Summa I-II Q.67, Articles 1–2: Do the Moral and Intellectual Virtues Remain After This Life?

Orientation #

He opens: “I guess we’re up to question sixty-seven,” and reads the prooemium listing its six articles; the class covers the first two and ends “now he’s going to the what?” (the next article). He refers back to what “has been said in the first part” (the prima pars) on the separated soul, without a locus. The previous class treated wisdom among the intellectual virtues and charity among the theological; the next treats whether faith remains after death.

The class, in order #

1. The six articles of q. 67 (“up to question sixty-seven”) #

After the opening prayer he reads the prooemium: the question is about the duration of virtues after this life; six things are asked: (1) moral virtues, (2) intellectual virtues, then four on the theological virtues, (3) faith, (4) hope, (5) “for some reason he has stuck in there, kind of afterthought,” whether something of faith or hope remains, (6) charity.

2. Article 1, objections: why moral virtues would not remain (“men in the state of future glory”) #

1. Men in future glory will be like the angels (Christ to the Sadducees, Matthew 22); but it is ridiculous to posit moral virtues in angels (Ethics X); so not in men after this life.
2. Moral virtues perfect man in the active life, and the active life does not remain (Gregory, Morals VI: the works of the active life pass away with the body). Aside: Mary “has chosen the better part” that is not taken away; the contemplative life continues, the active does not, “no more filling out income tax forms”; Augustine would say “then you got to get the active life in” this life.
3. Temperance and fortitude are virtues of the irrational parts, concupiscible and irascible, “which even the dog and the cat have” (the barking dog is irascible); these are corrupted with the body since they are acts of bodily organs. Aside on organ = tool: Aristotle’s definition of soul should be rendered “first act of a natural body equipped with tools,” not “organic body.”

Sed contra: Wisdom 1:15, justice is perpetual and immortal. He notes justice is in the will, “in the reason,” the immaterial part; so it might remain in a way fortitude and temperance would not except in their root.

3. Corpus: formal vs. material in the moral virtues (“something is formal and something as what, material”) #

Point: the moral virtues remain as to what is formal in them, not as to what is material.

• Augustine (De Trinitate XIV) reports Tully (Cicero) laying down that the four cardinal virtues cannot exist after this life, men being blessed by knowledge of nature alone, “the nature which created all natures” (= God). Augustine himself (“I think it’s Augustine” for ipse) determines that the four virtues exist in the future life, but in another way.
• Material in these virtues: an inclination of the desiring part to certain passions or operations in some mode. Formal: the order of reason, since that mode is determined by reason.
• Hence, materially, they do not remain: no desires of food and venereal things, no fears and darings about dangers of death, no distributions and exchanges of things that come into use in the present life. Formally, they remain “most perfectly”: reason “most rectified” (rectissima) about what pertains to that state, and the desiring power moved altogether according to reason, which “isn’t in this life. You know from the daily newspaper.”
• Augustine’s list: prudence there without danger of error; fortitude without being molested by evils to be tolerated; temperance without the fighting of lusts; i.e. prudence, that one puts no good before or equal to God; fortitude, adhering most firmly to Him; temperance, delighting in no harmful defect. Justice: its act there is to be subject to God, as here it belongs to justice to be subject to a superior, “the abbot, the bishop.”

4. Replies: the two states after death (“the state after this life is twofold”) #

• Ad 1: the Philosopher speaks of moral virtues as to what is material: justice about exchanges and deposits, fortitude about terrible dangers, temperance about depraved desires. Ad 2: the acts of the active life pertain materially to the virtues.
• Ad 3, the distinction: (a) before the resurrection, souls separated from bodies: the irrational parts are not actually in the soul but only in their root, the essence of the soul; so these virtues are not in act, except in their root in reason and will, “in which are the seed-like things,” the seminalia, of these virtues. (b) after the resurrection: the irrational powers are again in the bodily organs, so fortitude can be in the irascible and temperance in the concupiscible, both powers perfectly disposed to obey reason.
• Justice differs: being in the will, which is incorruptible, it remains in act even before the resurrection, which is why Wisdom calls it perpetual and immortal: “both by reason of the subject … and by reason of the likeness of the act.”
• Aside: “I wonder if the first thing that greets you when your soul separates from your body is your guardian angel. Why not?”

