Summa I-II q.57: Order of the Virtues, Speculative Habits as Virtues, and Understanding, Science and Wisdom

Orientation #

He says “we’re up to question fifty-seven” and refers back to an earlier point that foresight is more a virtue than geometry, and that faith is a virtue because moved by the will (prev. lecture, the same distinction of the two ways a habit is a virtue). Article 6 “we’ll have to pass until we get there.” The class ends inside the reply to the first objection of a. 2. The previous class treated the subjects of virtue (sense appetites, interior senses, will); the next continues q. 57 into art and prudence.

The class, in order #

1. The prooemium and its strange order (“why doesn’t he begin with the theological virtues”) #

The question on distinction of virtues divides into three: virtues of reason (he avoids “intellectual,” a pejorative word in his vocabulary), moral, theological. Puzzle: in theology everything is referred to God, and in the Secunda Secundae Thomas takes the theological virtues first, then the four cardinal virtues with the virtues attached to each; here the order is reversed. His preliminary: the theological order “is not followed everywhere in a kind of simple way.”

2. Digression: the road in natural philosophy vs. the road in wisdom (“not be too fanatical about saying”) #

Point: an order that holds of a science as a whole need not hold of every part of it.

• Natural philosophy: from general to particular and down into matter — the eight books of Natural Hearing, the book on the universe, generation and corruption, minerals; then again from De Anima (soul defined as first act of a body equipped with tools, so not fully abstracted) through the intermediary works (sense and sensible, memory and reminiscence) to history, generation, parts of animals. Usque ad elementa, as the Latin prooemium says.
• Wisdom: toward the immaterial and from less universal to more universal. Book IX (act and ability): begins with motion and the ability for motion, then act universally, discovering other abilities (for form, to think). Substance: material substance in VII-VIII, a general understanding, then immaterial substances. The one: you ascend from the one that is the beginning of number to the one convertible with being — hard, and Thomas notes Plato and Aristotle each attribute to one what belongs to the other.
• But exceptions: the eight books of Natural Hearing go from motion toward the mover, moved then unmoved, and the unmoved mover is shown not to be a body — one of the two main places one learns there is something immaterial. The other: De Anima goes living soul (plant), sensing soul (animal, already some immateriality in knowing), understanding soul (can exist after the body’s death). Also De Anima sometimes manifests sense through understanding, the reverse of its usual way (sensing is undergoing, later reason undergoes too).
• Summa Contra Gentiles (“my favorite book”): God in himself, as beginning, as end — done twice, first what reason and faith can know, then (book IV) what only faith knows (Trinity, Incarnation, last things).
• Geometry: plane then solid is not general to particular (the sphere is not a kind of circle, the cube not a kind of square) but simple to composed — as the Book I definitions run point, line, angle, figure. Yet the first theorems know the line (simpler) through the equilateral triangle constructed by two circles (more composed). So “you’ve got to not be too fanatical about saying that there’s no exception.”

3. Why reason’s virtues, then moral, then theological (“more like God”) #

1. Condescension to our need to go from more known to less known: virtues of reason and moral virtues are more known to us than theological; when he gets to details (II-II) he reverses.
2. Second puzzle: Thomas takes intellectual before moral, Aristotle the reverse (Ethics II-V moral, VI intellectual). Answer: something like all the virtues of reason is in God in a superior way, but no liberality with money or temperance with food and drink in God — so reason’s virtues are more like what is in God, a fitting order in a science about God. Confirmed by II-II: prudence, then justice (both in God properly — distributive, not commutative), then fortitude (God is strong only metaphorically) and temperance (not even metaphorically: “we wouldn’t call God chaste, or sober”); Aristotle takes fortitude and temperance in book III, justice in V, prudence in VI.
3. Also the virtues of reason are fewer — five, the same five Aristotle distinguishes at the start of Ethics VI. “We’ll let him get away with this.”

• Aside: SCG takes the human soul before the separated substances, the reverse of the Summa (angels first), but SCG first considers the understanding substance in general, which gives him leeway.

