Washington's Virtues, Believing God About God, and Why Truths Reason Can Prove Must Also Be Believed (II-II q.2 a.4)

Orientation #

He says he is going “back from the cardinal virtues to the theological virtues” and recalls what Thomas said about the three things in the act of faith, credere Deum / Deo / in Deum (prev. lecture); and that “we haven’t studied yet the virtue of faith,” only the object and the act, then the profession. The previous class worked through articles 2 and 3 of the question on faith; the next takes up articles 5 to 7 on explicit faith.

The class, in order #

1. Washington and the cardinal virtues (“regulated by prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude”) #

Point: he opens by reading from Washington Irving’s life of Washington to show the four cardinal virtues, “the second half of the secunda secundae,” in a real man.

• John Adams’s inaugural: Washington’s actions “regulated by prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude”; Jefferson: “his justice the most inflexible I have ever known… a wise, a good and a great man”; Irving’s summary list (prudence, firmness, moderation, immovable justice, courage, patience, truth, magnanimity); Lord Brougham on the veneration of “the immortal name of Washington.”
• Mourning at his death (Congress, Lord Bridport’s fleet, Bonaparte’s ten days of crape); Pershing in Paris: “We are here, Lafayette.”
• Aside: “we don’t honor him anymore” (his statue in Virginia); Irving as a boy blessed by Washington in a bookshop, and the biography as his last work; Washington died at the end of the 18th century, Irving before the Civil War.

2. Order of the three theological virtues (“The Lord is good to them that hope in Him”) #

Point: Thomas’s order (by faith we know our end, by hope we tend toward it, by charity we are already to some extent joined to it) is illustrated by a verse and a saint.

• Lamentations 3:25, “The Lord is good to them that hope in Him, to the soul that seeketh Him”: hope as already tending toward the end.
• St Teresa (of Avila [ed.: he says "de Silla"]): “I don’t know what more I can have in heaven than I have now; our union is already complete” — charity as union already begun; her remark that a woman has a better heart for love than a man holds in the supernatural order too.

3. The three things in the act of faith, in English (“believing God, about God, which is good to do”) #

Point: to “purify” Thomas’s “terrible Latin” (credere Deum, Deo, in Deum) by putting it in his native English, as his teacher said one must before really grasping it.

• On the board: believing God (what Thomas calls the formal object), about God (material object), which is good to do.
• Preface on the number three: Thomas, asked whether the Trinity can be known by natural reason (answer: no), always meets an objection from Aristotle’s book “on the universe” that we praise God by the number three; reply: there is a perfection in three, as in beginning, middle and end — Aristotle praises Homer for teaching the Greeks that a plot is not about one man but a course of action with beginning, middle and end.
• Argument from Aristotle’s proemium to the three books On the Soul:
  1. All knowledge as such is good; it is bad only per accidens. Contrast love: love of something bad is as such bad; knowing it is not.
  2. One knowledge is nevertheless better than another for two reasons: it is about a better thing, or it is known better / with more certitude. In the proemium he does not rank the two; in the biological works the main criterion is what you know, not how: better to know a better thing imperfectly than a lesser thing perfectly.
  3. Example: I can count the chairs in this room with great certitude — “big deal.” The moderns pursue mathematical science because it is more precise and certain; “that’s not true” as the measure of better knowledge. Knowledge of the body is good, of the soul better, of angels better, of God best.
  4. Believing God: since God can neither deceive nor be deceived, this has the excellence of certitude; believing God about God is knowledge of the best thing. So faith touches both of Aristotle’s reasons for one knowledge being better than another.
• The third phrase adds that the good is the object not of reason but of the will: we have no evidence, so reason is moved by the will in the act of faith.
• Aside: Kasurik, “the wisest man” at the College of St Thomas in St Paul, who said that compared to Aristotle he had “the mind of an angleworm”; his first meeting with De Koninck (“if you teach philosophy the way it’s been taught to me… I’m going to get up and leave”), De Koninck’s “I hope he keeps his mouth shut over there” when Kasurik went to Russia and photographed an installation for the CIA; cousin Donald’s navy stories.

4. Article 4, objections and sed contra (“nothing superfluous is found”) #

Point: it seems things provable by natural reason need not be believed.

