Meaning vs. Standing-For: Why the Essence Does Not Generate the Essence (Article 5)

Orientation #

He opens by returning to “this distinction we met in the last article”, the distinction between the meaning of a word and what it stands for (prev. lecture, q. 39 a. 4), and says he was thinking about it after “the last class”. At the very end he begins “So the sixth article here:” and the recording stops. The previous class treated a. 4 (whether “God” can stand for a Person) and the next continues with aa. 6–7.

The class, in order #

1. Return to meaning vs. standing-for, by way of dialectic (“no son is the one of whom he is a son”) #

The point: the distinction between what words mean and what they stand for looks trivial until a dilemma forces it.

• Model: Thomas, following Augustine, opens some reasons for the Incarnation with a dilemma. God should be followed but cannot be seen; man can be seen but is not a perfect model — solved by God becoming man. Man sinned and should make reparation but cannot; God could but did not sin — solved by God becoming man.
• The puzzle, “a little math”:
  1. No son is the one of whom he is a son (you are not your own son).
  2. I am the son of a man (true).
  3. Therefore I am not a man — but obviously I am a man. “You can’t have your cake and eat it.”
• False solution: “a man” in “I am the son of a man” means my father (Victor Berquist). Then everyone in the room is the son of a man, and “a man” would have as many meanings as there are fathers in the world.
• Better solution: “a man” means something that has human nature; since your father, my father, the next man’s father have human nature, “a man” can be said of each and so stand for your father in one context, mine in another. Connection between the two: if the fathers did not have human nature, “a man” could not stand for them; but meaning and standing-for are not the same thing.
• Boundary case: in “a man is an animal that has reason”, “a man” stands for neither my father nor yours, though it can be said of them; it stands for man according to his nature.
• A beginning in philosophy or theology is a seed: small in size, great in power, and therefore hard to see. You do not see the importance until you see everything that comes from it.

2. Leo XIII on the Scholastics and Scripture (“the greatest name among them all”) #

The point: this theological distinction is a tool for reading Scripture, as the encyclical on Scripture credits the Scholastics with doing.

• He reads par. 96 of Providentissimus Deus (he calls the author “Leo the Great” [ed.: the encyclical is Leo XIII’s]): the Scholastics’ Correctoria Biblica; their chief labour on interpretation; the clear distinction of the various senses of the sacred words; the value of each sense in theology; the division of books into parts (Thomas “always dividing, subdividing by two or three”); the connection of sentence with sentence. Their work is seen “in their theological treatises and in their Scripture commentaries” — he stresses that both are named, the Summa being a treatise — and the greatest name among them is Thomas Aquinas.

3. Scripture texts that need the distinction (“God so loved the world”) #

The point: several central texts become contradictions unless “God” is seen to stand for a Person without changing its meaning.

• John 3: “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.” Son is not the one of whom he is the Son, so the Son of God is not God? No: “God” there stands for the Father. And Father, Son, Holy Spirit are not three meanings of the word “God”.
• Matthew 16, Peter’s profession at Caesarea Philippi (given completely only in Matthew; Paul VI: the whole Church is built on the faith of Peter): “the Christ, the Son of the living God.” If he is the Son of the living God, he is not the living God — “radical to say the least” — unless “living God” stands for the Father.
• John 1: “the Word was pros, towards, God.” You are towards another, not yourself; so the Word is not God? “God” stands for the Father; the word does not have a different meaning there than elsewhere in Scripture.
• Hail Mary, “Mother of God” (the rule of prayer is the rule of faith): Protestants are uneasy because it seems to make her mother of the divine nature; “why not say Mother of Christ?” Answer: “God” stands for the second Person, and she is the mother of this Person according to his human nature; since this Person is one of those having the divine nature in common, she is mother of God. Their uneasiness comes partly from not seeing the distinction.
• Further removed relation: “two is half of a number” — nothing is half of itself, so two is not a number? “A number” stands for four without taking on the meaning of four. “A very, very subtle distinction.”
• Aside: a recent papal sermon used “triune God” (he checked the etymology: three and one) — three Persons, one God, one nature.
• All these depend on the distinction, and it is “something quite different from metaphor”.

