Category: Theology

Long before he wrote the Summa, St. Thomas treated of the question “whether the first truth is the object of faith” in his commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, (Bk. 3, Distinction 24, Question 3, Article 1).  Each of the objections and the sed contra of his Summa article is parallel in content to an objection or sed contra in the Sentences commentary.  The parallels are not so verbally close as to suggest that St. Thomas had the text of his Sentences commentary in front of him while he wrote the Summa article, but strong enough to argue that he was somewhat consistent over time in how he dealt with the question.

In my last post, I pointed out that St. Thomas illustrates the formal/material object distinction with geometry when he is talking about faith and with sight when he is talking about Sacred Doctrine.  As I noted, this is surprising:  since geometry is a science, one would expect him to use that as an example for Sacred Doctrine, which he also argues is a science; and since Scripture uses sight as a metaphor for faith, one would expect the sight metaphor to come up in connection with faith.

The unexpected switch is all the more interesting because St. Thomas uses the sight example to illustrate the formal/material object distinction when he deals with faith in the Sentences commentary.  In other words, in his earlier work he did what one would expect; in his later work, despite using some of the same objections and the same quotation in the sed contra, he changed the example he uses from sight to geometry.  I wish I knew what he had in mind!

As I walk through the text of ST II-II.1.1, I will use the comparison chart from last post to track ST I.1.3 as well.  I’ll begin with the Respondeo and then return to the objections as I look at the replies.

The first thing to notice is how St. Thomas defines his topic.  In the first line of the Respondeo, he says that faith is a habitus, a stable disposition; out of the tremendous range of realities one might call a habitus, he identifies faith as a cognitive habitus, that is, a stable disposition to know something.  Then he notes that the way to define a cognitive habitus is to specify what it disposes one to know, that is, the “object.”  The rest of the Respondeo is devoted to that project.

So ST II-II.1.1 is a step toward saying precisely what faith is:  the highest genus is habitus, the species is cognitive, and the last specific difference is the object.  This is a simple unpacking of the comparisons we find in Scripture.  In John 9 we find an elaborate comparison of faith with the power of seeing:  sight is a power, and specifically a cognitive power, and most specifically the cognitive power of knowing what light reveals.  When Jesus speaks a parable, he often concludes by saying, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear!”  And in the book of Revelation, Christ says, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches!”  The ear houses a power, and specifically a cognitive power, and most specifically the power of knowing sound.

St. Thomas goes on to distinguish between the material object and the formal object of a cognitive habitus.  Although sight allows me to know trees and cars and birds, the exact thing sight does is allow me to know colored things; if the colors come together one way, I know a tree, and if they come together another way then I know a car, yet seeing a car and seeing a tree are not two ways of knowing but one.  And although hearing allows me to know the words “bubble” and “splendid” as well as the timbre of a trumpet, the exact thing hearing does is allow me to know sound; if the sounds are formed one way then I hear the word “bubble,” and if the sounds are formed another way then I hear the trumpet’s tone, yet hearing a word and hearing a trumpet are not two ways of knowing but one.

Given that faith is biblically described as a power of sight while St. Thomas argues that Sacred Doctrine is a science, one would expect him to use sight as an example for faith and geometry as an example for Sacred Doctrine.  But to illustrate his point about material and formal objects, he uses geometry as an example for faith and sight as an example for Sacred Doctrine!  A strange choice, but it further emphasizes the close connection between the two Summa articles.

In geometry, the way of knowing is through definitions.  If I know what a triangle is, and by knowing what a triangle is I come to know the Pythagorean theorem, that is geometry:  the definition of a triangle is what St. Thomas calls the media demonstrationis, and it in the light of the definition that I know the conclusion.  I could of course come to know the Pythagorean theorem by measuring lots and lots of triangles until I was convinced through experience that they always turn out this particular way, but in that case I would not have the cognitive habitus of geometry.  I would know the same material object—the Pythagorean theorem—but the formal object would be different.  Similarly one can know a lot of things by reason or experiment that are also revealed in Scripture, but the formal object—the defining difference of the cognitive habitus at work—is different in the two cases.

At this point, St. Thomas gets down to business by specifying exactly what is the formal object of faith.  But I’ll take up that up in the next post.

In St. Thomas’s treatment of faith in the Secunda secundae of the Summa theologiae, the first question he takes up is “Whether the object of faith is the first truth.”  Before I walk through the text of the article, I want to point out that this article is almost point by point parallel to Question 1 Article 3 of the Prima pars, which asks “whether Sacred Doctrine is one science.”  Article 7 of that same question, “Whether God is the subject of Sacred Doctrine,” follows the exact same set of ideas.  These parallels seem to support my initial intuition that a careful account of faith will lead directly to a careful account of theology:

I am going to use the above table as the basis for the next several blog posts.  If you intend to follow this series of posts and you need me to switch to using an English translation of Aquinas, please let me know.  I don’t habitually look at English texts or translate Thomas’s Latin, so I won’t make the effort if no one out there needs it.

Over the past two years, I have grown increasingly dissatisfied with my own inability to articulate clearly what theology is.  In conversation with colleagues, I find that I give various accounts depending on the context, and that I have never sat down to the hard labor of unifying all my thoughts into a single, coherent view.  For the sake of my friends who have been or intend to be my partners in exploring the question, I would like to keep notes on this blog along the way to finding clarity.

I enter the question with two basic intuitions.  First, I think that theology is what happens when faith gets to follow its inclinations.  That is to say, fides quarens intellectum—“faith seeking understanding”—is a pretty good nominal definition of theology, and corresponds to what faith wants:  faith is by its nature not at rest but seeking, and by the very nature of faith the object it seeks is understanding.  So the key to arriving at a careful account of theology is to begin with a careful account of faith.

The second intuition is that “theology” has more than one meaning.  In general, one never finds “the” meaning of a word:  any given word has multiple, analogous meanings.  So the goal should not be to find the one true meaning of “theology,” but to discover the various meanings of the word “theology” and put them in order.  Some meaning of “theology” will be primary, another secondary, and so on, each being a true and legitimate meaning of the word.

Because I have not had an occasion to read it before, I would like to begin by walking through St. Thomas Aquinas’s account of faith in the Secunda secundae of the Summa theologiae.  But that will be its own post.