Summa I-II Q.55 aa.3-4 and the Start of Q.56: Virtue as a Good Habit, Augustine's Definition of Virtue, and the Subject of Virtue

Orientation #

He refers back to what Thomas “said above” in Article 2 (virtue is an operative habit) and, at the end, moves on to “the subject of virtue” (q.56), stopping at its proemium: “I’m going to stop there.” The previous class covered q.55 aa.1-2, the next takes up q.56 aa.1-3 on the subject of virtue.

The class, in order #

1. Article 3 objections: virtue of sin, potent in drinking wine, perfected in infirmity (“it seems that it’s not of the meaning of virtue”) #

The three objections all try to attach “virtue” to something bad.

1. Sin is always something bad, yet St Paul (Epistle to Corinthians) speaks of the “virtue of sin”. He notes in advance that Paul also calls concupiscence a “law” (“the law of my flesh”), an extended, quasi-metaphorical use.
2. Virtus corresponds to power, and power is toward good and bad alike: Isaiah 5, “woe to you who are potent in drinking wine, and strong men in mixing drunkenness”. Aside: “it’s directed towards me, I guess”; a student: no one is more powerful than the devil.
3. 2 Corinthians: “virtue is made perfect in infirmity”, and infirmity is an evil. “What a contradiction.” Sed contra: Augustine (On the Morals of the Church): virtue makes the soul best; Aristotle, Ethics VII: virtue quae bonum facit habentem, makes its haver good and his work good.

• His two eyes: the left eye sees clearly, the right is blurry, so the left is his “virtuous eye” and the right his “vicious eye”; 20/20 vision makes the eye good and its act (seeing) good. Why want a dull knife?
• Student on Genesis: God looked first on Cain, then on his offering; on Abel, then his offering: first the man, then his work.
• Aside: “wonder how long he had to think… to think up these objections.”

2. Article 3 body: the ultimate of a power is good (“virtue implies the perfection of a power”) #

Virtue is always ordered to the good because the last thing a power can reach is a good.

1. Virtue implies the perfection of a power, so the virtue of each thing is determined to the ultimate it is capable of (De Caelo I).
2. The ultimate a power can achieve is necessarily good, because everything bad implies defect. His case: the ability to be mistaken cannot be the virtue of reason; “the farthest I can do is an error” is “pretty bad”.
3. Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4: everything bad is weak (infirmum). Aside: Thomas’s communion prayer, infirmus … ad medicum vitae [ed.: garbled in recording], shows what he means by infirm. Conclusion: human virtue, an operative habit (Art. 2), is a good habit and operative of good.

3. Article 3 replies: metaphorical “good”, drunkenness, infirmity of the body (“just as perfect, so also good is said metaphorically”) #

Ad 1: “perfect” and “good” are said metaphorically of bad things (a perfect thief, a good robber, per Aristotle), so “virtue” is said metaphorically of evil. Illustrations of the metaphor: a house “completely” consumed by fire is as far from complete as it can be; “you’re a complete ass”; “is my glass completely empty?”; “perfectly dull”. Story: a seminarian called a “complete ass” by his Latin professor replied that if Samson killed a Philistine army with the jawbone of an ass, think what God could do with a complete one. Thus the “virtue of sin” is said to be law because through the law, occasionally (accidental causality), sin is magnified, reaching its maximum: cf. the Romans 7 reading just heard; a student adds Paul’s “fill up the quota of your sins”; his case: Hitler, the Holocaust getting going only late in the war. Ad 2: the evil of drunkenness (nimiae potationis) is a defect of the order of reason; with that defect an inferior power may be perfect in its own kind, but such perfection, being with a defect of reason, cannot be called human virtue. His case: the men who go out and kill ten or fifteen people, a perfection of the lower powers. Ad 3: reason is shown more perfect the more it can conquer or tolerate the infirmities of the body and lower parts; so virtue, attributed to reason, is perfected in infirmity not of reason but of the body. A student: one could also say one turns to God and is strengthened by God rather than natural powers. He: “let’s get to that answer today” (see segment 7, ad 6).

• Asides: Tolkien disliked Hitler’s misuse of German myth; a story of a saint leading the devil by the nose until he curses in German; Ratzinger on a novel where the Antichrist is a scripture scholar; Mark Twain on the German language and a translator who walked out of his booth.

4. Article 4: six objections against Augustine’s definition (“that virtue is the good quality of the mind”) #

The definition (from Augustine) is: a good quality of the mind by which one lives rightly, which no one uses badly, which God works in us without us. Objections:

1. Virtue is the goodness of man (it makes its haver good), but goodness is not good, as whiteness is not white; so “good quality” is unsuitable. His gloss: is health healthy? Health is that by which the body, not health, is healthy; so with virtue.
2. No difference is more common than its genus, since it divides the genus; but good, convertible with being, is more common than quality. “Put that in your pipe and smoke it.”
3. Augustine, De Trinitate XII: mens is what is not common to us and beasts; but there are virtues of the irrational parts (Ethics III). He notes mens usually includes the will; the question is how exactly one uses the word.
4. Rectitude (recte vivitur) pertains to justice: right and just are the same; justice is a species, and one does not define a genus by a species.
5. Whoever is proud of a thing uses it badly, and many superbiunt virtute; Augustine’s Rule: pride enters even into good works so that they perish. His case: Augustine on the chaste virgins who grew proud and fell. A student: the letter naming humility first, second and third, since pride can insinuate itself into every good work but humility; his aside: Dion had to watch for pride because he understood Thomas better than anyone. “That’s a subtle one.”
6. Man is justified through virtue, but Augustine (on John, “you will do greater things”) says: He who created you without you will not justify you without you. Sed contra: Augustine, especially De libero arbitrio II, from whose words the definition is collected.

