Infused Habits and the Growth of Habits: Carrying Words Over, Greatness as Perfection, and the Four Opinions on More and Less

Orientation #

He does not say what was done last time or what comes next; the class simply continues the replies of the article on infused habits and moves into the next question, stopping in the middle of the body of q. 52 a. 1 (“Thomas has got to sort things out”). The previous class treated q. 51 on the causes of habits, the next continues q. 52 a. 1 on why some forms admit more and less.

The class, in order #

1. Why God infuses habits; evil in men “for the most part” (“notice the difference between these two reasons”) #

Point: of Thomas’s two reasons for infused habits, the first is the essential one — a habit we need which nature cannot produce at all; the second only produces something we could acquire naturally.

• Reply to obj. 1 (does God treat men unequally?): God in his own nature is equally toward all, but “according to the order of his own wisdom, for a certain reason, what he gives to some he does not give” to others — because he sees the particular need.
• Aside that grows into a lesson: Thomas on providence must answer why there is malum in specie humana ut in pluribus (evil in the human race for the most part). Two reasons: (1) original sin; (2) from man’s nature — he is born without the virtues that dispose him toward his end. Aristotle in the De Anima: a tablet on which nothing is written; Averroes: the mind at first is like prime matter, open to all things. “There’s more ways to be bad than to be good”, so left to chance one ends up bad unless brought up well.
• Aristotle in the Ethics: how a man is brought up makes “no little difference… a great deal of difference… or rather, all the difference”; and “such as a man is by his habits, so does the end appear to him” — the lusty man sees sense pleasure as the goal; the disordered ambitious man (Richard III, Macbeth) sees kingship as everything, even if he must kill on the way. Hence one cannot be prudent without the virtues: if the end is wrong, one cannot judge what suits the end.
• Examples of “more ways to miss than to hit”: TV cooking contests, where starting from scratch nearly everyone spoils something (too dry, too seasoned); the family coffee cake made with coffee grounds.
• Student remark: a civilization that jettisons the very concept of virtue is heading for collective disaster; people now talk ethics without virtues and vices. He agrees (“this could be done”).
• Opening chatter: a priest who learned many languages; Catherine of Siena taught to read by the Lord; a Padre Pio biography (Ruffin?) where cures were purely by grace, the physical impediment remaining.

2. Nothing against what suits nature (“does not exclude, but that God some things”) #

Point (reply to obj. 2): that God acts in all things according to their mode does not exclude his doing what nature cannot do; it only follows that he does nothing against what is suitable to nature.

• Man naturally desires to know what a thing is and its cause; philosophy begins with wonder (Aristotle); ultimately to know what God is. But one cannot know what God is except face to face. So the beatific vision is not against nature but fulfils what is natural “in an overabundant way”.

3. Acts from an infused habit confirm it (“do not cause another habit”) #

Point (reply to obj. 3): since habits come from repeated acts, would acts from an infused habit generate a second habit? No — they confirm the one already there.

• Confessing the faith at Sunday Mass does not produce another faith but strengthens the one you have; an act of love from charity does not make a second charity but confirms it.
• Thomas’s comparison: medicinal remedies given to a man already healthy by nature do not cause another health but corroborate the health he had.

4. Q. 52: do habits grow, and how? (“the topic of the growth of habits”) #

Point: the prologue’s three questions — whether habits grow; whether by addition; whether each act makes the habit grow (since there have to be a number of acts).

• The early Greek philosophers already spoke of learning making the mind grow.
• Growth by addition is how a city grows: Shrewsbury, where he moved in 1969, once had farms (they used to stop after Mass so the kids could talk to the horses); now houses added on and cars lined up to the second entrance.

5. The objections and sed contra of a. 1 (“growth is about quantity”) #

1. Growth is about quantity (Physics V); habits are in the genus of quality (as shown earlier); so no growth. He: obviously “growth” is equivocal, said first of quantity — Monsignor Dionne’s phrase, “he can’t move the word”; Thomas will explain how it is moved. A good way to begin: an objection makes you stop and think.
2. A habit is a perfection (Physics VII); perfection implies an end, and at the end you can go no further — one meaning of “perfect” in the fifth book of wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics V] is what has reached its end. So no increase.
3. Whatever receives more and less is altered (water on the stove: cold, warm, hot); but there is no alteration in habits (Physics VII).

