Believing God, Believing by God, Believing in God, and Why Faith Is Needed for Salvation (II-II q.2 aa.2–3)

Orientation #

He refers back to what “has been said above” in the last question (prev. lecture, the article on what it is to believe) and closes with “I’ll be gone for two weeks now.” The previous class treated q. 2 a. 1 (believing as “thinking with assent”); the next takes up a. 4.

The class, in order #

1. The three acts of faith and the problem of translating them (“to believe by God, maybe the closest thing”) #

The point: Thomas distinguishes credere Deum, credere Deo, credere in Deum, and English cannot render them without equivocation.

• credere Deo (dative): “to believe by God” — God is the reason why you believe; the first truth; the formal object.
• credere Deum (accusative): what the object is, the material object.
• credere in Deum: “I left my heart in San Francisco” — the moving towards God as the end of your thinking.
• Trap: in English “I believe God” is what we would use for credere Deo, and “I believe in God” is used in yet another sense — so the English words cross the Latin senses.
• Objections (his run-through): (1) faith is one habit and one virtue, so one act, as seeing is the one act of the eye; (2) credere Deo is common to every act of faith since faith rests on the first truth, so it cannot be a particular act; (3) to believe God belongs even to some without faith; (4) to be moved to the end is the will’s, whose object is the good and the end (“Aristotle points out in fourteen books of wisdom”), but believing is an act of the understanding, so this difference does not belong to the act of faith.
• Sed contra: “this troublemaker is Augustine again” — he lays down this distinction; “lays down” signals firmness, as in laying down the law or laying down premises in a syllogism.
• Aside: Washington Irving’s life of Washington, the general laying down the law to a disorganized army; the Marine officer behind the line — “better a dead hero than a dead coward”; a friend’s reason for joining the Marines, “you might as well go into the best.”

2. The body: the object considered “tripliciter” (“the object of faith can be considered tripliciter”) #

The point: the act of any ability [ed.: potency] or habit is taken from its order to its object, and the object of faith has three aspects.

1. Believing pertains to the understanding as moved by the will to assent (as said before); so the object may be taken on the side of the understanding or on the side of the will moving it.
2. On the side of the understanding, two things: the material object → credere Deum, because nothing is proposed to be believed except as it pertains in some way to God (like the subject of theology: God, and other things as related to God as beginning or end; creatures relate to God as beginning); and the formalis ratio, the middle under which one assents → credere Deo.
3. On the side of the will moving the understanding → credere in Deum, the first truth as referred to the will under the ratio of end, the will’s object being the good.

• He repeats the caution: credere Deum in Latin means believing things about God, though “to believe God” in English sounds like the formal reason; “you gotta be very careful about the equivocation between the two languages.”
• Parallel aside: “to pray God” in other languages, Shakespeare’s “prithee” = “I pray you,” i.e. I beg you — a different meaning from English usage.
• Aside on thinking without words: he used to ask students whether one can think without words; you may sometimes, but you don’t know what you think unless you can put it into words, and if you don’t know what you’re thinking you cannot even investigate whether it is true or false.

3. The replies: one act, diverse relations; the faithless; the will (“one and the same act having a diverse relation”) #

• Ad 1 (and ad 2): not three acts but one act with diverse relation to its object — three aspects of the same act; nobody denies credere Deo is common to all.
• Ad 3: credere Deum (not in the English sense) does not belong to the faithless under the ratio by which it is an act of faith; they do not believe God under the conditions faith determines, hence do not truly believe God. Reason from “the ninth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics IX]: in simple things defective knowledge is only in not attaining them entirely. Since God is entirely simple, you get the whole or you completely miss; with composed things (truth about creatures) you can be right about one part and wrong about another. He recommends looking at the ninth and twelfth books; “a hard thing to understand fully.”
• Ad 4: the will moves the understanding and the other powers to the end; accordingly the act of faith is laid down as in some way tending towards God.

4. Student’s question: why the creed says “in Deum” (“the creed uses in Deum”) #

The point: the creed’s credo in Deum must be taken in Thomas’s third sense.

• His answer: the act of reason is commanded by the will, and the will cannot act without its own object, so the act of believing tends towards God in himself as end — “kind of a subtle thing, but isn’t that the truth?”
• Student’s reformulation (“the creed is to build up our will”) corrected: the point is what moves reason to assent, namely the will; that must go into the account of the act of belief, since the act is not there without the will moving reason.
• The other two senses (material object, formal object) are on the side of reason: what is it thinking about, and why is it thinking this way. But the act is voluntary: Augustine, often quoted by Thomas, says no one believes unless he wills. So leaving out the order to the will leaves out something essential — “amazing thing,” “a lot here to chew on.”
• Aside (group conversation): Weigel’s personal book on John Paul II; communist attempts to destroy the faith in Poland; the crowds’ “We want God”; the general (Jaruzelski) reportedly terrified at the Pope’s return; whether he converted before he died, left undecided; Cardinal O’Connor’s mother said to be Jewish and his founding of the Sisters for Life after visiting Auschwitz.

