Grace Natural to Christ, the Assuming Person, and 'Simply' vs. 'In Some Way' (ST III, Q.2 a.12 – Q.3 aa.1–2)

Orientation #

He refers back to “that beautiful likeness I was giving you earlier” from the De Potentia on the power of generating and the power of creating (prev. lecture), and ends by saying “one more article”, so the class closes with q. 3 a. 2 with the remaining articles of q. 3 to follow. The previous class worked through De Potentia on generation vs. creation and the hypostatic union through grace; the next continues q. 3 aa. 3–6.

The class, in order #

1. q. 2 a. 12: is the grace of union natural to Christ? (“the grace of union was not natural to the man Christ”) #

The point: “natural” is said in two ways, and in one of them both the grace of union and habitual grace are natural to Christ.

• Three objections read: (1) the union was made in the person, not the nature, and a thing is denominated from its term, so the grace should be called personal rather than natural; (2) grace is divided against nature (gratuitous from God vs. natural from an intrinsic beginning), and opposites are not denominated from each other; (3) it is not natural to Christ by the divine nature (else the other persons would have it) nor by the human nature (else all men would). He notes: “there’s got to be some distinctions about what nature is.”
• Sed contra: Augustine, Enchiridion — in the taking on of human nature, grace becomes in a way natural to that man in whom no sin can enter.
• Corpus: Aristotle, “fifth book of Wisdom” (the fifth after the natural books): nature means (a) birth itself, (b) the essence of a thing — Thomas takes the first and the last of Aristotle’s senses. So “natural” in two ways: from the essential principles (fire carried upward), or what one has from birth (Ephesians 2:3 “by nature sons of wrath” = original sin; Wisdom 12:10 “bad is their birth and natural their malice”).
• Conclusion: Christ’s grace (of union and habitual) is not natural as caused by the principles of his human nature; it is natural as caused by the divine nature, and natural as from his birth, since from conception the human nature was joined to the divine person and the soul filled with grace. “In some way, Christ is naturally holy.”
• Replies: (1) true that the union is in the person, but it was caused by the power of the divine nature and belongs to Christ from his nativity; (2) no contradiction: it is grace as not from merit, natural as from the divine power in his humanity from birth; (3) not natural by human nature as caused by its principles, hence not owed to all men; yet natural by his human nature because of what was private to his nativity — conceived of the Holy Spirit so as to be the same one, natural Son of God and of man; and natural by the divine nature as the active beginning, which belongs to the whole Trinity.

2. Prooemium of q. 3: eight questions about the one assuming (“about the union, from the side of the person assuming”) #

He lists the eight: whether a divine person can assume; whether the divine nature; whether the nature abstracting from personality; whether one person without another (“that better be so” or we are in heresy); whether any person could assume; whether many persons could assume one nature in number (“almost as bad as how many angels dancing”); whether one person could assume two natures in number; and the “most interesting one”, whether it was more suitable for the Son to assume — he expects Thomas to hold the Father or Holy Spirit could have, so the question of fitness is real.

• Asides: Father Boulet on “mental indigestion”; an English translation with handwritten “yes / no / skip” beside the articles — the abbreviated course; one should rather understand a little more each time through.

3. Digression: order of generating and creating, faith and reason (“the generating of the Son is before”) #

The point: the same divine power has no order in substance but an order in its acts, and this is proportional to the order of natural reason and faith.

1. In substance the power of generating and the power of creating are the same (the divine essence); considered in their acts, generating the Son is before creating — John’s Gospel: the Word, and all things made through the Word.
2. Paul VI, encyclical on the Eucharist: a conciliar definition holds for all time because mysteries of faith are defined in thoughts belonging to universal, necessary (“common”) experience — e.g. “God has no parts”: everyone understands whole and part.
3. So what comes from reason naturally is prior to faith as used to express it; hence Augustine’s letter (Boulet used to cite it): no opposition between reason and faith, since we are capable of faith because we have reason. He warns not to press the likeness too far.

4. q. 3 a. 1: does it belong to a divine person to assume? (“two things are implied. To wit, the beginning”) #

The point: “to assume” means to take to oneself, implying a beginning of the act and a term, and the person is both.

