Aquinas, Summa I-II Q.10, Articles 3–4: Is the Will Moved by Necessity by the Passions or by God?

Orientation #

He refers back to “what has been said before or above” (Thomas’s own cross-reference in a. 3) and to an argument for the unmoved mover from the Eudemian Ethics “we sketched earlier” (prev. lecture). He does not announce next time. Verified sources place the class at I-II q. 10, aa. 3-4, with a stretch matched to Summa Contra Gentiles IV, ch. 15 (where in the class this falls is not evident from the transcript; possibly the passage on God knowing evil). The previous class covered q. 10 aa. 1-2 and set up today’s article on the sensitive appetite; the next moves to q. 11 on fruition.

The class, in order #

1. Opening anecdotes (“seeketh after a sign”) #

Pre-class stories from a book on old New England inns, offered as an example of an apt scripture quotation.

• Dr. Ames, annoyed by “the law’s delay”, hung a sign caricaturing the court; when the sheriff came to seize it he found only the legend “A wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign, but there shall no sign be given it” — his point: people then knew scripture, and he assumes the class can appreciate it likewise.
• Washington and the innkeeper’s daughter (“a better office … letting you in”), the girl who would not wash her cheek for a week; Lafayette’s return, the woman on the balcony (“I’ve lived long enough”).
• Mayor Washington of Chicago and the jail sign “Washington slept here”; Louisiana “half under water, the other half under water.”

2. Art. 3, objections: is the will moved of necessity by passion? (“moved of necessity by the passion”) #

The objections he reads and glosses, taken seriously as Thomas did at the public disputatio.

1. Romans 7:15 (“not the good I will do I do, but the evil that I hate”), said on account of concupiscence, which is a passion — even St Paul seems to concede necessity; “a pretty good argument.”
   • Aside: reading SCG that morning, Thomas denies God has passiones, but passio has many meanings; he calls them passiones affectionum; here it is a passion “of the inferior [appetite]”.
2. Ethics III: qualis unusquisque est — such as a man is, so does the end seem to him; and it is not in the will’s power to get rid of the passion at once. Jefferson: when angry, count to a hundred — even the man resisting needs time for anger to calm. “I should hit you” seems proper while I am angry, not once the anger subsides.
   • Note on English: “emotion”, and “feeling” used in that sense (“you hurt my feelings”).
   • Aside on the title: Nicomachus may have been both Aristotle’s father’s and son’s name.
3. A universal cause is applied to a particular effect only through a particular cause; universal reason moves only through particular estimation (De Anima III); reason knows the universal but doing is in the singular, so the senses must come in. As universal reason is to particular estimation, so will to sense appetite; hence if sense appetite is disposed by passion to something, the will cannot move contrary.

• Sed contra: Genesis 4, “under you will be your desire, and you will dominate it.”
• Aside: the story of the young man objecting to Thomas [name unclear in recording] and everyone scandalized; Thomas sits down quietly and handles the objections.

3. Art. 3, body and replies (“reason is wholly bound”) #

Passion moves the will by way of the object (a man disposed by passion judges something suitable that he would not judge so outside it), not as an efficient cause; and this change happens in two ways — “I didn’t know that. Did you?”

