https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/Recent content in 2. Prima Pars on The Duane Berquist LecturesHugoenThu, 10 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/001-vatican-i-dei-filius-pius-ixs-prologue-and-chapter-1-on-god/Tue, 06 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/001-vatican-i-dei-filius-pius-ixs-prologue-and-chapter-1-on-god/Berquist begins Vatican I’s dogmatic constitution Dei Filius, treating it as an unfinished companion to Vatican II’s later documents on revelation and the Church. He works through Pius IX’s prologue on Trent’s legacy and the errors of rationalism, pantheism, and materialism that confused nature with grace, then turns to the constitution’s first chapter, its profession of God as one, living, creator, and Lord. He compares its structure to the Trinitarian pattern of the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds and the nature/person division of the Athanasian Creed, aligning it instead with the God-in-Himself, Creator, Ruler ordering of Aquinas’s Summa Contra Gentiles, pausing along the way to touch Summa Theologiae I, question 90 on scientific hypothesis and doubt.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/002-dei-filius-chapter-1-god-distinct-from-the-world-creation/Tue, 06 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/002-dei-filius-chapter-1-god-distinct-from-the-world-creation/Berquist takes up Dei Filius’s opening chapter on divine simplicity, God’s real distinction from creation, and creation as a free act, setting its structure against the orderings Aquinas uses in the Summa Theologiae and Summa Contra Gentiles. He treats pantheism—found in figures from Tocqueville and Spinoza to Hegel and Einstein—as the modern error the council’s canons target, and reads Anaxagoras as an ancient halfway case, closer to materialism than to genuine creation from nothing. Along the way he considers what divine omnipotence and liberality mean and why theology and philosophy order angels, matter, and man differently. He closes by pointing ahead to the document’s next move, into revelation and faith.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/003-the-necessity-of-belief-and-the-two-roads-to-god-vatican/Thu, 15 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/003-the-necessity-of-belief-and-the-two-roads-to-god-vatican/Why must a learner believe before he can know? Berquist works through ordinary cases—trusting a teacher’s proof, persisting with a hard author like Aristotle, hearing Mozart—to show belief enables knowledge, though sciences differ in how much they depend on a teacher, least in mathematics and most in sacred doctrine. He then reads Vatican I’s Dei Filius, applying a threefold structure: chapter one on God as source and end, chapters two through four on how we come to know this through revelation, faith, and reason. Closing on the revelation chapter, he distinguishes the two roads to God, natural reason and supernatural revelation, and uses Aristotle’s senses of “necessary” to explain why revelation is needed both to secure natural knowledge of God and, absolutely, for our supernatural end.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/004-scripture-tradition-and-the-nature-of-faith-vatican-i-chapters/Thu, 15 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/004-scripture-tradition-and-the-nature-of-faith-vatican-i-chapters/Berquist takes up Dei Filius, Chapters 2 and 3, tracing the Council’s teaching that revelation comes through both Scripture and unwritten Tradition, and that the Church alone judges Scripture’s true sense, with attention to the canons condemning errors on natural knowledge of God and on which books are canonical. He then turns to the definition of faith as a supernatural virtue resting on God’s authority, working from the definition in Hebrews as read through Aquinas’s commentary, and closes on the “reasonable service” of faith—miracles and prophecy as external signs alongside the Spirit’s internal grace—and why perseverance in faith is necessary for salvation. He brings in Augustine, Hilary of Poitiers, Newman, Sartre, Marx, and von Balthasar along the way.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/005-dei-filius-iii-the-church-as-a-sign-of-credibility-the-canons/Thu, 22 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/005-dei-filius-iii-the-church-as-a-sign-of-credibility-the-canons/Berquist reads through Denzinger’s text of Dei Filius: why faith is necessary for salvation, why the Church herself is a sign of credibility, and the canons condemning fideism, rationalism, and the denial of miracles. He then turns to Summa Contra Gentiles IV, ch. 15, where Aquinas distinguishes two orders of knowing God—natural reason and revealed faith—showing how the same truth, including certain moral precepts, can be reached by both. To picture the distinction he reaches for Aquinas’s comparison of sight and touch grasping one object differently, alongside remarks from Augustine and Aquinas’s Eucharistic hymns on the freedom and merit of belief.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/006-dei-filius-iv-how-reason-serves-the-mysteries-of-faith-why/Thu, 22 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/006-dei-filius-iv-how-reason-serves-the-mysteries-of-faith-why/Berquist asks how reason serves the mysteries of faith without ever mastering them, working from Vatican I’s Dei Filius alongside Augustine, Aquinas, and Vincent of Lérins. He distinguishes three ways reason helps: analogy with natural knowledge, as when mind, knowledge, and love illumine the Trinity; tracing connections among mysteries themselves, such as the Incarnation’s bearing on Mary as Mother of God or the missions of Son and Spirit ordered to man’s last end; and establishing faith’s preambles. He insists reason can never contradict or penetrate these truths, and that theology alone judges its own relation to philosophy. The class closes with Vatican I’s condemnations of rationalism and why doctrinal formulas keep their force across ages.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/007-summa-theologiae-i-q-1-prologue-overview-and-art-1-2-why/Thu, 05 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/007-summa-theologiae-i-q-1-prologue-overview-and-art-1-2-why/Berquist begins with the prologue and structure of Question One before working through Article One’s case that revelation is necessary—both absolutely, for knowledge of man’s supernatural end, and for a fuller, more certain, more widely shared grasp of truths about God that unaided reason could reach only slowly and with error. He then takes up Article Two’s objections to calling sacred doctrine a science, addressing how it can proceed from higher, God-given knowledge the way subalternate sciences borrow their principles from higher ones. Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Ethics, Boethius, Dionysius, and Vatican I are brought in to frame the argument.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/008-summa-theologiae-i-q-1-art-2-5-sacred-doctrine-as-a-subalternate/Thu, 05 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/008-summa-theologiae-i-q-1-art-2-5-sacred-doctrine-as-a-subalternate/Berquist takes up four questions Aquinas poses about sacred doctrine: is it a science, is it a single science, is it speculative or practical, and is it the most excellent science of all. Working from Aristotle’s account of subalternate sciences in the Posterior Analytics, he explains how theology borrows its principles from God’s own knowledge and from the knowledge of the blessed, the way music takes principles it does not itself demonstrate. He traces Aquinas’s argument that the science’s unity comes not from its many subjects but from the single formal aspect under which they are treated—things knowable through divine revelation—and closes by weighing the certitude and dignity that make this science higher than the rest, pausing on Augustine’s De Trinitate along the way.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/009-summa-i-q-1-a-6-7-sacred-doctrine-as-wisdom-and-god-as-its/Thu, 12 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/009-summa-i-q-1-a-6-7-sacred-doctrine-as-wisdom-and-god-as-its/Berquist takes up Articles 6 and 7 of Question 1, where Aquinas asks whether sacred doctrine counts as wisdom and whether God is properly its subject. He traces the objections and Aquinas’s replies, drawing on Aristotle, Augustine, and Dionysius, to show how sacred doctrine exceeds philosophical wisdom by knowing God both from creatures and from revelation itself. He argues everything treated in theology—creatures, morals, history—relates back to God as its beginning and end. The class closes by pointing ahead to how this subject connects to Scripture’s witness to the Word made flesh, with a glance at Vatican II.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/010-summa-i-q-1-a-7-9-christ-as-king-arguing-from-authority-and/Thu, 12 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/010-summa-i-q-1-a-7-9-christ-as-king-arguing-from-authority-and/Berquist begins with the Gospel portrait of Christ as king, prophet, and priest, and the Magi’s three gifts, to set up the unity of theoretical and practical wisdom in sacred doctrine. He then reads Article 7 on theology’s proper subject, Article 8 on how it argues from the articles of faith rather than toward them, weighing authority against reason, and Article 9 on why Scripture speaks through metaphors and bodily likenesses. He brings in Aristotle, Boethius, Dionysius, and Augustine, and reaches for Homer, Shakespeare, and the Song of Songs to show why figurative language reaches both the learned and the simple.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/011-summa-theologiae-i-q-1-aa-9-10-and-the-prologue-to-q-2-metaphor/Thu, 19 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/011-summa-theologiae-i-q-1-aa-9-10-and-the-prologue-to-q-2-metaphor/Berquist wraps up Article 9 on why Scripture uses lowly bodily images rather than dignified ones, then turns fully to Article 10: whether one passage of Scripture can carry several senses at once. He works through the objections, Gregory the Great’s sed contra, and Aquinas’s answer distinguishing the literal or historical sense from the threefold spiritual sense—allegorical, moral, and anagogical—drawing on Dionysius, Augustine, and Hugh of St. Victor along the way. He illustrates the distinctions with ordinary examples of metaphor and irony before previewing the prologue to Question 2, comparing its plan for treating God in Himself, as source of creatures, and as end of the rational creature to the structure of the Summa Contra Gentiles.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/012-summa-theologiae-i-q-2-aa-1-2-is-gods-existence-self-evident/Thu, 19 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/012-summa-theologiae-i-q-2-aa-1-2-is-gods-existence-self-evident/Berquist begins with how Aquinas structures the Summa around God as beginning and end of all things, then turns to Question 2, Articles 1 and 2. He walks through Thomas’s replies to the objections, including the response to Anselm’s argument that God’s existence is self-evident, and the distinction between demonstration “propter quid” and “quia” used to show existence can still be proved without knowing God’s essence. He draws parallels to Trinitarian and Christological doctrine and to Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics and Boethius, with digressions on happiness and wisdom along the way.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/013-summa-i-q-2-a-3-objections-against-gods-existence-and-the/Thu, 26 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/013-summa-i-q-2-a-3-objections-against-gods-existence-and-the/Berquist opens with Aquinas’s commentary on Psalm 21 and Psalm 24—David as a figure of Christ, and the distinction of via, semita, command, and counsel illustrated through St. Thérèse of Lisieux—before turning to Summa Theologiae I, q.2, a.3. He lays out the objections against God’s existence and works carefully through the first way, from motion, unpacking potency, act, and why a regress of moved movers cannot proceed infinitely, then the second way, from efficient causality. He compares this treatment with the parallel argument in the Summa Contra Gentiles, noting how Aquinas orders and develops the material differently there, and draws on Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics as background, using anecdotes from a seminar with Charles De Koninck and from teaching a child language to clarify the principles at stake.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/014-summa-i-q-2-a-3-the-third-fourth-and-fifth-ways-the-most/Thu, 26 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/014-summa-i-q-2-a-3-the-third-fourth-and-fifth-ways-the-most/Berquist follows Aquinas’s Latin text of the Five Ways from possibility and necessity through gradations of perfection to governance and finality, pausing on Aristotle’s Metaphysics II — read closely against a handout, “Note for Readings Two through Four” — as the source behind Aquinas’s talk of degrees of truth and being. He illustrates the arguments with fire and heat, geometric proofs, and ordinary cause-and-effect, while tracing the fifth way back through Aristotle’s Physics and John Damascene. Along the way he digresses on perseverance in grace and the prayer Anima Christi, then opens the first objection to the Five Ways, on the existence of evil, pointing ahead to Augustine and the Summa Contra Gentiles.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/015-gods-simplicity-perfection-infinity-unchangeableness-and/Wed, 01 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/015-gods-simplicity-perfection-infinity-unchangeableness-and/Berquist begins Aquinas’s treatise on the divine substance by asking why Question 3 of the Summa Theologiae orders its inquiry as it does: simplicity, then perfection, infinity, immutability, and unity, with simplicity and unity bound together since both deny God any composition of parts. He turns to the Presocratics—Thales, Anaximander, Anaxagoras—and to modern physicists like Born and Einstein, showing that the mind is naturally drawn to posit one simple, unlimited, unchanging first principle, whether as matter or as maker. Drawing on Summa Contra Gentiles IV, chapter 15, he argues Aquinas resolves this tension by identifying the first cause as pure act rather than potency. He closes by previewing the eight articles through which Question 3 strips away every kind of composition found in creatures.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/016-is-god-a-body-or-made-of-matter-and-form-aquinass-arguments/Wed, 01 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/016-is-god-a-body-or-made-of-matter-and-form-aquinass-arguments/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether God is a body and whether God is composed of matter and form, reading through the objections, sed contra, and responsio of Summa Theologiae I, q. 3, articles 1 and 2. He lays out the second-figure syllogisms by which Aquinas argues God cannot be a body — from pure act, indivisibility, and nobility — and shows why scriptural language about God’s hands or face must be read as metaphor, not literal predication. Along the way he brings in Aristotle’s Prior Analytics on syllogistic conversion, Dionysius’s Divine Names, and parallels drawn from liturgical texts like the Gloria and Sanctus.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/017-summa-theologiae-i-q-3-articles-3-4-god-is-his-own-nature/Thu, 16 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/017-summa-theologiae-i-q-3-articles-3-4-god-is-his-own-nature/Why can’t essence, existence, and nature be distinguished in God the way they are in creatures? Berquist follows Aquinas’s objections and responses in q. 3, aa. 3–4, leaning on the concrete/abstract distinction in language — “wise” versus “wisdom” — to show why speech about divine simplicity always falls short, since the mind knows only through sensible, composite things. Examples from geometry and natural philosophy fill out the point. He closes by warning against collapsing this identity of essence and existence in God with the “being” said commonly of all things, an error that produces pantheism, as in Hegel.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/018-summa-theologiae-i-q-3-articles-5-6-god-is-in-no-genus-and/Thu, 16 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/018-summa-theologiae-i-q-3-articles-5-6-god-is-in-no-genus-and/Berquist takes up two arguments in Aquinas’s treatise on divine simplicity: that God is in no genus, and that no accidents inhere in Him. Leaning on Aristotle’s Metaphysics V on whole and part, Porphyry’s Isagoge on genus and species, and Boethius’s De Hebdomadibus, he shows why genus-plus-difference composition would introduce potency into God, and why being itself cannot function as a genus. He then argues that since God is pure act and subsistent existence, nothing further, like an accident, can be added to Him. He ties both articles back to the earlier questions on body, matter and form, and essence and existence, and notes parallel treatments in the Summa Contra Gentiles.