Prima Pars
Lecture 95: Divine Sweetness, Justice, and Mercy in Scripture

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In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen. God, our enlightenment, guardian angels, strengthen the lights of our minds, order and illumine our images, and arouse us to consider more correctly. St. Thomas Aquinas, an angelic doctor, and help us to understand what you're doing. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen. So being that it's kind of a hot day here, I thought we should have a scriptural excursion. We just got through a little while back, talking about how there's mercy and justice in all God's works. And one of the texts that Thomas had quoted here was from Psalm 24, the correct number. And before we come to that particular line, which is quoted in the Summa Theologiae, he says about God here, the scriptural Latin text says, that God is dulcis et rectus. And dulcis is going to be understood by Thomas as referring to God as merciful. And rectus is being what? Just, huh? Now, in this text, he also explains dulcis or dulcedo, which is a metaphor. Now, a metaphor, as you know, is one of the most important figures of speech. And when we speak figuratively, the meaning of the speaker is not the meaning of his words. But there's a connection between the meaning of the word and the meaning of the speaker. And in the case of metaphor, the connection is one of likeness. So, in his commentary on this 24th Psalm, Thomas explains the metaphor of dulcis or sweet. And he says, sweetness is said properly, or non-figuratively, in bodily things. But it's said metaphorically in spiritual things. Whence, he says, is necessary in spiritual things, that sweetness be taken to the likeness of the bodily sweetness. And then he sings, symbols out, or sings out, three things about the bodily sweetness. Now, this is what bodily sweetness has. It refreshes the bodily taste. It quiets it down. And it, what? Delights it, huh? Pleases it, huh? Likewise, spiritual sweetness quiets and refreshes and delights spiritual taste. So, he sees three things in the metaphor of sweet, huh? Now, they often say to the students, teaching in college, the best explanation of the metaphor of sweet, or even the more particular metaphor of honey or something like that, is given by Thomas in his commentary on the Psalm. Even the romantic use of the word sweet, huh? So, if you call somebody sweet or honey, it's someone who's your sweetheart, maybe. Someone who loves you. And it's pleasant to be, what? Loved by somebody. It's also refreshing to be loved by somebody. As opposed to being hated by somebody, kind of wears you down, huh? Okay? It's unpleasant to be hated by people, huh? We only have probably spoke one time of the tenacious, ill will of some of his opponents. It's not pleasant to have people with tenacious who will look towards you. And it also is what? It's restful, right? You're at rest with someone who loves you, huh? Now, Shakespeare sometimes speaks of your sweet form. And then, sweet there is a metaphor for, not love, but a metaphor for beautiful. Your beautiful form, right? Now, we often define the beautiful by its effect. We say the beautiful is that which pleases with seeing, right? So, it's like the sweet insofar as it pleases, right? We also speak of a beautiful girl as a sight for sore eyes, which means that the beautiful refreshes our eyes. And I hear people say when they see a beautiful scene, ah, how restful. They can rest in that, huh? So, those three things are said. So, if you use the word dulcis as a metaphor for the divine mercy, that metaphor is based upon a certain likeness, huh? Between the divine mercy and the sweetness of the candle. That it's certainly very pleasing for God to have this will to remove our misery, right? And we can rest in God's mercy and its refreshing sort of thing, and so on. Now, coming back for a moment here, huh? Thomas goes on and says, But among men, huh? Sweetness is said insofar as they satisfy either themselves or others, often in bad things or in sins, huh? But in God, not except, except in the good. And therefore, he joins and rectus domino, right? Thus, that tocedo pertains to mercy, rectitude to, what? Justice. So, Thomas is explaining, then, the words of scripture. God is dulcis in rectus, huh? He's sweet and right, huh? That he's both merciful and just. So, it's saying the same thing that he teaches us in that article in the Sumba, that God is both, or question the Sumba, that God is both merciful and just. Now, we're on that. Let's just stop from it and notice something about this, huh? When Thomas explains, just said of God and mercy said of God, justice is said properly of God, the word. Just, huh? Regionally. Because justice is a virtue in the will. And God has a will. And that will is just. Now, you have to explain