Summa I-II q.62, a.1–2: Are There Theological Virtues, and How Do They Differ from the Intellectual and Moral Virtues?

Orientation #

He begins: “we’re up to question 62 here,” on the theological virtues. Article 1 refers back to the exemplar virtues “we learned in the previous thing there” (prev. lecture). No announcement of next time. The previous class treated the distinction and Macrobian division of the cardinal virtues; the next takes up the number and order of the theological virtues.

The class, in order #

1. Proemium: the four articles and their order (“Let’s look at the proemium first”) #

The point: the order of the four questions is itself instructive.

• Article 1, whether there are any theological virtues, comes first because, as Aristotle says in the Posterior Analytics, the question an est (does it exist) precedes quid est. Same in the Summa: after the question on sacred doctrine, whether God exists, then the treatise on the essence of God.
• Article 2, whether they are distinguished from the intellectual and moral virtues: more general. Article 3, their distinction among themselves (how many, which); article 4, their order. A student: “can’t order if you don’t know what they are.”
• Aside: his eight-year-old granddaughter “Lady Wisdom” (Sophia) answered three times, “God is simple.”
• Aside: a teacher of his would stop to show the order among the examples in Thomas and Aristotle.

2. Distinction before order (“nothing is before or after itself”) #

The point: order presupposes distinction.

1. Thomas, in the exposition of the Sentences of Peter Lombard, gives the best explanation of order: order in general means a before and after; it includes, or rather presupposes, distinction.
2. He shows this by the axiom of before and after: nothing is before or after itself (today is before tomorrow and after yesterday, but not before or after today). So distinction comes before order.
3. Distinction vs. order: things are distinct when one is not the other; in order when one is before or after the other. So distinction is itself distinct from order — “these things have a way of coming back upon themselves.”

• Reason is the only part of us that knows itself: gnothi seauton (“know thyself”) is addressed especially to reason; my hand cannot know what a hand is. Reflected in logic: one can define a square, but also define definition itself; reason eventually knows itself as the ability for discourse, “looking before and after.”

3. Asides before the first objection (“some consequence yet hanging in the stars”) #

• Don’t look ahead to the bold answer; a discarded library Summa had “yes, no, yes” pencilled after each question for the exam. Don’t underline Aristotle or Thomas — every sentence is important.
• From last night’s Physics II class: Aristotle’s corollary that one should go to the highest cause (akrotatos). Greek and Latin imagine the cause above and the effect hanging or dependent (depend = hang down, like a pendant); English says “ground,” the cause holding the effect up. Romeo, before entering the Capulets’ house, foresees “some consequence yet hanging in the stars”: the stars above, the effect hanging on the cause. Highest cause = first cause.

4. Article 1, objections (“virtue is a disposition of the perfect to the best”) #

• Obj. 1: Physics VII (“Natural Hearing”): virtue is a disposition of the perfect to the best; the perfect is what is disposed according to its nature; the divine is above man’s nature; so theological virtues are not virtues of man. Virtue perfects the nature of what has it.
• Obj. 2: theological virtues are called divine; divine virtues are exemplars, in God not in us (from last time). E.g. a priest’s sermon on the love of God: God loves all men, so we are to love all men — God’s love is the exemplar we imitate. So they’d be virtues of God, not of man.
• Obj. 3: theological virtues order us to God as first beginning and last end; but reason and will by their very nature have that order. Apocalypse: “I am the Alpha and Omega,” “the first (protos) and the last (eschatos),” and the arche and telos, beginning and end — the division of theology: God in himself, as beginning of things, as end.
  • Wonder is a natural desire to know the what and the why; seeing an effect one wonders about its cause, then the cause of the cause, ending in the first cause (Physics II). So we are already ordered to God as end.
  • Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy: takes up false happiness before true, since more known to us; true happiness turns out altogether perfect, hence God; the more like God, the truer the happiness. We naturally want to be happy.
  • Thomas on Psalm 8: men forget this natural order to God; those who hold to it are “the wise and the simple” (simple as pure of heart).

5. Sed contra (“who fears God will believe in Him”) #

Precepts of law are about acts of virtue; the divine law gives precepts about faith, hope and charity — Ecclesiasticus 2: who fears God will believe in him, hope in him, love him. So these are virtues ordering us to God.

• Aside: in Summa Contra Gentiles III Thomas takes up law before grace: among the things God commands is to believe and love him; later, grace’s effect in faith, hope, charity. “He gets it from both angles.”

6. Article 1, body: the twofold beatitude (“a twofold beatitude or happiness of man”) #

The point: virtue perfects man toward the acts by which he is ordered to beatitude; but there are two beatitudes.

