Summa I-II Q.19 a.10 and Q.20 a.1: Must our will match God's will, and is goodness first in the will or in the outward act?

Orientation #

He opens: “we’re up to Article Ten, I guess, in Question Nineteen.” He notes that q. 18 was on goodness and badness of human acts in general, q. 19 “just finished” on the interior act of the will, and q. 20 now begins the exterior act; he stops after a. 1 and says “Up to Article Two now.” The previous class covered qq. 19 aa. 8–9 (goodness of the will and intention, conformity to the divine will), and the next continues q. 20 on interior and exterior act.

The class, in order #

1. The three objections: must we will what God wills? (“not always to be conformed to the divine will”) #

The point: the objections argue that man is not held to conform his will to God’s in the thing willed.

1. We cannot will what we do not know; the good grasped is the object of the will; but what God wills we don’t know. So no conformity in the “what.”
2. God wills to damn someone he foreknows will die in mortal sin (he recalls Judas, “better if he’d not been born”); if we must will what God wills, a man would have to will his own damnation, “which is not fitting.”
3. No one is held to will what is against piety; if God wills someone’s father to die and the son wills it, that is against piety. He: “that’s pretty convincing… good objections are easy to see.”

• Aside: reading St Gertrude the night before on praying for the sick: pray that they be healed or that God’s will be done; St John of the Cross asked friends to pray he have his purgatory on earth — “pretty brave to pray for.”

2. Sed contra and the Topics aside on doubt (“Well, now I’m what perplexed”) #

Three arguments on the other side: (1) Ps 32:1 gloss — he has a rectified heart who wills what God wills, and everyone is held to have a right heart; (2) the form of any act is from its object, so conformity to the divine will must be in the thing willed; (3) repugnance of wills consists in willing diverse things, and a will repugnant to God’s is bad. Now “perplexed,” he recalls Aristotle, Topics book VI (on definition): those who define doubt as “the equality of contrary arguments” have given its cause, not what it is; likewise pain defined as “the pulling apart of parts naturally joined” — that or its cause?; and sleep as the adynamia (lack of power) of the senses — which is cause and which effect? Is being asleep why I don’t hear, or is the inability to hear why I’m asleep? (His own night: managing not to think of something makes him sleepier — an adynamia of thinking.)

3. Corpus: same thing good under one reason, not under another (“the judge has care of the common good”) #

The point: the will follows its object as proposed by reason, and reason can consider the same thing as good in one way and not good in another; so two wills willing opposites can both be good.

• Gethsemane: a legion of angels would be good for one reason (he jokes, to drive the gnats out), not good for another.
• The judge wills the thief’s death because it is just; the wife or son wills him not killed, “insofar as by nature” — both good wills. (Student: is death proportionate to stealing? He: “so you might wonder”; perhaps obstructing justice in those days.) Then: the more common the reason of good apprehended, the more the will is borne to a more common good. The judge cares for the common good (justice); the wife for the private good of the family.
• His example: in war the government drafts a father for the good of the nation; the wife and children wish him not moved from the family; both good, but the nation’s good is greater. Student presses: must the wife will the greater good for her will to be good? He: “maybe so… she’d have to submit”; but Thomas “hasn’t got that part yet,” he is only saying both objects are good relatively. God grasps the good of the whole universe, as its maker and governor; whatever he wills he wills under the reason of the common good, which is his own goodness. A creature grasps some particular good proportioned to its nature. So a will can be good willing something under a particular reason that God does not will under the universal reason, and vice versa; hence diverse men can will opposites well. Conclusion: a man’s will willing a particular good is not right unless he refers it to the common good as end, since even the natural desire of a part is ordered to the good of the whole — the hand rises without thinking to protect the head, sacrificing itself. So the particular good is willed materially, the divine and common good formally; the human will is held to conform to God’s in what is willed formally, not materially. He notes a sentence missed in the translation: from the end is taken the formal reason of willing what is for the end.

4. The De Veritate passage: four conformities (“two things should be considered”) #

His text carries a De Veritate passage. In the object of the will: the material (the very thing willed) and the formal (the reason for willing, the end) — as colour is material and light formal in the object of sight, since light makes colour actually visible. Hence conformity:

• material, when a man wills the thing God wills — “the object is as it were the matter of the act,” and this is the least of the conformities;
• final, when one wills on account of God;
• efficient: even where not conformed materially, one is conformed as regards the efficient cause, since the natural inclination or particular grasp by which he wills comes from God — “the will of man is conformed to the will of God because he wishes what God wishes him to wish”;
• formal: willing from charity as God wills, reduced to conformity in the last end, charity’s proper object. Worked through with a student: if God intends my father to die now, I should still will that he recover; my inclination to his good is from God, so I am conformed as to efficient cause, and I should remain conformed to God’s will whatever the disease brings. Student: so you must will the same thing God wills? He: essentially, in the ultimate end — but here and now, not this thing. Martha and Mary: they willed their brother not to die; Christ let him die to impress the apostles and others (the Pharisees then wanted to kill Lazarus too, “to get rid of the evidence”).

