Summa III q.5 a.3–4 and q.6 a.1: Christ's Soul and Mind, and the Order of the Assumption (Flesh Assumed Through the Soul)

Orientation #

He refers back to “a little text there in the beginning of class from the Compendium” on Christ as firstborn, where “before” is in time, in causality and in dignity (prev. lecture). He says the first two articles of q. 5 were about the body and “the next two” are about the soul; at the end he announces “we’ll try to do one article from question six” and that the point about time will be shown “more clearly below” (a. 3–4 of q. 6). The previous class worked through q. 5 a. 1–2 (true, earthly body) and the next continues q. 6 a. 1–3.

The class, in order #

1. Article 3 objections: “the word was made flesh, making no mention of the soul” #

Point: the objections against Christ’s having a soul all rest on John 1:14, which God phrases so as to “give us the occasion to misunderstand” while making a point.

• He notes Incarnatio comes from those very words, “the word was made flesh.”
• Obj. 1: John, treating the mystery, says “flesh” and says nothing of a soul. (He clears away a different misreading: “made flesh” does not mean the Word turned into flesh — “we can dispose of it another time.”)
• Obj. 2: a soul is needed so the body may live; but the Word is “the fountain of life” (Psalm 35), so a soul would be superfluous, and “God and nature do nothing in vain” (Aristotle, “first book about the universe”).
• Obj. 3 (“a little more strange”): soul plus body constitutes a common nature, the human species; but Damascene (book III) says there is no common species in Christ. He tells the class not to worry — “we’ll see what Damascene means.”
• Sed contra: Augustine, On Christian Struggle (“Agony”): we will not hear those who say only a human body was assumed and so read “the Word was made flesh.”
• Aside: the Protestant neighbour who read “brothers and sisters of Christ” literally — “honest folk can get mixed up in these things,” since Scripture calls uncle and nephew brothers.

2. Body of a.3: the error of Arius and Apollinaris “cannot stand for three reasons” #

Point: the opinion (Arius first, later Apollinaris; Thomas treats both in the Summa Contra Gentiles) that the Word stood to the flesh in place of a soul would make Christ one nature, not two, since soul and flesh constitute one human nature.

1. Against Scripture: the Lord speaks of his soul — Matthew 26 “my soul is sorrowful even unto death”; John 10:18 “I have power of laying down my soul.” Apollinaris replies that “soul” is metaphorical, as in the Old Testament “my soul hates your new moons and festivals.” Augustine (83 Questions) answers: the evangelists narrate that Jesus wondered, was angry, was saddened, was hungry — showing a true soul, just as eating, sleeping, being fatigued show a true body; if these were metaphor, “the faith of the gospel narration would perish,” for prophecy speaks in figures but the evangelists write historically, “according to the propriety of things.” He adds: does God wonder in his divine nature? — no; wonder belongs to the soul.
2. Against the usefulness of the Incarnation, the liberation of man from sin. He reads the whole Augustine text in English (four alternatives: the soul needed no remedy, was alien to him, was incurable, or was worthless; two are blasphemy — God not omnipotent, or not maker of our soul — and in the other two “the cause of the soul is ignored” or “no place is given to merit”; the soul by origin is more precious than the body, by sin worse than it; Christ being perfect wisdom and most loving neither despised the better nor left the more wounded). His gloss: the soul is more in need of redemption than the body, since man fell through the soul’s free will; cf. Thomas on the particular judgment of the soul before the general judgment — “sin begins in the soul and proceeds to the body.”
3. Against the truth of the Incarnation: flesh and the other parts get their species through the soul; the soul gone, there is flesh or bone only equivocally (Aristotle, De anima II) — the eye of a corpse is an eye equivocally, it cannot see. He mentions Aristotle also defines the soul in “the seventh book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics VII].

• Aside on Augustine: “he’s a pretty important guy.”

3. Reply to obj. 1: synecdoche, and “why do you use this figure of speech here” #

Point: “flesh” stands for the whole man, as if to say “the Word was made man.”