1. Obj. 1: in the works of God, even less than in nature, nothing is superfluous (nature gives two arms; you wish for a third carrying groceries, but you do not really need it); what can be done by one is superfluous to add; so believing what reason can know is superfluous.
2. Obj. 2: what must be believed is what faith is about; there is not scientia and faith of the same thing; scientia covers all naturally knowable things.
3. Obj. 3: all naturally knowable things are of one kind; if some are proposed to be believed, for like reason all would be; but that is false.

• “This dummy here, I don’t see any problem with those arguments” — “I got the brains of an egg worm.”
• Sed contra: it is necessary to believe that God is one and without a body (unum et incorporeum), which the philosophers prove by natural reason. Student asks what part of natural reason proves these: he answers with the “five parts” of thinking about God (segment 5).

5. Digression: five parts of thinking about God and six compositions (“there’s only six ways of being put together”) #

Point: unity and incorporeality belong to the second part, the substance of God, and incorporeality to his simplicity.

• Five parts of thinking about God: first, that God exists (five arguments in both Summae, but actually more, and not the same in the two); second, the substance of God, itself five: simplicity, perfection, unity, infinity, unchangingness — the order differs in the two Summae because the proofs of existence, which these build on, differ.
• Summa theologiae question on simplicity, eight articles: the first six each eliminate one kind of composition; the seventh shows God composed in no way, by induction from the six as well as by syllogism — so Thomas must think there are only six ways of being put together. (Summa contra Gentiles, written for “devilishly intelligent” Dominican theologians, shows it at once universally.)
• The six, as he lays them out: three found only in material substances — (i) continuous parts of a body (liver and teeth attached); (ii) body and soul (the dissecting agnostic never finds a soul on the table — “I’d be even more surprised than he”; homelier likeness: take a chair apart and you get legs and seat, not the shape); (iii) that whereby Socrates is Socrates vs. that whereby he is a man — if the same, Socrates would be the only man; in an angel, that whereby Michael is this kind of angel and that whereby he is Michael are the same. Three found in both material substances and angels — (iv) substance and existence (esse); (v) what it is and its powers (an angel’s understanding or will is not its substance); (vi) genus and difference, “strange as it may seem,” even in angels.
• After simplicity Thomas shows universal perfection. “Magnificent text.”

6. Article 4, the body: three reasons (“more quickly man would arrive”) #

Point: man must receive by faith not only what is above reason but also what reason can know, for three reasons.

1. Speed: the scientia to which proving God’s existence and attributes belongs is learned last, presupposing many other sciences (logic, geometry, philosophy of nature…), so only after much of life would one reach knowledge of God; hence it is good to believe God about God even for what one could reach by reason “as an old man.” Aside: scripture’s “he who adds science adds pain”; the professor sorry “to bring up painful memories.”
2. Commonness: many cannot progress in reasoned-out knowledge, from dullness of wit, from the occupations and necessities of temporal life, or from laziness (torpor) in learning; they would be defrauded of knowledge of God unless it were proposed by faith.
3. Certitude: human reason in divine things is multum deficiens; sign: the philosophers investigating divine things fell into many errors and contradicted one another; so that there be undoubted and certain knowledge of God, divine things must be handed on as said by God (a Deo dicta), who can neither deceive nor be deceived.

7. Replies to the objections (“that which is by one man known can be by another believed”) #

• Ad 1: natural investigation does not suffice for the human race for the knowledge of divine things provable by reason; so believing them is not superfluous.
• Ad 2: there cannot be scientia and belief of the same thing in the same person (apud eundem); but what one man knows another can believe. His gloss: “you used to know it, but now I just believe it again.”
• Ad 3: not all knowable things are suitably ordered to beatitude; so not all are equally proposed to be believed.
• Illustrations of Ad 1: the family of ten at daily mass, older children paired with younger, the little boy who kisses the cross and kneels at the tabernacle — “I’m sure that they believe”; De Koninck: “I think I can prove that God exists, but I would not be so presumptuous as to say so… I believe more that God exists than what my mother told me” (high-school students think they understand the proofs and don’t).
• Asides: De Koninck’s session with Pius XII, arguing from Thomas that strictly Peter is not in heaven, only his soul, so if Mary’s body had not been assumed Mary would not be there — the pope “very impressed”; Dionne’s article on the grace of Mary and the hypostatic union; Dionne correcting the order of his thesis outline (sapientis est ordinare) before leaving for Vatican II. Sister Aquinas, his kindergarten teacher: “my first teacher was Aquinas.”

8. Back to the three things: matching the Latin (“Deo is the first one”) #

Point: a student asks how the English board matches Thomas’s three; he sorts them.

