Aquinas, Summa I-II Q.11: Fruition (Enjoyment) and the Last End

Orientation #

He opens with “Now we get to question eleven,” i.e. the next question after the ones on the will’s being moved; he closes by saying the last reply “leads us right into the next question” (intention), but “we better stop.” He refers back to Thomas’s earlier treatment of what beatitude is (“as has been shown above”). The previous class worked through q. 10 aa. 3-4 (will moved by passion, by God), the next takes up q. 12 on intention.

The class, in order #

1. Fruition, fruit, and thanking one’s father (“the son is always in debt to his”) #

The point: fruition is another act of the will with respect to the end; the word carries the idea of what is last and delightful (the fruits of the Holy Spirit; fruit as dessert). Fundamental text behind the question: Augustine’s rule to enjoy what is to be enjoyed, use what is to be used, and not mix them up (he says it is “in the Sentences”).

Digression, prompted by the Catena Aurea on John: one Father says the only way to avoid boasting (jactantia) and vainglory is to realize anything good in you comes from God. Thence a chain of thanks:

• his grandfather to his mother: when I’m gone you’ll think you never thanked your father enough — I thought the same when mine died; Brother Richard: you don’t realize what your parents did until you are a parent;
• Cicero: the son is always in debt to his father, owing more thanks than he can give;
• so, a fortiori, thank God for giving you that father and mother; Plato thanked the gods for meeting Socrates; you can’t thank your teacher enough (candy bar, sweet tooth); can’t thank Thomas enough, but thank God more for giving us Thomas and Augustine; same for Mozart, Shakespeare, Homer, Socrates;
• his nephew wants to do well in school because he owes his parents; he replied: all the more you owe God — what he has given you, forgiven you, promised you.

2. The four questions and the three objections of a. 1 (“It seems that frui is not only of the”) #

The point: four things asked — (1) whether to enjoy is an act of the desiring power; (2) whether it belongs to the rational creature alone or also to brute animals (aside: telling the cat Tabitha “you’re having steak tonight”); (3) whether fruition is only of the last end; (4) whether only of the end when had. Translation: “to enjoy” is all one can do for frui; “fruit” derives from it.

Objections to a. 1, that enjoying is not only of the appetitive power:

1. To enjoy is nothing but to grasp the fruit; but the fruit of human life is beatitude, which consists in the intellect’s act, seeing God as he is, face to face (shown above); so enjoying belongs also to the understanding. His gloss: do my ears enjoy Mozart, my eyes Titian and da Vinci, do I enjoy Thomas — “feast of reason,” as Socrates calls it?
2. Each power has its own end, its perfection (sight: to know the visible; the ear: to perceive Mozart’s sounds); but the end of a thing is its fruit; so enjoying is of each power.
3. Fruition implies delight; sensible pleasure pertains to sense delighting in its object, intellectual delight to the understanding; so fruition pertains to the apprehensive, not the desiring power. He asks whether an equivocation is at work here.

Aside: in his Wednesday-night class on Aristotle’s “book of places” (Topics) the English text rendered synonyma as “synonym”; the right rendering is “univocal” — animal is not a synonym of dog but is said univocally of dog, cat, horse. Aristotle uses the word in both senses: univocal predication (as in the Categories), and synonym in poetry when he treats rhetoric.

3. Sed contra and body: the name comes from sensible fruits (“that which is more manifest was first”) #

Sed contra: Augustine (Christian Teaching I; Trinity X — “those two central works”) — to enjoy is by love to adhere to something for its own sake (propter ipsum); cf. Bernard of Clairvaux: the reason to love God is God. Love pertains to the desiring power; so enjoying is its act.

