Law and Reason, Law and the Common Good (Summa I-II, Q. 90, Articles 1–2): 'Beginning' and Its Meanings, Ways to Divide Sacred Doctrine, and the Wise Man's Judgment of Axioms

Orientation #

He returns first to the body of Article 1 (“let’s look at the body there, the respondeo, in the Article One again”) before taking up Article 2, and ends by announcing the next question: “Now, can just anybody make the law?” The previous class opened the Treatise on Law with q. 90, a. 1, on whether law pertains to reason.

The class, in order #

1. Why “principle” and not “beginning” (“how do they translate principium”) #

Point: the English translators write “principle” for principium because the English word “beginning” has not been carried over to the later senses of the Greek archē / Latin principium.

• Principium is equivocal by reason [ed.: analogous], with an order among the meanings; but the carry-over of the word from its first sense to its later ones is interrupted in English.
• Grade-school example: “principal” (P-A-L) vs. “principle” (P-L-E) — these are in fact the third and fourth senses of beginning.
• Aristotle’s senses of beginning: (1) the limit of something continuous — point of the line, line of the surface, surface of the body; the beginning is in the thing but is not that thing; (2) a fundamental part, in the thing — the foundation of the house, the keel of the ship; (he raises but leaves open: what is the beginning of the human body?); (3) a beginning not in the thing — the principal of a school, who commands and moves the others; whence monarchy; (4) the beginning in knowledge, further removed from the senses. Then every cause seems a beginning: matter and mover obviously, form harder, and the end strangest of all — “you seem to have moved the word beginning as far as you can.”
• Parallel case: John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word.” Not “word” as vocal sound significant by human agreement, no part of which signifies by itself; Greek logos is first said of word and speech, then carried over to the thought the word signifies — but English “word” has not been so carried over, so the reader must move it himself.
• Puzzle he raises from the text: Thomas calls both reason and the end primum principium — how can both be first? The reason is not the end; the reason knows the end and directs to it.
• Easier route to a. 1’s conclusion: law directs people to a course of action, to an end; to direct is to order; and reason is defined as what “looks before and after,” so law is something of reason.

2. Discourse, and the divisions of logic (“reason is the ability for large discourse”) #

Point: we are engaged in defining, which is one kind of discourse, and discourse is coming to know what you don’t know through what you do know.

• Two main kinds studied in logic: defining and reasoning. You must define before you can reason — Aristotle says Socrates was trying to syllogize, and a sign of it was that he was trying to define; the middle term of a syllogism tends to be a definition.
• Albert the Great divides logic into two (art of defining, art of reasoning), putting the Peri Hermeneias with the later books; Thomas divides it into three, following the three acts of reason from Aristotle’s book on the soul: understanding what something is; composing or dividing (affirming or denying) into a statement; putting statements together to conclude.
• His rule: “two or three, or both.” Neither division is the bad one. Example: Aristotle divides plot into beginning, middle and end, praising Homer for seeing a plot is not about one man and what happened to him but a course of actions; later in the Poetic Art he divides plot into two, tying the knot(s) and untying them — whence the marvel at the end of Cymbeline, how many knots Shakespeare unties in one scene, so naturally.

3. The divisions of sacred doctrine (“three main distinctions of sacred doctrine”) #

Point: sacred doctrine as a whole is divided both into three and into two, and both are illuminating.

