De Malo on Punishment and Sin; Summa III q.30 a.3: Why the Angel Appeared to Mary in Bodily Vision

Orientation #

He opens with the feast of the day, St. Raymond of Peñafort, “the occasion for my favorite book,” the Summa Contra Gentiles. He then finishes an argument left hanging from the De Malo before asking “Did you do Article 3 yet here in question thirty?” and reading it. The previous class treated the marriage of Mary and Joseph and the opening article on the Annunciation.

The class, in order #

1. Leftover from the De Malo: is punishment worse than fault? (“the danger here, of likeness of proportion”) #

The point: an objection built on a proportion collapses once you see the proportions are not alike.

• Objection: good act : reward of heaven :: bad act : punishment of hell. The reward is better than the good act. Therefore punishment should be worse than the bad act (worse than culpa).
• A student: the reward looks like a final cause of the good act, the punishment more like an efficient cause. He accepts the direction: the reward is the end of the good act, and the end is better than what is for its sake; but the bad act is not for the sake of the punishment — rather the punishment is to correct the bad act. “Thomas kind of turns the thing.”
• Second question, put more explicitly: which is worse, mortal sin or loss of the vision? A student: mortal sin is the turning away, the loss of vision only the consequence. His answer: mortal sin is opposed to the love of God in himself; loss of the vision is loss of my good, my enjoyment of God — a great good for me, but not comparable to the goodness of God in himself.
• Example attached to this: the Act of Contrition — “I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell… most of all because they offend Thee my God, who art all good” — the last clause naming what God is in himself.
• A further objection he reports (quoting Gregory): people fear the punishment more, as though it were worse. Reply: that is what the bad man does; the good man flees sin more; and as Aristotle says, the virtuous man is the measure of good and bad.
• Aside: Jack Storch calls De Malo the greatest treatise on evil; you will be disappointed if you come looking for sins of the flesh. Its first question is general — what the bad is, that it is found in something good, that the good is the accidental cause of the bad — and the last two articles distinguish poena from culpa.

2. The three objections of a. 3 (“more worthy is the understandable vision”) #

The point: each objection proposes a higher kind of vision, or none at all.

1. Intellectual vision is worthier than bodily (Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram XII — the commentary in which, he notes, Augustine faulted Jerome for sloppiness). And it is more suitable to the angel: in intellectual vision the angel is seen in his own substance, in bodily vision only in an assumed bodily figure. So high a message should come by the highest genus of vision.
2. Imaginary vision is nobler than bodily, as imagination is a higher power than the external senses; and the angel appeared to Joseph in sleep (Matthew 1:20; 2:13, 19).
3. Bodily vision of a spiritual substance stupefies the seer — sung of the Virgin in a Matins responsory for the feast of the Annunciation, that she was terrified of the light. Better her mind be preserved from such disturbance.

• Sed contra: Augustine in a sermon has the Virgin say, “There came to me the archangel Gabriel, shining in face, brilliant in his vestments, marvelous in his manner of coming in.”
• Aside: he and his wife have a Flemish Annunciation in the bedroom; he once lectured on how painters treated the Annunciation — there is always a symbol of virginity, the flowers.

3. The body of the article: three fitnesses (“belief seeking understanding”) #

The fact first — the angel appeared by bodily vision — then, “belief seeking understanding,” why it was suitable, a coming-together (convenientia).

1. As regards what was announced: the angel came to announce the incarnation of the invisible God, so it was fitting that an invisible creature take on a form to appear visibly. Also, all the apparitions of the Old Testament are ordered to this appearance, in which the Son of God appeared in the flesh.
2. As regards the one to whom it was announced — he stresses this is distinguished from the first: the dignity of the Mother of God, who received the Son of God not only in her mind but in her bodily womb (“blessed is the fruit of thy womb”); therefore not only her mind but her bodily senses were to be refreshed by the angelic vision. “That’s interesting.”
3. As regards certitude: what is subject to the eyes we apprehend more certainly than what is imagined. Chrysostom on Matthew: the angel stood before the Virgin visibly, not in sleep, because she was to take so great a relation from him. “That’s the nature of man.”

4. Reply to the first: intellectual, imaginary and bodily together (“if it be what alone”) #

Intellectual vision is potior than imaginary or bodily if it be alone; but as Augustine says, that prophecy is more excellent which has intellectual and imaginary vision at once than one that has only one of them. The Blessed Virgin had not only the bodily vision but intellectual illumination, so her apparition was the nobler.

