The Compendium of Theology and Sins of Omission (ST I-II q.71 a.5)

Orientation #

He says they are “up to question seventy-one, Article Five, I think, is where we left off.” Nothing is said about next time. Verified sources place the episode around I-II q. 71 a. 5, with the article itself matched for about ten minutes.

The class, in order #

1. Light reading with the grandchildren: the Compendium (“read the Compendium of Theology”) #

Point: he recommends Thomas’s Compendium of Theology and reports its order, which he admires.

• Occasion: written for the monk who was Thomas’s secretary, wanting a short theology to carry with him; unfinished.
• Division follows Augustine’s Enchiridion (written for a layman) and Thomas’s own Catechetical Instructions: three parts by faith, hope, charity. Faith = the articles of the creed; hope = prayer, expounding the Our Father (maybe the Hail Mary too); charity = the two commandments of love and the Ten Commandments. Thomas finished only the part on faith and began the Our Father; for the rest, go to the Catechetical Instructions.
• How the part on faith is divided: he recalls the definition of faith from Hebrews (substance of things hoped for, conviction of what is not seen); what is hoped for is the beatific vision; then John’s text, eternal life is to see you and the one you sent. So two parts: the divinity of Christ (shared by Father, Son and Spirit) and the humanity of Christ. The divinity part into three: substance and operations of God, Trinity, effects of God.
• Compared with the Summa Contra Gentiles, where the division is God in himself, God as maker/beginning, God as end and governor: there the first cut is between what natural reason can reach (even “Aristotle, the old pagan”) in three books, and what is known only by faith in the fourth (Trinity, Incarnation, last things). So the Trinity is separated from substance-and-operations and the balance is better; in the Compendium the Trinity “is no small thing” and gets its own place, while the effects are “jammed together” (maker and end no longer distinguished). “Both cases is beautiful.”
• He notes the “rule of two and three”: three, then two, then three.

2. Two examples of Thomas’s threes in the Compendium (“the infallibility of the divine foresight”) #

Point: the Compendium says familiar things in a very complete way.

• Future contingents are no problem for God, for three reasons: (1) the infallibility of divine foreknowledge, following Boethius: God’s knowledge is measured not by time but by eternity, “all at once, endless life”; the eternal now stands opposite every now of time. Example: I know infallibly that this man is sitting now because I see him now, but half an hour ago I could not have been sure (he might have been called to work with the incoming retreatants). (2) The efficacy of the divine will: what God wills comes about, and in the way he wants, necessarily or contingently. (3) The wisdom of the divine disposition: even where things could fail, God arranges that they will not.
• Christ’s death was voluntary (not suicide, and not excusing the Jews of responsibility); three reasons why he wanted to die: (1) to assume the punishment due to original sin (the sentence God gave); (2) the middle one, which he had to reconstruct: the spiritual sense of dying to the flesh for the spiritual life, “buried with Christ in baptism”; (3) to give a good example of charity, fortitude, patience and obedience (four virtues; Thomas’s Prayer after Communion names the same four with humility for fortitude).
• Why on the cross: matched to the same three: Adam sinned by taking fruit from a tree, so Christ is nailed to a tree (painters seldom show the cross as a tree); “if I be lifted up I will draw all men to myself”, from the sense world to the spiritual; and as a shameful death it teaches humility, since some men will die but not shamefully. Aside: Major André asked Washington to be shot, not hanged; crucifixion is worse than hanging.

3. Eve’s five sins and “nothing too much” (“she’s guilty of five things”) #

Point: Thomas’s ordering of Eve’s sins shows how the innocent are led astray from too much of a good thing.