• (a) Reason wholly bound, the man has no use of reason: vehement anger or concupiscence makes one mad, mindless (Orlando Furioso); as with fever, since these passions involve a bodily change. Here the same account holds as for brute animals, which of necessity follow the impetus of passion (“man is reduced to an animal”); no motion of reason, hence no motion of will. His example: bombs going off all round, people go crazy — fear can do it.
• (b) Reason not wholly absorbed: some judgment remains free, so some motion of will remains, and to that extent it does not of necessity tend where passion inclines.
• Conclusion as he leaves it: either there is no motion of will in the man (passion alone dominates), or if there is, it does not of necessity follow passion. “A good guy to go to confession to.”
• Reply 1 (St Paul): the will cannot prevent motions of concupiscence arising — that is “the evil I hate, I do” — but it can not-will to desire, or at least not consent. Bernard or Benedict, and Francis too, jumped in the bramble bush: that is not-consenting, doing what is in their power. Joke: “Did you jump in the bramble bush? — There wasn’t one, Father.” He asks whether the class is satisfied with that answer.
• Reply 2 (two natures): Thomas simply says “since in man there are two natures”, intellectual and sensitive, though colleagues say he would never speak so (one nature, except Christ); compare Aristotle’s matter and form as two senses of nature. Sometimes a man is aliqualis uniformly, through his whole soul — sensitive part wholly subject to reason (the virtuous) or reason wholly absorbed (the mindless); sometimes reason is clouded but something remains free — “one arm tied behind your back, not both” — and can wholly repel the passion or at least hold itself from following it. Then one thing seems to him according to reason, another according to passion: “a pretty description of temptation.”
  • Monastic saying: two dogs fighting inside me — “which one are you going to feed?”
  • Iliad: Agamemnon and Achilles in a sense know they are failing; even the embassy with its promises cannot move Achilles, though he knows he should.
• Reply 3: the will is moved not only by the universal good grasped by reason but by the good grasped by the senses, so it can be moved to a particular good without passion; many things we will and do without passion “through choice alone”, clearest where reason resists passion. Example from the paper: a man drinking beer and playing video games harmed a crying baby — his reason could have told him to feed it or set it somewhere.

4. Art. 4, objections: is the will moved of necessity by God? (“to his will who can resist”) #

“Important question”, since God is more powerful than sense appetite — all-powerful.

1. Every agent that cannot be resisted moves of necessity; God is of infinite power and cannot be resisted (Romans 9, “who can resist his will?”). By reason and by authority “really a powerful one.”
2. The will is moved of necessity to what it naturally wills (e.g. happiness); what God does in a thing is natural to it (Augustine, Contra Faustum, “chapter 26, I guess”); therefore it wills of necessity whatever God moves it to.
   • Aside: Faustus the Manichaean spoke of things above Augustine’s judgment until Augustine found he did not know the liberal arts; Monsignor Dionne asked what Augustine would have been without the liberal arts — deceived by Faustus.
3. The possible is that which, posited, nothing impossible follows (Aristotle); if the will did not will what God moves it to, God’s operation would be inefficacious — like Augustine unable to move someone, or the horse led to water that will not drink.

• Sed contra: Sirach — God made man and “left him in the hand of his own counsel”; liberum arbitrium. He likes the concrete “in the hand” (cf. English “out of my hands”).

5. Art. 4, body and replies 1-2 (“does not pertain to divine providence to corrupt”) #

God moves each thing according to its condition, so the will is moved contingently.

1. Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4: providence does not corrupt the natures of things but saves them (servare).
2. Hence God moves all things according to their condition: necessary causes give necessary effects through the divine motion, contingent causes contingent effects.
3. The will is an active principle not determined to one but indifferent to many — Thomas’s constant example, it is up to us to walk or run (joke: Thomas, a slow mover, would say “I walk or run”).
4. So God moves it without determining it of necessity to one of two opposites; its motion remains contingent, “except in those things to which it is naturally moved” — which sends you back to the second objection.

• Reply 1: the divine will extends not only to the thing coming about but to its coming about in the way congruent with its nature; it would be more repugnant to the divine motion for the will to be moved of necessity, which does not fit its nature, than freely, which does.
• Reply 2: what God works in a thing is natural to it in the sense that God wills what is natural to each; but he does not will that everything done in things be natural to them — striking example, that the dead rise; what he wills to be natural to each is to be subject to the divine power (“I’m naturally subject to divine power, but I don’t naturally rise — at least not by my own power”).
• Is he disagreeing with Augustine? He thinks not: Augustine says elsewhere God respects the laws he created and lets creatures make their own moves.
• Student exchange, left open: does God always move the will so that it is natural to choose this? He seems to say not always, yet it is still in accord with the nature of the will, which is to be free and contingent. Suggestions: “natural to your particular nature” (picking up Homer, a Euclid theorem a day); “natural to our will to be invited” — you are invited, but free to do otherwise; the saints acting on “divine instinct” — like “an acquired taste.”

