De Anima (On the Soul)
Lecture 94: Grace, Theological Virtues, and the Powers of the Soul

Transcript
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I had problems with my nose, you know, for the time. Like in great school, I'd blow my nose until noontime and then kind of stop, you know, for the day. Then it was lunchtime. Yeah, so now my joke is, you know, my wife says, you got a cold again. I said, no, no, it's just, it's not in remission right now. It's always there, you know, but sometimes it's in remission. Now, let me make a little theological footnote here to this business, huh? It's kind of interesting, huh? Now, you talk about the three great theological virtues, faith, hope, and charity. And you talk about sanctifying grace, huh? You talk about faith, hope, and charity. I love that, okay. Now, what's the relation between sanctifying grace and faith, hope, and charity there? Well, where are faith, hope, and charity? Where is it? They come from the grace. Where are they? In the soul. What part of the soul? What power of the soul? Yeah. Faith is in reason, right? The input, the understanding. And hope and charity are in what? Yeah. So they're in those powers that have a soul as a subject, right? Okay. So the one is in reason or the understanding. The other two are in the will. Okay. Now, what's the subject? Now, these are powers of the soul, right? Now, where is sanctifying grace? What is the subject in which sanctifying grace is? Yeah. Sanctifying grace is in the soul. Okay. Now, notice, huh? I didn't maybe dig into that I could have. What naturally flows from the soul, naturally now, right? Is the powers of the soul, and especially the reason and the will, right? Which not only flows from the soul, but they're also in the soul, right? Now, as St. Peter, for example, teaches us in his epistles, grace here is really a share in the divine, what? Nature. Okay? So, grace, being sanctified grace, is in the soul as in his subject. And just as it naturally follows from the soul, reason and will, so when grace is in the soul, there flows from the soul into the reason and the will, faith, hope, and what? Cherokee, huh? And especially the connection between grace and charity is strong, right? Okay? But, you know, there could be some kind of maybe unformed faith if you lost grace, right? But it wouldn't be formed faith. It wouldn't be the full virtue there. And you see, it's kind of analogous here, right? That just as the powers of the soul naturally follow upon or flow from the soul, right? So, the theological virtues in the powers of the soul flow from grace in the soul itself. So, it's not only one's reason is being elevated by the virtue of faith, right? And one's will is being elevated by hope and by charity, right? But one's soul is being elevated by grace, right? So, if you understand the relation of the soul to its powers, right? By a kind of analogy, right? The likeness of proportion, you can understand the relation of grace to faith, hope, and charity. But just as the powers of the soul flow from the nature of the soul, right? So, the nature of the soul is elevated by sanctifying grace, huh? As opposed to actual grace, as they call it, right? But sanctifying grace, they're naturally followed, you might say, right? From sanctifying grace. Certain virtues in those powers that will elevate them, right? So, just as my soul is being elevated by grace to a certain likeness to God, right? I'm being raised above what it is naturally, right? It's, as you see, something supernatural, right? This grace that is, as St. Peter teaches us, is a kind of sharing in the divine nature, right? Well, then we start to share in something of, what? God's operation, too, right? And there, but of course in us, it's going to be in our powers, right? Which is not the same thing as our soul. The powers are not the same thing as the soul. And so, it's going to naturally flow from grace, the elevation of the soul, certain virtues that elevate the powers that are in the spirit, right? In the immaterial part of the soul. And those are faith, hope, and charity, right? So, just, but now, you can also say this, that just as the reason and the will are not the soul, right? But they're like properties of the soul, following upon what the soul is, right? So, faith, hope, and charity are not exactly the same thing as sanctifying grace, but they follow upon sanctifying grace, okay? You see that? They flow with the work, right? But notice how, how, how they often say, grace never, what? Goes against nature, right? It elevates nature, right? And you can also say here that, in a sense, there's a certain harmony between the fact that reason and will flow from the nature of the soul, and then that faith, hope, and charity flow from the grace which elevates our soul, and makes it a certain way like God, more so than it was before it received the grace of it, okay? So, that's, how you should understand a little bit the relation there. So, if you understand this, you can understand, if you understand the relation of the soul to these, you can understand better the relation of grace to faithful and charity, you know? Sanctifying grace, huh? I mean, it wouldn't really make sense, you know, for the reason and the will to be elevated, not the soul itself. Because, after all, it's the soul that is understanding and what? Willing through these powers, right? So, my soul understands through its reason, right? And my soul wills and loves through its will, right? And so, the soul is going to be elevated as well as the reason and the will. See the idea? It makes sense when you start to think about it, huh? This is the way it is, huh? Yeah. In charity, sanctifying grace, right here, yet not in the soul, yet, so, we're