Reading The Summa

Question 59 - The Will of the Angels

2012-02-13T15:26:00.001Z

Why this Question Matters.

Having dealt with knowledge and the angelic intellect, Aquinas now turns to the question of angelic will. Are angels like humans in having a will distinct from their intellect? If so, is this will distinct from their intellect and is this will free in the sense that humans have free will.

The Thread of the Argument

A1: The attentive reader will have observed that, in asking whether angels have a will, Aquinas posits two of the same objections that he put forward in Ia.q19.a1 where he asked whether God has a will. In the case of the angels, the answer that Aquinas gives has a distinct neo-Platonic feel about it: all things emanate from the divine will and therefore everything has an appetite for goodness. All that needs to be done to sort out the answer to this question is to inquire into the nature of this appetite for goodness in different classes of things.

Aquinas distinguishes between three classes of the appetite for goodness. The first two of these are natural appetition and sensible appetition. Harking back to the “fifth way” in Ia.q2.a3, the first of these refers to the movement of things like inanimate objects or plants towards their natural ends. The second refers to objects that sense their environments, moving towards sweetness for example. In both of these first two cases the direction towards the good derives from some external power supplying the end-as-good. In contrast, the third class of appetite for goodness lies in those beings who move towards the good and at the same time know it to precisely to be good. This tendency of moving towards the good as known to be good is precisely what is meant by the will; hence angels (and, of course, humans) have such a will.

A2: Following the pattern set in Ia.q54. we must distinguish between the will and intellect & nature in the angels. The strategy for distinguishing between nature and will applies more generally than to just the angels: a nature is by definition included within the thing itself, whereas the will extends to things (identified as good) outside the thing. This argument applies to all creatures that have a will, and therefore to the angels. We do recall, however, that in God the object of the will lies within Himself and therefore, for God, this argument does not work; in God, we can only make an intellectual distinction between God’s nature and His will.

When it comes to the distinction between the will and the intellect, Aquinas observes that the intellect knows things that exist outside the knower insofar as that external thing can exist within the intellect. The will, on the other hand, involves an inclination towards something outside the one who wills. The power by which the creature has some exterior thing within must be distinct from the power by which it tends to something exterior.

A3: Part of the function of the intellect is to inform the will, so that the latter may take decisions based on this information. The will tends by its nature towards the good, but if it is presented by a number of different possible courses of action in some circumstance, each of which is equally good, then it has to take a decision between these choices. This is the basis of what we call the freedom of the will, the ability to choose between apparent goods.

Aquinas has built up a picture of the angels that identifies their intellects as being extremely powerful (Ia.q58), even to the extent of their knowledge being infallible. Can we make any sense, then, of the idea that angels have free will? As the second objection implies, if their intellects are so powerful, it would seem that there is very little scope for there being any indifference between alternate goods and therefore no choice for them to make!

The answer is swift and sweet: wherever there is intellect, there is freedom of the will. Replying to the second objection, Aquinas concedes that an angel would be imperfect if it did not know all it was able to know naturally. However, as we saw in the second article, the knowledge of the intellect is internal to the knower whereas the will reaches out to things external to the one who wills. Tending to things that are better than the angel will move the angel towards perfection, therefore non-determination of the will in the contemplation of higher things would be indicative of an imperfection. However, if the angel contemplates things lower than it, indifference between choices offered to the will is not indicative of imperfection.

A4: In Ia.q81. Aquinas will identify the irascible and concupiscible appetites in humans and will go into detail about them in the “Treatise on the Passions” (I-IIae.qq22-48). For the moment it is sufficient to note (I-IIae.q23.a4) that the irascible appetite is to do with our inclination towards objectives that are arduous to achieve; so that hope, despair, anger, courage and fear are passions of the irascible appetite. The concupiscible appetite is to do with our simple inclination towards things that are attractive; so that love and hatred, desire and aversion, joy and sadness are passions of the concupiscible appetite.

Aquinas asks whether these irascible and concupiscible appetites are found in the angels. He justifies his negative answer by arguing that angels only have intellectual appetites and that as the division into irascible and concupiscible appetites applies only to sensible appetition, therefore this division does not apply to the angels. The fact that this division applies only to the sensible appetite follows from the fact that distinct powers of appetite arise only from formal distinction between their objects rather than a material distinction. So, for example, the formal object of vision is colour; therefore there are not two separate powers that correspond to sensing black and white respectively, but only one. The formal object of the will (or intellective appetite) is the good considered generally; it is not split up into particular goods as considered by the will. Therefore there is no division in the intellective appetite such as happens with the sensible appetite.

Handy Concepts

In creatures the appetite for goodness is divided into three classes. Of the first two, natural appetition corresponds to the movement of inanimate objects and plants towards their end; sensible appetition corresponds to the movement of a sense towards its object. The third class, the will, corresponds to a movement towards the good as known as good. Angles and humans, as intellectual creatures, have such a will.
Despite the infallibility of angelic knowledge, angels still have choices to make and they have free will in making these choices.
There is a similarity between the third article and the question of the necessity of God’s will in Ia.q19.
There are no irascible or concupiscible appetites in the angels, as their appetites are purely intellective.

Difficulties

It’s unclear to me that Aquinas’s answer to the second objection in the third article actually addresses the problem, which is that the infallible intellect of the angel would know the (unique) right thing to do and therefore would have no choice to make. Aquinas chooses to address the consequences of choices involving lower beings. It seems odd that he hasn’t considered the possible objective indifference between choices, or the uncertainty of the prediction of future consequences or the possibility of incommensurability between different goods.

Question 58 - The Mode of Angelic Knowledge

2012-02-07T08:42:00.002Z

Why this Question Matters.

This is the last question in the series on angelic knowledge. If the previous questions have their centre of gravity in distinguishing God from his creatures, this question looks forward to the “Treatise on Human Nature” in distinguishing the angels from humans. We will see in this question that Aquinas attributes to the angels processes of thinking that many of us would wish for ourselves! Angels simply so not have to grind through information to arrive at a conclusion; they have a direct intuition of everything that is implicit in their premises.

Articles 6 & 7 refer to the morning and evening knowledge of the angels. These strange names, referring to the mornings and evenings of the days of creation, come directly from St. Augustine’s account in his commentary on the book of Genesis. Indeed, these two articles can be seen as St. Thomas’s summary of a section of this book.

The Thread of the Argument

A1: When we think of something, whether we perceive something new and come to an understanding of it or whether we contemplate something brought forth from our memories, our intellects move from potentiality to actuality. Is the same true of the angels? To answer this question, Aquinas has to distinguish between learning something anew and thinking about something we already know.

In the first case, angels do not have any potentiality as they have been brought into being by God with all the intelligible species that are connatural to them. In this sense, what they know, they know from the first instance of their creation. However, Aquinas observes that there may be an exception to this general rule: God may choose to illuminate an angel with some particular divine revelation and in that case their intellect will be moved from potentiality to actuality.

In the second sense, an angel need not be thinking about everything that it knows at the same time. Therefore, in this case, it is true to say that its intellect moves from potentiality to actuality. Aquinas notes that angels are always contemplating the Word of God for “it is this vision that the angels’ beatitude consists in”.

A2: Multitasking or thinking of more than one thing at once is seen as being a very valuable gift. Humans are capable of very complex tasks that involve many simultaneous considerations, but we tend to be best at these tasks when we have learnt them; when they have become habitual to us. Similarly our minds are capable of flitting from one subject to another with great rapidity; however, can we truly think of more than one thing at the same instant?

In this article Aquinas is asking this question of the angels; in order to answer it he has to be specific about how we can understand complex matters. He observes that we do contemplate complex things but he claims (with the backing of a long philosophical tradition) that in understanding such complex ideas we understand them as a unity. So, for humans beings things cannot be understood all at once insofar as they are distinct, but they can insofar as they are taken as a complex unity. Translating this into the language of intelligible species, this means that if a complex idea can be grasped by means of a single intelligible species then all the sub-ideas within that idea can (in a sense) be grasped at once; if, however, multiple intelligible species are required then the complex cannot be grasped all at once.

Applying this reasoning to the angels, Aquinas searches for those things that could be the principles of unity for complex ideas. For angels the special principle of unity that they have lies in their contemplation of the Word of God; things they know through this vision they know all at once. But for things known through intelligible species, the same considerations apply as for humans: if there is a single unifying intelligible species then knowledge can be all at once; if not, it cannot be.

A3: Human reason is capable of coming to a knowledge of things through a direct intuition (intellectus) and though a process of discursive reasoning (ratio). In the latter the process of reasoning proceeds from point to point by logical inference. Do angels think the same way or is their thinking all by a process of direct intuition?

Aquinas argues that lower intellects of their very nature attain perfection in their cognition by a process of movement and discourse; higher intellects have no need for this process. It is the weakness of our intellects that necessitates the process of discursive reasoning as we cannot see immediately the consequences inherent in first principles. The angels have a “fullness of intellectual light” that gives them all the consequences of these first principles.

A4: Continuing the theme of the previous article, Aquinas asks whether angels know things through composing and dividing (see Ia.q16.a2). Aquinas observes that if the intellect were capable of seeing every possible conclusion implied by a first principle (or set of first principles) then there would be no need for a process of composing and dividing. In a similar way, if an intellect upon apprehending an object were able to fully comprehend the what-ness of the object, then there would be no need of discursive thinking or of composing and dividing in coming to know about that object.

Since the intellectual light in angels is perfect, they comprehend all that is virtually contained (i.e. all that which is implied) in anything that they apprehend. Therefore they have no need of composing and dividing.

A5: The preceding articles of this question make it clear that angels have an extraordinarily powerful means of knowing things. They simply do not have to go through all the painful and mistake-prone steps that we do to arrive at knowledge; they know things through a direct apprehension of those things. But now an obvious question rears its head: however can such a being make a mistake? Christian doctrine, when it contemplates the fallen angels, is quite clear that the angels can be mistaken, and can be mistaken in a thoroughly spectacular way.

We came across the idea of the first act of the intellect (or simple apprehension) in Ia.q17. Like a correctly functioning sense organ the intellect is infallible in this first act; it is in the second act of the intellect (also called judgement) that mistakes are made. In us, with our processes of composing and dividing and of discursive reasoning we are prone to erroneous judgement, making a mess of what the first act delivers accurately. In the angels, on the other hand, all they have is the act of simple apprehension; as they don’t make judgements in the way that we do, they cannot make mistakes in this way. However, Aquinas identifies that they can still make mistakes; it is just that the mistakes that they can make are precisely the big ones! Their natural cognition is perfect, but their supernatural cognition, their cognition of things ordained supernaturally by God, is fallible. We will see more about the fall of the angels in Ia.q63., but for the moment, the consequences of this are that the good angels do have infallible knowledge both of natural and supernatural things. On the other hand, the fallen angels have infallible knowledge of natural things but can only make judgements about things based on their natural knowledge. Therefore if some object of knowledge combines the natural and the supernatural (such as whether a dead man may rise from the grave) they will be mistaken.

A6: In his commentary Super Genesim ad Litteram St. Augustine interpreted the Genesis account of the six “days” of creation not as literal solar days but as the creation of six different types of thing as made known to the angelic intellect. He called that primordial knowledge of things as they exist in the Word of God morning knowledge and the knowledge of things as they actually exist in themselves evening knowledge. In asking the question of whether angels have both morning knowledge and evening knowledge, Aquinas is summarizing Augustine’s teaching and making it his own.

A7: St. Augustine taught that there is a big difference between knowing something in the Word of God (morning knowledge) and knowing it as it is in its own existence (evening knowledge). Aquinas argues that since angels do not receive their knowledge of things from the things themselves (Ia.q55.a2) one has to be careful with the notion of evening knowledge. The object known by the angel does not make itself know to the angel, so to speak, but rather the knowledge comes via the intelligible species implanted by God. This means that evening knowledge is the knowledge of the thing as existing in its own nature.

Aquinas goes on to argue that angels have this latter type of knowledge in two ways: in the first case through their innate intelligible species; and in the second case through the ideas of things in the Word of God. This means that they know things in the word of God in two ways. They know things as they are in the Word of God (morning knowledge) but also in seeing the Word of God they see things as they exist in themselves. It is as though they not only see the plan for the thing in the Word of God, they also see the thing itself as constructed from that plan, in its own existence.

This means that we have to be careful in differentiating morning and evening knowledge. Morning knowledge and evening knowledge are the same in essence if by evening knowledge one is referring to knowledge of things in their own existence known through the Word of God. On the other hand, if we consider evening knowledge in the sense of knowledge obtained via intelligible species, then evening knowledge and morning knowledge are distinct.

Handy Concepts

Angels come into being knowing all that is connatural to them; but they do not necessarily think about everything all the time.
However, they are much better at integrating complex ideas into a unity than us; moreover, when they contemplate what they know through the Word of God, they contemplate it as a unity.
Angels know things through direct intuition; they have no need of discursive reasoning or of composing and dividing.
Angels’ natural cognition is infallible but their supernatural cognition is fallible.
St. Thomas assimilates St. Augustine’s ideas about morning and evening knowledge into his teaching about the angels. Morning knowledge is the primordial knowledge of things in the Word of God; evening knowledge is knowledge of things as they actually exist in themselves.
Aquinas will say more about intellectus and ratio in Ia.q79.a8-10.

Difficulties

In the first article, Aquinas does not explicitly differentiate between angels in the state of grace and glory and those who fell as to the constant cognition of the word of God. His answer seems to suggest that he is excluding the fallen angels from the constant vision of God.
When Aquinas talks about the unifying of ideas into a complex idea, he does not go into any details of how this really works. There’s probably a lot more to say about focussing the attention on one thing as it occurs in itself and as it occurs in a complex.

Question 57 - The Angels' Knowledge of Material Things

2012-02-04T13:37:00.001Z

Why this Question Matters.

Having discussed the angels’ knowledge of immaterial things in the previous question, it seems quite natural that he now asks about their knowledge of material things. The general answer to how angels know of material things is that God puts the knowledge there as part of their natures. Aquinas is not satisfied simply with such a deus ex machina answer and insists on spelling out how this knowledge comes to be in a number of particular cases that would at first seem to be awkward.

The Thread of the Argument

A1: The intellect of an angel is simple in the sense of not having all of the components that the intellect of a human being has. Angels do not know things through sense data nor do they have an imagination. How then can they know material things? The objections and the sed contra of this question hold in tension the ideas that “of course angels know about material things because they are higher beings than us” and “but they lack the means by which material things are understood”.

It is no surprise that the former observation wins out: the mistake in the latter position arises from thinking that angels must perceive material things in the same way that we do. Angels participate more perfectly in God’s goodness, as they are higher in the order of creation. This means that material things pre-exist in the intellects of angels (having been put there by God). As angels are purely intellectual beings and because the existence of a thing is in the mode of that in which it exists, this pre-existence of material objects in the angels must be an intellectual existence (an esse intentionale as we saw in Ia.q56.a2). Hence angels do know material things.

In the reply to the second objection, Aquinas reinforces the point that the intellect apprehends the essence of a thing, the what-it-is-ness of the object. In contrast, the senses apprehend the some of the exterior accidents of a thing (from which the active intellect derives the intelligible species, which in turn allows the intellect to infer the essence of the thing). Likewise the imagination apprehends likenesses of sensible things rather than the essence of the thing. Therefore it’s important to note that the angels’ knowledge of material things is a very direct knowledge of unmediated perception.

A2: Returning to a theme raised in Ia.q56.a1, there would seem to be a tension between the angels’ guardianship of singular individual human beings and the possibility that angels can actually have any knowledge of singulars. That the latter might be a problem, recall that Aristotle argues that intellectual knowledge is the knowledge of essences and thus of universals whereas sensation is the knowledge of singulars; as angels only have intellectual knowledge, they surely cannot have knowledge of individuals.

Aquinas gives a surprisingly long answer to this question, a fact that probably reflects the diversity of philosophical opinion at the time. He is, however, quite uncompromising; to deny completely the knowledge of singulars to the angels would be to deny the Catholic belief that angels minister to singulars lower in the hierarchy of creation. He also alludes to an intermediate position that the angels have knowledge of singulars but only through knowledge of the universal causes of these singulars. Aquinas discards this position as inadequate as it fails to do justice to what it means to have knowledge of singulars; predicting that an eclipse will happen by analysing the motion of the sun and moon is not the same as experiencing the eclipse as it happens here and now. Aquinas will return to the theme of knowledge through causes in the next article when he considers the angels’ knowledge of future things.

Aquinas observes that humans know things by a diversity of cognitive powers. For example, we know immaterial and universal things through the intellect; singular and corporeal things through senses. Angels, however, have a more unified and integrated intellective power. We can see something like this in the common sense of human beings; although we identify five different senses, we also recognize that these senses work together and are integrated to the extent that we can meaningfully differentiate between whiteness and sweetness.

Returning to the theme of Ia.q56.a2, Aquinas recalls that things flow forth from God in two modes: as existing in themselves but also as existing in angelic cognition. Just as God knows the things that He creates both in their universality and in their individuality, so also does he communicate this knowledge, universal and singular, to the angels.

A3: If angels are so smart what do they know of the future? Do they know future things to the extent that God knows future things? After all, God exists in eternity in which there is no notion of future and past; so, angels exist in aeviternity and similar considerations must apply.

Aquinas identifies that the knowledge of a future thing can be considered under two types: it can be considered as knowledge in its cause and as knowledge in itself. We know future things in their causes when we can predict what will happen based on what has happened; we see two cars skidding towards each other at high speed, we can predict that there will be a crash. Such knowledge is not infallible but probabilistic. We may simply not know of intervening causes that issue in a different outcome to that which we predict; at the last minute the driver of one of the cars may regain control and steer away from the other car. In contrast, we know things in themselves (to the extent to which we can know them) when we have cognition of them. So we do not have knowledge of future things in themselves but God does. In fact, only God has such knowledge of future things in themselves; the angels have a more perfect knowledge of future things in their causes that we do, but they do not have the knowledge of future things in themselves.

Angels may exist in aeviternity, but that does not mean that there is no change for them. There can be a succession of intelligible conceptions in the intellect of an angel as their intellect moves from potentiality to actuality.

A4: Aquinas attacks the question of whether angels can know the thoughts of our hearts in a manner that might seem dual to the approach that he took in the previous article about the angels’ knowledge of future things. There are two ways in which the thoughts of our hearts can be known by another. In the first instance they can be known by their effects: from the expression on someone’s face to their exterior acts, what lies behind may be inferred to a greater or lesser extent. This is the type of knowledge that the angels have of the thoughts of our hearts; but they are much better at it than we are! They have a much deeper insight into our hearts via externals that we can possibly hope for.

The second way that the thoughts of our hearts can be known by another is as they actually exist in our intellects (as far as thoughts are concerned) and in our wills (when it comes to affections). This type of “interior” knowledge is restricted to God.

A5: Finally in this question, Aquinas asks whether the angels know the “mysteries of grace” (or “all the mysteries of grace” if one reads the prologue to this question). By this he means those supernatural effects produced by God in creation; the effects in creation of the economic Trinity rather than things to do with the immanent Trinity.

To answer this question Aquinas distinguishes between the natural knowledge of the angels and their beatified knowledge. Natural knowledge is the knowledge that they have through their essence and the innate intelligible species implanted in them by God. On the other hand, their beatified knowledge is that which comes to them by their being raised to the supernatural (see Ia.q62 for more details of this). As so raised, they do not know all the mysteries of grace but only those revealed to them by God. Furthermore the higher the level of the angel, the more the angel knows of such mysteries.

Handy Concepts

Material things pre-exist in the intellects of angels as an intellectual knowledge.
The intellect (be it human or angelic) apprehends the essences of things.
God communicates the knowledge of things in their universality and their particularity to the angels.
God has created the angels as intellectual beings that know stuff as part of their being.
Angels know the future only insofar as they know the causes of things; they do have this knowledge to a degree of perfection much higher than ours.
Angels know the thoughts of our hearts only insofar as they know the effects of that flow from what is in our hearts; again, they know this much better than we do.
Angels know the mysteries of grace only insofar as they are raised to the supernatural level and only insofar as God reveals them.

Difficulties

It is curious that Aquinas does not raise Ephesians 3:10 in the discussion of the fifth article. The discussion that he gives in his commentary on the book of Ephesians expands on what he writes here.
One might identify synaesthesia as a failure of the common sense.

Question 56 - The Angel's Knowledge of Immaterial Things

2012-02-02T17:23:00.002Z

Why this Question Matters.

It’s now time for Aquinas to become more specific about what the angels know. In the next question he discusses the angels’ knowledge about material things, but here he turns to the topic of the angels’ cognition of immaterial things. Since we’ve already seen that angels know things through intelligible species that are connatural to them (Ia.q55.a1) it might at first seem puzzling that Aquinas would tackle this question, as one might simply argue that what angels know is determined by what God lets them know. But the point of this question is to make a principled enquiry into particular categories of the angelic knowledge of immaterial things. The division of the articles follows these categories: what do angels know of themselves, of each other and of God?

The Thread of the Argument

A1: To ask whether an angel knows itself might appear to be a strange question. But what Aquinas is really concerned with is the metaphysical mechanisms underpinning the fact that an angel must know itself. As far as Aquinas is concerned, self-knowledge is the primary knowledge that knowing things have and which follows pretty much immediately upon the being of the knowing subject. Descartes’ cogito ergo sum would have appeared to Aquinas as simply begging the question; it assumes the existence of the thinking “I” within its premise. One cannot really get started on metaphysics without the recognition that the most immediate act of apprehension of the knowing subject is of the being of the knowing subject itself.

Aquinas’s argument proceeds by observing that knowledge is an immanent action caused by a form in an agent, and that this form (the intelligible species) is united with the agent. In the case of material beings knowing material objects (even parts of their own selves), the active intellect constructs an intelligible species from sensory phantasms; this intelligible species is united with, rather than exterior to, the knowing subject. The second step is to notice that knowledge, especially in the case of humans, often involves this form bringing some potentiality within the intellect to actuality, but that it doesn’t have to involve this. In fact, a form of intelligence higher than that of humans would not involve the actualization of a potential but would correspond to the forms informing knowledge always being present to the intellect. Angels don’t have to learn these sorts of things; they always know what they know. Finally, Aquinas argues that there is no inherent reason to suppose that a form that informs knowledge in the knowing subject has to be accidental (even though it is in the case of human knowledge). In fact, an angel is a subsistent intelligible form and it understands itself thorough this very form.

The second objection raises an important issue about cognition: it makes the striking claim that no singular is intelligible. What lies behind this claim is the idea that, when we apprehend something, our apprehension starts at a general level and then proceeds to the more specific as we gather more data about the object. Our knowledge of something that comes into our field of attention starts out the universal level (“that’s an animal”) and then proceeds to become more specific (“that’s a cat” and then “that’s my cat Felix”), but never reaches the level of complete knowledge of the individual. In the case of this objection, it would seem that since angels are singular within their species, they cannot be intelligible (to themselves or to anyone else). Aquinas answers that it is not the singularity that makes things unintelligible but rather their principle of individuation. In the cases of material objects this principle of individuation is their matter. Singular things that exist without matter, like the angels, are intelligible.

A2: As with the first article, the question of whether angels know other angels seems quite uncontentious. The issue is how and what do they know? Aquinas takes his lead here from St. Augustine. Augustine had argued that things that existed from eternity in the Word of God “flowed” forth from Him in two ways: firstly as existing in their own intrinsic natures and secondly as existing as known. So when we consider one angel, this flow of being terminates in it as its nature and its intelligibility but also terminates in all other angels as it is known.

In using this distinction in the answer to the third objection, Aquinas introduces in passing the difference between natural being (esse naturale) and intentional being (esse intentionale). The idea is that the angel both exists in its natural state but also “exists” in the intellect of other angels as known. This is similar to the idea that the intelligible species of an object that exists in our intellect is a form of the object perceived that is not instantiated in matter but only exists in the intellect.

A3: Right back at the start of the summa, Aquinas proved that humans have a natural knowledge of God (however weak and inadequate that may be). Our knowledge of God is gained by inference from our knowledge of sensible things. Angels do not have sense organs, therefore they do not have sensible knowledge of things, and therefore one might doubt that they have natural knowledge of God.

Aquinas answers that there are three ways in knowledge of God may be had. The cognition of God through His own essence is the first way, and of course this way is reserved for God Himself. The way we know God is a way of knowing in which we receive a likeness of Him not directly from Him but indirectly through what He has created. The third way, which lies “in between” these two ways, is to receive a likeness of God directly from Him and this is the way in which the angels know God. This is a “natural” knowledge of God inasmuch as the image of God is stamped on the very nature of the angel.

Handy Concepts

Angelic knowledge (in this case, of self) is different from human knowledge and more perfect in the sense that it doesn’t involve the reduction of a potency to act. What seems essential to knowledge is the existence of an immaterial form (that can, in the case of humans reduce a potency to an act of knowledge or in angels can inform from the very moment of their creation).
Natural being and intentional being account for the existence of an angel and for it being known by other angels.
Angels receive a likeness of God directly from God and thus have a natural knowledge of God impressed upon their nature.

Difficulties

It seems odd that Aquinas has not tackled the question of the knowledge that angels may have about the separated souls of the faithful and the damned. After all, they are the other example of created pure spirits.
The question of intentionality (or of intentional being) is a substantial one in philosophy. One of the major proofs of the immateriality of mind derives from the fact that minds have meanings for things (and meanings are not things that material objects have). For Aquinas, the knowledge of things goes deep into his theory of being; and hence the importance of the notions of natural and intentional being.

Question 55 - The Medium of the Angelic Knowledge

2012-01-31T17:44:00.001Z

Why this Question Matters.

This question continues Aquinas’s inquiry into the knowledge that angels have and how they acquire it. Having disposed of the idea that knowledge or the power to have knowledge exhausts what an angel is, he now turns to the medium of an angel’s knowledge; by what does an angel know? When we think about human cognition, we think about our senses gathering sense data and about how our minds organize this information into knowledge. Angels do not have bodies and therefore do not have sense organs; therefore they cannot know things through sensing objects. Aquinas borrows concepts from human psychology (in particular, the notion of an intelligible species) to demonstrate how angelic knowledge comes about and how this process differs from what happens in humans and in God.

The Thread of the Argument

A1: Later on in the summa, in the “Treatise on Human Nature”, Aquinas is going to discuss human cognition in some depth. In this question, however, Aquinas wishes to discuss the way in which angels understand things and to compare this with the way that humans understand things. So we have to take some of the later discussion as understood here – and indeed this would already be part of the background education of the original readers of the summa.

When we perceive something, the senses present phantasms to the intellect, the raw materials of what they detect. (These phantasms might be thought of as what are termed qualia in modern philosophy.) So vision presents patches of coloured light and shade, hearing presents sounds, and so forth. If we take the example of seeing a vase, the sense of sight presents visible phantasms which the active intellect then organizes into what is termed an intelligible species; this is a form present in the mind by way of which the mind understands the original object of perception. The intelligible species is a sort of image of what is perceived in the mind; it is not the thing that is perceived but it is the thing by which the original object is perceived. The other faculties of the mind go to work on the intelligible species, so to speak, to provide an understanding of the original object.

Now, an angel is immaterial and therefore does not perceive things in the same way that we do. Angels do not have sense organs, for example, and therefore their knowledge of things is not built up from phantasms. How then do they know things? We recall that for God, the act of His intellect is His very substance (Ia.q14.a4); is angelic knowledge like God’s knowledge, known though their own substance? Or is their knowledge like our knowledge in that it is understood though intelligible species, even if those intelligible species are not constructed by an active intellect?

Aquinas argues for the latter solution by observing that that which the intellect understands provides a form for the actuality of the understanding intellect; the potentiality in the intellect to understand something is brought to actuality by the form of the thing understood. Now, an angel simply does not have all things within itself (otherwise it would be God), it does not have all forms within itself by which it can understand everything. But, the object of an intellect untrammelled by matter is being itself and therefore an angel has the power to understand everything. Therefore that understanding must be facilitated by forms made present to its intellect not though its substance. That is, it must be facilitated by intelligible species.

A2: Having argued that an angel understands things by means of intelligible species, Aquinas now has to answer the question of how those intelligible species come to be present to the intellect of the angel. In particular, even if the angel does not have sense organs by which to perceive things or an active intellect by which to construct intelligible species out of phantasms, is it still true that the intelligible species arrive at the angels intellect from the objects of perception themselves?

Aquinas’s position is, at first sight, strikingly odd and obscure: the intelligible species are not received from the things themselves but are connatural to the angels. What this means and why it is true is supported by two arguments. In the first case, Aquinas points out that there is a sort of hierarchy of being that we can observe both amongst material objects and amongst non-material objects. Things lower down the hierarchy of material objects do not achieve their perfection through their form alone but are perfected by the action of external agents, whereas objects higher up the hierarchy derive the perfection of their actuality from their form alone. Similarly, if we consider the lower intellectual creatures like man, they are brought to perfection not through their own forms but by the successive reception of intelligible species: humans learn and in so doing come closer to their perfection. Angels, being higher up the hierarchy, do not have to advance in this perfection by means of the successive accumulation of information; these intelligible species are already present to them as soon as they exist. Aquinas’s second argument puts it more bluntly: lower spiritual substances have a natural affinity with bodies and it is therefore connatural to them to attain intellectual fulfilment through these bodies. Higher spiritual substances, such as angels, have no such bodily affinity and they receive their intelligible species directly from God; it is connatural to them to have all the intelligible species relevant to their natural knowledge. For angels, knowledge is very much a matter of divine illumination; this illumination is mediated though intelligible species.

A3: A major element of the tradition that Aquinas inherits about the angels concerns their hierarchy. At the top of the hierarchy we have the Seraphim, Cherubim & Ophanim; next are the Dominions, Virtues & Powers; then the Principalities, the Archangels & the Angels. Aquinas asks in this article how these different levels in the hierarchy understand things; are the intelligible species by which the higher levels of the hierarchy understand more universal than those by which the lower levels of the hierarchy understand?

The basic tension in this question arises from the observation that a more specific knowledge about particulars would appear to be more perfect that a more general knowledge; but a more universal knowledge would seem more fitting to something higher up the hierarchy. These combined would seem to imply that those higher in the hierarchy would know less. Although this might be a quite normal state of affairs for a human organization, it seems quite inappropriate for a celestial hierarchy!

Aquinas points out that as God is completely simple He knows everything through one thing, His divine essence. As one proceeds down the celestial hierarchy from God, knowledge is obtained in progressively inferior ways, through more and more intelligible species. So, for an angel high up in the hierarchy, its knowledge is attained though fewer but more universal intelligible species. Aquinas gives us an analogy from everyday life: those with more developed intellects can grasp things with little explanation whereas those with weaker intellects need to be led though step by step. In reply to the objection about universality versus specificity of knowledge, Aquinas argues that knowing something “in a universal way” has two distinct senses. In the first sense we can certainly admit that to only know that something is an animal rather than that it is a human being is less perfect. On the other hand, we can consider a second sense that has to do with the way the knowing comes about; knowing specific particulars though a single universal medium is more perfect that knowing them through a complex of different media. After all, God’s knowledge provides an example of absolute perfection and is absolutely simple; we say that it is universal in this second sense.

Handy Concepts

In humans the active intellect constructs the intelligible species from the phantasms presented to it by the senses. The intelligible species is that by which the intellect comes to understand an object and provides the form that brings the intellect out of potentiality into actuality with respect to knowledge of this object.
Angels do not have bodies or active intellects, so they do not construct intelligible species in the way that we do. However, their knowledge is still based on intelligible species.
The intelligible species though which angels understand objects come direct from God rather than from the objects of knowledge.
Angels higher up the hierarchy have fewer, more universal, intelligible species by which they understand things.
A reading of the “Celestial Hierarchy” of Dionysius the Areopagite will prove useful for understanding the tradition that Aquinas inherits concerning the angels.

Difficulties

The idea that the angels obtain their intelligible species direct from God, rather than from the objects of perception themselves, might seem to cut them off from material part of creation. However, one might also argue that they are more intimately connected with material reality precisely because they do not receive their knowledge abstracted from the objects themselves. Modern philosophy argues about whether we can ever know things-in-themselves; the direct knowledge of the angels ensures that they, at least, can.
How perfectly do angels know things? The fact that angels higher up the hierarchy receive fewer but more universal intelligible species strongly suggests that their knowledge of things is still limited. Although they may know things-in-themselves, they do not know them as well as God knows them.
How could an angel, with such an excellent understanding of the nature of things, ever fall? (See Ia.q63).

Question 54 - The Knowledge of the Angels

2012-01-30T19:16:00.001Z

Preamble

Aquinas now turns to a series of questions (Ia.qq54-58) about how an angel’s intellect works and, in particular, its knowledge. Aquinas has placed the angels as purely spiritual creatures between man and God; infinite from below but finite from above. He has to sort out how the knowledge of the angels differs from the knowledge of God and from the knowledge of men. Although it may seem early to focus on the knowledge of the angels at this point and to spend so much effort on this subject, there is good reason. As the angels are purely spiritual creatures having form but no matter, the only powers that they have in their souls are those of intellect and will (as Aquinas points out in a5 of this question).

Why this Question Matters.

For this first question in the subsection about the knowledge of the angels, Aquinas asks about the angels’ knowledge or act of understanding in itself. Having placed the angels between God and men, Aquinas is concerned with differentiating their act of understanding and their power of understanding from these extremes. Therefore in building the contrary positions, in the objections, to those that he will argue for in his answers, Aquinas often uses analogies, either with the human intellectual faculties or with those of God. There’s a progression throughout the question from those things that might confuse the angels with God towards those where they might be confused with man.

The Thread of the Argument

A1: If one starts off by thinking about the human intellect, then Aristotle’s argument that the what-ness of the active intellect is identical with its action might seem to imply that an angel must be identical with its act of understanding. This is because an angel should be considered to be more sublime and more simple than the active intellect of the human soul and therefore cannot have more “structure” than this active intellect. However, the sed contra argues that the doing of a thing differs from what makes the thing what it is (its substance), more than the being of that thing differs from what makes it what it is. When we consider created entities, unlike God, we have to remember that their being differs from their substance and therefore their doing must differ from their substance.

Aquinas picks up from where the sed contra leaves off by pointing out that an action consists in the actualization of some power which is in potentiality. Therefore it is impossible for something that is not pure actuality to be identical with this actualization of a power alone. Only in God, who is pure actuality, is substance identical with being and with doing. In addition to this, Aquinas argues that were a creature to be identical with its act of understanding then this would give us a subsistent act of understanding. But there can only be one subsistent act of understanding (and this is God) in the same way that there can only be one subsistent whiteness.

In reply to the objections, Aquinas points out that the identification of the human active intellect with its action is simply not making an identification as far as substance is concerned but rather concerns concomitance; action and existence of the substance of the active intellect co-exist.

A2: If we can differentiate between the act of understanding of an angel and its substance, can we likewise differentiate between the former and its being? Aquinas recalls from the Metaphysics that there are two types of action: on the one hand there is the type of action that proceeds out of the agent and results in a patient being acted upon; on the other hand there is the type of action that does not proceed externally but which remains within the agent. (Aquinas suggests setting fire to something as an example of the first kind and sensing, understanding and willing as examples of the second kind.)

