The Thomist 68 (2004): 173-204 RESISTANCE TO THE DEMANDS OF LOVE: AQUINAS ON THE VICE OF ACEDIA REBECCA KONYNDYK DEYOUNG Calvin College Grand Rapids, Michigan T HE LIST OF the seven capital vices1 includes sloth, envy, avarice, vainglory, gluttony, lust, and anger. While many of the seven vices are more complex than they appear at first glance, one stands out as more obscure and out of place than all the others, at least for a contemporary audience: the vice of sloth. Our puzzlement over sloth is heightened by sloth's inclusion on the traditional lists of the seven capital vices and the seven deadly sins from the fourth century onward. 2 For hundreds of years, these seven vices were distinguished as moral and spiritual failings of serious and perennial importance. 3 By contrast, recent studies, as well as the popular imagination, typically associate sloth with, or even define it as, laziness.4 But is laziness in fact a moral failing? 1 Often conflated and confused with the seven deadly sins; see note 3. 2 See especially Morton Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins: An Introduction to the History of a ReligiousConcept (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1967), 56-57. 3 A capital vice is one that grows up from pride as its root and then in tum becomes a source (caput) from which many others spring (STh I-II q. 84, a. 3). Capital vices can also easily become deadly (or mortal)-that is, sins that cause spiritual death via the loss of charity (see, for example, STh II-II q. 35, a. 3; I-II q. 88, aa. 1-2). Aquinas characterizes the traditional list of seven as capital vices and argues that each can become mortal under certain conditions. • See, for example, the following description by Evelyn Waugh in The Seven Deadly Sins (essays in the Sunday Times reprinted by The Akadine Press, 2002): "The word 'Sloth' ..• is a mildly facetious variant of 'indolence,' and indolence, surely, so far from being a deadly sin, is one of the most amiable of weaknesses" (57). Josef Pieper also comments on acedia's association with laziness in Faith, Hope, Love (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1986), 118. The ordinary conception of acedia also frequently includes apathy and boredom. 173 174 REBECCA KONYNDYK DeYOUNG In this article, I will explore Thomas Aquinas's conception of the vice of sloth and his reasons for including it on the list of seven. For this reason, from here on I will refer to the vice by its Latin name, acedia, rather than the modern English term, "sloth." Aquinas's account deserves special attention because it stands at a key point in the history of acedia, a point at which previous strands of the Christian virtue tradition converge and after which the heuristic force of the traditional schema of virtues and vices is considerably dissipated. His account thus provides an interesting interpretive link between ancient Christian and modern conceptions of this vice. In part I, I will briefly trace the history of acedia in order to uncover the various sources of its association with laziness. In part II, I will analyze Aquinas's two-part definition of acedia, noting especially its opposition to the virtue of charity (caritas). His characterization of acedia as the kind of sorrow opposed to the joy of charity diverges from the tradition (both before and after him) in subtle but interesting ways, and yields an important clue as to why he thought acedia constituted a serious and important moral deficiency, warranting its inclusion on the list of seven capital vices. In part III, I will inquire more specifically into what might cause acedia'ssorrow. Here I engage an interpretive puzzle about Aquinas's own description of acedia, which turns out to be a necessary further step in clarifying his understanding of this vice: Is physical weariness the cause of acedia's sorrow, as some passages seem to suggest? Or does acedia have deeper, spiritual roots? Solving this puzzle helps us understand why Aquinas insists that acedia is a spiritual vice and, therefore, much more than laziness. If Aquinas is right that acedia is aversion not to physical effort as such, but rather to what it sees as the burdens of a relationship of love, then this feature of the vice, born of its link to charity, confirms its important role in the moral life. AQUINAS ON ACEDIA 175 I. THE LINK TO LAZINESS: A SHORT HISTORY OF ACEDIA Contemporary audiences are not unique in thinking of acedia as aversion to physical effort or as associated with states of torpor and inertia. The following cursory survey of the history of acedia will reveal both important consonances and dissonances between Aquinas's conception of the vice and the tradition of thought in which he played an important part. The history of acedia may be divided into five main stages.5 Its beginnings lie at least as early as the fourth century A.D., when the Desert Fathers of Egypt wrestled with this vice and Evagrius of Pontus first compiled a list of eight major vices, acedia chief among them. For the desert cenobites, acedia named the temptation to escape one's commitment to the solitary religious life, due to both physical weariness (a result of their extreme asceticism) and weariness with the spiritual life itself. Oppressed with the tedium of life and depressed at the thought of his spiritual calling, a monk would look out of his desert cell in the heat of the day and want nothing more than to escape and enjoy an afternoon of entertainment in the city.6 From this solitary mode of the religious life with its stringent asceticism, the concept of acedia was transplanted into Western monasticism by John Cassian, disciple of Evagrius. Here one's calling to the religious life took a communal form. In this second stage, the vice was understood less as a longing to escape solitary communion with God than as a temptation to shirk one's calling to participate in a religious community and its spiritual life. 7 Again, the one afflicted by this vice was aggrieved and oppressed by his commitment to the religious life with its identity and calling-hence Gregory the Great's label for it as a particular kind of tristitia (sorrow). But in its monastic form, escaping now 5 Here I gratefully acknowledge S. Wenzel's excellent historical work in The Sin of Sloth: Acedia in Medieval Thought and literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967). The stages outlined here are my own. 6 See especially ibid., 10, 18. 7 As we will note in part II, this conception of acedia, unlike Aquinas's, seems to affect both precepts of charity, that is, one's love of God and neighbor. 176 REBECCA KONYNDYK DeYOUNG involved shunning a relationship to God and to others who shared that relationship. The inertia and tedium caused by sorrow sapped one's motivation to do one's part in that community; thus acedia's link with laziness, understood as the neglect of one's duties (whether spiritual exercises or manual labor), emerges further. In the thirteenth century, Aquinas further reworked Cassianic acedia and Gregorian tristitia in his Summa Theologiae, both narrowing and broadening the concept. On the one hand, his opposition of acedia to charity more narrowly and precisely located the vice's threat to one's spiritual life. On the other hand, restricting its target to the virtue of charity broadened its application to any human being in any state of life, for Aquinas understood all human beings, simply in virtue of their nature as human beings, as made to live in relationship with God. For all those who accept this relationship and receive the gift of charity, Aquinas counted acedia a possibility. Acedia thus ceased to be a vice that threatened only those who chose the religious life in the strict sense. In the fourth stage, the Reformation further broadened the concept of acedia. First, it turned away from the tradition-based lists of virtues and vices in favor of what it saw as the more strictly scriptural commandments. 8 Moreover, the Reformers rejected the sacrament of penance, for the sake of which much of the previous analysis of acedia and its behavioral symptoms had been done. 9 Thus, the seven great vices gradually lost their status as central heuristic devices in theology and spiritual formation. In addition, the Reformers expanded the notion of one's spiritual vocation to include all forms of work and labor. So shirking one's spiritual or religious duties-the monastic sense of acedia-now included shirking all of one's duties in life, for example, to one's guild, one's family, one's church, and so on. Since all work can be an expression of one's religious calling, acedia came to mean neglect "Acedia" is only explicitly mentioned in the Septuagint once, at Psalm 118:28 (119:28 in modern translations); the Vulgate gives its close synonym "taedium" instead, usually glossed by commentators as "taedium cordis." See Wenzel, Sin of Sloth, 34. 9 See Bloomfield, Seven Deadly Sins, 91-93, 99. 8 AQUINAS ON ACEDIA 177 of one's work in general, while its opposite, diligence, came to be regarded as a virtue. Because Aquinas's account defined acedia as opposing charity, a theological virtue whose object is our friendship with God (our participation in the divine nature), acedia was in his view a peculiarly theological vice.10 This explains how acedia could be reduced to "mere" laziness in the fifth and final stage of its history-a stage characterized by humanizing and secularizing tendencies of thought that followed the medieval period and were already underway during the time of the Reformation. If one gives up a sense of the person as a being fulfilled only in relationship to God, then acedia-the vice that sorrows over and resists our divine identity and destiny-no longer seems to have any application. Evacuated of spiritual content, little is left of acedia save aversion to effort in general; acedia is merely laziness and its status as a capital and spiritual vice becomes puzzling. 11 On the contrary, Aquinas's conception of this vice entails understanding (at some level) and taking seriously that one is refusing the commitment and calling that a relationship to God entails, m order for it to count as a genuine case of acedia. (Sin of Sloth, 66). Despite the loss of the "great seven" as a schema by which to measure moral (mal)formation, modem cultures have raised "industriousness" to the level of an important virtue, and the "sloth" opposed to it thus can assume great importance as a moral defect (see, for example, Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love, 118-22). It is also worth noting that my version of the history does nothing to track Kierkegaardian and Pascalian descriptions of moral and spiritual states that resonate closely with acedia (for example, despair, restlessness, and the relentless pursuit of distractions via the aesthetic life or via empty diversion-seeking), much less the new humanistic version of acedia evident in Nietzschean nihilism (the hatred of man, ironically characteristic of Christians, described in part I of the Genealogyof Morals, for example) or in Sartre's descriptions of "bad faith." There are two important and interesting questions here (neither of which I will be able to address in the current essay): First, are these genuine cases of acedia? And second, would Aquinas (given his definition of acedia as opposed to charity) be able to recognize them as such? It would be one thing if Christians could diagnose acedia in others who had the vice but were unable, from their own perspective, to recognize and articulate the problem. It would be quite another to claim that one could self-diagnose from within a secular perspective. I think Aquinas would be able to countenance a "natural" form of acedia, understood as resistance of the will to its own inclination (born of natural necessity) to the perfection of human nature (albeit not in its perfect, supernatural form). Thus I am inclined to count these latter cases as instances of acedia, although in a sense analogous to its perfect form. 10 Wenzel also makes this point 11 178 REBECCA KONYNDYK DeYOUNG Our brief history of acedia12 goes some distance toward explaining the tendency to conflate sloth with mere laziness. In the next section, I turn to Aquinas's conception of acedia. By opposing acedia directly to charity, Aquinas provides an important clue about the nature and importance of the vice. The resulting conception of acedia transcends, but does not jettison, its historical link to laziness. II. ACEDIA'S OPPOSITION TO CHARITY In the Secunda Pars of the Summa Theologiae, formation in virtue is the central and primary characterization of the good life for human beings. Aquinas conceives of moral formation teleologically, in terms both of Aristotelian flourishing and ultimately, of Christian sanctification. 13 Thus, the virtues in their most perfect form are certain internal dispositions and principles of action infused by God (specifically, by the work of the Holy Spirit) that enable us to reach our telos, becoming like Christ, the exemplar of human perfection and one who lives in perfect communion with God. At its core, then, the moral life involves personal transformation. Vices, according to Aquinas, are the personal habits that thwart this transformation; virtues are the traits by which we take on the character of Christ. The apostle Paul describes this change in Colossians 3:5-14: Your life is now hidden with Christ in God. . . . Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature .... You used to walk in these ways, in the life you once lived. But now you must rid yourself of all such things ... since 12 As is indicated by its brevity, my account is not intended to be comprehensive. Notable omissions include the story of how Cassianic acedia and Gregorian tristitia were merged into a single vice and how Evagrius's list of eight reduced to seven, a more biblically symbolic number. See Bloomfield, Seven Deadly Sins, 72. 13 I have argued in more detail for these claims in "Power Made Perfect in Weakness: Aquinas's Transformation of the Virtue of Courage," Medieval Philosophy and Theology, forthcoming. AQUINAS ON ACED.IA 179 you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in the image of its Creator. 14 This teleological picture of the moral life as a project of personal transformation stands behind Aquinas's characterization of acedia. Acedia counts as a vice because it threatens (from within) the process of human perfection and its telos, a relationship with God that Aquinas will call charity. Aquinas defines the vice of acedia as "sorrow over . . . an internal and divine good [in us]." 15 The definition breaks down into two main parts. I will examine first what Aquinas means by "an internal and divine good" and, second, what he means by his puzzling description of it as a kind of "sorrow" (tristitia). The "internal and divine good" refers to that human participation in the divine nature which is nothing other than the virtue of charity. 16 Acedia is the capital vice directly opposed to the virtue of charity. 17 Thus, we should give a brief sketch of what 14 See also Ephesians 4:22-24, upon which Aquinas comments: "Hence he [Paul] makes two points here since vices must first be eradicated before virtues can be cultivated: First, he instructs them to put aside their former condition, their old way of living. Secondly, how they must take on a new way of life [characteristic] of Jesus. Three considerations follow. First, what does 'the old man' mean? Some hold that the old man is exterior and the new man interior. But it must be said that the old man is both interior and exterior; he is a person who is enslaved by a senility in his soul, due to sin, and in his body whose members provide the tools for sin. Thus a man enslaved to sin in soul and body is an old man .... And so a man subjected to sin is termed an old man because he is on the way to corruption." Aquinas also references the Colossians 3 passage in this section of the commentary, with the following remark, "In Colossians 3: 9 the Apostle indicates how to leave the old man behind: 'stripping yourselves of the old man with his deeds.' The substance of human nature is not to be rejected or despoiled, but only wicked actions and conduct" (Commentary on Saint Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians, trans. Matthew Lamb [Albany: Magi Books, Inc., 1966], c. 4, lect. 7). 15 Quaestiones Disputatae de Malo, q. 11, a. 2; see also Summa Theologiae 11-11 q. 35, a. 2. 16 STh 11-11 q. 23, a. 2, ad 1; and 11-11 q. 35, aa. 2 and 3. immediately after acedia, in STh 11-11, q. 36).Acedia sorrows over the divine good (the first precept of charity: "love God"), while envy sorrows over a neighbor's good (the second precept of charity: "love your neighbor"). Further, envy sorrows over a neighbor's good as excelling my own (so its object is neither something my own, nor something shared by me). It does not sorrow (at least directly) over the spiritual good of friendship itself, as sloth does, much less friendship with God. For a defense of the priority of loving God, see, for example, STh 11-11, q. 23, a. 5, ad 1: "God is the 17 Even more so than envy (the vice mentioned 180 REBECCA KONYNDYKDeYOUNG Aquinas means by "charity." It is the centerpiece of his account of the virtues, which are in turn at the center of his account of the moral life in the Summa Theologiae. Charity is the "root and mother of all other virtues"; its position parallels pride's with respect to the capital vices. In addition, charity is a theological virtue, which means that it has God as its direct object. 18 Aquinas characterizes charity primarily as a relationship with God. He describes it as "union with God," "sharing in the fellowship of eternal happiness," "friendship with God," and the "spiritual life whereby God dwells in us. " 19 From the beginning, human beings are made in the imago dei, and in the end we are perfected only by participating in God's divine nature. Here is the classic definition of charity: Charity is the friendship of human beings for God, grounded in the fellowship of everlasting happiness. Now this fellowship is in respect, not of natural, but of gratuitous gifts, for, according to Romans 6:23, "the grace of God is life everlasting": wherefore charity itself surpasses our natural faculties. Therefore charity can be in us neither naturally nor through the acquisition of the natural powers, but by the infusion of the Holy Spirit, Who is the love of the Father and the Son, and the participation of Whom is created charity. 20 For Aquinas, charity is a deep bond of friendship that makes us all we are meant to be. We might think, as a kind of analogy originally suggested by the apostle Paul, of the way a man and woman become "one flesh" in marriage. Marriage is more than a civil contract; it is a transformation of identity, the kind that comes only through the gift of oneself to another person. Thus, it involves the dying away of an old individual self and the birth of a new unity. In a mysterious way, this new bond of unity enables both members in the relationship to grow and be principal object of charity, while our neighbor is loved out of charity for God's sake." 13 STh II-II, q. 23ff. 19 STh 11-11, q. 23, a. l; II-II, q. 23, a. 2, ad 2, 3, 5; and II-II, q. 35, a. 2; for descriptions of participated charity, seeSTh II-II, q. 24, a. 5, ad3; and II-II, q. 28, a. 2. The passion of love is treated at STh 1-11, qq. 26-28; in q. 28 especially, Aquinas describes love (quoting I John 4) as effecting union, friendship, and mutual indwelling between lovers. 20 STh II-II, q. 24, a. 2. AQUINAS ON ACEDIA 181 transformed in ways that perfect their character. 21 Similarly, charity is a relationship of union with God, a participation in the divine nature that completes and perfects us. In Pauline terms, we "put on the new self, which is Christ," thereby becoming fully what we are meant to be.22 Aquinas also emphasizes that this relationship of participation in God himself is received only by way of a gift23-a gift of the Spirit that requires a gift of ourselves in return in order to count as genuine friendship,for friendship requires mutuality. 24 Finally, charity is linked to our ultimate destiny, what Aquinas describes as our telos. Our fulfillment as human beings comes with living in God's presence, being in union with him. In the consummation of this friendship, our will finds perfect joy and rest. 25 For now, Aquinas writes, the "grace [of charity] is nothing else than a beginning of glory in us. "26 The marriage analogy again illustrates its "now and not yet" character: spouses are married on the day they take their vows, but being married is an identity and activity 21 As Frederick Buechner says, "[A] marriage made in Heaven is one where a man and a woman become more richly themselves together than ... either of them could ever have managed to become alone" (Whistling in the Dark: A Doubters Dictionary [San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993], 87). See also Aristotle's conception of the effects of virtuous friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics (9.12.1172a10-15). 22 Charity involves an ontological change: It is "a habitual form superadded to the [human] natural power [i.e., the will or rational appetite, whose natural object is the perfect or complete good]" (STh I-TI, q. 23, a. 2; see also STh I-TI, qq. 1-5). As such, charity orients us to our supernatural end or telos. But the habitus of charity, as with all the virtues involving the will, is also an internal principle of human moral action and so functions as the source of moral change as well. 23 "Now, since charity surpasses the proportion of human nature, it depends, not on any natural ability or power, but on the sole grace of the Holy Spirit, Who infuses charity. Wherefore the degree of charity depends neither on the condition of nature nor on the capacity of natural virtue, but only on the will of the Holy Spirit, who divides his gifts according to his will" (STb I-TI, q. 24, a. 3). 24 Note that charity is only an infused virtue and has no habitually acquired form. Once we receive the virtue of charity, however, we can choose to exercise it in actions which thereby increase or strengthen it. See STh II-II, q. 23, aa. 4-7, 25 As Aquinas writes in STh I-II, q. 3, a. 4: "Delight comes to the will from the end [namely, God] being present," for "when human beings attain their ultimate end, they remain at peace, their desires being at rest." "Joy" he names as "the consummation of happiness." 26 STh TI-II, q. 24, a. 3, ad 2. 182 REBECCA KONYNDYKDeYOUNG that takes a lifetime of commitment, transformation, and livingin-relationship. So, too, does our friendship with God. This "internal and divine good in us" is the target of acedia's sorrow, which brings us to the second half of the definition. By "sorrow" Aquinas means something more technical than its usual connotation of sadness. 27 The Latin word acedia is a transliteration of the Greek ciKT)OE:ta-literally,"a lack of care. "28 Etymologically, at least, acedia is a lack of appetite, unresponsiveness, aversion, and, at its limit, even distaste. 