Summa III q.15 a.1–3: Whether Christ Had Sin, the Fomes of Sin, or Ignorance (with music, moral virtue and reason's rule over the emotions)

Orientation #

He opens the new question (“up to question fifteen, right?”) and lists its ten articles, professing surprise that Thomas should have a question on defects of the soul at all. Class ends at the break after article 3. The previous class treated the bodily defects Christ assumed (prev. lecture).

The class, in order #

1. Shakespeare’s birthday and the Merchant of Venice (“two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff”) #

Opening aside. It is the feast of St. George and, traditionally, Shakespeare’s birthday (baptized the 26th, customary baptism on the third day, hence the 23rd; 1564).

• Bassanio’s line — “His reasons are as two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff. You shall seek all day ere you find them, and when you have them, they are not worth the search” — is his experience of reading the modern thinkers.
• Graziano’s “Now by my hood”: the note says he is masked and likens himself to a hooded monk swearing by his monastic character. He proposes the class adopt the oath.

2. The ten articles of question 15 (“whether in Christ there was sin”) #

The list as he reads it: sin; the fomes of sin; ignorance; whether his soul was able to undergo/suffer; sensible pain; sadness; fear; wonder (admiratio); anger; whether he was at once wayfarer and comprehensor. He notes these are not all moral defects — only the first one or two — and praises Thomas’s thoroughness.

3. Article 1, objections: was there sin in Christ? (“far from my salvation are the words of my sins”) #

Five objections, as he reads them:

1. Ps. 21: “why have you abandoned me… the words of my sins,” spoken from Christ’s person on the cross (a cry in Matthew and Mark, not Luke or John; the ones most revealing the depth of his suffering).
2. Rom. 5: in Adam all sinned, being in him in their origin; Christ was originally in Adam.
3. Heb. 2:18: in that in which he suffered and was tempted he can aid the tempted; we most need aid against sin.
4. 2 Cor. 5: “he who did not know sin was made sin for us” — and God truly makes what he makes.
5. Augustine, On the Christian Combat: Christ gave himself as example; man needs example of doing penance for sins too. Sed contra: John 8, “Who of you will convict me of sin?” Aside: the modern scholars love such objections — “they’ll stop and die,” like Voltaire. He describes the Congregation for the Faith’s document on Roger Haight, S.J. (denying the Trinity, Christ’s divinity, the universality of the Church), a past president of the American Catholic Theological Society; such writers insert orthodox-sounding statements to point to, but “the congregation is not fooled.” A student: “Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.”

4. The body of article 1 (“sin does nothing to satisfy”) #

The three ends of the defects assumed give three reasons Christ took no defect of sin:

1. Sin does nothing to satisfy; rather it impedes the power of satisfaction — “the Most High does not approve the gifts of the wicked” (Ecclus. 34).
2. Sin does not show the truth of human nature, since it does not pertain to a nature of which God is cause, but is brought in against nature through the sowing of the devil (Damascene).
3. By sinning he could give no example of virtue, since sin is contrary to virtue. Hence no sin at all, neither original nor actual. Aside on the division of actual sin into mortal and venial: “sin” said of these is analogous, not univocal — mortal sin is not merely more sin than venial, it differs in kind. Confirmed by 1 Peter: “who did no sin, nor was deceit found in his mouth.”

5. Replies 1–5 of article 1 (“Christ and the church are considered to be one person”) #

• Reply 1: Damascene’s distinction — something is said of Christ according to his natural and hypostatic property (he was made man, suffered for us), and something according to personal property, i.e. in our person, what in no way belongs to him as such. Tyconius’s first of seven rules (given by Augustine, On Christian Doctrine III): “about the Lord and his body,” Christ and the Church taken as one person. So Christ speaks “the words of my sins” from the person of his members. Boundary case he offers: “Saul, why do you persecute me?” — the members are persecuted, yet Christ says me. Aside: Augustine approved Tyconius’s rules though Tyconius was a Donatist who argued against the Donatists — “the most illogical mind,” since he still remained one.
• Reply 2: Augustine, On Genesis to the Letter X: Christ was not in Adam in every way. We were in Adam according to the ratio seminalis (“seedy reason”) and according to bodily substance, both running down together from Adam; Christ took the visible substance of flesh from the Virgin’s flesh, but the reason of his conception was not from male seed but from above, the Holy Spirit overshadowing. So he took human nature from Adam only materially, actively from the Holy Spirit — as Adam took his body materially from the earth, actively from God. Therefore he did not sin in Adam, in whom he was only according to matter. (“We know Thomas’s best teachers: Augustine and Aristotle.”)
• Reply 3: (he calls this objection weaker) Christ aided us by being tempted and suffering insofar as he satisfied; sin would impede satisfaction. Otherwise the punishment he sustained would have been owed for his own sin and not satisfactory for us. Aside: perhaps Mary can be more helpful than other saints because she had no sin.
• Reply 4: Two solutions. God made Christ sin (a) in making him the victim/host for sin — Hosea 4, “the sins of my people,” i.e. the priests ate the hosts offered for sin; so Is. 53, “the Lord placed on him the iniquities of us all”; or (b) made him having the likeness of the flesh of sin, in taking a body passible and mortal — the condition flesh has from sin, without the sin.
• Reply 5: The penitent gives praiseworthy example not from having sinned but from voluntarily undergoing punishment for sin; Christ gave the greatest example of penitence, undergoing punishment voluntarily not for his own but for others’ sins. His own reflection: did Christ have the virtue of faith? No — so Mary is the greatest example of faith; some virtues are not in Christ but in someone else. And for penance for one’s own sins one must go not to Mary but to Peter, who wept after denying Christ three times. A student adds the sermon for the feast of Mary Magdalene: innocence and repentance cannot be in the same person, so God gave the two examples the same name — Mary Magdalene, the Blessed Virgin Mary.

