Aquinas on Law, Part 2: The Precepts of the Natural Law, Virtuous Acts, and Whether the Natural Law Is the Same for Everyone (Q94 a2–4)

Orientation #

He picks up in the middle of q. 94, beginning with article 2 (“The second one proceeds thus”), and carries the class through articles 3 and 4, ending “Where we should stop.” He notes in passing that he mentioned the instant-of-becoming argument “last time” and that “what is worth saying can be said more than once.” The previous class covered q. 93’s last article and q. 94 a. 1 (whether natural law is a habit). (context only)

The class, in order #

1. Objections to many precepts (“it seems that the natural law does not contain many precepts”) #

Point: three objections that the natural law has one precept only.

1. Law is in the genus of precept; many precepts would mean many natural laws (“you have your natural law, and I have mine” — as Falstaff said, “I’ve got more flesh, and therefore”).
2. Natural law follows human nature; human nature is one as a whole though multiple in parts — so either one precept (whole) or many according to the parts, and then even the inclinations of the concupiscible would pertain to natural law (“just doing what comes natural”).
3. Law pertains to reason; reason in man is one; therefore one precept.

He flags at the outset the parallel with Aristotle’s nous / Thomas’s intellectus — “natural understanding” (his translation), the habit opposed to reasoned-out understanding, science: many things are naturally understood, but the natural beginning of all is that something cannot both be and not be at once and in the same way.

2. Sed contra and the tool of proportion (“he’s arguing there from a what proportion”) #

Sed contra: as the precepts of natural law stand to doable things, so the first beginnings of demonstrations stand to demonstrations; those first indemonstrable beginnings are many (Euclid’s five or so axioms: equals to the same are equal to each other; equals subtracted from equals leave equals; the whole is more than the part); therefore the precepts are many. Synderesis is to the practical what natural understanding is to the looking (speculative) knowledge.

Digression on proportion, which he says he once made the whole matter of a senior seminar, each student taking proportions in one part of philosophy:

• definition : simple unknown :: demonstration (argument) : complex unknown;
• virtue of a knife is sharpness, enabling its own work well — so with the virtue of man, of the eye;
• first matter is known by proportion: first matter : man and dog :: clay : sphere and cube (Aristotle);
• likeness is a tool of dialectic, exercised especially in likeness of proportions; the most beautiful metaphors are from proportion (Poetics) — “like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, so do our minutes hasten to their end”;
• proportion is “a likeness of ratios”: 4:6 like 2:3 (think 4 as two twos, 6 as three twos); a student’s hesitation about 4:3 and 3:2 is corrected — 6:4 is like 3:2. Euclid V–VI are “the proportional books.”
• Physicists say the most useful thing for finding a new hypothesis is a proportion; wave mechanics was found this way, and Einstein says how many things were found by seeing proportion.

3. Per se nota: to all, and to the wise only (“Something is said to be per se notum dupliciter”) #

Body of a. 2 opens with the proportion, then a distinction: a proposition is per se nota (a) in itself, when the predicate is of the notion of the subject, (b) to us. “Man is rational” is known through itself in its nature, since whoever says man says something having reason — but not to one ignorant of what man is. Boethius (De Hebdomadibus, also De Trinitate): some dignitates (the Latin for axioms, “worthy of being believed on its own grounds”) are common to all, those whose terms all know — “every whole is more than its part.”

Why all know whole and part: you cannot eat an apple or a steak without experiencing whole and part (aside: the Oktoberfest man who drinks the whole thing without stopping, “kind of a stupid thing”).

The sophism he used to play on students (Bryson-like): animal is a part of man (his mother preferred “animal that has reason” to “animal”); but animal includes dog, cat, horse, elephant — so the part is more than the whole. Untying it: two senses of whole — the integral or composed whole, always more than one of its composing parts (animal is one part of man’s definition), and the universal whole, not composed of but said of its parts, always said of more than one of them (animal of more than dog; number of more than odd number; quadrilateral of more than square). Stay within one sense and the whole is always greater. “The most common sophistical argument is the one from the senses of the word.”

4. Thinking you don’t know what you do know (“men can think they don’t know what they do know”) #

The sophism shows how weak the human mind is. Physics II: men can think they don’t know what they do know. Argument: from Socrates everyone knows men think they know what they don’t; because you cannot always separate what you know from what you don’t, the reverse mistake is possible too — as, if you can mistake a lemon for an orange, you can mistake an orange for a lemon; a big orange for a grapefruit and back; a man for a woman and a woman for a man (“that’s very common”). To be in that state is “a terrible situation as far as the life of the mind is concerned.”

