Aquinas on Beatitude: Whether Friends Are Needed in Heaven, and Whether Man Can Achieve Beatitude (I-II, Q.4 a.8 – Q.5 a.1)

Orientation #

He opens with the prayer and says “we’re down to Article Eight … the last one in this question,” then goes on to question five. He refers back to the four senses of “necessary” and to Thomas’s definition of the kingdom as things “I think we mentioned before.” He refers ahead to question six as the place where the way of obtaining beatitude is treated “in great detail.” The previous class treated the Supplement’s articles on the beatitude of separated souls; the next continues q. 5 (degrees of beatitude, beatitude in this life, whether it can be lost).

The class, in order #

1. Objections and sed contra of q.4 a.8 (“Whether beatitude requires the society of friends”) #

The point: three objections that friends are necessary for beatitude, against Wisdom 7.

• Obj. 1: future beatitude is called “glory” in Scripture; glory is a man’s good brought to the knowledge of many; so friends are required. He calls this “a kind of strange argument.”
• Obj. 2: Boethius: no joyful possession of any good without consortium (sharing); beatitude requires delight (he links this to the word jucunda); so friends. Aside: “How can you enjoy a joke if you can’t tell it to anybody?” — the history professor at the College of St Thomas who re-used his jokes with each new class; the Dominican who ran out of jokes after a year.
• Obj. 3: charity is perfected in beatitude; charity, as Thomas himself says, is a kind of friendship, extending to God and neighbour; so friends. He remarks it is strange that Thomas seems to take the objections’ side here.
• Sed contra: Wisdom 7, “there came to me with her [divine wisdom] all goods”; wisdom consists in contemplation of God; so nothing else is required — “unless you say friendship’s one of those goods that comes with it.”

2. The body: felicity of this life vs perfect beatitude (“ad bene esse, the well-being of beatitude”) #

The point: Thomas’s distinction — friends are needed for the happiness of this life, and for the well-being but not the necessity of perfect beatitude.

1. In this life (Ethics IX): the happy man needs friends, not for usefulness (he is self-sufficient) nor for pleasure (he has perfect pleasure in the operation of virtue), but for doing good: to do good to them, to delight in seeing it, and to be aided by them in doing good, in the active life (a politician needs many friends) and in the contemplative.
2. In the fatherland: friends are not required of necessity, since man has the whole fullness of his perfection in God; but they belong to the bene esse of beatitude.

• The word “necessary”: imitating Aristotle, “is it necessary to understand the word necessary?” — yes either way. Of Aristotle’s four senses, two are relevant: necessary as that without which a thing cannot be, vs necessary for well-being. Food is necessary in this life; Mozart’s operas are necessary “for many” (for well-being).
• Augustine, On Genesis to the Letter VIII: the spiritual creature, to be blessed, is aided intrinsically only by the eternity, truth and charity of the Creator; extrinsically, “perhaps” (fortasse) only in this, that they see each other and rejoice in their society in God.
• The saints pray for us (we depend on the prayers of the Church triumphant); they rejoice over one sinner repenting, i.e. over one joining the society. Thomas’s definition of the kingdom (prev. lecture): the ordered society of those who see God. They rejoice in each other’s seeing God: we rejoice that Thomas sees God more clearly than we will — no jealousy, no envy there.
• Homer and Shakespeare represent true friendship by likeness to a father’s love for his son: even bad men rejoice, without envy, that a son pitches or bats better than they did. Reason: a friend is another self, ho philos estin allos autos (from his Greek book of simple sentences); Shakespeare says “a second self”; the son is a continuation of self; one cannot envy oneself (“I envy myself understanding Euclid better today than last year”). One rejoices in the loved one’s good as in one’s own.
• What he stresses: “you realize how excellent is the vision of God if it doesn’t require friendship necessarily.”

3. The three replies (“the perfection of charity is essential”) #

• Ad 1: the glory essential to beatitude is what man has not before men but before God — as Thomas says at the end of the De Beatitudine [ed.: as he names it; probably the end of the treatise on beatitude].
• Ad 2: Boethius’s words hold where the good had lacks full (plena) sufficiency; “full” is taken from the senses (“my glass is full”) and carried over to spiritual things. Here every sufficiency of good is had in God — in the Summa Contra Gentiles (read that morning) Thomas quotes God to Moses, “I will show you every good,” i.e. Himself. If you were the only one in heaven you would still be blessed.
• Ad 3: the perfection of charity is essential to beatitude as regards the love of God, not as regards the love of neighbour. Warning: not to be quoted out of context, since the apostle says the man who claims to love God and does not love his neighbour is a liar. Aside: the TV clip claiming Obama is a Muslim by quoting one sentence, refuted by the full text.
  • If only one soul enjoyed God it would be blessed, having no neighbour to love. Student question: can one have charity for the damned or the devil? — No: you cannot wish them a good they cannot have. If everyone else were lost you would still have what is most essential, the love of God.
  • If one does have a neighbour, love of him follows from the perfect love of God, as concomitant, not of the essence. “Quite an article … when Augustine and Thomas agree, what can you say?”

