Distinction and Order, the Senses of 'Before', and Augustine's Definition of Believing (II-II q.2 a.1)

Orientation #

He says Thomas has already distinguished the object of faith (q. 1) and “we’re going to start today” the distinction of the acts, interior and exterior; he opens with a review of distinction and order because “it’s good to review those fundamentals once in a while.” The previous class finished q. 1 (Creed, pope’s authority) and the next continues with q. 2 aa. 2–3. Verified sources place the class in ST II-II q. 2 (10 min matched) with about 10 min read from his handout on Categories ch. 12.

The class, in order #

1. The distinction of distinction: material vs. formal (“dividing something according to the continuous or by opposites”) #

Point: the first distinction of distinction is material (by division of the continuous) vs. formal (by opposites).

• Material distinction: the continuous has parts meeting at a common boundary — line at a point, semicircle at a line, two bodies at a surface; Euclid bisects a line, an angle, a semicircle. Called material because the continuous is a property of matter.
• Formal distinction: by opposites, the first postpredicament in the Categories (also in the Metaphysics). Four kinds: contradictories (being/non-being), having and lacking, contraries, and set apart from these, relatives.
• Application to the Trinity (Thomas): (1) the distinction of Father, Son and Spirit is not material, since God is not a body; (2) so it is formal; (3) not by contradictories, having/lacking, or contraries, since all three involve non-being (contradiction is being/non-being; privation is a subject able to have something and not having it; even one contrary lacks something it should have — vice is not mere lack but “a real infection” [ASR: “inflection”], yet lacks what it should have); God is “I am who am”; (4) therefore, “forced by the truth itself,” by relatives — and the names Father and Son suggest this.
• Note “first” is itself a name of order: before all the rest. A secondary distinction: dividing a line, a plane, a body, a motion; likewise secondary distinctions of form.

2. Distinction vs. order, and the order of the two (“nothing is before or after itself”) #

Point: distinction comes before order.

• Things are distinct when one is not the other; things are ordered when one is before or after the other.
• Argument: axiom — nothing is before or after itself. Today is before tomorrow and after yesterday, never before or after today as a whole; morning is before afternoon, but then morning and afternoon are distinct. Hence you must see things distinct before you see them ordered.
• Aristotle’s order in the Categories: first postpredicament, distinction of opposites; second, the senses of “before” (order). So one can distinguish orders and order distinctions (“first distinction, second distinction”).
• Aside: his old professor’s line, “this is the teacher’s way to confuse the issue — you’ve got to see what he meant.”

3. The senses of “before” (Categories 12, from his handout) (“what does before in being mean”) #

Point: four senses plus a so-called fifth, which he puts under the second.

1. Before in time (he is 81, so before the students in time).
2. Before in being: what is before can be without the later, not vice versa. Bricks before a brick house or wall: bricks can be without the house, the house not without bricks. He is before the students in time but not in being — they could be without him. Close to time (what is before in being is often before in time) but a different sense.
3. Before in knowledge: carried over by a likeness of ratios — some things can be known without knowing others, but not vice versa.
4. Before in the good, “the sense of better.”

• “Fifth”: cause before effect. Not really fifth: like before in being (the effect depends on the cause), yet not the same, since what is before in being can be without the later, but a cause cannot be without an effect. He always writes “fifth” in quotes; “it’s underneath the second.”
• Shakespeare’s definition of reason, “the ability for large discourse, looking before and after” (“the best short exposition of reason we have”): in which sense of before? “All of them” — go through each.
• Thomas, Sentences, “whether God the Father is before God the Son”: in no way. The body denies it in duration (time is the first sense of duration), by nature (second), in knowledge, in goodness or perfection — “exactly the order of Aristotle.”

4. First cause and first being are not synonyms (“the first being must be pure act”) #

Point: Thomas shows two things, God as first cause and as first being, in two senses of “first.”

• Cause is defined by being (what is responsible for the being or coming-to-be of another) but is not being; first cause = before all causes as cause is before effect; first being = before all in the sense of before in being. “So many people ignore that there’s two things being shown.”
• The five proofs argue to first mover, first maker (first cause). First being is argued from the two main distinctions of being per se (the fourteen books of wisdom, “first philosophy”): the figures of predication, and act and ability. (Categories also distinguishes universal/singular substance and accident.)
• From the categories: substance is the first being, but not the really first. The third argument in the Summa (and, in a different place, the SCG chapter on God’s eternity): substances known to us (you, me, dog, cat, tree) can be and not be; they cannot be first; before them something necessary; but what is necessary to another cannot be first; so a being necessary through itself — God. It can be without others, they not without it; the contingent are even more dependent than the necessary-to-another.
• From ability and act: early Greeks and modern scientists thought matter the beginning, with some probability, since what goes from ability to act is ability first. But Metaphysics IX: what goes from ability to act does so through something already in act; haplōs, act is before ability; hence the first being is pure act, nothing before it.
• So one is “ready to talk about the substance of God” — “but again, it’s good to know that distinction of order.”

