God Cannot Deny Himself: Homicide, Theft, and Adultery in the Decalogue, and Whether the Mode of Virtue Falls Under the Law (I-II q.100 a.8–9)

Orientation #

He picks up in mid-article at the second objection of the article on whether the precepts of the Decalogue admit dispensation, having treated the body of the article before (prev. lecture). He ends by announcing the next article, on the modus caritatis, as “very important,” and stops at 4:20.

The neighbouring class takes up Articles 10–12 on the Old Law.

The class, in order #

1. Reply to objection 2: God cannot dispense because he is justice itself (“God remains what? Faithful”) #

Point: God cannot dispense from the Decalogue, because to remove the order of his justice would be to negate himself.

• Premise (2 Tim.): God remains faithful, he cannot negate himself. He glosses with Shakespeare: “This above all, to thine own self be true… thou canst not then be false to any man” — it applies even to God. Fidelity in marriage likewise is being true to your better self.
• Premise: he would negate himself if he took away the order of his justice, because he himself is justice itself — he is altogether simple, in no way put together.
• Aside on the two ways of speaking (he credits Dionysius): with man, the virtue of justice is other than the man; in God there is no composition. So God is not only wise but wisdom itself, not only true but truth itself, not only alive but life itself — “I am the way, the truth and the life.” “God is not just truthful as I can be on a good day. He’s truth itself.” He notes Thomas at the end of Contra Gentiles I shows God is blessed and then that God is beatitude itself — beatitude, which in others can only be partaken of.
• Conclusion: God cannot dispense that man be not rightly ordered toward God, nor exempt from the order of his justice even in what orders men to each other.

2. The two orders of the universe, and the chair (“the order of the parts to each other”) #

Point: the Decalogue’s two tables answer the two orders Aristotle distinguishes.

• Order of the parts to each other, and order of all the parts to the separated good which is God (“Thomas is always quoting that”). First three commandments: order to God; the rest: order of things to each other.
• Example: the chair. Back and seat have an order to each other — the back meets the seat at a slightly obtuse angle, not a right or acute angle (the new New York trains with acute-angled seats would do harm). But this order of parts is on account of the order of the whole chair to sitting, which is outside the chair. So too the order of the parts of the universe is on account of the order of the whole to God: “I am the Alpha and the Omega.”

3. Digression: antonomasia, and the fine arts in heaven (“we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is”) #

• Puzzle from St John: we are already like God by image and likeness, and more so by grace — why then “we shall be like him”? Answer: we are most like him in glory, seeing him as he sees himself; so John speaks by antonomasia, not properly. Student: “that’s the fullness of the likeness.”
• Parallel: Aristotle calls Homer “the poet” by antonomasia; and poet itself, as Plato points out, is antonomasia, since the Greek means maker — there are makers of tables, dinners, glass, clothes, but the maker of the play or epic is the maker.
• His theory: sculpture, painting, fiction and plays will not survive in heaven — our surroundings and the saints in glory will be so beautiful that a painting is superfluous; and tragedy and comedy both result from the fall (the laughable person too). Chesterton: something too great for God to show us on earth — he fancies it was his humor. Scripture shows Christ weeping over Jerusalem and angry at hardness of heart, but never cracking a joke; he and Warren allow him a little irony, the humor befitting a superior man; a student adds that he rejoices.
• Asides on what we laugh at now: picking up the phone remote to change the TV channel; his son Paul asking whether he, Maria and Marcus came “from Mama,” and then whether father did — “well, then you don’t really belong, but you can stay”; a girl who made a coffee cake with coffee grounds in it. He leaves open what the source of our laughter in heaven would be: “It’s hard to see.”

4. Reply to objection 3: killing and taking as undue (“according as it has the notion of something not owed”) #

Point: the Decalogue forbids killing and taking under the notion of what is not owed, so the precept itself contains the very notion of justice.