that it's distributive justice, not commutative justice, right? But, it's properly speaking, distributive justice there. But then, we don't have a proper word originally, anyway, for mercy. Because mercy first names an emotion, a feeling. The one that Aristotle talks about in the rhetoric and the quetics and so on. It's sadness or the misfortune of another. But there's no sadness in God. So, although the word mercy might, for want of another word, eventually come to be used properly, right? To name the divine will to relieve our misery and so on. Nevertheless, the word originally would be used in a kind of metaphorical sense. As distinguished from the word just. You know, if you didn't have the word just in you, use the word anger for God's justice. Okay, well, that's a metaphor, not anger properly in God. So, if you said God is angry and merciful. But, the point is, although scripture sometimes does metaphorically name the divine justice anger, you don't have to do that in the Summa, right? Because the Summa is not symbolic theology. It's not like that book that Dionysius calls symbolic theology, which is about the metaphors, but it's said metaphorically about God. But you have its own word, right? So, Thomas takes up the idea that God is just, right? He uses the word just. He doesn't use the word anger there, though. He might have some other context, huh? Talk about that metaphor. Now, here, he doesn't use the word merciful. He uses the word sweet. There's some likeness there, right? That mercy here, even more explicitly than the Summa, is being named metaphorically. And justice seems to be named more properly. Rectism. That's a nice connection between the two, huh? But now, another thing that strikes us about this... is that the order here, in the 24th Psalm, is the reverse of the order in the Summa. In the first article, that question on justice and mercy, the first article shows that God is, well, just, right? And the second article is showing that sometimes God's justice is called truth, right? Then the third article shows that God is merciful. And then the fourth article is showing that there's justice and mercy in everything that God does, right? So justice of God is shown before his mercy. But in the Psalm, the mercy is spoken of before the, what? Justice, huh? Any reason for that? Mercy is more attractive, perhaps, or is it the sweetness? Yeah. What's more attractive, why doesn't Thomas speak of God's mercy first? In the order, it's more apparent that God is truth or just. Yeah, yeah. It's more known that God is just, right? Because we know God has a will, but no emotions. And justice is a virtue of the will. And the, by mercy is first naming a passion, right? And that's clear, they belong to God, right? How can it even be said about God, right? Because there's no sadness in God, right? So Thomas, in the sense of showing that God is just, before he shows that he's merciful, seems in a way to be following the order of what is more known to us and what is less known to us, huh? As the old man says there, as in public, you know, he says, when you get to be an old man, that's applied to any of us here, of course, you begin to think a little bit, you know, but maybe there is some kind of accounting after death, right? You're thinking a little bit of, you know, justice, right? Maybe there is a setting of scores afterwards, huh? But as Thomas explains, huh? In some ways, mercy is more fundamental than justice, huh? Because you couldn't owe anything to anybody or distribute to anybody what is their due, unless there's someone there to distribute it to. And so in the very beginning, prior to justice is mercy, right? So, in the things themselves, you might say mercy is more fundamental than justice, and that's the order here, huh? Okay? Now, in the next verse there, huh, is where you find the quote that was used in the Summa there to show that there's both justice and mercy in God's works, right? And the Latin says, in this eighth verse, It's universee vie, domini, misericordia, and veritas, right? That's a text, and one reason why they have another article in there about how veritas can be used to mean justice on one of its meanings. And Thomas, here in the text, he quotes another one from Tobias, chapter 3, verse 2. All your ways are mercy and truth. Well, notice you had the same order there, right? You don't use the metaphor of sweetness, but you used the word misericordia, right? But that's given before veritas, which there stands for, what? Justice, huh? Now, another little texture. This is kind of going a little bit into, again, the metaphor of docedo, right? This is in the Psalm 30, the correct number, number 16. And he says, Sweetness is said in spiritual things, transumptive. Yeah, it's a big metaphor. For just as bodily sweetness delights the taste of the flesh, so that is called