Antonomasia in Scripture: 'The Evil One' and 'The Good'; Summa I-II q.85 aa.2-3: Can Sin Destroy Nature's Good, and the Four Wounds of Nature

Orientation #

He picks up at ST I-II q. 85, a. 2, “where we had left off” (prev. lecture), and goes on to a. 3 on the wounds of nature; he breaks at the end of a. 3’s replies. Before that he spends a long opening on Matthew and on antonomasia, continuing something he says he mentioned “last time” about the Catechism.

The class, in order #

1. Opening prayer and Metaphysics XII (“God’s not only a life, but he’s life itself”) #

Prayer to God, the guardian angels and St. Thomas. He reports finishing the twelfth book of the Metaphysics, where Aristotle treats God’s knowing: God’s substance and His understanding are the same, His understanding is a life, and God is not only alive but life itself — “pretty good for this old pagan guy.” Thomas’s commentary ends with XII; he has been looking at XIII and XIV, where Aristotle says how to treat predecessors: improve on some things they said, and try to say other things as well as they said them. Examples of what cannot be bettered: Augustine’s “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee”; Mozart’s Don Giovanni — “the only way you could equal it was to write Don Giovanni over again.”

2. Antonomasia and the last petition of the Our Father (“ho ponēros, the bad one”) #

Point: Scripture very often names by antonomasia, and translations lose it.

• The last petition in Greek is tou ponērou — a genitive with the article: “the bad one,” “the evil one,” not abstract evil. He checked the Catechism, which says it refers to a person, the devil, but does not name the figure of speech.
• What antonomasia is: etymologically “to give a thing another name,” which is too broad (it is akin to pronoun: calling Father Michael “you” instead of “Michael”). Properly: a general name said of many is used for one in particular because that one stands out. Reverse case too: a noteworthy individual’s name is used for the class — a lover is called “a Romeo,” a man slow to act “a Hamlet” (Paul VI was called “the Hamlet himself”).
• Examples from Scripture: Bible just means “the book”; gospel means “good news,” and it is not the only good news; Christus, the anointed one, though kings, priests and prophets are also anointed. Of Jesus (savior) he is unsure — others save their country in battle, but “he is the savior”; the angel explains he will save his people from their sins. A student asks whether Mary saves us from our sins; he grants a bit of antonomasia here, since she is not called Jesus.
• Reading Matthew 13–16 he found ponēros used commonly of any bad person, which makes clear that ho ponēros is by antonomasia.

3. Matthew 19 and “one is the good” (“heis estin ho agathos”) #

The young man asks, “Teacher, what good thing may I do that I may have life eternal?” The Greek: Ti me erōtas peri tou agathou… heis estin ho agathos — “Why do you ask me about the good? One is the good.” Thomas’s text differs; his more authoritative Greek-and-Latin text at home lacks Thomas’s reading, giving it only in a footnote, and the little Greek/Latin/English text he has misses it too. The common translation “Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is God” loses the piquancy: the Greek says nothing of “God” but names God by antonomasia, ho agathos.

4. Translating logos and phusis (“In the beginning was the thought”) #

Point: English took over logos in one sense and phusis in another, without moving its own word.

• Logos: first meaning word, second thought, third reason itself. English “word” never carried over to mean thought — except his college English professor, whose little book said “Words written or spoken are thoughts,” which he takes non-literally, since words express thoughts.
• He asks the class which sense is meant in John 1; answer: thought. So an explanatory English rendering: “In the beginning was the thought, and the thought was toward God, and the thought was God.” And then ho logos, like ho agathos, is plainly antonomasia.
• Contrast phusis / natura, whose first meaning is birth. Translating as they translated logos, John would read “birth”; instead English took the word over in its later sense. Shakespeare’s Friar Lawrence does move “birth” to the sense of what a thing is: “Nor aught so good but, strained from that fair use, revolts from their true birth, stumbling on abuse” (he first quotes “For naught so vile that on the earth doth live, but to the earth some special good doth give”).
• The later sense is what is defined in Physics II: nature is a beginning and cause of motion and rest in that in which it is first, as such and not by happening.