4. Where we are in the treatise (“recall a bit the way he divided the text”) #

The point: locating q. 5 by the prologues of q. 1 and q. 2.

• Prologue of q. 1: first the last end of human life, then what leads to it or away from it, since the reasons of things ordered to an end are taken from the end; the last end being beatitude, first the last end in general (q. 1), then beatitude itself (from q. 2).
• Prologue of q. 2: first in what beatitude is (q. 2); then what it is (q. 3, with q. 4 on what is required for it); third, how we can obtain it, in general (q. 5). From q. 6 the detail begins — though not as much as in the Secunda Secundae, nor as much as in Alphonsus: Monsignor Dionne said the Summa gives the common principles of ethics, Alphonsus the proper principles down to the particular.

5. The eight articles of q. 5, with asides (“eight things are asked”) #

1. Whether man can obtain beatitude.
2. Whether one man can be more blessed than another. Thomas (in the SCG, read that morning) reconciles two texts: “in my Father’s house are many mansions” (inequality) and the parable where all are paid the same — all have the same beatitude, seeing God, but one sees more clearly. Aside on front-row seats, glasses, “take the lowest seat.”
3. Whether one can be blessed in this life. He quotes the close of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair — “who in this life ever gets what he wants, or having got it, is satisfied?” — and Cher, “You never get what you want, you just get what you get.”
4. Whether beatitude once had can be lost.
5. Whether man can acquire it by his natural powers — no.
6. Whether through the action of a higher creature — he can be helped, but no creature can make me blessed.
7. Whether some doings of man are required. Why did God not create us all blessed? Because it is against man’s nature, which is to achieve its end by what it does; God alone is blessed without deserving it (“golden spoon,” “platinum”).
   • Aside on three scriptural texts for beatitude, in order of decreasing metaphor: (i) the Gospel (Luke, he thinks) — sitting at God’s table eating the same thing: we share God’s own life, which consists in contemplating and loving Himself (cf. the Old Testament king who feeds you from his kitchen); (ii) 1 Cor 13:12 — now in a mirror darkly, then face to face: still metaphorical (God has no face), but the sense, given the mirror, is seeing God in Himself, not in something else (I see you in yourself vs in a mirror); (iii) 1 Jn 3:2 — we shall see Him as He is: nothing metaphorical. The first is most proportionate to us; “beautiful order”; an explanation might follow it.
8. Whether every man desires beatitude — odd that this is last; it “should be the first.”

6. q.5 a.1, objection 1, and a digression on “understanding” and “reason” (“what way of being equivocal by reason”) #

Obj. 1: as the rational nature is above the sensible, so the intellectual is above the rational (Dionysius, Divine Names, in many places); brute animals cannot reach the end of the rational nature; therefore man cannot reach the end of the intellectual nature, beatitude. “Two is to three as three is to four, and two can’t get up to three.” Digression on the names: we have an ability called reason, also called understanding (Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding is about reason). Angels are not said to have reason, the ability for discourse, since their knowledge is not discursive but immediate; theirs is called understanding. Shakespeare’s definition of reason as looking [ed.: as he reports it] — trying to see, coming to understand by discourse. So “understanding” is sometimes said of reason, sometimes divided against it. Which way of a name becoming equivocal by reason? Two ways:

• A: something significant is added to one of the two, which then gets a new name — as scientia is divided into scientia and sapientia, sapientia getting its name because it adds knowledge through the very first causes (an excellence deserving its own name), not because it is less science.
• B: one has the common meaning fully and keeps the name; the other has it imperfectly and gets a new name — cat divided into cat and kitten, man into man and boy. Thomas often quotes “some medieval writer” (Isidore? Isaiah? [unclear in recording]) on man’s intellectus umbratus, overshadowed understanding. He judges the present case is like B: the common meaning is the ability to understand; man has little of it, so his is renamed reason — and he may reason very badly and get little understanding out of it.
• Asides: the Journal of Animal Ethics, which forbids “beasts,” “slay the fox,” “pig out” as hate speech; students who cannot state, let alone prove, the Pythagorean theorem; a gubernatorial candidate saying voters do not know what candidates stand for; how the Germans could vote for Hitler (a friend’s relative recalled euphoria in Austria, and something similar with Obama); Churchill on democracy as the worst form of government except all the rest.

