Comparing Sins I: Are All Sins Connected or Equal, and Does Gravity Depend on the Object? (ST I-II q.73 aa.1-3)

Orientation #

He opens by recalling what Vatican II said Thomas is good for, and says “today we’ve got to talk about the comparison of sins to each other”, then reads the proemium of q. 73 and articles 1-3. He refers back to “what we were saying earlier” about not neglecting acquired virtues for infused ones (prev. lecture not confirmed by the context block; “as we said last time” is not the phrase he uses). He stops after a. 3: “Should we take a break here.” The previous class treated the distinction of sins (q. 72) and the next continues q. 73 with opposition to greater virtues and spiritual vs. carnal sins.

The class, in order #

1. Vatican II, the Lateran decretal, and the connection of mysteries (“to see the connection of one what”) #

Point: Thomas’s excellence is seeing the connection of one mystery with another, which the Council text itself does not do.

• What Vatican II says Thomas is for: to penetrate as much as possible into the mysteries of things, and to see the connection of one mystery with another.
• Example: Thomas’s exposition of the first decretal of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215; “where they say St. Francis and Dominic met”) lists God as eternal, all-powerful, simple, unchanging, but the Council does not connect eternal and unchanging. In the Summa, the question on God as unchangeable is immediately followed by God as eternal: because we are in motion we are in time; because God is unchanging He has eternity.

2. In how many senses is God a cause? (“How many ways is God a cause”) #

Point: God is cause in three senses, not four, because three are grounded in act and matter is passive ability.

• Four causes as he lists them: matter (that from which something comes to be, existing within it); form (both the intrinsic cause of a thing being what it is, and the model or exemplar); mover or maker; end (that for the sake of which).
• Student answer: “two and a half” (the exemplar is the extrinsic form, not the intrinsic).

1. Form, mover/maker and end are all based on actuality: act is the end of passive ability; the mover acts insofar as he has a form; the exemplar is an act.
2. Matter is passive ability.
3. God is pure act and altogether simple. Conclusion: God is cause as maker, exemplar, end, not as matter.

• Appropriation to the Trinity: mover/maker to the Father (power), exemplar/art to the Son (wisdom), end to the Holy Spirit (goodness). Romans “I think it is chapter eleven”: from him, through him, in him, appropriated to Father, Son, Holy Spirit. “It’s kind of beautiful to see that.”

3. The proemium of q. 73: ten questions (“comparison of sins to each other”) #

Point: he reads the ten articles with comments.

1. whether all sins and vices are connected (“I hope not”); 2. whether all are equal; 3. whether gravity is by objects; 4. whether by the dignity of the virtues opposed (a sin against charity worse than one against temperance); 5. whether carnal sins are graver than spiritual (“I bet he’ll say the opposite”); 6. by the causes of sins; 7. by circumstances; 8. by the quantity of harm; 9. by the condition of the person sinned against; 10. by the magnitude of the person sinning (“this is now aimed at you guys”).

• Aside: “Fr. Diage” told a TAC audience that he “taught me to read Thomas a sentence at a time”; he now divides the text into separate thoughts for his own reading.

4. Article 1: are all sins connected? Objections and corpus (“all sins are what connected”) #

Point: virtues are connected because every virtuous agent intends the one rule of reason; sins are not, because the sinner intends diverse, even contrary, goods.

• Obj. 1: James 2, whoever offends in one is guilty of all; Ambrose (one of the four or five great Western doctors): sin is transgression of the divine law. Obj. 2: every sin excludes its opposed virtue, and the one lacking one virtue lacks all (they are connected through prudence). Obj. 3: as the love of God, making the city of God, is the root of all virtues, so love of self, making the city of Babylon, is the root of all sins (Augustine, City of God 14). “Simplifies confession, doesn’t it? I did it all.”
• Sed contra: some vices are contrary to each other (Ethics II): cowardice contrary to foolhardiness, and contraries cannot be at the same time in the same way.
• Corpus, as he reads it:

1. The intention of the agent according to virtue is to follow the rule of reason; so all virtues intend the same, and are connected in right reason of things to be done, which is the definition of prudence (“What’s the English word? Foresight”).
2. The sinner’s intention is not to recede from reason but to attain some desirable good, from which the sin has its species.
3. Those goods are diverse, with no connection, indeed contrary. Conclusion: sins have no connection; sin is not going from multitude to unity (as the connected virtues do) but receding from unity to multitude. Example: wanting to eat too much and be an anorexic at the same time.