5. Student: separated souls have no emotions? (“keep the formal aspect”) #

Student: so separated souls don’t experience emotions, only the will? He agrees: no hunger, thirst, sexual desire, anger; “kind of a strange thing to be.” Then the rule for carrying names over:

• Words like love, desire first name the emotion and are carried to the will by keeping the formal aspect and dropping the bodily accompaniment, as when words are carried to God: “we keep the difference and drop the genus,” the genus being taken from matter or what is more potential.
• Example, scientia: in us (as in Euclid) it is a demonstration, a syllogism making us know the cause and that it cannot be otherwise. Does God syllogize? No; but as far as knowing the cause and its necessity, the difference, He knows it more perfectly. Likewise there is something material in hunger and thirst, but insofar as they are desire for something good there is a formal aspect that is kept.
• Difficulty: students find it hard to separate love the emotion from love the act of will, “especially older people … especially women”; so “God has no emotions” sounds cold. But a passage speaks of the angels’ love as “ferocious”: more intense than ours, since we are “a kingdom divided against itself.” Even eros is carried over to God by Dionysius the Areopagite because of intensity; God’s love is infinitely more intense than any emotion.

6. Article 2, objections: why intellectual virtues would not remain (“science is destroyed”) #

1. The Apostle (1 Cor 13): scientia destruetur, because we know imperfectly (ex parte); the other intellectual virtues are likewise imperfect and so cease with this life.
2. The Philosopher in the Predicamenta (the Categories; distinguished from the predicabilia: genus, species, difference, property, accident) says science, being a habit, is a quality hard to change, not lost except by great change or sickness; but no change is as great as death. Aside: Thomas spent his whole life acquiring knowledge, “what’s going to happen?” This objection is the opposite of Socrates in the Phaedo, that the soul is perfected in knowledge and virtue on leaving the body; and Shakespeare’s “who knows but dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil.”
3. The soul understands nothing without a phantasm (On the Soul III); phantasms are only in bodily organs and do not remain. Aristotle takes up the phantasm right after the senses, then distinguishes phantasms from thoughts.

7. Sed contra and the argument from the less apt (“more firm is the knowledge of universals”) #

• Knowledge of universals and necessary things is firmer than of particulars and contingents; but knowledge of particular contingents remains after death (Luke 16, the rich man: “remember that you received good things in this life”); much more, then, knowledge of universal necessary things, which belongs to scientia and the other intellectual virtues.
• Student: this means particular contingents are stored in the intellectual memory, which is hard to see. Reply: it is a dialectical place: if what is less apt to remain remains, what is more apt will; the premise is taken as probable because it is in Scripture; Thomas is “not showing how that’s the case.”
• Socrates’ parallel argument in the Phaedo: the soul is more godlike than the body (the Greeks call the gods “the immortals”), so more apt to be immortal; yet the body survives death at least in its bones, and the Egyptians even the skin (the mummy in his friend Robert Menory’s little science museum in Saint Paul); so much more the soul. “Good valid argument.”

8. Corpus: the forms remain in the possible intellect (“the place of what forms”) #

Point: science remains as to the intelligible forms, not as to the phantasms.

1. Some (Avicenna) held that intelligible forms remain in the possible intellect only while it actually understands, with no conservation afterwards except in sensitive powers (imaginative, memorative), which are corrupted with the body; every time you want to think “you got to turn yourself again to the agent intellect.” On this view no intellectual virtue could remain.
2. Against Aristotle (On the Soul III): the possible intellect is in act “when it becomes each one” (as one knowing, not as an individual) yet still in potency to consider: two acts, receiving the form and using it; between uses you still have the form.
3. Against reason: forms are received in the possible intellect immovably, according to the mode of the receiver; hence it is called “the place of forms,” conserving them. Aside: episteme is from the Greek for coming to a halt, as English under-stand-ing: “calm down and then you’ll understand it.”
4. But the phantasms, to which man turns in this life by applying the intelligible forms to them (knowing what a triangle is, I imagine one and apply the definition; in old age the images begin to fail), are corrupted with the body. Conclusion: as to the phantasms, “as it were material” in the intellectual virtues, they are destroyed as to that way of using them; as to the intelligible forms themselves, they remain. Scientia is basically an ordering of those forms.

