Summa I, q.27, a.4-5: Why the Procession of Love Is Not Generation, and Why There Are Only Two Processions

Orientation #

He says nothing explicit about last time; he back-references “that phrase” of Augustine and the “order of learning” from the proemium and the beginning of the treatise on the Trinity as things he told them before, and says the naming problem “is going to pursue us” into the relations. Verified sources put the class in q. 27, aa. 4 and 5, with a stretch matching q. 93 (probably the passage on the Son as Image and man made in God’s image). The previous class treated aa. 3-4 of q. 27 and the next begins q. 28 on the divine relations.

The class, in order #

1. Article 4, objections 1-2: should the procession of love be called generation? (“procession of love in God should be called”) #

The point: two reasons are put for calling the Holy Spirit’s procession a generation.

• Obj. 1: in living things, what goes forward in likeness of nature is said to be generated or born; the Holy Spirit is God, of the same kind, the same individual God, hence like the one from whom he proceeds; otherwise he would be extraneous to the divine nature, a going forward to the outside.
• Obj. 2: likeness belongs to the notion of the word (a thought is a likeness of something), but also to love: Ecclesiasticus 13, every animal likes what is like itself. He recalls the English word “like”: “I like you because you’re like me”; birds of a feather. Aside on Lombard’s Sentences, which Thomas commented on in his first years at Paris: the first two books are about proceeding from God, the last two about returning to God, so the whole is a circle; book one is the procession within God (the Trinity), book two the procession extra (creatures).

2. Digression: Augustine on the “immature and perverse love of reason” (“immature and perverse love of reason”) #

The point: before the third objection he pauses on Augustine’s warning in the De Trinitate that no place is more dangerous to think about, nor more fruitful, than the Trinity.

• Augustine also says intellectum valde ama, love reason very much; but love of reason can be perverse or immature.
• Perverse: per Albert the Great (a passage his old teacher gave him), studying anything for a reason other than to understand God, unless forced by practical necessity (getting the tire fixed), is perverse. Body for the sake of soul, soul for angels, angels for God; not God for the sake of something else. In the vision “you’ll be a pillar of that temple and not go out any longer.”
• Immature: not realizing how weak and easily deceived reason is. Disagreement among thinkers, scientists, historians (his college history teacher: if you can’t take criticism, don’t become a historian) shows that all, or all but one, are mistaken. Hence the order of teaching at the start of the treatise and the order of learning in the proemium: think out of order and your mind is “out of order,” like the sign on the broken machine. Albert on Aristotle’s logic: the early philosophers erred for lack of logic; Laval’s best teachers taught logic and natural philosophy, the fundamental things, which is why “metaphysics” means after the natural books. Reason needs helps: logic, order, and great teachers (Heisenberg constantly returning to Niels Bohr’s influence; a book Encounters with Einstein). “Mr. Self-Sufficiency” is immaturity; the young man should ask what the old guy would have done.

3. Objection 3 and the sed contra: no special name for this procession (“that is not in the genus”) #

The point: the third objection argues from the lack of a name; the sed contra answers from the Creed.

• Obj. 3: nothing is in a genus without being in one of its species. He illustrates genus/species: quadrilateral (square, oblong, rhombus, rhomboid, trapezium), number (odd, even), animal (dog, cat, horse), government (monarchy, oligarchy, democracy); one cannot be an animal without being some particular animal. So the procession of love must have a special name beside the common one, and the only one available is generation.
• His gloss: it is “kind of a shocking thing” that there is no name for the Holy Spirit’s going forward. Compare Aristotle in the Ethics: virtue lies between excess and defect (courage between cowardice and foolhardiness: Coriolanus’s Romans stand and retreat when they should; Hitler refusing to give up ground against the Russians was foolhardy). For temperance the excess has names (glutton, drunkard) but the defect has none, because it is so rare (he mentions the disorder of women not eating enough, guessing “bulimia”; one might invent “puritan”). Likewise the Holy Spirit’s mode of going forward is less known to us and has no likeness in creatures, whereas even animals show something called generation.
• Sed contra: then the Holy Spirit would proceed as generated, against the Athanasian Creed (whether by Athanasius immediately or remotely): Spiritus Sanctus a Patre et Filio, non factus (like a creature), nec creatus, nec genitus, sed procedens. He keeps the common name.
• The pattern of naming: Aristotle on chance (he had discussed it “against the house last night”): chance in human life has its own name, luck, Latin fortuna, Greek tuche; chance in nature has none and keeps the common name, so “chance” has two meanings. Perhaps the human case is named because more important to us. So “procession” names both, the Son’s has its own name (generation, birth), the Spirit’s keeps the common one. The same problem will recur in the order of learning, processions, relations, persons: the relations of this procession will lack names, and words must be adapted. “I think I realize the problem Jason has.”

