Summa I, Q. 34, Art. 1: Is 'Word' a Personal Name in God? Word as Thought, Imagining vs. Thinking, and Faith Seeking Understanding

Orientation #

He opens at the proemium of question 34, “where he begins to talk about some of the names of the second person”; the previous class treated the Father (prev. lecture), and he refers back to it when a student raises Chrysostom’s use of “cause” (“I mentioned how I was kind of shocked to see Basil”). He closes with “should we look at the second article here now?” The neighbouring classes treat q. 33 (Father as beginning, “Father” as proper name) and q. 34 aa. 2–3 (Word as the Son’s proper name; relation to creatures).

The class, in order #

1. Proemium of q. 34: three names of the Son (“there are attributed three names to the Son”) #

The point: three names go to the Son — filius (Son), verbum (Word, “thought”), imago — but the ratio of Son is taken from that of Father (already treated), so only Word and Image remain. On Word three questions: (1) whether it is said essentially (of the divine substance) or personally; (2) whether it is the Son’s own name; (3) “this strikes you as strange at first,” whether the name Word implies some regard to creatures.

2. Article 1: the four objections and the sed contra (“It seems that Word is not a personal name”) #

1. Personal names are said properly, not figuratively (Father, Son); but Word is said metaphorically in God according to Origen on John. Aside: “Thomas is rather rough” with Origen in the reply, though he keeps quoting him (Golden Chain); Benedict XVI was kinder in his audiences.
2. Augustine (De Trin.): Word is “knowledge with love”; Anselm (Monologium): for the highest spirit to speak is nothing but intueri cogitando. But knowledge, thinking, insight are said essentially (recall the treatise on the knowledge of God, the disputation on the unity of God). He flags in advance that Thomas will have to correct Anselm’s cogitando, which means discursive thinking but Anselm uses broadly.
3. It belongs to the definition of word that it is said; but Father, Son and Spirit each understand, so each says and each is said; hence Word is common to the three, essential.
4. No person is made, but “fire, snow, ice … winds … which do his word” (he says Psalm 48, later 148) — the Word is made. Sed contra: Augustine, De Trin. VII — as Son refers to Father, so Word to him whose Word it is; Son is personal because relative, so Word too. His gloss: he used to call God the Father “the Speaker of the House”; his poem, “God the Father said it all in one word.”

3. Corpus: “word” is said properly in three ways and figuratively in a fourth (“word is said properly in us in three ways”) #

The point: Word taken properly in God is personal “and in no way essential” — Thomas is “even more emphatic” here than in the Sentences, which is “less determined”.

• Why English hides this: logos in John 1:1 means word first, then the thought the word signifies — “equivocal by reason”, with a connection; English “word” has not been moved to that second meaning, though translating logos as “word” forces us to move it. Aside: his freshman English professor’s book said “words spoken or written are thoughts”; he objected “strictly speaking that’s false.” Compare: we do not translate spirit as breath; “ghost” is archaic but keeps the reference to breath.
• Order of naming: what is most manifest to us is the vocal sound, so it is named “word” first (we name as we know, starting from sense), then the name is carried over. Two things in the exterior word: the vocal sound and its signification. The sound signifies a concept of the understanding (Aristotle, “the Philosopher by antonomasia”, Peri Hermeneias I); the sound proceeds from an imagination (De Anima). His example: a professor imagining the words he will use in class — the imagined word is not yet the thought, but “you could call that a word too.” A non-signifying sound is no word (recall the definition of a name: vocal sound signifying by agreement, no part signifying by itself).
• Order in the things themselves (not in our imposition): first and chiefly the interior thought of the mind; second the vocal sound that signifies it; third the imagination of the vocal sound.
• Damascene (De fide orth. I, 13) gives the same three in a different order: word as “natural motion of the understanding … as light and splendor” (= first, the thought); word “pronounced in the heart” (= third, the imagined); word as “angel”, messenger of the understanding (= second, the sound).
• Fourth, figurative sense: what is signified or accomplished by the word — “this is the word I have spoken to you”, “the king has commanded” — the deed of one announcing or commanding.

