God's Beatitude, 'Know Thyself', Shakespeare on Ignorance, and Whether the Old Law's Ceremonies Could Be Kept After Christ's Passion

Orientation #

He opens with what he was reading while away with his grandchildren (Summa Contra Gentiles I, Shakespeare’s histories), then says “let’s turn to one and three, article four” — i.e. ST I-II q. 103, a. 4 — and notes they haven’t far to go to reach grace (“109 is it?”). The previous class treated earlier articles of the same question on the ceremonial precepts.

The class, in order #

1. The four requirements of beatitude (“blessedness, beatitude is the chief good of something that understands”) #

Point: why the last chapters of SCG I treat God’s beatitude, and what beatitude requires.

1. It must be a doing that remains in the doer, not a making or moving. Reason: what you make is an exterior product, and that is what gets perfected; it is accidental to the maker that he be perfected. Example: listening to Mozart (“the most beautiful, the most perfect music ever written”) perfects my ear; making a chair perfects the chair. And God especially learns nothing from making — no one gives Him instructions.
2. It must be an activity of the highest power, which in one who understands is the mind.
3. Its object must be the best thing to know — which is God Himself.
4. The form of the act: perfect, easy, firm (not fleeting), pleasant. God understands Himself perfectly, easily, eternally-firmly, and from that perfection most pleasantly.

Why the placement is fitting: Bk. II treats God as maker of things other than Himself, Bk. III as end of all and mover of all toward Himself — both activities affecting something outside God. So Bk. I fittingly ends with the activity wholly within. The three chapters run: God is blessed; God is His own beatitude; God’s beatitude excels every other.

2. The meaning of a name vs. that from which it is taken (“id a quo nomen imponitur”) #

Point: a name’s origin need not be what it is imposed on.

• Perfectus from per factum (“thoroughly made”) — yet God is not made; still, nothing is perfect unless fully made, lacking nothing.
• The same end of man goes by “happiness,” felicitas, eudaimonia — synonyms in translation, different in origin. “Happiness” is taken from hap, luck — the worst origin (Shakespeare: “we partake of your happiness,” Two Gentlemen of Verona). Felicitas is from fruitfulness, which is better: fruit is the natural result of the plant’s development, and Thomas says virtues are the road to happiness and vices to misery — as the newspaper shows daily.
• Practical upshot: since we are more at home with “happy,” one may say God is happy, happiness itself, and happier than any other, even though the a quo is poor.

3. The two Delphic maxims (“Know thyself, and nothing too much”) #

Point: an exhortation shows its addressee, and following it down narrows to reason.

• Order: “know thyself” comes first; the obvious cases of “nothing too much” (the runner from Marathon who dropped dead; the Russian tale of the man who could have all the land he could run around in a day, and died running) depend on knowing yourself.
• Addressee: not God or angel (who naturally know themselves), not dog, tree or stone (which cannot); man — able to know himself but perhaps not knowing himself well.
• Narrowing: not body (a body cannot know what a body is) but soul; not every part of soul (anger does not know what anger is; hunger, hunger; the eye does not know what an eye is) but reason, the only part that can know itself — and so it knows what is best in man.
• The profound point: reason knowing itself is a likeness of ratios to God knowing Himself; God knows nothing except by knowing Himself, and is blessed by that, not by knowing the universe.
• But “nothing too much” corrects the inference: God in knowing Himself knows the best object; reason in knowing itself does not — its highest object is God. To make self-knowledge the be-all is too much. St. Teresa: “Even in what is good, we must be measured and restrained.”
• Aside: a conversation with “Lady Wisdom” (granddaughter Sophia) about likeness as the cause of deception, occasioned by children offering Grandpa the artificial strawberries from the table centerpiece — Grandpa was not deceived; but “I’m just like God” is exactly that deception.

4. Shakespeare on ignorance (“dull, unfeeling, barren ignorance”) #

Point: Mowbray’s three words map onto the three acts of reason — knowledge of opposites is one.

