6 Aftermath: Thomism
Chapter 6 Aftermath: Thomism
Whatever Thomas intended, the Summa Theologiae has been the principal text in the history of the reception of his thought. The term ‘Thomism’, recorded in Chambers’ Cyclopaedia (1728), according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is defined there by reference to Thomas’s views on grace and predestination. More recently, in the journal Mind (1884), according to the same authority, ‘the Thomist philosophy’ is described as the ‘authoritatively imposed sheet anchor of Catholic doctrine’. These do indeed pinpoint the two most significant phases in the history of the use of Thomas Aquinas’s thought. The first was the fierce controversy between Jesuit and Dominican theologians over the relationship between divine grace and free will, stopped in 1733 by papal intervention. The second was the revival of Thomist philosophy, endorsed by Pope Leo XIII in 1879, with the intention of holding off the infiltration into Catholicism of post-Enlightenment philosophies. But two other phases in the reception history deserve attention: the suspicion initially of Thomas’s fellow theologians, and especially of some Franciscans; and, secondly, much later, the theory of human rights developed largely out of his work.
Condemnation in 1277
Thomas did not leave behind any ‘Thomists’. What were to be regarded as his distinctive positions were originally defined by his adversaries. In 1277 – on 7 March, three years to the day that Thomas died – the theology faculty at Paris condemned 219 propositions ‘prejudicial to the faith’, including perhaps as many as 16 plausibly attributable to Thomas. On 18 March 1277, 30 propositions in grammar, logic, and natural philosophy were condemned by the theologians at Oxford, some of these actions certainly being directed against Thomas. The condemnation was at the instigation of Robert Kilwardby (d. 1279), archbishop of Canterbury, who had taught at Paris, making his reputation by commentaries on Aristotle’s logic and ethics, before becoming a Dominican and moving to Oxford. For Kilwardby, Thomas’s philosophical theory of the unicity of substantial form in human beings had near-heretical theological implications.
20. Pope Leo XIII (1810–1903), under whose aegis the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas was revived
It was his critics who began the process of identifying Thomas’s distinctive teachings. In 1282, the Franciscans forbade copies of the Summa Theologiae to be made for anyone except ‘reasonably intelligent lectors’. In 1286, the Franciscan John Pecham (c. 1225–92), a long-standing adversary in the theology faculty at Paris, who had succeeded Kilwardby as archbishop of Canterbury, had Thomas’s theory that a human being has only one substantial form declared heretical. Indeed, he had the Dominican Richard Knapwell (d. 1288) excommunicated for teaching that there is only one form in a human being, namely the rational soul. Interestingly, 25 years later, at the Council of Vienne in 1311–12, the Church declared that the rational soul is the one unique form of the human body, thus endorsing the doctrine which Kilwardby, Pecham, and many others regarded as virtually heretical.
The theory of the unicity of substantial form goes as follows. Adopting the Aristotelian thesis that the rational or intellectual soul is what makes the human body what it is, Thomas laid himself open to critics who feared the implications for Christ’s body in the tomb. For them – the majority – human beings are made up of three substantial forms: vegetative, sensible, and intellectual. We are not rational all the way down, so to speak. In 1270, when Thomas debated the question before the theology faculty, he was in the minority, perhaps even on his own. Assuming that Christ really died (and there were ancient heresies about that!), and thus that his body was separated from his soul (in the jargon of the day), then, if the rational soul is the unique form of the body, it looked as if the body in the tomb was not the same as the body of the living Christ. On the other hand, if we were to allow for a forma corporeitatis in addition to the rationality-giving form, that remained the same, inhering in the body before and after death, that would ensure identity. Thomas dispensed with any such plurality of forms in a human being. The man Jesus Christ was really and truly dead, his soul being separated from his body; yet, since his dead body remained united to the person of the Son, so Thomas contended, there was no problem about its remaining the same body. Aristotle’s hylomorphic anthropology dispensed with the multi-levelled conception the theologians thought they needed, paradoxically enough allowing Thomas to highlight the doctrine of the hypostatic union between the human and divine natures in Christ. Far from distorting a Christian doctrine, on this occasion at least resort to Aristotle’s philosophy only enhanced the theology.
