https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/Recent content in 3. Prima Secundae on The Duane Berquist LecturesHugoenWed, 04 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/001-thomass-premium-to-the-ethics-wisdom-order-and-the-parts/Thu, 27 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/001-thomass-premium-to-the-ethics-wisdom-order-and-the-parts/Berquist works through two proems side by side: Aristotle’s brief statement of the aim, audience, and method of the Nicomachean Ethics, and Aquinas’s much larger Proemium, which locates ethics within reason’s four relations to order—natural, logical, moral, and mechanical. He follows Aquinas’s argument that moral philosophy concerns human acts ordered to an end, and his division of practical philosophy into ethics, domestic economy, and politics, keyed to the individual, household, and city as distinct wholes. The class ends inside Aristotle’s own text, weighing his opening claim that “the good is what all desire” against Socrates’s manner of questioning in Plato’s dialogues.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/002-is-it-good-because-we-want-it-the-order-of-ends-and-arts/Thu, 27 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/002-is-it-good-because-we-want-it-the-order-of-ends-and-arts/Working from Aquinas’s commentary on the opening lectiones of the Nicomachean Ethics, Berquist takes up Aristotle’s definition of the good as “that which all desire” and presses the Euthyphro-style question: is a thing good because desired, or desired because good? He works it out dialectically and by induction from cases like food, water, sleep, and knowledge. He then follows Aristotle’s argument that subordinate arts serve further ends—bridle-making under horsemanship, medicine aiming at health—pointing toward a self-sufficient end wanted for its own sake, which identifies political science as the master art governing the chief good of human life. Aquinas’s text, the Categories, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet come in along the way.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/003-aristotles-ethics-i-the-good-the-last-end-certitude-in-ethics/Thu, 10 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/003-aristotles-ethics-i-the-good-the-last-end-certitude-in-ethics/Berquist reads the Proemium to Nicomachean Ethics I with Aquinas’s commentary, showing by proportional reasoning how lower arts and goods serve higher ones and why this chain requires a highest good desired for itself. He then takes up Aristotle’s claim that ethics, as a practical science, admits less certitude than mathematics, and his portrait of the fit “hearer” of moral philosophy—experienced and self-governing rather than young or ruled by passion. Using tools, bodily organs, and human occupations as inductive examples, Berquist closes by raising the Socratic question of a thing’s “own act”: does man as such have a proper function, the question that will drive the search for a definition of happiness.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/004-happiness-as-activity-by-virtue-the-general-meaning-of-virtue/Thu, 10 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/004-happiness-as-activity-by-virtue-the-general-meaning-of-virtue/Berquist reads closely from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Book One, and Aquinas’s commentary (lectio 10) to define happiness as activity of the soul in accordance with reason, and to fix the general meaning of virtue: whatever lets a thing do its proper work well, as a sharp edge suits a knife or clear sight suits an eye. He maps how the moral virtues—courage, temperance, liberality, justice—differ from the virtues of reason itself, working from the handout “Drawing a Line Around the End of Man.” He closes with an extended turn to Shakespeare, using scenes from Hamlet, Henry IV, and Two Gentlemen of Verona, guided by “Shakespeare’s Understanding of a Play,” to show reasoned choice held fast against emotion and impulse.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/005-prologue-to-the-second-part-and-question-1-article-1-does/Thu, 17 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/005-prologue-to-the-second-part-and-question-1-article-1-does/Berquist begins by distinguishing a text’s editorial divisions from its logical, understandable ones, then shows how the Prima Secundae and Secunda Secundae are built around man’s last end and the virtues and vices that lead to or away from it—an order he contrasts with Aristotle’s arrangement of the virtues in the Nicomachean Ethics. Turning to Question 1, Article 1, he argues through whether every human act is for an end, dwelling on the etymology of “happiness” and “beatitude” and on Thomas’s answer that an end, though last in execution, is first in intention and so remains a cause. He illustrates the point with examples from Shakespeare and the Iliad.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/006-question-1-articles-2-3-nature-acting-for-an-end-and-how/Thu, 17 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/006-question-1-articles-2-3-nature-acting-for-an-end-and-how/Berquist takes up Articles 2 and 3 of Question 1 on human acts, asking first whether acting for an end is proper to rational nature alone. Drawing on Aristotle’s Physics Book II, he shows that every agent, rational or not, acts for an end—rational creatures directing themselves through will and reason, irrational things directed by another, as with plants and Fabre’s observed wasps. He then turns to Article 3, on whether moral acts get their species from the end intended, working out the relation between action, passion, and will. An etymological aside on “ethics” as customary philosophy runs alongside the argument.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/007-aquinas-on-the-last-end-summa-i-ii-q1-art-4-one-feast-one/Thu, 24 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/007-aquinas-on-the-last-end-summa-i-ii-q1-art-4-one-feast-one/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether one man can have several last ends, or none at all, distinguishing ends ordered per se from those ordered per accidens, with examples drawn from Euclid’s geometry and Aristotle’s Physics on the impossibility of an infinite regress of movers. He turns at length to Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona, tracing “happiness” back to “hap” and dwelling on the closing line “one feast, one house, one mutual happiness” as a picture of beatitude. Returning to the Article, he works through Aquinas’s replies on the diffusiveness of the good and the seemingly endless operations of reason and will, closing with the question of whether souls in heaven still grow in knowing and loving God.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/008-aquinas-on-the-last-end-summa-i-ii-q1-art-5-can-a-man-have/Thu, 24 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/008-aquinas-on-the-last-end-summa-i-ii-q1-art-5-can-a-man-have/Berquist takes up Article 5 of the Summa’s question on the last end: can a single man will many ultimate ends at once? He lays out objections from Augustine’s City of God and Scripture before tracing Thomas’s threefold argument—that the last end must be one because it alone perfectly satisfies desire, because it functions as the first principle moving the will, and because it gives unity to the whole genus of voluntary acts. He clarifies the reasoning with Aristotle on perfection and unity, Boethius’s Consolation, and homely examples like candy, tea, and stereos, closing by linking one man’s need for a single end to the human race’s shared final end.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/009-summa-i-ii-q-1-articles-6-7-whether-we-will-everything-for/Thu, 03 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/009-summa-i-ii-q-1-articles-6-7-whether-we-will-everything-for/Berquist asks whether every human act, including something as apparently pointless as a joke or a piece of speculative thought, is really willed for the sake of the last end. Working through Article 6, he shows how Aquinas treats jest and contemplation as ordered to happiness indirectly rather than directly, drawing on Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Ethics. He turns briefly to the opening of Article 7 and its question whether all men have the same last end, using the Psalm’s “taste and see” to explain why everyone seeks happiness even while disagreeing about what it is. Along the way he reads from Summa Contra Gentiles IV, ch. 15 and a handout on the first definition of reason.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/010-summa-i-ii-q-1-article-8-and-q-2-articles-1-2-god-as-the/Thu, 03 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/010-summa-i-ii-q-1-article-8-and-q-2-articles-1-2-god-as-the/Berquist follows Aquinas’s text closely, moving from the question of whether all creatures are ordered to man’s last end to the opening moves of the treatise on happiness. He shows how Thomas argues from confused to precise notions of man’s final good, then examines why riches cannot be that good—they exist only for the sake of something else—and why honor fails too, since it is given in recognition of some prior excellence rather than being self-sufficient. Along the way he draws on Aristotle’s Physics, Ethics, and Politics, Boethius, and Augustine, and illustrates the arguments with examples from Scripture, Shakespeare, Mozart, and Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/011-felicitas-as-fruit-boethius-on-false-happiness-and-why-happiness/Thu, 10 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/011-felicitas-as-fruit-boethius-on-false-happiness-and-why-happiness/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether human happiness could consist in honor or in glory, following the catalogue of false happiness Aquinas borrows from Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. He opens by tracing felicitas to its root sense of fruit, then reads passages on true and false happiness from Washington Irving’s Sketch Book and Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. Working through articles 2 and 3, he shows why neither honor nor fame can be man’s ultimate good, since both rest on the imperfect opinion of those who bestow them rather than on the excellence itself. He closes by setting human glory’s instability against the fixed certainty of glory before God.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/012-why-happiness-is-not-power-bodily-goods-or-pleasure-st-i/Thu, 10 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/012-why-happiness-is-not-power-bodily-goods-or-pleasure-st-i/Can happiness consist in power, bodily health, or pleasure? Berquist takes up Aquinas’s arguments in q. 2, articles 4 through 6, showing that each of these goods can belong equally to the virtuous and the vicious, and so cannot be the perfect good that fulfills a man. Leaning on Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and Aristotle’s Ethics, he traces how exterior and bodily goods prove unstable or insufficient, ordered toward something further rather than final in themselves. Anecdotes about Stalin, Hitler, and the atomic bomb, alongside lines from Chesterton, Dickinson, and Hopkins, press the argument toward an interior, intellectual good proper to man.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/013-beatitude-is-not-in-the-soul-or-any-created-good-summa-i/Thu, 17 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/013-beatitude-is-not-in-the-soul-or-any-created-good-summa-i/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s distinction between beatitude as possessed, which belongs to the soul, and the object in which beatitude consists, which lies outside it. He follows article 8’s argument that no created good, however excellent, can satisfy the will’s desire for universal good, since the will naturally reaches toward good as such and only God answers to that. Along the way he draws on Augustine and Dionysius from the article’s objections, and digresses into Euclid’s Book VIII on proportional means and Aristotle on perfection to sharpen what “satisfying the will” actually means.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/014-what-beatitude-is-created-and-an-operation-summa-i-ii-q-3/Thu, 17 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/014-what-beatitude-is-created-and-an-operation-summa-i-ii-q-3/Berquist works through the first two articles of question 3 on beatitude, asking first whether beatitude is something uncreated—God himself—or something created in the one who is blessed, and second whether it consists in an operation. Drawing on Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and Aristotle’s Ethics, he separates beatitude’s object and cause, which is God, from its essence, which is a created human act. He explains why that act must be immanent rather than transitive, since only an act remaining in the agent can perfect it, and brings in related passages on the angels from the Prima Pars along with digressions on Augustine and Chesterton to sharpen the contrast between contemplative and active life.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/015-summa-i-ii-q-3-a-3-4-beatitude-the-senses-and-why-happiness/Thu, 24 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/015-summa-i-ii-q-3-a-3-4-beatitude-the-senses-and-why-happiness/Berquist takes up two articles from Aquinas’s treatise on beatitude. First, does happiness consist in an operation of the senses? He argues sensory delight belongs only to imperfect, earthly happiness, and returns after the resurrection when glorified bodies share in the soul’s joy. Second, is happiness essentially an act of will rather than intellect? Aquinas locates its essence in the intellect’s vision of God, with the will’s delight following as a consequence. Berquist illustrates the arguments with asides on angels, glorified bodies, music, Mozart, geometry, and Augustine on peace and joy.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/016-summa-i-ii-q-3-a-4-5-replies-on-peace-charity-vs-faith-and/Thu, 24 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/016-summa-i-ii-q-3-a-4-5-replies-on-peace-charity-vs-faith-and/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s article on whether happiness consists in an act of the intellect or of the will, working through the objections and replies with help from Augustine, Dionysius, and Aristotle’s Ethics. He traces the argument that the speculative intellect, in contemplating God as the highest knowable truth, attains a union closed to the practical intellect and even to the will taken by itself. Along the way he touches on the order found among the blessed and how faith, hope, and charity relate to this vision, weighing the comparative dignity of intellect against will in reaching final beatitude.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/017-aquinas-on-beatitude-i-seeing-god-and-sinlessness-the-speculative/Thu, 31 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/017-aquinas-on-beatitude-i-seeing-god-and-sinlessness-the-speculative/Berquist works through Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 3, articles six and seven, asking whether perfect happiness could consist in the speculative sciences or in the contemplation of separated substances—angels. He builds Thomas’s case through proportional reasoning and the Aristotelian split between perfect and imperfect happiness, arguing that truth and being are had by participation, so any created object of knowledge, however excellent, falls short. Along the way he takes up a related question from the treatise on angels: whether an angel who sees God face to face can still sin. Aristotle, Dionysius, and Jeremiah are called in to sharpen the distinctions, closing on the claim that only God contemplated essentially satisfies beatitude.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/018-aquinas-on-beatitude-ii-the-vision-of-gods-essence-the-wonder/Thu, 31 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/018-aquinas-on-beatitude-ii-the-vision-of-gods-essence-the-wonder/Berquist asks whether man’s final happiness lies in seeing the divine essence itself, weighing an objection drawn from Dionysius against Aquinas’s answer: that the mind, once it grasps that a cause exists, naturally desires to know what that cause is. He backs this with parallel passages from Aristotle’s Ethics, Physics, and De Anima, and from Augustine and Francis de Sales, then turns to the next question, on whether delight belongs to beatitude, arguing that pleasure follows perfect activity rather than competing with it. Along the way he reads from a handout on Plato’s Phaedo and reaches for examples—wine-tasting, music, ballet versus opera—to make the point concrete.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/019-shakespeares-definition-of-reason-and-the-trinity-is-beatitude/Thu, 07 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/019-shakespeares-definition-of-reason-and-the-trinity-is-beatitude/Berquist opens with Shakespeare’s charge to “use reason”—understood as looking before and after—and uses it to approach the Trinity three ways: as a footprint in beginning, middle, and end, as an image in the mind’s procession of thought and love, and through direct reasoning about processions, relations, and persons. Along the way he digresses on the meter of Shakespeare’s lines, Marian titles, and the figure of antonomasia in Latin and English. He then turns to Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 4, a. 2, asking whether beatitude consists chiefly in the act of vision or in the delight that follows it, and works through Aquinas’s answer that pleasure perfects the act of seeing God without being beatitude’s essence, drawing also on the Summa Contra Gentiles.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/020-comprehension-and-rectitude-of-will-in-beatitude-summa-i/Thu, 07 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/020-comprehension-and-rectitude-of-will-in-beatitude-summa-i/Berquist asks whether beatitude requires comprehension of God and whether a rightly ordered will is necessary for attaining it, working through Summa I-II, Q.4, A.3–4. He draws out Aquinas’s distinction between two senses of “comprehension”—enclosing or limiting an object versus simply holding or possessing what is present to you—showing how the latter, not the former, applies to the soul’s vision of God. He brings in Augustine’s letters and Retractions, Paul’s epistles, and Aristotle’s accounts of perfection in the Metaphysics and Ethics, along with anecdotes like Sherlock Holmes and the philosopher’s love of wisdom, to show how vision, possession, and delight together make up beatitude, and why the will must be rightly ordered both before and in the act of attaining it.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/021-loving-god-as-a-friend-knowing-god-too-much-and-whether-souls/Fri, 15 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/021-loving-god-as-a-friend-knowing-god-too-much-and-whether-souls/Berquist opens by distinguishing love of concupiscence from love of friendship as it applies to charity toward God—what could it mean to wish God well, when God already possesses complete self-knowledge and self-love? He contrasts this with the discursive, step-by-step character of human knowing in this life against the timeless completeness of the beatific vision. The class then turns to Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 4, a. 5, tracking Thomas’s objections and response on whether the body is required for happiness: imperfect beatitude here below depends on bodily images, while the separated soul can already possess perfect beatitude in seeing God, though the body still adds to its fuller operation. Along the way Berquist draws in supporting passages from Aristotle’s Ethics, the Summa Contra Gentiles, and Augustine’s commentary on Genesis.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/022-replies-on-the-separated-soul-does-beatitude-need-a-perfect/Fri, 15 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/022-replies-on-the-separated-soul-does-beatitude-need-a-perfect/Berquist takes up three articles of I-II, q. 4 on the conditions for beatitude: whether the body’s disposition is required for it, whether the body itself belongs to beatitude, and whether external goods are needed for it. He fills out Thomas’s replies with Aristotelian arguments from the De Anima and Metaphysics on the immateriality of intellect and the priority of act over potency, and he reads Augustine on the soul’s overflow into the body. He also works from handout passages on Book One of the Physics and on the causes of love. The class closes on Thomas’s distinction between the body-dependent beatitude of this life and the perfect beatitude of the vision of God, which needs no exterior goods.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/023-aquinas-on-beatitude-whether-friends-are-needed-in-heaven/Thu, 28 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/023-aquinas-on-beatitude-whether-friends-are-needed-in-heaven/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether friendship is required for beatitude, distinguishing imperfect earthly happiness, which genuinely benefits from friends, from perfect beatitude in heaven, which consists essentially in the vision of God and does not strictly need companionship, even though companionship remains fitting to it. He then turns to whether man, whose intellect works discursively over time rather than by immediate understanding like the angels, is nonetheless capable of reaching that perfect good. Along the way he draws in Aristotle, Augustine, Boethius, Plato, and Scripture, with digressions on glory, charity, and the difference between understanding and reasoning.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/024-aquinas-on-degrees-of-beatitude-happiness-in-this-life-and/Thu, 28 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/024-aquinas-on-degrees-of-beatitude-happiness-in-this-life-and/Berquist takes up three articles of Aquinas’s question on beatitude: can one person be more blessed than another, is beatitude possible in this life, and can perfect beatitude, once possessed, be lost. He follows Thomas through objections, sed contra, and responses, drawing on Aristotle’s Ethics, Augustine’s Confessions, City of God, and De Trinitate, Boethius’s definition of eternity, and scriptural passages from Matthew, John, Psalms, and Job. Along the way he digresses into Heidegger’s question of being and Origen’s mistaken view that the blessed could fall from beatitude. The class breaks off mid-way through the fourth article, on why perfect beatitude cannot be lost.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/025-summa-i-ii-q-5-a-5-6-can-man-reach-beatitude-by-his-natural/Thu, 26 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/025-summa-i-ii-q-5-a-5-6-can-man-reach-beatitude-by-his-natural/Berquist takes up Aquinas on whether happiness lies within man’s natural reach or requires a gift from beyond him. Working through the objections and replies of article 5, he distinguishes an imperfect, natural happiness proportioned to created powers from the perfect beatitude of the beatific vision, which exceeds every created nature and can be given only by God. Article 6 then asks whether an angel could confer this blessedness, and Berquist explains how a higher creature can dispose or prepare a soul toward its end without itself being the cause of it. He fills out the argument with analogies drawn from teaching, shipbuilding, and medicine.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/026-summa-i-ii-q-5-a-7-8-are-good-works-needed-for-beatitude/Thu, 26 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/026-summa-i-ii-q-5-a-7-8-are-good-works-needed-for-beatitude/Berquist takes up two articles closing Aquinas’s treatise on man’s last end: whether human works are required to attain beatitude, and whether every man desires beatitude. He follows Aquinas’s replies and the authorities behind them—Aristotle, Augustine, St. Paul—testing the claim against hard cases like Christ’s beatific vision from the moment of conception and the case of an infant dying after baptism. He closes by distinguishing the logical division of the Summa’s Second Part from its merely editorial referencing, using a parallel from Matthew’s Gospel, to show how Question 5 hands off to the coming treatment of human acts in general and in particular.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/027-summa-i-ii-q6-art-1-the-plan-of-the-treatise-on-human-acts/Thu, 29 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/027-summa-i-ii-q6-art-1-the-plan-of-the-treatise-on-human-acts/Berquist begins by laying out how Question Six launches Aquinas’s treatise on human acts, separating the study of acts themselves from their principles—habits, law, and grace. He then reads closely through Question 6, Article 1, where Aquinas defines the voluntary as an intrinsic principle of action joined with knowledge of the end, drawing on Aristotle, Gregory of Nyssa, and John Damascene. Objections concerning external movers, animal motion, and divine causality are answered in turn. He also distinguishes acts proper to man from those shared with animals, and separates voluntariness from freedom, or liberum arbitrium.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/028-summa-i-ii-q6-art-2-4-the-voluntary-in-animals-voluntary/Thu, 29 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/028-summa-i-ii-q6-art-2-4-the-voluntary-in-animals-voluntary/Berquist takes up three articles on the voluntary in Aquinas’s treatise on human acts. He asks first whether animals, which lack knowledge of the end as end, can still be said to act voluntarily, distinguishing perfect from imperfect knowledge of the end. He then asks whether a person can voluntarily fail to act at all, showing how omission can still be voluntary through indirect rather than direct causation. Finally he takes up whether violence can be done to the will itself, separating the will’s own interior act from acts merely commanded by it, drawing on Aristotle, Damascene, Gregory, and Augustine, and illustrating the distinctions with examples from animal behavior and moral responsibility.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/029-violence-fear-and-the-involuntary-prima-secundae-q-6-aa-5/Thu, 06 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/029-violence-fear-and-the-involuntary-prima-secundae-q-6-aa-5/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether violence and fear cause involuntariness. He distinguishes acts elicited by the will from acts merely commanded by it, and natural inclinations arising from active versus passive principles, to show why violence—acting directly on the passive body—destroys voluntariness outright, whereas fear leaves the will’s choice intact and so produces an act voluntary in itself but involuntary “in a qualified sense.” He illustrates the point with Aristotle’s ship-jettisoning example from the Nicomachean Ethics, a merchant throwing cargo overboard in a storm, a reluctant child, and converts acting under threat of death. He closes with brief remarks on Gregory of Nyssa’s role in this distinction and on God’s antecedent versus consequent will.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/030-concupiscence-ignorance-and-the-circumstances-of-human-acts/Thu, 06 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/030-concupiscence-ignorance-and-the-circumstances-of-human-acts/Does concupiscence make an act involuntary, and does ignorance? Berquist works through Aquinas’s articles on both questions, distinguishing the voluntary from the involuntary and from the merely non-voluntary, then sorts ignorance into its concomitant, consequent, and antecedent kinds to show which excuses from responsibility and which does not. He then turns to q. 7, asking what a circumstance of a human act actually is and why the moral theologian must attend to it at all. Along the way he reaches for Oedipus, Shakespeare, and current news stories, tying the analysis back to how a confessor judges culpability.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/031-circumstances-of-human-acts-and-whether-the-will-wants-only/Thu, 13 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/031-circumstances-of-human-acts-and-whether-the-will-wants-only/Berquist treats Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 7, aa. 3–4 on how circumstances like time, place, manner, cause, and object bear on the substance of a human act, drawing on Aristotle’s Ethics and Cicero’s Rhetoric for the relevant categories. He then turns to q. 8, a. 1, asking whether the will’s object is only the good, working through the objections and Aquinas’s responses. Along the way he digresses into Aristotle’s Poetics and Bernard of Clairvaux, and repeatedly points out Aquinas’s habit of organizing distinctions in twos and threes.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/032-does-the-will-want-the-end-only-or-the-means-too-one-act/Thu, 13 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/032-does-the-will-want-the-end-only-or-the-means-too-one-act/Berquist takes up Question 8 of the Prima Secundae, asking whether the will’s act pertains only to the end or also to the things ordered to it, and whether the will moves toward end and means by one act or by two. Reading Thomas’s articles closely alongside Aristotle’s Ethics, he shows how the end serves as the “reason for willing” the means—comparing this to how light is seen together with color, and to how understanding reaches conclusions through first principles. Along the way he digresses into Aristotle’s Metaphysics, the philomythos-philosopher comparison, and his own formation through literature and Greek study.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/033-dividing-theology-the-end-as-a-cause-and-whether-the-understanding/Thu, 20 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/033-dividing-theology-the-end-as-a-cause-and-whether-the-understanding/Berquist opens with a digression on structuring theology and prayer by a “rule of two or three,” using the Our Father and the two Summas as examples, before turning to Question 9 of the Prima Secundae, on what moves the will. In Article 1 he asks whether the intellect moves the will, and works out how the two move each other: the intellect as an efficient cause with respect to the will’s exercise of its act, the will’s own object, apprehended as good, as its formal or final cause. He reads through the article closely, checking it against Aristotle’s account of appetite and intellect in De Anima II, lectio 5, and a handout note on the same readings.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/034-whether-sense-desire-moves-the-will-and-whether-the-will/Thu, 20 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/034-whether-sense-desire-moves-the-will-and-whether-the-will/Berquist asks how passion can make something appear good “here and now” even against reason’s universal judgment, tracing Aquinas’s answer through Augustine, Aristotle’s Physics, Ethics, Politics, and De Anima. He then turns to whether the will can move itself, comparing this self-motion to how the intellect moves from known principles to conclusions. Along the way he draws on Homer and Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, and contrasts lived experience with theoretical knowledge, to show how reason, passion, and free choice actually interact in a person.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/035-summa-i-ii-question-9-articles-4-6-is-the-will-moved-by-something/Thu, 27 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/035-summa-i-ii-question-9-articles-4-6-is-the-will-moved-by-something/Berquist takes up three linked questions from Question 9 of the Prima Secundae: whether the will is moved by something exterior to it, whether a celestial body can move it, and whether only God or an angel can move it. Reading closely in Latin and English, he traces Aquinas’s argument that the will moves itself proximately but requires God as first mover, since only God causes the rational soul’s very orientation to the universal good; angels and heavenly bodies can affect the will only indirectly, by presenting objects or stirring the sense appetite. Along the way he digresses on astrology, the soul’s immateriality, and free will’s resistance to bodily passion.