Prima Secundae
Lecture 50: Consent as an Act of the Will

Transcript
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Father, and Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen. Thank you, God. Thank you, Guardian Angels. Thank you, Thomas Aquinas. God, your Enlightenment. Guardian Angels, come from the lights of our minds, order and illumine our images, and arouse us to consider more correctly. St. Thomas Aquinas, Angelic Doctor. Pray for us. And help us to understand what you have written. Father, and Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen. Let's just recall where we are here by looking at the premium there to question 13 before we look at question 15, which we're concerned with today. In the premium to question 13, he says, Consequently, we're not to consider about the acts of the will, which are in comparison to those things which are towards the end, right? As opposed to the end itself. And these are three. To choose, right? To consent and to, what? Use, huh? But counsel precedes choice, huh? Therefore, first, we're not to consider about choice. Secondly, about counsel, which we talked about last time, right? Third, about consent, which we'll start today. And fourth, about, what? Use, huh? So that's the context in which this question comes up. So he says in the premium to this question, Then we're not to consider about consent. And about this, four things are asked. First, whether consent is an act of the desiring power or of the grasping or knowing power. Secondly, whether it belongs to brute animals, huh? The irrational animals. It was my cat consent to go out, or the dog consent to. Third, whether it is about the end or about those things which are towards the end. And fourth, whether consent in an act pertains only to the higher part of the soul. This distinction goes back to Augustine, right? The higher and lower parts of the soul. Most people don't know they have a higher part, apparently. Use that higher part. They don't know. Yeah. Okay. To the first, then, one goes forward thus. It seems that to consent belongs only to the grasping, huh? Or knowing part of the soul, right? Now, why does he use that word apprehensivum, huh? Apprehensiva, to name the knowing part, huh? What's the similarity between grasping, huh? And knowing, yeah. So knowing is a kind of movement from thing into the mind, huh? You can't get something into your mind. You can't, what? Know it, huh? So even Empedocles, right? One of the first philosophers long before Aristotle, right? Said that the thing known must be in the, what? Knower. Except he couldn't quite understand in what way the thing known is in the knower, right? But in the case, so, no, this is taken from the act of the hand, right? Because when the hand grasps something, it's contained in the hand, right? And so he calls the knowing power the grasping part, right? And that's in contrast to the, what? Desirative power, right? Which is going out to the thing, right? Where your treasure is, right? So the heart is in the thing, what? More love, right? So the emotion of the heart, or the desiring power, is to the thing, right? I left my heart in San Francisco, the song says, right? That's what I used to say to the students, you know, in college there. It's always bad if you lose your mind. If you lose your heart, it says, it's not always bad. No, it depends on who you lose it to. But notice the use of the words there, right? To lose your mind is what? The detriment of it, right? But if you lose your heart to God or someone, right? Like that's worth loving, right? Then that's good, right? Okay? Shouldn't keep your heart all to yourself, should you? Okay. So Thomas often calls the first act of reason simple grasping. Grasping what a circle is, or what a stone is, or what a dog is, or so on. Now, Augustine, in the 12th book of the Trinity, attributes consent to higher reason. But reason names a grasping power. Therefore, to consent belongs to the grasping power, right? Well, you can't argue much against Augustine, right? It's a dangerous thing to do, huh? Have you seen John Paul II's encyclical on Augustine? I actually haven't. That's quite impressive, you know. I mean, Augustine's quite impressive when you read that, huh? Okay. But maybe we haven't understood Augustine correctly, right? In this argument, huh? Moreover, to consent is to what? It's made up of centere, and together, right? But to sense is of a, what? Grasping or knowing power, huh? Therefore, also consentere, right? Right, no, it's taken right from an act of the, that's, that's, yeah. Okay, so the word itself seems to indicate. Moreover, just as to assent, right? Which is made up of that same word, centere, right, names the application of the understanding to something, right? So also to consent, huh? But to assent pertains to intellect, huh? Which is a grasping power, right? Therefore, to consent also pertains to the grasping power, right? So you're all convinced in that side, right? Mm-hmm. Good student is always misled by Thomas first. Okay. But against this is what Damascene says in the second book, huh? That if someone judges and does not love, this is not a, what? Sentence, huh? I don't know about that use of the word sentence there. I can think of this, you know, when you get tried and you get a sentence. They're consenting to something, right? To your punishment, huh? But to love pertains to the desiring power. Therefore also, what? Consent, huh? Well, let's see what Thomas has to say about this. He says, I answer. It should be said that to consent implies the applying or the application of the sense to what? To something, right? But it is a property of the sense that it knows things that are present, huh? Here and now, huh? Singulars. As opposed to the imagining