Aquinas on the Beatitudes (II): Virtues and Gifts

As with other scholastic theologians, Aquinas's thinking about the beatitudes is heavily linked with his thinking about the gifts of the Holy Spirit, an idea that they derive from Augustine, and with other major elements of Christian life: virtues, moral precepts, fruits of the Holy Spirit, petitions of the Our Father, and so forth. Aquinas's own account in the Summa Theologiae is primarily structured by the primary infused virtues -- love, hope, faith, prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance. This makes uncovering his account of how the beatitudes fit into the scheme fairly complicated, since there is no one place one can look. There are also a number of features in Aquinas's account that make the correspondences less than straightforward. The very basic scheme, which, as we will see, requires some nuance, could be summarized like this:

Virtue	Gift	Beatitude
Faith	Understanding	Purity of Heart
	Knowledge	Mourning
Hope	Fear of the Lord	Poverty of Spirit
Charity	Wisdom	Peacemaking
Prudence	Counsel	Mercy
Justice	Piety	Meekness
Fortitude	Fortitude	Hungering and Thirsting
Temperance
		Persecution

Of the three obvious peculiarities of the scheme, we've already seen the reason for one of them: the beatitude of persecution is the summary beatitude, indicating completeness in all of the others, so it stands outside the main list of seven. The assignment of both understanding and knowledge, and thus of their appropriate beatitudes to faith has to do with the content of each gift. Aquinas makes no explicit assignment of any gift (and thus of any beatitude) to temperance; but he mentions in passing that the fruits of the Holy Spirit associated with the gift of fear are those that have to do with temperance, which suggests -- although it does not establish -- a connection between temperance to fear of the Lord and thus to poverty of spirit. (Which we find elsewhere; Bonaventure, for instance, takes temperance to correspond to fear and poverty of spirit.)

But the real reason for the peculiarities is that Aquinas does not think there is a single exact correspondence among these lists: you can relate them in different ways depending on what you are trying to do. For instance, in a sense we can associate every virtue with every gift: the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love are the principles of all the gifts, and the gifts contribute to the completion of all the virtues. When we associate the gifts and virtues we are not doing so exclusively but according to something they have in common. These commonalities are real (which is why several of the gifts share names with virtues), but there may be different kinds, and they may not always be equally important. The gifts and beatitudes have a more rigorous linkage, due to the authority and arguments of Augustine, but we also see here that Aquinas thinks there is more than one legitimate way to arrange their correspondences.

This comes up in several cases. One case in which it comes up explicitly is in the discussion of the gift of piety and its relation to the beatitude of meekness (2-2.121.2). There he notes that there are two major kinds of fit you could see between the gifts and the beatitudes. The first is that of order, and Augustine gives that kind of fit -- the ordering of one list corresponds in some way to the ordering of the other. In this conguity, the gift of piety corresponds to the beatitude of meekness. The second is that of the special nature of each, based on the kinds of objects they have in view and the kinds of acts involved with them. In this way of fitting them together, there is still some congruity between the gift of piety and the beatitude of meekness, but there is a much stronger fit between the gift of piety and the beatitudes of hungering and thirsting and of mercy. It gets even more complicated when Aquinas answers an objection by noting that by the second kind of congruity, piety and knowledge will share a beatitude (the beatitude associated with knowledge is mourning).

Thus, Aquinas explicitly accepts Augustine's linear ordering as a legitimate way of viewing the relations between gifts and beatitudes. But he thinks there is also another way in which the gifts and beatitudes are related, by content; and this is not linear, but a matter of greater or lesser similarity

The significance of this is quite considerable. When people talk about Augustine's correspondences, they often say that they fit very well sometimes but sometimes seem a bit strained. But Aquinas can avoid this problem entirely. As he sees it, what Augustine is doing is recognizing that the order of gifts corresponds to the order of beatitudes in important practical ways. This order does not depend on the precise nature of either the gifts or the beatitudes, because it is based on their relations to other gifts and beatitudes. As it happens, in a number of cases the correspondences you get by focusing on order are the same ones you get if you ask which beatitudes have the most in common with which gifts. But they do not need to be. (It is worth noting, though, that even the point at which Aquinas himself recognizes the most divergence, the gift of piety, he still holds that there is some commonality of content between the gift and the beatitude that corresponds to it according to order.)

