Q70 Art. 3: Why Paul Lists Twelve Fruits of the Spirit, and the Loss of Wonder

Orientation #

He opens by continuing to enthuse about De potentia, “the most powerful book ever written,” which he has been reading outside class, and then says “we’re up to Article 3, I guess… Question seventy.” He does not refer to the previous class. The verification system matched about 10 minutes of the audio to Summa Contra Gentiles IV ch. 15; the transcript itself, however, names the text as Question 70, Article 3 on the twelve fruits, and its content follows that article, so the notes follow the transcript. The previous class treated the enumeration of the beatitudes and began the question on the fruits; the next continues with the fruits compared to the works of the flesh.

The class, in order #

1. Opening: what he found in De potentia (“most powerful book ever written”) #

Before the text, he reports three things from Thomas’s De potentia on the Trinity.

• Scripture’s argument (God says: would I, who give generation to others, not have generation myself?). Objection he himself felt: it doesn’t seem to follow — God gives motion to the world yet is unmoved, so giving generation need not imply having it. Thomas’s answer, “beautiful”: of the four causes (matter, form, mover, end), form has two kinds, the form of the thing itself and the exemplar; God causes generation in others not only as efficient cause but as exemplar, and as exemplar he must have it.
• Boethius’s definition of person, individua substantia rationalis naturae. Objection: ratio belongs to man, not angels or God. Reply: rationalis there is taken broadly for understanding. Apropos: what ratio means as man’s specific difference is discourse — exactly where Shakespeare begins his definition of reason (“ability for large discourse”); “Thomas must have read Shakespeare too.”
• Whether God the Son could have a son: the Son is the Father’s thought (verbum); a thought arising from a thought would be discourse, knowing one thing through another, which is reason in the strict sense — contrary to God’s understanding everything by one act in understanding his own substance. Aside: he has to take breaks because the book “kinda knocks you on your back.”

2. Article 3, the three objections (“It seems that the apostle unsuitably enumerates”) #

Point: the objections say twelve is too many.

1. Elsewhere Paul says there is one fruit of the present life: Romans 6, “your fruit in sanctification” (what we first ask in the Our Father, “hallowed be thy name”); Isaiah 27:9, “this is every fruit, that sin be taken away.” So not twelve.
2. Fruit arises from a spiritual seed; the Lord in Matthew 13 lays down a threefold fruit of good earth, a hundred, sixty, thirty. So not twelve. (“I always wonder about those three.”)
3. Fruit by definition is something last and delightful; but patience and long-suffering concern sadness-causing things, and faith is not last but a first foundation. So they are enumerated superfluously. Aside on “seed”: that is why we say seminar — the professor plants a seed. His teacher Caserta at Laval thought he learned more from De Koninck than from Dionne, but after years of teaching realised he had learned more from Dionne, who gave the seed, whereas De Koninck gave more the finished product; “I go around with one sentence of Dionne all day long.” Most people don’t cultivate the seed. Comparison: Stahl on early teachers of rhetoric giving sample speeches — impressive (Churchill) but are you getting the seeds to become a rhetorician?

3. The sed contra (“insufficiently enumerated the fruits”) #

Point: the sed contra here is not simply Thomas’s position but an objection from the opposite side — that twelve is too few — and will itself be replied to. All the beatitudes can be called fruits, yet nothing here pertains to the act of wisdom or many other virtues. Aside: De potentia does this in a big way on the Trinity — some twenty short arguments that there are more than three persons, a series that there are fewer, then the text, and he answers both sides. Caserta: “the business of the teacher is to confuse the issue” — a half-truth, but where he begins.

