Summa I, Q.39 a.8 (1): Being Led by the Hand to God, the Order of Appropriations, and Eternity, Beauty and Enjoyment

Orientation #

He refers back to “that article where Thomas asked whether the Father is a principium, a beginning” and to “the last name we had of the Son” (image) and the Spirit as “donum” — all treated earlier (prev. lecture). He says of the objections that “we’ll see the glory of that a little later today” and that eternity will be touched again “when we get to the glory of the Father”; the class ends before that. The previous class treated qq. 39 aa. 6-7 on predicating personal names of “God” and the appropriation of wisdom, power and goodness; the next continues a.8 through God as being, as cause, and in relation to creatures, ending with Romans 11.

The class, in order #

1. The four appropriations and their sources (“Thomas sees an order among those four”) #

Point: the first four objections of a.8 are the four appropriations themselves, taken from Hilary and Augustine but ordered by Thomas.

• Augustine, De Trinitate VI ch. 10, opens by quoting Hilary — the same text Thomas cites — then passes to the image of the Trinity in us, then to the fourth appropriation (from/through/in). So Augustine has the first and fourth in that chapter, not the second and third, and none of them ordered.
• Hilary is a little before Augustine (contemporary of Martin of Tours, whom he ordained); Augustine had Hilary’s book. “From Hilary to Augustine to Thomas, you get a fuller and fuller teaching.” Cajetan (preface to his commentary, printed in the Leonine edition): Thomas “seems to have inherited the mind of all the Church Fathers because he so reverenced them.”
• Reminder of what appropriation is: taking what belongs essentially to God and attributing it to a Person by a likeness between the attribute and what is proper to that Person, manifesting the less known by the more known — “but you have to understand what you’re doing.”
• Thomas does not reply to these objections separately but in explaining each appropriation.
• Aside: the Holy Grail claimed at Valencia; the Pope used it at Mass.

2. Objection 1 (Hilary): eternity, species, use (“essence and operation are too general”) #

Hilary, De Trinitate II: eternity in the Father, species in the Image, use in the Gift — three names proper to the Persons (Father, Image, Gift) and three appropriated things. Objection: eternity implies duration of being, species a beginning of being, use pertains to operation; but essence and operation are appropriated to no Person; therefore these are unsuitably appropriated. Reply anticipated: essence and operation are too general to have a particular likeness to any Person; the other names, as will be seen, do.

• Thomas’s prayers before and after Communion address the Father as omnipotens et aeterne Deus: power and eternity are appropriated to the Father because he is most of all a beginning that has no beginning. “This helps you to understand the prayer, or vice versa.”

3. Objection 2 (Augustine): unity, equality, concord (“the Father is not wise by generated wisdom”) #

Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana I (“Oh, that’s where he says that, not in the De Trinitate” — the texts are scattered and Thomas gathers them): in the Father unity, in the Son equality, in the Spirit the concord of unity and equality. Objection: one Person is not denominated formally by what is appropriated to another (the Father is not wise by generated wisdom); yet Augustine adds that the three are all one on account of the Father, all equal on account of the Son, all connected on account of the Spirit. “How do you understand what Augustine is saying there?” — left open here.

• Aside: his edition refers this to Hugh of St Victor; his baptismal name is Hugo (Hugo Duane Berquist, after a grand-uncle lost at sea off Sweden), confirmation name Victor after his father, hence an affinity for Hugh of St Victor; the old pastor objected that Duane is no saint’s name.

4. Objection 3: power, wisdom, goodness (“a beginning that has no beginning”) #

To the Father power, to the Son wisdom, to the Spirit goodness. Objection: virtus pertains to power, but virtue is appropriated to the Son (1 Cor 1:24, “Christ the virtue of God”; Thomas often uses virtus for power) and to the Spirit (Luke 6, “virtus went out from him and healed all”); so power should not be appropriated to the Father. His answer, from the earlier article on the Father as principium: power is defined as a beginning of operation; the Father is the beginning that has no beginning, so he most has the aspect of beginning; hence power is appropriated to him — not because the others are not beginnings, but because of this special connection. So the Creed says “the Father Almighty” though all are almighty.

