Summa I-II q.85 aa.4-6: Mode, Species and Order; Death and Bodily Defects as Punishments of Original Sin; Is Death Natural to Man?

Orientation #

He continues the reading of Summa I-II, q. 85, taking articles 4, 5 and 6 in order, and closes by saying “let’s take a few more questions to go before we get to the law.” He refers back to q. 85, a. 2-3 (“as has been said above”) and to the first part on the original state of man. The previous class treated q. 85, aa. 2-3 and the four wounds of nature (prev. lecture).

The class, in order #

1. Article 4, the objections (“where these three are great, great is the good”) #

Whether privation of mode, species and order is an effect of sin. Objections:

1. Augustine (De natura boni): where these three are great, the good is great; where none, no good. But sin does not annul the good of nature; therefore it does not take away mode, species, order.
2. Nothing is cause of itself; but sin itself is a privation of mode, species and order (Augustine). So the privation is not an effect of sin.
3. Diverse sins have diverse effects; mode, species and order are diverse things with diverse privations, deprived through diverse sins; so no one sin causes that privation.

Aside: Augustine’s teaching “always takes a long time to absorb”; Thomas treats the good in general in the prima pars before treating God’s goodness (“he’s addressing beginners, you know, like us”), and does it “even better in the Summa Contra Gentiles,” where he takes up Augustine’s “God is the good of every good.”

Sed contra: sin is in the soul as sickness in the body — Psalm 6, “Have mercy on me, Lord, because I am sick.” Bodily infirmity deprives the body of mode, species and order; so sin does so in the soul. Aside: of people defending homosexual marriage — “I just feel like saying, you are sick.” He notes English has no verb from “lack” (“lackens? I don’t think it works”), only “deprive” from privation.

2. The body of article 4: form, number, measure, end (“the forms of things are as numbers”) #

Point: mode, species and order follow every created being and good as such, because each is considered through a form.

• The form gives the species.
• Every form, substantial or accidental, is according to some measure, “as is said in the eighth book of wisdom, the metaphysics” — the forms of things are like numbers; hence a certain mode.
• From its form each thing is ordered to its end; hence order.

He stresses what is going on with the numbers: Aristotle disagrees with Plato that numbers are behind everything, yet “he sees a certain truth in what Plato is saying.” Example: body + life = plant; + sense = animal; + reason = man — a series like numbers. Shakespeare: “What is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more” — which shows both the number-likeness and the tie between what a thing is and its chief good or end. His own schoolroom parody: “what is the three if it be half of four? A two, no more.”

Digression on modus: Aristotle’s word for the way of proceeding in a science is tropos, a “turn of mind” (he credits Washington Irving’s phrase) — to do this science you turn your mind this way. In Latin it becomes modus procedendi, more abstract, tied to Augustine’s mensura praefigit modum: the way of proceeding should fit the subject “just like your shoes should fit your feet.” Montaigne’s point that each language has something in its word: tropos, modus, “way” each bring out something.

3. Grades of good, grades of mode-species-order (“diverse grades of mode, species, and order”) #

Four grades, each with its own mode, species and order:

1. the good of the very substance of nature — neither destroyed nor diminished by sin;
2. the good of natural inclination — diminished by sin, not wholly taken away;
3. the good of virtue and grace — taken away entirely by mortal sin;
4. the good that is an ordered act — its privation is sin itself.

So sin both is a privation of mode, species and order and deprives or diminishes them — but not the same mode, species and order.

Replies: to 1 and 2 together — sin does not annul nature’s mode, species and order, but it does that of inclination; and in the sinful act the privation is sin itself, not its effect. To 3: mode, species and order follow one another, because the key is the form: the form is like a number (hence measure, hence mode), and from every form there follows an inclination to something (hence order) — so they are deprived and diminished simul, together. “So put that in your pipe and smoke it for a while.”

