Aquinas on the Last End (Summa I-II, Q1, Art. 5): Can a Man Have Many Last Ends? No One Can Serve Two Masters

Orientation #

He opens directly on “the fifth article” and closes “Philosophy four-three-six”; he does not refer to last time or next time, apart from recalling “one mutual happiness” as “that last line” (prev. lecture: closing line of Two Gentlemen of Verona). Verified sources: the class treats Summa Theologiae I-II q.1 a.5 throughout, with about ten minutes read from the handout “Note for Word One”, p.1, and a page from the printed volume DHB Vol. III, The School of Aristotle, p.579 (neither named in the transcript). The previous class treated q.1 a.4 on whether there is one last end; the next class, on the feast of St Thomas, treats a.6 and the opening of a.7.

The class, in order #

1. The objection stated and the word “simul” (“many last ends, but not at the same time”) #

Point: the whole article turns on simul—Thomas denies many last ends together, not many last ends in succession.

• Objection: the will of one man can be borne to many things at the same time as last ends. He tells the class to “look at the words”: plural (“many things”) and simul (“together”).
• What Thomas will allow: a man could have many last ends over time. Illustrations: C. S. Lewis (work not recalled) on how the “end of life” shifts across a life; the little boy whose whole life was candy until his mother let him eat as much as he wanted on his birthday and he got sick; Romeo, for whom Juliet is his happiness; later, power or wealth. Candy-then-girl, girl-then-wealth: succession, not simul.
• “You love me or my money” (the girl to the guy): only one of them is the last end, not both.
• Student objection: in reality a man could have as his last end power and wealth—he desires both; “our notion of happiness is what perfects me”, and he might see his perfection as a beautiful wife, lots of money and power, so that taking away any one of them takes away his happiness. Answer reached with the class: then his one last end is composed of all of these; no one of them by itself is his last end, but the combination. He supports this by Boethius, whom Thomas often quotes: happiness is a state made perfect by the aggregation of all goods (Consolation of Philosophy). He notes this “kind of comes out” in the first objection and its reply.

2. Objection 1 and the reply: many goods as one perfect good (“wisdom shared with friends”) #

Point: the many in which people place the last end are taken as parts of one perfect good constituted from them.

• Obj. 1: Augustine, City of God XIX—some place the last end of man in four things: pleasure, quiet (rest), the first things of nature, and virtue; these are manifestly many; therefore one man can place his last end in many things.
• Reply ad 1 (read out of order, “just to make our order”): all those many are taken in the notion of one perfect good constituted from them by those who place the last end in them.
• Example: the society’s own motto—studies, friendship, the pursuit of wisdom—“our wisdom shared with friends”: not two ultimate ends (wisdom, friendship) but wisdom shared with friends, as parts of one.
• Student: “one mutual happiness”—“beautiful, that last line”; a student adds marriage as a fourth element in that context. He: heaven is spoken of metaphorically as marriage; Thomas often quotes Hosea, “I have espoused you to me in faith”, the consummation being seeing God face to face; and Psalm 44, which Thomas calls an epithalamium (a marriage-day poem, like Spenser’s Epithalamion).

3. Objections 2 and 3 (“does not lose its free power”) #

Point: the remaining objections rest on non-opposition and on the will’s freedom; Thomas will show what kind of opposition is in play.

• Obj. 2: things not opposed to each other do not exclude each other; many things are found that are not opposed; so if one is laid down as last end, the others are not excluded. He flags: Thomas will show the kind of opposition it is, in the reply to the second.
• Obj. 3: the will, by constituting its last end in something (e.g. pleasure), does not lose its free power; before it did so it could have placed it elsewhere (riches); therefore even after, it can at the same time place its last end in riches. What Thomas objects to is again simul.
• Reply ad 3, read now as “the key thing”: the power of the will does not extend to making opposites be together—which would happen if it tended to many disparate things as last ends.

4. Sed contra: belly-gods and two masters (“no one is able to serve two masters”) #

Point: what a man rests in as last end dominates his affection and gives the rules of his whole life; so there cannot be two.