5. Digression: Thomas orders the dialectic (“the order Thomas sees among these four”) #

Point: the objections are ordered because their order is the order Thomas sees among the appropriations.

• A text in the Tertia Pars (locus not given) distinguishes dialectic before demonstration from dialectic after: once the truth is seen, the master goes back and orders the dialectic, keeping the parts most useful to lead the student to the truth. Teaching ought to imitate discovery, but discovery has many dead ends.
• Plato’s dialogues wander, “like a man who, as Socrates, claims not to know”; Aristotle’s dialectic is ordered, drawing something from this dialogue and that.
• The Summa’s objections are more ordered than the quaestiones disputatae, which depend more on what students happened to raise.

6. Objection 4 (Augustine): from him, through him, in him (“the relation of a final cause”) #

Augustine, De Trinitate VI.10: “the Apostle” (by antonomasia) is not to be taken confusedly: ex ipso the Father, per ipsum the Son, in ipso the Spirit. Objection: in ipso implies the relation of final cause, first of all causes; so this should be appropriated to the Father, the beginning not from a beginning. His note: the Father is a beginning of the Son by a likeness most of all to the efficient (maker, mover), in no way as end; Basil and the Greeks call the Father “cause” in a loose, large sense; the likeness between God the Father and a human father remains.

7. Objection 5: truth, book of life, “who is” (“I am the way, the truth, and the life”) #

Truth is appropriated to the Son (John — he says “sixteen sixteen”; [ed.: the verse is John 14:6]).

• Aside on more than one sense of the words: the old catechisms took veritas for the creed, via for the commandments, vita for prayer and sacraments. In context Christ answers two questions of an apostle (“where are you going? how can we get there?”): as man he is the road (Greek hodos) to God; as God he is truth itself and life itself. Thomas’s prologue to the Tertia Pars: Christ, as man, is the via of tending to God.
• Likewise book of life (Psalm 39, “in the head of the book it is written of me”), and “who is” (gloss on Isaiah 65:1: the Son speaks, who said to Moses “I am who am”). Objection: these seem proper, not appropriated: (a) truth, per Augustine, De vera religione, is the highest likeness of the beginning without any unlikeness — that is the Son, image of the Father; (b) book of life signifies being from another, for every book is written by someone (“Thomas will seem to deny that — I find that text hard”); (c) if the whole Trinity spoke “I am who am”, Moses could say “He who is — the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit — sent me”, pointing to a certain Person, which is false since no Person is Father and Son and Spirit. Reply anticipated for (a): Thomas will say the objection takes truth insofar as it is the Son; truth simply said is essential and appropriated to the Son.

8. Body: “led by the hand” and the teacher (“leads the student from things already known”) #

Point: our understanding is manuducitur — led by the hand — from creatures to God.

• Monsignor Dionne loved this word and went to ST I q.117 a.1 (“whether one man can teach another”), last paragraph of the body: the teacher leads the student from the known to the unknown in two ways. (1) By proposing aids his understanding uses: less universal statements which the student can judge from things foreknown; sensible examples; likenesses; opposites. Example: Physics I, that we know things confusedly before distinctly — a profound universal reason, then three examples (sensing a whole before its parts; naming before defining; the child calling all men father) — the less universal manifesting the more universal. (2) By strengthening the understanding — not as a higher angel illumines a lower by active power, since all human intellects are one grade — by proposing the order of premises to conclusions, because the student lacks the power to bring them together; hence Posterior Analytics I: demonstration is a syllogism making us know.
• Euclid does only the second: every new theorem uses ones already seen, and he brings them together for you. Natural philosophy, wisdom, theology need more; Dionne gave a course on the manuductio proper to logic, “which has, as Thomas says, maxima difficultas” — “totally neglected.”
• The English translation does not render manuducitur; the image is of a child led by the hand who cannot yet walk alone.

9. Many names and the four considerations of a creature (“there are four things that occur to us”) #

Point: since we consider God as we take from creatures, we return to creatures to find the order of the appropriations.

