Summa III q.31 a.3–4: The symbolism of the genealogy numbers, the women in the genealogy, and why Christ took flesh from a woman

Orientation #

He is finishing the replies of q. 31, a. 3 (the reconciliation of the two genealogies) and then reads a. 4 whole. He breaks mid-way (“We need to break here”) and stops at the end of a. 4’s third reply. The previous class began q. 31 aa. 2–3 on Christ as son of David and Abraham (prev. lecture).

The class, in order #

1. Why Matthew descends and Luke ascends (“Matthew instituted what the kingly dignity”) #

Point: the two genealogies differ in direction and route because they signify two different things.

• Augustine (De consensu evangelistarum): Matthew insinuates the kingly dignity in Christ, Luke the priestly. His confirmations: only Matthew has the three wise men; Luke begins and ends in the temple and mentions it throughout.
• Matthew’s generations signify the taking on of our sins — through the origin of his flesh he took the likeness of sinful flesh without sin (i.e. the punishment: death, exhaustion). Luke’s signify the washing away of our sins through Christ’s sacrifice.
• Hence Matthew’s list descends, Luke’s ascends; Matthew goes from David through Solomon, in whose mother (Bathsheba) David sinned; Luke ascends through Nathan, sharing a name with the prophet by whom God expiated that sin. He notes Thomas is not saying the prophet was Solomon’s brother’s father — only the names are connected. “That’s beautiful the way Thomas sees that difference there.”
• Matthew commemorates the generations from Abraham down to Joseph at the start of his gospel; Luke narrates them not at the start but from the baptism, ascending past Abraham all the way to God, “to which the cleansed and expiated are reconciled” — and takes in the origin of adoption (Joseph “son of Eli” by adoption), because by adoption we are made sons of God, while by fleshly generation the Son of God is made son of man.
• Aside: Nathan’s parable of the man who took the lamb, and “Thou art the man,” he used to cite as an example of the poetic argument — you see yourself in a mirror, as Shakespeare says, and see what you really are.
• Aside: as Thomas says Plato and Aristotle are the chief philosophers, so Augustine and Thomas are the chief theologians.

2. The number forty and the meaning of ten (“the number what forty to the time of the present life”) #

Point: Thomas explains Matthew’s forty generations (excepting Christ himself) symbolically.

• Forty = 4 × 10; four for the four parts of the world in which we live our mortal life under Christ’s rule; ten because “from one proceeding to four, all number is constituted” (1+2+3+4 = 10).
• His Platonic gloss on 1–2–3–4: one = understanding (not from this to that); two = episteme, premises to conclusion; three = opinion, since from probable premises you reason to opposite conclusions — which is dialectic: “reasoning from probable opinions to opposite conclusions,” as Socrates does in the Meno, first arguing that virtue can be taught, then that it cannot; four = the senses, which bring in the body. Also the Platonic geometry: point, line (2), surface (3), solid (4).
• Ten can alternatively be the Decalogue, and four the present life or the four [parts of the world].

3. Many senses of one letter, against the mockers (“there’s more than one way of seeing symbolism”) #

Point: the multiplicity of symbolic readings is no objection.

• People make fun of Augustine’s number explanations because another reading is always possible; but for Augustine and Thomas there can be more than one sense of the letter. Augustine on the 153 fish: there may be other ways of explaining this, but you cannot say this one is wrong. Thomas himself gives several explanations of the same number.
• Criterion he states: whatever is orthodox and can be accommodated to the letter can be a sense of the letter — God, who sees many things at once, can see many senses.
• Asides: his orange cut in twelve pieces, three bites each — “I wasn’t doing it for purposes”; table eleven in high school, and eleven as the symbol of transgression because it goes beyond ten; a friend’s group of twelve calling themselves “the apostles” / “the dirty dozen.”

4. Jechonias, forty-two, and the fourteens (“which number also belongs to the Holy Church”) #

Point: the count of generations depends on how Jechonias is read.

• Augustine: the same Jechonias ends the second fourteen and begins the third, signifying a turning to extraneous nations at the transmigration to Babylon, prefiguring Christ’s passage from circumcision to the Gentiles.
• Jerome: there were two, Joachim the father and Jechonias the son, both taken into Christ’s generation, so that the three fourteens stand distinct, reaching forty-two.
• Forty-two = 6 × 7: six signifying the labor of the present life, seven the rest of the future life. Fourteen = 10 + 4, the same meanings as the quaternarius, but by addition where forty was by multiplication.
• Parallel: Augustine explains the 153 fish by seventeen — those who obey the ten commandments according to the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit: ten plus seven. So too twelve is sometimes 3 × 4 (preaching the Trinity to the four corners) and sometimes 10 + 2 (Decalogue plus the two commandments of love).
• Student contribution: Fr. Cisterius (inferred spelling) noted Augustine preached to merchants, who loved numbers — a kind of inculturation of the gospel.