• The five: pride, curiosity (curiositas, the disordered desire to know, not curiosity as a synonym for wonder), gluttony (the food looked delicious), disbelief (“you will not die”), disobedience.
• The first three all tie to temperance, as in the Secunda Secundae, where other virtues are attached to the cardinal virtues by likeness of mode: curiositas is excessive desire to know (a student adds Bonaventure’s phrase “concupiscence of curiosity”), pride excessive desire for one’s own excellence, gluttony for the pleasure of the senses. Then “the crux”: disbelief and disobedience.
• He flags: the big danger for a philosopher is pride and curiositas.
• The seven wise men: “know thyself” and “nothing too much”; why not “nothing too little”, which is also true? The emphasis falls on too much, because excellence, knowledge and sense pleasure are all good things.
• Pride starts from good things: people say Mr. Berquist must be holy because he thinks about God every day (a little theology and a little scripture daily); that is good but does not make one holy; holiness is loving God above all things and all things for God’s sake, even oneself.

4. Creatures add nothing to God’s goodness (“it’s like a point is to a line”) #

Point: Thomas’s argument that all creaturely goodness adds nothing to God, with two likenesses for our feeble minds.

• Mathematical: our goodness to God’s is not a shorter line to a longer (where adding could reach it) but a point to a line; add a point to a line and it is no longer. So all creation plus God is no better than God alone.
• Part and whole: creaturely goodness is a partaking of the divine goodness; Socrates plus the arm of Socrates is no better than Socrates alone.
• Aside: the Te Deum at the end of Matins, angels, seraphim and cherubim, apostles, prophets, martyrs, then the church, is an anticipation of heaven, all praising and yet adding nothing to him: “he is so self-sufficient.”

5. Asking the right question (“to go more than halfway”) #

Point: Heisenberg’s remark that to ask the right question is to go more than halfway to the truth, applied to the Socratic cause-or-effect question and pushed to a question of his own.

• His classroom device at Assumption: a line from ignorance (left) to knowledge (right), the path made of questions and answers; the right question is marked past the halfway point.
• Meno’s slave boy: asked how to double a square, says double the side; by Socrates’s questions he finds the diagonal from his own answers. Who contributed more? Socrates, by asking the right questions, makes the boy seem to teach himself.
• Euthyphro: is it pious because the gods approve it, or approved because pious? The latter. Likewise: is honoring father and mother good because commanded, or commanded because good?
• Augustine, De vera religione, on the first definition of the beautiful (what pleases when seen): does it please because beautiful, or is it beautiful because it pleases? He has no doubt it pleases because it is beautiful; delight is an effect.
• Aristotle’s Ethics opens with the induction that the good is what all want; the important question: good because wanted, or wanted because good? Wanted because good. Shakespeare too would call this a question of cause and effect.
• His own question: is the creature like God because it is good, or good because like God? A student answers “both, in different ways.” Tempted to say like God because good, as “two” comes first and being half of four, a third of six, a fourth of eight follow from it. But our goodness comes from God, and “every agent makes something like itself” (Aristotle, Thomas always repeating), so in a way we are good because like God. Then “my guardian angel” cautions: God’s will is involved, and the object of the divine will is the good, “so you better be careful there.” Left as a suggestive point.

6. Article 5: the objections and sed contra (“in every sin there is some act”) #

Point: can one sin without doing anything? Aside: Timon of Athens, the misanthrope’s denunciations of mankind; “I have to sin if I do anything.”

• Obj. 1: merit is to virtue as sin is to vice; merit cannot be without an act (Aristotle: they crown only the man who competes); so neither can sin. Tool of dialectic: likeness, specifically likeness of ratios.
• Obj. 2: Augustine, “on free judgment” (his rendering of De libero arbitrio), every sin is voluntary, so much that if not voluntary it is not sin; nothing voluntary without an act of will; so every sin has an act. “Very convincing”; the first use of dialectic is to exercise the mind.
• Obj. 3: if sin could be without an act, whoever ceases from an owed act sins; but the one who never does it ceases continually; so he would sin continually, which is false.
• Sed contra: James 4:17, knowing to do the good and not doing it is sin. Aside: no wonder Luther was scrupulous.
• The fourth commandment differs from the negative ones that follow: it commands doing something. If I do not honor father and mother, without kicking or killing them, am I sinning? People who skip Sunday Mass are not honoring God. Aside: John Paul II’s poem at his mother’s grave, “filial adoration”, honoring her by asking mercy for her.

