Summa I-II Q6 Art. 1: The Plan of the Treatise on Human Acts and Whether Human Acts Are Voluntary

Orientation #

“If you recall, we were at the beginning of question six.” Before the break, he says, they did questions 1–5 on the last end; now question 6 begins the treatment of human acts. He also says the distinction between “editorial and reference division” is one “I’ve pointed out many times” (prev. lecture). The previous class finished q. 5 (aa. 7–8) and the editorial/logical division of the Second Part; the next takes q. 6, aa. 2–4.

The class, in order #

1. The division of the Second Part recalled (“the editorial and reference division”) #

Point: the proemium to q. 1 divides the Second Part into (a) the last end of human life (qq. 1–5, done) and (b) those things by which man arrives at that end or deviates from it.

• Our Father as parallel: “Hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come” refer to the end; “Thy will be done… give us this day our daily bread” to the means of arriving (“not everyone who says Lord, Lord, but he who does the will of my Father”); the last petitions (forgiveness, temptation, the evil one) to deviating from it.

2. Proemium to q. 6: acts as the road; universal vs. particular (“virtue is the road to happiness”) #

Point: since one arrives at beatitude through acts, human acts must be considered, to know by which acts one arrives and by which one is impeded.

• Thomas “even in ethics” says virtue is the road to happiness, vice the road to misery; every miserable man in the newspaper has gone down the road of some vice and “predictably ended up in misery.”
• Distinction: the rest of the I-II vs. the II-II. Operations are about singulars, so every practical science (operativa scientia) is perfected in a consideration in particular. Moral consideration is therefore first in universali (rest of I-II), then in particular (the II-II, “the thicker font”).
• Aristotle in the Politics: Socrates always talks about virtue in general; better to talk about the particulars, “what’s the virtue of a woman, what’s the virtue of a man.”

3. The rest of the I-II: acts (6–48) and their principles (49 on) (“the principles, the causes, so to speak”) #

Point: the universal consideration of human acts treats first the acts themselves, then their principles; he reads the proemia of q. 49 and q. 90 to show what “principles” means.

• q. 49: after acts and passions, the principles or causes of human acts; intrinsic first, then extrinsic. Intrinsic principles are the powers and the habits; powers were treated in the First Part, so what remains is the habits.
• q. 90: the extrinsic principle inclining to evil is the devil (treated in the First Part; “maybe the Our Father” again); the exterior principle moving to the good is God, who instructs through law and aids by grace — hence law first, then grace (“the famous treatise on law”).
• Mnemonic: 49 is seven times seven; Thomas begins talking about the intellect in the seventh reading of the third book of the De Anima.

4. Proemium continued: proper vs. common acts; condition vs. distinction (“acts which are properly human”) #

Point: of human acts some are proper to man (he “sometimes” calls these human acts), some common to man and animals (acts of man); the proper ones come nearer to beatitude.

• Reason: beatitude is the private good of man, not shared with animals (“a cat can’t really be happy,” whatever the cat-food ads say). So acts proper to man first; second the acts common with animals, “the passions of the soul,” or emotions (anger, fear, desire).
• Aside: Thomas’s treatise on the passions is a foundation for understanding the emotions Mozart imitates; he once made a tape with Warren Murray showing Mozart’s different emotions, even a “plot” where hope is replaced by despair, major to minor key.
• Under the proper acts: first their condition, second their distinction (not until q. 18 “according to my text”). “What the heck does he mean by the condition of human acts? Explain yourself, Thomas.” Answer: human acts properly are the voluntary ones, since the will is the reasonable desiring power proper to man; so consider them as voluntary.
• Threefold order: (1) the voluntary and involuntary in general; (2) acts elicited from the will itself; (3) acts commanded by the will, done by means of another power. Charity: the act of love is the will’s own act, but it commands all the other powers, so those can be “acts of charity in a way too” — commanded, moved by the will.
• Because acts of the will have circumstances by which they are judged, the circumstances follow (q. 7).

5. The eight articles of q. 6 previewed (“Maybe not by you, but by Thomas”) #

Point: he runs the eight articles with a case for each.

1. Whether the voluntary is found in human acts.
2. Whether in brute animals — his two cats: after breakfast Tabitha went straight out to the wooded area to hunt, Moppet sat in the window “philosophically” watching the world go by. “Is that a choice that they made?”
3. Whether the voluntary can be without any act — sins of omission: if sins, voluntary; but no act there.
4. Whether violence can be imposed on the will — “give somebody enough beer.” Aside on De Anima: Aristotle, distinguishing imagination from opinion, says men and animals sometimes act through imagination rather than reason: animals because they have no reason; men because reason is covered over by passion, by disease (the madman), or by sleep — three reasons, which Thomas gives “a bit more fully.” The man wanting to blow up the Pentagon, the shooters “for no particular reason.”
5. Whether violence causes the involuntary (related to a. 4).
6. Whether metus (“I guess that’s a kind of fear”) causes the involuntary.
7. Whether concupiscence causes the involuntary.
8. Whether ignorance causes the involuntary — “didn’t know the gun was loaded,” the old song.

