Aquinas on Love as the Name of the Holy Spirit (ST I, q.37, aa.1–2)

Orientation #

He begins directly with q. 37 as “the second name here of the Holy Spirit, which is love,” and refers back to “the previous question” (the Holy Spirit’s going forward from the Father and the Son) (prev. lecture), to “appropriation in the last questions,” and to the notions “back in question thirty-two.” He does not say what comes next. The previous class worked through the last articles of the question on the Holy Spirit proceeding from Father and Son; the next continues with the Father loving by the Holy Spirit and the name “Gift.”

The class, in order #

1. The two articles of question 37 (“whether the Father and the Son love each other by the Holy Spirit”) #

Point: q. 37 asks (1) whether love is the Holy Spirit’s own (proper, “private”) name and (2) whether the Father and the Son love each other by the Holy Spirit; he says the second “is often misunderstood,” and the class will try to find “in what sense it is true.”

2. Article 1, objections and sed contra (“it seems that love is not the Holy Spirit’s own name”) #

Point: four reasons why love should not be a proper name, then Gregory’s authority against them.

1. Augustine, De Trinitate XV: as wisdom is said of Father, Son and Holy Spirit and of all three together as one wisdom, so love or charity; but a name said of each person and of all in common is not proper to one. So love is essential, “pertaining to the one divine nature,” not private to the Holy Spirit.
2. The Holy Spirit is a subsisting person; “love” signifies not a subsisting person but an action going forth from lover to loved.
3. Love is the connection of lovers (Dionysius: a uniting power; he notes this is the first effect of love in the Prima Secundae); a connection is a middle between those it unites, not something proceeding from them; but the Holy Spirit proceeds from Father and Son.
4. Of anyone loving there is some love; the Holy Spirit loves; so if he is love he would be “love of love, and spirit from his spirit, which is unfitting.” Sed contra: Gregory (the Great, he assumes), homily on Pentecost: “Ipse Spiritus Sanctus est amor.” — “So are you all convinced now that he should not be called love?”

3. Body of a. 1: love taken essentially and personally (“the name of love in God can be taken in two ways”) #

Point: love is taken both essentially and personally; taken personally it is the Holy Spirit’s proper name, as “word” is the Son’s — but unlike verbum, which Thomas says is never taken essentially in God. Argument as he gives it:

1. Two processions in God: by way of understanding (the word, “thought” — as an image goes forth when I imagine, a thought goes forth when I think) and by way of will (love).
2. The first is more known to us, so we have found proper names for what belongs to it, not for the procession of will. Example: Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, where the excess opposite temperance has names (gluttony, lust) but the defect has none because it is so rare, and Aristotle must invent “lacking in sensation” — the same problem as the unnamed going-forth of the Holy Spirit, for which “we use certain locutions”: “procession” and “breathing,” which are names of origin rather than of relation.
3. The processions are alike in this: as from understanding there goes forward a conception in the one understanding (the word, logos), so from loving there goes forward “a certain impression” of the loved in the affection of the lover, “according as the loved is said to be in the one loving.” Aside: we still say “she made a big impression on you” — the loved is pressed into the heart. So one who understands and loves himself has not only identity with himself but the understood in the understanding and the loved in the loving (reason forming a thought of what reason is, then loving what a wonderful thing it is).
4. On the side of understanding there are words for the relation of understander to understood (intelligere) and words for the going-forth of the concept (dicere, verbum). Hence in God intelligere is said only essentially, verbum personally, dicere notionally (relation of the beginning of the word to the word). Aside: he calls God the Father “the Speaker of the House.”
5. On the side of will there is only “to love” (amare, diligere — amor nearer to sense love and eros, dilectio from choice; he uses them as synonyms here); no words for the impression of the loved in the lover in its relation to its beginning. Aside on C. S. Lewis’s Four Loves (eros, philia, storge, agape): Greek has more words, Latin two, English one.
6. Therefore, “on account of the poverty of words,” these relations are signified by the words for love — as if we lacked “word” and had to say intelligentia concepta or sapientia genita. Insofar as the words express the relation of what proceeds by way of love to its beginning, “love” names a person and “to love” (= to breathe a love proceeding) is a notional word, like “to speak” or “to generate.” — “You got to know what you’re doing when you say this.” Student question: the lover goes out, the knower brings in — what is the distinction? Answer: the loved is in the lover, but not as in the knower; in the knower as a likeness (so the Son is the imago Dei), in the lover “by way of a kind of inclination towards the thing in itself.” That is why the Holy Spirit is not called Son: he does not proceed as a likeness but as an inclination — “less known to us.” A likeness need not impel you toward a thing; you may have a likeness of what you do not love.

