Chapter 11. Intellectual Creatures (SCG 2,46–101)
CHAPTER 11. INTELLECTUAL CREATURES (SCG 2,46–101)
1. SCG 2,5. ND, 2, 36, chapter 5 [1].
2. In SCG 2,46–101 Aquinas also refers to “intellectively active creatures” (creaturae intelligentis), “intellective substances” (substantiae intellectuales), “intellectively active substances” (substantiae intelligentis), “intellective natures” (naturae intellectuales), “intellective beings” (intellectualia), “intellectively active beings” (intelligentes), and “intellects” (intellectus). I think that Norman Kretzmann is right to say that these different terms are more or less interchangeable for Aquinas. See The Metaphysics of Creation: Aquinas’s Natural Theology in “Summa Contra Gentiles” II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 233.
3. ND, 2, 36, chapter 5 [1].
4. ND, 2, 141 [6].
5. ND, 2, 140–141 [5].
6. Aquinas does not speak of revelation in SCG 2,46, and my use of “revelation” at this point does not correspond to the way in which Aquinas typically uses it. Aquinas thinks of revelation as amounting to a series of propositions that people cannot demonstrate to be true but must accept on the basis of faith. Still, he does think that, in the sense that I might reveal something of myself by leaving traces behind, God reveals something of himself by creating (on the principle that the effects of agent causes resemble them in some way). And SCG 2,46 seems to be working with this thought so as to suggest that the reason why there are beings with intellect lies in the fact that God’s showing himself forth in the created order would stop seriously short if there were not creatures with intellect.
7. I use the phrase “or whatever” here since you might think that there are or might be creatures with understanding who are neither angelic nor human, since you might think that there are or could be intelligent extraterrestrials. Aquinas never discusses extraterrestrials and does not do so, I assume, because his medieval cosmology seems to rule them out. But I doubt that he would dismiss the possibility of such things were he working with the kind of cosmology that scientists favor today. On the other hand, I am sure that he would be offering the same account of the intellect of extraterrestrials as he does of what he considers intellect in people to be in SCG 2,56–90.
8. ND, 2, 143–144 [4].
9. ND, 2, 144 [2].
10. ND, 2, 146 [6].
11. Cats may not run after mice if they are blind, or have smelling or hearing disabilities. Nor will they run after mice if something or someone has introduced into them some aversion to mice. They will also not run after mice if they are tied up. And so on. Hence my use of the phrase “all things being equal.”
12. ND, 2, 147 [2].
13. ND, 2, 149 [2].
14. ND, 2, 151 [8].
15. See Meditations on First Philosophy 2. Having argued that he certainly exists since he cannot consistently maintain that he does not exist as long as he is thinking, even while entertaining the thought that he might not exist, Descartes asks what it is that he is. Later in his Meditations, he goes on to argue that he is essentially, or by nature, an immaterial thinking thing since, while he can doubt that bodies exist, he cannot consistently doubt that he exists. My view is that Descartes is wrong here since, for example, the fact that I can doubt that there is something whose essential nature is not to think, while I cannot doubt that I exist, does not entail that I am a being whose essential nature is to think. Be that as it may, however, many philosophers from ancient times to the present have argued that people are essentially thinking and incorporeal things, albeit things with bodies to interact with. In several of his writings, including the SCG, Aquinas frequently ascribes this view to Plato, whom he takes to regard people as controlling their bodies as the captain of a ship controls his ship: the assumption being that the captain and his ship are distinct things.
16. For a recent example of this line of argument, see Alex Rosenberg, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions (New York: Norton, 2011). The assumption that all that exists is material is commonplace among many contemporary philosophers. If you start with this assumption then you will end up saying the kind of thing that Rosenberg does in the book I have just cited. Aquinas, of course, would ask why we should assume that all that exists is material. Can we demonstrate that all that exists is material? I doubt that we can do that while wondering what such a demonstration would look like (where “demonstration” means what Aquinas takes it to mean). We can presume or believe that everything that exists is nothing but material. But can we demonstrate that this is so? I may be wrong here, but the impression I get when reading people like Rosenberg is that they are assuming more than they can prove. If you start by supposing that everything that exists is bodily and made up of physical elements, then your view of things that exist will commit you to the conclusion that all that exists are physical things bouncing off each other insofar as they connect causally and materially. But is it possible to demonstrate that this supposition is warranted? If it is possible to do this, what would the demonstration be? It might start with the premise “All that exists is material or bodily or physical.” But why suppose that this premise is self-evidently true? As I have shown, Aquinas offers reasons in SCG 1 for supposing that it is not true.
17. ND, 2, 151 and 152 [2 and 3].
18. ND, 2, 153 [2].
19. ND, 2, 158 [10].
20. ND, 2, 158 [1].
21. ND, 2, 163 [14].
22. Aquinas does not deny that people can be born suffering from brain damage that results in them being unable to think or reason or understand. But he would not have denied that such people are living human beings. He would have said that they are living human beings who suffer from defects that render them unable to engage in activities that are characteristic of healthy human beings, as are people who have been knocked unconscious or exist while being in a coma.