• Student: can the separated soul reason from principles to conclusions? “I think so”; it can “do its geometry,” though it will not understand by turning to images. Later, pressed (angels do not go from principle to conclusion, so why would the separated soul?): it would no longer be the normal way of knowing, but it might still know something about reasoning, as God understands syllogisms without syllogizing. In this life the soul is known by discourse: objects, acts, powers, soul; separated, it will be actually intelligible and understand itself through itself as an angel does.
• Asides: his teacher’s joke that on first meeting your guardian angel you will think it is God, and it will say “I’m way down here… not even the greatest of the angels”; make an act of will opening your mind to your angel; the prayer “illumine our images” you can forget as a separated soul. One philosopher’s practical wife thought talk of angels nonsense. Someone said it is hard to imagine the separated soul: “you can’t imagine it, it’s not a body”; the early Greeks (Physics IV) held that whatever is must be somewhere, so place would be first of all things; Aristotle will argue there is something that is not a body. Christ’s body is somewhere, hence the Eucharistic problems Thomas resolves “magnificently” in the Summa Contra Gentiles (five sets of objections, each answered); Paul VI near to calling Thomas the theologian of the Eucharist.

9. Replies to the three objections (“another way of understanding”) #

• Ad 1: Paul is understood as to what is material in science and as to the mode of understanding: neither the phantasms (Greek word Latinized, not translated) nor the use of science by turning to them remains. Aside: thinking in bed at night, body at rest, the images “clear,” reported next morning to his teacher; a drinker’s images all moving; images must be at rest to consider something in them; hence the prayer for the angel’s help with images.
• Ad 2: sickness corrupts the habit as to what is material, the images, not as to the intelligible forms. Aside: his teacher’s joke on recognising a friend among separated souls: not by his face, but “he always thought in a screwy way”; and “you’re going to recognize Thomas right away.”
• Ad 3: the separated soul has another way of understanding than by conversion to images (said in the first part); so science remains but not the same way of operating, as was said of the moral virtues.
• Aside: Christ, having everything but sin, had this knowledge by turning to images too, which could develop through life (the pagan whose faith he found, tied up with images), while in his higher knowledge he knew it all already.

10. Digression: imagination as the cause of error (“likeness is the cause of deception”) #

Point: imagination is likeness without difference, and so the main cause of deception.

• Imagination knows things in their absence, and you find the place is not as imagined: C. S. Lewis’s uncle: “what way did you have to imagine it to be?”; cousin Dallas in the Navy disappointed by unromantic places.
• Plato, Sophist (“appropriately called”): likeness is “a most slippery thing,” hard to grasp exactly in what way two things are alike. Aristotle in his book on sophistry: likeness is the cause of deception; more precisely, likeness and not seeing the difference.
• Aristotle’s four tools of dialectic: the third is the tool of difference, the ability to find a difference, useful for syllogisms about same and other and for definitions (difference is one [ed.: of the parts of the definition]); the fourth is the tool of likeness, useful for induction, hypothetical (if-then) syllogisms and definitions, and is not “the ability to find” but “the ability to consider” (skepsis, without its negative English sense) exactly in what way things are alike and not. He once put to Montaigne [ed.: a colleague; name as heard] that difference is given before likeness because of this danger; Montaigne, whose first reaction to any new idea was to reject it, did not object. He uses those three passages together.
• Imago: the picture on the wall (Saint Charbel, after a false start with Saint Bernard) is a likeness of him; Aristotle’s imitation in tragedy is better rendered likeness. So imagination is named from likeness, without the difference. Shelley: the poet sees likeness, reason only difference.
• Examples of image deceiving: wartime Hollywood films making our ally Russia a wonderful place with people going to church; politicians worry about their image, not the reality; “the likeness sticks.” Hence not depending on images “is going to lead to some purification of thought.” The Beatles’ “Imagine,” politicians’ “I have a dream.”