29 For Aquinas, joy and sorrow are the spiritual analogues of physical pleasure and pain; they name our appetitive reaction to the inner apprehension (by imagination or intellect) of a present good or evil, respectively. Aquinas usually uses "sorrow" rather than "pain" when the evil object in question is a spiritual one. 30 Acedia's sorrow is thus an appetitive aversion to a spiritual and interior good because that good is perceived by the agent as evil in some way (in what way we will consider later). In the disputed questions De Malo, Aquinas clarifies this: Sorrow about "some 27 See, for example, his treaonent of sorrow in the treatise on the passions, STh I-II, qq. 35-39. 28 Alternate Latin spellings-most commonly, accidia-trade on the mistaken etymological link of accidia/acedia to acidus (acid, bitter). Hence the medievals' psychological description of acedia as "bitterness." See Wenzel, Sin of Sloth, 54. 29 In framing acedia as a special species of sorrow, Aquinas is integrating strands of the tradition from Cassian to John Damascene and Gregory the Great (the latter, for example, lists tristitia in place of acedia in the list of seven found in his Moralia on Job XXXI, XLV, 87). See also note 37, below. 30 We can make this clearer by contrasting acedia with courage. In its strict sense, courage stands firm primarily against physical threats to the body-most notably, physical pain and death-to which we (embodied rational animals) have a natural aversion (STh II-II, qq. 123124). For example, in the paradigm act of courage, a martyr sacrifices a bodily good (his or her own bodily life) for the sake of a spiritual good (the truth of the faith). See also De Malo, q. 11, a. 1. In general, one can also distinguish three levels of one's "aversion to a present evil" in Aquinas's moral psychology: first, pain as aversion to bodily injury or evil; second, sadness as the passion averse to evil on the level of the sensitive appetite; and finally, sorrow (in the technical sense), which is aversion (disgust, contempt) at the level of intellectual appetite (simple willing). Aquinas uses dolor (pain) and tristitia (sadness) almost interchangeably for levels one and two, but reserves the technical sense of tristitia to refer to level three, on account of a difference in the objects of the respective appetites (sensible objects vs. spiritual objects). See STh I-II, q. 35, aa. 1 and 2. AQIBNAS ON ACEDIA 183 distressing or laborious work" (a martyr's bodily suffering, for example) is not acedia because in those cases the sorrow is not about an interior good but rather an exterior evil.31 Sorrow can manifest itself as a passion (located in the sensitive appetite) or an aversion of the will (the intellectual appetite). In the latter case, it looks more like disgust or contempt than the emotion of sadness typically associated with the term. Aquinas will be concerned primarily with the movement of the intellectual appetite in his definition of acedia. Aquinas's moral psychology links joy, the appetitive state directly opposed to sorrow, to rest in the appetite. 32 Like its analogue, pleasure, joy is a kind of delight in a good that is present and possessed.33 Acedia's sorrow is therefore a restless resistance to a good (perceived as evil in some respect) that is recognized to be our own. 34 This means that we do not have an aversion to God himself in acedia, but rather to ourselves-assharing-in-God' s-nature, united to him in the bond of friendship. Aquinas says, "acedia is not sadness about the presence of God himself, but sadness about some [internal] good pertaining to him which is divine by participation,"35 implying that acedia afflicts only those who already have charity. Aquinas also names joy as the first of three inward effects (acts or "fruits") of charity. 36 Acedia, as "a species of sorrow," is the vice directly opposing this joy. Rather than being lifted up by joy 31 De Malo, q. 11, a. 1, ad 4. 32 STh I-II, q. 3, a. 4; I-II, q. 31, a. 3. 33 34 STh I-II, q. 31, a. 2. De Malo, q. 11, a. 2. STh I-II, q. 35, a. 8: "For the proper object of sorrow is one's own evil. n 35 De Malo, q. 11, a. 3, ad 3 {emphasis added). two inward effects are as follows: We have peace (pax, concordia)when our will is united to God's will by the bond of friendship, so that we share in common the objects of our love, a theme Aquinas takes from Augustine. And we have misericordiatoward others whom God loves, evidenced by our grief when obstacles stand in the way of their well-being. Joy is defined in STh II-II, q. 28, a. 1 as delight "in the presence of one you love"-in this case, God. The effects include fruits of the Holy Spirit, as well as acts {both joy and peace) and virtues (misericordia).STh 11-11, q. 28, a. 4, corp. and ad 3; 11-11, q. 29, a. 4, corp. and ad 1; and 11-11, q. 30, a. 3. 36 The other 184 REBECCA KONYNDYK DeYOUNG at one's union with God, the person afflicted with acedia is oppressed or weighed down; as one's own, the divine good is seen as an unwelcome burden. 37 What makes acedia sinful or vicious, for Aquinas, is that it consists in an intrinsic disorder of our desires: It is inappropriate aversion, for it regards our participation in the greatest good and only source of lasting joy with apathy or distaste. 38 Acedia perceives this divine good in us as evil-as oppressive or repulsive. To God's offer of the "renewal of [our] whole nature at the center of [our] being," acedia turns away from "be[coming] what God wants [us] to be." 39 To mark the contrast, acedia is traditionally opposed to the beatitude "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness," where one wholeheartedly yearns to be renewed, that is, to become righteous like Christ. 40 acedia as experiencing oneself, or an aspect of oneself, as a burden is a theme I first noticed in the words of a twelfth century monk: "Oftentimes, when you are alone in your cell, a certain inertia, a dullness of the mind and disgust of the heart seize you. You feel an enormous loathing in yourself. You are a burden to yourself, and that internal joy you used so happily to experience has left you .... The spiritual vigor in you has withered, your inner calm lies dead" {quoted in Wenzel, Sin of Sloth, 33). It may seem contradictory or just plain confused to describe acedia both as apathy {lack of feeling, with a corresponding inactivity) and disgust (feeling repulsed, with a corresponding act of refusal). The best explanation is that when the one with acedia "turns away from" the divine good, this can either be an act of neglect or an act of deliberate rejection. Apathy seems a better description of the former; disgust, or distaste, the latter. 38 There are actually two potential problems in this vice (Sih II-II, q. 35, a. 1): (1) disorder-one's affectus has the wrong object, namely, sorrow over a good-and (2) immoderation-one's affectus has the right object, but lacks due measure and falls into excess. This latter problem includes sorrow over genuine evils, for example, grief over a loved one's death that is so great that it immobilizes or paralyzes us from further action. Another example of the same problem would be an occasion in which seeing a grave injustice done causes such great sorrow that it makes us despair of ever making a difference {"Why even try?") so we neglect misericordiaand its outer manifestation, acts of benevolence. I do not address the second form directly here, nor does Aquinas do more than mention it in the Summa Theologiae and De Malo. 39 Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love, 120. 40 Wenzel, Sin of Sloth, 57. It might seem puzzling that in order to have a vice opposing charity one must first have charity. How can one have two "opposite" qualities at once? The virtue of charity itself is infused by the Holy Spirit, but acting on it is, on Aquinas's account, up to us. It is entirely possible to have a virtue and fail to act on it, or even to act in ways that are not fully consonant with it. {If acedia turns mortal, of course, it will be incompatible with charity.) So it is possible to have charity without its "effects"-which include everything from 37 The sense of AQUINAS ON ACEDIA 185 Now there are times when one might be weighed down by suffering or grief or even physical weariness, and lack inner joy. Or despite a commitment to regular prayer and fasting, one might hit spells of dryness or a lack of devotion. This is not acedia. Acedia, as a sin and vice, moves beyond emotion and feeling to what Aquinas calls "reason's consent" to our lack of joy.41 As a metaphor for acedia, the Christian tradition frequently pointed to the people of Israel, freed from bondage in Egypt and faced with the prospect of making their home in the Promised Land. After the spies' report, however, the Israelites decided that the project of conquering the Canaanite nations looked much less appealing than it did before. God punished them with forty years of wandering in the desert wilderness-a punishment as much their choice as God's penalty. To the offer of a homeland and promised rest, a chance to embrace their identity and destiny as God's own people, the Israelites responded by turning away. As the psalmist recounts, "They despised the pleasant land" (Ps 106 :24a). The aridity of the desert landscape, the restless, aimless wandering, and the refusal of their own fulfillment and God's blessing in their promised homeland all have their analogues in the vice of acedia. Another commonly used scriptural portrait of acedia is that of Lot's wife: When faced with the opportunity to be saved from destruction, she leaves the doomed city of Sodom but cannot bring herself to turn completely away from her old life (in particular, its sense of home and identity} with all its familiarity. (Familiar miseries, with which one has learned to live, often seem emotions and actions to other virtues: joy is an act of will (with, one presumes, the concomitant emotional effect), peace is an act of will, and misericordiais a virtue. Further, joy is compatible with godly sorrow, because in that case, joy and sorrow have different objects (STh II-II, q. 28, a. 2). 41 While Wenzel is right to characterize it as an "affective disorder," it is also more than that. Virtues and vices involve both a cognitive and an affective moment; the emotions and decisions embody a judgment or view of the world that is also part of what it is to have the virtue. This is especially true of virtues and vices that are located in the will (or rational appetite). Aquinas identifies sloth as involving the consent of the will on several occasions, although he admits that it can be prompted by movements of the sensitive appetite. 186 REBECCA KONYNDYK DeYOUNG preferable to the demands of a new way of life.)42 In either case, the overwhelming urge is to stay with the comfortable and the known rather than risk change, even if it promises improvement. Acedia'sresentment, listlessness, sullenness, and apathy stem from perceiving oneself as "stuck" in a position (the new) that one does not wholeheartedly endorse but that one also cannot fully deny or escape. 43 Thus, the trouble with acedia is that when we have it, we refuse to be all that we are meant to be. This refusal-even when we think it constitutes an escape from an unappealing future-is itself a form of misery. In refusing our telos, we resist our deepest desires for fulfillment. This is why Gregory describes acedia as "a kind of sorrow." In outlining the sins to which acedia typically gives rise, Aquinas likewise explains how they are all attempts either to escape sorrow or to live with inescapable sorrow. 44 The oppressiveness of acedia comes from our own self-stifling choice. 45 42 Augustine's famous prayer, "Lord, make me chaste ... but not yet," also fits this pattern. The examples are from Wenzel; the interpretation of them is my own. acedia to contrast it with despair, a vice opposed to the theological virtue of hope and an offspring vice of acedia. Aquinas, following Paul, Augustine, and Gregory the Great, includes three theological virtues in his account of our moral and spiritual lives. The three theological virtues are faith, hope, and charity. Both hope and charity are located in the will, the appetite that desires our own fulfillment and flourishing. Hope is the virtue that counts on God's gracious assistance in attaining a relationship of union with him. Charity is the virtue that delights in (and constitutes) the present reality of that relationship. Both acedia and despair are a kind of sorrow or aversion to what is perceived as a present evil. Despair is the kind of sorrow opposed to hope. It is what we feel when we cannot bring ourselves to believe that God's mercy extends to us. While we accept the general possibility of salvation for human beings, we count ourselves as beyond the pale, beyond redemption, beyond the reaches of God's willingness to help. Acedia, on the other hand, is opposed to the joy of charity; it feels dejection rather than delight toward our participation in the divine nature and our relationship to God. So while both are a form of sorrow, their stances toward God are different. For despair, participation in the divine nature through grace is perceived as appealing, but impossible; for acedia, the prospect is possible, but unappealing. 45 In Gabriele Taylor's essay on sloth ("Deadly Vices?" in Roger Crisp, How Should One Live? [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996], 172), she argues that the slothful are neither able to live with themselves nor to enjoy living with themselves because it is precisely their selves and the demands internal to them that are the main obstacle to their happiness. Likewise, Pieper identifies sloth with Kierkegaard's despair of weakness, in which one chooses 43 44 It might be helpful for us in understanding AQUINAS ON ACED.IA 187 This definition of acedia-sorrowing over our friendship with God (and the transformation of our nature by grace effected by it) as something evil-gives Aquinas grounds for maintaining its status as a capital vice, that is, a vice that is the source of many others. It concerns one of the most basic movements of the appetite (sorrow being aversion to a present evil), and it concerns a very desirable good-a key characteristic of the capital vices46-namely, a good that is directly connected with our ultimate end and toward which the will is inclined by necessity of its nature. 47 Acedia thus involves inner tension, grappling as it does with both a strong push toward and a strong pull away from our ultimate end, friendship with God. 48 Acedia's opposition to charity, the greatest of all Christian virtues, makes it an extremely serious vice, but how and why the one with acedia resists charity is still mysterious. Thus, in the third and final section, I propose to examine the cause of acedia. Aquinas's answer to this question resonates with the common understanding of acedia as an aversion to effort, but also distinguishes it from mere laziness. Identifying the cause of acedia's sorrow over the internal and divine good of charity helps us fully grasp why he counts it among the spiritual vices. not to be oneself, for to choose oneself is to be constituted by a relationship to the infinite, the ground of the selfs existence (Sickness unto Death, trans. Alastair Hannay [London: Penguin, 1989], especially 50-51). For Pieper's description, see Faith, Hope, Love, 120. See also Aquinas on our endorsement of the gift given (i.e., the new graced self): "It is a sign of humility if we do not think too much of ourselves through observing our own faults; but if we despise the good we have received from God, this, far from being a proof of humility, shows us to be ungrateful: and from such contempt results sloth, because we sorrow for things we assess as evil and worthless" (SI'h IT-II, q. 35, a. 1, ad 3). 46 De Malo, q. 8; SI'h I-IT, q. 84, a. 4; inter alia. 47 SI'h I-II, q. 5, a. 8; I-II, q. 8, a. 1; and I, q. 82, a. 1. Given the will's inclination to the perfect good as a matter of natural necessity, is a "natural" analogue of acedia possible? See note 11, above. 48 We have already noted that acedia is a peculiarly theological vice since its object is our relationship with God (our participation in his nature), called charity. Now charity relates us to both God and our neighbor; however, the way Aquinas describes acedia, it appears that this vice grieves over the source relationship (friendship with God), not the concomitant one (love of neighbor). See also note 17, above. REBECCA KONYNDYK DeYOUNG 188 III. AN INTERPRETIVE PUZZLE: THE CAUSE OF SORROW difficulty of understanding Aquinas's conception of acedia is figuring out what might cause us to sorrow over our participation in the divine nature. What could possibly occasion sorrow over friendship with God? How could we feel aversion toward the relationship that constitutes our own perfection, especially aversion Aquinas describes as "dislike, horror, and detestation of the Divine good" ?49 In what follows, I will consider two explanations of the cause of sorrow over the divine good in us. Each explanation has some basis in Aquinas's texts. Each also pays heed to the strands of the tradition that associate acedia with an aversion to effort (the common meaning of "sloth"). I will argue, however, that the second is a better interpretation of Aquinas, and conclude that the effort to which acedia objects is not merely bodily toil or difficulty, as its characterization as "laziness" would indicate, but rather the commitment required by being and living in a relationship of love. With this explanation in hand, we can fully grasp why Aquinas insists that acedia is a spiritual vice and understand better how, on his conception of the problem, one might become vulnerable to it. The first and perhaps most straightforward explanation of acedia's sorrow affirms the common conception of this vice as laziness or sloth. We perceive friendship with God as involving too much physical work, too much bodily effort. Going to Mass, doing good works, engaging in spiritual exercises-all of these take too much time and effort. Weariness is often used in descriptions of acedia in both De Malo and the Summa Theologiae: Acedia is a kind of sorrow, whereby one becomes sluggish in spiritual actus because they weary the body. (STh I q. 63, a. 2, ad 2, on spiritual creatures) [Acedia] according to Damascene, is an oppressivesorrow,which so oppresses the soul of a person that he or she wants to do nothing .... Hence sloth implies a 49 SI'h II-II, q. 35, a. 3. AQUINAS ON ACEDIA 189 certain weariness of work, as appears from [Augustine's] gloss on Ps 106:18, "Their soul abhorred all manner of meat," and from the definition of some who say that sloth is a sluggishness of the mind which neglects to begin good. (STh !III, q. 35, a. 1, on acedia) [Acedia is] sadness about one's spiritual good, on account of the attendant bodily labor. (STh I-II, q. 84, a. 4, on sin and vice) [T]he reason a person shuns spiritual goods is a kind of weariness, while dislike of toil and love of bodily repose seem to be due to the same cause, viz. weariness. (STh 11-11, q. 35, a. 2, obj. 3, on acedia) Historically, as we have seen, Evagrius already conceived of the vice in such a manner-especially given the Desert Fathers' stringent ascetic practices-and the Cassianic monastic tradition followed suit. 50 Moreover, Augustine seems to think of it in this way, given his descriptions of the vice in the passages Aquinas quotes in the Summa Theologiae and De Malo. We can easily imagine cases of human love-caring for an aging parent or a newborn infant, for example-where the sheer physical effort and weariness associated with the task might cause us to shrink back from the relationship. Nonetheless the conception of acedia as a vice that shuns labor of the body (corpora/em laborem)51 as such is one that Aquinas considers but rejects. Bodily toil and difficulty are not the causes of acedia's sorrow. Neither is anything like diligence in good works named a virtue. More tellingly, he repeatedly describes the weariness mentioned in the above quotations as the effect of acedia, rather than the source of its sorrowfulness. Sluggishness about the commandments, the paralysis induced by despair, the 50 Evagrius famously called acedia the noonday demon, who struck just when the sun was beating down at its hottest and the temptation to sleep was at its maximum. Sticking to one's prayers and religious study required the effort of fighting against one's bodily needs, especially given the physically demanding practices of the Desert Fathers. In the later monastic tradition, acedia was the name of the desire to sleep in rather than rise for early morning prayers, or to shirk one's manual labor in favor of relaxation or wasted time chit-chatting or gossiping. There are plenty of examples of this conception to be found in, for example, Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, trans. R. Knox and M. Oakley (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1960), chaps. 10, 19, 20 inter alia. 51 5(Yh I-II, q. 84, a. 4. 190 REBECCA KONYNDYK DeYOUNG failure to act caused by pusillanimity in the face of the counsels of perfection-all of these are characterized as the offspring vices of acedia, behaviors that follow upon being afflicted by the vice. Responding to the traditional understanding of acedia as neglect of good works, Aquinas writes: "Sluggishness about things [that ought to be] done is not sadness itself but the effect of sadness. "52 While Aquinas will argue that acedia is more than laziness, he acknowledges that it can have inactivity as its effect: "Acedia, by weighing on the mind, hinders us from doing things that cause sorrow," 53 and "excessive sorrow ... paralyzes the soul and hinders it from shunning evil,"54 to the point that "sometimes even the external movement of the body is paralyzed [by sorrow]. "55 This is an effect of sorrow in general, however, and thus it does not mark acedia off in particular. Further, sorrow's direct effect is principally internal (i.e., on the soul). More importantly, identifying neglect and inactivity as the fruit of acedia's oppression does not explain why acedia is oppressed at the thought of the divine good in us in the first place. In fact, even as a result or concomitant effect of sorrow, laziness or inactivity is not a sure mark of the vice. Aquinas divides the daughters of acedia into two types: vices caused by having to live with inescapable sorrow, and vices that exemplify our efforts to escape from sorrow when we can. (He describes the effects of acedia as "flight" several times in four short articles in De Malo, echoing his description in the Summa Theologiaeof the appetite's natural reaction to sorrow in general.) Despair is an example of the former type of vice; and the "wandering of the mind after illicit things" 56 is an example of the latter. Thus, acedia can show itself as a curious mixture of depression or inertia on the one hand, and flight or escapism on the other. 57 52 De Malo, q. 11, a. 4, ad 3. q. 35, a. 4. SI'h I-II, q. 39, a. 3, ad 1. 55 SI'h I-II, q. 37, a. 2. 56 SI'h II-II, q. 35, a. 4. 