Summa I-II Q75 aa.1–3: Does sin have a cause? Inward causes (reason, will, sense desire) and outward causes

Orientation #

He announces “we’re up to question 75” and looks back to the proemium of q. 71 to place it; at the end he says “we’re up to Article Four now.” He also stops mid-article 1 to leave the body of the article for the students to think about overnight, then continues anyway. The previous class treated q. 74 (morose pleasure and consent), and the next takes up whether sin can be the cause of sin.

The class, in order #

1. Opening: thanking God for the universe before yourself (“before freely choosing you to be”) #

Point: gratitude has an order following the order of goods.

• Before thanking God for creating your immortal soul, thank Him for freely choosing you to be; and before that, for freely choosing this universe — God could have made an infinity of universes, and in one He did not choose there would be no place for you.
• Principle: you have to thank Him for the common good even before the private good.
• That He created you with an immortal soul means your soul is a permanent part of the universe — not so the soul of the dog or cat (“that nice dog who greets me there”).

2. Where q. 75 stands: the plan of q. 71 (“just so we’ll recall how thorough Thomas is”) #

Six things on vices and sins: (1) vices and sins in themselves, secundum se; (2) their distinction; (3) their comparison to each other; (4) the subject of sin; (5) the cause of sin — which we now begin; (6) the effect of sin.

• Note: in looking for cause and effect Thomas “looks before and after”; the first four considered the thing itself.
• q. 75 divides: the cause of sin in general (here), then in special later. Four articles: whether sin has a cause; whether it has an interior cause; whether it has an exterior cause; whether sin can be the cause of sin.
• Aside on how fundamental Thomas is — “is there a problem about whether sin has a cause?” The criminal’s “I just blacked out.” The bank robber asked by the judge why he robs banks: “That’s where the money is.”

3. Article 1, objections and sed contra (“it seems that sin has no cause”) #

1. Sin has the character of something bad; Dionysius says the bad has no cause; therefore sin has no cause. (“What more could you ask for? A nice syllogism.”)
2. A cause is that on which something else follows of necessity; but what is from necessity is not sin, since every sin is voluntary.
3. Either/or: if sin has a cause it is something good or something bad. Not good — “a good tree cannot bring forth bad fruit” (Matthew 7:18). Not bad — the bad of punishment follows on sin, and the bad of guilt is the same as sin. (“That was a strange argument, that last one.”)

• Sed contra: everything that comes to be has a cause, “nothing on earth comes to be without a cause” (Job 5:6); sin comes to be, being something said, done or desired against the law of God (Augustine’s definition, per his footnote).
• Aside: he offers to leave the rest for the day’s thinking — Charles De Koninck’s one public talk at the College of Saint Thomas gave Duffy “enough to occupy my mind for the rest of the week”; he himself would carry a phrase of De Koninck or Msgr. Dionne for days. Hence his scorn for a philosopher he knew taking a speed-reading course: “One thing a philosopher doesn’t need is a speed reading course to read philosophy texts. You’ve got to slow down.” (“Nobody even reads the bills anymore.”)

4. Article 1, body: act and disorder (“sin is a disordered act”) #

Two things in the notion of sin: it is an act, and it is disordered (against reason; and reason is defined by order).

1. On the side of act, it can have a per se cause, like any other act.
2. On the side of disorder, it can have a cause only in the way a negation or privation can. Two causes of a negation:

• (a) Secundum se: the defect (negation) of the cause itself causes the negation of the effect — as the cause of darkness is the absence of the sun (“they didn’t have light bulbs in those days”).
• (b) Per accidens: something affirmative, on which a negation follows, is the accidental cause of that negation — fire, intending heat, consequently causes the privation of cold.

3. The first way suffices for a simple negation; but the disorder of sin, like every evil, is not a simple negation but a privation of what one ought to have (debet habere). Therefore it requires an agent cause per accidens: what is naturally apt to be in a thing and ought to be there is never absent except from some cause impeding. Hence the customary phrase: evil has a deficient cause, or an agent cause per accidens.
4. Every per accidens cause is reduced to a per se cause. So since sin has a per se agent cause on the side of the act, the disorder follows from the cause of the act.
5. Conclusion: the will, lacking the direction of the rule of reason and the divine law, aiming at some changeable good, causes the act of sin per se and the disorder per accidens and outside its intention.