The first kind of action cannot possibly be the being of an agent; the being of an agent most definitely remains within the agent. However, this leaves open the second kind of action as a candidate for the being of an agent. But, curiously, such acts are in a sense too big to be the being of a creature. A creature is limited to being in a single genus and species whereas acts like understanding and willing have truth and the good as their objects and are therefore unlimited because truth and the good are transcendentals convertible with being itself. The acts of understanding and willing therefore receive their species from their objects rather than being fixed in a determinate genus and species. Even if we take the example of the act of sensing, it is still unlimited in a relative sense because it is related to all sensible objects. Only the being of God Himself is “big enough” to encompass all these objects and therefore it is only in Him that we can say that His act of understanding (or His act of willing) is His being.

A3: Aquinas has asked whether an angel’s act of understanding is identical with its substance or its being in the previous two articles and has rejected both identifications. He now turns his attention to the angel’s power to understand. This may seem a curious step, but it follows the pattern of previous questions which address the fact that what little we know about angels from the sources of revelation seems especially related to what they do, their powers to act. So here we ask whether the essence of an angel simply is its power to understand. This seems to be a reasonable question given the Christian tradition’s habit of thinking of angels as some sort of “pure intellect”.

Unsurprisingly, Aquinas rejects this position; it would make an angel (or any other created being) too much like God. Aquinas recalls that in created things, essence and being differ and essence is a potentiality to being; but the power to act is a potentiality to a particular being and this particular being is the act itself. As we have already seen that an angel’s being is not identical with his act of understanding, it cannot be the case that his potentiality to understand is his being either. Simply put, the potentiality to understanding is in potentiality to something less than the being of the angel. More generally, in a created thing the essence of the thing cannot be identical to the potentiality of the thing to do something. The idea of thinking of an angel in terms of intellect is a reasonable one given that an angel’s cognition is purely intellectual (Aquinas will develop this idea in the next few questions) but one must not make the mistake of identifying the power to know with what they are.

In the reply to the second objection, Aquinas makes an important metaphysical point. The objection suggested that since an angel is a simple form it cannot have any accidents; but if the angel’s power to understand is not identical with its essence then this power would have to be an accident. This contradiction is avoided because, although an angel is a simple form, it is not a simple form in which essence and existence coincide; the simple form remains in potentiality to its existence and this potentiality gives leeway for the existence of accidents. An angel can change as potentiality and actuality wax and wane and the particular position between potentiality and actuality can be regarded as accidental. For creatures that are composites of matter and form an individual is individuated by its matter and accidents can be associated with the individual. For an angel the accident pertains to its form and is therefore associated with its species (rather than any individual); but we recall from Ia.q50 that there is only one individual angel within each species!

A4: So far in this question, Aquinas has been concentrating on aspects of angels that might seem to make them a little too much like God; now he turns to an aspect of angels that differentiates them from men. Aquinas identifies in human beings a passive intellect and an active intellect. The passive intellect is that power within the intellect that is in potentiality to understanding and which comes to actuality in the understanding of things. On the other hand, the active intellect is that power of the intellect that renders intelligible the material things outside the soul that we come to understand. The basic idea is that the things outside ourselves that we come to understand are not in themselves intelligible to our intellects; there has to be a sort of “translation” into what we can comprehend. Once translated by the active intellect, the passive intellect “receives” the translation and is moved from potentiality to understand to actually understanding. Aquinas will develop these ideas in much more detail in Ia. q79.

Here Aquinas asks whether the same is true in angels: do they have both an active and a passive power within their intellects? His answer is swift and opaque: no, because the way they understand is simply different from the way we understand and the there is no need to posit the powers of “making intelligible” or of a potential to know being made actual in angels. Aquinas will consider the question of what the angels know and how they know it in the next few questions; but for now we will simply have to make do with the assertion that they do not use sense organs to gather information about sensible objects, nor do they have to interpret and organize this information in the same way that we do.

A5: The concentration on the intellectual powers of the angels to the exclusion of any consideration of imagination, sensing or memory (or any other human powers of cognition) in this question will have already prepared us for the coup-de-grace of this article: angels’ understanding is a purely intellectual understanding. The reason for this is very simple: as angels do not have material bodies, the only powers they have in their souls are those of the intellect and the will.

The objections point out a number of examples from the tradition where the Fathers talk as though angels have other cognitive powers, so in the replies to the objections Aquinas gives an account of how these are to be correctly interpreted.

Handy Concepts

Angels are simple pure forms, but they are still composites of actuality and potentiality. This observation rules out attempts to identify what an angel is or its being with its act of knowledge or with its power to have knowledge.
Angelic knowledge is, in many senses, quite unlike human knowledge and the angelic intellect has far less structure than that of humans. Aquinas will elaborate on these aspects of the angels over the coming questions.
The identification of the powers of the passive and active intellects within the human intellect might be seen as a corrective to the later excesses of idealism.

A Short Editorial

2011-11-02T15:56:00.002Z

You will, no doubt, have observed that nothing has been added to this site for a little while.

My apologies, I am still here! The consideration of a number of metaphysical aspects of Aquinas's thought (specifically to do with causation) have sent me off into a long think and to much time spent in the library.

Normal service will be resumed fairly soon!

Question 53 - The Local Motion of Angels

2011-07-23T18:18:00.001+01:00

Why this Question Matters.

In Ia.q52 Aquinas has argued that we can consider angels to be “in place” in a sense that is determined by the way that they exert their power in the world; they are where they act. Having dealt with the topic of statics, it would seem entirely reasonable to turn to the field of dynamics; in what way can we say that angels move? Local motion through space naturally involves time; indeed it is motion that, in the general sense of change, determines what we understand as time. Recall from the discussion in Ia.q10, that God is in eternity, angels are in aeviternity and matter-form composites are in time. If we ask the question of how angels can be considered to move in space and time, then we have to ask about what the interface between time and aeviternity might look like.

The Thread of the Argument

A1: The first question that Aquinas has to turn his attention to is whether it makes any sense to talk about an angel moving from place to place. In considering this question, he first of all thinks about what we mean by local motion in the case of ordinary material objects. When we think about objects moving we notice that their movement is continuous both in space and in time; things simply don’t jump from one place to another instantaneously. Indeed, it is this fact that leads us to model time and space as continua and to model motion by using considering location to be a continuous function of time. There is always a point in time between two different points in time; on any path between two places there is always an intervening point between any two different points.

When we turn to the angels we have to remember that they are said to be in place simply by the fact of their exercise of power in that place. If we are to say that they move, we are simply saying that the location of their exercise of power moves. As such, there is no reason whatsoever that impels us to think of that motion as being continuous. If they exercise their power, first in this place and then in that place, the change of place from one to another need not be continuous. Of course, it is perfectly possible that their motion may be continuous if it involves the continuous movement of the location of the application of their power. So Aquinas’s answer to this question is a guarded yes; we can consider angels to move locally, but we must be very careful not to confuse such motion with the local motion of material bodies.

A2: A corollary of the possible discontinuity of the local motion of an angel is that, unlike the local motion of a material body, he need not pass through intermediate points between here and there in his motion. To us, centuries after the invention of the calculus and more than a century after the careful analytical investigations by nineteenth century mathematicians into the nature of continuity, this is completely unsurprising and not at all difficult to prove. But Aquinas was writing before even the Oxford Calculators had started their seminal work; he spends a careful paragraph or two describing what it means for the motion of a material body to be continuous and he shows that if a motion is not continuous then the “intermediate” property of continuous motion fails. His analysis may not possess modern rigour, but what he could do is rather humbling.

A3: The other part of the equation when considering the possibility of discontinuous motion is that it must surely involve an instantaneous “jump” from one place to another. However, there is a problem with this.

Suppose we are timing material motion with a stopwatch. If we time a runner running the hundred metres race, we start the stopwatch at t = 0 when the gun fires and the runner starts running. The runner runs (continuously) from the start line to the finish line and arrives at the finish line at (say) time t = 10. Because the motion is continuous, the runner is at a particular place at every time between zero and ten seconds. Now let us try to do the same thing with an angel who moves discontinuously from the start line to the finish line. Let us suppose the angel arrives instantaneously at the finish line at time t = 10. Where is he at t = 9.9? He is at the start line. What about 9.99 seconds? Similarly he is at the start line. What about 9.999 seconds? There’s a pattern emerging here! There is no last time at which the angel is at the start line before he transitions to the finish line. The problem is that our very notion of modelling the motion of material objects using spatial and temporal continua is predicated upon the continuity of that motion. When we run into an example like angelic motion that is discontinuous, we must realize that this fails.

Aquinas draws the obvious conclusion: we cannot model discontinuous angelic motion using continua (there no problem with continuous angelic motion). The discontinuous motion of angels takes place in a discontinuous or discrete time. At one discrete time point an angel is here and at the next discrete time point the angel is there; we cannot say that this motion is instantaneous because there are no time points (for the angel) between the start and finish times.

Handy Concepts

Angels can be said to move in space insofar as their power is exercised first in one place and then in another. This movement can be continuous or it can be discontinuous.
In discontinuous motion an angel need not pass through intermediate places between his start and his destination.
An angel’s discontinuous motion cannot be measured by continuous time; rather it is measured by a discrete time. Hence we cannot say that discontinuous motion occurs instantaneously.

Difficulties

Aquinas’s solution in the third article is a fascinating anticipation of some the problems of time that arise in quantum mechanics. In some quantum mechanical systems, it does seem to make sense to model time and space as discrete variables.
Perhaps Aquinas’s solutions to the problems raised by angelic motion are a little more restrictive than they need be. The fundamental insight that an angel may be considered in place by the exercise of his power there, or by his potential to exercise power there, remains of fundamental importance. But Aquinas doesn’t seem to push some of his ideas far enough. For example, he asserts that an angel cannot be in more than one place at a time, but allows that that place may be spatially quite complex (the fundamental issue being that the place is determined by the needs of the determined exercise of power rather than anything to do with how the actors in that exercise of power are arranged). This being so, the movement of an angel from place to place corresponds to the shift of focus from one act of determined power to another. The act of determination of the angel to its act of power may be instantaneous, but does this force the application of that act of power in the material world to be instantaneous? Might we not consider such acts of power as coming-to-be in time in the material world? Pictures such as a spherical surface descending to intersect a plane surface may then be helpful. Elaborations of this picture are then helpful in eliminating the implication that angels’ discontinuous acts need to occur in discrete time.
Aquinas never really ties up the connection between time and aeviternity in this article, which is a bit of a disappointment!

Question 52 - Angels and Space

2011-07-23T10:31:00.002+01:00

Why this Question Matters.

In the material created world that we see around us, we’re quite comfortable with the idea that things occupy a certain delimited portion of space; in the jargon of medieval philosophy, we say that they are in place. For the more reflective, the only difficulty with this picture might be the question where am I? When we think about ourselves, we might ask about where our souls are, about where the seat of our being is. Despite the rare reports of “out of body” experiences, we are probably most comfortable with the thought that our souls are intimately connected with our bodies (even if we demur from being more specific than that). We are in place, because our material components, our bodies, are in place. What about a purely spiritual being like an angel? We’ve seen above that Aquinas considers that, although angels may make use of a body for certain functions, they are incorporeal and not composites of matter and form. How does such a pure form interact with the material world? Can we say that an angel is located in space and in time? Is an angel in place?

The Thread of the Argument

A1: Aquinas doesn’t have a lot of material upon which to found an answer to the question of whether we can say that angels are located in space and time. Indeed, this is one of those occasions where he attempts to take the scanty data provided by revelation and to build a coherent answer to a question not directly addressed by that scripture. Here we have the information that angels are present in some way to the people that they appear to and that they exercise some sort of “power” in space and time; we also know that they are not matter-form composites and therefore the category of “quantity” does not directly apply to them. When we think about how material objects are in place in space and time, we think in terms of their quantity; for example, this much being in this place gives us concepts such as volume and density. Aquinas claims that we should think of the presence of angels in space and time in terms of what he calls their power quantity. What he means by this is that it is only by the exercise of their power at a particular place that we recognize that they are present in that place; therefore the exercise of such power (or the potential to exercise such power) in a place provides an analogue to quantity that allows us to say that angels are in place.

Aquinas is very careful to warn about how the parallels between how an angel is in place and how a material body is in place have to be understood. For example, we can’t say that an angel is currently two metres wide or that he is at particular coordinates in the space time continuum or that he is contained in this room. Rather we have to understand the angel as acting upon this region of space and time, from outside of space and time as it were. It is by this acting (or power to act) that the angel is present in place, not by his being in that space and time in the way material objects are in space and time.

A2: God is omnipotent and omnipresent in that omnipotence. Seeing that pure spirits like angels seem to be more like God than we are, and are localized in a place by the act of power, we might ask whether angels can exercise that power in more than one place at a time. In other words, can they be in several places at once?

Aquinas is careful to point out that it is easy to be misled by thinking of the being-in-place of angel in the same way that we think of the being-in-place of a material object. We mustn’t think of an angel “being here” and “being over there”, rather we must think of an angel being where he is by where his power is directed. As such, we must think of his act of power as being determinate to a particular task; God’s power acts everywhere in everything, but an angel’s power acts on a particular determinate task. As an example, our Guardian Angels are present to us at all time; they don’t moonlight on some other task at the same time. Therefore, in the sense that an angel is in place, he is in only one place. However, the exercise of an angel’s power cannot be localized in a material sense to a particular point in space and time but rather is associated with wherever the exercise of power is occurring. Therefore an angel may be exercising his one determinate act in a region of space that may be extended (and which may even be disconnected).

A3: Dual to the question of whether an angel can be in more than one place at one time is the question of whether more than one angel can be in one place at one time. Because Aquinas has defined the notion of place for an angel in terms of the power that the angel exerts in a place, his answer to this latter question is immediate. One and the same thing cannot depend entirely and immediately on more than one cause, therefore two angels cannot exercise their power in the same place at the same time and therefore there cannot be more than one angel in a place at one time. We must be careful to understand that this does not preclude, for example, two angels being present in the same room. What it bars is the two angels “overlapping”; they cannot both carry out the one determinate action.

Aspects of this answer may seem puzzling. In the material world, we are quite used to the idea of causes collaborating or coming together in some other way in some action; can’t this be true of angels as well? Aquinas appears to be arguing a very subtle point here. If we think about two people pulling on a rope attached to a boat in a canal then in one sense we are quite justified in thinking of their causality acting together in some way to pull the boat along. But in another sense we might think of the power of one person acting on one segment of the rope and the power of the other acting on another segment. The power of these two pullers may be considered to act through the rope to form one power acting on the connection between rope and heavy object. Aquinas seems to divide any possible collaborative activity this way when it comes to angels. The power of acting of an angel is a determinate power of acting and at such a level of determination it is not shareable.

So if we think of examples such as the possession of someone by many evil spirits (e.g. Mark 5:9, where the spirit is spoken of in singular and plural terms) we might wish to consider the possession as a singular thing, but we should more rightly consider it the action of a multitude of spirits each acting in its determinate way, each different within the subject of the possession.

Handy Concepts

Angels are “in place” only in the sense that their power acts in a determinate fashion in a particular place in space and time. We must not think of their being in a place as suggesting that the place circumscribes or contains them.
Consequently, angels are localized to being in one place at one time in the sense that they carry out determinate acts of power at particular places.
Angels cannot “overlap”; the power of each angel acts to a determinate end that precludes more than one angel being in the same place at the same time.

Difficulties

In the summa, Aquinas appears to associate the notion of “being in a place” for an angel with the actual application of an act of power in that place. This would seem to limit an angel to being present in a place only when it is acting on that place; would this be true, for example, for our Guardian Angels that are always present to us? In what way are they always actually acting? In the later Quodlibetal Questions Aquinas appears to loosen his definition to allow that it is the power to act in a place rather than the actual exercise of that power that defines the notion of “in place” for angels.
In article 3, Aquinas’s reasoning that two angels cannot be in the same place at the same time is crying out for a more extended treatment of causation in general.
The post-medieval mocking of the scholastic age for allegedly debating the question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin simply demonstrates the degeneracy of post-medieval thinking.

Question 51 - Angels and Bodies

2011-07-22T13:47:00.001+01:00

Why this Question Matters.

We have seen in Ia.q50 that angels are incorporeal and that they are not compositions of matter and form. However, the testimony of revelation relates the appearance of angels as messengers of God to men; this would seem to imply that angels are using bodies in some way or are related to bodies even if they are not bodily themselves. Perhaps we should think of these appearances of angels purely in visionary terms; their being is directly placed in the mind of the seer. In this question Aquinas seeks to sort out the questions that such appearances raise with the metaphysical treatment that he has developed so far.

The Thread of the Argument

A1: Aquinas asks first whether bodies form part of the nature of angels. This is a question distinct from that answered in Ia.q50; here we are concerned with a relationship to bodies looser than that implied by the claim that angels are corporeal or that they are composed of matter and form. Even in this looser form, Aquinas answers in the negative: the possible use of a body by an angel for a particular task need not imply that the presence of a body is natural to an angel but rather it should simply be considered incidental.

Later in the summa, in Ia.q75.a2, Aquinas will argue that the act of understanding is not an action of a body or of a bodily power and that therefore the possession of a body is not in the nature of a purely intellectual being. Now Ia.q75 is in the section of the summa dealing with human nature and we immediately notice that humans are intellectual creatures that are united with bodies! Here Aquinas anticipates the later argument by pointing out that the union of soul with body in the intellectual creature man is due to the weakness of human intellect; we need our bodies in order to inform our intellects. In the case of angels, this is not so: the angel intellect is so powerful that is has no need of a body.

A2: Having argued that angels have no need of bodies as regards their natures, Aquinas now turns to the question of whether they might “assume” bodies for some particular purposes such as to appear in bodily form to humans. This is precisely the position that Aquinas takes with respect to the scriptural accounts of such appearances. He dismisses the suggestion that they might simply be “visions” occurring within the imagination of the recipient, as the appearances are not restricted to the intended recipient. Angels do not assume bodies for their own purposes but for our benefit; moreover this assumption, as it is recorded in the Old Testament, is a symbol of the future assumption by the Word of God of a human body. This “assumption” is not as a union of form and matter nor yet is it simply like a puppet master pulling the strings of a puppet. Rather it is a representation of them that represents what is intelligible in them.

A3: Angels assume bodies for some particular purposes, but what is the nature of these bodies? We’ve seen that Aquinas argues that at one extreme they are not simply lumps of matter that are manipulated by the angel nor, at the other extreme, are they a union of the form of the angel with the matter of the assumed body. Still, can we go so far as to attribute life to these bodies? Aquinas argues against a wooden literalism in the interpretation of the scriptural texts. Although the latter are phrased as though angels perform many bodily tasks, their function is figurative. As the reply to the first objection puts it: “these bodies are assumed only in order that the angels’ spiritual properties and their spiritual operations might be depicted by means of human properties and human operations.”

Handy Concepts

It is not of the nature of angels to have a necessary relationship to bodies.
Angels may assume bodies for particular purposes such as the communication of God’s will to men.
The bodies that angels assume provide representations of the angles spiritual natures in corporeal form.

Question 50 - The Angelic Nature

2011-07-22T11:44:00.001+01:00

Preamble

Aquinas introduces this question with a brief road-map that covers much of the rest of the first part of the summa. Questions 50-64 are to be devoted to purely spiritual creatures (the so-called “Treatise on the Angels”), Questions 65-74 to the purely corporeal elements of creation (the so-called “Treatise on the Six Days”), and Questions 75-102 are devoted to those creatures that include both spiritual and corporeal elements in their being (the so-called “Treatise on Man”). If we refer back to the introduction to Ia.q44 (at the start of the Treatise on Creation), we see that Aquinas is leading us through the different types of being created by God. The very final part of the first part of the summa, from Ia.q103 onwards, will be devoted to the governance of creation; that is, the relationship between God and the created order.

In this, the “Treatise on the Angels”, Aquinas will consider created beings that are purely spiritual. He will describe their substance (in Questions 50-53), their intellect (Questions 54-58), their will (Questions 59-60), and their creation (Questions 61-64).

Why this Question Matters.

It is a doctrine of the Christian faith that the beings called “angels” exist. But the sources of revelation about the nature of these angels is quite scanty: we know quite a lot about their function (the word “angel” derives from the word in Greek meaning “messenger”), but very little about what they are. Aquinas has built up a coherent metaphysical framework of being that allows us to talk about God and about material things; it is now time for him to describe how non-material but created things might fit into this framework.

The Thread of the Argument

A1: From a modern point of view, the idea of the existence of Angels seems a very strange thing. Their existence is attested to in the sources of Christian revelation and is therefore a truth of the faith in the Christian religion. However, one might ask whether the existence of the Angels is purely a truth of faith or whether there are any other grounds that might justify belief in their existence; for example a demonstration based in natural theology. Of course, we must also ask what these angels are supposed to be: what is their quiddity? Aquinas starts the “Treatise on the Angels” from the point of view of the necessity of the existence of incorporeal creatures; as such this section of the summa fits into a wider inquiry into what is included in the whole of creation. Aquinas argues that the existence of incorporeal creatures is necessary because God has created creatures principally for their assimilation to God; they come out from God and return to God. Perfect assimilation of an effect (a creature) to its cause (God) occurs when the effect imitates the cause with respect to the way that the cause creates the effect. As God creates the universe through his intellect and will (Ia.q14.a8 and Ia.q19.a4), the perfection of the universe requires there to be purely intellectual creatures. As an act of the intellect is not the act of a body or of a corporeal power, there must be purely incorporeal beings.

A2: Having disposed of the question of whether angels could be corporeal, it might seem odd that Aquinas now asks whether angels are composed of matter and form, for this latter would seem to imply that they are corporeal. The point is that Aquinas is addressing theories current in his time (especially among Franciscan theologians) that there might be some sort of matter-form composition in angels even if it isn’t the same sort of matter-form composition that exists in everyday objects. Aquinas traces the roots of some of this current thinking back to the Jewish philosopher Avicebron, who flourished in the eleventh century. According to this theory, a sort of “cosmic matter” becomes specialized to “corporeal matter” in bodies and “spiritual matter” in spiritual beings in composition with their respective forms. Aquinas rejects this idea, pointing out that it stretches credibility to try to make this consistent with intimate connection between matter and the notion of quantity. Moreover, Aquinas insists that the very nature of spiritual beings is that they are purely intellectual and that therefore, because of the nature of the intellect, they cannot admit of any composition with matter. Aquinas will return to the theme of the essential non-materiality of the intellect in Ia.q75.a5, but the argument boils down to the fact that if matter was essentially involved in the operation of the intellect then the reception of forms in the intellect would involve the composition of that form with matter, created a new individualized version of what is comprehended.

There are still some troublesome objections to be met. The matter-form composition gives us the genus and difference that allow us to distinguish things within a genus; without the matter-form composition we seem unable to make such distinctions. Aquinas argues that we cannot carry over so easily what we know about material objects to the spiritual world. In the spiritual world there is no correspondence to the material distinction between the determined and the determining; rather, each being of itself occupies a distinct degree in the scale of being. This will lead Aquinas to argue in article 4 that each individual angel occupies its own species within the genus “angel”.

Perhaps more troubling is that in material things the composition of matter and form corresponds to the actualizing of potentiality of matter by form. It would seem that without this composition a spiritual being must be considered pure act and not limited by matter and therefore infinite. Spiritual beings are beginning to sound a bit too much like God Himself for comfort! Aquinas points out that the composition of matter and form is not the only composition that must be considered when we think about actuality and potentiality: there is also the composition of essence and existence. It is this composition of “that which” and “that by which”, held in being by God, that distinguishes the pure actuality of God from the high-but-not-pure actuality of the angels.

Similarly this composition of essence and existence limits the spiritual creature to be a particular being and thus, absolutely speaking, limits it to be finite. But, as Aquinas points out in the spirit of the neo-Platonic liber de causis, we might consider such spiritual beings to be “quasi-infinite”. To illustrate what this means, he considers the example of “whiteness”; if whiteness could subsist on its own it would be non-finite inasmuch as it would not be limited to being this-particular-whiteness in this particular object. However, it would still be finite, absolutely speaking, as its being is that of a particular determinate type of thing. So, if we looked “from above”, from God’s point of view, purely spiritual beings would be determinate finite beings. If we look “from below”, such pure forms have a certain sort of infinitude.

A3: How many angels are there; only a few or many? After reviewing the approaches of Plato, Aristotle and Maimonides to this question, Aquinas comes down on the side of “many”. Not only does scripture appear to support this position, but one might argue that God would produce more things of a more perfect nature in creation. In the spiritual world such plenitude is represented by number rather than extent, so we may infer that the number of the angels far exceeds the number of material things.

A4: If we think about how angels might differ one from another, we might consider that any differences that they do have are differences of degree rather than of kind. Aquinas, however, disagrees: each angel occupies its own species in the genus of “angel”. This follows from the argument of article 2 that there is no composition of matter and form in angels. Because matter is the principle of individuation of things there can be no individuation of angels within a species. Each angel fully realizes the actuality of what its essence can be; that is, the composition of essence with existence fully determines what the angel is, there is no alternative determination of the angel.

Aquinas gives a helpful analogy carried over from article 2: if we consider “whiteness” purely as a form, it makes little sense to talk about different “whitenesses” as forms as opposed to different realizations of whiteness in things. When we say that the whiteness of this object differs from the whiteness of that object, we are simply saying that the form “whiteness” is realized differently in the two objects, not that there are two different “whitenesses”. “Whiteness” is multiplied by being instantiated in different matter; this is not something open to the essence of an angel.

A5: Aquinas has argued that angels are not a composition of form and matter but are a composition of essence and existence. It follows from this that angels are naturally immortal. What this means is that once an angel has been brought into existence its nature is such that it will not, by the course of nature, perish. This does not mean that an angel is a necessary being in the way that God is a necessary being; an angel’s continued existence depends on the First cause maintaining the composition of essence and existence in it.

Aquinas argues for this position by observing that things perish by the separation of their form from their matter. If we think about non-human material objects, we observe that a matter-form composite not only has potentialities to lose and gain accidental forms but it also retains the potentiality to lose its current substantial form and gain a new substantial form. So, a duck can not only lose its current plumage and gain a new one (whilst still remaining a duck) but it can cease to be a duck and become a duck-corpse. (More strictly, the matter of the duck is at first informed by the form of a duck and is then informed by the form a duck-corpse). It appears to be an inherent feature of matter-form composites that they have a potentiality for the eduction of a new substantial form: within them lie the seeds of their own destruction. When we turn to the consideration of angels, we observe that they have no matter, therefore they cannot perish in this way: they can only cease to be by God ceasing to cause their essence-existence composition. We might even say that they are naturally immortal and supernaturally mortal!

Handy Concepts

As God creates the universe by means of his intellect and will, it is fitting to the perfection of that universe that there be purely incorporeal spiritual creatures as part of that creation.
As angels are purely intellectual creatures, there is no composition of matter and form in then, rather only a composition of essence and existence.
There are many more angels than there are material objects.
Each angel is unique to a species.
Angels are not a composition of matter and form and therefore they are naturally immortal. The only way that an angel can cease to exist is by God withdrawing the cause that maintains their composition of essence and existence.

Difficulties

Although it may seem at times that Aquinas’s treatment of the angels is ad hoc, simply trying to fit the data of revelation, it might better be seen in more principled terms than that. Aquinas has identified various compositions that underlie the being of things: matter-form, essence-existence, and actuality-potentiality. Having identified that it makes good metaphysical sense to talk about a being (God) that is pure actuality and in which there is no composition of essence and existence or of matter and form, it would seem perfectly reasonable to investigate whether there can be beings that are compositions of essence and existence but not of matter and form.
Having talked about the natural immortality of the angels, one is immediately drawn to the question of the immortality of the human soul. We have already observed that for non-human material objects, the composition of matter and form can go out of existence and that the forms of such things go out of existence with the material object. Yet for the angels, there is a natural immortality because there is no such matter-form composition. The intellectuality of the form of an angel demands its non-materiality and it is in this intellectuality that its subsistence, the seed of its natural immortality, lies. When we turn to human beings we are met with a mixture: we are composites of matter and form and yet we also possess an intellect. As such we perish but our form, being an intellectual form, must continue in being. Aquinas will return to this issue in Ia.q75.

Question 49 - The Cause of Evil

2011-07-03T12:11:00.001+01:00

Why this Question Matters.

We’ve seen in Ia.q48 that evil is not an entity that has its own being, but rather is a privation in a good. It still remains to be seen, however, how evil comes about. Following his general metaphysical drift, Aquinas must ask about the cause of evil; after all, if it can be said to be present in a subject in some sense (Ia.q48.a3) then it must have been caused to be present in that subject. So then, what does it mean for evil to be caused? Again, as in Ia.q48, there’s a lot at stake behind this seemingly innocent metaphysical question. God is the first cause of all that is in creation so it would seem that we must attribute evil, even if only at the end of a long chain of causality, to God’s causality. The alternative would seem to be some dual principle in the universe, some most evil source of all evil. Is Aquinas finally caught between Scylla and Charybdis? Read on!

The Thread of the Argument

A1: We saw in Ia.q48.a3 that a good can be the subject of an evil, in the sense that for an evil to exist there must be a good that is suffering the privation that corresponds to the evil. But if this is so, can we go even further and say that any evil must be caused by a good? It’s clear that any given evil must be caused in some way. Evil is the privation of the good, so there must be some cause of that privation; something that prevents the subject of the evil from achieving the actuality it should achieve. Of course, the only things that can cause are those things that are actual, and things that are actual are good insofar as they are actual. Therefore every evil must be caused by some good.

However, Aquinas is not willing to let the question rest there; he wants to enquire into how evil is caused. He points out that the enquiry of Ia.q48.a3 implies that the subject of an evil is a cause of that evil in the sense of being a material cause. However, since the existence of evil consists in a privation of a form rather than the existence of a form, it cannot have a formal cause. Similarly, it does not have a final cause as it corresponds to a lack of a fitting end.

Even more than this, Aquinas argues that when we consider efficient causes, we will see that evil comes about per accidens rather than per se. To see this, consider an agent bringing about an action. If the agent is doing what it is meant to be doing, bringing about its proper effect it may still happen that some patients become collateral damage to the agent’s proper effect. There is no necessity for the boulder rolling down the hill to crush the tree that lies in its path; the evil caused to the tree is per accidens. On the other hand, if the agent is failing in its proper effect, this can happen because of a defect in the agent (for example, a young animal may not have learned how to run well) or in an instrument used by the agent (a broken leg tends to inhibit running, for example). Again, both of these cases are per accidens rather than per se to the cause. Finally a properly acting agent may cause evil in a defective patient: a piece of machinery may break because one correctly functioning part may mesh too hard with a defective part; as before, this is per accidens to the proper action of the agent.

So, although we must say that evil is caused by a good, it is caused in a somewhat peculiar and negative manner. It has a material cause in the good that is the subject of the evil; it has not final or formal cause because it corresponds to a privation of these in some good; and although it has an efficient cause, it comes about per accidens from its efficient cause. All this reinforces the idea that evil is not an entity in itself, but rather a privation in a good that results from a falling short in some way of the actualization of that good.

A2: Behind every secondary cause acting in creation is the first cause, God. Therefore God must be the cause of every evil. When it comes to the malum poenae, Aquinas is willing to concede this. The form that God intends in created things is ordered to the good of the whole universe. In Ia.q48.a2 we saw that part of the goodness of the universe inevitably requires the failure of some created things; but the important point that Aquinas wishes to make is that this failure is a per accidens feature of God’s causality, following the reasoning of article 1 of this question. The scriptural passages (such as 1 Kings 2:6) where death as well as life are attributed to God should be interpreted in the light of the per accidens nature of such causality (along the lines hinted at in Wisdom 1:12-15).

When we consider the malum culpae attributed to rational creatures, however, things are different. The defect in their action is caused by the defect in the agent causing the action, in line with part of the analysis presented in article 1. Therefore such defective action is not to be traced back to God.

A3: If there are evils that cannot be attributed to God, then perhaps there is some greatest evil to which they can be attributed as first cause. Given the machinery that Aquinas has already set up, it comes as no surprise that he can rapidly dismiss this idea, giving three reasons. In the first place, although the first principle of good things is good through His essence, this cannot be the case with any putative first principle of evil; any thing which exists is good insofar as it exists, and also evil does not exist except in a subject which is good. Secondly, although evil can diminish a good it cannot destroy if (Ia.q49.a4), so some good must always remain. If not, evil would reduce itself to sheer nothingness. In the third place, we have seen in article 1 that every evil is caused by some good and evil cannot itself be a cause except per accidens. As such, it cannot be a first cause as some per se cause would have to underlie it.

In the reply to the fifth objection, Aquinas makes an interesting observation. He denies that in creation evil is present in most things; much of the created universe is incorruptible and not subject to an admixture of evil. However, when we consider humans, the situation is different: evil appears to occur in most cases! Most humans follow the apparent goods offered to them by the senses whereas the true good for man lies in following the correctly ordered reason.

Handy Concepts

There is a sense in which what is evil is caused by what is good. However, evil has no final or formal cause. The material cause is the subject that suffers the privation corresponding to the evil. Efficient causes of evil act per accidens rather than per se.
God can be considered the first cause of malum poenae but not of malum culpae; the cause of the latter is attributed to defects within the agent.
One cannot trace back the cause of evil to some maximally evil first cause of evil in the way that one can trace back the causes of being to the first cause of being.

Difficulties

In article 2 Aquinas skates very quickly over the possibility of God’s causing sin. The answer given, that the defect arises from a defect in the agent, does not even begin to address how God’s providence could have allowed that defect to come to be nor does it address the question of how a defective agent is moved to its defective act. For example, someone with a malformed conscience may place an act that is objectively disordered. How, then did their conscience come to be in the state that it is in? Moreover, when we consider the actual act itself, how could it come to be without God acting as first cause behind any secondary causality that may act? Aquinas’s speedy dispatch of this issue at this point in the summa may be attributed to the fact that he hasn’t yet developed enough metaphysical theory to cover it adequately. After all, if we are to consider the sin, we need to have discussed the sinner; this Aquinas does later in the first part of the summa in questions 75-102. Also, we need to consider how God acts in creation; what can we say about how the first cause moves secondary causes to act. Again this is covered towards the end of the first part. For the moment, Aquinas is satisfied in stating that it is so, without really explaining how it is so.

Question 48 - The Distinction Between Good and Evil

2011-07-02T08:13:00.002+01:00

Why this Question Matters.

At first sight, this question and the next may seem oddly placed in the account of creation. Aquinas, however, has been concerned to explain the diversity amongst created things and he considers that the distinction between good and evil is of fundamental importance in this account. Lurking in the background to this question is the spectre of dualism; the idea that in the world (both created and uncreated) there are two principles: one good, the other evil and that they are constantly in battle with one another. It is a matter of great urgency within Christian belief to affirm that all that the creator God creates is good insofar as it has being. In this question and the next, Aquinas enquires into the nature of evil and into its origin in the world, affirming the traditional teaching that evil is privation of the good rather than a being with its own existence.

The Thread of the Argument

A1: One of the most fundamental questions about evil is “what is it?” In this question, Aquinas asks whether evil is something real; a reality opposed to the good. It’s important to remember that when we read about Aquinas talking about “evil” he is actually using the Latin word malus, which has a much broader meaning than the modern English use of the word “evil”. These days, we tend to restrict the use of the word “evil” to moral monstrosities; for Aquinas a broken chair leg is an “evil”. For Aquinas, malus is the absence of a good in something that should have that good by its very nature; so a broken chair leg is malus because it can’t be a particularly good chair leg if it is broken!

The position that Aquinas is going to argue against is that evil has its own reality. The main thrust of the objections to Aquinas’s position is that when we look at evil acting in the world it does appear to do precisely that: to act. It appears to be some sort of contrary to the good and to have the ability to act against the good. Anything that has the ability to act in this way, and to be a contrary to something that is real, must itself be a real thing.

