Summa III, Q.2, Arts. 5–6: Christ's Soul and Body Joined to a Pre-existing Person, and Why the Union Is Not Accidental

Orientation #

He picks up mid-article: “we’re still going to reply the first objection there” (a.5, the union of body and soul in Christ), refers back to the two errors “we talked about” (one nature / two persons) and to “another article on that” about the soul being joined to the body (prev. lecture). He closes: “next, Cobart is going to be dealing with union itself.” The previous class treated person, hypostasis and suppositum and the union of body and soul in Christ; the next takes up a.7-8 on union as created and union vs. assumption.

The class, in order #

1. a.5 reply 1: body and soul joined to something more principal (“comes to a person or hypostasis pre-existing”) #

Point: in mere men soul and body are joined so as to exist per se; in Christ they are joined so as to be joined to something more chief, which subsists in the nature composed of them, so no new hypostasis results.

• His line diagram: the second line is drawn to an endpoint that already exists (it was the end of the other line). “Kind of an amazing thing”: an end point existing before its line. So the Word did not subsist in human nature until human nature “had been drawn to this person from Mary.”
• Objection he voices: then the union of soul and body in Christ has less efficacy than in me (mine produces the person Duane Berquist). Reply: junction to something more noble does not take away power or dignity but increases it.
• Comparison in the text: the sensing soul constitutes a species in beasts as ultimate form, not in men, though in men it is more noble and more powerful. Old teacher Kasurik: sap of the tree vs. blood of the animal, the same thing but blood more perfect.
• Student: an eagle’s sensitive soul sees better than I do. Reply: touch is the foundation of all the senses, found in all of them. Aristotle: the man with a better sense of touch has a better understanding; Thomas, end of the commentary on book II On the Soul, gives two reasons: (1) touch is the foundation of the senses, so a better touch means a better sensing soul, a disposition for the understanding soul; (2) touch depends on a balance of hot/cold, wet/dry, so a better-balanced body receives a better soul.
• De Koninck (commencement address at Assumption College) against Descartes: “I sit, therefore I am”; moderns prefer sight, but the basic thoughts (substance, sympathy for others) go back to touch. The Third Man (Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Vienna, diluted medicines): from the top of the ride people are dots, all visual, no feeling.
• Student: then Christ, with a more perfect soul and finer touch, felt pain more; hands and feet, where touch is most nerved, were pierced. He adds Brutus’s eulogy in Julius Caesar: “the elements so mixed in him… this was a man.”

2. a.5 reply 2: Damascene’s words understood two ways (“he assumed human nature in atomo”) #

Point: Damascene’s phrase does not mean a common human nature was assumed.

1. “Human nature” can mean the nature as abstracted from every individual (in bare contemplation, no images), or as in all individuals. The Son did not assume it as it is only in the consideration of reason (he would not have assumed the real thing; only a Platonist separated form could be meant, against Luke 24:39, “a spirit does not have flesh and bones”); nor as in all individuals (he would have assumed all men). So he assumed it in atomo (Greek for individual), but not in another individual than the person of the Son.
2. Or Damascene refers not to soul-plus-body making one human nature, but to the two natures, from which no third common nature results (it would be sayable of many); hence “nor would there ever be generated another Christ.” He calls the Damascene text “a little obscure… don’t worry too much about that.”

3. a.5 reply 3: two beginnings of bodily life (“anima Christi, sanctifica me”) #

Point: the Word is the beginning of life as efficient (extrinsic) cause, but life is the being of living things (the Philosopher), and the body lives formally through the soul; the Word cannot be the form of a body (treatise on God’s simplicity), so body and soul had to be joined, or he would not be a man.

• Application: receiving the Eucharist you receive his soul too; the body is there by the words of consecration, the soul because it is joined to the body. The prayer Anima Christi puts the soul first. Lex orandi, lex credendi: would the prayer be right if soul and body were not joined?