The question no doubt seems arcane: how many theologians today would even be interested in the status of Christ’s body after his death? On the other hand, Thomas’s thesis, in purely philosophical terms, updated no doubt, that we humans are rational all the way down, seems as controversial as ever.
Early modern Thomism
Much later, as reports of the effects of the Spanish colonization of South and Central America began to trickle back to Spain, a remarkable group of jurist-theologians at Salamanca began to work out what would become the modern theory of human rights, explicitly relying on Thomas Aquinas. The greatest was the Spanish Dominican Francisco de Vitoria (1483–1546): educated in Paris at Saint-Jacques, once Thomas’s home, he was instrumental in substituting the Summa for Peter Lombard’s Sentences when he returned home to teach at Salamanca. Of course the Summa was widely available by this time, but it may be noted that it took about 250 years for it to become the principal text in Roman Catholic colleges.
Vitoria discussed the morality of the conquest of the Indies. He was critical of the Spanish methods of colonization in America. He is sometimes remembered as the ‘father of international law’. He set out the conditions of a just war and held that no war would be permissible if it brought serious evil to Christendom and the world at large. Above all, however, the discovery of the native peoples of the Americas, and the tendency of the good Spanish Catholic colonists to treat them as animals and even to exterminate them, compelled theologians like Vitoria to consider whether these creatures had souls, and from there to contend that they had rights to life and property. Obviously, since the question never arose in his day, there is no specific discussion in the Summa, but it was not difficult to draw on Thomas’s views, particularly on the soul and on the virtue of justice, to set out the foundations of the modern doctrine of human rights.
Domingo de Soto (1494–1569), also a Dominican friar, was another of the major figures at Salamanca. He is best known in economic theory and in theological circles for his defence of the price differential in usury as compatible with a Thomist notion of ‘just price’.
Better known than either Vitoria or Soto, Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484–1566), who emigrated as a young man to the Caribbean, where he witnessed the cruelties of the settlers against the indigenous people, became a powerful opponent of colonialism. In 1522, already a missionary priest, he joined the Dominicans. His Destruccion des las Indias (1552), condemning the cruelties of the colonists, is epochmaking. If Las Casas contributed less than his colleagues to the theoretical articulation of human rights, his book bears eloquent witness to the appalling situation to which they sought to respond theologically, always drawing on Thomas Aquinas.
Of course Dominicans and Thomists were not the only moralists at the time who were deeply disturbed by the news of what was happening. In 1510, teaching in Paris, many years before he returned to his native Scotland to teach at the University of St Andrews, John Mair (c. 1467–1550) discussed moral and legal questions arising from the Spanish discovery of America, insisting that the indigenous peoples had property rights that should not be taken away, at least not without compensation.
Later still, in the 17th century, the university arts curriculum in Scotland, then one of the heartlands of strict Calvinism, was overwhelmingly Aristotelian and scholastic: Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and William Ockham appear in virtually every set of logic ‘dictates’ (student lecture notes). As recent scholarship has shown, Thomas Aquinas’s account of justice and restitution greatly influenced Stair’s Institutions of the Law of Scotland. First published in 1681, Stair is the foundation of modern Scots law. Created Viscount Stair in 1690, James Dalrymple (1619–95) is Scotland’s greatest jurist. The complex interplay between restitution, fault, and three-party transactions may find a rationale within Thomas’s scheme, which partly explains the idiosyncratic nature of Stair’s account. Dalrymple was educated entirely at Glasgow University, where he taught philosophy until 1647 when he became a lawyer. The complex interaction in Stair’s thinking of his Presbyterian religion, scholastic philosophy, and commitment to the idea of natural law deserves more discussion. There appeared in 1695 A Vindication of the Divine Perfections, illustrating the Glory of God in them by Reason and Revelation, methodically digested into several meditations by a Person of Honour – thought to be by Stair. Quite independently of the growing recognition within the Roman Church of Thomas’s authority, his ideas, especially on the cardinal virtue of justice (as in ST 2–2.57–62), were valued, as Stair’s work shows, outside strictly theological circles, in the philosophy of law, and well beyond sympathy with Catholicism.
