Can Christ's Grace Increase? (ST III, Q.7, a.12): Natural Limits, 'Simply' vs. 'In a Qualified Sense', and Freedom from Envy

Orientation #

He opens by picking up something he “mentioned last time”: his reading of Pius X’s encyclical on St Anselm and, from there, Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo, which he says “goes back to the question that Thomas had” about whether it was suitable and necessary for God to become man (prev. lecture). He also refers to “the previous articles, back in Article Ten, I guess” for the finiteness of Christ’s grace. The previous class treated the fullness and infinity of Christ’s grace (q. 7 aa. 10-11); the next treats a. 13, whether habitual grace follows the union.

The class, in order #

1. Pius X on Anselm; Cur Deus Homo; the French separation (“faith seeking understanding, is a kind of”) #

An opening aside, not on the article.

• Pius X’s encyclical on St Anselm (Latin title “Communium Rerum, something like that”; found on the Vatican website under Pius X’s encyclicals, or on Anselm pages such as the Christian Ethereal Library). From about numbered section 44 to the end it describes Anselm as theologian: avoiding two extremes, (a) presumption, measuring the mysteries of faith by human reason or philosophy without faith; (b) not trying to understand, so far as one can, the mysteries one believes. He says Father Boulet stressed this, and also that faith seeking understanding is “a kind of a foretaste of heaven” and natural to us.
• The Pope says Anselm’s moderation prepared the way for “the great princes of this scholastic theology,” Thomas and Bonaventure; Thomas sometimes goes further than Anselm but is “very moderate.”
• Cur Deus Homo: two books, ~25 short chapters in book I; a dialogue between Anselm and another man who raises questions. He has read book I and recommends it for what “we’re studying right now.”
• Anselm died 1109; the 900th anniversary this year; there may be conferences, perhaps another encyclical by Benedict.
• Pius X’s early encyclical against the French law of separation (c. 1904), religious orders expelled, historic churches taken by the state. Warren Murray (by phone): good effects: exiled monks went to England and re-founded Benedictine houses there; the state must now maintain the churches, which the Church of France could never afford. Students: the Nova Scotia monastery was settled by Augustinians expelled from France; a smuggled statue of Our Lady still in Belgium with its own cult. “Good comes out even of bad sometimes.”

2. The objections and the sed contra (“the grace of Christ is able to be increased”) #

He reads a. 12: “it seems that the grace of Christ is able to be increased.”

1. To everything finite an addition can be made; Christ’s grace was finite (previous articles); therefore it can be increased. He suggests Thomas needed this article because of the “different senses of infinite” that are hard to state.
2. The increase of grace comes through the divine power (2 Cor 9: God is able to make all grace abound in you); the divine power, being infinite, cannot be restricted by any limit; therefore Christ’s grace could have been made greater.
3. Luke 2:52: the boy Jesus went forward in age and wisdom (sapientia) and grace (gratia) before God and men, the very two things under discussion; “I get scripture even on your side.”

• Sed contra, John 1: “the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.” Nothing greater can be understood than being the only begotten from the Father; his fullness of grace and truth is a result of that; so no greater grace than that with which Christ was filled can be, or be understood.

3. The body: two ways a form cannot be increased (“on the side of the form itself”) #

Point: Thomas distinguishes, then applies.

