Summa I-II Q.64 a.4 & Q.65 a.1: Do the Theological Virtues Have a Middle? And How the Moral Virtues Are Connected

Orientation #

He opens on “the fourth” article, saying he had “kind of anticipated” it, and recalls the two ways of distinguishing the cardinal virtues “as we said before” (prev. lecture). At the end he stops before q. 65, a. 2 because “these things are about charity” and belong together next time. The previous class covered q. 64, aa. 2–3 (the mean of moral and intellectual virtue); the next covers q. 65, aa. 2–3.

The class, in order #

1. q. 64, a. 4, the objections (“theological virtue consists in the middle”) #

Point: three arguments that theological virtue, like the others, is in a middle; he warns “there’s some truth to this… but maybe some falsehood too. He wouldn’t have put it in there if there was no truth.”

1. The good of the other virtues (moral and intellectual, as seen) is in the middle; theological virtue exceeds them in goodness; so much more is it in the middle.
2. The moral middle is the appetite ruled by reason, the intellectual middle the understanding measured by the thing; theological virtue perfects both understanding and appetite; so it is in a middle.
3. Concrete cases: hope is a middle between desperation and presumption; faith a middle between contrary heresies, as Boethius says in the book on the two natures. Confessing in Christ one person and two natures stands between Nestorius (two persons, two natures) and Eutyches (one person, one nature).

• His gloss on obj. 3: “truth explains falsehood.” Each heresy has part of the truth (two natures, so one might think two persons; one person, so one might think one nature). If the truth were two-and-two or one-and-one, neither error could be explained; if it is one-and-two, both can.
• Aside: he told Warren on the phone that Boethius is “the greatest mind between Augustine and Thomas”; “great guy.”

2. Sed contra and the hope–fear digression (“exalt him as much as you are able”) #

Point: where virtue is in a middle one can sin by excess; but about God one cannot sin by excess (Ecclesiasticus 43: “exalt him as much as you are able, for he is greater than all praise”); so no middle.

• Mock-application of the Greek “nothing too much” (mēden agan): “you shouldn’t love God too much… don’t want to be fanatic.” Can you trust God too much, believe him too much? Yet the heresies and presumption/despair seem to show a middle, so the difficulty is real.
• Hope and fear together: Thomas in the commentary on the Psalms speaks of both. Fear without hope leads to despair (I fear only God’s justice, considering my wicked ways); hope without fear, the funeral attitude “he’s in heaven now.” At a funeral the son said “we don’t know whether he’s in heaven or not yet,” asking for prayers; Father Styner told his mother when his father died, “never stop praying for him, we just don’t know.” If he is in purgatory and we say “he’s through with his suffering,” we abandon him. “It’s hard to strike the proper balance.”
• Mary’s words, “mercy to those who fear”: why not “those who hope”? Hope corresponds to mercy as object, fear to justice; she puts them together in one phrase.

3. The body: two measures of theological virtue (“the measure and rule of a theological virtue is God Himself”) #

Point: the middle of virtue is taken by conformity to a rule one can exceed or fall short of; theological virtue has two measures.

1. From the notion of the virtue itself the measure is God: faith ruled by the divine truth (“the first truth,” as Thomas calls it in the Secunda Secundae on faith), charity by his goodness, hope by the magnitude of his omnipotence and his piety (piety here = mercy). This measure exceeds every human capacity; whence never (nunquam) can a man love God as much as he ought to be loved, nor believe or hope in him as much as he ought; much less (multo minus) can there be excess. So the good of such a virtue is not in a middle but “the more it is so, the more it exceeds to the summit.”
   • Francis de Sales: we are thankful that God loves himself as much as he is lovable, since none of us do. Parallel: Shakespeare should be admired more than most admire him.
   • “So we’ve got to apologize to God for not loving Him as much as He should be loved… but you always try to love Him more.” Someone says “you love God too much” — “you better rethink that.” The woman writing in the Worcester paper attacking belief in the Eucharist: “who are we supposed to believe, him or you?” — the Adoro te devote: believe whatever the Son of God says, Verbum veritatis, nothing more true.
2. The other measure is from our part: though we cannot bear ourselves toward God as we ought, we ought to believe, hope and love according to the measure of our condition. Whence “peradventure” there can be a middle and extreme in theological virtue from our part. “That could be unfolded some more.”
   • Aside: a person should go forward in the spiritual life; “if you’re not going forward you go backwards.” The old liturgy’s prayer on Solomon: taught divine wisdom, “he became as one who knew no wisdom.”

