Seeing God as He Is, and Whether Christ Suffered in His Whole Soul (ST III q.46 a.7-8)

Orientation #

He opens by returning to something he raised last time — “can God make something that is not like Himself” — and announces a project for when this treatise is finished: comparing the eight reasons for the Incarnation in the Summa Contra Gentiles with the ten in the Summa Theologiae. The class then reads ST III, q. 46, aa. 7–8 straight through.

The class, in order #

1. 1 John 3: in what sense “we will be like him” (“we will be what homoioi, like Him”) #

• Point: the text does not mean we are unlike God now, but that we shall be like him most of all when we see him as he is.
• He reads: “Behold what manner of love the Father has given us, that we are called the sons of God” — tekna theou, children; and we are not only called but are. The world does not know us because it does not know him.
• A student answers “without sin”; he redirects: “we’ll be more perfectly like him” — “as if by maybe antonomasia.”
• Three grades of likeness, in his order: (a) by being made in God’s image and likeness — hence Shakespeare calls reason “god-like”; (b) more so by grace, whereby we are children of God; (c) most of all in the vision.

2. Why hope comes first among the reasons for the Incarnation (“he begins with the reason from hope”) #

• Point: the SCG’s first reason for the Incarnation is one not given explicitly in the ST, and it is a reason from hope.
• The argument as he gives it: (1) our end is to see God as he is; (2) we cannot see God as he is unless God himself is joined to our mind as the form by which we see him — “in your light we shall see light” (Psalms); (3) one might despair that this is possible, and so despair of one’s happiness; (4) but in the Incarnation God joined human nature to himself in one person; (5) therefore hope is strengthened, since a lesser joining to the mind is plainly possible. Hope is “not only desire but a desire for what is possible.”
• Confirmation from the text itself: the next verse after “we shall see him as he is” is “everyone having this hope hagnizei himself” — Greek for pure or holy.
• Aside on the ST’s ten reasons: five on the side of the good (faith, hope, charity, example…) and five on the side of the bad. “This is the best way for us to be saved, not the only way, but the best way.”
• Catechetical confirmation: Augustine and Thomas attach the Creed to faith, the Commandments and two commandments of love to charity, and to hope always prayer, the Our Father — whose first two petitions are “hallowed be thy name” (hagnos again) and “thy kingdom come,” the kingdom being “the ordered society of those who see God face to face.”
• Student: hope is directed to the last end more explicitly than faith and charity; he agrees, and the student cites Hebrews, faith as “the substance of things hoped for.”
• Aside: the SCG “is my favorite book, by the way. Because you don’t have any order in the Summa Theologiae” — though the ST list has items not so explicit in the other.

3. The four objections of a. 7 (“Christ did not suffer according to his whole soul”) #

1. The soul suffers when the body suffers only per accidens, as act of a body — “first act of a natural body equipped with tools” (the original sense of organic); but the soul is not act of the body by every power, since understanding and will are acts of no body.
2. Each power suffers from its own object; the object of the superior part of reason is the eternal reasons (Augustine, De Trinitate XII), from which Christ could take no harm, since they are in no way contrary to him.
3. When a sensible passion reaches reason there is a complete passion; in Christ, per Jerome, there was only propassio. Dionysius, epistle to John the Evangelist: he underwent those passions “according to judgment only,” as much as he allowed.
4. Passion causes pain, but there is no pain in the speculative intellect: to the pleasure of considering no sadness is opposed (the Philosopher, “first book about places” [ed.: Topics I (inferred)]). — Aside: “that’s what always attracted me to speculative intellect. When I was a student, I read this.”

• Sed contra: Psalm 87, spoken in the person of Christ, “my soul is filled with evils” — not vices but pains, whether pains the soul suffers with the flesh or the evils of the perishing people suffered with them (he weeps over Jerusalem).

