Aquinas on the capital sins (Question 84, articles 3–4): what 'capital' means and how the seven vices are derived

Orientation #

He opens directly on q. 84, a. 3, and refers back to what “has been said above” about cupidity as root and pride as beginning of sin (prev. lecture). He also recalls having mentioned Aristotle on murder, theft and adultery “last time.”

The class, in order #

1. The three objections of a. 3 (“the head seems to have itself to the animals as a root to the plants”) #

• Obj. 1: head is to animals what root is to plants (Aristotle, De anima II) — we take food in by the mouth, plants draw nutriment by the roots — so if cupidity is called the root, that is only another metaphor for head, and it alone would be the capital vice.
  • Aside: words like beginning (principium) are said in many ways; the prince is not God but is the beginning of something.
• Obj. 2: the head diffuses sense and motion to the members, hence order; but sin is lack of order; so sin has no notion of head. (He notes at once the counter-instance: a robber band has a head, and crime is organized.)
• Obj. 3: “capital” crimes are those punished by the head — he glosses the word as tied to striking, blows — and such punishment falls on sins of different genera; so capital vices are not determinate in species.
• Sed contra: Gregory (the Great) in Moralia XXXI enumerates certain vices as capital.

2. The two senses of caput (“capital is said from the caput, the head”) #

• Properly: the head is a part of the animal, the beginning and directive part of the whole; metaphorically every beginning is called a head — Christ head of the Church, the Pope, men who govern others.
• Hence capital sin (1) properly = punished by loss of the head; “we do not intend” that sense here; (2) metaphorically = from head as beginning or director of others.

3. Digression: metaphor in Scripture and in poetry (“whether Scripture should use metaphors”) #

• A student’s question: is God’s mercy said properly or metaphorically? — it names an emotion; the word is taken up from the Greek (Aristotle: tragedy moves fear and pity).
• He recalls Thomas’s article in the first part of the Summa (q. 1, inferred): Scripture rightly uses metaphors, not just because it does, but because it suits us. Objection: metaphor belongs to the poet, and poetry is infima doctrina, the lowest teaching — why should the highest use the lowest?
  • A student offers: the poet raises nature up, Scripture brings down. He agrees and sharpens it: in both cases something goes beyond our mind, but in one case above it, in the other below it; the poet takes what is below our mind and gives it more meaning than it has; theology does the reverse.
• Hence Dante is not a poet in Homer’s way — he treats heavenly things imaginatively, imitating Scripture. Homer takes what may have been a pirate raid and gives it a plot with beginning, middle and end, and so more order than a week of your own life has (“what has studying theology got to do with putting gas in the car?”).
• Mozart parallel: he babbled to Kasurik (ASR uncertain) about Mozart’s meaning and was told, “Duane, you think that’s got more meaning than it does” — Mozart gives the emotions more meaning than they have.

4. The respondeo of a. 3 and the replies (“especially according to the origin of the final cause”) #

• A capital vice is one from which others arise, chiefly by the origin of the final cause, which is the formal origin; so it is not only beginning but directive, since the art or habit to which the end pertains commands what is to the end. Gregory compares the capital vices to leaders of armies (he imagines the film; cf. Spenser’s procession of vices).
• Reply 1: “capital” is said denominatively from the head — by derivation or partaking, having some property of the head without being simply a head. So capital vices are not only those with the notion of the first origin of all (avarice the root, pride the beginning) but those with the notion of a near origin of many. Image: a chain of command, one general over five colonels.
• Reply 2: sin lacks order on the side of the aversio from God — for the bad, per Augustine (De natura boni), is a lack of mode, species and order — but on the side of the conversio it regards some lesser, commutable good, and there it can have order. Hence the pirate ship’s organization: “You keep the car running and I’ll go with the gun.”
• Reply 3: the third objection argues from the sense by punishment, which is not the sense here. Asides: some languages use “hand,” some “head”; oilmen in Saudi Arabia who attended one public execution and did not go back; ISIS videos.

5. Asides: attractive villains, Luther, the Angelus (“people like the bad characters in movies”) #

• Bad characters are liked better than wishy-washy good ones; our Lord spits out the lukewarm. Student: Milton’s Satan attractive, Christ bland — C. S. Lewis criticizes Milton for it; Dante’s devils likewise; Saul Alinsky’s book (which Mrs. Clinton wrote her thesis on) is dedicated to Satan, “the first revolutionary.”
• Warren Carroll’s lecture: Luther a revolutionary, not a reformer; his last sermon was against reason. St. Francis de Sales in an unguarded moment called Calvin “a stinker” and had to apologise for the scandal.
• Washington Irving, of Calvinist parents, sneaking out to the theatre; impressed in Spain (1829, the Alhambra) by the bells and the Angelus. Students recall Irish radio and television stopping three times a day for the Angelus bell.
• Aristotle sees the fourth through seventh commandments: in the Ethics, murder, theft, adultery are always wrong; in the Topics [ed.: “book on the places”], one who does not love his father or honour the gods “is not in need of argument, he is in need of punishment.”