5. Article 3, the objections: is believing necessary for salvation? (“it seems that to believe is not necessary for salvation”) #

The point: the objections look like nonsense yet, he admits, he could not answer them himself.

1. For the perfection of each thing what belongs to it by nature should suffice (the cat gets its claws); but the things of faith exceed natural reason, being non apparentia.
2. It is dangerous to assent where one cannot judge true from false — Job 12, non ab oris verba judicat, do not judge words by the ears (“some people substitute words for thoughts”); and one cannot judge the things of faith because they cannot be resolved into principia prima (the axioms and so-called postulates) by which we judge all things.
3. Salvation is from God (Psalm 36, salus autem iustorum a Domino); but the invisible things of God are understood through the things made (Romans 1:20, the text the Church uses for natural knowledge of God); what is seen by the understanding is not believed; so why isn’t natural knowledge enough?

• Sed contra: Hebrews 11:6, sine fide, without faith it is impossible to please God — “a pretty strong statement.”

6. The body: two motions, and the learner must believe (“for the perfection of the lower nature, two things”) #

The point: a lower nature is perfected both by its own motion and by the motion of a superior nature; the rational creature, ordered immediately to God, is led to the vision of God only by learning from God, and a learner must believe.

1. Two things come together for the perfection of a lower nature: one according to its own motion, one according to the motion of a superior nature. His own two-part prayer illustrates it: “Move us, God, to know and love you” (the higher motion) and “help us to know and love you” (one’s own motion, still needing help).
2. Examples: water by its own motion goes to the center (all four elements were thought to fall to the center), but by the motion of the moon it moves around the center in ebb and flow (fluxum et refluxum, the tides); the orbs of the planets move by their own motion one way but by the motion of the first orb the other way — “accepted on faith.”
3. Only the created rational nature has an immediate order to God: other creatures attain not something universal but only a particular sharing of divine goodness, in being only (inanimate things) or in living and knowing singulars (plants and animals); the rational nature, knowing the universal nature of good and of being, is ordered immediately to the universal beginning of being — Thomas says “first being,” not cause; a student’s slip “principio didn’t mean cause” is accepted as correct.
4. So the rational creature’s perfection consists not only in what is natural but in a partaking of divine goodness: the last beatitude is a supernatural vision of God, seeing him as he is (St. John); man can be led to it only by learning from God the teacher — John 6:45, everyone who hears from the Father and learns comes to me (he prefers “he who listens to the Father”).
5. Man partakes of this learning not at once but successively and discursively, according to the mode of his nature; and everyone learning must believe in order to come to perfect knowledge — “the philosopher” in the Sophistical Refutations: it is necessary for the learner to believe. So to arrive at the vision of beatitude it is presupposed that he believe God as a student believes his master teaching — “a beautiful way of proceeding, even in terms of human learning.”

• Aside on “the philosopher”: Thomas never names him; joke that it is not Berquist; Kocourek (inferred spelling; ASR “Kasurik”) said he had “the brains of an angler” next to the philosopher though wiser than anyone at the College of St. Thomas.
• Aside on the trochaic meter of his prayer: Thomas’s rhythmus (Adoro te devote; “visus, tactus, gustus, in te fallitur”) seems trochaic, contrary to the iambic which Aristotle says we fall into in daily speech; Shakespeare gives the witches trochees (“Fair is foul, and foul is fair”) to mark them as different from us.

7. Digression: words “equivocal by reason” and pros ti (“every respectable word in philosophy is equivocal by reason”) #

The point: De Koninck’s remark, unproved at the time, proves true the longer he lives.

• Puzzle he poses students: can you define by words equivocal by reason, when many meanings seem to lose precision? Turned around: can you define without them?
• Shakespeare’s definition of reason, every word equivocal by reason: “ability” (he shortens “capability”; the ordered senses show which is meant, the ability to do something); “discourse” (loose sense, running from one thing to another, scatterbrained; strict sense, running from what you know to what you don’t so as to come to know it — reason can do both); “large” (covering a large area, i.e. the universal, or large as opposed to small — reason discourses about the universal and about great things, and its full power is seen only in the latter, so both senses are used); “looking” (three senses: with the eyes, the imagination, reason — the third meant, trying to understand); “before and after” (all the senses). Five words or phrases, all equivocal by reason.
• Same for the definition of motion, “the act of what is able to be in so far as it is able to be”: defined by act and ability, both equivocal by reason.
• Kocourek’s insistence that Aristotle names the category not by the abstract “relation” but pros ti, Albert’s ad aliquid, “towards something”; then John’s Gospel, “the word was toward God” (pros) — the Son is toward God, “God” standing for the Father. “I’m just trying to introduce you to the idea that the Trinity is going to be distinguished by relations.”