• Dull = not sharp; sharp penetrates, and in reason’s definition (“looking before and after”) looking before requires seeing a distinction. Dullness prevents seeing a distinction.
• Unfeeling = no grasp; the first act of reason is simple grasping, and you cannot grasp what you cannot distinguish from other things (as I could not grasp this cup if I could not separate it from the air). “Perfectly ordered.”
• Barren = fruitless; reason is the ability for discourse, and discourse is coming to know what you don’t know through what you do know. Premises brought together bear fruit as husband and wife do: major and minor yield a conclusion, genus and difference a definition. Ignorance, being non-being of knowledge in what can know, is barren.

5. Mover and maker among the four causes (“they both name are named from an activity that does not remain in the doer”) #

A student’s grouping of mover and maker prompts this: both produce or move something outside the doer. The Creed says “maker of heaven and earth.” SCG II is God as maker; SCG III is stated first in terms of the fourth cause (God as end of all), then adds that God moves all toward Himself. Hence Bk. I’s placement of beatitude, the activity within. Asides: Thomas asking whether Christ is mediator as God or as man, “taking up each and every thing”; the Jesuit martyr Garnier in the volume Warren Murray contributed to, and the Garnier bookshop in Quebec where he bought old Latin Thomas.

6. Pros ton theon: a complaint about the Catena Aurea (“the logos was pros ton theon”) #

Point: John 1:1’s pros means “towards,” not apud, and that matters for the Trinity.

• Reading the Catena Aurea on John 1-3, he finds no recognition that the Greek is pros; “I can’t be the first person to have seen this.”
• Pros is Aristotle’s word for relation — not an abstract noun but pros ti, which Albert the Great renders ad aliquid.
• Why it matters: Father and Son cannot be distinguished by contradiction, by privation, or by contraries — each of these involves some opposition of being and non-being, impossible in “I am who am.” What is left is relative opposition, “towards something.”
• Structural note: in both the Categories and Metaphysics V (“the fifth book of Wisdom”), opposites are treated just before “before,” which is followed by hama, together.
• Aside: his one semester of Greek, with quotations — ho philos estin allos autos, “a friend is another self” — and the opening of John.

7. ST I-II q. 103, a. 4: the objections (“the legal things cannot be observed without mortal sin”) #

The question: whether after Christ’s passion the legal observances can be kept without mortal sin.

• Obj. 1: the apostles, after receiving the Holy Spirit (a pledge of eternal life, power from on high), did not sin mortally; yet Paul circumcised Timothy (Acts 16) and, on James’s counsel, purified himself with men in the temple until the offering was made for each (Acts 21).
• Obj. 2: avoiding contact (consortia) with Gentiles belongs to the law’s ceremonies, and Peter, the first pastor, withdrew and segregated himself at Antioch (Galatians 2).
• Obj. 3: the apostles’ precepts do not induce men to sin, yet Acts 15 decrees that Gentiles abstain from things offered to idols, blood, things strangled, and fornication.
• Sed contra: Galatians 5, “if you are circumcised, Christ will profit you nothing” — and nothing excludes the fruit of Christ except mortal sin.
• He flags his own perplexity repeatedly: “I’m really confused now, aren’t you?” and cites his “old teacher Kierkegaard” that it is the teacher’s duty to confuse things.

8. The body of the article (“all the ceremonial things are certain professing of the faith”) #

Argument as Thomas gives it:

1. Ceremonies are a professio of the faith in which inward worship consists — “professing, not protesting: we’re not Protestants.”
2. A man professes inward faith by deeds as by words; in either, professing something false is mortal sin.
3. Faith in Christ is the same for the ancient fathers and for us, but signified by different words because of before and after: they said “Behold a virgin will conceive,” in future verbs; we say He is conceived and born, in past.
4. So the old ceremonies signify Christ as to be born and to suffer; our sacraments signify Him as born and having suffered.
5. Therefore one who now said “Christ will be born” would sin mortally, though the ancients could say it piously and truly; and likewise one who now observes the ceremonies the ancients piously observed. Augustine, Contra Faustum: it is no longer permitted to use those sacraments, which personabant (announced) that He would be born, suffer, rise; now it is announced that He is born, has suffered, has risen — and the Christian sacraments personate these. He pauses on persona in personabant.