4. Article 5, objections and sed contra (“through one man sin came into this world”) #

Whether death and other bodily defects are effects of sin. Objections:

1. An equal cause has an equal effect; original sin is equal in all, but these defects are not equal in all.
2. Cause removed, effect removed; baptism or penance removes all sin, yet the defects remain. Joke: “If I go to confession, I’ll be a young man again” — “the font of youth is the baptismal font,” what Ponce de León forgot.
3. Actual sin has more the notion of guilt than original sin, yet actual sin does not change the nature of the body to a defect; much less original sin.

Sed contra: Romans 5:12, “through one man sin came into this world, and through sin death” — “the argument from authority is strongest” here, since Scripture is theology’s own source (he recalls the saying as John Paul II’s, “but he may have been quoting something else”).

5. The body of article 5: per se and per accidens cause (“the one removing the column”) #

1. A cause per se produces the effect by the power of its own nature or form, and so the effect is per se intended.
2. Death and such defects are outside the intention of the sinner; so sin is not their per se cause.
3. A cause per accidens is a removens prohibens — Aristotle, Physics VIII: the one who removes the column per accidens moves the stone placed on it.
4. The first parent’s sin took away original justice, by which the lower powers were held under reason without disorder and the whole body under the soul without defect (as treated in the first part on the original state of man). Hence as nature was wounded in the soul through the disorder of the powers, so the body was made corruptible.
5. The subtraction of original justice has the note of punishment, as has the subtraction of grace; so death and bodily defects are punishments of original sin, and though unintended by the sinner they are ordered by the justice of God punishing.

Asides: John Quincy Adams putting extra pillars along the wall before his wife’s dances, fearing the floor would collapse; a floor that did collapse at the American seminary in Rome. And, of Adam: “Wait till I get my hands on that guy. Do you realize all the trouble you caused.”

6. Replies of article 5 (“the equality of the cause removens prohibens”) #

To 1: only an equal per se cause gives an equal effect (the hotter the fire, the more it burns). An equal accidental cause does not: knock down columns with equal impulse and the stones on them are not equally moved — the heavier moves faster, “according to the property of its nature, to which it is left when the prohibiting thing has been removed.” So with original justice removed, the human body was left to itself, and bodies of different complexion are subject to more or fewer defects.

To 2: guilt, original and actual, is removed by the same thing that removes these defects — Romans 8:11, “he will make living our mortal bodies through the spirit dwelling in us” — but in the order of divine wisdom, at the suitable time (sapientis est ordinare). We must be conformed to Christ’s passion first; hence passibility remains for a time before we are promoted to the impassibility of glory.

To 3: in actual sin distinguish the substance of the act from the note of guilt. On the side of the substance, actual sin can cause bodily defect — from superfluous food some get sick and die. On the side of guilt, it deprives grace, which was given to rectify acts of the soul, not (as original justice was) to keep the body from defect.

Asides, at length: Henry Adams and his anti-Semitism; which of the Adamses said he could not believe in a God who became man and was spat in the face by a Jew; and his father’s judgment of character — letting a Jewish business friend pay for the family dinner because “he doesn’t want to be regarded as a tightwad… if you don’t let him be generous, he’ll be offended.”

7. Article 6, objections (“the corruptible and incorruptible differ in genus”) #

Whether death and such defects are natural to man. On the side of matter:

1. Corruptible and incorruptible differ in kind or genus (tenth book of wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics X]); man is of the same genus with other animals, which are naturally corruptible.
2. What is composed of contraries is naturally corruptible, having in itself the cause of its corruption; the human body is such.
3. Heat naturally consumes the wet, and life is conserved through heat and humidity, the operations of life carried out by natural heat (De anima II) — “you get withered up and you die.”

On the side of form (the sed contra arguments):

1. Whatever is natural to man God made in man; but God did not make death (Wisdom).
2. What is according to nature is neither punishment nor evil; but death and these defects are the punishment of original sin.
3. Matter is proportioned to form and each thing to its end; man’s end is perpetual beatitude and his form the rational soul, which is incorruptible “as even Aristotle knew”; so the human body is naturally incorruptible.

