Before and After, Definition by Causes, and the Old Law: Who Is Bound by It and Why It Came in the Time of Moses (ST I-II q.98 aa.5-6)

Orientation #

He opens by returning to “my aside there last time” on the order of Matthew versus John, and says he was also “talking last time about the order of the soul and the powers of the soul.” He then takes up q. 98, a. 5 and a. 6, ending mid-reply to the third objection of a. 6. The neighbouring classes treat earlier articles on the Old Law and then the precepts of the Old Law (qq. 99–100).

The class, in order #

1. Two orders to Christ, Matthew and John (“he goes in the reverse order”) #

• Peter’s profession in Matthew (“thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God”) goes from humanity to divinity; John goes the reverse, from the Word who was God, to the Word by whom all came to be, to the Word made flesh.
• Reason: the natural and first road in our knowledge is from the senses to reason. A student supplies this. So from the sensible Christ to the one not able to be sensed.
• Other scriptural cases of the same movement: metaphor (“The Lord is my rock”); the burning bush, which some Fathers take for Christ’s two natures — the bush human nature, the fire divine, and the fire does not consume the bush: the human nature is not swallowed up by the divine.

2. The Gospels, and faith, hope, charity (“I’d be the great discoverer of another distinction”) #

• Matthew, Mark, Luke stress Christ as the anointed one: king (Matthew), prophet/teacher (Mark), priest (Luke). He first hoped this gave a new division of sacred doctrine; on reflection it corresponds to faith, hope and charity — faith to prophet/teacher, hope/prayer to priest, the commands of love and the ten commandments to the king.
• Augustine’s Enchiridion, Thomas’s Catechetical Instructions and his Compendium of Theology (written for Brother Reginald, to carry around) all follow that order: creed under faith, Our Father under hope, the two commandments of love and the decalogue under charity — the order for beginners, matching Matthew’s order.
• John’s order is the order of theology; as a boy he heard the prologue of John at the end of every Mass, so it was fixed in mind. “With the truth, all things fit together.”

3. Shakespeare’s definition of reason and the divisions of logic (“the ability for discourse”) #

• Albert the Great divides logic into the art of defining and the art of reasoning. These are the two main kinds of discourse, and so agree with Shakespeare’s “ability to look before and after.”
• Discourse has two senses in Thomas: going from this to that; and, more strictly and profoundly, coming to know what you don’t know through what you do know. Example: students don’t know what a perfect number is, then learn it by definition — a number equal to the sum of its parts (what measures it evenly). Six: 1+2+3=6; 28 is the second. From this you also see a perfect number is always composite, never prime. So: the simple unknown is reached by definition, the complex unknown (a statement) by reasoning.
• Thomas divides logic into three parts, following Aristotle and the De Anima’s first and second acts of reason (understanding what something is; the true or false by composing and dividing), plus a third, reasoning. Hence Aristotle, father of logic: Categories, Peri Hermeneias, then the rest on reasoning.

4. Definition and demonstration differ by position only (“a complete definition would bring in all the causes”) #

• Defining is placed in the third act treatment (Posterior Analytics) because definition is the beginning of the syllogism, especially of demonstration — “Socrates wanted to syllogize, sign of which is he wanted to define.”
• Why the identity: to know what a thing is you must know what makes it be what it is, i.e. its causes; demonstration answers why, which more obviously asks a cause, but what asks a cause too.
• Objection he met in Thomas on the Sentences, on Augustine’s definition of infused virtue: there are other definitions of virtue, so Augustine’s must be lacking. Reply: there can be many incomplete or partial definitions of one thing; a complete one brings in all the causes.
• Knife example: “a tool for cutting a filet mignon” defines by end (the most important cause); “composed of a blade and a handle” defines by parts, i.e. by matter, and the blade’s insertion in the handle brings in form.
• Augustine’s definition: bona qualitas mentis, qua recte vivitur, qua nullus male utitur, quam Deus in nobis sine nobis operatur — good quality = form; mentis (reason or what shares in reason) = the matter it exists in; by which one lives rightly = end; which God pours into us without us = the efficient cause, not acquired by repeated acts like Aristotle’s virtues. All four causes.
• Physics I.1: all understanding comes from knowing beginnings, causes, elements; Thomas: understanding what or why is either way by causes, as in Posterior Analytics II.
• He shows the demonstrations: a knife is a tool for cutting; a tool for cutting must have blade and handle; therefore a knife has blade and handle. Likewise Aristotle defines demonstration by its end (a syllogism making us know the cause, and that of which it is the cause, and that it cannot be otherwise) and then reasons to its matter — necessary statements. Same with definition itself: speech making known what a thing is, therefore composed of genus and difference; or all combined.
• Tie-back: this is the other half of Shakespeare’s definition, “looking before and after” — “the crowning sense of before is the cause is before the effect.”

