Habits in the Angels: The Names of God, the Per Se Axiom, and Pure Act (Summa I-II q.50 a.6)

Orientation #

He says “we’re down to the last article here in question fifty” and that articles 3, 4 and 5 were “setting the topic” for the virtues, cardinal and theological (prev. lecture). At the end he returns to “the problem I started the class with”: why two theological virtues in the will (hope and charity) and only one in the reason. The previous class treated q. 50 aa. 4-5 (habits in the possible intellect and the will), and the next takes up q. 51 on the causes of habits.

The class, in order #

1. Opening aside: the four groups of names of God (“four groups of names of God”) #

He reports what he has just been reading in Thomas (the verified source matches Summa Contra Gentiles IV, ch. 15; he gives no locus): names said of God fall into four groups, two “from creatures” and two of God himself.

• From creatures: (a) negative names — simple = not composed, incorporeal; (b) names of relation to creatures — Lord, Creator; “one of the most difficult things in theology”: these are not real relations in God but follow on our way of understanding.
• Of God himself: (c) names corresponding to a real distinction in God — Father, Son, Holy Spirit; (d) names not corresponding to a real distinction but founded in God, imperfectly understood by us — good, perfect.
• Names said metaphorically (“the Lord is my rock”) could be added.
• Asides: “only Thomas would be so basic” as to ask whether God is nameable; Augustine (De Trinitate, he thinks, unsure) says that to call God ineffable is already to say something, so stop there.

2. Where we are; angels and catharsis (“The angel watching you make a decision”) #

Point: a. 6 turns to angels before the treatise on the virtues proper (whose objects, for the theological virtues, is God himself).

• His teacher Kasurik: the angel watching you decide is like you watching an angleworm; at death you will take your guardian angel for God, and he will say “no, I’ll take you to purgatory.”
• Four senses of catharsis, from the purgatory joke: of the will/soul (purgatory), of reason (Socrates), of the emotions (Aristotle), of the body (doctors purging what harms it, e.g. in cancer). When mistaken you need purging “another way.”
• Aside: he is reading Thomas on the motion of angels in the Sentences, “beautiful text.”

3. Objection 1 (Maximus) and how many distinctions a division needs (“How many distinctions do you need to distinguish the sacraments”) #

Objection 1: Maximus, commentator on Dionysius (Celestial Hierarchy, “seventh book” as he says), holds it unsuitable that intellectual/spiritual virtues be in godlike understandings “in the manner of accidents, as they are in us,” one in another as in a subject; every habit is an accident in the category of quality; so no habits in angels.

• Digression on dividing many into a few: Aristotle gives the ten highest genera without showing how he got them; Thomas, in two places, derives the ten by eight distinctions of two or three, since the mind cannot grasp a distinction of ten at once.
• Sacraments as the worked example: (1) matrimony and holy orders vs. the other five — ordered to the good of others (generating and educating members of the Church; the priest ordained for the good of the Church, to sacrifice and administer sacraments), not to the good of the recipient’s soul; (2) of the five, three perfect the soul, likened by Thomas to the living soul’s acts — baptism (birth), confirmation (growth), Eucharist (nourishment) — vs. two concerned with failure; (3) three into three, (4-5) two into two: five distinctions in all. Students guessed one, two, three; “no.”
• Porphyry’s five (genus, difference, species, property, accident): property and accident (outside the essence) vs. the three essential ones, then subdivide.
• Asides: sister-in-law told by the parish priest “now you know what it’s all about”; Hamlet’s ghost complains of dying “unhousled,” without the last sacraments, extreme unction — one needs Kittredge’s notes to see how Catholic Shakespeare sounds there.

4. Objection 2 and the axiom “per se before per aliud” (“per se is before the per aliud”) #

Objection 2: Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy ch. 4: the holy dispositions of the celestial essences partake above all of God’s goodness; what is per se is before and more potent than what is to another; so angels are perfected to conformity with God through themselves, not through habits — “godlike creatures to begin with.” Maximus adds: otherwise they would not remain in their essence nor be godlike per se.

• Aside on Dionysius: two famous works, Celestial Hierarchy and Divine Names; Thomas commented on the Divine Names, his teacher Albert on the Celestial Hierarchy; Fra Angelico’s paintings of men and angels in a stately dance.
• “You’ve got to be careful of that axiom.” Two misuses:
  1. Manichaeans: if something is bad to another (partaking of evil), there must be before it something bad to itself, evil itself opposed to God who is goodness itself. Augustine was under their influence.
  2. Plato: “Am I man himself, or do I partake of human nature?” (class: partake). So there must be man himself to himself, dog itself.
• What is wrong: easier against the Manichaeans, because the bad, when understood, is the lack of something one is able to have and should have; nothing’s nature can be a lack (“nature” of the bad is a very extended sense). Further: as God, goodness itself, can have nothing bad, so evil itself could have nothing good, hence no existence, since existence is good — impossible. Thomas shows God is good, then goodness itself, then has nothing bad. Against Plato: Aristotle in the seventh book of wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics VII] — it is the nature of man to be material and so individual; no man himself. Lesson: using an axiom while misunderstanding something else lets you posit something strange.
• Aside: Augustine met the great Manichaean teacher and, knowing the liberal arts, found it fishy that the man talked far above him yet lacked what one should start with; what if Augustine had not been educated in the liberal arts?

