What Beatitude Is: Created, and an Operation (Summa I-II q.3 aa.1–2)

Orientation #

He refers back to “that distinction now between the object of beatitude … and the beatitude itself” and to “the last article on the goodness of God in both summas” (prev. lecture). He does not say what comes next, though he previews all eight articles of q. 3 from its proemium. The previous class treated q. 2 aa. 7–8, the next treats q. 3 aa. 3–4.

The class, in order #

1. The proemium: eight things asked about what beatitude is (“Eight things are asked”) #

He reads the prologue of q. 3 and guesses the answers from the order of the articles.

• (1) Whether beatitude is something uncreated: the object is uncreated, but beatitude itself is not.
• (2) If created, whether it is an operation, “an act, doing” — apparently yes.
• (3) Whether an operation of the sensitive or of the intellectual part — intellectual only.
• (4) Whether of the understanding or of the will — “the more controversial one”; apparently of the intellect.
• (5) Whether of the speculative or of the practical understanding — apparently speculative. Aside on the word: theoretical from the Greek for looking, speculative from the Latin for looking, and the plain English would be “the looking understanding,” “like Shakespeare has,” though nobody says that.
• (6) Whether it consists in the looking of the speculative sciences, “like my Euclid,” maybe metaphysics.
• (7) Whether in looking at the separated substances, the angels.
• (8) Whether in the sola speculatione Dei — seeing God through his very essence, not as in philosophy nor by seeing one’s own soul. He puts together St John’s “seeing God as He is” and St Paul’s “face to face” (the latter “a little more metaphorical”), and God’s word about Moses. Asides on angels, attached to article 7: rereading the treatise on the angels in the prima pars; his teacher Kasurik on the angel watching you decide as you watch an angleworm; Fr Wagner on pilgrimage asked what angels think of our going to the moon — “they’re probably not impressed”; Buckley calling the New York skyscrapers “toys”; Kasurik’s story of the soul mistaking its guardian angel for God — “He’s up much higher than me.”

2. Dividing the eight articles (“the rule of two or three”) #

Point: a list of eight should be divisible into twos and threes.

• His proposed division: (a) created or not; (b) that it is an operation, then which operation in particular — with the last two articles as a group of their own. He leaves the exact scheme open: “you’d probably have to divide these into twos and threes.”
• Comparison: Thomas begins the treatise on the angels with four parts (substance, understanding, will, creation) — “what’s wrong with the man?” — but this reduces to two: the angel itself (three parts) and its creation.
• Aside: Thomas divides the consideration of creatures into angels, matter, soul — the order of the Psalms and of Daniel’s praise, not the philosophical order, but sensible because man is a microcosm combining the material and spiritual worlds and so comes last; “probably appropriate” that Christ became man, bringing the whole creation back to God.

3. Article 1, objections: it seems beatitude is something uncreated (“God is what beatitude itself”) #

• Obj. 1: Boethius, Consolation III — one must confess God is beatitude itself. He recalls Boethius’s own argument: beatitude is the summum bonum, the summum bonum is God, so beatitude is God. Thomas ends SCG book I with the beatitude of God; we partake of God’s beatitude; beatitude is also called eternal life, which God has essentially and we by partaking.
• Obj. 2: the very syllogism above — beatitude is the highest good; to be the summum bonum belongs to God (the last article on God’s goodness in both summas); there are not many summa bona; so beatitude is God.
• Obj. 3: beatitude is the last end to which the will naturally tends; the will tends to nothing as end except God, “who alone should be enjoyed.” Joke: so I should not enjoy my candy or steak — “This is a hard teaching. Who can follow this? Especially with chocolate chip cookies around.”
• Sed contra: nothing made is uncreated; man’s beatitude is something made, since (Augustine) those things are to be enjoyed which make us blessed.
• His summary: God is the object of beatitude, and our beatitude is a partaking or likeness of God’s beatitude — “God just thinks about himself. That’s all we do, now.”

