Summa III q.18 a.3–4: The Will as Nature and as Reason, and Free Choice in Christ

Orientation #

He opens with the prayer to God, the guardian angels and St. Thomas, then goes straight to article 3 of the question he has been reading, and ends by asking whether there is time for “another article before the…” — so the next article is pending. The neighbouring classes continue in the same question on the wills of Christ.

The class, in order #

1. The three objections of a. 3 (“in Christ there are two wills as regards reason”) #

• Obj. 1 (Damascene, bk. II): man’s will is twofold, the natural, called thelesis, and the rational, called boulesis; Christ had whatever belongs to the perfection of human nature, so both were in him. He notes this “strange way of thinking” is probably what gave rise to the article.
• Obj. 2: appetite is diversified according to the diversity of the apprehensive power (sense vs. understanding give sense appetite and intellectual appetite); but on the apprehensive side there is also a difference of reason and understanding, both in Christ; so a twofold will. He puts the question to the class: are understanding and reasoning two different powers in us? We do make some distinction — to understand and to reason is not the same thing.
• Obj. 3: some (Hugh of St. Victor, in a work on the four wills in Christ) place in Christ a will of piety, which can only be on the side of reason; so many wills of reason.
• Sed contra: in any order there is one first mover; the will is the first mover in the genus of human acts; so in one man there is only one will properly speaking, the will of reason; Christ is one man.
• Aside: “I have enough problems with my will without having three or four wills to contend with” — enough internal conflict between will and the emotions already.

2. The body of a. 3: voluntas as power and as act (“sometimes taken for the power and sometimes for the act”) #

• Like intellectus (used by Thomas for the power, for the act, and for the habit; Aristotle’s nous names both the power of understanding and one of the virtues of reason) — words equivocal by reason.
• If voluntas is taken for the act, two must be placed in Christ on the side of reason, i.e. two species of act, because the will is both of the end and of the things that are for the end, and is carried differently to each: to the end simply and absolutely, as to what is good as such; to the means with a comparison, as having goodness from its order to another.
• Example carried through: willing health (the end, willed as such) vs. willing the taking of medicine (willed only from its order to health). Damascene calls the first thelesis, simple will, called by the masters voluntas ut natura; the second boulesis, the will that results from taking counsel, called voluntas ut ratio.
• Parallel drawn: reason as nature naturally knows some things (the axioms); reason as reason knows by discourse. Shakespeare’s “ability for large discourse” defines reason as reason; and logic, the art, directs reason as reason — you need no logic for what you naturally know.
• This diversity of act does not diversify the power, since both acts fall under one common notion of object, the good — the object of the will is the good as known by reason. So: one human will essentially in Christ (not said by participation, “like we said Saturday”), but two acts, will as nature and will as reason.

3. Student exchange on “will as nature” (“ordered to one thing, which is happiness”) #

• A student: will as nature is will as ordered to one, i.e. happiness; we cannot not want to be happy. He accepts this “chiefly,” but adds that things obviously connected with happiness get included — life, liberty: in the Declaration of Independence the order of being is life, liberty, pursuit of happiness (liberty presupposes life; happiness presupposes liberty). Seeing that connection, one naturally wills liberty and life too.
• Another student’s worry: one can refuse to be healthy, e.g. to avoid the draft — but even so you want your leg well, not your head; the refusal is qualified.
• Same pattern with reason as nature: the fundamental thing is the axiom that something cannot be and not be at the same time in the same way, but it extends to “the whole is more than the part.”

4. The three replies of a. 3 (“not diversified according to powers”) #

• ad 1: those wills differ not by power but by difference of act.
• ad 2: intellectus and ratio are not diverse powers. Understanding as a power = the ability to understand; Shakespeare’s reason = ability for large discourse, “looking before and after” — looking, i.e. trying to see, not yet understanding. Discourse = coming to know what you don’t know from what you do know. The name “understanding” is said of angelic and human understanding, but is often kept as the angel’s own name, while man’s gets the new name “reason,” because man understands little without reasoning — Isaac’s phrase, intellectus obumbratus, intellect under the shadow.
  • Names equivocal by reason: a kitten is a little cat and a puppy a little dog, yet we also divide “he’s only a puppy, not a dog,” “just a boy, not a man.”
  • Aristotle’s vocabulary in the De Anima: nous; also dunamis theoretike, the power of looking at things (= Shakespeare’s “look before and after”); dunamis dianoetike (and dianoia), matching the Posterior Analytics’ dianoetic knowledge from pre-existent knowledge (= “large discourse”); and logismos, which in Greek means both calculation and reasoning — the two main kinds of discourse, since from two known numbers you get a third, from two known statements a third. Hence logistike (art of calculating) and logike. Shakespeare combines the two: “you have to admire that.”
  • Trinitarian aside: God the Father as thinker and the Son as his thought — but not thinking in our discursive way; he naturally understands himself, and the thought naturally follows; the Holy Spirit by way of the natural love God has of himself.
  • Aside: a student doing the Prior Analytics with him inherited Shakespeare volumes, some of them the New Hudson Shakespeare; the introduction to As You Like It there is the best short eulogy of Shakespeare he has seen.
• ad 3: the voluntas pietatis is nothing other than the will considered as nature, insofar as it flees an alien evil absolutely considered.