• Asides: six objections is unusual for the Summa, “he’s getting carried away, too much fun.” Thomas’s authorities are mainly Aristotle and Augustine, Cicero a little.

5. Article 4 body: the definition gathers all four causes (“the perfect meaning of anything is gathered”) #

The definition is perfect because the complete meaning of a thing comes from all its causes, and this one has them all.

• Formal cause, from genus and difference: qualitas bona; genus quality, difference good. Thomas’s “modest suggestion”: better to put habit, the proximate genus (genus propinquum), in place of quality. His parallel: defining square as a rectilineal figure instead of by its genus quadrilateral. Aside: when Thomas disagrees with Albert he says “someone said this” without naming him.
• Material cause: virtue has no matter ex qua, like other accidents, but a matter about which (the object) and a matter in which (the subject). The object determines the species, so it cannot enter a definition of virtue in general; hence the subject stands in for matter: “of the mind”.
• End: since virtue is an operative habit, its end is the operation. Three kinds of operative habit: always toward the bad (vicious habits); sometimes good, sometimes bad (opinion, as to true and false; Thomas on Ethics VI: opinion and suspicion are not virtues); always toward the good, per se (virtue). His case: wisdom as such is always for the good, though one may be proud of it. “By which one lives rightly” separates virtue from the first; “which no one uses badly” from the second, and also from power, which can be used well or badly.
• Efficient cause: the definition is of infused virtue (virtus infusa), “which God works in us without us”, so not of Aristotle’s virtues in the Ethics. Remove that clause and the rest is common to acquired and infused virtue. Aside: the English philosophers objected to “infused” as too sensible, “poured in”; “if it was wine, it would be a real infused.”

6. Replies 1-2: being first grasped; the good of reason (“that which first falls into the understanding is being”) #

Ad 1: Being first falls into the understanding, so to each thing grasped we attribute being, and consequently one and good, which are convertible with being (Aristotle shows being and one convertible in the fourth book of wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics IV], the good in the ninth). So essence is being, one and good; unity too; goodness too. This does not hold of special forms like whiteness and health, since not everything is grasped under the notion of white or healthy. Accidents and non-subsistent forms are called beings not because they have being but because by them something is; likewise good and one. “Wisdom is good because by wisdom I am wise”; so virtue is good because by it something is good. Ad 2: the “good” in the definition is not bonum commune, convertible with being and in plus than quality, but the good of reason: Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4, the good of the soul is to be in accordance with reason. “That’s a very solid thing.” His teaching formula: a good human act is a reasonable act; a good love a reasonable love; a good fear a reasonable fear (a suicide bomber); a good anger a reasonable anger. Aristotle teaches the same; as a boy he memorized a passage of the Nicomachean Ethics on living according to reason, to his father’s puzzlement; his brother and cousin got Uncle Jim reading it and it made sense: “too much common sense” for the college-educated.

• Aside: an email saying we should not try to make gay people straight; his reply: make them Christian first, the rest will take care of itself.

7. Replies 3-6: partaking of reason, rectitude, bad use, “without us” (“except insofar as it partakes of reason”) #

Ad 3: the distinction between the part of the soul essentially reasonable and the part not essentially reasonable but able to partake of reason. Virtue is in the irrational part only as it partakes of reason, so reason or mens is the proper subject of human virtue. Student exchange: when Thomas reaches temperance and fortitude he puts the habit in the appetite, not the mind; he agrees, and holds mens here means the soul in general as it partakes of reason. Thomas quoting Augustine: chastity is not a virtue of the body but of the soul. His example: Mozart’s music, a representation of the emotions in harmony with reason, the best case of emotions partaking of reason; the Romantic period revolts, refusing (as Arceli says [name unclear]) that emotions be subject to reason; rock and roll seems without reason. Mozart’s Symphony 36 and the Jupiter, both in C major, represent magnanimity. Ad 4: rectitude proper to justice concerns exterior things that come into man’s use, the matter of justice; rectitude implying order to a due end and to the divine law, the rule of the human will, is common to every virtue. Rectus is broader than justice: a “right line” is a straight line. Ad 5: one can use virtue badly as an object, when one thinks badly of it, hates it, or is proud of it; not in the act of virtue itself. Student: giving alms for the wrong reason; he: that is accidental. Parallel: a woman’s beauty or modesty as object of lust is per accidens; the beauty itself is not bad, “God made it beautiful to catch a man.” He quotes Cymbeline (Iachimo on knowing “what woman is”; Cymbeline’s “who is’t can read a woman?”) and links “read” to intus legere, intelligere; reading character; Padre Pio reading hearts and ejecting insincere penitents; American soldiers going to him after the war as to the Curé of Ars. Ad 6: infused virtue is caused by God without us acting, but not without our consent; Aristotle’s virtues come by repeated acts; what is done by us God causes in us not without our acting, since He operates in every will and every nature.