• The figure: synecdoche — name of the part given to the whole (“he’s a brain”); not invented for this passage: Isaiah 40, “all flesh will see”; Scripture also calls us “souls.” Aristotle comes close: “reason more than anything else is man.”
• Three reasons (Thomas) for naming the flesh: (a) through the flesh the Son of God became visible — “and we saw his glory,” taken from John’s own text; (b) Augustine, 83 Questions: in the unity of the assumption the chief thing is the Word, the last is the flesh; the evangelist, wishing to commend God’s humility and love, names the extremes and omits the soul, which is less than the Word but better than the flesh; (c) reasonable to name the flesh because, more distant from the Word, it seems less honorable — and against the Manichaeans.
• He asks the class for other reasons; a student: it increases our love for God’s humility — “that’s kind of the middle reason.” He adds Thomas elsewhere on the Incarnation arousing our hope.
• His development of (c): an a fortiori — if he went all the way down to the flesh, he took on the soul; cf. philosophy’s habit of proving the less obvious case: Aristotle assumed the universe always existed, and even so God’s existence can be shown, so a fortiori if it began; or showing the lesser sin is a sin.
• His development of (a): had he taken a soul without a body he would be invisible, and it is unnatural for us not to be led by the sensible — true of all the sacraments; First Vatican Council on motives of credibility: some peculiar to some (Hilary struck by “I am who am”), but miracles and fulfilled prophecy suit everybody, because “there is something sensible about the miracle.” Cana (John 2): “he manifested his glory” in the sign and they began to believe; he uses Cana as preparing for the Eucharist — there you can sense the wine, at Mass you cannot sense the body and blood, so it shows God’s power to transform.
• Why three arguments: “more than three, the guy forgets the first one”; “there is a human reason for these things.”

4. Replies to obj. 2 and 3: “the fountain of life as the first efficient cause” #

• Obj. 2: the Word is fountain of life as first efficient cause; the soul is beginning of life as form — “God can’t be the form of a body.” Form is the effect of the agent, so from the Word’s presence one should rather conclude the body is ensouled, as from fire’s presence one concludes the adjoining body is hot.
• Obj. 3: it was necessary to say there is in Christ a nature constituted by soul coming to body; Damascene denies only a common species in the sense of “some third thing resulting from the union of divinity and humanity.” “Take Thomas’s word for that.”

5. Article 4: “the Son of God did not assume a human mind” #

Point: the Apollinarists, beaten by the Gospel texts on the soul, conceded a soul but denied a mind, the Word taking its place; the same three reasons overcome them.

• Note: intellectum in Aristotle and Thomas sometimes means the power, sometimes the soul; “mind” could include the will (Augustine).
• Obj. 1: where the thing is present its image is not needed (no statue when the man is there); man by his mind is God’s image (Augustine, De Trinitate; Genesis).
• Obj. 2: a greater light obscures the lesser (no candle noticed in sunlight); the Word is “the light enlightening every man” (John 1:9), our mind a lamp lit from the first light (“the lamp of the Lord is the spirit of man”); he recalls Thomas’s communion prayer, sicut sub lumine claritatis aeternae, and that Aristotle compares the agent intellect to light.
• Obj. 3: it is called in-carnation; the understanding is not flesh nor the act of any body (Aristotle, De anima III).
• Sed contra: Augustine, De fide ad Petrum — “hold most firmly” (“that’s pretty strong”) that Christ has flesh of our kind and a rational soul: flesh (“touch and see”), soul (“I lay down my soul”), understanding (“learn from me, who am meek and humble of heart”; “behold my boy, he shall understand”).
• Body: (1) against the gospel narration (the modus narrativus of Scripture) which records his wonder; wonder is impossible without reason, since it brings effect to cause — seeing an effect and seeking its unknown cause (Metaphysics I). (2) Against the usefulness: the soul is capable neither of sin nor of justifying grace except through the mind, so the mind above all had to be assumed; Damascene III: the Word assumed a body and a rational soul, “the whole united to the whole, that he might save the whole; what cannot be assumed is incurable.” (3) Against the truth: body is to soul as matter to form — hence Aristotle, Physics II (“Natural Hearing”), the natural philosopher considers both, since the same science treats opposites and correlatives (not one science of virtue and another of vice; one logic of truth, another of error; father/son, husband/wife). A soul without mind gives bestial, not human flesh, since only the mind distinguishes our soul from the bestial; Augustine (83 Questions): the Son of God would then be “a certain beast with the figure of a human body” — ridiculous, and repugnant to divine truth, which admits no “fiction.”
• Replies: (1) the thing’s presence does not remove its image but perfects it — soldiers do not venerate the emperor’s image when he is present, yet the wax image is perfected by the seal’s impression and the mirror image by the man’s presence; so the Word united to the mind renovates the image (a medieval/Benedictine theme; “the image in the butter” softening and being re-impressed). (2) The greater light removes the light of another illuminating body but perfects the light of an illuminated one: the sun obscures the stars but perfects the light of the air; our mind is a light lit by the Word, so it is perfected, not emptied — “I’ll buy that.” (3) Though the understanding power is not the act of a body, the soul’s essence, which is the body’s form, must be nobler to have that power and so requires a better-disposed body — “kind of strangely answered”: the better your flesh, the better your understanding.
• Aside: “a woman’s right to abortion — it’s a fiction, something unreal.”

