Explicit Faith in the Trinity, the Merit of Believing, and Reason's Role in Faith (ST II-II q.2 a.8-10, q.3 a.1)

Orientation #

He begins directly at article 8 and refers back to “the same principle” of the earlier articles, that the greater ones believed explicitly and the lesser implicitly (prev. lecture). He does not say what comes next beyond starting the second question of Question 3 (“whether confession is necessary for salvation”) which he names but does not reach. The previous class treated q. 2, aa. 5–7 on explicit versus implicit faith, and the next finishes the question on confession and begins q. 4 on the Hebrews definition of faith.

The class, in order #

1. Whether the Trinity must be believed explicitly (q. 2, a. 8) (“to believe in the Trinity explicitly”) #

The point: explicit faith in the Trinity is now necessary for all, because the mystery of Christ cannot be explicitly believed without it.

• Obj. 1 (Hebrews 11): what is necessary is to believe that God is and is the rewarder of those who seek him; this can be believed without the Trinity. He calls it “a pretty good argument.” Reply: those two things were necessary at all times for all, but not sufficient for every time and for all. He says Thomas “takes the easy way out,” but “it’s a good answer.”
• Obj. 2 (John 17:6 with Augustine): “I have made known your name,” i.e. the name Father, hidden before, now manifest to the nations; so paternity and sonship were not to be believed before Christ. Reply: before Christ’s coming faith in the Trinity was hidden in the faith of the “old ones” (the greater ones); by Christ it was manifested to the world through the apostles. Same principle as before.
• Obj. 3: what must be believed explicitly is the object of beatitude, the highest good, which can be understood in God without the distinction of persons. He locates bonitas summa in the order of the Prima Pars: five parts of knowing God — does God exist, the substance of God (perfect, therefore good, goodness itself, summum bonum), what God does, the Trinity, and Christ come as man. Reply: God’s highest goodness as we now understand it through effects can be grasped without the Trinity, but as understood in itself, as seen by the blessed, it cannot; and the mission of the divine persons (of Christ and the Holy Spirit) leads us into beatitude.
• Sed contra: Genesis, “let us make man” (faciamus, plural) expresses the Trinity, so it was always of necessity to believe it. He notes it is “kind of interesting” that the body begins from the mystery of Christ rather than the Trinity.
• Corpus: the mystery of Christ cannot be explicitly believed without faith in the Trinity — the Son assumed flesh to renew the world through the grace of the Holy Spirit, and was conceived of the Holy Spirit without a human father. So as the mystery of Christ was believed explicitly by the greater and implicitly, in a shadowy way, by the lesser (Isaiah vs. “the lesser ones like you and me”), so too the Trinity; after grace is divulged all are held to believe it explicitly, and all reborn in Christ are so through calling on the Trinity (Matthew 28:19).
• Student exchange: in the early church some baptized in the name of Christ only; he does not recall the resolution but says the Trinity is implicit in it and the theologians take it up. Boston priest baptizing “Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier”: Cardinal Law declared those invalid.
• Student question: what does “explicit” mean for Muslims and Jews? He says what we have in the creeds, the profession of faith; Thomas “seems to be opening the door” — a Muslim might be saved without that explicit faith, like the simple ones; an explicit act is necessary for those who come to know the truth, and certainly for a Catholic.

2. Whether to believe is meritorious (q. 2, a. 9) (“Whether to believe is meritorious”) #

The point: belief is meritorious because it is subject to free will, moved by God, and ordered to God.

• Obj. 1: charity is the beginning of merit; faith “walks before” charity as nature does, and acts of nature don’t merit. Reply: nature is to charity as matter to form; faith is a disposition preceding the final form. Matter cannot act in virtue of the form before the form arrives, nor can the preceding disposition; once the form comes, both act in virtue of it — as the heat of the fire acts in virtue of the substantial form of fire, though there is a disposition while the thing is warming and has not yet burst into flame. So faith without charity produces nothing meritorious; charity “arriving on the scene” makes the act of faith meritorious. Later charity is called the form of faith (formed faith).
• Obj. 2: belief lies between opinion and science, neither of which merits. Reply, which he calls “important”: in science distinguish (a) assent, not subject to free will since the knower is forced by the demonstration (Aristotle: coactus a veritate), so not meritorious; and (b) actual consideration, which is in one’s power, and so meritorious if referred to the end of charity — the honor of God or the utility of the neighbour. In faith both are subject to free will. Opinion has only weak assent (Posterior Analytics I) and so does not proceed from a perfect will; it has little merit on the side of assent, though its consideration can merit.
  • Aside: Thomas commented on only two of Aristotle’s logical books, the Posterior Analytics (the high point of logic) and the Peri Hermeneias, the latter at a young student’s request; “wish he’d done more.”
  • Student: in the beatific vision, then, no merit — you are forced, “almost fixed”; another adds there is no increase in charity there. “I’ll take it anyway, despite all the drawbacks.”
• Obj. 3: one with a cause sufficiently inducing belief is not free to believe or not; one without it believes “light-headedly” (the Old Testament: who believes quickly is light of heart). Reply: the believer has something sufficient leading him — the authority of divine teaching confirmed by miracles, and the interior instinct of God inviting — so he is not light-headed; yet it does not compel in a way that removes merit. His gloss: I have a motive to believe the witness, “but I still don’t see the thing.”
  • Student: is this true of human teachers? “To some extent” — more so in sacred doctrine than mathematics.
• Sed contra (Hebrews): the saints through faith achieved the promises.
• Corpus: our acts merit insofar as they proceed from free will moved by God through grace (“well said”); every human act subject to free will (not, e.g., digestion), if related to God, can merit. To believe is an act of the understanding assenting to divine truth from the command of the will moved by God through grace — “a great definition”; hence subject to free will, in order to God, and meritorious. Student: so one who cannot exercise free will, e.g. in a coma, cannot merit.
• Aside: at Laval the two greatest minds were De Koninck and Msgr. Dionne; he wrote his thesis under Dionne but went to ask De Koninck’s view (“why did you come and ask me? You’ve got Dionne here”). Warren Murray went to study under De Koninck, who made clear Dionne was the greater mind; Mrs. De Koninck said the same to a young lady from Thomas Aquinas College. Dionne, sent to study under Maritain, came to see Maritain did not understand the text of Thomas and was leading people astray. Dionne once told him understanding Thomas when others don’t is “a temptation to pride.”