4. Respondeo: twelve fruits and the “going forward” (“fruit is said to be something that goes forward”) #

Point: twelve is suitable and answers to the twelve fruits of the tree of life beside the river in the Apocalypse (“you can’t leave out that word duodecim”). Since a fruit goes forward from a beginning, seed or root, the fruits are distinguished by the diverse going forward of the Holy Spirit in us. Digression on the word: Aristotle’s proodos, Latin modus procedendi, best English “way of going forward.” In De potentia Thomas distinguishes the going forward within God (Son from Father, Spirit from both) and of creatures from God, outside him; and explains why we use this word: all our naming goes back to the continuous, because knowledge starts from the senses, which do not get beyond the continuous, so we name first what is in place and carry the names forward. Examples: “distance” for contraries (species furthest apart) borrowed from distance in place; the eight (or nine) meanings of “in”, the first being in place; “before,” first in time, time being continuous and the number of before and after in motion (“things in motion sooner catch the eye than what not stirs”); “beginning,” first the point as beginning of the line, the line of the surface. This shows especially in words equivocal by likeness or ratios: beginning, end, in, before, going forward. Dionne’s lectures open with the way of going forward in natural philosophy, mathematics, wisdom, and later what is common to the forms of reasoned-out knowledge. The threefold going forward: (1) the mind of man ordered in itself — mens hominis meaning not reason narrowly but the immaterial part, will included; (2) ordered to what is alongside him (iuxta); (3) to what is below him. “Thomas is not going to make a distinction of twelve… but a distinction of three is understandable.”

5. The mind in itself: in good things and in bad things (“the root of all the affections”) #

Point: in itself the mind is well disposed both in bonis and in malis; this gives five fruits. In bonis:

• Charity first, because the first disposition to the good is love, the first affection and root of the others — as liking candy is the source of wanting it, joy at getting it, anger at losing it (from the course on the emotions). In charity the Holy Spirit is specially given to us as in his own likeness, because he is Love. His gloss: as efficient cause the diffusion of charity is common to the three persons; as exemplar cause it is specially attributed to the Spirit, Love itself. Parallel: the Word enlightening every man — equal as efficient cause, special to the Son as exemplar of understanding (“verbo veritatis verius,” nothing truer than the Word of Truth).
• Joy follows necessarily on charity: everyone loving rejoices from union with the one loved, and charity always has God present, “who remains in charity remains in God” (1 John 4:16). Aside: Richard of St. Victor (whom Thomas quotes with Hugo of St. Victor in De potentia) gives probable arguments for plurality of persons from joy and friendship, mutual love; he singles out the gaudium of charity.
• Peace is the perfection of joy, in two respects: rest from exterior disturbance (one cannot perfectly rejoice in the beloved while disturbed by others; one whose heart is in one thing cannot be molested, regarding other things as nothing — Psalm 118, “much peace to those loving your law, and no scandal for them”); and the settling (“sedation” not in our sense) of fluctuating desire, for he does not perfectly rejoice for whom what he rejoices in does not suffice. Augustine’s definition recalled by the class: tranquillity of order (locus left uncertain, “Confessions?”). In malis:
• Patience: not disturbed by the approach of evils.
• Long-suffering (longanimity): not disturbed by the delay of goods, since to lack the good has the notion of evil, as the Philosopher says in Ethics V. Aside: his freshman English professor described life as mainly waiting. Count so far: five — three in bonis, two in malis, “still following the rule of two or three.”

6. Toward the neighbour and toward what is below (“the good fire of love”) #

Iuxta hominem, one’s neighbour, four fruits, the first two about doing good, the last two about not harming:

• Goodness (bonitas): the will of doing well to him.
• Benignity (benignitas): carrying out that beneficence; the benign are those whom the good fire of love makes fervent to do good to neighbours. Aside: “benignity” is not really a translation, just more impressive.
• Meekness (or mildness): tolerating evils inflicted, restraining anger.
• Faith, taken not for the theological virtue but for faithfulness: not harming through fraud or deceit. (Taken for faith in God it orders man to what is above him, subjecting understanding and consequently everything of him to God.) What is below, three fruits:
• Modesty: exterior actions, observing the measure in everything said and done.
• Continence and chastity: interior desires. Two ways to distinguish them: chastity restrains from illicit things, continence even from licit ones (his brother Richard: if you can’t say no to candy you won’t be able to say no to really bad things); or, Aristotle’s use, the continent man undergoes concupiscences but is not led away, while the chaste neither undergoes nor is led — continence being less than virtue. “So now we got our twelve.”

