Summa I-II q.110 a.2–3: Grace as a Quality of the Soul, the Categories and the Five Predicables, and How Grace Differs from Infused Virtue

Orientation #

He picks up Q. 110 where the first article left off (“as has been said above” about the two ways man is aided by God’s gratuitous will) and works through Article 2 and then Article 3, breaking for “a little break here now before we begin article three.” He remarks in passing that “today is our feast of Saint Thomas.”

The previous class opened the treatise on grace with Q. 110, a. 1, whether grace places something in the soul.

The class, in order #

1. The two fundamental books of logic (“the book of the five names”) #

Point: to ask whether grace is a quality you need the Categories, and (for a. 3–4) the Isagoge.

• Porphyry’s book, properly Isagoge to the Categories of Aristotle, got shortened to “Introduction” — called the Isagoge by antonomasia, as Newton’s book became “the Principia.”
• The Greeks called them the book of the five names (genus, difference, species, property, accident) and the book of the ten names (substance, quantity, quality, relation…). He pulls out a bill “to make concrete this thing.”
• Porphyry says in his proemium the five are useful not only for the Categories but for definition, division and demonstration.
• The scandal he flags: is it scandalous that Thomas asks whether grace fits one of Aristotle’s ten? In the treatise on God’s simplicity we found God is in no genus “except perhaps as a cause” — so if grace is something divine, is it in a genus at all?

2. How the ten are distinguished (“said of individual substances”) #

• Aristotle’s first cut: substance vs. the nine accidents. Thomas prefers a three-fold division:
  1. said of individuals by reason of what they are — substance;
  2. by reason of something in addition existing in them — quantity, quality, relation;
  3. by reason of something outside them — the last six (being in this room, in the 21st century, being clothed; habitus).
• His example of the boundary: “my being clothed is not my substance, and not something existing in me like my knowledge or my health.”
• The two fundamental ones in the second group: how much and how. Grandchildren: “how are they?” (quality, healthy) vs. “how they shot up” (quantity).

3. Article 2, objection 1: no quality acts on its own subject (“does my knowledge teach you?”) #

Objection: a quality’s action is not without the subject’s action — my knowledge doesn’t teach you, I teach through my knowledge; my love doesn’t love you. But grace acts on the soul, justifying it (justificatio impii). So grace is no quality.

• Reply (his framing): this is the fallacy of equivocation, “the most common kind of mistake” per the Sophistical Refutations. Grace acts not as efficient but as formal cause — as whiteness makes a thing white, justice makes a man just.
• Example for the two senses of “make”: wood vs. shape makes this a chair rather than a table (a plastic lawn chair shows it’s not the wood); sugar is what “makes” the grandchildren’s cereal disgustingly sweet.
• Digression on why “maker” gets extended: beginning / cause / element (Metaphysics) — beginning is more general than cause, cause than element; the point is the beginning of a line but not its cause. Commenting on the Physics, Thomas sometimes appropriates beginning to the efficient cause, element to the material, and cause to form and end (the form makes a thing what it is; the end is the cause of the other causes). Since the mover-maker is most obviously a beginning, “maker” gets carried to the other causes.
• Aside: “who’s going to make dinner?” / “I’ll make time for that.”

4. Objection 2: substance is nobler than quality (“every substance is either the nature”) #

Objection: substance is nobler than quality, and grace is nobler than the soul’s nature (we can do through grace what nature cannot); so grace is a substance.

• Reply: every substance is either the nature of the thing or a part of the nature (matter and form are called substances, alongside the composite). So substance and nature are very close words.
• Nature as matter vs. as form (Physics II): walking up the church steps is natural by form; falling from the seventh floor, or helium rising, is natural by matter; “large discourse, looking before and after” is natural by form.
• Since grace is above human nature it cannot be the substance or a substantial form; it is an accidental form of the soul. “Accidentally” here does not mean by chance — an accident is what exists not in itself but in another as in a subject (this returns in a. 4).
• What is substantially in God comes to be accidentally in the soul, partaking of the divine goodness, as is clear about knowledge. Parallel: anger can be reasonable — not substantially reason, but by something of reason impressed on it; so the soul partaking of the divine nature has grace as an accident.
• He notes the Latin imperfecte participat — to take a part; and Aristotle’s remark that whole and perfect mean almost the same. Grace is had more imperfectly in the soul than the soul’s own subsisting, yet is nobler than the soul’s nature as an expression or participation of divine goodness — “but not, however, as regards the way of God’s being. I am who am.” (God to Moses: “I will show you every good” — Thomas: “that is myself.”)

