Does Hope or Faith Remain in Heaven? (Summa I-II q.67 a.4–5)

Orientation #

He opens by saying he has just finished reading the 97th chapter of the fourth book of the Summa Contra Gentiles, “the end of the book,” and that they will take “a little excursion” into the De Potentia and the Summa Theologiae. “As has been said” in the body of a. 4 refers back to the argument about faith’s imperfection (prev. lecture). Verified sources: this class treats Summa Theologiae I-II q. 67 a. 4 and a. 5. The previous class treated whether faith remains after death; the next takes up charity in glory and the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

The class, in order #

1. Objections: hope seems to remain in glory (“abandon all hope, you enter”) #

He reads the three objections of a. 4, admiring them (“What beautiful arguments those are! What a mind this guy had!”).

1. Hope perfects human desire more nobly than the moral virtues; the moral virtues remain after this life (Augustine, De Trinitate XIV); therefore a fortiori hope. He flags the “beautiful dialectical place”: if the less apt to survive survive, the more noble survive a fortiori.
2. Fear is opposed to hope; but fear remains (“fear of the Lord endures forever”): filial fear in the blessed, fear of punishment in the damned. Contraries are in the same genus, so hope for like reason.
3. Hope is of a future good, so is desire; the blessed desire the glory of the body (Augustine, Super Genesim ad litteram XII), and even the glory of the soul (“who eat me will still be hungry,” Ecclesiasticus 24; “in whom the angels desire to look upon,” 1 Peter 1:12). Aside: he asks Joshua whether there is “a holy envy” of Thomas’s mind; envy is horrible, but “starts over even good things.” He returns to this at the end (segment 10).

2. Sed contra and the body: hope is a kind of motion (“the act of the able, in so far as it is inability”) #

Point: whatever implies by its definition an imperfection of the subject cannot coexist with the subject perfected by the opposite perfection.

1. Motion by its very definition implies imperfection of the subject: it is the act of what exists in ability insofar as it is still in ability (Aristotle, “ninth book of Wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics IX]): walking home, you have not yet walked home; understanding a triangle, you have understood it — the latter a perfect act, motion imperfect act.
2. Hence when the potency is reduced to act, the motion ceases: the house once built, health once recovered; a thing is not still being whitened once it is white.
3. Hope implies motion toward what is not had (as said above on the passion of hope).
4. Therefore, when the thing hoped for is had — the enjoyment of the divine — there can no longer be hope. Sed contra: Romans 8, what one sees, one does not hope for; the blessed see God. Aside: “End of discussion. Period” — unlike Obama’s “period” about keeping your health plan, “a moving target.”

3. Reply 1: nobility of object vs. imperfection of subject (“a difference between knowing and guessing”) #

Hope is nobler than the moral virtues as regards its object, God; but the acts of moral virtue are not repugnant to beatitude (except by reason of their matter — no struggle over candy, steak or drink, since there is no food for the table there), whereas hope perfects appetite only about what is not yet had; moral virtue also about what is had in the present. His own example: guessing that there are three persons in God has a nobler object than knowing the Pythagorean theorem, but the way the subject possesses it is by definition imperfect; seeing God face to face, I can no longer guess — yet I will still know the Pythagorean theorem. Socrates in the Meno says “when I say this, I’m not guessing” — unusual for him. Even one who says “you’re just guessing” is making the same distinction; you may not always know whether you know or guess, but the distinction between knowing and guessing is “altogether stable, certain.”

