2 Works
Chapter 2 Works
In 25 years of working life, Thomas Aquinas wrote or dictated over eight million words: two million of commentary on the Bible; a million on Aristotle; with the rest divided between records of the disputations at which he presided, many short works, and three large compendia of Christian doctrine.
Biblical commentaries
Taking students through the Bible was Thomas’s principal duty. An assistant read out the text and the professor commented, paraphrasing, citing parallels, and so on. Two important commentaries have recently been translated into English. The commentary on the Book of Job (1261–5) focuses on the theology of providence, the suffering of the innocent, the human condition, and divine governance. The commentary on the Gospel of John (1270–2) is increasingly recognized as one of Thomas’s greatest works. It is, as yet, only among specialists that these works are much studied: their cut and dried analytical style is so different from the richly imaginative approach of earlier patristic commentary (such as Augustine’s), and so different again from the historical reconstructions of modern biblical exegesis, that the general reader is unlikely to make headway.
Disputed questions
Much of Thomas’s literary production takes the form of transcripts of disputations in which he participated. Face-to-face argument was an essential part of medieval pedagogy. Disputation as a method assumes there will be conflicting interpretations of biblical and other texts that need to be exposed, considered, and resolved. Thomas proceeds by reformulating a thesis as a question; setting out arguments that run against the thesis, citing authoritative texts (Scripture, Augustine, Dionysius the Areopagite, and suchlike); expounding his preferred answer to the question; and finally returning to the initial objections, admitting them, suitably qualified, or rejecting them, one by one. In ST alone, Thomas sets out about 10,000 arguments against the positions that he defends – doing so for the most part dispassionately, making the claims that he will reject as plausible as possible. Of course the method was not intended to reach compromise or supposed consensus. It allowed the disputants to discover the strengths as well as the weaknesses of opposing views; but the aim was to work out the truth by considering and eliminating error, however common or plausible or seemingly supported by authority.
We have three substantial collections of edited disputations. From his first three years of teaching at Paris we have 29 disputed questions, the first of which gives its name to the collection: De Veritate – ‘on truth’. These are, in effect, the working papers of the young theologian. There are two later collections. De Potentia, ‘on [divine] power’, comprises 10 disputations, all related to questions considered in the first part of ST (see Chapter 3), dealing then with the divine nature, the doctrine of creation, and the doctrine of God as Trinity. The collection De Malo – ‘on evil’ – contains 16 questions on sin, the causes of sin, and so on, Thomas’s best developed account of these matters.
While good English translations exist, these collections are not the easiest point of entry even for an advanced student.
Philosophical treatises
Thomas produced several important works of pure philosophy. In 1270, back in Paris, in the midst of the crisis over the interpretation of Aristotle, he wrote On the uniqueness of the intellect against the Averroists. This highly polemical work concludes as follows:
If anyone, puffing himself up with bogus knowledge, dares to argue against what I have written, let him not hold forth in corners or in the presence of the lads, who are incapable of judging such a difficult subject, but let him write against this book – if he dares. You will then have to deal not just with me, who am the least in this affair, but also with a crowd of other lovers of truth who know how to resist your errors and remedy your ignorance.
Naming no names, though everyone must have known who they were, Thomas inveighs against professors in the arts faculty who apparently accepted the interpretation of Aristotle’s philosophy of the mind that was proposed by the Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd, whom Thomas denounces as depravator and perversor of Aristotle’s thought. He denounces these colleagues (clergy of course) as ‘Averroistas’ but does not let his scorn disrupt the rigour of the argument. He takes seriously the idea that, instead of each human being’s having a mind, there is some kind of super mind of which our individual minds should be regarded as mere participations. Essentially, his argument is that the Averroist position cannot explain what it means to say ‘This man thinks’. Bizarre as it sounds, this resembles 19th-century absolute idealism in the wake of Hegel, according to which the process of history consists of a single mind that, so to speak, experiences itself. For Thomas, anyway, this ‘monopsychism’, as we might call it, is incompatible with Christian beliefs about the individual soul’s accountability under divine judgement, though his principal concern is to clear Aristotle of misinterpretation.