4. Replies of a. 1, with the grammarian and the logician (“the Holy Spirit is not middle, but third”) #

Ad 1: Augustine takes love essentially, as St John’s “God is love” does — God’s loving and his being are the same, as shown in the treatise on God’s operations; Augustine elsewhere would say the Holy Spirit is love. Ad 2: to understand, to will, to love are signified as actions going out to objects but are actions remaining in the doer, with a relation to the object. Examples: “I kick you” and “I love you” are grammatically alike, but the kick ends in you, the love remains in me — grammar reflects the outward action, which is more known; “my eyes fell upon it,” yet seeing remains within. In us love and the word of the heart remain in the lover/sayer with a relation to the loved/expressed; in God, where there is no accident (an accident exists in another as subject; shown in the simplicity of God), word and love are subsisting, because God’s understanding and loving are his very substance. So “the Holy Spirit is the love of the Father in the Son” signifies only the relation of love to the loved. Ad 3: the Holy Spirit is the nexus (he cannot translate; students offer “bond”) of Father and Son insofar as he is love: the Father loves himself and the Son by one love and conversely, so in the Holy Spirit as love is implied the relation of Father to Son and the reverse as lover to loved; mutual love must proceed from both. By origin he is not middle but third person; by the relation of lover to loved, a middle proceeding from both. Student on the Latin order tertia in Trinitate persona: digression on grammarian vs. logician. Grammarian sees in “equilateral right-angled quadrilateral” two adjectives before a noun; logician sees genus first (quadrilateral), because words signify things through thoughts and we know the confused/general before the distinct. Shakespeare’s “ability for large discourse, looking before and after” happens to put grammatical and logical order together; “discursive power” would not. “Green triangle” and “equilateral triangle” are grammatically identical, logically enormously different (species-making difference vs. accident). In the second act: for the grammarian “I am a stone” is correct and “I is a man” wrong; “he doesn’t care about truth and falsity” — the Neoplatonists’ put-down grammaticus. Ad 4: as the Son understands but it does not belong to him to produce a word, so the Holy Spirit loves (essentially) but does not breathe love (notionally): he loves as love itself proceeding, not as that from which love proceeds — otherwise you multiply persons. Student on “notionally”: the notions of q. 32, aa. 2-3, by which the persons are distinguished (e.g. Fatherhood); “sometimes instead of saying notionally, they say personally.” Summary: “the basic thing you want to see is that love can be taken in these two ways” — no such problem with “Son” or “Word”; without a word like “word” one would need a circumlocution such as “generated wisdom.” Aside: Thomas always treats Father and Son before the Holy Spirit, “almost like it’s more known to us.”

5. Article 2, objections and sed contra; friendship as godlike (“the Father is not wise by this generated wisdom”) #

Point: three objections against “the Father and the Son love each other by the Holy Spirit,” and Augustine for it.