4. Reply 2: servile and filial fear; fear in the damned (“filial fear has two acts”) #

Servile vs. filial fear: fear of punishment vs. fear of being separated from God (a student’s answer: “fear of punishment versus fear of offending”). Servile fear cannot be in glory, since no punishment is possible there. Filial fear has two acts: to reverence God — this remains; to fear separation from him — this does not, since nothing bad will be feared there (Proverbs 1:33, “you will rejoice in abundance, the fear of evil things being taken away” — “a beautiful text”). Fear is opposed to hope by the opposition of good and bad; the fear that remains is therefore not opposed to hope. Reverence is “the least kind of fear,” having almost lost the aspect of something bad. Student: even our Lord had fear of the Lord; Hebrews says he “was heard for his reverence.” In the damned there is more the fear of punishment than in the blessed the hope of glory, because there is succession of punishments (“from the hot to the cold and back again”), so the ratio of the future, the object of fear, remains. Hope and fear are defined by the future, like desire and aversion; love and hate can be in presence or absence; joy and pain in presence. Glory is without succession, by a partaking of eternity — “eternal life.” Definition of eternity supplied by the class: tota simul et perfecta possessio, from Boethius, taken over by Thomas, for whom he had “a great deal of respect.” No before and after in God: the Father is not before the Son. Yet not even in the damned is there properly fear, since fear is never without some hope of evasion; only communiter loquendo, as any expectation of future evil — “more like dread,” “they know the next storm is coming.” Student: isn’t despair, not fear, the contrary of hope? Answer: hope and fear are the principal passions; despair is accidental, secondary, because its object is a good one thinks one cannot attain; fear is the natural thing toward the bad, boldness goes toward the evil. Aside: seeking the definition of comedy, he began from the place that comedy is contrary to tragedy; tragedy’s emotions are fear and pity (Aristotle’s definition; Shakespeare’s prologue to Romeo and Juliet: “piteous overthrows,” “the fearful passage of their death-marked love”); so first he took mirth and boldness. A translator of Terence said that in comedy “the greatest is hope.” Since the principal passions are joy, sadness, hope, fear, and tragedy has fear and pity (a form of sadness), comedy has mirth and hope. Student: perhaps what the council had in mind with Gaudium et spes. Aside: story of his teacher jumping off the stage to fix a microphone — “that’s a reverence.”

5. Reply 3: hunger without boredom; desire but not hope for the body (“you can’t possibly become bored with God”) #

As regards the glory of the soul there is no desire in the blessed regarding the future; “hunger and thirst” mean the removal of disgust or boredom (student: “boredom”), and so too the “desire” of the angels: you never get tired of it. Food eventually disgusts (another helping, cousin Donald’s two weeks of spam in the Navy); but you cannot get bored with God because you never comprehend him — even God does not get bored of himself. Against the common complaint “just looking at God all the time, like the same movie over and over”: these are “ways of speaking.” Student quotes Shakespeare’s Pericles: “Truth can never be confirmed enough, though doubts did ever sleep” — there will be no doubts in heaven. As regards the glory of the body, souls before the resurrection can desire it, but not hope: not as theological virtue, whose object is God not a created good; nor as hope in general, whose object is the arduous good. A good whose inevitable cause we have is not arduous, so it is not properly hoped — one who has gold does not hope to buy. Since the glory of the body follows by redundancy, they only desire it. His application: the philosopher needs hope to find the truth, which is not only a good but a difficult good; if he despairs of it, “he can teach philosophy at Harvard.” Asides: no advertisements or deception in heaven, no changing the channel. Aristotle in the Poetics: when the play is not good, people eat more — popcorn at a Shakespeare film, fig leaves in the Greek theatre.

6. Article 5: objections that something of faith remains (“removing that which is proper… remains that which is common”) #

“Almost an afterthought” after excluding faith and hope. Objections:

1. Removing the proper, the common remains (Book De Causis; thought to be Aristotle’s but by a Muslim, taken from Proclus; Thomas commented on it, “a pretty good book” with a few corrections; “the last books of the wisdom”): rational removed, living remains; living removed, being remains. Faith has something common with the other two — knowledge — and something proper, enigma (dark, enigmatic knowledge); remove the enigma, the knowledge of faith remains.
2. Faith is a spiritual light (Ephesians 1, “the eyes of your heart enlightened”), imperfect beside the light of glory (Psalm 35, in lumine tuo videbimus lumen — which Thomas applies to seeing God through God, God joined to the mind as the form by which we see, since no created form suffices). But an imperfect light remains when a perfect one comes, as the candle is not extinguished by the sun. His gloss: the light Euclid gave us in the Pythagorean theorem remains — why not the light of faith?
3. A habit’s substance is not removed by subtracting its matter: liberality remains when a man loses money (a fortiori magnificence — endowing a chair, opening a museum), though he cannot act. Faith’s object is the first truth not seen; when it is seen, the habit could remain. Sed contra: faith is a simple habit; a simple thing is wholly removed or wholly remains; faith does not wholly remain, so it is wholly removed.