9. Reply to obj. 1: Jerome’s two times vs. Augustine’s three (“more suitably Augustine distinguishes three times”) #

• Jerome: two times. Before the passion the legal things were not obligatory or expiatory but not death-dealing (those who kept them did not sin); immediately after the passion they became not only dead but mortifera. Hence the apostles never really observed them but only by “pious simulation,” lest they scandalize the Jews and impede their conversion. He stresses: “Simulation is not dissimulation. Always remember.” The simulation meant not that the acts were unreal but that they were not done as observing the law — as a man circumcised today for health, where the doctor is not performing a Jewish rite.
• Against Jerome: it is unfitting that the apostles should conceal, for fear of scandal, what belongs to the truth of life and teaching, or use simulation in things pertaining to men’s salvation; truth is not to be set aside to avoid scandal.
• Augustine: three times. (1) Before the passion: neither dead nor death-dealing. (2) After the gospel is published: dead and death-dealing. (3) The middle time, from the passion until the gospel was spread: dead — having no force, binding no one — but not death-dealing, since converts from Judaism might lawfully observe them, provided they did not put their hope in them as necessary for salvation, as though faith in Christ could not justify without them. Converts from the Gentiles had no such cause.
• Hence Paul circumcised Timothy, born of a Jewish mother, but would not circumcise Titus, born of Gentiles (“Lucky guy”). The Holy Spirit did not wish the Jewish converts to be cut off from the observances at once, as Gentile converts were, so that a difference between the two rites might appear: salvation is from the Jews; the Gentile rite was always omnino illicitus and prohibited by God, whereas the law’s rite ceased by being fulfilled in Christ’s passion, having been instituted by God as figure and sign of Christ.
• Student exchange on the present day: some say one should not try to convert Jews; a student adds that Christians holding seder meals is one thing historically, another to go through the ceremony — “that’s kind of Judaizing.” He agrees, and notes the oddity: “we’re supposed to go back to their stuff, but they’re not supposed to come forward to ours.”

10. Reply to obj. 2: Peter at Antioch (“Paul truly reprehended him, not in pretending”) #

• Jerome’s reply: Peter withdrew simulatorie to avoid scandalizing the Jews, whose apostle he was; Paul reprehended him simulatorie to avoid scandalizing the Gentiles, whose apostle he was — so neither sinned. (“This is a good answer. I like this.”)
• Augustine disproves it: Paul says in canonical scripture (Galatians 2), where believing anything false is contrary to divine law, that Peter was reprehensible; so Peter truly sinned and Paul truly reprehended him. He remarks that this is correcting the Pope, and a footnote in his edition notes St. Thomas later teaches it was only a venial sin.
• Precisely what Peter’s fault was: not that he observed the legal things for a time — that was proper to him as a convert from the Jews — but that he gave excessive diligence to that observance lest the Jews be scandalized, so that scandal of the Gentiles followed.
• Aside: Brother Richard’s line that no priest under thirty or forty is worth going to confession to.

11. Reply to obj. 3: three opinions on the Acts 15 decree (“in the letter these things are prohibited … that there could coalesce a union”) #

• First opinion (from certain glosses expounding mystically): not to be taken ad litteram — blood means homicide, things strangled mean violence and rape, things offered mean idolatry, fornication being prohibited as per se malum. Rejected: homicide and rape were reputed illicit among the Gentiles too, so no special mandate was needed.
• Second opinion: taken literally, but to check gluttony (gula), not as legal observance; with Jerome on Ezekiel 44 (“you shall not eat of anything that is dead”) condemning priests who through desire of gluttony do not guard this. Rejected: there are more delicate and gluttony-provoking foods, so no reason why these rather than others should be forbidden.
• Third opinion (his footnote: perhaps alluding to Augustine), which Thomas adopts: literally prohibited, not as ceremonial observance but so that a union could coalesce between Gentiles and Jews living together. Blood and things strangled were abominable to Jews by custom, and eating idol-offerings could breed suspicion of returning to idolatry. So they were prohibited for that time of first coming together; afterwards, the cause ceasing, the effect ceases, with the truth of gospel teaching manifest — Matthew 15, nothing entering the mouth stains a man, and nothing is to be rejected that is received with thanksgiving.
• Fornication is included because the Gentiles did not reckon it a sin — “so maybe Thomas thinks it’s okay. Wow.”
• Aside: Father Hardin on two kinds of grace, pleasant and painful; “I wouldn’t thank you for fish, so I thank you for the steak.”