Body, as Thomas argues it:

1. Fruition (fruitio) and fruit (fructus) pertain to the same thing and one derives from the other; which from which does not matter, except that it is probable the more manifest was named first.
   • Aside on “manifest”: his teacher Kosterich said it means caught with the hand in the act — hand in the money box, in the till, in the cookie jar; a “manifest thief.”
2. What is more sensible is first manifest to us; so the name comes from sensible fruits. Examples: green apples off the trees as a boy, blueberries, blackberries; on a walk in St. Paul, Minnesota with his wife and brother Richard, green apples hanging over the sidewalk, “crisp and sour”; student: Augustine on stolen fruit tasting sweeter.
3. Sensible fruit is what is last expected from the tree and is perceived with a certain sweetness (his daughter has just planted fruit trees; how long till fruit?).
4. So fruition pertains to the love or the pleasure — “not the same thing, love and pleasure” — one has about something last expected, which is the end.
5. But the end and the good is the object of the appetitive power — Aristotle, Metaphysics II: if you do away with the end you do away with the good; his gloss: the moderns who no longer talk about the end “don’t really have anything good to say.” Conclusion: fruition is an act of the appetitive power. Asides: an emailed question from Rome about naming from the sensible first, in connection with Metaphysics V on being; “a beautiful text.” Fruit is what the senses know; the interior act is not so sensible — “nature loves to hide.”

4. Replies of a. 1: seeing God vs. enjoying God (“nothing prevents one and the same thing”) #

Ad 1: one and the same thing, under diverse reasons, pertains to diverse powers. The vision of God, insofar as it is a vision, is the understanding’s act; insofar as it is good and an end, it is the will’s object, and so is enjoyment. The understanding attains the end as the power carrying it out; the will as the power moving to the end and enjoying it once attained.

• Aside on “see” for “understand”: in Metaphysics I “desire to know” is eidenai, from seeing; his mother said “I see” to a blind man.
• His consequence: with intellect and no will we would see God but not enjoy him. Student: could there be an intellectual creature without a will? No — the good known by reason is the will’s object; given the object, you have the power that answers to it. Chesterton: the chief demonstration of the soul’s immortality is that you can’t get enough of a good thing. Ad 2: the perfection and end of every other power is contained under the object of the desiring power, as the particular under the common; hence the desiring power moves the other powers to their ends and itself enjoys the end when each arrives at it — “my will is moving my ear to hear Mozart.” Ad 3: two things in pleasure — (a) perception of the thing as suitable, which belongs to the grasping (knowing) power; (b) being pleased with (complacentia in) what is offered as fitting, which belongs to the desiring power, in which the notion of pleasure is completed. He notes a tension: Aristotle has pleasure accompany the perfected operation of the other powers, almost attached to them; Thomas speaks of it as completed in the will.

5. a. 2, objections: only men enjoy? (“It seems that frui is only of”) #

Objections that enjoying is of men only (Descartes’ view that the other animals are automatons):

1. Augustine, Christian Doctrine I: it is we men who enjoy and use.
2. Enjoying is of the last end, which brutes cannot reach.
3. As the sense appetite is under the intellectual, so natural appetite (the plant wanting sunlight, a big eater) is under sense; if sense appetite enjoys, so would natural appetite, which is false — knowledge is required to enjoy. “Can’t have the whole universe enjoying itself.” Sed contra: Augustine, Eighty-Three Questions — to enjoy food and every bodily pleasure is not absurdly reckoned to belong to beasts. So Augustine is quoted on both sides. Aside: John Paul II’s letter on Augustine (Augustinum Hipponensem) — complete, authoritative; one sees how much Thomas drew from Augustine.

6. a. 2, body and replies: executing vs. commanding, perfect vs. imperfect knowledge (“the knowledge of the end is twofold”) #

Body:

1. Enjoying is not the act of the power arriving at the end by carrying it out (execution — “carrying out the sentence”), but of the power commanding the execution.
2. Things without knowledge have the executing power (the heavy tends down, the light up) but the commanding power is in a higher nature that moves all nature by command — as in knowers the desiring power moves the other powers.
3. So things lacking knowledge arrive at the end but do not enjoy it; only knowers do.
4. Knowledge of the end is twofold. Perfect: knowing not only what is the end and good but the universal notion of end and good — rational nature alone. Does the dog know what an end is? No: he has an end and knows his own end, but not what it is to be an end. Imperfect: knowing the end and good particularly — brutes, whose desire is not commanding freely but moved by natural instinct to what is grasped. Conclusion: rational nature enjoys in the perfect sense, brutes in some respect, other creatures in no way. The apple tree does not enjoy its apples; the worm does, and I do (the worm detracts from my enjoyment, “especially if you eat an apple and have a worm”). Replies: ad 1, Augustine there spoke of perfect fruition, in the other place of imperfect (“a nice way to get out of things”). Ad 2, fruition need not be of the last end simply but of what each takes for its last end — the cat with a good meal and warm bed; the dog who eats, lies down and burps, “he’s happy.” Ad 3, sense desire follows some knowledge; natural appetite does not, especially in things lacking knowledge (we too have natural appetite, e.g. digesting). Ad 4 (the sed contra): Augustine’s way of speaking — “not absurdly,” as it would be absurdissime to say they “use” — shows he means imperfect fruition.

