5 Summa Theologiae : Third Part
Chapter 5 Summa Theologiae: Third Part
The ‘whole theological enterprise’, which is the Summa Theologiae, reaches its ‘consummation’ as we turn to consider ‘our Lord Jesus Christ’ specifically as ‘demonstrating in himself the way of truth by which we are able to reach by resurrection the beatitude of immortal life’: ‘the everlasting beatitude which consists in full enjoyment of God’ (ST 3 Prologue).
Christological questions come much later in ST than Christian theologians nowadays would prefer. Obviously, Thomas could never have imagined that the Summa would be studied in isolation from biblical commentary, as has happened for centuries (and being repeated here!). Nor could he have envisaged students of Christian doctrine whose days were not shaped by regular worship, penitential practices, and so on. They regarded the liturgy as continuous meditation on, and even re-creation of, the Passion of Christ. Their daily lives were supposed to constitute an ‘imitation of Christ’.
The Christology of the Summa opens with questions about ‘the mystery of the Incarnation, in the sense that God has become man for our salvation’. A theologian, whose thought is so entirely focused on the prospect of face-to-face beatific communion with God, was never going to base his theology on the ‘historical Jesus’, as reconstructed by New Testament exegesis. Thomas rests his account on the beliefs of the ancient Church about the unity of divine and human natures in the person of Christ.
The Incarnate Word (ST 3.1–26)
There is little here that is distinctively Thomas’s own thinking. On the contrary, he takes us step by step through the moves that are standard in classical Christology. The mystery of the Incarnation ‘took place by God’s uniting himself in a new way to the created, or, more precisely, by the created’s being united to him’ (cf. ST 3.1). It is not so much that God came down to earth, so to speak; but that the world and humanity were taken into a new relationship with God, in virtue of whose immanent activity they exist. In the creature who is the man Jesus Christ, the entire created order is united to God: Christ being not only head of the Church but also head of all human beings (cf. ST 3.8.1–3). In being united with the divine, moreover, the created nature was ‘not destroyed but rather was preserved’ – a favourite theme: creaturely nature saved, healed, and enhanced, not diminished or annihilated (as one might have feared), by union with the divine.
One of Thomas’s favourite questions is whether – given that something has happened – how appropriate was it? Given that God has become incarnate, as Scripture teaches, the first question is whether it was ‘appropriate’ or ‘fitting’, conveniens (ST 3.1.1)? That the Son or Word of God has become incarnate may well seem strange, unanticipated, and even inappropriate – but since it has happened, evidently and undeniably, it falls to the theologian to deal with whatever unease the fact may occasion. For Thomas, the chief pleasure of theological argument lay in showing how becoming the ways of God’s dealings with the world turn out to be – once what has happened is apprehended and reflected on in a contemplative spirit.
Four reasons might make the Incarnation seem inappropriate: the divine should not be united to flesh; God always remains infinitely distant from the created realm; the divine should not become entangled with evil; and God, who transcends the entire universe, should not be enclosed in a woman’s womb. Obviously, these are exactly the sort of objections that would be felt by those – particularly the Cathars – who regarded physicality as radically evil.
For Thomas, however, it is most fitting to manifest the unseen things of God through things that are visible, for this is why the whole world has been created, as Paul says: ‘The invisible things of God are there for the mind to see in the things that he has made’ (Romans 1:20); more specifically, what has happened through the mystery of the Incarnation is that ‘the goodness, wisdom, justice, and power or strength of God are made visible’ (cf. ST 3.1.1), as John of Damascus says, the great theologian of the Eastern Church as Thomas thinks, placing himself, as he no doubt supposed, in the great tradition of the ancient Church. He goes on as follows:
Whatever is appropriate to a thing is that which fits it according to the definition of its proper nature; as reasoning is appropriate to human beings because this is appropriate to them insofar as they are by nature rational; but the very nature of God is goodness, as Dionysius says, which means that whatever belongs to the meaning of the good is appropriate to God.