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/019-summa-i-q-3-art-7-is-god-altogether-simple-five-arguments/Thu, 23 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/019-summa-i-q-3-art-7-is-god-altogether-simple-five-arguments/Berquist reads Article Seven of Question Three closely, where Aquinas asks whether God is altogether simple, first summing up the six kinds of composition already denied of God and then laying out five separate arguments for God’s total lack of composition — as first being, as first cause, as pure act, and as identical with His own existence. He brings in supporting texts, including the Summa Contra Gentiles, Aristotle’s Metaphysics and logic, and Boethius’s De Trinitate, and pauses over how simplicity is known only through negation. He also flags a recurring logical trap: confusing “simply” speaking with speaking “in a qualified sense,” a distinction that governs whether the argument holds.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/020-q-3-art-7-replies-and-art-8-why-the-simpler-can-be-more-perfect/Thu, 23 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/020-q-3-art-7-replies-and-art-8-why-the-simpler-can-be-more-perfect/Berquist takes up Article 8 of Question 3: can God be part of another thing, as world-soul, as the formal principle of all things, or, per David of Dinant, as prime matter itself? He answers no on three grounds tied to God as first efficient cause and first being. Before that he returns to Article 7 on divine simplicity, using Euclid’s geometry, the comparison of tragedy and epic, and Mozart’s music to show why greater simplicity in immaterial things means greater perfection rather than less. He closes by rereading the prologue to Question 3, tracing how simplicity, perfection, infinity, and immutability hang together in Aquinas’s account of the divine substance.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/021-summa-i-q-4-aa-1-2-god-is-perfect-and-holds-every-perfection/Thu, 02 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/021-summa-i-q-4-aa-1-2-god-is-perfect-and-holds-every-perfection/Berquist takes up Summa Theologiae I, q. 4: whether God is perfect, and whether He possesses the perfections of all things universally. Working through the objections and Aquinas’s replies, he draws on Aristotle’s Metaphysics—Book IX on act and potency, Book V on what “perfect” means—and on Dionysius’s Divine Names, distinguishing a word’s etymology from its meaning and “simply” perfect from perfect in a qualified sense. Examples from geometry, Mozart, and the chicken-and-egg problem sharpen the distinctions. He connects the argument back to divine simplicity and God as pure act, then forward to question 93 on how creatures can be said to resemble God.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/022-summa-i-q-4-a-3-and-q-5-introduction-how-creatures-are-like/Thu, 02 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/022-summa-i-q-4-a-3-and-q-5-introduction-how-creatures-are-like/Berquist closes out the replies on God’s perfection, including the Dionysian point that esse subsistens contains life and wisdom eminently, then turns to Summa I, Q.4, a.3: can a creature be like God? Working through all four objections, the sed contra, corpus, and replies, he stresses that likeness runs asymmetrically—creatures are like God, but God is not properly said to be like creatures—and invokes the principle of ever-greater dissimilarity within similarity. He then opens Question 5 by laying out Aristotle’s and Avicenna’s account of the most universal notions, being, one, true, and good, distinguishing each from its opposite, using portraits, ratios, and religious orders imitating Christ as illustrations throughout.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/023-summa-i-q-5-are-good-and-being-the-same-arts-1-2-first-part/Thu, 16 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/023-summa-i-q-5-are-good-and-being-the-same-arts-1-2-first-part/Berquist previews the six articles of Question 5, “On the Good in General”—whether good and being are really identical, which comes first in our understanding, their convertibility, the good’s reduction to final causality, its structure of mode-species-order, and its division into honorable, useful, and pleasant. He then works through Article 1, where Aquinas argues good and being are one thing in reality but differ in meaning, the good adding desirability tied to perfection and actuality, and answers Boethius’s objection from De Hebdomadibus by distinguishing “simply” from “in a qualified sense.” Along the way he reviews standard distinctions—equivocation of word versus sentence, per se versus per accidens—and opens Article 2’s claim, drawn from Aristotle, Dionysius, Augustine, and Boethius, that being precedes good in the order of understanding.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/024-summa-i-q-5-is-good-prior-to-being-and-is-every-being-good/Thu, 16 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/024-summa-i-q-5-is-good-prior-to-being-and-is-every-being-good/Berquist takes up the second and third objections to Article 1 of Question 5—whether good adds anything real to being—before turning to Article 3, whether every being is good. He distinguishes per se from per accidens desirability and act from potency, arguing that “good” names only a relation of reason added to being, not a further determination of it. First matter and the objects of mathematics come up as cases where this distinction gets tested: things desirable or intelligible in different ways than a complete being is. He also treats evil as privation, drawing on Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics and, briefly, literary examples from Shakespeare and Dostoevsky.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/025-summa-i-q-5-a-4-why-we-want-the-good-and-the-good-as-final/Thu, 23 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/025-summa-i-q-5-a-4-why-we-want-the-good-and-the-good-as-final/Berquist takes up Article 4 of Question 5, where Aquinas asks whether goodness has the character of a final cause, given the prior article’s claim that “good” names what is desired rather than the ground of its own desirability. He traces Aquinas’s argument that good is formally the end—that for the sake of which a thing acts—while still presupposing efficient and formal causality, using the example of fire producing heat. He also examines the reply to the first objection, which distinguishes the good, tied to appetite and the end, from the beautiful, tied to form and cognition, with discussion of Aristotle, Dionysius, and Augustine. The class closes on how “mover” is analogically extended from efficient to final cause, applied to God as unmoved mover.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/026-summa-i-q-5-aa-5-6-mode-species-and-order-the-noble-the-useful/Thu, 23 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/026-summa-i-q-5-aa-5-6-mode-species-and-order-the-noble-the-useful/Berquist takes up article five’s question of whether the notion of good consists in “mode, species, and order,” tracing Augustine’s triad back to Wisdom 11’s “measure, number, and weight” and untangling objections by distinguishing how goodness is said of these principles themselves versus of the things they perfect. He then turns to article six’s division of good into the honestum, the useful, and the pleasant, working it out through the image of motion toward an end. Along the way he digresses into Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and takes aim at pleasure-based, utilitarian accounts of ethics.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/027-summa-theologiae-i-q-6-aa-1-3-god-is-good-the-highest-good/Thu, 30 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/027-summa-theologiae-i-q-6-aa-1-3-god-is-good-the-highest-good/Berquist takes up Question 6 of the Prima Pars, on the divine goodness. In Article 1 he shows why goodness belongs to God: an effect’s perfection reflects its cause, so every agent, above all God as first efficient cause, has the nature of the good and desirable — weighed against objections turning on mode, species, and order, and on the definition of good as “what all desire.” Article 2 asks whether God is the highest good, distinguishing God’s equivocal causality from univocal causation and meeting objections from composition, cross-genus comparison, and the scriptural line that “no one is good but God alone.” He then opens Article 3, on whether goodness belongs to God through His essence alone, with running digressions through Dionysius, Boethius, Aristotle, and Plato’s Symposium.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/028-summa-i-q-6-a-4-and-q-7-a-1-all-things-good-by-the-divine/Thu, 30 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/028-summa-i-q-6-a-4-and-q-7-a-1-all-things-good-by-the-divine/Berquist takes up two questions from the Prima Pars: whether all things are called good by the divine goodness, and whether God is infinite. He works through Thomas’s engagement with Augustine, Boethius, and Dionysius against Plato’s theory of separated forms, distinguishing God’s causality as exemplar, efficient, and final cause of goodness from the goodness intrinsic to creatures themselves. Turning to infinity, he separates the imperfect infinity of quantity, bound to matter, from the perfect infinity proper to subsisting being itself, drawing on Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics and the pre-Socratics Anaximander and Anaximenes for contrast.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/029-summa-i-q7-articles-2-3-can-anything-besides-god-be-infinite/Thu, 06 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/029-summa-i-q7-articles-2-3-can-anything-besides-god-be-infinite/Berquist takes up Question 7, article 2: can any creature be infinite in essence? He works through Aquinas’s answer by way of the distinction between being infinite simpliciter and secundum quid, applying it in turn to prime matter, form, created intellects, and angels, showing why each falls short of unqualified infinity. He then opens article 3, on whether an actually infinite continuous magnitude — an infinite body — is possible, drawing on Aristotle’s Physics and Categories. Along the way he digresses on Aristotle’s use of examples and on how physics and astronomy employ useful fictions.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/030-summa-i-q7-article-4-and-q8-article-1-no-actual-infinite/Thu, 06 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/030-summa-i-q7-article-4-and-q8-article-1-no-actual-infinite/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether an infinite multitude can exist in act. He argues it cannot—only an infinite in potency, as in the successive division of a continuum—and along the way brings in Aristotle’s Physics on number and division, plus modern physics (Weizsäcker, quantum theory, relativity) on whether the universe itself is finite. He then moves to q. 8, a. 1, asking how God is “in” all things, distinguishing this omnipresence from any spatial containment: God is present everywhere as the sustaining cause of being, not as a body occupying space.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/031-is-god-in-all-things-and-everywhere-summa-i-q-8-a-1-2/Thu, 20 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/031-is-god-in-all-things-and-everywhere-summa-i-q-8-a-1-2/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of divine presence: is God in all things, and is God everywhere? He works through the objections and replies, ruling out presence as part-in-whole or as an accident inheres in its subject, and instead grounds it in God as agent-cause most intimately united to the esse of every effect. Drawing on Aristotle’s Physics IV for the senses of “in” and “place,” he sets the question within the order of divine attributes already established—infinity, perfection, immutability, simplicity, unity—and brings in Boethius’s De Trinitate and Aquinas’s treatment of the Incarnation, using everyday illustrations to show why infinite power, not bodily extension, explains omnipresence.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/032-god-present-by-essence-presence-and-power-god-alone-everywhere/Thu, 20 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/032-god-present-by-essence-presence-and-power-god-alone-everywhere/Berquist asks how God can be said to be “in” creatures at all, distinguishing His presence as agent cause from His presence as an object known and loved. He explains why omnipresence belongs to God alone—unlike creatures, God is wholly present everywhere, not spread out through parts—drawing on Gregory the Great, Augustine, and Ambrose alongside Aquinas’s own objections and replies. Turning to q. 9, he opens the question of divine immutability, arguing that God’s pure actuality, simplicity, and infinity rule out any change in Him. Along the way he pauses over Aristotelian terms—act and potency, motion versus perfect operation, love of friendship versus love of desire—needed to follow the arguments.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/033-gods-unchangeableness-summa-i-q-9-pure-act-motion-vs-doing/Thu, 27 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/033-gods-unchangeableness-summa-i-q-9-pure-act-motion-vs-doing/Berquist takes up Article One of Question Nine, where Thomas argues from pure act, from divine simplicity, and from infinity that God is altogether unchangeable, weighing objections drawn from Augustine, Wisdom, and James along the way. He then turns to the harder question, from Article Two, of how creatures without bodies can still be called changeable: Thomas’s distinction between motion and mere operation lets him explain, with help from Dionysius, how an angel can be “in a place” without occupying it the way a body does. Berquist brings in Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics, Boethius, and modern figures like Locke, Berkeley, and Descartes to show why the act/potency framework is needed once imagination fails.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/034-the-eternity-of-god-summa-i-q-10-aa-1-2-boethius-definition/Thu, 27 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/034-the-eternity-of-god-summa-i-q-10-aa-1-2-boethius-definition/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s treatment of eternity in Question 10, starting from Boethius’s definition in the Consolation of Philosophy: eternity as “the whole, simultaneous and perfect possession of unending life.” He works through the objections raised against each element of that phrase—unending, life, whole, simultaneous, perfect, possession—before turning to Article Two’s question of whether eternity properly belongs to God. There he shows how Aquinas ties eternity to divine immutability on the model of time following upon motion in the Physics, checking the argument against related passages from Augustine, the Liber de Causis, and Exodus. Throughout, he stresses the negative method by which we approach a simplicity we cannot grasp directly.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/035-summa-i-q-10-a-3-5-is-only-god-eternal-how-eternity-differs/Thu, 18 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/035-summa-i-q-10-a-3-5-is-only-god-eternal-how-eternity-differs/Berquist takes up Article Three’s question of whether eternity belongs to God alone, then Article Four’s comparison of eternity and time, moving through each article’s objections, sed contra, and replies with Boethius’s Consolation, Aristotle’s Physics and Categories, and Augustine as running references. He digresses along the way into geometry, logic, and the “now” as it differs in time and in eternity, using purgatory as a case where duration is neither straightforwardly temporal nor eternal. The class closes by opening Article Five, laying out the objections that introduce the aevum, the intermediate duration proper to angels and spiritual substances, as the next problem to be resolved.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/036-common-doctor-dividing-into-twos-and-threes-the-aevum-q-10/Thu, 18 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/036-common-doctor-dividing-into-twos-and-threes-the-aevum-q-10/Berquist begins with Heraclitus’s fragment on the “common” to explain why Aquinas is called the Common Doctor, then turns to his habit of dividing questions into twos and threes, tracing the pattern through the Summa Contra Gentiles and the biblical commentaries. The core of the class is q.10, articles 5 and 6, where Aquinas asks whether the aevum differs from time and eternity, and how angelic being is measured by it—leaning on Aristotle’s Physics, Book VI, on the continuous. Objections are worked through in detail, with side discussions on Eucharistic change and on Hegel’s misreading of becoming.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/037-summa-i-q-11-arts-1-2-the-one-convertible-with-being-and/Tue, 23 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/037-summa-i-q-11-arts-1-2-the-one-convertible-with-being-and/Berquist takes up the first two articles of Question 11 of the Summa, on the divine unity. He asks whether “one” names something real added to being, distinguishing the transcendental one—convertible with being itself—from the numerical one, the principle of quantity and counting. Working closely through Aquinas’s objections and replies, he traces how one is opposed to the many not as its contrary but as its measure, drawing on Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics and on Pythagoras, Plato, Avicenna, and Dionysius to show how the mind ascends from being to division to unity to multitude.