The Footprint of the Trinity, Christ as the Road, and Whether All Are Subject to Human Law (Opening reflections; ST I-II q.96 a.5)

Orientation #

He does not announce a plan; he opens with an exercise (“Let’s see if you guys can syllogize”), spends most of the hour on preliminaries and spiritual reading, and only near the end turns to “Article Five here in Question Ninety-Six,” ending with “To six, one goes.” (Verified sources match ST I-II, q. 96, a. 5 for the final stretch.)

The class, in order #

1. The middle term for finding the vestigium (“look before and after”) #

Puzzle put to the class: why must you use reason — which, as Shakespeare teaches, means to look before and after — in order to find the footprint (vestigium) of the Trinity?

• A student offers “beginning.” He develops it: vestigium is a confused likeness of the Trinity, the image a distinct one; in the Sentences Thomas says what is common to every way of seeing the footprint in creatures is that there is a beginning, middle and end — Father as beginning (principium), Son in the middle, Holy Spirit at the end.
• To find a beginning, middle and end you must look before and after. So “beginning, middle, and end” is the middle term joining reason-as-looking-before-and-after to the discovery of the footprint.

2. Is the Father before the Son? — the senses of “before” (“Sollicite, frequenter et reverenter”) #

He cites Thomas’s counsel to read carefully, frequently, reverently (later he renders the third “fervently” — he does not settle it).

• The Sentences article: the Father is not before the Son in time, by nature, in knowledge, or in dignity — exactly the four chief senses of “before” in the Categories (he says “chapter 15, I think”).
• Why each fails: not in time, since the Son is eternal too; not in knowledge, since relatives are known together and are together by nature; not in dignity, since dignity attaches not to the relational but to the absolute [in eternity].
• A student suggests the middle term is “order”; he redirects to the senses of “before.”
• “Before” is equivocal by reason, not by chance — so its meanings have an order. Boundary case: his student Richard and his brother Richard share a name by chance, with no connection (Richard the Lionhearted likewise) — where the equivocation is by chance there is no order.
• The first meaning of “before” for us is time, because time is the number of the before and after in motion; Shakespeare: “things in motion sooner catch the eye than what not stirs.”
• Supporting principle from De Potentia (on “proceeding” in Scripture): all our words begin in the continuous — the road is continuous, the motion over it continuous, the time continuous (Physics, “natural hearing”).
• Parallel: the same is needed for the word “in” — Aristotle does not order the senses in the text, but Thomas takes the hint and orders all eight.

3. John Quincy Adams and reading the Bible through (“do you guys read the Bible over every year?”) #

Aside. Adams resolved to read the whole Bible every year (a student notes his Bible was shorter). Adams wrote the words of the Monroe Doctrine, announced by Monroe; “considered the greatest Secretary of State ever.”

4. Chrysostom on loving God with heart, soul and mind (“what is the great commandment?”) #

Point: the three terms of the great commandment (Matthew 22; “mind” is dianoia, a word Aristotle uses of reason) mark an ascent from the sensible to the spiritual. Thomas gives several explanations in the Catena Aurea; the first, Chrysostom’s, strikes him most:

1. whole heart — a love partly sensible, able to be sensed;
2. whole soul — a purely spiritual love, arising when you understand that God is good (he recalls the five chapters of the Contra Gentiles: God is good; goodness itself; nothing bad in him; the good of every good; summum bonum);
3. whole mind — out of love of God, using reason always to think about and remember God.

• Confirming example: St. Alphonsus Liguori made meditations on the Passion three times, prefaced by a chain of Fathers all insisting this is the way to come to love God (“a tear shed in meditating the Passion…” — Augustine); the dying man on the cross is close to the senses. “Greater love than this hath no man…” Mary Magdalene and female saints to whom Christ appeared suffering, on Fridays — a love that touches the sensible.
• Same order in faith: Peter’s complete profession, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God” — beginning from the sensible human nature (sensible especially to those who saw what others wished to see) and ascending to the divinity, which is not sensible.

5. The three roads, and Christ as the road (“I am the road”) #

His doctoral thesis compared Aristotle and Descartes on the roads in [logical] knowledge; three roads: (1) the natural road in our knowledge, from the senses into reason; (2) the common road of reasoned-out knowledge, studied in logic — reason as reason; (3) the private road of each reasoned-out knowledge. Aristotle is good on all three, Descartes has problems with all three.