I suspect a major reason for this, and also a reason for why the Augustinian order, while recognized, does not play a major role in Aquinas's account, is that his interest is less directly practical than Augustine's. Aquinas's discussion is not in any sense a how-to or a map for spiritual progress, and the beatitudes are a secondary matter, however important they may be as secondary matters. The structure of the Secunda Secundae is that of a manual for confessors, although it is more concerned with underlying principles than practical advice in the confessional; this is why it focuses almost entirely on virtues and vices, and fits everything else, including the beatitudes, around them: they need to be there because they concern the ends and effects, but they are not the point of focus. In his approach to the beatitudes, however, Augustine is explicitly interested in how to live according to the complete standard of Christian life. These are very different emphases.

There are other aspects of Aquinas's account of the beatitudes beyond all of this. He shows in general more interest in the relation between the virtues and the gifts, and the beatitudes to some extent come along with the latter. He also accepts various bits of lore about the beatitudes that I haven't looked at. For instance, in various places, he recognizes correspondences, also derived from Augustine, between the beatitudes and the petitions of the Our Father (2-2.83.9 ad 3). But a weakness in the Thomistic corpus is that we have no thorough discussion of the beatitudes: Aquinas discussion of them is either quick and general or scattered throughout his discussion of other things. One has to re-form Aquinas's account in order to see how it all fits together.

Murmurs and Glimpses of Eternity

Outlook
by Archibald Lampman

Not to be conquered by these headlong days,
But to stand free: to keep the mind at brood
On life's deep meaning, nature's altitude
Of loveliness, and time's mysterious ways;
At every thought and deed to clear the haze
Out of our eyes, considering only this,
What man, what life, what love, what beauty is,
This is to live, and win the final praise.

Though strife, ill fortune and harsh human need
Beat down the soul, at moments blind and dumb
With agony; yet, patience—there shall come
Many great voices from life's outer sea,
Hours of strange triumph, and, when few men heed,
Murmurs and glimpses of eternity.

SW:TFA

Amid all the holiday travel, I managed to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and have been considering what to say about it. I find I don't really have much.

(1) The story's not very original, of course, but the characters are excellent. This is seen in any number of ways. The most obvious is that they don't whine -- even Kylo Ren doesn't really whine, despite the fact that he often looks like he wants to do so. We've had whining characters in Star Wars from the beginning; Luke spent a lot of time whining, and Anakin took whining to the level of a performance art.

They also don't respond in wooden ways, which is a massive improvement as well. Just the acting and character direction on their own make the movie better than any of the prequels. One of the things that makes the movie is that Finn and Rey, without either of them being in any way goofy characters, do ebullience very well. My favorite moment in the movie is when Rey manages to bypass the technobabble-thingamajig and she is practically sparkling with triumph, which sets up Han's dry, understated reaction to it perfectly.

(2) The theme of the movie is the danger of fear; it pops again and again as something that holds us back from good. And their doing so is generally handled well, and in ways suitable to the characters. And it's notable that what both Rey and Finn need to overcome their very different fears is friendship -- both of them escape their fears when they are put in situations in which they realize they can no longer use being alone in the world as an excuse.

(3) There are some weaknesses. The battle and duel choreography have nothing of the excellence of the best fights of the earlier movies, for instance. Even minor fights in the prequels, for instance, were better choreographed than anything here. (It does help a lot that the movie makes it easier to care about the characters involved in these sequences. That was the problem with the prequels -- carefully choreographed fights between characters with whom we had little connection in circumstances that usually seemed not to matter much. And one of the worst choreographed fights in all of the movies, that between Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi in Episode IV, is one of the best fights of all, precisely because it is between characters who really matter under circumstances that really matter and is played out in a way that continues to matter for the story. There's nothing on that level here, but it does at least avoid the sterility of the prequels.)

Aquinas on the Beatitudes (I): Merit and Reward

Rob has been discussing Augustine's account of the beatitudes (Part I, Part II), so I thought I would say something about Aquinas's account of the beatitudes and, in a later post, how he uses and modifies Augustine's account.

Aquinas, as one might expect, finds a lot of structure in the beatitudes. The beatitudes are concerned with objective happiness, but what is more St. Thomas takes them to be systematically so. There are three major accounts of what happiness is. Some say it is a life of pleasure; some say it is an active life; and some say it is contemplative life. Aquinas argues, independently, that happiness is properly attributed to the contemplative life (more precisely, to completeness of contemplative life), and that the active life is something that disposes us to this happiness, while the life of pleasure, since it tempts people to go no further, is an obstacle to happiness. This provides the basic structure of the beatitudes.

