Aquinas on the Last End (Summa I-II, Q1, Art. 4): One Feast, One House, One Mutual Happiness — Why Ends Cannot Go On Forever

Orientation #

He says nothing explicit about last time except that “we’re still trying to find out what happiness is” and are “up to Article Four here in Question One”; he ends by proposing a break after the third reply. Verified sources place the class between q.1 a.3 and a.5, with a.4 read directly. The previous class treated a.2–3 (acting for an end; species from the end) and the next treats a.5 (whether one will can have many last ends).

The class, in order #

1. “Happiness” and “hap” in Two Gentlemen of Verona (“wish me partaker in thy happiness”) #

Point: the etymology of “happiness” (from hap, luck) is not its meaning, but it is the origin of its meaning; the word is still a fit name for the end of man.

• Caution: because the etymology is from hap “it doesn’t mean that you have to think of happiness as the result of hap”. Yet in the Nicomachean Ethics the translator renders eudaimonia by “happiness”.
• Reads the opening scene (handout): Valentine leaving, Proteus “tied down to Julia”. Valentine’s “home-keeping youth have ever homely wits”; Proteus’s “when thou happily seest some rare noteworthy object” (= something good to see) and, more explicit, “wish me partaker in thy happiness, when thou dost meet good hap” (= good luck, hence “happy” in the etymological sense).
• What it shows: friendship — you want to share in your friends’ happiness and have them share yours.
• Aside: “I will be thy bedesman” — “it’s the rosary”.

2. Proteus’s repentance and the last line: heaven in one line (“one feast, one house, one mutual happiness”) #

Point: the play’s last line is, in his opinion, the one line in Shakespeare that best describes heaven.

• Proteus, “as his name indicates” (the shape-changing Greek Proteus), is unfaithful, pursues Valentine’s girl, is caught; reads Valentine’s rebuke (“the private wound is deepest… that a friend should be the worst”) and Proteus’s “if hearty sorrow be a sufficient ransom for offence, I tender it here”; Valentine: “Then I am paid… who by repentance is not satisfied, is nor of heaven nor earth” — “beautifully said”. Both couples marry.
• “What hath fortuned” — noted as he pronounces it, “what has happened by fortune”.
• Writes the last line on the board: “one feast, one house, one mutual happiness.” Not by chance, he suggests, that Shakespeare’s best line on the last end is the last line of the play — “isn’t that strange”.
• One feast: Thomas’s communion prayer calls heaven the ineffable banquet; “eye has not seen, ear has not heard”; Christ speaks of eating at his table.
• One house: “in my Father’s house there are many mansions”; John Paul II dying: “let me go to the house of the Father”.
• One mutual happiness: the last end; and “one” three times over recalls the psalm “behold how good it is for brethren to dwell in unity” (his number: 132), with the oil and the dew of Hermon, which he takes to refer to the humanity and divinity of Christ, ending in eternal life. One above all by charity, but also one in hope and in faith.
• Anecdote: he put the question “what one line in Shakespeare best describes heaven?” to Warren Murray years ago and again by phone this morning; Warren didn’t know either time.
• Asides: a Friar Lawrence is mentioned in the play — perhaps the same who marries Romeo and Juliet, also set in Verona. A student recalls a Shakespeare poem “about the two being one” [unclear in recording which; not a sonnet].

3. Article 4, the objections and the sed contra (“the good is diffusive of itself”) #

Point: three arguments that there is no last end, from the good, from reason, and from the will; the sed contra from Aristotle.

• Obj. 1: the good by definition is diffusivum sui (Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4 — the middle term Thomas uses to argue God is good, since he bestows goods on creation). What proceeds from good is good, so diffuses another good, and so on “like these children” — the proceeding of good is in infinitum. But the good has the notion of an end; so ends go on without end. “Very interesting objection” — like the man who said of eternal life, “where’s it going to end?”
• Obj. 2 (from reason): things of reason can be multiplied without end — mathematical quantities, the species of number (given any number, add one). The desire of the end follows the grasp of reason; if reason doesn’t give out, neither does the desire for ends. He notes the translator’s “in infinite” sounds wrong in English; say “without end”.
• Obj. 3 (from will): good and end are the object of the will, and the will can reflect on itself infinitely — I will something, I will to will it… as I know a square, know that I know it, and so on. So no last end of the will.
• Aside: the old GE television slogan, “our most important product is progress” — “kind of endless”; “so twentieth century”.
• Sed contra: “the philosopher in the second book of Wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics II], where for each of the four kinds of cause Aristotle shows there is a first: those who make an infinite take away the nature of the good; the good has the notion of end; so one must lay down one last end.