23. Aquinas thinks that all human beings have souls. But, you might say, a newborn baby does not have intellect and will, from which it follows that not all human beings have a soul. Aquinas’s response to this thought would be “Even babies have intellect and will since they are things with the power to understand and will even though they are not able to exercise these powers.” In Aquinas’s view, human understanding and willing, considered as actually occurring, follows from a process of interaction between people and what exists around them in the material world. Yet, he thinks, there could be no “following from” here without a power or ability to proceed to the acquisition of knowledge. So he thinks that babies born without defects already have it in them to understand and will.
24. Anthony Kenny, Aquinas on Mind (London: Routledge, 1993), 46–47.
25. Some medieval readers of Aristotle took the agent intellect to be something outside all people allowing them to understand, this implying that there is but one agent intellect by which people manage to understand. Aquinas has no time for this idea since he thinks that we understand as individuals and must be able to understand because of what we have in us individually.
26. Kenny, Aquinas on Mind, 43.
27. Hardly anything is known about Alexander’s life, so only a rough dating for him is possible. In SCG 2,62 Aquinas takes Alexander to have taught that the receptive or possible intellect results from a blending together of physical things.
28. In SCG 2,56–90 Aquinas also contests what he takes to be various misreadings of Aristotle on soul. I am going to pass over these discussions in silence since they are technical and take us into problems of interpretation that I cannot engage with in this book.
29. ND, 2, 166 [8, 9, and 10].
30. ND, 2, 172 [14–15].
31. ND, 2, 199–201 [2–3 and 8].
32. ND, 2, 201–202 [2–3].
33. Aquinas also uses the word species to mean “idea,” as in “I have the idea of a cat in mind.” But in SCG 2,66 species refers to the having of a sensation produced by something acting on one’s body.
34. In what follows I am briefly summarizing and not trying to follow the various twists and turns of Aquinas’s detailed argumentation in SCG 2,68–90, in which he discusses and rejects all sorts of strange views. My aim is to help you to get a bird’s-eye view of the thrust of SCG 2,68–90, not to talk you through it point by point.
35. ND, 2, 204 [3]. Aquinas means that human beings are rational animals and that it is their intellect that makes them to be that.
36. ND, 2, 205 [6]. Aquinas means that human bodies rank high among bodily things because they are capable of motion and have several ways of sensing. On the other hand, he thinks that people rank low among intellectual creatures since, depending on their bodies for knowledge, they are inferior to creatures that are pure intellects who do not need to acquire knowledge as people do.
37. ND, 2, 207 [2].
38. ND, 2, 208 [6]. In SCG 2,70 Aquinas refers to the view, which he ascribes to Aristotle (see De Anima 2,3), that heavenly bodies have intellect. Yet Aquinas does not commit himself to this view. He says: “As for the heaven being animate (de animatione caeli), we have spoken of this matter not as asserting its accordance with the teaching of the faith, to which the whole question is entirely irrelevant” (ND, 2, 211–212 [7]).
39. ND, 2, 213 [2].
40. ND, 2, 246 [2].
41. ND, 2, 254 [2]. In SCG 2,79 Aquinas presents several arguments for the incorruptibility of the human soul. Here I am noting what I take to be the line of thinking that seems to be operative in almost all of the arguments in SCG 2,79. One of the arguments in SCG 2,79 that does not appeal to the nonmateriality of the human substantial form maintains that people have to exist forever since “it is impossible that natural appetite should be in vain” and since “man naturally desires to live forever” and since “man attains perpetual existence as regards his soul, whereby he apprehends being unqualifiedly and in respect of every time.”
42. See ND, 2, 265 [12].
43. Aquinas refers to these impressions as “phantasms,” which he thinks of as what people, as composites of form and matter, acquire as they take in what they encounter by means of their senses and by virtue of their agent intellect resulting in what they end up with in their receptive or possible intellect.
44. ND, 2, 264 [12].
45. In the Summa Theologiae Aquinas appears to embrace a different position on the human soul after death from what we find in SCG 2,81. In SCG 2,81 he notes that understanding in a separate soul cannot arise on the basis of bodily experience while it can come about as comparable to understanding had by essentially incorporeal creatures such as angels, to whom he refers in SCG 2,96–101. “When the soul shall be completely separated from the body,” he says, “it will be perfectly likened to separate substances in its mode of understanding, and will receive their influx abundantly” (ND, 2, 265–266 [12]). In Summa Theologiae 1a,89,1, however, Aquinas plays down the comparison between knowledge arising in departed (separate) human souls and knowledge in totally incorporeal things (angels). As SCG 2,81 does not, Summa Theologiae 1a,89,1 highlights the idea that the nature of the human soul requires that it be united to a human body in order to be perfect and nondeficient considered as what it is. According to Summa Theologiae 1a,89,1, it is against nature (praeter naturam) for the soul to acquire understanding when not joined to a human body, implying that knowledge in separate substances such as angels is not a good analogy for knowledge arising in people. For more on this difference between SCG 2,81 and Summa Theologiae 1a,89,1, see Anton Pegis, “The Separated Soul and Its Nature in St. Thomas,” in St Thomas Aquinas, 1274–1974, Commemorative Studies, edited by A. Maurer et al. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1974), vol. 1.
