of will (unlike Berquist’s divided loves: wisdom, wine, candy, Shakespeare, Mozart, grandchildren, wife, brothers) grounds one Love.
4. Trinity before Incarnation: it is “a Word made flesh”; the Te Deum and the Compendium follow the same order (Trinity, Incarnation, then prayer), and the transition turns on his really being the Son of God become man.

• His poem: “God the Father said it all in one word. No wonder when that word became a man, he spoke in words so few and said so much” (“a little borrowed there from Shakespeare”).

4. Understanding before willing, and the Holy Spirit’s name (“we don’t have names, right”) #

Point: in both Summas and the Compendium understanding is taken up before will, and this reappears in the Trinity: the proceeding of the Son is known before that of the Holy Spirit.

• Reason: we know God’s understanding and willing from our own, and understanding must be understood before willing can be; the good understood is the object of the will, so unless you know God primarily understands himself you cannot see why he primarily loves himself.
• “Father” and “Son” are proper names; “Holy Spirit” is only appropriate (Father and Son are also spirits and holy), so words have to be invented — because the proceeding by way of love is less known to us.

5. How strict is the order within the substance of God? (“something is brought out in one order”) #

Point: within the five-part consideration of the substance (simplicity, perfection with goodness, infinity, unchangeableness with eternity, unity) only some of the before-and-after is necessary.

• Necessary in all three works: simplicity before perfection. Reason: the first thinkers took the beginning of things as a simple, homogeneous matter (Thales water, Anaximenes air, Heraclitus fire); modern science looks for the simplest (proton, electron, neutron before atoms before molecules) — the “principle of simplicity”; so the simple is more known to us as beginning, while those who make matter the beginning do not see perfection.
• Variable: Contra Gentiles and Compendium put unchangeableness/eternity even before simplicity; the Summa Theologiae puts them after simplicity, perfection and infinity. His paper on the two Summas argued not that one order is right, but that each brings out something the other does not; sometimes you reason from A to B, sometimes the reverse.
• Why Contra Gentiles puts eternity first: its two much more developed arguments for existence (basic argument, two premises, three arguments for each) dwell on the unmoved mover, so it is natural to take up unchanging and eternal first, and there God as pure act comes out naturally.
• Why Contra Gentiles puts infinity last: having shown simplicity and unity, he removes infinity as bodily extension and as multitude, then gives the sense in which God is infinite. Infinity is where, as Augustine says, “more means better”: no limit to his perfection.
• The rule of two or three: the Trinity treatise is divided in three, the substance in five — but in the Compendium unity is part of simplicity, and infinity is taken before perfection, so the five pair off.
• Arguments for existence: the argument from motion always first (the only one in the Compendium); reason: motion is most known to us (“things in motion sooner catch the eye than what not stirs”; wave to be noticed, stay still not to be). The first maker / unmade maker naturally second, since mover and maker are alike and Aristotle reduces both to the third kind of cause, defining it first as the beginning of motion or rest and then bringing in the maker.
• Aside: an English translation of the Compendium exists.

6. Origin, relations, persons; one thing or three? (“are they one thing or three things?”) #

Point: the order origin, relation, person is explicit in Thomas; and the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are one thing in one sense of “thing”, three in another, without contradiction.

• Generation gives the relation Father–Son; breathing the Holy Spirit gives another relation of the two to the third and the third to them; Augustine (fifth book of De Trinitate, as he recalls) treats the persons as subsisting relations — “we will come to that”.
• Student: does this deny a real distinction between them? Answer: no. In the Categories, “being” or “thing” has more than one meaning: as substance they are one thing, one God, consubstantial; as relation, three subsisting relations.
• Review examples: nose and ear, man and dog are two things; take the dog out, one thing is left — then “no, two: the man and his shape”. The man in the street says you play with words, but if the shape of the nose is nothing, “it’s nothing to me if I flatten your nose”. Hitler refusing sweets lest a potbelly “destroy my image” (unlike Goering): people do worry about their shape, so shape is other than them. Yet “man and dog are two” and “man and his shape are two” do not use “thing” in the same sense: substance vs. accident. God has no accidents, but does have relations. So “thing” is equivocal not by chance but by reason.
• People know these things by their words without knowing they know them (Molière’s man who had spoken prose all his life). Even the ordinary speaker hesitates to say a dog and its size are the same thing: different sizes, still what a dog is; size or shape is “something of another rather than something by itself”.
• So in the order of learning the Categories come first — the only Aristotelian work Augustine knew; Augustine uses the Latin corresponding to the Greek, ad aliquid for pros ti, “towards something”, not “relation”.

