Summa I-II Q6 Art. 2-4: The Voluntary in Animals, Voluntary Omission, and Whether the Will Can Be Forced

Orientation #

He begins “let’s look at Article Two here now,” picking up from the previous article, where he recalls Thomas said the voluntary is maxime found in man, not that it is found in man alone (prev. lecture). At the end he says it is “too late now to go into other articles” and counts four of the eight done. The previous class treated q. 6, a. 1 and the structure of the Prima Secundae; the next treats aa. 5–6 on violence and fear.

The class, in order #

1. Article 2, objections and sed contra (“boys and brute animals”) #

The point: he reads the three objections against the voluntary being in brutes and the authorities on the other side.

• Obj. 1: voluntas is in reason (Aristotle, third book about the soul), so cannot be in brutes; therefore neither the voluntary.
• Obj. 2: by human acts being voluntary man is lord of his acts; brutes “do not so much act as are acted” (Damascene).
• Obj. 3: praise and blame follow voluntary acts (Damascene); none is owed to brutes. Student pushes back: “that’s a bad dog”; can you blame the cat for eating the mouse, give it a penance? Left for the reply.
• Sed contra: the Philosopher, third book of the Ethics (where he takes up the voluntary): boys, who do not yet have use of reason, and even brute animals “communicate,” share, the voluntary; Damascene and Gregory say the same. He notes Thomas rarely disagrees with Damascene and gives Gregory great authority.
• He cautions against over-reading a. 1: Thomas said maxime voluntarium invenitur in man, “not as if he was excluding it entirely” — “we could be mistaken.”
• Aside: Shakespeare’s pun on Brutus/brute in Julius Caesar.

2. Corpus: perfect and imperfect knowledge of the end (“perfect and what imperfect”) #

The point: the voluntary requires an interior principle with some knowledge of the end, and that knowledge is twofold.

• Perfect knowledge of the end: grasping not only the thing that is the end, but the notion (ratio) of end, and the proportion/order of what is for the end toward it. Belongs only to the reasonable nature. (When you study the four causes, you learn the ratio of end, “that for the sake of which.”)
• Imperfect knowledge: only apprehension of the end, without the definition of end or the order of act to end; found in brutes through sense and natural estimation (“instinct, we say sometimes in man too”). The animal knows the food it looks for, but not under the definition of that for the sake of which — “because then he wouldn’t always act in the same way.”
• Upon perfect knowledge follows the voluntary in its perfect notion: the end being grasped, one can deliberate about the end and the means and be moved or not moved. Upon imperfect knowledge follows the voluntary imperfectly: the one grasping the end does not deliberate but is immediately moved.
• Trees are excluded: they do not know the end in any way (“Never asked him… if he asked, they never answered”). Snow peas entangling to climb a trellis toward the sun: real action for an end, “magnificent,” yet without knowing what they act for — like the soldiers in the poem, “theirs not the question why, but to do and die,” which “puts them on the level of plants.”
• His question: is the animal then more alive than the tree, since alive means moving oneself, and the animal knows the end in some way while the tree does not? And man more alive still, knowing the end under the definition of end and the order of act to end.
• Aside on “reasonable”: he prefers it to “rational” as translation; the comic’s line that man is a rational animal who gets angry when asked to live by reason; “especially if you live in Washington D.C.”