• Objections: (1) a person is most perfect and the perfect admits no addition; assuming adds what is taken to the one taking. Aside: the Compendium of Theology shows God infinite, then that there are no accidents in God — we need accidents (geometry, justice) for our perfections, but nothing can be added to infinite perfection. Einstein on Mozart: “perfection is imperfectable”; the emperor’s “too many notes” — “just as many as I need.” (2) What something is assumed to is communicated to it, as dignity to Cinderella marrying the prince; but a person is by definition incommunicable (Part I; “Richard’s definition”). (3) A person is constituted through its nature, and the constituted cannot act on its constituting cause.
• Sed contra: Augustine, “book on faith to Peter”: the form of the slave the only-begotten God took into himself; he is a person.
• Corpus: assumption implies the beginning of the act (it belongs to the person properly to act; the taking of flesh was done by the divine action) and the term (the union was made in the person, as said above). So most properly the person assumes the nature.
• His comment: Thomas is not here giving a reason why it is suitable, only what “assumption” means; suitability may come in the objections and later articles. God is in no way perfected; something is done for human nature.

5. Replies to a. 1 (“Whence not God but man is what perfected”) #

• Ad 1: a divine person is infinite, so no addition. Cyril, synodal letter (Council of Ephesus): we do not understand the mode of union as by addition; as in adoption nothing is added to God but the divine is apponitur — “placed to”, the English has “united to”; he suggests “applied” — to man. “Not God but man is perfected”: human nature is given subsistence in a divine person. Contrast with marriage, where each is completed by the other; here only human nature is completed. Cyril’s other word, “co-apposition”, he looked up and leaves unexplained.
• Ad 2: incommunicable means not said of many supposita; but many things are said of one person (geometer, white, grandfather). A created person has many natures running together accidentally (quantity, quality); what is private to the divine person is that, from its infinity, two natures come together in it by subsistence, not accidentally. “Go on assuming as many natures as you want” — something infinite here.
• Ad 3: human nature does not constitute the divine person simply, only as denominated by such a nature: the Son of God, existing from eternity, has from human nature only that he be a man. By the divine nature the person is constituted simply; hence he assumes human, not divine, nature.

6. Digression: simply and secundum quid (“very important distinction in philosophy”) #

The point: the third reply rests on the distinction “simply / not simply”, which runs through both fundamental divisions of being and through all our thinking.

• Being by the figures of predication (substance and accidents) and being by act and ability are each a distinction of simply vs. not simply. Act/ability: “Am I in this room? in my house?” — in the house only in ability; chairs in the trees only potentially. (Student: “in your wife’s heart” — that is not merely ability.) A student asks whether secundum quid is the same as “accidentally”: no, a different distinction, though similar. Substance/accident: coming here I came to be in this room, not came to be simply; “if you leave this room you will cease to be” — only secundum quid, as the judge would understand.
• Metaphysics IX: what goes from ability to act is ability first in time, but goes to act by something already in act, so act is before simply; hence the first cause is pure act (Book XII). Early Greeks and modern scientists make matter the beginning — taking what is before in some way as before simply: the mistake “outside of speech” of confusing simply and not simply.
• Meno (an introduction to logic): the sophistical objection that one cannot investigate what one does not know — if good, there would be no logic and no reason to pay researchers. Aristotle refers to it at the start of the Posterior Analytics: what you don’t know you can know in some way, and so direct yourself to it. Socrates’ reply makes another such mistake: the slave boy does not know how to double the square (he first answers “double the side”, four times too big); he was able to know it from what he knew, as one is able to know a Euclid theorem before the master puts the premises together. So Socrates is really teaching him, though he denies it.
• Ethics: all day long we do bad because in some way good, or omit good because in some way bad (Sunday mass vs. sleeping; killing the man who annoys you or blocks your promotion; abortion chosen for job, schooling, pleasure). Washington Irving story: the Indian ruling by arsenic; Chesterton on shooting one’s mother-in-law at forty paces — a good shot, not a good man.
• Metaphysics I: the wise man knows all things “in some way” (knowing what is said of all things, since everything is something), God knows them simply. “Do you know my brother Mark?” — she knows what a brother and a man is, so knows him in some way, not simply. The wise-guy student who “knows everything” misses the distinction.
• Applied back: the Second Person cannot be said to be through his human nature, but to be a man.

7. q. 3 a. 2: does it belong to the divine nature to assume? (“some secondary way it can be said”) #

The point: the divine nature is the beginning of the assumption secundum se (by its power), but the term only by reason of the person; so the person assumes first and properly, the nature secondarily.