• Why many names of God: his perfection is one and simple but contains creatures’ perfections; in creatures they are multiplied. Radii of a circle: one point at the centre (God), many ends at the circumference; naming by as many radii as we have. The Fathers say our mind “stutters.” Job’s concreteness: “I was an eye to the blind man, a foot to the lame” — the text is better than the translation “I helped the blind.”
• Four considerations, in order: (1) the thing absolutely, as a being; (2) as one — as Aristotle, Metaphysics IV, treats being then one as subject of wisdom, Books VII-IX being, Book X one; one is undivided being, so being is prior and one adds undividedness (and sometimes distinctness from others); the first two consider the thing in itself; (3) as having a power to operate, do, cause; (4) by its relation to the things caused, close to the third. Applied: “you can consider me as a man, one man, a father, and then in relation to all these grandchildren.”
• The four objected appropriations follow this exact order.

10. First appropriation: eternity to the Father (“eternity signifies being not from a beginning”) #

• Boethius’s definition: interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio; interminabilis means no beginning, no end. Connection with the Father: eternity, as signifying esse non principiatum, fits him who has no beginning, whereas Son and Spirit proceed (the Father and Son being one beginning of the Spirit). Recall the notion innascibilitas.
• Language aside: Dionne’s proportion, English : French :: Greek : Latin — Greek and English better for both philosophy and poetry, French and Latin more abstract; Gide (introduction to the Pléiade Shakespeare) calls French “presque antipoétique”; Descartes helped make French abstract and cut off from the senses. His “thinking out” (a definition, a division, a conclusion) distinguished by the eight senses of in/out — Dionne: “good, but you can’t see that in French”; a compliment to Thomas that he could think so well in Latin. Taine on the French getting the abstract at once. Kant is clearer in French — “beware of that French clarity”: Descartes took clear and distinct as more certain, the opposite of Aristotle; Max Born: “young man, I was deceived by the clarity of mathematics.”

11. Species to the Son: beauty and the three names (“species or pulchritudo has a likeness”) #

Point: species is appropriated to the Son because it means beauty, and beauty’s three requirements match Son, Image, Word.

• Translating species: in English it is the kind under a genus (genus a name said with one meaning of many differing in kind, signifying what it is; the differences complete the species). Greek genos / eidos. Nearest English is “form” (a form of government; forms of fiction), but eidos and species relate to the eye (eidenai, to see; spectacles), and carry beauty: “shapely” has that connotation; “deformed” the opposite; formosa, speciosa. Augustine, De Trinitate VI.10, explaining Hilary: imaginem speciem nominavit, credo propter pulchritudinem — “so it’s not just Thomas, it’s Augustine already.”
• Thomas: beauty requires (1) integrity or perfection — whole and perfect mean almost the same (Metaphysics V, the group of words beginning with perfect, then whole); the diminished are by that fact ugly (a missing arm or leg); (2) due proportion or consonance; (3) clarity — fall leaves on a bright versus a cloudy day; Romeo seeing Juliet brighter than the candles.
• Likenesses: (1) integrity — the Son as Son in the strict sense, having truly and perfectly the nature of the Father (Augustine: in the Son the highest and first life); (2) consonance — the Son as express Image, for an image is called beautiful if it perfectly represents even an ugly thing (Augustine: “so great a coming together and the first equality,” anticipating the second group); (3) clarity — the Son as Word, light and splendour of the understanding (Damascene); Augustine: the perfect Word lacking nothing, “the art of the omnipotent God”; John 1 calls him Word, “the one who enlightens everyone who comes into this world.”
• Asides: Thomas does not hesitate to say he got it from Augustine; a Dominican Easter card with the Resurrection above the ground, angels and three figures; Dominican prayer cards used as bookmarks. “That’s really beautiful explanation — no pun intended.”

12. Use to the Holy Spirit: uti, frui, felicitas (“to enjoy is to use with joy”) #

Point: use, taken largo modo so as to include enjoyment, fits the Spirit as Love.

