Truth, Life and Appropriation in the Trinity; the Meter of the Adoro te; Operation as the Cause of Pleasure (ST I-II q.32 a.1)

Orientation #

He returns to a comparison begun “before” (Peter’s profession and “I am the road”) and says “we were pointing out last time” the three names of the second Person (Son, Word, Image) (prev. lecture). He notes one student “played hooky” last class. The previous class worked through the articles on comparing sensory pleasures; the next continues q.32 with motion, hope and memory, sadness, and others’ actions as causes of pleasure.

The class, in order #

1. Peter’s profession and “I am the road” (“the truth and the life”) #

Point: the two texts are alike in structure, different in what they name.

• Matthew 16 (“upon this rock”) and John: “I am the hodos”, which he insists is concretely road, not “way”; the truth and the life.
• Alike: each begins with something said of Christ by reason of his human nature before something said by reason of his divine nature. As man he is anointed (Christ “by antonomasia”; priests, prophets and kings were anointed and he has all three; “the divinity is not anointed”); as man he is the road to eternal life, as Thomas says at the start of the Tertia Pars, the via to the end.
• Different on the divine side: “Son of the living God” names him properly; “the truth and the life” names him by appropriation.

2. Why appropriate at all (“the more known is used to”) #

Point: appropriation answers a need of the mind.

1. In the treatise on God, the unity of God comes before the Trinity; something from the unity of God is appropriated to one Person.
2. A student: what is common to the three is spoken of one Person to help understand what is proper. He accepts this as enlightenment of the proper by the common attribute.
3. The fundamental reason: in defining and reasoning we use the more known to know the less known; what we know of God’s unity even Aristotle knew, while the Trinity is known only by faith.

• Truth appropriated to the Son as wisdom is (wisdom = knowledge of truth).
• Life follows upon truth, as in the grades of life: animal is distinguished from plant by sense, not by emotion (emotion follows sense; he doesn’t feel sorry for the tree when he saws a branch, unlike sawing a leg off a man); man from beast by reason, not by will (“animal that has reason”, will follows). So John 17 defines eternal life by knowing God.
• Of the three names Son, Word, Image, “Word” is the best for seeing why truth is appropriated (John 1: the light that lightens every man).

3. The quatrain of Adoro te devote: meter, poem vs prayer (“Fair is foul, and foul is fair”) #

Point: the prayer is in trochaic meter but is not a poem.

• Seven quatrains; sometimes called the Rhythmus of St Thomas. Two rhyming couplets per quatrain.
• His mnemonic: “add” (three letters) and “it” (two): iambic and trochaic have two syllables per foot, dactylic and anapestic three; iambic accents the second, trochaic the first; dactyl like trochee with three, anapest the reverse. The class scans the line (“Thesis toctus” [unclear in recording]) as trochaic.
• Aristotle: iambic is closest to daily speech, people fall into it unawares. Shakespeare uses trochaic for unearthly characters (fairies, witches) or solemn moments to give foreignness or dignity; perhaps Thomas saw the same thing.
• Trochee and dactyl fight the voice’s wish to end on an accent, so the last foot drops its unaccented syllable(s): the witches’ “Fair is foul…” ends on an accent; this quatrain is six trochees with the sixth cut short, which he thinks is called catalectic (“don’t take my word for it, look that up”).
• Distinction: meter does not make a poem. A poem (e.g. a Shakespearean sonnet: a likeness of thought or feeling in fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, three alternately rhyming quatrains and a couplet) is a likeness of thought or feeling; Adoro te devote is a prayer. He has heard the Our Father in Aramaic was metrical and the psalms may be; meter is for memorising. Metaphor does not make a poem either (“the Lord is my rock”): in poetry metaphor brings something up to the level of reason, in Scripture it brings something down to it. “Don’t call those things poems.”
• Aside: the two psalm numberings annoy him; Augustine’s division by the 50th, 100th, 150th psalm breaks down on the “wrong” numbering.