5. Soul, powers, acts: two reverse orders (“just the what reverse, right?”) #

• The question: soul before powers before acts, and acts before powers before soul — in which of Aristotle’s five senses of before?
• A student tries the first sense (time), then the fourth; he presses. Answer for the first order: the soul causes its powers (which are like properties following from its nature — some having the soul itself as subject, others joined to the body), and the powers cause their acts (“because I have a reason, I can look before and after, as I’m doing today”). That is the fifth sense, cause before effect — not fifth in order but set alongside the second, and mentioned by Aristotle because it is so important for philosophy; “if you don’t believe me, let’s ask why” — and by asking why we eventually go to God.
• Aside from this: if a perfect definition is by causes, can God be defined, having no causes? (left hanging)
• The reverse order is the third sense, before in the discourse of reason / in our knowledge: we know powers through their acts and the kind of soul through the power. Hence Aristotle’s investigation whether the understanding soul is immortal: understanding the universal, understanding continuous things in an uncontinuous way, shows an act not in the body, therefore a power not in the body, therefore a soul not immersed in matter but like a thing floating in water, only partly in it. And since being is before doing, doing not in the body means being not tied to the body — the soul survives death. Likewise Aristotle reasons in On the Generation of Animals that your soul did not come from your mother and father.

6. q. 98, a. 5, objections: are all men bound to the Old Law? (“all men are obligated to observing the old law”) #

• He notes the question arises in Acts. Objections: (1) whoever is subject to a king is subject to his law; the Old Law was given by God, “King of all the earth” (Ps. 46); (2) Deuteronomy 27, “cursed is he who does not remain in the words of this law”; if others could be saved without the Law, the Jews’ condition would be worse than other men’s; (3) Exodus 12:48 — a peregrinus wishing to keep the Passover must first be circumcised, and is then as one indigenous; but it would be vain to admit strangers to the observances if they could be saved without them.
• Sed contra: Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy ch. 9 — many Gentiles were led back to God by the angels, and the Gentiles did not observe the Old Law. (He notes Albert commented on the Celestial Hierarchy, Thomas on the Divine Names.)

7. His answer: natural law binds all, the added precepts bind the Jews (“they are of the law of what nature”) #

• The Old Law makes known the precepts of the natural law and adds certain private precepts above these — he prefers “private” to “proper,” since the common good is a proper good too, and one has a great obligation to it.
• All men are held to what the Old Law contains of natural law, not as it pertains to the Old Law but as it is of the law of nature; only the Jewish people are held to what it adds. Reason: the Law was given to that people that they might have a certain preeminence of holiness, out of reverence for Christ who was to be born of them.
• Aristotelian support for a naturally bad act: there is no virtuous mean of what is already an extreme — adultery is always wrong, so not “don’t commit adultery too much or too little”; likewise drunkenness is already excess.
• Analogy carrying the article: those put in a state of special sanctification are bound to more — clerics given over to divine service are bound to what laymen are not; religious by profession to works of perfection that seculars are not. Deut. 18: “You will be perfect and without stain with the Lord your God”; and they used a profession, Deut. 26, “I profess today before the Lord God.”
• Asides: the Pope on immigrants, treating them as you would be treated, applied toward abortion — “you do not want to be aborted yourself”; his greeting “I’d like to greet all the Jews” to the American bishops; a convert on EWTN who saw the Immaculate Conception made sense since Christ could not be born of a woman contaminated with sin; the quip to one who said he could not stay in the church if it were defined — “don’t worry, you’re already out of the church”; the religious who signs away inheritance and jokes “I’m legally dead,” and his own last will dated to his final vows, which his lawyer brother-in-law said would not take effect, spiritual death not being physical death.

