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Among Roman Catholic thinkers, Thomas Aquinas stands out for his integration of Greek philosophy into the dogmas of the church—an approach that has had a profound and lasting effect on the Christian world. During his career Aquinas wrote a burgeoning corpus of work, including numerous texts and commentaries on both biblical and Aristotelian writings. He is best known for the Summa Theologiae (1266–73), which was designed to become the standard textbook for theology students. Despite early contemporary resistance, the book is now, in philosopher Simon Blackburn’s words, “universally acknowledged to be the crowning achievement of medieval systematic theology.” Donald Winchester |
STET… AQUINAS!
A ‘THOMASTIC’ AMBLE, RAMBLE, and PREAMBLE
STET… That strong single word with which the printers indicate acceptance concentrates in its brevity all the testimony any one can render to the wisdom of Aquinas. By a starry appositeness the one million printers of the world speak in this single word the same language as the paragon and prince of philosophers. In a historical medieval development of the language in which Cicero and Virgil addressed themselves to the Roman citizenship, Aquinas addressed himself to a world which was Roman in a larger and more exalted sense. The writing of Cicero and Virgil became classic, which is to say, became dead; the writing of Aquinas conveys a system of thought and a rule of faith which will keep living to the end of time. Without any of the preoccupation with art which Cicero or Virgil were absorbed in, the Latin of the monumental tomes of St. Thomas is as plain as a pike-staff and is matter-of-fact beyond words. But there is a ruggedness and a strength in every sentence which carries a rich content and the weighted expression of a mind all compact, greater and roomier than any ancient Roman’s.
In this characteristic and characterful Latin (which was less the language of an epoch than a native climate of the soul of man), Aquinas wrote. By a divine condescension God Himself used this language of His creatures to establish the plaudits of the great and enduring work which St. Thomas produced. Accepting and approving the human’s comprehension of the divine, which is theology, the divine appreciation spoke with a human zest and tenderness: Bene scripsisti de Me, Thoma (‘Thomas, you have well written of Me.’). God’s Church the custodian of the perennial philosophy spoke also to the same effect: Thomae doctrinam Ecclesia suam propriam edixit esse (‘The church declared Thomas’s doctrine to be his own.’). It is not so important to add that the supreme doctor of the Church achieved the highest flights of the mind in a Latin, the mere numerical immensity of whose following ought to make Cicero and Virgil turn in their very graves. It is more important to add that this expounder of a living philosophy has had a jubilantly living following in every century after him to this very day. Other smaller philosophers have had their little cliques and coteries, their circumscribed schools and chosen scholars. The following of Aquinas was a world. It may be a miscellaneous world of all sorts and conditions; and even that aspect of the matter is testimony also to the spaciousness of the Thomistic synthesis. Like the great dome of the heavens it can include, accommodate, and cover the heads of all.
Perilous but parochial are self-made philosophies: perilous because they are prone to deviate the traveller into the Swamps and Sloughs of Despond; parochial because, instead of leading to the City of Truth, they do succeed in leaving the searcher contentedly taking up his permanent abode in, the suburban areas. For this reason the Cartesians and the Kantists are permanently lost; and Spinoza’s people are in permanent residence in Whitechapel. The impression, on the contrary, to be derived from the philosophy of Aquinas is far other than this. The line of communication between the venerable past of human thought and its greatest medieval master and conserver of its antiquity is a direct, distinct and distinguished route. From him, whom St. Thomas so reverently saluted as The Philosopher and The Master of them that know, there reaches down to the maker of the Thomist synthesis the only olden highway of wisdom. After Aquinas, that greatest positive, constructive achievement of reason in all the history of speculative thought, which he reared up, was to lay down a mighty new Roman road, a Via Sacra of reason, of which the end is not yet.
It is true that there were other philosophers in the ancient world besides Aristotle: Platonist idealists; the Greek schools of Materialists; their later old Roman poor relations, Stoic or Epicurean; the Plotinian sentimentalists and mystics and all the rest. It is also true to say that in the modern world, after the days of Aquinas, there flourished also other philosophers: the new idealists who accepted mind alone; the new materialists who are all heart and no head; and the new rationalists who were all head and no heart. On that most insidious uncharted rock of the philosophic seas which keeps recurring in the history of thought, whose dread name is dualism, they all made ship-wreck. In this sense there are no new heterodoxies; only the re-birth and return of old ones. There have been denials of the objectivity of the thinking subject, and denials also of the object of thought. The problem of the metaphysical reality of good and evil still divides; and there are the new optimists and their best of all possible worlds, and the new pessimists and their proper teleologies of death. In the same way the new theories of knowledge have their own groups of sectarians: the new rationalists also draw the line at visible nature; positivists close down with facts and observable phenomena; empiricists hold no truck with what lies beyond observation and the orbit of experiment; pragmatists converge on those interests that alone have practical bearing; and the poor utilitarians hope against hope that all would be grist that comes to their Mill. St. Thomas, if he were a contemporary, would have felt that all these people were not such stark strangers after all “but gentlemen whom he vaguely remembered to have met before.
