Chapter Eleven
Chapter Eleven
The Future of St. Thomas
We have already said that there are two classes of people today interested in St. Thomas: those whose interest is in the past, and those whose interest is in the present. We must now subdivide the latter class. There are the dilettanti who take it up today and drop it tomorrow. There are also the disillusioned, the desperate, who will make for any port in a storm. Not quite sure whether Thomism is true, they find in it a certain note of hope, and that is all they want; it is all that many people want in their religion.
All we need say of the dilettanti is that their Thomism is rather puerile, and that they merely stand in the way of the true revival. We cannot imagine that it has any future when we compare this flimsy, halfhearted support with the severity of its object.
We may show more sympathy toward the despairing, but they are equally disquieting. Philosophy and despair have nothing in common, since the latter lacks all guarantee of stability.
The real Thomist, then, will welcome only those who believe that there is an opening for Thomism, who are willing to help, and consequently prepared to submit to the conditions that we have still to enumerate.
It might be thought that a doctrine recognized as sound would compel universal assent by its own intrinsic merits, without being worked up into a doctrine that could no longer be called Thomism.
This objection I have often met with: it was put when I attempted to sketch in up-to-date language some of St. Thomas’s foundational writings. Some would prefer that the doctrine was left in its original austere garb, where nobody could use it, while others, with the best intentions, never face the facts.
It is impossible that Thomism should have a future — outside specialist circles — if left in its original medieval dress. If we merely put it forward without readapting and renewing it, it will certainly not have a lasting revival. A few willing oars may take it a few lengths, but ere long it will be swept out to sea. Our ideas have advanced, not in worth, but in the way in which they are expressed and discussed. We must be abreast of the times in this respect, even though our doctrine be identical with St. Thomas’s. It is as true of a system as it is of a man that he “becomes a novice at every stage of his life.”
If scholastics have been at fault, it is in thinking that Thomism could just go on indefinitely without a crisis — that is, without a fundamental readjustment, of the kind that nature effects in certain organs at the age of puberty, or after a serious breakdown. New conditions and new problems have, in the past, called for a change of point of view, which has never been effected. It was called for by Galileo, by Descartes, by Kant, and it looks as though it were surely called for now by Bergson.
St. Thomas is thoroughly medieval; his images and sense experience belong to his times. It is only his doctrine that can belong to our time, because it is outside all time. The defense of this latter proposition implies an acceptance of the former, since it is based on the distinction between what is alive and what is dead in a philosophy.
It is not enough to re-edit Thomism and defend it vigorously: we must rejuvenate it. It is only a fresh, living thing that can begin a new movement.
Since St. Thomas’s time, we have made progress, even if not always in the right direction. The Summa is not the sum-total of knowledge, nor a complete repository of eternal truth. Or rather, we may say that it is a complete synthesis, containing all knowledge virtually, and this knowledge can always be made more and more explicit.
St. Thomas’s writings do not even contain the whole of Thomism, any more than the Gospels contain the whole of Catholicism, or the grain of mustard-seed the whole kingdom of heaven. The Scriptures are a witness to religion, not the whole of it; they contain it in germ, not in its developed state. In the same way, Thomism is the development of an original germ; the germ is the principles and metaphysical theses. To be disloyal to these is to be no longer a Thomist. On the other hand, to strive to preserve the problems and solutions in their original form, in their original presentation, and their original relations to experience is to make it a barren doctrine, a sacred mummy, and not a living force.
This applies to any great doctrine. Its solutions, even when true, are always provisional. Time, which corrodes everything, soon plays havoc with many of them, and the synthesis has to be renovated. Metaphysics can never be adequately and finally expressed in temporal, ever-changing language, since it is outside time. Even the most lasting formulas are only so many stages at which we stop for a time, before going forward. To look upon them as the terminus would be a betrayal of our intelligence. There can be no end, properly speaking, to the pursuit of philosophy.