• Objections: (1) to assume is to take to oneself, but the union was made in the person, not the nature (“seems correct and orthodox — what’s wrong with this guy?”); (2) the nature is common to three persons, so the Father would assume, “erroneous to say the least”; (3) to act belongs to the person, the nature is that by which.
• Sed contra: Augustine, De fide ad Petrum: that nature which remains begotten of the Father took on our nature without sin.
• Corpus as above; hence also the nature is said “incarnate”, not as changed into flesh but as assuming the nature of flesh — Damascene: the nature of God was made incarnate, according to Athanasius and Cyril; a tradition of speaking. He notes Thomas’s “carefulness with speaking.”
• Ad 1: “se” is reciprocal, referring to the same suppositum; the divine nature does not differ in suppositum from the Word, so taking human nature to the Word it takes it to itself; the Father, not the same suppositum, cannot properly be said to assume. “Be careful”: to itself insofar as it is the person of the Son, not as nature.
• Ad 2: what belongs to the divine nature secundum se (goodness, wisdom) belongs to the three; to assume belongs to it by reason of the Word, so to that person only — speaking of the fact, not of the possibility of the Father or Holy Spirit. Compare the power of generating: every agent makes its like, so if it were the Father’s relation it would generate another Father; nor is it the divine substance alone, since the Son does not generate; it is the divine nature insofar as it is in the Father. The Sentences text (he has it pulled out): one may signify the nature by itself, the person by itself, or combine them.
• Ad 3: in God what is and that by which it is are the same (God the good is goodness); so what acts and that by which it acts are the same, since each acts insofar as it is a being; the divine nature is both that by which God acts and God acting.

His words #

• “Wisdom”, “fifth book / ninth book / twelfth book of Wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics]
• nature: birth itself; the essence of a thing (first and last senses of Aristotle’s)
• natural: from the essential principles; or what one has from birth
• grace vs. natural: not from merit vs. from the power of the divine nature from birth
• to assume: to take to oneself; beginning of the act and term
• synecdochically: “this taking of flesh”
• apponitur: “placed to”, “applied”, English “united to”
• incommunicable: not able to be said of many supposita
• simply vs. not simply / secundum quid (“cum quid” as he sometimes hears it)
• ability [ed.: potency]; being in act vs. being in ability
• mistake “outside of speech” of simply and not simply
• potentia generandi: the divine nature insofar as it is in the Father
• secundum seipsum / secundum se: by itself (beginning of assumption; goodness, wisdom)

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, ST III q. 2 a. 12 (objections, sed contra, corpus, replies)
• Thomas, ST III q. 3 prooemium
• Thomas, ST III q. 3 a. 1 (whole article)
• Thomas, ST III q. 3 a. 2 (whole article) Mentioned
• Aristotle, Metaphysics V (senses of nature); IX (act before ability); XII (pure act); I (wise man knows all things)
• Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, beginning (refers to the Meno)
• Plato, Meno (slave boy, doubling the square)
• Augustine, Enchiridion; De fide ad Petrum; letter on reason and faith
• Cyril, synodal letter (Council of Ephesus); Damascene; Athanasius
• Ephesians 2:3; Wisdom 12:10; John’s Gospel (all things made through the Word)
• Thomas, De Potentia (power of generating vs. creating); Compendium of Theology (God infinite, no accidents); Sentences (text on signifying nature and person); ST I (person incommunicable, “Richard’s definition”)
• Paul VI, encyclical on the Eucharist
• Washington Irving story; Chesterton quote

His questions #

• In what sense can Christ be called naturally holy? Not from the intrinsic principles of human nature, but from his birth, whereby he is joined to the divine person.
• How is the grace of union both grace and natural without contradiction? Grace as not from merit; natural as from the power of the divine nature from his birth.
• Is Thomas showing why it is suitable for the person to assume? Not really; he shows what “assumption” means and that the person is its beginning and term.
• Is anything added to God in the incarnation? No; not God but man is perfected, given subsistence in a divine person.
• Is secundum quid the same as “accidentally”? No, a different distinction, though similar.
• Did the slave boy know how to double the square? No, not simply; he was able to know it from what he knew, and Socrates taught him.
• How does the wise man know all things, and how does God? The wise man in some way (what is said of all); God simply.
• Does the power of generating belong to the divine nature secundum se? No; it is the divine nature insofar as it is in the Father, like assuming, which belongs to the nature by reason of the person of the Word.