Again, then, at the key moment, Thomas appeals to Dionysius the Areopagite, in effect to a deeply Neoplatonic concept of God as the sovereign good – goodness with the connotations of self-diffusive bounty:
Now the very idea of the good implies that it communicates itself to others, as Dionysius says. Therefore it fits with the idea of the supreme good that it communicates itself to the creature in the highest way. But, as Augustine says, this happens above all when [God] ‘so joins created nature to himself that one person happens from the Word, soul and flesh. Thus it is manifest that it was appropriate that God be incarnate’.
In brief, given the fact of the Incarnation, it is what we should expect, in retrospect – if, that is to say, with Dionysius, Augustine, and John Damascene, we already have an understanding of God as the freely and bountifully self-communicating sovereign Good. The God whose existence and nature has already been worked out by the great philosophers of antiquity (up to a point) from the existence of the world, and whose nature has been further disclosed in the history of the people of the Covenant (as Thomas would add), turns out to be the God who has united the created to himself in a new way (ST 3.1.1). Now that this event has occurred, it becomes possible and indeed desirable for the Christian theologian to work out how it was prefigured, however fragmentarily and obscurely, in natural religion and in the history of ancient Israel.
It has often been asserted that for Thomas there would have been no Incarnation but for Adam’s Fall, as the remedy for sin. However, it is only after considering the Incarnation as one more communication of divine goodness – beyond the gift of creation itself – that Thomas turns to consider the question whether the Incarnation was necessary to save sinful humanity from damnation (ST 3.1.2). Again he highlights the Incarnation as ‘advancing human beings towards the Good’, citing Augustine throughout, and culminating with the traditional patristic axiom: ‘God became man so that man might become God.’ Moreover, he refers to the ‘total participation in divinity which is truly the beatitude of man and the goal of human life, granted us by Christ’s humanity’. Only then does Thomas consider whether God would have become incarnate if the human race had not sinned (ST 3.1.3). He knows of conflicting views on this question. His teacher Albert the Great maintained that, even if Adam and Eve had not sinned, the Son of God would have become incarnate. On the other side, as Thomas must have known, his Franciscan colleague Bonaventure argued that our only source for knowledge about God’s will is Scripture; and everywhere in Scripture the Incarnation is related to sin. Given that the perspective in which Thomas sees the event of the Incarnation is that of the Dionysian conception of God as the freely and graciously self-communicating sovereign Good, there is surely a certain tension in maintaining that, but for the Fall, there would have been no Incarnation, and that the reason for holding this view is that ‘what comes in virtue of the sole will of God, beyond what is due to the creature, cannot become known to us except as delivered in Sacred Scripture, through which the divine will becomes known to us’ (ST 3.1.3). The principle that nothing can be known of God’s purposes apart from what is revealed in Scripture seems outflanked by the conviction that the event of the Incarnation is the greatest manifestation of God’s goodness (ST 3.1.1).
The first 26 questions spell out what one might call the metaphysics of the Incarnation: how the divinity of the Son of God should be conceived as really and truly united with the human nature of Jesus Christ in such a way that neither the divine nor the creaturely encroach on one another (ST 3.1–26). It has to be admitted that not only ‘beginners’ are likely to feel somewhat bemused by the arguments with which the many mistaken possibilities are relentlessly excluded. One argument after another demonstrates Thomas at work – how the divine and the creaturely are united in the incarnate Son of God is something (a ‘mystery’ he would have said) which can be illuminated only by steadfastly rejecting proposals that privilege the divine over the human or the other way round. For Thomas, as for any medieval theologian, it is by refuting plausible opposing theories that the correct view is reached. The true view is the one that remains when the mutually conflicting views have been rejected: what we should think is, so to speak, what remains when what we should not think has been demonstrated. Though aware of the temptations conventionally ascribed to the Egyptian heresiarch Arius (d. 336), denying the full divinity of Christ, Thomas is on the whole more concerned to affirm Christ’s true humanity. He even corrects his own earlier statement that Christ’s knowledge was so perfect that he never needed to discover anything; now, with the help of Aristotle, Thomas realizes that Christ had acquired knowledge like everybody else (ST 3.9.4, the only occasion in ST where he refers to himself).