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/038-summa-i-q-11-arts-3-4-god-is-one-and-most-of-all-one-review/Tue, 23 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/038-summa-i-q-11-arts-3-4-god-is-one-and-most-of-all-one-review/Berquist takes up two questions: whether God is one, and whether God is most one. He follows Aquinas’s arguments from divine simplicity, infinite perfection, and the unity of world-order, and works through the replies to objections concerning number, privation, and the difference between mathematical and metaphysical unity. Along the way he brings in Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics, contrasts Aquinas’s position with Plato’s forms, and explains how language of privation can be said of God without implying any imperfection in him. He ends by placing these articles within the Summa’s larger plan—existence, substance, operations—and looks ahead to the questions on divine knowledge and naming, using wave-particle complementarity as an image for why no single human concept can capture God’s perfection.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/039-summa-i-q-12-intro-and-a-1-we-name-things-as-we-know-them/Thu, 14 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/039-summa-i-q-12-intro-and-a-1-we-name-things-as-we-know-them/Having laid out God’s simplicity, perfection, and infinity, Berquist turns to how a creature comes to know and name Him at all, tracing the principle that our names follow our knowledge, and our knowledge follows the order of things—a pattern he ties back to Aristotle’s Categories. He then maps the structure of question 12, which asks whether a created intellect can see God’s essence, taking up natural reason’s grasp of God and the “light of glory” needed for the beatific vision. Article 1 gets close attention: Thomas argues, with support from Aristotle’s act/potency distinction and citations of Chrysostom and Dionysius, that God is supremely knowable in Himself yet elusive to us, like Dionysius’s bat blinded by staring at the sun. Berquist also draws on Summa Contra Gentiles IV, ch. 15 to fill out the point.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/040-summa-i-q-12-a-1-replies-and-a-2-god-infinite-and-knowable/Thu, 14 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/040-summa-i-q-12-a-1-replies-and-a-2-god-infinite-and-knowable/Berquist takes up objections in Summa I, q. 12, a. 1 drawn from Chrysostom, Dionysius, and Scripture, which press on whether a finite creature can be “proportioned” to see an infinite God. He traces Aquinas’s replies through a distinction between comprehending God and merely seeing him, and through two different senses of “infinite” and of “proportion” itself. He then moves into a. 2, explaining why no created likeness can stand in for the divine essence and why the intellect instead needs the “light of glory” to unite it immediately to God’s own substance. Along the way he draws on Aristotle’s Physics and De Anima and on Euclid to sharpen the key terms.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/041-summa-i-q-12-a-3-4-can-the-bodily-eye-see-god-the-meanings/Thu, 28 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/041-summa-i-q-12-a-3-4-can-the-bodily-eye-see-god-the-meanings/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether God’s essence could be seen by bodily or imaginative sight, and whether a created intellect can attain that vision by nature rather than grace. He works through the objections and answers—drawing on Job, Isaiah, Augustine’s City of God, Dionysius, and Aristotle, along with Summa Contra Gentiles IV, ch. 15—to separate sensation, imagination, and understanding as distinct powers. Analogies like perceiving life in a living body and Hamlet’s “mind’s eye” clarify why Scripture’s talk of “seeing” God is metaphorical, not literal. He concludes that vision of the divine essence belongs to intellect alone, and only by grace.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/042-summa-i-q-12-a-4-5-the-knowers-way-of-being-why-reason-is/Thu, 28 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/042-summa-i-q-12-a-4-5-the-knowers-way-of-being-why-reason-is/Berquist takes up Summa Theologiae I, q. 12, articles four and five, where Aquinas asks whether any created intellect can see the divine essence by natural power alone, and answers no—an elevating “light of glory” is needed instead. Drawing on Aristotle’s De Anima to explain how knowing requires the known to become immaterially present in the knower, Berquist shows why God’s essence, as pure act, exceeds every created intellect’s natural capacity. He works through the objection that this light might function as a medium standing between intellect and object, using comparisons to sense cognition and angelic knowledge to clarify how it instead elevates the knower’s own power.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/043-summa-i-q-12-a-6-7-why-some-see-god-more-perfectly-and-why/Thu, 05 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/043-summa-i-q-12-a-6-7-why-some-see-god-more-perfectly-and-why/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of the beatific vision, asking first why one soul sees God’s essence more perfectly than another—answered through charity and the light of glory—and then why no created intellect, though it sees God’s whole essence, can be said to comprehend Him. He moves through the article’s objections and replies, drawing the key distinction between knowing a thing according to its mode and knowing it as fully as it is knowable, and between seeing and comprehending, using analogies from geometry, music, and human relationships. Along the way he digresses into eternity versus time in heaven, spiritual marriage as an image of the soul’s union with God, and a comparison of the four major prophets to the four evangelists.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/044-summa-i-q-12-a-8-10-what-the-blessed-see-in-god-seeing-without/Thu, 05 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/044-summa-i-q-12-a-8-10-what-the-blessed-see-in-god-seeing-without/Berquist takes up articles 8 through 10 of Aquinas’s question on the beatific vision, weighing objections from Gregory the Great, Augustine, Dionysius, and Aristotle against the claim that seeing God means seeing all things in Him. He concludes that such knowledge is proportioned to how perfectly God is seen, so no created intellect comprehends everything God can make or do. Along the way he draws on Aristotle on understanding greater and lesser objects, Augustine’s Confessions on knowing God versus knowing creatures, and even literary asides on Homer, Chaucer, and Shakespeare’s Henry V. He closes by opening article 10, contrasting angelic and temporal succession with the timeless, unified vision Augustine describes in De Trinitate.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/045-summa-i-q-12-a-11-12-no-vision-of-gods-essence-in-this-life/Thu, 02 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/045-summa-i-q-12-a-11-12-no-vision-of-gods-essence-in-this-life/Berquist takes up two articles of Question 12: whether any human being in this life can see God through His essence, and whether God can be known by natural reason. He works through Aquinas’s objections and responses, testing the claim against scriptural cases—Jacob, Moses, Paul—and Augustine’s teaching on divine illumination, before turning to how far reason can reach God only through the effects of creatures. Digressions touch Boethius, Dionysius, Heraclitus, and Mortimer Adler. The class closes at the opening of Article 13, having settled that only special grace, not nature, allows any glimpse of the divine essence here.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/046-summa-i-q-12-a-13-and-introduction-to-q-13-knowing-god-by/Thu, 02 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/046-summa-i-q-12-a-13-and-introduction-to-q-13-knowing-god-by/Berquist works through Article 13 of Question 12, where Aquinas asks whether grace grants a fuller knowledge of God than natural reason achieves on its own. Grace, he shows, strengthens the natural light of understanding and can supply divinely-formed images, producing a more perfect knowledge even though God’s essence remains unseen in this life. Berquist then turns to Question 13, laying out its twelve articles—from whether God can be named at all, through the meaning of the word “God” and the name “He who is,” to whether affirmative statements about God are possible—showing how the question of naming follows directly from how we know God. He draws on Dionysius, Aristotle, and Scripture along the way.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/047-aquinas-on-the-names-of-god-part-1-can-god-be-named-and-do/Thu, 09 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/047-aquinas-on-the-names-of-god-part-1-can-god-be-named-and-do/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of divine names: can creatures name God at all, given that names arise from what we know, and God is known only through creatures? He traces the three ways names reach God—through causality, excellence, and negation—and asks why both abstract terms like “goodness” and concrete terms like “good” are needed, each catching something the other misses. Moving into Article 2, he asks whether any name said of God actually reaches his substance or only points toward it without expressing what God is. Dionysius, Augustine, and Maimonides are drawn on throughout to show how far, and how little, our words can reach the divine essence.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/048-aquinas-on-the-names-of-god-part-2-proper-and-metaphorical/Thu, 09 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/048-aquinas-on-the-names-of-god-part-2-proper-and-metaphorical/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of how creaturely names can signify God, distinguishing a name’s etymology from its meaning. “Good” and “living” name God properly, since their meaning carries no built-in material mode, while “rock” or “stone” remain metaphorical because their sense can’t be pried loose from matter. He surveys the rhetorical figures behind such naming—metaphor, irony, antonomasia, synecdoche, metonymy—drawing on Ambrose, Dionysius, and Thomas’s own scriptural commentaries, then asks why Scripture prefers metaphor. He closes on the imagination: its proper subjection to God, and its history of running “bold” and errant when it isn’t.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/049-hallowed-be-thy-name-why-dionysius-writes-about-names-and/Thu, 16 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/049-hallowed-be-thy-name-why-dionysius-writes-about-names-and/Why do many divine names all point to one simple God without collapsing into synonyms? Berquist traces Aquinas’s answer in Summa Theologiae I, q. 13, a. 4: each name like “good” or “wise” signifies the same reality but under a different ratio, an imperfect conception drawn from a distinct creaturely perfection. He contrasts Dionysius’s approach, organized around names themselves, with Aquinas’s, organized around things, and shows how thoughts and words both serve as starting points for speaking of God. The petition “Hallowed be Thy name” from the Lord’s Prayer frames the discussion, and the class closes with Aquinas’s reply invoking Aristotle’s semantic theory to explain signification without synonymy.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/050-carrying-names-over-to-god-analogy-between-univocal-and-equivocal/Thu, 16 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/050-carrying-names-over-to-god-analogy-between-univocal-and-equivocal/Berquist reads closely through articles 5 and 6 of question 13, objections and replies included, on whether names said of God and creatures are univocal, equivocal, or analogical. He lays out Aquinas’s two kinds of analogy—attribution and proper proportionality—and the distinction between the order in which we come to know a name, from creatures, and the order in which it truly belongs, first to God as cause. He brings in Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics, Dionysius’s Divine Names, and scriptural texts from Genesis, Ephesians, and Romans to show how a word like “good” is carried over from its creaturely sense to an eminent sense in God.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/051-summa-theologiae-i-q-13-article-7-are-lord-and-creator-said/Thu, 30 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/051-summa-theologiae-i-q-13-article-7-are-lord-and-creator-said/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether names that imply relation to creatures—“Lord,” “Creator”—apply to God only beginning in time, or from eternity. Drawing on Aristotle’s account of relation, he distinguishes real relations from relations of reason, and further separates relativa secundum esse from relativa secundum dici, using a column’s “right” side, a father and son, and knowledge of a known object as test cases. This lets Aquinas hold that God is truly called Lord in time without any change in God, since the relation is real only on the creature’s side. Berquist works through the article’s six objections and replies, reaching for analogies from a cat’s size to Bertrand Russell’s set theory along the way.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/052-summa-i-q-13-aa-8-10-what-the-name-god-signifies-whether/Thu, 07 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/052-summa-i-q-13-aa-8-10-what-the-name-god-signifies-whether/Berquist returns to Aquinas’s treatment of the divine name “God,” asking whether it signifies the divine nature itself or only God’s operation, whether the name can be communicated to creatures, and how it is predicated of God by nature, of creatures by participation, and of idols merely by opinion. Working closely through the Latin text of articles eight through ten, he draws out scholastic distinctions—between a name’s etymological source and what it actually signifies, and among univocal, equivocal, and analogical predication—illustrating them with examples like “stone,” “philosophy,” and “lion.” The class concludes that “God” is strictly incommunicable but extended analogically through likeness.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/053-summa-i-q-13-aa-10-12-univocal-equivocal-and-analogous-names/Thu, 07 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/053-summa-i-q-13-aa-10-12-univocal-equivocal-and-analogous-names/Berquist closes out the replies in article 10, on how “God” is used differently by believers and pagans, before turning to article 11’s question of why “Qui est”—He Who Is—stands as God’s most proper name, judged by signification, meaning, and universality. He distinguishes predication from signification, and equivocation “by chance” from equivocation “by reason,” which is analogy, using examples from Aristotle, Dionysius, Boethius, and Hilary of Poitiers. Article 12 then asks whether affirmative propositions can be truly formed about God despite his absolute simplicity. A handout page and a passage from the First Philosophers volume supply further illustration.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/054-summa-i-q-14-the-order-of-the-question-on-gods-knowledge/Thu, 14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/054-summa-i-q-14-the-order-of-the-question-on-gods-knowledge/Berquist takes up Summa Theologiae I, q. 14 on divine knowledge, first situating it against the treatment of God’s operations in the Summa Contra Gentiles and distinguishing immanent from transitive operations. He surveys the question’s sixteen articles before settling on Article 1: is there knowledge in God? The answer turns on Aquinas’s account of knowing as the immaterial possession of another thing’s form, drawn out through Summa Contra Gentiles II, ch. 4 and IV, ch. 15. A handout on the four kinds of argument supplies the logical framework for reading the article’s structure.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/055-summa-i-q-14-article-2-does-god-understand-himself/Thu, 14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/055-summa-i-q-14-article-2-does-god-understand-himself/Berquist takes up the question of whether God understands Himself, beginning from an objection drawn from the Liber de Causis and Aristotle’s De Anima before laying out Thomas’s response. Because God is pure act with no potentiality, His act of understanding, the one who understands, and the object understood are simply identical—unlike human and angelic knowing, where the possible intellect stands to intelligible objects as prime matter stands to natural forms, so that we know ourselves only indirectly, by first knowing other things. He draws out connections to act and potency in Aristotle’s Metaphysics IX, to the Nicomachean Ethics, and to the Trinity as reflected analogically in the soul’s own self-knowing and self-loving.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/056-summa-i-q-14-arts-3-4-does-god-comprehend-himself-and-is/Thu, 21 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/056-summa-i-q-14-arts-3-4-does-god-comprehend-himself-and-is/Berquist takes up two questions about divine knowledge in Summa Theologiae I, Q.14. Article 3 asks whether God comprehends Himself perfectly; since God is pure act, He is at once maximally knowable and maximally knowing, so the comprehension is complete. Article 4 asks whether God’s understanding is His very substance, and Berquist argues for this identity on the model of the earlier proof that in God essence and existence coincide. He leans on Aristotle’s Metaphysics IX and XII for the underlying act/potency framework, and pauses over the distinction between what holds true simply and what holds true only in a qualified sense.