Summa I q.42: Equality and Order among the Divine Persons (Quantity of Virtue, Likeness, Equality as a Relation of Reason)

Orientation #

He begins at the prologue of q. 42 with no explicit reference to last time beyond “I think I mentioned before” on his first thoughts about the word order. At the end he stops at the close of a. 1 and says he is leaving Saturday for a talk in California, returning late Friday; next week’s plan is left uncertain. The previous class finished q. 41, a. 6 and the next takes up the Son’s co-eternity (a. 2) and the order of nature (a. 3).

The class, in order #

1. Prologue of q. 42: persons compared to each other (“one person sends another person”) #

The treatise now turns to comparing the persons to one another: first as to equality and likeness (q. 42), second as to mission (later question). Aside on mission: Scripture speaks of the Father sending the Son and of the Son sending the Spirit, but the Father is never sent — “what the hell does that mean?” is left for later.

The six articles of q. 42: (1) whether equality has place in the persons — the problem is partly the word, which seems to imply quantity but has other meanings; (2) equality in eternity — in us the father is around before he generates the son; (3) order among the persons; (4) equality in magnitude; (5) whether one person is in another; (6) equality in power.

2. Why “order” follows eternity: keep the difference, drop the genus (“drop the genus and keep what is specific”) #

The point: a. 3 sits after a. 2 because if the Son proceeds from the Father one might think the Father is before him, and the first sense of before in Categories ch. 12 is before in time.

His own history with the word order, as he tells it:

1. His first thought: order means before and after.
2. Reading Thomas on Augustine’s ordo naturae in God (in the De Potentia and here), which is “not an order of before and after but of one from the other,” order of origin — he thought he had been mistaken; perhaps before-and-after is only one of two meanings.
3. The Athanasian Creed: no before and after in God in any sense; Thomas, without saying so, goes back to Aristotle’s four central senses of before (Categories 12) and denies each of the Father.
4. Then the Sentences commentary (fuller than the later works): distinction is presupposed to order rather than its meaning; before-and-after is what order means in general; it has many species. So his first impression “was not far off.”

Resolution: when Augustine keeps order for God he keeps a specific difference and drops the genus. He is before his own son and the son proceeds from him (one specific order); he is before Barack Obama in time, but Obama does not proceed from him (a different order). Order of nature keeps origin, drops before-and-after.

Parallel cases of the same rule (Father Boulay “always drumming into us”):

• scientia carried to God: drop habit, keep the act of which it is the habit;
• understanding: in us an ability distinct from the ability to walk; in God no ability distinct from actual understanding — drop ability, keep understanding;
• virtue: Aristotle defines moral virtue as a habit with choice in the middle towards us; there is choice in God but no habit — drop the genus.

3. Articles 4–6 and how the six divide (“divide the first article against the other five”) #

• Magnitude (a. 4): Hilary’s “dangerous way of speaking” — the Father is maior but the Son is not minor — sounds contradictory.
• Why “one in another” (a. 5) is attached to magnitude: each is God, there is no difference between the Father and the divine nature, the divine nature is in the Son, so in a way the Father is in the Son; distinct as relatives, in each other as God. Offered as “maybe why.”
• Power (a. 6): one might argue the Father and Son have the power to breathe forth a divine person and the Spirit does not, so is he less powerful? “You got to be careful.” Structure: a. 1 asks whether equality can be said at all; the other five give three kinds of equality — eternity/duration, magnitude, power — perhaps ordered as in us (man a greater thing than a dog, then his power to act; eternity concerning his very being). The word equal recurs in a. 2, 4, 6; a. 3 and a. 5 are attached to their neighbours, and why must become clear in the articles themselves.

4. The four objections of a. 1 (“A lot of things to be untied there”) #

1. Equality is according to unity in quantity (Metaphysics V); in God there is neither intrinsic continuous quantity (magnitude) nor extrinsic (place, measure of the mobile; time, measure of motion); and by discrete quantity there is inequality, since two persons are more than one.
2. The persons are one essence, signified as form (as human nature is our form); agreement in form makes likeness, not equality — so speak of likeness.
3. Equal is said to the equal, but Augustine (De Trinitate VI): a perfect image is co-equal to its exemplar, not the exemplar to the image. The Son is Image (one of the Son’s names, with Word). His gloss: a statue is like you, but are you like the statue? So perhaps the Son is like the Father, not the Father like the Son.
4. Equality is a relation; no relation is common to the three, only the nature; relations distinguish the persons — so does equality make another person? Sed contra: the Athanasian Creed — the three persons are co-eternal and co-equal.

