Summa III, Q.2, Arts. 7–8: The Union Is Created, Real Relations vs. Relations of Reason, and Union vs. Assumption

Orientation #

He recalls that the distinction between real relations and relations of reason “came up earlier in the prima pars” (divine understanding and will, creation) and “will come up again when you study creation.” No reference to last time or next time. The previous class dealt with whether human nature was joined to the Word accidentally, from the Sentences commentary; the next takes up whether the union is the greatest of unions.

The class, in order #

1. Opening: Teresa of Avila on angels and on the glorified humanity (“converse now, not with men, but with angels”) #

Point: two passages from Teresa’s Life as a devotional entry into studying Christ’s humanity.

• Ch. 24: her confessor urges her to break off friendships that were not sinful; told to pray the Veni Creator, she has her first rapture and hears “I will have thee converse now, not with men, but with angels.” He adds his old teacher Kasurik’s advice: make an act of will opening your mind to your guardian angel so he can direct your thoughts.
• Later passage: the Lord reveals first only his hands, then his face, then (on St Paul’s day) the whole resurrection body, “leading me according to my natural weakness”; the beauty of glorified bodies alone would be the greatest bliss. Seen “only with the eyes of the soul” (imaginary vision). He notes this fits our present study of Christ’s humanity, “got to be led into things gradually.”
• Aside: a handout on Thomas as teacher (sacred doctor) is passed round; more copies to come.

2. Article 7: objections and sed contra (“this is a very difficult reading”) #

Point: is the union of the divine and human nature something created?

• Obj. 1: nothing in God can be created, since everything in God is God; but the union is in God, since God is united to human nature.
• Obj. 2: the end is what is most potent in each thing; the end (term) of the union is the divine hypostasis, which is uncreated; so the union should be judged by the condition of its term.
• Obj. 3: propter quod unumquodque tale, et illud magis (“a great principle in philosophy”); man is said to be creator on account of the union; so much more is the union not created but the creator himself.
• Sed contra: everything that begins to be ex tempore (he: “from time”; in English “in time,” “in the fullness of time”) is created, since God is eternal; the union was not from eternity; therefore created.
• He warns the body goes back to “some very subtle things” about relations that Aristotle first saw and Thomas learned from him (and Averroes/Avicenna).

3. Beings of reason: negations and relations of reason (“philosophy is the only subject we can get paid for talking about nothing”) #

Point: real relations have “hardly any being”; relations of reason have none outside the mind.

• Beings of reason (entia rationis) are of two kinds: negations and (some) relations. Some thought all relations are of reason; no, there are real ones too.
• Negations: “Nothing is nothing” (true affirmative), “Nothing is not something” (true negative): nothing has no being except in the mind, which takes nothing “as if it were something.” Privation: blindness is a lack, yet we truly say this man is blind; grammatically “blindness” works like “science” (a scientist by science, blind by blindness): “odd things is beings of reason.”
• Relations of reason, several kinds:
  • Logical: genus to species (animal to dog, cat, horse; number to odd and even) and back. These follow on the mind’s separating out what is common; dog, cat, horse don’t exist out here, only this dog. (The child who, after being shown dogs, says “mommy, there’s a dog” separates it on his own.) Only in reason “unless you’re taking this right,” i.e. Plato, refuted by Aristotle in Book VII of wisdom.
  • Socrates is Socrates: a real relation needs two things, here there is one; the mind, coming back on itself, multiplies Socrates. Aristotle: predicating a thing of itself gives no reason for its being itself, it is “a brevity,” obvious.
  • Today is before tomorrow (student raises it): both relata must exist; nothing of tomorrow or yesterday exists; reason takes them together and compares. Contrast: my being taller or shorter than you is real, based on my size and yours.
  • Right and left: real basis in my body (right arm stronger); but the right and left side of a column (Thomas’s example, Roman pillars) has no basis in the column, only in me.
  • Seeing and seen (Aristotle’s case, “the one going to come up here”): the relation of seer to seen is real, of seen to seer only of reason; reason, understanding one as related to the other, must think the reciprocal. Is the glass’s being seen anything in the glass? Seeing is a quasi-spiritual activity; the glass, material, has no share in it. If someone loves you and you don’t know it, nothing is in you. So two relations “always come in couples,” but one real, one of reason.
• General point: relations said of God “from time,” e.g. becoming Creator. St James: no change, “not even a shadow of a change,” in God; the whole change is in you and me (he created your soul); we have a real relation to God, God none to us. “It’s hard to understand, right? But it comes up.”

4. Body of article 7 (“this union about which we speak is a certain relation”) #

Point: the union is a relation between the two natures as they come together in the one person of the Son of God, and such a relation is created.

1. Every relation considered between God and creature is really in the creature, by whose change the relation comes to be (from the prima pars).
2. It is not really in God, only according to reason, since it is not born by a change of God.
3. Therefore the union is not in God really but only according to reason, though it is truly said that the divine nature is united to the human; in the human nature, a creature, the relation is really there; therefore the union is something created.

