Understanding, Belief Seeking Understanding, and Whether Venial Sin Stains the Soul (Aquinas, Question 89, Article 1)

Orientation #

He opens by looking back at “the fourth article here” — whether a good or bad angel can sin venially — remarking that neither can, but for different reasons. He then turns to Question 89 and reads article 1. The neighbouring classes treat the same Thomistic questions on venial sin.

The class, in order #

1. Seeing versus discoursing (“when I’m walking home, have I walked home?”) #

A student’s question: why can “to see” be said of understanding but not of discourse or reason?

• From the ninth book of Wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics IX], where Aristotle contrasts motion with energeia: walking home — have I walked home? No. Seeing that picture — have I seen it? Yes [he says “No”, then the examples correct him; the point is that seeing is complete at every moment]. Loving someone: do you love them yet? Yes.
• Discourse is like motion: defined as coming to know from what you don’t know to what you do know. While coming to know, you have not fully come to know.
• Understanding is the perfection of reason; hence when you understand what a square is, you have understood it.
• Wisdom is the name of the highest perfection of reason — so the wise man understands most of all.

2. Understanding and substance: same etymology, different meaning (“intus legere, to read within”) #

Point: etymology is not meaning, but it can lead one by the hand.

• The senses know your size; what you are — your substance — only reason knows. Substance is taken both as opposed to accidents and more generally as what a thing is, which is reason’s object.
• Latin intelligere from intus legere, to read within; “nature” likewise names something within the thing.
• “The etymology of a word is not its meaning.” Examples: his own name, originally Bergquist (Berg, mountain; quist, branch) — there is no mountain-branch in the room; “Duane,” said to mean poem — “I’m not a poem”; Thomas’s etymology of lapis as laedens pedem, hurting the foot — the word does not mean “hurt the leg” but names the thing that does.
• Pair: intelligere and “to understand” have the same meaning but not the same etymology; substantia and “understanding” have the same etymology but not the same meaning.
• Still, etymology can manuducere, lead by the hand: to understand is to know what stands under.

3. The wise man most of all knows what stands under (“books seven and eight are devoted to substance”) #

• In the fourteen books of Wisdom, VII-VIII treat substance (chiefly material), XI-XIV the immaterial substances; wisdom is about being, and being is fundamentally substance.
• Causes are imagined as standing under and holding up their effects — English “ground,” as in legal grounds for divorce. So to understand effects is to know their causes, and he who knows the first cause (God) most of all understands.
• Book IV defends the axioms: axioms are the statements that stand under all other statements. Greek hypothesis — hupo + thesis, placed under. Aristotle also distinguishes the senses of the words used in the axioms and in wisdom, so he knows what stands under those words too.
• Aside: wonder too “stands under” the whole of philosophy, and the metaphor comes from the legs — standing, running, stumbling; he knows of none taken from sitting. His old teacher’s quotation: the man sitting becomes wise, because he is not moving around.

4. Augustine’s definition of believing (“to assent while thinking about it”) #

Point: a definition must both say what the thing is and separate it from every other act.

• Student offers: willingly to assent to something not seen, on the basis of a witness. He gives Augustine’s (followed by Thomas): to assent while thinking about it (cum assensione cogitare).
• “Assent” separates believing from doubt (where you don’t know which side) and from opinion (where you don’t assent fully).
• “While thinking about it” separates it from natural understanding, and from reasoned-out understanding — for there the assent comes after the discourse, and the thinking then comes to rest. In faith the mind is ex aequo, assenting firmly while still thinking, because it does not see.

5. Faith seeking understanding (“fides quaerens intellectum”) #

• Anselm’s definition of theology arises out of the very nature of the act: reason is moved to assent by the will, assents firmly, but lacks evidence, so the mind keeps thinking and wondering — and that gives rise to theology.
• Example: why should you love God? By faith you know you should. His “favourite book” gives five chapters (37-41 (inferred: Summa contra Gentiles I)): God is good; God is goodness itself, that whereby all things are good; hence nothing bad can be in Him and no reason not to love Him; God is the good of every good (following Augustine); God is the summum bonum.

6. Why venial sins never add up (“all the venial sins of the world”) #

The same pattern applied to what a child learns before first confession.

