Vol. XII

I got my box from Quaracchi yesterday with all the edited Ordinatio volumes I didn't have yet, including the just-released volume 12, which is 500 pages all about the Eucharist - the Scotistic Commission claims it's the longest and most comprehensive treatment of the subject in all the middle ages. Not even Faber has this one: ha ha, chew on that!

I'd love to get to it, but I have several volumes before that I need to get to first. Getting the box reminded me how hard it is to learn about Scotus without being a scholar with access to a top-notch library. These books are really really expensive, and there are no translations, and the scholarship on Scotus is still scanty at best, except on a few popular topics. So The Smithy will have to continue its mission of reading it for you and reporting on occasional bits.

Sorry about the collapse of Ockham month. No fancy excuses: I've been reading and doing other things, and I got bored with it.

Symposium

Instead of dutifully reading Ockham today I've been reading the Symposium and Allan Bloom's commentary. I confess that whenever I read Plato I feel that he is both the most beautiful and most profound of philosophers and become tempted to just keep reading him and ignore all his footnoters.

I remember vividly the first time I read the Symposium, at fifteen or sixteen, in the old Jowett translation in the Britannica Great Books set. It certainly made more of an impression on me than any of the other Plato I read around the same. I'll never forget my initial impression at the speech of Aristophanes, which I didn't understand was supposed to be funny and found simply absurd and ludicrous and a bit grotesque.

And too I remember vividly the second time I read it, a few years later as a college freshman. For many years at St John's College there had been a tradition of making the Symposium seminar an actual symposium, with everyone drinking and talking. Federal funding regulations had made this wise and beneficent custom impracticable for a program in which Plato comes in the first year when nearly all the participants were underage, and by the time I got there the practice had been "officially" discontinued. Unofficially, however, most people got plenty drunk beforehand and a few intrepid souls snuck their wine into class in things like Snapple bottles. I stayed totally sober - I was very careful not to drink for the first two years of college - and participated in the discussion and watched in amazement as various usually dour or carefree or vice-hardened classmates began to pour their hearts out, some even weeping, as we all wondered together about love and beauty and transcendence and being fundamentally incomplete.

Perhaps part of the reason that Plato has such attractions for me is (in addition to his astonishing excellence) merely personal, in that I read so much of him as a freshman, which was such a formative period and has so many intense associations. For instance, I can't read the Phaedrus without thinking of another seminar, after which I met up with my girlfriend who had just had her own (at St John's all the seminars in the College happen at the same time, from 8-10 PM on Monday and Thursday nights; it's almost like a community liturgy around which all other time is structured). We were talking and she mentioned how proud she was that we had kept the black horses of our souls in check so well, which was ironic, for I had partly spent my seminar worrying that my own black horse might be champing at the bit more than I could handle.

Anyway. I read a great deal besides my studies in scholastic philosophy and theology, but since the blog is explicitly centered around these, it's always hard to tell what place if any other matter have here. "What's this tripe?" I can hear my vast crowd of frothing readers protest. "We came here for the good stuff, and he's trying to pass off his nostalgia instead of thinking like a man!" Fair enough. Back to the trenches tomorrow.

Blog Changes

We (obviously) haven't put a lot of work into the aesthetics of The Smithy, preferring to focus on the ideas instead, and having no design sense anyway. But in an attempt to make the blog a little less ugly I've changed the fonts, and to make it a little easier on the eyes I've increased the font size. These and all elements are subject to change on reconsideration.

Does Aquinas confuse Person and Nature?

Summer. That time of the year when the Energetic graduate student throws off his bonds of seminar papers and teaching and is finally free to show the world just how dumb the Latins are, especially that moron Thomas Aquinas who makes so many foolish errors, led on, no doubt, by that fount of lies, Augustine.

While I was in Europe they were busy:

http://energeticprocession.com/2009/07/16/saint-cyril-on-divine-simplicity/#more-586

http://wellofquestions.wordpress.com/2009/04/14/aquinas-conflating-person-and-essence-in-god-redux/

http://www.nicenetruth.com/home/2009/05/problem-quotes-in-aquinas-listed-for-discussion.html

The basic problem seems to be that Aquinas actually says that a person is the same as the essence. Therefore he confuses them, and there is only one person.

The feature of Aquinas' position that our brethren in Christ fail to admit is that Aquinas also thinks that the persons are really distinct from each other. So we have an identity between person and essence and a distinction of the realiter variety between the persons. Sadly, Aquinas does not tell us what a real distinction is. It could be between two discrete things, but it can also obtain within one thing, such as the human person where body and soul are really distinct. This latter example seems to suggest that there is some notion of separability involved, which clearly cannot be the case between the Trinitarian persons, although we are looking at a real distinction within a single object. The real distinction results from the fact that persons are constituted by relations, and some feature of the generic character of a predicamental relation still remains, even in divinis, namely opposition and distinction. It is this opposition of relations towards each other that provides the real distinction between persons, which Aquinas even characterizes as things in their own right (of course, one would think that one fundamenta of the relation would be the divine essence, so properly the relation should be really distinguishing the person from the essence; but I am sure I fail to understand how Thomistic relations work...the Thomists will have to correct me on this. There is also the Scotist argument that real products cannot come from powers that are not themselves distinct).