57 Hence the literary portrait of this vice in Evelyn Waugh's BridesheadRevisited, where one character even bears the name Sebastian Flyte. 53 SI'h II-II, H AQUINAS ON ACEDL4. 191 Its tendency to flight prompted Aquinas and others to oppose acedia to the commandment to hallow the Sabbath day, which is a "moral precept commanding that the mind rest in God, to which the mind's sorrow over the divine good is contrary. "58 "Rest" may be taken here to refer both to stopping "activity" in order to engage in contemplation of God (the antidote to acedia's escapism)59 and to the joyful peace that characterizes that state of communion: recall that for Aquinas, "rest" and "joy" describe the will's possession of the good desired. When we turn away from fullness and rest, we naturally seek to distract ourselves from facing the resulting emptiness. But even incessant and successful diversions fail to give us real delight; they are, in the well-known words of Ecclesiates, a "mere chasing after the wind." Likewise, this vice can easily assume the mask of diligent activity. As Pascal also notes, a frantically paced life may be as morally and spiritually suspect as a life of idleness. 60 Hence, restlessness, as well as laziness, can be a hallmark of acedia. Acedia, however, names the sorrow itself, which weighs on the soul. In Aquinas's words, Sorrow is not a distinct vice, insofar as one shirks a distasteful and burdensome work, or sorrows on account of any other cause whatever, but only insofar as one is sorrowful on account of the Divinegood, which sorrow belongs essentially to acedia.61 So the sorrow causes the sluggishness (or the restlessness); however, the question remains, what causes the sorrow? What is it about our participation in God that would make us perceive it as an evil in some way? 58 STh II-II, q. 35, a. 3, ad 2; see also De Malo, q. 11, a. 3, ad 2 (emphasis added). 59 See STh II-II, q. 35, a. 1, ad 4. 60 Pensees, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (New York: Penguin, 1966), nos. 139, 143, 146, 164, 171. Although Pascal is concerned primarily with frivolous diversions, it is ironic that a life consumed with the busyness of doing ostensible works of charity may itself also be a form of resistance to the demands of charity. 61 STh II-II, q. 35, a. 4, ad 2. Aquinas describes it as a "constricting" or "weighing down" of the heart, which has the effect (as with sorrow in general) of impeding the movement of the soul as well as the body. 192 REBECCA KONYNDYK DeYOUNG Here begins the second explanation of what might cause acedia's sorrow. Rather than being caused by an aversion to the physical effort associated with charity, it may be understood more fundamentally as resistance to the transformation of the self implicated in friendship with God. Responding to the question of whether acedia is a special sin, Aquinas says: Therefore in answer to this question we must affirm that to sorrow over this special good which is an internal and divine good makes acedia a special sin, just as to love this good makes charity a special virtue. Now this divine good is saddening to us on account of the opposition of the spirit to the flesh because as the Apostle says in Galatians 5:17, "The flesh lusts against the spirit"; and therefore when love of the flesh is dominant in human beings we loathe spiritual good as if something contrary to ourselves,just as someone with embittered taste finds wholesome food distasteful and is grieved whenever he has to take such food. Therefore such distress and distaste and disgust [taedio] about a spiritual and divine good is acedia, which is a special sin. 62 This is one of only two brief passages in which Aquinas positively characterizes the source of acedia's sorrow. That source is the opposition of "the flesh" to "the spirit." But isn't the first explanation of the cause of sorrow merely confirmed by this passage-namely, that the "fleshly" toil involved in spiritual love for God is so onerous that we are averse to the life of the "spirit" on account of it? The present conundrum about why acedia is sorrowful (because of bodily effort or some other cause, most notably, a spiritual one) finds its parallel in a controversy over whether acedia should count as a carnal or a spiritual vice, positions for which there are again conflicting passages in the Summa Theologiae. Both problems hinge on how we should characterize the object of acedia, so the answer to this question will allow us to adjudicate both disputes at once. In question 63 of the Prima Pars, Aquinas apparently categorizes acedia, along with avarice and anger, as a carnal sin rather than as a spiritual sin, like pride and envy. The context is a discussion on the nature of spiritual creatures-in particular, the 62 De Malo, q. 11, a. 2 (emphasis added). AQUINAS ON ACEDIA 193 angels. Article 2 asks whether or not demons (fallen angels) are susceptible to only spiritual and not carnal vices because they are spiritual rather than embodied creatures. We rightly anticipate an affirmative answer to the question. The main authoritative source in this text is Augustine's City of God, where Augustine denies that the demons can be fornicators or drunkards-that is, susceptible to carnal vices like lust and gluttony. The question thus narrows to whether the demons have only the vice of pride, or whether there are other vices on the traditional list of seven that they also have. Pride and envy seem to qualify as obviously spiritual vices because their objects are a kind of excellence or superiority in another. 63 Pride is aggrieved at the superiority and excelling goodness of God, envy at the superiority or excelling goodness of a neighbor. On the other hand, lust and gluttony count as carnal vices because they have bodily pleasures as their objects. 64 We can imagine several reasons why acedia might count as a carnal vice. Like lust, it might have bodily pleasure as its object. That is, acedia might be the vice of inordinately seeking physical rest and comfort ("bodily repose")- "inordinately" meaning that the comfort is sought over and against a spiritual good or is engaged in immoderately (too much). This parallels the case of lust: it can be an inordinate desire either by means of a disorder in its object or in the degree of desire for a licit object. Acedia might also count as carnal because it involves a passion of the sensitive appetite, namely, sadness. Only creatures with sensitive capacities, which are essentially linked to the body, are capable of a passion in the strictest sense. Acedia would thus be like anger, a vice of excessive or misdirected passion. However, this argument is weakened by a distinction Aquinas makes between sorrow and pain (STh I-II, q. 35, a. 2 [the treatise on the passions]) and his location of acedia'saversion in the intellectual appetite in De Malo (q. 11, a. 1). In the latter passage, Aquinas notes that sorrow and the sin of acedia can occur in the 63 SI'h 11-11, q. 162 and q. 36, respectively. SI'h II-II, q. 153 and q. 148. 194 REBECCA KONYNDYK DeYOUNG intellective appetite as well as the sensitive appetite, so that the excessive or misdirected passions of the sensitive appetite need not be involved at all in cases of acedia. There, he also explicitly distances himself from Augustine, who claims that charity's good appears evil "inasmuch as it is contrary to carnal desires. "65 Despite apparently conceding that acedia is a carnal sin in the Prima Pars, in the Secunda Secundae Aquinas explicitly names acedia among the spiritual vices: [l]t cannot be said that acedia is a special vice insofar as it shuns spiritual good as toilsome or troublesome to the body, or as a hindrance to the body's pleasures, for this would not sever acedia from the carnal vices, whereby a person seeks bodily comfort and pleasure. 66 Here acedia is marked out over and against the carnal vices on account of its object, which is a spiritual good. This is the definitive way that Aquinas characterizes virtues (i.e., by their objects) and likewise, the vices. This is also the section of the Summa Theologiae that deals with acedia directly, and not, as in the passage in the Prima Pars, only in passing (in answer to questions about other topics). In the two passages where Aquinas directly addresses the nature of the vice (De Malo, q. 11; STh II-II, q. 35, a. 2) Aquinas numbers acedia among the spiritual vices, following the authority of Gregory in the Moralia. Moreover, Aquinas directly counters the characterization of acedia as averse to bodily effort or oppressed by physical weariness in several passages. In the principal article from the Summa Theologiae (II-II, q. 35, a. 2), for example, the objector reasons that if acedia were aversion to some kind of bodily toil or effort involved in pursuit of a spiritual good, then it would be mere laziness. But that would leave its opposition to charity puzzling. If "the reason why a person shuns spiritual goods is a kind of weariness . . . dislike of toil and love of bodily repose," then "acedia would be nothing but laziness, which seems untrue, for 65 As in the STh II-II, q. 35, a. 1 passage quoted earlier, Aquinas is quoting a gloss on Psalm 106: 18 ("His soul abhorred all manner of meat") from Augustine's Expositions on the Psalms. 66 STh II-II, q. 35, a. 2 (emphasis added). AQUINAS ON ACEDIA 195 idleness is opposed to carefulness, whereas acedia is opposed to joy." Aquinas's reply, as we have just seen, affirms that what distinguishes acedia as such cannot be its opposition to bodily labor or effort on the grounds that this would make acedia a carnal vice, which it is not. The parallel passage from De Malo echoes the same objection and reply: [I]t was argued that acedia is sadness about a spiritual good for a special reason, namely, inasmuch as it impedes bodily rest or relaxation. But counter to this: to seek bodily rest or relaxation pertains to carnal vices.... If then the only reason that acedia is a special sin is that it impedes bodily rest or relaxation, it would follow that acedia is a carnal sin, whereas Gregory lists acedia among the spiritual sins, as is evident in Book XXXI of the Moralia. (De Malo, q. 11, a. 2, obj. 3) Finally, in his commentary on I Corinthians, Aquinas also maintains that acedia is a spiritual vice on account of its object: "Certain sins are not satisfied [consummantur] in carnal pleasure, but only in spiritual pleasure [or the avoidance of spiritual sorrow-the same object is at the root of both], as it is said of the spiritual vices, for instance as with pride, avarice, and acedia."67 Throughout these passages, Aquinas insists that the pursuit of physical comfort or rest at the expense of a spiritual good is not what defines acedia.68 The object of acedia is not "friendshipwith-God-as-impediment-to-bodily-rest-and-comfort." How then should we understand acedia's status as a spiritual vice? Returning to our key passage, what does it mean when Aquinas tells us that "this divine good is saddening to us on account of the opposition of the spirit to the flesh" so that "when the love of the flesh is dominant in us we loathe spiritual good as if something contrary to ourselves"? 69 67 In I Cor., c. 6. Note that avarice also counts as a spiritual vice here, in opposition to its implicit characterization in STh I, q. 63, a. 2. 68 Even when Aquinas does allow that a spiritual good could be "saddening" because it "impedes a bodily good" or "when carnal affection prevails over reason," his concession is a reply to mistaken interpretations of acedia, which confuse it with "worldly sorrow" or "sadness over temporal evils"-another reference of Paul's (see De Malo, q. 11, a. 3, ad 1). 69 De Malo, q. 11, a. 2 (emphasis added). 196 REBECCA KONYNDYK DeYOUNG The best way to resolve the problem is to think of acedia as sorrow at the thought of being in relationship with God because of what I will call "the burdens of commitment." In fact, a symptom of acedia is that one perceives being in a relationship and maintaining it as burdens to be borne. Love and friendship are felt as making demands on us, and acedia resists them as such. This interpretation pays due attention to the dominance of passages where acedia is characterized as a spiritual sin on account of its spiritual object, but it also maintains some link to bodily effort, which is prevalent in both Aquinas's tradition and more recent conceptions of the vice. The source of sadness in acedia is the opposition of "the flesh" and "the spirit." Aquinas is quoting the Apostle Paul in Galatians 5: 17 here. He is not adopting a Platonic or Manichean dualism that denigrates the material aspect of the person, blaming the body as the source of sinful hindrances while identifying the true self with a person's inner, spiritual aspect (the soul). The problem of sin is not a result of embodiment, even if sin is also manifest there. Thus, winning the war against "the flesh"-if we restrict its meaning to bodily desires, in this case, for ease and comfort-will not make sin or vice go away. Rather, our whole personintellect, will, sense appetite, and external behavior-needs to be reoriented away from selfishness and alienation toward love of God and neighbor. To interpret Aquinas's use of "flesh" and "spirit" as indicating an opposition in acedia between bodily desire and spiritual good runs contrary to his insistence in several central passages that acedia should not be defined in terms of its aversion to bodily effort (or desire). Instead, the most plausible interpretation is to read "flesh" and "spirit" in terms of another pair of Pauline terms, which are in opposition-the "old self" and the "new self," sinful and redeemed human nature. As we saw in the beginning of part II, Paul frequently uses these terms to describe the moral transformation of the whole self by the Holy Spirit. 70 Attachment to the old self, ° 7 For example, see Colossians 3 and Ephesians 4 (quoted at the beginning of part II of this article), and Aquinas's commentaries on them (quoted in note 14, above). AQUINAS ON ACEDIA 197 in its alienation from God, is aversion to (becoming) the new self, which is defined by its relationship with God. The old self-"the flesh" (sarx, not soma)-is not the body or bodily desires, but the sinful nature of the whole person. Sin turns our whole being away from relationship to God, toward self-centeredness and alienation from others. By contrast, the new self, created by charity, orders the whole person toward relationship with God (and neighbor); love opens us up to an identity that is constituted by and consummated in communion with God. (Recall that Aquinas constantly describes the love of charity, as with love in general, as union, friendship, sharing or participating in the nature of another-all relational terms.) Here is Aquinas's commentary on the "old self" mentioned in Ephesians 4: First, what does "the old man" mean? Some hold that the old man is exterior and the new man interior. But it must be said that the old man is both interior and exterior; he is a person who is enslaved by a senility in his soul, due to sin, and in his body whose members provide the tools for sin. Thus a man enslaved to sin in soul and body is an old man .... And so a man subjected to sin is termed an old man because he is on the way to corruption. 71 This fundamental opposition of "selves" at the heart of the moral life explains why Aquinas describes acedia in the key passage above as loathing spiritual good "as if something contrary to ourselves." How does the old self/new self interpretation help us understand what goes wrong in acedia?Acediasorrows over being in a relationship of love to another. The claims of the other, the transformation of the self required, the commitment to maintain the relationship even when this requires sacrificing one's own desires-these are what acedia objects to, not merely the bodily effort they may or may not involve. (As we noted earlier, the person with acedia may pour significant bodily effort and emotional energy into the difficult task of constant distraction from and denial of her condition, so the aversion cannot be to 71 In Eph., c. 4, lect. 7 (emphasis added). 198 REBECCA KONYNDYK DeYOUNG corpora/emlaborem per se.) Put simply, acedia prefers stagnation and alienation to what it sees as the burdens of commitment. Acedia as aversion to our relationship to God turns away from the claims of a relational identity. Love for another at this level requires vulnerability, challenge, and change; it also involves responsibility and even suffering. In Paul's words to the Colossians, something must die in order for the new self to be born, and it might be an old self to which we are very attached. 72 A deep friendship changes my identity; the deeper the friendship, the deeper the transformation. It is this claim of the other on who I am that acedia resists. As Josef Pieper observes, "Acedia .. . will not accept supernatural goods because they are, by their very nature, linked to a claim on the one who receives them. "73 Acedia resists the self-renewal involved in sanctification. It wants to claim the relationship with God that justifies the self without accepting any further demands to become holy, to be created anew. Marriage and human friendships make good analogies here. For all its joys, any intense friendship or relationship like marriage has aspects that can seem burdensome. There is not only an investment of time, but an investment of self that is required for the relationship to exist and, further, to flourish. Even more difficult than the physical accommodations are the accommodations of identity: from the perspective of individual "freedom," to be in this relationship will change me and cost me; it will require me to restructure my priorities; it may compromise my plans; it will add obligations; it will demand sacrifice; it will alter the pattern of my thoughts and desires and transform my vision of the world. Stagnating and staying the same is easier and safer, even if ultimately it makes us more unhappy, than risking openness to love's transforming power and its claims on us. of her autobiographical novels, Anne Lamott recounts the words of an old woman at her church who said that "the secret is that God loves us exactly the way we are and that he loves us too much to let us stay like this" (Operating Instructions [New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1993], 96; emphasis in original). Those with acedia object to not being able to stay the way they are. 73 Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love, 119. 72 In one AQillNAS ON ACEDIA 199 Take, for example, a typical situation between a husband and wife. We will assume that, in general, theirs is a relationship of great and enduring friendship. But when they argue at dinnertime and head off to opposite corners of the house for the rest of the evening, it is much easier to maintain that miserable distance and alienation from each other than it is to do the work of apology, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Learning to live together and love each other well after a rift requires them to give up their anger, their score-keeping, their resistance to change, their desire to have their own way, their insistence on seeing the world only from each of their own perspectives. Saying "I'm sorry" takes effort, but it is not simply the physical work of walking across the house and saying the words that each resists. Do they want the relationship? Yes, they're in it and they're in deep. But do they want to do what it takes to be in relationship? Do they want to honor its claims on them? Do they want to learn genuine unselfishness in the ordinary daily task of living together? Maybe tomorrow. For now at least, each spouse wants the night off to wallow in his or her own selfish loneliness. Love takes effort. Those with acedia want the easy life, for they find detachment from the old selfish nature too painful and burdensome, and so they neglect those acts of love that will maintain and deepen the relationship. 74 Josef Pieper suggests that one afflicted by acedia may refuse his own perfection much as someone suffering from a psychological illness refuses do to the therapeutic work necessary for his own healing. This may be because the comfort of familiar miseries is preferable to unknown future possibilities (as we saw illustrated by Lot's wife), but it may also be because the process of healing and the resulting condition of health will bring responsibilities that the individual would prefer to avoid. Pieper comments, "The psychiatrist frequently observes that, while a neurotic individual Granted, it may be the case that one's tiredness after a long day at work makes one more prone to the initial argument or more reluctant to attempt reconciliation, but in that way, acedia is no more carnal than any other sin contingently occasioned by a movement of the sensitive appetite. 74 200 REBECCA KONYNDYK DeYOUNG may have a superficial will to be restored to health, in actuality he fears more than anything the demands that are made ... on one who is well. " 75 In addition to the effort required here and now, any serious, long-term, committed relationship-our friendship with God included-requires constant daily care to sustain it. Our relationship to God is "eternal, but daily, too. " 76 One with acedia is opposed to a life that embraces daily responsibility and the constancy of commitment; the very thought of that kind of relationship makes one weary. Perhaps this is why various theologians in the thirteenth century and before opposed acedia to the petition in the Lord's Prayer for daily bread, which they associated with the Eucharist. 77 Although eating the bread itself is a physical act, by refusing or neglecting it one also rejects the union with Christ implicit in the Eucharist; one resists the incorporation of Christ that occurs when his body (the bread) is made part of our own bodies. (It also shuns participation in the body of Christ that is the church.) It is no accident that acedia neglects the very place where the most intimate communion with and participation in God occurs. Further, its opposition to this petition reveals its distaste for the ongoing ("daily") efforts required to maintain our friendship with God over the long haul. This second interpretation of the cause of sorrow, therefore, has the advantage of explaining how acedia can count as a spiritual vice (i.e., one with a spiritual object), and one specially opposed to charity (i.e., friendship/participation in God's nature), while maintaining some link with effort (including perhaps the bodily effort of the first interpretation 78 ) as the source of sorrow and resistance. It also privileges Aquinas's definitions of this vice 75 Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love, 119. Quotidian Mysteries (New York: Paulist Press, 1998), 51-53. 77 Wenzel, Sin of Sloth, 5 6. 78 If the first explanation tends to over-physicalize acedia, I want to be careful not to overspiritualize it, for Aquinas thinks that human beings, in virtue of being a unity of body and soul, experience sin and vice in their whole person (in bodily desires, the will, and the intellect), even if the virtues and vices are primarily located in the soul (STh 1-11, q. 55, a. 4). 