Summa I-II q.3 a.4–5: Replies on Peace, Charity vs. Faith, and Beatitude in the Speculative Intellect

Orientation #

He picks up mid-article (“what about this objection here from peace”) and refers back to “our course on love and friendship” for the three causes of love. He ends abruptly at the third reply of a.5 (“I guess we got to stop now”). The previous class treated a.3 (senses) and the body of a.4 (will vs. intellect); the next continues with a.6–7.

The class, in order #

1. Reply 1 of a.4: peace and the order of heaven (“peace pertains to the last end of man”) #

Point: peace is not essentially beatitude but stands to it antecedently and consequently.

• Antecedently: disturbances and impediments to the end are removed — as the end of government is peace, so that you can pursue your geometry undisturbed.
• Consequently: the end achieved, man remains pacified, his desire quieted.
• Aside on Augustine’s “tranquility of order”: Thomas defines the kingdom of heaven as the ordered society of those who see God. There is order among the blessed — one body shining brighter than another; Dionysius’ hierarchies of beginning, middle, end, in each hierarchy three orders, each order again beginning, middle, end, down to the last individual; unless you are the highest angel, someone is above and below you.
• Cartoon of the boss chewing out the one below, down to the man who kicks the dog: in heaven you are enlightened by those above, not mistreated. The Psalms delight in the house of God as well as God; Augustine: great joy to see God “in degree,” and the heart at rest, however low your place.

2. Reply 2 of a.4: the good as the will’s first object (“the first object of the will is not its act”) #

Point: though the good is the will’s object, its first object cannot be its own act — just as the first object of sight is not vision but the visible. So if beatitude pertains to the will as first object, it does not pertain to it as its act.

3. Reply 3 and the digression: is the will better than reason? (“motion towards the end begins in the will”) #

Point: the end is first apprehended by understanding; nevertheless motion to the end begins in the will — “that’s interesting.”

• Faith, hope, charity: by faith we know the end, by hope tend toward it, by charity are joined to it; hope is in the will.
• The probable argument for the will’s superiority: faith is to reason as charity is to will; alternate the proportion (as Euclid does): charity is to faith as will is to reason; charity is better than faith (St. Paul; incidentally hope too is better than faith, Thomas in the disputed questions on hope); therefore will is better than reason.
• His objection: is the proportion exact? Faith is not seeing God as He is in Himself; charity even now loves God in Himself. The exact proportion is: seeing God face to face is to reason as loving God for His own sake is to will — and St. Paul does not say love is better than that.
• Student: how can charity love God in Himself when it follows on knowledge that cannot know Him in Himself? Answer: three causes of love (prev. course) — the good, knowledge, likeness; the objection there was that one who knows more does not necessarily love more; so the good, not knowledge, is the fundamental cause. The theologian may love God less than the simple believer; the devil knows God better and hates Him. Knowledge is needed, but love “can go further.”
• Contrariety of reason and will: reason’s object must be in the mind (its fundamental act is apprehension, grasping); the will goes out to the thing itself (its fundamental act is giving) — “I left my heart in San Francisco.” Hence the will is more proportioned to God in this life: I can jump into the ocean more easily than put the ocean into me — like the little boy before Augustine, who was trying to fit the Trinity into his mind.
• Therefore God leads us through faith, where reason is moved to assent not by evidence but by the will; “blessed are those who have not seen and believe”; faith is meritorious because reason is not forced. Aristotle, Physics I ch. 10: the early philosophers were “as if coerced by the truth itself” — not true of faith.
• Hebrews: he is annoyed by translations saying “evidence of what is not seen”; the Greek word is the one Aristotle uses in the Sophistical Refutations, conviction without evidence; and “substance (hypostasis) of things hoped for” brings in the will.
• Augustine’s definition of belief: to assent while thinking (assentire cum cogitatione), or to think without assenting. Contrast with the order of the three acts of reason from the Peri Hermeneias commentary: understand what a whole and a part are, then that the whole is more than the part, then use it to prove that equal angles subtend equal sides in a triangle. But English names another order: reason thinks about something before it understands it. Belief is thinking about what one has not understood; hence the mind is unsatisfied and keeps thinking — “faith seeking understanding” (Augustine, popularized by Anselm; Cur Deus Homo: why did God become man?). You understand a little more over your life, never to the point of not needing faith; theology is the science by which faith is strengthened, nourished, defended.

4. John the Baptist, the angels, and loving God as much as He is lovable (“the least in the kingdom of heaven”) #

Point: in heaven knowledge causes greater love than is possible here, yet no creature loves God as much as He is lovable.

