Aquinas, Summa I-II Q.17 a.8–9 and Q.18 a.1: What Obeys Reason, and Whether Every Human Action Is Good

Orientation #

He does not refer to last time or next time explicitly, but the class continues article by article through q. 17 (“the last article in this question”) and begins q. 18. The previous class covered q. 17 aa. 5–7 (command of will, reason, sensitive appetite); the next covers q. 18 aa. 2–4 (object, circumstances, end).

The class, in order #

1. Opening prayer and holiness of the doctors (“Do you have to be holy”) #

The point: authority as a teacher of theology begins with holiness of life.

• Aside: the three petitions he prays to the angels (strengthen the light of the mind, illumine the images, arouse to consider rightly) he found together in one reply to an objection in the second part of the Sentences [ed.: Thomas’s Sentences commentary, book II; no locus given].
• Father Peter’s question to beginners: must a good theologian be holy? His answer: the best theologians are the doctors of the church, and one is canonized a saint first, then made doctor — “that’s kind of an order”; their authority as teachers begins with holiness.

2. q. 17, a. 8: acts of the plant soul under reason’s command? (“this plant likes a lot of sun”) #

The point: reason commands only acts that follow upon some apprehension; the acts of the vegetative soul follow natural desire, so they are not commanded.

• Objections as read: (1) sense powers are more noble than plant powers and are subject to reason, so a fortiori the inferior plant powers; (2) man is a “little world”, the soul in the body as God in the world; everything in the world obeys God, so everything in man obeys reason (his gloss: “who by thinking can add a cubit to his height?” — high-heeled shoes are “a good attempt”); (3) praise and blame (vituperium) occur only in acts subject to reason, but there is virtue and vice about nourishing and generating (gluttony, luxury and the opposite virtues).
• Sed contra: Gregory [ed.: Nemesius, as Thomas’s “Gregory of Nyssa”]: the nutritive and generative power is “not persuaded by reason”.
• Answer, numbered: (1) every agent in some way desires the end (nurserymen: this plant “likes a lot of sun”, broccoli “is a big feeder”); (2) acts proceed either from natural desire, or from animal (sense) or intellectual desire; (3) natural desire does not follow upon any grasping, while animal and intellectual desire follow upon knowledge; (4) reason commands as a grasping power; therefore acts from sense or intellectual desire can be commanded, not acts from natural desire, which are the acts of the plant soul. “Digest this food” — you cannot command it.
• Reply 1: the more immaterial an act, the more noble, and the more subject to reason; that plant powers do not obey shows they are lower. Sensing vs. imagining: imagining is more immaterial — he cannot hear Mozart with his ear now, only in imagination, since sense needs the object present; he cannot see “Lady Wisdom” but can imagine. Sense acts are more subject to reason than plant acts for this reason.
• Reply 2: the likeness holds in some respect (as God moves the world, the soul moves the body) but not in all: the soul did not create the body as God created the world. Likeness is “a slippery thing”, as Plato says — a cause of deception when you see the likeness but not the difference; he once told Monsignor Dillon [name uncertain in recording] that this may be why Aristotle gives the tool of difference before the tool of likeness. Because God created the world it is wholly subject to him; you did not make your body, so girls who are not beautiful cannot make themselves so except “by deception” (cosmetic adjustment, radio adverts for fixing your smile).
• Reply 3: virtue and vice, praise and blame are not owed to digestion and the formation of the body but to acts of the sensitive part ordered to generation or nourishment — desiring the pleasure of food and sex, and using them as one ought or not. Putting food in the mouth is under my control; eating popcorn at the theatre without noticing — “you wonder whether it’s a natural act or a chosen act”.

3. Digression: Euclid I.20, the ass, and guessing before knowing (“even an ass knows this”) #

The point: in geometry men guess rightly before the proof; in natural philosophy, ethics and politics they guess opposite things, which is why there is room for dialectical disputation.

• Euclid I.20: in any triangle two sides together exceed the third. The Epicureans mocked it: “even an ass knows this” — put food here and the ass goes straight, not around. The reply he remembers: the ass knows it but not the reason why; and “there are asses who don’t know this”. He marvels at how Euclid proves it (“it’s sweet”) and had put it to his students the night before.
• Nobody would guess one side equal to the other two; but in natural philosophy or ethics men tend to guess opposites — hence dialectical disputatio.