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/036-summa-i-ii-question-10-articles-1-2-does-the-will-will-anything/Thu, 27 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/036-summa-i-ii-question-10-articles-1-2-does-the-will-will-anything/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s Question 10: does the will naturally will certain things, and is it necessarily moved by its object? He tracks article 1’s answer that the will does will some things naturally—the good in general, the last end, whatever belongs to one’s own nature—and then article 2’s distinction between exercise and specification of the act, showing that only a perfect, universal good, beatitude itself, moves the will of necessity, while every particular good leaves it free. Along the way he brings in Boethius on eternity and foreknowledge, Aristotle on nature and rational powers, and a handout passage read aloud, before pointing ahead to next week’s question on the sensitive appetite.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/037-aquinas-summa-i-ii-q-10-articles-3-4-is-the-will-moved-by/Thu, 03 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/037-aquinas-summa-i-ii-q-10-articles-3-4-is-the-will-moved-by/Berquist takes up two linked questions from the Prima Secundae: does passion ever force the will by strict necessity, and can God move the will of necessity as an outside cause? He works through Article 3’s distinction between reason wholly overcome by passion and reason retaining some freedom, then Article 4’s contrast between necessity simply speaking and necessity by supposition. Along the way he pulls in Aristotle’s Ethics, Romans 7 and 9, Genesis 4, Sirach, and Dionysius’s Divine Names to test Aquinas’s objections and replies, alongside a passage from the Summa Contra Gentiles on divine motion of the will.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/038-aquinas-summa-i-ii-q-11-fruition-enjoyment-and-the-last-end/Thu, 03 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/038-aquinas-summa-i-ii-q-11-fruition-enjoyment-and-the-last-end/Berquist takes up Question 11 of the Prima Secundae, where Aquinas examines fruitio, the act of enjoying an end. Moving article by article, he asks whether fruition belongs to the appetitive power rather than the intellect, whether it belongs to rational creatures alone or also, imperfectly, to animals, whether it regards only the last end, and whether it requires actual possession of that end. He draws on Augustine’s De Trinitate and De Doctrina Christiana alongside asides from Cicero, Aristotle, and Bernard of Clairvaux, using personal anecdotes about gratitude and delight to bring out Thomas’s distinction between perfect and imperfect enjoyment.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/039-summa-i-ii-q-12-arts-1-2-intention-as-an-act-of-the-will/Thu, 10 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/039-summa-i-ii-q-12-arts-1-2-intention-as-an-act-of-the-will/Berquist continues his reading of Thomas Aquinas’s treatise on intention, taking up Article 1’s question of whether intending is properly an act of the will or of reason, and Article 2’s question of whether intention bears only on the last end or on intermediate ends as well. He places intention among the will’s other acts — simple willing and fruition — showing how it presupposes reason’s ordering of means to end. Along the way he draws on Aristotle’s Physics I, lectio 11, on Summa Contra Gentiles IV, ch. 15, and on Homer’s image of “looking before and after” to make the ordering concrete.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/040-summa-i-ii-q-12-arts-3-5-intending-several-things-at-once/Thu, 10 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/040-summa-i-ii-q-12-arts-3-5-intending-several-things-at-once/Berquist takes up three articles of question 12 on intention. Article 3 asks whether one can intend several things simultaneously, distinguishing what is willed absolutely from what is willed as ordered to something else. Article 4 asks whether intending the end and willing the means to it are one motion or two. Article 5 asks whether brute animals intend an end, which turns on the difference between nature’s built-in “intending”—Berquist illustrates with Fabre’s observations of insect behavior—and the rational ordering of means to ends proper to will. Throughout he draws on Aristotle’s Categories, Physics, and De Anima, and on Augustine, to sharpen Aquinas’s distinctions, and digresses on modern science’s resistance to final causality.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/041-summa-i-ii-q-13-art-1-2-is-choice-an-act-of-will-or-reason/Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/041-summa-i-ii-q-13-art-1-2-is-choice-an-act-of-will-or-reason/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s account of choice (electio) in Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 13. He asks first whether choosing is an act of will or of reason, arguing that it is substantively willing but formally shaped by reason’s ordering of means to end. He then turns to whether brute animals choose, concluding they cannot, since their desires follow a fixed natural determination rather than deliberation among alternatives. Along the way he draws on examples from cats, medicine, and food preference, plus material from Aristotle’s Ethics and Physics, to sharpen the distinction between deliberated and merely instinctive appetite.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/042-summa-i-ii-q-13-art-3-6-choice-is-of-means-of-human-acts/Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/042-summa-i-ii-q-13-art-3-6-choice-is-of-means-of-human-acts/Berquist takes up four articles of Aquinas’s treatise on choice, asking whether choice is of the end or only of means to it, whether choice belongs only to human acts, and whether it concerns only possible things rather than being exercised of necessity. Working through the objections and Thomas’s replies article by article, he draws on Aristotle’s Ethics and Physics and reaches for everyday cases—grocery shopping, choosing a career, a doctor treating a patient—to make the willing/choosing distinction concrete. The upshot: only beatitude, the last end, is willed of necessity, while every particular good ordered toward it is genuinely chosen, and freely.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/043-serving-the-lord-and-learning-from-the-teacher-counsel-as/Thu, 15 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/043-serving-the-lord-and-learning-from-the-teacher-counsel-as/Berquist begins with Psalm 100’s movement from service through thanksgiving to praise, linking it to John 13, where Christ is named both kurios and didaskalos, and teaching is treated as a kind of enlightenment. He then works through Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 14, articles 1 and 2, asking whether counsel is a form of inquiry and whether it bears on the end sought or only on the means to it. Along the way he draws on Aristotle’s Ethics and the Summa Contra Gentiles to test how “counsel” and “science” apply, by analogy, even to God, illustrating the arguments with examples ranging from MacArthur at Inchon to political decision-making.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/044-what-we-take-counsel-about-resolution-and-why-counsel-is/Thu, 15 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/044-what-we-take-counsel-about-resolution-and-why-counsel-is/Berquist takes up four articles of Aquinas’s question on counsel: whether it concerns only what we ourselves do, whether it covers everything we do, whether it proceeds by resolution — working backward from an end to the means and principles that secure it — and why the search doesn’t go on forever. He translates and glosses the Latin line by line, testing each objection against the corpus and replies, and grounds the abstract analysis in homely cases like baking bread and driving, plus political examples, to show how contingent, particular action gets settled through practical reasoning. He also notes Chrysostom’s reading of “Let us make man” as an image of divine counsel.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/045-aquinas-on-consent-st-i-ii-q-15-aa-1-3-will-or-intellect/Thu, 29 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/045-aquinas-on-consent-st-i-ii-q-15-aa-1-3-will-or-intellect/Berquist reads closely through Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 15, articles 2 and 3, on the act Aquinas calls consent. He asks whether consent is an act of the appetitive power or the apprehensive one, whether brute animals can be said to consent, and whether consent bears on the end sought or only on the means chosen to reach it. Working through Aquinas’s objections and responses, he draws on Aristotle’s De Anima, Augustine’s De Trinitate, and John Damascene, and sorts consent out from neighboring acts like choice, counsel, and assent. Along the way he traces the Latin roots of consentire, assentire, and sententia.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/046-consent-and-higher-reason-q-15-a-4-then-use-q-16-aa-1-2-is/Thu, 29 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/046-consent-and-higher-reason-q-15-a-4-then-use-q-16-aa-1-2-is/Berquist glosses Aquinas’s articles on consent and use from the Summa’s treatise on human acts, moving from the end of q.15 a.4—whether consent to an act belongs to higher reason alone—into q.16, aa.1-2, asking whether use (usus) is properly an act of the will, and whether non-rational animals can be said to use anything. He works through the objections, Augustine’s sed contra from De Trinitate, and Aquinas’s responses, drawing out the distinctions between higher and lower reason, use and enjoyment, and rational ordering of means to ends versus mere instinct. He illustrates the last point at length with Jean-Henri Fabre’s observations of insect behavior.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/047-aquinas-on-use-and-command-whether-use-comes-before-choice/Thu, 05 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/047-aquinas-on-use-and-command-whether-use-comes-before-choice/Working through Question 16, article 3, Berquist takes up whether use can pertain to the last end, and in article 4 whether use is prior to choice or follows from it. He then turns to Question 17, asking in article 1 whether commanding is an act of reason rather than will, in article 2 whether command and use belong to the same power, and in article 3 whether brute animals can be said to command. Throughout he reads the Latin text closely and glosses the objections and responses, drawing on Augustine, Hilary of Poitiers, Damascene, and Aristotle’s Categories to sharpen the distinctions.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/048-aquinas-on-command-command-and-its-act-as-one-and-commanding/Thu, 05 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/048-aquinas-on-command-command-and-its-act-as-one-and-commanding/Berquist reads four articles of Aquinas’s treatise on human acts, following the question of how command relates to what it commands. He asks whether the act commanded is simply the same as the act of commanding, resolving it through the “one simply, many secundum quid” distinction, then turns to whether the will, reason itself, and the passions of the sensitive appetite can fall under reason’s command. Reason’s rule over the passions is compared to political rather than despotic rule—they obey, but can resist. Along the way he draws on Augustine, Aristotle, and Gregory/Nemesius, with asides on anger and music’s effect on the passions.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/049-aquinas-summa-i-ii-q-17-a-8-9-and-q-18-a-1-what-obeys-reason/Thu, 19 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/049-aquinas-summa-i-ii-q-17-a-8-9-and-q-18-a-1-what-obeys-reason/Berquist closes out Summa Theologiae I-II, Question 17, articles 8 and 9, asking whether the vegetative soul’s operations and the body’s members are subject to reason’s command. Nutrition, generation, and the heartbeat resist reason’s control, while sense-rooted movements do not. He then glances back at the prologue to Question 6 to place this discussion within the Prima Secundae’s larger plan of human action, before turning to Question 18 and its opening article on how an act counts as good or bad — according to its being, its object, and whether it meets reason’s due measure. Aristotle, Augustine, and Gregory get pulled in along the way.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/050-aquinas-summa-i-ii-q-18-a-2-4-goodness-and-badness-from-the/Thu, 19 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/050-aquinas-summa-i-ii-q-18-a-2-4-goodness-and-badness-from-the/Berquist takes up three articles of Aquinas’s question on the goodness and badness of human acts. Article 2 asks whether an act’s goodness comes from its object, article 3 whether it comes from circumstances, and article 4 whether it comes from its end, and he works through the objections, sed contra, and body of each with Thomas’s text open. Examples carry the argument: theft and drunkenness show how the object fixes an act’s species, almsgiving done for vanity and the Robin Hood case show circumstances and end shifting an act’s goodness without changing what kind of act it is. He closes with Thomas’s fourfold reckoning of an act’s goodness—genus, species, circumstances, and end—pausing along the way on the ordering of the divine attributes and of the evangelical counsels.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/051-summa-i-ii-q-18-a-5-6-good-and-bad-as-differences-of-species/Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/051-summa-i-ii-q-18-a-5-6-good-and-bad-as-differences-of-species/Berquist takes up Article Five’s question of whether good and evil constitute differences of species in moral acts, showing how an act is specified by its object as referred to reason. He then moves to Article Six, where Aquinas distinguishes the interior act of the will, specified formally by its end, from the exterior act, specified materially by its own object — worked out through the case of the thief who steals in order to commit adultery, and the contrast between the conjugal act and adultery. Along the way he digresses on privation versus positive being and on how reason orders both to sensation and to the higher sciences, reaching for illustrations from King Lear, drinking customs, and ordinary mealtimes.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/052-summa-i-ii-q-18-a-7-9-species-from-the-end-and-from-the-object/Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/052-summa-i-ii-q-18-a-7-9-species-from-the-end-and-from-the-object/Berquist takes Aquinas’s articles 7 through 9 of Question 18 one at a time, reading the objections, the sed contra, and the determination before turning to the replies. He works out how the end can function both as what gives an act its specific moral difference and as a mere circumstance, and why genus stays singular while differences multiply in a definition—drawing on Porphyry’s Isagoge and Aristotle’s Physics for the logical apparatus. The same per se/per accidens distinction is then applied to ask whether an act can be indifferent by its species and whether an individual act, in the concrete, can likewise escape moral determination. Frequent digressions—literary references, anecdotes about students and clergy—interrupt but always return to the text.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/053-circumstances-and-moral-species-the-wills-goodness-and-its/Thu, 02 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/053-circumstances-and-moral-species-the-wills-goodness-and-its/Berquist takes up Articles 10 and 11 of Aquinas’s treatment of human acts, asking whether a circumstance can give an act a new moral species and whether every degree of increase does so. Theft carried out in a sacred place serves as the running example: it becomes sacrilege, a distinct species of sin, because the circumstance touches a new aspect of reason’s order, not merely because the act is worse. He contrasts this with simply stealing a larger amount of money, which intensifies the same wrong without changing its kind. The class closes by turning to Question 19, Article 1, on whether the goodness of the will’s interior act depends on its object, with digressions on etymology and Aristotle along the way.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/054-the-good-will-depends-on-its-object-alone-on-reason-and-on/Thu, 02 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/054-the-good-will-depends-on-its-object-alone-on-reason-and-on/Berquist takes up three articles of Aquinas’s treatise on human acts: whether the will’s goodness depends solely on its object, whether it depends on reason, and whether it ultimately depends on the eternal law. Working through objections, sed contra, and responsio in each article, he uses examples like accidental harm and prudent foresight to show object, reason, and eternal law as successive measures of a right will. The class closes with a wide-ranging aside on Augustine, Francis of Assisi, and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics on loving versus being loved, framing Christ as the “known and perfect” measure, before flagging next time’s fuller treatment of the eternal law.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/055-aquinas-on-the-will-and-erring-conscience-st-i-ii-q-19-aa/Thu, 16 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/055-aquinas-on-the-will-and-erring-conscience-st-i-ii-q-19-aa/Berquist takes up three articles of Aquinas’s treatise on the will, pressing the hard case of erring conscience: is a will that agrees with reason it wrongly believes correct thereby good, or bad because the reason itself is false? He works through each article’s objections, sed contra, and corpus, using examples like fornication, a man mistaken about his wife’s identity, and almsgiving done from vainglory to test whether intention of the end suffices for goodness. Digressions touch confession practice, Aristotle’s logic, and Plato’s Protagoras. The session breaks off mid-reply in Article 7, at Pseudo-Dionysius’s principle that evil follows from any single defect while good requires every cause to be entire.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/056-aquinas-on-the-will-st-i-ii-q-19-aa-8-9-how-much-good-intention/Thu, 16 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/056-aquinas-on-the-will-st-i-ii-q-19-aa-8-9-how-much-good-intention/Berquist moves article by article through Aquinas on the will, first asking whether the will’s goodness increases in proportion to a good intention—distinguishing quantity of good “on the side of the object” from quantity “on the side of the intensity of the act.” He then turns to whether the human will must be conformed to the divine will, arguing that since we cannot know God’s will as He knows it, our conformity has to be understood as imitation rather than strict equality. Working closely through objections, sed contra, and corpus, he draws on Scripture, Aristotle, and Augustine to fill out Aquinas’s reasoning.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/057-summa-i-ii-q-19-a-10-and-q-20-a-1-must-our-will-match-gods/Thu, 23 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/057-summa-i-ii-q-19-a-10-and-q-20-a-1-must-our-will-match-gods/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether the human will must conform to the divine will not just in its general aim but in each particular thing willed. He works through the example of a judge willing a thief’s death for justice while the thief’s wife rightly wills his survival, showing that conformity belongs to the common formal reason for willing—the good aimed at—rather than to every material object. The class then turns to q.20 a.1, asking whether an act’s goodness resides primarily in the will’s interior act or in the exterior act itself, distinguishing goodness by genus and circumstance from goodness by ordination to an end. Along the way he draws on the Our Father, Job, Aristotle, and Shakespeare to sharpen the distinctions.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/058-summa-i-ii-q-20-aa-2-4-the-inner-will-and-the-outward-act/Thu, 23 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/058-summa-i-ii-q-20-aa-2-4-the-inner-will-and-the-outward-act/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s treatment of human acts in Summa I-II, q. 20, articles 2 through 4, tracing the scholastic form of objection, sed contra, and resolutio through each question. The issue is whether the goodness or badness of an outward deed depends entirely on the will that commands it, whether the interior act of will and the exterior act performed share one and the same goodness or two distinct ones, and whether the exterior act adds anything beyond what the will already possesses. He works the arguments through familiar analogies—medicine ordered to health, the knife’s cutting power, the relation of form to matter—pausing along the way over related passages in Aristotle and the Fathers.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/059-summa-i-ii-q20-a-5-6-and-q21-a-1-whether-consequences-add/Thu, 08 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/059-summa-i-ii-q20-a-5-6-and-q21-a-1-whether-consequences-add/Berquist works through the close of Question 20 and the start of Question 21 in Aquinas’s treatment of human acts. He asks whether a consequence that follows an act but wasn’t intended can add to its goodness or badness, sorting effects into those following per se and those per accidens. He then takes up whether a single act can be good in one respect and bad in another, distinguishing the genus of nature from the genus of morals, before turning to Question 21’s question of whether a good or bad act as such has the character of rectitude or of sin. Along the way he traces the terms ratio, concordia, and rectum, and brings in the Catena Aurea and Aristotle’s Physics and Ethics.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/060-summa-i-ii-q21-a-1-3-malum-peccatum-and-culpa-praise-and/Thu, 08 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/060-summa-i-ii-q21-a-1-3-malum-peccatum-and-culpa-praise-and/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s account of evil, sin, and fault in Summa Theologiae I-II, Q21, articles 2 and 3. He first clarifies terms with help from a supporting passage in the De Malo: malum is the broadest term, peccatum narrower, and culpa the most particular, since fault requires voluntariness. He distinguishes sin in art from sin in morals to sharpen what makes an act properly culpable. The class closes with article 3’s treatment of merit and demerit, arguing that praise, blame, and retribution belong to a person as a part owed to the community, not simply as an isolated individual.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/061-summa-i-ii-q-21-a-4-merit-before-god-why-thomas-treats-human/Thu, 15 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/061-summa-i-ii-q-21-a-4-merit-before-god-why-thomas-treats-human/Berquist works through Article 4 of Question 21, weighing objections—among them the analogy of man as God’s instrument and the case of a citizen acting within a political community—against Aquinas’s answer that merit rests on man’s ordering to God as final end and universal governor. He then steps back to explain the Summa’s pedagogy: why the treatise on human acts precedes the treatise on the passions. Drawing on Aristotle’s four senses of “before” and 1 Corinthians 13, he shows how love and hope first name passions and only later, by analogy, name the theological virtues of charity and hope.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/062-summa-i-ii-q-22-aa-1-2-is-there-passion-in-the-soul-the-meanings/Thu, 15 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/062-summa-i-ii-q-22-aa-1-2-is-there-passion-in-the-soul-the-meanings/Berquist begins the treatise on the passions of the soul in the Prima Secundae, framing questions 22 and following as the key to understanding fortitude, temperance, tragedy and comedy, and rhetorical appeal to emotion. Working through the proemium and opening articles of question 22, he traces the word “passio” through its equivocal senses—bodily suffering, undergoing, being acted upon—showing how it extends by “equivocation by reason” from physical change to sensation and to the soul, drawing on Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics and Augustine’s City of God. He then takes up whether passion is found more in the soul’s appetitive power or its apprehensive power, concluding, with Aquinas, that it belongs more properly to desire.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/063-summa-i-ii-q-22-a-3-and-q-23-a-1-why-passion-belongs-chiefly/Thu, 22 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/063-summa-i-ii-q-22-a-3-and-q-23-a-1-why-passion-belongs-chiefly/Working through Summa Theologiae I-II, questions 22 and 23, Berquist takes up whether passion properly belongs to the sensitive appetite rather than the intellectual, drawing on Dionysius and Damascene, before asking how the passions divide in species between the irascible and concupiscible powers according to their objects. He digresses on equivocal predication and analogical naming of God, criticizing a modern theologian who denies that language about God can be literal. He returns to illustrate the six concupiscible and five irascible passions—love, desire, joy, hope, despair, fear, boldness, anger—through Mozart’s operas and symphonic keys.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/064-summa-i-ii-q-23-a-1-3-replies-to-the-objections-how-emotions/Thu, 22 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/064-summa-i-ii-q-23-a-1-3-replies-to-the-objections-how-emotions/Berquist takes up Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 23, articles 1 through 3, where Aquinas asks how the irascible passions—hope, despair, fear, boldness—can be contrary to one another. He shows that contrariety follows one of two patterns: good opposed to evil, or approach opposed to withdrawal from the same object. The hard case is anger, which turns out to have no contrary at all, since it responds to an evil already inflicted rather than one still to be sought or fled. Along the way Berquist reaches for Aesop’s fox and the grapes and Mozart’s piano concertos to make the passions’ beginning-middle-end structure concrete, before returning to what despair and faith reveal about the spiritual life.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/065-the-eleven-passions-and-moral-good-and-bad-in-the-emotions/Thu, 29 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/065-the-eleven-passions-and-moral-good-and-bad-in-the-emotions/Why do love and hate, joy and sadness, hope and despair come in contrary pairs, while an act of reason simply is or isn’t, with no opposite? Berquist takes up that question from Summa Theologiae I-II, Q.23, a.4, using it to organize Aquinas’s eleven passions across the concupiscible and irascible powers, then moves into Q.24, a.1 and Aquinas’s inquiry into whether the passions can be called morally good or bad. Along the way he draws on Aristotle’s Ethics, Rhetoric, and Poetics on the education of the passions through music and story, and illustrates the reason-will-appetite relationship with anecdotes about Washington and MacArthur.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/066-stoics-vs-peripatetics-passions-that-increase-moral-goodness/Thu, 29 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/066-stoics-vs-peripatetics-passions-that-increase-moral-goodness/Berquist takes up four articles on the passions of the soul: whether every passion is morally evil, whether passion lessens the goodness of a moral act, whether passions are good or bad according to their kind, and, opening question 25, how the irascible passions relate to the concupiscible. Throughout he sets the Stoic view of the passions against the Peripatetic, drawing on Augustine, Cicero, and John Damascene as the authorities Aquinas cites, and reaches for examples from comedy, tragedy, and his own experience to show how reason governs feeling without simply suppressing it. The class breaks off partway into question 25, before the ordering of the passions is settled.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/067-aquinas-on-the-order-of-the-passions-love-first-among-the/Thu, 12 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/067-aquinas-on-the-order-of-the-passions-love-first-among-the/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s treatise on the passions in Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 25, articles 2 and 3: is love first among the concupiscible passions, and is hope first among the irascible? He shows how Thomas answers by separating the order in which the soul intends a good from the order in which it actually attains it, so that love can precede desire even though desire moves toward possession. Along the way he brings in Summa Contra Gentiles IV, ch. 15, and handout material on the “Effects of Love,” and opens with remarks on Thomas as commentator on Aristotle, touching Albert the Great, Averroes, and the account of pure act in Metaphysics IX.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/068-the-four-principal-passions-comedy-and-hope-and-the-start/Thu, 12 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/068-the-four-principal-passions-comedy-and-hope-and-the-start/Berquist closes out the question of whether joy, sadness, hope, and fear are the four principal passions, drawing on Aquinas’s cited authorities—Boethius, Cicero, Nemesius, Jerome, Augustine—before turning to the opening question of the treatise on love: whether love resides in the concupiscible appetite. Along the way he digresses into tragedy and comedy as ways of moving audiences toward opposite passions, pity and fear versus mirth and hope, and notes modern literature’s pull toward melancholy. He also marks the crucial distinction between sensitive love, amor, and rational or intellectual love, dilectio, a distinction the class will pick up again the following week partway through the article.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/069-aquinas-on-love-st-i-ii-q-26-aa-2-3-love-as-a-passion-and/Thu, 19 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/069-aquinas-on-love-st-i-ii-q-26-aa-2-3-love-as-a-passion-and/Berquist takes up Article 2 of Question 26 in the Prima Secundae: is love a passion? He glosses Thomas’s Latin closely—passio, virtus, coaptatio, principium—tracing how love names both a motion of the appetite toward good and a kind of fittedness or union with it, backed by Aristotle, Dionysius, and Augustine. Moving into Article 3, he draws out the later distinction among amor, dilectio, caritas, and amicitia, pausing over what “principium,” a beginning or source, really means. Anecdotes about conversion and about rightly versus wrongly ordered love illustrate the stakes of getting the analysis right.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/070-aquinas-on-love-st-i-ii-q-26-a-4-q-27-aa-1-2-love-of-friendship/Thu, 19 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/070-aquinas-on-love-st-i-ii-q-26-a-4-q-27-aa-1-2-love-of-friendship/Berquist works through the close of Summa Theologiae I-II, question 26, where Aquinas separates the love of concupiscence—wanting something for oneself—from the love of friendship, wishing well to another for that other’s sake. He then turns to question 27, asking whether the good is the cause of love and whether knowledge is required for it. Drawing on Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Ethics, Augustine, Cicero, and examples from Shakespeare, Austen, Mozart, and Beethoven, he shows how these distinctions bear on friendship and courtship. The class ends mid-argument, distinguishing the kind of perfection knowledge needs to distinguish parts from the kind love needs to grasp a thing as a whole.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/071-aquinas-on-the-causes-of-love-likeness-and-the-other-passions/Thu, 26 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/071-aquinas-on-the-causes-of-love-likeness-and-the-other-passions/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s article asking whether likeness is a cause of love, moving through the objections and replies in Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 27, a. 3, then on to a. 4’s question of whether the other passions—pleasure, desire, hope—can themselves cause love. The pivot is Aquinas’s distinction between likeness “in act,” a shared form grounding friendship-love, and likeness “in potency to act,” grounding concupiscent or wanting-love. That distinction explains why potters compete and the proud clash, yet a coward can still love courage in another. Berquist fills out the technical vocabulary of proportion and connaturality with anecdotes ranging from Bohr and Heisenberg to Mozart and J.C. Bach.