Eternal Law, Part 1: Is the Eternal Law Known to All? Distinction, Before and After, and the Last Instant of Change

Orientation #

He opens with his morning reading in the Sentences, then says “we’re up to Article Two here, whether the eternal law is known to all,” continuing the treatise on the eternal law. At the end he asks “Can we finish the article,” and does, ending with the reply to the third objection. The neighbouring classes treat q. 93 on the eternal law (previous: a. 1; next: a. 3 and part of a. 5).

The class, in order #

1. The soul is not in the body as in a place (“two examples of false imagination”) #

From a Sentences article on the whole soul being in every part of the body, which quotes Augustine and Albert by name (he notes he has rarely seen Thomas name Albert).

• Objection reported: if the soul is in every part of the body, it is in two places at once. Thomas: the soul is not in the body as in a place, but as form in matter — two different senses of “in.”
• Two false imaginations behind the objection: (a) the soul in the body as in a place — Descartes putting it in a gland in the brain; (b) the soul’s indivisibility imagined like a point’s, the indivisible having position in the continuous. Thomas calls this “stupid”; he remarks how many people think of the soul that way.
• A second Sentences text: Thomas uses “imagine” for the act of the mind. Compare our using “see” for “understand” (first the eye’s act, then carried over); Hamlet’s “I see his father in my mind’s eye.” Imagination is in a way more like reason than sight is, because in imagining you form an image as in thinking you form a thought.

2. The three objections of a. 2 (“whether the eternal law is known to all”) #

• Obj. 1: 1 Cor 2:11, “the things which are of God no one knows except the Spirit of God”; the eternal law is a ratio existing in the divine mind; so it is known to God alone. (“That convinces me.”)
• Obj. 2: Augustine (De Libero Arbitrio): the eternal law is that by which it is just that all things be most ordered — a prototype of order, of before and after. But not all know in what way all things are most ordered (people think there can be no evil in the world if God is around). So not all know it.
• Obj. 3: Augustine (De Vera Religione): the eternal law is that about which men are not able to judge. But Ethics I: each one judges well what he knows. So it is not known to us. (“Again, it seems good to me.”)
• Sed contra: Augustine, the notion of the eternal law is impressed upon us.

3. Looking before and after includes distinction (“in order to understand Shakespeare’s definition”) #

He predicts Thomas will “look before and after” in the body. Since every division is a distinction and a definition is in a way a division (and has order in it), the ability to look before and after includes the ability to look for distinctions, divisions and definitions.

4. The body: in itself or in its effect (“in one way, in itself; in another way, in its effect”) #

• A thing is knowable in two ways: in itself, or in its effect, in which some likeness of it is found — as one not seeing the sun in its substance knows it in its irradiation.
• Therefore: no one can know the eternal law as it is in itself except the blessed, who see God through His essence (St John: they see Him as He is, face to face). But every rational creature knows it according to its irradiation, more or less.
• Reason: every knowledge of truth is a certain irradiation of and partaking in the eternal law, which is the unchangeable truth (Augustine). All in some way know truth, at least as to the common beginnings of the natural law; some partake more, some less, and so know the eternal law more or less.
• Aside on the word: “irradiation” is rays coming from the source, not “reflection,” which is bouncing off — sunlight through the window onto the floor. Yet we speak of reflecting on something; Chesterton on Oxford’s puddles and reflections (“a perfect place for a university”); his parish priest ends his “reflection” with a question.

5. Replies to the first two objections (“the invisible things of God, through the things which have been made”) #

• Ad 1: what is of God is not knowable in itself by us, but is made known in its effects — Rom 1:20 (a text used at Trent, he thinks).
• Ad 2: each knows the eternal law according to his capacity, but no one can comprehend it; it cannot be known totaliter through its effects. So the one who knows it in that way need not know the whole order by which all things are most ordered — bad things are ordered in a way hidden from us.

6. Three acts of reason and what discourse presupposes (“never affirm, seldom deny, always distinguish”) #

Prompted by ad 3’s “to judge can be understood in two ways” — Thomas always looking for distinctions. A Dominican’s teacher’s maxim annoyed him, but after years of reading Thomas he sees the point: don’t begin with yes or no, since in one way yes, in another no.

• Aristotle, De Anima III: first act of reason, understanding what something is (a square, a circle, a quadrilateral); second act, joining or separating (the square is not a circle; the circle is not a quadrilateral). He stops there. Thomas in the proemium to the Posterior Analytics adds a third act, reasoning — and reasoning is the discourse so characteristic of reason that it is named from reason. He was puzzled why Aristotle stops.
• His answer: the De Anima is part of natural philosophy, so Aristotle emphasises what we know naturally, not discourse.
• Argument that discourse presupposes non-discursive knowledge: discourse is coming to know what you don’t know through what you do know; if you knew A through B, B through C, and always through something else, you would never know anything. So in the ability for discourse is included the ability to understand some things naturally (what a whole is, what a part is, that the whole is larger than the part).
• Likewise: if reason can look before and after, and nothing is before or after itself (an axiom we naturally know), reason must be capable of looking for distinctions; and if capable of a large discourse, of a small one. “You have to look before and after to fully understand the excellence of Shakespeare’s definition.”

