Thomas Aquinas: Faith, Reason, and Following Christ (Christian Theology in Context) 9780199213146, 0199213143

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Preface
1. Time, Place, and Person
1. The Twelfth-Century Ferment
2. The Thirteenth-Century Consolidation
3. Thomas’s Life
Part I: Faith and Reason
2. Thomas’s Intellectual Project
1. (Mis)characterizing Thomas’s Intellectual Project
2. Thomas’s Inaugural Lecture
3. Scientia
4. The First Question of the Summa theologiae: Sacra doctrina as Scientia
5. Thomas and Aristotle
6. Holy Teaching as a Way of Life
3. Praeambula fidei: God and the World
1. Philosophical Tools
2. God’s Existence
3. Creation
4. Knowing and Naming God
4. Fides Quaerens Intellectum
1. Faith
2. Theological Science
3. Convenientia
Part Two: Following Christ
5. The Way of God Incarnate
1. The Fittingness of the Incarnation
2. Hypostatic Union
3. Christology and Creation
4. Salvation through Christ
5. Christ as Teacher and Exemplar
6. The Way of God’s People
1. The Principles of Human Action
2. The Life of Grace
3. Formation in Virtue
4. The Sacramental Life
5. The Patria
7. Thomas in History
1. Thomism
2. Thomas, Theology, and History
Bibliography
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
R
S
T
U
V
W

Citation preview

christian theology in context series editors Timothy Gorringe

Serene Jones

Graham Ward

CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY IN CONTEXT Any inspection of recent theological monographs makes plain that it is still thought possible to understand a text independently of its context. Work in the sociology of knowledge and in cultural studies has, however, increasingly made obvious that such divorce is impossible. On the one hand, as Marx put it, “life determines consciousness”. All texts have to be understood in their life situation, related to questions of power, class, and modes of production. No texts exist in intellectual innocence. On the other hand, texts are also forms of cultural power, expressing and modifying the dominant ideologies through which we understand the world. This dialectical understanding of texts demands an interdisciplinary approach if they are to be properly understood: theology needs to be read alongside economics, politics, and social studies, as well as philosophy, with which it has traditionally been linked. The cultural situatedness of any text demands, both in its own time and in the time of its rereading, a radically interdisciplinary analysis. The aim of this series is to provide such an analysis, culturally situating texts by Christian theologians and theological movements. Only by doing this, we believe, will people of the fourth, sixteenth, or nineteenth centuries be able to speak to those of the twenty-first. Only by doing this will we be able to understand how theologies are themselves cultural products—projects deeply resonant with their particular cultural contexts and yet nevertheless exceeding those contexts by being received into our own today. In doing this, the series should advance both our understanding of those theologies and our understanding of theology as a discipline. We also hope that it will contribute to the fast developing interdisciplinary debates of the present.

Thomas Aquinas Faith, Reason, and Following Christ

Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt

1

3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries # Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt 2013 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2013 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available ISBN 978–0–19–921314–6 As printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

To the past and present members of the Theology Department at Loyola University Maryland. Ad bene esse beatitudinis facit societas amicorum (Summa theologiae Ia-IIae q. 4 a. 8).

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Contents Preface

ix

1. Time, Place, and Person 1. The Twelfth-Century Ferment 2. The Thirteenth-Century Consolidation 3. Thomas’s Life

1 1 9 22

Part I: Faith and Reason 2. Thomas’s Intellectual Project 1. (Mis)characterizing Thomas’s Intellectual Project 2. Thomas’s Inaugural Lecture 3. Scientia 4. The First Question of the Summa theologiae: Sacra doctrina as Scientia 5. Thomas and Aristotle 6. Holy Teaching as a Way of Life

41 41 46 51 55 68 73

3. Praeambula fidei: God and the World 1. Philosophical Tools 2. God’s Existence 3. Creation 4. Knowing and Naming God

83 83 91 107 134

4. Fides Quaerens Intellectum 1. Faith 2. Theological Science 3. Convenientia

143 143 150 160

Part Two: Following Christ 5. The Way of God Incarnate 1. The Fittingness of the Incarnation 2. Hypostatic Union 3. Christology and Creation 4. Salvation through Christ 5. Christ as Teacher and Exemplar

179 180 188 197 206 222

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6. The Way of God’s People 1. The Principles of Human Action 2. The Life of Grace 3. Formation in Virtue 4. The Sacramental Life 5. The Patria

229 230 252 258 264 282

7. Thomas in History 1. Thomism 2. Thomas, Theology, and History

291 291 308

Bibliography Index

317 337

Preface The basic thesis of this book is quite simple: the great Dominican historian Marie-Dominique Chenu was mistaken when he wrote in 1959, “Thomas’s spiritual and institutional development is unthinkable outside of Paris. Naples, Viterbo, and Rome are merely episodes in his intellectual development and in his career. Paris is his natural habitat.”1 Quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus. Chenu might be forgiven this lapse of judgment, since the overwhelming tendency since Leo XIII’s 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris, which placed Thomas on the front lines of Catholic intellectual warfare, has been to read Thomas Aquinas in the context of the medieval university, engaged in the project of creating a synthesis of faith and reason that would give to each its due (and, incidentally, bequeath to the Church a method for dealing with secular modernity). Chenu’s statement also contains an undeniable element of truth: the medieval university, and Paris in particular, is important for understanding Thomas. It was there that he was both a student and, on two separate occasions, a teacher. But there is more than simple piety revealed in the well-known story of the student who, admiring the city of Paris from a distance, said to Thomas, “what a beautiful city Paris is,” to which Thomas replied, “I would rather have the homilies of Chrysostom on the Gospel of blessed Matthew.”2 One might well argue that it is Paris and its university that were merely episodes in Thomas’s life, which was the life of a Dominican, a preaching friar—a life wholly given over to the care of souls through handing on the fruits of contemplation by the preaching of the gospel. Paris was simply a means to that end. Even historically sensitive readers of Thomas like Chenu have tended to overlook the significance in Thomas’s life of the network of Dominican educational institutions outside of Paris, in places like Naples, Viterbo, and Rome. Indeed, more than merely episodes in Thomas’s life, institutions such as these were the focus of his labors. As another great Dominican historian, Leonard Boyle, argued some thirty years ago, it was not for the elite group of friars who would be educated in the studia generalia at the universities that Thomas wrote his masterwork, the Summa theologiae, but for the fratres communes, the common brothers 1

Chenu (2002), 18–19.

2

Tocco Ystoria, cap. XLII.

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Preface

who fulfilled the Dominican order’s primary mission of preaching and hearing confessions.3 Though the line between the university and the Dominican studium was not always sharply drawn, particularly in a place like Paris, the goals of Dominican education remained distinctively evangelical and pastoral, and it is in light of those goals that Thomas ought to be read. Leonard Boyle first made the case for this and his student Miche`le Mulchahey has undertaken remarkable research to flesh out our picture of the nature of Dominican education in the High Middle Ages.4 Yet their work is only beginning to influence how philosophers and theologians read Thomas. I hope this book can serve as an extended footnote to their labors, drawing out some of the implications of what it means to read Thomas in light of distinctively Dominican ends. I also hope this book can serve as a general introduction to the life and thought of Thomas Aquinas for those who do not have a deep familiarity with his thought. In order to serve this purpose, I will spend a certain amount of time in discussions where Thomas’s Dominican context will recede somewhat into the background when it is not of direct relevance to the topic. But awareness of that context will, I hope, shape to one degree or another everything that I have to say, giving the reader the sense of Thomas as a theologian who is aware in all that he writes of the evangelical purpose of the community of preachers to which he has given his life. Even in some of the most abstruse philosophical discussions, Thomas is concerned to take every thought captive for Christ. As the subtitle of this book indicates, Thomas Aquinas sought to properly relate faith and reason for the sake of following Christ. One risks misunderstanding Thomas’s intellectual project unless one sees it as a form of discipleship. Therefore, after an opening chapter, which seeks briefly to locate Thomas within the intellectual and evangelical movements of his day, the first section looks at how Thomas related reason to faith. In Chapter 2, I characterize Thomas’s intellectual project as a whole, arguing that it is without reserve a theological project oriented to Dominican ends. Chapter 3 takes up those topics that Thomas called the praeambula fidei, which are those things about God and the world in relation to God that human beings can to some degree come to know without the aid of divine revelation. Chapter 4 turns to Thomas’s understanding of faith, and how reason serves a function within the realm of faith, and particularly in the task of the preacher. The second section of the book focuses on

3

Boyle (2000), 65–91.

4

Mulchahey (1998).

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following Christ. Chapter 5 examines Thomas’s Christology, which has often been overlooked or thought to be rather unoriginal in comparison with his more daring metaphysical speculations; I argue, in contrast, that it is here that we come to the heart of Thomas’s theology. In Chapter 6, I turn to what Thomas has to say about the Christian life—both the life of virtue made possible by grace and the sacramental life that gives “shape” to Christian existence—as well as that life’s fulfillment in eternal life. The last chapter serves as a coda to the whole, briefly surveying the subsequent history of Thomism and reflecting on the significance of history in how we read a thinker like Thomas. Because Thomas has loomed so large in theology, and Catholic theology in particular, there has been a tendency for theologians who have quite different presumptions and viewpoints to want to claim him for themselves. This has led to the phenomenon of different sorts of Thomists—Transcendental, Phenomenological, Strict Observance, Analytic, etc.—and the need occasionally to ask, “What sort of Thomist are you?” A reader who peruses the bibliography and notes will see that in matters of history and theology I am much indebted to French Thomists, while in philosophical matters I draw more upon Anglo-American thinkers. I do not know in what Thomist camp this places me, and the authors I employ are perhaps as much an indication of the limits of what one person can read and absorb as it is of a firm conviction that a particular approach to Thomas is the right one. But in case readers feel the need for a label, I will take my stand with the American novelist and short story writer, Flannery O’Connor, and declare myself a Hillbilly Thomist. This means that I think that friar Thomas has more in common than is usually thought with the Christ-haunted, apocalyptic, backwoods preachers that populate O’Connor’s fiction, and that her stories of restless hearts and disruptive grace are not incompatible with Thomas’s view that grace perfects and does not destroy nature.5 Therefore, those who wish to have an easy descriptor for this book can describe it as an essay in Hillbilly Thomism. As with any long-term project, I have incurred many debts in the writing of this book. My wife, Maureen, and my children, Thomas, Sophie, and Denis, have helped me keep things in perspective. The parishioners at Corpus Christi Church, where I serve as a deacon, have taught me much about the preacher’s task and my students at Loyola University have shown

5

See Bauerschmidt (2004).

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Preface

me the challenges and rewards of teaching. Anonymous readers at Oxford University Press made helpful suggestions regarding how to trim an overlylong text. Chad Pecknold allowed me to inflict drafts of various parts of this book on the PhD. students in his Theological Foundations seminar at the Catholic University of America and shared their feedback with me. The annual meeting of the Boston Colloquy in Historical Theology has pressed me to think more deeply about the enterprise of historical theology and I am particularly thankful to Boyd Taylor Coolman for inviting me to be a part of this remarkable gathering of scholars. Above all, I have been blessed by all my colleagues, past and present, in the Theology Department at Loyola University Maryland. With regard this book in particular, I have learned much from nearly a decade of scholastic disputation with Trent Pomplun and, more recently, from the tenacious analytic rigor of David Decosimo, as well as the innumerable helpful suggestions that others have made. As many have noted before, the pressures of modern academic life are not often conducive to true intellectual friendship, but my colleagues at Loyola have formed a scholarly community dedicated to unlocking for students and for each other the treasure trove that is the Christian theological tradition. It has been my privilege to serve as their department chair for the past four years, and to them I dedicate this book.

1 Time, Place, and Person 1. THE TWELFTH-CENTURY FERMENT Thomas Aquinas lived at the end of a period of amazing social and intellectual transition. Marie-Dominique Chenu, R. W. Southern, and others have argued that the twelfth century was characterized above all by a rebirth of confidence in the capacity of human beings to understand nature and to guide their actions in accordance with the nature of things.1 While the thinkers of the twelfth century still operated within a fundamentally Augustinian perspective, which took seriously the “fallenness” of human nature— indeed, the fallenness of all created natures—and the inability of human beings to live fully human lives, much less to live eternally, without God’s gracious help, at the same time they had an equally strong sense that the quest of human beings to understand nature, and thereby understand themselves, had an important role to play in reversing the effects of the Fall. Hugh of St Victor, in his Didascalicon, a text Thomas would likely have read as a Dominican novice,2 writes, the mind, stupefied by bodily sensations and enticed out of itself by sensuous forms, has forgotten what it was, and, because it does not remember that it was anything different, believes that it is nothing except what is seen. But we are restored through instruction, so that we may recognize our nature and learn not to seek outside ourselves what we can find within.3

We are “restored through instruction.” Perhaps moved by a pang of Augustinian conscience, Hugh moderates his claim a bit later, saying that the corruption of our nature, even if it cannot be completely removed by the remedy of education, can “at least be alleviated.”4 Still, in a variety of ways, from new educational endeavors to new forms of religious life, 1 2 3

See Southern (1995), 22–35; Chenu (1968), 1–48. Mulchahey (1998), 109–10. 4 Didascalicon, lib. 1 cap. 1. Didascalicon, lib. 1 cap. 5.

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Thomas Aquinas

Hugh and other twelfth-century writers display a notable confidence in what nature, assisted by grace, could accomplish.

The Life of the Mind Southern offers a brief list of intertwined developments that help account for this cultural flourishing: a large and continuing growth in population and wealth, the cessation of attacks on the heartland of Europe, the new opportunities for large-scale government and for meeting the intellectual challenges within Christendom, and the growth of Latin-based and clerically-populated schools which produced an integrated system of thought that—despite the contempt of later critics—was one of the most formidable and coherent intellectual and governmental structures that has ever been produced.5

Of particular note is the shift in the “sites” at which intellectual endeavor took place. While in the early Middle Ages the monasteries were the chief place for the transmission of knowledge, in the twelfth century we see the rise to prominence of schools associated with cathedrals, particularly in northern France, and, toward the end of the century, the beginnings of universities. These schools were not primarily schools for theology but rather for the teaching of the liberal arts, which were divided according to the “linguistic” arts of the trivium—grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic (i.e. logic)—and the “mathematical” arts of the quadrivium—arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.6 In the wake of the Investiture Controversy there was a shift, in both the Church and in secular kingdoms, from what Southern characterizes as “the period of government based on ritual to that of government based on clearly-defined procedures and concepts,”7 and as a result there was a need for “clerks” who could administer these increasingly complex structures, whether sacred or profane. During the first half of twelfth century, Paris rose to preeminence as a place to study; possessing as it did not only the cathedral school of Notre Dame and the school at the abbey of St Victor, but also other,

5

Southern (1995), 141. See Hugh of St Victor, Diascalicon, lib. 2 cap. 6, 15, 30; lib. 3 cap. 3; cf. Hugh’s De sacramentis lib. 1 pr. cap. 5–6. Hugh’s Didascalicon bears witness to the fact that in the twelfth century the seven liberal arts are simply one way among several of organizing human knowledge, and Hugh’s discussion of the arts is made quite complicated by the various schemata that he puts into play. 7 Southern (1995), 158–9. 6

Time, Place, and Person

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lesser-known schools, as well as individual teachers who were licensed by the chancellor of Notre Dame. In addition to a favorable geographical setting that allowed for the physical expansion needed to accommodate and support a growing number of masters and students,8 Paris also had its prestige enhanced by the presence of renowned individual teachers such as Peter Abelard. Furthermore, due to the canons of St Victor, students were able to undertake studies in theology as well as the liberal arts. These teachers or magistri (masters) were neither monks, who studied the liberal arts and theology in the context of reflection on scripture as a text for prayer, nor were they bishops, who did theology in the context of the pastoral care of their people. Rather, they were something new to the twelfth century: a new kind of authority, a voice authorized by the Church, it is true, but deriving its real authority from its dialectical skill.9 Education was as it were leaving the monastic cloister and finding its place within the life of the city itself. This sort of intellectual activity, conducted in urban schools rather than monasteries, comes to be identified as “scholasticism.” Not everyone thought of this as an advance. Peter Comester, himself a canon at St Victor in Paris, wrote, “There are some who do more praying than reading: they are the cloister dwellers; there are others who spend all their time reading and rarely pray: they are the schoolmen [i.e. “scholastics”].”10 Even by contemporary accounts, there was something more “worldly” about the learning being pursued in the schools of the cities. The shift from cloister to school brings with it something of a change in how intellectual pursuits were carried out. The two chief literary forms of the new schools were the lectio and the quaestio. A “lecture” was in fact a commentary on an authoritative text. The typical lecture began with reading the portion of text to be lectured on, followed by the divisio textus or parsing of the texts in terms of its component parts, so as to lay bare its structure. This was followed by an exposition of the different components, which could include defining terms, supplying background information, as well as introducing various interpretations of previous commentators. The last part of the lecture would take up controversial points raised by the text and seek to resolve them. It is this last part that would develop

8

9 See Southern (1995), 198–204. See Chenu (1968), 272–9. Sermon 9, quoted in Leclerc (1961), 198. For a general account of the contrast between monastic and scholastic theology and one decidedly tilted in favor of the monastic, see Leclerc (1961), 189–231. For an account that is more “pro-scholastic,” see Chenu (1968), 300–9. 10

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into a genre of its own: the quaestio.11 In the quaestio, the unsettled issue is taken up first by invoking authorities on opposite sides of the question, after which a resolution is offered. As these quaestiones broke free of the lectio and took literary form, the masters began to arrange them in an orderly manner in texts that would offer a summary of Christian doctrine—the summae of theology.12 While the genre of lectio or commentary was quite ancient, the quaestio seems to be a creature of the medieval schools. Some have claimed that it was an attempt to put into practice the dialectical approach of Aristotle but, as others have pointed out, it seems to have arisen well before Aristotle’s ideas concerning logic were particularly prevalent in medieval Europe.13 John Marenbon notes that the quaestio is not originally conceived as a “method” that can be applied to any subject matter. Rather than a self-conscious implementation of Aristotelian logic, the quaestio was a natural and perhaps inevitable outgrowth the twelfth-century desire to apply reason in a rigorous way to biblical and patristic texts.14 As M. D. Chenu puts it, the quaestio, “grew spontaneously on the surface of the text, the natural result of the literal and doctrinal difficulties presented by the text.”15 The quaestio reflects the increasing awareness that the theological tradition was a not-always-harmonious chorus of voices, whose dissonance might be mitigated by the tools of dialectic. The twelfth century also saw a significant influx of ancient texts into the Latin West, along with non-Christian texts that commented on and interacted with those ancient sources. Though Rome had drawn much of its culture from Greece, the Romans did not seem to have much taste for Greek philosophy or science, and thus few of these texts were ever translated into Latin. In the early sixth century Boethius, anticipating the loss of connection between the Greek-speaking East and the Latin-speaking West, conceived the project of translating key Greek philosophical texts into Latin, but this project was cut short by the political misfortunes that led to his imprisonment and eventual execution. Up until the twelfth century, therefore, the great philosophical figures and texts of antiquity were known mainly by reputation, if at all. This began to change around 1140, when a torrent of Latin translations of ancient works began to flow through the West. Some of these, particularly those coming out of Spain, 11 12 13 14

See Kenny and Pingborn (1982), 19–21. Marenbon (1987), 11; Leinsle (2010), 39–43. See Kenny and Pingborn (1982), 25 and Marenbon (1987), 12–13. 15 Marenbon (1987), 13–14. Chenu (1968), 291.

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were made from Arabic translations of Greek works; others were made directly from the Greek itself. Important works by Euclid, Ptolemy, and a few by Plato were translated, but the translations most significant for theology and philosophy were those of Aristotle. By the end of the twelfth century most of Aristotle’s works had been translated in whole or in part.16 In addition, translations of Islamic and Jewish philosophical works commenting on or in dialogue with Aristotle’s thought began to appear. Oddly, having expended such a great effort in translation, scholars of the twelfth century made little use of these texts. It would not be until the thirteenth century that the effects of these translations began to be felt. Along with translations of ancient and non-Christian texts, significant new texts were created in the twelfth century. Four of these warrant particular mention. Peter Abelard’s Sic et Non, which went through various revisions before reaching a final version in 1132, is not, in the usual sense, an “original” work, being a collection of quotations of the Church Fathers (almost exclusively Western writers). Such collections were common, but Abelard’s innovation was to arrange these quotations as seemingly contradictory answers to 158 different questions, which were themselves ordered in groups so as to treat faith, the Trinity, the divine nature and attributes, creation and fall, the incarnation, the apostolic Church, the sacraments of baptism, Eucharist and matrimony, and charity, grace, law, and sin. Two points are worth noting. First, Abelard collated conflicting views, but did not attempt to resolve their conflicts. In his prologue he offered various strategies for resolving the conflicts between theological authorities—ranging from recognizing the equivocal use of terms or scribal errors to the acknowledgement of simple mistakes on the part of the authority—but did not himself apply those strategies in his Sic et Non. Second, while the selection of questions was not comprehensive (e.g. he treated only three of the sacraments and one of the theological virtues), it did point to a preliminary ordering of topics, which reflected a sense that there is a logic to theology that is distinct from the order of the biblical text. These two features—the juxtaposition of conflicting authorities and the ordering of questions according to a logical scheme—would become characteristic of the theology of the schools.17 Completed not long after Abelard’s Sic et Non (c. 1142), the Concordantia discordantium Canonum (“Concordance of discordant canons”) of Gratian, which came to be known as the Decretum, did in the realm of canon law

16

Dod (1982), 48.

17

On the Sic et Non, see Marenbon (1997), 61–2.

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what Abelard did in doctrine, collecting together ecclesiastical legal texts from various sources (scripture, councils, papal writings, the writings of the Fathers) and juxtaposing them in a way that brought out their conflicts.18 Gratian’s work, which virtually single-handedly created canon law as a discipline, lacked the clear, logical ordering of topics that one finds in Abelard’s Sic et Non. But, as its name implies, it did something that Abelard did not attempt: in the dicta (“sayings”) that he wove into his source material, Gratian sought to reconcile the canonical material he had amassed, partly by ranking the authority of the sources (e.g. popes outranking bishops; general councils outranking regional ones; scripture outranking all human authorities), partly by distinguishing between judgments limited in application and those that were more general, and partly by recognizing when human customs had become outdated due to changes of circumstance.19 Another work contemporary with Abelard’s Sic et Non was Hugh of St Victor’s De sacramentis Christianae fidei (c. 1134), the title of which might best be translated as “On the Christian Mysteries,” since, while Hugh did offer a fairly extensive treatment of what we today would call “sacraments,” the scope of the work was nothing less than the entire economy of salvation. Indeed, Hugh, a canon of the abbey of St Victor in Paris, described the work as a summa of doctrine, structured around a distinction between the twofold work of God: creation and restoration.20 As such, it is generally seen as the earliest example of the summa genre, which was to become so important in the thirteenth century.21 Clearly engaged in a theological dialogue with Abelard,22 Hugh not only differed from Abelard on a number of doctrinal points, he also eschewed the contraposition of authorities that is characteristic of Abelard’s Sic et Non, as well as Gratian’s Decretum. Finally, some two decades after the works we have already discussed, we come to what is undoubtedly the most influential theological work of the later Middle Ages: the Sentences of Peter Lombard (c. 1158). Lombard,

18

R. W. Southern suggests, but does not attempt to demonstrate, a possible influence of Abelard on Gratian. See Southern (1995), 284, 287; D. E. Luscombe (1969) notes that the similarities in method between the two works is intriguing, but that there is no direct evidence of Abelardian influence on Gratian, and thus the question “must surely be deemed to be still unsolved, if not unsolvable” (215). For a general introduction to Gratian see Southern (1995), 183–318 as well as Christensen (1993). 19 See Christensen (1993), xv–xvi. 20 Hugh of St Victor, De sacramentis pr. cap. 2. 21 22 See, e.g. Pieper (2001), 95. See Luscombe (1969), 183–97.

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a master at the Cathedral School of Paris, drew on the texts assembled by Abelard and Gratian, as well as other texts from the Fathers, along with the writings of more recent theologians, such as Hugh, to create what Giulio Silano has characterized as a theological “casebook.”23 Like Abelard and Gratian, Lombard juxtaposed the sententiae or opinions of different authorities concerning a particular topic, and then, like Gratian but unlike Abelard, offered his own determinatio or resolution to any seeming conflicts between those authorities.24 Lombard arranged these topics in four books, dealing with 1) the triune God, 2) creation, 3) the incarnation, and 4) the sacraments and eschatology. This schema is similar to Hugh’s ordering of his De sacramentis in terms of the twofold work of God in creation (books one and two) and redemption (books three and four). Lombard, however, prefaced his work with a different account of its structure based on the Augustinian distinction between “things” and “signs,” going on to make the further Augustinian point that among “things” some are to be enjoyed for their own sake and others are to be used in order to attain that which is enjoyed. Among things, only God can, strictly speaking, be enjoyed, while created things should be used to attain the enjoyment of God (though a certain equivocation on this point in the texts of Augustine leads Lombard to make his first determinatio).25 Here, Lombard seems to have wanted to provide a rational account of his ordering of topics, moving beyond the salvation-historical pattern of creation and redemption. It is not entirely clear, however, how the Sentences actually conform to this pattern, since Lombard does not refer back to it in the rest of the work. Shortly after completing his final version of the Sentences, Lombard became Bishop of Paris. He reigned for only about a year, but certainly this position contributed to the popularity of his book of Sentences. More significant, however, was the inherent quality of the work itself, which judiciously selected passages from theologians that illuminated the theological issues at stake in particular topics. Lombard’s own determinations of conflicting authorities are usually balanced and thoughtful, though not always uncontroversial (in particular, his teaching that charity in human beings is the Holy Spirit).26

23

See Silano (2007), pp. xix–xxvi. On Peter’s sources, see Rosemann (2004), 55–6. Luscombe suggests the possibility that Lombard might have had personal contact in Paris with both Hugh and Abelard. See Luscombe (1968), 261. 25 Sentences, lib. 1 dist. 1. 26 See Ch. 6 in this volume. 24

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The Apostolic Life The twelfth century was not a renaissance only in the realm of “high culture,” the realm of schools and masters and texts. It was also a time of religious movements that sought a rebirth of the vita apostolica—the “apostolic life”—which grew out of the eleventh-century Gregorian reform’s emphasis on the primitive Christian community depicted in the Acts of the Apostles as an enduring model for the Church. In the eleventh and early twelfth centuries this ideal was largely interpreted in terms of the communal life and austerity of the monastery, giving birth to such communities as the monastery of Cıˆteaux. But as the twelfth century proceeded, the emphasis shifted somewhat from the common life of the apostolic community depicted in Acts to the preaching activity of the apostles.27 The religious revival sparked by the Gregorian reform took on a distinctively “evangelical” cast, both in its emphasis on the gospels as the model for the Christian life, and in the emphasis placed on preaching. Not only was there an increasing interest in the care of souls among monastic writers, but there was also the growth of a new form of religious life, that of the canons regular, as well as numerous lay movements devoted to the vita apostolica. While the institution of “canons,” who were typically clergy affiliated with a cathedral, predates the twelfth century, it is then that there begins a movement among these clerics to live an austere common life under the so-called rule or regula of St Augustine (thus the term “regular” canon). Soon, distinct orders of canons began to emerge, such as the canons at St Victor in Paris and the Premonstratensians founded by St Norbert. Unlike traditional monastics, who saw themselves primarily as learners and seekers, the canons regular saw themselves as teachers, who by word and example instructed others as a form of active service.28 Lay people also took up the ideal of the vita apostolica, whether striking out on their own as itinerant preachers or forming themselves into groups. Their preaching was, at least initially, oriented toward moral reform rather than doctrine and was often linked to an austere lifestyle.29 The austerity of these lay preachers was at times in notable contrast to the wealth of the secular clergy, and sharp rivalries would break out between the clergy and members of these lay movements. Clerical attempts to restrict their activities, particularly their preaching, pushed some of these 27 29

28 Chenu (1968), 204–19. See Bynum (1979). On the importance of poverty, see Chenu (1968), 242–4.

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movements, such as the Waldensians, into extreme anticlericalism, schism, and eventual heresy. In some ways, the vital currents of the apostolic life were similar to the renewed scholarly appreciation of natural reason; as Chenu puts it, “the vita apostolica, by inspiring new states of life, inspired as well a new awareness of the ways that grace could take root in nature.”30 Just as human reason was given a more significant place in intellectual pursuits, so too human apostolic activity was given a larger role in the pursuit of holiness. The evangelical emphasis of the new religious movements blended into the interest in teaching and learning of the schools, as both sought to find compelling ways to re-present the gospel in a new cultural situation.

2. THE THIRTEENTH-CENTURY CONSOLIDATION In the thirteenth century the various forces at play during the previous century coalesced into institutional structures. The different schools produced the universities and other educational institutions; the movements of renewal in religious life produced the great mendicant orders of the Franciscans and Dominicans. Both of these are important for understanding the thought of Thomas Aquinas. While it is undoubtedly true that Thomas cannot be understood apart from the institution of the university—Thomas did, after all, spend significant periods of his life at the University of Paris and was also affiliated with the University of Naples—it is important to give equal weight to his Dominican context, and in particular the Dominican educational institutions that were the primary framework for his intellectual activity, even when he was teaching at a university.

Universities Among medieval universities, Paris was renowned for the study of theology. It is difficult to pinpoint a date when the University of Paris was “founded.” Shortly after the time of Abelard, the different magistri began to think of themselves as forming a guild—a universitas, in the terminology of the day31—and to act as a body in pursuing their collective interests.

30

Chenu (1968), 202–3.

31

On the terminology, see Leff (1968), 16–17.

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The first official statutes of the university were granted in 1215 by Pope Innocent III, via his legate Robert de Courc¸on, and gave the magistri broad powers to govern themselves, and in particular affirmed their power to determine who “incepted” as a master—that is, was granted faculties to teach—which was a power formerly possessed by the chancellor of the Cathedral School, who was himself subject to the bishop.32 These statutes, however, seem to being giving official approval of what was already wellestablished custom. Among other universities, the University of Naples is noteworthy because it did not have an ecclesiastical foundation, but rather was founded by the emperor Frederick II in 1224 in order to have a source of scholars who would in no way be beholden to his rival, the pope.33 The magistri of the theology faculty at Paris had the tasks of explicating scripture (legere), conducting public disputations (disputare), and preaching (predicare), tasks that were first outlined in the twelfth century by Peter the Chanter. Peter wrote: Explication is a sort of foundation or base for what follows, because upon it other uses of the text rest. Disputation is a sort of wall in this exercise, this building, because nothing is fully understood or faithfully preached unless first analyzed by disputation. Preaching, however, which the previous ones support, is a sort of roof protecting the faithful from the raging storms of vice.34

A look at these three headings will allow us to revisit some of the developments that I have already traced in the twelfth century.35 The task of “reading” (legere/lectio) or explication or lecturing, as noted above, included not only textual analysis, but also the formation of quaestiones concerning the text. Though the form of the lecture did not change significantly in the thirteenth century, what was lectured on did, for it is in the thirteenth century that the works of Aristotle and his commentators began to make their impact felt in the schools. And that impact was quite disruptive, or at least it was feared that it would be so, for the University of Paris banned the teaching of Aristotle in 1210, and the statutes of 1215 repeated this prohibition with regard to his Metaphysics

32 See Wieruszowsk (1966), 32–8, and Verger (1992), 47–52. Gordon Leff (1968) notes, “It is the paradox of the Paris University that it evolved not by becoming independent of the control of the church, but by substituting the pope’s oversight for control by the bishop and chancellor” (22). 33 Verger (1992), 54. 34 Peter the Chanter, Verbum abbreviatum 1, quoted in Chenu (1968), 253. 35 For a general account of these three tasks and their relation to each other, see Smalley (1964), 208–13.

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and his works of natural philosophy, while allowing for the teaching of the logical works and Ethics. This prohibition seems to have been increasingly ignored with the passage of time, particularly after 1240, and by 1255 the syllabus of the arts faculty—those masters who taught the liberal arts in preparation for higher studies—included almost all of Aristotle’s extant works.36 Also, the fact that texts might not be lectured on does not mean that they were not read and studied, though it is not exactly clear who was reading which texts when.37 Part of the disruptive effect of the introduction of Aristotle was the difficulty of deciding where his works should be taught. Though quotations from Aristotle begin to appear in works by such members of the faculty of theology as William of Auxerre, Philip the Chancellor, and William of Auvergne, the basic teaching text of the theology master was traditionally the Bible. Regarding the arts faculty, some of Aristotle’s works, such as the logical works, could be fit within the scheme of the trivium and quadrivium, while other works such as the Ethics, Physics, and Metaphysics could not. Over the course of the first half of the century there is a transformation of the arts faculty at Paris, so that by 1255, when Aristotle was fully introduced, the framework of the seven liberal arts had withered away entirely and the faculty has become de facto a faculty of “philosophy,” if we understand that term broadly as encompassing the Aristotelian corpus.38 This transformation of the syllabus is indicative of the sort of transformation of thinking that Aristotle required of the magistri of the thirteenth century. There was a dawning realization that here was a powerful, comprehensive worldview that could not be assimilated into Christianity readily, and need not be seen simply as a propaedeutic for the study of some higher discipline, such as law or medicine or theology. Aristotle discussed the natural world, human society and culture, morals, and even the nature of God without any recourse to divine revelation, and in a way that often seemed to conflict with Christian views on such questions as the temporal creation of the world, the ontological status of forms or ideas, the individual immortality of the soul, and other issues.39 The fact that Aristotle arrived with an array of Jewish and Muslim commentators did

36

Dod (1982), 70–2; van Steenberghen (1955), 34–5, 41–8. Marenbon (1987), 54–7. 38 Van Steenberghen (1955), 28–35. Gordon Leff (1968) writes, “Aristotle had now effectively become the arts course” (140). 39 See Leinsle (2010), 133–6. 37

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nothing to allay the suspicions of the more traditional masters, particularly in the faculty of theology. While not exactly a shock to the system, since it was a realization so long on coming, the assimilation of Aristotle into the system of Christian thought would involve both immense conflict and immense intellectual labor. Thomas would have a key role to play in both this conflict and this labor. It was also during the thirteenth century that the Sentences of Peter Lombard become a significant university text in the faculty of theology. Alexander of Hales (d. 1245) was apparently the first master to make Lombard’s Sentences the basis of his lectures, a move that aroused no small amount of controversy. As noted above, the Bible was in theory the basic text of the master of theology; when Peter the Chanter spoke of the lectio as forming the foundation of the theology master’s efforts, it was clearly the explication of scripture that he had in mind. Lecturing on the Sentences could therefore be seen as distracting the master from his primary task of scriptural exposition. Eventually, the task of lecturing on the Sentences was assigned not to the masters but to the baccalarii Sententiarii (i.e. advanced graduate students).40 Normally it would take a baccalarius two years to lecture his way through the four books of the Sentences,41 an exercise that, when put into written form, somewhat fulfilled the role of the dissertation in a modern PhD. program. These commentaries came to sit increasingly loosely to the text of Lombard, eventually abandoning any pretext of being an interpretation of the actual text and simply taking the Sentences as a general framework within which theologians formulated their own questions.42 What is noteworthy is that while students were allowed to lecture on Lombard, commentary on the Bible—at least of any in-depth sort—was reserved for the masters. This in itself testifies to the continuing significance of the Bible as the basic text of theology. The second of the theology master’s tasks was conducting disputations (disputare). These were academic exercises that took the form of the quaestio and brought it to life as a pedagogical tool. Peter Abelard’s Historia calamitatum speaks of “disputation” already in the twelfth century, but it seems to refer to a more informal style of debate than what we find in the thirteenth century. Just as the quaestione eventually detached itself from the text of scripture, so too the disputatio, sometime around the beginning 40 See Rosemann (2007), 60–2. On the role in general of the Sentences in the early thirteenth century, see Spatz (1997), 27–52. 41 42 Rosemann (2007), 80. See Rosemann, (2007), 95–6.

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of the thirteenth century, detached itself from the lecture and became an academic exercise unto itself, observing a fairly fixed structure. Abelard’s habit of speaking of his academic debates in terms of “combat”—as if they were the intellectual equivalents of the knights’ tournaments—no doubt reflects something of his own romantic self-conception, but it also reflects the excitement and the competitive spirit that these exercises could engender, even in the highly structured form that they took in the thirteenth century. But they were also serious intellectual exercises by which fundamental questions, particularly those involving conflicting authorities, were addressed. In their developed form, the ordinary disputations were two-day affairs in which the first day was spent accumulating the arguments pro and con (often consisting of the citation of an authority) on a particular question, which had been set by the presiding master. These arguments were made first by the other masters who were present, then by the bachelors, and sometimes by other students. Then the master’s assistant or baccalaureus offered preliminary responses to the arguments, sometimes with assistance from the master himself. The second day was given over to the master, who offered a determinatio or solution to the question. This involved putting the various arguments that had been made into a logical order and offering an exposition of his own position, after which he would reply to each of the arguments.43 In addition to “ordinary” disputations, in which an orderly set of issues on a common theme chosen by the master were taken up seriatim, there were also disputations, called quodlibetal, that could be on any topic proposed by the audience. We might think of these disputations as the master having to perform without a net, ready to take on whatever issue was thrown at him, whether highly abstract questions concerning the divine nature or practical pastoral questions, such as whether a person can confess his sins in the sacrament of penance via writing. These quodlibetal questions, aside from their intrinsic interest, also tell us something about the sort of issues that were controversial at the time. The disputation, which was employed not only in the theology faculty, but also in the arts, medicine, and law faculties, reveals something about the nature of medieval intellectual life. It required that participants have a firm grasp on the tradition so as to be able to produce authorities in support of their views. Such exercises, along with the absence of ready 43 On the “ordinary” disputation see Kenny and Pingborn (1982), 21–2; Marenbon (1987), 19–22; Chenu (1964), 88–91.

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access to books, help to account for the high value placed on memory and the sophisticated memory practices of the period.44 They are also reflective of the value given to arguments from authority.45 At the same time, the dialectical employment of conflicting authorities reveals the thirteenth century’s awareness of the variegated nature of the tradition and a keen sense of the role of reason in resolving apparent conflicts. To use Peter the Chanter’s image, the foundation of authority, provided by scripture and the Fathers, had to be built upon by reason, exercised in the disputation, so as to provide walls for the structure. In short, the disputation runs counter to the widespread impression that the High Middle Ages, as the “age of faith,” was about unthinking faith and conformity to a monolithic religious authority. Finally, the theology master’s task of preaching (predicare) serves to remind us that the master of theology was not simply a creature of the university, but also of the Church. The understanding of the vita apostolica that developed over the course of the twelfth century placed preaching the gospel at the heart of that life. For Peter the Chanter, it was preaching that provided the sheltering roof for the faithful—a roof resting upon the walls of rational disputation and the foundation of the explication of authoritative sources. Of course the predicare that was the duty of the theology master referred to the preaching of sermons in Latin in the university setting. Among the events that constituted one’s inception as a master was the preaching of a sermon before the university. But masters of theology were often also expected to preach in the various city churches. Needless to say, these sermons were not all on technical theological matters; often they addressed the new vices that arose in the urban settings in which the universities found their homes.46 Despite later characterizations of scholastic theology as being entirely wrapped up in arcane questions such as how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, the available evidence indicates that the masters of theology in the thirteenth century took very seriously the practical and pastoral import of their work.

The Order of Preachers The role of the master as preacher raises the issue of another thirteenthcentury development that is of crucial importance for understanding the

44 46

45 See Carruthers (2008). See Chenu (1964), 126–39. On university sermons in general, see Roberts (2005), 83–98.

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life and thought of Thomas: the rise of the mendicant religious orders. A “mendicant” is a beggar, in the sense of one who depends upon receiving alms in order to live. The mendicant movement was part of the emergence of forms of religious life that were not supported by income-generating property—as were monasteries—but rather by gifts freely given and received. This is a development of the understanding of the vita apostolica that emerged over the course of the twelfth century, which emphasized the itinerant preaching life of the apostles, a mode of that did not allow for such things as monastic landholding or benefices and sinecures. The two great mendicant orders of the thirteenth century, the Franciscans and the Dominicans, both embraced poverty, though out of somewhat different motivations. For the Franciscans, there was a mystique— even a mysticism—of poverty that saw renunciation of goods as a way of identifying with the poor Christ. The Dominican approach was far more prosaic: renunciation of goods gave the friar the freedom needed for his primary task of preaching. As Simon Tugwell puts it, while both Franciscans and Dominicans are embodiments of the quest for the vita apostolic, the primary focus for Francis is on vita—the life lived in imitation of Christ—while for Dominic the focus was on apostolica—the apostle’s task of preaching.47 Domingo de Guzma´n—Dominic—was born in 1170 in Spain.48 In contrast to the stories of Francis’s early life, marked as they are by the dramatic story of his conversion and the conflict it engendered with his family, Dominic was by all accounts a pious child who was encouraged by his family toward a career in the Church. His uncle, a cleric, undertook his early education and eventually Dominic studied first the liberal arts and then theology at Palencia University. Dominic’s early biographer, Jordan of Saxony, describes his aptitude for the study of theology in a way that reflects the later Dominican ideal of knowledge that is put into practice in the instruction of others: the things which he easily understood were watered by the pious bent of his mind and blossomed into salutary works. . . . His memory, which was a storehouse of divine things, fruitfully spilled out from this to that, and his external words and character clearly bespoke what lay hidden within his sacred breast.49

47

Tugwell, (1982), 19. For the basic outline of the story of the founding of the Dominicans, in popular form, see Jarrett (1964); for a very succinct account, see Tugwell, (1982), 11–16. 49 Jordan of Saxony, Libellus n. 7, in Lehner (1964), 10. 48

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At the conclusion of his studies, Dominic became a regular canon of the diocese of Osma, having caught the attention of the Prior of the canons, Diego. In 1201 Diego became the Bishop of Osma and, when the king of Spain sent him on a diplomatic mission to Denmark, he took Dominic with him. This journey took them through southern France, which was a stronghold of the Albigensians, also known as the Cathars, a heretical group that subscribed to a dualist worldview that saw matter as the creation of the devil and spirit as the creation of God. This and other experiences fired both Diego and Dominic with missionary zeal. In 1205, on their return journey, they came to Montpellier, where they encountered a group of Cistercian abbots who had been sent by the pope to preach against the Albigensians in Southern France, but who had not had much success. It quickly became apparent that a major reason for this was the unfavorable impression made by the large and splendid retinues of the Catholic preachers, which contrasted with the poverty embraced by the Albigensian preachers. As Stephen of Bourbon imagined it, in a text written some decades later, the Albigensians mocked, How can you believe this man and his like? . . . They turn up with all this pomp and wealth, with their pack-animals and their riding-horses, and then they preach to you a Christ who was humble and poor. We, by contrast, preach in poverty and lowliness and austerity, we display in our deeds what we have told you about in our words.50

Jordan of Saxony imagined in turn Bishop Diego’s response: “Match steel with steel, rout false holiness with true religion, because the arrogance of these false apostles must be overthrown by genuine humility.”51 Diego realized that only if the Catholic missionaries could match the Albigensians in austerity would their preaching of Catholic doctrine gain a hearing. Abandoning their horses and carts, Diego and Dominic and the Cistercians took up a life of mendicancy and itinerant preaching, engaging in public debates with the Albigensians. Diego died in 1207, but Dominic and others continued the preaching mission, with papal support. When a papal legate was assassinated in 1208, the pope decided that the approach of Diego and Dominic was not working, or at least not working quickly enough, so he prevailed upon the King of France to launch a crusade against the Albigensians. This crusade became the occasion for a particularly bloody civil war between 50 51

De septem donis Spiritus Sancti n. 83, in Tugwell (1982), 87. Libellus n. 20, in Lehner (1964), 15.

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northern and southern France that was not really ended until 1229. Dominic, in the meantime, continued his fight against the Albigensians with spiritual weapons, and in 1215 was invited by Bishop Fulk of Toulouse to form a small community of preachers in that dioceses in order, as the bishop put it in his decree, “to root out the evil of heresy, to drive away vice, to teach the rule of faith and to instruct in sound morals.”52 It is worth noting that this mandate extended beyond preaching against the Albigensians to include the instruction of Catholics in faith and morals. In that same year Dominic accompanied Fulk to the Fourth Lateran Council, which had been convened by Pope Innocent III, in order to secure papal approval for his order of preachers. While Innocent supported Dominic, because of the restrictions that the Lateran Council had placed on the establishment of new religious orders he sent Dominic back to his confreres with the instruction that they were to choose for themselves a rule of religious life from among those already in existence. They chose the rule of St Augustine, adding to it detail regarding austerity of food, clothing, bedding, and so forth. According to Jordan of Saxony, they chose Augustine’s rule because he had been an outstanding preacher,53 but the fact that this rule was quite brief and left many details unspecified undoubtedly accounted for some of its appeal.54 For the order that Dominic had in mind was something quite unprecedented: an order dedicated not to prayer and contemplation, as the Benedictines and Cistercians were, nor to the preaching of moral exhortation and penance, as the various evangelical movements of the twelfth century had been and as the Franciscans would be, but rather to the preaching of Christian doctrine, a task traditionally associated not with religious but with the order of bishop.55 The centrality of the task of preaching to the identity of Dominic’s new order is reflected in Dominican lore concerning the naming of the order. Thomas of Cantimpre´, in the middle of the thirteenth century, wrote that the secretary recording Pope Innocent’s confirmation of the order was careful to describe them as “friars preachers” rather than “preaching friars,” explaining to the pope that he wanted to make clear that the members of this order were not friars (i.e. fratres or “brothers”)

52

Fulk, Bishop of Toulouse, in Tugwell (1982), 88. Libellus n. 42, in Lehner (1964), 42. 54 On the choice of the rule of Augustine and the additions made to it, see Mulchahey (1998), 12–20. 55 Mulchahey (1998), 8–9. 53

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who sometimes engaged in the activity of preaching, but equally preachers and friars.56 Writing around 1270, Robert Kilwardby, the provincial of the English Dominicans, noted that while people in a variety of states of life might preach, the Order of Preachers does so “by virtue of the very institution of their Order, by virtue of their job, which gives them their name.”57 The novelty of Dominic’s vision for an order of preachers was disturbing to many people, as was the idea of mendicant orders in general. The Rule of St Benedict, which since the sixth century had shaped Western notions of religious life, had denounced “the monks called gyrovagues, who spend their entire lives drifting from region to region.” The Rule interprets this lack of a stable location as an indication that they “are slaves to their own wills and gross appetites.”58 To many, the mendicants, both Franciscan and Dominican, seemed to be precisely the sort of corrupt monastics whom Benedict had denounced. Some Dominican writers, smarting under such criticism, sought to clarify that there was a bad sort of itinerancy, criticized by Benedict, but also a good sort, which had a spiritual purpose.59 Others, such as Thomas of Cantimpre´, seized upon the offending label and turned it to his own purpose: “my brethren, you need not be ashamed to be called or to be gyrovagues. You are in the company of Paul, the teacher of the nations.” He goes on to depict the monastic virtue of stability as a potential vice, saying, let them sit there if they want to, with all their warm clothes on, enjoying their peace, but then they should allow the friars, whom they call gyrovagues, to travel round the world in their meager tunics and in rags, rescuing from the jaws of the demons souls that were redeemed by the life-giving death of Christ, while they, in their peaceful and carefree existence, turn a blind eye while such souls go down to Hell.60

Stephen of Bourbon recounts another tale in which a Dominican novice replies to some monks who are enticing him to leave the order to become a monastic: “when I read that the Lord Jesus Christ was not a white monk 56

Thomas of Cantimpre´, Bonum universale de apibus lib. 1, cap. 9, in Lehner (1964), 44. Writing a few decades later, Stephen of Salagnac attributes the initiative in this matter to the pope, not the secretary. See De quattor in quibus Deus Praedicatorum ordinem insignivit II, n. 1, in Lehner (1964), 44–5. 57 “Letter to Dominican Novices”, in Tugwell (1982), 150. 58 Regula sancti Benedicti 1: 10–11, in Fry (1980), 171. 59 See Humbert of Romans, On the Formation of Preachers XXXIII–XXXIV, in Tugwell (1982), 287–90. 60 De apibus lib. 2 cap. 10, in Tugwell (1982), 134.

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[i.e. a Cistercian] or a black monk [i.e. a Benedictine], but a poor preacher, I want rather to follow in his footsteps than in those of anyone else.”61 The theme of “following” Christ is strong among the mendicants, taking up an ideal that is expressed in a phrase that reaches back at least to St Jerome: nudus nudum Christum sequi (“to nakedly follow the naked Christ”).62 The original Franciscan rule, the so-called Regula non Bullata, summed up the rule of life of the Franciscans as: “to live in obedience, in chastity, and without anything of their own, and to follow the teaching and footprints [doctrinam et vestigia sequi] of our Lord Jesus Christ.”63 This theme was not quite as strong among Dominicans, but it was by no means absent.64 Thomas himself invoked Jerome’s maxim in defense of the mendicant way of life.65 At the same time, as noted earlier, Dominicans had a somewhat different attitude toward poverty than did Franciscans. For the Dominicans, poverty had a primarily instrumental value, making their preaching more effective. Forms of poverty that did not serve the primary task of preaching need not be embraced. Jordan of Saxony, in recounting the life of Dominic, spoke of how the largess of Bishop Fulk allowed the Dominicans to supply themselves “with books and other necessities of life.”66 It is difficult to imagine a Franciscan describing books as being among the necessities of life. Yet this is typical for the Dominicans, for whom all aspects of their life were subordinated to the task of preaching. Humbert of Romans acknowledges, while gently lamenting, the lack of uniformity in Dominican regular observance that arose from the order’s need to respond flexibly to differing circumstances so as to fulfill effectively its primary task. Among the Dominicans, while it was expected that they should follow the order’s constitutions, the constitutions did not bind upon pain of sin—that is, one did not sin, even venially, simply by violating them.67 The Dominicans were also the first order to grant

61

De septem donis Spiritus Sancti n. 74, in Tugwell (1982), 139. For a brief treatment of this phrase, see Constable (1979). 63 Regula non Bullata, cap. 1, in Armstrong (1999), 63–4. 64 Estimations of its significance vary; Simon Tugwell, on the one hand, seems to minimize its importance, while Richard Newhauser sees it as a significant sub-theme in Dominican preaching. See Tugwell (1998), 92–9, and Newhauser (1998), 238–55. 65 Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 186 a. 3 ad 3; Contra impugnantes, pars 2 cap. 5. 66 Libellus n. 39, in Lehner (1964), 40. 67 See Humbert’s “Commentary on the Prologue to the Constitutions,” in Tugwell (1982), 141–5. 62

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dispensation from the requirements of its constitutions for the purpose of study or preaching.68 This dispensation for study points to another aspect of the friars preachers: in order to be prepared to preach doctrine, Dominic knew his friars had to be educated. Humbert, in a text intended to guide the formation of preachers, noted, “though a grace of preaching is strictly had by God’s gift, a sensible preacher still ought to do what he can to ensure that his preaching is commendable, by carefully studying what he has to preach.”69 Study as preparation for preaching was from the outset a hallmark of the Dominicans and almost from the very inception of the order Dominic had his friars studying in Paris. On August 15, 1217, Dominic dispersed his small group of friars to various places in groups of two or three. Jordan of Saxony tells us that he sent seven to Paris, some “to make the Order known,” but at least two “for the purpose of study.” Within a year the friars had been given the house of Saint-Jacques, which would become a vital intellectual center at the university.70 When Dominic visited the convent in 1219, there were about thirty friars living there, most of whom had been university students who had been attracted to the order.71 Friars were also sent to Bologna, the other great university city of the continent. Jordan tells us that initially, “they endured great distress from poverty,” but their fortunes changed when Reginald of Orle´ans, already a noted master of canon law, joined their ranks and began to attract students to the order.72 The Franciscans sent friars to study at Paris as well, only slightly later than the Dominicans.73 At Paris, the friars moved from being students to being teachers under rather unfortunate circumstances. Since their arrival in Paris, Dominicans at Saint-Jacques had been taught by secular masters (that is, masters who were diocesan clergy)—first John of St Albans and after him John of St Giles—who held their lectures in the Dominican convent. When the city’s over-reaction to a student riot in 1229 led to a faculty strike, theology lectures continued at St Jacques, and non-Dominican students were soon attending. By the time the strike ended in 1231 a Dominican, Roland of Cremona, had incepted as a master, filling a chair abandoned by one of the strikers. Shortly thereafter John of St Giles, showing that flair for the dramatic makes a good preacher, interrupted a sermon on poverty, 68 69 70 72

See Mulchahey (1998), 17–18, 38–9. On the Formation of Preachers VII.82, in Tugwell (1982), 205. 71 Libellus nn. 51–3, in Lehner (1964), 48–9. Mulchahey (1998), 26. 73 Libellus nn. 55–8, in Lehner (1964), 50–1. See Leff (1968), 36.

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descended the pulpit, and was clothed in the Dominican habit. Since masters normally determined who succeeded them, this gave the Dominicans two permanent chairs in the theology faculty. Not long after this, around 1236, another master, Alexander of Hales, became a Franciscan without relinquishing his chair, adding to the number of chairs held by the mendicant orders.74 The practice among the mendicants was to have friars hold these chairs for three years before moving them on to the orders’ own institutions, using them as a kind of training ground for masters who would teach outside the university setting. When added to the general consternation aroused by the unusual form of religious life practiced by the mendicants, the circumstances in which the friars had become part of the university faculty were likely a source of simmering resentment among the secular masters of theology. Mark Johnson suggests that the secular masters, who were a small group who generally held on to their chairs for decades, “feared the dilution of their prestige by having so many other masters in theology being produced by the mendicants.”75 The two most notable periods when these simmering tensions boiled over—the early 1250s and the late 1260s—were times when Thomas was resident in Paris. Both of these controversies occasioned works from Thomas defending mendicancy in general and the Dominican understanding of religious life in particular.76 In addition to their presence in the universities, the Dominicans developed their own network of educational institutions, ranging from the presence of lectors in the convents to specialized studia for the arts and natural philosophy to the provincial and general studia of theology. So much attention is paid to those relatively few Dominicans, such as Thomas, who studied at universities like Paris and Oxford, that one might forget that by far the majority of Dominicans were educated within Dominican institutions, institutions that were shaped by ends somewhat different from the universities. Even Dominicans educated in universities directed their studies to the ends of their order. For the Dominicans saw education, like poverty, as simply a means to the end of preaching the gospel and caring for souls. Indeed, an emphasis on utilitas is a recurrent theme in Dominican texts: the scholarly labors of the friars were to be

74

See Johnson (2007), pp. xi–xii; Leff (1968), 36–8; Mulchahey (1998), 364. Johnson (2007), p. xiv. For an account of these controversies, and Thomas’s response to them, see Johnson (2007), pp. xv–xxxii; see also Leff (1968), 38–47. 75 76

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useful to the task of preaching and, by this, useful also to the Church catholic.77 With reference to Thomas, it is worth remembering that he only spent six years teaching as a master at Paris, and that the greater part of his teaching activity was carried out in specifically Dominican institutions, oriented toward specifically Dominican ends. As we shall see, his Summa theologiae was not a university text, but was intended to serve the educational needs of the average Dominican friar, preparing him for the task of preaching and hearing confessions. As I hope will become apparent over the course of this book, keeping this in mind gives us a somewhat different picture of Thomas and his work.

3. THOMAS’S LIFE In looking at the twelfth- and thirteenth-century background of Thomas, two threads have appeared: on the one hand we have intellectual developments associated with the rise of schools and universities, the proliferation of translations, and new theological genres; on the other hand we have the development of movements of religious renewal, among both clergy and laity, sometimes taking forms deemed heretical and schismatic and sometimes evolving into new religious orders. In these two threads are represented the two themes of this book: faith and reason and following Christ. But it has also become apparent that these two threads, which we might characterize as the intellectual and the evangelical, intersect and intertwine, as can be seen from the sometimes controversial role that the new mendicant orders played in the new universities, as well as the way in which orders founded their own centers of study and shaped distinctive understandings of the place of study within religious life and the ends that knowledge serves. These threads intersect and intertwine not only in the history of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but also in the life of Thomas himself. I will very briefly recount some of those intersections.

Childhood and Youth Thomas was born around the year 1225 at his family’s castle in Roccasecca, about midway between Rome and Naples.78 His father, Landulf of 77

See Nadeau (1997). Torrell (1996), 1. Tugwell (1988a) prefers the date 1226. For the basic facts of Thomas’s biography, I draw primarily on Torrell (1996), supplemented by Tugwell (1988a) and, where 78

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Aquino, was a baron of Emperor Frederick II, one of the most powerful Holy Roman Emperors of the Middle Ages, whose holdings extended from Germany into southern Italy, and who was in almost constant conflict with the papacy. At some point the family’s allegiance must have shifted from Frederick to the pope, for Thomas’s brother Reginald was executed by the emperor and was considered a martyr by the family.79 Thomas was the youngest male and, as was often the case with noble families, had been destined by his family for life in the Church, though one that befitted his noble lineage. So at the age of five he was sent to the monastery of Monte Cassino, to receive a basic education and eventually, his family hoped, to become abbot of this prestigious monastery. Thomas stayed at Monte Cassino until around the age of fourteen, when he went to Naples to pursue further studies at the university there. His move was in part required by external events: in 1239 Frederick II was excommunicated by the pope, not for the last time, and had his troops occupy Monte Cassino so that it might serve as a fortress (the Germans would put the monastery to a similar purpose toward the end of the Second World War). As a result, most of the monks and all of the students were expelled from the monastery. The abbot of the monastery had already identified Thomas as a young man of unusual intellectual promise, so he recommended to Landulf and his wife Theodora that Thomas be sent to Naples for further studies. In moving from Monte Cassino to Naples, Thomas in a way reproduced in his own life the shift that occurs in the twelfth century with regard to both intellectual and religious life. Having received a monastic education as a child, Thomas encountered in Naples the new sort of education offered at the university. Having been founded by Frederick II as an alternative to the ecclesiastically-founded universities, Naples, unlike Paris at that time, offered its students the full range of Aristotelian philosophy, as well as other writers such as Averroes, without the restrictions that were in place, at least officially, at universities like Paris. In the same way, having received monastic formation in religious life, Thomas encountered in Naples the new mendicant form of vita apostolica noted, others. The earliest sources for Thomas’s life are the canonization process, William of Tocco’s Ystoria Sancti Thome and Bernard Gui’s Vita Sancti Thomae Aquinatis, which draws heavily from Tocco, but judiciously abbreviates. For a reflection on the value of these sources, see College (1974). 79 At the canonization hearing in 1319, Bartholomew of Capua testified that Thomas considered the execution unjust, and received a vision that assured him that his brother had received the martyr’s crown. Processus canonizationis Neapoli n. 78, in Foster (1959).

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represented by the Order of Preachers, who had been in Naples since 1231, and he was inspired to become a friar preacher. Thomas would spend five years in Naples, having passed from the monastic world to the scholastic and mendicant worlds.