De Auxiliis
The fiercest debate within Roman Catholic theology was over Thomas’s views on grace and predestination. The Spanish Jesuit Luis de Molina (1535–1600) sought to reconcile the absolute sovereignty of God and the liberty of the human will by introducing the notion of scientia media: a knowledge midway between God’s knowledge of actually existent beings, past, present, and future, and God’s knowledge of purely possible beings. This allowed for a knowledge of beings or states of being that would exist if certain conditions were fulfilled. Surveying the endless possibilities, each with its own outcome, God chooses for creation – and actually creates – that which corresponds most perfectly to God’s inscrutable designs.
The Dominican Domingo Bàñez (1528–1604) attacked this account on the grounds that it compromised the divine sovereignty by an anthropocentric focus on the interaction of God and creatures that amounted to Pelagianism. God moves creatures to action, but always according to their natures – and so moves free creatures freely. In effect, Molina had misunderstood Thomas’s doctrine of double agency. This seemed to Molina and his followers to evade the issue, with empty rhetoric that failed to allow human freedom any degree of real self-determination. In effect, according to Molinists, Bàñezian Thomists were little better than ‘Calvinists’, denying (as was supposed) that human response to divine grace could be real cooperation, let alone ‘meritorious’.
This bitter dispute was referred to Rome in 1594. It was considered from 1598 to 1607 by the papal commission de Auxiliis – auxilia being the ‘helps’ supposedly afforded human nature by divine grace. No solution was reached. Pope Paul V (in office 1605–21), on the advice of Saint Francis de Sales (1567–1622), forbade the Jesuits calling the Dominicans Calvinists and the Dominicans calling the Jesuits Pelagians. It was only in 1733, however, that Pope Clement XII officially put a stop to the debate:
We forbid these opposing schools either in writing, or speaking or disputation or on any other occasion to dare impose any theological note or censure on the opposite school of thought or to attack their rivals in offensive or insulting language.
The controversy rumbled on for a further two centuries. Learned books abound, mostly in Latin, written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in which Dominican theologians carried on the work of Bàñez, arguing that while of course the human will cannot be determined to a free action by any secondary cause, which would indeed deprive us of freedom, it can be so determined by God’s motion. This is what they called ‘pre-motion’. Thomas never uses the word. To these followers, however, it seemed a reasonable development: the human being who chooses a particular good moves himself to this good, yet this movement from potency to act, from being able to do something to actually doing it, requires a first cause: we who act freely both move ourselves as secondary causes and are simultaneously moved by God as the first cause. God’s premotion is ‘physical’, not just ‘moral’, in the sense of drawing the individual by love of the ultimate end; God’s moving the person to act would also, more importantly, occur as first efficient cause. God works in every agent but in such a way that agents have their own proper activity. We should not be trying to explain human liberty at all; our focus should be on the generosity of God.
Leonine Thomism
By the early years of the 20th century, however, Thomas Aquinas as a theologian, treated as the source of controversial ideas about grace and predestination, was overshadowed by Thomas Aquinas the philosopher, called in to equip the Roman Catholic Church with the intellectual weaponry with which to resist the advance of modern thought. Unless and until we have a philosophically acceptable account of how we know anything to be true or false, we cannot say what we know about God.
The story of the outburst of theological activity in the first half of the 19th century, as Catholic theologians sought to rethink Christianity in response to modern philosophy, is largely unfamiliar to English-language students. Georg Hermes (1775–1831), for example, very influential at the time, held the Cartesian view that our only certain knowledge was of ideas actually present in the mind, yet that, while the criterion of objective truth lies in our subjective beliefs, it is still possible to prove the existence of God by reason, and then to demonstrate the possibility of supernatural revelation. Anton Günther (1783–1863) held that the mysteries of the Trinity and the Incarnation could be demonstrated by rational argument; that there was no real gap between natural and revealed truth; and that the existence of God could be deduced from analysis of self-consciousness. Antonio Rosmini-Serbati (1797–1855) sought to finesse Enlightenment rationalism and what he (already) regarded as an over-Aristotelianizing Thomism, by maintaining that all human knowledge implies an immediate intuition of divine truth. Against such speculations, theologians such as the German Jesuit Joseph Kleutgen (1811–83) turned to pre-Cartesian philosophy, seeking to recreate Catholic theology as it supposedly was before the late-medieval developments, which gave rise, not only to the Reformation but (much more importantly, for Catholic theologians, at this stage) to philosophy as a methodologically sceptical discipline. The rise of modern Thomism is intelligible only as the Roman Catholic Church’s rejection of attempts by distinguished Catholic theologians to rethink Christian doctrine in terms of post-Cartesian philosophy.