6. Article 1: the three objections and the sed contra (“that whose beginning is in oneself”) #

Point: three strong arguments that the voluntary is not found in human acts.

• Aside: a young lady from TAC where “let the author speak for himself” is policy; thrown the Summa with no one explaining, Thomas “seems all mixed up — first he’s saying it isn’t so, and now it’s so.”
• Common premise: the voluntary is that whose beginning is in oneself — Gregory of Nyssa (his text cites De Natura Hominis), Damascene (On the Orthodox Faith), “even Aristotle, even he got into that paganism.” Aristotle treats the voluntary at the beginning of the third book of the Ethics because book two defined virtue as a habit with choice, in a mean toward us determined by reason; before the virtues, choice and the voluntary.
• Obj. 1: the beginning of human acts is outside man; appetite is moved by the desirable, which is a mover not moved. Dinner on the table, itself not moving, moves me to sit down. Aristotle, De Anima III: the desirable moves both the knowing power and the desiring power. “That’s pretty convincing, huh?”
• Obj. 2: Physics VIII proves no new motion in animals without a preceding exterior motion; all human acts are new (none eternal); so their beginning is outside. “This is serious… Thomas’s pessimistic period.”
• Obj. 3: who acts voluntarily is able to act of himself; but John 15, “without me you can do nothing.” “That’s where Calvin would conclude God is the author of sin.”
• Sed contra: Damascene, book 2, the voluntary is an act which is a reasonable operation; such are human acts. Gregory and Aristotle would say the same — “some pretty big minds.” How Thomas gets out of it: he must have had the answers before writing; still, “great times of being stumped, falling on the ground and praying” — “I should have done that in grade school.”

7. The body: intrinsic beginning plus knowledge of the end (“the name of voluntary implies”) #

Point: the voluntary must be in human acts; its notion is built up in steps.

1. Some motions have their beginning in the agent or thing moved, some outside. Stone thrown up: source outside (the man throwing); stone moving down: source in the stone, “left to itself.”
2. Of things moved from an intrinsic beginning, some move themselves, some do not. Reason: every agent acts for an end (as above); those are perfectly moved by an inward source which have within not only a beginning of moving but of moving toward an end; and acting for an end requires some knowledge of the end.
3. So what acts from an intrinsic beginning with some knowledge of the end has in itself the beginning both of acting and of acting for the end. What has no knowledge of the end has in itself a beginning of motion, but the beginning of moving for an end is in another who knows the end and directs it, impressing on it a beginning of motion toward the end. Tree producing acorns, reproducing itself: acting for an end, but not one it knows; “maybe this is true about the animals too.”
4. Hence the former are said to move themselves; the latter to be moved by others. Where both — that they act, and that they act for an end — are from an intrinsic source, the act is voluntary: the name implies the motion is from one’s own inclination.
5. So the definition of “these three guys” — now ordered Aristotle first, Gregory second, Damascene third (“what’s the significance of that?”) — is: not only whose beginning is within, but with the addition of knowledge.
6. Conclusion: since man most of all knows the end of his work and moves himself, in his acts the voluntary is most of all found.

8. Student exchange: are animals voluntary? Voluntary vs. free (“does he know it as an end”) #

Point: what moves itself knowing the end is most voluntary; what moves itself without knowing the end is “so much less voluntary.”

• Student: doesn’t this make animals voluntary, since they have knowledge? Answer: depends what you mean; if voluntary means source within, they have something of it; fully voluntary only with knowledge of the end.
• Student: the dog knows the food, which is the end of the trip; but the end of eating? “He doesn’t know that; he knows he’s hungry.” Exchange reaches: the dog has knowledge of the end but does not know it as an end. He grants the distinction is not made explicitly here; “maybe that’s implied.”
• Voluntary here has a broader meaning than being free; the article is not asking “is man free.” Thomas usually speaks of that as liberum arbitrium, free judgment.

9. The replies (“not every beginning is a first beginning”) #

Point: the replies show that being moved from outside does not destroy the voluntary, since the intrinsic beginning need not be the first beginning.

