Shakespeare's Definition of Reason and the Trinity; Is Beatitude Chiefly Vision or Pleasure? (Summa I-II, Q.4, A.2)

Orientation #

He recalls that the first article of question four asked whether pleasure is required for beatitude and that Thomas answered yes; today “let’s look now at the second article”, and the class ends with “another article” to follow. The previous session finished q. 3 on seeing the divine essence and began q. 4 with the role of delight; the next takes up the articles on comprehension and rightness of will. Verified sources: the reading is ST I-II q. 4 a. 2, with the handout on “The Before and After in the Acts of (Looking) Reason” (p. 7) behind the opening discussion, and SCG IV ch. 15 matched for about ten minutes (probably the Trinity material).

The class, in order #

1. From Shakespeare’s definition of reason to the Trinity (“the greatest object of human mind”) #

Point: the greatest object of human reason is the Holy Trinity, and there are three ways from Shakespeare’s exhortation to some understanding of it.

• Apology first: he forgets what he has said to whom; “as Peter Kreeft says, what is worth saying can be said more than once.”
• Three ways of understanding the Trinity: (1) begin from the footprint of the Trinity in creatures; (2) begin from the image of the Trinity; (3) go directly to the Trinity itself and try to understand it. Shakespeare does not reveal the Trinity (God does), but his definition of reason (“looking before and after”) is the starting point of the first two ways.

2. The footprint: beginning, middle, end defined by before and after (“every footprint of the Trinity”) #

Point: Thomas says every footprint of the Trinity is such insofar as it has beginning, middle and end; these are defined by affirming and denying before and after, so “looking before and after” leads straight to the footprint.

1. Draw the boxes: before something / not before something; after something / not after something.
2. Before and after something: the middle. Not before but after: the end. Before but not after: the beginning. Neither before nor after anything: not a part at all (the empty fourth box).
3. Likewise the persons of the Trinity are distinguished by affirming and denying “proceeds from someone” and “someone proceeds from him” (a student offered “generation, relation”; he wants something broader). Proceeds from someone and someone proceeds from him: the Son. Proceeds from someone, no one proceeds from him: the Spirit. Does not proceed from anyone, someone proceeds from him: the Father. Neither: “who’s the fourth member of the Trinity?” (joke answers: the Virgin, Muhammad) — Thomas says there cannot be one; again not a real possibility.
4. So there is a likeness: the Son is “a little bit like the middle”, the Father like the beginning; that is one reason power is appropriated to the Father, since power is defined as a beginning. The Holy Spirit “ties it up”.

• Caution: there is no before and after in the Trinity; the footprint is a very distant likeness, more distant than the image — a sign is that we never call the Son the footprint of God but the (perfect) image of God. Dionne always quotes Plato’s Sophist: “likeness is a slippery thing”; Aristotle’s tool of difference and tool of likeness; likeness is a source of error, and the most dangerous errors are those where the false is most like the true.
• “What strikes me with wonder”: one of the first things you see when you look before and after is beginning, middle and end, and that already is to see the footprint of the Trinity.

3. The image: reason, the definition of reason, the love of reason (“from reason goes forward a thought”) #

Point: Shakespeare’s meditation itself has the structure of the image of the Trinity.

• From reason (the ability) goes forward a thought of what reason is; the confused thought is not meant, but the distinct thought, which is the definition of reason. The definition of reason is not reason.
• From reason and the definition of reason goes forward the love of reason — the urge to use it, because you see how good it is. That is the whole meditation.
• Parallel: from God the Father goes forward a thought of what God is, the Word, “logos”; from the Father and the Word goes forward the love of God, the Holy Spirit.

4. The third way: direct study, and the before and after in one’s own thinking (“distinction comes before order”) #

Point: the direct study of the Trinity (Thomas, under Augustine’s influence) also follows a before and after — in the order of reason’s own thinking.

