God Became Man: 'Standing For', the Fallacy of Accident, and the Senses of 'Necessary' – Introduction to the Passion (ST III q.46)

Orientation #

He opens by saying that before starting “up here with question forty-six on the Passion of Christ” he wants to settle a couple of preliminary things; he promises that after going through Christ’s life, passion, death and glorification they will come back to the questions why God became man and why the Son rather than the Father or Holy Spirit. The previous class treated the Transfiguration (ST III, q. 45).

The class, in order #

1. The sophist’s syllogism (“God became man… the Holy Spirit is God”) #

He gets assent to two statements — God became man (with Augustine’s “God became man so that man might become God”), and the Holy Spirit is God — then, a sophist would separate them by extraneous talk and syllogize: therefore the Holy Spirit became man. No one will assent to the conclusion, yet it seems to follow.

• A student proposes equivocation. He rejects it: if “God” had different meanings said of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, you would have several Gods, whereas they are one and the same God, numerically speaking.
• Parallel trap: Jesus is the Son of God; but no one is the son of himself, so the son is not the one of whom he is son; therefore he is not God — “the Jews are right.” Natural reason yields it, and it denies the Trinity.

2. Supposition: what the word means vs. what the speaker means (“it stands for something”) #

His solution: in “God became man,” the word “God” stands for the Son of God, though that is not the meaning of the word “God.” Justification: the Word was made flesh, and the Word is God (almost the same sentence of John), so in some way God became man.

• He distinguishes this from figures of speech, where meaning of word and meaning of speaker also diverge:
  • Irony: “What a fine example of an Assumption College student,” said to a student found drunk under the table — he means the opposite of what his words say.
  • Metaphor: calling someone a pig — the word means the four-footed animal with tail and snout; he means glutton. (If “glutton” were a dictionary meaning of “pig,” it would no longer be metaphor.)
  • Metonymy: “that’s a bad place” — not the place but the people conducting nefarious business in it.
• Human parallels for supposition: “I am the son of a man” — “a man” stands for Reno Victor Berquist, but that is not a meaning of “man”; “I am the father of a man” — it stands for Paul Thomas Berquist. Likewise “Spirit of God”: “God” there stands for Father and Son together, as one God breathing the Holy Spirit.
• A student objects that the first statement is figurative and the sophist forces it literally. He refuses: it is not figurative — God really did become man. A second student gets it: in one use “God” stands for a person, in the other for the nature. He accepts this, insisting only that supposition is not to be identified with figurative speech, though the two are similar in that speaker’s meaning and word’s meaning diverge.
• “That’s a very important thing, this idea ‘stands for’” — it comes up in phrases like “the Son of God,” and he warns of the difficulties one falls into without it: “very subtle.”
• Aside: Augustine’s “God became man so that man might become God” — his first thought was our partaking of the divine, but more subtly, the man Jesus Christ really did become God, and through that we partake.

3. What kind of mistake is it? (“the fallacy of the accident”) #

He asks what sort of error the syllogism commits, and first sets aside a near neighbour.

• Sample sophism: a square is an equilateral right-angled quadrilateral; that is the definition of square; therefore a square is a definition of square (likewise man / animal having reason). The mistake there is simply vs. in some respect: the definition of man is man as known distinctly, not man simply. But this is not the mistake in the Holy Spirit argument.
• He notes he would have liked to phone Monsignor Dionne to check his answer, but is “on my own, unless I find angels helping me.”
• His answer: the fallacy of accident, which Aristotle says is the first of the mistakes outside of speech — and this is not a mistake in speech.
• The reason: in the Incarnation the union was not in the natures but in the hypostasis, the person. Had it been in the nature, the Father and the Holy Spirit would have been incarnate too. “God” is a word taken from the nature and signifies what has the divine nature; but the union took place not in what the divine persons have in common (the nature) but in what they do not have in common (the distinction of persons). So the nature is, as it were, accidental to the union — hence the fallacy of accident.

4. Is it necessary to understand “necessary”? (“either you ought to philosophize or you ought not”) #

He recalls Aristotle’s lost dialogue: if you say you ought to philosophize, do so; if you say you ought not, you must philosophize to show why not — so in any case you must. Imitating it more humbly: is it necessary to understand the word “necessary”? Either way, yes.

• Where “necessary” is already at work in theology: ST I, q. 1, a. 1, whether some doctrine beyond man’s natural knowledge is necessary; and the proof of God from the dependence of the contingent on what must be, and of what is necessary through another on what is necessary through itself.

5. The two mysteries and the senses of necessary (“Aristotle distinguishes in the fifth book of Wisdom”) #

The two beliefs that separate us even from Aristotle and from the Mohammedans are the three persons in God and the Incarnation; both are necessary, but not in the same sense.