4. In God, “Word” properly means the thought; a thought proceeding from another (“In the beginning was the thought”) #

The point: of the three proper senses, Word is said of God as thought; the Greek article makes it the thought by antonomasia — the only subsistent thought, a thought about God, “in fact a thought that is God.” Augustine, De Trin. XV: whoever can understand the word not only before it sounds but before the images of sounds are involved can see some likeness of the divine Word. Not “in the beginning was the vocal sound … was God.”

• Verbum cordis: the concept has in its very notion that it proceeds from another, from the knowledge of the one conceiving.
• Imagination vs reason as a comparison: from imagining proceeds an image (Shakespeare: “my head played the painter”); from thinking proceeds a thought. Image ≠ imagining; thought ≠ thinking. Thomas says some (the Arabs) call the first act of reason imaginatio per intellectum; and the Son is also called imago.
• Aristotle, De Anima III, distinguishes imagining and thinking, image and thought — not easy. The English empiricists use “idea” indistinctly for image or thought. Joke: if your girlfriend says “don’t get ideas”, ideas means images; a philosopher’s ideas should be thoughts. Locke tries to imagine the general idea of triangle (isosceles? scalene? equilateral? right-angled?) and says “all and none”; Berkeley: nonsense, so no general ideas — both confuse the thought of what triangle is with an image. Any imagined triangle is singular; the understanding of triangle is universal — but Aristotle does not start there, “that’s too hard to see.” He starts from: I can imagine without a reason, but cannot think something is so without some reason — imagine winning the lottery without buying a ticket (no reason to think it; reason to think I could not have won); imagine a terrorist outside in a ski mask (can’t think it without reason). Then emotion: imagining it, I don’t act like a millionaire or run; if I thought it, “I’d take that door as quick as my legs can carry me.” So the difference is seen gradually. Both image and thought are produced when we imagine or think a thing in its absence, unlike sensing where the object is present.
• God’s thought: in understanding himself he understands everything else, so his thought is chiefly of himself but “to some extent a thought of everything” — “he said it all in one word.” Aside: in the descent from God through angels to us, the lower you go the more thoughts and the less understood by them.
• Conclusion: Word properly said in God signifies something proceeding from another; this belongs to personal names, since persons are distinguished by origin — hence the treatise’s three parts: processions, relations of origin, persons. So Word is taken “personally only”.

5. Reply to obj. 1: Origen, the Arians, and why metaphor presupposes a proper Word (“of whom Origen is found to be the fountain”) #

The point: the Arians (Origen “the fountain” — “a strong thing”; Jerome: the church woke up and groaned to find itself Arian) held the Son other in substance, the highest creature but a creature; so they had to take Word metaphorically, lest under the notion of a thought proceeding they be forced to confess the Son is not outside the Father’s substance. His illustration: the image remains within my imagination, the thought within the thinker; what remains within God is God. Argument: (1) if Word is said metaphorically of God there must be a Word said properly, because (2) something is metaphorically a word only by manifesting: either it manifests as a word does, or it is manifested by the word; (3) if manifested by the word, one must posit the word; if it manifests outwardly, exterior signs are words only insofar as they signify an interior concept. So a Word properly said, personal, must be posited. Note: proprie here is opposed to figuratively, not to common (where it would mean “private”).

6. Reply to obj. 2: correcting Augustine’s “knowledge” and Anselm’s “to speak … cogitando” (“nothing of those things which pertain to the understanding”) #

The point: of all that pertains to the understanding only Word is said personally, since only Word signifies something going forth from another.