• Example: Pharaoh had the imaginary vision of the dream; the prophet came and gave the intellectual understanding of what it meant. The one who has both is better off.
• It would have been nobler still to see the angel in his very substance by intellectual vision, but this does not befit the status of man as viator, on the road. As Dionysius says, everything must be fitted [to its recipient].

5. Reply to the second: sense is the beginning of knowledge (“the beginnings of knowledge are more certain”) #

Imagination is indeed a higher power than exterior sense; but the beginning of human knowledge is sense, and in it certitude most of all consists, because the beginnings of knowledge must always be more certain. Hence Joseph, to whom the angel appeared in sleep, did not have so excellent an apparition as the Blessed Virgin.

• He asks for his definition of judgment; a student gives it: “the separation of the true from the false by some beginning in our knowledge.” Since the senses are the very beginning of our knowledge, a judgment that goes back to that beginning has a certain certitude.

6. Reply to the third, part one: disturbance and the dignity of being raised up (“we are alienated from our affection”) #

Ambrose on Luke: we are disturbed and alienated from our affection when we are bound by the intervention of some superior power — and this happens in imaginary vision too: Genesis 15, when the sun set a sleep came over Abraham, and a great fear and a great darkness invaded him. Such disturbance is not so harmful that one ought to forego the angelic vision. First reason: the very fact that man is raised above himself pertains to his dignity; the lower part is weakened, and from that the disturbance comes.

• Example attached: the natural heat going inward or outward — the “white fear.” In embarrassment, where it is not your body but what people say of you, the blood rushes outward to fight the exterior thing; when the body is threatened, you turn white, the blood going back to the heart to preserve life. Shakespeare plays on this in the sonnets with the red and the white flowers: “Very subtle, Shakespeare.”
• Same reason applied: Teresa of Avila in ecstasy — the lower part weakened, the higher raised up (and the body off the ground); and Paul carried to the third heaven, which Thomas understands as the heaven of the first hierarchy, the seraphim, seeing God in passing and not knowing whether he was in the body.

7. Digression: Shakespeare and Plato, Bernard, Origen (“poetic gift and some philosophical gift”) #

Shakespeare and Plato are unique in having both a poetic and a philosophical gift, which do not usually go together — Plato a philosopher with poetic gifts (hence poets prefer him to Aristotle; the legend that he was to be a poet until he met Socrates), Shakespeare a playwright with philosophical gifts. A student adds Benedict XVI’s gift for music and words as a Platonic leaning. He notes a text where Thomas says Augustine followed Plato as far as was compatible with the Catholic faith.

• Bernard is in some sense more poetic than Thomas; he recommends Pius XII’s encyclical on Bernard, Doctor Mellifluus, found under Pius XII’s encyclicals in Latin alphabetical order — and links the honey-name to Shakespeare’s “honey words,” “sugared sonnets.”
• On Origen: people who make a serious mistake about the faith tend to be dismissed altogether; Benedict encouraged reading him for his love of Scripture and of Christ. In Thomas’s exposition of John the authorities cited most are Augustine and Chrysostom, with Origen probably third; with Tertullian Thomas is more cautionary — a reminder how cautious the theologian must be, how much humility the one who uses his mind must have.

8. Reply to the third, part two: “do not fear,” and the discretion of spirits (“ne timeas”) #

Second reason, from Origen on Luke: the angel, knowing this to be human nature, first calms the man’s disturbance — hence to Zechariah and to Mary, after the turbatio, he says ne timeas.

• From the Life of Anthony: the discretion of good and bad spirits is not difficult — if after the fear a joy succeeds (“my spirit rejoices in God my savior”), the aid came from the Lord, since the security of the present soul is an indication of the Majesty; but if the fear that was brought about remains, it is the enemy who is seen.
• Aside: John Paul II’s “Be not afraid”; the Polish man in the package store who thought they were pulling his leg that a Pole had been elected; a Maronite priest with a Polish father getting congratulatory calls, and the joke that a Polish Maronite patriarch would be next.

9. Virginal verecundia, and stupefaction against admiratio (“she did not think great things of herself”) #

The Virgin’s disturbance suited virginal verecundia, for as Ambrose on Luke says, it is a virgin’s part trepidare, to be fearful and nervous at the approach and at the breath of men.