• Sed contra: faith is a habit and it grows — “Lord, increase our faith”; the father of the sick boy, “I believe, help my unbelief.”
• On translating fides: “faith” or “belief” (accepting without question); English “faith” gets mixed with hope (“I have faith in you” = trust). Belief is also human: “I believe Euclid” before seeing the demonstration, because he has shown one thing after another. Here it is believing God, a theological virtue. Augetur may be “grow” or “increase”; “habits grow” sounds odd, though “different habits grow” is fine.

6. Words of quantity carried over to spiritual things (“carried over from bodily quantities”) #

Point: Thomas’s first step — growth, like other words of quantity, is transferred from bodily quantities to spiritual things because of the connaturality of our understanding to bodily things, which fall under imagination.

• How a word is carried over: the prima impositio (first placing-upon), then reason picks it up and places it on a second thing for a reason. Equivocal by chance vs. by reason: his student Richard and his older brother Richard — no reason, no connection. By reason: either by the ratio of the second to the first (“being/thing” placed on substances like man and dog, carried to their shape, size, disposition, because these are of the first), or by a likeness; and other ways besides.
• Translatio (carrying across) and Greek metaphora have the same etymology, but English split them: “metaphor” carries the word, not the meaning (“honey” from the bees’ substance to the wife); “translation” carries the meaning, not the word (homo, anthropos → man). Thomas’s translatio nominis is our “metaphor”, not our “translation”.
• Thomas: all our words seem taken from imagination, from the continuous. Senses of “in”: first, bodies in this room; then part in whole, species in genus and genus in species, form in matter, whole in parts, “I’ve got you in my power”, “left my heart in San Francisco”.
• Aristotle’s senses of “beginning” in Metaphysics V (handout): first in the continuous — point begins the line, line the surface, surface the body; second, where it is convenient to begin (going to Boston he starts from the middle of the road where he lives); third, the fundamental part — foundation of a house, keel of a ship, heart of a man. In all these the beginning is in the thing. Fourth: not in the thing — he the beginning of his children, the carpenter of the table. Fifth: beginnings in the mind — Euclid’s definitions, axioms, postulates. Sixth: any cause, even an end. But the first is tied to imagination.
• Hence geometry is the science most proportioned to us, in a way more fundamental than arithmetic, being more imaginable. Carried over even to God (“great”) — “let’s not go all the way to God today.”

7. “Great” means brought to a suitable perfection (“brought to a suitable perfection of its quantity”) #

Point: in bodies a thing is magnum as brought to the perfection suitable to its quantity; so in forms “great” means perfect; and since good has the notion of the perfect, Augustine says that in things great not in bulk, to be greater is the same as to be better.

• “Fully grown” = perfect size for the kind: trees, animals, ant vs. elephant; a quantity great in a man (“a giant”) is not great in another thing. In forms: Albert the Great, Gregory and Leo the Great, now some say John Paul the Great. “Little man” is an insult: not yet full size. Girls in high heels wanting the perfect height; the woman wants a taller partner.
• Augustine’s Latin: quae non mole magna sunt, idem est esse maius quam melius — four M’s, alliteration (at the beginning of words, as rhyme is at the end). English versions give “in quantity” for mole (he asks the class for their translation; leaves the exact sense of mole to be looked up).
• Aside on translation losing the spirit: “Full fathom five thy father lies” cannot alliterate in French; Samuel Johnson — the poets force us to learn the language; De Koninck giving Dionne Shakespeare in English; Father Bole and Monsignor read Shakespeare in English better than the natives; Homer in Greek; a translator’s note on Hesiod, dactyls (“Merrily, merrily shall I live now”) coming out anapestic in English. Philosophers translate better than poets, but with problems: he renders epistēmē not by one word but “a reasoned-out understanding” (the Greek carries the sense of coming to a halt, after a motion — as opposed to the natural understanding at the beginning). “Category” comes from courtroom accusation (katēgoria in the Gospels’ accusing of Christ) — Warren Murray’s title “the ten supreme accusations”: to try you I must say something of you; English “category” loses this. Latin praedicamentum (“said of”) gave English “predicament”, a situation you can’t get out of — and indeed one in quantity cannot get into quality, a square cannot get out of quadrilateral; people fear being labelled and pigeonholed.
• Growth ↔ perfection: a plant grows to its perfect height. Thomas compares baptism, confirmation, Eucharist to the living soul’s generation, growth, nutrition: confirmation is growing to full height, constituted a soldier of Christ — the slap on the cheek means readiness to receive a blow for Christ.