• A, on the side of the subject: the subject reaches the furthest it can partake of the form “according to its own mode or measure.” Examples: in the old science, air at the greatest heat air can have and still be air (any hotter it turns to fire), so air never has the heat fire has; his glass, which cannot hold more water than this, though water can be received in greater amount, “but not in this cup.”
• B, on the side of the form: the subject reaches the furthest perfection in which that form can be had. Example (old physics): the heat of fire cannot be increased, there being no more perfect grade of heat than fire’s.
• Application. (1) As other forms have a determined measure from divine wisdom, so does grace (Wisdom 11: “you have disposed all things in number, weight, and measure”; the original is Greek; Augustine and Thomas often explain these words). (2) The measure of a form is fixed in comparison to its end. Example: no greater heaviness than the earth’s, because no lower place than the earth’s (earth at the centre, heavy things go down, the centre is farthest from the heavens). (3) The end of grace is nothing other than the union of the rational creature to God. (4) No greater union can be, or be understood, than union in a person, the hypostatic union: “this divine person is in fact a man, as well as you and me.” Conclusion: Christ’s grace reaches the highest measure; it cannot be increased on the side of grace itself, “if it could, there could be a union to God greater than” personal union.
• Nor on the side of the subject: Christ as man was from the first instant of conception “a true and full comprehensor,” i.e. he had the beatific vision; so no increase in him, as none in the other blessed, who are at the end of life. We, “purely on the way” (purely, because Christ’s body had not reached its goal, but his soul would never be more joined to God than at his conception), can increase both ways: not at the highest grade of grace, not yet at our end. Reason Christ has it from the start: he is “the source of grace and wisdom for all the rest of us.”
• Asides: whether to keep reading or sit with what one has read; his French teacher Caserque, “I will repeat myself until I understand it”; his brother Mark’s eight-student great-books programme and the observation that women often grasped an idea quicker but would not go over it again and again; the same shirt, the same weekly menu, the same shoes; “the way to be wise is to be a man of one book.”

4. Reply 1: mathematical vs. natural quantity, and the limits of modern physics (“limits in the quantities of natural things”) #

Point: finite quantity can always be added to in mathematics, but natural quantity is limited by form; a fortiori form itself has a limit.

• Mathematical quantity: nothing on the side of a finite quantity is repugnant to addition. Euclid: a line can always be bisected; Book IV, inscribing and circumscribing squares and circles forever, smaller or bigger; no shortest or longest line, smallest or largest circle.
• Natural quantity: repugnance from the side of the form, to which a determined quantity is owed. Aristotle against Anaxagoras (Physics I): if the parts can fall below any size, so can the whole; but kinds of animals and plants are found only within limits, due not to quantity per se but to the nature. Physics VI: the continuous as such is divisible forever, but descending to individual continuous things you find limits from their form: no man as small as a water molecule or as tall as the Empire State Building. “Aristotle was the first man to see this.” He was open to it because Physics II distinguishes the natural philosopher’s interest in number and shape (legs, ears, heart chambers, shape of the moon) from the mathematician’s, who considers them apart from natural bodies and so cannot discover what happens to quantity because of natures.
• Twentieth-century physics as the discovery of such limits, unforeseeable mathematically, after Newtonian physics assumed what is true of quantity by itself is true of natural quantity: Planck, December 1900, quantum hypothesis (energy given or received only in a smallest amount or its multiples, like the penny in a monetary system); Einstein 1905, a maximum speed, light, though mathematically one could go beyond 186,000 miles/sec; Heisenberg and Pauli on a minimum length. Early particle physics spoke like Anaxagoras (every particle made of all the rest, so all inside each, and so on), contrary to experience that electron and proton always have the same size. Aristotle too held a maximum speed (the daily revolution of the heavens), anticipating Einstein in that respect. General relativity: a finite universe, a “tremendous shock” after the Renaissance assumption of infinity; then perhaps finite in time (Big Bang); limits toward the small and the large.
• Weizsäcker’s essay: an older physicist angry at his lecture on limits, with no scientific objection; Weizsäcker’s thought that belief in an infinite universe arose as theology was abandoned, the universe substituting for the infinite God; hence the “panic.”
• Even in pure mathematics infinity has different ways: line, surface, body; a surface is infinite “in a different way” than a line.
• Thomas quotes the Philosopher, De Anima II: of all things constituted by nature there is a limit and reason of magnitude and growth (his example: natural wine stops at about 11-14% alcohol, varying by grape). Hence no addition to the quantity of the whole heaven, by reason of its form. A fortiori (“he’s giving an argument there, a fortiori”): if form limits quantity, form itself can have a limit; “if form itself had no limit, it would not give limit to other things.” So no addition to Christ’s grace is required even though grace by nature is limited.
• Boundary case: whiteness existing by itself (as Plato sometimes spoke): unlimited in whiteness, having its fullness, yet lacking wisdom, justice, etc., so “in some way infinite, but not simply.”

