Augustine on Order in God, Aristotle's Senses of Before and After, and the Rule of Two or Three

Orientation #

He does not say what was done last time or what comes next; he mentions in passing that his home class has read Aristotle’s De Anima and is now on Thomas’s treatise on the soul, and refers again to Gertrude’s prayers for her faults. The previous class treated appropriation of power, wisdom and goodness to the Persons, illustrated from St Gertrude.

The class, in order #

1. Augustine on order in the Trinity: drop the genus, keep the difference (“the order of this from that”) #

Point: Augustine’s “no before and after in God, but the order of this from that” is not a second genus of order; Thomas (Sentences) shows it is “order” used equivocally by reason.

• Augustine’s saying holds for every sense of before Aristotle gives (time, being, knowledge, goodness, cause); the Creed still says “God from God, Light from Light”.
• His difficulty: he had taught, with Thomas, that order is defined by before and after; did Augustine mean two kinds of order? We often misread Augustine, as Thomas’s replies to objections show.
• Thomas’s answer: Augustine keeps the difference (this from that) and drops the genus (before and after). This is the general rule his teacher Fr Boulay pressed: when a name is carried over from creatures to God, drop the genus, keep the difference.
  • Science: demonstration is a syllogism making us know the cause and that it is the cause and cannot be otherwise; God has no syllogism (genus) but knows the cause and that it cannot be otherwise (difference).
  • Justice: for Aristotle a habit; not a habit in God, but the difference (each his due) kept.
  • Reason (Aristotle, Porphyry): genus taken from the more material, difference from the more formal; God is pure act, so the genus goes.
• The carried-over name signifies the new meaning but connotes the first: equivocal not by chance but by reason.

2. Aristotle’s senses of before and after (“Today is before tomorrow”) #

Point: the senses in the Categories, with his examples.

1. In time: today before tomorrow, after yesterday.
2. In being: this can be without that, not vice versa. Letters C, A, T can be without the word “cat” (his favourite animal), not vice versa; bricks before a brick wall.
3. In the discourse of reason (knowledge): premises before conclusion, genus before difference, more known before less known, plane before solid geometry. Like sense 2 by proportion: an earlier theorem can be known without a later one, not vice versa. Euclid: you cannot imagine infinite lines, so the parallel-lines theorem (interior angles equal to two right angles) rests on the earlier theorem that a triangle’s angles equal two right angles — if the lines met you would have a triangle with more than two right angles. Likewise vertical angles equal from the two-right-angles theorem and the definition of a straight line. Student asked if the parallel theorem is a postulate: no, a theorem.
4. In goodness (before and better): Aristotle before Descartes; Thomas shows God better than all.
5. A seemingly forgotten fifth: cause before effect. Aristotle distinguishes it from sense 2: bricks can be without a wall, but a cause cannot really be without an effect. His own view: not fifth in order but placed alongside sense 2.

3. Shakespeare’s reason and the proofs for God (“looking before and after”) #

Point: proving God exists requires looking before and after in more than one sense.

• Shakespeare: reason is the ability for large discourse, looking before and after; discourse = running (reason runs from known to unknown); “large” = about the universal, or about great things (opposed to small talk).
• First proof (both Summas): motion to unmoved mover. Two orders: cause before effect (unmoved mover before moved movers), and order in knowledge (motion before the unmoved mover for us).
• Second (Summa Theologiae): to the first maker; mover and maker are both the third kind of cause.
• Next: things that can be and not be, before them something that must be; what must be sometimes has a cause; so something necessary through itself — God. Reasoning from what is more known to us to the first being.
• Struck that Thomas later says both “we have shown God is the first cause” and “the first being”: not synonyms; “first” in the cause sense vs. “first” in the sense of being (sense 2). Later “some things are better” uses sense 4. “Realize how important Aristotle’s text is on before and after.”
• Resolution: there is no before and after in God, though God is before us in being, cause, goodness.
• Aside: some thought souls form a tenth order after the nine angelic orders; Thomas: three hierarchies, three orders in each, beginning-middle-end in each, all imitating the Trinity — ten would break it; we are assumed to the places of the fallen angels.

4. The rule of two or three (“three is the first number about which we say all”) #

Point: reason can understand a distinction of two or of three, but more than three only through distinctions of two or three.