Becoming a Friar Thomas’s family was not pleased with his decision to join a scruffy upstart group like the Dominicans. As we have seen, the Dominicans, along with the Franciscans, were a disturbing departure from the traditional form of religious life. Even more, given the strong papal support for the Dominicans and Franciscans, and the Aquino family’s close ties with the emperor, Thomas’s becoming a friar could have proved acutely embarrassing for them politically. They were determined to dissuade him from this path and his mother, Theodora, set out for Naples. The friars arranged for him to leave Naples for Rome, intending that he would go from there to Paris, where he would continue his studies at Saint-Jacques. Having just missed Thomas in Naples and again in Rome, Theodora was determined not to miss him again, so she sent word to his brothers who were in the area serving with Frederick II. As Marie-Dominique Chenu notes, “This was a time when fraternal affection could easily coexist with brute force.”80 Thomas’s brothers intercepted him and took him to the castle at Roccasecca. Here Thomas spent a year or two under what might be called house arrest, though he was well treated by his family.81 The most colorful episode (which Torrell discreetly passes over in a parenthetical remark) was when Thomas’s brothers smuggled what Tocco describes as “a beautiful girl, dressed ornately like a whore” into the room where Thomas was being held.82 As Simon Tugwell puts it, they presumably did this “in the hope that a good dose of fornication would bring Thomas to his senses and make him less idealistic.”83 Thomas, feeling himself stirred by her beauty, grabbed a burning log from the fire in his room and drove the girl out. He then drew a cross on the wall with the charred log and fell to his knees, praying that God would grant him the gift of chastity. He fell asleep 80

Chenu (2002), 2. The fact of Thomas’s confinement is well attested by a brief account in Gerard de Frachet’s Vitae Fratrum (pars 4 cap. 17 n. 3) (in Foster (1959)), which appeared while Thomas was still alive. 82 Tocco, Ystoria cap. XI; cf. Gui Vita cap. 7, in Foster (1959). 83 Tugwell (1988a), 206. 81

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and in a dream two angels came and, in answer to his prayer, bound his loins so that he would always persevere in purity. Apart from this incident, Thomas’s family seems to have used more subtle forms of persuasion to change his mind, restricting his contact with the Dominicans, and hoping that with time he would come to his senses. Eventually his family realized that Thomas was not going to be dissuaded from his purpose and let him return to the Dominicans. Thomas seems to have had good relations with his family after this, but in his Contra retrahentes, written some three decades later, he has harsh words for families that would seek to prevent young men from pursuing the path of perfection: “in the matter of entering religious life, relatives are not friends, but rather enemies.”84 It is not hard to imagine that Thomas is in some sense offering his judgment on the actions taken by his family over two decades earlier. After his return to the Dominicans, Thomas was probably sent to Paris to study. It is possible that while in Paris Thomas would have attended lectures in the arts faculty, even though this was not the normal practice of Dominicans, on Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics and De Anima.85 He may also have begun initial theological studies there under the German holder of one of the Dominican chairs in the theology faculty: Albert the Great.86 In his time in Paris Albert had immersed himself in the full range of Aristotle’s writings that were, while still officially proscribed as the subject matter for lectures, readily available and widely discussed. He also read Muslim and Jewish commentators, who influenced his interpretation of Aristotle in a decidedly Neoplatonic direction. We do not know if Thomas, due to his early exposure to Aristotle at Naples, was already interested in the question of how Aristotle might aid in the task of Christian theology, but in Albert he certainly would have found encouragement to pursue that line of inquiry. The Dominicans had decided to create four studia generalia for the advanced study of theology and in 1248 Albert was sent to Cologne as master in one of the new studia. Thomas accompanied Albert to Cologne to continue his studies and it is from Cologne that we have an anecdote of Thomas as a student that gives some sense of how others perceived him. Thomas was a large man (though probably not, as some modern writers 84

Contra retrahentes cap. 9. For a survey of the question of whether Thomas studied at Paris in the period 1245–8 and what and where he might have studied while there, see Torrell (1996), 19–24. 86 For biographical information on Albert, see Tugwell, (1988a), 3–28. 85

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have claimed, obese—the rigors of Dominican life in the thirteenth century would have made obesity an unlikely achievement)87 and very quiet, so his fellow students referred to him as “the dumb ox” (bos mutum). Of course “dumb” referred mainly to his taciturn nature, not his intelligence, but it is possible that Thomas’s fellow students took his quietness as a sign that he was not all there intellectually. One story tells of a fellow student who, wanting to be helpful, tried to explain one of Albert’s lectures to Thomas, but ended up having Thomas explain the lecture to him. Albert, who was no doubt well aware of the intellectual talent of the student whom he had brought with him from Paris, is said to have remarked, “We call this one the dumb ox, but I tell you that the whole world is going to hear his bellowing!”88

Becoming a Master On Albert’s recommendation, Thomas was sent back to Paris around the year 1252 to become a baccalaurius sententiae in preparation for becoming a master. This was despite hesitation on the part of the master General of the Dominicans, probably related to the fact that, at twenty-seven, Thomas was two years below the requisite age set by the university’s statutes. Also, this was a particularly tumultuous time at the university, with antimendicant feelings running high and a brewing controversy over the place of Aristotle in the university curriculum, and in theology in general. Arriving in Paris as both a mendicant and, at least in some sense, an Aristotelian, Thomas would seem to have had his sides already chosen for him. After spending some time giving “cursory” lectures on the books of Isaiah and Jeremiah,89 Thomas began his work as a bachelor of the Sentences, lecturing on Lombard’s text and preparing his own text based on those lectures. In the form that has come down to us, this commentary on the Sentences is more than simply the dutiful fulfilling of an academic requirement. It is in some sense his first summa or comprehensive treatment of Christian theology. It is difficult to imagine that 87 Tocco describes him as “large bodied, tall and of upright stature” (Ystoria, cap. XXXVIII). See the comment of Foster (1959), 76–7, note 83. 88 See Tocco, Ystoria, cap. XIII. 89 Torrell proposes that Thomas fulfilled the role of cursor biblicus while still in Cologne and thus ascribes his commentaries on Isaiah and Jeremiah (including Lamentations) to this period; see (1996), 27–8. Tugwell assigns them to the beginning of his time in Paris; see (1988a), 211.

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Thomas completed such a massive and mature work in the two years assigned by the statutes of the University of Paris, and it is likely that he continued working on revising and refining the text even into his time as a master in the theology faculty. Given the tumultuous situation in Paris, it is not surprising that Thomas’s inception as a master in 1256 was accompanied by some controversy. Not only was Thomas once again below the statutory age for inception, but the secular masters were hard at work trying to deny the Dominicans one of their chairs on the theology faculty. Despite this, the chancellor of the university, with some encouragement of Pope Alexander IV, granted Thomas a license to teach. At Thomas’s inaugural lecture, royal archers who had been dispatched to protect the convent of SaintJacques kept a watchful eye on protesters who stood outside. As a Regent master in the theology faculty, Thomas fulfilled the traditional three duties: lecturing, disputing, and preaching. It is not entirely clear which biblical books were the subject of his lectures, though his commentaries on Matthew and Job have both been suggested.90 With regard to disputing we are on firmer ground: Thomas’s disputations De veritate definitely date from this period of teaching in Paris, as do Quodlibets 7 through 11. With regard to preaching, a surprisingly small number of Thomas’s sermons survive, but we have every reason to believe that he preached on a regular basis. In all of these endeavors Thomas was aided by Reginald of Piperno, who would remain Thomas’s assistant, confessor, and confidante for the rest of his life. During this Paris regency, Thomas also undertook labors that fell outside his appointed tasks as master. Almost immediately upon taking his master’s chair, he came to the defense of the mendicants against the attack of William of St Amour. Thomas’s Contra impugnantes Dei cultum et religionem offers a distinctively Dominican response to William’s suggestion that all religious should live within the confines of monasteries. This period also produced a very different sort of extracurricular work by Thomas: his commentary on Boethius’s De Trinitate. If the Contra inpugnantes is a defense of the Dominican way of following Christ, the commentary on Boethius might be seen as an attempt to think through the place of theology among the sciences—that is, a reflection on the relationship of faith and reason. The engagement with the text itself is quite brief and breaks off partway through the second chapter of 90 Torrell, however, dates the Matthew commentary to Thomas’s second period of teaching in Paris. See Torrell (1996), 55–7.

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Boethius’s six-chapter work, well before Boethius gets around to discussing the Trinity. The work does contain a brief literal commentary on the text, but is largely taken up with quaestiones that are only loosely related to what Boethius wrote. Thomas seems to have abandoned the work once he had achieved his purpose of locating theology among the other sciences. At the end of his time in Paris Thomas began work on the Summa contra Gentiles, which traditionally has been thought to be a “handbook” for Dominican missionaries to use in disputes with Muslims, though not all accept this interpretation.91 Some have suggested that, while not literally a handbook, it was intended for the intellectual formation of those who would be disputing with non-Christians; others see it as having a purely intra-Christian purpose, perhaps best seen as a continuation of his reflections on faith and reason begun in the abandoned commentary on Boethius.92 I shall have occasion later to offer further remarks on the Contra Gentiles, since it often features in debates over Thomas’s understanding of the relationship between faith and reason.

Dominican Labors Having completed the three-year term as Regent Master that was normal for Dominicans, Thomas left Paris in 1259 to attend the Dominicans’ General Chapter, where he worked on a commission that included Albert and three other intellectually prominent friars. The purpose of this commission was to make recommendations regarding the life of study in the order, in particular emphasizing the need for ongoing study and making some tentative moves toward providing more in the way of a philosophical education for the friars.93 Thomas’s precise movements after the General Chapter are a bit unclear. We know that by 1261 he was lector in the Dominican priory at Orvieto. This means that he was engaged in the education of the fratres communes—the garden-variety friars with

91 For an account of the controversies, see Torrell (1996), 104–7; Van Steenberghen (1991), 287–90; and Jordan (2006), 90–4. 92 Much of the Contra Gentiles is, like the commentary on Boethius, an autograph and R.-A. Gauthier demonstrated that the opening of the Contra Gentiles is written on the same parchment and with the same ink as the commentary on the De trinitate. See Torrell (1996), 101. 93 For a discussion of the recommendations of this commission and the legislation flowing from them, see Mulchahey (1998), 222–6, 232–6.

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whose education the commission of 1259 had largely been concerned. In this role Thomas would have lectured on both scripture and the Sentences, and it is thought by some that a first version of Thomas’s commentary on Paul’s letters is from this period.94 While in Orvieto Thomas also completed the Contra Gentiles and produced a number of other works, in particular the Catena Aurea, a running commentary on the four gospels drawn from the Fathers that he made at the behest of Urban IV in which we encounter what we might call Thomas-the-researcher. Not content with the standard florilegia of patristic quotations, Thomas produced a work that drew on Greek texts that were little known in the West (some of which he had to have translated), which he scrupulously identified. Jean-Pierre Torrell notes that Thomas himself drew on the Catena, as can be seen in particular in his commentary on John’s gospel and in the Christology section of the Summa theologiae, which is much richer in its use of patristic sources than the corresponding section of the Sentences commentary.95 Thomas left Orvieto for Rome in 1265 in order to set up a studium at the convent of Santa Sabina. This seems to have been something of an experiment on the part of the Dominicans—what Leonard Boyle describes as a studium personale (it appears that Thomas was the sole teacher)—that was intended by the Roman province to make use of the presence in their midst of a teacher of remarkable gifts.96 Writing in the early fourteenth century, William of Tocco conveys some sense of the excitement that Thomas’s teaching generated among students: “he was so novel in his lectures—proposing new articles, finding new and clear way of resolving them, and adducing new types of qualifications—that no one who heard him teach these new questions and new ways of answering them could doubt that God had illuminated him with new rays of light.”97 At Santa Sabina Thomas was given a free hand to develop a course of study with Dominican students who had come there specifically to study with him. It was hoped that this would provide a model for theological education on a provincial level—something between the education that took place in the convents and that which students intending to become masters undertook in the studia generalia.98

94 On the role of the conventual lector, see Mulchahey (1998), 134–41; on the dating of the Pauline commentary to this period, 319. 95 96 Torrell (1996), 139. Leonard Boyle, O.P. (2000), 26–7. 97 98 Ystoria sancti Thome cap. XV. See Mulchahey (1998), 278–80.

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What sort of curriculum did Thomas develop at Santa Sabina?99 Perhaps most striking, given the role of the master at Paris as magister sacra pagina, is that Thomas does not seem to have lectured on scripture. Why this would have been the case we do not know. Was it that Thomas considered exegesis somehow distinct from theology proper, and once he was able to design his own theological curriculum he moved away from lecturing on scripture? There is nothing in any of his writings that would indicate that he held such a view. If, for whatever reason, Thomas was experimenting with a curriculum that would focus exclusively on “scientific” theology, it was not one that he repeated later in Naples, when he once again was teaching in a Dominican studium where he was given a free hand to design the curriculum.100 If we turn to the question of what Thomas did lecture on in Rome, other interesting features emerge. In his first year Thomas’s morning lectures were devoted to the Sentences. This was not simply a rehashing of his Parisian lectures, but was an entirely new working-though of the topics in the first part of book 1 of Lombard. Evidently, however, this experience of lecturing on the Sentences gave Thomas a keen sense of their deficiencies, so much so that he embarked on the writing of the Summa theologiae, which formed the basis of his morning lectures in his second and third years at Santa Sabina. It is worth pausing for a moment over what we can glean from Thomas’s prologue to the Summa concerning his intentions. The prologue of the Summa makes clear that Thomas intended it to be a break with current approaches to theological education. Thomas first notes that he is intending to instruct not the proficient but “beginners” (incipientes).101 Whatever Thomas means by this phrase, it is fairly certain that he does not primarily have a university audience in mind; after all, he had left Paris and had no indication that he would ever return.102 Leonard 99 For a detailed discussion, to which I am much indebted in what follows, see Mulchahey (1998), 280–306. 100 It is possible, however, that the curriculum at Santa Sabina did influence Dominican theological education in Italy, where the friars developed studia particularis theologiae that focused on Lombard’s Sentences to the exclusion of scripture studies. Mulchahey argues that the adjective particularis, as distinct from generalis, indicates the recognition on the part of the Dominicans that these studia did not offer a complete theological education, but rather were focused on a particular area of theology; see (1998), 336–40. 101 Summa theologiae, pr. 102 For a recent defense of the view that Thomas had a university audience in mind, see Jenkins (1997), 85–90. Part of Jenkins’s argument is his view that the Summa was intended to be a replacement for Lombard’s Sentences, and that the Sentences were strictly a university

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Boyle suggests that it was intended to educate “young and run-of-the-mill Dominicans” for the Dominican way of life, with its characteristic activities of doctrinal preaching and the hearing of confessions.103 Did Thomas envision it as something that the conventual lector would use, rather than Lombard’s Sentences, in a place like Orvieto? Perhaps, but it is worth remembering that the students at Santa Sabina were not quite “run-ofthe-mill.” They were students who had been sent there precisely so that they could study with Thomas at an institution that offered something intermediate between the education in the convent that all friars received and the education at the studia generalia that was reserved for an elite few. Friars at a provincial studium like Santa Sabina might well expect to go on for more advanced studies, so the description “beginners” would not be entirely inapt. On the other hand, Victor White made the intriguing point that Thomas never actually identified the incipientes as the audience of the book—he simply says that teacher of catholic truth ought to instruct them—and that we are perhaps on firmer ground in seeing the audience not as the incipientes but the veritas catholicae doctor who would be their teacher. In other words, the Summa might have been intended as a teacher’s manual rather than a textbook, and in such a role a text that would be useful to Dominican teachers across a range of institutions.104 Thomas continued his prologue by noting that such beginners “have not seldom been hampered by what they have found written by other authors,” citing in particular “the multiplication of useless questions, articles, and arguments” along with the practice of failing to teach “according to the order of the subject matter, but according as the plan of the book might require.”105 Thomas divided his work into three parts: the prima pars, which deals with God and God’s creative act, the secunda pars, which deals with human acts as virtuous and vicious, and the tertia pars, which deals with the being and action of Christ, who is divine and human, including his sacramental activity and (though this part was never written) his work of consummation.106 Particularly significant is the secunda pars, which seems to have been intended to replace not Lombard’s text. The former claim is correct; but Miche`le Mulchahey has shown, to my mind conclusively, that among the Dominicans the Sentences formed part of the education of the ordinary friars in the convents. See Mulchahey (1998), 135–7. 103

Boyle (2000), 80. White (1958), 5–6. 105 Summa theologiae, pr. 106 Discussions of how best to understand the structure of the Summa is ongoing among modern authors. For a brief survey of some positions, see Torrell (1996), 150–3. 104

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Sentences, in which we find no corresponding discussion of either the principles of human action or of particular virtues and vices, but rather manuals such as Peraldus’s Summa de vitiis et virtutibus, which was used to prepare friars for the important task of hearing confessions.107 Thus in Thomas’s morning lectures at Santa Sabina he seems to have covered the material that comprises the prima pars of the Summa. In addition to the morning lectures, Thomas lectured in the afternoon as well. Miche`le Mulchahey argues that Dionysius the Areopagite’s Divine Names was the subject matter during Thomas’s first two years108 and Aristotle’s De anima was the subject matter in the last year.109 This latter claim runs contrary to Torrell’s statement of what has generally become the modern scholarly consensus: “the commentaries of Aristotle were never the subject of Thomas’s oral teaching.”110 While this generally seems to have been the case, there is a tradition in the medieval sources that at least the first books of Thomas’s De anima commentary were a reportatio taken down by Reginald of Piperno and later edited by Thomas. Given the experimental nature of the school at Santa Sabina, it is certainly possible that Thomas did something there that he did not do elsewhere. Finally, while in Rome, Thomas conducted disputations: certainly the De potentia and De spiritualibus creaturis and possibly part of the De malo.111 If we attempt to line up these lecture cycles and disputations, then it appears that Thomas made some effort to coordinate his different academic responsibilities so as to allow him to approach the same topic from different angles. In his first year, for example, while lecturing on God in the morning (the Roman lectures on the first book of Sentences), he was disputing questions on God’s power and attributes (De potentia) as well as offering afternoon lectures on Dionysius’s Divine Names—which treats of how human knowledge and language relates to God. Similar correlations can be made in Thomas’s second and third years in Rome.112

107

See Boyle (2000), 82–5. Even in his Sentences commentary, Thomas is already incorporating far more material on the virtues than was typical. Vernon Bourke notes that in commenting on Sentences lib. 3, d. 33, on the cardinal virtues, Albert has five questions, Bonaventure has six, and Thomas has forty-one. See Bourke (1974), 247. 108 Mulchahey (1998), 292–3. Torrell tends toward the view that Thomas’s commentary was written at Orvieto and was what we might call a “personal” work, not the fruit of his teaching; see (1996), 127. 109 Mulchahey (1998), 299–301. 110 Torrell (1996), 172. 111 Thus Mulchahey (1998), 287–302; Torrell places the De malo during Thomas’s second sojourn in Paris; see (1996), 201–2. 112 See the table in Mulchahey, (1998), 303. On the coordination of the disputations with the work on the Summa, see Pesch, (1988), 91.

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Parisian Controversies In 1268, or possibly 1269, Thomas was recalled to Paris to serve a second regency. This broke with the Dominicans’ typical pattern of using their chairs in Paris as a training ground for masters who would afterward dedicate themselves to the order’s own educational institutions. Clearly there was a pressing need to have Thomas at the university. One possible factor dictating his return was a flare-up of the longstanding conflict between the medicants and the secular masters, and it was during this second stay in Paris that he wrote two more defenses of mendicant life, De perfectione spiritualis vitae and Contra retrahentes.113 Another factor was the continuing struggle taking place at the university over the proper relation of Aristotelian thought and Christian theology, particularly concerning the question of the eternity of the world and of the unity of the intellectual soul of all human beings. It was this controversy that would occasion the condemnation in 1270 by Stephen Tempier, Archbishop of Paris, of thirteen propositions, allegedly drawn from the teaching of masters in the arts faculty. In some ways, this was a struggle between the arts masters, such as Boethius of Dacia and Siger of Brabant, who had considerable enthusiasm for what they understood to be Aristotle’s views, and the theology masters, who treated Aristotle with considerably more suspicion. Thomas returns to Paris, therefore, because of controversies over the both the proper relationship of faith to reason and the legitimacy of the Dominican understanding of what it means to follow Christ. Amidst these controversies Thomas continued his writing of the Summa theologiae, completing the secunda pars and probably beginning the tertia pars.114 Thomas also resumed commenting on scripture, as would have been expected of a master in Paris. His commentary on the Gospel of John, which is one of his most polished and sophisticated commentaries, is almost certainly from this period. He would also have conducted disputations, which probably included the questions De virtutibus and De unione Verbi.115 Once again we see Thomas coordinating his various activities: 113

Tugwell argues that Thomas was already bound for Paris before the “renewal of hostilities” over mendicancy, and therefore this was not a factor in his return. See Tugwell (1988a), 226. 114 Torrell (1996), 147 locates the opening questions of the tertia pars at the end of the second Paris regency; Mulchahey (1998) 310, on the other hand, speaks of a “general consensus” that it was not begun until Thomas arrived in Naples in 1272. 115 Thus Torrell (1996), 205–7; Mulchahey (1998), 315–18, with her later dating of the first questions of the tertia pars, similarly argues for Thomas conducting the disputations De unione Verbi in Naples.

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disputing questions on the virtues while working on the second part of the Summa and questions on the hypostatic union while beginning the third part. Such economy of effort helps to account for Thomas’s amazing productivity. Thomas also engaged in the production of a dizzying number of small works, quodlibetal questions, and a commentary on the influential Liber de causis, which Thomas was the first to identify as not a work of Aristotle but rather an adaptation, probably by an Arabic author, of Proclus’s Elements of Theology.116 Thomas also continued the work, which he had begun in Rome with the De anima, of commenting on the works of Aristotle. Thomas did not, however, lecture on Aristotle; these commentaries were apparently Thomas’s own attempt to come to grips with the text of Aristotle in a systematic way. It does seem, however, that others read his commentaries, since after his death the masters of the arts faculty in Paris requested copies of these works.117 Given the conflict between the theology and arts faculties, and Thomas’s penchant for disagreeing with both sides, it is noteworthy that the arts masters would hold him in such high esteem.

Silence In 1272 Thomas went to Naples to serve as master of a newly-founded studium generale.118 In some ways this was a homecoming for Thomas, returning to the place where he first encountered both Aristotle and the friars preachers. As was the case at Santa Sabina, at San Domenico in Naples Thomas was given a free hand in shaping this house of studies. Unlike Santa Sabina, however, the studium would not be a solely Dominican affair, but would also offer courses for the theology faculty at the University of Naples. While in Naples, Thomas continued working on the tertia pars and his Aristotelian commentaries. In his teaching, he seems to have lectured on the Psalms, covering psalms 1–54, and begun a second series of lectures on Paul’s letters, covering Romans and part of 1 Corinthians. However we interpret the absence of lectures on scripture from the curriculum at Santa Sabina, it seems clear that by the time Thomas 116 Some, however, argue that the discovery was actually made by William of Moerbeke, who translated the version from which Thomas worked. See Hankey (2004), 47, note 39. 117 See the text in Foster (1959), 153–5. 118 The normal sense of this term would be a house of studies drawing students from across different provinces. Mulchahey argues that, despite the name, the house of studies was intended solely to be an intra-provincial affair. See (1998), 306–7.

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35

was designing the program at San Domenico he had returned scripture to the heart of theological education. Thomas also took advantage of being in his native land to preach in the vernacular on the Our Father and possibly on the Ten Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed, and the Hail Mary.119 Thomas taught at San Domenico for only a year before a mysterious event on December 6, 1273 brought his work to an end. Bartholomew of Capua, at the canonization hearing for Thomas in Naples, gives us our fullest account of that event, an account ultimately deriving from Reginald of Piperno.120 After celebrating Mass that morning, Thomas did not set to work, as was his habit. Rather, he “hung up his writing instruments” and broke off the Summa in the middle of the discussion of the sacrament of penance. Having worked for several years at a furious pace, Thomas simply ceased. When Reginald pressed him to begin working, Thomas replied, “Reginald, I cannot.” When Reginald persisted, Thomas said, “Reginald, I cannot because everything I have written seems to me to be straw.” Some days passed and Thomas did not resume his work. Reginald and Thomas went to visit Thomas’s sister, perhaps in the hope that he could rest there and then return to his work. She was shocked by his appearance and his near inability to speak. Reginald pressed Thomas to tell him why he would not write, and after swearing Reginald to say nothing of this until after Thomas’s death, Thomas said, “All that I have written seems to me to be straw compared to what I have seen and what has been revealed to me.” Thomas never returned to academic work. This event and Thomas’s various statements concerning it have been subject to different interpretations: a mental or physical breakdown, brought on by overwork, or a mystical experience that took him beyond dialectic into the mystery of God; a repudiation of his life’s work, or a confirmation of his consistent teaching that the reality of God can be only imperfectly signified by human language. At the beginning of 1274, despite his debilitated condition, Thomas set out for the Council of Lyons, which had been called by Pope Gregory X in an attempt to reconcile Orthodox Christians with the western Church. On this journey Thomas and his companions passed the monastery of Monte Cassino where, in answer to a request from the monks, Thomas composed a brief text on the reconciliation of divine foreknowledge with 119 The latter are more difficult to date; given their vernacular origin (though we only possess Latin versions), they presumably are from one of Thomas’s sojourns in Italy. 120 Processus canonizationis Neapoli n. 79, in Foster (1959).

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human freedom. Thomas’s seeming inability or unwillingness to continue his academic work notwithstanding, he ably and succinctly answered the question that was put to him. From there they proceeded to the home of Thomas’s niece, where he fell seriously ill. Some sources say that after a few days Thomas began to feel a bit better and continued on his way to the Cistercian monastery at Fossanova; other say that Thomas felt that his final hour was upon him and he asked to be taken to the monastery, since “If the Lord must visit me, it is better for him to find me in a religious house than in a house of lay people.”121 Upon arriving at Fossanova, many witnesses heard Thomas utter the words of Psalm 132: “This is my rest for ever and ever: here will I dwell, for I have chosen it.”122 Thomas was at Fossanova for about a month, often in a confused mental state. Some claim that he dictated a brief commentary on the Song of Songs, but no authentic text of this is extant. Witnesses also note that he received the Eucharist with great devotion and was able to make all of the responses when he received the last rites. He died shortly thereafter, on March 7, 1274. What does Thomas’s life tell us about his thought? Our sources all stress, as one would expect from hagiographical literature, Thomas’s holiness. But from within the hagiographical conventions, a picture of the particular sort of holiness that Thomas embodied emerges with striking clarity; as Herbert McCabe put it, Thomas’s holiness was first and foremost “sanctity of the mind.”123 This is perhaps not surprising in one who was drawn to and formed by the Order of Preachers, with their charism of study and speaking. Thomas’s particular sanctity of mind combined both intellectual openness and unswerving evangelical purpose. Thomas believed in following arguments where they led, but he also believed that truthful arguments could never lead us away from Christ.124

121 For the former version, see Tocco, Ystoria cap. LVII; for the latter version, see the testimony of Abbot Nicholas of Fossanova, Processus canonizationis Neapoli n. 8, in Foster (1959). 122 It might be noted that all of the claimed eyewitnesses to these words were monks of Fossanova, who seem to have had something of an interest in retaining the body of such a holy man as Thomas within their monastery. Indeed, in the decades after Thomas’s death there was considerable effort made by various parties to claim all or part of his body. The Dominican Bernard Gui also reports these words, but is careful to gloss them as Thomas simply indicating that his earthly pilgrimage had ended (Vita cap. 38 in Foster (1959)). 123 McCabe (1987), 236; cf. Chenu (2002), 31: “This is the sanctity of intelligence. At the very heart of the spirituality of Thomas Aquinas rests this conviction: human understanding is a place for holiness, because the Truth is holy.” 124 On this aspect of Thomas’s character, see Boland, (2007), 29–34.

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Every thought, to the degree that it is true, can be, as St Paul puts it, taken captive to obey Christ (2 Corinthians 10:5). It is this very passage that Aquinas quotes as an authority in support of his claim that “grace does not destroy nature but perfects it.”125 Everything that constitutes “nature,” including the thoughts of the human mind, finds its fulfillment in obedience to the command of Christ. Nature’s capacity to respond to grace means that the intellect of the follower of Christ is never crabbed or cramped, but at least in principle open to truth wherever it can be found. In his commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics Thomas wrote, “we ought to love both those whose opinion we follow and those whose opinion we repudiate. For both have diligently sought the truth and have aided us in doing this.”126 In the end, our assessment of Thomas’s character might be summed up in an attribute of which the sources speak frequently: Thomas’s “purity.” At Thomas’s funeral, Reginald of Piperno, who was for years Thomas’s confessor, said of him, “I always found him pure, like a five-year-old child, as if no corruption of the flesh ever touched him, nor did he consent to any evil pleasure.”127 But Thomas’s “purity” was not simply an absence of bodily desires; it was a singleness of purpose that determined all that he did. If, as Kierkegaard said, purity of heart is to will one thing, then Thomas’s heart was supremely pure. In all of Thomas’s intellectual activities, his single goal was at all times the Dominican task of preaching Jesus Christ and caring for souls so that human beings might attain beatitude. Yet, as Thomas’s own writings on human happiness make clear, if the one thing toward which our will is oriented is the God who created the heavens and the earth, then this purity of heart does not require that we strip ourselves of all other thoughts and passions, but rather calls us to let those thoughts and passions be transformed by being ordered to our one goal. The purity of St Thomas is the purity of the disciple who gives up all to follow Christ, in faith that all that is true and good will be regained a hundredfold in God’s kingdom (Matthew 19:19). Perhaps at the end of his life he hung up his writing instruments as a final act of purification; as Thomas said in speaking of the contemplative life, “discoursing must be laid aside and the soul’s gaze fixed on the contemplation of the one simple truth.”128

125 126 127

Summa theologiae Ia q. 1 a. 8 ad 2. Sententia Metaphysicae lib. 12 lec. 9 n. 14. 128 Tocco, Ystoria cap. LXIII. Summa theologiae IIa–IIae a. 180 a. 6 ad 2.g.

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PART I FAITH AND REASON

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2 Thomas’s Intellectual Project What was Thomas’s intellectual project? We have seen that Thomas lived in a time of great intellectual and religious ferment and I have claimed that Thomas, following Paul’s injunction to take every thought captive for Christ, sought to harness the new intellectual world of the thirteenth century to the evangelical task of proclaiming the gospel. But this is not the only possible answer; even among admirers of Thomas there is considerable disagreement with regard to how best to understand what he was up to. So, partly in the interest of fairness, I would like to begin with a view of Thomas that I believe to be wrong, but which has many quite intelligent supporters. This is the view of Thomas as one who is engaged in a philosophical project that can at least in principle be detached from any theological project that he might also have been pursuing.

1. (MIS)CHARACTERIZING THOMAS’S INTELLECTUAL PROJECT Fernand Van Steenberghen, writes that what Thomas Aquinas had understood better than any other thinker of the thirteenth century, was that philosophy necessarily forms the central framework of the whole edifice of the sciences, and that Christendom did not yet possess a philosophy which would be the expression of its particular culture and the reply to its particular needs. Having seen that, he took it as his personal mission to form one, and then to rethink all the theological problems with the aid of this philosophy.1

Van Steenberghen’s view, or views approximating it, has been common among interpreters of Thomas since at least the mid-nineteenth century, and still has great currency among those who study Thomas Aquinas. Yet it is, I think, mistaken.

1

Van Steenberghen (1955), 97, emphasis in the original.

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What is mistaken in this characterization? While Van Steenberghen does not deny that Thomas was a theologian, he presents Thomas’s important achievement as essentially philosophical in nature: the intellectual task was to find the correct philosophy to unify the various areas of knowledge, including theology. While rethinking theological problems in light of this new philosophy was no doubt quite labor-intensive, it was the philosophical framework that was the work of genius. As Van Steenberghen puts it, “It is the good philosopher who makes the good theologian, not the other way around.”2 Furthermore, he ascribes to Thomas the intention of creating just such a philosophical system, meaning that, in some sense, Thomas himself saw his mission as fundamentally philosophical. For Van Steenberghen, the philosophical project of Thomas was strongly influenced by the new Aristotelianism prevalent at the University of Paris, but it was not simply identifiable with the philosophy of Aristotle.3 In fact, he notes elements of Thomas’s philosophy that are “completely foreign to Aristotelianism.”4 These elements are drawn largely from Neoplatonic sources, which might lead one to describe it as a “platonic Aristotelainism” or an “Aristotelian Platonism,” but Van Steenberghen thinks it better to see Thomas as accomplishing an original philosophical synthesis.5 The fact that Thomas never produced a written exposition of this synthesis—a Summa philosophiae—seems to Van Steenberghen to be simply the result of Thomas being occupied by his duties as a “professor of theology.”6 A somewhat different, and perhaps more extreme, version of the Thomas-as-philosopher view can be found in Ralph McInerny. McInerny argues that, “there are no peculiarly Thomistic philosophical principles that could supplant the Aristotelian ones he adopts.”7 In other words, Thomas is not only a philosopher; he is an Aristotelian of the strict observance. Thomas found in Aristotle a completely adequate philosophical framework, to which he added, drawing particularly on Neoplatonic sources, but which he never felt the need to contradict or alter in any fundamental way. In particular, the metaphysics of Thomas, the “science of being as being,” is not an original synthesis; it is simply the metaphysics of Aristotle, enriched but not fundamentally changed by Neoplatonic additions.8 On this view, theology not only does not contribute anything

2 4 5 7

3 Van Steenberghen (1991), 315. Van Steenberghen (1991), 298–302. Van Steenberghen (1955), 70, emphasis in the original. 6 Van Steenberghen (1991), 307. Van Steenberghen (1991), 314. 8 McInerny (2006), 160. McInerny (2006), 305.

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essential to Thomas’s philosophy, it does not even provide an occasion to deviate from Aristotle. The modern interpreter of Thomas whom both Van Steenberghen and McInerny identify as their opponent is E´tienne Gilson, who sees Thomas Aquinas as the preeminent practitioner of “Christian philosophy.” What Gilson means by this phrase is, first of all, a historically identifiable phenomenon: those philosophical systems that, whatever their rational cogency in the abstract, were born in a milieu in which Christian influence was decisive.9 But beyond the historical contingencies of their production, Gilson sees Christian philosophies as including, “every philosophy which, although keeping the two orders [of the natural and the supernatural] formally distinct, nevertheless considers the Christian revelation as an indispensible auxiliary to reason.”10 As Gilson explains it: In so far as the believer bases his affirmations on the intimate conviction gained from faith he remains purely and simply a believer, he has not yet entered the gates of philosophy; but when amongst his beliefs he finds some that are capable of becoming objects of science then he becomes a philosopher, and if it is to the Christian faith that he owes this new philosophical insight, he becomes a Christian philosopher.11

What Gilson means by beliefs “becoming objects of science” is their being rationally demonstrated. To take the example much beloved by Gilson: when in Exodus 3:14 God reveals his name to Moses as qui est—“he who is”—we have laid down “the principle from which henceforth the whole of Christian philosophy will be suspended.”12 This is what Gilson refers to as the “metaphysic of Exodus,” by which he does not mean a metaphysical system contained in scripture, but rather the historically indispensible point of origin of the Christian understanding of being.13 The idea of God as esse ipsum subsistans or “being itself ” is, for Gilson, something that is defensible on the basis of unaided human reason, but prior to the encounter of philosophical yearning with Christian revelation it was an idea that remained inchoate and confused. Gilson believes that those principles in Thomas that are purely philosophical—i.e. are subject to rational demonstration—can be extracted from his theology so as to constitute a Christian philosophy that makes no appeal to divine

9 11 13

10 See Gilson (1950), 40–1. Gilson (1950), 37, emphasis in the original. 12 Gilson (1950), 36. Gilson (1950), 51. Gilson (1950), 433, note 9. For a discussion, see Kerr (2002b), 80–5.

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revelation, but the philosopher forgets, at his or her peril, their original source and setting within theology. The essential argument of both Van Steenberghen and McInerny against Gilson seems to be that, despite his remarks about keeping the natural and supernatural orders formally distinct, Gilson hopelessly confuses them, thus turning philosophy into theology.14 In particular, they see him as not clearly distinguishing between those instances when theology happens to occasion a new philosophical insight and those instances when theology contributes a formal principle to philosophy, at which point philosophy ceases to be philosophy and becomes theology. From their perspective, Gilson confuses the particular historical occasion of a notion’s origin with the intrinsic philosophical value of the notion itself, such that he is willing to describe theology as “an indispensible auxiliary to reason” when in fact it is a mere contingent occasion for reason’s autonomous exercise. McInerny grants “the historical fact of the influence of the faith on philosophy,” but notes that “this is a far cry from holding that there is a continuing formal, objective dependence of philosophy on the faith.”15 From my perspective, what Van Steenberghen and McInerny see as a fatal weakness in Gilson is in fact a strength. That is, Gilson takes as primary the concrete, historical act of thinking, in such a way that systems of thought, while not reducible to the historical context of their genesis, can best be grasped by taking seriously the notion that the occasion of their genesis is in some sense an “indispensible auxiliary.” Gilson’s approach at least invites us to take seriously the fact that Thomas’s thought was produced in particular times and places and for particular concrete purposes. And while it is true that Thomas makes, on a variety of occasions, various rough-and-ready distinctions between theology and philosophy or faith and reason, it is not really the case that, as Van Stenberghen puts it, “the distinction between philosophy and sacred science is perfectly clear” in Thomas.16 Even if one were to grant such a “perfectly clear” distinction, there is little evidence that Thomas ever thought of himself as a philosopher. Certainly Thomas imbibed great quantities of the writings of Aristotle and other philosophi, wrote detailed commentaries on those texts that required him to ponder them deeply, and had his thinking affected in both its form and its content by this encounter. Moreover, he wrote several short treatises and many sections, questions, and articles in his longer works that 14 15

See Van Steenberghen (1991), 312–13; McInerny (2006), 140–1. 16 McInerny (2006), 106. Van Steenberghen (1991), 309.

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do not depend on an acceptance divine revelation for their cogency. One could, and many have, distill from those works something that might not inaptly be described as a “philosophy” that might serve some apologetic or other sort of purpose.17 But with regard to Thomas’s intellectual project as a whole, it would leave one with a severely truncated account, one that Thomas himself surely would not recognize. Imagine a nun who devoted her life to the creation of icons. Imagine that nun acquired great skill and a keen aesthetic sense that was reflected in her use of line and color. Imagine further that this nun studied artists who depicted both secular and sacred subjects, and on the basis of this study introduced certain innovations in the painting of icons that were initially controversial but were eventually accepted as legitimate and even, in some cases, canonical, setting new standards in the painting of icons. Then imagine the nun’s work coming to be appreciated by those who do not share her beliefs concerning icons as windows into eternity, those who appreciated the icons purely as aesthetic objects. These admirers would in a certain sense not be “wrong” in their appreciation; the values of line and color to which they could point would undoubtedly be present in the nun’s work. It would not be wrong to say that the nun had produced “great art” or even that she was a “great artist.” But for those who did share the nun’s understanding of icons as windows into eternity, such a description, while not wrong, would be somewhat beside the point, or at best of limited usefulness, perhaps as showing that the aesthetes are not beyond the reach of God’s grace. Thomas can certainly be appreciated as a philosopher, but for those who share Thomas’s own view of the uses of reason, such a description is of limited usefulness, to the point of being mistaken in characterizing Thomas’s intellectual project. If we take Thomas’s prologue to the Summa theologiae as indicating something of how he understood what he was up to, then it is clear that he saw himself as catholicae veritatis doctor—a teacher of catholic truth. And this was a role he carried out as a part of his wider role as a friar preacher, whose task was preaching the gospel. As we begin to try to grasp the nature of Thomas’s intellectual project, we might begin with how he understood the role of the catholicae veritatis doctor. To do this, we will look at the inaugural lecture that formed part of 17 The apologetic impulse behind separating out a philosophy from Thomas’s theology is perhaps reflected in McInerny’s comment (2006), 139 that, on Gilson’s account, those things about God that philosophy can demonstrate “no longer provide a lingua franca in which believer and nonbeliever can agree that there is a God and on some of his attributes.”

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the ceremonies surrounding his inception as a master in the faculty of theology at Paris in 1256.

2. THOMAS’S INAUGURAL LECTURE When Thomas set about preparing his inaugural lecture for his inception as a master of theology at the University of Paris, he was in something of a quandary over his subject matter. The story, which circulated while Thomas was still alive, is that he saw in a dream a figure who gave him a book and told him to take as his text Psalm 103:13—“watering the mountains from his things above, the earth is filled with the fruit of your works.”18 Here we can look for an initial glimpse of what Thomas means by sacra doctrina, which we might translate literally as “sacred doctrine,” or loosely as “theology,” but which is perhaps best rendered as “holy teaching,” since it refers less to a body of information than it does to a process of instruction, by which God’s own knowledge is shared with human beings in order to lead them to blessedness. This inaugural lecture indicates not only how Thomas understood the task he was taking up as a master in the theology faculty but also is a distillation of Thomas’s most basic convictions about God, the world, and the pursuit of human fulfillment.19 The lecture begins with the theme, so prominent in Dionysius the Areopagite, of mediating hierarchy: “The king of heaven, the Lord, established this law from all eternity, that the gifts of providence should reach what is lowest by way of things that are in between.” This principle of mediating hierarchy means that material things, such as mountains and rain, can serve as metaphors by which spiritual truth is transmitted to us. The teacher is like the mountains upon which the waters fall from the sky: the water flows down the sides of the mountain to water the lands below; similarly, it is by the “ministry” of the teacher that, “the light of divine wisdom flows down into the minds of students.”20 After this introduction, the lecture has a fourfold structure, treating in turn 1) what is taught, 2) the teacher, 3) the student, and 4) the act of teaching. 18 Gerard de Frachet’s Vitae Fratrum pars 4, cap. 24 n. 8, in Foster (1959). Many of Thomas’s fellow Dominicans interpreted the figure with the book as St Dominic himself. 19 There is a second extant principium, which is a commendation of scripture and a discussion of its structure and division. There are several theories about how it is related to Rigans montes, which are discussed in Torrell (1996), 53. 20 Rigans montes pr.

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The first part, taking as its starting point the phrase “from his things above,” focuses on the teaching itself. Coming from above, holy teaching is elevated in terms of its source, its content and its goal. The source, as noted above, is divine wisdom itself. The content is divided by Thomas into three: that which can be reached by everyone, because of the knowledge of God’s existence that “is naturally implanted in everyone” (though this is an incomplete form of knowledge);21 those things that are “more exalted,” which can be reached “only by the minds of the wise, following the guidance of reason alone”; and finally “the highest things, which transcend all human reason.” It is this last that is the specific purview of the sacri doctores who, “instructed by the Holy Spirit . . . passed these things on to us in the text of sacred scripture.”22 Thomas sees the content of sacra doctrina as encompassing the somewhat vague knowledge of God that everyone has by intuition, the clearer knowledge of God that philosophers have by argumentation, and the knowledge of God had through revelation, which outstrips the previous two in both clarity and extent, and which is transmitted to us through scripture. While it is this last that is the unique purview of holy teaching, such that Thomas will sometimes treat sacra doctrina and sacra scriptura as synonyms,23 all knowledge of God falls within the scope of this teaching. Finally, Thomas notes that this teaching is elevated in terms of its goal, which is eternal life. This teaching comes down from the heights of divine wisdom in order to lead us back to those heights. Thomas then discusses the teacher, who is again likened to the mountains upon which the rain falls. Teachers of divine wisdom are “high” like the mountains because they “make light of the things of earth and yearn only for the things of heaven”; they are “radiant” [splendorem] because, just as the mountains are the first to catch the light of morning, their minds are the first to be illuminated by divine wisdom; they are a defense, protecting the faith in the way that encircling mountains defend a land. No doubt conscious of the occasion of this lecture, Thomas correlates the three likenesses with the three tasks of the master of theology at the university: preaching, lecturing, and disputing. At the same time, Thomas gives a distinctively Dominican cast to these tasks. Like Dominic, Thomas 21 This sort of knowledge of God, which is neither self-evident (per se nota), nor the result of a demonstration, nor gained through revelation, crops up in several places in Aquinas and is presumably the basis of most “natural” religions. He discusses it in Contra Gentiles lib. 3 cap. 38 n. 6. 22 Rigans montes cap. 1. 23 See, e.g. Summa theologiae Ia q. 1 a. 2 ad 2: “sacra scriptura seu doctrina.”

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emphasizes that the quality of preachers’ lives enable them to preach effectively. He likewise emphasizes the importance of study: the enlightening of teachers’ minds enables them to lecture suitably. And he sees their being “well armed” [muniti] as necessary for refuting errors in argument: a suitable metaphor for a member of an order that had its origin in an intellectual crusade against heretics.24 Turning from the teacher to the pupil, Thomas briefly lays out what makes for a suitable student. Students must be like the earth: low, solid, and fruitful. They are to be low in the humility with which they listen to their teachers. They must also, however, possess the solidity of right judgment [sensus rectitudinem]; they cannot simply be passive recipients of knowledge, but must engage their intellects in assessing and assimilating what they are taught. Finally, they must be fruitful, inasmuch as they must be able not simply to parrot back what they are taught, but also to take that knowledge and go on to make new intellectual discoveries.25 Thomas expects a good student to possess the virtues that he himself exhibited: a humble docility in the face of received tradition, an incisive analytical mind that can grasp that received tradition, and a capacity to take what has been learned and analyzed and learn new things on one’s own. Thomas finally takes up the activity of teaching itself, once again drawing three lessons from his biblical text. First, just as the teacher does not receive from God all that God knows—for the text does not say that the things from above are “poured out” [influens] upon the mountains, but rather that the mountains are “watered” [rigans] from above—so too the teacher must measure out to the students the degree of knowledge that is suited to their capacities to receive. Second, Thomas notes that the “things above” are said to belong properly to God [superioribus suis] and are thus possessed by him according to his nature, while the teachers “share abundantly” and the students have “an adequate share” in this wisdom. Third, referring to the phrase “from the fruit of your works,” Thomas notes that God communicates wisdom according to his own power, while the teacher communicates that wisdom “ministerially” [per ministerium]. The fruits of divine wisdom properly belong to God alone. In all of this Thomas acknowledges both the need for a fundamental stance of humility on the part of the teacher, since the subject matter exceeds the teacher’s capacity to grasp, as well as the need for the teaching

24

Rigans montes cap. 2.

25

Rigans montes cap. 3.

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to be properly ordered, so that students are not introduced to matters beyond their capacity. In order to fulfill his ministerial role, therefore, the teacher must be innocent, intelligent, fervent, and obedient—virtues that no one possesses “by himself and from his own resources.” Yet one can hope to be made adequate to the task by God.26 One striking features of this lecture is the absence of any explicit mention of Aristotle. The whole thing seems rather Neoplatonic, as indicated by the quotation from Dionysius that Thomas makes at the outset and the image of divine wisdom descending from God on high through the intermediary of the teacher down to the students. Thomas seems to feel no need to invoke Aristotle or to use an Aristotelian vocabulary.27 The influence of Aristotle is not, however, altogether absent. This is particularly the case with regard to what Thomas has to say about the role of the human teacher in sacra doctrina.28 Augustine had said that, strictly speaking, no human being could be said to be the teacher of another human being.29 Thomas, on the other hand, following his teacher Albert, held that there was a real sense in which, while God is the source of all truth and thus the primary cause of knowledge, human beings are genuine “ministerial” causes in the imparting of knowledge.30 Though it may not be immediately apparent, this view of teaching is related to Thomas’s more general understanding of the role of creatures in relation to divine causality, and it is here that we might look for an Aristotelian influence in Thomas’s inaugural lecture. Thomas combines the “vertical” account of causality, developed in Neoplatonism, with the “horizontal” account of causality derived from Aristotle, in developing his own account of “primary” and “secondary” causality.31 Drawing on sources that interpret the emanationism of Neoplatonism in light of a monotheistic understanding of 26

Principium Rigans montes cap. 2. Is it possible, given the controversy that periodically flared up over the place of Aristotle in the curriculum at Paris, Thomas thought it was best to downplay the role of Aristotle in his understanding of what a teacher does? There is not, however, much evidence that there was any particular controversy over Aristotle at the time of Thomas’s lecture. See Van Steenberghen (1991), 285–8. 28 Vivian Boland (2007), 41–58 argues that Thomas’s writings on teaching and learning become more clearly influenced by Aristotle over the course of time. 29 See Augustine’s Concerning the Teacher (De Magistro), ch. 12. 30 See Tugwell (1988a), 268–9. Thomas defines a “minister” as “an intelligent instrument; while an instrument is moved by another, and its action is ordered to another” (Summa theologiae Ia q. 112 a. 1). 31 The terms “vertical” and “horizontal” are borrowed from Kockelmans (2001), 221–6; Kockelmans in turn is influenced in his account, if not his vocabulary, by Fabro (1961). 27

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creation—particularly the works of Avicenna and the Liber de Causis— Thomas sees the dependence of all creatures on God as the “vertical” axis of causality. Yet this dependence of creatures on the primary causality of God does not vitiate the causal capacity of creatures, and Aquinas takes Aristotle to have given a compelling account of this capacity in his metaphysics of act and potency. Creatures are not simply “occasions” for God’s exercise of causality, but are genuine causes.32 In Thomas’s early formulations of the relation of the primary or “vertical” causality of God to the secondary or “horizontal” causality of creatures, he uses terms borrowed from the Muslim philosopher Avicenna—terms that can make it sound as if this distinction describes a mere division of labor: “Avicenna says that the divine agent differs from the natural one, for the natural agent is the cause of motion [motus], but the divine agent is giving being [esse] as the creator of the world.”33 This might give the impression that God is responsible for the existence of things and natural agents for their movement. In later writings, Thomas offers a more subtle account, in which Aristotle’s description of natural causality forms the “horizontal” axis, which is, one might say, “suspended” from the vertical axis, in the sense that natural causes depend entirely on God, who “is the cause of everything’s action inasmuch as he gives everything the power to act, and preserves it in being and applies it to action, and inasmuch as by his power every other power acts.”34 Thomas’s account of the genuine causality of the teacher is part of his larger account of created causes. The teacher, operating on the “horizontal” axis of causality, is a genuine, if not the ultimate, source of the knowledge acquired by the student; the horizontal act of teaching is, as it were, suspended from the vertical divine gifts of both natural reason and divine revelation.35 We see signs of Aristotle’s influence here, though it is an influence that cannot be neatly separated out from other influences. It

32 This is a view that Aquinas, drawing on Maimonides, associates with “some of the sages in the Moorish books of law” (De potentia q. 3 a. 7). I shall have more to say on this in the following chapter. 33 Super Sent. lib. 1 d. 7 q. 1 a. 1, ad 3. 34 De potentia q. 3 a. 7. 35 In his commentary on Boethius’s De Trinitate, written during his first Parisian regency, Thomas says that both natural knowledge and supernatural faith depend upon God, though in different ways: “the mind needs the divine activity in all knowledge of the truth, but in knowing natural things it does not require a new light but only the divine movement and direction: but in knowing other matters [e.g. the mysteries of faith] it needs in addition a new illumination” (q. 1 a. 1).

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might be characterized as a cross-fertilization of Aristotle and Neoplatonism, but it also is shaped by scriptural accounts of God’s relationship to creatures. Furthermore, it is influenced by the Christian belief in the incarnation, in which the primary mediator of divine wisdom is the humanity of Christ, in which wisdom has become incarnate so as to be “the teacher’s teacher.”36

3. SCIENTIA In his disputed questions De veritate, which he commenced upon his inception as a master in Paris, Thomas returns to the question of what it means to teach someone: “one person is said to teach another inasmuch as, by signs, he manifests to that other the reasoning process [decursum rationis] which he himself goes through by his own natural reason.”37 Notice that what is communicated is not simply data, but the teacher’s own “reasoning process.” This reflects the view of teaching that we saw in Thomas’s inaugural lecture: someone has truly learned what a teacher has to teach when that knowledge becomes “fruitful,” which involves not simply understanding that what the teacher says is true, but understanding why it is true. This sort of knowledge is what Thomas means by the term scientia. The word scientia had a long history in Latin-speaking theology prior to the thirteenth century. For much of that history, the term was understood in contrast to sapientia or “wisdom.” St Augustine wrote, “wisdom is concerned with the intellectual cognizance [cognitio intellectualis] of eternal things and knowledge [scientia] with the rational cognizance [cognitio rationalis] of temporal things.”38 In light of this distinction, scientia is positioned as a lesser form of cognition, suited to the practicalities of material life, and firmly subordinated to the higher form of cognition, sapientia. It was not, of course, that scientia was a bad thing—it was, after all, one of the gifts of the Spirit (see Isaiah 11:2)—but it was sapientia that was the higher apprehension of truth. With the introduction of Aristotle’s works in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, however, scientia began to take on new value, since it translates episteme, the word used by Aristotle for the most certain form of knowing, in which, as he puts it, “we are aware both that the explanation [aition], on 36 38

37 Rigans montes, cap. 2. De veritate q. 11 a. 1. Augustine, De Trinitate lib. 12, cap. 4.

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account of which the object is, is its explanation, and that it is not possible for this to be otherwise.”39 In other words, episteme or scientia involves knowing why it is that something is the case, what its “cause” or “explanation,” both of which might translate the Greek aition, is; it further involves knowing that this relationship between event and explanation (or effect and cause) is a necessary one. The means by which we attain this sort of knowledge is a demonstration, which Aristotle describes as a “scientific deduction” [syllogismos],40 meaning a form of argument involving a chain of inference from true premises to a true conclusion. So, for example, if it is true that “Socrates is a human being” and that “all human beings are mortal,” then it necessarily follows that it is true that “Socrates is mortal.” As Thomas puts it, “The nature of scientia consists in this, that from things already known conclusions about other matters follow of necessity.”41 Such a scientific syllogism produces not simply knowledge that something is the case (e.g. that Socrates is mortal), for that sort of knowledge might be attained by some other means, such as observation (e.g. I see Socrates drink hemlock and die). Rather, it produces knowledge of why something must be the case (e.g. Socrates is mortal because he is a human being). As long as the premises are true and the inferences valid, and one accepts the truth of the premises and understands the inferences, the argument necessarily produces certain knowledge. And the premises that are most surely grasped, and thus produce the most certain conclusions, are those that Aristotle describes as “true and primitive and immediate and more familiar than and prior to and explanatory of the conclusion.”42 To use the language that Thomas and other scholastics would later use, the ideal scientific syllogism is one whose premises are per se nota—i.e. known through themselves or self-evident, and therefore not in need of any demonstration. Examples of such “first principles” would be statements such as “a whole is greater than its part” or “a thing cannot be true and false in the same way at the same time.” The question that arises in the thirteenth century, in light of this understanding of scientia, is how scientia is related to sacra doctrina.43 One of the first of the Parisian masters to take up this question was William of

39

40 Posterior Analytics 71b, 10–12. Posterior Analytics 71b, 18–19. 42 Super De Trinitate q. 2 a. 2. Posterior Analytics 71b, 21–2. 43 For a general treatment of medieval ideas on Aristotelian scientia, see Serene, (1982). For the specific issue of theology as scientia, the classic treatment, and still a good starting point, is Chenu (1927); more recently, see Leinsle (2010), 147–81. 41

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Auxerre, who made the crucial move of identifying the articles of faith as the first principles of theological scientia.44 The notion of “articles of faith” was itself a relatively new one, first appearing in the twelfth century. The articles were usually associated with the different clauses of the Apostles’ Creed and were variously numbered, usually at twelve or fourteen, often with half pertaining to the Godhead and half to the incarnation.45 These articles can be thought of as propositions that distill scriptural revelation, pointing us to what is most essential, defining the central beliefs of Christianity.46 For William, the articles are principia per se nota—self-evident principles—for “if there were no principles in theology it would be neither art nor science.”47 Like the self-evident premises of Aristotelian scientia, the articles of faith cannot be proven through demonstration, but are the principles by which the theologian goes on to draw other conclusions. As William puts it, “faith is an argumentum not a conclusio, proving not proven.”48 What he does not seem to do, however, is actually to connect these first principles to Aristotle’s theory of demonstration.49 A second crucial move was made by Thomas’s contemporary Bonaventure, probably under the influence of Robert Grosseteste, author of the first medieval Latin commentary on the Posterior Analytics (c. 1230). In that commentary the term scientia indicates not simply a type of knowing, but an organized body of knowledge that is characterized by particular first principles and ways of proceeding. Grosseteste uses the term “subalternate” to describe scientiae—what we would call “fields” or “disciplines”— that do not begin from principles per se nota but rather from principles that have been demonstrated by a “higher” scientia.50 The classic example of this would be the way that optics begins from principles demonstrated by geometry or the way that music begins from principles drawn from mathematics. Optics and music would be subalternate sciences with regard to geometry and mathematics. Bonaventure picks up on this term in the prologue to his Sentences commentary to reply to the objection that Lombard proceeds improperly because he uses inquiry, whereas scripture 44 On William’s construction of theology as an Aristotelian science, see Chenu (1927), 49–52 and Coolman (2004), 185–217. 45 On the early history of the idea of “articles of faith,” see Goering (1998). For William of Auxerre’s own definition of the term “article of faith,” see Coolman (2004), 193, note 21. 46 In Thomas, see Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 1 a. 6 ad 1. 47 William of Auxerre, Summa Aurea 3.12.1, quoted in Coolman (2004), 193. Cf. Summa Aurea 5.4.3. 48 Summa Aurea 1, pr., quoted in Coolman (2004), 186. 49 See Leinsle (2010), 148. 50 On Grosseteste, see Goering (1998), 133–4.

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uses narration. In reply, Bonaventure says the scientia of the Sentences is related to the scientia of scripture “by means of a kind of subalternation” (per modum cuiusdam subalternationis), and that just as the subaltern scientia optics proceeds in a manner different from the superior scientia geometry, thus constituting it as distinct, so too the Sentences proceed in a manner different from scripture, while remaining subalternated to scripture.51 In using this terminology of “subalternation,” Bonaventure seems to intend chiefly to indicate the subordination of the sort of theology done by Lombard and other masters to the theology of scripture, and does not connect it to William of Auxerre’s identification of the articles of faith with the first principles of scientia.52 Thomas, however, does make this connection. He combines the idea of the articles of faith as first principles with the idea of a subalternate scientia so as to argue that sacra doctrina as practiced by human beings is a scientia that draws its first principles from a higher scientia. In doing this Thomas appears to accommodate as much as possible his understanding of sacra doctrina to the Aristotelian understanding of a demonstrative “science.” What advantage would there be to this? Why not stay with the traditional Augustinian distinction between scientia and sapientia and claim for sacra doctrina the more exalted status of sapientia? Is this simply the case of succumbing to the allure of the novelty of Aristotle’s philosophy, a desire to conform what the theologian does to what the philosopher considers the most certain form of knowledge? Recall that sacra doctrina refers not simply to a body of truths, but to a process of teaching; recall further that, at least in its ideal form, teaching involves not simply knowing that something is the case, but knowing why it is the case. In other words, the goal of the teacher is not simply to impart information, but to produce scientia in the student. It is only if the student in some sense possesses scientia that his or her knowledge will be “fruitful”—i.e. able to be communicated to another. Thomas’s concern to understand the sense in which holy teaching is scientia is really a concern about its communicability. It is not a case of Thomas trying to be as Aristotelian as he can, practicing a servile conformity to the demands of Aristotelian philosophy. Rather, it is a case of the preaching friar’s concern to communicate as effectively as possible the truth of the gospel. The more sacra doctrina approaches scientia, the more firmly and fruitfully it implants itself in the student’s mind, which is a particularly important

51

Bonaventure, In I Sententiarum, pr. q. 2 ad 4.

52

See Chenu (1927), 55.

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concern if the student is himself a preaching friar who will in turn be sent out to proclaim the gospel. As Victor White puts it, the whole orientation of the Summa theologiae “is evangelistic, ‘pedagogical,’ and . . . it is ‘scientific’ only to the extent that scientific and logical methods may serve this evangelistic concern.”53 Holy teaching as scientia serves Dominican ends at least as much as it serves Aristotelian ends.

4. THE FIRST QUESTION OF THE SUMMA THEOLOGIAE: SACRA DOCTRINA AS SCIENTIA The position Thomas maps out in the ten articles of the opening question in the Summa theologiae concerning the nature of sacra doctrina as scientia, though brief in comparison with modern treatises on theological method, is very carefully considered, and it will repay us to carefully consider it in turn. Thomas opens the question by asking whether there is a need for any further teaching (doctrina) apart from philosophical studies (philosophicae disciplinae).54 Note here that Thomas is asking about the activity of both teachers and learners: given the teaching activity of philosophers, does anything further need to be taught? Does anything further need to be learned? Thomas considers two objections, which both would argue “no,” but which do so from opposite directions. The first, citing a scriptural authority (Sirach 3:22, “Seek not the things that are too high for you”), argues that human being should not seek what is beyond the grasp of reason and, since what is within the grasp of reason is adequately dealt with in philosophy, there is no need for—indeed, there cannot be—any other doctrina. If we recall that teaching involves the teacher communicating to the student the teacher’s own “reasoning process” (decursum rationis), the first objection seems to be saying that there can be no decursum rationis about what it beyond the grasp of natural reason, and thus there can be no teaching of what is beyond reason. The second objection, citing a philosophical authority (Aristotle’s Metaphysics 6.1, 1026a), argues from the other end that everything that exists, including God, is encompassed within philosophy and thus there is nothing above human reason. In proof of this the objection mentions the fact that within philosophy there is a part that is known as “theology” or “divine scientia” that treats of God. If philosophy encompasses teaching about both God and the world, what is there left for sacra doctrina to do?

53

White (1958), 7.

54

Summa theologiae Ia q. 1 a. 1.

