Summa I, Q. 43, Articles 1–2: The mission of the divine persons (with Shakespeare's 'dull, unfeeling, barren ignorance' and the three acts of reason)

Orientation #

He refers back to what was said before: that the one who proceeds is equal to the one from whom he proceeds (“as he said before”), and that the names carried over to God drop the genus and keep the difference (Father Boulay’s point) (prev. lecture). He says nothing explicit about next time beyond “let’s stop there.” The previous class finished q. 42 (equality, Son in the Father, equality of power); the next continues q. 43, aa. 3–5.

The class, in order #

1. The eight articles of q. 43 and how to divide them (“whether any person sends himself”) #

The point: he lists the articles of the question on mission and asks the class to find a division into two or three.

• Articles as he runs them: (1) whether it belongs to a divine person to be sent; (2) [not stated in the recording; it begins at “sent invisibly”]; (3) whether sent invisibly; (4) whether it belongs to each person to be sent (“only the Son and the Holy Spirit”); (5) whether both Son and Holy Spirit are sent invisibly; (6) to whom the invisible mission comes; (7) the visible mission (“that dove descending… fire on the apostles… Son becoming flesh”); (8) “strange little article”: whether any person sends himself, visibly or invisibly.
• Student proposals: first half vs. second half; first, second, then third-through-last; visible/invisible with 3–8 on invisible (“invisible kind of implies visible”); or 1 on the suitability of being sent, 2–7 on being sent itself, 8 on sending oneself. He offers no verdict: “That’s just a guess.”

2. Sentences vs. Summa: distinction earlier, order later (“it belongs to the wise man to order”) #

The point: an example that an earlier work can be more distinct while the later is better ordered.

• Prayer in the Secunda Secundae under religion: one question of about sixteen articles; in the Sentences the same matter is divided into several questions (who should pray, to whom, for what, how). “The division was more explicit” in the Sentences, “the order of them is better in the Summa” — “if I remember right… haven’t made that comparison exactly.”
• Reason: in the Sentences the order follows the distinctions of the text being commented on and the questions that arise there, not the order of learning; this is what Thomas warns of at the beginning of the Summa about the exposition of books.

3. Out of the order of learning (“Don’t read this book”) #

The point: modern teaching takes up questions before their foundations.

• Introduction-to-philosophy books sent free to professors, all with a section “existence of God, pro and con”: you are not ready for that question “until you’ve done a lot of things beforehand.” Even defending the good arguments would be “out of the order of learning.”
• Likewise applied ethics courses (business, medicine) without an ethics course; modern logic books beginning with what they like and dislike about the syllogism — “that’s not where Aristotle begins.”

4. Three acts of reason and Shakespeare’s “dull, unfeeling, barren ignorance” (“Dull, unfeeling, barren ignorance”) #

The point: a line from Richard II maps, in order, onto the three acts of reason from Thomas’s proemium to the logic (beginning of the Peri Hermeneias, more completely the beginning of the Posterior Analytics).

1. Third act, reasoning: coming to know a statement you didn’t know through statements you know. Knowledge is fertile — as in Euclid, one theorem proves another; two dogs produce a dog, two statements produce a statement, two numbers a number. So ignorance is barren.
2. First act, understanding what a thing is — definition, division, distinction. Ignorance is dull, not sharp: “it can’t distinguish things, it can’t divide them, it can’t define things.”
3. Second act, statement: “unfeeling” — the word he had not seen before. “I feel that this is so” is about a statement; “he has good sense” means good judgment. So the three words are the first, second, third act, “and it puts that last” — the first act is ordered to the second, the second to the third.

• He stresses: “one of these incredible examples… of a precision in Shakespeare that serves no clear poetic purpose.” Whether learned or natural gift, “nobody knows where Shakespeare’s wisdom comes from.”
• Asides: Gaunt dying, advising Richard because people listen to the dying; York: “Direct not him whose way himself will choose” — no docility, “won’t listen to the church even.”

5. Degradation of words: imitation, feeling (“an imitation is an inferior likeness”) #

The point: words lose meaning through customs, and “feeling” is one such case.

