Summa I-II q.73 aa.6–7: How the Demons Know, the Cause of Sin and Circumstances That Make Sin Worse

Orientation #

He does not refer to last time. He opens with what he “was reading this morning”, Thomas on the punishment of the demons, then says “we’re up to Article Six here in Question Seventy Three”, and reads aa. 6 and 7 through. At the end he begins the next article by remarking that the article titles are probably not Thomas’s own. The next class continues with q. 73 aa. 8-10 on harm done and the dignity of persons.

The class, in order #

1. Opening digression: the knowledge and obstinacy of the demons (“the punishment of the demons”) #

Point: reporting Thomas on the fallen angels, he draws out a distinction of knowledge and the reason the demons cannot repent.

• Objections say the demons are now wholly ignorant; Thomas denies it. Distinctions: natural knowledge vs supernatural. Natural knowledge remains: the angel is altogether simple, so cannot be punished by taking part away “like a man can cut off an arm.”
• Supernatural (spiritual) knowledge: pure speculativa vs affectiva. The demons had some speculative revelation (from higher angels; seeing Christ’s miracles and the spread of the Church); of the affective kind, which gives love of God, they have none.
• Affective knowledge is the gift of the Holy Spirit called wisdom: sapientia from sapor; Thomas: sapida scientia, “savory knowledge”, which is why the gift of wisdom is attached to charity (in the Secunda Secundae). He connects it to Thomas’s rhythmus (seven quatrains, rhymed in pairs; “Memorial mortis Domini, panis vivus vitam praestans homini”), whose fifth quatrain has “dulce sapere”: this cognitio affectiva, differing from the wisdom of theology and of Aristotle.
• Objection (in Thomas): the malice of the demons is finite, God’s mercy infinite, so conversion must be possible. Reply: God has mercy only on the penitent, and the demons cannot be penitent, because when an angel chooses “the whole angel goes for it”, unlike our lukewarm choices that can be gone back on.
• At death we become like the angels: “where the tree falls, there shall lie”; John Damascene (quoted by Thomas): what the fall was for the angel, death is for us. Aristotle (quoted by Thomas): such as a man is in his habits, so does the end seem to him; if you cannot change your habits you cannot change your end.
• Student: could Hitler change at the last moment? Extremely difficult, his habits being so strong. Don Giovanni does not repent in the hand of the Commendatore; he goes to hell.
• Why can we not change at death? Student: we are no longer in time; he adds “we don’t have bodies”, and that we are used to a “wishy-washy” half-and-half life and think change is always possible; it is not: the will is then determined.
• The second half of the Hail Mary (not from Scripture, unlike the first) asks “now and at the hour of our death” because that hour determines everything, “like a snapshot”. He finds the angels frightening: they fell “the second instant of their existence”; we are not finished off in the second instant of ours.

2. Article 6, objections and sed contra (“according to the cause of the sin”) #

Point: reading whether gravity of sin is to be observed according to its cause.

• Obj. 1: a greater cause moves more vehemently, so resisting is harder; but what is harder to resist pertains to weakness (infirmitas), and sin from weakness is judged lighter.
• Obj. 2: concupiscence is the general cause of sin (gloss on Romans 7:7, the law that prohibited concupiscence prohibited every evil); but the man conquered by greater concupiscence sins less. Falstaff: they “have more flesh than other men’s”, so more to overcome.
• Obj. 3: as rectitude of reason causes virtuous acts, defect of reason causes sin; the greater the defect, the less the sin. His gloss: for educated people to sin is more serious than for the peasant; those lacking use of reason (the little boy, the baby) are wholly excused; one who sins from ignorance sins more lightly. A student links it to our Lord’s servant who knew the master’s will (severe beating) vs one who did not (light beating).
• Sed contra: multiply the cause, the effect is multiplied.
• Aside: in Thomas’s prayers for confession, sin is appropriated: against the Father by weakness, the Son by ignorance, the Holy Spirit by malice, “the worst thing.”

3. Article 6, body: two kinds of cause (“a twofold cause”) #

Point: the proper cause of sin always aggravates; extrinsic causes divide.

1. In the genus of sin, as in any genus, there is a twofold cause. The proper and per se cause is the will itself of sinning, related to the sinful act as tree to fruit (gloss on Matthew 7: the good tree cannot produce bad fruit). The greater this cause, the graver the sin: the more the will was inclined to sin, the more gravely one sins. Aside: felicitas comes from fruit; here the fruit is bad, but “the natural result” of what you do.
2. Other causes are extrinsic and remote, inclining the will; here one must distinguish:
   • (a) Causes that lead the will according to its own nature, as the end, the will’s proper object (Aristotle: the end and the good are the same): these magnify sin; he sins more gravely whose will is inclined from intention of a worse end.
   • (b) Causes that incline the will apart from its nature and order (to be moved freely from itself according to reason’s judgment): what diminishes reason’s judgment (ignorance) or the free motion of the will (infirmity, violence, threats and fears). These diminish sin as they diminish the voluntary; if the act is wholly involuntary it has no character of sin.