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In the sed contra, which states briefly the position opposed to the objections, Thomas quotes 2 Timothy: “All scripture inspired of God is useful to teach (ad docendum), to reprove (ad arguendum), to correct (ad corripiendum), to instruct in justice (ad erudiendum ad iustitiam).” This reply, taking it for granted that scripture is not part of philosophy, notes that it is nevertheless useful in all of these activities, which are all forms of teaching. Therefore there must be a scientia that is distinct from philosophy. What Thomas does in the remainder of the article is to unpack this fact so that we might have some insight into why this would be the case. In trying to show why there would be such a teaching, Thomas gives a two-part answer. First, human beings have a goal, a life with God, that exceeds the grasp of reason. Thomas does not here argue for this premise, though he will later.55 Rather, he presumes that his readers will accept this. In order to move toward a goal, he says, human beings must have some knowledge of it; that is to say, while I might unknowingly be in motion toward something, it is properly spoken of as my “goal” only if I intend to move toward it. Therefore, if God is to be the goal of human life, it is necessary that we have some knowledge (cognitium) of God and this is given to us in divine revelation. Note that here Thomas is not speaking of scientia, but of the more general term “cognition.” This part of his argument seems to be directed toward the first objection, so that when at the end of the article Thomas offers his explicit response to this objection he simply clarifies that holy teaching is constituted by this scriptural revelation. Thomas makes essentially the same point that we found in his inaugural lecture: God is the ultimate source of sacra doctrina. Second, Thomas concedes the point that philosophers do indeed teach many things about God, and he even concedes that some of those things are true. As he makes clear later, such things include God’s existence, creative activity, and perfection.56 Yet it is still fitting that there should be a sacra doctrina about such matters—a teaching rooted in divine revelation—because, once again, the comprehensive flourishing of human beings (totis hominis salus) is at stake and “the truth about God such as reason could discover would be known only to a few, and that after a long time, and with the mixing in of many errors.”57 Thomas is well aware that

55

On God’s exceeding the full grasp of human reason, see, inter alia, Summa theologiae Ia q. 12 a. 12 and on God as the goal of human existence see Ia-IIae q. 3 a. 8. 56 See Summa theologiae Ia q. 12 a. 12. 57 Summa theologiae Ia q. 1 a. 1 co.; cf. IIa-IIae q. 2 a. 4; De veritate q. 14 a. 10; Contra Gentiles lib. 1 cap. 4.

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philosophers such a Plato and Aristotle had scientia of some things concerning God based on their natural reason. But he was also aware that they were rather exceptional men, who had much leisure for contemplative labor, and who, despite their best efforts, got a number of things about God wrong. Because God is concerned for the flourishing not just of the philosopher, but also of the prince and the peasant, it is fitting there should be a holy teaching by means of divine revelation.58 This second part of Thomas’s response is clearly addressed to the second objection, and in the explicit reply to that objection at the end of the article Thomas addresses the further question of how, if philosophy and sacra doctrina address some of the same matters, such as the existence of God, they can be distinguished from each other as distinct scientiae. Thomas notes that areas of knowledge or “sciences” are distinguished not always by their subject matter but sometimes by their methodologies. The biologist and the chemist might both study organic life, but using different tools and approaches. Thus there is no inherent difficulty in distinguishing philosophy, which bases itself on human reason, from holy teaching, which bases itself on divine revelation. I have spent considerable time on this particular article, not only because it is Thomas’s opening move in his discussion of the nature of sacra doctrina, but also because it is a good example of what he means by “holy teaching.” In essence, the first article of the Summa is a performance of the very thing that it wants to show: that there can be a reasoning process with regard to that which is beyond the grasp of natural human knowledge. The first part of Thomas’s response even takes something like syllogistic form: • Major premise: the God who exceeds the grasp of natural reason is the goal of human living. • Minor premise: the goal of human living must be capable of being made known to human beings if they are going to direct their thoughts and actions to it. • Conclusion: the God who exceeds the grasp of natural reason must be capable of being made known to human beings. Thomas is showing how someone who accepts the premises concerning God as goal and the intentional natural of human action ought to further accept that there needs to be some sort of decursum rationis by which human beings can come to knowledge of that goal.

58

Cf. Super 1 Cor. cap. 1 lec. 3 n. 55.

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Of course, this does not fit precisely the model of Aristotelian scientia. Specifically, the premises of the syllogism are not self-evident (per se nota), an issue Thomas takes up in the second article of the first question, which asks explicitly whether holy teaching is scientia.59 In his response, Thomas does not use the term “subalternate scientia,” but the idea is clearly present.60 He distinguishes between those scientiae that begin from premises known though “the natural light of the intelligence” and those that begin from premises “known by the light of a higher scientia.” He then uses the same examples that Grosseteste drew from Aristotle (optics is subalternate with regard to geometry; music is subalternate with regard to mathematics) and draws the conclusion that it is “in this way” (i.e. as subalternate) that sacra doctrina is scientia, because it proceeds from premises that have been proven by another scientia, namely the scientia of God and the blessed (i.e. the saints and angels). Just as a musicologist believes the principles handed on to her by the mathematician, so too holy teaching believes what is revealed by God. While scientia that begins from borrowed principles may not be the highest sort of scientia, it is scientia nonetheless. We may move rather quickly over the next few articles, which serve to elaborate points already stated or implied in the first two. Thomas takes up the question of whether holy teaching is a single scientia, given that it extends to such diverse topics as God, angels, physical beings, and human morality. Thomas responds by noting that the unity of a scientia is not compromised by its being extended to a variety of things, so long as those things are considered according to the same “formality,” by which he means the same general defining feature. To use a modern example, a great variety of organisms ranging from hamster to human beings can be studied in the field of biology without compromising the unity of that field because they share the “formality” of being living things, and it is in this regard rather than some other (such as their being ugly or expensive or illbehaved) that the biologist studies them. In the case of holy teaching, a great variety of things can be considered under the general defining 59 Summa theologiae Ia q. 1 a. 2. The question of whether the first principles of sacra doctrina could properly be described as principles per se nota is one on which Thomas’s thinking appears to develop from the commentary on the Sentences, where he does speak of them in this way (perhaps influenced by William of Auxerre), to the Summa theologiae, where this language disappears. See Mansini (2010), 407–35. 60 For places where Thomas uses the language of subalternation, see Super Sent. lib. 1 pr. a. 3 qc. 2; Super De Trinitate q. 2 a. 2 ad 5 and 7; De veritate q. 14 a. 9 ad 3; Lectura Romana pr. q. 1 a. 1 ad 1.

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feature of being divinely revealed.61 Thomas goes on to note in the fourth article that because sacra doctrina considers things under this single formality, it can be both “speculative” and “practical”—that is, it teaches us both the truth of things that are knowable and the goodness of things that are doable—because God’s revelation concerns both our quest for truth and our quest for the good life for human beings, both of which are fulfilled by union with God. Thomas goes on to note that if one must choose, it is better to say that sacra doctrina is speculative, since it is first concerned with communicating the truth about God: the truth that we hope to attain in its fullness by ordering our actions accordingly.62 But Thomas’s interest is clearly in underscoring the unity of the speculative and the practical, a unity that is ultimately grounded in the source of sacra doctrina in divine wisdom. God’s knowledge is in a sense both “speculative” and “practical”—things exist because God knows them, so there is a sense in which God’s knowing is a making63—so it is only fitting that the scientia of sacra doctrina, which is a sharing in the divine scientia, would be both practical and speculative as well. Moreover, a scientia that is both speculative and practical is one that is fittingly pursued by Dominican friars whose mission was both to preach the truth of Christian doctrine and to care for souls through the administration of the sacrament of penance. In the fifth article Thomas argues that holy teaching is superior to all other scientia, both in the realm of speculation and of practice. Speculatively, it is superior with regard to its certitude, since its principles are drawn not from the error-prone light of human reason but from the inerrant light of divine scientia, as well as its subject matter, which is chiefly (though not exclusively) those things that transcend human reason. We should remind ourselves here that even though sacra doctrina is a subalternate scientia, and thus would seem to be less certain of its first principles than would be metaphysics, the principles of which are per se nota, in fact sacra doctrina is more certain of its principles, because they are, as he says in his commentary on Boethius’s De Trinitate, “a certain sharing in, and a likeness to, the divine knowledge.”64 Practically it is superior because the end toward which it directs our actions is not some limited goal, such as worldly happiness or civic well-being, but eternal happiness, which includes within itself all the other genuine goods for which human beings strive.65 Because of the

61

Summa theologiae Ia q. 1 a. 3. Thomas’s argument is the reverse of the argument he made in the second reply of the first article, in which he noted that the same object could be studied under different formalities by different scientiae. 62 63 Summa theologiae Ia q. 1 a. 4. See Summa theologiae Ia q. 14 a. 8. 64 65 Super De Trinitate q. 2 a. 2. Summa theologiae Ia q. 1 a. 5.

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exalted status of sacra doctrina, Thomas argues in the sixth article that it is not simply scientia but sapientia, true wisdom.66 Here Thomas, without actually mentioning Augustine’s distinction between scientia and sapientia, overcomes the opposition between them by identifying “wisdom” as the highest form of knowledge within a particular order of knowledge, the form of knowledge that considers that order of knowledge’s highest principles.67 The wise person, therefore, is the one who can exercise directive judgment within a particular order of knowledge, in the way that an architect directs the actions of builders. Holy teaching is the supreme wisdom because it is concerned not simply with a particular order of knowledge, but with the order of knowledge that has an architectonic role with regard to all other orders of knowledge, because it concerns itself with the highest principle of all, namely God.68 As the highest form of wisdom the role of sacra doctrina is not to prove the principles of other orders of knowledge but, Thomas says somewhat peremptorily, “only to judge them.”69 Of course, for theology to have this architectonic role it must have as the subject of its investigation God himself, which Thomas argues in the seventh article of the question. Thomas earlier argued that holy teaching treats things in terms of the “formality” (i.e. general defining feature) of having been revealed by God. Here he clarifies that this means that theology is about God, because the things God reveals are either about God directly or about things in their relationship to God. This is why the first principles of sacra doctrina are articles of faith, because faith in its most proper sense always has God as its object.70 The eighth article might be taken as summarizing and drawing together what has been said in the seven preceding articles. Thomas asks whether holy teaching is argumentativa, by which he means, does it proceed, in the manner of a scientific syllogism, to follow a chain of inferences so as to draw conclusions from premises. Thomas’s answer comes as no surprise to one who has been following his arguments in the previous articles: Sacra doctrina argues from its first principle to draw certain conclusions. It does not try to prove its first principles, but in this it does not differ from other scientiae, all of which either begin from self-evident principles (as in metaphysics), or draw their first principles from a higher scientia. As with 66

Summa theologiae Ia q. 1 a. 6; cf. Super De Trinitate q. 2 a. 2 ad 1. In his commentary on Colossians, however, Aquinas evokes the Augustinian distinction without any qualification: “Sapientia is the knowledge of divine things, and scientia is the knowledge of created things” (Super Col. cap. 2 lec. 1 n. 81). 68 Cf. Contra Gentiles lib. 1 cap. 1 n. 1. 69 70 Summa theologiae Ia q. 1 a. 6 ad 2. Summa theologiae Ia q. 1 a. 7. 67

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any other scientia, the arguments of holy teaching will only be convincing to those who accept the premises from which those arguments begin.71 With those who accept part of scripture (presumably Thomas has the Jews in mind) or some of the articles of faith (presumably Christian heretics), one can argue concerning other parts of scripture or other articles of faith. With those who reject scripture or the articles of faith entirely, no positive argument can be made, though their own arguments can be refuted.72 Thomas acknowledges that holy teaching is most appropriately based on authority, even though arguments from authority are normally the weakest sort of argument. He says elsewhere that philosophical arguments should never be accepted by sacra doctrina on the basis of the authors’ authority but only if what the authors say is reasonable. “What is well said it takes; the rest it rejects.”73 But in the case of scripture and the articles of faith derived from it, the authority involved is no mere human matter, but a matter of divine revelation, and thus more certain even than premises per se nota. Following from this, Thomas offers a ranking of the sources used in holy teaching, with scripture providing the premises for necessary arguments, the doctores ecclesiae providing premises for probable arguments, and philosophers serving as a source of “extrinsic and probable arguments.”74 Here and elsewhere Thomas is very clear about the utility of philosophical argument in sacra doctrina, a point that he frequently reinforces with the statement that “grace does not abolish nature, but perfects it” (gratia non tollat naturam, sed perfecit).75 We will return to this maxim in later chapters, but here we should note the affirmation of the usefulness of philosophical reasoning. But we should also attend to the limits of that reasoning, and the fact that in being taken into the realm of sacra doctrina philosophical reasoning, while not abolished, is in a very real sense transformed. Responding to the objection that philosophical argument “dilutes” holy teaching with the “water” of purely human reasoning, Thomas writes, “those who use the works of the philosophers in holy teaching, by bringing them into the service of faith, do not mix water with wine, but rather change water into wine.”76 The use of philosophical argumentation is based not so much on any autonomy ascribed to 71

72 See Super De Trinitate q. 3 a. 1. Summa theologiae Ia q. 1 a. 8. 74 Super De Trinitate q. 2 a. 3 ad 8. Summa theologiae Ia q. 1 a. 8 ad 2. 75 a In addition to Summa theologiae I q. 1 a. 8, cf. Super De Trinitate q. 2 a. 3; Lectura Romana pr. q. 4 a. 4. See also Super Sent. lib. 3 d. 29 q. 1 a. 7, “caritas ordinem naturae non mutat, sed perficit,” and Super Col. cap. 3 lec. 4 “lex charitatis non removet legem naturae, sed perficit.” 76 Super De Trinitate q. 2 a. 3 ad 5; cf. Contra impugnantes, pars 3 cap. 5. 73

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philosophy, but on the Pauline principle of taking every thought captive in obedience to Christ.77 In commenting on another Pauline passage (1 Corinthians 1:17), Thomas distinguishes between “teaching in wise words” (docere in sapientia verbi), and “using wise words in teaching” (uti sapientia verbi in docendo). In the former case, one takes human wisdom as the mainspring of one’s teaching, rejecting anything that is not contained therein, thereby destroying faith. In the later case, one presumes faith as the foundation, and employs whatever truths one might find among the philosophers in the service of faith. He then quotes Augustine’s dictum that if philosophers happen to have said anything that is in conformity to the faith, “we must not only have no fear of them, but even appropriate them for our own use from those who were, in a sense, their illegal possessors.”78 How specifically does holy teaching make use of the arguments that have been seized from the philosophers and transformed into the wine of wisdom? We can see, roughly speaking, three uses.79 First, as Thomas had noted in the first article, philosophical arguments can prove certain truths about God based on our perception of God’s effects. Thomas refers to these truths, which most people hold on faith but which are capable of rational demonstration (by a few, after a long time and with much error mixed in), as the praeambula fidei (preambles of faith). Second, one can use natural reason to “manifest” truths of faith, by drawing analogies with things we know through our natural reason and by making arguments based on premises drawn from revelation. Thomas notes elsewhere that this is, “done for the training and consolation of the faithful.”80 Third, one can refute objections to holy teaching by showing them to be false, or at least not probative. In the final two articles of the question, Thomas turns to scripture, from which the first principles of sacra doctrina are derived. From what has been said thus far, it should be clear that scripture is absolutely central to Thomas’s intellectual project. He is, after all, a magister in sacra pagina and his chief vocation, both as a Dominican and as a theology master, is the interpretation and communication of the content of scripture. At the same time, Thomas’s approach to the sacred text might seem somewhat alien to 77 In addition to Summa theologiae Ia q. 1 a. 8 ad 2, see Super De Trinitate q. 2 a. 3 and Contra impugnantes, pars 3 cap. 5. 78 Super 1 Cor. cap. 1 lec. 3, n. 43, quoting De doctrina Christiana 2.40.60. 79 Super De Trinitate pars 1q. 2 a. 3 co.; Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 1 a. 5 ad 2, 3; Contra Gentiles lib. 1 cap. 9 n. 2–4. 80 Contra Gentiles lib. 1 cap. 9 n. 4.

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us today, conditioned as we are to a largely historical approach to biblical texts. Thomas shows little interest in the historical circumstances in which the books of scripture were written, nor is he particularly concerned to distinguish between different genres of biblical literature. Though he describes scripture at one point as a “narrative of signs,”81 he often treats the biblical material as if it were a series of theological treatises, and it is somewhat jarring for a modern reader to find him noting in his commentary on Galatians that Paul is using a syllogism of the second figure.82 This is not to deny the value of Thomas’s biblical commentaries, but simply to note that their approach, common in the thirteenth century, may well seem unfamiliar to us today. In article nine Thomas takes up the question of whether scripture ought to make use of metaphors. Why does Thomas think this is an important question? Recall that Thomas has just spent eight articles arguing that holy teaching is not only scientia, in something like an Aristotelian sense, but is indeed the highest scientia, the architectonic wisdom that orders and judges all other scientiae. Furthermore, he has argued that the first principles of this scientia are taken above all from sacred scripture. But, thinking in terms of Aristotelian scientia, if one allows metaphor into one’s premises, one runs the risk of introducing the fallacy of equivocation. For example, if one began from the premises, “Socrates is the finest flower of the human race” and “a flower is the reproductive organ of a plant,” one might conclude, “Socrates is the reproductive organ of a plant.” Or the premises, “God is the rock of my salvation” and “A rock is inanimate,” would seem to yield: “God is inanimate.” These examples are clearly ridiculous, but they do indicate some of the problems posed by metaphor for Aristotelian science.83 Thomas’s answer to this difficulty is twofold. First, he accounts for the presence of metaphors in scripture by seeing them as acts of divine 81

Super Sent. lib. 1 prol. q. 1 a. 5. Super Gal. cap. 3 lec. 4 n. 140. See Pesch (1988), 106–7 for general remarks concerning Thomas’s approach to the letters of Paul. 83 It should be noted that it is not just biblical metaphors that Thomas finds potentially problematic. He complains in his commentary on the Metaphysics about Aristotle’s famous simile comparing the intellect’s inability to grasp that which is most intelligible (separated substances) to the owl’s inability to see in bright sunlight, since the intellect, unlike sight, is not the power of a bodily organ (Sententia Metaphysicae lib. 2 lec. 1 n. 283). As witness to the dangers of making a philosophical argument that does not recognize a metaphor when it sees it, he points to Averroes’s argument that Aristotle has failed to prove the inability of the intellect to grasp the essence of immaterial substances, characterizing it as “wholly ridiculous” (valde derisibilis) (Sententia Metaphysicae lib. 2 lec. 1 n. 286). 82

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accommodation to human nature. The point of scripture is to teach us to know God in a way that we otherwise could not, and this knowing of God, being essential for our salvation, must reach us through a medium that is accessible to us. Therefore, like any good teacher, God is concerned to reach us by means that are adapted to our capacities. It is our nature to come to knowledge through our perception of material things. Therefore God, as it were, “translates” spiritual truths into material metaphors.84 The Greek root of the word “metaphor” means to carry something from one place to another; in the metaphors of scripture God might be said to carry our minds from the material image to spiritual truth. When we encounter places in scripture that speak of God by means of a material image—as the “rock of my salvation” or as possessing a “mighty arm”— we know that we are dealing with a metaphor in which we are not meant to rest, but by which we are to be transported to an encounter with a spiritual reality. Second, Thomas makes the point that part of the power of scripture is that its metaphors are so obviously false that they clearly signal their own inadequacy. As Thomas puts it in this article, “God is above whatever we may say or think of God,” and therefore, “what God is not is clearer to us than what God is.”85 We are less likely to be fooled by a vivid material metaphor than we are by a subtle spiritual one into thinking that we have a comprehensive grasp of the reality of God. One can sometimes get the impression that Thomas is impatient with metaphors, viewing them as at best a flashy ornamentation that intelligible truth dons in order to attract the more simple-minded, and which more sophisticated minds can do without. The fact that Thomas’s own writing is so often bereft of metaphors, or even vivid examples, only reinforces this impression. But when Thomas says that metaphors are “both necessary and useful,”86 we ought to take him at his word. We have already seen in Thomas’s inaugural lecture the significance he assigns to the means, including the metaphors, by which divine wisdom reaches us. Whatever problems metaphors pose for Aristotelian scientia are more than offset by the way in which they expand the scope of holy teaching, so that it may be “proposed to all without distinction of persons.”87 84 Thomas on occasion uses translative and metaphorice as synonyms. See Super Sent. lib. 1 d. 34 q. 3 a. 1. 85 Summa theologiae Ia q. 1 a. 9 ad 3. 86 Summa theologiae Ia q. 1 a. 9 ad 1. 87 Summa theologiae Ia q. 1 a. 9. In the Super De Trinitate q. 2 a. 4, Thomas gives a more esoteric cast to metaphors, presenting them primarily as a means of hiding intelligible truth from both unbelievers and the uneducated. By the time he writes the Summa theologiae the

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In the tenth and final article Thomas examines the quadriga or fourfold interpretation of scripture according to the literal, allegorical, anagogical, and moral senses, a form of scriptural interpretation rooted in the fathers and common in the Middle Ages.88 As Thomas explains these senses, the “literal” or “historical” sense is simply what the words mean on the face of things and the other three “mystical” senses point us to deeper levels of signification. The allegorical sense is how things of the Old Law are signs of things in the New Law, or of how things that are true of Christ the head are also true of his body the Church.89 The anagogical sense is how things of the Old or New Law are signs of heavenly realities and the Church triumphant. The moral or tropological sense is how things are signs of what we ought to do.90 In his commentary on Galatians, Thomas offers an example of how this works in practice: the statement “let there be light” refers, in the literal sense, to actual light; in the allegorical sense it can mean “let Christ be born in the Church”; in the anagogical sense it can mean “let us be conducted to glory through Christ”; and in the moral sense it can mean “let us be illumined in mind and inflamed in heart through Christ.”91 Thomas’s way of distinguishing the literal sense from the mystical sense is particularly crisp. The literal sense is how the words refer to things. These things might be actual historical persons or events (thus “David” refers to the second king of the Israelites) or they may be fictional persons or events (thus “the prodigal son” refers to the one who, in Jesus’ parable, went into the far country) or they might even be things that are spoken of metaphorically. This last point is significant: when scripture speaks of

theme of hiding truth from scoffing unbelievers has been reduced to a mere mention, and that of hiding intelligible truth from the uneducated has vanished completely. 88 In addition to this article, Thomas discusses the fourfold sense of scripture in a variety of places. The fullest discussion is found in Quodlibet 7 q. 6 aa.1–3; for other extended discussions see Super Sent. lib. 1 pl. q. 5; Lectura Romana pr. q. 4 a. 1 ad 3; Comm. Galatians cap. 4 lec. 7. 89 On the latter point, see Quodlibet 7 q. 6 a. 2 ad 5. 90 Thomas notes that explicit moral instruction (e.g. the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount) falls under the literal sense of scripture. The moral sense only applies to those things that are “images” (similitudines) of what we ought to do (see Quodlibet 7 q. 6 a. 2 ad 3). 91 See Comm. Galatians cap. 4 lec. 7. In his Galatians commentary Thomas speaks only of moral and anagogical meanings being found in the New Law, specifically in the actions of Christ the head, though his example in this commentary is not of a passage from the New Testament, but from the Old: “let there be light.” In Quodlibet 7 q. 6 a. 2 he does not restrict the moral and anagogical senses to the New Law. In Summa theologiae Ia-IIae q. 102 a. 2 he states explicitly that the ceremonies of the Old Law are subject to moral and anagogical interpretation.

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God’s “strong right arm” this refers, as Thomas uses the term, “literally” to God’s power, even though God does not, as we would use the term, “literally” have an arm. But the phrase “strong right arm” signifies God’s power, albeit in a metaphorical way. Something can be “literal” without being, strictly speaking, true. The “mystical” senses, on the other hand, arise not from how words signify things but from how things signify other things. It is not the word “light” that, according to the moral sense, signifies the illumination of our minds through Christ, but rather it is light itself. It is not the word “Jerusalem” that, according to the anagogical sense, signifies heaven, but the city itself. The history of things and events is like a vast language, a web of signs, through which God communicates to us the mysteries of faith. For this reason, Thomas restricts the fourfold sense to the sacred text of scripture alone, because only God can make history meaningful in this way. Thomas writes elsewhere, “just as a human person can use words or construct images in order to signify something, so God uses the actual course of events which are subject to his providence in order to signify something.”92 Thomas is resolute in maintaining, with Augustine and Dionysius, that all theological argumentation must be rooted in the literal sense of scripture, for anything discerned in mystical interpretation must be taught literally somewhere in scripture.93 This emphasis on the literal sense serves as a hedge against fanciful and arbitrary interpretations and is reflected in Thomas’s own exegetical practice. He rarely indulges in flights of allegorical fancy. For example, one might compare Thomas’s commentary on Job to Gregory the Great’s famous and highly influential Moralia in Job. Thomas says at the outset of his commentary that “Gregory has already disclosed to us its mysteries so subtly and clearly that there seems no need to add anything further to them,” and then proceeds to offer an interpretation of the literal sense of the book, which is concerned with the question of divine providence.94 Thomas is certainly not speaking

92

Quodlibet 7 q. 6 a. 3. Summa theologiae Ia q. 1 a. 10 ad 1; Quodlibet 7 q. 6 a. 1 ad 3. In the former instance he cites Augustine’s epistle 48 against Vincent the Donatist and in the later case he cites de Doctrina Christiana 2.6.8. In Super Sent. lib. 1 pr. a. 5 he cites Dionysius’ epistle to Titus in support of the primacy of the literal sense. 94 Super Iob pr. In this same prologue Thomas states that he believes that Job was an historical person, since Ezekiel 14:14 refers to Job (along with Noah and Daniel) as if he were “a man in the nature of things” and not just a figure in a parable. But he also notes that the nonhistoricity of Job would not change the literal sense of the book. 93

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disingenuously when he praises Gregory’s commentary, since it is a text he cites over 200 times in the Summa theologiae alone, but it does seem that he also thought that Job had not be adequately interpreted until an account of its literal sense had been offered. Likewise in his other scriptural commentaries, he rarely makes an appeal to the spiritual sense of a passage unless it is an interpretation that is sanctioned by a wellestablished theological authority. Where are we left at the end of this first question of the Summa theologiae? Have we come to an understanding of Thomas’s intellectual project as a whole? Is it possible to take the opening of the Summa as a starting point in characterizing that project? We should bear in mind that Thomas began working on the Summa while in Rome, where he had been given a free hand to design his own ideal curriculum, and that it was a project to which he devoted the rest of his life. It is true that Thomas produced many other works besides the Summa theologiae. But, as I discussed in the last chapter, once Thomas began writing the Summa he tended to coordinate his other major projects around it. It was Thomas’s work on the Summa that, in the last decade of his life, determined much of his other work: he disputed those questions, lectured on those books of scripture, and wrote commentaries on those works of Aristotle that would be particularly useful to whatever part of the Summa he was working on at the time. This historical datum fits perfectly with Thomas’s description of holy teaching and the way in which it uses “wise words” as a means to its end. Furthermore, the explicit pedagogical purpose of the Summa gives it a central place in the state of life to which Thomas had vowed himself: that of a friar preacher whose life is consecrated to the communication of the Christian gospel. At the same time, we should bear in mind that the opening question of the Summa is not a complete treatise on theological method in the modern sense. Thomas’s purpose there is quite specific: to argue that holy teaching is scientia. His purpose is not to say everything that needs to be said about how theology operates. Notably absent is any discussion of so-called arguments “from fittingness” (ex convenientia), which play a prominent role in the Summa and which are quite different from the sort of deductive argument discussed in this first question. I will discuss Thomas’s account of “fittingness” in Chapter Four; here let it suffice to say that the communication of the gospel involves a range of argumentative strategies, and it is only in reading the Summa as a whole, within the context of Thomas’s other writings, within the project of Dominican formation for Dominican

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ends, and within the life of the wider Church, that we can really grasp Thomas’s intellectual project.

5. THOMAS AND ARISTOTLE Thus far I have not said much about Thomas’s debt to Aristotle and his devotion to understanding the thought of Aristotle. The significance of Aristotle in Thomas’s thought is undeniable and his influence is pervasive. The question is how best to characterize and understand that significance and influence. We might first ask, why Aristotle? What was it that attracted Thomas the friar preacher to the thought of the ancient Greek writer whom Herbert McCabe describes as a “marine biologist” who took the methods of observation and classification that he used on animals and applied them to “areas like physics, astronomy, the study of society, and of what makes human beings tick”?95 Contrary to the image some have of Aristotle as approaching knowledge in an abstract and deductive manner, he was in fact a keen observer of the natural world. Jonathan Lear says that, for Aristotle, “There is no substitute, then, for going out into the world— whether it be ponds where frogs live, or societies where men live—and studying it, for human beings, unlike god, must discover primary substances if they are to contemplate them.”96 Thomas, on the other hand, while a man of considerable intellectual gifts, as we have seen, did not number attentiveness to what was going on around him among them. It is difficult to imagine him, like Aristotle, spending years studying marine life or writing something like Aristotle’s History of Animals. So what was it that he found of value in Aristotle? First, as has been much remarked upon, both Aristotle and Thomas focus their understanding of reality on the concrete, existing thing—what Aristotle called ousia and Thomas called substantia. This is usually contrasted with the approach of Plato, whose attention was directed more to the universal forms in which particular things share. Of course, the matter is not quite as simple as depicted in Raphael’s fresco of The School of Athens, in which we see Plato and Aristotle in the center, with Plato pointing upward, toward the realm of ideal truth, and Aristotle gesturing outward, toward the truth found in the material world. Aristotle, no less than Plato,

95

McCabe (2008), 2.

96

Lear (1988), 319.

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was interested in universal forms, which united diverse things into common classes, but he thought that they were found in subsisting things rather than in a separate realm. As Thomas puts it, “a form is spoken of as a being, if we are speaking strictly, not because it is something, but because something is it.”97 In other words, “goodness” or “whiteness” only exists because things exist that are good or white.98 Furthermore, for Aristotle it is the essence of material things that the mind naturally knows. Relatively speaking, therefore, Aristotle was more interested than Plato in particular things as the means by which we reach universals, an interest that manifested itself in his previously mentioned investigations into nature. Thomas, while not showing much personal interest in the natural world that lies before his eyes, likewise stresses the essence or quidditas (literally, “whatness”) of material things as the natural object of the human intellect. Any natural knowledge in this life of nonmaterial things, such as God or angels, is only the result of an often laborious process of deduction from what we can perceive through our senses. It seems that for Thomas what defines natural knowledge as natural, at least for human beings, is its origin in the senses. Moreover, like Aristotle, Thomas emphasizes the powers of acting that were rooted in the natures of these concrete entities. We have seen this in his understanding of the teacher as a genuine secondary cause of learning in the pupil: even if it is God who is the source of the natural light of reason that both student and teacher possess, a student learns because the teacher teaches, not because God puts ideas in the student’s mind. A subtler example of this emphasis might be seen in Thomas’s insistence on the primacy of the literal sense over the spiritual senses in his biblical interpretation. Before something can be a symbol, it must first be a thing (though perhaps a fictional thing, like God’s arm or the prodigal son); David must be a king if he is to symbolize the royal office of Christ. There is what Josef Pieper calls a certain “worldliness” that Thomas and Aristotle share.99 This worldliness fits not only with the new learning of the universities, but also with the new forms of ministry in the mendicant orders, which were carried out not in rural monasteries, but amid the clamor and conflict of the cities. At the same time, while Thomas 97

De virtutibus q. 1 a. 11 co.; cf. De potentia q. 3 a. 8 co. This refers only to forms as they exist in their “natural being” (e.g. the fieriness of fire or the humanity of a human being) and not as they exist according to their “intelligible being” in the mind of an intellectual being. That is, even if no white thing existed, “whiteness” would exist as long as a mind possessed this concept. See Summa theologiae Ia q. 15 a. 1. 99 Pieper (1991), 48. 98

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might have an affinity for Aristotle based on this common worldliness, this shared appreciation of the concrete substance and of the powers inherent in nature, Thomas’s strong affirmation of the integrity of nature is not merely an echo of the “naturalism” of Aristotle’s thought. Thomas’s worldliness is, as Pieper puts it, a “theologically founded worldliness” that is rooted in the Christian doctrines of creation and incarnation.100 This worldliness finds a pleasing and providential echo in Aristotle that Thomas exploits in various ways, but Aristotle is not its ultimate source. Second, Thomas undeniably made use of Aristotle’s philosophical vocabulary, albeit not without some alteration. But as significant as the terms and concepts Thomas found in Aristotle was the particular style of thought from which those terms arose. This style of thought was rooted in the human capacity for making distinctions. Whether in his biological works or his logical works or his writings on metaphysics and ethics, Aristotle’s was the master of the distinction. He did not simply observe animals, but sought to classify them in terms of their common genera and specific differences. The kind of taxonomy-by-distinction that Aristotle uses to classify animals was thought by him to be no less useful in his quest to understand in other areas. Thomas’s appreciation of the distinctionmaking capacity of reason is evident to anyone who has ever perused his work at any length. Often he will resolve some apparent contradiction among theological or philosophical authorities by drawing a distinction. No less significant is the way in which the general framework of thought that he takes over from Aristotle is structured by a series of distinctions through which we understand the natural world that is the proper object of human understanding. This is clear at the outset of what is perhaps Thomas’s earliest extant work, the De principiis naturae, the handbook or vade mecum of Aristotelian natural philosophy that Thomas is reputed to have written for his fellow students. A work of remarkable concision, it displays the structuring-bydistinction of Aristotelian thought better than Aristotle’s own diffuse and somewhat haphazard writings. Beginning with the fundamental distinction between the actual (“that which is”) and the potential (“that which can be, but is not”), Thomas quickly moves to the further division of being into “substantial” existence and “incidental” or “accidental” existence. This distinction is clarified when applied to the first distinction he has made: the matter from which (ex qua) something is made, which is

100

Pieper (1991), 134.

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potential substantial existence, is distinguished from the subject in which (in qua) an accident or incidental property exists, which is potential accidental existence. The combining of the initial two distinctions helps to clarify them: the subject of an accident has an existence apart from the accident, though the accident has no existence apart from its subject, while the matter from which something is made has no existence apart from whatever form that it has. In an amazingly brief course, Thomas has made a series of distinctions that have given us such fundamental notions as “act,” “potency,” “substance,” “accident,” “matter,” and “subject.”101 Thomas then briskly proceeds to distinguish between matter and form, generation and corruption, genus and species, intrinsic and extrinsic causes, absolute and conditional necessity, universal and particular causes, as well as univocal, equivocal, and analogical predication. There will be time to explain and explore these and other distinctions in the next chapter, but for the moment I would simply linger over the distinction-making process itself. Here we have exercised the fundamental human ability to distinguish this from that, and thus to know better both this and that. No mere logic-chopping, this is the human capacity to recognize the world as a structured whole rather than the “booming, buzzing confusion” that William James (rightly or wrongly) claimed the visual world of infants to be. What distinctions allow us to do is to have not simply descriptions of the things in our world, an account of the impact of that thing upon me, but rather definitions of things, how they are in themselves.102 Or, to use Thomas’s terminology, it allows us to grasp the quidditas of things. For Thomas, the distinctions drawn by human reason, whether distinctions drawn between matter and form or between virtues and vices, are not a grid that humans impose upon a world that itself has no inherent structure. Rather, in drawing these distinctions human inquirers bring themselves into conformity with the world as it is actually structured.103 It is undeniable that Thomas treats Aristotle with great deference and, almost, reverence. We can contrast his attitude with that of Roland of Cremona, the first Dominican to hold a chair as a master of theology at Paris, incepting in the late 1220s. Roland came to the Dominicans with an 101

De principiis naturae cap. 1. This distinction between “description” and “definition” is borrowed from McCabe (2008), 23. 103 Lear (1988), 230 writes, “If, as we come to investigate the broad structure of reality, the order of our knowledge comes to reproduce the order of reality, then there is an important sense in which subject and object of inquiry come to coincide.” 102

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extensive education in the arts and medicine, and argued strongly in a number of places for the utility of such secular knowledge for theological pursuits. Yet for Roland, Aristotle “surpassed all other philosophers in the vanity of pride,” principally because he taught the eternity of the world. Plato, to Roland’s mind, is preferable, since he, “said that the world was made, and that in part it has its beginning from, and was made by, God.”104 In this, his attitude appears almost exactly the opposite of Thomas’s, who frequently faults Plato for his erroneous views.105 A more subtle difference, however, might be noted between the attitudes of Thomas and Roland. Roland approves of Plato because his views are seen as more in accord with theological truth. Thomas favors Aristotle simply because he thinks he gives a better, more accurate account of the world. Josef Pieper notes: The Christian West’s encounter with Plato, as it took form during the first millennium, was wholly different in structure from its encounter with Aristotle. The encounter with Plato was an encounter of two religious modes of thought; but the encounter with Aristotle was the encounter between religion and philosophy.106

Many medieval theologians championed Plato over Aristotle because they found in his thought what Augustine found in the libri Platonici: a compelling and accurate account of God that lacked only one thing: the fact that the Word had become flesh and dwelt among us.107 Thomas values Aristotle not because he is so theological, but because of Aristotle’s strong naturalism; one is not tempted to think that Aristotle is giving us anything close to a full account of God, to which the mysteries of faith might be appended. The “theology” that one finds in Book 12 of the Metaphysics is notable in its austerity, an austerity that matches what Thomas frequently says about the deliverances of natural reason with regard to God: by unaided reason we know better what God is not than what God is. 104 Roland of Cremona, Postillia in Job, Paris, Bibliothe`que Nationale, MS, lat. 405, fol. 47vb, quoted in Mulchahey (1998), 63. At the same time, it should be noted that Roland is like Thomas in seeing Aristotle’s error as excusable, since he did not have the benefit of divinely revealed scripture and its teaching that “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” See Roland of Cremona, Postillia in Job, fol. 82vb, quoted in Mulchahey (1998), 63. 105 But see the references in Pieper (1991), 43 for Thomas defending Plato against Aristotle. 106 Pieper (1991), 44. 107 Augustine, Confessions 7.9.14. Thomas, of course, knows this passage from Augustine and does not deny some intimation of the divinity of the Word among these philosophers. See Super Col. cap. 1 lec. 6 n. 66.

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What Aristotle gives us are conceptual tools with which we can understand the natural world. Our understanding of that natural world can provide us hints and intimations of the God who is its cause, but Aristotelian philosophy itself attests to its radical inadequacy to the task of speaking of God. It is sometimes argued that we run the risk of misrepresenting Thomas if we overemphasize the significance of Aristotle in Thomas’s intellectual project, and this is certainly true.108 Sources that are in diverse ways “platonic”—Augustine, Dionysius, the Liber de Causis, the platonized Aristotelianism of Avicenna—as well as the fundamentally Christian nature of Thomas’s intellectual vocation, all play an important role.109 At the same time, we ought not to underestimate the significance of Aristotle in Thomas’s intellectual world. What Aquinas learned from Aristotle was a certain habit of mind regarding the making of distinctions. Of course, not only this, since Thomas accepts many of the things that Aristotle claims to be true about the world. But it is this that is crucial. For much that Aristotle says about the world, and much that Thomas accepts from Aristotle, we now know to be mistaken. But the process itself of coming to clarity regarding the substance of things is one that Thomas extends into realms unimagined by Aristotle, and which we might ourselves extend into realms unimagined by Thomas.

6. HOLY TEACHING AS A WAY OF LIFE The undeniably crucial role that Aristotle plays in Thomas’s thought returns us to the question of philosophy and its relationship to sacra doctrina. And in returning to this question, we might at this point find ourselves in something of a quandary with regard to how exactly we ought to understand this term “philosophy.” It is certainly a term that Thomas knows and uses, but what does he mean by it? As is well known, Thomas does not appear to have ever applied the term “philosopher” to a Christian.110 In this sense, it would appear that “philosophy” is what we call the search for wisdom by those who do not have the benefit of divine 108

See, e.g. Mark Jordan (2006), 60–88; Pieper (1991), 43–4. For a succinct account of the Neoplatonic influence on Thomas, particularly in questions 1–45 of the first part of the Summa theologiae, see Hankey (1987). 110 See Jordan (2006), 63–4. Indeed, Thomas sometimes, particularly in his biblical commentaries, uses “philosophy” in a quite negative sense, as that which is false by comparison with the truth of divine revelation. See, e.g., Super Io. cap. 1 lec. 5 n. 125. 109

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revelation: i.e. it is what pagans do. Does Thomas therefore think that philosophy as an activity has entirely disappeared from the Christian world? If so, then what is it that the arts faculty does, where the works of Aristotle and his Arabic commentators are taught and studied? What is Thomas himself doing, at least at times, either when he comments on Aristotle, or writes a work like De pincipiis naturae, which makes no mention of God, or De ente et essentia, which has no recourse to divine revelation, or even in the Summa theologiae when he makes an argument based upon premises naturally knowable to human being? And if it is something that Thomas does, if there is “philosophy” in his work, how is this related to sacra doctrina? To address this issue, Ralph McInerny invokes a contrast originally made by Josef Pieper between “philosophy” and “philosophizing.” McInerny argues that one’s philosophizing—i.e. the activity of philosophical reflection—is clearly influenced by “a host of existential factors,” including, for believers, faith. Thus, “for the believer, the faith that is at the core of his being, a virtue of the speculative intellect, animates, or should, his every activity, most emphatically including philosophizing.” But this is not the same thing as saying that the philosophy produced ought to be similarly inflected by the philosopher’s faith. The existential stance from which one philosophizes is something quite different from one’s philosophy itself, which is constituted not by an existential stance, but by the arguments one actually makes. As McInerny puts it, “a philosophical argument, whatever its existential provenance, cannot include as a condition of its acceptability revealed truth.”111 According to McInerny, we can acknowledge the importance of faith and revelation to the philosophizing of believers, while maintaining that it is irrelevant to philosophy itself.112 Here we return to the disagreement between McInerny and Van Steenberghen, on the one hand, and Gilson, on the other: how are the historical circumstances of an idea’s genesis related to that idea? McInerny’s invocation of Josef Pieper’s distinction is notable in part because Pieper would seem to have a position on faith and philosophy that is quite different from McInerny’s, and much closer to Gilson’s. Pieper says that the existential stance of one engaged in philosophizing is inseparable from the philosophy itself; indeed, he says that religious faith, and even a sort of “revelation,” logically precedes philosophy: Man’s relatedness to the totality of being is achieved in the philosophical act. Philosophizing is directed toward the world as a whole—that is what we have been 111

McInerny (2006), 107.

112

McInerny (2006), 119.

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arguing. Now, a certain interpretation of reality is given to man prior to all philosophy, always already preceding it—“always already”, “since time immemorial”. And this is an interpretation of reality, a tradition (in doctrine and anecdotes), that concerns and refers to the entirety of the world . . . epistemically and logically prior to all philosophy, to all interpretations of the world that build on experience.113

Pieper does not entirely collapse philosophy into theology. He recognizes that while theology operates in a “top down” manner, “the philosophical act begins with the contemplation of the visible, concrete reality of experience that lies before our eyes; . . . philosophizing begins ‘from the bottom,’ with the questioning of the things encountered in everyday experience, which opens up to the seeker ever new and more ‘wondrous’ [erstaunlicher] depths.” Yet even this “from the bottom” activity of philosophizing is “a gift, pregiven, always already expressed and revealed.”114 For Pieper, this does not mean that the theologian knows everything that the philosopher knows, but rather that philosophy can never be done in abstraction from theology.115 Whereas McInerny distinguishes philosophizing from philosophy in order to protect philosophy from what might be called theological “contamination” emanating from the philosopher’s existential stance; Pieper recasts philosophy as the activity of “philosophizing” precisely to re-inscribe philosophy into its necessary background of tradition and revelation that can only be described as “theological.” For Pieper, both the process (philosophizing) and the product (philosophy) of thought are inseparably interwoven in the concrete existential circumstances of the thinker; for McInerny, the product ideally bears no trace of the process of its production: true philosophy done by a Christian should be indistinguishable from that done by a non-Christian. To put it differently, Pieper focuses on philosophy as what Pierre Hadot calls a “way of life.” Hadot has argued, primarily in the context of interpreting ancient philosophical “schools,” that we ought to understand philosophy primarily as a way of life (manie`re de vivre). By this he means that the “philosophy” of antiquity, whether Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, or Epicurean, was “a mode of existing-in-the-world, which had to be practiced at each instant, and the goal of which was to transform the whole of the individual’s life.”116 “Philosophy” (what Pieper calls

113 115

Pieper (2006), 68. Pieper (2006), 72.

114 116

Pieper (2006), 70. Hadot (1995), 265.

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“philosophizing”) in this sense is both “incommensurable” and “inseparable” from “philosophical discourse” (what Pieper calls “philosophy”), by which Hadot means the theoretical account that “justifies, motivates, and influences” the concrete life-choice by which one took up the mode of “existing in the world” that is the philosophical life.117 Philosophical discourse and the philosophical life are “incommensurable,” because “the essential part of the philosophical life—the existential choice of a certain way of life, the experience of certain inner states and dispositions— wholly escapes expression by philosophical discourse.”118 At the same time, discourse—whether in the form of dialogue or textual exegesis—is integral to the philosophical form of life, so long as it remains closely tied to that life and does not seek to substitute itself for it. The philosophical discourse serves the life, not vice versa. What has all of this to do with the question of the relationship between philosophy and sacra doctrina in Thomas Aquinas? Hadot himself identifies medieval scholasticism as the historical moment in which life and discourse become definitively separated.119 But Hadot’s argument concerning this moment of separation of life and discourse is a bit odd. He says that the medieval scholastics take up Aristotle’s discourse without taking up the form of life, turning the “philosophy” of Aristotle into pure discourse. But on Hadot’s own account Neoplatonism had already adopted elements of Aristotelian discourse into a way of life that was in some respects quite different from that of Aristotle’s Lyceum, and this does not appear to have initiated any fateful split between life and discourse. Hadot’s answer seems to be that Neoplatonism remained a philosophy, and thus could integrate the philosophical discourse of Aristotle, while in scholasticism we are dealing with something different—theology—into which the discourse of Aristotle could not be truly integrated, but must remain a mere “servant” of theology.120 But if by “theology” he means a truth that is known beginning from revelation rather than reason, then this too was present in Neoplatonism, and indeed in Plato’s Timaeus, a point that Hadot himself notes.121 One might begin to suspect that Hadot, like McInerny, simply takes a sharp distinction between “philosophy” and “theology” as axiomatic, as well as the view that there is a purely philosophical Aristotelian discourse operative in medieval scholasticism. If one questions these presumptions, it is difficult to see why scholasticism should be singled out as the key moment of rupture between life and 117 119

See Hadot (2002), 172–9. Hadot (2002), 253–4.

120

118 Hadot (2002), 173–4. Hadot (2002), 255–8.

121

Hadot (2002), 152–3.

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discourse. At least in the case of the theologians, the discourse of the great scholastic thinkers of the thirteenth century can still be best understand by locating it within the concrete form of life that it justifies, motivates, and influences. For example, Bonaventure’s entire discourse can be read as a commendation of Francis as the “sage” who embodies the life of true wisdom.122 Thomas, too, can be fruitfully read as one whose discourse is located within a concrete life-choice: that of the Dominican friar. As I have argued, Thomas’s work ought to be read as “Dominican” work, growing out of and oriented toward the characteristic Dominican activities of doctrinal preaching and the hearing of confessions. The “way of life” of Thomas and his confreres simply was the life of sacra doctrina. Within this way of life there are certainly moments when Thomas the friar preacher contemplates what Pieper calls, “the visible, concrete reality of experience that lies before our eyes” and wonders, as it were, “from the bottom up.” Thomas’s early biographers compare him to Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt, guided by the pillar of cloud—symbolizing worldly scientia gained through the senses—and a pillar of fire—symbolizing the divine scientia that God shares with humanity through revelation.123 This bottom up thinking from sense data might well be described as “philosophical.” Thomas’s Aristotelian commentaries, while hewing closely to the text of Aristotle, are not simply mechanical exercises in paraphrasing but are exercises in genuine philosophical wonder. Likewise there are numerous questions in his explicitly theological works that he addresses on the basis of what the human mind naturally knows. But this activity takes place within a way of life that presumes a divinely given revelation as an inescapable background. Though guided by both the pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire, the journey of the Israelites is only one journey, and it is a journey toward the promised gift of beatitude. Though Thomas employs both natural human reason and supernaturally infused faith, it is all part of the one way of life of holy teaching. Perhaps the greatest challenge to my claims about Thomas’s intellectual project is to be found not in works such as the Aristotelian commentaries nor in treatises like De aeternitate mundi that do not make arguments based on revealed truths but in Thomas’s “other” summa—the Summa contra Gentiles. Here Thomas is not simply engaged in a localized bottom up reflection that is integrated within the larger project of holy teaching; 122 On the figure of the “sage,” see Hadot (1995), 251–63 and (2002), 230–1. Of course in Bonaventure Francis is a “sage” only to the degree that he is an icon of Christ. 123 Tocco, Ystoria cap. XV.

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rather, he seems to be engaged in a different sort of project altogether. Here, it could be argued, Thomas is engaged, at least in the first three books, in the sort of “theology” that belongs to metaphysics, the “divine science,” or “natural theology” (not a term that Thomas himself ever uses) that is distinct from the theology of sacra doctrina. Thomas’s motives in doing this are, presumably, apologetic: an attempt to find common ground with Jews and Muslim on the basis of unaided human reason. Whatever the existential situation of the author, we seem to have in this work a clear separation of philosophy (Books 1–3) from theology (Book 4), displaying the “twofold mode of truth” of which Thomas speaks at the outset of the work.124 While Thomas may be up to something different in the Summa theologiae, in the Contra Gentiles he is to all appearances providing us a clearly articulated philosophy, perhaps even the philosophical “central framework” of which Van Steenberghen spoke. How compelling is this challenge? As I noted in Chapter One, the Contra Gentiles is a somewhat mysterious work with regard to its purpose, and the various legendary account of its genesis are not of much use. But how does the work present itself? Does it indicate that its first three books constitute a natural theology and is distinct from the sacra doctrina that we find in the Summa theologiae? It is true that Thomas says near the outset that, “we are aiming, then, to set out following the way of reason and to inquire into what human reason can investigate about God.”125 But much the same could be said about the Summa theologiae, or indeed any text from which one expected to actually learn something. Sacra doctrina, though it draws its first principles from divine revelation, is human reason’s investigation into God. This statement, therefore, does not in itself indicate that Thomas is out to do something radically different from what he would later undertake in the Summa theologiae. Furthermore, in the beginning of Book 2, in which Thomas is usually thought to be operating from the perspective of unaided human reason, we find an apologia for why one ought to inquire not simply into God, but also into God’s works: i.e. creatures. Thomas gives four reasons why meditation on God’s works is “necessary for instruction of human faith in God.” The first three of these follow the standard Augustinian Trinitarian figure of God’s wisdom (the Son), power (the Father) and goodness (the Spirit), arguing that our knowledge, admiration, and love of these divine attributes can be enhanced through our reflection on creatures.

124

Contra Gentiles lib. 1 cap. 3.

125

Contra Gentiles, lib. 1 cap. 9 n. 4.

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The fourth reason focuses on the way in which consideration of creatures endows us with “a certain likeness to God’s perfection.” This likeness is engendered in us when we “know creatures by the light of divine revelation.” Thomas concludes this apologia by saying that it should now be evident that “the consideration of creatures has a part to play in the building up of the Christian faith.”126 All of this seems somewhat strange if we think that Thomas is operating simply on the basis of unaided human reason in the first three books of the Summa contra Gentiles. In fact, he seems to be saying that our participation in divine wisdom is really only accomplished when we contemplate creatures “by the light of divine revelation.” Thomas goes on to offer what seems to be a clear account of how philosophy and theology—or, as he calls it, “the teaching of the Christian faith” (doctrina fidei christinae)—differ in their subject matter, their principles, and their order of proceeding. With regard to subject matter, the philosopher considers the things that befit creatures according to their natures (such as the upward tendency of fire), while the “believer” (fidelis) considers them in terms of their relationship to God. He quickly adds that this should not be taken to imply that theology is somehow incomplete, any more than philosophy is incomplete inasmuch as it leaves certain things to geometry.127 With regard to principles, philosophers base their arguments on the “proper causes of things” (ex principiis rerum causis) while believers base their arguments on the first cause (ex prima causa). Thomas goes on to note a point that is already familiar to us from our discussion of the opening question of the Summa theologiae: that theology is rightly called the highest wisdom, “since it treats the highest cause.” He also notes that, as the highest wisdom, theology is served by human philosophy, which it can employ, arguing from philosophical principles. In other words, though philosophy and theology are distinguished by the principles from which they argue, theology can in fact employ both sorts of principles.128 With regard to their order of proceeding, philosophy considers creatures first and God only at the last (Pieper’s bottom up thinking); theology begins with the consideration of God and then proceeds to the consideration of creatures. Thomas notes that this 126 Contra Gentiles lib. 2 cap. 2. It is possible that the four reasons Aquinas gives for contemplating creatures might correlate to the four books of the Summa contra Gentiles: wisdom (Book 1: God), power (Book 2: Creation), goodness (Book 3: Providence), the likeness of God in human beings (Book 4: Trinity, incarnation, sacraments and eschatology). 127 Contra Gentiles lib. 2 cap. 4 nn. 2–3. 128 Contra Gentiles lib. 2 cap. 4 n. 4.

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too indicates the relative perfection of theology, since it knows things “in God,” in the same way that God, “knowing himself, immediately knows other things.”129 It is notable that while Thomas in this text distinguishes philosophy and theology, he also makes clear that theology in a certain sense subsumes philosophy: it argues not only according to its own principles (God as first cause), but also according to the principles of philosophy (the proper causes of things). Furthermore, Thomas’s discussion makes it clear that in the Summa contra Gentiles he is following the order not of philosophy, but of theology: “following this order [i.e. the order of the teaching of faith], after what has been said in Book I about God in Himself, it remains for us to treat of the things which derive from Him.”130 In the Summa contra Gentiles he is not following the bottom up order of proceeding found in philosophy, but rather the “top down” order found in theology—and not simply the “natural theology” or “divine science” that is part of metaphysics, but rather the teaching of faith that is sacra doctrina.131 Thus, even in the first three books of the Summa contra Gentiles, where we might expect to find a purely philosophical discourse, we find doctrina fidei christinae. What then is Thomas’s intellectual project? It is, consistently and without deviation, holy teaching as a way of life. He knows that others have had different intellectual projects, such as the pagan pursuit of wisdom, the finest fruits of which were, in Thomas’s estimation, the works of Aristotle. Thomas draws freely from the fruits of these other intellectual projects, but he also recognizes that they are different from his project. He draws freely from these other projects because he believes that what the catholicae veritatis doctor judges to be well-reasoned is valid whether it is found among Christians or among pagans. And while accepting on authority the truths proclaimed by the scriptural authors might suffice for salvation, good reasoning is vital to the project of holy teaching. As Thomas says in one of his quodlibetal questions, “those

129

Contra Gentiles lib. 2 cap. 4 n. 5. Contra Gentiles lib. 2 cap. 4 n. 6. It might be added that Book 3 of the Summa contra Gentiles, which is often understood to be an instance of Thomas arguing purely on the basis of natural reason, is devoted to divine providence, which Thomas elsewhere claims that reason cannot discover (Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 1 a. 8 ad 1). 131 Kretzmann (2002), 25–8 argues strenuously against what seems to me the plain sense of this chapter of the Summa contra Gentiles, claiming that the knowledge of the first principle from which the believer begins his investigation of creatures is not that which is given in revelation. 130

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investigating the root of truth and making known how what is said is true must rely on reason; otherwise, if a teacher determines a question with bare authorities, the hearer will indeed be assured that something is so, but he will acquire no scientia or understanding and will go away with an empty head.”132 In the end, however, it might be slightly misleading to speak of Thomas’s “intellectual project,” for the project is not purely intellectual, but is woven into the fabric of a way of life. Perhaps one ought not to say that Thomas has an intellectual project, which for all the grandeur of Thomas’s thought is still perhaps too grand. It might be truer to Thomas to say that he had an intellectual ministry, the ministerial role of the teacher of divine wisdom. Writing of a thirteenth-century manual for Dominican novices, Miche`le Mulchahey notes the particular form of intellectual asceticism it seeks to foster among the young friars: The Dominican, like any other religious, must become a disciple of divine science. But the friar will not abandon human learning utterly in his process of discipleship; rather, he will harness human learning and break it to the service of theology. That is the challenge of Dominican ascesis.133

This is the ascesis of taking every thought captive to Christ that formed Thomas and to which his life was devoted.

132

Quodlibet 4 q. 9 a. 3.

133

Mulchahey (1998), 117.

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3 Praeambula fidei: God and the World Even if we see Thomas’s intellectual project as one oriented entirely to the preaching of the gospel, it is also clear that he thinks that there is knowledge of God that can be gained even absent the gospel, through the exercise of reason alone. In Summa theologiae Ia q. 12 a. 12, Thomas specifies the content of the knowledge that human beings can have of God apart from divine revelation: We know of his relationship with creatures, that he is the cause of them all; also that creatures differ from him, namely, that he is not in any way part of what is caused by him; and that being uncaused is attributed to him not on account of any defect on his part, but because he exceeds all things.1

Thomas elsewhere describes this sort of knowledge as not being a matter of faith, but rather a praeambula fidei—literally, what “walks before” faith.2 These are things that someone might well hold on faith—indeed, Thomas thinks that most people do hold them on faith—but they are also capable of being rationally demonstrated. As such, they are within the penumbra of holy teaching, and have an important role to play in holy teaching as a way of life, but do not belong to it alone. At the same time, it is important to bear in mind that the “preambles” not only walk before faith, but are in a real sense walking toward faith.

1. PHILOSOPHICAL TOOLS We have seen that Thomas distinguishes between “teaching in wise words” (docere in sapientia verbi), and “using wise words in teaching” (uti sapientia verbi in docendo), rejecting the former and commending the latter. This distinction helps us see that Thomas employs philosophy as a means 1

Summa theologiae Ia q. 12 a. 12. See Summa theologiae Ia q. 2 a. 2; Ia–IIae q. 2 a. 10 ad 2; Ia–IIae q. 8 a. 5; Super De Trinitate pars 1 q. 2 a. 3; q. 3 a. 1. 2

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to an end, as a set of tools that are useful for clarifying thought, whether we are reasoning from the “bottom up,” starting from creatures, or from the “top town,” beginning from God as first truth. This instrumental approach to the tools of philosophy is reflected in the Dominican curriculum of Thomas’s day. Beginning in 1259, as a result of the recommendations of the committee on studies of which Thomas was a member, the Dominicans began to institute studia artium. These were not, however, schools of the liberal arts in the traditional sense, teaching the trivium and quadrivium, nor arts schools such as the ones found at universities, teaching the natural philosophy of Aristotle. Rather, these were schools that taught logic, focusing on how to reason and not on the content of Aristotle’s philosophy.3 Of course, Thomas clearly thought that the substance of Aristotle was also useful in holy teaching, and he probably saw the studia artium as a good first step for the Dominicans, who were traditionally quite suspicious of philosophy, toward a more thorough philosophical education.4 But it is also noteworthy that it was the most “utilitarian” aspect of philosophy, logic, which was the first to be studied by the friars as a part of their formation. Here again we have the typical Dominican emphasis on utilitas; Humbert of Romans, who was Master General of the Dominicans during the first part of Thomas’s academic career (1254–63), criticized preachers who dwelt too much on philosophical points, noting, “a good preacher’s concern is to study what is useful.”5 Of course, unless one is a particularly rigid sort of positivist, it is impossible to separate logic from other areas of philosophy. Aristotle’s Categories is considered one of his “logical” works, but its discussions of such terms as “substance,” “quality,” “quantity,” etc. clearly have metaphysical implications. Indeed, in Aristotle’s philosophy terms, concepts, and things are closely related, in sometimes quite interesting and complex ways: “logical” or “linguistic” distinctions correlate to metaphysical distinctions. Therefore as we come to Thomas’s arguments concerning the praeambula fidei, it will be useful at the outset to look briefly at the philosophical vocabulary—largely Aristotelian—that he uses, and thereby gain some insight into the patterns of thought that inform his work and 3 See the discussion in Mulchahey (1998), 220–2. Mulchahey offer a convincing revisionist account of these studia that makes clear that they were places where logic, rather than natural philosophy per se, were taught. 4 Mulchahey (1998), 265, notes that the institution by the Dominicans of studia naturarum, where the substance of Aristotle’s philosophy was studied, only became a normal part of Dominican education in 1305, well after Thomas’s death. 5 Humbert of Romans, On the Formation of Preachers VIII.83, in Tugwell, (1982), 205.