distinguishing and sanctifying grace, which you hear is in the soul from faithful and charity. No, no, it's reversed in a sense. Well, we're saying that faithful and charity flow from the soul elevated by grace, right? That just as the reason and the will follow upon the very nature of the soul, right? So, when the soul has been elevated by grace to a kind of partaking of the divine nature, you know, So, when the soul has been elevated by grace to a kind of partaking of the soul, right? So, when the soul has been elevated by grace to a kind of partaking of the soul, right? So, when the soul has been elevated by grace to a kind of partaking of the soul, right? The words of Peter were kind of taken over in one of the cans of the Mass, right? You know, it talks about God partaking of our nature, right, when he became man, right? But as Augustine says, God became man so that man might become God, okay? God became man so that man might eventually partake of something of God's life, huh? Okay? And so it's to be expected that when the soul is elevated to a kind of partaking of the divine nature, that something is going to follow from that, right, in those powers that naturally follow upon the soul, huh? Okay? And the connection between grace and charity are especially, what, especially strong, right, huh? Because if you lose charity, you lose grace, right, and vice versa. They go together, right? They're tied up that way. A question you had about that? Sanctifying grace then affect, if it adheres in the soul, faith, hope, and charity are not, strictly speaking, sanctifying grace, but what effect will sanctifying grace have on the vegetative and nutritive powers of the soul? Well, since sanctifying grace appears in the soul, yet the faith, hope, and charity are in the intellect and will, in the spirit, but yet grace is in a certain sense... Yeah, there's another kind of overflowing, you know. It's like, for example, when you understand something that you've been trying to understand, right, or if I see some truth that I didn't see before, right, an interesting truth, you know, I tend to feel better physically, right, you know, but that's kind of an overflow from the top down, right, huh? It's a little different type of overflowing there, I think, you know. And it's not quite the, you know, if my body's very tired, maybe I won't have that so much, right, because the body is not disposed, right? But, you know, certainly when a man's will is very strong, right, it's going to influence his emotions, huh? So if somebody really loves you, like, you know, like John Paul II does, right, that's going to be reflected in a sort of emotional warmth there, too, huh? But that's a little different type of... There's some similarity there, right? You know, even, you know, the use of our reason might sometimes influence our imagination, huh? Because when I think, I'm going to imagine something, too, right? So the command of reason, the imagination forms. I want to think about the triangle, or these theorems I have on board here a minute ago, right? My reason, in a sense, is commanding my imagination to form, intersecting straight lines, or to form a triangle or something like that, right? Before I even put it on the board, huh? And I might think of those geometrical theorems on that that I'm going to a board, just, you know, form the triangle or the intersecting lines in my head, right? But I don't know why we're getting to that so much. That's interesting to talk about so much, you know? I think it's particularly relevant here, you know, to see something of the, what, likeness of ratios here, right? That in some way, grace is to faith over charity, to some extent, like, the soul is to reason and will. In what sense, huh? Well, given the nature of what the soul is, there are certain powers, right, that naturally follow upon what the soul is, okay? It's like a property in geometry, right? Follows upon what intersecting straight lines are, what a triangle is, right? Well, then, when that nature is elevated to a certain likeness to the divine, huh? By grace, which is a kind of partaking of the divine nature, huh? As St. Peter teaches us. Then there are flows, right, from the soul, elevated by grace, into the powers that follow naturally upon the soul. It's a certain elevation, right? So I'm elevated by the light of faith, my reason, right? And the natural light of reason that we'll be talking about when you talk about the act of understanding, right? But there's an added light to that. And one's reason sees how good it is to believe, right? In case of the sin, light there, you know? It's kind of like Cardinal Newman, you know, talks about after his conversion there, you know, to Rome and so on, right? The mysteries of the faith that he had some difficulty with, you know, accepting, you know, as an Anglican, you know, it all of a sudden became easy to accept, right? You see? And then they stood out as things to be ideas, right? So his mind had been elevated, you know, by that. And then hope and charity, right? You know, the acts of the will now have a certain, what, vigor that they didn't have before, right? You see? But, so there's a certain, you know, I don't want to identify these things because faith, hope, and charity are really what we classify in logic as habits, as virtues, the first species of quality, Aristotle talks about it, why reason and will would be in the second species of quality, the, you know, innate powers, and so on. It's a different thing, right? Okay? And again, it's between the soul and grace. Grace is like a disposition of the soul, right? Okay? But nevertheless, there's a certain likeness of proportion here, right? That just as the powers of the soul seem to follow what