3 Summa Theologiae : First Part
Chapter 3 Summa Theologiae: First Part
By any reckoning, the Summa Theologiae counts among the half dozen great works of Catholic Christian theology. We might as well stick to the Latin title, since there is no satisfactory translation. It is neither a summing up nor a résumé. In the early 12th century it meant handy summaries of doctrine. By the mid-13th century, however, a summa, in other disciplines besides theology, had become comprehensive, encyclopaedic, organized – not alphabetically, but according to the author’s viewpoint. ‘Since the teacher of Catholic truth must teach not only advanced students but also instruct beginners’, as Thomas says in the Prologue (ST 1), ‘we propose in this work to treat of whatever belongs to the Christian religion in such a way as may be consistent with the instruction of beginners.’
How Thomas intended this massive work to be used, or by whom exactly, we don’t know. It is sometimes such hard going that his claim to write for ‘beginners’ has been taken as evidence of his being one more professor with unrealistic expectations. More charitably, he may have been designing a guide for future professors, rather than directly for students. He obviously takes it for granted that his readers have not only completed the standard liberal arts course but are also proficient in biblical studies. Forty years later, in 1308 to be precise, the friars engaged in teaching in his home province were ordered not to use the Summa but to stick to expounding the Sentences of Peter Lombard.
The origins of the Summa are as follows. In 1265, Thomas was commissioned to teach young friars at Santa Sabina in Rome. Perhaps they were an elite. He was authorized to return them to their home priories if they did not perform well. He seems to have begun by expounding Peter Lombard’s Sentences. A record of the course, identified some years ago in a 13th-century manuscript in Lincoln College, Oxford, and now entitled the Lectura romana, covers the nature of holy teaching, the names and attributes of God, the Trinity, and charity. Thomas was evidently dissatisfied. Perhaps, as he reflected on the concept of charity, he suddenly conceived the plan to rethink the Christian life as a whole in the light of the four cardinal virtues of prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice, as in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, as well as the three divinely given virtues of faith, hope, and charity. Perhaps he saw that much more needed to be said about the moral life, in a way that would lead his students more effectively into the practice of the Christian religion.
11. Santa Sabina, the Dominican house in Rome
He hit on an entirely different scheme, which would result in the Summa as we have it. First he would consider God (to which this chapter is devoted); then the movement of the rational creature towards God (Chapter 4); and thirdly (see Chapter 5) he would consider Christ, who ‘as man is the way for us to tend towards God’ (ST 1.2).
The Thomist axiom
‘Grace does not destroy nature’, as Thomas says (ST 1.1.8 ad 2), ‘but perfects it, which is why natural reason ministers to faith and the natural inclination of the will ministers to charity.’ This is the most cited ‘Thomist’ axiom. He formulates it early in his career as follows: ‘the gifts of grace are conferred on nature in such a way that they do not destroy it but rather perfect it’. In fact, the axiom is not exclusively or even particularly characteristic of Thomas. On the contrary, the earliest recorded appearance is to be found in Bonaventure, dated to 1248. The roots of the axiom lie in Greek patristic theology, communicated through Dionysius and well established in the West long before Thomas. Some Christians, including Catholics, regard human reasoning as much too twisted by human sinfulness to be easily fulfilled in Christian faith, just as they are inclined to regard the Christian practice of charity as cutting across the natural desires of human will. To such Christians, the harmonious interaction between faith and reason, charity and natural love, and thus between grace and nature, that is expected by Thomas remains deeply problematic.
Theology in the university
The first thesis in the first question of the first part of the Summa runs as follows: ‘The philosophical disciplines provide such a complete account of everything, including the deity, that any other kind of teaching seems superfluous’ (ST 1.1.1). The right of Christian theology to count as a university discipline may well require justification today. In an academic environment dominated by the Catholic Church, Thomas could not be serious (we might think) in questioning the need for any teaching about God other than the disciplinae philosophicae. By the ‘philosophical disciplines’ Thomas meant the whole range of the liberal arts, mathematics, astronomy, the natural sciences, metaphysics, law, medicine, and so on. This was all undergoing radical revision, as the newly translated legacy of ancient Greece, mediated largely through Muslim scholarship, was being assimilated. By no means a universally welcomed process, the discovery that things in the natural world, including human beings, could be studied on their own, independently of biblical revelation and Church teaching, threatened traditional Catholic orthodoxy. Some prominent academics in the newly developing arts faculty at Paris seem to have been exhilarated at the prospect. ‘All regions of reality’, Thomas says, formulating the argument, ‘are dealt with in the philosophical disciplines, including the divine – which is why the Philosopher [Aristotle] refers to one part of philosophy as theology or divine science’ (ST 1.1 objection 2): ‘There was no need for any other kind of teaching.’
The new learning seemed to be developing into an alternative to Catholicism, among members of the arts faculty, or so it was suspected by the theologians. Boethius of Dacia (Bo of Denmark: fl. 1275), in his book On the Highest Good, defended the possibility of achieving beatitude through love of wisdom. He was assumed to be influenced by Ibn Rushd’s version of Aristotle’s ideal of the philosophic life as the way to supreme happiness. (He remained a Christian and eventually became a Dominican friar.) The Summa Theologiae might have been composed (though we don’t know) to persuade admirers of Aristotle that his philo-sophia, ‘love of wisdom’, was not only quite compatible with Christian assumptions about nature, truth, goodness, and the soul, but actually greatly illuminated them. Thomas did once say that philosophy is a kind of revelation: ‘the study of philosophy is in its own right allowable and praiseworthy, because God revealed to the philosophers the truth which they perceive, as the Apostle [Paul] says’ (ST 2/2.167.1).
On the other hand, in one of his last sermons at the University of Paris, he said this: ‘A little old lady (vetula) of today knows more about things concerning the faith than all the philosophers of antiquity’ – quite a significant remark (we might think) to his assembled colleagues and students at the height of the crisis over the effects on Catholic Christian doctrine of the study of the pagan Aristotle. He said much the same thing in a sermon on the Creed preached probably in Naples in 1273: ‘None of the philosophers before the coming of Christ was able, with all his effort on the task, to know as much about God . . . as a little old lady knows, after the coming of Christ, through her faith.’
