Is God the Cause of Sin? Summa I-II Q.79, Articles 1–3: The Act of Sin, Blindness and Hardness of Heart

Orientation #

He opens by placing the class: question 79, the exterior causes of sin — first on the part of God, second the devil, third man — and lists the four articles of q. 79 (God cause of sin; act of sin from God; God cause of blindness and obduracy; whether these are ordered to the salvation of the blinded). He ends saying they should go into Article 4 before the break, but do not.

The class, in order #

1. Setting up the question (“on the exterior causes of sin”) #

The point: q. 79 asks about causes of sin outside the sinner. He notes the oddity of the enterprise — “It’s bringing the prosecutor with God, right? That’s a little dangerous thing here.”

2. The objections of a. 1: God as cause of sin (“That’s pretty damning consideration”) #

He reads the four arguments that God is the cause of sin:

1. Romans 1: God handed them over to a reprobate sense, to do what is not fitting; the gloss says God works in men’s hearts inclining their wills to whatever He wants, in good or in bad. To incline the will to evil is sin.
2. Wisdom 14: the creatures of God are made in hate and a temptation to the soul of man; temptation is a provoking to sin; creatures are made only by God.
3. Whatever causes the cause causes the effect; God causes free judgment (liberum arbitrium), which causes sin.
4. God is not repugnantly the cause of the evil of punishment — Isaiah 45, God creans malum; Amos 3, is there an evil in the city God has not made? — so neither of guilt.

He dramatises the force of these: “Some heretic knew scripture better than we know it… he could really give us a rough time”; “What a guy this Thomas is — he must have been sweating when he wrote this”; “guilty or not guilty, would you, as jury, at this point?”

Sed contra: Wisdom 11, “you hate nothing of those things you have made,” and Wisdom 14, God hates the impious and his impiety; therefore God is not the cause of sin.

Aside (Wisdom 14 objection): Albert the Great on the dangers of women — “if I said everything that I know about women, the whole world would be stupefied.”

3. Digression on why one must raise difficulties (“it’s tied, unless you examine the knot”) #

The point: arguments on both sides bind the mind. Aristotle (in the Metaphysics, “Wisdom”) compares a mind hearing opposing arguments to legs tied together: you cannot go forward until you untie the knot. Hence the twenty-three questions of Book III of Wisdom. “Dick used to say Aristotle was somebody” — he praises this as antonomasia.

4. The body of a. 1: direct and indirect causing (“just as the pilot is not said to be the cause”) #

1. Man causes sin in two ways: directly, inclining his own or another’s will to sinning; indirectly, by not pulling others back from sin — Ezekiel 3, if you did not say to the impious “death,” his blood will be required of your hand.
2. God cannot be a direct cause: every sin is a receding from the order which is in Him as in an end, whereas God inclines and converts all to Himself as ultimate end (Dionysius, Divine Names 1; Aristotle, Wisdom XII). He cannot cause a departing from the order which is Himself.
3. Neither indirectly: it can happen that God does not give some the aid to avoiding sin which, if bestowed, would keep them from sinning; but He does all this according to the order of His wisdom and justice, being wisdom itself and justice itself. So another’s sin is not imputed to Him as cause.
4. The pilot: he is not called the cause of the sinking of the ship merely from not governing it, except when he withdraws his governing while able and bound to govern.

Conclusion: God is in no way a cause of sin.

Aside: Cardinal Dolan on how few sermons were given on the Church’s teaching on reproduction; a priest in a nearby city afraid to preach it, with nobody coming to church.