• Thomas: all the venial sins of the world do not add up to one mortal sin. But why? A penny is not a dollar, yet a hundred pennies are; number seems to accumulate.
• Answer: it is not that venial sin merely falls short of mortal sin — then one could add on and catch up. In mortal sin you break the very beginning: you break the order to God as end. In venial sin you do not proceed as quickly or surely toward God, but “you’re not choosing a different road.”
• Shakespeare: “Revolts from two births, stumbling on abuse” — the very beginning corrupted.
• Aristotle’s parallel: deny the principle of contradiction, the natural beginning of all the axioms, and the only alternative is a return to the life of a plant; you give up the philosophical life.
• Whitaker Chambers, on becoming a communist, felt contempt for his Columbia friends who treated ideas like ping-pong balls — something to play with, knocked back and forth, not taken seriously: they had given up the end, wisdom, knowledge of the truth. Likewise professors for whom it is “better than digging ditches for a living” — he contrasts his neighbour leaving at 5:30 in the cold for construction work in Boston; an easier life is hardly the purpose of the life of the mind. A dean at St. Mary’s in California called philosophy “an amazing imaginatively pleasing picture of the world” — the end is gone.
• Same in marriage: adultery differs from leaving the light on, not locking the front door, not taking out the trash, not squeezing the toothpaste, because adultery is contrary to the very end of the thing. Modern marriage as a semi-formalized friendship loses sight of children as the end; once the beginning is lost, “anything goes.”

7. The six articles of Question 89 (“now we are to consider venial sin by itself”) #

Venial sin considered secundum quid; six questions: (1) whether venial sin causes a stain in the soul; (2) its distinction as figured by wood, hay and straw [a student’s version: “wood and stubble”] — aside: what Thomas said of his own theology, that it is all straw; (3) whether man in the state of innocence could sin venially; (4) whether a good or bad angel can sin venially; (5) whether the first motions of unbelievers are venial sins; (6) whether venial sin can be in someone with original sin only.

8. Article 1: the three objections and the sed contra (“that convinces me”) #

• Obj. 1: Augustine, On Penance: venial sins, if multiplied, take away the beauty (decorum) of the soul and separate us from the embraces of the celestial spouse; but a stain is nothing other than a lessening of beauty.
• Obj. 2: mortal sin causes a stain by the disorder of the act and the affections of the sinner; venial sin too has a certain disorder of act and affections.
• Obj. 3: the stain is caused by contact with a temporal thing through love — like touching coal, or something attached to the sink or the icebox; in venial sin the soul by disordered love touches a temporal thing.
• “He always gives it away” — the objections, he notes, take the side opposite his own conclusion; he jokes that each one convinces him (“is it nitwit or dimwit here?”).
• Sed contra: Ephesians 5, that he might show himself a glorious Church not having a stain; the gloss glosses “stain” as criminal sin, i.e. mortal. Aside: he asks the class the etymology of “criminal” — left unresolved.

9. Digression: how the mind separates a thing from everything else (“you can’t grasp the center of the desk”) #

• To grasp something (simple apprehension) the mind must separate it from everything else — as you cannot grasp the centre of the desk, since you cannot separate it from the rest of the table.
• Objection of “lesser thinkers”: separating from an infinity of other things is an infinite task, so you never grasp anything.
• His reply, from “my friend Albert the Great”: in logic the first thing considered is the universal. Take “number”: say something is not a number and you have separated it from infinitely many things at once. And I am sure no even number is an odd number — an infinity separated from an infinity — because one is divisible into two equal parts and the other is not, and so they cannot be the same.
• Applied: by universals Augustine’s definition separates believing from doubt (firm adherence to one side of a contradiction), from probable opinion, from the first act of the mind (understanding what something is), from the second act (composing and dividing, affirming or denying, true or false), and from reasoned-out understanding, where discourse leads to understanding and then comes to a halt — quietus, which he ties to the etymology of episteme, coming to a stop. In faith assent is not the term of thinking: the mind is ex aequo, both at once. So too “square”: an equilateral right-angled quadrilateral separates it from everything else.

10. The body of the article: two brightnesses (“habitual, as it were inward; actual, as it were exterior”) #

• Macula, stain, implies a loss of brilliance from some contact; the word is borrowed from bodily things and transferred by likeness to the soul. His example: the grease spot on his shirt from cooking, which does not look right and is very hard to get out.
• In the body there is a twofold brightness: one from the intrinsic disposition of the members and their colour, another supervening from exterior light. So in the soul: one habitual, as it were intrinsic; another actual, as it were exterior. “That’s a strange distinction — but it seems to be valid.”
• Venial sin impedes the actual brightness only, not the habitual, since it neither excludes nor diminishes the habit of charity and the other virtues; it impedes only their act.
• But a stain implies something remaining in the thing stained — hence it pertains rather to the habitual than to the actual loss of brightness. Therefore, properly speaking, venial sin does not cause a stain in the soul; if it is anywhere said to bring in a stain, that is in a qualified sense, inasmuch as it impedes the brightness that comes from the acts of the virtues.
• Asked whether they see the distinction, a student says “somewhat”; he answers that each rereading shows a little more, and quotes De Koninck: “if you think you’ve understood everything you’ve read, this is a sign you’ve understood nothing.”