7. Objections 2 and 3, sed contra (“Blessed the man whom you instruct”) #

• Obj. 2: true beatitude is the vision of God, pure truth; but it is connatural to man to see truth in material things, understanding intelligible forms in images (phantasms — the Greek for images), as Aristotle says in On the Soul III; so man cannot reach beatitude. His gloss: reason’s own object is the what-it-is of something sensed or imagined, a natural or a mathematical thing.
• Obj. 3: beatitude is the obtaining of the highest good; one cannot reach the highest without passing through the media; the angelic nature lies between God and man and man cannot transcend it; so he cannot obtain beatitude. Aside: his little son Marcus asking why we cannot be born knowing what we need to know — “you want to be an angel.”
• Sed contra: Psalm 93, “Blessed the man whom you instruct, Lord.” (Thomas had all the psalms memorised.)

8. The body: man is capable of the perfect good (“capable of the perfect good”) #

1. Beatitude names the obtaining of the perfect good; whoever is capable of the perfect good can reach beatitude.
2. Man is capable of it, since his understanding can grasp the universal and perfect good and his will can desire it. Even Vanity Fair’s “no one gets what he wants” witnesses that man desires a perfect good and has some notion of it.
   • Plato’s argument (Socrates): we get the idea of equality from things that are not equal but judged to fall short of equality — so the knowledge is not derived from them. His comparison: you cannot judge a portrait’s fidelity unless you already knew the man. His own favourite: Lafayette, returning after Washington’s death, judging the statues (“that’s not exactly what he was”) until one in Virginia — impossible without a knowledge of Washington not derived from the likenesses. Apply to happiness: we judge even those we call happy to be imperfectly happy; so we have some apprehension of true, perfect happiness. Thomas is pointing to this.
3. The same appears from man’s capacity for the vision of the divine essence (shown in the First Part), in which perfect beatitude consists. One sees God as He is only if God is not only what is seen but that by which one sees — the form informing the mind. “Terribly, terribly profound.” Hence the marriage comparison (“I have espoused you in faith,” Osee): the vision is the consummation, “two in one mind” instead of two in one flesh.

• Summary: the first part shows man naturally ordered to want this beatitude (a natural desire cannot be in vain); the second alludes to other places showing he is capable of seeing God as He is.

9. Reply 1: likeness is slippery; statim vs paulatim (“the tool of likeness is dangerous”) #

The point: the objection’s proportion (sense : reason :: reason : intellect) exaggerates a likeness; Thomas brings out the difference.

• Dionne always quoted Plato: likeness is a slippery thing; seeing two things as like, you may exaggerate — especially with likeness of ratios (proportions), “like two is to four as four is to eight — but it’s not that exact.”
• The four tools of dialectic: the third is difference, the fourth likeness, whose special work is seeing proportional likeness between things far apart. He suggested to Monsignor that difference is put first because likeness is dangerous without it. Man is “on the horizon” between animal and angel — some sense, but with a difference.
• Even exact ratios differ in other respects: 2:3 :: 4:6, but 2 and 3 are prime and one is odd, 4 and 6 are even; the likeness consists precisely in 2 being the same parts of 3 that 4 is of 6. Aristotle says consideration of likeness: ask exactly where they are alike.
• Thomas’s difference: the rational nature exceeds the sensitive as to the object (sense can in no way know the universal); the intellectual exceeds the rational only as to the way of knowing the same intelligible truth: the angel grasps it statim, at once; reason arrives at it paulatim, bit by bit, by investigation — discourse, running from one thing to another; intelligere hominis est per modum motus. Hence the rational nature can reach beatitude, the perfection of the intellectual nature, but otherwise than the angels: they at once after the beginning of their condition, men through time (Aristotle: man is the animal with a sense of time — most of life is past or future, “we’re almost dead”). The sensitive nature can in no way reach it, not even by discourse, not even after a long time, not even by the Journal of Animal Ethics.
• Aside: the Charlie Rose interview with a computer expert predicting the year computers overtake the human mind; between the animal-ethics people and these, “it shouldn’t be hard for us to take over the world”; more films about computers taking over than dogs; Animal Farm.