4. Ten categories divided into two or three (“Thomas divides it into three”) #

Point: a student wanted the ten categories divided in two (substance/accident); Thomas divides in three: substance; what exists in the substance but is not what it is (quantity, quality, relation); the last six.

• Are the last six accidents the way quantity and quality are? My clothing is not in me as my size, health, geometry, fatherhood are. The threefold division brings out that being clothed or being in this room is “less an accident than something like an accident”; Thomas’s phrase is accidentaliter, id est habens se [ed.: habens se accidentaliter], and he does not say habitus.

5. a.6, the objections: “habitu inventus est ut homo” (“You got to look at the Latin here”) #

Point: four arguments that human nature was united to the Word accidentally; “I’m convinced, aren’t you?”

1. Paul, Phil 2:7: habitu inventus est ut homo. Aristotle’s category echein, “to have,” is habitus in Latin (Thomas, Albert), and being clothed falls under it; habitus comes accidentally. He translates habitus as “outfit”: extrinsic yet fitted to you. Distinction: habitus as a genus (something outside you) vs. habit as first species of quality (habit/disposition; then ability or power/impotency; sense qualities; figure), something in you. “Haves and have-nots” is not about virtue but external things; first sense of “have” that comes to mind is exterior (house, car, money). Aside: Benedict XVI on money as unreal.
2. What comes after complete being comes accidentally; accident (Porphyry’s Isagoge, Aristotle Metaphysics V) is what can be present or absent without corruption of the subject; human nature comes in time to one perfect from eternity. Aside: Porphyry’s lost attacks on Christianity, burnt by a Christian emperor; Augustine in City of God on why he did not convert.
3. Everything is substance or accident; human nature does not pertain to the divine nature of the Son, since the union was not in the nature.
4. A tool comes accidentally; Damascene, De Fide Orthodoxa III, calls the flesh of Christ an instrument of the divinity.

• Sed contra: what is said accidentally predicates not aliquid but how much, how, or having itself somehow; against Pope Alexander’s decree that Christ as man is aliquid.

6. Corpus: two heresies and the five accidental unions (“the Catholic faith medium tenens”) #

Point: the mystery (mysterium, not fully understood) was attacked by those confounding the natures and those separating the persons; the Church holds the middle.

• Eutyches, Dioscorus (Monophysites, “one nature”): Christ from two natures but not in two natures after the union. Nestorius, Theodore of Mopsuestia: two persons, Son of God and son of man. He recalls the Trinity parallel: one person, so one nature; two natures, so two persons.
• The five Nestorian unions, each accidental: (1) indwelling as in a temple (like the Holy Spirit in you, Paul, or me in my house, “more like the last six categories”); (2) affection, wills conformed, like two men in harmony; (3) operation, as a hammer is my tool; (4) dignity of honor; (5) equivocation, communication of names. On (5): a student’s earlier question about Martha and “Son of God”; we too are sons of God (John), equivocally.
• Later teachers, fleeing heresy, fell in “through ignorance”: Lombard’s first opinion (Sentences III d.6), one person but two hypostases, a man from body and soul assumed by the Word; third opinion, soul and body not joined to each other but each accidentally to the Word, so as not to multiply persons. Aside on the plan of the Sentences: books I-II procession from God, III-IV return, hence Incarnation in book III, as Thomas too places it in the return. These articles “might seem logic chopping” but track the history of mistakes.
• Both fall into Nestorius: two hypostases = two persons (person is hypostasis in a rational nature); Nestorius also spoke of one person by unity of dignity, which the fifth synod (Second Council of Constantinople) anathematised. Indwelling as in a temple does not differ from clothing; the third opinion is even worse in denying soul joined to body.
• Faith: not by essence or nature, not secundum accidens, but in a middle way, secundum subsistentiam or hypostasis. Fifth synod: Apollinaris and Eutyches “worshipping the confusion” that destroys both natures (“neither God nor man, a serious mistake”); Theodore and Nestorius “rejoicing in division,” an affectual union; the Church confesses union “according to composition.” “There you go, the word composition”: the council’s word, so “I can’t be too tough on Thomas” for using it, though he extends it to secundum subsistentiam. Second opinion is the faith; first and third are condemned heresies, not opinions. “Boom.”
• Aside: Paul’s insensati to the Galatians at Mass; Galatians as Celts, ancestors of the Irish.