76 See Kathleen Norris, AQUINAS ON ACED.IA 201 in those passages devoted to acedia as the central subject of inquiry. 79 Why then does Aquinas say that the demons, who can have only spiritual vices, cannot have acedia? Aquinas maintains (STh I, q. 63, a. 2) that acedia "is a kind of sadness, whereby one becomes sluggish in spiritual exercises because they weary the body" (a direct paraphrase of Augustine's own definition of the vice, quoted in De Malo, q. 11, a. 1). This limited Augustinian definition names one possible form of acedia, which is why Aquinas accepts it here. Nevertheless, it is by no means acedia's only or even primary form. On the Augustinian definition, acedia is linked to embodiment, just as avarice is linked to temporal goods (STh I, q. 63, a. 2, ad 2). But if this makes a vice "carnal"-something Aquinas never actually says in this passage-then it must be in an extended sense of the term. For when Aquinas discusses avarice in the Secunda Secundae, he seats the love of money in the intellectual appetite (the will) just as we saw him do with sorrow in the case of acedia.80 I read Aquinas as implicitly including in the list of vices the demons cannot have (in STh I, q. 63, a. 2) any vice possibly involving some bodily connection or expression, in order to honor the authority of Augustine in the sed contra, who claims that the demons have only pride and envy. The main issue in the article is the root of the demons' sin, which is why Aquinas spends the bulk of the article explaining how pride is the first sin of the demons, and concludes that "Under envy and pride, as found in the demons, are comprised all other sins derived from them" (ibid., ad 3). 79 The four passages cited in favor of the first explanation (physical weariness or effort as the cause of acedia), except the passage about the demons, are either definitions quoted by authorities Uohn Damascene, Augustine, etc.) or words put in the mouth of an objector, and two of the four are remarks about acedia in texts outside Aquinas's main treatments of the vice (in STh I and I-m. I deal directly with the passage in the Prima Pars because it appears to be the place where Aquinas himself comes closest to endorsing the "weariness" view. so Avarice involves desiring money for the sake of gaining temporal possessions or goods, and can be counted as a carnal vice in that sense, but the love of money also includes a desire for security and self-sufficiency and self-provision (no need to rely on Providence for the future), as is indicated by Aquinas's characterization of money as a partly spiritual, partly material object in the treatise on justice (STh II-II, q. 118). 202 REBECCA KONYNDYK DeYOUNG According to the second interpretation, which I am advocating, acedia does not trade primarily on an opposition of bodily toil to spiritual gain. Rather it objects to the effort involved in the investment and transformation of the self over time. If the demons cannot have acedia, then, perhaps it is not because they lack bodies, but because their nature is such that it is determined by a single act of will rather than by the lifelong process of moral transformation characteristic of the human condition. 81 Unlike human beings, purely spiritual creatures do not have to commit to an ongoing process of moral transformation and the effort involved in that slow, daily, self-mortifying change. 82 My conclusion, then, is that the above passage from the Prima Pars is not decisive in understanding acedia (nor avarice either, for that matter). Acedia's resistance to our participation in the divine nature, to our friendship with God, is resistance to the burdens of commitment-understood as the sacrifice of the "old self," the transformation of identity-involved in that relationship. Our aversion, distaste, and grief are best understood as caused by the demands of accepting the spiritual good of divine friendship and the personal transformation that love requires, and not the sacrifice of bodily comfort or pleasure per se, although this may of course be involved. Here acedia reveals its roots in pride. Pride, for Aquinas, is the refusal to acknowledge God's superior excellence. Those with pride shun a relationship with God because it means relinquishing first place for the self; such people prefer alienation so that they can maintain the illusion of self-sufficiency. Those afflicted with acedia also prefer alienation so that the old self can remain their first priority. Friendship requires them to share and give 81 Alternatively, we could simply deny that the demons have acedia themselves, and-following Aquinas's designation of the demons as extrinsic principles of human acts-say that human beings have acedia because of the demons' corrupting influence, a role in which they manifest pride (i.e., usurping God's role as the extrinsic principle of [rightly ordered] human acts through law and grace, but not the other vices strictly speaking). This follows Aquinas's own comments in STh I, q. 63, a. 2, ad 3. 82 At least they don't seem to have the "over-and-over again-ness" of the self-investment that seems (affectively, emotionally, mentally, and perhaps also bodily) wearisome. AQUINAS ON ACEDIA 203 themselves; this investment is onerous and burdensome if they are too attached to their old selves. So the prideful resist a relationship with God altogether because they loathe any form of dependence and submission, whereas those with acedia accept the relationship initially, but then resist the demands of love for mutual self-giving and self-transformation. In that sense, acedia is sloth, for it wants the easy way out-the benefits of the relationship without the burdens. Ironically, by their restless resistance to what they see as the burdens of commitment, those afflicted by the vice of acedia become a burden to themselves. Perhaps, then, it is especially to them that Christ addresses himself in Matthew's gospel, when he says, "Come to me all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light" (Matt 11:2830). CONCLUSION Aquinas's conception of acedia explains why it merits a place among the seven capital vices. On his account, acedia strikes at the heart of who we are called to be by turning us against our own happiness and ultimate end. It does so because it perceives the demands of friendship with God as a burdensome self-sacrifice, and it clings to the old self while resisting the demands of love. In the words of Isaac Watts, "Love so amazing, so divine, demands my self, my life, my all." 83 Acedia thus involves aversion to more than just bodily effort, although that may certainly be involved; properly speaking, it shirks the long, painful process of dying away to one's whole sinful nature, which encompasses body and soul, action and will. In that sense, Aquinas's characterization of acedia explains why it should count as one of the most serious of the vices, undermining, as it does, our fundamental motivation to Isaac Watts, "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross," Psalter Hymnal (Grand Rapids: CRC Publications, 1988), 384. 83 204 REBECCA KONYNDYK DeYOUNG engage in the process of forming our character after the pattern of Christ. Without acedia's link to charity, however, the historical turns that reduced this vice to simple laziness and made diligence its logical counterpoint are perfectly understandable. It is a virtue of Aquinas's account that he incorporates the link to laziness in his characterization of acedia, since the element of bodily weariness and physical effort is present in conceptions of the vice from its beginnings with Evagrius and on into the present day. Only because his conception of this vice makes resistance to the demands of charity central, however, can he also pay due to the strands of the Christian tradition that make acedia a spiritual and a capital vice. Hence his account stands as a helpful explanation of why acedia was taken to be such a serious vice for many centuries, and why contemporary accounts tend to fail to see its importance. 84 84 Thanks to the members of my Aquinas reading group at Notre Dame, my colleagues in the philosophy department at Calvin College, and Brian Shanley for their comments on previous drafts of this paper. I am grateful to audiences at Baylor University, Creighton University, the University of Notre Dame, St. Mary's College, and Hope College for their comments on early versions of the paper. I am also grateful to Abram Van Engen for his research assistance. The Thomist 68 (2004): 205-58 THE SEMIOSIS OF ANGELS JOHN DEELY University of St. Thomas Houston, Texas I. STATING THE QUESTION Semiosis is the action of signs whereby, through the unification of three elements under a single relation, that one of the three which stands in the foreground as representing brings about the effect distinctive of signs, namely, renvoi, which is for one thing so to stand for another that that other is made manifest to or for yet another still. The sign-vehicle, the foreground representative element or representamen, achieves this effect actually when the semiosis is completed, that is to say, when the semiosis achieves its "proper significate outcome" of including in the very single relation of sign-vehicle to object signified an interpretant here and now. The effect can, however, be achieved virtually when the semiosis but determines the specific possibility of bringing about a proper interpretant in future circumstances. The interpretant, famously, "need not be mental"; that is to say, the interpretant need not be an interpreter. But in zoosemiosis and anthroposemiosis interpreters, that is to say, cognitive organisms acting as such, are normally involved. Indeed, in the case of anthroposemiosis, we find verified an intellectual component which precisely raises semiosis above the level of perceived objects as sensibly perceived. The perceived objects common to humans and other animals thus become intellectually perceived as well, but only by the human animals. It is this further dimension added to sense perception that constitutes the possibility of realizing the 205 206 JOHN DEELY fact that what signs strictly consist in are triadic relations which, as relations, can never be perceived, though they can be understood. At the foundation of this "intellectual semiosis" stands language, in its contrast to linguistic communication, as Thomas Sebeok best pointed out near the end of the last century. 1 But this intellectual semiosis proves in its turn to have a prelinguistic foundation precisely in the perceptual semiosis common to all animal organisms, which involves sensations and the interactions of brute secondness whence human understanding derives the materials from which it forms even its species-specifically distinctive representation of objects as involving more than their relation to us within experience and perception. Language may be biologically undetermined, but the zoosemiosis upon which it depends for the very materials it forms in its own way and fashions intellectually 2 is most definitely not biologically undetermined. Indeed, it is unthinkable apart from the world of bodies. The question arises, could an intellectual semiosis be possible that did not arise out of and have constantly at its disposal a perceptual base of cognitive materials with which to work? Since discourse, commonly speaking, is precisely this interaction between sense and understanding, we are asking whether there even can be an intellectual semiosis which is not discursive. Or, to put it perhaps more plainly, can semiosis extend even beyond the world of matter and motion, to achieve its effect and proper work also in a realm of pure spirits bodiless from the start? Can we 1 See Thomas A. Sebeok, "The Evolution of Communication and the Origin of Language," lecture of June 3 in the June 1-3 ISISSS '84 Colloquium on "Phylogeny and Ontogeny of Communication Systems." Published under the title "Communication, Language, and Speech. Evolutionary Considerations", in Thomas Sebeok, I Think I Am a Verb: More Contributions to the Doctrine of Signs (New York: Plenum Press, 1986), 10-16. See further idem, "Language: How Primary a Modeling System?", in Semiotics 1987, ed. John Deely (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1988), 15-27; "Toward a Natural History of Language," Semiotica 65 (1987): 343-58; and Global Semiotics (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2001). 2 Cf. Thomas A. Sebeok, "Zoosemiotics: At the Intersection of Nature and Culture," in The Tell-Tale Sign, ed. T. A. Sebeok (Llsse, The Netherlands: Peter de Ridder Press, 1975), 85-95. See also idem, "Semiosis in Nature and Culture," in The Sign & Its Masters, Sources in Semiotics 8 (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1989), 3-26; and "'Talking' with Animals: Zoosemiotics Explained," Animals 111, no. 6(December1978): 20-23, 38. THE SEMIOSIS OF ANGELS 207 even conceive of a cognitive being that has no body, and yet is capable of intellectual understanding perforce in the absence of sensations and perceptions alike? Would such an intellectual activity be semiosic? Can semiosis be verified, if only in thought, respecting the possible existence of angels? Fortunately for us, the author of the first systematic treatise to demonstrate the unity of semiotic inquiry, John Poinsot, 3 was also the author of one of the most extended and authoritative of the traditional theological treatises on the subject of angels. 4 In what 3 John Poinsot (=Joannes a Sancto Thoma), Tractatus de Signis, subtitled The Semiotic of John Poinsot, extracted from the Artis Logicae Prima et Secunda Pars of 1631-32 using the text of the emended second impression (1932) of the 1930 Reiser edition (Turin: Marietti), and arranged in bilingual format by John Deely in consultation with Ralph A. Powell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); also available as a text database, stand-alone on floppy disk or combined with an Aquinas database, as an Intelex Electronic Edition (Charlottesville, Va.: Intelex Corp., 1992). Hereafter "Poinsot 1632." The electronic edition is enhanced by the inclusion of further texts, especially from Poinsot's writings on relation, flagged by the Greek r followed by an Arabic number (1, 2, etc.). 4 Throughout this work, "Poinsot 1643" will refer to the "Tractatus de Angelis" in]oannis a Sancto Thoma Cursus Theologicus Tomus N, Solesmes ed. (Paris: Dciclee, 1946), 441-835; originally published at Lyon in 1643. This treatise by Poinsot is one of the most extended treatments of the subject of angels that comes down to us from the Latin Age, comprising 248 pages in folio, compared to the 95 folio pages on the subject in Aquinas himself. The earlier, yet longer, 632-folio-page treatment in Suarez, is fully known to and taken into account by Poinsot (see, e.g., d. 39, a. 3, n. 5sqq.). This Treatise on Angels is set within the larger project of Poinsot's Cursus Theologicus, wherein it occurs as the 39•h through 45•h "disputations" thereof. The treatise addresses specifically the matter of questions 50-64 and 106-7 of the Prima Pars Summae Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas with a "Summa litterae" (or summary statement), and with Poinsot's own expanded discussions of the parts he deems more in need of exposition ("Disputations"), as follows: 1 (=disputation 39, after summary of questions 50-51): On the Existence and Constitution of Angels Article 1. What faith teaches concerning the existence and nature of angels A. 2. Whether the form of an angel has any composition with matter A. 3. Whether angels can differ only numerically A. 4. Whether angels are naturally incorruptible 2 (= d. 40, after summary of qq. 52-53): On the Location and Movement of Angels A. 1. What rationale is there in an angel for being in a place A. 2. Clearing up difficulties in the view just proposed A. 3. Whether one angel can be in several places, or several angels in one place A. 4. Whether an angel in movement has to pass through intermediate places A. 5. Whether the movement of an angel in space can occur instantaneously 208 JOHN DEELY follows, we will consider the understanding of semiosis among pure spirits or angels that is to be garnered from the writings of John Poinsot. We will follow his philosophical thought on this matter, passing through the world of bodies where the first signs of "spirituality" arise in the cognitive activity of animals, and then more completely in the intellectual cognition species-specifically human. It will then be both in contrast to and in continuity with human intellection that we will be able to give specificity to the type of existence required to establish a genus of purely spiritual intellect and intellectual activity, which, as we will see, is what the word "angel" properly signifies.5 3 (= d. 41, after summary of qq. 54-55): On the Intellect and Cognitive Determinations of Angels A. 1. What Thomas Aquinas has shown concerning the intellective capacity and actual intellection or understanding of an angel A. 2. Whether an angel needs a further specification ["species intelligibilis superaddita"] to reach self-awareness A. 3. Whether with respect to objects other than itself an angel has infused or acquired specifications A. 4. Whether and how higher angels understand on the basis of more universal specifications 4 (= d. 42, after summary of qq. 46-48): On the Object and Manner of Angelic Cognition A. 1. Whether an angel has comprehensive awareness of things lower than itself and of angels higher than itself A. 2. How an angel knows future and past things A. 3. Why an angel does not naturally know thoughts of the heart A. 4. Whether an angel can understand anything by discoursing, or by composing and dividing 5 (= d. 43, after summary of qq. 49-53): On the Merit and Sin of Angels A. 1. Whether there can be an intellectual creature incapable of sin A. 2. Whether an angel could have sinned in its first instant of being A. 3. What kind of sin would an angel have committed and respecting what object 6 (= d. 44, after summary of q. 54): On the Final State of Angels and the Damnation of Demons A. 1. How many instants would an angel require in order to reach its full determination A. 2. What would be the cause of obstinacy in demons A. 3. How a spirit could be tortured by fire 7 (= d. 45, after summary of qq. 106-7): On the Conversation and lllumination of Angels A. 1. How angels spiritually converse among themselves A. 2. What is illumination for an angel, and for which angels can it occur 5 Poinsot 1643: d. 39, a. 1, 447 'U: "nomen 'Angelus' per se solum non designat nobis substantias illas spirituales, nisi cum etiam nomine spiritus designantur." Ibid.: d. 39, a. 2, 457 'V2: "Unde sequitur Angelos esse formas simplices, id est, non habentes aliam entitatem quam THE SEMIOSIS OF ANGELS 209 II. WHAT Is AN ANGEL? The world of matter, considered less in itself than as it has been thought and believed to be in the realm of human opinions, has a history strange indeed. Even by the time of Homer, we find records of belief in beings superior to human beings that are yet still bodily creatures, albeit of some material more ethereal than that of our bodies. Such were the gods, or "immortals," in the original version of Porphyry's Tree, which terminated with "Rational Animal"-not divided only into individual humans, but rather specifically divided into mortals (humans} and immortals (the gods). By Aristotle's time we find something else again. Aristotle's Unmoved Mover or "Self-Thinking Thought" has no body, no materiality, no potentiality. But more interesting, for our purpose, we find the idea of the Separated Intelligences, bodiless spirits postulated as movers of the celestial spheres, pure immaterial substances, yet finite in nature. The celestial spheres were postulated to be (on the strength of the want of contrary evidence) susceptible only to change of place. Some ancient thinkers, indeed, dispensed with Aristotle's Separated Intelligences by postulating that the heavenly bodies were living bodies moved by their intrinsic principle of life, their souls, just as living beings in the sphere below the moon are moved by their souls in carrying out the activities of life. But it is Aristotle's idea of beings purely intellectual by nature and without bodies that moves us closer to our goal of understanding the idea of an angel; for the word "angel" in its biblical derivation is a synonym for "spirit" understood as an intellectual individual or "substance" which has in its nature nothing of matter as the principle whereby quantity (the having of parts outside of parts resulting in occupation of space) locates a body or--even less-whereby a body is rendered mortal, susceptible of that terminal "substantial change" wherein an individual ceases to be. formae in qua subsistunt, quasi formae completae et non facientes compositionem cum aliqua alia comparte quae dicitur materia." 210 JOHN DEELY The picture is a little complicated at this point by an hypothesis of Aristotle that, over many centuries, hardened into a veritable dogma of philosophy, to wit, the hypothesis that the material universe admits of two kinds of matter: terrestrial,which undergoes substantial as well as quantitative, qualitative, and local change; and celestial,which undergoes only change of place, local motion-and only perfectly circular local motion at that. As Benedict Ashley has pointed out, 6 this was an attempt to accommodate imagined facts that risked compromising Aristotle's basic theory of material substance, for even when the Greeks and Latins imagined that the heavenly bodies were incorruptible, it was understood that the Aristotelian idea of "matter" was, as a pure potentiality in the order of substance, able to compose with a substantial form by receiving, through the specification such a form provided, an actual individual existence. 7 Thus, the discovery consequent upon Galileo's work that the entire material universe is of a uniform nature in its matter, consisting exclusively of temporal individuals which come into existence, maintain themselves, and eventually go out of existence wholly in and through process is actually more consonant with Aristotle's original doctrine of material substance as having an essence comprised of two principles: "prime matter," according to which the individual in nature (i.e., the material substance) is capable of having its body turn into some other kind of body or bodies entirely (and hence is constantly threatened by nonbeing); 8 and "substantial form," according to which the individual at any given moment of its existence continues to be actually of this rather 6 Benedict Ashley, O.P., "Change and Process," in The Problem of Evolution, ed. John N. Deely and Raymond J. Nogar (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Publishing Co., 1973), 265-94. 7 Poinsot 1643: d. 39, a. 2, 4611112: "licet una materia possit differe ab alia per ordinem ad formam extrinsecam quam respicit, et penes modwn diverswn recipiendi, tamen semper in se debet supponi quod sit pura potentia in genere substantiali, eo quod potest componere cum forma substantiali recipiendo ab ipsa primwn esse simpliciter." 