Above and Below; The New Law in the Old; The Burden of the New Law; Exterior Acts in the New Law (ST I-II Q.106 A.3-4, Q.108 A.1)

Orientation #

He returns to q. 107, a. 3, saying “back to Article Three and Question One O Seven,” and at the end reaches q. 108, a. 1, noting “Only one question now away from grace.” He tells the class the fourth article of q. 108 (the counsels) “is that of you guys now.” The previous class treated hope in Aquinas and Shakespeare and began the New Law’s relation to the Old.

The class, in order #

1. “Above” and “below” have four senses like “before” (“almost as many senses as the words”) #

His point: the vertical pair above/below runs through roughly the same four senses as the horizontal pair before/after, and perhaps in the same order.

• First sense: place. He is above his mattress, the wires below it; dinner on the table, the table under — as the first sense of “before” is before in time/place.
• Second sense: agent and cause. Michelangelo above the marble, the carpenter above the wood — though not strictly spatial: pounding something into the ceiling is still acting upon it. From this, form is said to be above matter, matter underlying. Since matter is the cause most known to us, English says “ground” for cause — Shakespeare seems sometimes to use “ground” so. The ancients sometimes reverse the image: the cause above, the effect hanging from it — still vertical.
• Third sense: order in the mind. Dog under animal; genus put above species (the singular being based on matter, the form above it). Aristotle’s methodos = meta + hodos, “over a road”: the road underlies the knowledge that follows it. Oddly, we think of going along the road as before-and-after, but the road as under the method. A calendar: Monday is before Tuesday, yet the first week is printed at the top and the last at the bottom.
• Fourth sense: dignity. “I’d put Mozart above Haydn” — and Haydn would put Mozart above himself; Hegel puts Mozart above all masters in all arts and ages. “Top shelf.”
• Scripture in the fourth sense: John 8:23, “I am from above, and you are from below” — very concrete in the Greek (anō); John the Baptist, John 3 (inferred: 3:31), “He who comes from above is over all… he who is of the earth speaks of the earth” (desursum venit, super omnes). Going to chapel is horizontal; prayer, once there, is “the ascent of the mind to God,” and “Our Father who art in heaven” places God above us — not spatially, since God is everywhere, but in the fourth sense.
• Faith as “substance.” Paul’s definition: substantia rerum sperandarum, “the substance of things hoped for, the conviction of what is not seen”; the Greek hypostasis has the same etymology. Substance is sometimes said to be before accidents, but “substance” itself names what stands under and supports them — the second sense.
• Student aside: had we been created in space without gravity, with no up or down, naming would differ; yet the perspective points beyond the natural. He answers with Chesterton at a dinner party: a relativist said there is no true and false, only “one great upward movement of the universe”; Chesterton replied — if there is no right and wrong, no true and false, “what’s the difference between up and down?”
• “Understanding” is taken from the vertical direction: not “before-standing.” To understand an effect is to know its underlying cause; to understand a word, the thing standing under it; to understand an epistēmē or methodos, the road that underlies it. He grounds all this in Thomas: “we name things as we know them,” so the order in naming follows the order in knowing.
• Aside on the fourth sense among the living: De Koninck put Dionne above himself — he told Berquist so when Berquist wrote his thesis under Dionne (“why are you asking me when you’ve got Dionne?”), told Warren so, and Mrs. De Koninck told a visiting student the same: Dionne was the greatest mind there.

2. q. 107, a. 3 objections: the New Law is not contained in the Old (“That convinces this dummy here”) #

Three objections, which he plays along with (“I’m wholly convinced now, aren’t you?”):

1. The New Law consists especially in faith (hence “law of faith,” Romans 3), and many things to be believed in the New are not in the Old.
2. A gloss on Matthew 5:19 (his footnote says Augustine) makes the chief commands of the Law the lesser commands, those of the Gospel the greater; the greater cannot be contained in the lesser. He notes the quantitative, imaginative character of the argument.
3. What is contained in another is had together with it; then having the Old one would have the New, and giving a New Law would be superfluous.

• Sed contra: Ezekiel 1:16, rota in rota, “wheel within a wheel,” which Gregory expounds as the New Testament in the Old. “Wheels turning within wheels. That’s amazing.”