7. The response: two opinions, both true secundum aliquid (“on account of the sin of omission”) #

Point: the question is moved chiefly for the sin of omission; Thomas grants both opinions a partial truth by a per se / per accidens distinction.

• First opinion (his Bible’s notes refer to Peter Lombard, though that need not mean Lombard held it himself): every omission has some act, interior (willing not to go to church when bound) or exterior (in that hour or before, occupying oneself with things that impede going). This reduces to the interior: whoever wills something incompatible with another, by consequence wills to lack it, unless he does not notice; so one is judged culpable. Aside: the Quebec rule that newspapers could not be sold until Sunday Masses were over, as if buying a paper would keep anyone from church.
• Second opinion (referred to Albert): no act required; simply not doing what one is obligated to do is sin.
• Thomas: both have truth secundum aliquid. Taking only what belongs per se to the notion of sin, an omission is sometimes with an interior act (willing not to go) and sometimes with no act, interior or exterior, as when one simply thinks nothing about going or not going. Examples: his wife’s Irish friend served meat on a plane on a Friday without realizing; a relative who bit into a burger before asking “isn’t it Friday?”; travel that makes Mass impossible does not really obligate, “I don’t think so.”
• Taking also the causes or occasions of omitting (accidental causes), some act is necessary: one omits only what one can do and not do, and declines only from some cause or occasion joined or preceding. If the cause is not in man’s power (infirmity), no sin; if it lies under the will (I drink too much, fall asleep, and Mass is gone), the omission is sin, and the voluntary cause has some act, at least interior, not necessarily simultaneous.
• Two ways that act relates to the omission: (a) borne directly on the omission (not wishing to go to church to avoid the labor): per se, since the voluntary belongs to the definition of sin; (b) borne on the thing that impedes, joined (wishing to play) or preceding (wishing to stay up, so missing Matins): per accidens, because the omission follows apart from intention, per accidens meaning “apart from intention” as in Physics II.
• Judgment is by what is per se, not per accidens; hence it is truer to say some sin can be without any act, though otherwise the accompanying acts and occasions stand around the essence of other actual sins.
• Joke: failing to read the Compendium is not a sin of omission, but failing to be informed as one’s state of life requires can be; pre-Cana conferences that do not teach the church’s full teaching, with many levels of responsibility.

8. Reply 1: more is required for the good than for the bad (“good happens from a whole integral cause”) #

Point: Dionysius’s authority, which Thomas always quotes: good from a whole integral cause, bad from any single defect.

• How many ways can a man be ugly? Cyrano’s nose (do not mention it, he may draw his sword), ears too big; everything must be right to be handsome. A woman with beautiful hair turns around and the hair is all that was beautiful.
• Homer has everything: excellence of plot (Aristotle: he taught the Greek poets plot), of character (Hegel: Homer’s characters are many-sided diamonds, the French tragedians’ a personified voice), of words (the similes that relieve the death scenes). Chopin on Mozart: he had everything in his head, every instrument, not just the piano.
• Is an argument good if one premise is bad? No; integral cause.
• So sin happens either in doing what one ought not or in not doing what one ought; merit only in voluntarily doing what one ought. “More is required for merit than for demerit.”
• Inspections at the military academy: shoes, brass, rifle, anything fails you; cadets carrying a second polished pair; a student’s father’s Air Force inspector’s white glove on a string; the German company that shined the drain, and floors scrubbed with toothbrushes.
• Aside: Aristotle likewise, ignorance comes both from not studying and from false arguments.

9. Reply 2: voluntary as in our power (“because it is in our power”) #

Point: something is voluntary not only as coming under an act of will but as in our power to be or not be (Ethics III); so not-willing can be voluntary insofar as willing or not willing is in man’s power.