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/057-summa-i-q-14-arts-5-6-god-knows-other-things-in-himself-and/Thu, 21 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/057-summa-i-q-14-arts-5-6-god-knows-other-things-in-himself-and/Berquist takes up two linked questions in Aquinas: does God know creatures at all, and does He know them each in their particularity or only in a general way? He traces the objections and Augustine citations Aquinas marshals, showing that God does not know things by looking outward to them but by knowing His own essence, which contains their likenesses more perfectly than they possess them themselves. Along the way he reaches for comparisons outside the text—the geometric limit of a circle approached by polygons, Berkeley’s idealism, Sartre on freedom—to make the logical shape of Aquinas’s argument about universal versus particular knowledge vivid.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/058-faith-hope-and-charity-in-jude-is-gods-knowledge-discursive/Thu, 04 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/058-faith-hope-and-charity-in-jude-is-gods-knowledge-discursive/Berquist begins with Jude 20–21, asking how the epistle’s ordering of faith, hope, and charity toward eternal life compares to other schemes for presenting sacred doctrine—the Bible’s own order, the Summa’s, and Augustine’s, echoed later in Dei Verbum. He then works through Summa Theologiae I, q.14, a.7, on whether God’s knowledge is discursive, using an example from Euclidean geometry to clarify what discursive reasoning is and why it cannot apply to God, who knows all at once. He starts a.8, on whether God’s knowledge causes things, drawing out how intellect and will together account for God causing what He knows. Along the way he brings in Aristotle, Augustine, Shakespeare, and Homer to sharpen the argument.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/059-gods-knowledge-of-things-that-are-not-and-of-bad-things-knowing/Thu, 04 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/059-gods-knowledge-of-things-that-are-not-and-of-bad-things-knowing/Berquist takes up two articles of Aquinas on divine knowledge: whether God knows non-beings, things that are not, and whether God knows evil things. He follows the disputation itself—objections, sed contra, respondeo, replies—showing how Aquinas distinguishes the knowledge of vision from simple understanding, and argues that evil is known only indirectly, through the good it deprives. Along the way he draws on Aristotle’s Metaphysics and De Anima, Boethius, Augustine, and Dionysius’s Divine Names, and digresses into Plato’s Meno and Sartre on nothingness and freedom to sharpen the notion of privation and ignorance.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/060-summa-i-q-14-a-11-whether-god-knows-singulars-practical-knowledge/Thu, 11 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/060-summa-i-q-14-a-11-whether-god-knows-singulars-practical-knowledge/Berquist takes up the question of whether God knows singulars, against the Aristotelian background in which understanding grasps universals and sense alone reaches particulars. He follows Aquinas’s answer in Summa I, q.14, a.11: God’s knowledge is not caused by things, as ours is, but is the cause of things, extending to matter as well as form, so it reaches singulars directly through the divine essence without needing abstraction. Along the way he digresses into Empedocles on the elements, the difference between universal and singular in fiction and history, and the discreteness of thought against continuous quantity, before turning to a related passage in q.93.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/061-summa-i-q-14-a-12-whether-god-knows-infinite-things-senses/Thu, 11 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/061-summa-i-q-14-a-12-whether-god-knows-infinite-things-senses/Berquist takes up the article asking whether God can know an infinity of things, walking through the objections and Augustine’s authority before reaching Aquinas’s answer: God knows all things through the divine essence, which serves as a likeness of each thing in its particularity, and this differs according to whether the knowing is “of vision” or “of simple intelligence.” He widens the discussion into Aristotle’s Physics, drawing on the commentary’s treatment of the senses of “in” and of limit and infinity from the Metaphysics, and works through matter-form relations and a translation question over logos, ratio, and oratio. He closes by testing potency versus actuality against examples from quantum theory, relativity, and elementary particles.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/062-summa-i-q-14-a-13-does-god-know-future-contingents-eternity/Thu, 18 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/062-summa-i-q-14-a-13-does-god-know-future-contingents-eternity/Can God know future contingent events without making them necessary? Berquist walks through Aquinas’s article, arguing that God does not know contingents merely as conjectured from their causes but as actually present to Him in the eternal “now,” following Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy definition of eternity. He takes up Thomas’s replies to the objections one by one, including the distinction between necessary causes and contingent effects, and the composition/division fallacy that shows why a foreknown event need not “have to” happen. Drawing on Aristotle’s Categories, Posterior Analytics, and Peri Hermeneias, he stresses how time-bound human reason struggles to picture eternity’s simultaneity, and notes its bearing on later Trinitarian questions.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/063-summa-i-q-14-aa-14-15-gods-knowledge-of-statements-and-why/Thu, 18 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/063-summa-i-q-14-aa-14-15-gods-knowledge-of-statements-and-why/Berquist takes up two Aquinas articles on divine knowledge: does God know enunciable things—truths formed by joining subject and predicate—and is that knowledge variable? Aquinas answers that God grasps every true statement in the single, undivided act of knowing His own essence, not by composing and dividing as we do. His knowledge stays unchanging even as the temporal things He knows change, because knowledge and love, unlike creating, name relations in the knower rather than in the thing known. Berquist digresses into Aristotle on relations and true/false statements, and, against Plato, argues true knowledge need not copy the mode of being of its object—illustrated with an example from Shakespeare.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/064-summa-i-q-14-a-16-and-intro-to-q-15-is-gods-knowledge-looking/Thu, 25 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/064-summa-i-q-14-a-16-and-intro-to-q-15-is-gods-knowledge-looking/Berquist finishes Article 16 of Question 14, where Thomas distinguishes speculative from practical knowledge in three ways—by the object known, the mode of knowing, and the end intended—to argue that God’s knowledge of Himself is purely speculative, while His knowledge of creatures is practical insofar as He intends to bring them into being. He then turns to Question 15 on the divine ideas, tracing the term back to Plato’s eidos, or separated Form, and asking whether truth requires that our mode of knowing match the mode of a thing’s being. Aristotle denies this requirement; Augustine, read alongside him, relocates Plato’s Forms into the mind of God rather than a separate world.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/065-summa-i-q-15-aa-1-3-ideas-in-the-divine-mind-whether-there/Thu, 25 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/065-summa-i-q-15-aa-1-3-ideas-in-the-divine-mind-whether-there/Berquist takes up Question 15 of the Prima Pars, “On the Ideas,” working article by article through whether ideas are in God at all, whether they are many or one, and whether there is an idea corresponding to everything God knows. He follows Aquinas’s arguments and replies closely, drawing on Augustine’s Eighty-Three Questions and Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Physics, with side references to Dionysius, Plato, and Damascene. Along the way he distinguishes “idea” from “form” and asks how divine simplicity survives the plurality of ideas: not as many forms in God, but as the many ways one essence can be known as imitable. He tests the doctrine against hard cases—matter, genera, and evil as objects of divine knowledge.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/066-summa-i-q-16-a-1-is-truth-in-the-mind-or-in-things-doctors/Thu, 08 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/066-summa-i-q-16-a-1-is-truth-in-the-mind-or-in-things-doctors/Berquist begins with a brief note on Aquinas’s standing among the Doctors of the Church, citing tributes from Popes John XXII, John XXIII, and Leo XIII, before turning to Summa Theologiae I, q. 16. Laying out the prologue’s eight articles, he focuses on article 1: is truth found only in the understanding, or also in things? Weighing objections drawn from Augustine and Aristotle, he follows Thomas’s answer that truth is properly the conformity of intellect to thing, and belongs to things only secondarily, insofar as they correspond to an intellect—above all the divine intellect—as their cause. Courtroom testimony and geometrical examples illustrate the doctrine of truth as adequatio.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/067-summa-i-q-16-a-1-3-same-knowledge-of-opposites-truth-in-judgment/Thu, 08 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/067-summa-i-q-16-a-1-3-same-knowledge-of-opposites-truth-in-judgment/Berquist asks why truth is found primarily in the mind rather than in things, even though goodness works the other way around, residing chiefly in things themselves. He distinguishes the intellect’s “first act,” simple apprehension of what something is, from its “second act,” the judgment made by affirming or denying, arguing with Aristotle’s Metaphysics and De Anima that truth strictly belongs only to this act of composing and dividing. He closes with the convertibility of truth and being, taking up the puzzle of how negations and non-being can still be known as “beings of reason,” illustrating the distinctions with comparisons to love and with everyday examples.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/068-summa-i-q-16-a-4-5-is-the-true-before-the-good-is-god-truth/Thu, 22 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/068-summa-i-q-16-a-4-5-is-the-true-before-the-good-is-god-truth/Berquist takes up two questions from Aquinas’s treatise on truth: does the good take priority over the true, or the true over the good, and is God truth itself? He reads through the objections and replies of article 4, using the coffee-and-sugar example and the notion of what is “per se notum” to sort out priority “simply” versus “in some respect.” Turning to article 5, he considers how truth is appropriated to the Son within Trinitarian language. Aristotle’s Ethics and Augustine’s On True Religion are drawn in alongside a reading from a handout on the natural fragments of the first philosophers.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/069-summa-i-q-16-a-5-6-privation-opposites-and-the-fallacy-of/Thu, 22 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/069-summa-i-q-16-a-5-6-privation-opposites-and-the-fallacy-of/Berquist opens with an objection from the Disputed Questions on Truth: if God causes all truth, does he thereby cause sin? He answers by distinguishing mere non-being from privation, and by exposing the fallacy of the accident lurking in the objection. From there he digresses into Aristotle’s four kinds of opposition from the Categories—relatives, contraries, privation and possession, contradiction—and into analogous predication, using being and health as his examples, as treated in the Metaphysics. He compares how the Summa Theologiae, Summa Contra Gentiles, and Compendium Theologiae order the divine attributes, before finishing with Summa I, q.16, a.6: whether truth is one or many, distinguishing truth as it exists in many created minds from truth as things stand relative to the one divine truth.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/070-summa-theologiae-i-q-16-aa-7-8-is-created-truth-eternal-is/Thu, 01 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/070-summa-theologiae-i-q-16-aa-7-8-is-created-truth-eternal-is/Berquist takes up two questions from Aquinas on truth: whether created truth is eternal (Article Seven) and whether truth is unchangeable (Article Eight), weighing objections drawn from Augustine and Anselm against Thomas’s replies. He digresses into Aristotle’s account of truth and being in the Metaphysics and Peri Hermeneias, explaining the convertibility of being, one, true, and good, and distinguishing privation from mere negation. Examples range from Socrates on the soul’s immortality to Shakespeare’s King Lear, and he opens by reflecting on a verse from Sirach about wine, music, and the love of wisdom. A brief passage from Summa Contra Gentiles IV on the world’s eternity also enters the discussion.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/071-summa-theologiae-i-q-17-aa-1-2-falsity-in-things-and-in-the/Thu, 01 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/071-summa-theologiae-i-q-17-aa-1-2-falsity-in-things-and-in-the/Berquist takes up Question 17 of the Prima Pars, asking whether falsity can be found in things themselves and whether the senses are ever false. Reading Aquinas against Augustine’s Soliloquies and On True Religion, and against Aristotle’s Metaphysics, he shows why falsity belongs properly to the understanding rather than to reality, since a thing is only called false relative to a mind it misleads—as with fool’s gold, which deceives judgment without itself being false. Turning to article two, he traces how sense error arises: through accidental sensibles, a poorly disposed organ, or common sensibles known indirectly through proper ones, never through the proper sensible itself. Wine tasting and optical illusions supply the concrete cases throughout.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/072-summa-i-q-17-a-3-whether-falsehood-is-in-the-understanding/Thu, 15 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/072-summa-i-q-17-a-3-whether-falsehood-is-in-the-understanding/Can the intellect itself be deceived, or only its judgments? Berquist follows Thomas through Article Three of Question Seventeen, distinguishing the mind’s simple grasp of what a thing is—where error has no purchase—from its act of composing and dividing propositions, where falsehood becomes possible. He sets this against Aristotle’s four kinds of opposition (contradiction, privation, contrariety, relation) to place truth and falsity correctly among them, reaching toward Article Four. Examples range from sense perception and everyday misjudgments to a Trinitarian case, with side excursions into Macbeth’s witches and a handout on Shakespeare and error.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/073-summa-i-q-17-a-4-true-and-false-as-contraries-q-18-on-the/Thu, 15 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/073-summa-i-q-17-a-4-true-and-false-as-contraries-q-18-on-the/Berquist takes up the question of whether true and false stand as contraries, drawing on Aristotle’s Peri Hermeneias and Metaphysics IV to sort out negation, privation, and contrariety, and answering objections that invoke Augustine on falsehood and idols and on divine truth. He then moves into q. 18, a. 1 on whether life belongs properly to God, setting the Summa Theologiae’s treatment beside the Summa Contra Gentiles and turning to Aristotle’s De Anima for the grades of life and kinds of soul, before showing why understanding is treated ahead of will and how John’s Gospel appropriates life and truth to the Son.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/074-aquinas-on-life-st-i-q-18-a-1-3-moving-oneself-life-as-being/Thu, 22 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/074-aquinas-on-life-st-i-q-18-a-1-3-moving-oneself-life-as-being/Berquist takes up three articles of the Summa’s question on life. Article 1 asks whether “to live” applies to all natural bodies, using self-motion—plants moving toward nourishment, animals toward sense objects—as the test for what distinguishes living from merely moved things. Article 2 asks whether life names an operation or the very being underlying operations, and Article 3 asks whether life belongs to God. Drawing on Aristotle’s Metaphysics XII, Berquist follows Aquinas’s ascent from plant to animal to rational self-motion, concluding that God, whose understanding is eternally in act, possesses life most perfectly and is, properly speaking, life itself.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/075-life-in-god-st-i-q-18-a-3-4-perfect-act-all-things-as-life/Thu, 22 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/075-life-in-god-st-i-q-18-a-3-4-perfect-act-all-things-as-life/Berquist takes up Aquinas on God’s life, using Aristotle’s three senses of act—motion, immanent activity, and form—to show how Plato’s self-moving God and Aristotle’s unmoved mover can both be true of God. He then works through whether all things are “life” in God, drawing on the Prologue of John and Paul’s “in Him we live and move and have our being,” and explains through Thomas’s replies why creatures have a higher being in the divine mind than in themselves, and why evil cannot be called life in God. He closes by sketching how the treatise moves next into God’s knowledge, will, love, and providence, organized around the same distinction between immanent operation and activity directed outward.