5. Back to Matthew: the young man and the capital vices (“marriage is a dead end”) #

The rich young man refuses the invitation — a capital vice (avarice, implied). Earlier in the chapter Christ says one cannot get out of marriage; his family joke: “marriage is a dead end… no exit.” Objection raised in the text: then it is not good to marry; Christ replies, he that can take it, let him take it — which touches another capital vice (the difficulty of celibacy). He notes the De Malo treats the seven capital vices with the same four-and-three distinction, but gives only one of the two ways given in the Summa (the Summa also divides by the three goods: of the soul, of the body, exterior) — so despite its thoroughness, the little Summa text is richer.

6. ST I-II q. 85, a. 2 — the objections (“whether the whole good of human nature can be taken away by sin”) #

• Obj. 1: the good of human nature is finite; a finite thing is wholly consumed by continual subtraction; since it can be continually diminished by sin, it can be wholly consumed.
  • He anticipates the answer via the geometrical case: one may divide forever only by taking the same ratio, not the same amount. But, he notes Thomas saying elsewhere, the more you take away the weaker the subject becomes and the less able to resist — so you can take away more, not less. Moral image: the boy who begins by taking candy from the grocery store ends by murdering to get things; each sin is graver, not lighter. Stalin, Mao, Hitler, responsible for killing millions, are “kind of icons or images of the evil one” but do not deserve the name. His old teacher (name unclear in recording): if you want to be really bad, you can’t take the top title — you cannot possibly be as bad as Satan.
• Obj. 2: in things of one nature the ratio of whole and parts is the same (air, water, flesh, all bodies of similar parts); the good of nature is wholly uniform; a part can be taken by sin, therefore the whole can.
• Obj. 3: the good of nature diminished by sin is a disposition to virtue; in the damned this disposition is wholly taken away, as the blind man cannot be restored to sight.
• Sed contra (Augustine, Enchiridion): evil can only be in the good; the evil of guilt cannot be in the good of virtue or grace, being contrary to it; so it must be in the good of nature, which it therefore does not wholly take away. — “He’s confused the issue sufficiently, Thomas. Now, can we get some clarity from you?”