• Puzzle: no greater man than John the Baptist, yet the least in heaven is greater. Answer: the least in heaven sees God as He is; since knowledge causes love, he loves God more — and cannot help it; here one can sin and lose love, there one cannot.
• Thomas on the angels’ natural knowledge of God: objection, an infinite distance between angel and God cannot be crossed. Reply: he keeps the infinite distance but transposes it from substance to knowledge — between the angel’s knowledge of God and God’s knowledge of God there is infinite distance. “Beautiful thing.”
• So God is infinitely more knowable and lovable than any saint, even the Blessed Virgin, knows or loves Him; only Christ in His divine nature loves God as much as He is lovable. Francis de Sales (Treatise on the Love of God): praise God as much as you can, He is above all praise — finally you want God to praise Himself. Likenesses: the young lady whom no one loves as much as she deserves; Mozart on the car radio or while distracted, not appreciated as much as it is appreciable (though not infinitely lovable); the good meal after spicy food that burned the taste buds.
• In heaven you rejoice that those above love God more than you do.
• Student: must we be humble even in heaven? — Yes, count on it; “learn of me, for I am meek and humble of heart”: Christ singles out humility.

5. Replies 3–5 of a.4 read out (“love excels knowledge in moving”) #

• Reply 3 (re-read): “apprehended” is the Latin for grasped; motion begins in the will, so to the will is owed what follows at last on attainment — delight or enjoyment.
• Reply 4: love excels knowledge in moving, but knowledge goes before (praevia) in attaining; nothing is loved unless known (Augustine, De Trinitate X). We attain the intelligible end through the intellect, as the sensible end through sense: you must taste the salmon before you enjoy it. So love cannot be the end, since you love God before attaining Him — but after attaining, you love Him more.
• Reply 5, on Augustine’s second definition of happiness (“has all that he wills” and wills nothing badly): he is blessed by having what he wills, which is other than the act of willing; the good will is required as a suitable disposition, counted among the goods that make one blessed as an inclination — just as motion is reduced to the genus of its term, alteration to quality, warming-up to warm. Break.

6. Article 5: objections and sed contra (“beatitude consists in the operation of the practical understanding”) #

1. The last end of a creature is to become like God; the practical intellect, cause of things known, is more like God’s productive knowledge than the speculative, which takes knowledge from things.
   • Aside: de Tocqueville’s letters against Gobineau’s racist theories, predicting the Germans would take them up — “prophetic.”
2. Beatitude is man’s perfect good; the practical intellect is ordered to the good, the speculative to the true; by the practical we are called good, by the speculative knowing. Aside: no prudence without the moral virtues.
3. Beatitude is a good of man himself; the speculative intellect is about things outside man, the practical about his own operations and passions. The poet’s “being human, think human things” — which Aristotle disagrees with.

• Sed contra: Augustine, De Trinitate I: contemplation is promised as the end of all our actions and the eternal perfection of our joys. His favourite work of Augustine, above the Confessions (the most read, even outside Catholic circles) — as the Consolation of Philosophy is the most read work of Boethius [ed.: transcript says “Ethics”].

7. Body of a.5: three reasons (“You can’t make or do God”) #

1. If beatitude is an operation, it must be man’s best: of the best power on the best object; the best power is intellect, whose best object is the divine good, object of the speculative not the practical intellect — “you can’t make or do God.” Hence beatitude consists most of all (maxime) in contemplation of divine things; and since each thing seems to be what is best in it (Ethics X — he corrects “ninth” to “tenth”), this operation is most proper to man and most delightful.
2. Contemplation is sought for its own sake; acts of the practical intellect are for action, and actions for some end.
3. In the contemplative life man has in common with God and the angels, to whom he is likened in beatitude; in the active life the other animals share, though imperfectly.

• Conclusion: perfect beatitude of the future life consists wholly in contemplation; imperfect beatitude here first in contemplation, secondly in the practical intellect ordering actions and passions (Ethics X): Aristotle’s divine happiness of wisdom and human happiness of prudence. Churchill slept well the night he became prime minister — a man who could direct things.
• Aside: memorizing the Ethics X passage (“strain every nerve to live by the best in us”) in the English edition; his father passing by. A student once proposed: do the practical here, the contemplative next life — no, the contemplative life here helps the next.