Hegel is his example: Hegel held something can both be and not be, because he could not untie this argument — there is a last instant in which a thing is not a sphere and a first instant in which it is; if different, a time between in which it is neither, which is impossible; so the same instant, the moment of becoming, in which it both is and is not. Solution (Aristotle, Physics VIII; used by Thomas): there is no last instant in which it is not a sphere, but only a first instant in which it is. So with dying: no last instant in which you are alive, but a first instant in which you are dead. Marx takes the unsolved contradiction over from Hegel — “dialectics is the study of the contradiction within things,” as comrade Lenin says. He recommends De Koninck’s French article, “Le paradoxe du devenir par contradiction” (in Le vrai et le faux philosophique [unclear in recording — title as he gives it]).

• Aside: a student overhearing his ironic praise of “the excellence of Hegel’s method” concluded “somebody finally found a better method than Aristotle’s.”
• Same instrument applied to the Eucharist: no last instant in which it is bread, but a first instant in which it is the body of our Lord — otherwise heresy either way.
• Same for justification: if there were a last instant of guilt distinct from the first instant of grace, there would be a time between in which you are freed of guilt without grace, “which is horrible.” (He attributes the raising of the soul’s justification in this context to Empedocles [ASR uncertain].)

5. Per se nota to the wise only (“propositions per se nota soli sapientibus”) #

Not the wise in the fullest sense, but those who understand what the terms signify. Example: no perfect number can be a prime number. A perfect number equals the sum of all that measures it evenly — 6 = 1+2+3; the next is 28 (he remembers it by SCG I c. 28, where Thomas begins on God’s perfection — “maybe accidental, but it helps me”). A prime is measured only by one, which cannot add up to the number. A student asks whether an even number can be prime: just two. Thomas’s own example: to one understanding that an angel is not a body, it is per se notum that he is not in place circumscriptively — not manifest to the rudibus, the raw beginners (Augustine, De Catechizandis Rudibus).

Debater’s test for whole and part: tell the man who denies it that he’ll get part of his salary, part of his dinner, part of his book, part of his car — “what difference does it make to you?” “They’ll scream.”

6. The first precept and the order of inclinations (“the good is what all want”) #

Order in what falls under everyone’s grasp: being falls first, and very close to it something — “everything is something, so if you know what something is, you know everything” — true secundum quid, not simpliciter. Something/nothing are almost like being/non-being. Avicenna: the understanding of being is included in whatever anyone apprehends. Hence the first indemonstrable beginning: you cannot at once affirm and deny; founded on being and non-being, and all others founded on it (Metaphysics IV — “whoever the philosopher is”).

Proportionally: as being is first in grasping simply, good is first in the apprehension of practical reason, which is ordered to doing; every agent acts for an end having the notion of good. So the first practical beginning is “the good is what all want” — which Aristotle does not claim as original, introducing it in Ethics I by induction as “well said.” First precept of the law: good is to be done and pursued, evil to be avoided, and on it all other precepts are founded — all that practical reason naturally grasps as human goods.

Order of precepts follows the order of natural inclinations:

1. What man shares with all substances — desire for preservation of its being; hence what conserves human life, and the contrary forbidden. Applied: assisted suicide is opposed to this. A student adds the Hippocratic “do no harm.”
2. What he shares with the other animals — what nature teaches all animals: the joining of male and female, and the education of children. “That’s something else that’s being violated today.”
3. What is proper to him as rational — to know the truth about God and to live in society; hence to avoid ignorance and not to offend those with whom he must live. (Aside: Carson, the medical man possibly running for the Republican nomination, urged at a graduation a commitment to spend half an hour a day learning something new — “that man avoid ignorance.”)

7. Replies of article 2 (“they have the notion of one natural law”) #

1. All the precepts, as referred to one first precept, have the notion of one natural law — they are one in order. He supports order-from-one with Aristotle at the end of Metaphysics XII quoting Homer: “the rule of many is not good; let there be one.” Illustration: the divided command in the Pacific between MacArthur and the Navy caused problems. Aside: Bonaventure’s disputed question on evangelical perfection ends with whether all must obey the Supreme Pontiff — a pamphlet of it circulated at Vatican I during the discussion of papal primacy.
2. All inclinations of whatever parts of human nature — concupiscible, irascible — pertain to natural law as ruled by reason, and reduce to the one first precept; so many precepts in themselves, coming together in one root (“sometimes he calls it the beginning, sometimes a root”).
3. Reason, though one in itself, orders all that pertains to men; so all rulable things fall under the law of reason.

(Break here.)

8. Article 3: objections on acts of the virtues (“not all acts of the virtues are of the law of nature”) #

1. Law is ordered to the common good; some virtuous acts, especially of temperance, are ordered to a private good — “your dinner is for you… we can’t share everybody at your meal.”
2. All sins oppose some virtuous act; if all virtuous acts were of nature’s law, all sins would be against nature — yet only some sins are especially called against nature.
3. In things according to nature all men agree; in virtuous acts they do not — what is virtuous for one is vicious for another (the amount of alcohol good for one is not for another; ice cream).

