Chapter One
Chapter One
St. Thomas’s Epoch
The beginning of the thirteenth century has often been described as a time when revolutionary forces, coupled with confusion of mind, were on the verge of misguiding Christian thought and Christian civilization. Père Mandonnet, O.P., in his classic Siger de Brabant, has drawn a vivid picture of that epoch, but it is enough for our present purpose to point out its salient characteristics, as these are sufficiently striking not to need further amplification.
The West was Christian to the core. Christianity had been present when its civilization was formed, had watched over its infancy, inspired its institutions, and nourished its thought with doctrines derived from the Gospel by centuries of development. It thus possessed the greatest possible treasure, a doctrine of life, in those days which our modern topsy-turvy civilization likes to refer to as the “Dark Ages.”
Then a crisis arose, comparable to that of the sixteenth century, and due to similar causes. It was a question, then as always, of growth; and the growth of institutions, like the growth of a child, is beset with dangers. If it goes wrong, we call it a decline, and in a society fundamentally sound but still unstable, and only imperfectly adapted to the general laws of human thought and experience, such a decline might well prove fatal.
Like the crisis at the Renaissance, this, too, was a return to antiquity. Greek thought and Greek ideas invaded the Christian West, by the introduction of Arab, Jewish, and Alexandrine philosophy. It was a breath of life, but it came as a cyclone; it was at once a medicine and a poison.
Aristotle became the new God. His writings, inflated by misleading commentaries, were inadequate in themselves, while their excessive naturalism, together with some particularly serious blemishes, threatened to lead Christian thought astray. And they had ardent followers in the schools, who were ready to push them to extremes.
Even the teaching on God was endangered, for Aristotle’s treatment of God in the twelfth book of the Metaphysics is misleading, despite its highly intellectual character. With great caution it can be explained in a Christian sense, as has indeed been done by St. Thomas, but even then, it is meager and wholly inadequate. God has no definite personality; there is no affirmation of providence, nor even of his freedom in creating. While he is admitted as the final cause, his efficient causality, if not openly denied, is at least made very doubtful.
Similarly, Aristotle makes the soul something above matter; it is “separate”; it comes to the body “from without,” as it were “by the door.” There is no certitude that it belongs to the individual, that it guarantees him a really spiritual and immortal life, that it makes him really responsible. He leaves it an open question whether morality is a mere whim, or corresponds to a divine order. Everything is vague and ambiguous enough to enable commentators, especially the Arabs, to interpret it in a sinister sense.
People began to be known as Aristotelians, followers of Averroes, Avicenna, Avicebron, and Maimonides, and their Christianity was at a low ebb. Under the aegis of “the Philosopher”1 and his followers, they disputed the most fundamental and certain of Catholic dogmas. The creation of the world in time, the divine government and Fatherhood, the individuality and immortality of the soul, free will, and moral responsibility gave place to an eternal world, an abstract God cut off from all communication with his creatures, a unique Intellect for all men, which alone was immortal, a strict determinism, physical and psychological, which ruled out all responsible action. That was knowledge. The Christian faith, the basis of civilization and the mother of all learning, could not be openly attacked, but there was always this bias, which was later to call forth St. Thomas’s most indignant protests.
“We have no doubt,” they would say, “that faith is true, but we are speaking as philosophers. As philosophers, we must say this; as Christians we may say that: a different point of view requires different conclusions; a different learning requires different principles.” They began to distinguish, as Jules Soury has done just as seriously, between “Oratory and Laboratory.”
Here were two contrary dangers to Christianity: the danger of ignoring the new learning, and the danger of apostasy. To reject the newly found wisdom was to make human reason apparently to contradict itself, while to give way to these forces of paganism and intellectual pride was to open the door to the most pernicious errors, and so risk disaster.
There was only one thing to be done: to take over the new doctrines and restate them: to refine the gold. Instead of casting aside the finest of all human philosophies, out of a kind of cowardly prudence, was it not better for Catholics to adapt it to Christian thought, by interpreting, revising, completing it, and thereby to make it their own? That was what St. Thomas set out to do.
But this way out of the difficulty, obvious in retrospect, was not then evident. It is almost the same thing to conceive a plan, and to be able to carry it out. It was so much easier to make protests, to react violently, and to go to the other extreme.
There was an influential school of mysticism, going back to St. Augustine and St. Bernard, steeped for the greater part in Franciscan spirituality, which opposed the Aristotelian and rationalistic movement. This school willingly went to the lengths of exalting faith to the detriment of reason and knowledge, whose very autonomy, methods, and principles were viewed with suspicion. Aristotle was suspect, and so also were those who tried to introduce his dialectics and his views into theology. Its horror at the excesses of the extremists was natural, but it was hostile to the very Renaissance as well, on the grounds that it menaced the ancient Faith.