4. q. 17, a. 9: do the bodily members obey reason? (“the members of the body are organs or tools”) #

The point: members are tools of the soul’s powers; those moved by sense powers obey reason, those moved by natural powers (heart, genital members) do not.

• Objections as read: (1) the members are more distant from reason than the plant powers, which do not obey; (2) the heart is the beginning of animal motion and its motion is not commanded — Gregory: “the pulsing thing” is not persuadable; (3) Augustine, City of God XIV: the genital members move sometimes without the will (the object present, or absent), and when the soul’s concupiscence is fervent the body is frigid.
• Aside on obj. 2: Aristotle and Thomas hold the heart cannot be sick, so the body’s recovery from sickness starts from the heart — “that’s altogether true, but… it’s cholesterol, that’s why I had surgery”.
• Sed contra: Augustine, Confessions VIII: the soul commands the hand to move, and so easily that command is hardly distinguished from service (the pianist).
• Answer: the members are organs, i.e. tools (Greek organon = tool) of the powers of the soul; a tool is by definition for a purpose, so calling them tools already admits they are for the sake of something. Hence as the powers stand to obeying reason, so do the members: members moved by sense powers are subject to command, those following natural powers are not.
• Reply 1: members do not move themselves but are moved by powers, some of which are closer to reason than the plant powers. He notes the order of De Anima: plant powers in book II, then sense; in book III, after understanding, desire and the power to move the body, since that follows on those.
• Reply 2: in understanding and will what is by nature comes first and the rest derives from it — from naturally known beginnings, knowledge of conclusions; from natural willing of the end, choice of what is toward the end. “Nature is what is first in anything.” So in bodily motion the beginning is by nature, and that beginning is the heart; its motion follows as a per se accident of the life from the union of soul and body (the old question whether heart or brain is fundamental — “first of all it seems to be the heart”). Compare heavy and light bodies, moved by what generates them (Physics VIII). This motion is called vital; Gregory: the pulsing part, known in the pulsing veins. Aside: “pulse” as short for pulsating; “I stand at the door and knock”.
• Reply 3: Augustine: the genital members’ disobedience is punishment of sin — the soul suffers disobedience especially in that member through which original sin passes to posterity; but with the supernatural gift removed, nature is left to itself, so a natural cause must be considered too. Aristotle, On the Motion of Animals: motions of heart and genital members are involuntary; from apprehension (understanding, imagination) follow passions, and from these the motion of the members, not from command, because these motions require a natural alteration of heat and cold, not subject to reason. Specially so in these two members because each is “as it were a separate animal”: the heart is the beginning of the senses (Aristotle roots the senses in the heart, not the brain — “now that’s altogether correct”), and from the genital members goes forth the seed-like power which is in virtue the whole animal; “beginnings necessarily are natural” — something, he says, “to bring up to the biologists”.

5. Back to the proemium of q. 6: the plan of the Prima Secundae (“virtue is the road to happiness”) #

The point: to see where q. 18 sits, he re-reads the division of the treatise on human acts.

• Since beatitude is reached through acts, after beatitude come human acts, by which one reaches it or is impeded. Thomas sometimes says virtue is the road to happiness, vice the road to misery — the daily newspaper shows someone made miserable by vice.
• Operations are about singulars, so every practical science is perfected by particular consideration: acts in general (rest of Prima Secundae) vs. in particular (Secunda Secundae, and even that “is not enough” — the patron of moral theologians and confessors [name not given in recording] goes further).
• In general: first the acts themselves, then their principles — not until q. 49.
• Acts proper to man vs. common to man and animals (the passions, from q. 22, “where I take the twos on love and friendship”); the proper ones are nearer to beatitude, so first.
• Of the proper acts: their condition (just finished), then their distinction — which q. 18 calls their goodness and badness: “that is a distinction in human acts that’s relevant to moral theology”.

6. Proemium of q. 18 and its eleven articles (“there’s no mean of the extreme”) #

The point: how the goodness and badness of acts is divided, and what “moral” means.

