Summa I-II q.73 aa.8–10: Harm Done, the Person Sinned Against and the Standing of the Sinner

Orientation #

He picks up at “the eighth one” of question 73 and reads articles 8, 9 and the first half of 10, stopping in the body of a. 10 (“next day we’ll drop you the rest of this article”), though he then reads the four reasons and two replies anyway. He says the first three paragraphs of the body of a. 8 are what the class is “responsible for” on the exam, not the last paragraph on penal harm. The previous class treated aa. 6-7 (cause and circumstances), the next takes up q. 74 (prev. lecture, next lecture).

The class, in order #

1. Article 8, objections: harm as measure of gravity (“the gravity of the sin is not increased”) #

He reads the three objections against measuring gravity by harm (nocumentum), rendering as he goes.

1. Harm is an event following on the act, and an event following does not add to the goodness or badness of the act.
2. Harm is found most of all in sins against one’s neighbour, since no one wants harm for himself and no one can harm God (Job 35: “if your iniquities are multiplied, what do you do against him… your impiety does harm to the man who is like yourself”); so sins against the neighbour would be graver than sins against God or oneself.
3. Loss of the life of grace is a greater harm than loss of the life of nature (one should have contempt for the life of nature lest one lose the life of grace); the seducer deprives a woman of the life of grace, so the simple fornicator would sin more gravely than the murderer, “which is manifestly false.”

• On obj. 1 he remarks these people “haven’t heard about the last judgment,” which exists so that one sees all the evil of what one has done (Karl Marx with his book); “see your children’s children” in the psalm applies to the preacher whose converts convert others.
• On obj. 2 he asks the class which is worse, to kill your neighbour or yourself; they answer yourself, because “love your neighbour as yourself.” He notes most people, even in a Christian state, assume the opposite.
• Aside: the ideal way to teach would be to give a student only the objection, with no TV or radio, and let him lose sleep until he finds the answer; “you really appreciate the answer when it comes.”

2. Sed contra and the “two or three” rule (“not two or three, but two or three”) #

Sed contra: Augustine, third book on free judgment [ed.: De libero arbitrio]: vice is opposed to nature, so the more it diminishes the integrity of nature the more malice it has; that diminution is harm; so the greater the harm, the greater the sin.

• Aside on Thomas’s threefold answer: does Thomas know numbers besides two or three? Socrates in the dialogues always divides into two, Hegel into three; no other philosopher stands out as always dividing by one number, so his rule is “two or three.” A rule is good if it is true for the most part.
• Aside: he would edit the text so each of the three ways begins on a new line; “they don’t let me edit the text,” they only make things bold.

3. Body of article 8: three ways harm has itself to sin (“harm has itself in three ways to sin”) #

The point: harm aggravates sin only through the sin’s object, will, or per se consequences.

1. Harm foreseen and intended (homicide, theft): the quantity of harm increases gravity directly, since the harm is per se the object of the sin. “You can’t hear confessions without knowing this distinction.”
2. Harm foreseen but not intended: the man crossing a field to take a shorter way, who knows he damages what is there but does not act “with the soul of harming.” This aggravates indirectly, in that a will much inclined to sin does not omit doing harm it does not simply will. Example: in Israel, killing the innocent around terrorists — foreseen, but not what is intended; different from intending to kill the innocent. “I want to get you, someone else is standing in the way, so I shoot anyway.”
3. Harm neither foreseen nor intended, subdivided: (a) if per accidens to the sin, it does not aggravate directly but only on account of negligence, since one giving labour to an illicit thing is imputed even the evils apart from his intention; (b) if it follows per se from the act, it aggravates directly, since what follows per se pertains in some way to the sin — public fornication and the scandal of many, even if not foreseen.

• Penal harm (“altogether differently”): harm the sinner incurs. If per accidens and unforeseen, it does not aggravate — the man running to kill who hits his foot. If per se, the greater harm does not make the graver sin but the graver sin induces the greater harm: the unbeliever who has never heard of hell is punished more for homicide than theft, though he foresees neither; for the believer the foreseen greater punishment shows the sin is graver, but the gravity of the harm is caused only by the gravity of the sin.