3. Replies to Article 2 (“voluntarium is said denominatively”) #

• Ad 1: voluntas names the reasonable desire (appetitus): originally “desire,” then the power of desiring, because desire is more known — Shakespeare: “things in motion sooner catch the eye than what not stirs”; so too epithumia and the irascible appetite are named from the emotion though desire is not their only act. Hence voluntas cannot be in what lacks reason. But voluntarium is said denominatively from the will (as in the Categories on denomination) and can be extended to whatever partakes of the will by some agreement or likeness — so brutes, insofar as through some knowledge they are moved to an end. Parallel: Aristotle says animals partake in a way of prudence or foresight, as birds flying south, squirrels storing nuts (“people go to Florida in the winter — snowbirds”).
• Ad 2: man is lord of his act because he deliberates; since deliberating reason “has itself to opposites,” the will can go either way, decide to do or not. In this way — the perfect way — the voluntary is not in brutes. He links it to Aristotle on dialectic: reasoning from probable opinions “even to contradictory conclusions.”
• Aside from ad 2: this is why we can be redeemed as angels cannot — we deliberate, they have full knowledge of what they do; there is “no history of the angels,” history is human; the angels who referred their glorious nature back to God were saved, those who rested in self-sufficiency lost. Then the inscrutability of evil: Christ choosing Judas though he says beforehand he will betray him — an example for us, since bishops, priests, laymen also turn evil; Paul VI took flak for saying there would be other Judases in the Church; McInerny’s novel “Judas Priest.”
• Ad 3: praise and blame follow the voluntary according to its perfect notion, not found in brutes — answering the student’s “bad dog”: you can train animals to some extent (“give him a cookie”), but “can’t trust them completely. Can’t trust us completely.”
• Break-time asides on monkeys: the number-sequence screen test the monkey wins every time; the psychologist raising a monkey with his children — ahead at first in dexterity, slows down at language; the chimp on the streetcar with a newspaper; the Quaker State “grease monkey” commercial; “when the monkey writes a computer program… then I’ll be impressed.”

4. Article 3, objections and sed contra (“whether the voluntary can be without any act”) #

The point: he reads the three objections that the voluntary requires an act, and the sed contra from dominion over not-doing.

• Obj. 1: the voluntary is from the will, and nothing is from the will except through some act, at least of the will itself. He remarks: “you have to do violence to your mind to see these objections” — comparing an objection read that morning in the Sentences, that the Father is more powerful than the Son because he can generate a Son and the Son cannot; “sounds pretty convincing.”
• Obj. 2: as by the act of will one is said to will, so with the act ceasing one is said not to will; but not-willing causes the involuntary, opposed to the voluntary.
• Obj. 3: knowledge belongs to the notion of the voluntary, and knowledge is through some act.
• Sed contra: that of which we are lords is voluntary; we are lords of doing and not doing, willing and not willing; so not-doing and not-willing are voluntary too. His example: not going to church on Sunday is voluntary. Student adds the radio lyric, “if you choose not to decide, you have still made a choice.”
• Aside: Voltaire reportedly mocked the clergy by such objections; and a digression on “overlook” vs “understand” (under/over), “look over” vs “overlook,” “overview,” episcopus meaning overseer — “some bishops overlook more than others.”

5. Corpus: two ways of being “from” something (“as heating from heat”) #

The point: “distinction overlooked” — the voluntary is from the will, but “from” is said in two ways.

1. Directly: what proceeds from a thing insofar as it acts, as heating from heat.
2. Indirectly: from its not acting, as the sinking of the boat is from the helmsman insofar as he desists from steering. He traces this to Aristotle on the causes: the same thing is cause of opposites by its presence and absence, with the example of the gubernator.

• Qualification: not everything following on a lack of action is reduced to the non-agent as cause, but only when he is able and ought to act (potest and debet). His stock example, “Aristotle’s corollary”: the guard who stays awake and alerts the camp causes its safety; if he snoozes or goes for a beer and the enemy takes the camp, he is court-martialled — but not if the enemy were invisible, and not the man who was not on guard duty that night, though he too could have alerted the camp. So if the helmsman could not steer, or the ship was not committed to him, the sinking is not imputed to him.
• Conclusion: since the will, by willing and acting, can impede not-willing and not-acting, sometimes the not-willing and not-acting is imputed to it as from it. Thus the voluntary can be without an act: sometimes without an exterior act but with an interior one (when he wills not to act); sometimes without even the interior act (when he does not will).