• Aside: Tennyson died with Cymbeline in his hands (“better to die with the Bible,” but appropriate for a poet); Washington Irving to his nephew: Shakespeare “and one or two others said it all.” Cymbeline: husband deceived by a villain into thinking his wife unfaithful; one of the late “mercy, forgiveness plays.”

4. The replies (“created … not created”) #

• Ad 1: moral and intellectual virtues are in a middle by conformity to a rule one can transcend (say what is not is; eat or drink more than one should), which is not so in theological virtues, per se loquendo — he flags the distinction per se / per accidens as “quite a distinction,” already treated.
• Ad 2: both kinds of virtue perfect understanding and appetite, but the moral and intellectual in order to a created rule, the theological to an uncreated one; “whence it is not a similar reason.” Plato in the Laws, against “man is the measure of all things”: God is the measure of all things — most fully in the theological virtues. Boethius, Consolation: happiness is a perfect good, the only perfect good is God, so happiness is God; human happiness is more happiness the more Godlike.
  • His own reflection: bodily food sustains a body that will die anyway; “food for your mind is real food” — “blessed is he who eats bread in the kingdom of heaven,” which the Fathers read as seeing God; Thomas’s sacrum convivium.
• Ad 3: hope is a middle between presumption and despair ex parte nostra, not on God’s side (not “trusting God too much or not enough”): one presumes who hopes from God a good exceeding his condition (ranking oneself above the apostles, next to Mary or Christ — Thomas’s discussions of who is greater, Peter or John, may end “the same,” but putting yourself up there is presumptuous); one despairs who does not hope what he is able to hope according to his condition. No excess on God’s side, whose goodness is infinite. Likewise faith is a middle between contrary heresies (the element of truth in obj. 3) not by comparison with God, whom one cannot believe too much, but insofar as ipsa opinio hominis, the human opinion itself, is a middle between contrary opinions. “That’s a very subtle thing… Beautiful, beautiful text.”

5. q. 65 prologue (“the connection of the virtues”) #

Five articles: (1) whether the moral virtues are connected; (2) whether they can be without charity; (3) whether charity can be without them; (4) whether faith and hope can be without charity; (5) whether charity can be without faith and hope. His guess in passing: in God there is charity but not moral virtues. “I’m dying to find out.”

6. a. 1, objections and sed contra (“it seems that the moral virtues are not connected”) #

1. Moral virtues are caused by exercise of their acts (Ethics II); one can be exercised in the acts of one virtue without another; so one can be had without another — “that makes sense.”
2. Magnificence (great things with money) and magnanimity are moral virtues, but one can have the others without them, having liberality and philotimia (about small honors); Ethics IV: the poor cannot be magnificent, and he who is worthy of little things and is dignified by them is temperate but not magnanimous — “not the Jupiter Symphony… or the thirty-sixth.”
3. The intellectual virtues, perfecting the understanding, are not connected (one science without another); so neither the moral, perfecting the desiring part.
4. If connected, only through foresight; but one can be prudent about the matters of one virtue and not another, as one can have one art without another (build a house but not bake bread); so no necessity.

• Sed contra: Ambrose on Luke (the virtues are connected, chained together; who has one seems to have many); Augustine, De Trinitate VI (the virtues in the human soul “in no way are separated” — “wow, that’s strong”); Gregory, Moralia XXII (one virtue without the others is either not at all or imperfect); Cicero, Tusculan Questions II [ed.: transcript “Discipline Questions”] (confess you lack one and you must lack all — “pretty strong, Tully”). “Guys, they’re good men, so they must know.”

7. The body: imperfect vs. perfect virtue and two reasons for connection (“moral virtue can be taken either perfect or imperfect”) #

Point: the distinction perfect/imperfect determines the question.