4. The response: understanding by likeness, will by inclination (“this is a very subtle thing here”) #

The point: the procession of love is not generation because of the difference between understanding and will.

1. The understanding comes to act by the thing understood being in it by its likeness; the will comes to act not by a likeness in it but by an inclination toward the thing willed.
2. Reason (Aristotle, sixth book of Wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics VI]): the true is primarily in the mind, the good chiefly in things. Understanding gets something into the mind (simple apprehension, “apprehend” = to grasp: what I grasp is in my hand; “you grasp what I’m saying”); willing puts your heart into the thing (the pop song about giving love away; “I left my heart in San Francisco”; “my heart’s not in it”; our Lord: where your treasure is, there your heart shall be). So there is a kind of contrariety between knowing and loving.
3. Confirmation from opposites: there is the same knowledge of opposites (ethics knows virtue and vice, medicine health and sickness, one logic of good and bad reasoning, so his logic exams gave bad arguments that look good; Aristotle’s Politics V teaches both how to corrupt and how to preserve governments), because the thought of one contrary is not contrary to the thought of the other. But there is not the same love of opposites: loving health excludes loving sickness, loving virtue excludes loving vice, beauty ugliness, because love goes out to the thing in itself, where one contrary excludes the other, whereas the mind takes contraries in according to the mind’s way.
4. Knowing, as Empedocles first spoke of it, is by the known being in the knower, not in its real being but in likeness; love is inclination toward the thing itself and has no idea of producing a likeness.
5. Conclusion: the procession by way of understanding is by way of likeness and so can be generation (every generator generates something like itself); the procession by way of will is by reason of something impelling and moving toward something, so it proceeds not as generated or as a son but as breath (spiritus), the name for a living motion and impulse, as one is said to be moved or impelled by love to do something. “That’s a very subtle thing to see”; “takes a long time to see that.”

• More known case, the imagination: what proceeds from imagining is an image, Latin for likeness. But when I get “all shook up” about candy or wine, the emotion is not a likeness of the candy; the likeness is in sensing and imagining, the inclination is in the appetite. “An enormous difference between the two.”
• Yet the thing loved is in the lover in some way: “she made a big impression on you,” stuck in your heart, which is different from the likeness in imagination or memory.

5. Reply to obj. 1: whatever is in God is God (“whatever is in divine things is one”) #

The point: the Holy Spirit’s being God comes from divine simplicity, not from proceeding as a likeness.

• Thomas: whatever is in God is one with the divine nature. He explains via Aristotle on “have” (fifth book of Wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics V]): to every sense of “have” corresponds a sense of “in” (I have knowledge, knowledge is in me; the body has health, health is in the body). In creatures the haver and the had, the container and the contained, differ; in God they are the same, though we keep the words “have” and “in,” which fit creatures better, for lack of others.
• Hence the particular definition of each procession cannot be taken from what proceeds (both are God, “more than like God”), but from the order of one procession to the other, i.e. from the notions of understanding and will; the name is imposed on each to signify its proper notion. So the one proceeding by love takes the divine nature yet is not said to be born, since he does not proceed as a likeness but as breath and inclination.
• Isabella Rose: his granddaughter, whom he calls “Isabella the Rose,” makes an impression on his heart; she is in his heart, but not as a likeness; being in the heart differs from being in the memory as an image. Hence not generation or birth. Aside: in the Summa Contra Gentiles that morning, Thomas on the virtues in God (art, foresight, providence, wisdom, justice, truthfulness, liberality); Avicenna, whom Thomas credits: God alone is liberal, since (per Aristotle on liberality) one gives for the goodness of giving, and God gets nothing back, not even a good act. Timon of Athens is over-generous “like God,” but without wisdom, goes broke, is refused by fair-weather friends and becomes a misanthrope; Thomas says the divine virtues, in what is perfect in them, are the exemplars of ours.

6. Reply to obj. 2: likeness as cause of love, not love as likeness (“likeness pertains in a different way”) #

The point: likeness belongs to the word as being a likeness (as the generated is like the generator), but to love only as its beginning or cause; so it does not follow that love is generated, but that the one generated is the beginning of love.