7. Reply 1: examples need not be alike in every way (“God is not a point”) #

Point: Damascene, book III: a likeness alike in every way would be the same thing, not an example; least of all in divine things, both in theology (the persons) and the dispensation (Incarnation).

• His lines: the second line has no endpoint of its own but is drawn to one already there; “don’t extend this too much.” St Patrick’s shamrock is one in three but not eternal, “good enough for the Irish.” Aside: half Irish, mother a Burke, no scholarship behind the Charlemagne descent.
• Human nature is assimilated to clothing not as accidental union but in that the Word is seen through it, as a man through clothes, and the clothing is changed to the figure of the wearer (breaking in a shoe) while the wearer is unchanged; human nature is made better, the Word unchanged (Augustine, 83 Questions). Alternative he notes: the last chapter of the Categories distinguishes many senses of “to have,” so Paul’s text might be explained by another sense than clothing; Thomas does not go that way here.

8. Reply 2: what comes to complete being can be drawn into it (“taken to the very same being”) #

Point: what comes after esse completum comes accidentally unless drawn into communion of that being.

• The comparison: in the resurrection the body comes to the pre-existing soul, not accidentally, because taken to the same being so that it has vital being through the soul; not so whiteness, whose being differs from the man’s. Even now the body shares the soul’s existence, but does not wholly contain it. Argument: the soul does something not in the body, understanding; it understands the universal, separated from the continuous (everything in the continuous is individual), so reason is not continuous, not a body; and one must be before acting (“even Descartes… I think therefore I am, kind of an axiom”), so the soul’s being is not entirely in the body; it takes its being with it and the body will share the same being again. Contrast: geometry comes to my soul accidentally, a new being not part of being a soul.
• Applied: the Word had complete being from eternity according to hypostasis; human nature comes not to one being as nature (as body to soul) but to one being of the hypostasis. “That’s something to chew.” Reason thinks before it understands; understanding the soul-body case helps, “yet there’s a difference.” At the resurrection the body will not give me a being I lack but partake of it; I’ll be more complete, more perfect.
• Aside: Euclid’s book on continued proportion, “bestseller for two thousand years”; Einstein’s two wonders (magnet, Euclid), Einstein on Mozart (“Beethoven made his music, Mozart found it”); music in heaven vocal, properly speaking; Palestrina; Socrates in the Phaedo, philosophy the highest music; Aristotle, with the truth all things harmonize; Benedict XVI plays Mozart, John Paul II on the Church’s homage; Ave verum (text more ancient than Mozart); Dove sono reused as an Agnus Dei; “if my soul’s getting really disordered I go to Corelli.”

9. Reply 3: substance said in two ways (“go forward wisely and slow”) #

Point: accident is divided against substance, but substance (Metaphysics V) means either essence/nature or suppositum/hypostasis; union according to hypostasis suffices for non-accidental union, even without union in nature (unlike my body rejoining my soul, which forms one complete nature).

• Digression on Metaphysics V: Friar Lawrence’s “wisely and slow, they stumble that run fast” applies a fortiori to wisdom. Book IV finds wisdom is about being as being and the one and many, and that “being” and “one” are equivocal by reason; book V distinguishes and orders the senses of the words used throughout wisdom and in the axioms. The commonest mistake (Aristotle’s book on mistakes [ed.: Sophistical Refutations]) is mixing senses of words equivocal by reason, so book V keeps him from stumbling. De Koninck: Thomas was a humble student of Aristotle, reading “carefully, frequently, and with reverence”; being teachable is a matter of will.