Moreover, Thomas sees two ways of judging the right thing to say or think in matters of Christian doctrine: one acquired by study, the other ‘by experiencing the divine’, pati divina, in a neat phrase quoted from Dionysius the Areopagite (ST 1.1.6).
Thomas distinguishes between theology (such as Aristotle’s) achieved by the light of natural reason, and ‘holy teaching’, sacra doctrina, based on faith in ‘sacred scripture’, sacra scriptura. Human beings are called to a destiny (he assumes) that transcends our natural capacities to discover:
We must know what the end is before we direct our intentions and actions towards it. Therefore, it is necessary for human salvation that some truths which exceed human reason be known through divine revelation.
(ST 1.1.1)
‘Holy teaching’ is a categorically different kind of exercise from ‘the theology, which is part of philosophy’ (ST 1.1.1). However, Thomas expects these two ways of thinking about God to work in harmony. He does not regard himself as a philosopher; he is a ‘teacher of Catholic truth’. But he likes to show how philosophical insights, new and old, are compatible with, and actually supportive of, Christian belief. Moreover, he takes it for granted that theologians make use of the philosophical disciplines ‘in order to achieve greater clarity’, adding, perhaps unexpectedly, ‘as political science uses military science’ (ST 1.1.5).
Nevertheless, many Christians may have to take on faith truths that can be, and indeed have been, demonstrated by philosophy (ST 2/2.2.4):
First, in order that we may arrive more quickly at knowledge of divine truth. Because the science to whose province it belongs to prove the existence of God is the last of all to offer itself to human study, since it presupposes many other sciences; so that it would not be until late in life that we would arrive at knowledge of God. The second reason is, in order that knowledge of God may be more general. For many are unable to make progress in the study of science, either through dullness of mind, or through having a number of occupations, and temporal needs, or even through laziness in learning, all of whom would be altogether deprived of knowledge of God unless divine things were brought to their knowledge under the guise of faith. The third reason is for the sake of certainty. For human reason is very deficient in things concerning God. A sign of this is that philosophers in their researches, by natural investigation, into human affairs, have fallen into many errors, and have disagreed among themselves. And consequently, in order that we might have knowledge of God, free of doubt and uncertainty, it was necessary for divine matters to be delivered to us by way of faith; being told us, as it were, by God himself who cannot lie.
According to Thomas, that is to say, natural theology, with theistic proofs, theodicy, and so on, was not a first-year subject. On the contrary, as part of metaphysics, it was for advanced students, after lengthy training in the other branches of knowledge. Secondly, most people are either too stupid or busy or lazy to follow philosophical arguments for God’s existence. Thirdly, though there are arguments that he regards as valid, mistakes have crept in, and in any case these arguments are not always compatible with one another.
Existence and nature of God (ST 1.2–11)
For Thomas, the world in which we find ourselves doesn’t ‘just exist’, as brute fact, inexplicably, for no reason or by chance. As Josef Pieper, a great exponent of Thomas, once noted, the key to his thought, more or less hidden, lies in the idea of creation – the notion that nothing exists which is not created except the Creator himself.
In the Summa, obviously, if we think of the intended readership, Thomas was not attempting to persuade religiously neutral philosophers to agree with him. The famous ‘five ways’ of demonstrating God’s existence, which he happily takes from the philosophers of antiquity, are not an attempt to refute atheism but an effort of faith seeking understanding of itself. Thomas could not have imagined that philosophical arguments were required to justify religious practice. For him, we know ourselves as subject to something higher, we perceive in ourselves defects, which we need a higher power to deal with (ST 2/2.85.1). To which higher power we should turn may be a good question, he goes on to say; but ‘offering sacrifice is a matter of natural law’ – ‘all agree on this’. The metaphysical reasoning, independent of divine revelation, by which philosophers in antiquity concluded that there is a God is the same reason by which all human beings know that we must worship – what form, precisely, worship should take has been divinely revealed; but, for Thomas, that worship is required is as naturally rational a belief as that God exists.
The ‘five ways’ go as follows: (1) motion in the world is explicable only if there is a first unmoved mover; (2) the chain of efficient causes in the world presupposes an uncaused cause; (3) contingent beings must depend on a necessary being; (4) the degrees of reality and goodness in the world must be approximations to a self-standing maximum of reality and goodness; and (5) the empirically obvious teleology of non-conscious agents in the universe entails the existence of an intelligent universal principle. These five arguments, for which Thomas claims no originality, demonstrate, from features of the world, that there is a source and goal of everything that exists.
Thomas is mainly concerned to show that argument is needed. He steers between the view that God’s existence is so obvious that no argument is required (ST 1.2.1), and the view that no argument is possible because God’s existence is purely a matter of faith (ST 1.2.2). The existence of God is not self-evident, whatever people thought at the time; nor, on the other hand, does one need to have Christian faith to believe in God’s existence.
As they stand in the Summa, these arguments yield no more – yet no less – than what the ancient philosophers have in fact demonstrated. In the Metaphysics (Book XII) and in the Physics (Books VII and VIII), Aristotle laid out at length a proof for the existence of an unmoved mover: something, that is to say, which moves everything else but itself is moved by nothing. As his commentaries show, Thomas was happy to endorse Aristotle’s argument. He shows no interest in working out his own original proof. He wants to show that Aristotle’s unmoved mover is identical with the God self-revealed in the Christian dispensation. The commentary on Aristotle’s Physics culminates in these words:
Thus does the Philosopher in his general consideration of natural things conclude at the first principle of the whole of nature, who is the One above all things, the ever blessed God. Amen.
Thomas probably did not expect his students to familiarize themselves with this, or any other, philosophical argument for the existence of God. The most elaborate, and most readable, set of arguments is to be found in Book 1 of his Summa Contra Gentiles, as has been shown in detail by Norman Kretzmann. This is Thomas’s most personal attempt to show that the thought of the ancient Greeks and their Muslim commentators was fulfilled in the light of Christian revelation.
