Aquinas on Law, Part 1: Who Is Subject to the Eternal Law, and Is the Natural Law a Habit? (Q93 a6, Q94 a1)

Orientation #

He opens directly with “Article Six, I guess, Question Ninety-Three,” finishing q. 93, then announces “Now we got to the natural law” and begins q. 94, listing its six articles. Verified sources confirm q. 93 a. 6 and q. 94 a. 1 as the texts read. The previous class worked through earlier articles of q. 93 on law derived from the eternal law.

The class, in order #

1. The three objections of q. 93 a. 6 (“not all human things are subject to the eternal law”) #

Point: three texts seem to exempt some men from eternal law.

1. Galatians: “If we are led by the Spirit, we are not under the law”; the just, sons of God by adoption (Romans 8), are led by the Spirit — therefore not under the eternal law. He comments: “People have abused that text”; “That seems like an equivocation.”
2. Romans 8: “the prudence of the flesh is an enemy to God, and therefore is not subject to the law of God” — and in many men the prudence of the flesh dominates.
3. Augustine, De libero arbitrio I: eternal law is that by which the bad merit misery and the good eternal life; but the beatified and the damned are no longer in a state of meriting.

Sed contra: Augustine, City of God XIX — in no way is anything subtracted from the laws of the highest Creator and orderer, from which the peace of the universe is ministered, peace being tranquility of order. He adds the tag “sapientis est ordinare.”

Asides: on “Son of God” — at Matthew 16 Peter’s confession is rewarded because he means the unique divine Son, not the broad sense in which Nathanael or we may be called sons. On the second objection: “no news is good news,” the reverse of what the radio gives; the men arrested in Massachusetts for beheading policemen in honour of ISIS.

2. The body: two ways of being subject, and how good and bad stand (“by way of knowledge… by way of acting and undergoing”) #

Point: rational creatures are subject in both ways; the bad make up by undergoing what they fail in acting.

• Two modes of subjection: (a) partaking the eternal law by way of knowledge; (b) by way of acting and undergoing, partaking it as from a mover. Irrational creatures have only the second.
• Rational nature has both, since it has some notion of the eternal law, and a natural inclination to what agrees with it — Aristotle, Ethics II, we are inborn to having virtues; Cicero likewise on the natural mode. He remarks the inclination today is “kind of hidden… covered.”
• In the bad both are corrupt: the inclination depraved by vicious habit, the natural knowledge of the good darkened by passions and habits of sin.
• In the good both are perfected from above: knowledge of faith and of wisdom above natural knowledge (he glosses: “a gift of the Holy Spirit”), and an inward mover of grace above the natural inclination (“I suppose this is infused virtue”).
• Conclusion: the good are perfectly under the eternal law, always acting according to it; the bad imperfectly as to action, but what is lacking on the side of action is supplied on the side of passion/undergoing, insofar as they suffer what the eternal law dictates about them. Augustine, De libero arbitrio; and De catechizandis rudibus: God, having mercy, by suitable laws knows how to adorn the lower parts of his creature — “just a strange quote there.”

3. Replies to the three objections (“that word of the apostle can be understood in two ways”) #

• To 1, two readings: (i) “under the law” means one unwilling, subject to it as to a weight — the gloss: under the law is he who abstains from evil by fear of threatened punishment, not by love of justice; spiritual men, having charity poured in by the Holy Spirit, fulfil the law voluntarily and so are not under that weight. (ii) Works done by the Holy Spirit are more the Spirit’s than the man’s, and the Spirit is not under the law, any more than the Son; 2 Corinthians 3, “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.” His gloss: “you freely obey the law, so you don’t seem to be under the law.”
• To 2: prudence of the flesh cannot be subject on the side of action, since it inclines to what is contrary; it is subject on the side of undergoing, meriting punishment by divine justice. And in no man is it so dominant as to corrupt the whole good of nature — sin diminishes but does not destroy it.
• To 3: the same thing preserves in an end by which one is moved to it — the heavy body rests below by the same weight by which it moved there. So by the same eternal law by which some merit beatitude or misery they are preserved in it; both blessed and damned are subject.

Asides: the old schoolteacher’s last category of evaluating a student, “me prodding.” Maximilian Kolbe on Jeremiah’s question why the wicked prosper: nobody is so bad he never did any good, so God rewards the damned in this life, their only time for reward; and nobody is so just he never did wrong, so God speeds the punishment of the just here to shorten purgatory. On Hebrews’ definition of faith as “the substance of things hoped for” — substantia, Greek hypostasis, standing under, i.e. foundation: so beatitude already has a foundation in us; argumentum he would render “conviction.”

4. Turning to natural law, and the six articles (“Now we got to the natural law”) #

Point: q. 94’s plan. He notes Thomas’s order is the reverse of Aristotle’s, who in the Rhetoric treats human law first and then natural law — “these people are more aware of the human law.” The six questions: (1) what natural law is; (2) its precepts; (3) whether all acts of virtue fall under it; (4) whether it is one among all peoples; (5) whether it is changeable; (6) whether it can be deleted from men’s minds. Note: he first says “four things are asked,” corrects himself to six.