4. Second quatrain: “Word of Truth” (“nothing than this Word of Truth”) #

Point: Thomas’s own usage shows that truth is appropriated, not proper, to the Son.

• Sight, touch, taste are deceived in te (the Eucharist); by hearing alone one safely believes: fides ex auditu, and whom we hear is Christ. “I believe whatever the Son of God says.”
• Then he shifts from “Son of God” to “Word”: nothing is more true than the Word of Truth (alliteration that makes it stick, “doesn’t make it poetry”).
• As in “Word of God”, God stands for the Father, so here Truth stands for the Father. Argument: the Father is Truth itself as much as the Son and Spirit; if nothing is more true than the Word of Truth, and nothing is more true than Truth itself, the Word of Truth is Truth itself too. That Thomas lets “Truth” stand for the Father shows that “the truth” in John 14 is appropriation, not proper.

5. Where appropriations come from (“power, wisdom, goodness”) #

Point: appropriation is seen more from the treatise on God’s operations than on his substance.

• In power / wisdom / goodness: goodness comes from the substance of God, wisdom and power from the operations (wisdom a perfection of mind; power a source of activity, in creating).
• Apostles’ Creed: “God the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth”, yet almighty and creator are common to all three (Athanasius: equal in power). Power is appropriated to the Father, what pertains to understanding (wisdom, truth, object of mind) to the Son, what pertains to will (goodness, object of will; love) to the Spirit; “the Holy Spirit is love” is “getting closer to being proper”. The three operations — understanding, will, power — go one to each Person.
• Only goodness can be appropriated from the substance, since truth is primarily in the mind while the good is primarily in things. But among the first thoughts of the mind (being, one, truth, goodness) one could appropriate one to the Father (Augustine: all are one on account of the Father, equal on account of the Son), truth to the Son, goodness to the Spirit; “I don’t think I’ve seen that, but it seems to me you could.”
• Theological virtues: kindling love appropriated to the Spirit (“Come Holy Spirit… kindle”), faith to the Son who enlightens (John 1), hope to the Father (the Lord’s teaching on prayer, Luke: the Father gives the Holy Spirit; Christ prays to the Father at the Last Supper; hope gives strength, strength is the Father’s).
• Student: the spiritual senses likewise, allegory to faith, moral to charity, anagogical to hope (he thinks from Augustine). He adds that Augustine’s and Thomas’s catechetical instructions divide by faith, hope, charity (creed, Our Father, commandments), proportioned to us: starting from what is in us and ending in the Trinity.

6. Question 32 opened: the eight articles (“eight things are asked”) #

Point: pleasure, like love, gets cause–itself–effect treatment; the articles previewed.

• Likeness of the treatise on love and on pleasure: each considered in itself, then cause before, effect after, giving completeness. Reason: of the emotions whose names are carried to acts of will, only love and delectatio are found in God; also for us these two are most fundamental (“what people want most of all is pleasure”).
• a.1 operation as proper cause: Ethics X, pleasure follows the perfection of operation (hearing Mozart well, seeing a painting with good eyes, understanding appropriation well).
• a.2 motion. Distinction: operation vs motion. Thomas uses operatio (Aristotle energeia) for a perfect act; motion is by nature imperfect act, act of what is able insofar as able. Test (Ethics IX): walking home — when you have walked home you are no longer walking; seeing, hearing, loving — you are seeing and have seen at once (“you’re loving somebody, have you loved them yet? Yes”). Motion, more known to us, is carried over to operation (so Plato’s self-moving first mover, God understanding and loving himself, agrees with Aristotle) but not to form; “act” is carried from motion to form. Aside: Quebec newsreels called les actualités.
• a.3 hope and memory: for an operation not present, anticipated or remembered.
• a.4 sadness — “oh my goodness”; a student: “he’s melancholic”.
• a.5 actions of others (fellow citizens voting for Romney). a.6 willing to benefit another (“you feel good to do something for somebody”).
• a.7 likeness — “strange”, likeness was a cause of love. a.8 wonder. Student example: the Pharisees asked whose son the Messiah is, “and everyone heard and glad” (Mark). He adds the wonder of the student refreshing the professor, “breaking through the bovine stare”.
• Aside: his stock example of classifying the campus vegetation, “prison company excluded”.