His words #

• duration of virtues after this life: the subject of q. 67.
• organ: “tools”; the soul is first act of a natural body “equipped with tools” [ed.: organic].
• irrational parts: the concupiscible and irascible appetites, shared with dog and cat.
• material vs formal in a moral virtue: inclination of the desiring part to passions or operations in some mode, vs the order of reason imposed on them.
• rectissima: reason “most rectified” in the blessed.
• root / seminalia: the “seed-like things” of temperance and fortitude in reason and will before the resurrection.
• keep the difference, drop the genus: the rule for carrying names (love, desire, science, eros) to the will, angels, God.
• Predicamenta / predicabilia: the ten categories vs genus, species, difference, property, accident.
• scientia / reasoned-out knowledge: a demonstration; an ordering of understandable forms [ed.: intelligible species].
• understandable forms, possible (undergoing) understanding, agent intellect: his renderings [ed.: intelligible species, possible intellect].
• dialectical place: argument from the less apt to remain to the more apt.
• episteme: from “coming to a halt”; cf. under-stand-ing.
• place of forms: the possible intellect as conserving the species.
• phantasm: Greek word Latinized; “image”; the material element in the intellectual virtues.
• Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics].
• tool of difference / tool of likeness: third and fourth tools of dialectic; “find” a difference, “consider” (skepsis) a likeness.
• imago: likeness; imitation (tragedy) better rendered “likeness”; imagination = likeness without difference.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, ST I-II q. 67 prooemium; a. 1 entire; a. 2 entire (read and translated throughout).
• Wisdom 1:15 (sed contra a. 1); 1 Cor 13 (obj. 1, a. 2); Luke 16 (sed contra a. 2).

Mentioned

• Matthew 22 (like the angels); Luke, Mary’s better part; Augustine, De Trinitate XIV, on Tully (Cicero); Gregory, Morals VI; Aristotle, Ethics X; On the Soul III (phantasm; possible intellect in act); Categories (habit hard to change); Physics IV (place); Plato, Phaedo (immortality); Plato, Sophist (likeness slippery); Aristotle on sophistry [ed.: Sophistical Refutations (inferred)] and the four tools of dialectic [ed.: Topics I (inferred)]; Dionysius the Areopagite on eros; Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles on the Eucharist; Thomas, prima pars on the separated soul; Shakespeare (Hamlet, “shuffled off this mortal coil”); C. S. Lewis; Shelley on the poet; Euclid.

His questions #

• What’s the English word for organ? Tools; the soul is the first act of a natural body equipped with tools.
• What is formal, and what material, in the moral virtues? Formal: the order of reason; material: the inclination of the desiring part to passions and operations.
• Do separated souls experience emotions? No, only acts of will; the sensitive appetites are only in their root before the resurrection.
• When we carry a word like love or science over to God, what do we keep and what do we drop? Keep the difference (the formal aspect), drop the genus (the material).
• Does God syllogize? No, but he knows the cause and its necessity more perfectly; he understands syllogisms.
• How can knowledge of particular contingent things remain in the intellect? Left open; Thomas takes it as probable from Scripture in a dialectical place.
• Will the separated soul be able to reason from principles to conclusions? He thinks so, though not by turning to images and no longer as its normal way of knowing; it will understand itself through itself like an angel.
• Where does the Greek word for science, episteme, come from? From coming to a halt or stop; cf. under-standing.
• Why does Aristotle give the tool of difference before the tool of likeness? Because likeness without the difference deceives, and the fourth tool is the ability to consider, not find, a likeness.
• What is an image, and of what is imagination named? A likeness; imagination is named from likeness without the difference, and so is the main cause of deception.