Dividing in Twos and Threes, and the Acts of Law: Command, Prohibit, Permit, Punish (ST I-II q.92 a.2)

Orientation #

He picks up where the class left off in the treatise on law and goes to q. 92, a. 2; at the end he says the next step is to take up the laws “one by one, in particular.” A long preamble first, on dividing into two and three. The neighbouring classes treat the division of divine law and the effect of law (prev. lecture) and the eternal law in q. 93.

The class, in order #

1. The arguments for God as divisions of two and three (“so it’s two divisions of two and one of three”) #

Point: the Contra Gentiles and the Summa Theologiae prove God’s existence by the same three causes, differing only in which is subdivided.

• Three kinds of cause at issue, distinguished by their effect, each a kind of act: mover → motion; maker → form; and being/existence. Examples: I am able to be in motion, but actually in motion when I walk; wood is able to be a chair, actually a chair when it has the form; in God substance and being are the same, in creatures different, since they get existence from God.
• Contra Gentiles: two arguments from motion, one from the maker, one tied to being. Summa Theologiae: the argument from being is the one divided in two. In both, the fifth argument stands against the first four.

2. Why there are ten categories (“or by reason of something outside of it”) #

Point: the ten are reached by about eight successive divisions into two or three, so the mind can grasp them.

• First division into three: something is said of a thing (a) by what it is — man said of you; (b) by something added but in you — cook, geometer, health; (c) by something outside — clothed. Boundary case: health is not what you are (sometimes sick), but is in you; clothing is neither.
• Substance is left undivided (not three higher genera). The second member divides absolute against relative, then absolute into quantity (size) and quality (disposition).
• Of the remaining six, one — being clothed — is set apart as man’s own category: other animals are supplied by nature with fur, and are clothed only when we dress them (a kitty-cat costume, a blanket on a dog in winter).
• The other five: those based on an extrinsic measure — place, position, time (time already has order, so needs no further category) — and acting/undergoing. Position is the arrangement of one’s parts in place, hence extrinsic: jumping from an airplane my body has the shape of a standing man but I am not standing, for I need something to stand on; “the difference between sitting and squatting.” Acting and undergoing: kicking / being kicked, shoving / being shoved.
• Asides: Heisenberg — a physical system always needs three units, however chosen; and with light-speed and Planck’s quantum there must be a third constant. A student objects that recent research says light’s speed may not be constant.

3. Other twos and threes (“so you divide into two or three”) #

• Thomas divides the Bible in two on John’s “the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ”: the Old by law, the New by grace — grace’s origin (Gospels), nature (Paul’s epistles), effect, the Church, itself threefold: origin (Acts), growth (canonical epistles), final state (Apocalypse). Vatican II’s division of the New Testament touches on this.
• Aristotle divides the play into beginning, middle, end, and later into two: tying and untying the knot — as in the third book of wisdom on dialectic. That is what Thomas does in each article: he ties you into knots at the start and unties them in the replies, on the basis of the body.
• His own doctoral thesis: three roads in our knowledge — the natural road from sense into reason; the common road of reasoned-out knowledge, studied in logic; the private roads proper to each science. Defining, judging and the order of determination differ in natural philosophy, geometry and wisdom. Natural philosophy goes from general to particular and toward matter; wisdom the opposite. Example: wisdom book IX takes act and ability first in motion, then expands act to form and operation — less universal to more; books VII–VIII take material substance first, then ascend to substance in general, preparing for immaterial substance so far as our weak mind can know it.

4. The article and its four objections (“whether the acts of law are suitably assigned”) #

The four assigned acts: to command, to prohibit, to permit, to punish.

1. Every law is a common precept (the legis consultus); to command is the same as to precept; so the other three are superfluous.
2. Law’s effect is to lead subjects to the good, and counsel is about a greater good than precept; so law should rather counsel than command. (The young man who asked what more he could do, and was flattened by Christ’s suggestion.)
3. Men are incited to good by rewards as by punishments; so rewarding should be an act of law as much as punishing. “That makes sense to me — because I’m only a nitwit, you know, not a wit.”
4. The legislator intends to make men good; but he who obeys only from fear of punishment is not good — servile fear, says Augustine, makes a man do what is good but not do it well. So punishing is not proper to law. (Illustration: the man with the gun behind you, better a dead hero than a dead coward; he has heard even Washington threaten this once.)

• Sed contra: Isidore, Etymologies V — every law either permits, or commands the strong man to ask a reward, or forbids (no one may ask marriage of the sacred virgins — the Romans too had sacred virgins), or punishes (he who commits murder is beheaded, capite plectatur).