5. Reply to the first objection and the Our Father (“in the particular, we don’t know what God wills”) #

Reply: what God wills under a common reason we can know — whatever he wills he wills as good; so whoever wills under some reason of good is conformed in the reason for willing. In particular we do not know, so we are not held to conform there.

• Parents of a child in danger of death: if they knew God willed the child to die it would be different; not knowing, they will its life by their natural inclination, and are conforming to God who gave them that. When it dies they accept it — King David fasted and wept while the child was sick, then bathed and anointed himself.
• In glory all will see, in each singular thing, its order to what God wills, and so conform formally and materially. Aside from “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”: it cannot be done on earth as fully, since I may not will in particular what God works in particular. Augustine’s division of the seven petitions: the first three are for what is given fully only in the next life (God not fully hallowed, kingdom not fully come, will not fully done), the last four can be fulfilled here — he recalls the priest leading the first three and the congregation answering the last four. One would expect four about goods against three about evils; Augustine’s three/four “shows not his perverseness but the subtlety of his mind.” Thomas divides them three ways: two for the end, two for the means (chief means doing his will), three removing impediments. The Fathers on the seventh petition: “lead us not into temptation” asks not to come under its power; “deliver us from evil” asks, if I have succumbed and am drowning in the quicksand, to be pulled out — a reading he “never thought of” as a child (he had taken two petitions about sin and one about other evils). Student: “evil” may mean “the evil one” — he: one way, perhaps fits the Greek. “Brevity is the soul of wit” — how profound the Our Father is; Augustine and Thomas following him say all one can rightly pray for is in it; other prayers repeat it in different words. So the saints’ wills in heaven are more conformed than in this life, where they were not always conformed to the particular thing God willed.

6. Replies to objections 2 and 3, and to the sed contras (“God does not will the damnation”) #

• To 2: “you got to be careful about saying that” — God does not will damnation under the notion of damnation nor death as death, for he wills all men to be saved (the antecedent will, as Damascene says); he wills these under the notion of justice. So it suffices that a man will God’s justice and that the order of nature be observed — which also answers 3, the father’s death.
• Unusually, Thomas then answers the arguments on the other side, “strange.”
  • To the first: he wills more what God wills who conforms in the reason for willing than who conforms in the thing willed, because the will is chiefly “born” (carried) to the end rather than to what is for the end; so one is more held to will the end.
  • St Paul praying against the “stimulus” in his body: God says it is better for him, against being puffed up by the revelations — was Paul bad in praying for it? He didn’t know in particular it was there for his humility. Aside: things good for one’s humility seen only afterwards (“they saw what a scoundrel I really was”); Parolles (from French paroles, “words”) exposed, yet “there’s room for even me.” [ed.: All’s Well That Ends Well; he cannot recall the play’s name.]
  • To the second: the species and form of an act is taken more from the reason of the object than from what is material in it — “the same point.”
  • To the third: no repugnance when men will diverse things under different reasons; only if under one reason one wills what the other does not. “So that was a close call there.” Student’s aside: perhaps one who died young was spared temptations he would have succumbed to — “whom the gods love dies young,” the Greek proverb.

7. Question 20 prologue and the digression on Thomas’s inexhaustibility (“six things are to be asked”) #

Q. 18 in general, q. 19 the interior act, now the exterior act; six articles: (1) whether good and bad are first in the will’s act or the exterior act; (2) whether the whole goodness of the exterior act depends on the will; (3) whether interior and exterior act have the same goodness; (4) whether the exterior act adds goodness or badness beyond the interior — wanting to rob you vs. actually robbing you (law punishes conspiracy, but more if done); (5) whether consequent events add anything; (6) whether the same exterior act can be good and bad, “dangerous territory.” Asides: Thomas thinks everything you think about and more, like God knowing all points on infinitely many lines through a point; Mozart on writing what connoisseurs appreciate yet everyone likes; his friend Warren Burley pointing out four or five melodies combined at the end of the Jupiter Symphony’s fourth movement; De Koninck, teaching the Physics since the 1930s, seeing something new each time and having more wonder than anyone in the class; Msgr Dionne pointing out a point in the Physics in Rome (“how could I have taught it all these years and missed that?”). On a. 3: some dislike this precision as “stingy,” would be “more pastoral”; Shakespeare sometimes speaks as if truth is stingy — to say only the truth about someone is stingy praise. Aristotle, Ethics VIII on friendship: most men want more to be loved than to love; being loved is connected with being honoured, honour being testimony to some excellence; but one wants honour either from those in power who can benefit one, or from the virtuous as confirmation — in either case for something else, whereas one wants to be loved for its own sake; what is per se is better than what is for another. Then friendship consists more in loving, shown (without reason given there) by the mother who gives her baby to be nursed by another, loving its good though the child will not know her — so he takes a woman as better than a man in love. St Francis’s prayer to seek more to love than to be loved: “if this saint had to pray for this, what about the rest of us slobs”; that is why we flatter. Julius Caesar: Cassius complaining Brutus always criticises his faults — a flatterer would not, a friend does; one could teach ethics from Shakespeare’s examples, as Thomas quotes Terence.

