Summa I, Q.39 a.8 (2): Unity, Equality and Concord; Power, Wisdom and Goodness; 'From Him, Through Him, In Him', and the Glory of the Father

Orientation #

He continues the article begun last time; at the start of the third consideration he refers back to “that text we looked at at the beginning of class there on leading by the hand, per similia et opposita” (prev. lecture). At the end: “next time we’re going to go into… the third question”, i.e. question 40 on the persons compared to the relations, “so we’ll start next week.” The preceding class opened q.39 a.8 and its objections; the following class takes up q.40 a.1.

Note: the verified-source list says “q. 93”; the transcript itself says “thirty nine” and “question forty”, so these notes follow the transcript (q.39 a.8).

The class, in order #

1. Second consideration: God as one (“unity is said absolutely”) #

Point: unity, equality and concord (“connection”, “harmony”, “agreement” offered by students) are appropriated to Father, Son and Holy Spirit because each implies oneness differently.

1. Unity is said absolutely, presupposing nothing else; so it goes to the Father, who does not presuppose another person from whom he proceeds — “the beginning, not from a beginning” (he flags: “we’ll see this in the glory of the Father later on today”).
2. Equality implies unity in respect to another (the equal has one quantity with another); so it goes to the Son, a beginning from a beginning (“I’d be one without a son, but if my son is equal to me, equality begins with him”).
3. Connection implies unity of two others; so it goes to the Holy Spirit, who is from two.

Reply to the objection (Augustine: “one on account of the Father, equal on account of the Son, connected on account of the Holy Spirit”): this is not like the rejected “Father wise through the Son”. Rule: a thing is attributed to that in which it is first found. Example: Aristotle’s living, sensing, understanding soul — the sensing soul is alive too, but life is first found in plants, sense in animals (“even Shakespeare calls our soul the understanding soul”). So: remove the other persons per impossibile and unity still stands in the Father — hence philosophers knew God is one (Aristotle ends Wisdom XII with “the rule of many is not good; let there be one”, quoting the poet to show the truth is not far from common understanding — a commentator explains this well [name unclear in recording, likely Saint Thomas]). But Aristotle never spoke of equality in God, nor between God and us; equality appears only once the Son is posited (the Macedonians/“Semi-Arians” admitted the Son’s divinity and denied the Spirit’s, and equality would be found there without the Spirit). Not that the Son is the beginning of the Father’s equality, but unless the Son were equal the Father could not be called equal; the Spirit is equal to the Father because he has the nature from the Son. Remove the Spirit and there is no way to see Father and Son as connected.

2. Third consideration: power, wisdom, goodness (“a double appropriation here”) #

Point: the appropriation is by likeness to what is in the persons and by unlikeness to what is in creatures (“I believe in God the Father Almighty” — appropriated, not proper).

• Power: has the notion of a beginning (Wisdom IX: “power is the beginning of motion or change in another”); likeness to the heavenly Father, “beginning of the whole divinity” (the article on principium recalled). Unlikeness: it fails in the earthly father through age (aside on heavy suitcases and “bigger wheels”).
• Wisdom: likeness to the celestial Son as the Word, “conceived wisdom”. Unlikeness: it fails in the earthly son through youth — “to play the young man” means to play the fool; Aristotle’s young/old/prime of life in the Rhetoric. Digression: a moral virtue lies between two vices but not equidistant — temperance is closer to “puritanism” than to intemperance (hence named against intemperance), courage closer to foolhardiness than to cowardice, so the young are more courageous, “as opposed to Falstaff” (reading Henry IV Part One).
• Goodness: the reason and object of love (in the prima secundae Thomas argues: the good is the object of love; the object of love is the cause of love); likeness to the divine Spirit, who is Love. Repugnancy to the earthly spirit, which implies violent impulse, “a wind knocking down the wall” — the hot-tempered, carried-away man.

Student question: is “earthly spirit” a person or the wind? He: spirit means wind, breath; “spirited” in English is not necessarily bad, “high-spirited” can connote excess. Aside: Shakespeare’s “lusty” for a vigorous young man vs. our “lust” the vice; likewise “anger” became a capital vice’s name because people are moved on impulse to do terrible things — though even Christ gets angry, and that is nothing bad.