8. Replies of a. 5 (“familiar ministers, to which others are not obliged”) #

1. Subjects are bound to the law the king proposes commonly to all; if he institutes something for his familiar ministers, others are not bound.
2. The more a man is joined to God the better his condition; the Jewish people, more bound to the divine cult, was of more worth — Deut. 4, “what other nation is thus renowned,” with its ceremoniae and iusta iudicia (pointing to the three kinds of precept). Likewise clerics are of better condition than laymen, religious than seculars. (Aside: the nuns in grade school told him a priest is “almost assured of salvation” — “you’re a shoo-in.”)
3. Gentiles obtained salvation more perfectly and securely under the observances of the Law than under natural law alone, so they were admitted — as now laymen transfer to the clerical state, and seculars to religion, though without this they can be saved.

9. q. 98, a. 6, objections: why in the time of Moses? (“These objections are all the Monday morning quarterbacks”) #

1. The Law disposes for the salvation to come through Christ, and man needs that remedy right after sin; so it should have been given immediately after sin — “strike while the iron’s hot.”
2. It was given for the holiness of those from whom Christ would be born, and the promise of the seed began with Abraham; so it should have come in Abraham’s time.
3. As Christ was born of Abraham in particular, so of David, to whom the promise was renewed — 2 Kings (Samuel) 23:1, read and puzzled over with the students: “David the son of Jesse said, the man to whom it was appointed concerning the Christ of the God of Jacob,” David speaking of himself. So the Law should have been given after David, as it was after Abraham; the narrowing goes on.

• Sed contra: Galatians 3, the law was laid down on account of transgression until the seed should come to which it was promised, “ordered by the angels in the hand of the mediator” — ordinata, “given in an orderly way,” as the gloss says.
• Digression on antonomasia: Thomas in the Sentences says grace is said by antonomasia, and God is said to love us by antonomasia since he loves everything he made, but loves us with a friendly love. A student gives Paul’s most general definition: a gift divinely given — a gift because unowed, divinely given because no one else can give it; even creation is gratis, but one still distinguishes grace and nature in the antonomastic sense.

10. His answer: the Law came when it did to convict pride and to aid (“man is proud… of knowledge and of what power”) #

• Every law is laid down for two kinds of men: the hard-hearted and proud, who are restrained and dominated by it; and the good, who instructed by it are aided to fulfil what they intend.
• Man is proud in two ways. (a) Of knowledge, as if natural reason sufficed for salvation: so he was left to the rule of his own reason without a written law, and learned by experience that his reason was defective — intellectus adumbratus — men falling into idolatry and the ugliest sins around Abraham’s time (he notes homosexuality among them, “now we’re back to that”). Hence a written law was needed as remedy for ignorance, “for through law comes knowledge of sin” (Rom. 3:20). (b) Of power: instructed by the law, man must then be convicted of pride when he could not fulfil what he knew he ought — Rom. 8:3, “what was impossible to the law, in which it was weak through the flesh, God sent his Son, that the justification of the law might be fulfilled in us.” He calls this a difficult text.
• On the side of the good, the law was given as an aid, most necessary when the natural law began to be obscured by the exuberance (superabundance) of sins — he cites Shakespeare’s “fair is foul, and foul is fair, hovering through the fog and filthy air” for the two things, filthiness and overflow.
• The aid had to come in order, so that men might be led by the hand (manuductio) from the imperfect to the perfect — Monsignor Dionne at Laval always spoke of manuductio, and Thomas at q. 117, a. 1 describes the teacher leading from known to unknown, one way being manuductio; a senior gave a course on manuductio in logic and in wisdom, these being the most difficult sciences. Hence between the law of nature and the law of grace the Old Law had to be given.
• Asides: Don Giovanni as “the exuberant sinner” who goes down to hell at the end; a Bishop Power with potestas on his coat of arms.