8 Poinsot1643: d. 39, a. 4, 480119: "quia in Angelo non estpotentia ad aliquam formam, per quam tollatur suwn esse quod habet a Deo per creationem; ergo neque habet naturam aliquam inclinantem ad non esse.-Patet consequentia: quia nulla inclinatio et potentia po test esse primo et per se ad non esse, quia esset inclinatio ad nihil, et consequenter esset nulla inclinatio; sed omnis inclinatio vel potentia ad non esse est secundario, quatenus est ad aliquam formam ex qua non-esse alterius sequitur." THE SEMIOSIS OF ANGELS 211 than some other kind (even though potentially, as just noted, always of some other kind rather than this actual one here and now). 9 So we are able to say that material substances as such involve bodies which occupy space. The question is: are there spiritual substances? That is to say, are there substances that have no material component as part of their intrinsic constitution? A) "Spiritual Matter"? A view ancient even in Christian times, after the "immortal gods" of Greco-Roman antiquity had faded from actual belief and become mythical remnants of pre-Christian opinion, 10 held that only God, the Unmoved Mover of Pure Actuality, Ipsum Esse Subsistens, could properly be described as without material composition. Thus, as late as Aquinas, 11 the belief was common enough that angels were not pure spirits but only more spiritual than human beings, because, though not composed of corporeal matter and substantial form, they were yet composed of a putative spiritual matter. So, in concert with several early Fathers of the Church, held the great Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, contemporary of Aquinas and (like Aquinas) a Doctor of the Church. But Aquinas and his followers, even though equivocating on the question of whether indeed terrestrial and celestial matter differed specifically, pointed out with deadly logic that the idea of "spiritual matter" is a flatus vocis, an empty nominalism, no more intelligible, though less obviously unintelligible, than a "square circle." To belong to the spiritual order, an order by definition transcendent to the material order, the matter in question has to possess a perfection exceeding the perfections of corporeal nature. 9 Ponsot 1643: d. 39, a. 3, 469 '119: "Aristoteles per materiam non intelligit haecceitatem, sed materiam illam quae est pars compositi et reddit naturam materialem et corpoream." 10 E.g., John Damascene, De fide orthodoxa, c. 3, p. 865, in J.P. Migne, ed., Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca 94 (Paris, 1857-1866). 11 For the full historical context, see James Collins, "The Thomistic Polemic against Universal Matter," chapter 2 of his dissertation, The Thomistic Philosophy of the Angels (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1947), 42-74. 212 JOHN DEELY But perfection follows upon actuality in beings, not upon potentiality. Therefore, spiritual matter, to be spiritual, necessarily would possess an actuality greater than even material forms, that is, the actuality of substances subject to "corruption" (the technical Latin term taken over from Aristotle's Greek for "ceasing to be"). But in that case, the spiritual matter could not enter into the very make-up of an angel insofar as the angel is a substance, that is, an actual individual; for existence comes to an individual only via its form, that is, only insofar as it is a substance of some kind, whereas the putative spiritual matter already would have to have a substantial actuality of its own as spiritual in order to belong to an order superior to the material order. 12 The material order can be conceived as a hierarchy, to be sure, beginning with substances (individuals) different in kind among themselves but having in common the fact of not being alive. "Being alive," in Aristotle's framework, is one of those relatively few instances in nature of an "either/or," like pregnancy in a female. For us as students of nature, it is often hard to tell whether or not we are confronted with a living individual, or whether a given living individual continues here and now to be living, or had died ("corrupted," in Aristotle's technical sense). But considered ontologically on the part of the intrinsic constitution of the part of nature we are observing, our difficulties are apart from the fact that the substantial form giving actuality to the individual we are observing either is or is not a "soul." The term "soul" here should not mislead us. The study of the soul, for Aristotle and for the mainstream thinkers of the Latin Age, was what we have come to call "biology." If any given individual either is or is not alive (regardless of how far from "generation "-Aristotle's technical term for the moment a substance begins to be, similar to the modern term "conception"-or how close to "corruption"), and if the actuality that makes an indivi12 Poinsot 1643: d. 39, a. 2, 4611112, summarized the contradictio in adiectis as follows: "materia spiritualis, licet esset in potentia ad formas spirituales, tamen in se deberet habere actualitatem superantem omnem actualitatem corpoream, et consequenter in genere substantiae deberet habere aliquem actum; et sic non posset componere cum forma substantiali, accipiendo ab ipsa primum esse simpliciter in genere substantiae." THE SEMIOSIS OF ANGELS 213 dual be the kind of individual it is we call "substantial form," then we need a term to distinguish when the substantial form in question belongs to an individual that is not alive and when it belongs rather to a living thing. Aristotle's term for substantial form in the latter case is simply "soul." So "soul" names, in this vocabulary, the principle whereby a body exists as an actually living body, nothing more nor less. When an inorganic substance undergoes transformation into some other kind of subtance, the original substantial form recedes into the potentiality of matter even as a new substantial form or forms are educed or drawn out of that same potentiality by the circumstances and conditions of the matter subjected to change. Whether this new substantial form will be organic or inorganic, that is, a soul or not, depends exactly on the same thing: the circumstances and conditions so modifying the material body in question that it is no longer capable of sustaining the actuality of its original substantial form. B) Spirituality in Matter Here an interesting ambiguity arises, for a "reception of form by matter" is one thing, a "reception of form by form" quite another, as we will see. On the one hand, "spiritual" is opposed to "material" as an either/or, such that a substance is either a material substance or a spiritual substance, in which latter case it will have no composition of form with matter but only of form with existence. On the other hand, certain substances, undoubtedly material at the level of substantial existence, exhibit at the level of activity an operation that borders on or partakes of the spiritual level. What makes the composition of matter and form at the level of substance a material composition is nothing less than the fact that the form "educed from" or "received within" matter comes to be in a restrictive or subjective manner, such that the individual in question comes to be, dependently upon its environment (to be sure) but nonetheless as existing within that environment as a thing in its own right, a subject of existence distinct from, even if related to, the other subjectivities that surround it. But if the 214 JOHN DEELY substance so constituted subjectively is not only a living substance but also a cognitive organism, then it crosses another either/or divide in its capabilities: it is capable not only of being acted upon by its surroundings but (also) of partially becoming aware of those surroundings, that is, of objectifying them, in and through the interactions. Such a substance Aristotle calls a "sensible substance" or an animal. The distinguishing feature of an animal is that it has a soul that, even though educed from the potentiality of matter (as also are plant forms), is further capable of receiving in its own actuality the very actuality specified from outside itself by an agent acting upon it. This peculiar receptivity the Latins called "the reception of form by form," where the receiving form is the cognitive power subjective to the individual becoming aware, while the received form is called a "species," that is to say, a specificationor specifyingform causing the subject acted upon to enter into a relation not simply of "action and passion" (cause and effect), like one rock striking another, but into a relation of subject and object, that is, of one knowing to another than itself known. 13 This initial florescence of spirituality in the material world is, in Aristotle's terms, an accidental rather than a substantial spirituality. It pertains to and occurs only in the activities of organisms over and above their substantial constitution, which remains determinately material. What is "spiritual," then, in the case of these cognitive organisms, is no part of their essential being whence they derive existence, 14 but something consequent rather upon the level of "second act," the level of the operations whereby substantial existence maintains itself as determinately of 13 Poinsot1643: d. 39, a. 2, 459 '118: "modus materiae primae in communi sumptae est esse receptivam formarum stricto et coarctato modo, scilicet faciendo illas sibi proprias, et componendo aliquod tertium entitativum ex eis, sive substantiale sive accidentale. Modus vero spiritualitatis, prout talis, est excedere istum modum sic strictum, et posse recipere formas intentionaliter, id est, cum tanta arnplitudine ut fiat [reading, in agreement with the Solesmes corrigendum at the bottom of b459, 'fiat' for 'faciat'] alia a se, et uniat sibi res, etiam quae secum non componunt sed extra se sunt, objective et intelligibiliter: quia spiritualitas fundat intelligibilitatem. Ergo modus spiritualitatis pugnat cum modo materiae primae." 14 Poinsot1643: d. 39, a. 2, 463 '1121: "quod non est seipso intelligibile .•• non est seipso et in substantia spirituale". THE SEMIOSIS OF ANGELS 215 a certain kind of being. This is the case of an animal in contrast with the case of a plant (whose operations are wholly subjective and transitive, transforming things outside itself not into objects immanently cognized but into its substantial self as nourishment or offspring); and in contrast a fortiori with the case of an inorganic substance interacting subjectively with its surroundings (as Yves Simon so nicely showed for the Scholastic context). 15 Human beings are a species or type of animal. As such they too are capable of the spiritual activity of partially objectifying their surroundings. But this objectification moves to a different level, so to speak. With the other animals, the horizon of objectification is limited to what their senses are able to respond to. With the human animal, objectification begins with the senses, but then goes on to distinguish what is objectified from what exists or might exist apart from the objectification, and makes that the horizon of objectification. Since what exists or might exist is not limited to what can be directly sensed, the horizon of cognition becomes now in principle unlimited. The human animal, aware initially of objects like any other animal, comes to see in those objects beings that transcend sensation, 16 and develops a communication system based in principle on this larger horizon of being rather than simply on the horizon of objects. The cognitive power or ability to visualize the difference between objects and beings the Greeks called vou<;, the Latins "intellect." The communication system consequent upon it they called discourse or rational discourse, which continues to this day to be the heart of species-specifically linguistic communication. Linguistic communication, and, more fundamentally, intellection, depends in general on sensory modalities, but it does not depend specifically on any one sensory modality. Linguistic 15 Yves R Simon, "To Be and To Know," Chicago Review 15, no. 4 (Spring, 1961), 83-100; and "An Essay on the Classification of Action and the Understanding of Act" (posthumous), ed. J. N. Deely, Revue de fUniversite t!Ottawa, 41, no. 4 (October-December 1971): 518-41. 16 Quia "sensitiva cognitio non est tota causa intellectualis cognitionis," Aquinas writes, "ideo non est mirum si intellectualis cognitio ultra sensitivam se extendit" (Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate, q. 10, a. 6, ad 3). 216 JOHN DEELY communication must be sensed to be understood, but it does not matter whether its sensory vehicle, its "embodiment," be, for example, visual, auditory, or tactile. This indifference suggested to Aristotle and actually proved, as far as Aquinas was concerned, 17 that the human intellect differs from the cognitive powers of sensation (external sense) and perception (internal sense) upon which it depends in this: that whereas all powers of sensory cognition are themselves composite of matter and form, dependent for their existence and exercise upon some bodily organ or part specifically adapted for the purpose (as the eye for seeing, the ear for hearing, the tongue for tasting, etc.), the intellect itself is not so composite, but springs from the form alone, the soul in which all the powers of the organism are rooted. · Thus, just as the sensory soul gives rise to powers of sensation and perception, the int.ellectual soul gives rise in addition to the power of intellectual awareness, understanding; but this power, unlike those of sensation and perception, depends only indirectly, not directly, upon bodily organs. The embodied powers of sense, Aquinas will say, provide the intellect with its object, but in its proper activity the intellect does not act through a bodily organ. Only in this way, Aquinas thought, could the horizon of being be an unlimited horizon: that is, if the cognitive power which thinks being is not intrinsically limited by matter, by direct dependence upon a bodily organ. 18 The role of matter is to subjectivize and individualize, as we have seen,19 whereas the role of cognition is to objectify, to make the individual cognizing aware of what is other than itself. In the case of sensation and perception, the organism's awareness is expanded to include something of the physical surroundings. In the case of intellection, with the grasp of being the human organism's awareness is expanded to include See Aquinas, In Aristotelis Libras de Anima Commentarium, esp. book 3. existens prohibet extraneum et obstruet illud" was the terse formula in which Aquinas summarized for his followers the reason why the intellect as such has no organ, and why every cognitive power that does have organic embodiment has an intrinsically limited range. 19 See citation in note 13, above. 17 18 "Intus THE SEMIOSIS OF ANGELS 217 the very otherness of what is not itself, to include the realization that things exist whether or not they are objectified-even whether or not they are material, when the question of God or angels arises. In the case of sensation and perception, the body itself in its sense organs is adapted and proportioned to those other bodies or parts of the material environment that act upon the organism so as to create the cognitive stimuli that determine sensations and are organized into the perception of what to seek, what to avoid, and what safely to ignore. Hence, as Aquinas puts it, "things are of themselves sensible." In the case of intellection, it is the human mind itself that is required, in its species-specifically human cognitive activity, to elevate what was heretofore only senseperceived to the level of an intelligibleobject. So, while things are of themselves perceptible, they must be renderedintelligible by the activity of the mind itself in that dimension or aspect of its activity which depends only indirectly on bodily organs and their products ("the human intellect depends upon sense to provide its object, but not its exercise respecting that object"). 20 This process of rendering perceived things intelligible was one of the classical meanings of the term "abstraction," wherein the world of bodies, in itself material, is rendered immaterial as cognized, objectified, or known, first accidentally and relative to the cognizing organism in sense perception, then in itself as understood to involve being, that is, what is in principle independent of our awareness, beliefs, or desires. The material, subjective existence of things in the universe, in itself, is both the starting point for and an impediment to speciesspecifically human intellectual awareness. To reach the awareness proper to and distinctive of the human mind or intellect ("language" in the semiotic root sense),21 the subjectivizing principle in bodily substances which we call matter must be transcended or overcome. This is precisely the business of "abstraction": of itself, intellectual awareness abstracts from the body to reach what is 20 See Aquinas, De Verit., q. 10 a. 6; STh I, q. 75, a. 3; and I, q. 84, a. 6. 21 Cf. Poinsot 1643: d. 45, a. 2, 8201127, citing Aquinas, STh I, q. 107, a. 1, ad 2: "lingua Angelorum metaphorice dicitur ipsa virtus Angeli, qua concepnun suum manifestat." 218 JOHN DEELY "true of all or many," the 'universal' or nature considered in itself which individuals share (if it is a question of corporeal natures), or even the natures of things that have no intrinsic involvement in bodiliness (if it is a question of God or, as we shall shortly see, angels). As Poinsot summarizes: 22 "intellectuality of itself abstracts from body, nor does it depend upon but rather is impeded by the body." C) Spirituality in Existence Here the argument becomes remarkable. The intellectual soul, as a soul, is the substantial form of a body. As intellectual, it exhibits an activity that does not directly depend upon a bodily organ. But agere sequitur esse, "action follows upon being": the intellect as a power is rooted in the s.oul as the substantial form of the body, even though the intellect itself has no organ in which it itself is directly embodied. Therefore, when all organs fail, the intellect does not go back into the potency of matter, as do the powers of sense perception and, indeed, the sensible soul itself as a substantial form. What can act without a bodily organ can exist without a bodily organ: and so the human soul, which is the principle whence the intellectual power emanates, exists, and acts, must itself be capable of surviving the failure of all bodily organs. When the body of an animal with an intellectual soul dies, the soul lives on and continues in act as an intellect, continues to be as an intellectual form, preserving in itself at least the intellectual dimension of all that it experienced while complete as the form of a body. In this way the human soul, intellectual but incomplete (a part and not a whole) after the circumstances of life deprive it of its body, continues able to be aware of, dwell upon, perhaps even learn from the past--even though, now separated from the body, it has no means of deriving new experiences and phantasms from which to add to its objective world of things experienced and known. 22 Poinsot1643: d. 39, a. 2,' 36: "intellectualitas de se abstrahit a corpore, nee petatillud, sed potius impediatur per corpus." THE SEMIOSIS OF ANGELS 219 All other souls, plant and animal, are drawn from and recede back into the potentiality we call matter. Forma dat esse: nothing can exist simply, but must exist as this or that, in this or that way. Yet the form is not the existence, but the specification of the existence as an existence of this or that kind. Moreover, if we look at existence in the perspective of the relationship of effect and cause, something remarkable appears. All other effects are produced by agents acting upon something else. But not existence. Existence is presupposed. A material structure can be acted upon, its dispositions changed, a new form educed, with the result that it will exist as something substantially different from what existed before the change in the dispositions. But to change the dispositions of a body presupposes that the body exists; and the changed dispositions that lead to the existence of a new substance likewise presuppose existence. Whence then does existence, precisely as such, come? What is the cause, not of the dispositions or change of dispositions in the material things that exist, but of the existence itself of the material things? D) The Source of Existence Here we come to the unique emphasis that distinguished the philosophical thought of Aquinas from that of Aristotle, his principal mentor, and that will become, we will see, the key to accounting for the semiosis of angels: the consideration of existence itself in the perspective of the relationship of effect and cause, leading Aquinas to enunciate his unique doctrine of creation as the one activity that presupposes nothing in its exercise. "Concerning existence, however," his last great Latin disciple summarized, 23 "we say that it does not result from the proper principles of a nature, but is given by God and received in a nature." The doctrine of creation unique to Aquinas was the doctrine that, contrary to the common understanding of the Book of Genesis as supposedly revealing that time had a beginning, in 23 Poinsot1643: d. 39, a. 3, 4741136: "De exsistentia vero dicimus quod illa non resultat ex propriis principiis naturae, sed a Deo datur, et recipitur in natura." 220 JOHN DEELY fact the beginning of time is strictly irrelevant to the idea of creation, which concerns centrally and solely the dependence in being, dependentia in esse, of all beings that involve potentiality upon an Actuality with no potentiality, Aristotle's Unmoved Mover. This, as Aquinas put it in closing his commentary on the Physics, "all men understand to be God," the 'being' which, since existence is the actuality which gives reality to any substantial form along with all other actualities proper to that form, Aquinas preferred to call lpsum Esse Subsistens, Actual Existence Itself Subsisting. Wherever there is actual existence, there is the creative activity of God, the unique 'causality' termed "creation," which is like efficient causality in that it makes something be this or that way, but which is unlike efficient causality in that it makes be whatever it makes be not out of something else, especially not out of a pre-existent matter or potentiality of any kind, but "out of nothing." Ex nihilo nihil fit, nothing comes from nothing in the material universe but from the potentialities contained in that universe. But the universe itself, witli. all the potentialities in it, comes precisely from nothing by the creative action of God, creatio ex nihilo, which action alone sustains the material universe and everything in it. In this universe "nothing comes from nothing," but every event has a cause that presupposes existence, something to act upon, be it agent, material, form, or outcome. E) The Intellectual Soul We recall that the intellectual soul is still a soul, that is to say, the form of a body. 24 It is not just a substantial form correlate with matter as the potentiality for yet other substantial forms, but the substantial form correlate with a living body or, rather, the substantial form that makes a human body to be a living body (insofar as forma dat esse). It does not come from the potentiality of matter, as presumably do all other souls; yet neither does it come to be apart from matter, even though at bodily death it will d. 42, a. 1, 474 ,29: "Et qui comprehenderet potentiam materiae, etiam deberet cognoscere animam rationalem ad quam est in potentia, licet ilia per creationem sibi infundatur ab extra." 