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/072-the-effects-of-love-union-and-mutual-indwelling-st-i-ii-q/Thu, 26 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/072-the-effects-of-love-union-and-mutual-indwelling-st-i-ii-q/Berquist takes up the question of what love does to the lover, tracking Aquinas through Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 28, articles 1 and 2, on union and mutual indwelling as effects of love. He works the Latin text closely, distinguishing formal from effective union and love of concupiscence from love of friendship, and asking whether it is knowledge or love that properly unites lover and beloved. Along the way he draws on Shakespeare, Augustine, Dionysius, Aristotle, and Mozart to fill out the psychology at stake, and pauses on a Trinitarian parallel—the appropriation of beauty to the Son—as another case of the same careful distinction-making.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/073-aquinas-on-the-effects-of-love-ecstasy-zeal-and-whether-love/Thu, 03 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/073-aquinas-on-the-effects-of-love-ecstasy-zeal-and-whether-love/Berquist continues through Aquinas’s account of what love does to the one who loves, taking up ecstasy (going outside oneself), zeal, and the question of whether love can injure the lover, in Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 28, articles 3 through 5. He shows how the love of friendship and the love of concupiscence produce different kinds of ecstasy and zeal, drawing on Dionysius, Augustine, and the Song of Songs alongside examples from Shakespeare, Mozart, and Socrates’ Symposium. He closes on love’s bodily effects—melting, fruition, languor, fervor—and on whether love perfects or corrupts depending on the fitness of its object.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/074-love-as-the-cause-of-all-action-and-the-start-of-hate-its/Thu, 03 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/074-love-as-the-cause-of-all-action-and-the-start-of-hate-its/Berquist opens with the question whether love is the cause of everything anyone does, working through the article’s objections and replies to show how Aquinas draws Aristotle, Dionysius, and Augustine into a single answer. He then turns to hatred, asking what its proper object is and how it depends on love as its cause, since nothing is hated except as opposed to something already loved. Along the way he reaches for concrete cases — the taste of wine, Shakespeare’s division between comedy and tragedy — to make the distinctions vivid, and pauses over Aristotle’s categories to clarify the order these questions on the passions are meant to follow.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/075-summa-i-ii-q-29-aa-2-4-love-stronger-than-hate-and-whether/Thu, 10 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/075-summa-i-ii-q-29-aa-2-4-love-stronger-than-hate-and-whether/Berquist closes out Article Two’s treatment of Aristotle’s “before” and “together” from the Categories, then turns to Article Three: is hatred stronger than love? He works through the per se versus per accidens distinction, drawing on Augustine’s De Diversis Quaestionibus and Dionysius’s Divine Names to show how love underlies and outlasts hatred even where hatred seems fiercer in feeling. Moving into Article Four, he opens the harder question of whether a man can hate himself, distinguishing what one is simply from what one is in some respect. Shakespeare’s Richard III and Coriolanus supply the concrete cases against which these distinctions are tested.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/076-per-se-vs-per-accidens-hating-the-truth-hating-in-general/Thu, 10 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/076-per-se-vs-per-accidens-hating-the-truth-hating-in-general/Berquist takes up two articles from Aquinas’s treatise on hatred, q. 29 of the Summa’s Ia-IIae: whether a man can hate himself, and whether truth can be an object of hatred. The governing tool is the distinction between what something is per se and what it is only per accidens, which he shows Plato, Sartre, and Berkeley all blur in their own ways. He explains why hatred follows immediately after love in Aquinas’s order—one science covers opposites—and draws on Aristotle’s account of the good as what all things desire, matter’s desire for form, along with illustrations from the Phaedo, Timon of Athens, and the Iliad, to show how misanthropy and envy stand against friendship.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/077-concupiscence-i-is-it-only-in-the-senses-and-is-it-its-own/Thu, 20 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/077-concupiscence-i-is-it-only-in-the-senses-and-is-it-its-own/Berquist opens Question 30 of the Prima Secundae on concupiscence, the desire that follows pleasure and pain among the passions of the soul. He takes up the first article’s question of whether concupiscence exists only in the sensitive appetite, then the second’s question of whether it names a passion distinct from the others in the concupiscible power, citing Aristotle’s Rhetoric, John Damascene’s Orthodox Faith, and scriptural passages from Wisdom, Romans, and the Psalms. Along the way he distinguishes desire, love, and pleasure by species, treating love as conformity to an object and pleasure as rest in a good already possessed, with digressions on etymology and literary illustrations from Shakespeare and Augustine.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/078-concupiscence-ii-natural-and-acquired-desires-and-whether/Thu, 20 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/078-concupiscence-ii-natural-and-acquired-desires-and-whether/Berquist continues through the replies of question 30 before turning to articles 3 and 4, where Aquinas asks whether concupiscence regards only the absent and whether it can be infinite in scope. He separates natural desires, fixed by nature toward determinate goods, from the rational, non-natural desires that reason can extend without limit, drawing on Aristotle’s Ethics, Rhetoric, and Politics and Augustine’s Eighty-Three Questions. Illustrations range from the appreciation of Mozart and Shakespeare to the beatific vision and the desire for wealth, showing how apprehension shapes what appetite can reach. He closes by pointing ahead to the next session’s treatment of pleasure as a related passion.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/079-aquinas-on-pleasure-part-1-is-pleasure-a-passion-summa-i/Thu, 27 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/079-aquinas-on-pleasure-part-1-is-pleasure-a-passion-summa-i/Berquist begins Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 31, a. 1, asking whether pleasure (delectatio) is a passio—a genuine motion or emotion of the soul. He works through the article’s objections and Aquinas’s reply, drawing on Damascene, Aristotle’s Physics, De Anima, and Nicomachean Ethics, and Augustine’s City of God. Central to the discussion is the dispute between Plato and Aristotle over whether pleasure is a process of “becoming” or the perfection already attained, and how pleasure, though named from its effect and predicated “through its cause,” still qualifies as a motion of the sensitive appetite. He also traces the word passio and links the argument back to the earlier treatise on love, setting up later questions on pleasure’s causes and moral status.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/080-aquinas-on-pleasure-part-2-is-pleasure-in-time-how-joy-differs/Thu, 27 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/080-aquinas-on-pleasure-part-2-is-pleasure-in-time-how-joy-differs/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether pleasure is in time, working through the distinction between motion, the “act of the imperfect,” and operation, the “act of the perfect” — a distinction that bears directly on why the beatific vision is timeless even though it is a kind of pleasure. He then moves to article 3, separating gaudium (joy) from delectatio (pleasure) more broadly, and closes with article 4’s question of pleasure’s proper subject, asking whether angels and intellectual creatures share a pleasure of their own, analogous to but distinct from the bodily pleasure common to animals. He draws throughout on Aristotle’s Ethics, Physics, and De Anima, with digressions through Augustine and Plato.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/081-summa-i-ii-q-31-a-5-are-spiritual-pleasures-greater-than/Thu, 04 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/081-summa-i-ii-q-31-a-5-are-spiritual-pleasures-greater-than/Why do bodily pleasures so often feel stronger than the pleasures of understanding? Berquist works through Aquinas’s answer in I-II q. 31 a. 5: intellectual pleasure is greater and more stable in itself, but bodily pleasure seems more vehement because it is familiar, tied to the body, and bound up with relieving pain, points he traces back to Aristotle’s Ethics, Augustine, and Summa Contra Gentiles IV. He also digresses on the “natural starting point” proper to different kinds of inquiry, drawing examples from Aristotle, Plato, and Shakespeare to show how philosophy, poetry, and drama each begin from what is most evident to us before reaching what is most knowable in itself.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/082-summa-i-ii-q-31-a-6-8-pleasures-of-touch-and-sight-unnatural/Thu, 04 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/082-summa-i-ii-q-31-a-6-8-pleasures-of-touch-and-sight-unnatural/Berquist reads through three articles of the Summa Theologiae on pleasure, article by article, weighing objections against Aquinas’s resolutions. Article 6 asks whether touch or sight affords the greater pleasure, turning on the distinction between pleasure taken through knowledge and pleasure taken through bodily utility. Article 7 asks whether any pleasure counts as “unnatural,” distinguishing what is natural according to reason from what is merely natural to animals as such. Article 8, on whether one pleasure can be contrary to another, closes by linking Aquinas’s analysis to Aristotle’s Poetics on the pleasure proper to different literary genres, with Berquist drawing in illustrations from Plato’s Phaedo and Shakespeare along the way.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/083-truth-life-and-appropriation-in-the-trinity-the-meter-of/Thu, 11 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/083-truth-life-and-appropriation-in-the-trinity-the-meter-of/Berquist opens with Christ’s titles—Son of the Living God, Truth, Life, Way—and explains appropriation, the device by which attributes common to the whole Trinity get assigned to one Person, working this out through the hymn Adoro Te Devote, its trochaic meter, and phrases like “Word of Truth.” He then turns to Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 32, a. 1, asking whether operation is the proper cause of delight, drawing on Aristotle’s Ethics, Rhetoric, and Physics to distinguish motion, which is incomplete, from perfect operation or act, the ground of pleasure. Summa Contra Gentiles II, ch. 11 is also read along the way.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/084-motion-hope-and-memory-sadness-and-the-actions-of-others/Thu, 11 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/084-motion-hope-and-memory-sadness-and-the-actions-of-others/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question on pleasure, asking in successive articles whether motion, hope and memory, sadness, and the deeds of other people can each be a cause of pleasure. He reads through the objections, the sed contra, and Aquinas’s own determination for articles 2 through 5, drawing on Aristotle’s Ethics, Rhetoric, and Physics alongside Augustine’s Confessions and City of God. Examples range from Shakespeare to Berquist’s own anecdotes. The class ends on the third article’s account of how love, hate, or admiration toward someone lets that person’s good or evil actions become a cause of our own pleasure or pain.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/085-aquinas-on-the-causes-of-pleasure-doing-good-to-others-likeness/Thu, 18 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/085-aquinas-on-the-causes-of-pleasure-doing-good-to-others-likeness/Berquist takes up two articles from Aquinas’s treatise on pleasure. Article six asks whether doing good to others is a cause of pleasure, prompting a discussion of liberality against prodigality and the pleasure of victory drawn from Aristotle’s Ethics and Rhetoric. Article eight asks whether wonder causes pleasure, and Berquist distinguishes two kinds of wonder—one from ignorance of a cause, the other from an effect too great to comprehend, as in contemplating God—tracing the theme through Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Poetics and Plato’s Theaetetus. He moves steadily between Aquinas’s Latin text and its objections, sed contra, and replies, illustrating points with examples from sports and literature.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/086-aquinas-on-the-effects-of-pleasure-expansion-of-the-heart/Thu, 18 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/086-aquinas-on-the-effects-of-pleasure-expansion-of-the-heart/Berquist continues his reading of Aquinas’s treatise on the passions, moving from pleasure’s nature and causes to its effects in q. 33. He takes the articles in order: whether pleasure causes an expansion or dilation of the heart, whether pleasure generates a desire or thirst for itself, and whether pleasure impedes the use of reason. Drawing on Aristotle’s Ethics and Physics, Augustine, Dionysius, and Scripture, he distinguishes spiritual from bodily pleasure and desire from rest, testing the arguments against ordinary cases like food and music.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/087-natural-beginnings-how-pleasure-perfects-activity-i-ii-q/Thu, 25 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/087-natural-beginnings-how-pleasure-perfects-activity-i-ii-q/Berquist asks whether pleasure perfects operation, and what it even means for something to be a “natural beginning” for inquiry — a notion he traces through Aristotle’s Ethics and Poetics, Plato’s Timaeus, and Augustine. He works out the distinction between pleasure as a supervenient end riding on an activity and pleasure as an efficient cause driving it, using wine-tasting, music, the difference between tragedy and comedy, and cooking to show how fitting pleasure tracks a fitting operation. Having settled article 4 of question 33, he turns to open question 34, article 1, and the case for holding that all pleasure is bad.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/088-good-and-bad-pleasures-whether-all-pleasure-is-good-and-the/Thu, 25 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/088-good-and-bad-pleasures-whether-all-pleasure-is-good-and-the/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether pleasure is good, working through articles 1 through 3. He rejects the Stoic position that pleasure is simply evil and the Epicurean position that all pleasure is good, drawing Aquinas’s distinction between pleasure as rest of appetite in a good conforming to reason and pleasure taken in what is only apparently good. He separates pleasures bound up with an operation from those tied to generation or motion, following Aristotle against Plato’s account of pleasure as mere motion. He closes with article 3’s question of the best pleasure, naming the vision of God, and along the way digresses into the moral formation of children and temperance in music.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/089-reason-looks-before-and-after-pleasure-as-the-measure-of/Thu, 08 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/089-reason-looks-before-and-after-pleasure-as-the-measure-of/Berquist works through Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 34, a. 4, where Aquinas asks whether pleasure is the measure or rule by which we judge moral good and evil, then moves into q. 35 and its first article on whether pain, or sorrow, counts as a passion of the soul at all. He tracks the objections and the authority drawn from Augustine before laying out Thomas’s own resolution, pausing along the way over Aristotle’s account of “before and after” from the Categories and Physics as it bears on pleasure and pain. He also brings in Falstaff’s speech from Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part One and a comparison to Mozart’s symphonies to illustrate how virtue and its felt experience relate.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/090-sadness-and-pain-how-they-differ-why-pain-is-contrary-to/Thu, 08 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/090-sadness-and-pain-how-they-differ-why-pain-is-contrary-to/Berquist takes up Aquinas on pain and sadness, asking first whether dolor and tristitia name the same thing, then whether pain is strictly contrary to pleasure, and finally whether every sadness excludes every pleasure. He glosses Aquinas’s Latin terms against Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Ethics and Augustine’s City of God and Confessions, using Aristotle’s distinction between homonymous and synonymous terms to sort genus from species contrariety. Examples carry the argument: animal sensation versus human aesthetic delight, sorrow at parting, and the strange pleasure taken in tragic drama or in penance, where sadness itself becomes, per accidens, an occasion of joy.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/091-theobald-shakespeare-and-homer-on-looking-before-and-after/Thu, 15 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/091-theobald-shakespeare-and-homer-on-looking-before-and-after/Berquist begins with a piece of textual detective work: Lewis Theobald’s correction of the Folio’s nonsensical “table of green fields” to “a babbled of green fields” in Henry V, which leads him into Hamlet’s line calling reason “large discourse, looking before and after.” He hunts that phrase back to Homer, comparing Menelaus in Iliad III and Polydamas in Iliad XVI as men who look ahead and behind. Returning to Aquinas, he works through Summa Theologiae I-II, Q35, A4, asking whether every sadness is contrary to every pleasure, sorting the question by genus, species, and relation, and closing with Aristotle’s account, from the Metaphysics and Ethics, of pleasure acting medicinally against sadness.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/092-sadness-and-the-pleasure-of-contemplation-a5-is-pain-fled/Thu, 15 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/092-sadness-and-the-pleasure-of-contemplation-a5-is-pain-fled/Berquist takes up two questions from Aquinas on pleasure and sadness. First: does any sadness stand contrary to the pleasure of contemplation? Thomas argues that per se it does not, since contemplation’s object admits no true contrary as bodily goods do, though sadness can creep in per accidens through obstacles to understanding or bodily fatigue from sustained thought. Second: is pain fled more than pleasure is desired? Thomas holds desire is naturally stronger, since good can be whole and unmixed while evil is always partial, parasitic on some good. Berquist fills out the text with Aristotle, Augustine, Dionysius, Gregory of Nyssa, and examples from Shakespearean tragedy and comedy.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/093-summa-i-ii-q-35-a-7-8-is-inner-sorrow-greater-than-bodily/Thu, 29 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/093-summa-i-ii-q-35-a-7-8-is-inner-sorrow-greater-than-bodily/Berquist takes up two articles from Aquinas’s treatment of sorrow: whether exterior pain exceeds interior pain, and whether Damascene’s four species of sadness—acedia, anxiety, mercy, and envy—form a fitting division. He traces the per se/per alia distinction Aquinas uses to separate bodily pain from pain rooted in the appetite, then shows how the four species arise from extraneous features taken from either the object or the effect of sorrow. He fills out the argument with ordinary cases—a lottery winner, envy between friends, grief at illness—alongside references to Shakespeare and Ecclesiasticus.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/094-melancholy-loneliness-and-the-replies-of-a-8-q-36-a-1-is/Thu, 29 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/094-melancholy-loneliness-and-the-replies-of-a-8-q-36-a-1-is/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s treatment of sadness, first asking whether Damascene’s fourfold division—torpor, anxiety, pity, envy—covers the species of sadness completely, then moving to q. 36, a. 1: is sadness caused more by an evil present or a good lost? He argues for the priority of evil-joined, drawing on Aristotle and Shakespeare to illustrate melancholy, loneliness, and tragedy’s purgation of pity along the way. The class closes with a tangential turn to the Eucharist as spiritual food, using Dionysius’s threefold contrast between material and spiritual nourishment.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/095-why-the-emotions-matter-and-how-desire-causes-sorrow-summa/Thu, 06 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/095-why-the-emotions-matter-and-how-desire-causes-sorrow-summa/Berquist takes up Question 36 of Thomas’s treatise on the passions, asking what causes sorrow and how it follows from concupiscence, love, and hope. Before entering the articles, he explains why Thomas uses emotion-language analogically for acts of will and even of God, drawing on the Summa Contra Gentiles, and sketches the treatise’s bearing on ethics, rhetoric, poetics, and music. He then works the article-by-article method—objections, sed contra, respondeo—showing how desire for a loved good, when frustrated, becomes sorrow. Examples range from Scripture and Plato’s Symposium to Shakespeare and ordinary experience.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/096-the-desire-for-unity-greater-power-and-sadnesss-effects-on/Thu, 06 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/096-the-desire-for-unity-greater-power-and-sadnesss-effects-on/Berquist glosses these articles of Aquinas’s treatise on the passions line by line, reciting objections and the authorities of Augustine and Aristotle before working through Thomas’s own answers. He asks why desiring unity can itself be a source of pain, why encountering a power greater than one’s own produces sadness, and whether sadness actually weighs down or impedes the soul, drawing on a handout note tied to Book Six of Wisdom. Along the way he reaches for anecdotes and examples from Shakespeare, Washington Irving, and Mozart to make sense of unity, goodness, and the soul’s inclinations, closing on Thomas’s account of metaphor as scripture’s and poetry’s way of naming what reason alone cannot fully say.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/097-summa-i-ii-q37-a3-4-q38-a1-whether-sadness-hinders-action/Thu, 13 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/097-summa-i-ii-q37-a3-4-q38-a1-whether-sadness-hinders-action/Berquist takes up Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 37, articles 3 and 4, asking whether sadness hinders every operation and whether it harms the body more than the other passions do. He then turns to q. 38, article 1, on whether pleasure is an apt remedy for sorrow. Along the way he brings in the Summa Contra Gentiles’ discussion of which passions can rightly, or only metaphorically, be attributed to God, and draws on Shakespeare, Dickens, and Augustine’s Confessions for illustration. The session breaks off mid-discussion of Augustine’s grief over a dead friend, before further remedies for sorrow are taken up.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/098-summa-i-ii-q38-a2-5-remedies-for-sadness-weeping-the-sympathy/Thu, 13 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/098-summa-i-ii-q38-a2-5-remedies-for-sadness-weeping-the-sympathy/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of what remedies sadness, moving article by article through Summa I-II Q38. Why does weeping ease pain, and why does sharing sorrow with a friend lighten rather than double it? He follows Aquinas into the further claim that contemplating truth can console even amid suffering, drawing on Augustine’s Confessions and the example of martyrs’ joy, before turning to Christ’s Passion and Mary’s compassion. The class closes with article 5’s more homely remedy: sleep and baths as bodily aids that restore the body and, through it, calm the soul.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/099-aquinas-on-sadness-whether-sorrow-can-be-good-honorable-or/Thu, 10 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/099-aquinas-on-sadness-whether-sorrow-can-be-good-honorable-or/Is sadness simply an evil to be avoided, or can grief itself be good? Berquist reads through the four articles of question 39, following Aquinas’s case that sorrow can be a bonum honestum when it responds rightly to a genuine evil, and a bonum utile when it turns the will away from sin, before asking whether bodily pain outranks even sorrow of soul as the worst evil. He draws on Aristotle’s Ethics, Augustine, and Gregory of Nyssa, and reaches for Christ weeping over Lazarus, Jacob’s grief in Genesis, and lines from Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet to test what sadness reveals about reason’s grasp of true versus apparent evil.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/100-the-irascible-passions-begin-hope-how-it-differs-from-desire/Thu, 10 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/100-the-irascible-passions-begin-hope-how-it-differs-from-desire/Berquist begins question 40 of the Prima Secundae, on hope. He works through the first three articles: whether hope differs from desire, whether it belongs to the appetitive rather than the cognitive power, and whether hope is found in brute animals. Along the way he lays out Thomas’s account of hope’s object as good, future, arduous, and possible, and sets hope and despair alongside fear and boldness as irascible passions built upon the concupiscible ones. He illustrates the discussion with digressions into Augustine’s City of God, Aristotle’s De Anima and Metaphysics, Plato’s tripartite soul, and examples from Shakespeare, Dante, and Mozart.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/101-hope-fear-and-despair-socrates-hatred-of-arguments-and-whether/Thu, 24 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/101-hope-fear-and-despair-socrates-hatred-of-arguments-and-whether/Berquist takes up the question of whether desperation is contrary to hope, the fourth article of Question 40 on the irascible passions in the Prima Secundae. Working through the article’s objections and replies, he draws the key distinction between contrariety by excess and recess, proper to hope and fear as irascible passions, and contrariety of opposed objects, proper to the concupiscible passions like love and hate. Along the way he reaches for illustrations from Shakespeare, Plato’s Phaedo, and Mozart to make the psychology of hope and despair concrete, tying the technical analysis back to questions of pedagogy and the pursuit of truth.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/102-causes-and-effects-of-hope-experience-youth-drunkenness-and/Thu, 24 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/102-causes-and-effects-of-hope-experience-youth-drunkenness-and/Berquist takes up three articles from the Summa’s treatise on hope. He asks whether experience causes hope, drawing on Aristotle’s Rhetoric to explain why the young and the drunk are especially prone to it, before turning to the final article’s question of how hope causes love—how expecting a good from someone can grow into genuine love for that person, whether a teacher or God. Along the way he leans on Aristotle’s De Anima and Ethics, Augustine, and the gloss on Matthew’s genealogy, folding in his own anecdotes to make the distinctions concrete.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/103-hope-and-action-is-fear-a-passion-prima-secundae-q40-a8-q41/Thu, 14 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/103-hope-and-action-is-fear-a-passion-prima-secundae-q40-a8-q41/Berquist finishes Article 8 of Question 40, weighing whether hope helps or impedes operation, before turning to Question 41’s opening question: is fear a passion of the soul? He parses Aquinas’s Latin closely—bonum arduum possibile, the per se/per accidens distinction, and passio understood as “undergoing”—and tests Damascene’s definition of fear against it, relating the discussion to sadness. Drawing on Aristotle’s Ethics and De Anima, and on the Summa Contra Gentiles, he illustrates the psychology of hope, fear, and anger with examples ranging from Shakespeare and Mozart to everyday anecdotes.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/104-fear-as-a-special-passion-natural-fear-and-the-six-species/Thu, 14 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/104-fear-as-a-special-passion-natural-fear-and-the-six-species/Berquist takes up Thomas’s treatment of fear, asking first whether it counts as a distinct passion—answered by its object, a future evil that is difficult and hard to resist. He then asks whether any fear is natural, working through the objections and replies with Thomas’s comparisons to hope. Turning to Damascene’s sixfold division—laziness, shamefacedness, shame, wonder, stupor, and anxiety—he shows these species are distinguished by their objects rather than by mirroring the species of sadness, drawing on Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Physics, Augustine, and Nemesius to sharpen distinctions like shame versus embarrassment and wonder versus stupor. He closes by pointing ahead to Question 42, on fear’s object.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/105-aquinas-on-fear-part-1-fears-object-good-or-evil-death-and/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/105-aquinas-on-fear-part-1-fears-object-good-or-evil-death-and/Berquist begins with Christ’s being “troubled” in spirit before Judas’s betrayal, using it to recall the senses of passio from Question 41 before turning to Question 42. He works through the articles asking whether fear’s object is evil rather than good, whether that evil includes death and other natural evils, and whether fear can even regard the evil of guilt, or sin, itself. Citing Augustine, Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Ethics, Cicero, and Damascene, he tests the distinctions against ordinary cases—fear of death, addiction, seduction, shame—to separate fear from sadness and hope as passions of the sensitive appetite.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/106-aquinas-on-fear-part-2-fear-of-fear-sudden-and-irremediable/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/106-aquinas-on-fear-part-2-fear-of-fear-sudden-and-irremediable/Berquist continues through Aquinas’s treatise on the passions, taking up the Summa’s articles on whether fear can itself be an object of fear, why an evil that strikes suddenly is more terrifying than one long anticipated, and why evils with no remedy are feared above all others. He then moves into question 43 on the causes of fear, working through the arguments that love and defect (a lack in oneself) give rise to it. Following the disputation form—objections, sed contra, respondeo, replies—he pauses often to render Aquinas’s Latin plainly and illustrate the points with examples drawn from military surprise and historical figures, while linking fear back to hope and charity.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/107-summa-i-ii-q-44-the-effects-of-fear-contraction-counsel-trembling/Thu, 28 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/107-summa-i-ii-q-44-the-effects-of-fear-contraction-counsel-trembling/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s Question 44 on the effects of fear, asking whether fear causes bodily contraction, whether it prompts deliberation and counsel, and whether it produces trembling. He works through the objections, the sed contra, and Aquinas’s responses article by article, setting fear’s physiological and psychological effects against those of anger, shame, and hope. He draws on Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Ethics, the pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata, and Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, illustrating the arguments with anecdotes about military commanders, political campaigns, his own teaching, and Shakespeare to show how fear’s contraction, caution, and trembling differ from related passions.