5. Digression: confusion, distinction, division, definition (“always distinguish”) #

Point: distinction is fundamental in knowledge; it is before order and before division, and division is before definition.

• “Never affirm, seldom deny, always distinguish” (a Dominican’s teacher; “a little bit of exaggeration”).
• Before distinction in the mind: confusion. After: order. Why Shakespeare’s definition of reason as “looking before and after” includes looking for distinction: the axiom “nothing is before or after itself”; if I couldn’t distinguish today from yesterday I couldn’t see yesterday was before today; if I couldn’t distinguish beer from wine I couldn’t see wine is better than beer.
• Distinction vs. division: every division is a distinction, not every distinction a division; division is the distinction of the parts of some whole. Boundary case: Thomas says there is distinction in God between Father, Son, Holy Spirit but no division, since God has no parts. The persons are distinct by opposition of relatives: John 1, “the Word was toward God”, Greek pros (the word for relatives, pros ti, Aristotle’s ad aliquid), so the Father is not the Son. “It’s very important to see.”
• Division vs. definition: defining square as equilateral right-angled quadrilateral divides it into genus and difference; but dividing number into odd and even, or quadrilateral into square, oblong, rhombus, rhomboid, trapezium (or parallelogram and trapezium), is not a definition.
• Definition: speech signifying/making known what a thing is; tied to the object of our mind, what a thing is (On the Soul III: “we’ll get there”).
• His puzzle: is the definition of definition a definition of the definition of definition? Answer: no in particular; it defines definition in general, as the definition of square tells what a square is. “Looks down at the students’ faces… ‘Why are you doing this to me?’”

6. Article 1: replies (“James speaks about sin not on the side of”) #

Point: the objections hold only on the side of turning away, or only for infused virtue, or only for the virtues.

• Ad 1: James speaks of sin on the side of aversion, not conversion (by which sins are distinguished): all commandments are from one God, so God is held in contempt in every sin, and from that contempt comes the guilt of all. Student question: per se or per accidens? Per accidens: the drunkard intends the pleasure, not to depart from the whole law.
• Ad 2: not every sin removes the opposed virtue. Venial sin does not; mortal sin removes infused virtue, but one act does not remove acquired virtue, produced by repeated acts, unless a contrary habit is generated. “That’s what we were saying earlier”: acquired virtues have a stability infused ones lack; grace does not remove the need for acquired perfection. Where a virtue is excluded, prudence is excluded (every act against a virtue is against foresight), and so all moral virtues as to what is formal in them, since Aristotle’s Ethics II definition (habit with choice, in the middle towards us, determined by right reason, i.e. prudence, Ethics VI) puts prudence in the definition. But inclinations remain, and it does not follow that one has all vices: (a) many vices are opposed to one virtue, so a virtue can be removed by one without the other; (b) sin is directly opposed to the virtue as inclination to act, and some virtuous inclinations remain.
• Ad 3: love of God gathers affection from many to one, so its virtues are connected; love of self scatters affection among diverse temporal goods (“a description of contemporary man”: kids lining up all week for the new iPhone), so its sins are not.

7. Article 2: are all sins equal? Objections and corpus (“twofold genus of what privations”) #

Point: the Stoic error considers sin only as privation; but there are two kinds of privation, and sin is the kind that admits more and less.