Sed contra: Damascene, De Fide Orthodoxa III — virtuous acts are subject to the law of nature. He cautions: there is a natural inclination to them and they are ordered to man’s natural good, but the habit is not acquired by nature, but by repeated acts.

9. Body of article 3: two ways of speaking of virtuous acts (“in so far as they are virtuous… in their own species”) #

a. 2 began with a proportion; a. 3 begins with a distinction.

• As virtuous: all belong to the law of nature. Each thing is naturally inclined to the operation suited to its form — fire to heating; the rational soul being man’s proper form, each man is naturally inclined to act according to reason, and that is to act virtuously. “One’s own reason dictates to each one naturally that he act virtuously.”
• In their proper species: not all, for many things done according to virtue are found by the investigation of reason as useful for living well, to which nature does not at first incline.

Digression on identifying with one’s reason — “which is going to get somebody madder: to say you’re wicked, or to say you’re stupid?” Two bank-robbery stories: the teller downtown who played dumb over the “withdrawal notice” and walked off, so he fled empty-handed; the White Castle robber in Minnesota who, having only a hand in his pocket pretending to be a gun, took the hand out to grab the bag and lost it to the girl. Each would kick himself not for stealing but for the stupidity. “Even a criminal doesn’t want to be called stupid.”

10. Replies of article 3 (“certain sins are said to be against nature”) #

1. Temperance is about the natural desires for food, drink and the reproductive, which are ordered to the common good of nature, as other legal matters to the common moral good.
2. “Nature of man” two ways: what is proper to man — and so all sins, as against reason, are against nature (Damascene, book II); or what is common to man and other animals — and so certain sins are specially called against nature, as against the mixture of male and female natural to all animals, the concubitus masculorum. He compares degrees of generality: stepping out the window you go down by your nature as something heavier than air, more general still than your animal nature. “So we have to see how the words are used.” (Aside: a guess that the Supreme Court might take the question back to the states — “Who knows what they’re going to do.”)
3. The third objection proceeds about acts considered in particular: according to the diverse conditions of men, some acts are virtuous to some as proportioned and suitable, and vicious to others to whom they are not proportioned.

Exchange on stopping for a meal: “You have a natural inclination to learn too” — and a supernatural inclination; a student: “this is food for thought.”

11. Article 4: objections that natural law is not one in all (“whether the law of nature is one before all”) #

Opening illustration: on the islands they go without clothing, which would be vicious for us.

1. Gratian, Decretum dist. 1: the natural law is what is contained in the Law and the Gospel — but this is not common to all, since “not all obey the gospel” (Rom 10:16).
2. Things according to law are called just (Ethics V), yet in the same book nothing is so just among all that it is not diversified in some.
3. Different men are naturally inclined to different things — some to pleasures, some to honors (who look down on the pleasures of the table).

Sed contra: Isidore, Etymologies — the natural law is common to all nations.

12. Body of article 4: common beginnings vs. particulars (“the more one descends to the particulars, the more defect is found”) #

Reason proceeds from the common to the particular (Physics I, “the common rule of all learning”), but differently in looking reason and doing reason — his renderings of speculative and practical; “speculative” has been spoiled by the stock market (as “Holy Ghost” was spoiled by ghost movies, though ghost is the English for spirit).

• Looking reason is about necessary things, impossible to be otherwise; so without defect truth is found in its conclusions as in its principles.
• Practical reason negotiates about contingent things, in which human operations are found; so there is necessity in the common things, but defect increases as one descends to particulars.

Hence four-fold result: in speculative matters the same truth in beginnings and conclusions, though conclusions not equally known to all (the triangle’s three angles equal two right angles is true for all but not known by all; the Pythagorean theorem is not true for one man and false for another). In practical matters, the same rightness only as regards the general; in particulars neither the same truth nor equally known.

Example: from “act according to reason” follows as a conclusion that things lent or deposited be returned — true ut in pluribus, but it can be damnosum and irrational, as if the man wants his weapon back to fight his country or cut somebody’s head off. His own classroom versions: the drunk at the party who wants his car keys back; the man who lent you his hunting gun and is now in a rage with his wife. The more particular the conclusion, the more ways it can fail — so it may have to be stated with a qualification. Aside: at St. Thomas Military Academy, during the Washington inspection, he was in charge of the roll and told the latecomer not to run up, promising not to mark him absent — violating the rule, but the man later thanked him. Another aside: a movie in which slapping a hysterical woman “woke her up” — an exception to a rule.

