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Chapter 8 THE REAL DISTINCTION BETWEEN INTELLECT AND WILL Introduction Speaking of the will, its nature and raison d’être, Thomas de Vio, Cardinal Cajetan, uses the expression ‘‘arduum arcanum,’’ a challenging mystery .1 And anyone who has read Cajetan’s commentaries on the primary texts concerning the will in the Summa theologiae (ST) of St. Thomas Aquinas will be inclined to agree. The study of intellect and will belongs in part to that topmost flight of natural philosophy that considers the human soul,2 but mostly it belongs to metaphysics.3 What this means in terms of the content of our conceptions is that to intellect and will, properly speaking, motion belongs merely metaphorically.4 Such metaphor is necessary but dangerous, for unless we succeed in isolating the proper intelligibilities to which the metaphors point, we may take the metaphors for proper conceptions and thus miss the natures of intellect and will.5 The ultimate discussions of intellect and will must be expressed in such concepts as can be applied properly to immaterial things.6 The sort of thing to which such concepts apply St. Thomas calls a ‘‘metaphysicum,’’ a metaphysical item.7 In this chapter I aim to bring out the metaphysical character of the conceptions that are in play. Our precise point of study is the very distinction between intellect and will. According to St. Thomas, this is a distinction found in things themselves, and not merely one arising from our human way of looking at things. We rightly and truthfully predicate intellect and will of God, but the distinction between the two does not exist in God.8 In creatures, on the other hand, intellect and will cannot be identical.9   Wisdom, Law, and Virtue Since intellect and will are powers of the soul,10 we may expect that their distinction will arise from the distinction of their respective objects.11 But the objects of intellect and will are beings and truths, on the one hand, and goods, on the other. And these—being, truth, goodness—are distinct only as conceptions of our minds, though admittedly the distinctions have foundations in reality.12 If we are asked to distinguish between being and truth, we may well say that truth involves relation to intellect, and if the good is queried, we may speak of relation to appetite, or even to will.13 The realities to which we are eventually sent are intellect and will themselves. Cajetan, when pushed to present the precise distinction between the respective objects of intellect and will, seems to favor use of the distinction between quiddity and existence, which of course for St. Thomas is a real distinction in creatures. Roughly speaking, Cajetan would make the object of the intellect quiddity, that of the will existence .14 In any case, it should be clear enough that the distinction presents a considerable challenge, falling as it does between two powers neither of which has a corporeal organ through which it operates.15 Let us, then, examine St. Thomas’ ex professo treatments of this issue. Discussions of intellect and will abound in St. Thomas’s writings, and so it is all the more remarkable that when one goes in search of ex professo treatments of the real distinction, one finds so little. In the first part of the Summa theologiae, in the treatise on the angels, article 2 of question 59 asks whether intellect and will differ in angels. The actual discussion expressly applies to all rational creatures, angelic and human. In the Ottawa edition of the Summa theologiae, the parallels indicated for this article are Quaestiones disputatae de veritate (DV) 22.10 and Commentary on the Book of Sentences of Peter Lombard 1.42.1.2 ad 3. The latter is simply a statement of the fact that in all separate substances (i.e., separate from matter) other than God, will and intellect ‘‘do not seem to be altogether the same thing.’’ It contains no argument supporting what it calls a ‘‘real diversity.’’16 However, DV 22.10 is a full discussion of whether will and intellect are one power of the human soul. Indeed, in the Leonine critical edition of DV, the editor gives as parallel discussion only ST 1.80.1.17 Now, this article in the ST asks whether one is obliged to posit a special kind of power of the soul, called ‘‘appetite’’; that is, the Leonine editor seems not to have thought fit to refer us to ST...

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