Abstract and Concrete Names of God, and Why It Was Fitting for Christ to Die (Question 50, Articles 1–2)

Orientation #

He opens with “this little side here that I’ve got represented on the board,” a text from Thomas’s Sentences on the divine fatherhood, before turning to Summa III, q. 50 (“so we have to question fifty here, on the death of Christ”). He refers back to a discussion of whether God can make something unlike himself, and to q. 49 on why the second Person became man (prev. lecture). The class breaks after a. 2, with a question whether to take another article.

The class, in order #

1. Fatherhood, the divine nature, and God the Father (“is there a distinction between those two in reality”) #

Point: two distinctions of reason in this text are not the same kind of distinction.

• Fatherhood and the divine nature: no real distinction; fatherhood and God the Father: no real distinction. In both cases the distinction is secundum rationem, more precisely according to the modus significandi, the way of signifying.
• But they differ: fatherhood / God the Father is the ordinary theological distinction of abstract and concrete (like deitas / deus, “God is good” / “God is goodness itself”), and both terms are in the genus of relation.
• Fatherhood / divine nature is not abstract-and-concrete but a distinction across two genera: relation and substance. A student supplies the point — naming fatherhood names God in his relation of origin to another person. He notes the objection to himself: but God is not in a genus.
• He praises Thomas’s procedure: having first shown by separate articles that these are the same, he then points out the distinction of reason. “It’s kind of striking the text of Thomas, the clarity in which he sees those things.”

2. Why theology must use both abstract and concrete (“the abstract is simple and imperfect in creatures”) #

Point: the doubling of names comes from the human way of knowing, not from God.

• In creatures the abstract signifies something simple but imperfect (my knowledge, my health: knowledge is that by which I teach, but my knowledge does not teach); the concrete signifies something composed but perfect.
• Hence Dionysius’s saying that all these words can be both affirmed and denied of God: affirmed abstractly for simplicity, affirmed concretely for perfection; denied abstractly because of the imperfection, denied concretely because of the implied composition of the wisdom and the one who has it.
• Root of it, from Aristotle’s book on the soul: the proper object of our reason is the what it is of a sensible or mathematical thing, and there the form is always simple but imperfect, the perfect always composed. So the first two things assumed of God — that he is simple and that he is perfect — cannot both be expressed in one human way of speaking. “We stutter about the divine nature” (he attributes it tentatively — “is it Gregory?”).
• Test case of the abstract/concrete gap in us: my body and its health are not the same, which is why my body can lose its health; “if my body and its health were the same thing, I’d be in very good shape, because you can’t separate something from itself.”
• Deus means habens deitatem — having the divine nature — though the having and the had are not really distinct in God.
• This does not make our knowledge of God false, unless you think that the way we know must be the way things are — “that fundamental question of philosophy.”

3. Faint imitations of God: the simpler that is also more perfect (“brevity is a soul of wit”) #

Point: three created cases where what is simpler or smaller is nevertheless more perfect, a footprint of God.

• Poetics: after comparing tragedy and epic (similar in emotional effect and in the characters used), Aristotle argues tragedy is the better form of fiction because it produces the same effect in a much shorter time — simpler, yet better. (He notes the part on comedy is lost.)
• Euclid II.5: of rectangles (counting the square), the square contains more area for the same perimeter, and more area even for less perimeter. Worked out with the class amid arithmetic confusion: 5×5 has perimeter 20 and area 25; 2×8 has perimeter 20 and area 16 — he and the students stumble over which number is area and which perimeter before settling that less (or equal) perimeter holds more area. Euclid’s actual theorem: with equal perimeters the square exceeds by the square on the difference of the sections.
• “Brevity is a soul of wit” [ed.: he keeps his own wording; in an earlier class he reportedly said “verity”]: the wise man says more in fewer words, the other talks and talks. He tells of a man quoting a remark about a politician wanting to preside over the redemption of the American nation — “I wish I’d said that”; “brevity is a soul of wit, that’s my line.” He admires Shakespeare’s short exhortations — fifty words or less, and no student could match them.
• Application: God, altogether simple, contains the whole universe; “I will show you every good” — Thomas says, that is myself. “It’s going to be amazing to see how perfect He is, but in how simple a way.”

4. Knowing God by negation (“pure act — there’s a composition there”) #

Point: even our best middle terms for God are composed knowings of something simple.

