Aquinas on the Causes of Virtue: Nature, Habit and Infused Virtues (Prima Secundae Q. 63, aa. 1–3)

Orientation #

He refers back to “last night,” when they were reading Aristotle on going to the highest (akrotatos) cause and on the corollaries of the ways of being causes; he also says the definition “which God in us without us works” was met before, in q. 55, a. 4. He says he will treat the connection between nature, reason and will in a talk “out in California.” The class ends with a break before article 4, which he proposes to take separately (“divide the four into three and one”). The previous class finished the question on the theological virtues and their order; the next takes up a. 4 (whether infused and acquired virtues differ in species) and the start of q. 64.

The class, in order #

1. Prayer and the prelude to question 63 (“on the cause of virtues”) #

Opening prayer (thanks to God, guardian angels, Thomas; “order and illumine our images”), with a joke about asking one’s guardian angel to carry the prayer up and “beef it up a little.” Then the prelude: Thomas looks at the cause before the effect and asks four things: (1) is virtue in us by nature; (2) is some virtue caused by “being accustomed” or the repetition of works; (3) are some moral virtues “poured into us,” infused; (4) whether acquired and infused virtue are of the same species.

2. Article 1, the objections and the standard reply (“It seems that virtue is in us by nature”) #

The point: the first three arguments each carry “a big element of truth,” which the body will sort out through two senses of “nature.”

1. Damascene: the virtues are natural and equally in all. Anthony (the reference is Athanasius’s Life of Anthony, “a different Anthony” from tomorrow’s feast) in his sermon to the monks: si naturam voluntas mutaverit, if the will changes nature it is perverse; if the condition of nature is served, it is virtue. He hears Shakespeare in it (“stumbling on abuse … revolts from true birth”, birth being the word for nature). Gloss on Matthew 4: Christ taught natural justice, chastity, justice, humility, which man has naturally.
2. The good of virtue is according to reason; reason is the nature of man, “reason more than anything else is man” (Ethics X). So virtue is natural.
3. Natural is what is in us from birth; some virtues are in some from birth, Job 31: “from infancy there grew with me mercy, from the womb it came forth with me.” He flags that the first two argue from nature in one sense, the third in another. Sed contra: what is by nature is common to all and not taken away by sin (natural goods remain even in the demons, Dionysius, Divine Names); but virtue is not in all men, “as you can know from the daily newspaper,” and is taken away by sin.

3. Article 1, the body: three opinions on where forms come from (“a hiding of forms”) #

The point: Thomas first stands back and treats the general question of bodily forms, then applies it to sciences and virtues, and the truth lies in the middle.

• Entirely from within: those laying down a “hiding of forms,” Anaxagoras: everything is inside but too small to see. Aristotle is sometimes hard on him (he makes what is only in the ability of matter be actually there, only invisible), sometimes reads him as trying to express potency (“listen to what he’s trying to say and what his words actually say”); aside: students likewise often can’t say what they mean.
• Entirely from outside: forms from a separated cause, like Plato’s forms.
• The middle: partly within, pre-existing in matter in ability; partly from outside, reduced to act by the agent. Applied to sciences and (moral) virtues:
• Entirely within: Plato (Meno and elsewhere); all sciences and virtues pre-exist in the soul and learning and exercise only remove impediments from the weight of the body, as iron is polished. Learning is recalling. His boundary case: trying to recall a name you know; “you have to recall things which you learn, but you don’t recall what you learn” — the element of truth and the error.
• Entirely from outside: from the inflowing of the agent intellect, taken as a separate substance, not ours: Avicenna.
• The truth between: by nature according to a certain aptitude, not according to perfection (Ethics II); “this is more true,” said with modesty.

4. Nature of the species vs. nature of the individual; seeds and beginnings (“according to a certain commencement”) #

Distinction: natural by the species (man) vs. natural by the individual. What separates them: species is by form, individuation by matter; man’s form is the rational soul (“the understanding soul, as Shakespeare calls it”), his matter the body. What belongs to him by reason is natural by species; what belongs to him by the determined makeup of his body is natural by the individual, though even the body of the species is in some way referred to the soul, since such a body is proportioned to such a soul. (He connects the distinction to Macbeth.) In both ways virtue is natural “according to a certain commencement, not according to completion”:

