Q75 a.4 & Q76 a.1: How one sin causes another through the four causes; ignorance as a cause of sin

Orientation #

He picks up the fourth article of the question on the causes of sin (“to the fourth one proceeds”), finishes it, then reads the prologue and first article of the next question, on ignorance. At the end he marks the place: “Okay, good step number one.” (Verified sources place the class in ST I-II, q. 75, a. 4 and q. 76, a. 1.)

The class, in order #

1. Opening talk about Thomas as a teacher (“What would it be like to have Thomas as a teacher?”) #

Anecdotes, not doctrine: Thomas was received in Paris as the teacher of the teachers; asked what was the greatest grace he received, he is said to have answered that he always understood what he read. De Koninck’s reply to a contemporary’s “Il faut dépasser Saint Thomas”: “Fine, if you can do it.” Students recall the story of Paul appearing to Thomas to explain the epistles.

2. The objections of a. 4: no one of the four causes fits (“there are four genera, four kinds of causes”) #

The point: sin seems unable to be a cause of sin at all.

1. The end has the notion of the good, which does not belong to sin, bad by definition.
2. The efficient cause: evil is not effective but “infirm and impotent” (Dionysius). Aside: people who read Hitler and Stalin will think Dionysius naive.
3. Matter and form seem to belong only to natural bodies composed of matter and form. He names the form of argument: going through all four and finding none fits — “the either-or syllogism,” technically the disjunctive syllogism.
4. Second objection: it belongs to what is perfect to make something like itself (Meteorology IV); sin by its notion is imperfect. Aside: his modern-philosophy teacher at Laval on Descartes — called father of modern philosophy but has no sons, since they all do their own thing. Only the perfect has a son; plants and animals reproduce only at their perfect age.
5. Third objection: if sin causes sin, that sin has a sin for cause, and so on to infinity, which is unfitting — the same kind of regress refused in proving God exists. Sed contra: Gregory on Ezekiel — “the sin that is not quickly deleted through penance is a sin and the cause of sin.” Gregory, Pope c. 590–604, one of the four great Western doctors. Aside: he wishes he could hand out the objections alone and see the next day whether students had really thought about them; the story of a difficulty he could not solve as an undergraduate, which his teacher Kasurik could not solve either, until reading Thomas gave him the answer — and Dionne, ten years later, saw where he was going.

3. Digression on dividing the four causes (“we still follow the rule of two or three”) #

The point: four is hard to understand at a stroke; we grasp it by dividing into two or three.

• History: the first Greek natural philosophers have only matter; Pythagoras adds form (two); Empedocles adds the mover — earth/air/fire/water, ratios, love and hate (three); Aristotle adds a fourth.
• Two and two: inward causes (matter, form) against outside causes (mover, end).
• One and three: matter, based on potency, against form, mover and end, all based on act — this is the division used of God: pure act, he can be end, mover and exemplar form, but in no way the matter out of which things are made.
• Another two and two: matter and mover (prior in being) against form and end (more perfect; form is like the end of generation).
• Parallel with the four kinds of opposites (Metaphysics V): relative opposites against the other three, since contradiction, privation, and even the lesser contrary involve non-being — hence Father and Son cannot be distinguished by those three; and one relative posits the other (father/son, teacher/student, friend/friend).
• Supreme example: Thomas dividing the ten categories into three and subdividing by twos and threes, where Aristotle merely enumerates ten.
• Asides: the metric system is unintelligible because it divides into ten first thing, whereas the standard way halves — 2, 2, 2; Austria, and putting speed inside in kilometers. A student grants him the point (“so we won’t dismiss you entirely”). He asks to be reminded of the word “point” later.

4. Respondeo: one sin causes another in all four genera (“according to the four genera causes”) #

Sin has a cause on the side of the act as well as on the side of the disorder; so one sin can cause another as one human act causes another.

• Efficient, per accidens, as removens prohibens — the remover of what prevents. Example: Samson pulling down the pillar — per se gravity brings the roof down, but he is per accidens the cause. Aristotle’s case: the stone falls by its own inclination, but whoever removes the support is the accidental cause of its falling. A student’s example: taking the Baltimore Catechism out of instruction — ignorance. Applied: by one mortal sin a man loses grace, charity, or shame, whatever held him back, and so falls into another.
• Efficient, per se: from one act a man is disposed to a similar act more easily; acts cause dispositions and eventually habits inclining to like acts. A student: “one kind removes the fear, one kind calls more love.”
• Material: one sin prepares the matter of another — avarice prepares the matter for litigation and disputes about accumulated wealth; eating too much for lust.
• Final: one commits a sin for the sake of the end of another — simony for ambition (wanting one’s family prominent), fornication for the sake of theft. His examples: stealing jewels to seduce a woman; stealing a car to impress her.
• Formal: since the end gives the form in moral matters, the end-sin is the form of the other. In fornication committed for theft, the fornication is material, the theft formal. Example: Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor — legend says Queen Elizabeth asked Shakespeare for Falstaff in love; his proposals aim at the wives’ husbands’ money, so the sin is materially fornication, formally theft. He admits one could as well speak of that as the end. He notes Thomas’s order — efficient, material, then end and form, the first pair thought together and the second pair together — and says he himself would then divide up each of the four.

