God Alone Is Good, 'I Am Who Am': Divine Simplicity and the Senses of 'To Have'

Orientation #

He opens by announcing “a little excursion today” before the article, and only at the last line says “let’s go now to Article Two here.” He refers back to “the week before” when he treated the three ways of dividing sacred doctrine. The previous class had moved from human law into the opening questions on the Old Law (prev. lecture).

The class, in order #

1. Two sayings of Christ (“you are she who is not”) #

The point: two strong sayings — “Why do you call me good? God alone is good” (Mark; also in Matthew and Luke, not John), and Christ’s word to St. Catherine of Siena, “Remember just two things: I am who am, and you are she who is not” — need explaining, since Christ obviously knows Catherine exists and knows his human nature is good.

• Neither is explained merely by degree: not simply because God is more good than Christ’s human nature, nor because God exists more fully than Catherine. The way of speaking goes beyond comparison.
• Aside (the force of “who are you talking to?”): a student in a philosophy class asked “Do I exist?” and the professor answered, “Who’s talking? Who’s asking that question?”
• He locates the source in the treatise on the substance of God — five things in both Summas: simplicity, unchangeableness, perfection and therefore goodness, unity, infinity.

2. The goodness chapters of the Contra Gentiles (“my favorite work”) #

The point: the goodness saying comes from God being goodness itself.

• SCG I, cc. 37-41: (37) God is good; (38) God is his goodness itself; (39) therefore nothing bad in God; (40) defending Augustine’s “God is the good of every good” — if he is goodness itself and everything is good by goodness, then he is the good of every good; also, he is the end of all things, so the good of every good; (41) “anticlimactic,” God is summum bonum.
• Hence Christ’s saying: a thing is good by goodness; God alone is goodness itself; so God alone is good.

3. The being saying and divine simplicity (“the to be of God is his very substance”) #

The point: the word to Catherine rests proportionally on simplicity as the goodness saying rests on goodness.

1. In God, being is his very substance; in no creature is its being the creature itself — being is something added to it.
2. Proof from pure act: your being is to your substance as act is to ability; what has its being other than its substance is not pure act.
3. Aristotle, Metaphysics IX (“the ninth book of wisdom”): simply speaking act is before ability; so the first cause is pure act, and its very substance is to be.
4. Every creature has its being from God, so its substance is not its being.

• The ambiguity of “being” in English: being as what is (a human being) vs. being as the act of existence (esse, to be). It is by being in the second sense that you are said to be a being in the first. God alone is being itself; hence God alone is the being.
• He notes he was going to use “she who is not” “to attack the feminists, put them in their place” — a joke, dropped.

4. As God and as man (“the Father is greater than I”) #

A further difference between the two sayings: to Catherine he speaks of himself as God (“I am who am”); in the Gospel (“God alone is good”) he speaks of himself as man — as when he says “the Father is greater than I,” said of himself as man. Fittingly, the saying appears in Matthew, Mark and Luke but not in John, where the divinity is emphasized; he calls his check of the Gospels “shabby, shoddy research.”

5. Digression: priest, prophet, king (“don’t neglect the gift given to you”) #

Occasioned by a sermon that morning on St. Paul to Timothy — don’t let them despise your youth; the basic piece of advice being “don’t neglect the gift given to you” — and by the baptismal anointing, “now you are a priest, and a prophet, and a king.”

• He distributes these over the Gospels “in Anaxagorean fashion”: Matthew the kingship (descent from David, the Magi), Luke the priesthood (begins and ends in the temple), Mark the prophetic role.
• The Anaxagorean way of naming: Anaxagoras said everything is in everything; asked why he calls this a cat, this a tree, this a stone, he answered, we name it from what it has most of — absolutely, or in comparison with other things. So it does not mean kingship alone is in Matthew.
• Connected with the three divisions of sacred doctrine he gave “the week before”: faith, hope and charity (Augustine’s Enchiridion, Thomas’s catechetical instructions, the Compendium of Theology); and the SCG division — God in himself, God as maker and his effects, God as end and his providence (God in himself, God as beginning, God as end), followed in the Summa Theologiae though harder to see because of the expansion of the second part.
• The correspondence he draws with the class: charity/the commandments → king; hope/prayer → priest; faith/the creed (teaching) → prophet. “It comes in very, very, very beautiful.”