Conclusion: as regards the first common beginnings, the natural law is the same among all in rectitude and in knowledge; as regards particular conclusions, the same ut in pluribus, but in few cases it fails — in rectitude, from particular impediments (as generable and corruptible natures fail ut in paucioribus through impediments), and in knowledge, from depraved reason through passion, bad custom, or a bad habit of nature. Example: among the Germans of old theft was not reckoned wrong, as Julius Caesar records in the Gallic War [he mentions the Spartans as well; transcript garbled here]. Aside: “All Gaul is divided into three parts” — as this country is East Coast, Midwest, West Coast; and why Midwest and not Mid East? “Because that was already taken.”

13. Replies of article 4 (“those things which are of the law of nature are treated there fully”) #

1. Gratian’s word does not mean everything in the Law and Gospel is of natural law — many things there are above nature — but that the things of natural law are treated there fully; and Gratian at once exemplifies with the golden rule: do to others what you would want done to you. “I wouldn’t invite you to sleep with my wife, so I shouldn’t sleep with yours; I don’t want you telling lies about me, so I shouldn’t tell lies about you.”
2. The Philosopher’s word is about things naturally just not as common beginnings but as conclusions from them, right ut in pluribus and failing in fewer.
3. As reason dominates and commands the other powers in man, all the natural inclinations belonging to the other powers must be ordered according to reason; so this is commonly right among all, that all man’s inclinations be directed by reason.

His words #

• natural understanding — his translation of nous / intellectus: the habit of naturally known beginnings, as against reasoned-out understanding, which is science.
• looking reason / looking knowledge — [ed.: speculative]; he avoids “speculative” as spoiled by stock-market usage.
• doing reason / doable things — [ed.: practical / operabilia].
• synderesis — to the practical what natural understanding is to the looking.
• proportion — “a likeness of ratios.”
• per se nota — “known to themselves”; dupliciter: in itself (predicate in the notion of the subject) and to us; omnibus vs. soli sapientibus.
• dignitates — “the Latin word for axioms”; a dignitas is worthy of being believed on its own grounds.
• integral or composed whole vs. universal whole — the first put together from its parts, the second said of its parts.
• rudibus — the raw, the beginners (Augustine’s De Catechizandis Rudibus).
• secundum quid / simpliciter — in some way / without qualification.
• ut in pluribus / ut in paucioribus — for the most part / in fewer cases.
• damnosum — “damning,” harmful, of returning a deposit in the wrong case.
• concubitus masculorum — the sin especially called against nature.
• Natural Hearing — [ed.: Aristotle’s Physics].

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 94, a. 2 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 94, a. 3 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 94, a. 4 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Gratian, Decretum, dist. 1 (quoted within a. 4)

Mentioned

• Boethius, De Hebdomadibus; De Trinitate
• Aristotle, Metaphysics IV (first indemonstrable beginning); XII (Homer, “let there be one”)
• Aristotle, Physics I (from common to particular); II (thinking one does not know what one knows); VIII (instants of becoming)
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I (the good is what all want); V (the naturally just)
• Aristotle, Poetics (metaphor from proportion)
• Euclid, Elements (axioms; books V–VI as “the proportional books”)
• Avicenna (being included in whatever is apprehended)
• John Damascene, De Fide Orthodoxa II and III
• Isidore, Etymologies
• Romans 10:16
• Augustine, De Catechizandis Rudibus
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles I, c. 28
• Bonaventure, disputed questions on evangelical perfection (last question, on obedience to the Supreme Pontiff)
• Charles De Koninck, “Le paradoxe du devenir par contradiction”
• Julius Caesar, De Bello Gallico
• Shakespeare (the waves and the pebbled shore); Falstaff

His questions #

• Are the precepts of the natural law many or one only? — Many in themselves, but one in root and order, all founded on the first precept.
• What is the first thing that falls into the apprehension of reason, and what into practical reason? — Being; and for practical reason, good — hence “good is to be done and pursued, evil avoided.”
• Can a man think he does not know what he does know? — Yes; since he can think he knows what he does not, the reverse mistake is possible too — and it is a terrible state for the mind.
• Is the last instant in which a thing is not a sphere the same as the first instant in which it is? — There is no last instant in which it is not; only a first instant in which it is (so too for death, the Eucharist, and justification).
• Why is six called a perfect number, and can a perfect number be prime? — Because it equals the sum of what measures it evenly (1+2+3); no, since a prime is measured only by one.
• Which makes a man angrier, to be called wicked or to be called stupid? — Stupid — even a criminal does not want to be called stupid, because one identifies with one’s reason.
• Are all acts of the virtues of the law of nature? — As virtuous, yes, since man is naturally inclined to act according to reason; in their proper species, no.
• Is the law of nature one and the same in all? — In its first common beginnings, yes, in rectitude and knowledge; in particular conclusions, only for the most part, and it can fail in both.
• Should what is borrowed always be returned? — For the most part yes, but not when returning it would be harmful and irrational.