II-II, Q.1, Articles 1–2: is the object of faith the First Truth, and is it simple or complex (a statement)?

Orientation #

He refers back to “this thing I was reading earlier” whose name is “Verbum Dei” (prev. lecture), and ends: “next time we’ll start on Article Three.” The previous class introduced the Secunda Secundae and opened question 1 on faith; the next takes articles 3 and 4.

The class, in order #

1. Article 1, the three objections (“It seems that the object of faith is not the first truth”) #

Point: Thomas begins each article by arguing against what he holds, to make the mind really think; these objections “tie the mind up.”

• Obj. 1: what is proposed for belief includes not only what pertains to the divinity (the first truth) but the humanity of Christ, the sacraments of the Church, and the condition of creatures (an immortal soul). So the object is not only the first truth.
• Obj. 2: faith and infidelity are about the same thing, being opposites; there can be infidelity about anything in Scripture (deny it and you are an unbeliever); but Scripture contains many things about men and created things (who was whose father, son, husband). His example: “Who was Solomon the son of? I deny that. Unbelievable.” David and Solomon are not the first truth.
• Obj. 3: faith is divided against charity among the theological virtues; charity loves not only God, the summa bonitas, but the neighbour; so faith too has more than the first truth as object. He notes both Summas treat God’s goodness in order: God is good, is goodness itself, has nothing bad in him, is the summum bonum; so “summum bonum” in the order of good parallels “first truth” in the order of truth.
• He says he is “convinced” and “tied up.” Aristotle spoke of objections as tying the mind in a knot; you must see and examine the knot before untying it; Thomas makes it hard so we make more effort.
• Asides: a St Mary’s College student who came daily with “I got him today” and relaxed back into his seat as the objection was untied; Thomas as the “Dumb Ox” (Chesterton’s title), Albert the Great’s staged debate and “his bellow will be heard around the world”; Albert, old, going to Paris to defend Thomas, who died at forty-nine, “the age when the mind is best, as Aristotle said”; Plato finding only Aristotle in the Academy, “a whole school by himself,” and some thinking the late dialogues answer Aristotle’s objections.

2. Sed contra and the body of article 1 (“the object of any knowing habit”) #

Point: the object of faith is the first truth both as formal reason and as that to which everything believed is related.

• Sed contra: Dionysius (the Areopagite whom Paul met at Athens; author of Divine Names, on which Thomas commented, and Celestial Hierarchy, on which Albert commented) says faith is about “a simple and always existing truth.” Are you going to go against Dionysius? Maybe something is wrong with the objections.
• Corpus, as he reads it:
  1. In any knowing habit the object has what is known materially (material object) and that through which it is known (the formal ratio of the object). His example: seeing you, I see colour; even your shape, and that you are alive, I know through colour, not your substance or “the inner man.”
  2. Thomas’s example: in geometry the conclusions are known materially, the middle terms of the demonstration are the formal reason of knowing.
  3. So the formal reason of faith’s object is the first truth, since faith assents to nothing except because it is revealed by God; it rests on divine truth as the medium by which all is known.
  4. Materially, faith assents to many things besides God, but only as they have some order to God, by which man is helped toward divine enjoyment. So even on the side of the material object it is in a way the first truth, “just as the object of medicine is health,” medicine considering nothing except in relation to health.
• “There’s kind of a double reason”: we assent by the light of the first truth, and we know all things in relation to the first truth. Student: the Virgin Birth is in relation to God. He: she is the Mother of God; to say Mother of Jesus but not of God is heretical; “you have to go all the way to God”; and my end, eternal life, is God too.
• Aside: the Summa Contra Gentiles considers God in himself (book 1), as beginning of things, making and moving them (book 2), and as end, having providence (book 3), everything in comparison to God, and does it twice, for what natural reason can know and what faith alone knows; “Alpha and Omega.”

3. Replies to article 1, and antonomasia (“the Bible is said to be the book”) #

Point: creatures come under faith insofar as through them we are ordered to God and we assent on account of divine truth; Scripture treats all things in respect to God; charity loves the neighbour on account of God, so its proper object is God (“we love our neighbour in God”).

• Reply 1 and 2 as above; reply 3 “corrects the objection”: anyone who says he loves God and not man is a liar, but the neighbour is loved on account of God.
• Antonomasia (the Greek name): a name common to many given to one that stands out. Why “the Bible”? biblias [ed.: Greek biblion] just means book; among all books it is the book, being God’s word (the “book of books” says it another way). “Gospel” means good news, but this is the best news. “Christ” means anointed, but among the anointed he stands out. Aristotle in the book on the poetic art calls Homer “the poet”; for us the poet is Shakespeare, so the Federalist Papers, urging the colonies to stay together, quote “in the words of the poet, ‘A long farewell to all my greatness’” (Henry VIII) without naming him.
• Now “you’re untied”; Thomas will tie us up “ten times in this question”; the Summa usually has three objections, the Quaestiones Disputatae ten or twelve.

