The Good Will Depends on Its Object Alone, on Reason, and on the Eternal Law (Aquinas I-II q.19 a.2–4)

Orientation #

He opens “to the second article, I guess”, i.e. continuing the question begun at the end of the previous class (prev. lecture). He does not announce what comes next beyond “we’re going to stop here” before starting article 4, which he then reads through. The previous class finished q. 18 and began q. 19 a. 1; the next continues with aa. 5-7.

The class, in order #

1. Article 2, objections and sed contra (“does not depend only on its object”) #

The point: whether the goodness of the will depends on the object alone.

• Obj. 1: the end has more affinity to the will than to any other power; other powers’ acts get goodness from end as well as object; so the will’s act does too. His aside as he reads: “of course, the end is going to be the object of the will.”
• Obj. 2: goodness of an act comes also from circumstances (when, where, how much, in what way one ought); so goodness of will depends on circumstances too. Aside: “maybe circumstances can be objects too.”
• Obj. 3: ignorance of circumstances excuses badness of will; this would not be unless the will’s goodness depended on circumstances.
• Sed contra: acts do not get their species from circumstances as such; but good and bad are specific differences of the will’s acts; so goodness of the will depends on the object alone.

2. Article 2, corpus: what is first is simple (“the more something is before”) #

The point: the will’s goodness is taken from one thing, the object, because the will’s act is first in the genus of moral goodness.

1. In any genus, the more something is before, the more it is simple and consists in fewer things (the first bodies are the simple bodies).
   • Example on the name: the proton “turned out not to be proton or first, but it was named from being first.”
   • Example: this is why tragedy is better than epic according to Aristotle: simpler.
2. The beginning of goodness and badness of human acts is from the act of the will; so the will’s goodness is to be noted by something one, while other acts’ goodness may be noted by diverse things.
3. What is the beginning in each genus is so not per accidens but per se, since everything per accidens is reduced to what is per se as to a beginning.

• Conclusion: the will’s goodness depends on the one thing that per se makes for goodness in the act, the object, not on circumstances, which are accidents of the act. His remark: “That simplifies life, huh? Until he asks another question.”

3. Article 2, replies (“the end is the object of the will”) #

• Ad 1: the end is the object of the will, not of the other powers. He connects this with Aristotle’s fourth kind of cause, the end: end and good are “basically the same thing”, and Aristotle “sees that connection.” So for the will, goodness from the object does not differ from goodness from the end, unlike other powers, whose object can be other than the end and be ordered to a good or bad end; except per accidens, insofar as one end depends on another end and one will on another will. “Smart guy this time… I think I’ll continue to follow this guy.”
• Ad 2: supposing the will is of the good, no circumstance can make it bad. “Willing some good when he ought not” can be taken two ways: (a) the circumstance refers to the thing willed, and then the will is not of something good, because willing to do a thing when it ought not to be done is not to will the good (his example: willing to do geometry when one should be going to church); (b) it refers to the act of willing, and then it is impossible to will the good when one ought not, since one always ought to will the good, except per accidens, insofar as willing this good impedes willing some other good one ought to will; then the bad comes not from willing this good but from not willing the other. Likewise for the other circumstances. “That’s a mouthful. Brainful.”
• Ad 3: ignorance of circumstances excuses badness of will insofar as the circumstances are on the side of the thing willed, which one was not willing: shooting your father when you were shooting the rabbit, not knowing your father was there; the father backing the car over the child in the garage. “He didn’t will to do that.”

4. Article 3, objections and sed contra (“does not hang from reason”) #

The point: whether the goodness of the will depends on reason. Aside on the word: English “depend upon” pictures the thing depending as under; the Latin pictures it hanging from something above.

• Obj. 1: the before does not depend on the after; the good pertains before to the will than to reason; so the will’s good does not depend on reason. “Kind of an interesting objection”: the good is the object of the will.
• Obj. 2: Aristotle, Ethics VI: the good of the practical intellect is truth conformed to rectified appetite (verum conforme appetitui recto); rectified appetite is a good will; so practical reason’s goodness depends on the will’s rather than the converse. Aside: “one we used to always like to quote when we studied the ethics… we thought we were pretty solid on that notion.”
• Obj. 3: the mover does not depend on the moved; the will moves reason and the other powers; so the will’s goodness does not depend on reason. Aside: this is why the moderns think the will better than reason, because it is the mover; but reason moves the will in a different way, by the end.
• Sed contra: Hilary, De Trinitate X: immoderate is every pertinacity of a will not subject to reason; the will’s goodness consists in not being immoderate; so it depends on being subject to reason.
• Aside: at the March for Life in McGovern’s office, a pediatrician calmly answering an assistant who kept saying “a woman’s right to choice”; “I’m in favor of choice too, but you got to choose the good”; “there was no reason there”, as Orwell says, modern man “thinks in slogans and talks in bullets.” Hilary of Poitiers would not approve.