• “Imitation”: Aristotle’s tragedy is an imitation of human life — simply a likeness, since one can represent men as they are, as thought to be, or as they should be. In commercial custom imitation means a cheap likeness (Bailey’s Irish Cream and its cheaper imitations).
• “Feeling”: the theology department at Assumption forbade “I feel that…” — “tell me what you think.” Yet students meant a statement, usually an opinion held without certainty (“I feel we should do this”). Degradation here comes from democratic customs, people living by feelings as emotions — an equivocation between feeling as emotion and feeling that something is so.
• Warren Murray’s point: assentire and sentire cum ecclesia use “sense” of a statement; feeling is also touch, “the touch of certitude” (Thomas wanting to touch the wounds). “So it’s not etymologically a bad word.”
• Joke: “I feel we should skip mass on Sunday”; the man at a funeral who got “that good feeling” from many priests in the sanctuary.

6. Article 1: does it belong to a divine person to be sent? (“the one sent is less than the one sending”) #

The point: Thomas takes mission seriously; the corpus gives the two relations in its definition.

• Objections: (1) the one sent is less than the sender, but no person is less; (2) whoever is sent is separated from the sender — Jerome on Ezekiel, what is joined in one body cannot be sent (his image: twins can’t send each other); (3) whoever is sent leaves one place for another, but a divine person is everywhere.
• Sed contra: John 8, “I am not alone, but I and the one who sent me, the Father” — “it’s in Scripture, you better pay attention.”
• Corpus, two things implied in mission: (a) relation to the one from whom sent, shown as a going-forward, either by command (lord sends servant), by counsel (counselor sends the king to war), or by origin (the flower sent forth from the tree); (b) relation to the term, that in some way he begins to be there — either not there before at all, or there in a new way. So mission can belong to a divine person as a going-forth of origin plus a new way of existing in another: the Son sent into the world begins to be there visibly through the flesh, though he was in the world before (John 1:10).
• His gloss: a person must proceed from someone to be sent — so the Son is sent by the Father, with no inferiority; and the change will be more in the one to whom he is sent, “because he can’t change.”
• Reply 1: sending implies lesserness when by command (the commander is greater) or counsel (the adviser is wiser) — “Aristotle gives the counselor as an example of a mover”; in God it implies only origin, which is according to equality. Thomas distinguishes three: command, counsel, origin. He notes this is “perfectly ordered”: it comes right after the question on equality.

7. Dropping the genus, keeping the difference (“if one were a number”) #

The point: the way “sent” is carried to God resembles how names generally are carried over — drop the genus, keep the difference (Father Boulay).

• Euclid sometimes calls one a number; Warren Murray says it is spoken of as odd. Euclid’s second definition of odd: a number differing from an even by one. One is not a number, but it is less than two by one — keep the difference, drop the genus. “Just like… there’s only one God.”
• So here: drop any inequality between sender and sent, keep that the one sent proceeds from the sender.

8. Article 1, replies 2–3: no separation, no locomotion (“you have to transcend the imagination”) #

• Reply 2: what begins to be where it was in no way before is moved locally and so separated from the sender; a divine person neither begins to be where he was not nor ceases to be where he was — mission “without any separation, but only the distinction of origin.”
• Reply 3: the objection concerns sending by locomotion, which has no place in God — “resolving to the imagination”; Boethius: transcend the imagination when speaking of God. Richard II again: the queen’s courtiers say she weeps for imaginary rather than true things.
• His unfolding of the habitudo: when I begin to know and love God, he is in my knowledge and my love, so in me in a new way — before he was in me as creator and conserver, not as known and loved. That suffices for “sent”; no change in him, only in me.

9. Article 2: can a mission be eternal? (“When the fullness of time came”) #

• Objections: (1) Gregory: the Son is sent in that he is generated; generation is eternal; (2) what is said of something temporally means it is changed, but a divine person does not change; (3) mission implies a going-forward, which is eternal.
• His comment on (1): proceeding is needed to be sent, but the full notion of sending needs the beginning to be in the term in a new way, “maybe a temporal change.”
• On (2): the same problem as creation — God did not create from eternity though he could have; did he change from inactivity to activity? Or is something said of God in time because of a change in creatures, a relation not real in him? Aristotle first said this: something is said relatively not by a relation in it but because something else is related to it — “known” said of the chair, nothing in the chair. “Time solves these problems.”
• Sed contra: Galatians 4, “when the fullness of time came, God sent his own Son.” Aside: Warren Murray on the fullness of time — Greek philosophy as a tool for theology, the Roman Empire (government, roads) as preparation.
• Corpus, a difference to be noted among words implying origin: some imply only relation to a beginning (procession, going out); some also determine a term — eternal (generation: going-forth into the divine nature; breathing/spiration: going-forth of subsisting love, “that’s what the Holy Spirit is”) or temporal (being sent: that it be in something; giving: that it be had). To be had by a creature or be in him in a new way is temporal, so mission and giving are said only temporally, generation and spiration only eternally, procession and going-forth both: the Son proceeds eternally to be God, temporally to be man (visible mission) or to be in man (invisible mission).
• Reply 1: Gregory speaks of temporal generation from the mother (“easy way out”), or the Son has from eternal generation that he can be sent.
• Reply 2: the new way of being in someone or being had is by a change in the creature, as God is said in time to be Lord of things he made — “developed a lot in the De potentia.”

