Malice Without Habit, Malice Worse Than Passion, and Whether God Causes Sin (ST I-II q.78 a.3-4; q.79 a.1)

Orientation #

He picks up in Q. 78 immediately after the previous article, saying “now the next article is going to say…” and at the end moves into the exterior causes of sin (“Now we’ve got to go to the exterior causes of sin”). He also promises a Bible article “tomorrow” bearing on ignorance of choice. The previous class treated the first two articles of I-II q. 78 on sin from certain malice.

The class, in order #

1. Setting the question: are malice and habit convertible? (“Are these convertible?”) #

The point: q. 78 a. 3 asks whether everyone who sins from certain malice sins from habit — a convertibility question, like “is every dog an animal, but every animal a dog?”

• Don Giovanni as the man who sins from habit: he opens the opera trying to seduce a woman, kills the father who draws his sword, sings at the great dinner before the ghost that “woman is the glory of man” — and he can’t change.
• Tied to the Hail Mary’s “now and at the hour of our death”: “where the tree falls, there it lies” — you fall where your habits are, and only the great mercy of God would make you fall otherwise. “It’s frightening.”

2. Objection 1: Ethics V — only the habituated act as the unjust man acts (“that is not just of anyone to do unjust things”) #

• Obj. 1: Aristotle (Ethics V, the book on justice) says it is not for just anyone to do unjust things as the unjust man does them, i.e. from choice, but only for those having the habit; sinning from certain malice is sinning from choice of evil; therefore only the one with a habit sins from certain malice.
• Reply (taken at once): to act as the unjust one acts is not only to do something unjust from certain malice, but to do it with pleasure and without any great refusal or opposition of reason — and that belongs only to one having the habit.
• Habit’s grip on choice illustrated: the Montcalm restaurant in Quebec where the waitress yelled “petite steak” to the kitchen the moment he walked in; the UPS driver at McDonald’s, “two hamburgers mustard only,” five days a week, so they were down before he reached the window. Also his own tea rather than coffee, and banquet choices of steak or salmon.

3. Objection 2: Origen on the gradual decline (“it is not suddenly that someone is empty or fails”) #

• Obj. 2: Origen (Peri Archon I) — one does not fail suddenly but little by little, declining through parts; the greatest falling-away (maximus defluxus) is sinning from certain malice; therefore one reaches it only through much custom, from which a habit is generated.
• Reply: not at once does someone fall into sinning from certain malice; it presupposes something — “which nevertheless is not always a habit.” He leaves that dangling: “I wonder what that is.”
• Aside on method: objections properly done arouse “reasonable wonder,” a real problem; texts that print the answer in bold destroy the wonder.
• Student exchange on the three raisings from the dead as stages in the death of sin: the girl just dead, the widow’s son being carried out, and Lazarus four days buried — the last is the man who is habitual in all his sin.

4. Objection 3: the will’s natural inclination is to good (“from the nature of the power, man is not inclined to evil”) #

• Obj. 3: when one sins from certain malice his will must of itself be inclined to the evil chosen; but by nature the power is inclined not to evil but to good; so something must be superadded to the power — either passion or habit; but sinning from passion is sinning from infirmity, not malice; therefore from habit.
• His gloss: God gave the nature, and the inclination following it is good; so choosing a known evil requires something added, an emotion (passing) or a habit. “I’m convinced, right? I rest my case.”

5. The sed contra as a fourth objection, and Thomas’s reply (“as a good habit is to the choice of good”) #

• Note on counting: sometimes there are four answers and three objections — the sed contra is itself an objection on the other side.
• Sed contra: as a good habit stands to choosing good, so a bad habit to choosing bad; but sometimes a man without the habit of virtue chooses what is good according to virtue; therefore sometimes one without a vicious habit can choose evil from certain malice.
• Reply (ad 4): the reason is not similar for choice of good and choice of bad, because evil is never without the good of nature, whereas good can be perfectly without the evil of guilt.

6. Digression: Iris the offspring of Thaumas (“It’s not a bad genealogy”) #

Socrates says whoever made Iris the offspring of Thaumas gave a good genealogy, and goes no further.