• Origin of the interest: Monsignor on the way of proceeding — Aristotle in the Metaphysics, the way of going forward in mathematics is not that of natural science, nor of wisdom, so one must be educated in each; Thomas adds that for this reason logic must be learned before the other sciences, since it teaches the common way of going forward.
• He noticed Aristotle in Physics I calls it not just “mode of proceeding” but the road; Monsignor granted “that’s much more concrete.”
• Concreteness illustrated: Thomas — virtue is the road to happiness, vice the road to misery, “confirmed every day in the daily paper.” Christ’s two roads (Matthew): the broad road to misery that many enter, the narrow road to life. Christ says “I am the road” (hodos).
• What does “road” mean here? Young Paul, asked about the basic road in human knowledge, answered “there are cars and trucks on it” — you begin with the sensible road. We do not drive, gallop or walk up Christ: the road is imitation (Aristotle: man is the most imitative of the animals and first learns by imitation; The Imitation of Christ, memorized by St. Thérèse; “learn of me, for I am meek and humble of heart”; “take up your cross and follow me”; to Peter after the resurrection, about another man: “that’s not your business, you follow me”).
• Student asides: Eastern traditions (Buddhist, Taoist) speak of “the way,” but “way” is less concrete than “road”; Gerard Manley Hopkins reports countrypeople saying “all roads” where we say “always” — perhaps a vestige of Roman roads.

6. Love in God, and whether the Father necessarily generates (“essentially, notionally and personally”) #

The Holy Spirit is harder to understand than Father and Son. Thomas: “love” is said of God in three ways — essentially (God himself is love), notionally (the love of the Father and the Son from which the Spirit arises), personally (the Holy Spirit). “Not something for a Sunday homily on Trinity Sunday” — you’d lose your audience in more than one way. (Aside: his mother wishing the priest would explain things, having heard the same Gospels every year.)

• A student asks about generation by will vs. by nature vs. by necessity. He distinguishes: it is not by will; it is by nature — but insofar as the divine nature is the same as paternity (otherwise the Son could generate too); whether it is necessary is another article.
• His argument, as he gives it: God is per se necessary, so everything in God is necessary; I believe there are three persons; therefore I can syllogize that God is necessarily three persons — but I do not see the reason why. Contrast: I can give the reason why a triangle’s interior angles equal two right angles. “When you see God face to face, if you get that far, then you’ll see why he must be three persons.” He stresses this shows “exactly where we are.”

7. The senses of “necessary,” and whether logic is necessary (“is it necessary to understand the word necessary?”) #

In that article Thomas distinguishes the senses of necessary — “a beautiful text”; he meant to copy it into his Metaphysics V file on “necessary” and found he had already done so years before.

• Imitating the lost Protrepticus fragment (“should you philosophize or not? — if not, you must philosophize to show why not”): is it necessary to understand the word “necessary”? If you say yes, then understand it; if no, you still have to [use the word].
• Thomas’s basic division: absolute necessity, based on what a thing is; conditional necessity, from extrinsic things — the mover/maker, or the end.
  • From the mover/maker: force — the police pick me up and I necessarily go into the paddy wagon, because they are stronger; not the way a triangle necessarily has its angles.
  • From the end: need — necessary to live; necessary to have a boat or a horse if you are to make a trip.
• So logic is necessary for philosophy in that sense: if you want to philosophize well and avoid much error. Albert the Great: the cause of the error of the early Greeks was that they did not know logic; in Physics I Aristotle takes apart Leucippus [ed.: possibly Melissus/Parmenides] partly for the kinds of mistake studied in logic. He is careful to reframe the question: is it necessary that the man who philosophizes know logic — do men sometimes philosophize without knowing it?
• Student: won’t philosophy done well necessarily lead to logic? — You need logic to define and reason well, but you never arrive at logic without philosophizing. Socrates was trying to syllogize, the sign being that he was always trying to define, and definition is the main middle term. Aristotle sometimes speaks of such men as coerced by the truth itself without seeing the reason why.
• Asides: his teacher Kasurik quoting Augustine, that the only part of logic worth teaching is the part about errors; a remark that “coerced by the truth” hardly applies to people now, with homosexual marriage “and all the rest of this nonsense.”