4. Article 5, the objections and sed contra (“essential names signified in the abstract”) #

The point: the question is whether, as one says “God generates God”, one may say “the essence generates the essence”.

1. Augustine, De Trinitate VII: Father and Son are one wisdom because one essence, and each is wisdom — so “wisdom from wisdom”, “essence from essence”, like “God from God, light from light”.
2. When we are generated or corrupted, what is in us is generated or corrupted; the Son is generated and the divine essence is in the Son.
3. God and the divine nature are the same (from the treatise on simplicity: otherwise something in God besides the nature, and composition). Aside: reading Aristotle’s Wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics] I on the materialists — in material things the simple is imperfect and the composed more perfect, but the first cause must be altogether simple and altogether perfect, which the materialists cannot combine; this pairing of simple and perfect is central to Thomas on the divine substance. Related difficulty of speaking about God: “God is wise” brings out perfection (wisdom that did not make one wise would be no good) but its word-form implies a haver and a had, hence composition; “God is wisdom itself” brings out simplicity; we need both, each defective, neither nor both giving God as he is.
4. Whatever is said of something can stand for it; the divine essence is the Father; so the essence generates — the same principle as “a man” standing for my father.
5. Syllogism: the essence is the Father; the Father is a generating thing; so the essence is a generating thing; if not, the essence is both generating and not generating, a contradiction, impossible in God.
6. Augustine, De Trinitate IV: the Father is the beginning of the whole Godhood (deitas, which refers to the divine essence); he is beginning only by generating or breathing; so he generates or breathes the divine nature.

• Sed contra (“give Augustine a chance to redeem himself”), De Trinitate I: nothing generates itself; if the essence generated the essence it would generate only itself, since nothing in God is distinct from the essence.

5. Thomas’s determination: the way of signifying (“the mode of signifying”) #

The point: the truth of speech depends not only on the thing signified but on the way of signifying.

• Abbot Joachim (he first says “abbess”, corrects to “abbot”) erred: because of simplicity nothing in God is other than the essence, so whatever is said of God can be said of the essence.
• Reply: secundum rem God and deitas are the same, but not the same way of signifying. “God” signifies the divine essence as in the one having it, so from its way of signifying it can stand for a Person, and the properties of the Persons can be said of it (God begotten, God generating). “Essence” signifies the nature as an abstract form, so it cannot stand for a Person; attributing personal properties to it would signify a distinction in the essence itself, as there is among the Persons. The nature is altogether simple.
• Aside: “God gives birth; I’m going to be without, but I give others” [unclear in recording].

6. Reply 1: the holy doctors’ way of speaking (“not extended, but explained”) #

The point: “essence of essence” is orthodox if explained, but not a way of speaking to adopt.

• To express the unity of essence and Person, the holy doctors sometimes spoke more expressly than propriety of speech allows; these locutions are to be explained, not extended, abstract names being expounded through concrete or personal names: “the Son, who is the divine essence and wisdom, is from the Father, who is also the divine essence and wisdom.”
• Student: is this basically the standing-for principle? He: it involves it, but the point is that the concrete name can stand for the Persons even in their private differences while the abstract name cannot. Student: isn’t the reply saying something different — that the doctors spoke more explicitly? He agrees: they wanted to emphasise the unity of the nature with both Persons, “speaking more rhetorical”.
• Order among abstract names: names pertaining to action are closer to the Persons, because acts are of individual substances (John Paul II’s The Acting Person: acts are of persons). So “nature of nature” (nature is a beginning of motion or operation) and “wisdom of wisdom” (wisdom orders things; “orders all things sweetly from one end to the other”) are less improper than “essence of essence”. He does not say we should adopt these either — “he’s excluding really two categories, but one even more so than the other”, and that is the one in the objection.

7. Reply 2: generation in creatures vs. in God (“the same nature in number”) #

The point: in creatures the generated receives a nature the same in kind but not the same individual; the Son receives the numerically same nature.

