Humility with Charity, Hope with Fear: Aquinas on Matthew, the Magnificat, and the Philosopher's Virtues; Whether Sin Can Be the Punishment of Sin (Q. 87, a. 2)

Orientation #

He opens with an aside on John Chrysostom (Thomas would give the whole city of Paris for the Homilies on Matthew), then spends the first half of the class on two passages from Thomas’s commentary on Matthew before turning to Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 87, a. 2. He ends by pointing ahead to Article 3 (“Now what’s frightening here in Article Three here?”). The previous class ended partway through q. 86-87 on the debt of punishment, with plans to continue at q. 87.

The class, in order #

1. Matthew 18: humility and greatness (“unless you be converted and become like this little one”) #

The disciples, out of rivalry, ask who is greater in the kingdom of heaven; Christ sets a little one (parvulum) among them: whoever humbles himself as this little one is great in the kingdom. Parallel: Luke 18:14, who humbles himself shall be exalted.

Thomas’s objection (potest esse quaestio): this does not seem true, because perfectio est in caritate — where there is more charity, there is more perfection; so greatness should be measured by charity, not humility. He calls it “a good objection.”

Reply: humility necessarily accompanies charity (istud de necessitate sequitur caritatem). In pride there are two things, a disordered affection (affectus inordinatus) and a disordered estimate of oneself; contrariwise the humble man does not care for his own excellence (qui propriam excellentiam non curat) and does not regard himself as worthy. Since every man desires the excellence he loves, the more a man loves God the more he holds his own excellence in contempt — so the more charity, the more humility, and conversely. Only because the two go hand in hand can Christ measure exaltation by humility.

Augustine is brought in as saying the same: love of self usque ad contemptum Dei makes the city of man, and the reverse the city of God; Aristotle says we should try to say some things better than our predecessors and other things just as well as they said them.

2. Why humility rather than charity is named (“because of their pride that they had a little bit there”) #

Why emphasize the accompanying virtue rather than charity itself? Because of the context: the disciples’ rivalry and pride. Same objection applies to the Magnificat, which had bothered him years ago: Mary seems to attribute her exaltation to her humility. Same solution — and there is reason to stress humility precisely where one is to be exalted: the highest title is Mother of God, than which no creature can be raised higher, and she stresses humility.

3. Philosophy: the lover of wisdom must be humble (“don’t call me wise, God alone is wise”) #

Descending “to a humbler sphere”: to love wisdom is in a way to love God, since God is not only wise but wisdom itself. Pythagoras, credited with the theorem and called wise, refused the name — God alone is wise; call me a lover of wisdom. So the very word philosopher carries humility as well as love of wisdom. Aristotle at the end of the golden age says the same: God alone is fully wise, man not at all or only imperfectly. Aristotle’s thanks to predecessors, even the mistaken ones who exercised the mind, is humility too; the sophists by contrast call themselves sophos. Reason for the connection: wisdom is knowledge of truth, and pride is the great cause of being mistaken. A student adds Heraclitus: the wisest man compared to God is like an ape in wisdom and beauty and all else.

4. Mozart: the lover of beauty must be humble (“not in such a way as to become displeasing to the ears”) #

Mozart to his father on Die Entführung aus dem Serail: Osmin’s anger must show loss of self-control but never become displeasing to the ears, i.e. cease to be music. Hence music as opposed to noise must please the ear — and what pleases ear or eye is the beautiful; so Mozart is a lover of the beautiful. And love of beauty is like love of God (Augustine’s Confessions: “too late have I come to know thee, thou ancient beauty”), so it too requires humility.

Evidence of Mozart’s humility: to the charge that everything came easily, “there is not a master in the art of music before me whose works I have not studied diligently”; study under Padre Martini in Italy; the six string quartets dedicated to Haydn because “he taught me how to write a string quartet” (Alfred — not Albert — Einstein on the influence of Haydn’s “Russian” quartets, where each instrument gets its own voice); the early imitations of J. C. Bach, on whose lap he sat in London; and hearing unfamiliar J. S. Bach and exclaiming “this is something one can learn from.” Aside: “No one knew how beautiful a woman’s voice could be until Mozart wrote for it.”

5. Matthew 8: Christ’s wonder at the centurion (“admiration does not fall in God”) #

Text: the centurion, a pagan, says “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but say only the word”; he explains by his own chain of command; Jesus marvelled and said he had not found such faith in Israel.

Thomas’s objection: he “wondered” (admiratus est), but wonder cannot fall in God, since wonder arises only from ignorance of the cause, which cannot be in God.

Reply: wonder has two senses — (a) from ignorance of the cause of a known effect; (b) from the apprehension of the magnitude of an effect, through imagination and an image of some great effect. The second can fall in Christ: admiratus est, id est magnum reputavit — he reckoned it great that this man had such faith.