5. Objection 3 and the sed contra (“the angels of the first”) #

Objection 3: habit is a disposition (fifth book of wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics V]), and disposition is the order of what has parts; angels are simple substances; so no dispositions, hence no habits. Sed contra: Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy ch. 7: angels of the first hierarchy are called calefacientes (burning with love), thrones, effusion of wisdom — which name forms of habit.

6. Thomas’s answer: a position partly true, partly false (“partly has truth”) #

The position: some (Maximus, Simplicius) say there are no habits in angels; whatever is said of them is said essentially — habits and virtues in them are essential because of their immateriality. Simplicius on the Categories (Latin: Predicamenta): wisdom in the soul is a habit, in an intellectual substance a substance; divine, self-sufficient things exist in themselves, not in another.

• His diagnosis: they are confusing angels with God. God’s wisdom and justice are his very substance, not acquired or partaken — “strange as that may be.”
• Angels are in between: like the courageous man, who looks a coward to the foolhardy and foolhardy to the coward (Shakespeare’s Coriolanus deals with this); seen from God, angels look almost like men, seen from men, like God. Likewise Shakespeare’s romances, placed with tragedies or comedies depending which extreme you look from, are really something in between.
• Thomas: “partly has truth… partly contains falsehood.” The subject of a habit is only a being in potency. The commentators, seeing angels lack the potency of matter (the potency we know best), excluded habits and every accident.

7. Not pure act: potency without matter (“to be pure act is proper to God”) #

Point: angels lack the potency of matter but have some potency, since they receive existence from God and are in potency to it; pure act is God alone.

• “Pure act” is the middle term for the divine attributes: simple, perfect, infinite, unchanging, eternal, one. He prefers the Contra Gentiles order, where pure act is brought in as the consideration of substance begins; the Summa Theologiae brings it in ad hoc at the treatment of simplicity.
• Source: ninth book of wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics IX] — first ability [ed.: potency] and its kinds, then act and its kinds, then their order (“Shakespeare’s definition”: see distinction, then order). Act is before ability in almost every way; only in the one thing going from ability to act is ability before, and it goes because something already in act moves it. Simply (simpliciter), act is before ability; so the first being is pure act — if it were ability actualized, something would be before it.
• The moderns’ mistake: like the early Greeks, they make potency simply before act — matter first, then evolution — the fallacy of simpliciter and secundum quid.
• Conclusion: insofar as potency is found in angels, habits can be; but since the potency of matter and of an intellectual substance are not of one ratio, “habit” is equivocal by reason in the two. Thomas corrects Simplicius, who said angelic habits are unlike ours and more like the simple immaterial species they contain: “we’ve got to think higher here, Simplicius.”

8. Human understanding lowest, angelic in act; “pure” and “simple” negative (“things in motion sooner catch the eye”) #

• Human understanding, “infimus” (he jokes “infamous” — lowest), is in potency to all understandables, proportioned to prime matter in sensibles; so it needs a habit to understand. Aristotle, De Anima II: the early Greeks explained knowledge but not error, though in man and animals there is more error than truth (camouflage in animals shows how much deception there is).
• Angelic understanding is not pure potency in the genus of understandables but a certain act — not pure act, which is God’s alone.
• “Watch out for language.” “Pure” means without passive ability; “simple” means not composed (Thomas shows God not composed of matter and form, quantitative parts, substance and existence…, then not composed in any way). Grammatically affirmative, negative in meaning, unlike “unchanging,” “incorporeal.” A student offered “wonder” as another such word.
• God most knowable simply but not to us: Physics preamble, from more known to us to more known simply; Metaphysics IX, things knowable to the extent they are in act, so pure act most knowable. To us the act most known is motion (Shakespeare: “things in motion sooner catch the eye than what not stirs”; knowledge begins from sense), which is why Metaphysics IX begins with ability for motion and only in its second part sees act universally.
• Asides: sport and movies are all motion; French newsreels called les actualités; Marx and Hegel make reality motion, hence the philosophy of history; people imagine beatitude as boring and would prefer a big football game; Shakespeare on fashion.

9. The angel knows itself through its substance (“we know the soul through its powers”) #

Angelic mind is act with an admixture (permixtio) of potency, less the higher it is; insofar as in potency it needs habitual perfection by understandable forms for its operation (as in the prima pars); insofar as act, separated from matter in its essence, it understands some things — itself at least — and others according to the mode of its substance (De Causis), more perfectly the more perfect it is.