• Aside on the Son’s three names to come: Son of God, Word of God, Imago Dei; the third fits the first two, since as Son and as Word he proceeds as likeness; none is said properly of the Holy Spirit.
• Prima Secundae on love (nature, kinds, causes, effects; the edition cross-references it as the basic treatise on love): the causes of love are good, knowledge, likeness. Wuthering Heights as a teaching example: the woman is drawn to one man for his good qualities, to the other because he is like her; the causes are divided between two people, and she concludes she is more drawn to the one like her. Teachers: one may be drawn to a teacher because he is like you rather than for what he knows; his mother’s warning against choosing a doctor for his personality. His own teachers, Kasurik [name uncertain in recording], De Koninck, Dion: he was most like the first, each wiser than the one before.
• Applied to God: why love God? Because he is good and known as good; and because you are made in his image and likeness; two reasons, not the same, though connected: the more like him, the more we love him. He reads “the least in heaven is greater than John the Baptist” this way: in the vision the good is better known, so more loved; and (John’s epistle) “when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is,” so also more like him. In Wuthering Heights the two reasons are divided; in God united.
• Student: opposites attract. His answer: be careful whether per se or per accidens. Aristotle’s highest friendship is between equals in virtue, having both reasons; two bad men are alike but alike in what is bad, a contrariety, so cannot love each other as well.
• Student: likeness is the result of generation, whereas in love it is the reverse, one seeks to become like what one loves. He agrees (“just the opposite”).

7. Reply to obj. 3: named only from creatures, but a name could be made (“we are not able to name God except from creatures”) #

The point: we name God from creatures, and in living creatures nature is communicated only by generation, so only that procession has its own name; the other “remains without its own name.” Thomas follows the order of learning: the Word first, then the Spirit.

• But it could be named, as Aristotle invents a Greek compound, “lacking sensation,” for the defect of temperance (not liking wine, or Mozart as the Holy Father does). So: breathing; the Father and the Son breathe the Holy Spirit.
• Coined names elsewhere: Renaissance writers found plays between tragedy and comedy (Aristotle’s Poetics covers tragedy, the part on comedy lost) and ran two words together, “tragicomedy.” Modern editions call Shakespeare’s last plays (Pericles, Cymbeline, Tempest) “romances,” though the 1623 First Folio had only tragedies, comedies, histories; “romance” has more than one sense. His own division: mercy-and-forgiveness romances (nearer tragedy; mercy is like pity) and love-and-friendship romances (nearer comedy). Test case, a husband wrongly believing his wife unfaithful, in all four kinds: Merry Wives of Windsor (comic), Much Ado About Nothing, Cymbeline or Winter’s Tale (great but redeemable mistake, reconciliation), Othello (tragic).
• This will pursue the class into the relations: “breather,” “the breathed one” could be invented, but lack tradition.

8. Article 5, objections and sed contra: more than two processions? (“more going forwards in God than two”) #

The point: three reasons for more processions, against the Church’s two.

• Obj. 1: power is attributed to God as knowledge and will are; so a third procession by power.
• Obj. 2: goodness is most of all a beginning of going forward, since per Dionysius the good is diffusivum sui; so a procession by goodness.
• Obj. 3: God’s fecundity is greater than ours; in us many thoughts proceed one from another (Shakespeare’s definition of reason: large discourse looking before and after; discourse is coming to know one thing from another, genus and differences to species, premisses to conclusion) and one love from another; so more processions in God. Aside: some, “like the Buddhists,” think in generations after generations.
• Sed contra: only two go forward in God, the Son and the Holy Spirit, hence only two processions. Aside: he prefers “going forward” for procedere; the mind itself is going forward in considering the divine goings-forward.

9. The response: only two immanent actions (“remain in the one doing them”) #

The point: processions in God can be taken only from actions that remain in the doer, and in an intellectual and divine nature these are only understanding and willing.

• The table or house goes forward from the maker to the outside; the image stays within the one imagining.
• But imagining, though it remains within, is an operation of the one sensing, an internal bodily sense, outside intellectual nature; God has no body or senses. Exterior sensing is not wholly outside the genus of outward actions, since sensing is perfected by the sensible acting on the sense.
• So no procession but that of the Word and of love; “love” really names the action, and what goes forward there has no name.