• Human law cannot make it licit that a man be killed when it is not owed him; but the killing of malefactors and of enemies of the country is not undue, so it is not contrary to the precept nor homicide at all — he cites Augustine (On free judgment [De libero arbitrio]). “So if I’m attacking a country, I’m owed to death.”
• Likewise if what was his own is taken from someone to whom it is owed that he give it up: not theft.
• Scriptural cases, each attached to a commandment: the sons of Israel taking the spoils of the Egyptians by God’s command — not theft, because owed them by God’s judgment. Abraham consenting to kill his son — not homicide, because owed by the command of God, Lord of life and death, who inflicted death on all men, just and unjust, for the sin of the first parent; what a man carries out by divine authority is no more homicide than God’s own act is. Osee approaching the unfaithful woman — not moechatus or fornicatus, because he approached one that was his own by the divine command, God being the author of the institution of matrimony.

5. The rule: immutable in reason of justice, changeable in determination (“as regards the ratio, the reason of justice”) #

Point: this is the distinction the whole article turns on.

• As regards the ratio of justice they contain, the precepts of the Decalogue are immutable.
• As regards the determination by application to singular acts — whether this is homicide, theft or adultery — they are changeable, because sometimes a man is owed his life and sometimes not.
• Last paragraph (read again in full): this change is sometimes by God’s authority alone, in what God alone instituted, as matrimony; sometimes by human authority in what is committed to human jurisdiction, in which men carry the place of God — “not regarding all things.”
• He notes he sent the whole question to someone in Germany who may find the matrimony point useful.

6. Aside: the death penalty and papal rhetoric (“the pope has never condemned capital punishment”) #

• He reports a recent papal talk to an international penal-law society saying the death penalty is “condemned,” with references to Evangelium Vitae and the Catechism; but looking these up, the Catechism first gives the reason why it is legitimate and only restricts its use as unnecessary in present circumstances. So “condemned” is a rhetorical way of speaking. He calls this pope one who “uses more rhetoric sometimes than strict reasoning.”
• Benedict XVI (as a student confirms): a Catholic is not a bad Catholic for disagreeing with the pope here — it is a prudential matter of circumstances, not of justice as such.
• His own point: no pope has ever condemned capital punishment as such, because Scripture does not and the teaching of the Church never has. A possible motive for the recommendation: if respect is shown even to the life of a murderer, then a fortiori to innocent babies.
• Student: R. R. Reno in First Things on this pope’s formation not lending itself to rhetorical precision, where John Paul II and Benedict weighed every word; the pope has admitted speaking spontaneously. His example from the encyclical on the environment: species destroyed that we will never know — “if you don’t know what they are, how do you know they’re being destroyed?”

7. Reply to objection 4, and disciplinary asides (“a work that’s necessary for human salvation”) #

• The Sabbath case (defending the country on the Sabbath): he is not understood to violate the Sabbath who does work necessary for human salvation, as the Lord proves in Matthew 12. He notes this fourth reply was more a matter of interpretation of the command than of dispensation.
• Student question: is Sunday Mass obligatory for a traveller? Answer: dispensed when circumstances make it impossible; but if you are somewhere a week and a half and down the street from a parish church, “you don’t have much of an excuse.”
• Asides: the reaction against vernacular Mass (the woman who had defended Latin to her Protestant neighbours; he notes the Mass was probably said in Greek, or Aramaic, before Latin); the Saturday-evening Sunday obligation as scandalising some; the old fast from midnight, not even water, relaxed by Pius XII and then to one hour — the sisters of St Joseph covering the drinking fountains before First Communion; he prefers to count the hour from the beginning of Mass, to be safe. Friday abstinence stories: Aunt Margaret’s hamburger; Rosalie’s friend served meat on a plane; a new monk’s caterpillar in the lettuce — “it’s okay, this is a meat day.”