• My human nature is not my father’s (half Swedish by kind, but not numerically his). Expression “one in number” goes back to Aristotle: one in genus (man and dog), one in species (two men), one in number (I) — “really there’s no number there in me”.
• In creatures the nature is another in number, beginning to be through generation and ceasing through corruption; so it is said to be generated and corrupted per accidens. The Father does not give the Son a nature like his own but individually the same; so the divine nature is not generated — nothing new. Contrast: my nose is not my father’s nose, my love not his love; but the Son understands by the same understanding and loves with the same love as the Father.
• The objection reasons mistakenly from us, where human nature has a new existence in the son.
• Student: is there nothing new then? He: there is a relation. The Persons are subsisting relations (modus subsistendi); the relation subsisting in the divine nature is the Person, and by reason of relation there is a real distinction: the Son is not the one of whom he is the Son, and he is the Son of the Father, not of the divine nature.
• Aristotle, Categories, on relatives: we do not always give the proper correlative. “Slave of a man” — but not “man of a slave”; proper correlative is master. “Man and wife” — proper correlative of wife is husband. If “Son of the divine nature” were the proper correlative he would not be the divine nature; but he is Son of the Father, so not the Father, and the Father is Father of the Son, so not the Son. “Son of a man” likewise does not give the proper relative (that is “son of my father”). Divine generation is not exactly as human: the human son is “a chip off the old block”, not the same individual substance.

8. Replies 3 and 4 (“as universal of the particular”) #

• Reply 3: though God and the essence are the same secundum rem, the different way of signifying requires speaking diversely of them (as in the body).
• Reply 4: the essence is said of the Father by identity, on account of simplicity; it does not follow that it can stand for him, because of the diverse way of signifying. The objection’s principle holds where one is said of the other as universal of particular — my father is a man, your father is a man, so “a man” can stand for either in the right context. (He notes the objection’s Latin read differently at first but Thomas’s reply is understood of the words.)

9. Reply 5: substantive vs. adjective names (“a thing generating and a thing not generating”) #

The point: the syllogism fails because “generating” is an adjective and must attach to a substantive that stands for a Person.

• Digression on “name” (nomen): broader than our “noun”. In Peri Hermeneias the statement is composed of noun and verb; Greek onoma / rhema, Latin nomen / verbum, the same word for name and noun. Aristotle defines the name in general (vocal sound, signifying by human agreement, no part signifying by itself); if it signifies with time it is a verb, if without, a noun. The verb adds something positive and so gets a new name; the other keeps the common name. Common pattern: “animal” said of beast and man, but kept for the beast against man — in biology class “you’re an animal” is no insult; from your girlfriend it is. English tends to call only “man” or “dog” a name, but Aristotle’s definition covers “walks”, “runs” too. Likewise homo divided into vir and femina (Greek similar), but English divides “man” into man and woman; one language has a word the other lacks.
• Substantive names bring along their own subject; adjectives do not, but place what they signify about the substantive. Hence the sophists, who began grammar (as the philosophers developed logic, the sophists grammar and rhetoric — “the lower mindset of the sophists”), say substantives stand and adjectives do not stand but join.
• Substantive personal names can be said of the essence by identity of thing, without the personal property determining a distinct essence, being placed about the subject implied by the substantive. Notional and personal adjectives cannot be said of the essence unless a substantive is added: not “the essence is generating”, but “the essence is a thing generating” or “God generating”, if “thing” or “God” stands for a Person, never if for the essence. So “the essence is a thing generating and a thing not generating” is no contradiction: the first “thing” stands for a Person, the second for the essence.
• Parallel, less subtle: Father, Son, Holy Spirit are one thing or three things? If “thing” stands for substance (what it is), one; if for relation, three — Aristotle distinguished these meanings of thing in the Categories (“put that in your pipe and smoke it”). A very subtle distinction, but one you are forced towards, because without it you end in contradiction.

10. Reply 6: “beginning of the whole Godhood” (“ruler of the whole people, not of himself”) #

The point: deitas as one in many has something of a collective name, so “whole Godhood” can mean the whole of the three Persons.

• The Father is beginning in all the Persons without being beginning of himself, as a ruler of the whole people is not ruler of himself. Same as “God is the first cause of all things” — of all things but himself; adding that always would be annoying, but a logician can make the objection “God is among all things”.
• Or: he is beginning of the whole Godhood not by generating or breathing the Godhood, but because by generating and breathing he communicates the divine nature (the transcript says “to the Father and the Son”; sense requires the Son and the Holy Spirit).
• Aside (getting ahead): in the Sentences on the missions, the mission of the Son and Holy Spirit leads us back to God and ultimately to the Father, the principium deitatis; the Father is not sent; the Persons are sent by reason of their procession and an effect in us, to bring us back. Our soul came immediately from God, our body through our parents, and our end is to return to that from which we came. He also recalls a saying, “the happy man is a man enjoying the end of his life to the beginning of it” — “not sure exactly what that means”.