6. Replies to Article 3 (“nolo legere”) #

• Ad 1: voluntary is not only what proceeds from the will directly as from its acting, but indirectly as from its not acting, when it is able and ought to act. Student: is the kid responsible for the room not being cleaned? Yes — able and should have, but didn’t. He recalls the two sons: one says “yep, Dad” and does not go; the other says no and goes.
• Ad 2: “to not will” in two ways. (a) In the force of one word, as the negative verb nolo — nolo legere, “I wish not to read” — an act of will, causing the voluntary. (b) In the force of a speech, not affirming any act of will — this does not cause the voluntary. He and the students find the text “strange,” “just the reverse” of what one expects, yet “faithfully reproduced in more than one edition.” Working sense: if I don’t want to read and you force me, it is not voluntary — or minimally, “in some way,” like the souls in purgatory who want to be there because they need to, or like martyrs: “the least kind of voluntary.” “We must look at that text as it is, and sometime when we are wiser, we will illuminate it more.” Left open.
• Ad 3: an act of knowledge is required for the voluntary as an act of will is: it must be in one’s power to consider, will and act; so as not-willing and not-acting when it was time is voluntary, so is not-considering. Application: not studying the Church’s teaching on morality is voluntary, culpable; “ignorance of the law is no excuse” — he would not make it “completely universal,” but you should know a red light means stop. Comic’s line: “I forgot it was against the law.”

7. Article 4, objections and sed contra (“whether violence can be inferred to the will”) #

• Obj. 1: anything can be coerced by something more powerful; God is more powerful than the human will; so at least by Him it can be forced.
• Obj. 2: every passive thing is coerced by an active power when changed by it; the will is a passive power, a “moved mover” (third book about the soul — the good as unmoved mover); so sometimes forced.
• Obj. 3: violent motion is against nature; the will’s motion to sinning is against nature; so it can be forced. He quotes Friar Lawrence in Romeo and Juliet: nothing so good but, strained from fair use, “revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse.”
• Sed contra: Augustine, fifth book of the City of God: what comes to be by the will does not come to be from necessity; everything coerced is from necessity; so the will cannot be forced. He notes “necessity” here is in the one sense, violence.
• Aside: Friar Lawrence is a Franciscan, more suitable to a Juliet; would a Dominican have delayed telling the parents, or called them together first?

8. Corpus: elicited vs. commanded acts (“twofold is the act of the will”) #

1. The act elicited immediately by the will: to will.
2. The act commanded by the will and exercised through another power in between (a motive power): to walk, to speak.

• As regards commanded acts the will can suffer violence, when the outer members are impeded from executing its command (“put me in a straitjacket”).
• As regards its own act, violence cannot be done to it: the act of will is nothing but an inclination from an interior knowing principle (as natural desire is an inclination from an interior principle without knowledge), while the violent is from an exterior principle; so being forced is against the very definition of the act of will, as it is against the notion of natural inclination. The stone can be borne upward by violence (“like Sisyphus”), but that violent motion cannot be from its natural inclination; so a man can be dragged by violence, but that this be from his will is repugnant to the notion of violence.

9. Replies to Article 4 (“the heart of the king is in the hand of God”) #

• Ad 1: God, more powerful than the will, moves it — but not violently; Proverbs 21, “a marvelous text that Thomas often quotes”: the heart of the king is in God’s hand and He turns it wherever He wills. If it were violence it would not be an act of the will nor the will moved, but something against it. His gloss: God moves the will as its source, “closer to the will than the will is to itself” — the “smallness of God” of the objection, yet “he’s closer to me than I am to myself.” He recalls Bernard of Clairvaux (inferred from “Clairvaux”) and “draw me” in the Song of Songs, “comes as the Father draws him”: is being drawn by God violence? No.
• Ad 2: a motion is violent not whenever a passive thing is changed by its active principle, but when this is against the inward inclination of the passive; otherwise all alterations and generations of simple bodies would be violent — they are natural because of the natural aptitude in the matter (nature is both matter and form): fire generated from paper is natural because of the matter’s aptitude for the form. So when the will is moved by the desirable according to its own inclination, the motion is voluntary. Aside: Fr. Merkelbach’s point that acquiring a habit makes the actions more voluntary, being more disposed to them — “strange.”
• Ad 3: what the will tends to in sinning, though bad and against rational nature and truth, is apprehended as good and suitable to nature, according to some passion of sense or some corrupt habit. Student: the devil never tempts to something simply bad — Genesis: the woman saw the tree was beautiful, the fruit good for food and desirable for wisdom; “you just forgot about the other stuff.”
• Close: four of eight articles done; the rest next time.