10. Replies: power, goodness, fertility (“power is the beginning of acting in another”) #

• To obj. 1: power is the beginning of acting in another (Aristotle, ninth book of Wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics IX]), so by power one takes action to the outside, the going forward of creatures, not of a divine person. His playlet: “I went forward from God just like you did,” but outside; and what is in God is God, so I am not God.
• To obj. 2: per Boethius in De Hebdomadibus, the good pertains to God’s essence, not his operation, except as object of the will; processions are taken from actions, and goodness and truth are objects of understanding and loving, not further activities; the essence and goodness of God belong to the treatise on the substance, the operations to the Trinity, an order of learning.
• To obj. 3: as shown in the treatise on God’s operations, God understands all things by one simple act and wills all by one; so no thought from thought or love from love in him, one perfect thought and one perfect love, and in that his perfect fertility. We multiply thoughts because of their imperfection; to know and express everything in one thought “would be nice.” Vision: seeing God as he is, one knows all one naturally wants to know, all at once, partaking of eternal life, no before and after.
• Closing asides: human generation needs male and female because of imperfection; the heresy that “firstborn” implies other children of Mary, against which her fertility in one child is greater than in twelve or all, since that one is more lovable than all together. The recording ends mid-aside.

His words #

• going forward; his rendering of processio / procedere [ed.: procession, proceed]
• procession extra; the going forth of creatures outside God (book two of the Sentences)
• immature and perverse love of reason; Augustine’s phrase, De Trinitate
• intellectum valde ama; Augustine, “love reason very much”
• out of order; a mind that thinks things out of the order of learning
• book of Wisdom; his name for Aristotle’s Metaphysics (fifth, sixth, ninth books)
• luck / fortuna / tuche; chance in human life; chance in nature keeps the common name
• grasping / simple apprehension; the basic act of the mind, from apprehendere, to grasp
• breath; spiritus, a living motion and impulse; how what proceeds by love proceeds
• impression; how the thing loved is in the heart, not as a likeness
• Imago Dei; third name of the Son, fitting Son and Word
• breathing / breather / the breathed one; possible invented names for the second procession and its relations
• diffusivum sui; Dionysius on the good
• large discourse looking before and after; Shakespeare’s definition of reason; discourse = coming to know one thing from another

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 27, a. 4 (objections, sed contra, response, replies)
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 27, a. 5 (objections, sed contra, response, replies)
• Athanasian Creed, on the Holy Spirit (quoted in Latin)
• Ecclesiasticus 13 (in obj. 2)

Mentioned

• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 93 (verified match; presumably the Imago Dei / image-and-likeness stretch; he states no locus)
• Augustine, De Trinitate (danger and fruitfulness; immature and perverse love of reason)
• Albert the Great (study for the sake of God; on Aristotle’s logic)
• Peter Lombard, Sentences, four books
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (courage, temperance, the unnamed defect; friendship of the virtuous); Politics V; Poetics; Metaphysics V (have/in), VI (true and good), IX (power); on chance
• Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles, on the divine virtues; Avicenna on liberality
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I-II, questions on love, causes of love
• Dionysius; Boethius, De Hebdomadibus; Empedocles
• Matthew on treasure and heart; John the Baptist saying; 1 John “we shall be like him” (loci inferred)
• Shakespeare: Coriolanus, Timon of Athens, Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing, Cymbeline, Winter’s Tale, Othello, Pericles, Tempest; Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights; Heisenberg, Encounters with Einstein

His questions #

• Can you be in a genus without being one of the species? No; an animal must be some particular kind of animal.
• Why is there no name for the way the Holy Spirit goes forward? Like the unnamed defect of temperance and chance in nature: less known to us, no likeness in creatures; it keeps the common name.
• What is the difference between the understanding and the will? Understanding is in act by the likeness of the thing in it; will by inclination toward the thing willed.
• Is there the same love of opposites, as there is the same knowledge of opposites? No; love goes to the thing itself, where one contrary excludes the other.
• When I get shaken up about candy, is that a likeness of candy proceeding in my emotions? No; the likeness is in sensing and imagining, the emotion is inclination.
• Why should one love God? Because he is good and known as good, and because you are like him; two reasons, not the same.
• Do opposites attract? Be careful whether per se or per accidens; the highest friendship is between those alike in virtue.
• Why isn’t there a third procession from power, or one from goodness? Power is the beginning of acting in another, hence of creatures; goodness pertains to the essence and is an object, not an action.
• What about the lack of fertility in God? One simple act understands and wills all; one perfect thought and love is his perfect fertility.