Summa I-II, Q. 66, Arts. 5–6: Wisdom as the Greatest Intellectual Virtue and Charity as the Greatest Theological Virtue

Orientation #

He opens “we’re up to Article Five right now” (the earlier articles of q. 66, prev. lecture) and ends with a. 6 as “hardly a better stopping point”. He does not say what comes next. The previous class covered q. 66 aa. 2-4; the next takes up q. 67 on virtues after this life.

The class, in order #

1. Sapientia as savory knowledge (“Sapida scientia, savory knowledge”) #

Point: the word for wisdom (sapientia, from sapiens, related to sapida, savory) fits the thing: Thomas sometimes explains it etymologically as sapida scientia, knowledge of savory things.

• Illustration from Shakespeare, whose lines he “savors”: Hamlet’s death (“good night, sweet prince…”), Juliet found apparently dead (death like an untimely frost on the sweetest flower), Lear on the ungrateful child (which his mother quoted at him when he was disobedient), the curses in Richard II (he cannot recall the woman who curses; the play is his guess). A man with a photographic memory of Shakespeare challenged anyone to name a subject and he could top it.

2. Article 5, the four objections and the sed contra (“prudence seems to command wisdom”) #

Point: four reasons to think wisdom is not the greatest intellectual virtue.

1. The commander is greater than the commanded; politics (Ethics I) dictates which disciplines are studied in cities, by whom and how far (his example: Massachusetts high schools required to teach American history, math), and that belongs to prudence (Ethics VI); so prudence is greater than wisdom. He notes a student (Probus) has a parallel objection: the logician teaches everyone how to think, so isn’t the logician the wise man? “A probability argument.”
2. Virtue orders man to happiness (Physics VII: a disposition of the perfect to the best; Thomas elsewhere: virtue the road to happiness, vice the road to misery, seen daily in the newspaper); prudence is right reason about what leads to happiness; wisdom does not consider human acts; so prudence is greater.
3. More perfect knowledge is greater; we know human things (science) better than divine things (wisdom), Augustine’s distinction in De Trinitate XII; God is incomprehensible (Job 36, “God, the great one, conquering our knowledge”); so science is greater.
4. Knowledge of beginnings is worthier than of conclusions; wisdom concludes from indemonstrable beginnings known by understanding (his term: “natural understanding”); so intellectus is greater. Sed contra: Ethics VI, wisdom is “as the head” of the intellectual virtues.

3. The body: the object is the highest cause (“it considers the highest cause”) #

Point: greatness of a virtue in its species is from its object; wisdom’s object, the highest cause, God (Metaphysics I), excels all objects of the intellectual virtues.

• Since we judge effects through causes and lower causes through the higher, wisdom judges and orders all the other intellectual virtues: it is architectonic.
• Probus presses the logic objection; he puts it off till the replies are done (“maybe it’s a secundum quid thing”).

4. Replies 1 and 2: prudence as minister; wisdom as beginning of happiness (“a servant or minister of wisdom”) #

Reply 1: prudence is about human things, wisdom about the highest cause, so prudence cannot be greater unless man were the greatest thing in the world (Ethics VI; Aristotle finds that laughable). Prudence does not command wisdom but the reverse: “the spiritual one judges all things and is judged by no one” (1 Corinthians), wisdom being about immaterial things (he recalls Dionne: “towards immaterial”). Prudence has no entrance into the highest things but commands about the things ordered to wisdom, how men should be disposed to arrive at it: a servant, minister, doorkeeper to the king.

• Aside: art is the only virtue Thomas gives no argument for here (left as remark). Reply 2: prudence considers the means to happiness; wisdom considers the object of happiness itself, the highest intelligible. Were wisdom’s consideration perfect there would be perfect happiness in its act; in this life it is imperfect about God, so it is a beginning or partaking of future happiness, nearer to happiness than prudence.
• Martha and Mary: “Mary hath chosen the better part, and it shall not be taken away”: the contemplative continues and is perfected in the next life; the practical life ends with this life (“won’t be building houses or going shopping”).

5. Reply 3: nobler object vs. greater certainty (“a great thing to know something about celestial things”) #

Point: Aristotle’s two criteria (On the Soul I) for one knowledge being preferred to another: nobler things, or more certain.

1. Equal in nobility, the more certain is the greater virtue.
2. Less certain but about higher things is preferred to more certain about lesser things: On the Heavens II (great to know celestial things even by weak probable reason; he thought their bodies higher than ours); Parts of Animals, the text “we usually use”: more lovable to know a little of higher things than much of lesser, with the likeness of a glimpse of the beloved being worth more than a long view of someone you don’t care about (his gloss: the boss you see all day).