4. The six articles surveyed (“they divided the three parts of prudence”) #

• a. 1: speculative vs. practical reason differ by end — to know the truth vs. the making or doing of something. Martha and Mary: Mary chose the contemplative, “the better part,” not taken away because continued and perfected in the next world; house- and chair-making ends with this world. Recall (prev. lecture): foresight more a virtue than geometry because a virtue in the fullest sense also inclines to use well, and foresight presupposes rectitude of appetite by the moral virtues; likewise faith is a virtue because moved by the will (Augustine: no one believes unless he wills).
• a. 2: three speculative virtues: wisdom, science (reasoned-out knowledge), understanding (Aristotle nous, Thomas intellectus; his “natural understanding”: what you understand without reasoning it out).
• a. 3: is art a virtue — same question as for speculative habits, since it needs no rectitude of appetite: “I can be a good cook and still be a glutton.”
• a. 4: prudence not asked whether a virtue (it is one in the full sense) but whether distinct from art: doing vs. making. Every making is a doing, not every doing a making; making gets a new name because there is a product, the other keeps the name doing.
• a. 5: is foresight necessary to man — not asked of wisdom, science, understanding: you needn’t be a geometer to be saved, but you must live and be directed.
• a. 6: eubulia (good counsel), synesis and gnome (two kinds of judgment) as virtues attached to prudence; the main thing in prudence is command. Story: brother Mark and two friends in Quebec — one imaginative (counsel), Mark with judgment but lackadaisical, the third a “go, go guy” (command); they had to be together to do the prudent thing. Augustine decided to convert “but not quite yet”: judgment without command.

5. Article 1, objections and sed contra (“Theorists don’t do anything”) #

• Terms: speculative (Latin), theoretical (Greek), “looking” in English — he shocks by saying “looking philosophy”; hence his liking for “theorem” (something to look at) over “proposition” (from prothesis, what he proposes to prove) for Euclid’s 48 in Book I.
• Obj. 1: virtue is a habitus operativus; speculative is divided against practical, i.e. operative. Anecdotes: the colleague’s wife interrupts when he leans back from the book — the moment of absorbing what was read; his mother did the same (“What are you thinking about?”).
• Obj. 2: virtue is of what makes a man happy; speculative habits consider natural and divine things, not human acts. Felix from “fruitful”: happiness the natural result of virtuous activity as fruit of the plant’s; happiness the reward of virtue; Thomas: virtue the road to happiness, vice the road to misery (“in the newspaper every day”). Aristotle calls first philosophy theology in Metaphysics VI, not divine as ours is, though about God; “we have to show that our science has more right to the name.”
• Obj. 3: science and virtue are diverse genera, not one under the other (Topics IV, the book on dialectical reasoning).
• Sed contra: only speculative habits consider necessary things, and Ethics VI lays down intellectual virtues in the part of the soul considering what cannot be otherwise (as opposed to foresight and art, where things can be done differently).

6. Article 1, the response (“makes one use that ability well”) #

1. Every virtue is said in order to the good; a habit is a virtue in two ways: (a) it gives the ability for doing well; (b) in addition it makes one use the ability well.
2. Way (b) belongs only to habits regarding the desiring part, since the desiring power makes us use all our powers and habits. Aside: Voltaire reading the Summa’s objections to use against unsuspecting Catholics — misusing it.
3. Speculative habits perfect only the intellectual part, so they are virtues in way (a): the good work of the understanding is consideration of the true; not in way (b). Illustration: using speculative knowledge to deceive students — his Hegel lecture “showing” the Hegelian method superior to the syllogism, and a student thanking him for it; trying to convince students the whole is not always greater than the part.
4. Having a speculative science does not incline one to use it; use is by the will moving. So virtues perfecting the will — charity, justice — make one use the speculative habits well (hence justice properly in God, who has will; courage and temperance are in irascible and concupiscible and God “is not an emotional guy”). Acts of these habits can be meritorious if from charity (Gregory, Moralia VI). Note he says the contemplative is of greater merit than the active — “he’s quite the man in moral theology.”

7. Article 1, replies (“a certain beginning of perfect beatitude”) #

• Ad 1: work is twofold, exterior and interior; practical/operative as divided against speculative is taken from the exterior work; the speculative habit is ordered to the interior work of considering the true, and so is operative.
• Ad 2: virtue is “of” things as objects or as acts. As objects, speculative virtues are not of the things by which man becomes blessed — except that God, the object of complete beatitude, is summum speculabile (“supreme object of contemplation”; he prefers “to be looked at most of all”). As acts, they are of those things: meritorious, and a beginning of perfect beatitude, which consists in contemplation of the true. “That’s very strong what he says here.” Student exchange: Thomas on the state of perfection quoting Origen — one does not become perfect at once but begins the contemplation that leads to perfection; the Dominican motto contemplata aliis tradere; the four things Thomas says in SCG about this most perfect activity.
• Ad 3: science is divided against virtue in the second sense (pertaining to the desiring power). Naming: the genus name is kept by the one that has it most perfectly, the other gets a new name — “we met that way of speaking quite often.”