8. Perfection of the form in itself vs. as partaken (“according as the subject partakes”) #

Point: Thomas’s subtler distinction — the perfection of a form considered (a) according to the form itself, where it is called great or small (great or little health, great or little science), vs. (b) according to the subject’s partaking, where it is more or less (more or less white, more or less healthy).

• (a) Knowing many theorems of geometry (Euclid: thirteen books, forty-eight theorems in Book I) vs. two or three — “I know a little geometry”, “a little French”. (b) You and I understand the same theorem, but one understands it better — more on the side of the subject’s participation.
• The distinction does not mean the form has being apart from matter or subject; it is one consideration according to the notion of the species, another according as it is partaken in the subject. He admits it is “kind of hard to see”.

9. Four opinions, as Simplicius narrates (“there were four opinions among the philosophers”) #

Point: on the intensity and remission of habits and forms, Simplicius (met often here, “an important guy”) reports four opinions in his commentary on the Praedicamenta; Thomas must sort them out — the class ends there.

• Digression on the names: praedicabilia (Porphyry’s genus, species, difference, property, accident) and praedicamenta (the ten categories) are both tied to praedicare, said-of. Porphyry tells Chrysaorius these are useful not only for Aristotle’s Categories but for division (Euclid dividing quadrilateral into square, oblong, rhombus, rhomboid, trapezium; number into odd/even, prime/composite), definition (square: equilateral right-angled quadrilateral — species through genus and differences) and demonstration (proving a property of a species through what it is). What Porphyry does not bring out: he is dividing “name said univocally of many”; he saw this in Thomas’s Summa contra Gentiles on names said of God and creatures — an either-or argument that every name said univocally of many is their genus, species, difference or accident (as he lists it), a complete division.
• The highest genera are said of everything below: substance of bodies, of animals, of man, of you and me. In the Metaphysics Aristotle leads us from logic per modum praedicationis (the brevity of wisdom) and from natural philosophy per modum motus. Logic is dominated by “said of”: Peri Hermeneias (subject and predicate), Prior Analytics (said of all / said of none: if A of all B, A of whatever B is said of), Posterior Analytics (said of necessarily, per se), Topics (really “places”, a transliteration — places to examine whether what is said is accident, genus, property, definition) — all “in the mind”. Thomas begins substance from what is said of it; in theology, with Dionysius, one says, denies, and says in a higher way of God.
• The four opinions: (1) Plotinus and the Platonists — qualities and habits receive more and less because they are material, with an indetermination from the unlimitedness of matter (water more or less hot, candy or wine more or less sweet). (2) Others — qualities in themselves do not receive more and less, but the qualia, the qualified things, do, by diverse participation: justice is not more or less, but the just man is (“every man has his price; I’m more just than you or less unjust”). Aristotle touches this in the Praedicamenta — English “predicaments” loses “said of”. (3) The Stoics, in between — some habits in themselves receive more and less, the arts; some not, the virtues. (4) Some — immaterial qualities and forms do not receive more and less, material ones do.
• Closing aside: the accounts of Thomas falling down to pray and then “Ah, now I see it.”