For the benefit of the many whom Thomas assumed to be unlikely ever to master the arguments, God has revealed his existence historically to Moses at the burning bush (Exodus 3:14): ‘I am who I am’ (ST 1.2.3).
Long before Thomas came on the scene, the tradition was well established that ‘the One who is’ is the principal name of God. It designates the eternal, self-sufficient source and goal of all things: ipsum esse, ‘Being itself’ (it needs the capital letter) as Thomas would say, understanding ‘Being’ not as a noun but as the infinitive of the verb ‘to be’.
This interpretation of God’s self-revelation was familiar (not that Thomas knew this) to Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BC—c. AD 50), the greatest thinker of Hellenistic Judaism.
Of course, the expression ‘Being’ easily evokes images of faceless omnipotence or, for sceptical linguistic philosophers, seems an illegitimate and even ludicrous inflation of an everyday verb. In his commentary on St John’s Gospel, dealing with the handful of texts where Jesus is represented as saying ‘I am’, Thomas assumes that the self-revelation of God to Moses at the burning bush has been fulfilled in Jesus Christ and should be understood Christologically. This is a quite common move among theologians of the day, especially his Franciscan colleague Bonaventure. Thomas, however, does not make much of this, even in the commentary on John. He never makes the connection explicit in the Summa.
Divine simpleness
‘We do not know what God is but what he is not’ (ST 1.3 Prologue), Thomas declares, in a formula that, though seldom repeated, remains determinative throughout his thinking. He borrows it from Dionysius. He was presumably aware of the teaching of the Fourth Lateran Council of the Church (1215), always a benchmark for Thomas, according to which God is said to be an ‘altogether simple substance or nature’, substantia seu natura simplex omnino.
God is not a body, like a planet, as many at the time no doubt imagined. (Famously, when the space satellite Sputnik was launched in 1977, Nikita Khrushchev, then leader of the Soviet Union, reportedly crowed that it found no sign of God, only proving that it may be a more common misconception than one might assume.)
Thomas, anyway, has his eye on something much more sophisticated. God is not a substance with accidents, a being with properties – as creatures are. God is what he has – a much trickier thesis. That is to say: such characteristics as goodness, truth, eternity, and so on are not attributes that qualify God’s being. That would make God’s essence subject to modification and therefore incomplete. God is not to be envisaged as a substance with accidents, an entity with an array of qualities. God is omniscient, not in virtue of instantiating or exemplifying omniscience – which would imply a real distinction between God’s nature and his omniscience. The properties that are attributed in the Bible to God – wisdom, justice, mercy, love, and so on – are not properties in the sense of being added on to, or in principle separable from, God’s being. These evidently disparate qualities have to be conceived as identical, in the divine case. We are forced to say this, Thomas thinks, because the alternative would be to make God some kind of creature. To speak of the ‘simpleness’ of the divine nature is to deny of God any of the distinctions that characterize created things, especially, of course, ourselves. In short, God is not to be conceived anthropomorphically.
God does not belong to any genus – not even to the genus of substance (ST 1.3.5). Whatever the temptation to think of God as ‘a being’, even as ‘the supreme being’, in a world composed entirely of entities of one kind or another, Thomas’s insistence on the ‘simpleness’ of the divine nature rules this out completely. God should not be envisaged even as ‘first in the genus of substance’, as ‘the prototype’ (ST 1.3.6). God is not part of the universe, even the dominant part.
God does not enter into composition with other things (ST 1.3.8), as we might be tempted to think, indeed as many have thought, according to Thomas: conceiving God as the ‘world soul’ (anima mundi); as the basic form of everything, a view that is ‘said to be that of Amaury of Bène and his followers’; and as the ‘primordial stuff’ (materia prima) – ‘a really stupid thesis’, which Thomas ascribes with a flicker of contempt to David of Dinant.
Amaury (Amalric, d. 1205/7) gave lectures on Aristotle that attracted a large audience. The university condemned his teachings, and in 1209, ten of his followers were burnt to death before the gates of Paris as heretics. His own body was exhumed, burnt, and the ashes scattered. David’s writings were condemned in 1210, to be burned ‘before Christmas’.
13. Amaury de Bène lecturing in Paris, painted c. 1375–80
The horrifying measures to which the ecclesiastical authorities had recourse reflect the fear that the university was succumbing to an organized attempt to foist a pantheistic religious philosophy on Latin Christendom. When Thomas denounces David of Dinant, he must have remembered that engaging with Aristotle’s thought, as he had done since student days at Naples, was, after all, fraught with appalling risks.
God is in everything, ‘not as a part or a property but like the agent in an action’ (ST 1.8). God is not subject to being changed by anything external to himself: nothing is external to God (ST 1.9). God is not subject to time or temporal change (ST 1.10). Finally, God is unique, singular: otherwise something would be alongside God, constraining him (ST 1.11). These are the standard claims in ancient Christian theology, conveniently and compactly set out – by no means uncontested in modern times.
Knowing and naming God (ST 1.12–13)
At this point – only at this point, one may remark – Thomas raises the question of how we know anything about God (ST 1.12 Prologue). The question is not whether human beings can have knowledge of God at all – a question that no modern theologian can avoid: Thomas, by contrast, is interested only in how.
His thinking is always end-directed, teleological. His considerations are dominated by whether created beings see God face to face (ST 1.12.1), and if so how (ST 12.2–5). Even in heaven, knowledge of God – if we mean by that total comprehension – must always elude creatures (ST 12.6–10). As for knowing God here and now, no human being can see the divine nature (ST 1.12.11). On the other hand, a certain knowledge is available by natural reasoning (ST 1.12.12), such as that there is a God, who must be good, eternal, and so on. Rather more may be known of God by the revelation of grace (ST 1.12.13), though even this is always knowledge of ‘God the Unknown’.