5. Simply and in some way (“simpliciter and secundum quid”) #

Point: the distinction just used (Greek haplōs / not haplōs; Latin simpliciter / secundum quid) is “a very important kind of distinction” running through all philosophy.

• It appears in the first distinctions of being: substance/accident (did I come to be when I came into this room? “I came to be in this room”: qualified; leaving, I cease to be sitting, not cease to be) and act/potency (“are there chairs in the trees out here? In ability,” not simply).
• Meno: you can’t know what you don’t know; but you can know it in some way, which Meno misses and Socrates can’t quite bring out. His class examples: counting the eight students, directing himself to what he didn’t know because he knew what he was looking for; “Do you know my brother Mark?” No, but knowing what a brother and a man are, she knows him “in some way,” not simply.
• Wisdom: God alone is wise simply; among the parts of philosophy first philosophy is wisdom simply (about all things), natural philosophy and ethics wisdom secundum quid; compared with God’s knowledge even first philosophy is wisdom only in a qualified sense. So a thing can be “simply” in one context and “not simply” in another. Only God is infinite simply.
• Logic: Aristotle calls the enthymeme syllogismos tis, a syllogism secundum quid.
• Applied: grace is a partaking of the divine nature, not the divine nature; so not essentially infinite; yet in Christ’s soul it is the fullest, because grace is proportioned to its end, and the end is union with God, greatest in the personal union.
• Contrast with contemporary theologians who say Christ “doesn’t know who he is”: Thomas holds fullness of knowledge (beatific vision) and grace from conception, “because the perfect is the source of all other things.” We can be full in the second (subject’s) sense: by death, all the grace God is calling us to, this heaven or that; “our cups will be full.”

6. Reply 2: what infinite power can and cannot make (“Now this is very subtle”) #

Point: Thomas concedes something and denies something.

• Concedes: the divine power, being infinite, can make something greater and better than the habitual grace of Christ.
• Denies: it cannot make something ordered to a greater end than the personal union to the only-begotten Son; to that union “sufficiently corresponds such a measure of grace, according to the definition of divine wisdom.” It belongs to the wise man to order things, but also to measure them.
• So Christ’s grace cannot be increased: he is at the end already; “no matter how much you guys try to get grace,” you won’t equal it, since you are ordered not to personal union but to seeing God face to face, some more clearly than others, with grace commensurate to that vision.
• Divine wisdom gives the human nature taken from the Virgin a grace making it suitable to union with the Son; gives Mary a lesser grace but one suitable to being this man’s mother; our mothers, not called to that end, cannot have grace equal to Mary’s.
• Student: is it surprising that he says the grace could have been greater, given its final cause? Answer: it respects that grace is a partaking of the infinite divine nature, produced by infinite power: “you can always partake of it more”; God can assimilate you more and more to himself.
• Digression on envy: Pilate knew they delivered Christ out of envy (Matthew). Why will I rejoice rather than envy if you see God more clearly? (a) The distance between the highest and lowest angel’s clarity is “as it were nothing” beside the clarity with which God sees himself (Thomas’s pre-communion prayer); two girls slightly different in beauty may envy each other, but not beside a third who is “tremendous”; Snow White’s queen and the mirror, “a beautiful story about envy”; envying God would make no sense. (b) More important, Thomas’s point that the more understanding you are, the more you love the common good: God is the common good of the kingdom, and next to him the order of the kingdom; loving that order you love the fact that we do not see God equally. “Kingdom of God” has two meanings: the society of those who see God face to face, and the whole universe. Aristotle, Metaphysics XII: the army is ordered to victory (MacArthur: “no substitute for victory”) and its parts one to another on account of victory; so the universe to God, and things to one another because of that order.
• Asides: “the brain of an angleworm” beside Aristotle or Thomas, yet ordered under him; the academic world’s fault, everyone “trying to do his own thing,” whereas he tries to do what Thomas does, Thomas what Augustine does; Albert the Great on Thomas’s death, “the light of the church has been extinguished,” compared with Haydn on Mozart (“as an honest man before you and God, your son is the greatest composer”) and Plato on Aristotle (“a whole school by himself”): older men free of envy.

7. Reply 3: progress in habit vs. in effects (“according to effects”) #

Point: Luke 2:52 is explained by a distinction.