5. Article 3, corpus: reason proposes the object (“the good understood is the object proportioned to the will”) #

The point: the will’s goodness depends on reason in the same way it depends on the object, since reason proposes the object.

1. The will’s goodness properly depends on its object (a. 2).
2. The object of the will is proposed to it by reason: the good understood is the object proportioned to the will; the sensible or imagined good is proportioned to sense appetite, not the will. Example: candy is proportioned to my sense appetite, not to my will.
3. The will can tend to the universal good, which reason apprehends; sense desire tends only to the particular good the sense power grasps. Charles De Koninck: “we hate every thief”, every terrorist.

• Conclusion: the good of the will depends on reason in the same way as on the object.
• Parallel he draws to the treatise on love (Thomas on the causes of love, first three articles): the good is the cause of love as its object; then knowledge is asked about as a cause of love and turns out to be a condition of the object, since the object of love is the good as known, so knowledge is a cause “in the same way” the good is; likeness, the third cause, is “really kind of a different thing.” Here likewise the object of the will is the good as known, and known by reason.

6. Article 3, replies (“truth conformed to rectified appetite”) #

• Ad 1: the good under the ratio of good, that is of the desirable, pertains before to the will than to reason; but it pertains before to reason under the ratio of true, since the will cannot desire the good unless reason grasps it first. “A clear mind, Thomas.”
• Ad 2: Aristotle in Ethics VI speaks of practical understanding as taking counsel and reasoning about the means (those things which are for the end), where it is perfected by prudence. Prudence means foresight; the English word for prudence is foresight (“anybody who reads Sir Winston Churchill will find out”); Thomas in the Secunda Secundae names prudence from its principal part. In the means, reason’s rectitude consists in conformity to the desire for a suitable end; but that desire presupposes a right grasp of the end, which is reason’s. So: reason proposes the end, the will wills it, then prudence, which presupposes a rectified will.
  • Example: unless I want to eat moderately, reason will not find the amount. Drunkards will not admit they drink too much; unless you will the end, reason cannot find the means, which leads to what is now called “willful inadvertence”: I don’t want to know the means.
  • Thomas asked how one becomes a saint: “want to be one”; unless you will to be holy, you won’t find the way. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”
• Ad 3: the will moves reason in one way, and reason moves the will in another, on the part of the object; so the end is said to move us. Example: Rapunzel in the tower moved him to climb; women seek to be an unmoved mover; a student is going to write a novel, “The Unmoved Mover.”
• Asides: Thomas thought in Latin, “an inferior language”, Aristotle in Greek; Monsignor Dionne [ed.: ASR later gives “de Haan”; likely the same person] admired Thomas for thinking so well in Latin, and agreed his own French was inferior to English for philosophy, which annoys the Quebecers. His standing offer: an exhortation to use reason as good as Shakespeare’s in fifty words or less (“Shakespeare did it in forty-nine”); no takers.

7. Digression: Great Expectations, Francis, friendship (“more seek to love than to be loved”) #

The point: friendship requires both loving and being loved, but consists more in loving.

• Estella in Great Expectations is brought up as a kind of unmoved mover; Dickens’s original ending had her still reject him; Bulwer persuaded him to a happy ending and Forster the biographer approved; Chesterton’s piece on Great Expectations holds the original ending more in accord with what went before. Chesterton’s introductions were gathered (title “GKC as MC”), besides his book on Dickens; also his epilogue for Ghéon’s Curé of Ars, his St Francis and St Thomas; the Francis omnibus.
• Francis’s prayer: that he might more seek to love than to be loved. Cicero’s definition of friendship (used by Aelred and Augustine; a student is writing a doctoral thesis on Aelred) has love in it but does not make explicit that the love is mutual and known to be mutual; benevolence unreturned is not friendship. Given both are essential, friendship consists more in loving. Francis had to pray for this; “what about the rest of us”; people want more to be loved than to love.
• Aristotle, Ethics IX: the mother without milk gives her baby to a nurse, though the baby will attach to the one who feeds it; she seeks more to love than to be loved. Likewise women giving up a baby (Vietnam) for its good, knowing the adopter will get its love. A perfection of love “man doesn’t have sometimes.”
• God loves us before we love him: “Why do you persecute me?” to Paul.

8. Article 4, objections and sed contra (“one is the rule and the measure”) #

The point: whether the will’s goodness depends on the eternal law. Aside: “we just like quoting these things out of context, these objections,” as in politics.

• Obj. 1: of one thing there is one rule and measure; the rule of the human will, on which its goodness depends, is right reason; so not the eternal law.
• Obj. 2: a measure is homogeneous with the measured (you measure a surface by the square inch, a body by the cubic inch; Mozart is the measure of composers, not of poets); the eternal law is not homogeneous with the human will; so it cannot be its measure.
• Obj. 3: a measure ought to be most certain; the eternal law is unknown to us.
• Sed contra: Augustine, Contra Faustum XXII: sin is a thing done, said or wished against the eternal law (“some clarity of mind there”); evil of will is the root of sin; so the will’s goodness depends on the eternal law.

