Summa I-II q.102 a.4 reply 10 and a.5: The Feasts of the Old Law, Rest in God, and the Reasons for Circumcision

Orientation #

He is finishing q.102 a.4 (“now to the tenth one”) and then begins a.5, breaking off at the reply to the second objection (“so we’ll start at secundum”). He assigns Numbers 28-29 and Leviticus 14 as homework. He notes the previous class went through a.4 at length (“we had a good time with it, with that question one hundred two, article four”). The neighbouring classes continue the same commentary on q.102.

The class, in order #

1. The continual feast and the seven temporal ones (“there were seven temporal solemnities”) #

In the old law there were seven temporal solemnities and one continual, from Numbers 28-29. The continual one: a lamb sacrificed daily, morning and night; through this eucharistia sacrifice is represented the perpetuity of the divine beatitude. He refers to the end of SCG I, where Thomas shows God is beatus, singularly beatus, and is his own beatitude — “happiness itself” — so no one can be happier than he.

• Aside: the Chick-fil-A advertisements with cows saying “eat chicken”; a good company, in conflict with the administration.

2. Sabbath and new moon: creation and governance (“commemoration of the work of the divine governing”) #

Two weekly/monthly feasts for two benefits common to the whole human race, hence frequentius, repeated:

1. The Sabbath, each seventh day, in memory of the creation of things (said above, back in q.100).
2. The Neomenia, each month, commemorating the work of divine governing. He ties this to the Apocalypse — “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end” — and to the plan of the Summa Contra Gentiles: book I God in himself, book II God as beginning of things (creation, the Sabbath), book III God as end of things (governing, the new moon).

• Why the moon fits governance: lower things are especially varied according to the motion of the moon, and for creation we say God made, for governing we call him the Mover — and the moon is a great mover, as the tides show. He remarks that the medievals were ahead of Galileo here, who did not realise the moon causes the tides; also that the moon’s influence over water was held to make men lunatics.
• Why at the new moon and not the full moon: to avoid the worship of the idolaters, who worshipped the full moon (as dogs bay at it).
• Aside on creation: your immortal soul did not come from your mother and father; Aristotle saw this in the Generation of Animals.
• “Month” comes from “moon.”

3. The five yearly feasts (“benefits specially shown to that people”) #

These recall benefits not common to all men but proper to that people, so only yearly.

1. Passover, first month: liberation from Egypt.
2. Pentecost, after fifty days: the giving of the law.
3. Trumpets (tubarum), first day of the seventh month: memory of the liberation of Isaac, when Abraham found the ram held by the horns — hence horns, and much noise. It served as invitation and preparation for the next feast.
4. Expiation, the tenth day: memory of God forgiving the people’s sin in the adoration of the calf, at the prayers of Moses.
5. Tabernacles, seven days: the divine protection and leading through the desert, where they dwelt in tents — hence the fruit of the most beautiful tree (citrum), wood of dense foliage (myrtle, odiferous), palm branches, and willows of the brook, which long keep their vigour; these were found in the land of promise, to signify that God led them through the arid desert into a most delicious land flowing with milk and honey. He notes the seventh month was, as it were, almost wholly solemn, as the seventh day is.

• On the eighth day, the feast of the assembly and congregation, in which they collected from the people what was necessary for the expenses of divine worship; it signified the uniting of the people and the peace restored in the land of promise.
• Aside: his grandchildren named one of the milk cows “Honey,” so they had a saying about milk and honey.

4. The figurative reasons of the feasts (“the perpetuity of Christ, who is the Lamb of God”) #

Item by item: the daily lamb — the perpetuity of Christ, the Lamb of God (Hebrews, last chapter: Jesus Christ today, tomorrow and forever); the Sabbath — the spiritual rest given us through Christ (Hebrews 4); the new moon — the enlightenment of the primitive church by Christ preaching and working miracles; Pentecost — the descent of the Holy Spirit on the apostles; Trumpets — the preaching of the apostles; Expiation — the cleansing of the Christian people from sins; Tabernacles — their journey in this world, progressing in the virtues; the feast of congregation — the gathering of the faithful in the kingdom of heaven, and therefore said to be most holy. He stresses Thomas’s last line: these three feasts were continuous to each other, because it is necessary for those expiated from vices to progress in virtue until they arrive at the vision of God (Psalm 83).