11. Replies of a. 6, and the digression on before (“the law ought not to be given except to a people”) #

1. Not fitting immediately after the first sin, because man did not yet recognize his need, being confident of his own reason; and the dictate of the natural law had not yet been darkened by the customs of sinning.
2. A law is given only to a people, since it is a praeceptum commune, for the common good, as the definition of law had it; so in Abraham’s time certain familiar, as it were domestic, precepts were given by God to men. When his posterity was multiplied into a people, a law could suitably be given. “For servants are not part of the people or the city” to whom law is given (Politics III).
   • Digression on before, prompted by “family”: you must be a man or woman before husband or wife — before in time, and also in the second sense, since you can be a man or woman without being husband or wife, but not the reverse; he finds it striking that the first and second senses connect here. As a boy he thought the same held of husband/wife before father/mother, and took it as an argument for the greatness of matrimony; but he now doubts the second sense holds there, “though in this case it’s better this way.” Attached anecdotes: chapel weddings, “illegitimate” versus “love child” and the stigma the law has tried to remove, “the first child can come anytime, after that it takes nine months,” and the “premature” joke his mother heard and did not get.
3. Because the law had to be given to a people, not only those from whom Christ would be born received it, but the whole people signed with circumcision, the sign of the promise made to Abraham and believed by him; so even before David the law had to be given to a people thus brought together.

• He closes mid-stride: “Okay, we’ll deal with that, Thomas. Don’t try that again.”

His words #

• Natural road in our knowledge — from senses to reason; why Matthew’s order comes first, for beginners.
• Discourse — two senses: going from this to that; strictly, coming to know the unknown through the known.
• Manuductio — leading by the hand, from the imperfect to the perfect, from known to unknown.
• Antonomasia — saying a common word of one thing preeminently (grace; God’s loving us).
• Private precepts — his preferred rendering of what the Old Law adds beyond natural law, rather than “proper,” since the common good is also a proper good.
• Intellectus adumbratus — the overshadowed/defective reason man learned he had by experience.
• Exuberance of sins — the overflowing, superabundant character of sin that obscured the natural law.
• Praeceptum commune — law as a common precept, for the common good, hence given to a people.
• “Natural Hearing” [ed.: Physics].

Texts #

Read in class

• Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 98, a. 5 (whole article, with replies).
• Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 98, a. 6 (objections, sed contra, body, three replies).
• Psalm 46; Deuteronomy 27; Exodus 12:48; Deuteronomy 18; Deuteronomy 26; Deuteronomy 4; 2 Kings (Samuel) 23:1; Galatians 3; Romans 3:20; Romans 8:3.
• Augustine’s definition of infused virtue (bona qualitas mentis…), from Thomas on the Sentences.

Mentioned

• Matthew, Mark, Luke, John (prologue); Peter’s profession at Caesarea Philippi.
• Augustine, Enchiridion on Faith, Hope and Charity; Thomas, Catechetical Instructions; Thomas, Compendium of Theology.
• Albert the Great’s division of logic; Thomas’s Praemium to logic.
• Aristotle: De Anima, Categories, Peri Hermeneias, Posterior Analytics II, Physics I.1, Nicomachean Ethics on the mean, Politics III, On the Generation of Animals, the five senses of “before.”
• Pseudo-Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy ch. 9 (Albert’s commentary); Thomas on the Divine Names.
• Thomas, ST q. 117, a. 1 on the teacher.
• Shakespeare: definition of reason; Macbeth, “fair is foul.”

His questions #

• What is the natural road in our knowledge? From the senses to reason.
• What is a perfect number? A number equal to the sum of its parts, i.e. of what measures it evenly — six, then 28; always composite, never prime.
• Can God be defined, if a perfect definition is by causes and he has no causes? Left open.
• In what sense of before is the soul before its powers and the powers before their acts? The fifth sense, cause before effect, placed alongside the second because of its importance for philosophy.
• In what sense are the acts before the powers and the powers before the soul? The third sense, before in the discourse of reason: we know the power by its act and the soul by its power.
• Are all men bound to observe the Old Law? Only to what it contains of the natural law; what it adds binds the Jews alone, as clerics and religious are bound to more than laymen.
• Was the Old Law suitably given in the time of Moses? Yes — late enough that experience had convicted man’s pride of reason and darkened natural law called for a written remedy, and only when Abraham’s posterity had become a people to whom a common precept could be given.
• In what sense is “man and woman” before “husband and wife”? In time, and in the second sense — one can be the first without the second but not the second without the first.