• Digression, negation vs. privation (from Aristotle’s Categories, the four kinds of opposites: negation, privation, contrariety, and relative opposition): this glass does not see — mere negation, since it is not able to see; a man or a dog that is blind — privation, non-being of what by nature one is able and ought to have. He notes the fourth kind reaches as far as the Trinity: “in God everything is one except where there’s the opposition of relation.” (Aristotle distinguishes four senses of privation in Metaphysics V, “the fifth book of Wisdom.”)
• Per accidens reduced to per se, illustrated: “a wise grandfather” — the way I became wise and the way I became a grandfather are totally unrelated. Whence the parish Mass for grandfathers with Bishop McManus, and the Pope on youth and wisdom needing to meet; and George Bush: “When I was young and foolish, I was young and foolish.”

5. Article 1, replies (“evil does not have a cause — per se”) #

• To 1: Dionysius means evil has no cause as such, since no one acts aiming at the bad as such. Sin signifies not only the lack of good but an act under such a lack, and in that way it has a per accidens cause.
• To 2: the definition of cause (that on which something follows necessarily) must be understood of a cause both sufficient and not impeded; otherwise all things would happen from necessity (Metaphysics VI). So sin has a cause without being necessary, because the effect can be impeded.
• To 3: the will not applying the rule of reason or the divine law is the cause of sin; but this non-application, before it is applied to the act, is in itself neither evil, nor punishment, nor guilt. Hence the cause of the first sin is not something bad, but something good with the absence of some other good. “You can’t always be thinking about these things.” The subtle point: the will proceeding to act without waiting for the ordering of reason.
• Aside: “Don’t confuse me with the facts”; St Alphonsus on willful inadvertence — “I don’t want to think about that” — which you see in conversation, people turning away.
• Aside: the corncob pipe (his father’s, and MacArthur’s); Washington Irving’s life of Washington, and Washington laying his hand on the infant Irving in a New York bookshop.

6. Article 2, objections (“whether sin has a cause within”) #

1. What is within a thing is always present to it; so if sin had an inward cause, man would always sin, since given the cause the effect is given.
2. The same is not the cause of itself; but the inward motions of a man are sin; so they are not its cause.
3. Whatever is within man is either natural or voluntary. Natural cannot cause sin, since sin is against nature (Damascene — “as Shakespeare says too”); and what is voluntary, if disordered, is already sin. So nothing inward can cause the first sin.

• Sed contra: Augustine, voluntas est causa peccati. “Brevity is the soul of wit.” [ed.: here he does say “brevity”]
• Aside: he imagines torturing prisoners with these objections until they solve them; and the story that Voltaire would read only the objections and throw them at his Catholic acquaintances.

7. Article 2, body: proximate and remote interior causes (“one which is proximate… another which is remote”) #

1. The per se cause of sin is taken on the side of the act; of a human act there is an interior cause both immediate and remote.
2. Immediate: reason and will, according as man is free in his judgment (liberum arbitrium).
3. Remote: the apprehension of the sensitive part and the sense appetite. As the will is moved by the judgment of reason to what is according to reason, so sense appetite is inclined by sense apprehension — “so the apple was attracted to the senses there of Eve” — and this inclination sometimes draws will and reason.
4. Since the cause of sin is some apparent good moving, with a defect of the proper motive (the rule of reason or divine law): the mover (apparent good) pertains to sense apprehension and sense appetite; the absence of the right rule pertains to reason, whose office is to consider such a rule; the perfection of the voluntary act pertains to the will, whose act, presupposing the lack of reason’s order, is already sin.

• His summary: reason beginning and the will completing, with the sense part influencing.
• Digression on liberum arbitrium: Thomas in the Prima Pars asks whether it is more in reason or in will and says more in the will, yet arbitrium names an act of reason — the freedom of the will depends on reason’s ability to judge and go to opposites. Hence the translation problem: word for word it is “free judgment,” though we want to say “free will.” Aristotle: everyone who does wrong is mistaken.