5. Replies in a. 1 (“we are said to expose those whom we do not protect”) #

• To 1: the text itself gives the solution (“solution” = untying). Those handed over to a reprobate sense already have one; God is said to hand them over insofar as He does not prohibit them from following their own sense — as we “expose” those whom we do not protect (Augustine, On Grace and Free Will, source of the gloss). So the gloss means: in the good He inclines the will directly; in the bad, only insofar as He does not prohibit. And this follows on the merit of a preceding sin.
• To 2: “in” in “made in hate and in temptation” is not causal but consequent. God does not make creatures for man’s harm; it follows from men’s foolishness, whence “and a trap for the feet of the foolish” — sapiens opposed to sapientia, savory knowledge — who use creatures for something other than they were made for.
• To 3: an effect of a middle cause is reduced to the first cause insofar as the middle cause is subject to the first cause’s order; not if it goes outside that order. Examples: a servant acting against the Lord’s mandate is not reduced to the Lord as cause; so sin against God’s precept is not reduced to God. The conductor: a player’s wrong note is not attributed to the conductor, because he is not following the conductor’s order. Attached asides: Mozart’s sister on Mozart hearing which instrument was off; von Karajan’s iron hand in The Magic Flute; Handel carrying an unruly prima donna; Beecham’s Messiah and “I see you can play it backwards, now let’s play forwards”; Toscanini playing the Jupiter Symphony “like a Beethoven symphony”; his teacher Cassidy and the comparison “as much difference as between De Koninck and Maritain and St. Thomas.”
• To 4: punishment is opposed to the good of the one punished, who is deprived of some good; guilt is opposed to the good of the order which is in God, hence directly opposed to the divine goodness. So the reason is not the same for guilt and punishment. “Punishment, in a sense, is putting back order into things.”
• Aside on punishment: Sister Mary Cyril in sixth grade, lining the kids up, slamming her fist against the gym wall — “I’m going to put your head through this wall” — where there was already a large crack; and “Cannonball Corona,” who cracked the pointer.

6. Article 2, objections: is the act of sin from God? (“the act of sin is not something”) #

1. Augustine, On the Perfection of Justice: the act of sin is not something; everything from God is something. He glosses Augustine’s way of speaking: evil is nothing, the man who sins becomes nothing — a way of emphasising that evil is basically a lack, a non-being, “something a thing is able to have and should have, but doesn’t have.” “I’ve got to watch Augustine’s way of speaking sometimes.”
2. Man is called cause of sin only as cause of the act of sin; but no one intending evil works anything (Dionysius) — all act for what they want; and God is not cause of sin.
3. Some acts are evil according to their species; whatever causes a thing causes what belongs to it by its species; so if God caused the act of sin He would cause sin.

Sed contra: the act of sin is a motion of free judgment, and God’s will is cause of all motions (Augustine, On the Trinity III; also Aristotle). His hint: “but maybe he’s not the cause of the privation.”

7. The body of a. 2: God causes the act, not the defect (“reduced in the curved tibia”) #

1. The act of sin is both a being and an act, and on both counts it is from God.
2. Every being however it is derives from the first being (Dionysius, Divine Names 5).
3. Every action is caused by something existing in act, since nothing acts except as it is in act; every being in act is reduced to the first act, pure act, God, who is act through His essence. So God is the cause of every action as action.
4. But sin names being and action with a certain defect, and that defect is from a created cause, liberum arbitrium, insofar as it falls short of the order of the first agent.
5. The limping example (one Thomas commonly uses): the defect of limping is reduced to the curved tibia as cause, not to the motive power, from which nevertheless comes whatever there is of motion in the limping.

Conclusion: God is the cause of the act of the sin, but not the cause of the sin, because He is not the cause of the act’s being with a defect.

Asides and student exchange:

• Students discuss tibia: looked up as “the inner and typically larger of two bones between knee and ankle,” from Latin generally the shin bone — “so it’s more precise than we anticipated.”
• Is God the cause of my thinking? Yes; of my being deceived by the fallacy of equivocation? The defect is mine.
• Going up to Laval and hearing a garbled version of what Dion said: “I know where the defect is coming.” Likewise Pope Francis’s remarks and the media.
• He once collected the misquotations of Aristotle’s definition of motion — “a whole page of them”; few students can repeat exactly what was said.
• A student’s story: a philosophy professor teaching Scotus’s haecceitas (“thisness”); a student, unable to read the board, wrote a whole paper on Scotus’s notion of thinness.
• The pianist and the defective key: whatever sound there is, he caused by striking; but he is not responsible for the defect in the sound.