5. Aside: how drama inculcates virtue (“to lead men into something virtuous”) #

Thomas: it belongs to the poet to use a kind of representation to lead men to what is virtuous. A play should not be a sermon; it moves the emotions, and by laughing at the lustful man you are inclined toward virtue. Cases: The Merry Wives of Windsor; Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, where the Count woos Susanna and the Countess substitutes for her in the garden, so he caresses his own wife’s flesh; Paul VI — the artist has an advantage over the preacher, who must warn and scold, while the artist induces people to desire what is good. Kasurik: you can tell a good teacher by the examples he gives. John Paul I: after reading Oedipus one is anything but enthusiastic about incest. An Elizabethan play of brother and sister ending with her heart on his sword — not a pretty play, but it does not incline you to incest. The Merchant of Venice, watched at his son’s house: you are not inclined to sympathize with the Jew, and Gratiano’s mockery when the law is turned on him — flesh but no blood.

6. Replies to the three objections (“not every cause of sin is a sin”) #

1. As disordered, sin has the notion of bad; as an act it has something good, at least an apparent end. So on the side of the act there can be a final and an efficient cause of another sin, though not on the side of the disorder. Sin has a matter not from which but about which — as we speak of the matter of a science — and it has its form from its end. He presses the point: what would you do if you did not know the four kinds of causes? Philosophy is a preambulum — it walks before theology.
2. Sin is imperfect by its moral imperfection, on the side of the disorder; on the side of the act it can have the perfection of nature — fornication can lead to another person — and in that respect can cause sin. He praises the method: the objections make you think, and when the solution uses something already seen in the body, you see it from another angle and it sticks.
3. Not every cause of sin is a sin; so there is no infinite regress, but one arrives at a first sin whose cause is not another sin — the sin of Adam and Eve.

7. The requested digression on “point” and the transfer of words (“the world is pointless”) #

The point: words move naturally from a first to a last sense, and philosophy follows that movement.

• Aristotle’s senses of end (Metaphysics V): (1) the point is the end of the line, the line of the surface, the surface of the body; (2) the end of motion; (3) the end of thinking, the definition — finis; (4) the end of intention, purpose. Common speech moves “point” from the first sense straight to the last: “the world is pointless,” “what’s your point?”
• John 1: logos translated “word” though the meaning is thought — but translating it “word” is good because it forces English to travel the same road the Greek word travelled, from word to thought.
• The sophism he puts to students: happiness is the end of life; the end of life is death; therefore happiness is death — the fallacy is confusing the second sense of “end” with the fourth.
• Shakespeare’s Friar Lawrence, “revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse”: “birth” is not the origin but the last sense, the nature of the thing.

8. The prologue of q. 76: the interior causes of sin (“first about the inward causes of sin”) #

Causes of sin in general are done; now in particular, divided into three: inward causes; exterior causes; and the sins which are causes of other sins. The inward consideration is tripartita: ignorance, cause of sin on the part of reason; infirmity or passion, on the part of the sense appetite; malice, on the part of the will — “you might guess it’s going to be the worst of all.” Aside on malice: the hatred of Bush produced during the campaign, and a senator (Durbin) comparing Guantánamo to the gulag; his own couplet — terrorists cut off heads, abortionists pull babies apart in the womb, and it is difficult to see who is worse.

9. Article 1: objections against ignorance as a cause of sin (“ignorance is the non-being of knowledge”) #

The four questions of the article: whether ignorance is a cause of sin; whether it is a sin; whether it entirely excuses; whether it diminishes sin. (He starts to say “whether ignorance is a cause of sin — well, no, it’s an excuse for sin,” giving the common first reaction; and recommends asking people what they think before explaining, as with the parables — someone objected to the man thrown out for lacking a wedding garment.) Objections: (1) what is not is the cause of nothing, and ignorance is the non-being of knowledge, a lack. (2) Causes of sin are taken on the side of conversion, the turning toward; ignorance regards the aversion, the turning away. (3) Every sin consists in the will, and the will is carried only to what is known, since the apprehended good is its object. Sed contra: Augustine, On Nature and Grace — some sin through ignorance.

10. Antonomasia (“the philosopher… doesn’t even call him by his name”) #

Thomas says “the philosopher.” The figure of speech is antonomasia: giving the common name to the one it stands out in. Aristotle calls Homer “the poet.” Very common in Scripture: the Bible, the Gospels, and Christ are all named by antonomasia — he says he will ask his parish that question. Joke: “What the hell is antonomasia? You’ve got to come up with a better name for it.”