1. By species: in reason there are naturally known beginnings, both of knowables and of things to be done. Euclid calls them axioms, Greek for “worthy,” accepted on their own grounds, e.g. the whole is more than the part; to the man who denies it, give him part of his meal or part of his car and he will scream and show he knows it. Practical ones: do good and avoid evil; do unto others. Thomas calls them seminalia, seed-like things (the Greeks too were fond of “seed”); they are seeds of the intellectual virtues (sciences) and of the moral. And in the will there is a natural desire of the good according to reason.
2. By the individual: from the disposition of the body some are better or worse disposed to a given virtue; some by birth more disposed to bravery, others to be cowards, timorous, or lascivious. Examples: his grandson David, fearless on amusement-park machines where the girls were afraid, and who brought the hose to the window ledge and flooded computer, bedroom and basement (“nobody else in the family is quite that brave”); young Churchill jumping off a bridge and nearly killing himself, and in the war having to be kept from exposing himself to the enemy. The mechanism: the sensitive powers are acts of bodily parts and are aided or impeded by their disposition, and consequently the rational powers they serve; so one man has an aptitude to science, another to courage, another to temperance. Why not the completion: nature is determined to one, but the consummation of virtue is not according to one way of action but diversely, by diverse matters and circumstances. His example: courage needs to be pushed toward the danger, temperance to hold back from food, drink and sex; nature cannot incline you both ways (“nature not being able to do more than one thing, as Shakespeare says”). Hence Plato’s Republic educates by athletics and football for courage, and good music and tragedy (pity softens) for temperance. Conclusion: virtues are in us by nature according to aptitude and beginning, not perfection, “apart from the theological virtues, which are totally from the outside.” Replies: objections 1–2 proceed from seeds by species (as rational creatures); objection 3 from the bodily disposition one has from birth.

5. Article 2, the objections, and the need for acquired virtue (“from the repetition of doings”) #

The point: the objections claim virtue is only from God, and he uses them to bring out why the acquired virtues are still needed. Aside: some derive “moral” from mos, custom, because it is acquired by custom.

1. Augustine’s gloss on Romans 14:23 (“everything not from faith is sin”): every life of the faithless is sin, nothing is good without the highest good; where knowledge of truth is lacking, virtue is false even in the best customs. He says one must soften this with distinctions: Augustine is not denying some human virtue, only virtue in the fullest sense. Faith is not acquired from works (Ephesians 2:8, saved by grace through faith, the gift of God). So no virtue by habituation.
2. Sin is incompatible with virtue and cannot be avoided without grace (Wisdom 8:21, “I cannot be continent unless God gives it”). So virtue only by gift of God. His aside on stability: some concluded one could forget the natural virtues. But an infused or theological virtue can be lost by one act (murdering wife or neighbor loses charity), whereas an acquired virtue is not lost by one act; “grace builds on nature.” Example: the Paris priests converting prostitutes, who relapsed quickly because they had the infused virtues without the natural temperance of repeated acts. So the natural virtues are needed for stability, even for what God gives.
3. The acts preceding virtue fall short of it; the effect cannot be more perfect than the cause. Aristotle raised this: how become courageous by courageous acts without the virtue? His answer in passing: like developing muscles, one act does not do it, but repeated acts, each acting “in the virtue of the ones that come before,” produce something. Sed contra: Dionysius, Divine Names 4, the good is more powerful than the bad; bad acts cause habits of vice, so much more good acts cause virtue. Example: Hamlet’s sermon to his mother, at first hard to refrain, then easier.

6. Article 2, the body: the good and its two rules (“mode, species, and order”) #

The point: virtue perfects man toward the good, and the good is taken according to a rule, which is twofold.

• The ratio of good consists in mode, species and order (Augustine, On the Nature of the Good), or number, weight and measure (Wisdom 11). He offers two ways to read the triad: by different causes, or by before and after: mode is what contributes to the species being well blended, species the form itself, order what follows. Correspondences: mode–measure, species–number, order–weight (inclination). Species as numbers is Aristotle in the Physics: body is one, add life and you have a plant (two), sensation an animal, reason a man; Shakespeare’s “what is a man if his chief good be but to sleep and feed” — take reason away and he is a beast, sensation away a plant, life away a stone. Aside: Augustine “certainly had something by nature” without the teachers Thomas had, “of course Thomas had Augustine too.”
• The rule is twofold: human reason and divine law. The divine law is the superior rule and so extends to more: whatever is ruled by reason is ruled by divine law, not the reverse.

