Dividing Theology, the End as a Cause, and Whether the Understanding Moves the Will (Question 9, Article 1)

Orientation #

He begins “before we go into question nine” by coming back to “the old rule of two or three, or both” that he wants the class to see applied to theology; last time is otherwise not referred to. He says “we’ll see that later on” about where the mutual moving of mind and will begins, and “if I get to two” about the later articles. The previous class worked through q. 8 on whether the will’s act bears on the end and the means; the next continues q. 9 with sense desire and the will moving itself.

The class, in order #

1. The rule of two or three or both: the Our Father (“Remember the old rule of two or three”) #

Point: a good division may be twofold and threefold at once, and each division illumines something.

• Seven petitions of the Our Father. Divided into two: four about the good, three about the bad. Divided into three (Thomas, Summa Theologiae): the end, the means to the end, the impediments to the end. The two fit together: the “good” side of the twofold division subdivides into the end and the means (“not everyone who says Lord, Lord… but who does the will of my Father”).
• Augustine’s other twofold division: three petitions vs. five. The first three are fully answered only in the next life (God not sufficiently praised here, the kingdom not fully come, “on earth as it is in heaven” implies it is done imperfectly here); the other petitions are more or less for this life (no communion in heaven, no temptation, the evil one excluded).
• Conclusion: asked whether to divide the seven into two or three, “I’d say both”; here there were two divisions into two, and “you don’t want to neglect any of these because they all illumine something.”

2. Dividing theology; dividing sacred doctrine for all men (“What part of theology are we in”) #

Point: theology too is divided into two or three, and the Summa Theologiae and Summa Contra Gentiles differ in which they follow.

• Twofold: dogmatic and moral (what “somebody in Rome” would say; common in seminaries).
• Threefold: God in Himself, God as beginning of all things (efficient cause, maker), God as end. Apocalypse says it three times with growing precision: “I am the Alpha and Omega”; “…the first and the last”; “…the beginning and the end.”
• Summa Contra Gentiles follows this most precisely: Book I God in Himself (substance and operations), Book II God as beginning (creation), Book III God as end (providence moving things to the end); Book IV does the same three for what is known only by faith (Trinity, Incarnation, our final state), which he alludes to at the beginning of SCG.
• Connecting the two divisions: the first two members are dogmatic, the third is where moral theology is found. The second part of the Summa Theologiae (moral theology) begins with the end of man, which falls under God as end of all things, especially the rational creature; so the whole of that third member is not simply moral theology, but moral theology fits there.
• His own course: he “cheated,” doing things from the prima pars and the third part before the second, “showing my immoral bent.”
• Student suggestion: divide by divinity and humanity, and under humanity Christ is the way, so morals. His response: it makes some sense (first part God Himself and as beginning, the end touched only briefly; second part the end for man and the means; Christ the way as well as truth and life; the sacraments as “tools to get to the end, not tools to make the universe”), “although I kind of prefer this division; it’s more revealing.”
• Before theology, sacred doctrine intended for all men (Augustine’s Enchiridion, Thomas’s Catechetical Instructions) is divided into three on a different basis: faith (the creed), hope (the Our Father, sometimes the Hail Mary; “prayer is tied up with hope”), charity (the two commandments of love and the ten). Mapped to the twofold division: creed = dogmatic; charity and probably the Our Father = moral. Thomas takes up the Our Father under the virtue of religion in II-II (its primary act devotion, then prayer).
• SCG gets basic things of moral theology but not the depth of the second part; “a little bit unbalanced.” Thomas mentions the threefold division at the beginning [unclear in recording which work], “my favorite book, Summa Contra Gentiles.”

3. The end as cause: last, first, and good (“Aristotle recalls the distinction of the four kinds of causes”) #

Point: Aristotle in Physics I notifies the end in three ways, and Thomas notes that only the second says how it is a cause.