• Distinction: the understandable form by which one understands, considered absolutely (in God nothing other than the divine substance) vs the thought the understanding forms in conceiving, which proceeds and grounds the real distinction by relations of origin.
• To understand stands to the understanding as being to a being in act; it does not go outside but remains in the one understanding — an immanent act, like sensing and loving, vs making or building with an exterior product.
• Augustine’s “word is knowledge”: notitia taken not for the act or a habit but for what is conceived in knowing; so Augustine’s “wisdom generated” = the conception of the wise one, the thought. Conceptio is close to filius: in God, where to be and to understand are the same, thought and Son are one; “my concepts are not my children, strictly speaking,” but if for me to be and to understand were one, my thoughts would be my children, “knowledge generated.” He judges Augustine’s word “not speaking so correctly”: notitia by itself suggests the act of knowing rather than the thought; the word is rather that in which you express what you know (imagining is not the image).
• Anselm’s “to speak is to look upon while thinking”: understood as the Word conceived by the insight of the divine thinking; but cogitatio does not properly belong to God’s Word (Augustine, De Trin. XV: not called cogitatio lest something movable be believed in God, taking form and being changed about; cogitatio properly is the investigation of truth, which has no place in God, who always actually understands and so always has a perfect thought; once one has arrived at truth one contemplates, does not think it out — Augustine improperly uses cogitatio for contemplation). “Thomas treats Anselm with respect, but sometimes corrects his language.”
• Digression on faith from cogitatio: Augustine’s definition of to believe, assentire cum cogitatione / cogitare cum assensione (Thomas, Secunda Secundae), separates belief from every other act of reason: obvious things (the whole more than the part) we simply assent to; others we assent to after thinking them out or are still thinking without assent; in faith we assent while still thinking, because we don’t understand what we assent to — reason naturally wants to understand. Root of Anselm’s fides quaerens intellectum; we think about the Trinity now without ever fully understanding in this life. Hebrews’ definition: “substance (hypostasis) of things hoped for, conviction of what is not seen”: substance as foundation, foretaste, “appetizer” of the beatific vision, not possession (faith disappears when you see God as he is, per Paul). Student: pignus, a pledge — “instead of the Eucharist”; he notes Thomas uses convivium both of the Eucharist and of the beatific vision, and a psalm (he says 62 or thereabouts) uses “banquet”, applicable to both.
• Student aside (from the Sentences): Chrysostom calls the Father “cause” of the Son and Thomas piously expounds it; he recalls Basil (prev. lecture) and Aristotle’s beginning/cause/element: every cause a beginning, not every beginning a cause — the point is beginning, not cause, of the line. Tie-in: the first objection is Arian, refusing that the Word of God is God — like Jehovah’s Witnesses saying “divine”; Augustine, “God became man so that man might become God — but be careful what you mean by that.”

7. Reply to obj. 3: only one person says; every person is said (“it is not true that the Father and the Son, the Holy Spirit, are one speaking”) #

The point: as Word is personal, so “to say” is personal — quoting his whole 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. He was the brevity and soul of wit.” So the three are not “one saying”; Augustine, De Trin. VII, “speaking by that one co-eternal Word” (a short student exchange over a word in the Latin text; the sense, he says, is that it is unique to one person).

• Distinction: to be said as a word is said (belongs to the Son alone) vs to be said as the thing understood is said (belongs to each person and every creature). Example: “I said you could go” — you said both the words and what they mean; “watch out what you say.” The Father, understanding himself, the Son, the Spirit and all contained in his knowledge, conceives the Word, so the whole Trinity and every creature is said by the Word — as a man understanding stone “says” stone by the thought conceived.
• Some improperly take “to say” for “to understand”; they differ: to understand implies only the relation of understander to thing understood, with no origin — in us informing by the form of the thing, in God complete identity of understanding and understood; to say implies chiefly a relation to the word conceived (to say is nothing but to bring forth a word) and through it to the thing understood, made manifest in the word. So only the person who brings forth the Word speaks — “he’s the only speaker” — though each person understands, is understood, and consequently is said by the Word. Hilary (as Thomas cites): ex verbis inordinate prolatis heresy is incurred — e.g. using dicere for intelligere, “each of them speaks,” “each has a word.”