10. Replies 2 and 3 (“man is not able to transcend the angels”) #

• Ad 2: knowing truth through images is connatural to man in the state of this life, the soul being turned to phantasms while joined to the body; after this life another way of knowing is connatural (First Part): the separated soul understands itself through itself — “quite a transition,” knowing a little the way the lowest angels know (aside: he always sits in the tenth pew).
• Ad 3: man cannot transcend the angels by grade of nature, being naturally below them; he can transcend them by the operation of the understanding, when he understands something above the angels, i.e. God, who beatifies him; when he perfectly achieves this he will be perfectly blessed.

His words #

• necessary: two of Aristotle’s four senses — without which a thing cannot be, vs necessary for well-being.
• bene esse: the well-being of beatitude, to which friends belong.
• jucunda: joyful, linked by him to the delight beatitude requires.
• fortasse: perhaps — Augustine’s hedge on extrinsic aid.
• kingdom: the ordered society of those who see God (prev. lecture).
• ho philos estin allos autos: a friend is another self; Shakespeare’s “second self.”
• plena sufficiency: full sufficiency, a word carried over from the senses.
• concomitant: how love of neighbour and friendship stand to perfect beatitude, not of its essence.
• reason: the ability for discourse; understanding: said of reason, or divided against it (angelic).
• equivocal by reason: a name divided so that one member keeps it — by addition (scientia/sapientia) or by fullness (cat/kitten, man/boy).
• intellectus umbratus: overshadowed understanding, man’s imperfect intellect.
• phantasms: the Greek word for images.
• statim / paulatim: at once / bit by bit — angelic vs human grasp of truth.
• discourse: running from one thing to another; intelligere hominis est per modum motus.
• tools of dialectic: third, difference; fourth, likeness (proportional likeness of things far apart).
• horizon: man between the material and spiritual worlds.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 4, a. 8 (whole article)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 5, prologue and a. 1 (whole article)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, prologues of q. 1 and q. 2
• Augustine, On Genesis to the Letter VIII (as quoted in a. 8)
• Wisdom 7; Psalm 93 (sed contra) Mentioned
• Aristotle, Ethics IX (the happy man needs friends); On the Soul III (forms in phantasms); Aristotle on the four senses of necessary; on the tools of dialectic (inferred: Topics); man as the animal with a sense of time
• Boethius (no joyful possession without consortium)
• Dionysius, Divine Names
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae, First Part (vision of the divine essence; the separated soul’s way of knowing); Summa Contra Gentiles (God to Moses, “I will show you every good”; the many mansions and the parable of equal pay); Secunda Secundae; Thomas on charity as friendship
• Alphonsus (proper principles of ethics)
• John 14 “many mansions” (inferred locus); Luke (sitting at God’s table); 1 Cor 13:12; 1 John 3:2; Osee, “I have espoused you in faith”; the apostle on loving God without loving one’s neighbour
• Plato (Socrates on equality and the portrait; “likeness is a slippery thing”)
• Locke, Essay on Human Understanding; Shakespeare (second self; reason as looking; his “Shakespeare’s ethics” collection); Homer; Terence; Thackeray, Vanity Fair; Orwell, Animal Farm; Churchill on democracy

His questions #

• Is it necessary to understand the word “necessary”? Yes either way — to say yes, or to show why not.
• Is food necessary in this life? Are Mozart’s operas? Food, yes (cannot be without it); Mozart, for many (for well-being).
• Are the saints inclined to pray for us down here? Yes; we always depend on the prayers of the Church triumphant.
• If you were the only one in heaven, would you still be blessed? Yes; every sufficiency of good is had in God.
• Can you love the devil or the damned by charity? No; you cannot wish them a good they cannot have.
• Why didn’t God just create all of us blessed? It is contrary to man’s nature to reach his end otherwise than by what he does; only God is blessed without deserving it.
• Which way of “equivocal by reason” is understanding/reason? Like cat/kitten and man/boy: man has the ability to understand imperfectly, so it is renamed reason.
• How can we judge that things approach equality, or that people are imperfectly happy? Only if we have a knowledge of equality, or of true happiness, not derived from these imperfect cases.
• Exactly how are 2:3 and 4:6 alike? Two is the same parts of three that four is of six; in other respects (prime, odd/even) they differ.
• Why might the tool of difference be put before the tool of likeness? Because likeness is dangerous if you do not see the difference (his suggestion to Monsignor; left as suggestion).