6. The four objections of a. 4 (“there ought not to be said to be seven capital vices”) #

• The list read out: inanis gloria (empty glory), invidia (envy), ira (anger), tristitia/acedia, avaritia, gula, luxuria. (Roadside sign near Worcester: “Lust drags you down to hell.”)
• Obj. 1: vices are opposed to virtues; the principal virtues are four; so the capital vices should be four, not seven.
• Obj. 2: passions cause sin; the principal passions are four, but only two are represented here — delight (gluttony, lust) and sadness (acedia, envy); hope and fear get no mention. (He notes the Vatican II constitution on the Church in the modern world naming the joys and sorrows, hopes and fears — the four principal passions.)
• Obj. 3: anger is not a principal passion, so should not be among the principal vices.
• Obj. 4: pride is the beginning of sin as avarice is the root, and avarice is listed; so pride should be listed.
• Obj. 5 [he reads a further one]: some sins are caused by none of these — one errs from ignorance, or sins from a good intention, as one who steals to give (Robin Hood).
• Sed contra: the authority of Gregory, so enumerating them in Moralia XXXI. Asides: envy of men called “the Great” (the Greek voted out because people tired of hearing him called “the Just”; John Paul II called “the Great”); a local shooting of a doctor in Boston attached to the anger objection; the queen bee whom the ancients took for a king.

7. Why this origin can fall under art (“either always or for the most part”) #

• The origin of sins from a capital vice can be taken two ways. (1) By the disposition of the particular sinner, most affected to one end — this cannot fall under art, since the particular dispositions of men are infinite. Example: getting angry because you were served salmon — a peculiar hang-up; something else would set someone else off.
• Teaching requires what is true always or for the most part; Aristotle says you cannot teach what happens by luck or chance. Geometry: the triangle’s interior angles [he says “right angles”; the two-right-angles theorem is meant]. Natural science: men are born with five fingers — Anne Boleyn reportedly six; some born without an arm — yet man is a two-armed, two-legged animal, because it is true for the most part.
• Chance aside: the man who ran into a lady’s car, and through the court delays they fell in love and married — not a recommended way to meet a wife.
• (2) By the natural relation of these ends to one another: ut in pluribus, for the most part — “malum in specie humana,” most men are bad, as Aristotle says most men prefer a life suited to beasts. This mode falls under art.

8. First derivation of the seven: the primary reasons of moving the appetite (“something moves the appetite in two ways”) #

• Capital vices are those whose ends have the primary reasons of moving the appetite; the distinction of those reasons distinguishes the capital vices.
• Two ways of moving: (a) directly and per se — the good to pursuit, the bad to flight; (b) indirectly, quasi per aliud — pursuing an evil for an attached good, or fleeing a good for an attached evil.
• Under (a), the threefold good of man (goods of soul, body, exterior — the old Greek division, in Aristotle and Socrates):
  • good of the soul having desirability from apprehension alone: excellence of praise or honour — pursued disorderly by vainglory;
  • good of the body, for conservation of the individual (food and drink — hence also drunkenness, gula taken broadly) — gluttony; for conservation of the species — lust (he notes luxuria also connotes the superfluous);
  • exterior good, wealth — avarice.
  • The same four disorderly flee the contrary evils (disgrace, poverty).
• A student notes Thomas divides into three but subdivides the middle into two and still gets four, keeping his own rule.

9. Second derivation: the three notes of happiness (“partakes something of the property of happiness”) #

• Good moves desire especially as partaking something of the property of happiness, which all naturally desire.
• Digression on the two philosophies: looking philosophy [ed.: speculative/theoretical — from the Greek and Latin words for looking] begins in wonder; Albert the Great says great poetry rouses wonder, and Aristotle’s philomythos, the lover of myths, is in some way a philosopher; geometry and the rest are speculative because pursued out of wonder, not out of desire for wealth or power. Philosophy of doing [ed.: practical] begins in the desire for happiness — hence Aristotle’s two treatments of happiness in Ethics I and X, with the virtues, vices and friendship between; “virtue is the road to happiness, vice the road to misery.” Domestic philosophy aims at the family’s happiness (his own house had no TV, so the children read; his daughter does the same); political philosophy at the country’s, as Washington and such men sought.
• The three notes:
  1. Perfection — happiness is the perfect good, whence excellence and clarity: aimed at by pride/vainglory.
  2. Sufficiency — which riches promise: avarice. (Classmate’s father’s advice: “money isn’t everything — yeah, but what it is, it’ll buy.” The sweepstakes advertising; the Canadian big-prize winners who ended up more miserable, divorced; the rich board member near tears over one more deal; Soros giving to all the wrong things — people know how to make money and not what to do with it.)
  3. Pleasure (delectatio), without which happiness cannot be — Aristotle treats pleasure in Ethics X before his final account of happiness, and in I: gluttony and lust, the pleasures best known to sense. (Beer advertisements selling happiness.)
• So the same four are derived twice: once from the division of man’s goods, once from the properties of happiness. Aside on the presidential “bully pulpit” and the poor viewership of last night’s address.