In the same year, Thomas issued On the eternity of the world, against murmurers, directed against colleagues in the theology faculty. One of Aristotle’s ‘errors’ was that he believed that the world has always existed. Thomas’s eminent Franciscan colleague Bonaventure argued that it makes no sense to say that a world that has been created existed from all eternity. Thomas of course believed that the claim that the world had always existed is false: the Bible tells us so. However, contrary to what most theologians of the day believed, he contends that it cannot be proved by reasoning alone that the world did not exist from eternity. For Thomas, the concept of createdness has to do with total and radical dependence on God as first cause of all things – which is a separate issue from the world’s having a beginning. He saw nothing incoherent in the idea of a created eternal world. Somewhat provocatively, he claims that Augustine and Anselm, the greatest authorities in the eyes of his colleagues, agreed with him. For that matter, his view of createdness as dependence for existence is not what is commonly understood by creation today, let alone in his day.
9. Ibn Rushd (1126–98), the Muslim philosopher
Thomas greatly admired the work of the Persian Muslim thinker Ibn Sina (980–1037), Avicenna as he was known in Latin, whose work he had no doubt met at university in Naples. Ibn Sina’s learning was legendary. (The most influential of his writings was probably his Canon of Medicine, translated from Arabic into Latin in the 12th century and reprinted as late as the 17th.) The short treatise On Being and Essence, composed ‘for his brothers and companions while he was not yet a master’ – before 1256, then, in what was to be a widely read treatise – expounds the metaphysical doctrines held in common by Christians, Jews, and Muslims at the time. Thomas introduces his most characteristic thesis: in creatures there is a real distinction between their being (existence) and essence (nature), whereas in God there can be no such distinction.
Neoplatonic studies
Thomas owed a great deal to the Corpus Areopagiticum, writings in Greek by an unknown author who presented himself as Dionysius the Areopagite, converted by Saint Paul (Acts 17:34).
10. Ibn Sina (980–1037), the Muslim philosopher
Scholars now identify him as an early 6th-century monk, probably based in Syria. To add to his near-apostolic authority as Paul’s supposed disciple, he was identified with the first bishop of Paris, martyred in the mid-3rd century (on Montmartre), whose remains were housed in the monastery of St-Denis, to the north of Paris, where the master copy of the Corpus was kept, from which the translations into Latin were made. Peter Abelard (1079–1142/3) had to leave the monastery for expressing scepticism about the latter identification.
In his inaugural lecture as professor (1256), Thomas shows his debt to Dionysius. The role of theologians, while minor, is nevertheless honourable, in the cascading descent of divine wisdom. Things are disposed by divine providence in such a way that creatures have real effect on one another. To suppose otherwise diminishes God by denying the power to cause things to happen with which rational creatures are endowed. Teachers play a real part in the transmission of knowledge. This is the earliest instance of the general principle according to which creatures are genuinely free to play a real part in running the world and working out their destiny: a principle frequently affirmed by Thomas.
Pseudo-Dionysius, as he has been called since his unmasking by scholars in the 16th century, was indebted to, perhaps taught by, Neoplatonist thinkers, especially Plotinus (c. 205–70) and Proclus (c. 410–65), as well as thoroughly immersed in patristic writers up to Cyril of Alexandria (d. 444). For centuries, in the Greek Orthodox Church even more than in the Latin West, these writings had an authority that was only exceeded by the authority of the Bible itself. Thomas was familiar with all four of the Areopagite’s works: The Divine Names (the names applying to the divine unity), The Celestial Hierarchy (on the angels), The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy (on the mediation between the human and the divine realms by the hierarchs of the church and the sacraments), and The Mystical Theology (on the union with the One beyond speech and knowledge which this mediation secures).
Dating from before 1250, a copy in Thomas’s own hand of Albert the Great’s commentary on Dionysius’s treatise On the Divine Names survives in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples. His own commentary, of which there is no English translation, is dated to the years back in Italy (1261–8). Through his study of Dionysius, he was well aware of the Christian Platonism that characterizes the mystical theology of the Eastern Church. Moreover, several of Thomas’s key maxims come from Dionysius. For example: ‘we cannot know what [God] is but rather what he is not’ (ST 1.3. Prologue). His account of the angels is permeated with allusions to Dionysius. He is familiar with Dionysius’s liturgical vision of the world, which brings the believer into union with the unknown God – even if he is not really enthusiastic about it.
The other Neoplatonic work on which Thomas wrote a commentary was the Book of Causes: ascribed to Aristotle (as his ‘theology’) but identified by Thomas as the work of an Arab philosopher who had borrowed a good deal from Proclus and from Dionysius. An important thesis, which Thomas appeals to in his exposition of the eucharist, and which he knows comes from Proclus, goes as follows: ‘Whatever is produced by secondary causes is also and more eminently produced by prior causes, since these are the causes of the secondary causes.’ Of this book there is an excellently edited English translation. Though the commentary on the Book of Causes comes late in his career, Thomas cites it already in his earliest treatise, On Being and Essence.