In the following question, Thomas considers whether God may be named by us at all (ST 1.13.1); whether we say things about God properly or only metaphorically (ST 1.13. 2–3); whether our names for God are synonymous (ST 1.13.4); univocal or equivocal (ST 1.13.5); if analogical, then is God or the world the analogue (ST 1.13.6); whether names for God are tensed (ST 1.13.7); whether the word ‘God’ is a noun or a verb (ST 1.13.8); whether the name ‘God’ is unique (ST 1.13.9); whether the name ‘the One who is’ is the name most proper to God (ST 1.13.11); and finally, whether affirmative propositions can be formed about God (ST 1.13.12) – which responds to an apophaticism ascribed to Dionysius that goes too far for Thomas.
We might be tempted to follow Rabbi Moses ben Maimon (1135–1204), the exponent of Judaism whom Thomas greatly respected, into maintaining (as Thomas thinks) that when we say that God is good we mean only that God is not evil, or that God is the cause of goodness in things – as if what sounds like an affirmation would really only be another negation (ST 1.13.2). Against this radical proposal, Thomas simply declares that this is not what people mean when they speak of God. We speak of God as we know him: since knowledge of God depends on knowledge of something created, one way or another (how else?), we can speak of God only as represented somehow by them: ‘Any creature, in so far as it possesses any perfection, represents God and is like God, for God, being simply and universally perfect, has pre-existing in himself the perfections of all his creatures.’ Thus, we predicate of God perfections we are familiar with in ourselves – meaning them, however, ‘in a higher way than we understand’. Indeed, the perfections we find in creatures (goodness, life, and the like) are attributed more appropriately to God (ST 1.13.3), since these realities belong primarily to God and only secondarily to creatures.
Yet, though we never mean anything of God and ourselves in exactly the same sense, it does not follow that what we say is simply equivocal. There is a way we use words, which is neither univocal nor equivocal; we often speak analogically. Thomas does not seem to think there is anything remarkable about this. Using words analogically, he clearly thinks, is a perfectly familiar procedure. This uncontentious analogical use of perfection words in respect of God depends, however, he clearly assumes, without spelling it out very clearly, on the dependence of creatures on God as cause of existence, goodness, truth, and so on.
The most appropriate name for God is ‘the One who is’ – as John Damascene (c. 655–c. 750) says. Thomas appeals to the authority of the church father whom he takes to be the bearer of the theology of the undivided Church. For the first time, however, Thomas goes further, claiming that the Tetragrammaton is even more appropriate (the four-lettered Hebrew YHWH) – the sacred name which is too holy to pronounce, the name which means ‘the incommunicable and, if we are allowed to speak like this, the singular substance of God’ (ST 1.13.11). Thomas seems to have picked this up from reading Rabbi Moses.
14. Moses Maimonides (1135–1204), the Jewish philosopher
God’s knowledge and will (ST 1.14–26)
Thomas never speaks of God as ‘a person’. Of course, he uses the word ‘person’ for the three persons in the divine Trinity. That had long been part of the vocabulary of Latin theology. His word persona does not mean an autonomous individual centre of self-consciousness, as we naturally think today. This does not mean, however, that God conceived as ‘the One who is’ is not ‘personal’. As the fifth of the ‘five ways’ concludes, there is ‘some intelligent being by whom all natural things are ordered to an end’ – ‘this we call God’ (ST 1.3.3).
True, ‘knowledge in God is not a quality or an habitual disposition’, as with us; rather, it is ‘pure actuality’ (ST 1.14.1). God’s being is identical with God’s knowing. By the principle of the simpleness of the divine nature God’s knowing is his being: ‘if it were other than his substance, it would follow, as Aristotle says, that something other would be the actuation and completion of the divine substance, and we should have the altogether impossible conclusion that the divine substance would stand to it as potency to act’ (ST 1.14.3). ‘In God intellect, and what it understands, and the form by which it understands, and the very act of understanding, are all one and the same’ (ST 1.14.4).
‘Anything with a mind has a will.’ For Thomas, however, or anyone of his day, the notion of will does not mean, even in God’s case, will to power, domination, command, and suchlike, as we might think. ‘We call will a desire or an appetite, though it doesn’t only desire what it doesn’t have but also loves and takes delight in what it does have.’ This is the sense in which will exists in God: God ‘eternally possesses the good which delights his will, since it is nothing other than his substance’ (ST 1.19.1). For Thomas, will, voluntas, is aligned conceptually with desire, consent, delighted acquiescence, in short, with love (cf. ST 1.20.1).
‘Those who say that because nature is deterministic it is not subject to providence, are misled by the fact that human planning cannot change nature but only make use of it’ (ST 1.22.2). God, however, is the author of nature and that includes the determinism often to be found in the natural order. God, indeed, is ‘the cause of our acts of free choice, which means that our prudence is contained within God’s providence as a particular cause subject to a universal one’. Thomas plays on the assonance between prudentia and providentia. The main point he is making here, however, is to establish that God cares for the creatures he has made.
In short, while it might look at first sight that the deity as identified in these first 26 questions of ST is Aristotle’s First Cause, moving everything but itself unmoved by anything, an eternally blissful fulfilment of all being, Thomas, while delightedly endorsing all this, has been guided also by the concept of God forged in the history of Israel and recorded in Scripture: the God who knows and loves and cares, the God in whose image we humans are made (as Thomas will say). Though he does not think of referring to God as ‘a person’, or indeed to us as ‘persons’ – that modern concept had not yet entered the vocabulary – Thomas certainly conceives of God as an agent, with mind and will, and one who cares.
This set of questions culminates in the claim that God is ‘bliss’, beatitudo (ST 1.26). What blessedness means, Thomas thinks, rewriting the biblical notion in the light of Christian Platonism, is ‘the perfect good of an intellectual nature, whose it is to be aware of its own completeness in the good it possesses, and to whom it is appropriate that what good or evil happens to it it is mistress of its own activities’ (ST 26.1). At the beginning of the second part of ST he will return to this theme: ‘There is bliss in God, because his very being is identical with his doing, thereby enjoying no other than himself’ (ST 1/2.3.2). God’s being is his doing: not the doing which is creating the world, but the doing which is the life internal to the Godhead. The doing which is the being that is the divine bliss is precisely not the doing which is bringing the universe about but simply God’s being as God is. ‘God is bliss, by nature, Deus est beatitudo per essentiam suam’ (ST 1/2.3.1 ad 1). ‘The divine essence simply is bliss itself’ (ST 1.94.1).