sweetness, which delights the mind inwardly. But it happens, it says sometimes that the sense of taste of the flesh is not well disposed. And it delights in some bad taste. Incorrupto sapere. And then it's false glad. And thus the affection of man, when it is not well ordered, delights in a thing which is not truly delightful. But if it is well disposed, it delights in the true good, which is the divine good. And therefore, the substantial goodness of God is called the, what? Sweetness of God. And he quotes Wisdom 1621. Your substance, huh? Shows the sweetness that you have in your sons. Or, Thomas says, the sweetness of God is said in that way in which someone is said to have a bitter affection. And he thinks how he can sadden others. And he quotes Ephesians chapter 4 of 31. Let all bitterness be taken away from him, St. Paul is saying. Therefore, by the contrary, the sweetness of the soul, when one proposes to console others. Whence the sweetness of God is the proposal by which he has said, or by which he has said, to wish all men to be saved. He's quoting there 1 Timothy 2.4. Taste and see how sweet is the Lord. Psalm 33. And he quotes again, totus erectus, going back to another psalm, right? And in whatever way, he says, sweetness is taken, it contains, what? Telegation, pleasure, delight. Because although it is one and simple in itself, nevertheless, it is the root and the fountain of all goodness. And therefore, whatever delights in the world, behold, it is in God. Now, you can go on, that is a text, but we were talking before, remember, about the wine there? And how Thomas, in the explanation of the wine, was growing short? Well, the sense of the letter is that the wine is growing short. They're running out of wine. But the spiritual sense, as we explained before, is that the wine of justice, the wine of wisdom, and the wine of charity, we're all running short. And Thomas explains a likeness between wine, each of those three, right? And it's not for the same reason, right? Insofar as wine bites and stings, it's a metaphor for justice. Insofar as it delights the heart of man, you know how the French corrected the scriptural text there? One wine rejoices the heart of man. The text just says wine rejoices the heart of man. And Thomas, you know, quotes that passage from, I think it's the book of Wisdom, you know, that there's no bitterness at all in wisdom, right? And then, so far as warm wine intoxicates us and warms us, it's a metaphor for charity and love. Well, what comes out in this text here, I think you can expand on it, is that sweetness can be a metaphor for more than one thing of God. Even though the one thing of God. We saw in the other text how sweetness can be a metaphor for the divine mercy, right? But here, it can be a metaphor for the divine goodness, the substantial goodness of God. So, when we were back in the treatise on the substance of God, right, you had the question of the goodness of God. And you found out that God is good and he's, more than that, goodness itself and so on. If you were in symbolic theology, you could speak of that goodness of God as the sweetness of God. Now, obviously, the good is going to be pleasing when you have it, right? But what does it question says? Thou hast made us for thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee. Thou hast made us for thyself, so that the... Thou hast made us for thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee. Quietat, he says, is one of the reasons for the likeness of this metaphor, right? You find rest in that, right? And then come to me and I'll refresh you, you will burn it, right? So the divine goodness is pleasant, is refreshing, and it quiets the heart, right? It quiets the heart. But it seems to me you could apply the metaphor also to the divine beauty. You know how Augustine says in the beginning of the Confessions, I think it is, who regrets the time he's lost. He says something like, too late have I come to know thee, thou ancient beauty. That's kind of appropriate, you know, Plato's, Socrates' discourse in the higher love matters, right? That they lead up to the beautiful itself. And this is really God himself. It's the same as the good itself, the beautiful itself, but the meaning is a little bit different, good and beautiful. But we're speaking before, how would Shakespeare speak of your sweet form? Your beautiful form. It's something that pleases the eye, it refreshes the eye, it quiets the eye, how restful the scene is, you know? See a beautiful scene, how restful. Well, this is a fortiori, true of the divine beauty, right? Okay? That to see the divine beauty is going to be extremely pleasing, right? The torrent of the light that you have in this. But you will be completely at rest, right? Let's look at anything else. And then finally, it will refresh you, right? Get tired of it. Look at