Loving God as a Friend, Knowing God "Too Much," and Whether Souls Without Bodies Can Be Blessed (I-II, Q.4, a.5)

Orientation #

He opens by saying they are in the Prima Secundae “up to question five,” and that today is question four, article five. A student’s question about the separated soul not yet having its body is answered “this is going to be in this article now.” The episode ends as he turns to the replies to the objections, which are not reached. The previous class treated q. 4 on comprehension and rightness of will; the next treats the Supplement on the beatitude of separated souls.

The class, in order #

1. Loving God by the love of friendship (“the love of wanting and the love of friendship”) #

Point: to love God by charity is not to love him as what satisfies my mind, but to wish God well.

• Distinction: amor concupiscentiae (love of wanting) vs. amor amicitiae (love of friendship, “love of wishing well”). Loving God “for the good of your own mind” is love of wanting — directed principally to yourself, though a student notes it would not exclude charity, and he agrees it is not a bad love (“it would be one hell of a vision”). But if that is all the love you have, you do not have charity. Example: loving the steak for myself — same kind of love, higher object.
• Argument for what charity toward God means, by analogy: if I love you by charity I must wish that you see God face to face; so to love God by friendship is to wish that God know himself as much as he is knowable and love himself as much as he is lovable — which no creature can do — and so be uniquely blessed. Objection (student): can you wish something that must already be that way? His reply: yes; parallel, I assume Thomas and Mary see God face to face now, yet loving Mary by charity I must wish she see and love God as much as the Mother of God should, “even though she already does.”
• A student cites Francis de Sales: love of benevolence, good will toward God, wishing him the greatest good he can have, himself, “as if he didn’t already have it.” He accepts this: that is why he renders amor amicitiae as “wishing well,” which is what benevolence means.
• Aside: Romeo’s true friend Benvolio, against Malvolio [ed.: transcript “Melville”] in the comedy.

2. Would I want to know God more in heaven? (“no motion in the beatific vision”) #

Point: the puzzle that our discursive knowing in this life makes us imagine heaven as endless progress.

• Our knowing here is discursive in two senses: we pass from one thought to another, and we go from what we don’t know to what we do. The beatific vision is eternal life, partaking of God’s eternity: no motion, no before and after.
• The puzzle: no creature knows God as much as he is knowable, so God is more knowable than I will see him; would I not want to know him more, “each century or so”? But then, as Aristotle said, there would be no end, “it’d be endless.”
• His diagnosis: we imagine the vision as if in time, with time left to know him more; in fact “this is all at once, and that’s it.”

3. “Nothing too much” applied to knowing and loving God (“Know thyself, and then Nothing too much”) #

Point: the Delphic maxim has a different application in heaven than in this life.

• The seven wise men’s two words at Delphi: “Know thyself,” “Nothing too much.” At first it seems ridiculous to say you can know or love God too much; and saying “never too much” does not violate the maxim.
• In this life we should always try to know and love God more; to say “now I know enough, put away the psalms” is “a very dangerous thing.” Aside: his wife thinks he knows Shakespeare too much.
• But from the point of view of heaven there is a “too much”: I should want to know and love God as much as God’s plan for me intends. Hierarchy as he gives it: the man Jesus knows and loves God as the Son of God made flesh should; Mary as the Mother of God should, “incomparably more” than others; then the angels; then the apostles; and I as God intends for me. To want more in heaven than God intends would be “imitating the sin of the devil,” as Thomas explains it for the angels: wanting beatitude from his own powers, a beatitude of which I was the source.
• Conclusion: knowledge and love of God can always grow in this life, not in heaven; beatitude is above our nature but not opposed to it, even though it seems opposed because we always want to understand worthwhile things better. Student: is there not a certain “time” in that they lack the body now and get it later? — “this is going to be in this article.”

4. Article 5, the six objections (“It seems that for beatitude is required the body”) #

Point: he reads and glosses all six objections that the soul without the body cannot be blessed.