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/108-emotions-virtue-and-music-q-44-a-4-whether-fear-hinders-action/Thu, 28 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/108-emotions-virtue-and-music-q-44-a-4-whether-fear-hinders-action/Berquist asks whether fear impedes operation, working through Aquinas’s article on the question, then turns to audacity: what it is, how it stands opposed to fear, and how it follows upon hope rather than despair. He draws on Aristotle’s division of the soul’s powers—reason, will, irascible and concupiscible appetite—to show why the passions have their own order distinct from virtue proper, comparing reason’s rule over emotion to a father governing a son rather than a master commanding a slave. He illustrates the point with contrasting passages from Mozart and Haydn, and with anecdotes about upbringing, to show how art and discipline alike depend on this ordering of feeling.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/109-shakespeare-on-the-effects-of-fear-the-death-of-saint-ferdinand/Thu, 14 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/109-shakespeare-on-the-effects-of-fear-the-death-of-saint-ferdinand/Berquist takes up Article 3 of Question 45: whether some defect can be a cause of boldness. Working through the objections and Thomas’s answer, he shows how hope-provoking and fear-excluding factors—one’s own strength, experience, the presence of allies, confidence in God—combine to produce audacity. He illustrates fear’s grip with Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, then turns to the chronicle of St. Ferdinand III’s death and Washington Irving’s remarks on Spanish romance as studies in fearlessness. Asides on Homer, Mozart’s late symphonies, and Aristotle’s per se/per accidens distinction frame why fear, hope, boldness, and despair are ordered as they are, continuing material begun with Summa Contra Gentiles IV, ch. 15.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/110-are-the-bold-quickest-at-the-start-the-treatise-on-anger/Thu, 14 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/110-are-the-bold-quickest-at-the-start-the-treatise-on-anger/Berquist takes up Article 4 of the question on boldness: are the bold most eager right at the start of danger, or in the thick of it? Working through the objections and the sed contra drawn from the Ethics, he shows Thomas distinguishing the sudden, non-discursive judgment behind the passion of boldness from the deliberate judgment of reason behind the virtue of courage. He then opens Question 46 on anger—whether it is a distinct passion, its object and subject, its relation to reason, and how it compares to hatred. The class closes with digressions on the secundum quid/simpliciter fallacy, the Meno’s paradox of inquiry, and the concord of reason and passion heard in Baroque and Mozartean music against Wagner and rock.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/111-aquinas-on-anger-part-1-is-anger-a-special-passion-and-is/Thu, 21 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/111-aquinas-on-anger-part-1-is-anger-a-special-passion-and-is/Berquist begins with a brief remembrance of Saint Fernando before turning to Aquinas’s proemium on anger, which divides the topic into the passion itself, its causes, and its effects. He then works through article 1, asking whether anger counts as a special passion distinct from others, and article 2, asking whether its object is good or evil, drawing on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Cicero, Augustine, and Avicenna and pausing over the distinction between something “universal in predicating” and “universal in causing.” Side discussions treat the natural desire to see God, by way of Summa Contra Gentiles IV, ch. 15, and Aristotelian happiness, plus a short reading from the handout “Note for Sixth Book of Wisdom, Reading 4.”https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/112-aquinas-on-anger-part-2-anger-in-the-irascible-power-anger/Thu, 21 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/112-aquinas-on-anger-part-2-anger-in-the-irascible-power-anger/Berquist works through articles 3 and 5 of Aquinas’s question on anger, tracking the objections, sed contra, and determinations in turn. He asks whether anger belongs to the irascible rather than the concupiscible appetite, and whether reason must be involved in anger, distinguishing reason as commanding from reason as merely announcing or persuading. He also takes up whether anger is more natural to man than concupiscence, weighing passions ordered simply to a good against those bound up with difficulty or “elevation.” Cicero, Augustine, Damascene, and Aristotle’s Ethics and Rhetoric are drawn on throughout, alongside digressions touching Coriolanus and Falstaff.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/113-aquinas-on-anger-part-1-anger-vs-hate-who-we-get-angry-at/Thu, 04 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/113-aquinas-on-anger-part-1-anger-vs-hate-who-we-get-angry-at/Berquist takes up articles six through eight of Question 46 on the passion of anger. He asks whether anger is graver than hatred, whether it is aimed only at those against whom justice is owed, and how Damascene’s threefold division—fell, mania, and furor—maps onto real cases of temper. Drawing on Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Ethics and on Cicero, he presses Aquinas’s distinctions between anger and hatred in object, intensity, and permanence, illustrating them with Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and Othello alongside ordinary examples of getting angry.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/114-aquinas-on-anger-part-2-what-causes-anger-injury-being-slighted/Thu, 04 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/114-aquinas-on-anger-part-2-what-causes-anger-injury-being-slighted/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s account of anger’s efficient cause, asking whether anger always arises from something done against oneself and whether contempt — parvipensio, “thinking little of” someone — is its one true motive. He follows the objections, sed contra, and Thomas’s replies in articles 1, 3, and 4, drawing on Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Ethics for the underlying psychology. Along the way he shows how excellence or defect, in oneself or in the one who offends, makes a person more or less prone to anger, illustrating the argument with examples from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, the Psalms, Job, and ordinary and animal behavior.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/115-summa-i-ii-q-48-the-effects-of-anger-pleasure-fervor-impeded/Thu, 11 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/115-summa-i-ii-q-48-the-effects-of-anger-pleasure-fervor-impeded/Berquist closes out Aquinas’s treatment of anger by working through its four effects: does anger cause pleasure, does it most stir bodily fervor, does it most block the use of reason, and does it cause silence rather than speech. He moves article by article through Summa I-II, q. 48, laying out objections, the sed contra, and Thomas’s answers, and pulls in Aristotle’s Ethics and Rhetoric, Damascene, Gregory’s Moralia, and Augustine along the way. Examples from Shakespeare, sports, and politics, plus his own anecdotes, keep the abstract distinctions grounded. The session completes his run through the passions, following earlier classes on love and on the causes and remedies of anger.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/116-summa-i-ii-q-49-habits-in-general-the-prologue-the-senses/Thu, 11 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/116-summa-i-ii-q-49-habits-in-general-the-prologue-the-senses/Berquist begins the treatise on habits at Summa I-II, question 49, first pausing over Thomas’s prologue itself—arguing it is a distinct genre from a simple introduction—and laying out the fourfold order in which habits will be treated: their substance, their subjects, the causes of their generation, growth, and corruption, and their distinction. He then turns to Article 1, whether habit is a quality, tracing Aristotle’s several senses of “to have” from the Categories and Metaphysics and the difference between habit and disposition. Along the way he draws out a recurring linguistic pattern, where a common term splits so that the perfected sense keeps the old name while the imperfect or excellent sense takes a new one, illustrated by knowledge and wisdom, understanding and reason, man and boy. He closes with Thomas’s answer and replies to the objections, affirming habit as a quality, with Article 1 to be revisited before Article 2 on the division of quality.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/117-power-and-glory-in-psalm-62-the-senses-of-to-have-and-the/Thu, 18 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/117-power-and-glory-in-psalm-62-the-senses-of-to-have-and-the/He opens with prayers and a reading of Psalm 62, taking “power” as the body’s hope for resurrection and “glory” as the soul’s thirst for the vision of God, with echoes drawn from the Adoro Te Devote. The class then turns to Aristotle’s doctrine of the ten categories—substance, quantity, quality, relation, and the six modes of “having,” including time, place, position, action, and passion—working through the senses of “to have” and “in.” Berquist traces how Aquinas orders these distinctions in Summa Contra Gentiles IV, chapter 15 and II, chapter 11, using them to pin down habit as a quality distinct from mere disposition or position.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/118-is-habit-a-quality-aquinas-on-question-49-articles-1-2-and/Thu, 18 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/118-is-habit-a-quality-aquinas-on-question-49-articles-1-2-and/Berquist takes up the opening article of Question 49, where Aquinas asks whether habitus is rightly classed as a quality. He tracks Aquinas’s use of Augustine alongside Aristotle’s Categories and Metaphysics, sorting out the different senses in which something can be said “to have”—a point on which the article’s coherence turns. He distinguishes habitus as one of Aristotle’s predicaments from habitus as a species within the category of quality, and sketches Aristotle’s fourfold division of quality: habit and disposition, natural capacity, sensible qualities, and shape or figure. Analogies like clothing fitting a body and passing moods versus settled dispositions illustrate how a settled habit differs from a mere disposition.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/119-aquinas-on-habit-st-i-ii-q49-aa-2-3-why-habit-is-the-first/Thu, 25 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/119-aquinas-on-habit-st-i-ii-q49-aa-2-3-why-habit-is-the-first/Berquist begins with a short meditation on the Eucharist in Summa Contra Gentiles IV, ch. 15, tying it to faith, hope, and charity as sung in the Adoro Te Devote. He then works closely through Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 49, a. 2, where Thomas takes apart Simplicius’s fourfold division of quality and argues, through the notions of mode, nature, and order to act, that habit and disposition belong first. Article 3’s distinction between habit and disposition follows, with Berquist reaching for Aristotle’s Categories, Physics, and Ethics, plus asides on Shakespeare and the Trinity, to show how Thomas divides a genus into species.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/120-why-habits-are-necessary-and-where-they-are-body-soul-powers/Thu, 25 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/120-why-habits-are-necessary-and-where-they-are-body-soul-powers/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of why a subject capable of many acts needs a habit to settle it toward one of them, then turns to where habits actually reside — can the body itself bear a habit, and does a habit belong to the soul’s essence or to its powers? He follows the text and objections closely, drawing on Aristotle’s Physics, Ethics, and Categories along with commentators Simplicius and Alexander of Aphrodisias, and grounds the abstract arguments with examples from geometry, natural science, and ordinary experience. He closes by placing sanctifying grace within this same framework, as a habit disposing the soul to share in the divine nature, distinct from habits like the virtues that belong to the soul’s powers.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/121-summa-i-ii-q50-a3-habits-in-the-sensing-powers-with-asides/Thu, 02 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/121-summa-i-ii-q50-a3-habits-in-the-sensing-powers-with-asides/Berquist takes up the question of whether habits can exist in the powers of the sensitive part of the soul, working directly against the text of Article 3, Question 50 of the Prima Secundae. He draws the key distinction between operations that follow natural instinct and those that can be brought under reason’s command, and uses a parallel from the Summa Contra Gentiles on power versus habit in the sacraments to sharpen it. He also asks how interior senses like memory and imagination get habituated by reason’s influence, illustrating the point with digressions into Euclidean geometry, Homer, and a handout on dividing Shakespeare’s plays.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/122-summa-i-ii-q50-aa4-5-habits-in-the-understanding-and-in-the/Thu, 02 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/122-summa-i-ii-q50-aa4-5-habits-in-the-understanding-and-in-the/Berquist takes up two questions from Aquinas’s treatise on habits: can the possible intellect have habits, and can the will? Working through article 4 and article 5 of Question 50, he traces Aquinas’s arguments and replies against objections drawn from Aristotle’s De Anima, the account of act and potency in the Metaphysics, and the Nicomachean Ethics. Along the way he digresses on the ordering of the sciences and the difference between intellectual and sense powers, illustrating points with anecdotes from teaching and family life. He closes by flagging the schedule break for Holy Thursday and Ascension Thursday.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/123-habits-in-the-angels-the-names-of-god-the-per-se-axiom-and/Thu, 16 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/123-habits-in-the-angels-the-names-of-god-the-per-se-axiom-and/After brief remarks on the divine names, Berquist turns to Aquinas’s question of whether habits exist in angels, since angels lack the matter whose potency normally grounds a habit’s acquisition. Working through Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 50, a. 6 with the commentators Maximus and Simplicius, he draws the distinction between potency and pure act to explain how angels can nonetheless possess “deiform” habits ordering their understanding toward God. He brings in Aristotle’s Metaphysics IX on act and potency, Dionysius’s Celestial Hierarchy, and even Hamlet, closing with anecdotes on guardian angels and on teaching philosophy.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/124-the-causes-of-habits-natural-habits-habits-from-acts-and/Thu, 16 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/124-the-causes-of-habits-natural-habits-habits-from-acts-and/Berquist takes up Aquinas on the causes of habits, Summa Theologiae I-II, q.51, articles 1 through 3. The first article asks whether a habit can be natural to man, distinguishing natural by species from natural to an individual, and cognitive powers from appetitive ones. The second asks whether habits are caused by repeated acts, and the third whether one act can generate a habit. Working through objections and replies, he draws on Aristotle’s Ethics, Posterior Analytics, and Physics, and on Averroes, using examples from moral virtue, scientific demonstration, and the training of horses.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/125-infused-habits-and-the-growth-of-habits-carrying-words-over/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/125-infused-habits-and-the-growth-of-habits-carrying-words-over/Berquist takes up Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 52, a. 1, on whether a habit can increase, and traces why repeated acts confirm a habit like faith or charity rather than generating it. He turns to Aristotle’s Metaphysics V, lectio 3, on how a word like “greater” gets carried over analogically from bodily quantity to spiritual perfection, working from a handout titled “Note for Word Cause.” He lays out four competing opinions on what “more and less” mean when applied to habits, illustrating the stakes with examples like Padre Pio and Catherine of Siena to show how growth in virtue differs from growth in size.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/126-how-forms-admit-more-and-less-species-as-numbers-health-substance/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/126-how-forms-admit-more-and-less-species-as-numbers-health-substance/Why can something be more or less healthy, more or less hot, while a substance simply is or isn’t, and a triangle can’t be more or less triangular? Berquist works through Aquinas’s treatment of this question, drawing on Aristotle and citing Boethius and Simplicius, moving through the article’s objections and replies. He distinguishes two ways a form intensifies: within the habit itself, as a widening scope, and through a subject’s participation, as a deepening possession, illustrated by growing understanding of geometry, familiarity with the Summa Contra Gentiles, and memorized Psalms. He closes by showing how “large” and “growth,” properly terms of quantity, get applied analogically to intelligible perfections like virtue and science.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/127-summa-i-ii-q52-a1-how-habits-grow-the-form-itself-vs-how/Thu, 30 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/127-summa-i-ii-q52-a1-how-habits-grow-the-form-itself-vs-how/Can a habit—say, justice or knowledge—properly be said to “grow,” given that growth is originally a bodily, quantitative word? Berquist walks through Q52, Article 1, laying out four historical opinions on intensity and remission, from the Platonists through a view touched on in Aristotle’s Categories to the Stoics, before turning to Thomas’s own answer: a form can be more perfect either in itself or in how fully its subject shares in it, illustrated through geometry, health, number, and figure. Digressions into Augustine, Boethius, Shakespeare, and Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Physics trace how “great” and “perfect” migrate from body to spirit, before he returns to the article’s opening objections.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/128-q52-a2-3-habits-dont-grow-by-addition-the-four-kinds-of-order/Thu, 30 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/128-q52-a2-3-habits-dont-grow-by-addition-the-four-kinds-of-order/Berquist takes up two articles of Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 52 on how habits increase. Article two asks whether a habit grows by addition, the way a body gets bigger or knowledge accumulates fact by fact, or instead by a subject participating more perfectly in a form it already has, as heat intensifies or charity deepens without new “pieces” being added. Article three then asks whether every act proceeding from a habit increases it, and Aquinas concludes that acts equal to or exceeding the habit’s current intensity strengthen it while weak or negligent acts can instead diminish it. Along the way Berquist draws on Aristotle’s Physics, Metaphysics, and Ethics, plus a handout passage and readings on the first philosophers, to fill out the comparison.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/129-aquinas-on-habits-how-they-are-corrupted-and-diminished-summa/Thu, 19 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/129-aquinas-on-habits-how-they-are-corrupted-and-diminished-summa/Berquist takes up Aquinas on the corruption and diminution of habits in Summa I-II, q. 53. He asks first whether a habit can be corrupted at all, then whether it admits of degrees of loss, and finally by what manner this happens. The key distinction is between intellectual habits like science, seated in the incorruptible intellect, and moral virtues rooted in the sense appetites, which are weakened differently by forgetfulness, a contrary act, or plain disuse. Along the way he draws on Aristotle’s Ethics and Peri Hermeneias and Augustine’s De Trinitate, and reads from the handout “The First Definition of Reason.”https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/130-aquinas-on-habits-how-they-are-distinguished-by-power-object/Thu, 19 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/130-aquinas-on-habits-how-they-are-distinguished-by-power-object/Berquist takes up Question 54 of the Prima Secundae, article by article: can several habits exist in a single power, are habits distinguished by their objects, are they distinguished according to good and bad, and can one habit be constituted out of many. He reads and glosses Aquinas’s Latin closely, pulling in Aristotle’s Ethics, Physics, and Metaphysics alongside Anaxagoras, Shakespeare, and Scripture. Distinctions like genus versus species and active principle versus object versus end get worked out through everyday cases — health, cooking, the senses — to show why habits differ as they do.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/131-summa-i-ii-q-55-aa-1-2-is-virtue-a-habit-and-is-it-an-operative/Thu, 26 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/131-summa-i-ii-q-55-aa-1-2-is-virtue-a-habit-and-is-it-an-operative/Berquist takes up the opening articles of Question 55 on virtue in general. Article 1 asks whether human virtue is a habit, sorting out the word’s equivocal uses—as object, act, or habit—by way of Aristotle’s Categories and citations from Cicero and Augustine. Article 2 asks whether that habit is specifically operative, distinguishing virtue proper to reason and will from mere natural perfections like health, beauty, and strength. Along the way he digresses into the structure of the Summa Contra Gentiles and, drawing on Aristotle’s Metaphysics V, presses for precision about what perfection and likeness to God actually mean.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/132-summa-i-ii-q-55-aa-3-4-and-the-start-of-q-56-virtue-as-a/Thu, 26 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/132-summa-i-ii-q-55-aa-3-4-and-the-start-of-q-56-virtue-as-a/Berquist takes up two articles of Summa I-II, q. 55: whether virtue is necessarily a good habit, and whether Augustine’s definition—“a good quality of the mind by which one lives rightly, which no one uses badly, and which God works in us without us”—is soundly formulated. Working through the objections and Aquinas’s replies, he considers how “virtue” and “good” can be applied metaphorically even to vice, how virtue bears on power and weakness, and in what sense mind, reason, and the lower faculties count as virtue’s proper subject. He closes by opening q. 56, on the powers of the soul as that subject, drawing throughout on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Augustine, with his own anecdotes woven in.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/133-aquinas-on-the-subject-of-virtue-st-i-ii-q-56-aa-1-3-virtue/Thu, 03 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/133-aquinas-on-the-subject-of-virtue-st-i-ii-q-56-aa-1-3-virtue/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of where virtue resides in the soul. Article 1 asks whether virtue is in a power of the soul at all; Article 2, whether one virtue can extend across several powers such as reason, will, and appetite; Article 3, whether the intellect can be a subject of virtue. The key distinction he draws is between habits that are virtues simply speaking, which require rectitude of the will, like prudence and faith, and habits such as art or speculative science that are virtues only in a qualified sense. He fills out Aquinas’s terse arguments with etymology, comparisons to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and anecdotes.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/134-aquinas-on-the-subject-of-virtue-st-i-ii-q-56-aa-4-6-the/Thu, 03 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/134-aquinas-on-the-subject-of-virtue-st-i-ii-q-56-aa-4-6-the/Berquist takes up three successive articles on where virtue actually resides in the soul: whether the irascible and concupiscible appetites can be subjects of virtue, whether the interior senses—imagination, memory, the cogitative power—can be, and whether the will can. Working through objections, the sed contra, and Aquinas’s determinations, he draws on Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics, Plato’s Republic, and Cicero’s Rhetoric, leaning on the “rational by participation” distinction and the image of reason ruling the passions as a father rules a son, not as a master rules a slave. Chariot imagery, horse-taming, and memory training illustrate how moral virtue perfects the sense appetites, while charity and justice are shown to be seated in the will itself.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/135-summa-i-ii-q-57-order-of-the-virtues-speculative-habits-as/Thu, 17 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/135-summa-i-ii-q-57-order-of-the-virtues-speculative-habits-as/Berquist takes up Question 57 of the Prima Secundae, on the intellectual virtues, asking first why Aquinas treats these before the moral and theological virtues and how his order compares to Aristotle’s in Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics. He then reads Article 1 closely—whether a speculative habit like knowledge can be called a virtue at all, since virtue seems to concern action—and Article 2, on why understanding, science, and wisdom must be counted as three distinct virtues rather than one. Along the way he draws on Aristotle’s Physics, De Anima, and Metaphysics, and Aquinas’s Summa Contra Gentiles, to clarify terms, and reads briefly from a handout on the order of wisdom.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/136-principles-vs-conclusions-why-opinion-is-not-a-virtue-and/Thu, 17 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/136-principles-vs-conclusions-why-opinion-is-not-a-virtue-and/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s ordering of the intellectual virtues in q. 57, using the relation of premises to conclusions to show how understanding, science, and wisdom differ as a “potential whole.” He then asks why opinion, unlike science, is not itself a virtue, distinguishing dialectical opinion and rhetorical suspicion from true knowing—illustrated by a shopper totaling grocery prices and someone mixing cocktails. Turning to articles 3 and 4, he contrasts art, ordered to a good product, with prudence, which presupposes an appetite already rectified by moral virtue, drawing out the difference through carpentry versus dressmaking and a passage from Aristotle’s Poetics.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/137-is-foresight-prudence-necessary-for-living-well-art-right/Thu, 24 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/137-is-foresight-prudence-necessary-for-living-well-art-right/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether prudence is a virtue required for living well, working through the objections and respondeo of Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 57, a. 5. He draws out the difference between prudence and art by contrasting perfection in the agent with perfection in the product made, and shows why practical truth is measured by conformity to right appetite rather than to the thing itself, unlike speculative truth. Examples range from tragedy and taste in art to church architecture, illustrating why even work outside strict moral action needs right desire for a fitting end.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/138-counsel-judgment-and-command-eubulia-synesis-and-gnome-as/Thu, 24 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/138-counsel-judgment-and-command-eubulia-synesis-and-gnome-as/Berquist takes up the question of whether good counsel, judgment by common law, and judgment by natural equity in exceptional cases belong to prudence as annexed virtues. He walks through the objections and Aquinas’s replies, distinguishing the three acts of practical reason—counsel, judgment, and command—and showing why command is the act to which prudence chiefly belongs. He explains how synesis and gnome differ by the rule each judges against, drawing comparisons to logic, geometry, and natural philosophy to show why judgment varies by domain, and touches on Cicero’s and Macrobius’s rival divisions of prudence’s parts.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/139-what-makes-a-virtue-moral-moral-vs-intellectual-virtue-socrates/Thu, 24 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/139-what-makes-a-virtue-moral-moral-vs-intellectual-virtue-socrates/Berquist begins the treatise on virtue in the Summa Theologiae by asking, with Article 1, whether every virtue is moral, and then, in Article 2, why moral virtue must be distinguished from intellectual virtue. He sets Thomas’s answers against their background in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and tests Augustine’s definitions of virtue against that framework, showing how Thomas sifts and qualifies them. The key distinction he draws is between reason and the appetitive power as the two roots from which intellectual and moral virtues respectively grow. Along the way he recalls his own teachers, Charles De Koninck and Monsignor Dionne at Laval, on how they read these same questions.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/140-aquinas-on-virtue-i-st-i-ii-q-58-a-3-4-intellectual-vs-moral/Thu, 31 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/140-aquinas-on-virtue-i-st-i-ii-q-58-a-3-4-intellectual-vs-moral/Berquist reads closely through the objections and responses of I-II, q. 58, a. 3–4, testing whether human virtue is adequately divided into intellectual and moral, and sorting out where prudence, continence, perseverance, and the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity fit within that division. He then takes up whether moral virtue can stand without intellectual virtue, arguing that it needs prudence and understanding—though not wisdom, science, or art—because right choice requires both a rightly ordered end and sound reasoning about means. He draws throughout on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, with examples ranging from Shakespeare and Scripture to his own anecdotes.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/141-aquinas-on-virtue-ii-st-i-ii-q-58-a-5-q-59-a-2-prudence-needs/Thu, 31 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/141-aquinas-on-virtue-ii-st-i-ii-q-58-a-5-q-59-a-2-prudence-needs/Berquist closes out ST I-II q.58 a.5, where Aquinas argues prudence cannot exist without moral virtue, since sound judgment about particular ends depends on an appetite already rectified by virtue. He then turns to q.59, a.1 and a.2, asking whether moral virtue is itself a passion and whether virtue can coexist with passion at all—laying out the Stoics’ distrust of emotion against the Peripatetic view that rightly ordered passion serves reason. Anecdotes on marriage preparation, envy, mercy, and anger illustrate the difference between disordered feeling and passion governed by reason. The session breaks off mid-discussion of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics as background to this dispute.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/142-summa-i-ii-q59-a3-4-can-the-virtuous-man-be-sad-is-every/Fri, 08 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/142-summa-i-ii-q59-a3-4-can-the-virtuous-man-be-sad-is-every/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s rejection of the Stoic wise man who feels no sadness, arguing instead that moderate sorrow over real evils — bodily harm, sin, another person’s wrongdoing — belongs fittingly to virtue, and he points to Christ’s own sorrow as the standing counterexample to Stoic apatheia. He then follows Article 4 into Aquinas’s distinction between virtues whose proper matter is the passions, such as fortitude and temperance, and virtues like justice that instead concern operations. Along the way he digresses through Aristotle’s psychology, the nature of beauty, the difference between will and emotion, and touches on the communion of saints and Marian devotion.