8. Article 1 objections: are good and bad first in the exterior act? (“Thou shalt not commit murder”) #

Aside first: the commandments — murder, adultery, theft — are exterior acts, and people think ethics is “do’s and don’ts,” rules, which seem to be exterior acts.

1. The will has its goodness from its object, and the exterior act is the will’s object (one wills theft, or to give alms); so the interior act is good or bad according to the exterior act it wills.
2. Good belongs first to the end, and the will’s own act cannot be the end (as said above); the act of another power can be; so good is first in another power’s act.
3. The will’s act is related formally to the exterior act, and the formal is after, since form comes to matter. “Stuart at this point is convinced” — “No, I’m confused.”

9. Sed contra, corpus and replies (“the end is before in intention”) #

Sed contra: Augustine, Retractations — the will is that by which one sins and lives rightly. (Aside: Augustine’s Retractations is a lesson to all; some philosophers change their minds so often they would have written many.) Corpus: an exterior act is good or bad in two ways — (a) by its genus and the circumstances, as almsgiving with the owed circumstances; (b) from its order to an end, as almsgiving for inane glory is bad. Teaching is good in the first sense, bad in the second if for inane glory — “a lot of that going on in the world.”

1. The end is the will’s proper object, so the goodness an exterior act has from its end is found first in the will and derived to the exterior act (teaching to make you more like God who knows everything, vs. for glory).
2. The goodness the exterior act has by itself, from suitable matter and circumstances, is not from the will but from reason: considered as in reason’s ordering and grasping, it is before the goodness of the will; considered as in the carrying out of the work, it follows the will’s goodness, which is its cause — “an interesting distinction.” Replies: (1) the exterior act is the will’s object as proposed by reason, and so is prior — but then it is in reason more than in the exterior act itself; as in execution it is the will’s effect and follows it. (2) “Famous principle” governing the whole response: the end is before in intention, after in execution. (3) Form as received in matter is after in the way of generation, though prior in nature as more perfect; as in the agent cause it is in every way before; the will is the exterior act’s efficient cause, so the will’s goodness is the form of the exterior act as existing in its agent cause. “Gives a lot to think about.”

His words #

• “conformed in the thing willed” (in volito): material conformity, willing the very thing God wills.
• “reason of willing” (ratio volendi): the end; formal conformity.
• “materially / formally”: the particular good willed as matter, the common good willed as form (the end).
• “born to” — his gloss of fertur: “it means carried to.”
• “antecedent will”: God’s willing all men to be saved, “as Damascene says.”
• “inane glory”: his rendering of inanis gloria [ed.: vainglory].
• “adynamia”: lack of power (of the senses), from the Topics example.
• “genus” of the act: its kind, with circumstances — first way an exterior act is good.
• “before in intention, after in execution”: the “famous principle” of the end.
• “agent cause”: the will as efficient cause of the exterior act.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, ST I-II, q. 19, a. 10 (objections, sed contra, corpus, replies including replies to the sed contras)
• Thomas Aquinas, De Veritate, passage on material and formal in the will’s object (in his text; locus not stated)
• Thomas Aquinas, ST I-II, q. 20, prologue
• Thomas Aquinas, ST I-II, q. 20, a. 1 Mentioned
• Ps 32:1 (in the sed contra)
• Aristotle, Topics VI (definitions of doubt, pain, sleep)
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics VIII (loving vs. being loved)
• Augustine, Retractationes (sed contra of q. 20 a. 1); Augustine on the seven petitions of the Our Father
• Damascene (antecedent will)
• St Gertrude; St John of the Cross; St Paul’s “stimulus”; King David and the sick child; Lazarus, Martha and Mary; Gethsemane
• Shakespeare: Julius Caesar (Cassius and Brutus); Parolles (play unnamed); “brevity is the soul of wit”; Terence; St Francis’s prayer; Mozart, Jupiter Symphony

His questions #

• Can the judge and the thief’s wife both have a good will? Yes: under different reasons, justice (common good) and the good of the family.
• For the wife’s will to be good, must she will the greater common good? “Maybe so… she’d have to submit” — Thomas has not got to that part yet.
• If God intends my father to die now, what should I will? That he recover; so conformed to God as efficient cause, and still to his will whatever happens.
• Are parents bad who will their dying child to live if God wills its death? No, unless they knew it; not knowing, they follow their natural inclination and accept the death.
• Can God’s will be done on earth as fully as in heaven? No: we do not will in particular what God works in particular; Augustine puts it among the first three petitions.
• How do the Fathers understand “deliver us from evil”? As being pulled out once one has succumbed to temptation; a student adds “the evil one.”
• Does God will someone’s damnation? Not as damnation, but under the notion of justice; he wills all to be saved.
• Was St Paul bad in praying to be freed of the stimulus? No; he did not know in particular that it served his humility.
• Is friendship more in loving or in being loved? In loving — the mother giving her baby to be nursed.
• Are good and bad first in the exterior act or in the will? From the end, first in the will; from matter and circumstances, first in reason, then in the will, then the work.