46. ND, 2, 267 [2].
47. ND, 2, 272. In SCG 2,83 Aquinas cites a number of arguments contesting this conclusion, but he finds the arguments flawed and rejects them in SCG 2,83 and 84. For a comprehensive account of Aquinas on the origins of human life, see Fabrizio Amerini, Aquinas on the Beginning and End of Human Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
48. This is the thesis of SCG 2,85, in which Aquinas seems to be attacking what he takes to be Manichaean views concerning God being a body of some kind. In SCG 2,85 Aquinas also argues that human souls are not eternal, while God is, that God is not the form of anything, while the soul is the form of the body, and that God lacks potentiality, while something from which something is made has potentiality.
49. This is the thesis of SCG 2,87–89.
50. You can see that in SCG 2,91 and following Aquinas has angels in mind because of his reference to Pseudo-Dionysius toward the end of SCG 2,91. Aquinas says, “We conclude to the existence of a plurality of intellectual substances that are not united to bodies,” and he then goes on to say: “With this conclusion Dionysius is in agreement when, speaking of angels, he says that ‘they are understood to be immaterial and incorporeal’” (ND, 2, 315 [10]). The reference here is to De Divinis Nominibus 4. For a detailed study by Aquinas of separate substances, see his treatise De Substantiis Separatis (On Separate Substances), written some time after 1271. For an English edition of this text, see Saint Thomas Aquinas: Treatise on Separate Substances, translated by Francis J. Lescoe (West Hartford, CT: Saint Joseph College, 1959).
51. The word “angel” occurs close to three hundred times in the Bible. Belief in angels was declared to be a matter of faith by the Fourth Lateran Council, which speaks of God making “the angelic and the terrestrial” (angelicum videlicet mundatum).
52. See ND, 2, 312–313 [2]: “That which is through itself must be prior to that which is by accident. Therefore, there are some intellectual substances, prior in nature to souls, which, through themselves, enjoy subsistence without bodies.” I assume that Aquinas is here saying that there have to be things with essences before there can be things that are accidentally thus and so.
53. See ND, 2, 313 [3]: “It is not of the generic essence of an intellectual substance to be united to a body, although this is of the essence of that intellectual substance which is the [human] soul. There are, then, some intellectual substances which are not united to bodies.”
54. ND, 2, 314 [6]. In SCG 2,92 Aquinas argues that there are many “separate substances” (i.e., angels). Since SCG 2,92 relies heavily on what I take to be outdated cosmological or scientific views concerning heavenly bodies, which Aquinas derives from Aristotle (who never referred to angels), I am going to pass over this chapter in silence while assuming that you are not especially interested in antique cosmology. Yet it is interesting to find Aquinas disagreeing with Aristotle in SCG 2,92 concerning how many separate substances there are if one tries to count them with reference to heavenly bodies. Aquinas takes Aristotle to teach that there are as many separate substances “as the movements observed in the heaven” (ND, 2, 316 [1]). But, he argues: “The intellectual substances existing apart from bodies are much more numerous than the heavenly movements” (ND, 2, 317 [4]). So, Aquinas’s discussion of angels is indebted to Aristotle at some remove from what Aristotle seems to have thought.
55. ND, 2, 321 [2–3]. By “quiddity” (quidditas) Aquinas means “what a thing is as signified by a definition.” According to Aquinas the quiddity of a substance is its essence.
56. Aquinas writes: “Following upon local movement, time measures only such things as exist somehow in place” (ND, 2, 328 [10]).
57. ND, 2, 339 [2].
58. The belief that nothing exists except material things is sometimes referred to as naturalism. For an introduction and discussion of this, see Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro, Naturalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008).
59. See Richard Swinburne, The Evolution of the Soul (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). For a good account of contemporary and previous views on mind and body, see William Jaworski, Philosophy of Mind: A Comprehensive Introduction (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). For defenses of a variety of positions on mind, body, soul, and self, see The Mind-Body Problem: A Guide to the Current Debate, edited by Richard Warner and Tadeusz Szubka (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).
60. For good accounts and discussions of Aquinas on the human soul, see Gyula Klima, “Man = Body + Soul: Aquinas’s Arithmetic of Human Nature,” in Thomas Aquinas: Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Brian Davies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Also see Gyula Klima, “Aquinas on the Materiality of the Human Soul and the Immateriality of the Human Intellect,” Philosophical Investigations 32 (April 2009).
61. See C. J. F. Williams, Being, Identity, and Truth, chapter 7.
62. Herbert McCabe, “The Immortality of the Soul,” in Aquinas: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Anthony Kenny (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976), 304.
63. “The Immortality of the Soul,” 304–305.