3. The objection from virtus (“that word virtus gives you a problem”) #

Point: virtus is appropriated to Son and Spirit not as the power itself but as what proceeds from power (as a “virtuous” deed names the effect — “that’s justice”, meaning the thing done). Virtus sometimes means virtue, sometimes power; he notes the same trouble comparing Greek and Latin names of the angels (“Virtues, Powers”). “Don’t worry too much about that.”

4. Fourth consideration: from, through, in (“the relation of a material cause”) #

Point: the three prepositions of Romans 11 (end of ch. 11), said of God essentially, are appropriated by Augustine.

• Ex / from: sometimes material cause (table from wood) — no place in God; sometimes efficient cause (the Pietà from Michelangelo) — belongs to God by active power, so appropriated to the Father as power is. Thomas elsewhere adds a third sense: from the opposite (hard from soft); creation is “from nothing” in that sense, not as from matter. You are made from nothing and from God, not from matter.
• Per / through: sometimes a middle cause (carpenter through the hammer, Michelangelo through the chisel) — in this sense through is not appropriated but proper to the Son (John 1:3, “all things were made through him”), not because the Son is an instrument but because he is a beginning from a beginning; sometimes the form through which the agent works (artist through his art) — appropriated to the Son with wisdom and art.
• In: properly the relation of a container. Digression: Aristotle, Natural Hearing IV, eight senses of “in”, unordered; Thomas orders them “as Aristotle teaches in the fifth book of Wisdom”. His run-through: (1) in this room, the most sensible; (2) teeth in the mouth, part in whole; (3) genus in species; (4) species in genus — a transition, since the first three are actual presence and here the species is in the genus only in potency; (5) form in matter; (6) whole in parts (“like form and matter”); (7) “I’ve got you in my power”, another potency; (8) “I left my heart in San Francisco” / “where your treasure is, there your heart shall be”, which looks back to the first sense (where are you?). Eight items as he gives them. Thomas here uses only two: things are contained in God by their likenesses in his knowledge (in ipso → Son) and as conserved and governed by his goodness toward an end (in → Holy Spirit, with goodness).
• Reply to the objection that the final cause, first of causes, should go to the Father: the persons of whom the Father is beginning do not proceed as to an end (each is the last end) but by natural procession, which pertains more to natural power than to end.

5. Romans 11:33-36 and God as cause “two and a half” ways (“O the depth of the riches”) #

He reads the English (unsearchable judgments, who has been his counsellor, who first gave to him — “nobody”), then the Greek: ex autou, di’ autou, eis auton ta panta; autō hē doxa eis tous aiōnas, amēn. Applied to God himself, the three words touch the causes God is:

1. Of the four causes (matter, form, mover, end) God is in no way matter.
2. Form: Plato distinguishes intrinsic form (God is not my soul) from exemplar; since we are made in God’s image, God is a cause as exemplar — the “half”. Aristotle in Natural Hearing I says form is “something godlike”, arguing against Plato from what they share; Thomas explains: God is pure act and form is act against matter’s potency, so form has a distant likeness to God (the philosophi principales).
3. Mover/maker: from him. 4. Above all end: in him. So all things are from him as maker, through him as knowledge/exemplar, in him as end. Thomas asks whether ta panta includes sin; with Augustine, sin is nothing and whatever there is of being is from God. Aside: Sartre tries to found man’s dignity and freedom on non-being — “a great mistake, as we learned in the first book of Natural Hearing”. Translation note: the Protestant “of him” (even in the interlinear) should be “from him”, as Thomas’s Latin has.

6. Honour and glory (“we honor God as the beginning”) #

Point: honour and glory are not simply synonyms. A student: glorifying is a higher thing. His recollection (perhaps from Thomas on the Mass): we honour God as the beginning of all things, glorify him as the end. Test: we are commanded to honour father and mother, who are a beginning of us, but we would not glorify them; Thomas quotes “If I am the Father, where is my honor?” (Malachi 1:6). Confirmation (student’s prompt): Moses says “show me your glory” and God answers “I will show you every good”; good pertains to the end (Wisdom II: take away the end, you take away the good). Thomas’s Romans commentary gives a further sense: his text reads “honor and glory” (as at the end of the Roman canon). Because all things are from, through and in him, honour, reverence and subjection are owed by every creature; because he takes neither counsel nor gift from another, glory is owed — contrariwise 1 Cor 4:7, “if you have received, why do you glory?” (“why glory in your knowledge of the Trinity? you took it from Augustine and Thomas”). Gregory’s forms of pride: claiming an excellence you lack, or pretending you found the Pythagorean theorem yourself rather than learning it from Euclid. Isaiah 42:8, “I will not give my glory to another.” Upshot: God as beginning is like a father of all (Homer’s Zeus, “father of mortals and immortals”) and is honoured; as beginning not from a beginning, receiving from none, he is glorified — hence “the glory of the Father” is fitting, since Father and Son are both beginnings but only the Father is not from a beginning. Note: the Greek has only “glory” there, but right after the denial of counsellor and gift.