• Into three: faith, hope, charity — Augustine’s Enchiridion, followed by Thomas in the Catechetical Instructions (Naples) and in the Compendium of Theology (written for his confessor-friend, unfinished). Faith → the Creed; hope → the Our Father (and the Hail Mary); charity → the two commandments of love and the Ten Commandments. “That kind of covers everything,” especially for a beginner.
• Summa Contra Gentiles: three divided by two — God in Himself, God as beginning, God as end (Books I–III), so far as knowable by natural reason as well as by faith; Book IV the same three as known only by faith (Trinity, Incarnation, last things).
• Into two: law and grace — “the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” Old Testament under law, divided in two: the law of the King (Pentateuch, recalled by the Prophets) and the law of the Father (Sapiential books — “my son”). The movement from king to father is gentler; then Christ: “I call you now friends.” New Testament under grace, in three: Gospels, the origin of grace; Epistles of St. Paul, the nature of grace; Catholic Epistles and Apocalypse, the effect of grace — the Church in its origin, development and final stage.
• Also: Thomas divides Matthew into three, John into two (the first chapter set off against the rest).
• Aside: the two Summae treat the substance of God with the same five parts in different orders; one should not say which order is better but show what each order brings out.

4. Article 2 set up: the bad regimes (“the good of the king or the good of the ruler”) #

Point: to ask whether law is ordered to the common good is to ask against the regimes that aim at the good of a part.

• Tyranny, oligarchy, democracy in the pejorative sense: the ruler, the rich, the mob. Each aims at the good of a part — something unjust.
• How can one part direct the whole city to its own good? It must be more powerful: by military force (tyrant), by wealth (oligarchy), by numbers (the multitude).
• Aside (political, contemporary): Obama’s release of a classified document on Israel’s atom bombs — “he’s really lost his marbles.”

5. The three objections and the sed contra (“law is not ordered always to the common good”) #

1. Law commands and prohibits; but precepts are ordered to singular goods; so law’s end is not always the common good.
2. Law directs man to acting; human acts are in the particular; so law orders to a particular good.
3. Isidore: if a law stands by reason, whatever is constituted by reason is law; but what is ordered to the private good also stands by reason; so law is ordered to private good too.

• Sed contra, Isidore, Etymologies V: law is in no way for private utility but is written down for the common usefulness of the citizens.
• He pauses with the class: “How can he answer these objections? There must be some distinction we’re not seeing.”

6. The body: law regards happiness, and the common happiness (“the first beginning in things to be done”) #

1. Law pertains to what is the beginning of human acts, from being their rule and measure; reason is that beginning; and within reason, whatever is the beginning with respect to all the rest is what law chiefly pertains to.
2. The first beginning in things to be done, with which practical reason deals, is the last end.
3. The last end of human life is felicitas or beatitudo. Gloss: felicitas from the Latin for fruitful — we speak of a fruitful life; beatitudo — to be blessed; Aristotle: if anything comes to us from the gods, it would seem to be happiness. Therefore law most of all regards the order to happiness.
4. Every part is ordered to the whole as the imperfect to the perfect; one man is part of the perfect community; therefore law properly regards the order to the common happiness.
5. Confirmation from Aristotle: in Ethics V the definition of legal just things says they are productive and preservative of happiness and its parts in the political communion; and Politics I, the perfect community is the city — whence “political philosophy” from polis.
6. In every genus, that which is said most of all is the beginning of the others, and the others are said according to their order to it — “That’s a famous principle. It takes a hard time to understand that.” Old example from physics: fire, which is most hot, is the cause of heat in mixed bodies, which are hot insofar as they partake of fire. His own version: a fire burning in a fireplace warming the room — as you approach, it gets warmer, and the source of heat is what is most hot.
7. Therefore, since law is said most of all (maxime) according to the order to the common good, any precept about a particular work has the character of law only by its order to the common good. He stresses maxime — “not as if it’s alone”; there is law about a part of the city, e.g. the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

• Parallel: is geometry part of philosophy? Only as ordered to wisdom.
• Asides: Washington refused to make himself king and wanted to go back to his farm; his old professor Kasurik in the car — “I wish I knew what was going on in Washington” / “That’s a laugh, they don’t know themselves”; the city grown too big for anyone to make sense of.

7. Digression: how the wise man judges the axioms (“what do you need the wise man to judge the axioms?”) #

Point: natural understanding and the wise man judge the axioms in the same way, yet the wise man’s judgment is superior — so what is the difference?