7. a. 3, objections and body: last simply vs. last in some respect (“the last is twofold, simply”) #

Objections that fruition is not only of the last end:

1. Paul to Philemon: “I enjoy you in the Lord,” though Paul does not place his last end in a man.
2. Galatians lists fruits of the Spirit — charity, joy, peace — which are not last ends.
3. Acts of the will reflect on themselves (I will myself to will, love myself to love; “I like that I like Mozart”); so one enjoys one’s own enjoyment, which is not the last end — only the uncreated good, God, is. Sed contra: Augustine, Trinity X — one does not enjoy what one takes for the use of the will, i.e. what is desired for the sake of another; only the last end is not so desired. Body:
4. Two things belong to the notion of fruit: that it be last and that it quiet the appetite with sweetness or pleasure.
5. “Last” is twofold — simply (not referred to another) and secundum quid (last of some things; the last theorem of Euclid Book I) — “the distinction we so often” use.
6. What is simply last, in which one delights as in the last end, is properly fruit and one is properly said to enjoy it.
7. What is not delightful in itself but only desired for another (a bitter potion for health) is in no way fruit.
8. What has some pleasure in itself, to which preceding things are referred, can in some way be called fruit, but not properly and completely. Augustine (Trinity X): we enjoy things known in which the will rests pleased; but it rests simply only in the last — “our hearts are restless” — for while something is still expected the will’s motion stays suspended even though it has arrived at something; as in locomotion the middle of the magnitude is both beginning and end, but is an end in act only when one rests there (from the Physics).

8. a. 3, replies: “in the Lord,” the fruits of the Spirit, enjoying one’s enjoyment (“did not add in Domino”) #

Ad 1: Augustine, Christian Doctrine I — had Paul said “I enjoy you” without “in the Lord,” he would place the end of his love in the man; adding it, he places it in God and enjoys the brother not as end or terminus but as a middle. “I don’t come to rest in you… it terminates in God.” We will enjoy all the saints and angels in heaven in the Lord.

• Student: this is why the Latin moralists speak of the “use” of marriage, not its enjoyment — it is a means, whereas now it is taken as an end in itself.
• Aside: Thomas in a little work quotes a sapiential book, “run into your house and play with your thoughts,” and asks how contemplation is like play: partly for its own sake, but not fully — we play so as to do something serious later. Not “playboy”: beer and video games as the end of life. Ad 2: fruit is compared one way to the tree producing it (as effect to cause), another way to the man enjoying it (as something last expected in delighting) — “not fair to the tree,” which does all the work. The apostle’s list are fruits because effects of the Spirit in us, not enjoyed as last end. Or, with Ambrose: called fruits because they should be sought for themselves — not that they are not referred to beatitude, but they have in themselves whence they ought to please us. Faith as a fruit of the Spirit differs from the theological virtue: an intensity of belief, and that certitude is delightful. Aside: we say “play” for Shakespeare’s dramas. Ad 3: end is said in two ways — the thing itself, and the obtaining of it — not two ends but one end in itself and as applied to another. God is the last end as thing, fruition as the obtaining of it; so there is not one end God and another the enjoyment of God, and the same notion of enjoyment by which we enjoy God and by which we enjoy the enjoyment; likewise created beatitude, which consists in fruition.
• He works it through: can you be pleased that you are pleased? Yes: if the restaurant meal is what you hoped for you are pleased and pleased that you’re pleased; “what a wonderful piece of music” is being pleased that you are pleased.