9. Article 4, corpus: first cause and second cause (“the effect more depends upon the first cause”) #

1. In all ordered causes the effect depends more on the first cause than on the second, since the second acts only in the power of the first. Example: what moves the caboose? the next car, but most of all the engine, since the cars in between move only as moved by it.
2. Human reason is the rule of the human will, but it has this from the eternal law, the divine reason: “the light which enlightens every man that comes into this world.”
3. Psalm 4: “Many say, who will show us good things? … sealed upon us is the light of your face, Lord”: the light of reason in us can show the good and rule the will insofar as it is derived from God’s face. He links this with seeing God face to face and Thomas’s prayer after communion calling that lux vera.

• Conclusion: the will’s goodness depends much more on the eternal law than on human reason; where human reason fails one must run back to the eternal reason.

10. Article 4, replies; the perfect measure that is known (“the perfect is the measure of the imperfect”) #

• Ad 1: of one thing there are not many proximate measures, but there can be many measures ordered one under another: “I measure my mind by Monsignor, he measures it by Thomas.”
• Ad 2: the proximate measure is homogeneous with the measured, not the remote measure.
• Ad 3: the eternal law is unknown as it is in the divine mind, but becomes known in some way through natural reason, derived from it as its image, or through revelation.
• Digression on Plato and Aristotle (Ethics I): Plato measures all things by the good itself; Aristotle wants a more proximate measure, the virtuous man; one who excels in a virtue becomes your measure. Man is the most imitative of the animals; the Imitation of Christ; imitating a saint in some virtue.
• But Plato’s other principle: the perfect is the measure of the imperfect, and every man is imperfect. How have a measure both perfect and known? Augustine’s little dialectic, quoted by Thomas: God should be followed but cannot be seen; man is seen but should not be followed. God solved this by becoming man: a perfect example that is also known; a reason one can see for the Incarnation.
• Yet the Sermon on the Mount ends “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect”, not “as I am perfect”, and the Father is not incarnate. A student: “he who sees me sees the Father.” He: he talked about that later; “they weren’t ready yet.” Left there.

His words #

• per se / per accidens: what is first in a genus is so per se; the per accidens is reduced to the per se as to a beginning.
• proton: named from being first, though it turned out not to be first.
• end and good: the same thing; the end is the object of the will.
• depend upon / hang from: the English pictures the thing beneath, the Latin above.
• verum conforme appetitui recto: truth conformed to rectified appetite (Ethics VI).
• prudence: foresight, named from its principal part.
• willful inadvertence: not wanting to know the means because one does not will the end.
• unmoved mover: applied jokingly to the beloved who moves without being moved.
• ratio of good / ratio of true: the good pertains first to reason under the ratio of true, to the will under the ratio of the desirable.
• proximate vs. remote measure: only the proximate need be homogeneous with the measured.
• lux vera: Thomas’s phrase in the prayer after communion for seeing God face to face.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I-II q. 19 a. 2 (objections, sed contra, corpus, replies)
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I-II q. 19 a. 3 (objections, sed contra, corpus, replies)
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I-II q. 19 a. 4 (objections, sed contra, corpus, replies)
• Psalm 4 (quoted in a. 4 corpus)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Ethics VI (truth conformed to right appetite); Ethics IX (mother and nurse); Ethics I (Plato’s good itself vs. a proximate measure)
• Aristotle on the fourth kind of cause, the end (no locus)
• Hilary of Poitiers, De Trinitate X
• Augustine, Contra Faustum XXII; Augustine’s “dialectic” on following God/man as quoted by Thomas (no locus)
• Thomas, treatise on love, first three articles (the good, knowledge, likeness as causes) (I-II q. 27, inferred); prudence in the Secunda Secundae (no locus); prayer after communion
• Cicero on friendship; Aelred; Francis’s prayer; Chesterton on Great Expectations, Dickens, Francis, Thomas, Ghéon’s Curé of Ars; Orwell; Churchill; Imitation of Christ; Sermon on the Mount; Charles De Koninck

His questions #

• Why is tragedy better than epic, according to Aristotle? Because it is simpler; what is first in a genus is simple.
• What is the object of the will, and how does the end relate to the good? The end is the object of the will; end and good are basically the same thing.
• Is candy proportioned to the will? No, to sense appetite; the will tends to the universal good that reason apprehends.
• Can reason find the means if the will does not will the end? No; unless I want to eat moderately, reason won’t find the amount.
• What moves the caboose? The next car, but most of all the engine; the cars between move only as moved by it.
• Does friendship consist more in loving or in being loved? Both are essential, but more in loving.
• How can you have a measure that is both perfect and known? One reason given for the Incarnation; but he then notes “be perfect as your heavenly Father” and leaves it open.