• Homer in a good English translation is still better than those writing in English, though you get him imperfectly; Mozart on an imperfect machine rather than others on a perfect one.
• Applied: geometry is better secundum quid (more certain for us); wisdom better simpliciter (better object).
• Wisdom, the knowledge of God, cannot be perfectly had in this life; Metaphysics: not a human but a divine possession; yet the modica, small knowledge of God had by wisdom, is preferred to all other knowledge.
• Augustine: happy who knows God though nothing else; miserable who knows all else and not God; happy who knows God and other things, but for knowing God alone. Romeo and Juliet as his way of bringing this out: “eye hath not seen…”; Romeo forgets Rosalind on seeing Juliet, and would forget even Juliet, even himself, on seeing God.
• Warren Murray on friendship: those you’d like as friends are often separated by distance or age (Aristotle, Thomas, Shakespeare, Mozart, Albert, Augustine); you might think you’ll run around meeting them in heaven, but “if you take it up with God, you probably won’t be running around much”. Student: at the Parousia we won’t pull out the Summa to read about the Parousia. Student: still, some contact with the saints? He: we glorify God in everything, even in his works.

6. Reply 4: wisdom judges the indemonstrable beginnings (“the sophist Berquist”) #

Point: the truth of indemonstrable beginnings depends on the definition of the terms (know whole and part, and at once every whole is greater than its part); but to know the ratio of being and non-being, whole and part and what follows on being belongs to wisdom, because ens commune is the proper effect of the highest cause. So wisdom not only uses these beginnings, as the other sciences do, but judges them and disputes against those who deny them.

• Metaphysics IV: nearly half spent defending the principle of contradiction; “to be or not to be, that is the question” is a question only because you cannot both be and not be.
• Metaphysics V takes up the meanings of whole, part and being: the wise man in a sense knows the beginnings better than natural understanding does.
• His classroom example: “the whole is more than the part, always?” Yes. But animal is only a part of what man is (his mother preferred “animal that has reason”), yet animal includes dog, cat, horse, elephant besides man: so the part includes more than the whole? Students doubt. Solution from Metaphysics V: composed whole (put together from parts) vs. universal whole (said of its parts); keep one meaning and the whole is always more: the universal whole is said of more than its subject part, the composed whole composed of more than one part. He had mixed the two (animal as composing part of the definition vs. animal as universal whole). The man of natural understanding cannot defend the axiom “against the sophist Berquist” without the wise man Aristotle.
• Same with “before” (Categories 12, and differently in Metaphysics V): distinguish the senses and “nothing is before or after itself” holds; mix them and something is before itself.
• “Is nothing something?” Kasurik: philosophy is the only subject where you get paid for talking about nothing; nothing is a being of reason.
• Russell: even numbers equal all numbers (1-2, 2-4, 3-6…), so the part equals the whole. His answer: you are multiplying beings of reason; one can put 2, 2, 2 after each. People deny “the whole is greater than the part” when they lack wisdom.

7. The answer to Probus: logic and the three roads (“the road of reason as reason”) #

Point: logic is about the road of reason as reason, but that presupposes the natural road, which comes before it; the wise man knows the natural road, the basis of the road of reason, and “distinguishes and shows the order of the three roads”, so he directs more than the logician.

• His doctoral thesis was doing one of the things the wise man does. If there were no road before the logician’s, the logician would be the wise man; but there is one, “which Aristotle talks about in the second book” (book not specified further).

8. Article 6, the objections: “likeness is a most slippery thing” (“the ability to consider a likeness”) #

Point: three reasons to think charity is not the greatest theological virtue, the first turning on a likeness of ratios.