God as Trinity (ST 1.27–43)
The consideration of God, as Thomas stated at the start (ST 1.2), falls into three parts: first, that which pertains to the divine essence (ST 1.2–26); second, what pertains to the distinction of the divine persons (ST 1.27–43); and third, what concerns the procession of creatures from God (ST 1.44–119).
For Thomas, as for his contemporaries, human knowledge of God has been established in three waves, so to speak: God as First Cause of everything has been discovered by the wisdom-seekers of the ancient world; God as Lord has been revealed to the people of the Law; and God as the Trinity has been revealed by Jesus Christ. The discovery of God has a history. On the whole, he seems to think, the process has been quite smooth. Of course, the self-revelation of God by Christ to his disciples far surpassed the self-revelation to Moses at the burning bush, and that, in turn, far surpassed the discovery of the beginning and end of all things by the ancient philosophers.
Difficult as it of course is, in the light of modern biblical exegesis, to approach the doctrine of the Trinity by way of assembling the New Testament data, that is the easiest way for us today. That is how Thomas proceeds in the Summa Contra Gentiles and in his commentary on St John’s Gospel. In the Summa Theologiae, however, he begins, not with the role of Father, Son, and Spirit in the history of salvation as recounted in Scripture but with the inner life of the Trinity, the ‘immanent Trinity’, as modern theologians call it. The focus is on the ‘processions’ within the Godhead of the Word and the Spirit (ST 1.27); the mutual relations these processions imply (ST 1.28); and the ‘persons’ that the relations constitute (ST 1.29). The treatment is so abstract and technical that one might be inclined to agree that future professors rather than ordinary students must be the intended readership. Tempting as it is to recommend reversing Thomas’s pedagogic order here, and go to the mission of the divine persons (ST 1.43), the last question in the sequence, we should resist.
Knowledge of the Trinity is required for two reasons (ST 1.32.1). The more important reason is so that we may have the right view of the salvation of humanity, accomplished by the Son who became incarnate and by the gift (or gifts: manuscripts differ) of the Holy Spirit. We might, in other words, fail to do justice to the roles of Christ and/or the Spirit in the dispensation of salvation. Thomas is well aware, as the discussion shows, of Arianism: the ancient heresy, always a temptation, to deny the full divinity of Christ by thinking of him as a creature, with of course a uniquely special role. He shows little sign of interest in so-called binitarianism, the belief that there are only two persons in the Godhead, involving denial of the divinity of the Holy Spirit. He knows about the Filioque (‘and the Son’): the phrase widely accepted in the Western Church by 800, asserting that the Holy Spirit proceeds from both Father and Son (‘double procession’); and the hostility of the Eastern Church to the doctrine (he thinks they are just wrong).
The other reason is to have a right view of the creation of things:
For by maintaining that God creates everything through the Word we avoid the error of those who held that God’s nature compelled him to create the world. By affirming that there is in God the procession of Love we show that God made creatures not to make up a lack in himself, nor for any reason extrinsic to himself; but out of love of his own goodness.
It may be the less important reason, though in fact Thomas repeatedly attacks the idea that God had to create the world, in particular to complete or complement his own being. Creation and salvation, Thomas wants to show, are grounded in the eternal, immanent activity of God. Thus, what may at first sight look, with the concepts of procession, relation, and person, an extremely abstract approach, entirely detached, turns out, as we get into it, to locate the realities of the world and the history of salvation in the light of the Trinitarian life of God. The historical event of the Word at the Incarnation and of the Spirit at Pentecost are manifestations in the created order of the eternal issuings within the Godhead which the divine persons are.
As Thomas says in a key passage, in which he knowingly makes an option, ‘everything is treated in [his version of] sacred teaching under the aspect of God, sub ratione Dei, either because it is God himself or because it is ordered to God as beginning and end’ (ST 1.1.7). It is not just a bird’s-eye view of Christian doctrine that Thomas offers, it is literally a God’s-eye view of everything, and in particular of the created order. He deals with the internal life of the Godhead first – the ‘immanent Trinity’ – because he wants us to see the world, and everything creaturely, as created through the Word and loved by the Holy Spirit.
Creation and evil (ST 1.44–49)
Thomas Aquinas is not the only Christian thinker who has emphasized the goodness of God and of creation, but it was his main contribution to the most serious crisis in the Catholic Church of his day. The six questions in the Summa Theologiae which Thomas devotes to the doctrine of creation culminate in refutations of the idea that evil is a reality (ST 1.48) and that there exists one sovereign evil in conflict with God as supreme good (ST 1.49). Though he never mentions them, he no doubt had in mind the doctrines of the vast number of dissidents in the Church whom we know as the Albigensians or Cathars. He was alluding to them when he denounced the Manichaean heresy as ‘more mistaken than even pagans are’ (ST 1/2.10.6). The respect for nature that Thomas finds in Aristotle, in other words, is far more congenial, simply because it is compatible with the religion of the Incarnation – which the heresies of the Cathars are not, as he would think.
Thomas presumably knew that the Dominican friars were founded to bring these ‘heretics’ back to orthodox Catholicism. (The heresy allegedly began in Bulgaria; hence its supporters in France were sometimes called bougres.) Albi in southwest France was one of their principal centres. ‘Cathars’ – a name given to them, not one that they chose – most likely originated from Greek katharoi, ‘pure ones’, first recorded in 1181, referring, no doubt ironically, to certain heretics in Cologne. An elite of devotees vowed to celibacy, to owning no property, to pacifism and vegetarianism, rejected the priesthood and the use of church buildings, and so on, which naturally greatly alarmed ecclesiastical authorities. In 1209, Pope Innocent III proclaimed a crusade that initiated decades of war, devastating Languedoc, with frequent massacres, culminating in 1243 when the Cathar stronghold of Montségur in the Pyrenees was captured – about the time that the 19-year-old Thomas joined the Dominican Order.