11. Contrast of a. 5 with a. 4 (“God being both simple and perfect”) #

The point: a. 4 said “God” can stand for the Persons; a. 5 says the abstract names cannot, because of the different way of signifying. We have the two ways because we cannot shed our natural way of thinking, which is about material things, where a thing is not its nature but has it; and we must use both kinds of word because God is both simple and perfect. He begins “So the sixth article here:” and the recording ends.

His words #

• meaning of a word vs. what it stands for; his rendering of significatio / suppositio [ed.: signification / supposition].
• a beginning is a seed: small in size, great in power, hard to see.
• “no son is the one of whom he is a son”: the dialectical starting point.
• “Wisdom” of Aristotle [ed.: Metaphysics].
• way of signifying / mode of signifying: modus significandi.
• “private” to the persons: his rendering of propria [ed.: proper/personal properties].
• one in genus, one in species, one in number: Aristotle’s three unities; “one in number” = individually the same.
• per accidens: how the nature is said to be generated and corrupted in creatures.
• subsisting relations, modus subsistendi: the Persons.
• proper correlative: master/slave, husband/wife (Categories).
• name / noun: nomen / onoma covers both noun and verb; verb (verbum, rhema) signifies with time.
• substantive vs. adjective names: substantives bring their own subject and “stand”; adjectives “join”.
• thing (res) as what-it-is vs. as relation.
• deitas: Godhood, the divine essence; here with “a certain agreement with a collective name”.
• principium deitatis: the Father as beginning of the Godhead.
• triune: three and one (from a papal sermon).

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 39, a. 5 (objections 1–6, sed contra, body, replies 1–6).
• Leo XIII, Providentissimus Deus, par. 96 (he says “Leo the Great”).
• John 3:16; Matthew 16 (Peter’s profession); John 1:1 (“pros”); the Hail Mary, “Mother of God”.
• Augustine, De Trinitate VII, IV, I — as quoted within the objections and sed contra.

Mentioned

• Augustine’s dialectical reasons for the Incarnation (as taken up by Thomas).
• Aristotle, Metaphysics (“Wisdom”) I, on the materialists.
• Aristotle, Categories, on relatives and on “thing” as substance vs. relation.
• Aristotle, Peri Hermeneias, definition of name, noun and verb.
• Abbot Joachim (in the body of the article).
• John Paul II, The Acting Person.
• Paul VI on Matthew 16.
• Thomas Aquinas, commentary on the Sentences, on the missions (locus not given).
• “wisdom orders all things sweetly from one end to the other” (Wisdom 8:1, inferred).
• Recent papal sermon using “triune God”.

His questions #

• If I am the son of a man, and no son is the one of whom he is a son, am I not a man? “A man” stands for my father without meaning him; meaning and standing-for differ.
• Do the words “a man” really have as many meanings as there are fathers? No; “a man” means what has human nature, and so can stand for any father.
• In “God so loved the world”, what is “God” standing for? Are Father, Son, Spirit three meanings of “God”? For the Father; not three meanings.
• Does “God” have a different meaning in “the Word was towards God” than elsewhere in Scripture? No.
• What does the word “God” mean in “Mother of God”? It stands for the second Person, whose mother she is according to his human nature.
• If God and the divine essence are the same thing, why can’t you say the same about both? Because they differ in the way of signifying; the truth of speech depends on both.
• Why is my human nature not the same as my father’s? Same in kind, not individually the same; the Son alone receives the numerically same nature.
• Is the Son of God the Son of the divine nature? No; he is the Son of the Father, the proper correlative.
• Is “the essence is a thing generating and a thing not generating” a contradiction? No; “thing” stands once for a Person, once for the essence.
• Is the Father beginning of himself if he is beginning of the whole Godhood? No; “whole Godhood” is taken for the three Persons, as a ruler of the whole people is not ruler of himself.