• Thaumas is wonder personified; Iris is both the rainbow personified and the messenger of the gods — in The Tempest, when she appears she is hailed “many-colored messenger.”
• Student-led unfolding: the rainbow joins heaven (place of the gods) to earth (place of man), and the messenger goes between God and us. So wonder unites us with God: wonder makes us seek the cause, then the cause of the cause, and is not satisfied until the first cause, God.
• And the rainbow after the flood is a sign of reconciliation of man and God, fittingly, since it seems to unite heaven and earth.

7. The body of a. 3: the two ways the will of itself moves to evil (“the will has itself in a different way to good and to bad”) #

The point: sin from certain malice always presupposes some disorder, but not always a habit.

1. By nature of its potency the will is inclined to the good of reason as to its own object — “whence every sin is said to be against nature.” He matches this with Shakespeare: “For not so good, but strange in that fair use, revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse” — birth is where the word nature comes from (nativity, prenatal, postnatal). “That’s a universal affirmative statement.”
2. So the will’s inclining to something bad in choosing must come from elsewhere: sometimes from defect of reason (sin from ignorance), sometimes from the impulse of the sense appetite (sin from passion). Neither is sin from certain malice.
3. Sin from certain malice is when the will itself of itself is moved to evil — and this happens in two ways:
   • (a) through a corrupt disposition inclining to evil, so that the evil becomes suitable and similar to the man, and by reason of that agreement the will tends to it as to something good (the first definition of good: “the good is what all want”). Such a disposition is either a habit acquired from custom turned into nature, or a sick habit on the part of the body — a natural inclination to some sin, “like Coriolanus, anger,” from the corruption of nature in him.
   • (b) through removal of something preventing or prohibiting: a man is held back from sin not because sin as such displeases him — “not because fornication is such as displeasing to him” — but by hope of eternal life or fear of hell; remove hope by despair, or fear by presumption, and he sins from certain malice without a habit.

• Conclusion: sin from certain malice always presupposes some disorder, “which nevertheless is not always a habit.”
• Anecdote: the counting house after Sunday Mass, and Padre Pio’s reply to the man who said he did not believe in hell — “You will when you get there.”

8. Hope and fear must balance (“hope without the fear would become presumption”) #

• Thomas in the commentary on the Psalms: hope and fear of God are named together because both are needed — hope without fear becomes presumption, fear without hope becomes despair.
• Tragedy arouses fear (and pity), comedy mirth and hope; the Greeks played comedy after two or three tragedies, since nothing but tragedy breeds melancholy and despair about the human situation, while nothing but comedy makes you superficial, taking nothing seriously.
• The same in philosophy: one needs the hope of actually coming to know the truth — Whittaker Chambers despised his Columbia fellows because “they regarded ideas as ping pong balls,” knocked back and forth, not taken seriously; many in the academic world have despaired of truth. And one needs the fear of being in error. Against this, Warren Murray on Monsignor Dionne — “his principal passion is fear”; and Kasurik’s story that Dionne spoke quite differently in his office than in class, because “it’s the business of the professor to encourage the students.”
• Student remark on scripture: men despairing of salvation who hand themselves over to vice by choice — “that’s kind of modern world.”
• Aside: the nun who told John Paul II “I’m worried about your holiness” and got the reply “I’m worried about my holiness too.”

9. Article 4: is sin from certain malice graver than sin from passion? Objections and replies (“It seems that the one who sins from certain malice does not sin more gravely”) #

• Obj. 1: ignorance excuses wholly or in part; the man of certain malice suffers ignorance of the principle, which is greatest (Ethics VII), having a bad estimate of the end, the beginning in things to be done; so he is more excused. — Reply: the ignorance of choice, from which the objection proceeds, neither excuses nor diminishes sin; so neither does greater such ignorance make the sin less. (“We have to wait for the Bible article tomorrow” on what that means.)
• Obj. 2: the greater the impulse to sin, the less one sins; but habit’s force is stronger than passion’s; so sinning from habit is less. — “Most beautiful answer”: the impulse from passion is as it were from outside with respect to the will, but by habit the will is inclined as it were from within; the reason is not similar.
  • Student parallel, accepted: the man who acts well from charity does it more with his own will, more inclined to good — even though the man with hardly any inclination might be said to have more to overcome.
  • Student objection: the habit of intemperance would be in the concupiscible appetite, not the will, so it too would be outside. His answer: it still implies he acts from choice, and the habit influences choice, which is intrinsic to the will.
• Obj. 3: to sin from certain malice is to sin from choice of evil, but the man of passion also chooses evil; so no less sin. — Reply, “the same kind of distinction he had the other article”: it is one thing to sin choosing, another to sin from choice. The man of passion sins choosing but not from choice, because choice is not in him the first beginning of the sin; he is induced by passion to choose what, outside passion, he would not choose. In the man of certain malice, choice is the beginning of sin.
  • Aside: a priest who said you must absolve a young couple living together unmarried because “they’re addicted” — the same confusion.
• Sed contra: sin from industry merits graver punishment (Job 34: he strikes the impious in the place of those seeing, who as it were of industry recede from him); punishment is increased only for gravity of guilt.