Aquinas answers that to understand the opposition between good and evil we must look to analogies such as the opposition between light and dark rather than to that between two opposed agents. We realize that our notion of darkness arises from an understanding of light and corresponds to an absence, a privation, of light. Now, everything is good insofar as it has being and every reality tends towards its own being and perfection. Therefore we should understand evil as a failure to move towards that being and perfection; evil is a lack, a privation, in what it is for real things to be what they are ordered to be.

The second objection points out that, in the field of morality, a good habit differs in species from a bad habit. This would seem to indicate that bad habits are a different species of reality from good habits. In his answer to this objection, Aquinas develops his main answer to the question by arguing that when there is a privation in something, there is not a privation down to complete nothingness. Rather, there is some being that remains short of the being that should be. So, for example, when somebody chooses to do something completely stupid, it is not that they are entirely lacking reason, but that they are choosing some apparent good (that should be considered good in reality insofar as it has being). Aquinas takes this line of thought further in his answer to the fourth objection, which claims that evil appears to act in the world and therefore must be a reality. Against this, a distinction has to be made in what it means to act. In the first place, something can act as a formal cause, as when the form of whiteness makes something white. In this case we can say that evil “acts” as a privation, in being a lack of a particular form in something. We can also consider acting as efficient cause (the painter makes the wall white) or as final cause (the end is chosen for the wall to be white). Again, in these two cases, evil isn’t doing anything per se, as a reality in itself. Rather, evil “acts” insofar as some other reality (what is actually done or what is actually chosen), that falls short of the perfection of the entity, comes to be. In this sense we can say that evil is always conjoined to some good.

A2: Having determined that evil is not a thing, not a reality in itself, we would be inclined to think that we cannot say that there could be evil in things. Aquinas resists this, however. He has already explained (in Ia.q.47.a2) that the perfection of the universe requires there to be an inequality amongst things. Now, one type of this inequality can be seen in the difference between mortal corporeal things that can lose their being and immortal incorporeal things that cannot. So it would appear that the perfection of the universe requires there to be some things that can fail with respect to their goodness (and others that do not). To this extent we are justified in saying that there can be evil in things.

In reply to the second objection, Aquinas makes the important point that we can be misled by the language of being. There is a difference between being as considered the being of a thing (this is the sense in which the transcendentals “being” and “thing” are convertible) and the being expressed in the truth of propositions as when we say that there is blindness in the eye. In the former case we are making a positive expression of the being of something, in the latter we’re actually expressing a lack of being.

The third objection touches on the general “problem of evil”: it would appear that what is better is that which has less evil mixed with it; God always makes what is better, therefore there cannot be any evil in the things made by God. Aquinas answers that we should consider the totality of what is made by God; this is better if it contains things able to lose their good. Underlying this position is the belief, handed down from St. Augustine, that God can do good even with evil, so that many goods (such as a lion) would not exist if some evils (such as the ass being eaten by the lion) did not exist.

A3: We’ve seen that evil is not a thing (article 1) but that we can say that evil is in things (article 2). Can we be more precise about how evil is in things, if it not a thing itself? In this article, Aquinas asks if evil can have good as its subject. What this means may sound a little obscure, but Aquinas’s meaning becomes clearer when we inspect his reply.

There are two ways we can look at the absence of good. In the first case (where this absence is a negative) a particular good may not be present in a situation where it would not be expected to be present. So, we would not expect a man to be able to run as fast as a deer or to have the strength of a lion. This sort of absence is a simple absence and cannot be considered an evil in any way. By contrast, where a good is not present where it should be present, then this is a privation and represents a true evil. An eye should provide the function of sight; if it doesn’t, it is suffering a privation; blindness is an evil in this sense. The fundamental difference between these two situations is that in only one of the cases do we have a being that is in potentiality to something; the eye is in potentiality to having its sight, even though it doesn’t actually have it. Moreover, the subject of the privation of sight (the potentiality) is the same as the subject that is in actuality (the eye without sight). In this way, we can always consider evil as having some good as its subject, because it is always associated with the subject suffering the privation; privation is a negation-in-a-subject rather than a straight non-existence. As Aquinas notes in the reply to objection 3, the subject of the evil is not the good that opposes it but the actuality in potentiality to the good. So “sight” is not the subject of “blindness” but rather the blind eye is the subject of blindness.

A4: Can evil totally destroy the good? If one though of evil as an entity, then the idea of evil destroying good would seem quite reasonable. But if evil is a privation, then a total lack of good would seem to be non-being rather than any sort of depraved being. Aquinas answers this question by making distinction between what we understand by “good”. He is quite willing to affirm that the good of sight is completely destroyed by the evil of blindness. On the other hand, that good which is the subject of evil (see article 3) is not diminished at all by evil, as a good in itself. This latter may seem puzzling, but what Aquinas means is explained as he continues his answer. If we consider the unseeing eye not simply in its actuality as an unseeing eye (which is a good in itself) but in its potentiality to be a seeing eye, then we can say that evil diminishes the good. So it is as a potentiality that evil diminishes the good but not as an actuality.

The question then remains as to whether evil can diminish the good in this sense to zero. Aquinas argues that this cannot be so because, even if evil acted without limit, there would still be a subject with some actuality (and therefore a good) in potentiality to reversion to the good.

A5: One of the fundamental divisions in the understanding of evil is the division between the malum culpae (the “evil of fault”) and the malum poenae (the “evil of punishment or of pain”). Informally, one might think of the difference between these two as being the difference between bad things chosen by the will of a rational being and bad things that happen to an individual. The question asked here is whether this division is an adequate division for all types of evil.

Aquinas answers that evil is a privation of the good and that the good consists in a certain actuality in a being. Now we can divide actuality into first actuality and second actuality: first actuality is something that exists in a thing and second actuality is the operation of that thing. So, for example, I have learned how to speak French but I am not currently actually speaking it (first actuality) versus I am currently speaking in French (second actuality). Likewise, we can divide evil into that which corresponds to the privation of a first actuality (I am missing both legs) versus the privation of a second actuality (I have good legs but I am too lazy to use them to walk to the shops). In the first case, I can’t do something; in the second case I choose not to do what I can (and should) do.

So, if we restrict attention to those beings that have a rational will, the good is the proper object of the will. An evil in the first sense prevents me from doing something and has the character of an affliction or a pain or a punishment. An evil in the second sense is my choice not to choose a true good in favour of an apparent good and has the character of a sin or of a fault. So in rational creatures, at least, the division of evil between either malum culpae or malum poenae is appropriate.

If we think about non-rational creatures, however, this division is not appropriate. Bad things can happen to a stone (being crushed to dust, for example) but one can hardly say that they are a matter of fault or of punishment.

A6: Having discussed the division of evil into the malum poenae and the malum culpae in article 5, it might seem natural to ask whether punishment (or penalty) itself has more of the character of evil that sin does. Aquinas’s position is that sin has more of the character of evil than does punishment, even when punishment is taken in the most general sense, for example when the withholding of such things as grace or glory, things not strictly due to the rational creature, are considered as punishments. He gives two arguments in support of his position.

First, someone becomes evil because of the evil of sin, which consists in the disordered use of the goods that a person has by his will; whereas punishment deprives that person of an actuality and therefore the ability to act towards some particular good, but does not inhibit the good use of what the person does possess. Second, God is the author of punishment (depriving the creature of some good) but not of sin; the evil of sin is properly attributed to the misused free will of the creature.

Handy Concepts

The diversity amongst created things includes the distinction between good and evil; this distinction is that evil is a privation, or lack, of the good. Evil is not a being or entity in its own right.
In this question, Aquinas is talking about “evil” in the most general sense implied by the Latin word malus; this sense is much wider than is implied by modern use of the word “evil”.
Even though evil is not itself an entity, we are justified in saying that evil can be “in” things. Furthermore, the good can be the subject of evil in the sense that it is a “privation-in-a-subject”. The subject of evil is not the opposing good; rather it is thing suffering the privation.
Evil can diminish the good, but it cannot totally destroy it; there is always some being left that is the subject of the privation.
The division of evil into the malum poenae and the malum culpae for rational creatures follows the distinction between first and second actuality. The first corresponds to a lack in the creature that prevents full being or actuality; the second corresponds to the misuse of a first actuality in the creature.
The misuse of what we have has more of the character of evil that the absence of what we don’t have.

Difficulties

The division of evil, at least for rational creatures, into the malum culpae and the malum poenae may seem quite reasonable. That malum culpae be translated as the “evil of sin” or the “evil of fault” likewise seems quite reasonable. But understanding what the malum poenae really is and translating the phrase into English seems more challenging. The Latin word poena translates as “punishment” or “penalty”, but does this mean that Aquinas considers any form of evil that befalls an individual as a punishment from God? The key is in the body of his answer in the fifth article: “Therefore the evil which comes from the withdrawal of the form and integrity of a thing, has the character of a penalty; and especially so on the supposition that all things are subject to divine providence and justice, as was shown above (Ia.q22.a2)”. Aquinas holds short of claiming that every such occurrence of evil is a punishment; rather, in the light of the action of divine providence, he claims it has the character of the punishment. When we might say that we are suffering from the afflictions of life, we are reflecting a similar position to Aquinas; it is as if we are being punished. On this line of thought, Herbert McCabe suggest a more fitting translation of malum poenae to be “evil suffered”.
Aquinas’s treatment of evil in this part of the summa is very condensed. For a much more extensive analysis of evil, his “Disputed Questions de malo” is a must. For a modern commentary on Aquinas’s treatment of evil, Brian Davies’s “The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil” is very helpful.

Question 47 - The Diversity Amongst Creatures

2011-06-29T13:41:00.000+01:00

Why this Question Matters.

God is a simple unity and it therefore seemed reasonable to philosophers and theologians that such unity would be reflected in what He created. However, one must ask about the extent of such unity; after all, there simply is diversity and inequality in the world. Have these come about directly caused by God’s intention or have they come about indirectly? Aquinas argues that there is unity in the world, to the extent that we can say that there is one world, but that it would be a mistake to say that the world is one, in the sense of lacking diversity or inequality.

The Thread of the Argument

A1: Aquinas asks whether God is the source of multiplicity of things. This may seem a rather odd question, but it is motivated by opposition to the Gnostic and Neo-Platonist belief in the essential oneness of things. (Indeed this latter belief lives on today in some New Age and Neo-Gnostic sects and can arguably be seen to lie behind occult beliefs such as astrology.) After going though a number of faulty arguments about diversity and its origins, Aquinas argues that diversity comes about by the intention of God to communicate His goodness to creatures and to represent His goodness though them. As any one creature is finite and therefore cannot provide an adequate representation of God’s goodness, God produces diverse creatures so that the inadequacy of the representation of any one may be made up by others.

In response to the objection that agents tend to produce just one effect (and therefore God acting as efficient cause would produce a unity of effect), Aquinas argues that a voluntary agent like God acts though a form conceived in the intellect (Ia.q19.a4); God’s simplicity is not in contradiction to that form being of diverse things (Ia.q15.a2) and so it is quite reasonable to consider God as the cause of diversity in creatures.

A2: A consideration of God’s justice might lead one to think (as it apparently did Origen) that God would have created all things equally and that therefore any inequality that exists in the world would have to be explained by something other than God’s actions. However, Aquinas points out that this reasoning is faulty: justice presupposes the differences in merit that lead to the differences in reward; but anterior to creation there are no differences in merit that might lead to differences in reward. There is nothing upon which justice can be founded in the act of creation. Rather, inequality exists in creation for the benefit of the whole and must be attributed to God’s wisdom in the same way as diversity is accounted to God.

A3: There seems no particular reason to suppose that God’s creative activity is limited to the creation of just one world. Aquinas however sees the ordering of all things in creation as an argument that the world is indeed one. Things in creation have an ordering both to one another and to God as their creator and this ordering is a sort of “glue” that provides unity. Indeed, one might argue that the world is all that God has created and so is by definition a unity.

Handy Concepts

God is the source both of the diversity of things and of their inequality.
God has created diversity and inequality in order to show forth better His goodness and for the greater good of the whole.

Difficulties

From Aquinas’s answer to the third objection of the third article it appears that he is taking the word “world” in a very limited sense as suggested by the medieval understanding of cosmology. In the light of more recent understanding of the extent of the created universe, it is interesting to speculate how Aquinas might re-write the answer to this question. He might address physical theories of the so-called “multiverse” or he might address metaphysical “many-worlds” theories. I suspect he would find the first fascinating and would give the second short shrift.

Question 46 - The Beginning of the Duration of Creatures

2011-06-29T11:36:00.003+01:00

Why this Question Matters.

A famous medieval debate concerned the possibility of either, on the one hand, proving that the created universe must have existed forever or, on the other hand, whether it could not have existed forever. The relationship of this argument to the creation account given in the book of Genesis is manifest: if the eternity of the universe is provable, then the Genesis account has to be interpreted very broadly indeed. Aquinas held to the position that neither the eternity nor the non-eternity of the universe could be proved and that the non-eternal creation of the universe is therefore purely an article of faith. In this question, Aquinas lays out his reasoning on both these questions and discusses the relation between creation and time.

The Thread of the Argument

A1: Ten supporting objections are given to the thesis that the universe must have existed from eternity. Rather than go through these each in turn, it suffices to point out that many of them are based on the same difficulties that Aquinas had to answer in Ia.q45 when dealing with the very notion of creation ex nihilo. In particular, our observation of the created universe suggests that any change or being has to be preceded by a previous change or being. Similarly, if we make the mistake of seeing creation purely in terms of being a change, then it has to be considered a change in some subject which would have to appear to pre-exist the act of creation.

Aquinas argues that the existence of the world is a consequence of God’s will and that, as argued in Ia.q19.a3, there is no metaphysical necessity constraining God from holding the created universe in being for whatever type and length of duration He wills. Having set forth his position Aquinas, showing due deference to the reputation of Aristotle, argues that the latter’s arguments on this subject were not attempts at a proof of the eternity of the universe but were demonstrations that earlier accounts of the coming to be of the universe were faulty.

The fourth and the eighth objections demonstrate a lack of appreciation for the utterly radical nature of creation ex nihilo; Aquinas takes the opportunity to amplify just how radical this idea of creation is. The fourth objection suggest that before the universe exists there would have to be a vacuum in the place where the universe comes to be (and it was widely believed that a vacuum was impossible); the eighth suggests that if God existed before the universe was created then time must have existed before the universe existed in order for there to be a “before” and an “after”. Aquinas replies that a vacuum is not nothing (something modern physics would applaud!) but rather a space capable of holding a body; not even this exists before creation. Likewise, time did not exist before the creation of the universe; when we speak of God being in eternity, we are claiming much more than that God exists in a temporal forever.

A2: Conversely to the arguments of article 1, the idea that the universe could have existed forever would seem to be troubling. If we think of the universe as co-eternal with God then it’s hard to think of it being created, even if its being depended entirely upon Him; if there never was a time when the universe didn’t exist then we can’t say that it came to be, which is surely what we mean by creation. Likewise, if the universe has always existed, then time would have had to traverse an actual infinity to arrive at now. Aquinas answers these objections by pointing out that “ex nihilo” refers to “out of nothing” rather than “after nothing” and that it is hard to make any sense of the idea of a traversal with an undetermined point in the infinite past.

Aquinas’s major argument is similar to that given in answer to article 1: the existence or otherwise of the universe is entirely dependent on God’s will, but we cannot know the content of God’s will by natural arguments but only by revelation. He also offers a supporting argument from the eternal existence of universals; their eternal existence demonstrates that we cannot show that concrete particulars have not always existed.

The reply to the seventh objection gives us a succinct summary of Aquinas’s teaching on the difference between per se and per accidens series of causes that we discussion in the Introduction to Metaphysics and which Aquinas uses in the proof of the existence of God in q2.a3.

A3: In modern physics, time is considered to be part of the space-time continuum that comes to be in the big bang. This immediately poses awkward questions that bear a surprising similarity to some of the questions that Aquinas has addressed above. In particular, it is hard to get the mind around the idea that time is created in the creation of the universe, and harder still to start thinking about what might have happened “before” the big bang. So, now looking at this from a philosophical and theological point of view, does it make sense to say that the creation of the universe occurs at the beginning of time if time itself is created along with the rest of creation?

Aquinas answers that this phraseology is to be interpreted in accord with the standard interpretation of scripture. This states that four things were created “in the beginning”: the highest heaven; corporeal matter; time; and angelic nature. The difficulties that we may have with this concept are all related back to how we understand the idea of creation ex nihilo.

Handy Concepts

There can be no metaphysical proof that the created universe has existed forever.
There can be no metaphysical proof that the created universe has not existed forever.
Creation is an act of God’s will and therefore our knowledge of the eternity or non-eternity of creation comes from what has been revealed to us of God’s will.
Aquinas produced the short document De Aeternitate Mundi during the medieval controversies about the eternity of the universe.

Difficulties

Aquinas’s argument against the possibility of proving the finite duration of the Universe using an argument based on the eternal existence of universals seems to be rather weak, or at least missing a few steps of explanation.

Question 45 - The Mode of Emanation of Creatures from the First Principle

2011-06-28T18:36:00.002+01:00

Why this Question Matters.

Christian theology has always considered the account of creation given in the book of Genesis as a description of creation ex nihilo, from absolutely nothing at all. This immediately poses serious philosophical problems; not the least of which is the fact that all “acts of creation” that we see in nature are actually changes. Put in the Aristotelian terms that Aquinas would use, in natural creation an already existing subject is reduced to actuality from its potentiality to be the new entity. If we’re trying to give a metaphysical account of creation ex nihilo, then we are faced with the fact that there simply isn’t a subject that can be the subject of change! Therefore, God’s act of creation is both unique and different from natural change. In this question, Aquinas faces up to the philosophical challenges posed by this doctrine.

The Thread of the Argument

A1: The very idea of creation itself needs some thought. We are quite used to the idea that we can make something out of something else, and we sometimes say that we create something out of something else. However, Aquinas wants to reserve the word “create” for the act of making something out of nothing; an act clearly alluded to in the opening words of the book of Genesis. With an allusion back to Ia.q44.a2, Aquinas claims the idea of creation for the coming forth of the totality of an entity from the first cause rather than for the more restricted notion of a particular effect emanating from a cause (which is what we have when we consider making something from something else).

In thinking about the coming to be of things in the created order, we are used to the idea of something (like a man) coming forth from something else (not a man, but the fusion of sperm and ovum, for example); in thinking about creation, we have to generalize this to consider the idea of some being coming forth from non-being. The third objection argues that this makes no sense; when we try to say that something is made out of nothing we are trying to say that “nothing” stands in some relation to that which is made, in the same way that we say that something is, for example, made out of bronze. Aquinas answers this objection by observing that “out of” is used in a different sense when we speak of “creation out of nothing” (ex nihilo, in Latin); what is in view here is not a relation to a material cause but an ordering. In addition, one may simply take “out of nothing” as being a denial of “out of something”.

A2: Having established that we are to take “creation” as referring to the making of something out of nothing, Aquinas turns to the philosophical difficulties facing this idea. Each of the objections is built on the fundamental idea that God is only capable of things that are not impossible; Aquinas takes the law of contradiction as not only being an epistemological fact (that we cannot know contradictories) but also an ontological fact (contradictories cannot be). So, the first objection repeats the claims of the ancient philosophers that nothing can come out of nothing and that this fact is a fundamental law of being; to hold otherwise would be to posit a contradiction. The second objection builds on a theme touched upon in the first article: every example of something being made that we know of is an example of something being made from something else. Therefore creation must be considered to be a change and therefore a change in some subject; but nothing cannot be a subject, therefore creation from nothing makes no sense. Similarly, as the third objection points out, if something has been made, then at some stage it must have been being made before it finally existed. What is being made is not the same entity as what is made, therefore what is being made precedes what is made and must be the subject of the change that occurs when something is made. Therefore when something is made, there must be a pre-existing subject of change, which is impossible under the hypothesis of being made out of nothing.

Aquinas’s answer reprises what he wrote in q44.a1-2. that everything to do with an entity must be considered to have its being from God. If God is considered only as acting to change what already is, then what already is would be left as an uncreated element of creation; a clear contradiction. The answer to the first objection is immediate; the ancient philosophers in issuing this opinion were only considering what happens within creation, not what occurs in the emanation of things from the first cause.

One might think that the second objection would be despatched with equal alacrity; however, Aquinas takes the opportunity to discuss at length how we talk about creation. His main assertion is that creation can be considered to be a change only insofar as we understand it that way by analogy with what goes on in creation. Change itself involves one thing being different now from the way it was: either it is the same being in potentiality as when the substance of the being has changed (but the prime matter underlying it is the same) or it is the same being in actuality as when its accidents have changed. Creation is different: there is not one being that is now one way and then another. Our minds may find it easier to conceive of something before it exists and then it existing, but this is not a change in a subject.

The third objection is dealt with swiftly by pointing out that the objection fails to consider the case of instantaneous creation. If there is no motion or change in creation, as has been shown by the replies to the previous objections, then we are left with the conclusion that something being created is simultaneous with it having been created.

A3: The question asked in this article may seem puzzling: is the act of creation a real entity that exists in the creature? The point here is that the act of creation creates the creature and in doing so sets up a relation in the created to the creator; there is a “pointing toward” to creator inherent in the created being. The relation is real in the creature but only conceptual in God Himself, as we saw in Ia.q13.a7. In affirming this real relation in the creature, Aquinas has to deal with some technical objections. For example, if the act of creation is a real entity in the creature, then it would seem that this real entity itself would need an act of creation; the spectre of infinite regress looms large! A similar objection came up in Ia.q42.a1 and the same answer is given here; the reality of a relation is in its pointing to something and does not require a further relation to define that reality.

The third objection comes back to the difficulty of dealing with the idea of creating something out of nothing. If the act of creation is a relation in the thing created then it would be an accident in the thing created and would presuppose the thing as a subject in which to be an accident. The act of creation would therefore seem to be ontologically posterior to the thing created, which seems very strange. In his reply to the objection, Aquinas insists on the ontological priority of the thing created but admits of a certain type of priority for the act of creation inasmuch as it is the principle of the thing created.

A4: One might be tempted to think that creation is restricted in some way to those things that have no structure (like prime matter), because composite entities are composites of more basic entities and we might wish to distinguish between the creation of the basic entities that they are composed of and the causal processes that bring the basic entities together in the composite. Against this, the creation narrative in Genesis does not restrict creation in this way, but speaks of the creation of composite things. Aquinas maintains this latter position. He argues that being created is ordered to the being of the thing created; therefore creation is associated with things to which being belongs properly. When we think of the basic components, like form and prime matter, out of which composite things are made we are not thinking of beings but of things which are the principles of being. They are real entities, but we should not imagine that they have any proper existence other than instantiated in composites. Aquinas introduces the terminology that such basic components of composite things are co-existent rather than existent and that they are co-created with the created things they comprise.

A5: Given that we sometimes say that human beings, especially in the act of conception, “take part in creation”, it seem wise to ask whether creation belongs exclusively to God or whether there is some sense in which we can say that creatures themselves create. Aquinas denies this, maintaining that God alone creates in the sense that we have been discussing in this question (that is, creation ex nihilo, in which being absolutely speaking is given to creatures). In his answer, Aquinas pays particular attention to the possibility that created entities may participate in creation by acting as instruments of God’s act of creation. He rejects this on the grounds that acting instrumentally involves some proper effect of the instrument in the act. For example, a saw is an instrument that a craftsman uses in cutting something. The act of cutting is proper to the saw itself and therefore it is correct to consider the saw as an instrument of the craftsman. In the case of creation, though, there is no instrument that has the proper action of giving being absolutely speaking; any created instrument pre-supposes something already created to act upon.

This point of view is amplified in the reply to the first objection. This objection is founded on an observation of Aristotle that that which is perfect can make something similar to itself. Immaterial creatures are more perfect than material creatures that (for example, in the case of a human procreating a human) make things similar to themselves. Therefore immaterial creatures must be able to make things similar to themselves and this must be through an act of creation, as immaterial creatures have no matter upon which to act. Aquinas counters by observing that the argument founders because the “making something similar to itself” does not apply to producing its own nature absolutely speaking but rather by applying that nature to something. In the case of human procreation, a human is the cause of human nature coming to exist in some particular determinate matter, but not in coming to exist absolutely speaking.

A6: The Nicene Creed states that the Father is “the creator of all things, visible and invisible” and that “through Him [the Son] all things were made” and that the Spirit is “the Lord, the giver of life”, so it would seem that creation can in some way be attributed to the persons of the Trinity. Aquinas constructs an answer that allows us to see the way that we might attribute creation to the essence of God whilst also maintaining the role of the persons. Remembering that effect resemble their causes, we see that creation (which is the giving of being) corresponds to the being of God and hence is to be attributed to God’s essence, common to the three persons of the Trinity. Hence we cannot claim that creation is proper to any of the persons but rather is common to the whole Trinity. However, God is a cause of things through His intellect and will and so, insofar as the processions of the divine persons include these attributes of the essence, they are causes of the production of creatures.

A7: We saw in Ia.q32.a1 that we cannot ascend from knowledge of creation to knowledge of the divine persons of the Trinity. This would seem to imply that no vestige of the Trinity is left in creatures as a result of the act of creation. What then motivates St. Augustine to say that “a vestige of the Trinity is evident in creatures”?

Aquinas answers that all effects represent their causes in some way and we must determine the way in which the cause of being is represented in the creature and we must also understand what it means to be a “vestige”. So to start with, we can differentiate between effects that resemble the causality of their causes in a vestigial way (smoke from fire, for example) from effects that resemble their cause by being like it in form (fire from fire, for example). We recall (Ia.q27) that the Son proceeds as the Word of God’s intellect and the Holy Spirit proceeds as the love of God’s will. Therefore, inasmuch as rational creatures possess intellect and will, we can say that there is a representation of the Trinity as an image. However, we can say more than this by tracing back certain things in creatures to their causes.

In the first place, a creature subsists in its own being and represents in some way its cause and principle; this points to the person of the Father, principle-not-from-a-principle. Secondly, a creature has a form which determines it to a species; this fact points to the Word in the sense that form comes from the craftsman’s conception. Thirdly, each creature is ordered to its end; this fact points to the Holy Spirit inasmuch as the ordering to the end comes from the creator’s will.

A8: Every time something is made in the created order by natural processes a new form comes to be. But a form does not come to be from anything else, so it must be created. Hence we can claim that creation is involved in all works of nature. Aquinas demolishes this neat little argument by pointing out the way that people are liable to misunderstand what a form is and what it means for a form to exist. The natural form of a body does not itself subsist; it is not a thing. Rather it is that by which something exists; it is a principle of the existence of that thing (as prime matter is also a principle of the thing). Being made and being created properly only apply to subsistent things (composites of form and matter) and not to their principles. As Aquinas pointed out in article 4, these principles, such as form and matter, can only be said to be co-created with the subsistent thing. Therefore, form begins to exist when the composite is made. When a composite is made by natural processes, it is made from the matter; so creation is not involved in the natural process but is presupposed by it.

Handy Concepts

In Christian theology, creation is considered in the sense of creation ex nihilo, out of nothing. Creation ex nihilo involves the creation of the total being of the entity.
Creation can only be thought of in terms of change by analogy with coming to be in the natural world. However, in creation there is not change in some subject, rather the coming to be of the subject itself.
Something created bears a real relation to God the creator; the relation of God to the created is not a real relation but a conceptual relation.
Creation involves the coming to be of the whole entity, not simply the parts or components of the entity or the principles of the entity. Matter and form, though they are real entities, are not subsistent and do not come to be independent of their composite.
Created entities do not take part in creation even as instrumental causes.
Creation is proper to the Trinity as a whole, being attributed to God’s essence. However, the persons of the Trinity can be considered as causes of creatures insofar as the processions of the divine persons include the attributes of the essence corresponding to intellect and will.
Rational creatures can be said to contain an image of the Trinity; moreover, creatures in general can be said to contain a vestige of the Trinity.
Forms cannot be said to be created; rather they are co-created with the composite of which they comprise one of the principles.

Difficulties

The reader may find the answer that Aquinas gives to the third objection in article 3 rather lacking. Indeed, we must point out that this answer has been the subject of some controversy over the centuries. For details, see the footnotes to this passage in the recent Blackfriars translation.
In article 8 Aquinas ponders the question of where substantial forms come from. Although his answer tells us of a number of positions that are false his positive answer (that they are co-created but not created at the creation of the composite) is hardly helpful.

Question 44 - The Procession of Creatures from God

2011-05-07T15:19:00.000+01:00

Preamble

Having finished his consideration of the divine persons of the Trinity, Aquinas comes now to the treatment of a different sort of procession, that of creatures from God. The traditional (convenient, but somewhat artificial) division of the summa labels this new section (qq. 44-49) the Treatise on Creation. Aquinas himself indicates a somewhat different, threefold, division in the work: qq. 44-46 deal with the production of creatures; qq. 47-102 deal with the different types of creatures; and qq. 103-119 deal with conservation in existence and governance of creatures. One should note that qq. 47-48 continue the important discussion of the nature of evil and of its causes in creation.

Why this Question Matters.

God as the first cause of all creation has been dealt with in a number of places in the “Treatise on the One God” but it is now time for Aquinas to return to this theme in the context of the treatment of the Trinitarian procession that he has developed in the “Treatise on the Trinity”. The subjects covered in this question (God as efficient, exemplary and final cause of creatures and as creator of prime matter) allow him to reiterate a number of themes that have already been dealt with earlier in the summa whilst at the same time elaborating on his metaphysical approach to creation.

The Thread of the Argument

A1: Is it true that everything that has being is necessarily created by God by means of efficient causality? This might seem a strange question to ask in the light of all that Aquinas has already covered concerning the radical dependence of creation on God. But the start of this new section of the summa allows Aquinas to reiterate this profound message, and to emphasize the necessity of this relation, by meeting the apparent difficulties posed by a trio of metaphysical objections to the thesis. In the first place it might seem that the relation of a caused being to its cause is not a part of the definition of that being and is therefore not necessary for its being. Secondly, one might observe that there are examples of so-called necessary beings, those that are unable not to exist. Here, Aquinas is thinking of such things as mathematical entities or of spiritual substances which contain within themselves no principle of dissolution. Therefore, depending on precisely what sort of necessity is involved, God is either not needed in order to create them or to keep them in being once they have being. Finally, what of mathematical entities in particular, that do not seem to come about through efficient causation?

Aquinas argues that any feature that is found in anything by participation must be caused by that thing which has the feature by essence (recalling something of the argument of the fourth way in Ia q.2). As there can only be one subsisting esse, (in the same way that there can only be one subsisting whiteness), all things other than God must participate in being rather than having self subsisting being and their being must be caused by God.

Turning his attention to the objections, Aquinas admits that being caused does not belong to the definition of being, absolutely speaking, but that the relation to a cause follows from those things that do belong to the definition for anything that exists. Here Aquinas is alluding to his argument that created beings are compositions of essence and existence (which we first saw in his rejection of Anselm’s ontological argument in Ia q.2 ad 2). Although we must not think of essence and existence as being two distinct things-in-themselves, we must consider them as two principles composed in any being. Therefore the definition of a thing simply cannot include its own existence, but we can deduce from the existence of a thing (and therefore of the things pertaining to its definition) that there is a composition of essence and existence which is caused by God.

To the objection that necessary beings need not be caused by anything, Aquinas turns to Aristotle to argue that one has to explain the nature and cause of their necessity; the relation between cause and effect may be necessary but it still requires the cause to exist for the effect to exist. Finally, Aquinas argues that mathematical entities exist in the reason as abstracted from created things that do have efficient causes for their beings. So, although the objects studied by mathematics do have efficient causes, it is correct to say that they are not studied by mathematicians under the aspect of efficient causation.

A2: In the metaphysical theory of hylomorphism, beings are considered to be a composition of matter and form. For anything that actually exists its matter is informed by some form; uninformed matter does not exist, in the same way that pure potentiality does not exist. However, it is still possible to consider matter and form as conceptually separable principles that are actually combined in all created beings. Matter considered in this way as completely uninformed by form is called prime matter and can be thought of as the potentiality in any thing that is reduced to actuality by form.

Does it make sense to say that prime matter is created by God? The major problem facing an affirmative answer is that it hardly seems coherent to talk about the creation of something that doesn’t exist! Aquinas addresses this challenge immediately with a brief tour through the history of philosophy (borrowed from Aristotle’s Metaphysics), pointing out that our understanding of being has developed from a thoroughly naïve view to something much more sophisticated. The objection that we cannot say that prime matter exists arises from the naïve view of being.

However, if we go so far as to consider being simply as being, we realize that we must not restrict ourselves to thinking of these-beings or such-beings but we must enquire into being-in-general. In particular, we must think not only of causes in the sense of causing something to be such-a-being (through accidental form) or this-being (through substantial form), but also in the sense of what causes everything pertaining to their being in any way at all. It’s in this sense that we should think in terms of form and prime matter which can be considered principles of being even though they might lack independent existence. When we do this, it makes perfect sense to consider prime matter, as a principle of being, as created by God.

A3: In the third article, Aquinas asks whether God is the exemplar cause of creatures. Having got used to the idea of Aquinas adopting Aristotle’s system of four causes (material, formal, efficient and final), we might be surprised to see the introduction of another type of cause. One has to recall the way in which medieval philosophers and theologians received the authoritative texts of their predecessors; with a spirit of charity and with a wish to reconcile apparent differences within and between them. After all, the premier medieval textbook, The Sentences of Peter Lombard, provided the source material for exactly this sort of reconciliation. In this case, the idea of an exemplar cause provides a way of reconciling the differences between the approaches of Plato and Aristotle to the notion of forms. For Plato, forms have their own separate existence apart from their exemplars in their own third realm. For Aristotle, forms exist only as exemplified by their exemplars. If we recall Ia qq. 14-15 (and especially Ia q.14 a.8), we get a big hint about how this reconciliation goes: forms exist as ideas in the mind of God, so they don’t quite have their own realm of existence but neither do they completely fail to exist when not exemplified. Like the plan of a building that exists in the mind of the architect before it is built, a form exists as an exemplar cause in the mind of God.

Aquinas simply has to recall the discussion of Ia qq.14-15 to affirm that God is the exemplar cause of all created things. Now one might follow the objections in claiming that the exemplar causes of created things are really the species within which things fall. In reply to this, Aquinas affirms that although we can speak of one created thing as being an exemplar of another by analogy, we should be careful of claiming per se existence for something like a species which is really an intellectual construct. Our agent intellect abstract universals from particulars, but such universals do not subsist other than in the particulars that their exemplars. Therefore we can’t really consider them as exemplar causes.

A4: Answering the last question of whether “God is the final cause of all things” allows Aquinas to dispel some misconceptions that may prevent some from accepting the obvious answer. He observes that when an agent and a patient interact causally, the agent acting for an end gives the patient the same end but in a different way. He also notes that some agents, which he calls imperfect agents, not only give to the patient but also receive something from the patient in acting on the patient. One has to be very careful when attempting to apply this analysis to the first cause, God, because He does not act to acquire any sort of thing at all; he is a perfect agent, and all the giving is one-way only.

So, to object that God in supplying ends to created things must be acting for the sake of an end is to make an incorrect analogy; God does not act for ends as He is pure actuality. The best we can say is that He acts just for the sake of His own goodness.