8. Replies in a. 2, and the subtle third (“This is a very subtle point now”) #

• To 1: Augustine there names “thing” what is a substance; in that sense the act of sin is not a thing. He notes this is a different explanation from the one he had been giving — some objections take a famous text but misunderstand it, and the reply must correct the text’s reading.
• To 2: in man is reduced not only the act but also the defect, because he is not subject to the one to whom he ought to be subject, even if he does not intend this principally; hence man is cause of sin. God is cause of the act in such a way that in no way is He cause of the accompanying defect; hence not cause of sin.
• Applied: God gives the human soul in generation, including in an adulterous act. He is cause of what is natural in the act, not of the disorder; so He cooperates with nature, not with the adultery.
• To 3 (“a very subtle point”): acts and habits take their species not from the privation in which the ratio of evil consists, but from an object to which such a privation is joined; so the defect not said to be from God pertains to the species of the act consequently, not as a specific difference.
• Connected: Dionysius’ no one acts except for the good — the good is apparent, attached to some lack. And: does the sinner want to be punished? No, but it follows on what he has done.
• Student question: is this connected with God creating the soul while original sin is there? Answer: yes, He is not creating the sin with the soul, not responsible for the defect.

9. Article 3, objections: God as cause of blinding and hardening (“whom he wishes he hardens”) #

1. Augustine, 83 Questions: God is not the cause that a man become worse; by blindness and obduracy a man becomes worse.
2. Fulgentius: God is not the avenger of that of which He is the author; God punishes the hardened heart.
3. The same effect is not attributed to contrary causes; but the cause of blindness is said to be man’s malice (Wisdom 2, “their malice has blinded them”) and the devil (2 Corinthians, “the god of this age has blinded the minds of the unbelieving”) — causes contrary to God.

Sed contra: Isaiah 6, “blind the heart of this people and weigh down their ears”; Romans 9, “whom he wishes he has mercy on, and whom he wishes he hardens” — “It’s frightening.”

Asides: “the novissimo” — in Latin the last day is also “the most new.” On the U.N. committee attacking the Vatican as cruel for its teaching on contraception and abortion — “They want children to live”; and Rahm Emanuel [transcript: “Ron Emanuel”] enlisting Muslim patrols in Chicago while favoring gay marriage, turning a blind eye.

10. The body of a. 3: two things in blinding and hardening (“not soft to living well”) #

1. Blinding and hardening imply two things. First, the motion of the human soul adhering to evil and turned away from the divine light — as regards this God is not the cause, just as He is not cause of sin.
2. Second, the subtraction of grace, from which it follows that the mind is not divinely illumined to seeing correctly (mens non illuminatur ad recte videndum) and the heart is not softened to living well. As regards this, God is the cause. He stresses the two words are not synonyms: excaecatio is in the mind, the reason that does not see; hardening is in the heart, the will. Aside: is a soft heart good? A soft brain is not; a hard heart is not good, but hard-headed seems good. He once gave a talk on the kind of contrariety of reason and will, and finds these words striking.

Aside within: “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know what the Church teaches. I fear my freedom.”

11. Digression: “What time is it?” (“Is three o’six time or an example of time?”) #

The point: our ordinary speech about time is puzzling. Day, month, year, morning, afternoon, evening are parts of time; but “what time is it?” is answered by “three o’six,” which is a now, indivisible, and so not a part of time at all. Is a line composed of points? Is time composed of nows? Aristotle argues against this in Book VI of Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics]. He presses the same about “we begin at seven o’clock.” A student offers: “between 306 and 307?” He leaves the puzzle as mysterious, unresolved.