• One progresses in wisdom and grace either (A) in the habits being augmented, impossible in Christ, or (B) in effects, doing wiser and more powerful things. Christ progressed the second way: with age he did more perfect works “that he might show himself to be a true man,” toward God and toward men, “in kind of an exterior way.”
• A scriptural way of speaking Thomas must explain, like Abraham’s sacrifice: “now I know you love me” cannot mean God learned; it means “now I have made known to you and the others that you love me.” Such ways of speaking are easily misused.
• Student: it almost sounds as if Christ pretended to grow, to appear more like a man. Answer: he did not show his full wisdom because it would have been an impediment to belief in his being a man (“started spouting metaphysics”); he did not want to scandalize unnecessarily.
• Student: “he put on a good show when he was twelve.” He agrees, but says he never fully understood the finding in the temple, why he could not have told his parents, “unnecessarily worrying his mother”; perhaps the Fathers explain it. Left open; break.

His words #

• “faith seeking understanding”: Anselm’s programme, avoiding presumption and refusal to understand.
• “Natural Hearing” [ed.: Physics]: cited for Anaxagoras (bk I), the continuous (bk VI), mathematical vs. natural quantity (bk II).
• “comprehensor”: one who has the beatific vision, at the end, as opposed to one “on the way.”
• “purely on the way”: we, whose body and soul have neither reached their end; Christ was not purely so.
• “a fortiori”: his label for Thomas’s step from limited quantity to limited form.
• “simply / in some way”: simpliciter / secundum quid; Greek haplōs; the thing itself vs. qualified.
• “ability” [ed.: potency]: “are there chairs in the trees? In ability.”
• “enthymeme is a syllogismos tis”: a syllogism secundum quid.
• “partaking of the divine nature”: grace; hence not essentially infinite, always further partakeable.
• “the perfect is the source”: why Christ has fullness from the start.
• “common good”: God, and next to him the order of the kingdom/universe; the more understanding, the more one loves it.
• “twelfth book of Wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics XII]: the army ordered to victory.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 7, a. 12 (objections, sed contra, body, three replies).
• 2 Cor 9 (obj. 2); Luke 2:52 (obj. 3); John 1 (sed contra); Wisdom 11 (body).
• Aristotle, De Anima II, “of all things constituted by nature there is a limit…” (as quoted in the reply).

Mentioned

• Pius X, encyclical on St Anselm (Communium Rerum), ~nn. 44 to end; Pius X on the French law of separation (c. 1904).
• Anselm, Cur Deus Homo, book I (25 chapters), book II.
• ST III q. 7 a. 10 (Christ’s grace finite), “I guess”.
• Euclid, Elements, bisection; Book IV inscribing/circumscribing.
• Aristotle, Physics I (Anaxagoras), VI (the continuous), II (natural vs. mathematical quantity); Metaphysics XII (army).
• Plato, Meno.
• Matthew, Pilate and envy; Genesis, Abraham’s sacrifice (book not named).
• Weizsäcker, essay on limits in modern physics; Thomas’s pre-communion prayer; Snow White.

His questions #

• Can you have more water in a glass than this? Not in this glass; a limit from the subject, though water can be received in greater amount elsewhere.
• Is there some union to God than which there is no and cannot be any greater one? The hypostatic union, being united to God in person.
• Why does Christ have this perfection from his conception? Because he is the source of grace and wisdom for all the rest of us; the perfect is the source.
• If the parts can fall below any size, what follows for the whole? The whole can fall below any size, contrary to what we find in dogs, cats, trees.
• When I came into this room, did I come to be? I came to be in this room: qualified, not simply.
• Can you know what you don’t know in some way? Yes, confusedly: knowing what you are looking for is enough to tell you to count.
• Can grace be essentially infinite, like the divine nature? No; it is only a partaking of the divine nature.
• Is it surprising that Christ’s grace could have been greater though its final cause is fixed? Not once you see grace as partaking of an infinite nature by an infinite power.
• Did he grow in wisdom and grace as in age, or make these known? Made them known by what he did exteriorly, on Thomas’s reading.
• Why the finding in the temple, worrying his mother? Left open.