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/143-summa-i-ii-q59-a5-q60-a1-virtue-with-passion-is-there-only/Fri, 08 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/143-summa-i-ii-q59-a5-q60-a1-virtue-with-passion-is-there-only/Berquist closes out the question of whether perfect moral virtue requires passion, working through the article’s objections, sed contra, and corpus, and considering how spiritual joy can overflow into bodily feeling. He then turns to q. 60, a. 1, asking whether moral virtue is a single undivided habit or is necessarily plural, comparing Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Plato’s Protagoras on the unity of virtue. He distinguishes univocal from equivocal causation in explaining how one virtue forms another, and illustrates the discussion with examples drawn from Shakespeare’s plays and stories of actresses who performed them.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/144-summa-i-ii-q-60-aa-2-4-virtues-of-operations-and-passions/Thu, 05 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/144-summa-i-ii-q-60-aa-2-4-virtues-of-operations-and-passions/Why isn’t there just one moral virtue instead of many? Berquist takes up Articles 2 through 4 of Question 60, where Aquinas distinguishes virtues by their matter: justice governs exterior operations toward others, while temperance, fortitude, magnanimity, and mildness govern interior passions, further divided by the contrariety of those passions and by whether the irascible or concupiscible appetite is engaged. He opens with a passage from a Padre Pio biography contrasting Stoic endurance with Christian suffering, and illustrates debt, piety, and being “true to oneself” through reason rather than feeling with examples from Shakespeare’s Lear, Hamlet, and Coriolanus, Cicero, and Socrates in the Euthyphro and Crito.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/145-summa-i-ii-q-60-a-5-aristotles-eleven-moral-virtues-and-the/Thu, 05 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/145-summa-i-ii-q-60-a-5-aristotles-eleven-moral-virtues-and-the/Berquist takes up article 5 of question 60, where Aquinas asks whether the moral virtues are diversified according to the different objects of the passions. Working through the objections and reply, he shows that virtues are distinguished not by passions as such but by their relation to reason, and lays out Aristotle’s roughly ten or eleven moral virtues—temperance, fortitude, liberality, magnificence, magnanimity, philotimia, mildness, friendliness, truthfulness, eutrapelia, and justice. From there he digresses into the pattern of binary and ternary division running through Aristotle and Aquinas—categories, Scripture, the Our Father, the Psalms—reaching for examples in Shakespeare and Mozart to show how naturally the mind falls into twos and threes.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/146-the-cardinal-virtues-why-they-are-principal-why-there-are/Thu, 12 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/146-the-cardinal-virtues-why-they-are-principal-why-there-are/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of why prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude are singled out as “cardinal” or hinge virtues, and why the list stops at four rather than including magnanimity, humility, or patience. He reads through the objections and replies of articles one and two, weighing Aristotle’s Ethics, Plato’s Protagoras and Republic, Cicero’s Rhetoric, and Gregory’s Moralia against Aquinas’s distinction between a virtue’s formal principle and its material subject in the soul’s appetites. Along the way he reaches for examples from Mozart and Shakespeare to make the distinction concrete, and touches Summa Contra Gentiles IV, chapter fifteen, before the class closes with prayer.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/147-are-the-cardinal-virtues-distinct-political-purging-purged/Thu, 12 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/147-are-the-cardinal-virtues-distinct-political-purging-purged/Berquist takes up the question of whether the four cardinal virtues are truly distinct habits or merely general conditions of a well-ordered soul, setting Gregory’s and Augustine’s broader usage against Aristotle’s more specific treatment in the Ethics, and resolving the apparent conflict by distinguishing virtue as a general disposition from virtue as a habit fixed on determinate matter. He then follows Aquinas’s use of Macrobius and Plotinus to rank prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude across four levels — political virtues governing ordinary civic life, purging virtues that detach the soul from bodily passions, virtues of the already-purged soul, and exemplar virtues existing in God himself. He closes by flagging next week’s shift to the theological virtues, with a passing aside on Summa Contra Gentiles III, ch. 64.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/148-summa-i-ii-q-62-a-1-2-are-there-theological-virtues-and-how/Thu, 09 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/148-summa-i-ii-q-62-a-1-2-are-there-theological-virtues-and-how/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether there are theological virtues, and if so, how faith, hope, and charity are distinguished from the virtues treated earlier in the Prima Secundae. Working through the objections and responses of articles 1 and 2, he dwells on Aquinas’s distinction between man’s natural and supernatural happiness, the idea of participation in the divine nature, and the different formal objects that set theological virtues apart from those proportioned to reason. Along the way he brings in Greek and Latin terms for happiness and cause, and passages from Aristotle, Augustine, Boethius, and Scripture to unpack Aquinas’s argument.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/149-summa-i-ii-q-62-a-3-4-why-faith-hope-and-charity-are-three/Thu, 09 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/149-summa-i-ii-q-62-a-3-4-why-faith-hope-and-charity-are-three/Why must the theological virtues be three—faith, hope, and charity—rather than two or one? Berquist walks through Aquinas’s answer, then turns to how the three stand in relation to each other. He draws out Aquinas’s distinction between the order of generation, in which faith gives rise to hope and hope to charity, and the order of perfection, in which charity as the form and root of the virtues comes first and perfects the other two. He fills out the argument with Scripture, Augustine, Aristotle’s De Anima, and his own reflections on love and friendship, closing with a brief look at the Anima Christi.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/150-aquinas-on-the-causes-of-virtue-nature-habit-and-infused/Thu, 16 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/150-aquinas-on-the-causes-of-virtue-nature-habit-and-infused/Berquist takes up Question 63 of the Prima Secundae, on what causes virtue. He asks first whether virtue is in us by nature, distinguishing a natural aptitude toward virtue from virtue as a completed perfection—an ambiguity he traces through Damascene, Aristotle’s Ethics, and Augustine. He then works through article two, on whether moral virtues are caused in us by repeated acts, contrasting such acquired human virtues with virtues simply given by God. The class ends opening article three, on whether virtues besides the theological ones can be infused, with side references to Dionysius and to Thomistic texts on providence and prudence.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/151-infused-vs-acquired-virtues-and-why-virtue-lies-in-the-middle/Thu, 16 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/151-infused-vs-acquired-virtues-and-why-virtue-lies-in-the-middle/Berquist works through the end of Summa Theologiae I-II, Question 63, Article 4, where Aquinas asks whether infused and acquired virtues differ in species, answering that they do because acquired virtue is measured by human civic life while infused virtue is measured by life among the saints. He then turns to Question 64, Articles 1 and 2, on whether moral virtue consists in a mean, distinguishing justice, whose mean is a real, objective “thing,” from courage and temperance, whose mean is relative to the individual person. He illustrates these distinctions with examples ranging from Shakespeare and Tennyson to cooking, tea-brewing, and monastic practice.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/152-summa-i-ii-q-64-a-2-3-the-middle-of-reason-justice-and-the/Thu, 23 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/152-summa-i-ii-q-64-a-2-3-the-middle-of-reason-justice-and-the/Berquist reads Aquinas on whether the mean of moral virtue lies in the act of reason or in the matter reason regulates, treating justice as the special case where the rational mean and the real mean coincide. He then turns to Article 3’s question of whether intellectual virtues too consist in a mean, locating truth as that mean between the false affirmation that what is not, is, and the false negation that what is, is not. Along the way he draws on Aristotle’s Metaphysics VI and the Categories/Peri Hermeneias treatment of opposition, using examples from Shakespeare and Mozart to fix the fourfold division of contradiction, contrariety, privation, and relation as it bears on truth and error.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/153-summa-i-ii-q-64-a-4-q-65-a-1-do-the-theological-virtues-have/Thu, 23 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/153-summa-i-ii-q-64-a-4-q-65-a-1-do-the-theological-virtues-have/Can faith, hope, and charity be excessive, the way courage or temperance can? Berquist works through q. 64, a. 4, concluding that toward God there is no such thing as too much, though a relative mean remains on our side. He then takes up q. 65, a. 1: are the moral virtues connected to one another, or can a person have one without the rest? Drawing on Ambrose, Augustine, Gregory, Cicero, and Aristotle, he argues that perfect moral virtue requires prudence and so the virtues stand or fall together, while imperfect virtues or bare inclinations can exist in isolation—illustrated along the way with digressions on Boethius and Shakespeare.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/154-aquinas-summa-i-ii-q-65-arts-2-3-can-the-moral-virtues-exist/Thu, 06 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/154-aquinas-summa-i-ii-q-65-arts-2-3-can-the-moral-virtues-exist/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question whether the moral virtues can exist without charity, and whether charity can exist without them, working through the objections, sed contra, body, and replies of Articles 2 and 3 of Question 65. He draws out Aquinas’s distinction between acquired moral virtues, built up through repeated acts as in Aristotle’s Ethics, and infused virtues, given by God together with charity and inseparable from it, noting that acquired virtue is actually more stable since it survives a single mortal sin. He illustrates how virtue perfects an agent’s nature and action with homely comparisons: a knife’s sharpness, eyesight, and a returned wallet.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/155-aquinas-summa-i-ii-q-65-arts-4-5-and-q-66-art-1-faith-hope/Thu, 06 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/155-aquinas-summa-i-ii-q-65-arts-4-5-and-q-66-art-1-faith-hope/Berquist works article by article through Aquinas’s treatment of the theological virtues: can faith and hope exist without charity, and can charity exist without faith and hope? He glosses the Latin closely, weighing objections and sed contra texts drawn from Augustine’s Enchiridion and City of God, Paul, and John’s Gospel, and brings in Aristotle’s Categories and Ethics and Bernard of Clairvaux’s stages of love to sharpen the distinctions. He turns from there to Q.66, art. 1, asking whether one virtue can be greater than another, using friendship and the case of prudence against the moral virtues to explain imperfect versus perfect virtue.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/156-summa-i-ii-q-66-arts-2-4-equality-of-the-virtues-intellectual/Thu, 20 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/156-summa-i-ii-q-66-arts-2-4-equality-of-the-virtues-intellectual/Berquist takes up Question 66 of the Summa’s treatise on virtue, on the “quantity” or magnitude of the virtues. He works through Article 2’s question of whether all the virtues are equal in one person, Article 3’s comparison of moral and intellectual virtue, and the opening of Article 4 on whether justice ranks first among the moral virtues, moving through objections, sed contra, body, and replies in each. Aristotle’s Ethics and Augustine’s De Trinitate supply the authorities under dispute, and Berquist repeatedly turns on Thomas’s distinction between what holds “simply” and what holds “in a certain respect” to dissolve the apparent contradictions. Digressions on Shakespeare and Chesterton illustrate the points along the way.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/157-summa-i-ii-q-66-arts-5-6-wisdom-as-the-greatest-intellectual/Thu, 20 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/157-summa-i-ii-q-66-arts-5-6-wisdom-as-the-greatest-intellectual/Berquist asks why wisdom, rather than prudence, science, or understanding, counts as the greatest intellectual virtue, and finds the answer in wisdom’s object: the highest cause, God, which lets it judge and order every other intellectual virtue. He then turns to q. 66, a. 6, where Aquinas argues that charity surpasses faith and hope among the theological virtues—all three share God as object, but only charity attains union with him, while faith and hope keep a kind of distance. Along the way he draws out the etymology of sapientia, reads from Shakespeare to illustrate the point, and distinguishes the love of wanting from the love of friendship.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/158-summa-i-ii-q-67-articles-1-2-do-the-moral-and-intellectual/Thu, 27 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/158-summa-i-ii-q-67-articles-1-2-do-the-moral-and-intellectual/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether virtues remain in the soul after death, reading closely through articles 1 and 2 of Question 67. He draws out the distinction between what is “material” in a virtue—its dependence on bodily passions and images, as in temperance or fortitude—and what is “formal,” the rational ordering that can survive separation from the body, as with prudence and justice, and similarly with intellectual habits like scientia. Along the way he brings in Aristotle’s De Anima and Physics, and Plato’s Sophist, to clarify how separated souls and angels know and imagine, warning against being misled by deceptive likeness.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/159-summa-i-ii-q-67-article-3-does-faith-remain-in-glory-knowing/Thu, 27 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/159-summa-i-ii-q-67-article-3-does-faith-remain-in-glory-knowing/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s article on whether faith remains in glory, moving through the objections, the sed contra from 2 Corinthians 5, and the determination itself. He pauses to sort out Aquinas’s distinctions among knowledge, opinion, and faith—perfect versus imperfect knowing on the side of object, middle term, and subject—using Euclid, Aristotle, and Augustine’s account of angelic “morning and evening” knowledge as illustrations. He also treats the difference between guessing and knowing and touches the principle of non-contradiction, building toward Aquinas’s conclusion that faith’s essential lack of vision makes it incompatible with seeing God face to face.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/160-does-hope-or-faith-remain-in-heaven-summa-i-ii-q-67-a-4-5/Thu, 06 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/160-does-hope-or-faith-remain-in-heaven-summa-i-ii-q-67-a-4-5/Does hope, like faith, disappear once its object is finally possessed? Working through the objections and Aquinas’s answers in q. 67, a. 4 and a. 5, Berquist traces why hope and desire cease when the good they aim at is attained, while faith persists only in a qualified sense. He distinguishes servile from filial fear and takes up the genus-difference relation between faith and the beatific vision, along with eternity as “tota simul et perfecta possessio.” Digressions through Boethius, Plato’s Sophist, Aristotle’s Poetics, and examples from Shakespeare and Terence sharpen the precision of Aquinas’s argument.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/161-charity-never-fails-and-how-the-gifts-of-the-holy-spirit/Thu, 06 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/161-charity-never-fails-and-how-the-gifts-of-the-holy-spirit/Berquist first takes up whether charity remains numerically the same when we pass from this life to glory. Unlike faith, which is imperfect knowledge by definition and so cannot survive into vision, charity is not defined by imperfection—it is the same habit, only intensified by the fuller knowledge that now causes it. He then turns to q.68 a.1, the opening question of Aquinas’s treatise on the gifts of the Holy Spirit, asking how the gifts are really distinct from the virtues even though Gregory and Augustine use overlapping language for both. Along the way he draws on Aristotle’s accounts of heroic virtue and divine motion in the Nicomachean and Eudemian Ethics, plus recollections of his own teachers.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/162-summa-i-ii-q-68-aa-2-4-why-the-gifts-of-the-holy-spirit-are/Thu, 20 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/162-summa-i-ii-q-68-aa-2-4-why-the-gifts-of-the-holy-spirit-are/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of why the gifts of the Holy Spirit are necessary for salvation, why they must be habits rather than passing acts, and whether the traditional seven are rightly enumerated, citing Isaiah 11. He explains why the theological virtues, though supernatural, are received imperfectly and so leave the soul needing the gifts to follow the Spirit’s promptings. Along the way he draws on Aristotle’s account of heroic virtue in the Nicomachean Ethics and on Gregory the Great’s Moralia, working through Aquinas’s objections and replies article by article and pausing on the relation between natural reason and divine instinct.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/163-summa-i-ii-q-68-aa-4-7-how-the-seven-gifts-are-distinguished/Thu, 20 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/163-summa-i-ii-q-68-aa-4-7-how-the-seven-gifts-are-distinguished/Berquist reads Aquinas’s account of the seven gifts as perfections matched to the soul’s powers the way virtues perfect reason and appetite: wisdom, understanding, science, and counsel on the side of knowing, piety, fortitude, and fear on the side of desiring and acting. He follows article 4’s question of why art and the theological virtues get no corresponding gift, and why piety, not justice, is listed; article 5 on their connection through charity; article 6 on whether they remain in the heavenly fatherland; and article 7 on their relative dignity and order. Aristotle, Augustine, Gregory the Great, and Ambrose are drawn in throughout, with Thomas’s “likeness of ratios” argument illustrated by examples ranging from Shakespeare’s Juliet to Berquist’s own catechism memories.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/164-gifts-compared-with-the-virtues-beatitudes-as-acts-and-their/Thu, 27 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/164-gifts-compared-with-the-virtues-beatitudes-as-acts-and-their/Berquist works through Article 8 of Question 68, where Aquinas argues the gifts exceed the moral and intellectual virtues in dignity but remain subordinate to faith, hope, and charity. He then turns to Question 69, asking whether the Beatitudes are really distinct from the virtues and gifts, since one names acts and the others name habits, and whether the rewards Christ attaches to each Beatitude belong to this present life or only to the life to come. Reading closely through Thomas’s objections and replies, he draws on Augustine, Ambrose, Gregory the Great, Chrysostom, and Aristotle, adding asides on prayer and the stages of spiritual life. The class breaks off mid-argument in Article 2, having shown that beatitude’s reward is both an inchoate experience now and its full perfection later.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/165-why-the-beatitudes-and-their-rewards-are-listed-as-they-are/Thu, 27 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/165-why-the-beatitudes-and-their-rewards-are-listed-as-they-are/Berquist takes up two questions from the Summa’s treatise on happiness. In q. 69, a. 3, he follows Aquinas’s argument that the beatitudes correspond to a threefold order of lives—voluptuous, active, and contemplative—with the eighth beatitude confirming the preceding seven; a. 4 asks whether the rewards attached to each beatitude are fittingly assigned. He then moves to q. 70, examining the fruits of the Holy Spirit as St. Paul lists them in Galatians 5: whether these fruits are properly called acts, and how they differ from the beatitudes themselves. Throughout, he draws comparisons to Aristotle’s Ethics and Augustine.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/166-q70-art-3-why-paul-lists-twelve-fruits-of-the-spirit-and/Thu, 10 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/166-q70-art-3-why-paul-lists-twelve-fruits-of-the-spirit-and/Berquist takes up Question 70, Article 3, where Aquinas explains why St. Paul names twelve fruits of the Holy Spirit in Galatians. He walks through the article’s objections and Thomas’s answer, showing how the fruits are ordered by man’s disposition toward himself, his neighbor, and things beneath him. Along the way he takes up divine generation and Boethius’s definition of person, the threefold way of purgation, illumination, and union, and turns to Summa Contra Gentiles IV, chapter 15, to ask what happens when wonder drops out of inquiry. Aristotle, Augustine, and Shakespeare are brought in to sharpen Thomas’s reasoning.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/167-last-replies-on-the-twelve-fruits-fruits-vs-works-of-the/Thu, 10 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/167-last-replies-on-the-twelve-fruits-fruits-vs-works-of-the/Berquist finishes his run through the fruits of the Holy Spirit by taking up Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 70, a. 4: whether the fruits stand as real contraries to the works of the flesh listed in Galatians, working through Augustine’s pairing of individual fruits against individual vices. He reads closely from a handout, “The Royal Fragment,” and turns to a further question raised along the way—whether knowledge of good and evil is a single habit even though love of good and love of evil are not—drawing on Aristotle’s De Anima and Ethics. Along the way he uses examples from a Quebec driving story, Whittaker Chambers, Shakespeare, and Socrates’ Protagoras to press the Latin text under discussion.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/168-imitation-humility-and-the-love-of-wisdom-mozarts-music-st/Thu, 24 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/168-imitation-humility-and-the-love-of-wisdom-mozarts-music-st/Berquist begins with digressions that turn out to bear on the day’s text: what imitation means in Aristotle’s Poetics and Plato, why humility conditions the love of wisdom (Pythagoras, Socrates, Augustine’s City of God), and how Mozart’s symphonies imitate the passions in sound. He then turns to Aquinas’s Question 71 on vice, reading the prologue and the first article’s question—whether vice is contrary to virtue—closely against the text, tracking how Aquinas measures virtue and vice by nature and working through the objections and Aquinas’s replies.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/169-st-i-ii-q-71-aa-2-4-vice-against-nature-and-reason-habit/Thu, 24 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/169-st-i-ii-q-71-aa-2-4-vice-against-nature-and-reason-habit/Berquist takes up three articles of question 71: is vice contrary to nature, is a vicious habit worse than a vicious act, and can sin coexist with virtue in the same person? He follows Thomas’s objections, sed contra, and responses, leaning on Aristotle’s Ethics and Metaphysics and Augustine’s On Free Choice of the Will to argue that reason is man’s proper nature, so vice opposed to reason is against nature, and to sort out habit against act through efficient and final causality. Along the way he digresses into wisdom taken simply versus qualifiedly, Anaxagoras and Empedocles, and lines from Shakespeare’s King Lear and As You Like It.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/170-the-compendium-of-theology-and-sins-of-omission-st-i-ii-q/Thu, 22 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/170-the-compendium-of-theology-and-sins-of-omission-st-i-ii-q/Berquist begins with the shape of Aquinas’s Compendium of Theology — its treatment of faith, hope, and charity alongside the Summa Contra Gentiles — with side excursions on divine foreknowledge, why Christ died, and Eve’s fivefold sin. He then settles into Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 71, a. 5, where Aquinas asks whether every sin consists in some act, working through the puzzle of sins of omission and the relation between interior and exterior acts, replying to the objections in turn. Along the way he draws on Aristotle, Augustine, and Dionysius, and offers his own anecdotes to make Aquinas’s distinctions concrete.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/171-augustines-definition-of-sin-and-how-sins-are-distinguished/Thu, 22 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/171-augustines-definition-of-sin-and-how-sins-are-distinguished/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s treatment of Augustine’s definition of sin from Contra Faustum: something said, done, or desired against the eternal law. Working through the objections and response of article six, he shows how each objection presses on one term of the definition — act, will, end, and law versus reason — to force out its precise sense. He then turns to question seventy-two, on whether sins differ in species according to their objects, and follows Aquinas into the distinction between carnal and spiritual sins, drawing on Gregory the Great’s Moralia and Pauline texts, with side remarks on avarice, pride, and Christ’s grace from the Compendium of Theology.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/172-summa-i-ii-q-72-aa-3-6-sin-by-cause-against-god-self-and/Wed, 28 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/172-summa-i-ii-q-72-aa-3-6-sin-by-cause-against-god-self-and/Berquist takes up four articles of Question 72, on the specific differences among sins. He asks whether sins differ in species according to their causes, whether the threefold division of sin against God, against self, and against neighbor holds up, and whether mortal and venial sin are specifically distinct or differ only through their relation to punishment. He closes with whether sins of omission differ formally from sins of commission, or only materially. Students translate the Latin with him, and he brings in Augustine, Gregory, and Aristotle’s Physics and Ethics to test each distinction.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/173-q-72-aa-6-9-negation-rests-on-affirmation-sins-of-heart-mouth/Wed, 28 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/173-q-72-aa-6-9-negation-rests-on-affirmation-sins-of-heart-mouth/Berquist takes up four articles of q. 72 on how sins are distinguished, asking how sins of the heart, mouth and deed differ in species, and how vices opposed by excess and defect—prodigality against illiberality—count as distinct. Running through the discussion is a recurring principle: every negation presupposes a prior affirmation, which he traces in syllogistic logic, in the divine names (God as simple, unchanging, “I am who I am”), and in moral cases like gluttony, avarice and envy as disordered loves of real goods. He digresses through Shakespeare and Bohr and Einstein, and recalls teaching anecdotes, to show how one principle unfolds into many consequences for a mind like Aquinas’s.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/174-comparing-sins-i-are-all-sins-connected-or-equal-and-does/Thu, 11 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/174-comparing-sins-i-are-all-sins-connected-or-equal-and-does/Berquist takes up three questions Aquinas raises about comparing sins in the Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 73: are all sins connected to one another, are they all equal, and is their gravity measured by their object? He works through articles 1 through 3, using Aquinas’s distinction between privation and disorder—likened to sickness striking a vital organ versus a peripheral one—to show why sins against God or against oneself outweigh sins against external things. Citations from Scripture, Aristotle, Cicero, and Augustine back the argument, alongside a digression on logical distinction and a Shakespeare example.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/175-comparing-sins-ii-opposed-virtues-and-carnal-vs-spiritual/Thu, 11 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/175-comparing-sins-ii-opposed-virtues-and-carnal-vs-spiritual/Berquist reads closely through Aquinas’s articles on comparing sins, asking first whether the gravity of a sin corresponds to the dignity of the virtue it opposes, distinguishing opposition by object from mere opposition by restraint. He then turns to whether spiritual sins are graver than carnal ones, tracing Aquinas’s three grounds—the subject in whom the sin resides, the object offended, and the motive behind it. Along the way he digresses into Aristotle’s Ethics, the question of angelic versus human time, and points and lines in geometry to sharpen the underlying distinctions, working directly from the Latin text throughout.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/176-summa-i-ii-q-73-aa-6-7-how-the-demons-know-the-cause-of-sin/Fri, 26 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/176-summa-i-ii-q-73-aa-6-7-how-the-demons-know-the-cause-of-sin/Starting from a question about how the demons know and why their will is fixed in obstinacy, Berquist moves into articles 6 and 7 of Question 73, asking whether the gravity of a sin follows from its cause and whether circumstances can aggravate it. He lays out Aquinas’s threefold account of how a circumstance increases malice: by shifting an act into a worse species, by multiplying instances of that same species, or by deepening an existing deformity already present. Adultery, theft, Oedipus, and reckless drinking supply the concrete cases. Along the way he brings in angelic choice, the gift of wisdom as “savory knowledge,” and Aquinas’s own devotional poetry.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/177-summa-i-ii-q-73-aa-8-10-harm-done-the-person-sinned-against/Fri, 26 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/177-summa-i-ii-q-73-aa-8-10-harm-done-the-person-sinned-against/Berquist takes up Summa Theologiae I-II, q.73, articles 8 through 10, on what makes one sin graver than another. Article 8 asks whether sin is aggravated by the harm (nocumentum) done, and he distinguishes harm that is foreseen and intended from harm merely foreseen and harm not foreseen at all. Articles 9 and 10 turn to whether gravity depends on the dignity of the person sinned against—God, oneself, or a neighbor—or on the standing of the one sinning. Along the way he draws on Hamlet and As You Like It to illustrate order and disorder in nature as the underlying measure of virtue and vice.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/178-summa-i-ii-q-74-part-1-two-ways-the-mind-stumbles-can-sin/Thu, 02 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/178-summa-i-ii-q-74-part-1-two-ways-the-mind-stumbles-can-sin/Berquist begins with the puzzle, raised from Augustine, of why evil seems to predominate among men, tracing it to the primacy of sense knowledge over reason. He turns to Friar Lawrence’s speech on “stumbling” in Romeo and Juliet, using it to distinguish two failures of reasoning—bad premises versus a rush to conclusions—and applies the same distinction to Hamlet. He then works through the first two articles of Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 74, asking whether the will can be the subject of sin and whether it is the only one, weighing objections drawn from Dionysius, Augustine, and Aristotle. The class closes with Aristotle on virtue and friendship read alongside Psalm 100 on thanksgiving and praise.