12. Digression: Book II of Wisdom, easy and difficult truth (“is the difficulty in you or in the object?”) #

He reports re-reading Book II of the Metaphysics (“second book of wisdom”), divided in three: how man stands toward knowing truth; to which knowledge the knowledge of truth most belongs; how a man ought to pursue truth.

• Easy: everyone sees some part of the truth, however small — even making McDonald’s hamburgers all day, you see something about heat and how it turns out. And some truths all see, like the whole is more than the part — anyone denying it will object when given part of his salary, part of his dinner, part of a car. And by the efforts of many men a certain bulk of truth accumulates.
• Difficult: the cause of difficulty is either in the object or in the subject’s weakness. His examples: finding it hard to love God, or wisdom, or the common good — the defect is in you, since the common good is very good; finding it hard to love cancer — the defect is in the object. So too in knowing: natural philosophy is harder than mathematics because of the thing — these things hardly exist, as time is past and future, and the past no longer is, the future not yet; wisdom is harder because of the weakness of our mind.
• Student exchange: if somebody doesn’t love salmon, is the problem in the thing? “Ah, definitely. You hit it!” So too preferring beer to wine, or Beethoven to Mozart: the difficulty is in him. Asides: G. C. King on the solo piano music — “there is only Mozart”; Wagner’s admirers put in the company of mad Ludwig and Hitler, but Wagner said Mozart is above all masters in all arts and all ages; his own bad habit of reading while listening to Mozart, against his cousin’s advice.

13. God’s causing on the side of subtraction: the sun and the closed house (“it leaves that dark”) #

1. God is the universal cause of the enlightenment of souls — John 1:9, the true light which enlightens every man coming into this world — as the sun is universal cause of the enlightening of bodies.
2. But aliter tamen: the sun enlightens by necessity of nature (nature operates “automatically” in the presence of its object — fire burns paper put before it), God voluntarily through the order of His wisdom.
3. The sun, though of itself it enlightens all bodies, leaves dark a body in which it finds an impediment — the house whose windows are closed (students supply: shutters). But the sun is in no way the cause of that obscurity, since it is not by its judgment that light is not brought in; the cause is only the one who closes the window.
4. God, by His own judgment, does not send the light of grace where He finds an obstacle. Hence the cause of the subtraction of grace is not only the one placing the obstacle but also God, by His judgment. In this way God is the cause of blindness, of the weighing down of the ears, and of the hardness of heart — “notice he’s got all three things here now,” because eyes and ears are both used in instruction. Aside: in Acts they closed up their ears against Stephen and shouted.
5. Then it reduces to two, distinguished by the effect of grace, which perfects the understanding by the gift of wisdom (a gift of the Holy Spirit) and softens the affection by the fire of charity. And because for knowledge two senses most serve, sight and hearing — sight for discovery by oneself, hearing for being taught — as regards sight is laid down blindness, as regards hearing the weighing down, as regards affection hardening.
6. Aside on translation: the student’s English text has “heaviness of the ears.” He wonders why the prophets say “weighing down” rather than “closing,” and why we do not speak of a good listener as having “light ears” — “I suppose if your ear is weighed down, it’s not alert to hearing.”

14. Replies in a. 3 (“not made worse, but punished”) #

• To 1: blinding and hardening, on the side of the subtraction of grace, are punishments; by them a man is not made worse but punished — brought back to order. Being made worse through guilt incurs these things, as it does other punishments.
• To 2: that objection proceeds about hardening as it is guilt — back to the first member of the body, the motion of the human heart adhering to evil and turned from the divine light; as regards this God is not the cause.
• To 3: malice is a cause of blindness in that it demerits blindness, as guilt is the cause of punishment; and in this way the devil is said to blind, insofar as he induces to guilt.
• Added: the devil himself suffers a certain blindness because of his sin. Pride is the cause of error in two ways: it makes you evaluate yourself better than you are, so you apply your mind to judging what you cannot judge and easily err; and it makes you unwilling to listen to the teacher.
• Student: do all seven deadly sins lead to some form of blindness? Answer deferred — “we’ll be coming to those sins pretty soon here. All in good time, my friend. Can’t get out of order.” Left open.