4. Replies 1-2: disorder is the main thing (“disorder is the main thing”) #

Reply 1: as said above on exterior acts, the foreseen and intended event does add to goodness or badness. Reply 2: harm aggravates, but not from harm alone; the sin is per se graver from disorder, and harm aggravates insofar as it makes the act more disordered; so sins against neighbour, where harm is greatest, are not gravest, since there is much more disorder in sins against God and against oneself.

• Shakespeare’s “large discourse, looking before and after”: before and after is the definition of order; disorder is not following the rule of reason.
• Why blaspheming God is more disordered than killing a neighbour: God is the end of the whole universe, everything is ordered to him. The man on the street would say the opposite.
• Love of neighbour “as yourself”: Thomas’s texts (he once collected them) mean not equally but in the same way, for the neighbour’s own sake; one should love one’s brother more than a stranger, yet will the good of the neighbour as one wills the brother’s. Order of charity: God first.
• Scale of common goods: kill the governor or the president? betray the state or the country? act against Shrewsbury, the state, the country, the whole universe (God) — the last most disordered.

5. Shakespeare digression: nature before virtue before the age (“hold the mirror up to nature”) #

The point: Shakespeare “sees the before and after,” which is the key to ethics.

• Hamlet, the exhortation to use reason (Act 4, Scene 4, “something like that”; also “Know thyself,” Polonius’s “to thine own self be true,” “What is a man”).
• Hamlet’s speech to the players: overstep not the modesty of nature; the purpose of playing is to hold the mirror up to nature, show virtue her feature, scorn her image, and the age its form and pressure. Perfectly ordered: nature before virtue and vice (nature is the measure of good and bad), virtue and vice before the age (an age is known by the virtues or vices that predominate).
• As You Like It: two pairs of brothers, one older brother unjust to the younger over the inheritance, one younger usurping the older’s throne; two cousins close as sisters; all reconciled in the forest, the Duke’s “tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones.” The forest is a poetic image of return to nature; enmity between brothers is unnatural (his own memory of a boy who couldn’t stand his cousins, against his family’s Christmas pillow fights).
• Friar Lawrence: nothing so vile but gives some special good, nor so good but “strained from that fair use revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse.” Virtue is a habit in accord with nature, vice a habit opposed to nature.

6. Reply 2 continued and reply 3 (“no one is able to harm God”) #

Reply 2, second part: no one can harm God in his substance, yet there is harm in the things of God — uprooting the faith (convert to Muhammad, leave, or die), violating sacred things — and these are the gravest sins; likewise one who knowingly harms himself, as in suicide, though under some apparent good, e.g. to be freed from something (Romeo and Juliet).

• Aside: God’s substance is the first thing treated after his existence: simple, perfect (therefore good), infinite (therefore everywhere), unchanging (therefore eternal), one; the same five in the Summa contra Gentiles in a different order and in the Compendium of Theology. Reply 3, two reasons: (1) homicide intends the neighbour’s harm directly, the seducer intends pleasure, not harm (“I never want to hurt anybody” — everybody’s excuse); (2) homicide is the per se sufficient cause of bodily death, but no one is the per se sufficient cause of another’s spiritual death, since no one dies spiritually except by his own will. His summary: I may do more harm by seducing than by murder, but what I intend is more evil in the other case. Break.

7. Dividing the ten articles of q.73 (“I’m divided always by two or three”) #

Answering the “critics” who objected that ten articles break the two-or-three rule.