To actually attempt to answer the argument regarding identification, however, one must consider Aquinas' notion of rationes in God. Basically, in nearly Scotist fashion, Aquinas thinks that if God and features in divinis such as personal properties, relations, attributes could be defined, none of them would be included in the definition of any other nor could they be predicated of each other. That things in God cannot be defined is apparent because definition entails the assigning of genus and species, which are related as potency and act. But, God has no potency-act composition. That we should treat something that cannot be defined as if it could is not so scandalous as it sounds, as Aquinas thinks that the categories themselves cannot be defined, although we assign a ratio to them and act as if they are (they are the ultimate genera, after all, and defining them would entail an infinite regress). So all these divine elements are really identical, but differ by ratione, that is none fall into the definition of the other. To take my defense of Thomas in a scotist line, I would add that the fact that they do not fall into the definition of the other is not due to the operation of an intellect, but is prior to such activity. So I do not think that Aquinas confuses person and nature because these retain distinct rationes which cannot be predicated of each other while being really identical.

I trust some real Thomists will come to my defense here, as these are precisely the issues which I think Aquinas is deficient and Scotus is brilliantly not.

I have appended some texts to shed some light on the notion of rationes, and may update this discussion later.

De potentia, q. 8 a. 2 ad 3

Ad tertium dicendum, quod licet relatio non addat supra essentiam aliquam rem, sed solum rationem, tamen relatio est aliqua res, sicut etiam bonitas est aliqua res in Deo, licet non differat ab essentia nisi ratione; et similiter est de sapientia. Et ideo sicut ea quae pertinent ad bonitatem vel sapientiam, realiter Deo conveniunt, ut intelligere et alia huiusmodi, ita etiam id quod est proprium realis relationis, scilicet opponi et distingui, realiter in divinis invenitur.

Scriptum, I d. 33 q. 1 a. 1 ad 3 (ed. Mandonnet, 767): “Sciendum est autem, quod ‘ratio’ sumitur dupliciter: quandoque enim ratio dicitur id quod est in ratiocinante, scilicet ipse actus rationis, vel potentia quae est ratio; quandoque autem ratio est nomen intentionis, sive secundum quod significat definitionem rei, prout ratio est definitio, sive prout ratio dicitur argumentatio.”

Scriptum, I d. 33 q. 1 a. 1 ad 3 (ed. Mandonnet, 767): “Dico igitur, quod cum dicitur quod est alia ratio paternitatis et essentiae in divinis, non accipitur ratio secundum quod est in ratiocinante tantum, sed secundum quod est nomen intentionis, et significat definitionem rei: quamvis enim in divinis non possit esse definitio, nec genus nec differentia nec compositio; tamen si intelligatur ibi aliquid definiri, alia erit definitio paternitatis, et alia definitio essentiae. In omnibus autem intentionibus hoc communiter verum est, quod intentiones ipsae non sunt in rebus sed in anima tantum, sed habent aliquid in re respondens, scilicet naturam, cui intellectus huiusmodi intentiones attribuit... et ita etiam ipsa ratio quam dicimus aliam et aliam in divinis, non est in re; sed in ratione est aliquid respondens ei, et est in re [sed...re: sed est in re aliquid respondens ei in = Parma ed.] quo fundatur, scilicet veritas illius rei cui talis intentio attribuitur: est enim in Deo unde possunt rationes diversae ibi convenire.”

Super Sent., lib. 1 d. 27 q. 1 a. 1 ad 3

Ad tertium dicendum, quod sicut attributa essentialia non sunt plures res, ita nec proprietates uni personae convenientes; sed sunt una res, quae est illa persona; sed tamen quia relatio manet in divinis etiam secundum communem rationem generis, manet etiam relationis distinctio, inquantum est relatio; et ideo potest dici quod sunt plures relationes, et una relatio de alia non praedicatur. Non sic autem est in essentialibus, quae non manent ibi secundum communem rationem generis; unde non distinguuntur secundum rationem alicujus communis, cujus ratio in Deo sit, si tamen accipiatur commune reale, ut significatur nomine primae impositionis; si vero accipiatur commune rationis, quod significatur nomine secundae impositionis, sic commune est omnibus quod sint attributa; et ideo quia dividunt unum commune rationis, secundum hoc non praedicantur de invicem. Non enim dicimus quod hoc attributum sit illud attributum; sed quod est aliud attributum ab illo. Sed quia non dividunt unum commune reale, ideo ratione divinae simplicitatis secundum quodcumque nomen primae impositionis de se invicem praedicantur, ut dicatur: haec res est illa res; vel etiam propriis nominibus, ut: sapientia est bonitas