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/179-summa-i-ii-q-74-part-2-sin-in-the-passions-and-in-reason/Thu, 02 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/179-summa-i-ii-q-74-part-2-sin-in-the-passions-and-in-reason/Berquist takes up four articles of Summa I-II q.74, tracking Aquinas’s replies to objections about where sin actually resides. He distinguishes the hand as a mere instrument from the passions, which can partake of reason and so be blamed, and separates venial disorder in sensuality from mortal sin properly located in reason. Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics, Augustine, and the Council of Trent back up these distinctions. He digresses at length on Aristotle’s account of music and moral education, drawing examples from Mozart’s operas and his own reflections on memory and self-control to make the psychology concrete.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/180-summa-i-ii-q-74-a-6-10-morose-pleasure-consent-in-higher/Wed, 08 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/180-summa-i-ii-q-74-a-6-10-morose-pleasure-consent-in-higher/Berquist takes up articles 6 through 10 of Question 74, where Aquinas asks whether sin can exist in reason as merely apprehending, without consent, and whether dwelling with pleasure on a sinful thought—“morose pleasure”—is itself sinful even apart from any act. He follows Aquinas’s use of Augustine’s distinction between higher and lower reason from De Trinitate to locate exactly where consent occurs, and works out the conditions under which consenting to such pleasure counts as mortal rather than venial sin. As usual, he moves through objections, sed contra, and replies article by article, pausing along the way for asides on Samuel Johnson, Shakespeare, and religious art.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/181-summa-i-ii-q75-aa-1-3-does-sin-have-a-cause-inward-causes/Fri, 17 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/181-summa-i-ii-q75-aa-1-3-does-sin-have-a-cause-inward-causes/Does sin have a cause, and if so, what kind? Berquist follows Aquinas’s answer that sin as an act has a per se cause, while sin as disorder or privation has only an accidental cause — since evil as such has no proper cause. He traces how the will’s failure to apply the rule of reason or divine law serves as sin’s proximate cause, with sense appetite acting as a remote interior cause and reason as immediate. Along the way he digresses into anecdotes and literary references — Shakespeare, Plato’s Phaedo — and reflections on mercy, justice, and hope that circle back to the text’s distinctions.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/182-q75-a-4-q76-a-1-how-one-sin-causes-another-through-the-four/Fri, 17 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/182-q75-a-4-q76-a-1-how-one-sin-causes-another-through-the-four/Berquist asks whether one sin can be the cause of another, and answers it by running Thomas’s article through Aristotle’s four causes—efficient, material, final, and formal—showing how, say, a sin of intemperance can set up another sin as its material or final cause. He digresses into the history of causal thinking from the pre-Socratics to Aristotle and into the shifting meanings of “end” and “point,” drawing illustrations from Shakespeare and Mozart to show sins interlocking with one another. Turning to q. 76, a. 1, he takes up whether ignorance can be a cause of sin, distinguishing per se causation from merely removing an impediment (removens prohibens), and universal from particular practical knowledge.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/183-aquinas-on-ignorance-as-a-cause-of-sin-summa-i-ii-q-76-is/Fri, 24 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/183-aquinas-on-ignorance-as-a-cause-of-sin-summa-i-ii-q-76-is/Berquist takes up Summa Theologiae I-II, Question 76, article by article: can ignorance be a sin, does it excuse from sin, and does it diminish sin? He draws Thomas’s key distinctions—nescience versus ignorance, vincible versus invincible ignorance, and ignorance that is directly voluntary from ignorance only indirectly willed—showing how each bears differently on moral responsibility. He supplements the text with parallel passages from the Summa Contra Gentiles, Aristotle’s logic and Ethics, and Augustine, plus a detour through “before and after” in the Categories and Metaphysics linked to the Apocalypse’s “Alpha and Omega.” Anecdotes from Charles De Koninck and Ralph McInerny and remarks on culpable ignorance in public life round out the discussion.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/184-aquinas-on-passion-and-sin-summa-i-ii-q-77-arts-1-2-can-passion/Fri, 24 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/184-aquinas-on-passion-and-sin-summa-i-ii-q-77-arts-1-2-can-passion/Berquist asks how a passion of the sense appetite—something below the will—can nonetheless move the will and even overwhelm reason’s own knowledge. He traces Article 1’s account of how passion reaches the will indirectly, by “abstracting” the soul’s powers and disturbing the internal senses, then turns to Article 2, where Aristotle’s “syllogism of the incontinent man” explains how someone can judge wrongly in a particular case while still holding correct universal knowledge. Drawing on Aristotle’s Ethics and De Anima, Scripture, and examples like Bathsheba, drunkenness, and distracted scholars, he distinguishes habitual from actual knowledge to show how disordered passion overrides practical judgment without erasing it.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/185-summa-i-ii-q-77-aa-3-6-sins-of-weakness-love-of-self-the/Thu, 30 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/185-summa-i-ii-q-77-aa-3-6-sins-of-weakness-love-of-self-the/Berquist takes up four articles of Question 77 on sin committed through passion. He asks whether such sin should properly be called sin of infirmity, then whether inordinate self-love is the root of every sin, drawing on Augustine and Cicero for supporting cases. Turning to 1 John, he examines Aquinas’s division of sinful desire into concupiscence of the flesh, concupiscence of the eyes, and pride of life. The class closes with Article 6’s question of whether passion arising before or after the act’s choice diminishes or increases its gravity, with a passage from Summa Contra Gentiles IV read alongside.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/186-summa-i-ii-q-77-aa-7-8-and-q-78-a-1-whether-passion-excuses/Thu, 30 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/186-summa-i-ii-q-77-aa-7-8-and-q-78-a-1-whether-passion-excuses/Berquist takes up articles seven and eight of Question 77, asking whether passion excuses a person from sin entirely and whether a sin committed under the sway of passion can still be mortal. He works through Aquinas’s replies, weighing objections drawn from Scripture, Aristotle, and Dionysius, and sharpens the distinctions between acting from ignorance, from passion, and from malice, and between venial and mortal sin. Examples range from drunkenness and crimes of passion to the Holocaust and contemporary abortion debates. The class breaks off partway into Question 78’s first article, on whether one can sin from certain malice, with objections still to be finished next time.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/187-aquinas-on-sinning-from-certain-malice-whether-it-is-possible/Thu, 06 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/187-aquinas-on-sinning-from-certain-malice-whether-it-is-possible/Berquist takes up Question 78 of the Prima Secundae, where Aquinas asks whether a person can sin “from certain malice” rather than from ignorance, passion, or vicious habit. Working through article 1’s objections and reply, he unpacks a threefold sense of ignorance and shows how the will goes wrong by loving a lesser good in place of a greater one. Article 2 then sharpens a technical distinction between merely sinning while one has a habit and actually sinning from that habit. He tests the argument against examples ranging from Don Giovanni and King David to present-day politics.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/188-malice-without-habit-malice-worse-than-passion-and-whether/Thu, 06 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/188-malice-without-habit-malice-worse-than-passion-and-whether/Berquist takes up three connected questions from the Summa: does sinning “from certain malice” require an already-formed vicious habit, is such sin graver than sinning from passion, and can God in any sense be called a cause of sin. Working through the objections, sed contra, and Thomas’s own responses, he presses the distinction between choosing to sin and merely sinning while choosing, tying it to how far reason and habit, rather than passion, govern the act. Examples range from Aristotle’s Ethics and Scripture—Job, Wisdom, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Romans—to Augustine and Dionysius, alongside Don Giovanni, Shakespeare, and Padre Pio. He closes with q.79 a.1’s answer that God permits but never directly causes sin, leaving free will intact within providence.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/189-is-god-the-cause-of-sin-summa-i-ii-q-79-articles-1-3-the/Thu, 20 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/189-is-god-the-cause-of-sin-summa-i-ii-q-79-articles-1-3-the/Berquist takes up Question 79 of the Summa’s treatise on sin’s exterior causes, pressing the hard question: if God causes every act, does he cause the act of sin? He follows Aquinas’s answer that God causes the act and its being, but never the defect or privation that makes it sinful—that comes from a deficient free will—using the analogies of a lame leg’s limp and a pilot steering a ship to show how a cause can produce motion without producing the flaw in it. He then extends the same reasoning to articles 2 and 3, on whether God causes blindness of mind and hardness of heart, treating these as further privations rather than positive effects of God’s causality.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/190-blindness-for-salvation-or-damnation-and-the-devil-as-a-cause/Thu, 20 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/190-blindness-for-salvation-or-damnation-and-the-devil-as-a-cause/Berquist opens with Aquinas’s question of whether divine blinding and hardening are ordered to the salvation of the one blinded, drawing on Augustine’s Enchiridion and Questions on the Gospels to show the same affliction can be merciful healing for one person and just punishment for another. He then takes up the devil as cause of sin, working through whether the devil moves the will directly, whether he works through the imagination and sensory desire, and whether he can impose outright necessity on sin. The conclusion holds throughout: the devil can incite and tempt, but can never force the will while reason remains free. Berquist threads the arguments with personal anecdotes and asides on Pope Francis and papal media coverage.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/191-aquinas-the-devil-as-cause-of-sin-how-original-sin-is-passed/Thu, 11 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/191-aquinas-the-devil-as-cause-of-sin-how-original-sin-is-passed/Berquist closes out the question of whether the devil is directly the cause of every human sin, arguing he is only an indirect cause, then moves to Aquinas’s account of original sin. He works through the claim that all men are “one man” in Adam, comparing it to how a hand’s act is imputed to the will that moves it, to explain how Adam’s sin belongs to the whole race. He distinguishes this sin of nature from personal actual sins, which are not inherited, and asks why only Adam’s first sin, and not later sins of Adam or other ancestors, is passed on to everyone.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/192-aquinas-does-original-sin-reach-everyone-mary-miraculous/Thu, 11 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/192-aquinas-does-original-sin-reach-everyone-mary-miraculous/Berquist reads through three articles of the Summa where Aquinas asks how original sin is transmitted. He takes up whether it reaches all who descend from Adam by ordinary generation, what would happen to a person miraculously formed from existing human flesh rather than begotten, and—raising the counterfactual case of Eve sinning without Adam—whether a mother alone could pass the sin to her children. Along the way he brings in Mary’s Immaculate Conception and preservation through Christ’s merits, and pushes the biological analogies into modern territory, comparing Aquinas’s account of generation to cloning and IVF.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/193-original-sin-in-its-essence-habit-unity-concupiscence-and/Thu, 08 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/193-original-sin-in-its-essence-habit-unity-concupiscence-and/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s account of original sin’s essence in Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 82. Reading through the objections, sed contra, and responses in articles 1 through 4, he distinguishes the material element of original sin, disordered concupiscence, from its formal element, the loss of original justice and the soul’s withdrawn subjection to God, drawing on Anselm, Augustine, and John Damascene along the way. He also asks whether original sin counts as one habit in a given person and whether it is present equally in everyone. Along the way he digresses into wonder in learning Euclid’s geometry and pastoral experience with unwed mothers before closing with a prayer to Aquinas and Damascene.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/194-where-original-sin-lives-flesh-or-soul-chief-and-instrumental/Thu, 08 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/194-where-original-sin-lives-flesh-or-soul-chief-and-instrumental/Berquist leads students through the article’s full structure — four objections, the sed contra, Aquinas’s corpus, and the replies — on whether original sin belongs more to the flesh or the soul. The corpus turns on a threefold distinction: Adam as principal cause, the seed as instrumental cause, and the soul as the actual subject in which sin inheres. Discussion draws in Augustine’s Retractions on Romans 7, the question of how the rational soul is created and infused into the body, and a caution against reading Thomas’s psychology through a Cartesian split of soul from flesh. Ten minutes are given to the handout “The First Definition of Reason,” p. 58.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/195-original-sin-in-the-soul-the-souls-essence-and-the-will-first/Thu, 15 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/195-original-sin-in-the-soul-the-souls-essence-and-the-will-first/Berquist asks where original sin lives: in the soul’s essence, as original justice did, or in a particular power like will, intellect, or the generative faculty? He works through the objections and replies of articles 2 and 3, using Aristotelian distinctions—before and after, cause and effect, nature versus person—and comparisons to grace and the theological virtues to show why the essence is the primary subject while the will is the first power affected. Along the way he draws on Porphyry’s Isagoge, Plato’s tripartite soul, and Aristotle’s account of “tying and untying knots” to clarify the vocabulary Aquinas is using.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/196-infected-powers-avarice-as-the-root-and-pride-as-the-beginning/Thu, 15 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/196-infected-powers-avarice-as-the-root-and-pride-as-the-beginning/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of why original sin especially infects the generative power, the concupiscible appetite, and the sense of touch, working through each objection, the respondeo, and the replies in article 4 of question 83. He then turns to question 84, drawing Thomas’s distinction between avarice as the “root” of sin and pride as its “beginning,” tracing the argument through Augustine’s City of God and Paul’s epistles. Along the way he brings in a handout on the causes of love, a Latin textual crux, and examples of avarice and pride drawn from ordinary life and his own teaching experience.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/197-aquinas-on-the-capital-sins-question-84-articles-3-4-what/Thu, 22 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/197-aquinas-on-the-capital-sins-question-84-articles-3-4-what/Berquist takes up Article 3 of Question 84, where Aquinas asks whether vices beyond pride and avarice deserve to be called “capital,” and shows that the term is metaphorical: a capital vice is one that serves as head or source of other sins, not one punished by beheading. He then moves into Article 4, where Aquinas derives the traditional seven—vainglory, envy, anger, sloth, avarice, gluttony, lust—from the threefold division of human goods (of soul, body, and external things) and from the conditions of happiness: excellence, sufficiency, and pleasure, drawing on Gregory the Great’s Moralia. Along the way he digresses on poetic versus scriptural metaphor and illustrates each vice with examples from literature and ordinary life.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/198-replies-on-the-seven-capital-vices-then-the-effects-of-sin/Thu, 22 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/198-replies-on-the-seven-capital-vices-then-the-effects-of-sin/Berquist finishes the objections on the capital vices: why pride and avarice, though grave, are not counted among the seven; why anger is principal even though it isn’t one of the four chief passions; and how sin rooted in ignorance reduces to acedia. He then opens the treatise on the effects of sin with Question 85, article 1, asking whether sin diminishes the good of nature, and distinguishes three things at stake—the natural principles themselves, the inclination to virtue, and the gift of original justice. Along the way he draws in Aristotle’s Ethics and Rhetoric, Plato’s Meno, Euclid, and Shakespeare.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/199-antonomasia-in-scripture-the-evil-one-and-the-good-summa/Thu, 29 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/199-antonomasia-in-scripture-the-evil-one-and-the-good-summa/Berquist begins with a grammatical figure, antonomasia, tracing how Matthew’s Greek uses “the evil one” and “the good” as titles by way of eminence, and extends this to Christ, Jesus, and the Logos in John’s prologue. He then works through Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 85, articles 2 and 3, asking whether sin can wholly destroy the good of human nature and explaining the four wounds it inflicts instead—ignorance, malice, weakness, and concupiscence. He draws on a handout on the nature and kinds of love, along with comparisons from Aristotle, Shakespeare, and Churchill to sharpen the distinctions.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/200-summa-i-ii-q-85-aa-4-6-mode-species-and-order-death-and-bodily/Thu, 29 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/200-summa-i-ii-q-85-aa-4-6-mode-species-and-order-death-and-bodily/Berquist follows Aquinas’s argument that sin, as a privation, strips things of mode, species, and order, then asks whether death and other bodily defects follow from original sin as its effects. He traces the per se versus per accidens distinction Aquinas draws from Aristotle, and the contrast between the corruptibility of matter and the incorruptibility of form, to explain why the body decays though the soul does not. He weighs whether death is natural to man as such or only consequent upon sin, closing with questions about the resurrected body’s supernatural gifts and where Aristotle and Plato might stand before God.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/201-death-and-defects-natural-to-man-q85-a6-universal-vs-particular/Thu, 12 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/201-death-and-defects-natural-to-man-q85-a6-universal-vs-particular/Berquist asks whether death and other bodily defects are natural to man, and shows how Aquinas answers by distinguishing universal nature from particular nature: matter is corruptible by nature, yet man’s rational soul and his original justice made him incorruptible, so death enters through the loss of that gift rather than through nature as such. He then follows a chain of related passages — Aristotle’s Physics on the definition of the continuous, invoked to argue for the immateriality of reason, and a section of Aquinas’s De Veritate on whether scientia can rightly be said of God — closing with remarks on how ordinary words like “discourse,” “stumble,” and “grasp” reveal something true about the act of reasoning.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/202-the-stain-of-sin-q86-and-the-debt-of-punishment-q87-a1-lost/Thu, 12 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/202-the-stain-of-sin-q86-and-the-debt-of-punishment-q87-a1-lost/Does sin leave a lasting blemish on the soul even after the act is over? Berquist works through Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 86, aa. 1–2, treating the “stain” (macula) as a loss of the soul’s due brightness (refulgentia), then turns to q. 87 on the “debt of punishment” (reatus poenae). There he follows Aquinas’s account of sin as a disordering of the person’s threefold relation—to reason, to human law, and to divine law—each carrying its own liability to punishment. He pauses over objections and sed contra texts from Augustine, Ecclesiasticus, Ephesians, Joshua, and Romans, with etymological asides on macula and reatus, breaking off partway into the reply to the first objection.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/203-humility-with-charity-hope-with-fear-aquinas-on-matthew-the/Thu, 19 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/203-humility-with-charity-hope-with-fear-aquinas-on-matthew-the/Berquist reads Aquinas’s commentary on Matthew’s Gospel: the child set among the disciples as a figure of humility, and the centurion whose faith moves Christ to “wonder.” He draws out the two senses of admiratio—ignorance of a cause versus recognition of excellence—and presses objections and replies on why charity requires humility. From there he moves to Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 87, a. 2, asking whether sin can itself be the punishment of sin, and to the Magnificat’s pairing of hope with fear. Pythagoras, Aristotle, and Augustine on wisdom and love furnish comparisons, alongside anecdotes about Mozart, Socrates in the Phaedo, and Berquist’s own teachers.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/204-mortal-sin-and-eternal-punishment-aquinas-on-aversion-conversion/Thu, 19 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/204-mortal-sin-and-eternal-punishment-aquinas-on-aversion-conversion/Berquist takes up three articles of Aquinas’s question on punishment following sin, asking whether every sin merits eternal punishment, why some punishments cannot be undone, and whether punishment can be infinite in quantity. Working through objections, the sed contra, and Thomas’s own answers, he leans on Aristotle’s Categories and Metaphysics for the notions of order and beginning, and on Augustine and Gregory for the distinction between aversion from God, which is infinite, and disordered attachment to created goods, which is finite. He also reads from a handout on Shakespeare’s exhortation to use reason and digresses through Don Giovanni and the structure of Matthew’s Gospel to press home the distinctions.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/205-the-debt-of-punishment-after-sin-names-of-the-holy-spirit/Thu, 26 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/205-the-debt-of-punishment-after-sin-names-of-the-holy-spirit/Berquist takes up three linked questions from Aquinas on punishment after sin: does the debt of punishment remain once guilt is forgiven, is all punishment proportioned to guilt, and can one person justly be punished for another’s fault. Reading the Latin text article by article, he tracks objections, sed contra, and corpus, drawing on David’s sin in 2 Kings, the man born blind in John 9, Job, and Augustine’s Retractions and letter to Avitus. He also brings in Summa Contra Gentiles IV, ch. 15 on medicinal punishment and satisfaction. The class opens with a scriptural excursus on the names of the Holy Spirit and the Son in Matthew and 1 John.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/206-venial-and-mortal-sin-loving-god-enough-repairable-and-irreparable/Thu, 26 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/206-venial-and-mortal-sin-loving-god-enough-repairable-and-irreparable/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether venial sin stands properly divided against mortal sin. Moving through the article’s three objections, Augustine’s sed contra, and Thomas’s determinatio, he shows the division turns on repairable versus irreparable disorder in relation to the ultimate end. He explains why this is an analogical division—like being’s division into substance and accident—rather than a strict split into equal species. The class also digresses into the logic of division and definition, the precept to refer all one’s acts to God’s glory, and the distinction between enjoying (frui) and using (uti) created goods.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/207-aquinas-on-venial-and-mortal-sin-summa-i-ii-q-88-articles/Thu, 05 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/207-aquinas-on-venial-and-mortal-sin-summa-i-ii-q-88-articles/Berquist asks what actually distinguishes a venial sin from a mortal one, working through Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 88, aa. 2–3 by genus, cause, and outcome, and asking whether venial sin disposes a person toward mortal sin. He connects this to Summa Contra Gentiles IV, ch. 15, and to the temptation of Christ in Matthew, treating the devil’s threefold assault as a figure of the “spirit of error” and of contempt for order. Along the way he digresses into contemporary culture, marriage, and music to illustrate how disorder in small things prepares the way for graver falls.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/208-can-a-venial-sin-become-mortal-q-88-articles-4-6-circumstances/Thu, 05 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/208-can-a-venial-sin-become-mortal-q-88-articles-4-6-circumstances/Berquist takes up three linked questions from Aquinas’s treatise on sin: can a venial sin become mortal (article 4), can circumstances turn it mortal (article 5), and can a mortal sin become venial (article 6)? He tests the claim against anger and drunkenness, asking whether losing rational control in these states changes the genus of the act rather than merely its circumstances. Along the way he leans on Augustine, Peter Lombard’s Sentences, and Chrysostom as authorities cited in the objections and replies, and repeatedly returns to Aristotelian distinctions among habit, disposition, and the act of will to explain why genus, species, and circumstance are not interchangeable in judging an act’s gravity.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/209-understanding-belief-seeking-understanding-and-whether-venial/Thu, 12 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/209-understanding-belief-seeking-understanding-and-whether-venial/Berquist works through Question 89, article 1, asking whether venial sin stains the soul. He first digresses into what “understanding” means, tracing etymological links between understanding, substance, and cause, and brings in Augustine’s definition of faith as “assent while thinking about it” alongside Anselm’s account of theology as faith seeking understanding. Returning to the article, he distinguishes venial from mortal sin by whether one abandons one’s ultimate end, God, or merely pursues it imperfectly, drawing on Aristotle’s Metaphysics on substance and wisdom to show why only mortal sin corrupts that final ordering.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/210-wood-hay-and-straw-venial-sin-in-the-state-of-innocence-and/Thu, 12 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/210-wood-hay-and-straw-venial-sin-in-the-state-of-innocence-and/Berquist takes up three articles of the Summa on venial sin: whether it is rightly figured by the “wood, hay, and straw” of 1 Corinthians 3, whether man before the fall could have committed it, and whether angels, good or fallen, are capable of it at all. He follows Thomas’s objections and determinations closely, leaning on Augustine’s City of God and On Faith and Works to sharpen the distinctions between venial and mortal fault and between the intellectual condition of angels and men. A page from the “Causes of Love” handout is read alongside the text, with characteristic digressions on etymology and other authors along the way.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/211-first-motions-of-sensuality-in-the-faithless-and-whether/Thu, 19 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/211-first-motions-of-sensuality-in-the-faithless-and-whether/Berquist takes up two articles from Aquinas’s treatise on sin. First, whether the first stirrings of sensuality—unwilled movements of desire prior to any act of reason—count as mortal sins in those without faith, given that in the faithful such movements remain merely venial. Second, whether someone who has only original sin, without any actual mortal sin, can still commit venial sin. He walks through the objections, the sed contra, and the corpus of each article, pausing to paraphrase difficult turns of Thomas’s argument. The class closes with his opening remarks on how to approach the coming Treatise on Law theologically rather than as political theory.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/212-beginning-the-treatise-on-law-wisdom-the-axioms-and-whether/Thu, 19 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/212-beginning-the-treatise-on-law-wisdom-the-axioms-and-whether/Berquist turns from habits, virtues, and vices to the extrinsic principles of human acts—God and the devil—before beginning the Treatise on Law proper in Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 90. He works through Article 1, whether law belongs to reason, laying out the objections and Aquinas’s reply that law is a rule and measure of acts, and so belongs to reason rather than will alone. Along the way he digresses into Aristotle on equivocal terms, the role of axioms, and the soul-body relationship as needed background. He closes on the article’s reply to the third objection, where reason moves by the power of will directed to the common good, setting up the definition of law to follow.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/213-law-and-reason-law-and-the-common-good-summa-i-ii-q-90-articles/Thu, 26 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/213-law-and-reason-law-and-the-common-good-summa-i-ii-q-90-articles/Berquist opens with Article 1’s question of what “beginning” or principle means, drawing out its several senses in Aristotle before locating law within the larger divisions of practical reason and sacred doctrine. He then turns to Article 2, where Aquinas argues that law is essentially ordered to the common good rather than to some private or partial good. The key move is an analogy: just as axioms function as starting points for speculative reason, the last end—human happiness, felicitas or beatitudo—functions as the starting point for practical reason, and law must be judged by its ordering to that end. The class closes by posing the next question: who has the authority to make law.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/214-who-makes-law-promulgation-eternal-law-and-natural-law-q/Thu, 26 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/214-who-makes-law-promulgation-eternal-law-and-natural-law-q/Berquist works through the last two articles of Question 90—whether the reason of any private person can make law, and whether promulgation belongs to the essence of law—weighing the difference between ruling a household and ruling a city, and why a law unpublished binds no one. He then turns to Question 91, asking how many kinds of law there are, and reads closely through the article on eternal law before beginning the article on natural law, tracing how rational creatures share in divine reason by knowing and directing their own acts. As usual he moves slowly through each objection and reply in the text itself, breaking off for anecdotes and political asides along the way.