Summa III, Q. 40, Arts. 2–4: Christ's Ordinary Way of Life, His Poverty, and His Keeping of the Law

Orientation #

He picks up in the middle of q. 40, taking articles 2, 3 and 4 in order, having already treated the article on whether Christ should have lived among men rather than in solitude (prev. lecture). At the end of a. 3 he says “Good time for one more article” and goes on to a. 4.

The class, in order #

1. Setting up article 2 (“whether Christ ought to have led an austere life”) #

A student and he sort out the form of the objection: the objections argue for austerity, the sed contra against it (“the Son of Man came eating and drinking,” Matthew 11). Three objections:

1. Christ preached a higher perfection than John did; John led an austere life to provoke men to perfection by example — camel-hair clothing, leather belt, locusts and wild honey (“having a balanced diet, at least”). Chrysostom: it was marvelous to see so great patience in a human body, and it drew more of the Jews. So a fortiori for Christ.
2. Abstinence is ordered to continence (Hosea 4: “eating they were not satisfied, they fornicated and did not cease” — eating and drinking sometimes stand for fornication); Christ observed and proposed continence (Matthew 19, eunuchs for the kingdom). So he ought to have observed austerity in himself and his disciples.
3. It is ridiculous to begin a stricter life and fall back to a laxer one — “this man began to build and was not able to finish.” Christ began most strictly after baptism, forty days fasting in the desert.

2. The body of article 2 (“conform himself to them in his way of life”) #

The point: since it was fitting to Christ’s end that he converse with men, and one who converses with others most fittingly conforms himself to them in his way of life (1 Corinthians 9, “I was made all things to all men”), it was most suitable — convenientissimum that Christ in food and drink have himself as others commonly do. Augustine, Contra Faustum: John is said not to eat nor drink because he did not use the food the Jews used; and unless the Lord used it, he would not in comparison be said to be eating and drinking.

• Asides: a priest in high school — “Dwayne, don’t you want to be all things to all men?”; a picture of Benedict smiling with his beer, “no beer, no fun”; a Venetian painting in his dining room, renamed from The Last Supper to The Feast at the House of Levi because too worldly — Christ comes even to these sinners’ banquets.

3. Replies in article 2 (“the kingdom of God is not food and drink”) #

• To 1. Christ gave an example of perfection in all things that per se pertain to salvation; abstinence from food and drink does not (Romans 14 — “kind of unusual use of a text”). Augustine (Questions on the Gospels, on “wisdom is justified by its sons”): the apostles understood the kingdom not to be in food and drink but in evenness of soul, which neither abundance raises up nor need depresses — as Paul says of his own abundance and need, and as Hamlet praises Horatio for staying on level key in good fortune or bad. Both are licit and praiseworthy: abstinence for one segregated from common consortium, common life for one placed in society — e.g. John XXIII as a diplomat going to many a banquet. So the Lord wished an example of both. John worked no miracles, lest he draw attention from Christ, so he had only the example of a severe life; Christ, having the testimony of miracles, left fasting to John and went to the meals of the publicans.
  • Aside: a monk making final vows in South Dakota — “now that you’ve taken your vows, what are you going to do?” “I am going to eat and drink.”
• To 2. Other men acquire continence by abstinence; Christ by the power of divinity compressed the flesh in himself and others. Matthew 9: John’s disciples fasted, Christ’s did not. Bede: John abstained because abstinence increased his merit, having no power of nature; but the Lord, to whom it naturally belonged to forgive defects, why would he avoid those whom he could render more pure than those abstaining? He glosses the Last Supper foot-washing as implying the apostles were already purged of sins and needed only the minor washing — more pure than John’s disciples, who were doubtful about Christ.
  • Aside: recordings of 1960s schoolchildren retelling Bible stories, animated as cartoons — John sends to ask Jesus “Are you really God or just a shocking holy saint?”
• To 3. Chrysostom: that you might learn how great a good fasting is, and how it is a shield against the devil, and that after baptism one should aim at fasting rather than indulgence — he fasted not needing to, but instructing us. He did not go beyond Moses and Elias (each forty days), lest the assumption of flesh seem unbelievable. Mystically: Gregory — forty because the power of the Decalogue is fulfilled through the four Gospels (denarius quater ductus in quadragenarium surgit); or because we subsist in this mortal body from the four elements, to whose will we contract the Lordly precepts of the Decalogue. Augustine (83 Questions): all discipline of wisdom is to know Creator and creature; the Creator is the Trinity; the creature partly invisible, the soul, to which three is attributed (love God from whole heart, soul, mind), partly visible, the body, to which four belongs (hot, wet, cold, dry); ten, which insinuates the whole discipline, multiplied by four, because discipline is carried on through the administration of the body, makes forty — hence the forty-day time of mourning.
• And it is not incongruous to return to the common life: this belongs to contemplata aliis tradere — first give way to contemplation, then descend to the public life of action. Bede on Mark: Christ fasted lest he depart from the precept; he ate with sinners that they might recognize his power.