Thomas probably never met a Cathar. He must have heard of Moneta of Cremona (c. 1180–1250?), a professor at the University of Bologna, among the first to join the Dominican friars (Dominic died in Moneta’s cell in 1221). Dating from about 1241, Moneta’s Summa against the Cathars and Waldenses must have been familiar to him. In 1252, the Dominican friar Peter of Verona, inquisitor general of northern Italy, was assassinated by a Cathar and canonized by the Pope a year later as a martyr and declared heavenly patron of inquisitors.
The Manichees slip quietly into the Summa Theologiae. In connection with the question of the presence of God in everything, Thomas notes that ‘In the past there were certain people called Manichees who declared that immaterial and imperishable things are subject to God’s power, but visible and perishable things to some contrary power’ (ST 1.8.3). The crucial move against Manichaean dualism was to affirm the goodness of God and of creation.
15. Expulsions of Cathars from Carcarsonne, 14th-century manuscript
However, the idea of creation needed a great deal of explanation. Repeatedly Thomas explains what the doctrine excludes. Indeed, as he expounds it, the doctrine denies much more than it affirms.
God was not obliged or compelled to create the world – Thomas insists on this, again and again. ‘The first agent acts not in order to get something but to communicate his own completeness, which is his goodness’ (ST 1.44.4). The world is the result of God’s goodness, bonitas; ‘God’s bounty’, we might say.
16. Montaillou, one of the last strongholds of the Albigensians
Createdness is simply the relatedness of creatures to the Creator as source of their being: creatures are really related to God in the sense that we are totally dependent on God as the one who keeps us in being. God, of course, for Thomas, is in no way dependent on the world. Creating the world is an ongoing event, so to speak, that God does – but like all God’s doings, according to the principle of divine simpleness, creating as God’s doing is also God’s being (ST 1.45.3). The existence of the world, and of humanity, adds nothing to God, in the sense that it makes no difference to God – a radically non-anthropocentric doctrine.
Next comes a highly controversial issue (ST 1.46). Thomas assembles ten arguments, mostly from Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd, and Moses ben Maimon, in favour of the thesis that the created world has existed from all eternity. These arguments employ the notions of possibility, necessity, genesis, space, being set in motion, setting in motion, time, duration, complete and eternal duration. Thomas’s first concern is to refute these arguments, thus to show that the world’s always existing cannot be demonstratively proved (ST 1.46.1) – which does not mean, however, that it is a demonstrable conclusion that the world had a beginning (ST 1.46.2). Contrary to what many of his contemporaries thought, he takes ‘the same stand here as with regard to the mystery of the Trinity’: that the world began is a matter of faith, not something that can be proved. ‘It is as well to remember this so that one does not try to prove what cannot be proved and give non-believers grounds for mockery, and for thinking the reasons we give are our reasons for believing.’
Thomas next considers the classical doctrine of Gnostics and Neoplatonists that only one thing can emanate from the One (ST 1.47.1). It is a deep question, in the background the kind of mysticism which envisages the ascent to perfection as leaving separateness and variety behind to rejoin the One alone. Consistently with his insistence on the reality of finite things, Thomas does not accept any of this. The diversity of things has been put down to various causes, Thomas recalls. Democritus (d. 361 BC) and the ancient physicists, seeing only the material cause of things, put diversity down to matter alone, treating change as the result of matter in motion. Anaxagoras (d. 428 BC) attributed the distinctiveness and multitude to the concert of an agent with matter, an intelligence which sieved things from the mixture of world-material. And so on. Here, as so often, Thomas is simply quoting Aristotle, he did no firsthand research in support of his learned references.
Thomas then takes on the question of the reality of evil. Arguing with the support of Dionysius, that evil cannot be an existing being or a positive kind of thing but a certain absence of a good (ST 1.48.1) – one opposite is known from the other, as light from darkness – so what is evil from the concept of the good. But the good is whatever is desirable, such that every nature desires its own existence and perfection, thus the existence and perfection of anything has the meaning of goodness. It follows that by the word ‘evil’, malum, we mean ‘absence of good’ – privatio boni (ST 1.48.5).
The universe of creatures, Thomas goes on to say, is ‘better and more complete for including in it some things which can and do sometimes fall from the good without God preventing this’ – it befits providence to respect nature not destroy it, as Dionysius says – while Augustine reminds us that God is so powerful as to be able to bring good out of evil:
Hence many goods would disappear were God to permit no evil. For example, no fire would be kindled were air not spent, the lion would not survive were the ass not killed, and there would be no vindication of justice nor patient endurance to be praised were there no wickedness.
(ST 1.48.2).
The doctrine that any evil must always be an absence of good is an implication of the doctrine that everything is created by God and every created thing is intrinsically good. We must not give way to the temptations of Catharist disbelief in the goodness of creation. Thomas is only articulating a long-standing doctrine, which obviously needs a great deal of discussion. Moreover, the give and take within nature is one thing, with the lion killing the ass to survive, and so on – but is anyone’s virtue worth the price of another’s vice?
The discussion concludes with six arguments in favour of the idea that there is one supreme evil (ST 1.49.3). This hydra-headed error is rooted – ‘like other strange positions of the ancients’ – in their failure to consider the universal cause of the whole of being but only the particular cause of particular effects: ‘when they found one thing damaging another such as fire burning down some poor man’s house they concluded that the nature of the thing, fire in this instance, was evil’ – ‘but the goodness of a thing should not be assessed from its reference to another particular thing but on its own worth according to the universal scheme of things wherein each most admirably holds an appointed place’. And here again much more needs to be said.
Angels (ST 1.50–64)
The created beings to whom Thomas first devotes attention are the angels (ST 1.50–64). Of course, many religions acknowledge the existence of angels (‘messengers’ in Greek): they appear in the Bible, they play a role in Judaism, Islam, and the Mormon religion as well as in Christianity. In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council of the Western Church reaffirmed the existence in the universe of a spiritual realm of creatures distinct from human beings, vastly more numerous and incomparably superior in intelligence. Thomas employs the resources of Neoplatonism in a sustained analysis of what is necessarily implied in creaturely forms of life that are by definition bodiless. The Bible speaks of superhuman created beings that are occasionally sent as God’s intermediaries with humanity. Thomas’s concept of God would in any case make it a reasonable hypothesis that God would create intelligent beings that are not restricted by physicality: ‘There must be incorporeal creatures because what God chiefly intended in creation is to produce a goodness consisting in a likeness to himself’ (ST 1.50.1).