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worldview. Aquinas will use this vocabulary not simply in the praeambula fidei, but within sacra doctrina itself. As I noted in Chapter 2, Thomas’s early De principiis naturae offers a kind of “short course” in Aristotelian physics that lays out the terms with which Thomas operates throughout his life. This is, in good Dominican fashion, a most “useful” work. The architectonic of this text are the four Aristotelian causes: material, formal, efficient, and final. All of these are placed in the context of the metaphysics of act and potency, with which Thomas begins the work—the distinction is between actual being and potential being.6 Like Aristotle, Thomas sees the flux of the world—the becoming of the world—in terms of a process of “generation” and “corruption,” in which things come into and go out of existence. This process is a matter of certain potentials becoming actual and others ceasing to be actual, a process that results from the action of beings upon each other. We can understand this process by distinguishing among various ways in which we might speak of things as “causes,” sources of generation, and corruption. We call something a cause when it can serve as a response to that distinctively human question, “why?” It is not simply a verbal accident of English that we call the answer to the question “why?” a “reason,” since it is our capacity to ask such questions that constitutes us as reasonable beings.7 To be a rational being involves not simply knowing that something is the case—a kind of knowing that we share with our nonrational fellow animals—but knowing why it is the case. To “reason” is to inquire into the reason for a thing, which of course presumes that there is a reason, that there is a point to asking “why?,” and that there is some sort of conformity between the reason-of-the-world that is the answer to the why-question and the reason-of-the-mind that motivates human beings to ask this question. Thomas, like Aristotle, is aware that why-questions are of various sorts. If we presume that the question “why?” is always asked about some real state of affairs—something that actually is—then we can think of our whyquestions in terms of actualized possibilities and group them into four sorts: 1) we can be asking about the possibility that has been realized; 2) we can be asking about the sort of thing that has been realized in the realization of this possibility; 3) we can be asking about who or what has

6 7

De principiis naturae, cap. 1. And in Greek the word aition can mean both “cause” and “explanation.”

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brought about the realization of this possibility; and 4) we can ask about the purpose for which this possibility has been realized. To use Aristotle’s example of a bronze statue, if we ask “why is there this statue?” we might receive the answer “because bronze has been given the shape of Alexander.” In this answer, the passive-voice construction draws our attention to the word “bronze,” which is the material in which the image of the statue has been realized. There is a statue of Alexander because the bronze, which has the possibility of being made into a statue, has had that possibility actualized. In Thomas’s terminology, we are asking about the material cause of the statue. It is important to note that, though Thomas speaks of “matter,” he is not thinking of some sort of neutral “stuff ” that gets put into some shape (which Aristotle’s bronze statue example might lead us to assume) but rather of the potential that is actualized in the generation of something. Further, it is not simply an accident of English grammar that the answer to our why-question is a passive construction, because material causes cannot realize their own potential; they are what we might call, somewhat oddly, to our ears, “passive causes.” To this same question, “why is there this statue?” we might receive essentially this same answer, grammatically reshuffled: “because the shape of Alexander has been given to bronze.” In this form emphasis falls on the shape or form of the statue, which, in Thomas’s terminology, we would call the formal cause. We are speaking here not of a “passive cause” but of an “active” one: it is the shape or form of Alexander that realizes or actualizes the potential of the bronze to be a statue of Alexander. Notice that, however constructed, the actual content of the two statements are the same: both answer the why-question concerning the statue in terms of a passive potential (bronze-that-might-be-a-statue) that has been realized by being given a particular form (the shape of Alexander). The two ways of answering this question coincide in these statements because matter and form coincide in things. We never have matter without any form (though Thomas will speak of “prime matter” as a kind of remainder concept that we can posit by a mental exercise), nor do we ever have the form of a material thing without that form being embodied in some sort of matter, or at least known by the mind. Any really existing thing—apart from God, as we shall see—always involves the actualization of some potential; in the case of material things, this involves their being a composite of form (actuality) and matter (potentiality), which Thomas

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calls “intrinsic causes.”8 Intrinsic causes answer a why-question by telling us what a thing is. There is another sort of answer that might be given to our whyquestion. When we ask, “why is there this statue?” we might receive the answer, “because Demetrios, the sculptor, cast it.” Here, the answer is not concerned with the intrinsic causes of the statue’s composition but rather with something extrinsic to the statue itself: the craftsman who made the statue. In this case, Demetrios was the one who made the statue exist by taking the shape or form of Alexander and imparting it to bronze. This is what Thomas calls the efficient or agent cause, and this is a notion of “cause” that is probably quite familiar, since today we typically think of a cause as a thing “outside” of something that acts upon it to affect it in some way. The efficient cause answers the question “why?” in terms of who or what acted so as to make something that was potential to be actual. But, for Aristotle and Thomas, an efficient cause is not the only sort of extrinsic cause. In answer to our question, “why is there this statue?” we might also receive the answer, “Because Demetrios desired that there be an immemorial monument to Alexander, so that his name might be praised down through the ages.” In this case, though Demetrios is spoken of, the actual “reason” that is being given is not Demetrios as agent, but Demetrios as desirer, and it is the desired goal—the praise down through the ages of Alexander (or perhaps of Demetrios; the antecedent of “he” in the answer is deliberately ambiguous) that is the reason for there being the statue. This is what Thomas calls the final cause; it is the answer to the why-question that seeks to know the goal of the action. Like the efficient cause, the final cause is extrinsic to or “outside of” the thing that has come into existence; but while we might think of the efficient cause as “pushing” the thing into existence, we can think of the final cause as “pulling” it into existence, drawing it by it inherent attractiveness. In contemplating different ways of answering why-questions, we begin to grasp what Thomas and Aristotle call “causes.” In considering intrinsic (material and formal) causes, however, a further distinction should be added. Anything that exists is a potential that has been actualized so as to exist in a particular way. But there is a difference between the “is” of “Elvis is a human being” and the “is” of “Elvis is in Memphis.” To say that Elvis is a human being is to say that a particular sort of thing exists, the human being Elvis. To say that Elvis is in Memphis is that say that something that

8

De principiis naturae cap. 3.

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exists is existing in a particular sort of way. Elvis cannot cease to be a human being without ceasing to be, while he can cease to be in Memphis by, for example, moving to Las Vegas. The former sort of existence Thomas calls esse substantiale, while the latter he calls esse accidentale.9 Being something is at least logically prior to existing in a particular sort of way: there must be a human being Elvis if we are to speak intelligibly of an Elvisin-Memphis or a young-Elvis or a fat-Elvis. The form by which something that is potentially Elvis becomes actually Elvis is called a “substantial form,” while the forms by which Elvis comes to be actually in Las Vegas, or young, or fat, or wearing a white jumpsuit is called an “accidental form.” The distinction of substance and accident ought not to be thought of as if the substance were an unchanging “core” of a thing to which accidents are attached and removed, in the way that ears, noses, and hats might be attached to a Mr Potato Head toy. Rather, just as we might think of causes as different ways of asking and answering the question “why is it?” we might think of substantial form as addressing the question “what is it?” and accidental form as addressing the question “how is it?”10 Or, to put it another way, the terms “accident” and “substance” are ways of distinguishing between that which exists as a quality of something, and that which exists on its own as something possessing qualities. In our ordinary linguistic use, we can speak of “a human being” or “a horse” but we cannot speak of “a red” or “a six-foot” or “a fat” unless we connect it with something that has its own existence—“a red rooster” or “a six-foot wall” or “a fat pension.” This is a very useful distinction because it can help us account for continuity of identity, such that we can know that a red rooster that gets painted blue is still the same rooster, even though it is no longer red. With regard to formal causality, it can help us distinguish between those changes that involve no change of identity (the acquisition or loss of accidental form) and those that that do (the acquisition or loss of substantial form). So while a red rooster becoming a blue rooster and a red rooster becoming dinner are both changes of form, in one case it involves a change of accidents (i.e. color) but in the other it involves a change of substance. That is, after the rooster has become dinner, we will get a different answer to the question “what is it?” Seen in this way, the distinction between accident and substance is not one between perceptible entities and the occult entities to which they are attached, but rather

9

De principiis naturae cap. 1.

10

See Aristotle, Metaphysics 7.1, 1028a 10–30.

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a fairly commonsense way of speaking about different sorts of changes that occur and the sorts of continuities that persist through those changes. There is one final philosophical tool that needs to be mentioned here, but this is not one that Aquinas derives from Aristotle, at least not directly. This is the distinction between essence (essentia), what a thing is, and existence (esse), the fact that a thing is. It is generally conceded that this is a distinction that was unknown, or not clearly known, in antiquity. It is a distinction that Greek seems verbally ill-equipped to make, since the word ousia does double duty for both essence and existence. It is a distinction that is generally thought to have been introduced into Western thought by Muslim thinkers such as Avicenna and Jewish thinkers such as Moses Maimonides, though perhaps hints of it can be found in Boethius’ De Hebdomadibus.11 Thomas’s earliest articulation of this distinction is found not in De principiis, but in the nearly contemporary De ente et essentia. There are many complexities, subtleties, and puzzles involved in Thomas’s argument, but his basic point is this: to understand what something is we must grasp its essence or quidditas in its entirety; therefore whatever is not included in our understanding of what something is must not be included in its essence or quidditas. But when we understand a term like “man” or “phoenix” we can grasp what-it-is without having to determine that-it-is in reality. Our act of understanding a thing’s quidditas is something distinct from the act of judging whether things such as men or phoenixes really exist. And therefore, Thomas concludes, a thing’s existence must be different from its essence. Thomas goes on to argue that if there were something in which essence and existence were not distinct, there could only be one such thing, since what-it-is would simply be thatit-is and therefore it could be distinguished from everything else only by its uniqueness (and this unique act of pure existence he will later identify as God). In all other things, in which what-it-is is distinct from the fact that-it-is, existence is, as it were, “added” to essence. As Thomas puts it, they are “composites” of essence and existence. This is the case even if there are beings that are pure form without matter (as Thomas conceives the angels to be), since they too would need to receive the existence that is distinct from their essence. In this sense, even immaterial things are “composite” since their essence is distinct from their existence; indeed,

11

See Wippel (1982), 392–3.

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the distinction between existence and essence defines what it is to be created.12 The idea of all things other than God needing to have their existence imparted to them will become important in Thomas’s way of understanding the relation of creatures to God. One further refinement should be added. Prior to Thomas, Avicenna had put this distinction between essence and existence in terms of the existence of creatures being an “accident” of their essence.13 Though in one text we find Thomas also referring to existence as an “accident,”14 he quickly came to be dissatisfied with this way of formulating the distinction. Aquinas sees the analogy of substance-accident is misleading because it could imply that essences are some sort of substance prior to actually existing. He recognized that an essence could not be separated from its existence in the way that a substance might be separated from one of its accidents. If you remove the snubness of Socrates’ nose (say through primitive plastic surgery), Socrates still has a nose, albeit one that is no longer snub. But if you remove existence from Socrates’ humanity, it is not the case that you still have humanity, albeit one that does not exist. Rather, you don’t have anything at all. Or, rather, the only way to remove existence from Socrates’ humanity is to remove that humanity by, for instance, turning him into something else (e.g. a corpse). Therefore the distinction ought not to be reified in such a way as to imply that existence is somehow a separable accident of essence. Thomas prefers to draw an analogy not with the distinction between substance and accident, but with the distinction between potentiality and actuality. Just as matter is potentially something, a potential that is made actual when it receives a particular form, so too an essence potentially exists, but only actually exists inasmuch as it receives existence. This analogy, based on the structure of substances, underscores the intimate unity involved in being (existence) something (essence). Just as matter and form are inseparable in a material substance as long as that substance exists, so too being and essence are inseparable in any created substance. Thus we have laid out before us some of Thomas’s most frequently employed philosophical tools: the four causes—material, formal, efficient, and final—along with the distinctions between substance and accident on

12

De ente et essentia, cap. 3. See The Metaphysics of The Healing bk. 8, ch. 4. This is the view of Maimonides as well; see The Guide of the Perplexed bk. 1, ch. 57. 14 Quodlibet 2 q. 2 a. 1: “since all that is outside a thing’s essence may be called an accident, the being which pertains to the question ‘is it?’ is an accident.” 13

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the one hand and essence and existence on the other. As I said, this is certainly not all that Thomas takes from Aristotle and other sources. A firm grasp of these tools, however, should be enough to get us started in examining what Thomas thinks that unaided human reason can grasp concerning God and things in relation to God.

2. GOD’S EXISTENCE As a friar preacher, it is not really Thomas’s task to convince his listeners that there is a God.15 Thomas knew nothing of what we might call “theoretical atheism”—that is, an intellectual commitment to there being nothing that corresponds to the word “God” as this is ordinarily used. The closest thing that Thomas knew to such atheism seems to be the denial of any sort of divine providence by Democritus.16 When Thomas treats the vice of “unbelief ” in the Summa theologiae, he does not even consider those who would deny the existence of God, but treats only of paganism, Jewish rejection of Christ, and heresy.17 When discussing the words of Psalm 14, “The fool has said in his heart, ‘there is no God’,” Thomas identifies such denial either as thinking “that God is not omnipotent, and that he has no concern for human affairs,” or as the moral corruption of one who lives as if he or she will not be judged.18 The task of the preacher is not to convince the theoretical atheist, but to convince the practical atheist, the one who lives as if there were no God. If we take all of Thomas’s work as fitting in some way with the preacher’s task of proclaiming the gospel, then the demonstrations of God’s existence that Thomas offers are clearly not intended to convince the unbeliever. Rather, they are intended to reveal, in a preliminary and somewhat obscure way, how the word “God” is properly employed in human discourse, as well as showing that such discourse is not unmoored from reality. In his demonstrations Thomas wants to sketch a picture of the world as the sort of place that will only be intelligible to us if we allow ourselves to inquire into its ultimate source.

15 In one of Thomas’s popular sermons, In Symbolum Apostolorum, a. 1, he does offer a brief account, not unlike the fourth way of the Summa, of why one ought to think that there is one God who is the creator of all things. 16 Super Sent. lib. 1 d. 3 q. 1 a. 2 co.; Summa theologiae Ia q. 22 a. 2. 17 Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 10 a. 5. 18 Super Psalmos 13 n. 1.

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Five Ways Among those whose exposure to Thomas Aquinas only extends as far as an undergraduate survey of philosophy, he is probably best known as the one who claimed to have proven the existence of God in five different ways. This is in part because of the way in which Thomas has been anthologized in textbooks of the history of philosophy, which will often include the third article of the second question of the first part of the Summa theologiae as somehow representative of Thomas’s thought as a whole. Not only does this isolation of a single article from the rest of Thomas’s thought occasion a misperception of the sort of thinker he is, but the statement that Thomas claims to have proved God’s existence can also be misleading because of what we today take to be the obvious meaning of “proof.” While today the challenge “prove it” is typically taken as a demand for evidence, for Aquinas the claim to have demonstrated God’s existence is something rather different. Following the model of Aristotelian scientia, Thomas’s proofs answer to the demand to produce an argument from things that are already in evidence; that is, he wants us to realize the implications of something that is readily displayed before our eyes. The first thing that might be asked, however, is whether there is any need for a demonstration of God’s existence at all.19 In asking this, Thomas is not asking whether faith, absent a demonstration, is a sufficient basis for the affirmation that God exists; he clearly thinks that it is. There is even a sense in which by faith we know God’s existence better than we do by reason. As Thomas famously said, “none of the philosophers before the advent of Christ with all their striving were able to know so much of God and of those things required for life as an old woman knows through faith after the coming of Christ.”20 What concerns Thomas is not the sufficiency of supernatural faith, but whether natural reason’s apprehending of God’s existence is something arrived at by demonstration, or is something per se nota, self-evident, that reason grasps in the way it grasps the truth that a whole must be greater than its part or that something cannot both be and not be in the same way at the same time. In other words, is God’s

19 In addition to Summa theologiae Ia q. 2 a. 1, see, among others, Super Sent. lib. 1 d. 3 q. 1 a. 2; Super De Trinitate pars 1 q. 1 a. 3; Contra Gentiles lib. 1 cap. 10–11; Lectura Romana d. 3 q. 1 a. 1; Super Psalmos 13 n. 1. 20 In Symbolum Apostolorum prooemium; cf. Sermon 14, Attendite a falsis, pars 2.

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existence a first principle that we reason from or is it something that we reason to, starting from other principles. In the Contra Gentiles Thomas speculates that the reason why knowledge of God seems to many people to be per se nota is that they are introduced to the idea of God at such an early age that custom “comes to have the force of nature.”21 But this cannot be genuine self-evidence, since in order for a proposition like “God exists” to be self-evident to someone two conditions must be fulfilled: 1) the predicate must be identical to the subject and 2) one must know the meaning of both the subject and the predicate. In the case of “God exists,” the first condition is fulfilled, since God’s essence, uniquely, is identical with God’s existence, but the second is not, since no creature can know God’s essence, which exceeds the capacity of any created being to know. If God’s existence is not self-evident, can it be made evident? That is, can it be demonstrated, beginning from things that are better known to us? Thomas, drawing on Aristotle, notes that demonstrations can be of two sorts: what he calls demonstrations propter quid, which we might call a “why-demonstration,” and what he calls demonstrations quia, which we might call a “fact-demonstration.”22 The former argues from cause to effect, and is employed when the cause is better known to us than the effect, and the latter is an argument from effect to cause, and is employed when the effect is better known to us than the cause. If I know of Fido that he is a dog, then I know that Fido’s offspring, Rex, will also be a dog, even if I have never examined Rex. The essence of the cause (“caninity”) is known to me, allowing me to have scientia of the effect. This would be an example of a why-demonstration: beginning from my knowledge of Fido, I can demonstrate why Rex is a dog—i.e. because Fido is a dog. But say that I see a light on the horizon, the source of which is unknown. I can demonstrate that there is a source of that light, since the light must have something that accounts for its presence; I can further know that whatever that source is must be the sort of thing that can account for light; but I cannot be said to know why there is a light, rather than something else, since I have no knowledge of the light’s source that is not derived from my knowledge of the light itself. This is the sort of knowledge one derives from a fact-demonstration.

21

Contra Gentiles lib. 1 cap. 11 n. 1. I borrow these English equivalents from Richard Berquist’s illuminating translation of and commentary on Thomas’s Expositio Libri Posteriorum. 22

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Arguments for God’s existence are of this latter sort, because we know God’s effects better than we know God, since the human mind’s natural object is the quidditas of material things.23 Thomas’s proofs for God’s existence, therefore, begin from features of the material world that are familiar to us and then seek to demonstrate that there must be a God to account for them. This is something different from the kind of evidencegathering that goes on in modern empirical science, since the method remains deductive rather than inductive. Also, such demonstrations based on God’s effects do not give us a firm grasp on the nature of God any more than a fact-demonstration based on a mysterious light can give us a firm grasp on the nature of its source, nor can they tell us why God should produce this effect rather than that. Fact-demonstrations allow us to know how properly to employ the word “God” in discourse, as well as to know that our language is referring to something, but they offer no basis for grasping the quidditas of God. While the knowledge thus produced is spare, it is genuine. Thomas clearly considers his demonstrations of God’s existence to be formally valid proofs, by which I mean arguments that move from true premises to a true conclusion by means of a proper inference. We may not judge them to be so, but we must strain mightily against the text in order to maintain that Thomas did not so consider them.24 Thomas takes up the question of demonstrating God’s existence in several places, perhaps in greatest detail in the Contra Gentiles. But it is in the form of the “five ways” found in the Summa theologiae that Thomas’s views have achieved their “canonical” form in the philosophical tradition. Furthermore, the sparseness of Thomas’s argumentation in the Summa is actually helpful in seeing what he is doing, since the fundamental structure of the demonstrations stands out clearly. It is to this text, therefore, that I will primarily refer.

23

Summa theologiae Ia q. 2 a. 2; q. 88 a. 3. A relatively mild example of this straining can be found in Pesch (1988), 132 who denies that the five ways are any sort of “rational ascent to a previously unknown God,” but rather reason’s limit-possibility with regard to approaching “the God always already known to faith” (emphasis in the original). For a more extreme example of such straining, see Preller (1967), esp. ch. 3. While I am sympathetic to aspects of Preller’s approach, I think it is misleading to say, “the proofs as they stand in the Summa theologiae are logically incompatible with Aquinas’s own teaching on the nature of God and our ‘cognitions’ of him” (109). This implies not simply that the five ways have been misread by interpreters, but that they are being presented by Thomas as arguments in need of deconstruction (thus Preller habitually refers to Thomas as “quoting” the viae, not “arguing” them). 24

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Many questions persist concerning the five ways: their purpose (given the audience and nature of the Summa, should they be seen as apologetic in intent, a foundation for sacra doctrina, or something else?), their relationship to similar arguments found in Aristotle and other writers (e.g., is Thomas’s argument “from motion” identical to the argument found in book eight of Aristotle’s Physics?), their relationship to each other (are they five discrete proofs or does Thomas intend them to have a cumulative force?), and so forth. The arguments are usually described as the arguments from 1) motion, 2) cause and effect, 3) possibility and necessity, 4) the gradations found in nature and, 5) the guidedness of nature. Analogues to all of these arguments can be found in the preceding philosophical and theological tradition.25 My intent here is not to treat the individual arguments in detail, but to step back from them and ask what all five of the demonstrations have in common. As fact-demonstrations, all five seek to move from something that is manifest to the existence of something that is not manifest, but which must be the case if we are to account for that which is manifest to us. What is manifest is simply the world in its totality, which is grasped under different aspects of that totality in the different demonstrations.26 Each of the five ways turns on a claim about what we might call the world’s selfinsufficiency: nothing moves itself; nothing causes itself; nothing is the source of its own necessity; nothing measures itself; the universe as a whole does not guide itself. Also, each operates within a broadly Aristotelian account of the world of becoming as one that can be analyzed in terms of potentiality and actuality. In this way, being moved, being caused, existing, having gradations of existence, and being guided to an end can all be thought in terms of potential being actualized. All also involve a kind of “stepping back” from particular instances of the actualization of potency in order to consider, not this or that phenomenon, but 25

See the list, drawing on the work of Leo Elders, of analogous arguments in Kerr (2000b),

70–1. 26

Kenny (1969), 36 claims that, if one combines the first two ways, “the distinction between the Five Ways reflects the distinction between the Four Causes.” That is, the first and second ways are concerned with efficient causality, the third way is concerned with material causality, the fourth way is concerned with formal causality, and the fifth way is concerned with final causality. As attractive as this suggestion is, I do not think that it can be sustained in the end. In particular, I am not convinced that the third way is concerned with material causality. Also, in order to sustain this claim, one must keep shifting our focus from God as extrinsic cause (in the first, second, and fifth ways) to created realities as intrinsic causes (third and fourth ways); in the latter case, I do not see how Thomas expects us to make the leap from an intrinsic cause to an extrinsic one.

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the world as a whole. Finally, they all recognize that if the world as a whole cannot actualize itself, then there must be something that is not encompassed by the world that actualizes it, something that is not itself actualized by anything else but rather exists as pure actuality, and this is what people call “God.” Peter Geach notes that an essential feature of the five ways “is something tantamount to treating the world as a great big object.”27 In other words, each of the five ways involves asking “why?” about the world as a whole, understood under a particular aspect. Geach does not think that approaching the world in such a way is a flight of fantasy, nor does it involve a manifest contradiction. Scientists who speak of “the universe” are not laughed out of scientific meetings. If such speech is legitimate, why should we think that inquiry into the “why?” of the universe—the world taken as “a great big object”—is not legitimate? As Geach puts it, there is no reason to think that, “though we can speak without contradiction of the world as a whole, we cannot raise concerning it the sort of causal questions that we can raise concerning its parts.”28 Of course, when we shift from asking “why?” concerning the parts to asking “why?” concerning the whole, we are asking a different sort of question. We are asking a “why-question” that cannot be answered by means of a why-demonstration, but only by a that-demonstration, since we have no knowledge of the world’s source that is not derived from our knowledge of the world itself. We are no longer asking why the world is the way it is, but why it is at all. This “treating the world as a great big object” is important for understanding Thomas’s explicit employment of Aristotle’s argument against an infinite regress in the first three ways. When Thomas denies the possibility of an infinite regress, he is not referring to an infinite temporal series, but rather to the world as a system of simultaneous causes. Thomas alludes to an example from Aristotle: the hand that uses the stick to move a stone.29 The hand does not first move the stick which subsequently moves the stone; rather these motions are temporally simultaneous, and any “priority” of which we speak is a logical priority of causal efficacy: the mover is prior to that which is moved in the sense that without the mover there would be no movement in something else. It is clear that Aristotle is not arguing against an infinite temporal series, since he thinks motion is eternal. Likewise Thomas’s argument against an infinite regress of causes has nothing to do with the question of the temporal beginning of the 27 28

Anscombe and Geach (1976), 112. Anscombe and Geach (1976), 113.

29

See Aristotle, Physics bk. 8, ch. 5 256a.

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world since, as we shall see later, he sees no logical inconsistency in the world being of infinite duration and yet still having God as its cause.30 The five ways, therefore, would still work even if the world had always existed. Part of the significance of Thomas’s willingness to accept the logical possibility of the infinite duration of the world is that it makes clear that reason cannot find God by thinking back through a series of motions or causes or whatever. Any of these series could, at least in theory, be infinite. For the five ways to work, one must make a “leap” from asking “why?” within the series of motions, causes, grades of being, etc. to asking “why?” about the series itself. This “leap” is not a “leap of faith” in the Kierkegaardian sense. It is a “leap” that human reason makes within the limits of its natural capacities, though perhaps poised at the extremity of that limit. “God” is the answer not to the question of why this or that thing occurs, but the question of why anything occurs. Finally, we might ask whether Thomas is engaging in question begging when he concludes each of his five demonstrations with the seemingly insouciant “this everyone understands to be God.” Is this a conclusion that has been warranted by the demonstration? Has it been made apparent that the unmoved mover, the uncaused cause, the source of necessary being, the source of the varying degrees of being and goodness, the intelligence that guides the universe, ought to be identified with God? It is important to remember that Thomas is not claiming to have proved the God of Christian faith. Rather, he claims that if we look at how the word “god” is ordinarily employed, it at least signifies “something existing above all things, the principle of all things and removed from all things.”31 As noted before, the actual pay-off of the five ways is quite austere in terms of our understanding of God. Because they are fact-demonstrations, they do not deliver to us God’s nature, but simply the fact of God’s existence. 30 De aeternitate mundi 3. Thomas believes that the Catholic faith teaches that the world has a temporal beginning, but maintains that there is no heresy in believing that God could have made a world of infinite duration. He remarks in his commentary on Aristotle’s Physics that if Aristotle, presuming the eternity of the world, can successfully argue for a first mover, how much more ought we to see the need for a first mover of a world that has a temporal beginning, “for it is clear that every new thing needs some innovating principle” (Sententia super Physicam lib. 8 lec. 1, n. 970). Thomas says essentially the same thing in Contra Gentiles lib. 1 cap. 13 n. 30: “The most efficacious way to prove that God exists is on the supposition that the world is eternal. Granted this supposition, it is less manifest that God exists. For, if the world and motion have a first beginning, some cause must clearly be posited to account for this origin of the world and of motion. That which comes to be anew must take its origin from some innovating cause; since nothing brings itself from potency to act, or from nonbeing to being.” 31 Summa theologiae Ia q. 13 a. 8 ad 2. See also McDermott (1964), 187.

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We might say that what the five ways demonstrate is that the world, taken as a whole, cannot account for its own fundamental features: in particular, the phenomena of change, causality, necessary existence, gradations of value, and goal-oriented action. God, in turn, is demonstrated to be that which accounts for a world that cannot account for itself. When Thomas concludes “and this is what people call ‘God’,” he does not say which people do this, or what else they might have to say about God. This is, as George Lindbeck once remarked, a bit like identifying Socrates by giving his longitude and latitude.32 This would not be what we normally mean by “knowing X,” though it might be helpful in telling us where to look and where not to look for X. The five ways tell us that God is not a thing in our world, and yet the world is at its root dependent upon this God. As Victor White puts it, the five ways, “lead from a purely subjective to an objective agnosticism: they will show that we cannot merely say, ‘I do not know’, but also that ‘there is an Unknown’.”33 This having been said, it is also important to note that while the five ways do not tell us much about God, there are certain claims about God that are entailed by them. In particular, in God essence and existence are one. Thomas discusses this point more fully in his various treatments of “divine simplicity,” a traditional attribute of God that he takes up and radicalizes in light of the distinction in creatures between essence and existence.34 In Augustine, for example, God is simple because he is not composed of parts, as a material thing is, nor is he subject to changeable passions, the way an immaterial being like the human soul is.35 For Thomas, God’s simplicity exceeds that of even a passionless, immaterial creature, since even purely intellectual beings such as angels are composed of essence and existence, for their existence is something received from God, distinct from their quidditas. If the world taken as a whole is made up of beings for which the actuality of their existence is not included in their essence, then the world cannot provide the answer to the question of its own existence, and our asking “why” about the world can only come to an end in something radically simple, for which essence and existence are one, about which one cannot ask “why” concerning its existence. Put differently, in Exodus 3 God is uniquely named as qui est, “he who is,”

32

33 Lindbeck (1967). White (1956), 49. For Thomas’s discussions of divine simplicity, see, among others, Super Sent. lib. 1 d. 8 q. 4; Contra Gentiles lib. 1 cap. 22–3; Lectura Romana d. 8 q. 3; De potentia q. 7 Summa theologiae Ia q. 3; Compendium theologiae lib. 1 cap. 9–11. 35 Augustine, De Trinitate lib. 6 n. 8. 34

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for this name does not signify existing in this or that way, but the simple act of existence itself.36 As such, God is “perfect,” in the specific sense of being fully actual, admitting of no unrealized potential. From this radical simplicity of God, Thomas spins out his affirmation of other divine perfections—unparticipated goodness, infinity, omnipresence, immutability, eternity, and unity—which are in fact denials of the imperfections entailed by various forms of composition.

Rethinking the Five Ways I have focused on the general pattern of argumentation Thomas employs in the five ways rather that the details of the arguments. In part this is because of considerations of space; this is not a book on the five ways, and there are a number of fine treatments of these available.37 In part, however, it is because in many ways the details are highly problematic, given our current understanding of the natural world. For example, the first way, the argument from motion, which Thomas calls the most evident (manifestior), presents a number of difficulties. As noted, the argument bears a strong resemblance to the argument found in book eight of Aristotle’s Physics and would seem to share with Aristotle’s argument a number of dubious features, not least of which is an account of motion that requires the cause of motion to be constantly acting upon the thing that is moved. Such an understanding of motion is obviously contrary to Newton’s first law of motion, which requires only an initial mover to account for motion. Were one to attempt to accommodate Thomas’s argument to a Newtonian account of motion, it would seem that the best it could deliver would be a first mover who moved things at the outset, but need do so no longer—a mover that, indeed, no longer need even exist. Of course, as I have noted, Aristotle does not mean by “first mover” that which is temporally first. But this too raises difficulties. Aristotle’s argument against an infinite regress of movers, which Thomas invokes, seems to envision a cosmos of concentric spheres, in which each sphere moves the one below it. Aristotle’s “first mover” is not the “earliest” mover, but rather the “outermost” mover: that which moves the outermost celestial sphere. Though the world is, for Aristotle, 36

See Summa theologiae Ia q. 13 a. 11. An example of a detailed treatment, ultimately negative in its judgment on all five arguments, is Kenny (1982). A more favorable treatment of the five ways and Thomas’s other demonstrations of God’s existence can be found in Wipple (2000), 379–500. 37

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temporally infinite, it is spatially finite, and it is at the “edge” of this finite space that we find the first mover.38 This clearly does not conform to our current knowledge of how the universe is structured. The usual way of addressing these difficulties is to shift the demonstrations from a physical to a metaphysical register. Modern Thomists point out that by “motion” (motus) Thomas does not mean simply “local motion,” movement from point A to point B; rather, as Thomas’s own example of fire makes clear, he means by motus what Aristotle means by his corresponding Greek term, kinesis, which includes not simply change of location, but also changes of quantity or quality.39 While the context of Aristotle’s arguments about the unmoved mover, which are really about the motion of the celestial spheres, makes it clear that Aristotle is thinking of kinesis in the more restricted sense of local motion, Thomas’s invocation of wood burning as an example of motus gives a broader sense to the term, so that the “motion” involved includes any change from potentiality to actuality. This broad sense of motus shifts the argument from the level of the physical to that of the metaphysical, specifically the metaphysics of potency and act, and thereby has the advantage of freeing Thomas’s argument from what Thomas Gilby called “debated questions of celestial mechanics.”40 Clearly Thomas’s defenders have a point; his argument has more to do with the actualization of potential than it does with physical motion. It does seem, however, that Thomas thought the demonstration could be made on the basis of local motion, as one type of motus.41 Moreover, it is not immediately apparent how Aristotle’s argument against an infinite regress would remain cogent when applied beyond the level of physical motion and outside of his picture of the celestial spheres. In general, it is not entirely clear the degree to which metaphysics can or should be divorced from an account of the physical universe. In this particular instance, doing so seems to undercut the very point of the five ways: to begin our attempt to make evident God’s existence with something that is obvious to us through our senses. It is perhaps possible to recast the basic pattern of argumentation in the five ways by beginning not from the perceptible world as a physical object, 38

For a brief description of Aristotle’s cosmos, see Guthrie (1981), 268. Aristotle, Physics 5.1 225b 5–9. 40 Gilby (1964), 193. 41 In Contra Gentiles lib. 1 cap. 13 Thomas includes “Aristotelian” arguments that clearly indicate that he is talking about physical motion, as well as one that is couched in terms of potency and act. 39

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but from the world as an object of inquiry for the human knower. That is, the five ways do not give us simply an accurate picture of the universe as something that entails God, but they show us that the world becomes ultimately unintelligible without that which people call God. Our inquiry into the world, our asking “why?” about the world, if it is pushed beyond asking about this or that particular feature or set of features of the world, so as to ask “why?” about the world as “a great big object” of inquiry, must ultimately terminate in that about which it makes no sense to ask “why?”—something that simply is—and this is what people call “God.” We should think of the five ways not as five different ways in which we might discover an object, but rather five cases of human inquiry, five instances of human wondering, five ways in which we might ask “why?” Why are things changing? Why does one thing cause another? Why are there unchanging physical principles? Why are we able to discern gradations of qualities? Why is the universe so finely tuned? When we begin to wonder about such things, our intellect cannot rest until it arrives at that which brings to an end our wondering. As W. K. C. Guthrie notes with regard to Aristotle’s argument for the unmoved mover, “an endless retrogression of intermediaries, causing motion because moved in their turn by something else, explains nothing.”42 In other words, the human impulse to ask “why,” to seek a cause, cannot finally come to rest in moved movers or caused causers. If, as Thomas says, the natural impulse of the human intellect is to inquire into causes,43 then we are presented with a choice: either this quest has no end and the human impulse to know must rest content with perpetually knowing one more thing, or human inquiry can in principle find a place to rest. If the latter is the case, that in which the intellect rests must be a suitable answer our question “why” and yet must not be itself the sort of thing about which it is suitable to ask “why.” It must, in short, be an answer to the question “why” asked, not about this or that thing, but about everything taken together. It must be an answer to reason’s leap from inquiring about particular things to inquiring about the world taken as “a great big object.” And the answer to this inquiry is what people call God.

The God of the Philosophers? We return to our earlier question: why would a friar preacher like Thomas Aquinas concern himself with demonstrations of God’s existence

42

Guthrie (1981), 252.

43

Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 3 a. 8.

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that prescind from the scriptural revelation that it is his mission to communicate? To put it in Pascal’s terms, what does the God of the philosophers have to do with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and why should Thomas be interested in this connection? Is the God that Thomas demonstrates in the five ways the same as the God of the philosophers? More specifically, is the God that Thomas demonstrates in the five ways the same as the God of “the Philosopher,” as Thomas called Aristotle? It is evident that Thomas thought that philosophers like Aristotle had, beginning from natural reason and the senses, discovered some truths about God. But how close does the God of the philosophers come to the God of the five ways, and how close does the God of the five ways come to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? Jonathan Lear writes concerning Aristotle’s conception of God: Aristotle’s God is not a directing general: he does not intervene in the world, or in any sense create it. He does not create matter or form, nor does he intervene in any way so as to be considered responsible for the bringing together of form and matter. Nor is he a divine engineer. He has no purposes or intentions: so the teleological organization to be found in the world cannot be an expression of divine purpose.44

Though the metaphors of God as a “directing general” or a “divine engineer” are far cruder than Thomas’s subtle account of God’s relationship to the world, Thomas clearly does think the God creates both matter and form and that God has purposes and intentions for the world that he creates. Moreover, for Aristotle God is the first mover only in the sense of being a final cause, that which all things desire and act so as to attain, while Thomas holds that God is not simply the final cause of the world but also the efficient cause of the world, that which acts to give things their being. For Aristotle, God cares nothing for and has no knowledge of the things outside himself, just as, to use W. K. C. Guthrie’s metaphor, a seaport is indifferent to the ships that have it as their goal: The final cause, “separate and by itself” may be seen in the port for which the ship is making. It may remain entirely indifferent to, and ignorant of, the impending arrival, but its existence has instigated all the varied activities, all the discipline and order essential to a properly conducted ship.45

Is the generic, indifferent “providence” exercised by God as final cause the best that we can discern from the evidence of God’s effects? In discussing 44

Lear (1988), 295.

45

Guthrie (1981), 267.

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faith in the Summa theologiae, Thomas notes what the philosophers were not able to discover about God: that God is provident, that God is omnipotent, and that God alone is to be worshipped.46 Does Thomas have Aristotle and his unknowing, improvident God in mind here? If so, is the word “god” flexible enough to encompass both Aristotle’s first mover and the God who revealed himself to Moses as ’ehyeh ’asˇer ’ehyeh? The root of the difference between Thomas and Aristotle on the question of providence is the issue of God’s knowledge. In his commentary on Book 1 of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, discussing Aristotle’s criticisms of Plato with regard to the forms, Thomas presents the case against the forms as exemplary causes. Having given Aristotle’s arguments—in a presentation that is characteristically clearer than Aristotle himself— Thomas judges that, “this argument does away with the separate exemplars postulated by Plato.” He then goes on to say, however, that, “it still does not do away with the fact that God’s knowledge is the exemplar of all things.” Thomas proceeds to argue that the tendency of natural causes to reproduce their forms in the things that they generate (i.e. the fact that humans give birth to humans and not to fish, or that fire makes things burn and not freeze), “must be traced back to some directing principle which ordains each thing to its end.” Such a principle must be a “being who knows the end and the relationship of things to the end,” and thus the knowledge in God’s mind is the exemplary cause of things.47 Turning from the first book of the Metaphysics to the last, we find Thomas taking up a related question. Aristotle argues that the highest immaterial substance—God—must be a knower. But what does this knower know? Aristotle states that it cannot be something below itself, since this would mar the perfection of the highest immaterial substance. Since, in Aristotle’s view, the knower is conformed to the thing known, there are “some things which it is better not to see than to see.” Nor can the unmoved mover know something above it, since it would then not be the highest immaterial substance. Aristotle concludes, “Therefore it must be itself that thought thinks (since it is the most excellent of things), and its thinking is a thinking on thinking.”48 Most interpreters of Aristotle take this to be saying that God has no knowledge of anything other than

46

Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 1 a. 8 ad 1; cf. Compendium theologiae lib. 1 cap. 246: “although reason proves that there is only one God, it is subject to faith that he directly governs all things such that he is to be worshipped in a particular way.” 47 Sententia Metaphysicae lib. 1, lec. 15 n. 233. 48 Aristotle, Metaphysics bk. 12, ch. 9 1074b.

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himself; W. K. C. Guthrie speaks of “Aristotle’s plain but distasteful portrayal of a deity wrapped up in eternal self-contemplation.”49 Thomas, in contrast, while recognizing that “the Philosopher’s aim is to show that God does not understand something else but only himself, inasmuch as the thing understood is the perfection of the one understanding and of his activity, which is understanding,” goes on to say that, “it does not follow, however, that all things different from himself are not known by him; for by understanding himself he knows all other things.” Thomas’s argument for this is that “the more perfectly a principle is known, the more perfectly is its effect known in it.”50 Since God knows himself perfectly as the principle of all things, he must know his effects most perfectly. As to the argument that there are some things that it is better not to see, Thomas says that this is only true “insofar as the intellect becomes absorbed in it, and when in actually understanding that thing the intellect is drawn away from the understanding of nobler things.” This is not the case with God, since in thinking his own thought of things less than himself, God is still thinking of that which is highest.51 Both of these passages turn on the notion of there being exemplars of the things that are not God in the mind of God, an idea that most would associate with Platonism rather than Aristotle. Thomas’s entire argument seems rather un-Aristotelian. As we have seen, Aristotle’s model for the highest substance is not that of an efficient cause, which, if the agent be intelligent, must have some knowledge of that which it causes, but rather a final cause, which is immobile with regard to that which it causes, and also need not be aware of that which it causes. If I am moved by my desire for a bottle of beer to get up off the sofa and go to the refrigerator, this does not require any knowledge on the part of the beer. Even if the final cause happens to be intelligent, it acts upon that which it causes without

49 Guthrie (1981), 261, note 2. Some modern interpreters (Guthrie mentions Brentano and Anscombe) have argued in various ways against what most take to be the plain sense of the text. Jonathan Lear (1988), 295–6 offers what he calls a “conjecture” that gives a much more Platonic Aristotle, for whom the world is thought by God, as “the antecedent existence of form at its highest level of actuality.” He proposes, as “the missing piece in a jigsaw puzzle,” the suggestion that, for Aristotle, “God’s thought does not reproduce the structure of the world: the order of the world as a whole is an attempted physical realization of God’s thought.” This conjecture might be thought of as a version of Thomas’s claim that God’s knowledge of the world is causal, but thought exclusively in terms of final, rather than efficient, causality. 50 This reading of Aristotle is not original to Aquinas, but stretches back at least to Alexander of Aphrodisias (c. ad 200). 51 Sententia Metaphysicae lib. 12, lec. 11 n. 2614–16.

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requiring any knowledge on its part. The ability of a beautiful woman to cause me to act in all sorts of foolish ways does not require that she even know that I exist (and the fact that she does not know I exist might lead me to act even more foolishly). In this sense, there is absolutely nothing mysterious about Aristotle’s notion of God as an unmoved mover; if we think of those movers that are unmoved qua mover, God is but one member of a class that includes all final causes. Thomas’s understanding of the highest substance seems to add something to Aristotle’s: the highest cause not only knows itself, but knows itself as cause. Thomas holds that God is a “directing principle that ordains each thing to its end,” but the language of “end” here does not involve purely final causality. It seems to be conceptually mixed with notions of efficient causality: God is not simply an object of desire, but a doer or maker. Thomas’s claim that “the more perfectly a principle is known, the more perfectly is its effect known in it” would not apply if one were speaking purely of a final cause. Perfect knowledge of a beautiful woman, for example, does not involve knowledge of who will be drawn to her. But perfect knowledge of an efficient cause could plausibly be said to include knowledge of each and every effect of that cause. Thomas’s additions to Aristotle, based as they are on efficient causality, seem like alien visitors in the world of final causes.52 So what exactly is Thomas saying when he says, as he does in his commentary on the Metaphysics, that Aristotle’s position does not negate something or does not imply something? Is he saying that Aristotle does not intend to include or exclude a particular view, or simply that a particular view is not incompatible with what Aristotle has said? With regard to God’s knowledge, the arguments of Aristotle do not seem to envision anything like exemplary ideas of creatures in the mind of God, nor God’s knowledge of other beings. In fact, it would seem that he intends to exclude them. It seems implausible that Thomas would willfully misrepresent Aristotle or that he could have missed the intention

52 In Summa theologiae Ia q. 14 a. 4, addressing the question of whether God knows things other than himself, Thomas couches his argument in terms of what must be true of God as first efficient cause. Cf. Contra Gentiles lib. 1 cap. 49. David Burrell (2004a), 73, however, offers the cautionary reminder that none of Aristotle’s four causes really fits with the act of God as the free creator of the world. He writes that Thomas’s “occasional use of ‘efficient causes’ to identify the creator of all is manifestly ‘loose’ or ‘improper,’ and only intended to contrast this causality with others even less apt. For Aristotle’s efficient causes always presupposes a subject upon which to work.”

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of Aristotle’s text.53 It seems more plausible that Thomas is simply pointing out that, whatever Aristotle’s intentions, his views as stated are not incompatible with the positions Thomas develops with regard to divine knowledge of created beings. Thomas thinks that even though Aristotle, like all philosophers, had an understanding of God that suffered from “the mixing in of many errors,” the prime mover whose existence Aristotle demonstrated in Physics 8 and Metaphysics 12 is the same as the God who revealed himself to Moses in Exodus 3. This might seem curious if we recall Thomas’s remarks concerning the fool who says in his heart that there is no God, whom he identifies as one who thinks that God “has no concern for human affairs.” Presuming that Thomas saw the plain sense of Aristotle’s texts denying that God has knowledge of the world, it is puzzling how Aquinas is able to identify the God of the Physics and Metaphysics with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It seems as if Aristotle should be counted among those fools who say in their hearts that there is no God. But clearly Thomas does not think of Aristotle in this way. It seems that for Thomas, while what Aristotle demonstrates concerning God is manifestly inadequate, particularly with regard to God’s providence, in its role of accounting for the motion of the world it still falls within the ambit of “what people call God.” And this would be so primarily because the prime mover of Aristotle, solipsistic as he is, still functions within Aristotle’s thought as the encompassing explanatory principle from which all activity flows. Aristotle’s inquiry comes to rest in an unmoved mover. We might say that the prime mover occupies the conceptual “place” in which Thomas knows the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is to be located. At the same time, Thomas’s notion of what can be known about God through reason goes a good deal beyond that of Aristotle, particularly in thinking of God not simply in terms of final causality but also of efficient causality. Even in the fifth way, the demonstration that argues most explicitly in terms of final causality, Thomas is at pains to emphasize that the world’s teleological ordering demands “a being endowed with knowledge and intelligence . . . by whom all natural things are directed to their end.”54 God’s agency as cause is directly related to God’s knowledge.

53

The latter case is implausible, but not impossible. In a few places Thomas cites one of Aristotle’s arguments against Empedocles as showing that Aristotle held that it was unfitting that God should not know anything that human beings know (Summa theologiae Ia q. 14 a. 11, citing De anima 1.5 410b 4–6 and Metaphysics 3.4 1000b 3–11). 54 Summa theologiae Ia q. 2 a. 3.

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One might say that, compared to Aristotle, Thomas’s notion of God develops from a far more radical process of inquiry, one that cannot rest content with inquiry into final causality but also into efficient causality, an inquiry that comes to rest not simply in a God who knows himself, but a God who knows the world, and in that knowing acts to make the world. Thomas thinks he can offer reasons for holding that God knows the things that he makes, reasons that do not depend on revelation and, perhaps, of which even Aristotle would admit the cogency, were he presented with them. At the same time, Thomas is aware that God’s providence is something that “the philosophers” have failed in knowing. In this sense, while the God of the five ways occupies the same conceptual space as the God of the philosophers and is argued for in a manner that the philosophers could, in principle, grasp, Thomas understands this God in a way quite different from the philosophers, a way that is far more adequate to the God of revelation, and in particular to the God who creates all things from nothing.

3. CREATION The doctrine that God is, as the Creed puts it, “creator of all things, visible and invisible” is hardly peculiar to Thomas Aquinas. Yet in his day this was not an uncontested point of doctrine. The Albigensians or Cathars had denied that the good God, the God of Jesus Christ, was the creator of the visible, material world, and it was precisely this heresy that the Dominicans had been founded to combat. Perhaps this led Thomas to attend particularly closely to what exactly is meant when we speak of God as creator. It is not simply, however, that Thomas thought extensively about creation as a distinct topic of reflection; the notions of the world as created and God as creator are woven through his thought as organizing principles that provide a distinctive cast to his work. It is the doctrine of creation as formal principle, rather than a simple material affirmation, which is noteworthy in Thomas’s thought. Josef Pieper said that creation is the “hidden” element in the thought of Thomas, an element that often does not appear precisely because it is architectonic: in a passage to be elucidated certain notions remain unexpressed because they were self-evident to the author, whereas they are in no way self-evident to the man who is interpreting the text . . . the notion of creation determines and characterizes the interior structure of nearly all the basic concepts in Thomas’s philosophy of

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Being. And this fact is not evident; it is scarcely ever put forward explicitly; it belongs to the unexpressed in St. Thomas’s doctrine of Being.55

What Does it Mean to Create? One point of Thomas’s teaching on creation that was controversial was his claim that reason cannot disprove the eternity of the world; in this life, the beginning of the world in time is a truth that only faith can know. Many of Thomas’s fellow theologians argued strenuously that the very idea of an eternal creation, as taught by Aristotle, was not only contrary to revealed truth but also incoherent and repugnant to reason. On the other hand, some on the arts faculty argued on the basis of reason for the eternity of the world; Siger of Brabant, for example, argued that if God is pure act, then he must have actualized his potential to be creator from all eternity. At least some who held this view seem to have claimed that, while the world’s eternity was philosophically demonstrable, it should be denied on theological grounds.56 This odd-sounding position—that something can be demonstrated philosophically but denied on the basis of theological authority—may or may not have been what they actually meant to convey, but in any case Thomas would have nothing of either of these positions. For him, the contrary of a theological truth could never be philosophically demonstrated. If you think you have done this, you should go back and recheck your argument. Moreover, those who leave a falsely-proven “truth” unrefuted—“causing doubt and not solving it”—are like those who would leave a pit uncovered for others to fall into.57 At the same time, Thomas thought that the demonstrations that had been put forward for the noneternity of the world were unconvincing, thus leaving the world’s temporal beginning as a truth of faith that could be neither proven nor disproven philosophically.58 One was bound by the authority of scripture to believe that the world had a temporal beginning, and Thomas thought this view perfectly respectable, philosophically speaking. 55

Pieper (1999), 46, 48. Wippel (1995), 70 notes of Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia, “their efforts to reconcile faith and reason, and at the same time, to protect the intrinsic integrity and autonomy of purely philosophical inquiry, end by paying a considerable price, i.e., by placing the certainty of purely philosophical inquiry at risk or in question when dealing with certain issues.” If Wippel’s interpretation is correct, then the so-called Latin Averroists are not, as is sometimes claimed, rationalists, but rather radical fideists. 57 Sermon 14, Attendite a falsis, pars 2. 58 This position is not unique to Thomas; it is found in Maimonides as well (see The Guide of the Perplexed bk. 2, chs. 13–28). 56

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While it could be philosophically defended, however, it could not be philosophically demonstrated. Thomas’s argument, as given in his short, elegant treatise De aeternitate mundi, is interesting not only for the way in which it parses what can and cannot, and need and need not, be philosophically demonstrated, but also for the way in which it clarifies exactly what we are claiming when we say that something is “created.” First, he notes that the idea that the world could exist eternally without being caused by God is an “abominable error,” not only on the basis of faith, but even for “philosophers who avow and demonstrate that nothing at all can exist unless it was caused by him who supremely and in a uniquely true sense has existence.”59 Thomas then asks whether, granted that the world is caused by God, it could possibly exist eternally. If it is not possible, this is either because God is not powerful enough to do it or because it is something that is impossible by its very nature. The former is obviously not the case, since God’s power is infinite, but what of the latter? God’s power does not extend to the impossible, so “our task is to examine whether something that is made could have existed forever.”60 There are two ways in which something might be impossible: because it lacks the “passive potentiality” that is needed for it to occur or because it is conceptually incoherent. With regard to the first, a “passive potentiality” is the capacity to receive a form. So, for instance, bronze has the capacity to receive the form of Alexander but air does not, therefore it is impossible to sculpt a statue of Alexander from air, no matter how skilled the sculptor. The case of receiving existence, however, is not like the case of receiving a form; it does not seem that any passive potentiality at all is required because, as Thomas notes, if God can make an immaterial being like an angel, in which there is no passive potentiality (because there is no matter), then God must not need any prior passive potentiality in order to create. In other words, the eternal existence of a creature does not necessarily entail the eternal existence of a passive potentiality. Second— and here Thomas gets to the point that primarily interests him—it might be that something is impossible because it involves a logical impossibility. Even God, with his infinite power, cannot bring about something that is by its very nature impossible, for example, that a circle might be square or that the fourteenth day of August might precede the thirteenth. 59 De aeternitate mundi n. 1. Sections numbers correspond to those found in Vollert’s translation. 60 De aeternitate mundi n. 2.

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Thomas says, “The whole question comes down to this: whether the idea of being created by God according to a thing’s entire substance [i.e. ex nihilo], and yet lacking a beginning of duration, are mutually repugnant or not.”61 Can these two thoughts be held together without falling into incoherence? Thomas notes that they would be incompatible, and thus impossible to think together, if either an efficient cause had to be temporally prior to its effect or if nonexistence had to be temporally prior to existence. With regard to the first possible source of incompatibility, Thomas argues as follows. First, he thinks it is obvious from such examples as light illuminating the air that a cause that produces its effect immediately need not temporally precede its effect in existence. Since we now know that light moves at 186,000 miles per second, it is fortunate for us that Thomas does not rest content with what he takes to be the obviousness of the premise. He argues that causes begin to produce their effects as soon as they begin to be causes, even if their total effect is achieved only after a duration of time, so the cause-effect relationship does not necessarily demand temporal duration. We are used to efficient causes that operate through “motion,” (i.e. motus or change), but Aquinas argues that change is only one type of efficient causality; causing the existence of something is another sort, not requiring temporal duration. Though the light produced by a light source, as we now know, does not illuminate distant bodies instantaneously, but only after some duration of time (no matter how small), the actual production of light by the source does not require any duration between the source acting and the production of light. Thomas then moves to a second premise: God produces his effects immediately, not through motion. Aquinas argues that God’s willing, while intelligent, does not require deliberation, and thus does not require temporal duration. This argument trades on the difference between causing change and causing the being of an entire substance. In a sense, God’s efficient causality of substances is a bit like formal causality in things. The form “chair” is a cause of a chair instantaneously; it is not in any temporal sense prior to that which it causes, though form does have logical priority over matter. If this can be the case with a created agent, such as a form, how much more would this be true of God? Thomas argues that the temporal gap between cause and effect is an imperfection, and God, who is perfect, is not subject to such a gap. Therefore, God does not have to exist “before” creation in order to be “prior” to creation.

61

De aeternitate mundi n. 3.

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Regarding the second possible incompatibility, based on the claim that nonexistence must be temporally prior to existence, Thomas notes that this makes the mistake of treating “nothing” as if it were a state of being rather than simply the absence of being. As Frederick Copleston puts it, “The true meaning of ‘out of nothing’ is ‘not out of anything.’ ”62 So if we say that “nothing is prior to existence,” we are not saying that first there is nothing and then there is existence, but simply that there is nothing logically prior to a thing’s existence. In some ways, this returns to the earlier point that existence requires no passive potentiality. The claim that creation is ex nihilo is not the nonsensical claim that there is a moment in time when there is nothing, and then a subsequent moment in time when there is something, but rather that created things are characterized by what we might call an ontological indigence: “[the creature’s] nature is such that it would be nothing if left to itself.”63 Therefore, according to Thomas, there is no incoherence involved in Aristotle’s view that the world is eternal. Neither is there anything in Aristotle’s view that is blasphemous, in the sense of putting creatures on a par with God. Thomas quotes John of Damascus and Hugh of St Victor, to show that their real concern is that creatures not be thought of as co-eternal with God. Invoking Boethius as an authority, Thomas distinguishes between an infinite duration of creaturely existence and the timeless eternity of God. There is therefore no blurring of the line between the created and the uncreated in the view that the world is of infinite duration. We should remember, however, that Thomas is arguing here for what he considers a counterfactual claim. Thomas holds that the Catholic faith clearly teaches that the world’s existence is not without temporal beginning and those who would deny this are wrong. But they are not wrong because they are maintaining an incoherent position, but because they deny divine revelation. While Thomas does not think the arguments for the world’s eternity found in Aristotle are anything more than “probable” (as opposed to probative), he also does not think Aristotle is arguing for a fundamentally incoherent notion.64 Aristotle’s problem is that he lacks the gift of faith, not that he lacks the gift of intelligence. I have followed Thomas’s argument from this short treatise in such detail for three reasons. First, it provides a good example of how Thomas argues by means of the drawing of distinctions: impossibility due 62

63 Copleston (1955), 137. De aeternitate mundi n. 7. For Thomas’s rejection of the probative value of Aristotle’s arguments for the world’s eternity, see In Physic. lib. 8 lec. 2. 64

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to lack of power versus impossibility due to lack of passive potentiality versus impossibility due to logical incoherence; efficient causality of motion versus efficient causality of existence; infinite created duration versus uncreated eternity. These distinctions allow Thomas to clarify what is and is not at issue in the debate over the eternity of the world, and help reveal what is truly mysterious about God’s creative act, and what is obscure merely on account of conceptual confusion. Second, Thomas’s argument proceeds largely without recourse to theological authorities, apart from the fundamental claim that God created the world “in the beginning,” by which he establishes his entire argument as a counterfactual one. At the same time, it is of crucial theological import in the way that it separates the idea of creation from the idea of temporal beginning. This has the effect of “purifying” his account of creation of any “ontic” overtones and making clear that the claim that the world is created is first and foremost a claim about its relation to God, and not about its life history. Understanding creation primarily in terms of the complete and utter dependence of all things upon God, rather than simple temporal beginning, leads Thomas to see God’s creative activity in a particular way. Peter Geach notes that, for Aquinas, when we speak of God’s “making,” our use of the word “is more like ‘the minstrel made music’ than ‘the blacksmith made a shoe’; for the shoe is made out of preexisting material, and, once made, goes on existing independently of the smith; whereas the minstrel did not make the music out of preexisting sounds, and the music stops if he stops making it.”65 The creator God is neither a demiurge that shapes preexisting co-eternal matter, nor a distant deity who gave the world a “shove” into existence long ago and now sits back and watches as it proceeds on its way. While in one sense this is, of course, simply the orthodox Christian understanding of creation, it is brought out with particular clarity by Thomas’s identification of creation as God’s continual gift of esse. Third, by demonstrating the inadequacy of philosophical arguments to determine the question of the world’s duration, it hints at something that is sometimes overlooked in Thomas’s work: unaided human reason is not only inadequate in understanding God; it is also inadequate in understanding natural, created realities. We fail to grasp not only the quidditas of God, but even that of material substances, which are the natural objects of the human intellect. We infer those “whatnesses” from, as it were, the

65

Anscombe and Geach (1976), 110.

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“effects” of material substances, their impact upon our senses. Thomas writes in De ente et essentia, “Even when things can be sensed we don’t really know what really differentiates them but use consequent incidental differences as symptomatic of differences in essence.”66 We never know “humanity” directly, but infer it from our perception of human beings. Thomas says in his sermon on the phrase “I believe in one God” from the Apostles’ Creed that, “our knowledge is weak to such a point that no philosopher would be able to investigate perfectly the nature of a single fly.”67 Josef Pieper argues that the obscurity of the essences of created things is a function of their createdness, noting, “not only God himself but also things have an ‘eternal name’ that man is unable to utter.”68 This works itself out in at least two ways. First, we ought to consider that things have come forth from God, who is not simply their efficient cause, but also their exemplary cause. We have seen in discussing Thomas’s understanding of God’s providential knowledge that God knows creatures in an eminent way by knowing them in their eternal exemplars.69 This exemplary relationship of creature to creator in part accounts for the unknowability of the creature; as Pieper puts it, “the ultimate reality of things is something to which we can never finally penetrate, because we can never fully grasp the likeness of the Divine Ideas precisely as likenesses.”70 Second, creatures, thought in isolation from their divine exemplar, are nothing, and, as such, unintelligible. As Thomas writes in one of the disputed questions De veritate, “creatures are darkness in so far as they are from nothing.”71 We have, therefore, a dual unknowing with regard to created essences: a “negative” apophasis due to the essential nothingness

66

De ente et essentia, cap. 5. In Symbolum Apostolorum prooemium. Examples of similar statement can be multiplied: “principia essentialia rerum sunt nobis ignotae” (Sentencia De anima lib. 1 lec. 1 n. 15); “formae substantiales per se ipsas sunt ignota” (De spiritualibus creaturis 11 ad 3); “differentiae essentiales sunt nobis ignotae” (De veritate q. 4 a. 1 ad 8). These references are all taken from Pieper (1999), 65. See also Compendium theologiae lib. 1 cap. 104: “regarding things that fall under the senses, there are many things whose essence we cannot know with certainty, the essence of some things in no way, and the essence of other things weakly,” and in lib. 2 cap. 8, “human beings cannot perfectly perceive the created world.” He likewise says in the commentary on Job, “as the human mind cannot totally and perfectly understand creatures in themselves, much less can it have a perfect idea about the Creator in himself” (Super Iob cap. 11, lec. 1). 68 Pieper (1999), 65. 69 See Summa theologiae Ia q. 15 a. 1, q. 44 a. 3, q. 45 a. 6. 70 Pieper (1999), 67. 71 De veritate q. 18 a. 2 ad 5. 67

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of creatures and a “positive” apophasis due to the excess of their exemplary cause. The kind of analysis of creation that we find in De aeternitate mundi, which works from within the confines of natural reason, shows the inadequacy of reason with regard not only to the mysteries of God, but also to what Thomas presents as its natural object: the quidditas of material things. Reason can know some things about the natural order, such as its dependence on God, but much remains obscure apart from grace, including the important question of whether the world has a temporal beginning.

