Chapter Six
Chapter Six
St. Thomas’s Teaching
In order to discover the genius of St. Thomas at work in his teaching, it would be necessary to analyze the numerous works in which that teaching is contained; it would be necessary to give a more or less detailed and critical summary of it. That we have attempted elsewhere, for those interested in philosophy.27 We must, however, give a brief review of it, if only to show that, although he borrowed largely from others, and was supremely impersonal, St. Thomas’s doctrine was the achievement of his own original genius.
Pierre Duhem once remarked that he found in St. Thomas not so much a synthesis as a mosaic, and a “desire of synthesis.” To the real student of St. Thomas, this statement appears most unjust. The one thing that continually strikes him is his unity of plan, which is felt even when least looked for, like the unity of line and mass in a cathedral.
It is true that St. Thomas borrowed a great deal, but the whole value, the very meaning of what he borrowed is due to its being inserted in the unifying plan that he constructed. If he had borrowed everything in this way, it would not have lessened the philosophical value of his work. “Every master finds his materials ready at hand,” says Barrès. “Thought,” says Emerson, “is the property of him who can entertain it; and of him who can adequately place it.”28 The philosopher receives a thought from another, and his task consists in finding out exactly how it fits into his philosophy. He adopts it precisely because it holds this place.
Every really great man is a creator, but it does not follow that he must create an alphabet; he uses the existing one for coining new words. Just as it is not the letters that create new words, so it is not thoughts that create new philosophies, but the ordering and subordinating of them, the interplay of elements in a carefully planned framework, which connects them all with their first causes.
Hence, it is not the details and particular theories that are of importance in a great philosophy, but the breath of intellect that vivifies them, the web that binds them together, the vague, primary intuition, and the final, complete synthesis which give life to the whole.
According to St. Thomas, intellects, angelic and human, are gradated by the fewness of the principles by which a whole series of truths are known. His own intellectual greatness depended upon the fact that he was able to range an infinity of conclusions under comparatively few principles. This, far from being a “mosaic,” is a real work of art, a living, organic construction.
Every thinker makes use of pre-existing theories; his special work is to use his own thought to put them in their due place. Henceforth, he works alone; he uses his own judgment. What he rejects is scarcely less important than what he chooses, and both are absorbed into his final achievement. It may happen that what was negligible before is now of sovereign value.
It has been wittily said, “It is not enough to plunder one’s predecessors; they must be assassinated.” St. Thomas never “assassinates” in this way, but how much he overshadows many of those whom he has been blamed for plagiarizing! Even St. Augustine, great as he is, hardly holds now the position he held before St. Thomas’s time. And we have already seen that, according to Emile Boutroux, “The most important work of Aristotle was the Christian philosophy,” by which is meant Thomism.
Having answered that criticism — which, I believe, is in some quarters a most unphilosophical attempt to blacken his name — we must sketch the general trend of St. Thomas’s philosophy without attempting to give even an approximate outline of it.
A glance at the index to the Summa Theologica will show that everything, not only his theology, but his philosophy too, is centered in God. Spinoza’s philosophy has a similar orientation, and so must every complete system of doctrine, for in God is to be found the ultimate explanation of the whole of knowledge. All our ideas begin and end with God. All explanation is by universal principles, and ultimately by the First Principle. He who does not see as far as God is shortsighted, however far he may see, and he who does not view things from as far away as God is too near to see them fully. To refer things to God is the only way to put them in true perspective and thereby to understand them aright. We cannot determine the essence, limits, or proportions of anything without this reference to the Supreme Being.
A still more fundamental reason for this procedure was that Being is basically one, and is one in God. This bears out the great principle that, in philosophy, doctrine and method coincide.
Nowadays there is a good deal of ridicule about this Philosophy of Being, despite its support by the greatest thinkers of all ages. Being has been called “that meaningless and mysterious verbalism” which would have achieved success “in a world devoid of reality.”29 Evidently, no world is so empty as the conceptual world of one who denies it reality, but then, as a consequence, any reality there might be remains unaffected by such a conception. Taken in its most universal sense, being is more real than any of its multifarious participations; to deny this is at once a form of atheism and a warping of the highest faculties of the intelligence.
The main problem of philosophy was exactly the same for St. Thomas as it had been for Plato — namely, how the multiple comes from the one, and how it can be reunited to it. Identity and variety, differentiation and reintegration, emanation and return were the main discussions of Plato, of the Alexandrine Neo-Platonists, and of St. Thomas, although, of course, with important differences.