8. Article 9, the objections: does the mode of virtue fall under the precept? (“do it justly”) #

Objections, each with the reason he gives:

1. It is the mode of virtue to do just things justly, brave things bravely, i.e. with perseverance and stability; Deuteronomy 16:20, iustum quod iustum est exsequaris. His gloss: merely avoiding fornication after a struggle is not an act of chastity done chastely — you must rejoice in what is chaste; you should pay debts with joy. (Aside: paying for the family dinner because his pockets bulged with twenties.) He asks “Who would even think of this question?” and warns that an argument from Scripture is strong but can mislead: “The Lord is my rock; rock is a body; therefore God is a body” — you are led by the imagination, understanding the words but not what is under them.
2. What falls most under precept is what is of the lawgiver’s intention; the lawgiver intends principally to make men virtuous (Ethics II); and the virtuous man does things virtuously, enjoying them — the liberal man is glad to bestow. Aside: “they laugh at you for saying that today in American politics.”
3. The mode of virtue seems to be to act voluntarily and with pleasure; Psalm 91 “serve the Lord in joy,” and 2 Cor. 9 “not from sadness or from necessity, for God loves a cheerful giver,” with the gloss (possibly from Augustine): whatever good you do, do it cheerfully, and then you do well; if you do it with sadness, it comes from you, but you do not do it. “I’m convinced, aren’t you?”

Sed contra: no one can act as the virtuous man acts unless he has the habit (Ethics II and V — the sign of acquired justice is that I rejoice in paying what I owe); but whoever transgresses a precept merits punishment; so the man without the habit would merit punishment whatever he did — against the law’s intention, which is to lead man to virtue by accustoming him to good deeds.

9. The body: what law can coerce and judge (“the precept of the law has the coercive power”) #

1. What falls directly under the precept of law is what the law forces you to; the force of law is through fear of punishment (Ethics X): what comes under precept is that for which the pain of the law is inflicted. Example: I may be sad at driving thirty rather than sixty, but they punish me for the speed, not for the sadness.
2. Punishment is inflicted only for what the legislator can judge, since the law punishes from judgment.
3. Man, giver of human law, can judge only exterior acts — “men see those things which appear” (1 Kings 16). God alone, giver of divine law, judges the interior movements of the will — “scrutinizing the hearts and the loins” (Ps. 7:10). Hence the threefold division, following the Philosopher (Ethics II) on the three things in which the mode of virtue consists:

• Knowingly — judged by both human and divine law, since what one does in ignorance he does per accidens. Example: in Shakespeare’s civil-war play, the father who has killed his son and the son who has killed his father, and the king weeping over them.
• Willingly / by choice, implying the twofold inward motion of will and intention — judged by divine law alone: human law does not punish the man who wishes to kill and does not kill, but divine law does, “whoever is angry with his brother is subject to judgment” (Matt. 5). He recalls his reading on intention in the Sentences: intention is an act of the will influenced by reason directing something other than itself, and regards the end; choice also involves reason, but with regard to what is for the end. Asides: conspiracy to kill is more than thinking about it — taking steps; legislators, judges and executives who facilitate abortion are conspiring to murder; plotters who buy their bomb materials from the FBI.
• Firmly and immovably, which properly belongs to habit — falls under neither law: no one is punished, by man or by God, who gives suitable honour to his parents without having the habit of piety. Example of his own habit: as a boy in Minneapolis he and his friends found a billfold, turned it in, found the owner in the paper; his parents refused any reward and refused the ice cream soda — “they brought me up justly,” and now he simply cannot pick up a dropped billfold and take the money, “I try, but I just can’t.” He mentions a little work, Pietas de Fies [unclear in recording; on the piety of Christ toward his mother], in French. A student adds a remark from Peter Feulner (inferred) on Mass intentions: you need not have good feelings toward the person or feel sorry that someone died in order to fulfil the obligation.

10. The replies to the three objections (“not already that it come about from the habit”) #

1. The mode of the act of justice that falls under precept is that it come about according to the order of justice, not that it come from the habit of justice.
2. Two things in the lawgiver’s intention must be distinguished: that to which he intends to induce by the precepts (virtue), and that about which he lays down the precept (the act of virtue, which leads or disposes to virtue). The end of the precept and that about which the precept is given are not the same, just as elsewhere the end and what is to the end differ. He restates Aristotle’s paradox: how do you become just by doing just things? — you are not yet doing it as the just man does, but you are doing something good that disposes you to be truly brave. Student: “practice makes perfect.” Aside: a military man told him that every time you go into battle you have to learn it over again.
3. To do the work of virtue without sadness falls under the precept of divine law, since he who acts with sadness does not act willingly; to act delightfully falls under precept in some way — insofar as the pleasure follows from love of God and neighbour, and love is the cause of pleasure — and in some way does not, insofar as pleasure follows upon the habit, “pleasure in the work done is a sign of the habit generated” (Ethics II). Something can be delightful either on account of the end or on account of the suitability of the habit: you may do something for your husband or wife with pleasure because you love them, without having the habit.