A life of pleasure involves two things: abundance of external goods (of some kind) and satisfaction of one's passions. The first beatitude, "Blessed are the poor in spirit", links happiness to humility and in particular nonattachment to external goods. The second beatitude, "Blessed are the meek", links happiness to restraint in matters of the irascible passions (like anger), and the third beatitude, "Blessed are those who mourn", links happiness to restraint in matters of concupiscible passions (like desire).

Active life is a life concerned with one's neighbor, in matters either of obligation or of graciousness. The fourth beatitude, "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice", concerns the former, and the fifth beatitude, "Blessed are the merciful", concerns the latter. This active life disposes to contemplation by certain effects, one concerned with ourselves and the other concerned with other people. First, it purifies our passions, which is identified by the sixth beatitude, "Blessed are the pure of heart", and second, it brings us to good relations with other people, which is identified by the seventh beatitude, "Blessed are the peacemakers".

But what of the eighth beatitude, "Blessed are those who are persecuted for justice"? This is the summary beatitude, indicating the point at which all the others have achieved their full and complete form: when you hold to them even in persecution.

And what of the contemplative life? Each beatitude consists of a merit and a reward. The merits all have to do with removing obstacles or the active life that disposes us to contemplation; but the goal, contemplative life, being itself the happy life, is the reward of these eight merits.

The merits of the first three beatitudes consisted of withdrawing from false happiness. People pursue false happiness, however, because they confuse it with something suggestive of true happiness. The rewards of the first three beatitudes, then, are the features of true happiness that false happiness only mimics. We pursue external goods like wealth and honor as if they were happiness because we confuse them with excellence and abundance of good. Thus the reward for poverty in spirit is the Kingdom of Heaven, which is precisely this abundant excellence in God. People seek retaliation as if that could give happiness because they want security for themselves; thus the meek get the security of inheriting the earth. People treat self-indulgence as happiness because they are aiming for consolation or comfort; thus the reward for mourning, which opposes self-indulgence, is comfort.

The next two merits required working toward the good of others, either through justice or mercy. People shirk the former in order to increase their own good; so the reward for not shirking is to have one's fill of good things. People shirk the latter in order to avoid increasing the bad things they have; so the reward for being merciful is having one's own misery relieved through mercy.

The next two merits were concerned with disposing us directly to contemplation both internally and with respect to others. Purity of heart is rewarded with the clear vision of God, and peacemaking is rewarded with union with God as children of God (through, of course, the Son of God who is perfectly united to God). And the eighth, of course, being a summary merit, gets a summary reward; thus we get the same reward as the beginning to indicate that we go around again.

None of this requires on its own that the beatitudes be seen as an ascent; eternal happiness, which the beatitudes describe, is one thing. We just need to break it up to understand it, according to how it is merited and the way in which it aptly rewards those merits. But Aquinas does accept the Augustinian notion that the beatitudes do indicate some kind of ascent. The rewards of the beatitude are also in ascending order of excellence:

For it is more to possess the land of the heavenly kingdom than simply to have it: since we have many things without possessing them firmly and peacefully. Again, it is more to be comforted in the kingdom than to have and possess it, for there are many things the possession of which is accompanied by sorrow. Again, it is more to have one's fill than simply to be comforted, because fulness implies abundance of comfort. And mercy surpasses satiety, for thereby man receives more than he merited or was able to desire. And yet more is it to see God, even as he is a greater man who not only dines at court, but also sees the king's countenance. Lastly, the highest place in the royal palace belongs to the king's son.

This ascent will be relevant (as in Augustine) to the association of each beatitude with a gift of the Holy Spirit, which I'll talk about in the next post in this series.

The eight beatitudes are, in Aquinas's view, completely exhaustive. Whenever we find another makarism or beatitude in Scripture (and possibly elsewhere), we can reduce it to these eight. Thus Aquinas gives three examples from the Old Testament: "Blessed is the man whom the Lord corrects" (Job 5:17) is reducible to the beatitude of mourning; "Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the ungodly" (Psalm 1:1) is reducible to the beatitude of purity of heart; "Blessed is the man who finds wisdom" (Proverbs 3:13) is reducible to the beatitude of peacemaking.