8. Article 2, replies (“it’s not always within”) #

• To 1: what is within as a natural power is always present (inest); what is within as an interior act — of the desiring power or the grasping power — is not always present. People aren’t always thinking or willing. The will is a cause of sin in potency (“in ability”), reduced to act through the preceding motions of the sense part and then of reason: something is proposed as desirable to sense, appetite inclines, reason sometimes (interdum) ceases from considering the suitable rule, and so the will produces the act of sin. Because the preceding motions are not always in act, neither is sin. (“That was a close call.”)
• To 2: not all interior motions belong to the substance of sin, which consists chiefly in the act of the will; some precede and some follow the sin.
• To 3: what causes sin as a power producing an act is something natural; and the motion of the sense part from which sin follows is sometimes natural — as when someone sins on account of the desire for food. Sin is made unnatural by the failure of the rule that man by his nature ought to attend to. Hence Shakespeare’s “What is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed?” — that is, not acting like a man. [ed.: he says “mark of his time”]
• Digression on woman and will, man and reason: Posthumus in Cymbeline, deceived by Iachimo (he compares Iago), denouncing all womankind — Aristotle’s remark that people generalize from what they suffer. Since sin consists principally in the act of the will, and we speak of man as reason and woman as will, “it consists more in woman than in man.” He softens it: the child who is bumped runs to his mother; the woman saints more clearly illustrate love; “affectionate will to the woman, affectionate reason to the man.” He cites a passage of John Paul II he cannot locate, and Pope Francis on the Church as mother and on not wanting women “made into men” — “every pastor has his housekeeper; she controls everything.”

9. Article 3, objections (“whether sin has an outside cause”) #

1. Sin is voluntary, and the voluntary is of what is in our power; so it has no exterior cause.
2. As nature is an interior principle (Aristotle: a beginning and cause of motion and rest in that in which it is, first, as such, and not by accident), so is the will. But “sin” in natural things — a defective birth, monstrous parts, a baby born without an arm — comes only from the corruption of an interior principle. So neither in morals.
3. When the cause is multiplied the effect is multiplied; but the more and greater the exterior things inducing to sin, the less it is imputed to the man as sin. So nothing exterior is a cause of sin. — He notes the Greek word for cause carries the sense of responsible.

• Sed contra: Numbers 31 — those who deceived the sons of Israel and made them go astray in the sin of Phogor.

10. Article 3, body: exterior causes move but do not induce (“but not sufficiently inducing to sin”) #

Since the interior cause is threefold — will as completing, reason as to the lack of the rule, sense appetite as inclining — something exterior can be a cause in three ways. (“Well, that would move me to enthusiasm” — and the aside on Thomas’s “the proemium has three parts” in the De Anima commentary, drilled into them by professors writing theses.)

1. The will cannot be moved inwardly except by God, who cannot be the cause of sin (to be shown later, in the cause of sin in particular).
2. So the exterior can only move reason — a man or a demon persuading to sin — or move sense appetite, as exterior sensible things do (“the woman or the bottle”).
3. But exterior persuasion does not necessitate reason (“this happens in politics — you can’t convince these people”); nor do things proposed outwardly necessitate sense appetite, unless one is somehow disposed; nor does sense appetite necessitate reason and will.
4. Conclusion: something outward can be a cause moving to sin, but not sufficiently inducing; the cause sufficiently completing sin is the will alone.

• A student raises addiction: he grants dispositions can be established that make one weak, but the analysis holds.
• Aside: his friend Jim asked which is better, a woman or a bottle — “a bottle: it doesn’t talk”; and their afternoon alternating used bookshops and taverns — “we ran out of bookshops”; “we haven’t run out of taverns yet.”

11. Article 3, replies, and David (“it still remains in us to sin and not to sin”) #

• To 1: because exterior movers do not induce sufficiently and of necessity, it remains in us to sin and not to sin.
• To 2: positing an inward cause does not exclude the exterior, since the exterior causes sin only by means of something interior. “The candy doesn’t make me eat to excess” — it moves sense desire, but the will has to consent to my stuffing myself.
• To 3: multiplying exterior causes inclining to sin multiplies the acts of sin, since many men from those causes and in many ways are inclined to them (“a good description of mankind”); but the ratio of guilt, which consists in the voluntary, is lessened.
• David and Bathsheba: moved by something exterior, and he went far — having the husband killed — yet forgiven. Thomas says the Psalms are attributed to David so that we do not lose hope in our own sinfulness; not Moses but David, the grave sinner.
• On hope and mercy: I believe God because of His truthfulness, not His mercy; but I hope in God primarily because of His mercy, while His justice instills the necessary fear. Thomas: mercy without justice becomes weak [he first says “tyrannical or something,” then, prompted, settles on weak]; justice without mercy has its own harm.