6. Digression: custom as second nature (“the influence of custom upon our thinking”) #

Custom, like a second nature, makes things seem natural and therefore obvious, even when they are not.

• Metaphysics II, “fifth reading”: Aristotle on custom’s influence on how we want to proceed — those raised in geometry want to proceed mathematically everywhere (Lord Kelvin in his brother Richard’s physics book: if not mathematical, not science).
• He goes further than Aristotle: custom makes us think we know something not obvious, maybe false. People think they know the Earth is round (“it’s on Google Earth”), or turns on its axis — “I believe it, I don’t know it”; his brother Mark was annoyed by “today we all know”; the meteorologist still says sunrise and sunset.
• Thomas: custom is like a second nature, so it makes things seem natural and hence obvious, like things naturally known; hard not to be a slave of custom — Shakespeare’s “custom tyrant”, ruling the mind for the good of the custom rather than of the mind. So the person brought up in virtue finds some things natural to do and others to avoid.

7. Art. 4, reply 3: incompossible vs. impossible simply (“a subtle distinction here that’s easy missed”) #

If God moves the will to something, it is incompossibile with this that the will not be moved to it, but not impossible simply — only under that condition; hence the will is not moved by God of necessity. (“Sounds like Leibniz.”)

• Exchange on sitting and standing: was it impossible for me to have been standing the last five minutes? Not simpliciter — I could have stood; but given (positing) that I was sitting, I could not be standing. Impossible in a qualified sense, “on a supposition”: necessity from supposition.
• Applied to God’s will: can it change? No, simpliciter. Does he necessarily will you and me to be? According to his nature he wills contingent things contingently; but having willed me to be, he cannot will me not to be — “a done deal” — just as my sitting excludes standing. “People get a lot confused” over this, and it comes up in God and in us.

8. Digression: the order good–knowledge–love in God (“Does God love himself?”) #

A before-and-after in our knowledge of God that is not a before-and-after in God, and why that is not falsehood.

1. Could God love himself if he were not good? No — one loves only the good. So being good is before loving himself.
2. Could he love himself if good but not knowing it? No — you cannot love what you do not know. These two causes of love, the good and knowledge, are more fundamental than the third, likeness: no likeness in God loving himself (perhaps in the Father loving the Son).
3. Could he know he was good if not good? No. So: good, before knowing he is good, before loving himself.

• Is this before and after in our thoughts or in things? In us it is in things: the girl’s beauty, my knowledge of it and my love are three things; my knowledge of Mozart’s music is one thing causing another, my love of it. In God knowledge is not a second thing besides goodness, nor love a third. The Prima Pars follows this order (simple, perfect, good; later knowledge; later will and love) — an order in our thoughts, seen from how it is in us.
• Is there falsehood in knowing God this way? No: truth does not require that the way we know things be the way they are; there is something in God to which each thought (goodness, knowledge, love) corresponds; we must know him from creatures in this life. This is how this part of theology prepares us to understand God (cf. the Eudemian Ethics argument sketched earlier).
• Aside: his “healthy addiction” to reading SCG; reading on the divine will sends the mind back to these questions.

9. God knows evil; all knowledge is good (“all knowledge is good”) #

“God is love” (St John) — but God is knowledge, wisdom, truth too; so does he know evil?

• Thomas’s argument: there is truth about the bad as well as the good; if God did not know the bad he would not know all truth, which is absurd. Aristotle (De Anima and Metaphysics) finds Empedocles’ position absurd because it makes God not know something we know. The truth about the bad is good — “good to know how not to wreck your car.”
• His talk: all knowledge is good, not all love is good. A priest objected: then you favour sex education for five-year-olds? Answer: something good as such can be bad per accidens, for other reasons, not as knowledge; the as-such / by-accident distinction is fundamental — Aristotle first divides “being” and “one” that way; if some knowledge were bad as such, could God be knowledge itself?
• Student: St Alphonsus on near occasions of sin as relative to the person — a bar is not sinful, but is for the man with a drinking problem. His examples: defending the Quebec beer industry against the claim that drinking is per se bad (water into wine, the Eucharist). Aristotle: the accidental is the first kind of mistake outside of words, and “deceives even the wise.”