power, right? Which is grasping of the likenesses of bodies or bodily likenesses. Even of what? Absent things, huh? Of which they are what? Likenesses, huh? And the understanding is apprehensive of universal reasons, huh? Which is able to apprehend indifferently whether the singulars are present or what? Absent, huh? So I can't see a cat unless the cat's here, right? But I can make all kinds of statements about cats and dogs and the universal. I can imagine them, right, in their absence, right? But the senses know things only here and now, present in front of us, huh? I was going to try to explain the word here, right? A little torture here, but... And because the act of the, what? Desiring... Desiring power is a certain what? Inclination towards the thing itself. It's just the contrary of knowing, right? According to a certain likeness, right? This application of desiring power to a thing, according as it inheres in that thing, right? It takes over the name of what? Sense, huh? As it were, taking a certain what? Experience of the thing, huh? To which it adheres insofar as it finds what? Delight in it, huh? It doesn't mean to say something is to my taste. To see your liking. Yeah. Whence wisdom, one, it is said, right? Sentite, he says, in the Latin, of the Lord in what? Goodness, right? Taste and see how sweet is the Lord, right? Things of that sort, huh? And according to this, to consent is an act of the, what? Yeah. I mean, it's more clear to somebody in Latin, right? The way the word was carried over, right? Now, what about this objection from Augustine, huh? It's in the higher part. Well, it goes back to Aristotle speaking like Augustine speaks, right? Sometimes. To the first, therefore, it should be said that just as it is said in the third book about the soul, third book by Aristotle there about the soul, the will is in reason. What does it mean by that, right? Does it mean the faculty or power of reason? Or does it mean that part of the soul, right? That is rational. What's the second of these two, right? And sometimes you find, you know, this distinction there when they divide up the soul and they divide it like in the second book about the soul into five of January, right? The vegetative powers and the sense powers and the desiring powers and then the structural powers and the moving powers, right? But then sometimes they divide the soul up according to it's rising above matter in some way, right? So the animal in a way rises above the animal when he has, what, sense, huh? And the rational soul rises even more above matter when you understand, huh? So the will is on the plane of the understanding or the reason, right? That most immaterial part of us, huh? And the senses and the emotions on the second part, then the ability to digest my food is down here, right? Low part of my soul, right? And hardly right, reason is much above matter at all, right? Okay? So that's, you know, a common thing you see in Aristotle, right? Okay, so sometimes reason means what? That part of the soul, right? You know the famous dialogue of Plato there? The Republic, huh? Okay. And in the Republic, Socrates is working out a great analogy between the parts of the soul and the parts of the city. And he's concerned with those parts of the soul in which there is virtue, huh? Moral virtue or moral vice for that matter, right? And he has three parts of the soul. Reason, the irascible appetite, huh? Where you have anger and fear and so on. And then the concubisal appetite where you have sense desire. And then that corresponds to three parts of the city, huh? The rulers to the reason, the soldiers to the irascible, and then the common people down here to the what? Yeah, and that's a very nice division, right? It's a very common division, right? But when you compare that to the division of the so-called four cardinal virtues, right? How do you fit the four cardinal virtues into three? Well, temperance fits in the concubisable. Courage in the irascible. Foresight or prudence obviously fits in reason. But where do you put justice, right? Because justice is not in the emotions. It's in the will. So Plato doesn't, at that point, right, distinguish reason and will. He doesn't distinguish will from reason. But it's possibly understood in that part, right? And in the dialogue called the Protagorism, where he takes up, you know, the main virtues, he has the four cardinal virtues plus piety, right? And so you could ask, well, then how do these fit into the three that are there, right? But they're using the word, it seems to me, reason more for what is, yeah. And so just as reason kind of rules the emotions, if you're good, so too you might say that the will kind of, what, commands the emotions to, or refuses to go along with them in some cases and so on, right? Okay. So this is not as artificial, it might seem to some, he doesn't know these texts, right? But if you're familiar with that text in the third book on the soul, you know what Aristotle means by saying the will is in reason. It's in that rational part of man, right? It follows upon reason. Man has will because he has reason, he's got emotions because he's got sensation, so the animals have emotion but they don't have will. So it makes sense to put them, right? That level, huh? Whence Augustine attributes consent to reason, or when he does that, he takes reason according as in it is included what? Will, right? And this is how in scripture sometimes, you know, what does heart mean, huh? What does heart mean? So usually you apply heart more to the will, right? But sometimes heart includes what? Yeah. You see it sometimes in prayers, huh? And so on. And sometimes in mind you'll include what? Will, right? That's something similar to this, right? So these ways of speaking are not that. People use