Whether we consider all things as essence and existence, substance and accident, thought and object, spirit and matter, knowledge and will, they always necessarily connote a relationship with something relatively one. Here the multiple, although real, is secondary and derived, and consequently reducible. The formulation and solution of the problem of the universe involves the setting out of all these in their true relations with the one.
Everything that the mind understands witnesses to a certain homogeneity, which enables things to be synthesized. The intelligence is not content with stray straws; it must have the sheaf. The mind is the natural judge of being; it equals it in extension, and its living, passive operation represents the active evolution of being.
Now, what is this power that can connect things in the real order, as the mind connects them in the ideal, in order to understand them? What is the bond that binds this universal sheaf? What is the source that all things presuppose? What is the absolute, homogeneous term that will explain the relative homogeneity of things? For the latter cannot be first, since, being relative and having differences, it implies a participation in some common, anterior thing, and a divergence from it.
The answer to this essential question is God. We approach God by apparently very different ways, but they all fundamentally come to this: the ulterior implies an anterior, diversity implies homogeneity, the multiple implies a unity.
Whether we follow everyday experience, scientific empiricism, common sense, or genius, we are led to the same conclusion. It is sufficient to notice that the objects of our knowledge present a certain order; there are categories, degrees, causes and effects, antecedents and consequences, means and ends. In short, the universe, in every sense of the word, and considered in all its possible relations, is seen to be what Kant calls an immense conditioning. From whatever phenomenon we start, we rise from one condition to another, whether real or ideal, until, at the top — for there must be a top, otherwise all these conditions are meaningless — we reach the Unconditioned, God, who is self-sufficient, the center of all expansion, the first Being and source of all things.
This, of course, brings us face-to-face with a mystery, a mystery that is the only adequate explanation of all things. We can name it and qualify it only by its effects; but it still remains the highest form of our knowledge, as well as that about which we know least. Silence is here the highest form of adoration.
Once we have reached this point, we descend again, by the synthetic method, and thereby explain the relations of things with God. Just as we began with things to rise to God, so we start back from God to reach things. St. Thomas uses the latter method in theology (where God’s existence is granted) and the former in his philosophy. As a matter of fact, both methods are used in conjunction in all his works, although they are always clearly defined.
But everywhere is apparent this central focus of thought, whence the mind determines the relations of reality by deriving it from God and is led back to God from every point where these relations touch things. It is this that gives to his expositions, when slightly amplified, their sense of completeness, and makes his system revolve with the perfection of the solar system.
God is the first Being, the perfect, full Being, who is “virtually all things,” since all things have their rise and raison d’être in him. He is the All — so much so that what comes from him “is not an addition to him.” “In him we live and move and have our being.” Scotus Erigena went so far as to say that, in a sense, God created himself by giving being to his creatures — an exaggeration that brings out how God possesses all being, to what extent creatures are united to him and to one another, and how all things are homogeneous, fundamentally identical, reducible to a common principle, and all converging, because all are divine.
God is assembled being; the world is distributed being. The object of Thomistic philosophy is to classify this distribution, and to reassemble, by an alternate systole and diastole.
Nearest to God we find pure spirit; next comes man, who is spirit joined to matter, and below him the instinctive, living organism of the brute. Then comes vegetal life, then beings and activities differentiated by forms and specific properties, and lastly, pure matter, the common substratum of everything that evolves or changes.
These are all participations in the divine being, concrete resemblances of the Prototype, a gradated descent of the All-Being, who loses nothing of his transcendence by being thus participated in. And these things differ only by the degree in which they participate in God, by the way in which they (imperfectly) reflect their first Principle, by their relation to God’s being, whence is derived all in his creation that has number, weight, measure, mode, species, or order.
Spirit and matter, in particular, differ only as the greater and lesser, perfect and imperfect, actual and potential. The act of knowing and the thing actually known are identical, and where the act is perfect, the two are perfectly identified in God. Spinoza’s idea that the infinite Substance is manifested both in thought and in extension vitiates both his pantheism and his dualism. That which is manifested is not a simple mode: it subsists, and the connection between the extended body and the thought is due to a more ultimate actualization.