Commentaries on Aristotle
Much of Thomas’s personal study went into ‘exposition’, as he usually called it, of works by Aristotle. Having embarked on what would become the Summa Theologiae, he clearly found Aristotle’s De Anima very helpful in his own theological account of the soul. Then, if he did not already know from reports, he soon found on his return to Paris in 1268 that influential professors in the arts faculty (clergy, of course), much indebted to the standard Muslim interpretations, particularly those of Ibn Rushd, were teaching Aristotle in ways that threatened Catholic orthodoxy.
Thomas’s commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics was composed in tandem with the analysis of action, virtue, and so on in the Summa Theologiae. He was obviously delighted to find that a coherent ethics could be developed independently of Christian beliefs, albeit one that found its fulfilment only in the light of Christian revelation.
Thomas is palpably at home in Aristotle’s world: a world that is saturated with purposefulness, a world that is meant to be understood in the sense that it is our nature as rational beings to inquire into the world’s order and to come to understand it. Our sense of the intelligibility of the world is not, for Aristotle or for Thomas, a projection of mind onto nature, as it seems to many philosophers and others nowadays. To the contrary, Aristotle’s world is a projection of intelligible, teleologically ordered nature onto the human mind.
Good translations exist of the commentaries on Aristotle; it cannot be said that much interesting study of them is available, and in any case there is no scholarly consensus as to whether they are creative or merely pedestrian expositions. Of the 12 studies of Aristotle’s works that Thomas undertook, 6 were left unfinished. It is striking that, in what turned out to be his last year, Thomas put so much effort into these commentaries.
Commentary on Lombard’s Sentences
Of the three major works that Thomas composed, the first was the massive commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard. Peter Lombard (c. 1095/1100–1161) played a decisive role in the development of theology as a systematic discipline. The sententiae are ‘opinions’ culled from vast reading, organized in four books – God, creation, Christ, the sacraments – and forming the staple of doctrine teaching at Paris and elsewhere right into the 16th century. In Thomas’s day and for long afterwards, it was customary for every would-be professor of theology to compose and publish an exposition of Lombard’s Sentences. More than mere commentary, this should be seen as an original theological work in its own right. Since there is no English translation, and as yet no critical edition of the original Latin, and relatively little discussion in the secondary literature, we shall say no more.
Summa Contra Gentiles
The second major work, entitled (not by him) the Summa Contra Gentiles, he seems to have started in Paris in early 1259. A good part of the text survives in autograph manuscript. Much revised, this book reads like an experiment to see how near the ancient Mediterranean world’s search for wisdom might come to biblical revelation. The first three of the four books investigate how far the truths of the Christian faith can be expounded on the basis of principles available to non-believers; only in the fourth do the arguments depend on specifically Christian revelation. ‘Although the truth of the Christian faith surpasses the capacity of reason’, Thomas says at the beginning, ‘nevertheless the truth that human reason is naturally endowed to know cannot be opposed to the truth of the Christian faith’ – the implication of which is that for us ‘to be able to see something of the loftiest realities, however thin and weak the sight may be, is a cause of the greatest joy’.
Summa Theologiae
The third and by far the most famous and most studied work is the Summa Theologiae, divided into three parts – on (1) God, one and three, and creator; (2) the journey of the image of God to final union with God; and (3) Christ as the way – to which our next three chapters are devoted. Conventionally they are known as prima pars (the First Part), secunda pars (Second Part), itself divided in two, and tertia pars (Third Part).
The purpose of the Summa Theologiae, was, as Thomas says, to set out Christian doctrine in an orderly way, considering how
newcomers to this teaching are greatly hindered by various writings on the subject, partly because of the swarm of pointless questions, articles, and arguments, partly because essential information is given according to the requirements of textual commentary or the occasions of academic debate, partly because repetition has bred boredom and muddle in their thinking.
(ST 1. Foreword)
While he continued to expound Scripture, and to participate in disputations, he saw the limitations of these methods of teaching: line-by-line exposition made grasp of the whole picture difficult, while energetic debate favoured increasingly subtle refinements, not always with the focus on central doctrines of the faith. He sought, not to replace expounding Scripture in class and debating issues in formal disputations – indeed he carried on doing both, and he surely expected his students to participate in both – but to provide a synoptic guide, a bird’s-eye view of Christian doctrine, laid out systematically.