4. Article 1, body: end said in two ways (“end is said in two ways”) #

1. End means (a) the thing we wish to obtain — as money to the avaricious; or (b) the obtaining, possession, use or enjoyment of that thing — as possessing money is the end of the avaricious, enjoying a pleasant thing the end of the intemperate. Aside: the Magnificat’s second part names the goods God is not too good to — riches, power, glory, pride.
2. In the first way, the last end of man is the uncreated good, God, who alone by his infinite goodness can perfectly fulfill the will of man.
   • On sua infinita bonitate: infinity modifies goodness; this helps him see why the ST treats God’s perfection and goodness and then his infinity — “that’s why I try to force the five into three,” taking infinity as a modification of goodness. Thomas could equally have said “simple goodness,” since they are all in a sense the same thing.
   • On implere: “fulfill,” etymologically; full is taken from the continuous (a glass) and carried over to desire; “my cup is overflowing.”
3. In the second way, the last end is something created, existing in him — the obtaining or enjoyment of the last end. This is called beatitude, also eternal life: he cites Psalm 132 (“how good it is … for brethren to be all one,” the oil on Aaron’s beard, “there the Lord has pronounced his blessing … eternal life”), noting it is in the third part of the Psalms, which deals with resting in the end.
4. Conclusion: considered as to its cause or object, beatitude is uncreated; as to its very essence, created — and “the what it is of beatitude” is what the question is about.

• On “cause or object”: not that the words mean the same, but they can be the same thing. Thomas’s proof that good is the cause of love has as middle term that the object of love is its cause; likewise for all the emotions — the object of fear (the reactors “over in Japan … melting down”) is what causes fear.

5. Article 1, replies (“blessed through his very nature”) #

• Ad 1: God is beatitude by his very essence — not blessed through obtaining or partaking another good but through his own substance. Men are blessed by partaking, as Boethius says, “just as they are called gods by partaking,” even in Scripture; that partaking is something created. So my seeing God as He is, and even my loving God, is something created — “doesn’t exist now.” Aside: even Aristotle sometimes holds God up as a model of happiness.
• Ad 2: beatitude is called man’s highest good not because it is the highest good but because it is the obtaining or enjoyment of the highest good.
• Ad 3: it is called the last end in the way the obtaining of the end is called the end.

6. Article 2, objections: it seems beatitude is not an operation (“life is not an operation”) #

A student groans at the number of objections; he answers that the De Veritate questions run to about twenty, and “we’re just beginning this stuff.” Aside on the text: he suspects the original lacks the ut before beatitudo sit operatio.

• Obj. 1: Romans 6 — “your end eternal life”; but life is not an operation but the very being of the one living. He notes the double sense of life: being (my death is opposed to life in this sense) vs. operation (“my life is listening to Mozart”; Msgr Dionne on retiring from teaching, “that’s my life” — he would not be dead if he stopped).
• Obj. 2: Boethius, Consolation III — beatitude is “a state made perfect by the bringing together of all goods”; status does not name an operation.
  • On “all goods”: Thomas often quotes God to Moses, “I will show you every good,” meaning “I will show you myself.” We know the simple in a composed way (Thomas on the angels: things above us we know more composedly than they are, things below us more simply). Illustration: to imagine an angel’s excellence, imagine Mozart, Shakespeare, Homer, Aristotle, Thomas, Einstein, Washington, MacArthur “all rolled into one”; each angel has the whole perfection of its kind, no man the whole perfection of man. Student: how about Christ? He: Christ did not show all he knew (numbers, the natural world) — moderation proportioned to the audience; Francis de Sales on parables as our Lord’s favourite way of teaching; Bonaventure on preaching to the sensuales (rooted in the senses, not sinful) vs. the spirituales — “give them milk.”
  • Aside on method: as with an article on a definition, each objection singles out one part and so concentrates the mind on the whole definition distinctly — “something beautiful about the way he does these things.”
• Obj. 3: beatitude signifies something existing in the blessed one, its last perfection; operation signifies something proceeding from the operator.
• Obj. 4: beatitude remains in the blessed; operation does not persist but passes away. Aristotle on God’s blessedness: if he is always in the state we can only sometimes be in, that is marvellous; but our operations come and go.
• Obj. 5: of one man there is one beatitude, but operations are many — else “forty-eight beatitudes in the first book of Euclid,” with the Pythagorean theorem as the forty-seventh.
• Obj. 6: beatitude is without interruption, but operation is interrupted by sleep, other occupation, or rest — Aristotle marvels at God for this reason; Politics VIII on music as rest. Story: exhausted from a session with Msgr Dionne, finding Diane de Sotel playing the piano — restful, but “no longer at this intense intellectual activity.” (Whether Dionne or Belay played an instrument he does not know; a story that Dionne conducted a choir.)
• Sed contra: Ethics I — happiness is an operation according to perfect virtue.