This equally answers the dualism of Descartes and disposes of his problem of the union of soul and body. Man is not a mixture of two heterogeneous and irreducible substances; he is a degree. It is true that we speak of him as composite, but that is due to our analysis of him; in reality, there is neither body nor soul, but simply man, just as water, before analysis, is not oxygen and hydrogen, but simply water.
Man is not a spirit enclosed in matter, an “imprisoned angel,” a “fallen god,” or a monster; he is an autonomous being, and what multiplicity there is in him is due to the imperfection of his being, for the further a being is removed from God, the more multiple it becomes in extension, time, and movement.
The famous dispute over the unity of the substantial form in man, on which St. Thomas laid such stress, and which is still an open question, brings out this point clearly. It involves the whole of his metaphysics. He never wavered, although as fully alive as anyone to the difficulties that his theory created. If man is one, how can we explain his twofold origin, from God and from his parents? If man is one, how can we conceive that the soul is immortal, when the body corrupts? Thus, while the problems of individuation and of survival might remain dubious, the general trend of his metaphysics commanded assent and furnished solutions to the objections of materialism on the one hand, and an equally one-sided “angelism” on the other.
Now let us see what follows from these principles.
God comes first. The world proceeds from God, without, however, being separated from him. This divine parentage which binds all things to their common principle, creates in them a tendency toward it. This accounts for their activity and determines their end. Every being thus tends spontaneously toward its principle, and the truer the principle, the more powerful the tendency. A true principle is one that governs, not only the inner reality of what proceeds from it, but also the development and destiny of that reality. The infant seeks his mother for food, the student his master for knowledge; the soldier obeys his officer in the hope of victory. Similarly, all things tend to God for their being, for perfection of every kind, for their good. Created being seeks God, because it will more fully realize itself by a fuller participation in God. It finds its true form and realizes its end, perfection, by making itself more like to God.
Nowadays, these ideas of finality are rejected by scientists, although science has really no power to deal with a question like this, which is metaphysical. And is it really more illuminating and rational to represent the world as a sort of monstrous machine, driven by some quite indefinable power, than to represent it as an immense desire, giving rise to an immense effort? Still, the two aspects are not exclusive but only complementary.
Anyhow, St. Thomas held that being emanated from God, and strove to be reunited to him; that this desire actuates reality and accounts for the ceaseless travail of all creation.
Each being tends toward God according to its own nature. All travel by the same route, but all do not go equally far. Just as nature is a hierarchy, so are its laws and, consequently, its ends. The material world is created, follows its allotted curve, and corrupts: the plant buds, grows, gives its fruit, and dies; the brute has a more varied destiny, but radically the same as the plant’s. But to the spirit’s journey there is no end; in its rich unfolding, in its mighty quest, it can reach even to God himself. It has the power of thinking all being, of penetrating to the cause of being, and it is destined, by nature and by grace, to be united to that cause. Man will not be confused with God, for by this union he more fully realizes his own being; but he will be joined to God and, in a sense, will be deified. His destiny might almost be called a Christian Nirvana.
St. Thomas held that the material universe was permanent and would return to the perfect under some form that it is impossible to foretell. The new heavens and new earth were not empty words to him. It is true that he was influenced by the then-prevailing cosmology, but his thought is sufficiently independent of it to be adapted to modern theories. But when all is said and done, cosmology, ancient or modern, will always be faced by a mystery.
But to return to the particular case of man, which interests us the most: we must classify the various ways in which we tend toward God, according to the different elements of our being. As material, vegetal, and sensitive beings, we would have no special destiny if these faculties were autonomous; but they are not. Since our being is one, all its parts are subordinated to and directed toward their common end, which is the perfection of the whole being. Our material faculties are ordained to serve our life; our material life, our sensitive life; sensitive life, thought; natural thought, faith; and faith, the eternal vision of God.
Hence, the intelligence is the principal factor in this return to God, although it is the will that creates the desire, just as in lower beings, while their form is their essential part, there is a certain tendency to which is due their self-development and the realization of their end. It is this fact that gives knowledge its sovereign value in the natural order, and faith in the supernatural.
St. Thomas, following Aristotle, makes knowledge, in the widest sense of the word, the highest, natural, human perfection. “Happiness is the joy produced by truth.”30 The study of wisdom is more perfect and sublime, more useful and delightful, than any other pursuit of mankind.”31 “The ultimate end of all things is the good of the intellect, which is truth.”32 But wisdom can have a much wider meaning than as understood by Aristotle. In the learned, faith completes natural knowledge; in the ignorant, it takes the place of knowledge, while, provided we do not misuse our freedom, it will be revealed in all its fullness in the Beatific Vision.