Besides the beatitudes in Matthew (the Sermon on the Mount), however, the most prominent makarisms in the Bible are a clearly related list of beatitudes in Luke (the Sermon on the Plain). Aquinas takes the standard Matthaean list to be adapted specifically to the disciples of Christ, i.e., those who had already spent a fair amount of time learning for Jesus, while he takes the Lucan list to be an adaptation of the beatitudes for the common multitude, who have spent less time improving their understanding of happiness. What does the multitude tend to treat as the good or happy or successful life? A life that has an abundance of external goods, a sufficiency of what the body requires, a joyfulness of heart, and the favor of others. Since treating the life of pleasure is the primary obstacle to genuine happiness, we have the four paradoxes corresponding to these four common assumptions about happiness: happy are the poor, happy are the hungry, happy are those who weep, happy are you when men hate you. Why? Because now you can seek true happiness instead of becoming mired in false happiness.

to be continued

Foxes and Sunshowers

I was thinking about sunshowers today, and the ways they are described. A sunshower, of course, is when it is raining while the sun is shining. Growing up, we always had a saying for a sunshower: "The devil is beating his wife". As it happens, that is a quite common tag for sunshowers in the American South, and is apparently the saying for the same phenomenon in some places that speak French, Dutch, or Hungarian, as well. But folk sayings associated with sunshowers are extraordinarily common, and some of the most common are animal-linked. One of the animals that keeps coming up is the fox. Just looking at Wikipedia, here are some of the fox-and-sunshower sayings from around the world:

In Bangladesh: "shial mamar bia hoce" -"Uncle Fox is getting married"
In Brazil, "Casamento da Raposa" (Fox's Wedding)
In Finland, it is called "ketut kylpevät" or "foxes are taking bath"
In Galician, the traditional belief is that the vixen or the fox are getting married: casa a raposa / casa o raposo; sometimes the wolf and the vixen: estanse casando o lobo coa raposa.
In Japan, it is known as "kitsune no yomeiri", or "the kitsune's wedding", and means a fox's wedding ceremony is being held.
In Korea, a male tiger gets married to a fox.
In Nepal (Nepali), it is called "the fox's wedding" or "gham-paani, gham-paani shyal ko bihe" which literally translates to "Sunshine-rain, sunshine-rain, the fox is getting married".
In Sinhala, it is called "the fox's wedding"
In Bengali, it is called "the blind fox's wedding".
In Kannada, it is called "Kaage Nari maduve" which means Crow and fox getting married"
In Malayalam, it is called the Fox's wedding
In Oriya, it is called "the foxes wedding"
In Tamil, it is called the fox and the crow/raven are getting married
In Telugu, it is called "Yenda Vanala, kukkala nakkala pelli" which means "Dogs and Foxes getting married in the sunshowers"

This is extraordinarily widespread, too widespread to be coincidence, but nobody knows why foxes and sunshowers are linked together in the imaginations of so many cultures. Given how common it seems to be in Indian languages, I wonder if it started in India and spread from there, but it's anyone's guess. On the other hand, the culture that seems to have the most elaborate folktales associating foxes and sunshowers is Japan; but whether this is because they got the saying from the folktales or they developed the folktales because they had the saying, nobody knows.

Maronite Year XV

In the Maronite calendar, Epiphany or Theophany (Denho in the Syriac) is specifically concerned with the Baptism of Christ. Indeed, this is practically guaranteed by the structure of the Sundays: Advent led up to the Birth of Christ, which was followed by the Finding in the Temple, when Jesus was about 12, and now we in a sense complete the narrative as we find it in Luke. And this is reaffirmed by the fact that the day following the Epiphany is always the Memorial of the Praises of John the Baptist.

Feast of the Glorious Epiphany
Titus 2:11-3:7; Luke 3:15-22

Are You not, O Lord, the Way,
through whose bright lustral waters
we become children of God,
those in whom He is well pleased?
And are You not He, O Lord,
by whose light the nations came
to find their great salvation
and rejoice to know their King?

By You, forgiving Ember,
the waters were filled with light,
for in Your light we see light,
and are illuminated.
In the river called Jordan
one God was manifested:
the Father declared His Son
with the Spirit upon Him.

Christ was born and was baptized
that we might be saved by Him;
that simple creature, water,
was exalted to serve God.
None can enter the kingdom
save by water and Spirit,
save by being adopted,
being washed in the Jordan.

Today the waters are blessed,
set aflame with holiness;
our leprosies are thus healed
by the salvation of God.
The grace of God dawns on us
for holy lives of justice,
that we may be set apart
and seek to do noble deeds.

Music on My Mind

Muse, "Uprising". You can blame Enbrethiliel. But it's catchy enough on its own. You'll notice the evil teddy bears in the video, which are a staple of Muse videos in general; the point of them, of course, is that sometimes injustice disguises itself as a cute and cuddly harmless little thing, with lying promises of hugs.

They will not force us
They will stop degrading us
They will not control us
We will be victorious