5. The same three in Augustine’s division of the Psalms (“expiated from vices, progress in virtue”) #

Question put to the class: don’t you have these same three in the way Augustine, followed by Thomas, divides the Psalms? In the prologue of his commentary Thomas reviews several divisions and rejects all but Augustine’s. Using the correct (old Catholic) numbering, Augustine takes Psalm 50, Psalm 100 and Psalm 150 as characterising each group of fifty:

1. First fifty — fighting one’s vices and sins; Psalm 50 is the psalm of repentance (Teresa of Avila’s favourite).
2. Second fifty — good deeds, progressing from virtue to virtue; this comes after getting rid of sin.
3. Last fifty — resting in God. (He corrects himself mid-sentence on which psalm characterises the third group.) Thomas’s commentary only reached about Psalm 53, but one can see Augustine hit the nail on the head.

• Aside: a nun describing her week said, “On Sunday we just rest in the Lord.”

6. What rest in the vision of God means (“your soul will come to a complete rest”) #

Aristotle, Physics VII: the soul coming to rest understands. Seeing God face to face, the reason no longer discourses or seeks — it knows the best thing to know, by which it knows everything else — and the will rests in goodness itself, the good of every good; the body is subject to them. So one is completely at rest: “don’t go outside anymore,” as Scripture says. “No philosophers in heaven.”

• Contrast example of not being at rest: people hyped up on drugs. The Assumption student who recorded two men whose “minds were being expanded”; they spent the whole time talking about the recorder’s little red light, and when sober could not stand themselves — the best cure.
• He speculates: the beatified can let their bodies be seen or not, so Thomas probably won’t be bothered by people running after him with questions.

7. What arts belong in heaven (“it would make sense of music, though”) #

A speculative digression, offered as his own idea.

• Music: Thomas seems in places to say there could be music in heaven; he recalls (Paul VI?) on music being appropriate for love, and poets see the connection between music and love — heaven being a place of love, music fits. Mozart and Palestrina getting together for a great Mass.
• Not eating or drinking: no beer, not even wine.
• Not painting or sculpture: glorified bodies and their surroundings would be so beautiful that beautiful paintings would be superfluous. Supporting comparison from this life: a walk in the forest in the fall is beautiful to see, but its sounds (birds, squirrels) are not as great as the sounds of music.
• Not tragedy or comedy: both are the result of the fall — we would not be in the misery tragedy represents nor the ridiculousness of comedy; our life is a back-and-forth between them. So Mozart and Palestrina rank above Shakespeare, Homer and Michelangelo for heaven.

[Break taken here.]

8. The ten objections of a.5 (“a suitable cause of the sacraments of the old law cannot be made”) #

He reads them through, commenting as he goes:

1. Worship should not resemble idolaters’ practices (Deuteronomy 12); idolaters went so far as shedding blood, cutting themselves with knives and lances until covered with blood (3 Kings 18); the Lord forbade cutting oneself or making a calvitium (baldness/shaving) for the dead. So circumcision, a cutting, was unsuitably instituted. — Aside: does the modern practice of fighters or suicide bombers shaving their bodies have an ancient connection?
2. Worship should be honourable and grave (“in a grave people I will praise you,” Psalm 34) — he compares talk of presidential gravitas — but eating in haste belongs to levity; yet Exodus 12 commands eating the paschal lamb quickly, and other rules about the eating seem wholly irrational.
3. The old sacraments figured the new; the paschal lamb signifies the Eucharist (1 Corinthians 5: “our pasch is Christ, offered”). Then there should be sacraments prefiguring confirmation, extreme unction, matrimony and the rest. — He remarks the Eucharist is the end of all the sacraments.
4. Purification presupposes something unclean, but nothing bodily is unclean before God, since every creature of God is good and nothing to be rejected that is received with thanksgiving (1 Timothy 4). So purification after touching a corpse or other corporeal infection is unsuitable.
5. “From the unclean what is made clean?” (Sirach 34). The ashes of the red calf were unclean — the offering priest, the one who ate, and the one who collected the ashes were stained till evening (Numbers 19:7) — so purification by those ashes is unsuitable.
6. Sins are not bodily and cannot be carried about, nor can the unclean cleanse from sin; so the scapegoat, on which the priest confessed the people’s sins and which was led into the desert, and the calf burnt outside the camp which rendered men unclean so that vestments and flesh had to be washed, were unsuitable.
7. What is already clean needs no cleansing; so a second purification for the cleansed leper or his house (Leviticus 14) is unsuitable.
8. Spiritual uncleanness cannot be cleansed by bodily water; so the brazen laver with its base for washing priests’ hands and feet (Exodus 30), and the water-purification and shaving of all the hair of the Levites, seem irrational.
9. The greater cannot be sanctified by the lesser; so consecrating greater and lesser priests (Leviticus 8) and Levites (Numbers 8) by bodily anointing and bodily sacrifices is unsuitable.
10. Men see appearances but God looks on the heart (1 Kings 16); so special vestments for priests (Exodus 28) and exclusion from the priesthood for bodily defects — blind, lame — are without reason (Deuteronomy 21). — Student exchange: in the Middle Ages a missing finger barred ordination without special dispensation; a student instances Isaac Jogues, who needed a dispensation because he had been mutilated. He jokes: “I’m convinced, aren’t you? It didn’t take ten arguments to convince me.”