7. The five articles of the question on procession (“whether there is a going forward in God”) #

Point: processio means going forward; the articles ask (1) whether there is a proceeding within God (not only creatures proceeding outside him) — a question of “does it exist”, for without it no relations and no persons; (2) whether some proceeding can be called generation (the one giving Father and Son); (3) whether there is another besides generation — note Thomas has no word for it, love being more obscure, and heretics admitted the Word’s divinity while denying the Spirit’s; (4) whether that other can be called generation (then the Spirit would be another Son, “a grandson”); (5) whether there are more than two — the answer depends on there being only two operations, understanding and willing.

• Aside on grandchildren and grandnephews met over the holiday, trying to figure out what he was to them.

8. Article 1: moving the word “proceeding” inward (“a going forward that remains within God”) #

Point: we name things as we know them, so “proceeding” first names something sensible and outward; in God it must name a going-forward that remains within.

• Objection 1 as he reads it: proceeding signifies motion to the outside; in God nothing is movable and nothing extraneous; therefore no proceeding in God. Two reasons: motion, and outwardness.
• Carrying words over: if you cannot “move the word” (Monsignor Dillon [uncertain in recording]) you fall back on the earlier sensible meaning; Shakespeare’s pun “my cane understands me” shows “understand” once meant stand under and had to be moved to an act of reason.
• The distinction: procession ad extra (going out of your room in the morning; making a chair, or the chocolate-chip cookies his eldest grandchild makes) vs. procession that remains within (the image proceeding from the imagination stays in the imagination). The outward is more known to us; the inward is more like God, and since whatever is in God is God, what proceeds remaining within God is God. “It’s beautiful that Thomas begins there”: he forces the mind to see this first distinction.
• Aside: error is “mistake”, being “mixed up”, the opposite of distinguishing; the first thing in learning is to see distinctions (what a thing is vs. its size; inward vs. outward proceeding).
• Reply to the motion part, via “to see”: first the act of the eye; is there a meaning between that and understanding? Yes, imagining: Hamlet says “I see my father” — “in my mind’s eye” — before his friends report the ghost; and in a dream we take imagining for seeing with the eyes but never confuse understanding with seeing. So the second meaning is to picture; it is more like the eye than understanding is, yet more like understanding than the eye is (English calls both an image and a thought an “idea”). If I had always imagined something there would always be an image in me and no change; so if God always understands himself he always has a thought of himself, no change. Both parts of the objection fall.

9. Objections 2 and 3, and the sed contra (“in God there is no diversity”) #

• Objection 2: everything going forward is other than that from which it goes; in God no diversity but summa simplicitas; therefore no procession.
• Distinction / division / definition are in order: definition divides (square: equilateral right-angled quadrilateral) but not every division is a definition (number into odd and even); division is more general than definition, distinction more general than division, since division implies a whole and parts, while distinction says only “this is not that”. Thomas sometimes uses them interchangeably, but in the Trinity he never says God is divided into the persons (they would be parts, and God is simple); he always says there is a real distinction — to deny it is to be Sabellius. The distinction of persons is the first distinction, there even had God created nothing. The hard problem, reconciling supreme simplicity with real distinction, is answered by the persons as subsisting relations — “getting into the game a little bit there”; left for later.
• Objection 3: to go forward from another is repugnant to a first beginning; God is the first beginning (the arguments for existence; Alpha and Omega).
• Sed contra: the Lord in John 8, “I have proceeded from God”.

10. The body: Arius and Sabellius, more and less than the truth (“the truth is between two extremes”) #

Point: Scripture, which uses names of proceeding, is presupposed; the errors lie in how the proceeding is taken.