12. Closing digression: the balance of hope and fear in a student (“you need a balance of hope and fear”) #

He generalises the mercy/justice balance to the philosopher: despair of finding the truth makes you give up the pursuit; lack of fear of error makes you think you can answer any question, and you make mistakes.

• Socrates in the Phaedo: his joke that on the day he is to die the immortality of the soul is not an irrelevant topic; the two tougher objectors (Simmias) whose objections plunge the company into near-despair; the narrator saying he never admired Socrates more, for the beautiful way he restored their hope, answering the easier objections first.
• Warren Murray on Msgr. Dionne: “his principal passion is fear” — his first response to a newfangled idea is no, which forces you to justify it. Kasurik found Dionne quite different in his office than in class; Dionne’s answer: “It’s the business of the teacher to encourage the student to think” — but that one was pushing, showing the difficulties. A teacher like that, or like Socrates, sees where his students are: sometimes they need encouraging, sometimes discouraging.
• He thanks God for Kasurik, De Koninck and Dionne in that order — Kasurik encouraging (“Duane, read this”; “read very carefully”), De Koninck more careful, Dionne most fearsome; had he had Dionne first he would have been afraid to think. He recalls living across from De Koninck’s house, watching Dionne and De Koninck walk back and forth talking, and De Koninck asking Dionne for a logical analysis of some little text.

His words #

• secundum se — “according to itself,” of the thing itself, as opposed to by way of cause or effect.
• “inward” — his preferred rendering of interior.
• “lack” — his English for privatio; a non-being of what one is able to have and ought to have.
• “deficient cause” / “agent cause per accidens” — how evil is caused.
• “ability” [ed.: potency] — “the will is a cause of sin in ability, in potency.”
• “grasping power” [ed.: apprehensive power] and “desiring power” [ed.: appetitive power] — “better than saying appetite.”
• liberum arbitrium — “free judgment”; the problem of rendering it “free will.”
• interdum — “sometimes”; reason sometimes ceases from considering the rule.
• “willful inadvertence” (St Alphonsus) — “I don’t want to think about that.”
• “sin” of nature — the Latin breadth by which a defective birth is called a sin.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 71, proemium (the six-part plan).
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 75, proemium and aa. 1–3, in full (objections, sed contra, body, replies).
• Matthew 7:18; Job 5:6; Numbers 31 (both scriptural sed contra / objection texts as Thomas quotes them).

Mentioned

• Dionysius, that evil has no cause.
• Augustine, the definition of sin, and voluntas est causa peccati.
• Damascene, sin is against nature.
• Aristotle, Categories (four opposites); Metaphysics V (senses of privation), VI (not all things by necessity); definition of nature; that the wrongdoer is mistaken; that men generalize from their sufferings.
• Thomas, Commentary on the De Anima, on the three parts of Aristotle’s proemium; Prima Pars on liberum arbitrium; on the Psalms attributed to David.
• Shakespeare, Cymbeline (Posthumus and Iachimo); “What is a man, if his chief good and mark of his time be but to sleep and feed?”
• Plato, Phaedo.

His questions #

• What do you have to thank God for before His freely choosing you to be? — For freely choosing this universe, of which you could be a part; the common good before the private good.
• Does sin have a cause? — Yes: per se on the side of the act, per accidens (a deficient cause) on the side of the disorder.
• What is the difference between a simple negation and a lack? — The glass does not see: mere negation; a blind man or dog: privation, lacking what by nature he is able and ought to have.
• When Dionysius says evil has no cause, what does he mean? — No cause per se, since no one acts aiming at the bad as such.
• Is the cause of the first sin something bad? — No: something good, with the absence of some other good — the will acting without waiting for the rule of reason.
• If sin has an inward cause, why do we not always sin? — Because the cause is present as a power always, but the preceding acts of sense and reason are not always in act.
• Is liberum arbitrium more in reason or in the will? — Thomas says more in the will, though it is named from judgment and depends on reason’s power to go to opposites.
• Can something outside us be the cause of sin? — It can move reason (by persuasion) or sense appetite (by sensible things), but never sufficiently induce; the will alone sufficiently completes sin.
• Why does multiplying exterior inducements not increase guilt? — It multiplies the acts of sin but lessens the ratio of guilt, which consists in the voluntary.
• Mercy without justice becomes what? — Weak (he first tries “tyrannical”); and justice without mercy has its own harm — hence the needed balance, extended to hope and fear in the philosopher.