Application to Aristotle: in Metaphysics I philosophy begins in wonder (e.g. an eclipse: why is the sun cut off? is God angry with us?) and ends in the opposite of wonder, since once you know the cause you no longer wonder. Yet in Metaphysics XII, having arrived at the first cause, Aristotle says God is always in the contemplative state we can only rarely reach, and in a better way — “he compels our wonder,” even more wonder. Not a contradiction: this is wonder in the second sense, at the excellence and magnificence of God’s intellectual life. Aristotle in the Ethics on the remarkable pleasure of understanding great things, unlike the pleasure of candy.

6. The Magnificat: mercy and fear (“his mercy is from generation to generation to those who fear him”) #

Puzzle of the same shape: mercy is connected with hope, justice with fear; why then does Mary tie mercy to those who fear him rather than to those who hope? Other Scripture texts, and the Te Deum, tie mercy to hope.

Solution, from Thomas on the Psalms (inferred locus): hope without fear of divine justice becomes presumption, which is no longer hope; fear without hope of mercy becomes despair, which is not the fear of God. So the two require each other, and naming one brings the other in, while giving the balanced picture. He notes this is “solving that second problem in the Magnificat in the way he solved the first one.”

7. The same balance in the philosopher (“the fear of being mistaken”) #

Truth is a good, but a difficult good; hope is the movement of the appetite toward a difficult good; without hope one despairs of knowing the truth. He thinks American universities are full of people who have despaired — Whittaker Chambers at Columbia found his fellow students treating ideas as ping-pong balls, knocked back and forth and never taken seriously; Chambers was serious though mistaken, and later, looking at his little daughter’s ear, saw that so well-shaped a thing could not have come by chance — every work of nature is a work of mind directing nature.

But hope alone is not enough: Socrates is in mortal fear of thinking he knows what he does not know, with plenty of evidence from others who claim knowledge. Without the fear of error one will not be careful in pursuing this difficult good. So hope and fear must be balanced, as hope in divine mercy with fear of divine justice; they are different things, like humility and charity, but each requires the other.

The Phaedo shows the teacher’s handling of both: Aristotle in the De Anima says the truth about the soul is among the hardest things to know; the company grows confident, objections come, they begin to despair, Phaedo’s hearer feels the sinking, and Socrates leads them out before answering the objections — the first objection easy, the second harder, and confidence overshoots. Thomas does likewise in the disputed questions. Sometimes you must encourage the student, sometimes warn and shake him up.

Personal: going from Kasurik [ed.: likely Kocourek] to De Koninck to Dionne he met more of this fear — Warren Murray: “Dionne’s principal passion is fear, the fear of being mistaken.” Kasurik was better to start with, being encouraging. Dionne saw at once the flaw in his thesis outline, said he had no evidence but it would not change again, and left him to write it himself — balance. Modern philosophers show pride instead; De Koninck wrote that he felt like jumping off a bridge at having to be in the moderns again. Warren Murray on the pride of great scientists who sometimes admit they are blocking the way to recognizing God, since it would interfere with their being the wisest. A student adds that prominent atheist scientists always come up with some alternative to God — the religious instinct intact but misapplied.

8. I-II, q. 87, a. 2: whether sin can be the punishment of sin (“I’m convinced, temporarily”) #

Three objections:

1. Punishments are brought in so that men may be led back to the good of virtue (Philosopher, Ethics X) — you spank the kid hoping for that; but sin leads not to virtue but to its opposite.
2. Just punishments are from God (Augustine, Eighty-Three Questions); sin is not from God and is unjust.
3. It is of the notion of punishment to be against the will; sin is in accord with the will, from the will.

Sed contra: Gregory on Ezekiel says some sins are the punishment of sin — “Well, Gregory’s good enough for me.” He notes the same pattern as before: here Gregory is set against the objections, as Thomas earlier objected to Christ’s own words and to Mary’s.

Response: sin is spoken of in two ways. Per se, sin can in no way be the punishment of sin: per se sin is considered as going forth from the will, and so has the ratio of guilt, whereas it is of the ratio of punishment to be against the will (as had in the First Part). Per accidens, in three ways:

1. On the side of the cause — the removal of what prevents, one of the famous kinds of accidental cause (the man who pushes the prop is the per accidens cause of the roof’s collapse, because he removed what prevented it). The causes inclining to sin are the passions, the devil’s temptation and the like; these are impeded by the aid of divine grace; grace is withdrawn by sin; and since the subtraction of grace is a punishment and from God, the sin following is per accidens called a punishment. Romans 1:24: “he handed them over to the desires of their own hearts” — men abandoned by grace are captured by their passions. (Aside: the terrorists seem to do something worse each day.)
2. On the side of the substance of the act, which induces some affliction — interior, as is clear in anger and envy; or exterior, as when some are oppressed by grave labour and loss in carrying out the sinful act. Wisdom 5:7: “we have become exhausted in the way of iniquity.” (Italian navigato: the young man who looks a hundred because he has sailed the seven seas.)
3. On the part of the effect — a sin is called the punishment with respect to an effect that follows. In these last two ways a sin is the punishment not only of a preceding sin but also of itself.