7. The body of a. 2, and the digression on the continuous and the immateriality of mind (“divisible forever”) #

• The good diminished is the natural inclination to virtue, belonging to man from being reasonable, i.e. acting according to reason, which is to act according to virtue. Aside on translating rationalis: “reasonable” can mean merely having reason, or living according to it; to be good is to be reasonable — “you’re not being reasonable.”
• Sin cannot take away that he has reason, else he would no longer be capable of sin; so the good of nature cannot be wholly taken away.
• The example some use: Physics III — subtract the same quantity from a finite magnitude and it is finally consumed (his English for the Latin: “he always takes a handful”); subtract by the same proportion (half, then half of the half) and it goes on in infinitum.
• Digression on the two definitions of the continuous: (a) Categories: a quantity whose parts meet at a common boundary (parts of a line at a point, of a surface at a line, two bodies at a surface) — proper to logic, since form is like the whole; (b) Physics VI (“natural hearing”): that which is divisible forever — proper to natural philosophy, which deals with matter, since parts are like matter. Discrete quantity (number) contrasts on both counts: its parts meet nowhere, and division ends at one.
• Argument from this that the mind is immaterial: the definition of square (an equilateral right-angled quadrilateral) is not divisible forever — division stops at the highest genus, the categories — and its parts do not meet at a common boundary. So you understand something continuous in an uncontinuous way. That cannot be because of what is understood (that is continuous), so it is because of your understanding; therefore reason is not a continuous, not a material thing.
• Second argument, from universality: many tables of the same kind because you have enough wood; everybody gets a piece of pie because there is enough pie; many men in the room because there are flesh and bones to go around — so matter subject to quantity is the source of individuation. Reason understands square, sphere, cube apart from this matter. Boethius: a thing is singular when sensed, universal when understood. So our mind is not material.
• Thomas’s own answer: the proportional-subtraction example does not apply, since a later sin diminishes the good of nature no less, perhaps more, because graver. Instead the inclination is a middle between two terms: rooted in rational nature, tending to the good of virtue as to its end. On the side of the root it is not diminished (sin does not diminish nature itself); on the side of the end it is, by the laying down of an impediment. Diminution in the first way would eventually consume it; diminution by impediments can go on in infinitum, because impediments can be added in infinitum, as a man can add sin to sin — yet never totally consumed, since the root remains.
• Image from the text: the transparent (diaphanous) body keeps its inclination to receive light while clouds superimposed diminish it. His own image: the snow that kept falling, the driveway, nowhere left to put it — his car was not getting worse, the impediments to reaching the goal were; in a blizzard your eyesight is not diminished, only the seeing to the end of the block. A student: “You were still reasonable. Couldn’t get out the door.”
• Replies: (1) obj. 1 proceeds by diminution through subtraction; this is rather diminution by addition of an impediment, which neither removes nor diminishes the root. (2) The inclination is wholly uniform but has respect to both a beginning and an end, diminished as to one and not the other. (3) “That’s very striking, isn’t it?” — even in the damned the natural inclination to virtue remains, otherwise there would be no remorse of conscience in them; it is not reduced to act because they lack grace by divine justice, as the blind keep an aptitude to see in the root of nature (the animal naturally has sight) though the organ-forming cause is lacking. He asks whether the worm (of Scripture) said metaphorically is this remorse of conscience.
• Student question: if the devil is still doing bad things, is he still sinning and still growing in guilt? Yes — getting worse every day. He notes it is not agreed how high the devil stood in the hierarchy. Aside: in this life people kick themselves — “How could I be so stupid? I could have had it so easy, but I went and did this” — and that is very small compared with what comes next life. “Frightening.”

8. ST I-II q. 85, a. 3 — objections to the four wounds (“infirmity, ignorance, malice, and concupiscence”) #

• Obj. 1: the same thing is not effect and cause of the same; these are laid down as causes of sin; so not as effects.
• Obj. 2: malice names a sin, so it should not be among the effects of sin.
• Obj. 3: concupiscence is natural, being an act of the concupiscible power, so not a wound of nature. (Aside: “Doing what comes natural — isn’t there a song about that?”)
• Obj. 4: to sin from infirmity and to sin from passion are said to be the same; concupiscence is a passion; so it should not be divided against infirmity.
• Obj. 5: Augustine, On Nature and Grace, lays down two punishments of the sinning soul — ignorance and difficulty — from which arise error and torment; these four do not agree with those four.
• Sed contra: the authority of Bede — “the argument from authority is strongest in theology.”

9. The body of a. 3 (“here is a little mirror for you to see yourself”) #

He frames the article as an exercise in the Greek “Know thyself,” like going through the virtues in the Nicomachean Ethics asking “do I have this one?” — “pretty discouraging”; and like the scriptural man who looks in the mirror and turns away forgetting how defective he is.