7. Article 1, objections and sed contra (“operation is not the proper and first cause”) #

Point: three objections that the cause is not operation.

1. Rhetoric I: to be pleased is for the sense to undergo something, so pleasure requires knowledge (tree and stone have none). But objects are knowable before the operations; so the object, not the operation, is the cause. His probe: is it Mozart’s music or my hearing it that pleases? God or my seeing him in the vision? “or both in some order” — hearing rock and roll won’t please, the object must be good. De Anima gives two criteria of better knowledge (better object, or known better); Parts of Animals says nobility of object outweighs manner: knowing God imperfectly beats knowing the number of chairs in the room perfectly; a glimpse of someone loved beats a leisurely view of the boss; grandparents and a picture of the grandchild.
2. Pleasure consists most in the end achieved; but sometimes the end is the thing done, not the operation (Michelangelo: making the Pietà, or “there it is”?).
3. Idleness and rest are the ceasing of operation and are delightful (Rhetoric I).

• Sed contra, Ethics VII and X: pleasure is a connatural, unimpeded operation.

8. The body: two things required (“wealthy in my sleep”) #

Point: every pleasure follows upon some operation.

1. Pleasure requires (a) obtaining a suitable good and (b) knowing that attainment (stock goes up while asleep, unknown: no delight; a brilliant idea not known to be brilliant).
2. Actual knowledge is an operation; the suitable good is obtained by some operation; and one’s own operation is itself a suitable good.
3. Hence every pleasure follows upon some operation (“you don’t get pleasure sleeping, I guess”).

• Translation aside: “operation” is a transliteration; he prefers “doing”. Doing divides into making (product apart from the doing, gets a new name) and doing (no product, keeps the name) — names becoming equivocal; the doing without product is the more perfect doing, though “your wife might think you’re not doing something.” The philosopher looking up from his book is doing the most important part; his deaf mother asking “who are you talking to?” when his lips moved reasoning out what he read.

9. Reply to the first objection (“every pleasure is reduced into some operation”) #

Point: objects please only as joined to us by operation.

• Objects are delightful only insofar as joined to us, either by knowledge alone (delight in considering things) or in some other way together with knowledge, as knowing oneself to have wealth or honor — or to be loved (Aristotle: to be loved is a way of being honored, and better).
• Politics II: great pleasure in thinking something one’s own, from natural self-love (his nice edition of Shakespeare; grandchildren). But to have is nothing but to use or be able to use (the bookcase: “what should I look at tonight?”), and that is an operation.
• Conclusion, which he flags: “Thomas, very strong… every pleasure is reduced into some operation as a cause. Wow, what a mind.” Ordering this article first is right; “he’s got help from Aristotle.”
• Aside on order: Aristotle’s eight senses of “in” (Physics IV) are unordered; Thomas orders them 1–8 as Aristotle orders senses of words in “the fifth book of Wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics V]. His own senses of “thinking out”: one each for senses 2–7 of “in”; those for 2–5 belong to the logic of the first act, 6 to the second act, 7 to the third. Dionne said “thinking out” can’t be said in French; Dionne and Boudet, native French speakers, held English superior for philosophy and poetry; a philologist called English “the greatest invention of the human mind”; a German priest called it “a dumpling language” (“euthanasia”).