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/076-summa-i-q-19-arts-1-2-light-and-life-in-st-john-whether-there/Thu, 29 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/076-summa-i-q-19-arts-1-2-light-and-life-in-st-john-whether-there/Berquist begins in St. John, tracing Aquinas’s division of the Gospel and asking why light and life appear coupled in John 8 much as way, truth, and life are elsewhere—a pairing he links to Aristotle on the soul and life in living things. He then moves into Summa Theologiae I, q. 19, working closely through Article 1, whether will exists in God, and Article 2, whether God wills things besides Himself, unpacking Thomas’s arguments and replies to objections against comparisons drawn from Aristotle, Plato, and Augustine. He closes on divine freedom in willing creatures into existence, and what that freedom implies for human gratitude.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/077-summa-i-q-19-arts-3-4-absolute-vs-suppositional-necessity/Thu, 29 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/077-summa-i-q-19-arts-3-4-absolute-vs-suppositional-necessity/Berquist takes up two articles from Aquinas’s question on the divine will: does God will all things necessarily, and is His will the cause of things? He draws out the objections and Thomas’s replies, distinguishing absolute necessity from necessity by supposition to show why God wills His own goodness necessarily but other things freely. Along the way he contrasts the necessity proper to divine knowledge with the freedom proper to divine willing, and brings in Aristotle, Averroes, Dionysius, and Augustine to sharpen the text. Digressions on Plato’s and Aristotle’s literary forms and on natural versus voluntary causation serve to clarify Thomas’s argument.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/078-summa-i-q-19-articles-5-6-nothing-causes-gods-will-and-his/Thu, 19 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/078-summa-i-q-19-articles-5-6-nothing-causes-gods-will-and-his/Can anything be assigned as a cause of God’s will, and is his will always accomplished even when creatures resist it? Berquist works through Aquinas’s arguments in Article Five and Article Six, showing why God’s willing is simple and non-discursive rather than reasoned like ours, and why nothing external can determine it. He develops the antecedent-consequent distinction—illustrated by a judge’s will toward a condemned man and Christ’s will in Gethsemane—to explain how a particular effect can seem to thwart God while his will as universal cause remains unfrustrated. Augustine, Aristotle, and Damascene are drawn in along the way, with a digression touching Einstein and quantum debates.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/079-summa-i-q-19-articles-7-9-gods-will-does-not-change-does/Thu, 19 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/079-summa-i-q-19-articles-7-9-gods-will-does-not-change-does/Berquist takes up three hard questions about the divine will in Question 19: is it changeable, does it impose necessity on everything willed, and does God will evil? Working through each article’s objections, sed contra, and corpus, he draws out Aquinas’s key distinctions—willing a change is not the same as a change of will, and necessity can be conditional rather than absolute, per se causes differ from per accidens ones. Everyday analogies help show how divine immutability and providence coexist with contingency and free choice. The discussion closes by locating evil’s presence within, rather than against, a well-ordered universe.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/080-summa-i-q-19-arts-10-12-gods-free-choice-and-the-will-of/Thu, 26 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/080-summa-i-q-19-arts-10-12-gods-free-choice-and-the-will-of/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether God possesses free judgment (liberum arbitrium), working through the objections, sed contra, and corpus of Article 10 with citations from Jerome, Ambrose, and Augustine. He then turns to Article 11’s account of the “will of the sign,” distinguishing the metaphorical sense in which God’s will is signified from acts that are properly volitions. Examples from Scripture, Shakespeare, and classical philosophy illustrate points about necessity and divine willing. He closes by laying out the fivefold division of the signs of God’s will—operation, permission, precept, prohibition, and counsel—and connecting counsel to the three evangelical counsels and the goods of soul, body, and exterior things.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/081-the-eleven-emotions-and-summa-i-q-20-art-1-is-there-love/Thu, 26 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/081-the-eleven-emotions-and-summa-i-q-20-art-1-is-there-love/Berquist works through the eleven concupiscible and irascible movements of the soul—love and hate, desire and aversion, joy and sadness, hope and despair, fear and boldness, and anger—tracing their bearing on ethics, rhetoric, music, and literature. He then follows Aquinas in transferring these emotional names analogically to the will, drawing on the Summa Contra Gentiles and the Prima Secundae before turning to a close reading of Summa Theologiae I, q. 20, a. 1. Using the principle that what belongs to a thing “through itself” is prior to what belongs “through another,” he shows why love is the root of every appetitive act, and why love and joy, stripped of their bodily component, can properly be attributed to God.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/082-part-1-gods-love-for-all-things-and-whether-he-loves-them/Thu, 03 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/082-part-1-gods-love-for-all-things-and-whether-he-loves-them/Berquist takes up Question 20 of the Prima Pars, reading closely through the objections, sed contra, and body of Articles 2 and 3. The question is whether God loves all things, and whether He loves them all equally. He draws out Thomas’s distinction between the love of concupiscence and the love of friendship, and the key point that God’s love causes goodness in creatures rather than responding to goodness already there, unlike human love. He also explains how God can be said to love some things “more,” through the greater good willed to them, even while the intensity of His will remains one and undivided—drawing on Dionysius, Augustine, Aristotle, and passages from Wisdom and the Psalms.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/083-part-2-whether-god-always-loves-the-better-more-and-the-justice/Thu, 03 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/083-part-2-whether-god-always-loves-the-better-more-and-the-justice/Berquist works through Article 4 of Aquinas’s question on the love of God, asking whether God always loves the better thing more. He tests the claim against hard cases—Christ versus the human race, angels versus man, Peter versus John, the penitent versus the innocent—before turning to Aquinas’s answer that God’s love causes goodness in things rather than responding to goodness already there. He then opens Question 21 on divine justice and mercy, distinguishing commutative from distributive justice and weighing objections about God’s will, debt, and the difference between essence and act, drawing on the Sentences commentary, the Ethics, Scripture, and Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory along the way.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/084-summa-i-q-21-arts-2-4-justice-as-truth-gods-mercy-and-mercy/Thu, 10 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/084-summa-i-q-21-arts-2-4-justice-as-truth-gods-mercy-and-mercy/Berquist takes up three articles of Summa Theologiae I, q. 21, tracing Aquinas’s case that divine justice can be called truth, since justice concerns reason rightly ordering will and action. He then asks whether mercy fits God at all, distinguishing mercy from mere pity and showing how goodness, justice, liberality, and mercy name one divine reality under different aspects. Along the way he digresses on the words felicitas, misericordia, and wretched, and draws parallels from Shakespeare and Greek tragedy and comedy. The class closes by opening article four’s question of how mercy and justice together underlie every work of God, starting with creation.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/085-summa-i-q-21-art-4-replies-and-q-22-art-1-mercy-in-every/Thu, 10 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/085-summa-i-q-21-art-4-replies-and-q-22-art-1-mercy-in-every/Berquist works through the replies to Article 4, answering objections drawn from the damned, the conversion of Jews and Gentiles, the sufferings of the just, and creation itself, to show that mercy and justice are both present in every act of God even when one is more prominent — an “Anaxagorean” point about naming things from what stands out in them. He then turns to Question 22, Article 1, asking whether providence belongs to God, tracing the term through Cicero, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics Book VI, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, and Damascene, with the etymology of providentia and prudentia and examples from politics and war along the way.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/086-sweet-and-right-a-psalm-commentary-on-gods-mercy-and-justice/Thu, 24 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/086-sweet-and-right-a-psalm-commentary-on-gods-mercy-and-justice/Why does Scripture call mercy “sweet” but reach for words like rectus and veritas to name God’s justice? Berquist works through Aquinas’s commentaries on Psalms 24, 30/31, 35, and 39, along with passages from Tobias, Wisdom, and Ephesians, to draw out a threefold likeness — refreshment, delight, rest — behind the metaphor of sweetness as it applies to mercy, goodness, and beauty. He connects this to the Summa’s own ordering of mercy before justice and the hope and fear each attribute stirs. The class then opens Summa I, q.22, a.2, asking whether all things are subject to divine providence.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/087-chance-evil-and-free-will-under-divine-providence-god-plans/Thu, 24 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/087-chance-evil-and-free-will-under-divine-providence-god-plans/Does chance, evil, or human freedom show that God’s providence cannot reach every particular thing? Berquist takes up Aquinas’s objections in Summa Theologiae I, q. 22, aa. 2–3, arguing that each rests on confusing universal with particular causality, or God’s knowledge with His mode of executing it through secondary causes. He illustrates the point with chance meetings and the contrast between art and nature, and draws in the Book of Job on faith amid evil, Augustine’s Enchiridion, and Plato’s threefold providence via Gregory of Nyssa to show providence extends to particulars and evils without destroying creaturely freedom.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/088-six-senses-of-sleep-tocquevilles-doubt-providence-and-contingency/Thu, 31 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/088-six-senses-of-sleep-tocquevilles-doubt-providence-and-contingency/Berquist opens with Aquinas’s Commentary on John, distinguishing six senses of “sleep” that bear on the Lazarus narrative before asking why Christ was rejected in Chapter 12, comparing this to the parallel account in Matthew 21–23. He digresses through Aristotle on chance and fortune, Augustine’s numerological reading of the 153 fish in John 21, and Tocqueville’s late reconciliation with the Church as a case of doubt overcome by faith. The class then moves into the Summa Theologiae, asking whether providence imposes necessity on the things it governs (I, Q.22, a.4) and opening the question of predestination (Q.23, a.1).https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/089-predestination-in-the-divine-mind-reprobation-and-divine/Thu, 31 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/089-predestination-in-the-divine-mind-reprobation-and-divine/Berquist follows Aquinas article by article through Question 23 on predestination, asking first whether predestination places anything real in the one predestined, then whether reprobation belongs to God at all, and finally whether the predestined are objects of divine choice. Working closely through each article’s objections, sed contra, and corpus, he draws on Augustine, Dionysius, and Aristotle to unpack distinctions between immanent and transitive action, and between God’s antecedent and consequent will, showing how these bear on love, choice, and providence. Along the way he digresses into Origen and Calvin on related errors. The class breaks off mid-argument in Article 4, with the rest left for a later session.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/090-aquinas-on-predestination-st-i-q-23-arts-5-6-is-it-caused/Thu, 07 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/090-aquinas-on-predestination-st-i-q-23-arts-5-6-is-it-caused/Berquist takes up two articles of Question 23 in the Prima Pars: whether God predestines on account of foreseen merits, and whether predestination is infallibly certain. Working through Aquinas’s objections, sed contra, and responses, he draws on Romans, Titus, Job, and Augustine to show that predestination’s ultimate reason lies in God’s goodness and will rather than in anything foreseen in the creature, yet remains certain without destroying human freedom or the contingency of secondary causes. Along the way he digresses into Pelagianism, the order of the universe, and de Tocqueville on democratic custom to sharpen the reading of the text.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/091-aquinas-on-predestination-st-i-q-23-arts-7-8-and-the-book/Thu, 07 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/091-aquinas-on-predestination-st-i-q-23-arts-7-8-and-the-book/Berquist takes up two questions Aquinas asks about predestination: whether the number of the elect is certain to God, and whether the prayers of the saints can add to or alter that number. He follows Aquinas’s distinction between the number being fixed “formally” and “materially,” using Augustine and examples like Monica’s prayers for Augustine to show how prayer functions as a real secondary cause within, not against, God’s eternal ordering. Scripture cited along the way includes passages from Deuteronomy, Matthew, Romans, Kings, and Genesis. He closes by opening the following question, on what the “Book of Life” named in q. 24, a. 1 actually signifies.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/092-book-of-life-q-24-a-2-3-gods-operations-and-water-and-fire/Thu, 14 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/092-book-of-life-q-24-a-2-3-gods-operations-and-water-and-fire/Berquist reads two articles of the Summa Theologiae’s question on the Book of Life: whether it pertains only to the life of glory of the predestined, and whether a name once written there can be erased. He keeps returning to the distinction between something being true “simply” and true only “in a qualified way,” using it to sort out how Scripture can speak of names being blotted out without contradicting predestination. He then turns ahead, sketching how the Summa’s coming treatise on God’s power, knowledge, and will fits the larger structure, and closes by considering scriptural images of water and fire as ways of speaking about God.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/093-divine-power-q-25-a-1-active-and-passive-ability-in-god/Thu, 14 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/093-divine-power-q-25-a-1-active-and-passive-ability-in-god/Berquist takes up the first article of Question 25, where Aquinas asks whether potentia can be attributed to God, coming right after the treatments of divine knowledge and will. He digs into the Greek behind “power,” working through Aristotle’s Metaphysics Book IX on active versus passive ability and the difficulties of rendering dunamis in English, before turning to Aquinas’s objections and responses, which conclude that only active power, not passive, belongs to God. Along the way he distinguishes God as pure act from first matter, naming God concretely versus abstractly, and explains why will and power differ from the divine essence only secundum modum intelligendi, not really.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/094-summa-i-q25-articles-2-4-gods-infinite-power-omnipotence/Wed, 20 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/094-summa-i-q25-articles-2-4-gods-infinite-power-omnipotence/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s treatise on divine power, Summa I, Q25, articles two through four. He shows why God’s active power must be infinite—grounded in the infinity of the divine essence itself, not the deficient “infinite” of matter or quantity—then asks what it means to call God omnipotent: the power to do whatever is absolutely possible, meaning whatever is not self-contradictory. Along the way he draws the distinctions between active and passive power, univocal and non-univocal agency, and the two senses of “possible,” weighing objections from Aristotle, Hilary, and Scripture, before opening the question of whether God can undo the past.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/095-summa-i-q25-articles-5-6-and-q26-article-1-could-god-make/Wed, 20 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/095-summa-i-q25-articles-5-6-and-q26-article-1-could-god-make/Berquist asks two hard questions Aquinas poses about divine power: could God have made things other than He made them, and could He have made them better? Working through Summa I, q. 25, aa. 5-6, he draws out the distinction between God’s absolute power and His ordered power, and argues that no created order, however good, could ever be fully adequate to God’s infinite goodness. He then turns to Question 26 on the divine beatitude, taking up Article 1’s question of whether happiness belongs to God, before setting up next week’s session to finish this material and move on to the treatise on the Trinity.