• Imperfect moral virtue: an inclination in us toward some work of the genus of good things, whether from nature or from becoming accustomed; so taken, the virtues are not connected — one may be prompt to liberality from bodily complexion or custom and not prompt to chastity. Boundary case: soldiers who “go berserk” and take a town show some courage but “not too much chastity.” Aside: Euclid of Megara, asked what he lost in the sack, “I didn’t see anybody carrying off wisdom” (the medievals confused him with Euclid of Alexandria).
• Perfect moral virtue: a habit inclining to a good work and to doing it well; so taken they are connected, “as by almost everybody is laid down” (the authorities above, “and Plato and Aristotle, I think”).
• Twofold reason, according to the two ways of distinguishing the cardinal virtues (prev. lecture):
  1. As general conditions: discretion (prudence), rightness (justice), moderation (temperance), firmness of soul (fortitude), found in whatever matter, though one more in one virtue than another. Firmness has no praise of virtue without moderation, rectitude, discretion, and so for the rest — the temperate man refusing “this den of iniquity” is also strong. This reason is Gregory’s (virtues disjoined cannot be perfect; not true prudence which is not just, temperate, strong — he notes Gregory already using Thomas’s distinction) and Augustine’s, who studied under Ambrose.
  2. As four special virtues by matter: Aristotle’s reason, Ethics VI. No moral virtue without foresight, since it is a property of moral virtue to make a right choice (it is a habit of choice), and right choice needs not only inclination to the suitable end (from moral virtue) but right choice of what is toward the end (foresight, which takes counsel, judges, commands). And prudence not without the moral virtues, since it is right reason about things to be done proceeding from their ends as beginnings, to which one is rightly disposed only through moral virtue: as speculative science cannot be had without understanding of the beginnings. “You’ve got to be stable in them by the moral virtues, otherwise you’re not going to take counsel well and judge well, let alone command.” Hence the moral virtues are connected.

8. Ad 1 and ad 2: common vs. eminent status (“perfect man according to the common status”) #

• Plato’s city trains courage by gymnastic; West Point (his son): jumping off a high bridge “gives you a little bit of courage” — but are you being trained in temperance?
• Ad 1: some moral virtues perfect man according to the common status, about matters that occur commonly in every life; so man must be exercised about the matters of all of them at once (that is why Plato had music as well as gymnastic — courage and temperance). Exercised well about all, he acquires all; exercised well about one and not another (well about anger, not about concupiscences), he acquires a habit of refraining anger which lacks the notion of virtue, through defect of foresight, corrupted about desires — as natural inclination lacks the perfect notion of virtue if prudence is lacking.
• Other virtues perfect man according to an eminent status (magnificence, magnanimity); their matter does not occur to everyone, so one can have the others without these in act, but, having acquired the others, has them “in ability that is near”: liberality about little donations, plus abundance of money, yields magnificence “by a little instruction” (modico eruditionis, as he reads it), as a geometer by a little study gets a conclusion never considered — “would you agree, my geometer friend?” Physics II: what differs little seems nothing; what we can quickly have we are said to have. Hence ad 2 is clear.
• Student objection: wouldn’t the meek man who lacks temperance still be a good judge about meekness? Answer: foresight is one virtue, corrupted by his concupiscence, so he would not judge well even there — “he would have some judgment,” but weakened. The student compares courageous but unchaste men who seem to judge well about courage; he grants they judge “to some extent,” but the one virtue of foresight is somewhat corrupt.
• Student adds de Sales: pagan virtues look virtuous next to vice but next to the saints seem no virtue at all; St Paul the first hermit had no occasion for liberality or patience but, having the perfection of charity, could exercise any of them easily. He: Paul probably could not practise magnificence, “but if all that’s lacking is the money, big deal.”

9. Ad 3: why the intellectual virtues are not connected (“about diverse matters that are not ordered to each other”) #

• Intellectual virtues are about diverse matters not ordered to each other (diverse sciences and arts); moral virtues are about passions and operations which “manifestly” have an order to each other: all passions proceed from primary ones, love and hate, and terminate in pleasure and sadness; operations likewise; so the whole matter of moral virtue falls under the one notion of prudence.
• Illustration of the first half: great atomic physicists naive about communism, wanting to give the bomb to the Russians; even Oppenheimer, who studied under Bohr in Copenhagen. “How could a guy be so naive here and so good there?” — that is the point.
• All understandables have an order to first beginnings, so all intellectual virtues depend on the understanding of principles, as prudence on the moral virtues; but the principles do not depend on the conclusions, whereas the moral virtues do depend on prudence, since appetite moves reason and reason moves appetite.
• Attached to a student’s earlier question (merit and meditation, or thinking over articles of faith): at morning Mass one starts thinking of breakfast, or falls asleep wanting coffee — “one distracts from another”; experience shows the connection. Shakespeare’s “counselling out of fear”; “discretion is the greater part of valor” — “that’s the coward talking” (Falstaff); seriously in Coriolanus, where the soldiers think the courageous man foolhardy.

