Grace, Virtue and the Soul: Rereading Article 3 and the Objections of Article 4 (Summa I-II, Q.110)

Orientation #

He opens by going back over the body of article three “again, just because it’s such an important article,” then moves to article four. The previous class treated q.110 aa.2–3 on grace as a quality of the soul.

The class, in order #

1. Re-reading the body of a.3 (“this cannot stand”) #

Point: grace and virtue are not the same thing differing only in ratio.

• The opinion: some (and this “seems to be what the Magister” — Peter Lombard — “thought, in the second book of the Sentences”) hold grace and virtue are one in essence, differing by reason: grace as making man pleasing to God or given gratis, virtue as perfecting us to act well.
• Thomas: “if someone rightly considers the notion of virtue, this cannot stand” — “That’s Thomas’ phrase all the time. This cannot stand.”
• Reason, from Aristotle, Physics VII: virtue is a disposition of the perfect, and “I call perfect what is disposed according to its nature.” Hence the virtue of each thing is said in order to some pre-existing nature.

2. Why habit comes before power among the qualities (“it’s always struck as kind of strange”) #

Point: an aside on the Categories order of the species of quality: (1) habit or disposition, (2) natural ability or inability, (3) sensible qualities, (4) shape. It seems strange that habit precedes power, since power is closer to the nature. Thomas’ reason: by habit we are disposed well or badly toward our nature — a power can be used well or badly, even contrary to nature, whereas virtue is a disposition in agreement with nature and vice a disposition contrary to it (hence vices called “inhuman”). Aside: in God the virtues are the same as his nature, “so you didn’t have to worry about nothing.”

3. The infused virtues require a higher nature (“partakers of the divine nature”) #

Argument as he reads it:

1. Acquired human virtues dispose a man suitably in order to the nature by which he is a man.
2. The infused virtues dispose man in a higher way and to a higher end.
3. Therefore they must be in order to some higher nature — the divine nature partaken of (2 Peter: “most great and precious promises… that through these we might be made consortes, partakers, of the divine nature”), according to which we are said to be regenerated as sons of God.

• His gloss: “son” ties with nature; the Word is son of God by nature, we are not, so our nature must be raised up to partake.
• The proportion Thomas then draws: as the natural light of reason is something apart from the acquired virtues which are said in order to it, so the light of grace is something apart from the infused virtues which derive from it and are ordered to it. Ephesians: “you were once darkness, but now light in the Lord; walk as sons of light.” As acquired virtues (Nicomachean Ethics II) perfect man to walk according to the natural light of reason, so infused virtues to walk according to the light of grace. — “Makes you respect nature.”

4. Two further proportions about the gifts of the Holy Spirit (“a similar likeness or proportion”) #

Attached to the same taste for proportion: the gift called wisdom is to the theological virtue of faith as first philosophy (wisdom in that sense) is to natural understanding. And: as moral virtue disposes the other powers to obey reason promptly, so the gifts dispose even reason to obey the Holy Spirit promptly — here God himself, not reason, is the measure. Aside: how little they knew of the gifts when they were confirmed.

5. Article 4, first objection: the rider and the horse (“as the rider to the horse”) #

Point: the objection that grace is in a power, not the essence.

• Augustine, Hypognosticon: grace is compared to the will or free judgment as rider to horse (sessor, “someone who is seated” — a word he says he had never heard). The will or liberum arbitrium is a potency (as said in the Prima Pars); so grace is in a power as in a subject.
• His own note on the image: the rider is above the horse, not really in it. And: if you lose control of the horse you are dragged by it — reason dragged by the emotions.
• On Thomas’ care: he had already seen in the previous article that grace is in the soul, but Thomas leaves “nothing unchewed.” Asides: Fr. Blaise on “constipated minds”/mental indigestion, and the stack of books with “Voilà la vérité!” on top; Fr. Peter Fowler’s “truth with a capital T”; a student adds the opposite defect — food that passes through without nourishing. Also: Thomas deserves to be called the Magister by antonomasia, as Averroes was simply “the Commentator.”

6. Reply to the first objection (“from grace itself flow the virtues”) #

The answer, as a proportion:

1. From the essence of the soul flow its powers, the sources of its operations — and the powers stand to the soul as property to species, following upon it (hence the Isagoge distinction of property from accident: accident has no connection with the nature, property follows on it).
2. So from grace flow the virtues into the powers, by which the powers are moved to their acts.
3. Hence grace is compared to the will as mover to moved — which is the rider’s comparison to the horse — not as accident to subject. So Augustine is defended.

• Grace is thus “like a second nature.” He notes more powers in us than in the dog, more in the dog than in the tree.
• Student clarification: the proportion in a.3 was nature : human virtues :: grace : infused virtues, with two aspects — harmony with the nature, and flowing from it.

7. Digression on proportion, metaphor and equivocals (“Brevity is the soul of wit”) #

Point: proportion is the heart of metaphor, of dialectic, and of discovery. “I’m a great respecter of proportion.”