6. Question 6 prooemium: “the order of the foresaid taking on” #

Point: the six articles concern before-and-after in the assumption.

• His list from the transcript: (1) flesh through the medium of the soul; (2) soul through the medium of the spirit or mind; (3) whether Christ’s soul was assumed before the flesh; (4) the reverse, flesh before union with the soul; (5) whole nature through its parts; then “fifth, by means of grace” — he says “fifth” twice for the last two, giving six in all as he states. “A man of leisure” thinks up such questions.
• Soul vs. spirit (spiritus) applied to man: soul = first act of a natural body, source of the powers in the body; spirit = the powers not in the body. Magnificat: “my soul magnifies the Lord” perhaps touches what she does through the body (giving flesh to God, praising with the tongue), “my spirit rejoices” her reason and will dwelling in God; compare Psalm 62 alternating flesh and soul (“my flesh pines, my soul thirsts”). Student: doesn’t Paul speak of the sword dividing soul and spirit? — he supposes that is when you no longer know whether you are in the body, as Paul carried to the third heaven or Teresa of Avila’s “divorce from the world” in contemplation.

7. Q6 a.1 objections: “would not assume flesh by means of the soul” #

• Obj. 1: the Son’s union with human nature is more perfect than with all creatures, yet to creatures God is immediately present by essence, presence and power (from the treatise on God’s operation); so much more immediately to the flesh, not through the soul.
• Obj. 2: soul and flesh are united in unity of hypostasis; the body pertains to the hypostasis as immediately as the soul — nay, more nearly, since matter is the principle of individuation implied in “hypostasis.”
• Obj. 3: remove the middle and you separate what it joined — remove the surface and colour ceases; but the soul separated by death, the Word remained united to the body in the tomb.
• “Let’s see how he gets out of this — Houdini”: objections tie the mind up so it cannot move (Aristotle, “third book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics III]).
• Sed contra: Augustine, Epistle to Felician: divine power joined the rational soul to itself and through it the body, the whole man — “Thomas following his other master, Augustine.” He promises to bring a Teresa of Avila text on the feast of Augustine.

8. Body: “a twofold order: one of time, and the other of nature” #

1. A middle is said with regard to a beginning and an end, so it implies order.
2. Order of time: no middle in the Incarnation — the Word united the whole human nature at once, simul et semel (to be shown below).
3. Order of nature is twofold: (a) by grade of dignity (angels between men and God); (b) by causality (a middle cause between first cause and last effect). These match Aristotle’s senses of “before”: cause before effect, and before in dignity (the “fourth sense”). (b) follows on (a), since the cause is better than the effect; Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy ch. 13: God acts on the remote through the nearer substances — “why we invoke the angels starting our studies.”
4. By dignity the soul is middle between God and flesh, being more like God (especially the spirit, the image of God): so flesh is united through the soul.
5. By causality the soul is in some way cause of the flesh’s assumability, since flesh can be assumed only by its order to the rational soul, whereby it is human flesh — human nature being more assumable (said above).

• Recap of his three senses of before against the Compendium’s “firstborn”: here before in time is denied, before by nature (both ways) affirmed.