1. Perfection of virtue and grace presupposes perfection of nature; the soul is a part of human nature, every part separated from its whole is imperfect. Aside: the soul as “the better part” — why you call your spouse your better part. He notes this “kind of arguing” stands behind the argument for the resurrection.
2. Beatitude is perfect operation; operation follows being (“you got to be before you can do something”); nothing acts except as it is in act; the separated soul lacks perfect being, like any part separated from its whole.
   • Digression on operatio: a text in the Summa Contra Gentiles on how creatures become like God in operation gives three kinds of operation — acting on something, being acted upon (motion), and an operation that neither is imperfect nor goes out to something else, like understanding or willing. Acting on another likens you to God as cause; being acted upon, as being perfected; understanding and willing, a third way. He calls it “a stretch of the word.” What to call the three in English? “Operation” sounds too active. Candidate: “doing.” Making a chair or dinner is doing; thinking is doing too, though the average man thinks you’re doing nothing sitting in a chair — his old teacher Kosurik [ed.: name uncertain in recording] quoting Thomas, homo sedens fit sapiens; listening to Mozart is doing something; growing (grandchildren, trees), nourishing, reproducing, are “kind of doing”; is falling doing something? Some word must be stretched: “act” first means motion, form is called act by analogy to motion, and the other activities are distinguished from motion; one wants a name for all three as opposed to form. He also mentions this distinction in “the ninth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics IX (inferred)].
3. Beatitude is the perfection of man; the soul without the body is not man. Aside: “Well, Thomas, are you blessed now or not?” — the man Thomas is not there, the soul is.
4. The Philosopher, Ethics VII: the operation of happiness is not impeded; but the separated soul’s operation is impeded, since (Augustine, Genesis to the letter XII) there remains in it a natural desire of administering the body, by which it is held back from tending (pergat) with its whole intention to the vision of the divine essence. Aside: Socrates argues the soul is better off separated, yet adds you must not commit suicide, as if the soul were in the body by command of the gods — a caution because some readers contemplated suicide.
5. Beatitude is a sufficient good and quiets desire; the separated soul still desires union with the body (Augustine).
6. Man in beatitude is equal to the angels; the separated soul is not (Augustine).

• He remarks that six objections is “a large number for the beginner’s book.”
• Sed contra: Apocalypse 14, “Blessed are the dead who have died in the Lord.”

5. Response, part one: the beatitude of this life needs the body (“twofold is beatitude, one imperfect”) #

Point: imperfect beatitude is an operation of intellect that cannot be without images, and images are in a bodily organ.

• Distinction: imperfect beatitude, had in this life, vs. perfect, the vision of God as he is.
• The beatitude of this life is an operation of the understanding, either “looking” (speculative, theoretical) or “doing” (practical); they differ by their end. Hence Ethics X gives two happinesses, the more divine being the act of wisdom, the other the act of political foresight [ed.: prudence]. Either way it is an act of intellect.
• Understanding in this life cannot be without the image, and the image is only in a bodily organ (“as is had in the first part,” the treatise on the soul). So this beatitude depends in some way on the body: “I could lose my beatitude” by losing my mind. Examples: the neighbour in the rest home, sometimes clear, sometimes thinking she works there; Euclid saying he is slower now and must save the long theorem for tomorrow; Albert the Great’s photographic memory failing toward the end of his life. The point of connection: you don’t think without imagining, and the image is in the body.

6. Response, part two: perfect beatitude, by authority (“false both by authority and by reason”) #

Point: the opinion that souls of the saints are not blessed until they resume their bodies at the judgment is refuted first by authority.

• Some lay down that perfect beatitude cannot come to the soul without the body. He thinks the Greek/Orthodox Church sometimes had that idea (left uncertain).
• Question to class: which is stronger, authority or reason? — Authority. Reason given: Thomas calls theology sacra doctrina, and doctrina is named from the teacher, whereas mathematics is named from the learner; the learner is most self-sufficient in geometry, the teacher most necessary in theology. Aside: Aristotle’s Physics in Greek is called “natural hearing” — why?
• The authority: 2 Corinthians 5 — while in the body we wander from the Lord, for we walk through faith and not through sight (species); one walking by faith is not yet present to God; but “we have a good will to wander from the body and be present to the Lord”; so the souls of the saints walk through sight, seeing the essence of God, in which true beatitude is found. Aside: characters named Peregrine in English novels who wander about.

7. Response, part three: perfect beatitude, by reason (“does not need for its operation the body, except”) #

Point: the intellect needs the body only for images, and the divine essence cannot be seen through images.

1. The understanding needs the body for its operation only on account of the images in which it looks upon understandable truth (first part). Aristotle: the natural object of our mind is “the what it is of something sensed or imagined”; so when I think what a triangle is, I think the what-it-is of this thing I imagine. Shown by experience: in solid geometry, when you can’t get the image you can’t do it — his cardboard models of the polyhedra, and the metal set of the five regular solids his son-in-law sent, each named after a grandchild, “to aid in memory.” Aside: he must go teach Euclid in Maine and “get tanked up” on wisdom seeing Sophia.
2. But the divine essence cannot be seen through images (first part).
3. Perfect beatitude consists in the vision of the divine essence; therefore it does not depend on the body, and the soul without the body can be blessed.