• Aristotle: the best metaphors are by proportion. Shakespeare: “Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee calls back the lovely April of her prime”; “Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, so do our minutes hasten to their end” (an intelligible metaphor, on the connection of time and motion). In a simile the proportion is explicit; in a metaphor it is more condensed. Homer praised for similes, Shakespeare for metaphors. Aside: the young mother whose dog looks like her; his granddaughter “little Maria.”
• Philosophy uses closer proportions; the fourth tool of dialectic is the tool of likeness, which is the ability to see proportions — one to the other as the other to that.
• Proportional equality of the virtues: the objection that faith is not as good as charity; Thomas answers they are equal proportionally, as the fingers of a growing hand grow proportionally to their own work (the thumb must be able to hold your glass) — hence you cannot be high in prayer and low in patience.
• Equivocals by proportion: we are in this room, the heart is in the body — not the same “in,” but proportional; cut out your heart and it is in a place, not as a part. Likewise a pulled tooth. Asides: the man who comes in with half his teeth missing; the missionary’s glass eye left on a tree stump, over which the natives put a cloth.
• Likeness must be handled with care: error comes from thinking things more alike than they are, or alike in a way they are not. Difference (the third tool) is easier; likeness is also “the cause of deception.”
• Discovery by proportion: Pierre Duhem; Einstein on wave mechanics; light known as a wave turns out also a particle (the “light quant”/photon), so perhaps particles are also waves — de Broglie predicted the waves, “and sure enough.”

8. Second objection and reply (“from grace begin the merits of man”) #

Objection (Augustine): from grace begin the merits of man; merit consists in an act proceeding from a power; therefore grace perfects a power. Reply: grace is the beginning of meritorious doing mediante virtute, by means of the virtues, as the essence of the soul is the beginning of the operations of life mediantibus potentiis.

• His question to the class: “Do I think because I’m a man or because I have reason?” Both, in a sense — one is the beginning, the other the middle; a man through his reason thinks, through his will wills. Shakespeare: “What is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.”

9. Third objection and reply: the soul is not put in its species by a power (“every soul was capable of grace”) #

Objection: if the essence of the soul were the proper subject of grace, then the soul as having an essence would be capable of grace, so every soul would be — false.

• Reply: the soul is subject of grace as it is in the species of understanding or rational nature; and the soul is not constituted in species by a power, since the powers are natural properties following upon the species. Hence the human soul differs in species by its very essence from souls of brutes and plants, and it does not follow that just any soul can receive grace.
• Warning against reasoning from property back to species: two is not two because it is half of four — it is half of four because it is two, and also a third of six, a fourth of eight, a fifth of ten, endlessly; all follow on its being two. Four is not half of eight because it is a number (not every number is even) but because it is this species of number; four is the only number that is half of eight, a third of twelve, a fourth of sixteen. Likewise man has senses because he is an animal, but not reason because he is an animal (else every animal would reason) — because he is a man.
• Yet we know souls through their properties: hence intellectus, “to read within” (intelligere), and English “understanding,” getting to what stands under; we come to know a thing through its effects or properties, which are closer to sense. We even define things by their effects.
• The three souls as a “potential whole”: all the power a soul can have is in man, less in the animal, least in the plant — hence Aristotle sometimes speaks as if the plant had only part of the soul. Asides: animals named from anima; the wife’s friends who give plants souls — “Do they go to purgatory?”

10. Digression: how life is first known (“it moves itself”) #

Point: naming begins from what is most known to sense, and sense does not go beyond the continuous.

• In the Sentences, before treating active and contemplative life, Thomas treats life, going back to what is most known: a thing seems to move itself. His example: stepping on something in the forest path and it zips away — alive; kicking a stone that rolls — not alive.
• Kasurik’s maxim: “you can tell a man’s understanding of something even by the examples he gives.” Thomas’ two examples of self-motion: from plants, growth (not reproduction, not self-feeding, which are more hidden); from animals, locomotion. Why these: naming begins from the senses, and the senses do not transcend the continuous; growth is increase in size (continuous quantity), and locomotion is the most obviously continuous motion, divisible forever.
• Understanding and sensing are called motions only in an extended sense: they are perfect, not imperfect, acts. His example: while you are walking home you have not walked home, and when you have walked home you are no longer walking home — by its nature an imperfect act. But when you hear me you have heard me; when you understand you have understood; “when someone’s loving you, have they loved you yet?” — yes. So life is most known in plant growth and animal locomotion, not here.
• Same point about form: the first meaning is shape, something in the continuous; and when we say God is indivisible we fall back on the point — but the point has position in the continuous, while God has none. “He’s very indivisible.”
• Asides: the phone call to Warren Marini about Kasurik’s maxim; modern philosophers pick colourful examples appealing to imagination, while Aristotle and Thomas take the right one — “What’s a substance? A man or a dog.”

11. Fourth objection and reply: senses of “before” (“the essence of the soul is before its powers”) #

He notes these objections get closer to the truth as they go; this one “has got some very good.”