11. Closing (“This is very important. The modus caritatis”) #

He notes the next article is long, stops at 4:20, and flags the modus caritatis as very important.

His words #

• “To thine own self be true” — Shakespeare, used of God’s fidelity: he cannot negate himself.
• “Justice itself,” “truth itself,” “beatitude itself” — the way of speaking required by God’s simplicity, over against “God has justice.”
• antonomasia — calling a thing by the name of that in which it is pre-eminent: Homer “the poet”; “we shall be like him.”
• “not owed” / “undue” [ed.: indebitum] — the notion under which the Decalogue forbids killing and taking.
• ratio of justice vs. determination through application to singular acts — the immutable vs. the changeable in the Decalogue.
• moechatus / fornicatus — the terms denied of Osee’s act.
• “mode of virtue” — that one do just things justly, bravely, with perseverance and stability, knowingly, willingly, and from a firm habit.
• vis coactiva — the coercive power of the precept of law, working through fear of punishment.
• quantum ad aliquid — “as far as to some extent”: his repeated tag for the threefold division of the answer.
• intention — an act of the will influenced by reason, regarding the end; choice regards what is for the end.
• modus caritatis — the mode of charity, the subject announced for next time.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 100, a. 8, replies to objections 2, 3, 4, and the concluding paragraph
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 100, a. 9, whole article
• 2 Timothy 2:13 (God remains faithful, he cannot deny himself)
• Deuteronomy 16:20; Psalm 91[99]:2; 2 Corinthians 9:7 with the gloss; 1 Kings [1 Samuel] 16:7; Psalm 7:10; Matthew 5:22; Matthew 12

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics II, V, X
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles I, end (God is beatitude itself); Summa Contra Gentiles III, ch. 51 (inferred from the verified sources; he does not name it)
• Augustine, De libero arbitrio; Pseudo-Dionysius (the two ways of speaking of God)
• Thomas Aquinas, commentary on the Sentences, on intention
• 1 John (“when he appears, we shall be like him”); John 14:6; Apocalypse (“Alpha and Omega”)
• Shakespeare, Hamlet (Polonius); a Shakespeare history play of civil war
• Evangelium Vitae; the Catechism; Chesterton; R. R. Reno in First Things; a work he calls Pietas de Fies [unclear in recording]

His questions #

• Why can God not dispense from the Decalogue? Because he is justice itself, and to take away the order of his justice would be to negate himself.
• Why does St John say “we shall be like him,” when we are already like him by image and by grace? Because he speaks by antonomasia: in glory we shall be most like him.
• Was the taking of the spoils of the Egyptians theft, Abraham’s consent homicide, Osee’s act adultery? None of the three: each was owed by the command of God, so the act does not fall under the notion the precept forbids.
• In what, then, is the Decalogue unchangeable and in what changeable? Unchangeable in the ratio of justice it contains; changeable in whether this particular act counts as homicide, theft or adultery.
• Has any pope condemned capital punishment as such? No — the restriction is prudential, about circumstances, not a condemnation.
• Does the mode of virtue fall under the precept of law? Threefold: acting knowingly, under both laws; acting willingly and by choice, under divine law only; acting from a firm habit, under neither.
• How can you become just by doing just things, if doing them already makes you just? You do not yet do them as the just man does, but you do what is good and disposes you to the virtue.
• Is Sunday Mass obligatory for someone traveling? Dispensed when circumstances prevent it; not when a church is down the street.
• What would we laugh about in heaven? Left open — “I don’t know. It’s hard to see.”