24 Poinsot1643: THE SEMIOSIS OF ANGELS 221 continue to be apart from the matter in correlation with which it begins to be. As we have seen, the intellectual soul as such cannot be educed from the potentiality of matter, because it exhibits an actuality in intellection that does not reduce to the bodily organs by which life is corporeally maintained. The human soul must be immediately created by God. But, we have also seen, this means no more than that its existence depends directly only on God, which is true of all existence. As a soul, as the form of a living body, it will not receive existence until and unless the body of which it will be the form is brought about in the material universe by the standard play of efficient causes upon material by which any body is brought into being.25 But once called into being by those material circumstances, this form, the intellectual soul, in contrast to every other substantial form of a body, inorganic or organic (such as vegetative and sensitive souls), will outlive the material circumstances of its creation. Forma dat esse: when the esse is more than the esse simply proportioned to that of a living body, the forma through which that esse comes will continue to hold and exercise its esse when the body to which it gave life can no longer sustain that life. It is not a question of a twofold act, one drawn from the potency of matter and a second attached to that first actuality as the captain of the ship. A soul abstractly is the form of a living body. But concretely, a soul is the form of this living body, this one and no other. No soul, therefore, pre-exists or could pre-exist the body of which it is the form. The soul comes into existence as the form of this body, and, if it be an intellectual soul, when that 25 Deus "infundit et creat animam rationalem quando materia est disposita," Poinsot notes (1643: d. 41, a. 3, 596 '157), yet this happens "juxta naturalem capacitatem" materiae "et exigentiam ejus," albeit extrinsically. For, as he had explained earlier (ibid.: d. 41, a. 3, 583 U4, emphasis added): "Itaque potest esse aliquid debitum alicui naturae, et tamen non oriri ex principiis propriis, sed ab extra; fietque illi violentia, si negetur talis forma vel concursus: si quidem etiam respectu passivi principii potest violentia dari, ut diximus in Physica (quaest. 9, a. 4, 191-4). Et anima rationalis debetur corpori organizato et disposito, ita ut esset miraculum illi non infundi; et tamen non oritur ex propriis principiis, sed ab extra venit." Whence (ibid.: d. 41, a. 3, 600 Ul): "etiam anima creatur a solo Deo et infunditur corpori, nee tamen supernaturalis est ejus creatio." 222 JOHN DEELY body is destroyed or "corrupted" it continues to exist not simply in its own right independent of that body but incompletely as a part of what was once a whole, namely, the living organism of which it was the principle of life, and continues to be incompletely after having lost its body to yet other actualities which its corporeal potentiality contained as defining its mortality. 26 It was an intellectual animal, but still an animal, that is to say, a living body aware of something of its surroundings and capable of learning from that awareness, growing cognitively up to the moment of death, "corruption," at which moment it lost not existence, like all other animals, but only the capacity further to learn. Dependent on the body for experience, dependent upon experience for developing ideas, the animal in question, the human animal, was not so much intellectual, capable of insight into being, as rational, dependent upon a sequence of experiences with other bodies to see what such insight contained, what the content of an initial insight implied. F) Spiritual Substances Complete in Themselves A truly and perfectly intellectual being, in fact, could not even be an animal. Which brings us at last to the angels: Spirituality properly speaking [that is, in the substantial order of first act, whence esse comes, and not merely in the operational order of second act, whence esse is sustained] is rightly demonstrated on the basis of intellectuality. But that angelic beings are pure spirits in no way informing or forms of bodies is proved by this: the fact that angels are perfect intellectual substances, and not imperfect as we are. Whence, since intellectuality of itself abstracts from body, and does not seek but is rather impeded by bodiliness, if there are bodily intellectual 26 Poinsot 1643: d. 39, a. 3, 475 1139: "ordo forrnae ad materiam non est relatio praedicamentalis, sed transcendentalis, pertinetque ad ipsum genus substantiae incompletae; et licet substantia dicatur ad se, tamen substantia incompleta et partialis non est pure ad se, complete et determinative, sicut substantia completa, sed dicit ordinem ad aliam partem et ad totum, etiamsi substantialis pars sit. Unde anima, quae est substantia incompleta, ipsa sua natura substantiali non est omnino ad se, sed ad alterum cui coaptatur et coordinatur, non ut relatio praedicamentalis, set ut pars: et ideo potest individuari per ordinem ad corpus, cujus est forma substantialis; et consequenter multiplicata materia multiplicabitur etiam anima, in quantum forrna illius est: quod totum non currit in Angelo." THE SEMIOSIS OF ANGELS 223 creatures bespeaking imperfection in the intellectual order, there must needs be yet other creatures perfect in that order of understanding, which means creatures lacking bodies and every intrinsic connection with bodies. 27 Angels are pure forms unmixed with further substantial potentiality, immediately receptive of existence and so superior to bodies of every kind; they are forms subsistent in themselves, with no intrinsic involvement with matter whatever, though able to act upon the material universe; they are not "separated souls," as the forms of dead humans are thought to be, but distinct, complete, separated substances. 28 Comparable to the dimensive quantity or "size" of bodies, there will be in angels only virtual quantity, that is to say, the "size" or "extent" of their power to operate (not in but) on bodies. 29 III. How MANY ANGELS CAN DANCE ON THE HEAD OF A PIN? This is the form of the question generally familiar to Americans, at least since the time of John Dewey (1859-1952). My 27 Poinsot 1643: d. 39, a. 1, 456 1136: "In Angelis vero magis est nobis notum quod intelligant, eo quod effectus eorum apud nos ex locutione et aliis intelligentiae actibus magis innotescunt, et ex intellectualitate recte probatur spiritualitas. Quod vero ita sint puri spiritus quod nullum corpus informent, ex eo probatur: quia sunt substantiae intellectuales perfectae, et non sicut nos. Unde cum intellectualitas de se abstrahit a corpore, nee petat illud, sed potius impediatur per corpus, necesse est quod si dantur creaturae intellectuales cum unione ad corpus, quod imperfectionem in eo genere dicit, dabiles sint aliquae creaturae in illo genere intelligendi perfectae, atque adeo omni corpore et corporeo affectu carentes." 28 Poinsot1643: d. 39, a. 1, 4511115. Cf. Ron Rhodes, "Were Angels Once People?," in Angels Among Us (Eugene, Ore.: Harvest House Publishers, 1994), 74. 29 Poinsot 1643: d. 40, a. 1, 494-5 1133: "formalis ratio, qua Angelus exsistit in loco, debet esse talis, quod non contineatur nee mensuretur corpore locante sed quod contineat corpus, et fundet ubi non circumscriptivum, nee subjectum legibus loci et extensionis, sed superius loco: sicut anima nostra est in corpore ut superior et continens illud: sic enim a fortiori debet Angelus esse in corpore seu in loco, superiore modo quam anima, scilicet non ut informans, sed ut motor •... Corpus autem, cui Angelus conjungitur tamquam loco, substantia est. Non ergo potest substantia Angeli illi uniri, nisi accidentaliter comparetur ad tale corpus. Non potest autem fundari in aliquo accidente ipsius Angeli, per se et formaliter commensurabili corpori, quia hoc esset quantitas. •.• Debet ergo esse accidens virtualiter commensurans Angelum corpori. Nee est alia virtus sic commensurans, quam virtus operativa vel receptio passiva ab alio operante." Cf. Aquinas, Quodl. 1, in Parma ed.: q. 3, a. 4; in Busa ed.: q. 3, a. 1. 224 JOHN DEELY learned British friend Christopher Martin tells me convincingly that this form of the question is misstated, for the head of a pin already occupies space. The correct form of the question concerns the point of a pin, inasmuch as a point as such, ideally, is precisely distinguished by having no parts whatever outside of parts, that is to say, no quantification at all. "You might as well ask how many angels can dance in a football field as on the head of a pin," Martin insists. The question remains, how do angels relate to what we call positions in space, since they have in their own substance no subjection whatever to quantification, having no body? Angels, being superior to bodies, can act on bodies, but they can have no body of their own. As a consequence, the contact of angels with bodies is possible through their activity, "virtue" or "power," only, not through their substance. 30 An angel is a finite being, not an infinite one, precisely because its power is limited to acting on and in creation, that is to say, to acting under the general dependency in existence of all finite being upon the creative activity of God. Not being the form of a body, the angel is not in some one place according to its form; yet, not being ubiquitous, being finite, it is where it acts upon bodies. 31 A) Virtual and Dimensive Quantity It is in this context that St. Thomas and his followers introduce the distinction so dear to Peter Redpath, of which he has made such remarkable extensions, namely, the distinction between the dimensive or dimensional quantity of bodies, whereby they have parts outside of parts and occupy space essentially according to what they are, and virtual quantity, or the extent of power and 3 ° Cf. the brief discussion by Billy Graham, "Do Angels Sing?," in Angels: God's Secret Messengers (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1995), 68-71. 31 Poinsot 1643: d. 40, a. 1, 490 ,16: "D. Thomae ... ponit hanc differentiam inter animam et Angelum, quod Angelus 'unitur corpori solum ut motor, et ideo unitur ei per potentiam vel virtutem; anima autem intellectivam ... per suam essentiam.'" THE SEMIOSIS OF ANGELS 225 control over bodies that a pure spirit can exercise through its actions. 32 Since, then, the presence to the world of bodies is something accidental to an angel and variable, "where" something is has a radically different meaning when applied to any bodily substance, including the human being, and when applied to a pure spirit. "Where a body is," in the categories of Aristotle, the Latins called ubi circumscriptivum, "circumscriptive location," the surroundings that locate a body and upon which the body depends in its existence. The human being, for example, depends on more or less fourteen pounds per square inch of pressure upon its body from without in order to continue in existence. Increase that pressure too much and the body will be crushed; decrease it too much and the body will explode. That is the nature of "circumscriptive ubi." Ubi angelicum is a wholly different matter. The angel relates to place not by depending upon surrounding bodies but by dominating bodies through its activity influencing whatever body or bodies it chooses to act upon within the limits of its finitude. 33 B) The "Location" and "Movement" of Angels in Space An angel may "pass" from spatial location A to distant spatial location B without "passing through" any of the intervening locations, or the angel may choose to "mark its passage" by exercising its power in some manner over the intervening locations, in which case it will appear to move locally, as it were, as a wind sweeping over the land. A body, by contrast, cannot pass from A to B except by traversing the space in between. 34 32 Ibid.: "D. Thomas agnoscit quod ipsa substantia Angeli sit quantitas virtualis: quia quantitatem virtualem semper ponit in Angelis ratione virtus operativae: quia id quod in corporibus est quantitas dimensiva, in Angelis dicit esse virtutem operativam." 33 "In angelo," Poinsot remarks (1643: d. 40, a. 4, 522 117), "non est modus quo dicatur subesse loco, sed quo subjicit sibi locum; redditur tamen ilium tangens virtuali suo contactu, eique conjunctus." H Poinsot 1643: d. 40, a. 4, 522 118: "Quare motus corporis et spiritus non possunt univoce convenire in acquirendo tenninum localem, nee in habendo contactum erga corpus. Quia motus corporis acquirit ubi circumscriptivum, quod est commensuratum loco et ab illo dependens, et distantiam seu extensionem in illo habens; ubi autem angelicum non potest 226 JOHN DEELY Angels, then, are "someplace" in the physical universe of bodies only when and to the extent that they take possession of some one place rather than another. This "taking possession" is familiar in the idea of "demons" particularly, or "evil spirits" taking over the control of some human being: "an angel and a soul can occupy the same body," Poinsot tells us,35 citing Thomas Aquinas, 36 "because 'the two are not compared under the same relation of causality, since the soul occupies the body as its form while the demon occupies it quite otherwise'"-as an intruder overpowering the rightful occupant, as it were. C) The Answer to the Immediate Question This brings us back to our question: How many angels can dance on the head of a pin, or, indeed, the point of a pin, or, for that matter, in a football field? The answer is all of them or none of them, depending on whether they choose to exercise their power over bodies in respect of the given area, large or small, and with the caveat that a choice to occupy one and the same spatial location at one and the same time by each individual member of the angelic community has no probability of occurring. But, were they so to choose, all can be "present" there only insofar as they exercise their power each to achieve some different effect37-for example, each one performing a wholly different dance; or different parts of the same dance, as in a ballet ("duo Angeli pluresve partialiter et inadaequate ad eumdem effectum conhabere talem commensurationem. Et cum distantia non possit intelligi nisi ratione extensionis (si quidem major vel minor distantia mensuratur per extensionem), consequenter dicendum est quod Angelus, qui omnis extensionis expers est, non potest moveri localiter ad hoc ut acquirat aliquam distantiam seu exsistentiam vel praesentiam ad locum secundum extensionem loci." 35 Poinsot 1643: d. 40, a. 3, 516 1140: "Angelus et anima possunt esse in eodem corpore, quia 'non comparantur secundum eamdem habitudinem causae: quia anima exsistit ut forma, non autem daemon.'" 36 Aquinas, STb I, q. 52, a. 3, ad 3. 37 Poinsot 1643: d. 40, a. 3, 518 1147: "de facto et ordinarie, Angeli non sunt in eodem loco formali; possunt tamen absolute loquendo esse quasi praetematuraliter et per accidens, ut si duo Angeli pluresve partialiter et inadaequate ad eumdem effectum concurrant, vel unus sit in eodem loco per passionem et alius per operationem." THE SEMIOSIS OF ANGELS 227 currant") or even a waltz with one leading, the other following ("unus sit in eodem loco per passionem et alius per operationem"). Otherwise, respecting an identical respect, the more powerful angel will exclude the "presence" of the less powerful ("non [pos]sunt in eodem loco formali ... absolute [et per se] loquendo"). 38 However, all this is moot compared with the question of why angels would choose anything at all. In other words, the question of where and how angels might choose to perfect themselves by operations depends upon how angels see the world. For cognitive beings choose to act only according as they see things, that is to say, dependently upon their awareness. N. THE AWARENESS OF ANGELS We are considering the being of a creature whose whole essential activity consists in awareness and the intellectual inclinations or desires consequent thereon, but that is nonetheless a creature, that is to say, a finite being, and therefore one whose awareness, however perfect intellectually,39 is nonetheless a finite awareness, and requires specification from without in order to be aware of one thing rather than another. As intellectual, the angel, like the human mind, is able to consider being in the whole of its extent, actual and possible. But as being finite in intellect, this universal capacity needs to be specified to be aware actually, "here and now," as it were, of this object or range of objects rather than of that object or that other region in the range of objects possible to consider. The human being forms its actual awareness of clouds in the sky, or a breeze swaying the trees, or the night sky 38 Poinsot 1643: d. 40, a. 3, 516 1140: "in eodem loco materiali non repugnat, absolute loquendo, plures Angelos vel plures spiritus esse, si operentur diverso modo vel diversus effectus: non autem respectu unius et ejusdem effectus, in ratione continentis talem locum." See further ibid.: d. 40, a. 3, 5171145. 39 Poinsot 1643: d. 41, a. 1, 554 U2: "est advertendum quod intelligere ex duplici principio limitatur: scilicet ex objecto a quo habet specificationem, et ex subjecto a quo habet individuationem; et, si est subsistens [quod pertinet Deo solo] caret utraque." 228 JOHN DEELY sparkled with stars, in response to just such specifications from without. With angels, there is a problem to be considered from the outset. Lacking a body of any kind and in any way, they also lack organs whereby they might receive from outside themselves any kind of specifying stimulus in response to which their mind or intellect might form a concept relating them cognitively to the surroundings external to their proper subjectivity. Whence then is to come the stimulus for the angelic intellect to look beyond its own activity in the consideration of beings which are other than itself, which it itself is not? A) The Stimulus for Cognitive Response in Angels The answer to this question, according to Thomas Aquinas and those who follow his thought on the matter, is that the pure awareness of angels, being spiritual, is attuned to an environment that is likewise purely spiritual, and the stimuli "from without" that prod the angelic consciousness to form and to be able to form concepts that will serve as sign-vehicles (representamens, as we have become accustomed to say after Peirce) manifesting objects other than themselves are nothing else than the "climate changes" of the spiritual order in which the angel dwells, namely, the changes in existence all throughout the universe that come about always and only from the of the whole of finite being, in which changes the creative activity of God consists. We are aware only of bodies living and dying, particular material substances beginning, developing, and ceasing to be. The reason for this is that bodies are all that we can directly and immediately know. Pure spirits are aware directly and immediately of their surroundings, just as we are. But, unmediated by senses, what this angelic awareness directly takes rise from is the creative activity which is manifested directly whenever and wherever and however existence occurs. For the climate in and of which purely intellectual or utterly bodiless spirits-angels, in a word-are perforce directly immersed and aware is the receiving of THE SEMIOSIS OF ANGELS 229 existence, the actuality presupposed in every other actuality, as from the purely spiritual source of the universe of finite spiritual and material beings indifferently. This creative influx is, as it were, the very air they breathe, the one aspect of being that comes from God alone and manifests the divine activity wherever and for whatever duration ("whenever") it is found: "Concerning existence, we note that it results not from the subjective principles of any [finite] nature," material or spiritual, "but is imparted by God and received in a nature. "40 (The expression "received in" requires to be quite carefully and singularly understood, inasmuch as, prior to existence, there is no nature in which existence can be received. So the "reception" in this case signifies rather the manner or specificationaccordingto which the creative power of God is being exercised respecting things 41 and manifested respecting intelligibility, that is, as making it possible for purely spiritual intelligences actually to attend to the surrounding universe of spiritual and material substances or "things" interacting also among themselves in various ways.) This divine activity, of course, is internal or "immanent" to each angel insofar as it is a substance, a "subjectivity" or thing among the rest of things; but it is external or transitive to each angel insofar as the angel is an intellect capable of being aware of the whole of being, not of itself only but of all beings insofar as they are intelligible. And all beings are intelligible, ultimately and supremely, precisely as they issue forth from the creative activity of God whence and whereby they derive their existence both as real and as acting and interacting in the universe of things. It is in 40 Poinsot 1643: d. 39, a. 3, 474 U6, cited in note 23 above. 41 Poinsot1643: d. 41, a. 2, 574 '1125: "Quia sicut existentia specificatur et determinatur ab essentia, non per hoc quod essentia superveniat existentiae, eique ut causa formalis de novo uniatur, ipsa existentia materialiter suscipiente essentiam et specificationem ejus: sed per hbc quod existentia ista, quae resultat ex productione talis essentiae, adaequatur illi, et sic modificatur in ipsa receptione a specificativo hujus essentiae, participatque et ebibit exsistentia ab ipsa essentia determinatam illam speciem." Poinsot has in mind Aquinas' distinction (STh I, q. 75, a. 5, ad 1) between the "actus primus" quod est "infinitum, virtualiter in se omnia praehabens" et "participatur a rebus, non sicut pars, sed secundum diffusionem processionis ipsius" (which is the source of the angelic "species impressae"), on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the "actus vero recepti, qui procedunt a primo actu infinito et sunt quaedam participationes eius" sed ut pars entis creati, sci!., ipsum esse proprium ei. 230 JOHN DEELY just this way that the imparting and sustaining of existence-in which "creation" (the creative activity of God) consists-impacts upon and enables the intelligence of angels to become aware from within of the universe without as a whole, including angels themselves as parts: the specifications providing the ground for the awareness of angels derive from the divine ideas according to which God is creating as outward expressions thereof, representing the creative rationales more or less universal in God's causing of existence, and in accordance with which the things themselves derive their existence following the modality of causes more or less universal. 