• Objection: the essence is before the powers; the prior can be understood without the posterior (with the class he sorts the senses of before: not before in time; not merely the second sense, cause before effect; but the third, that the prior can be understood without the posterior). Therefore grace could be understood in the soul with no power understood — unfitting, since we know the soul through its powers. (De Anima: we know the soul by its powers, the powers by their acts, the acts by their objects.)
• Reply: since the powers are natural properties following upon the species (Porphyry, Isagoge), the soul cannot be without them — as two cannot be without being half of four, or a triangle without interior angles equal to two right angles (a property of the species triangle, itself a species of rectilineal plane figure — he corrects himself from “equilateral”). But even granting it could be without them, it would still be said according to species to be understanding or rational — not because it had these powers in act, but because it is a species of such a nature that such powers naturally flow forth.
• His summary: the soul is not before the powers in the sense that it could be without them (they could not be without it); it is before as cause before effect; but in the third sense, for us, the order is reversed — we know the soul through its powers.

12. Reason as the power that knows itself (“Hey, I’m not a body”) #

Point: reason is the only part of us that can know itself — the hand does not know what a hand is, the eye sees itself in a mirror but does not know what an eye is. Hence his definition: reason is the ability to understand and reason and order itself and others; Shakespeare’s, “capability and god-like reason… looking before and after” — the two in harmony.

• Most people’s reason has not come to know “I am not a body,” but Aristotle in De Anima III helps reason know it is not a body, in several ways.
• Confirming anecdote from a former student: a Canadian brain surgeon stimulating parts of the brain got “I taste chocolate” and the like, but never “I just willed something, I just chose something” — and concluded the will is not a part of the brain. “And he was right.” A student adds the case where stimulation moved the patient’s arm and the patient said, “I didn’t do it, you did.”

His words #

• “This cannot stand” — his rendering of Thomas’ recurring hoc non potest stare.
• Ratio — “according to reason,” the merely notional difference alleged between grace and virtue.
• “Perfect” — “what is disposed according to its nature” (Aristotle, Physics VII).
• “Natural ability or inability” [ed.: natural potency/impotency, second species of quality].
• Consortes — “partakers,” of the divine nature.
• Magister — Peter Lombard; but Thomas deserves the title “by antonomasia,” as Averroes is “the Commentator.”
• Sessor — the rider, “someone who is seated.”
• Liberum arbitrium — “free judgment.”
• Mediante virtute / mediantibus potentiis — “by means of the virtues” / “by means of the powers.”
• “Potential whole” — the soul’s three kinds, all the power in man, less in animal, least in plant.
• Intellectus / intelligere — “to read within”; English “understanding,” getting to what stands under.
• “Imperfect act” vs. “perfect act” — walking home vs. seeing, hearing, understanding, loving.
• “Property following upon the species” — from Porphyry’s Isagoge.
• “Fourth tool of dialectic” — the tool of likeness, i.e. seeing proportions.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 110, a. 3, body (re-read).
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 110, a. 4, objections 1–4 with replies 1–4.
• Aristotle, Physics VII — virtue is a disposition of the perfect (quoted within a.3).
• 2 Peter 1:4 (inferred verse) and Ephesians 5:8 (inferred verse) — quoted within a.3.
• Augustine, Hypognosticon — rider and horse (quoted in a.4 obj. 1); Augustine on merits beginning from grace (obj. 2).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Categories — the species of quality.
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics II.
• Aristotle, De Anima III — the soul known by its powers; that the understanding is not a body.
• Porphyry, Isagoge — species, property, accident.
• Peter Lombard, Sentences II.
• Thomas Aquinas, commentary on the Sentences — on life, active and contemplative.
• Thomas Aquinas, De Potentia (disputed questions on power) — procession; naming begins from the senses.
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I — the will as a potency.
• Thomas on the gifts of the Holy Spirit (locus not stated).
• Shakespeare, sonnets and Hamlet (lines quoted, loci not stated); Homer; Pierre Duhem; Einstein; de Broglie.

His questions #

• Why does Aristotle put habit or disposition before power among the species of quality? — Because by habit we are disposed well or badly toward our nature, so it is in that sense closer to the nature.
• Are we sons of God by nature? — No; only the Word is; our nature must be raised by grace to partake of the divine nature.
• Is grace in the essence of the soul or in one of its powers? — In the essence, as a second nature from which the virtues flow into the powers; grace is to the will as mover to moved, not as accident to subject.
• Do I think because I’m a man or because I have reason? — In a sense both: the man is the beginning, reason the middle.
• Is two two because it is half of four? — No; it is half of four (and a third of six, and so on) because it is two — one must not reason from property back to species.
• What two examples does Thomas give for “alive means moving itself”? — Growth in plants and locomotion in animals, because sense does not go beyond the continuous.
• When you are walking home, have you walked home? When you hear me, have you heard me? — No to the first (an imperfect act), yes to the second (a perfect act); so sensing and understanding are called motions only in an extended sense.
• In what sense is the essence of the soul before its powers? — As cause before effect, not as able to be without them; in the third sense (prior known without posterior) the order is reversed for us.
• Can anything know itself among our parts? — Only reason; hence “know yourself” belongs to reason, defined as the ability to understand, reason, and order itself and others.