7. Digression: providence and the four species of foresight (“God’s foresight resembles that of the fathers”) #

Occasioned by “extends to more.” Finishing his current reading of Summa Contra Gentiles III (“my favorite book of Thomas”), he made excursions to De Malo q. 1 on evil, and to De Veritate q. 5 on providence. There Thomas approaches divine providence through human foresight (prudence), via Cicero’s memory, understanding and foresight; what is presupposed to prudence is the natural understanding of life’s end and the moral virtues, prudence itself being about means. In God the divine goodness stands in place of our moral virtues. Thomas then says divine providence is like the prudence of a father or a king, not of the individual. He connects this with the four species of prudence in the Secunda Secundae: for one’s own good, for a family, political, and military (MacArthur, who could pass from general to administering Japan; King David). Why not the individual’s? His example: for Duane Berquist the good thing tonight is to read the Summa Contra Gentiles, but as a father he reads fairy tales or does the rosary with pictures, for the common good of the family. God needs no means to an end, being the end himself and universally perfect; his foresight is a directing of others to the common good of the whole universe. He adds that Thomas divides the Old Testament by the law of the king (Pentateuch and prophets) and the law of the father. “Kind of a beautiful text.”

8. Article 2, the body concluded, and the replies (“which God in us, without us, works”) #

1. Virtue ordered to the good measured by human reason can be caused by human acts, since they proceed from reason, under whose rule such a good consists (“be more modest there than Augustine”).
2. Virtue ordered to the good measured by divine law (Thomas explains modus by “measure”) cannot be caused by acts whose beginning is reason, but only by divine operation. Hence Augustine’s definition of this virtue, met before in q. 55, a. 4: bona qualitas mentis, by which one lives rightly, which no one uses badly, “which God in us, without us, works.” Reply 1: Augustine’s “horrible quotes” are about virtue in its most perfect form. Reply 2: a divinely infused virtue, considered in its perfection, does not suffer any mortal sin with itself, so one mortal sin loses it; an acquired virtue can coexist with an act of sin, even mortal, because the use of a habit is subject to the will, and a habit is contrary not to an act but to a habit — “you gotta repeatedly be bad.” So without grace man cannot avoid mortal sin such that he never sins, but he can acquire a habit by which he abstains from bad works ut in pluribus, especially from what is valde contrary to reason. Acquired virtue may be weakened and eventually worn away, but not by one act. Some mortal sins, directly opposed to the theological virtues, cannot be avoided at all without grace; “about these below.” Reply 3 (the greater from the lesser): of acquired virtues there pre-exist seeds or beginnings by nature, which are more noble than the acquired virtues, as understanding of beginnings is more noble than knowledge of conclusions. He recalls the virtues of “looking reason”: nous, episteme, sophia; intellectus, scientia, sapientia; his own “natural understanding, reasoned-out understanding, wisdom,” wisdom first in excellence, natural understanding before reasoned-out. Likewise the natural rightness of reason is more noble than the rightness of appetite that comes by partaking of reason (moral virtue). So acts, proceeding from higher beginnings (altioribus; cf. last night’s akrotatos, highest cause, the cause above the effects), can cause human virtues. Here Thomas stresses the greater causing the lesser, not the drip-drip image of repeated acts. Parallel objection he saw in the providence text: a body cannot produce a spirit, therefore a spirit cannot produce a body — no, the lesser cannot produce the greater, but the greater may produce the lesser.

9. Article 3: infused virtues besides the theological (“effects to be proportioned to their causes”) #

Aside: one hears of faith, hope and charity in sermons, “not much about infused moral virtues.” Objections: (1) what can come from second causes does not come immediately from God (the apple from the tree, God remote cause, except miraculously; Dionysius: the law of the divine nature brings the last things through the middle); moral and intellectual virtues can be caused by our acts; “who could disagree with that?” (2) There is even less superfluity in God’s works than in nature’s: two eyes for distance, no third eye or third leg (students: a fourth arm would be handy, to drive and text; “I have two brains, though”). The theological virtues suffice for the supernatural good. (3) Nature does not do by two what it can do by one, much less God; God inserts the seeds of the virtues (gloss on Hebrews 1). All three object to multiplying virtues without necessity. Sed contra: Wisdom 8, she teaches sobriety and justice, prudence and virtue. Body:

