Summa I, q.27, a.3: A Second Procession in God, the Procession of Love, and the Word as 'the Thought'

Orientation #

He says that “the article we just read last time” was the second article of q.27, on the generation of the Word (prev. lecture); this class takes the third article, and at the end he breaks “between articles” and says “we’ll go on to the fourth article.” Verified sources: the class works through ST I q.27 a.3 (matched); a text-matching system also found ~10 minutes matching Summa Contra Gentiles IV ch. 15, which he does not name. The neighbouring classes treat the procession of the Word as generation (previous) and whether the procession of love is generation (next).

The class, in order #

1. Opening: prayer and the Pope’s vacation (“A piano was brought into the cabin”) #

Aside, no doctrinal content: he reads a news item that Pope Benedict, unlike John Paul II’s hikes, spent his 18-day Alpine vacation on two daily piano sessions, mostly Mozart — “a little bit of support there from Mozart, you know, despite being a mason.”

2. Dividing the five articles of q.27 (“how would you divide these five articles”) #

Point: you must divide the question to know where you are.

• His three-part division: (1) is there a going-forward in God? (a.1); (2) what is it? (aa.2-4); (3) how many? (a.5).
• Within the middle part: a.2 established a going-forward that is generation, giving rise to the Son; a.3 asks whether there is another going-forward besides that one; a.4 asks whether that other can be called generation.

3. The three objections (“like you’re a Buddhist or something”) #

Point: he reads and glosses the three objections against a second procession.

1. Obj. 1 — if there is another procession from the first, by the same reason there would be another from that, and so on forever (in infinitum), which is unsuitable; so stand at the first and say there is only one. His gloss: “processions and processions, you know, like you’re a Buddhist or something.”
2. Obj. 2 — in every nature there is only one way of communicating that nature, because operations take their unity and diversity from their terms; procession in God is only by communication of the divine nature; there is one divine nature; therefore one procession.
3. Obj. 3 — if there is another procession it can only be that of love, according to the will; but God’s will is the same thing as his understanding; so that procession cannot be other than the intelligible procession. His gloss: the distinction between divine understanding and will is only in our mind, corresponding to their unity in God; so the objection anticipates the answer (the second proceeding is according to the will) and turns it back: if the powers are the same, the acts and proceedings are the same, and you are “merely naming the same thing twice” — falling back into the heresy of Sabellius, where Son and Holy Spirit differ only in thought. “That’s kind of an interesting objection.”

4. Sed contra and the two Greek verbs (“to march out with an army”) #

Point: the sed contra rests on two Johannine texts, and the Greek behind them uses two words for what Latin renders by one.

• Sed contra: the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father (John 15:26), but he is other from the Son (John 14: “I will ask my Father, and he will give you another Paraclete” — another Counselor, Adviser); therefore there is another going-forward besides that of the Word.
• Book-learning aside with his Greek New Testament and lexicon: in John 8:42 (“I proceeded forth and came from God”) the verb is exeimi, lexicon: “to march out with an army, to come forth”; in John 15:26 (“the Spirit of Truth, which proceedeth from the Father”) it is ekporeuetai (he gives the Latin-lettered form as exporuo [ed.: garbled in transcript]), “to go out or forth… passive, to march out.” So the Son marches out from the Father and the Holy Spirit marches out from the Father and the Son.
• The two Greek words are “really synonyms, more or less”; Latin has one, procedere; English can say “goes forth” and “comes forth.”
• Aside: a Vatican commission ten or twelve years ago, discussing this “sore point with the Orthodox” (the filioque), examined nuances the Greek fathers might give the two words, and concluded they come to the same thing.

5. The body: two processions, of word and of love (“the loved is in the lover”) #

Point: there are two processions in God, of the Word and one “not so well named.”

1. In divinis (he wonders why Thomas says “in divine matters” rather than “in God”) there is no going-forward except by an action that does not tend outside but remains within the agent.
2. In an intellectual nature such actions are two: the action of understanding and the action of the will.
3. The Word proceeds according to the understanding.
4. According to the will there is found in us another going-forward, that of love, “by which the loved is in the lover, just as by the conception of the word the thing understood is in the one understanding.”
5. Therefore besides the going-forward of the word there must be laid down another, the going-forward of love.

• What he flags: this is also the reason, later on, why there are only two — these are the only two operations remaining within the agent that could give rise to a person; and because divine understanding and loving are the divine being, the one proceeding by way of knowing and the one by way of loving is also God (looking ahead to a.5).