His words #

• passion, emotion, feeling; the passion of the lower / sense appetite (passio, passiones affectionum)
• qualis unusquisque est; “such as a man is, so does the end seem to him”
• particular estimation; the sense power through which universal reason moves to the singular
• “moved by its object, not by an efficient cause”; how passion moves the will
• mad, mindless; reason “wholly bound” or “absorbed” by passion
• aliqualis; “of some sort”, uniformly or in diverse parts of the soul
• “not consent to the desire”; the will’s power against concupiscence
• “through choice alone”; willing without passion
• “in the hand of his own counsel”; liberum arbitrium [ed.: free choice]
• servare; providence “saves” natures rather than corrupting them
• “second nature”; his rendering of custom’s force, with Shakespeare’s “custom tyrant”
• incompossibile, incompossible; impossible “with that condition”, not “simply” (simpliciter)
• “necessary from supposition”; the sitting/standing case
• “before and after in our thoughts” vs. “in things”; the order good–knowledge–love in God
• as such vs. by accident (per se, per accidens); the “fundamental distinction”

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 10, a. 3 (objections, sed contra, body, replies 1-3)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 10, a. 4 (objections, sed contra, body, replies 1-3)
• Romans 7:15; Genesis 4; Romans 9; Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) — as cited in the articles

Mentioned

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles IV, ch. 15 (verified source; the transcript itself cites SCG only on God’s passiones, the divine will, and God’s knowledge of evil)
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics III; De Anima III (as cited by Thomas)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics II, “fifth reading” (custom); Metaphysics and De Anima against Empedocles; the division of “being” and “one” into as such / by accident
• Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics (argument for the unmoved mover, sketched earlier)
• Augustine, Contra Faustum “ch. 26, I guess”; Augustine elsewhere on God respecting the laws he created
• Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4
• Summa Theologiae Prima Pars, treatment of the divine substance (simple, perfect, good), knowledge, will (no locus given)
• Homer, Iliad (Agamemnon, Achilles, the embassy); Orlando Furioso; Shakespeare (“custom tyrant”); St Alphonsus on occasions of sin; a book on old New England inns

His questions #

• Is the will moved of necessity by the passion of the lower appetite? No: passion moves it only by way of its object; where reason keeps any freedom the will need not follow passion, and where reason is wholly bound there is no motion of will at all.
• Now what about this text of St Paul — “the evil that I hate, that I do”? The will cannot stop motions of concupiscence arising, but can not-will to desire or at least not consent.
• Are you satisfied with that answer? left open (no reply recorded).
• Is God always moving the will so that it would be natural for it to choose this? He seems to say not always, though the motion still accords with the will’s nature as free; suggestions (“invited”, “acquired taste”) left open.
• Was it impossible for me to have been standing the last five minutes? Not simply — I could have stood; but given that I was sitting, impossible on that supposition.
• Can God’s will change? Having willed me to be, can he will me not to be? No simpliciter to the first; to the second, not once he has willed it — “a done deal”, necessity from supposition.
• Could God love himself if he wasn’t good? If he didn’t know he was good? Could he know he was good if he wasn’t? No in each case: good is before knowing, knowing before loving.
• Is that before and after in our thoughts or in things? In things for us; in our thoughts only, for God, where goodness, knowledge and love are the same.
• Is there falsehood in knowing God in a before-and-after way? No: truth does not require that the way we know be the way things are, only correspondence.
• If all knowledge is good, then you’d be in favour of sex education? No: knowledge good as such can be bad by accident, for other reasons.