• q. 18 proemium: first how an act is good or bad, then what follows (merit and demerit, sin and guilt, from q. 21). Of the first, threefold: in general (q. 18), interior acts (q. 19), exterior acts (q. 20). Aside: Thomas dictated pacing, then lying down, like Napoleon dictating several letters at once.
• The eleven articles read out. On a. 1: he asks whether every action is good or some bad — not whether every action is bad. On a. 3, circumstances: “those terrible things, just stand around”. On a. 5 (good or bad in its species): Aristotle in the Ethics — the good is a mean, so you cannot simply say eating is good (too much, too little); but of adultery or murder there is no mean of the extreme — “don’t murder too many, just the right number” — because it is already bad by definition.
• On a. 10 (“moral act in the species of good or bad”): for Thomas a moral act is not necessarily good; today “moral” is used as the opposite of “immoral” — the priest’s grandmother: “Is there such a thing as immoral theology?”

7. q. 18, a. 1: objections and sed contra (“Cancel my confession, Father”) #

The point: three arguments that no action is bad, stated with more force than their holders give them.

• Obj. 1 (Dionysius, Divine Names 4): the bad acts only by virtue of the good, and from the good nothing bad comes.
• Aside: Thomas states false positions better than those who hold them. His own comic experience: required to study Marxism at conferences, playing the Marxist and saying what Marx “would say”, then showing why he was wrong.
• Obj. 2: nothing acts except as it is in act; a thing is not bad as in act but as an ability deprived of act, and ability perfected by act is good (Metaphysics IX). Bad is the lack of something you are able to have and should have. Augustine: “sin is nothing, and the man who sins becomes nothing” — “kind of overstating it, but it is a lack”.
• Obj. 3 (Dionysius again): the bad is a cause only per accidens, but every action has a per se effect. His joke: “I feel better already. Cancel my confession, Father… I can’t answer objections, I just laugh at them.”
• Sed contra: John 3, everyone who does badly hates the light.

8. The answer: good and being, simply and secundum quid (“good and being are convertible”) #

The point: each thing produces such an action as it is, so the goodness of acts follows the goodness of things: as much being, so much good.

• Argument: (1) a thing acts as it is; (2) good and being are convertible (first part); (3) God alone has the whole fullness of his being as one and simple — “I am who I am”; every other thing has the fullness of being suited to it according to diverse things: my substance, my geometry, my mildness are not the same. Categories: “my body is healthy” but not “my body is health” — it has health. In the Contra Gentiles, one chapter says God is good, the next that God is goodness itself; likewise God is alive and is life itself (“Son of the living God”), loves and is love. In q. 12–13 of the prima pars both ways of speaking are imperfect: we start from material things where form and what has it differ; “God is wise” might imply he has wisdom distinct from him, so we say he is wisdom itself (“sweet wisdom”, as Richard says). But I am not geometry itself — “a horror story about somebody like that” — only a geometer, “somewhat”.
• (4) So in some things something is lacking of the fullness owed: I should be not only a man but geometer, logician, just, temperate; fullness of human being requires soul and body with all powers and tools of knowledge and motion. The blind man is good insofar as alive, bad insofar as he lacks sight; with no being at all he could be called neither.
• Simply vs. secundum quid: what lacks something owed is good only secundum quid; but by substance I am a being simply — conceived, I came to be, period; reading Euclid I came to be only a geometer; coming to be just and honest, I came to be good simply. So what gives being simply gives good only secundum quid, and vice versa (first book [ed.: prima pars] discussed this). A student: is coming to love God coming to be? — not simply; it may be coming to be good simply.
• Conclusion applied: every action has goodness insofar as being, and is bad insofar as it lacks the fullness owed to human action — a determined quantity according to reason, a suitable place, and the like.
• Three senses of bad: the lack (blindness); what has the lack (the blind eye, the blind man); what produces the lack (some condition, or “some king of the sword”). Badness is a kind of non-being.
• What is a bad human act? A student: an unreasonable act — lacking the order or measure reason should give. Should the doctor have a drink before operating? The actress who ate until her stomach burst; men in bars drinking a bottle of whiskey straight and dropping dead — “if you don’t drop dead, it’s probably lacking the measure of reason”; the teenager told that pain is the body’s sign “don’t do stuff like that”.