9. a. 4: enjoyment of an end not yet had (“the end is had in two ways”) #

Objections that fruition is only of the end had: (1) Augustine, Trinity X — to enjoy is to use with joy, not of hope but of the thing; till it is had, joy is of the hope; (2) only the last end quiets the appetite (“our hearts are restless”), and it rests only in the end now had; (3) to enjoy is to grab the fruit, which one does only when the end is had. Sed contra: to enjoy is by love to adhere to something for its own sake, which can happen with a thing not had. He anticipates “some kind of distinction.” Body: to enjoy implies a comparison of the will to the last end as the will has something for its last end; the end is had perfectly (in intention and in reality) or imperfectly (in intention only); so there is perfect fruition of the end really had, imperfect of the end had in intention only. Replies: ad 1, Augustine speaks of perfect fruition. Ad 2, the will’s rest is impeded in two ways — from the object, when it is not the last end but ordered to another; from the desirer, when the end is not yet obtained. The object gives the species to the act, the agent’s condition gives the way of acting, perfect or imperfect. So fruition of what is not the last end is improper, falling short of the very species of enjoyment; fruition of the last end not had is proper but imperfect. Example: Bernard of Clairvaux on the Song of Songs — the bride at rest in contemplation, called out to good works, not to be disturbed; a fruition, but imperfect, since she does not yet really possess the groom. Ad 3, to take up or have the end is said not only secundum rem but according to intention — which leads into the next question.

His words #

• fruition, enjoyment (frui, fruitio, fructus): another act of the will with respect to the end; the fruit is what is last and delightful
• desiring power: his rendering throughout [ed.: appetitive power]
• grasping power: the knowing power; “simple grasping” for the first act of the mind [ed.: apprehensive power; simple apprehension]
• manifest: caught with the hand in the act (Kosterich)
• synonyma / univocal: the correct translation of Aristotle’s term in the Topics is “univocal,” not “synonym”
• feast of reason: Socrates’ phrase, for enjoying Thomas
• carrying out: the executing power, against the commanding power [ed.: execution]
• simply vs. secundum quid: not referred to another vs. last of some things
• complacent, being pleased: for Thomas’s complacentia in what is offered as fitting
• had in intention only vs. really (secundum rem)

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 11, a. 1 (prologue, objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 11, a. 2
• Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 11, a. 3
• Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 11, a. 4 Mentioned
• Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana I; De Trinitate X; Eighty-Three Questions (as cited in the articles)
• Paul, Philemon (“I enjoy you in the Lord”); Galatians (fruits of the Spirit); Ambrose on the same
• Aristotle, Topics (“book of places”); Categories; Metaphysics I (eidenai), II (end and good), V (being); Physics (middle of a magnitude); Aristotle on pleasure accompanying perfect operation
• Thomas, Catena Aurea on John; Sentences (Augustine’s use/enjoy rule); a “little work” quoting a sapiential book on play (Sirach, inferred)
• Cicero on the son’s debt; Plato thanking the gods for Socrates; Chesterton on immortality; Bernard of Clairvaux (reason to love God; sermon on the Song of Songs); John Paul II, Augustinum Hipponensem; Descartes on animals as automatons; Euclid, Elements I, last theorem

His questions #

• Do my ears enjoy Mozart’s music, my eyes Titian’s paintings, do I enjoy Thomas? The vision or hearing is the act of the knowing power; the enjoying is the will’s act (ad 1).
• Is this an equivocation in the objections? Answered by the body: fruit and fruition are named from sensible fruits, which are last and sweet, i.e. the end, the object of appetite.
• What does “manifest” mean? Caught with the hand in the act, a manifest thief.
• Could there be an intellectual creature without a will? (student) No: the good known by reason is the will’s object, and the object has its power.
• Does the dog know what an end is? No; he has an end and knows his own end, not what it is to be an end.
• Does the apple tree enjoy its apples? Not at all; the worm does, and I do.
• Can you be pleased that you are pleased? Yes: pleased with the meal, pleased that you’re pleased; “what a wonderful piece of music.”
• How is contemplation like play? Partly for its own sake, but not fully, since we play to do something serious later.
• Is there a fruition when Bernard’s bride rests in contemplation? Yes, but imperfect, since she does not really possess the groom.