• Example contrasted: if I kick you, I am kicker and you kicked, but both of us are changed (your shape, my moving leg). Is that how God changes us, being involved and changed too? No.
• Aside: the most complete text is De Potentia, where Thomas distinguishes five kinds of relations of reason: one (of logic) set apart, and four others, two from Aristotle’s text and two from Avicenna. Only these few men understood this.

5. The same distinction in the prima pars: God’s understanding and will, the Trinity, creation (“absolutely essential to understanding God”) #

Point: the real/of-reason distinction runs through the whole of theology.

• We treat divine understanding before divine will because in us they are two powers and understanding moves the will by proposing its object (the good as understood); so we say God understands himself and his goodness and therefore loves himself, a mover-moved relation. Real? No, like Socrates to Socrates: two imperfect thoughts corresponding to the same thing.
• “The form by which God understands is himself, so he primarily understands himself”: is God really the beginning of his own understanding? If so his understanding would not be the same as himself; again a relation of reason.
• But Father to Son and Son to Father are real relations. So the distinction is “absolutely essential” for God and the Trinity.
• Creation: our dependence on God is a real relation in us; God’s being our Creator is not a real relation in him.
• Vatican II (from the handout, to be looked at when copies come): to illustrate the mysteries of salvation integre (as a whole), quantum fieri potest, “with St Thomas as teacher.”

6. A second distinction: secundum dici vs. secundum esse (“nothing is double in itself”) #

Point: Aristotle’s distinction in the Categories is not the same as real vs. of reason, though people confuse them.

• Plato defined relation as “what is said to be of another in any way whatsoever”; that makes knowledge a relation, since knowledge is always of something.
• But knowledge is fundamentally a quality, with a relation following upon it (relative secundum dici); double is nothing in itself, its whole nature is to be of another (relative secundum esse), so double goes in the category of relation, knowledge in quality.
• Thomas sometimes crosses the two distinctions: four members. “I wouldn’t recommend it until you’ve got a very quiet room, padded room.”

7. Digression: Aristotle on the two causes of difficulty (“as the eyes of the bat are at the light of day”) #

Point: relations are doubly hard, for both of Aristotle’s reasons.

• Book II of wisdom: difficulty can lie in the thing known or in the weakness of our mind. Natural philosophy is harder than geometry because of the thing: time hardly exists (no time in the now, “that’s all that’s real”). Wisdom/theology is harder because of our mind: the bat at daylight (Aristotle thought the bat flies at night because the sun is too bright), though light makes things knowable; Plato’s cave, those who get out would be blinded.
• So: creaturely relations (my being taller than you) hardly have being, hard to know because hardly knowable; the Trinitarian relations are most knowable in themselves but not to us. Aristotle’s discovery: what is more knowable is less knowable to us. “Very difficult thing”: people constantly get into trouble here, in God, the Trinity, creation, and now the Incarnation.

8. Replies to the objections of article 7 (“its being depends on its subject”) #

• Ad 1: the union is not in God really but only according to reason; God is said to be united to the creature because the creature is united to him, without any change in God, the knower/known case from Book V of wisdom.
• Ad 2: the ratio (thought, definition) of a relation, like that of motion, depends on its term; its being depends on its subject. Fatherhood is toward my son but real by a foundation in me; teaching logic and teaching geometry are two relations to the same student, real by the teacher’s possessing the science. Since the union has real being only in the created nature, it has only created being.
• Ad 3: man is said to be and is God on account of the union insofar as it terminates at the divine hypostasis; but it doesn’t follow that the union is the creator, because “created” regards being more than relation.

9. Article 8, entry: what “assumption” means, and the Assumption of Mary (“her body was taken to her soul”) #

Point: assumption = taking to oneself (ad se sumptio); a student exchange on Mary’s Assumption.

• Students: does Mary’s assumption mean she takes on Christ’s glorified body? He: no; if she died, body and soul were separated and the body was taken to the soul, otherwise one would speak of the ascension of Mary. A student: he’d always heard Christ ascended by his own power, Mary was assumed because not by her own. He: that works if you take her as not having died. Pius XII’s definition seemed to him to speak of her as having died, though not clearly; the East speaks of dormition, sleep (Paul speaks of death as sleep because of the ease of resurrection for God’s power). A student: not officially defined whether she died, a point between East and West. Left open.

10. Article 8, objections and sed contra; synecdoche (“Other is the union, other the incarnation”) #

• Obj. 1: relations, like motions, are specified by their term; union and assumption have the same term, the divine person.
• Obj. 2: the one uniting and the one assuming, the united and the assumed, seem the same; union and assumption follow the action and passion (grammatically active and passive).
• Obj. 3: Damascene, Book III: union shows only the joining, not to what it was made; incarnation and humanatio determine to what; so does assumption; so they seem the same.
• Aside on Damascene’s incarnatio / humanatio: “the Word was made flesh” is synecdoche: a composing part (flesh) for the whole man. Distinguished from antonomasia, which is universal whole and part; both Greek words with no English equivalent, common in Augustine and Thomas.
• Sed contra: the divine nature is said to be united but not assumed.