• “Pure act” is the commonest middle term in natural theology, but it composes act with pure, and pure is a negation of potency. Likewise Euclid’s definition of a point as that which has no parts: knowing a simple thing by a negation of composition. A student presses on how the negation of composition is itself composed; he redirects to the composing of the two words.
• Order differs by work: the Summa Contra Gentiles (which his college “natural theology” course used) asks whether God has parts, distinguishing subjective parts from integral/composing parts; the Summa Theologiae instead denies composing parts in the treatise on simplicity and denies subjective parts under the unity of God (not three gods). Either way we know God by negating both kinds of whole.

5. The Sentences on the two processions and the procession of creatures (“the going forward of creatures from God”) #

Point: creation reflects both divine processions.

• The Son goes forth from the Father as his likeness — as Son like the Father, as Word like that of which he is the Word — hence imago Dei. Creatures go forth as like God in some way (even the lowest, so far as they have being and some good), and so reflect the Son’s procession by way of nature. Related question raised earlier: can God make anything that isn’t like him?
• But creatures do not proceed by necessity of nature; they proceed by will and choice, so the Holy Spirit’s procession by way of will and love “anticipates” the going-forth of creatures.
• He notes Thomas appeals to the Word’s likeness-character when explaining why it was fitting for the second Person to become man. He remarks that the Sentences sometimes have things not repeated exactly in the later works, “said in a little different way.”

6. Aside: teaching the same course twice (“you got to keep them together”) #

He sat in on both sections of Kasurik’s course, and again after already getting an A, because the same man says things differently in each class. Practical rule: two sections must be kept in step (both MWF or both TTh), or you lose track and get hopeless confusion; and it is frustrating to finish early, having said it better, with ten minutes left and no way to dismiss them.

7. Thomas on the magnitude of God, and the one-word Pentateuch (“God the Father said it all in one word”) #

An objection to the divine magnitude runs that magnitude means bigger and smaller; Thomas answers that in a way there is something smaller, and himself quotes “brevity is [the soul of wit].” He adds the pious Jewish saying: since scripture was written without spaces and with the words joined by the letter meaning and, and without punctuation, the whole Pentateuch is one word — God spoke one word.

8. The plan of question 50 (“about this six things are asked”) #

The six articles: (1) was it fitting for Christ to die; (2) was the union of his divinity with his flesh dissolved by death; (3) the same about his soul; (4) was Christ a man during the triduum mortis; (5) was his body the same in number living and dead; (6) did his death effect our salvation. On “three days” a student names the figure — synecdoche, the part for the whole — for the triduum.

9. Article 1: objections and sed contra (“before you is the fountain of life”) #

Point: the appearance that the fountain of life cannot die.

1. What is first in a genus is not disposed by what is contrary to the whole genus (fire, source of heat, is never cold). But the Son of God is the fount of all life (Ps. 35:10). So dying is unfitting.
2. Death is more of a defect than sickness (morbus, whence “morbid”), since sickness leads to death; but Christ was never sick — we never read of him getting a cold or the chickenpox. So still less death.
3. “I came that they might have life, and have it more abundantly” (John 10). But the opposite does not lead to its opposite — every maker makes what is like itself (carpenter to his idea; a fortiori man generates man, dog dog, cat cat). The medical maxim “the opposite is cured by the opposite” he notes the Fathers do use.

• Sed contra: John 11, “it is expedient that one man die for the people, lest the whole race perish” — said prophetically by Caiaphas, as the evangelist himself testifies (v. 51).