Thus, knowledge leads us through things back to God, and faith melts before the vision of God. The other parts of our nature attain their perfection in the new surroundings, to which they, too, are destined. The doctrine of the resurrection of the body is thus seen to fill a great need, which is acutely felt in philosophies divorced from the Faith.
This aspect, however, seemed to St. Thomas of secondary importance. It was a consequence of the vision, a communication to the body of a higher vitality, the result of its union with God. What chiefly impressed him was the marvelous expanse of knowledge that this vision opened out. For, although the principal object of the vision is God, it necessarily includes everything else.
He was greatly attached to the theory that, in order to know anything, we must have within us, in an ideal way, the being that we know. Aristotle holds that the soul is, in a sense, all things, because it is capable of knowing all things. Hence, a single being is capable of possessing in itself all the perfection of the world. It is easy to understand why the ancient philosophers considered this reflection of the world as the soul’s greatest perfection. We go further and find this same perfection in the vision of God. As St. Gregory says, “What shall they not see, who see him, who sees all things?”33
It remains to state the conditions for enjoying this vision, which, with God’s grace, we have to work for ourselves. This brings us to morality and the broad principles of ethics, which are governed by the same uniform laws. The highest of human activities is contemplation, because it is the nearest approach to man’s end, which is intellectual. By contemplation is meant, not only what the word signifies in mysticism, but knowledge of any kind, and art, insofar as it is intellectual.
Knowledge, in its widest sense, begins with the knowledge of nature; this leads to philosophy in general, which, in turn, leads to metaphysics. To know and to “rationalize” matter cannot be an end in itself, since matter contains in itself neither its raison d’être, nor its end.
We must bear in mind that this order is an ideal, which is only ultimately to be realized. Here on earth, this very ultimate realization often necessitates a reversal of the process. Practice follows upon theory, and contemplation is allowed to be determined by action.
Further, as matter is, in a certain sense, spirit, so action is, in a certain sense, thought. It is a kind of alloy both of the thought that is revealed and of the thought that is searched for — the former, because every action is the outcome of a thought; the latter, because every realization is a return from, and an amplification of, thought. Every realization creates some kind of leisure, and thereby makes contemplation possible; if it is morally good, it is as meritorious as the contemplation that it makes possible. When we attain our end, action as we now understand it will give place to a higher form of activity. Our final end will be “the most noble use of man’s noblest faculty, for the highest object.”
It may be argued that in this great theory, the distinction between natural and supernatural creates an irreconcilable dualism, thereby marring the unity that God obviously intended should characterize his creation. The argument is worthless. Natural and supernatural are distinctions that apply only to creatures — that is, to beings that are dependent and gradated. In God, there is neither natural nor supernatural, but simply God. We distinguish, because we participate in God and communicate with him in two different degrees, as in a binary rhythm, and we analyze these two degrees, without ever implying that they are really distinct.
Our nature has been created, as it were, double, because of the double end to which we are destined; the higher, or super, nature tends to the higher end, which is our last end, pure and simple. Therefore, the unity of the whole reality is not destroyed. The supernatural does not create in us an ontological and final duality, anymore than does rationality in attaching itself to our sensitive life, or the sensitive to the vegetal, or the vegetal to the physicochemical activity of the tissues. These are all continuous, make up one integral existence, and normally produce the same results.
A further argument may be drawn from the fact that God chose the Incarnation as the means of realizing these supernatural ends. The whole order of grace centers on our Lord, who is God and Man, the common Brother, the Head of the entire creation, and the point of contact between Creator and creature.
In a very true sense, everything comes from the One, everything is one, tends toward the One, and is consummated in the One. There is a simple, perfect unity underlying the enormous diversity of forms.
We have dwelt mostly upon man in our survey, because knowledge is, after all, made for man. But we must not fail to notice the stupendous effort that St. Thomas makes to integrate his philosophy and theology by an account of the pure spirit. This treatise on the angels is one of his greatest achievements.