• Philippians 3, “whose god is their belly”: since God is our last end, whatever you make your last end is called your God, though it is not God—“that’s beautiful”, he says of Scripture’s way of speaking. They place their last end in the delights of the stomach.
• Matthew 6: no one can serve two masters—Thomas adds “not ordered to each other”. Therefore no many last ends of one man.
• Aside (illustrating two masters): students in the academic world try to set two teachers against each other, or “swear by” one teacher; can you have two masters in that sense? He thinks not. Laval stories: De Koninck was more known than Dionne, but made clear to Warren Murray and to Mary Shane that Dionne was the master; when Berquist, whose adviser was Dionne, brought a thesis question to De Koninck, he answered “why ask me when you’ve got Dionne?”; a class discussion of equivocal and analogous names he wrote up for De Koninck was sent on to Dionne; De Koninck joked that Dionne’s principal passion was fear—fear of being mistaken, so his first reaction to a new idea was to reject it.
• “So who’s your master, Berquist or Thomas?” If you see him departing from Thomas and still follow him, then he is your master—“you’re on your own.”

5. The body: “the will of one man” and “simul” (“it’s impossible that the will of one man”) #

Point: Thomas’s thesis is precise—one man, at the same time.

• He is not denying that two men may have different last ends (one man’s may be his stomach).
• Simul refers first to time: the word is hama in the Categories, in the chapter right after “before and after”, because the first meaning of before and after, and so of simul, is in time.
• Example of succession: boys attach themselves to one game, seek friends who play it, then lose interest and get new friends around something else; later “you get a girl.”
• Asides on differing ends: Warren Murray joined a cuisine club and quit after hearing the agitated talk about nearly missing ingredients; tea experts’ timings and temperatures—he gives everything four minutes; a friend on super-priced stereos: “the only one that can tell the difference is a dog”—“then how much do you like the dog?”

6. First reason: the perfect good leaves nothing outside itself (“leaves nothing outside itself to be desired”) #

Point: what one desires as last end one desires as a perfect and completing good; if two things were each the perfect good, neither would satisfy.

1. Each thing desires its own perfection; so what someone desires as last end he desires as a perfect good, completing himself.
2. Augustine, City of God XIX: “the end of the good” means not that it be no more, but that it be perfected so as to be full (plenum). He reads the English: “we mean not that it passes away so as to be no more, but that it is perfected so as to be complete.” Two senses of “end” (Physics II): the terminus (death) and that-for-the-sake-of-which, the fourth kind of cause. His sophism for students: happiness is the end of life; the end of life is death; therefore happiness is death—the fallacy is the shift between the two senses.
3. Aside on “full”: plenitudo divinitatis (fullness of divinity in Christ); “full” comes from the concrete—a full glass, a full plate—then is carried over to “he fully understands.”
4. So the last end must fulfil the whole desire of man, leaving nothing outside itself to be desired; otherwise it would not be the last end. This cannot be if something extraneous is required for its perfection.
5. Hence the appetite cannot tend to two things as if each were its perfect good—then neither would satisfy.

• Illustration of “something missing”: a bishop in the Catholic Reporter on young people finding the happiness society offers has good things but something missing, and so coming to the church; his father’s golf friend at the Blue Moon, a fallen-away Catholic, who never spoke of religion but said out of the blue, after Berquist entered the monastery, “my wife and I started going back to church because we thought something was missing.” Thomas in Summa Contra Gentiles, having shown what man’s end is, shows that it satisfies all his desires.
• Reply ad 2 (tied to this reason): many things can be taken with no opposition between them, yet it is opposed to a perfect good that something of the thing’s perfection lie outside it—“there the opposition comes in.”
• Two senses of “perfect” from Metaphysics V: (a) what has all its parts; (b) what has all the ability of its kind. Dryden, who first saw more Beaumont and Fletcher than Shakespeare, came to see he was “a limb of Shakespeare”—the second sense, said in a word from the first. Einstein’s “pre-established harmony” between Mozart and Johann Christian Bach (Sebastian’s youngest son, who went to Italy and married a Catholic): J. C. Bach described as “Mozart with something missing”—second sense. He would take “Aristotle with something missing” as a great compliment; the class: “a lot missing.”
• Reply ad 3 restated: if the will pursued disparate things as last ends, neither would be perfect; or if one were, it would seek nothing beyond it.