3. The body of a. 3: contained in act, contained in power (“as in a what seed?”) #

Two ways of being contained in another:

1. In act, as the located in place — which he expands through the senses of “in”: first, place (we are in this room); second, part in whole (my heart in my body); third, genus and species — the genus is in the species in act, the species in the genus in ability [potency]; then effect in cause, form in matter, “you’re in my power.”
2. In power (in potestate), as the effect in the cause, the incomplete in the complete — as the genus contains the species in power. (He corrects the reading here: it is the genus containing the species, not the reverse, which was deceiving them in the Latin.) Illustration: asked “how many,” you say “five”; you have spoken of five in potestate, not in actu. And the whole tree is contained in the power of the seed — if you came new into the world and were shown an acorn for a huge tree, “you’d be rather taken aback.”

• Conclusion: the New Law is contained in the Old as in a seed, since the New is to the Old as perfect to imperfect. Chrysostom on Mark 4: the earth brings forth first the herb, then the ear, then the full fruit — herb in the lex naturae, ear in the law of Moses, full fruit in the Gospel. “Isn’t that beautiful?” Thus the New Law is in the Old as fruit in the ear.
• Student exchange on “corn”: whether it means wheat rather than maize; he allows it could be any grain. A student notes maize is from the New World — “a tangential question.”

4. Replies of a. 3 (“the new is contained in the old”) #

1. All things to be believed that the New Testament treats explicitly and openly, the Old treats implicitly, under a figure. He half-recalls the Augustinian tag: the New is contained in the Old, the Old made clear in the New. Example: reading Alphonsus Liguori that morning on Isaiah 53 quoting the Fathers — “it’s a gospel,” almost explicit about the Passion, hard for the Jews to deny its appropriateness to Christ.
2. The New Law’s precepts are “greater” as regards explicit making-known; as to substance all are contained in the Old — charity is explicit there. Augustine Contra Faustum: nearly all that Christ commands with “but I say unto you” is found in the old books — but they were not understood. They understood homicide only as taking away the body; the Lord opened that every iniquitous motion to harm your brother falls into the genus of homicide (“If I do that, I’ll kill you” — a figure of speech in some cases). Nothing prevents the greater being contained in the lesser virtute, as the tree in the seed.
3. What is implicitly given must be made explicit — “Shakespeare would say, unfolded”; going from the confused to the distinct, as Aristotle says. “What’s folded in has to be folded out.”

• Gardening asides on seeds: he once planted broccoli and one came up white — cauliflower, a seed mixed in; and Warren in Quebec, where the growing season is poor, was excited by a splendid vegetable in his garden that a girl student had tied there from the market.

5. q. 107, a. 4: is the New Law heavier than the Old? (“My yoke is sweet and my burden is light”) #

Objections:

1. Matthew 5:19 context: Moses’ commands are easy in act — you shall not kill, not commit adultery; Christ’s — not be angry with your brother, not desire your neighbour’s wife — are difficult.
2. It is easier to use earthly prosperity than to bear tribulation; the Old Law’s observance was followed by temporal prosperity (Deuteronomy 28), the New by manifold adversity (2 Corinthians: “in much patience, in tribulations and necessities”).
3. What adds to another is harder: the Old prohibited perjury, the New oaths; the Old dismissal of a wife without a bill of repudiation, the New divorce altogether (Matthew 5, on Augustine’s tradition).

• Sed contra: Matthew 11, “Come to me all you who labour and are burdened” — those labouring in the difficulties of the Law and weighed down by the sins of the age — followed by “My yoke is sweet and my burden light.”
• “Now I’m really completely puzzled… I wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to untie myself. So I go to the master.”

6. The answer: a twofold difficulty (“one is on the side of exterior works”) #

“Thomas always has distinctions I just couldn’t see by myself.”

1. Difficulty on the side of exterior works, which of themselves have weight. Here the Old Law is much heavier: it bound to many exterior acts and multiple ceremonies, whereas the New adds fewest things beyond the natural law’s precepts, in the teaching of Christ and the Apostles — with some later added by the institution of the holy Fathers, in which Augustine (to the questions of Januarius [ed.; transcript: “Donatus”]) says moderation is to be kept lest the life of faith become burdensome: God willed our religion free, with sacraments most manifest and few in number, not like the servile burden tolerable to the Jews.
2. Difficulty in the interior act — doing the work of virtue promptly and with delight (“What a delight to get out of bed early”). This is the difficulty of virtue: valde difficile to one not having virtue, easy to the virtuous. Here the New Law is heavier, since it prohibits inward motions of the soul, not everywhere prohibited in the Old, and where prohibited, without such a penalty laid down. Ethics V: to do the things the just man does is easy, but to do them as he does — promptly and with pleasure — is difficult to one lacking justice. So 1 John 5: “my commands are not grave” — Augustine: not grave to one who loves, grave to one not loving. Example: changing diapers — easy for a mother who loves the little one, wanting the child comfortable; his own father had to do it when his mother was away, and did it to the family’s amazement.