10. “In” and “to have” (“as many meanings as the word to be in”) #

The point: the reply’s pairing of “in” and “had” answers to Aristotle’s remark that “to have” has as many meanings as “to be in.”

• Aristotle treats “to have” in Metaphysics V (the “fifth book of wisdom”) and the last chapter of the Categories; Thomas compares the eight meanings of “in” in Physics IV (“natural hearing”) with the meanings of “have.”
• Examples of the correspondence: the genus is in the species / the species has a genus (and the reverse); the part is in the whole / the whole has parts; “I have you now” / “you’re in my power.” So the one in whom a divine person is in a new way has God in a new way.

11. Article 2, reply 3: procession twinned (“the procession is twinned”) #

Mission not only implies going-forth from a beginning but determines a temporal term, so it is only temporal; or, mission includes the eternal procession and adds a temporal effect. Relation to the principle is only from eternity; hence procession is gemina, twinned, eternal and temporal — not on the side of the principle but on the side of the term. “It’s a mouthful.”

His words #

• three acts of reason: understanding what a thing is (definition, division, distinction); statement; reasoning.
• barren / dull / unfeeling: his mapping of Shakespeare’s line onto the third, first, second acts.
• imitation: for Aristotle simply a likeness, not an inferior one.
• degradation in meaning: a word losing sense through commercial or democratic customs.
• sentire cum ecclesia / assentire: “sense” used of a statement.
• going forward: his rendering of processio.
• command, counsel, origin: the three ways one is sent.
• breathing: his rendering of spiratio [ed.: spiration].
• habitudo: relation of the one sent to the term.
• natural hearing: [ed.: Physics].
• fifth book of wisdom: [ed.: Metaphysics V].
• gemina: twinned, of procession as eternal and temporal.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, ST I q. 43 a. 1 (objections, sed contra, corpus, three replies)
• Thomas, ST I q. 43 a. 2 (objections, sed contra, corpus, three replies)
• Shakespeare, Richard II: “dull, unfeeling, barren ignorance”; “Direct not him whose way himself will choose”
• John 8 (sed contra a. 1); John 1:10; Galatians 4 (sed contra a. 2)

Mentioned

• Thomas, ST q. 43 prologue, the eight articles (inferred)
• Thomas, ST II-II on prayer (c. sixteen articles) and the Sentences treatment of prayer
• Thomas, proemium to the logic; beginning of Peri Hermeneias and Posterior Analytics
• Euclid (theorems; one as number; two definitions of odd number)
• Aristotle, Poetics on imitation (inferred); on the counselor as mover among the causes; on relatives said by another’s relation (“known”)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics V and Categories last chapter on “to have”; Physics IV eight senses of “in”
• Jerome on Ezekiel; Gregory the Great; Boethius on transcending the imagination
• Thomas, Quaestiones disputatae de potentia

His questions #

• How could the eight articles be divided into two or three? Several student proposals; he leaves it as “just a guess.”
• Why does Shakespeare call ignorance barren? Because knowledge is fertile: from known statements you come to know others.
• If one were a number, would it be odd or even? Odd, by keeping the difference (differs from even by one) and dropping the genus.
• Does my knowing or loving God change him? No; he is in my knowledge and love, so in me in a new way — change in me.
• Did God always create the world, or change from inactivity to activity? Said of God in time by a change in creatures; “time solves these problems” — left largely open.
• Whether the Son sent is less than the Father? No: in God sending implies only origin, which is according to equality.
• Can a mission be eternal? No: mission determines a temporal term; procession is twinned, eternal and temporal.