7. Replies to the first two objections (“beginning, middle, and end”) #

• Ad 1: sanctification comes about through all the virtues, by which also sins are taken away; fruit is named in the singular there on account of the unity of the genus, divided into many species, whence many fruits.
• Ad 2: the hundred-, sixty- and thirtyfold are not diverse species of virtuous acts (which is how fruits are distinguished) but diverse grades of perfection even of one virtue: conjugal continence thirty, widowed sixty, virginal a hundred. His gloss: Christ approved all three in order — born of a virgin, praised by the widow in the temple, present at the wedding at Cana. The saints distinguish the three evangelical fruits otherwise by three grades of virtue; three because the perfection of anything is observed according to beginning, middle and end (“Beautiful”). Homer taught the Greeks that a plot has a beginning, middle and end. Thomas’s commentary on the Psalms rejects several divisions and takes Augustine’s: Psalm 50 (correct, not the “Protestant” numbering) penance, beloved of Teresa of Ávila — beginners fighting vices; Psalm 100 good action and growing in virtue; Psalm 150 praising and resting in God; Thomas died at about Psalm 54 and subdivides the first fifty likewise. Same in “looking” philosophy: beginning mathematics (logic is only a tool; the liberal arts are “introduction to the secrets of philosophy”), middle natural philosophy, end metaphysics; in practical: ethics, domestics, politics, the last a kind of practical wisdom. The reply to the third objection is not reached in the recording.

8. Aristotle refutes; the moderns “wave goodbye” (“we just wave them goodbye”) #

Point: Aristotle’s way of going forward is to examine predecessors’ reasons; the moderns’ is fashion. Aristotle in the Politics examines praised cities (Sparta) and proposed ones (Socrates’ Republic, with real defects like community of wives), and in the Metaphysics what others said of the four causes, keeping the good and showing where they fall short — not to make a name but because there are defects. Santayana: we no longer refute our predecessors, we wave them goodbye. Modern philosophers (student: Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Descartes) disagree with Aristotle on fundamentals without recalling him, giving a reason, or examining his reason — “a kind of pride.” How did they get away with it? Fashion, as Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida: giving to dust that is a little gilt more laud than gilt or dusted; “one touch of nature makes the whole world kin,” all praising newborn gods. The most-read thing is the newspaper — “what’s new?” — an undeveloped wonder that wonders only about the new. Student additions: Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals on a charismatic Oxford figure (Oh! Calcutta), Napoleon’s charisma, a classical Chinese thinker lamenting charisma over virtue. He: Dionne warned that students attach to a professor’s personality, something outside his knowledge, and don’t profit; but fashion (the new) is different from charisma.

9. Superficial versus profound wonder (“Woe or Wonder”) #

Point: wonder is the beginning of philosophy (Plato), but ours is stunted to the superficial. Real wonder: in the Tuesday class on Physics III Aristotle says twice motion is hard to see yet can be; walking across the room, part is gone, part to come, and in the now how far do I move? Likewise time: past no more, future not yet, the now of no length — a whole whose parts don’t exist, like a word without its letters, a man without head and limbs, a book without pages. De Koninck, teaching place (Natural Hearing IV) since the 1930s, stood in the hall saying “isn’t this wonderful?” — more wonder than any student. People don’t wonder what happiness is (he memorised the Ethics in high school; his father was impressed), what motion, time, eternity are; De Koninck ended the course on time with a day on eternity, which is understood by negations of time — “before Abraham was, I am,” not “I was,” since as God he is before Abraham in duration, not in time. Sources of wonder: Albert the Great, beginning of his Metaphysics commentary, poetry dat modum admirandi; Dionne agreed there would have been no Greek philosophers without Homer; Aristotle compares the philomythoi to the philosopher; De Koninck: read good literature before philosophy (fairy tales, then Homer). Book Woe or Wonder on Shakespearean tragedy, from the end of Hamlet; the wonder in Winter’s Tale. The burning bush: Moses’ wonder at the bush not consumed; a metaphor of the incarnate Word whose divine nature does not consume the human; fire and sun enlighten and warm, as God enlightens by faith then warms by charity — metaphors are there partly to make you wonder what they mean, like the twelve fruits on the tree. Mozart’s first quartet (Lodi, K. 80) and the first Haydn quartet rouse wonder; the St. Paul library LPs. Homer, Sophocles, Shakespeare the supreme poets (“Sophocles is Homer writing tragedy”). Student remarks: a war on wonder in Protestantism and materialism; gender-issues courses in an English department block wonder; Il Postino and Neruda’s non-transcendent metaphor; rap “so real.” He closes: “the perfection of a thing is observed according to its beginning, middle and end — there’s enough truth to that.”