On another tack, one might object that if God is the end of all things, then all things must desire Him. But then one simply observes that not all things desire God. But this approach is to ignore the fact that nothing has the nature of the God except insofar as it participates in a likeness of God. Therefore things desire God (whether that desire be intellective, sentient or natural) insofar as they desire the Good.

Handy Concepts

God is the efficient, exemplar and final cause of all created things.
We noted above the introduction into medieval philosophy of the notion of exemplar causes. We should also note that the idea of instrumental causes (those things that act as instruments of other causes) had become common by this time and were used extensively in the theology of the sacraments. Reference to the extensive list of causes of justification given in the Decree on Justification of the Council of Trent gives an indication of how this process of expanding the notion of causality continued through the Middle Ages.
Prime matter is one of the principles of the being of things that represents the pure potentiality that is reduced to actuality by the inherence of a form.
We must be careful when thinking of God as final cause of things not to misapply the analogy of created things supplying the ends for other created things.
The reply to the third objection of article 3 is relevant to the modern debate on the nature of the supernatural.

Difficulties

Aquinas seems to leave the answer to the third objection to the first article hanging in the air. Mathematical objects, even though they are not studied under the aspect of efficient causes by mathematicians, are abstracted from things that do have efficient causes. Should he not continue the argument at this point by considering the efficient causation of the process of abstraction?

Question 43 - The Missions of the Divine Persons

2011-04-22T11:00:00.002+01:00

Why this Question Matters.

Aquinas has built his theology of the Trinity around the immanent processions of the divine persons from the Godhead; his major focus has been to give an account of God-in-Himself. But now, as we begin the transition between Aquinas’s treatment of the Trinity and his so-called “Treatise on Creation”, notions associated with the idea of the “Economic Trinity” as opposed to the “Immanent Trinity” start to come to the fore. In this question Aquinas considers the divine missions; we immediately see one of the fundamental problems that may have motivated Aquinas to organize his Trinitarian treatise as he has. If God is omnipotent and omnipresent, what sense can we make of the notion of the Economic Trinity? How can He go anywhere or do anything if He is already everywhere and responsible for the being of everything?

The Thread of the Argument

A1: When we start to think about the economic Trinity, we’re immediately faced with a fundamental question: if God is omnipresent, how can it make sense to say that the divine persons are sent anywhere or to anything? In order to answer this question Aquinas enquires into what we might mean by a “mission”. The first component of a mission is the relation between the sender and the one sent; the second is the relation between the one sent and that to which he is sent (the terminus of the mission). When we think about the divine persons, and the theory that Aquinas has already developed, we can identify the relationship between the sender and the sent as that of origin. The second component seems trickier: God is omnipresent, therefore a divine persons cannot become present where previously He was not present; the only alternative left is that He is present in a different way, in a different mode of being, to any previous presence. So, for example, in the incarnation the Son became present to us in the flesh.

A2: Likewise, the concept of a mission might seem to clash with divine immutability; going on a particular mission with a particular objective in view would seem to imply something temporal which would imply change. This might force us to think that missions must be eternal, stretching the meaning of the word beyond breaking point. In order to answer this problem, Aquinas distinguishes carefully between the things implied by the different divine names; in particular he teases apart the significations relating to the two relations implied by mission that he described in a.1. Names like “generation” and “spiration” are associated with both an eternal relation to the principle as well as an eternal terminus; they describe the processions from the point of view of that which processes eternally. Names such as “mission” and “giving” imply a temporal terminus in addition to the eternal relation to the principle; a new mode of existing of a divine person in some aspect of creation is something temporal.

Therefore Aquinas insists that the idea of “mission” includes within itself the temporality of its effect. However, that a divine person exists with a new mode of being to a creature does not imply any change in God, but simply a change in the creature.

A3: Having identified that a divine person sent on a mission to a creature starts to exist in that creature in some new mode of being, Aquinas now turns to the possibility that there could be several new modes of being for the divine person. He frames this discussion in terms of some of the types of grace recognized by Christian theology. In particular he focuses on the notions of sanctifying grace (gratia gratum faciens), which is that by which we are made holy by participation in the divine life; and gratuitous grace (gratia gratis data), the gift given to one for the benefit of others.

Aquinas wishes to argue that a divine person is present to a creature in a new mode of being associated simply with sanctifying grace. This may seem quite counterintuitive because it might seem to be mistaking a cause (the new mode of being of a divine person, an uncreated grace) with its effects (sanctifying grace or gratuitous grace, both created graces). Similarly, one might wish to simply identify uncreated grace, gratuitous grace and sanctifying grace as different modes of being of a divine person in a creature. It must be pointed out (see “Difficulties” below) that Aquinas’s stand on this issue has been much misunderstood (especially outside the Catholic tradition) as over-favouring created grace to the detriment of the uncreated grace of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

The reason that Aquinas adopts this point of view is that when he enquires into how a divine person might be present to a creature by a new mode of being, he identifies that there are limited possibilities. We know that God exists in everything through His essence, power and presence as a cause (Ia q.8 a.3). For the rational creature there are only two new ways by which a divine person may be present: as that which is known in the knower and as that which is loved in the lover. It is precisely sanctifying grace that allows us to know and to love God and it is therefore this by which God is present to us in a new mode of being. In simple terms, God is always present to us in as intimate a way as is possible as far as being is concerned; but sanctifying grace opens up a new mode of His being present to us by transforming our receptivity to Him. In terms of the common misunderstanding of Aquinas’s position, uncreated grace is always present where there is fruitful created sanctifying grace, but it is the created sanctifying grace that opens up the possibilities of the uncreated grace that is always potentially there. As the reply to the first objection puts it: “Through sanctifying grace rational creatures are perfected not only in order that they might use this created gift, but also in order that they might enjoy the divine person Himself.”

A4: Is the Father sent on a mission to us? If we consider the indwelling of the Trinity as promised in John 14:23, it might seem so. However, if one notices that “mission” includes the idea of procession then one has to recognize that as the Father does not proceed, He is not sent on a mission. We have to distinguish between the fact that the Father dwells within us and how He gets there! It is not by mission in the way that the Son and the Spirit are sent to us.

A5: One might recognize that some missions of divine persons are visible (the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity, for example) and that others are invisible (a gift of gratuitous grace, for example). One’s first thought might be that the missions of the Son are precisely those that are visible and that the missions of the Holy Spirit are precisely those that are invisible. In this article (can the Son be sent invisibly?) and in a.7 (can the Spirit be sent visibly?), Aquinas tests this hypothesis.

In support of the hypothesis identifying visible and invisible missions with the Son and the Spirit respectively, one might claim that the invisible missions are those that occur through the gift of grace and that these gifts are associated with the Spirit rather than with the Son. However, this line of thinking is too simplistic: Aquinas argues that the whole Trinity dwells in the mind through sanctifying grace and that a divine person being sent on a mission through invisible grace implies both the new mode of being present to the mind and an origin from another. Hence the Father, the Son and the Spirit are present though invisible grace; the Son and the Spirit are present as through a mission (see a.4) and are present together.

The gifts of the Holy Spirit are truly attributed to the Holy Spirit (Ia q.38 a.2) but this does not prevent them from being attributed also, by appropriation, to the Son. To attempt to make a simple identification of a gift of grace with the Spirit is to miss an inter-relatedness of the Trinity; it is to attempt to prise the persons too far apart. Similarly, it is mistaken to simply identify the Son as purifying the intellect and the Spirit as purifying the will; the Son is the Word who spirates the Love, sent to us to form the intellect so that it might “break forth into the affection of love”.

A6: a.1 implies that divine mission involves the coming to be of a new mode of existence of a divine person to a creature. This, in combination with the argument of a.3, implies that anyone who participates in grace is the recipient of an invisible mission of a divine person; grace perfects them, opening them to the presence of the divine person. The objection (on the basis of John 7:39) that divine missions could not have been sent to the Old Testament patriarchs fails; Aquinas distinguishing between the invisible mission of the divine persons and the visible signs given at Pentecost.

In replying to the second objection, Aquinas makes an important connection with the theology of the virtues that he will develop in the second part of the summa. The idea of participation with grace might seem to imply an instant step-change in the person participating in that grace; but this would seem to be inconsistent with the gradual process of perfection in the virtues, suggesting a disconnect between grace and the virtues. Aquinas insists that, although it must be true in some sense that there is such a step-change, this does not exhaust the possibilities for the action of grace. In particular, grace does act through the gradual perfection of the person through the developing virtues.

Similarly, connection is made with the theology of the sacraments to be developed in part III of the summa. The sacraments are instrumental causes of grace, so divine missions are not made to the sacraments themselves, but to the recipients of the grace through the sacraments.

A7: Aquinas now turns to the question dual to that posed in a.5: is the Holy Spirit sent on visible missions? The objections home in on the difficulties we might have in actually distinguishing between what we mean by visible and invisible missions. For example, we might wish to assert bluntly that if the Holy Spirit were to be sent on a visible mission, this would involve Him being made incarnate or by Him being made intimately connected with a creature in some other way. At the opposite extreme, we might argue that idea of an invisible mission is incoherent as all divine missions must, in some way, make themselves visible through their effects.

To answer this question, Aquinas returns to what might be considered one of his foundational theological principles: that God provides for everything according to its mode. The mode most proportionate to man is to be led to invisible things through the visible (Ia q.12. a.12), therefore it is quite reasonable to suppose that even when God acts through an invisible mission it is made manifest in some visible way. However, we may distinguish the missions of the Son and of the Holy Spirit in that the Son was sent as the author of sanctification and the Holy Spirit as the gift of that sanctification. Putting these together, Aquinas arrives at the conclusion that the Son is sent visibly as author and the Holy Spirit visibly as sign of sanctification.

In answering the objections Aquinas actually enumerates the visible missions of the Holy Spirit (ad.6): the appearance of a dove at the baptism of Christ; the appearance of a cloud at the transfiguration; the breathing of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles related in John 20:22-3; the tongues of fire at Pentecost. We notice that not all manifestations of the Holy Spirit are considered as visible missions: notably the reply to the first objection, building on the teaching of Augustine, distinguishes between prophetic visions which are made manifest through spiritual images rather than through corporeal forms and visible missions that are made manifest through creatures. Similarly, in the reply to the fourth objection, Aquinas distinguishes visible mission made manifest through a rational creature (as in the incarnation of the Word) and visible mission made manifest through any other creature. That made manifest through a rational creature is witness to the author of sanctification, whereas that made manifest through any other creature is simply a sign of that sanctification.

A8: Finally, Aquinas asks whether a divine person can only be sent on a mission by the person from whom He proceeds. The objections suggest a number of reasons why this assertion might be true, but Aquinas points out that theological opinion was divided on the issue. His resolution is to point out that both positions, pro and contra, can be considered true in some sense. If the person who sends another person is considered from the point of view of being the principle of Him who is sent, then the proposition must be taken to be true. However, if the “person who sends” is considered from the point of view of being the principle of the effect of the person that is sent, then one can rightly claim that the whole Trinity sends the person.

Handy Concepts

The distinct notion of mission is consistent with the omnipresence and omnipotence of God insofar as mission denotes the coming to be of a divine person to a creature in a new mode of being.
The dynamic notion of mission is consistent with divine immutability in that it represents a new real relation to the creator in the creature, but not a real relation or any coming-to-be in the creator.
Sanctifying grace (gratia gratum faciens)is that by which we are made holy by participation in the divine life; gratuitous grace (gratia gratis data) is a gift given to one for the benefit of others. The new mode of being of a divine person is an example of a created grace, whereas the indwelling person is an uncreated grace.
The new mode of being of a divine person in a creature corresponds to sanctifying grace. Anyone who participates in grace is the recipient of an invisible mission of a divine person.
We may distinguish visible from invisible missions of the divine persons, the former often associated with the Son and the latter with the Spirit; but as Aquinas argues, it is less cut-and-dried than that.

Difficulties

We’ve suggested above (a.3) that Aquinas is often misunderstood as arguing in favour of created grace (the way in which we are transformed and conformed to the image of the Trinity) to the detriment of uncreated grace (the indwelling of the Trinity through the agency of the Spirit). This may be because commentators miss the (necessary) subtlety of his argument that mission corresponds to sanctifying grace. That this misunderstanding is a misunderstanding can be amplified by referring to a beautiful passage from Aquinas’s Commentary on the Gospel of John (Chapter 4, Lecture 2) that emphasizes the intimate connection between created grace and the uncreated grace that creates it:

“Now water is of two kinds: living and non-living. Non-living water is water which is not connected or united with the source from which it springs, but is collected from the rain or in other ways into ponds and cisterns, and there it stands, separated from its source. But living water is connected with its source and flows from it. So according to this understanding, the grace of the Holy Spirit is correctly called living water, because the grace of the Holy Spirit is given to man in such a way that the source itself of the grace is also given, that is, the Holy Spirit. Indeed, grace is given by the Holy Spirit: “The love of God is poured out into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us” (Rom 5:5). For the Holy Spirit is the unfailing fountain from whom all gifts of grace flow “One and the same Spirit does all these things” (1 Cor 12:11). And so, if anyone has a gift of the Holy Spirit without having the Spirit, the water is not united with its source, and so is not living but dead: “Faith without works is dead” (Jas 2:20).”

Question 42 - The Co-Equality of the Persons

2011-04-05T13:14:00.001+01:00

Why this Question Matters.

One of the great threats to the orthodox doctrine of God comes from those who would identify subordination amongst the persons of the Trinity. Typically the Father would be placed first followed by the Son and then the Holy Spirit in an order of dignity or of power or even of temporal existence. This position is in marked contrast to the creedal faith of the Church which insists on the co-equality of the persons of the Trinity but which allows for a certain sort of ordering in the Trinity (see Ia q.27 a.2 et passim) associated with the idea of being a principle. In this question Aquinas concentrates on rebutting these erroneous positions whilst bolstering the orthodox doctrine.

The Thread of the Argument

A1: We are probably used to an informal idea that the divine persons are co-equal, but what does it mean to say that two divine persons are equal? When we think about material things, we tend to think in terms of equality of quantity or of quality; there is some attribute of the things concerned about which we claim equality or inequality. When we think mathematically, we can put forward some absolute notions of equality as when we say that two sides of an equation are equal. When we think about the divine substance and the persons of the Trinity, we have to be careful to specify what we really mean. Aquinas starts his treatment of equality in the Godhead from the point of view of a negation of “greater than” and “less than”. The only thing there is in the Godhead to which we might apply the idea of such inequalities is the divine substance; this clearly cannot be unequal among the divine persons as they are each individually fully God. Hence we must consider the divine persons equal in this sense.

One might be concerned that with a notion of equality based purely on essence, there is nothing left upon which to base any distinction between the persons! We certainly do not believe that the Father is identical to the Son, but is this not implied by saying that they are equal? Aquinas answers that, as far as talking about God is concerned, we can signify equality (and likeness) with either names or with verbs. When thinking in terms of names, we identify the essence of the Father with that of the Son and there is a sort of convertibility between equality and likeness (a property not shared with created things). When we think in terms of verbs, there is a sort of reception by the Son from the Father of the divine essence: this allows us to say that the Son is made equal to the Father, but the Father is not equal to the Son.

Similarly we might have the concern that equality is a relation and it is by relations that the persons of the Godhead are made distinct. However, we recall from our discussion of relations in general that Aquinas does not consider equality to be a real relation but only a relation of reason. These relations of reason do not compromise the real relations that distinguish the persons.

A2: A fundamental creedal belief of Christianity is the co-eternality of the persons of the Trinity. Aquinas defends this belief with a discussion of the relationship between agents and action. He identifies that voluntary agents choose the time of their action and that natural agents produce their action when they have the power to produce the action. We might think of a natural and voluntary agent like a man as having to accrue the necessary power after which time it is down to his power of choice as to when he acts. When we think about actions, we tend to consider actions that have successive stages (they start to happen, they continue and then they cease). In this case, we cannot think of the effect as existing until the action is complete. When we consider God, we realize that He generates the Son because of His nature rather than as an act of His will and that He has the necessary power of generation from eternity. We also recognize that the generation of the Son is not a successive action (otherwise the generation would be a change in the Godhead, contradicting divine immutability). Put together, these imply the Son is eternally generated from the Father. A similar argument proves that the Spirit is co-eternal with the Father and the Son.

As one might expect, the major target of this question is the Arian heresy. The first objection is based on the Arian identification of the possible modes of generation that might be applied to the Son. Aquinas sweeps this objection aside by noting that there is no mode of procession amongst creatures that perfectly captures the generation of the Son by the Father and that the modes put forward by the Arians do not include the one that most nearly approaches the Son’s generation. This is the procession of a word from an intellect; as the intellect of God is pure act, thus not having to pass from potentiality to actuality, the procession of the word from the divine intellect is co-eternal with the divine intellect.

A further objection put forward is that if the Son is being generated eternally from the Father, this might seem to imply that the Son’s generation is not yet complete (and will never be complete). This would seem to imply that the Son lacks the perfection of having His generation completed. However, we have to remember that God exists in eternity rather than in time; there is no temporal now in which the generation of the Son is taking place; but rather an indivisible analogy of now that always abides. In a sense, one is justified in saying that the Son is eternally being born as well as that He is always already born.

A3: We’ve seen above that the divine persons are equal in terms of essence as well as co-eternal. Does this imply that we can’t identify some sort of “natural ordering” amongst the divine persons? As the Athanasian creed implies, we must never “divide the substance” or “confuse the persons”, but the lack of an ordering in the Trinity might seem to confuse the persons. Aquinas rescues the situation by appeal to the idea of “principle”. We saw in Ia q.33 a.1 that there is a “principle” in God with respect to origin that does not introduce any notion of priority. It’s on the basis of origin that we may rightly associate a natural ordering in the Trinity. Aquinas quotes St. Augustine as making the distinction that this is not “an ordering whereby one is prior to another, but whereby on is from another”.

A4: Examples from scripture (such as John 14:28, “The Father is greater than I”) strongly suggest that the Son is in some way less than the Father. Similarly, paternity is associated with the Father but not with the Son. Although Aquinas has already asserted equality amongst the persons, there still seems a lingering doubt that the Father is greater than the Son in some way. This is the challenge that various subordinationist heresies presented to the orthodox doctrine of the co-equality of the divine persons.

Aquinas’s defence of the orthodox position returns to the theme already suggested in a.1; God’s greatness is the perfection of the divine nature and this greatness is associated with the divine essence. Part of the perfection of the divine nature involves the paternity of the Father and the filiation of the Son and it is through the filiation that the Son attains to the perfection of the nature that is in the Father. Divine paternity and filiation provide an analogy with human paternity and filiation; but the analogy cannot be pushed too far as human paternity and filiation involve successiveness (see a.2). Paternity is of the essence of the Father because that is what constitutes the Father as Father; similarly filiation is of the essence of the Son. Therefore we can rightly claim that the same essence that is the paternity in the Father is the filiation in the Son and consequently the Son has the same dignity as the Father.

When we consider the scriptural witness, we can also observe the words of the Apostle Paul that “He thought it not robbery to be equal with God” (Philippians 2:6). It is clear that scripture that teaches any notion of non-equality actually refers to the humanity of Christ in the hypostatic union.

A5: John 14:10 tells us that the Son is in the Father and that the Father is in the Son; what does this mean? If we think of “being in” in the way that Aristotle took it to apply to created reality we seem to be left befuddled; it doesn’t work. Similarly, how can relational opposites “be in” each other?

Aquinas claims that the Father and the Son are “in” each other in three ways corresponding to essence, relation and origin. As far as essence is concerned, the Father is His own essence which is the same as the essence of the Son. If we think about the relation between the Father and the Son then it is clear that, conceptually speaking, the Father is in the Son is the same sense that the relation is in the Son and vice versa. As the procession of the Son is immanent to the Father, we also see that the Son remains within the Father. Conversely, everything is said by the Word and thus the Father is in the Son.

A6: Rounding off his survey of the equality amongst the divine persons, Aquinas turns to the power of Father in comparison to that of the Son. Following the strategy of a.4, Aquinas notes that power is associated with the perfection of the nature of God which is therefore associated with greatness.

A tricky objection suggests that the power of the Father enables Him to generate a Son equal to Himself, but that the Son cannot do likewise. Aquinas’ answer again alludes to the approach in a.4. Just as it is the same essence that is the paternity in the Father and the filiation in the son, so it is the same power by which the Father generates and the Son is generated. Although the power is the same, the Son is not able to generate because this omnipotence comes with a relation that differs between Father and Son.

Handy Concepts

The starting point for understanding the equality amongst the persons of the Trinity is a recognition that ideas of equality and inequality pertain to the persons as they are the divine essence. Having grasped this, the co-equality of the persons follows naturally as does their equality in terms of power.
The persons of the Trinity are co-eternal.
The natural ordering of the persons in the Trinity does not imply any ordering of priority.
Scriptural references to the Father being greater than the Son refer to the human nature in the hypostatic union.

Question 41 - The Persons and the Notional Acts

2011-04-05T11:09:00.002+01:00

Why this Question Matters.

In Ia q.32 a.2, Aquinas introduced the ideas of the properties and of the notions or characteristic acts in God. We recall from there that the properties in God are what belong to each person, as a person, which allow them to be distinguished one from another and that the notions are these distinguished characteristics inasmuch as they are known by us. Thus the notions were introduced from the point of view of epistemology (how we may know the distinction between the persons of the Trinity) rather than ontology (the reality of the persons of the Trinity). It is the notions that allow us to know of the distinction between the persons. In the rest of Ia q.32 Aquinas defended what might be called the classical view of the notions; now it is time for him to give a lengthier account of them.

The Thread of the Argument

A1: In returning to the theme of the notions from Ia q.32, Aquinas has to join the treatment given there up with the discussion in Ia q.40. In the latter, when considering the ontology of the Trinity Aquinas had to give the idea of relation priority over the idea of origin. However, we recall that in Ia q.40 a.4 Aquinas was willing to admit that, conceptually speaking, we could think in terms of the relations constitutive of the persons as being presupposed by origins, which are themselves associated with the notions. The very short answer to this question summarizes this discussion by saying that in order to designate the order of origins among the persons, we have to attribute these notions to them.

In addition to this recapitulation, Aquinas addresses some further objections to the idea of the notions. For example, Boethius observed that when one attempts to apply Aristotle’s categories of being to God all of the nine accidental categories collapse down into substance, except for relation. Since the notions would naturally fit into the category of action, this would seem that we could only apply notion to the essence of God rather than to the persons. In reply to this objection, Aquinas distinguishes between two orders of origin (with corresponding acts) in God. The first is the procession of creatures from God, to which the reasoning of this objection does apply; this is an action of the whole essence of God. The second is the procession of divine person from divine person. But here the reasoning from Ia q.32 a.2-3 applies: in their being (as opposed to how we know about them) the notions simply are the relations.

Similarly, one might argue that what can be truly said of God must either be said of the essence or of the persons and that what we can say of the persons is limited to their names and the names of their properties. In answer, Aquinas recalls the difference between reality and what we can say of reality, and amplifies this with a demonstration of how we think of action as the origin of motion in created things contrasted with how we must think of this in God where there is no motion.

A2: Aquinas next asks whether the notional acts are voluntary (that is, are they a result of some definite act of His will) or whether they are necessary. In view here are mistakes such as those made by the Arians (and various other types of subordinationist) that would see the Father as supreme, bringing forth the Son and the Holy Spirit by acts of His will. But another problem is the opposite error of thinking that God is in some way made, by the force of necessity, to bring forth the Son and the Holy Spirit.

At the foundation of these errors is a misunderstanding of the analogy between the way creatures proceed from the Godhead and the way in which the persons of the Trinity proceed, leading to confusion between the two. It is clear from what has been said before about God’s intellect and will that he does bring forth creature by an act of His will. But it should by now be equally clear that the procession of the persons in the Godhead pertains to the very nature of the Godhead itself. In this sense it is true to say that the notional acts are necessary rather than voluntary. But we must remember that it is in the nature of God Himself for these personal processions of the Trinity to exist. Therefore we must to note that this type of per se necessity is not a necessity that can be in any sense considered as forcing God’s hand. Rather it is a necessity that reflects the nature of God Himself. One might make an analogy with the observation that it is necessary for me to be rational in order to be a human being.

A3: Having set forth his Trinitarian theology, Aquinas will move on next (in Ia qq.44-49) to talk about creation. We will see that Aquinas’s theology of creation is strongly Trinitarian in that he sees the procession of creatures from God in analogy to the procession of the persons from the Godhead. Here, some of that discussion is anticipated when Aquinas asks whether we are to understand the notional acts as processions from something-or-other or ex nihilo (that is, from nothing at all). It might at first sight seem as though the immanent procession of the persons has to be understood as a procession ex nihilo in the same way that the procession of creatures from the Godhead is a procession ex nihilo (Ia q.45 a.2). However, Aquinas denies this: the Son (for example) is not generated from nothing but from the very substance of the Father.

The root of the difficulty for this question, as Aquinas identifies it, is that when we talk about creation or about the making of things we distinguish between created makers who make things out of other pre-existing things but when we talk about God creating, we acknowledge that He creates from nothing. It’s therefore obviously very tempting to apply this to the procession of the persons from the Godhead and identify this as such an act of creation. This, however, is mistaken as it repeats the error made by the Arians in interpreting various scriptural passages as implying that the generation of the Son is such an act of creation. This is why in the creed we say that the Son “was begotten, not created”: the idea of generation from the Godhead must be clearly distinguished in reality and in the way we understand it from the creation of the created order. We must also remember (against other heresies that “divide the substance”) that the Father does not transfer some part of His nature to the Son in generating Him, but rather communicates the whole of His nature to Him.

A4: As the objections point out, there may be reason to doubt that we can associate the idea of a “power” in God with the notional acts. For example, the Son proceeds as the conception of God’s intellect and the Spirit proceeds as love in an act of God’s will. The argument of Ia q.25 a.1 might suggest that we shouldn’t consider God’s acts of understanding and will as coming under the purview of God’s power. However, as the idea of power is intimately tied up with the idea of being a principle of some act, Aquinas insists that we should consider the notional acts as deriving in some way from a power of God.

Aquinas emphasizes that we must recall that when we predicate things of God there are two different ways of distinguishing between them and that it is vital not to confuse the two. There is a real distinction between such predicates and there is a conceptual distinction. There is a real distinction between His essence and those things that He creates; similarly there is a real distinction between persons that we recognize through the notional acts. However, because there are no accidents in God, there is only a conceptual distinction between an action and the agent of that action. These considerations apply to the implicit distinction between a power and that of which the power is a principle. So those things that correspond to real distinctions, such as the coming forth of created things from God or the coming forth of persons from the Godhead can be associated with the idea of power in the sense of principle. But when we consider acts of God’s intellect or of His will, remembering that in reality will and intellect correspond with essence, we have to recognize that we can only make a distinction of reason and we use the notion of power as principle in an analogical sense.

A5: Continuing on the theme of the power of God associated with the notional acts, Aquinas asks whether the “power to generate” and the “power to spirate” are themselves real relations in the Godhead. Aquinas denies this on the grounds that a power in any agent is that by which the agent acts and that in so acting the agent produces something similar to itself with respect to the form by which it acts. This is precisely why the Son in being generated by this notional power of God is of the same essence as the Father.

A subtlety that Aquinas deals with is related to the fact that as realities, the divine essence and the relations are identical. We might think that, for example, “the power to generate” is associated with the corresponding relation through the identification of essence and relation. No ground is given here, though, as distinction must be made between the person who generates and that by which He generates. The Paternity of the Father is not that by which He generates; rather the essence is that by which the Father generates and the Paternity is that which constitutes the person who generates. The “power to generate” can, of course, be identified indirectly in this way with the person who generates but directly it is identified with the divine essence.

A6: Having established that one may talk about powers associated with the notional acts, it is important to nip in the bud incorrect idea that may flow from this. For example, the existence of such powers might suggest that it they be actualized more than once; why, for example, can the Father not bring forth more than one Son? To say that He cannot do so would appear to be limiting the limitless!

Aquinas recalls, in the sed contra, that in God the possible and the actual coincide and that this would therefore lead to the heretical assertion of more than three persons in the Godhead. To swat away this impious suggestion, Aquinas goes back to basics in giving a number of reasons why this line of thought is faulty. For example, at the root of the Trinity is that fact that the persons are defined and distinguished by being subsistent relations; we can count these as handed to us in revelation and there is no mechanism by which they may be multiplied. Similarly, the processions are associated with acts of God’s will and of His intellect; these acts are single simple acts again giving no basis for their multiplication.

Handy Concepts

Notions or characteristic acts in God are concerned with how we may know the distinctions in the Trinity rather than simply how they are.
Although there is an analogy between the procession of the persons in the Trinity and the procession of creatures from God, pushing the analogy too far leads to some of the classical heresies.
The notions are necessary in the sense of being natural to God.

Question 40 - The Persons in Comparison to the Relations

2011-03-16T14:10:00.001Z

Why this Question Matters.

Right at the start of his treatment of the Trinity Aquinas identified subsistent relation as the key concept in identifying and distinguishing the Persons of the Trinity. In the light of the material that he has developed since that introduction, he now returns to consider in greater depth the comparison of the Persons and the relational properties.

The Thread of the Argument

A1: Returning immediately to the theme of Question 28, Aquinas asks whether the relations in the Godhead can be identified with the Persons of the Trinity. The reason that he returns to this question is that he wants to address some of the possible problems and alternative approaches to the relational understanding of the Trinity, in the light of the theory that he has developed in the body of the treatise. Here Aquinas can recall that since the essence is the same as each Person (Question 39, Article 2) and each relation is necessarily the essence, we can identify the relations with the persons. Aquinas can apply the reasoning of this latter question to conclude that the relative properties are in the Persons and yet they are the Persons. In this way, Aquinas both argues against those who would attempt to drive a wedge between the relations and the Persons as well as preparing the ground for his contention in the next article that what distinguishes the Persons is founded in their relational properties rather than in what founds the relations.

The first objection suggested that if two things are the same, then the multiplication of one would imply the multiplication of the other. This would seem to rule out there being more than one relation in one Person; troubling if we reflect upon the paternity and common spiration in the Father. The answer to this objection allows Aquinas to amplify the point made in his reply: Person and relative property signify the same reality but differ conceptually. God’s simplicity excludes any composition of form and matter (therefore the abstract is to be identified with the concrete in God) and it excludes any composition of subject and accident (therefore any real attribute of God is His essence). The former means that, for example, God’s deity is God and it also implies that the Paternity of the Father is the Father: the relative properties and the Persons signify the same reality although their modes of signifying differ. The two identities together imply the identity of Person and relational property. The multiplication suggested in the objection need not happen: for example, the common spiration is not a single person subsisting per se but one property existing in two Persons in a way similar to the existence of one essence in two Persons (as seen in Question 30, Article 2).

The fact that Person and property signify the same reality and yet differ in their mode of signification allows us to understand that the relations determine distinct Persons in the Godhead yet do not determine distinct essences in the Godhead. The relational properties are only “in the essence” of God via this identity of Person, essence and relation; their signification only operates when considered as signifying something like a form in a subject.

A2: When we think of created things, and particularly when we thing about created things through the lens of Aristotle’s division of being into the categories, it’s hard to see that the relations are fundamental to the distinction between the Persons. In the Categories, being is divided into “substance” and the nine accidental categories, one of which is “relation”. This division implies that substance is, in a sense, primary and that relation is secondary: in this case, relation would appear to pre-suppose a distinction between substances. However, if we try to apply this reasoning to the relations in the Godhead and to the essence of God Himself, we have to be careful; the relations in the Godhead are subsistent and each the same as the essence. Putting this informally, we might ask whether God the Father is Father because he begets the Son or whether he begets the Son because He is Father. In contrast to other theologians of his day (Bonaventure, for example), Aquinas takes the latter view. The relational property of being Father is the primary source of what makes the Father a distinct Person; the fact that the Father is the originator of the Son and that the Son originates from the Father is secondary to the relational properties of being Father and of being Son.

In order to argue in support of this position, Aquinas identifies that the only possibilities for distinction in the Godhead arise from either origin or relation. There is in the Godhead, of course, no real difference between these, but they differ by their mode of signifying: origin signifies in the mode of an act and relation signifies in the mode of a form. In the created world, relation follows upon act, therefore Aquinas’s intellectual opponents apply this to the Trinity and argue that, for example, the Father is distinct from the Son because the one generates and the other is generated and that the relations follow after the fact. Aquinas identifies two major faults with this position.

The first problem is that in order to identify two things as distinct it is necessary to identify something intrinsic to them that provide a foundation for the distinction. Origin simply does not supply that intrinsic property, rather being a sort of trajectory from a thing to a thing that presupposes a distinction between them. Actually within a divine Person there are only two candidates that might provide the distinction: essence and relation. The former doesn’t distinguish, so it must be the latter that does. This line of reasoning explains Aquinas’s insistence in the first article that the relations are in the Persons.

The second problem is that positing the origins of the Persons as fundamental to the distinction between the Persons is prone to lead to the error of dividing something common to the three Persons. In other words, this approach leads to the idea of dividing the substance and therefore to tritheism.

A3: Even if we grant that it is the relations that make the Persons, is it possible that we might abstract the notion of relation from the notion of Person and still maintain a distinction between what would simply be hypostases of the Trinity? No: Aquinas insists that even when we are considering things as abstracted intellectually (as opposed to what is truly in reality) relation remains necessary for the distinction of the Persons. If we abstract away relation in our thinking, then Person evaporates from our thinking as well.

Aquinas considers how we make abstractions and identifies two fundamental types. When we consider a man as a rational animal, if we abstract the idea of rational from man and then remove the concept of rational, then we no longer have the concept of man but only the idea of animal. This example involves the abstraction of a universal from particulars. In contrast, if we consider the example of abstracting from a matter/form composite such as a bronze ring, abstracting and then removing the idea of a ring or circle still leaves us with bronze as a concept in the mind.

When we consider God, there are no universals and particulars and there is no composition of matter and form, but there remains the analogue of them by means of the different modes of signifying. Corresponding to the example of particulars and universals, abstracting and removing the properties leaves the common essence of God but not the hypostases which are analogical to particulars. When the properties that do not constitute the Persons are abstracted and removed in the sense of the matter/form abstraction, the concept of hypostasis remains. However, if the properties that constitute the Persons are removed, the concept of hypostasis vanishes. The point is that as the relational properties are subsistent, they “bring along with them” their corresponding supposits. One simply cannot be thought of without the other.

Those that argue that origin provides the foundation for relation might suggest that one can therefore abstract away the notion of relation whilst still leaving origin as the basis for the hypostases. However, in the first place Aquinas has shown the weakness of this position in the previous article and secondly since every hypostasis with a rational nature is a Person (following Boethius) it would be necessary to abstract way the rationality of the nature rather than the properties constituting the Person in order to be left with a hypostasis which is not a Person.

A4: In asking whether the characteristic (or notional) acts such as begetting and spirating are presupposed by the relations, Aquinas has the chance to summarize and elaborate upon his teaching from the earlier articles and the opportunity to distinguish between reality and how we may conceptualize that reality. Here he explicitly mentions the two possibilities: either the Father is the Father because He generates or the Father generates because He is Father. Aquinas favours the latter, but he is willing to make conceptual distinctions that explain the structure of the problem and the approach of other theologians.