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/096-summa-i-q-26-a-2-is-god-blessed-by-his-understanding-knowledge/Tue, 26 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/096-summa-i-q-26-a-2-is-god-blessed-by-his-understanding-knowledge/Berquist takes up Summa Theologiae I, q. 26, a. 2: given that God’s beatitude is really identical with His essence, why do we ascribe it specifically to His act of understanding? Working through the article, he brings in Aristotle’s De Anima and Nicomachean Ethics, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, and Augustine to argue that knowledge, not will, is what completes happiness. This leads him into related questions—why the will fixes after death for angels and men, how sensory, aesthetic, and intellectual pleasures rank against one another—before he opens the next article, on whether God himself is beatitude.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/097-summa-i-q-26-a-3-4-and-the-opening-of-the-trinity-treatise/Tue, 26 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/097-summa-i-q-26-a-3-4-and-the-opening-of-the-trinity-treatise/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether God alone constitutes the beatitude of the blessed, weighing the object of understanding against its act, and asking whether divine beatitude comprehends every lesser or even false form of happiness. He digresses through Aristotle, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, and the etymological difference between “felicitas” and “beatitudo” to sharpen the distinction between true and counterfeit happiness. He then turns to the prooemium opening question 27 on the Trinity, examining Aquinas’s characteristic twofold and threefold divisions of material and comparing them to the structure of the Our Father, the seven sacraments, and Christ’s prayer in John 17, before the class breaks for summer.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/098-order-of-teaching-about-god-and-whether-there-is-procession/Thu, 18 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/098-order-of-teaching-about-god-and-whether-there-is-procession/Berquist takes up the opening of Question 27, where Aquinas turns from God’s existence, substance, and operations to the Trinity of persons distinguished by relations of origin. He contrasts this deliberately ordered method with Augustine’s more wandering approach in De Trinitate, and draws on Aristotelian categories of substance and relation to show how God can be both one and three. Turning to Article 1, he examines whether “procession” can properly be predicated of God, working through how a word like this, drawn from sensible experience such as imagination, gets carried over analogically to name a process that stays entirely within the divine nature. He also brings in Aristotle’s Metaphysics VI, lectio 4, on the naming of wisdom.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/099-inward-procession-the-word-and-why-the-words-procession-is/Thu, 18 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/099-inward-procession-the-word-and-why-the-words-procession-is/Berquist asks why Aquinas locates the model for divine procession not in any bodily motion but in the intellect’s production of an inward word or concept, then turns to whether this procession deserves the name “generation.” He traces Thomas’s distinction between generation taken generically, as any passage from potency to act, and generation properly speaking, the origin of something like in nature from a conjoined living principle—concluding that since God’s understanding is identical with his being, the Word proceeds eternally as the consubstantial Son. He draws on Aristotle’s Metaphysics VI and Augustine’s De Trinitate, with etymological asides on logos and natura, to fill out the argument.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/100-summa-i-q-27-a-3-a-second-procession-in-god-the-procession/Thu, 25 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/100-summa-i-q-27-a-3-a-second-procession-in-god-the-procession/Taking up article three of Question 27, Berquist asks whether there is, besides the generation of the Word, a second procession in God: that of love. He walks through Thomas’s objections and replies, showing why the divine processions do not multiply endlessly and how God’s simplicity permits one nature to be communicated in two really distinct ways—understanding and will. He traces how the will’s procession of love presupposes an ordered relation to the intellect’s procession of the Word even though both are identical with the divine essence, drawing on Summa Contra Gentiles IV, ch.15. A digression treats the Greek verb for “proceeding” in John’s Gospel and Logos as a case of antonomasia.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/101-summa-i-q-27-a-4-5-why-the-procession-of-love-is-not-generation/Thu, 25 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/101-summa-i-q-27-a-4-5-why-the-procession-of-love-is-not-generation/Why does the Word’s procession count as generation while the Spirit’s procession of love does not? Berquist follows Aquinas through q.27, a.4-5, drawing the key distinction between intellect, which proceeds by forming a likeness of what is known, and will, which proceeds instead by inclination or impulse toward what is loved, producing no such likeness. Because generation strictly means producing something like oneself, love’s procession lacks a proper name and is called “spiration” instead. He fills out the argument with Augustine’s De Trinitate, Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics, Avicenna, and examples from Shakespeare and Wuthering Heights to make vivid the difference between knowing and loving.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/102-summa-i-q-28-art-1-are-there-real-relations-in-god-relations/Thu, 08 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/102-summa-i-q-28-art-1-are-there-real-relations-in-god-relations/Berquist continues the treatise on the Trinity, moving from Question 27 on the processions into Question 28’s first article: are there real relations in God, or only relations of reason? He works through Aristotle’s and Avicenna’s categories of relation and objections drawn from Boethius’s De Trinitate, distinguishing real relations from mere relations of reason—illustrated with examples like universals, temporal order, and the relation of knower to known. The stakes are doctrinal: real relations must be affirmed to preserve the genuine distinction of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit against Sabellius’s heresy, while relations of reason alone would collapse that distinction. Along the way he digresses on Peter of Tarentaise and the Greek text of John’s Gospel.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/103-summa-i-q-28-art-2-relation-and-the-divine-essence-why-we/Thu, 08 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/103-summa-i-q-28-art-2-relation-and-the-divine-essence-why-we/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether relation is really the same as the divine essence, tracking objections drawn from Augustine’s De Trinitate and Boethius on the categories before turning to Aquinas’s answer. He shows how the case of Gilbert of Poitiers, condemned for separating relation from substance in God, sharpens the problem, and how Aquinas resolves it: relation, unlike other accidents, can be really identical with the divine substance while still being distinguished “toward” its correlative term. Along the way he digresses into divine simplicity, theology’s status as a science, invoking Augustine and Hilary, and how our imperfect names for God each point toward the one simple divine perfection.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/104-summa-i-q-28-art-3-why-the-divine-relations-are-really-distinct/Thu, 15 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/104-summa-i-q-28-art-3-why-the-divine-relations-are-really-distinct/Berquist takes up the question of why the divine relations—Fatherhood, Sonhood, and the rest—are really distinct from one another, though each is really the same as the divine essence. Working through Thomas’s objections and answer, he leans on Aristotle’s Categories and Physics, especially the four kinds of opposition, to show that relative opposition, unlike other kinds, necessarily entails real distinction—unlike, say, divine goodness and power, which differ only in reason. Along the way he digresses into Aristotle’s logic of equivocal names and Porphyry’s Isagoge, and Thomas’s habitual patterns of division, closing with a look ahead to the next article’s question of how many such relations exist in God.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/105-summa-i-q-28-art-4-and-intro-to-q-29-the-four-real-relations/Thu, 15 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/105-summa-i-q-28-art-4-and-intro-to-q-29-the-four-real-relations/Berquist takes up the question of why there are exactly four real relations in God—paternity, filiation, and the two unnamed relations bound up with spiration—rather than some other number. Working through the article’s objections and replies, he draws on Aristotle’s Metaphysics Book V and the philosophy of relation to show why relations grounded in self-understanding, self-willing, Platonic ideas, and equality or likeness don’t add to that count. He also treats the “Athens to Thebes” objection about reciprocal relations before turning to preview how the next question, on the divine persons, will be organized.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/106-summa-i-q-29-art-1-boethius-definition-of-person-as-an-individual/Thu, 29 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/106-summa-i-q-29-art-1-boethius-definition-of-person-as-an-individual/Berquist takes up the article in which Thomas examines Boethius’s definition of person—“an individual substance of a rational nature”—as the doorway into the fifteen questions on the divine persons. He walks through the objections and replies term by term: what “individual” adds, the several senses of substance (first, second, common, and substance as essence), and why “nature” is used rather than another word. He draws on Aristotle’s Categories, Physics, and Metaphysics to justify how an intentional term like “individual” can still belong to a real definition, pausing along the way over equivocation and the order in which we come to know Christ’s humanity and divinity.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/107-summa-i-q-29-art-2-person-hypostasis-subsistence-and-essence/Thu, 29 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/107-summa-i-q-29-art-2-person-hypostasis-subsistence-and-essence/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether “person” is simply synonymous with hypostasis, subsistence, and essence, working through the text of Summa Theologiae I, q. 29, a. 2 alongside Boethius and Aristotle’s Metaphysics. He traces how “substance” splits into essence—what a thing is—and the individual subsisting subject, which can then be called suppositum, res naturae, subsistentia, or hypostasis depending on which aspect is in view, with “person” reserved for this same reality when found in a rational nature. The class closes with a long aside on how poetic art moves an audience toward virtue without preaching, drawn out through Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor and Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/108-summa-i-q-29-a-3-should-the-name-person-be-used-of-god-boethius/Thu, 10 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/108-summa-i-q-29-a-3-should-the-name-person-be-used-of-god-boethius/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether “person” should be used of God, working through four objections: that Scripture never uses the word, that “person” originally meant a theatrical mask, that “hypostasis” causes translation trouble, and that the definition of person as an individual of rational nature seems ill-suited to God. He follows Thomas’s answer that “person” names what is most perfect in all nature—a subsisting individual of intellectual nature—and so applies to God most eminently, even though its etymology from masks does not. Boethius, Richard of St. Victor, and the Athanasian Creed are brought in as supporting authorities within Aquinas’s broader treatise on the Trinity.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/109-summa-i-q-29-a-4-person-in-god-means-relation-as-subsisting/Thu, 10 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/109-summa-i-q-29-a-4-person-in-god-means-relation-as-subsisting/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether “person,” applied to God, signifies relation or substance. He lays out the objections drawn from Augustine, Aristotle, and the etymology of “persona,” then follows Thomas’s resolution: person signifies relation per modum substantiae, relation taken in the manner of a subsisting substance rather than an accident, with Boethius cited as affirming that names proper to the divine persons signify relation. He also draws on Summa Contra Gentiles IV, ch. 15, and pauses to compare Augustine’s and Aquinas’s differing styles of argument and the value of confronting opposing positions fully before resolving them.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/110-summa-i-q-30-a-1-are-there-many-persons-in-god-subsistent/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/110-summa-i-q-30-a-1-are-there-many-persons-in-god-subsistent/Berquist takes up Article 1 of Question 30: whether there are several persons in God. He follows Thomas’s argument that a divine person signifies a subsisting relation, and since God contains several real relations, several persons must follow. Working through the four objections and replies, he clarifies the equivocal senses of “substance,” distinguishes absolute from relative properties in God, and answers the objection that the persons could not be parts of a whole by invoking Aristotle’s Physics distinction between numbering number and numbered number. He draws in Boethius, the Athanasian Creed, and the Categories, and touches on Mary’s grace and the individuation of souls along the way.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/111-summa-i-q-30-a-2-why-only-three-persons-opposed-relations/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/111-summa-i-q-30-a-2-why-only-three-persons-opposed-relations/Why stop at three persons in God, and not four, or more? Berquist takes up Summa I, Q. 30, a. 2, working through objections that would multiply the persons by counting relations, or attributes like goodness, against Aquinas’s replies. He distinguishes procession per modum naturae from procession per modum intellectus and voluntatis, showing why the Word is one with the Son while the Spirit remains a distinct procession of love, and why no further relation of origin can be found in God. Along the way he reaches for Aristotle’s Poetics to illustrate what makes a number fitting rather than arbitrary.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/112-aquinas-on-the-trinity-summa-i-q-30-a-3-numbers-in-god-the/Thu, 24 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/112-aquinas-on-the-trinity-summa-i-q-30-a-3-numbers-in-god-the/Berquist takes up Thomas’s question whether numerical terms applied to the Trinity signify positively or only remove something, working closely through Summa Theologiae I, q. 30, a. 3 and into a. 4, with a parallel passage from Summa Contra Gentiles IV, ch. 15. The key distinction is between material division, proper to quantity and the continuous, and formal or transcendental multitude and unity, convertible with being itself — a distinction he traces through Aristotle and Avicenna and finds blurred in Plato’s two senses of “one.” He also reads Thomas’s replies to the objections and the sed contra citations from Hilary and Ambrose, touching along the way on appropriation of divine attributes to the Persons and on thought and prayer with and without words.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/113-aquinas-on-the-trinity-summa-i-q-30-a-4-and-q-31-person-shared/Thu, 24 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/113-aquinas-on-the-trinity-summa-i-q-30-a-4-and-q-31-person-shared/Berquist takes up Article 4 of question 30, where Aquinas asks whether “person” can be predicated in common of the three divine persons. Drawing on Boethius and Richard of St. Victor, he distinguishes a name held in common “by reason,” as an individuum vagum, from one held by a shared essence, so “person” names each divine person without turning into a genus over three species. He then moves into the opening of question 31 on the word “Trinity,” touching along the way on appropriation and on why Scripture can call the Father “alone” without excluding the Son and Spirit.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/114-summa-i-q-31-articles-1-2-is-there-a-trinity-in-god-and-is/Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/114-summa-i-q-31-articles-1-2-is-there-a-trinity-in-god-and-is/Berquist takes up Aquinas on the Trinity, article by article. The first question asks whether “Trinity” is a fitting name for God; the second asks whether the Son may be called alius (other, masculine) than the Father, though never aliud (other, neuter)—a distinction that keeps the difference between the persons from collapsing into a difference in essence. He works through the objections and replies, sorting out distinction from division and difference from diversity to steer between Arius and Sabellius, drawing on Augustine, Hilary, and Boethius, with a Shakespeare handout used to illustrate why theological speech must be exact rather than loose.