Thinking, thought and image: is 'image' said personally in God? (Summa I, q.35, a.1)

Orientation #

He opens by recalling “we’ve talked before here” about Aristotle in the third book On the Soul distinguishing thinking from imagining, and “we mentioned before” Augustine’s definition of believing (cogitare cum assensu) (prev. lecture). He says “you’ll meet this later on” of Augustine’s ordo naturae and the four senses of “before”. Verified sources place ST I q.35 a.1 as the text read, with matched stretches of ST I q.93 and SCG IV ch.15 (the latter two not named by him). The previous class treated q.34 aa.2-3 on “Word”; the next treats “Image” as proper to the Son and the name “Holy Spirit”.

The class, in order #

1. Think / thought, imagine / image (“The thought is not the same thing as the thinking”) #

Point: English has a verb-noun pair (think/thought, imagine/image) that Latin and Greek lack for the divine Word, and this pair helps see how the Son proceeds as a likeness.

• When reason thinks something out, a thought proceeds from the mind; the thought is “like the end of the thinking”, not the thinking. Parallel: imagining a gold mountain, from which an image of a gold mountain proceeds. Hence Thomas explains that the Arab philosophers sometimes call this “imagining through the intellect”. In English “I think that’s so / I imagine that’s so” are used interchangeably.
• Aristotle, third book On the Soul, distinguishes thinking from imagining in many ways; the one recalled: you can imagine (a gold mountain) without any reason, but you cannot think that something is so without some reason.
• Does God think? He thinks “chiefly and first only of himself” (“that sounds selfish”); but in thinking of himself he in a way thinks of everything, since he is the cause of everything and everything, insofar as it is, is like him who is being itself.
• Latin: the thought is verbum, from verbalize? No — the related verb is “to say”; Greek logos relates to legein, to speak, rather than to think. So English has “a superiority in one respect” here.
• Augustine’s definition of to believe: cogitare cum assensu (and sometimes reversed, assentire cum cogitatione). But cogitatum is “that which is thought of”, not “thought”; cogitatio is the activity.
• Caution: English contrasts “thinking” with knowing (“Do you know so-and-so is winning? No, but I think he is”) — in that sense God does not think, since it implies uncertainty. But by division of the equivocal word, knowing is thinking in the broad sense (“I know two is half of four — do I think so? yes”). Thomas says cogitari should not be used of God because it implies motion toward understanding (“I’m thinking about it” vs “I understand it”).
• Application: if the Son proceeds as the Word or thought the Father has of himself, he proceeds as a likeness (imago, “likeness” in English). Argument: (1) the thought exists in God’s thinking; (2) God’s thinking is his being (no difference between his being and his doing); (3) so the being of the thought is God’s own being; conclusion: the thought is God himself. Likewise as Son by nature he proceeds as a likeness of the Father. So the name Image “comes last” as “almost a natural conclusion” of Son and Word. The Holy Spirit does not proceed as a likeness but by way of love; he is like God not because he proceeds as love but because he proceeds as divine love, and God’s loving is his being.

2. The article and its three objections (“It seems that Imago is not said personally”) #

Point: q.35 asks two things — whether image is said in God personally rather than essentially, and whether it is proper to the Son; a.1 opens with three objections.

• Obj. 1: Augustine, De Fide ad Petrum: one is the image and divinity of the Holy Trinity, the image to which man is made; therefore image is essential. His gloss: we are in a way like God but, being an imperfect image, we are said to be made to the image.
• Obj. 2: Hilary, De Synodis (“on the councils”): the image is, to the thing it images, a species or form that in no way differs; but species/form is said essentially in God (Paul: “in the form of God”). What strikes him: likeness is of something, but form is said more absolutely — and the personal carries the idea of relation.
• Obj. 3: image is said from imitating (imitando); Aristotle, Poetics: man is the most imitative of animals, delights in imitations, learns first by imitation, and “imitation” is the first word of the definition of tragedy. Imitation implies before and after (a statue of me, of George Washington, is posterior to the original); but in the divine persons there is no before and after (the Athanasian Creed). So image cannot be a personal name.
• Sed contra: Augustine, De Trinitate VII: what more absurd than to say image is said ad se (to itself)? Ad se is one of those “misleading affirmative ways of saying something negative”: it means “not to another”, absolutely. So image is said relatively, hence personally.
• Aside: on his trip (El Paso–Albuquerque) he read De Potentia on his computer — the last three of its ten questions (processions, relations, persons) cover this same material with up to twenty-five objections; he never reached the body of the article on the flight. Thomas cut it down here “for a beginner”. Thomas is explicit in De Potentia that Augustine is his master and authority in determining these things.