6. Reply to obj. 1: love is where the series rests (“Fortunately I’m not”) #

Point: the going-forward that stays within an intellectual nature terminates in the going-forward of the will, “because that’s where you rest in what has gone forward, loving it”; so no infinite regress.

• Example, the image of the Trinity in us: from my reason proceeds Shakespeare’s definition of reason; I realize what a great thing reason is; I rest in its beauty — and there it ends.
• Where the image falls short: the being of my reason, my understanding, and my loving are three different things. Is the definition of reason reason? In some way, but simply speaking no. Is reason-in-my-love reason? Not without qualification. If my loving and understanding were my being, they would be, “and then I’d be just like God. Fortunately I’m not.”

7. Reply to obj. 2: whatever is in God is God (“Whatever God has is God”) #

Point: the divine nature can be communicated in more than one way because, unlike other things, whatever is in God is God.

1. In me, what I have (some geometry, some health, a little Greek) is not me; it is added, a composition.
2. God is altogether simple (excluded from composition in the question on God’s simplicity), so knowledge, virtues, whatever he is said to have, are God.
3. Therefore through any going-forward not to the outside, the divine nature is communicated — which does not happen in other natures, which communicate their nature only one way, since their other operations are not their being.

• Restated at the end of the class: two operations within God, both identical with the divine being, so two ways of communicating the nature.

8. Two inward goings-forward in us: image and thought (“can I imagine my imagination?”) #

Point: of the two creaturely goings-forward that remain within, thought is the better image of the Trinity, though less known to us.

• Imagination: I imagine a gold mountain or a glass mountain (fairy tale); the image goes forward from and remains within my imagination — like God insofar as it stays within its source.
• Thought: when I think, a thought (vague, or distinct if a definition) goes forward from my mind.
• Why thought is more like the Word: I cannot imagine my imagination, but when Shakespeare defines reason as “the ability for a large discourse, looking before and after,” reason is understanding itself. The image is not an image of the imagining power; a thought of reason can go forward from reason.
• Supporting point from Thomas on logic: reason can think about how to use the hands (cooking), but in logic it thinks about how to use itself to know; reason comes back on itself and knows its own act and, to some extent, itself.
• So Shakespeare’s definition, apart from its philosophical use, “is an image of something in God” — though it “still falls very short.”

9. Antonomasia and why the Son is “the Word” (“In the beginning was the thought”) #

Point: Scripture names by antonomasia, which the Latin cannot show because it lacks the article; “the Word” is such a name, and there are four reasons why this thought is the thought.

• Aside on Latin: no article as a part of speech; later scholastics sometimes stick in ly or the like; he is unsure whether French le came from this (he thinks rather from Italy).
• Antonomasia (Greek; found in the big Oxford dictionary): giving a common name to one particular thing because it is outstanding, or vice versa using an outstanding individual’s name for the common thing — “he’s a Romeo.”
• Scriptural instances: Bible means just “book,” so the Bible is the book, because it is the word of God; Gospel = good news (a new baby is good news, but not the Gospel); Christ = anointed — kings, priests, prophets were anointed, but in chapter 16 Peter says “You are ho Christos,” the Christ, standing out among all the anointed.
• John 1:1, ho logos: logos means first the word (spoken, then written), then the thought the word signifies; English “word” has not been moved to the second sense; John uses the second, so “In the beginning was the thought.” Latin distinguishes verbum oris and verbum cordis.
• Two tasks with antonomasia: recognize it, then say why. Four reasons, given “in ascending order,” why this is the thought:
  1. It is the only thought God has — “put all his marbles in one thing.”
  2. A thought is judged better by being more certain or about a better thing (Aristotle, proemium of De Anima), and the better-object criterion is more important (proemium of Parts of Animals): better an imperfect knowledge of the soul than a perfect knowledge of the triangle. This thought is chiefly of God, the best thing; and unlike our many thoughts of God (simple, good, wise…), which even all together do not express what he is, it fully and perfectly expresses what God is. (He notes God also expresses everything else, but does not develop it.)
  3. Every other thought is an accident existing in another (my thoughts in my mind, in my soul); this thought is a substance, subsisting, a person — and, looking ahead to Thomas on “person,” nothing is more perfect than a person, which subsists in the highest nature, the understanding nature.
  4. “Last but not least, this thought is God” — “the grand conclusion.” Any one of these alone would make it the thought.
• Aside: Latin commentaries perhaps under-emphasize antonomasia for lack of the article; English uses the article to bring it out — Aristotle calls Homer “the poet”; the Federalist Papers, on the danger of disunion, quote “the poet”: “A long farewell to all my greatness” — Shakespeare.