Assuming that the relations in God really constitute the Persons and make them distinct then we can observe that origins in God can be signified actively (e.g. generation or spiration) or passively (e.g. being begotten or proceeding). This distinction allows us to observe that the origins as passively signified are conceptually prior to the properties of the Persons who proceed. When origins are signified actively, they are conceptually prior to any non-constitutive property of the Person. For example, the characteristic act of the common spiration is conceptually prior to un-named relation common to the Father and the Son. So in the conceptual realm, when we think of what constitutes the Person of the Father we can think in terms of a relation that presupposes the characteristic act of begetting but we can also think in terms of the relation constitutive of the Father being presupposed by the characteristic act. This process of distinction mirrors the conceptual distinction that one might make between the word “Father” signifying the divine relation of paternity and the subsistent Person.

Handy Concepts

The relations constitute and distinguish the divine Persons.
Person and property signify the same reality but differ in their mode of signification.
“God the Father begets the Son because He is Father” rather than “God the Father is Father because he begets the Son.”
We cannot abstract the idea of relation from the divine Persons in order to leave some kind of bare but distinct hypostases.
Distinctions can be made facilitating the conceptual priority of the characteristic acts over the relations.

Difficulties

Question 40 has gained the reputation of being one of the hardest questions to understand in the summa. Emery quotes Dondaine as saying that it considers “the most arduous problems in Latin Trinitarian theology”.
Aquinas’s conclusions in this question represent one side of an enduring split in Western theology between what one might approximately characterize as a Dominican school and a Franciscan school.
Article 4 appears to make distinctions between the real and our conceptual understanding of the real that almost contradict one another.

Question 39 - The Persons in Comparison to the Essence

2011-02-16T12:16:00.003Z

Preamble.

Aquinas has now spent some time investigating the Persons of the Trinity as Persons. For the rest of the Trinitarian treatise, he will investigate the relationship between the Persons and various other aspects of the Trinity. In this question, he investigates the relationship between the Persons and the essence; in Question 40 a detailed inquiry is made into the Persons and the relations and properties; in Question 41 the characteristic acts of the Persons are considered; in Questions 42 the Persons are compared with one another; and in Question 43 the missions of the Persons are considered.

Why this Question Matters.

The Christian doctrine of the Trinity is prone to the opposite errors of tri-theism (where the Persons are seen as individual Gods) and of modalism (where the Persons are “collapsed” into the divine essence and are seen merely as “modes of being” of the divinity). In the first article Aquinas recalls that divine simplicity implies that the Persons and the divine essence are the same reality; but that there is a real distinction between the Persons because they are subsistent relations. With this apparently paradoxical situation explained through our analogical understanding of God, the rest of the question is devoted to how we may speak of, and understand, the Persons in relation to the divine essence without falling into error.

The Thread of the Argument

A1: Returning to the theme of how we are to understand the idea of God as being three persons in one essence, Aquinas asks whether the essence in God is the same as a Person. At first sight, this proposition would seem to be nonsense: for example, if the persons are distinct then this would imply distinction in the essence which contradicts the unity of God’s essence. Similarly, identifying Person and essence would seem to mean that each Person (or subject) would have its own nature; again a problem.

Aquinas returns to Divine simplicity in his answer: simplicity implies immediately that the essence of God can be identified with each Person. However, this answer is troubling in that we’ve spent many questions demonstrating the distinction between the Persons and now we seem to be saying that really they are the same. Some theologians, recognising this difficulty, proposed that we can find some way to distinguish between Person and essence. Aquinas rejects this saying that the relations in God (which define the Persons) are the Divine essence because of Divine simplicity. We must affirm that essence and Person are the same reality whilst simultaneously holding that there is a real distinction among the Persons. To reconcile this apparent paradox we remember that a Person is a relation subsisting in the Divine nature; the distinction between the Divine essence and the Persons is not a real distinction but a conceptual one.

This conceptual distinction between Person and essence allows us to affirm something of the essence while denying it of the Persons. Therefore we can simultaneously affirm the unity of the essence and the distinction of the Persons. The strangeness of this position arises from the fact that in God the relations are subsistent; in created things this is never true and therefore analogies that we might attempt with creatures break down. Thus, as far as created natures are concerned, individuals are individuated as subjects by matter. When we use the notion of “subject” or “hypostasis” when referring to God by analogy with created subjects we have to remember that the principle of individuation that gets us the notion of “subject” is different. To think of three blobs of “stuff” within God pushes the analogy too far; although they are analogous, individuation by relation is different from individuation by matter.

A2: Aquinas continues this theme of naming Divine realities by analogy with created realities when he turns to the question of whether we can say that the three Persons are “of one essence”. In creation the nature of a species is individuated by matter; this means that we perceive the nature of a thing through its form and its individuality through its being a subject having that form. By analogy we talk of the essence as being the form of the three Persons. Now when we use the genitive “of” with created things we are happy to say that a form is “of” the subject that has the form. So we refer to the “health of John”. We don’t say that the thing is “of” the form; “John of health” (or “John is of health”) without a qualifying adjective (“John is of good health”) simply doesn’t work. Similar considerations allow us to say both “the essence of the three Persons” and “three Persons of one essence”, with emphasis on the unity of the essence.

A3: We can claim that the essence of God is the same as a Person and that the three Persons are of one essence; we can go even further than this and name an individual Person “God”. But when we do this are we using the name “God” in the same way as when we use the name “man” in the sentence “Socrates is a man”? In the latter, when we say that “Plato, Socrates and Cicero are each men” we mean that that there are three men under consideration. When we say that “The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are each God”, are we saying that there are three Gods? The objections suggest that that is precisely what we mean; but of course Deuteronomy demands “Hear oh Israel! The Lord your God is One God”.

To resolve this, Aquinas considers the more general question of how any name applied to the essence of God can be applied to each of the Persons individually. He immediately distinguishes between names that signify the essence as nouns and names that are adjectives and claims that such nouns are predicated of the Persons in the singular only (so that saying “The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are each God” only refers to one God). Adjectives, however, can be predicated in the singular or the plural. To see this, we recall that substances (signified by nouns) are those things that exist in and of themselves and that accidents (signified by adjectives) have their existence in some substance. Hence nouns are put into the singular or the plural according to the form corresponding to the substance; adjectives then agree grammatically with their nouns.

When we consider creatures, the only case where there is single form for a multitude is where we have a collection and this is signified by a collective noun which is in the singular (“a profession”). When described adjectivally (“professionals”) we get the plural, however. It is different when we consider God: we’ve seen in the last article that the divine essence has a signification like a form and this form is most definitely a unity. Therefore nouns that signify the divine essence are predicated of the Persons only in the singular. (Socrates, Plato and Cicero are three men that share the form of a human being and are each individuated by matter, but Father, Son and Holy Spirit, individuated by relative opposition, are not three Gods but one God.)

Adjectives are predicated in the plural because of the plurality of Personal subjects. An example from the Athanasian Creed illustrates the difference between the divine nouns and adjectives: using adjectives we speak of three who are eternal, uncreated, and immeasurable; but we speak of them as the eternal, the uncreated, and the immeasurable.

A4: In a sentence like “drink another cup, my friend” the word “cup” really refers to the wine that the cup contains; we’re not being asked to suppose that someone is literally to consume a cup! In the terminology of medieval logic the “signification” of the word “cup” in this sentence is a cup, but the “supposition” is the wine that the cup contains; we are “supposed” to infer that the sentence is referring to the wine rather than to the cup. This distinction between signification and supposition facilitates the precise analysis of how we use certain types of sentences in language.

In this question Aquinas asks whether concrete names for the substance of God can have a Person as their supposit. As the Nicene Creed identifies the Son as “God from God” it would appear that we have to allow for this. Aquinas rejects some contemporary theories as inadequate, claiming that the name “God” signifies the divine essence as existing in the one that has that essence; this wider understanding of the word “God” allows it to supposit for a Person. We therefore have to be careful to recognize when the word “God” supposits for the essence and when it supposits for a Person in a given sentence.

In replying to the objections, Aquinas distinguishes between the way that words work when applied to the created and to the uncreated. For example, when we use the word “man” in a sentence, its natural supposit is to an individual person, and something extra has to be in the sentence in order for it to be understood in the sense of “humanity”. This is because we infer the conceptual notion of humanity from the collection of individuals. In contrast, the word “God” is naturally associated with the common nature and we have to have something added to it in order to understand the supposition as referring to a Person (So in “God from God” the “from” shows that a procession is involved, which is characteristic of a Person.) This observation gets us out of the conundrum caused by the two sentences “God generates” (referring to the Father) and “God does not generate” (referring to the Son) offered in the third objection. Here, the first sentence contains the characteristic act of generation that identifies that the supposition of the sentence is the Person of the Father. The second sentence does not contain such a characteristic act (it would have to read “The God who is generated does not generate” in order to supposit the Person of the Son).

The replies to the fourth and fifth objections give extended examples of how to apply Aquinas’s teaching to unravel various apparent paradoxes caused by careless inference about the supposition of the word “God”.

A5: We have certain concrete names for the divinity, such as “God”, but we also have more abstract names like “essence”. Aquinas can now ask the same question as Article 4 for such abstract names; can they supposit for a Person? This time the answer is that they cannot. In answering this question, Aquinas is following the lines of a medieval controversy involving Joachim of Fiore, who had attacked the opinion of Peter Lombard, and whose opinions were promptly condemned by the fourth Lateran council in 1215. In following the line laid down by the council, Aquinas has to be sensitive to the use of language by the Church Fathers who had been willing to say that “essence is from essence”.

Aquinas points to Joachim’s mistake as being the fact that he has not understood that to understand a proposition, one must not only take into account what is signified but also the way in which things are signified. In this case a word like “God” signifies (or supposits) in a different way to a word like “essence” even though in reality God is the same as the divine essence. “God” signifies the divine essence as existing in one who has it, therefore it can signify in a way that refers to a Person. “Essence” on the other hand, signifies the divine essence as an abstract form and cannot therefore signify a Person.

The objections fall into two themes: the use by the Church Fathers of expressions that do apparently supposit a Person with abstract names for God; and apparent paradoxes caused by careless attention to detail.

Aquinas, following his usual reverential exposition of the Fathers, claims that they sometimes expressed things more strongly than their terminology would support. Now that terminological precision has been achieved, one should read the Fathers with the appropriate translation of terms or by disambiguating such expressions with the addition of appropriate terms. So a phrase in Augustine like “essence from essence” should be read as “The Son, who is the essence, is from the Father, who is the essence”.

As an example of one of the paradoxes, the fifth objection observes that since the Father is the essence, “the essence generates”. Therefore if “the essence does not generate” (as this article would assert), we obtain a contradiction. To resolve this paradox, Aquinas distinguishes between substantival names (like “Julius”) which automatically point to concrete particulars and adjectival names (like “Caesar”) which do not. An adjectival name requires a substantival name conjoined to it in order to signify (“Julius Caesar”). Since names like “essence” are adjectival, they cannot supposit for a Person. We would need to say something like “the essence is the God who generates” in order for the supposit to work. Hence there is no paradox because the word “essence” in the two sentences is not working on the same way.

A6: A brief article covers the question of whether propositions like “God is three Persons” or “God is a Trinity” make sense. In such propositions, the Persons are taken as predicates of the concrete essential names. Aquinas affirms that this can be done, by building on the analysis of Article 5, recalling the difference between adjectival names of the Persons (that cannot be predicated of the essence) and substantival names (which can). We then have to recall that not only is the divine essence the same as one Person, but also is the same as two or three Persons; therefore any combination of the Persons can be predicated of the essence. As we saw in Article 4 the name “God”, by its very nature, supposits for the essence. Therefore just as “the essence is three Persons” is true, so is “God is three Persons”.

A7: Nouns can be either common nouns (that name items in general) or proper nouns (that name particular items). So “apostle” is a common noun whereas “Paul” is a proper noun. But notice that we sometimes refer to the apostle Paul as “the Apostle”; when we do this, using a common noun as a proper noun, it is called “appropriation”. In the context of Trinitarian theology, appropriation is the ascription of common (and therefore essential) names to one of the Persons. In this Article, Aquinas notes that we do appropriate essential names to the persons (he gives the example “Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God” from 1 Cor. 1:24) and provides a justification for this practice.

We can come to know of the essential attributes of God by the light of natural reason, and Aquinas has spent some effort in working this approach out in the treatise on the One God, using analogies of the Divine with the created. However, the attributes proper to each Person are beyond natural reason and are known only to faith. Aquinas argues that, as the Personal properties are so obscure, it is fitting that essential attributes be appropriated to the Persons in order to make the Faith manifest. However, as the objections point out, this is not without its dangers. Aquinas identifies two valid types of appropriation: in the first case by way of similarity (for example, things to do with the intellect are assimilated to the Son, who proceeds as the Word); and by way of dissimilarity (for example, power is appropriated to the Father in contrast to the way in which human fathers get weaker with age). Appropriation by similarity is much the more common of the two.

In appropriating essential attributes to the Persons, Aquinas is clear that we do not understand these attributes to be proper to the Persons, but that the process helps to make the Persons better known to us though similarity and dissimilarity to created things known to us. In doing so, we do have to be careful not to fall into error: for example, we must remember that the Father is not wise through the wisdom of the Son but rather is wise by the wisdom that is the Divine essence.

A8: Aquinas now turns to particular examples of appropriations made by some of the Fathers of the Church in their writings. The selection appears to have been made according to their importance in medieval controversies and Aquinas’s aim is to justify these appropriations against objections drawn from such controversies.

This final article is laid out in an unusual form for the summa. We have the usual section of objections laid before us first, attacking a series of appropriations, but then the rest of the question is taken up with Aquinas’s extended answer which lays out a series of principles for appropriation and then takes each objection in turn within the body of the answer. The result, very much longer than the usual respondeo section, reads a little bit like an individual academic paper embedded within the body of the summa. Because of its length, we will not attempt to précis all of the arguments and counter arguments for each of the appropriations mentioned, but will merely describe the principles that Aquinas lays out.

Aquinas begins with an important reiteration of how we know God by analogy with how we know His creatures; and of how we know creatures themselves. Our first grasp of a created object is through its very being; we first grasp that it is. The second step is for us to understand the created object as a unity; it is not simply a being, but a being that makes sense to be identified as a unified thing. We then grasp the thing insofar as it has a power to act and to cause in the world. Finally, we understand the thing in relation to what it causes; indeed, we could not claim much knowledge of a thing unless we knew how it fits into the causal structure of the world. We can see in this division a relation to the structure of much of the first part of the summa: QQ. 2-10 deal with God in his being as known through analogy with His creatures; Q. 11 deals with God’s unity; QQ. 14-26 deal with God’s operations; and QQ. 44ff. deal with God’s relationship to creatures.

From the point of view of this question, however, Aquinas takes this division of the modes of knowing creatures (and thereby knowing God, by analogy) to point to different ways in which appropriation can be applied to God. We can apply appropriation from the point of view of God’s being; this gives us the Father-Son-Holy Spirit triad “eternity”, “species” and “use” that is the subject of one of the objections. We can consider appropriation from the point of view of God’s unity; this gives us the triad “unity”, “equality” and “harmony”. From the point of view of God’s power of causation we obtain the triad “power”, “wisdom” and “goodness”. Finally, considered in the light of God’s relationship to creatures, we obtain “through Him”, “with Him” and “in Him”, corresponding to efficient, formal and final divine causality.

Handy Concepts

The distinction between the Divine essence and the Persons of the Trinity is not a real distinction but a conceptual one.
Within God, the principle of individuation of the Persons is by relation, in contrast to the individuation of created objects by matter. Although analogous, we have to remember that individuation by relation is different from individuation by matter.
When considering a sentence in a language, we can talk about the signification of a term (which is what the term might be taken as pointing literally to) and the supposition of the term (which is what the term is really pointing to).
When talking about creation we infer “humanity” from examples of individual human persons. But when talking about divinity we infer the individual Persons from the common divine essence.
The process of using a common noun as a proper noun is called appropriation. In the context of Trinitarian theology, appropriation is the ascription of common (and therefore essential) names to one of the Persons.
Appropriation helps to make the Persons better known to us though similarity and dissimilarity to created things already known to us.

Difficulties

Much of this question might be seen as simply a defence of “how things are done” and of what was accepted and rejected by the Fathers of the Church. It is, of course, worth asking whether the principles that Aquinas used correspond to the principles that the Fathers used. One might also ask whether what we have here is a theory that designed to fit the facts rather than a theory that will predict the facts. But in defence of Aquinas one must also surely recognize that what he presents is principled and coherent with an organic relationship to what has gone before him.

Question 38 - The Name "Gift"

2011-01-24T13:43:00.001Z

Why this Question Matters.

In Acts 2:38, Peter foresees the gift of the Holy Spirit to those who repent and are baptized. The final topic in Aquinas’s trilogy of questions on the Holy Spirit concerns “Gift” as a name for the Holy Spirit.

The Thread of the Argument

A1: The first question that Aquinas asks is whether the term “Gift” can even be considered as the name of the name of a Person of the Trinity. In order to overcome objections to this idea, Aquinas has to define the sense in which “Gift” is to be used. “Gift” indicates something apt to be given as well as indicating a relationship with the giver and with the receiver. For a gift to be given it has to be able to belong to the giver and to the one receiving. In the case of the Holy Spirit there is no problem with the idea of the gift belonging to the giver, but the case of belonging to the receiver (us) is more difficult. Aquinas argues that “to belong” implies that receiver must be able to use or enjoy the given in freedom. For rational creatures this is only possible when the creature is in some sense conjoined to God. But that we are able to participate in the divine Word and in the Love that proceeds is the supernatural end of man, lifted up by God. Hence in this sense, the gift that God gives to us can be possessed by us.

In reply to the objection that the name “Gift” does not really distinguish a person in God, Aquinas answers that for a gift to belong to someone can be understood in three ways. In the first sense anything can be considered to belong to itself; in this sense the Holy Spirit can be considered to give Himself. In the second sense, something belonging is a possession and as such is different in essence from the giver; in this sense the gift of God can be something created (such as a created grace). In the third sense, something belongs when it has its origin in the one to whom it belongs. This is the sense in which the Son belongs to the Father and the Holy Spirit belongs to the Father and to the Son. In this last sense we see that the giver and the given can be considered Persons of the Trinity.

A2: We’ve seen that “Gift” can be considered as a name for a Person of the Trinity, but how can it be considered as a proper name for the Holy Spirit? As scripture tells us that “A Son is given to us” it would seem that the name could not be proper to the Holy Spirit. Likewise, this name does not seem to signify any property of the Holy Spirit; it is not characteristic of Him.

Aquinas quotes Aristotle to the effect that a gift is given with no intention of being recompensed; a true gift expresses true love, the willing of good for another. Therefore the first gift is of the love itself which stands as the primary gift through which all gifts are given. As the Holy Spirit proceeds as “Love”, He therefore proceeds as if the primary gift. Therefore the name gift is proper to the Holy Spirit, expressing His character as the primary among all gifts. Even though the Son is truly given, the fact that the Son is given is on account of the Father’s love.

Handy Concepts

The Holy Spirit can be considered as “Gift” to us as his origin is in the Father and the Son and we can possess him when we are elevated to the supernatural.
“Gift” is a name proper to the Holy Spirit as love is the very foundation of any true gift.

Question 37 - The Name "Love"

2011-01-24T13:38:00.001Z

Why this Question Matters.

In the second of this trio of questions concerning the Holy Spirit, Aquinas asks about how we can consider the name “Love” to be used of the Holy Spirit. The bulk of the arguments in this question concern the precise use of language to express precise concepts; a problem made harder for the lack of terminology given to us to talk about the Holy Spirit. Despite its technical clothing, this question is important because it allows Aquinas to steer a course between many Trinitarian errors, maintaining a coherent account of the three Persons and the one essence.

The Thread of the Argument

A1: Following a by now well established pattern, Aquinas asks whether the name “Love” can be considered a proper name for the Holy Spirit. There are some difficulties: we already attribute the term “Love” to God, how then can it be proper to the Holy Spirit? “Love” doesn’t really seem to signify a subsistent person, rather it signifies an action; love is a bond between persons, not something that proceeds from them; if the Holy Spirit is “Love” that loves then there will be a love that belongs to “Love” and therefore a Spirit from the “Spirit”.

The basic problem that Aquinas has to face in answering these objections is the lack of words that we have to describe the different modes of love. Consequently, much of the effort in this question describes the need for precision in how the word “Love” is being used in saying that “Love” is a proper name for the Holy Spirit. He immediately points out that the name “Love” can be taken both with respect to God’s essence and with respect to a Person of the Trinity. To illustrate this he makes an analogy with the procession of the “Word”. When thought of as a Person, God’s “Word” is his self-understanding insofar as it comes forth from Him. But we recall that “understanding” and “an understanding” are also predicated of the divine essence; God’s knowledge and understanding of things is creative of them, for example. In similar fashion, “love” and “to have affection for” are predicted of the divine essence. But whereas in the case of understanding in the intellect, we have words such as “word” and “to speak” in order to express what proceeds from the intellect, we have to make double use of the word “love” to express both what exists in the will and what proceeds from the will. Therefore, as long as we understand “Love” to be the name that refers to “Love insofar as it proceeds from the divine will” then we can rightly claim “Love” as a proper name of the Holy Spirit.

In answering the objections, Aquinas is able to expand upon this explanation. When we think of ourselves, we realize that love is something that remains within the lover in a sense similar to how the “inner word” (verbum cordis in Latin, “word of the heart”) remains within the one expressing a conception; yet there is also a relation to the thing loved or to the thing expressed by the word. When this is raised to the consideration of God, the relational aspect gives us the subsistent Persons. In replying to the third objection, Aquinas points out that the Holy Spirit is not some sort of “medium” between the Father and the Son, but rather one of the Persons of the Trinity; He provides the “bond” between the Father and the Son because of the single relation of love that the Father has for the Son and the Son has for the Father. For the final objection, Aquinas points out the parallel with the Son. Understanding belongs to the Son only insofar as He is the Word proceeding; He does not have an understanding that is in any sense separate from the understanding that God has of Himself. There is no word that proceeds from the “Word” and likewise, there is no love that proceeds from the “Love”.

A2: The second article probes further the idea that the Father and the Son love one another by the Holy Spirit. Aquinas approaches this question from the point of view of a grammatical analysis as he believes that other scholars have been led into error by misunderstanding how “by” should be taken. In Latin, this idea is expressed with the use of the ablative case (Spiritu Sancto) which is often interpreted as indicating instrumentality (“I hit the nail with the hammer”), although it can also be used in many other ways including to give a sense of origin (“He came from the village”). Aquinas points out that taking the ablative in its instrumental sense here, as if the Holy Spirit were some sort of cause, is to get things back to front. He then runs through a list of misunderstandings that originate with this mistake.

Aquinas singles out the opinion of Richard of St. Victor: the ablative should be taken here as indicating a “formal effect”. To explain what this means and to justify the interpretation, Aquinas points out that we often name things from their forms (a man from humanity, for example) and that the expression of this formal cause of things often uses the ablative case. But in a phrase like “he is clothed with a garment”, also using the ablative, what is expressed is not the fact that the garment is a form in the sense of signifying something in the subject (“he”) but rather points to one of the ten categories (or modes of being) giving the sense that “he is having the garment”. Similarly, when we say that “a tree blooms with its flowers”, we are not saying that the flowers are the form of the tree’s blooming but rather that the flowers are the effect of the tree’s blooming.

It is in this latter sense that we can say that the Father and the Son love by the Holy Spirit. But we also have to restrict “love by the Holy Spirit” to the Persons (or more strictly to the characteristics or “notions” that identify the Persons); if we take “love” in an essential sense (as discussed in Article 1) then the Father and the Son love by their common essence. If we take “love” as characteristic of the Persons of the Father or of the Son, then we are using it the sense of “to spirate love”. So, with these restrictions, just as we can say that the Father utters himself by His Word, so we can say that the Father and the Son love by the Holy Spirit.

The reply to the third objection anticipates some of the themes that Aquinas is going to cover in his teaching on creation (QQ. 44-49). The Father loves not only the Son but also Himself and us by the Holy Spirit. Taking “love” in its notional sense, characteristic of the Father, includes both the bringing forth of the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit Himself. In the same way that in uttering the Word the Father completely expresses Himself (including us!), by the Holy Spirit He loves us in loving His Word.

Handy Concepts

As long as we understand the name “Love” in the sense of the love that proceeds from the divine will, we can rightly claim “Love” as a proper name for the Holy Spirit.
As long as we don’t mistake “by” as indicating a cause but rather an effect, we can say that the Father and the Son love each other by the Holy Spirit.
In his reply to the second objection, Aquinas uses the terminology of “notions” (or “characteristics”). Notions are basically abstract concepts that allow us to identify and distinguish the divine Persons. There’s a close connection with the idea of a “property” (where the word is taken in a technical sense) as something that belongs strictly to one subject or class of subjects. A property of a divine Person provides something notional (or characteristic) of them. To illustrate this, that the Father speaks his Word is a notion of the Father and His speaking that Word is a notional action. The term “love” can be taken as an essential action of God but also as a notional action of the Father and the Son jointly.

Question 36 - The Name "Holy Spirit"

2011-01-23T11:09:00.003Z

Why this Question Matters.

Having devoted one question to the Person of the Father and two the Person of the Son, Aquinas continues the Trinitarian sequence with three questions devoted to the Holy Spirit. Following the pattern of the previous questions in this series, a question is devoted to each of three names for the third Person of the Trinity: “Holy Spirit”, “Love” and “Gift”. Considering the name “Holy Spirit”, Aquinas has to return to face the problems associated with the shortage of precise scriptural terminology associated with the Spirit; the spirit is much harder to grasp firmly. Aquinas goes on to consider some of the key questions (then as now) for ecumenical dialogue with the Eastern Churches: does the Holy Spirit proceed from the Father and the Son or from the Father only? Can we say that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son and, if so, what does “through” mean in this context? How are we to understand the Father and the Son as “principle” of the Holy Spirit?

The Thread of the Argument

A1: We’ve already seen that talking about the Holy Spirit is more difficult that talking about the Father or the Son; scripture seems much less precise over terminology for the Holy Spirit than for the Father and the Son. For example, the term “proceed” is overloaded; both the Son and the Holy Spirit proceed from the Father, but the term has a particular affinity with the Holy Spirit. Why is this particularity not recognised with a distinct term? When Aquinas comes to consider whether the name “Holy Spirit” is a proper name of one the Persons of the Trinity (following the pattern of previous questions) he has to face up to similar objections. “Holy Spirit” is a name made up of terms (“holy” and “spirit”) that both have wide applicability; is such generality consonant with it being the name of a divine Person? Similarly, the name has no obvious relational connotations in the way that both “Father” and “Son” do; as relation is central to the notion of personality within the Trinity, this seems strange.

Aquinas gives a striking answer: Question 27 Article 4 showed that of the two processions in God, one does not have a proper name; this was carried over in Question 28 Article 4 to a recognition that the corresponding relation does not have a proper name. Consequently, this divine Person simply does not have a proper name! However, we are still justified in using the name “Holy Spirit” of the third Person of the Trinity, recognizing the fact that scripture and the usage of the Church has created this name to identify that person. Although the name “Holy Spirit” cannot be said to be proper to the third Person of the Trinity in the sense of being uniquely applicable to Him, Aquinas sets out three arguments to show that the name does at least contain elements that point to aspects proper to Him. For example, the term “spirit” is suggestive of impulse and movement; thoroughly appropriate to the Holy Spirit.

A2: Does the Holy Spirit proceed from the Father alone or from the Father and the Son? In favour of a procession from the Father alone, Aquinas assembles some powerful witnesses. From scripture and tradition: John 15:26 appears to ascribe the procession to the Father alone; the Nicene creed as developed at the Council of Constantinople ascribes the procession to the Father alone and the later Council of Ephesus prohibited addition to this creed; St. John of Damascus (who in many ways represents the culmination and summit of the ancient Eastern theological tradition) ascribes the procession to the Father alone; the apocryphal Acts of St. Andrew (apostolic founder of the Byzantine Church), dating from the third century, ascribes the procession to the Father alone. Likewise, there are some purely theological arguments favouring this position: if we recognize the analogy between the procession of the Word and the Spirit in God and the procession of our “word” and “spirit” from our intellect and will then the analogy breaks down as our “spirit” does not appear to proceed from our “word”; it simply appears superfluous to demand procession from the Son when procession from the Father would of necessity be perfect; Anselm had already anticipated and answered the objection that procession from the Son is necessitated in order to be able to differentiate the procession of the Son from the procession of the Spirit. Against these positions, the Athanasian Creed affirms the double procession.

Aquinas claims that the double procession is necessary in order to be able to distinguish the Persons of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. He argues that we cannot distinguish between the Son and the Spirit by looking to anything to do with the divine essence, as this is common to the Persons; in other words, anything absolute (i.e. non-relational) simply will not help us. Therefore only the relations distinguish the Persons.

The relations can only distinguish between the Persons inasmuch as they are “opposed” relations. To illustrate this notion we observe that the relations between the Father and the Son are opposed, therefore the Father is not the Son; likewise we note that there are two relations in the Father (to the Son and to the Holy Spirit) but these relations are not opposed, so they do not “divide” the Father into two Persons. The trouble is that if the only relations in the Son and the Holy Spirit were those by which they are related to the Father, they would not distinguish the Son and the Holy Spirit as they are not opposed relations. This would imply that the Son and the Spirit are the same one Person, which would make a bit of a wreck of Trinitarian faith. Therefore there must be an opposed relation between the Son and the Spirit, and since the only opposed relations in God are relations of origin (Question 28 Article 4), it follows that either the Son is from the Holy Spirit or the Holy Spirit is from the Son. The latter is the only possibility consistent with scripture and tradition.

Aquinas argues that this is consistent with the analogy of the Word as proceeding from God in the mode of intellect and the Spirit proceeding from God in the mode of will as we do not love something unless we apprehend it.

Turning to Greek theology, Aquinas claims that they understand the procession of the Holy Spirit as having something to do with the Son, even going so far as teaching that the Spirit “flows” from the Son. They resist, however, the idea that the Spirit proceeds from the Son. Thomas is, at this point, thoroughly puzzled: why do the Greeks not understand procession in the sense of origin? Are they ignorant or stubborn?

Turning to the objections, Aquinas notes that, in talking about God, we are not restricted to the exact words and phrases of scripture but can also use those things that are implied by scripture. So in this case we can look to John 16:14 (and elsewhere) to bolster the case for the double procession. He also proposes an hermeneutical rule by which anything said of the Father must be understood of the Son unless what is said involves a relation of opposition between Father and Son. Similarly, although Ephesus did teach that the creed was not to be altered, what the Fathers of the Council intended was that later creeds were not to teach a faith different from the earlier creeds. Clarification by expansion was not ruled out. This is illustrated by the fact that Constantinople itself expanded the creed of Nicaea in order to develop the teaching about the Holy Spirit and ecumenical (and other) councils after Constantinople and Chalcedon propagated their own creedal statements (whilst affirming the Creed of Constantinople). As later councils had to face the threat of new or resurgent heresies, they were free to address such threats by expansion and elucidation of the one faith. Against the opinion of St John of Damascus, Aquinas flatly disagrees, pointing to the authority of the Council of Ephesus against the Nestorians.

The rest of the objections are swiftly dispatched by careful analysis of the terminology

A3: Having dealt with the question of the double procession, Aquinas now turns to the formula, amenable to Greek theology, that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son. Clearly, one of the main issues to be clarified consists in what this statement means. Each of the objections, in its own way, points to ambiguity in the term “through” being applied to the procession of the Holy Spirit.

Aquinas distinguishes two separate senses of the preposition “through” when it is concerned with action caused through another. He illustrates this distinction by examples. In the first case we can talk about a craftsman acting through a desire for money (final cause); he can act through the craft that he works (formal cause); and he can act through the command of another (efficient cause). The sense here is that the agent acts because of something – it is through the something that he acts. In the second case, however, we can talk of the craftsman acting through his hammer. The difference here is that it is not the hammer that causes the craftsman to act but rather that the hammer receives its causative action from the craftsman and it “passes along” the causative action of the craftsman. Similarly, Aquinas offers the example of a king acting through a magistrate. The magistrate receives the power to act from the king and in so doing carries out the intentions of the king and of himself.

It is this second sense that we can rightly say that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son: the very fact that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son is something that comes to the Son from the Father.

In the replies to the objections, Aquinas amplifies what he has said in his answer. The power by which the Father and the Son spirate the Holy Spirit is unmediated as it is just one thing; however, when considered as Persons, although the Spirit proceeds in common from the Father and the Son, the procession is mediated through the Son. He insists that because there is no distinction in the power to spirate between the Father and the Son, then we mustn’t think of the Son as being a secondary or instrumental cause of the Father spirating. This is where the analogy of the craftsman and the hammer might mislead as the hammer is most certainly an instrument of the craftsman. An important point to note is that, in the reply to the second objection, Aquinas admits that the Spirit can be said to proceed “principally” from the Father because the Son receives the power of spirating the Spirit from the Father. This does not mean, of course, that the Son is in any way subsidiary to the father insofar as He spirates the Spirit.

A4: Having stated that we may say that the Spirit proceeds “principally” from the Father and “through” the Son, Aquinas balances this position by insisting that the Father and the Son are a single “principle” of the Holy Spirit. Although the Father and the Son breathe the Holy Spirit as two persons, they breathe Him together as one power, in no sense dividing the Holy Spirit.

One of the problems that Aquinas has to face in this article is that he has set up his system using concepts and terminology taken from the field of logic. This means that he has to answer a whole battery of technical objections to do with the applicability of these terms in this situation. Indeed, in the main body of the article he takes one of these objections in order to clarify his terminology.

Aquinas’s main answer is deceptively straightforward and follows immediately from the superstructure that he has already erected. The only thing that distinguishes Father from Son as Persons of the Trinity is relational opposition; they are not relationally opposed as far as being a principle of the Holy Spirit is concerned, hence there is no distinction between them when considered as principle of the Holy Spirit. The objection in the main body of the answer is that, strictly speaking, the term “principle” denotes a property of some subject rather than denoting a subsisting being (that is, a person). Therefore “principle” is acting as an adjective and “one” must be acting as an adverb. Putting this together, this means that describing the Father and the Son as “one principle” of the Holy Spirit simply means that they are principle of the Holy Spirit in one way, which is much weaker than what Aquinas wishes to claim. Aquinas resists this saying that “principle” is acting as a noun, giving the examples of “father” and “son” from ordinary language. (The point that Aquinas is claiming here is that “father” determines a subject relationally by being father of a son but that it also determines that subject because the father is the principle or source of origin of that son). Now he can argue that just as we say Father and Son are one God, so also they are “one principle” of the Holy Spirit because there is genuine unity in the property signified by the term “principle”.

The first objection argued that the Holy Spirit could not proceed from the Father and the Son as far as the one nature is concerned, because the Holy Spirit is of the same nature as Father and Son and would therefore proceed from Himself. Likewise He could not proceed from them as far as one property is concerned as properties inhere in single subjects. Hence He must proceed as if from two rather than from one principle. To answer this, Aquinas claims that the Father and Son are one in the power by which the Holy Spirit proceeds from them and that because they are of one nature there is no puzzle about them sharing one property. He points forward to the discussion in Question 41 Article 5 which will concern the coincidence of nature and property. But Aquinas still wants to maintain a balance: the Holy Spirit does proceed from the Father and the Son as from two subjects; He proceeds from them as uniting them.

The next five objections, based on a variety of logical fallacies, are dispatched in similar fashion; the seventh objection concerns the reconciliation of various different opinions that affirm that the Father and Son are two spirators, or should be considered two “authors” of the Holy Spirit; opinions which would seem to lie uneasily with Father and Son being one principle. Aquinas’s solution is delicate, distinguishing between noun and adjective forms of spiration: we can say that the Father and the Son are “two spirating” (considering “spirating” as an adjective, not a verb) but not that they are “two spirators” (considering “spirator” as a noun) as there is only one spiration.