this, you're so beautiful. So anything else that sweetens can be a metaphor, huh? It can be a metaphor for the divine mercy, it can be a metaphor for the divine goodness, the divine beauty, which were in the treatise of the substance of God, right? Anything else that could be a metaphor for it, okay? But in God himself, though, anything else could be a metaphor. And maybe even for it, you would say, the divine love, huh? So, you know, in our metaphor, sweetheart, right? Actually, sweetheart has got two figures of speech. There's a synecdoche, right? Because the heart is only a part of this person, right? So you're naming that person from a part. That's the figure of speech called synecdoche. But this heart is said to be sweet because this heart loves you, right? And then those three elements of the metaphor are sweet, huh? Pleasing to be loved by somebody. It's refreshing, it refreshes you, you know? And you're at rest with someone who loves you, right? And you can see that by its opposite, huh? It's painful to be hated by somebody. It makes you kind of, you know, a little bit noisous to be hated, you know? And it's not very restful. And it kind of wears you down. It doesn't refresh you at all, you know? What about the mind? I suppose you could, yeah. If, how does that, dulcis? Well, the reason I was, well, I was trying to point out that point with the text, dulcis and rectus, that one likeness between that text, right, and the summa is that dulcis is said metaphorically, right? A rectus seems to be said more properly than just, right? And that's like the words in the summa, because justice is said properly of God, right? Mercy could perhaps be said properly of God, but originally it would name a, what, emotion, a passion, right? So mercy, in a sense, is to the divine will. It's naming the divine will to relieve our misery. A little bit like anger names the divine, what, justice, right? But in the case of justice, it may have its own name, right? And, you know, if you go back, you know, and the second point I wanted to make was that, if you go back to the article there in the first question, summa, why does scripture use metaphors, right? It uses metaphors because these things are beyond us, right? So the fact that scripture in the 24th Psalm, or even Thomas in the question on race and justice, uses a word that is a metaphor, right? Or at least it's first a metaphor, is a sign that this is less known to us, kind of more beyond us, right? Okay? As if we could understand the divine justice better than the divine mercy, right? Okay? So by truth there is not, I don't think, a metaphor. But at least the first article is where it shows that God is just using the word just, right? He's going to make some distinctions there. That's going to be, as we said before, distributive justice and not commutative justice, right? But I say maybe the divine truth, which, you know, what you're thinking of, I think, was truth in another use of the word, right? Truth comes up in the tweet of Sun, what, understanding of God, right? This is kind of a peculiar use of the word truth, to name the divine justice. The word speaks, and that's the truth. The truth speaks, that's the word he says. Cast fire. I've come to cast fire on the earth. Well, that's not proper to speak. It's speaking of the word. So then, are there attributes, or for instance, justice, God's justice? Is God's justice not? Galatians could be apt to call the divine justice sweet, you know? It's in the text that we have, right? Sweetness is kept for mercy, and something else for the just, right? But, I mean, part of what we've just done is find a number of different applications. I mean, we've named two of the transcendentals as found in the divine, as being able to say, sweeten us up, and even of divine truth, which is all three. So, I mean, certainly locally to this text, there's... Yeah, but you'd speak of the divine justice as being moderated, so to speak, or sweetened by the divine mercy. I didn't speak of the justice so much as being sweeter, as being more severe. I think in the Divine Comedy, Dante presents the saints as having some kind of delight in God's justice that we can't have right now, because we can't... We don't have the understanding that the saints have. So when they see even, you know, the sinners in hell suffering, and then they see all God's providence, they can delight in the justice therein. Whereas for us now, we can't see everything, and so when we see suffering, it's difficult for us to see the providence present. So it's more apt to say that his mercy is sweet right now than to say that his justice is sweet. Although, I think, strictly speaking, you can say, sure, it's sweet, you know, those with vision. Yeah. I mean, the poets, you go back to Greek poets, I mean, they speak of, revenge is sweet, right? I'm not so sure we should find