• But some say (Thomas does not name them, he notes) that since she was accustomed to visions of angels she was not disturbed at the vision of the angel, but was in admiratio at what was said to her.
• The distinction he draws out: admiratio is the beginning of philosophy, wonder the beginning of learning; stupefaction is an impediment — stupefied, you cannot proceed at all. And she wondered because she did not think great things of herself: her humility. Hence the evangelist does not say she was disturbed at the vision of the angel but at his speech.

10. Student question: why Joseph’s vision differed (“she had no other index to go by”) #

A student asks why it was fitting that Joseph had the lower, dream-vision and Mary the bodily one, and answers from a place he recalls in Thomas: the marvel announced to the Virgin had no precedent whatsoever, so she needed the great surge of the sense, having no other index to go by; Joseph already had the sensible evidence of his wife pregnant while knowing he was not the father and that she was pure, so he did not need the index of the senses and needed a higher kind of vision. [Locus not given in class.]

• Closing aside, on Thomas on John (text “a little bit off,” he says): why John was the disciple whom Christ loved — three reasons: John’s purity or virginity, the excellence of his mind, which went to the highest things, and the fervor of his love for Christ.

His words #

• culpa — fault, the bad act, as against poena, punishment.
• “belief seeking understanding” — the fact of the apparition first, then why it was suitable.
• “convenience,” “this comes together” — his rendering of convenientia, fittingness.
• “understandable vision” [ed.: intellectual vision] — seeing the angel in his own substance.
• potior — “more potent,” of intellectual vision taken alone.
• viator — man “on the road,” the status that excludes seeing an angel in his substance.
• judgment — “the separation of the true from the false by some beginning in our knowledge.”
• “white fear” — blood withdrawn to the heart under bodily threat, against the outward rush of embarrassment.
• turbatio / ne timeas — the disturbance, and the angel’s “do not fear.”
• verecundia — virginal modesty; trepidare, to be fearful at the approach of men.
• admiratio — wonder, the beginning of philosophy, as opposed to stupefaction, an impediment.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 30, a. 3 — read and commented through, objections, sed contra, body, three replies.
• Thomas Aquinas, De Malo, q. 1, a. 5 (inferred) — the objection on reward and punishment, and poena vs. culpa.
• Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram XII (obj. 1); a sermon of Augustine (sed contra); Augustine on the more excellent prophecy (reply 1).
• Matthew 1:20; 2:13, 19 (obj. 2); Genesis 15:12 (reply 3).
• Chrysostom on Matthew; Ambrose on Luke; Origen on Luke; Life of Anthony.
• Matins responsory for the feast of the Annunciation (obj. 3).

Mentioned

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles; his exposition of the Gospel of John (Augustine, Chrysostom, Origen, Tertullian; the three reasons John was the beloved disciple).
• Gregory (quoted in the De Malo objection); Aristotle, on the virtuous man as measure; Dionysius, on all things being fitted.
• Pius XII, Doctor Mellifluus; Bernard’s four sermons on the Blessed Virgin; Shakespeare’s sonnets; Plato’s dialogues.

His questions #

• Which is better, the good act or the reward — and does it follow that punishment is worse than the bad act? No: the reward is the end of the good act, but the bad act is not for the sake of punishment; punishment is to correct it.
• Which is worse, mortal sin or the loss of the vision? Mortal sin, because it is opposed to the goodness of God in himself, a greater good than my enjoyment of him.
• Ought the angel to have appeared to the Virgin by bodily vision? Yes — Thomas states the fact and then shows it fitting on three counts.
• Why was bodily vision suitable to the dignity of the Mother of God? Because she received the Son not only in her mind but in her bodily womb, so her bodily senses too were to be refreshed.
• Is not intellectual vision higher? Higher if alone; but she had bodily vision and intellectual illumination, and that combination is nobler.
• Is not imagination a higher power than the external senses? Yes, but sense is the beginning of knowledge and beginnings must be more certain — so Joseph’s dream-vision was less excellent.
• Give me the definition of judgment. The separation of the true from the false by some beginning in our knowledge.
• Does not the disturbance caused by an angel argue against bodily vision? No: being raised above oneself weakens the lower part and belongs to man’s dignity, and the angel first calms the fear with ne timeas.
• Why was the Virgin in wonder rather than stupefied? Because she did not think great things of herself; and the evangelist says she was troubled at his speech, not at the vision.