3. Translating imago: likeness, imitation (“the word imitation has been degraded”) #

Point: the native English word for imago is “likeness”, but neither “likeness” nor “imitation” carries the meaning exactly.

• Translations of the Poetics give “imitation” as the genus of tragedy, but English commerce has degraded “imitation” to mean a cheap or inferior likeness — whereas Aristotle’s poet may represent men as they are, as thought to be, or as they should be, so the imitation may be an improvement. He usually translates “likeness”.
• Thomas uses similitudo for the genus, but image will be “more exact in meaning than likeness”: not just any likeness suffices.
• Examples: “original” Bailey’s Irish Cream against the cheaper imitation; car parts that are “just like” original equipment; barbecue chips in so many varieties that you cannot find the original; Dave’s barbecue with a six-pack of sauces — “after the first one your tongue is burned out”.

4. Body: likeness in species or in a sign of it — shape (“a sign of the species”) #

Point: an image requires likeness in the form of the thing, or at least in some sign of the species.

• Thomas’s standard example: paper with the skin-colour of a man is not a likeness of a man; with the shape of a man (or of a dog) it is at least a sign of the species. Different species of animals have different figures, not different colours (a cat and a dog may share a colour). Painting a thing’s colour on a wall is no image unless one depicts its figure.
• Boethius, on the road from the senses into reason, singles out two senses: in one text hearing and sight (learning from another or by yourself), in another touch and sight. Sight excels by clarity, touch by certitude (doubting Thomas wants to put his hand in the wound: he trusts touch more than sight); but what touch and sight share is that they alone know shape (he can see and feel the shape of the glass), and shape is what identifies (he knows a chair by its shape, not its colour).

5. Body: origin required — the two eggs (“One egg is not a what image of another”) #

Point: likeness in species is not enough; the notion of image requires origin.

• Augustine, Eighty-three Questions: one egg is not the image of another because it is not expressed from it. A dozen eggs look alike but none is an image of another; a son may be called the image of his father. “Notice how good his example is.”
• The English “likeness” and “imitation” half-imply this: to say “this is a likeness of that” implies that is the original and this is from it.
• Conclusion of the body: to be truly an image something must proceed from another and be like it in species or in a sign of species; whatever implies procession or origin in God is personal; therefore image is a personal name.
• Care with “original”: one must not say the Father is “the original God”, since the Son is the same God; the Son has the very same nature individually, but has it from the Father. A text he was reading (he thinks in the Sentences): the divine nature is not in the three persons “in the same way” — in the Father not from another, in the Son from the Father, in the Holy Spirit from Father and Son. “Got to be careful about that way of speaking,” and the cross-referenced places (Marquette edition) put it a little differently.

6. Digression: “proceeding” as “going forward” (“Going forward, I think, is the way to translate”) #

Point: procedere should be translated by the native “going forward”, and its meaning is carried over from the continuous to the mind and finally to God.

• De Potentia q.10, first article: whether “procession” may be used of God.
• Monsignor Dionne in graduate school distinguished three ways of proceeding, from Thomas on the modus procedendi in the second book of wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics II], where Aristotle says the way of proceeding differs by science, must fit its matter, and one should not try to acquire a science and learn its modus procedendi at once; the way must be learned first. Thomas adds: each science has its proper way, but the common way of going forward is studied in logic; so logic comes first in the order of learning, as geometry’s private way precedes geometry. (Dionne, one day, added “the natural way of going forward”.)
• Modus is usually rendered “way” (though etymologically it is related to measure; Greek tropos).
• De Potentia q.10 refines the general principle of the beginning of the fifth book of wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics V] — we name things as we know them, so we name the sensible first and carry names over — by noting that these carried-over words start from the continuous. The first meaning of coming and going is locomotion, the most continuous of changes (more than growth, obviously more than becoming hot). Applied to the mind (from Euclid’s definitions, postulates and axioms going forward to conclusions and beyond) the word is already moved to something not bodily; finally it is carried all the way to God, as in John’s Gospel on the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father.
• Same pattern for “form”: its first meaning is shape, the limit of the continuous.

7. Reply 1: exemplar vs image (“properly is called a what exemplar”) #

Point: that to whose likeness something proceeds is properly the exemplar, only improperly an image; Augustine’s usage in De Fide ad Petrum is the improper one, and Thomas “is correcting Augustine a little bit”.

