Chapter Ten
Chapter Ten
St. Thomas’s Influence Today
There are today two classes of people who take an interest in St. Thomas: the historians and the philosophers; those who treat him sympathetically as a giant of the past, and those who find him still an active force. Or, to borrow a metaphor from M. Thibaudet, there are those who regard his work as a beautiful waterfall, and those who wish to utilize its energy.
With both classes, it is evident that St. Thomas has come into his own. One general reason for this revival is that the twentieth century is doing for medieval philosophy what the nineteenth did for medieval art. Both are parts of the same great movement, and their comparison is instructive and might make us apprehensive. The revival in art brought about by Chateaubriand, Montalembert, Ozanam, Victor Hugo, Cartier, and Viollet-le-Duc was a sham. Then the error was acknowledged, and we drifted into Modernism. A parallel movement in philosophy, it will be argued, is leading to the attempts of the neo-Thomists, imitators of the thirteenth century, but with no more future than has the neo-Gothic in architecture. St. Thomas for them is merely an individual belonging to a forgotten century.
This, we submit, is where the comparison fails. Beauty is concerned primarily with external expression. If it were only a matter of the unchanging element in art, we could do today what was done at Chartres and in the Parthenon, in the days when men cared less about novelty, or when these works were in their infancy. Witness Rodin, Bourdelle, the brothers Perret and M. Le Corbusier. Now philosophy, too, has its substance and its external expression, and we are ready to make admissions about the latter, which some, perhaps, would not expect from us. But the substance is of the utmost importance, because here it is no longer principally a question of a state of mind, as in art, but of objective truth: not the free expression of one’s own idea of reality but of reality itself.
Those who look upon philosophy as a sort of “work of art” might argue otherwise and maintain that the parallel holds completely. For them, the entire effort of thought in interpreting the universe gravitates toward experimental science: beyond that, there is only “poetic creation,” which varies indefinitely with the varying imaginations of men and ages. We cannot here enter into controversy; we simply point out that this view is a denial of philosophy, because it arbitrarily deprives it of its proper object.
Philosophy is a study of the world based on the most exalted intellectual notions, which are abstracted from the things themselves; it is even more objective than experimental science. Therefore, it is not to be treated as a work of art. A successful genius in any branch of knowledge, and in any age, compels not only our admiration but our mental assent, which is the homage exacted by truth. We admire a work of art because it pleases us, or because its author is inspired. We assent to a philosophical thesis because it is true, and it makes no difference whether it comes from the thirteenth century or from the twentieth.
It is a bad omen when those who claim to represent their generation, and to be working for the progress of generations to come, disdain a great doctrine on the pretext that it is ancient. Those who really forge ahead are those who feel the support of the past behind them. “The teaching of the past,” writes Nietzsche, “is the teaching of an oracle. You understand it only if you are a builder for the future, and a visionary of the present.” The converse is equally true.
St. Thomas was a man of his times; he wished to serve his own generation, as all men should. This was not merely virtue but wisdom as well, even from the point of view of posterity. The thinker who claims to work for some abstract posterity will work feebly for all, like an artist trying to paint man in general.
Our Lord, whose mission was universal, was nonetheless a Jew, and a Jew of the time of Tiberias. A philosophy, even a universal philosophy, will not be fundamentally any the less a philosophical product of a certain epoch and of certain surroundings. And, just as our Lord’s being a Jew did not hinder him from being Son of Man, so the fact that St. Thomas’s philosophy was written between 1250 and 1274 does not prevent it from being fundamentally an eternal philosophy — the philosophia quaedam perennis that Leibnitz sought after.
In writing for his own age, St. Thomas has written for all ages, because he went below the foundations of his own age and found the eternal principles of things. Truth is “older than the idea which we have of it,” as Pascal says, and surely it is more lasting than we are, especially when, as in metaphysics, it is concerned with objects outside time.
In fact, Thomistic philosophy in its youth and today are not contradictory. Those principles at which we marvel were once new; they seem rather arid now, because they have lost their bloom.