11. The body: ignorance as removens prohibens (“he points out a distinction”) #

1. Physics VIII (“books of natural hearing”): the moving cause is twofold, per se — what moves by its own power, as the generator is the cause moving heavy and light things by giving them the power to move up or down — and per accidens, as the removens prohibens.
2. Ignorance is a privation of the knowledge perfecting reason, and that knowledge would prohibit the act of sin insofar as reason directs human acts. So ignorance causes the act of sin in the second way.
3. Reason directs by a twofold knowledge, universal and particular, since deliberation uses a kind of syllogism whose conclusion is a judgment, a choice, or the act itself, for actions are singular; and a singular conclusion follows from a universal only by means of a singular premise. Examples: fornication is wrong, this is fornication; stealing is wrong, this is stealing; a father should not be killed, this man is my father, therefore I should not kill him.
4. Hence ignorance of either premise can cause parricide — ignorance of the universal rule or of the singular circumstance. Oedipus: he knew he should not kill his father or marry his mother, but did not know this man blocking his way was his father, nor that the woman was his mother.
5. Therefore not just any ignorance of the sinner causes sin, but only that which takes away the prohibiting knowledge — not knowing the Pythagorean theorem is no cause of sin.
6. Boundary case: if a man’s will were so disposed that he would not be held back from parricide even knowing it was his father, the ignorance is not the cause of his sin but a mere accompaniment; such a one does not sin on account of ignorance but sins being ignorant (Ethics III). Aside on language: he prefers saying Thomas points out a distinction rather than “makes” or “distinguishes,” which sounds subjective, as if distinctions were made to get out of trouble — “he’s a wit, but we’re dimwits,” and nitwits don’t see them even when pointed out. He notes this ties back to his interest in the word “point.”

12. Replies of a. 1 (“removens prohibens is more like the efficient cause”) #

1. Non-being cannot be a per se cause but can be a per accidens cause, as the removal of what prohibits. He flags a fine point: Thomas uses both remotio prohibentis and removens prohibens — the removing agent is more like the efficient cause; the removal itself is a little different, the effect of that.
2. As the knowledge which ignorance takes away regards sin on the side of conversion, so ignorance on the side of aversion is a cause of sin as removens prohibens.
3. The will cannot be carried to what is in every respect unknown; but where something is known in one way and unknown in another, the will can will it — as one knows the man he kills to be a man but not to be his father, or knows an act to be delightful but not to be a sin.

His words #

• “either-or syllogism” — going through all the members and finding none fits [ed.: disjunctive syllogism]
• removens prohibens — “what removes the thing that prevents something,” an accidental efficient cause; distinguished later from remotio prohibentis, the removal itself
• “fifth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics V]
• “books of natural hearing” [ed.: Physics]
• preambulum — philosophy “walks before theology”
• “matter not from which but about which” — the matter of sin, as of a science
• tripartita — the threefold division of the interior causes: ignorance, infirmity/passion, malice
• antonomasia — giving the common name to the one it eminently belongs to (“the philosopher,” “the poet”)
• “he points out a distinction” — preferred to “he makes a distinction,” which sounds subjective
• “sins being ignorant” vs. “sins on account of ignorance” (Ethics III)

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, ST I-II, q. 75, a. 4 — objections, sed contra, body, replies
• Thomas Aquinas, ST I-II, q. 76, prologue
• Thomas Aquinas, ST I-II, q. 76, a. 1 — objections, sed contra, body, replies
• Gregory the Great, Homilies on Ezekiel (quoted in the sed contra)
• Augustine, On Nature and Grace (quoted in the sed contra)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Meteorology IV; Physics VIII; Nicomachean Ethics III; Metaphysics V (senses of “end”; four kinds of opposites); the ten categories
• Dionysius, on evil as infirm and impotent
• Gregory, Moralia in Job
• Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet (Friar Lawrence); Mozart, The Marriage of Figaro; Sophocles, Oedipus; Boswell’s Life of Johnson; John 1

His questions #

• Why does the objector go through all four causes to conclude that sin cannot cause sin? Because it is an either-or (disjunctive) syllogism: if no one of the four fits, there is no cause.
• How can sin, imperfect by its notion, be the father of another sin? On the side of the act it can have the perfection of nature, though it is imperfect on the side of the disorder.
• Does one sin causing another give an infinite regress? No: not every cause of sin is a sin, so one arrives at a first sin — that of Adam and Eve.
• In which genus of cause is one sin the cause of another? In all four: efficient (per accidens as removens prohibens, and per se by disposition), material, final, and formal, since the end gives the form in morals.
• What would you do if you did not know the four kinds of causes? What did Thomas do? Philosophy is a preambulum, it walks before theology.
• What does it mean to say “the world is pointless”? It has no end — the word “point” has moved from the first sense of “end” (the end of a line) to the last (purpose).
• What is wrong with: happiness is the end of life, the end of life is death, therefore happiness is death? It confuses the second sense of “end” (term of motion) with the fourth (purpose).
• What is the name of the figure of speech in “the philosopher”? Antonomasia — as the Bible, the Gospels and Christ are named.
• How can ignorance, a non-being, cause sin? Not per se, but per accidens, as removens prohibens — it removes the knowledge of reason that would have prohibited the act.
• Does just any ignorance of the sinner cause sin? No — only that which takes away the prohibiting knowledge; and if the will would have acted anyway, he sins being ignorant, not on account of ignorance.