• Believing God = credere Deo (relying on God); about God = credere Deum (the material object); good to do = credere in Deum, which brings in the will — “I’m kind of being a little playful there.”
• Restated: it is good to believe God because he can neither deceive nor be deceived (“maybe it’s not good to believe me”); nothing better to believe about than God; the good is the object of the will, which moves reason to believe; and the act of formed faith has both of Aristotle’s excellences — “reason number three there,” praising God.

9. Two ways we are inclined to believe: the habit and miracles (“it didn’t occur to me”) #

Point: although the virtue of faith is not yet studied, once one has it, like any habit it gives an inclination; miracles are a second, sensible sign.

• Billfold at Minnehaha Falls: found money, and pocketing it “never occurred to my mind, no temptation” — what it is to have something of the virtue of justice; Washington’s integrity the same. So the virtue of faith, a real habit, inclines one to believe.
• Dionne’s observation that Aristotle, after the abstract reason, gives a concrete sign — going back to the senses where knowledge begins. Its counterpart in faith: miracles, proportioned to us as animals whose knowledge starts in the senses (Christ rising from the dead; raising Lazarus; water to wine, “the first miracle, I guess”). Likewise in philosophy a striking example makes one say “that’s what he was talking about.”
• Distinction: the infused habit (not acquired by our own acts) inclining toward what is in harmony with it vs. the sensible sign — “a different reason for believing than a miracle.”
• Student (a priest): with someone coming to faith he spontaneously proposed saints — Padre Pio, “a freak of God,” in the clouds turning Allied bombers — as striking testimony; the woman replied “there’s something more to be seen here”; also the Shroud of Turin and Guadalupe.
• Asides: Father Boulay, who “thumbed that into us,” his rapid Quebec French, the oral exam (“Mr. Berquist, what do you know?”) and the exam he never gave (“call me on the phone”); Boulay chose Laval because of Dionne’s carefulness.

His words #

• secunda secundae: second part of the second part; its “second half” is the cardinal virtues.
• credere Deum / Deo / in Deum: his English — believing God (formal object) / about God (material object) / which is good to do.
• per accidens: knowledge is bad only incidentally.
• reasoned-out knowledge: his rendering of scientia [ed.: science].
• unum et incorporeum: one and without a body.
• multum deficiens: much deficient (human reason in divine things).
• in multis erraverunt: they fell into many errors.
• a Deo dicta: as said by God.
• apud eundem: in the same person.
• torpor: laziness in learning.
• sapientis est ordinare: it belongs to the wise man to order (Dionne).
• angleworm / egg worm: his self-deprecation for a small mind.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae II-II, q. 2, a. 4: objections, sed contra, body, replies (read and translated).
• Lamentations 3:25.
• Washington Irving, life of Washington (passages on Adams, Jefferson, mourning, character, Brougham).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, On the Soul, proemium (all knowledge good; two reasons one is better).
• Aristotle, biological works (main criterion is what you know).
• Aristotle, book “on the universe” (praising God by three) [ed.: De mundo (inferred)].
• Aristotle on Homer and plot with beginning, middle, end.
• Thomas, question on whether the Trinity is known by natural reason (locus not stated).
• Thomas, question on the simplicity of God, eight articles (Summa theologiae I, q. 3, inferred); Summa contra Gentiles on the same.
• Both Summae, five arguments for God’s existence.
• St Teresa, saying on union; scripture “adds science, adds pain” (locus not stated).
• Dionne, article on the grace of Mary and the hypostatic union (Laval théologique et philosophique).

His questions #

• “Regulated by prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude — does that ring a bell?” The cardinal virtues, second half of the secunda secundae.
• Could you say that all love as such is good, as all knowledge is? No: love of something bad is as such bad.
• Which is the main criterion for one knowledge being better, what you know or how you know? What you know (biological works): better to know a better thing imperfectly.
• Which is better, to know the souls, the angels, or God? Each is better as its object is better; God best.
• What part of natural reason proves God is one and incorporeal? The second part of thinking about God, the substance of God; incorporeality under simplicity.
• Do those three objections seem to have any problem? Left to the replies: “I don’t see any problem” — then Thomas’s replies.
• Which Latin term matches “believing God”? Deo (relying on God); Deum is the material object; in Deum brings in the will.
• What in faith corresponds to Aristotle’s concrete sign after the abstract argument? Miracles, proportioned to us who begin knowledge in the senses.