7. The eleven emotions of the De Veritate (“about eight” distinctions #

Read on vacation, in the De Veritate questions on the good and on the emotions. Why he wanted them as a young man: rhetoric (Aristotle on using the emotions to convince the crowd); poetics (the playwright represents people with emotions, and tragedy and comedy arouse emotions); music as a likeness of the emotions (Mozart’s letter to his father on representing Osmin’s anger in the Abduction from the Seraglio — a man losing control, but without ceasing to be music or displeasing the ear); ethics (courage, temperance are about the emotions). Three or four arts and sciences all needing the emotions; the De Veritate text is the key to all. The division (he and a student count the distinctions as “about eight,” like the number used to get the ten categories):

1. concupiscible (the agreeable/disagreeable as such to sense) vs. irascible (the difficulty of getting the agreeable or avoiding the disagreeable).
2. concupiscible divided by agreeable / disagreeable. 3–4. each into three: love (candy, as a little boy), then desire when you lack it, then joy when you have it; and hate (salmon you find disagreeable), aversion (turning from it on the menu), sadness when it is forced on you at a dinner party. 5+. irascible: good vs. bad; in the difficult good, hope or despair (arising after desire, according as you think you can or cannot overcome the difficulty); in the difficult bad, arising from aversion, fear or boldness (daring).

• The eleventh “oddball”: anger — someone standing on his toes and saying “so what,” or using his grandchildren for target practice; and if he succeeds in punishing the misdeed, satisfaction or joy.
• What he stresses: Thomas shows at the same time the distinctions and the order — liking giving rise to wanting and to joy, hope and fear arising from desire, anger arising from pain and leading to joy. “Magnificent.”

8. No last instant: Hegel, dying, the Eucharist, justification (“there’s no last instant in which you are alive”) #

From the Tuesday night class in Physics VI (“Natural Hearing”) and De Koninck’s article in French on becoming between contradictories.

• Hegel’s difficulty: clay not a sphere, later a sphere. There is a last instant in which it is not a sphere and a first in which it is; if these are different, in the time between it would neither be nor not be a sphere — impossible; so Hegel says they are the same instant, and then it both is and is not a sphere: a contradiction.
• Aristotle’s solution: in the time of becoming it becomes a sphere; at the end of that time it is. So there is a first instant in which it is a sphere, but no last instant in which it is not.
• Applied to dying: there is no last instant in which you are alive, only a first instant in which you are dead — when the activity of dying is completed, you are dead. (Also Physics VIII.)
• The medieval difficulty over the Eucharist: last instant of bread and first instant of the body; if the same instant, you have both bread and body together — heresy. Solution: no last instant in which it is bread (no last indivisible, though any last stretch of time you like), but a first instant in which it is the body; likewise wine and blood.
• The De Veritate last question, on grace: can you be freed of guilt without grace? No. Clever objection: last instant of guilt and first instant of grace cannot be the same (real contraries together), so they differ; in the time between you are neither in guilt nor in grace, so you were freed of guilt without grace. Thomas gives three historical attempts and says of each “this cannot stand” — e.g. that the same now has guilt as end of the past and grace as beginning of the future; Thomas: it is still one now. He solves it as in the Eucharist case, from Aristotle, Physics VIII: no last instant of guilt, a first instant of grace.
• He stresses: first and last are defined by before and after; Aristotle’s accomplishment of looking before and after “in a very subtle way” that Hegel and the medieval theologians could not, touching the two chief sacraments (the greatest, the Eucharist; the most common, confession — and baptism the same).

9. Why error spreads: reading badly and wanting to believe (“we all really wanted to believe it”) #

Student: did Hegel miss this in Aristotle, or was there a gap in his education? — “At least a gap in his understanding”; it depends how thoroughly they read. De Koninck’s joke that they read Aristotle’s Physics “on weekends” at Columbia. Warren Murray’s professor at Minnesota saying what Aristotle did not say — that he looked for the four causes everywhere, though he would not look for the purpose of a right-angled triangle. Students’ parallels: a Roman document reported as saying the exact opposite of what it says; a Jesuit at a parish meeting doing the same, who took the correction as “the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

• Why Hegel had such impact: “it appeals to imagination”; people want to believe it; and Hegel is fun to read, good on the fine arts, ordering them and seeing music above painting.
• Student: Margaret Mead’s Samoa study, exposed as bogus, caught on because “we all really wanted to believe it.” He agrees, citing Pius XII (quoted in the Catechism): because of the fall and the corruption of the will, what is difficult to understand we easily persuade ourselves is doubtful or untrue, because we do not want it to be true.
• Feuerbach’s syllogism: man’s mind is infinite; the infinite is God; therefore man’s mind is God — “Thomas: this is stupid.” Marx and Engels became enthusiastic Feuerbachians; the pride “smoking” in Marx’s doctoral-thesis introduction, against anyone who does not admit the human mind to be the highest divinity.
• Asides: bishops gathering before the synod to push homosexual marriage and women’s ordination, though John Paul II’s teaching on the male priesthood is de fide; Belloc on the Germanic countries becoming Arian rather than Christian, and Fr Hardon saying the same; synods and councils as the most violent gatherings of Christians (a bishop back from the 1990s synod on religious life: “I’ve never been so insulted in all my life”); “that’s why they stopped wearing beards”; Newman declining Vatican I, his temperament not up to it.