4. The body: per se vs. per accidens order (“per se loquendo”) #

Point: per se speaking (through itself, as opposed to through another or by happening), one cannot proceed forever in ends from either side, because in things per se ordered, remove the first and you remove all that is ordered to it.

• A student supplies the reason: if A is for B for C, take away the last and there is no purpose in the rest.
• Distinction, per se vs. per accidens order, by cases: his ten grandchildren in birth order — if Kate were not, Sarah could still have been; it does not belong to Sophia as such to come after Isabella; per accidens. His morning: Summa Contra Gentiles, a bit of Metaphysics, a theorem of Euclid, tea, Böhm’s Mozart 26th then 27th concerto; mass, library, breakfast — each could have come in another order; accidentally ordered.
• Per se ordered: Euclid’s theorem that if a:b = x:y and b:c = y:z then a:c = x:z, proved through the earlier theorem that if first:second = third:fourth then first:third = second:fourth (alternation); worked on the board step by step (“how the hell did you do that?”). The order of the one theorem before the other is not accidental; the later follows simply from the earlier. And that earlier theorem depends on other premises, back to something obvious — this cannot be endless.
• Aristotle, Physics VIII: no infinite in moving causes, since there would be no first mover, without which the others cannot move, moving only in that they are moved. Contrast: he did not read the Contra Gentiles in order to hear the concerto; that would be an order he imposed arbitrarily.
• Asides: he took delight in the Euclid proof (“absolutely beautiful… one thing after another”) and quotes the American poetess (identified by a student as Emily Dickinson) on Euclid alone having looked on beauty [ed.: the line is usually attributed to Edna St. Vincent Millay]. A student’s Tesla story (calculating the volume of every dish before dining at the Waldorf) — his reply: a form of scruples, “not a necessary thing”.

5. The same proof in the particular sciences (“not every statement is a conclusion”) #

Point: the impossibility of an infinite in per se ordered things is shown in each lower science, and the argument has a similar shape in all.

• Physics: a first mover. Ethics (even in the proemium): a first end, which is the last end — first in one way, last in another. Logic: not every statement is a conclusion.
• A statement can be both conclusion and premise (the alternation theorem). But if every premise were a conclusion, you could never begin: before using any statement, someone says “prove it”, and so on. A statement in need of proof cannot prove until proven; if all are of that sort, the whole chain is one chain in need of proof with nothing before it.
• Train: a railroad car cannot initiate motion but moves another if moved; ten or fifteen such cars are like “one grand moved mover”, presupposing a mover; if every mover were of that sort, it is in the group; only cars, no motion. “One moves only insofar as it’s being moved by another — that’s what it means to be per se ordered.” Likewise he learned the a:c theorem through the alternation theorem, but not how to hear Mozart through the Contra Gentiles.

6. The twofold order: intention and execution (“the order of intention and the order of execution”) #

Point: in ends there is a double order, and in both there must be something first.