9. Replies: “the scandal of mediation” #

• To 1: two orders between creature and God — as caused by God (source of being), where by his infinite power God reaches each thing immediately, causing and conserving it (essence, power, presence); and as led back to God as end, where there is a middle, lower creatures led back through higher (Dionysius). The assumption belongs to this second order, the Word being its end, so he is united to flesh through the soul. He calls this “a very interesting distinction”: God in himself, God as beginning, God as end (Alpha and Omega), with “more of a middle” toward the end. Application: to Christ through Mary, and through the saints; “smart guy” — his teacher’s line about Aristotle’s brain of an angel and his own “angle worm.”
• To 2: if the Word’s hypostasis were constituted simply by human nature, the body as matter would be nearer to it; but since the hypostasis is prior to and above human nature, what is higher in that nature is nearer — the soul. Aside from Physics II: both matter and form are nature, but form more, since by matter a thing is natural in ability, by form actually.
• To 3: something can cause the aptitude for a union and, removed, not remove the union: what depends on something in coming to be need not depend on it afterwards. Friendship caused by a go-between remains when he leaves; a marriage entered because of beauty remains when beauty fades; so the soul separated, the Word’s union to the flesh remains. Anecdote: the man who arranged a party of married couples and two singles, who married — his disappearance would not undo the marriage. “We have to stop there.”

His words #

• Incarnatio: from “the word was made flesh.”
• “fountain of life”: Psalm 35; the Word as first efficient cause of life, not form.
• synecdoche: name of the part given to the whole (“he’s a brain”).
• “book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics]; “seventh book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics VII]; “third book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics III].
• “Natural Hearing” [ed.: Physics].
• “first book about the universe” [ed.: De caelo I].
• “ability” [ed.: potency].
• intellectum: sometimes the power, sometimes the soul.
• modus narrativus: the narrative mode of Scripture.
• Apollinaristae: the Apollinarists.
• sicut sub lumine claritatis aeternae: from Thomas’s communion prayer.
• “fiction”: something unreal, that does not exist.
• spiritus vs. soul: the powers not in the body vs. the first act of a natural body.
• simul et semel: together and at once — no middle in time.
• hypostasis: implies the principle of individuation, i.e. matter.
• “scandal of mediation”: being led back to God through what is nearer him.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, ST III q. 5 a. 3 (whole article) and a. 4 (whole article)
• Thomas Aquinas, ST III q. 6 prooemium and a. 1 (whole article)
• Augustine, “book against [unclear in recording]” on the four alternatives for omitting the soul — read in full in English (cited by Thomas in a. 3)
• John 1:14; Matthew 26; John 10:18; John 1:9; Isaiah 40; Psalm 35; Psalm 62 (as he numbers it); Luke 1 Magnificat (inferred)

Mentioned

• Augustine, On Christian Struggle; De haeresibus; 83 Questions; De Trinitate; De fide ad Petrum; Epistle to Felician
• John Damascene, book III
• Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy ch. 13
• Aristotle, De anima II and III; Physics II; Metaphysics I, III, VII; De caelo I
• Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles (on Arius and Apollinaris); Compendium Theologiae (firstborn); treatise on God’s operation (essence, presence, power)
• First Vatican Council on motives of credibility; Hilary on “I am who am”; John 2 (Cana); Genesis (image of God); Paul, third heaven and sword dividing soul and spirit; Teresa of Avila

His questions #

• Does God wonder in his divine nature? No — wonder belongs to the soul; that is why the Gospels’ report of his wonder shows a true soul.
• Why is it appropriate that John should emphasize the flesh? To make the Son visible, to commend God’s humility going all the way down, and a fortiori to show he took the soul too.
• Why are miracles a motive of credibility appropriate to everybody? Because there is something sensible about a miracle, and we are led by the sensible to what cannot be sensed.
• Why does Thomas give three arguments in the body? More than three and the listener forgets the first; “there is a human reason for these things.”
• What’s the difference between the word soul and the word spiritus applied to man? Soul is source of the powers in the body; spirit names the powers not in the body (reason and will).
• Why does the Magnificat say “my soul” and then “my spirit”? Perhaps soul touches what she does through the body, spirit her reason and will rejoicing in God — “understood in various ways.”
• Is the soul assumed before the body in time? No; before only by nature — in dignity and in causality.
• If matter is the principle of individuation, isn’t the flesh nearer the hypostasis? Only if the Word’s hypostasis were constituted by human nature; since it is prior, the higher (soul) is nearer.
• How can the Word remain united to the body in the tomb if the soul is the middle? The soul causes the aptitude for union; the union, once made, does not depend on it, like friendship after the go-between leaves.