6. The key word: “has” (“a chapter on it in the categories”) #

The point: the creature can be said to be good but not goodness itself, and the key to this is the word to have, which has a chapter in the Categories.

• The ancient commentators called the Isagoge the book of the five names (genus, difference, species, property, accident) and the Categories the book of the ten names — the names of the highest genera.
• Senses of “has” elicited from the class, in order: (1) a genus has species (Euclid: five kinds of quadrilateral); (2) a species has a genus — not the same sense; (3) a species has differences; (4) a species has a definition; (5) a genus has differences — Aristotle: the differences of one genus are not those of another unless one is under the other; (6) [he loses the count himself: “Well, now I’m getting lost. That’s the fifth sense or the sixth sense”]; (7) a genus has a name and a species has a name — but that, he says, is one and the same sense; (8) a species has a property; (9) a species has accidents; and the big one he says they are missing: (10) substance has accidents (I have a size, a shape, health, knowledge), and correspondingly an accident has a subject — and to have accidents and to have a subject are not the same.
• Reported as he leaves it: the count does not come out. He names “eight senses” and then “nine,” and the numbering drifts; he breaks off — “Aristotle said three was enough… he doesn’t distinguish all the senses” — with “I haven’t even finished yet,” sufficiently manifested “by kind of induction.”
• He stresses: you cannot understand the Categories without seeing how a genus has species and a species has a genus; one could “almost explain the whole categories” by the word has.
• Note: a genus has a definition only per accidens — not as genus, but as a species of a higher genus.

7. Parallel digression: the senses of “in” (“every sin is in the will”) #

Prompted by asking whether there is a connection between have and in.

• Thomas, on Augustine’s “every sin is in the will,” stops on in: in one sense every sin is in the will, in another not. Two senses: as in a subject vs. as in a cause. If I tell a lie the subject is my vocal ability; if I strike and kill you, the subject is that act; but the cause is in the will.
• The will causes sin per se when it directly chooses; per accidens when it does not restrain what it should restrain. Example: I did not steady the falling pillar when I could have — am I responsible for your downfall?

8. From outside to inside: you are never what you have (“the haves and the have-nots”) #

The point, built by induction: no creature is what it has.

• Easiest sense: what is exterior — I have a book, a car (“still out there, I think”), a house (“unless it’s burned down”). “The haves and the have-nots” shows this sense is first in our minds.
• Aristotle’s harder example: I have a wife — and he adds that a man has a wife and a wife has a husband are not the same sense of has; relations are difficult (“especially your in-laws”). Aside: the expression “I’ve had it” — what sense of had is that?
• Moving inward: I have two arms — closer to me than a car, but I am not my two arms. I have knowledge, good will, love — but am I love? St. John says God is love; we have love and are not love itself. Thomas has wisdom; Thomas is not wisdom itself.
• Grammar of the pair: I am healthy = I have health; I am wise = I have wisdom. So “good” means having goodness.
• The conclusion he drives at: “Whatever I am said to have, I am not. Whatever God has, He is.” If God has knowledge he is knowledge itself; love, justice, mercy likewise — “I’m sometimes merciful to the student, but am I mercy?”
• Joke on the maxim: “If you are what you eat, and you have a good steak, are you what you eat? I don’t think so.” And on his granddaughter Sophia: a philosopher is a lover of Sophia; and since God is wisdom itself, to love wisdom is in a way to love God.

9. Why both ways of speaking are needed (“God is wise and wisdom itself”) #

The point: our language is forced to say both, and each alone is defective.

• Say God is wisdom itself — to bring out simplicity: there is no difference between God and his wisdom.
• Say God is wise — because if you only said “wisdom itself,” you would be detracting from him: “what good would it be to be wisdom itself if you weren’t wise by it?” Otherwise you would have to say, “Why do you call God wise? Man alone is wise; God is wisdom itself.”
• Supporting argument: my knowledge does not know; it is that by which I know. Geometry does not know the theorems; I know them by my geometry. So if you were knowledge itself and no one knew by it, it would be no good.
• Scripture pushes both ways too: “God is love,” and “God so loved the world that he sent his only Son.”
• Hence Thomas always quoting Dionysius: affirmative statements about God do not quite fit. Say “God is good” flatly and you seem to deny simplicity (as if he has goodness); say “goodness itself” only and you deny his perfection.