the soul is, right? So, faith, hope, and charity flow from grace, right? And it's even more intimate than that because grace is in the soul and faith, hope, and charity are in those powers, right? That's very interesting, huh? To see the way that is. I was fine with that. Oh, okay. I remember in grade school, you know, we had the geography book and we were reading about some foreign country where the big crop was peanuts. Oh, yeah, you're right, right. So I pretend to eat peanuts, you know. And his sister, St. Joseph's sister, if I was eating peanuts, are you eating in the way? I said, just pretend to eat, you know. You're reading about peanuts. Well, don't pretend, you said. Yeah, right. It looked like I was eating peanuts, you know. It's like a kid, you're reading about all about peanuts, the production of peanuts, you know, in this geography text. You're really taking it in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're sore, man. That's right. Exercise in your mansion. Yeah, I mean, if I speak about whining, I'd probably go, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so that's a little thing to think about after you think about how the powers of the soul flow from the soul, right? So say the first powers are habits and the second powers are what, I mean? I say, if you study logic, right, and the category, substance, quantity, quality, towards something, Christel distinguishes four kinds of qualities, right? And the first kind he talks about is habit or disposition, right? And the second kind of quality he talks about is these natural powers, huh? The third kind of quality he talks about is sensible qualities like hot and cold and black and white and so on. And the fourth species of quality talks about is figure or shape, huh? Now, Thomas talks about that teaching of Aristotle in the Prima Secundae, right? when he's going to start to talk about the virtues. Well, the virtues are one kind of quality, right? And so he calls the teaching of Aristotle about quality and the four species of quality, four kinds of quality, and he explains the order which Aristotle gives them. It's beautiful, right? The order he gives. But it's tied up with the fact that nature is what comes first, huh? And by the habit or disposition, you're well or ill-disposed towards your nature. So because the connection of habit with nature, he puts that first, even before the natural powers, right? Because the powers can be disposed ill or badly by the habits that they have. So if I have cruelty, right, and other bad habits like Saddam Hussein has, I'm ill-disposed towards being a man, right? But if I have the various virtues, then I'm well-disposed towards being a human being. I'm courageous, I'm just, I'm temperate, and so on, right? But if one of these things gets out of line and is badly disposed, then I'm badly disposed towards my nature as a human being. But we can't go into all that right now. But as you say, Thomas does give a very nice explanation. Unfortunately, we don't have a commentary on the categories that's really adequate to the work, huh? But, you know, you get little snitches here and there that I try to bring together when I lecture on the categories, where Thomas will discuss, you know, one of the categories maybe in particular, right? Yeah. But he does have kind of a general explanation of the distinction of the ten categories in the third book of the physics, huh? The third book of natural hearing and the fifth book of wisdom, right? And then he just teaches all ten of them in a kind of a general way, right? But then there are other texts where he discusses one category or another in particular in more detail. And he happens to, in the Prima Secundae, talk about quality a lot because he's about to take up the qualities called virtues. And so he wants to distinguish them from all the other ones, all the other qualities, so he recalls the teaching of Aristotle, huh? Okay? About the different kinds of quality. That's really a very fundamental work, the categories of Aristotle, huh? And not a very well understood work, right? And Porphy wrote the famous isagoge, the original introduction to the categories, because some guy was trying to understand the categories, I can't understand them. And so Porphy wrote this isagoge, the introduction to the categories, where he explained what these words that Aristotle uses, the genus, species, or in Greek, genos, edos, diaphora, huh? And so on. What these words mean, huh? And so that became a kind of standard thing, huh? I was looking at Averroes, you know, the Arab philosopher, Muslim philosopher down in Spain. And he's going to, you know, he's called the commentator in the Middle Ages because he commented on all of Averroes' books. He's going to comment on the categories, and someone says, you better comment on that. I said goge too, so Averroes says, okay, okay, because I have so much demand for me to comment on that. And when I first went to Laval, we read Albert the Great's commentary on the, you know what, I used to goge, kind of paraphrase, huh? And he has a paraphrase, the categories too, but it's not as good as Thomas would have done, right? And Thomas, you know, but you have to kind of pull together many different texts where Thomas happens to talk about, you know, this or that aspect of the categories. We don't have any commentary on it. The only commentaries you have of Thomas on the logical works of Aristotle is a commentary on the whole of the postural analytics, right? And then an incomplete commentary on the perihermoneus, huh? But there's no commentary by Thomas on the prior analytics or on the categories or on the book about places or his reputation, but there are times when he talks about these things a bit, right? As it comes up, right? So you can kind of, if you read all of Thomas and reread him and reread him, you'll find little hints, you know, to help you to understand the book, but... Ah, okay? Amen. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. God, our enlightenment, guardian angels, strengthen the lights of our minds, ordinate luminary images, arouse us to consider more quickly. St. Thomas Aquinas, Angelic Doctor. Amen. Do you thank our Lord for the coming man today? Amen. Amen. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. Amen. I think that's the time of the Incarnation, really, isn't it? Yeah, right. The Annunciation, so... Yeah, that's a good point. It's the feast of, not only the Annunciation, but the feast of the Incarnation, huh? Sure. So we're up to Article 7 here in Question 77, huh? And if you recall, Article 6 was whether the powers of the soul flow from the what? The soul, right? And some of them flow from the soul into the body, right? And others remain within the soul itself. Okay? But now he's asking a similar question about does one power of the soul proceed from another power of the soul? Now, to the seventh, one proceeds thus. It seems that one power of the soul does not arise from another. For of those things which come to be together, one does not arise from the other. But all the powers of the soul are together, created with the soul. Therefore, one of them does not arise from what? Another, huh? Of course, Simul, at once or together, is the opposite of what? Before and after, huh? That chapter I gave you from the categories on before, that's followed by a chapter on Simul or together. And so there's more than one sense of together. And more than one sense of one thing arising from another, right? So you could say, for example, that a property arises from or comes from the nature of the thing. So from the fact that the number two has come to be, Simul together is going to be what? Half of four, right? So half of four is going to follow upon this number being two, but not follow upon it later in time. It's not that you have two existing and then after a while it becomes half of four. No. At once when it's two, it's half of four. It's not that you have a triangle, a plane figure contained by three straight lines and so on, and after a while the angles start to become equal to two right angles. No. At once. Together, huh? Remember Aristotle's example there of, this doesn't mean every cause is necessarily simultaneous with its effect, but remember the example of Aristotle in the categories there where he said, you are sitting down, right? And the statement you are sitting down being true are together in time, right? Whenever you are sitting down, the statement you are sitting down is true, right? And whenever the statement you are sitting down is true, you're sitting down. And yet, you're sitting down is the cause of the truth of the statement you are sitting down. And if you stood up, then that statement would cease to be true, huh? But there's no time lapse there, So it's possible for one thing to arise from another or come from another and still be together in what? Time or duration. Now sometimes, you know, when you're looking at the objections to the Trinity, you know, and somebody would say, well, if the Son proceeds from the Father or the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, then the Son would be after the Father in duration or the Holy Spirit would be after the Father and the Son. Well, that doesn't follow, huh? But we're kind of thinking of the fact that we're usually thinking of a maker in the sense of a man who makes a pie or makes a chair or something like that where it's through some kind of emotion, right? It takes time that he eventually, what, produces the object. In that case, the cause has a before in time, huh? So the house built exists before the house does. because the house takes some time to build. But who doesn't exist in time before half of what? Four does. Moreover, the power of the soul arises from the soul as an accident. An accident in the sense of a proper accident, right? Like a property. Arises from a subject. But one power of the soul cannot be the subject of another. Because one accident is not an accident of another. Therefore, one power does not arise from another. Now, Thomas is not going to maintain that one power is the subject of another power, right? But that one power arises from the soul in a certain order from another power. And he'll explain the ways that takes place in the body of the article. But the opposite does not arise from its what? Opposite, huh? But each thing arises from something like it in species, huh? So dogs, what? Produce a dog, right? Cats produce a cat, right? So if you divide the powers by some kind of opposition, which is the way we divide things in general, by opposites, right? How can one arise from the other, huh? So he says the powers of the soul are divided by opposites as diverse species. Therefore, one of them does not proceed from the other, huh? Now, the reply to this is taken from something more known, huh? The sin contra, namely the act, right? But against this is that the powers are known through their acts. But the act of one power is caused by another, as the act of imagining from the act of what? Sense, huh? He's not using imagining there, phantasia, which is a Greek word for imagining, or imagination, in the sense of this creative thing we sometimes use the word imagining, too, right? But he's thinking of the fact that if I look at you for a little bit, right, and I close my eyes, you kind of, what, remain in there, right? An image of you, huh? And that arose from my, what, seeing you, right? So I'm no longer seeing you now, in the