• By original justice reason perfectly contained the inferior powers, and reason itself was perfected by being subject to God. (Promised again in heaven: reason in perfect control of our emotions.) Aside: his wife found in Fr. d’Alzon, founder of the Assumptionists, that faith “enables us to see things as God sees them” — a beautiful statement; a student adds “substance of things hoped for.”
• Original justice subtracted by the first parent’s sin, all the powers remain destitute of their own order by which they are naturally ordered to virtue; this destitution is called a wound of nature — “maybe a little metaphorical,” taken from the body.
• Why the powers are destitute of virtue: in Aristotle the moral virtues are the lower powers partaking of reason — he divides the soul into what is reasonable essentially and what is reasonable by participation; if not perfectly subject to reason, they do not fully partake of it.
• The four subjects of virtue: reason, in which is foresight [prudence]; the will, in which is justice; the irascible, fortitude; the concupiscible, temperance.
• The four wounds, each from a power destitute of its order: reason to the true — ignorance; will to the good (its object being good in general) — malice; irascible to the arduous/difficult — infirmity; concupiscible to the delectable moderated by reason — concupiscence.
• And because the inclination to virtue is diminished by each actual sin, these four wounds are deepened: reason is blunted, especially in things to be done; the will hardened towards the good; acting well made more difficult; concupiscence burns more. “There, know thyself now. You see how you’re wounded.”
• Asides: he prefers Churchill’s word “foresight” to “prudence.” Everett spoke two hours at Gettysburg and told Lincoln, “It took me two hours to say what you said in two minutes” — “a beautiful example of the brevity as the soul of wit.” He says he will bring the text and read it.
• Digression on will vs. emotion: people see the difference between reason and the emotions, and even between irascible and concupiscible, more easily than the will. Plato in the Laws or Republic has only three parts — reason, thumos, epithumia — with prudence, courage and temperance placed in them, but no will and so no place for justice; he has something like original justice as the harmony of the three parts. Aristotle sees the distinction more clearly. Likewise students find it hard to distinguish the love that is an emotion from the love that is in the will. Test case: why do we say “fall in love”? A student: because your reason becomes subject to emotion initially. He agrees — you fall into the power of love; Proteus in Two Gentlemen of Verona is in the power of love and cannot be wise. You would not say that of the will. Students add the combat images: knocked down, wind knocked out, smitten, wounded, “so smitten you’re decapitated.” The test is the phrase “in the power of.”
• On ignorance: he recalls pneuma planēs, the spirit of error, in (he thinks) St John’s epistle; “error” comes from wandering — a knight errant; the Greek gives us planet, the wandering stars as against the fixed.
• Aside on the Good Samaritan: the man beaten going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, the inn (which he guesses is the Church), the money and the promise to repay what is overspent — God repays what you overspend helping people. Bishop Sheen: why did the priest and the Levite pass him by? Because they saw he had already been beaten up and robbed.

10. The replies of a. 3 (“nothing prevents that which is an effect of one sin to be the cause of another”) #

• Reply 1: an effect of one sin can be the cause of another, since a soul disordered by a preceding sin is more easily inclined to sin. Aside: this rests on experience, the starting place in ethics; Thomas’s order of the sciences — geometry, then natural philosophy, then ethics, then wisdom — and ethics requires more experience than natural philosophy, so the old man should have wisdom. “No fool worse than an old fool,” and Shakespeare’s line (he thinks King Lear): “thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise” — his gloss: “You’re old before you’re wise.”
• Reply 2: malice is not taken here pro peccato but for a proneness of the will to evil — Genesis 8: “prone are the senses of man to evil from his adolescence.” “If you’re a misanthrope, you’re getting plenty of material here.”
• Reply 3: concupiscence is natural in so far as it is subject to reason; to exceed the limits of reason is against man’s nature. Aside: the biography of John Quincy Adams his son sent him — several of the Adams family died of drink; drinking too much is its own punishment, and the man who drinks to excess does not enjoy it more but suffers more. A student reports studies that cultures long acquainted with alcohol developed resistance, while more recently introduced populations (Irish, American Indians) had more drunkenness. Further Adams asides: greatest Secretary of State in American history; a slab of country from Minnesota over was saved by him; he opposed admitting Latin American republics (Guatemala, Honduras, perhaps Costa Rica) as too different culturally and religiously — “not a happy marriage”; he formulated the Monroe Doctrine and wrote Monroe’s speeches, turning the whole Congress around.
• Reply 4: infirmity can commonly name every passion, in so far as it weakens the soul’s strength and impedes reason; but Bede takes infirmity strictly, as opposed to fortitude, a strength pertaining to the irascible.
• Reply 5: Augustine’s “difficulty” includes the three pertaining to the appetitive powers — malice, infirmity, concupiscence — from which it happens that one does not easily tend to the good; error and pain are not wounds but the results [ed.: Thomas: fruits or effects], since one sorrows that he is infirm in the things he [wills]. Break called here.