His words #

• “the exterior causes of sin” — q. 79’s subject: God, devil, man.
• “obduracy” / “hardness of heart” — his renderings of obduratio, discussed as a translation problem.
• “solution” — the untying of a knot, the literal sense of solutio.
• “free judgment” / liberum arbitrium — his usual rendering of free will.
• “in” laid down “consequently,” not “causally” — reply to the Wisdom 14 objection.
• “middle cause” — the secondary cause between God and the effect.
• “the first act, which is the pure act” — God, act through His essence.
• “tibia” — the curved shin bone in the limping example.
• “mens non illuminatur ad recte videndum” — the mind not enlightened to seeing correctly.
• “aliter tamen” — “in a different way, however”: sun by necessity of nature, God voluntarily.
• “weighing down of the ears” — his rendering; the student’s text has “heaviness.”
• “the novissimo” — the last day, in Latin also “the most new.”
• “Natural Hearing” [ed.: Aristotle’s Physics], Book VI, on the continuous and indivisibles.
• “Wisdom” [ed.: Aristotle’s Metaphysics], books II, III, XII.
• “antonomasia” — of calling Aristotle “somebody.”
• “sapiens” opposed to “sapientia” — savory knowledge.
• “thinness” — a student’s misreading of Scotus’s haecceitas (“thisness”).

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 79, prologue and aa. 1-3 (objections, sed contra, body, replies) — read and translated throughout.
• Romans 1 with the gloss; Wisdom 11, 14; Isaiah 45; Amos 3; Ezekiel 3 — within a. 1.
• Augustine, On the Perfection of Justice; Dionysius, Divine Names 5; Augustine, On the Trinity III — within a. 2.
• Augustine, 83 Questions; Fulgentius; Wisdom 2; 2 Corinthians (“the god of this age”); Isaiah 6; Romans 9; John 1:9 — within a. 3.
• Aristotle, Metaphysics II (paraphrased at length: easy and difficult truth, its three-part division).

Mentioned

• Dionysius, Divine Names 1; Aristotle, Metaphysics III (the twenty-three questions) and XII.
• Aristotle, Physics VI (the continuous not composed of indivisibles).
• Augustine, On Grace and Free Will (source of the Romans gloss).
• Acts of the Apostles (they closed their ears against Stephen).

His questions #

• Guilty or not guilty — is God the cause of sin? No; He is in no way a cause of sin, directly or indirectly.
• How is he going to get out of this? “Talk about Houdini.” By distinguishing direct inclining from mere non-prohibiting, ordered by wisdom and justice.
• Why is the pilot not blamed for the sinking? Because he is blamed only when he withdraws his governing while able and bound to govern.
• Is God the cause of the act of sin? Yes, insofar as it is being and act; not of the defect, which is from free judgment.
• Is God the cause of my thinking — and of my being deceived by a fallacy? Of the thinking yes; the defect is mine.
• Is the pianist responsible for the defective key’s bad sound? For the sound, yes; for the defect in the sound, no.
• Does the sinner want to be punished? No, but punishment follows consequently on what he has done.
• Is three o’six time, or a part of time? Neither day, month nor year: it is a now, indivisible — left open as mysterious.
• If you find it hard to love the common good, or salmon, or cancer, where is the difficulty? In you for the common good and salmon; in the object for cancer.
• Is a soft heart good? Is a hard head good? Yes and yes — which shows a kind of contrariety of reason and will; left as striking, not resolved.
• Do all seven deadly sins lead to some form of blindness? Left open: “we’ll be coming to those sins pretty soon.”