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/215-summa-i-ii-q-91-aa-3-4-why-we-need-human-law-and-divine-law/Thu, 09 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/215-summa-i-ii-q-91-aa-3-4-why-we-need-human-law-and-divine-law/Berquist takes up Articles 3 and 4 of Aquinas’s treatise on law: why human law must supplement natural law, and why divine law is needed beyond both. He follows the objections, sed contra, and responses closely, drawing a parallel between speculative and practical reason, and laying out Aquinas’s four reasons for divine law—our supernatural end, the uncertainty of human judgment, the need to govern interior acts, and the need to prohibit every sin. Along the way he digresses through Cicero, Augustine, and moral certitude, and offers an extended reflection on Mozart’s late symphonies as an image of the order of faith, hope, and charity. The class ends partway into the reply to the second objection of Article 4.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/216-summa-i-ii-q-91-aa-5-6-and-q-92-a-1-the-old-law-and-the-new/Thu, 09 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/216-summa-i-ii-q-91-aa-5-6-and-q-92-a-1-the-old-law-and-the-new/Berquist takes up three articles from Aquinas’s treatise on law: whether the divine law is one or twofold, whether the leftover sensual inclination after original sin can be called a “law,” and whether law’s effect is to make men good. He argues the Old and New Law differ not in kind but in degree, like a boy compared to a man, both stages of one order. The “law of the fomes” is law only by participation, or as a kind of punishment, not properly speaking. Reading objections, sed contra, and corpus in Latin, he ties the discussion to Aristotle, Augustine, and Scripture, and closes on how law forms virtue relative to the legislator’s intention.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/217-dividing-in-twos-and-threes-and-the-acts-of-law-command-prohibit/Thu, 23 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/217-dividing-in-twos-and-threes-and-the-acts-of-law-command-prohibit/Berquist opens with a wide-ranging look at Aquinas’s recurring twofold and threefold divisions, drawing examples from the proofs of God’s existence, Aristotle’s ten categories, and the division of Scripture. He then settles into close commentary on Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 92, a. 2, where Aquinas asks whether the acts of law—commanding, prohibiting, permitting, and punishing—are suitably assigned, working through the article’s objections and replies to show how these acts bear on virtue, vice, and morally indifferent acts. Along the way he adds etymological asides, comparisons with Aristotle’s Ethics, and anecdotes on how punishment actually shapes behavior.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/218-the-eternal-law-as-the-highest-reason-in-god-god-as-maker/Thu, 23 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/218-the-eternal-law-as-the-highest-reason-in-god-god-as-maker/Berquist begins the treatise on law by setting out its sixfold division—eternal, natural, human, Old, New, and the “law of the fomes”—before turning to question 93 and its first article, on whether the eternal law is the highest reason existing in God. He works through Aquinas’s comparison of God as artist, who conceives exemplar ideas, and God as governor, who moves things to their end, and reconciles Augustine’s talk of many divine ideas with the unity of an eternal law ordered to the common good. He digresses into the fourfold division of order from the Ethics commentary, the meaning of logos in John’s Gospel, and why the eternal law is appropriated to the Son.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/219-eternal-law-part-1-is-the-eternal-law-known-to-all-distinction/Thu, 28 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/219-eternal-law-part-1-is-the-eternal-law-known-to-all-distinction/Berquist reads Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 93, a. 2 closely: does everyone know the eternal law? He walks through the objections and Augustine’s texts behind them, then Thomas’s answer—that the eternal law is known to us only in its effects, by a kind of “irradiation” or participation, while only the blessed see it as it is in itself. To show how Aquinas draws such distinctions, he turns to Aristotle’s Physics on change between contradictories, applying it to the instant of consecration in the Eucharist and to the moment grace returns after confession, before returning to finish the article’s response to the third objection on how judgments differ.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/220-eternal-law-part-2-whether-all-law-comes-from-the-eternal/Thu, 28 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/220-eternal-law-part-2-whether-all-law-comes-from-the-eternal/Berquist takes up Article 3’s question of whether every law flows from the eternal law, working through objections built on the fomes—the law of concupiscence—and on unjust human laws. He and the students press the distinction between a law approving an evil and one merely permitting it, testing it against abortion legislation, same-sex marriage, slavery, and the civil toleration of lesser evils. The class then turns briefly to Article 5, asking whether contingent natural things fall under the eternal law, raised through divine providence’s governance of irrational creatures.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/221-aquinas-on-law-part-1-who-is-subject-to-the-eternal-law-and/Thu, 04 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/221-aquinas-on-law-part-1-who-is-subject-to-the-eternal-law-and/Berquist finishes Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 93, a. 6, on whether all human beings are subject to the eternal law, then turns to q. 94, a. 1: is the natural law a habit? He works through the article’s objections and replies, drawing on Paul, Augustine, Basil, and Aristotle, and pauses over whether grace or fear better explains obedience to law. Along the way he takes up side questions on the metaphysics of nothing and being, and on God’s knowledge of evil against Empedocles and Averroes, tying the arguments to present-day cases like crime, cultural decline, and debates over marriage.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/222-aquinas-on-law-part-2-the-precepts-of-the-natural-law-virtuous/Thu, 04 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/222-aquinas-on-law-part-2-the-precepts-of-the-natural-law-virtuous/Berquist takes up Article 2 of Question 94: if the first precept of natural law is simply “good is to be done and evil avoided,” why does Aquinas list several precepts rather than one? He traces the proportion Aquinas draws between synderesis and practical reason on one side, and natural understanding and speculative reason on the other, showing how the many precepts follow the order of man’s natural inclinations—self-preservation, procreation and the raising of offspring, and the properly rational goods of knowing God and living in society. He then moves to Article 3, on whether every virtuous act belongs to natural law, touching Boethius on what is per se nota along the way, before opening Article 4’s question of whether natural law is the same for all, raised against Gratian’s Decretum and Aristotle’s remarks on the variability of justice among peoples.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/223-natural-law-i-can-the-natural-law-change-abraham-hosea-custom/Thu, 11 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/223-natural-law-i-can-the-natural-law-change-abraham-hosea-custom/Berquist asks whether the natural law can change, testing Aquinas’s answer in Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 94, aa. 5-6 against hard cases: Abraham’s command to sacrifice Isaac, the Israelites despoiling the Egyptians, Hosea’s marriage to a harlot, and the loss of common ownership. Aquinas’s distinction between the unchangeable first principles of natural law and its variable secondary precepts lets him read these as additions rather than true changes. Berquist also digresses into the Commentary on the Sentences on whether God wills all men to be saved, comparing Damascene’s and Augustine’s explanations, before turning to the De Malo’s account of how concupiscence, bad persuasion, and corrupt custom can obscure or “delete” natural law precepts from the heart.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/224-natural-law-ii-and-human-law-replies-on-grace-and-unjust/Thu, 11 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/224-natural-law-ii-and-human-law-replies-on-grace-and-unjust/Berquist closes out the natural law questions in the Summa, working through Aquinas’s reply on whether sin can wipe out the natural law (I-II, q. 94, a. 6), before turning to human law proper: why human beings need positive laws at all, and how such laws relate back to natural law, either as direct conclusions from common principles or as particular determinations of them (I-II, q. 95, aa. 1–2). He illustrates the distinction with examples like speed limits and which side of the road to drive on, and reads short passages from the handouts “Shakespeare on Error” and “Effects of Love” along the way. The session ends partway through the replies on article two.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/225-aquinas-on-human-law-st-i-ii-q95-a3-4-isidores-conditions/Thu, 18 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/225-aquinas-on-human-law-st-i-ii-q95-a3-4-isidores-conditions/Berquist takes up Isidore of Seville’s list of conditions a law must meet—honest, just, possible, suited to custom, place, and time, necessary, useful, clear—and asks whether these are arbitrary or follow from what law is. Working through the objections and replies in Article 3, he shows how the conditions reduce to three: conformity with religion, with natural discipline, and with human welfare. In Article 4 he turns to Isidore’s divisions of human law—ius gentium, civil law, laws tied to particular forms of government, and laws named for their framers or subject—arguing each division is grounded in the definition of law itself. Asides on prayer, current events, and music thread through the reading.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/226-the-power-of-human-law-st-i-ii-q96-a1-4-general-laws-vices/Thu, 18 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/226-the-power-of-human-law-st-i-ii-q96-a1-4-general-laws-vices/Berquist takes up four articles of Question 96 on the power of human law, reading Aquinas’s objections, sed contra, corpus, and replies in turn. He asks whether law ought to be framed in general terms rather than fitted to particular cases, whether it should suppress all vices or only some, and whether it should command every act of virtue. He tests these arguments against contemporary cases—traffic and drug laws, tax policy, and the contrast between EU and U.S. legal traditions—before turning to obedience to unjust laws and the conditions under which human law truly obligates in conscience.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/227-the-footprint-of-the-trinity-christ-as-the-road-and-whether/Thu, 25 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/227-the-footprint-of-the-trinity-christ-as-the-road-and-whether/Berquist begins with wide-ranging reflections — syllogistic reasoning, the vestigium or “footprint” of the Trinity left in creatures, and the image of Christ as via, the road, drawn from Aristotle and Scripture — before settling into a close reading of Summa Theologiae I-II, question 96, article 5. There he works through Aquinas’s answer to whether every man is bound by human law, attending to the distinction between a law’s coercive force and its directive force, and to how the ruler himself stands in relation to the laws he makes.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/228-acting-outside-the-words-of-the-law-and-changing-human-law/Thu, 25 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/228-acting-outside-the-words-of-the-law-and-changing-human-law/Berquist takes up two questions from the Summa: whether it can be right to act outside the words of the law (I-II, q.96, a.6) and whether human law should be changed (q.97, aa.1-2). He follows Aquinas’s arguments, objections, and replies, drawing on Augustine, Aristotle, and Justinian, to distinguish the letter of a law from the intention of the lawgiver, and to weigh the goods of custom and stability against the case for reform. Along the way he tests these distinctions against American history—the Missouri Compromise, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson—and against present-day arguments over constitutional interpretation and changing social custom.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/229-why-reason-is-not-a-body-thomass-three-arguments-sentences/Thu, 10 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/229-why-reason-is-not-a-body-thomass-three-arguments-sentences/Berquist opens with Peter Lombard’s Sentences, Book II, distinction 19, as Thomas comments on it, asking whether the soul survives the body’s death—a question Aristotle raises in the proemium to De Anima. He lays out three Thomistic arguments for reason’s immateriality, using a light-bulb analogy, the mind’s non-continuous grasp of continuous things, and self-knowledge as illustrations. The class then shifts to Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 97, a. 3, asking whether custom can obtain the force of law, and considers custom’s parallel role in shaping both moral-legal practice and how people come to know things.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/230-dispensing-from-human-law-q-97-a-4-and-whether-the-old-law/Thu, 10 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/230-dispensing-from-human-law-q-97-a-4-and-whether-the-old-law/Berquist closes the treatise on human law by working through Aquinas’s article on dispensation, distinguishing it from mere favoritism and marking off what a ruler can and cannot dispense with, given the limits set by natural and divine law. He then turns to the first article of the treatise on the Old Law, asking whether that Law was good, and traces Thomas’s account of its real but imperfect goodness—ordered toward grace rather than possessing it—against both human law and the New Law. Along the way he adds etymological notes and anecdotes, situating the question within Thomas’s larger division of Scripture into law and grace.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/231-god-alone-is-good-i-am-who-am-divine-simplicity-and-the-senses/Thu, 17 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/231-god-alone-is-good-i-am-who-am-divine-simplicity-and-the-senses/Berquist opens from two sayings of Christ—to the young man in Mark, and to St. Catherine of Siena—asking why Scripture reserves “good” and “am” for God alone. Drawing on Aquinas’s treatment of divine simplicity in the Summa contra Gentiles, he argues that creatures merely have goodness, being, wisdom, and the rest, whereas in God these are identical with his very self. To make the point precise he turns to Aristotle’s Categories and works through the several senses of “to have”—as genus has species, as subject has accident—showing how none of them fit God, who has nothing he is not. He closes by linking this teaching on simplicity to Christ’s threefold office of priest, prophet, and king named in the rite of baptism, before turning to the next article under study.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/232-the-old-law-given-by-god-given-through-angels-and-given-only/Thu, 17 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/232-the-old-law-given-by-god-given-through-angels-and-given-only/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s treatment of the Old Law’s origin and scope in Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 98, articles 2 through 4. He follows Aquinas’s case that the Law, though imperfect, fits humanity at an early developmental stage—likened to a pedagogue guiding a child—and that its transmission through angels reflects a hierarchical order running from God through higher to lower creatures. He then examines why the Law was given specifically to the Jewish people, who alone, amid surrounding idolatry, kept worship of the one true God. Throughout, Berquist moves through each article’s objections and replies while drawing comparisons to Aristotle’s Ethics.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/233-before-and-after-definition-by-causes-and-the-old-law-who/Thu, 24 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/233-before-and-after-definition-by-causes-and-the-old-law-who/Berquist opens with the differing orders of Christology in Matthew and John—one moving from Christ’s humanity toward divinity, the other the reverse—and ties this to the catechetical triad of faith, hope, and charity, and to Albert the Great’s and Aquinas’s account of definition and reasoning as the two operations of logic. He then turns to Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 98, working through article 5, on whether all men were bound to observe the Old Law, and article 6, on whether its giving in the time of Moses was fitting, reading Aquinas’s objections and replies alongside Deuteronomy, Romans, and Galatians. Along the way he draws on Aristotle’s Physics and Posterior Analytics, Shakespeare, and current papal remarks on family and immigration to bring out the causal structure of a definition and the pedagogical reasoning behind the Law’s timing.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/234-the-precepts-of-the-old-law-one-end-many-commands-moral-ceremonial/Thu, 24 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/234-the-precepts-of-the-old-law-one-end-many-commands-moral-ceremonial/Berquist takes up the opening articles of question 99 on the precepts of the Old Law, asking first whether the Law contains a single precept or many, and showing how its commands answer to one end: friendship with God, expressed in the Golden Rule. He then follows Aquinas’s division of precepts into moral, ceremonial, and judicial kinds, working through each article’s objections and replies. Along the way he digresses into Aristotle on friendship, the errors of modern philosophy, and current politics and culture. The class breaks off partway into article four, on whether judicial precepts form a distinct category from the moral and ceremonial ones.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/235-know-thyself-act-before-ability-and-the-precepts-of-the-old/Thu, 01 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/235-know-thyself-act-before-ability-and-the-precepts-of-the-old/Berquist opens with a detour on “know thyself”—how reason knows itself in relation to God’s self-knowledge—and Aristotle’s account of act and potency in Metaphysics IX, before returning to close reading of Aquinas. In q. 99, a. 5 he works out the distinction among the Old Law’s precepts: moral, judicial, ceremonial, testimonia, and mandata. Article six then asks why the Old Law relies on temporal rewards and punishments to draw an imperfect people toward God. Throughout, he translates Thomas’s Latin closely and pauses to apply the distinctions to present-day cases like marriage and abortion.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/236-the-moral-precepts-and-the-decalogue-natural-law-every-virtue/Thu, 01 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/236-the-moral-precepts-and-the-decalogue-natural-law-every-virtue/Berquist takes up Summa I-II, question 100, asking whether the Old Law’s moral precepts belong to the natural law, whether they concern the acts of all the virtues, and whether they can be reduced to the Ten Commandments. He follows article 4’s survey of how Hesychius, Origen, and Augustine differently divide the Decalogue between precepts ordered to God and to neighbor, settling on Augustine’s division of three and seven. Along the way he draws on Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics to clarify natural moral knowledge and justice, mixing close commentary on the text with anecdotes and personal reflection.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/237-summa-i-ii-q-100-a-5-why-these-ten-commandments-duties-to/Wed, 07 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/237-summa-i-ii-q-100-a-5-why-these-ten-commandments-duties-to/Why these ten precepts, in this order? Berquist takes up article 5, where objections press Aquinas on the decalogue’s arrangement: shouldn’t duties to God and to neighbor balance more evenly, why single out the Sabbath among feasts, why rank blasphemy against God above perjury against neighbor, and why does honoring parents outrank love of children? Following Aquinas’s answers, he shows the commandments ordered around fidelity, reverence, and service owed to God as ruler, and debts owed to others, drawing on Augustine, Isidore, and Cicero, with the material-formal cause distinction used to clarify the structure.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/238-summa-i-ii-q-100-a-6-7-why-the-commandments-come-in-this/Wed, 07 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/238-summa-i-ii-q-100-a-6-7-why-the-commandments-come-in-this/Berquist takes up two articles on the order of the Ten Commandments. Article 6 asks why the precepts run in this sequence: love of God before love of neighbor, honor of parents before the rest, and sins of deed ranked above sins of word and word above sins of heart. Article 7 then asks why only the first, third, and fourth commandments come with an explicit reason, promise of reward, threat of punishment, or call to remember, while the others do not. Aquinas answers by distinguishing what is morally self-evident from what needs further motivation, and Berquist fills this out with etymology of terms like peccatum, comparisons to Aristotle, and Scriptural and pastoral examples.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/239-a-second-definition-of-reason-understanding-order-and-whether/Thu, 15 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/239-a-second-definition-of-reason-understanding-order-and-whether/Berquist builds a second definition of reason, testing “the ability to understand, reason, and direct itself and others” against Shakespeare’s phrase “large discourse, looking before and after,” drawing on Aristotle’s psychology and Aquinas’s account of understanding, substance, and the hierarchy of knowable objects. He then works closely through Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 100, a. 8, asking whether the precepts of the Decalogue admit of dispensation. Going through the objections and Aquinas’s response, he distinguishes precepts expressing the lawgiver’s essential intention, which cannot be dispensed, from those regulating particular modes of observing that intention, which can. Along the way he digresses into prayer, the seal of confession, and stories from his military and West Point years.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/240-god-cannot-deny-himself-homicide-theft-and-adultery-in-the/Thu, 15 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/240-god-cannot-deny-himself-homicide-theft-and-adultery-in-the/Berquist works through the remaining objections in Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 100, a. 8, asking how homicide, theft, and adultery can seem to be dispensed from in Scripture—the Israelites despoiling the Egyptians, Abraham’s binding of Isaac, Hosea’s marriage—while the precepts themselves remain unchangeable. He distinguishes divine from human law by God’s sovereign authority over life and property, then turns to article nine and Aristotle’s threefold account of virtuous action, knowledge, choice, and firm habit, to ask which of these law can actually command and punish. He also draws on Summa Contra Gentiles III, ch. 51, with digressions on capital punishment, liturgy, and Scripture’s use of antonomasia.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/241-aquinas-on-the-moral-precepts-charity-the-other-moral-precepts/Wed, 21 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/241-aquinas-on-the-moral-precepts-charity-the-other-moral-precepts/Berquist works through the last three articles of Question 100 on the Old Law’s moral precepts. He asks whether the “mode of charity”—loving God and neighbor in the right manner, not just materially—falls under divine precept, then how the moral precepts beyond the Ten Commandments are distinguished and traced back to charity as their root, drawing on Deuteronomy, Leviticus, and Paul. He closes with Article 12’s question of whether the moral precepts of the Old Law could justify, distinguishing the precepts themselves from the grace needed to fulfill them. Along the way he digresses into natural law, the division of sin, and Aquinas’s example of “healthy” as an equivocal term.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/242-aquinas-on-the-ceremonial-precepts-worship-of-god-figures/Wed, 21 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/242-aquinas-on-the-ceremonial-precepts-worship-of-god-figures/Berquist takes up the opening articles of Aquinas’s treatment of the ceremonial precepts, working through the objections and replies of I-II, q. 101, aa. 1-3. He asks why these precepts pertain to the worship of God at all, distinguishing interior from exterior worship, and why man’s composite nature requires bodily as well as spiritual acts of religion. He then traces why the Old Law’s ceremonies were both numerous and figurative, prefiguring Christ under an imperfect, preparatory covenant. Digressions on the etymology of cult and ceremonia, on Maimonides, and on scriptural versus poetic metaphor keep returning to the Latin text itself.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/243-summa-i-ii-q-101-a-4-and-q-102-a-1-2-dividing-the-old-law/Thu, 29 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/243-summa-i-ii-q-101-a-4-and-q-102-a-1-2-dividing-the-old-law/Berquist closes out Question 101, article 4, on the fourfold division of the Old Law’s ceremonial precepts—sacrifices, sacred things, sacraments, and observances—before turning to Question 102, articles 1 and 2, on whether these ceremonies have a rational cause. Along the way he digresses into the Compendium of Theology’s treatment of the divine attributes, the Trinity, the “before and after” said of Christ’s two natures, and how virtue is acquired given temperament. He returns to the text to work through whether precepts like circumcision and the Passover sacrifice carry a literal cause in addition to their figurative meaning, closing with the class beginning the objections of article 2.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/244-summa-i-ii-q-102-a-3-the-reasons-for-the-old-law-sacrifices/Thu, 29 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/244-summa-i-ii-q-102-a-3-the-reasons-for-the-old-law-sacrifices/Berquist takes up Article 3 of Aquinas’s question on the ceremonial precepts, asking why the Old Law’s sacrifices took the particular forms they did: which animals were offered, how they were slaughtered, which parts withheld, and why bread and salt were added. Working through Thomas’s fourteen objections, he traces the threefold rationale Thomas gives in reply—excluding idolatrous worship, ordering the mind rightly toward God, and prefiguring Christ’s own sacrifice—dwelling especially on the treatment of animal species and ritual defects. He breaks off partway through a later reply to resume next session, and along the way turns briefly to the Mass as a re-presentation of Christ’s sacrifice and to pantheism, also drawing on Summa Contra Gentiles IV, ch. 88.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/245-aquinas-on-the-old-law-sacrifices-holocaust-sin-and-peace/Thu, 05 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/245-aquinas-on-the-old-law-sacrifices-holocaust-sin-and-peace/Berquist reads closely through Aquinas’s treatment of the Old Law sacrifices, sorting holocausts from sin offerings and peace offerings and asking why blood, fat, bread, oil, salt, and incense carry the meanings they do, including why certain things were forbidden in the ritual. He digresses on the disappearance of Jewish sacrificial worship and modern efforts to revive Temple practice. He then turns to Trinitarian doctrine, explaining appropriation—why creation and beginning are attributed to the Father, and the movement toward the end and goodness to the Holy Spirit—tying this to Christ as Alpha and Omega in Revelation.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/246-aquinas-on-the-tabernacle-and-temple-why-sacred-places-inspire/Thu, 05 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/246-aquinas-on-the-tabernacle-and-temple-why-sacred-places-inspire/Why does the tabernacle give way to the temple, why one shrine rather than many, why an east-west orientation, why forbidden images alongside cherubim, why particular materials for the altar and steps, why multiple coverings, why consecrate inanimate things, why fixed feast days? Berquist takes up ten objections Aquinas raises in Article 4 on the ceremonial precepts, then follows his replies, which uncover both literal and figurative reasons—the latter pointing forward to Christ and the Church. He fills out the text with anecdotes about churches, vestments, and sacred art, showing how visible ordering trains reverence.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/247-summa-i-ii-q-102-a-4-replies-6-9-the-tabernacle-the-ark-the/Thu, 12 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/247-summa-i-ii-q-102-a-4-replies-6-9-the-tabernacle-the-ark-the/Berquist works through the last replies of Article 4 on the Old Law’s ceremonial precepts, taking up the tabernacle’s furnishings one by one. He asks what the ark, the cherubim, the candelabra, the altars, and the table of showbread mean both literally, as instruments of worship, and figuratively, as signs pointing beyond themselves. The coverings and their consecration come in for the same double reading, tying each detail back to divine attributes, the ranks of angels, and ultimately to Christ and the Church. He closes by marking the shift to Aquinas’s De Anima as the group’s next text.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/248-summa-i-ii-q-102-a-4-reply-10-and-a-5-the-feasts-of-the-old/Thu, 12 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/248-summa-i-ii-q-102-a-4-reply-10-and-a-5-the-feasts-of-the-old/Berquist continues through Summa I-II q.102, finishing the tenth article on the solemnities of the Old Law before turning to the fifth article on the causes of its sacraments. Along the way he digresses on divine beatitude, on Augustine’s threefold division of the Psalms, and on the nature of heavenly beatitude, showing how the feasts’ literal, historical reasons point toward their figurative fulfillment in Christ and the sacraments of the New Law. Turning to circumcision, he begins reading the objections on why God chose this particular sign, working through the Latin text line by line. The class ends mid-argument, having reached only the reply to the first objection, with the remaining objections left for the next session.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/249-summa-i-ii-q-102-a-5-replies-2-4-the-passover-meal-the-sacraments/Thu, 19 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/249-summa-i-ii-q-102-a-5-replies-2-4-the-passover-meal-the-sacraments/Berquist continues through question 102, article 5 of the Prima Secundae, asking why the Old Law prescribed the particular rites it did for the Passover meal and for bodily uncleanness—corpses, leprosy, discharges, unclean vessels and dwellings. He follows Aquinas’s habit of giving both a literal reason, rooted in hygiene or historical circumstance, and a figurative one, in which these observances prefigure Christian realities: the Eucharist, heresy, sin, idolatry. Along the way he digresses into related history, etymology, and personal anecdote. The class breaks off partway through the article, just before Aquinas’s reply to the fifth objection.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/250-summa-i-ii-q-102-a-5-replies-5-9-the-red-heifer-the-day-of/Thu, 19 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/250-summa-i-ii-q-102-a-5-replies-5-9-the-red-heifer-the-day-of/Berquist takes up Summa I-II q.102 a.5, replies 5 through 9, where Aquinas defends the reasonableness of some of the Old Law’s oddest ceremonies. Working through the Levitical prescriptions for the red heifer, the Day of Atonement’s calf, ram, and scapegoat, the cleansing of lepers, and the consecration of priests and Levites, he moves between the plain historical sense of the rites and Aquinas’s figurative reading of their animals, colors, and gestures as foreshadowing Christ’s passion and the sacraments. The class works through the Latin together, comparing details to later Christian liturgical practice along the way.