He notes in advance: Thomas will not reply to the first three separately — “it’ll be clear from the body of the article.”

8. Universal and particular nature (“one way according to universal nature”) #

1. Particular nature is the proper active power conserving each thing; on this reckoning every corruption and defect is against nature (second book on the universe [ed.: De caelo II]), since this power intends the being and conservation of what it is in.
2. Universal nature is the active power in some universal principle, as in one of the heavenly bodies — the sun, which makes the plants grow — and intends the good of the whole universe, which requires alternation, generation and corruption.
3. So corruptions are natural not by the inclination of the form, which is principle of being and perfection, but by the inclination of the matter apportioned to such a form by the universal agent.
4. Every form intends perpetuity so far as it can, but no form of a corruptible thing can achieve it — except the rational soul, which is not wholly subject to bodily matter and has its own immaterial operation. He glosses: the brain is not the organ of universal thought; it may be the organ of imagination, but not of the reason that knows the universal as universal.
5. Hence incorruption is more natural to man on the part of his form; but since he also has matter composed of contraries, corruptibility follows in the whole. Man is naturally corruptible according to the nature of the matter left to itself, but not according to the nature of his form. The first three objections proceed on the part of matter, the other three on the part of form.

Aside: it is “kind of amusing” to read Thomas’s little summaries of what the planets were said to do.

9. The two conditions of matter: the iron tool (“this that it rusts follows from the natural disposition of iron”) #

The form, the reasonable soul — “an understanding soul, as Shakespeare says” — is by its incorruptibility proportioned to its end, perpetual beatitude; the body is in one way proportioned to it and in one way not. Two conditions can be noted in matter: one the agent chooses, one he does not but which follows from the matter’s natural disposition.

• Example: the maker (he hesitates — “woodworker, carpenter, house builder… I just mean maker”) choosing iron for a tool because it is hard and can be given a fine edge for cutting: that condition is chosen. That it is breakable and rusts follows from iron’s nature, is not chosen, and “he would more repudiate it if he were able to.”
• Likewise nature chooses the human body for its temperate complexion, the most suitable organ for touch, the foundation of the senses, and for the other sense and motive powers; that it is corruptible is from the condition of matter, and nature would choose an incorruptible matter if it could. He flags the likeness of nature to art, “a comparison Aristotle often makes.”
• God, to whom every nature is subject, supplied for the defect at man’s institution: by the gift of original justice he gave the body a certain incorruptibility — “as long as he ate the food he should.” So God did not make death, and death is the punishment of sin.

He adds: one could with probability guess by natural reason that God would give us a body suited to an immortal soul ordered to perpetual beatitude, and supply for the body’s deficiency — “and that’s what he in fact did do.” Aside: the rusting car patched with metal tape, “the most taped car in the whole parking lot.”

10. Student exchange on the resurrected body (“something supernaturally added to the body”) #

• Could God have made matter incorruptible? Not in this universe, given the matter this universe is made of.
• Then the resurrected body? That is a supernatural gift, making the body more suitable to the soul; not the same as the body given to Adam, since it is immortal without needing to eat.
• Student: we know things by their properties, and the resurrected body has different properties — is that not a substantial change? No: it is something supernaturally added, a gift, not a substantial change — otherwise it would not be the same nature. The four characteristics of the resurrection body (e.g. passing through a door) are not proper to nature but supernatural.
• Why it is fitting: the soul is naturally the form of a body, so its existing forever without the body seems unnatural; hence what the Church knows by revelation about the state of the body is reasonable.
• Even the damned will have immortal bodies, but without those gifts. So matter itself, the material universe, is somehow raised supernaturally.

Aside: Warren Murray joining a gourmet society and finding his neighbour at the annual dinner agitated about flying in the ingredients.