6. Article 2, objections: the fomes of sin (“tinder or kindling for a fire”) #

He struggles with fomes: “the fountain of sin,” foaming, the stuff down there that revolts; a student’s Latin dictionary gives tinder or kindling for a fire — flammable matter. Objections:

1. From the same beginning — the subtraction of original justice, by which the lower powers were subject to reason and the body to the soul — come both the fomes and the body’s passibility and mortality. Christ had passibility and mortality, therefore also the fomes.
2. Damascene III: by consent of the divine will the flesh of Christ was permitted to suffer and do what is proper to flesh; it is proper to flesh to desire what is desirable to it; and the fomes is nothing other than concupiscence (gloss on Rom. 7:8).
3. By the fomes the flesh desires against the spirit (Gal. 5); the spirit shows itself stronger and more crown-worthy the more it dominates the concupiscence of the flesh — “he is not crowned who has not lawfully fought” (2 Tim. 2). Christ’s spirit was strongest and most worthy of a crown (Apoc. 6:2, “he went forth conquering that he might conquer”); therefore most of all the fomes. Sed contra: Matt. 1:20, “what is born in her is of the Holy Spirit,” and the Holy Spirit excludes sin and the inclination to sin.

7. The body of article 2, and the digression on music (“your emotions are moved in sympathy with the music”) #

Body: Christ had grace and all the virtues most perfectly. Moral virtue, which is in the irrational part of the soul, makes that part subject to reason, and the more so the more perfect the virtue — temperance the concupiscible, fortitude and mansuetudo (gentleness) the irascible. The fomes by definition is the inclination of the sense appetite against reason. Therefore the more perfect the virtue, the more the force of the fomes is weakened; Christ’s virtue being most perfect, in him there was none. Nor could this defect be ordered to satisfying; it inclines to the contrary. He unpacks concupiscible/irascible (back to Plato and Aristotle): the concupiscible regards what is agreeable or disagreeable to sense (desire, pleasure, pain/sadness), the irascible is “the fighter for the concupiscible” (anger, boldness, fear). Digression from Aristotle’s Politics: it matters what music you listen to, because the emotions are moved in harmony with the music — Bach, Mozart, Handel represent the emotions in a reasonable state and so dispose to moral virtue; rock and roll moves them irrationally and disposes to vice. Aristotle says paintings too must be watched, but music is more powerful with the emotions. Tragedy is defined as producing catharsis, a purgation of the emotions — the same would hold of comedy, but that part is lost. Examples and reports attached here:

• Austin’s essay “Towards an Evaluation of Music,” read when his brother Richard was at the College of St. Thomas.
• A friend in conflict with his brother taken to As You Like It: two pairs of brothers wronging each other, reconciled in the forest of Arden (“nature”) — his rapport with his brother changed. “Good fiction and good music are a stepping stone to moral virtue.”
• Student: Rahner said he was not interested in art and music; Cardinal Ratzinger said of an unnamed big post-Vatican-II theologian that he prided himself on being a barbarian, and that for a theologian not to be in touch with the beautiful is very dangerous. Ratzinger plays Mozart, in whose music one sees the human tragedy.
• Student: Evelyn Waugh’s Helena (his own favourite of his works) has a gifted Roman poet, a convert, who feared someone with the gifts of a Cicero but the soul of a jackal.