4. Amphiboly: “Word of God” (“Word of God is an amphiboly”) #

Point: an amphiboly is a speech of several words with more than one meaning (equivocation is one word with more than one meaning); “Word of God” (the Bible, or Christ as John names him) is one, and the two senses connect.

• The Bible is most of all about Christ, the Word made flesh; the Gospels have pre-eminence as chief witness to his words and deeds; the Old Testament prepares the way. So the Word of God in one sense is chiefly about the Word of God in the other.
• Vatican II’s analogy, which he calls beautiful: as the Son of God becomes man, the Word of God takes on human language; God adapts himself to our way of speaking.
• Parallel he found: Shakespeare calls what he taught at Assumption College as “philosophy of nature” the “wisdom of nature,” which in one sense is about the wisdom nature reveals in what it does. Brevity (“gravity,” as heard) is a sort of word: two things said with few words.

5. Article 2, objections and sed contra (“not something complex by way of something enunciable”) #

Point: is the object of faith something enunciabile, statable? He prefers “statement” to “proposition” (proposition, pro-pono, originally meant premise; Aristotle’s Peri Hermeneias is about the statement).

• Obj. 1: the first truth, God, is incomplexum; a statement is composed of subject and predicate, noun and verb. He recalls the question on God’s simplicity: eight articles, six eliminating each way creatures are composed, the seventh concluding he is in no way composed, first inductively from the elimination, then by three or four syllogisms.
• Obj. 2: the symbol (creed) lays down things, not statements: not “I believe that God is omnipotent” but “I believe in God the Father Almighty,” not grammatically a statement.
• Obj. 3: vision succeeds faith (1 Cor 13:12, “through a mirror, in an enigma… then face to face”); the vision of the fatherland (patria) is of the incomplex, the divine essence itself; so faith of the way likewise. Two ways of speaking of the vision: 1 John’s “when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is,” and the metaphorical “face to face,” as Moses spoke with God as with a friend.
• Sed contra: faith is in the middle between science and opinion; middle and extremes are of one genus; science and opinion are about enunciabilia; so faith is too. “Mary is assumed into heaven” is a statement.
• Asides: “I always believe the last objection I heard,” “the stability of a wind sock”; Voltaire popping objections Catholics could not answer; someone said getting rid of Thomas would get rid of the Church, false but a testimony to Thomas. Aristotle on the plot: beginning, middle, end, and two parts, tying and untying the knot; Shakespeare’s “it is too hard a knot for me to untie.” Thomas’s five-part order on God: existence; substance (simple, perfect, infinite, one, unchanging); operation, immanent and going out to us; the Trinity; the Word made flesh; the first three shared with Aristotle. Here Thomas says “essence” where he usually says “substance.”

6. Body of article 2: the way of the knower (“things known are in the knower”) #

Point: the object is simple on the side of the thing, complex on the side of the believer.

1. Things known are in the knower in the knower’s way (the general proposition: things are in a receiver in the receiver’s manner).
2. The human understanding’s own way of knowing truth is composing and dividing, affirmative and negative statements: “a square is a quadrilateral,” “a square is not a circle”; “God is simple,” “God is perfect,” “God is the good of every good” [in the summa caritatis as heard; unclear which work] are all statements.
3. So things simple in themselves the human understanding knows in a complex way; conversely the divine understanding knows in a simple way what is complex in itself: God knows everything by knowing himself, and every creature is composed in more ways than one. “What a messed up thing we are”; “the more German you are, the more complex it is.”
4. Therefore, on the side of the thing believed the object is simple; on the side of the believer it is complex, enunciabile, statable. God does not believe, he is “an unbeliever,” is love itself, and has no hope.