His words #

• antonomasia — a general name said of many used for one in particular because it stands out; and conversely a proper name used for a class (“a Romeo,” “a Hamlet”).
• ho ponēros / tou ponērou — “the bad one,” “the evil one,” in the last petition of the Our Father.
• ho agathos — “the good,” i.e. God, in Matthew 19.
• ho logos — word, thought, reason; in John 1 he takes it as thought.
• phusis / natura — first meaning birth; the later sense defined in Physics II.
• “natural hearing” [ed.: the Physics].
• foresight — Churchill’s word, which he prefers for prudence.
• thumos / epithumia — the irascible and concupiscible parts in Plato.
• delectabile moderatum ratione — the delectable moderated by reason; he applies it to Mozart’s clarinet quintet, horn quintet, oboe quartet.
• pneuma planēs — spirit of error; “error” from wandering, whence planet.
• pro peccato — “for the sin,” the sense malice does not have in reply 2.
• “brevity as the soul of wit” — his phrase, of Lincoln at Gettysburg.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 85, a. 2 — objections, sed contra, body, replies.
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 85, a. 3 — objections, sed contra (Bede), body, replies.
• Matthew 19 (the rich young man), in Greek and English.
• John 1:1.

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics XII (God’s understanding, life itself); XIII–XIV (how to treat predecessors); Thomas’s commentary ends at XII.
• Aristotle, Physics II (definition of nature); III (subtraction by quantity vs. proportion); VI (the continuous divisible forever).
• Aristotle, Categories (continuous as parts meeting at a common boundary).
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (the catalogue of virtues); the division of the soul into reasonable essentially and by participation.
• Plato, Laws or Republic (three parts of the soul).
• Augustine, Enchiridion; On Nature and Grace; Confessions (“Thou hast made us for thyself”).
• Thomas Aquinas, De Malo (seven capital vices).
• Catechism of the Catholic Church (on the seventh petition).
• Boethius (singular when sensed, universal when understood).
• Genesis 8; the Good Samaritan; the man in the mirror.
• Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet (Friar Lawrence), Two Gentlemen of Verona (Proteus), King Lear (old before wise).
• Bishop Sheen; Fr. d’Alzon; Winston Churchill; a biography of John Quincy Adams.

His questions #

• What is antonomasia? — A general name said of many, used for the one in which it stands out.
• What sense of logos is really meant in the prologue of John — word, thought, or reason? — Thought: “In the beginning was the thought.”
• If natura were translated as logos was, what would it be? — Birth.
• Can the whole good of human nature be taken away by sin? — No; the root of the inclination in rational nature always remains, since sin cannot remove reason itself.
• Then how can it be diminished endlessly? — Not by subtraction from the root but by the endless addition of impediments on the side of the end, as clouds before a transparent body.
• Is the definition of a square divisible forever? — No; and this shows reason is not a continuous, material thing.
• Does the natural inclination to virtue remain in the damned? — Yes, otherwise there would be no remorse of conscience in them.
• Is the devil still sinning and growing in guilt? — Yes, getting worse every day.
• Why does Plato have no place for justice among the parts of the soul? — Because he has no will, only reason, thumos and epithumia.
• Why do we say “fall in love”? — Because one falls into the power of love, reason becoming subject to emotion.
• Is “the worm” of Scripture the remorse of conscience? — Left open (he suggests it, metaphorically).