• Augustine distinguishes use from enjoyment: “the whole secret of life is to know what to enjoy and what to use.” Naming: use divides into use and enjoyment, since to enjoy is to use and add something. To use is to take something into the power of the will; to enjoy is cum gaudio uti (Augustine, De Trinitate X).
• The use by which Father and Son enjoy each other belongs to what is proper to the Spirit as Love; Augustine: that dilectio, delectatio, felicitas or beatitude, the end of the rational creature, Hilary called “use.” Augustine: the Spirit is the suavitas of the generator and the generated, poured on us with marvellous largeness and abundance.
• Felicitas vs “happiness”: happiness from “hap,” as if luck; felicitas from fruit, the natural result of a good tree, closer to Aristotle, whose eudaimonia has the idea of a higher being’s influence (the discussion in Ethics I: if anything is God’s gift, happiness is). Happiness the natural fruit of good deeds, misery of bad — Macbeth: “unnatural deeds do breed unnatural troubles.”
• Conclusion of the paragraph and reply to obj. 1: it is clear why eternity, species (beauty) and use (enjoyment) are appropriated, but not essence or operation, which by their commonness show no likeness to what is proper to a Person.
• Bonaventure writing Francis’s life: leave a saint to write a saint’s life — leave a doctor to explain the doctrine. “Il faut dépasser saint Thomas” — “fine if you can do it”; the present Pope draws openly on Augustine.
• Asides: a Spanish wine named gaudium; Spain now produces more wine than France or Italy; handsome Spanish schoolchildren.

His words #

• appropriation: attributing an essential attribute to a Person by likeness to what is proper to it, manifesting the less known by the more known
• Image, Gift (donum): proper names of Son and Spirit
• virtus: often used by Thomas for power
• beginning not from a beginning / principium: the Father’s special aspect; power defined as beginning of operation
• ex ipso, per ipsum, in ipso: Father, Son, Spirit
• hodos: Greek “way,” road; Christ as man the via to God
• manuducitur: “led by the hand,” of a child learning to walk; manuductio proper to each science
• wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics]; “Natural Hearing” implied for Physics (“Actual hearing” in ASR)
• tota simul et perfecta, interminabilis: Boethius on eternity; esse non principiatum
• innascibilitas: notion of the Father
• species: kind, form, but with the eye and beauty; eidos, eidenai; formosa, speciosa; “shapely”
• integrity/wholeness, consonance (consonantia, “sounding well together”), clarity: the three requirements of beauty
• uti / frui: use vs enjoy; cum gaudio uti
• dilectio, delectatio, felicitas, suavitas
• felicitas vs happiness: fruit vs hap; eudaimonia

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, ST I q.39 a.8, objections 1-5 and first part of the body (eternity, species, use)
• Thomas Aquinas, ST I q.117 a.1, body, last paragraph
• Augustine, De Trinitate VI ch. 10 (imaginem speciem nominavit, credo propter pulchritudinem) Mentioned
• Hilary, De Trinitate II; Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana I; Augustine, De vera religione; Augustine, De Trinitate X
• 1 Cor 1:24; Luke 6; John “16:16” [ed.: 14:6]; Psalm 39; Isaiah 65:1 (gloss); John 1; Romans (the Apostle’s “from him, through him, in him”)
• Cajetan, preface to commentary on the Summa; Thomas, prologue to Tertia Pars; a Tertia Pars text on dialectic after demonstration (locus not given)
• Aristotle, Physics I; Posterior Analytics I; Metaphysics IV, V, VII-X; Nicomachean Ethics I
• Boethius on eternity; Damascene; Bonaventure, life of Francis; Gide, Pléiade Shakespeare introduction; Taine; Max Born; Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth

His questions #

• Why is power appropriated to the Father, since Son and Spirit are also called virtus? Power is a beginning of operation, and the Father is the beginning that has no beginning.
• How do you understand Augustine saying all three are one on account of the Father, equal on account of the Son? Left open.
• As what cause, most of all, is the Father a beginning of the Son? Efficient — like maker or mover; in no way as end.
• How do they translate manuducitur in the English? They don’t really translate it.
• What is the connection between eternity and the Father? Eternity has no beginning; the Father is a beginning without a beginning.
• How do you translate species into English? “Form” is nearest, but species carries the eye and beauty; hence beauty.
• What is the connection between beauty and the Son? Its three requirements (wholeness, consonance, clarity) match Son, Image, Word.
• What does felicitas come from? Fruit — the natural result of a good tree, unlike “happiness” from hap.