• Occasion: a correspondent from Rome working on how the wise man judges the axioms; he warned him that natural understanding knows them too.
• Sameness: both know that the whole is more than the part by knowing what a whole is and what a part is.
• Boethius: the axioms are statements known through themselves to all men — so why a wise man at all?
• His answer, with a student’s help: the wise man knows the common terms (whole, part) are equivocal by reason; he distinguishes their chief senses and thinks out their order, so knows the axioms more distinctly and universally — and he can defend them.
• Why defence matters: the commonest sophistical argument is from equivocation. He used to lead students to think it is not always true that the whole is more than the part.
• “That’s a very subtle thing”: a man can think he does not know what he does know. To know something and to know that you know it are connected but not the same; failing to answer the objection, you may think you don’t know what you do know — “a bad state of mind.”
• Aristotle, Physics II (“Natural Hearing”): those who tried to prove that nature exists act as if they did not know what they do know. Is such a state possible? He shows it by the opposite, thinking you know what you don’t know, which Socrates made notorious. His gloss: if you can’t always separate what you know from what you don’t, you can err either way — “if someone can make the mistake of thinking Miller’s is Budweiser, someone can make the mistake of thinking Budweiser is Miller’s.”
• The wise man does not demonstrate the axioms, but defends them; and when he demonstrates immaterial things he shows that those who hold that whatever is must be somewhere are mistaken — though that may look obvious (the Russian cosmonauts: “no God up here”; yet “the heavens declare the glory of God”). Some things are per se known to the wise but not to all men; so the wise man also knows what is and is not an axiom.
• Aside: last Tuesday night’s class read Physics VI; the apparent contradiction in becoming, which Hegel accepts; De Koninck’s article on the paradox “devenir par la contradiction” (inferred title); the medievals’ difficulty over the Eucharist for the same reason.

8. Whole and part, and the ordering of the law (“is the part for the sake of the whole?”) #

Point: the part is for the sake of the whole, so the whole has the character of a more ultimate end, and law must take that priority into account.

• Chair: the arm, seat and back are for the sake of the chair; the whole chair is ordered to sitting. Dinner: the whole dinner is not for the sake of dessert.
• Since everything is ordered ultimately to the last end, the part must be ordered to the whole; and when law does something about a part, it is for the sake of the whole.
• Aside: the chair at home with an arm that keeps falling off — gorilla glue, and the temptation to find a use for it in its present condition.

9. The three replies (“a precept implies the application of the law”) #

• To 1: a precept or command implies the application of law to the things ruled by it; the order to the common good is applicable to singular ends, and so precepts are given about particulars. Example: they may make a law about not practicing medicine without a license; and the military code, under which a declared traitor could be subject to death, or as it now stands to life imprisonment — with the aside on the trade of five hardened criminals for one man, whom Obama called a hero.
• To 2: operations are in particulars, but those particulars can be referred to the common good — not by a community of genus or species (a universal in predication or being said of), but by the community of a final cause, as the common good is said to be a common end.
• To 3: he first notes Isidore’s text may be taken out of context. Nothing stands firmly according to speculative reason except by resolution to the first indemonstrable beginnings; likewise nothing stands firmly by practical reason except by being ordered to the last end, the common good; and whatever so stands has the aspect of law.
  • Why geometry is most certain for us: you see clearly that it goes back to first beginnings. Worked example: vertical angles are equal — a straight line meeting a straight line makes two right angles (or angles equal to two right angles); this pair and that pair are each two right angles; and quantities equal to the same are equal, “if you add equals to equals, the results are equal”; subtract the common one. “Even I can get that into my dim white head.”
  • Aristotle always compares the beginnings/axioms with the end in practical matters: the end is like the beginning. In Metaphysics V he begins with the word “beginning,” and later treats “end”; the end is first thought of as the opposite of the beginning, but then “end” is used to cover both — the endpoints of a line include the beginning. In a way the beginning of the road is the end of the road, going the other direction; and the end is the beginning of action, since we act for the sake of an end. So end and axioms are analogous — a proportion.
  • Aside: Chesterton’s [ed.: transcript “Chester”] last words, “My end is my beginning” (attribution uncertain in recording).
  • On “speculative”: he dislikes the word; Shakespeare uses “looking,” and theōrētikē in Greek means a looking. “Got to move these words.” Montaigne on the man who can’t move the word; and this morning’s news magazine with a horrible use of the word “metaphysics,” nothing to do with its origin.