Creation as Relation The fundamental significance of creation is not as a “historical” event, the first moment in the life history of the universe, but as an ongoing relationship that creatures have to God. As Thomas says, “creation does not denote an approach to being, nor a change effected by the creator, but merely a beginning of existence, and a relation to the creator from whom the creature receives its being.”72 In characterizing this relation, Thomas is at pains to stress its “mixed” character: whereas creatures have a “real” relation to God, God has a “logical” relation to creatures, so that “creatures are really related to God himself, whereas in God there is no real relation to creatures, but only a logical [secundum rationem] relation.”73 Since this denial that God has a “real” relation to creatures has engendered occasional confusion, it seems worthwhile to clarify what Thomas means. A “real relation” is one that has its basis in some feature of the thing itself. A “logical relation,” on the other hand, is one that is true of something not because of any feature of that thing itself, but solely because of its relationship to something else. If John is larger than Mary, this is because of some real feature of both John and Mary, namely, their size, and thus there is a mutual real relation between them. Likewise if John is Mary’s father, this is because of some real feature common to both John and Mary, namely, the DNA that they share, and thus there is a mutual real relation between them. But in some cases, two things are related based only on a feature possessed by one of the things; this would be an instance of “mixed relations” in which X has a real relation to Y but Y has a logical relation to X. If John sees Mary but she does not see him, he

72

De potentia q. 3 a. 3.

73

Summa theologiae Ia q. 13 a. 7.

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has a real relation to her, because possession of the sense image of Mary is now a feature of who John is; Mary, on the other hand, has a logical relation to John, since “being seen” is not a feature of Mary. One can interview John and, by asking the right questions, discover that he has seen Mary, but one could never discover by examining or interviewing Mary that she has been seen by John. Mary is not, however, unrelated to John, since once John sees Mary we can now say of her something that we could not say before: “Mary was seen by John.” What was previously a false statement about Mary becomes a true statement, but not because of anything about Mary.74 What this means in terms of God’s relation to creation is that being created tells us something about creatures—though this is an odd sort of “something,” since it refers not to a particular discernible feature of the creature, but to the very fact of the creature’s existence—but it does not tell us something about God. As Brian Davies puts it, “the fact that there are creatures is a fact about creatures, not God.”75 This is not unlike the fact of John knowing Mary being a fact about John, not about Mary. Yet just as the logical relation of Mary to John allows us to say certain things about her that we could not otherwise say, so too the logical relation of God to the world allows us to say things about God that we otherwise could not say, such as, “God is the creator of all things, visible and invisible.” Here we can see the centrality of the doctrine of creation to Thomas’s thought as a whole, for this idea of mixed relations is crucial for understanding not only creation, but also God’s providential action in the world, and is closely related to Thomas’s understanding of divine simplicity and that which follows from it. Because God’s essence is God’s existence, there can be no change or becoming in God. Within Thomas’s metaphysics of act and potency, to claim that God could undergo change would necessarily imply that there is some possibility—some potential—that is unrealized in God. God’s essence, however, is fully actual, and there is a sense in which nothing is true of God that is not eternally true of God. But, from the side of creatures, we can and must make statements about God that, in their grammatical structure (what Thomas calls their modus significandi),

74

In De potentia q. 7 a. 10 Thomas offers several examples of mixed relations: the knower and the object of knowledge, the perceiver and the object of perception, a moveable object vis-a`-vis an immovable object, value and currency, and a copy and an original. 75 Davies (1992), 76. The language here becomes a bit slippery, since in ordinary use we well might call any true statement concerning something a “fact” about that thing.

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imply the opposite. By the logic of mixed relations, a statement can become true of God at a particular point in time that is not true of God at another point in time, without God undergoing any change. For example, in 1000 BC the statement “God has rescued the Israelites from slavery in Egypt” is false, whereas in 100 BC it is true, but not because something—rescuing Israel—has “happened to” God. Rather, something has happened to the world: a people, the Israelites, have been rescued from slavery. And yet there is absolutely nothing false, nor even metaphorical, about the biblical statement “the LORD saved Israel that day from the hand of the Egyptians” (Exodus 14:30), any more than the statement “Mary was seen by John” is false or metaphorical. Any claim about the acts of God in history that is not merely a bit of mythology such as one might find in Homer depends for its coherence upon this analysis of mixed relations. This application of the idea of mixed relations to a providential historical event indicates the architectonic significance of Thomas’s understanding of God as creator, for it is precisely in order to characterize the relationship of creator and creature that Thomas develops his account of mixed relations. The intelligibility of divine providence depends on the prior intelligibility of the relation of God the creator to creation; the history of salvation is a mode of the creator’s relatedness to creation. While the stories of God’s acts in history might seem a particularly vivid example of divine relatedness, we ought not to underestimate the intimacy of creator and creature that is entailed in the existence of creation itself. God’s proper effect is the esse of creatures, which is that which most properly belongs to any created being, that by which the creature most intimately is what it is.76 Moreover, it is precisely on account of God’s simplicity, on God’s having a logical and not real relation to creatures, that there is an infinite breadth to God relatedness. Thomas writes: the more simple a thing is the greater the number of its concomitant relations: since its power is so much the less limited and consequently its causality so much more extended. . . . Accordingly from God’s supreme simplicity there results an infinite number of respects or relations between creatures and him, inasmuch as he produced creatures distinct from himself and yet somewhat likened to him.77

76

Summa theologiae Ia q. 8 a. 1.

77

De potentia q. 7 a. 8.

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Despite the impression that the claim that God is not “really” related to creatures might give, Thomas’s understanding of the relationship God to creation is such that this means that God is more related to creatures, in both breadth and depth, not less. The breadth is apparent from the example of John seeing Mary: Mary’s capacity to be seen is much greater than John’s capacity to see, which is limited by his field of vision. But in order to see how the “nonreality” of God’s relation to creation results in a deeper sort of relatedness, we should shift our example from seeing and being seen to another example that Thomas uses: teaching and being taught. Suppose that Mary teaches John to speak Hungarian. This involves a new fact about John—he can now speak Hungarian—but no new fact about Mary. She could speak Hungarian before and she can still speak Hungarian after having taught John. But in this act of teaching, she has handed over to John something that was her own possession, the ability to speak Hungarian, though without any diminishing of her possession of it; she communicates the actuality of her ability to speak Hungarian to John, so that he now participates in this ability. What was something “interior” to her, the capacity to speak Hungarian, has now become “interior” to John. The logic of mixed relations means that something true about the one who is acting can become true of the one who is being acted upon, without ceasing to be true of the one who is acting, establishing a kinship between them in which the recipient participates in what properly belongs to the giver. In the case of Mary and John, it is the ability to speak Hungarian; in the case of God and creatures it is the possession of existence itself; in the first case we have a relation that brings about an accidental change in a substance, John, while in the second we have a relation that does not bring about a change, but rather is the ongoing source of a thing’s existence.78 It is sometimes observed that Thomas has two ways of relating God and the world. The first might be characterized as a “top-down” approach, in which God is conceived of as the most perfect being, cause, end, etc. and all other beings, causes and ends are ranged beneath him in a hierarchy of decreasing perfections. This “top-down” depiction of God’s relationship to creatures might be inflected in a variety of ways. It appears in a platonic form in the fourth of Thomas’s five ways: God is the “maximum” perfection, from which lesser perfections are derived by way 78 This example of teaching/being taught has the advantage over the seeing/being seen example inasmuch as it is the agent of the action, and not simply the passive recipient of the action, that is unchanged.

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of participation.79 It appears in an Aristotelian form in the first way: God is the first among movers, from which the motion of the outer sphere of heavenly beings is derived, which in turn moves all lower beings. We might be tempted to think that the imagery of God at the pinnacle of existence with all beings ordered beneath him is a “Greek” inheritance in Thomas’s thought, but such hierarchy is equally a scriptural way of thinking, as one can see from a text like Daniel 3:52ff., in which the cosmos that is called upon to praise God is hierarchically ordered (though the final part of the hierarchy named—Israel—is in fact the key to the hierarchy as a whole). Thomas’s hierarchical approach incorporates Aristotelian, platonic and biblical notions to speak of the way in which creatures are oriented toward God via their orientation to each other. Specifically, causes are ordered as primary and secondary—remote and proximate—in such a way that beings within the hierarchy participate in the causal activity of God so as to be genuine causes, and not mere occasions for the exercise of divine causality. Similarly, the journey of creatures to God, the highest good, is undertaken along the path of created goods. Part of Thomas’s conviction that grace perfects and does not destroy nature is the belief that our knowledge of and desire for created goods can serve as our means for union with God, provided that those created goods are properly—that is, hierarchically—ordered to God.80 Thomas has a second way of relating God to the world that can be seen in his answer to the question of whether it belongs to God alone to create.81 In his answer, Thomas distinguishes between what we often call “making”—e.g. taking wood and fashioning it into a chair or combining a man and a woman’s DNA so as to produce a child—and “creation” strictly speaking. Thomas sees the term “create” as meaning the production of existence absolutely, not as this or that being. In this sense, God alone can create. It is God alone who bestows the “to be” or esse of each thing that exists, calling it into being ex nihilo. No created intermediary, whether angelic or human, can create in the sense of bestowing esse.82 79 In his commentary on John’s Gospel Thomas gives a version of the Summa’s fourth way, which he there explicitly identifies as platonic in approach. See Super Io. prooemium 1 n. 5. 80 In terms of my discussion of the role of the teacher in the previous chapter, this “topdown” approach has both “vertical” and “horizontal” dimensions. 81 Summa theologiae Ia q. 45 a. 5. 82 Thomas sees this in contrast to the views of Avicenna and Peter Lombard. See Summa theologiae Ia q. 45 a. 5.

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Creatures can move or change other creatures, but they cannot create them. In this way, while Thomas sees the hierarchical ordering of beings as a way of accounting for the web of genuine causality, by which carpenters fashion chairs and parents beget children, he at the same time insists that God alone produces the esse of each and every creature. And since esse is the “first act” of everything that exists, God is engaged with beings in the most immediate of ways. This unique act of bestowing esse might be characterized as a “bottom-up” relation of God to creatures that does not involve any hierarchical mediation. Timothy McDermott notes that the medieval cosmological system within which Thomas operates—in which God moves the outer sphere, which in turn moves the lower spheres, which ultimately move the sublunary world of birth and decay—has been effectively destroyed, first by Galileo and Newton, who dismantled the heavenly spheres, and later by Darwin, who replaced the top-down causation of the heavens with the bottom-up causation of natural selection. This is not, McDermott avers, necessarily bad news, since it “has liberated us to see another aspect of Aquinas’s work: a bottom-up metaphysics of existence in which God is in immediate presence to every individual part of nature, caused or uncaused, more interior to things, as he says, than things are to themselves.”83 While it is not entirely clear to me that one can completely abandon a “top-down” metaphysic if one wishes to maintain the proper relation between creaturely making and divine creation, McDermott’s point is well taken that we can no longer conceive of that top-down dimension in the same way that Thomas did. He is furthermore correct in saying that the dismantling of the medieval cosmos in no way prevents us from affirming, with Thomas, God as the source of created esse.

Creatures as Causes The question of whether a creature can properly be said to “create” in any way is one on which Thomas’s thought develops. In early writings, he maintains that it is at least theoretically possible for God to employ creatures as instrumental causes of creation, though he thinks this position is contrary to revealed truth (in this way, it is analogous to the view that the world has no temporal beginning).84 But at least by the time he writes the Contra Gentiles Thomas has come to the view that such delegation of

83

McDermott (2007), 34–5.

84

Super Sent. lib. 2 d. 1 q. 1 art. 3; De veritate 5.9.

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divine creative power is not only contradicted by revelation, but also by reason.85 Thomas’s mature view is clear: only God creates in the sense of bestowing esse. This is because a secondary instrumental cause only shares in the action of the primary cause by virtue of something belonging to it by nature (e.g. the capacity of water to make wet or the capacity of fire to burn). But, given Thomas’s view on the real distinction between esse and essentia, esse does not belong to any created being by nature—after all, this is what it means to be created—and thus the imparting of being cannot be the effect of any secondary cause, in the way that the making wet of water or the burning of fire can be.86 At the same time, Thomas is also clear that created causes are real causes. From Maimonides he is aware of the Islamic Kalam theologians of the Ash’arite school who deny this causal efficacy.87 Al-Ghazali, in his The Incoherence of the Philosophers, offers the famous example of fire burning cotton: “what proof is there that [the fire] is the agent? They have no proof other than observing the occurrence of the burning at the juncture of contact with the fire. . . . [Something’s] existence with a thing does not prove that it exists by [that thing].”88 The specific concern among these Muslim theologians was that not all agency be reduced to necessary causality (the way that, in an Aristotelian view, fire necessarily burns cotton) so as to deny the possibility of miracles. A perhaps deeper concern was to underscore the contingency of all occurrences and their radical dependence on God’s will. Fire burns cotton in each and every instance only because God wills that it so does. This “occasionalist” view might, as first glance, seem to enhance God’s creative power. Thomas, however, did not think so. He argues that a denial of causal efficacy to creatures “would imply a lack of power in the Creator: for it is due to the power of the cause that it bestows active

85 Contra Gentiles, lib. 2 cap. 20–1; De potentia q. 3 a. 4; Summa theologiae Ia q. 45 a. 5; Compendium theologiae, lib. 1 cap. 70. 86 See Summa theologiae Ia q. 45 a. 5. 87 Contra Gentiles lib. 3 cap. 97 n. 15; De potentia q. 3 a. 7. 88 Tahafut al-falasifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers), Discussion 17.5–6. Whether alGhazali himself supported the occasionalist position is a matter of some dispute among historians of Islamic philosophy. See the brief discussion of the debate in Griffel (2009), 9–12 as well as Griffel’s own suggestion that al-Ghazali remained agnostic on the question (275–9). See also Courtenay (1973), 77–94, who similarly argues that al-Ghazali presents two views (one that is occasionalist and one that is not all that different from Aquinas ) without ever declaring for one over the other.

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power on its effects.”89 In the Contra Gentiles he offers a series of arguments against this view that seem to be intended to have a cumulative effect. A diversity of causes better accounts for the diversity of effects and fits better with what we know through our senses: different created causes are associated with different effects. Further, if God causes everything directly, what purpose is there to the useless charade of what looks like created causation? Again, if things act to the degree that they are actual, and if things are actual to the degree that God has communicated to them the likeness of himself as actus purus, then the likeness of God in things is their capacity to act. And, yet again, “the perfection of the effect demonstrates the perfection of the cause. . . . So to detract from the perfection of creatures is to detract from the perfection of the divine power.” And so forth and so on, in a series of arguments that draw out the implications of the occasionalist position in such a way as to show that what this position seeks to secure—the singular power and glory of God—is precisely what it ends up undermining.90 In Thomas’s day, the long-established “orthodoxy” among Muslim thinkers was that all creation consisted solely of atoms and their accidental configuration, the former having no properties apart from the latter, and the latter perpetually perishing, to be renewed in existence solely by God. The net effect of this atomism is to deny that creatures have stable natures by which they act, but rather are contingent arrangements of atoms that are destroyed in the instant after they come into existence, only to be replaced by new arrangements that might or might not be the same as arrangement of the prior instant. Al-Ghazali recounts in The Incoherence of the Philosophers that critics of this view like to point out that this means that someone who leaves a book in his house might return to find that it has turned into “a beardless slave boy—intelligent, busy with his tasks—or into an animal. . . . that has defiled the library with its urine and its dung.”91 Al-Ghazali’s response to this criticisms is to say that “God created for us the knowledge that he did not enact these possibilities,” even though they remain genuine possibilities. In a way that seems to anticipate David Hume’s later arguments, he says that what appear to us to be stable natures and causal efficacy in things are in fact simply the effect of

89 Summa theologiae Ia q. 105 a. 5. In the twelfth century this same point is made by William of Conches. See Chenu (1968), 11. 90 See Contra Gentiles, lib. 3 cap. 69 nn. 12–20. 91 The Incoherence of the Philosophers, Discussion 17.13.

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“the continuous habit of their occurrence repeatedly, one time after another.”92 Thomas does not directly refer to this metaphysical underpinning of Islamic occasionalism in his arguments in the Contra Gentiles, but he does note that to deny the ordered relationship of cause and effect between created beings is “to deprive them of their best possession, for individual things are good in themselves, but all things together are best because of the order of the whole.” This “order of the whole” can only be a relationship of cause and effect, “for, in regard to things that are different in their natures, there can be no gathering together into a unity of order unless by the fact that some of them act and others undergo action.”93 For Thomas, the perfection of the infinite creator is best imaged in a finite creation by an ordered diversity, since, as Thomas writes in the Compendium theologiae, “it was impossible that one thing perfectly represent the divine goodness because of the remoteness of each creature from God. Therefore, it was necessary that many things represent him, so that one thing supplied what another lacks.”94 Thomas’s rejection of occasionalism goes to the heart of his vision of creation. Creatures image their creator by actualizing potentials in their fellow creatures. Human beings do this in their most distinctively human way when they exercise their capacity of know the quidditas of material things. Through human knowledge, material things are “spiritualized” and raised to a higher form of existence by having their potential to be known actualized; Thomas writes, “lower things exist in the intellect in a higher state than they exist in themselves.”95 But it is the order of cause and effect that makes creation knowable, since “if created things have no actions productive of effects, it follows that no nature of anything would be known through the effect. And thus all knowledge of natural science is taken away from us.”96 The intelligibility of the material world, by which it shares in the sort of life that God lives, depends upon the ordered unity of cause and effect. Even more, it is the ability to see the world as an 92

The Incoherence of the Philosophers, Discussion 17.15. Contra Gentiles lib. 3 cap. 69 n. 17. 94 Compendium theologiae lib. 1 cap. 102. A similar point is made by Honorius of Autun in the twelfth century; see Chenu, (1968), 26. 95 Super 1 Cor. cap. 2 lec. 2 n. 98. 96 Contra Gentiles lib. 3 cap. 69 n. 18. What Lear (1988) writes of Aristotle is no less true of Aquinas: “if man is to come to a systematic understanding of the world, he must do more than apprehend the separate forms as though they were discrete atoms of intelligibility. To be a systematic understander, he must come to see the world as forming an intelligible whole. And for this to be possible, the world itself must constitute an intelligible whole” (134). 93

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ordered whole that underlies each of the five ways. God, for Aquinas, is not first glimpsed by reason in particular causal actions, particular gradations of being, or particular instances of ends being attained, but in all of these things thought in terms of the world as “a great big object.” It is in grasping the network of causality among creatures that we come to see the world as a whole, and it is precisely this wholeness of the world that the atomist metaphysics of occasionalism would deny to us.

The Human Creature as Body and Soul From what has just been said, it is clear that Thomas gives human beings a distinctive role within the cosmos. Existing as a composite of body and soul, human beings lift the material world to higher, nobler, mode of existence through coming to knowledge of it. It is important to remember that the soul is for Thomas a natural and not a supernatural reality. It is for him, as it is for Aristotle, “the first principle of those things that live.”97 Not only humans, but also other animals, and plants as well, possess souls. What distinguishes human beings from other ensouled material creatures is the kind of soul we possess: a rational soul, which is a soul that is capable of a certain sort of knowing. The kind of knowing that distinguishes the rational soul is not simply knowing this or that particular object, in the way that a lioness can perceive the animal at the waterhole so as to hunt it, but rather the kind of knowing that allows us to recognize the sort of thing a particular object is, in the way that a naturalist recognizes the animal at the waterhole as belonging to the genus gazelle and the species dorcas, so as to classify it. Of course the rational soul is not exclusively employed for scientific classification. It is also what allows us to walk into a store and recognize that it is a book store rather than a clothing store, or to distinguish a piece of sculpture from a piece of marble, or to identify the fire hydrant on the corner as being the same kind of thing as all the other fire hydrants in town. To say that a human being possesses a rational soul is to say that human beings are on the whole capable of engaging in these sorts of activities; it is not to identify some sort of gaseous object or “spark” that is hidden deep within our bodies.98 Through the activities 97

Summa theologiae Ia q. 75 a. 1. Thus Thomas’s understanding of the soul is something quite distinct from that of Dr Duncan MacDougall (1907) who, by weighing patients before and after death, claimed to have determined experimentally that the human soul weighed 21 grams. Dr MacDougall also conducted his experiment on dogs and determined that they did not have souls, another point on which Thomas would disagree. 98

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made possible by the rational soul we lift things out of their material particularity and elevate them to the status of intelligible realities. Aristotle’s understanding of the relationship between soul and body is a point on which Thomas sees him as preferable to Plato with regard to his compatibility with traditional Christian theology. Aristotle’s understanding of human beings as “rational animals” emphasizes the inherently embodied nature of human beings: because human beings are animals, embodiment is as much a part of their essence as rationality is. The characteristic activity of human beings is not simply thinking, but specifically thinking based on sense data. The body, which is the locus of sensation, is necessarily included in what it means to be human. Thomas’s strong affirmation of the unity of body and soul was hardly novel in the Christian tradition. In the Twelfth century, Honorius of Autun had written, “Spirit and matter, antithetical in nature yet consonant in existence, resemble a choir of men and boys blending their bass and treble.”99 Thomas’s way of affirming the unity of body and soul, however, proved to be among the most controversial of his teachings. In particular, Thomas’s view that the rational soul was the single form of the human being was contested during his life and continued to be contested for a number of years after his death, not only by the theologians outside the Dominican order, such as the Franciscan John Pecham, but also by some of Thomas’s fellow Dominicans, such as Robert Kilwardby.100 What exactly is Thomas’s view? First, the soul’s relation to the body ought to be thought of in terms of a form that informs matter and not, as some might imagine, two distinct things that are merely juxtaposed. Second, and correlatively, the rational soul is the only form of the body. Some medieval theologians argued, following the Jewish philosopher Ibn Gabirol, known in the Latin West as Avicebron, that there were in human beings a plurality of substantial forms corresponding to the different sorts of souls: vegetative, sensitive, and rational.101 According to this view, there were different substantial forms for the different levels of existence present in a human being: bodily existence, animate existence, rational existence, etc. Thomas rejects this view repeatedly, arguing that since a substantial form by definition makes a thing to be what it is, there can be

99

Liber XII quaest. p. ii, quoted in Chenu (1968), 8. Torrell (1996), 187–90. 101 For Ibn Gabirol see the Fons Vitae 2.3. Critics of Aquinas would later identify their position as “Augustinian” but there is no evidence that Augustine himself argued for a plurality of substantial forms in human beings. See Mulchahey (1998), 149 n. 59. 100

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only one substantial form in each thing: “it is one and the same substantial form that makes a man a particular thing or substance, and a bodily thing and a living thing, and so on.”102 The objection to Thomas’s position was couched in theological terms. Specifically, if the soul is the form of the body, then when Christ dies and his rational soul is separated from his body, is the body that lies in the tomb still Christ’s body? If there is a form of Christ’s bodily existence that is distinct from his rational existence, then there seems to be no difficulty in saying that the body remains Christ’s. But if the rational soul were the single substantial form of the embodied human nature of Christ, then the separation of body and soul would mean that the body is no longer Jesus. As Herbert McCabe put it, “to lose the soul is to lose the substantial form and not just an accidental form; it is to perish and not just to be altered.”103 And this question of the identity of Christ’s body is significant because it speaks of the continuity between the body that dies and the body that is raised; if the body of Christ ceases to be his body upon death, then what fittingness is there in him taking up that same body again in resurrection? In what sense would it be necessary that the tomb be empty?104 Thomas, however, is not willing to abandon what seems to him the more reasonable view of human nature in order to give a simple answer to this theological question. Instead, he comes up with a fairly complex solution, in which Christ’s separated body and soul remain his due to their both being united to the person of the Word, even though Christ in the tomb is, in a sense, no longer human, since a body without a rational soul is no longer a human body.105 It is not clear that this is an entirely satisfactory solution, though it is difficult to see what better solution offered itself to Thomas, so long as he clung to what was to him the philosophically superior view of the rational soul as the single substantial form of the body in human beings. For Thomas, the thesis of the plurality of substantial forms seems an attempt to restate the platonic view in Aristotelian terms: the rational soul is a substance that is occupying another substance, i.e. the body that is

102 Comm. De anima lib. 2 lec. 1 n. 225. See also, Summa theologiae Ia q. 76 a. 3–4; Quodlibet 1 q. 4 a. 1; Compendium theologiae lib. 1 qq. 90–2. 103 McCabe, (1976), 299. 104 For a discussion of these issues and controversies, and their background, see Bynum (1995), 229–78. 105 See Summa theologiae IIIa q. 50 a. 4–5; Quodlibet 2 q. 1 a. 1; Compendium theologiae lib. 1 cap. 229.

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what it is by virtue of some other form.106 Though Thomas is willing to adopt platonic thought in many areas, on this point he is unyielding. The human person is an ensouled body, not a soul that occupies a body. He saw the platonic view as philosophically problematic for a variety of reasons. If his opponents worried about the continuity of self between this life and resurrected life, Thomas was worried about continuity in this life. Thomas’s account of human agency involves a complex interaction of the rational and the animal: our doing involves not only what we think, but also our senses and passions. As Anthony Kenny notes, if there were a plurality of substantial forms, “one could not say that it was one and the same human being who thought, loved, felt, heard, ate, drank, slept and had a certain weight and size.”107 The plurality of substantial forms in human beings is also, in Thomas’s eyes, theologically problematic. The Christian tradition takes very seriously the proposition that God creates human beings not simply as souls that make use of bodies, but as a unity of body and soul. In Genesis, it is when God breathes into the figure made from the dust that it becomes a living being (Genesis 2:7). Thomas undoubtedly saw any attempt to separate soul and body—and to identify the person with the soul—as having at least a faint whiff of the Cathar heresy that the Dominicans were founded to combat. Thomas said of the Cathars that, in their dualism of body and soul, “they failed to remember that they are humans.”108 As became apparent in the intellectual struggle over Catharism, much in Christian theology hangs on the psychosomatic unity of the human person: the importance and nature of God’s incarnation in Christ, the sacramental economy of salvation, and the resurrection of the body. It was in connection with an exposition of Paul’s discussion of the resurrection of the body in 1 Corinthians 15 that Thomas had occasion to put his view most pointedly: “The soul is not the whole human being, but only part of one: my soul is not me.”109 The question of human destiny after death shows the strengths of Thomas’s position, as well as the problems it raises. The theological truth of resurrection becomes more comprehensible when we see the human soul as the form of the person, for if the soul is united to the body as its form, then this union must be in some sense natural to the soul. Resurrection, therefore, is a more fitting destiny for human beings than

106 108

Summa theologiae Ia q. 76 a. 3, Contra Gentiles lib. 1, cap. 119.

107 109

Kenny (1993), 152. Super 1 Cor. cap. 15 lec. 2 n. 924.

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would be a mere immortal disembodied existence. But if it is natural to the soul to be united to the body, then how could the soul survive the death of the body? What sense could be made of an interim, disembodied state of the soul between the time of death and the resurrection of the body at Christ’s return? After all, in an Aristotelian context, when a cow dies, the form of “cowness” that informed its matter dies with it. Why should this not be true of human beings as well? Though objections to Aquinas’s view on the relationship between soul and body were often couched in terms of the question of the identity of Christ’s dead body, perhaps the immortality of the soul is the more pressing issue. It is one reason why many of Thomas’s contemporaries were deeply suspicious of Aristotle and felt that Plato was preferable, since, in his understanding, the fate of the soul was not tied to the fate of the body. The problem for Thomas is to account for the postmortem existence of the soul, while holding on to the Aristotelian understanding of the soul as the form of the body. How can the soul be both a substance and part of a substance (i.e. a form)? Platonic Christians had no problem with the subsistence of the soul, since they thought of all forms as subsisting; what they had trouble with was the concrete individual thing and the unity of the matter-form composite. But if one understands the soul as the form of the body, how does one account for the continued existence of the separated human soul? Thomas’s answer is that the subsistence of something depends on it having its own proper operation and since the proper operation of the rational soul—thinking—is not reducible to a material process the soul therefore must not depend upon the body for its subsistence. To understand this, one must have some sense of why he does not believe that thinking is a material process. For Thomas, the form of a material object makes it this sort of thing and not that—the form “lettuce” makes a head of lettuce to be lettuce and not a lion, and it could only become a lion if it were to lose the form “lettuce” and acquire the form “lion” (if, say, a very hungry lion were to eat and digest a head of lettuce). But human beings can acquire the forms “lettuce” and “lion” without ceasing to be human beings: to know a lion is to have acquired the form “lion” without actually becoming a lion (in the way the head of lettuce must). This is what makes us capable of knowing many things at the same time: we can possess their forms without actually being them. And this is only possible if their forms can “inform” us in some way different from the way form is joined to

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matter.110 Knowledge is therefore not reducible to my brain undergoing a particular kind of change, as some modern materialists would assert.111 Knowledge per se must be the act of something immaterial, which can immaterially receive the form of what is known. If the distinctive act of the human soul is therefore something that can be engaged in without bodily change, then it can properly be thought of as something that can subsist apart from the body. Despite this, however, Thomas sees it as the human soul’s natural state to be united to the body.112 There is something incomplete about a separated soul; Thomas writes, “the soul is more like God when united to the body than when separated from it, because its nature is then more perfect.”113 This helps us understand why it would be fitting that our ultimate happiness would involve not simply the soul but also the resurrected body. As Peter Geach notes, “This description of the life that would be possible for the disembodied soul is meagre and unattractive; but why should it be otherwise.”114 It is therefore not surprising that Thomas is in some ways more convincing in arguing for the fittingness of resurrection than he is in arguing for the natural immortality of the soul.115

The Human Creature and the Natural Desire for God Augustine wrote at the beginning of his Confessions, “You are great, Lord, and highly to be praised. . . . You stir man to take pleasure in praising you,

110

Summa theologiae Ia q. 75 a. 2. Of course my knowing might involve my brain changing, just as it might involve my pupil dilating or my eardrum vibrating. I am not sure, however, that Thomas would agree with this claim. It is precisely because sensation is invariably accompanied by a physical change in the sense organ that Thomas denies that the souls of non-rational animals are subsistent. It would seem to follow that if understanding were always accompanied by a change in the brain then the rational soul would likewise not be subsistent. This difficulty is not necessarily insurmountable, and perhaps must be surmounted in order to save Thomas’s account of the soul’s subsistence, given our greater knowledge of the connection between cognition and the brain, which Thomas is only willing to describe as the place in which interior acts “are, in a way [quodammodo], performed” (Summa theologiae Ia q. 91 a. 3 ad 3). 112 Summa theologiae Ia q. 76 a. 1 ad 6; cf. Super I Cor. cap. 15 lec. 2 n. 924. 113 De potentia q. 5 a. 10 ad 5. 114 Anscombe and Geach (1976), 100. 115 Herbert McCabe (2008) writes: “there are deep puzzles about how such an independently subsisting soul could have any operations, even thinking, without any body to animate. Aquinas speculates bravely on how a ‘separated soul’, at least in heaven, could somehow think as well as have the understanding which is the beatific vision (which fortunately does not depend on human concepts but on the Word of God). It is all rather an uphill struggle and it is with a sort of relief that Aquinas reminds us that in the Scriptures it is not immortality of the soul we are promised but the resurrection of the body” (123). 111

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because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”116 This passage is quoted by Thomas in only a few places,117 but it is nevertheless a useful means of entry into what has been a highly disputed question in the interpretation of Thomas: in what sense do human beings have by nature a desire for God? Is it the case that human beings are so constituted by their creation that their nature remains unfulfilled unless they attain the vision of God? If that is the case, is the vision of God something that is within the capacity of their nature? If it is not—if it is something supernatural that can only be attained through God’s gracious assistance—does this imply an obligation on God’s part to give us this assistance, lest the nature he has created be frustrated? Thomas’s own position is not entirely clear. While he clearly speaks of a “natural desire” for vision of the essence of God in a number of places,118 this has been interpreted in various ways in light of other things Thomas says. One approach to reading Thomas underscores the distinction between our created nature and God’s grace, to the degree of positing for human beings a theoretically-possible, though never historically actual, “pure nature” that is complete in itself apart from any supernatural calling by God to the beatific vision. While acknowledging that Thomas holds that human beings are recipients of grace from the very origins of the human race,119 this approach stresses that there is nothing contradictory about the notion of a human nature that has no supernatural destiny,120 and that indeed maintaining the cogency of such a notion is crucial in order to maintain that grace is freely given. One of the best known proponents of this approach, the twentieth-century Dominican theologian Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, says that in such a hypothetical state of pure nature we would still have found the goal of our existence in loving God above all things, but we would have loved him as the “author of nature,” not the “author of grace.” We would have known God, “only in the reflection of 116

Confessions 1.1.1. This line from Augustine is quoted by Thomas in Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 175 a. 1 and De veritate q. 13, a. 1, in the opening objections to parallel articles dealing with rapture. It also appears on three different occasions in sermon material: Sermon 12, Seraphim stabant; In Symbolum Apostolorum a. 12; and De decem praeceptis, prooemium (a second quotation in the 1954 Marietti edition of the sermons on the ten commandments has been eliminated in the Leonine edition). 118 e.g. Summa theologiae Ia q. 12 a. 1. 119 Summa theologiae Ia q. 95 a. 1. 120 Thomas does indeed say in Quodlibet 1 q. 4 a. 3 co., “it was possible for God to make human beings with purely natural endowments.” 117

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his goodness in creatures, in the same way as the greatest among the pagan philosophers knew him, though our knowledge would have been more certain than theirs, and free from any admixture of error.”121 While such a pure nature is hypothetical, it is still significant, for Thomas speaks of a twofold end for human beings: a purely natural end that fulfills our human nature, and a supernatural end to which we are called by God’s grace: The end towards which created things are directed by God is twofold. One end exceeds all proportion and faculty of created nature, and this end is life eternal, which consists in seeing God, which is above the nature of every creature, as shown above (Ia q. 12 a. 4). The other end, however, is proportionate to created nature, and to this end created being can attain according to the power of its nature.122

In this view, the “natural desire” for God is, seemingly, the sort of desire we would have had in a state of pure nature, as well as the sort of desire that pagan philosophers had, and which does not need divine revelation in order to be satisfied. To say that human beings are so constituted in their natures that their existence as human is frustrated unless they attain to the vision of God’s essence would be tantamount to saying that God, who is the author of human nature, owes grace as a “debt” to human nature, since the vision of God’s essence can only be had through God’s grace.123 Such indebtedness would, however, be contrary to the very notion of grace. It rather has to mean that, apart from the desire for God as the author of grace, which is the result of our supernatural calling, we also have a natural desire to know God as the author of nature: a desire that is, in the terminology employed by Thomists after the late sixteenth century, a mere “velleity”—the will’s act by which it would desire something, if God would give one the means to attain it.124 One might well wonder, however, whether such a velleity could really count as “restlessness” in Augustine’s sense. Another approach focuses less on Thomas’s remarks concerning the twofold end of human beings and more of what he says concerning the dynamism of intellectual substances (i.e. human beings and angels).125 121

Garrigou-Lagrange (2002), 22. Summa theologiae Ia q. 23 a. 1; cf. De veritate q. 14, a. 2 co.; De virtutibus q. 1 a. 10 co. Super Sent. lib. 4 d. 23 q. 2, a. 1; De veritate q. 8 a. 3; Contra Gentiles lib. 1 cap. 3 n. 3, lib. 3 cap. 52 n. 7; Summa theologiae Ia q. 12 a. 4; Ia–IIae q. 5 a. 5. 124 See Garrigou-Lagrange (1943), 307–39. 125 This approach is most often associated with the twentieth-century Jesuit theologian, Henri de Lubac. See de Lubac (1967). 122 123

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In various places, as I noted earlier, Thomas argues as follows: human beings are characterized by their desire to know the essence of things, and this knowledge involves not just the thing, but also knowledge of its cause. In other words, the natural desire of the human intellect is to ask “why?” and it is not sufficient to know that a cause is (which can be known from the effect) but we want to know what the cause is. And this inquiry does not cease “until one arrives at knowledge of the essence of the cause.” But we are not only capable of asking “why?” about this or that thing; as we have seen, human beings are capable of asking “why?” about the world taken as one big object. And thus the natural desire of human reason cannot be at rest, nor the human person be fulfilled, until one arrives at knowledge of the essence of that which answers the question “why?” asked about the world as a whole, and this is what people call God.126 Such texts seem to be saying that the “natural desire” for God cannot rest in knowledge of God as the author of nature, the knowledge that human beings would have had in a state of “pure nature” and which philosophers attain based on God’s created effects. Rather, our natural desire remains restlessly unfulfilled until it attains to knowledge of God’s essence. As Thomas puts it in the Summa contra Gentiles, “no matter how fully we know that God exists . . . we do not cease our desire, but still desire to know him through his essence.”127 Given Thomas’s view that we can only attain knowledge of God’s essence through grace, and not by our own natural capacities,128 it would seem that human beings have a natural desire for an end that exceeds their nature and can only be had through grace. Therefore Thomas wants to say that, “the good that regards the final perfection of human beings falls by nature within their desire,”129 while at the same time falling outside of our nature’s capacity to attain it: “No matter what human reason can experience and contemplate of the truth, it is not enough to completely satisfy our desire for wisdom.”130 This seems to bring us closer than mere “velleity” does to Augustine’s restless heart, in which there is built into human nature a desire that 126 See Summa theologiae Ia q. 12 a. 1, Ia–IIae q. 3 a. 8; Compendium theologiae lib. 1 cap. 104; Super Io. cap. 1 lec. 11, n. 212; Super Mt. cap. 5 lec. 2, n. 434; De virtutibus q. 1 a. 10 co. Thomas makes the same argument with regard to separated substances (i.e. angels) in Contra Gentiles lib. 3 cap. 50 n. 3. 127 Contra Gentiles lib. 3 cap. 50 n. 7. 128 See, e.g., Contra Gentiles lib. 3 cap. 52 n. 7: “we are said to attain [the vision of the divine essence] by God’s grace alone, because such a vision exceeds all the capacity of a creature and it is not possible to reach it without divine assistance.” 129 Compendium theologiae lib. 2 cap. 9. 130 Super Io. cap. 6 lec. 1 n. 854.

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human nature cannot satisfy. Even when Thomas speaks of a “twofold end” of human beings, the “natural” end of human beings is not really a final end, but rather a proximate end that is ordered to the final end, and thus has the character of a means rather than of an end strictly speaking. Therefore even a natural end, such as the proper governance of political society or even contemplation of God as the author of nature, is incomplete and unfulfilling apart from its ordering to the supernatural end.131 The first approach to interpreting Thomas on the natural desire for God, with its emphasis on the theoretical possibility of “pure nature” and the distinction of the two ends for human beings, seeks to secure the integrity of nature and the gratuity of grace, resisting any attempt to “naturalize” the supernatural. The second approach, rooting itself in the natural desire of human beings to know the essence of things, seeks to avoid any notion that grace is an extrinsic “add-on” to human nature, rather than its perfection and fulfillment. Thomas shares both of these sets of concerns, though neither of them is for him a focus of much explicit discussion. The sharpness of the difference between these two approaches only emerges after the condemnation in 1567 and again in 1579 of the views of Michael Baius, who was, somewhat paradoxically, accused of being both hyper-Augustinian, even Calvinist, and Pelagian.132 This controversy heightened the sensitivity of theologians to the dangers entailed in claims about human beings’ natural desire for God, dangers that they sought to avert by using a host of distinctions in speaking of such desires: innate versus elicited, necessary versus free, efficacious versus inefficacious. Advocates of the “pure nature” interpretation see such distinctions as necessary to avoid theological errors; advocates of the “natural desire” interpretation see these distinctions as artificially separating nature from grace, making the relationship between them static rather than dynamic.133 It is important to emphasize that we do not find these distinctions in Thomas. The “pure nature” interpretation could, of course, argue that they are implicit in Thomas’s views. Thomas, however, is fairly careful in the distinctions he draws, as well as those he does not draw, and it is possible that, like the “natural desire” interpreters, he did not wish to

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Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 23 a. 7 co. See, for example, the account of Baius given in Sollier (1913). 133 In characterizing these two approaches as “pure nature” and “natural desire” I am aware that Thomists such as Garrigou-Lagrange do admit that there is a natural desire for God as the author of nature, albeit one that is elicited, conditional, and inefficacious. 132

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undercut the dynamic quality of the relationship between nature and grace. Of course, this would mean that the human heart, by virtue of its having been made for God, in God’s image and likeness, is in some sense restless by its very nature. Such a view can find textual support in Thomas. In the Compendium theologiae Thomas makes the interesting claim that since the rational soul surpasses the capacity of corporeal matter, it is only because of a “disposition supernaturally implanted from the beginning in the human body for the sake of the soul” that the union of body and soul can be considered “natural,” and their separation at death as unnatural.134 This is a somewhat startling claim, given the emphasis we have seen Thomas place on the naturalness of the union of body and soul in humans, for it would seem to imply that at least in some sense the nature of the human composite is itself “supernatural” (though not unnatural), which in turn implies that the distinction between natural and supernatural in Thomas is not so clearly drawn as is often claimed. If this is the case, then the “natural desire” interpretation of Thomas would seem to be the better of the two. Thomas’s claim that “grace does not destroy nature but perfects it”135 would mean that grace not only takes human nature to a perfection beyond its natural capacity, but that in some sense grace is needed for human nature even to be itself. Does such a view contradict the gratuity of grace? In discussing God’s omnipotence, Thomas says that divine power is shown preeminently in God’s “sparing and having mercy,”136 and that God’s mercy is “the foundation of all divine works” and that “nothing is due to anyone, except on account of something already given to him gratuitously by God.”137 This claim is remarkable because it would seem to contradict the idea that there is any sort of realm of pure nature in which God gives to creatures only what is their due; it seems to make even creation an act of divine mercy, and in some sense a “grace.”138 Thomas does say that God could give to creatures according to the strict measure of justice, which justice some might be seen as establishing the boundaries of a “pure nature,” but this seems to run counter to Thomas’s association of creatio ex nihilo with a mercy that is in excess of justice.139 It is hard to see how giving to creatures what is due to their nature can be thought of as an act of “pure”

134 136 137 138

135 Compendium theologiae lib. 1 cap. 152. Summa theologiae Ia q. 1 a. 8 ad 2. A quotation from the Roman liturgy, the collect for the tenth Sunday after Pentecost. Summa theologiae Ia q. 25 a. 3 ad 3. 139 Summa theologiae Ia q. 21 a. 4. Summa theologiae Ia q. 21 a. 4 ad 4.

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justice, when the very existence of that nature is an act of divine mercy. Such considerations should at the very least make us cautious about reading into Thomas any notion of a “debt to nature.” The obscurities of Thomas’ position are not necessarily a fault, or if they are they may well be a happy fault. It is as if he senses that there is something inherently paradoxical in the human creature: we have a nature that is supernaturally constituted and supernaturally fulfilled. Perhaps here we are seeing the mysteriousness of God reflected in our inability fully to grasp the nature of God’s human image.

4. KNOWING AND NAMING GOD For Thomas, what it means for human beings to be created in the “image and likeness of God” is that human beings are “knowers,” capable of knowing the “whatness” or quidditas of things.140 As mentioned before, however, what our mind naturally knows are material things, not immaterial thing.141 This is why God is not per se nota for us, but must be made evident by means of a demonstration beginning from God’s effects. This also means that our knowledge of God, and consequently our speech about God, will necessarily have an certain indirectness about it in this life; as Thomas puts it, our knowledge and speech concerning God are “analogical.” Even in the beatific vision, in which we see God face to face and know even as we are known, God will remain incomprehensible to us. How then, according to Thomas, can we be said to know or say anything true about God? What does it mean to know the essence of a God who is beyond the comprehension of any creature?

The Uncreated God in the Language of Creatures Christians and others say all sorts of things about God—God is wise, God is good, and so forth—and typically are not troubled in their use of such language. But in light of Thomas’s reflections on God’s transcendence, our ordinary ways of speaking about God can begin to seem troublesome. If God is “simple,” as Thomas maintains, do the words “wise” and “good” in the statements “God is wise” and “God is good” correspond to anything real in God? If so, then it would seem that God is not simple after all, since

140

Summa theologiae Ia q. 93 a. 6.

141

Summa theologiae Ia q. 88 a. 1.

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“God is wise” and “God is good” certainly seem to be picking out distinct attributes of God. If not, then we might ask whether what we say about God is really true. Also, if “wise” and “good” correspond to something in God, but something indistinct, then we might ask whether the statements “God is wise” and “God is good” are completely synonymous, which would seem to indicate that, in the case of God, the descriptors “wise” and “good” don’t really tell us much, since in our ordinary usage they are not synonyms. These, for Thomas, are questions of no small import and he treats them at length already in his commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, noting that everything he has to say in the first book of that commentary, which discusses the nature of God, depends on a proper understanding of how our language works in relation to God.142 For if the words we use in speaking of God don’t tell us anything about God, if they don’t actually refer to something true about God, then holy teaching as a project is doomed from the start. Taking up this question in his commentary, Thomas first defines “meaning” (ratio) as “what the mind grasps in a word’s signification and, in the case of things that have definitions, this is the definition of the thing named.” Thomas quickly notes that an inability to produce a definition does not immediately consign a term to meaninglessness. Some terms, such as quantity and quality and the other categories, are so fundamental to the process of definition that they are not themselves subject to definition. This does not mean that such undefinables are meaningless. Rather their meaningfulness is displayed in our ability to use them within language in such a way as to communicate successfully. One might say to someone unfamiliar with the strange American system of measurement that a “quart” is a way of referring to a quantity of liquid, and quite meaningfully communicate, despite the fact that one cannot give a definition of “quantity.”143 Such a claim is obviously important to Thomas, since the word “God” is not subject to definition, yet he does not want to say that it is meaningless. Meaning can be related to things outside the mind in three ways. First, it can be related immediately, as when a word like “human” refers to 142 Super Sent. lib. 1 d. 2 q. 1 a. 3 co. For parallel discussions, see Contra Gentiles lib. 1, cap. 31; Lectura Romana d. 2 q. 1; Summa theologiae Ia q. 13 a. 2; Compendium theologiae lib. 1 cap. 24. 143 Even in the case of things that are in principle definable, we can often communicate quite successfully without being ourselves able to offer a definition. As Peter Geach (1976) notes, “I certainly could not define either ‘oak-tree’ or ‘elephant’; but this does not destroy my right to assert that no oak-tree is an elephant” (39).

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particular human beings. Second, meaning and extra-mental realities can also be related remotely, as when we form a concept based not on things outside the mind, but on concepts that in turn correspond to extra-mental things. For example, a generic concept like “animal” does not correspond to an extra-mental reality, since there is no such thing as a “generic animal.” However, it is remotely related to such extra-mental things as horses and cats and human beings because it is drawn from such concepts as (in the case of human beings) “rational animal.” It is, we might say, a “meta-concept” that has immediate reference to another concept and not to a thing. Finally, meanings and things can be related fictitiously in those cases in which there is no basis, either immediate or remote, in an extra-mental reality, as when we might tell a story about dragons. Thomas goes on in his Sentences commentary to ask whether the different meanings of the words that we apply to God correspond to anything real in God. He notes that Maimonides and Avicenna hold that, in the case of God, our words have a remote basis in reality: they are meta-concepts that either indirectly deny an attribute to God or identify God as the source of that attribute in creatures. To call God “wise” is not to say something positively about God, but rather is a denial that God is foolish, and the claim that God is “good” is simply the claim that God is the cause of goodness in creatures. These terms are applied “equivocally” to creatures and to God, and apply to God only in our minds, either when we negate something that we find in creatures (such as a lack of wisdom) or identify God as the cause of something (such as goodness) that we find in creatures. Language that seems to refer to God in fact refers to concepts in our mind derived from creatures, and God remains beyond all thought and language. Thomas contrasts this view with that held by Dionysius and Anselm, who hold that, in the case of perfections that we find in creatures, such as wisdom and goodness, these are not simply remotely attributed to God as meta-concepts, but rather have an immediate basis in God. They exist in God, however, in a “supereminent” way. That is, the perfections that we ascribe to God truly exist in God, though we understand these divine perfections in an imperfect way that imports into them the diversity and lack of fullness that they have when found in creatures.144 144 One might ask how we determine which attributes are perfections and which are not. In essence, a perfection is whatever it is better to be than not to be. Thus, all other things being equal, it is better to be one, true, good, wise, spiritual etc. than it is to be diverse, false, evil, foolish, material etc. Of course, in particular cases, a perfection might not be the best

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According to Thomas, these two approaches, which seem contradictory, are in fact reconcilable. The first approach begins with created things, from which we derive our meanings, while the second begins with God the creator, from whom the perfections in created things derive. What is simple in God is multiple in our concepts, due not only to the inadequacy of our minds but also—in fact, more so—to the excess of God’s perfection. The multiplicity of our conceptions of God’s perfections does correspond to something in God, but what it corresponds to is not multiplicity, but rather the fullness of those perfections. Contra Maimonides and Avicenna, Thomas argues that the many concepts by which we know God are not simply a result of our mind and its limitations, but are first and foremost the result of the eminence of God’s perfection. As Thomas puts it: “the plurality of these words derives not only from our mind forming diverse conceptions of God, which have different meanings . . . but derives from God himself, that is to say, to the degree that something in God corresponds to all these conceptions, namely his own full and all-embracing perfection.”145 Writing later in the Summa theologiae, Thomas gives a much more concise form of this same argument, and makes explicit the connection between God’s relationship to creatures and the nature of our knowledge of God. As mentioned above, in creation, the perfection of God is “diversified” in creatures. The unity of perfection that flows forth into diversity in creation is, in our knowledge of God, retraced back to its super-eminent unity. Thomas writes: As, therefore, there corresponds to the different perfections of creatures one simple source represented in a varied and multiple way by these diverse perfections of creatures, so too there corresponds to the varied and multiple conceptions of our intellect something altogether simple, which is imperfectly understood by means of these conceptions.146

The knowledge of God that we derive from his created effects understandably bears the marks of those created effects. We can recognize this, and thus negate the multiplicity of our conceptions, even if we cannot gain any conceptual purchase on the super-eminence that authorizes both that multiplicity and its negation.

simpliciter. Thus, given that “human being” is defined as a rational animal, it is better for human beings to be material than for them to be purely spiritual. 145 Super Sent. lib. 1 d. 2 q. 1 a. 3 co. 146 Summa theologiae Ia q. 13 a. 4.

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For Thomas, this means that our theological language, though it draws its raw material from the language that we use to speak about creatures, is not doomed to the pure equivocation to which Maimonides and Avicenna would seem to consign it. It is, to be sure, perpetually inadequate. But this inadequacy does not lead us to deny that God possesses such perfections as wisdom or goodness. Rather, it leads us to deny that the super-eminent perfection of God exists in the fragmentary way that is implied by our distinction between the perfections of wisdom and goodness. To use Thomas’s terminology, our theological language refers to God in what it is talking about (the res significata), but not in the way it speak (the modus significandi), which is drawn from creatures.147 It is in this context that Thomas develops what he has to say about analogy. Thomas speaks of analogy in a number of places, and his various remarks have been of much interest to later interpreters. It is not clear that Thomas ever explicates in one place a complete “theory of analogy,” as some interpreters seem to think; his remarks are in fact scattered and ad hoc in character. If there is anything that is common to most of Thomas’s discussions of analogy, however, it is his positioning analogy between univocity and equivocity.148 In the Summa theologiae, for example, in treating of the relationship between words used of creatures and words used of God, Thomas first discusses why we cannot apply words univocally to God and creatures.149 To apply a term univocally means that its use is identical in all cases of its application. To apply the term “dog” to Fido and to his pup Rex is to use the term “dog” univocally, since Fido and Rex, though they are different dogs, are dogs in an identical sense: they are members of the species Canis lupus familiaris. And this would be the case because Fido, as Rex’s sire, has passed to him his doggy nature in such a way as to make him be a dog; in Thomas’s terms, “dog” can be applied univocally to both Fido and Rex because Fido is a “univocal” cause of Rex. This cannot, however, be the case of God and creatures because God has not, by the act of creation, passed on to any creature his divine nature. Therefore no term—not even “being”—is applied to both God and creatures univocally, the way that “dog” is univocally applied to both Rex and Fido. After this, Thomas discusses why we cannot apply words to God and creatures in a “purely equivocal” sense. This would include the view that 147 148 149

See Contra Gentiles lib. 1 cap. 30 n. 3; Summa theologiae Ia q. 13 a. 3. See Klubertanz (1960), 37–8. For the following paragraphs, see Summa theologiae I aq. 13 a. 5.

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language derived from creatures bears only an coincidental similarity to the language we use about God, in the way that the sound made by a dog and the outer covering of a tree’s trunk both happen to be called “bark.” But it would also include the view of Maimonides and Avicenna, discussed above, that we apply perfection terms drawn from creatures to God not because God literally possesses those perfections but rather only as a way of indicating either that God is the cause of a perfection in creatures or that the opposite of that perfection ought to be denied of God. Whereas Fido is the univocal cause of Rex, God is the equivocal cause of creatures, not unlike the way that the sun is an equivocal cause of plant growth: the sun’s causal activity produces not another sun, but rather a plant; likewise, God’s creative causal activity produces not another God but a creature. Yet, as noted before, if our language about God is purely equivocal then we are never able to say anything about God that is actually true. It is between these two unacceptable alternatives that Thomas positions analogy. In one sense, analogy is a form of equivocation, since it applies terms across specific differences, in the way that “bark” can be applied to canines and trees. Such pure equivocation, however, leaves our understanding entirely in the dark, since knowing what a dog’s bark is tells you nothing about what tree bark is. In analogy, however, there is some sort of commonality of meaning; so, for example, when we speak of healthy food and a healthy complexion the uses of “healthy” are related, since the former is the cause of the latter, and so the two uses illuminate each other, yet one would not say that “healthy” means the same thing in both cases. Because God is the source of all perfections, our perfection terms can be used analogously of both God and creatures without our having to claim that we know what they mean when applied to God. The reason for this is that while the perfection language we use belongs most properly to creatures—we learn to use the word “good” in the context of encountering good and bad apples, dogs, days, people, etc.—the perfections themselves belong most properly to God who, as the source of every perfection in creatures, possesses them most perfectly. This shows that analogy is not simply about our use of language but, as the language of univocal and equivocal causes indicates, is a use of language that is grounded in a metaphysical vision in which creatures have a real participation in God’s existence and the perfections that flow from it.

Excess and Unknowing Despite the fact that our use of “perfection terms” in speaking of God refers to something real in God, it is important to remember that this

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reference doesn’t give us any secure “purchase” on God. Thomas’s work is replete with statements of the sort: “The most important thing we can know about the first cause is that it surpasses all our knowledge and power of expression. For that one knows God most perfectly who holds that whatever one can think or say about him is less than what God is.”150 Thomas is sometimes presented as someone who claimed to know a lot about God, so it is good to remind ourselves of how austere his claims concerning human knowledge of God in fact are. As we have seen, Thomas holds that human reason, beginning from God’s effects, can demonstrate that God is, but not what God is. Of course Thomas recognizes that we cannot know that something is without knowing in at least a minimal sense what it is, by locating it within some genus; in order to know that a distinct figure coming across the horizon exists, I must locate it at least within the genus of things that are perceptible. In the case of God, however, we cannot have even this minimal generic knowledge, since God does not belong to any genus (Deus non est in genere)—God is not any kind of thing.151 What we have instead is knowledge “by way of negation, by way of causality, and by way of transcendence” (per negationem, per causalitatem et per excessum);152 it is “a knowledge that is dark and mirrored, and from afar.”153 What we know God to be is the negation of creaturely imperfection and finitude; what we know God to be is the cause of all creaturely perfection; what we know God to be is a perfection that, in its simplicity, contains and exceeds all the perfections that we know from creatures. We know God by a kind of un-knowing of creatures. As we saw in the five ways, we demonstrate God’s existence by rendering creation, taken as a whole, inexplicable, and it is this un-knowing of creation that we move, as suggested earlier by Victor White, from not knowing God to knowing God to be the unknown that exceeds the world. This limitation on our knowledge of God, this knowing that is an unknowing, is not simply a temporary impediment, imposed on us in this life by the fact that our knowing is encumbered by our bodily senses. It is the condition of our creatureliness. Thomas’s deep apophaticism is not restricted to the praeambula fidei that natural human reason can demonstrate; it extends to the knowledge of God that we have through grace by

150

In this instance, the statement is from Super De causis, prop. 9. Cf. De potentia q. 7 a. 5 ad 14; Contra Gentiles lib. 1 cap. 14 n. 2–3, cap. 30 n. 4; Summa theologiae IIa–IIa q. 8 a. 7. 151 Summa theologiae I aq. 3 a. 5 co.; De potentia q. 7 a. 3 co. 152 Super De Trinitate, pars 3 q. 6 a. 3 co. 153 Super Io. cap. 1 lec. 11 n. 211.

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faith and in the glory of the beatific vision itself. Of course the knowledge of God that we have by grace—the knowledge that is faith—greatly exceeds the dim knowledge that we have by nature,154 and the knowledge that is had by glory—the knowledge of the blessed—exceeds the knowledge of grace,155 but Thomas is quite clear that even those creatures who behold the essence of God, such as the angels and the saints in heaven, do not comprehend that which they see. This is not because something of God’s essence remains hidden, but because God’s knowability exceeds our capacity to know; one might say that God’s incomprehensibility from the side of creatures is a function of God’s super-comprehensibility in himself.156 As Thomas puts it in one place, “ ‘although the whole divine essence is seen by the blessed, since it is most simple and has no parts, yet it is not wholly seen, because this would be to comprehend it.”157 In Thomas’s triad of knowledge per negationem, per causalitatem, and per excessum, it is the last—transcendence or excess—that defines the other two, and which is missing from the accounts of Avicenna and Maimonides. We negate what we know of creatures because we know that God exceeds creatures, and it is because God exceeds creatures that God can be the cause of everything that exists. As we saw in Chapter 1, when, at the end of his life, Thomas ceased writing, he said to Reginald of Piperno, “All that I have written seems to me to be straw compared to what I have seen and what has been revealed to me.” This is not simply a confession of the inadequacy of his words, but is a testimony to the transcendence of the reality toward which those words stretch out. What is revealed to Thomas is not the negation of his life’s work, but its exceeding. As Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange put it, “human words, even inspired words, far from being exaggerations, can express supernatural truths only by understatement.”158 Thomas becomes in the end like Aristotle’s oculus noctuae, whom Thomas invokes so frequently in his own writings, the owl that is blinded by the excess of the sun’s light.159

154

Summa theologiae Ia q. 12 a. 13. Summa theologiae Ia IIae q. 8 a. 7 co. 156 See, e.g., Contra Gentiles lib. 3 cap. 55; Summa theologiae Ia q. 12 a. 7; Super I Tim. cap. 6 lec. 3 nn. 268–70. 157 Super Io. cap. 1 lec. 11 n. 213. 158 Garrigou-Lagrange (2006), 254. 159 Aristotle, Metaphysics 2.1 933b 9–11. For Thomas’s use of this image, see, e.g., Super De Trinitate pars 3 q. 5 a. 4 co. 3; Contra Gentiles lib. 2 cap. 60 n. 22; Summa theologiae Ia q. 1 a. 5; De spiritualibus creaturis a. 10 ad 7; Super De causis pr.; Super Rom. cap. 12 lec. 2 n. 978. 155

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In setting out to discuss what Thomas thinks we can know through natural human reason, I have found myself continually trespassing upon the domain of faith, prodded across the often unmarked borderline between reason and faith by the internal dynamic of Thomas’s own arguments. It is as if reason begins a line of inquiry that only faith can complete. This is, I realize, a claim that runs counter to the view that Thomas effects a clear and distinct delineation of the realms of reason and faith, the natural and the supernatural. It is true that Thomas does make such a distinction, but it is one that he is constantly blurring in practice. The very category of praeambula fidei blurs the line between the domains of reason and of faith, since what reason can prove concerning these matters can also be known, and with greater certitude, through faith. The dynamism of the relationship in Thomas between reason and faith, the natural and the supernatural, helps us to understand why Aristotelian natural philosophy would have been of interest to a friar preacher. Thomas saw our inquries into natural phenomena, our asking “why?” about the natural objects of the world, as initiating a process that would reach fully its terminus not simply in knowledge that there is a God but in the vision of God’s essence that can only be had through grace. As I said at the outset of this chapter, the “preambles” not only walk before faith, but are walking toward faith. Because human beings are created in grace, every thought stands poised to be taken captive for Christ, awaiting only the word of the gospel to be proclaimed. Once claimed in this way, reason’s act of walking toward faith is perfected in becoming the believer’s act of following of Christ.

