ST I-II Q.71 aa.2-4: Vice Against Nature and Reason, Habit vs. Act, and Whether Sin Can Coexist with Virtue

Orientation #

He opens by turning to “the second article about vice being against nature,” presupposing the first article, “as had been said in the first article” (that vice is contrary to virtue) (prev. lecture). The previous class worked through the prologue and first two articles of q. 71, and the next takes up a. 5 on whether every sin requires an act. Verified sources: this class treats ST I-II q. 71, aa. 2, 3 and 4.

The class, in order #

1. Article 2, the four objections (“it seems that vice is not against nature”) #

Point: he reads the objections that vice is not against nature.

1. Vice is contrary to virtue, but virtues are not in us by nature: they are either poured in by God or acquired by being accustomed (Aristotle, Ethics II: we do not have the virtues in a perfect state by nature but by repeated acts). Illustration: what parents do with repeated acts; “familiarity breeds contempt,” so a child fears the father who is away more than the mother at home (“wait till father comes home”); a stranger can frighten more because you don’t know what to expect (his aunt Helen’s ice-cream shop in Watertown, Minnesota, and the cop who said “we can put him in jail for a day”: “boy, did I sober up”).
2. One cannot be made accustomed to what is against nature: throw the stone up as often as you like, it will not stay up or go the other way (Ethics). But some are accustomed to vices. He calls this objection “beautiful.” Aside: the story of Thomas at the King of France’s table, breaking the silence with an argument against the Manichaeans; the saintly king had it written down.
3. Nothing against nature is found in those having the nature ut in pluribus (most men are not born missing an arm), but vices are found in men for the most part. His teacher Kasurik quoted Thomas, “evil in the human race for the most part”; the Greek philosophers said most men are bad; Scripture, “the number of fools is infinite”; Matthew 7, wide (lata) is the road to perdition and many (multi) go through it.
4. Sin is to vice as act to habit; sin (peccatum) is defined by Augustine (Contra Faustum XXII) as something said, done or desired against the law of God; but God’s law is above nature, so vice should rather be said to be against law than against nature.

2. Sed contra and body: nature is the form, the rational soul (“that which is against the order of reason”) #

Point: since a thing’s nature is above all its specific form, and man’s form is the rational soul, what is against reason is against man’s nature.

• Sed contra: Augustine, De libero arbitrio III: every vice, insofar as it is a vice, is against nature. Aside on Augustine: John Paul II’s encyclical on him; in the new Catechism Augustine is quoted even more than Thomas.
• Body, step 1: vice is contrary to virtue; the virtue of each thing is to be well disposed according to what suits its nature; so vice is that by which a thing is disposed against what suits its nature; hence each thing is held in contempt from vice, and vituperatio is believed to be drawn from vitium (Augustine, De lib. arb. III).
• Aside: Cajetan at the start of his Summa commentary: Thomas so reverenced the fathers that he seems to have inherited the mind of them all, as Aristotle inherited the mind of the Greek philosophers before him. Example of the same reverence: a De potentia article on faith and miracles goes back to Anaxagoras, whom Aristotle admired: the mind must be unmixed with things in order to command them; a parent who becomes one of the kids can no longer command them.
• Step 2: the nature of each thing is most of all the form by which it gets its specific nature; man is constituted in his species by the rational soul; so what is against the order of reason is properly against man’s nature as man, and what accords with reason accords with his nature. “The good of man is to be in accordance with reason, the bad of man to be outside of reason” (Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4). Human virtue makes man good and his work good (Aristotle, Ethics II), so it accords with nature insofar as it suits reason; vice is against nature insofar as it is against the order of reason.
• His summary: in one word, a bad human act is an unreasonable act, a good one a reasonable act; “that’s kind of the starting point.”
• Shakespeare, “What is a man if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more”: the argument begins from a proportion, a likeness of ratios, learned first in math (4 is to 6 as 2 is to 3) and then carried to non-mathematical things (as seeing is to the eye, so hearing to the ear); Aristotle says the mind is exercised in seeing these. The chief good of man is to man as the chief good of the beast is to the beast; the poet, to avoid sounding like a teacher, puts “sleep and feed” for the beast’s chief good (his cat purring when fed and settled). If man’s chief good is no more than the beast’s, he is no more than a beast; parallel: “What is a three if it be half a four?” Two. The chief good of man involves the use of reason.

3. Student’s question and reply 1: born with the virtues? (“Does that mean that we’re born with the virtues”) #

Point: virtues are not caused by nature in their perfect being, but incline to what accords with nature, i.e. the order of reason.