This does not imply that philosophy has no firm foundations. We cannot insist too strongly on the correlative truths: eternity of the essential, mortality of its incarnations; necessary assent to the ever-prevailing essence, necessary renewal of the successive forms and adaptations.
The true critic is he who takes into consideration this twofold necessity, who shows that he understands St. Thomas by rewriting him freely and by bringing him into touch with modern thought, by a genuine metamorphosis. A genuine metamorphosis is one that acts according to nature, like the production of a butterfly from a chrysalis.
Thomism, moreover, is not only a doctrine but also a method, or better, an attitude. We have portrayed St. Thomas at work. When he met with some new point of view, or with contradiction, or an adverse doctrine, he did not buttress up his own view. No, he examined his findings with discrimination, and seems more eager to assimilate than to combat them. Once he had modified and corrected them, he was prepared to use them for his own growth. His whole life shows this tendency; it is a consequence of his independence and breadth of mind. And surely we should be like him in this respect.
St. Thomas never meant his system to be exclusive or watertight. He wrote for all who think, in order to exchange ideas and to harmonize his thoughts with theirs. He expected his followers to do likewise and would have been horrified at their clinging to his apron-strings and refusing to move with the times.
Much still remained unsaid. Nothing that he said could express adequately the fullness and unfathomable depths of truth, but he at least had due respect for what he could not adequately explain. He counted on the collaboration of others for the development of various problems. The future might be able to find out what in his days was unknown.
Now what, in the light of modern science, are the gaps and shortcomings in St. Thomas’s work? It is not easy to say, and it will always be subject to differences of opinion, but I think that most people will agree on the following.
St. Thomas’s exposition is tinged with a kind of formalism due to his associations with Aristotle, and to the method prevalent in his day. Not that he has lost sight of reality, as so many did, for whom science became a mere logic-chopping and juggling with abstract terms. His sound judgment saved him from this. But even while his conclusions remain true, the concrete elements of the problem are not always put forward in an intellectual way. He is rather in the air, and his writings, for all their substantial richness, are presented in a way that seems rather stinted and sparse, and, for us who are realists and word-conscious, not very adaptable.
St. Thomas himself taught that it is the individual that is real, not the logical framework; that science must be in touch with the concrete, which is the end of knowledge.43 One does not easily evade a whole century’s persistent pressure. We know the stir that the discovery of Aristotle’s Organon caused in the Middle Ages. There is no question but that St. Thomas, were he alive today, would write in quite a different strain and marshal his proofs in quite a different manner.
It may be simply a question of style, but, after all, style is fundamental to the communication of thought. All medieval writers and their commentators have a tendency to fill up the gaps in their experience with a priori notions, and to substitute conventional symbolism for scientific observation. These may satisfy the dialectician, but they hardly take us very far into reality.
Nature is visualized in the schools as a series of cog-wheels, agents and recipients, causes and effects, whose interplay is determined by unchangeable essences and fixed qualities derived therefrom. This takes the place of the changing complexus, growing ever more unified as we probe it more deeply, which science reveals. It follows that, in a number of theses, even in the proofs of the existence of God, the physicist is at a loss to find where to classify his discoveries under the logical labels used in the text. Well-meaning thinkers have said as much to me, and I must, to some extent, admit it. The harsh and, to my mind, unjust strictures of
M. Le Roy, on the Thomistic proofs of the existence of God, while traceable in part to his personal views, are also due to this abstract formalism, which looks so like a mere matter of words, and must, for the needs of today, be made more positive. Nothing could be easier to do, in principle at least, since it only implies a change of externals. But it has not been done and must be included in the agenda of modern Thomism.
Again, it often treats of man’s various faculties and psychological characteristics, not as terms in analysis, but as distinct entities, thereby destroying the unity of life, and sometimes rendering their interrelations almost unintelligible. St. Thomas avoided this fault; he was far better informed than most of his disciples, even his modern disciples, and his genius intervened to save the situation, when it might have proved extremely dangerous for doctrine. Still, there is that impression: the method tends to confuse us and greatly to lessen the value of the conclusions.