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/115-summa-i-q-31-article-3-can-alone-be-said-of-god-solus-only/Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/115-summa-i-q-31-article-3-can-alone-be-said-of-god-solus-only/Berquist takes up Article 3 of Question 31, where Aquinas asks whether the exclusive term “alone” can be predicated of God together with an essential name. He works through the distinction between categorematic and syncategorematic uses of “alone,” showing why “God alone creates” is true—excluding creatures from a shared act—while “the Father alone” is false, since it wrongly excludes the Son and Spirit from what belongs to the divine essence. Along the way he draws on Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations to clarify terms like elenchus, terminus, and proposition, and contrasts “only” as adverb with “alone” as adjective. He begins Article 4 before time runs out.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/116-exclusive-words-about-the-divine-persons-st-i-q-31-a-4-and/Thu, 07 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/116-exclusive-words-about-the-divine-persons-st-i-q-31-a-4-and/Berquist works through Aquinas’s treatment of exclusive words applied to the divine persons—texts like “you, the only true God” and “no one knows the Son except the Father”—distinguishing categorematic from syncategorematic uses of “solus” and weighing how Augustine and Ambrose read such formulas without excluding the other persons. He then turns to whether the Trinity of persons is knowable by natural reason, arguing that reason, working from created effects, reaches what Father, Son, and Spirit share but not the distinctions of origin proper to each. He brings in Aristotle, Augustine, Richard of St. Victor, and Hermes Trismegistus to show philosophers circling the mystery without reaching it.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/117-notions-in-god-abstract-and-concrete-names-for-the-divine/Thu, 07 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/117-notions-in-god-abstract-and-concrete-names-for-the-divine/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s article on whether notions should be posited in God, walking through the objections and the citation from Damascene before reaching Thomas’s own answer. He explains why Praepositinus’s view is rejected, and why notions are needed both against heretics and to mark how the Father is differently related to the Son and to the Holy Spirit—while also noting the limit that essential or personal acts cannot be predicated of the notions themselves. Along the way he draws on Aristotle’s account of change and the soul’s powers to show why our imperfect manner of knowing requires abstract and concrete language about God. He closes by looking ahead to next week’s question on why there are five notions corresponding to four relations and three persons.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/118-summa-i-q-32-a-3-4-and-q-33-intro-the-five-notions-when-opinions/Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/118-summa-i-q-32-a-3-4-and-q-33-intro-the-five-notions-when-opinions/Berquist takes up Summa Theologiae I, Q.32, articles 3 and 4, asking how the five notions—innascibility, paternity, filiation, common spiration, and procession—distinguish the divine persons, and which mistaken opinions about them cross the line into heresy versus remaining tolerable error. He draws on Porphyry’s five predicables, the Aristotelian categories, and Boethius’s definition of person to sharpen the terms at stake. Turning to the opening of Q.33 on the person of the Father, he asks whether “beginning” (principium) can be said of the Father, contrasting Aristotle’s philosophical sense of the word with its Trinitarian use, since the Father is “beginning” without being prior in time to the Son.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/119-summa-i-q-33-a-1-3-beginning-vs-cause-father-as-the-proper/Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/119-summa-i-q-33-a-1-3-beginning-vs-cause-father-as-the-proper/Berquist takes up Question 33, where Aquinas asks whether “Father” can properly be called a beginning within the Trinity. He first lays out Aristotle’s Metaphysics V distinctions among beginning, cause, and element, since Thomas’s terminology depends on them, then moves to the second article’s comparison of “Father” against “generator” as a name for the first person. The third article asks whether “Father” belongs more properly to the first divine person or to God as Creator; Berquist works through Augustine, Basil, Hilary, and Dionysius alongside scriptural texts to distinguish the degrees—footprint, image, grace, glory—by which creatures are called sons of God, insisting throughout that such language is analogical, not modeled on creaturely causation.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/120-summa-i-q-34-art-1-is-word-a-personal-name-in-god-word-as/Thu, 28 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/120-summa-i-q-34-art-1-is-word-a-personal-name-in-god-word-as/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether “Word” is a personal name in God, proper to the Son, or an essential name shared by the whole Trinity. He lays out the threefold proper sense of “word”—vocal sound, imagined sound, and interior concept—against its merely metaphorical fourth sense, testing this against readings from Origen, Augustine, and Anselm that Aquinas engages and corrects. The payoff is that “Word” signifies something proceeding from another, so it names a relation of origin and belongs to the Son alone. He digresses to distinguish imagining from understanding, and faith from mere cogitation, to sharpen why Aquinas is so careful with this term.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/121-summa-i-q-34-arts-2-3-word-as-the-sons-own-name-and-the-words/Thu, 28 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/121-summa-i-q-34-arts-2-3-word-as-the-sons-own-name-and-the-words/Berquist takes up Article 2 and Article 3 of Question 34, asking first whether “Word” is the Son’s own personal name, then whether that name implies a relation to creatures. He works through Aquinas’s objections and replies, distinguishing God’s understanding, identical with his being, from human thought, which is merely accidental, and separating immanent acts like knowing and willing from transitive acts like making. The Word turns out to be primarily expressive of the Father and only secondarily expressive and productive of creatures. He draws on John 1:1, Hebrews 1:3, Colossians 1:15, and Augustine’s writings on the Trinity to show why “Word” names a subsisting person rather than an accident or effect.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/122-thinking-thought-and-image-is-image-said-personally-in-god/Fri, 14 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/122-thinking-thought-and-image-is-image-said-personally-in-god/Berquist takes up the question of whether “Image” is predicated of God personally, and specifically whether it belongs to the Son. Drawing on Augustine, Hilary, and Aristotle, he distinguishes mere likeness from true imaging, which requires both likeness in species and origination from an exemplar—using shape versus color, and Augustine’s example that one egg is not an image of another, to sharpen the point. He digresses through related terms, thinking versus imagining, cogitare, verbum and logos, and modus procedendi, to show how these distinctions ground the Son’s procession as the Father’s natural Word and Image. He also brings in Summa I, q. 93 and Summa Contra Gentiles IV, ch. 15 along the way.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/123-why-only-the-son-is-the-image-and-the-name-holy-spirit-q/Fri, 14 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/123-why-only-the-son-is-the-image-and-the-name-holy-spirit-q/Berquist takes up two questions from the Summa: why the name “Image” is proper to the Son and not the Holy Spirit, and why “Holy Spirit” is a fitting name for the third divine Person. He shows that the Son proceeds as a likeness of the Father, per modum intellectus, which is what “image” strictly requires, while the Spirit, though no less like Father and Son, proceeds by way of love rather than likeness. Weighing objections drawn from Colossians, Hebrews, Damascene, and Augustine’s De Trinitate, he explains how “Holy Spirit” names the third Person as the mutual bond of love between Father and Son, using ordinary analogies to make the distinction between procession by intellect and procession by love concrete.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/124-summa-i-q-36-a-2-does-the-holy-spirit-proceed-from-the-son/Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/124-summa-i-q-36-a-2-does-the-holy-spirit-proceed-from-the-son/Berquist takes up Summa Theologiae I, q.36, a.2: does the Holy Spirit proceed from the Son? He works through the objections and Thomas’s respondeo, which argues that unless the Spirit proceeds from the Son, the Son and Spirit could not be really distinguished as persons—only relations of origin can do that. Along the way he draws in the authorities Thomas cites, Dionysius, the Constantinopolitan and Athanasian Creeds, John Damascene, and Anselm, placing the article within the wider treatment of order and relation in the Trinity. He opens with an aside on Pope Benedict’s audiences on Augustine and digresses briefly on wisdom, syllogistic structure, and Origen.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/125-summa-i-q-36-aa-3-4-from-the-father-through-the-son-and-the/Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/125-summa-i-q-36-aa-3-4-from-the-father-through-the-son-and-the/Berquist takes up two articles on the Trinity: whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son, and whether Father and Son together are one principle of the Spirit. Moving through Thomas’s objections and replies, he brings in Hilary and Augustine on the Trinity and uses the analogies of fire and heat, a king and his bailiff, and Adam, Eve, and Abel to show how “through” and “one beginning” can be said of divine persons without threatening their equality or eternity. He closes on whether Father and Son should be called “two breathers” of the Spirit, settled by distinguishing substantive from adjectival naming.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/126-aquinas-on-love-as-the-name-of-the-holy-spirit-st-i-q-37/Thu, 03 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/126-aquinas-on-love-as-the-name-of-the-holy-spirit-st-i-q-37/Berquist takes up Question 37 of the Prima Pars, asking whether Love is a proper personal name of the Holy Spirit and whether the Father and Son can be said to love one another “by” the Spirit. Drawing on Augustine’s De Trinitate and Gregory the Great, he contrasts the Word’s procession by way of intellect with the Spirit’s procession by way of will, showing why terms like Amor and Nexus need to be read both essentially and notionally. He then sorts through competing scholastic readings of the phrase “the Father loves the Son by the Holy Spirit,” settling on the view that the Spirit is named from being the term of that mutual love, as a tree is called “flowering” from its flowers.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/127-the-holy-spirit-as-love-and-as-gift-st-i-q-37-a-2-replies/Thu, 03 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/127-the-holy-spirit-as-love-and-as-gift-st-i-q-37-a-2-replies/Berquist works through the replies of q. 37, a. 2 on the Father’s loving by the Holy Spirit, then turns to q. 38, asking in two articles whether “Gift” is a suitable name at all and whether it is proper to the Holy Spirit specifically, drawing on Augustine’s De Trinitate alongside Hilary and Damascene. He also uses the handout “Nature and Kinds of Love” to sort out the different senses of love at play, then steps back to chart the architecture of Thomas’s whole treatise on the Trinity—processions, relations, and the fifteen questions on the persons—before previewing q. 39 and the shift toward questions on essence, properties, and notional acts.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/128-summa-i-q-39-persons-compared-to-the-essence-overview-and/Thu, 10 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/128-summa-i-q-39-persons-compared-to-the-essence-overview-and/Berquist turns from the absolute consideration of the divine persons to their comparative consideration, laying out the ten questions ahead—essence, properties, notional acts, and the persons’ relations to one another. He then works through q.39, a.1, tracing Thomas’s argument that in God essence and person are really the same, while the persons remain really distinct only through relative opposition. Drawing on objections and replies invoking Augustine, Boethius, and Hilary, he sets this against Gilbert de la Porrée’s error of separating relation from essence and against Sabellius’s collapse of the persons into one. He closes by previewing the coming articles on predicating essential and notional terms of the persons.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/129-summa-i-q-39-a-1-replies-and-article-2-relations-as-opposition/Thu, 10 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/129-summa-i-q-39-a-1-replies-and-article-2-relations-as-opposition/Berquist takes up the objections and replies in Summa I q.39 a.1 before turning to a.2, where Aquinas asks why we say the three persons are “of one essence” rather than “of one nature” or “from one substance.” Drawing on Aristotle’s categories, relation, and the four causes, alongside Hilary and Augustine, he shows why creaturely individuation—where form and matter multiply individuals within a species—cannot model how the divine persons are distinct yet share one essence. Along the way he tests the prepositions (“of,” “from”) in Latin theological language against ordinary usage, with digressions on angelic love of the common good and musical analogies, to show how careful phrasing guards against tritheism.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/130-trinity-question-39-article-3-why-the-three-persons-are-one/Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/130-trinity-question-39-article-3-why-the-three-persons-are-one/Why can the Trinity be called “one God” but never “three Gods,” while it is rightly called “three persons”? Berquist follows Aquinas’s answer in Summa Theologiae I, q. 39, a. 3: substantial names like “God” and “one” name the divine essence and so are said singularly of the whole Trinity, while names that are adjectival or relational, such as “person” or “thing” taken relationally, admit the plural. He tests this rule against objections drawn from Genesis, Deuteronomy, and Augustine, and pauses over the transcendentals and over theology itself as faith’s own defense against heresy, with a supporting text from Summa Contra Gentiles IV, ch. 15.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/131-trinity-question-39-article-4-can-god-stand-for-a-person/Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/131-trinity-question-39-article-4-can-god-stand-for-a-person/Can the word “God” refer to a Person—Father, Son, or Spirit—rather than only the shared divine nature? Berquist walks through Article Four’s objections and the sed contra drawn from the Creed’s phrase “God from God,” then Aquinas’s determination that “God” signifies the divine nature as had by a subject, so it can stand for one Person or for all three depending on what is predicated of it. He clarifies this with human-language parallels: “a man generates a man,” “a man teaches a man,” “man is a species,” showing how signification and supposition diverge. Along the way he digresses into universals, Porphyry’s Isagoge, and metaphor and irony as further cases where meaning and reference come apart.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/132-meaning-vs-standing-for-why-the-essence-does-not-generate/Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/132-meaning-vs-standing-for-why-the-essence-does-not-generate/Berquist takes up Article 5 of Summa Theologiae I, q. 39: can an abstract term like “essence” stand for a divine person, as the concrete term “God” does? Using John 3:16, Matthew 16, and John 1:1 alongside ordinary puzzles about sonship, he draws out Aquinas’s distinction between what a word signifies and what it can supposit for, then follows the refutation of Abbot Joachim’s error and the replies distinguishing substantive from adjectival or notional names, including Augustine’s remark that the Father is “beginning of the whole Godhead.” He also touches briefly on Leo XIII’s Providentissimus Deus regarding the Scholastics and biblical interpretation before moving toward Article 6.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/133-god-is-three-persons-and-appropriating-essential-attributes/Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/133-god-is-three-persons-and-appropriating-essential-attributes/Berquist asks whether “God,” which names the divine essence, can also stand for a person, the way “man” stands for an individual — and why the two words work differently in predication. He then turns to appropriation: why wisdom is fittingly attached to the Son, power to the Father, goodness to the Holy Spirit, though all three possess each attribute equally. Working through the objections and replies of Summa Theologiae I, q. 39, aa. 6–7, he draws on Augustine, Boethius, Damascene, and Aristotle to show how naming by likeness or contrast makes the Trinity more accessible to human understanding.