Our Lady (ST 3.27–30)
Unlike some modern Roman Catholic theologians, Thomas treated ‘Mariology’, not as an independent field of study, but entirely in the context of Christology, between the questions on the Incarnation and the questions on the life, Passion, and Resurrection of Christ (ST 3.38–59). Famously, while conceding that the practice in other traditions of celebrating the conception of the Blessed Virgin should be tolerated, Thomas saw no need to hold any doctrine of her ‘immaculate conception’ (ST 3.27.2). Mary (like John the Baptist) was sanctified in the womb: he saw no reason to say that she was conceived free of original sin, uniquely so, in view of her destiny as Mother of God. This doctrine, defined in 1854 as a dogma that Roman Catholics must believe, developed first in England; it was propounded by John Duns Scotus in Oxford and Paris, then by Franciscan theologians in general; and was widely accepted in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, though long resisted by Dominican friars out of loyalty to Thomas Aquinas.
The Passion and Resurrection of Christ (ST 3.46–59)
That the Christian faith ‘glories especially in the cross of Christ’ emerges in the questions on the Passion (ST 3.46–52). The first question – ‘whether Christ had to suffer in order to redeem the human race’ (ST 3.46.1) – is a meditation on New Testament texts, insisting that God was not compelled to save humankind this way and that Christ chose to die. Of course, God could have redeemed us otherwise (ST 3.46.2) but this way demonstrated how much God loves humankind, provides an example of obedience, and so on (ST 3.46.3). Nothing here departs significantly from what any other theologian of the time would have said.
There is one noteworthy move. Asking why Christ’s death was by crucifixion – death on a cross – Thomas brings together several patristic motifs: the multiple symbolism of the cross as tree of life, as that on which Christ was lifted up, as the sign that embraces the whole world; with the wood of the cross anticipated by Noah’s wooden ark, Moses’ rod, and the Ark of the Covenant, and so on (ST 3.46.4) – rare evidence of the richly symbolic allegorical theology in which Thomas was immersed as a boy at Monte Cassino but which he usually suppresses. In retrospect, being crucified between two thieves was extremely significant – here Thomas quotes Chrysostom, Jerome, Leo, Hilary, Bede, Origen, and Augustine, in a tapestry of patristic allusions. Question 46 is concerned with what happened, but actually shows much more interest in looking for the significance of the event in cosmic-symbolic terms than in working out the facts (as we might now want to do).
According to Thomas, the man Jesus Christ was caught up in the beatific vision of God throughout his life and even as he died on the cross. He endured maximum physical pain and mental anguish, yet nevertheless continued to enjoy the beatific vision (ST 3.46.8; but see 3.9.2 and 3.10.1–4). Thomas cites John of Damascus, as always his principal authority in delicate doctrinal matters: Christ’s divinity ‘allowed his flesh to act and suffer whatever was appropriate’. The cry of dereliction (Matthew 27:46), Thomas will claim, means that God ‘abandoned Christ in death inasmuch as he exposed him to the power of his persecutors’ – ‘he withdrew his protection, but maintained the union’ (ST 3.50.2 ad 1). That is to say, the cry of dereliction is that of a holy man who, in his suffering, remains certain of the love of his Father. The psalm from which the cry comes needs to be read through to the end, when it will turn out that the psalmist foresees salvation in the midst of his affliction (Psalm 21 (22)).
Here, of course, Thomas is only repeating the traditional doctrine. It no doubt tests modern Christian sensibilities. It is one thing to read Psalm 21 through to the end: thus to put the cry of dereliction in a context which deprives it of the horror of believing Christ to be abandoned by God. It is another matter to interpret the abandonment as meaning no more than that at last the protection against his enemies, which he had enjoyed so far, was now withdrawn, but the test for modern Christians remains. In traditional language, Jesus was simultaneously a viator and a comprehensor: walking the earth while having the vision that the blessed have of God in heaven. For Thomas, the continuous union with God implied in the beatific vision is only an implication of the hypostatic union: if the divine nature and a human nature are to be united in the Incarnation then there can be no suspension or cessation of the divine nature’s being what it is without breaking up the union altogether. Finally, for Thomas, as in the tradition, Jesus is of the same divine nature as the Father – Christ’s union with the Father could not be dissolved; it is a logical issue: no person of the Trinity can exist deprived of relationship in communion with the other two.