5. Digression: three, four, five (“my Pythagorean theorem, right?”) #

Point: a recurring pattern he uses at the board — the first Pythagorean triple 3-4-5 as a mnemonic for two doctrines.

• De anima: three souls, four grades of life, five genera of powers. Five to four: appetite follows on sense or reason, so desire gives no separate grade. The four grades: nutritive/growth/reproduction; plus sensation; plus locomotion; plus reason.
• Four to three: the soul is distinguished by rising above matter. Plant powers rise above matter somewhat, since they do not simply follow chemical principles (the old physics example: fire left to itself burns the body; the plant soul limits and directs it). Sensation is an immaterial reception in a bodily organ — “my eye doesn’t take on this shape.” Reason rises entirely above matter: “my reason is not in the brain… power of the soul that it has in itself, but not in the body.” But an oyster and a dog differ not by a new kind of immateriality, only by superiority of movement — hence three souls, four grades.
• Supporting aside on stability: Heisenberg said the stability of the living organism is not at all probable from physical principles; and Bohr’s atom, if a miniature solar system, would have no stability at all in contact with others — so atomic stability already resists mechanical explanation.
• Trinity: three persons, four relations, five notions — how five notions yield only four relations, four relations only three persons. He leaves these as questions to explain; “how do you explain the difference in numbers?”

6. Luke’s seventy-seven (“signifies the universality of sins”) #

Point: Luke’s number signifies the totality of sin taken away.

• Ten is the number of justice, shown in the ten precepts; sin is transgression of the law, hence eleven, transgression of ten. Seven signifies universality/totality, since time as a whole is divided by the revolution of seven days. 7 × 11 = 77: the universe of sins taken away by Christ.
• His own observation: Thomas does not directly answer the discrepancy in the number of generations beyond the symbolism — one might say a grandfather is given here, a grandson there, but Thomas does not attempt it. Left as he leaves it.

7. Ad 4: the kings omitted from Joram to the fourth generation (“Joram the king got mixed up with Jezebel”) #

Point: why three kings are dropped from Matthew’s list.

• Jerome on Matthew: because Joram mixed with the most impious Jezebel, his memory is removed to the third generation, lest he be placed in the holy order of the nativity.
• Chrysostom: as great a blessing was made on Jehu, who took vengeance on the house of Ahab and Jezebel, so great the malediction on Joram’s house for the daughter of the iniquitous Ahab and Jezebel, that to the fourth generation his sons were cut from the number of kings — per Exodus 20:5, visiting the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.
• Objection anticipated: other sinners are kept in the genealogy. Answer (from the Questions on the New and Old Testament): in them there was not a continual impiety; Solomon was spared by his father’s merit, Roboam by Asa’s; but in these three the impiety was continuous.
• Asides: “Don’t get mixed up with Jezebel, that’s for sure”; “Sounds like the Kennedys” — the debate line that the seat is not Kennedy’s but belongs to the citizens of Massachusetts.

8. Ad 5: the women named in the genealogy (“none of the holy women is taken”) #

Point: Matthew names only women whom Scripture reprehends.

• Jerome: so that he who came for sinners, born of sinners, might delete the sins of all. Thamar (reprehended for her union with her father-in-law), Rahab the harlot, Ruth the foreigner (a Moabitess), Bathsheba — named not by her own name but by her husband’s, both on account of her sin (conscious of the homicide) and so that naming the husband might recall David to his sin.
• Luke, intending Christ as expiator of sins, does not mention such women.
• The brothers of Judah are commemorated to show them pertaining to the people of God, whereas Ishmael (brother of Isaac) and Esau (brother of Jacob) were separated from it and are not in Christ’s generation; also to exclude pride of noble birth, since many of Judah’s brothers were born of slave women, and yet all were patriarchs and princes of tribes.
• Phares and Zara named together (Ambrose on Luke): the twofold life of the people — the law, signified by Zara, and faith, signified by Phares. The brothers of Jechonias are placed because all ruled at diverse times, which did not happen with other kings, or because their iniquity and misery were alike.
• Aside: the Fathers were forced into these investigations by heretics pointing out apparent discrepancies — as with the Trinity and Incarnation, the starting point was not curiosity but the necessity of defence; hence Augustine’s saying that heresy is necessary for the development of theology, since otherwise one would be afraid to touch such difficult things.