• Aristotle lists and exemplifies the ten categories without dividing; Thomas, in Physics III and Metaphysics V, divides the ten into three, subdivides the second into three, then the last six into two, dividing by two or three until all are reached.
• His division of the proemium’s ten: a. 1 (are all sins connected/equal) against 2-10; a. 2 (are they equal, presupposed by every comparison) against 3-10; aa. 3-5 essential (object, dignity of virtues, carnal vs spiritual by objects) against 6-10 extrinsic (cause, circumstances, harm, persons — “who am I and who did I kill”); 6-8 against 9-10 (persons).
• Thomas’s scripture commentaries: Matthew divided into three, John into two, then subdivided by two or three. Apparent exception: senses of words, e.g. eight senses of “in”; even there the first three are ways of being in something actually, the rest by passive or active ability.

8. Article 9: the condition of the person sinned against (“person in whom one sins”) #

Objections: (1) it would be gravest to sin against a just and holy man, but he is less hurt, tolerating with equanimity (Stephen praying for Paul; contrast killing a man in a drunken brawl who is in no state to repent); (2) it would be most aggravated by propinquity — Tullius in the Paradoxes, killing a slave vs one’s father — but each is nearest to himself, and one sins less killing his own horse than another’s (Ethics V; St Francis’s brother: “your horse, my horse, who cares”); (3) dignity or knowledge aggravates the sinner’s sin (Wisdom 6, the powerful powerfully tormented; the servant knowing the Lord’s will), but injuring the wealthy is not worse than injuring a pauper, since there is no accepting of persons before God. Sed contra: scripture blames specially sins against God’s servants (altars destroyed, prophets killed), against one’s own (son insulting father, daughter rising against mother), against rulers (who says to the king “apostate”). Body: the person is in some way the object, and the first weight of sin is from the object, greater as the object is a nearer or more principal end; the principal ends of human acts are God, oneself, neighbour, one ordered under another.

• God: the more one is joined to God by virtue or office, the more injury to him redounds to God (“who touches you touches the apple of my eye”; the shock of the shooting of Reagan then of John Paul days later).
• Oneself: graver the more the person is joined to one by natural necessity, benefits, or any conjunction; harming oneself is worst, “who is harmful to himself, to whom will he be good”; Paul, no one hates his own flesh (aside: the priest who ran off with a woman — if he was unfaithful to God, why expect fidelity to her; ex-nuns waiting to pick up ex-priests).
• Neighbour: the more the sin touches many; against a public person, king or prince bearing the person of the multitude, graver than against a private person (Exodus 22, curse not); against a famous person, from scandal and disturbance of many. Replies: (1) the injurer, as far as in himself, disturbs the virtuous man inwardly and outwardly; that he is not disturbed inwardly comes from his goodness, which does not lessen the sin; (2) harm to oneself in things under the lordship of one’s will (possessions) is less sin, since done by one’s will; in natural and spiritual goods, not under that lordship, it is graver — getting oneself sterilised is worse than burning down one’s house; killing oneself worse than killing another; neighbours’ things are not under our lordship, so the argument does not proceed, unless perhaps they wish or approve (“an obtuse text”); (3) no accepting of persons if God punishes more for sins against more excellent persons, since it redounds to the harm of many — the king who put Boethius to death.

9. Article 10: the greatness of the person sinning (“magnitude of the person sinning”) #

Objections: (1) a man is great by adhering to God (Ecclesiasticus 25, “how great is he who finds wisdom and science,” yet not above him who fears God), and the more one adheres the less is imputed (the Lord propitious to those seeking him with their whole heart, “not imputed that they are less holy” — “strange text”); (2) no accepting of persons, Romans 2:11; (3) no one should receive something incommodious from a good. Sed contra: Isidore, second book on the highest good (“I don’t know that book”): the greater the man who sins, the greater the sin is known to be. Body: sin is twofold. From surreptio, sudden, from infirmity of human nature: less imputed to the greater in virtue, who less neglects to repress such sins, which infirmity does not allow to be wholly avoided. From deliberation: more imputed the greater one is, for four reasons:

1. The greater can more easily resist, exceeding in knowledge and virtue (the servant knowing his lord’s will whipped more). Thomas: the educated man is more guilty of sins of the flesh than the common man; no man can live without pleasure, and one without taste for higher pleasures goes to excess in lower ones, whereas the educated man has other things to turn to.
2. Ingratitude: every good by which one is magnified is a benefit of God, so every greatness, even in temporal goods, aggravates (Wisdom 6). Thank God for your soul, parents, teachers; harming a parent is worse partly as greater ingratitude, beyond the person sinned against.
3. Special repugnance of the act to the person: the prince, keeper of justice, violating justice; the priest who vowed chastity fornicating.
4. Example or scandal: Gregory, Pastoralia — guilt is vehemently extended when the sinner is honoured for reverence of the great, since the sins of the great come to the knowledge of many (Renaissance popes). The wise man acting foolishly is worse than the fool. Replies: (1) the authority speaks of what is negligently done through eruption of infirmity; (2) God does not accept persons if he punishes the greater more, since greatness makes for gravity — the devil punished most, in the ice as Dante puts him; the great man suffers incommodity not from his good but from its bad use. He stops here.

• Aside: Brother Mark and he thought they had a way of cleansing and reforming minds; “the questions are harder.”

His words #

• nocumentum: harm; “how would you translate that?”
• event following: consequence of the act (obj. 1 and reply 1)
• with the soul of harming: with intent to harm
• compendiosus: in a shorter way (the man crossing the field)
• per se vs per accidens: “an awful common distinction,” what is intended or follows of itself vs what is incidental
• penal harm: the harm the sinner himself incurs
• before and after: his definition of order; disorder = not following the rule of reason
• love your neighbour as yourself: not equally but in the same way, for his own sake
• order of charity: God first
• two or three: the rule of division (Plato two, Hegel three)
• propinquity: nearness of person (from propinquitas)
• accepting of persons: partiality (Romans 2:11)
• lordship of one’s will: what one may dispose of (possessions) vs natural and spiritual goods
• vituperate: blame, reproach
• surreptio: sudden sin from infirmity vs sin from deliberation
• magnus, magnitude: greatness of the person sinning
• custos: keeper (prince as keeper of justice)

Texts #

Read in class

• Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 73, a. 8 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 73, a. 9 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 73, a. 10 (objections, sed contra, body through the four reasons, replies 1-2)
• Shakespeare, Hamlet (speech to the players; “large discourse, before and after”); As You Like It (Duke’s forest speech); Romeo and Juliet (Friar Lawrence on nature and abuse) Mentioned
• Augustine, De libero arbitrio III; Job 35; Wisdom 6; Ecclesiasticus 25; Romans 2:11; Exodus 22; Cicero (Tullius), Paradoxes; Aristotle, Ethics V; Isidore, “on the highest good,” book II; Gregory, Pastoralia; Thomas on the ten categories, Physics III and Metaphysics V; Summa contra Gentiles and Compendium of Theology (the five on God’s substance); q. 73 proemium; Thomas’s commentaries on Matthew and John; Dante (devil in the ice)

His questions #

• Which is worse, to kill your neighbour or to kill yourself? Yourself; you are to love your neighbour as yourself.
• Does Thomas know there are numbers besides two or three? He does; ten articles are divided by successive twos and threes.
• What is the distinction under the third way (harm neither foreseen nor intended)? Per accidens (aggravates only by negligence) vs per se (aggravates directly).
• Is it more disordered to blaspheme God than to kill my neighbour? Yes, because God is the end of the whole universe.
• What is the order of charity? God first.
• Would you divide the ten articles into three like the categories, or into two? Two, repeatedly: 1 / 2 / 3-5 / 6-8 / 9-10.
• Who is the first martyr in Acts? Stephen, praying for Paul.
• What are the three principal ends of human acts? God, the man himself, his neighbour.
• Is the wise man acting foolishly worse than the fool? Yes, that is worse.
• Does God accept persons if he punishes the greater more? No; greatness makes for the gravity of the sin, so the devil is punished most.