19. Thomas Aquinas in The Crucifixion, 1437, by Fra Angelico, San Marco, Florence
The rest of Thomas’s discussion offers the same kind of interest: time and again he summarizes the pre-modern view, thus providing a neat starting point for comparison and sometimes for challenge.
The Sacraments (ST 3.60–90)
Thomas moves straight from Christology to consider the sacraments. He saw no need to discuss the nature of the Church as such. Scattered throughout the Summa, there are the elements from which a theological account might be created. In a good phrase Thomas refers to the ‘people of God’ as ‘the gathering of the faithful’, congregatio fidelium. He has plenty to say about bishops and the hierarchical structure especially of liturgical assemblies, often quoting Dionysius the Areopagite. He was of course well aware of the existence of heresy, schism, and other forms of internal dissent within the Church: Catharist clergy and laity remained a problem throughout his career. However, it was not until the 15th century, with the division of Western Christendom at the Great Schism (1378), that the nature of the Church as such emerged as a topic for attention in systematic theology.
Thomas finds it natural to move from the mysteries of the Word incarnate to the sacraments of faith, precisely because ‘they have their efficacy from the incarnate Word himself’ (ST 3.60 Prologue). For Thomas, baptism and the eucharist are primarily Christological events. It soon emerges that the sacraments of the Church, and particularly baptism and the eucharist, have been instituted for two main purposes: ‘to perfect human beings in what pertains to the worship of God according to the religion of the Christian life and secondly to counter the failures by sin’ (e.g. ST 3.65.1). The priority should be noted: perfecting the worship that comes naturally to rational creatures is mentioned before counteracting the effects of sinfulness.
The word ‘sacrament’ was introduced into Christian language by the African church father Tertullian (c. 160–220). The first great exploration of the concept of sacrament as such was undertaken by Augustine (354–430), another African as it happens: a sacrament is an action that, over and above its own distinctive and characteristic form, evokes some further reality beyond itself.
One distinctive contention relates to Thomas’s solution of the question much debated at the time (and since) as to whether sacraments are signs or causes – only symbols or actually agents of Christ’s intervention in Christian lives. Some of his contemporaries claimed, so Thomas says, that the sacraments ‘cause grace’ in the sense that God takes advantage of the occasion, so to speak, to bestow his favour. The rite of baptism, for example, would be the occasion for God to work in the soul, but the rite itself would only place the recipient favourably in the appropriate situation. The immersion in the font would not itself effect any change in the person who is being baptized. The rite would be purely symbolic – as an abbot is given a staff, a bishop a ring, when they are installed in office: staffs and rings do not make them abbots or bishops. In contrast, Thomas argues, as he thinks with ancient patristic authority, that the sacraments do not only symbolize a radical change in a person’s condition but also actually effect it. Of course it belongs to God alone to cause grace, to sanctify the individual, as he hastens to say; ‘grace is nothing else than a certain shared similitude to the divine nature’ – yet, he insists, ‘the sacraments of the New Law are causes and signs at the same time’ (ST 3.62.1) – ‘he saved us by the washing of regeneration’ (Titus 3.5). Thomas refuses to accept the choice between signs and causes. The rites bring about what they symbolize – sacraments effect what they signify. As sacramental events, baptism and the eucharist are not only moments when those present hope for a divine intervention to coincide with the rituals, as many at the time seem to have believed. Rather, for Thomas, the rituals accomplish what they also symbolize (cleansing in baptism, nourishing in the eucharist). In short, Thomas was rejecting just another version of the occasionalism which he repeatedly sought to exclude: immersion into the water at a baptism does not only symbolize rebirth; the bread and wine consecrated at the eucharist do not merely symbolize the body and blood of Christ, they really are. This is, in effect, another instance of the double agency, which was Thomas’s favourite theme: God’s agency is such that the human action is also really and truly efficacious.