11. Body of article 8: three differences (“union implies the relation itself, but assumption the acting upon”) #

1. Union implies the relation of the natures as coming together in one person. Every relation that begins to be in time is caused by some change, and change consists in acting and being acted upon. So the first and chief difference: union = the relation; assumption = the action (assuming) or passion (assumed). He took something from the Blessed Virgin, something was taken from her: that is assumption.
2. Hence assumption is taken as in becoming (in fieri), union as made. So the one uniting is said to be united, but the one assuming is not said to be assumed. Human nature signified in the term of the assumption to the hypostasis is said to be a man: the Son of God, uniting human nature to himself, is a man; but human nature in the abstract is signified as assumed, and we do not say the Son of God is human nature; he took human nature.
3. A relation, especially of equality, is not more toward one extreme than the other; action and passion relate diversely to agent and patient. So assumption determines both the term from which (ab alio) and to which (ad se, sumptio); union determines neither. Hence one can say indifferently that the human nature is united to the divine or the reverse; but not that the divine nature was assumed by the human, since the human nature was joined to the divine personhood so that the divine person might subsist in human nature. “Are you thoroughly convinced now that these aren’t synonyms?”

12. Replies to article 8 (“from words put forth disorderly, heresy arises”) #

• Ad 1: union and assumption relate to the term diversely, as shown.
• Ad 2: uniting and assuming are not entirely the same: every person assuming is uniting but not the reverse; the Father united human nature to the Son, not to himself, so he is uniting but not assuming. Likewise united and assumed differ: the divine nature is united, not assumed. Hilary: ex verbis inordinate prolatis heresy arises; you don’t say human nature took on the divine nature. Dickens: we are not always masters of our words, sometimes they master us.
• Ad 3: assumption determines to whom the coupling is made on the part of the one assuming (ad se sumptio); incarnation and humanatio on the part of the assumed (flesh, human nature: “made flesh,” “made a man”). So assumption differs in definition from both union and incarnation/humanizing.
• Caution on “a humanized God”: the word is misused as if God were made more human. Break “after those two horrendous articles.”

His words #

• “wisdom” (second, fifth, seventh book of wisdom) [ed.: Metaphysics]
• “ability” or “power” for the faculties of understanding and will [ed.: potency]
• “beings of reason” (entia rationis): negations and relations of reason
• “privation or lack”: blindness
• “relations of reason” vs. “real relations”; “relations come in couples”
• propter quod unumquodque tale, et illud magis: “on account of what a thing is such, that more so”
• ex tempore: “from time,” which he renders “in time”
• ratio of a relation: “the thought, the definition”
• esse reale: real being
• secundum dici vs. secundum esse: said of another vs. whose whole being is toward another
• “assumption” = ad se sumptio, taking to oneself; “assumed body and soul”
• “dormition”: Eastern term for Mary’s sleep/death
• incarnatio, humanatio (Damascene in Latin): made flesh, made man; “humanizing”
• synecdoche (composed whole and part) vs. antonomasia (universal whole and part)
• in fieri: in coming to be, vs. made
• ex verbis inordinate prolatis (Hilary): from words put forth disorderly

Texts #

Read in class

• Teresa of Avila, Life, ch. 24 (rapture, “converse with angels”) and a later passage on visions of Christ’s hands, face, and glorified humanity
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 2, a. 7 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 2, a. 8 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Vatican II, one phrase on studying the mysteries “with St Thomas as teacher” (from the handout)

Mentioned

• Thomas, De Potentia (five kinds of relations of reason)
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I (relations of God to creature; divine understanding and will; Trinity; creation)
• Aristotle, Categories, chapter on relation; Metaphysics II (difficulty of truth), V (knower and known), VII (against Plato’s forms)
• Plato, Republic (the cave); Plato’s definition of relation
• St James (no shadow of change in God)
• John Damascene, Book III (union vs. incarnation)
• Hilary; Charles Dickens; Pius XII’s definition of the Assumption; St Paul on death as sleep
• his teacher Kasurik

His questions #

• Is the union of the divine and human nature something created? Yes: it is a relation real only in the created nature, so it has only created being.
• Is nothing anything? How can I make two true statements about nothing? Nothing has no being except in the mind, which takes it as if it were something.
• Is blindness something in the world? It is a lack, a non-being, yet truly affirmed of a man.
• Is “Socrates is Socrates” a real relation? No: a real relation needs two things; the mind multiplies the one Socrates.
• Is today before tomorrow a real relation? No: both relata must exist; reason compares them.
• Is the glass’s being seen anything in the glass? No: the seer is really related to the seen, the seen to the seer only by reason.
• Has God really changed in becoming Creator, or in having something united to him? No: the whole change is in the creature; God’s relation is of reason only.
• Is there a real relation between the divine understanding and the divine will? No: two imperfect thoughts of the same thing; but Father to Son is real.
• What does “assumption” mean, and did Mary die? Taking to oneself; whether she died is left open.
• Are union and assumption the same? No: union is the relation (made), assumption the action/passion (in becoming); the divine nature is united but not assumed.