1. Effects must be proportioned to their causes and beginnings. He asks Joshua where this came up last night: it is a corollary from the ways of being causes — the class settles on the third corollary (first: causes in act and effects in act are together; second: go to the highest cause; third: proportion). “A famous principle Thomas learned from that pagan Greek Aristotle.” He notes the De Veritate objection that God’s providence cannot extend to corruptible things since corruption is a defect rests on this same principle.
2. All acquired virtues proceed from natural beginnings pre-existing in us.
3. In place of those, God confers the theological virtues ordering us to a supernatural matter — needed because a natural virtue is not proportioned to an end above nature.
4. Therefore, to the theological virtues there must proportionally answer other habits divinely caused, standing to them as the moral and intellectual virtues stand to the natural beginnings. “That’s a mouthful,” but all from the one principle. Replies: (1) acquired virtues are not proportioned to the theological virtues, so others proportioned to them must be caused immediately by God. (2) The theological virtues order us to the supernatural end “according to a certain beginning,” immediately as regards God himself, but the soul must be perfected about other things in order to God — “strange,” “difficult to see,” and not brought out until here. Example: Dominic bringing the wine over the hills to the nuns while abstaining himself, “obviously infused virtue.” (3) The power of the natural seeds does not extend beyond the proportion of nature; for a supernatural end other beginnings must be added above. He adds that this “casts light upon the need for purgatory.” Break.

His words #

• “poured into us”: his rendering of infused (infusio).
• “being accustomed” / “repetition of works” / “customing of doings”: his rendering of the objection’s phrase [ed.: assuetudo operum, habituation].
• “hiding of forms”: Anaxagoras’s position [ed.: latitatio formarum].
• “ability”: as in “the ability of matter” [ed.: potency].
• “the understanding soul”: Shakespeare’s phrase for the rational soul.
• “commencement” / “beginning”: as opposed to completion or consummation [ed.: inchoatio, principle].
• axioms: Euclid’s word, Greek for “worthy,” accepted on their own grounds.
• seminalia, “seed-like things”: Thomas’s word for the natural beginnings.
• mode, species, order / number, weight, measure: Augustine’s and Wisdom’s triads for the ratio of good, with his correspondences (mode–measure, species–number, order–weight/inclination).
• “foresight”: his rendering of prudence and providence.
• bona qualitas mentis … quam Deus in nobis sine nobis operatur: Augustine’s definition of infused virtue (q. 55, a. 4).
• ut in pluribus: for the most part; valde: very much (contrary to reason).
• “looking reason”: speculative reason; “natural understanding, reasoned-out understanding, wisdom”: nous, episteme, sophia / intellectus, scientia, sapientia.
• akrotatos / altioribus: the highest, higher cause or beginnings.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 63, prologue and aa. 1, 2, 3 (whole articles). Mentioned
• Athanasius, Life of Anthony; Anthony’s sermon to the monks (in a. 1 obj. 1)
• Damascene, book III (a. 1 obj. 1)
• Gloss on Matthew 4; Job 31; Romans 14:23 with Augustine’s gloss; Ephesians 2:8; Wisdom 8:21; Wisdom 11; Wisdom 8; gloss on Hebrews 1
• Dionysius, Divine Names (natural goods remain in the demons; ch. 4, the good more powerful than the bad; the last through the middle)
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics X (reason is man) and II (aptitude, not perfection); Physics (forms as numbers)
• Plato, Meno; Republic (education for courage and temperance)
• Avicenna (agent intellect as separate substance)
• Augustine, On the Nature of the Good
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 55, a. 4; Secunda Secundae on the species of prudence; Summa Contra Gentiles III; De Malo q. 1; De Veritate q. 5
• Cicero (parts of prudence, via De Veritate)
• Shakespeare: Macbeth, Hamlet (“what is a man”; the sermon to Gertrude), “stumbling on abuse”; Churchill, My Early Life (inferred title)

His questions #

• Where does the “Anthony” of the first objection come from? Athanasius’s Life of Anthony, the abbot, a different Anthony from tomorrow’s feast.
• What are the first three objections arguing from? Nature in one sense (species, reason) for the first two, another sense (birth, bodily makeup) for the third.
• What does Euclid call the naturally known beginnings, and what does the Greek word mean? Axioms; “worthy” of being accepted on their own grounds.
• Why can’t the completion of both courage and temperance be by nature? Nature is determined to one, and the two virtues pull opposite ways.
• What is the distinction between mode, species and order? Perhaps by different causes, or by before and after (blending, form, what follows); he does not go fully into it.
• Why is God’s foresight like the father’s or king’s and not the individual’s? God needs no means to an end, being the end; his providence directs others to the common good.
• How can a stable habit come from an unstable act (the greater from the lesser)? The acts proceed from natural beginnings that are more noble than the acquired virtue.
• Where did the principle that effects are proportioned to their causes come up last night? As a corollary of the ways of being causes; the class settles on the third corollary.
• Don’t the theological virtues suffice to order us to the supernatural? Only according to a certain beginning, as regards God himself; other infused virtues perfect the soul about other things in order to God.