1. Augustine, De Trinitate VII: the Father is not wise by generated wisdom (the Son); by likeness he is not loving by love proceeding (the Holy Spirit). He adds: wisdom and goodness, properly and not by appropriation, are essential names; appropriating power to the Father, wisdom to the Son, goodness to the Holy Spirit does not mean the Father is wise by the Son. “But then your pipe is smoking.”
2. “To love” is taken either essentially or notionally; essentially it fails (one could equally say the Father understands by the Son); notionally it fails (one could say the Father and Son breathe by the Holy Spirit, or the Father generates by the Son). Digression from his love-and-friendship course (Thomas on love in the Prima Secundae, then Aristotle on friendship, NE VIII): Shakespeare’s “godlike amity.” Friendship is godlike as love (John: God is love); is it godlike as mutual love? Only if God is more than one person. Aristotle divides friendship of equals (Hamlet and Horatio, Bassanio and the Merchant) from friendship of unequals (father and son); in God, Father and Son being equal, the two kinds of friendship in creatures are one — “all this depends upon seeing that in some way the Father and the Son have mutual love.”
3. By the same love the Father loves the Son, himself and us; he does not love himself by the Holy Spirit, since no notional act reflects on its beginning (the Father does not generate or breathe himself); the love by which he loves us implies relation to the creature and so pertains to the essence. — “Tying the mind into a knot.” Sed contra: Augustine, De Trinitate VI: the Holy Spirit is that by which the one generated is loved by the one generating and loves him.

6. Body of a. 2: the ablative and the five opinions (“the ablative is construed in the relation of some cause”) #

Point: the difficulty is grammatical — the ablative signifies some cause, so the sentence seems to make the Holy Spirit the beginning of the Father’s and Son’s loving, omnino impossibile, like the Father being made wise by the Son. Aside: a grammarian told him the Latins imitated Greek grammar; Greek has nominative, genitive (what is before the action), dative (with the action), accusative (after); Latin tacked on the ablative, which is like the Greek genitive and “doesn’t really come last.” Prepositions (“through, by, from”) likewise carry the sense of cause, as hitting the nail with a hammer. Five opinions (his count matches Thomas’s):

1. The statement is false, retracted by Augustine along with “wise by generated wisdom.”
2. It is improper: the Father loves the Son by essential love, appropriated to the Holy Spirit.
3. The ablative is construed as a sign: the Holy Spirit, proceeding from them as love, is a sign that the Father loves the Son.
4. Construed as formal cause: the Holy Spirit is the love by which, formally, they love each other, as one is healthy by health.
5. Construed as formal effect — these “exceed more closely to the truth” [ed.: come nearer]. Aside: preachers say the Holy Spirit is the love of the Father and Son; “I don’t know what they understand by this.”

7. Denomination from forms and from effects (“things are in general denominated from their forms”) #

Point: why the fifth opinion is nearest: names are given from forms, but also from what proceeds from a thing.

1. Things are denominated from forms (white from whiteness, man from humanity); so that by which something is denominated has the relation of a form even when it is not one. Healthy by health, geometer by the science of geometry (true forms) vs. clothed by clothing, shod by shoes, armored by armor (construed as formal cause, not a form). Aristotle on denomination, Categories ch. 1.
2. Something is also denominated by what proceeds from it: (a) an agent by its action (I am teaching; fire is warming the air) — his question: am I a teacher by my knowledge (the form by which I can teach) or by my teaching (posterior)? “If you say both, it’s not in the same way”; (b) by the end or effect of the action: fire is heating by its heating, though heating is not heat, the form of fire; a tree is flowering by its flowers, which are not its form but an effect; Michelangelo is a sculptor by his statues.

8. Application: loving by the Holy Spirit as talking by words (“the tree is said to be flowering by its flowers”) #

Point: the distinction of a. 1 settles the sentence.