that sweet, but they'll speak of that, you know, as being, oh, really satisfying, you know? So I kind of avoid that way of speaking a little bit. Okay. Okay, this is a little reference here. Looking a little bit now towards us. in the psalm here, 31, he's talking about, again, the divine mercy. He says, Ipsum misericordiae, churcum dabit, the one who, the one who hopes in God, right? Or hopes in the Lord, right? Now, the one hoping in him. Now, sometimes Thomas will speak of the divine mercy as being an object more of our hope, right? And the divine justice as being an object of our, what? Fear, yeah. And a couple of texts where this comes up a little bit. We'll see eventually here. But this is another little text here. Going back to the Summa, as you mentioned before, there were four articles in the question on the justice and mercy of God, right? And the first one was that the justice of God, that God is just. And the second article was that the divine justice is called true, right? Well, in the Psalm 35, in the correct number, interesting little text here, where the word is used in another, slightly different way here. And I reached out to the thing in Latin a little bit, if you can stand my Latin here. Second verse. Domine in celo, in the heavens, misericordia tua. Mercy is in the heavens. Ad veritas tua, and your truth, usque ad nubes, as far as the, what? Clouds. Justitia tua. Secret montes, the mountains of God. Okay? Now there, veritas is, I think it's a third thing there, besides the mercy and the, what? Justice, huh? And Thomas coming in this, huh? Whatever God does in us is either from justice, or from mercy, or from truth. From justice, when he renders us something for our merits. From truth, when he renders what he promised. from mercy, when he excels our merits and his promises. Okay? Now he says, the justice of God is alta, is high, because no one so much merits, but that God gives him more than he merits. But the truth is higher, because God promises and gives things which we never merited, right? Such as the incarnation itself. And other things which pertain to the mystery of redemption. But mercy is altissima, the highest, because those things which we are not able to think are given. Eye is not seen, the earth is not heard, and he didn't quote the whole thing. It's just a common thing. And therefore, justice is compared, in that text I read you, to mountains. Truth to the clouds which are above the mountains, which are higher, and mercy to the heavens which are above all things. And he quotes another psalm there. Domine in celo misericordia tua. God in the heavens is your mercy, which is the cause of all our good things. And he has an interesting quote there from Isaiah. What's Isaiah? I recall the mercies of God and his truth and his justice as the mountains of God. That's a beautiful text. That's a beautiful text. It gives a little another use of the word truth. Now this is from Psalm 27, number 5. It should be known that man frequently sins. If you didn't know that, do you know it now? What? And from this he encouraged the guilt of punishment. And because through the many works of the divine justice, man is provoked to what? Fear. So there, okay, and through the works of mercy, he is provoked to hope, right? Sometimes he's converted to penance and he's healed. Well, there you have mercy of God being the object of our hope, right? The justice of God being the object of our, what? Fear, right? And you have a lot of texts of scripture in the present church that follow that, right? But occasionally you reverse it, right? And when I was gathering this, I couldn't remember the text in the Psalms, but I remember it's in the Psalms, where Thomas says that if you hoped in God's mercy but didn't have fear of his justice, you would become presumptuous. But if you feared God's justice and had no hope of his mercy, you would despair. So you need a balance of hope and what? Fear. And that's kind of a key to the spiritual life. And I suppose if you're a confessor of something of that sort, you have to try to give the one confessing this balance of hope and fear, right? So if a woman realized what she's done having had an abortion or something like that, right? I would think that would tend to lead to kind of despair about one's own condition or something like that. So you might have to strengthen her hope, right? And other times we feel that somebody is, you know, he's a good guy, he's going to let us all go home and, you know, at a wake sometimes, he'd say, well, his suffering is over. And my usually remark is, I hope so. I hear it for nothing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you heard me speak before of how in other contexts there there's other kinds of hope and fear of being a balance, right? And I mentioned the great dialogue of the Phaedo there, where Socrates is showing