• Digression on the words: English happiness is named from luck (hap; cf. Latin fortunate; Two Gentlemen of Verona, “when you meet with good happiness”); felicitas from felix, fruitful — the natural result of doing what you should; eudaimonia from eu + daimon, a good daimon, more like a guardian angel than our “demon” — Socrates in the Apology: his daimon always warned him of danger but not now, so perhaps death is not bad and the soul freed from the body becomes perfect in virtue. Each word has some truth: an accident that blinds you (no more Summa Contra Gentiles) or finding gold on your property is luck; happiness is also the result of what you do; and some higher being influences you. In the Poetics Aristotle uses eutychia, from the word for luck, which is what the poet emphasizes. Thomas here uses beatitudo, being blessed by God, not “fortunate.”

1. One beatitude is proportioned to human nature, reachable by the principles of his nature — Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, who knows it is not altogether perfect: “let us call them happy as men.”
2. Another exceeds man’s nature, reachable only by divine power, by a partaking of the divine nature — 2 Peter 1:4, through Christ we are made consortes, sharers, of the divine nature. Grace is a partaking (a taking-a-part) of the divine nature.
3. Since this beatitude exceeds the proportion of nature, man’s natural principles are not sufficient to order him to it; so some beginnings (principles) must be added to man from above by God, ordering him to supernatural beatitude — just as natural principles order him to his natural end, though not without divine aid.

• SCG III: man and the angels differ from the rest of creation by being free, with dominion over their action, and by being ordered to an end above their natural end; hence law is given to them and grace.
• Why “theological” (three reasons as read): they have God for object, ordering us rightly to God; they are poured into us by God alone; only by divine revelation are they treated, in Scripture. This third is why “theological” rather than “divine.”
• Aside: he was bothered by naming a thing from the science that studies it (“psychological problems,” “geometrical objects,” “social/political problems,” “a visual datum”): the science is known from its subject, not the subject from the science. But since these must be revealed, they belong to the science based on revelation — “we can let them get away with it.”

7. Article 1, replies (“the wood which is ignited partakes of the nature of fire”) #

• Reply 1: a nature can be attributed to something essentially, or by partaking of a higher nature — ignited wood partakes of the nature of fire; so man partakes of the divine nature, and these virtues belong to him by the nature he partakes of. Thomas keeps the connection of virtue and nature, distinguishing essential from participated. Aristotle himself (Ethics) distinguishes the part of the soul rational essentially from the part that partakes of reason; the virtues in the will and emotions are there insofar as these partake of reason. God has the nature essentially; angels and saints partake.
• Reply 2: they are called divine not as those by which God is virtuous, but as those by which we are made virtuous by God and ordered to God; so not exemplar but “exemplate” virtues. The exemplar is an extrinsic cause; his father’s company kept patterns for the wagons on the wall, taken down to make something.
• Reply 3: reason and will are naturally ordered to God as beginning and end of nature, according to the proportion of nature; to him as object of supernatural beatitude they are not sufficiently ordered by their own nature. “Are you convinced there are theological virtues now, gentlemen?”

8. Article 2, objections and sed contra (“What could be more clear than that?”) #

• Obj. 1: a virtue in the soul perfects either the intellectual or the desiring part; the first are intellectual virtues, the second moral; so theological virtues are not distinct.
• Obj. 2: wisdom is an intellectual virtue ordering us to God, considering the altissimam causam — image of a chain, each link held by the one above, the top screwed to the ceiling; the first cause is altissima. Aristotle in Ethics VI sometimes calls wisdom theology; cf. his college course “Natural Theology.”
• Obj. 3: Augustine, On the Morals of the Church: in the four cardinal virtues there is the ordo amoris, order of love; but love is charity, a theological virtue. (The Song of Songs speaks of charity set in order; Thomas treats the order of charity in the Secunda Secundae — e.g. love the Church more than yourself.)
• Sed contra: what is above man’s nature is distinguished from what is according to it; the theological virtues are above nature, the intellectual and moral according to it. A student raises the infused moral virtues; he defers: “let’s not get too complicated here.”

9. Article 2, body: formal object (“the formal difference of their objects”) #

The point: habits differ in species by the formal difference of their objects.

• The shape of a little box is known by sight and by touch, but not in the same way — through yellow, through hardness: same thing, different formal object.
• Students beginning philosophy say its teaching on God is “what we were taught in catechism”: but philosophy and theology do not know the same thing in the same way.
• The object of the theological virtues is God himself, last end of things, insofar as he exceeds the knowledge of our reason; the object of the intellectual and moral virtues is something comprehensible (perfectly grasped) by human reason. Hence a specific distinction.