• Aristotle’s second kind of cause is “form and exemplar”: the exemplar is an extrinsic form imitated in making (a copy of a famous painting). God is the exemplar according to which we are fashioned; likeness implies the copy is not the original.
• Student: isn’t Augustine just using Scripture, “let us make man in our image”? He does not know; perhaps Scripture means only that we are made like God, and “likeness” is a weaker word there; he does not know the Hebrew.
• Student: so “the divine nature is a likeness of our soul” would be improper — yes, it would almost imply our soul is the original.
• Aphrahat extends the comparison: God had man in his thought and made him; then man has God in his thought, and so becomes like God — with “a big difference”.
• From his Wednesday-night love-and-friendship course: the two causes of love are the good known and likeness. When we see God as he is we will love him more for both reasons: we will see he is goodness itself; and (1 John 3:2, “when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall know him as he is”) we are like him in two ways — we see him only with our mind joined to God as that by which we see, and God sees himself through himself as the understandable form, so we will see him through God himself as the understandable form. Paul says something similar: we shall know as we are known.
• His father’s factory: an order for a “number 500 wagon”, wood cut to the patterns on the wall — those are exemplars, and the wagon the likeness.
• Asides: a Kittredge note on Hamlet about Lethe — once we see God we will not remember “these silly things” of this life, election 2008 included. A remark about Obama’s minister calling Christ a poor black man persecuted by rich white Romans: “let’s get off that”.

8. Replies 2 and 3: form from another; from, not after (“You don’t say God after God”) #

Point: Hilary’s “species” means a form derived in another from another, and imitation in God signifies likeness, not posteriority.

• Reply 2: image is the species of another, as what is likened to another is said to be its form; Hilary’s ad quam (“to which”) itself implies an original. A statue has the form of another, derived from it, not just “a form”.
• Reply 3: imitation in the divine persons does not signify being after but only likeness. Thomas often solves such objections thus: not one before another but one from another — “God from God, light from light, true God from true God”, never “God after God”. Augustine’s ordo naturae Thomas explains as one from another, not one after another. With before and after in God one proceeds negatively: Thomas shows that in none of Aristotle’s four central senses of “before” in the Categories is the Father before the Son, or Father and Son before the Holy Spirit.

His words #

• thought vs thinking — the thought proceeds from the mind as “the end of the thinking”.
• verbum, logos — the Latin/Greek for “thought”; logos from legein, to speak.
• cogitare cum assensu — Augustine’s definition of believing; cogitatum “that which is thought of”, cogitatio the activity; cogitari not used of God (motion toward understanding).
• likeness — his English for imago; also the genus (similitudo).
• imitation — “degraded” in English to mean a cheap likeness.
• sign of the species — chiefly figure or shape.
• exemplar — that to whose likeness a thing proceeds; “extrinsic form”; image used of it only improperly.
• going forward — his translation of procedere / proceeding.
• modus procedendi — “way of going forward”; common (logic) vs private (e.g. geometry).
• second / fifth book of wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics II, V].
• ad se — “to itself”, i.e. not to another; a misleading affirmative for a negative.
• ordo naturae — Augustine’s phrase; Thomas: one from another, not one after another.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, ST I q.35 a.1 (objections, sed contra, body, replies 1-3).
• Augustine, De Trinitate VII (sed contra); De Fide ad Petrum (obj. 1); Eighty-three Questions (the egg).
• Hilary, De Synodis (obj. 2). Mentioned
• ST I q.93 and SCG IV ch.15 — verified sources matched by text; not cited by him.
• Thomas, De Potentia q.10 a.1 (procession); its questions on processions, relations, persons.
• Thomas on the Sentences (divine nature “not in the same way”, he thinks).
• Aristotle, On the Soul III; Poetics (imitation, definition of tragedy); Metaphysics II and V; Categories (four senses of “before”); the causes (form and exemplar).
• Boethius (road from senses to reason; two senses).
• Paul, “in the form of God”; “know as we are known”; 1 John 3:2; John’s Gospel on the Spirit proceeding; Genesis “let us make man in our image” (raised by a student).
• Athanasian Creed; Aphrahat; Euclid; Kittredge on Hamlet.

His questions #

• Does God think, and what does he think of? In the broad sense yes; chiefly and first only of himself, and in that of everything, as its cause.
• Does thinking that two is half of four differ from knowing it? Knowing is thinking in the broad sense; only the narrow sense, contrasted with knowing, is excluded from God.
• If the Son is the Father’s thought of himself, why is the thought God? Because God’s thinking is his being, so the thought’s being is God’s being.
• How is imago translated into English? Likeness — but image is more exact than likeness.
• Is a paper with a man’s colour a likeness of a man? With his shape? No; yes, since shape is the sign of the species.
• Which two senses does Boethius single out, and what do they share? Touch and sight; they alone know shape.
• Is one egg an image of another? No: it is not expressed from it; origin is required.
• How should “proceeding” be translated? Going forward.
• Which should be learned first, the science or its way of proceeding? The way; hence logic first in the order of learning.
• Isn’t Augustine just using Scripture’s “in our image”? Left open — perhaps Scripture means only “made like God”; he does not know the Hebrew.