Handy Concepts

The third Person of the Trinity does not, strictly speaking, have a proper name; however, we should refer to Him as “Holy Spirit” as scripture and the Church have associated this name with Him.
As the only thing that distinguishes the Persons in the Trinity is relational opposition, the Holy Spirit must proceed from the Father and the Son (as opposed to from the Father only), otherwise the Son and the Holy Spirit would be indistinguishable.
The double procession of the Holy Spirit is supported by scripture, especially when we remember that that we must co-attribute things to the Father and the Son unless they are explicitly distinguished by relational opposition.
We can rightly say that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son as long as we understand this to mean that the Son receives the power to spirate the Spirit from the Father, and not in an instrumental sense.
The Father and the Son are jointly a single principle of origin of the Holy Spirit.
These questions on the Holy Spirit were written at a time when ecumenical relations with the Eastern Orthodox were being actively discussed. Indeed, Aquinas died on his way to the Council of Lyon in 1274 where his work “contra errores Graecorum” (not his own title) was to be used in the discussions with the East. There was a great deal of motivation at the time to understand the terms of the debate between West and East. It’s one of history’s great “what ifs” to consider what might have happened had Aquinas got to the council.
In the summa we only see a relatively short consideration of the double procession. In Question 10 Article 4 of his work de potentia 24 objections are made in favour of the procession from the Father alone.

Difficulties

In article 2, Aquinas quotes the so-called Athanasian Creed in support of the double procession as though this were evidence from Eastern theology in support of the double procession (Athanasius was patriarch of Alexandria in the fourth century and is counted among the Doctors of the Church, both in the East and the West). However, it is now believed that the Athanasian Creed is Gallican in origin (i.e. from the West), dating from the fifth century.
Aquinas makes little enquiry here into differences of approach between the East and the West as to the relationship between the economic Trinity and the immanent Trinity; this may mean that he misses some subtleties of the debate.
Although the fact that Aquinas asks whether the Eastern theologians are being ignorant or stubborn in Article 2 may seem anti-eirenic, this should probably be seen more as a sign of Aquinas’s complete incomprehension at the Eastern position rather than as a condemnation of the Easterners. Aquinas’s basic position is one of great respect for Eastern theology; other contemporary Western theologians were much more willing to dismiss the Eastern Orthodox as heretics.
Good starting points for study of the debate over the double procession (the so-called “filioque” debate) are Emery’s book “The Trinitarian Theology of St Thomas Aquinas” and the document “The Greek And Latin Traditions Regarding The Procession Of The Holy Spirit” from the Pontificial Council for Promoting Christian Unity.

Question 35 - The Name "Image"

2011-01-14T19:54:00.001Z

Why this Question Matters.

Continuing his discussion of the Person of the Son, Aquinas now dedicates one of the shortest questions in the summa to the name “Image” (Colossians 1:15). How are we to understand this name in the context of Aquinas’s Trinitarian theology?

The Thread of the Argument

A1: Aquinas argues that to be an image means at least to have some likeness to another. More is required than this though, as one thing may be a likeness of something else completely accidentally. What is required is for the image to proceed in some way from the other. As an example, a photograph may provide a likeness of a person but it has also come to be by light reflected from that person being collected and focussed by the lens of the camera; the image has, in a sense, proceeded from the original. It is therefore entirely reasonable to apply the word “Image” to God when we think of the second Person of the Trinity proceeding from the Father.

A2: The slickness with which Aquinas justified the name “Image” to the second Person of the Trinity appears to run into difficulties when one points out that the Holy Spirit also proceeds from the Father and also that scripture tells us that man is the image of God (1 Corinthians 11:7, for example). It would seem that “Image” is not simply a proper name for the second Person of the Trinity but has to be shared. Aquinas points out that the Greek Fathers of the Church are willing to apply the name “Image” to the Holy Spirit whereas the Latin Fathers restrict the name to the Son because that is the use made of the name in scripture (as far as God is concerned). He rehearses a number of arguments about this simply in order to reject them as inadequate before settling on an argument that parallels the rejection of the application of the term “begotten” to the Holy Spirit. It belongs especially to the notion of “Word” to be a likeness of that from which it proceeds whereas one simply cannot say the same about the notion of “Love”.

When one considers that man is made in the image of God, one has to recognize that the word “image” is being used in a different way to when it is applied to the Son as the Image of God. The Son is the perfect Image of the Father and He agrees in nature with the Father; man in a sense is tending towards the image of the Father as he is perfected, but remains of a different nature to the Father.

Handy Concepts

An “image” of an object is something that is like the object (including the sense of being of like species) but which also “proceeds” from that object in some sense. Therefore it is reasonable to apply the name “Image” to God as second Person of the Trinity.
One may apply the name “Image” to the Son as a proper name by observing that the “Word” of God pre-eminently images the Father.
Man is in the image of God, but in a way that is fundamentally different to the way that the Son is the Image of the Father.

Difficulties

The arguments rejecting the application of the term “Image” to the Holy Spirit (including Aquinas’s) appear to be rather weak.

Question 34 - The Name "Word"

2011-01-14T15:03:00.001Z

Why this Question Matters.

Aquinas now turns to the Person of the Son. We already refer to this Person of the Trinity as “Son” but there are other names that are used of Him. In particular, He is referred to as “Word” (especially at the beginning of the Gospel of John) and “Image” (Colossians 1:15). How are we to understand these latter two names in the context of Aquinas’s Trinitarian theology? In this question, Aquinas describes how we may understand the second Person of the Trinity as “Word”.

The Thread of the Argument

A1: Aquinas claims that when we apply properly the term “Word” to God it refers to the second Person of the Trinity. To justify this claim he describes the different meanings that we apply to the token “word”. In common use we think of a word as a sound that signifies something in a definite way. One might think that a word written on a page provides a counter example to the specificity of this claim, but one should note that the actualization of the signification of a written word occurs when a mind reads and internally or externally “vocalizes” the word. So a word is associated with an external procession of something conceived interiorly by a mind. As such Aquinas claims that the principal meaning of the term “word” refers to the interior conception by the mind and that secondary meanings refer to the sound that signifies this conception as well as the imagining of this sound. Aquinas also identifies a fourth, improper, meaning of “word” in the thing signified by the word. When we apply the principal meaning of “word” to God, with its associations of procession from the mind, then we see that this accords perfectly with the procession of the Son. Therefore it is perfectly proper to associate “Word” with the Person of the Son.

Aquinas still has a number of awkward objections to deal with. One might argue, as Origen did, that one applies the term “word” to God in a metaphorical sense. Aquinas claims that if one does so, then one must also recognize that this metaphorical sense is grounded in the proper sense. To insist that a metaphorical sense excludes the proper sense would be to make a move similar to that made by the Arians in trying to justify their claims about the relationship between the Father and the Son. In other words, you’d have to be pretty desperate to make this move!

Another problem is that one has to argue carefully that the “speaking of a word” is truly associated with the personal relations in God rather than simply being associated with His essence. It is clear that we associate the notion of “word” with cognition, with thinking and with seeing (in the sense of fully grasping something). But when we apply these to notions to God’s intellect, we stay within the realm of God’s essence; God’s understanding simply is God’s essence, for example. Aquinas identifies the radical difference between a knower’s act of understanding (something entirely internal to the knower) and what the knower’s intellect conceives in its act of understanding (which proceed from the intellect by means of a word). This objection is framed in terms of the writings of Sts Augustine and Anselm: one of Aquinas’s implicit points is that when one reads authorities such as these, one must be very careful to elucidate the way in which they are using theological terms. Here, St Augustine appears to limit the term “word” to being a substantial predicate but other works of his show that this is a misreading. Similarly, St. Anselm is misread if one fails to appreciate how he is using his terminology.

Again, apparently following Anselm, one might argue that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are all intelligent and that when “God speaks”, each of the Persons speaks. So, in a sense, the speaking of a word by God is associated with the whole Trinity and therefore arguably is associated with the divine essence rather than with the Persons. Aquinas resists this analysis by affirming that “speaking” is properly predicated of a Person in God and that one should resist the idea that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are one “speaker”. One can say, however, that each of the Persons of the Trinity is “spoken” but one can distinguish the ways in which they are spoken. All of them are “spoken” in the sense of how a thing understood in the intellect of God is spoken (the fourth, improper meaning that Aquinas identified above), but only one of them (the Son) is “spoken” in the way that a word is spoken. Aquinas absolves Anselm of heinous error by observing that the latter is really using “speak” as an improper sense of the word “understand”. When we think of God understanding Himself, then we are in the realm of the divine essence (because God’s understanding is His essence); but when we think of God speaking his Word, we are in the realm of the Persons of the Trinity.

A2: The body of this article simply summarizes what we’ve already seen. A “word” signifies what emanates from the intellect; in God the Person who proceeds by an emanation of the intellect is the Son. Hence “Word” is reasonably a proper name for the Son. The article is largely made up of a collection of objections and their replies, most of which are routine fare for Aquinas to dispose of. The fourth objection is possibly the trickiest: understanding involves the conception of a word; but the Son understands. Therefore surely the Son brings forth His own Son. To answer this, Aquinas notes that divine understanding belongs to the essence of God and therefore the Son understands as God rather than as anything that should be considered as really distinct from God. There is no separate understanding that would be the source of a further procession.

A3: From the beginning of the Gospel of St John we know that all things were made through the Word of God; there is an intimate relation between the Word and creatures. In this article Aquinas starts laying the groundwork for his Trinitarian theology of creation that will he will develop in Questions 44-49. Here he simply recalls that in God’s single act of understanding His single Word expresses not only Himself but also His creatures; indeed, he recalls that His understanding is itself creative of creatures. Thus Aquinas can claim that “Word” implies a reference to creatures; whenever “Word” is mentioned, the idea of what God creates is present.

The first objection suggests that anything in the divinity connoting an effect in creatures is an essential name (that is, it refers to the essence of God). However, since a “person” is an individual substance of a rational nature, the name “person” has itself a weak reference to “nature”. Therefore, Aquinas argues, although a divine name does not involve a reference to creatures as far as the Personal relation is concerned, it can be taken as providing such a reference through that weak association of the name with the nature.
Another objection is that terms like “Lord” or “Creator” that certainly do involve a reference to creatures involve relations between creatures and God that occur in time. However, “Word” is an eternal procession and therefore differs qualitatively from such terms. Aquinas merely points out that some effects of God on creatures, such as “creating” and “governing” are transitive (involving a “going out” from God) whereas other are immanent, such as “knowing” or “willing”. These latter occur from eternity (thought the effects may be brought to actuality at a particular point in time in creation), so there’s no reason to worry about the eternity of the “Word” in this respect.

Handy Concepts

When we correctly identify the principal meaning of the term “word” as referring to the interior conception by the mind, we can properly apply “Word” as a proper name of the second Person of the Trinity.
The name “Word” as applied to the Second Person of the Trinity has a reference to the creative activity of God and therefore to creatures themselves built into it.
The beginning of St John’s Gospel is built around the idea of the Word as second Person of the Trinity. Aquinas gives us a powerful and extended treatment of “Word” in his magnificent commentary on the Gospel of St John.

Difficulties

Some English translations of Article 3 refer to the “relation” between the Word and Creatures. I think that this has the potential to be misleading given the technical meaning of “relation” in Aquinas’s Trinitarian theology. In Latin, the title of this article is “utrum in nomine verbi importetur respectus ad creatoram”. Following the later English Dominican translation, the “respectus ad” is more safely rendered as “reference to”.

Question 33 - The Person of the Father

2010-12-03T14:36:00.001Z

Preamble

Aquinas has dealt with the Persons of the Trinity in general in Questions 29-32 and will return to a more detailed comparison of the Persons in Questions 39-43. In the meantime, as the next step in this subsection, he looks at each individual Person. He devotes one question to the Person of the Father (Question 33), two to the Person of the Son (Questions 34-35) and three to the Person of the Holy Spirit (Questions 36-38).

Why this Question Matters.

Devoting questions to each individual Person of the Trinity allows Aquinas to go into greater depth concerning questions particular to each Person. For the Father, Aquinas introduces the idea that He is the principle of the other Persons of the Trinity and discusses and disposes of objections to the notions of the Father introduced in the previous question.

The Thread of the Argument

A1: One of the ancient Trinitarian errors that Aquinas wishes to avoid in his account of the Trinity is that of subordinationism. This error is a collection of ideas that suggests that the Persons of the Trinity are not co-equal: one may be prior to another; one may be cause of another; one may be superior to another; with many variations on this theme. However, we do wish to acknowledge that there is some sort of structure, of ordering, within the Trinity. In this article, Aquinas introduces the idea that the Father is the principle of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and he explains the sense in which the term “principle” can be used in an orthodox way.

Aquinas’s argument is very brief: used in this theological sense, a principle is simply that from which something proceeds. As the Son and the Spirit proceed from the Father, we can truly say that the Father is principle of the Son and the Spirit. The bulk of the article is taken up in answering objections that are designed to hone the precise meaning of what Aquinas has stated. Maintaining Augustine’s teaching that “the Father is the principle of the whole divinity”, the key is that “principle” used in this sense does not imply “inferior” or “posterior” or any other terms that imply subordination.

The first objection is that Aristotle teaches that a principle is the same as a cause and that we do not call the Father a cause of the Son. Aquinas replies that the Greek theologians use the words we translate as “cause” and “principle” interchangeably but that Latin theologians use the corresponding Latin terms more precisely. For the latter a principle is more general than a cause. As more general terms are more appropriate to God (Question 13, Article 2) it is appropriate to use the term “principle” of God. With this distinction we can see that “cause” implies a dependence of one thing upon another but that “principle” does not.

Another sense of the word “principle” suggests that something is the principle of something else if it is responsible for the beginning of that thing. This cannot be the case with the Father as principle of the Son as the Son has no “beginning”. Again, there is a difference in terminology between Greek and Latin theologians: this sense is not allowed in Latin theology. The Latin theologians are willing to go so far as saying that the Father is the “author” (Latin auctoritas) of the Son, but insist that this term does not imply any subordination.

Finally, the term “principle” is related etymologically to the term “priority”; this would seem to be a problem. However, Aquinas insists that the signification of “principle” here relates to priority in the sense of origin and not in the sense of prior/posterior.

A2: Scripture applies the term “Father” to the first Person of the Trinity. Aquinas is happy to build on this by asserting that proper names signify that which distinguishes an individual from other individuals. Since the Father is distinguished from the other Persons of the Trinity by his paternity, the proper name of the first Person is “Father” as this is the name that signifies that paternity.

Although the term “Father” is a strictly relational one as far as we are concerned, this is no objection to applying it to the first Person of the Trinity on the basis that it is not a term pointing to an individual substance, because relations in God are subsistent. Similarly, although we speak metaphorically of a word being begotten by its “father”, when we apply the terms to the Trinity they are applied properly and not metaphorically.

The final objection suggests that the notion of “generation” and therefore of “father” is derived from its application to creatures and subsequently applied to God. This would contradict the proper application of terms to God that are said primarily of God and subsequently of creatures by analogy. Aquinas denies this order of priority, teaching that the more perfect notion of generation is where the thing generated has numerically the same form as that generating (i.e. God generating the Son) as opposed to simply the same species as that generating (i.e. as in creatures).

A3: When we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we pray to the entire Trinity, yet we pray to “Our Father”. It would seem that the term “father” can apply both to the individual Person of the Father and to the whole Trinity. Which of these applications really has priority? One might argue that a common term (i.e. applied to the whole Trinity) has precedence over a personal term (i.e. applied to one Person of the Trinity). Similarly, one might argue that there is no priority of one application over the other; the term applied to the relation between the Father and the Son is applied on the same basis as it is applied to the relationship between the Father (as God the whole Trinity) and us creatures.

In a move that might remind us of how analogical predication works, Aquinas claims that priority is to be given to names applied in situations where the whole meaning of the name is exhibited in its use rather than where it is exhibited in a certain respect. We might call a man a “lion” because of his character, but this meaning is secondary to the application of the term to the large feline animal. In the case of the terms “father” and “son” it is clear from previous arguments (Question 27, article 2; Question 28, article 4) that these are most perfectly found in the relation between the Divine Persons. Aquinas brings a number of scriptural arguments to bear to prove that the term applied to the relationship between God and creatures is derivative of this Trinitarian application.

In reply to the objections, Aquinas points out that although common names do take priority over proper names, the argument that he has just made shows that common names associated with a relation to creatures are posterior to proper names associated with relations between the Divine Persons. This mirrors the fact that the procession of creatures from the mind of God is posterior to the procession of the Word through which those creatures are created.

A4: In Question 32, Aquinas introduced the notions of the Persons of the Trinity. In this article, he concentrates on the notion that the Father is unbegotten. Connecting this idea with that of principle introduced in Article 1, he observes that the Father is unbegotten in the sense that He is a principle-not-from-a-principle just as the Son is begotten of the Father in the sense that He is a principle-from-a-principle.

There are still a number of problems with the term “unbegotten” and the corresponding property of innascibility that have to be addressed. The first is that these terms appear only to deny something of the Father rather than posit a positive property. But Aquinas replies that first things and simple things are known through negation, so that this really is no problem.

Trickier is the problem that a term like “unbegotten” can either be taken as a privation or a negation. The former is ruled out because privations correspond to lacks of perfection and this cannot be said of God. However, if “unbegotten” is taken as a negation then we can surely apply it to the Spirit who, although He proceeds, is not begotten. This would mean that the term is not proper to the Father. Aquinas answers that this reasoning depends on too shallow an analysis of “privation”. There are some uses of the term “privation” which do not imply imperfection: a mole is blind whereas other animals are not but this does not imply that a mole is an imperfect mole as it has no need of sight for its perfection. In this sort of sense, it is no problem to consider being unbegotten to be a privation. However, this still leaves the problem that the Spirit might be considered unbegotten. This may be addressed in two ways: the term “unbegotten” may either be associated with the idea of not-from-a-principle or with the idea of not being from another in any way (and not just by generation). Either of these approaches makes the term proper to the Father.

Another problem is that “unbegotten” is not a relational term and therefore if it is applied to the Trinity it must denote the substance rather than a particular Person. This would have some difficult consequences. Aquinas identifies two senses of the term “unbegotten”, one of which can be taken as referring to the substance of God and whose application simply implies the uncreatedness of the Divine substance. The other sense of the term can be taken relationally, as it gains its reference from the term “begotten” which is relational. So, for example, the Father and the Son are distinct because a particular relation holds for one but not for the other.

The Father is not begotten, but also He does not proceed, so why is non-procession not a notion of the Father? The point here is that the Father’s not-being-from-another is fully described by reference to the Father-Son relation in which the Son is begotten and the Father is not. The procession of the Spirit presupposes the generation of the Word, so once we have denied being begotten of the Father, it follows that the Father does not proceed.

Handy Concepts

The Father is principle-not-from-a-principle in the Trinity.
Orthodox Christian theology avoids any idea of subordination amongst the Persons of the Trinity. Although the Father is principle-not-from-a-principle, this does not make Him superior to the other Persons of the Trinity.
Although the name “Father” is proper to the first Person of the Trinity, it is also used to refer to the entire Trinity as when we pray to the Father in the Lord’s Prayer.

Question 32 - Our Knowledge of the Divine Persons

2010-12-02T14:18:00.003Z

Why this Question Matters.

Aquinas believes that the fact that God is Trinity is purely a truth of revelation indemonstrable by human reason. However, although indemonstrable it is not unreasonable, as he has shown in previous questions. So far, we have seen how a metaphysical picture of God as Trinity can be built up consistent with (and possibly implied by) the data of revelation. This still leaves open questions about what we can know of the underlying reality of God as Trinity (the question of epistemology rather than ontology). In this question, Aquinas introduces facts about God that allow us conceptual access to the Persons of the Trinity; the notions in God that allow us to characterize and distinguish between the Persons.

The Thread of the Argument

A1: Aquinas has shown (in question 12) that our natural knowledge of God (i.e. the things that we can know about God in the absence of revelation) is derived purely from our knowledge of creatures. This means that our natural knowledge of God is restricted to what we can know of Him as causing the being of creatures. However, God’s creative power is common to the entire Trinity and is therefore associated with His essence rather than with the distinction of the Persons. Hence, our natural knowledge of God does not extend to a demonstrable knowledge of the Persons.

Aquinas goes further, saying that attempts to prove the Trinity of Persons are actually damaging to the faith. On the one hand, truths that are purely of the faith by their very nature surpass and excel human reason; to bring them down to our level is to undermine their dignity. On the other hand, attempts to prove such truths of faith (which are bound to have metaphysical holes in them) bring the faith into disrepute amongst unbelievers because it would appear to the latter that Christians base their beliefs on nonsense. Truths of the faith, such as the Trinity of Persons in God, should be received only through authority; theologians should concentrate their arguments on showing that such faith is not metaphysically impossible.

In the replies to the objections, Aquinas gives a forward reference (Question 39) to the idea of the appropriations: some attributes of God which are really associated with His essence can be appropriated to one of the Persons of the Trinity with which this attribute has a special affinity. We appropriate God’s power to the Father, His wisdom to the Son and His goodness to the Holy Spirit, for example. Aquinas is willing to admit that philosophers are able to infer the existence of such essential properties amenable to appropriation to the Persons.

In the reply to the second objection, Aquinas discusses the nature of explanation. In doing so he gives a nice illustration of a sophistication in medieval science that some may find surprising. He points out that an “explanation” can, on the one hand, have the nature of a proof or, on the other hand, it can simply provide a consistent description of matters of fact and that there may be other equally valid consistent descriptions. As an illustration of the former, Aquinas claims that the uniform motion of the celestial bodies is amenable to proof. For the latter, he describes the fact that although epicycles and eccentrics give a consistent explanation of the observed behaviour of astronomical objects, some other explanation may be superior.

A2: Aquinas now introduces the twin ideas of the Properties and the Notions in God. Simply put, the properties in God are what belong to each Person, as a Person, which allow them to be distinguished one from another; the notions are these distinguished characteristics inasmuch as they are known by us and allow us to distinguish the Persons (with a technical caveat concerning the common spiration of the Holy Spirit by the Father and the Son). This article considers whether it makes sense to posit notions (and therefore properties) in God. The usual objections can be made: scripture does not talk explicitly of such things therefore neither should we; such ideas confuse the already complex distinction between essence and personhood in God; one shouldn’t start to posit such things about a purely simple being. Despite the objections, Aquinas is able to rally patristic support in favour of the idea of the properties and notions: we simply do recognize that there are paternal, filial and processional properties and that we can know about them.

In the medieval period there were a number of solutions to this question offered by a variety of theologians. The “classical” position had been put forward in the standard textbook of the time by Peter Lombard. This stated that there are five such notions in God: the Father’s unbegottenness (or innascibility) and paternity; the Son’s filiation; the procession of the Spirit and the spiration of the Spirit common to the Father and the Son. Aquinas begins his answer by introducing the figure of Praepositonius of Cremona (Chancellor of the University of Paris at the start of the thirteenth century) as representative of those theologians denying such notions in God. Praepositonius identified statements such as “the Father distinguishes Himself from the Son through paternity” as simply being the equivalent of “the Father is the Father”. Statements such as the former are simply ways of speaking that actually say no more than that the Persons are distinct and that God is one.

Aquinas will have none of this! He recalls that we name in the way that we understand and that we understand things as concrete realities (named by concrete words) or as principles or forms of such things (described by abstract words). Applying our use of language to God does not destroy Divine simplicity: we can still apply abstract names when we talk of God’s essence and concrete names when we talk of the subsisting relations. If we were unable to do this, then we would be completely unarmed to argue against Trinitarian heretics: we need to be able to talk of God’s substance as a “what”; of the Persons as a “who”; and of the relations as a “that by which”. Within the Father there is no real difference between what He is, who He is and that through which He is; but in order to understand and describe Him we must be able to perceive and distinguish these three. A further consideration is that if we were unable to distinguish notions in such a way, we would not be able to distinguish between the two relations that the Father has with the Son and the Spirit respectively. However, it’s important to note that the filiation and the spiration are not distinct realities within the Father so the corresponding notions do not divide the Father but simply distinguish His relations.

A3: Having introduced the notions in the previous article, Aquinas now sets about defending the “classical” list. In order to account for the notions, Aquinas claims that Divine Persons are multiplied by their origin and that this can arise in two ways: by being source of another or by being from another. The Father is known by being not from another, the notion of innascibility (or unbegottenness). He is also known by the facts that the Son and the Spirit are from Him and these give us the notions of Paternity and Common Spiration. Similarly the Son is known by His Filiation and also by the Common Spiration and the Spirit is known by the Procession. There are thus five notions in God, only four of which are relations (innascibility is not relational, for which, see Question 33, Article 4). Similarly, only four of the notions are properties (as the common spiration is not a personal property). Aquinas completes his account with the rather obscure distinction between “notions of persons” and “personal notions” (which will be explained further in Question 40, Article 1) to claim that three of the notions are personal (Paternity, Filiation and Procession) whereas the other two are simply notions of persons.

A4: It might have seemed so far that Aquinas defends the notions in God as being of the Faith itself, especially in the light of his argument in favour of the notions based on the need to be able to refute heretics. But this would leave Aquinas in a difficult position: many distinguished theologians of the recent past disagreed with the account that Aquinas gives. Does this mean that Aquinas considers them all heretics?

In order to address this problem, Aquinas makes a distinction. One can identify those things that pertain directly to faith as revealed to us. For example, that God is both one and three. To deny any of these truths would be to fall immediately into heresy by the very nature of the denial. On the other hand, there are matters that pertain indirectly to the faith rather than directly. For example, a denial that Samuel was the son of Elkanah is not a direct denial of a truth of the faith, but the denial implies the proposition that sacred scripture errs in places which is a direct denial of the faith. In this case, the inference is pretty straightforward but in many cases the chain of reasoning from a particular proposition to a direct denial of the faith may be highly complex (and, indeed, inaccessible to many people). If this is so, then one cannot accuse of heresy those who hold such mistaken beliefs because the proof of their erroneous nature was not available to them.

Handy Concepts

Our knowledge of God, derived from created causes, reveals the essence of God, but not the Persons as created causes are actions of the entire Trinity.
The notions are distinct characteristics of the Divine Persons by which we can distinguish between them. We can go on to distinguish notional acts (where we think of the Divine Nature from the point of view of its relations) and essential acts (where we think of the Divine Nature absolutely).
Cajetan identified that “This question does not concern the reality considered absolutely in itself, but the reality insofar as it is described and apprehended by us”.
One cannot accuse of heresy those who were not in a position to be able to comprehend that a particular position implies a denial of the faith.

Difficulties

Relations, notions and properties are all the same reality, differing from one another only conceptually. This distinction is not available to reason alone but is itself guided by revelation.

Question 31 - Terms Referring to Unity and Plurality in God

2010-11-17T16:33:00.002Z

Why this Question Matters.

Aquinas has established that the persons of the Trinity are subsisting relations, the relations being derived from the scriptural data concerning processions. He now moves on to discuss what we can say about various aspects of the Trinity. The character and focus of this question may, at first reading, appear to be slightly odd. However, it reflects the keen interest that medieval philosophy took in the functioning of language and in the relationship between language and the traditional areas of philosophy. (In these concerns, medieval philosophy shows a fascinating similarity to many aspects of the linguistic philosophy of the twentieth century). The choice of subjects for the articles of this question reflects some of the most important and lasting controversies in the Middle Ages about the use of language when applied to God. Aquinas’s immediate concern in this question is revealed in the body of the second article: “heresy arises from words that are used incorrectly” (quoting St. Jerome) and “There is no other place where error is more dangerous, where questions are asked more rigorously, or where anything more fruitful is found” (quoting St. Augustine). So then, what can we say about God as Trinity and what must we avoid saying?

The Thread of the Argument

A1: Aquinas has shown that we can attribute a plurality of persons to God; in this article he demonstrates that we can be more specific and attribute the name “Trinity” to this plurality of persons. The argument is very straightforward: the name “Trinity” simply signifies determinately what the word “plurality” signifies indeterminately. The bulk of the article is devoted to answering a number of linguistic objections to this attribution.

As an example, the first objection suggests that names must either signify the substance of God or a relation within God. The word “Trinity”, taken as a name, can’t signify the substance because this would attribute the substance of God individually to each person (leading to tri-theism). However it can’t signify a particular one of the relations because it clearly is not a referential word. Although Aquinas admits that etymologically the word “Trinity” would appear to refer to the single essence of the three persons, as it is used in the context of God it refers to the number of persons in the single essence. The objection has set up a false dichotomy.

A2: The question of whether we may say that the “Son is other than the Father” had a lengthy pedigree in medieval times; it almost became a standard scholastic exercise. The fundamental dichotomy is that we want to be able to say it in order to distinguish between these two persons of the Trinity, but we must beware of the possibility of it expressing the idea that the Father and the Son are different in the sense of being substantially different. Aquinas uses this background to chart a terminological course between the Arian error of dividing the substance of God and the Sabellian error of conflating the persons. In thinking about Arianism, Aquinas teaches that we must avoid words like “diverse”, “different”, “separate”, “divided”, “disparate”, “alien” or “discrepant” because all of these are too suggestive of various erroneous positions. However, we can use the word “distinct” especially if we note that it is referring to the relations. He comes up with a similar list when considering Sabellianism. Essentially, Aquinas is attempting to build a list of allowable words and their definitions in order to avoid the sort of misunderstandings that arose frequently in the past.

In addition Aquinas applies the principle of expositio reverentialis by saying that when we come across an orthodox authority who uses language imprecisely we must recognize that we have to understand that language in an informal sense, substituting correct formal terminology as we read.

Having considered such terminology, Aquinas concludes that it is reasonable to say that the Son is other than (alius) the Father because the word implies only a distinction of supposita rather than of substance. It’s worth noting that in the reply to the fourth objection Aquinas is so precise as to say that alius (i.e. the masculine grammatical gender) refers to the supposita and therefore acceptable whereas aliud (i.e. the neuter grammatical gender) refers to the common essence and therefore cannot be used.

A3: The next article tackles the linguistic question of how the word “alone” can be used when talking about God’s essence. In order to address this question Aquinas introduces the grammatical ideas of categorematic and syncategorematic terms: a term is categorematic if it can stand as the subject or predicate of a proposition. So in the phrase “a white elephant” the term “white” (acting as a predicate) signifies something absolutely with respect to the subject “elephant”. On the other hand, a syncategorematic term is one that is not categorematic. Words like “of” and “and”, “all” or “none” are usually (always?) syncategorematic. A word like “alone” can act in both ways: compare “Socrates is alone” with “Socrates alone is writing”: in the first proposition “alone” is functioning as a predicate describing the fact that Socrates is on his own. In the second proposition Socrates need not be alone; we simply learn that Socrates is the only one writing.

Aquinas observes that we can use “alone” syncategorematically when speaking of God’s essence (“God alone is eternal”, for example) but not categorematically (“God is alone” for example). To do the latter would contradict the conclusion reached in the previous article.

A4: Having dealt with the question of how the word “alone” may be used in propositions about the divine substance, Aquinas now asks the same question of propositions about the divine persons. If we take the proposition “The Father alone is God” then we can immediately see that a syncategorematic reading does not work as it attributes solitariness to the Father (against the teaching of Article 2). Even when we read it syncategorematically, we have to be aware of different possible meanings. The correct meaning is equivalent to “He, being the only one who is Father, is God”. Aquinas points out that this is such a subtle use of grammar that it is dangerous and that such phrases should not be left to stand on their own but should have explanations attached. Aquinas provides precisely such explanations for a number of common examples in the replies to the objections.

Handy Concepts

Aquinas is guided again in this question by the need to sail between the twin Trinitarian errors of Arianism and Sabellianism.
Aquinas practises and preaches the doctrine of “expositio reverentialis”: we must read orthodox authorities with sympathy and reverence, realizing that although the terminology may be misleading, or the ideas insufficiently developed, the kernel of the ideas presented is correct and what the authority writes should be built upon rather than demolished.
A term is categorematic if it can stand as the subject or predicate of a proposition. Otherwise it is syncategorematic. Words such as “alone” can only be used syncategorematically of the substance and persons of God and even then should be used with care and glossed precisely.

Difficulties

Why does Aquinas not refer to the idea of transcendental multiplicity in the first article?
This question may appear to be reserved only to grammar nerds, but the underlying principle that sloppy use of language can make a complete hash of theology is a vitally important one.

Question 30 - The Plurality of Divine Persons

2010-11-15T11:52:00.001Z

Why this Question Matters.

God is one and yet God is three. In this simple statement of Trinitarian faith lays one of the greatest mysteries of Christianity. That it is true is a matter of faith and, Aquinas believes, it cannot be demonstrated on purely metaphysical grounds. Still, we can ask whether it can be considered coherent. Aquinas has identified that scripture reveals to us that there are real subsisting relations within the Godhead and that we can identify these with the “persons” identified in the creedal statements of the Church. Aquinas now focuses on the question of plurality in the Godhead with respect to the persons: is there plurality? How many persons are there in the Godhead? In what sense can we even think about using number when it comes to the persons of the Godhead?

The Thread of the Argument

A1: In the light of the Christian teaching on the unity and simplicity of God, the first question to ask is whether it makes sense to talk about a plurality of persons in God. Of course the Christian Tradition, here illustrated by the Athanasian Creed, insists upon such a plurality and Aquinas aligns his teaching with this. As the notion of “person” corresponds to a relation subsisting as a reality in the Godhead and as there are a plurality of such relations, then it makes sense to talk of a plurality of persons in God.

The reply to the first objection sees Aquinas continuing his explanation of the possibilities for confusion in the Greek and Latin terminology. The second objection asks why, when the absolute properties of God (such as goodness and wisdom) do not lead to differentiation, relations do lead to such distinctions. Aquinas recalls the fundamental difference between absolute and relative properties: the very being of relations is founded in their pointing to something else; they exist in opposition. It is this that creates the multiplicity from relations. Continuing this theme, for the third objection Aquinas points out that a plurality of absolute things (such as goodness, wisdom) does not create plurality in God because of His simplicity. But relations, because of their pointing-to-the-other, do not create the type of composition of thing-and-property that would contradict simplicity. Finally number, by its very definition, would seem to create parts-within-a-whole. Aquinas replies that, at the very least, we can attribute number as an intellectual construct to God because such a construct exists in the intellect rather than in the thing itself. He postpones until Question 42 Article 4 a discussion of why number existing in things (as when we count parts of a whole) does not pose a challenge when we apply it to the Trinity.

A2: Having accepted that we can reasonably talk about persons in the Godhead, we must continue the enquiry of Question 27 Article 5 and Question 28 Article 4 and check that Aquinas’s Trinitarian theory gives us the “right” number of persons. Aquinas argues that the real distinctions among the persons arise from their being in relational opposition to one another; therefore all he has to do is to count the genuine relation oppositions. The technical difficulty arises from the doctrine that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son (the famous filioque clause of the creed). Unless care is taken over the relational opposites associated with the Holy Spirit, there will be some double counting.

The relations to sort out are the spiration and the procession (the latter in the sense specialized to the Holy Spirit). First Aquinas points out that procession cannot be associated with the Father and/or the Son, since if this were so the relations of paternity and sonship (based on intellectual procession) would be founded on the procession of the will. Therefore procession is associated with the Holy Spirit and spiration is associated with both the Father and the Son. In the reply to the first objection, Aquinas goes a little bit further and explains that whilst paternity, filiation and procession are personal properties (i.e. they constitute the persons), spiration is not as it neither belongs to a single person nor constitutes a single person.