5. Body: equal by negation of more and less (“said by negation of more and less”) #

1. Metaphysics X (the book on the one and the many): the equal is said by negation of more and less — “a very subtle thing.” Two lines are equal when neither is longer nor shorter. Grammar looks circular (unequal negates equal), but equal negates more-and-less, not unequal. Parallel: in the Categories Aristotle puts hama (simul, “together”) right after before-and-after because it is defined by their negation — two events together, neither before the other.
2. Boethius, De Trinitate: difference of deity follows those who increase or diminish, as the Arians, who vary the persons by grades of merit and lead them into a plurality of beings.
3. Of unequal things there cannot be one quantity in number; but quantity in God is his essence; so inequality would mean not one essence, three persons not one God — impossible. Conclusion: neither more nor less, therefore equal — as if I am neither taller nor shorter than you I am equal in height. He notes the body does not solve “this little problem about the word”; that is left to ad 1.

6. Aside: moving the word large and small (“Shakespeare’s definition of reason”) #

Shakespeare: reason is the ability for “large discourses, looking before and after.” Large there is not quantity: (a) discourse about the universal, which covers many — close to quantity; (b) discourse about great things (God, the soul, happiness). His manuductio by the opposite: “small talk” is talk about unimportant things; large discourse is “big talk.” A “small person” may mean size, or a small mind. Churchill on Clement [ed.: Attlee; ASR “Clemency”]: “a very modest man, with much to be modest about.” Thomas’s prayer before communion: “out of your immense largitatis” — large in this other sense. The first objector “can’t move the word.”

7. Reply to 1: twofold quantity (“twofold is what quantity”) #

A. Quantity molis (a heap, bulk) or dimensive quantity, one/two/three dimensions — only in bodies, no place in God. So the persons are not equal in size in the first sense of size (“I’m going to size you up” is another sense: character). B. Quantity of virtue (power or perfection), noted according to the perfection of a nature or form: more or less hot, more or less sweet, i.e. more or less perfect in heat.

Virtual quantity is noted:

1. first in its root, the perfection of the form — “spiritual magnitude,” as great heat by its intensity and perfection. Augustine, De Trinitate VI: in his quae non mole magna sunt, hoc est maius esse quod est melius esse — the rhetorician’s alliteration, lost in translation (“Full fathom five thy father lies” cannot alliterate in French: Dr. Purvis is asked and confirms); this is why Latin scholars prefer Augustine’s Ciceronian style to Thomas;
2. then in the effects of the form: first effect is being (wood is a chair by the form the carpenter gives it), second is operation (every agent acts through its form). By being: the more perfect nature has greater duration (“going to go back to eternity”); by operation: more potent to act. Augustine, De fide ad Petrum: equality in that no one precedes in eternity, exceeds in magnitude, or is overcome in power — exactly Thomas’s three, in the same order. Cajetan (whose commentary the edition he calls the “New England edition” [ed.: likely Leonine; ASR uncertain] printed with the Summa): Thomas seems to have inherited the mind of the Fathers because he studied and reverenced them; likewise Aristotle with Plato and his predecessors, Euclid with the Pythagorean theorem. “You’re not reading one man going off on a tangent.”

8. Student question: is virtual quantity in the category of quantity? (“compares natures to what numbers”) #

Answer: no; it transcends the categories, is more a matter of perfection or form. More and less hot is a difference in quality; more just, more humble, is more of the perfection of that virtue. Student: metaphorical? — No: equivocal by reason (like “excel”: one ability is higher, one student excels by more perfect understanding); it can exist in any category. Why the likeness to quantity: Aristotle (eighth book of “Wisdom” / later “Natural Hearing” — he gives both) compares natures to numbers, which differ by adding or subtracting one; body = stone, + life = plant, + sense = beast, + reason = man, so stone, plant, beast, man are like 1, 2, 3, 4. Plato said natures are numbers; Aristotle: not numbers, but a likeness. Shakespeare’s exhortation to reason: “What is a man if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more” — a proportion (chief good of man : man :: chief good of beast : beast, alternated); his own version: “What is a three if it be half a four? A two, no more.” “Add” a difference to a genus is not quantitative addition. “What does that add up to,” “can’t put two and two together” are more metaphorical; more/less, add carry over by likeness from quantity to quality. General law: words equivocal by reason get their start in the continuous — Metaphysics V opens with beginning: point of a line, surface of a body; foundation of the house; the carpenter (not in the table); “where” knowledge begins (not a place); the end as beginning of action. Monsignor Dionne’s phrase for the objector: someone who “can’t move the word.”

Aside: Kittredge’s Julius Caesar — Mark Antony’s speech is a complete enumeration of the orator’s qualities, out of the Rhetoric’s order because he alliterates (“wit, nor words, nor worth”): a precision in Shakespeare that serves no obvious poetic purpose, “a double excellence.”