8. Article 2, objections (“three are about what is from a beginning”) #

• Preface: Aristotle (Ethics VI) names five virtues of reason; Thomas here names three, with art and foresight the other two. Aristotle takes science, art, foresight first, then wisdom and understanding: three about what is from beginnings, two about beginnings — the beginnings in our knowledge (intellectus) and the beginning of all things (God). “It’s a very subtle thing.” Why: the two about beginnings are obscure — one at the very start of knowledge, passed over unnoticed; the other at the very end, least known. Everyone knows geometry, the carpenter’s and cook’s art, political and military foresight; “what’s wisdom? Just a word to them.” Thomas divides three speculative, two practical; Aristotle sometimes too. “The rule of two and three” is kept in more than one way.
• Obj. 1: a species should not be divided against its genus (not “dogs and cats and animals,” not “human beings and a woman”); but wisdom is quaedam scientia (Ethics VI). Greek: sophia vs. episteme, yet in the book on sophia he calls it an episteme — “hopelessly mixed up.” Same equivocal-by-reason as with virtue, but here the species takes the new name because it adds something noteworthy: science knows through causes, wisdom knows the very first cause, the cause of causes. His granddaughter Sophia: “wisdom is the knowledge of God.”
• Obj. 2: powers, habits, acts distinguished by the formal notion of the object, not the material object. Illustration: the formal object of the eye is color, not books (fake book-boxes for drinks); the table’s shape known by eye through color, by hand through hardness; sight and touch not distinguished by knowing books or tables; recognizing a voice on the phone, yet the person is not the formal object of hearing, sound is. So since the principle is the reason for knowing the conclusion, understanding of beginnings should not be another habit from science of conclusions.
• Obj. 3: the understanding is rational essentially (will and emotions by participation); it syllogizes dialectically as well as demonstratively; so opinion should be a speculative virtue as science is.
• Sed contra: the Philosopher in Ethics VI lays down only three — “a heck of a lot of confidence in this guy called the philosopher.”

9. Article 2, the response (“wisdom judges and orders about all things”) #

1. Speculative virtue perfects the looking understanding in considering the true, its good work.
2. The true is known either through itself or through another. Known through itself: has itself as beginning, perceived at once (the whole is more than one of its parts) — the habit is understanding, habit of beginnings.
3. Known through another: reached by investigation of reason, and has the notion of a term or limit (episteme: coming to a halt, reaching the goal).
4. Last in two ways: last in some particular genus, or last with respect to the whole of human knowledge. Since what is known later by us is prior and more known by nature (Physics I, prooemium), the last in all human knowledge is first and most knowable by nature — God is most knowable, but not to us. About this is wisdom, considering the highest causes (Metaphysics I).
   • Aside on altissimas causas: the Greeks imagine the cause above, the effect hanging from it (“pendant”); the native English word is “ground,” the underlying cause, so “understand” = know what stands under; the servants’ pun in Two Gentlemen of Verona (“even my staff understands me”) — a lousy pun that makes you stop and think.
5. Hence wisdom judges and orders about all things: perfect and universal judgment only by resolution to the first causes. Science perfects the understanding for what is last in this or that genus, so there are diverse sciences; wisdom is only one.
6. Thus in the division two members are lowest species (one understanding, one wisdom) and one is a genus (many reasoned-out knowledges: geometry, arithmetic, natural philosophy). Not impossible: equilateral triangles all one shape but isosceles many (equal sides twice or three times the base); all squares alike, oblongs not; animal into beast and man — all men one species, not all beasts.