• Order of intention: the first is the beginning moving desire; take it away and desire is moved by nothing. Can the first thing you want be a means? No — it must be an end; a means as means cannot be willed without willing the end.
• Order of execution: the first is where the operation begins; take it away and no one would do anything.
• The two orders run contrary: I want to be happy → get rid of my headache → take an aspirin → I have none, the drugstore has → go to the drugstore — finally something I can do; then aspirin, headache gone, “on my way to happiness, or at least happier”. Beginning of intention: wanting happiness (if I didn’t care whether happy or miserable, no headache-removal); beginning of execution: the first step in my power. People who “don’t know where to begin” can do nothing until they find a place to begin.
• So the beginning of intention is the last end; the beginning of execution is the first of those things toward the end. Pythagorean theorem: Euclid I.47 needs 46, and so on; if there were always something before, you could never understand it — it must go back to what is obvious and already in your power.
• If no last end: nothing desired, no action ended, the agent’s intention never at rest. If nothing first among means: no one begins, and counsel [ed.: consilium; transcript “consul”] would not terminate (headache — how? aspirin — won’t work… forever).
• Things without per se order, joined per accidens, nothing prevents from being infinite: accidental causes are undetermined. So there can be an infinity of ends and of means in that way — after Thomas, Metaphysics, Euclid, a Psalm… “a very unproductive life, no problem.”

7. Reply to the first: the good diffuses downward, by understanding (“in number, weight, and measure”) #

Point: it belongs to the good that something flow from it (because of its perfection), not that it proceed from another; so the first good is the last end, and the objection only proves an endless descent toward things for the end.

• That descent would hold if one considered only the power of the first good, which is infinite; but God diffuses by his understanding, which pours into things according to a certain form, so a certain mode is applied by which other goods share the diffusive power — Wisdom 11, God disposes all in number, weight and measure. Reason always acts toward some definite end; Aristotle in Metaphysics II uses this too (no acting by mind without an end).
• Counting: “Daddy, can you count to a hundred?”… to a thousand, a million — always aiming at something further than one can achieve is not acting out of mind; “no goal for me to aim at”. Applied to “progress is our most important product” and to academics who advance their science for those after them to advance it further: something irrational there. In the end there is one thing we want to know, the first cause, God himself — no further “why”; St. Bernard: the reason for loving God is God.
• Fr. Hardon: they convince you to buy things you don’t need with money you don’t have; “happiness is always one purchase away”.
• Objection he raises: the seven wise men said “nothing too much” — but can you love or know God too much? No; only God loves and knows God as much as he is lovable and knowable. Then would I not, in the lower ranks of heaven, want to know God as much as Peter does? His answer: in heaven the will is entirely conformed to God’s, so one wants to know God as much as God wants one to know him — “I don’t know what else to say”, though contrary to our experience of always understanding Euclid, the Contra Gentiles, the Posterior Analytics better (De Koninck, teaching physics since 1935, still saw something new each time).
• Student: so in heaven we don’t grow in knowledge of God? “Not essentially”: a certain measure of the light of glory, “that’s it for you”; my cup will be full (St. Teresa), yours may hold more. God made everything by number — my days are numbered, even my weight is a number; so there is a limit to how much I understand in this life. Proportioned metaphor: he now needs less steak than the young; full is full; no wish to enter the hot-dog-eating contest.

8. Reply to the second: mental multiplicity (“Socrates is Socrates is Socrates”) #

Point: in per se things reason begins from principles naturally known and proceeds to a term (Posterior Analytics I: no infinite in demonstrations, which keep a per se connection); in per accidens things — a unit added to a pre-existing number — nothing prevents reason going on forever.

• Physics III: one reason people think the infinite exists is that reason never gives out; but this is a mental multiplicity of “no great significance”.
• “Socrates is Socrates”: the one man found twice; the statement is itself: four Socrates; as many as I want.
• Bertrand Russell’s proof that the part equals the whole: list all numbers, list their doubles; an even number for every number, so the evens equal all numbers, yet are a part. “Smoke and mirrors”: a mental multiplicity (using 2 as many times as you want) confused with real multiplicity. Likewise “Sophia is Sophia, and the statement is itself” gives more Sophias than people in the room; more Duane Berquists than monks — not a multiplication of real being, “thank God”, but mental.
• Metaphysics V: senses of being; being in the mind, treated with true and false, vs. being in things — only one Socrates out there. Boethius: nothing more true than that a thing is itself; but that is being-as-true. So Russell confuses senses of being. His old trick of getting students to mix up senses of whole and part; “being” is harder still; Aristotle: the most common mistake is mixing up words; Msgr. Dionne’s lectures le mot en logique — we don’t see our thoughts directly and must work through words.
• Aside: a student’s “a rose is a rose is a rose” (attributed by the student to Virginia Woolf [ed.: usually Gertrude Stein]); “God is God” does not make two gods; intellectus est in… [unclear in recording]; a student asks whether Bonaventure or Augustine has “if God is God then God is”.