• Augustine, quoted perhaps by Thomas, locus not recalled: “intellectum valde ama” — love the understanding very much.
• Axiom: nothing is before or after itself, so distinction comes before order.
• Distinction: reason looks before and after in the things it thinks about vs. before and after in its own thinking. Which first? Probably things — but since reason is the ability for discourse, and discourse implies before and after (bringing one thing to another), to know the before and after in things fully you must consider the discourse by which you know them. Hence Thomas says logic is in a way the first science: it teaches the road to be followed in all reasoned-out knowledge.
• Thomas’s order in treating the Trinity: persons are distinguished by relations of origin, so first the processions (two), then the relations based on them (the Father generates, so the other is called Son; they breathe the third, called Spirit, love), then the persons.

5. Why the exhortation is in verse; the numbers (“seven is a symbol of wisdom”) #

Point: playful reflection on the form of Shakespeare’s lines, which “concentrates you on the words”.

• The lines are blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter), in (he thinks) the fourth scene of the fourth act.
• Why put an exhortation in meter? Compare Thomas’s Adoro Te Devote, rhymed and metrical, kept among the indulgenced prayers after Vatican II for its special excellence and place in tradition; found faded over the baldachino at his home parish, Nativity, St Paul, Minnesota. Meter does not make a poem; calling it one is a misuse. Three reasons offered by students for meter: memorization (he thinks fundamental), beauty, glorifying God with music. He has heard the Our Father in the original language had meter, and asks whether the Psalms do.
• The counting: seven lines, first line beginning on the seventh syllable — two sevens; seven a symbol of wisdom (seven wise men of Greece, seven angels before God; he was reading SCG III ch. 7); the last line ends on the sixth syllable, so in quantity six lines, and six is the first perfect number, symbol of completeness; forty-nine words, and Thomas says the square of a number has the same symbolism as the number. Aristotle says reason is best at forty-nine; Thomas died at forty-nine. All “by chance”, he says.
• Challenge: anyone in fifty words or more to give as good an exhortation; “am I exaggerating the excellence of this?”

6. Aside on Mary: the order of her titles (“I am the Immaculate Conception”) #

Point: applying before and after to Mary’s titles.

• She is mother of the Church because mother of all grace, and mother of all grace because Mother of God — cause and effect, not the reverse; Mother of God has always seemed to him her greatest title (Cusanus, he thinks: infinite is the distance between the servants of God and the Mother of God).
• Why she says “I am the Immaculate Conception” rather than grammatically “I was immaculately conceived”: as mother of the Church she gives birth to all of us; we are in a way immaculately conceived at baptism; she is a universal cause of our baptism, and one names the cause by the effect — as Christ says “I am truth itself” because he is the source of all truth.

7. ST I-II q. 4 a. 2: the objections (“whether beatitude is chiefly vision or the pleasure”) #

Point: after a. 1 (pleasure is required, since beatitude is the attaining of the summum bonum and delight follows the appetite’s rest in the good obtained — if Euclid’s theorem delights, imagine seeing God, “the torrent” of the Psalm, the beautiful itself in Socrates), a. 2 asks the more precise question: is beatitude chiefly the vision or the delight? Modern hedonists would say the delight.

1. Obj. 1: Aristotle, Ethics X, delight is the perfection of operation; the perfection is more potent than the perfectible; so pleasure is more potent than vision. Example: the delight in hearing Mozart seems to perfect the hearing; the beautiful is what pleases when seen or heard.
2. Obj. 2: that on account of which something is desirable is more potent; operations are desired on account of their pleasure — Pericles would not study geometry, nor would he listen to Mozart, without delight; nature adds pleasure to operations needed for the individual (eating) and the species (reproduction) so animals will not neglect them.
3. Obj. 3: vision corresponds to faith, pleasure to charity; charity is greater than faith (the apostle, 1 Cor 13); so pleasure is more potent.