His words #

• beatitude / blessedness / happiness — the chief good of something that understands; he weighs the three names by their origins.
• id a quo nomen imponitur — “that from which the name is placed upon something,” distinguished from what the name is placed upon and from its meaning.
• hap — luck, the root of “happiness”; felicitas from fruitfulness; eudaimonia the Greek.
• “likeness of ratios” — the proportional likeness between reason knowing itself and God knowing Himself [ed.: analogy of proportionality].
• “likeness is the cause of deception” — his formula, illustrated by the artificial strawberries.
• “looking before and after” — his phrase in the definition of reason; reason as “the ability for discourse.”
• “simple grasping” — the first act of reason [ed.: simple apprehension].
• pros / pros ti / ad aliquid — “towards,” “towards something”; the word of relation, against the Latin apud.
• hama — “together,” neither before nor after.
• “professing, not protesting” — professio of faith by deed.
• personabant / “personate” — Augustine’s word for how sacraments announce Christ.
• mortiferum — “death-giving, death-causing,” of the legal observances after the gospel is published.
• simulatorie / “pious simulation” — doing the act truly but not as observing the law; “simulation is not dissimulation.”
• omnino illicitus — “entirely illicit,” of the Gentile rite.
• ad litteram — in the letter; per se malum; gula, gluttony.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, ST I-II, q. 103, a. 4 — objections, sed contra (Galatians 5), body, and the three replies, read and translated throughout.
• Augustine, Contra Faustum — quoted within the body on personabant.
• Acts 15, 16, 21; Galatians 2; Matthew 15 — read as quoted in the article.
• Shakespeare, Richard II — Mowbray’s “dull, unfeeling, barren ignorance,” expounded line by line.
• John 1:1 in Greek — en archē ēn ho logos … pros ton theon.

Mentioned

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles I, last three chapters (chs. 100-102, inferred); and the chapter on God as universally perfect.
• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Sentences III, d. 19 (his own correction from “second book”).
• Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea on John 1-3; his commentary on John (not yet read on this point).
• Aristotle, Categories (opposites / before / together) and Metaphysics V; Albert the Great on the Categories.
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, with Thomas’s commentary (the Oxford English translation).
• Jerome on Ezekiel 44.
• Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Cymbeline, Henry IV Parts 1-2, Henry V.
• St. Teresa on measure in good things; Plato and Aristotle on knowledge of opposites.

His questions #

• Why must the chief good be an activity that does not produce or move anything? Because in making, the exterior product is the end and is what gets perfected; the maker’s perfection is accidental.
• Why is listening to Mozart better than making a chair? It perfects my ear with the most beautiful object; making a chair perfects the chair.
• To whom is “Know thyself” addressed? To man — not to God or angel, who naturally know themselves, nor to dog, tree or stone, which cannot; and within man, to reason, the only part that can know itself.
• If reason knowing itself is like God knowing Himself, is it man’s beatitude? No: God in knowing Himself knows the best object, reason does not; making it the be-all is “too much.”
• Can you explain Shakespeare’s three words about ignorance? Dull = unable to see a distinction; unfeeling = unable to grasp; barren = unable to bear a conclusion or definition, since discourse is knowing the unknown through the known.
• How can Father and Son be distinguished? Not by contradiction, privation or contrariety, which all involve some non-being, impossible in “I am who am” — only by relation, pros ti.
• How do you translate apud into English? It lacks the sense of “towards” that the Greek pros has.
• Whether after Christ’s passion the legal observances can be kept without mortal sin? No: ceremonies profess faith by deeds, and to observe them now is to profess something false — though in the middle time before the gospel was published they were dead but not death-dealing.
• Why did Paul circumcise Timothy but not Titus? Timothy was born of a Jewish mother and so of the group for whom observance was still licit in the middle time; Titus was from the Gentiles, whose rite was always illicit.
• Did Peter sin at Antioch? With Augustine, yes — truly reprehensible, not by pretense; not for observing the legal things but for excessive diligence about them, whence scandal of the Gentiles followed. (A footnote adds Thomas later calls it only venial.)
• Why does the Catena Aurea not notice pros? Left open — “I can’t be the first person to have seen this … I’m going to talk to Thomas about that when we get up there.”