The truth contained in ideas derives its cogency from reality itself, and reality from God himself, so that, indirectly, truth is from God, and therefore defies the ravages of time. That which is lasting in the realms of reality is lasting also in true thought, and the true thought of the future will find it again. Hence, to disdain any truth is to offend against that eternal activity ever at work in the world of things, and in the human mind.
We need to take up again this ancient wisdom, which is at once the most humbling and most ennobling of creeds. Never has man so scorned human authority as he does today, when he has rejected that of God. He repudiates tradition and all teaching, and is a slave to every fleeting attraction, because he will not be the free servant of truth.
Indocility of this kind was foreign to St. Thomas’s character. He made use of the past, as something eternally present, which furnished him with the elements of a new teaching. His great interest to us is due to this fact that he satisfied the needs of his own age by borrowing from antiquity. With equal loyalty, should not we be free to do the same?
At certain epochs, and particularly, I suppose, in the days of Descartes, Thomists sincerely believed that they had the right and duty to modify the Thomist system in its very foundations, in order to bring it into line with newly found needs. We may praise their broad-mindedness, but, insofar as they changed its object, they gave way to weakness, by allowing themselves to be overpowered by the intellectual activity of their age, when their principles were quite sound and merely needed adapting.
Thomism suffered in those days because its adherents, while holding its externals, never bothered to consult its author, or to be guided by his principles. The scholastic method, which never restricted St. Thomas, because he used it as a method, and not as a strait-waistcoat, began to paralyze the brains of his followers. They deferred to his authority without mastering his thought, and there can be no living philosophy without such mastery.
Hence, the modern revival of Thomism must be a renovation, and an effort to go deeper into St. Thomas’s meaning. The revival may not as yet be firmly established, but it is still being attempted, and that is a sign that the philosophy bears the mark of continuity that we claim for it. Give a thing to time, says Carlyle, and, if it prospers, it is a good thing. This is even a truer test when a thing revives, after being spoiled by its misguided guardians.
The chief objection that is brought, sincerely or otherwise, against the possibility of a revival in Thomistic philosophy is that this philosophy is based on a now discredited idea of the world, and on cosmology, physics, and even psychology, which science will no longer endorse. It is geocentric and anthropocentric, which is quite opposed to our modern conception of our position in the universe. It is solidly realist, whereas the prevailing philosophical current is idealist and nominalist.
The same objection is brought against Christianity itself, the dogmas of which are said to depend upon the same narrow conception of the universe. In both cases, the error is due to lack of knowledge. Sometimes with the best will in the world, and often with great feeling, these objectors falsify everything, because they merely skim the surface. As Albert the Great would have said, “They blaspheme what they do not know.”
A noted French physicist, in a preface that does him no honor, speaks of Christianity and of science in terms that are simply silly. It would make him blush to tax him with them in serious company. Less trivial and obviously sincere is M. Pierre Lasserre, who comes to the same conclusion in his Ernest Renan. But his presentation of Thomism is invariably incorrect. How, then, it may be asked, can his conclusions be of value or his criticism well founded? Criticism is our strong point nowadays; indeed, it is our only one. It has great value, but not when its basis is wrong, and in the present case, it obviously is so.
It is not true that Thomism, much less Christianity, depends on a defunct theory of physics or cosmology. We have proved this of Christianity elsewhere,39 by a simple exposition of its doctrines in the light of current thought. As for Thomism, it is beyond the scope of this book to discuss the problem in all its details, but the following summary should prove sufficient.
Thomism, as a philosophy, is essentially metaphysical. Cosmology and physics, not to mention working hypotheses in psychology (which are classifications rather than parts of a system), are not part of its essential makeup. It is obvious that the geocentric theory will greatly affect the way a thirteenth-century writer expresses his doctrine, but it is elementary criticism to distinguish between the fundamental ideas of a metaphysician and the means whereby he expresses them — those accessory facts which inevitably present themselves to a thinker, because of the ideas common to an age, which color the thought of the individual.