9. Article 4, objections and sed contra (“ought not to be taken from a woman”) #

1. The masculine sex is more noble, and it was most fitting Christ take what is perfect in human nature; so he should have taken flesh from a man, as Eve was formed from a man.
2. Whoever is conceived of a woman is contained in her womb; but God fills heaven and earth (Jer. 23:24), so it does not befit him to be contained in a woman’s small womb. (He notes this is a heretic’s objection.)
3. Those conceived of a woman undergo uncleanness — Job 25:4, no one born of woman can be clean; but nothing stained comes into the Wisdom of God (Wis. 7:25).

• Sed contra: Galatians 4:4, Deus misit Filium suum factum ex muliere.

10. The body of a. 4: three reasons (“most suitably nevertheless did he take flesh from the woman”) #

1. The whole of human nature is ennobled. Augustine, De 83 quaestionibus: the liberation of man ought to appear in both sexes; so he took on the more honourable sex as man, and it was fitting the liberation of the female sex appear in his being born of a woman. His comment: this is “real women’s liberation… true liberation.” Aside: lecturing on the Annunciation, he noted the order of redemption corresponds to the order of the fall — the fall begins from Eve and goes to the man, so redemption begins from Mary’s fiat and proceeds to the man conceived.
2. The truth of the Incarnation is made known. Ambrose, De incarnatione: many things you find according to nature and beyond nature — according to nature he was in a woman’s womb, above nature a virgin conceived and brought forth — that one might believe him God who renews nature and man born according to nature. Augustine, Epistle to Volusianus: had the omnipotent God formed man anywhere but from the maternal womb and suddenly brought him to view, would it not confirm an opinion of error, so that no true man taken on would be believed? Doing all marvellously, he would take away that he did it mercifully; now he appears mediator between God and man, joining both natures in the unity of his person, subliming the customary with the unaccustomed and tempering the unaccustomed by the customary. “That’s marvellous.”
3. All the diversity of human generation is completed: from the slime of the earth without man or woman (Adam); from a man without a woman (Eve); from man and woman (other men); so the fourth remains, from a woman without a man. A student: “St. Thomas is for the completion of the universe, all the possibilities.” He judges the first reason the most interesting, and notes Thomas put it first.

• Language aside (on homo/vir): Latin and Greek have one word (homo, anthrōpos) covering what English can only say with “man”; conversely Greek and Latin use one word (onoma/nomen) for both name and noun, so in the Peri Hermeneias commentators must say when Aristotle means name (including the verb) and when noun as opposed to verb. He recalls a woman at daily Mass forever correcting “man” in the text; “whether you call it horizontal, whether you call it vertical, it’s really just [the language].”
• He calls Ambrose one of the four or five great doctors of the Western Church, and pauses to fix that “Volusiana” is in fact Volusianus, a man.

11. The three replies (“do not despise yourselves, men”) #

• Ad 1: the masculine sex is indeed more noble, and therefore he assumed human nature in the masculine sex; but lest the feminine sex be despised, it was fitting he take flesh from a woman. Augustine, De agone christiano: do not despise yourselves, men — the Son of God took on the man; do not despise yourselves, women — the Son of God was born of a woman. “That’s marvelous.”
• Ad 2: Augustine, Contra Faustum XXIII (Faustus used this objection): the Catholic faith does not say the Son of God born of the Virgin was so contained in the mother’s womb as if he were not outside it, as if he had given up the administration of heaven and earth, as if he had gone out from the Father and were not in the Father. “But you, O Manichaean,” with a heart able to think only bodily things, cannot grasp these things; and per the Epistle to Felicianus, such men can think of nothing but bodies, of which none can be everywhere whole, because of parts (he and a student compare texts: “tanta parte” — it must be partes). Much other is the nature of the soul than of the body; how much more of God, creator of both, who knows to be everywhere and contained by no place, to come without receding from where he was, to go away without deserting.
  • He links this to the missions of the divine persons: not by leaving one place and coming to another.
  • Aside: in Homer, Hera dresses up and seduces Zeus so that he cannot attend to the battle; the objection would reduce God to Zeus’s level or less. Aside: his cousin Donald could not get his mother to understand that Christ in his divine nature had no body.
• Ad 3: in conception from man and woman there is nothing unclean insofar as it is God’s work — Acts 10:15, what God has made, do not call common. The uncleanness comes from sin, insofar as one is conceived with lust, which was not so in Christ. And if there were uncleanness there, the Word of God, being in no way changeable, would not be stained: Augustine, Contra quinque haereses, God the Creator of man saying, “What is it that would move you in my nativity? I am not conceived by the desire of lust… I made the mother from whom I was born” — he adds, “made her without sin, by the way.” And if the ray of the sun knows to dry the sordid members of the earth without being stained by them, much more can the splendor of the eternal light cleanse wherever it radiates without being polluted.
  • He judges: “my first answer is better there,” since it sticks to the matter of conception.
  • Asides: the Cloaca Maxima at Rome, always met with in Latin books; and the Pope’s address for the seventh centenary of Duns Scotus, apparently touching the Immaculate Conception.