• What he stresses: Thomas does not simply affirm or deny but gives distinctions; here “two distinctions of two”, and the answer is “two out of three.”

4. Article 6, replies; concupiscence in two senses (“I wasn’t myself”) #

• Ad 1: the objection proceeds from an extrinsic moving cause diminishing the voluntary; growth of such a cause diminishes the sin.
• Ad 2: “concupiscence” names either the emotion or the act of the will that is like a passion (not bodily, but in its formal aspect). If the motion of the will is included, more concupiscence, more sin. If it means a passion, a movement of the concupiscible power, then a greater concupiscence preceding reason’s judgment and the will’s motion diminishes sin (he falls from a graver temptation, so it is imputed less); but concupiscence following the judgment of reason and the motion of the will makes the sin greater, since a great motion of concupiscence can arise from the will tending “unbridled” to its object, e.g. premeditation.
• Example: people apologise “I wasn’t myself” for getting upset; that is true in a way, “there was something of you in there”, but the emotion is not what makes you a man; it may make a dog a dog.
• Ad 3: that argument proceeds from a cause of the involuntary, so it diminishes sin.
• Asides (students and him): he tries to say “terrorists and abortionists lack respect for human life”; we are upset about a few beheadings while abortionists “do it every day for money”; an abortionist nearly shot by a pro-lifer wrote in the New York Times “I was just finishing my sixth abortion of the morning”, his callousness undercutting his self-pity, perhaps waking people to both evils; the film with real abortion (Nathanson [ed.: ASR “Nathan”], “The Sound of Silence” [ed.: probably The Silent Scream]) that Reagan used; a student wonders how it first dawned on Nathanson when he already tore the parts out, perhaps he saw pain; Whittaker Chambers in Witness converted looking at his daughter’s ear (the eye is even more amazing); ISIS shocks so openly that “even Obama” must oppose them.

5. Article 7, objections and sed contra (“whether circumstance aggravates sin”) #

• Obj. 1: sin has its gravity from its species; a circumstance does not give species, being an accident (is a white man a different kind of man from a black man? No).
• Obj. 2: a circumstance is either bad, and then of itself causes a species of badness (another sin, not an increase of the first), or not bad, and then has nothing to increase evil by. (Killing a white or a black man: no difference.)
• Obj. 3: the malice of sin is on the part of aversion, circumstances follow on the part of conversion, so they do not augment malice.
• Sed contra: ignorance of a circumstance diminishes sin; one who sins from ignorance of a circumstance merits forgiveness (Ethics III), which would not be unless circumstances aggravate. Example: Shakespeare’s history play where a father kills his son and a son his father, each discovering it afterwards (a student: antithesis).

6. Article 7, body: three ways a circumstance aggravates (“close the book and tell me the three ways”) #

Principle: each thing is apt to be increased by the same thing from which it is caused (Aristotle, Ethics II, on the habit of virtue). Sin is caused by the defect of some circumstance, since it departs from reason’s order because one does not observe suitable circumstances; hence sin is apt to be weighed down by circumstances, in three ways. He challenges them to find the three unaided. Aside: he and Brother Mark joked about locking professors in a cell with a piece of an article to work out the three ways; Brother Mark on Euclid, clear once seen, but how long to find it oneself.

1. The circumstance carries the sin into another genus: fornication is approaching one not one’s own; add that she is another’s wife and it passes into injustice (usurping what belongs to another), so adultery is graver than fornication. Question of words (is adultery a form of fornication or the reverse?) left unsettled, “not really important.” Further cases he supposes: killing mother or father rather than a stranger; suicide. Warning: a circumstance is an accident, “those things that stand out.” Aside: “predicament” comes from the categories, where you cannot pass from one genus to another; here you can draw a sin into another genus within the same broad genus.
2. The circumstance does not draw it into another genus but multiplies the ratio (definition) of the same sin: the prodigal who gives when he ought not and to whom he ought not sins in many ways within one genus, as sickness is graver when more parts are infected (cancer metastasizing); Tully, Paradoxes: in violating the life of one’s father many things are sinned, one violates him who nourished, instructed, and called one forth in house and country. So this is not about killing a father vs a stranger as such but the many debts to the father; a father who generated you and abandoned you is owed less. Oedipus is excused somewhat, being ignorant that the man was his father.
3. The circumstance increases a deformity coming from another circumstance: taking what belongs to another is theft; taking much makes it graver, though much or little of itself says nothing of good or bad.

• Difference of 2 and 3, put to a student: killing the man who both generated and fed you is worse than killing one who only did one: that falls under the second; taking much rather than little is not bad in itself, so the third.
• Aside: Thomas wrote De Malo at about twenty-nine; his mother, when he praised it, asked “So what have you been doing?”