Metaphysical doctrines go through two phases. At first, they are in the mind, in a pure state, but lacking all coordination with experience, and therefore incommunicable. The second phase is a sort of individuation, when the idea is mingled with a heap of notions derived from experience, and true, more or less, according to the state of experimental knowledge. This may somewhat tarnish the original idea, but it does not destroy its truth in its own order.
I might express the notion of providence by saying that God directs atoms as well as souls. Now, the fact that the atomic theory is no longer held does not invalidate my notion of providence. And if I use the theory of atoms in my proof of providence, as St. Thomas uses the sun, “the source of all heat,” my proof will not be rendered invalid because the theory of atoms has given way to a theory of force. Such a conclusion would show ignorance of the very nature of a metaphysical problem and of the method of solving it.
M. Pierre Lasserre imagines, as others have done, that “the ideal world of Plato or of St. Thomas is only an idealization of the world as it appeared to them, with their scanty scientific data.” Nothing could be further from the truth. The ideal world of St. Thomas (we may leave out Plato, whose true position is still uncertain) is an agglomeration of the necessary data of all experience, even the most elementary and, therefore, most stable. It does not depend, therefore, on the progress of experimental knowledge, but simply on the progress of the mind.
When we are given as an example the theory that man is the principal end of creation, we must not treat it as a metaphysical theory, but as a belief founded on limited experience. What is metaphysical, and therefore as valid now as then, is that matter is ordained to form, body to soul, as the less to the greater, and the partial to the total, which is its ultimate end.
We admit that, in the Middle Ages, knowledge was represented as a unity; hence its beauty. In every progressive age, the attempt at unification begins anew. But the unity reached is always provisional, like the unity of a body and its daily nourishment; it is not of its essence. It is much more a link for connecting minds, and methods of exposition; it is not properly a unity of doctrine.
Further, it is certainly not to this kind of unity that we refer when we praise the synthesis of St. Thomas. A complete synthesis, comprising all experimental science, will always be, absolutely speaking, an impossibility. A relatively complete synthesis will require restating every twenty years. But a metaphysical synthesis is quite another thing, and on a different plane. It is not unrelated to the other, and therefore there is, and always will be, the possibility of restating the ancient doctrine. But the doctrine will be just the same, with merely a new presentation and a new line of development.
We may add that, while St. Thomas certainly made use of the science of his day, he often shows his aloofness from and even mistrust of theories, which he realized were only a temporary vogue. Even when he makes no such proviso, his cautious language, his general principles, his concern with first causes and unconcern with contingencies make it equally clear.
Secondly, it would be wrong to imagine that this physics and cosmology, so oddly out-of-date as a whole, is therefore worthless. The great writers of antiquity have not labored in vain. In their errors about facts, and in their maladjustment of true data, there are flashes of true genius, intuitions that modern science has confirmed from a different standpoint and expressed in different, although closely allied, form.
In particular, St. Thomas’s metaphysics of God is believed by some to depend on out-of-date ideas. This is easily disproved. After what we have said of metaphysics in general, the following should be a sufficient defense. To St. Thomas, the universe, created by God, is absolutely and wholly contingent, in its form, duration, and being. He held the possibility of an eternal, solitary God or, on the other hand, of an eternal world. He held likewise that the world could have been created quite different from what it is, with entirely different laws. Now, he could not have maintained that the world was contingent in this way, especially in its form, if he had begun by deriving his God from the creature.
Voltaire’s ironic epigram, “It is said that God created man to his own image: man has retaliated,” is applicable to Deism, or to the various emanationist forms of Pantheism, but not to St. Thomas’s conception of God. He places the divine essence far above forms subject to time, and even grants that “God has no essence.”40
Again, the problem of the relations of faith and reason is treated in the Thomistic synthesis, principally as a metaphysical problem, as its very nature necessitates. In the realm of contingency, then as now, our data can be accepted as data, on the supposition that it is revealed.
