Blindness for Salvation or Damnation, and the Devil as a Cause of Sin (Q.79 a.4; Q.80 a.1–3)

Orientation #

He continues the reading of the questions on the causes of sin, taking the last article on blinding and hardening (q. 79, a. 4) and then moving to the cause of sin on the side of the devil (q. 80), stopping after the third article (“So should we stop or go on? One more”). The previous class treated God as exterior cause of sin in q. 79, and the next continues q. 80 and moves into q. 81 on original sin.

The class, in order #

1. The four objections of q. 79, a. 4 (“always ordered to the salvation”) #

Question: are blinding and hardening always ordered to the salvation of the one blinded?

• Obj. 1 (Augustine, Enchiridion — he notes the title is “the Enchiridion of faith, hope and charity” [unclear in recording]; a Greek-ish word, “manual”): God, being summe bonus, would permit no evil unless He drew good from it; much more does He order to good the evil of which He Himself is cause; God causes blinding by subtracting grace; therefore it is ordered to that man’s salvation. “That’s a nice argument.”
• Obj. 2 (Wisdom 1): God does not delight in the loss of the impious; He would seem to, if He did not convert their blindness to their good — as a doctor would seem to delight in the sick man’s affliction if the unpleasant medicine or operation were not ordered to his health.
• Obj. 3 (Acts 10:34): God is no respecter of persons; He does order some blindness to salvation — the Jews blinded so as not to believe Christ, who killed Him and were afterwards “struck to the heart” and converted (Acts 2:37; Augustine, Questions on the Gospels). Aside: this fulfils our Lord’s word at the Last Supper, “some will kill you, thinking they serve God.”
• Sed contra: evils are not to be done that goods may come; blinding is evil; therefore God does not blind men for their good.

2. The body: blinding as preambulum to sin (“blinding is a certain preambulum”) #

• Blinding is a preamble, a walking-before, to sin. He flags the word as a nice instance of preambulum.
• Sin is ordered to two things: per se to damnation; from God’s merciful providence, to healing, insofar as He permits some to fall so that, recognising their sin, they be humbled and converted (Augustine, On Nature and Grace).
• Augustine’s case: some proud virgins of the early Church — better they fall into sins of the flesh and be cured of pride, since spiritual sin is worse than fleshly.
• Conclusion: of its nature blinding is ordered to the damnation of the blinded (hence it is set down under reprobation); but by divine mercy — not justice — it is ordered for a time, medicinally, to the salvation of the blinded; and this mercy is not given to all, only to those “for whom all things cooperate unto good” (Rom 8). So for some blinding is ordered to healing, for others to damnation (Augustine, Questions on the Gospels, bk. 3).
• His aside on the hardness of the teaching: “What is abortion per se ordered to? Damnation” — not something one quotes to people; the deaths of Stalin (cursing his attendants) and Hitler (suicide); Pius XII said eternal damnation is among the mysteries hard to believe. Some things manifest God’s justice, others His mercy; perhaps the same thing cannot manifest both equally.
• Digressions: the series on Christian spirituality by “Reverend P. Kura” (name uncertain), on the origin of the virgins and the roots of monasticism, available electronically through Toronto; and a long boyhood story of being beaten at checkers — pride, and how it would have been good for him to be beaten.

3. Replies, and hope beside fear (“hope in the divine mercy and fear the divine justice”) #

• Ad 1: all evils God makes or permits are ordered to some good, not always the good of the one in whom the evil is — sometimes another’s, or the whole universe’s: the guilt of tyrants ordered to the good of the martyrs, the punishment of the damned to the glory of His justice. Thomas on the Psalms: hope in the divine mercy, fear the divine justice. He notes the Magnificat seems to reverse it — “his mercy is on them that fear him” rather than on them that hope — hope going without saying.
• Aside: the same balance of hope and fear in philosophy — Socrates’ hope of finding truth and fear of thinking he knows what he does not; and the current phrase “low information voters,” perhaps coined by Rush Limbaugh.
• Ad 2: God does not delight in men’s loss as loss, but by reason of His justice, for the good that follows.
• Ad 3: ordering some men’s blindness to salvation is mercy, others’ to damnation is justice; mercy to some and not all is no respect of persons (referring back to q. 23, a. 5, ad 3 — “we got to go back there”).
• Ad 4: evils of guilt may not be done that good may come; evils of punishment may be, in regard to the good — “so spank those kids.”

4. Q. 80 set up: four questions on the devil (“the cause of sin on the side of the devil”) #

Whether the devil is directly a cause of sin; whether he leads into sin by inward persuasion; whether he can impose necessity of sinning; whether all sins arise from his suggestion — “I guess not true.”

5. A. 1, objections (“the devil is directly the cause of sinning”) #

• Obj. 1: sin consists directly in the affections; Augustine (De Trinitate IV) says the devil by his association inspires malignant affections; Bede on Acts 5 says he draws the soul into the affection of malice; Isidore (On the Highest Good) says he fills men’s hearts with hidden desires.
• Obj. 2: Jerome — as God is the perfecter of good, the devil of evil; God is directly cause of our goods, so the devil of our sins.
• Obj. 3: the Philosopher in the Eudemian Ethics proves there must be some extrinsic beginning of human counsel — “a text that Thomas often talks about”; counsel is of bad as well as good; so as God moves to good counsel, the devil to bad.
• Sed contra: Augustine (On Free Will I and III) — by nothing else does man’s mind become slave of lust save by its own will; and one is enslaved only through sin; so only one’s own will can be the cause of sin.