7. Second reason: the beginning of willing is natural, and nature tends to one (“nature does not tend except towards one”) #

Point: as reasoning begins from what is naturally known, willing begins from what is naturally desired; nature tends to one; the beginning of rational desire is the last end; so the last end is one. “A very subtle argument.”

• Principle from Summa Contra Gentiles: we acquire what is not natural through what is natural. Examples: knives, forks, hammers acquired through the hand, the natural tool we are born with (the baby grasping a finger), hence “tool of tools”; Aristotle in the Poetics, man the most imitative of animals (“monkey see, monkey do”, but none as imitative as man), behind plays; we first learn by imitation and naturally delight in imitations—so English, French, Greek, none natural, are acquired by imitating parents and siblings (the Greek thinkers who isolated a baby to find the natural language: “kind of crazy”); every profession is learned by imitating those in it (the younger golfer watching the older).
• Applied: what we naturally know is the cause of knowing what we do not naturally know; what we naturally want is the cause of wanting what we do not naturally want. Naturally known beginning: the whole is more than the part. Natural desire: Metaphysics opens “all men by nature desire to know”—the beginning of philosophy is something natural.
• Shakespeare, Coriolanus: “nature not being able to be more than one”; custom imitates nature and determines to one.
• Thomas at the opening of his commentary on Psalm 1: one thing men have in common—they all want to be happy.
• Personal: as a boy he was convinced there was something which, if you had it, nothing else would matter—the task was to discover that one thing; one may be mistaken about what it is, but there is a determination to one.
• Student: is this argument harder to see than the first? “No more.”
• Confirmation from Metaphysics IV: all axioms go back to the axiom about being and non-being, which Aristotle calls the natural beginning. To say a whole is no more than one of its parts denies that a whole is a whole; to say a number is both odd and even is to say it is divisible into two equal parts and not. Fr Owen Bennett: it takes a long time to unfold that, yet even a child knows it—two children over a candy bar: “mine”—“no, mine”—it can’t be both.

8. Third reason: one first beginning in every genus (“in every genus there is one first beginning”) #

Point: voluntary actions get their species from the end and their genus from the common last end; in every genus there is one first beginning; the last end has the notion of a first beginning; so it is one. He calls it “a rather difficult thing”, sometimes referred to the fourth way to God; he offers “a little idea” of it.

• Text: as natural things are placed in a genus by a common formal notion, so all things desired by the will, as such, are one genus; therefore the last end is one, “and especially because” in every genus there is one first beginning.
• Two properties of the one (Metaphysics V and X): to be a beginning and to be a measure. Evidence from what is most known: Euclid VII—one is the beginning of numbers and measures all numbers (composites are also measured by other numbers, primes by none but one); and one is not a number (a student’s point, with the aside on Shakespeare’s little poem where love “has murdered number”, making lover and beloved one). Further: we measure with a ruler, something one; the virtuous man is the measure of all men (Aristotle); the meter bar in Paris; a unit or standard measure is one.
• One as beginning: the teacher is one and is the beginning of learning; our teacher here is Thomas, and we measure ourselves by that one man (as one compares De Koninck and Dionne to Thomas); he measures poets by Shakespeare, musicians by Mozart—if not by one, by very few, tending to unity. Original meaning of measure: that whereby quantity is made known; other things are made known by something one (genus or difference). The family tree goes back to Adam; monarchy—one ruler.
• Measured by approach to the beginning: in geometry some things are more certain as they approach the axioms; statements known through themselves are before, and the beginning of, those known through others, and measure their truth; among self-evident statements, the axioms common to all sciences measure the private principles (“no odd number is even” rests on contradiction). The axiom of contradiction is a natural beginning of all and measures all—something one.
• Not explicit in the text but Thomas’s: when the same belongs to many but to some more than others, it belongs per se to one of them, in abundance. The air in a room is warmer nearer the fire; things are more or less hot by distance from the one fire, which is both measure and beginning of their heat; conclusions in geometry are more or less known by nearness to the beginning. So all things desired are in one genus, the good, desired more or less as they approach the good itself. Common principle: what is so through itself is more so than what is so through another (sugar sweeter than what is sweet through it); and what is so through itself will be one.
• Closing sentence of the article: as the last end of man simply is one for the whole human race, so the last end of this man is one for this man—the will of this man must be established in one last end. “So it’s enough, I guess.”