His words #

• “poetic argument” — an argument that works by making you see yourself in a mirror, as in Nathan’s “Thou art the man.”
• “sense of the letter” — the literal sense; for Augustine and Thomas one letter can carry several such senses, any orthodox reading that fits.
• episteme — demonstrative knowing, from premises to conclusion, as against understanding (not from this to that) and opinion.
• “dialectical reasoning” — “reasoning from probable opinions to opposite conclusions.”
• “grades of life” vs. “genera of powers” vs. “souls” — four, five, three respectively; souls distinguished by ways of rising above matter.
• “notions” / “relations” / “persons” — five, four, three in the Trinity, posed as a parallel puzzle.
• quaternarius, denarius — the four, the ten, as symbolic numbers combined by addition or multiplication.
• “continual impiety” — the reason certain kings are cut from the genealogy, unlike other royal sinners.
• homo / vir — the common word for man and the word for male; English lacks the distinction.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 31, a. 3, ad 3, ad 4, ad 5
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 31, a. 4, whole article (objections, sed contra, corpus, ad 1–3)
• Quoted within these: Augustine, De consensu evangelistarum; De diversis quaestionibus LXXXIII; Epistle to Volusianus; Contra Faustum XXIII; De agone christiano; Contra quinque haereses; Epistle to Felicianus; Ambrose, De incarnatione and on Luke; Jerome on Matthew; Chrysostom; Questions on the New and Old Testament
• Scripture: Galatians 4:4; Jeremiah 23:24; Job 25:4; Wisdom 7:25; Exodus 20:5; Acts 10:15

Mentioned

• Aristotle, De anima (three souls, four grades, five genera of powers); Peri Hermeneias (onoma as name and as noun)
• Plato, Meno (whether virtue can be taught)
• Augustine on the 153 fish
• Homer, Iliad (Hera and Zeus during the battle)
• Shakespeare (the mirror; “one of the four corners” of England)
• A papal address for the seventh centenary of Duns Scotus

His questions #

• Why does Matthew’s genealogy descend and Luke’s ascend? Matthew signifies Christ taking on our sins and his kingship; Luke, the washing away of sins and his priesthood, ascending to God to whom the cleansed are reconciled.
• Why does Matthew go through Solomon and Luke through Nathan? In Solomon’s mother David sinned; Nathan bears the name of the prophet by whom God expiated that sin.
• Is it arbitrary that the same number gets several symbolic explanations? No — there can be more than one sense of the letter, and any orthodox reading that fits the letter may be one.
• How does the count reach forty-two? Either the one Jechonias is counted twice (Augustine) or there were two, father and son (Jerome), giving three fourteens; 42 = 6 × 7, labor of this life times rest of the next.
• Does Thomas answer the discrepancy in the number of generations directly? No — he explains the symbolism only; left open.
• Why are three kings omitted after Joram? Because of the continual impiety brought in through Jezebel’s daughter, per Exodus 20:5, to the third and fourth generation.
• Why are only reprehended women named in Matthew? So that he who came for sinners, born of sinners, might delete the sins of all.
• Why did Christ take flesh from a woman rather than a man? To ennoble all human nature and let the liberation of both sexes appear, to manifest the truth of the Incarnation, and to complete the fourth mode of human generation.
• Was God confined by being in the womb? No — only bodies, having parts, cannot be wholly everywhere; God comes without receding and goes without deserting.
• Why three souls but four grades of life and five genera of powers? Appetite follows on sense or reason, so gives no grade; and oyster and dog differ by no new kind of immateriality, so give no third soul.