7. Article 2, body: beatitude is the last act of man (“the last act of man”) #

1. Beatitude is the last perfection of man.
2. Each thing is perfect to the extent it is in act (Aristotle, ninth book, on act and ability; ability without act is imperfect).
3. So beatitude consists in the last act of man.
4. Operation is the last act of the one operating — the philosopher’s “second act” in De Anima II: one having a form is able to act in ability, as the knower in ability is in potency to considering; and each thing is said to be on account of its operation (On the Heavens I — he first says “the universe,” then corrects to On the Heavens).
5. Therefore man’s beatitude is an operation. “It goes back to the understanding of ability and act.”

• Joke: he’ll write a book called The Ultimate Act of Man — or “more dramatic, Final Act.”

8. Ad 1 and ad 2: two senses of life; Boethius vs. Aristotle (“This is eternal life”) #

• Ad 1: life said in two ways. (a) The being of the one living — in this sense beatitude is not life, for it has been shown that the being of a man is not his beatitude; only God’s being is his beatitude — which is how Thomas would show no one can be as blessed as God: none of the rest of us are our own beatitude. (b) The doing of the one living, as the principle of life is reduced to act — active, contemplative, voluptuous life; in this sense eternal life is the last end. John 17:3, “this is eternal life, that they know you, the true God” — “there, God himself seems to be saying that eternal life is knowing rather than loving.”
• Ad 2: Boethius defines by the common notion — that beatitude is a perfect common good, “a state perfect by the bringing together of all goods,” meaning only that the blessed one is in the state of a perfect good; Aristotle expresses the very essence, showing through what man is in that state, namely an operation — though he too, in Ethics I, shows beatitude to be a perfect good. He returns to “I will show you every good”: God is “the universe … all turned into one,” our mind having to know the simple through the composed.

9. Ad 3: twofold action; Marx and the fallacy of the accident (“making a chair can’t be my beatitude”) #

• From “the ninth book of Wisdom, the ninth book after the books of Natural Philosophy” [ed.: Metaphysics IX]: action is twofold.
  • A: action proceeding into exterior matter — to burn, to dry, secare to cut. Not the perfection of the agent but of the thing acted on, so it cannot be beatitude: making a chair perfects the chair; teaching perfects the student as such.
  • B: action remaining in the doer — to sense, to understand, to will; the perfection and act of the agent; this can be beatitude. Aristotle himself says there that happiness is this kind of activity.
• Objection he raises: college teachers say they learn the subject by teaching, practical men say they learn by making. Reply: that is accidental to teaching and making — you teach insofar as you know, and the professor “should know it.” Marx’s mistake is to see man as perfecting himself by making; it is the fallacy of the accident, “the first kind of mistake outside of language.” People are easily deceived because it happens most of the time (winemakers learn and improve), but making McDonald’s hamburgers day after day perfects the hamburgers, not the maker.
• Can directing others be the ultimate end? No — directing others is helping them to their end. Seen in God: is God perfected by creating universes or by directing us? “Got nothing to gain. Got nothing to lose too.”

10. Ad 4 (and 5, 6): grades of beatitude; the present life vs. the blessed (“let us call them blessed as men”) #

• Since beatitude names a last perfection, and diverse things are capable of diverse grades of perfection, beatitude is said in diverse ways:
  • In God, by his very essence, since his being is his operation; he enjoys not another but himself.
  • In the blessed angels, by an operation joining them to the uncreated good, one and eternal.
  • In men in the present life, by an operation joining man to God, which can be neither continuous nor therefore one (multiplied by what cuts in between), so perfect beatitude cannot be had here. Hence Ethics I calls man’s beatitude imperfect and concludes “let us call them blessed as men” — blessed secundum quid, not simpliciter. But God promises perfect beatitude, “when we will be as the angels in heaven” (Matthew, where he is talking about marriage).
• To the objection “operation ceases”: in perfect beatitude the operation in which the mind is joined to God is one, continuous and eternal. In the present life, to the extent we fail from the unity and continuity of that operation we fail from the perfection of beatitude, yet there is some partaking, more so the more the operation is continuous and one. Hence the active life, occupied with many things, has less of the notion of beatitude than the contemplative life, which turns around one thing, the contemplation of truth. When a man is not actually doing it he is ready to do it always; and the cessation of the act by sleep or “the occupation of something natural” (“very discreet here”) is ordered to that operation — so a kind of continued operation (“I woke up thinking about this thing here again”). This answers objections 5 and 6 too.
• His closing gloss: it is an operation that will “come, but it won’t go” — Augustine said that before Thomas; partaking of eternal life, with no before and after in that operation.