10. The body of a. 4: three reasons (“for a threefold reason”) #

1. Sin consists chiefly in the will; the more the motion of sin is proper to the will itself, the graver, other things equal. In certain malice the will moves itself; in passion the impulse is extrinsic. So malice aggravates — the more vehement the malice the more — and passion diminishes, the more so the greater the passion. (He wonders aloud about David’s vehement passion, and about Peter’s denial, brought up to him many times — “he was pope.”)
2. Passion passes quickly and the man returns to his good purpose, penitent; but the habit by which one sins from malice is a permanent quality, so he sins longer. Ethics VII compares the intemperate man to one continually sick, the incontinent to one who labors now and again.
3. The man of certain malice is badly disposed as regards the end itself, the beginning in things to be done; the man of passion’s purpose tends to a good end, only interrupted. “Semper defectus principii est pessimus” — always the defect of the beginning is worst. Dionne “would knock that into our heads”; Aristotle: a little mistake in the beginning is a great one in the end — he demonstrates by aiming slightly off target.

• He notes the reasons are ordered, the first being the more principal. “I’m convinced, by the Master here.”
• Aside: the California student who came with an objection every class and visibly relaxed when it was answered; some students don’t know when an objection has been answered, and many objections are so classical you hear them over and over.

11. Q. 79 opens: the exterior causes of sin (“Now we’ve got to go to the exterior causes of sin”) #

Division: first on the part of God, second on the part of the devil, third on the side of man. Under the first, four articles: (1) whether God is a cause of sin; (2) whether the act of sin is from God; (3) whether God is cause of blindness and hardness of heart — “plenty of times in the Gospels Christ is said to be angry with the hardness of their heart”; (4) whether these are ordered to the salvation of those blinded or hardened.

• Aside from another text of Thomas read that day: Christ teaching in parables the audience misunderstood is not the cause of their error; it came from the defect of their mind.

12. Article 1: is God the cause of sin? (“These are fighting words now”) #

Objections, each with its reply taken at once:

• Obj. 1: Romans 1, God “turned them over to a reprobate sense”; and the gloss, that God works in men’s hearts inclining their wills whither he wills, to good or bad. — Reply: from the text itself the solution is clear — they already had a reprobate sense; he is said to hand them over insofar as he does not prevent them from following it, “just as we are said to expose those whom we do not defend.” And Augustine (On Grace and Free Will), whence the gloss is taken: in the good God directly inclines the will, in evil only insofar as he does not prevent — and this too happens from the merit of preceding sin. He flags: “Difficult text, that ’nevertheless’.”
  • Student: Augustine somewhere says God respects the laws he has made and lets his creatures make their own moves.
• Obj. 2: Wisdom 14, the creatures of God are made “in hate and in temptation to the soul of men”; temptation is provocation to sin; creatures are made only by God. (“He made woman. He made Bathsheba.”) — Reply: this preposition “in” is not laid down causally but consecutively; God did not make creatures for men’s evil, but this followed on men’s foolishness — whence “and in a trap for the feet of the foolish.” Men use creatures otherwise than they were made for. He notes the word “in” comes up in a number of texts this way.
• Obj. 3: the cause of a cause is cause of the effect; God causes liberum arbitrium, which causes sin. — Reply: the effect of a middle cause is reduced to the first cause only as the middle cause is subject to the order of the first; as it goes outside that order it is not. If the servant does something against the Lord’s command, that is not reduced to the Lord as cause. His example: “If I send you to beat the kid and say do it gently, and you don’t do it gently, am I the cause of what you did?”
• Obj. 4: God can without repugnance be cause of the evil of punishment — Isaiah 45, God creating evil; Amos 3, “if there is evil in the city that God did not make” — so likewise of guilt. — Reply: punishment is opposed to the good of the one punished, deprived of some good; but guilt is opposed to the good of order which is in God, directly opposed to divine goodness. So the reason is not similar.
• Sed contra: Wisdom 11, “you hate none of those things which you have made”; but God hates sin (Wisdom 14, the impious and his impiety are odious to God); therefore God is not the cause of sin.
• Body: a man is cause of sin, his own or another’s, in two ways — directly, by inclining his own or another’s will to sinning; indirectly, by not restraining or drawing back from sinning (Ezekiel 3:18, to the watchman: if you do not tell the impious he shall die, his blood I will require at your hand).
  • God cannot be directly the cause, because every sin is a receding from the order which is toward him as end, and God inclines and turns all things back to himself as last end (Dionysius, On the Divine Names ch. 1); it is impossible he cause a departing from himself.
  • Nor indirectly: it can happen that God does not give some the assistance which, given, would keep them from sinning — but all this he does according to the order of his own wisdom and justice, since he is wisdom and justice; so another’s sin is not imputed to him as cause. Just as the pilot is not said to be cause of the ship’s sinking by not steering, except when he withdraws the steering while able and bound to steer. “And thus it is clear that God in no way is a cause of sin.”