To sum up, the essential part of the Thomistic synthesis does not belong exclusively to any particular era, and may therefore just as well belong to our own. Once granted that metaphysics is an autonomous science, and granted the principle of faith, we may hold it without fear of being behind the times. It does not deal with something time-bound, but with something that rises free of time and dominates the whole course of time.
This does not mean that we must adopt St. Thomas’s didactic method. After all, it was not his creation, but the custom of his times. He perfected it in many ways, but only relatively to his times. Again the problems that he proposed and his particular point of view were governed by the stage of knowledge at the time, by his audience, and by his controversies. These are only a covering or shell; they are not the fruit.
The fruit itself would be of the utmost value in these days, when, despite our pretensions, we are so impoverished. These are times of topsy-turvydom, with all the wealth of materials: “Un rien infiniement riche,” as Paul Valéry says. Chateaubriand, even in his day, denounced “the invasion of ideas, following upon the barbarian invasion.” A modern German philosopher describes current thought as a “pathological interregnum.” Nietzsche calls it “a joyless, forceless critique.”
We could easily multiply such examples, but it is not necessary in order to bring home the fact that our philosophers, when we ask for bread, give us a stone. Their brilliant theories may open up certain avenues of thought; on the other hand, they many simply obscure the issue, and the net result is neither illuminating nor reassuring. Chaos rules thought and leads to a kind of triumphant failure. We find an eager curiosity about philosophical systems, together with disdain of the truth, or utter despair of ever attaining it.
It is not that we lack the men. We have plenty of theories, detailed analyses, penetration, and breadth of outlook. But we have no order, no general rules of the intelligence drawn from first principles or from the First Principle. We are “ever learning and never attaining to the knowledge of the truth.”41 These men speak wisely on occasion, but at other times, they leave the impression that to become a philosopher is to lose your reason. And judging by their supineness in making up their minds, they do not know themselves when they have spoken wisely.
In short, we are weary of thinkers and want a little truth. The crisis through which society is passing, and which makes every thinking man apprehensive, is fundamentally a crisis of doctrine. If the eye be faulty, what chance have the limbs to act well? There is a worldwide cry for peace; peace implies order, and order comes primarily from thought. And we have no thought wise enough and comprehensive enough to assist us.
The remedy is to be found in religion. We must renew our youth by a pact with God, as Faust renewed his by a pact with the Devil. But religion will help us only if it assumes an intellectual character. We must have a philosophy, and what better one than that which the Church has declared to be most suited to her teaching and tendencies? Thomism is not an archeological specimen, but a living force, capable of supplying the help we need.
St. Thomas was a master of order, a guide of minds, a wise man. In the midst of ever-shifting uncertainty, he found a firm foothold: his vantage-point was high enough to enable him to help a much wider public than that for which he wrote. To all our differences and serious disputes he applies the salve of truth; he lends to our resources the power of his broad and ever-adaptable synthesis. He is uncompromising only with regard to this framework and these general principles, without which the mind is unbalanced, and reality untruly centered.
Therefore, in advocating Thomism, we are not advocating a return to the thirteenth century. We are urging men to follow the right path, not to retrace their steps. We have wandered far from the right path, and a return to it is not a retrograde step.
Nowadays, every system starts ab ovo.42 We, however, are not urging a repetition of St. Thomas’s philosophy, and, if there are, here and there, signs of such a tendency, no sensible person, nobody with any breadth of mind, should be misled by them. Every religion has its true worshipers and its fanatics. There is a kind of worship that makes us want to blaspheme, but it would be silly to do so, for we would thereby fall into the very excess that we deplore. No, the true way to be a Thomist is to seek truth, wisdom, enlightened religion to an extent ever more ambitious and never satisfied. That is to be a Thomist of the school of St. Thomas himself, and not of the dabblers in Thomism.
The notion has long since been dead and buried that to be a Thomist means to belong to a past age and to be out of touch with one’s own. Every lover of philosophy can find in Thomism something to think about, some weapon, some instruction. And he may even find that it solves the difficulties that lie at the very roots of knowledge.