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/134-summa-i-q-39-a-8-1-being-led-by-the-hand-to-god-the-order/Thu, 08 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/134-summa-i-q-39-a-8-1-being-led-by-the-hand-to-god-the-order/Berquist takes up Summa Theologiae I, q.39, a.8, where Aquinas asks how essential attributes—eternity, beauty, and use—can be appropriated to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit without confusing what belongs to the divine nature with what is proper to each Person. He works through the article’s objections, drawn from Hilary and from Augustine’s De Trinitate and De Doctrina Christiana, and follows Aquinas’s ordering of the appropriations by being, unity, power, and relation. He also turns to Question 117’s treatment of teaching and manuductio, “leading by the hand,” to show how Aquinas arranges this material toward theological truth.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/135-summa-i-q-39-a-8-2-unity-equality-and-concord-power-wisdom/Thu, 08 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/135-summa-i-q-39-a-8-2-unity-equality-and-concord-power-wisdom/Berquist works through the appropriation of essential divine attributes to the three Persons in Summa Theologiae I, q. 39. He follows Thomas’s four considerations: God as being, marked by unity, equality, and concord; God’s causal power, with power, wisdom, and goodness assigned respectively to Father, Son, and Spirit; and God’s relation to creatures, given in Paul’s phrase “from him, through him, in him” from Romans 11. He finishes on Romans 11:33-36 and Thomas’s commentary, drawing out the distinction between honoring God as beginning and glorifying God as end.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/136-summa-i-q-40-art-1-is-the-relation-the-same-as-the-person/Thu, 15 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/136-summa-i-q-40-art-1-is-the-relation-the-same-as-the-person/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether the divine relations are the same as the divine persons, working through the objections and Thomas’s answer. He distinguishes two grounds of identity in God—denying composition of form and matter, and denying composition of substance and accident—and shows how this lets fatherhood constitute a person while common spiration is shared by two persons without multiplying them. Along the way he draws on the senses of “in” from Aristotle’s Physics, the unity of act between acting and undergoing, and Plato’s Parmenides to clarify the logic of Trinitarian predication.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/137-summa-i-q-40-arts-2-3-relations-distinguish-and-make-up-the/Thu, 15 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/137-summa-i-q-40-arts-2-3-relations-distinguish-and-make-up-the/Berquist takes up Article 2’s question of what distinguishes the divine persons, weighing objections before Aquinas’s answer: only subsisting relations, not origin or anything absolute, can both distinguish and constitute the hypostases. He then turns to Article 3, asking whether the persons would remain if the personal properties were removed by abstraction, and follows Aquinas to the conclusion that in God relation is identical with person, so stripping away the relations strips away the persons themselves. Along the way he draws on Boethius, Augustine, and Hilary, and illustrates the argument’s stakes with stories about Padre Pio, Einstein, and others.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/138-aquinas-on-the-trinity-whether-fatherhood-comes-before-generation/Thu, 22 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/138-aquinas-on-the-trinity-whether-fatherhood-comes-before-generation/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether, in God, the relation of fatherhood comes before the act of generation, or the reverse—since we normally think an act produces a relation, not the other way around. Reading closely through Summa Theologiae I, q. 40, a. 4 and into q. 41, a. 1, he distinguishes a relation taken simply as relation from that same relation as constitutive of a person, and active from passive ways of signifying origin, to show why fatherhood and generation are really one thing in God though conceived differently by us. He draws on Aristotle’s categories of relation and action-passion, and reads from handout pages on the order of wisdom and on Book One of Lombard’s Sentences to situate the question.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/139-aquinas-on-the-trinity-does-the-father-generate-the-son-by/Thu, 22 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/139-aquinas-on-the-trinity-does-the-father-generate-the-son-by/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether the Father generates the Son by will or by nature, working through the article’s arguments—drawing on Hilary, Augustine, and Aristotle’s Metaphysics IX—for why divine generation and spiration must occur by nature, since will, unlike nature, remains open to opposites. He digresses into Aristotle’s account of potency, act, and the several senses of “necessary” in Metaphysics IX and V, using this to expose modern errors, in Sartre and Mill, that deny any natural determination of will or intellect. He closes with literary illustrations of the nature/will distinction from Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and Twelfth Night and from Robert E. Lee’s letters.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/140-summa-i-q-41-a-3-4-the-son-begotten-from-the-fathers-substance/Thu, 29 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/140-summa-i-q-41-a-3-4-the-son-begotten-from-the-fathers-substance/Berquist takes up Article 3 of Question 41, where Aquinas asks whether the Father begets the Son “from something” or “from nothing”—distinguishing the prepositions de and ex to separate generation from creation, and addressing scriptural texts that seem to call Wisdom or the Spirit “created.” He traces the objections and Thomas’s replies in detail, then moves into Article 4, on whether “power” can properly be attributed to God with respect to generating and spirating. Along the way he draws on Dante, Aristotle’s Poetics, and analogies from craftsmanship and etymology to make the technical distinctions concrete.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/141-summa-i-q-41-a-4-5-power-as-a-beginning-and-whether-the-power/Thu, 29 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/141-summa-i-q-41-a-4-5-power-as-a-beginning-and-whether-the-power/Berquist takes up article 4’s third objection on whether power, understood as a “beginning,” can apply to generation and spiration as it does to understanding and willing, then moves to article 5’s question of whether the power of generating signifies the divine essence or the relation of Father to Son. He follows Thomas’s answer that a real beginning requires real distinction—true of Father and Son, and of God and creatures, but only notional in the case of intellect and will—so that generative power signifies essence directly and relation only obliquely. Along the way he draws on Aristotle’s Physics and Categories, Porphyry’s Isagoge, and Hilary’s De Trinitate, with digressions on Mozart, Einstein, and Heisenberg to sharpen the distinction between what is really distinct and what is only conceptually so.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/142-summa-i-q-41-a-6-why-there-is-only-one-son-and-one-holy-spirit/Thu, 05 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/142-summa-i-q-41-a-6-why-there-is-only-one-son-and-one-holy-spirit/Berquist works through Article 6 of Question 41, where Aquinas asks whether God could have more than one Son or more than one Holy Spirit. He lays out Aquinas’s four arguments against the possibility, tied to the nature of relations, the processions of intellect and will, the natural mode of procession, and the perfection of the persons. Answering the first objection sends him into a digression on Meno’s paradox and the priority of act over potency. He closes by placing the article within the treatise’s larger structure, marking the shift from questions comparing the persons to the divine nature, relations, and notional acts toward the final two questions comparing the persons to one another.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/143-summa-i-q-42-equality-and-order-among-the-divine-persons/Thu, 05 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/143-summa-i-q-42-equality-and-order-among-the-divine-persons/Berquist takes up Question 42 of the Prima Pars, where Aquinas asks how the divine persons compare to one another in equality, likeness, and order. Working closely through Article 1, he traces Aquinas’s move from dimensive quantity, which cannot apply to God, to “virtual quantity”—the quantity of a thing’s perfection or power—drawing on Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Categories, Augustine’s De Trinitate, Boethius, and the Athanasian Creed. He shows how words like “order,” “magnitude,” and “more” shift from a quantitative to a qualitative sense when applied to God, illustrating the same kind of shift with examples from ordinary speech and Shakespeare.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/144-summa-i-q-42-a-2-3-the-son-co-eternal-with-the-father-and/Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/144-summa-i-q-42-a-2-3-the-son-co-eternal-with-the-father-and/He takes up the question of the Son’s co-eternity with the Father in Summa I, q. 42, a. 2, working through objections drawn from Arius and Aquinas’s replies, which invoke Augustine, Boethius, and the Athanasian Creed to show how “beginning,” eternity, and generation must be freed of any temporal sense before being applied to God. Turning to article 3, he asks whether there is an order of nature among the divine persons, tracing how order, nature, and beginning have to be stripped of their creaturely, genus-based meaning while some specific difference is retained. Along the way he brings in Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics and Porphyry’s Isagoge, and recalls his own early reading of Thomas’s Sentences commentary against the later Summa.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/145-summa-i-q-42-a-3-4-order-of-origin-without-before-and-after/Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/145-summa-i-q-42-a-3-4-order-of-origin-without-before-and-after/Berquist takes up two articles of Summa I, q.42: whether there is order among the divine persons, and whether the Son is equal to the Father in greatness. He turns to Aristotle’s Categories and Physics for the relevant senses of “confusion,” “beginning,” and relation—distinguishing relatives said secundum dici from those secundum esse—to show how Thomas can speak of origin and order in God without any temporal priority or inequality of nature. He also brings in patristic and conciliar language, from Hilary, Augustine, and Athanasius, to show how the Father’s scriptural “greater” status is reconciled with the Son’s full equality in the one divine nature.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/146-summa-i-q-42-articles-5-6-the-father-and-son-in-each-other/Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/146-summa-i-q-42-articles-5-6-the-father-and-son-in-each-other/Berquist continues Question 42 on the equality and mutual indwelling of the divine Persons, first laying out how its six articles divide: equality in general, then equality of duration, magnitude, and power, with the Father-in-Son question tied to equality of nature. He then reads Article 5, whether the Son is in the Father, applying Aristotle’s eight senses of “in” from the Physics, and Article 6, whether the Son is equal to the Father in power, weighing objections from Scripture and Augustine. He digresses on Thomas’s habit of dividing topics into twos or threes, illustrated from the Creed, the Psalms, and Aristotle’s categories of motion.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/147-summa-i-q-43-articles-1-2-the-mission-of-the-divine-persons/Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/147-summa-i-q-43-articles-1-2-the-mission-of-the-divine-persons/Berquist takes up two articles of Summa I, Q. 43 on the mission of the divine persons: whether it belongs to a person to be sent, and whether that sending can be eternal. He works through the objections and Aquinas’s replies, showing how mission involves both the eternal relation of origin—generation of the Son, spiration of the Spirit—and a new temporal presence to a creature, so that any “change” lies in the creature, not in God. Along the way he compares Aquinas’s ordering of questions here to his earlier, less polished arrangement in the Sentences commentary, and turns to a passage from Shakespeare’s Richard II to illustrate the three acts of reason: understanding, judgment, and reasoning. He also notes how words like “imitation” and “feeling” have been degraded in ordinary usage.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/148-summa-i-q-43-arts-3-5-sanctifying-grace-why-the-father-is/Thu, 03 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/148-summa-i-q-43-arts-3-5-sanctifying-grace-why-the-father-is/Berquist follows Aquinas closely through three articles on the invisible missions of the divine persons. Article 3 asks whether such missions occur only through sanctifying grace; article 4, why the Father—proceeding from no one—cannot himself be sent; article 5, whether the Son can be sent invisibly, which Aquinas affirms through a knowledge of God joined to love. Working through objections, sed contra, corpus, and replies, and drawing on Augustine’s De Trinitate, he uses homely analogies—the Hail Mary, giving a book, teaching a student—to show how grace disposes the soul to receive the persons dwelling within it.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/149-summa-i-q-43-art-6-and-a-logic-aside-who-receives-the-invisible/Thu, 03 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/149-summa-i-q-43-art-6-and-a-logic-aside-who-receives-the-invisible/Berquist takes up whether the invisible mission of the divine persons comes to everyone who has grace, working through objections drawn from the Old Testament fathers, growth in virtue, the blessed, Christ, and the sacraments. Midway he digresses into logic, drawing on Aristotle’s Categories and Peri Hermeneias and Albert the Great’s commentary to ask how a name signifies a thing through a thought, and how several names or definitions can bear on one and the same thing under different concepts. He connects this to Summa Contra Gentiles I, chapter 35, on the names said of God, before closing with a plan to finish the remaining articles next time.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/150-summa-i-q-43-a-7-why-the-holy-spirit-is-sent-visibly-the/Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/150-summa-i-q-43-a-7-why-the-holy-spirit-is-sent-visibly-the/Berquist takes up Article 7 of Question 43, asking whether it is fitting for the Holy Spirit to be sent visibly. He walks through Aquinas’s objections and answers, drawing the key distinction between the Son’s visible mission—accomplished through the human nature he actually assumed, letting him act as author of sanctification—and the Spirit’s, accomplished through specially-formed signs, the dove, fire, and wind, which only signify sanctification without acting. He then compares the point of these appearances to Christ, to the apostles, and to the Old Testament patriarchs, with a short digression on exemplar causality drawing on Summa Contra Gentiles IV and Q.93, before turning toward Article 8.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/151-q-43-a-8-on-who-sends-whom-and-why-the-trinity-is-taught/Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/151-q-43-a-8-on-who-sends-whom-and-why-the-trinity-is-taught/Berquist takes up Article 8 of Question 43, asking whether a divine person can be sent by someone from whom he does not proceed—weighing the objections against the Sed Contra’s appeal to Isaiah 48:16, and resolving it by distinguishing “sending” as the origin of the person from sending as the origin of an effect in creatures. He then turns to a pedagogical question: how theology should be ordered. He contrasts the sense-based “order of manuductio,” which moves from Christ’s humanity toward his divinity as Peter’s confession and the Synoptic Gospels do, with the “order of definition,” which moves from the Trinity to the Incarnation as John’s Prologue does—explaining, with help from Augustine and Aristotle, why this course follows the latter order.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/152-the-logic-of-names-one-thing-known-through-many-thoughts/Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/10-prima-pars/152-the-logic-of-names-one-thing-known-through-many-thoughts/Berquist lays out the logical possibilities for how a name, a thing, and a thought relate: sometimes one word signifies one thing through a single thought (univocal terms), sometimes through several distinct thoughts, and sometimes the same sound covers unrelated things (equivocation). Working through examples from geometry and from Aristotle’s Categories and Physics, along with Porphyry’s account of genus, species, and difference, he sorts which combinations actually occur and which are impossible. He then turns to Aquinas on the names of God, showing how several divine names can genuinely signify one simple reality through really distinct thoughts, without collapsing into mere synonyms. He closes by distinguishing a term’s signification from its supposition—what it stands for within a sentence.