3. Whether reason brought in diminishes the merit of faith (q. 2, a. 10) (“diminishes the merit of faith”) #

The point: reason preceding the will to believe diminishes merit; reason following a prompt will is a sign of greater merit.

• Obj. 1 (Gregory): faith has no merit where human reason gives experience. Reply: Gregory speaks of the man who will not believe except on account of the reason; if one wills to believe on divine authority alone, having a demonstrative reason too (that God exists) does not diminish merit. De Koninck said he believed more because his mother told him about God than from studying Thomas; and “I think I can prove the existence of God, but I would not be so presumptuous as to say so.” Contrast those who will not believe without signs — “I’ve never seen a miracle” — as said to Christ.
• Obj. 2: what diminishes the nature of virtue diminishes merit, since happiness is the reward of virtue (Nicomachean Ethics I); faith is of things not appearing, and more reasons make them less non-apparent. Reply: reasons brought in for faith are not demonstrations giving vision, so the things remain non-apparent; they remove impediments by showing what is proposed is not impossible — e.g. against the Mohammedan who says “you’re really saying there are three gods.” Such arguments diminish neither faith nor merit. Demonstrative reasons are preambles (“walking before”), not articles; they diminish the ratio of faith (something now appears) but not the ratio of merit, which is the will’s promptness to believe what does not appear. “Subtle thing there.”
• Obj. 3: contraries have contrary causes (Empedocles: love and hate, elements joining and separating); what is contrary to faith — persecution or a reason persuading against — increases merit, so reason aiding faith must diminish it. His joke: “that’s why we persecute you.” Reply: what is repugnant to faith increases merit insofar as it shows the will more prompt and firm — the early fathers holding on though they could not answer the arguments, the martyrs, the sapientes not receding for the rationes philosophorum or the heretics’ arguments (“that Frenchman” reading objections to embarrass young Christians). But what goes along with faith does not always diminish the will’s promptness — “sometimes they do maybe.”
• Sed contra: 1 Peter 3:15, parate semper, be ready to give a reason for the faith and hope in you.
• Corpus: faith merits as subject to the will both as to use and as to assent. Reason relates to the believer’s will (i) as preceding — one has no prompt will to believe unless reason is brought in; this diminishes merit, as passion preceding choice diminishes the praise of moral virtue (wanting to be praised for alms); acts of moral virtue are to be done propter judicium rationis, non propter passionem. Illustration: doctor-prescribed suicide debated in a Boston committee — supporters bring in the suffering spouse and make you feel inhuman, pity rather than judgment of reason. So one must believe on divine authority, not human reason. (ii) as consequent — a prompt will loves the truth believed, thinks out and embraces whatever reasons it finds; this is a sign of greater merit, as consequent passion in moral virtue is a sign of a prompt will. Thomas “looking before and after” — “he must have read Shakespeare, in the original Latin.” John 4:42: the Samaritans, “not now because of your speech do we believe.”
• Closing question: better to have reasons or not? “Blessed those who do not see but believe” — before or after, or either way? Left there.

4. Confession as the exterior act of faith: the three confessions (q. 3, a. 1) (“whether confession is an act of faith”) #

The point: “confession” is equivocal; only the confession of things of faith is the act of faith.