His words #

• beatitude; used for beatitudo, kept untranslated throughout [ed.: happiness/blessedness]
• “an operation, an act, doing”; his renderings of operatio
• “the looking understanding”; his English for the speculative/theoretical intellect
• sola speculatione Dei; seeing God “through his very essence,” “as He is,” “face to face”
• summum bonum; the highest good, which is God
• eternal life; another name for the last end
• “obtain”; for adipisci; “enjoyment,” “possession,” “use” for the second sense of end
• sua infinita bonitate; “by his infinite goodness,” infinity modifying goodness
• implere; “fulfill,” from “full” as said of the continuous
• cause and object; can be the same thing though the words differ
• essentia; “the what it is” of beatitude
• partaking; for participatio, men blessed and “called gods” by partaking
• status; Boethius’s “state,” which does not name an operation
• “ability”; [ed.: potency], paired with act; “ability without act is imperfect”
• “second act”; operation as the last act of the one having a form (De Anima II)
• “the ninth book of Wisdom”; [ed.: Metaphysics IX], “after the books of Natural Philosophy”
• secare; to cut
• fallacy of the accident; “the first kind of mistake outside of language,” Marx’s mistake
• action remaining in the doer vs. action going into exterior matter
• blessed secundum quid vs. simpliciter; men in this life vs. the blessed
• sensuales / spirituales; Bonaventure’s audiences, “not meaning sinful”

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, ST I-II q. 3, prooemium (the eight articles)
• Thomas Aquinas, ST I-II q. 3, a. 1 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Thomas Aquinas, ST I-II q. 3, a. 2 (objections, sed contra, body, replies 1–4, with 5–6 noted as answered)
• Psalm 132 (his numbering), on the oil on Aaron’s beard and the blessing
• John 17:3, “this is eternal life”

Mentioned

• Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy III (God is beatitude; beatitude a state perfected by all goods)
• Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles I, last part, on the beatitude of God
• Thomas, ST I, treatise on the angels (its fourfold division; angels/matter/soul)
• Augustine (things to be enjoyed which make us blessed; eternal operation)
• Aristotle, Ethics I (happiness an operation according to perfect virtue; “blessed as men”)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX (act and ability; twofold action; happiness an immanent activity)
• Aristotle, De Anima II (second act); On the Heavens I (a thing said to be on account of its operation); Politics VIII (music as rest)
• Romans 6; Matthew (as the angels in heaven); 1 John (seeing him as he is) and St Paul (face to face) (inferred loci not stated); Exodus on Moses (inferred); the Magnificat; Daniel’s praise
• Euclid I (48 propositions, prop. 47 the Pythagorean theorem)
• Thomas, De Veritate (twenty objections per question) (inferred, from “the QD”)
• Francis de Sales on parables; Bonaventure on preaching; Chesterton, “God is all that being can possibly be”

His questions #

• Is beatitude itself something uncreated, as its object is? No: as object or cause it is uncreated, as its very essence it is something created in man.
• How do you divide eight articles by “the rule of two or three”? Created or not; then that it is an operation and which operation; last two on their own — left open in detail.
• Can cause and object be the same thing? Yes: the object of love is the cause of love; the object of fear is what causes fear.
• Is beatitude life? Not life as the being of the one living; yes as the doing of the one living, “eternal life.”
• Can making a chair, or teaching, be my beatitude? No: they perfect the chair or the student, not the agent; learning by teaching or making is accidental.
• How about Christ — did he have the whole perfection of man? He had it but did not show it all; he moderated his teaching to his audience.
• Is God perfected by creating or directing us? No: “got nothing to gain, got nothing to lose too.”
• Can perfect beatitude be had in this life? No: the operation joining us to God is neither continuous nor one here; we are “blessed as men.”
• Does the operation of beatitude cease? In the blessed it is one, continuous and eternal; it will come but won’t go.