By the universality of his outlook and the tremendous range of his comprehensiveness, St. Thomas stands as a permanent contrast to these smaller visionaries and narrower minds, no matter whether they are the great leaders of later groups or only the little Joads and Joneses who nowadays cultivate the bad habit of philosophizing to catch « penny of the public. By his side all of them to a man are dwarfed and diminished. It is a commonplace to say that memorable and monumental realization of Aquinas was a synthesis. The term, as used of him, is entitled to all it means and says. Where St. Thomas assembled, others dispersed; where he harmonized, others sundered and separated. St. Thomas links, spans, bridges, reconciles, unites, unifies. In the Thomistic synthesis all the parts, which the later sophists sundered to fly off at a tangent with them and prosper dubiously on those fractions, had fallen into proper place and station.
Aesthetes and artists jump out of their shoes to remind their patrons that art is one. The moral of St. Thomas is that truth also is one and indivisible; just as all creation is one, and the rational intellect one, and the Godhead One also. This one moral there is to everything. The parts of truth cannot militate one against the other, or the House of Truth will be divided against itself. Even amid a seeming irreconcilability there must be, and is in fact, a real reconciliation. That Inchcape rock of dualism which had spelled disaster to often has no toll to take of the skipper Thomas, alone in the sea-worthiness of his craft, and voyaging also in strange seas of thought alone.
In his scheme of things matter (which destroyed some seekers after the truth) and spirit (which confounded others) make their permanent non-aggression pact. The physical world (of the facts of which some made the be-all and end-all of enquiry) establishes an enduring peace and concord with the metaphysical (the sole sovereign claim of which seduced others). Good and evil are real though tragic relatives; reason and faith are not antinomies but corollaries; the rational intellect of the world of demonstrable fact and that which comprehends the world beyond it are not two intellects but one. But even these harmonies are nothing to St. Thomas, did they not point the way to Gloriana, the highest glory of God. The conclusions of philosophy were vain without the benediction of theology, queen of the sciences. Which is to say, there are no barriers between reason and revelation; the certitudes of philosophy avail nothing and are vanity, itself, did they not reach to the dogmas or affirmations of the Christian creed. Journey’s end is Civitas Dei, Such, reasonably and legitimately, is its only end.
The Thomist theology, as everyone knows, is in complete accord with the mind of the Church, completely and comprehensively Christian and Catholic, and a miracle of inviolable orthodoxy. There is nothing in the popular penny Catholic Catechism which is not expounded with all scientific and technical precision and with full theological elaboration and richness in the Thomist theology. And, vice versa, the Thomist theology is always available to be boiled down to, and abbreviated into, a Catholic Catechism; and the famous Catechism so extracted by Pegues from St. Thomas’s Summa Theologica is proof enough of the ability of this book, which Sir Arthur Helps called, ‘the most tremendous book ever written’, to slim conveniently down to the breast pocket of the Christian and Catholic fighter who has a mind to bash and gash any sort of adversary impertinently and rashly showing defiance.
In St. Thomas’s own estimate, however, the whole Summa Theologica itself (20 volumes all complete, in the English translation) was an expository Catechism. That which was to become the hardest test of a man’s brain-case, that which was to give the students fathoming the profundities or scaling the altitudes of its pages the extraneous mark of tousled hair and abstracted looks, as of men facing an apparition or of Jacob wrestling with an angel, the author’s preface says, was jotted down for beginners. .These gigantic infants were to imbibe therefrom the mere elements of Christian doctrine as sucklings have a way of imbibing their material sustenance. In a sense Aquinas was not asking too much of his progenies of Christian learning. If the rational animal had to use his rationality, if man was to employ his God-given and unique gift of mind, let him set about the training of it while yet in his bib and swaddling-clothes. Finis autem ultimus uniuscujusque rei est qui intenditur a primo auctore et motore ipsius. Primus autem auctor et motor universi est intellectus. Opportet ergo ultimum finem universi esse bonum intellecius; hic autem est Veritas.1 The mind then was made for metaphysics and has the capacity to comprehend it. The age of Aquinas was an age of metaphysicians. Of the degeneration of mind in owe time, Mr. Bernard Shaw instances our horror of, and incapacity for, metaphysics as a convincing evidence. To ease the matter, however, there is at our service the Summa Theologica.