• Angels: going up the hierarchies from guardian angels to archangels they get simpler and more perfect, unlike material substances (a tree is more perfect than a stone but a stone is simpler; a dog more perfect and more complicated than a tree; man more of both); approaching God you expect completely simple and universally perfect.
• Each angel is the only one of its kind, as Socrates would be the only man if he were a man for the reason he is Socrates (“if I was a man for the same reason I’m Duane”). His first teacher: “God hates equality,” no two angels equal in nature. Problem: we love our own kind; do angels love each other as much? Thomas: the more intellectual, the more one loves the common good, which is caused more by distinction of kinds than by many of one kind; so angels love each other more because unequal. The senses love only the private good; truth is very much a common good.
• Dominican maxim: “never affirm, seldom deny, always distinguish”; better: affirm and deny after distinguishing.
• Student: angels would know God simply? He: not as simply as God knows himself; angels know themselves first but not other things thereby, so need more understandable forms, and lower angels need more of them and understand less well by them; still far less composed than our knowledge. An angel knowing what a triangle is sees every property; I must demonstrate that its angles equal two right angles. Shakespeare defines reason as “ability for a large discourse, looking before and after”; discourse is going from one thing to another; angels know without discourse, a fortiori God.
• Asides: his graduate teacher: “we’re all bastards,” half spiritual, half bodily. Pythagoras and transmigration (“don’t hit that dog, I recognise my friend”), which Aristotle refutes; Thomas adds that your soul could not be the soul of my body: parents begin the body, God creates the soul to fit it, so you owe your soul’s creation, under God, to your parents; Aristotle in the Generation of Animals already saw the human soul is not from the parents though a dog’s is, and that both ancient opinions are true “according to something.” The Marietti edition’s notes on the different opinions.

7. Replies to article 2 (“does not stop at the statable”) #

Point: the objections hold of the object on the side of the thing, not of the way we believe.

• Reply 1: obj. 1 proceeds on the side of the thing believed.
• Reply 2: the creed touches on things insofar as the act of believing is terminated at them, as its wording shows; the act of the believer does not stop at the enunciabile but goes to the thing; we form statements only to have knowledge of things, in science as in faith. I do not form a complex statement to say God is complex but to know he is simple, by negation (“not composed, not a body”); knowing what is not complex in a complex way is not false.
• Reply 3: the vision of the fatherland will be of the first truth as it is in itself, per 1 John 3:2 (he likes remembering it as “one three two”). His sophist’s objection: then before we see him we are not like him? Student: “Let us make man in our image.” He: we are already like him, by creation and more by grace; John speaks by antonomasia, we will be most like him, knowing him as he knows himself because God is joined to our mind as that by which we see him. That vision is not by way of a statement but by simple understanding; the light of glory makes reason able to receive God, it does not illumine God. Through faith we do not grasp the first truth as it is in itself, “so it’s not a similar reason.”

His words #

• knot / untie: Aristotle’s image for an objection binding the mind, and the plot’s two parts.
• material object vs. formal ratio (“formal reason”) of the object: what is known vs. that through which it is known.
• first truth: God, as formal reason of faith and as that to which all believed things are related.
• antonomasia: a common name given to the one that stands out (“the Bible,” “the poet”).
• amphiboly: a speech of several words with more than one meaning; equivocation is one word.
• Word of God: the Bible / Christ (John).
• enunciabile: “statable,” something able to be put in a statement; he prefers “statement” to “proposition.”
• incomplexum: simple, uncomposed.
• componendo and dividendo: affirmative and negative statement.
• patria: fatherland, the vision of heaven versus “the faith of the way.”
• symbol (symbolum): the creed, “things thrown together.”
• discourse: going from one thing to another (Shakespeare’s “large discourse”).
• light of glory: what makes reason able to receive God as that by which he is seen.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 1, a. 1 (objections, sed contra, corpus, replies).
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 1, a. 2 (objections, sed contra, corpus, replies).
• 1 Corinthians 13:12 and 1 John 3:2 (quoted within the article).

Mentioned

• Dionysius, Divine Names and Celestial Hierarchy (Thomas’s and Albert’s commentaries).
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, question on God’s simplicity, eight articles (locus not given).
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, books 1-3 order.
• Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones Disputatae.
• Aristotle, Peri Hermeneias; Poetics (“the poetic art”); Generation of Animals.
• Chesterton, The Dumb Ox.
• Shakespeare, Henry VIII (“a long farewell to all my greatness”), quoted in the Federalist Papers.
• Vatican II, Dei Verbum (“Verbum Dei”).
• Genesis, “let us make man in our image” (student).
• Marietti edition notes.

His questions #

• Why is Thomas making things so difficult for us? So we make more effort; you must see and examine the knot before untying it.
• What do I really see when I see you? Colour; even shape and life are known through colour.
• Why is the Bible called the Bible? By antonomasia: among all books it is the book, being the word of God.
• What is an amphiboly? A speech of several words with more than one meaning; equivocation is one word.
• Is the object of faith something simple or composed? Simple on the part of the thing believed; composed on the part of the believer.
• Would the angels know God in a simple way? More simply than we, but not as simply as God knows himself; they need many understandable forms.
• If we shall be like him only when we see him as he is, were we not like him before? We were, by image and by grace; John speaks by antonomasia: we will be most like him.