1. Faith is in the understanding, hope and charity in appetite, so faith : hope and charity :: intellectual : moral virtue. Socrates in the Sophist (pointed out to them by Monty Dion): likeness is a most slippery thing, it escapes you when you think you have grasped it. In Aristotle’s tools of dialectic (Topics) the third tool is the ability to find a difference, but the fourth is not “to find” but “to consider” a likeness (Greek skepsis, best rendered “consider in what way they are alike”). In a proportion, a likeness of ratios, there can be great difference: “The Lord is my rock”. So one must consider whether this likeness justifies the conclusion. “Likeness is a slippery thing”; a good example of why Albert said one must know both Plato and Aristotle, the chief philosophers.
   • Student: does this make poetry and art dangerous? He: yes, imagination is the source of error, taken up with likenesses (Shelley’s essay on poetry); Sophistical Refutations: likeness is the cause of error, the most dangerous errors most resembling the true. Names equivocal by reason of a likeness of ratios (beginning, end, before) are the hardest to grasp.
2. What is by addition to another seems greater; hope presupposes love (Augustine, Enchiridion) and adds a motion of extending to the thing loved; so hope is greater than charity.
3. The cause is more potent than the effect (he warns: the fourth sense of before is “better”, but cause-before-effect is another sense, so be careful); faith and hope are causes of charity, per the spiritual meaning of the genealogy in Matthew 1 (Abraham begot Isaac…: faith begot hope, hope begot love; touched in the end of the prologue of Dei Verbum). He slips “etymology” for “genealogy” and calls the slip itself an instance of slippery likeness, like the man in the cave grabbing the wrong bird. Sed contra: 1 Corinthians 13, “the greater of these is charity”. The order “faith, hope, charity” is not the order of excellence but of coming-to-be and of knowing them: catechetical instruction (Thomas, Augustine) goes creed, Our Father, commandments. Four senses of before applied: in time, faith first; in being, faith can be without charity, not charity without faith; in reason, instruct in faith first; in the fourth sense, “better”, charity before hope, hope before faith (“you don’t have that often taught”).

9. The body: same object, nearer to it (“the thing loved is in the one loving”) #

Point: since all three theological virtues have God as proper object, none is greater by a greater object; one is greater by being nearer the object, and so charity.

• Faith is about things not seen (“substance of things hoped for, conviction of what is not seen”); hope about things not had (cf. “abandon all hope”, in hell for a different reason); charity about what is already had: the loved is in some way in the lover, impressed on the heart, and the lover is drawn to union with the loved. 1 John 4: who remains in charity remains in God and God in him (“I left my heart in San Francisco”). Thérèse of Lisieux (called by Pius XI, he thinks, the greatest saint of modern times): “our union is already complete.” Faith and hope disappear at vision; charity is perfected.
• Sophia across the room vs. close up: same object, different distance. “That’s a nice distinction Thomas sees.” Contrast with a. 5: wisdom is better by a better object even though we are farther from it; “I’m closer to the square than to God”, comprehend the square, not God.

10. Reply 1: love nobler than knowledge of what is above us (“more noble is love than knowledge”) #

Point: faith and hope are not to charity as prudence to moral virtue, for two reasons.

1. Theological virtues have an object above the human soul; prudence and moral virtue concern what is below man. Knowledge is perfected as the known is in the knower (Thomas’s vis apprehensiva, grasping power; simplex apprehensio, the first act of reason: what is grasped is held as in the hand); love as the lover is drawn to the loved. What is above man is nobler in itself than as in man, since each thing is in another by the mode of that in which it is; the reverse for what is below man (the stone or atom is nobler in our mind than in itself).
2. Prudence moderates the appetitive motions of the moral virtues (how angry should I be? even Christ is angry with the hard-hearted Pharisees); faith does not moderate the motion toward God but only shows the object, and that motion exceeds human knowledge: Ephesians 3:19, “the charity of Christ excelling science” (probably “knowledge” in the Greek).

• Student aside: Scripture says a man does not know whether he is worthy of love or hate; you don’t know your own movement, but you love God.

11. Reply 2: love of wanting vs. love of friendship (“the love of wanting”) #

Point: “this is the great distinction”: hope presupposes the love of what one hopes to obtain, the love of wanting [ed.: amor concupiscentiae], by which one loves oneself more, wanting the good; charity implies the love of friendship, wishing well [ed.: amor benevolentiae], to which one arrives through hope.

• The girl at the mixer: the love you have at once is wanting; she is the good you want for yourself, and you do not think “it would be good for her to know me”. Really loving her is wishing good for her. A student who learned the distinction saw why her parents’ marriage lasted: they wished good to each other; that is what marriage needs to survive, hard in a hedonistic culture.
• Father Harden: violations of the sixth commandment always involve the fifth, since unchaste people are selfish and will kill for advantage; unchastity and uncharity go together; today murder in the West is rarer except abortion, but reputations and job prospects are destroyed for ideological enemies.
• A good teacher: at first you love him with the love of wanting (his teaching for yourself); you may come to love him for his own sake, another kind of love. Wine: only ever wanting (you wish it to keep only because you want to enjoy it).
• The priest who married his brother Richard sensed they would stick, and felt sadness marrying many he sensed would not last. In business, someone useful is loved with wanting; sometimes he becomes a real friend whose success you wish apart from his help: “an improvement”.