The only way to prevent Catholic theologians from succumbing to the rationalism and subjectivism of modernity was to train them in the tough-minded realism of Aristotelian metaphysics and epistemology as practised by Thomas Aquinas. Thomists argued, in their thousands, against the scepticism that characterized post-Cartesian theories of knowledge, that there is no problem about bridging some supposed gap between a person’s consciousness and the outside world. On the contrary, cognitive activity occurs when the form of whatever it may be in the world is realized as the form of the thing in a person’s mind. When some reality which is potentially intelligible becomes actually so, the mind, which is a potentiality for knowing, is actually exercised (as we saw in Chapter 3). Against idealists of one sort or another, there is no tertium quid between mind and world, such as impressions, sense data, or any other entity that would inevitably open up the possibility that knowledge is not of reality but only of intermediaries of some kind.
Pope Leo XIII himself, however, was not interested in epistemology. He wrote as follows to his fellow bishops:
While, therefore, We hold that every word of wisdom, every useful thing by whomsoever discovered or planned, ought to be received with a willing and grateful mind, We exhort you, venerable brethren, in all earnestness to restore the golden wisdom of St. Thomas and to spread it far and wide for the defense and beauty of the Catholic faith, for the good of society, and for the advantage of all the sciences.
Leo sought the revival of ‘Christian philosophy’ – ‘Thomist philosophy’ – in the context of the ongoing political problems: ‘False conclusions concerning divine and human things, which originated in the schools of philosophy, have now crept into all the orders of the State.’ He would continue his project in the encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891), an immense exposition of Catholic teaching on modern social and political issues, the foundation of Catholic ‘social doctrine’. Like the Spanish natural rights school, he looked mostly to the second part of the Second Part, to the questions on the virtue of justice.
Pope Pius X’s condemnation of Modernism in 1907 diverted Thomism from social doctrine to epistemology. The Modernists were accused of reducing revelation to experience, Scripture to history, and doctrine to symbols – in short, they were inclined to subjectivism and relativism. The Thomistic fundamentals were not to be ‘placed in the category of opinions capable of being debated one way or the other’. On the contrary, the Vatican published a list of 24 Thomistic theses to be affirmed, certainly by any Catholic seminary professor. These began with an affirmation of the divine being as pure act, in contrast to the admixture of potency in creatures. The Code of Canon Law (1917) required those in charge of religious and clerical formation to teach the ‘principles of the Angelic Doctor and hold to them religiously’. Thomas’s fate was to become the principal intellectual weapon against modernity.
Only five months after Pius X’s death, his successor, Benedict XV, declared that there is room ‘for divergent opinions’ so long as they constitute no ‘harm to faith or discipline’ and are expressed ‘with due moderation’. In turn, his successor, Pius XI, in 1923 reasserted that there must be no deviation from Thomas in metaphysical principles. These must be preserved intact, even while ‘lovers of Thomas’ were allowed to engage in ‘honorable rivalry in a just and proper freedom which is the life-blood of studies’. Like Leo XIII, he emphasized Thomas’s contributions ‘in the science of morals, in sociology and law, by laying down sound principles of legal and social, commutative and distributive justice, and explaining the relations between justice and charity’. He noted particularly:
those superb chapters in the second part of the Summa Theologiae on paternal or domestic government, the lawful power of the State or the nation, natural and international law, peace and war, justice and property, laws and the obedience they command, the duty of helping individual citizens in their need and cooperating with all to secure the prosperity of the State, both in the natural and the supernatural order.
What he wanted most was that:
the teachings of Aquinas, more particularly his exposition of international law and the laws governing the mutual relations of peoples, become more and more studied, for it contains the foundations of a genuine ‘League of Nations’.
At this point, in the early 1920s, the Vatican was hoping to influence the new arrangements for securing international peace that emerged from the catastrophe of the Great War.
In the work of the French philosopher Jacques Maritain (1882–1973), the American Jesuit John Courtney Murray (1904–67), and many others, a substantial body of literature on these subjects exists, including social and political philosophy, the philosophy of education, history, and culture, much of which was inspired by study of Thomas.