Asides: driving up, no natural-law signs but a 45 mph sign and a policeman behind him. A student on the Framers: they assumed the system needs a virtuous citizenry, and in a hedonistic society without virtue the laws must change to rule by fear of punishment rather than cheerful obedience from love of virtue. He answers with Thomas’s concise word: virtue is the road to happiness, vice the road to misery.

5. Objections of q. 94 a. 1: is natural law a habit? (“there are three things in the soul”) #

1. Ethics II: three things in the soul — power, habit, passion; natural law is not a power nor a passion (clear by enumerating one by one); therefore a habit. He notes the form: a division into three with two eliminated.
2. Basil: conscience or synderesis is the law of our understanding, which can only mean natural law; synderesis is a habit (Prima Pars); therefore natural law is a habit. He glosses synderesis as the natural knowledge in the practical order, in the order of prudence — e.g. “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” which children have no answer to when asked how they would like it done to them.
3. Natural law always remains in man, but man’s reason does not always think about it; therefore it is not an act but a habit.

Sed contra: Augustine, De bono coniugali — a habit is that by which something is done when necessary; but natural law is found in little ones and in the damned, who cannot act by it.

6. The body: habit properly, and habit as what is held (“it is not the same that someone acts and that by which someone acts”) #

Point: not a habit properly; a habit only in the sense of what is held habitually.

1. Properly and essentially, no: natural law is something constituted by reason, as a proposition is a work of reason.
2. Reason: habit is that by which someone acts, and it is not the same to act and to be that by which one acts — by the habit of grammar one makes suitable speech. So no law can be a habit properly.
3. In another way, “habit” names what is held by habit — as “faith” names what is believed. He notes the ambiguity: is our faith the habit or the things we believe? (the profession “this is our faith” at Easter).
4. Since the precepts of natural law are sometimes actually considered by reason and sometimes present only habitually, in this way natural law can be called a habit. Comparison: the indemonstrable principles of speculative matters, as Boethius says, are not the habit of principles but the principles of which there is a habit.

Aside on terminology: Thomas has “picked up this bad habit” of calling a statement a proposition; a proposition is properly a premise, something placed before for something; “I prefer calling a statement.”

7. Reply to 1 and 2; what natural law is (“the philosopher intends there to investigate the genus of virtue”) #

• To 1: Aristotle there seeks the genus of virtue; since virtue is a beginning of act, he lists only beginnings of human acts — powers, habits, passions. Besides these there are other things in the soul: acts (to will is in the one willing, things known are in the knower) and natural properties such as immortality. So he asks: is not natural law something known in the knower? — hence not a habit.
• To 2: synderesis is called the law of our understanding insofar as it is a habit containing the precepts of natural law, the first beginnings of human deeds — just as Aristotle’s nous, Thomas’s intellectus, which he renders “natural understanding,” is the habit of things known naturally, e.g. that something cannot both be and not be. “Although the sophists can make you kind of wonder.”

8. Digression: can you talk about nothing? (“nothing is more true than a thing is said to be itself”) #

Point: negations have some sense of being, so true statements can be made about nothing.

• His boyhood wondering what it would be like if there were absolutely nothing — but then there would be nobody and no imagination to imagine it; can you imagine nothing?
• The puzzle: the average man says nothing is the opposite of something, hence not something. But Boethius: nothing is more true than that a thing is said to be itself (a dog is a dog, a rose is a rose); so “nothing is nothing” is true, and “nothing is the opposite of something” is true — so nothing must be something: a contradiction.
• English ambiguity: “he said nothing” may mean he did not say anything, or that he said something true about nothing.
• Resolution from Thomas on Metaphysics IV (inferred), where Aristotle shows the subject of wisdom is being and gives many meanings; Thomas reduces them to four: (i) substance — a man, a dog; (ii) accident — shape, health, sitting, being in this room; among accidents some may be more real than others; (iii) coming to be, and ceasing to be — a way of being, but by diminution, since you have not arrived at being; (iv) nothing, ignorance, negations. In this fourth sense nothing is something. Confirmation from usage: “someone is blind,” “someone is ignorant.”
• A student: we cannot even think non-being except in terms of being. Another recalls a book by a psychiatrist (he names Rabbi Jonathan Sacks; [ed.: the stories described are Oliver Sacks’s]) about a woman catatonic for twenty years who had been trying to think about nothing by repeating “nothing, nothing, nothing.”

9. Digression: does God know evils? (“by knowing himself, he knows the good in things”) #

Point: God knows evil second, through the good it lacks. Objections from the Sentences article:

1. Knowing is either by being the cause of what one knows or by the thing acting on the knower; God does not know by things acting on him; and God is not the cause of evils; therefore God does not know evils.
2. Knowledge is by likeness, and the likeness of the known must be in the knower (as in imagining); there is no likeness of God to the bad, since he is perfectly good.

