The Meeting of the Philosopher and the Theologian
The Meeting of the Philosopher and the Theologian
Aquinas’ genius lay in his ability to merge two streams of thought, the philosophy of the Greeks, specifically Aristotle, and Christian theology and Church doctrine. It is as if he took one dance partner who refused to mix with another of a different style (anti-intellectualism many of the Christian theologians of his day), and joined them, arriving at an entirely new and profoundly more complex and beautiful expression, which only the likes of Aquinas could make understandable.
During most of its history, philosophy has been influenced by one or another discipline, biology, physics, math, for example. Medieval philosophy’s single influence was theism. Aquinas was quintessentially a theologian, yet he was certain that the Greek emphasis on human beings’ rational and empirical intelligence could now serve the Christian cause.
Before Aquinas and his peers, generally, theological texts and religious doctrine were deemed irrefutable. But, scholars of Aquinas’ caliber saw philosophy as fodder to establish coherence, truth, and justification of his Christian beliefs; although faith transcended reason, rational philosophy and the scientific study of nature could enrich and expand doctrines of faith. Although designated Doctor of the Church, to suggest Aquinas was exclusively a theologian would be a mistake. His motivation, to find the first cause of things, to acknowledge human beings’ basic desire to know, is strictly Aristotelian.
In his copious works, Aquinas took up the concerns of the philosopher in metaphysics, ethics, politics, and ontology. Fundamentally, the philosophy in each of us desires to know, while the theologian in each of us, in Aquinas’ interpretation, desires to know God. Aquinas, a devout Christian, could not and would not separate the two.
Aquinas needed both philosophy and theology, because philosophy alone was inadequate to prove God; human reason alone was not enough. While humans’ desire to know the essence of God (what God is), philosophy could not deliver with mere proof that there is a universal cause. Philosophy’s theoretical base falls short of human desire for the satisfaction and fulfillment of contemplating the essence of God. At length Aquinas discussed Aristotle’s and other philosophers’ solutions to this problem. Their solutions were not acceptable to Aquinas.
“Distress,” implying anguish, was the result of this gap in explanation. Unlike his predecessor, Augustine, and his peer Bonaventure, he was able to put Christian belief on a solid foundation.
In the opening of his Summa theologica Aquinas discusses the necessity of theology. “Can God be seen in God’s essence?” is a question that troubles Aquinas to conclude the affirmative. He draws upon foundational material of Christian faith, the Bible, to prove that human fulfillment through divine revelation is possible. “We shall see Him as He is,” (I John 3:2), and “For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face.” (I Corinthians 3:2) For Aquinas, the “light of faith” which is God’s grace, illuminates the natural light of reason and intellect. “Human beings are directed to God as an end that surpasses the grasp of their reason.”
Hence, philosophy is guided by the light of natural reason, and theology is guided by the light of faith, the latter perfecting the former. Although Aquinas spent the last years of his brief life immersed in commentaries on the work of Aristotle, his embedded Christian faith and orientation made it impossible to imagine any Christian, in his words, could “philosophize as though he or she had never heard of Christianity.” He often used the metaphor of wine and water to explain the merger of the two disciplines: “The water of philosophy was absorbed into the wine of theology.”
Aquinas, essentially, mediated Aristotle’s introduction into the medieval West. By doing so, he in effect founded theology as a science. Almost every topic he addressed: morality, ethics, God, the sacraments, politics, he addressed in Aristotelian-metaphysical terms: matter and form, essence and existence, first and final causality. Yet, the influence of each dancer on the other is reciprocal.
Aquinas deepened Aristotle by giving him a new religious significance, or as it has been said, Aquinas converted Aristotle to Christianity and baptized him. It is also true that Aquinas converted medieval Christianity to Aristotle and to the values he held. No, rational philosophy could not offer proof of revealed truths in Scripture and Church doctrine. Aquinas embraced it all, committing himself to uniting the two world-views in one great summa, the Summa theologica, the synthesis of diverse elements exceeding the whole. In the streams of Greek philosophy (Aristotle) and Christian faith and doctrine he saw a unity that only his herculean effort and intellect could fathom and articulate.
Of note, it would not be until the twentieth century before medieval philosophy would be deemed as offering anything original, because of its enmeshment with theism. Despite the great achievements of the period, Gothic cathedrals and the forming of universities, ‘Medieval’ lacked the luster of the Italian Renaissance and Greco-Roman periods surrounding it. It has taken many scholarly pursuits to alter the pejorative perceptions of medieval philosophy and to raise it to the platform it deserves.