8. ST I-II, q. 96, a. 5: are all subject to law? — the objections (“No one is above the law”) #

He reads the article, glossing as he goes. Objections:

1. Those alone are subject to the law for whom the law is laid down; but 1 Timothy: “to the just one the law is not laid down”; therefore the just are not subject to human law. (“Put that in your paper.”)
2. Pope Urban (Decretals, 19 q. 2): he who is led by a private law is in no way restricted by the public one; but all spiritual men are led by the private law of the Holy Spirit (Romans 8:14). “So even the devil can quote scripture.”
3. The jurisconsult: the prince is freed from the laws; but who is untied from the law is not subject to it.

• Sed contra: Romans 13, every soul is subject to higher powers; no one is subject to a power who is not subject to the law that the power bears.
• Modern hook he supplies: an organization (Judicial Watch) whose slogan is “no one is above the law” — Thomas will distinguish.

9. The corpus: ruled vs. coerced (“as a thing ruled is subject to the rule”) #

Law has two things in its notion: it is a rule/measure of human acts, and it has a coercive power. Hence two ways of being subject:

1. As ruled by the rule (“we get the word regular — the regular person lives by the rules”). All who are subject to a power are subject to the law that power brings forth. One can fail to be subject to a power in two ways:
   • simply free from all subjection — those of one city or kingdom are not subject to the prince of another, just as they are not under his dominion;
   • ruled by a higher law — one subject to the proconsul need not obey him in what the emperor has dispensed him from; the lower command does not bind where the superior directs. So one can be simply subject to the law yet in some respect not restricted by it.
2. As the coerced to the coercer, the forced to the forcing. In this way virtuous and just men are not subject to the law, but only the bad: what is forced and violent is contrary to the will; the will of the good harmonizes with the law, the will of the bad is in discord with it.

• Aside on the vocabulary: “it’s a father’s law” [ed.: he is glossing cogere] — a cogent argument is one forcing you to acknowledge the conclusion.

10. Replies to the three objections (“no one is properly coerced by himself”) #

1. The Apostle’s argument concerns subjection by way of force: no law is laid down for just men because they are a law to themselves, showing the work of the law written in their hearts (Romans); in them law has no coercive power as it has in the unjust.
2. The law of the Holy Spirit is above every humanly laid-down law, so spiritual men are not subject to human law in what is repugnant to the Spirit’s leading — but it is itself of the Spirit’s leading that spiritual men be subject to human laws (1 Peter 2: “be subject to every human creature on account of God”).
3. The prince is released from the law as to its coactive power, for no one is properly coerced by himself.
   • Gloss on “forcing oneself”: when people say “I forced myself,” it is against some will of theirs — he forces himself to eat salmon he detests, so as not to embarrass the hostess, offering it up for the souls in purgatory.
   • Why the prince is free from coercion: no one can pass a genuine condemnation on him if he acts against the law; over Psalm 50, “to thee only have I sinned” — the king has no man who judges his deeds. ("L’état c’est moi.")
   • But as to the directive power, the prince is subject to the law by his own will: whoever gives law for others ought himself to obey his own law (the chapter Cum omnes in the Constitutions); the wise man’s authority [the bearing of the burden you lay on others — he cannot recall the phrasing]; those are criticized by the Lord who say and do not do, laying heavy burdens on others and not moving a finger to lift them. As regards the judgment of God the prince is not free from the law’s directive power, but should fulfil it voluntarily, not coerced.
   • Finally, the prince is above the law insofar as he can change it if expedient and dispense in it for circumstances of place and time.

• Student exchanges: this was written before constitutional monarchies and Magna Carta; and on Thomas’s point that one kingdom’s subjects are not bound by another’s laws, a student complains of a trend in the progressive wing of the Supreme Court to cite foreign cases and common law from other countries (Zimbabwe, the UK) to buttress decisions lacking domestic precedent. Reply in jest: “when I drive on the left side of the street, I was following English law” — “experiments against reality.”
• Cooking asides (attached to forcing oneself to eat): a little girl’s coffee cake made with coffee grounds — tell her at twenty-one and she’ll laugh; a cake baked with salt instead of sugar by simple sisters from Brazil in Portugal, and the general reputation of nuns’ cooking.