5. Article 4 set up, with its objections (“whether in Christ there was free judgment”) #

• He stresses the Latin says free judgment (liberum arbitrium), not free will: “without free judgment you wouldn’t have free will.”
• Obj. 1 (Damascene, bk. III): gnome (opinion/mind/thinking) and proairesis (choice) cannot properly be said in God — and in matters of faith above all we ought to speak properly. So no choice in Christ, hence no free judgment, whose act is choice.
  • Digression: Anselm says not only the Father says himself but the Son and the Holy Spirit say themselves — Thomas answers that “say” is being used loosely for “understands”; it is never a proper use. His own little poem: “God the Father said it all in one word, but he’s the only one that has a word proceeding from him.”
  • Note on liberum arbitrium: arbitrium names something of reason, a judgment, and choice proceeds from it — whereas Aristotle in Ethics III leaves it somewhat in the air whether choice is an act of reason or of will, since it involves both.
• Obj. 2: choice is the desire of what one has taken counsel about (Ethics III); but we do not take counsel about things of which we are certain, and Christ was certain of all things.
  • Context given: Ethics II defines moral virtue as a habit with choice, in the middle relative to us, determined by reason; only at the start of book III does Aristotle ask what this choice is — the chief thing in the moral order. Do you choose to drink moderately or excessively?
• Obj. 3: free will is open to both alternatives; Christ’s will was determined to the good, since he could not sin. He notes the same is said of God: it is not true that he would need to be able to choose evil to be free.
• Sed contra: Isaiah 7 — “he will eat butyrum and honey, that he may reject evil and choose good,” an act of free will. A long exchange over butyrum: butter, or curds, or cottage cheese; he holds for butter (“curds are a corruption, modern translation”), someone suggests it is meant as the bitter opposite of the honey; a dictionary is at hand. [left unsettled]

6. The body of a. 4: choice follows on will as reason (“in Christ there is a twofold act of the will”) #

1. In Christ there are the two acts already distinguished: toward what is willed as such (the end), and toward what is willed by its order to another (means).
2. As the philosopher says in Ethics III, choice differs from will in that will properly is of the end, choice of the things toward the end.
3. Therefore simplex voluntas = will as nature, and choice = will as reason; and choice is the proper act of free judgment.
4. Hence, since one lays down in Christ a will as reason, one must place choice in him, and consequently free judgment.

7. The replies of a. 4, and the digression on the best possible universe (“He chose us in Himself before the constitution of the world”) #

• ad 1: Damascene excludes choice from Christ as he takes the name to imply doubt; but doubt is no necessity of choice, since choosing belongs even to God — Ephesians 1:4, “he chose us in himself before the constitution of the world.” In God there is no doubting; doubt attaches to choice only insofar as it is in an ignorant nature, and the same answer covers the other authorities cited.
• Digression, from that verse: thank God for choosing you to be, and for choosing to make a universe of which you could be a part. Did God make the best possible universe?
  • The objection: the better the craftsman, the better the work (Plato); God, infinitely good, wise and powerful, must have made the best possible.
  • His answer: any universe he makes is infinitely less than himself, so he could always make a better one; hence God cannot make the best possible universe, because it involves a contradiction — there is no best one to be chosen. Parallel contradiction: could God make something that does not depend on him for its existence?
  • Thomas’s diagnosis of those who hold the best-possible view: either God made the universe not by choice but by natural determination (nature is determined to one), as a Leibniz would think, or he made it by will but had to choose the best — and there is no best to choose.
  • Therefore God chooses among infinitely many possible good universes, so he has free choice. And the universes he did not choose would have had none of us in them: “I’m glad he chose the one of which I’m a part.” Could he have been part of a universe his mother and father were not part of? He doubts it very much.
• ad 2: choice presupposes counsel, but does not follow from counsel until determined through judgment; what has been judged to be done after the inquiry of counsel, we choose (Ethics III). So doubt or inquisition does not belong per se to choice, but only as it occurs in an ignorant nature — Aristotle is speaking of choice in us.
  • The three acts of prudence: counsel, judgment, command. His brother Mark’s joke about three men in Quebec: one could think of all kinds of things to do but had no judgment which should be done; Mark had the judgment; the third got them going. Between them they divided the three acts — which shows a complete man of prudence must have all three.
• ad 3: Christ’s will, though determined to the good, is not determined to this or that good; so it belongs to him to choose by free judgment, confirmed in the good, as it does to the blessed.