8. Reply to obj. 4: Psalm 148 taken figuratively (“creatures are said to do the word of God”) #

Fourth, figurative sense: what is signified or effected by the word; creatures “do” God’s word by carrying out the effect they are ordered to from the Word conceived by divine wisdom — as one does the word of the king. “Your word is my command.” Then: “should we look at the second article?”

His words #

• Word / thought: his rendering of verbum, logos; “you could translate, in the beginning was the thought.”
• equivocal by reason: logos meaning word, then the thought signified, with a connection [ed.: analogical/equivocal by design].
• by antonomasia: “the Philosopher” for Aristotle; “the Word” with the Greek article for the one subsistent thought.
• verbum cordis: the concept of the heart; proceeds from the knowledge of the one conceiving.
• imaginatio per intellectum: the Arabs’ name for the first act of reason, simple grasping.
• understandable form: the form by which one understands, considered absolutely [ed.: intelligible species].
• immanent act: to understand, sense, love — remaining in the agent — vs making, building.
• notitia: Augustine’s “knowledge”; corrected to what is conceived in knowing.
• conceptio / filius: thought as conception; “knowledge generated”.
• cogitatio: investigation of truth, thinking something out; improper of God, whose act is contemplation.
• assentire cum cogitatione / cogitare cum assensione: Augustine’s definition of to believe.
• fides quaerens intellectum: Anselm; rooted in the act of faith itself.
• hypostasis / substance of things hoped for: foundation, foretaste, appetizer; pignus (pledge); convivium (banquet).
• Speaker of the House: God the Father as the only one who “says” in the proper sense.
• ex verbis inordinate prolatis: Hilary as cited; from disorderly words heresy is incurred.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 34, prooemium; a. 1 objections, sed contra, corpus, replies 1–4 (verified source).
• Augustine, De Trinitate VII (sed contra; ad 3) and XV (corpus; ad 2), as quoted in Thomas.
• Damascene, De fide orthodoxa I, 13, as quoted in Thomas.
• John 1:1; Psalm 148 (fire, snow, ice, winds … which do his word). Mentioned
• Origen, on the Gospel of John; Anselm, Monologium; Aristotle, Peri Hermeneias I; De Anima (incl. Book III on imagining vs thinking); Thomas, Sentences (on Word; Chrysostom on “cause”); Thomas, Secunda Secundae (on to believe); Hebrews, definition of faith (inferred: 11:1); Paul on faith ceasing when we see God; Psalm “62 or so” (banquet); Jerome on the church finding itself Arian; Shakespeare (“my head played the painter”); Locke and Berkeley on the general idea of triangle; Basil, Chrysostom, Hilary (as cited); Benedict XVI on Origen; the Golden Chain.

His questions #

• Is knowledge said in God essentially or personally? Essentially — recall the treatise on the knowledge of God; only Word is personal.
• In English does the word “word” mean thought? No; Greek logos has been moved to that meaning, English has not.
• Is the image the same thing as the imagining? Is the thinking the same as the thought? No: image proceeds from imagining, thought from thinking.
• If you try to imagine triangle in general, can you do so? No — any imagined triangle is isosceles, equilateral or scalene; that is Locke’s confusion.
• Can I really think I won the lottery when I haven’t bought a ticket? No; I can imagine it, but cannot think it without a reason.
• In which sense is “Word” said properly of God? As thought, not vocal sound, not imagined sound, not metaphorically.
• What remains within God — is it God? Yes; that is why the Arians had to take Word metaphorically.
• In what sense is faith the “substance” of things hoped for? A foundation, foretaste, appetizer — not yet possession; a pignus, pledge.
• Are the Father, Son and Holy Spirit one speaking? No; only the Father says, but each person is said by the Word.