• Obj. 1: to sin is to do what is not licit, equally reprehensible in all. Obj. 2: the rule of reason is to human acts as a linear ruler to bodies; to go beyond the line is equally so whether by more or less, since privations do not receive more or less. His examples: his father at golf, “at least get it past the hole”; a level, either it’s level or not; “measure three times, cut once”, if it’s short it’s short. Obj. 3: Cicero, Paradoxes, all virtues equal (“How could he be so stupid?”).
• Sed contra: John 19, Christ to Pilate: he who handed me to you has the greater sin, yet Pilate had some sin. Adultery worse than fornication.
• Corpus:

1. The Stoics (Cicero, Paradoxes) held all sins equal; hence heretics held all punishments in hell equal (“that’s not what Dante said”).
2. They considered sin only as privation, and no privation exceeds more or less (privation a kind of non-being).
3. But there are two kinds of privation: (a) pure lack, consisting in being corrupted: death (no one is more dead on the first day than after a year, even if the corpse is dissolved; mortuary joke: “this guy just came in, so he’s only a little dead”), darkness (a house is not darker under many veils than under one that excludes all light); nothing of the opposite habit remains, so no more or less; (b) privation retaining something of the opposite habit, consisting more in being-corrupted (in motion): sickness, lacking due commensuration of humours but leaving something, else the animal would not live; ugliness; these receive more or less on the side of what remains (his heart pills work more or less, “they don’t do that for a dead man”).
4. Sin is like the second: the order of reason is not wholly removed, else evil “if it is integral would destroy itself” (Ethics IV; he notes the Prima Pars on distinction quotes the same text: evil cannot destroy the good that is its subject). The substance of the act would not remain without something of the order of reason. Conclusion: gravity varies by how much one recedes from rightness of reason; not all sins are equal.

• Aristotle in Ethics II leads to “virtue in the middle” through the arts, which are more known: cooking steaks too much or too little, salt, a chair leg cut too short or too long; departure from the middle can be more or less. Music: Baroque, classical, Romantic, less beautiful, then positively ugly, rock bands “scary”.
• Aside: the “Grateful Dead” package store sign he took for a sick slogan; “deadheads, not dead foot or dead elbow”.

8. Article 2: replies (“as if it were a pure what privation”) #

• Ad 1: sins are not illicit because committed but because of some disorder; a greater disorder is more illicit and graver. Example: King Lear, daughters doing awful things to their father, worse than brother against brother in As You Like It, since you owe your life to your father, not your brother; Friar Lawrence’s line on “true birth”. His favourite play question; “each time I saw it acted… really well done”.
• Ad 2: the argument treats sin as a pure privation, the distinction he drew (one man is as dead as another, beheaded or dying in bed).
• Ad 3: virtues are equal proportionally in one and the same man; yet one virtue precedes another in worth by species, and one man is more virtuous than another in the same species; and even if virtues were equal, vices would not be, since virtues have a connection and vices do not.

9. Article 3: gravity by object; objections, corpus, replies (“in that way in which one sickness is more grave”) #

Point: since the object is the end of the act, and reason orders from the end, a sin about a higher end is graver.

• Obj. 1: gravity is the mode or quality of sin, the object its matter. Obj. 2: gravity is the intensity of malice, and malice is on the side of aversion, not of conversion to the desirable good. Obj. 3: sins of diverse objects are of diverse genera, and diverse genera are incomparable (Physics VII): one line longer than another, one triangle bigger than another, but not a triangle bigger than a line; “can candy be sweeter than a girl?” only metaphorically.
• Sed contra: sins have species from objects, and murder is graver than theft by species. He notes the order of the negative commandments: murder, adultery, theft, false witness (“kind of strange”; maybe false witness could be worse).
• Corpus:

1. Sins differ in gravity as sicknesses do: health is commensuration of humours suited to the animal’s nature, virtue is commensuration of the act to the rule of reason.
2. A sickness is graver when it removes commensuration through a prior principle: one from the heart, principle of life, is more dangerous (aside: as a boy everyone died of heart, now of cancer, since medicine keeps the heart going).
3. So a sin is graver the more it disorders something that is a beginning in the order of reason; reason orders all from the end; the objects of acts are their ends. Conclusion: gravity follows diversity of objects. Exterior things are ordered to man, man to God: homicide graver than theft (“I’d be more mad if you took my arm than my car”); sins immediately against God (infidelity, blasphemy) gravest, e.g. the attempted black mass (“more serious than fornication”). Student: this sheds light on the gravity of the angels’ fall; he agrees the difference of gravity among objects “is first and chief”, following on species.