Harnack
There were less favourable views. Adolf Harnack (1851–1930) was no doubt the greatest German church historian and theologian of his day. For him, as regards Thomas, the basic error resides in the underlying concept of God and of grace: ‘There was no recognition of personality, neither of the personality of God, nor of man as a person.’ Thomas’s model is ‘communications of things’ (dingliche Mitteilungen), whereas what is wanted is person-to-person communion:
the disclosure to the soul, that the holy God who rules heaven and earth is its Father, with whom it can, and may, live as a child in its father’s house – that is grace, nay, that alone is grace, the trustful confidence in God, namely, which rests on the certainty that the separating guilt has been swept away.
Not even the mystics had a real sense of this. Like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, they all, when they thought of God, looked ‘not to the heart of God, but to an inscrutable Being’ (ein unergründliches Wesen), ‘who, as he has created the world out of nothing, so is also the productive source of inexhaustible forces that yield knowledge and transformation of essence’. And when they thought of themselves – these mystics – they did not think of ‘the centre of the human ego, the spirit, which is so free and so lofty that it cannot be influenced by benefits that are objective, even though they be the greatest perceptions and the most glorious investiture, and at the same time is so feeble in itself that it can find support only in another person’. Rather, in place of the personal fellowship with God, which is grace, they construed grace as ‘knowledge and participation in the divine nature’. The more impersonal, objective (dinglich), and external this grace becomes, the less surprising it is that it at length becomes ‘a magical means, which stirs to activity the latent good agency of man, and sets in motion the standing machine, that it may then do its work’.
Thomas has ‘the Areopagitic Augustinian conception of God’ – God as ‘the absolute substance’. Though he rejected the pantheism of the ‘Neoplatonic-Erigenistic mode of thought’, there are traces of the idea that creation is the actualization of the divine ideas. Indeed, with his thesis that God necessarily conceived from eternity the idea of the world, since this idea coincides with his knowledge and also with his being (the doctrine of divine simplicity), it appears that the pancosmistic conception of God is not finally excluded, the ‘pantheistic acosmism’ is not quite banished. We have perhaps said enough to indicate what there is in what Thomas says to give some plausibility to Harnack’s wild caricature.
Philosophy of being?
In the last 20 years or so, there has been a remarkable flood of scholarly work on Thomas Aquinas in English. A quick look would soon reveal significant differences over how to read Thomas. Some insist so strongly on reading Thomas as a theologian that others fight back, insisting that he wrote a good deal of great philosophy, easily extracted from his theology. For some, Thomas remains an Aristotelian, others stress his debt to Dionysius the Areopagite and thus to a certain Neoplatonism. One key issue relates to how we are to understand Thomas as a philosopher of being.
21. The Triumph of St Thomas Aquinas, 1470, by Benozzo Gozzoli, now in the Louvre
Consider some remarks in the late Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et ratio. In connection with Thomas, we are directed to consider the realism that recognizes the objectivity of truth and produces not merely a philosophy of ‘what seems to be’ but a philosophy of ‘what is’ (not phenomenalism but realism, in the jargon). There needs to be investigation of being – ipsum esse. Yet, what is this ‘philosophy of Being’ which,
within the perspective of the Christian metaphysical tradition, … is an active or dynamic philosophy which presents truth in its ontological, causal and communicative structures, retrieving its impetus and perennial impulse in the very fact that it is upheld by the act of ‘being’ and as a result it possesses a complete and general access to a solid universe of things and goes beyond every limit to arrive at Him in whom the consummation of all things is attained?
John Paul II refers us to an address he delivered in Rome in 1979, speaking in Italian:
the philosophy of St Thomas is a philosophy of being, that is, of the actus essendi [actualization of Being], whose transcendental value paves the most direct way to rise to the knowledge of subsisting Being and pure Act, namely to God.
He goes on: ‘we can even call this philosophy the philosophy of the proclamation of being, a chant in praise of what exists.’ – which sounds even better in Italian: ‘filosofia della proclamazione dell’essere, il canto in onore dell’esistente’.
In short, the desiderated philosophy of being breaks out into a song of praise, this ontology culminates in doxology.