A3: When we talk about plurality or number in the Godhead we are faced with one of the central mysteries of the Trinity: how can there be just one God (who is absolutely simple) and yet there be these three “persons” in the Godhead. So far, we may have been unconsciously assuming that we apply the concept of number univocally to God and to creatures; but is this valid? What does it mean to apply number to God? Do numerical terms imply some reality in God?

Aquinas observes that the notion of plurality arises in two ways. On the one hand, material things can be divided into subsets and from this we associate number with quantity. On the other hand there is a transcendental notion of plurality that arises from dividing being into the one and the many. This latter is the only sort of plurality that makes sense for immaterial things. Aquinas claims that previous authors have become muddled on this issue by attempting to apply the first notion of number to God. Aquinas rejects this line of thinking, suggesting that if it is followed one can only make sense of numerical claims about God in terms of metaphor.

Aquinas therefore considers number as applied to the Godhead in terms of the transcendental notions of unity and multiplicity. Aquinas has already applied the transcendental notion of unity (convertible with being) to God’s essence in Question 11 Article 1: When we say that God is one, we are positively affirming that His being is an undivided reality. Here Aquinas applies transcendental multiplicity to the Godhead: what this affirms is that each person is undivided and that each person is not some other person. Put in this way, Aquinas claims that we can then affirm number to the Godhead as a reality and not just as a metaphor or simply as an intellectual construct. Moreover, as Aquinas lays out in his reply to the third objection, unity does not exclude multiplicity but rather excludes division. Similarly, multiplicity does not exclude unity but rather division between the realities out of which the multiplicity is formed.

A4: The final article in this question is a somewhat technical exploration of how the notion of “person” can be considered common to the three persons. That there might be a problem is explored in the objections: for example, only essence is common to the three persons, therefore personhood cannot be common to them. Similarly, if “person” is common to the three then it is either a real or conceptual commonality. If it is only a conceptual commonality then there is really only one person; if it is a real commonality then this would seem to set up “person” as being a universal with God possessing particularity, or genus and species, with respect to this universal (see Question 3 Article 5).

Aquinas points out that when we talk about creatures such as men, the name “person” is common to them, but it is a different sort of commonality than that implied by saying that they share the same essence. It is not a real commonality, but the type of commonality that it is has been something over which various authors have disagreed. Aquinas argues that this commonality is a commonality of concept, pointing towards the notion of an indeterminate individual (such as we refer to when we say “a man” without any particular man in mind). Even with this vagueness, in the example of “a man”, we point towards a common nature, together with a particular mode of existing as a per se individual. Now when we use the term “person” (as opposed to “a man”) things are slightly different: we are pointing towards a reality that subsists in a particular nature. This is what is conceptually common to all of the divine persons.

In answer to the objection against conceptual commonality, Aquinas points out that even when we consider creatures, commonality of personhood does not set up commonality of genus or species, so the objection fails. Moreover, things are simply different when we consider the divine: the persons share a common being whereas creatures particularizing a universal have different beings.

Handy Concepts

“Persons” in the Godhead correspond to subsisting relations and therefore we can talk about a plurality of such persons.
Spiration is a real relation in the Godhead but does not belong to or constitute a person; therefore the four real relations in the Godhead correspond to three persons.
In considering number and plurality to arise out of the division of being into the one and the many, Aquinas is following Aristotle’s Metaphysics.
The discussion of number as applied to the Godhead had rumbled on for many years during the middle ages. A good discussion of the background to Aquinas’s treatment can be found in Chapter 7 of Emery’s “The Trinitarian Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas”.

Difficulties

In the sed contra of Article 2, Aquinas quotes the famous Johannine Comma as an authority in favour of the tri-personality of God. Although the canonicity of this writing is disputed, it can still be considered at the very least as an ancient authority.
Aquinas’s reduction of the four real relations in the Godhead to the three persons may seem a bit of an ad-hoc sleight of hand to accommodate the filioque. However, one might note that the problem doesn’t simply go away if one insists that the Holy Spirit proceeds only from the Father, and even might be considered worse if this were the case. Having two real relations (paternity and spiration) associated with the Father would seem to associate two persons with the Father!
In the de potentia (Q.9 A.5) Aquinas writes that “The plurality of persons in God is an article of faith, and natural human reason is unable to investigate and adequately understand it.” We emphasize again that Aquinas is not trying here to derive this truth of faith from reason but is trying to show that it is at least rationally coherent.
The difficult notion of transcendental multiplicity is discussed at more length in Aquinas’s de potentia Q.9 A.7.

Question 29 - The Divine Persons

2010-11-13T12:00:00.002Z

Preamble

Aquinas has now established that there are real relations in God and that, as a consequence of divine simplicity, these relations are substantial. He has also identified the connections between the notions of procession and relations. Having dealt with these highly abstract concepts, Aquinas now devotes Questions 29-38 to an understanding of the idea of “persons” within the Godhead, connecting this notion with those of procession and relation, and providing a detailed discussion of each person. In Questions 39-43 he will then discuss in more detail the relations between the persons of the Godhead.

Why this Question Matters.

Aquinas is now aiming at a metaphysical elucidation of the classical Christian affirmation that God is three persons (Gk. hypostases) in one substance (Gk. ousia). The next step in this process is for him to address the question of what is meant in this context by a “person”. Aquinas has available to him a number of different definitions of personhood current in medieval theology; the one he favours is that of Boethius: “The person is an individual substance of a rational nature”. One of the major strengths of this definition is that it applies not only to human persons but can also be applied, by analogy, to angels and to divine persons; it is an expansive and inclusive definition. However, Aquinas has to explain carefully what the terms of the definition mean as it is easy to misunderstand what it is driving at. Having established a metaphysical definition of “person” he then has to discuss the various Greek and Latin terms used in Trinitarian theology, as to avoid later confusion. Finally, Aquinas delves into how the notion of person applies analogically to God: from this discussion will emerge the critically important idea that the persons within the Godhead are the subsistent relations identified in the previous two questions.

The Thread of the Argument

A1: Aquinas first addresses the suitability of Boethius’ definition of person. He observes that if we consider substances in general (i.e. the genus of substance) then we quickly recognize the fact that we can identify individual substances. Individual substances have the property that they subsist in themselves: they do not require some other substance to specify their being. Contrast an individual substance like a ball with the whiteness of the ball: the ball subsists in itself, but the whiteness (which we are quite entitled to call this whiteness) depends for its being on the ball. Aquinas identifies such substances as primary substances or hypostases. Further, there is a more perfect mode of particularity to be found amongst those substances that are rational; they are in control of their actions. These rational individual substances are what we call persons.

The objections to this article mostly focus on technical issues involved with the definition. For example, if we are taking “substance” in the definition to refer to primary substance, then it would seem redundant to refer to an individual substance. Aquinas replies that the addition of the word “individual” is justified because it adds the property of “not being assumable by another”. Although this may seem odd, Aquinas is thinking of the special case of individuated human nature in Christ: from the definition of Chalcedon we know that Christ is not a human person; His personality is that of the second person of the Trinity. Similarly one might object (on Aristotelian grounds) that the definition should use “essence” instead of “nature”. Aquinas replies that the sense in which “nature” is being used here (slightly different from Aristotle’s use), which is the essence of each particular thing, is better appropriate that the more general term “essence”. The reply to the fifth objection looks forward to Aquinas’ teaching on the soul: a separated substance (such as the soul of a human after death) is an individual with a rational nature but is not a person. Aquinas replies that the soul is a part of a human person and therefore cannot be identified as being a primary substance. It may be an individual, but it is not an individual substance.

A2: Terminology has always provided an obstacle to the understanding of Trinitarian theology. Even when the Doctrine of the Trinity was approaching its definitive conciliar form there was confusion between different theological schools that were using the same words to mean subtly (and sometimes not so subtly!) different things. Therefore, it is always a good idea, before embarking on Trinitarian speculation, to have a session devoted to the defining of terms. In the objections to this article Aquinas gathers together arguments and counter-arguments to suggest that a person, an hypostatis, a subsistent and an essence are really the same things. In a twist of scholastic humour, Aquinas gathers arguments for and against this position from a single author, Boethius, who is also the author from whom he has acquired his definition of person!

In his reply, Aquinas identifies two senses of the word “substance”. In the first sense, the substance of a thing tells us what that thing is: it is a thing’s what-ness or its quiddity. In this sense, substance is the same as the Greek ousia and can be identified with essence. (As an example of this use, in the creed we affirm that the Son is consubstantial with the Father; consubstantial is translating the original Greek term homoousios).

The second sense of the word “substance” is a bit more complicated, but basically refers to an individual thing within the genus of substance. As such, it can be described in a number of different ways. It can be referred to as a suppositum, which is a logical term referring to the thing that underlies some attributes (so, for example, the ball is the suppositum that underlies the property of roundness). Secondly a substance can be called subsistent insofar as it exists as a thing-in-itself and not in another (so the ball subsists but the roundness does not, as it exists in the ball). Thirdly, a substance is a thing-with-a-nature (the ball exhibits the nature of what it is to be a ball). Fourthly, a substance is called a hypostatis or substance in that it underlies its accidents (so the ball underlies the whiteness of the ball).

All that is left to Aquinas now is to specialize these words to the genus of rational substances.

A3: The Athanasian Creed explicitly attributes personhood to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but one might ask whether this is a reasonable thing to do. Aquinas replies by saying that subsisting in a rational nature is the most perfect thing in the created world and by the teaching of Question 13 Article 3 it is therefore quite reasonable to attribute personhood to God. We do, of course, have to remember that such an attribution is by way of analogy and that the personhood attributed to God is attributed in a far more excellent way than it is to creatures. Aquinas’s answer to the question set in this article is quite straightforward; the bulk of the interest comes in his replies to the objections.

First of all, one might object that scripture gives us various words and formulations to describe God and that we should not go beyond these. Aquinas admits that “person” is not said of God in scripture but he claims that what personality describes is used many times of God. Moreover, if heretics are to be refuted, then new ways of expressing the ancient faith are quite appropriate. In a similar line, one might object to the very word “person” because its etymological derivation is quite inappropriate to God. But this is to fall into the etymological fallacy; because a word originates in one way this does not imply it necessarily retains such a meaning (especially when it is being used, as here, in a technical sense).

In the reply to the third objection, Aquinas adds an important qualification to what he said about hypostatis in Article 2. In the created world, a substance is called a hypostatis insofar as it underlies its accidents: but in God there are no accidents, so surely we cannot apply the notion of hypostatis to God. Aquinas replies that, when applied to God, we are not thinking of hypostasis in this way but in terms of signifying a subsistent entity. He also relates some history of the terminological arguments in the early Church: as the Greek term “hypostasis” used to be translated as the Latin “substantia” (that is, “substance” or “essence” rather than the later understanding of “subsistence”), confusion arose as the Latins thought the Greeks were attributing three essences to God.

Objection 4 collects together some terminological problems. A rational nature would seem to imply discursive cognition, which is not true of God (Question 14 Article 7); individuation would seem to imply individuation by matter, again not applicable to God; God does not have any accidents, so how can we call Him a substance? Aquinas answers the first and third of these by pointing out that rationality can be thought of in a much wider sense and that substance refers, more fundamentally, to per se existence. In answering the second objection, Aquinas introduces the important idea of individuation as incommunicability. An individual is one for whom it makes no sense to attribute its properties to something else. So, for example, it would make no sense to attribute my thoughts to some other person.

Aquinas’s answers to objections 2-4 emphasize the importance of understanding that in Trinitarian theology terms are borrowed from the metaphysics of created reality and are given subtly modified technical definitions when applied to divinity. Failure to realize this will lead to failure to understand the analogical way in which personhood is applied to God.

A4: Aquinas leaves the hardest problem until last! How are we to understand personhood when it is applied to God? How does the analogy with created personhood work? The fundamental problem lies with our use of the word “person” in everyday language: when I talk about “that person, John”, I am referring to a concrete individual, to a primary substance. When I talk about a “group of people”, I am pointing to a plurality of individuals; the concept of relation doesn’t seem to enter into view at this point. Aquinas recognizes this and recalls that some theologians (including St. Augustine) took the word “person” as signifying the essence in God. They took the relational aspects defined by conciliar decree as a sort of ad-hoc “add-on” intended to confute heretics. Aquinas is not satisfied with this explanation, arguing that it simply leaves the door wide open for further misconceptions.

Another way of looking at the use of the word “person” when applied to God is to consider that it simultaneously points to both substance and to relation. The question remains as to which is primary: does “person” signify substance primarily and relation indirectly, or does it signify relation primarily and substance indirectly? Aquinas is happy with neither of these approaches but affirms that the second is closer to the truth; still, more work needs to be done.

To do this, Aquinas notes that we have to distinguish between what we signify when we talk about a “human person” (“this flesh and these bones and this soul which are the principles that individuate a man”) and what we signify when we talk about a “divine person”. When we talk about divinity, we remember that there are no accidents in God: the divine relations subsist in exactly the same way that the divine essence subsists. Therefore Divine Paternity (relation) is God the Father (person) is divinity (essence). Therefore, “divine person” signifies a relation as subsistent. For Aquinas, when we are talking about divine personhood, relation and essence are tightly interwoven and although we might assign priority to one, we have to remember that such identification is wrapped around with provisos.

So, Aquinas notes that his solution is, in a sense, consistent with the two previous ideas about relation and essence suggested above. However, it is important to note that he has welded the two ideas of relation and essence together much more closely than the previous theological solution would have it. It is true that “person” signifies relation directly and essence indirectly but we must note that it signifies “relation” as an hypostatis when we are talking about divinity. Similarly, it is correct to say that “person” signifies essence directly and relation indirectly but we must remember the proviso that this is insofar as hypostasis and essence coincide.

Handy Concepts

Aquinas adopts the definition of Boethius: “The person is an individual substance of a rational nature”. It’s a good definition from his point of view as it is (i) accurate and (ii) amenable to a strategy of analogical predication.
Individuals are characterized by their self subsistent existence. They are also characterized by the property of incommunicability.
It is important to grasp the technical meaning of the terms used in Trinitarian theology and to recognize that their analogical use when applied to divinity can mislead us if we are not careful.
Personhood in God corresponds to subsistent relation. Later on we will see that, in a sense, we should say that God is Father not because he has brought forth a Son; rather He has brought forth a Son because He is Father.
In article 4 Aquinas challenges St Augustine and corrects him. It’s interesting to note the way in which he does this: he has the confidence to take on an argument of one of the greatest of the Church Fathers but he also has the humility to do this is in a very gentle way. Augustine is correct insofar as he is using the theological language available to him, but Aquinas sees the need, and has the ability, to develop what the saint has done. This is a recurring pattern in Aquinas’s work.

Question 28 - The Divine Relations

2010-10-12T18:03:00.001+01:00

Why this Question Matters.

In the previous question, Aquinas identified as foundational to the explication of the Trinity the scriptural affirmation of processions within the Godhead. The fundamental points were made that these processions are immanent to the Godhead and that mistaking these immanent processions for the economic activity of the Trinity was at the root of the two important ancient heresies of Arianism and Sabellianism. Aquinas is now faced with the task of putting metaphysical flesh on the bones of this traditional interpretation of scripture. The basic tool that he has available to him is that of the category of relation. The strategy is quite straightforward: the processions within the Godhead define relations; as there are no accidents in God, these relations must be substantial rather than accidental; these relations are the persons within the Trinity. Aquinas will lay out the foundations for this strategy of persons-as-relations in this question and will complete it and elucidate the detailed consequences in the subsequent questions. All the while, he will navigate between the heresies of Arianism, Sabellianism and Tritheism.

The Thread of the Argument

A1: Aquinas is immediately faced with a fundamental problem in applying the category of relation to the processions in the Godhead. In the Categories, Aristotle identified relation as an accidental category. We know there are no accidents in God; hence such a category is inapplicable to God. This problem was well known by the time of Aquinas and had led to a realization that Aristotle’s notion of relation (set out in the Categories) had to undergo development and modification if it was to apply to the divine substance. Therefore Aquinas’s first question: “Are there any real relations in God?” is an entirely natural one to address. The objections home in on the obvious problems: there can be no accidents in God and it looks as though the relations involved here are actually “relations of reason” rather than “real relations”. The sed contra points out that if paternity and sonship are not real relations then God is not the Father or the Son in reality but only as a construct of our minds; an obvious lapse into a form of Sabellianism. In his reply, Aquinas observes that it is only in the category of relation that we find terms that express what is conceptual as opposed to real. Sometimes the relations between things are of the very nature of the things involved; sometimes, though, they are simply because of our understanding of the world. The processions in God are of the former type, because what proceeds from the Father has the same nature as the Father; this is paradigmatically a real relation.

A2: Having established that there are real relations in God, Aquinas now spells out the consequences of this by asking whether these relations are identical with His nature. One might doubt that this is so because in the normal course of events relations are something different from the substances in which they inhere. One might also point out that if God’s nature is fundamentally relational, this would seem to make His nature dependent upon something other than itself, which is clearly wrong. The sed contra points out that anything that is not the divine nature is a creature and yet, in the liturgy, we worship these relations as co-equal to God.

Aquinas briefly discusses two aspects of the accidental categories when we are talking about created things: their inhering in a subject (that is, their being is a being-in) and their specific character (or their essence). In the accidental categories other than relation, the specific character of an accident also inheres in its subject. So the accident of height inheres in a subject and is to do with the subject alone. For the accident of relation, though, things are different: the relation inheres in a subject but its specific character is associated with being directed to something outside the subject. One possible mistake to make here (which St Thomas ascribes to Gilbert de la Poirée as the reason for the latter’s condemnation by the Synod of Rheims) is to take account only the essence of a relation whilst neglecting its being-in a subject. If one does this, then a relation appears to be something that is not intrinsically associated with a subject.

Once one has realised this double aspect of the accident of relation, then the consequences of transferring this notion from creatures to the divine substance is that the being of a real relation can no longer be accidental, it has to be substantive. Therefore a real relation in God has the being of the divine essence and is therefore the same as the divine essence.

It might be objected at this point that in identifying the being of the real relations in God to be identical with His essence we have collapsed the persons of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit into one another. But we have to remember here the dual aspect of relations: they have a being-in a subject (which has here been identified with the divine essence) but they also have a specific character to do with going-out-to (or pointing-to) something (its “relational opposite”). So the being of the relations are the same, but their pointing-to their relational opposites differ. This fact is taken up explicitly in the next article.

A3: It would appear that since the relations in God are identical to His substance, then they cannot be distinct. Similarly, one might view the only real relation in God to be that of procession (or origination); any two examples of such could not be really different, but only conceptually so. Aquinas’s answer is disarmingly simple: if we attribute something to a thing then we attribute to it everything that is contained in the definition of the attribution. In the case of relation, the definition doesn’t only include the being-in of the relation but also the pointing-to of the relation. It is by the latter that the relations within God are distinct. Therefore we can quite happily affirm that when we think of the being of God, then unity follows on this being; when we think of the relations in God, distinction follows.

A4: Having established that there are real relations in God, now is the time to count them. Aquinas has already implied that there are four: those associated with Fatherhood, Sonship, Spiration and being-Spirated. The objections list a number of putative examples which would seem to suggest a multiplication of relations even as far as infinity. Equally one might object that Fatherhood and Sonship (respectively Spiration and being-Spirated) go together as a pair and should therefore only be counted once, giving us less than four.

When Aristotle discussed relations in the Metaphysics (as opposed to the Categories) he identified that relation is either founded on quantity or upon action (or being acted upon). As there are no quantities in God, the real relations in God must be founded upon action. Therefore the real relations in God are founded upon the internal processions in God (because the external relations with creatures do not define real relations in God). Therefore, from the investigations of Question 27, there can only be two opposite relations each corresponding to the two immanent processions within God. The procession of the Son from the Father gives us the relations of Paternity and Filiation; the Procession of the Holy Spirit gives us Spiration and being-Spirated). These pairs of opposed relations are genuinely distinct as each member of a pair has a different pointing-to. The examples of possible other relations presented in the objections fail, as they each boil down to a misunderstanding of God in His single act of being.

Handy Concepts

Following the tradition that he inherited, the fundamental metaphysical tool that Aquinas uses to build his theology of the Trinity is the notion of relation. Although the category of relation is not the most immediately given datum of revelation (that place belongs to the processions), Aquinas sees it as inevitable that any orthodox theology of the Trinity will necessarily be resolvable to one of relation.
The real relations in God correspond to the procession revealed in scripture.
In the created world, relations do not only have their being in some subject, they also have a going-out-to or pointing-to their “relational opposite”. We can distinguish between their being and their specific character. This twofold aspect of relations becomes critical for distinguishing the persons in the Trinity, when we generalize the notion of relation to the divine substance.
In using relations in this way, Aquinas has explained the unity of the substance (their being-in is the same) as well as the distinction of the persons (their pointing-to is different).
There are four real relations in God because that is what scripture reveals to us.
The connection between the real relations in God and the person of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit will be made in the next question.

Difficulties

It was well known by the time of Aquinas that Aristotle’s conception of relation as set out in the Categories needed to be developed in order to deal with the divine substance. (Indeed, Aristotle himself carried on developing the theory in the Metaphysics.) It is reasonable to ask whether the theory of relation was adequate by the time Aquinas applied it in his Trinitarian theology. Some would argue that his conception of relation was inadequate; others would say that it’s been downhill all the way since his time.

Question 27 - The Procession of the Divine Persons

2010-10-09T18:16:00.003+01:00

Preamble

It used to be standard practice to divide the summa into a number of “theological treatises” and on that account, we are now moving from the “Treatise on the One God” to the “Treatise on the Blessed Trinity”. It’s now less fashionable to make such a hard and fast division, and more in keeping with the times to emphasise the unity in the work as a whole and the intimate connections between the different parts. There’s truth in both approaches: to cut the summa up into pieces risks losing the unity that is undoubtedly there; but equally we must note that the character of the work changes at certain key points, which Aquinas himself often signposts. At this point in the summa, Aquinas tells us that we are now to turn from considering the oneness of the divine essence to those things that pertain to the Trinity of persons in God.

It is important to note that, although this is not a hard division, we are moving from the realm of “natural theology” (where metaphysics can conclusively demonstrate facts about the existence and being of God) to the realm of “revealed theology” where facts about God are discerned by reason applied to the data of revelation. Aquinas firmly believed, in opposition to a number of prominent theologians of his time, that the truths of the Trinity cannot be demonstrated by means of metaphysics; they are purely truth of revelations. This does not mean that he believes that metaphysics has no role to play; on the contrary, the role of metaphysics is to show that arguments against the truths of faith are not proofs. Metaphysics can be used to show that the truths of the faith can be explained in a rationally coherent way consistent with other scientific (in the widest sense of the word) truths.

One consequence of this is that there may be many ways of approaching and expressing the truths of the Trinity; unfortunately not every way of approaching the Trinity, however attractive it may be, is rationally consistent in this way with the truths of faith and of reason. Aquinas will spend much of his time in this part of the summa showing how it is possible to misunderstand the data of revelation and how this has led people into error throughout the ages.

Aquinas’s presentation of the doctrine of the Trinity does not arise out of thin air. He is indebted to the Fathers of the Church who came before him and especially to St Augustine (in the West), the Cappadocian Fathers (in the East) and the some of the documents of the early ecumenical councils. However, it is also true to say that Aquinas produces a creative synthesis out of the tradition that is handed on to him that goes deeper and further than that tradition.

Why this Question Matters.

One of the most fundamental questions in the consideration of the Trinity is: where to start? What are we to make of the data of revelation; what in it is most foundational for Trinitarian theology? The Christian doctrine of the Trinity is revealed in scripture but, as is well known, it took some centuries before the Church was able to elaborate and define what it meant by the claim that God is one substance in three persons, by an extended reflection on the meaning of scripture. St. Thomas starts his teaching on the Trinity by identifying that the most fundamental notion that scripture gives us is that of an “immanent procession” in the Godhead. We are quite used to the creedal claim that the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father and the Son”; what Aquinas notes is the scriptural teaching that, in sense, both the Son and the Holy Spirit “proceed” from the Father and that the “procession” of the Holy Spirit has a double meaning (which he will elaborate in later questions). In this question, Aquinas starts his meditation on the Trinity by elaborating the notion of “procession” and by introducing two ancient and fundamental heresies (Arianism and Sabellianism) that demonstrate how misunderstanding the idea of procession can lead to theological shipwreck.

The Thread of the Argument

A1: Following his standard practice, Aquinas first of all asks whether it makes any sense to talk about “processions” in God. The idea of this question, of course, is to understand the correct meaning of the word in this context and to point out how it can be misunderstood. In everyday life, “procession” usually means something like “a going out from”. The objections build on this observation to claim that such a notion of procession is incompatible with the divine essence. There is no motion in God, so there cannot be a “going out”; if something “goes out”, it is different from what it goes out from, but there is no diversity in God; if God goes out from God, it would seem that the first “God” referred to cannot be a first principle. The sed contra observes that scripture tells us about this “going out” from God; what then does it mean?

In his answer, Aquinas introduces a distinction between what we now call the “immanent” and the “economic” processions in the Trinity. To do this, he introduces us to the Arian heresy, which took the Son to be first among the Father’s creatures and the Sabellian heresy which took the Father, Son and Holy Spirit to be different modes of existence of the one God. He does this because he identifies the root of their mistakes to lie in their identification of procession purely with “economic procession”. This latter refers to the going out of the Son and the Holy Spirit into the created world from the Father. Aquinas claims that what the Arians and the Sabellians missed was the fact that this economic procession is founded in an “immanent procession", a procession that goes on within the Godhead itself. To help us visualize this idea, he gives us the analogy of the intellect understanding something; such an understanding, in a sense, both goes out from the intellect but also stays within the intellect itself. The intellect may present such understanding to the will so that (economic) action may follow upon this immanent understanding. Later on, Aquinas is going to push this analogy further; here he hints at by introducing the phrase “the word in the heart” to describe such a process of understanding. That Aquinas intends the reader to make the connection with the opening of St John’s Gospel should be clear.

The answers to the objections should be clear; the objections make the same mistake of identifying the economic processions of this world with the immanent processions within the Godhead. However, the reply to the third objection hints at a future theme. We’ve already seen that creation goes forth from God’s creative knowledge; itself a kind of procession. It is no coincidence that Aquinas will consider creation immediately after his teaching on the Trinity, as he sees the creation as an act of the whole Trinity.

A2: Having established the fundamental nature of procession within the Godhead, Aquinas immediately turns to the tasks of specializing this notion to the cases of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and of relating procession to the other words that scripture and tradition use to describe the relations between the persons of the Trinity. In this article, he looks at the description of the Son as “begotten of the Father before all worlds” (as the Nicene Creed puts it); the notion of “begetting” or “generation”. Applying the notion of “generation” to the Son might appear troublesome: we use the word “generation” to refer to the coming to be (and decay) of material things, this would clearly not work as far as the Son is concerned. Similarly, if Aquinas is going to push his analogy of procession with the conception of an idea (or word) in the mind of God, then how does he explain that we simply don’t apply the word “generation” to this mental process? Finally, if something is generated from another thing, it receives its existence from the latter. But if the Son is fully God, then He must be self sufficient existence and not receive His being from another.

Aquinas points out that “generation” can be used with a very wide meaning corresponding to a general notion of coming into existence and going out of existence but that it can also be used to refer to a process whereby something living comes into existence with the same nature as that that generated it. It is this latter use that carries over by analogy to the case of the Son being “generated” by the Father.

Replying to the objections, Aquinas points out that the first objection is founded upon the wider meaning of the word “generation”. The second objection is trickier. When we form an idea in our minds, that idea does not have the same nature as our minds, so in this sense the analogy fails. However, God’s act of understanding is His very being; hence the Son that is generated in this sense does have the same nature as the Father. Finally, and trickiest of all, one has to accept that the analogical use of the word “generation” has its limits. When we are talking about the generation of the Son, we have to understand that whilst He is generated by the Father, He doesn’t receive existence into some subject but rather He receives His existence as from some principle. The concern here is to avoid any notion of “subordination” in the Trinity (that the Son and the Holy Spirit are in any sense inferior to the Father) whilst recognizing that there are relations of order in the Trinity (so that the Father can be said to be the principle of both the Son and the Holy Spirit).

A3: Aquinas has connected the fundamental notion of procession with the generation of the Son and now he turns to the procession of the Holy Spirit. There are objections to the idea of more than one procession in the Godhead: if two, then why not three and four and so on? There is only one nature of the Godhead to be communicated, so how can there be more than one procession communicating that nature? The third objection is an excellent example of Aquinas anticipating an objection to the solution that he is going to propose: the procession of the Son corresponds to the going forth of a word in the intellect of God; the only other similar possibility would seem to be that the procession of the Holy Spirit corresponds in some way to the will of God. But in God, the Will and the intellect are the same thing, therefore there cannot be two processions.

Aquinas does indeed turn to the will of God as the solution to this question. In our minds, the intellect proposes something to the will as a good and the will is drawn by its nature to this good: there is a coming forth of love, immanent to the will, towards that good. By analogy, the immanent procession of the Holy Spirit corresponds to the procession of love towards the word in the intellect of God. The first objection is met as there is naturally within the Godhead, this structure of intellect and will, and no more. However, Aquinas will devote Article 5 of this question to a further consideration of this issue. The second objection is met by observing that what is true in the created word is not necessarily true of God. In God, any procession would be a means of communicating the divine nature.

The third objection goes to the heart of the difficulty of the doctrine of the Trinity; it challenges any notion of there being “structure” within God, as everything in God is in some sense “convertible”. Aquinas, of course, spent a lot of time showing that we can talk about things like intellect and will in God and that these notions, though imperfect, have some correspondence with reality. So here he is not going to give up so easily! Nothing can be loved by will unless it is conceived in mind so these processions, although they are related in being the same substance, are distinct as processions.

A4: Having established that it is fitting that the procession of the Son be called generation, Aquinas now has to face the awkward consequence of his argument that one might also call the procession of the Holy Spirit generation as well. This would be rather embarrassing, as Christian tradition (here Aquinas quotes the Athanasian Creed) holds that generation is unique to the Son. To answer this, Aquinas points out that intellect and will differ from one another in the following way. The intellect understands something when there is a likeness of the thing in the intellect for it to ponder. The will wills something not because the something is present in likeness but because it tends towards that thing. Therefore the procession that corresponds to the intellect carries within itself the very notion of likeness and thus corresponds naturally to the notion of generation (whence like comes from like). The procession corresponding to the will, on the other hand, carries with it the notion of tending-towards. We don’t have a particular name for this procession immediately to hand, but scripture indicates that we can liken this to the breathing of a spirit and so we can call it “spiration”.

A5: Returning to the first objection to Article 3 above, Aquinas now shows why there are only two processions in the Trinity. Given the way that Aquinas has explained the notion of procession, he seems open to the objection that over and above intellect and will we might attach a procession to God’s power or to His goodness. Similarly, we observe that created minds have many more than one single idea and therefore surely God must have many ideas, each of which would correspond to a procession. To meet these objections Aquinas returns to emphasize the fact that we are considering immanent processions in this question. We will see later that many things do proceed from the Godhead externally but as for immanent processions, he observes that in spiritual beings (and therefore by analogy in divine beings) there are only two actions that remain within the agent, those of intellect and will. Consequently there can only be two immanent processions that correspond exactly to these.

Handy Concepts

The fundamental data of revelation concerning the Trinity lies in the notion of immanent procession within the Godhead. Although our experience in the world is of the action of the economic Trinity, we do not have to work backwards from this (as we did when we inferred God’s existence from his action in the world) to the immanent Trinity as the latter is revealed directly in scripture.
Two of the “great” early Christian heresies were rooted in a misidentification of the economic Trinity with the immanent Trinity. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
The procession of the Son corresponds to the idea of a word in the intellect; the procession of the Holy Spirit corresponds to the loving movement of the will towards that word.
The procession of the Son can fittingly be called “generation”.
In the case of the Holy Spirit, the word “procession” is overloaded. The word is used in common with the procession of the Son but is also used as a particular name for the procession of the Holy Spirit (which can also be called “spiration”).

Difficulties

The idea that we can use the methods of metaphysics in order to discern truths contained purely in revelation (as opposed to natural theology) may seem troubling, if not repugnant. Aquinas was well aware of this objection and gives an extended apology for his approach in the opening two questions of his commentary Boethius’s “On the Trinity”.

Relations

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One of the important metaphysical concepts that Aquinas makes use of is that of a “relation”. He uses the concept in Ia q.13 in talking about how we are related to God and how God is related to us. When he comes to consider the Trinity, the notion of a relation becomes central. Aquinas will develop an exposition of the Trinity that maintains metaphysical coherence between the idea of God as “one” and God as “three” by identifying the “hypostases” (or “persons”) within God as “subsisting relations”.

This article is intended to give a brief overview of how medieval philosophers thought about relations as an aid to understanding how Aquinas uses the notion.

There is a superb article on “Medieval Theories of Relations”, by Jeffrey Brower, over at the online “Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy”.

In many ways, this article simply condenses and simplifies what is said there, so if the reader finds what is written here intriguing, puzzling or simply infuriating, relief may be had by going on to read Brower’s article.

We’re thoroughly used to using the notion of a relation in everyday language. For example:

“James is taller than Richard.”
“This potato is heavier than that tomato.”
“Hannah is my daughter.”

These examples seem quite benign, but when one starts to consider the metaphysics underlying such expressions of relation one is rapidly exposed to some surprising difficulties. For example, it would seem quite reasonable to think that “James is taller than Richard” expresses an objectively real fact about the world rather than simply being a consequence of how our minds organize their thoughts about the world. This being so, it would seem that a relation has to be some sort of real thing in the world as opposed to something that only exists in the mind. Where then does this relation exist? What is it? Does it have form and matter?

Medieval philosophers started their thinking about relations from Aristotle’s treatment in the Categories (which we mentioned in our Introduction to Metaphysics). In this work, Aristotle divided what we can express about things into two classes: substance and accident. Aristotle characterises substance as that which cannot be predicated of anything or said to be in anything – “primary substances”; or as that which can be predicated of something but cannot be said to be in anything – “secondary substances”. On the other hand, accidents are predicated of things in the sense of being (or inhering) in things. There is a primary division between being in a subject (accident) versus not being in a subject (substance).

So, for example, when we say that “that cat is white”, we are predicating something (whiteness) of some thing (“that cat”). The whiteness inheres in the cat as an accident, whereas the phrase “that cat” points to that particular cat rather than being predicated of it, and certainly does not inhere in the cat. So in our sentence, “that cat” points to a primary substance and “white” is an accident inhering in that particular cat. Similarly, in the sentence “that animal is a cat”, “that animal” points to a primary substance and “cat” is a secondary substance, a universal.

In the Categories, Aristotle went on to divide up the class of accidents into nine subclasses. One of these subclasses is what we are considering here, the notion of “relation”. Aristotle’s original Greek described “relation” as “pros ti” (“towards something”) and this description gives us an important clue about the metaphysical opportunities and problems associated with relation. The other eight accidental categories are all naturally associated with a thing-in-itself: we can happily say that “the ball is big” (the category of quantity) or “the ball is in the sandpit” (the category of place) but when we come to talk about relations involving the ball, we need something else there as well: the thing that enters into the relation with the ball: “the ball is bigger than the ant”.