• Plato’s Socrates always divides by two: opposites are two, and you must divide by opposites (men vs white is no division; male/female, good/bad are).
• Aristotle gives not a reason but a sign that two is not always enough: three is the first number of which we say “all” (both of us go; all three of us). Animals divide into land, water, air.
• Everyday signs: three meals; repas complet in Quebec = appetizer, main course, dessert; three straight lines are the fewest that enclose an area, so the triangle is the first rectilinear figure; three theological virtues.
• “Now that’s kind of a strong claim to Mr Berquist.”
• Test 1, opening of the Categories: a distinction of four (universal substance, individual accident, universal accident, singular substance) understood by crisscrossing two pairs — said of / not said of a subject, in / not in a subject; like good men, bad men, good women, bad women.
• Test 2, the ten categories (Thomas, Commentary on Physics IV and Metaphysics V): said of an individual by reason of (a) what it is (man, animal, living body, body, substance — an angel is a substance too); (b) something in it beyond what it is (white, wise, just, healthy); (c) something outside it (clothed, in this room, at 3:25). Substance left undivided; (b) into absolute (quality: knowledge, virtue; quantity: size) vs towards another (father, son, student); the last six he does not go through. Habitus (clothed, armed, shod) is man’s own category — De Koninck’s public lecture: only man dresses, other animals only in our service; beach, mass, wedding (his wife’s wedding dress).

5. Theological and historical tests of the rule (“distinction of seven”) #

• The Our Father: first distinction of two — the one addressed vs. seven petitions; the seven not understood as seven but as three for God (hallowed, kingdom, will), four for us; the four as one for the good (bread) and three for the bad (forgive, temptation, evil) — the bad happens in many ways and past evil sticks with you. Aside: Gertrude always prays for her faults; our Lord said to look for him in her heart.
• Four causes: nobody grasps four; intrinsic (matter: the chair’s wood; form: its shape) vs extrinsic (maker: carpenter; end: something to sit on).
• McNeill, The Rise of the West, thirteen chapters divided into three periods (5, 5, 3): spread of civilization from Mesopotamia until four independent civilizations (China, India, Europe, Middle East); the Eurasian cultural balance; the rise of the West from about 1500. Aside: McNeill’s thesis on the potato in Irish history; potatoes underground survived the Thirty Years’ War.
• “History” is named by antonomasia from the Greek for investigation: Aristotle calls his three books on soul an investigation, and Thomas says an investigation is by nature incomplete; nothing is more incomplete than history (narrations of an accident diverge). Poetics: tragedy more philosophic than history, which is about the singular — Paul VI calling himself a Hamlet, a “Romeo”; Boethius: singular and sensed, universal and understood.

6. The two Summas divided (“I am the way, the truth, and the life”) #

Point: the four books of the Summa contra Gentiles divide cleanly by two and three; the three parts of the Summa Theologiae are harder, and he proposes John 14:6 as their key.

• SCG: books 1–3 (known by natural reason as well as faith) vs book 4 (faith alone). Books 1–3: God in himself (simplicity, perfection); God as beginning (creation); God as end (providence). Book 4 in the same order: Trinity; the Word made flesh; last end (resurrection, seeing God face to face). Four → two → three.
• ST: “What the heck is Thomas doing?” — prima pars treats creation and the Trinity too, so it is not the same three.
• Thomas (Sentences and start of the Summa): theology is neither looking nor practical science but both, as knowledge of God. Philosophy’s division: looking (mathematical, natural, first/wisdom), practical (ethics, domestics, politics), plus logic (three acts of reason). So prima pars resembles looking philosophy (God, soul: essence, powers, acts after Dionysius; motion and time), secunda pars resembles practical — Boulay’s caution: don’t make dogmatic and moral theology two sciences; it is one.
• Tertia pars (incarnation, sacraments, final state): the three fit “I am the way, the truth, and the life” — truth ~ prima (wisdom is knowledge of truth, Aristotle), life ~ secunda (learning how to live, to get to heaven), way ~ tertia (Thomas: de Christo, secundum quod homo, est via to God). SCG rather follows the Apocalypse, “Alpha and Omega”: God is beginning and end of all else, not of himself. ST’s moral part is the thickest, its third part more developed on Christ — a more Christian theology, without the natural-reason/faith division.
• Student: doesn’t ST begin with God, things coming forth from God, and the return? Reply: he refers to that, and the secunda (end and virtues) and tertia (Christ, sacraments) are like it, but it is not the division altogether, since prima pars already treats God as creator.
• Joke: vows to the Typikon and “the rule of two or three”.

7. The hard case: senses of a word (“eight different senses”) #

Point: senses of a word resist division by two or three.

• Eight senses of “in”; but the ten senses of being Thomas does divide by three, then two or three, where Aristotle just lists them.
• Student: can the five senses of before be divided into two? Reply: hard, not impossible. Likenesses: senses 2 and 3 proportional; 1 and 2 related — he, 82, is before the students in time but not in being (“could you be without me? I hope so”); what is before in being is usually before in time, not vice versa. Sense 4 more removed: the good/end often comes after in time — the philosopher is a lover of wisdom (Pythagoras: God alone is wise), Thomas: hardly at the end of life does a man reach natural wisdom; “metaphysics” = after the books of natural philosophy, which interviewees didn’t know. Sense 5 alongside 2: effect depends on cause as wall on bricks; hence Thomas argues first from effect to cause, then in terms of being (contingent → necessary → necessary through itself, “I am who am”), then from better to best.