• Two questions of q. 3: whether confession is an act of faith; whether necessary for salvation (not reached).
• Obj. 1: confession pertains to penance, of which it is a part (when he was young the sacrament was called confession, not reconciliation). Reply: threefold confession praised in Scripture — of things of faith (proper act of faith, ordered to faith’s end); of thanksgiving (act of latria, honoring God outwardly); of sins (ordered to the deletion of sin, the end of penance).
• Aside on equivocation as the commonest source of error (the father of logic): medievals confusing two philosophers of the same name; two Winston Churchills, statesman and novelist, and the letter on how to distinguish themselves; an American entertainer suing a namesake; a Richard mistaken for a brother; Chesterton mocking scholars who say a book “wasn’t written by X but by somebody else of the same name.”
• Obj. 2: one is held back from confessing by fear or confusion (Ephesians: pray that I may make known the mystery with confidence); not receding from good through fear pertains to fortitude. Reply: a removens prohibens is a per accidens cause, not per se (Physics VIII) — Samson holding up the roof. Fortitude removing the impediment is only the per accidens cause of confession. “Very subtle”: a different kind of per accidens cause than luck or chance.
• Obj. 3: fervor of faith also induces other exterior good works (Galatians 5:6, faith working through love), and those are not called acts of faith. Reply: interior faith through love causes the exterior acts of the other virtues by commanding, not eliciting; confession it produces as its own act.
• Sed contra: 2 Thessalonians, opus fidei in virtute; the gloss: confession is properly a work of faith.

5. Corpus and discussion: exterior speech signifies the heart (“we believe, on account of which also we speak”) #

The point: an exterior act belongs to the virtue to whose end its species refers.

• Fasting by its species is for compressing concupiscence, so an act of abstinence (joke: “what you guys do up here”). Confession of things of faith is by species ordered to the end of faith: 2 Corinthians 4:13, “we believe, therefore we speak”; exterior speech signifies what is conceived in the heart, so as the interior conception is properly an act of faith, so is the exterior. Boundary: telling your children not to steal is an act of justice, not of faith.
• Student: can one without charity confess the faith? Yes, but it must be faith.
• Students on Protestants’ “imperfect faith”: we believe what God has revealed and the Church proposes; they skip the proposing witness and think it is God directly; likened to right opinion; a real but incomplete confession. He: “Where did you get the Bible?” — not at the bookstore; their act implies the Church even if not explicitly.
• Student analogy: proving a geometrical theorem on the board — an exterior act of geometry? Writing the conclusion in large letters and the class accepting it would be human faith.
• Confessing articles without faith: PhDs in theology who do not believe in God; a Harvard graduate student told “it’s a pure hypothesis that St. John believed in the divinity of Christ,” and a professor who said one must come to hate John’s Gospel; he came to read the Gospels at Berquist’s house. Undermine the Church’s authority and you undermine the rest of revelation. “That was not the exterior act of theology.”

His words #

• bonitas summa / summum bonum: the object of beatitude, in the “substance of God” part of the Prima Pars.
• “walking before”: his gloss on faith preceding charity, and on preambula (preambles) to faith.
• formed faith: charity as the form of faith.
• coactus a veritate: forced by the truth; the assent of science is not free.
• removens prohibens: what removes an impediment; a per accidens cause (Samson).
• propter judicium rationis, non propter passionem: moral virtue acts from the judgment of reason, not passion.
• consequenter / preceding: the two ways reason relates to the will of the believer.
• latria: the virtue whose act is the confession of thanksgiving.
• jejunare: to fast, ordered to “compressing” concupiscence, an act of abstinence.
• parate semper: 1 Peter 3:15, be always prepared.

Texts #

Read in class

• Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 2, a. 8 (objections, replies, sed contra, corpus)
• Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 2, a. 9 (objections, replies, sed contra, corpus)
• Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 2, a. 10 (objections, replies, sed contra, corpus)
• Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 3, a. 1 (objections, replies, sed contra, corpus)

Mentioned

• Hebrews 11 (believe that he is and is the rewarder); Hebrews (saints through faith achieved the promises)
• John 17:6 with Augustine’s exposition; Genesis 1 faciamus; Matthew 28:19; John 4:42; 1 Peter 3:15; Galatians 5:6; Ephesians (pray for me); 2 Thessalonians (opus fidei in virtute) with gloss; 2 Corinthians 4:13
• Old Testament “who believes quickly is light of heart” (Sirach, inferred)
• Gregory, homily on faith having no merit where reason gives experience
• Aristotle, Posterior Analytics I (opinion weak); Physics VIII (removens prohibens); Nicomachean Ethics I (happiness reward of virtue)
• Thomas’s commentaries on Posterior Analytics and Peri Hermeneias
• Empedocles, love and hate as contrary causes

His questions #

• Where does Thomas say God is the bonitas summa? In the Prima Pars, the “substance of God” part, before the Trinity is taken up.
• What does explicit faith in the Trinity and in Christ mean, especially for Muslims and Jews? What is in the creeds; Thomas seems to open the door to implicit faith for those who have not come to know the truth.
• Is it in the beatific vision meritorious to assent? No — one is forced, and there is no increase in charity.
• Is it true of human teachers too that one believes on their authority without seeing? To some extent; more so in sacred doctrine than mathematics.
• Would Thomas say he expresses himself well, or the truth well? He must know the truth.
• Better to have reasons or not to have reasons — before or after? Left open, with “blessed those who do not see but believe.”
• If you tell your children not to steal, is that an act of faith? No — an act of justice.
• Can someone without charity make a confession of faith? Yes, but it must be faith.
• Where did you get the Bible? Not from the bookstore — from the Church, which their act of faith implies.