sense of my eyes, no longer seeing you, right? But something of your image and your color and so on remains in my eye. If you recall what Aristotle said there in the third book about the soul, he's talking about this. It's a little bit like billiard balls, right? I knock this ball, and then it was already, knocks that ball, right? But the second ball maybe doesn't move as strongly as the first ball did, right? And if that's another one, even weaker, huh? So my image of you is not as vivid of your color and shape as my eye is, huh? Okay? And of course, the longer you're away from the sensation, the more it tends to fade. So apparently it's a commonplace among witnesses to accidents that if three or four people see an accident take place on the street, and you ask them right away to write down what they saw, and you ask them another next day what they all saw, you get much more agreement with the first day than the, what, second day, huh? Because the images are, what, weakened by their distance from the first mover there, huh? From the, so he speaks of imagining there as a motion caused by the sense and act. That's an interior motion. Or you could say, for example, that the object of the will, the will loves or desires something that reads in, what, knows in some way, or the emotions, huh? You smell something, you taste something, and suddenly you have this hunger for it, huh? I used to work with a package store. He had a, a habit, I'd say that, on, I don't know, Labor Day, some day, like that. He'd have his whole family over, you know, sons or daughters in the neighborhood. And he'd cook, you know, bacon and eggs and all this stuff on the outdoor grill. That smells going all around the neighborhood. But he'd start at like six in the morning or something like that, you know. People trying to sleep, you know, on the day off and so on. He starts smelling these things. So there's an order between what you smell and this, you know, desire to eat. Or you could be laying in bed, right, and someone's cooking bacon or something, you know, and all of a sudden you, you realize you're hungry and that you weren't while you were just laying there, huh? And the, you know, mop at the cat, right? When we sit down to dinner, she comes around and actually looks up at you, you know, with those big eyes and wants a little bit of chicken or something or whatever it is you're eating, right? A little piece of that. Or several pieces, huh? But she's, she's a little more polite than the other cat used to be. The cat with the man. Now he says, As I answer, it ought to be said, that in those things which proceed, go forward, right, from something one, right, according to a natural order, as the first thing, which is the same thing as the beginning, is the cause of everything, so that which is nearer to the beginning or to the first is in some way a cause of those things which are more, what, remote, huh? It has been shown hour above that among the powers of the soul, there is a multiple, huh, many kinds of order, right? And therefore, one power of the soul goes forward from the nature of the soul by medium of a, what, another, right? And now he's going to talk about, what, a couple of orders here at least, huh? Because the soul is the beginning and the cause of the powers in more than one way, huh? It's a cause in the sense of in, which is one of the four kinds of causes. And it's a cause in a way like the maker or the mover. And it's also a cause in some way like matter because it's the subject of the powers, either by itself or in junction with the, what, body, right? Now, if you go back to that text that I gave you from, it was the twelfth chapter of the categories, where Aristotle distinguishes the four central senses of before. Do you remember that? Some of you had that. And the first meaning he gave of before was before in time, huh? And like yesterday is before today, huh? Yeah. And the second sense of before is in being, right? If this can be without that, but not vice versa. Aristotle gives example one is before, what, two, okay? Or you could say bricks are before a brick fireplace in the second sense, because bricks can be without a brick fireplace, but not vice versa, right? Okay. Now, what is before in being may often also be before in time, but they're not the same sense of before. And I give examples sometimes, you know, of a loaf of bread. If you get an unsliced loaf of bread, you take a nice long knife, you slice off one, what, piece of bread, right? And you slice off a second one, right? And then you slice off a third and so on. So one is not only before two in being here, but in time, right? Yeah. And two is before three, right? But if I say to the person in the bakery, they're going to cut a sliced loaf and they have a machine there, it goes from zero to what? Twelve or thirteen, or whatever the number of slices is, all at once, huh? See? And I say, now, usually you have one child before you have two, huh? Uh-huh. You can have one without having two, but you can't have two without having one. And usually you have one in time before two, right? But if you get two for one, right, you have twins, then you have two children at the same, what, time, right? So one was not before two in time, in this case, right, if you had twins, but one would still be before two in being. One can be without two, right? See? And if one of those children died, you still have one of them, right? Just like you knock apart the brick fireplace, I think that's a real brick or what. But since they knock these things apart, you know, and they actually sell the bricks, people like, for some reason, these old bricks, you know, that have been with it and so on. But the bricks could still be without the brick wall.