• Asides at ad 3: a French driver on the road to Quebec kicking a stone into his new car (“I’m a philosopher, what do I care”); a woman driver ramming him into the car ahead; women driving down the middle of the road to 8:30 Mass, challenged by a student as mere induction. Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony and a library clerk who thought his Prokofiev record was on the wrong speed.

8. Question 56 proemium: the subject of virtue (“whether virtue is in the power of the soul”) #

He reads the six questions of the proemium and previews them. (1) Whether virtue is in a power of the soul as subject: his geometry is not floating around his head but in a power, his reason. (2) Whether one virtue can be in many powers: he would think not, but there may be connections, e.g. foresight and temperance, memory and temperance; the foolhardy man shows a link between vice and opposition to reason. (3) Whether the understanding can be the subject: he has logic, geometry, arithmetic, natural philosophy (“the wisdom of nature, as Shakespeare calls it”), some wisdom and theology “up there”, perhaps a little foresight. (4) The irascible and concupiscible; (5) the sense apprehending powers, eye and ear; (6) last, the will. Why the will last: Plato had reason, the irascible and the concupiscible, with no place left for justice, which became the ordering of all; but justice belongs in the will, so Plato did not see the will as a distinct subject. Plato did see courage in the irascible, temperance in the concupiscible; Aristotle begins (Ethics III) with fortitude and temperance and reaches justice only in book V; Thomas follows his master. “I’m going to stop there.”

• Aside: MacArthur’s foresight keeping the Russians out of Japan; Patton frightening a Russian with his gun, “I believe you would.”

His words #

• quae bonum facit habentem: “makes its haver good”, and his work good (Ethics VII).
• virtuous eye / vicious eye: the eye that sees well vs. the blurry one; virtue of a power.
• infirmum: “weak”, Dionysius’s word for everything bad.
• doing habit: his rendering of operative habit; “operative of something good”.
• occasionally: accidental causality, “through the law sin is magnified”.
• nimiae potationis: too much drinking.
• recte vivitur: “by which one lives rightly”.
• mens, mentum [ed.: mens]: mind; usually includes the will; here the soul as it partakes of reason.
• superbiunt virtute: are proud of their virtue.
• genus propinquum: proximate genus (habit, not quality).
• matter ex qua / about which / in which: none for accidents; the object; the subject.
• virtus infusa: infused virtue, “poured in”.
• bonum commune, in plus: good convertible with being, wider than quality; vs. good of reason.
• fourth book of wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics IV], ninth book: being-one; the good.
• rectus: right, straight (“right line”).
• intus legere, intelligere: to read within.
• wisdom of nature: natural philosophy (Shakespeare’s phrase).

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 55, a. 3 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 55, a. 4 (six objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 56, proemium
• Shakespeare, Cymbeline (Iachimo; “who is’t can read a woman”, quoted from memory)

Mentioned

• St Paul, Corinthians (“virtue of sin”); 2 Corinthians (“virtue made perfect in infirmity”); Romans 7 (“law of my flesh”); “fill up the quota of your sins”
• Isaiah 5 (potent in drinking wine)
• Genesis, Cain and Abel
• Augustine, On the Morals of the Church; De Trinitate XII; the Rule; De libero arbitrio II; commentary on John
• Aristotle, Ethics III, VI (Thomas’s commentary: opinion and suspicion), VII; De Caelo I; Metaphysics IV and IX
• Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4
• Thomas’s prayer before communion
• Tolkien; Mark Twain; Ratzinger on a novel of the Antichrist

His questions #

• Which of my eyes is my virtuous eye? The left, which sees clearly; virtue makes the eye good and its seeing good.
• Can the ability to be mistaken be the virtue of my reason? No; the ultimate of a power is good, evil is defect.
• Why say a house consumed by fire is a “complete” wreck? Metaphorical “complete”: it is as far from complete as it can be; so “virtue” of sin.
• Is health healthy? No; health is that by which the body is healthy, as virtue is that by which one is good.
• Is the difference “good” more common than the genus “quality”? Not the good meant here, which is the good of reason, not bonum commune.
• What’s a good human act, a good love, a good fear, a good anger? A reasonable one (Dionysius: the good of the soul is to be according to reason).
• Does mens here mean only reason? No, the soul generally as it partakes of reason; temperance is in the appetite.
• Can one use virtue badly? As an object (hating it, pride), not in its act; the bad use is per accidens.
• Does God work infused virtue without us? Without us acting, not without our consent.
• Why does Thomas put the will last among subjects of virtue? He follows Aristotle (fortitude, temperance first, justice in book V); Plato had no distinct place for justice.