5. Object before act, act before ability (“distinction of objects is before the distinction of acts”) #

Point: Thomas follows Aristotle’s order from the three books on the soul: abilities known through acts, acts through objects.

• Seeing/hearing (acts) vs. colour/sound (objects): both seeing and hearing are sensing, so to distinguish them you must bring in the object; the distinction of colour and sound is before that of seeing and hearing; the distinction of the abilities to see and hear comes after the acts.
• Thomas: object of faith (q. 1), then acts (interior, then exterior), then the habit. Shakespeare too defines reason by its act.
• Aside: a philosophy doctoral student emailed him a question that morning; this would be “a beautiful text to give him.”

6. Prologue of question 2: the ten articles (“about the first ten things are asked”) #

Point: the act of faith, first the inward act, then the exterior act, the confession of faith (not of sins).

• He reads the ten: (1) what it is to believe; (2) in how many ways it is said; (3) whether believing something above natural reason is necessary for salvation; (4) whether believing what reason can reach is necessary; (5) explicit belief; (6) whether all are equally held to explicit belief; (7) explicit faith about Christ always necessary — “do the Jews have explicit faith about Christ?” (left hanging); (8) the Trinity explicitly; (9) whether the act of faith is meritorious; (10) whether human reason diminishes the merit of faith — “a very important question.”
• Aside on (9)/(10): the early fathers held firmly to the faith before they could answer every objection, resisting the temptation not to believe; Voltaire “poked the Catholics” yet called for a confessor when he thought he was dying; Churchill on the soldier in the field who “pretty much has to believe.”

7. Article 1, objections and sed contra (“it seems that to believe is not to think with assent”) #

Point: Augustine’s definition, credere est cum assensione cogitare, under three objections.

• Translating cogitare: no exact English; nearest is “thinking about.” Why think about something? To understand it; or to think out something — a distinction, division, definition, order, beginning statement (like the axiom of before and after), conclusion. Euclid thought out distinctions, definitions, axioms, new conclusions.
• Obj. 1: cogitatio implies investigation (cogitare as simul agitare); Damascene, De fide orthodoxa IV: faith is non inquisitus consensus — so Damascene against Augustine.
• Obj. 2: faith is in reason; but cogitare is the act of the cogitative power, a sense power (De anima I, as read); the same word names an act of sense and of reason — his mother’s “‘I see,’ said the blind man.”
• Obj. 3: to believe is an act of the understanding (object the true); to assent, like to consent, is of the will.
• Sed contra: Augustine, De praedestinatione sanctorum — “think twice before you disagree with Augustine.” Augustine and Thomas “the greatest minds of the church.”

8. Body: three senses of cogitare (“cogitare can be taken in three ways”) #

Point: Thomas answers by a distinction.

1. Commonly: any actual consideration of the understanding — Augustine, De Trinitate XIV: hanc nunc dico intelligentiam qua intelligimus cogitantes.
2. More properly: consideration with investigation, before reaching perfection of understanding through certitude of vision — as one must think about a theorem in Euclid before saying “now I see it must be so” (and then not because Euclid says it). Augustine, De Trinitate XV: the Son is not called cogitatio but Word, since our cogitatio proceeds to what we know and is formed afterwards, whereas God understands without thinking anything out. So cogitatio is properly the motion of the soul deliberating, not yet perfected by full vision: an imperfect motion that comes to rest when thought out. “Understanding” = standing under, firm; Greek epistēmē, per Plato and Aristotle, from coming to a halt — a beautiful etymology Latin scientia lacks.
3. Act of the cogitative power, “a kind of particular reason”: deliberating about particular intentions rather than universal ones.

• Aside: Latin is imperfect beside Greek for philosophy; his two teachers in Quebec, Fr. Boulay and Msgr. Dion (both French-speaking), insisted English is better than French for philosophy and poetry.

9. Applying the senses: what is proper to the believer (“firm adhesion to one part of a contradiction”) #

Point: taken in the second sense, cum assensione cogitare gives the whole ratio of believing.

• Sense 1 does not: one who considers what he knows also thinks with assent.
• Acts of the understanding: (a) firm assent without thinking out — the whole is more than a part; nothing is before or after itself; a consideration “already formed”; (b) unformed thinking out without firm assent — guessing: inclining to neither side of a contradiction (doubting), to one side on a light sign (suspecting), or adhering with fear of the other (opining; a firmer guess than suspicion). “To be or not to be” — a question because you can’t have both.
• Believing: firm adhesion (“adhesive — what sticks”) to one part — there are three persons in God — like the one knowing and the one understanding (natural understanding: the whole/part axiom without reasoning; the triangle’s angles after Euclid’s demonstration); yet knowledge not perfected by manifest vision, in common with the doubter, suspecter, opiner. So proper to the believer: firm assent while thinking about it; thus believing is distinguished from all acts of the understanding about the true and false. He notes Thomas “is talking about distinction.”
• His praise of the definition: “the brevity of wit.” It explains Anselm’s theology as fides quaerens intellectum: firm assent to what one does not see naturally keeps thinking about it — why three persons, why God became man. Theology also arises from attacks: a church father said heresy is necessary for theology to develop; it grows piecemeal, article by article, as heretics challenge; Jerome, the whole world groaned to find itself Arian [ASR: “errant”].
• Second merit: believing is not against the nature of reason, which wants to understand what it accepts; assent without thinking would be “a kind of tyranny.”