10. Article 1, body: five reasons it was fitting (“the first one is the most important”) #

1. Satisfaction for the human race, judged worthy of death for sin (Gen. 2:17, “whatever day you eat… you will die by death”); it is a fitting way of satisfying for another that one undergo the punishment owed by the other; “Christ once for our sins died” (1 Peter 3). The most important reason.
2. To show the truth of the nature he assumed. Eusebius: if after spending time with men he simply disappeared, fleeing death, he would be thought a phantasm. Occasion for Franklin — “nothing is certain but death and taxes” — and the coin in the fish’s mouth: he paid taxes too (the temple tax).
3. To free us from fear of death (Heb. 2: he shared flesh and blood that by death he might destroy the one who had power over death and free those who all their life were subject to servitude). A colleague held that at age three one realizes one will die; he called his twenty-year-old students “the immortals.” Ephrem: God did not kill Adam the day he ate so that he might think of it each day. He thinks Thomas himself had some fear of death (Thomas’s sister was killed by lightning; he was uneasy in storms), just as Thomas is “more human” in saying it is hard to get through the Our Father without distraction — a point he once discussed with Warren Murray. “I think we naturally fear death.”
4. To give us an example of dying spiritually to sin by dying bodily. Hence Socrates defining philosophy as the practice of dying, and our word mortification. The soul is perfected by separation from the body — by resisting bodily inclinations, and as in the absent-minded professor, whose mind is not absent but whose body is left behind. From this Thomas builds an argument for immortality: if separation from the body is the soul’s road to perfection, it cannot be the road to its destruction — “the road to perfection is just the opposite of the road to destruction.” The dialogue is the Phaedo. Socrates’ limit: he does not see that man is not just a soul and that the body is naturally joined to it. Text: Rom. 6, “what is dead to sin is dead once… reckon yourselves dead to sin but living to God.”
5. That by rising he showed the power by which he overcame death and gave us hope of rising: if he had never died, we would only say he is an immortal creature, good for him. “If we preach that Christ rose from the dead, how is it that some of you say there will be no resurrection?”

• Asides: whether Socrates is a saint in heaven, and whether Thomas ever prayed for Aristotle, given his debt — left open. Aristotle’s reaching immortality of the soul and knowledge of God before Christianity shows what natural reason can do, which is what Rom. 1:20 is taken to mean; a providential parallel to the Jews who were not converted, whose survival lets Christians argue from the antiquity of the Old Testament books rather than be told “you wrote them yourselves.” Socrates’ joke that the philosopher looks dead because he forgoes bodily pleasures, like a monk; and his explanation of graveyard ghosts as body-loving souls trying to get back in.
• “He’s not morbid at all” — Thomas’s five reasons are worth a whole day’s thought.

11. Article 1, replies (“Christ is the fountain of life secundum quod Deus”) #

1. Christ is the fount of life as God, not as man; he died as man, not as God. Augustine, Contra Felicianum: far be it that Christ so felt death as to lose the life which he himself was — otherwise the fountain of life would have dried up; he felt death by participation in human affection, freely assumed, without losing the power of his nature by which he vivifies all things. He adds Thomas on John 14:6: as man he is the way, as God he is the end — truth and life — answering both of the apostles’ questions, where are you going and how do we get there.
2. Christ did not die of sickness, lest he seem to die of necessity and bodily weakness, but of death inflicted from outside, to which he freely offered himself, to show his death was voluntary — as when he went up to Jerusalem, or earlier escaped those taking up stones. Had he died of sickness one would say, as of Lazarus, that he could do nothing about it.
3. One of two opposites does not per se produce the other, but sometimes by accident: cold by accident heats. His own preferred version — fire, which of itself warms you, burns your house down and so makes you cold; a student offers the reverse (cold drives you to the fire). So Christ through his death brings us to life, because he destroyed our death by his own — which returns to the first reason of the body.

12. Article 2: was the divinity separated from his flesh? (“it remained united after death”) #

Objections:

1. Matt. 27:46, “My God, why have you abandoned me?” — Ambrose: the man about to die cries out at the separation of the divinity; since divinity is free from death, death could not be there unless life had departed.
2. Remove the middle and the extremes are separated. The divinity was joined to the flesh by means of the soul (as established above); at death the soul was separated from the body; therefore the divinity from the flesh. “Good argument, huh?”
3. God’s vivifying power is greater than the soul’s; the body cannot die unless the soul is separated; still less can it die unless the divinity be separated.