5. Objection 3: grace remains after ceasing to be in the subject (“the being of an accident is to be in another”) #

Objection: no quality remains once it ceases to be in its subject; but grace remains, since it would not be annihilated; it is called “a new creature” (Galatians). So grace is a substance.

• Reply (Boethius, and Aristotle before him): the being of an accident is to be in another; strictly nothing is in itself. An accident is not so much a being as of a being — not having being, but that by which something is. (“Being” is “perhaps the most equivocal word there is.”) Hence properly no accident comes to be or is corrupted; it is said to do so as the subject begins or ceases to be in act according to it.
• Grace is called created because men are created according to it, i.e. constituted in a new being, from nothing — “This is very profound”: from nothing, that is, not from your merits. Ephesians: “created in Christ Jesus in good works.” “That’s fancy footwork.”

6. Sed contra and the body: the two ways God aids (“motion of the soul” vs. “habitual gift”) #

• Sed contra: Psalm 103, “that your face might be exhilarated [cheered up] in oil” — the gloss takes grace as the light, the nitor, the brightness of the soul, and brightness is a quality, as beauty of the body is. He ties this to Dionysius putting clarity in the notion of beauty (“some clarity in Mozart’s music”).
• Body: in one who has God’s grace there is signified an effect of God’s gratuitous will, and man is aided in two ways:
  1. the soul is moved by God to know, will or do something — here the effect is not a quality or form but the motion of the soul, “for the act of the moving mover in the moved is motion” (Physics III);
  2. some habitual gift is poured into (infunditur) the soul — and a habit is a form, not a motion. (He asks whether “poured in” is taken from the continuous: yes.)
• Digression on act: Metaphysics IX — act means first of all motion, then is carried over to form. Mover and maker both cause act in another: the mover causes the act called motion, the maker the act called form (the carpenter is cause of the chair). Aristotle names the mover before the maker because motion is more known than form — hence “action,” “activity”; strange to call a shape an action. Modern testimony to motion being what is most known: Heraclitus, Hegel, Marx; “I don’t know anybody who says all things are at rest.” Aristotle finds motion a strange thing, hard to understand, “the thing that has the least being.” Movie directors say “action”; people watch sports, not somebody sleeping.
• Aside: in the Summa Contra Gentiles, Book II treats God more as maker, Book III more as mover (He does not leave what He made but moves it to its end).

7. Why the gift must be a quality (“he disposes all things sweetly”) #

Argument of the body:

1. It is not fitting that God provide less for those He loves to a supernatural good than for those He loves only to a natural good.
2. To natural creatures He not only moves them to their natural acts but imposes forms and powers, the principia of their acts.
3. Hence the motions by which they are moved by God become connatural and easy to them — “he disposes all things suaviter,” sweetly (Wisdom 8), because what He moves them to they are naturally inclined to. (He predicts the citation before Thomas gives it.)
4. Much more, then, to those He moves to a supernatural good does He pour in forms, supernatural qualities, by which they are moved sweetly and promptly to the eternal good.
5. Therefore the gift of grace is a quality.

• He adds an a fortiori: if a form is needed to act promptly and with delight within our nature, still more is needed for what is above our nature.
• Examples of connatural promptness: the cat’s paw; the kitten that would not be held when a striated belt was moved (the snake being the cat’s natural enemy) though it played with the other belts — instinct; squirrels running and leaping in trees.
• Student question: can grace be a quantity, since one can have more or less grace? Answer: qualities admit more and less without being quantities; a grandchild’s body is a substance that has quantity. Grace has no number, length or width, since the soul is not a body — length, width, depth of the soul only metaphorically. (“I’m at the age of shrinking.”)

8. The five predicables, and soul to its powers (“species to property”) #

Point: to see how grace stands to the virtues, you need property vs. accident.