Reply to obj. 1: that God punishes by permitting some to fall into sin is ordered to the good of virtue — sometimes of the sinners themselves, who after sin rise more humble and more cautious (Augustine on the early virgins: better that some proud ones should fall into sins of the flesh, so as to be humbled and recovered from pride); always for the amending of others, who seeing men go from sin to sin fear to sin. In the other two ways it is plain that sin is ordered to the correction of the one who suffers labour or detriment in sinning, which is apt to withdraw men from sin — as with the grave mental consequences of abortion, sending women to Rachel [ed.: Project Rachel].

Replies to obj. 2 and 3: they take per se what is meant per accidens. “So he’s untied the knots — I can go free now.”

Aside within the article, on Thomas quoting Scripture from memory: a professor who knew 120 students’ names from their faces the first day; a high-school classmate with a photographic memory who could recite a four-page poem after one reading and get ten girls’ names at a party; the memory trick of imagining a house and putting each thing in a room.

His words #

• parvulum — the “little one” Christ sets among the disciples.
• perfectio est in caritate — the objection’s premise: perfection lies in charity.
• affectus inordinatus — disordered affection, one of the two things in pride, the other being a disordered estimate of oneself.
• propriam excellentiam non curat — the humble man does not care for his own excellence.
• de necessitate sequitur caritatem — humility follows charity of necessity.
• philosopher — “a lover of wisdom,” and by Pythagoras’s origin also a name of humility.
• admiratus est, id est magnum reputavit — “he wondered,” i.e. he reckoned it great; the second sense of wonder.
• wonder, two senses — from ignorance of the cause of a known effect; from apprehension of the magnitude of an effect.
• hope — “the movement of the appetite towards a good that is difficult to obtain.”
• presumption / despair — hope without fear; fear without hope.
• ratio — “aspect”; the ratio of guilt vs. the ratio of punishment.
• per se / per accidens — sin as it goes forth from the will vs. sin as accidentally punitive.
• removal of what prevents — “one of the famous kinds of accidental cause.”

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, ch. 18 — on Mt 18:1-4, objection from charity and reply on humility.
• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, ch. 8 (inferred) — on the centurion, objection on divine wonder and reply.
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 87, a. 2 — objections, sed contra (Gregory on Ezekiel), response, reply to obj. 1.
• Luke 1, Magnificat; Luke 18:14; Romans 1:24; Wisdom 5:7.

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics I and XII; Nicomachean Ethics X; De Anima.
• Plato, Phaedo.
• Augustine, Confessions; De diversis quaestionibus LXXXIII; the two cities; on the proud virgins.
• Gregory the Great, Homilies on Ezekiel.
• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Psalms (inferred) — hope and fear.
• John Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew.
• Mozart’s letters; Whittaker Chambers, Witness; the Te Deum; Heraclitus (via a student).

His questions #

• Why does Christ measure greatness in the kingdom by humility, when perfection is in charity? Because humility necessarily accompanies charity: the more charity, the more contempt of one’s own excellence.
• Why emphasize humility rather than charity itself? Because of the context of rivalry and pride among the disciples — as also with Mary, who is raised highest of creatures.
• Can one truly be a lover of wisdom without humility? No — God alone is wise, and pride is the great cause of being mistaken.
• Is there a connection between the love of God and the love of beauty? Yes; hence the lover of beauty too must be humble, as Mozart’s debts to Haydn, Bach and Martini show.
• How can Christ have wondered, since wonder comes from ignorance of a cause? Wonder has a second sense, apprehension of the magnitude of an effect: he reckoned the centurion’s faith great.
• Is Aristotle contradicting himself, saying philosophy ends in the opposite of wonder yet that God compels our wonder? No — the wonder at God’s contemplative life is wonder in the second sense.
• Why does Mary join God’s mercy to those who fear him rather than to those who hope? Because hope without fear becomes presumption and fear without hope despair; naming one brings in the other.
• Is the hope of coming to know the truth enough for a philosopher? No — he must also have Socrates’ fear of thinking he knows what he does not know.
• Can sin be the punishment of sin? Per se never, since sin proceeds from the will and punishment is against the will; per accidens in three ways — by removal of grace, by the affliction in the act, and by its effect.