• Ad 1: it belongs to the notion of the voluntary that its beginning be within, not that it be the first beginning; the intrinsic beginning may be moved by an extrinsic one. A beginning can be first in its own genus without being first simply: in the genus of alterable things the first alterer is the heavenly body (“the old understanding”), itself moved locally by a superior mover. So the knowing power and the appetite are the first beginning in the genus of appetitive motion, though moved from outside according to other kinds of motion. “Does that satisfy you?” — “Fine.”
• Ad 2: an animal’s new motion is preceded by an outside motion in two ways: (a) something sensible is presented to sense, which grasped moves the desire — the lion seeing the stag approaching (the thirsty one of the Psalms) begins to move toward it; (b) the body is changed by a natural change, cold or heat, and so accidentally the sense desire, a power of a bodily organ, is changed — animals going under a tree out of the heat, into a warm place out of the cold; his first cat lying under the old stove for the warmth. Not against the voluntary: the desire to go into the warmth is a different genus of motion from the chilling of the body; that desire still begins intrinsically.
• Ad 3: God moves man not only by proposing a desirable to sense or by changing the body (the two ways animals are influenced) but by moving the will itself, since every motion of will and of nature proceeds from him as first mover (developed at length in Summa Contra Gentiles III and in the First Part). Thomas denies that even Michael, Gabriel and Raphael can move the will immediately — angels, and the devil, only persuade; God can move the will intrinsically because he is its source. As it is not against the notion of nature that its motion be from God, nature being a tool of God moving, so not against the will’s act. Common to natural and voluntary motion: from an intrinsic principle.
• Student recalls the definition of nature: principle of motion and change; he completes it — beginning and cause of motion and rest in that in which it is, as such and not by happening, “tied to being an intrinsic principle.”
• Aside: “nature” comes from “birth,” because birth is from within. Every time he gets medicine they ask his date of birth (January 18, 1936), “but actually I existed before” that, in his mother’s womb. So nature and will both have their source within, though both depend on God — “hard to understand,” taken up elsewhere in theology.

His words #

• editorial vs. reference division: two ways of dividing the Summa’s Second Part, recalled from earlier classes.
• “doing science” / operativa scientia: practical science, perfected in particular consideration.
• human acts vs. acts of man: acts proper to man vs. those common with animals (“radically is kind of the way he speaks of it”).
• private good of man: beatitude, not shared by animals [ed.: proper good].
• passions of the soul: “you could call them the emotions.”
• condition of human acts: their being voluntary.
• elicited vs. commanded acts: the will’s own act vs. acts of other powers moved by the will.
• metus: “I guess that’s a kind of fear.”
• beginning / source / origin: his renderings of principium.
• mover not moved: the desirable, e.g. dinner on the table.
• first in its own genus vs. first simply: the heavenly body; the knowing power and appetite in the genus of appetitive motion.
• liberum arbitrium: “free judgment”; the sense of “free” that this article is not about.
• nature: beginning and cause of motion and rest in that in which it is, as such and not by happening; from “birth.”

Texts #

Read in class

• Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 1, proemium (division of the Second Part)
• Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 6, proemium (entire) and list of eight articles
• Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 49, proemium
• Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 90, proemium
• Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 6, a. 1 (objections, sed contra, body, three replies)
• John 15, “without me you can do nothing” (in obj. 3)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, book II (definition of virtue) and beginning of book III (choice and the voluntary) (inferred: Ethics)
• Aristotle, De Anima III: the desirable moving the knowing and desiring powers; imagination vs. opinion, three reasons men act by imagination; “seventh reading” on the intellect
• Aristotle, Physics VIII: no new motion in animals without a preceding exterior motion
• Aristotle, Politics: Socrates and the virtues of woman and man
• Gregory of Nyssa, De Natura Hominis (as his text cites it); Damascene, On the Orthodox Faith, book 2
• Summa Contra Gentiles III and Summa Theologiae I on God as first mover of will and nature
• Psalms, the thirsty stag; the old song “didn’t know the gun was loaded”; Calvin on God as author of sin

His questions #

• What does he mean by the principles of human acts? Intrinsic (powers, habits) and extrinsic (devil; God through law and grace), per the proemia to qq. 49 and 90.
• What the heck does he mean by the condition of human acts? That they are voluntary, since the will is the reasonable desiring power proper to man.
• Is that a choice those two cats made? Left open (the matter of a. 2).
• Isn’t obj. 1 pretty convincing — I’m not free, the source is the meal on the table? Answered in ad 1: the desirable moves an intrinsic beginning that is first in its own genus, not first simply.
• What’s the significance of putting Aristotle first in the body’s list? Left open.
• Doesn’t this mean the animals are voluntary? In the broad sense (source within), something of it; fully voluntary requires knowledge of the end, which the dog has without knowing it as an end.
• Is the meaning of the article “is man free”? No; voluntary here is broader than free; freedom he calls liberum arbitrium.
• Does that satisfy you? (ad 1) “Fine.”
• What’s the definition of nature in natural philosophy? Beginning and cause of motion and rest in that in which it is, as such and not by happening — an intrinsic principle.