His words #

• malum in specie humana ut in pluribus: evil in the human race for the most part.
• “such as a man is by his habits, so does the end appear to him”: Aristotle’s principle for why virtues are needed for prudence.
• growth / increase: his two renderings of augetur; “grow” first said of quantity.
• fifth book of wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics V].
• faith / belief: his two renderings of fides; belief = accepting without question; distinguished from hope (trust).
• prima impositio: the first placing of a word upon a thing.
• equivocal by chance vs. by reason: by reason either through the ratio of the second to the first or through likeness.
• translatio nominis / metaphora: carrying over of the word (our “metaphor”), as against English “translation”, which carries the meaning.
• connaturality of our understanding to bodily things: Thomas’s reason for the transfer.
• magnum: great, as brought to a suitable perfection of quantity; in forms, perfect.
• mole: “in quantity” in the English of Augustine; he wants the more concrete sense looked up.
• alliteration: sameness at the beginning of words, rhyme at the end.
• reasoned-out understanding / knowledge: his rendering of epistēmē (a halt after motion) [ed.: science].
• category / katēgoria: accusation, something said of you; praedicamentum → “predicament”.
• praedicabilia / praedicamenta: Porphyry’s five and Aristotle’s ten, both from praedicare, said-of.
• per modum praedicationis / per modum motus: the ways from logic and from natural philosophy into the Metaphysics.
• qualia: the qualified (concrete), which are more or less though the quality itself is not.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, Summa Theologiae Ia-IIae q. 51 a. 4 ad 1, ad 2, ad 3 (article number inferred; the replies on infused habits).
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae Ia-IIae q. 52 prologue and a. 1, objections, sed contra, and body up to the four opinions.
• Aristotle, Metaphysics V, senses of “beginning” (Aquinas, lectio 3, from his handout — inferred).
• Augustine, “in things great but not in bulk, to be greater is the same as to be better” (quoted in the article; no locus given).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Physics V (growth about quantity) and VII (habit a perfection; no alteration in habits); De Anima (tablet on which nothing is written); Ethics (upbringing; habits and the end); Categories / Praedicamenta; Peri Hermeneias; Prior and Posterior Analytics; Topics.
• Averroes (mind like prime matter); Simplicius, commentary on the Praedicamenta; Porphyry’s book on the five predicables, addressed to Chrysaorius; Dionysius on names of God.
• Thomas, Summa contra Gentiles (whether any name is said univocally of God and creatures); Thomas on divine providence and on the three sacraments compared to the soul’s operations (no loci).
• Scripture: “Lord, increase our faith”; “I believe, help my unbelief”; the accusations of Christ in the Greek Gospels.
• Euclid, Elements (Book I’s 48 theorems; definitions of square, divisions of quadrilateral and number); Shakespeare, The Tempest, Richard III, Macbeth; Homer; Hesiod, Theogony and Works and Days; Samuel Johnson.

His questions #

• Why does God give infused habits to some and not others — isn’t that unequal? He is equal in his nature, but by the order of his wisdom gives to some what he does not give to others, seeing their need.
• Is giving man the beatific vision against his nature? No; it fulfils the natural desire to know the cause and what God is, overabundantly.
• Do the acts that come from an infused habit produce another habit? No; they confirm the one already there, as medicine corroborates a healthy man’s health.
• How do you translate fides? Faith, or belief (accepting without question); not to be confused with hope.
• Is a name equivocal by chance or by reason, and why is it carried over? Two Richards: by chance; “being” to accidents, or “honey” to the wife: by reason, through relation to the first or likeness.
• Why are words of quantity carried over to spiritual things? Because of the connaturality of our understanding to bodily things, which fall under imagination.
• Why is a form called great? Because “great” means brought to its suitable perfection, and in forms perfect is better.
• How do they translate mole in your English text? “In quantity”; the concrete sense left to be looked up.
• What did Porphyry not bring out about the five predicables? That they divide “name said univocally of many” — seen from Thomas’s Contra Gentiles.
• Which of the four opinions is right? Left open; “Thomas has got to sort things out.”