42 It is important to remember that we are talking of finite, albeit purely spiritual or bodiless, beings: they can only be living things capable of purely intellectual awareness and the desires and actions consequent thereon. They are not and cannot be omniscient. They cannot pay attention to everything possible for them to know at once, nor is it possible for them to know everything at once. The former is the case because they must themselves respond to the stimuli of changing existences everywhere around them, in which activity they are subject to some freedom both of choice and even of distraction. Thus, just as we may be in a room with music in the background while being so absorbed in thought or conversation as not to notice it, or just as we may ignore the fact that it is raining in India, so can it happen with angels.43 The latter is the case because things do not exist everywhere all at once but only successively, one after another, and dependently upon 42 Poinsot1643: d, 41, a. 3, 596 U6: "secundum quod illae species derivantur ab ideis divinis quasi quaedam earum expressiones, repraesentando rationes magis vel minus universales in causando, et secundum quod res derivantur a Deo juxta modum causarum magis vel minus universalium, sic dicuntur illae species magis vel minus universales." Cf. ibid.: d. 41, a. 3, 590 U6; 645 'l29. 43 Angels are perfect in their existence and nature as intellectual substances, Poinsot notes (1643: d. 41, a. 3, 5891133), "perfecta, inquam, in actu primo etin ratione scientiae. Nam in actu secundo non est necesse quod ab initio consideret in actu secundo omnia: quia in creaturis non est imperfectio actu non considerare aliqua, sed est imperfectio carere scientia seu facultate considerandi: hoc enim est ignorare." On the distinction between a simple defect and "ignorance" as a privative defect, see Jacques Maritain, The Sin of the Angel, trans. William L. Rossner, S.J. (Westminster, Md.: The Newman Press, 1959), 61-64, text and notes 18, 19, and 20. THE SEMIOSIS OF ANGELS 231 causal series some aspects of which are necessary and other aspects contingent, so that, even seeing all things in their causes and as receiving whatever they have of existence from God, the future holds even for angels surprises beyond what they can see and conjecture. The past too can hold blind spots for angels. For if a thing comes into existence while a particular angel attends elsewhere, and then passes away without leaving signs traceable to its proper singularity, the angel in question-unless enlightened by another who was paying attention at the time-will have no way whatever of coming to know what it missed. 44 B) How Concepts Work Differently for Angels Because the actual ideas (the "concepts") of angels are formed in response to the determinations impressed upon the angels from within by the activity of God communicating existence to finite singulars and sustaining that existence in and through their interactions, the angelic manner of knowing contrasts sharply with intellectual knowledge in human beings. In our intellectual knowledge, the universal is at one extreme, the singular at another. The universal gives rise to abstract knowledge. The singular, if present to, active upon, and proportioned to our senses, gives rise to intuitive knowledge in the immediately cognized coincidence or partial identity of object and thing-that is to say, to the awareness of a physical thing as physically existing independently of awareness, here and now existing also in awareness as object thereof. Or again, our knowledge is said to be universal when we have managed to arrive at an understanding of what is necessary to a particular nature, as when we know that wherever there are molecules of water there are combinations of two hydrogen atoms with one atom of oxygen. In neither of these senses of "universal" can the knowledge of angels be called universal; nor can the knowledge of angels be .. Poinsot 1643: d. 42, a. 2, 651 '48: "Quod si nee fuit prius eognita ut in memoria remaneret, nee effectum sui reliquit, omnino nullum principium manet in Angelo unde tale individuum eognoscat. n 232 JOHN DEELY opposed or contrasted to their awareness of singulars. 45 Whatever an angel is aware of it is aware of on the basis of the divine activity of creation, whether it be the continuance of things in existence or the divine concurrence in their operations and interactions through which that existence is maintained, diminished, increased, or lost. 46 Consequently, in utter contrast to any sense in which human knowledge can be said to be either "universal" or "of the universal," angelic knowledge is called "universal" because it forms itself directly from the specifying stimuli of the universal activity of God's imparting of existence ("creation"} and because angelic awareness reaches directly to the singular existent, intuitively whenever it considers an existing singular, and abstractively when it considers a past or a future singular. In this last case (the contemplation of a future contingent}, moreover, the "universal knowledge" of the angel is liable to error as "virtual falsity." 47 "Virtual falsity" as yet excluding actual falsity is a particularly interesting notion. When an angel "here and now" conjectures the future on the basis of what it presently knows of existing things and their interaction, it makes a guess- "performs an abduction," as we say in semiotics. If the guess will turn out to be right, it can be said to be "virtually true"; but if the future will turn out otherwise than the angel now conjectures, the guess is "virtually false." But when the future on which the guess bears becomes present, the angel attending thereto will know of everything that exists that it does exist, and so in that present moment it no longer has room for conjecture and it is unable to think that its former conjecture might still be correct. Hence actual falsity is precluded from angelic awareness inasmuch as, at any given moment, though an angel can be deceived about what will be in See Poinsot 1643: d. 41, 6091130; 612 1138; etc. The effects of "divine governance," Poinsot notes, following in particular Aquinas STh I, q. 104, "vel sunt ipsa continuatio et conservatio rerwn in esse, vel concursus auxilii ad operandum," in either case consisting in "omnimoda dependentia creaturae a Deo in existendo" (p. 141 of.his "lsagoge ad D. Thomae Theologiam. Explicatio connexionis et ordinis totius summae theologicae D. Thomae per omnes ejus materias," in ]oannis a Sancto Thoma Cursus Theologicus Tomus N, Solesmes ed. [Paris: Desclee, 1946), 143-219). 47 See Poinsot 1643: d. 42, a. 4, 6771136, but also passim. 45 46 THE SEMIOSIS OF ANGELS 233 some particulars, it cannot be deceived about what here and now actually, as opposed to virtually, exercises existence in the universe of finite being. This is perhaps the deepest contrast between anthroposemiosis and the putative semiosis of angels. We conceive "the universal" not only often erroneously, but always in a static way, such that, even when circumstances make the universal in question determinately false, the state of our knowledge as discursive (in contrast to the comprehensive awareness of angelic knowledge, as we will see shortly) 48 leaves it possible for us to remain ignorant of the relevant facts and consider the entertained universal as true. The "universal" knowledge of an angel can entertain no such illusion because it has nothing of the static about it; it is more like watching a landscape under rapidly shifting conditions of light and weather: The concepts angels form in their awareness of things can be called "universals" only by reason of the medium on the basis of which they represent the things themselves right down to their unique differences. And this medium is the more universal according as it the more perfectly and intimately represents the things that are grasped within it: just as a cause is more universal the more forcefully it brings about its effect, and the more intimately and profoundly it achieves that effect: and so the universality of angelic knowledge is a universality of activity, which applies to many rationales of existence. 49 More than an activity, the "universal knowledge" of an angel is a constant unfolding into clear and distinct awareness of what exists which, as has been said, contains constant surprises for the angel comprehending what unfolds, for the actual awareness of the angel forms itself from determinations "which receive the force of representing the individuals existing successively, just as they are N.E, "Comprehensive Knowledge," below. Poinsot 1643: d. 41, a. 4, 609 1130, emphasis added in the translation: "Solum ergo dicuntur species Angelorum universales ratione medii per quod repraesentant res ipsas usque ad proprias differentias illarum. Et hoc medium quanto est universalius, tanto perfectius et intimius repraesentat res quae sub illo comprehenduntur: sicut causa quanto est universalior, tanto vehementius influit in effectum, et intimius ac profundius ilium attingit, eo quod talis causa est activior et perfectior: et sic universalitas ejus est universalitas activitatis, quae ad plures rationes se extendit." 48 Section i9 234 JOHN DEELY caused in the universe from the creative ideations of God, not otherwise and not before. "50 Note that it is not abstractly that the creative activity of God impacts upon and specifies the concept-formation, or actual awareness, of the angel. It is not concepts that are "infused" into the angel's consciousness, full-blown. 51 The climate in which the angelic mind is bombarded with infused specifications or stimuli arising from the universal maintenance of existence by God is not a Platonic realm of pure Ideas, even Divine Ideas, abstractly and eternally exemplifying universal natures. Quite to the contrary, what is at issue is the dynamic activity whereby the universe is maintained in existence insofar as it dynamically and in finite ways exemplifies the infinity of divine perfection as finitely imitable in various, varying, specific ways: specifications in response to which the angel attends to the universe around it are similitudes derivative from the divine ideas [through the creative activity according to which things receive existence], and represent things in the angelic intellect in the way in which those things are derived from God as one following upon the other in a temporal order. 52 It is not any static exemplar in the divine mind or "individual essence" in some created substance itself that provides the representative rationale in response to which the angel forms its awareness of the universe. It is rather the rationale of the emergence and development in time of creatures ("ut descendens so Poinsot 1643: d. 42, a. 2, 647 U2: "acceperunt vim repraesentandi ista individua successive, sicut ab ideis causantur in universo, et non aliter, nee ante." 51 Nor is it ideas, which differ from concepts only in that they are concepts used to guide practical activity: see, in Poinsot, Natura/isPhilosophiaePrima Pars (Reiser ed., vol. II [Turin: Marietti, 1933], 1-529), q. 11, "De Causa Materiali, Formali et Exemplari," a. 3, "Ad quod genus causae reducatur idea seu exemplar," 240b7-247b16. See discussion below in note 92. 52 Poinsot1643: d. 41, a. 3, 590 '36: "iliac species repraesentant singularia eo modo quo sunt, et dependenter ab eorum terminatione; ita quod, quando sunt intra causas, repraesentant intra causas, quando extra, ut existentia in se: non vero in se determinate quamdiu sunt futura. In hoc enim non est inconveniens, quod dependeant species angelicae a productionis singularium, ut a termino suae repraesentationis: quia similitudines sunt derivatae ab ideis divinis, et eo modo repraesentant res in intellectu Angeli, quo derivantur a Deo per successionem temporis." THE SEMIOSIS OF ANGELS 235 a Dea," as Poinsot puts it)53 that stimulates the angels to form their concepts representing the many creatures perfectly and distinctly. The unity of the conceptual representation is taken not from the creatures conceptually known but from the constancy and manner of the creative activity of God which brings these creatures about and in response to which as to a stimulus the angel forms its awareness. 54 C) Universal Knowledge of Singulars: The Key to the Knowledge Distinctive of Angels When it is said that intellectual knowledge of universals contrasts with sense knowledge of particulars, then, the expression "knowledge of universals" is almost equivocal as between human beings and angels, embodied spirits and spirits with no internal dependency upon bodies in their cognitive activity: 55 Angelic conceptions are not universal [in the way that human intellectual ideas are) from the fact that they represent directly and essentially some nature in a universal state or some generic grade ... but from the fact that the conceptions rep:esent several things . . . insofar as they come from God . . . according to diverse relative conditions. 56 It is the production of singulars in and through the divine creative activity that is the actual term of "universal" angelic awareness, the equivalent for a human being of standing in the presence here 53 Poinsot1643: d. 41, a. 4, 612 U9: "non praecise secundurn se, sed utdescendens a Deo ... sic potest esse ratio repraesentandi plura perfecte et distincte." 54 Ibid.: "non oportet unitatem hujus repraesentationis surnere ex aliqua unitate rerum repraesentatarum in se, sed ex unitate et modo exemplaris a quo derivantur: sicut sigillaturn surnit unitatem a sigillo, licet res valde diversarum figurarum exprimat." 55 Ibid.: US: "species angelicae non sunt universales ex eo quod aliquam naturam in universali seu gradurn aliquem genericurn directe et per se repraesentet ... sed ex eo quod repraesentant plures res sub aliquo universali medio, it est, quatenus descendunt a Deo et ab ideis divinis secundurn diversas habitudines." 56 Poinsot expresses here exactly the view of Aquinas, De Verit., q. 8, a. 10 ad 3: "una forma intellectus angelici est ratio propria pluriurn secundurn diversas ejus habitudines ad diversas res, ex quibus ejus habitudines ad diversas res, ex quibus habitudinibus consurgit pluralitasidearum," concerning which textPoinsotadvises (1643: d.41,a.4, 612 U7): "Nota hoc bene." See full text in note 76 below. 236 JOHN DEELY and now of a person while shaking hands and exchanging greetings, but with none of the limitations of distance and circumstance that intuitive awareness dependent upon sense (i.e., human intuitive awareness) entails and including the awareness of causality at work in every aspect of the being standing before one insofar as that being exercises a unique existence. The "universality" in question is a concrete, not an abstract, universality: The climate from which angelic concept-formation receives its specifying determinations is one representative of things according as they are derived from divine ideas, whence perforce the specifications in question represent whatever individuals they do represent successively, and not simultaneously: because it is successively that individuals exemplify the creative action of God in the physical universe. So it is that the concepts angels form in actually achieving awareness in response to these determinations represent the things of the universe, not by taking anything from the very things themselves,57 but rather by taking determination according to the way in which the things themselves depend upon the divine exemplars; whence from the efficacy of their representation and from the efficacy of their participation in the divine or creative ideas, angelic conceptions perforce are assimilated to the individuals when they come to be and participate existence from the divine ideas, and not in any other way. Nor is this representation or application to the knowing of the individual determinately drawn from the individual things themselves, except insofar as they are the final terms (the terminus) of such representation. 58 Poinsot sums all this up in a terse formula: "id habent in re:. praesentando, quod ideae in causando, "59 a formula which he expands over the next several pages of his treatise and recapitulates 57 That is, not by any process of "abstraction" such as discursive reason (or even the perceptual intelligence of brute animals)-any awareness dependent upon bodily organs, directly or indirectly-requires. 58 Poinsot 1643: d. 42, a. 2, 645 1128: "Sed quia ipsa individua successive fiunt ab ideis divinis in hoc universo, hoc ipso quod infunditur Angelo species repraesentativa rerum secundum quod derivantur ab ideis divinis, oportet quod aliqua individua successive repraesentet, et non simul: quia sic derivantur ab ideis divinis in hoc universo. Ergo si species Angelorum repraesentant res, non desumendo aliquid ab ipsis, sed prout descendunt ab ideis divinis, necesse est quod ex vi suae repraesentationis, et ex vi quam participant ab ipsis ideis, habeant assimilari individuis quando fiunt et participant esse ab ideis, et non aliter. Neque ista repraesentatio seu applicatio ad cognoscendum individuum determinate sumenda est ex ipsis rebus, nisi in quantum sunt termini talis representationis." Cf. ibid.: d. 41, a. 4, 612 1137. 59 Poinsot. 1643: d. 42, a. 2, 645 '1129. THE SEMIOSIS OF ANGELS 237 in saying that "the specifying determinations on the basis of which angels form concepts possess in representing the very content which the divine ideas impart in the causing of actual existence. " 60 This is the key to the knowledge distinctive of angels. D) The Semiotic Triangle We see in all this clearly verified the triadic structure of signs which is the foundation of semiosis, no less in the "sphere below the moon" than in the empyrean home of the angels: the "infused" determinations from the creative activity of God, whereby the angel is enabled to form an actual awareness of whatever it chooses to pay attention to in the universe, serve as the basis for angels to fashion sign-vehicles (concepts) which represent to them the universe of things other than (and also including) themselves. So we have the famous triad: first, the representamen or signvehicle, to wit, the concept itself; second, the object signified, which in this case (as in our immeasurably more limited partial identification case of sense perception) is an object identical with a physically existing thing; and third, the one-namely, the pure spirit or angel-to or for which the existing here and now thing is represented in the manifestation making of that thing also an object. The nature of this triad may be expressed in a formula-the semiotic formula, let us call it-which, as Poinsot points out, 61 admits of no exception in the order of finite being: any two things related to a common third are in that same way related to one another. Poinsot 1643: d. 42, a. 2, 647 '1132: "id habent species Angelorum in repraesentando, quod ideae divinae in causando. . . . Et consequenter ex vi talis infusionis habet ilia representatio intentionalis in Angelo determinare et explicare repraesentationem illam ad hoc vel illud individuum quod de novo fit, quia sic producitur ab ideis divinis; et species illae sunt quaedam sigilla et repraesentationes idearum, prout in hoc universo producunt." See also ibid.: d. 42, a. 2, 645 '1127. 61 Poinsot 1643: d. 41, a. 1, 559 '1151: "Quaecumque enim sunt eadem uni tertio, sunt eadem inter se, eo modo quo in illo tertio unum sunt: quod axioma in creatis nullam patitur instantiam." 60 238 JOHN DEELY E) ComprehensiveKnowledge As with us, the awareness of a given object for an angel can pass from abstract to intuitive or back, but on entirely different grounds. With us, an object need only pass out of the range of sensation to become "abstract," whether or not it continues to exist. Not so with the angels. Near or far, as long as a thing exists, an angel adverting to it and so making it an object of awareness will apprehend it intuitively, unless for reasons of its own it chooses to use less than the full comprehension of the impressed specification at the basis of this particular consciousness. Otherwise, whatever exists in nature, when an angel attends to it, that angel knows intuitively, that is, knows the physical thing in its very physical reality objectified, and comprehensively as well. The term "comprehensively" here does not mean that, for each and every angel, there is nothing left to know or be known about the object. The term means rather that the angel in knowing, when attending fully to the particular stimulus or species impressa62 in proportion with which it forms its speciesexpressae or concepts, 63 knows to the full capacity of its specifically individual apprehensive power the substantial being and necessary properties and causes involved therein. But this same angel knows only conjecturally the contingencies that bear on the future of the being in question. And, if the object of the apprehension is a being 62 Poinsot 1643: d. 42, a. 4, 673 'll24: "potest intellecus [angelicus] uti inadequate aliqua specie, solum ut dividat cognitiones seu conceptus circa diversa objecta .•• applicando modo speciem uni cognitioni seu objecto tantum, et postmodum alteri, non tamen unum deducendo ex altero et in vi ipsius deductionis cognoscendo," as the human intellect is further able to objectifiy inadequately its environmental stimuli (and so fall into actual rather than merely virtual falsity). But also "posse Angelum uti una specie ad diversas cognitiones habendas" (ibid., d. 41, a. 4, 616 'VSO), so that different angels' can even form different conceptions respecting the same objective stimulus, "quia potest uti specie ilia in hanc vel illam partem." See ibid.: d. 41, a. 2, 'll43. 