10. Where we stand (“now we know two things about what law is”) #

Law is something of reason, and for the common good — two parts of the definition; we are not yet able to define it. Next: “Can just anybody make the law?”

His words #

• beginning [ed.: principium, archē] — what the English translators render “principle”; equivocal by reason, in four ordered senses plus the causes.
• equivocal by reason — said in many senses with an order among them [ed.: analogous].
• discourse — “coming to know what you don’t know through what you do know.”
• looking reason — his preferred rendering of speculativa [ed.: speculative/theoretical reason], from Greek theōrētikē, “a looking.”
• Natural Hearing [ed.: Aristotle’s Physics].
• felicitas / beatitudo — happiness; felicitas from “fruitful,” beatitudo from “blessed.”
• maxime — “most of all,” not “alone.”
• community of a final cause — the way particulars are referred to the common good, as against community of genus or species.
• two or three, or both — his rule about divisions.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 90, a. 1, body (re-read).
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 90, a. 2 — three objections, sed contra, body, and three replies (read and translated throughout).
• Isidore, Etymologies V, quoted in obj. 3 and sed contra.
• Aristotle, Ethics V, definition of legal just things, quoted within the body.
• Aristotle, Politics I, the city as the perfect community, quoted within the body.

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics V (“the fifth book of wisdom”) — senses of “beginning” and of “end.”
• Aristotle, Physics II (nature’s existence); Physics VI (read last Tuesday).
• Aristotle, On the Soul — the acts of the mind; Poetic Art — plot.
• John 1:1.
• Augustine, Enchiridion; Thomas, Catechetical Instructions, Compendium of Theology, Summa Contra Gentiles (four books), commentaries on Matthew and John.
• Boethius, on axioms known through themselves.
• Shakespeare, Cymbeline; “reason is the ability for large discourse.”
• De Koninck, article on the paradox of becoming by contradiction (inferred title).

His questions #

• Why do they translate principium by “principle” rather than by “beginning”? — Because the English word has not been carried over to the later senses of archē/principium, as Latin and Greek were.
• How can both reason and the end be called the first beginning? — The reason is not the end; reason is the beginning as knowing the end and directing to it. (He leaves the puzzle at that.)
• What does “discourse” mean? — Coming to know what you don’t know through what you do know; its two kinds are defining and reasoning.
• How is sacred doctrine as a whole divided into two or three? — Into three by faith, hope, charity (and in SCG by God in Himself, as beginning, as end); into two by law and grace.
• How can one part direct the whole state to its own good? — By being more powerful: by military force, by wealth, or by numbers.
• What is the end to which law is directed? — The common good: the last end is happiness, and since the part is for the sake of the whole, law regards the common happiness.
• Why is the wise man’s judgment of the axioms superior to every man’s natural understanding of them? — He knows the terms are equivocal by reason, distinguishes and orders their senses, can defend the axioms against sophisms, and knows what is and is not an axiom.
• Can a man think he doesn’t know what he does know? — Yes; since one can think one knows what one doesn’t, one can err the other way too.
• Is the whole for the sake of the part, or the part for the sake of the whole? — The part for the whole; so the whole is the more ultimate end, and law orders particulars for the sake of the common good.
• Can just anybody make the law? — Left open; taken up next class.