4. Article 3: objections against a pauper’s life (“do not give to me mendicity… or wealth”) #

1. Christ ought to take the most choosable life; the most choosable is the mean between wealth and poverty (Proverbs 30) — “Aristotle is virtue lying in the middle.”
2. Exterior wealth is ordered to food and clothing; Christ led the common life in food and clothing; so he should have observed the common way in wealth too, not the greatest poverty. (“That seems reasonable.”)
3. Christ most of all invited men to humility (Matthew 11, “learn from me”); but humility is most commended in the wealthy (1 Timothy 6, “do not savor high things”).
   • Aside illustrating the third: Vanderbilt himself getting up to help the new servant pick up the dishes she dropped, to relieve her embarrassment. A student notes that being God, his humility is more impressive anyway.

• Sed contra: Matthew 8, the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head — Jerome: “why do you wish to follow me on account of wealth, since I am of such poverty that I have not even a little place to stay?” And Matthew 17 (the temple tax, the coin in the fish): simply understood it builds up the hearer, that the Lord was in so great poverty he did not have tribute for himself and the apostle.

5. Four reasons Christ led a pauper’s life (“fitting with the office of preaching”) #

1. It befits the office of preaching, for which he said he had come (“let us go to the nearby villages, for this I have come”). Preachers must be given over entirely to preaching, freed from the care of other things — which those possessing wealth cannot do. Hence “possess no gold nor silver”; and the apostles: “it is not right for us to leave the word and to administer tables.” He compares: philosophy too should free one entirely.
2. He took on bodily death to give us spiritual life, so he sustained bodily poverty to give us spiritual riches — 2 Corinthians 8, “who on account of us was made needy, that by his lack we might become rich.” He remarks that Hegel would like this, one office giving rise to the other, “but it’s not to be understood in the way Hegel understood these things.”
3. Otherwise his preaching would be ascribed to greed — Jerome on Matthew: if the disciples had wealth, it would seem they taught for gain, not for men’s salvation; the same reason holds for Christ.
4. So much the more would the power of divinity be shown, as he was seen more abject in poverty. A sermon of the Council of Ephesus: he chose all things poor and vile, mediocre and obscure, that his divinity might be known to have transformed the earth — hence a poor mother, a poor country, the manger.
   • Asides on giving money away: Fr. Dalzone [uncertain name], from a wealthy family, endlessly asking his mother for money for a Catholic college and giving it away; St. Pius X giving away what his sisters sent him to town for, including their savings for new sheets; his own boyhood pastor, who let the parish linen go crumbly because everything went to the church, and was furious when the ladies raised money for the parish house. “Monsignor was a tough old man” — he asked young Duane how he got baptized with a name that is not a saint’s name; and at his laying-out in the church, “if he didn’t go to heaven, I don’t know who does.”

6. Replies in article 3 (“voluntary poverty does not have this danger”) #

• To 1. Abundance and mendicancy are to be avoided by those who wish to live by virtue insofar as they are occasions of sin: abundance an occasion of pride, poverty an occasion of stealing, lying, perjury. But Christ could not sin, so that cause does not hold for him. Further, not every poverty is such an occasion, but only poverty contrary to the will — poverty not chosen. Voluntary poverty has no such danger, and this Christ chose.
  • Aside: Solomon corrupted — a student says by wealth, he corrects, by his wives. He recalls Albert on women: “if I said everything I know about women, the whole world would be stupefied” (a student asks which work; not identified). The proverb: you are not wiser than Solomon, not more pious than David, not stronger than Samson — watch out.
• To 2. One can use the common life in food and clothing not only by possessing wealth but by taking necessaries from the rich, as Christ did — Luke 8, the women who ministered to him from their faculties. Jerome Against Vigilantius: a Jewish custom, not leading to guilt, that women supplied food and clothing to their teachers. Paul avoided it because it would have made scandal among the Gentiles, and supported himself by making tents. He notes Judas as the one whom money corrupted.
• To 3. In one who is poor by necessity, humility is not much commended; in one voluntarily poor, as Christ was, poverty is a sign of the greatest humility.