12. Reply 3: perfecting cause vs. disposing cause (“the heat of fire is more powerful than the soul”) #

Point: the perfecting cause is more potent than its effect, not the disposing cause; else the heat of fire, disposing matter for the soul, would be more powerful than the soul, “which is clearly false”. Faith generates hope and hope charity as one disposes for the other; dispositions are sometimes put under the material cause. Class stops here.

His words #

• sapientia, sapiens, sapida; sapida scientia: savory knowledge, his gloss of Thomas’s etymology of wisdom.
• “natural understanding”: the habit of indemonstrable beginnings [ed.: intellectus principiorum].
• disciplinae: the disciplines politics ordains in cities.
• secundum quid vs. simpliciter: geometry better in a respect, wisdom better simply.
• “architectonic”: wisdom’s ordering of the other intellectual virtues.
• modica: the small knowledge of God had by wisdom.
• ens commune: being in common, proper effect of the highest cause.
• “the three roads”: natural road, road of reason as reason (logic’s object), and the order among them shown by the wise man.
• skepsis: “to consider” a likeness, in what way things are alike, not “to find” it.
• “likeness of ratios”: proportion; source of equivocal names (beginning, end, before).
• “four senses of before”: time, being, reason, “better”.
• vis apprehensiva, simplex apprehensio: grasping power, simple grasping.
• “love of wanting” vs. “love of friendship / wishing well”: his rendering of the two loves in reply 2 [ed.: amor concupiscentiae / amor amicitiae, benevolentiae].
• “cause perfecting” vs. “cause disponent” (disposing).

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 66, a. 5 (objections, sed contra, body, four replies), translated line by line.
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 66, a. 6 (objections, sed contra, body, three replies), translated line by line.
• Handouts per verified sources: “Shakespeare’s Understanding of a Play”, p. 25 (probably behind the opening Shakespeare passages); “The Matter and Order of Wisdom”, p. 11 (probably behind the three-roads answer to Probus).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Ethics I (politics ordains disciplines), VI (prudence; wisdom head of intellectual virtues; man not the greatest thing).
• Aristotle, Physics VII (virtue a disposition of the perfect to the best).
• Augustine, De Trinitate XII (science vs. wisdom); Job 36.
• Aristotle, Metaphysics I (highest cause), IV (principle of contradiction), V (whole, part, being, before); wisdom a divine possession.
• 1 Corinthians (the spiritual man judges all; eye hath not seen); 1 Corinthians 13 (the greater of these is charity).
• Aristotle, On the Soul I (two criteria); On the Heavens II; Parts of Animals (glimpse of the beloved); Categories 12 (before).
• Augustine (happy the man who knows God); Augustine, Enchiridion (hope presupposes love).
• Plato, Sophist (likeness slippery); Aristotle, Topics (tools of dialectic); Sophistical Refutations (likeness cause of error); Shelley, essay on poetry.
• Matthew 1 (genealogy, spiritual sense); Dei Verbum (prologue); 1 John 4; Ephesians 3:19.
• Shakespeare: Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Richard II (his guess), “to be or not to be”.
• Thérèse of Lisieux; Pius XI; Russell on even numbers.

His questions #

• Isn’t the logician the wise man, since he commands all the others how to think? (Probus) Logic’s road of reason presupposes the natural road, which the wise man knows and orders; so the wise man directs more.
• How do you solve the objection that prudence commands wisdom? Prudence commands about what is ordered to wisdom, as its minister; it does not command wisdom itself.
• Is the whole always more than the part, given that animal includes more than man? Yes, once composed whole and universal whole are distinguished; the objection mixes the two senses.
• How do you answer Russell’s even numbers equal all numbers? You are multiplying beings of reason; one can put 2, 2, 2 after each one.
• Is faith to hope and charity as intellectual virtue to moral virtue? No: the theological object is above the soul, where love is nobler than knowledge, and faith only shows the object, does not moderate the motion.
• Does the slipperiness of likeness make poetry and art dangerous? (student) Yes; imagination lives on likenesses and likeness is the cause of error.
• What kind of love do you have at once for the girl at the mixer, or the good teacher, or wine? The love of wanting; for a person it may become friendship, for wine never.
• Is the disposing cause more potent than its effect? No, only the perfecting cause; else fire’s heat would be more powerful than the soul.