His words #

• “certain malice” — ex certa malitia; sinning from the choice of evil, the will of itself moved to evil.
• “convertible” — said of terms that predicate of each other both ways (dog/animal test).
• “said contra” — sed contra; here functioning as a fourth objection, hence four replies to three objections.
• “maximus defluxus” — Origen’s greatest flowing-down or falling-away.
• “sick habit on the part of the body” — a bodily disposition inclining to a sin, e.g. anger.
• “ignorance of choice” — the ignorance that neither excuses nor diminishes sin.
• “to sin choosing” vs. “to sin from choice” — the second means choice is the beginning of the sin.
• “liberum arbitrium” — free judgment, free will.
• “in … not laid down causality, but consecutively” — the “in” of Wisdom 14 marks consequence, not cause.
• “semper defectus principii est pessimus” — the defect of the beginning is always worst.
• “governor” [ed.: pilot/helmsman] — the ship’s steersman in the closing analogy.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 78, a. 3 (objections 1–3, sed contra, replies, body)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 78, a. 4 (objections 1–3, sed contra, replies, body)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 79, prologue and a. 1 (objections 1–4, sed contra, replies, body)
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics V (the just/unjust man acting from choice); VII (ignorance of the principle; intemperate vs. incontinent as continually vs. intermittently sick)
• Origen, Peri Archon I (gradual failing)
• Romans 1; Wisdom 11, 14; Isaiah 45; Amos 3; Job 34; Ezekiel 3:18
• Augustine, On Grace and Free Will; Pseudo-Dionysius, On the Divine Names ch. 1

Mentioned

• Thomas Aquinas, commentary on the Psalms (hope and fear together)
• Thomas Aquinas, another text read that day (Christ’s parables and the hearers’ error)
• Plato/Socrates on Iris and Thaumas (inferred: Theaetetus)
• Shakespeare, The Tempest (“many-colored messenger”); Shakespeare quoted on “revolts from true birth”
• Mozart, Don Giovanni; Shakespeare’s Coriolanus; the raisings of Lazarus, the widow’s son, the girl

His questions #

• Are “sins from certain malice” and “sins from habit” convertible? No — malice always presupposes some disorder, but not always a habit.
• What does it presuppose, if not always a habit? Either a corrupt disposition (habit from custom, or a bodily inclination), or the removal of a restraint — hope destroyed by despair, fear by presumption.
• Why is it said that Iris is the offspring of Thaumas? Because the rainbow joins heaven and earth as the messenger goes between God and us: wonder seeks the cause of the cause and rests only in God.
• Is sin from certain malice graver than sin from passion? Yes, for three reasons: it is more proper to the will, it lasts longer (habit is a permanent quality), and it corrupts the end, the beginning.
• If the greater impulse lessens sin, why does habit not lessen it? Because passion’s impulse is from outside the will, habit inclines the will from within.
• Does the man of passion not also choose evil? He sins choosing but not from choice; choice is not the beginning of his sin.
• Is God the cause of sin? In no way — not directly, since sin is a receding from him as end; not indirectly, since his withholding of aid follows the order of his own wisdom and justice.
• What does “God handed them over to a reprobate sense” mean? That they already had it, and he did not prevent them from following it — “we expose those whom we do not defend.”