• Student: if virtues accord with nature, are we born with them? He: unfortunately not (“was I born temperate with candy?”); sometimes one has a natural inclination to one virtue or one vice, but not in the perfect state.
• Signs that we recognise reason as what we should live by:
  • Wicked vs. stupid: a man is more apt to fight if called stupid; some enjoy being called wicked. “Stupid” is opposed to reason more directly than “wicked”; it says you are not fully human, defective as a rational animal.
  • Emotions vs. reason as “more me”: students (especially girls) say emotions; but a pre-planned murder is judged more severely than a murder of passion, because there you are more yourself; a letter breaking off with someone is more final than saying it in anger, because reason is more involved.
  • Should you live by reason or emotions? To defend living by emotions you must give a reason; so you already grant reason the authority to decide, putting it first. “You’re not being honest with yourself if you don’t realize that.”
  • Yet at birth the emotions are outside reason, attracted to sensible things independently, and can be crazy (the man in the paper who drove, not walked, to the liquor store next door for more wine).
• Reply 1 read: virtues, though not caused by nature in their perfect being, incline to what accords with nature, the order of reason; Tully in his Rhetoric: virtue is a habit in the mode of nature, in agreement with reason. So virtue becomes “second nature”: the temperate man does not drink excessively; Thomas says drink usque ad hilaritatem, not to the point of not knowing what you are doing. The Greek idea that a man who commits rape or murder drunk is punished twice, for the crime and for getting drunk: two sins. Virtue is thus according to nature, not that one is born with it; by contrariety vice is against nature.

4. Reply 2: two senses of “against nature” (“to be against nature is opposed to”) #

Point: the Philosopher’s stone example concerns “against nature” as opposed to what is by nature; the article concerns it as opposed to what is in accordance with nature.

• Against what is by nature: it is by nature that we have two arms; one born without an arm is against nature. Asides: you could use a third arm when carrying groceries but you can get along without it; you don’t need three eyes (the children’s story), but two are needed for depth and distance.
• Against what accords with nature: the way virtues are according to nature, inclining to what suits nature.
• Shakespeare presents this: he takes brothers, or father and children, so that betrayal is easily seen as against nature. As You Like It: two pairs of brothers (a younger brother usurps the older’s throne; an older brother denies the younger his inheritance); both end in the forest and are reconciled there; the forest is metaphorical for nature; the banished duke finds “tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones.” What is good must be in harmony with nature. Goneril in Lear, betraying her father, is the contrary case.

5. Reply 3: man’s twofold nature and the fine arts (“in man there is a twofold nature”) #

Point: most men are bad because man has a rational and a sensitive nature and more follow the sensitive.

• The objection is that most men are bad; Heraclitus, as Aristotle reports, says most prefer a life suitable to beasts.
• Reply: man’s nature is twofold, rational and sensitive; men arrive at the act of reason through the operations of sense, so more follow the sensitive inclinations than the order of reason; more reach the beginning of a thing than its perfection; from this arise vices and sins, following the sense inclination against reason: concupiscence (for the woman, the booze) or anger.
• This explains to some extent why most angels are said to be good while most men are bad: man’s double nature makes him “easy prey.”
• “That’s why you need the fine arts”: Thomas in the proemium to the Poetics: poeta est inducere ad aliquod virtuosum per decentem repraesentationem, it belongs to the poet to lead into something virtuous through a suitable representation. He took a friend in conflict with his brother to As You Like It. Asked his favourite Shakespeare play: King Lear, the one where nature is emphasised (a father with three daughters, one good, two bad; a man with two sons, one good, one bad); the fine arts lead because they appeal to the senses too.

6. Reply 4: eternal law as art to artefact (“as art to the artificial work”) #

Point: vice is against nature and against eternal law for the same reason.

• Whatever is against the ratio (definition) of an artificial thing is against the nature of the art producing it; eternal law is to the order of human reason as art to the artificial work; so it is of the same reason that sin is against human reason and against eternal law. (Human law, he adds, partakes of divine law applied to us.)
• Augustine, De lib. arb. III: all natures have from God that they are natures; insofar as they are vicious they depart (discedunt) from the art by which they were made.
• Asides: the saying attributed to Thomas that the way to become wise is to be “a man of one book” (he cannot find the quote); Bonaventure’s book was the crucifix. Same-sex marriage: “obviously against nature.” Break.

7. Article 3: is the bad habit worse than the bad act? (“a habit is in a middle between potency”) #

Point: the act is more potent in goodness and badness than the habit, shown two ways.