8. Reply 1: proportionality vs. union (“multo maior assimilatio”) #

• The practical intellect’s likeness to God is by proportionality (as God is to the universe, so the carpenter to the chair); the speculative intellect’s assimilation is by union or informing, a “much greater assimilation” — you may add: knowing the same object God knows. And of His chief object, His own essence, God has no practical but only speculative knowledge. Hence theology, unlike philosophy, is both speculative and practical, but chiefly speculative, because chiefly about God, who is not to be made or done.
• Digression on likeness: reason knowing itself (Shakespeare’s exhortation to use reason) is like God who knows Himself, by proportionality; reason knowing God is like God in knowing the same thing — the greater likeness. Same with love: loving myself is like God loving Himself, but loving God is the greater likeness. To say reason is better knowing itself than God would be pride (“let Him know Himself, and I know myself”) — Marx: man comes to know himself by making things, a remote likeness to God.
• Aristotle, Topics I, the tools of difference and likeness: the mind is exercised more in differences between close things (cat/dog, not cat/tree) and in likenesses between distant things (cat/tree); proportion is the more distant likeness (2:3 as 4:6).
• Terminology: in Euclid “proportion” is a likeness of ratios; later “proportion” was used for a ratio, leaving the clumsy “proportionality” — Thomas caught in that misuse, to be corrected in “the new Berquist edition, ad mentem Euclidis.” Proportion lets us see likeness across infinite distance: 2:3 as four trillion to six trillion; the Lord is my shepherd; the parables of the kingdom.
• Jokes: his brother Mark’s “liberalism more geometrico demonstrata” (from a flat federal republic to construct a pyramid of total power; a liberal’s mind and reality, extended to infinity, never meet); an 18th-century English novelist’s tutor: a young man’s mind and discretion extended to infinity never meet.
• Thinking about myself through eternity would bore me; you never get bored with God, never comprehend Him. God cannot spruce Himself up or get a haircut.

9. Replies 2 and 3 (“if man were his own last end”) #

• Reply 2: the practical intellect is ordered to a good outside itself; the speculative (“looking”) intellect has its good in itself, the contemplation of truth; if that good is perfect the whole man is perfected and becomes good — which the practical does not have but is ordered to. Aristotle treats moral virtues before intellectual because more known to us and because they dispose us for the others: the carpenter makes the chair, then I sit and read Thomas.
• Reply 3: the argument would hold if man were his own last end; but the last end is an extrinsic good, God, attained by the speculative intellect. Aristotle in Ethics X: if man were the best thing, activity about man would be best; he is not. He stops here.

His words #

• antecedently / consequently: how peace stands to beatitude, before and after
• “grasping” (apprehension): the fundamental act of reason; “giving”: the fundamental thing in love
• assentire cum cogitatione: Augustine’s definition of belief, to assent while thinking
• faith seeking understanding: Augustine, popularized by Anselm
• hypostasis: Hebrews’ “substance of things hoped for”
• praevia: knowledge as “way before” love in attaining
• maxime: most of all — contemplation of divine things
• “looking understanding”: his rendering of the speculative/theoretical intellect
• proportion vs. ratio: proportion in Euclid = likeness of ratios; “proportionality” the later clumsy word
• multo maior assimilatio: the speculative intellect’s much greater likeness to God

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, ST I-II q.3 a.4, replies 1–5
• Thomas, ST I-II q.3 a.5, objections, sed contra, body, replies 1–3 Mentioned
• Augustine, De Trinitate X (nothing loved unless known); De Trinitate I (contemplation promised)
• Aristotle, Ethics X (each thing is what is best in it; two happinesses; man not the best thing); Physics I ch. 10 (“coerced by the truth”); Topics I (tools of likeness and difference); Sophistical Refutations
• St. Paul on charity greater than faith; Thomas, disputed questions on hope; Hebrews on faith
• Anselm, Cur Deus Homo; Francis de Sales, Treatise on the Love of God
• Thomas on the angels’ natural knowledge of God (infinite distance); Thomas, Peri Hermeneias commentary (three acts of reason)
• Dionysius on the hierarchies; Psalms on the house of God; Christ on John the Baptist; de Tocqueville–Gobineau correspondence

His questions #

• Is the will better than reason, since charity is better than faith? Probable, but the proportion is inexact: faith does not see God in Himself, charity loves Him in Himself.
• How can charity love God as He is in Himself if it follows on knowledge? The good, not knowledge, is the fundamental cause of love; the will goes out to the thing, reason must take it in.
• How can the least in the kingdom of heaven be greater than John the Baptist? He sees God as He is, and so loves Him more, and cannot fail to.
• Can anyone love God as much as He is lovable? Only God — Christ in His divine nature; not even the Blessed Virgin.
• Must we be humble even in heaven? Yes; many are above us.
• Is reason most like God when it knows itself, as God does? Like Him by proportionality; more like Him in knowing God, the same object He knows.
• Is theology speculative or practical? Both, but chiefly speculative, since God is not to be made or done.
• Does beatitude consist in the practical intellect? No: the divine good is an object of the speculative intellect; perfect beatitude is wholly contemplation, imperfect chiefly so.