ways of speaking, they never reflect upon them. And they say, well, gee, yeah, I guess I do speak that way, don't I? I don't know why I speak that way, but I do, right? Kind of strange, huh? Now, the second objection was in some way stronger, right? Because you seem to have the very word there, centire, right? Which means to sense, right? And Thomas admits, huh? To the second it should be said that centire, properly said, pertains to the what? Grasping power, right? But according to the likeness of a certain experience, right? Or one is, what? Pleased by something, right, huh? It's a reason why. It pertains to the what? Appetite, right? It's kind of carried over by a certain likeness. That often happens, huh? You want to see God as he is, right? Got the eye? Got this. No. It's carried over to what? The reason, to understanding, right? By what? Sit in what? Likeness, huh? I mentioned that in the famous text of Aristotle. It's usually translated, all men by nature. Want to what? Know they'll say, right? But the Greek word he actually uses there is identi, right? Which means to see, and therefore, probably would be more accurately translated as to understand, right? Not that the other translation doesn't make sense, too. But we tend to use that way, right? When Hammond says, I see my father now, and they're looking around, you know, he says, in my mind's eye, right? Well, then mind there is, what? More of the imagination, right? The memory. They can picture his father and see him now, right? So even there, the mind's eye is not yet the mind's eye, and it's the reason, right? But I often ask the students, you know, the first meaning of the word, to see, is the act of the eye, right? What's the second meaning? And they'll try to say, to understand, but I say, no, no. There's something in between seeing and understanding that is more like seeing than understanding is, right? And that's to imagine, right? And that's what Hammond says, I see my father now. And that's what we're talking about. And that's what we're talking about. I can see him now, right? You know? Sometimes you think you've got to go tell somebody something, you know, they're not going to react well to, right? I can see right now, you know? Yeah, I can see anything right now. My wife is telling me about this lady, you know, who got a little accident in her car, you know, and she's fighting to stiff to tell her husband, you know? So in my day, you know, I've got a little space like that, she says, so much, you know, I don't know, I care, you know? It's still a big thing to me, you know? But apparently it's a fighting stiff, right? But yet imagine, so, and I say the fact that in a dream you think you're seeing with your eyes and you're actually imagining is a sign of how much alike they are. And, but even in a dream, you don't confuse understanding with seeing with the idea, no. But you do confuse imagining with seeing, right? So that's kind of like the second sense, right? And you're carried over by another likeness, huh? Now the third objection talks about the other word, ascentere, right? Which has the same word as centere, but the other part is odd, right? To the third, it should be said that ascentere is quasi ad allud sentere. And thus it implies a certain distance to that to which it ascents. But consentere is to sense, what? Together, huh? And thus it implies a certain conjunction to that to which it consents. And therefore the will of which it is is to tend towards the thing itself. More property is said to what? Ascent, huh? But the understanding whose operation is not according to a motion to the thing, but from the motion of from the thing to the mind, yeah. But potseus e conversio, but the reverse, right? As has been said in the first part of Summa. More property is said to what? Ascent. Although he says one for the other, everyone is accustomed to a place, right? But there's a little difference in the word, right? So one is a little more appropriate to the reason and its act because of the way that it goes, right? Okay. It's also possible or able to be said that the intellect ascents insofar as it's moved by the will, right? Especially in faith, right? Now, second argument. Whither consent belongs to the brute animals. The beastio animals, right? So the woman says to the man, you brute. That's not a compliment, obviously. To the second one proceeds thus. It seems that consent belongs to the brute animals. For consent implies the determination of the appetite to one thing. But the appetite of brute animals are determined to something one. Therefore consent is found in the brute what? Animals, right? There's a likeness there somewhere, right? But are you overlooking a difference? Moreover, take away the before, you remove the after. But consent goes before the carrying out of the deed. If therefore there's no consent in the brutes, there'd be no carrying out of the deed in them, right? Boy, that's... Which is clearly false, right? Come on, come on. Just like that. How'd you like to debate, Thomas, huh? I just raise my handkerchief and I give up. See, his fellow students called Thomas the, what, dumb ox, right? So Albert the Great arranged for a debate between himself and Thomas, right? And guess who won? And then he said, this guy you call the dumb ox, they tell you his bellow, will be heard around the world, huh? It shows a marvelous, what, the ability of Albert, right? The Great. He's just known in those, even those days, huh? Albert the Great. And the student passes him, huh? There's a story told of Plato coming into the school, the academy there. And just Aristotle was sitting there, right? He said, well, go ahead. He said, he's a whole school by himself, right? There's no jealousy, right? Or like Haydn coming over to Mozart's father, you