10. Ad 1 and the equivocation of words (“every respectable word in philosophy is equivocal”) #

• Obj. 1 (and obj. 3 of a. 1) rest on a word problem. Can you think without words? You can’t tell others without them, and hardly know what you think yourself. The most common mistake in thinking is equivocation of words; people “don’t understand words equivocal by reason.”
• Ad 1: wisdom is a certain science in what is common to all sciences — demonstrating conclusions from beginnings; but it has something its own above all sciences: it judges about all things, and not only about conclusions but about the first beginnings (Aristotle defends the principle of contradiction). So it has the notion of a more perfect virtue than science.
• His own defence of an axiom: mother didn’t like “man is an animal”; “an animal that has reason” — “that’s better, Dwight.” Animal is a part of man, yet animal includes dog, cat, horse — so a part includes more than the whole? Resolved by Metaphysics V: composed whole put together from parts vs. universal whole said of its parts; “animal” as universal whole vs. as composing part of the definition of man (with “has reason,” or “two-footed”).
• Wisdom vs. knowledge in English: wisdom is a form of knowledge, yet “people have a lot of knowledge these days but not much wisdom” — equivocal by reason: one shares what the other has and adds something that makes it stand out, so gets a new name. “Careful Thomas is here.”
• Asides: the priest’s “treat the girl like a person, not a thing” — she’s not a person, not a thing, “she’s nothing”; Monsignor Dionne on the tendency to make things univocal to simplify; Charles De Koninck: every respectable word in philosophy is equivocal; only a mind depending on words and senses is dogged by this. Recording ends here (ad 2 and ad 3 of a. 2 not reached).

His words #

• virtues of reason — his preferred name for intellectual virtues, “intellectual” being pejorative to him
• Natural Hearing — the eight books [ed.: Physics]; the book on the universe [ed.: De Caelo]
• wisdom — Aristotle’s first philosophy [ed.: Metaphysics]; “book nine of wisdom” etc.
• act and ability — [ed.: act and potency]
• usque ad elementa — the descent of natural philosophy into matter (Latin prooemium)
• foresight — prudentia [ed.: prudence]
• looking / speculative / theoretical — Latin, Greek, English of the same; “looking philosophy”
• theorem vs. proposition (prothesis) — something to look at vs. what is proposed for proof
• habitus operativus — a habit that does something
• felix / felicitas — from “fruitful”; happiness the reward of virtue
• reasoned-out knowledge — scientia, episteme (coming to a halt); natural understanding — nous, intellectus
• summum speculabile — God, “to be looked at most of all”
• contemplata aliis tradere — Dominican motto
• eubulia, synesis, gnome — good counsel; two kinds of judgment
• doing vs. making — making gets a new name because of the product
• altissimas causas — cause imagined above the effect; English “ground,” “understand”
• equivocal by reason — one meaning has what is common plus something that stands out, hence a new name
• rule of two and three — a division of five is understood through a three and a two

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 57, prooemium (translated and discussed)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 57, a. 1 (objections, sed contra, response, three replies)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 57, a. 2 (objections, sed contra, response, ad 1)
• handout: “The Matter and Order of Wisdom,” p. 11 (verified source; passage not identifiable from the transcript)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics II-VI (five virtues of reason at the start of VI; fortitude and temperance III, justice V)
• Aristotle, Topics IV; Metaphysics I (highest causes), V (kinds of whole), VI (theology), VII-IX; Physics I (prooemium) and VIII; De Anima and the intermediary works
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles (order of the whole; the four things about the most perfect activity); Summa Theologiae II-II (order of theological and cardinal virtues); Thomas on the state of perfection, quoting Origen (student)
• Augustine (no one believes unless he wills; “not quite yet”); Gregory, Moralia VI
• Luke, Martha and Mary (inferred)
• Euclid, Elements I (definitions; first theorems; triangles)
• Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona (the “understand” pun)
• Voltaire; Hegel; Charles De Koninck; Monsignor Dionne

His questions #

• Why doesn’t he begin with the theological virtues, since in theology everything is referred to God? Condescension to our going from more known to less known; in II-II he reverses the order.
• Why virtues of reason before moral, when Aristotle does the reverse? Reason’s virtues are more like what is in God; many moral virtues (liberality, temperance) have no likeness in God.
• How do speculative and practical reason differ? By their end: to know the truth vs. the making or doing of something.
• Are the speculative habits virtues? Yes, in the first way (ability for good work, considering the true), not in the second (good use, which is by the will).
• Is a theorist doing anything? Yes, the interior work of the understanding; “practical” is taken from exterior work.
• How translate summum speculabile? “Supreme object of contemplation” was offered; he prefers “to be looked at most of all.”
• Why does Aristotle divide the five into three and two? Three about what is from beginnings, two about beginnings, the latter obscure at either end of knowledge.
• Is wisdom a science or divided against it? Both: a science in what is common, but with something its own (judging all things and the first beginnings), so a new name — equivocal by reason.
• Can you think without words? Left open; but the most common error in thinking is equivocation of words.