Eucharist (ST 3.73–83)
The idea that the eucharistic bread and wine are transformed into the flesh and blood of Christ is already there in the Apologist Justin Martyr (c. 100– 65). More relevantly for Thomas, however, there had been a ferocious controversy, centred in Paris, since the late 9th century, over the distinction between something being present in figura and in veritate – ‘figuratively’ or ‘really and truly’. An anonymous treatise dated to about 1140, originating probably in Paris and perhaps by the Oxford theologian Robert Pullen (d. 1146), contains what reads like an innovation, referring to the eucharist: ‘not a transformation of a quality but, if I may say so, a transubstantio [sic] or transmutatio of one substance into another’. By 1170, this word is widely used, as a noun as well as in verbal and adverbial forms. The word first appears in a conciliar text at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), in the verbal form: ‘by divine power bread and wine having been transubstantiated, transsubstantiatis, into the body and blood’.
Fifty years later, Thomas is familiar with three different understandings of what happens at the consecration of the bread and wine at the eucharist: the substances of the bread and wine coexist with the substances of Christ’s body and blood; they are annihilated; and they are converted into the substances of Christ’s body and blood. He argues that the third of these meanings is the only acceptable one. He wanted to secure the presence of Christ’s body and blood in the consecrated bread and wine secundum veritatem, ‘truly’, not solely secundum figuram or sicut in signo, ‘figuratively’ or ‘symbolically’ (ST 3.75.1). Some have held the coexistence position, – Thomas dismisses this, without much argument, ‘as heretical’ (ST 3.75.2). Others held that the substances of the bread and wine are annihilated and replaced by those of Christ’s body and blood: this view is ‘false’ – it rests on a mistakenly materialist notion of movement (ST 3.75.3). Citing the 4th-century bishops Eusebius of Emesa (as he thinks), Ambrose of Milan, and John Chrysostom, thus deliberately reaching back to early Christian authorities, he holds that this ‘change’, conversio, unlike all natural changes, is ‘totally supernatural, effected by God’s power alone’, and may be called by a name proper to itself: ‘transubstantiation’ (ST 3.75.4).
However, the bread and wine after being consecrated and thus now being Christ’s body and blood still look and taste like bread and wine. In the jargon of the day, the properties or ‘accidents’ of bread and wine remain (ST 3.75.5) – but without the bread and wine of which they previously were the properties, existing now as accidents with no subject in which to inhere (ST 3.77.1–2).
Substance and accidents is of course Aristotelian terminology; yet Thomas explicitly bases his theory on the first theorem of the Neoplatonist Liber de Causis: the first cause can suspend a second cause, and thus keep accidents in existence in the absence of the substance of which they were the accidents (ST 3.75.5). In short, for Thomas, this unique phenomenon can be located with a degree of intelligibility only in terms of the Neoplatonic ontology of creation. Like the doctrine of creation itself, this understanding of eucharistic consecration completely surpasses anything Aristotle could have understood.