1. The end is at the end, last, contrasted with the mover or maker at the beginning. Example: he is cook tonight; he, the mover, is at the beginning; the beautiful meal, the goal of the activity, is last “even in time.”
2. It is “that for the sake of which” (hou heneka; huius gratia). Thomas notes here the end is said to be not last but first: last in time or being, but first in intention (“the last shall be first”; Shakespeare: look before and after). This, he says, is the definition of the end as a kind of cause.
3. The end is something good, or at least appears good; the apparent good moves only insofar as it resembles or has some element of the really good.

• Why he is struck: in Metaphysics V “cause” is taken up under “beginning”; every cause is a beginning (not every beginning a cause); beginning is defined as first in being, becoming or knowing. So the end as cause must be first in some way, and the word “end,” which indicates last, “doesn’t seem to fit it as a cause.”
• “End” has more than one meaning: his college sophism “happiness is the end of life; the end of life is death; therefore happiness is death.” Aristotle plays on it in Ethics I: what is last is not always the end in the sense of that for the sake of which; you cook meat and get burnt meat, not the end you were cooking for.
• “Purpose” (etymology: put forward, put before) fits the end as first in intention; yet “end” is the basic word because being last in time is more known to the senses (“things in motion sort of catch the eye,” Shakespeare): end of the table, end of the motion, and only in a third sense that for the sake of which. So the word starts from what is more known even though it does not name the end as cause. Result is more known than intention: drivers weaving between cars intend to get ahead, not to cause an accident, but that is often the result.
• Aside: end of recess; his grandfather, a boxer, said “come in” and you dropped the bat mid-swing.

4. Question 9: the mover of the will, six articles (“What moves the will”) #

Point: “mover of the will” is a better translation than “motive,” since motive would mean the end again (q. 8).

• Six articles: (1) moved by the understanding; (2) by sense desire; (3) whether the will moves itself (“didn’t we say in natural philosophy that nothing moves itself?”); these three are inside us. Then exterior: (4) by some exterior beginning; (5) by a celestial body (Shakespeare’s characters blaming the stars, the “star-crossed lovers”; Shakespeare need not believe it); (6) by God alone as exterior principle, “but it’s an interior principle too.”

5. Article 1: objections and sed contra (“it seems that the will is not moved”) #

• Obj. 1: Augustine on Psalm 118 (“my soul wants to desire thy justifications”): the understanding flies before and a slow or no affection follows; we know the good and do not delight to do it (Augustine’s “not quite yet”). The motion of the movable follows the motion of the mover, so the understanding does not move the will, “the way I move this glass.”
• Obj. 2: understanding is to will as imagination is to sense desire, showing what is desirable; but imagination showing the desirable does not move sense appetite; we stand to imagined things as to things shown in a picture, from which we are not moved (On the Soul, where the objection comes from).
• Obj. 3: the same is not mover and moved with respect to the same; but the will moves the understanding, for we understand when we will. His example: he is a philosopher, a lover of wisdom; that love, an act of will, moves him to turn over pages and thoughts. Analogy: husband moves wife to some things and wife moves husband to others.
• Sed contra: Aristotle, On the Soul III, the desirable understood is the unmoved mover; the will is the moved mover.
• Asides: a Chesterton impersonator at a pro-life dinner on incompatibility (men and women “essentially incompatible”); Warren Murray’s line, a man pays two dollars for a one-dollar thing he needs, a woman one dollar for a two-dollar thing she doesn’t need; his own running to another store to save a dollar on wine.

6. The respondeo: two ways of being in potency, two movers (“to do or not to do, that is the question”) #

Point: a thing needs to be moved by another insofar as it is in potency to more than one thing, and it is in potency in two ways, so it needs a mover in two respects.