• Taken essentially, the Father and Son love each other not by the Holy Spirit but by the essence itself, since God’s essence is love — Augustine, De Trinitate XV: “who dares to say that the Father loves neither himself nor the Son nor the Holy Spirit except through the Holy Spirit?” The first opinions have “an element of truth” here.
• Taken notionally, to love is nothing other than to breathe love, as to speak is to produce a word and to flower to produce flowers. As the tree flowers by its flowers, the Father is saying, by the Word, himself and creatures, and the Father and Son love, by the Holy Spirit, themselves and others. Class exchange: am I saying something by my knowledge and ability to form words, or by words? Answer: “talk by words is different” — that is in habitudine effectus formalis; so the Holy Spirit is not the source of their love; from their loving each other he proceeds. Boundary cases: I walk by muscles (source) vs. “I walk by walking” (action proceeding); an author is an author by his books (denominated from what proceeds — “you don’t have any books, you’re not an author”) in a different way from being an author by knowledge and diligence (novelists holding themselves to so many words a day). “See, that’s not false, is it?” English must use the preposition “by” where Latin has the ablative. Closing asides: Vatican II (Paul VI in the official text) urging Thomas as teacher to penetrate and illuminate the mysteries; the joke “il faut dépasser saint Thomas” — “you got to catch up with him before you can get ahead of him”; a man teaching the Physics (“the books of natural hearing”) since 1935 who still sees something new; one could teach this treatise thirty years and say the same; he has caught up with neither Thomas nor Aristotle.

His words #

• “private name” / “own name”: proprium nomen, proper name of a person.
• “going forward”: procession.
• “thought”, “mental word”: the verbum, logos.
• “breathing”: spiration [ed.: spiratio].
• “impression of the thing loved in the affection of the one loving”: Thomas’s account of what proceeds by way of love; the loved is in the lover.
• intelligere (essential), dicere (notional), verbum (personal): the three words on the side of understanding.
• amare, diligere, dilectio: the two Latin words for love; dilectio from choice, chosen love.
• intelligentia concepta, sapientia genita: circumlocutions for “word” if the word were lacking.
• “notionally”: pertaining to the notions of q. 32 by which persons are distinguished; “sometimes they say personally.”
• nexus: he leaves it as “connection,” students say “bond.”
• “accident”: what does not exist by itself but in another as subject.
• ablative “in the relation of some cause” (in habitudine): the grammatical root of the difficulty.
• “formal effect” (effectus formalis): what a thing is denominated from as if from a form, though it proceeds from it.
• “natural hearing”: [ed.: Aristotle’s Physics].

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 37, a. 1 (objections, sed contra, body, four replies).
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 37, a. 2 (objections, sed contra, body; the replies are not reached in this recording).
• Augustine, De Trinitate XV (as quoted in obj. 1 and in the body of a. 2); VII (obj. 1 of a. 2); VI (sed contra of a. 2).
• Gregory the Great, homily on Pentecost (sed contra of a. 1).

Mentioned

• Dionysius on love as a uniting power; Thomas on the effects of love, Prima Secundae.
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (unnamed defect opposite temperance; friendship, bk. VIII); Categories ch. 1 (denomination).
• St John, “God is love” (epistles).
• Summa I, q. 32 (the notions); the treatises on God’s operations and simplicity.
• C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves.
• Shakespeare: definition of reason (“large discourse, looking before and after”); “godlike amity”; Hamlet and Horatio; Bassanio and the Merchant of Venice.
• Kierkegaard, “No doubt that woman can talk.”
• Second Vatican Council and Paul VI on Thomas as teacher.

His questions #

• What does it mean that the Father and the Son love each other by the Holy Spirit? Only notionally, with “by” construed as formal effect: as a tree flowers by its flowers, a speaker talks by words.
• Is the Holy Spirit the source of the Father’s and Son’s love? No — “omnino impossibile”; he proceeds from their loving each other.
• How is the loved in the lover differently from the known in the knower? In the knower as a likeness (the Son is imago Dei); in the lover as an inclination toward the thing itself — so the Holy Spirit is not a Son.
• Why is the Holy Spirit third and not middle? By origin third; by the relation of lover to loved a middle proceeding from both.
• Am I a teacher by my knowledge or by my teaching? Both, but not in the same way: the form in me vs. the action proceeding from me.
• Is fire a heater by its heat or by its heating the air? Both; heat is the form, heating an action proceeding — denomination from effect.
• Is friendship godlike insofar as it is mutual love? Only if there is mutual love in God, i.e. if Father and Son love each other — which the article defends.
• Is it false to say I am an author by my books? No; but it differs from being an author by knowledge and diligence.
• What does “notionally” mean? Pertaining to the notions of q. 32 that distinguish the persons; equivalently “personally.”