• Genus: said of many univocally, signifying in common what they are; species adds the difference. Triangle: figure / plane figure / rectilineal plane figure (proximate genus); “three-sided” is the difference.
• Genus signifies what a thing is in general, species in particular, difference how it is what it is; property and accident signify something outside what it is — but the property follows upon the nature, the accident has no connection with it.
• Triangle with interior angles equal to two right angles: a property — and this is why Porphyry says the five are good for knowing demonstration (Euclid I.32 (inferred)). Triangle being green: an accident.
• Soul to its powers = species to property. The nobler the soul, the more powers: plants have nutrition, growth, reproduction; animals add sensation and the emotions (the dog barking outside — “a dog is known for his anger”); only man has the full powers, so Aristotle can call the plant’s or beast’s soul a part of the soul; De Anima treats vegetative, then sense, then intellectual powers.
• Application, admittedly “getting ahead of ourselves”: as powers followed naturally on receiving the soul, so from grace — which is in the soul itself — there follow properties in the higher powers: faith in reason, hope and charity in the will. “So philosophy has some use there in theology.”

9. Article 3, objections 1–2: is grace the same as virtue? (“faith which operates through love”) #

• Obj. 1 (Augustine, On the Spirit and the Letter): operating grace is faith working through love, and that faith is a virtue. Reply (given at once): Augustine calls it grace because the act of faith working through love is the first act in which sanctifying grace is made known. “So you need Thomas to know what Aristotle is really saying, and what Augustine is really saying.”
• Obj. 2: whatever the definition fits, the thing defined fits. Virtue’s definitions fit grace — Aristotle’s (Ethics II: makes its bearer good and his work good) and Augustine’s (“a good quality of the mind by which one lives rightly”). So grace is a virtue.
• Reply: the “good” in virtue’s definition is said by agreement with a nature already existing, essential or partaken. Grace is not good that way but as the root of goodness in man — as human virtues answer to human nature, the theological and infused virtues answer to grace and in a sense follow upon it, but are not the same.

10. Objection 3: the species of quality (“it must be in the first species”) #

Objection by elimination: grace is a quality; not the fourth species (form and figure, since grace does not pertain to body — “grace is not the shape of the soul”); not the third (passible quality in the sensitive part, warm, sweet — Physics VII — whereas grace is principally in the mind); not the second (natural power or impotence, since grace is above nature and does not stand to good and bad as a natural power does). Therefore the first species, habit or disposition; but habits of the mind are virtues (even science is in a way a virtue of reason). So grace is virtue.

• He puts the question to the class: does Aristotle exhaust the species of quality, or might there be another? “My logic teacher in college thought so.”
• Thomas’s reply: grace is led back to the first species not because it is a habit or disposition but because it is like one — a habitudo, a way of having oneself, presupposed to the infused virtues as their beginning and root, they falling from it like properties.
• He compares this move to his own handling of an equivocal word: the fifth sense of “before” in the Metaphysics (cause before effect) he placed alongside the second sense (that which can be without the other, while the other cannot be without it) — not the same sense, but a likeness; cause and effect differ because the cause can be without the effect but not conversely, and that asymmetry is a kind of dependence.
• Asides on distraction: a girl passing the window; the dog digging in the flower bed; his cousin Donald lecturing while airplanes took off outside — “things in motion, so they catch the eye”; the English professor who banged to wake the class.

11. Sed contra and body of a. 3 (“nothing is before itself”) #

• Sed contra: if grace were a virtue it would be one of the three theological ones; not faith or hope, which can exist without sanctifying grace; not charity, because grace precedes charity (gratia praevenit) and “nothing is before itself” (Augustine, On the Predestination of the Saints). “That’s a good text there — goes back to my axiom of before and after.” He notes “before” here means before in causing, not better than charity.
• Body: some (the Master, Peter Lombard, Sentences II) held grace and virtue the same in essence, differing only in reason — grace as making one pleasing or as given gratis, virtue as perfecting for acting well. Thomas: “this cannot stand” (one of his phrases, like calling something frivolous).
• Argument: (1) Virtue is “the disposition of the perfect to the best” — of what is perfect and disposed according to its nature (Physics VII). (2) So every virtue is said in order to some pre-existing nature. (3) The acquired virtues dispose man for the nature by which he is a man, according to reason. (4) The infused virtues dispose to a higher way and a higher end, so they must be in order to a higher nature — the divine nature partaken (2 Peter: “greatest and precious things promised, that we might be made consortes of the divine nature”; he notes with satisfaction that it is Peter, “the Pope himself”). (5) According to this nature we are regenerated as sons of God — which is in the line of nature, not habit (John: we are sons of God now, and when He appears we shall see Him as He is).
• Conclusion: as the natural light of reason is something apart from the acquired virtues that are ordered to it, so the light of grace, a partaking of the divine nature, is something apart from the infused virtues that derive from it and are ordered to it. Ephesians 5: “You were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord; walk therefore as sons of the light” — acquired virtues perfect man for walking by the natural light of reason, infused virtues for walking by the light of grace.
• Closing aside: “What could be more clear than Thomas — Doctor Clarissimus.” The Franciscans call their teacher the Seraphic Doctor, Thomas is the Angelic Doctor.