4 Fides Quaerens Intellectum Thomas holds that human reason, unaided by revelation, can not only tell us things about the natural world, but also can provide an austere account of the existence of God. Thomas also holds that reason plays a vital role within theology. Indeed, it must have a role to play if sacra doctrina is to be scientia. Thomas is not willing to say that holy teaching is simply a matter of believing a collection of bits of information that God has revealed. If it is true scientia, then reason must have some role to play in this activity. It must be a process of, to use St Anselm’s phrase, “faith seeking understanding” (fides quaerens intellectum), in which understanding involves some sort of seeing-the-whole by grasping the interrelatedness of the parts.1

1. FAITH When we speak of faith or belief, we must speak both of the act of faith, by which we believe something that is proposed to us, and of the object of faith, which is the thing that is proposed to us for belief. Thomas distinguishes between the stable disposition by which we believe (habitu quo credimus) and that which is believed (eo quod creditur).2 For Thomas, the act of faith is intimately related to that which is believed, because faith is not a blind impulse but an act of the intellect in which the mind lays hold of something. The act of faith is in no way meritorious on its own; if directed toward the wrong object, it ceases to be a virtue and becomes a vice. As Thomas puts it, “by false knowledge of God, a human being does not

1 See Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 8, a. 5 ad 3: “faith implies merely assent to what is proposed, but understanding implies a certain perception of the truth.” Thomas never uses Anselm’s phrase, though in his commentary on the Sentences he speaks of an act of thinking that “presses on to understand that which is already believed” (tendit ad intellectum eorum quae jam credit). Super Sent. lib. 3 d. 23 q. 2 a. 2 qc. 1 ad 2. 2 Super Rom. cap. 1 lec. 6 n. 106.

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approach him, but is cut off from him.”3 Therefore, after discussing Thomas’s account of the act of faith, I will pass on to what he says about the object of faith, both God as the first truth, and the scriptures, creeds, and teachings of the Fathers that make up the body of particular truths through which we assent to God as first truth.

Faith as a Virtue The classic Christian definition of faith is found in Hebrews 11: 1: “Faith is the substance of things to be hoped for, the evidence [argumentum] of things that appear not.” Thomas accepts this as a proper definition of faith, based on apostolic authority, but finds that it requires some reshuffling for the sake of greater clarity, and thus he offers this definition: “faith is a disposition of the mind, by which eternal life is begun in us, making the intellect assent to what is not apparent.”4 Understanding the several parts of this definition and their interrelationship will help us understand how Thomas sees the virtue of faith and its act. First, faith is a disposition or habitus. A habitus is something added to a nature, to dispose it to operate in a particular way. What distinguishes a habitus from other dispositions is its enduring character.5 Identifying faith as a habitus indicates that having faith is less like constantly twitching a particular mental muscle and more like an inclination to act in particular sorts of ways. As Thomas notes, someone who has the habitus of faith can be said to have faith even when asleep.6 Thomas further defines true faith as a virtue, meaning that it is a disposition that inclines us to act well, specifically to know the truth revealed by God.7 It is, along with hope and love, a theological virtue, meaning, first, that it has God as its object and, second, that rather than being cultivated through practice, as are acquired virtues, it is “infused” in human beings by God.8 Faith is only a virtue, however, if it is informed by caritas (love or charity); faith in God without love of God, such as the demons have (see James 2:19), is “lifeless,” since it 3 Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 10, a. 3 co.; cf. Contra Gentiles lib. 3 cap. 118 n. 3: “one who believes something false does not believe in God.” One might wonder how this squares with Thomas’s evident view that philosophers such as Aristotle and Avicenna, who believed false things about God, might still be counted as affirming God’s existence. 4 Super Heb. cap. 11 lec. 1 n. 558; De veritate q. 14 a. 2 co.; Summa theologiae IIa–IIae, q. 4 a. 1 co. 5 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 18 a. 2 ad 2; q. 53 a. 1 ad 1. 6 De veritate q. 14 a. 1 ad 4. 7 Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 4 a. 6. 8 Summa theolgoiae Ia–IIae q. 62 a. 1.

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sees God as true, but not as desirable.9 The disposition of faith is therefore a gift from God by which we are able to act in such a way as to attain God as our goal.10 As a disposition of the mind, the act toward which faith inclines us is an intellectual one, in which we grasp God as the first truth.11 God gives to the intellect the light of faith, which allows us to grasp supernatural truth in the same way that the light of reason allows us to grasp natural truths.12 Rather than a blind impulse of trust, faith is, as Augustine said, “to think with assent.”13 Faith involves not only saying to God, “I believe that you are trustworthy,” but also, “I assent to the truth of what you say.” In this way, faith is a kind of knowledge, with an identifiable cognitive content: the articles of faith. Second, it is by faith that eternal life is begun in us. This means that faith is a kind of foretaste of eternal life, the means by which we share in what the saints and angels enjoy eternally: union with God. Recalling that sacra doctrina “borrows” its first principles—the articles of faith—from the scientia of the blessed, faith can be understood as the way in which this borrowing takes place, the act of receptivity by which we appropriate this gift. On the other hand, our sharing in eternal life is not completed in faith, but only “begun” (inchoatur). We remain viators, wayfarers on the road to beatitude.14 In this life, Thomas says, “faith is like a lamp with which the road is lit,” but “in heaven there will be no such lamp, because the radiance of God, i.e. God himself, has enlightened it.”15 In the heavenly vision of God, faith will give way to knowledge, just as hope will give way to attainment, with only love remaining.16 In consequence, there is a sense in which faith, so long as it persists, is a form of assent that never rests from activity. Typically, discursive thought comes to an end in an act of assent, as when we cease pondering a syllogism once we have grasped its conclusion. In the case of faith, however, assent is caused by our will, not by our pondering, so that we can assent to a truth of faith even as we continue to ponder it. And this pondering will have no end, so long as our assent is based on faith rather than vision. Thomas says of the mind of one 9

Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 4 aa. 3, 5; Super Rom. cap. 1 lec. 6 n. 106. Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 6 a. 1; Super Io. cap. 6 lec. 3 n. 902. 11 Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 4 a. 2. 12 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 109 a. 1 co.; IIa–IIae q. 2 a. 3 ad 2. 13 Augustine, On the Predestination of the Saints, ch. 2. 14 The image of Christians as viatores or wayfarers, so prevalent in Thomas, is also found in a sample sermon for mid-Lent in Humbert of Romans’s On the Formation of Preachers XVIII.1–3, in Tugwell (1982), 347–50. 15 Super II Cor. cap. 5 lec. 2 n. 164. 16 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 67, aa. 5–6. 10

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who has faith: “it still thinks discursively and inquires about the things which it believes, even though its assent to them is unwavering.”17 And though the will moves the intellect to assent, the will itself does not cease from desiring. Thomas writes, “the knowledge of faith does not bring rest to desire but rather sets it aflame, since every human being desires to see what he or she believes.”18 It is as if one who has faith is simultaneously at rest and restless, a state not unfitting for viatores (pilgrims) who journey toward God within the movement of grace. This leads to the final point, which is that faith involves the intellect’s assent to what is not apparent. For Thomas, this is what chiefly differentiates faith from both intellectus and scientia and it is the reason why it must be the will that moves the intellect to this assent, rather than the intellect moving itself. Faith is, as the Letter to the Hebrews puts it, assent to things that “appear not.” In the case of both intellectus, by which we grasp principles that are self-evident, and scientia, by which we grasp the conclusion of a demonstration, we cannot but assent to the truth that is before us, lest we fall into irrationality. Once we recognize that wholes are greater than their parts or grasp the Pythagorean theorem, we are not free to withhold our assent from these truths. In faith, however, the intellect is not so compelled by the evidence of that to which it assents that it loses its freedom, but rather must be moved to that assent by the will.19 While faith is different from intellectus and scientia, it is also different from those other intellectual acts that concern truths that are not apparent: doubt, in which the intellect is poised between two alternatives, unable to assent to either, and opinion, in which the intellect assents to one of the alternatives, but only weakly because of the uncertainty of the mind’s grasp of the truth. Faith’s assent has the certainty of intellectus or scientia, even though it cannot see the truth to which it assents. Thus Thomas describes faith as poised between scientia and opinion: sharing the certainty of the former, despite not seeing clearly the truth to which it assents, like the latter.20

17

De veritate q. 14 a. 1 co. Contra Gentiles lib. 3 cap. 40 n. 5. 19 Contra Gentiles lib. 3 cap. 40 n. 3; Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 17 a. 6 co.; De virtutibus q. 1 a. 7 co. 20 See, e.g. De veritate q. 14 a. 1 co.; Super De Trinitate pars 2 q. 3 a. 1 co. 1; Summa theologiae a I –IIae q. 67 a. 3 co. Thomas seems to have gotten this way of putting the matter from Hugh of St Victor, De sacramentis lib. I pars 10 cap. 2 (see Super Sent. lib. 3 d. 23 q. 2 a. 1 ad 8; De veritate q. 14 a. 2). For the background of this formulation in the debate between Abelard and Bernard of Clairvaux, see Brown (2002), 221–3. 18

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It is because the assent of faith involves an act of the will that faith is meritorious, that is, deserving of reward.21 Of course, as I have said, the act of faith, like all other meritorious human actions, is accomplished by the will being moved from within by God’s grace.22 It is this inner movement (interior instinctus) of grace that is primary in faith.23 At the same time, there are exterior inducements that are instrumental in moving the will. In discussing Jesus’ saying from John’s gospel, “No one can come to me unless the Father, who sent me, draws him” (John 6:44), Thomas notes the variety of ways in which one might be drawn to belief. In addition to the inner movement of grace, one might be drawn to faith through the testimony of miracles, though Thomas seems not to think miracles probative in themselves.24 More compelling is the sheer attractive power of Christ and his message. Thomas says that many whom the Father draws are in fact, “drawn by the Son, through a wonderful joy and love of the truth, which is the very Son of God himself.”25 The Father’s work of drawing people to himself through Christ is continued by means of those preachers who convey the attractive, captivating reality of Christ, and thereby share in the divine work of bringing people to faith.26 The work of the preacher, however, is merely one of disposing the hearer to believe; the actual moving of the will and illuminating of the intellect belong to God alone, since only God can move the will without compromising human freedom.27 Therefore, Thomas says, “The preacher should give thanks when his preaching proves effective in the lives of his congregation.”28 Thomas’s discussion of the virtue of faith is something of a balancing act, attempting to do justice to the roles played by the intellect and the will, God’s grace and human freedom, as well as the knowing and unknowing—the satisfaction and ongoing desire—that faith involves. As so often when confronted with Thomas’s analysis of a human act, we might be tempted to imagine all that it entails as a kind of psychological 21

De veritate q. 14 a. 3; Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 2 a. 9. See Thomas’s discussion of merit in Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 114. 23 For the development of Thomas’s thinking on the role of the divine instinctus in the act of faith, which is closely related to developments in his thinking on grace discussed in Chapter 6, see Sherwin (2005), 131–46. 24 See Quodlibet 2 q. 4 a. 1. 25 In Io. cap. 6 lec. 5 n. 935. 26 On preachers as cooperating with God as instrumental causes, see Sermon 15, Homo quidam erat dives, pars 2. 27 De veritate q. 27, a. 3 ad 12; Super Rom. cap. 10 lec. 2 n. 842. 28 Super I Thes. cap. 2 lec. 2 n. 40. 22

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Rube Goldberg contraption, involving unnecessary complexity to perform a simple task. Yet what seems at first to be overengineered complexity is in fact required to give an account of the act of faith in all its subtlety. Unless we wish to reduce faith to something like simple trust or to an act of assent indistinguishable from our assent to purely natural truths, then something along the lines of Thomas’s account seems needed.

The Object of Faith Thomas’s nuanced account of the virtue of faith and its act should not, however, lead us to forget the priority he gives to the object of faith. Indeed, the object of faith has literal priority in the Summa theologiae, being the first topic Thomas takes up, prior to examining the act of faith. This indicates how free Thomas’s understanding of faith is from the subjectivism that today is often thought to be the essence of faith. Not only is faith an intellectual act of assent to truth, but it is also the truth that is assented to that determines the nature of the act. Thomas is quite clear that it is God himself who is the object of faith, and not a set of facts concerning God. He notes that when we profess the creed we say, “I believe in God almighty,” not “I believe that God is almighty.”29 Faith is not only trust, but it certainly includes trust, because faith is a matter of believing God; whatever it is that we assent to in faith is assented to because it is God who proposes it for our assent. We might say that what is revealed in divine revelation is not first and foremost truth about God, but rather God as first truth.30 Revelation is God’s own knowledge of himself, God’s own perfect grasp of his own truth, shared with rational creatures and received by them to the degree that they can share in it.31 Thomas holds that “the thing known is in the knower according to the mode of the knower.”32 Therefore, one aspect of our human sharing in God’s self-knowledge is that, being the kinds of creatures we are, it is natural for us to know things by way of propositions.33 Though the first truth is supremely simple in itself, “in terms of how it is received into our

29

Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 1 a. 2 ad 2. Summa theologiae Ia q. 16 a. 5; IIa–IIae q. 1 a. 1. 31 See Contra Gentiles lib. 3 cap. 154, n. 1. 32 Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 1 a. 2 co. Cf. Super Sent. lib. 1 d. 38 q. 1 a. 2 co.; De veritate q. 2 a. 12 ad 7; Summa theologiae Ia q. 12 a. 4; In De divinis nominibus cap. 2 lec. 4. 33 Summa theologiae Ia q. 85 a 5. 30

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minds, it is multiplied into different propositions.”34 Of course, what is grasped by the mind it not the proposition, but the truth that the proposition signifies. Just as our grasping of the proposition “the cat is on the mat” gives us knowledge of the cat, so too our grasping in faith of propositions about God gives us knowledge of God, and not simply of the proposition.35 Still, propositions remain the means, indispensible in this life, by which we give assent to God as first truth. The first principles upon which the discourse of holy teaching is built are those propositions known as the articles of faith. These articles of faith, which Thomas thinks of as more or less equivalent to the articles of the Apostles’ Creed, are a kind of distillation of the revelation contained in scripture. Thomas notes that “the truth of faith is contained in holy scripture diffusely, under various modes of expression, and sometimes obscurely.” The articles of faith serve as “a clear summary from the sayings of holy scripture;” they involve “no addition to holy scripture, but something taken from it.”36 In De articulis fidei et ecclesiae sacramentis Thomas, in delineating the articles of faith, associates each article with a passage of scripture, but he generally feels no need to prooftext the articles of faith. It is from the totality of the scriptural witness that the articles are derived. At the same time, Thomas can be somewhat cavalier regarding the actual enumeration of the articles, noting that they are sometimes numbered at twelve and sometimes at fourteen.37 While he consistently identifies God’s triune nature and the incarnation as the fundamental mysteries of faith,38 Thomas recognizes that the distinct articles in which these mysteries are expressed are an ecclesiastical composition, and can change and develop over time, as new needs arise within the Church.39 In discussing the enumeration of the articles of faith, Thomas observes that, since that which is one in God is manifold in our understanding, the diversity of the articles of faith is due to the limitations of our understanding. Specifically, they relate to the diverse ways in which our

34

De veritate q. 14 a. 12. Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 1 a. 2 ad 2. 36 Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 1 a. 9 co.; cf. Contra errores Graecorum pars 1 cap. 32, where Thomas says that through the words of the Council of Nicaea, “the true meaning of Scripture is understood.” 37 Compendium theologiae lib. 1 cap. 246. 38 See, e.g. De veritate q. 14 a. 11 co.; Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 1 a. 8 co.; De rationibus Fidei cap. 1; Compendium theologiae lib. 1 cap. 2. 39 Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 1 a. 7. 35

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scientia fails before the mystery of God; each article of the Creed bears upon the first truth from the perspective of the way in which it is a mystery to us. Our reason fails in one way when we consider the suffering of God on the cross and in another way when we consider the resurrection. The crucifixion and resurrection are distinct articles in the Creed, since we might come to believe that God incarnate suffered and died without believing that God incarnate rose from the dead. In contrast, the difficulty we have in grasping the death and burial of God incarnate is the same difficulty we have in grasping the suffering of God, thus all three can be encompassed under the same article.40 What is noteworthy in this is that the articulation of the faith is determined from our side by our incapacity to know God; the Creed is a measure of our cognitive failure before the mystery of God. Our “I believe” is, strictly speaking, a profession of what we do not see, since we believe in the first truth precisely as unseen. Previously I have stressed the austerity of the knowledge of God we are able to attain through natural reason. But the knowledge of God that we have through faith is no less a seeing in a mirror, darkly; in faith, no less than in reason, God’s essence remains unknown to us. Thomas says that in sacra doctrina, “we make use of God’s effects, either of nature [i.e. for the praeambula fidei] or grace [i.e. for the mysteries of faith], in place of a definition.”41 Such “effects of grace” would include prophetic visions and insights, God’s saving acts in history, and above all the supreme work of grace, the joining of humanity to divinity in Jesus Christ, all of which are conveyed in the “narrative of signs” (narrativus signorum) that is sacred scripture.42 While we can have a more perfect knowledge of God by grace than we can by reason—for example, we can know that God is a Trinity of Father, Son, and Spirit—we are, in faith, still, “united to him as to one unknown.”43 In faith it is precisely the nonappearance of that to which we give our assent that is its defining feature.

2. THEOLOGICAL SCIENCE As I mentioned before, Thomas typically speaks of the use of reason within the realm of faith in three ways: to demonstrate the praeambula

40 41 42 43

here.

Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 1 a. 6; cf. Super I Cor. cap. 15 lec. 1 n. 896. Summa theologiae Ia q. 1 a. 7 ad 1. Super Sent. q. 1 a. 5 co. Summa theologiae Ia q. 12 a. 13 ad 1. Thomas is quoting Dionysius’s Mystical Theology

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fidei, to refute arguments made against the faith, and to construct arguments that contain premises held on faith in order to show the cogency and coherence of the Christian faith and to draw from those premises certain conclusions.44 My primary interest here is in this third use of reason, which might be said to constitute “theological science,” strictly speaking.

Reason within Faith In Thomas’s discussion at the outset of the Summa theologiae of the “argumentative” character of sacra doctrina, he speaks of how, beginning from the articles of faith, holy teaching “goes on to prove something else.”45 Like any scientia, of course, theology will only be demonstrative for those who accept its first principles: thus a heretic who accepts scripture as a premise can be proven wrong on the basis of scripture, while someone who does not accept scripture cannot be proven wrong (though one should be able to answer his or her objections against the faith).46 But for someone who accepts the articles of faith as first principles, it is possible to use those articles as premises in the construction of theological arguments “in order to make its teaching clearer.” This does not imply any “dependence” of theology upon philosophical disciplines, the way a subalternate scientia depends on a higher one; rather, theology “makes use of them as of lesser scientiae, and as handmaids.” This reliance on philosophical arguments is not due to any defect in the premises of sacra doctrina, but rather “to the defect of our intelligence, which is more easily led by that which is known through natural reason . . . to that which is above reason.”47 This “defect” of our intelligence—which should not be understood as a flaw in our nature, but rather our nature’s inherent limitations—is really twofold. First, we think discursively, by composing and dividing. Because of this, unlike God or the angels, who apprehend truth in a simple glance, we naturally know things best through a demonstration that proceeds stepwise from premises to conclusions. Second, our minds are naturally oriented toward knowing the essences of material things, and thus the effects of God that can be perceived with the senses, whether effects of nature or of grace, are the most natural starting point for our process of discursive reasoning. Sacra doctrina—theology—is in a sense a concession to the kinds of beings that we are: bodily, temporal 44 46

See Ch. 2, Sect. 4. Cf. Quodlibet 4 q. 9 a. 3.

45

Summa theologiae Ia q. 1 a. 8 co. 47 Summa theologiae Ia q. 1 a. 5 ad 2.

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beings whose cognitive apparatus is oriented toward material things and discursive reasoning.48 Reason, therefore, is not simply a preamble to faith, but has a vital role to play within faith. In proposing this, Thomas must deal with the objection that the use of reasoned argument in connection with matters of belief would lessen the merit of faith. Thomas draws an analogy with the role of the emotions (passiones) in relation to virtuous action.49 If one engages in a virtuous act simply because one is emotionally inclined toward such an action (e.g. I run into a burning building to save my beloved pet dog), then the action is less meritorious than if one engages in a virtuous act toward which one is not emotionally inclined (e.g. I run into a burning building to save my girlfriend’s cat), but which one judges to be the right thing to do. However, emotions that do not motivate virtuous actions but follow upon them (e.g. my increased affection for my girlfriend’s cat, once we have survived the harrowing rescue together) can be a sign of a deeper appropriation of the virtue in question, and actually increase the merit of the virtuous action. In other words, the more virtuous you are the more you enjoy being virtuous. Likewise, Thomas argues, seeking reasons prior to the will’s act of moving the intellect to assent, which can include both arguments and signs such as miracles,50 lessens the merit of faith. However, if one seeks reasons for a truth that one already assents to on faith, so as to “ponder and embrace” (excogitate et amplectitur) that truth, this can be the occasion of greater merit, because it is a sign of one’s love for that truth.51 Faith seeks understanding in order to embrace truth more firmly and to employ the divine gift of reason to better know the giver of that gift. How then does faith use reason in seeking the understanding of the mysteries of faith? Before looking at a “macroscopic” example of how Thomas both employs and delimits reason in regard to a mystery of faith— the triune nature of God—let us look at a “microscopic” example of the use of reason within faith: Thomas’s use of the demonstrative syllogism in discussing the question of whether Jesus Christ had any knowledge acquired through sense experience. 48 Thomas reiterates repeatedly God’s “condescension” to humanity, seen in God’s willingness to present immaterial realities in bodily form, of which the incarnation is the supreme example. See, e.g. Summa theologiae Ia q. 1 a. 9 and IIIa q. 1 a. 1. The angels, presumably, have no theology, but only worship. 49 Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 2, a. 10 co. 50 See Summa theologiae IIIa q. 55 a. 5 ad 3. 51 Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 2 a. 10 co.

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Thomas begins with the following argument:52 1. Major premise: nothing that God implanted in our human nature was lacking in the human nature assumed by the Word of God. 2. Minor premise: it is clear that God implanted in human nature not only a passive intellect (i.e. an intellect that receives the forms of things perceived) but also an active intellect (i.e. an intellect that acts to draw conceptual knowledge from sense experience). 3. Conclusion: in the soul of Christ there was not merely a passive intellect, but also an active intellect. Thomas takes the major premise from the theological tradition—the Chalcedonian doctrine that Christ possesses an integral human nature— which is itself a distillation of the scriptural depiction of Jesus as “like us in all things except sin” (Hebrews 4:15). The minor premise, on the other hand, is drawn not from revealed truth, but from Aristotle’s account of the soul. It is from the conjunction of these premises that Thomas draws his conclusion that Christ must have had a human active intellect. Thomas then takes this conclusion and uses it as a premise in his next argument: 4. Major premise: in the soul of Christ there was an active intellect. 5. Minor premise: God and nature make nothing that does not possess a proper function. 6. Conclusion: the active intellect of Christ had its own proper function. Again, the minor premise is drawn from Aristotle and, when joined to the previous conclusion, yields a further conclusion that, in turn, becomes the premise for the final argument. 7. Major premise: the active intellect of Christ had its own proper function. 8. Minor premise: the proper function of the active intellect is to acquire knowledge from sense experience. 9. Conclusion: Christ acquired knowledge through sense experience. Once again, the minor premise draws on Aristotle’s account of the human soul and is linked to the previous conclusion to arrive at an answer to the question posed at the outset.

52

Summa theologiae IIIa q. 9 a. 4 co.

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Here we can clearly see Thomas proceeding according to an Aristotelian model of demonstration. This example reveals certain feature typical of Thomas’s way of proceeding with regard to particular questions. Specifically, we see how the demonstrative syllogism is employed both to provide the formal structure of the argument, and, at least in this case, to provide premises that, when combined with premises held on faith, give greater insight into the mystery of faith being explored.53 In this example, given the scriptural premise that Jesus was “like us in all things,” Thomas employs Aristotle’s account of the human soul to flesh out what it means to be “like us,” concluding that part of what being “like us” entails is acquiring knowledge through sense experience. It is worth noting that this was not a position that was widely held in Thomas’s day and, as we shall see in the next chapter, Thomas himself only arrived at his position on this question later in his life, because he became convinced that a view of Christ as one who acquired knowledge in a human way was both more in accord with what reason told us about human nature, and also fit better with the gospels’ picture of Jesus as one who “grew in wisdom and stature” (Luke 2:52).

Faith, Reason, and the Triune God To move from the “microscopic” level of the chain of argumentation within a single article to the “macroscopic” level of the use and limits of reason with regard to the mysteries of faith, we can look at Thomas’s discussion of the Trinity. Thomas held, as the Christian theological tradition has generally held, that the Trinity is a mystery, meaning that it is not subject to proof. Yet within the tradition there has been a certain amount of variation as to what exactly this means with regard to reason’s scope. Some theologians were willing to find “vestiges” of or pointers to the Trinity in creation, and thus engaged in what at least look like attempts to demonstrate, or at least rationally justify, God’s triune nature.54 Thomas’s position is considerably stricter, arguing that since unaided human reason can only know God from God’s created effects, and since creation is a work that is shared by the Trinity as a

53

It is not always the case that Thomas uses a premise drawn from revelation and a premise drawn from reason; sometimes reason’s only role in a theological argument is to draw a conclusion from two revealed premises, not to supply a premise itself. 54 The most famous of these is the argument made by Richard of St Victor in book 3 of his De Trinitate.

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whole, we can know from creation only those things that belong to the unity of the divine essence, not what belongs to the Trinity of persons.55 While Thomas will allow for “vestiges” of God in creatures, and even for an “image” of the Trinity in the human soul,56 he holds that from such vestiges one can only arrive at arguments that “are neither very convincing nor very probable, except to the believer.”57 Yet this does not mean that reason is useless, even with regard to the Trinity. We can use rational argument to “manifest” the Trinity: “assuming the Trinity to be true, it is shown to be congruent with reason.”58 If we look at the opening article of the first question of Thomas’s discussion of the Trinity in the Summa theologiae, we can see how this works in practice.59 In this article Thomas takes up the question of whether there is “procession” in God—i.e. of how we can meaningfully speak, as scripture does, of Christ and the Spirit “coming forth” from God. Despite the fact that Thomas entertains the initial arguments or “objections,” which conclude that there is no procession in God, the question is really not whether there is procession (since this is the language given to us by scripture and tradition) but what we might mean by “procession.” More precisely, Thomas is asking how we might understand the language of “coming forth” that we find in scripture (e.g. John 8:42) in such a way as not to fall afoul of those initial arguments. The three arguments given at the beginning of the article all reject the language of “procession” as contradicting fundamental truths about God: that God is eternal and unchanging, that God is absolutely simple, and that God (and, implicitly, God’s Word) is the first principle of creatures. What is most significant in this context is that they indicate possible inconsistencies among theological claims. For example, if a “procession” involves movement, as when I proceed from my living room to my dining room, then whatever it is that is proceeding must be moveable, but if it is movable, then it must not be God, since God is not subject to motion, as Thomas has already argued.60 Likewise, the word “procession” implies a difference or opposition between that which comes forth and that from which it comes forth—if I come forth from my house, then I am obviously something distinct from my house. But God is radically simple in being, as 55 Super Sent. lib. 1 d. 3 q. 1, a. 4; Super De Trinitate pars 1 q. 1 a. 4; Lectura Romana d. 3 q. 1 a. 3; Summa theologiae Ia q. 32 a. 1. 56 Contra Gentiles lib. 4 cap. 26, nn. 6–8; Lectura Romana d. 3 q. 2 a. 1; Summa theologiae Ia q. 45 a. 7. 57 58 Super De Trinitate pars 1 q. 1 a. 4 co. Summa theologiae Ia q. 32 a. 1 ad 2. 59 60 Summa theologiae Ia q. 27 a. 1. See Summa theologiae Ia q. 9 a. 1.

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Thomas has shown;61 therefore we cannot speak of God coming forth from God. Finally, if God is the principium or first cause of existence, as Aquinas has argued in the five ways,62 then how can we speak of God as having proceeded, since whatever “comes forth” derives its existence from that from which it comes forth?63 The total effect of the opening arguments is to say that the notion of “procession” implies things that are unfitting of God, if God is the simple and immutable first principle of existence that Thomas has argued him to be. The beginning of Thomas’s response makes clear that the question of whether or not we ought to use the term “procession” in understanding the Trinity is not really at issue. Apart from the passage from John’s gospel that he cites in the sed contra, Thomas notes that, “divine scripture uses words that pertain to procession in connection with divine things.” Thomas is probably thinking not simply of explicit uses of the word “process” but also of terms such as “Word” and “Son” and “Spirit,” which seem to imply a derived existence. Thomas’s purpose is to justify this scriptural language and show that it can—and must—be understood in a way that does not compromise the identity of God as the simple, immutable first principle of all existence. Thomas then introduces two theologians from antiquity who understood “procession” in a way that was incompatible with God as the simple and immutable first principle of existence, but who drew differing conclusions from this. One the one hand we have Arius who, as Thomas presents him, held that since the Son and Spirit proceeded from the Father they must not be God, because such a procession would mean that they were mutable, nonsimple, and at best secondary-principles of existence. On the other hand we have Sabellius who, as Thomas understands him, held that the Son and the Spirit must not proceed from the Father in any way that makes them really distinct, but rather simply be two different ways of talking about the Father’s activities of taking flesh and sanctifying rational creatures. Thomas offers scriptural arguments against both Arius and Sabellius: against the former he cites passages that either state or imply the divinity of the Son and Spirit and against the latter he cites passages 61

62 See Summa theologiae Ia q. 3. See Summa theologiae Ia q. 2 a. 3. The import of this objection is seen more clearly in the form found in De potentia q. 10 a. 1 arg 6: “We should by no means attribute to God anything that is derogatory of his dignity. Now God’s dignity consists chiefly in his being the first cause of existence, and not deriving existence form anything else: which would seem incompatible with procession, since whatever proceeds derives its existence in some way from another. Therefore it must not be said that anything proceeds in God.” 63

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that state or imply that the Son is not the Father. These brief scriptural citations are not meant to be exhaustive, but simply serve as reminders to Thomas’s readers of the sorts of scriptural evidence that might be marshaled. Why does Thomas introduce the heretical views of Arius and Sabellius into his argument? His interest is not purely historical, nor is he necessarily thinking of contemporaries who might hold similar positions.64 Rather, Thomas often uses pairs of heretics as a way of developing a doctrinal position, showing how the Church’s position falls between unacceptable alternatives. In De rationibus fidei he writes, The holy, catholic, and apostolic Church proceeds carefully between contrary errors. It distinguishes the Persons of the Trinity against Sabellius, yet without falling into the error of Arius, but rather professes only one essence of the three Persons; in the mystery of the incarnation, on the other hand, it distinguishes the two natures against Eutyches, but does not separate the persons in the manner of Nestorius.65

We might see this as a more particular instance of Thomas’s well-known dictum that it is easier to say what God is not than to say what God is. These pairs of heretics serve to define a kind of doctrinal via negativa along which we advance toward God, helping to see the different possible ways for reason to fail before this mystery of faith. This indicates once again that the strongly apophatic approach that Thomas adopts with regard to the praeambula fidei is not left behind when it comes to revealed knowledge of God. Here too—perhaps here especially—“the primary mode of naming God is through negation of all things, since he is beyond all, and whatever is signified by any name whatsoever is less than that which God is, for he surpasses our knowledge, which we express by the words we employ.”66 We might also note that Thomas’s way of arguing against them fits with what he says in the opening question of the Summa about how one argues with heretics who accept some or all of scripture as authoritative: “we can argue with heretics from the sources of holy teaching, and against those who deny one article of faith, we can argue from another.”67 Thomas uses scripture to show the error of those who might be inclined to resolve any apparent conflict between the language of “procession” and

64 Though figures such as Rocelin and Gilbert of Porre´e were often thought of in terms of the revival of ancient heresies. 65 De rationibus fidei cap. 9. 66 67 In De divinis nominibus cap. 1 lec. 3. Summa theologiae Ia q. 1 a. 8.

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the understanding of God as the simple, immutable first principle of existence by either (following Arius) denying that the Son and Spirit who proceed from the Father are God or (following Sabellius) denying that the Son and Spirit who are God proceed in any way that would make them really distinct from the Father. Yet Thomas does not rest content with having shown that Arius and Sabellius are wrong; he wants as much as possible to show why they are wrong, what the root of their error is, so that we might avoid similar errors in our thinking about God. The views of Arius and Sabellius, though seemingly opposed to each other, grow from a shared error: “both of these opinions take ‘procession’ as meaning movement toward something external, and therefore neither of them affirms procession as existing in God himself.” To rectify this error, Thomas turns to Aristotle and the distinction he makes between an “outward” procession and an “inward” procession, which corresponds roughly to the distinction between making and doing.68 While rational beings engage in “transitive” actions that affect something external to them—as when I turn clay into a pot—they also engage in what we might call “intransitive acts”—as when I look at a pot and think “that is a pot.”69 In the first case my action results in something that is external to me: the clay pot. In the second case my action remains internal to me. Arius and Sabellius fail to make this distinction, presuming that for God any proceeding or coming forth involves the production of a creature and not recognizing the possibility of a procession that could be, as it were, “within” God. With regard to the question of how reason is used within faith, we should note how Thomas has brought into the realm of theology a distinction—between making and doing—taken from Aristotle, in a way not unlike his use of Aristotelian premises in discussing Christ’s acquired knowledge. Certainly Aristotle would never have dreamed that his distinction would be used in such a way, but this does not seem to trouble Thomas. This Aristotelian distinction serves Thomas’s theological purposes by helping to identify the error of the Arians and Sabellians. Yet Thomas does not leave the distinction exactly as he finds it in Aristotle. Noting that the idea of an immanent action—one that remains within the

68

See Aristotle, Metaphysics bk. 9, ch. 8 1050a 25; Nichomachean Ethics bk. 6, ch. 4 1140a 1. The explanation of Aristotle and Thomas’s point in terms of transitive and intransitive verbs is borrowed from McCabe (2002), 45. It should be noted that the external operation that is “making” is not restricted to the production of artifacts; later in this article Thomas uses the example of a hot thing making something else hot. 69

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agent—“applies most conspicuously to the intellect,” Thomas begins to develop a version of Augustine’s “psychological analogy” of the Trinity, noting that when we understand there is something that comes forth within us (procedit aliquid intra ipsum)—a conception of what it is we understand— that he calls, following Augustine, the “word of the heart” (verbum cordis). This connects the Aristotelian notion of an immanent action to the Christian Trinitarian understanding of the eternal Son as the Word proceeding forth from the Father. But making this connection requires some modification of Aristotle’s account of knowing. Gilles Emery notes: For Aristotle, properly speaking, the immanent operation of the mind and will effectively ‘produces’ nothing. In order to be able to acknowledge that the acts of knowing and loving produce an immanent issue, St. Thomas reinterprets Aristotle in the light of the Augustinian tradition.70

In order for Aristotle’s account of knowledge to be useful here, Thomas must reconceive it such that the “inner word” is something really distinct. The Aristotelian distinction employed by Thomas has a real but limited role in illuminating the Trinity as a mystery of faith, but it is a role that is normed by scripture and the theological tradition—in this case, the Gospel of John and Augustine’s psychological analogy. Yet even once the Aristotelian distinction, suitably modified, is fused with the Augustinian tradition to give us an analogy of procession within God, Thomas is at pains to remind us that this remains an analogy and, while an analogy drawn from intellectual beings is better than one drawn from material generation, “even the likenesses derived from these fall short in the representation of divine things.” As Thomas says in his commentary on the letter to the Colossians, our mental word represents

70 Emery (2007b), 58. Harm Goris maps the development of Thomas’s views regarding the “inner word” in relation to Aristotelian psychology and sees at least three distinct phases of his thought, the most mature of which is the one reflected in Summa theologiae Ia q. 27 a. 1. In addition to the importance of the “inner word” for the psychological analogy of the Trinity, Goris also notes its importance in Thomas’s views on the divine ideas, another point on which he departs notably from Aristotle. See Goris (2007), 62–78. John O’Callaghan argues that the verbum mentis in fact plays no role in Thomas’s philosophical account of cognition and is simply a metaphor used in a purely theological context to speak of the Trinitarian image of God in human beings. O’Callaghan is surely right to point out that Thomas often discusses human cognition without any mention of an inner word, and I am sympathetic to his worries about the mischief that such a notion might cause in our attempts to say what it is that we know when we know something (i.e. do we know the thing, or simply the inner word that represents the thing?). I cannot, however, make much sense of his solution, and in particular of the way in which he draws the distinction between philosophy and theology, which seems to imply that a (philosophically-speaking) fictional mental entity like an inner word could be a (theologically-speaking) useful metaphor. See O’Callaghan (2001).

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the Son, “somehow, albeit deficiently.”71 Thomas’s analogy helps us to know better the mystery of the Trinity, but in such a way that the mystery remains a mystery. We can see with regard to the error of the Arians and Sabellians not just that they are wrong, which scripture demonstrates, but why they are wrong, and to this degree we have something like scientia with regard to this particular point. But this is a scientia that has among its premises things that are unknowable—namely, what it means when Christ says “From God I proceeded.” We can know what this does not mean—an “external” procession—but what an “internal procession” means in the case of God is only dimly illuminated by the analogy drawn from human psychology for, as Thomas notes elsewhere in the Summa, “intellect is not found univocally in God and ourselves.”72 Thomas goes on to say much more about the Trinity in the Summa theologiae. He will extend the analogy of intellectual procession to encompass the second procession within God, the procession of the Spirit, corresponding to the operation of the will. He will move from “procession” to “relation” to his ultimate goal of the Trinitarian persons, developing the notion, drawn from patristic authors, of Father, Son, and Spirit as “subsistent relations of origin.” He discusses each of the persons and the things that are appropriated to them, as well as the distinctive missions of the Son and Spirit in the economy of salvation (a discussion that is continued in the treatise on grace in the secunda pars, as well as the Christology of the tertia pars). All of this intellectual work will be conducted with great rigor, while at the same time never losing sight of the limitations of human reason. As Thomas says, “such discussion is not without its use, since it enables the mind to perceive some glimpse of the truth sufficient to steer clear of error.”73 This might seem a weak endorsement of the tradition of Trinitarian theology, until one remembers that for Thomas the merest glimpse of uncreated truth is superior to complete knowledge of any created truth. As he says in one of his sermons, “Having a little bit of faith is more than knowing everything that all philosophers in the world have known.”74

3. CONVENIENTIA I noted above that, in considering the application of the language of “procession” to God in the Summa theologiae, the objections with which 71 73

72 Super Col. cap. 1 lec. 4 n. 31. Summa theologiae Ia q. 32 a. 1 ad 2. 74 De potentia q. 9 a. 5. Sermon 21, Beatus vir pars 2.

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Thomas begins amount to the claim that such language implies things that are “unfitting” of God. Thomas’s argument, in turn, attempts to show that such language, properly understood, is, in fact, fitting. This notion of “fittingness” or convenientia is an important one in Thomas’s theology, particularly when dealing with the events of salvation history.75 It offers a form of reasoning that is in a way suppler than that of the syllogistic demonstration and which reveals what might be called an “aesthetic” dimension to Thomas’s theology.76 This is particularly important as we seek to map the uses of reason within sacra doctrina, keeping in mind Thomas’s commitment to the preacher’s task of drawing people to the gospel by conveying the attractive power of revealed truth.

Fittingness and Necessity One might say that arguments ex convenientia are a way of displaying the “necessity” of the events of salvation history. Thomas notes that the difference between scientia and opinio is that “science demands that its object should be deemed impossible to be otherwise, whereas it is essential to opinion that its object should be deemed possible to be otherwise.”77 Beginning from self-evident principles, which hold true in all cases, the scientific syllogism proceeds to demonstrate truths that likewise hold true in all cases. Reason’s stepwise passage from premises to conclusion conforms the mind to a universal truth. Thomas further notes that the object of faith is also deemed by the believer to be impossible to be other than it is. Yet this impossibility is clearly not identical with the impossibility involved in scientia, since Thomas readily admits that the economy of salvation could have been ordered differently—e.g. it could have not included the incarnation or Christ’s death on the cross.78 So the “necessity” involved here is not identical to the necessity of scientia; it is not arrived at by the discursive progress of the syllogism, but by the holistic insight in which we see the “rightness” of salvation history. The difference between scientia and convenientia might be thought of in this way: both have to do with a kind of “seeing,” but in the former case one “sees” in the way that one might see how a geometry proof “works” by

75

The idea is hardly, however, unique to Thomas. For an account of the place of “fittingness” in Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo? see Root (1987). 76 See Narcisse (1997). 77 Summa theologiae IIa– IIae q. 1 a. 5 ad 4. 78 Summa theologiae IIIa q. 1 a. .2; q. 46 a. 2.

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following its argument, while in the latter case one sees in the way one might “see” how a particular piece of art or architecture “works.” In the first case, seeing implies a comprehensive knowledge of how the proof is accomplished and the ability to reproduce the proof oneself, while in the latter case one can see how a piece of art “works” without being able to create such art or have an exhaustive knowledge of it. This second sort of seeing is so different from the first that Thomas, relying on the Letter to the Hebrews definition of faith as “the evidence of things that appear not,” will make “unseeing” a defining characteristic of faith. Yet in the idea of “fittingness” there is a sort of “seeing” that is brought back into faith. Inquiring into the fittingness of something obviously involves acceptance of the fact of that which is being inquired into. Reason is, Thomas holds, utterly incapable of demonstrating the truth of the mysteries of faith, such as the incarnation or salvation through the cross of Christ. Yet our capacity for rational insight is not limited to demonstration. Though the intellect remains restless so long as it has not arrived at scientia of the object of its knowledge, its assent in faith to that object can be strengthened by its deeper apprehension of the fittingness of that to which it assents, the ways in which the mysteries of faith interlock with each other and with our ordinary knowledge of the world. It is beyond reason’s capacity to demonstrate the mysteries of faith, but reason can ask, once we assent to these things as true, what insight we can gain into them by seeing their fittingness. Thomas’s most complete account of the place of fittingness among the different sorts of necessity is found in connection with his discussion in the Summa of the necessity of Christ’s passion.79 He first distinguishes between what we might call “intrinsic necessity” and “extrinsic necessity.” He describes the former as “anything that of its nature cannot be otherwise,” that is, what a thing is due to its form and matter, or genus and species. For example, a triangle has three sides by intrinsic necessity and a human being is a rational animal by intrinsic necessity. In the same way, 79 Summa theologiae IIIa q. 46 a. 1; cf. Summa theologiae Ia q. 41 a. 2 ad 5; IIIa q. 1 a. 2. Here again it is his reading of Aristotle that provides an important implement in his theological tool kit (see Sententia Metaphysicae, lib. 5 lec. 6 nn. 1–7 sec. 827–35 and lib. 12 lec. 7 n. 14 sec. 2532). Chenu (1964) writes that “It is impossible to reduce to the Aristotelian categories and criteria these ‘arguments by the appropriate’ used by the medieval masters” and then adds parenthetically and with a double negative, as if to soften the blow, “(Aristotle would not have treated them without contempt)” (182). While there is a certain truth in this claim, one ought not forget the Aristotelian background of the notion of the necessity of fittingness, which also comes into play in Thomas’s discussion of necessity in relation to will. See Summa theologiae Ia q. 82 a. 1.

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God is perfectly good, infinitely wise and so forth according to this sort of necessity, since a “god” who was not perfectly good or wise would not be the God of Christian faith.80 For God to be evil or ignorant in any way would mean a privation of divine perfection, something intrinsically impossible give God’s pure actuality.81 Thomas implies that the Father generates the Son by such intrinsic necessity;82 the acts of God in history, however, cannot be accounted for by such necessity. Had God’s not become incarnate or not suffered on the cross, this would imply no imperfection, and thus implies no intrinsic necessity; whatever necessity accrues to it must therefore be extrinsic. Extrinsic necessity can be due either to an efficient cause or a final cause. Necessity due to an efficient cause involves some sort of external compulsion; for example, if someone ties me to a chair I necessarily remain seated. Such necessity of compulsion cannot apply to God, since no efficient cause acts upon God. More precisely, as Thomas argued in the second of the five ways, that which people call “God” is that which is not subject to efficient causality, but rather is the transcendent source from which all efficacy flows. Necessity due to a final cause can be either absolute, such that the end requires a particular means, or relative, such that the end can be attained better by one means than by another. For example, food is absolutely necessary for the health of animals, but health is better attained by some food than by others. When a mother tells her child that he must eat his carrots, the necessity of this “must” is not absolute but relative: health is better attained by eating carrots than by eating cotton candy. Thomas further notes that a means can be more fitting, and in that sense “necessary,” to an end if it includes within itself other effects that are conducive to that end.83 So, for example, eating carrots preserves health not only by providing nutrition, but also by not contributing to tooth decay, which can have a deleterious effect on health, as well as providing vitamin A, which can improve eyesight, preventing events that can also have a negative impact on health, such as falling off cliffs on dark nights. Carrots can therefore be judged necessary for health, albeit in an extrinsic, relative way. It is this last, extrinsic, relative necessity of a means to an end that is in play in the necessity of fittingness. This is clearly the weakest sort of necessity, but it is important to recognize that it is still a proper use of the word “necessary,” since, as I noted, Thomas associates scientia with things 80 82

See Summa theologiae Ia q. 19 a. 3. Summa theologiae Ia q. 41 a. 2 ad 5.

81 83

Summa theologiae Ia q. 4 a. 1. Summa theologiae IIIa q. 46 a. 3 co.

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that are necessary.84 Sacra doctrina is scientia, even if a subaltern scientia that frequently concerns itself with matters that are necessary in the weak sense of being the most fitting means to an end. In light of what is already given to us in revelation, particularly concerning God’s exercise of providence in history, the logic of “fittingness” allows us to draw from these data some insight into why God has ordered the economy of creation and redemption in the way that he has. In the case of Christ’s suffering, seeking to grasp its fittingness involves our “seeing” how both our deliverance from evil, and our advancement in good,85 as well as the symbolic and prophetic fittingness of the particular manner of Christ’s death,86 come together (conveniunt) in this event. But perhaps convenientia ought not to be seen as simply the bare minimum required to make holy teaching a pallid yet valid sort of scientia. There might be a sense in which the inductive seeing of fittingness is more fundamental to knowledge than the deductive seeing of the syllogism. W. K. C. Guthrie argues that though we tend to think of Aristotelian episte¯me¯—Thomas’s scientia—in terms of deductive reasoning, it is clear that the primary postulates are not known from deduction.87 As Thomas puts it, we argue from first principles, not to them.88 So what is the source of these first principles? Whence do we derive the premises of the scientific syllogism? Some are per se nota, known through themselves, such as the principle of noncontradiction, but others, the vast majority of indemonstrable premises, are derived by induction from sense experience. Aristotle says at the conclusion of the Posterior Analytics, “it is necessary for us to become familiar with first principles [archai] by induction; for perception too instills the universal in this way.”89 Thomas says in his commentary on this passage, “it is clear that sensing is properly and per se of the singular, but yet there is somehow even a sensing of the universal.”90 In constructing the deductive syllogism concerning the mortality of Socrates, our premises—“Socrates is a man” and “all men are mortal”—are obviously not per se nota, and can only be inductive pieces of knowledge derived from our perceptions of different men and of Socrates.

84

85 See Ch. 2, Sect. 3. Summa theologiae IIIa q. 1 a. 2; q. 46 a. 3. Summa theologiae IIIa q. 46 a. 4. 87 For Guthrie’s discussion of Aristotle, which has strongly influenced my own interpretation of Thomas on this point, see Guthrie (1981), 195–202. 88 Summa theologiae Ia q. 1 a. 8. 89 Posterior Analtytics 100b 3–5. 90 Expositio Posteriorum lib. 2 lec. 20 n. 14. 86

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All of this might seem quite obvious; after all, everyone knows that part of Thomas’s debt of loyalty to Aristotle is his insistence that knowledge comes through sense perception. But, as obvious as this may be, it seems that this is often forgotten when it comes to thinking about the “scientific” character of Thomas’s theology. For if deduction must be an operation carried out using principles derived, at least in part, from induction, then it would seem that scientia is founded on something that bears more than a passing resemblance to convenientia. That is, induction involves an ability to see patterns within an array of particulars and to make judgments by which universals are derived from those particulars. And these judgments are not themselves “scientific” but rather lie at the foundation of all scientia. This means that, in relation to scientia, convenientia is not only for Thomas an alternative path of theological reasoning, but lies at the very foundation of scientia. For sacra doctrina to be scientia depends upon prior acts of inductive reasoning that might not unfittingly be described as ex convenientia.

The Aesthetics of the Preached Word These considerations can help us see that in Thomas’s thought scientia and convenientia are related in highly complex way, and that the distinction between faith and reason in his work is perhaps not as clear as it is sometimes claimed to be. At the same time, this complexity seems only appropriate if we keep in mind the complexity of the preacher’s task as understood by the Dominicans. As I noted in Chapter 1, the Dominicans, unlike other evangelical movements such as the Waldensians and Franciscans, were given a mission not only of “preaching penance” but also of “preaching doctrine.” This means that the preacher’s task was not simply to engage the affections of his hearers but to engage their intellects as well. This is the root of Thomas’s concern over the “scientific” status of sacra doctrina: the communicability of the content of faith as that which is determinative of the act of faith. In order to move his hearers to faith, it was not enough for the Dominican preacher to move their hearts to compunction; the intellect must be moved as well. At the same time, it was not enough for the Dominican preacher to spell out clearly the data of revelation in order to instruct his hearers in the faith. The preacher’s task is to be an instrumental cause of living faith, faith that is informed by love, and this involves an engagement of both reason and affection. In light of this, we ought to turn again to the aesthetic quality of arguments ex convenientia.

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Thomas does not offer much in the way of systematic reflection on beauty, but from his scattered remarks we can discern a fairly clear position. Truth, goodness, and beauty, as transcendental aspects of being, are “convertible,” meaning that they are different “modes” by which the same reality is grasped.91 To the degree that something exists, it is true, good, and beautiful; falsehood, evil and ugliness are privations of being. What, then, is the particular mode of apprehending being that we identify with beauty? Thomas seems to present beauty as something of a middle ground between truth and goodness: it is a particularly “cognitive” form of the good. As Thomas puts it, “beauty adds to goodness an orientation toward the cognitive faculty: so that ‘good’ means that which, absolutely speaking, pleases the appetite, while the ‘beautiful’ is something of which its perception or understanding is itself pleasing.”92 To experience beauty is to experience a particular kind of cognitive delight: “beautiful things are those that please when seen.”93 The constituent elements that make something pleasing to sight are wholeness or perfection (integritas sive perfectio), proportion or harmony (proportio sive consonantia), and brightness (claritas).94 What is notable in what Thomas has to say about beauty is the way in which it takes into account both the formal properties of the beautiful object—its integrity, its proportion, and its brightness—as well as the subjective apprehending of the object—the pleasure that the object causes in the one who sees or hears it. John Haldane remarks that, for Thomas, “beauty is only ascribable in the context of actual or potential contemplation of the form of a thing. This introduces an element of subjectivity but relates it directly to an objective ground, viz., the nature of the object being contemplated.”95

91 For Thomas’s discussion of the transcendentals, see De veritate q. 1 a. 1. Thomas does not treat beauty here, and there has been some discussion among interpreters as to whether he considered beauty a transcendental attribute of being. From the way in which Thomas speaks of the relationship between goodness and beauty (e.g. Summa theoloiae Ia–IIae q. 27 a. 1 ad 3), as well as how he speaks of all things being beautiful by participation in divine beauty (In De divinis nominibus cap. 4 lec. 5), it seems to me undeniable that he in fact does treat beauty as a transcendental. For a general discussion of the transcendentals in Thomas, see Aertsen (1992); for a discussion of beauty as a transcendental see Eco (1988), 20–48. 92 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 27 a. 1 ad 3. I have translated apprehensio as “perception or understanding” in order to covey its dual meanings. 93 Summa theologiae Ia q. 5 a. 4 ad 1. This is clearly inadequate as a definition, since it speaks of beauty solely in terms of vision, whereas Thomas elsewhere (Ia–IIae q. 27 a. 1 ad 3) speaks of beautiful sounds, but not, we might note, beautiful tastes or smells. 94 Summa theologiae Ia q. 39 a. 8 co. 95 Haldane (2004), 248.

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One can immediately see a similarity to Thomas’s account of faith, specifically in the primacy that account accords to the object of faith, while at the same time not ignoring the significance of the act of faith. This similarity invites us to see something that Thomas himself does not make explicit: that one might think of faith in “aesthetic” terms. Faith as a total phenomenon falls, as it were, in the middle ground between the object of faith and the subject who has faith. This allows Thomas to take account of such factors as the presence or absence of love in the one who has faith without thereby reducing faith to a merely subjective state. Just as certain formal features of the beautiful object must be present in order for genuine aesthetic experience to occur, so too genuine faith requires a true object. Arguments from fittingness might be thought of as displaying the orderliness of the economy of salvation in such a way as to move the will to praise God’s goodness by the sheer attractive power of the Word made flesh in Christ, with whom Thomas associates beauty in particular.96 In light of this, the Dominican preacher’s task of moving both the minds and the affections of his hearers might be seen as an aesthetic endeavor. This is not to say that the preacher ought to seek to endow his preaching with a superficial prettiness, so as to tickle the ears of his audience. The beauty of Thomas’s preaching, like the beauty of his theology as a whole, is of a particularly deep and austere sort. Thomas associates beauty with order,97 and his preaching typically takes the form of uncovering the sometimes obscure orderliness of scripture and tradition by spelling out a series of divisions and distinctions that manifest that order. Dominican preaching in the thirteenth century generally followed the pattern of what was referred to as the sermo modernus, by way of contrast with the modus antiquus. The latter was a style of preaching in which an entire passage of scripture was expounded verse by verse—in the manner, for example, of Augustine’s sermons on the psalms. The “modern sermon,” on the other hand, took a single thema—usually a single verse of scripture—and expounded it at great length, normally by an initial divisio of the verse into what the preacher took to be its organic components and then an elaboration of this framework through various methods of dilatatio or development. This development could take various forms: further subdivision; the invocation of “chains” of authorities (either from scripture or the Fathers) linked by common words or ideas; 96 97

See Summa theologiae Ia q. 39 a. 8 co. e.g. Summa theologiae Ia q. 96 a. 3 ad 3; q. 108 a. 5 ad 5.

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interpretation according to the traditional fourfold sense of scripture (particularly the tropological or “moral” sense); the glossing of words in terms of their etymology or philosophical definition; and the use of exempla or illustrative stories that might come from the lives of the saints or folks tales or even pagan literature. Typically several of these techniques would be used in developing the thema.98 This is the pattern that we find in Thomas’s extant sermons. Thomas’s academic sermons—those preached in Latin, mainly as part of his duties as a regent master in Paris—always use a scriptural verse as their thema, usually one taken from the liturgy of the day. For example, in the sermon Exiit qui seminat, probably preached on Sexagesima in 1271,99 Thomas draws his thema from the gospel reading of the Mass, “A sower went out to sow his seed,” which he subdivides into three topics: the seed, the identity of the sower, and the nature of the act of sowing. This is further subdivided—for example, the seed of Christ is from him (ab eo), in him (in eo), and leads toward him (ad eum)—and these subdivisions are fleshed out in various ways. Thomas invokes authorities: scripture, but also Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, Chrysostom, Gregory, and Bernard.100 He also offers allegorical interpretations, for example, of the crop yields in the parable from which his thema is taken: the thirtyfold yield signifies those who do what is required for salvation, having faith in the three persons of the Trinity and obeying the Ten Commandments; the sixtyfold yield signifies those who seek a higher state of perfection through a life of penitence in which the six counsels of perfection101 perfect the Ten Commandments; the hundredfold yield signifies, by means of some fairly obscure mathematics, the innocent who know only spiritual things. In this same sermon Thomas elaborates upon his framework by addressing at some length the objections of those who resist his injunction that sowers ought to go out early in the morning—that is, that people ought to enter religious life in their youth. At the time, the practice of the Dominicans and Franciscans of allowing men to enters while still quite young was much criticized by 98

For a discussion of the sermo moderna see Mulchahey (1998), 401–19; Leinsle (2010),

68–73. 99

For the dating of this sermon, see Torrell (2002a), 363. On rare occasions in other sermons Thomas will invoke Aristotle as an authority. See the sermons Beati qui habitant pars 2 and Beta gens pars 3. Perhaps surprisingly, Thomas cites Aristotle more frequently in his vernacular sermons on the Ten Commandments than he does in his academic sermons; see De decem praeceptis aa. 6 and 7. 101 That is, the six points in the Sermon on the Mount when Christ modified the Old Law with the words “You have heard that it was said. . . . But I say to you . . . ” (See Matthew 5:21–48). 100

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the secular masters at the university—in essence, they charged the mendicants with taking advantage of the enthusiasm of youth—and it is perhaps not surprising that this would occupy a large part of the sermon. Thomas even manages to slip in a reference to the Dominican understanding of the relationship between prayer and study, on the one hand, and preaching, on the other: “a preacher ought first to draw in contemplation what he will pour out later in preaching.”102 Beginning from his brief thema, Thomas unfolds an extensive discussion of the religious life that no doubt sought to strengthen his mendicant confreres in their commitment to their still relatively novel form of religious life as well as to convert the hearts and minds of the secular masters, or at least to rebut their arguments. Thomas’s extant vernacular sermons103 depart somewhat from the model of the sermo modernus, in that they take for their thema texts that were fundamental to the catechesis of lay people, such as the articles of the Apostles’ Creed, or the Our Father, or Ten Commandments. In preaching on these texts Thomas did not typically begin with a division of the thema that would go on to provide the structure of the sermon. The vernacular sermons are also somewhat more “practical” in their content, in that Thomas more frequently appeals to benefits associated with his topic, so as to move the wills of his hearers.104 As he says in his commentary on 1 Thessalonians, “It is the practice of a good preacher to use as an example the blessings coming to others.”105 In the sermons on the Creed, for example, after an explication of the article that is his theme, Thomas often enumerates the benefits associated with that article or those things that might be drawn from the article “for our edification” (ad eruditionem nostrum).106 Likewise, at the beginning of his sermons on the Our Father 102 Sermon 9, Exiit qui seminat pars 3; Thomas makes the same point, in almost the same words, in his Sermon 4, Osanna filio David, pars 2, where he also discusses controversies over the religious life. 103 The sermons that Thomas delivered in the vernacular (that is, his native Neapolitan dialect, since he never learned any other vernacular language) have only been preserved in Latin, in the form of uncorrected reportationes taken down by secretaries (the sermons on the Ten Commandments by Peter of Andria and those on the Creed, Our Father, and Hail Mary by Reginald of Piperno). They thus do not give us anything like the ipsissima verba of Thomas, though there is no reason to believe that they do not convey accurately the content of Thomas’s preaching. 104 This feature is not entirely absent from Thomas’s academic sermons. See, for example, Ecce rex tuus pars 3, which discusses four benefits of the incarnation. 105 Super I Thes. cap. 1 lec. 1 n. 18. 106 See In Symbolum Apostolorum aa. 3, 5, 6, 8; in the prooemium and a. 11 he begins with a discussion of the benefits associated with that article.