What was the use of research and subtle argument when one could obtain certitude from the fountainhead? This pride of intellect could only unsettle people, bring up a lot of useless questions, and prepare the way for heresy and schism. There were plenty of names that could be cited in evidence of the danger due to these novelties; arrogant thinkers, who threw aside all authority, went so far with their rationalism as to seem to have lost all shreds of Christianity, and who claimed to prove and control everything, even God’s word.
So far had things gone that the relation between faith and reason was by now an insoluble question. St. Anselm and others had found it a stumbling-block. Peacemaker, mystic, philosopher though he was, equally at home in dialectics and in contemplation, Anselm could not settle the problem satisfactorily. Rational mysticism and theological rationalism fought it out in the dark.
They could not trace the passage from what was demonstrated to what was believed, from science to dogma, and were led to a total disregard for the one, which meant the virtual destruction of the other. They lost themselves in a maze of questions, in their attempt to clear them up; they clouded with doubt the very theses they prided themselves on proving; or, on the other hand, they rejected every kind of demonstration, even where it was admissible. Was there any way out?
Ecclesiastical authorities, appealed to by both sides, hesitated between stemming the tide of progress, and countenancing the scandalous abuses of Paris and of its Faculty of Arts, which threatened to corrupt the whole of Christianity. They compromised by indecisive measures. They condemned nothing absolutely, except the errors that were self-condemned, but they issued provisional prohibitions to check the evil, in the vain hope of better times, which seemed never to come.
There is nothing extraordinary about this perplexity. Human reason has ever been a source of danger to religious minds. Its very grandeur as the image of God, and its apparent close intimacy with us, renders it domineering, deceptive, and self-sufficient.
The Middle Ages were credulous, but they were young, and full of vigor and originality, just as prone to the sublime as to the ridiculous, unbalanced, and curious to a degree of presumption. They were used to the warm climate of faith, and were suddenly plunged into the cold air of philosophy. Would they have the stamina to resist the change? A badly managed crisis would leave them permanent invalids. They had to be saved without drastic measures, and the only thing to do was to resort to temporary alleviation, and wait for a better time.
They had to find out whether this Aristotle, taken as a whole, with due allowance made for his obvious lapses, was friend or foe.
Could they work with him? Was he a treacherous ally or an insidious enemy? If only he had been alone! But, alas, he had a following of Jews and Arabs who gave him an artificial glory and obscured his real greatness. The Pope made up his mind that, at all costs, the faithful must be protected. Aristotle was twice forbidden to be taught in the schools as an “author.” This did not anathematize him, and there was nothing to prevent his being read as a classic in private. Moreover, the ban was only temporary — “until he shall have been revised.” But who was to revise him?
At the moment when St. Thomas’s intellectual life began, the question was not absolutely decided. Albert the Great had undertaken “to render the works of Aristotle intelligible to the Latins,” and to assimilate their substance. He worked with energy, but he was not sufficiently orderly or methodical. He touched on questions without fully settling them; his expositions were confused; his textual equipment was incomplete, being taken from translations that were inaccurate and full of glosses. His knowledge was encyclopedic. His genius was rather to collect materials than to synthesize. In a word, despite his truly great personal fame, he was not the man to direct his age and lead the Church to safety.
Abelard, a few decades before, had prepared the way. He was a dialectician of repute, fully aware of the need of providing the Faith with rational weapons, by the introduction of philosophy. He became the pioneer of the new reform, but did it more harm than good in the long run. Although he had no lack of courage, he was not sure of his ground. His outbursts, exaggerated, it is true, by overzealous mystics, gave a bad name to his propositions and methods, while his better work was spoiled by its sketchiness. The real leader was yet to come.
The human race is ever restless; it goes through a cycle of phases. Ideas are conceived, brought forth, developed; then comes a crisis, and the cycle begins over again. In the history of Christianity, there are outstanding epochs when new forces providentially appear. By reason of their antecedent phases, whose import is only now recognized, they seem to extend far into the past, even as they exert an influence over the future. The progress of the gospel is an excellent example.
In the third and fourth centuries, the Fathers made a great effort to harmonize Christian doctrine with what remained of ancient thought, then on the decline — a real attempt to rediscover this thought, make it their own, and weld it into a complete synthesis. This is brought out by M. Aimé Puech in his fine Histoire de la littérature grecque chrétienne.
But those days were long past, and a turbulent period succeeded them. Intellectual life dwindled almost to nothing, and then revived. A long period of gestation and sporadic achievements ended with the century of St. Louis, and a renaissance was imminent. In this hour of greatness and hope, Aristotle, the Philosopher par excellence, returned. He was a dangerous tool and difficult to use. It was not enough that the work should be waiting to be done. “There must be some chance, something unforeseen,” says Nietzsche, “in order that a great man, in whom lies dormant the solution of a problem, may set to work at the appointed time: in order that he may, as it were, shine out.”
St. Thomas was providentially raised to fill this role, and he succeeded in spite of all opposition. Let us say something of his formation.