• Senses of necessary (Metaphysics V): (1) absolute — cannot not be; (2) from an extrinsic cause, the agent, i.e. force; (3) from the end, divided into (a) that without which the end cannot be achieved at all (breathing), and (b) that without which one cannot live well (steak and wine) — a student adds “both sides,” and he agrees.
• Trinity: absolutely necessary, like three being a number, a square a quadrilateral, a triangle’s angles equal to two right angles, two being half of four. God necessarily understands himself, hence necessarily has a thought of himself; knowing his goodness he necessarily loves himself. The Father did not choose to have a Son; Father and Son did not choose to breathe the Holy Spirit. (He says we would know this by natural reason — but that we find it out with the help of revelation.)
• Incarnation: not forced, not absolutely necessary — he chose to become man — but necessary from the end: as Augustine teaches and Thomas follows, redemption could have come another way, but there was no better way.
• Parallel: is logic necessary? Thomas says it deals with the greatest difficulties; not absolutely necessary, but necessary for the well-being of philosophy, since errors must be recognized. Boethius: the bad must be known to be avoided. He half-recalls Augustine saying the only part of logic worth teaching is the part on mistakes — “I don’t know if that’s true.” He is struck that modern philosophy seems never aware of the kinds of mistakes there are.

6. Theology as more than faith seeking understanding (“also the defending of what you believe”) #

Is Anselm’s “belief seeking understanding” a definition of theology? Part of the truth, not the whole: theology also defends what is believed, against heretics and against philosophers.

• Evidence: in the fourth book of the Summa Contra Gentiles on the Incarnation, Thomas first goes through the scriptural passages heretics misuse, showing overwhelmingly (as Augustine does) that Scripture teaches what we believe — defending and nourishing the faith — and then answers the arguments from natural reason that the Trinity or the Incarnation is impossible.
• Defending is implied in Augustine’s definition of faith as an act: to assent while thinking; if you are thinking you are trying to understand. Not to think about what you assent to would be to deny your nature. Augustine: “I am the sort of man who would want to understand what he believes.”
• Two questions to return to later: why God became man; and why the Son rather than the Father or the Holy Spirit, since they too could have become man.
• If you truly believe God became man, you must wonder what he did, said, and — surprisingly — suffered; hence we go chiefly to the Gospels. Thomas is trying to understand what the Gospels report but do not always explain: e.g. Christ foretells that he will go up to Jerusalem, die and rise, and the apostles hardly believe it, taking it as figurative, so they never get to ask why he should die on a cross rather than, say, be beheaded.

7. Thomas’s divisions (“those things which belong to the exit of Christ from the world”) #

The life of Christ falls into four parts: his coming into the world; his preaching and the rest; his passion and death; his glorification. The third: things belonging to Christ’s exit from the world, divided into (1) passion, (2) death, (3) burial, (4) descent into hell.

• He remarks it is interesting that Thomas puts the descent here, since it is sometimes grouped with the resurrection and ascension. Two schemes:
  • The descent/exaltation scheme (suggested by a psalm he cites as Psalm 8, and Philippians on taking the form of a slave): becoming man, death, descent into hell — then resurrection as reward for death, ascension as reward for the descent, and the second coming answering to the first, humility and mercy answering to justice and glory.
  • The Te Deum scheme, in three: coming into the world; death; opening heaven after his death; second coming.
  • And the old division by goods: descent into hell gives the beatific vision to the prophets (good of the soul), resurrection (good of the body), ascension (exterior good, a place).
• The passion itself has a threefold consideration: the passion itself; its efficient cause; its fruit or effect. “This is very thorough what Thomas does.”
• Aside: a painting he attributes to Fra Angelico where the saints watch Christ on the cross genuflecting or weeping in penance, while Thomas is shown thinking — not that Thomas lacked devotion, but he really wonders, faith seeking understanding, what the meaning of all this is. “I certainly wouldn’t choose to undergo this, would you?”

8. The twelve articles of q. 46 (“about the first, he asks twelve things”) #

He runs through the list, commenting:

1. Whether it was necessary for Christ to suffer for men’s liberation — hence the importance of “necessary.”
2. Whether there was some other possible way of human liberation. (1 and 2 go together: if liberation is the end, could it be reached only thus, or was this the best way?)
3. Whether this mode was fitting.
4. The form of death: whether it was suitable he suffer on a cross — as Peter was later to do (“follow me… they will lead you where you do not want to go”); he recalls Paul VI referring to the legend of Peter leaving Rome and meeting Christ walking in: Quo vadis? — which turned Peter around.
5. His passion in general.
6. Whether the pain he sustained was the greatest.
7. Whether his whole soul suffered — “that’s interesting.”
   • Digression on the whole soul being in the whole body and in each part (Augustine’s teaching, followed by Thomas in the Sentences commentary). Objection: if my whole soul is in my head it cannot also be in my foot, since an indivisible like a point cannot be in two places. Thomas calls this stupid: a beautiful example of a twofold false imagination — imagining the soul in the body as in a place, whereas it is there as form in matter; and imagining the soul’s indivisibility as a point’s, which has position in the continuous, whereas the soul is outside the whole genus of the continuous. False imagination is the fundamental cause of mistake: imagining things other than they are, or trying to imagine what cannot be imagined. Descartes locating the soul in a gland in the head does just this; so does the common picture of the soul as air-like and man-shaped — as in Dante, who recognizes souls by their shape but cannot embrace them, since you cannot hug the air.
8. Whether the passion impeded the joy of fruition — since he enjoyed the beatific vision. Moderns miss this; he recalls a call-in program with Fr. Groeschel where a woman reported a priest saying Christ did not know he was God until his baptism and the Father’s voice, and a doctor on the program saying that “Whom do men say that I am?” shows Christ seeking affirmation that he was what he was. His wife met the same notions in a school text and said they were not right. 9–10. The time and the place of the passion — these go together, being extrinsic measures. Thomas considers even these with loving attention: he is a diligent thinker, from a word meaning to love.
9. Whether it was suitable that he be crucified with thieves — we know why they crucified him so, but he himself accepted it, and it was part of his providence.
10. Whether the passion should be attributed to his divinity: can we say God suffered, God died on the cross? Not in his divine nature, but in his human nature. “That’s very important.”

