Grace in the Essence of the Soul, and the Division of Grace: Gratum Faciens and Gratis Datum (Q.110 a.4 – Q.111 a.1)

Orientation #

He picks up in the middle of q. 110, a. 4 (grace in the essence of the soul), refers back to what “we said from the third article” (prev. lecture), then goes back to the proemia of q. 109 and q. 111 to locate where the class stands, and opens q. 111, a. 1. He ends: “I’d like to go on to next time.”

The class, in order #

1. The sed contra: regeneration reaches essence first (“by grace we are born again”) #

• By grace we are regenerated into sons of God. Generation in living things terminates first at the nature/essence, and only through that at the powers. Therefore grace is first in the essence of the soul, then in its powers.
• “Nature is another word for generation in living things.”

2. The body: the answer depends on the preceding article (“this question depends upon the preceding one”) #

• If grace were the same as virtue, differing only ratione, grace would be in a power of the soul as its subject, since the power is the proper subject of virtue (geometry in reason, justice in the will, courage in the irascible appetite).
• Example of difference in definition only: a line thirty-six inches long and a line three feet long — the same length, differently defined.
• But grace differs from virtue; and every perfection of a power of the soul has the notion of virtue. Hence grace, being before virtue, has a subject before the powers of the soul — the essence of the soul.
• The reason behind this is the axiom of before and after, “as Boethius says”: nothing is before or after itself. If grace were in a power, it would be before itself.
• Aside (occasioned by his father’s nickname “Tuffy” for courage): none doctrinal.

3. Digression on the Ten Commandments and the darkened natural law (“whether they should have been put in stone”) #

• Objection he recalls from Thomas on the Sentences: the Decalogue belongs to the natural law, written in our hearts, so why write it down? Reply: we do not write down speculative axioms like “the whole is more than the part,” but through passions and bad customs the natural understanding of the natural law is darkened.
• Illustrations of the darkening, with student contributions: partial-birth abortion accepted by public figures; NARAL’s anger at a Doritos ad showing the moving baby as “humanizing”; mothers sharing ultrasound pictures; a young mother’s first sonogram sent to him; Bernard Nathanson’s [transcript: “Bernard Davidson”] conversion on seeing an abortion by ultrasound — the film The Silent Scream [transcript: “Silent Screen”], shown at the White House under Reagan; an abortionist who showed the woman the ultrasound of twins and lost the case; a twin unknowingly left behind and born; the pro-life marches including people conceived in rape, who “have a right to be too.”

4. Regeneration and recreation: the soul is not from the parents (“through a certain regeneration or recreation”) #

• As by the understanding power man partakes of divine knowledge through faith, and by the will of divine love through charity, so through the nature (essence) of the soul he partakes of a likeness of the divine nature through a certain regeneration or recreation. Cf. John on the beatific vision: we are called sons of God, and we are.
• Why “recreation”? Because it restores what was given in creation. The dog’s soul comes from his parents; man’s body comes from God through his parents, but his soul is created immediately by God when the body is disposed to receive it. Student: St Paul says “new creation.”
• Why an animal soul can come from the parents: it does not transcend the body; a soul coming from parents comes to be by the transformation of matter, and so would be tied to matter. Aristotle says in the Generation of Animals that the human soul does not come from the parents — he knows this from De Anima III, where he argues the soul does not depend on matter for its being: if its existence were tied to the body, all its operations would be in the body; but understanding the universal is not in the body, so its being is not immersed in the body. Thomas: other animals’ souls are entirely immersed in the body; ours is partly in the body, partly above it — between animals and angels.
• Aristotle at the start raises whether the soul is immortal, and says this depends on whether any operation of the soul is not in the body.