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he lists the benefits of prayer and, in explicating the petition “thy kingdom come,” offers three reasons why heaven is desirable.107 In his sermon on the Hail Mary he concludes by describing how the fruits sought by Eve—likeness to God, delight, and beauty—are found in the fruit of Mary’s womb.108 In his sermons on the Ten Commandments he explicates the rewards (desiderabilia) of charity as well as those attached to the commandment to honor one’s father and mother.109 These might at first seem like crass attempts to appeal to a vulgar audience by dangling rewards in front of them. On the other hand, the preacher’s task is to draw the minds and hearts of his audience to God, and Thomas is convinced that part of the attractive power of the gospel lay in the fact that it was actually good news—bona annunciatio—for human beings.110 In highlighting what is beneficial or edifying, or fruitful or desirable in his thema, Thomas is simply presenting it as the gospel, that which promises human beings the deepest sort of happiness. All of Thomas’s sermons, whether delivered originally in Latin to an academic audience or in the vernacular to a predominantly lay audience, are characterized by a lack of rhetorical flourish and by a reliance on the beauty of the structure that the sermon exposes. In some ways this conforms to the stylistic ideal that Humbert of Romans, the master of the order of preachers during a significant portion of Thomas’s life, set out in his treatise De eruditione praedicatorum, in which he said that the preacher must have a voice that is sonorous and a style of speaking that is fluent, but that he should avoid “measured rhythms, metres and rhetorical embellishments,” because “other arts are a matter of ingenuity, but in this art of preaching there is a serious business for the mind to deal with.”111 Thomas seems to have taken these sorts of counsels to heart; John di Blasio, who heard Thomas preach in the vernacular on the Hail Mary in Naples, recalled that, “he preached with his eyes shut and his mind in heaven.”112 Thomas’s sermons appear to have been even more rhetorically austere than most Dominican preaching. He is extremely sparing in his use of exempla, which feature so prominently in much 107

In orationem dominicam prooemium and a. 2. Super Ave Maria a. 3. De decem praeceptis prooemium and a. 6. 110 Super Rom. cap. 1 lec. 1 n. 24. 111 On the Formation of Preachers X.116–20, in Tugwell (1982), 219–20. Given the paucity of manuscripts, it is unlikely that Thomas actually read this work, but it does give us some indication of the sort of thinking about preaching that went on among the Dominicans. 112 Processus canonizationis Neapoli, note 70, in Foster (1959). 108 109

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thirteenth-century preaching and which were assiduously gathered by the Dominicans into exemplaria, collections intended to provide a body of illustrative stories upon which the preacher could draw.113 Even Humbert, for all that he prized rhetorical simplicity, said that exempla, “move [listeners] more than mere words do and are more easily grasped by the understanding and more deeply fixed in the memory and, in fact, are more willingly listened to by many and attract many to sermons by a certain delight [taken] in them.”114 For Thomas, however, it seems that the attractive force of Christianity by which people were drawn to faith was not to be found in the superficial ornamentation of exemplary stories, but in the profound fittingness of Christian truth itself, a fittingness that his preaching seeks to display by articulating the rational patterns within revealed truth. The particular aesthetic quality of Thomas’s preaching, and of his thought as a whole, might be thought of in terms of the comparison, which has become something of a cliche´, between scholasticism in general (and the thought of Thomas Aquinas in particular) and gothic architecture. The neoclassical architect Gottfried Semper was perhaps the first to propose—in his case disparagingly—that Gothic architecture was “scholasticism in stone,” but since the mid-nineteenth century the comparison has been employed by a variety of thinkers, with varying degrees of sophistication.115 The art historian Erwin Panofsky moved beyond the cliche´ to offer an illuminating comparison of scholasticism and Gothic architecture that does not simply point out parallels, but argues for a direct influence of scholastic educational methods upon the “metal habits” of the architects who built the great churches of the thirteenth century.116 Panofsky sees the scholastic habits of mind as prizing above all else, “(1) totality (sufficient enumeration), (2) arrangement according to a system of homologous parts and parts of parts (sufficient articulation), and (3) distinctness and deductive cogency (sufficient interrelation).”117 These values of enumeration, articulation, and interrelation are, Panofsky 113 On the simplicity of Thomas’s preaching style and the absence of exempla, see Torrell, (2002a), 291–4. Torrell’s statement, “one never finds in Thomas the anecdotal exempla that pepper the speech of the preachers of that era” (294), is not, however, entirely accurate. For example, Thomas’s sermon for the feast of Martin of Tours, Beatus vir, incorporates, quite appropriately, a number of exempla from the life of St Martin. On Dominican exemplaria, see Mulchahey (1998), 458–72. 114 Humbert, De dono timoris, quoted in Mulchahey (1998), 461. 115 For a brief overview, see Frankl and Crossley (2000), 295–7. 116 Panofsky (1951), 20–6. 117 Panofsky (1951), 31.

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argues, adopted from scholastic thought and applied to architectural form in the Gothic. This is not a matter of the iconography of the building conveying this or that doctrinal point, but of the very structure of the building itself: its self-presentation as a whole that is at the same time possessed of clearly articulated elements that relate to each other in a rational way. In this way, Gothic architecture makes visible the “fittingness” of its structure as an ordering that is not only beautiful but also does the practical work of distributing the forces that threaten to bring the edifice down.118 This is the kind of beauty we find in Thomas’s preaching and in his thought in general. In a way not unlike the Gothic cathedral’s redistribution of force, Thomas’s theological edifice is compelling to the degree that it is a structure capable of redirecting the stresses produced by the cumulative weight of the Christian tradition in its quest for understanding.119 It is the beauty of a whole that is grasped in the fittingness of its articulation. In the case of Thomas’s preaching, what might strike a modern reader as a somewhat tedious series of divisions and subdivision, without even the momentary relief of a charming exemplum, did not necessarily strike his contemporaries in the same way. His early biographer William of Tocco tells us that when Thomas preached in Rome on Christ’s passion he provoked his listeners to tears, and when preaching on the resurrection he led them to share in the joy of Mary at her son’s resurrection.120 Whether or not Thomas’s listeners responded in precisely the way that Tocco describes, it is clear that the sermo modernus in general had an immense attractive force for an audience fascinated by the ordering power of reason and its capacity to transform both thought and practice. Division and subdivision, rational ordering, and the making of distinctions—these were not simply ways of convincing the minds of one’s hearers, but also had a certain rhetorical force that could sway their hearts by the sheer beauty of order, proportion, and clarity; the same sort of beauty found in Gothic architecture. Thomas in particular sought for a 118 Gothic churches were, of course, highly ornamented. Panofsky’s point, however, is that it is in the articulated structure itself, rather than in its iconography, that we see the mental habits of scholasticism displayed. Dominican architectural legislation, it should be noted, emphasized the decorative austerity of the friars’ churches. See Sundt (1987), 394–407. 119 Though Thomas does not use precisely this analogy himself, in Quodlibet 1 q. 7 a. 2 co. he compares both the bishop and the teacher of theology to the architect who, unlike the artisan, has a comprehensive overview of the project of construction. 120 Tocco, Ystoria cap. LIII. We might take Tocco’s account with a grain of salt, since he also says that immediately after Thomas descended the pulpit a woman with a flow of blood was healed by touching the edge of his cappa.

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manner of preaching that, eschewing surface decoration, manifested an articulated wholeness as a means of drawing in his listeners. This is no less the case with Thomas’s other works. His Latin is almost always unadorned, uncomplicated, never seeking to draw attention to its surface by dazzling the reader, but trusting in the beauty revealed in the manifestation of the fittingness of its subject matter. In a work like the Summa theologiae, Thomas was not only providing information and arguments for the friars he was forming, but also providing them with a model of a certain sort of rhetoric, fostering in them the mental habits that would serve them in their preaching, so that they would be prepared to present the gospel to their hearers in a way that would move them to living faith, a movement that involves both mind and heart. Yet at this point the architectural analogy fails, because while the task of the preacher is in some ways like that of the architect, planning a beautifully constructed edifice, it is in other ways quite different. For what the preacher constructs is not itself the object that draws the admiring assent of his hearers, but rather is a kind of mapping of that object designed to manifest to his hearers the formal features that constitute its beauty. The preacher’s task as instrumental cause of faith is less like the architect of the cathedral and more like the tour guide or art critic, who studies the edifice so as to unfold to others the power of its beauty. The preacher cannot provide apodictic proofs of the revealed mysteries, but he can present those mysteries in such a way that the beauty of their fittingness is presented in its full persuasive force, a persuasive force that can lead to an adherence as firm as that produced by a demonstration from first principles.121 But in the end this adherence is not the work of the preacher, no matter how talented, but of God, who graciously gives the light of faith. This is the difference, Thomas notes, between John the Baptist, who in some ways exemplifies the task of the preacher, and Jesus: “Christ bears witness as the light who comprehends all things, indeed, as the existing light itself. John bears witness only as participating in that light.”122 The inner movement of grace retains its primacy in eliciting the act of faith. If theology is fides quaerens intellectum, for Thomas it is also contemplata aliis tradere, handing on to others the fruits one has gained in

121

Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 1 a. 5 ad 2. Super Io. cap. 1 lec. 4 n. 117. On the figure of John the Baptist in Thomas’s biblical commentaries, see Torrell (2002a), 336–56. 122

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contemplation.123 For Thomas, contemplation in its essence consists in, “the simple act of gazing on the truth,”124 by which he means the divine truth that is God, but which, in an extended sense, also includes the divine effects of both nature and grace.125 Likewise, not only the intuitive act of grasping the truth, but also the discursive process of reasoning from first principles might be included in an extended sense of “contemplation,” and is indeed the prelude to contemplation in the strict sense of the term.126 The faith that seeks understanding finds its terminus not in the formulation of more and better theological conclusions, but in the simple act of gazing upon divine truth. In fides quaerens intellectum, one moves from the articles of faith through a discursive process to a deeper contemplative perception of the object of faith. In contemplata aliis tradere one moves from that deepened contemplative perception back through a discursive process to a rearticulation of the truth that has been seen, so that others might share in the fruits of one’s contemplative insights. The acts of preaching and teaching might be thought of as retracing the steps that faith has taken in its quest for understanding. Thomas went to considerable lengths, in the face of family opposition, to pursue his vocation as a Dominican friar. Why? Some accounts of Thomas’s intellectual project—those that present his achievements as primarily philosophical—might lead one to think that Thomas sought out the Dominicans because their emphasis on study and their presence in universities provided him with an ideal context in which to pursue his Aristotelian philosophical project. This view is not, however, very plausible. Despite exceptions such as Albert the Great, the Dominicans of Thomas’s day were not particularly philosophical in their orientation, and their “study” did not typically consist in perusing tomes of Aristotle, but rather the books of sacred scripture. Nor, for that matter, was the life of a Dominican likely to keep one in a university context: only a small minority of friars was sent to study at a studium generale; an even smaller number became magistri; and at least at Paris the masters typically served only for three years before being employed in Dominican educational institutions. Thomas was unusual in that the demands of the times and 123 Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 188 a. 6 co; cf. Sermon 9: Exiit qui seminat pars 3. This phrase, which seems to originate with Thomas, would become one of the mottos of the order of preachers. 124 Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 180 a. 3 ad 1. For a discussion of the history of the term contemplatio, as well as the correlative Greek term theoria, see Auman (1966), 90–101. 125 Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 180 a. 4 co. 126 Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 180 a. 3 co.

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his own particular talents led him to both an extensive engagement with Aristotle and two different stints as a magister in Paris. But if Thomas were primarily interested in being an Aristotelian philosopher, he would have been better advised to become a secular master in the arts faculty than to become a preaching friar. The obvious answer to the question of why Thomas became a Dominican is that Thomas wanted to do what Dominicans were in fact founded to do: to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ and to care for souls, primarily through hearing confessions. Thomas became a Dominican because he recognized with St Dominic that, as Jean-Pierre Torrell puts it, “to announce what one has understood of the Gospel truth to someone deprived of it is to come to the aid of the worst poverty and to participate in the highest act of divine mercy.”127 Thomas, as a preaching friar, is oriented primarily toward communicating the Gospel of Jesus Christ in such a way that his hearers are disposed to the inner movement of grace. This is what he aims at in all his intellectual work, whether preaching to a lay audience in the vernacular, or teaching his Dominican brothers, or even writing an Aristotelian commentary. As Vivian Boland puts it, “His option for Aristotle is to be understood within his option for the Dominicans.”128 Faith seeks understanding not simply for its own edification, but in order to communicate the mysteries of faith in a way that conforms to the exigencies of rational animals. Faith is, as the Letter to the Hebrews says, the evidence of things that appear not, yet Thomas seeks to articulate the object of faith in such a way that we might catch a glimpse sufficient to draw the will to move the intellect to assent. I have argued that we can find an analogy for this interplay of will and intellect and object in the experience of being captivated by beauty. Like our captivation by a beauty of which we never weary, our captivation by the mysteries of faith has an endless character. As noted above, Thomas says that in faith the mind does not cease it discursive activity. This might seem at first to be a frustration for the mind, which seeks to rest in its object but is condemned to the wearying toil of pondering. Part of the attractiveness of something beautiful, however, whether a natural object or an artifact, is its inexhaustibility: its capacity to continually reveal new secrets that we never tire of pondering. Even more so, the object of faith, beyond any artifact or natural phenomenon, is the endlessly captivating reality that we touch in the act of faith.

127

Torrell (2003), 381–2.

128

Boland (2007), 36.

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PART II FOLLOWING CHRIST

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5 The Way of God Incarnate A well-known story about Thomas recounts how, near the end of his life, in the midst of writing the third Part of the Summa, which treats of the incarnation and of salvation through Christ, he levitated while praying before a crucifix. A voice spoke from the crucifix: “You have written well of me, Thomas; what will you accept as a reward for your labor?” Thomas replied, Domine, non nisi te—“Lord, nothing but you.”1 A skeptical reader might doubt the truth of this story because it features talking crucifixes and levitating theologians. But even a pious reader might be given pause. Though the third Part of the Summa theologiae and the fourth book of the Summa contra Gentiles treat Christology in great detail, Thomas’s Christology is not typically seen as either the center or the crowning achievement of his thought. Alois Grillmeier, for example, asks with regard to the Summa theologiae, “whether in the concrete development of this system Christology does not appear too late in Thomas, as the whole of Christian anthropology and the teaching on grace and Christian life have been elaborated previous to the Christology.”2 Grillmeier does not go on to answer his own question, but one gets the impression that the answer is, “probably yes.” Of course, Thomas has had many defenders who have sought to affirm the centrality of Christ in his theology and to account for the seeming late appearance of Christ in the Summa theologiae.3 Yet, at least in the English-speaking world, Thomas is still best known for his metaphysics and his ethics, and while there is a widespread (though not universal) consensus that an appreciation of Thomas’s theistic convictions is key in understanding his thought in these areas, his Christology is rarely mentioned, and indeed is often presumed to be of little interest—simply a rehashing (albeit a sophisticated one) of 1 This formulation of the exchange is from Tocco, Ystoria cap. XXXIV; cf. Gui cap. 23 in Foster (1959). 2 Grillmeier (1982), 746. 3 See, e.g. Chenu (1964) 314–15; Corbin (1974), 782–806. Healy (2003) might be read as an extended defense of the view that Thomas is, in a sense quite different from Karl Barth, a “Christocentric” theologian.

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standard Western medieval theological views.4 Jesus Christ, however, is absolutely central to Thomas’s theology, and Thomas’s Christology is distinctive in a number of ways. It will be the burden of this chapter to attempt a sketch of the contours of Thomas’s thinking about Jesus Christ, who is for Thomas the way by which we journey to God as well as the divine truth and life that awaits us at the end of that journey.5

1. THE FITTINGNESS OF THE INCARNATION Thomas begins his discussion of Christ in the Summa theologiae by inquiring, in a question consisting of six articles, into the fittingness of the incarnation. This opening question is like an overture that sounds the major themes of what will follow and thus repays close attention. In this overture, Thomas is characterizing the God who becomes incarnate, asking about the conformity between our claims about God and the belief that God has become incarnate in Jesus Christ. In doing this he is not trying to make Jesus fit within a preconceived characterization of God. Rather, Thomas is exploring what aspect of God come to the fore when we affirm in faith that God has assumed a human nature in Jesus Christ.

Self-Communicating Goodness Thomas sees the incarnation as fitting into what is most fundamental about the Christian picture of God: God is the highest good. What is most fitting to something is that which belongs to it by nature, and the nature of the good is to share itself. The better something is—the higher it is on the scale of goodness—the greater its capacity to share its nature: the hotter a burning thing, the more readily it kindles combustible material. If God is the highest good, then it is fitting for God to share his goodness in the highest way possible with creatures, which is to join created nature to himself. In making this argument, Thomas appeals to what might be 4 This view was once expressed to me by a member of Thomas’s own religious order, though he at least had the excuse of being an historian and not a theologian. Even Fergus Kerr (2009), who faults the narrowly “philosophical” approach to Thomas, remarks in his Thomas Aquinas: A Very Short Introduction, that in the first twenty-six questions of the tertia pars that “there is little here that is distinctively Thomas’s own thinking” (88). This may simply be an acknowledgment of the thoroughly traditional character of Thomas’s thinking, but it might also be taken to imply a somewhat routine rehashing of past theologies. 5 Super Io. cap. 14 lec. 2 n. 1868.

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thought of as his “platonic” sources: Dionysius and Augustine. From the former he derives the notion of the self-communicative nature of the good and it is to the latter that he appeals for the notion of the incarnation as the creaturely sharing in divine goodness by means of a union of the Word with an integral human nature, both soul and flesh.6 Thomas sees the incarnation as the supreme instance of divine generosity. This generosity is identical to the generosity we see in creation, though perhaps more intensely present to us. As the Dominican tertiary Catherine of Siena put it, “you clothed yourself in our humanity, and nearer than that you could not have come.”7 Thomas does not deny that there are intellectual puzzles engendered by this belief, but he thinks that these ought not to blind us to the way in which the incarnation is consonant with our conviction that God is the highest good. And in light of this overriding consonance, we can deal with puzzles as they arise. Some of the difficulties are addressed by Thomas in the objections and replies to this article. For example, how is the belief that God became incarnate compatible with a belief in divine immutability? The divine perfection of goodness entails that God is unchanging, since any change could only entail a deviation from that perfection. But if God does not possess a human nature at one particular moment, and does possess a human nature at another particular moment, how is it that God does not change between those two moments?8 Thomas’s reply trades upon his earlier analysis of the “mixed relations.”9 The way Thomas puts the matter is revealing: “The mystery of the incarnation was not brought about through God being changed in any way from the state he had been from eternity, but through his having united himself in a new way to creation or, rather, through having united it to himself.”10 First, by identifying the incarnation as a union between God and creation, Thomas signals that the creator-creature relationship is the proper framework for analyzing this event. And as with any relationship between God and creation, the creature has a “real” relation to God, while God has a “logical” relation to the creature. While a change in a creature might make something true about God at one moment that was not true at an earlier moment—i.e. in 10 BC the statement “God possesses a human nature” is false whereas in AD 10 it is true—this need not imply a change in God, just as the statement “John is shorter than this 6 8 9

7 Summa theologiae IIIa q. 1 a. 1 co. Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, ch. 153. Summa theologiae IIIa q. 1 a. 1 arg. 1. 10 See Ch. 3, Sect. 3. Summa theologiae IIIa q. 1 a. 1 ad 1.

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son” being false in AD 2000 and true in 2010 need not imply any change in John’s stature, since it could be entirely attributable to his son’s growth. Incarnation might be understood as an event that “happened” to God at a particular moment in time, but only in the sense that John’s son surpassing him in height can be understood as an event that “happened” to John. It is certainly true that what was previously false about John is now true, but nothing has happened to John’s stature, except that it is smaller relative to his son. This change is an event concerning John, but not an event “in” John; it is an event “in” John’s son. In replying to this objection Thomas first says that the incarnation is God “having united himself in a new way to creation,” but then corrects himself so as to say more exactly that it is God “having united [creation] to himself.” In other words, the event of incarnation is “in” creation, not “in” God.11 As Thomas puts it is the Summa contra Gentiles, “By reason of the perfection and immobility of the divine goodness, God loses no dignity no matter how closely a creature draws near to him, although this makes the creature grow in dignity.”12

The Ends of the Incarnation Thomas turns in the next article to the question of whether the incarnation was necessary for human salvation.13 Thomas does not want to make the incarnation simply an addendum to God’s dealings with the world, but neither does he want to say that it is strictly necessary, and thereby compromise the gracious generosity manifested in the incarnation. In addressing this question, he does what we might expect: he draws a distinction. As we saw in the previous chapter’s discussion of the kind of necessity associated with “fittingness,” Thomas distinguishes between a means that is absolutely necessary to an end, in the way that food is necessary to sustain human life, and a means that allows the end to be attained in a manner that is “better and more fitting,” in the way that carrots are necessary for health. The incarnation is necessary for human salvation in this latter sense. Thomas says that there were “many” other means by which God could have restored humanity, though he does not presume to specify them. He is more concerned with showing how salvation through incarnation is most conveniens. The fittingness of the incarnation involves the confluence of two things necessary for human salvation: our advancement (promotio) in good and 11 12

See, e.g. Super Rom. cap. 1 lec. 2 n. 37. Contra Gentiles lib. 4 cap. 55 n. 3.

13

Summa theologiae IIIa q. 1 a. 2.

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our removal (remotio) from evil. The incarnation not only fits with God’s nature as self-communicating goodness, but it also fits with the end of human salvation by accomplishing both the union of human beings with God and the forgiveness of sins, necessitated by the Fall. These two effects of the incarnation form for Thomas a fundamental structure within which to think about God’s saving activity: God is always both perfecting and repairing created nature. Romanus Cessario interprets this in terms of the image of God, thus linking salvation to God’s creative purposes: salvation is a matter both of “image perfection” and of “image restoration.”14 This dual focus in thinking about salvation will run throughout the third part of the Summa, both in discussions of soteriology and of the working of grace through the sacraments. Furthermore, Thomas makes clear that both our promotio boni and our remotio mali are accomplished by the incarnation in a variety of ways. The incarnation advances us in the virtues of faith, hope, and love, as well as providing us an example of human excellence and giving us a share in divinity. It likewise removes us from evil by teaching us to scorn the devil and prize human dignity; it humbles our pride by saving us without any merits of our own and showing us an example of divine humility; and it frees us from the slavery of sin by making it possible for repayment to be made for human sin.15 The incarnation as the means of salvation is not, for Thomas, any sort of simple mechanism but, one might say, one filled with redundant systems, any one of which might have sufficed for salvation, but which when taken together reveal the scope of divine love and mercy. As if to underscore the plenitude of saving power in the incarnation, Thomas concludes by saying, “there are very many other benefits that are gained, beyond human comprehension.”16

The Motive and Timing of the Incarnation In the third article Thomas takes up the motive of the incarnation. In Thomas’s day, this question of whether God would have become incarnate if humanity had never fallen was of fairly recent vintage.17 14

Cessario (1990), 128. Cf. Contra Gentiles lib. 4 cap. 54 where many of these same benefits of the incarnation are found, though not described in terms of promotio boni and remotio mali, but rather in terms of beatitude and the fostering of the virtues that lead toward it and the healing of the vices that lead away from it. 16 Summa theologiae IIIa q. 1 a. 2 co. 17 For a succinct historical overview, see Florovsky, (1976). 15

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The earliest examples seem to be in the twelfth century, and among Thomas’s immediate predecessors and contemporaries we find no unanimity: Robert Grossetest, Alexander of Hales, and Thomas’s teacher Albert all say that Christ would have become incarnate, whereas the Dominican Guerric of St Quentin and the Franciscan Bonaventure say that he would not. There is no clearly discernible background presumption determining the position one holds on this issue and Thomas simply notes at the beginning of his reply that, “there are different opinions on this question.” Thomas is often read as staking out a clear negative response to this question. But this way of reading what he says seems to be at least in part the fruit of hindsight, which places what is supposed to be Thomas’s position in contrast with what is supposed to be the position developed by John Duns Scotus several decades later. According to this account of things, Thomas Aquinas holds that sin is the motive for the incarnation, and that if Adam and Eve had not fallen from their paradisal state the Word would never have taken flesh and dwelt among us; Scotus, on the other hand, holds the view that the motive of the incarnation is the uniting of creator to creature in the crowning of creation, and thus would have happened whether or not Adam and Eve had sinned.18 This contrast, however, is too simple, doing justice neither to the position of Thomas, nor to the position of Scotus. In the case of Thomas it ends up affirming precisely what it is that Thomas resists engaging in: speculation about what might have been. In addition to this article of the Summa theologiae, Thomas takes up the issue in a handful of other places.19 His brief reference to this issue in his commentary on 1Timothy, in commenting on the verse, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” (1:15), contains a remark that is indicative of his general approach to the question: God ordained things to happen according as things were to be done. But we do not know what he would have ordained if he had not foreknown sin. Nevertheless, the authorities seem to signify expressly that he would not have become incarnate if man had not sinned, to which opinion I myself am more inclined.20

18 For a brief account of the views of Aquinas and Scotus that presents the question in this way, along with the criticism that Aquinas thereby separates the orders of creation and redemption, see O’Collins (2009), 211. 19 See Super Sent. lib. 3 d. 1 q. 1 a. 3, as well as a passing mention in De veritate q. 29 a. 4 and Super I Tim. cap. 4 lec. 1. 20 Super I Tim. cap. 1 lec. 4 n. 40.

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Thomas clearly thinks that one ought not to spend too much time speculating on this question, since it concerns something hidden within the mystery of God’s will. As such, he says in the Summa, “it can be made known to us only though being revealed in Holy Scripture.”21 While Thomas’s reading of scripture and tradition leads him to note that salvation from sin is consistently spoken of as the motive of the incarnation, he has also argues in the immediately preceding article that the incarnation is fitting inasmuch as it both frees us from sin and advances us in goodness. Moreover, deriving as it ultimately does from God’s liberality, the “why” of the incarnation cannot ever be completely in our intellectual grasp. Therefore, we ought not to say that liberation from sin is the sole reason for the incarnation, and he concludes his argument by saying that “the power of God is not limited to this; even had sin not existed, God could have become incarnate.” What is at stake for Thomas on the occasions that he addresses this question is not, as it will later be for Scotus, the question of the order of God’s intentions. That is, it is not a question of whether it is the glorification of the humanity of Christ or the crowning of creation or the redemption of humanity that has priority.22 Rather, for Thomas this is a noetic question: how can we best grasp the purpose of the incarnation? Particularly in the context of the opening articles of the third part, Thomas seems more interested in the issue of how we would go about answering this question than he is in the question itself. And this is because he is concerned with the stance we take before the economy of salvation. Thomas has argued that while we can speak of a certain kind of “necessity” of the incarnation, this is only the weakest form of necessity—the necessity of fittingness. The incarnation and the salvation it brings constitute a freely chosen act of divine mercy, and as such can only be understood through revelation.23 Given the actual economy of salvation as it plays out in history, our grasp of the “necessity” of the incarnation is strengthened by taking into account not only our advancing in goodness, but also our removal from evil. In the context of Thomas’s opening discussion of the fittingness of the incarnation, his way of answering this particular question shows much about his general approach to how one thinks about the economy of 21

Summa theologiae IIIa q. 1 a. 3. See Scotus, Ordinatio III (suppl.) dist. 19 in McElrath (1980). 23 This is not, of course, to claim that theologians like Scotus, who came to conclusions different from Thomas, were basing their views on scripturally unwarranted speculation. 22

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salvation. While Thomas clearly possesses a mind of great speculative power and scope, he consistently seeks to hew closely to the language of scripture and of the tradition. Reason most clearly manifests truths of divine revelation when it seeks to include all of the data of salvation history. That means in this case that we will better grasp the truth of the incarnation if we seek to understand its fittingness with regard not only to the goal of the perfection of the image of God in human beings, but also to the goal of restoring that image after the fall into sin. The next article flows naturally from this one. Taking up the theme of the incarnation as the remedy for sin, Thomas first makes clear that by the incarnation Christ took away both actual sin (i.e. sins committed by individuals) and original sin. Here his argument grows from the conviction that “if Christ came to take away one sin more than another, it is to the degree that one sin is greater.”24 Thomas notes that in one sense actual sin is greater because of its voluntary nature, while in another sense original sin is greater because of its extent, touching the human race as a whole. Thomas’s point is that Christ is most fittingly thought of as taking away sin in its totality by taking on the pain, though not the guilt, of both original and actual sin, “so that in him death and other such things might be brought to an end.”25 The concluding two articles of this question address the issue of the timing of the incarnation. Not surprisingly, Thomas’s takes as his fundamental principle that “God has determined all things in his wisdom. Therefore God became incarnate at the most fitting time.”26 In other words, we cannot ask whether God should have disposed the economy of salvation differently, since it is taught in scripture that God sent his Son “in the fullness of time” (Galatians 4:4). We might, however, inquire into God’s wisdom in that disposing, so that it might be made more manifest to us. Thomas’s way of doing this takes seriously the historical character of human existence and the correlative historical unfolding of the economy of salvation. In speaking of why God did not become incarnate immediately after the fall of humanity, he speaks of how the human race had to develop over time a profound sense of its need for a redeemer, a sense that could only reach its fullness after human experience of the inadequacy of both the natural law and the law of Moses.27 The human race, existing in the flow of time, could most fittingly be disposed to receive the redeemer 24 26 27

25 Summa theologiae IIIa q. 1 a. 4 co. Summa theologiae IIIa q. 1 a. 4 ad 2. Summa theologiae IIIa q. 1 a. 5 sed contra. Summa theologiae IIIa q. 1 a. 5 co.; see also Super Gal. cap. 4 lec. 2 n. 201.

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by means of a process of historical development, and the seeming delay of the incarnation is really God’s love accommodating itself to the requirements of human nature.28 In speaking in the final article of why the incarnation was not fittingly delayed until the end of history, Thomas’s focus switches from the human need for a historical process of preparation to the efficacy of the incarnation for the perfection of human nature, a perfection that could in no way emerge from a historical process itself. He writes, “The work of the incarnation is to be viewed not as merely the end point [terminus] of a movement from imperfection to perfection, but also as the starting point [principium] of the perfection of human nature.”29 In other words, while the timing of the incarnation is fitting with regard to the historical development of the human race, it is also fitting with regard to the nature of the incarnation as an absolute novelty in history. God incarnate is not the outcome of any natural process of human development, but is solely the result of the divine initiative. The historical development that Thomas sees is not a matter of the immanent realization of evolutionary possibilities, but purely one of an increasing awareness of the inadequacy of human effort and the need for a redeemer. As he puts it in the Summa contra Gentiles, the human race had to be “left to itself for a while to discover that it was not sufficient for its own salvation.”30 The incarnation fittingly occurs neither at the beginning of history, nor at the end of history, but in the midst of history, so as to graciously transform human history. In Thomas’s overture to the third part of the Summa theologiae he not only argues that the incarnation is fitting, but he also develops a picture of God as self-communicating goodness that takes on flesh both for the restoration and the perfecting of the image of God in human beings. In Jesus Christ, not only is he who is fully God at the same time fully human, but his humanity is perfected by the grace of that union, such that Christ is not only the truth of God made visible to us, but also the truth of our own human nature.31 Christ is our pattern of life, our way, because the unique union of divinity and humanity in his person reveals the perfection of the creature’s relationship to the creator. It is in light of this overture that what follows, particularly the rather technical discussions of the hypostatic union, ought to be read.

28 30

See Summa theologiae IIIa q. 1 a. 5 ad 1. Contra Gentiles, lib. 4 cap. 55 n. 11.

31

29 Summa theologiae IIIa q. 1 a. 6 ad 2. Summa theologiae IIIa q. 2 a. 12.

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Thomas’s treatment of the hypostatic union—that is, the union of divinity and humanity in the divine person or hypostasis of God the Son—in the Summa theologiae might well lead one to suspect that Thomas had forgotten that he was writing for beginners and was simply following his own private path of inquiry. Though Thomas proceeds carefully in discussing how humanity and divinity are united in the person of Christ, moving slowly forward through the forest of technical terminology that was bequeathed to later generations by the fifth-century Christological debates, using philosophical tools from Aristotle and others in clarifying and applying that terminology, the end result is in places mind-bendingly difficult. But despite the difficulties of this discussion, Thomas’s purpose remains pedagogical. It is important to remember that Thomas’s seeks as a teacher is to help his students not simply learn doctrine, but also to catch a glimpse of why those doctrines are true. This is not to deny the ultimately mysterious nature of the hypostatic union. Thomas’s analysis culminates in a strong affirmation that the hypostatic union shares in the mystery of God’s own being. It is, however, to affirm that reasoned analysis can help us attain some glimpse of why we must speak of that mystery in the way that we do.

Single-Subject Christology In trying to offer a general characterization of Thomas’s Christology, one might first note what could be called its “Cyrillian” character, by which I mean the strong affirmation of the unity of Christ that is often identified with the fifth-century theologian Cyril of Alexandria and his followers. As many have commented, Thomas’s mature Christology is marked by the fundamental research he undertook into the debates of the fifth century, which gave him a keen sense of what was at stake in those events.32 As complex and obscure as Thomas’s discussion of the hypostatic union often is, the outcomes is a clear affirmation of what might be called a “single-subject” Christology. Like Cyril, Thomas holds firmly that the claim that Jesus Christ is God incarnate can be true only if he is a single divine subject subsisting in two natures, divine and human. In other

32 Torrell (1996), 103, 140. On Thomas’s use of Greek patristic sources in general, see Emery (2007b), 193–207.

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words, when we ask what Christ is our answer is twofold—divine and human—but when we ask who he is our answer is singular: God the Son. As with his discussions of the Trinity, Thomas’s Christology typically employs an analysis of heresies to chart a historical via negativa through failed attempts at grasping the mystery of Christ. This is particularly true in the Summa contra Gentiles and the Compendium theologiae, which proceed by means of an examination of various heretical positions toward a discernment of the Catholic faith in the incarnation as expressed in the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon.33 Thomas’s treatment of these heresies is less extensive and detailed in the Summa theologiae, though they still serve an important heuristic purpose in displaying Christological doctrine. The two poles of error with regard to the union of humanity and divinity of Christ are represented by Eutyches, who stresses the unity of Christ to the detriment of the duality of his natures, and Nestorius, who stresses the distinct integrity of the natures to the detriment of Christ’s unity. This, of course, puts the matter too simply with regard to the historical figures that bore those names, but it does capture something of how Thomas uses them to define the field of Christological opinion. As Thomas presents him, Nestorius, concerned to avoid any “mixing” of the divine and human in Christ, understood Jesus as a human person who is indwelt by the divine person of the Word through grace and who, by virtue of this indwelling, is one with God in intention, operation, and honor. This union with God is different in degree but not in kind from the way in which God indwells any holy person.34 This results in a merely accidental union of a divine person and a human person; the Christ of Nestorius is not one subject, the Son of God, but rather two subjects: the natural Son of God indwelling the son of Mary, who is adopted by God through the grace of that indwelling. Why is this a problem? Thomas says that the New Testament knows nothing of two sons, but only of the one Son of God, to whom is attributed both human properties, such as being born and dying, and divine properties, such as creating the world and bestowing everlasting life.35 Furthermore, Christ must be a single subject or person in order to say truthfully, “I and the Father are one,” since it is the man Jesus who says those words; were Nestorius’s position true, Jesus would have had to say, “The Word who indwells me and the Father are 33 See Contra Gentiles lib. 4, ch. 28–41; Compendium theologiae lib. 1 cap. 202–9. See also Super Io. cap. 1 lec. 7 nn. 166–70; In Symbolum Apostolorum a. 3; Super Philip. cap. 2 lec. 2. 34 See Contra Gentiles lib. 4 cap. 34 n. 2; Summa theologiae IIIa q. 2 a. 6 co. 35 Contra Gentiles lib. 4 cap. 34 nn. 26–8.

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one.”36 In short, Nestorius’s position must be wrong because the gospel narratives present Jesus as a single agent, not as two agents who interact with each other in a relationship of indwelling. The duality in Christ is not to be located on the level of who Christ is—i.e. his person—but on the level of what he is—his natures, which are divine and human. Eutyches is the other pole of Thomas’s dichotomy of heresies. As Thomas understands him, Eutyches taught that Christ is “from two natures (which were distinct before the union) but not in two natures (the distinction of nature coming to an end after the union).”37 In the Contra Gentiles Thomas goes into some detail showing the absurdity of speaking of a “combination” of divine and human natures, arguing that even if such a combination were possible it would mean that Christ was neither truly divine, since he would not be immutable, nor truly human, but rather some sort of tertium quid.38 Invoking Philippians 2:6–7, Thomas maintains that we must be able to say truly that Christ possesses both the “form of God” and the “form of a servant” and if this is to be the case then the unity cannot be located on the level of what Christ is, since the form determines what a thing is and is therefore synonymous with “nature,” but on the level of who Christ is, the Word incarnate.39 In several texts Thomas also considers more recent Christological discussions, as these are found in the “three opinions” discussed by Peter Lombard in his Sentences, which represent different ways of understanding how humanity and divinity are united in the incarnation.40 The first, commonly called the homo assumptus position, holds that the Word of God assumed “some human being” (hominem quemdam) constituted by a body and soul, while maintaining that Christ is a single person. The second, often called the “subsistence” view, speaks of Christ incarnate as a single hypostasis or subsistence constituted of body, soul, and divinity. The third view, known as the habitus view, holds that if soul and body were united to each other in Christ then he would be a human person as well as a divine person, thus falling into the error of Nestorius; to avoid this, the habitus view proposes that in the incarnation the Word is “clothed” with a human soul and body, without the soul and body being united to each other. Over the course of his writings dealing with these 36 Contra Gentiles lib. 4 cap. 34 n. 6; Super Io. cap. 1 lec. 7 n. 176; Compendium theologiae lib. 1 cap. 203. 37 Summa theologiae IIIa q. 2 a. 6 co.; cf. Contra Gentiles lib. 4 cap. 35, n. 2. 38 Contra Gentiles lib. 4 cap. 35 n. 12; cf. Compendium theologiae lib. 1 cap. 206. 39 Contra Gentiles lib. 4 cap. 35 n. 4; cf. Super Philip. cap. 2 lec. 2. 40 Peter Lombard, Sententiarum libri VI, lib. 3 d. 6 cap. 2–4.

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three opinions Thomas’s views develop,41 but from the outset he shows a marked preference for the second of the three opinions, and by the time he writes the Summa theologiae he says that it “is not to be called an opinion, but an article of Catholic faith.”42 As Thomas understands it, the homo assumptus view treats the humanity and divinity as distinct subsistences or hypostases and therefore the claim that Christ is a single person is only a verbal fig leaf placed over what is essentially the position of Nestorius, since “person” is simply the term we use for the subsistence or hypostasis of a being endowed with reason.43 Thomas rejects the third opinion even more strongly, saying in the Contra Gentiles that it is “entirely repugnant to the teaching of the faith,”44 combining as it does some of the worst features of ancient heresies: since his soul and body are not united, Christ is not truly human (the error of Eutyches, Mani, Apollinaris, and others); since the Word is merely “clothed” in this soul and flesh, there is no true substantial union of God and humanity, but only an “accidental” union (the error of Nestorius), such that the Word takes on human qualities but cannot be said to be human.45 It is only the second opinion, in Thomas’s view, that adequately expresses the Catholic faith that in the incarnation Christ truly is both divine and human, a single subsistence or hypostasis composed of divinity, soul and body. And because this subsistence in question is a person— which Boethius’s classic formulation defines as “an individual substance of rational nature”46—we can here speak of a “single-subject” Christology. Thomas’s commitment to a single-subject Christology reaches a point of particular intensity and particular difficulty in his various discussions of the question of the unity of Christ’s esse or act of existing.47 Does the unity

41 As might be expected, Thomas’s lengthiest explicit discussion of the three opinions is found in his commentary on the Sentences, where he devotes to each of the opinions a question consisting of several articles. See Super Sent. lib. 3 d. 6. See also Quodlibet 9 q. 2 a. 1 ad 1. Other discussions of Lombard’s “three opinions,” though not explicitly identified as such, can be found in Contra Gentiles lib. 4 cap. 37–9; Compendium theologiae lib. 1 cap. 209–11; and Summa theologiae IIIa q. 2 a. 6. 42 Summa theologiae IIIa q. 2 a. 6 co. 43 See Compendium theologiae lib. 1 cap. 210. Thomas’s estimation of this opinion shifts over time. In Super Sent. lib. 3 d. 6 q. 1 a. 2 he considers the view to be nonheretical. This has changed by the time he writes the Summa contra Gentiles. 44 Contra Gentiles lib. 4 cap. 37 n. 2. 45 Contra Gentiles lib. 4 cap. 37 n. 10. 46 See Summa theologiae IIIa q. 2 a. 2 co.; Contra Gentiles lib. 4 cap. 38 n. 2. Boethius’s definition is found in his Contra Eutychen et Nestorium cap. 3. 47 Super Sent. lib. 3 d. 6 q. 2 art. 2; Summa theologiae IIIa q. 17 a. 2; Compendium theologiae lib. 1 cap. 212; De unione Verbi a. 4. For a discussion of how Thomas’s approach to this question was viewed by other theologians in the thirteenth century, see Brown (1998), 220–37.

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of Christ’s person mean that he is a single existing thing, or does the duality of his natures imply a duality of existence: human and divine. In his various discussions of this issue, Thomas consistently maintains that Christ has a single act of existing: that of the divine Word. This Thomas calls esse personale, which might be translated as “existing-as-a-person.” Esse personale is the existence that one has as a particular concrete entity that is the ascriptive subject of propositions. It is grammatically and conceptually equivalent to a proper name and as such it can only be used in the singular. However, we can also speak of the being “by which” something is the kind of thing it is. In his Quaestio disputata de unione Verbi incarnati this is what Thomas calls the esse secondarium. The terminology is unique to this particular work, but the idea itself hardly is. In all cases, Thomas sees as primary the existence Christ has as the subject of ascription.48 Thus we can say that it is on account of his human nature that Christ exists as human, but his human nature does not, obviously, make him exist simpliciter. The act of existing of the incarnate Jesus Christ is numerically identical with God’s own act of existence. This, for Thomas, is the Catholic faith in the incarnation: in Jesus Christ a human being exists by virtue of the divine act of being itself, allowing us to say that this man is God. How then ought we to think of the existence of Christ’s human nature? If it does not have its own act of existence, in what sense can it be said to exist at all? If we say that it does not exist, then we have fallen into the error of Eutyches and deny the humanity of Christ. If we say that it exists in relation to the person of the Word in the same way that an accident exists in relation to a substance then we posit only an accidental union of humanity and divinity, which, from the perspective of Thomas’s singlesubject Christology, smacks of Nestorianism. Thomas solution is to posit a part-whole model rather than the substance-accident model: Christ’s human nature has the kind of existence that a part has in relation to a whole. That is, there is a sense in which a part is an individual sort of thing, but it only exists as the thing it is because of its relation to the larger whole of which it is a part. So, for example, we can only speak of parts known as “motherboards” because larger wholes exist called “computers.”

48

Jean Pierre Torrell (2002b) writes in reference to Summa theologiae IIIa q. 17 a. 2, “there is only a single being in Christ that corresponds to the unity of person designated by the name ‘Christ’; but the author contests neither in this article nor others that the human nature of Christ also possessed its being in the manner which is proper to nature (that is to say as a quo and not as a quod)” (vol. 3, 308).

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While the motherboard does not blink out of existence when removed from the computer, and might well be put to use as a coaster, it can only be meaningfully spoken of as being “a motherboard” because of its relation to that of which it is a part. Thomas writes, “although the human nature is a kind of individual in the genus of substance, it does not have its own personhood, because it does not exist separately but in something more perfect, namely, in the person of the Word.”49 As Eleonore Stump puts it, “anything that is or would be a substance existing on its own ceases to be a substance in its own right when it is included within a larger whole.”50 Christ’s human nature is, as in the case of all other humans, constituted by his being a composite of body and a rational soul. In the case of other humans, however, this body-soul composite constitutes them as human persons— individual substances of a rational nature. In the case of Christ, however, the would-be personhood is subsumed into the personhood of the divine Word, and thus his esse personale is that of the Word. Put differently, Christ’s human nature belongs to his divine person not in the way that my shirt belongs to me, but in the way that my eye or my hand does. Thomas’s view is, on the whole, clear. This does not mean that it does not present difficulties, puzzles, and aporias. C. J. F. Williams sums up succinctly one difficulty with Thomas’s single esse approach: “How can the infinite divine existence be contracted by becoming the existence of this finite human essence, or nature?”51 One might similarly ask how a human nature or essence can have a divine act of existence without being co-eternal with God? It is not at all clear that Thomas has an answer to these “how” questions. In sacra doctrina, however, the arrival at a “how” or “why” to which one cannot provide an answer is not necessarily a sign of failure; indeed, it might be precisely this that is a sign of success. For the goal of sacra doctrina is not to arrive as a final explanation but rather the proper locating of mystery by distinguishing it from both the rationally knowable and the nonsensical. Through our reasoning process we might know why we must speak in the way we do about Christ’s esse, given the even greater inadequacies of the alternatives, without grasping how it is true that a human nature could exist by virtue of its union to the divine Word. One might say that the reason Thomas has no answer to the “how” of this is because this simply is the mystery of the incarnation. The single esse personale of Christ locates the hypostatic union on the level of the 49 50

Summa theologiae IIIa q. 2 a. 2 ad 3. 51 Stump (2003), 409. Williams (1968), 519.

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mystery of the divine esse, and by so doing signals the irreducibility of this mystery. As Thomas notes at one point, the grace of union “is above all genera even as the divine Person himself.”52 The hypostatic union is incomprehensible because it is the unity of that which non est in genere, and thus one should not be surprised that Thomas says that “to explain this union perfectly is beyond the strength of human beings.”53

Consequences of the Union Of course, Thomas’s discussion of the hypostatic union yields more than ineffability; it helps him to makes sense of some of the more extravagant and peculiar Christian claims, such as the claim that Jesus of Nazareth is the creator of the stars or that the Lord of Glory was crucified.54 Such statements involve what is traditionally called the communicatio idiomatum or “exchange of properties.” Because Thomas holds that the incarnation means that a single divine subject or suppositum subsists in two distinct natures, what is true of Christ according to either of those natures can truly be predicated of the divine subject. Because Jesus of Nazareth is the divine Word incarnate, “Jesus” and “Word” have the same referent (in technical terms, they have the same “supposition”) and, at least in a logical sense, it makes no difference whether we are speaking of Jesus or the Word, we are referring to the same subject. Because this single subject possesses both a divine nature and a human nature, things that could only be true of God and things that can only be true of a creature can both be said about this subject. This is why we can say that the one who was born of the Virgin Mary in Bethlehem was eternally begotten of the Father and the one who created the universe hung in agony on the cross. And these are not metaphorical or poetic statements but are literally true, since the Word truly possesses a divine nature and a human nature. While strongly asserting the unity of Christ as the subject of whom we speak, Thomas is also careful to distinguish the natures by which we are authorized to speak as we do, which he does by means of what is sometimes called a “reduplicative strategy.”55 That is, when we are speaking most strictly we ought to say, “Jesus of Nazareth, as divine, is the creator of the stars” and “the Lord of Glory, as human, was crucified,” thus indicating by the reduplicative “as” phrase the nature by virtue of

52 54

53 Summa theologiae IIIa q. 7 a. 13 ad 3. Contra Gentiles lib. 4 cap. 41 n. 9. 55 Super 1 Cor. cap. 2 lec. 2 n. 92. See Summa theologiae IIIa q. 16 aa. 10–12.

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which the statement is true of the subject. As Thomas explains in his little work De rationibus fidei, It is the same man who sees and who hears, but not by virtue of the same thing, for he sees by virtue of his eyes and hears by virtue of his ears; likewise it is the same apple that is seen and is smelled, but the former is by virtue of its color and the latter is by virtue of its odor; for this reason we can say that “the seer hears” and “the hearer sees,” and that “the thing that is seen is smelled” and “the thing that is smelled is seen.”56

As Thomas indicates, in actual speech we often omit the reduplication, leaving it implicit (e.g. “the hearer [as one also possessed of eyes] sees”). So long as one recognizes the implicit reduplication this is unproblematic, but if confusion is likely—as, for instance, in the statement “Christ is a creature,” which might be taken as a statement of the Arian view of the Trinity rather than a shorthand way of saying “Christ, as human, is a creature”—then, for pastoral rather than for strictly logical reasons, one should avoid such phrases.57 Thomas, however, is not only interested in the logical and linguistic consequences of the incarnation. A person is not simply a grammatical subject but is also a center of activity; as Thomas notes, “to act for an end belongs not to a nature but to a person.”58 At the same time, it is the nature in which a subject subsists that determines the sort of activities that subject engages in: a plant can engage in the activity of reproduction because it has a vegetative nature and an animal can see and hear because it has a sensate nature. The Word’s assumption of a human nature in the incarnation is also the assumption of a capacity for human activities, such that those activities are the activities of God. Contrary to any “Nestorian” dividing up of the acts of Christ in the flesh, in which his weeping at the tomb of Lazarus is the act of his humanity and the raising by Christ of Lazarus from that same tomb is the act of his divinity, Thomas sees in Christ the activity of a single agent, the divine Word. At the same time, because the Word subsists in two natures, he has two kinds of activity, human and divine. The one agent has two sorts of acts that occur together without division or confusion. To describe this Thomas borrows a term from Dionysius the Areopagite: “theandric,” which he translates variously as deivirilem (“divinemanly”) and divinamhumanam (“divino-human”).

56

57 De rationibus fidei cap. 6. Summa theologiae IIIa q. 16 a. 8. Super Rom. cap. 1 lec. 3 n. 51; cf. Summa theologiae IIIa q. 20 a. 1 ad 2, which cites Aristotle’s Metaphysics bk. 1, ch. 1, 981a in support. 58

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While Christ weeps by virtue of his human nature and raises the dead by virtue of his divine nature, it is the one subject Jesus Christ, the divine Word, who weeps and who raises.59 In order to speak of how the divine word acts in a human way by virtue of his human nature, Thomas takes over from John of Damascus the notion of Christ’s humanity as the “instrument” of his divinity.60 This allows him to give Christ’s human nature its due, for John is at pains to stress that each nature has its own distinctive “operation,” even though there is a single agent or “operator.” The divine agent wields the human flesh as its instrument, but the instrument contributes to bringing about the effect in a way that is “shaped” by the nature of the instrument. We might think of the carpenter who desires to cut a piece of wood. If the carpenter chooses to employ an axe in this task the wood will be cut in one sort of way, but if the carpenter uses a saw the wood will be cut in another sort of way. While the tools can do nothing unless wielded by the carpenter, and in that sense are not the source of the activity, they do have, in a real sense, an activity that is proper to them. Moreover, it is by virtue of the axe wielded by the carpenter that he is able to act in an “axe-like” way. As Thomas notes, “what is moved by another has a twofold action—one which it has from its own form—the other which it has inasmuch as it is moved by another.” This twofold action, however, is always done in a relationship of profound interpenetrating activity: “the moved shares in the operation of the mover, and the mover makes use of the operation of the moved, and, consequently, each acts in communion with the other.”61 Christ, in all of his actions, performed human actions divinely and divine actions humanly.62 Colman O’Neill notes that the instrumentality of Christ’s humanity is an essential element in Thomas’s Christology: “It is the means by which St Thomas introduced into Western theology the richly suggestive intuition of the Greek Fathers that the very union of God with human nature brought redemption to all that is human.”63 In other words, in Thomas’s Christology the Eastern emphasis on the redemptive nature of 59 Thomas discusses this in a number of places: See Super Sent. lib. 3 d. 18 q. 1 a. 1; Contra Gentiles lib. 4 cap. 36; Summa theologiae IIIa q. 19 a. 1; De unione Verbi a. 5; Compendium theologiae lib. 1 cap. 212. 60 John of Damascus, The Orthodox Faith, bk. 3, ch. 15. This idea does not originate with John, but is typical of the Alexandrian approach to Christology championed by Cyril. 61 Summa theologiae IIIa q. 19 a. 1. Cf. De veritate q. 27 a. 4 co. 62 Summa theologiae IIIa q. 19 a. 1 ad 1. 63 O’Neill (1965), 243–4.

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the incarnation itself is joined to the more typically Western focus on the passion of Christ as salvific. In what might at first seem like a particularly fanciful piece of exegesis, Thomas makes a profound point: The Lord says in Genesis 9:13: “Behold, I will establish my bond with you and your seed after you. I will place my arch between me and you,” namely, in the sign of peace. By this arch God’s Son is signified, because, as the arch is brought forth by reverberation of the sun on a cloud of water vapor, so Christ is brought forth from the Word of God and from the human nature, which is as the cloud.64

Here, the hypostatic union itself is presented as the “sign of peace” between God and humanity. This offers an extremely rich understanding of Christ as the one who saves us by virtue of his theandric activity, which finds its focal instance in the suffering and death by which he reconciles fallen humanity. But, as we shall see, the suffering and death of Christ are located by Thomas within the larger context of all of Christ’s acts and, indeed, his very act being itself, in which humanity and divinity are brought into union. In this sense, Thomas already begins his soteriology— the doctrine of salvation—in his discussion of the hypostatic union and its consequences.65

3. CHRISTOLOGY AND CREATION Given the architectonic role of creation in Thomas’s thought, it is no surprise that he always seeks to locate the relationship of divinity and humanity in the incarnation within his larger understanding the creatorcreature relationship.66 The delicate interplay of divine and human natures in the person of Christ is a reflection of Thomas’s constant concern to do justice both to the creator and the creature. As we have seen, he uses the “mixed relations” that characterize God’s relationship to creation as a way of understanding how the incarnation does not necessitate any change or alteration in God, while at the same time allowing the 64

Sermon 5: Ecce rex tuus, pars 2. This might in part account for why soteriology per se receives such a seemingly brief treatment in the Summa contra Gentiles, appearing to be confined to chapter 55 in the fourth book. Perhaps Thomas felt that most of what needed to be said had been already said in the detailed treatment of the person of Christ. 66 David Burrell, in his review of Richard Cross’s The Metaphysics of Incarnation, stresses the importance of creation as the context for incarnation, and faults Cross for not attending to this. See Burrell (2004c). For Burrell’s own brief account of the difference that attention to Thomas’s teaching on creation makes in how we read his Christology, see Burrell (2004b). 65

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incarnation to be a genuine novum in human history. Likewise, John of Damascus’s understanding of Christ’s humanity as an instrument of his divinity plays as a variation upon Thomas’s understanding of creatures as secondary causes, which depend entirely upon God as primary cause, while not themselves ceasing to be genuine causes. Thomas seeks to show that the theology of God as creator, properly understood, in no way runs counter to Christology. This perhaps reflects the origins of the Dominicans as preachers against the Cathars, who denigrated material creatures as the product of an evil divine or quasi-divine force and for whom Christ was, in the words of Malcolm Lambert, “a wraith or a visiting angel and not a man.”67 In contrast to this, Thomas presents a Christology that both exploits his more general insights into creation and gives Christ’s humanity its full due.

Creator and Creature In discussing the fittingness of the incarnation, we have already seen how Thomas addresses some of the possible conflicts generated by the claim that the creator of the universe has been joined to a human nature. For Thomas, the incarnation of God is fitting because it coheres with an entire picture of the relationship between creator and creature that can be characterized as “noncompetitive” or “noncontrastive.” As we saw in examining the “five ways,” central to Thomas’s understanding of God is the insight that God is not a “thing” alongside other things, but rather is the answer to the question of why there is anything at all. Thomas claims that God is not contained in any genus, not even the genus “substance,” which means that God is not a particular—for example, “uncreated”— kind of thing.68 And because God is not a thing of an uncreated sort that is distinct from created things, there is no sense in which God and creation are rivals in a zero-sum game. The world does not need to be less so that God can be more; rather, the self-communicating goodness of God gives things their existence. How does this view of creator and creation as noncompetitive play itself out in Thomas’s Christology? In at least two of Thomas’s works, we find raised against the statement “God is a human being” the objection that the proposition is in “remote matter” (materia remota).69 What does

67 69

68 Lambert (1992), 145. Summa theologiae Ia q. 3 a. 5 ad 1. Super Sent. lib. 3 d. 7 q. 1 a. 1 arg. 8; Summa theologiae IIIa q. 16 a. 1 arg. 1.

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this objection amount to? In his commentary on Aristotle’s Peri hermeneias Thomas explains the terminology: If the predicate is per se in the subject, it will be said to be an enunciation in necessary or natural matter. Examples of this are, “a human being is an animal” and “a human being is able to smile.” If the predicate is per se repugnant to the subject, as excluding the notion of it, it is said to be an enunciation in impossible or remote matter; for example, the enunciation “a human being is a donkey.”70

Thus the objection that the proposition “God is a human being” is in remote matter amounts to the claim that the terms “God” and “human being” are mutually exclusive and contradictory: to say that “God is a human being” makes no more sense than saying that “a human being is a donkey.” Thomas’s response is to say that in the case of “God is a human being” the proposition is not in remote matter but in natural matter. This is because the divine person subsists in a human nature such that the human nature of Jesus has no subject other that the divine Word. The human nature of Jesus is the nature of the Word. Thomas’s response to this objection might seem question begging, simply offering a counter-assertion to the objection. Here again it is important to relocate claims about incarnation within the larger context of claims about creation. Claims about the relation between the natures of Christ must not be thought along the lines of claims about possible relations between creatures, but along the lines of the relation between creator and creature. The claim that “God” and “human being” are not contradictory terms in the way that “donkey” and “human being” are grows from the view that God is not a being alongside other beings, but rather the reason why there are beings at all. God is not a kind of being. It would be nonsense to say that there is a donkey who is a human being because donkeys and human beings share the genus, “animal,” within which they are differentiated from each other by the specific difference “rational”—that is, they are different kinds of animal, one rational and the other not. Therefore by a simple application of the

70 Expositio Peryermeneias lib. 1 lec. 13. Thomas also notes a third possibility: “If the predicate is related to the subject in a way midway between these two, being neither per se repugnant to the subject nor per se in it, the enunciation is said to be in possible or contingent matter.” Thomas is thinking here of accidental predication, such that there is no conflict in a fruit being orange in color and round in shape. He does not think this applies to the case of “God is a human being” because he thinks that Christ’s humanity is best thought of not as an accident of the divine Word, but rather as something like an integral part.

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law of noncontradiction we can conclude that there can be no animal that is both rational and not rational at the same time. But there is no common genus uniting, and thus no specific difference separating, God and human beings. Therefore there is no contradiction in saying that “God is a human being.” As C. J. F. Williams asked, “Finite natures exclude each other, certainly: but does a finite nature exclude, or is it excluded by, an infinite nature? . . . Do we know enough of what it is to be God to be able to say with confidence that such a being could not— logically could not—become incarnate?”71 Or, as Henk Schoot memorably puts the matter, “God is not different from creatures the way in which creatures mutually differ. God differs differently.”72 To point this out is not, of course, to offer a rational argument in proof of the claim that in the incarnation “God is a human being,” nor is it to offer proof for any other of the most mysterious and piquant statements of the Christian faith: “The Virgin Mary gave birth to God” or “The eternal Word was born in time” or “God died upon the Cross.” But it is to show that these statements are not irrational. For Thomas these statements are certainly mysterious, but are not by any means nonsensical. Indeed, the coherence of almost everything that Thomas, and the Christian faith in general, would want to say about the incarnate Word hangs upon the noncompetitive relationship between God and creatures. For example, the claim that Christ has two wills, divine and human, both of which are free,73 makes no sense if we presume that divine and human freedom are competitive in such a way that the more a human will submits to God the less free it becomes. Divine freedom should not be envisioned as in equipoise with human freedom, but rather as its enabling ground. It is only when creatures seek to separate their will from God’s will through sin that the conflict between those wills appears, not in a clash of freedoms, but in the human loss of freedom. If we think of our wills in terms of the divine goodness shared with free creatures, then there is no contradiction in the claim that Christ has two wills. Reading Christology in light of Thomas’s doctrine of creation can serve as a hedge against a mythological understanding of Christ that Christians have sometimes been prey to. Many of the heresies of the fourth and fifth centuries arose from the presumption that the more Christ was divine the less he was human and vice versa. In Thomas’s own day, the Cathars’ denial that Christ was a fully embodied human being represented a revival 71 72

Williams (1968), 523. See also McCabe (1987), 57–8. 73 Schoot (1993), 144. Summa theologiae IIIa q. 18 aa. 4–6.

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of this muddled thinking, and modern debates over “low” and “high” Christologies fall into the same error of thinking of divinity and humanity in competitive terms. Thomas understood that it is only if we can eliminate the idolatrous notion that God is a kind of thing that we will be able to think in a coherent manner, not only about creation, but about the incarnation.

Christ’s Humanity One of the significant features of Western Christianity in the high Middle Ages is a renewed emphasis on the humanity of Christ, ranging from Anselm’s reinterpretation of the passion of Christ as an act of satisfaction made by Christ as a representative of humanity to the tender Franciscan devotion to the Christ child in the manger. This was of a piece with the burgeoning humanism of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and provided a significant counter-force to the Cathar views on materiality and the docetic character of their Christology. While some modern theologians have suggested that Thomas’s Christology has monophysite and even docetic tendencies,74 he, no less than other theologians in his day, clearly places a significant emphasis on Christ’s humanity. In fact, on a number of points Thomas underscores Christ’s humanity in a way that exceeds many of his contemporaries. One place where Thomas’s attentiveness to Christ’s humanity can be seen with particular clarity is in his discussion in the Summa of the empirical knowledge Christ has as human. As noted in the Chapter 4, Thomas parts company with most of his contemporaries and with his own earlier position that Christ only appeared to learn as he progressed through life in order to affirm that Jesus, like any human being, acquired knowledge through experience. Perhaps the most problematic text for medieval theologians was Luke 2:52: “Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature.” This text, as well as the general picture of Jesus in the gospels, seems to depict him as someone capable of learning through experience, and this seems somehow integral to the depiction of his humanity. 74 Adolph von Harnack (1961), the great liberal protestant historian of dogma, wrote: “Thomas made the greatest effort to give such predominance to the divine factor that the human became merely something passive and accidental; as he was influenced by the Areopagite, he continued also, in a very real way, the Greek Monophysite Christology” (vol. 6, 188). For a recent version of this charge see Cross (2002), 57–62. Even Eleonore Stump (2003), who is on the whole favorably disposed toward Thomas’s Christology, speaks of his “tendency to emphasize the divine nature of Christ at the expense of his human nature” (454).