For anyone familiar with recent philosophical debates about personal identity, the discussion of the angels is like a grand thought experiment, an imaginative exploration of a possible world of pure intelligences. Thomas never discusses how many angels could dance on the head of a pin (if any one ever did!), but his considerations would delight the speculatively minded – as, for example, no two angels are the same in kind, each angel is its own unique species (ST 1.50.4), an angel can know bodies without sensing them (ST 1.55.5; 57.1–2), and so on. According to Karl Barth, however, the most eminent Protestant theologian of modern times, Thomas may well count as ‘the greatest angelogue of all Church history’, but his account of the angels is ‘a gigantic self-projection of the ego into an objectivity in which it thinks to find in the angel its desired and in the demon its dreaded superior alter ego, i.e. itself supremely magnified’ (in Church Dogmatics III/3, 1961). It would be fun to sort this out!
Human beings (ST 1.75–102)
Human nature demands distinct consideration by the theologian, Thomas declares (ST 1.75 Prologue), evidently regarding himself as a theologian though in no way reluctant to engage in what he must have known are purely philosophical arguments. Though, characteristically, he leaves it to the reader to see where the discussion is headed, we eventually reach the human being as made to the image of God (ST 1.90–102). Everything that he will go on to say, in the Second Part, about happiness, moral psychology, emotions, virtue, sin, law, grace, and so on, will depend on his account of the soul, as will also what he says, in the Third Part, about the Incarnation and the nature of the sacraments.
There is no better translation for the Latin anima than the word ‘soul’ so long as we remember that neither Thomas nor Aristotle (with the word psyche) believed in a ghostly entity hidden within the human body. For Thomas, the word ‘soul’ means the basic principle of life in living creatures (ST 1.75.1) Following Aristotle, Thomas argues that a soul, as the primary principle of life, is not itself a body but that which makes a body alive. The soul is not some invisible entity inside the body; but the ‘form’, or the visibility as we might almost say, of the body. Neither Thomas nor Aristotle sees the soul as connected with inwardness; to the contrary, the soul is naturally public. The soul is how the creature is alive, interacting with things around. This way of existing is marked by sensitivity to the surroundings and readiness to move one way or another. Instead of the venerable conception of the human soul as an exile from a spiritual other world, Thomas favours an Aristotelian notion of the human soul as an aspect of a living organism native to this material world.
In modern philosophy, having a mind and being a person are often regarded in terms of the ‘subject’, the ‘I’ as privileged locus of selfconsciousness, facing objects out there (including other human beings), apprehended initially as impressions, which we then assemble into intelligible shapes. For Thomas, on the contrary, the objects out there in the world become intelligible as the person’s intellectual capacities are realized. Instead of being objects out there, either opposing us blankly or inertly waiting for us to look at them, so to speak, it is the world that has priority, in the sense that objects elicit and configure our cognitive capacities: ‘With us, to understand is in a way to be passive’ (ST 1.79.2). Quoting Aristotle, ‘mind is a sort of susceptibility’. Certainly, we have to ‘assign on the part of the intellect some power to make things actually intelligible’; but this capacity, which we are inclined to regard as primary or all-important, is, according to Thomas (as to Aristotle before him), secondary. As our cognitive potential is actualized by potentially cognizable objects, we may say that our intellectual capacities actualized are the world’s intelligibility enacted – or, according to the neat Latin version of Aristotle’s axiom: ‘intellectus in actu est intellectum in actu’.
In contrast with philosophical views of the mind/world relationship that presuppose a gap between our minds and things in the world, Thomas develops Aristotle’s claim: one comes to know something by the mind’s becoming one with the object of thought. The mind’s projecting or imposing a structure of intelligibility upon inherently unintelligible objects in the world gives way to a model of how knowledge happens which is participational: the mind assimilates and is assimilated to the object, rather than simply depicting or reflecting it. The structure of elements that constitutes a thought, and the structure of elements that constitutes something that is the case, can be the very same thing. In effect, knowledge is a kind of assimilation: the object becoming intelligible is one’s intelligence being actualized. Knowing is a new way of being on the knower’s part; being known is a new way of being on the object known’s part. For Thomas, meaning is the mind’s perfection, the coming to fulfilment of the human being’s intellectual powers; simultaneously, it is the world’s intelligibility being realized.
Philosophers are unlikely to be persuaded merely by Thomas’s Aristotelian axiom: ‘soul is in a certain way everything’. His confidence that things really are as they show themselves, that there is no veil between the world and our minds, matches his belief in the world’s belonging to God. What shows itself is the case. There is a certain fittingness of world to mind, of entity to intellect, convenientia entis ad intellectum. Our experience of things is not a confrontation with something utterly alien, but a way of being the world to which we naturally belong. We are inclined to begin with the mind, asking how our mental acts ever hook up with the world outside. In contrast, Thomas begins with the world, with what is the case, external objects which evoke intellectual activity on our part, and thus actualize the capacities with which we are endowed.
We assume that the objects of our knowledge remain totally unaffected. To be known, for an object unaware of it, is as if nothing had happened. On Thomas’s view, articulating as it does the doctrine of creation in terms of the metaphysics of participation, the object, in being known by the subject, is brought into the light and to that extent its nature and destiny are fulfilled. It is easy to see how our minds are affected, by absorbing what comes to view in the world. But for Thomas it makes sense to hold that, even if there were no human minds, things would still be ‘true’ – in relation, that is, to God’s mind. He does not look at the world and see it as just what is the case, in itself; rather, he sees the world, and things in it, as destined to a certain fulfilment, with appointed ends, modes, and opportunities. It is not too much to say that, for Thomas, as for Aristotle, the forms embodied in the natural world attain an altogether higher level of reality in our minds – because, as already for Aristotle, the world constitutes an intelligible whole in virtue of its dependence on the divine mind.