7. Thomas fuller in Romans than in Physics (“Scripture is the soul of theology”) #

Point: the same doctrine is sometimes more complete in one text of Thomas than another. In Romans he gives three senses of “from”; Aristotle’s definition of matter, “that from which something comes to be, existing within it”, excludes by its second clause both the opposite (not in what comes to be) and the carpenter (“to the best of my knowledge, not inside the chair”), whereas Thomas commenting on Natural Hearing II mentions only the opposite. Likewise in Romans “in” gets three causal relations: matter (soul in body) — not said of God; efficient, in whose power the effects are (“in his hand are all the ends of the earth”, Psalm 94:4 as he cites it; “it’s out of my hands”; Acts 17:28, “in him we live and move and are”); final, as in a goodness conserving them (Colossians 1:17, “all things consist in him”).

8. The remaining objections: truth, book of life, qui est, iste (“truth… is appropriated to the Son”) #

• Truth pertains to understanding, so is appropriated to the Son but is not proper to him, since truth in the understanding and in the thing is essential like understanding and thing; Augustine’s definition (truth as conformity) is given as appropriated to the Son — the Son conformed to the Father.
• Book of life: directly imports knowledge (God’s knowledge of those who will have eternal life) and life only obliquely, so it goes to the Son, though life goes to the Holy Spirit as implying interior motion, fitting his being loved (the creed’s vivificantem: only the Spirit is called giver of life). Ezekiel’s book written inside and outside mentioned. Being written by another belongs to a book as artificial, not as book, so no origin is implied; appropriated, not personal.
• Qui est is appropriated to the Son not by its proper notion but by something adjoined: God’s speech to Moses prefigures the liberation of the human race, made through the Son. Student asks whether that is the burning bush; yes (“I am who am”). Fathers: the bush is the incarnate Son, fire the divinity, bush the human nature, the fire not consuming it as the infinite nature not swallowing the human; secondarily an image of the Virgin. A student adds: Moses was sent to deliver Israel — “tell them I AM sent you”. Taken relatively, qui est can refer to the Son (“the generated, who is”), so personally; taken absolutely, essentially.
• Iste: grammatically seems to mean a definite person, but anything demonstrable can be grammatically called a person (iste lapis, iste asinus), so the divine essence signified by “God” can be pointed to — Exodus 15:2, “Iste is my God, and I will glorify him.”

9. Power and glory in the Psalms (“to see your power and your glory”) #

Point: returning to glory, he reads Psalm 62 (a psalm of thirst: “my flesh pines, my soul thirsts… to see your power and your glory”). Two readings: power = God as beginning, glory = God as end; or flesh and soul — the body seeks God’s power to raise it (Christ to the Sadducees on the woman with seven husbands: “you err, knowing neither the power of God nor the scriptures”, power there being power to raise the dead, which most would not believe possible), the soul seeks the vision, the glory. Another psalm (“sing joyfully to the Lord… he made us… the flock he tends”) shows the division of sacred doctrine: God in himself, as maker, as end (providence under the end). Students: Gregory makes glory a title of the Holy Spirit (he: perhaps appropriating again); the Te Deum’s “glory of the Father”, “glorious choir of the apostles”. Ambrose’s definition (via Thomas): clara notitia cum laude, “clear knowledge with praise — that’s what heaven is”. “Father, glorify thy name… I have glorified it and will glorify it again.” His conclusion: glory is appropriate to the Father as the beginning not from a beginning; we glorify God as end and as receiving from no one — hence Paul glories only in God, not in his own accomplishment.