1. What is in potency is brought to act by something already in act; that is to move it.
2. A power of the soul is in potency in two ways: to do or not to do (exercise or use of the act), and to do this or that (determination of the act). Sight sometimes sees and sometimes not; sometimes white, sometimes black. Eat now or not; sweet or bitter (salmon: “no choice, I’m determined not to eat it”).
3. The first is on the side of the subject, sometimes acting and sometimes not; the second on the side of the object, by which the act is specified.
4. Movement of the subject is from an agent; every agent acts for an end (shown above), so the beginning of this motion is from the end. Hence the art to which the end belongs commands the art of what is toward the end: the ship-governing art commands ship-making (Physics II). His fuller three-term version from before class: the art that uses the product commands the art that forms it, which commands the art that prepares the matter. Example: his father’s company made farm wagons (the Grain King, “best wagons made in Minnesota”); the experimental farm found defects in use and forced redesign, so the farmer’s art commands the maker’s; the maker in turn commands the shape and size of the steel and wood from the steel company or lumberyard, because he knows what won’t snap in the field. The use is the end of the formed product as the formed product is the end of the raw materials.
5. The good in general (the third notification of the end, above) is the object of the will; therefore the will moves the other powers to their acts, “for we use the other powers when we wish”; their ends and perfections are particular goods under the will’s object. The power with the universal end moves the power with a particular end under it: the army leader intending victory and the order of the whole army commands a tribune intending the order of one squad.
6. The object moves by determining the act, in the manner of a form, as in natural things the action is specified by a form, heating from heat. The first universal principle is being and the true, the object of the understanding; so in this way the understanding moves the will by presenting its object.

• Conclusion: the will moves reason and the other powers because its object is the good, the end to which all other ends are subordinated; reason moves the will by presenting its object, “like its form.”
• On good and true: in Metaphysics V the equivocal words are divided into three groups, beginnings or causes, the subject of the science, properties (the first word of the third group is “perfect”); being and one fall in the second, true and good are more like properties, perfections of being. De Veritate: the good is what is perfective of another in the manner of an end, the true perfective as a form, “it’s going to form your mind.” Correspondingly, the fundamental act of reason in logic is understanding what something is (form); the fundamental act of the will is willing the end. “Hard to see, but think about that.”
• Father Hardon: the most important use of the will is to direct the mind what to think about, since you think about what you want to. Where does it all begin if each moves the other? “All begins with the mind,” to be seen later.

7. Ad 1 and ad 2: not of necessity; the true without the good (“does not move it from necessity”) #

• Ad 1: Augustine’s authority shows only that the understanding does not move the will of necessity.
• Ad 2: as imagination of a form without the estimate of its being suitable or harmful does not move sense desire, so the apprehension of the true without the notion of the good and desirable does not move the will. Hence the speculative understanding does not move to action, but the practical does (On the Soul III; the text and Thomas’s commentary also solve the objection). Example: he did a Euclid theorem this morning (even times even is even, odd times odd is odd) without acting on it.
• He adds from Aristotle: no necessity there either. Ethics VII, the continent and the incontinent man both have strong emotions; one follows reason, the other his emotion; so neither reason nor emotion moves necessarily.
• Asides: the tiny dog that came out at him this morning; men given to anger vs. Francis de Sales, who went beyond continence to the virtue of mildness; irascible powerful men (Kennedy, LBJ chewing out staff at St. Mary’s College, Patton); Pius XI throwing a cardinal’s red hat on the floor (“you’re not a cardinal anymore”), then reinstating him; the story that Augustine appeared to Thomas and said Thomas was better because purer; Thomas follows Bernard on the steps of humility, against a modern theologian who said he did not take Bernard seriously.

8. Ad 3: each more universal than the other (“it’s not the same the mover and mover”) #

Point: the will moves the understanding as to exercise of the act (his will moved him to pick up Euclid rather than not), because the true, the perfection of the understanding, is a particular good under the universal good; the understanding moves the will as to the determination of the act, on the side of the object, because the good is grasped under a special notion comprehended under the universal notion of the true. So mover and moved are not the same in the same respect.