10. Reply to obj. 3: order of love to word (“at some sight”) #

Point: though will and understanding are not other in God, the processions differ by an order intrinsic to the notions of will and understanding.

• Aside on Thomas’s method: the Summa is for beginners; each objection forces you to concentrate on one part of the problem, as with the definition of eternity, where one objection attacks each part and the replies bring out the whole definition distinctly.

1. Love does not go forward except in order to the going-forward of the word, for nothing can be loved by the will unless first conceived in the understanding.
2. Support from Thomas’s treatise on love (done together earlier): three questions — nature and kinds of love (friendship/concupiscence, sense/chosen), causes, effects; under causes, the good, then knowledge, then likeness are each causes of love — hence an order of knowledge before love.
3. Classroom example: Marlowe’s “Whoever loved, that loved not at first sight?” (quoted in As You Like It); students argue first vs. second or third sight, Romeo and Juliet; his resolution: “I don’t care where the truth is here. I just want you to see that it’s at some sight.”
4. As the word is ordered to its principle though of the same substance, so love, of the same substance, goes forward only from a concept of the understanding; hence a distinction of order: the procession of love proceeding from the procession of the word.

• What he flags: “very important for this filioque” — Thomas will later argue that unless the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Son as well as the Father, he would not be really distinct from the Son, “and that’s what some people don’t understand.”
• Break taken between articles; the fourth article follows.

His words #

• going forward / going forth / proceeding — his rendering of processio, procedere [ed.: procession]
• the Word, thought of God — the Son; logos in its second sense, the thought signified
• exeimi — John 8:42, “to march out with an army, to come forth”
• ekporeuetai — John 15:26, “to go out or forth… to march out” (transcript gives a Latin-lettered form, garbled)
• Paraclete — Counselor, Adviser, Comforter (John 14)
• in divinis — “in divine matters”; he asks why not simply “in God”
• Sabellius — the heresy in which the persons differ only in thought
• antonomasia — common name given to one outstanding thing, or vice versa
• ho Christos — “the Christ,” the anointed by antonomasia
• ho logos — “the Word”
• verbum oris / verbum cordis — word of the mouth / of the heart
• love of friendship / love of concupiscence; sense love / chosen love — kinds of love from the treatise on love
• filioque — the Holy Spirit’s proceeding from the Son as well as the Father

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 27, a. 3 — objections, sed contra, body, three replies
• John 15:26; John 14 (another Paraclete); John 8:42 — in Greek, with lexicon
• John 1:1 (ho logos)
• Shakespeare’s definition of reason: “the ability for a large discourse, looking before and after” (Hamlet, inferred)
• Christopher Marlowe, “Whoever loved, that loved not at first sight,” as quoted in Shakespeare, As You Like It

Mentioned

• Summa Contra Gentiles IV, ch. 15 — verified-source match, not named in class
• ST I q.27 aa. 1, 2, 4, 5; the question on God’s simplicity; the question on the word “person”; the article on the definition of eternity
• Thomas’s treatise on love: nature/kinds, causes, effects (ST I-II qq. 26-28, inferred)
• Thomas on logic (reason directing its own act) — no locus given
• Aristotle, De Anima, proemium; Parts of Animals, proemium; Aristotle calling Homer “the poet”
• Peter’s confession, “chapter sixteen” (Matthew 16, inferred)
• The Federalist Papers quoting “A long farewell to all my greatness” (Shakespeare, Henry VIII, inferred)
• Vatican commission on exeimi / ekporeuetai and the Orthodox
• Sabellius; Romeo and Juliet; the glass mountain fairy tale

His questions #

• How would you divide these five articles? Is there a going-forward in God; what is it (aa. 2-4); how many are there.
• Between the divine understanding and divine will, is there a real distinction in God? No; they are one and the same thing; the distinction is in our mind.
• Is the definition of reason reason? Is reason in my love reason? In some way, but not simply speaking; it would be only if my understanding and loving were my being.
• Whatever God has is God — is that true of you and me? No; my knowledge of geometry or my health is added to me, a composition.
• Can I imagine my imagination? No; but reason can define and know itself, so thought is the better image of the Word.
• What is antonomasia? Giving a common name to one outstanding particular (or vice versa): “he’s a Romeo.”
• Is logos in John 1:1 used in its first meaning (word) or second (thought)? The second: “In the beginning was the thought.”
• Why, of all thoughts, is this one called the thought? Four ascending reasons: God’s only thought; fully expresses God; a subsisting person, not an accident; it is God.
• Whoever loved that loved not at first sight — must it be first sight? Left open by design; what matters is that it is at some sight — knowledge precedes love.