His words #

• exemplar cause: the second kind of formal cause, alongside the form of the thing itself.
• ratio (strict sense): discourse, knowing one thing through another; broad sense, understanding.
• verbum: the Son as the thought of the Father.
• fruit: what goes forward from a beginning, as from a seed or root; something last and delightful.
• going forward: his rendering of proodos / modus procedendi [ed.: procession].
• equivocal by likeness or ratios: words like beginning, end, in, before, going forward.
• mens hominis: the immaterial part of man, will included, not reason narrowly.
• iuxta hominem: what is alongside a man, his neighbour.
• sedation of desire: the settling down of fluctuating desire, not our sense.
• longanimity / long-suffering: not disturbed by delay of goods.
• benignitas: fervent carrying out of beneficence; “benignity” is not a translation.
• faith (fruit): faithfulness, not the theological virtue.
• continence vs. chastity: from licit vs. illicit; or undergoing without being led vs. neither.
• looking philosophy [ed.: speculative/theoretical philosophy]; domestics [ed.: economics, household].
• Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics].
• philomythoi: lovers of myth, compared by Aristotle to the philosopher.
• dat modum admirandi: poetry gives the way of wondering (Albert the Great).

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Question 70, Article 3: objections 1-3, sed contra, respondeo, replies 1-2 — ST I-II q.70 a.3 (inferred); verification system reports SCG IV ch. 15 for ~10 min.
• Galatians 5 (twelve fruits); Romans 6; Isaiah 27:9; Matthew 13; Apocalypse (tree of life, twelve fruits); 1 John 4:16; Psalm 118. Mentioned
• Thomas, De potentia (Trinity: generation, person, procession, whether the Son has a son).
• Boethius, definition of person.
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics V; Physics III (motion) and IV (place, time); Politics (Sparta, Republic); Metaphysics (predecessors on causes).
• Thomas, commentary on the Psalms (prologue on divisions; Augustine’s 50/100/150).
• Richard and Hugo of St. Victor, on the Trinity.
• Augustine, tranquillity of order (locus left open).
• Shakespeare: definition of reason (Hamlet, inferred); Troilus and Cressida; Hamlet’s ending; Winter’s Tale.
• Albert the Great, commentary on the Metaphysics; Santayana; Stahl on rhetoric; Paul Johnson, Intellectuals; Woe or Wonder; Mozart K. 80 and the Haydn quartets; Il Postino.

His questions #

• How does it follow that because God gives generation to others he has generation himself? Because he causes it not only as efficient cause but as exemplar.
• What does ratio mean as man’s specific difference? Discourse — where Shakespeare too begins his definition of reason.
• Where does the number twelve come up? In the respondeo, from the twelve fruits of the tree of life in the Apocalypse.
• Why do we use the word “going forward” of the Spirit’s procession? All naming goes back to the continuous, since knowledge starts from sense.
• Is the diffusion of charity a work of the Holy Spirit alone or of the whole Trinity? As efficient cause common to all; as exemplar specially the Spirit, who is Love.
• What is the perfection of joy? Peace, in two respects: rest from exterior disturbance and settling of desire.
• How many fruits so far, and how divided? Five: three in bonis, two in malis; then four toward the neighbour, three toward what is below — twelve.
• What do the hundred-, sixty- and thirtyfold mean? Grades of perfection of one virtue: virginal, widowed, conjugal.
• What is the beginning of looking philosophy? of practical? Mathematics, natural philosophy, metaphysics; ethics, domestics, politics.
• How did the moderns get away with ignoring Aristotle? Fashion (Troilus and Cressida) and, a student adds, charisma.