5. The body: law as a saying of reason leading from something to something (“just as in the demonstrative sciences”) #

1. As an enunciation is a saying of reason by way of enunciating, law is a saying of reason by way of commanding. He prefers plain English: “statement” rather than “enunciation”; enunciating belongs rather to looking reason, commanding to practical.
2. It is proper to reason to lead one into something from something — reason is discourse, from one thing to another (the definition their “teacher, the wit Shakespeare,” gives). In logic the discourses chiefly studied are defining and reasoning; in calculation you are led from one number to another.
3. So as in the demonstrative sciences reason is led to assent to the conclusion through certain beginnings, so one is led to assent to the precept of the law through something.

• Aside on “demonstration”: from showing, as the Greek apodeixis. “Show me” of Missouri — American pragmatism at its best, says a student. Aristotle’s definition: a syllogism making us know the cause, and that it is the cause, and that it cannot be otherwise; such are in geometry and arithmetic, but there are demonstrations elsewhere. The calculus professor who used the Pythagorean theorem, could not teach calculus without it, and had few students who could demonstrate it: “what are you doing?”

6. Three differences of human acts, and the three acts of law (“some acts are good from their genus”) #

• Good in kind = acts of the virtues; of these law commands (praecipere vel imperare, which he takes as synonyms) — “the law commands the acts of all the virtues,” Ethics V, the book on justice. Our laws are imperfect but do this: laws against driving under the influence and rape (temperance), against unpaid debts and robbery (justice), against cowardice in battle (court-martial; Patton cursing “yellow-bellied cowards,” so strongly that Eisenhower made him apologise).
• Bad in kind = acts of the vices opposed to the virtues; these law prohibits. He says “a cowardly act is opposed to the virtue of justice” — a slip for courage. Note: two vices oppose each virtue — foolhardiness and cowardice against courage; against temperance the defect is so rare Aristotle says it has no name (“call him a puritan”), so “intemperance” means the excess. Hence more bad acts are possible than good.
• Indifferent in kind: law neither commands nor prohibits but permits.

7. Punishing set against the other three (“that fourth one stands against the other three”) #

Point: the first three exhaust what can be said of the act itself — must do, must not do, may do — so the fourth is of another sort: that through which the law leads men into obeying, namely fear of punishment, where the law gets its strength. Needed especially for those not good, or too young to see why obeying is good.

• Confirming distinction: prohibiting is not the same as punishing.
• Driving stories: twelve hours Williamsburg to Shrewsbury; everyone five or ten miles over the limit; the trooper who stopped him coming from Quebec, took him for a drinker because of night-driving eyes, and sent him to Dunkin’ Donuts. Watching a Worcester cop spot things — his wife’s friend married to a cop could tell a prostitute at a glance; but brain-injured people are sometimes mistaken for drunks.
• Aside on rational philosophy in the broad sense: the mind is led from the certain to the certain (demonstration), from opinion to the probable (dialectic, belief without certainty), to a suspicion (rhetoric, weaker still), and in poetry one is led to conclude by the way a thing is represented — almost illogical: are young lovers so because Shakespeare represented them so, or did he represent them well because of what we know of real lovers? People are led by a likeness — wartime Hollywood films showing Russians going happily to church.
• Childhood illustration of punishment: spinning the stools in Aunt Helen’s store in Watertown, Minnesota, till the town’s one cop said “I guess we can put him in jail for a day.” “Boy, did I sober up.”

8. Reply 1: precept taken largely (“taking precept largely, law is said to be a precept”) #

To restrain from evil has the aspect of good, so prohibition has something of command; taking precept largely, every law is a precept. Strictly, we command what is to be done and prohibit what is not: the Ten Commandments command honouring father and mother, but rather prohibit murder, theft, adultery.

• Parallel from the question on liberum arbitrium: whether beasts have it; whether God has it. Objection — reason is discourse, God has none, so no free choice. Thomas: reason taken largely is the immaterial knowing power, understanding; strictly it is the ability for discourse, which man alone has — too high for the beast, too low for angels and God. Yet Dionysius lists “reason” among the divine names, taken in the large sense.
• “It’s always a problem in these arguments because the words are sometimes taken strictly and sometimes in a looser way.” So with “knowledge”: strictly, being certain. A student raises Orwell on the vulgarisation of language by political and socialist jargon, communism most virulent; he agrees misuse of words is entrenched in the West. His own examples: “we all know the earth turns on its axis” — but we still say the sun rises, and most take it on common opinion, not evidence; “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” would have been unintelligible in slave-owning Rome or Athens; and “we all know” about global warming. A student cites Weather Underground on a warm planetary year despite a cold northern hemisphere; he doubts whether it is propaganda, and whether warming, if real, is human-caused or one of history’s natural trends.