• Ad 1: the object, though called matter, has the ratio of end as the agent’s intention bears on it; the form of a moral act depends on its end, “the cause of all the other causes”.
• Ad 2: from unsuitable conversion to a changeable good follows aversion from the unchangeable good, in which evil is perfected; so diversity in conversion gives diverse gravity. Aside: a Dominican’s book on Mary Magdalene; one involved in pride rather than carnal sin finds it harder to come to love Christ.
• Ad 3: all objects of human acts are ordered to each other and to the last end, so all human acts come together in one genus and all sins are comparable.
• Asides on confessing: his own confession in French misread as concealment; Fr. Steinberg unsure whether he absolved a German penitent; a Polish woman confessed through “first commandment, yes or no?”.

His words #

• “mysteries of things”: what Thomas is for, per Vatican II, and the connection of one with another
• “passive ability” [ed.: passive potency]: matter; “act is the end of passive ability”
• “exemplar / extrinsic form”: the model things are designed to look like, the sense in which God is formal cause
• “appropriation”: assigning maker, exemplar, end (power, wisdom, goodness) to Father, Son, Holy Spirit
• “foresight” [ed.: prudence]: right reason of things to be done; in the definition of moral virtue
• “turning towards / turning away” [ed.: conversion / aversion]: the two sides of sin
• “distinction”: this is not that; “division”: distinction of the parts of a whole; “definition”: speech signifying what a thing is
• “pros ti / ad aliquid”: Greek and Latin for the relative, as in “the Word was toward God”
• “pure privation” vs. privation “retaining something of the opposite habit”: death, darkness vs. sickness, ugliness
• “commensuration of humors”: his gloss “very simple medical science”; health as the model of virtue
• “Tullius / Tully”: Cicero, author of the Paradoxes

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 73, proemium and aa. 1-3, read sentence by sentence with the objections, sed contra, corpus and replies Mentioned
• Vatican II on Thomas (no locus given)
• Thomas’s exposition of the first decretal of the Fourth Lateran Council
• Summa Theologiae, Prima Pars: God unchangeable then eternal; the treatment of whether evil eliminates the good entirely
• Romans, “I think it is chapter eleven”
• James 2; Ambrose on sin; Augustine, City of God 14
• Aristotle, Ethics II (contrary vices; virtue in the middle, via the arts; definition of moral virtue), IV (integral evil destroys itself), VI (right reason as prudence); Physics VII (diverse genera incomparable); On the Soul III (object of the mind)
• John 1 (the Word toward God); John 19 (Pilate)
• Cicero, Paradoxes; Dante (punishments not equal)
• Shakespeare: reason as looking before and after; King Lear; As You Like It; Friar Lawrence

His questions #

• What did Vatican II say Thomas is good for? To penetrate the mysteries of things and see the connection of one with another.
• In what senses of cause is God a cause? Maker, end, exemplar; not matter, since all three rest on act and God is pure act.
• What’s before distinction in the mind, and what is distinction before? Confusion before; order (and division, then definition) after.
• Why does “looking before and after” include looking for distinction? Nothing is before or after itself; to see order you must first see distinction.
• Why does Thomas say there is distinction but no division in God? Division is of parts of a whole; God has no parts; persons are distinct by relative opposition.
• Is a definition of definition a definition of the definition of definition? No; it defines definition in general, not that definition in particular.
• Can I have both cowardice and foolhardiness? No; contraries cannot be in the same subject at the same time in the same way.
• Is guilt of all sins from one sin per se or per accidens? Per accidens; the sinner intends the pleasure, not departure from the whole law.
• Is one man more dead than another? No; death is a pure privation and admits no more or less.
• Can a triangle be bigger than a line, or candy sweeter than a girl? No, diverse genera are incomparable; only metaphorically.