His words #

• Isagoge / “book of the five names” — Porphyry’s introduction, so called by antonomasia; the five predicables.
• “Book of the ten names” — the Categories.
• Beginning, cause, element — Aristotle’s three words; beginning widest, element narrowest (material line).
• Maker / mover — his renderings of efficient cause under two aspects: cause of the act called form, and of the act called motion.
• Accidentally — “does not mean by luck or chance”; accident as what exists in another as in a subject.
• Imperfecte participat — imperfectly partakes, “takes a part.”
• Nitor — the brightness or beauty of the soul (translation queried in class).
• Infunditur — poured in; he notes the metaphor is taken from the continuous.
• Suaviter — sweetly; God disposes all things sweetly because creatures are inclined to what He moves them to.
• Connatural and easy — how divinely caused motions feel to a creature that has the fitting form and powers.
• Habitudo — “a certain way of having yourself,” what grace is, rather than a habit.
• Gratia praevenit — grace comes before charity, i.e. in causing.
• “This cannot stand” — his note of Thomas’s phrase for rejecting an opinion.
• Axiom of before and after — “nothing is before itself,” used to show that order requires distinction.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 110, a. 2 (objections 1–3, replies, sed contra, body) and a. 3 (objections 1–3, replies, sed contra, body); brief reference back to a. 1.
• Aristotle, Physics III (act of the mover in the moved is motion); VII (passible qualities; virtue is the disposition of the perfect).
• 2 Peter 1:4; Ephesians 2:10; Ephesians 5:8; Galatians (new creature); Psalm 103(104):15; Wisdom 8:1.

Mentioned

• Porphyry, Isagoge proemium; Aristotle, Categories, Sophistical Refutations, Metaphysics V and IX, Nicomachean Ethics II, De Anima, Physics II.
• Augustine, De spiritu et littera; De praedestinatione sanctorum. Peter Lombard, Sentences II. Boethius. Dionysius (clarity in beauty).
• Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles II and III; the treatise on divine simplicity (is God in a genus).
• Euclid I.32 (inferred). Exodus (“I will show you every good”; “I am who am”). 1 John (we are sons of God).

His questions #

• What are the two fundamental books of logic? — The Isagoge and the Categories, the book of the five names and the book of the ten.
• Is God in any one of the ten categories? — No, in no genus, “except perhaps as a cause.”
• How does Aristotle distinguish the ten? — Substance vs. accidents; Thomas divides into what a thing is, what is in it, and what is outside it.
• Does my knowledge teach you, or do I teach through my knowledge? — The latter; the quality acts as formal, not efficient, cause.
• What makes this a chair — wood or shape? — Shape, but as formal cause, not as maker.
• Is what is substantially in God substantially in the soul? — No; it is in the soul accidentally, by participation, as reason is in anger by impression.
• Can grace be a quantity, since there is more and less grace? — No; qualities admit more and less without being quantities, and the soul has no dimensions except metaphorically.
• What is the soul to the powers of the soul, in the five predicables? — Species to property.
• Did Aristotle exhaust the species of quality, or is grace a further species? — Left open as a question to the class; Thomas’s own answer is that grace is reduced to the first species by likeness, not as being a habit.
• Are grace and virtue the same in essence, differing only in reason? — No; virtue presupposes a nature, and grace is that partaken divine nature, the root and light from which the infused virtues derive.