10. Reply 4: joined vs. separate instrument (“truly humanatus… not synecdochically”) #

Point: not everything taken up as a tool pertains to the hypostasis (the sword), but what is taken to the unity of the hypostasis can still be an instrument, as the body or members of a man.

• Athanasian Creed: nothing more like the Incarnation than the union of soul and body; Thomas: not as form and matter but as joined instrument. Distinction (Summa Contra Gentiles): my hand vs. my ballpoint pen or hammer.
• Nestorius: human nature taken up only (“only, that’s important”) per modum instrumenti, not to unity of hypostasis, so he denied that man was truly Son of God. Cyril, epistle to the monks of Egypt: Emmanuel did not take on merely the office of instrument; God was truly humanatus, properly not synecdochically. Damascene’s “tool” pertains to unity of hypostasis, like my hand.

His words #

• per se: by itself, as the line drawn standing alone.
• efficacy: the power of the soul-body union; increased, not lessened, by junction to something nobler.
• in atomo: Greek for individual.
• habitus / echein: the category “to have”; his rendering “outfit” (extrinsic but fitted); vs. habit as first species of quality.
• accidentaliter, id est habens se: Thomas’s phrase, “having itself accidentally,” not “habitus.”
• accident: what can be present or absent without corruption of the subject (Porphyry).
• aliquid: “something,” what Christ as man must be predicated to be.
• mysterium: something we can’t fully understand.
• Monophysites: from the Greek for one nature.
• secundum subsistentiam / secundum compositionem: the council’s word “composition,” Thomas’s “subsistence.”
• esse completum: complete being; what comes after it is accidental unless drawn into it.
• equivocal by reason: words with many senses, ordered, as in Metaphysics V.
• “fifth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics V]; “book on mistakes” [ed.: Sophistical Refutations].
• joined instrument: my hand, vs. a separate tool like a hammer.
• humanatus: “made man,” properly, not synecdochically (Cyril).

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, Summa Theologiae III q.2 a.5, replies to objections 1-3.
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae III q.2 a.6, entire.
• Philippians 2:7 (habitu inventus est ut homo); Luke 24:39. Mentioned
• Thomas, Commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul, end of book II (touch and understanding).
• Aristotle, Metaphysics IV-V; Categories (last chapter, “to have”); Sophistical Refutations (inferred, “book on mistakes”).
• Porphyry, Isagoge; Augustine, City of God (on Porphyry); Augustine, 83 Questions.
• John Damascene, De Fide Orthodoxa III; Peter Lombard, Sentences III d.6; Summa Contra Gentiles (joined instrument); Athanasian Creed; Cyril, Epistle to the monks of Egypt; Second Council of Constantinople.
• Shakespeare, Julius Caesar (Brutus’s eulogy), Romeo and Juliet (Friar Lawrence); Plato, Phaedo; Euclid; the film The Third Man; Anima Christi; Ave verum.

His questions #

• Does the union of body and soul in Christ have less efficacy than in me? No: junction to something more noble increases power and dignity.
• How does Aristotle know a man with better touch understands better? Thomas’s two reasons: touch grounds all senses; its balance means a better-disposed body for a better soul.
• Is being clothed an accident the way size or health is? Less an accident than something like an accident; hence Thomas’s threefold division.
• Would the Anima Christi be right if soul and body were not joined? No: the soul is present in the Eucharist because joined to the body; lex orandi, lex credendi.
• Is the Holy Spirit dwelling in you a substantial union? No, more like me being in my house.
• Is human nature an accident because it comes in time to one complete from eternity? Not if drawn into the same being, as the risen body comes to the soul; unlike whiteness or geometry.
• How do we know the soul’s being is not entirely in the body? It understands the universal, apart from the continuous, and one must be before one acts.
• Does being a tool make the union accidental? Not a joined instrument, like my hand; Nestorius erred by saying “only” an instrument.