On the face of it, this account of transubstantiation seems to collude with the sceptical metaphysical doctrine that the way that things appear is no guarantee as to how they really are. Such a radical denial of the common-sense realism that things are normally just as they seem does not only depart completely from anything that Aristotle could have conceived but seems to threaten the confidence that Thomas consistently shows in the reality of the world that we inhabit. The properties of bread and wine that persist after the eucharistic consecration Thomas does not conceive of as in any sense illusions: a first possibility Thomas considers (ST 3.77.11). He compares the conversion of bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood with the creation of the world: ‘in neither one nor the other is there any underlying subject’ (ST 3.75.8). The word ‘conversion’ needs to be ruled out in creation, we cannot say ‘non-being is converted into being’. True, on Thomas’s account of what happens, the bread and wine in the eucharistic consecration are changed, ‘converted’ – into Christ’s body and blood: Christ’s body and blood are not (so to speak) created from nothing. ‘The common order of nature prescribes that an accident should inhere in a subject’; but there are plenty of examples of ‘a contrary arrangement to be quite in order because of some special privilege of grace’ (ST 3.77.1). Thomas cites the resurrection of the dead, the giving of sight to the blind, and, on another level still, ‘look how some people are granted special privileges beyond the ordinary law’. He has just quoted the case of the conception of Christ in the Virgin’s womb ‘without male seed’. In the context of this array of miraculous or otherwise privileged events, so Thomas thinks, there need be no alarm at the prospect of our having here, in the eucharistic consecration, for a special reason and in the order of grace, ‘accidents without a subject’. To the contrary:
Seeing that all effects depend more upon the first cause than on secondary causes, God, who is the first cause of both substance and accident, by using his infinite power, is able to conserve an accident in being, even when the substance which hitherto as its immediate cause was keeping it in existence has disappeared (ibid).
The properties of bread and wine that remain ‘free-floating’, so to speak, after the consecration, are accorded by God’s power the status of subsisting in being, displaying the condition of that utter dependence on God which is Thomas’s understanding of the doctrine of creation. If, as Josef Pieper suggested, the idea of creaturehood is the key by which ‘the basic concepts of his vision of the world are determined’, we may perhaps conclude that, paradoxically, Thomas’s account of the miracle of the eucharistic consecration only underlines what he owes to the doctrine of creation.
It is perhaps quite fitting that the Summa comes to a head in these questions on the eucharist (ST 3.73– 83). In comparison, the remaining six questions on the sacrament of penance seem, if not perfunctory, rather dutifully routine.
It was while celebrating Mass that Thomas had the experience that made him decide to stop writing. The daily eucharist would have been the centre of his students’ lives. It seems likely that having instructed them to see the Incarnation as one more instance of divine bounty, emphasized the true humanity of Christ over against likely crypto-docetic tendencies, and presented the sacraments as acts of Christ, Thomas would have been content.
Of course, much that Thomas discusses in ST let alone elsewhere cannot be taken seriously today. For example, he considers what newborn infants would have been like if Adam and Eve had not sinned: would they have had their full bodily powers the moment they were born (ST 1.99.1)? Would they have been adults from birth? ‘No Catholic will doubt that it could happen’, Thomas assures us; ‘but it is natural that on account of the very great humidity of the brain in infants the nerves, which are the mechanism of movement, are not fit for moving the limbs.’ Some animals have the use of their limbs as soon as they are born (Thomas reports what he has read in Aristotle, not what he has seen in the fields) – they owe this to the dryness of their brains. Thomas goes on, even more bizarrely, to consider whether females would have been born but for the Fall (ST 1.99.2). Aristotle, after all, regards the female as a male manqué – but for once Aristotle’s idea is completely ruled out by the Bible.
The chief argument Thomas has against the possibility of ordaining women as priests or bishops is that they are incapable of exercising or even signifying leadership in the natural order and thus equally incapable of doing so in the Church. How Thomas would have dealt with the many instances of women, as abbesses as well as queens, exercising leadership roles, we do not know: presumably he would have regarded them as honorary men.
Of course, there is much in a 13th-century text which we find completely unacceptable, or unintelligible, or so embedded in beliefs and customs of the time that we could not salvage anything of interest. On the other hand, a text composed by a great thinker in a very different intellectual environment from our own can, precisely because it is so alien or exotic, inform us of possibilities and open up perspectives in ways which allow us to become clearer and more secure about what we ourselves believe. Few readers are likely to engage in detailed reading of the Summa Theologiae, which would take years (as Thomas no doubt intended). But a summary of the salient features to which we have drawn attention in the last three chapters may offer a guide to the initiation into Thomas’s version of holy teaching. Of course, he expected his readers to continue to study Scripture and to take part in discussion of the questions that arise. It is worth repeating, in concluding this highly selective reading, that we don’t know how Thomas wanted his most famous book to be used.