10. Student question: geometry vs. faith (“I don’t believe it anymore, I know it”) #

Student: so it is not against reason because, like doubt, suspicion, opinion, it involves thinking? — Answer: in geometry you think about it, take examples, find the reason, then assent without further thinking; in faith you never know that there are three persons in God, yet firmly assent while still thinking, lacking evidence in reason. He once believed the Pythagorean theorem (Euclid I.47, converse I.48), now knows it; during exams he re-proves it on the board. Student: you see reasons to assent without seeing the truth? — Yes, as in guessing, but there the thinking does not suffice for firm assent. Thomas separates believing from all acts of reason similarly in De veritate. Admire Augustine, who lacked Aristotle’s help.

11. Replies to the objections (“inducitur, he didn’t say forced”) #

• Ad 1: faith has no inquisition of natural reason demonstrating what is believed, but has an inquisition of the things by which one is induced (inducitur, not forced) to believe: said by God, confirmed by miracles. Contrast being forced by the truth, as in geometry, or as he was forced by the axiom to see distinction before order. Aside: the five postpredicaments — opposites, before/after, hama (together, neither before nor after), kinds of motion (tied to opposites), having; the first three clearly linked.
• Ad 2: two senses of cogitare confused — putting universals together vs. singulars. Napoleon’s “second sense” on the battlefield; MacArthur [ASR: “McCarthy”] going out: “I can’t fight him if I can’t see him.”
• Ad 3: the believer’s understanding is determined to one not by reason but by the will; assent names the act of the understanding as so determined.
• Class ends as he begins article 2.

His words #

• material distinction — division of the continuous, a property of matter; formal distinction — by opposites
• first postpredicament / second postpredicament — Aristotle’s opposites, and before/after [ed.: Categories 10–12]
• axiom of before and after — nothing is before or after itself
• before in being — can be without the later, not vice versa; “fifth” sense (cause) “underneath the second”
• ability — [ed.: potency]; haplōs — simply
• fourteen books of wisdom / first philosophy — [ed.: Metaphysics]; figures of predication — the categories
• three books on the soul — [ed.: De anima]
• cogitare — “thinking about”; cogitatio as simul agitare; thinking out
• non inquisitus consensus — Damascene’s phrase for faith
• cogitative power — a sense power, “a kind of particular reason”
• epistēmē — from coming to a halt; understanding — standing under
• guessing — suspecting (light sign) and opining (adhering with fear of the other side)
• adhesion — “clinging, sticking to” one part of a contradiction
• fides quaerens intellectum — Anselm, faith seeking understanding
• inducitur — induced, not forced, to believe
• hama — together, the third postpredicament

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, ST II-II q. 2 prologue, a. 1 objections, sed contra, body, replies 1–3
• Aristotle, Categories ch. 12 (handout “Before”), senses of before
• Augustine, De Trinitate XIV and XV (as quoted by Thomas); De praedestinatione sanctorum (sed contra)
• Damascene, De fide orthodoxa IV (obj. 1)

Mentioned

• Thomas, Sentences, “whether God the Father is before God the Son”
• Thomas, ST I, five proofs, third argument (inferred: I q. 2 a. 3); SCG, chapter on the eternity of God
• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX; Categories (opposites, quantity, substance); De anima I
• Thomas, De veritate, on acts of reason (locus not stated)
• Euclid, Elements I.47–48; Shakespeare, Hamlet (“large discourse, looking before and after”; “to be or not to be”); Anselm; Jerome

His questions #

• What’s the first distinction of distinction? Material (by division of the continuous) vs. formal (by opposites).
• Which of the four opposites distinguishes Father, Son and Spirit? Relatives; the others involve non-being, and God is “I am who am.”
• What’s the distinction between saying things are distinct and saying they’re ordered? Distinct: one is not the other; ordered: one is before or after the other.
• Which comes first, distinction or order? Distinction, since nothing is before or after itself.
• In what sense of “before” did Shakespeare say reason looks before and after? All of them.
• Is the first cause the same as the first being? Both true of God, but not synonyms; two senses of “first.”
• Is the distinction of colour and sound before that of seeing and hearing? Yes; and acts before abilities.
• Why do you think about something? To understand it, or to think out something about it.
• What do you think of Augustine’s definition of to believe? It has “the brevity of wit”; explains theology’s origin and respects reason’s nature.
• Does thinking about a theorem mean you’ve understood it? No; it is on the way; assent comes after — unlike faith, which assents while still thinking.