know, and saying, as an honest man before God, he says, your son is the greatest composer, you know? You know, just don't question about it. It's kind of marvelous to see, you know, the older man and the one from whom the younger man, to some extent, has been a student, right? Or underling, right? Admitting the greatness of the other guy, huh? That story about Aristotle is true, right? And it's one of Augustine, I mean, about Albert and Haydn and Mozart, you know? That's great stuff. Pride is a great impediment to the life of the mind, right? I was talking on the phone to Warren Murray, and I said to him today, he said, I was asking a different question. He said, what is the greatest impediment to the love of God? What would you answer? What most of all prevents you from loving God, huh? Yeah, yeah. In the sense of pride, you know? Pride, you know? More so than being irascible. Or being, you know, a glutton or something, right? Or a drunkard, right? I mean, you know, that's going to impede you too, I mean, being too much attached to these material things. But nothing impedes you from loving God as much as what? Right. That even impeded the grace of the angels, perhaps. That's, you know, Augustine. Or sui, uscli, I'm contentious. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thomas in his commentaries in Peter's, I mean, on St. Paul's Epistles, speaks of how pride is the main cause and the sight of the will, anyway, of error, right? Because, he says in two ways, huh? Partly because you don't listen to those who know the matter better than you do. And they would, you know, prevent you from making all these errors. Or they would call you back from the errors you've already made, right? And then the other thing is that pride makes you overestimate your own ability. And if you attempt something beyond your powers, and therefore you've easily fallen to error when you attempt to judge something beyond your powers, huh? So pride is the main cause of error, right? I was looking at Pius X's encyclical on the modernists, right? And he's talking about the remote causes of their, you know, these errors and so on. And he says, well, first thing he mentions there is curiosity, right? But then he goes to pride, and that would be much more the cause, right? That's the main thing, you know? There's tremendous pride in the modernists. And so it's a good example, you know, of what Thomas is talking about, huh? What does Thomas say about the Latin or Verus, you know? They speak as if wisdom began with them. I was reading this, rereading the treatise of Thomas, you know, they didn't quite complete, but it's got 20 chapters, right? The treatise on the separated substances, written for his original, right? His confessor and so on. He's always asking where some little tidbits are, and so on. And, you know, he's showing the excellence of Aristotle and Plato over the other philosophers before, right? But he calls them the philosophie pre-kipui, right? The chief philosophers are Plato and Aristotle. And Albert had said that before, you know? Anybody who wants to be a philosopher, he's got to know Plato and Aristotle. That's the key guys. When I read the modern philosophers, I often will see them, you know, saying just the opposite of what Aristotle said, without noting that he said the opposite, without recalling that he said the opposite, let alone without recalling why he said it, giving no reason why what he said was not, you know? Good answer, you know? Well, when Aristotle disagrees with Plato, or he disagrees with Empedocles, or some other philosopher before him, he recalls what the other guy said, and he recalls the reason why he said it, right? And he argues both against what he said and the reason, you know? And that seems, you know, what you ought to do, right? You know? And they speak as if, you know, wisdom began with them, you know, so all of a sudden, you know, when the flash of lightning, they became, so all they're pretty soon, this is a Nazi, right, huh? As Barclay discovered there was no matter, right? No material world, right? Right, right. Yeah. You heard how Samuel Johnson, you know, kicked a stone and said, I refute him thus. But I used to say that Bishop Barclay opens the door of a study before he attempts to leave it. I'm sure he enjoyed a good steak as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He came working on that stage, you know, for a while, you know, some kind of charitable stuff. We'd go down, swimming down a lot in Rhode Island there, you know, down by Newport, and go by his place, you know. Yeah, I've never gone over to him. I think I'd take a pilgrimage over there, you know. I say, Rose, we've got to go over there sometime, you know, and look at whatever they got there, you know. Some place was supposed to stay when he was... Can't be there, of course. You've got to be faithful to that, right? And not look for a building that isn't there. Moreover, men sometimes are said to consent to doing something from some passion. Well, that's quite a lot of examples of that, right? Has concupiscence, right? Sense, desire, or what? Anger, right? Every day you pick up the newspaper, somebody's done something terrible by anger, or concupiscence to other cases. But there's quite a few examples of that, right? You read the police problem. When I was a bachelor, I lived in the house there, and Mr. there, and another guy living in the house there, an old gent there, he used to listen to the police plot all the time. So as soon as I go by his place, you hear what's going on in the town, you know. And one time I was right across the street. Oh, please, I'm sorry. They're arriving, so. It's constant all day long, right? There's somebody doing something they shouldn't be doing. Those are just the ones