9. Replies 2–4: counsel, reward, and whether punishing makes men good (“ego dico, non Dominus”) #

• Reply 2: to counsel is not the proper act of law; it can belong also to a private person who has no power to establish law — as Paul, giving a counsel in 1 Corinthians, says “ego dico, non Dominus.” Hence counsel is not among law’s effects. Examples: which college to attend; whom to marry — his mother: “you’re of age, you can make up your mind, but my mother’s got a right to say whether she thinks this girl’s right for you.”
• Reply 3: rewarding can pertain to anyone (a school prize), but punishing only to the minister of the law, by whose authority punishment is inflicted; so only punishing is an act of law. Test case: driving on the wrong side of a two-way street is punished, but nobody is congratulated for driving on the right side. Parking violation punished less than a moving violation, as more dangerous. Privately, parents reward an A or a B — champagne for his A in math, of which he was too young to drink much; and the candy counter downtown if he did not drive his mother crazy while shopping.
• Reply 4: by beginning to avoid evils and do good from fear of punishment, a man is sometimes brought to the point where he enjoys it and does it from his own will — a student adds, “has the habit of it.” So law by punishing does lead men to become good: “so it’s not entirely a dead end, like the argument was trying to say.”

His words #

• “looking reason” [ed.: speculative reason]; contrasted with practical reason.
• “statement” — his preferred English for enunciatio, a saying of reason by way of enunciating.
• “ability” [ed.: potency] — as in “act and ability” in book IX of wisdom.
• “wisdom” [ed.: the Metaphysics], cited by book (III, VII–VIII, IX).
• “the wit Shakespeare” — his standing name for the poet, source of “discourse” as reason’s definition.
• praecipere vel imperare — “to command,” which he treats as synonyms Thomas takes as synonyms; he doubts English has two words.
• “precept taken largely” / “strictly” — the broad and strict senses of a word, his recurring tool.
• liberum arbitrium — free choice; reason taken largely as the immaterial knowing power.
• apodeixis — Greek for demonstration, from “showing.”
• “the legis consultus” — the authority cited in objection 1 that every law is a common precept.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 92, a. 2 — objections, sed contra (Isidore, Etymologies V), body, replies 1–4.
• Thomas Aquinas, on liberum arbitrium, first and third articles, paraphrased from that morning’s reading (ST I, q. 83, inferred).

Mentioned

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles and the five ways of the Summa Theologiae.
• Aristotle, Categories (the ten genera, by division).
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics V (law commands the acts of all the virtues); also on courage, foolhardiness, cowardice, and the nameless defect of temperance.
• Aristotle, Metaphysics III, VII–VIII, IX.
• Aristotle, Poetics (beginning, middle, end; tying and untying) (inferred).
• Augustine, on servile fear.
• Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names.
• John’s Gospel (“the law was given by Moses…”); 1 Corinthians; the Ten Commandments; Acts, canonical epistles, Apocalypse; Vatican II on the New Testament.
• Heisenberg on three units in a physical system; Orwell on the corruption of language; the Declaration of Independence.

His questions #

• Why should there be ten categories — can the human mind understand a division into ten? No: they come by about eight successive divisions into two or three.
• Is clothing part of what you are, or in you as your geometry is? Neither — hence a separate category, and man’s own.
• Am I standing if I jump out of an airplane? No: the intrinsic arrangement is the same, but standing requires something outside to stand on.
• What is the definition of reason that Shakespeare gives? Discourse — going from one thing to another.
• How many acts does he have in the body of the article, and are they of one kind? Four, but three (command, prohibit, permit) cover the act itself; punishing stands apart as what leads to obedience.
• Is prohibiting the same as punishing? No.
• Do the Ten Commandments command us not to murder, or prohibit it? Strictly they prohibit; taking precept largely, prohibition has something of a command.
• Does the law reward you for driving on the right side of the street? No — rewarding belongs to anyone, punishing only to the minister of the law.
• Can punishing make men good, since servile fear does not make one act well? Yes indirectly: habituated by fear, a man may come to enjoy the good and do it from his own will.
• Do we all really know that the earth turns on its axis? Left open — most hold it as common opinion, without the evidence.