7. Article 4: conversatio and the Law (“should Christ’s life revolve around the law”) #

He glosses conversatio from convertere, to turn around — the same word as conversion; “should Christ’s life revolve around the law?” Objections:

1. The Law forbade work on the Sabbath, as God rested on the seventh day; but Christ cured a man on the Sabbath and told him to take up his bed.
2. Christ did and taught the same things (Acts 1, “Jesus began to do and to teach”); but he taught that what enters the mouth does not defile, against the Law’s precept (Leviticus) that eating or touching certain animals makes a man unclean.
3. The same judgment falls on the one doing and the one consenting (Romans 1); Christ consented to the disciples’ dissolving the Law in plucking grain, excusing them (Matthew 12).

• Sed contra: Matthew 5, “do not think I have come to dissolve the Law” — Chrysostom: he fulfilled it first by transgressing nothing of the legal things, secondly by justifying through faith, which the Law by the letter was not strong enough to do.
• Body. Christ lived in all things according to the precepts of the Law — in sign of which he willed to be circumcised, circumcision being a protestation of fulfilling the whole Law (Galatians 5: whoever is circumcised is bound to carry out the whole Law). Four reasons: (1) that he might approve the old Law; (2) that by observing it in himself he might consummate and terminate it, showing it was ordered to himself; (3) that he might take from the Jews the occasion of calumny; (4) that he might free men from servitude to the Law (Galatians 4, “made under the Law, that he might redeem those under the Law”).

8. Three ways Christ is excused from Sabbath transgression (“an opus divinum”) #

1. The precept forbids human work, not divine work; God ceased on the seventh day from making new creatures but always works to conserve and govern — “my Father works until now, and I work.” Christ’s miracles were a divine work.
2. Works of necessity for bodily safety are not forbidden — leading an ass or ox to water, or drawing one out of a pit on the Sabbath. He and the students sort out which text is which. “So the doctor can save you on Sunday” — joke about waiting till Monday.
3. Works pertaining to the worship of God are not forbidden — Matthew 12, the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath and are without crime (how? by killing animals — left uncertain); John 7, a man receives circumcision on the Sabbath. Christ’s command to the paralytic to carry his bed pertained to the worship of God, i.e. to the praise of the divine. The Jews objected falsely, “this man is not from God, who does not keep the Sabbath.”

• He stresses: “that’s kind of interesting, those three reasons — usually you think of the second one,” i.e. of necessity, whereas the first is opus divinum. Applied: teaching on Sunday is no manual work but an opus divinum, disposing one for the contemplation of truth; likewise architectural drawing and writing; better theology on Sunday than geometry, “maybe.”
  • Aside: Aristotle (Parts of Animals) — not to be squeamish about dissection, since it lets one see the wisdom of the maker; he quotes Heraclitus, “there are gods even in the kitchen.” Heraclitus also mocked praying to statues (“as if a man should chatter to his house”) and spoke ironically of Homer’s gods doing what would be disgraceful in men.

9. Reply on clean and unclean foods (“not on account of their nature, but signification”) #

Christ wished to show that no food by its nature renders a man unclean in soul, but only by a certain signification. Augustine Contra Faustum: if it is asked of the pig and the lamb whether by nature they are clean, every creature of God is good; but by signification the lamb is clean and the pig unclean.

• Plato’s Republic: Socrates calls the first proposed city, with nothing truly human in it, “a city for pigs” — the pig as the unclean animal by signification.
• Bonaventure, Treatise on Preparation for Mass (as he recalls it): what would the Church be without the Eucharist? “Like a herd of pigs rushing off a cliff.”
• Digression on Europe. Against “God is dead” theology: one should not say God is dead but that the European soul is dead — Augustine: when the soul leaves the body the body is dead; when God leaves the soul, the soul is dead. God’s life is independent of ours; ours depends on his. A student recalls Nietzsche’s actual line, “God is dead, we have killed him”; he answers that this makes what we do determine what is real, man the measure. Church attendance in France falling from about twenty-seven to four percent. The cathedrals: a book of photographs; Rosalie’s grandmother — the real thing to see in Italy is the churches; buildings that took over a century, showing the devotion and perseverance of the people, now witnesses to what we have given up, kept up by the French government as tourist attractions. His daughter Maria in Rome stayed with a Jewish convert who had come to Italy as an artist and was struck that there must be something to the religion that inspired such beauty. Contrast: the apartment boxes in California that he and his brother Mark called “Boxville.”