8. Replies of article 2, with the horse and the son (“should reason rule the emotions like the man rules his son”) #

• Reply 1: The lower powers of the sense appetite are naturally able to obey reason; the bodily powers and fluids are not. So perfection of virtue does not exclude the body’s ability to suffer, but does exclude the fomes, whose very definition is the resistance of sense appetite to reason. “No one thinking about it can add a cubit to himself.” From the Nicomachean Ethics: as the doctor who cures the body by art must know what the body is by nature, so the moral philosopher must know the soul’s makeup. Aristotle divides the soul into the rational part and the part that has no reason, then subdivides — [ed.: he misspeaks, saying “he subdivides the rational part”] — into what can be trained to obey reason and what cannot. Anger and sadness can be trained by repeated acts; the ability to grow cannot. Plato’s image: reason to the emotions as a man to his horse — the horse throws him at first, but if he keeps getting on, the horse is tamed (cf. Washington Irving’s A Tour on the Prairies on breaking wild horses, wild at first, quickly brought into subjection). Aristotle’s question: should reason rule the emotions as a man rules his son, or as a master rules a slave? Answer: as a father rules his son — the slave has no say and is ruled for the master’s good; the son is ruled for his own good and has something to say about his life. Illustration: his father’s business friend sent his son to Amherst, who flunked out, was not fit for college at all, and was happy running a filling station. His own father and uncle finally told him to take a night course in philosophy; before dying his father said, “You’re going to have an easier time in life than I did.” Thomas calls the vices of concupiscence childish vices: a child always given his way becomes unmanageable, and so do the emotions. Hence Christ, having perfect virtue, has concupiscible and irascible wholly subject to reason, no room for vice — but the part not subject to reason can still have defects: Christ can get tired. Aside: you cannot tell your body not to be tired or to sleep on command; a friend was hospitalized to find a sleeping pill that would not leave him groggy.
• Reply 2: The flesh naturally wants what is pleasing to it; but the flesh of a rational animal wants this according to the mode and order of reason (a good human act is a reasonable act; a good desire is one ordered and measured by reason). So Christ’s flesh naturally desired food, drink, sleep — he was hungry after forty days — as desired according to right reason (Damascene III). This does not give a fomes, which implies desire for pleasant things outside the order of reason. Aside: modus comes from measure, as Augustine explains; “mode” is akin to mensura.
• Reply 3: Some strength of spirit is shown in resisting contrary desires of the flesh (St. Francis and the thorn bush — a student first says Benedict; he grants both may have done it); but greater strength is shown when by that power the flesh is wholly compressed so that it cannot desire against the spirit. This belonged to Christ, whose spirit had the highest grade of fortitude. And though he had no interior fight on the part of the fomes, he sustained an exterior fight from the world and the devil, and by overcoming it merited the crown of victory. Aside: St. Francis de Sales had a real temper and became a very gentle saint, model for Paul VI and John XXIII. Student exchange: then how could Christ be tempted in the desert? — He can be tempted from outside; he has no disordered emotion prone to give in, so not tempted as we are. He could be tempted by hunger but not by gluttony; turning stones to bread would have been no sin — it was in his power and he was hungry. Jerome (per Thomas’s commentary) makes it a temptation against his Father’s providence; the devil “always tempted one obvious thing against something else,” there are always two points to a temptation. Could he be tempted to pride? Not really — but the devil did not know that, so he tempted him by something exterior; “If thou be the Son of God” is a demand to show his stuff. The three temptations correspond to 1 John’s lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, pride of life — the three St. John of the Cross likes to treat.

9. Article 3, objections and body: was there ignorance in Christ? (“Christ came that he might take away our ignorances”) #

Objections:

1. What belongs to him according to human nature was truly in him (suffering, death); Damascene III says they took on an ignorant and slavish nature. (“You see what Damascene thought of us.”)
2. One is ignorant through a defect of knowledge; some knowledge was lacking — “he who did not know sin was made sin for us.”
3. Isaiah 8: “before the boy knew to call father and mother, the strength [of Damascus] was taken away”; that boy is Christ. Sed contra: ignorance is not taken away by ignorance, and Christ came to take away our ignorances, to enlighten those sitting in darkness and the shadow of death. Body: as in Christ was the fullness of grace and virtue, so also the fullness of all knowledge. As fullness of grace and virtue excludes sin, fullness of knowledge excludes ignorance, its opposite. John: “full of grace and truth” — full of grace, no sin; full of truth, no ignorance. (He notes that verse has many senses of the letter.)