8. Digression on antonomasia and the article (“the apostle, and Aristotle as the philosopher”) #

Point: “the apostle”, “the philosopher”, “the poet” are antonomasia, and Latin’s lack of the article may have made Thomas less aware of it in Scripture.

• English uses “the”, not “a”, for antonomasia: “Aristotle is a philosopher” is true but ranks him with the rest (the man who dismissed Einstein’s remark as “just what Einstein says” — “a footnote in a history book”); Homer is “the poet”. But not every “the” is antonomasia: “I am the teacher of so-and-so”, “the grandfather of Sophia”, “the father of Paul” do not mean “the teacher”, “the grandfather”.
• Application: “In the beginning was the Word” — Greek has “ho logos”, Latin no article; Thomas’s commentary on John, as he recalls, does not emphasize that this is the thought among all thoughts. Why? A thought is better for being of a better thing and in a better way; this is the only thought fully expressing what God is, and so in a way expresses everything, since when God is comprehended everything else is known — visible even before we are told the Word is God.
• Student: was Thomas limited by “logos” rendered as “verbum” rather than “thought”? Answer: no — logos means word first too, is equivocal by reason, and Thomas makes those distinctions; the problem is only the missing article.
• Monsignor Dionne: a sign of Thomas’s excellence is that he could think so well in an inferior language, Latin; Aristotle thought in Greek; Dionne and Boulay, both French-speaking, held English superior to French for philosophy and poetry (Berquist’s paraphrase: a sign of Dionne’s excellence is that he thinks so well in French); Walter Hurdle the philologist: English is the greatest invention of the human mind.
• Federalist Papers, “in the words of the poet, a long farewell to all my greatness” (Shakespeare, probably Hamilton writing): antonomasia, a tribute to the writers.

9. Sed contra and body: pleasure is the quieting of the will (“the cause is more potent than the effect”) #

Point: vision is more potent than the pleasure, because it is its cause.

• Sed contra: the cause is more potent than the effect; vision is the cause of the pleasure.
• Body, as he reads it: Aristotle moves this question in Ethics X and leaves it unsolved; but on diligent consideration the operation (the vision of God face to face) must be more potent than the pleasure:
  1. Pleasure consists in a certain quieting of the will — the policeman gives candy to the lost child; his own candy bags handed back on the cross-country drive (“they never caught on”); a beautiful sight is restful (Vermont in the fall).
  2. The will rests in something only on account of the goodness of that in which it rests; so if it rests in an operation, the quiet proceeds from the goodness of the operation.
  3. Nor does the will seek the good in order to be at rest, for then the act of the will would be the end, against what was shown before (the end is an act of reason, not of will); it seeks the operation because the operation is its good.
  4. Conclusion: chiefly the good is the operation in which the will rests, and the resting follows on it.
• Why Aristotle “leaves it unsolved”: he ends by saying pleasure perfects happiness as beauty perfects youth — not the essence, but something that goes with it (as you age you lose your looks). Thomas takes this as Aristotle in a sense expressing the answer.

10. The replies (“pleasure perfects operation as beauty youth”) #

• Ad 1: pleasure perfects operation as decor does youth — something following upon youth, not its essence; so pleasure is a perfection going along with vision, not one making the vision perfect in its own kind. Medieval Latin sometimes tries an invented article here, because of the defect of the language. Caution on comparison: two ratios (pleasure : operation, beauty : youth); sometimes one reasons from one ratio to the other (as Shakespeare does in the exhortation), sometimes one ratio only illustrates the other by likeness — here Aristotle is illustrating, not reasoning.
• Ad 2: sense apprehension does not attain the common notion of the good but only some particular pleasant good, so in animals (sensitive appetite) operations are sought for pleasure, and God arranged it so they preserve individual and kind — plants reproduce without pleasure. The understanding apprehends the universal notion of good, on whose attainment pleasure follows, so it chiefly intends the good; hence the divine intellect, instituter of nature, adds pleasures on account of the operations; things are to be judged by the order of the intellectual appetite, not the sensitive.
• Ad 3: charity does not seek the good loved for the sake of pleasure; delight in attaining the loved good is something following upon it; so pleasure does not answer to charity as its end, but rather vision, through which the end first becomes present. “Another article” — the class ends.