10. Article 2, replies (“either God alone is wise, or God most of all”) #

• Reply 1: intellectual and moral virtues perfect understanding and desire according to the proportion of human nature; theological virtues perfect reason and will supernaturally.
• Reply 2: the Philosopher’s wisdom considers divine things as investigable by human reason; theological virtues, what exceeds reason. Aristotle himself calls wisdom a divine knowledge that God alone has or has most of all, so he admits human wisdom is less than divine; if man could partake of divine wisdom, that would be wisdom in a higher sense, and Aristotle would grant it. Hence a “Catholic philosopher” is no contradiction: one studies the lower so as to study the higher; otherwise, Albert the Great says, a perverse attitude to knowing, unless forced by necessity. Thomas at the University of Naples: Martin taught him logic, Peter of Ireland natural philosophy, with Averroes being translated. Origin of “philosopher”: Pythagoras refused “wise” — God alone is wise — “call me a lover of wisdom”: humility is in the origin as well as the etymology. So the stricter name for metaphysics is not wisdom but first philosophy, first in dignity among the parts of philosophy; “philosophy” names a human thing — God is not a philosopher.
• Reply 3: charity is love, but not every love is charity. “Every virtue is an order of love” can mean love communiter dicto or the love of charity which informs all virtues. Commonly: each cardinal virtue requires ordered affection, and the root of every affection is love — why want steak, enjoy steak, fear it may spoil? because I like steak. Augustine looks at the root, “before and after.” Why hope to understand Thomas, fear you may not? because you love to understand it. As charity: not that every virtue is essentially charity, but all depend on charity, as will be shown later. “What a marvelous mind these guys have.”

His words #

• an est / quid est: does it exist, before what it is.
• order: a before and after; presupposes distinction.
• axiom of before and after: nothing is before or after itself.
• gnothi seauton: know thyself; addressed especially to reason.
• “Natural Hearing” [ed.: Physics].
• akrotatos: the highest cause; cause above, effect hanging/dependent.
• protos, eschatos; arche, telos: first and last; beginning and end (Apocalypse).
• wonder: natural desire to know the what and the why.
• beatitude / happiness / felicitas / eudaimonia / eutychia: as distinguished in segment 6.
• consortes: sharers of the divine nature.
• theological virtues: beginnings added divinely ordering man to supernatural beatitude.
• “exemplate” virtues: exemplified, as opposed to exemplar; exemplar an extrinsic cause.
• formal object: same thing known through a different form (yellow vs. hardness).
• altissima causa: highest cause.
• comprehend: “kind of perfect grasping.”
• ordo amoris: order of love; love communiter dicto vs. love of charity.
• first philosophy: the stricter name for metaphysics, not wisdom.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 62, proemium; a. 1 (objections, sed contra, body, replies); a. 2 (objections, sed contra, body, replies).
• Ecclesiasticus 2 (in sed contra of a. 1); 2 Peter 1:4 (in body of a. 1).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Posterior Analytics (an est before quid est); Physics VII (virtue definition); Physics II (highest cause); Nicomachean Ethics (happiness “as men”; rational essentially vs. by participation; book VI, wisdom called theology; wisdom God alone or most of all); Poetics (eutychia).
• Thomas, exposition of the Sentences of Peter Lombard (on order); commentary on Psalm 8; Summa Contra Gentiles III (law before grace; man and angels); Secunda Secundae, question on the order of charity.
• Apocalypse (Alpha and Omega); Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy; Plato, Apology (Socrates’ daimon); Augustine, On the Morals of the Church; Song of Songs; Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet; Two Gentlemen of Verona; Albert the Great (perverse attitude to knowing).

His questions #

• Why does “whether there are theological virtues” come first? Because an est precedes quid est, as in the Posterior Analytics and the Summa’s question on God’s existence.
• Is there a distinction between distinction and order? Yes: distinct when one is not the other; ordered when one is before or after the other; distinction comes first.
• To whom is “know thyself” addressed? Us, but especially our reason, the only part that knows itself.
• What kind of cause is an exemplar? An extrinsic one (the wagon patterns on the wall).
• Why call them theological rather than divine? God is their object, God alone infuses them, and they are known only by revelation, in Scripture.
• Do I know the shape of the box in the same way by sight and by touch? No: same thing, different formal object (yellow vs. hardness).
• Why do I want steak, enjoy steak, fear it will spoil? Because I like steak — love is the root of every affection.
• Are you convinced there are theological virtues now? Class moves on to article 2; taken as settled.