• Objections: (1) as the longer-lasting good is better, the longer-lasting evil is worse; the habit lasts, the act passes. (2) Many evils are more to be fled than one; a bad habit is virtually the cause of many bad acts. (3) A cause is more potent than its effect; the habit perfects the act in goodness and evil. He tells them to think out the answers overnight.
• Sed contra: one is justly punished for a vicious act, never for a vicious habit unless it goes to act.
• Body, way 1: habit is in the middle between potency (ability) and act; act is preeminent to potency in both goodness and badness (Metaphysics IX, “the book on act and ability”): it is better to act well than to be able to act well, more blameworthy to act badly than to be able to (“which is worse, to kill you or to be able to kill you?”); so the habit, above potency, is below the act.
• Way 2: a habit is called good or bad only because it inclines to a good or bad act; so by propter quod unumquodque tale, et illud magis est tale (when the same thing belongs to two things, but to one because of the other, it belongs more to the cause), “bad” belongs more to the act.
• The ability can be for both good and bad (no one is more able to kill you than the doctor); only in the act is there fully good or fully bad.
• Aside: Kasurik said Thomas prayed all night until he had to teach.

8. Replies 1-3: simply and in some way; kinds of cause (“simply and in some way”) #

Point: the habit is worse only secundum quid, and is cause of the act only as efficient cause.

• Reply 1: nothing prevents something being simply more potent yet falling short in some way; this is the old simply / secundum quid distinction, and confusing them is the second fallacy outside of language. Plato’s Meno makes it: how can you investigate what you don’t know? (why pay researchers to find the cause of cancer?) — they know it imperfectly, through effects. What is simply more potent excels in what is considered per se in both; the habit’s longer duration comes from both being in a nature that cannot always act and whose action is a transient motion. Example: getting drunk is worse simply; being a chronic drunkard is worse in some way (longer-lasting, gives rise to many acts). “That’s a hard thing.”
• Digression on the same distinction in philosophy: first philosophy is wisdom simply; natural philosophy is wisdom about natural things (“the wisdom of nature,” Shakespeare’s phrase), geometry about continuous quantity, arithmetic about numbers; but compared with God’s wisdom, first philosophy is wisdom only in a qualified way. “Philosophy” for Aristotle names a kind of knowledge, not love of wisdom, the knowledge a lover of wisdom pursues, so he calls first philosophy “philosophy” period; the word suits a man who admits he is not wise in the full sense; God alone is fully wise. If Aristotle had access to the word of God he would agree theology is more wisdom than first philosophy. Thomas keeps quoting Aristotle’s critique of Empedocles (Ethics and Metaphysics): we know earth by earth, water by water, air, fire, love, hate; but God has no hate, so we would know something God does not; still Empedocles saw something: hate separates, so a God with hate would not be indestructible.
• The two main divisions of being, substance/accident and act/ability, each have being simply and being in some way: walking into the room he came to be in some way; he came to be simply in 1935 (born January 18, 1936); leaving, he ceases to be in this room, not simply. Knowing in ability vs actually: only actual knowing is knowing without qualification. Diminutives (his surname, “little rose”) likewise add a qualification. Student: the ability to see a distinction is the definition of reason; he: the ability to see before and after is included in it, as the ability for large discourse includes small.
• Reply 2: a habit is not simply many acts but in some way, in power; so one cannot conclude it is simply worse.
• Reply 3 (put to Joshua: does the objector know there are many causes?): the habit causes the act in the genus of efficient cause; the act causes the habit in the genus of final cause, according to which good and bad are defined (end and good are basically the same, Aristotle on the fourth cause); so the act is preeminent in goodness and badness.

9. Article 4: can sin be together with virtue? (“a man uses the habit when he wishes”) #

Point: a habit of the soul does not act of necessity, so one who has virtue can sin; only mortal sin excludes the infused virtues.

• Objections: (1) contraries cannot be together, and sin is in some way contrary to virtue (he hints at different ways of being opposed). (2) Sin is worse than vice (a. 3); vice cannot be with virtue; so neither sin. (3) Peccatum is broader than English “sin,” like Greek hamartia: a baby born missing a leg is a peccatum naturae; in natural things sin happens only through corruption of the natural power, as monsters (originally something missing, not the Hollywood sense) come from a corrupted beginning in the seed (Physics II); so sin in voluntary things only where the soul’s virtue is corrupted.
• Sed contra: Ethics II, virtue is generated and corrupted through contraries; one act does not generate virtue, so one act does not take it away. The virtuous man who sins probably repents.
• Body: a habit in the soul differs from a form in a natural thing. A natural form of necessity produces its operation: fire burns the paper; heat cannot be with the act of cooling, nor lightness with the motion of descent (he corrects himself), except by violence of an exterior mover. A habit does not produce its operation of necessity, “a man uses the habit when he wishes” (De virtutibus): the will is free to act or not, this way or that (at a restaurant he could order salmon, steak or chicken); so one having virtue can not use it or act contrary, and proceed to sin. “Notice how weak man is”: even with virtue he needs God’s help.
• One act of sin cannot corrupt the virtue as habit, which shows it is not fully opposed: one cannot be temperate and intemperate, brave and cowardly at once, but the act is not opposed that way; as the habit is not generated by one act it is not corrupted by one (moral virtue from mos, custom). But compared to the cause of the virtues, one act can take some away: every mortal sin is contrary to charity, the root of all infused virtues as virtues; so one mortal sin excludes charity and consequently all infused virtues as virtues (said because faith and hope remain as unformed habits). Venial sin, not contrary to charity, excludes neither. Acquired virtues are not taken away by one act; in this respect charity is less stable than temperance. Student: why need Aristotle’s acquired virtues if we have infused? He: the infused introduce a kind of instability since they can be lost by one act; the acquired give stability. Result: mortal sin cannot be with infused virtues but can with acquired; venial can be with both; but “drip drip drip, gotta watch that.”
• Reply 1: sin is contrary to virtue not secundum se but according to its act; so sin cannot be together with the act of virtue (the same act cannot be courageous and cowardly). Story: Washington’s inexperienced army running from the British; “fix bayonets” as the 18th-century way, guns being inaccurate; a student adds the Normandy landing where a commander’s “fix bayonets” charge froze the German gunners.
• Reply 2: vice is directly contrary to virtue as sin is to the virtuous act; vice excludes virtue as sin excludes the act of virtue; the vicious act is not related to the virtue in that way.
• Reply 3: natural powers act of necessity, so with the virtue whole no sin is in the act; the soul’s virtues do not, so the reason is not similar. Having the virtue is not enough, you must use it: God to Catherine of Siena, what good is it to show you the steps across the bridge unless you walk.