Consider such remarks as the following, quite representative of the kind of thing that Thomas often says (ST 1.4.1):
The most perfect thing of all is to be, for in comparison with everything it is actuality. For nothing has actuality unless it exists: hence to be is the actuality of everything including of forms themselves. So [to be] is comparable with other things more as what is received to the thing receiving than vice versa. For when I say ‘the being of a man’ or ‘of a horse’ or of whatever, to be is regarded as something received like a form, not like something to which existing belongs.
This is a strange way of talking. Thomas goes on, in the next article, citing his Neoplatonic authority Dionysius, to contend that, since God is ‘self-subsistent being itself’, ipsum esse per se subsistens, God ‘necessarily contains within Himself the full perfection of being’ (ST 1.4.2). This leads him, again quoting Dionysius, evidently with some delight, to say this (ST 1.4.2):
To be is more perfect than life as such … a living thing is more noble than something that only exists … though an existent does not include in itself being alive or intelligent, because what participates in being does not necessarily participate in every form of existing, yet being itself includes in itself life and intelligence, because none of the perfections of existing can be lacking to that which is being itself, ipsum esse subsistens.
In the next article, again quoting Dionysius, Thomas considers whether creatures may be said to resemble God. Since the Bible tells us so (Genesis 1,26 and 1 John 3,2), the answer is obviously yes. Thomas spells it out – ‘all created things, so far as they are beings, are like God as first and universal principle of all being’ (ST 1.4.3). He continues:
As Dionysius says, when Scripture declares that nothing is like God, it does not mean to deny all likeness to Him. For, ‘the same things can be like and unlike to God: like, according as they imitate Him, as far as He, Who is not perfectly imitable, can be imitated; unlike according as they fall short of their cause,’ not merely in intensity and remission, as that which is less white falls short of that which is more white; but because they are not in agreement, specifically or generically.
Of course, as we are warned: ‘Likeness of creatures to God is affirmed … solely according to analogy, inasmuch as God is a being by essence whereas other things are beings by participation.’
There is always the following reminder:
Although it may be admitted that creatures are in some sort like God, it must nowise be admitted that God is like creatures; because, as Dionysius says: ‘A mutual likeness may be found between things of the same order, but not between a cause and that which is caused.’ For, we say that a statue is like a man, but not conversely; so also a creature can be spoken of as in some sort like God; but not that God is like a creature.
Creatures most resemble God simply in that they are, and in doing what it is their thing to do, so to speak. In effect, Thomas seems to be recommending a contemplative attitude towards things if we are to know anything about what God is like. Expressions such as ‘Being itself’ sound odd. For Thomas, however, the world is a world of creatures – composed hierarchically of an immense variety of existents participating in the act of existing.
Thomas conceives the being of a thing on analogy with an activity, which that thing exercises. This quasi-activity he refers to as esse or actus essendi, ‘to be’ or ‘act of being’, often translated as ‘existence’. What exerts this quasi-activity he refers to as ens, a being, an entity, a sort of present participle of the verb esse. Then, what this thing is he regularly refers to as essentia, a sort of abstract noun formed from yet another present participle of the same verb.
The notion of being – of what it means to be – is that being is intrinsically self-communicative and relational through action: ‘every substance exists for the sake of its operation’, as Thomas often says, in some form or another. This runs all through Thomas’s thought. Being is not a state but an act, being is dynamic, it’s energy, it’s act – finite beings are relational because they depend on one another, they lack so much; but also because they have a certain innate drive to self-communication, to enrich others, so to speak.
This understanding of being as naturally self-communicating to others Thomas inherits from the Platonic tradition of the selfdiffusiveness of the good. Existing, for Thomas, is not being ‘just there’, as if waiting passively, inertly, in neutral, to have significance granted or imposed, or to be contextualized. ‘Action issues from existence’ (agere sequitur esse): existing is actively participating, playing a role, in a community of hierarchically related beings. Beings naturally open out in self-communicating action to and on one another, in a whole variety of ways, receiving as well as donating, and thus sustaining a network of relations with all its interactions. Whatever counts as a substance, as existing in itself, naturally relates to others by its self-communicating action, by the difference it makes. Being related in some way to others is the nature of substance. In effect, every thing is in some way imaging God – once again, in Thomas, the Christian doctrine of creation is the more or less hidden key to his metaphysical considerations.