His words #

• simul — “together”, “at the same time”; first meaning in time; the Greek hama of the Categories.
• last end / ultimate end — that which the will rests in, which “dominates the affection of man” and gives “the rules of his whole life”.
• “your God” — what you make your last end, in Scripture’s way of speaking.
• end (two senses) — that which is no more (terminus, death) vs. that for the sake of which (fourth kind of cause).
• plenum / fullness — carried over from a full glass or plate to “fully understands”.
• perfect (two senses) — what has all its parts; what has all the ability of its kind.
• “a limb of Shakespeare” — Dryden’s phrase for Beaumont and Fletcher.
• tool of tools — the hand, the natural tool through which artificial tools are acquired.
• the one — its two properties: to be a beginning and to be a measure.
• measure — originally, that whereby quantity is made known.
• private principles — the principles proper to a science, measured by the common axioms [ed.: proper principles].
• through itself / through another — per se / per aliud; the per se is always more so.
• “the fourth arguments of God” — the fourth way [ed.: the quarta via].

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II q.1 a.5: objections 1–3, sed contra, body (three reasons), replies ad 1–3, closing sentence (translated line by line).
• Augustine, City of God XIX, on “the end of the good” (English also read).
• Philippians 3 (“whose god is their belly”); Matthew 6 (two masters).
• Handout “Note for Word One”, p.1; DHB Vol. III, The School of Aristotle, p.579 (verified sources; not named in the transcript).

Mentioned

• C. S. Lewis (work not recalled); Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet; Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy; Hosea; Psalm 44 as epithalamium; Spenser, Epithalamion; Aristotle, Categories (simul, after before-and-after); Physics II (senses of end); Metaphysics I (opening), IV (axiom of contradiction), V (perfect; one), X (one); Poetics (man most imitative); Euclid VII; Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles (on the end satisfying all desire; acquiring the non-natural through the natural); Thomas, commentary on Psalm 1; Shakespeare, Coriolanus; Shakespeare’s “little poem” on love murdering number (inferred: The Phoenix and the Turtle); Dryden on Beaumont and Fletcher; Einstein on Mozart and J. C. Bach; Catholic Reporter (a bishop).

His questions #

• Could a man have many last ends, but not at the same time? Yes—candy, then the girl, then wealth; Thomas denies only simul.
• Could power and wealth both be his last end? Only as one end composed of both; no one of them alone.
• Can you serve two masters—two teachers you swear by? He thinks not; at Laval, De Koninck himself pointed to Dionne as the master.
• Who’s your master, Berquist or Thomas? Thomas; if you follow Berquist departing from Thomas, you’re on your own.
• Happiness is the end of life, the end of life is death, so happiness is death—what’s wrong? “End” shifts from that-for-the-sake-of-which to terminus.
• Is English (or French, or Greek) natural? No; acquired by imitation, the natural through which the non-natural is acquired.
• Is the second argument harder to see than the first? “No more.”
• What is the one that is most known to us, and how is it beginning and measure? The one of Euclid VII: beginning of numbers, measure of all numbers, not itself a number.
• Is the teacher one or many? One—the beginning of learning; our teacher here is Thomas.
• Do we measure things as more or less by how they approach the beginning? Yes—geometry approaching the axioms, air approaching the fire.