When he comes to consider the notion of conscience, it is no surprise to find, Thomas denies that it is, properly speaking, a faculty, as we tend to think today; rather, conscience is ‘applying our knowledge to what we do’ (ST 1.79.13). Conscience is not an inner voice addressed to the individual but an exercise of practical reason, in principle open to discussion. Thomas even thinks of conscience, etymologically, as con-scientia: ‘knowledge with’, as something that is shareable, not something essentially ‘private’.
The whole series of questions on the nature of the human soul (ST 1.75–89) culminates by considering the cognitive situation, so to speak, of the ‘separated soul’, anima separata. For Thomas, as we should expect by now, it was for the human soul’s good that it was united to a body and that it understands by turning to sensible images (ST 1.89.1) – there is nothing regrettable about our being embodied and our minds being dependent on the visible, sense-perceptible world. Once again, Thomas takes the opportunity to confirm his repudiation of neo-Gnostic suspicions of this world and the body.
On the other hand, ‘it is possible for the soul to exist apart from the body, and also to understand in another way’ (ST 1.89.1). What is to be said about the minds of the saints in heaven, engaged in face-to-face vision of God? Thomas denies that they understand by innate ideas (species) or by ideas retained from their previous condition – rather, the souls in heaven ‘understand by means of participated ideas resulting from the influence of the divine light, shared by the soul as by other separate substances (the angels), though in a lesser degree’. In short, as soon as we are dead ‘the soul turns at once to what is above it, nor is this way of knowledge unnatural, for God is the author of the influx both of the light of grace and of the light of nature’ (ST 1.89.1).
As the First Part moves towards its end, two salient themes should be mentioned: the moral agent as made in the divine image and the theory of double agency.
The Book of Genesis 1:26 is of course the starting point. There is a sense in which the whole world is after God’s image, but, Thomas insists, only intelligent creatures are properly speaking made to God’s image (ST 1.93.2). It is in virtue of our intellectual nature that we are said to be in God’s image (ST 1.93.6). The divine image is found in everyone, including women (it evidently needed to be said) (ST 1.93.4). The image of God is realized in us, in its fullness in people who are saintly, in our actually knowing and loving (93.7). We might say that, for Thomas, a human being images God dynamically, in the event of worshipping.
Divine government (ST 1.103–190)
Largely from Dionysius Thomas has a strong sense of the Platonic tradition of the ‘self-diffusiveness of the Good’: every being tends, by the inner dynamic of its act of existing, to overflow into action, action that is simultaneously self-manifestation and selfcommunication. This natural tendency to self-giving and thus to interacting with others is a revelation of the natural ‘generosity’ that characterizes the creative act of being itself. In other words, causing is always on analogy with the individual’s interacting in an endless number of ways with things and bringing things about. Thomas was familiar, through his reading of Aristotle, with the world picture, attributed to the 5th-century BC philosopher Democritus, according to which our world and the kinds of beings in it arise from the collision of atoms whirling arbitrarily in a void. For Thomas, as for Aristotle, the world is conceived teleologically: things fit together, in a multiplicity of ways, forming a kind of hierarchic community.
Whether cooperation is necessarily founded on competition, even in conflict, is the question. The three arguments that Thomas considers go as follows: (1) if God is active in everything that acts, his action surely suffices – it would be redundant for any created cause to act at all (‘occasionalism’); (2) if an action of a creature issues from God working in the creature, it cannot at the same time issue from the creature (one action cannot issue simultaneously from two agents); and (3) God may be said to bestow on creatures the power to act but is not further involved in their acting (a form of deism).
This takes us right to the heart of Thomas’s theology. ‘Lord, thou hast wrought all our works in us’, he often quotes (Isaiah 26.12) – which he serenely takes (e.g. at ST 1.105.5) as excluding all competitiveness between divine and human agency. On the other hand, when he speaks of ‘cooperation’ between creatures and God, he frequently alludes to the picture of two rival agents on a level playing field, ruling it out – yet seeming to recognize that this is a strong temptation. For Thomas, it is the mark of God’s freedom, and ours, that God ‘causes’ everything that we humans do in such a way that we ‘cause’ it too. But Thomas is well aware how difficult it is to keep hold of this thought. If the action by which an effect is produced proceeds from a human agent, we are tempted to think, it surely does not need to be attributed to God as well. When a thing can be done adequately by one agent, it is superfluous to posit another: either God or the human agent does whatever it is. If God produces the entire natural effect, surely nothing is left for the human agent to do. Such are the bewitching thoughts Thomas seeks to dissolve. As he quite flatly asserts, there is nothing to stop us from thinking that the same effect is produced by a lower agent and by God – by both, of course, in different ways. Easy to say, one may object; not so easy to follow through.
Yet, for Thomas, it is always by divine power that the human agent produces his or her own proper effect: that is the doctrine of creation. It is not superfluous, even if in principle God can by himself produce all natural effects, for them to be produced by us as causes. Nor is this a result of the inadequacy of divine power, as one might be tempted to think. On the contrary: it is the gift of divine goodness (bonitas = bounty). According to the doctrine of creation, God wills to communicate his likeness to things not only so that they might exist but also that they too might cause in their own way.
Our reading has been very selective. We don’t know what Thomas hoped his students would take away from the First Part. The salient points may be summarized as follows.
17. Thomas Aquinas’s handwriting
Much is truly said about God in philosophy but, according to Christian revelation, human desire for happiness can be fulfilled only in union with God; there is no disharmony between philosophy and theology, to the contrary, faith fulfils reason, the legacy of ancient Greece can and should for the most part be welcomed into Christian theology. God’s existence is neither self-evident nor purely a matter of faith. God is ‘the One who is’, as revealed to Moses at the burning bush. God is not a being of any kind. God is under no compulsion to create; the world is sheer gift. Creatures such as human beings are endowed with reason and free will, made in the divine image, are genuinely agents of their own moral achievements – and in no sense in competition with God.
This takes us to the Second Part of ST: ‘the movement of the rational creatures to God’, the moral life, as we may say, as a journey into sharing divine bliss.