When we think of our original examples, a sentence like “James is taller than Richard” seems to involve a number of aspects. First of all, each of the participants in the sentence has a particular height; the relation between the heights of James and Richard is said to be founded in the heights of each individual. Next, there is a comparison between the heights that dictates whether the relation holds or not. Finally there are the questions of where this relation exists as an accident and the sense in which we can say that the existence of this relation is real.

In the Categories, Aristotle held that a relation is not a separate thing to which the participants in the relation are jointly attached but is really explained by the foundational accidents involved. This idea bears a sort of similarity to Aristotle’s approach to universals; universals are instantiated in their exemplars, there is no Platonic third realm of universals where they have a totally separate existence. However, for Aristotle, relations (as universals) are still real entities with their own existence.

In the Middle Ages, although philosophers followed Aristotle in teaching that relations are real entities explained by foundational accidents, there was a dispute between those that held that relations amounted to no more that these foundational accidents (“reductive realism”) and those who held that although relations were founded on these foundational accidents, relations were sui generis accidents (“non-reductive realism”). These latter (including Aquinas) held that we should distinguish between such a thing as the accident of height and the accident of pointing-towards other heights founded upon the accident of height.

There’s a major distinction to be made between some modern approaches to relations, where they are considered to be things that hold between two or more things and the Aristotelian (and medieval) approach in which they inhere in one thing pointing towards another.

Medieval philosophers were also willing to recognize a distinction between propositions and situations that define real relations (so called “relations according to being” or “relationes secundum esse”) and propositions and situations that simply express relative terms (“relations according to speech” or “relationes secundum dici”). In other words, a distinction was made between what serves to relate things and what simply stands in some relation. For example, if we were to come across a decapitated body with its head by its side, we might say “this is a head” and “this is a body”. “Body” and “head” would appear to be relative terms related to each other, but do “this is a head” and “this is a body” express real relations? The problem is that if so this would appear to identify substances with relations, but according to Aristotle relations are accidents. The solution is to recognize that these relative statements are describing parts of substances and not relations. If we were to go on and say “this is the head of that body” we would now be expressing a relation between two substances whose accidental situation indicates that they originally came from one substance. Aquinas refers to this distinction in Ia q.13 a.7 ad1.

Let’s consider another problem: think about the relation of “equality”. “James is the same thing as James” seems to express an obvious fact about reality. If this relation is a real thing, which we’ll call “R1”, then we can immediately observe that “R1 is the same thing as R1”. This is itself a real relation which we’ll call “R2”. We can then apply this reasoning to R2 to get R3, and so on. We soon see that our simple notion of the relation of equality implies an infinite sequence of “real things” associated with one apparently simple relational statement! This would seem the sort of hopeless mess that would have William of Ockham rubbing his hands in glee. The way out of this conundrum is to observe that when we say “James is the same thing as James”, we’re not really saying anything about James. We could quite happily substitute the word “James” with any “x” that named a substance and we’d still have a true statement. Statements like this do not express real relations (“relationes reales”) but what the medieval philosophers called “relations of reason” (“relationes rationes”). In this example, we notionally posit a relation founded on the unity of the substance concerned.

There are also problems in other directions and Aristotle seems to have identified some of these problems in his Metaphysics, suggesting that he himself knew that the treatment in the Categories would not ultimately be sufficient for all circumstances. Much of the medieval debate about relations amounts to a debate about how to relate the theory of relations given in the Categories with that advanced in the Metaphysics and then how to square this resolution with the data of revelation about God.

As we saw, our original examples given above seem to be based on accidents in both the objects appearing in the relations concerned. “James is taller than Richard” depends upon a fact about James’ height and a fact about Richard’s height and a comparison between the two. However, this need not be the case.

“Richard is thinking about Fiona.”

This sentence seems to express a relation between Fiona and Richard that only depends upon some fact about Richard (that he is currently thinking about Fiona). There would seem to be nothing about Fiona that is involved in this relation. (If one argues that “Fiona is known by Richard” is the underlying fact about Fiona that grounds this relation, one should consider that this is just another way of saying “Richard knows Fiona”).

“I have arrived at a position to the right of the column”.

Similarly, this sentence provides another example where it is a fact about me that founds the relation rather than any fact about the column. In both of these examples there is a profound asymmetry. Medieval philosophers dealt with these examples by using the idea of a “relation of reason” that we saw above. They considered that even if there were no case for considering one side of the relation being real (or extra-mental) we should consider it as if it were so, projecting the mental relation onto the subject concerned. In examples such as these, there is both a real relation and a relation of reason involved. Philosophers such as Aquinas were quite happy to consider that certain relations did not introduce something in extra-mental reality. The discussion in Ia q.13 a.7 gives a clear example of Aquinas exercising these concepts of real relation and relation of reason simultaneously.

“I am thinking about those two chairs.”

This sentence would seem to set up a relation between two chairs (as well as a relation between me and the two chairs). But surely this relation expresses no facts inherent in the chairs themselves. Here we have an example where the relations involved are purely those of reason.

Finally, we come to the examples that motivated much discussion in the middle ages about the nature of relation and about whether the notion of relation put forward by Aristotle was adequate when dealing with the metaphysics of theism.

“God the Son is the son of God the Father.”
“The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.”

We already know from Aquinas that when we talk about God, we often talk analogically. Does this apply here, when we talk about relations involving God? Or are these statements literally true, and if so, how are we to understand them?

If we take the statement “Jesus is the Son of God” as being true, then it appears to set up a relation between God the Father and the God the Son. If we were to consider this relation to be purely one of reason, then we would fall into the heresy of Sabellianism (the idea that the distinction between the persons of the Trinity is purely notional). If we were to suggest that the relation is real in the Son and a relation of reason in the Father, then we would be falling into the error of Arianism (that the Son of God is a creature) because the reality of the relation in the Son would correspond to an accident in the Son which would imply that the Son was a creature. If the relation were real in both God the Father and in God the Son then we would seem to have set up accidents in both of them, contrary to the doctrine of divine simplicity.

Aquinas’s solution is simple and bold: when we consider relations concerning the divine persons, those relations can correspond to substances rather than accidents. Aquinas will spend much of Questions 27-43 of the first part of the summa developing the idea that the persons of the Blessed Trinity are subsisting relations within the Godhead.

Question 26 - God's Beatitude

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Why this Question Matters.

This is the last question “concerning what belongs to the unity of God’s essence”, the so-called “Treatise on the One God”. Aquinas has already reflected on beatitude as the last end of rational creatures; but now it is time for Him to consider how we might pre-eminently attribute beatitude to God Himself.

The Thread of the Argument

A1: Aquinas needs to define what he considers beatitude to be, so that he can overcome objections that suggest beatitude is to do with the accumulation of goods or is to do with being the reward for merit (which would make no sense for God). He states that beatitude is the “perfect good for an intellectual being” where that being is capable of grasping its own satisfaction with the good it possesses; is capable of doing well or badly; and is master of its own actions. From this definition, it is clear that beatitude belongs especially to God.

A2: When we think about God, although He is entirely simple, we can think about Him under different aspects. We can think about Him from the point of view of His essence or from the point of view of His will or of His intellect. How should we be thinking of Him when we consider His beatitude? One might consider beatitude, as it is to do with the good, to be to do with essence; similarly, as beatitude is to do with an end, one might also consider it under the aspect of the will. However, Aquinas insists that God’s beatitude is associated with His intellect. Everything with intellect desires to be blessed and the most perfect thing in an intellectual creature is the intellect by which it grasps all things. Hence the beatitude of an intellectual creature lies in intellectual activity. In God, being and understanding are really identical, but we can understand them in different ways. So it is appropriate for us to think of God’s beatitude in terms of His intellect.

A3: We might be inclined to simply identify the beatitude of those who are blessed with God Himself. Aquinas takes care to distinguish between intellect thought of as having an object to understand and intellect as the thing that does the understanding. In the first sense God is indeed beatitude as He is the object of the understanding intellect. But in the second sense, we should understand beatitude as something actually created in those who are blessed.

A4: Finally, Aquinas asks whether God’s beatitude encompasses all beatitude. As beatitude is a kind of perfection and God’s perfection includes every other sort of perfection (Question 4 Article 2) the answer is a straightforward “yes”. Anything desirable in a beatitude pre-exists in God’s beatitude. Aquinas takes this opportunity, at the end the “Treatise on the One God”, to offer a brief hymn of praise to God’s glory.

Question 25 - God's Power

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Why this Question Matters.

Having talked about God’s willing and His knowledge, together with things such as His providence that arise from them, it is quite natural for Aquinas to discuss God’s power; that by which God acts as an agent. We commonly call God infinitely powerful and also omnipotent, but what do these mean? A common objection to the notion of omnipotence is that it implies contradictions: if God is omnipotent what is to stop Him from creating a stone so heavy that He cannot lift it? Aquinas’s strategy is to pursue a careful line of enquiry as to what these terms mean, turning the common objections on their heads.

The Thread of the Argument

A1: Aquinas begins his discussion of the power of God by asking whether there is power in God. This does seem a very curious question but the very first objection against the thesis indicates the need for the precision that Aquinas will bring to bear throughout this question. The Latin word potentia, which is here translated as “power” can also be translated as “potentiality” and, as we have seen, God is pure actuality with no admixture of potentiality. This play on words indicates the need to distinguish between two kinds of potentia: a passive power that corresponds to the ability to be acted on by an agent, and an active power facilitating acting as an agent on other things. Clearly God has no potentia in the first sense but has it pre-eminently in the second sense. A number of objections are made that are each based on confusion about God’s simplicity. For example, power is a source of action (or actuality) but God’s actuality is his essence but His essence has no source. Aquinas replies that power, in the context of God, should properly be thought of in terms of the source of effects rather than of actions and this approach frees us from the contradiction. Similarly, as God’s knowledge and will are the cause of all things, the notion of power seems to be redundant. As before, Aquinas is willing to distinguish between what is real in God and what is conceptually useful for us in talking about God.

A2: We commonly think that there can be no limit to God’s power both in terms of amount and extent but this would seem to lead to problems when God applies His power to the created world. Any infinite power would seem to bring about an infinite effect; in particular, infinite force acting on a body would accelerate it to infinite velocity. But these are impossible. God’s active power clearly has to be infinite, as God’s essence is infinite (Question 7 Article 1), so the apparent contradictions must lie in confusion about How God’s power acts in creation. The confusion is twofold but basically arises from pushing the analogy of action within creation with God’s action too far. If a body were acting on another body with infinite power then we do indeed reach a physical nonsense. However, God is not a body nor does He act as a univocal agent. When the first body acts on the second its power is ordered entirely towards the single end of moving the second body. It has no “choice” in how it acts on the body; its action is strongly coupled and subordinated to the end of moving the second body. When God acts in creation He acts as a non-univocal agent whose power is not subordinate to any of its effects as an and. He chooses the end He wishes to achieve and uses as much of His power as is appropriate.

A3: Having dealt with the question of the infinitude of God’s power, Aquinas now turns to the question of the extent of God’s power: is God omnipotent? The problems that Aquinas has to face in this article are made clear in the objections: surely omnipotence means “being able to do anything”? But if God is omnipotent then he can act upon Himself; He can sin; He can create a weight that He cannot lift! Moreover, if God can do anything, then it would seem that what there is in the world and how it all fits together is entirely down to God’s will; there can be no notion of necessity in the world at all. Aquinas confesses that God is omnipotent but immediately admits that what omnipotence amounts to is non-trivial to determine. Aquinas’s solution is that God can do anything that is possible. What then does “possible” mean? According to Aristotle, one of the meanings of “possible” relates to what is possible to a particular power (this is called relative possibility). I can lift a fifty kilogram weight, but I cannot life a hundred kilograms. We might think that what is possible to God is simply the sum of all that is possible to created powers, but this seems far too restrictive. Neither can we say that God can do what is open to God’s power, as that would be circular. Aristotle’s second meaning of “possible” relates to what is absolutely possible. In this sense something is possible if it doesn’t involve an inherent contradiction. Put another way, a state of affairs is absolutely possible if it can have being. Nothingness is the only thing that contradicts being, so whatever simultaneously implies being and non-being cannot be absolutely possible and is beyond the remit of God’s omnipotence. Aquinas coins a neat way of putting it: “the best thing to say, however, is that they cannot be brought about, not that God cannot bring them about”.

A4: Having determined that God’s power stretches to all that is non-contradictory, Aquinas asks whether He can make the past not to have been. In other words (given article 3), is the mutability of the past inherently contradictory? In Question 10 Aquinas discussed time, aeviternity and eternity and it was clear there that understanding the relationship between a being that exists “in eternity” and beings that exist “in time” is a tricky philosophical problem. If one thinks of the analogy where God “looks” down on the four dimensional space-time universe, grasping all of it in one go, then it would not be too difficult to imagine that God may fiddle with what is in the past (as far as we are concerned). However attractive this analogy may seem, it can be misleading and Aquinas claims that to be able to change the past is inherently impossible. We feel perfectly at ease with the idea that saying Socrates is both seated and standing is a contradiction; Aquinas claims that to say Socrates was seated and was standing (simultaneously) is also a contradiction. If this little argument is not enough, the authority of Augustine and Aristotle are called on to bolster the argument.

A5: Since God foresees and pre-ordains what He actually brings about it would seem that God is unable to bring about what He does not bring about. In other words, God is constrained in what He brings about by what He actually brings about because of the way that He brings it about. Aquinas has already pointed out in Question 19 Article 3 that God’s will is not constrained by any natural necessity, so the fact that things have come about from God in the way they have is not a constraint on God. God was perfectly free to create the universe in whatever way He pleased. Similarly it is not correct to think of God’s plan of wisdom and justice as constraining Him. The confusion seems to lie in the fact that God brings all things to be in His single act of being; because we think of His single act of being under a number of different conceptual guises (His being, His essence, His power, His justice, His providence and so forth) we are liable to think of these different aspects constraining each other. We have to be careful not to allow these different conceptual approaches to God to obscure the single underlying reality. A further useful distinction to make that allows us to think coherently in terms of these conceptual distinctions without falling into the trap of thinking that their mutual inter-relationships constrain God, is between the Absolute Power of God and the Ordained Power of God. The absolute power of God refers to His radical freedom to bring about whatever He wills to bring about. His ordained power refers to His power to bring about whatever He has pre-ordained to bring about by reason of His just will.

A6: Having shown that God, by His absolute power, is not constrained in what He brings into being, we might ask whether He can make things better than He does. Aquinas answers this question by making a number of distinctions about how things could be made better. If we think of a particular thing then, as far as its essence goes, God cannot make it any better than it is because to do so would be to change its essence and therefore make it something different. He can, of course, make something different instead of what He has actually made. Although God cannot improve the essence of something without changing what it is, He can make its non-essential characteristics better; so a human can become wiser or more virtuous, for example.

Handy Concepts

God’s power refers to His active power rather than to any notion of passive power or potentiality.
God’s omnipotence reaches to everything that is consistent with being. This is sometimes formulated as the “Principle of non-contradiction”, that something cannot simultaneously be and not be.
We distinguish between the Absolute Power of God and the Ordained Power of God. The former refers to His power to bring about whatever He wills, the latter to His power to bring about what He wills.

Difficulties

In Article 3 Aquinas claims that God can only do what is inherently possible, in the sense of not involving a contradiction. He also states this in the form of saying that a state of affairs cannot simultaneously be and not be. Later thinkers such as Descartes claimed that part of God’s creative activity involves determining what the laws of logic themselves are. Therefore Aquinas’s “Principle of non-contradiction” is itself under God’s power. God could have made creation with different logical rules. This point of view is related to later medieval developments in the idea of the absolute power of God. As Aquinas himself observed, this idea is rationally incoherent, as our minds are subject to the laws of logic and anything outside this cannot be thought about: it is not to hard to turn the assertion itself into a contradiction (as far as our laws of logic are concerned!)
The argument in Article 4 that the past cannot be changed depends on something in the past having a sort of absolute existence. To assert a different past is therefore to assert a simultaneous being and non-being, because the event in the past has real being. But what happens if one attempts to argue that God “changing” an event in the past involves that event never having had existence? It would seem that to do so, one would have to leave any coherent notion of philosophical realism behind.

Question 24 - The Book Of Life

2010-08-02T19:19:00.001+01:00

Why this Question Matters.

Several times in scripture, both in the Old Testament and in the New, reference is made to the “Book of Life”. Clearly this book has something to do with the ultimate destiny of individual humans. In the article Aquinas clarifies the meaning of this term and reconciles some different accounts of its meaning found in the Christian tradition.

The Thread of the Argument

A1: As the “Book of Life” has something to do with the ultimate destiny of individual humans, a good question to ask is if this “book” is identical to predestination. Aquinas answers that, primarily speaking, the “Book of Life” is God’s knowledge of who He has predestined to eternal life and that the terminology of a “book” is a metaphor with the human activity of recording facts in books. However, Aquinas is willing to concede that the term “Book of Life” is open to more than one meaning. In particular, it can also refer to the Old and the New Testaments of the Bible inasmuch as the latter record those things that lead to life and it can also refer to the divine force which enables all to remember their deeds inasmuch as they lead to life. So although the “Book of Life” is about predestination there is a conceptual distinction between the two.

A2: One may also ask whether the “Book of Life” refers only to the elect predestined to glory or whether other things (such as God’s life or the life of all of nature) are recorded there. Aquinas insists that the “Book of Life” refers to those destined to glory because it is primarily to do with election to something beyond the natural. Neither God’s life, nor the course of the natural world involve election beyond what is natural to them, therefore they are not the subject of the “Book of Life”. In replying to the last of the objections, Aquinas observes that the life of grace is not in itself the end of life, but rather a means to the end. So one is only elected to the life of grace insofar as one is elected to the life of glory; conversely the fact that one is at some time granted grace does not imply that one is therefore predestined for glory. Those who ultimately fall from grace are said to be conditionally elected and their names are written in the book of life conditionally rather than absolutely. Aquinas will return to this point in the third article.

A3: It would seem that if one’s name is written in the “Book of Life” then it cannot be erased from there, as the election to eternal life is infallible. Aquinas recognizes that sometimes something is said to be done when it becomes known; therefore one might argue that one can say that a person is entered into the “Book of Life” when their grace becomes known and their name erased when it is clear that they have fallen from grace. Having said this, Aquinas still insists that human opinion is of secondary importance here; the “Book of Life” concerns objectives facts rather than human opinions. However, continuing the thread of argument in the reply to the final objection in Article 2, he recalls that the “Book of Life” is to do with elevation to the supernatural order and that therefore the “Book of Life” also contains the names of those who are conditionally elected. It is almost as if the “Book of Life” contains two sections: those unconditionally elected to glory and those conditionally elected. The names in the first part cannot be erased, but those in the second part can.

Difficulties

It seems a little curious that Aquinas makes no mention of the other books referred to in Apoc. 20: 11-12 out of which the deeds of all (predestined and reprobated) are recalled.

Question 23 - Predestination

2010-08-02T17:40:00.003+01:00

Why this Question Matters.

The predestination of the elect to glory is one of the great mysteries of the Christian religion. Consideration of predestination in general leads to a range of difficult questions: Why do some go to heaven and some to hell? If God is all-powerful why does He not redeem everybody? How can it be just that the elect are chosen irrespective of their merits? How does predestination differ from predetermination? If predestination is true, why should we not all be fatalists? Aquinas sees predestination as a special case of God’s providence which itself originates in God’s will. In this article he brings all the resources that he has developed in the previous questions concerning God’s will to bear on the question of predestination. In doing so, Aquinas set the parameters for discussion of predestination and the co-operation of primary and secondary causes for the next seven centuries.

The Thread of the Argument

A1: In this introductory article, Aquinas recalls that providence is the ordering by God of created things to their end and that everything falls under His providence. He goes on to identify that the destiny of a creature may simply be proportionate to its created nature or it may exceed its nature. For rational creatures, this latter is eternal life which consists in the vision of God. If the destiny of a creature is to exceed its created nature then it has to be lifted up to such a destiny by God. Such a destiny pre-exists in God and this planned sending of the rational creature to eternal life is called predestination. Therefore predestination is a part of the providence that applies to some humans and angels. Predestination is therefore not predetermination which implies a necessity of the end.

A2: Aquinas has identified that predestination is that part of providence to do with the sending of some rational creatures to eternal life. He now asks whether those predestined to eternal life carry a mark of their destiny within themselves. Here he seems to be thinking in terms of a parallel to the baptismal seal on the soul. Despite this attractive parallel, Aquinas denies that the predestined are identified in such a way. Predestination is part of providence and as such exists in the mind of God. However, recalling the distinction made in Question 22 Article 3 between provenance and governance, Aquinas distinguishes between “active” part of predestination that exists in the mind of God and its “passive” part that exists in the predestined: the predestined carry out the plan of predestination as a “calling” that can be attributed to them.

A3: Predestination is the sending of certain rational creatures to their eternal destiny in the divine vision. If some, but not all, rational creatures are sent to such a destiny, does this not imply that the remainder are sent to a rather less fulfilling destiny in a similar fashion? There are two questions wrapped up together in this article: does God reprobate some rational creatures to eternal damnation and is such reprobation a parallel to predestination so that there is a so-called “double predestination” (to heaven and to hell)? Aquinas’s answer to these troubling theological questions has become the standard account: God does reprobate some rational creatures but their reprobation is not a parallel to predestination. Predestination is a part of providence and, as was pointed out in Question 22 Article 2, the workings of providence may allow for failures. Therefore predestination is to do with those who are destined to eternal glory whereas reprobation pertains to those who will fall short of this goal. Aquinas notes that reprobation is not simply to do with God’s foreknowledge of those who will fail but also involves the intention to permit the reprobate to fall into sin and to impose the consequent punishment. In reply to the objections, Aquinas points out that although God loves all rational creatures and wills certain goods to all of them, He does not thereby will every good to all rational creatures. Dealing directly with the objection that reprobation must be to a person rejected like predestination to a person predestined, Aquinas answers that causality differs between the two cases. Predestination causes both the future gift of glory and the present gift of grace in the predestined. Reprobation does not cause anything in the present; that is, it is not the cause of sin which is to be attributed to the free will of the reprobate. It is the cause of the abandonment of the sinner by God and of the eternal damnation that is the just penalty for the sin freely willed by the reprobate. But if someone is reprobated by God, how can he be held accountable and punished for what he cannot avoid? Aquinas answers that lacking the gift of grace does not take anything away from the rational creature that he previously had; he remains responsible for his inability to avoid sin and is therefore justly punished.

A4: The fourth article asks what may seem to be a curious question: are the predestined elected (that is, chosen) by God? At first it may seem unclear what the question even means! A guide to what is going on in the article is found in the answer that Aquinas gives: predestination logically presupposes election, and election logically presupposes love. He wants to make a contrast between election (or choice) and love in us with that in God. We are spurred to love someone by a pre-existing good in that person; we choose that person because of that good and then we love them. So in us, a good precedes election which precedes love. The important point is that this order is reversed when it comes to God. God’s love for someone creates the good in them; so that God’s love for that person singles them out (or elects them) and creates the good (predestining them to glory). From Question 20 Article 3, we know that although God loves all of creation, he also loves some more than others. This inequality implies choice of some over others.

A5: One of the most puzzling questions about predestination is this: why are some predestined to glory and others not? An obvious answer might seem to be that God has foreknowledge of those who would be meritorious in response to the gift of grace and of those who would not be, and restricts the gift of grace to those who will. So, if we put it formally we might ask: is foreknowledge of merit a cause of predestination? This might appear a very appealing position to take, not least because it avoids the awkward conclusion that God would otherwise appear to be arbitrary and unjust. However, it must be pointed out that this solution has it own problems. After all, God creates the beings whose reactions He foresees, so it would seem that the problem of arbitrariness is simply pushed back to His creative decisions: why would God create some who would react well to grace and others who wouldn’t?

Aquinas starts his considerations of this question with a reminder of the conclusion of Question 19 Article 5 that it impossible to assign a cause of God’s act of will from the point of view of the act of willing itself. All we can do is to explain those relationships between acts of will where God wills one thing to exist for the sake of another. Aquinas is usually respectful of opinion with which he disagrees, but here he is willing to describe as “crazy” those who might be foolish enough to consider merit to be a cause of the very act of predestining. The questions that are valid concern whether there can be any relationship between merit and predestination and if so, what? The idea that those meritorious in a previous life are predestined in this life is rapidly dismissed. Similarly dismissed is the Pelagian argument that the first movement towards God in a human is made by the human themselves.

Aquinas now turns to the question of God’s foresight of the merits of those predestined. He immediately points out a central weakness in the thinking of those who propose this position: there is an incorrect separation between God acting as first cause and human free will acting as secondary cause, as if they were two independent modes of causality. The correct position is that secondary causes act concomitantly with the first cause; if we grasp this then we realize that human acts of freewill are themselves part of predestination. “God’s providence produces effects through the operation of secondary causes, so what comes from freewill comes from predestination.”

However, instead of finishing there and dismissing the question with a firm “no”, Aquinas goes on to make a subtle distinction. If we look at the predestination of an individual as a whole process, then we simply cannot assign a cause to it other that God’s particular act of goodness. However if we look at the internal structure of predestination (again following the lead of Question 19 article 5) we can see that we can attribute causal relationships between the components of predestination. A later effect of predestination may be considered a final cause of an earlier effect, for example. In this restricted sense, we can say that God preordains glory to someone because of his merits, but we must simultaneously say that He preordained that He would give him the grace required for him to merit that glory.

The third objection to this question is based on the argument from injustice: if God arbitrarily chooses some for predestination to glory (not based on any feature of those chosen or not chosen), then this is fundamentally unjust and so cannot be said of God. Aquinas’s reply to this objection is a long reflection on God’s goodness, which essentially concedes that we have reached the point where rational explanation gives way to mystery. God’s predestination is based on God’s goodness and Aquinas argues that the fact that some are chosen for glory whereas others are reprobated for punishment simply reflects that we have to consider the common good of creation as a whole: “God permits certain evils to be effected lest many goods should be impeded”. It appears that it has to be so for the greatest good of creation as a whole. However, when we turn to the question of why any particular individuals are predestined or reprobated, explanation runs out. Aquinas makes an interesting parallel concerning the composition of natural objects: why does God choose this particular bit of prime matter rather than any other bit of prime matter to be informed to become this particular rock? The reason lies in God’s will and is not open to our view. As to whether this is unjust, Aquinas points out that the gift of grace is exactly that: a gift that is owed to no-one. It cannot be considered unjust that God chooses to give a gift to some but not to others.

A6: Predestination, emanating from God’s will, might seem to be infallible. But equally, one might imagine circumstances where one of the elect happens to die suddenly whilst not in a state of grace. Aquinas reiterates that the order of providence and therefore that of predestination is infallible. However, this does not impose necessity on the course of events. As was argued before (Question 22 Article 4), God arranges contingent causes to bring about effects contingently and necessary causes to bring about necessary things. If someone is predestined, then in a hypothetical sense they could lose that predestination, but actually they cannot.

A7: Are there a fixed number of the predestined? Aquinas answers that there are and that this fixed number is made up of specific elect individuals rather than simply being a fixed number of vacancies to be filled up by unspecified individuals. This follows simply from what he has said in the previous article. As so often when there is a straightforward answer to the question, Aquinas probes deeper. He points out that it is not simply the case that God knows how many of the elect there are, but that His knowledge of this number is (through His determination) creative of that number. To illustrate this, Aquinas points out that in construction projects there are certain elements that are essential to the construction (knowing how many rooms there are to be, for example) and there are certain elements (the exact number of bricks, for example) that are incidental to the project. Something analogous pertains to the universe: there are elements within creation, the exact details of which don’t really matter; there are also other elements that do matter. One of those things that matters for the purpose of the universe is those rational souls that attain the beatific vision; hence God has planned their exact number and their identity in creating the universe. Aquinas will not speculate as to the number of the elect.

A8: Finally, Aquinas asks whether the prayers of the holy can contribute to predestination. The answer might seem to be an obvious “no” because whether or not someone is elect is determined in God’s will. However, Aquinas’s answer is much more subtle than that and gives us an important insight into how Aquinas regarded prayer. We can generalize from the context of predestination: what effect can prayer have on God’s will? Aquinas deals first with the simplistic approach that prayer is simply superfluous by observing that scripture admonishes us to pray, therefore it cannot be entirely irrelevant. He goes on to dismiss the contrary position that God’s predestination is changed by prayer again by appeal to scripture. To answer the question, Aquinas observes that as far as the very act of predestining itself is concerned, prayer has no effect. But if we consider the internal structure of predestination (following the lead of Question 19 Article 5 yet again) then we can see that God provides secondary causes that work together to effect the fulfilment of God’s primary-causal act of predestining. Prayer is one of these secondary causes; therefore it is quite appropriate to pray that someone may be predestined and that the predestined pray for themselves, for these prayers are all part of the matrix of secondary causes that God has ordained to bring about the purpose of the first cause.

Handy Concepts

Article 1 provides some of the material concerning the effect of grace in elevating rational creatures beyond their natural powers that became so important in the twentieth century arguments over the supernatural.
Aquinas makes extensive use of the argument in Question 19 Article 5 concerning the attribution of causes to God’s will. The act of willing itself is beyond causal analysis, but the internal structure of the effect of the act of will may be so amenable.
Despite Aquinas demolishing the idea that predestination may be associated with God’s foreknowledge of merit in the elect (Article 5), the idea came back in the form of the scientia media of Molinism. A good punch-up was had at the end of the sixteenth and into the start of the seventeenth century between the Jesuit supporters of Molinism and the Thomists concerning such relationships between grace and freewill in general. The Congregatio de Auxiliis was formed by the pope in order to decide between the warring factions, but no conclusion was reached save for an order to the parties to stop accusing each other of heresy. The decision was reserved to the Holy Office and we are still awaiting their decision today.
In the reply to Objection 3 in Article 4, Aquinas revisits the notion of God’s antecedent will and His consequent will (which we saw in the reply to the first objection in Article 6 Question 19). Antecedently and relatively speaking, God wills all to be saved; according to His consequent will and simply speaking, it doesn’t necessarily work out that way. Later in the summa, when Aquinas comes to the topic of grace, he will discuss how this works in more detail and he will lay the foundations for the doctrines of efficacious grace and sufficient grace that follow from these aspects of God’s will.

Difficulties

Article 3’s distinction between predestination and reprobation may seem an artificial construct to avoid the notion of double predestination. Indeed, Calvinists rejected this distinction and affirm that God does predestine the elect to glory and the rest to hell.
In article 5, Aquinas concedes that we cannot know why God elects some but not others. He makes a strong argument that such election is not unjust, but perhaps the flavour of unfairness remains. The nature of God’s love for the reprobated remains one of the great mysteries.
The argument of Article 7 depends on some elements of the creation being so key to the good of creation that God specifies them exactly and that other elements are not so important. For these latter, God knows them but his knowledge does not specify them exactly. For example, God specifies that there are enough of a species of animal for that species to flourish, but he does not specify the exact number of that species, leaving the latter to the playing out of secondary causes. This is another example of God creating necessary causes for some things and contingent causes for others.

Question 22 - God's Providence

2010-08-01T15:26:00.001+01:00

Why this Question Matters.

In the next three questions, Aquinas turns to the subjects of providence and predestination. Given that God’s causality simply is what causes everything to be, it might seem that what He plans for creatures has an inevitability that removes all freedom from those creatures. Even more specifically, it would seem to reduce Christianity (or any other religion that recognizes God as first cause) to the playing out of an inevitable Fate. In this question, Aquinas concentrates on providence; that is, God’s plan for His creation. In following a strategy similar to that of Question 19, Aquinas has to tread a careful line between absolute determinism and total incoherence in his argument that God’s creative power enables His creation to play a true causal role in the unfolding of the plan that God has for it.

The Thread of the Argument

A1: Aquinas asks whether it is appropriate to associate providence with God. Following a fairly well established pattern, the point of this question does not lie in a yes/no answer but in clarifying what we mean by providence when we use it in relation to God as opposed to other possible meanings. The answer is, of course, “yes”: God’s goodness is not only expressed in the creation of things and in His holding them in existence, but also in His ordering such created things to their end. When we talk about providence with respect to God, what we mean is the plan in God’s mind that orders all created things to their end. Aquinas goes on to connect this notion with the virtue of prudence because, humanly speaking, prudence is itself associated with the correct ordering of affairs. In the reply to the first objection, Aquinas quotes Aristotle to the effect that “prudence…commands what good deliberation well advises and what understanding correctly decides upon”. So there is a certain connection between prudence and providence in human affairs. When we consider God, however, we have to remember that this is an analogy and that He does not deliberate and that His act of understanding itself is creative of what is correct.

A2: If God’s providence were to extend to everything in the created world then there would seem to be a number of problems. How could anything occur by chance if everything was ordered by God’s providence? If God were providing for everything, how could misfortune befall anything? How could people make decisions for themselves if their lives were mapped out by providence? Aquinas simply reasserts that providence is God’s ordering of all created things to their ends and that God’s causation (being the first efficient causation) reaches to every secondary cause. In answer to the objection that chance would seem to be ruled out by universal providence, Aquinas points out that we consider events fortuitous or down to chance when particular causes are frustrated by other particular causes or when seemingly unrelated causes interact. Aquinas gives the example of two servants who meet by chance (as far as they are concerned) when carrying out the orders of a master who has foreseen their meeting by his intentionally sending them so they would meet. Particular causes may give the impression of chance to their agents, but from the point of view of the universal cause such chance events are foreseen. To the objection that misfortune and the occurrence of evil affecting individuals would seem to rule out universal providence, Aquinas points out the difference between particular and universal providence. Someone with care for an individual would indeed do their best for that individual, but one tasked with universal providence would preserve the good of the whole. Omelettes cannot be made without eggs being broken and lions cannot flourish without the death of their prey. Aquinas quotes Augustine: “Almighty God would in no way permit any evil in His works unless He were so good and powerful that He could bring good even out of evil”. In answer to the objection that free choice would seem to be incompatible with providence, Aquinas gives an answer that has some similarities with that of Question 19 Article 8 where the problem of reconciling contingency with the seeming necessity of things caused by God’s will is tackled. The very act of free choice itself goes back to the manner in which God’s causality acts. God’s providence assures the freeness of our particular choices that are themselves ordered to the end to which we are directed by God.

A3: God provides for everything but does He provide directly for everything? Were He to do so, it might seem to remove all causality from created things and would also seem, for example, to make God directly responsible for evil. To answer this, Aquinas distinguishes between providence and governance. The former involves the “idea or planned purpose” for things, the latter involves the execution of this planned purpose. Having made this distinction, Aquinas argues that God’s providence is universally direct but that his governance is executed indirectly through intermediaries (that is, the beings that He has created). As in Question 19, the idea here is that God acts as universal cause, laying out the plan for all creation but that as part of that creation he creates true secondary causes that execute that plan. Those causes are all ordered to their end though God’s provenance.

A4: Finally, Aquinas turns to the question of whether God’s providence imposes necessity on the things for which it provides. Given the answers to the last two articles, and Aquinas’s general overlying idea of created secondary causes acting under the providence of the primary cause, his answer that such necessity is not imposed on all things does not come as a surprise. Aquinas adapts and reiterates the teaching of Question 19 Article 8 that God’s providence prepares necessary causes for some effects, so that they come to be of necessity and that He prepares contingent causes for other things, so that they come to be contingently.

Difficulties

The idea that God prepares contingent causes (Article 4) is difficult to reconcile with what we might understand by contingency. See also Question 19.