In the thirteenth century the mediaeval world crested, and Thomas Aquinas, the scintillate scholastic resident at the University of Paris, was its intellectual apex. His great contribution was to enlist Aristotle, the newly re-discovered “pagan philosopher”, for the service of the Christian vision of God and the soul.
He was in accord with Aristotle that there is no need to doubt the world as real. We merely need to understand it, to understand how we understand it, how we process the sensing of it, how we process our ideas of it, how we “mind” it, “attention” it, as opposed to Plato’s how we “intention” it. Contrary to Augustine, he maintains human intelligence is a natural power fully capable of dealing with the natural world without a divine illumination. He denies the theory of double truths. Two contradictory statements defy logic. Reason and faith are two distinct capacities; they may buffer each other, but only in matters supernatural does pre-eminence belong to revelation and faith.
Aquinas is both theologian and philosopher, and must deal with both reason and revelation. He observes that only the sensible world can impact our senses. Therefore, no natural knowledge of God is possible. Neither have we any implanted or intuitive knowledge of God. But the data of the world does provide clues indicative of the reasonableness of God’s existence. He presents five demonstrations (usually dubbed “proofs”) of such reasonableness, the first three of which are variations on the same principle. First, a series of motions cannot be infinite, there must exist a first mover which is not itself moved. Second, a series of causes and effects must have an un-caused first cause. Third, a series of contingencies must have a beginning point which is non-contingent, a necessary being, a first being. Fourth, because any quality or attribute found in varying degrees in the world is not intelligible without the positing of a highest degree of that quality or attribute as the real and logical base of comparison, the deposition of a highest (the highest good, highest truth, etc.) is requisite. Fifth, the orderliness of the world presents the need that there be an intelligent source and end, a power of engendering order. These demonstrations of the reasonableness of God’s existence allow the pursuit of knowing something more about God by exercising the negative and positive (analogical) methods, but as in Pseudo-Dionysius, these also remain inadequate and incomplete, for the vision of the divine nature exceeds the capacities of human intelligence. Any terms applied to God must be understood as transcending man’s understanding of those terms. This caveat, enunciated in endless form by saints and scholars alike, most unfortunately too often evaporates as soon as pronounced.
It is to be noted that the first three “proofs” provide no more than the reasonable indication of a beginning point, a basal, fundamental logical principle. The fourth and fifth arguments say little more than it is reasonable that finding order in reality man projects the basis of that order to the ultimate past and to the ultimate future. No one nor any combination of these demonstrations of reasonableness presents anything more than reasonable assumptions about the orderliness of the cosmos. No one nor any combination of these demonstrates the God of Judeo-Christian scriptures. They simply convey man to the point of knowing unknowing, to the point where man confronts the limit horizon of reason, to the point where doubt is ultimate, or where man assess that the knowing of a boundary to rational knowledge itself presents a platform upon which rational knowledge resides, a platform from which, in one enunciation, faith may leap, hopefully, even lovingly, into the vastness beyond us.
For Aristotle, matter and God are co-eternal; they are metaphysical entities. God is the unwitting first and final cause of all, a pure rational principle without either providence or care. Aquinas, having with his “proofs” brought us to Aristotle’s god, must look through man, through the creature back to the Creator, through the effect back to the cause, and utilize analogy to envision the omnipotent and loving God of scripture who can and does produce the world out of nothingness by an act of free will, a free will that in turn bespeaks divine care and wisdom.
The more stringent challenge in adapting Aristotle resided in upholding the Christian notion of the individual immortal soul in contradiction to the Aristotelian view of a universal rational soul common to or transcending of all men. Thomas expostulates there are spiritual substances or beings (God, angels, and human souls) some of which are destined to inform matter. He argues every soul is a complete operational system for the whole of man. There is no rational soul separate from a sensible soul, from a concupiscible soul. It is one individual, one unitary, integrated being, one “I”, who claims not only “I feel”, but “I want”, and “I know”. The individual human soul, the substantiating form of the individual man, and thus the product of God’s direct and unique creative act, is not corrupted with the body merely because it has an inclination to the body. This is evidenced by its capacity for operations not dependent upon the body, specifically understanding and willing. Thus, like non-material ideas, the objects of understanding, the soul is non-material and immortal, and like the objects of the will it is spiritual and free.
Man is made a social and rational being whose end is his perfection, his happiness, the fulfilment of his rational nature of intellect and will. Society exists for the sake of man, but the common good is the goal of man’s actions. These theories of society for man and man for the common good plant man firmly on this earth, within this earth. Faith may offer something more, some divine boon, but man’s place, man’s task, is in this world.