the need for a balance between the hope of finding the truth and the fear of being mistaken. And one place in the Phaedo where his friend is starting to get discouraged and kind of despair they're going to find the truth about the immortality. So Socrates very beautifully and very impressively leads him out of his despair and back to the investigation. And then he takes up the objections of Simeas and Sibas and first objections of Simeas and bang, bang, bang, three syllogisms each knocking down the premise of Simeas it's over and then nope. And then Socrates says no, no, it's not going to be so easy to answer Sibas, right? And finally he succeeds in answering Sibas and Sibas is even convinced that the soul is immortal and then Simeas says no, these are difficult movements yeah, we can think about these some more, but I can't today I'm going to die. But it's necessary to get that belt between hope and fear, right? I mentioned I think you know, my story my teacher told me under Monsignor Dion and how you know he went to see him after class one time he was a diligent student and went to the office and talked to Dion and Dion talked much differently in the office he said why are you talking so differently here? And he said well it's the business of the teacher to encourage the student here's a guy he didn't need To encourage, right? You had to, you know, slow him down, right? And when I was, you know, writing my doctoral thesis, I'd write it under Monsignor Dion and so on, and I came in with the outline of what I was going to do and so on. And he proposed a little change in it, you know. And then he proposed it, right? I could see it was improving. In fact, it was so good I could write the thing about myself from then on. But then he did. I said, oh yeah, it's not good the way it is. Oh, oh, oh, I don't have any evidence, he says. Here he's suggesting something that once I had, I could, you know, think about it by myself, really. And he'd give me the thing. Oh, I don't have any evidence. You know, like I'd be too quickly, you know. But, so you have to have that balance of hope and fear. And they say about a politician, he has to run scared, right? But if he had no hope of getting elected, he's not going to, you know, run much of a campaign, right? But if he, you know, overconfident and doesn't have a certain fear that the voters might turn him out as they do the rascals from time to time. Yeah, yeah. He's the spice of life. You heard the famous defense by Aesop, you know, the guy who was, gave money off the thing and so on. Remember that story? Yeah. He said there was an animal crossing the river and he jumped in between the rocks and he fell down between the rocks and got wedged in there. He started to bleed, right? And so the insects were coming down and they were feasting on the blood there. And some other little animal came by and he was too small to push him out. They said, you want me to chase the bugs away? And he said, no, no, no, no, no. They've had all they're going to eat, you know. If you chase them away, other ones will come and take the rest of the blood. So he says, my client, he says, he's made his money now. He's not going to take much more money out of the public till, you know. But you remove him and put somebody else in. He's going to take the rest of the money that's in the till. It was pretty damn good defensive. Come on, man. He's made his money now. He's not going to take much more from the public treasury. That's right, too. This is a text here from Psalm 39, number 2 here. Unless there was hope to fear, man would flee from God. And therefore it's necessary that there be fear by which he flees sin and hope by which he accedes to what? That's my little scriptural excursion there, right? From the treatise on the question on the mercy and justice of God, huh? Give me a little break now before we go back to the text of Thomas. I know we usually, it'll break to the weaker brethren now. We're actually having a question on the providence of God there, question 22, article 2, I believe, right? So we'll ask one quick thing before you jump into the break. Yeah? Would you tie up then the sweetness you mentioned at one point? The sweetness could be tied up clearly with the predestination of the elect and then the justice with the reprobate. You had spoken, I think, of that. Yeah, yeah. If you go to hell, you go there because of God's justice, right? Yes. Even though it's temporary, a little bit by his mercy, right? It doesn't punish you as much as you deserve. Right. Okay? But if you go to heaven, it's more God's mercy than his justice of it. There's some reward for merits of some sort, right? But still more mercy than justice, right? So it's not as if in one of these is found only justice and the other only mercy, right? But one is more predominant in one than in the other, right? Okay.