10. Replies of article 3 (“nature taken on can be considered in two ways”) #

• Reply 1: The assumed nature considered (a) by reason of its species — thus Damascene calls it ignorant and servile, a servant of God its maker, not having knowledge of future things; (b) according to what it has from union to the divine hypostasis, whence fullness of knowledge and grace — John 1:14, “we saw him as the Word, the only-begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth,” where “only-begotten from the Father” names the person. In this second way human nature in Christ had no ignorance. Aside: Thomas and Augustine take the temptation of Adam and Eve this way — not tempted by sins of the flesh, since their flesh was subject to reason, but by knowledge of future contingents, so as not to rely on God’s providence: a very intellectual, proud sin, like the temptation of Christ. A student notes that they too were tempted by something sensible and obvious toward something else.
• Reply 2: Christ is said not to know sin because he does not know it by experience, though he knows it by simple knowledge. Illustration: knowing in a simple way what it is to be in battle without having been in one.
• Reply 3: The prophet speaks of Christ’s human knowledge: before the boy knew, i.e. according to his humanity, to call Joseph “father” (his reputed father) and Mary “mother” — not that there was a time when he was a man and did not know this. Either literally the strength of Damascus and spoils of Samaria were taken by the king of the Assyrians [transcript: “Syrians”], or spiritually of the people not yet called, as Jerome’s gloss expounds. Augustine (sermon on the Epiphany) says it was fulfilled in the adoration of the Magi: the power of Damascus is the wealth Damascus prided itself on, which the Magi bring; Samaria stands for idolatry, and these first spoils are the boy’s taking away of idolatry. He calls it an obscure passage — “as Augustine says, there are more things in Scripture I don’t understand.”

His words #

• “the fountain of sin” / “foaming” / fomes — his renderings; a student supplies the dictionary sense, tinder or kindling for a fire, “flammable matter down there.”
• “delicta” — sins/faults, as in the Psalm objection.
• “seedy reason” / “seedy idea” — ratio seminalis, the seed-principle by which we were in Adam, as against corpulentia, “bodiness,” bodily substance.
• “the host for sin” — victim, the sacrificial offering (Hosea’s “sins of my people” eaten by the priests).
• “mansuetudo” — gentleness, the virtue moderating anger.
• “mode” from mensura, measure — the order and measure of reason in desire.
• “ignorances” (plural) — what Christ came to take away.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 15, prologue and aa. 1–3 (objections, body, replies).
• Within these: Ps. 21 (“why have you abandoned me”); Rom. 5; Heb. 2:18; 2 Cor. 5; 1 Pet. 2; John 8; Ecclus. 34; Damascene, De fide orthodoxa III; Augustine, On the Christian Combat; Augustine, On Christian Doctrine III (the seven rules of Tyconius); Augustine, On Genesis to the Letter X; Hosea 4; Is. 53; Matt. 1:20; Gal. 5; 2 Tim. 2; Apoc. 6:2; gloss on Rom. 7:8; Is. 8; John 1:14; Augustine, sermon on the Epiphany; gloss of Jerome. Mentioned
• Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (Bassanio; Graziano “by my hood”); As You Like It.
• Aristotle, Politics (music and the emotions); Poetics (catharsis) (inferred); Nicomachean Ethics (doctor/moral philosopher; rule of father vs. master).
• Plato (man and horse; concupiscible/irascible).
• Thomas’s commentary on the temptations; Jerome on the first temptation.
• 1 John (lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, pride of life); John of the Cross.
• Washington Irving, A Tour on the Prairies; Evelyn Waugh, Helena; Austin, “Towards an Evaluation of Music”; the Congregation for the Faith on Roger Haight.

His questions #

• Whether in Christ there was sin? No — sin cannot satisfy, does not show the truth of human nature, and cannot give example of virtue; neither original nor actual.
• How can Christ say “the words of my sins”? He speaks from the person of his members, Christ and the Church being taken as one person (Tyconius’s first rule); cf. “Why do you persecute me?”
• Did Christ sin in Adam, since he descended from him? No — he was in Adam only materially, not by the seminal reason; his conception was from the Holy Spirit.
• What does “he was made sin for us” mean? Either made the host/victim for sin, or made to have the likeness of the flesh of sin, taking a passible and mortal body.
• Did Christ have the virtue of faith? No — so Mary, not Christ, is the greatest example of faith; and for penance for one’s own sins, one looks to Peter.
• Whether in Christ there was the fomes of sin? No — the more perfect the moral virtue, the more the fomes is weakened; Christ’s virtue was most perfect.
• Should reason rule the emotions like a master ruling a slave, or a father ruling his son? Like a father ruling his son — for the son’s own good, and the son has something to say.
• If Christ had no fomes, how was he tempted in the desert? By an exterior fight from the world and the devil — tempted by hunger, not by gluttony; and the devil did not know he could not be tempted to pride.
• Whether in Christ there was ignorance? No — the fullness of knowledge excludes ignorance; the nature is called “ignorant and servile” only by reason of its species, not as united to the divine person.
• What does “before the boy knew to call father and mother” mean? Left partly open — either literally of Damascus and Samaria, or spiritually of the uncalled people (Jerome), or of the Magi’s adoration (Augustine); “there are more things in Scripture I don’t understand.”