4. Three kinds of whole, and two ways a power can suffer (“whole is said with regard to parts”) #

• Distinction one, three wholes: (a) the integral or composed whole, put together from parts (a book from its pages); (b) the universal whole, whose parts are particulars — kath’ holou, whence “Catholic”; (c) the potestative whole, the whole of power: Aristotle in De Anima III calls the powers parts of the soul, though not parts composing it nor species of a genus. So “whole soul” = according to its essence, or according to all its powers.
• Distinction two, two ways of suffering: (a) by the undergoing proper to a power, i.e. from its own object — sight from superabundance of the visible; (b) by the undergoing of the subject in which the power is founded — sight suffering when touch suffers in the eye.
  • Boundary case he works: a pin stuck in the eye, or the eye pierced or distempered by fever, is suffering through touch, not proper to sight; snow blindness, or the Spanish Civil War trick of propping the eye open and shining a light in it, is suffering proper to sight.

5. The whole soul in the whole body, and false imagination (“the whole was in the whole, and the whole in each part”) #

• By essence, the whole soul of Christ suffered, since the whole essence is joined to the body — Augustine’s saying (his text gives De Trinitate VI; he notes the phrase is not explicitly in Aristotle, though Aristotle agrees; see the disputed questions on the soul).
• Why people cannot accept it: they falsely imagine the soul in the body as in a place (then it could not be in head and foot at once) or as a part in a whole; it is in the body as form. “False imagination is the chief cause of deception.”
• Digression on the eight senses of “in” (Physics IV): Aristotle just lists them, Thomas in the commentary orders them imitating Metaphysics V — beginning from being in a place, part in whole, species in genus and genus in species, form in matter, whole in parts; “and I got you in my power. That’s the seventh sense. I left my heart in San Francisco. That’s the eighth.”
• Digression on the senses of “end” (Metaphysics V), prompted by reading the Sentences on God’s infinity: (1) limit of a quantity — end of a line is a point, of a triangle a line, of a cube a square; God, not a body, is unlimited here only metaphorically (Scripture’s “wider,” “higher”; metaphor works by likeness of ratios, as with “first”/“beginning”); (2) end of a journey or motion — not applicable, God does not change; (3) purpose, that for the sake of which — God has no purpose but is the end of all things, “Alpha and Omega, the first and the last”; (4) definition, finis, terminus, Greek horos — God’s perfection is in no way limited, so “infinite” is the negation of this fourth sense. “You got to know the third sense and the fourth sense.”
  • Attached: the SCG’s order — book I God in himself, II God as beginning, III God as end. And a student exchange on tabernacles bearing the Alpha and Omega; asked whether Christ is beginning and end as God or as man, the class answers as God.
  • Aside: teaching logic, he noticed the many senses of “thinking out” correspond to the senses of “end”; Monsignor Dionne called it marvellous but said it cannot be done in French — he and Fr. Boulay, both native French speakers, held English superior to French for philosophy and poetry as Greek is to Latin.
• Aristotle’s remark that the commonest mistake in thinking comes from mixing the senses of a word — “only a mind that depends upon the senses could make this kind of mistake.” His sophism against “the whole is greater than the part”: man is an animal; but animal is only part of what man is (animal that has reason); yet animal contains besides man dog, cat, horse, elephant — so the part contains more than the whole. The fallacy: confusing the composed whole (composed of more than any one part) with the universal whole (said of more than any one part).
• Attached remark: some arguments against the faith are hard to answer on the spot; the Fathers are commendable for holding the faith before they could answer them; one may say “I’m not sure what this means, but I know it doesn’t mean that,” and be patient with oneself — as he was with Mozart’s Magic Flute, heard once and heard nothing, though he listened to the clarinet this morning.

