Part Four Paris (1269–72)
PART FOUR PARIS (1269–72)
When Thomas returned to Paris for an unusual second term as regent master of theology at the Dominican convent on the Rue St Jacques, he was coming into a maelstrom. During his absence in Italy, the academic scene had changed entirely. Before, it was the animosity between the secular masters and the mendicants that had to be contended with. Now Thomas himself and his teachings were being looked at askance. And numbered among his foes were Franciscans.
The bone of contention was Aristotle. The young masters of the Faculty of Arts embraced Aristotle with an enthusiasm that led to heterodoxy. Theologians began to have second thoughts about the growing influence of the Philosopher. After all, Aristotle had taught a number of things that were in real or apparent conflict with revealed truth. Since contradictories cannot be simultaneously true, either Aristotle was wrong or Christianity was. There would of course be little doubt where a Christian’s allegiance lay – or so it seemed. But the young masters of arts who came to be called Latin Averroists sought to adopt a mind-boggling via media. They appeared to want to accept as philosophical truth what was in conflict with what they as Christians believed.
Aristotle had taught that the world is eternal. Genesis speaks of the beginning of the world’s existence. The Latin Averroists seemed to want to assent to both claims. They were called Averroists because they accepted as good money the Commentator’s reading of Aristotle. Does every person have an intellect or is there but one intellect existing apart that thinks through each of us? Averroes adopted the latter view. But it was the immaterial activity of the agent intellect that grounded Aristotle’s proof of the soul’s immortality. On Averroes’ reading, personal immortality was not only unproved, but incoherent.
The Aristotelian tenet that each substance has but one constitutive form making it to be and to be what it is was thought to run afoul of the Christian belief that for three days the dead body of Christ awaited resurrection. What made it one body? What made it Christ’s? Perhaps we need a substantial form making the body to be the body, before the advent of soul.
These and other issues, involving as they did the religious and cultural underpinnings of the university, were far more than academic questions. Shortly after Thomas’s return there was the condemnation of 1270, which expressed the concern about the inroads of pagan philosophy on the understanding of Christian doctrine. An animus against Aristotle, and philosophy itself, was growing. Thomas as we have seen, and as his contemporaries knew, had found little to balk at in the doctrine of Aristotle. His attitude was rather one of grateful amazement at the reach of the human intellect even when unaided by the ambience of grace and revelation. His position was complicated by the fact that he was every bit as appalled by the Latin Averroists as any other theologian. Waffling on the principle of contradiction seemed an odd way for alleged followers of Aristotle to behave. Thomas had to steer a middle course between the Latin Averroists on the one hand and the understandably upset theologians on the other.
He began with two polemical works, On the Eternity of the World and On the Uniqueness of Intellect. The latter is a thorough analysis and rejection of the Averroistic reading of Aristotle’s On the Soul. Correctly read, Thomas argued, Aristotle’s doctrine on soul re-enforced the Christian belief in immortality. As to the eternity of the world, Thomas attacked those who thought this was an incoherent notion. He argues that it is not. The believer must hold Aristotle mistaken in claiming the world is eternal, but he does so by appeal to Revelation. God could have created an eternal world, however, so Aristotle’s position was not incoherent nor was there any philosophical proof that it was false.
Furthermore, the commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul which had occupied Thomas in Rome, became the first in a series of twelve commentaries, close and careful readings clearly meant to show that, correctly understood, Aristotle was one of the greatest assets of the human mind and consequently an invaluable support of Christianity. This did not mean that whatever Aristotle might have meant, we none the less can use his words, according them an irenic sense. Thomas was a serious man. It was the truth he found in Aristotle that won his allegiance in the first place. That allegiance strengthened as he subjected the text to the extended analysis that makes his commentaries a major factor in the history of Aristotelianism.
Everything I have mentioned thus far was on the margin of Thomas’s main task as regent master. The polemical writings and the Aristotelian commentaries did not emerge from his teaching. He continued his work on the Summa theologiae, he added to the fund of his Disputed Questions. But the very manner in which he did theology required the defence of Aristotle contained in polemical writings and effectively in the commentaries. In his remarkable, impressionistic book on Thomas Aquinas, G. K. Chesterton grasped the stakes involved in Thomas’s defence of Aristotle. Western civilization had reached a crossroads where obscurantism attracted some and an oddly dissociated conception of the truth of faith attracted others. Thomas was the champion of the compatibility of faith and reason and of their mutual re-enforcing, not as a slogan but as a policy pursued and illustrated in thousands of pages. His victory was not immediate – there was another condemnation in 1277 – nor was it complete. But it has stood as the fullest and most satisfying synthesis of faith and reason produced in the Christian era.