9. Reply to the third: the will’s reflection is per accidens (“indifferently once or many times”) #

Point: the multiplication of acts of the will reflecting on itself is per accidens to the order of ends, since about one and the same end the will reflects on itself indifferently once or many times.

• Charity: one loves God, neighbour, oneself, and can love that one loves — and that one loves that one loves, any number of times; indifferent. He often thinks “I think I know this” but rarely goes to “I know that I know that I know”; I want to know God, and to know that I know God. Break proposed.

His words #

• happiness; from hap (luck), origin but not meaning; used to translate eudaimonia
• ultimus; the last end; noted against Shakespeare’s last line
• diffusivum sui; the good is diffusive of itself (Dionysius)
• second book of Wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics II]; likewise “fifth book of Wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics V]
• per se loquendo; “through itself”, as such; opposed to through another or by happening
• per se order vs. per accidens order; the former: one is only insofar as through another; the latter: could have come in another order
• one grand moved mover; the railroad cars between engine and caboose
• order of intention / order of execution (carrying out); beginnings: the last end / the first means
• counsel [ed.: consilium; transcript "consul"]; deliberation that would not terminate
• number, weight, measure; Wisdom 11
• mental multiplicity; multiplication in the mind, not in things (Socrates is Socrates)
• being in reason / being in things; being as the true and false (Metaphysics V)

Texts #

Read in class

• Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona: opening scene (Valentine/Proteus), repentance scene, last lines (handout p. 27)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 1, a. 4: objections, sed contra, body, three replies (translated from the Latin)
• Euclid, theorem on proportions (a:b = x:y, b:c = y:z ⟹ a:c = x:z) and the alternation theorem it uses (loci not stated)

Mentioned

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, end of book II (angels’ way of understanding; his morning reading)
• Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4
• Aristotle, Metaphysics II (sed contra; first cause in each kind); Metaphysics V (senses of being); Physics VIII (first mover); Physics III (the infinite); Posterior Analytics I (no infinite in demonstrations); Nicomachean Ethics proemium (first end)
• Euclid, Elements I.46–47 (Pythagorean theorem)
• Wisdom 11:20 (inferred verse); Psalm 132 (his number; “brethren dwell in unity”); John 14 “many mansions” (inferred); “eye has not seen” (1 Cor 2, inferred)
• Thomas’s communion prayer (ineffable banquet); St. Bernard on the reason for loving God; Boethius on “a thing is itself”; St. Teresa on the full cup; Msgr. Dionne, le mot en logique; Bertrand Russell on even numbers; Romeo and Juliet prologue

His questions #

• What one line in Shakespeare best describes heaven? “One feast, one house, one mutual happiness” — until a better line comes up.
• Are my ten grandchildren, or my morning’s readings and Mozart concertos, per se ordered? No, per accidens: any could have been without the one before.
• Is the order of the alternation theorem before the a:c theorem accidental? No; the second follows simply from the first, and this chain must go back to something obvious.
• If every mover only moves as moved, does adding more of them give motion? No; ten cars are one grand moved mover, still presupposing an engine.
• Can the first thing you want be a means? No; it must be an end, since a means cannot be willed without willing the end.
• Is aiming always at something further than one can achieve (counting, endless progress) acting by mind? No; there is no goal to aim at; reason acts for a definite end.
• Can you love or know God too much? Then in heaven won’t I want to know him more than I do? No to the first; in heaven the will is conformed to God’s, so one wants to know him as much as God wants — “I don’t know what else to say.”
• So in heaven we don’t grow in knowledge of God? Not essentially; a set measure of the light of glory, the cup full.
• Are the even numbers equal to all numbers, so that the part equals the whole? No; Russell confuses mental multiplicity with real, and senses of being.
• Can you love by charity that you love, and that you love that you love? Yes, any number of times; that reflection is indifferent, per accidens to the order of ends.