10. Ad 4: ends as beginnings vs. matter of art (“in no way can reason be said to be right”) #

• The ends to which moral virtues incline stand to prudence as beginnings; makable things stand to art only as matter. Reason may be right in one part of a matter and not another, but in no way is it recta if there is a defect in the beginning: one who errs about “every whole is more than its part” cannot have geometry, receding far from truth in what follows. Aristotle: a small mistake in the beginning is a great one in the end — the wrong road at the fork differs little at first, “almost infinitely apart” later.
• Moreover things to be done are ordered to each other, makables not; so a defect of prudence about one part of doables induces defect about others. MacArthur: a visitor eats dinner while MacArthur, “too tired to eat,” goes to bed; next morning the visitor won’t wake him — “wake him up! He went to the front two hours ago.” Someone else, from hunger or sleep, would have gone hours later; “all these things are related.”
• He stops here: the remaining articles are about charity and belong together.

His words #

• middle; his rendering of medium [ed.: mean]
• first truth; Thomas’s name for the divine truth ruling faith (Secunda Secundae)
• piety; in the text on hope, taken “in the sense of mercy”
• nunquam; never — “never can a man so much love God as he ought”
• multo minus; much less (the transcript’s “multominus”)
• Verbum veritatis; the Word of Truth, from the Adoro te devote
• summa; the summit toward which theological virtue exceeds
• peradventure; his rendering of Thomas’s hedge that there “can be considered” a middle from our part
• per se loquendo / per accidens; speaking properly vs. incidentally
• ex parte nostra; from our side, not God’s
• ipsa opinio hominis; the human opinion itself, which is the middle between heresies
• sacrum convivium; Thomas’s “feast for reason”
• foresight; his rendering of prudentia [ed.: prudence]
• philotimia; Aristotle’s virtue about small honors
• magnificous; magnificent (the poor cannot be)
• ratio virtutis; the notion of virtue
• ability that is near; propinquity in potency to a virtue not yet in act
• modico eruditionis; “by a little instruction” as he reads it [ed.: form uncertain in recording]
• recta; right, said of reason
• makable / doable; things of art vs. things of prudence

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 64, a. 4 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 65, prologue and a. 1 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Ecclesiasticus 43 (sed contra of q. 64, a. 4)

Mentioned

• Boethius, On the Two Natures; Consolation of Philosophy
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics II (virtue from acts), IV (magnificence, magnanimity), VI (prudence and moral virtue); Physics II (“what differs little seems nothing”)
• Thomas, commentary on the Psalms (hope and fear); Secunda Secundae on faith; Adoro te devote
• Ambrose on Luke; Augustine, De Trinitate VI; Gregory, Moralia XXII; Cicero, Tusculan Questions II
• Plato, Laws (God the measure), Republic’s gymnastic and music (inferred; he says “the city”)
• Francis de Sales (God loves himself as he is lovable; pagan virtues; Paul the hermit)
• Shakespeare, Cymbeline, Coriolanus, “discretion is the greater part of valor”
• Mary’s words “mercy to those who fear” (Magnificat, inferred)

His questions #

• Can you love God too much, believe him too much, hope in him too much? No: God as measure exceeds every human capacity; no excess, much less than in other virtues.
• Why do both heresies about Christ seem plausible? Each has a part of the truth (two natures, one person); truth explains falsehood.
• Why does Mary say “mercy to those who fear” rather than “those who hope”? Hope answers to mercy, fear to justice; she puts the two together.
• Is hope a middle between presumption and despair? Yes, but ex parte nostra, according to one’s condition, not on God’s side.
• Can a man be brave without being temperate? With imperfect virtue, yes (the soldiers who sack a town); with perfect virtue, no.
• If one controls anger but not desire, is he a good judge about meekness? (student) Only to some extent; foresight is one virtue and is weakened by the corruption.
• Why are the sciences and arts not connected as the moral virtues are? Their matters are not ordered to each other; passions and operations are, under one prudence.
• Why does a defect in one part of prudence spread to the rest? Ends are beginnings for prudence, and doables are ordered to each other; a small error in the beginning is great in the end.