8. Article 3, the replies (“nothing of danger or damnation”) #

• Ad 1: because man’s nature depends on a higher nature, natural knowledge does not suffice for his perfection; something supernatural is required. His gloss: man is made in the image and likeness of God, has something godlike, reason; the dog and cat do not, “not in that way.”
• Aside: Shakespeare’s definition tells you how to understand “equivocal by reason” itself: first separate the meanings, then run from one to the other looking before and after to see the order; when you have the order you can stop running — “this is very important.”
• Ad 2: as man by the natural light assents to first beginnings, and the virtuous man judges rightly about what belongs to his virtue through the habit, so through the light of faith divinely infused a man assents to the things of faith and not to their contraries; hence “nothing of danger or damnation in those who are in Christ Jesus,” illuminated by him through faith. His gloss: the virtue, being a habit and disposition, inclines one supernaturally to reject what is contrary and accept what accords.
• Ad 3: as to many of the invisible things of God (e.g. the Trinity) faith precedes in a higher way what natural reason knows proceeding from creatures to God (ex creaturis in Deum cognitionem). Aristotle did not arrive at the Trinity, though some, from his remark that we use “three” in praising God, think he knew something of it; Thomas puts that in its proper place. Ecclesiasticus: plurima supra sensum hominis, many things above the sense of man are shown to you.
• Closing: “I’ll be gone for two weeks now.”

His words #

• credere Deo: “to believe by God” — God as the reason why you believe; the formal object.
• credere Deum: “to believe God” in the Latin sense — believing things pertaining to God; the material object.
• credere in Deum: to believe with the motion towards God as end of one’s thinking; the will’s contribution.
• lay down: sign of firmness, as in laying down the law or premises in a syllogism [ed.: ponere].
• ability: his rendering of Thomas’s potentia [ed.: potency]; also the first word of Shakespeare’s definition of reason.
• tripliciter: in three ways, “he doesn’t go beyond three.”
• formalis ratio: the formal reason, “the middle under which one assents.”
• “ninth book of wisdom,” “fourteen books of wisdom”: his names for Aristotle’s Metaphysics IX and the Metaphysics as a whole [ed.].
• non apparentia: not appearing; things of faith that exceed natural reason.
• principia prima: first beginnings, “the axioms and the so-called postulates” into which one resolves judgments.
• fluxum et refluxum: ebb and flow, the tides due to the moon.
• first being: what Thomas says for the universal beginning of being here, “not cause.”
• equivocal by reason: a word with many ordered senses; De Koninck: every respectable philosophical word is such.
• discourse: loose sense (running from thing to thing) vs. strict sense (running from the known to the unknown so as to know it).
• large: covering a large area / the universal vs. large as opposed to small.
• pros ti, ad aliquid: “towards something,” Aristotle’s and Albert’s name for what we call relation.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 2, a. 2 (objections, sed contra, body, replies).
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 2, a. 3 (objections, sed contra, body, replies).
• Hebrews 11:6 (sed contra of a. 3); John 6:45; Romans 1:20; Job 12; Psalm 36; Ecclesiasticus (locus not given); John 1:1 (“the word was toward God”).
• Shakespeare’s definition of reason (“large discourse, looking before and after”), by phrase.

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX (and XII) on knowledge of simple things; “fourteen books of wisdom” on the will’s object.
• Aristotle, Sophistical Refutations: the learner must believe.
• Augustine: distinction of the three acts; “no one believes unless he wills.”
• Thomas, prima secundae (as “above”) on beatitude as supernatural vision of God.
• Thomas’s Adoro te devote (rhythmus); Shakespeare, Macbeth witches (inferred); Washington Irving’s life of Washington; Weigel’s book on John Paul II.

His questions #

• How would you translate credere Deo? “To believe by God” is closest — God as the reason why you believe; English “I believe God” is misleading.
• Aren’t there three acts, since faith is one habit? No: one and the same act with a diverse relation to its object, three aspects.
• Can faithless people believe God? Not under the ratio faith determines; God being simple, you get the whole or completely miss.
• Why does the creed say in Deum rather than one of the other two? Because the act of believing, commanded by the will, tends towards God as end; without the will’s order the act is not fully described.
• Can you think without words? Sometimes, perhaps, but you don’t know what you think until you can put it in words, so you can’t examine its truth.
• Why isn’t natural knowledge of God enough for salvation? Man’s nature depends on a higher nature; perfection needs a supernatural partaking, the vision of God, reached only by learning from God, which presupposes believing.
• Isn’t it dangerous to assent where you cannot judge? No: the infused light of faith, like natural light and the habit of virtue, inclines to the things of faith and away from their contraries.
• Can you define something by words equivocal by reason — or without them? You cannot define without them; Shakespeare’s definition of reason and the definition of motion use only such words.
• Did Jaruzelski convert before he died? left open.