• Nature vs. will: nature determined to one; the will can do this or that, do or not do, two indeterminations. The grandchildren’s cows will drop calves, not pigs; bees will not switch from honey to lemonade; but tonight, steak or chicken.

10. Reply 3: the affirmative precept (“always obligates, but not always”) #

Point: the sin of omission is contrary to an affirmative precept, which obligates always but not for always; you must honor your parents but need not be honoring them all the time; one sins only at the time when one ceases from the required act.

• When mother comes in, you stand up; aside: Theodore Roosevelt disapproved of Churchill for not standing when a woman entered.

His words #

• rule of two and three; Thomas’s habit of dividing into two and three
• Compendium of Theology; Catechetical Instructions; Enchiridion “on faith, hope and charity”
• infallibility of divine foreknowledge / efficacy of the divine will / wisdom of the divine disposition; Thomas’s three for future contingents
• eternity; “all at once, endless life” (Boethius); the eternal now opposite every now of time
• curiositas; the disordered, excessive desire to know, distinct from curiosity as wonder
• nothing too much; the wise men’s saying, emphasized over “nothing too little”
• “on free judgment” [ed.: De libero arbitrio, usually “On Free Choice/Will”]
• tool of likeness; likeness of ratios (dialectical tool in obj. 1)
• secundum aliquid; in some respect, of the two opinions
• per se / per accidens; per accidens = apart from intention (Physics II)
• integral cause; Dionysius, good from a whole cause, bad from any defect
• nature determined to one vs. will able to do this or that, do or not do
• affirmative precept; obligates always but not for always

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II q. 71 a. 5, objections, sed contra, response and three replies
• James 4:17 (sed contra)

Mentioned

• Thomas Aquinas, Compendium of Theology (division; future contingents; Christ’s death; Eve’s five sins); Catechetical Instructions; Summa Contra Gentiles (division of books I-IV); Secunda Secundae (virtues attached to the cardinal virtues); Prayer after Communion
• Augustine, Enchiridion; De vera religione (the beautiful); De libero arbitrio (obj. 2)
• Hebrews (definition of faith); John (eternal life is to know you)
• Boethius on eternity
• Aristotle, Ethics III (the voluntary, reply 2); Nicomachean Ethics opening (the good is what all want); Physics II (per accidens); on Homer and plot; on crowning only the competitor
• Plato, Euthyphro; the slave boy and doubling the square (inferred: Meno)
• Dionysius (good from an integral cause)
• Heisenberg on the right question; Hegel on Homer; Shakespeare, Timon of Athens; John Paul II’s poem at his mother’s grave; the Te Deum

His questions #

• How does the Compendium divide the part on faith? Into the divinity and the humanity of Christ, following Hebrews on faith and John on eternal life.
• Why does Christ want to die, and why on the cross? To assume the punishment of original sin, to die to the flesh, to give an example of virtue; tree for tree, lifted up to draw all, a shameful death for humility.
• What are Eve’s five sins, and what virtue do the first three tie to? Pride, curiosity, gluttony, disbelief, disobedience; the first three to temperance.
• If you add a point to a line, how much longer is the line? No longer; so creation adds nothing to God’s goodness.
• Is the creature like God because it is good, or good because like God? Both, in different ways; his guardian angel’s caution about the divine will leaves it unsettled.
• What tool of dialectic is used in the first objection? Likeness, a likeness of ratios.
• If I am not honoring my father and mother, am I sinning? Yes; the affirmative precept can be broken without doing anything.
• Does Thomas come down on one opinion as the whole truth? No; both are true secundum aliquid, per se and per accidens.
• Is an argument good if one premise is bad? No; good requires an integral cause, so more is required for merit than for demerit.
• What does “always obligates, but not for always” mean? You must honor your parents, but not at every moment; you sin only when you cease from the act at the time it is required.