6. The body of a. 7 and the replies (“all the powers of the soul are rooted in the essence”) #

• By essence: the whole soul suffered. By all its powers: the whole soul is not in every part of the body according to all its powers — sight in the eye, digestion in the stomach, and reason and will not in the body at all.
  • Attached: Canadian doctors stimulating parts of the brain get sensations and movements but “never get an act of will”; Fr. Anthony Kramer’s version, the man whose arm is raised by the electrode saying “I didn’t do this, you did this.” A “back door” to showing the will is not in the body.
  • Attached: Socrates in the Parmenides imagining the universal as a sail spread over many — but then only part of the sail is over you, whereas the whole of what man is is in each man; a caution against circles in logic, “intrinsically evil, I think.”
• Taking the soul by all its powers and by the proper undergoing: Christ suffered according to all the lower powers, since in each power dealing with temporal things something is found that causes pain; but the superior reason did not suffer on the side of its object, God, which was to him not a cause of pain but of pleasure and joy. Taking the undergoing on the side of the subject, all the powers suffered, since all are radicantur, rooted, in the essence, to which passion arises when the body suffers.
• Reply 1: though the understanding as a power is not act of the body, the essence of the soul is, and in that essence the understanding is rooted.
• Reply 2: the objection proceeds about undergoing from the power’s own object — and there the superior reason did not suffer.
• Reply 3: dolor is a perfect passion, by which the soul is disturbed, when the passion of the sensitive part reaches to changing reason from the rectitude of its act; in Christ the passion did not reach reason in its own faculty, only on the side of the subject.
  • On propassio: a diminution of passio. In English “emotional” means your reason is affected, “you’re not quite yourself” — in that sense Christ had no emotion; he was angry at the Pharisees’ hardness of heart but “not thrown off his cool.”
  • Plato’s image: reason to emotions as a man to a horse — the horse throws you and you must keep getting back on; the man who does not control his emotions is the one dragged through the dirt with his foot in the stirrup. “That happens to all of us to some extent, right? But not never to Christ.”
  • Attached aside, at length: whether President Obama is genuinely eloquent or only reads a text well.
• Reply 4: the speculative intellect has no pain or sadness on the side of its object, the true considered absolutely, which is its perfection; but pain can pertain to it as rooted in the essence of the soul.
  • Socrates’ argument (the Apology and dialogues): the pleasure of eating has a pain opposed, hunger; sleep has weariness; scratching requires the itch — so these cannot be the greatest good. But to the pleasure of understanding a theorem of Euclid there is no opposed pain. “Hunger makes good sauce” — snacking across the country ruins the appetite for dinner. A student quotes “What is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed,” and mentions Belloc’s The Four Men on the worst and best thing in the world.

7. Article 8: the three objections to Christ’s whole soul enjoying (“did not have the blessed enjoyment”) #

1. It is impossible to be sad and joyful at once, pain and joy being contraries (a principle Aristotle uses in Physics VIII); the whole soul of Christ suffered pain.
2. The Philosopher, Ethics VII: vehement sadness impedes not only the contrary delight but any delight, and conversely. Christ’s pain was maximus and the pleasure of the vision maxima (as shown where he treats man’s end — “in the first of the second part,” he self-corrects from “the first part”).
3. Blessed enjoyment is according to knowledge and love of divine things (Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana I — the place about using what is to be used and enjoying what is to be enjoyed); but not all the powers attain to knowing and loving God.

• Sed contra: Damascene, book III, that the divinity permits his flesh to act and suffer what is proper to it; so likewise it is proper to the soul as blessed that it enjoy, the Passion not impeding its fruition.
• “He’s going to get out of this, huh? Houdini.”

8. The body of a. 8: the wall between the parts (“the higher part of the soul perfectly enjoyed”) #

• Same twofold sense of “whole soul.” By essence, the whole soul enjoys, since the essence is the subject of the higher part to which enjoying the divinity belongs — just as passion by reason of the essence is attributed to the superior part, so conversely fruition by reason of the superior part is attributed to the essence.
• By all its powers, the whole soul does not enjoy: not directly, since enjoyment is not the act of just any part; nor by redundantia (he renders it “overflowing,” a student offers “redundancy”), because Christ was a viator, a wayfarer on the way (via), his body not yet having reached its end, so there was no overflow of glory from the superior part to the lower, nor from soul to body.
• But neither, conversely, was the higher part impeded by what was proper to the lower. Hence the higher part enjoyed perfectly while Christ suffered. “That’s hard for us to understand, right? There’s kind of a wall there between the two.”
• Student: the Transfiguration was the one time that overflow did occur — treated under the miracles of Christ, and by way of miracle, temporary; after the Resurrection it is otherwise. He agrees.