Quite generally speaking, it must be admitted that the part played by abstract logic in the works of St. Thomas, as in those of Aristotle, is disproportionate. His method of exegesis is a striking instance in point and may serve as typical. If we take the Psalter, a work obviously compiled without any motive of theology or mysticism, we find that St. Thomas, by ingenious analysis, has discovered in it a whole ideological order, rather like the battles that Leonardo da Vinci imagined he saw in the crevices of ancient ramparts. However fallacious this procedure may be, it is quite innocuous; but once it is introduced into philosophy, only a genius of more than ordinary judgment can prevent it from having dire consequences.
The Thomism of today must give up these excesses of a method which is valuable in itself, but, because of these excesses, brings the doctrine that it expounds into bad repute. We want less abstract reasoning and more facts, and more control by facts; more abundant use of positive science, even in Metaphysics, and a fortiori in psychology and ethics, and above all in social ethics. St. Thomas’s anatomy of reality is wonderful; it is even too plentiful, for, as Michelangelo “invented muscles,” St. Thomas invents, or reinvents faculties such as the senses communis, appetitus concupiscibilis, and iracibilis. But the biology of reality, so to call it: the study of the environment, internal and external, of these elements has still to be developed, if we wish his admirable philosophy to be something more than a museum piece, and to become a living doctrine for all.
My fellow Thomists might be tempted to deem this criticism lacking in respect. I reply in the words of Péguy: “A great philosophy is not one that has no breaches in its walls, but one which has fortresses.” We must beware, lest a false respect on the part of its adherents should lead to a loss of respect and to abandonment on the part of those outside. We wish to spread St. Thomas’s philosophy as a living force in the future, not as a literary monument. Therefore, it must steep itself in modern life; it must follow the progress of science and modern philosophy, as far as these are sober, in order to bring about what must come someday — namely, a new Summa, summarizing contemporary thought, as St. Thomas’s Summa summarized the thought of the past.
For it is our ideal that the Thomism of the future should be characterized epoch from epoch, by successive syntheses, while retaining unchanged the continuity of its line of thought. Such a doctrine cannot perish, but it must be renewed periodically. Those who would “preserve” it are merely preparing for its fall. Only what is eternal survives; temporal things grow or die, or rather grow by partially dying in order to be born again, only what is immortal in them remaining unchanged.
The circumstances that gave rise to Thomism are dead, its problems are dead, its method and vocabulary are dead; but the doctrine is not affected by clearing out this debris. The mollusk sheds its outer shell and makes a new one; the shell is not essential to it. A great doctrine is not identical with any of its ephemeral creations; it depends on something much deeper.
Anyone not accustomed to deep thinking, who merely burdens his memory with a lot of ready-made formula, is lost as soon as the expressions are changed. Again, those who know a system only by its exterior forms, like the silhouette of a tree, are shocked or grieved if anyone strips the bark off their tree, and lops off its branches to make it grow better. But anyone who really understands the life of the tree will recognize it just as easily by its stunted branches, and by its sap, as by its full branches and foliage.
Fundamentally, Thomism, like any other philosophy, does not depend upon its ideological symbols, taken in a material sense, but rather, on the profound relations that they are used to represent. Matter and form, substance and accident are terms that might be discarded without modifying either the life or the results of Thomism. Not that I propose their abolition; all I mean is that the principle is not fantastic in the light of modern thought.
We need a Thomism that will be to St. Thomas’s work what the New Testament is to the Old — without, of course, the intervention of a divine Person.
Thomism will always be one of the great treasures of humanity, and St. Thomas will be its leader and its greatest example. His insight into things visible and invisible, and his incarnation of wisdom in things are a wonderful heritage. If, in the near future, it were adopted, it would greatly help in the restoration and harmony of thought, and the promotion of peace and order in practical affairs, and we should be able to await, but with more confidence, the realization of M. Gonzague de Reynold’s vision of hope: “We are living in a nebula, but a nebula which may become a star. If it should do so for an élite, it will be the first sign of reconstruction, the first hope of a new world.”