• Objection recalled (“we mentioned before”): the angel’s power of understanding is in its substance; how is its substance in its power? Thomas: different senses of “in” — power in substance as accident in subject; substance in the power as the understandable form by which it understands.
• Contrast: the separated soul, made actually understandable, understands itself through itself; in this life (De Anima) we know soul through powers, powers through acts, acts through objects — a discourse.
• Aside: De Causis was once thought Aristotle’s; it is not, but is profound; Thomas commented on it.

10. Habits to attain God; why hope as well as charity (“it’s not enough to love”) #

No angel reaches God’s perfection, “distant from it in infinitude”; so to attain God by understanding and will they need habits, existing in potency to that pure act; Dionysius calls these habits deiformes. Habits that are dispositions of a natural being (e.g. health) are not in angels, being immaterial.

• Back to the opening problem: why two virtues in the will. Love of the end is not enough without hope of overcoming the difficulties. Examples: philosophy is love of wisdom, but one may think wisdom impossible for oneself; the Minnesota student who could not reconcile authors A, B, C, D, threw away his books and farms (told to him as a warning); Romeo loves Rosalind [ed.: Rosaline] but without hope of her one despairs and gives up the pursuit; loving to be senator is not enough to run — without hope one just goes through the motions.
• Aside: “underinformed voters”; the Judge Judy Supreme Court prank; Canadians in 2000 mocking Americans (and Al Gore) for thinking Toronto the capital.

11. Replies and closing (“leave nine pews there in front of you”) #

• Ad 1: Maximus speaks of material habits and accidents.
• Ad 2: what belongs to an angel by essence needs no habit; but angels are not being through themselves — they partake of divine wisdom and goodness — so insofar as they receive from outside, habits must be posited.
• Ad 3: angels have no parts of essence (unlike his body and soul and innumerable bodily parts) but parts according to potency, as the understanding is perfected by many species and the will relates to many things.
• Aside: he sits in the tenth pew, leaving nine for the nine orders of angels — “it’s a metaphor”; “repetition is the mother of learning.”

His words #

• names said properly / metaphorically / negatively / by relation of God — his four groups plus the metaphorical
• catharsis — purging; of will, reason, emotions, body
• highest genera — Aristotle’s ten [ed.: categories]; Predicamenta, the Latin name
• per se / per aliud (per aliquid) — through itself / through another; the axiom “per se before per aliud”
• the bad — lack of something one is able to have and should have
• book of wisdom (fifth, seventh, ninth) — [ed.: Aristotle, Metaphysics]
• calefacientes — burning, with love (Dionysius on the first hierarchy)
• habitudines atque virtutes essentiales — habits and virtues essential in angels (Maximus)
• potency of matter vs. some kind of potency — the potency we know best vs. the angel’s potency to its received existence
• pure act — without passive ability; proper to God
• ability — his English for potency [ed.: potency]
• simpliciter / secundum quid — simply / in a certain respect; the fallacy of confusing them
• equivocal by reason — of “habit” said of matter-potency and intellect-potency, not one ratio
• infimus — lowest (joked as “infamous”)
• permixtio — admixture of potency in the angelic mind
• deiformes — godlike habits by which angels are conformed to God
• “in” — accident-in-subject vs. understandable-form-in-power

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 50, a. 6 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy chs. 4 and 7, and Maximus on it, as quoted in the article
• Simplicius, commentary on the Categories (Predicamenta), as quoted in the article

Mentioned

• Thomas Aquinas, on the four groups of names of God — Summa Contra Gentiles IV, ch. 15 (inferred: verified source)
• Thomas Aquinas, commentary on the Sentences (motion of the angels); Summa Theologiae I (“prima pars”; simplicity of God); commentaries on Divine Names and on De Causis
• Albert the Great, commentary on the Celestial Hierarchy
• Augustine, De Trinitate (he is unsure of the place)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics V, VII, IX; De Anima II; Physics I preamble; Categories
• Porphyry (Isagoge, inferred) on the five predicables
• Liber de Causis
• Shakespeare: Hamlet (Kittredge’s notes), Coriolanus, the romances, Romeo and Juliet, “things in motion sooner catch the eye”

His questions #

• What are the four groups of names said of God? Negative names and relation-names (from creatures); names for a real distinction in God (Father, Son, Spirit) and names founded in God without real distinction (good, perfect).
• How many distinctions do you need to distinguish the seven sacraments? Five (two vs. five; three vs. two; then three and two subdivided).
• Am I man himself, or do I partake of human nature? Partake — but the axiom does not yield a man himself, since man’s nature is material and individual.
• What’s wrong with the Manichaean and Platonic arguments from the axiom? The bad is a lack and cannot be a nature or exist; man cannot be immaterial.
• Does lacking the potency of matter mean the angels are pure act like God? No; they receive existence from God and are in potency to it.
• “Pure” — what does it mean? Without passive ability; negative in meaning though affirmative in grammar, like “simple.”
• To us, what act is most known? Motion, since knowledge begins from the senses.
• Is it enough to love the woman (or wisdom, or office) to pursue her? No; you need hope of overcoming the difficulties — hence hope as well as charity.
• Would you get bored just looking at God forever? Left as a joke about people imagining heaven as a football game; not resolved.