7. Body: same in genus, not in number (“faith comes together with vision of the fatherland in genus”) #

Some say hope is wholly removed but faith is partly removed (the enigma) and partly remains (the substance of knowledge) — like a teacher clarifying a student’s confused knowledge: confusion gone, knowledge remains (“this guy’s still thinking of this… hard to get your mind around”). If understood as remaining the same in genus, not in number, it is said most truly: faith and the vision of the patria share the genus knowledge. (Aside: patria, fatherland — “Our Father… thy kingdom come,” the ordered society of those who see God; we are exiles in this valley of tears.) But hope does not share a genus with beatitude: hope is to enjoyment as motion to rest in the end, and motion is not in the genus of rest. If understood as the same knowledge in number, it is altogether impossible: when the difference of a species is removed, the substance of the genus does not remain the same in number — remove the difference constituting whiteness and the same color in number does not remain, now white, now black. For the genus is not compared to the difference as matter to form, so as to remain numerically the same when the difference is removed, as matter does when the form is removed.

8. Digression: likeness is “the most slippery thing” (“the genus is to the difference like matter is to form”) #

Plato in the Sophist calls likeness most slippery — superlative. The mind is the vis apprehensiva, and a slippery thing is hard to grasp (the ceremonial slippery pole in the Navy). Aristotle in On Sophistical Refutations makes likeness the cause of deception: the tin “spilled ink” on the white tablecloth, wax fruit, Aunt Margaret perfuming artificial flowers. Of the tools of dialectic, the third is the ability to find a difference, but the fourth is the ability to consider a likeness (Greek skepsis, whence “skeptic”): you must see exactly in what way things are alike, or you exaggerate the likeness and are deceived. The real likeness: genus is to difference as matter to form; the order of the senses of “in” follows it — (1) in place; (2) part in whole, teeth in the mouth; (3) genus in species, since genus is part of the definition; (4) species in genus, not in act but in ability — quadrilateral is in the definition of square, but square is in quadrilateral only in ability, as it may also be oblong, rhombus, rhomboid, trapezium; (5) form in matter, like species in genus since form is first in the ability of matter. Porphyry (on genus, species, difference, property, accident) says the same. It also explains why, carrying a word over to God, one so often drops the genus and keeps the difference (Father Boulay “would bang into our heads”): demonstration is a syllogism making us know the cause and that it cannot be otherwise; God does not syllogize, so the genus is dropped, but he knows the cause far better; the genus is taken from what is material, the difference from act, and God is pure act with no passive ability. Boundary case: clay molded from sphere to cube is the same clay in number; but losing a vice and acquiring the opposite virtue, the genus of the vicious habit does not remain in the virtue — “so in that way, the two are not alike.” Latin he gives: non idem comparatur genus et differentia secundum materiam et formam — not that they are unlike absolutely, but not alike in this way. Thomas’s skepsis: he sees in what way they are alike (and reasons from it, the senses of “in”) and in what way not. (Aside: comparing professors, or De Koninck and Dion [names as heard], or man and woman — alike in some ways, not every way.)

9. Why the genus cannot survive: genus and difference signify the whole (“the genus denominates the whole from what is as matter”) #

Genus and difference are not parts of the species (though in some cases he will say they are), otherwise they would not be said of it: the letter C is not the word cat, my arm is not a man, the leg of a chair is not a chair; but square is a quadrilateral and is equilateral. As the species signifies the whole composed of matter and form, so do difference and genus, but genus denominates the whole from what is as matter, difference from what is as form, species from both: in man, sensitive nature stands materially to intellectual nature; “animal” is what has a sensitive nature, “rational” what has an intellectual nature, “man” both — the same whole signified by all three, not from the same thing in it. Hence with the difference removed the substance of the genus cannot remain, just as the same animality could not remain if another kind of soul constituted the animal. So the knowledge that was enigmatic cannot become numerically the same clear vision: nothing the same in number or species of faith remains in the fatherland, only the same in genus. His simpler example again: losing a vice, I do not keep the habit minus its badness; I acquire a new habit by other acts.