His words #

• stands for — his English for supponere; the word “God” stands for the Son though it does not mean the Son [ed.: supposition].
• meaning of the speaker vs. meaning of the word — the pair common to supposition and to figures of speech.
• irony / metaphor / metonym — figures where speaker’s meaning diverges from the word’s.
• fallacy of equivocation — a mistake in speech; rejected as the diagnosis here.
• simply / in some respect — the fallacy in “a square is a definition of square.”
• fallacy of the accident — “the first kind of mistake outside of speech”; his diagnosis of the sophism.
• hypostatic union — union in the person, not in the natures.
• “the fifth book of Wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics V] — where Aristotle distinguishes senses of necessary.
• necessity from an extrinsic cause: the agent, which is force; and the end — the latter split into “without which the end cannot be achieved at all” and “without which one cannot live well.”
• belief seeking understanding [ed.: fides quaerens intellectum] — Anselm’s phrase; part, not the whole, of what theology is.
• false imagination — “the fundamental cause of mistake.”
• diligent — from a word meaning to love; said of Thomas’s attention to time and place.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 46, prologue and the division of the twelve articles (a. 1 and following, read as a list with comment).
• Thomas Aquinas, the division of the treatise on Christ’s exit from the world (passion, death, burial, descent into hell).

Mentioned

• Augustine, “God became man so that man might become God”; his definition of faith as assent while thinking; “I am the sort of man who would want to understand what he believes”; the whole soul in each part of the body; (doubtfully) that only the part of logic on mistakes is worth teaching.
• John’s prologue: “In the beginning was the Word… and the Word was God”; “the Word was made flesh.”
• Thomas Aquinas, ST I, q. 1, a. 1 (whether a doctrine beyond natural knowledge is necessary), and the question whether God exists.
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles IV (esp. ch. 3, on the Incarnation and the heretics’ scriptural passages) (inferred ch.).
• Thomas Aquinas, commentary on the Sentences, on the soul’s presence in the body.
• Thomas Aquinas, commentary on the Epistles of St. Paul, on figures of speech (irony in Paul).
• Aristotle, Metaphysics V; the lost dialogue on whether one should philosophize; Sophistical Refutations on mistakes outside speech (inferred).
• Boethius: the bad must be known to be avoided.
• Philippians, “the form of a slave”; Psalm 8; the Te Deum.
• John 21 (inferred): “they will lead you where you do not want to go”; the Quo vadis legend, cited by Paul VI.
• Dante, souls recognized by shape but not embraceable; Fra Angelico’s Crucifixion with Thomas thinking.

His questions #

• Would you assent that God became man? And is the Holy Spirit God? Then does it follow that the Holy Spirit became man? No — the conclusion is false, though it seems to follow.
• Is the mistake equivocation — does “God” have a different meaning in the two premises? No; that would make Father, Son and Spirit different Gods, whereas they are numerically one God.
• What is “supposition” in English? What does “God” stand for in “God became man”? It “stands for” the Son of God, though that is not the meaning of the word.
• Is there a difference between what the word means and what the speaker means in figures of speech? Yes — in irony, metaphor and metonymy the two diverge, as they do (differently) in supposition.
• What kind of mistake is the sophism, then? The fallacy of accident: the union was in the person, not in the nature, and “God” is taken from the nature.
• Is it necessary to understand the word “necessary”? Yes, either way — as with Aristotle’s argument that in any case you must philosophize.
• Is it necessary that there be three persons in God, and necessary that God became man, in the same sense? No: the Trinity is absolutely necessary; the Incarnation is necessary from the end — not the only way, but the best way.
• Is theology “belief seeking understanding”? Part of the truth, not the whole: theology also defends the faith against heretics and philosophers.
• If your whole soul is in your head, how can it be in your foot? A twofold false imagination: the soul is in the body as form in matter, and its indivisibility is not that of a point.
• Can we say that God suffered, that God died on the cross? Yes, but not in his divine nature — in his human nature (article 12, still to be treated).