In that first and last aid there is the Angel of the Schools, with the light of his burnished wing clarifying subtlety; there is the Angelic Doctor making simplicity out of the complex and imparting his doctrine and giving a peace of his own angelic mind to supply the deficiencies of the millions less favoured with mind and so less able to fulfil the obligation and end of intellect And last there is the Common Doctor stating the case for, and of all, and expounding the doctrine which everybody holds but one and one only, of mortal minds can so set forth. That prime and paramount business of stating the relation of God to His creature, man, there will not arise the need to do again. On a great many of the major issues the last word has been spoken by St. Thomas. Of God, and man, and the God-Man; of the Holy Ghost, of the Angels and of the Eucharist, these parts of the Thomist theology are each a nec plus ultra, tremendous is their very name.
The five tremendous proofs of Divine Existence, the tremendous attributes of the Divine Essence, these and the rest, once the Aquinas has spoken, are become commonplaces which everyone kens. Said the rhetoric of a fervent old Thomist; Neque aliud superest nisi Lumen gloriae, post Summam Thomae 2. But God has no need of theology; only man has. Between even an Aquinas and the divine knowledge lies an infinity. Of the effort of the finite to grapple with the infinite, such as the Summa was the saint himself, in a ecstasy of humble abasement, said that all of it was straw. And as if to mark that infinite distance, the Summa of Aquinas, that most complete achievement of the noblest labour of the finite intellect, remains for all time an unfinished work. In the middle of the enquiry into Penance in the Tertia which was to be devoted to that Sacrament, Aquinas dies at the age of forty-nine, having boxed the compass of the highest of problems and things human and divine. In the words of the copyist of the Toledo manuscript: Hic moritur Thomas, ecclesiae lumen, orbis decus, theologorum gemma 3.
The philosophy of Aquinas which, in the Thomistic system, antecedes the theology has to be taken the other way about in these days, because the Nordic Man and the Neanderthal Man and the rest of the Modern Men will have it so, or not at all. These people like their philosophy neat and their study of the causes of things stopping short of, and not dragging in, a Prime Cause or Causa Causans. The Modern Men Somehow carry it off; but the Thomist philosophy, which does not shirk a logical conclusion drawn from reason, because the whole of it is based solidly and wholly on reason, cannot exclude God. There is therefore a God in Thomist philosophy. This God, as the Christian thesis has always maintained is One Whose exist nee is demonstrable from pure reason. In a typical Thomist philosophical work, such as the De Ente et Essentia, the goal is the Divine Being and the Divine Essence, while in the greatest of the philosophical writings, the Summa Contra Gentiles (which some have called the Summa Philosophica in contradistinction to the Summa Theologica) makes it its avowed purpose to lead the agnostic or sceptic or atheist by an exercise of reason to the complete reality of the Infinite Being.
To Aquinas, as to the rest of the medievals, a philosophy, which did not fulfil this obligation, would have appeared a partial, and therefore a futile, philosophy; useful only as paper for raising a medieval winter fire. But this slight offence to the feelings of the Modern Man notwithstanding, the Thomist Philosophy is a positive and a staunchly objective philosophy; and it can stand independently and on its own feet.
Descartes, in his time, said, dooming the moderns in one sentence to benightedness and to the tender mercies of Will o’ the Wisp,: Cogito, ergo sum. Four centuries before doom, Aquinas saved the day for the mind by proclaiming his Sed contra est, which still thunders down the corridors of times. Reversing that dangerous hysteron-proteron and putting our Dumb Ox of Sicily before Descartes, we find the truth the other way about. My intellectual faculty (if any) is not a proof of my existence. Rather I exist; therefore I think; and not only think, but eat, and drink, and sleep, and do a great many other things like pointing out the errors of Cartesians, knowing that, because they exist, they also think and are free to commit errors with their thinking apparatus. No philosopher* has urged so powerfully the fundamental, indubitable, self-apparent, primary truth, that we are there; that you cannot get behind the fact that we are there, because, to begin with, we are there; all this, in spite of an occasional discovery that some of Us may not be all there.
St. Thomas’s metaphysic, firmly conscious of realities, begins then with Being. It is the heart and core of philosophy.
To deny being is to qualify for entry into a lunatic asylum; to affirm being almost goes without saying. What in the world could we affirm if we did not begin by affirming that we were there in it? Thus, between being and non-being, there is all the difference in the world. Together with this doctrine of being goes its famous corollary of the goodness of being. We are not only there, but our being there is certainly good. There is all the difference in the world between a metaphysic which holds this and others which hold that being is evil. Omne ens est bonum is the commonest of Thomistic maxims; the four bare words comprise the most magnanimous and solacing thought on and for man. On these two truths everything else hangs; with them Thomism begins. With them, however, a Thomistic preamble must end.
- The final end of every being is that which is intended by its first author and mover. Now the first author and mover of the universe is the intellect. It is necessary therefore that the final end of the universe be the good of the intellect; but the good of the intellect is truth.
- After the Summa of Thorns there remains nothing but the light of glory.
- Here dies Thomas, tight of the church, ornament of the world, of theologians.