9. Sed contra and the body of the article (“nothing came about without reasonable cause”) #

Sed contra: “I am the Lord who sanctifies you” (Leviticus 20), and God does nothing without reason — “He made all things in wisdom” (sophia, Psalm 103); therefore nothing in the old sacraments was without reasonable cause. He notes that in theology the argument from authority is strongest, and that it satisfies him. Corpus: sacraments are properly those things applied to the worshippers of God for a certain consecration, by which they are delegated to divine worship. God’s cult pertains generally to the whole people, specially to priests and Levites; so some of these sacraments concern the people commonly, some the ministers. Three things were needed for both:

1. Institution in the state of worshipping God — for the people, circumcision, without which no one was admitted to any of the legal things; for the priests, their consecration.
2. Use of the things pertaining to divine worship — for the people, eating the paschal banquet, to which no uncircumcised person was admitted; for the priests, offering the victims and eating the bread of proposition and the other things given over to their use.
3. Removal of what impedes divine worship, i.e. kinds of uncleanness — for the people, purifications from exterior uncleannesses and expiations from sins; for the priests and Levites, the washing of hands and feet and the cutting (shaving) of hair. All these have reasonable causes, both literal (as ordered to God’s worship for that time) and figurative (as ordered to signifying Christ).

• On “Levites”: a student suggests they are the tribe the priests are taken from, with something like altar-boy status, less than the priests.
• On “minister”: every priest is a minister, though it is not the official title; Protestants are usually so called. Anecdote: his uncle and aunt killed together in an accident, one a Swedish Lutheran, the other a German Lutheran, so the funeral had to be divided between the two churches.
• He notes the parallel of circumcision with baptism: the baptized have a certain share in the priesthood; and asks the class whether we give communion to the unbaptized — “even to some that are baptized.”
• On convivium: Thomas calls the Eucharist a convivium, a banquet, and the vision of God the ineffable convivium — as one sees in the Psalms too.

10. Reply to the first objection: the reasons for circumcision (“professing the faith in the one God”) #

Literal reasons, in order:

1. Principally, to profess faith in the one God. Abraham was the first to separate himself from the unfaithful, going out of his house and his kindred, so he first took circumcision (Genesis, before Moses). Paul assigns this cause in Romans: he took the sign of circumcision as a sign of the justice of faith which was in the foreskin — for there his faith was reputed to him for justice, because he believed against hope in hope. He glosses: against the hope of nature in the hope of grace — “that’s beautiful” — that he might become father of many nations, though he was old and his wife sterile. The profession was fixed in the Jews’ hearts by a sign in their flesh they could not forget: “my covenant in your flesh, an eternal covenant” (Genesis 17).
   • Why the eighth day: before then the boy is too tender and could be gravely hurt, not yet regarded as solid — as animals were not offered before the eighth day. He notes the significance: Christ rose on the eighth day. And why not later: lest for fear of the pain some refuse the sign, and lest parents, whose love increases after living with and watching their sons grow, withhold it from them.
2. To weaken concupiscence in that member.
3. In sugillationem — to revile — the worship of Venus and Priapus, in which that part of the body was honoured. He recalls Greek processions with the phallus, laughable but saying something about our nature. Answer to the objection itself: the Lord forbade only that cutting which came about in the worship of idols, which was not like circumcision. Figurative reason: circumcision figured the taking away of corruption by Christ, completed in the eighth age, the age of those rising from the dead; and because all corruption of guilt and punishment comes to us through fleshly origin from the first parent’s sin, it was done in the member used for generation. “The Apostle” — he notes this is antonomasia for St Paul — in Colossians 2: we are circumcised in Christ by a circumcision not made by hand, in the putting off of the body of the flesh, but in the circumcision of our Lord Jesus Christ. “That’s pretty explicit” — and Paul was a former Jew.