• Averroes in fact held that God does not know evils; he jokes that this might be Averroes’ account of God’s happiness — after all this bad news, he knows nothing bad.
• Root in Empedocles: by earth we know earth, water water, air air, fire fire, love love, hate hate — because we have these in us. He supports the principle: if the mind cannot grasp a thing it cannot know it, and to grasp is to have it in hand. Empedocles concluded that God, being incorruptible and indivisible, has no hate (hate separates, love unites), and so does not know hate — whence we would know something God does not. Aristotle criticises this in On the Soul III (he first says the second book) and in the Metaphysics.
• A student: because evil is a negation, an absence. His answer: God by knowing himself knows all the good he has made, and by knowing that good knows its opposite — so evil is known second, not first. If God knew only himself he would know badness only in some general way as opposed to his goodness, not this man’s sickness or ignorance; he must know the health and the knowledge to know the sickness and the ignorance opposed. And this is no discourse in God, as though he knew premises and one day put them together: knowing himself he always knows the good, and knowing the good always knows the evil — “but we have to go further.”
• Application: they call homosexual unions marriage; people do not know what a marriage is, therefore they do not know that this thing is not a marriage.
• His own question: who knows the student’s ignorance better, student or professor? If the professor knows what the student does not know, he knows it better; and if you do not know what you do not know, there is no direct way to know your own ignorance, only a roundabout one. A student adds Noah, who did not know his measure of wine.

10. Reply to the third objection, and the conclusion (“habitually within us… not able to use on account of some impediment”) #

• To 3: the argument concludes only that natural law is held habitually — and that is not the same thing: “If I grasp the thing, my hand is not what is grasped.”
• To the sed contra: what is within us habitually sometimes cannot be used because of an impediment — a man cannot use the habit of science while asleep, and the boy cannot use the habit of understanding of beginnings, or the natural law within him, because of the defect of age.
• “The conclusion then to this first article is not that the natural law is the habit, but that it’s held by this natural habit.”

His words #

• Sapientis est ordinare — his tag on the sed contra of q. 93 a. 6: it belongs to the wise man to order.
• “way of undergoing” — subjection to law by suffering what it dictates [ed.: passion, as against action].
• “inborn to having virtues” — his rendering of Aristotle, Ethics II, on our natural aptitude for virtue.
• “beginnings” / “principia” — [ed.: principles], used for the indemonstrable first principles.
• “statement” — his preferred word for what Thomas calls propositio; a proposition properly is a premise, placed before for something.
• “synderesis” — the natural knowledge in the practical order, the order of prudence; a habit containing the precepts of natural law.
• “natural understanding” — his rendering of Aristotle’s nous, Thomas’s intellectus: the habit of things known naturally.
• “hypostasis” — Greek answering etymologically to substantia, to stand under; hence faith as “substance of things hoped for” means foundation.
• “argumentum” — in the definition of faith, which he would translate “conviction.”
• “discourse in God” — denied: God does not reason from premises to conclusion.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 93, a. 6 — objections, sed contra, body, replies (complete).
• Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 94, prologue (the six articles) and a. 1 — objections, sed contra, body, replies (complete).
• Augustine, De libero arbitrio I (cited twice within the articles); De civitate Dei XIX; De catechizandis rudibus; De bono coniugali.
• Galatians (“led by the Spirit”); Romans 8; 2 Corinthians 3.
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics II (three things in the soul; inborn to virtue).

Mentioned

• Matthew 16 (Peter’s confession); Hebrews (definition of faith).
• Cicero, on the natural mode of inclination to virtue.
• Basil, on conscience or synderesis as the law of our understanding.
• Boethius, on the habit of first principles; and “nothing is more true than that a thing is said to be itself.”
• Aristotle, Rhetoric (human law before natural law); Metaphysics IV (inferred), on being; On the Soul III, against Empedocles.
• Empedocles, fragment: by earth we know earth, etc.
• Averroes, that God does not know evils.
• Aquinas, Scriptum super Sententiis, article whether God knows evils.
• Aquinas, Prima Pars, that synderesis is a habit.

His questions #

• Are all men subject to the eternal law? Yes — the good perfectly, by acting according to it; the bad imperfectly in action but under it by undergoing.
• Are the blessed and the damned under the eternal law, since they no longer merit? Yes: the same law that moved them to beatitude or misery preserves them in it, as weight both moves and rests the heavy body.
• Is natural law a habit? Not properly — it is constituted by reason, and habit is that by which one acts; but it is a habit in the sense of what is held habitually.
• Is the natural law something known in the knower? Yes — it belongs among acts and things known, not among powers, habits and passions.
• Can you talk about nothing, or is that simply not talking about anything? You can say true things about it (“nothing is nothing”), because in the fourth sense of being, negations are called beings.
• Is nothing something? In the fourth sense of being, yes; not in the sense of substance or accident.
• Does God know evils? Yes, but second: knowing himself he knows the good in things, and knowing the good he knows the evil opposed to it.
• Who knows the student’s ignorance better, the student or the professor? The professor, who knows what the student does not; one’s own ignorance is knowable only in a roundabout way.
• Is it really possible to know your own ignorance? Not directly — left open beyond “kind of in a roundabout way.”