Thomas Aquinas’ embrace of Aristotle and rationalism was avant-garde. Some bishops thought it blatantly heretical. From the fifth century Augustine’s Neo-Platonic and idealistic approach stood virtually unchallenged. Will was the primary power. The divine will, understood in its ultimate manifestations, freedom and love, stood as the base of both creation and redemption. God was free to will as he would. Man had “fallen” and corrupted his own free will, and with it his entire nature. God’s intervention (illumination) was required to correct the fault-line in human will that it might rightly control reason, senses, passions. Despite the chasm twixt God and man, despite the lowliness of man in this vision, there is here, by this divine injection of light to correct will and reason, to give them the power of right direction, an intimacy with the divine, a portal to the mystical.
Aquinas sets reason in the centre of man, and by reason man analyzes his experiences, his world, and reasonably, by comparison, by analogy, comes to the world revealed to faith. Reason will never, can never, behold the God revealed by faith, but it can point to that God, it can, as it were, climb to the hypogeum of the heavens and from there glimpse the soles of God’s feet. This may seem to be nuance, but if modern science has taught us anything, it is how a minute change of perspective can change not only how we see the world but how the world is itself, how and what the world becomes. There are three critical items in this Thomist shift of perspective. First, God is enclosed in his transcendence. Second, man is armed with the reliability of experience and reason, and thereby set on the path to become master and lord of this world. There is here a foretaste of Darwin, a sense of the “ascent of man”. Third, the independence of man, the worldliness of man sets man on the path that will branch out as humanist man, secular man, modern man, anxious man, and eventually, man at a loss for a god. Thomas may have denied validity to a natural knowledge of God, but allowing reason to see God as reasonable opens a door to argue the contrary. The mystical and intimately intuitive are displaced when reason is set as centre. The schoolmen who follow Aquinas will be less discerning about the bounds of logic and their relationship to reality, and therein demean and discredit all academic efforts that hang upon the baptized Aristotle. Both Luther and Calvin will be deeply troubled by this movement they consider a horrifying directional shift that renders God in some manner an object obtainable by argument, and veer reformed religion back to something more aligned to the Augustinian interpretation.
The comprehensive concinnity of analysis and synthesis in the work of Aquinas is failed by such skimming across selected planes. I shall take my comfort that this master debater and theoretician who gave us the theory of transubstantiation could also write a poem to the Christ of the Mass confessing “faith supplies where feeble senses fail”. This is not a subscription to “double truth”, but the acknowledgement that our abilities are varied, that they entail not only intellect, but volition, creativity as well as receptivity. Thomas’ work can stride the centuries and the tensions twixt dogma and practice because he is in his academics an Aristotelian, in his spirituality an Augustinian.
An Excursus: Aristotle divides the stuff of the visible world into two logical constructs: substances, and accidents. Substance indicates the underlying reality of a thing constitutive of it, the enduring idea-ted identity, the “thing-ness”. Accidents reference the sensible aspects by which we come into contact with, by which we sense, the thing. The substance of bread might be termed “bread-ness”, the state of being bread, belonging to all breads of all times. It is the essential, abiding, and defining aspect we conceptualize. The accidents are the changeable elements of a particular bread or piece of bread, the shape, colour, texture, smell, taste, etc., the basis of our sensing, of sense data. Aquinas used this theory to explain the mystery of the Roman Mass wherein the bread and wine “become” the body and blood of Christ. By divine allowance, the accidents of bread and wine are retained, but the thing-ness of bread and wine are replaced by the presence of the heavenly Christ. Yet he can prayerfully rhapsodize “we know not how”. Indeed!
When in his Parisian chambers Thomas knelt to pray, it was not with his brilliant intellect but with his humble heart, and thus, he speaks before his Lord not “I know you” but “Thee do I adore”. Seven centuries later, Jean-Paul Sartre, ensconced in his own Parisian flat, will write a tortuously long analysis of the subjectification and objectification involved in knowing and loving another, and indeed, a good deal of modern philosophy will crash upon the rocks of reason in trying to enunciate how we comprehend another, another person, another mind. If I may be brief in reply, we do not “know” another, we “behold” another. In one degree or another, positive or negative, we embrace the other, value the other, will the other a place with us or apart from us. (I am confessedly fond of the term “behold”. It combines being and holding in a singular act such that one “is” as one encounters, as one “holds” the other. It denotes a subliminal unitive act.) We may later attempt to understand this or that about the other, his/her history or attitudes, but this action is a wrapping of the mind about that which is already wrapped into our evaluative embrace or rejected from our embrace. Indeed, as time goes by, the value of the one embraced dissipates curiosity about history and attitudes, and one is content simply to be at one with the other as other. Thus, old friends are usually content to simply be-with each other, conversations and adventures having become inconsequential to the bond of love. There is an insightfulness in the Augustinian idea that love, valuation, not only precedes knowledge, but forms the groundwork for its very existence. The question, however, is, if such be valid regarding persons, can it be applied to the knowing of things?