8. Free judgment illustrated by his own evening’s reading (“should I read Shakespeare, or should I read Thomas”) #

• A student asks whether “free judgment” and “free choice” are just two aspects of the same thing. His reply: liberum arbitrium points out that reason can judge this or that to be good (and in us can even judge something bad to be good); unless reason had that ability there would be only one thing judged good to do, and no choice.
• Worked example of that freedom, all the options good: Shakespeare, or Thomas on the Gospel of St. John (the greatest book ever written, with Augustine and Chrysostom behind it), or Thomas on the De Anima, or the Quaestiones disputatae de potentia (beautiful things on the Trinity — maybe read that first to understand John’s first chapter), or his favourite, the Summa contra Gentiles; or, worn out from the monks, relax with Shakespeare, since Thomas treats the virtue of eutrapelia and quotes the anecdote about St. John and the bow that must be unbent. “I’m a crafty fellow, you see.”
• Attached: Msgr. Dionne’s view that if you have only eight or nine years for philosophy you should spend them on logic; Warren Murray calls that excessive, since logic is just a tool — but without it you cannot figure out the rest. And he may need to read Albert the Great on the Prior Analytics to know what he is talking about next week.
• Contrast case: the animal’s judgment is determined by its nature — with cats, some things they judge the same way every time and you cannot convince them. And we say “I have no choice” when only one thing is to be done.
• Asides: whether one should get the new flu shot (a commentator got very sick; “take Obama’s advice, just take a pain pill”); the news rumour about Obama’s dog on Air Force One and the White House denial.

His words #

• thelesis — Damascene’s name for the natural or simple will, of the end; the masters’ voluntas ut natura.
• boulesis — Damascene’s rational will, resulting from counsel; voluntas ut ratio.
• “equivocal by reason” — of a name kept for power, act and habit, or for man’s and the angel’s understanding.
• “will as nature” / “will as reason” — his rendering of voluntas ut natura / ut ratio.
• “free judgment” — his literal rendering of liberum arbitrium [ed.: usually “free will”].
• intellectus obumbratus — Isaac’s phrase, “intellect under the shadow,” for man’s understanding.
• dunamis theoretike / dunamis dianoetike / logismos — Aristotle’s names for the power: ability to look; ability for discourse; calculation-and-reasoning.
• gnome and proairesis — Damascene’s terms: position or thinking, and choice.
• voluntas pietatis — the will of piety, “a monk’s language maybe,” = will as nature fleeing an alien evil absolutely considered.
• appetitus praeconsiliati — Aristotle’s definition of choice: desire of what one has taken counsel about.
• eutrapelia — the virtue Thomas treats about relaxing.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 18, a. 3 — objections, sed contra, body, three replies.
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 18, a. 4 — objections, sed contra, body, three replies.
• Isaiah 7 (sed contra of a. 4); Ephesians 1:4.

Mentioned

• John Damascene, De fide orthodoxa II (thelesis/boulesis) and III (gnome/proairesis).
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics II (definition of moral virtue) and III (choice, counsel, judgment).
• Aristotle, De Anima II–III; Posterior Analytics opening (inferred).
• Hugh of St. Victor, on the four wills in Christ (inferred).
• Shakespeare, “large discourse, looking before and after”; New Hudson Shakespeare, introduction to As You Like It.
• Thomas: commentary on the Gospel of St. John, on the De Anima, Quaestiones disputatae de potentia, Summa contra Gentiles.
• Anselm, on the Son and Holy Spirit “saying” themselves; Plato, on the craftsman; Leibniz; Albert the Great on the Prior Analytics.

His questions #

• Is the ability to understand and the ability to reason two different powers in us? No — intellectus and ratio are one power, named from naturally knowing some things and from having to reason to others.
• Does the twofold act of will diversify the power of will? No — both acts fall under one object, the good as known by reason; in Christ there is one human will essentially.
• Is will as nature simply the will as ordered to one thing, happiness? Chiefly, yes; but it extends to what is obviously connected with happiness — liberty, life itself.
• Was there choice in Christ, given that he was certain of all things and could not sin? Yes — choice presupposes counsel only as terminating in judgment, and doubt belongs to choice only in an ignorant nature.
• Does butyrum in Isaiah 7 mean butter or curds? Left open; he holds for butter and calls curds a modern corruption.
• Did God make the best possible universe? No — he cannot, since any universe is infinitely less than himself and there is no best to choose; so his choosing this one is free.
• Are “free judgment” and “free choice” just two names for the same thing? Not quite — arbitrium marks reason’s ability to judge this or that good, without which there would be no choice at all.