5. The brain and the light bulb (“therefore the light bulb is the organ of sight”) #

• Student argument he restates for them: a blow on the eye interferes with seeing, so the eye is the organ of sight; a blow on the brain (or alcohol) interferes with thinking, so the brain is the organ of thought.
• His counter-case: in a windowless room with one bulb, a blow on the bulb interferes with my seeing you — but the bulb is not the organ of sight. So there are two ways of interfering with a power: attacking the organ, or attacking the object. Since the proper object of our mind is the what-it-is of something sensed or imagined, damage to the image interferes with thinking on the side of the object.
• Then, separately, the power and act are shown not to be in the body: if they were, understanding would be singular, not universal. I cannot imagine triangle in general — any imagined triangle is isosceles, scalene or equilateral — yet I demonstrate of every triangle that its angles equal two right angles. Another route: we know immaterial things (that God is immaterial), which no bodily power could do. Student: “like knows like”? — knowledge of our own soul’s immateriality is the gateway to knowing angels and God.
• Where this stands: Physics VIII is coming to immaterial things at the end of natural philosophy; treating the immaterial as such belongs to wisdom — hence “metaphysics,” a title from Aristotle’s first great editor, not Aristotle.

6. “Large discourse”: the three (and four) senses (“reason is the ability for large discourse”) #

Shakespeare’s definition of reason [ed.: Hamlet, “looking before and after”] as the capacity for large discourse; three ways a discourse is large:

1. about the large — either (a) covering a large area, i.e. about the universal (“no odd number is even” covers infinitely many), or (b) about great things, large as opposed to small talk (his mother’s small talk relaxed his father);
2. its beginning or end is large — a large induction is large from its beginning; F = ma is large at its end, since all masses and accelerations can be plugged in;
3. the discourse itself is long — Euclid’s chain to the Pythagorean theorem, proposition 47.

• Senses and imagination are tied to the singular; reason’s discourse about the universal is one way of seeing its immateriality.
• Student question: is there a strong modern refutation of the Aristotelian-Thomistic understanding of the soul? — No; sometimes ignored, often misunderstood. The English are very concrete and blur reason and imagination (he suspects this of Newman’s usage, though he has not looked at the Grammar of Assent).
• Related: from De Potentia, all our words go back to the continuous. Growth and locomotion are not the highest example of life; sensing is a fuller sign, understanding fuller still. “Motion” is carried over to what Thomas calls operations, which are not motions. Kasurik’s quotation “the man sitting makes wisdom” — he corrects it: “the man sitting becomes wise.” The Greek episteme comes from coming to a halt; Archimedes thought it out relaxed in the bath, and at “Eureka” he had stopped thinking and was merely excited.
• He praises the precision: “What precision, you know, in these guys” — Thomas even explains the order and choice of Aristotle’s examples; modern Thomists “need an editor. Diarrhea of the mouth.”

7. Where we are: the plan of the treatise on grace (“go back to the proemium here at the beginning of question one o nine”) #

• Consideration of the exterior principle of human acts, God as aiding by grace, divides into three: grace itself; its causes; its effects — “a good example of looking before and after” (he compares his course on love: love itself, causes, effects).
• Grace itself divides into three: its necessity (q. 109); its essence or nature (just finished, four articles); its division (q. 111).
• There is no part on the demonstration of grace. Thomas sometimes describes the philosophical method as defining, dividing and demonstrating — what Euclid does; and Porphyry in the proemium to the Isagoge says knowing genus, species, difference, property and accident is useful for definition, division and demonstration.
• Placement: q. 111 is the third part of the first part, within the first part of the second part of the Summa; the whole Summa has three parts, the second only two.

8. Q. 111 proemium: five articles, and a suspicion about the naming (“isn’t all grace gratis datum?”) #

• The five: (1) is grace suitably divided into gratum faciens and gratis data; (2) division of gratum faciens into operating and cooperating; (3) a further division of the same (grace going before and following); (4) the division of gratis data, famously from St Paul; (5) comparison of the two — which is better, the fourth sense of before and after.
• His suspicion: since all grace is gratuitously given, this is a familiar kind of naming. Two patterns:
  • (a) A name common to both is kept for the deficient member while the superior one gets its own name: man vs. “the animals,” though man is an animal; number vs. odd number.
  • (b) The common meaning found fully in one and imperfectly in the other: understanding kept for angels, while man’s overshadowed understanding is called reason; disposition vs. habit, habit being a stable disposition, the easily lost ones keeping “disposition” (a mood; student: the disposition of the wind sock).
• So he suspects gratum faciens will turn out superior.
• Aside: St Paul, and St Paul, Minnesota, originally named Pig’s Eye — “shows you the importance of names.”