9. The replies of a. 8 (“contraries within the same thing, but not according to the same”) #

• Reply 1: the joy of the vision is not directly contrary to the pain of the Passion, because they are not about the same thing; nothing prevents contraries in the same subject if not according to the same — as Christ as man was mortal and by his divinity immortal. Fruition pertains to the superior part of reason through its own act, pain to it according to its subject; to the essence pain pertains from the side of the body whose form it is, joy on the part of the power of which it is subject.
• Reply 2: Aristotle’s saying holds by reason of the redundancy natural from one part of the soul to another — “but this was not so in Christ, because he did not allow this to take place.”
• Reply 3: that argument proceeds about the totality of the soul as regards its powers.
• He breaks here.

His words #

• tekna theou — “children of God,” his rendering of the Johannine phrase (also “sons of God”).
• homoioi — “like Him.”
• antonomasia — the figure by which “we will be like him” means “most of all like him.”
• hagnizei / hagnos — “purifies himself”; translatable as pure or holy, echoed in “hallowed be thy name.”
• “first act of a natural body equipped with tools” [ed.: organikou, usually “organic body”] — he insists “tool” restores the for-the-sake-of-something the biologists have lost in “organ.”
• composed whole / universal whole / potestative whole — the three wholes; the potestative is “the whole power.”
• kath’ holou — “according to the whole,” whence “Catholic.”
• Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics] — for the eight senses of “in.”
• the fifth book of Wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics V] — for the senses of “end,” “beginning,” “whole,” “nature.”
• horos, terminus, finis — limit, hence definition: the fourth sense of “end.”
• radicantur — “rooted”: the powers are rooted in the essence of the soul.
• propassio — a diminution of passio; the emotion Christ underwent without his reason being disturbed.
• dolor — pain, “a perfect passion by which the soul is disturbed.”
• viator — wayfarer, one on the way (via), whose body has not yet reached its end.
• redundantia — “overflowing” (a student: “redundancy”) of glory from higher part to lower.

Texts #

Read in class

• 1 John 3:1–3
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 46, a. 7 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 46, a. 8 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Psalm 87 (Vulgate), “my soul is filled with evils”
• Summa Contra Gentiles — the first of the eight reasons for the Incarnation (SCG III, ch. 51 on seeing God by God as form — inferred)

Mentioned

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III (ten reasons for the Incarnation); Sentences commentary, on God’s infinity; Disputed Questions on the Soul; Prima pars, on God not a body, and on the rooting of the powers; “first of the second part,” on man’s end
• Augustine, De Trinitate VI and XII; De Doctrina Christiana I
• Aristotle, Physics IV and VIII; Metaphysics V; De Anima III; Ethics VII; “first book about places” [ed.: Topics (inferred)]
• Jerome (propassio); Dionysius, epistle to John the Evangelist; John Damascene, book III
• Plato, Laws (law against homosexuality as against nature); Parmenides (the sail); Apology and dialogues (Socrates on pleasure and pain)
• Hebrews, “faith is the substance of things hoped for”; Euclid’s axiom; Belloc, The Four Men; Shakespeare (“reason is god-like”; “sleep and feed”)

His questions #

• “How do you understand the saying that we will be like him when we see him as he is?” — Not that we are unlike now: we are like by image, more by grace, most of all in the vision.
• Why does Thomas begin the SCG reasons for the Incarnation with hope rather than faith? — Because hope aims at the vision of God as our end, and the Incarnation shows that end to be possible, so hope is strengthened.
• In how many ways is “whole soul” said? — Two: by its essence, and by all its powers (a potestative whole).
• How is the soul in the body? — Not as in a place, not as a part in a whole, but as form; hence whole in the whole and whole in each part.
• “Is he the beginning and the end as man or as God?” — As God.
• In which sense of “end” is God called infinite? — By negation of the fourth sense (limit/definition); he is the end of all things in the third sense (purpose).
• Did Christ suffer according to his whole soul? — Yes by essence, and in all the lower powers by their proper objects; the superior reason suffered only as rooted in the essence, not from its object.
• Did the whole soul of Christ enjoy the beatific vision during the Passion? — By essence yes, since the essence is subject of the higher part which enjoyed perfectly; by all its powers no, since there was no overflow while he was a wayfarer.
• How can joy and pain, contraries, be in the same soul? — They are not about the same thing; contraries may be in the same subject when not according to the same.