Thomas also applies to the mystery of Christ’s Eucharistic presence other Aristotelian principles. According to Aristotle, in the act of knowing we assimilate that which is known; in the act of becoming, the higher form assimilates the lower. We assimilate the intelligibility of things to create a knowledgeable being. We ingest food and thereby assimilate its vitality into our vitality. In receiving the Eucharistic presence of God’s Christ and in loving God, God is the higher form, and thus, man is assimilated into God, or at least, into a godly life. It ought to follow that two equals assimilate each other mutually and become a unity, and that such is properly the nature of human love. Unfortunately, Thomas, exemplary of the long-lived patriarchal zeitgeist, does not allow for such logic to interfere with the encultured prejudice that being female is something lesser than being male.
I have had reason to set much of this scoping of Thomas in contrast to Augustine. Just as occidental philosophies orbit about the analyses of either Plato or Aristotle, much of occidental theology orbits the visions of one or the other their ideological disciples, Augustine and Aquinas.
Augustine had granted prime place to the will. The will of man, a faltering instrument thanks to the Fall, to man’s insular self-centredness, needs divine illumination before proper use can be made of it. The rightful vision of the world and self require a divine (a whole-making, an integrating) illumination to correct the lense fractured in the paradisial act. This analysis has invigorated Christian mysticism both Roman (Duns Scotus, Bonaventure, and the Franciscans, et al.) and Protestant (Luther, Calvin, Boehme, et al.). It persists still. Its theological embodiment did not, does not, however, always give proper weight or even consideration to the epistemology inherent in this idealistic approach, and thus, great berth is given to divine intervention to the detriment of human reason.
Systemic to this inheritance is the fact that it is not Augustine, the un-baptized philosopher and academic, that comes down to us, but the baptized Augustine. After his conversion, Augustine sailed off to North Africa to live a hermetical life of contemplation and prayer, was created the local bishop by popular acclamation, and thrust into a position of pastoral leadership. Within this office he writes not as a professor at ease to explore straight lines between aspects of this and that, but as a pastor required to herd, track, and defend a flock. A pastor is a shepherd, and shepherds do not have the luxury of ivory tower abstractness; they are required to respond to a hundred different bleating hearts, a hundred different wandering souls, a hundred different threats lurking, waiting to pounce. At times we read Augustine and we hear the pastor giving comfortable words to the troubled soul. At times we hear that same pastor, treating the same topic, turn the same words inside out to chase off the attack of a heresy. Augustine’s thoughts run up and down hillsides and meadows, scolding, consoling, chasing, challenging according to the situation before him.
In Thomas we find something different. Thomas is the academic. He has the luxury of the ivory tower. His thought is a straight line, an academic procession from lecture hall, through quadrangle to chapel. Thomas’s world is rational. He stands with two feet firmly on the ground and analyzes his way up the ladder of being’s increasingly vital forms. Faith may be summoned to convey the heart where reason can merely peek, but reason, as in Aristotle, rules. The religious mind of the mediaeval ages reaches its climacteric here. The door is opened to the primacy of man’s investigative powers.
As I have marked, Luther, Calvin, Cranmer, and their confreres, all imbued with mediaeval piety, a piety informed by Augustine’s illuminative theology, rejected the academic argumentations of the latter mediaeval scholastics that swirled about fragmented, arcane or frivolous investigations, and fell back upon faith and scripture as the only sureties to inform the heart and mind of man. However, as pastors, their concern was with divine illumination understood as a supernatural gift. The psychological and epistemological aspects inherent in the Platonic/Augustinian vision become desiccated, and in this decocting of idealism to a lesser level, the division twixt mind and will, twixt the world that mind deciphers and the heart that seeks the divine, the whole, the holy, twixt secular and sacred becomes not a logical division, not a rational sequestration for the sake of examination and analysis, but an artifice, a man-made bi-optic lense, and it constitutes a deceptive bifurcation of reality, of man, of God, compart-mentalizing you from me, spirit from world, body from soul, man from nature, therein bedraggling the cosmic meaningfulness of existence, the wisdom and joy of being, the (dare I say illuminating?) creativity of life behind, within, above, and beyond every particularity. As the dust of the Reformation settles, this haulm will come to full flower in centuries of theories played out as point, counterpoint, with the occasional disruption, some tantrum of revolution, that tosses the game aside—for a time, at least. Rationalist systems will counter Empiricist theories, theology will retreat into pounding out positional catechetics, the principal churches will grow insipid or uninspiring, and religious man will look to the extremes of austerity, simplicity, transcendence or theatre, to ideas and ideals encapsulated in such sundry movements as quietism, pietism, deism, ritualism.
An Excursus: Philosophy and theology are meant to infuse being with wisdom and joy, to open man to being, to being at one within himself and his world, to being whole, holy. We have this fractioning propensity to hold onto to bits and pieces, to fiefdoms and kingdoms, to ideas and ideologies, and rarely if ever to step back, to be ful-filled by and in the plenum of being, to be free, to be joyous and wonderful. There is moral, a spiritual, a vital, and vitalizing difference between acting out of duty or distraction, and acting out of wonder and joy. The Genesis narrative has God breathe into the nostrils of the Earthling he had made of dust; we are dust without in-spiration; we are created more; we are created to be more.