10. Reply on the plucked grain (“excused… on account of the necessity of famine”) #

The disciples were excused from transgression by the necessity of hunger, just as David was no transgressor when from necessity of famishing he ate the loaves it was not lawful for him to eat. He notes the argument is a fortiori: David’s case seems more questionable than plucking grain as you pass.

• Aside: in France or Spain, people are allowed to pick an orange from a tree by custom — though some of those orange trees are the bitter kind used for marmalade.

His words #

• convenientissimum — “most suitable,” his stress in the body of a. 2 on conforming to others in food and drink.
• “evenness of soul” — Augustine’s mark of the apostles, which neither abundance raises nor need depresses; illustrated by Horatio on “level key.”
• contemplata aliis tradere — the Dominican life he ascribes to Christ: first contemplation, then descent to the public life of action.
• “most choosable” — his rendering of the objection’s eligibilissima, the mean between wealth and poverty.
• “mendicity” / mendicant — “that’s the word mendicant, the begging stage.”
• conversatio — “to turn around,” same word as conversion; “should Christ’s life revolve around the law?”
• opus divinum — divine work, not forbidden on the Sabbath; extended by him to teaching, architectural drawing, writing.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 40, a. 2 (whether Christ should have led an austere life) — objections, sed contra, body, three replies.
• Summa Theologiae III, q. 40, a. 3 (whether Christ should have led a pauper’s life) — objections, sed contra, body, three replies.
• Summa Theologiae III, q. 40, a. 4 (whether Christ lived according to the Law) — objections, sed contra, body, three replies.

Mentioned (within the articles or by him)

• Scripture: Matthew 3, 5, 8, 11, 12, 17, 19; Mark (Bede’s commentary); Luke 8; John 7; Acts 1; Romans 1, 14; 1 Corinthians 9; 2 Corinthians 8; Galatians 4, 5; 1 Timothy 6; Hosea 4; Proverbs 30; Leviticus.
• Chrysostom on Matthew; Jerome on Matthew and Against Vigilantius; Bede on Matthew and on Mark; Augustine, Contra Faustum, Questions on the Gospels, 83 Questions; Gregory; a sermon of the Council of Ephesus.
• Aristotle, Parts of Animals (Heraclitus, “gods even in the kitchen”); Plato, Republic (“a city for pigs”); Shakespeare, Hamlet (praise of Horatio); Bonaventure, Treatise on Preparation for Mass; Albert (work not identified).

His questions #

• Should Christ have led an austere life? No — one who converses with men conforms to them in food and drink; John gave the other example.
• Why then did John the Baptist fast and work no miracles? Lest he draw attention from Christ: he had only the example of life, while Christ had the testimony of miracles.
• Was it inconsistent for Christ to fast forty days and then return to the common life? No — that is contemplata aliis tradere: contemplation first, then the public life of action.
• Why forty days and not more? Lest, going beyond Moses and Elias, the assumption of flesh seem unbelievable; and forty has its mystical reasons (Decalogue × four Gospels; ten × the body’s four).
• Should Christ have had moderate wealth rather than poverty? No: the mean is counselled because riches occasion pride and involuntary poverty occasions theft and perjury; Christ could not sin, and his poverty was voluntary.
• If he lived the common life in food and clothing, how without wealth? By taking necessaries from the rich, as the women in Luke 8 ministered to him from their means.
• Did Christ live according to the Law? Yes, in all its precepts — signified by his circumcision — to approve it, consummate it, remove calumny, and free men from it.
• How is healing on the Sabbath not a transgression? Three ways: it is a divine work, not human; works of bodily necessity are not forbidden; works of divine worship are not forbidden.
• Can you teach on Sunday? Yes — it is not manual work but an opus divinum, disposing one to the contemplation of truth.
• How do the priests “profane” the Sabbath in the temple without crime? Left open — “by killing animals or what? Maybe so… I don’t know.”
• Are some foods unclean by nature? No — every creature of God is good; the lamb is clean and the pig unclean by signification only.