• Replies: (1) that authority speaks of the New Law’s difficulty precisely as regards the express prohibition of inward motions — which he admits. (2) The adversities the observers suffer are not imposed by the Law itself, and are easily borne for the love in which this Law consists; Augustine: love makes things that seem arduous and beyond our power paene nulla, close to nothing. (3) The additions are ordered to fulfilling more easily what the Old Law in fact commanded — so they show the New Law easier, not graver.

7. q. 108, a. 1: ought the New Law to command exterior acts? (“the gospel of the kingdom”) #

He notes q. 108 “seems more what law is usually like.” Four things asked in the question: whether the New Law ought to command or prohibit exterior works; whether it does so sufficiently; whether it suitably orders interior acts; and whether it suitably adds counsels to precepts — the last being the students’ assignment. Objections that it should command no exterior act:

1. It is the gospel of the kingdom (Matthew 24) — a phrase he says one rarely hears in sermons — and the kingdom of God does not consist in exterior acts: “the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17); “the kingdom of God is not food and drink, but justice and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Romans 14). He plays the objection up with jokes: sleep in on Sunday, steak instead of salmon on Friday. A student: “what about murder and such?”
2. It is the law of the spirit (Romans 8), and “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty” — but there is no liberty where a man is bound to do or avoid exterior works. Aside: Augustine’s “love and do what you want” is easily misunderstood; some wanted “the spirit of the council” to rid us of all external rules.
3. Exterior acts pertain to the hand, interior to the soul; the difference laid down between the Laws is that the Old coerces the hand, the New the soul.

• Sed contra: by the New Law men are made sons of light (John 12, “believe in the light that you may be sons of light”), and sons of light must do works of light and reject works of darkness (Ephesians 5: “you were once darkness, but now light in the Lord; walk as sons of the light”).

8. The body of q. 108, a. 1: grace reaches us through sensible things (“the Word was made flesh”) #

The principal thing in the New Law is the grace of the Holy Spirit — “that was the kind of thing that shook us up there” — made known in faith working through love. Men attain this grace through the Son of God made man, whose humanity was first filled with grace, whence it was derived to us: John 1, “the Word was made flesh… full of grace and truth… of his fullness we have all received, grace for grace… grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” Hence it is fitting that grace be led down to us through exterior sensible things. Exterior works pertain to grace in two ways:

1. As leading to grace: the works of the sacraments instituted in the New Law — baptism, Eucharist and the rest. (Asked why these two are named first: the chief sacraments — the Eucharist is in a way the end of all the sacraments, baptism the beginning.)
2. As proceeding from grace. Here a difference: some exterior works have a necessary agreement or contrariety with interior grace, i.e. with faith working through love; these are commanded or prohibited — confession of faith commanded, its denial prohibited (Matthew 10: “whoever confesses me before men, I will confess before my Father; whoever denies me, I will deny”). Other works have no such necessary relation; these the legislator, Christ, left to each one’s care — so each is free to determine what is expedient for himself, and those presiding over others to order what is to be done or avoided. Hence the Gospel law is called the law of liberty: the Old determined many things and left few to man’s liberty.

9. Replies of q. 108, a. 1 (“the free one is the one who is his own cause”) #

1. The kingdom of God consists chiefly — not only — in interior acts; consequently all things without which those interior acts cannot be pertain to it. If the kingdom is interior justice, peace and spiritual joy, then exterior acts repugnant to these are repugnant to the kingdom and so prohibited in the gospel of the kingdom. Things indifferent to these — eating this food or that — are not the kingdom: “the kingdom of God is not food and drink.”
   • Asides: Queen Elizabeth set two fish days a week to build up the maritime population, more than Catholics’ one — “good for the economy… terrible for the diet.” And the Quebec restaurant where the waiters called out “petite steak” as soon as he came in the door; a student’s parallel, putting two hamburgers mustard-only on the grill at McDonald’s when he saw the UPS truck coming.
2. Metaphysics I: the free man is the one who is his own cause; so he acts freely who acts from himself. To act from a habit suited to one’s nature is to act from oneself, since the habit inclines in the manner of nature; a habit repugnant to nature would make one act from a corruption come upon him, not from himself. Since the grace of the Holy Spirit is like an inward habit poured in, inclining us to act well, it makes us freely do what agrees with grace and avoid what is repugnant. So the New Law is the law of liberty in two ways: (a) it does not coerce us except as to what is of itself necessary or repugnant to salvation; (b) its precepts and prohibitions we fulfil freely, from an inward instinct of grace. For these two it is called the law of perfect liberty.
   • Student: an account of Jean de Brébeuf and the North American martyrs — the intricate, onerous, time-consuming rituals of the people he dealt with, and the sense of liberation Christianity brought; we take that for granted in an increasingly pagan world with its own rituals and superstitions.
3. Since the New Law restrains the soul from disordered motions, it is necessary that it also restrain the hand from disordered acts, which are the effects of interior motions.