His words #

• maxime voluntarium invenitur: the voluntary is found most of all in man (a. 1), not exclusively.
• perfect vs. imperfect knowledge of the end: grasping the thing and the notion of end and the order of means to it, vs. bare apprehension of the thing.
• “reasonable nature”: his rendering of rationalis [ed.: rational].
• natural estimation: the animal’s imperfect knowledge, “the instinct we say sometimes.”
• voluntas / appetitus: the power named from its most known act, desire.
• epithumia: the concupiscible appetite, named from the emotion.
• denominatively (denominative): named from the will by some likeness or partaking, as in the Categories.
• reason “has itself to opposites”: ground of dominion over one’s act; cf. dialectic reasoning to contradictory conclusions.
• “from” something directly / indirectly: as heating from heat vs. the sinking from the idle helmsman.
• gubernator: helmsman, pilot.
• potest and debet: able and ought — the condition for imputing an omission.
• nolo legere: “I wish not to read,” to-not-will in the force of one word.
• elicited vs. commanded act: the will’s own act (to will) vs. an act exercised through a medium power (to walk, to speak).
• violent: from an exterior principle, against the inward inclination of the passive thing.
• natural aptitude: the matter’s disposition that makes generation natural, not violent.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 6, a. 2 (objections, sed contra, corpus, replies)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 6, a. 3 (objections, sed contra, corpus, replies)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 6, a. 4 (objections, sed contra, corpus, replies)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, third book about the soul [ed.: De Anima III] (will in reason; moved mover)
• Aristotle, third book of the Ethics (boys and brutes share the voluntary)
• Aristotle, Categories (denomination)
• Aristotle on the causes: a cause of opposites by presence and absence, the helmsman (Physics II, inferred)
• Damascene; Gregory (authorities on the voluntary in brutes)
• Augustine, City of God, book V
• Proverbs 21 (heart of the king)
• Song of Songs (“draw me”); Gospel of John (Judas foretold); Genesis (the woman and the tree)
• Peter Lombard, Sentences (an objection on the Trinity read that morning)
• Shakespeare, Julius Caesar; Romeo and Juliet (Friar Lawrence); the line on things in motion
• Tennyson’s charge poem, “theirs not to reason why” (inferred; quoted as “there’s not the question why, but to do and die”)
• Ralph McInerny, “Judas Priest”; Fr. Merkelbach on habit and voluntariness

His questions #

• In the previous article, did Thomas say man alone is voluntary? No — maxime voluntarium invenitur; he did not exclude brutes.
• Does the requirement of knowing the end exclude trees from sharing the voluntary? Yes; they act for an end but do not know it in any way.
• Is the animal more alive than the tree, and man more alive than the animal? He puts it as likely: alive means self-moving, and the animal knows its end imperfectly, man under the notion of end.
• Can you blame the cat for eating the mouse? Praise and blame follow the perfect voluntary, which brutes lack; training is not blame.
• Is the kid responsible for the room not being cleaned? Yes, because he was able and ought to have cleaned it.
• What does Thomas mean by “to not will” not causing the voluntary? Left open — “we must look at that text as it is” until wiser.
• Is ignorance of the law an excuse? Not when one could and should have considered; not-considering is voluntary.
• Is being drawn by God violence to the will? No; God moves the will as its source, not from outside.
• Does acquiring a habit make the act more or less voluntary? More (Merkelbach): the will is more disposed to it.