6. A. 1, body: the two movers of the will and the three ways of the object (“only the will of man is directly a cause of his sin”) #

1. Sin is an act; to be the direct cause of an act is to move that act’s proper principle to acting.
2. The proper principle of the act of sin is the will, since every sin is voluntary.
3. The will is moved in two ways: by the object; and from within, by what inclines it to willing — and that is only the will itself or God.
4. God cannot be the cause of sin. Therefore from the inward side only man’s own will is directly cause of his sin.
5. On the side of the object, something moves the will in three ways (“I didn’t know about that three”): the object itself proposed (food arouses the desire to eat); the one who proposes or offers such an object; the one who persuades that the object proposed has the character of good — “that’s more the marketing agent,” and it is also the first thing in a prooemium, showing the desirability of the knowledge.
6. But none of these three is a direct cause, since the will is moved of necessity by no object except the last end. So neither the thing offered, nor the proposer, nor the persuader is a sufficient cause; the devil causes sin only by persuading or proposing.

• Example: the serpent and Eve — first he distracted her (“Did God tell you…”), then he lied (“You won’t die, you’ll be like the gods”), then he showed her the fruit: distracting, attracting, persuading.
• Ad 1: all those authorities mean the devil by suggesting or proposing desirables leads one into the affection of sin.
• Ad 2: the likeness to God holds only so far as the devil is in some way a cause of our sins as God is of our goods, not as to the mode of causing: God causes good by inwardly moving the will, which the devil cannot do. Aside: “You got to be careful of likeness — likeness is a cause of deception.”
• Ad 3: God is the universal beginning of every inward human motion; that the will be determined to bad counsel is from the will itself and from the devil by persuading or proposing. Aside: rhetoric is the art of persuasion, and Aristotle counts a man a good rhetorician if he omits none of the available means of persuasion — he need not actually persuade.

7. A. 2: can the devil instigate inwardly? (“the whole inward operation of the devil … about the imagination”) #

• Obj. 1: inward motions of the soul are works of life, and no work of life is except from an intrinsic principle — a living thing moves itself — not even the work of the vegetative soul, the lowest.
• Obj. 2: inward motions arise, by the order of nature, from the exterior senses; to act outside the order of nature belongs to God alone. (Aside: Shakespeare, “fie, fie, in sinful fantasy.”)
• Obj. 3: the inward acts are to understand and to imagine; by the First Part the devil cannot impress forms on the fantasy, since imagined forms, being more spiritual, are of more dignity than forms in sensible matter, which he also cannot impress.
• Sed contra: otherwise a man would never be tempted except by [the flesh / outward things], which is plainly false.
• Body: the inward part is the intellective (understanding and will — the will already dealt with) and the sense part. The understanding per se is moved by one enlightening it to truth, which is not the devil’s aim; he aims rather to darken reason into consenting to sin, and that darkening comes from the imagination and the sense-appetite. So the devil’s whole inward operation is about the phantasia and the sense-appetite, which he can move commovendo, by stirring them: he can present imaginary forms and excite the sense-appetite to passion, because (First Part) bodily nature obeys spiritual substance as to local motion only — not growth or the rest. Hence he can cause whatever can come about from local motion of lower bodies, unless repressed by divine power. Example: he made the swine run off the cliff.
• Support from Aristotle, On Sleep and Waking (“nice little book”): in sleep much blood descends to the sensitive power, and with it descend the motions or impressions left from sense, preserved in the species, which move the apprehensive power so that it seems as if changed by outward things; the demons can procure such local motion of spirits and humours, waking or sleeping, and thus a man imagines something. Likewise the sense-appetite is stirred to passion by a determinate motion of heart and spirits, and the devil can cooperate here. And from the same book: lovers are moved by a slight likeness of the thing loved — the hint. Once passion is aroused, what is proposed to imagination is judged as to be pursued, because to one held by passion that seems good to which passion inclines him. So the devil inwardly induces to sin by moving imagination and sense-appetite.
• Aside: the Communion prayer asking Christ to preserve you from the evil one.
• Ad 1: works of life are always from an inward beginning, but an exterior agent can cooperate — exterior heat helps the vegetative soul digest food.
• Ad 2 (and hence ad 3): the appearance of imaginable forms is not wholly outside the order of nature, nor by mere command, but through local motion; and those forms were originally taken from the senses.
• Aside: a strange dream of his own this week about a parishioner, the judge’s wife, injured in Europe — “no reality to it all.”