9. Q. 111, a. 1: the objections and replies (“grace is not suitably divided”) #

• Obj. 1: grace is a gift of God; but man is not pleasing to God because something is given him — rather the reverse: something is given gratuitously because he is acceptable. So nothing is gratum faciens. (Student parallel: persona non grata.)
  • Reply: grace is said to make one acceptable not effective (as efficient cause) but formaliter, as a form, since by it man is justified and made worthy to be called pleasing to God — Colossians, “he made us worthy… in light.” His illustration of the two senses of “what makes this a table and that a chair”: the shape (formal) and the carpenter (efficient) — a student’s answer that “brought in” the distinction well.
• Obj. 2: what is not given from preceding merits is given gratis; but the good of nature is given without preceding merit, since nature is presupposed to merit; so nature is given gratis, yet nature is divided against grace — so “gratis datum” is an unfit difference, being outside the genus. (Different genera have different kinds of differences, Categories: divide animals by two-legged and four-legged, but not numbers or habits.) He calls this “a serious difficulty.”
  • Reply: gratis excludes the notion of debt, and debt is twofold: (i) proceeding from merit, referred to the person who acts (Romans 4: to him who works, reward is reckoned as debt, not according to grace); (ii) due from the condition of nature — e.g. that man have reason and what pertains to human nature. Neither is a debt on God’s part; rather, the creature ought to be subject to God, so that the divine ordering be fulfilled, that such a nature have such properties and such consequences. Natural gifts lack the first debt but not the second; supernatural gifts lack both, and therefore specialius claim the name grace — pattern (b) above.
• Obj. 3 (the objection he himself had raised): every division should be by opposites; but gratum faciens is also given gratis (Romans 3:24, “justified gratuitously through his grace”).
  • Reply: gratum faciens adds something over the notion of grace gratuitously given, which also belongs to the notion of grace; therefore gratis data, which does not do this, keeps the common name; and so the two members are opposed as gratum faciens and non faciens gratum. “That way of naming things makes you think both what they have in common and what one has that sets it apart.”
  • Parallel from logic: definition is sometimes called a property, sometimes divided against property; both are convertible with the subject, but definition brings out the nature and so gets a new name.
  • Boundary case he presses: in one way a habit is a disposition, in another not — so “disposition” must be equivocal, equivocal by reason, not by chance. And: how many fingers? “Four fingers and a thumb” — the thumb gets a new name because it has something more (indispensable for grabbing a glass), so “finger” becomes equivocal. Likewise, is the boy a man?

10. The sed contra and the division of Scripture (“the Apostle attributes both to grace”) #

• The sed contra argues from Paul, not from the Gospels: Ephesians, gratificavit nos in dilecto filio, for the first; Romans 11:6, “if it is grace, it is not from works, otherwise grace is not grace,” for the second. Since the Apostle attributes both, grace may be distinguished by having one only or utrumque — the latter grace in the fullest sense.
• Why Paul: Thomas divides Scripture by law and grace (John: the law was given by Moses, grace and truth came by Jesus Christ). The Old Testament by law (the law of the King, the law of the Father); the New into three — the origin of grace, Christ, in the four Gospels; the nature of grace, in Paul’s Epistles; the effect of grace, the Church: Acts (its origin), the canonical Epistles (its growth), the Apocalypse (its final state). Hence Paul’s Epistles are the place for grace, even though the Gospels are the greatest books of the New Testament.
• Aside: Paul is “the Apostle” by antonomasia; John Paul II calls Peter and Paul the princes of the Apostles. Also: “God must be a friend of the philosophers” — and of those who look before and after, hence of Thomas and of Shakespeare (likeness is the cause of love).

11. The body of a. 1: the order by which some are led back through others (“led back to God”) #

1. “The things which are from God are ordered” (Romans) — quae a Deo sunt, ordinata sunt.
2. The order of things consists in this, that some things are led back to God through others (Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy; Thomas commented on the Divine Names).
3. Grace is ordered to man’s being led back to God — note: not merely led to God, but led back, “because he had left him.”
4. Therefore grace is twofold: one by which a man is himself joined to God — gratum faciens; another by which one man cooperates with another that he be led back to God — gratis data, so called because it is above the faculty of nature and above personal merit, yet not given that the man himself be justified but that he cooperate for another’s justification. Of this Paul speaks: “to each is given the manifestation of the Spirit ad utilitatem” (of others) — the division of it comes in a. 4.