10. A further difficulty: verbs and eternity (“before Abraham was, I am”) #

The point: even the form of a statement about God is problematic.

• From the book on statements [On Interpretation], the second book in logic after the Categories: a noun and a verb are each a vocal sound signifying by human agreement or custom, no part of which signifies by itself; the verb signifies with time, the noun without time.
• But a statement needs a verb, and God is not in time — “hell of a problem there.” John: “Before Abraham was, I am” touches on his eternity; and “In the beginning was the Word” does not mean past time.
• Thomas’s image of eternity: the now of eternity is the center of the circle, the nows of time the points on the circumference, one before or after another, but all directly across from the center — so God’s eternity in some way encompasses all of time.
• Student contributions accepted: Catherine is distinguished as being in time, and as a creature made out of nothing; he replies that the reason he gave is the deeper one — God is his own being, his own esse.
• Closing aside: he was struck by the young priest from Colombia quoting the baptismal ceremony in the order priest, prophet, king — fitting for a baptism.

His words #

• “excursion” — his name for the whole digression preceding the article.
• “the ninth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics IX].
• “act” and “ability” — being is to substance as act is to ability [ed.: potency].
• “being” in two senses — what is vs. the act of existence, esse, “to be.”
• “Anaxagorean way of naming” — naming a thing from what it has most of, absolutely or in comparison with others.
• “the book of the five names” (Isagoge) and “the book of the ten names” (Categories).
• “per se” / “per accidens” cause of sin — direct choice vs. failure to restrain.
• “the haves and the have-nots” — evidence that the exterior sense of have is first in our minds.
• “the book on statements” [ed.: On Interpretation / Peri Hermeneias].
• “the now of eternity” vs. “the nows of time” — center and circumference of a circle.

Texts #

Read in class / commented on

• Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles I, cc. 37-41 (God is good; goodness itself; nothing bad in him; the good of every good; summum bonum) — summarized chapter by chapter.
• Aristotle, Categories, the chapter on “to have” — senses drawn out inductively.
• Aristotle, On Interpretation — definitions of noun and verb.
• Thomas on Augustine’s “every sin is in the will” — the two senses of in (locus not stated).

Mentioned

• Mark; Matthew; Luke (“Why do you call me good? God alone is good”); John (the saying absent there; “before Abraham was, I am”; “In the beginning was the Word”; “God is love”; “God so loved the world”).
• Christ’s words to St. Catherine of Siena.
• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX (act prior to potency).
• Augustine, Enchiridion; Thomas’s catechetical instructions; Compendium of Theology (faith, hope, charity division of sacred doctrine).
• Dionysius, via Thomas, on affirmative statements about God.
• Porphyry, Isagoge (as “the book of the five names”) (inferred attribution).
• St. Paul to Timothy (the morning’s epistle).
• Euclid, five kinds of quadrilateral.
• Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 98, a. 2 — announced at the very end (inferred article number).

His questions #

• Why does Christ say “God alone is good,” and why tell Catherine “you are she who is not”? Because a thing is good by goodness and is by being, and God alone is goodness itself and being itself.
• Is it simply because God is more good, or exists more fully, than the creature? No — the way of speaking goes beyond degree.
• What word is key to understanding this way of speaking, one that has a chapter in the Categories? The word “to have.”
• Does a genus have something? Does a species have a genus in the same sense? A genus has species, a species has a genus — not the same sense of “has.”
• What does substance have, and what corresponds on the side of accidents? Substance has accidents; accidents have a subject — again not the same sense.
• In what sense is every sin “in” the will, and in what sense not? Not as in a subject, but as in a cause — per se by direct choice, per accidens by not restraining.
• Am I what I have — my car, my arms, my knowledge, my love? No: whatever I am said to have, I am not.
• Does God have love, or is he love? Both must be said: he is whatever he has.
• Why not say simply “God is wisdom itself” and drop “God is wise”? Because that would detract from his perfection — what good is being wisdom itself if no one is wise by it?
• How can we make a statement about God, when a statement needs a verb and a verb signifies with time? Left open as a genuine difficulty; illustrated by “before Abraham was, I am” and the center-of-the-circle image of eternity.