8. A. 3: no necessity of sinning (“in no way can he induce necessity”) #

• Obj. 1: a greater power can impose necessity on a lesser; Job 41 — “there is no power on earth that can be compared to him.”
• Obj. 2: man’s reason is moved only by what is proposed to sense and imagination, since all knowledge begins from sense and there is no understanding without a phantasm (De Anima III); but the devil can move imagination and outward senses — Augustine, Eighty-Three Questions: this evil creeps through all the sensual entrances, gives itself figures, accommodates itself to colours, adheres to sounds and tones.
• Obj. 3: per Augustine there is some sin when the flesh lusts against the spirit; the devil can cause concupiscence of the flesh as he can other passions; therefore he can induce to sin of necessity.
• Sed contra: 1 Peter — “your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, goes about seeking whom he may devour; resist him, strong in faith.” Such an admonition would be vain if man necessarily succumbed. Aside on metaphor: the lion serves both ways — the Lion of Judah, Christ; also Leo the Great.
• Body: the devil by his own power, unless restrained by God, can induce a man of necessity to do some act which in its genus is a sin; but he cannot induce the necessity of sinning, because a man does not resist a motive to sin except by reason, whose use the devil can impede totally only by stirring passion in the sense-appetite to the point of madness [ASR garbled] — and reason thus bound, what the man does is not imputed as sin. If reason is not wholly bound, then from the part in which it is free it can resist.
• Ad 1: no power greater than man can move man’s will, only God.
• Ad 2: what is grasped by sense or imagination does not necessarily move the will if a man has the use of reason, nor does such apprehension always bind reason.
• Ad 3: concupiscence of the flesh against the spirit, when reason actually resists, is not sin but the matter of exercising virtue; and that reason fails to resist is not in the devil’s power.

9. Closing exchange: misreported words (“I don’t believe liars”) #

On ad 3 he remarks this is what Pope Francis meant about one with same-sex attraction who is trying to serve the Lord — no judgment against that; it is matter of virtue, and it is being misunderstood. A student reports Warren Murray’s account of an interview with Cardinal George, worried the Pope says things he should know will be misinterpreted. On the ex-Catholic atheist who interviewed the Pope twice, the first interview eventually pulled from the Vatican website: he would not believe the report — “not because Pope Francis didn’t say it, but because I don’t believe liars. Don’t believe a liar even when he tells the truth.” Hence our Lord told the demons to be silent when they confessed Him, but told Peter “Blessed are you” — “What’s the difference?” (left hanging).

His words #

• summe bonus — “supremely good,” in Augustine’s objection.
• Enchiridion — “manual,” a handbook; he notes it is a Greek word.
• praeambulum — “walking before”; blinding as a preamble to sin.
• Reprobation — under which blinding is set down, as of its nature ordered to damnation.
• excaecatio — blinding.
• Evils of guilt vs. evils of punishment — the first may never be done for a good end, the second may.
• Counsel — deliberation, with an extrinsic beginning (Aristotle) [ed.: he corrects the ASR "consul"].
• The three ways an object moves the will: the object proposed; the one proposing; the one persuading it is good.
• Phantasia / fantasy — the imagination, the devil’s field of work.
• Commovendo — by stirring up, moving together; the devil’s way with imagination and sense-appetite.
• “Likeness is a cause of deception.”
• Necessity of doing an act sinful in its genus vs. necessity of sinning — the devil can do the first, never the second.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 79, a. 4 (objections, body, replies)
• Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 80, prologue and a. 1
• Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 80, a. 2
• Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 80, a. 3

Mentioned

• Augustine, Enchiridion; On Nature and Grace; Questions on the Gospels bk. 3; On Free Will I and III; De Trinitate IV; Eighty-Three Questions
• Bede, on Acts 5; Isidore, On the Highest Good; Jerome
• Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics (extrinsic principle of counsel); De Anima III; On Sleep and Waking; Rhetoric (inferred)
• Scripture: Wisdom 1; Acts 2:37, 10:34; Romans 8; Job 41; 1 Peter 5 (inferred); the Magnificat
• Summa Theologiae I, on the devil and bodily nature’s obedience as to local motion; I, q. 23, a. 5, ad 3 (respect of persons)
• Shakespeare, “fie, fie, in sinful fantasy”

His questions #

• Are blinding and hardening always ordered to the salvation of the one blinded? — No: of their nature they are ordered to damnation; by mercy they are medicinal for some only, “those for whom all things cooperate unto good.”
• What is sin per se ordered to? — Damnation; only from God’s merciful providence is it ordered to healing.
• May evil be done that good may come? — Evils of guilt, never; evils of punishment, yes, in view of the good.
• Is the devil directly the cause of man’s sin? — No; only what moves the will inwardly can be, and that is the will itself or God.
• In how many ways does an object move the will? — Three: the object proposed, the one proposing it, the one persuading it is good.
• Can the devil work on man’s inward parts? — Yes, but only on imagination and sense-appetite, and only by local motion of bodily spirits.
• Can the devil impose a necessity of sinning? — No; he can force an act sinful in its genus, but if reason is bound the act is not imputed, and if reason is free it can resist.
• Is concupiscence of the flesh against the spirit a sin? — Not when reason actually resists; it is then the matter of exercising virtue.
• Why did our Lord silence the demons who confessed Him but bless Peter? — Left open (his point: one does not believe a liar even when he tells the truth).