63 Poinsot 1643: d. 41, a. 4, 607 'll25: "non minus repraesentativi sunt conceptus [seu species expressae], quam species [impressas] ... quia species impressae proportionantur conceptibus, quia ex illis formantur conceptus tamquam ex principio repraesentativo." Moreover (ibid.: d. 45, a. 2, 835 1125), "species in inferioribus Angelis sunt minus perfectae quam in superioribus, ideoque non tot veritates demonstrant, vel non cum tanta determinatione et distindione sicut species superiorum." THE SEMIOSIS OF ANGELS 239 itself capable of immanent activity, the angel does not know at all those immanent acts ("secrets of the heart") 64 save insofar as they outwardly manifest themselves in some bodily state or behavior of the cognized organism. In other words, at any given moment, unlike our intellectual knowledge, which always contains an element of confusion or potential for greater clarity overall in the here and now (and is said in this sense to be "discursive"), the purely intellectual awareness of the angel, which is all the angel has, it also has wholly actually respecting the here and now-not in the sense that there is nothing in the here and now being of which the angel is unaware, 65 but in the sense that there is nothing further in the here and now which is potential respecting the individual angel's here and now awareness. A given angel always knows, if not all that there is to know, at least all that it can by itself know under the actual circumstances here and now. It is in this sense that the angel is said to know "comprehensively" rather than "discursively"; 66 but, since the next moment in time may, and the whole of future time certainly will, unfold differently than the individual angel is led to conjecture from what it does know here and now, the angel, turning its attention here or there, is constantly liable to surprises further revealing the limited or finite nature of its intellectual power, for all its "comprehensiveness" at any given moment. Yet the angel cannot from this experience learn, for example, a habit of humility, because the "Angelus," Poinsot notes (1643: d. 41, a. 4, 6161150), "qui videt in alio species quas habet, non videt cogitationem et usum earum." Whence these secrets are formally treated and defined ind. 42, a. 3, which opens as follows (655 'Ill): "Cogitationes cordis et secreta cordis idem sunt: et dicuntur talia quaecumque ex libero voluntatis usu proveniunt intra potentias interiores, quae libertatem participant, et nullo effectu exteriori extra illas produntur et exeunt. ... dicuntur secreta cordis, quamdiu in effectu vel signo aliquo extemo seu extra illas potentias posito non manifestantur." See further ibid.: d.42, a. 3, 6641!s 38-39. 65 For example, an angel of greater intellectual power and reach can, through conversation with its inferiors, instruct them, as we will see. 66 Poinsot 1643: d. 42, a. 4, 673 1123, emphasis added: "in habendo unamquamque operationem et perfectionem ex ilia provenientem, scilicet attingentiam veritatis, petit non procedere de potentia ad actum et de imperfecto ad perfectum, quod est procedere per motum: sed illam operationem perfecte habere, quia comprehensive, et statim attingere totam perfectionem quam f>Otest per quamlibet operationem." 64 240 JOHN DEELY angelic nature has no place for the taking of habits. 67 So too in its comprehensiveness from the first moment is the awareness that contingent causes found only conjectural as opposed to certain knowledge: part of the comprehension is that it does not know everything and cannot infallibly predict the future on the basis of the certainties it does have. F) Learning by Successive Discourse Since the angelic knowledge always takes its rise from the stimulus of the divine creative activity which gives existence to natural beings, and since it is in time that this creative activity gives rise to the succession of individuals and events in nature from which the angel attending to the unfolding constantly learns new things comprehensively, the successive character of this comprehension gives a successive sense in which the angel can be said to learn. If the notion of discursive knowledge is extended to include the capacity to learn new things without any transition from potentiality to actuality respecting the known at any given moment, angels may be said to have a successive discourse, that is, a discourse in which the previous awareness is not at all the cause of the later awareness (as when we see a new consequence of something we already knew) but merely its predecessor, which did not actually have all that is contained in the new awareness simply because contingent causes in nature that are now actual were not then actual. In other words, the angel has nothing to learn by inference in reflecting on its present knowledge, yet it can and will learn by contrast in the successive awareness it maintains of existence and holds in intellectual memory. Whatever it will learn will come, not from a present awareness that is potential respecting a 67 Poinsot 1643: d. 42, a. 4, 461 U2: "superfluit ibi habitus, quia potentia ex se est sufficienter in actu ad penetrandum omnes illas veritates" quorum capax sit hie et nunc. Yet it might be the case that, given what we now know to be the evolutionary rather than the cyclical nature of our physical universe, in light of what will shortly be said about learning from within 'successive discourse', there is place for angels to develop noninferential interpretive habits, but at a wholly different pace and with a different function than is the case for the inferential habits of rational animals. THE SEMIOSIS OF ANGELS 241 future awareness, but always and only and wholly from the future state of the objects themselves, known intuitively by the angels (i.e., known as actually existing at the time they are considered by the angel). 68 "And so it is," Poinsot notes wryly, "that God moves [i.e., instructs the understanding--or, rather, comprehensionof]69 a spiritual creature by means of time. " 70 Motion, the passage from potency to act, is essential to discourse, both in the successive discourse of angels and in the illative discourse of humans; but the motion in question is internal to the discourse by which we come to see new things in the realizing of consequences, while it is only external to the "discourse" by which new things enter angelic apprehension through the causal unfolding of the universe in its contingent as well as its necessary causes. We have also seen that the angels, in forming concepts, form sign-vehicles or representamens that achieve the distinctive effect of semiosis, in the end, exactly in the manner that human concepts (in contradistinction, now, to percepts) do, although without the dependency upon zoosemiosis and the actions of sensible bodies upon organs of sense: to wit, by relating the angels to the universe of things other than themselves objectified through 68 Poinsot 1643: d. 42, a. 4, 673 '23: "non est necesse quod Angelus habeat in actu secundo omne quod est in ipso in actu primo; ideoque convenit ei habere discursum successivum, hoc est diversa successive intelligere, et successive diversas operationes habere . . . . Unde cum possit operari circa diversa objecta, oportet quod etiam possit habere diversas operationes, et non omnes simul . . . quia penes objecta specificantur et limitantur" conceptiones angelicae. 69 See note 66 above. Discourse is to understanding, we might say, as motion is to bodies! Cf. Poinsot 1643: d. 42, a. 4, 670 'll13; and 674 'll26. 70 Res existentes a speciebus impressibus objectivae "repraesentantur autem secundum ordinem quo descendunt a Deo; descendunt vero ab ipso per tempus successivum, non per aevum [i.e., by time such as measures transient physical operations, not such as measures the 1iµmanent operations of angelic awareness]; et sic Deus movet creaturam spiritualem per tempus." (Poinsot 1643: d. 42, a. 2, 649 '1139) Whence (ibid.) "etiam res illae quae coexistunt aliquo instanti angelico, quando correspondet diversis partibus temporis, v.g., si correspondent uni horae vel uni diei, non possunt cognosci ab Angelo in vi illius instantis sic extensi, quamdiu non producuntur in ipso tempore, sed adhuc correspondent parti termporis futuri." The situation of the angelic semiosis in this particular may be said to have an anthroposemiotic counterpart, as it were (ibid.: d. 42, a. 2, 653 'll56: emphasis added): "Sicut enim nos ex collatione plurium specierum unam formamus, ita Angelus in una simplici specie habet virtualiter et implicite plura, quae successiveexplicantur." 242 JOHN DEELY the concepts which represent those things as cognized by the angels forming the concepts. This concept formation on the part of angels is what constitutes them as actually aware, and this awareness takes its excitation or stimulus from the purely spiritual activity of God, impressed on the angelic intellects from within concomitantly with their own creation, in creating the universe of interacting things by imparting to the events and things of the - universe, not all at once but successively, an actual existence beyond nothingness and outside of the efficient causes of coming to be in the case of individuals, "substances." G) The Distinctiveness of Angelic Semiosis If we consider now what is distinctive of this angelic semiosis, in contrast with the semiosis of animals, linguistic or not linguistic, we find that it concerns mainly the situation of intuitive awareness, that is to say, the awareness wherein the very object signified is identified with a thing physically existing here and now. In the semiosis of animals, intuitive awareness is limited by the range of the senses. Not only are past or future imagined objects known abstractively, but even objects that have a here and now physical existence are known to us intuitively only when they are present and active upon our bodily senses. If we look at a picture of someone who is alive but in some distant place, we are intuitively aware of the picture, but the person in the picture we are aware of only abstractively. 71 Not so with the angels.72 Concepts formed on the basis of the objective stimulus of the divine creative activity cannot be de71 Poinsot1643: d. 42, a. 1, 626119: "Sicut qui videt imaginem imperatoris, in illa attingit imperatorem: sed imaginem praesentem intuitive, et imperatorem abstractive, quia absensest." Poinsot expounds the matter of "intuitive awareness" in the two longest questions of his 1632 Treatiseon Signs, Book ill, qq. 1 and 2. n Poinsot 1633: Phil. nat. 1. p., q. 1, a. 3, 32a34-bl: "Quod vero dicitur intellectus [humanus] intuitive videre obiectum, dicimus, quod id habet dependenter a sensu et in quantum continuatur cum illo. Clausis autem sensibus, quantumcumque res sint praesentes, intellectus non potest intuitive cognoscere, quia non possunt illae species [impressae] de tali praesentia certificare nisi mediantibus sensibus. Si tamen Deus infunderet aliquod lumen superius et species exemplatas a Deo, sicut infunditur, angelis, posset illis intuitive videre independenter a sensu." THE SEMIOSIS OF ANGELS 243 ceived as to what actually exists and what does not, for everything that an angel considers that actually exists physically is represented and known so to exist. Only things considered by an angel wholly alert to its stimulus that either no longer exist or that do not yet exist are known abstractively, and, in the latter case, are known mainly conjecturally as well (and so under threat of "virtual falsity"). How do we explain the necessarily intuitive character of angel awareness respecting the universe of physically existing things? My guess would be that the explanation lies in the ability of a purely intellectual consciousness directly to apprehend categorial relations among physical objects. Categorial relations 73 are all and only those relations that exist in the world of nature without any dependence upon the cognitive activity of organisms. They differ they necessarily involve the from mind-dependent relations in actual existence of two (at least) related things: A can be similar to B, categorially speaking, if and only if both A and B exist. The shape, let us say, on the basis of which the two are "similar"-or whatever other "accident" (whatever subjective characteristic, let us say) on the basis of which the two are related-can and does exist in each of the two independently of the other. But the characteristic in question as foundation or basis of a relation cannot exist equally independently (which, of course, is the proof that every relation as such exists not independently of but irreducibly respecting its subjective basis or "ground"). 74 73 See John Deely, FourAges of Understanding:The FirstPostmodernHistory of Philosophy from Ancient Times to the Turn of the 21" Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 72-78 and 228-29; Poinsot 1632: Tractatus de Signis, second preamble, article 2. 74 I prescind, in the present context, from the special difficulties concerning the notion of "ground" within semiosis proper, which I have discussed at length elsewhere: see in particular the Index entry GROUND in Deely, Four Ages of Understanding,901-3. Here it is sense [A] that is operative, as is clear from Poinsot 1643: d. 41, a. 1, 558 '1147: "species imperfectae, sicut modi, oportet quod entitative quantum ad realitatem identificentur cum aliqua entitate reali determinatae speciei: quia cum modus non sit realitas, non distinguitur a re cuius est modus realiter et entitative, et ita manet indistinctus realiter et entitative; et consequenter identificatur cum ipsa re cujus est modus. Unde non inhaeret illi, sicut reliqua accidentia, sed seipso illi conjungitur: quod est entitative identificari. Aliquas sequeretur processus in infinitum: quia, cum ipsa inhaerentia quidam modus sit, si inhaeret per aliam inhaerentiam, ista rursus inhaerebit per aliam, et sic in infinitum. Nee potest separatim existere a subjecto, sicut accidentia quae inhaerent, licet subjectum possit manere sine modo per corruptionem 244 JOHN DEELY In our semiosis, categorial relations and mind-dependent relations are functionally equivalent precisely because we cognize things on the basis of models 75 representing "how things actually are." In most cases, it is only by experimentally reducing these models--our conceptions-to sensibly verifiable alternatives that we are able to determine whether or how far there is a "correspondence" to an actual physical state of affairs blithely indifferent to what or whether we think about it, whether or how we try to "model" it for the purposes of our own understanding. In the comprehensive awareness of angels, there would be neither need nor place for experimenting with cognitive models. The objective stimuli upon which angelic conceptions are formed, being not abstract representations of nature but rather, as we have seen, dynamic representations of natures realized in individuals when and as they receive actual existence through the creative activity of God (including its utilization of secondary causes in bringing about the material dispositions calling for this or that individual existence), would give rise to an immediate awareness of the arising of whatever categorial relations obtain here and now among interacting individuals of the physical universe: So from the creative ideas according to which things exist, derive in the angelic mind objective stimuli representative of stones, or of herbs as possessing medicinal qualities, or as they pertain to the climate of this rather than that region; and likewise derive stimuli representative objectively of birds as belonging to a given region, or useful to a particular end, or even according as they are useful to humans: or stimuli representative of some embellishment of ipsius modi, seu alicujus ad illud requisiti.-Similiter species relativae identificari possunt cum fundamento, quod est determinatae speciei et entitatis in se: quia non distinguitur a fundamento tamquam realitas, sed tamquam modus. Nam si realitas sit, nullo modo identificabitur cum illo sed accidentaliter illi adveniet, sicut plures species accidentales adveniunt subjecto habenti suam speciem entitativam determinatam ab illis distinctam." See the fuller treatment in Poinsot 1632: :no of the electronic edition(= Ars Logica, q. 17, a. 4), 590b35-595b23, esp. 593allff. 75 Cf. Poinsot 1643: d. 41, a. 4, 611 U4, emphasis added: "uno verbo, a divina mente tamquam ab artifice profluunt et res in propria natura et materia, sicut domus ab artifice in lapidibus et lignis: et profluunt imagines repraesentivae talium rerum, sicut ab artifice fit in papyro vel cera aut aere incisio et copia domus faciendae, quam typum seu mode/um vocamus; et haec non desumit suam unitatem ex re ipsa fabricata ut in se, sed ex unitate et modo quo est in mente artificis." THE SEMIOSIS OF ANGELS 245 an elemental state of earth or air respecting a higher and more universal end: or even as things upon earth depend upon events occurring in the heavens, and finally according to various other diverse modalities and outcomes which can affect the manner in which things derive existence from God. 76 Thus the angel, conjecturing upon the future, in many respects can only guess. But which among the guesses proves true and which false the angel will learn only when the cognitive relations attaching to its various representations become categorial within intuitive cognition, 77 while those cognitive relations sustaining others of its conjectures remain abstractive and, moreover, now determinately and necessarily so. The angel cannot be deceived about what does actually exist here and now, at least not when attending to it, although it can conjecture vainly about what will actually exist at a later "here and now." The reverse, of course, happens when the object present within the angel's intuitive awareness physically ceases to be: the angel attending to the event immediately becomes aware that the sign relation whereby its concept makes present in awareness an existing thing ceases to include a categorial component within the representation and passes with the thing to an abstract, minddependent or purely objective status. The sign-relation, real to now, becomes instantly unreal, both in itself physically and objectively in the angelic awareness: 76 Poinsot 1643: d. 41, a. 4, 612 1137, emphasis added: "Sic ab ideis divinis possunt in mentem Angeli derivari similitudines lapidum vel herbarum, ut conducunt ad medicinalem virtutem, vel ut pertinent ad climata hujus regionis potius quam illius, et similiter similitudines avium quatenus tali regioni deserviunt, aut tali utilitati aut fini, vel etiam secundum quod deserviunt homini: vel secundum quod pertinent ad ornatum integri elementi, v.g., aeris vel terrae, ubi est altior et universalior finis: vel etiam secundum quod fiunt a causis universalibus caelorum, ac denique secundum alias diversas habitudines et fines, qui variare possunt modum quo ista derivantur a Deo. Quod unico verbo dixit S. Thomas (quaest. ilia 8 de Verit. a. 10 ad 3), quod 'una fonna intellectus angelici est ratio propria plurium secundum diversas ejus habitudines ad diversas res, ex quibus habitudinibus consurgit pluritas idearum'. Nota hoc bene." n Poinsot 1643: d. 42, a. 2, 640 '1115: "similitudo speciei, quae est in Angelo, non est completa et tenninata antequam objectum existat. ... Complementum autem similitudinis dependet ab altero extremo, ad quod similutudo tenninatur." 246 JOHN DEELY The objective determination on which the angel's awareness of the case is based derives from the issuing forth of the newly existent thing, which issuance is assimilated to the representation; therefore, from the force of that representation alone, the representation is applied and determined to the produced thing while it exists or is produced and assimilated to the representation. When the thing ceases to exist, accordingly, it is no longer assimilated to that representation, nor does the representation remain determinately applied as similar to a physical reality: because it is solely determined respecting that thing according as the thing itself receives existence or descends from God, and the representation is similarly determined not indeed to the thing as past, because as past it is already not receiving existence from God nor pertinent as an actual part of the universe ... and so remains as but a memory [recognized as such]. 78 In the semiosis of a human awareness, it is not so. Our intuitive awareness is tied to our senses. For example, if a friend whom we are on our way to visit suddenly dies, we normally have no awareness whatever of the fact that the real relation between us has ceased. The objective relation within the semiosis, real or unreal, remains functionally equivalent until and unless we learn of the death: we arrive at the appointed place of rendezvous, and are disappointed or angered at our friend's failure to appear. We wonder if he forgot or if something happened, and hope (in vain, on the supposed situation) to hear from him an explanation that will satisfy our feeling of annoyance or disappointment or fear. But the hope is vain, for the relation, formerly categorial as well as objective, without any change in awareness on our part, has become purely objective. The abstractive awareness of our friend is no longer temporarily circumstantial, but permanently abstractive; yet we, in contrast to an angel in the same circumstance, 78 Poinsot 1643: d. 42, a. 2, 650 '1146: "ipsa determinatio speciei ... fit ex appositione et productione rei de novo productae, quae assimilatur illi speciei; ergo ex vi illius solum applicatur et determinatur species ad rem productam, dum est vel producitur et assimilatur ipsi speciei. Transeunte ergo re, non amplius assimilatur ipsi speciei, nee species manet determinate et applicate similis ipsi rei: quia solum determinatur erga illam prout res ipsa producitur seu descendit a Deo et similis redditur speciei, non vero ad ipsam ut praeteritam, quia jam non derivatur a Deo nee pertinet ad universum. Unde, ut repraesentetur tamquam praeterita, debet suffici species alia determinatione, quatenus scilicet cognita est, et sic manet memoria de ilia: quia memoria est repraesentatio de re ut aliquando cognita." The point is treated yet more expansively in the following 1147. THE SEMIOSIS OF ANGELS 247 have no immediate awareness of the change m the relational status. So, Poinsot points out: When St. Thomas says that nonexisting things have not a nature through which they are assimilated to the objective stimuli for angelic conceptions, he is not speaking only of that relative similitude which is founded upon the co-existence of the foundation and terminus of the relation, but rather of the completive and determinative assimilation of the foundational representations to those individuals insofar as it provenates from the change of the individual existents according to which the representations in question are one time assimilated to those individuals as actual, another time not .... So that assimilation whereby things are assimilated to specificative representations in the mind of an angel is an assimilation obtaining not only on the side of the things [i.e., categorially], but one penetrating into the representations themselves through the new determination or application provenating from the creative divine ideas; whence, given the objects and the creative the intentional assimilation applied to these individuals here and now results. 9 In the physical universe, the change that produces or destroys the categorial relations may be the substantial change whereby a given individual begins or ceases to be. But in the order of the representations upon which angelic conceptions are based in foiming an actual comprehensive awareness of the individual in question there is no more than a modal explicitation (or suppression!) of an aspect of the actually possessed stimulus for the objectification. 80 79 Poinsot1643: d. 42, a. 3, 655 'V60: "cum D. Thomas