10. The other side: fleeing a good for an attached evil (“either with respect to one’s own good”) #

• Two ways:
  • one’s own good — acedia, sadness about a spiritual good on account of the bodily labour joined to it. (He rejects the old Baltimore “laziness”; “sloth is probably a better way to translate it here.”) Dock story: asked what he would do with the prize, he said find a quiet place and read; the dock worker said he would “get to hear him” [unclear in recording] — he would not know what to do with it. Also: skipping Sunday Mass for two more hours of sleep.
  • another’s good — envy, sadness at another’s good insofar as it impedes one’s own excellence, provided there is no insurrection.
• Long treatment of envy: a sociologist’s claim that envy is a disease of democracy — since all are equal, another’s elevation is felt as an affront; the people who crawled out of the woodwork at De Koninck’s death, envious of his fame. A student’s friend who admitted feeling a loss whenever anyone else benefited (he went on to be a successful Boston lawyer). Student: “through the envy of the devil death entered the world” — he envied God first. Parents competing over children’s schools and jobs, and envying other parents whose children’s friends like them better; the baseball-game joke (Amherst, Harvard, “my son bats .375”). Hume on Aristotle and [Peter Lombard?] being washed away; the Laval professor’s joke that Descartes, “the father of modern philosophy,” has no sons, because to follow another is to honour him — so everyone must start his own mess. A student adds deconstruction and Rawls’s lowest-common-denominator ideal society as fuelled by envy. The song of the trees: the maples demand equal rights, “and all the trees are equal by hatchet, axe and saw.” Finally, whether envy is at work in women who want ordination — and the reply that this misunderstands the order, treating priesthood as a secular promotion rather than the servant of all; a student counters that some priests are on power trips too.
• If there is insurrection to revenge, it is anger. The class breaks off mid-sentence, on the vices belonging to the same pursuit — insidiae [ASR “Obsidios”] — so the remaining replies to the objections of a. 4 are not reached.

His words #

• capital — said denominatively from caput, by partaking some property of the head without being simply a head.
• caput, properly — the part of the animal that is beginning and directive of the whole; metaphorically — any beginning or director.
• capital sin, first sense — punished by loss of the head; set aside here.
• origin of the final cause — “which is the formal origin”; how capital vices give rise to others.
• denominative — flagged as “very important.”
• ut in pluribus — “for the most part,” his constant contrast with “always.”
• malum in specie humana — “most men are bad.”
• looking philosophy [ed.: speculative/theoretical philosophy] — begins in wonder.
• philosophy of doing [ed.: practical philosophy] — begins in the desire for happiness.
• philomythos — the lover of myths, in some way a philosopher.
• inanis gloria — empty glory / vainglory.
• acedia — better rendered “sloth” than the Baltimore “laziness.”
• delectatio — pleasure, the third note of happiness.
• infima doctrina — “the lowest teaching,” said of poetry.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 84, a. 3 (objections, sed contra, respondeo, all three replies).
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 84, a. 4 (objections, sed contra, respondeo through envy and anger; replies not reached).

Mentioned

• Gregory the Great, Moralia XXXI (the enumeration; capital vices as leaders of armies).
• Aristotle, De anima II (head to animal as root to plant) (inferred).
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I and X (happiness, pleasure); Ethics on murder, theft, adultery; Topics (“book on the places”) on one who does not love his father.
• Aristotle, Poetics (Homer taught the Greeks the good plot; tragedy moves fear and pity) (inferred).
• Augustine, De natura boni (the bad as lack of mode, species, order).
• Thomas Aquinas, ST I, q. 1 (metaphor in Scripture) (inferred).
• Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes (joys and sorrows, hopes and fears) (inferred).
• Milton, Paradise Lost/Regained; Dante; Homer; Spenser; Shakespeare’s Coriolanus; Alinsky; Hume; Descartes; Rawls.

His questions #

• Is “the mercy of God” said properly or metaphorically? — Metaphorically; it names an emotion, the word taken from the Greek.
• Why should the highest teaching use metaphor, which belongs to the lowest, poetry? — Both go beyond our mind, but the poet raises what is below it, Scripture lowers what is above it; so metaphor suits us.
• Does sin, being disorder, exclude the notion of a head? — No: disorder is on the side of turning from God; on the side of the lesser good sought, there can be real order (the pirate band).
• Why are capital vices more than the one first root? — Because “capital” is denominative: it covers near origins of many sins, not only the first origin of all.
• Can the origin of sins from capital vices fall under art? — Only in the second mode, the natural relation of ends, which holds ut in pluribus; not the infinite particular dispositions of men.
• What desire gives rise to looking philosophy, and what to the philosophy of doing? — Wonder; and the desire for happiness.
• Why seven and not four, given four principal virtues and passions? — Left open: he derives the seven positively but the class ends before the replies to the objections.