• Sed contra: what belongs to human nature is said of the Son of God only by reason of the union; but the creed (symbolum, Greek for “thrown together”) says the Son of God was conceived, born, suffered, died and was buried — which could not be said unless the body remained united. He recalls Socrates’ “you will have to catch me first” when asked where he should be buried, since he identified himself with the soul alone.
• Body: what is conceded by God’s grace is never recalled without some fault — Rom. 11, “without penance are the gifts and calling of God.” Much more the grace of union, which is greater and more permanent by its very notion than the grace of adoption, since it is ordered to a union in person, adoption only to an affective union; and even adoption is lost only through guilt. Since there can be no sin in Christ, the union of his divinity with his flesh cannot be dissolved: the flesh remained united to the Word according to the personal hypostasis after death, there being no other hypostasis of the Word in Christ’s flesh — as Damascene says in Book III. He stresses the union is in the person, not in the nature — the hypostatic union.
• Replies: (1) The “abandonment” is not an untying of the personal union but the Father’s exposing him to the passion; to abandon is simply not to protect him from his persecutors — as with any martyr; it is not despair. Or, as Augustine expounds in On the Grace of the New Testament, it refers to the prayer “let this chalice pass from me.” (Aside: Augustine is the most quotable Father; councils, the Catechism and the popes quote him and Thomas more than anyone.) (2) The Word is united to the flesh “by means of the soul” only in the sense that flesh belongs to human nature through the soul — not that the soul is a middle joining the two; the dead flesh still pertains to human nature, since by divine ordering an order to the resurrection remains in it. He warns against reading the reply as about union of the divine nature with the flesh: the full phrase is divinitas unita carni Christi in persona. (3) The soul vivifies formaliter, as an intrinsic form, so its presence is necessary for the body to live; the divinity vivifies not formally but effective, since it cannot be the form of a body — it would then have the character of a part, and God has no parts. And God acts not from necessity but from will.
• Asides: pleasure at a student naming a child Ambrose; the story of the brothers calling Thomas to see an elephant in the street — “I would rather believe there was an elephant in the street than that one of my brothers could lie.”

His words #

• secundum rationem — a distinction of reason, not real, between names of God.
• modo significandi — “the way of signifying”; his more precise name for that distinction.
• abstract / concrete — deitas / deus, “goodness itself” / “good”; simple-but-imperfect vs. composed-but-perfect.
• Deus = habens deitatem, “having the divine nature.”
• “pure act” — the commonest middle term in natural theology; act composed with a negation of potency.
• “going forward” — his rendering of processio [ed.: procession].
• triduum mortis — the three days; the figure is synecdoche, part for the whole.
• morbus — sickness, “whence ‘morbid’.”
• symbolum — literally, in Greek, “thrown together”; the creed.
• grace of union vs. grace of adoption — the first ordered to personal union, the second to an affective union.
• formaliter / effective — vivifying as intrinsic form vs. vivifying as efficient cause.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 50, prologue (the six articles); a. 1 (three objections, sed contra, body with five reasons, three replies); a. 2 (three objections, sed contra, body, three replies).
• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Sentences — the articles on whether fatherhood is the divine essence and whether fatherhood is the Father; the discussion of the divine magnitude; the processions.
• Quoted within these: Ps. 35:10; Gen. 2:17; 1 Peter 3:18; John 10:10; John 11:50–51; Rom. 6:10–11; Rom. 11:29; Matt. 27:46; Heb. 2:14–15; Augustine, Contra Felicianum; Augustine, On the Grace of the New Testament; Ambrose on Matt. 27; Damascene III; Eusebius.

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Poetics (tragedy vs. epic; the lost book on comedy); Aristotle, De Anima (inferred) on the proper object of our reason.
• Euclid, Elements II.5; Euclid’s definition of a point.
• Plato, Phaedo; Socrates on philosophy as the practice of dying, and on burial.
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles — the questions on God prior to the Trinity, “natural theology,” including whether God has parts (SCG I, ch. 60 matched in the audio, inferred as the locus).
• Thomas on John 14:6.
• Romans 1:20; Dionysius on affirming and denying names of God; Ephrem on Adam; Shakespeare; Benjamin Franklin.

His questions #

• Is there a real distinction between the fatherhood and the divine nature, or between fatherhood and God the Father? No real distinction in either case — only a distinction of reason according to the way of signifying.
• Is it the same distinction of reason on both sides? No: fatherhood/Father is abstract and concrete within the genus of relation; fatherhood/divine nature spans relation and substance.
• Why must theology use both the abstract and the concrete of God? Because our knowing is drawn from sensible things, where the simple is imperfect and the perfect composed; the abstract voices God’s simplicity, the concrete his perfection.
• Does truth require that the way we know be the way things are? No — otherwise we could not know God at all from creatures.
• What figure of speech is the “three days” of the triduum? Synecdoche, the part for the whole.
• If Christ is the fountain of life, how can he die? He is fountain of life as God and died as man; he never lost the life which he himself is.
• Why did Christ not die of sickness? Lest he seem to die of natural necessity; he died of violence freely accepted, to show his death voluntary.
• Was the divinity separated from Christ’s flesh at death? No: grace is withdrawn only for fault, and there is no sin in Christ, so the flesh remained united to the Word in the person, which is why the creed says the Son of God was buried.
• Is Socrates a saint in heaven? Did Thomas ever pray for Aristotle? Left open — “I don’t know; nobody has ever been able to do this.”