10. Replies to the second and third (“proportioned to and connatural to the one doing”) #

• Ad 2: even where the operation is not the end, the things done or made are delightful insofar as had or made, which refers back to some use or operation (“Look what I’ve made!”).
• Ad 3: operations delight insofar as proportioned and connatural to the doer; human power being finite, an operation is proportioned according to a measure; beyond it, it is no longer proportioned or delightful but laborious and wearying. Hence idleness, play and rest delight insofar as they remove the sadness of labor. (He misreads “otium” as “odium” and corrects himself.) So professors tell jokes; the students’ faces say “why are you doing this to me?”

His words #

• road: his rendering of hodos / via, preferred to “way” as concrete.
• by antonomasia: Christ as the anointed one.
• appropriation vs properly said: common attribute spoken of one Person, to enlighten the proper by the more known.
• uno et trino: the treatises on God one and triune.
• Rhythmus of St Thomas: Adoro te devote.
• catalectic: last foot dropping its unaccented syllable(s), “look that up”.
• likeness of thought or feeling: his definition of poem.
• fides ex auditu: faith is from hearing.
• delectatio: pleasure.
• operation / operationes: perfect act (Aristotle energeia); motion: imperfect act, “act of what is able insofar as able”.
• les actualités: newsreels, “what’s going on”.
• propria et prima: proper and first (cause).
• doing vs making: his English for operatio, doing without product being the more perfect.
• ownness: [unclear in recording] his gloss at “once it is clear”.
• otium: idleness (he first said “odium”).
• thinking out: his term whose senses he orders by the senses of “in”.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, Adoro te devote, first and second quatrains (Latin, translated).
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 32, prooemium and a. 1 (objections, sed contra, body, replies 1–3).
• Verified sources also record Summa Contra Gentiles II, ch. 11 and a handout “Shakespeare on Error” p. 3 (DHB Vol. III p. 1030) in this recording; the transcript does not name either.

Mentioned

• Matthew 16 (Peter’s profession); John 14 (“I am the road…”), John 17 (eternal life), John 1 (light), Luke (the Father gives the Holy Spirit).
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae III, prologue (Christ as man the via); Prima Pars, treatise on the operations of God; articles on appropriation (Hilary, Augustine).
• Athanasian Creed; Apostles’ Creed; Augustine on the psalms’ division and on unity/equality in the Trinity; Augustine’s and Thomas’s catechetical instructions.
• Shakespeare, Macbeth (witches’ lines; inferred).
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics VII, IX, X; Rhetoric I; De Anima; Parts of Animals I; Politics II; Physics IV; Metaphysics V (inferred, “fifth book of Wisdom”); Plato on the self-moving first mover.

His questions #

• What common need of our mind is the reason for appropriation? The more known (unity of God, known even to Aristotle) is used to understand the less known (Trinity, known by faith).
• Why is “the truth and the life” naming him by appropriation and not properly? Because truth is common to all three; “Son of the living God” is the proper name.
• Which of the three names—Son, Word, Image—is best for seeing truth appropriated to the second Person? Word.
• What is the meter of this quatrain? Trochaic, six feet, the last cut short (catalectic, to be verified).
• Should Adoro te devote be called a poem? No: it is a prayer, not a likeness of thought or feeling; meter and metaphor do not make a poem.
• In “Word of Truth”, what does Truth stand for? The Father — a sign that “the truth” is appropriated, not proper, to the Son.
• Can one appropriate from the substance of God rather than the operations? Only goodness; but one, truth and goodness could be appropriated to Father, Son, Spirit (his own suggestion).
• Is it Mozart’s music that pleases me, or my hearing it? Both in some order; the object must be good, but objects please only as joined to us by operation (Reply 1).
• With Michelangelo, was it the making of the Pietà or the Pietà made? Left open in the objection; Reply 2: the thing made delights as had, which refers to use or operation.
• Why doesn’t he have the seven articles (i.e. why put operation first)? Because every pleasure is reduced to operation as its cause; this is the fundamental truth, “with help from Aristotle”.