11. Closing remark (“St Thomas is accused of not being scriptural”) #

Out of time, he stops at ad secundum. A student remarks that Thomas is sometimes accused of not being scriptural; here is evidence that he knew Scripture — “more than we had, that’s for sure.”

His words #

• eucharistia — the daily lamb-sacrifice as a continual feast, representing the perpetuity of divine beatitude.
• beatus — God is blessed, singularly blessed, is his own beatitude; “happiness itself.”
• Neomenia — the monthly feast of the new moon.
• frequentius — the benefits common to all men are recalled more often, weekly and monthly.
• tubarum / feast of trumpets — “the feast of the horns.”
• citrum — the fruit of the most beautiful tree at Tabernacles (“the lemon?”).
• calvitium — shaving/baldness made for the dead, forbidden.
• gravitas — gravity required of divine worship (“in a grave people I will praise you”).
• omnino irrationabilia — “entirely irrational,” of the rules about eating the pasch.
• sophia — “He made all things in wisdom” (Psalm 103).
• sacerdotes et levites — priests and Levites, the ministers of divine worship.
• convivium — banquet; Thomas’s word for the Eucharist, and the vision of God as the ineffable convivium.
• “against the hope of nature in the hope of grace” — his gloss on Abraham believing against hope in hope.
• in sugillationem — “to revile,” of circumcision against the worship of Venus and Priapus.
• antonomasia — why “the Apostle” means Paul.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, ST I-II q.102 a.4 ad 10 (the seven solemnities, literal and figurative reasons).
• Thomas Aquinas, ST I-II q.102 a.5, objections 1-10, sed contra, corpus, and ad 1.
• Quoted within these: Deuteronomy 12; 3 Kings 18; Exodus 12, 28, 30; 1 Corinthians 5; 1 Timothy 4; Sirach 34; Numbers 19:7; Leviticus 8, 14, 20; Numbers 8; 1 Kings 16; Deuteronomy 21; Psalm 34; Psalm 83; Psalm 103; Genesis 17; Hebrews 4 and last chapter; Romans; Colossians 2.

Mentioned

• Numbers 28-29 (homework); Leviticus 14 (homework).
• ST I-II q.100 (the Sabbath, “as has been said above”).
• Summa Contra Gentiles I (divine beatitude), and the plan of books I-III.
• Thomas’s Commentary on the Psalms, prologue and its reach to c. Psalm 53 (inferred locus).
• Aristotle, Physics VII; Generation of Animals.
• Apocalypse, “I am the Alpha and the Omega.”

His questions #

• Why was the new-moon feast celebrated at the new moon and not the full moon? To avoid the worship of the idolaters, who worshipped the full moon.
• Why are the Sabbath and new moon repeated so frequently, while five other feasts come once a year? Because creation and governance are benefits common to the whole human race; the yearly five recall benefits shown specially to that people.
• Don’t you have these same three — expiation, progress in virtue, vision of God — in Augustine’s division of the Psalms? Yes: Psalms 1-50 repentance, 51-100 good deeds and progress, 101-150 resting in God.
• Will there be philosophizing in heaven? No — the reason, seeing God face to face, no longer discourses; reason and will are completely at rest.
• Would there be music, or painting, or tragedy and comedy in heaven? Music, plausibly, since it suits love; not painting or sculpture, since glorified bodies and surroundings are beautiful enough; not tragedy or comedy, which are results of the fall.
• What are the Levites as opposed to the priests? The lesser ministers of divine worship, from the tribe the priests are taken from — something like altar-boy status (a student’s suggestion, accepted).
• Do we give communion to someone who is not baptized? No — as no uncircumcised person was admitted to the paschal banquet; “even to some that are baptized” we do not.
• Why was circumcision on the eighth day, and not earlier or later? Earlier the child is too tender and not solid; later, fear of the pain or the parents’ grown love might lead to its being withheld.