11. The three replies (“it’s very important to see that distinction”) #

• Ad 1: Augustine speaks of the case where many venial sins dispose toward mortal sin; otherwise they would not separate one from the embrace of the celestial spouse. Aside: he used to say the union of soul with God is more intimate than that of husband and wife, which is only on the surface — in the beatific vision God Himself is joined to our mind as that by which we see Him as He is, so we must be altogether pure.
• Ad 2: the disorder of the act in mortal sin corrupts the habit of virtue; in venial sin it does not. “That’s very important to see.”
• Ad 3: in mortal sin the soul by love touches a temporal thing as an end, and thereby wholly impedes the inflowing of the splendour of grace — which comes to those who adhere to God as last end through charity (“you were darkness once, now you are light in the Lord”). In venial sin man does not adhere to the creature as to his last end; so the case is not similar. He remarks on “the splendour of grace” and recalls an encyclical of John [Paul II] (inferred).
• Closing: he once made a collection of texts from Plato and Aristotle on the importance of the beginning — something he got from De Koninck and especially Dionysius [unclear in recording: “Dion”]. Aristotle always compares, in practical matters, the end to the beginning; give up the end and you give up everything, which is what mortal sin does. Last line: “at least we got unstained here — we’re temporarily not glowing.”

His words #

• the ninth book of Wisdom — Metaphysics IX; “the fourteen books of wisdom” for the whole work.
• energia — energeia, activity complete at every moment, contrasted with motion.
• discourse — coming to know from what you don’t know to what you do know.
• intus legere — “to read within,” his account (from Thomas) of intelligere.
• manuducere — to lead by the hand; what a good etymology does for the meaning.
• to assent while thinking about it — Augustine’s definition of believing.
• ex aequo — of the mind in faith, assenting and still thinking, “equally” both.
• fides quaerens intellectum — Anselm: belief seeking understanding; his definition of theology.
• secundum quid — venial sin considered “in a certain respect,” by itself.
• macula — stain; a loss or detriment of brilliance from contact.
• quietus — the coming to a halt of discourse in understanding; he ties it to episteme.
• splendour of grace — the inflowing brightness in those who adhere to God as last end through charity.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 89, prologue (the six articles) and a. 1, in full — objections, sed contra, body, replies.
• Augustine, De Poenitentia (quoted in obj. 1).
• Ephesians 5, with the gloss (sed contra).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX (motion and energeia); VII-VIII (substance); XI-XIV (immaterial substances); IV (defence of the axioms, senses of terms); the principle of contradiction and “the life of the plant.”
• Thomas Aquinas on the act of faith, following Augustine’s definition (inferred: ST II-II, q. 2, a. 1).
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles I, cc. 37-41 (inferred) — why God is to be loved.
• Anselm; Albert the Great, on the universal as the first consideration in logic.
• Shakespeare: “Revolts from two births, stumbling on abuse.”
• Whitaker Chambers; De Koninck.

His questions #

• Why can “to see” be said of understanding but not of discourse or reason? Because discourse is like motion — while coming to know you have not come to know; understanding, like seeing, is complete when it occurs.
• What is the perfection of reason? Who understands most? Understanding; and among men the wise man, since wisdom names reason’s highest perfection.
• Is there a connection between “understanding” and “substance”? Yes: substance is what a thing is, known only by reason, and to understand is to know what stands under — but the words have the same etymology, not the same meaning.
• How would you define the act of faith? With Augustine: to assent while thinking about it.
• Why do all the venial sins of the world not add up to one mortal sin? Because mortal sin breaks the beginning, the order to God as last end, while venial sin only slows the journey on the same road.
• How can the mind separate a thing from an infinity of other things? By universals: to say something is not a number, or that no even number is odd, separates infinitely many at a stroke.
• What is the etymology of “criminal”? Left open.
• Does venial sin cause a stain in the soul? Properly speaking no: it impedes only the actual brightness, the act of the virtues, not the habitual, since it neither excludes nor diminishes charity; it is called a stain only in a qualified sense.