• “That’s rather unusual”: the true is a particular good and the truth about the good is a particular truth, so each is more universal than the other. This shows they are not genus and species: animal is more universal than dog and dog cannot be a particular kind of animal in the reverse way; if color is more universal than green, green cannot be more universal than color. “How can that be? Seems impossible at first” if you think from the categories.
• Sophists attacked geometry: “nothing good in your science,” so truth is more universal than the good; yet truth is only one good among others (Mozart’s music, Shakespeare’s plays, a house, “even a car unless you have to drive it”), so the good is more universal than the true. “Very strange. It’s true.”
• Closing asides: Chesterton, truth is stranger than fiction because fiction is our own imagination; Hamlet, “as a stranger give it welcome,” which applies to the strange truths of the Catholic faith; De Koninck on those who say “il faut dépasser saint Thomas” (“good if you can do it”); the doctor’s wife asking whether he found it hard keeping up with his field, “Madam, the problem in my field is catching up”; De Koninck teaching the Physics since 1935 and still seeing new things; Dionne at Vatican II pointing something out to De Koninck (“how could I have missed that all these years”). No one has caught up with Aristotle or Thomas on the fundamental things, “including myself.”

His words #

• rule of two or three, or both: a division may be twofold and threefold at once; neglect neither.
• God in Himself, God as beginning, God as end: the threefold division of theology (SCG); “beginning” here = efficient cause, maker.
• sacred doctrine for all men: catechesis divided by faith, hope, charity, as distinct from theology.
• that for the sake of which: hou heneka, huius gratia; the definition of the end as a cause, first in intention.
• beginning: what is first in being, becoming or knowing; every cause is a beginning.
• purpose: put forward, put before; names the end as first in intention.
• mover of the will: his translation for the subject of q. 9, against “motive.”
• exercise (use) of the act vs. determination of the act: to do or not vs. to do this or that; subject side vs. object side.
• understanding: his term throughout [ed.: intellect].
• sense desire, sense appetite: used interchangeably.
• the desirable understood: the unmoved mover; the will the moved mover.
• good: perfective of another in the manner of an end; true: perfective as a form (De Veritate).
• continent / incontinent man: both have strong emotion; one follows reason, one emotion.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 9, prologue and a. 1 (objections, sed contra, respondeo, replies), translated as he goes.
• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on On the Soul II, lectio 5 (verified from his handout, “Note for Book Two About the Soul, Readings 5-6,” p. 5; where in the class it was read is not marked in the transcript).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, On the Soul III (sed contra; practical vs. speculative intellect; ad 2).
• Aristotle, Physics I with Thomas’s commentary (four causes; the end notified three ways).
• Aristotle, Physics II (ship-governing art commands ship-making).
• Aristotle, Metaphysics V (cause under beginning; three groups of words).
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I (senses of “end”); VII (continent and incontinent).
• Thomas Aquinas, De Veritate (good and true as perfective).
• Augustine on Psalm 118 (obj. 1); Augustine, Enchiridion.
• Thomas Aquinas, Catechetical Instructions; Summa Contra Gentiles I-IV; Summa Theologiae II-II on the virtue of religion.
• Apocalypse, “I am the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.”
• Shakespeare: Hamlet (“look before and after”; “as a stranger give it welcome”); “things in motion catch the eye”; Romeo and Juliet (“star-crossed lovers”).

His questions #

• How do you divide the seven petitions into two or three, or both? Both: four good / three bad, end-means-impediments, and Augustine’s three (next life) / five (this life).
• What part of theology are we in, and into what two does that divide theology? Moral; dogmatic and moral.
• Is there also a division of theology into three? God in Himself, God as beginning, God as end (SCG Books I-III).
• How can the end be both last and first? Last in time or being, first in intention.
• Does the will move itself, since natural philosophy says nothing moves itself? Left open for a. 3.
• In what two ways is a power of the soul in potency to diverse things? To do or not to do (exercise), and to do this or that (determination).
• Which art commands which? The art of the end commands the art of the means: use commands forming, forming commands preparing the matter.
• How can the true and the good each be more universal than the other? The true is a particular good; the truth about the good is a particular truth; so they are not genus and species.
• If mind and will each move the other, where does it all begin? With the mind; to be taken up later.