10. Replies of a. 5 (“the candle… do not regard the same subject”) #

1. Removing rational, living remains the same in genus, not in number.
2. The candle’s imperfect light and the sun’s perfect light are not opposed because they do not regard the same subject; faith’s imperfection and glory’s perfection are opposed and regard the same subject, so cannot be together, like the clarity and obscurity of the air — no day with night. Again Thomas’s ability to see in what way things are not alike. Student: what of the generous man with no money — “like Mozart without a piano”?
3. He who loses money does not lose the possibility of having money, so liberality suitably remains; but in glory not only the act of faith’s object (the unseen — “the substance of things hoped for, the conviction of what is not seen”) is taken away, but even the possibility of not seeing it, on account of the stability of beatitude, which is eternal; so such a habit would remain in vain. Close: “What a mind this guy had!” — Joshua: not envy but emulation of his clarity of mind; a composer said if we cannot equal Mozart we can at least imitate the clarity of his music.

His words #

• “ability” — his rendering of potency, “the act of the able, in so far as it is inability” [ed.: potency; act of a being in potency insofar as it is in potency]
• “ninth book of Wisdom” — Aristotle’s ninth book [ed.: Metaphysics IX]
• “the passion of hope” — hope as motion toward what is not had
• “servile or slavish fear” vs. “filial fear” — fear of punishment vs. fear of separation from God
• “in saeculum” — fear of the Lord remaining “forever”
• “tota simul et perfecta possessio” — the definition of eternity (Boethius)
• “communiter loquendo” — fear in the damned only in the loose sense, “more like dread”
• “arduous good” — object of hope in general, not merely the good
• “by redundancy” — how the glory of the body follows on the glory of the soul
• “enigma” / “dark knowledge or enigmatic” — what is proper to faith
• “in lumine tuo videbimus lumen” — Psalm 35, applied to seeing God through God
• “division” / “vision of the fatherland” — the beatific vision [ed.: ASR "division" for "vision" throughout]
• “patria” — the fatherland, the kingdom of those who see God
• “vis apprehensiva” — the mind as the power that grasps
• “skepsis” — the fourth tool of dialectic, considering a likeness
• “non idem comparatur genus et differentia secundum materiam et formam” — genus and difference are not compared as matter and form
• “senses of being in” — his five: place; part-whole; genus in species; species in genus (in ability); form in matter

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 67, a. 4 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 67, a. 5 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Romans 8 (sed contra a. 4); Proverbs 1:33; Ecclesiasticus 24; 1 Peter 1:12; Ephesians 1; Psalm 35:10 — as quoted within the articles

Mentioned

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles IV, ch. 97 (just finished); De Potentia
• Augustine, De Trinitate XIV; Super Genesim ad litteram XII
• Aristotle, “ninth book of Wisdom” (Metaphysics IX, inferred); On Sophistical Refutations; Poetics
• Plato, Meno; Sophist
• Book De Causis (Proclus; Thomas’s commentary)
• Boethius (definition of eternity); Porphyry (genus, species, difference, property, accident)
• Hebrews (Christ “heard for his reverence”); Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet prologue, Pericles; Terence’s comedies; Gaudium et spes

His questions #

• Whence, when that potency is reduced to act, what happens to the motion? It ceases — the house built, health recovered.
• Could I still be guessing that there are three persons in God once I see God face to face? No; but I will still know the Pythagorean theorem.
• Briefly, what is the difference between servile and filial fear? Fear of punishment vs. fear of offending / being separated from God.
• What’s the definition of eternity, and who gave it? Tota simul et perfecta possessio; Boethius.
• Isn’t despair, not fear, the contrary of hope? Hope and fear are the principal passions; despair is accidental, secondary with regard to the good.
• What is the opposite of fear in comedy? Not boldness but hope; comedy deals with mirth and hope.
• Hunger and thirst are said by reason of the removal of what? Disgust or boredom — you can never be bored with God.
• Wouldn’t the light of the Pythagorean theorem remain in the vision — why not the light of faith? The candle and sun do not regard the same subject; faith and glory do, and are opposed.
• When I lose a vice and gain the opposite virtue, does the genus of the vicious habit remain? No; I acquire a new habit.
• Should we envy Thomas’s mind — is there a holy envy? Joshua: emulate rather than envy his clarity of mind.