• He recommends the Contra Gentiles on the Trinity first for those unfamiliar with the scriptural passages, since it establishes from Scripture what is said before asking how to understand it; here Thomas is brief “as fits a beginner”.
• Arius: proceeding as effect from cause — the Son the Father’s first creature, the Spirit the creature of both; then neither is true God, against 1 John (“this is the true God”) and 1 Cor 6:19 (the body a temple of the Holy Spirit; only God has a temple). Athanasius (his college choice among the Fathers) and Hilary chief opponents. Cause and effect are really diverse in substance.
• Sabellius: proceeding as the cause proceeding into the effect by moving it or impressing its likeness — the Father called Son as taking flesh, called Holy Spirit as sanctifying and moving the rational creature; so one person under three names, as one man is husband, father, grandfather, brother.
• Truth as a mean: as moral virtue is a mean (courage between cowardice and foolhardiness; moderation between intemperance and insensibility [garbled in recording]), so truth lies between saying more and saying less (Kent: “the modest truth, nor more nor clipped”; Falstaff: “more or less than the truth … villains and sons of darkness” — “takes one to know one”; the oath “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” excludes the two departures, not mere emphasis). Thirty brothers taught at the monastery: more than the truth; two: less. More = saying what is not, is; less = saying what is, is not.
• Applied: one substance, three persons. Arius, three substances for three persons, says more; Sabellius, one person for one substance, says less. Incarnation reversed: one person, two natures; Nestorius (two persons) says more, the Monophysites (one nature) say less.
• “The truth also explains error” (Aristotle): each error has part of the truth (one person suggests one nature; two natures suggest two persons), but errors cannot explain each other; only the middle position with the whole truth explains both. Pythagoras: “having seen only a part, they boast of having seen the whole.”
• Against Sabellius: the Lord’s words that the Son can do nothing of himself, and many others showing the Father is not the Son; Augustine and Thomas in the Contra Gentiles go through many more passages. The class ends here, mid-body.

His words #

• ordo doctrinae: “order of teaching”; ordo disciplinae: “order of learning”; he takes them as the same.
• prologus: “prologue”, etymologically “foreword”, but more precise.
• “the doing of God”: his name for the treatise on God’s operations, understanding and willing.
• “unmade maker”: the first efficient cause.
• “thing” (being): equivocal by reason, not by chance; substance vs. relation/accident.
• ad aliquid, pros ti: “towards something”, Augustine’s and the logic class’s rendering of the category [ed.: relation].
• processio, “proceeding”, “going forward”; ad extra: to the outside.
• “move the word”: carry a name from its sensible meaning to a new one.
• “mixed up”: his gloss on mistake; the opposite of distinguishing.
• distinction / division / definition: in order of decreasing generality.
• summa simplicitas: highest simplicity.
• “more than the truth / less than the truth”: saying what is not, is / what is, is not.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 27, prooemium (he says “question twenty-eight”)
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I, prologus (second paragraph)
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 27 (list of five articles); a. 1, objections 1–3, sed contra, body up to the refutation of Sabellius
• Handout “Note for Sixth Book of Wisdom, Reading 4”, p. 14, on Aquinas, Metaphysics VI lectio 4 (verified by matching; the passage on more and less than the truth, inferred)

Mentioned

• Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles (arguments for God’s existence; order of the substance; Trinity from Scripture); Compendium Theologiae (English translation available)
• Augustine, De Trinitate (bk. V on persons as relations, as he recalls); Augustine on “more means better”
• Aristotle, Categories; on the third kind of cause; Nicomachean Ethics on the mean (inferred, unnamed); “the truth also explains error”
• Te Deum; Our Father
• John 8; 1 John; 1 Corinthians 6:19; “the Son can do nothing of himself” (John, inferred)
• Shakespeare: Hamlet (“mind’s eye”), King Lear (Kent), Falstaff, “things in motion sooner catch the eye”; Molière (speaking prose); Pythagoras; Speer’s memoir on Hitler

His questions #

• Is there any difference between the order of learning and the order of teaching? No: the teacher should teach in the order the student can best learn; the two phrases name one thing.
• Why consider the substance of God before his understanding and willing? Because the operations borrow from the substance (simplicity, pure act).
• Why must the operations of God be understood before the Trinity? Because the Son proceeds as God understood and the Spirit as God loved, and one act of understanding and one of will yield only one Word and one Love.
• Is the order of the five parts of the substance of God infallible? No: simplicity before perfection always; the other three vary between the works, each order bringing out something.
• Are the Father, Son and Holy Spirit one thing or three things? One as substance, three as subsisting relations; “thing” is equivocal by reason.
• Is there a meaning of “to see” between the act of the eye and understanding? Yes, imagining, which is more like each than they are like each other.
• Would there be any change in me if I had always imagined something? No, not as far as the image goes; likewise God always having a thought of himself.
• How do you reconcile the supreme simplicity of God with the real distinction of persons? Through the persons as subsisting relations — left for later.
• What does it mean to say more or less than the truth? More: what is not, is (Arius, Nestorius); less: what is, is not (Sabellius, Monophysites).