The angels seem to have awakened in him a very special curiosity and devotion. In the beginning of his Opusculum De Creaturis Spiritualibus, he says pleasantly, “Not being able to do the work of the angels in choir, we can at least write about them.” He made a point of sifting the opinions of ancient philosophers concerning spirits, and this is an additional proof that his rigid method did not dry up the religious fervor latent in his writings.
His treatise on the angels is a remarkable work. It is like a complicated mathematical treatise, with a few passages from Scripture here and there, but primarily derived from rational psychology, and natural theology, the two great sciences that it links together. Although our interests today are in other directions, we ought not to neglect this monumental work.
This meager outline should be enough to show the genius of St. Thomas’s undertaking, its masterly fulfillment, and, above all, his sureness in the midst of dangers on every point of doctrine.
He assimilated not only the principles of Aristotle, but also Platonism, Alexandrine Neo-Platonism, and the Platonism of Augustine, the Pseudo-Denis, and the Liber de Causis. He found a place even for Parmenides, with his theory of the unity of being. But he has restated the doctrines of all these authors, as well as the particular theses that follow from their principles.
St. Thomas held that, while being was one, it was virtually multiple, in which he differed from Parmenides. He held with Plato that God was perfectly free to manifest himself in creation or not, in which he differed from Aristotle and the Alexandrine school. He held with Plotinus that being emanates from God and returns to him, but he differed in that he substituted for Plotinus’s vague and mystic explanations a complete hierarchy of values, drawn from experience, which distinguishes species and being, and includes even the dogmas of faith.
His doctrine is monistic, but without the errors of monism, dynamistic, but without the errors of dynamism, which denies substances and makes everything the action of forces. It is intellectualistic, because it identifies being and thought, but it is voluntarist as well, because it makes thought engender love, as being engenders force. Thought directs our love to God, and love, our thoughts. Everything is done by love and for love, and love is the consummation of all things.
Lastly, his doctrine is at once creationist and evolutionist. It is creationist insofar as it makes everything come freely from God, and thus depend upon being, and not upon some indefinable chaos. It is evolutionist insofar as it makes everything return to God. Medieval physics made it necessary for St. Thomas to hold that this return was an unchanging cycle, but there is nothing to prevent the modern Thomist from adopting the modern theory of evolution, and maintaining that things develop in a straight line, whose last term is unknown to us.
This enables us to avoid the exaggerations and fallacies of isolated theories, which lead to manifest impossibilities. This St. Thomas believed was the only possible way to establish an order out of the multifarious, and apparently opposed, notions that we get from things. There seemed no other solution to the problem of the world, as our entire experience presents it, and in its main outlines, his system is seen to be perfectly complete.
It is sometimes objected that the reduction of the multiple to the one, which is its goal, is not de facto realized, because the multiple is not eventually destroyed, and the multiple and the one must both subsist. The answer is that, if the multiple so returns to the one that nothing now remains but a divine existence, and all is as it was before the cycle began, then there is surely no purpose achieved by creation. Or are we expected to turn the entire creation into some sort of pointless symphonic movement?
The multiple must subsist, but only as subordinated to the one, explained and bound together by the one, to such a degree that it is virtually contained in the one, with no part of it free and independent.
In this doctrine, to quote Lachelier, “all things harmonize, and nothing is confused.” That is what makes it a perfect system, without for a moment denying that there is a mystery behind it, which can be ever further explored. St. Thomas never claimed to have spoken the last word; he intended to be true as far as he went, and to offer a complete system in outline. It is independent of any new data of cosmology, physics, or positive psychology, because he treats of it metaphysically. He had no fears of ever being out of date, because he based it on the best-established phenomena, although he illustrates his teaching by examples taken from the physical theories of his time, which are now rejected. His sole object was to take up a true position with regard to reality, and to make a general framework. He did not aim at completeness of detail.
He respected the mystery; this terra incognita was marked on his map, and he did his best to describe it from without, but always with fine scientific caution. He did not even attempt a scientific proof of Providence. Cajetan rightly praises him for this; scientific caution of this sort in a theologian cannot but increase our confidence in him.
He realized, and often says, that the human mind must needs, in this world, move between two zones of darkness: matter below and mystery above. The latter is so intelligible that it dazzles us. We are forced to acknowledge, above and below, this unfathomable sea, and when, by the supreme effort of our reason, we try to sound it, we must not take the length of our line as any indication of its depth.
That is where St. Thomas shows his prudence; and genius allied to prudence is the essence of the truly wise man.