His words #

• ut in pluribus: for the most part; what holds in most of those having a nature.
• peccatum: sin, but broader than English “sin,” like Greek hamartia; a fault of nature too (peccatum naturae).
• vituperatio: contempt/blame, believed drawn from vitium.
• “unreasonable act”: his one-word account of a bad human act.
• “ability” [ed.: potency]: used throughout for potentia.
• second nature: virtue as habit in the mode of nature (Tully).
• usque ad hilaritatem: Thomas’s measure for drink, to cheerfulness.
• propter quod unumquodque tale, et illud magis est tale: what belongs to two things, but to one because of the other, belongs more to the cause.
• simply / secundum quid (in some way, not simply): the distinction governing a. 3; its confusion is “the second kind of fallacy outside of language.”
• monster: originally something missing (an arm), not the modern film sense.
• “unformed” habits: faith and hope remaining after mortal sin, no longer virtues.
• “free judgment” [ed.: De libero arbitrio]: his title for Augustine’s work.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, ST I-II q. 71 a. 2 (objections, sed contra, body, replies 1-4)
• Thomas, ST I-II q. 71 a. 3 (whole)
• Thomas, ST I-II q. 71 a. 4 (whole)
• Shakespeare, “What is a man if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed” (Hamlet, inferred); As You Like It, “tongues in trees, books in the running brooks”
• Thomas, proemium to the Poetics, poeta est inducere ad aliquod virtuosum per decentem repraesentationem

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Ethics II (virtue by repeated acts; stone thrown up; virtue makes man and work good; virtue generated and corrupted by contraries); Metaphysics IX (act and ability); Physics II (monsters, peccatum in nature); critique of Empedocles (Ethics and Metaphysics)
• Augustine, De libero arbitrio III; Contra Faustum XXII
• Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4
• Cicero (Tully), Rhetoric
• Thomas, De virtutibus; De potentia (faith and miracles); Cajetan’s commentary on the Summa
• Matthew 7 (wide road); “the number of fools is infinite”
• Plato, Meno; Heraclitus (via Aristotle); Anaxagoras
• John Paul II, encyclical on Augustine; Catechism of the Catholic Church
• Shakespeare, King Lear (Goneril)

His questions #

• Is a man more apt to fight if you call him wicked or stupid? Stupid, because it is opposed to reason more directly and says he is not fully human.
• Other things equal, which do you judge more severely, a pre-planned murder or a murder of passion? Pre-planned, because there you are more yourself, reason is more involved.
• Should you live by your reason or your emotions? By reason: any defence of living by emotions gives a reason, so reason already decides.
• Which is worse, to kill you or to be able to kill you? To kill; act is preeminent to ability in badness, and habit lies between.
• Which is worse, to be a drunkard by habit or to get drunk? Simply, getting drunk; in some way the chronic alcoholic, being longer-lasting and giving rise to many acts.
• What part of philosophy is wisdom simply? First philosophy; natural philosophy, geometry, arithmetic are wisdom about their subjects; against God’s wisdom even first philosophy is qualified.
• When I walked into this room, did I come to be? In some way (in this room); simply, in 1935.
• Does the objector know that there are many kinds of causes? No: habit is efficient cause of act, act is final cause of habit, and good is defined by the end.
• Why need the acquired virtues Aristotle talks about if we have infused virtues? Infused virtues can be lost by one mortal sin; acquired virtues are not lost by one act and give stability.