10. Reply to the third objection: two senses of judging (“does not the ear judge the words”) #

• (a) As a knowing power judges its own object — Job 12: does not the ear judge words, and the throat the savour of the one eating? In this sense the Philosopher says each one judges well what he knows, judging whether what is proposed is true.
• (b) As the higher judges the lower by a practical judgment, whether it ought to be so or not. In this sense no one can judge about the eternal law.
• His example, taken from the student’s marriage remark: whether a marriage is to be annulled as invalid is not for the married parties to judge, even though in some sense they know more about their marriage.
• Aside (from the preceding chat): marriage as “a dead end — there’s no way out,” and the man at the hardware store who called death “the ultimate divorce” — no, dissolution, not an untying of the knot; where would the last instant of being free be?

His words #

• “False imagination” — imagining the soul as in a place, or as indivisible like a point.
• “In” — two senses distinguished: as in a place vs. as form in matter.
• “Ratio” — rendered “a certain thought, or something thought of, existing in the divine mind.”
• “Most ordered” / “prototype of order, before and after” — his gloss on Augustine’s definition.
• “Irradiation” — rays coming from the source (not reflection, which bounces off); the translation renders it “reflection.”
• “Totaliter” — entirely; the eternal law cannot be known entirely through its effects.
• “Comprehend” — to know entirely, as opposed to knowing according to one’s capacity.
• “Discourse” — coming to know what you don’t know through what you do know; Shakespeare’s word, including what reason knows naturally.
• “Natural Hearing” [ed.: Aristotle’s Physics].
• “Looking before and after” — Shakespeare’s phrase for reason, including distinction, division, definition, and first and last.
• “Concupiscible” / “irascible” — the agreeable-disagreeable as such vs. the difficulty of attaining or avoiding.
• “Oddball” — his name for anger, the eleventh emotion, fitting no pair.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, ST I-II, q. 93, a. 2 (objections, sed contra, body, replies) — the spine of the class.
• Augustine, De Libero Arbitrio (definition of eternal law; its notion impressed on us) and De Vera Religione (men cannot judge it; unchangeable truth) — as quoted in the article.
• 1 Cor 2:11; Rom 1:20; Job 12 — as quoted in the article.
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I — each judges well what he knows.

Mentioned

• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Sentences: the whole soul in every part of the body; a text using “imagine” of the mind.
• Aristotle, De Anima III (two acts of reason); Thomas, proemium to the Posterior Analytics (the third act).
• Thomas, De Veritate: the question on the good, the questions on the emotions, the last question, on grace.
• Aristotle, Physics VI and VIII (becoming between contradictories); De Koninck’s French article in the Revue (inferred title uncertain).
• Shakespeare, Hamlet (the mind’s eye; the definition of reason as looking before and after).
• Mozart’s letter to his father on Osmin’s anger; Chesterton on Oxford; Pius XII quoted in the Catechism; Feuerbach; Hegel on the fine arts; Belloc.

His questions #

• Is the eternal law known to all? Not in itself, except by the blessed who see God through His essence; but every rational creature knows it in its irradiation, more or less.
• In which of the two ways do we know Sophia — in herself or in her effect? In her effect (the picture of her cooking).
• How could you say “irradiation” in a less Latinized word? Not “reflection” (that is bouncing off) but rays shining from the source; the translation nevertheless has “reflection.”
• Why does Aristotle in the De Anima give only two acts of reason and not discourse? Because the De Anima is natural philosophy, emphasising what we know naturally; Thomas adds the third act in the logic proemium.
• Can discourse go on forever, knowing A through B, B through C? No; then you would never know anything, so reason must know some things naturally.
• How many distinctions does Thomas use to get the eleven emotions? About eight (as with the ten categories).
• Are the last instant in which it is not a sphere and the first in which it is the same instant? Neither: there is no last instant of not being a sphere, only a first instant of being one.
• Are the last instant of bread and the first instant of the body the same? No — that would be heretical; there is no last instant in which it is bread.
• Did Hegel miss this in Aristotle, or was it a gap in his education? At least a gap in his understanding; it depends how thoroughly one reads.
• How could Hegel have such an impact on such erroneous foundations? It appeals to the imagination, and people want to believe it — Pius XII on the corrupted will judging the difficult truth doubtful.
• In which sense can no one judge about the eternal law? In the second: as a higher judging a lower by practical judgment whether it ought to be so.