8. Opposites before before-and-after; distinction by relatives (“Nothing is before or after itself”) #

Point: Aristotle treats opposites first because opposites are the basis of distinction, which is presupposed to order.

• The axiom of order: nothing is before or after itself, in time (hospital bracelet, birthday January 18, 1936, existence in the womb), in being, in knowledge, in goodness (becoming better is not the same thing being better than itself).
• Know thyself (the seven wise men; “brevity is the soul of wit”, Shakespeare): an exhortation, too high for animals, too low for angels and God, addressed to man; to soul rather than body; to reason. In logic, reason knows itself: definition of definition, division of division (universal vs integral whole), and Thomas’s distinction of distinction — formal (by opposites) vs material (by division of the continuous; Categories, quantity).
• The four opposites (post-predicaments): contradiction, having/lacking, contraries — all close, involving non-being — and, “my God, he saw that”, relatives.
• Application to the Trinity: the Persons are really distinct (against the heretics who make one Person Father and Son by different roles); not material, God being no body; not by contradiction, lacking or contraries (non-being in “I am who am”); so by relatives — Father and Son differ by relations. “Amazing” that the categories ground the greatest mystery.
• Soul and body: not a material distinction; must be relative; opposites fit each other (teacher/student, taller/shorter). Thomas: a man’s soul cannot be a dog’s soul (the early thinker recognizing a friend’s voice in a dog), nor my soul your body’s; God creates the soul to fit the body the parents began — so the separated soul is still distinguished by what it fits. Nut and bolt example begins; recording ends.

His words #

• order: defined by before and after (genus); Augustine’s “this from that” keeps the difference only.
• equivocal by reason: a name carried over keeps a new meaning while connoting the first [ed.: analogous].
• before in being: this can be without that, not vice versa.
• discourse: from Latin for running; reason running from known to unknown.
• large discourse: about the universal, or about great things.
• looking philosophy / practical philosophy [ed.: speculative/theoretical vs practical]; logic the tool.
• first maker, first mover, first being, first cause: “first” in different senses of before.
• rule of two or three: reason grasps distinctions of more than three only through two and three.
• repas complet: appetizer, main course, dessert.
• habitus: to be clothed, armed, shod; man’s own category.
• antonomasia: history named “investigation” as the incomplete inquiry par excellence.
• via: “de Christo, secundum quod homo, est via” — Christ as man the road to God.
• axiom of order: nothing is before or after itself.
• formal vs material distinction: by opposites vs by division of the continuous.
• relatives: the fourth kind of opposite, by which the Persons and soul/body are distinguished.

Texts #

Read in class (quoted or commented from memory):

• Augustine, saying on no before and after in the Trinity, with Thomas’s explanation in the Sentences.
• Aristotle, Categories: senses of before and after; opening fourfold distinction; ten categories; opposites (post-predicaments).
• Shakespeare, definition of reason (“large discourse, looking before and after”) (Hamlet, inferred).
• Thomas, Summa contra Gentiles, prologue division of the four books; Summa Theologiae, division of the three parts; the proofs of God’s existence (both Summas).
• John 14:6 and Apocalypse “Alpha and Omega” (loci inferred). Mentioned:
• Aristotle, definition of demonstration (Posterior Analytics, inferred); Poetics on tragedy and history; De Anima called an investigation; Porphyry on genus and difference.
• Euclid, Elements I, parallel lines, triangle angles, vertical angles (inferred).
• Thomas, Commentary on Physics IV and Metaphysics V (categories); treatise on the soul; article on theology as looking or practical (Sentences I and start of ST).
• McNeill, The Rise of the West; De Koninck’s lecture on clothing; Boethius on singular/universal; the seven wise men, “Know thyself”.

His questions #

• Is Augustine saying there are two kinds of order? No: he uses “order” equivocally by reason, dropping the genus and keeping the difference.
• Is demonstration (a syllogism) what “science” means when carried over to God? No syllogism; but God knows the cause and that it cannot be otherwise.
• Can a cause really be without an effect? No, unlike bricks without a wall; so sense 5 differs from sense 2.
• Does “first cause” mean the same as “first being”? No: two different senses of before (cause/effect vs being).
• How many meals do you need in a day? Three; two is not quite enough.
• How can you understand a distinction of four, or of ten? By crisscrossing two opposites; or, with Thomas, dividing the ten by three, then by two or three.
• Is the parallel-lines proposition a postulate? No, a theorem, resting on the earlier triangle theorem.
• Am I (82) before you in being? No, only in time; you could be without me.
• What kind of distinction is there between Father and Son, and between soul and body? Formal, by relative opposites, since material and the other opposites are excluded.
• Can the five senses of before be divided into two? Left open (“hard to do; not saying you can’t”), with likenesses among 1–2, 2–3, 2–5 noted.