7. Article 7, replies (“aversion from the rule of reason”) #

• Ad 1: careful with “accident.” Digression: an objection on the angels’ natural knowledge, whose object is separated substances (some Arab philosophers place man’s beatitude there); Thomas replies there is some happiness in knowing separated substances, but ultimate happiness is knowing the first substance; “first substance” said of God analogously, God not being in the genus of substance; you need something above yourself to be happy. Reply proper: some circumstance gives the species to the moral act (the first way); but one that does not can still make the act graver, as a thing’s goodness is weighed not only from its species but from accidents: a man’s goodness lies not only in being a man but in being courageous or prudent; so with malice from circumstances (ways 2 and 3).
• Ad 2: in both ways a circumstance can aggravate: if bad, it need not always constitute a species but can add a ratio of wickedness in the same species (way 2); if not bad, it aggravates in order to the malice of another circumstance (way 3). He stresses how thoroughly the body answers the objections: the prisoner would get objections first, the body dropped in later, the replies last. Danger of the Marietti-style text printing the answers in bold: memorizing, not understanding.
• Ad 3: reason must order an act not only as to its object but as to all circumstances (“so it’s hard to be good”); aversion from the rule of reason, not from God, arises from corruption of any circumstance: acting when or where one ought not. Examples: laughing in church, or more than one should; the story of Thomas preferring to believe there was an elephant in the road than that a brother would lie; drinking when one is to operate; the seventeen-year-old on the Normandy bombers who ate nothing before flying (missed the target the first day) and got a cup of whiskey after landing, not before; eating more at grandmother’s Thanksgiving is not wrong, but so every day would be; German meals too heavy, Italians and French eat better than us and we better than the Germans, and a student on cuisine and wine declining northward. This aversion suffices for the definition of evil, and aversion from the rule of reason follows from turning away from God, to whom man ought to be joined through right reason: “you don’t hear that in sermons too often.”
• Closing: he skips the title of the next article, thinking titles are editorial, as the not-quite-fitting chapter titles of the Summa Contra Gentiles suggest.

His words #

• pure speculativa vs affectiva: two kinds of spiritual knowledge; the demons lack the affective, which gives love of God.
• sapientia: from sapor; sapida scientia, “savory knowledge”; the gift of wisdom tied to charity.
• rhythmus: Thomas’s metrical, rhymed prayer; “dulce sapere.”
• infirmitas: weakness; sin from it is lighter.
• levius: “more lightly” (judged).
• proper and per se cause of sin: the will itself of sinning; tree to fruit.
• extrinsic and remote causes: divided into those that move the will by its nature (the end) and those apart from it (ignorance, infirmity, violence, fear).
• felicitas: from fruit.
• concupiscence: either the motion of the will “like a passion” in its formal aspect, or the passion of the concupiscible power (emotion).
• unbridled: the will tending without restraint to its object.
• circumstance: an accident, “those things that stand out.”
• carries over (transfers) into another genus: first way of aggravating.
• multiplies the ratio (definition) of the sin: second way.
• predicament: from Aristotle’s categories, one cannot pass from one genus to another.
• first substance: said of God analogously, God not being in the genus substance.
• aversion from the rule of reason: what suffices for the definition of evil; follows from turning from God.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 73, a. 6 (objections, sed contra, body, replies).
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 73, a. 7 (objections, sed contra, body, replies).

Mentioned

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, on the punishment and knowledge of the demons (locus not stated; Prima Pars inferred); Secunda Secundae on the gift of wisdom.
• Thomas Aquinas, rhythmus (“Adoro te” inferred), fifth quatrain.
• Thomas Aquinas, prayers for confession (appropriation of sins).
• Thomas Aquinas, De Malo.
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles (chapter titles).
• Gloss on Romans 7:7; gloss on Matthew 7; Scripture “where the tree falls”; the Hail Mary; Lord’s parable of the servant and the master’s will.
• John Damascene (as quoted by Thomas).
• Aristotle, Ethics II (habit of virtue) and III (ignorance of circumstance); Aristotle on habits and the end.
• Cicero (Tullius), Paradoxes.
• Shakespeare: Falstaff; a history play (father kills son, son kills father).
• Mozart, Don Giovanni; Sophocles, Oedipus (inferred); Whittaker Chambers, Witness; Euclid.

His questions #

• Why can we not change our habits when we die? We are no longer in time and no longer have bodies; the will is then determined, like the angels.
• Why does the Hail Mary say “and at the hour of our death”? Because that hour determines everything, the way the will falls, like a snapshot.
• Could Hitler change at the last moment? Extremely difficult, because his habits were so strong.
• Is the white man a different kind of man than the black man? No: a circumstance is an accident, not a species.
• Close the book and tell me the three ways a circumstance aggravates sin. Carrying into another genus; multiplying the ratio of the same sin; increasing a deformity from another circumstance.
• Is adultery a form of fornication, or the other way around? Left open; a question of words.
• Do you see the difference between the third way and the second? Killing him who both generated and fed you is the second; taking much rather than little, not bad in itself, is the third.
• Is the aversion here from God? No, from the rule of reason, which follows from turning away from God.