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/251-appropriations-to-the-trinity-hamlet-on-discourse-the-priestly/Thu, 03 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/251-appropriations-to-the-trinity-hamlet-on-discourse-the-priestly/Berquist begins with how attributes like causality and the theological virtues get appropriated to particular Persons of the Trinity on grounds of fittingness rather than exclusivity, touching Aquinas’s own prayer and papal teaching on mercy before a short detour into reason and discourse in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. He then turns to Book IV of Aquinas’s Summa Contra Gentiles, reading closely through the literal and symbolic meanings of the priestly vestments and the bodily qualifications demanded of Old Testament priests. The class closes by reading the opening objections of the next article, which press against the rationality of Mosaic rules on diet, mixed fabrics, and priestly conduct—setting up Aquinas’s answers for next time.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/252-why-the-old-law-forbade-certain-foods-clean-and-unclean-animals/Thu, 03 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/252-why-the-old-law-forbade-certain-foods-clean-and-unclean-animals/Berquist reads Aquinas on why the Mosaic Law forbade eating certain animals, fish, and birds, distinguishing reasons of bodily fitness and worship from the figurative meanings these prohibitions carried for sin and virtue. He works through related precepts too — the ban on eating blood and fat, the command against boiling a kid in its mother’s milk, and the offering of first fruits — pausing over the Latin names of obscure creatures Aquinas cites. Along the way he digresses into scripture, personal anecdote, and everyday spiritual life to make the ancient dietary code feel concrete rather than merely legalistic.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/253-summa-i-ii-q-102-a-6-end-and-q-103-a-1-clothing-animal-and/Thu, 10 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/253-summa-i-ii-q-102-a-6-end-and-q-103-a-1-clothing-animal-and/Berquist works through the remaining objections of Summa Theologiae I-II, Q.102, a.6, taking up Old Testament ceremonial precepts—prohibitions on garments of mixed fabric, wearing tassels, cruelty to animals, mixed breeding and sowing, and priestly restrictions on contact with the dead, marriage, and mourning—and asks what each means both literally and as a figure of Christ. He then turns to Q.103, a.1, asking whether ceremonial precepts existed before the Law, weighing Genesis evidence: the sacrifices of Cain, Abel, and Noah, Abraham’s altars, circumcision, and the priesthood of Melchizedek. Along the way he adds etymological remarks, points to parallels in the Summa Contra Gentiles, and illustrates points with personal anecdotes.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/254-summa-i-ii-q-103-aa-2-3-did-the-old-laws-ceremonies-justify/Thu, 10 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/254-summa-i-ii-q-103-aa-2-3-did-the-old-laws-ceremonies-justify/Berquist takes up two articles of the Summa on the ceremonial precepts of the Old Law. First: could these ceremonies justify? He follows Aquinas’s answer that they removed only bodily uncleanness and prefigured Christ’s grace, without themselves cleansing sin. Second: why did the ceremonies end at Christ’s coming? He traces Aquinas’s account of a shift from a status of faith and hope in future goods to one where the promised realities are now present, working through objections and sed contra texts from Galatians, Hebrews, and Colossians, and pausing over Passover, Pentecost, and Tabernacles alongside their New Testament and liturgical successors, plus a digression on contemporary Jewish belief and practice.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/255-gods-beatitude-know-thyself-shakespeare-on-ignorance-and/Thu, 14 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/255-gods-beatitude-know-thyself-shakespeare-on-ignorance-and/Berquist begins with divine beatitude as God’s immanent act of understanding, pausing over the etymology of “happiness” and “felicitas,” the Delphic maxim “know thyself,” and Shakespeare’s Richard II on the blindness of ignorance. He then turns to Summa Theologiae I-II, question 103, and its inquiry into whether observing the Old Law’s ceremonies after Christ’s passion is mortal sin. Working through the objections, he lays out Jerome’s and Augustine’s opposed readings of the “three times” that govern the ceremonial law’s legitimacy, testing the question against their dispute over Peter and Paul’s quarrel at Antioch.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/256-the-judicial-precepts-of-the-old-law-what-they-are-whether/Thu, 14 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/256-the-judicial-precepts-of-the-old-law-what-they-are-whether/Berquist takes up question 104 of the Prima Secundae, asking what the judicial precepts of the Old Law actually are and how they differ from the moral and ceremonial precepts. He follows Aquinas through four articles: the precepts order men to one another by divine institution rather than natural reason alone; they figure Christ’s mysteries only “ex consequente,” unlike the ceremonial precepts, which do so “per se”; their binding force ceased with Christ’s coming, though observing them is not spiritually deadly; and they divide fourfold, covering rulers and subjects, citizens, foreigners, and household members. He supplements the text with citations from Aristotle, Paul, and Augustine.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/257-aquinas-on-the-old-laws-judicial-precepts-i-ii-q-105-a-1/Thu, 21 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/257-aquinas-on-the-old-laws-judicial-precepts-i-ii-q-105-a-1/Berquist opens with a short question on why Christ’s resurrection was necessary, drawing three reasons: the whole is completed by the part, Christ’s humility merits bodily glory, and his headship brings resurrection to the Church. He then turns to Aquinas on the judicial precepts of the Old Law, I-II q. 105. Article one asks why the Law did not directly establish a supreme king, working through the dangers of tyranny and Aquinas’s case for a mixed regime combining kingship, aristocracy, and democracy. Article two takes up precepts governing relations among people—gleaning, daughters’ inheritance, the jubilee restoration of property, and rules on lending and debt—with constant reference to Aristotle’s Politics and Ethics and to biblical and modern examples.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/258-aquinas-on-the-old-laws-judicial-precepts-q-105-a-2-deposits/Thu, 21 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/258-aquinas-on-the-old-laws-judicial-precepts-q-105-a-2-deposits/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s article on the judicial precepts of the Old Law, asking how well that law ordered the communal life of Israel. He follows Aquinas’s replies to a series of objections touching deposits, loans, wages and hired labor, the appointment of judges, the requirement of two or three witnesses, and the proportioning of punishments to crimes—including theft, the death penalty, exile, slavery, and even the killing of animals implicated in an offense. Along the way he draws on personal anecdotes, family stories, and his own past studies in moral theology to make the legal reasoning concrete.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/259-aquinas-on-the-old-laws-rules-for-foreigners-war-slaves-and/Thu, 28 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/259-aquinas-on-the-old-laws-rules-for-foreigners-war-slaves-and/Berquist continues through Question 105 of the Old Law’s judicial precepts, taking up Article 3 on how Israel was to treat outsiders — Ammonites, Moabites, Egyptians, Idumeans, eunuchs, and immigrants — and the conduct required in war and toward strangers within the community. He works through the article’s objections and replies on citizenship and admission to the people, pausing to draw contemporary parallels to immigration policy and women in combat. The class then moves into Article 4, on the ordering of domestic persons: masters and servants, fathers and children, and the extent of a father’s authority. It breaks off partway through, near the fifth objection on paternal power over children.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/260-marriage-and-the-household-in-the-old-law-is-the-new-law/Thu, 28 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/260-marriage-and-the-household-in-the-old-law-is-the-new-law/Berquist closes out Question 105’s treatment of the judicial precepts governing domestic life under the Old Law: rules against intermarriage with aliens, the practice of a brother marrying his deceased brother’s widow, divorce, and the ordering of servants, wives, and sons within the household. He then turns to Question 106, article 1, working through Aquinas’s argument that the New Law is principally the unwritten grace of the Holy Spirit given through faith in Christ—a law instilled on the heart—rather than a body of written precepts, with the Gospel text serving only secondarily, as what disposes us toward and orders that grace. He reads the Latin closely alongside Aquinas’s citations of Paul, Augustine, Jeremiah, and John.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/261-aquinas-on-the-new-law-st-i-ii-q-106-grace-of-the-holy-spirit/Thu, 04 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/261-aquinas-on-the-new-law-st-i-ii-q-106-grace-of-the-holy-spirit/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s account of the New Law in Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 106, arguing through article 1 that it consists principally in the interior grace of the Holy Spirit poured into the heart, with written precepts as secondary and instrumental. He follows Aquinas into article 2’s question of whether this Law should have been given at the world’s beginning, and into articles 3 and 4 on why it appears when it does in salvation history and whether it will endure until the end of time. Along the way he addresses the errors of Montanism and Manichaeism, drawing on Scripture and Augustine and Aquinas’s Latin terms to sharpen the distinctions. Personal anecdotes accompany the exposition throughout.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/262-hope-in-shakespeares-alls-well-and-the-theological-virtues/Thu, 04 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/262-hope-in-shakespeares-alls-well-and-the-theological-virtues/Berquist opens with Aquinas’s Commentary on the Sentences, Book III, distinction 26, asking why three theological virtues are needed to direct us to our last end and how hope as a passion relates to hope as a virtue. He tests this against Helena’s love for Bertram in All’s Well That Ends Well, using her pursuit of a seemingly impossible good to show that hope requires confidence in attainability, not just knowledge and love of an end. The class closes in Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 107, articles 1 and 2, where Aquinas argues the New Law does not contradict the Old but perfects it, retaining its end of justice and love of God while superseding its ceremonial precepts.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/263-above-and-below-the-new-law-in-the-old-the-burden-of-the/Thu, 11 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/263-above-and-below-the-new-law-in-the-old-the-burden-of-the/Berquist begins with a wide-ranging look at “above” and “below” — spatial, causal, logical, and hierarchical senses, drawn out through John 8:23, the word “understanding,” and a few stories — before settling into Aquinas. The class works through Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 107, asking whether the New Law is contained in the Old, using the image of seed and fruit: the New Law lies within the Old “in power,” as a plant lies hidden in its seed. From there Berquist takes up q. 108, a. 1, on whether the New Law should prescribe or forbid exterior acts, distinguishing such outward works from the interior gift of the Holy Spirit that makes it a “law of liberty.” Objections and replies are read in Latin and English throughout.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/264-sufficiency-of-the-new-law-the-sermon-on-the-mount-and-the/Thu, 11 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/264-sufficiency-of-the-new-law-the-sermon-on-the-mount-and-the/Berquist asks whether Christ’s law suffices to order human life, tracing Aquinas through q. 108, articles 2, 3, and 4. He follows the distinction between precepts, which bind under necessity for salvation, and counsels, which offer readier means to the end, mapping this onto the Sermon on the Mount’s treatment of the Decalogue and the judicial and ceremonial precepts of the Old Law. The three counsels—poverty, chastity, and obedience—come in for particular attention. He draws in Augustine and Aristotle’s Ethics along the way, and illustrates the argument with Benedictine liturgical custom and the theology of indulgences.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/265-grace-part-1-st-i-ii-q-109-a-1-can-we-know-truth-without/Thu, 18 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/265-grace-part-1-st-i-ii-q-109-a-1-can-we-know-truth-without/Berquist works through the first article of Aquinas’s treatise on grace, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 109: whether man without grace can know any truth. Moving through the objections, the body of the article, and its citations from Augustine, he shows why Aquinas holds that every act—natural knowing as much as supernatural grace—requires God’s prior motion. To make that claim precise, he traces “act,” “motion,” “form,” and “in” back to Aristotle’s treatment of the continuum in the Physics, and to the cosmology of eternally moved heavenly bodies, arriving at God as first mover and pure act.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/266-grace-part-2-st-i-ii-q-109-a-2-3-willing-the-good-and-loving/Thu, 18 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/266-grace-part-2-st-i-ii-q-109-a-2-3-willing-the-good-and-loving/Berquist takes up two questions from the treatise on grace: can man, by his own natural powers, will and do good, and can he love God above all things? Working through the objections and replies of q.109 a.2 and a.3, he distinguishes the state of integral nature before sin from the state of corrupt nature after it, showing that even unfallen man needed divine motion to act well, while fallen man needs healing grace besides. He brings in Aristotle’s Ethics, Augustine, John Damascene, and St. Paul to weigh natural love of God against love given through infused charity.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/267-aquinas-on-the-necessity-of-grace-st-i-ii-q-109-a-4-7-keeping/Thu, 25 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/267-aquinas-on-the-necessity-of-grace-st-i-ii-q-109-a-4-7-keeping/Berquist takes up four successive articles of Aquinas’s treatise on grace, each posing a variant of the same question: can human nature, on its own power, do what only grace can do? He follows Aquinas through objections and replies on fulfilling the commandments, meriting eternal life, preparing oneself for grace, and rising from sin, drawing on Augustine’s arguments against the Pelagians and on Aristotle to show why nature—intact or fallen—cannot reach its final end without God’s help. The explication stays close to the text of q.109, with personal digressions folded in along the way.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/268-aquinas-on-the-necessity-of-grace-st-i-ii-q-109-a-8-10-avoiding/Thu, 25 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/268-aquinas-on-the-necessity-of-grace-st-i-ii-q-109-a-8-10-avoiding/Berquist reads Aquinas on grace’s necessity, taking up three linked questions in q.109: can a person in mortal sin avoid sinning without grace (a.8), does someone who already has grace still need continuing divine assistance to act well (a.9), and is perseverance in the good a further grace beyond justification itself (a.10). He walks through the objections and sed contra arguments, several drawn from Augustine, tying Aquinas’s reasoning back to Aristotle’s causes and to parallel treatments in the Summa Contra Gentiles. Side remarks on prayer, perseverance, and the saints accompany the close reading of the Latin. He closes by previewing q.110, on the nature of grace itself.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/269-summa-i-ii-q-110-a-1-does-grace-place-something-in-the-soul/Thu, 03 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/269-summa-i-ii-q-110-a-1-does-grace-place-something-in-the-soul/Berquist begins Aquinas’s treatise on grace with Question 110’s first article: does grace place something in the soul? Working through the objections and reply, he draws out Thomas’s three senses of “grace”—another’s favor, a gratuitous gift, and gratitude for a gift received—and shows how these meanings relate by priority and posteriority rather than as a simple equivocation. The discussion turns to a long digression on the four causes and the sense of “in” at work in the article, then to Aquinas’s practice of naming divine attributes by negation from continuous, bodily things. Throughout, Berquist emphasizes how Thomas argues “before and after,” reasoning from what is better known in creatures toward what is true of God.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/270-summa-i-ii-q-110-a-2-3-grace-as-a-quality-of-the-soul-the/Thu, 03 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/270-summa-i-ii-q-110-a-2-3-grace-as-a-quality-of-the-soul-the/Berquist takes up Thomas’s question of whether grace is a quality of the soul, working through the objections and replies of articles two and three. To make sense of Thomas’s answer—that grace is an accidental quality, in the first species along with habit, yet not simply identical with virtue—he turns back to Aristotle’s Categories and Porphyry’s Isagoge, laying out the nine accidents, the five predicables, and the species of quality. He also draws on Aristotle’s account of causality, distinguishing mover from maker, to explain why grace acts on the soul formally rather than efficiently.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/271-grace-virtue-and-the-soul-rereading-article-3-and-the-objections/Thu, 10 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/271-grace-virtue-and-the-soul-rereading-article-3-and-the-objections/Berquist glosses Thomas’s Latin text and objections in Q.110, Articles 3 and 4, on grace and virtue. He works out how virtue presupposes a nature it perfects, and how infused virtue flows from grace much as the soul’s natural powers flow from its essence—so that grace’s proper subject is the rational soul as such, not any particular power of it. He draws on Aristotle’s Physics, Categories, and De Anima, and on Augustine and Peter Lombard, to fill out the argument. Along the way he digresses into proportion and analogy, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and the soul’s powers and species, with anecdotes and literary comparisons.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/272-grace-in-the-essence-of-the-soul-and-the-division-of-grace/Thu, 10 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/272-grace-in-the-essence-of-the-soul-and-the-division-of-grace/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s argument that grace, like nature, must be seated in the essence of the soul rather than directly in its powers, since it grounds the theological virtues of faith and charity the way nature grounds the soul’s own operations. He then turns to q. 111’s division between grace that makes one pleasing to God (gratum faciens) and grace given for others’ benefit (gratis data). Along the way he digresses into the soul’s immateriality, the difference between universal understanding and imagination, and the logic of naming things by “before and after,” drawing on Euclid and Aristotle’s De Anima before circling back, via the soul’s origin from God, to a tangent on abortion and prenatal humanity.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/273-seven-apostles-the-father-of-lights-and-why-aquinas-treats/Thu, 17 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/273-seven-apostles-the-father-of-lights-and-why-aquinas-treats/Berquist begins in John 21, asking why exactly seven apostles are named at Christ’s third resurrection appearance, tracing the Catena Aurea’s numerology of three, seven, and ten alongside similar patterns in Aristotle’s Physics. He then reads James chapter 1 for its Greek terms for wholeness and perfection, hearing in them an echo of Aristotelian metaphysics. From there he works through Aristotle’s Metaphysics Book IX on wisdom and the priority of act over potency, showing how this principle underlies Aquinas’s Summa treatment of God’s unity, simplicity, perfection, infinity, and unchangeableness.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/274-the-plan-of-the-summa-contra-gentiles-and-divisions-of-grace/Thu, 17 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/274-the-plan-of-the-summa-contra-gentiles-and-divisions-of-grace/Berquist begins by laying out how the Summa Contra Gentiles is structured in four books—three treating God as beginning and end of creatures through natural reason, a fourth reserved for truths known only by faith—and contrasts this with the organization of the Summa Theologiae. A digression asks whether rational theological argument is even possible within Islam, given its voluntarist God. He then reads closely through I-II, q. 111, aa. 2-3, tracking Aquinas’s division of grace into operating versus cooperating and prevenient versus subsequent, weighing objections and replies against Augustine’s authority, and pointing out how Aquinas’s habit of dividing matter into twos and threes structures the whole argument.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/275-operating-and-cooperating-grace-the-nine-graces-freely-given/Thu, 31 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/275-operating-and-cooperating-grace-the-nine-graces-freely-given/Berquist walks through Article Four of Question 111 on grace, where Aquinas distinguishes gratia gratis data from gratia gratum faciens and lists the nine freely given graces—faith, wisdom, knowledge, healing, miracles, prophecy, discernment of spirits, tongues, and interpretation—each ordered to helping one person instruct and confirm others in divine truth. Using personal prayers, liturgical language, and asides into Aristotle’s Ethics and Metaphysics, he clarifies the terms before turning to Article Five, which opens the question of why the grace that makes us pleasing to God is nobler than these gifts, anticipating Thomas’s answer through the analogy of justice as the virtue most excellent because it orders one person toward another.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/276-the-cause-of-grace-god-alone-deifies-with-christs-humanity/Thu, 31 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/276-the-cause-of-grace-god-alone-deifies-with-christs-humanity/Berquist begins Aquinas’s treatise on the cause of grace, first placing question 112 within the Summa’s larger architecture, with digressions on Aquinas’s habit of dividing texts into twos and threes, illustrated from the Summa Contra Gentiles and the relation of Old to New Testament. He then works through article 1’s question—whether God alone is the efficient cause of grace—tracing the objections and Aquinas’s replies, especially the distinction between principal and instrumental causality as applied to Christ’s humanity and the sacraments, and between grace and mere angelic illumination. He closes with Aquinas’s fire metaphor for divine nature and the Trinity and a brief remark on Christ’s divinity.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/277-summa-i-ii-q-112-a-2-4-preparing-for-grace-whether-grace/Thu, 07 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/277-summa-i-ii-q-112-a-2-4-preparing-for-grace-whether-grace/Berquist takes up three articles of Question 112 on the cause of grace. Does a man need some disposition or preparation before receiving grace, and if he prepares himself, does grace necessarily follow? He works through each article’s objections, sed contra, and reply, drawing the key distinction between grace as a habitual gift and grace as God’s ongoing motion of the soul, and between measuring grace’s magnitude by its object versus by the subject who receives it. Scriptural citations and analogies from natural philosophy punctuate the argument throughout.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/278-summa-i-ii-q-112-a-5-and-q-113-a-1-2-knowing-whether-one/Thu, 07 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/278-summa-i-ii-q-112-a-5-and-q-113-a-1-2-knowing-whether-one/Can someone know for certain that he has grace? Berquist follows Aquinas’s answer in q.112, a.5, sorting knowledge of one’s own grace into revealed, certain, and merely conjectural kinds, with scriptural backing from Job, Ecclesiastes, 1 Corinthians, and Romans alongside Augustine. He then turns to q.113, articles 1 and 2, on what “justification” means: a kind of metaphorical justice consisting in the infusion of grace together with the remission of sin. Along the way he and the students linger on Aquinas’s Latin, translation choices, and parallels in Aristotle, Plato, and Bernard of Clairvaux.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/279-justification-of-the-impious-i-ii-q-113-aa-3-5-free-will/Thu, 14 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/279-justification-of-the-impious-i-ii-q-113-aa-3-5-free-will/Berquist takes up three articles from Aquinas’s question on the justification of the impious, reading the body, objections, and replies of each in turn. The driving question is whether justification of an adult requires the concurrent motion of free will, an act of faith, and a movement of detestation toward one’s sin. He tests this account against hard cases—infants at baptism, the mentally incapacitated, and Augustine’s story of a friend baptized while unconscious and dying—to see how Aquinas’s reasoning holds. Along the way he draws in Scripture, Augustine, Aristotle, and Aquinas’s own commentary on John’s Gospel to situate the technical analysis of grace within a wider picture of nature, reason, and providence.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/280-justification-of-the-impious-i-ii-q-113-aa-6-7-remission/Thu, 14 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/280-justification-of-the-impious-i-ii-q-113-aa-6-7-remission/Berquist takes up two articles from the Summa’s question on the justification of the impious. Article Six asks whether remission of sins belongs among the elements required for justification, and Aquinas answers by laying out four required elements—infusion of grace and two motions of free will, away from sin and toward God—with remission of guilt as the term reached through that motion. Article Seven then asks whether justification happens instantaneously or successively, and Aquinas argues for instantaneity, appealing to Aristotelian physics on continuity and time and the impossibility of a “last instant” in which the prior sinful form still holds. Berquist fills out the argument with parallel texts from the Summa Contra Gentiles and Aristotle’s Physics.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/281-aquinas-on-the-justification-of-the-impious-the-order-of/Thu, 21 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/281-aquinas-on-the-justification-of-the-impious-the-order-of/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s treatment of the justification of the impious, asking what order holds among its four elements—infusion of grace, the two movements of free will, and remission of guilt. He follows the article’s distinction between priority in nature and priority in time, illustrated by sunlight dispelling darkness and matter’s disposition to form, and by Paul’s conversion. He then examines whether justification, rather than creation or the glorification of the blessed, is God’s single greatest work, and whether it should be called miraculous, weighing the agent’s and the patient’s perspective throughout with support from Aristotle’s Physics and Augustine on John and on predestination.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/282-aquinas-on-merit-can-man-merit-anything-from-god-and-can/Thu, 21 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/282-aquinas-on-merit-can-man-merit-anything-from-god-and-can/Berquist lays out the ten articles of Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 114 on merit as an effect of cooperating grace, then works closely through Article 1: whether man can merit anything from God at all. He draws out Aquinas’s simpliciter/secundum quid distinction and the basic inequality between God and man that makes strict merit impossible for a creature, before turning to Article 2, whether man can merit eternal life without grace. The session breaks off partway through the reply, having distinguished the state of integral nature from the state of corrupt nature as it bears on whether unaided human acts could ever be proportionate to eternal life. Throughout, Berquist illustrates the arguments with digressions into literature and everyday examples.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/283-grace-and-merit-i-worthy-merit-of-eternal-life-q-114-a-3/Thu, 28 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/283-grace-and-merit-i-worthy-merit-of-eternal-life-q-114-a-3/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether a person in grace can merit eternal life “worthily” (ex condigno), by strict proportion, or only “fittingly” (ex congruo). Following the text’s reply to objections, he uses the image of a seed’s virtual equality to the full-grown tree to show how grace, through the Holy Spirit dwelling in the soul, makes present merit genuinely proportionate to future glory. He then turns to article 4’s question of why charity, more than the other virtues, is the principal root of merit, tracing it to charity’s ordering of every other virtue toward the last end. Along the way he digresses into the definition of sacraments and the divisions of logic before returning to these distinctions.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/284-grace-and-merit-ii-charity-and-merit-and-whether-the-first/Thu, 28 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/284-grace-and-merit-ii-charity-and-merit-and-whether-the-first/Berquist continues Aquinas’s treatment of merit, taking up whether charity is the principal root of merit, whether a man can merit the first grace for himself, and whether one man can merit it for another. Drawing on Augustine, Gregory, Job, Romans, James, and John’s Gospel, he presses Aquinas’s habit of distinguishing before judging, here between merit of condignity and merit of congruity. The conclusion: only Christ merits the first grace for others ex condigno, while anyone else’s part is at most a fitting, congruous merit rooted in prayer and charity. He pauses along the way over Aristotle’s psychology and ethics, John’s structure, and stories from Mother Teresa and Augustine’s Confessions.https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/285-summa-theologiae-i-ii-q-114-articles-6-10-restoring-grace/Wed, 04 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/theology/11-prima-secundae/285-summa-theologiae-i-ii-q-114-articles-6-10-restoring-grace/Berquist begins from John 10:30, “The Father and I are one,” using Christ’s statement to show Aquinas’s habit of careful distinction—one in nature, distinct in person, simpliciter versus secundum quid—against errors like Sabellianism. He then turns to Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 114, reading articles 6 through 10 on merit: whether someone who has fallen from grace can merit its restoration, whether merit increases charity, and whether perseverance and temporal goods can themselves be merited. The reading moves through Aquinas’s objections and responses alongside Scripture from Ezekiel, Proverbs, Psalms, and 2 Timothy, plus Augustine, Gregory’s Moralia, and the councils of Orange and Trent as given in Denzinger.