9. The replies (“a good shot, but not a good man”) #

• Reply 1: the bad acts in virtue of a deficient good; with nothing of good there would be nothing of being nor any acting; if it were not deficient it would not be bad. Thomas: evil has no efficient cause but a deficient cause — Shakespeare “kind of plays upon that”. The action caused is a good that is deficient — good in some way, bad simply. Chesterton: a man shoots his mother-in-law between the eyes at fifty paces — “a good shot, but I wouldn’t say he’s a good man”.
• Reply 2: nothing prevents a thing being in act in one way (so it can act) and lacking act in another (so it causes a deficient act): the blind man has the power of walking but stumbles for lack of the sight that directs walking.
• Returning to obj. 2 of a. 8: likeness deceives when you see the likeness but not the difference — you conclude they are the same, or more the same than they are, because of something you actually did see.
• Reply 3: a bad act can have a per se effect through what it has of being: adultery causes human generation as union of male and female, not as lacking the order of reason. Shakespeare: a baby for her cradle before a husband for her bed — “out of order”. Break.

His words #

• little world: man, as the soul is in the body like God in the world [ed.: microcosm].
• tuperium / vituperium: blame [ed.: vituperium].
• natural desire vs. animal (sense) desire vs. intellectual desire: the first follows no grasping, the others follow knowledge.
• grasping power: reason as apprehensive [ed.: apprehension].
• tool of difference / tool of likeness: Aristotle’s order, difference first (Topics, inferred).
• organ: Greek for tool; the members as tools of the soul’s powers.
• vital motion: the heart’s motion, a per se accident of life from soul-body union.
• pulsing part / pulsating: Gregory’s term for the heart’s motion known in the veins.
• separate animal: heart and genital members as principles containing the whole in power.
• distinction of acts: Thomas’s term in q. 6 for what q. 18 calls goodness and badness.
• moral act: not necessarily good; today “moral” means good.
• no mean of the extreme: adultery, murder are bad by definition, no right amount.
• good and being convertible: as much being, so much goodness.
• simply vs. secundum quid: substantial being is being simply, good only secundum quid; virtue is good simply, being secundum quid.
• three senses of bad: the lack; what has the lack; what produces it.
• deficient cause: evil has no efficient cause but a deficient one.
• order and measure of reason: what a good human act has and a bad one lacks.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 17, a. 8 (whole article)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 17, a. 9 (whole article)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 6, proemium
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 18, proemium and list of articles
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 18, a. 1 (whole article)

Mentioned

• Thomas, Sentences commentary, book II (a reply to an objection, no locus)
• Gregory [Nemesius], on the nutritive, generative and pulsing powers (cited in the articles)
• Augustine, City of God XIV; Confessions VIII; “sin is nothing”
• Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4
• Aristotle, De Anima II–III; Physics VIII; On the Motion of Animals; Metaphysics IX; Ethics (mean, no mean of extreme)
• Plato on likeness as slippery
• Euclid, Elements I.20
• Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles (God is good; God is goodness itself); Summa Theologiae I, qq. 12–13
• John 3; Exodus “I am who I am” (inferred); “I stand at the door and knock” (Revelation, inferred)
• Shakespeare (deficient cause; baby for cradle before husband for bed); Chesterton (mother-in-law)

His questions #

• Which is more immaterial, sensing or imagining? Imagining; sense needs the object present, imagination does not.
• How would you prove that any two sides of a triangle exceed the third? Left open in class; he praises Euclid’s way of doing it.
• Is a doctor of the church made doctor before or after being canonized? Canonized first; teaching authority begins with holiness.
• Is it good to eat? What about adultery — not too much, not too little? Eating has a mean; adultery and murder have no mean, being bad by definition.
• Why can you say my body is healthy but not my body is health? A creature has its perfections as diverse things; only God is his own goodness.
• Is coming to love God coming to be? Not simply; it may be coming to be good simply.
• What is a bad human act in general? An unreasonable act, lacking the order or measure reason should give.
• Should the doctor have a drink before he goes in to operate? No — reason must measure the act (implied, not spelled out).
• Eating popcorn at the movies: natural act or chosen act? Left open, as a puzzle about acts done without noticing.