12. Closing parallel: the seven sacraments divided five and two (“not primarily ordered to the good of the person”) #

• Matrimony and holy orders are not primarily for the good of the one married or ordained but for utility — the good of the Church, the children (who are the common good of mother and father); the priest is taken from men to offer sacrifice in the name of the people. The other five are for the good of the recipient, and among those, two remove evil, while the first three — baptism, confirmation, Eucharist — Thomas illustrates from the vegetative soul: birth, growth, and the third power.
• Asides: his sister-in-law Dolores registering in the parish with children already; the “Monsignor” vs. “father” joke. He decides there is no time for another article.

His words #

• ratione — differing only in definition, not in thing (three feet / thirty-six inches).
• essence of the soul — the subject of grace, “before the powers.”
• recreation — Thomas’s word beside “regeneration,” chosen because grace restores what creation gave; the soul itself is created immediately by God.
• immersed in the body — Thomas’s term for the animal soul, against ours, “partly above the body.”
• large discourse — Shakespeare’s rendering of reason’s capacity; three senses, one of them subdivided.
• operation [ed.: as against motion] — what we do that is not a motion.
• episteme — from the Greek for coming to a halt.
• gratum faciens / gratis data — grace “making us acceptable” / grace “gratuitously given”; the second keeps the common name.
• formaliter vs. effective — as form vs. as efficient cause (shape vs. carpenter).
• twofold debt — from merit; from the condition of nature.
• specialius — supernatural gifts more specially claim the name grace.
• equivocal by reason [ed.: analogy / equivocation a consilio] — as “disposition,” “finger,” “man.”
• antonomasia — why Paul is “the Apostle.”

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 110, a. 4 — sed contra, body, and the parallel of faith, charity, regeneration.
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 109, proemium (the threefold and threefold division).
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 111, proemium and a. 1 — objections 1-3 with replies, sed contra (Ephesians; Romans 11:6), body.
• Romans 3:24; Romans 4; Romans 11:6; Colossians (“he made us worthy… in light”).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, De Anima III; Generation of Animals; Categories (differences proper to genera); Physics VIII.
• Thomas, Scriptum on the Sentences, on the Ten Commandments; De Potentia; commentary on the Divine Names.
• Porphyry, Isagoge, proemium; Euclid, proposition 47; Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy.
• John (sons of God; “the law was given by Moses”); Boethius (nothing before or after itself); Augustine on grace; Shakespeare (“looking before and after”); Newman, Grammar of Assent.

His questions #

• Is a line thirty-six inches long the same line as one three feet long? Not the same line, but the same length, differently defined.
• If grace were the same as virtue, where would its subject be? In a power of the soul — but then grace would be before itself, which is impossible; so its subject is the essence of the soul.
• Why does Thomas add “recreation” to “regeneration”? Because grace restores what was given in creation; the soul itself comes by an act of creation, not from the parents.
• If a blow on the brain interferes with thinking, is the brain the organ of thought? No — the light-bulb case shows one may interfere with a power through its object; the image is the object of understanding.
• Can I imagine triangle in general? No; only an individual triangle — so understanding the universal is not in the body.
• Isn’t all grace gratuitously given? How then divide grace against grace? As man is divided against “the animals”: the fuller member gets its own name, the other keeps the common one.
• Is the consideration of grace here divided into two or three parts, and what are they? Three: grace itself, its causes, its effects — and grace itself again into necessity, nature, division.
• What makes this a table and that a chair? Two senses of “what makes”: the shape (formally) and the carpenter (efficiently) — grace makes acceptable formaliter.
• How can a habit both be and not be a disposition? “Disposition” is equivocal by reason, as “finger” is of the thumb.
• Why does the sed contra go to Paul rather than the Gospels? Because in Thomas’s division of Scripture the nature of grace is treated in Paul’s Epistles.