His words #

• looking before and after: Shakespeare’s completion of the definition of reason; the handout’s title
• footprint (vestigium) of the Trinity: a creature insofar as it has beginning, middle, end; a more distant likeness than the image
• image of the Trinity: reason, the thought of what reason is, the love of reason
• proceeds from someone / someone proceeds from him: the two affirmed-and-denied marks distinguishing the persons
• tool of likeness, tool of difference: Aristotle’s; likeness “a slippery thing” (Plato via Dionne)
• intellectum valde ama: Augustine, “love the understanding very much”
• ability for large discourse: reason, as in Shakespeare; discourse implies before and after
• relations of origin: what distinguishes the persons; order of study: processions, relations, persons
• rhythmus: name given in some Latin texts to the Adoro Te Devote’s metrical form
• antonomasia: figure of speech, “the apostle”, “the philosopher”, “the poet”
• summum bonum: the highest good, whose attaining is beatitude
• delectatio: pleasure, delight; defined as a certain quieting of the will
• concomitans: pleasure “coming together with” beatitude (a. 1)
• ad primum: the reply to the first objection
• decor: beauty, in “pleasure perfects operation as decor youth”
• logos / ho logos / verbum: word, thought; the article missing in Latin

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 4, a. 2, objections, sed contra, body and replies (verified source)
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics X, as quoted in the article (pleasure perfects operation; beauty and youth)
• 1 Corinthians 13 (charity greater than faith), in obj. 3
• Shakespeare, Hamlet IV.iv, the exhortation on reason, discussed from the handout “The Before and After in the Acts of (Looking) Reason”, p. 7

Mentioned

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 4, a. 1 (recalled)
• Thomas on the footprint of the Trinity, the processions and relations, and appropriation of power to the Father (locus not stated; SCG IV ch. 15 is a verified source for about ten minutes, probably here)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles III, ch. 7 (seven as symbol of wisdom)
• Thomas’s commentary on John (John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word”)
• Augustine, “intellectum valde ama” (locus not given)
• Plato, Sophist, “likeness is a slippery thing” (as quoted by Dionne)
• Thomas Aquinas, Adoro Te Devote
• Federalist Papers (“in the words of the poet”)
• Peter Kreeft; Cusanus on the Mother of God; DHB Vol III, The School of Aristotle, p. 954 (printed volume in use)

His questions #

• What is the greatest object of human mind? God — more precisely, the Holy Trinity.
• What is before something and after something? not before but after? before but not after? neither? The middle; the end; the beginning; not a part at all.
• Who proceeds from someone and someone proceeds from him? who proceeds but no one proceeds from him? who does not proceed but someone proceeds from him? who is the fourth member? The Son; the Spirit; the Father; there cannot be a fourth.
• Which before and after should reason think about first — in its own thinking or in things? Things, probably — but to know things fully you must consider the discourse, hence logic is in a way the first science.
• Why should Thomas compose the Adoro Te Devote in meter and rhyme? Memorization (fundamental), beauty, glorifying God with music.
• Why does Mary say “I am the Immaculate Conception”? As mother of the Church and of all grace she is a universal cause of our baptismal “immaculate conception”, as Christ says “I am truth itself”.
• Whether beatitude is chiefly the vision or the pleasure? The vision: the will rests in the operation on account of its goodness, and pleasure follows as beauty follows youth.
• Does saying “the” always mean antonomasia? No (“the teacher of so-and-so”), but antonomasia does use “the” rather than “a”.
• Was Thomas limited by “verbum” for “logos”? No; the only limitation is the missing article.