• Closing aside: philosophers at the University of California once wanted them to come down and stage a medieval debate; they turned it down, since preparing for such a thing would take extensive work.

His words #

• the four senses of “before” — the pattern he applies to above/below: place, agent/cause, order in the mind, dignity.
• methodos — meta + hodos, “over a road”; knowledge that follows the road underlying it.
• ground — English word for cause, taken from matter as underlying.
• understanding — knowing what stands under: the underlying cause, the meaning under the word.
• hypostasis / substantia — faith as “the substance of things hoped for”; substance as what stands under and supports accidents.
• in act / in ability — his rendering of in actu / in potentia: genus in species in act, species in genus in ability [ed.: potency].
• in potestate — “in power”: how the genus contains the species, and the tree the seed.
• unfolded — his Shakespearean gloss on making the implicit explicit; “what’s folded in has to be folded out.”
• valde difficile — “very difficult,” of virtuous acts to one without virtue.
• paene nulla — “close to nothing”; Augustine on what love makes of arduous things.
• law of perfect liberty — the New Law, both for not coercing beyond necessity and for making us fulfil from an inward instinct of grace.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 107, a. 3 (whether the New Law is contained in the Old) — objections, sed contra, body, replies
• Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 107, a. 4 (whether the New Law is heavier than the Old) — objections, sed contra, body, replies
• Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 108, a. 1 (whether the New Law ought to command or prohibit exterior acts) — prologue of the question, objections, sed contra, body, replies
• John 8:23; John 3 (inferred: 3:31); John 1:14, 16–17; John 12
• Ezekiel 1:16; Matthew 5:19; Matthew 11:28–30; Matthew 10:32–33; Matthew 24; Luke 17; Romans 3, 8, 14; Ephesians 5; 2 Corinthians; Deuteronomy 28; 1 John 5

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics V (doing what the just man does, as he does it)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics I (the free man is his own cause); Aristotle on going from the confused to the distinct
• Chrysostom on Mark 4 (herb, ear, full fruit)
• Gregory on Ezekiel; Augustine, Contra Faustum; Augustine to the questions of Januarius [ed.; transcript “Donatus”]; Augustine On the Words of the Lord; Augustine’s “love and do what you want”
• Alphonsus Liguori on Isaiah 53
• Shakespeare (on “ground” for cause; “unfold”)

His questions #

• What are the four senses of “above” and “below”? Place; agent/cause (form above matter); order in the mind (genus above species); dignity (Mozart above Haydn; “I am from above”).
• Why is our word “understanding” vertical rather than horizontal? Because to understand is to know what stands under: the underlying cause, the meaning under the word, the road under the method.
• What are the senses of “in” that lie behind “contained in another”? Place; part in whole; genus and species (genus in species in act, species in genus in ability); effect in cause, form in matter.
• In what way is the New Law contained in the Old? Not in act but in power, as the tree in the seed and the fruit in the ear.
• Then why was a New Law needed at all, if it was already in the Old? Because what is given implicitly must be unfolded and made explicit — from the confused to the distinct.
• Is the New Law heavier or lighter than the Old? Lighter as to exterior works and ceremonies; heavier as to interior motions prohibited — yet not grave to one who loves.
• Ought the New Law to command or prohibit any exterior acts? Yes: grace comes to us through the incarnate Word and sensible things, so sacraments are commanded and acts necessarily agreeing with or repugnant to faith working through love are commanded or prohibited.
• How can a law that binds be called the law of liberty? Because the free man is his own cause, and grace as an inward habit makes us act from ourselves; and because it leaves undetermined all that is not necessary or repugnant to salvation.