10. Where we are: the proemia of q.39 and q.40 (“the persons in comparison to the essence”) #

Point: the persons are distinguished by relations of origin; of the fifteen questions on the persons, ten consider them absolutely and five comparatively. Q.39 compared persons to the essence — hence appropriation belongs there, but the fundamental question was whether the person is the same thing as the divine nature: yes. Q.40 compares them to the properties/relations, four articles: whether the relation is the same as the person; whether relations distinguish and constitute the persons; whether, abstracting the relations by the understanding, distinct hypostases remain; whether the relations, in our way of understanding, presuppose the notional acts (a multiple answer, differing for Father and Son: does he generate because he is Father, or is he Father because he generated? — “a subtle answer”). A later question compares persons to the actus notionales (to generate, to breathe): is generating really different from the Father, as my walking is not my legs, my seeing not my eyes? Shakespeare: reason is the ability “to look before and after”. “You notice how thorough Thomas is.”

His words #

• concord / connection / harmony; his renderings of Augustine’s third term for the Spirit [ed.: nexus, concordia]
• beginning, not from a beginning; the Father, vs. the Son, a beginning from a beginning [ed.: principium non de principio]
• living soul, sensing soul, understanding soul; his names for the three souls [ed.: vegetative, sensitive, intellectual]
• Wisdom (twelfth, ninth, fifth, second book); [ed.: Metaphysics]
• Natural Hearing; [ed.: Physics]
• per similia et opposita; leading by the hand by likenesses and opposites (recalled from earlier)
• play the young man; “play the fool”
• puritanism; his name for the vice of defect opposite intemperance
• virtus; power or virtue, here “that which proceeds from the power”
• from the opposite; third sense of “from” (hard from soft; creation from nothing)
• two and a half; the senses in which God is a cause (mover, end, and form only as exemplar)
• philosophi principales; Thomas’s phrase for Plato and Aristotle
• honour vs. glorify; God as beginning vs. God as end / as receiving from no one
• clara notitia cum laude; Ambrose’s definition of glory (via Thomas)
• actus notionales; to generate, to breathe
• ability; [ed.: potency]

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, ST I q.39 a.8 (body: second, third, fourth considerations; replies on final cause, virtus, truth, book of life, qui est, iste)
• Romans 11:33-36 (English and Greek)
• Thomas, Commentary on Romans ch. 11, “fifth reading” (on honour and glory; three senses of “from” and of “in”)
• Thomas, ST I q.39 proemium and q.40 proemium
• Psalm 62 (as he numbers it), “O God, you are my God”

Mentioned

• Augustine (appropriations; sin is nothing) — De Trinitate (inferred)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics XII (one ruler), IX (power as beginning), V (ordering senses), II (end and good); Physics IV (eight senses of “in”), I (form godlike), II (definition of matter); Rhetoric (young, old, prime of life)
• Thomas, ST I-II on the causes of love; the article on principium; ST I q.117 on manuductio (prev. lecture)
• John 1:3; Malachi 1:6; 1 Corinthians 4:7; Isaiah 42:8; Psalm 94:4; Acts 17:28; Colossians 1:17; Exodus 3 (burning bush), Exodus 15:2; Exodus 33 “show me your glory” (no locus given); Ezekiel’s book written inside and outside; Matthew/Sadducees passage; John 12 “Father, glorify thy name” (no locus given); Psalm “sing joyfully” (no number given)
• Gregory on the forms of pride; Ambrose’s definition of glory; Homer on Zeus; Shakespeare (understanding soul; “lusty”; Henry IV Part One; “look before and after”); Sartre; Te Deum; Roman canon; Euclid (Pythagorean theorem)

His questions #

• Why is the plant soul called “the living soul” if the sensing and understanding souls are alive too? Because a thing is attributed to that in which it is first found.
• Would Aristotle speak of equality in God? No — neither in God nor between God and us; equality appears only when the Son is posited.
• On account of what does power fail in the earthly father, and wisdom in the earthly son? Age in the father, youth in the son (“to play the young man”).
• Is “earthly spirit” a person or the wind? Spirit means wind or breath; applied to the person who acts on violent impulse.
• In what sense of cause is God a cause? “Two and a half”: not matter; form only as exemplar; mover; above all end.
• Is there a distinction between honouring God and glorifying God? We honour him as beginning of all things, glorify him as end — and as a beginning that receives from no one.
• Would we glorify our father and mother? No; we honour them as a beginning of us, but do not glorify them.
• Does “all things” in Romans 11 include sin? Whatever there is of being is from God; sin is nothing (Augustine).
• Is the Father’s generating something really different from the Father, as my walking is from me? Left open — to be treated in the question on the notional acts.
• Does the Father generate because he is the Father, or is he the Father because he generated? Left open — “a subtle answer” promised for next week.