11. Aristotle and the hope of mercy (“I’ve often wondered if Thomas Aquinas said a prayer for Aristotle”) #

Aristotle knew the soul is immortal and is naturally in the body; given the kind of body, the soul would be separated from it — so there is a real problem in him, and “thinking of Plato and Aristotle kind of leads up to Christianity”; he would have found Christianity reasonable had it been presented to him. A saint — Gertrude or Mechtilde, he is unsure which — asked our Lord about Aristotle and was told not to inquire into the counsels of his mercy. Aristotle’s memorial to Plato: the first man to show by both word and deed that the virtuous life is the happy life — “quite a compliment.” The class notes Dante placed him in a happiness that was not the supernatural happiness.

His words #

• “the eighth book of wisdom” — Metaphysics VIII [ed.: he calls metaphysics “wisdom”; likewise “the tenth book of wisdom” and “the tenth book after the books on natural philosophy” for Metaphysics X].
• tropos — Aristotle’s word for the way of proceeding, a “turn of mind”; Latin modus procedendi, “the way of going forward.”
• mensura praefigit modum — Augustine, quoted for the tie of measure to mode.
• per se cause / per accidens cause — the first produces by its own nature and intends its effect; the second is a removens prohibens, the remover of the column.
• removens prohibens — removing what prevents.
• sapientis est ordinare — “it is of the wise man to order”; used here of order in time.
• “ability to suffer” / “lack of sufferability” — [ed.: passibility / impassibility of glory].
• particular nature vs. universal nature — the proper conserving power of a thing vs. the active power in a universal principle (a heavenly body) intending the good of the universe.
• “an understanding soul, as Shakespeare says” — his rendering of the rational soul.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 85, a. 4 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 85, a. 5 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 85, a. 6 (objections, sed contra, body, solution)
• Romans 5:12; Romans 8:11; Psalm 6 (quoted within the articles)

Mentioned

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 5, a. 5 (cited by him as the earlier treatment of mode, species, order)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles (Augustine’s “God is the good of every good”)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, on the original state of man
• Augustine, De natura boni
• Aristotle, Metaphysics VIII (forms are as numbers); Metaphysics X (corruptible and incorruptible differ in genus)
• Aristotle, Physics VIII (removing the column)
• Aristotle, De anima II (operations of life through natural heat)
• Aristotle, De caelo II (inferred; “the second book on the universe”)
• Book of Wisdom (“God did not make death”)
• Shakespeare, “What is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more”
• Aristotle’s memorial inscription to Plato; Dante; Washington Irving; Montaigne; Henry and John Quincy Adams

His questions #

• Does sin take away mode, species and order, if it does not annul the good of nature? It takes them away at the grade of inclination (diminishing) and of grace (destroying), not at the grade of the substance of nature.
• How can the privation of mode, species and order be an effect of sin, if sin is that privation? The privation that is sin is that of the ordered act; what sin causes is the privation at the other grades.
• Why do mode, species and order stand or fall together? Because all three follow the form: the form is like a number, gives measure and hence mode, and carries an inclination to an end.
• Why are bodily defects unequal, if original sin is equal in all? Because sin is only a per accidens cause, a remover of what prevented; the body, left to its own complexion, follows its own diversity.
• Why do the defects remain after baptism or penance? They will be removed in the order of divine wisdom at the suitable time; we must first be conformed to Christ’s passion.
• Is death natural to man? Naturally corruptible on the side of matter left to itself; not natural on the side of the form, and God supplied the defect by original justice.
• Could God have made matter that does not corrupt? Not in this universe, given the matter it is made of; the resurrected body’s incorruption is a supernatural gift.
• Is the change in the resurrected body a substantial change? No — a supernatural addition to the same nature; otherwise it would not be the same nature.
• What about Aristotle’s salvation? Left open: “don’t inquire into the counsels of my mercy.”