reported. But again, this is what Damascene says. That after... After judgment, right, man disposes an amada he loves. What has been judged from what? Consul, right? And this is called what? Sentencia, right? It has consensus, right? That's even more direct. Sentencia, right? But consul is not in brood animals, right? Therefore neither is consent. Thomas says, I answer, it should be said that consent, properly speaking, it's not in brood animals, right? So does the dog consent to go with you? Would you speak that way? I don't think I would speak that way in English. Would you? The dog consents to go with you? Would you say that? He agrees to go with you? So he has to be either affirming or consenting or not consenting. Because if the body goes the other way. That's an interesting word, agreement, huh? It's almost like consent, huh? I agree to something, right? And that seems to imply even more the appetite, huh? Agreement, huh? Because it agrees with me, right? It doesn't agree with me, right? Salmon doesn't agree with me. Letters doesn't agree with my wife. So he says, probably speaking, it's not in brood animals. Now, why does he say this? Well, the reason for this is because consent implies, huh? The application of the, what? Motion, the appetitive motion. Something to be done. To doing something, right, huh? That word application here is a key word now. But of that it is, or to that it belongs, to apply the appetitive movement to doing something, in whose power is the, what? The appetitive motion, yeah. Just as to touch a stone belongs to the, what? Staff. Staff, but to apply the staff to the touching of the stone belongs to the one who has, in his power, to move the staff, right? But the brood animals do not have in their power the appetitive motion, but such a motion is in them from the instinct of, what? Nature. Nature. Whence the brood animal desires something, huh? To be sure. But he does not apply his appetitive motion to something. He can apply it or not, right? So they say, some animals, depends on some dogs even, well, if you keep feeding them, they'll eat themselves to death. They'll overeat till they die. Not all dogs will do that. Some of them have a little more sense than that. But some animals, you just keep feeding them, they'll just keep eating until they die. Yeah, yeah. Maybe some of them do that. Well, some of these students, you parent the animal like this, you know, and they act, you know, just kind of in like, they're attacking them, right? Yeah. They can't help themselves. Whence the brood animal desires to be shared but does not apply the appetitive motion to something. And on account of this, not properly is it said to consent, right? But only the rational nature, which has in its power the appetitive motion, is able to apply it or not apply it to this or to that, right? Second Thomas talks about how, you know, the will can, what, apply reason to this or that, right? To think of this or think of that. Think of it or not think about it, right? What should I apply myself to today? Should I apply myself to a theorem of Euclid, huh? Or should I apply myself to a psalm? Or should I apply myself to the Prima Secundae? Or what should I do, huh? You can hang up in Mozart. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. I was listening to some Mozart's variations, right? They're very interesting. It's got about 12, 15, you know, variations of different melodies. Not necessarily his own, you know, but very interesting what he does with these melodies, huh? You see, at a concert, most of us sit down afterwards and just, you know, improvise in the piano, you know, and they enjoy that even more than the concert, you know, because it's got a spontaneous thing, you know. I think I would do this. Okay. Now, to the first, therefore, it should be said that in brood animals, there is found, of course, a determination of desire to something, right? But it could be said to be a passive thing, right? Sometimes they compare that, you know, to, you know, in the old physics there, to a stone falling to the ground, right? Does the stone move itself to the ground? No. Well, it kind of undergoes this motion because of the nature it's been given, right, by whoever made it a stone. So it's kind of passive, right, that determination, right? There's a kind of determination to go down rather than some other ways. So this is like that in the brood animals. There's a determination of the appetite to something in a passive sense only, right? But consent implies a determination of the appetite that's only passive, but more active, right, huh? Or in control. To the second, it should be said that the before removed, the after is removed, that, what, properly follows from it only, right? If over something can follow from many things, not in account of this is the after removed, when one of the, what, before is removed. Just as if hardening can come from both, what, cold and hot, for the bricks, I suppose, huh? Are hardened by fire and the water is congealed or hardened by cold. It's not necessary that heat being removed, one removes all, what, hardening, right? But the execution of the work not only follows from consent, but also from the impetuous motion, right? Such as is found in the brood animals, huh? Someone's describing, you know, C.S. Lewis describes, you know, the emotions of the animals, you know, what a kind of fantastic world is compared to our emotions, which are kind of, you know, half stopped and half, you know. But there's, kind of real, yeah. Full emotional life, right, but that's it. Now, men who act from passion are able, what, to not follow the passion, right? But the brood animals are not able, right? And so there's not the same reason in saying that they're both influenced by emotion. Okay.