He ends: “To six, one goes.”

His words #

• “look before and after” — Shakespeare’s phrase, his standing definition of what it is to use reason.
• vestigium / footprint — a confused likeness of the Trinity in creatures, as against the image, a distinct likeness.
• principium — the Father as beginning.
• “equivocal by reason” vs. “equivocal by chance” — the first has an order of meanings, the second none (two Richards).
• “natural hearing” [ed.: Aristotle’s Physics].
• Sollicite, frequenter et reverenter — “carefully, frequently, and reverently” (he later says “fervently”).
• dianoia — the “mind” of the great commandment; Aristotle’s word for reason.
• hodos — road; Christ “I am the road” [ed.: usually “the way”], road being more concrete than “way.”
• “the natural / common / private road” of knowledge — his thesis’s three roads.
• “essentially, notionally, personally” — the three ways “love” is said of God.
• absolute vs. conditional necessity; conditional as force (from the maker/mover) and as need (from the end).
• “directive power” vs. “coactive/coercive power” of law — the hinge of a. 5.
• “regular” — from regula, the rule; the regular man lives by the rules.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 96, a. 5 — objections, sed contra, corpus and three replies, read through.
• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Sentences I — article on the vestigium; article on whether the Father is before the Son; articles on the Holy Spirit as love; article on necessity in the Father’s generating (paraphrased and discussed, not read verbatim).
• Chrysostom in Thomas’s Catena Aurea on the great commandment (Matthew 22).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Categories, chapter on “before” (“chapter 15, I think”), after the chapters on opposites.
• Aristotle, Metaphysics V (senses of “necessary”); Metaphysics on the ways of proceeding in the sciences, with Thomas’s commentary.
• Aristotle, Physics I (the way/road of proceeding; criticism of Leucippus); Aristotle on time as the number of before and after in motion; on man as most imitative.
• Aristotle, lost Introduction to Philosophy / dialogue, the “should you philosophize” fragment.
• Thomas, De Potentia, on “proceeding” and words beginning in the continuous; Summa Contra Gentiles I, five chapters on God’s goodness (inferred).
• Scripture: 1 Timothy 1; Romans 8:14; Romans 13; Romans (law written in hearts); 1 Peter 2; Psalm 50; Matthew 22, Matthew 16, the two roads (Matthew 7, inferred).
• Canon law: Urban, Decretals 19 q. 2; the Constitutions, chapter Cum omnes; the jurisconsult on the prince.
• The Imitation of Christ; St. Alphonsus Liguori’s meditations on the Passion; Augustine on tears and on the part of logic about errors; Albert the Great on the early Greeks; Gerard Manley Hopkins (“all roads”).

His questions #

• Why must you use reason — looking before and after — to find the footprint of the Trinity? What is the middle term? — Beginning, middle and end, found in every creature; Father beginning, Son middle, Spirit end.
• Is the Father before the Son? — No: not in time, by nature, in knowledge, or in dignity — the four chief senses of “before.”
• Why must you look before and after to understand the word “before”? — Because it is equivocal by reason, so its senses have an order, beginning from time, which follows motion.
• What do “whole heart, whole soul, whole mind” mean? — On Chrysostom: a love partly sensible; a spiritual love from understanding God’s goodness; the constant use of reason to think of and remember God.
• When Christ says “I am the road,” what does he mean — are we to drive on him? — That we imitate him: learn of me, take up your cross and follow me.
• Is it necessary that the Father generate the Son? — Yes, since God is per se necessary and all in God is necessary; but we do not see why there must be three persons, only that it follows.
• Is it necessary to understand the word “necessary”? Is logic necessary to philosophize? — Necessary as a need, if you would philosophize well and avoid error; yet men do philosophize without logic, and one reaches logic only by philosophizing.
• Are all men subject to the law? — As ruled, yes — all under the power; as coerced, only the bad, since the good will harmonizes with the law.
• Is the prince above the law? — Freed from its coercive power, since none can condemn him; bound by its directive power before God, and able to change or dispense in it.