Scholastica commentaria in Primam Partem Summae Theologicae

SUMMARY OF THE ARTICLE.

FIRST conclusion: That division seems properly to be of human good, yet it can belong to good insofar as it is good. The reason of the sufficiency of the division cannot be gathered more briefly than is laid down by St. Thomas in the article. Second conclusion, to the second: This division is not by opposed things, but by opposed accounts. Third conclusion, to the third: Good is not divided into those three as a univocal [predicate] predicated equally of them: but as an analogical one, which belongs by priority to the honest good, then to the delightful good, third to the useful good.

COMMENTARY.

CONCERNING the article note that the division of good can be made in many other ways, as for example: of goods, some are the greatest, as the virtues, by which one lives rightly; some are intermediate, as the powers of the soul, without which one cannot live rightly; but the lowest goods are the goods of the body, and temporal [goods]. This division is Augustine's, book 2 De libero arbitrio, chap. 19, and in the book De cognitione verae vitae, chap. 7, where he divides good according to a fourfold grade of things, namely of existing, living, sensitive, and intelligent things. Moreover, on Psalm 154 he divides good into the good which is good through itself, and the good which is good from another, that is, into good by essence and good by participation; but in the book De bono coniugali he lays down the division which St. Thomas lays down in this article. But other divisions St. Thomas omitted, because they are not of good insofar as it is formally good, but according to other material accounts, or insofar as good is the same as being.