8. The added distinction: essence vs. well-being (“for the perfection of something, something pertains in two ways”) #

Point: the body belongs to the perfection of beatitude in the second way only.

• Two ways something pertains to a thing’s perfection: (a) constituting its essence, as the soul is required for man; (b) its well-being (bene esse), as beauty of body and quickness of genius (claritas ingenii, as he reads it, “probably Aristotle talks about that”) pertain to the perfection of man.
• The body pertains to the perfection of beatitude not in the first way (not essential) but in the second: since operation depends on the nature of the thing, when the soul is more perfect in its nature it will have its operation, in which happiness consists, more perfectly.
• Augustine, Genesis to the letter XII: asked whether the highest beatitude can be bestowed on the spirits of the dead without bodies, answers that they cannot see the unchangeable substance as the holy angels see it, whether from some more hidden cause or because there remains in them the natural desire of administering the body. His gloss: “you’re not going to get free of that enemy, this body.” So they are essentially blessed, with an added perfection to come — not to see God more clearly, but because the complete perfection of the operation depends on the complete perfection of the one operating, and we are not complete without the body.
• Aside: Aristotle “supposed to have died of overwork,” trying to get as much into his head before he died.
• He begins on the replies (“the first objection, though”) only to note that all the objections deny you are blessed, whereas “essentially, you are”; the replies are not reached.

His words #

• amor concupiscentiae; “the love of wanting.”
• amor amicitiae; “the love of friendship” or “the love of wishing well,” i.e. benevolence.
• discursive; going from one thought to another, and from what we don’t know to what we know.
• eternal life; partaking of God’s eternity, no motion, no before and after.
• “Know thyself,” “Nothing too much”; the two Delphic words of the seven wise men.
• operatio; Thomas’s stretched word for three kinds: acting upon, being acted upon, and understanding/willing; his candidate English word “doing.”
• act; first meaning motion, form called act by analogy.
• homo sedens fit sapiens; “the man sitting becomes wise.”
• looking intellect / doing intellect [ed.: speculative / practical].
• political foresight [ed.: prudence].
• sacra doctrina; named from the teacher, against mathematics, named from the learner.
• “natural hearing” [ed.: Physics].
• species (2 Cor 5); “sight.”
• Peregrine / to wander; his rendering of peregrinamur.
• “the what it is of something sensed or imagined”; Aristotle’s natural object of our mind.
• well-being [ed.: bene esse]; beauty of body and quickness of genius (claritas ingenii).

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 4, a. 5: six objections, sed contra, and the whole response (replies not reached).
• 2 Corinthians 5 (as quoted within the response).
• Apocalypse 14 (sed contra).
• Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram XII (as quoted in obj. 4 and in the response).

Mentioned

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, on three kinds of operation (locus not stated).
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics VII (operation of happiness not impeded) and X (two happinesses).
• Aristotle, “the ninth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics IX (inferred)], on the distinction of act.
• Summa Theologiae, first part, treatise on the soul (images in a bodily organ; God not seen through images).
• Thomas on the sin of the devil (locus not stated).
• Francis de Sales on the love of benevolence (raised by a student).
• Plato’s Socrates on the soul, suicide, and the gods (work not named).
• Handout “Note for Book One of Natural Hearing, Reading I,” p. 9 and DHB Vol. III, “The School of Aristotle,” p. 316 (verified sources; the transcript shows only his passing remark that the Physics is called “natural hearing”).

His questions #

• If I love God for the good of my own mind, is that the love of charity or the love of wanting? Love of wanting, principally directed to myself; not bad, but if it is all my love, I lack charity.
• What does it mean to love God by the love of friendship? To wish that he know himself as much as he is knowable and love himself as much as he is lovable — benevolence, “as if he didn’t already have it.”
• Why wouldn’t I in heaven be frustrated wanting to know God better? Because we imagine the vision as in time; it is all at once, no before and after.
• Can you know or love God too much? Not in this life; in heaven, wanting more than God intends would imitate the devil’s sin.
• What is the third kind of operation, besides acting upon and being acted upon? Understanding or willing, which stays within and is not imperfect.
• Is thinking, or growing, or falling “doing something”? Thinking yes; growing “kind of”; falling left open.
• Which is stronger, the argument by authority or by reason? By authority, since theology is doctrina, named from the teacher.
• Why is Aristotle’s Physics called natural hearing? Left open.
• Does the added perfection of the body mean the soul sees God more clearly? No; the operation is more perfect because the one operating is complete.