9. Reply to 2: equality adds to likeness (“Just like your father”) #

In virtual quantity equality includes likeness and adds the exclusion of excess. Things sharing a form are like even if they partake of it unequally: air is like fire in heat (he suggests steam), but not equal if one partakes more perfectly. Since the nature of Father and Son is one and equally perfect in both, we say not only like (excluding Eunomius [ASR “binomius”]) but equal (excluding Arius). English: “just like” — after his father died a cousin said “just like your father”; just means equal (“it just fits”).

10. Reply to 3: nouns and verbs (“by nouns and by what verbs”) #

Equality/likeness signified by nouns is mutual: the Son is equal and like the Father and conversely, since the essence is not more the Father’s than the Son’s; the Son has the Father’s magnitude, which is for him to be equal. In creatures (Dionysius, Divine Names 9) there is no such reciprocity: the caused is like its cause, having its form in some way, not the reverse — I am made in God’s image, God is not like me. Verbs signify equality with motion: the Son receives from the Father whence he is equal, so we say the Son is co-equalled, likened, “generated like” the Father, not the reverse.

11. Reply to 4: equality implies both essence and relations (“nothing is said to be equal to itself”) #

In God there is only the essence, in which the persons communicate, and the relations, by which they are distinguished; equality implies both — as earlier with “the ability to generate,” which is the nature as in the Father. Distinction, because nothing is equal to itself (you are neither more nor less than yourself, but not equal); unity, because they are one magnitude and essence. A thing is not referred to itself by a real relation; nor is one relation referred to another (opposition is not a relation in the middle between fatherhood and sonship) — otherwise relations multiply forever. So equality is not a real relation distinct from the personal relations (no fourth person) but a relation of reason including both. Lombard, Sentences I d. 31: in these, equality is only relative — “a beautiful thing.” Asked whether the equality of Father and Son signifies common nature or opposed relations, a student answers: both. Class ends here.

His words #

• ordo naturae: Augustine’s order in God; not before and after, but one from another, origin.
• drop the genus, keep the specific difference: rule for names carried from creatures to God.
• “Wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics]; “Natural Hearing” [ed.: Physics].
• hama / simul / together: defined by negation of before and after.
• equal: said by negation of more and less (not of unequal).
• quantity molis: heap, bulk, dimensive quantity, only in bodies.
• quantity of virtue / virtual quantity: perfection of a form; its root is “spiritual magnitude”; its effects are being (duration) and operation (power).
• equivocal by reason: the mode in which more/less, add, large, size, beginning are carried from quantity to other categories; not metaphor.
• manuductio by the opposite: leading by the contrary example (“small talk”).
• “can’t move the word”: stuck on the original quantitative meaning (Monsignor Dionne).
• largitas: largeness in the non-quantitative sense (Thomas’s prayer before communion).
• relation of reason: what equality is in God, since relating relations would go on forever.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, ST I q. 42 prologue; a. 1 objections 1–4, sed contra, body, replies 1–4.
• Augustine, De Trinitate VI (image co-equal; non mole magna).
• Boethius, De Trinitate (Arians, grades of merit).
• Augustine, De fide ad Petrum (three equalities).
• Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 9 (no reciprocal likeness in creatures). Mentioned
• Athanasian Creed (co-eternal, co-equal; no before and after).
• Aristotle, Categories 12 (four senses of before) and the chapter on hama; Metaphysics V (equal; beginning), X (equal by negation), VIII (natures as numbers; also cited as Physics VIII).
• Thomas, De Potentia (order of nature); Commentary on the Sentences (order); Lombard, Sentences I d. 31.
• Cajetan, Commentary on the Summa; Hilary (maior/minor).
• Shakespeare, Hamlet on reason and “what is a man” (inferred), The Tempest “full fathom five” (inferred), Kittredge’s Julius Caesar; Thomas’s prayer before communion.

His questions #

• Why does the article on order come right after the one on equality in eternity? Because if the Son proceeds from the Father one might think the Father before him; the first sense of before is in time.
• What is the first meaning of before and after in Categories 12? In time.
• Why is “one in another” attached to equality in magnitude? Each is the divine nature, so as God each is in the other; offered as “maybe.”
• Would you be said to be like your statue? No — hence the objection that the Father is not like his image.
• Why does Aristotle put hama right after before and after? Because together is defined by negation of before and after, as equal by negation of more and less.
• What do you mean by small talk? Talk about unimportant things — so large discourse is talk about great things.
• Does quantity of virtue belong to the category of quantity? Is it metaphorical? No; it transcends the categories, a matter of perfection; equivocal by reason, not metaphor.
• Are you equal to yourself? No; neither more nor less, but not equal — equality requires distinction.
• Does the equality of Father and Son signify their common nature or their opposing relations? Both.