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Theologians took up a variety of positions with regard to these texts.75 Hugh of St Victor, in a position that echoed that of many of the Fathers, held that while Christ had a human rational soul that gave life to his body, his human knowledge was simply his soul’s finite sharing in the divine knowledge that he possessed by virtue of the hypostatic union. Consequently, there was no real increase in his knowledge, but only in human beings’ estimation of that knowledge.76 Peter Lombard was more willing than Hugh to speak, not simply of a sharing in divine wisdom by the human soul of Christ, but of two wisdoms in Christ: one human and one divine. Yet in the end his position differs little from that of Hugh, since Lombard held that the human knowledge of Christ was not had through empirical acquisition, but through divine grace, and thus he did not see any room for a genuine growth in Christ’s knowledge.77 With regard to the extent of this grace-given knowledge, the human soul of Christ knows everything that God knows, though not “as clearly and sharply as God does, so that it is not equated to its creator in knowledge.”78 In the thirteenth century, Bonaventure and Albert the Great both offer a fourfold division of knowledge in Christ: the divine knowledge that he has as the Word, the beatific knowledge that his human soul has, the knowledge that corresponds to Adam’s pre-Fall state, and the “experimental” or “experiential” knowledge that comes through the senses.79 By implication in Albert, and explicitly in Bonaventure, this last sort of knowledge is associated with humanity’s fallen state.80 Further, Albert sees the human act of knowing through the senses as serving to “stimulate” (excite) Christ’s infused knowledge, whereas Bonaventure tends to speak of Christ coming to know in one way—i.e. “experimentally”—what he already knows in another way—“by the knowledge of simple intelligence” (i.e. infused knowledge).81 In neither of these cases, however, can we speak of Christ “learning” according to the normal human pattern of

75 For a brief historical survey of the question, see Hayes (1992), 32–9 and Torrell (2002b), 421–9. 76 Hugh of St Victor, De sacramentis lib. 2 pars 1 cap. 6. 77 Sentences lib. 3 d. 13 n. 8–9. 78 Sentences lib. 3 d. 14 cap. 1 n. 3. 79 For Albert, see In Sententiae lib. 3 d. 13, a. 10; for Bonaventure, see In Sententiae lib. 3, d. 14, a. 3, q. 1. In Breviloquium pars 4 cap. 6, Bonaventure gives a fivefold distinction, distinguishing the knowledge had due to the integrity of Christ’s human nature from the knowledge infused by grace. 80 For Bonaventure, see In Sententiae lib. 3 d. 14, a. 3, q. 2 ad 3. 81 In Sententiae lib. 3 d. 14, a. 3, q. 2.

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knowing. His “advancing in wisdom” remains simply a matter of an increasing manifestation to others of his wisdom. Thomas’s early writings follow the view of his teacher Albert. In his commentary on the Sentences, in fact, his position on the lack of acquired knowledge by Christ is stated even more strongly than Albert’s.82 As in Bonaventure, the most Thomas will concede is that in his experimental knowledge Christ comes to know what he already knows, but knows it in a new way.83 It is in this way that Christ can be said to “advance in wisdom.”84 As late as the Compendium theologiae (1265–7) Thomas holds a position on Christ’s growth in human wisdom that is within the mainstream of medieval theology: Luke 2:52 is referring to the increasing manifestation of Christ’s wisdom, or at most to his acquiring through experience the wisdom already infused in his soul.85 In his late writings Thomas comes to a keener appreciation of the need for Christ to have a fully functioning human psychology in order to secure the integrity of his human nature. Thomas’s concern is the Christological one that Jesus be human in every way that we are apart from sin, which is undergirded by the soteriological concern that, as Gregory of Nazianzus put it, “what is not assumed is not healed.”86 Thomas, however, was very much in accord with other theologians of his day in affirming that Jesus possesses divine knowledge as the Word of God, as well as all possible forms of human knowledge: i.e. not only knowledge acquired through experience, but also the beatific vision enjoyed by the blessed and an infused knowledge akin to that of the prophets or angels. Perhaps Thomas’s views on this capacious possession of divine and human knowledge by Christ is one source of the charge of Docetism made by some modern theologians against him. Difficulties arise when we try to imagine the internal psychological experience of Christ, trying to take account not

82

83 Super Sent. lib. 3 d. 18 a. 3 ad 5. Super Sent. lib. 3 d. 14 a. 3 qc. 5. De veritate q. 20 a. 6 ad 3. 85 Compendium theologiae lib. 1 cap. 216. In this text Thomas subdivides the infused knowledge of Christ into two: that which pertains to what is naturally knowable by humans and that which is knowable by grace. At no point, however, does he identify Christ’s experimental knowledge with the fallen state of humanity. Indeed, he holds that Adam, prior to the Fall, knew things through sense images; see Summa theologiae Ia q. 94 a. 2. In Ia q. 94 a. 3 ad 3 Thomas says of Adam what he says elsewhere of Christ: that his experimental knowledge did not alter the number of things he knew, but only the way in which he knew them. This indicates that at least as late as 1268 his position on Christ’s knowledge was probably unchanged. One wonders whether his reconsideration of Christ’s knowledge might have led him to reconsider Adam’s knowledge. 86 Epistle 101, to Cledonius in Hardy (1954). 84

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only of his divine and human knowledge but also his three different sorts of human knowledge. But imagining Christ’s mental states does not seem to have been of much concern to Thomas or to other thirteenth-century theologians. His concern is Christological and soteriological. If Christ is both human and divine then he must surely possess both sorts of knowledge, just as he must possess two wills. Moreover, Christ as redeemer cannot give what he does not himself possess, since a cause must possess actually what the recipient of the action possesses potentially; therefore, if Christ is to be the cause of our blessedness, which consists in the vision of God, he himself must possess the beatific vision.87 Likewise, if he possesses knowledge most perfectly, it would be unfitting for him to be denied knowledge of things outside of the range of his immediate experience, whether this be a matter of time or distance, when such knowledge was granted to the prophets.88 Modern theologians who see Thomas’s views on the knowledge of Christ as quasi-docetic might simply be imposing upon him concerns about Jesus’s subjective experience that are peculiar to our own era. If Thomas’s views are quasi-docetic, then the entire Christian tradition before him and for several centuries after him is no less, and perhaps considerably more, docetic. But the charge of Docetism—that Christ only appeared to be human—seems itself misconceived. There is certainly nothing about possessing the beatific vision that makes one less human; Thomas would think that our humanity is only enhanced by the vision of God. Nor were the prophets less than human because of their divinely infused knowledge. While the modern interest in subjective experience is certainly legitimate, it was not Thomas’s concern. Thomas’s chief interest was to understand what it means for Christ to be both viator (one on pilgrimage to beatitude) and comprehensor (one who has attained beatitude). To transpose Thomas’s concern from the Pauline language of the “vision of God” into the synoptic language of the “kingdom of God,” we might say that Thomas presents Christ in his humanity as one who lives fully in the kingdom that he proclaims, while still identifying fully with us who are yet on pilgrimage to that kingdom. Another place in which we can see Thomas’s concern for the humanity of Christ is in the attention that he pays in the Summa theologiae to “what things the incarnate Son of God did and underwent ( fecit vel passus est) in the human nature united to him.”89 This phrase “did and underwent,” 87 88

Summa theologiae IIIa q. 9 a. 2. Summa theologiae IIIa q. 11 a. 1.

89

Summa theologiae IIIa q. 27 pr.

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along with similar phrases in the Summa and elsewhere, are Thomas’s shorthand way of speaking of the narrative depiction of Jesus in the gospels as one who both acts and is acted upon. Encompassing questions 27–59 of the tertia pars, this discussion includes what we might normally think of as the soteriological “work” of Christ—i.e. his passion and resurrection—but also includes his conception and birth, circumcision, baptism, manner of living, temptation in the wilderness, teaching, miracles, transfiguration, ascension, and final return in glory. In other words, Thomas integrates what today we would call his “soteriology” into a more comprehensive account of Jesus’ life as given to us in the gospels. This represents a significant departure from both Lombard’s Sentences and Thomas’s own commentary on the same, which pass from a treatment of Christ’s will via a discussion of his merits to a treatment of Christ’s death.90 Thomas is quite distinctive among his contemporaries in making the events of Christ’s life the subject of dogmatic inquiry. A work like Bonaventure’s Lignum vitae employs the life of Jesus as material for prayerful reflection, but it seems that it was only Thomas who, in his Summa, inquired into such matters as the fittingness of the place and time of Jesus’ birth, whether he should have been circumcised or written his teachings down, the significance of his miracles in proving his divinity, and so forth.91 It perhaps goes without saying that arguments from fittingness play a prominent role in addressing these questions, since God incarnate could arranged the details of his life in a number of different ways. At the same time, Thomas shows that the particular details of the life that Jesus lived have about them the necessity of fittingness, especially in terms of his mission both as a revealer of God’s Word and as one who would reconcile humanity to God. Thomas’s employment of elements associated with thinking through the creator-creature relationship in noncompetitive or noncontrastive terms uncovers the false dichotomy underlying the Cathars’ docetic Christology and opens the way to the affirmation of the full humanity of Jesus, including his learning through the activity of his agent intellect. 90 The questions of the Summa concerning Christ’s life prior to the passion have received little commentary. For example, Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange’s detailed commentary on Thomas’s Christology skips from question 26 to 46. See Garrigou-Lagrange (1950). A recent exception is Torrell (1999). 91 According to Torrell (1999), vol. 1, 26 it is not until Francisco Suarez in the latter half of the sixteenth century that we find a similar example of doctrinal reflection on the life of Christ.

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It also allows him to affirm the significance of the events of Jesus’ earthly life as revelatory: in such embodied human activities as being born or having friends or teaching or dying, God is revealed. More generally, the very project of thinking through Christology in conjunction with creation stands as a rebuke to the Cathars’ dualistic cosmology, for it offers creation as the proper context for Christology. Thomas’s non nisi te in no way implies an abandonment of created realities. Christ saves not by plucking us out of the world in all its materiality, but by perfecting our created nature through joining it to the divine nature.

4. SALVATION THROUGH CHRIST Thomas’s understanding of redemption undoubtedly fits within a “medieval” and “Western” type of soteriology, with its focal point in the cross as that by which Christ makes satisfaction or repayment to God for human sin and thereby vicariously merits salvation for humanity.92 This focus on the cross and on satisfaction does not, however, exhaust Thomas’s understanding of salvation through Christ. Thomas also incorporates themes of the defeat of evil, the bestowal of grace, the moral example of Jesus, the resurrection as the efficient cause of our resurrection, and so forth. As Thomas puts it, “if someone considers with pious intention the fittingness of the suffering and death of Christ, he will discover such a depth of wisdom that something more and greater will occur to him any time he thinks about it.”93 The proliferation of approaches to salvation in Thomas should lead us to question whether the whole notion of a dominant “medieval” or “Western” type of theology is not itself something of a caricature. At the very least, Thomas himself presents a richness of perspectives and approaches in his account of the saving work of Christ that outstrips such characterization. Of course, one person’s “richness” is another person’s “incoherence,” and Thomas’s inclusion of differing approaches within his soteriology has itself become an occasion for criticism. The judgment of Adolph von Harnack on Thomas’s soteriology was multa, non multam—many items that do not amount to much as a whole, being a “wavering” between different viewpoints concerning redemption found in the Christian tradition and their 92 This characterization of Western medieval soteriology can be found in Aule´n (1969), esp. ch. 5. 93 De rationibus fidei cap. 7.

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diverse emphases on the necessary and the contingent, the objective and the subjective, the one-time forgiveness of sins and the ongoing life of penance.94 In what follows I will attempt to show that Harnack is mistaken and that Thomas’s soteriology has both complexity and coherence.

Priestly Mediation There are many possible points of entry to Thomas’s understanding of salvation. As we have already seen, Thomas speaks of the ends of the incarnation in terms of advancement in good and removal from evil, or what Cessario calls “image perfection” and “image restoration.” But what is the specific role of Christ in this twofold task? Thomas’s Summa theologiae is unusual among the writings of thirteenth-century theologians in offering an extended discussion of the priesthood of Christ. Jean-Pierre Torrell suggests that this theme, which was not much mentioned in Thomas’s earlier works, became important to him after his commentary on the Letter to the Hebrews, which was itself a text that was not much commented on at that time: in addition to Thomas’s commentary we know of one, now lost, by Albert the Great, one by Guerric of St Quentin, and an anonymous work that circulated under the name of Hugh of St Cher.95 It is noteworthy that all of the known commentaries on Hebrews from the mid-thirteenth century are ascribed to Dominicans. Perhaps because, in contrast to the Franciscans, they were from the outset an order of priests and clerics, the Letter to the Hebrews was of particular interest to Dominicans in understanding their own priestly identity. In discussing the priesthood of Christ, Thomas identifies the role of the priest as the work of mediation: the priest both “communicates divine things to the people” and “offers to God the people’s prayers and to some degree makes repayment to God for their sins.”96 The priest as mediator stands at the juncture of the descent of divine wisdom and blessing, on the one hand, and the ascent of human prayer and sacrifice, on the other. Both directions of movement must be recognized if the priestly work of Christ is to be given its due. This means that Christ’s sacrificial death, in which he is both priest and victim, must be understood within the context of his mediatorial activity as a whole.97 94

95 Harnack (1961) vol. 6, 196. Torrell (2002b) vol. 3, 353. Summa theologiae IIIa q. 22 a. 1 co. 97 While we ought not to focus too much on the order in which things are mentioned, it is worth noting that in treating of Christ’s activity as a priest Thomas speaks first not about the 96

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How does Christ as mediator communicate divine things to us? In one sense, we might speak of the hypostatic union itself as a kind of “mediation,” since “were he purely a human being or only God, he would not be a true mediator.”98 As noted before, the incarnation is a reconciling act of God, by which divinity is communicated to humanity, and not simply a prelude to the cross: “insofar as it was received into fellowship with a divine person, our nature was ennobled and exalted by being conjoined to God.”99 It is not only in the hypostatic union, however, that Christ communicates divine things to us, but also in all that he did and suffered in the unity of his person. In discussing Christ’s manner of life in the Summa, Thomas notes that Christ’s life as a whole served the incarnation’s threefold purpose of proclaiming the truth, freeing human beings from sin, and giving them access to God.100 Thus Thomas notes that, “since Christ’s humanity is the instrument of his divinity . . . all the things that Christ does and undergoes [omnes actiones et passions Christi] operate instrumentally in virtue of his divinity for the salvation of human beings,” and it is in light of this general principle that Thomas sees Jesus’ death as salvific.101 At the same time, Jesus’ sufferings and death provide, as it were, the interpretive key to his life, revealing the significance of its details. In his De rationibus fidei, Thomas speaks succinctly of the various ways in which the life and death of Christ mediate salvation. Being born to poor parents and leading a life of poverty, deprived of any social status; bearing the burden of work, hunger, thirst, and bodily torment; finally, dying the shameful death of the cross—by all of this he shows us that neither the love of bodily goods nor the fear of bodily evils ought to turn us from spiritual goods. Further, Christ comes to reveal divine truth to us with an authority that ought to exclude all doubt, an authority attested to by his miracles, the divine source of which is brought into sharp relief by the humility and simplicity of his life. The power of his teaching is further attested by his choice of the uneducated and lowly to be his ascending offering of sacrifice, but the descending communication of “divine things” (divina) to humanity. 98

Super Gal. cap. 3 lec. 7 n. 169. Thomas elsewhere clarifies that Christ can be spoken of as mediator by virtue of his composite person only in a loose sense, since as mediator he stands “between” God and humanity and must therefore be inferior to God, which is something true of his human nature but not of his divine person. For this reason it is insofar as he is human that Christ can, in the strict sense, be called a mediator. See Super Sent. lib. 3 d. 19 q. 1 a. 5 qc. 2 co. 99 In symbolum apostolorum a. 3 co. See also Super Heb. cap. 8 lec. 2 n. 392. 100 Summa theologiae IIIa q. 40 a. 1 co. 101 Summa theologiae IIIa q. 48 a. 6 co.

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messengers. People were willing to suffer poverty, persecution, ridicule, and even death for the sake of his truth, showing that they did not preach in order to gain any human advantage but in order to submit themselves wholly to God.102 All of this might be thought of as belonging to the “downward” motion of mediation, in which Christ bestows upon his followers the pattern of divine life as this is lived out in a world of sin: a life of poverty and suffering and renunciation. In De rationibus fidei, it is only after having discussed this that Thomas then turns to what we might see as the “ascending” motion of mediation: Christ’s offering of himself to the Father on our behalf in order to make repayment for human sin. But even on the cross, this upward motion of mediation is made comprehensible by being located within the entire context of Christ’s mediatorial work: the poverty and suffering of the cross is at the same time a human offering to God and a revelation of divine wisdom to human beings. In his commentary on John, Thomas cites with approval Augustine’s remark that Christ hanging on the cross is like a teacher in his teaching chair.103 Without in any way implying that Thomas’s slights the sacrificial death of Jesus, it is important to recognize that this sacrifice does not exhaust Christ’s work as mediator. A soteriology that places importance on such things as the teachings and moral example of Jesus, or on his passion as the revelation of God’s love to sinners, is sometimes placed in opposition to a soteriology that focuses on the cross as a sacrifice. This is clearly not the case with Thomas, for whom the priestly work of Christ included both ascending and descending mediation. We should recall that, as a Dominican, Thomas belonged to an order of clerics who grounded their priestly ministry not only in the ascending mediation of offering the sacrifice of the Mass, but also in the descending mediation of God’s Word through preaching and the care of souls, and who looked to Christ as the exemplar of their mode of life.104 It does not seem too far-fetched to think that the expansive Dominican understanding of priestly ministry would have 102

De rationibus fidei cap. 7. Super lo. cap. 19 lec. 4 n. 2441. Cf. In symbolum Apostolorum a. 4, where Thomas appeals (without specific citation) to Augustine for the view that “the passion of Christ suffices for completely modeling our life.” 104 Humbert of Romans cites Christ as the precedent for the centrality of preaching to the ministry of the Dominicans: “When Christ was in this world, he celebrated Mass only once, on Maundy Thursday; we do not read of him ever hearing confessions, he administered few sacraments and those infrequently, he did not very often assist at any canonical divine worship; you will find that the same thing is true of all the practices mentioned above, except prayer and preaching. And once he started preaching, we find in the gospels that he is 103

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influenced Thomas’s views on the nature of Christ’s role as mediator, such that within the encompassing category of “mediator,” the downward movement of revelation and grace is the necessary complement of the upward movement of sacrifice.105 If we bear this in mind, we can better understand what Thomas says about Christ’s death as making satisfactio or “repayment” for human sin.

The Efficacy of the Cross The passion of Jesus is the focal point of Thomas’s soteriology, revealing the significance of his life of poverty and labor and hunger; it is where all of the virtues of Christ, which we as members of his body are called and graced to imitate, are most vividly displayed; it speaks most eloquently of God’s love revealed in Christ, the love that converts the hearts of sinners. But the suffering and death of Christ also has a specific efficacy as a meritorious act of repayment, sacrifice, and redemption. It doesn’t simply show us something; it does something. Thomas’s discussion of the efficacy of the cross in question forty-eight of the Summa shows that even this focal point it itself multifaceted. Thomas begins his discussion with a consideration of the meritorious nature of Christ’s passion. Though it has become a term heavily freighted with theological polemic, the term “meritorious” simply means deserving of reward; when we speak of something being merited by someone, we mean that it is given to that person out of justice. A worker merits her salary from her employer on account of her day’s work, and a son merits an inheritance from his father on account of his status as son. In the case of human beings meriting something from God, whether an earthly benefit presented as having devoted his whole life to preaching, even more than to prayer” (On the Formation of Preachers XX.269, in Tugwell (1982), 258–9). 105 Thomas Rausch faults Thomas for introducing an overly “cultic” understanding of the priesthood into the Dominican tradition, undercutting the more “prophetic” thrust of earlier Dominicans. See Rausch (1999). While it is true that Thomas sees holy orders as “principally ordered to consecrating the body of Christ and dispensing it to the faithful, and to cleansing the faithful from their sins” (Contra Gentiles lib. 4 cap. 75, n. 1), this does not exclude the importance of teaching and preaching as a priestly role. Addressing the question of whether a priest must know the whole of sacred scripture, Thomas notes that while a priest can be ordained simply to celebrate Mass, priests who (like Dominicans) exercise care not only over Christ’s Eucharistic body but also over his mystical body, the Church, ought to have sufficient knowledge “to know what people have to believe and fulfill in the law” (Super Sent. lib. 4 d. 24 q. 1 a. 3 qc. 2 ad 1). Thus it would seem that, as Thomas conceives it, the fullness of priesthood, which is possessed eminently by Christ, includes both the “prophetic” and the “cultic.”

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or grace or eternal life, any meriting on the part of the human being rests upon the prior gift of divine grace and this can be “merit” only in a qualified sense. That is, human beings merit eternal life from God on account of their status as sons and daughters of God, but this status is itself a gift, given in adoption through Jesus Christ. There is something somewhat paradoxical about any discussion of human “merit” in relation to God, since the basis of our meriting anything from God is the unmerited grace that God gives us through Christ.106 As Thomas puts it, “a human being obtains from God, as a reward for his doing, what God gave that person the power to do in the first place.”107 It is only by virtue of this gracious adoption that human beings can be said to merit, strictly speaking. Christ, as Son by nature and not by adoption, merits salvation in strict justice, and not simply for himself but for all those who are incorporated into his mystical body. Thomas begins his exploration of the efficacy of Christ’s passion in the Summa with a discussion of Christ as head of the mystical body, which addresses at the outset the difficult question of how the good action of one person can be to the benefit of another. In the case of other human beings, this is not possible, at least if we mean “merit” as a matter of justice. If my father is a good man and pleads with a judge to mitigate my sentence for grand theft, the judge might be moved to reduce my sentence, but this would be an act of mercy, not of justice, since it is my father’s goodness that is being rewarded, not mine. But in the case of the members of Christ’s body, because of their incorporation into Christ they participate in the merits of Christ their head such that they can receive salvation as something that is truly theirs in justice.108 This can help us see why the merits of Christ’s cross are not simply imputed to Christians in, as it were, a legal fiction, but truly belong to them to the extent that they are joined to Christ in love. Thomas writes in the disputed questions De veritate that, “Christ and his members are one mystical person. . . . Thus, when something is given to us on account of Christ’s works, that is not opposed to the statement of the Psalms (61:13): ‘You will render to every person according to his works.’ ”109 Even more strikingly, Thomas says in his commentary on the Psalms, “Christ transforms himself 106

Summa theologiae Ia– IIae q. 114 a. 3. Summa theologiae Ia –IIae q. 114 a. 1 co. 108 See Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 114 a. 6. 109 De veritate q. 29 a. 7 ad 7. Nieuwenhove (2005), 290 suggests that this strong element of participation makes the language of “substitution” inappropriate as a way of describing Aquinas’s understanding of salvation. 107

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into the Church and the Church into Christ.”110 At the foundation of Thomas’s understanding of salvation through the cross we find a theology of the mystical body of Christ. It is only once Thomas has established this foundation in the participation of Christians in Christ that he proceeds to discuss satisfactio (which I have tended to translate in this chapter as “repayment”) in the second article of question forty-eight. The language of satisfactio had been used in connection with the sacrament of penance at least since Tertullian as a way of talking about the acts of reparation done by the penitent.111 It is Anselm who first integrates this notion into the Christian understanding of the work of Christ.112 Though often identified as the Western understanding of the saving significance of Christ’s death, not only the terminology but also anything resembling the Anselmian conception of satisfactio is absent from Lombard’s Sentences. In Book 3, distinction 20, where Thomas and other thirteenth-century commentators would locate their discussions of satisfactio, Lombard focuses primarily on the defeat of the devil by the righteousness of Christ. This simply underscores the soteriological pluralism of the thirteenth century: Anselm’s was one approach among several. While Anselm’s theology of salvation is important for Thomas, JeanPierre Torrell is correct when he says that satisfactio is not the “key element” (clef de vouˆte) in Thomas’s account, if by this he means that it is not a concept that can be understood in isolation.113 As we have seen, Thomas begins his discussion of the efficacy of the passion with a treatment of how Christ merits for us, which is a necessary presupposition for understanding what he says about satisfactio. Furthermore, Thomas’s account of the efficacy of the passion will also involve a specification of satisfactio in terms of the biblical categories of “sacrifice” and

110

Super Psalmos 21 n. 1. See Tertullian, De paenitentia. For a brief discussion, see Pelikan (1971), 147–8. 112 For a general account of Anselm’s argument, found in his Cur Deus Homo?, and its historical setting, see Southern (1990), 197–227. 113 Torrell (1999), 398. In contrast, see Pesch (1988), 323, who describes satisfactio as the “decisive soteriological category” in Thomas. It appears that for Pesch it is God’s acceptance of the satisfaction of Christ, rooted in God’s eternal saving will, that is the key to all of Thomas’s theology of salvation. There is one sense, of course, in which this is true, though I would tend to place more emphasis on conventientia as a form of necessity and not simply, as Pesch styles it, a way of dealing with contingency, and thus would want to underscore that God’s acceptance of Christ’s sastifactio is not merely an act of divine benevolence, but is also a supremely fitting act. Pesch seems to fear that speaking of the “fittingness” of the passion risks blunting the edge of the folly of the cross. See Pesch (1988), 318–22. 111

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“redemption.” Thomas also shows an independence from Anselm on a number of points. In particular, Thomas softens what seems to be Anselm’s claim that the repayment offered by the Deus-homo is absolutely necessary for human redemption. Thomas follows other twelfth- and thirteenth-century thinkers in retrieving Augustine’s insight that salvation through the death of Christ was not strictly speaking necessary, since God in his omnipotence could have simply forgiven the sins of humanity, but was the most fitting way to redeem humanity.114 Thomas also, as we shall see, places relatively more emphasis on the love and obedience that Christ offers to God and somewhat less emphasis on the notion of God’s offended honor. In its most obvious sense, satisfactio refers to an action or a gift by which one seeks to make amends to someone whom one has offended or harmed. The cognate English term “satisfaction” can be misleading, since it usually indicates a subjective sense of contentment with a state of affairs, while the Latin satisfactio is more objective in its meaning: one can receive satisfactio whether one feels contented or not. The only real survival of this more objective sense of “satisfaction” is found in the phrase “I demand satisfaction,” by which one means not that one demands contentment, but rather that one wants to be duly compensated for damages inflicted. Thus the language of satisfactio presumes that an offense has been committed for which the offended party must be compensated. This compensation might be thought of as having a threefold aspect: 1) the offended party is mollified, 2) the damage to the order of things is repaired and 3) the offending party is enabled to engage in actions that transform him or her from being unjust to being just. As Thomas uses the term satisfactio, it must be purged of some of its connotations in being put to a theological purpose. First, while sin is an offense against God, it does not literally “damage” God.115 When we sin, we take from God what rightly belongs to him: our love and obedience. But being deprived of human love and obedience in no way diminishes God; rather, it diminishes human beings, who suffer the effects of their damaged relationship with God. It is these effects, including physical death, that Thomas calls the “penalty” (poena) of sin: not something

114

On the necessity of Christ’s repayment through his passion, compare Cur Deus Homo? lib. 1 cap. 19 and Augustine, De Trinitate lib. 13, cap. 10 n. 13; but see also Cur Deus Homo? lib. 2, cap 5, where Anselm retreats somewhat from the language of necessity. For Thomas’s view, see Summa theologiae IIIa q. 46 aa. 1–3. 115 See Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 47 a. 1 ad 1.

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extrinsically imposed by God, but the intrinsic effects of alienation from God.116 Further, because we speak of God’s “anger” in a metaphorical sense only, since God is not subject to passions,117 we cannot literally speak of satisfactio as mollifying God or of turning away God’s wrath. The “anger” of God of which scripture speaks is simply a way of speaking of the effect of sin, as a violation of divine order, on us.118 Satisfactio, therefore, cannot be thought of as effecting any change in God, but rather of effecting a change in us, so that we cease to suffer the guilt that is an intrinsic effect of sin. When applied to the divine human relationship, the first aspect of satisfactio blends into the third. Keeping this in mind, we can look at what Thomas says in the Summa in addressing the question of “whether Christ’s suffering brought about our salvation by way of satisfactio.”119 He makes no attempt to offer a detailed reproduction of Anselm’s argument and his treatment of the question is extraordinarily terse. He simply notes that in making repayment for an offense that has been committed, one must offer something to the offended party that he or she loves more than he or she hated the offense. The love and obedience that motivates Jesus to suffer, and which he offers to God, is more than the offense of the entire human race because 1) of the greatness of his love, 2) the worth of his life, being the life of one who was both divine and human, and 3) the depth of his suffering, which included not only bodily suffering but also interior sorrow over the sins of the entire human race, which he knew intimately.120 Therefore Jesus’ passion is not only sufficient to make satisfactio for the human race, but in excess of any requirement of strict justice. In his replies to the objections, Thomas fills out this spare picture somewhat. He first refers back to the previous article, in which he establishes the mystical body of Christ as the context in which to understand the saving work of Jesus: Christ can offer repayment on our behalf because “the head and limbs are like one mystic person.” Moreover, he clarifies that the bond that joins head to members is love (caritas): insofar as any two people are one in love, the one can make satisfactio for the other. This theme of love as the key to understanding satisfactio is 116

See Summa theologiae Ia –IIae q. 87 a. 1. See, inter alia, Summa theologiae Ia q. 3 a. 2 ad 2. 118 See De veritate q. 23 a. 3 co.; Super Psalmo 17 n. 6; Super Eph. cap. 4 lec. 10 n. 263. 119 For other discussions of satisfactio in Thomas, see Super Sent. lib. 3 d. 20 q. 1 aa. 1–4; Contra Gentiles lib. 4 cap. 54 n. 9, cap. 55 nn. 22–7; Compendium theologiae lib. 1 cap. 226. 120 On this last point, see Summa theologiae IIIa q. 46 a. 6. Here is another instance in which the fullness of Christ’s knowledge has soteriological significance. 117

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underscored in the reply to the second objection, which notes that the love that motivated Christ to suffer was greater than the malice of those who inflicted that suffering on him. Finally, in reply to the third objection Thomas refers to the hypostatic union of humanity and divinity in Christ, by which the human suffering of Christ is given infinite value because it is the suffering of a divine person. This Anselmian point is one that he brings out more clearly in some other texts. In his commentary on Hebrews he notes, “it was necessary that there be one who was human, and ought to make repayment, and one who was God, who alone has power over the whole human race and who therefore could make repayment on behalf of all human beings.”121 What emerges from this brief discussion? Perhaps most striking is the emphasis on the love that was the motive for Christ’s passion. As Thomas puts it in the Contra Gentiles, “the death of Christ had its power to satisfy because of his love, by which he voluntarily endured death.”122 Any “compulsion” in Jesus’ death on the cross is purely the compulsion of love. In treating the sacrament of penance later in the Summa, Thomas notes that “love demands that a person should grieve for the offense committed against his friend, and that he should be anxious to make repayment to his friend.”123 The image here is not really one of a monetary debt owed to someone, but of a relationship of friendship that has been broken because we have not treated our friend as we ought. Sin takes from God the love and obedience that is by nature owed to him by rational creatures. Therefore the “debt” of sinful humanity that Jesus repays on our behalf, as a representative of the human race, is a debt of love and obedience. Two points should be noted concerning this emphasis on the love that motivates Christ’s passion. First, by underscoring love, Thomas mitigates any but the weakest sense of necessity in Jesus’ death. The death of Jesus has value only because it is something that he freely undergoes out of love. Of course, this is a love that is only “proven”—to us, not to God— through death, but it is this love, rather than the death of Christ per se, that God wills. Thomas writes in the Contra Gentiles, “though the will of God is not for the death of human beings. . . . the will of God is for the virtue by which a person bears death bravely, and in charity exposes himself to the dangers of death. The will of God was for the death of Christ, in that Christ undertook that death in charity and bore it bravely.”124 Likewise, in his commentary on Romans Thomas writes, 121 123

Super Heb. cap. 2 lec. 4 n. 143. Summa theologiae IIIa q. 84 a. 5 ad 2.

122

Contra Gentiles lib. 4 cap. 55 n. 24. 124 Contra Gentiles lib. 4 cap. 55 n. 17.

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“God the Father gave him up to death by appointing him to become incarnate and suffer and by inspiring his human will with such love that he would willingly undergo the passion.”125 The death of Jesus is in accord with the divine will inasmuch as the goodness of Jesus, his absolute love of God and neighbor and his unswerving loyalty to God’s kingdom, was willed by God in full knowledge that sinful human beings would crucify him on account of that love and loyalty. Second, while Christ’s making repayment to God involved him bearing the penalty of human sin, this should not be understood as a penalty extrinsically applied by divine justice. Recall that poena refers to the “natural” consequences of sin, which follow upon our distancing ourselves from God, the source of our existence, including sickness, vulnerability, and death. While Thomas sees satisfactio as involving the bearing of a “penalty,” his emphasis is not on the exaction of divine justice, but on the love-motivated willingness with which one takes on that penalty. Thus in his later writings he clearly distinguishes the poena of satisfaction from the poena of “punishment” as we usually conceive it—i.e. a penalty imposed by a judge. The latter, which Thomas calls “vindictive justice,” can restore the objective order of justice, but only the former, in which one willingly atones for the harm that has occurred, can effect “the reconciliation of friendship [reconciliatio amicitiae].”126 If we see the poena involved in Christ’s passion in this light, it distances Thomas’s understanding of satisfactio from any crudely “penal” understanding of the cross, in which divine justice requires that sin be punished by death, which penalty is then paid by Christ, upon whom the divine wrath falls in our stead. Such a view can be found, for example, in the early thirteenth-century guide for anchoresses known as the Ancrene Wisse: “So ‘our beating fell on him’ (Isaiah 53:5) because he put himself between us and his Father, who was threatening to strike us, as a compassionate mother puts herself between her child and the angry, stern father, when he is about to beat it. Our Lord Jesus Christ did this, took the death-blow himself, to shield us from it, thanks be to his mercy.”127 Here we see the love of Christ placed in 125

Super Rom. cap. 8 lec. 6 n. 713. Summa theologiae IIIa q. 90 a. 2 co. This is a shift in his position as found in Super Sent. lib. 4 d. 15 q. 1 a. 1 qc. 1, where Thomas seems willing to give the name of satisfactio to something imposed on someone unwillingly, and d. 15 q. 1 a. 1 qc. 2, where he says that penance is a part of vindictive justice. Cessario (1990), 77 speaks of the “juridical” understanding of satisfaction that we find in Thomas’s commentary on the Sentences, which he contrasts with his later, more “personalist” view. 127 Ancrene Wisse part 6, translated in Savage and Watson (1991), 182. 126

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opposition to the exacting of justice by the Father, as a turning away of divine wrath. Thomas’s understanding of satisfactio, in contrast, sees Christ as healing the effects of sin through restoring humanity’s friendship with God, which he effects by taking on human vulnerability and death for the sake of the love of God.128 We risk misunderstanding what Thomas means by satisfactio or “repayment” unless we see that the “debt” that Christ settles on our behalf is the infinite debt of love owed by rational creatures to the source of their existence.129 Thomas’s account of Christ’s passion as an act of love is underscored when in the next two articles he extends his discussion of the efficacy of the passion to include the biblical categories of sacrifice and redemption. There is, of course, no question that the suffering and death of Jesus constitutes in some sense a sacrifice, since scripture itself speaks in this way (Thomas cites Ephesians 5:2 in the sed contra of the article). The bulk of Thomas’s discussion in article three is taken up with quotations from Augustine that serve to highlight the distinctiveness of Christ’s sacrifice. First, he quotes from book ten of The City of God to establish that true sacrifices are offered, “in order that we may be united to God in a holy fellowship [sancta societate],” a statement that obliquely directs us back to the mystical body of Christ, which is the foundation of Thomas’s discussion of the efficacy of the passion. Christ’s passion is a “true” sacrifice because it is motivated by love, which is the bond uniting the holy fellowship of God and humanity. What is key is not the external form of the sacrifice, but the inward disposition of Christ as the offerer: in discussing the symbolic fittingness of the cross as the instrument of Christ’s death, Thomas stated earlier, “in Christ’s burnt offering the material fire was replaced by the spiritual fire of charity.”130 Thomas then quotes Book 4 of Augustine’s De trinitate, concerning how every sacrifice can be thought in terms of to whom it is offered, by whom it is offered, what is offered, and for whom it is offered. The quotation goes on 128 Gerald O’Collins misreads Thomas’s use of the verb placare in speaking of the effect of this satisfactio, as implying the “placating” of a wrathful God, rather than the more general sense of “reconciliation.” According to O’Collins (2009), “this helped open the way, sadly, to the idea of Christ propitiating an angry God by paying a redemptive ransom” (210). While I agree with O’Collin’s negative evaluation of such a view, I do not think the blame for it can be laid at Thomas’s door, since 1) such a view was already present in Western theology and 2) Thomas distinguished the justice involved in satisfactio from vindictive justice. 129 On the infinity of the debt of love that humanity owes to God, Thomas writes that love of God, “is so good that one ought always to make further progress in it and is the kind of debt that a human being ought always to pay” (Super Eph. cap. 5 lec. 1 n. 269). 130 See Summa theologiae IIIa q. 46 a. 4 ad 1.

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to note that in the sacrifice of Christ the priest by whom the sacrifice is offered is also what is offered, and because of the unity of humanity and divinity in Christ the one to whom the sacrifice is offered is also the one for whom the sacrifice is offered. This point, which Thomas has already made in a somewhat more diffuse way in discussing the priesthood of Jesus,131 indicates the perfection of Christ’s sacrifice, overcoming as it does the alienation and dissimulation that shadows all other sacrifice. As a human practice, sacrifice always runs the risk of falling into a purely mechanistic transaction between people, their appointed priestly representative, and the gods; it is a practice that opens up the possibility of insincere worship and a blood-thirsty God. The profound solidarity of priest, victim, beneficiaries and God that is found in Jesus’ sacrificial death is itself the reconciliation that the sacrifice seeks. Seen in this way, Christ’s death is sacrificial in a manner quite different from all other sacrifices: it is neither an effort to curry favor with the divine, nor is it a mere pointer to a hopedfor future reconciliation, as were the sacrifices of the Old Law. It is a sacrifice that is uniquely effective for reconciliation between God and humanity. Thomas then turns in article four to the passion as an act of redemptio, which literally means “buying back” or “ransom.” Here Thomas is faced with the issue that much troubled both Anselm and Abelard in the twelfth century: the “rights” of the devil with regard to sinful humanity. Given the scriptural language of Christ “redeeming” us (e.g. 1 Peter 1:18, Galatians 3:13), and the ancient Christian imagery of the human race in thrall to Satan, the question naturally arises: from what captivity are we redeemed and to whom is this price of redemption paid? Despite their differences, Anselm and Abelard were agreed that because of the fundamental injustice of his actions, the devil had no “right” to humanity and thus could not justly be paid a ransom for the redemption of humanity.132 As the second objection in Thomas’s article puts it, “deceit and cunning should not benefit anyone.” There is also a more subtle difficulty raised by the language of “buying back,” which is that even if a ransom is paid to God and not the devil, this still makes salvation an act of mercantile transaction rather than an act of divine love. In attempting to sort out the language of redemptio, Thomas notes that there are two ways in which sin makes us captives: the bondage of sin 131

See Summa theologiae IIIa q. 22 aa. 2–4. For Anselm’s rejection of the notion of the “rights of the devil” to fallen humanity, see Cur Deus homo? lib. 1 cap. 7; for Abelard, see Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans lib. 2, 3:26. 132

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itself, in which we are subjected to the devil, and our bondage to the debt of poena, in which we unwillingly suffer the effects of sin according to divine justice and so are subjected to God. We are freed from this dual bondage through the passion of Jesus, which restores to God humanity’s love and obedience and thereby breaks the hold of the devil over the human race and transforms humanity’s subjection in justice to God into subjection in love.133 This clearly avoids the difficulty of giving the devil a just claim over humanity, but does it avoid the implication that God must be “paid off” in order to save us? The imagery of redemptio is too thoroughly biblical for Thomas to avoid it entirely, and so he describes Christ’s passion as quasi quoddam pretium, which we might translate as “a sort of a kind of a price.” But he immediately makes clear that the ransom that is paid is Christ himself—his total gift of himself in love and obedience to the Father. We call this the “price” because this is what Christ handed over in the act of saving humanity. In other words, Thomas reads the “price” of redemption in terms of Christ’s satisfactio, such that the debt that is paid is the debt of love. Thomas’s treatment of the efficacy of the passion in question fortyeight is rounded out by two final articles. Article five asks whether the role of redeemer is “proper” (proprium) to Christ. Thomas’s immediate concern in the body of this article is to establish that, while the divine Trinity is the first cause of our salvation, the act of redemption is “appropriated” to Christ as human, since it is his human life that is the price of redemption. Finally, in article six Thomas’s discussion culminates in underscoring that it is because Jesus’ humanity is an instrument of his divinity that his passion is efficacious for salvation. As he had noted earlier in his discussion of the priesthood of Christ, “by reason of the fact that his human actions drew efficacy from his divinity, the sacrifice that he offered was eminently efficacious in blotting out sin.”134 In this article Thomas ties this explicitly to his previously developed notion of the instrumentality of Christ’s humanity. As he puts it, and as I have had occasion to quote previously, “all the things that Christ does and undergoes operate instrumentally in virtue of his divinity for the salvation of human beings.” Here we can see that the single subject Christology that Thomas develops in the first twenty-six questions of the tertia pars is not simply a bit of speculative metaphysics regarding the ontological constitution of the incarnate God. Rather, it undergirds his entire soteriology. Christ’s 133 134

Summa theologiae IIIa q. 48 a. 4 ad 1 and 2. Summa theologiae IIIa q. 22 a. 3 ad 1; cf. De veritate 29.4 co.

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offering of his life on the cross is a gift of infinite value precisely because it is the human life of God. Suffering and dying are not strictly speaking “divine” actions, but human actions undertaken by a divine person by means of his humanity. Thomas writes, “Rightly, then, does one say that the Word of God—that God—suffered and died.”135 While maintaining traditional Christian theological commitments to the impassibility of God, Thomas allows at the same time a truly radical affirmation that God unites himself to the pain and destruction occasioned by human sin, and by such a union heals that pain and reconciles humanity to himself.

Resurrection The strong affirmation that we find in Thomas of the significance of the cross for human salvation has led some to fault him for giving no real saving significance to the resurrection. Otto Hermann Pesch, for example, claims that Thomas sees the resurrection simply as a confirmation of Jesus’ divinity and his role as savior, a kind of reward for his suffering. Pesch writes, “Thomas speaks of the resurrection of Jesus without any particular emphasis. In this, he is completely a child of the western Church.”136 That is, Thomas follows the typical Western pattern of confining saving efficacy to the cross and, while not ignoring the resurrection of Christ, sees it as having no real role to play in human salvation. But if it is in fact the case that, as Thomas says, “all the things that Christ does and undergoes operate instrumentally in virtue of his divinity for the salvation of human beings,” then his resurrection too must be efficacious for our salvation. Those who, like Pesch, see Thomas as ascribing no intrinsic saving efficacy to the resurrection might well be forgiven for so doing . As JeanPierre Torrell has noted, Thomas’s thinking on this matter developed over time and even in its mature form is fairly subtle in its statements.137 In his commentary on the Sentences Thomas sees the resurrection of Jesus as the realization in the head of the mystical body what will one day be accomplished in the members, as well as a “dispositive” (we are justified by faith in the resurrection) and “exemplary” (Christ’s resurrection is the pattern of our resurrection) cause. The furthest Thomas seems willing to go in his early writings toward affirming the resurrection as an efficient cause of salvation is the hesitant affirmation that it is “somewhat like 135 137

136 Contra Gentiles lib. 4 cap. 34 n. 14. Pesch (1988), 330. For what follows, see Torrell (2002a), 215–41.

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an instrument” (quasi quodam organo) with regard to effecting our resurrection.138 A more robust affirmation of the saving efficacy of the resurrection awaited a clearer sense on Thomas’s part of the implications of the instrumentality of Christ’s humanity. Torrell sees a shift beginning in the disputed questions De veritate,139 and finding even clearer expression in the Contra Gentiles and Summa theologiae, the latter of which bears what Torrell calls “the ripest fruit of his reflection.”140 Thomas’s mature views links exemplary and efficient causality by means of the principle that, “every agent causes something similar to itself” (omne agens agit sibi simile).141 An efficient cause is also exemplary, because it brings about an effect that is, in at least some sense, like itself. Just as hot things cause heat in other things, so too Christ as risen is the cause of our resurrection; and just as fire, as the highest member of the genus “things that are hot” is (according to Thomas’s understanding of the elements) the source of all heat, so too Christ, the “firstborn of the dead” (Colossians 1:18), is as the incarnate God the cause of the resurrection of all human beings, with his humanity being the instrument by which that resurrection is effected. It is, of course, as human that Christ is resurrected (as God he is immortal), and so his risen humanity is an efficient cause instrumentally by virtue of its union with the divine Word and it is an exemplary cause because, at least for the just, it sets the pattern for humanity’s risen life with God.142 The resurrection of Christ effects not only our bodily resurrection at the last judgment, but also our spiritual resurrection through justification. Commenting on Romans 4:25 (“who was handed over for our trespasses and was raised for our justification”), Thomas writes, Because an effect has to some extent a similarity to its cause [effectus habet aliqualiter similitudinem causae], [Paul] says that Christ’s death, by which mortal life was extinguished in him, is the cause of extinguishing our sins; but his resurrection,

138

Super Sent. lib. 4 d. 43 q. 1 a. 2 qc. 1. See De veritate q. 27 a. 4 and especially the strong statement in q. 29 a. 5 that Christ, “is in some sense the source of all grace in his humanity, just as God is the source of all being.” 140 Torrell, (2002a), 224. He refers specifically to Summa theologiae IIIa q. 19 a. 1, but see also Contra Gentiles lib. 4 cap. 79 n. 4. 141 This formulation, or the equivalent idea, occurs in numerous places in Thomas. See, e.g. Super Sent. lib. 4 d. 1 q. 1 a. 4 qc. 4 co.; Contra Gentiles lib. 2 cap. 21, n. 9; Summa theologiae a I q. 19 a. 4 co.; De veritate q. 2 a. 3 co.; De potentia q. 7 a. 1 ad 8. 142 Summa theologiae IIIa q. 56 a. 1 ad 3; cf. Super I Thes. cap. 4 lec. 2 n. 95. 139

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by which he returns to a new life of glory, he calls the cause of our justification, by which we return to a new life of justice.143

While we do not find in Thomas any direct reference to what modern theologians call the “paschal mystery”—the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ as a single saving event—Thomas’s oft-repeated point about the instrumentality of all Christ’s human acts for salvation does seem to imply a unified understanding of not only his death and resurrection, but of all his human acts, as salvific. As Thomas says, writing near the end of his life in reference to the sacrament of penance, “it is from the power of the name of Jesus Christ suffering and rising again [virtute . . . nominis Iesu Christi patientis et resurgentis] that this sacrament is efficacious unto the remission of sins.”144 It is the Word incarnate in his totality, human and divine, dying and risen, who is the cause of our salvation. In this sense, pace Harnack, the saving work of Christ as depicted by Thomas is both multa and multam—many-faceted and yet profoundly coherent.

5. CHRIST AS TEACHER AND EXEMPLAR In Christ’s resurrection we see a kind of “ontological” exemplarity with regard to our resurrection, but the life of Christ in its totality is also exemplary in a more ordinary sense: as Thomas puts it, “Christ’s action is our instruction.”145 The significant place that Thomas gives to Christ as a teacher is hardly surprising for a Dominican friar, given their order’s mission as preachers and teachers and their emphasis, taken over from the twelfth-century canons regular, on docere verbo et exemplo—teaching by word and example.146 This teaching by word and example is not something in addition to Christ’s saving work, but is itself of soteriological significance. Thomas habitual inclusion of the moral example of Jesus among his saving works would seem to indicate that he was untroubled by the inclusion of this sort of “subjective” or “moralistic” element within

143

Super Rom. cap. 4 lec. 3 n. 380. Summa theologiae IIIa q. 84 a. 7 co. Summa theologiae IIIa q. 40 a. 1 ad 3; probably quoting Innocent III’s Sermon 22 de tempore. See also Contra Gentiles lib. 4 cap. 55 n. 20: “deeds are more provocative of action than words; and deeds move the more effectively, the more certain is the opinion of the goodness of him who performs such deeds.” 146 On the spirituality of the twelfth-century canons regular, see Bynum (1979). 144 145

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soteriology.147 Again, this is hardly surprising given the place of moral exhortation and guidance in the ministry of the preaching friars. As a thirteenth-century manual for Dominican novices, Libellus de instructione et consolatione novitiorum, puts it, “the instruction of Christ is saving wisdom that leads disciples to eternal happiness.”148 Indeed, following Jesus, conforming oneself to his example, in a sense is perfection. As Thomas says in one of his sermons, “God has sent his Son, in order to reform this image that is deformed by sin. . . . And how are we renewed? Surely, when we follow Christ. This image, which is deformed in us, is perfect in Christ . . . ‘Put on Christ’ [Rom 13:14], which means ‘act like Christ’: the perfection of the Christian life consists in this.”149 This claim does not entail a naı¨ve view of imitating Christ. The concrete particulars of Jesus’ life are not a set of actions to be mechanically imitated, but rather occasions for inquiring into the end toward which that action is directed. One place we can see this is in Thomas’s discussion of the hotly debated question of Christ’s poverty. Thomas is sometimes presented as offering a “moderate” position, between those among the secular clergy who denied that Christ was poor, and those, particularly among the Franciscans, who denied that Christ and his disciples had any possessions whatsoever, even those held in common. Yet what is notable about Thomas’s position is not his moderation, but his understanding of what it means to imitate Christ in this particular instance. Thomas maintained poverty as a value, but not an absolute value. Unlike the Franciscan tradition, which tended to see poverty in terms of a mystical conformity to Christ, Thomas and the Dominicans treated poverty in a more strictly instrumental manner.150 For Thomas, poverty was fitting for Christ because, “this was in keeping with the duty of preaching.”151 That is, Christ’s poverty, which is not absolute destitution but rather the holding of goods in common combined with a moderate austerity, was a means to an end, and that end was the manifestation of the truth of the

147 e.g. Contra Gentiles lib. 4 cap. 54 n. 7; Summa theologiae IIIa q. 1 a. 2, IIIa q. 46 a. 3; Compendium theologiae lib. 1 cap. 227. 148 “Christi eruditio est sapientia salutaris que discipuluum ducit ad beatitudinem sempiternam.” Libellus de instructione et consolatione novitiorum (Tolouse, Bibliothe`que municipale, MS. 418, fol. 5r), quoted in Mulchahey (1998), 116 n. 173. 149 Sermon 5, Ecce rex tuus pars 3. 150 The difference between the Franciscans and Dominicans on attitudes toward poverty (as seen from the Dominican side) can be seen in Robert Kilwardby’s “Letter to Dominican Novices” (c. 1270) in Tugwell (1982), 149–52. 151 Summa theologiae IIIa q. 40 a. 3.

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gospel.152 As Dominic had learned from experience when preaching to the Cathars, poverty brought with it a certain mobility and freedom that landowning monastics lacked; also, poor preachers are more convincing than wealthy ones. Furthermore, the poverty of Christ was itself an evangelical proclamation of the poverty that the Word takes on in assuming human nature.153 What it means to imitate Christ in a concrete situation can never be simply “read off ” the text of the gospel as if it were a script. This is because the New Law of the gospel is not primarily a written law externally imposed, but rather the gracious action of the Holy Spirit within the believer. Imitation is a matter of inner conformity to Christ and might require a certain “improvisation” with regard to outward actions. At the same time, the gospel can be seen as a written law in a secondary sense, in that it directs us to certain acts that dispose us to receive the grace of the Spirit.154 The question then becomes, how does one “read” the example of Christ so as to know how to discern its relevance to particular lives lived out in varying times and places? Thomas’s answer is that we do not read the gospel in isolation, but in the context of the Church and through the tradition of the saints. He writes, “the statements and commands found in sacred scripture can be interpreted and understood from the actions of the saints, since it is the same Holy Spirit who inspires the prophets and the other sacred authors and who inspires the actions of the saints.”155 We learn how to improvise through the examples of others’ improvisations. The relationship of imitation between the Christian and Christ is one that is mediated by those in the past who have sought to imitate Christ’s example, so as to become themselves examples to be imitated. It is they who teach us what it means to imitate Christ.156 Yet they can never take the place of Christ, for the norm of our evaluation of these exemplars is Christ, for he alone “is the unfailing exemplar of holiness.”157 There is an inevitable circularity to our interpretation of what it means to follow the New Law of the gospel: the teachings and actions of Christ are the object of our imitation, but this imitation must be 152 See De perfectione cap. 7; Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 188 a. 7, IIIa q. 40 a. 3. For general analyses, see Franks (2009), esp. 132–57, and Horst (1998), 256–70. 153 Summa theologiae IIIa q. 40 a. 3. 154 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 106 a. 1. 155 Super Ioannem cap. 18 lec. 4 n. 2321. 156 In his Sermon 20, Beata gens Aquinas speaks of the saints as our “parents” who “have supplied us with an example of living rightly and well.” 157 Super I Cor. cap. 11 lec. 1 n. 583.

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mediated by the teaching and actions of the saints, which in turn must be judged by the teaching and actions of Christ, the unfailing exemplar. The moral exemplarity of Christ is rooted in his “ontological exemplarity” inasmuch as it is precisely his identity as the incarnate Son of God that makes him, as I noted at the outset of this chapter, both the way and the goal. Christ is the perfect image of the Father and, through the instrumentality of his humanity, the source of all grace.158 The acts of Christ are not simply behavioral patterns to be imitated, but are themselves salvific, for, “Christ gives life to the world through the mysteries which he accomplished in his flesh.”159 Here we see how far the exemplarity of Christ as understood by Thomas is from the notion of Jesus as a simple “moral example.” Christ is not an admirable figure locked in the past, but is the living Lord who has called us to be his friends, and makes this possible by the gift of his grace. Thomas writes, “Since all friendship is based on some kind of sharing (for similarity is the cause of love), upright friendship [recta amicitia] is that which is based on a similarity or a sharing in some good. Now Christ loved us as similar to himself by the grace of adoption, loving us in the light of this similarity in order to draw us to God.”160 And as he writes in the Contra Gentiles, “the flow of salvation from Christ to human beings is not through a natural propagation, but through the zeal of good will in which one cleaves to Christ.”161 Grace makes us “Christoform” by making us friends of Christ. We might think of the relationship of outward imitation and inner conformity in terms of the relationship of humanity and divinity in Christ. As the instrument of his divinity, the humanity of Christ, while not the principle cause of our gracious transformation, still operates according to its own proper form in order to dispose the matter to receive the effect of the primary cause.162 We might say that the imitation of Christ’s outward manner of life, what he did and suffered in his humanity, disposes us to an inner conformity through grace. Thomas quotes with approval an injunction that he ascribes to St Augustine: “walk like this human being and you will come to God.”163 Our imitation of Jesus is one way in which his humanity acts instrumentally in the economy of grace. Discussing the story of Christ washing his disciples’ feet, Thomas remarks, “this action is both an example and a mystery.” He goes on to explain, “it is an example of humility to be practiced . . . and it is a mystery because it signifies an 158 160 162

159 See Jean-Pierre Torrell, (1998), 204–8. Super Io. cap. 6 lec. 4 n. 914. 161 Super Io. cap. 13 lec. 7 n. 1838. Contra Gentiles lib. 4 cap. 55 n. 30. a 163 See Summa theologiae I q. 45 a. 5. Super Io. cap. 14 lec. 2 n.1870.

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interior cleaning.”164 Here we see in summary Thomas’s conception of the place of Christ in the Christian life. Because Christ himself is in his human nature both viator and comprehensor—one who is both a wayfarer and yet already a sharer in divine beatitude165—his life in its totality is an example to be imitated, and is the source of grace that makes that imitation not simply a matter of outward emulation, but of inner conformity and Spirited improvisation. Because outward imitation of Christ’s human life is an instrumental cause of divinely wrought inner conformity, morality shades into mystery as we contemplate Christ’s life.166 In the end, if we try to summarize Thomas’s understanding of the nature of the person of Christ and of his saving work, we might say that Thomas presents Jesus as Emmanuel—the saving presence of God with us. Thomas writes, “the name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is ‘God with us,’ designates the cause of salvation, which is the union of the Divine and human natures in the Person of the Son of God, the result of which union was that ‘God is with us.’ ”167 For Thomas, soteriology is already begun in the hypostatic union, which is the bond of peace between God and humanity. Conversely, one might say that the telos of the hypostatic union is the theandric love of Christ that is enacted on the cross. Thomas writes that, “whatever occurred in the mystery of human redemption and Christ’s incarnation was the work of love.”168 Out of love for humanity, the Word becomes both the way and our fellow wayfarer, in order to lead us to our true homeland. In so doing God brings all creation to its final end. As Thomas writes in the Compendium theologiae, “The universe of God’s whole work of creation is in a way perfected when human beings, who were created last, return cyclically to their source, united by the work of incarnation to the very source of things.”169 It is this work of love, embodied in the person of the incarnate Word, that friar Thomas preaches, so that in knowing the Word we might know the way to the Father. All of Thomas’s intellectual labors lead to and flow from this task of preaching the divine love made flesh in Jesus. While 164

Super Io. cap. 13 lec. 2,n. 1756. Summa theologiae IIIa q. 11 a. 2. 166 Gillon (1967) proposes that we might think of the Summa theologiae as containing two “moral theologies”—that found in the secunda pars and that contained in the tertia pars, in the questions treating the mysteries of Christ’s life, which give us “the living model which should illumine our behavior and give us the strength and courage to strive after the sublime ideal of the Christian life” (140). 167 Summa theologiae IIIa q. 37 a. 2 ad 1. 168 Super Eph. cap. 3 lec. 5 n. 178. 169 Compendium theologiae lib. 1 cap. 201. 165

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respecting the integrity of created natures, Thomas knows that human creatures have a destiny that perfects their nature by exceeding it. When Thomas says to the crucified Christ, non nisi te, he is rejecting nothing of the created truth that he had found in thinkers like Aristotle, even while recognizing in the cross the truth of a love in excess of anything Aristotle could imagine, the truth of a love that is the source and end of all truth. It is this truth that Thomas seeks to serve. In Chapter 1 I summed up Thomas’s character by the virtue that is often ascribed to him by his hagiographers: purity. This is the purity of heart that wills one thing—the comprehensive good that is God. In willing this comprehensive good, one abandons no created good, but rather comes to see these created goods as ordered toward the highest good. Commenting on Paul’s command to “take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5), Thomas expresses precisely how he understands his own intellectual vocation: “this happens when a person subjects all that he knows to the service of Christ and the faith.”170

170

Super II Cor. cap. 10 lec. 1 n. 352.

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6 The Way of God’s People Thomas’s understanding of salvation is in one sense strongly objective, focused on what God does on our behalf, but it also attends carefully to the way in which this act of God is appropriated by human subjects, both individually and collectively. In thinking of salvation—the “way” that leads human beings to God—Thomas focuses on Christ as the way (via) of salvation while not ignoring the wayfarer (viator) who undertakes the journey. Any account of salvation, therefore, must include not only the action God takes on behalf of human beings, but also the responsive action of human beings by which they appropriate the saving act of God in Christ. This appropriation, while a truly human act, is at the same time the work of the Holy Spirit. Though Thomas, and medieval Western theology in general, are sometimes faulted for ignoring the role of the Holy Spirit in theology, it is possible to understand the entire secunda pars of the Summa, which deals with human action oriented toward the beatific vision under the impulse of grace, as an extended, albeit mostly oblique, treatise on the Spirit’s work. Along with Thomas’s explicit discussions of the Spirit’s gifts, which are woven through his account of the cardinal and theological virtues, we also have his account of the New Law as the grace of the Spirit, the discussion of the Spirit’s activity as uncreated grace, the role of the Spirit in the charisms and states of life in the Church, and so forth.1 In thinking about the human appropriation of Christ’s saving work through the work of the Spirit, it is good to bear in mind two claims that Thomas makes, both of which I discussed above in Chapter 3: “grace does not destroy nature but perfects it”2 and “the soul is not the whole human being, but only part of one: my soul is not me.”3 In our journey

1

Walsh (2005) notes, “much of his pneumatology, of which the foundations are laid in the trinitarian questions of the Prima Pars, is developed in the Secunda rather than in the Tertia” (331). 2 Summa theologiae Ia q. 1 a. 8 ad 2. 3 Super I Cor. cap. 15 lec. 2 n. 924.

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toward perfection in God, we remain what we are by nature: the rational animal, the ensouled body, in which Spirit and matter are joined. The way of salvation must therefore be suited to the kind of creatures that we are. The net result of this is that Thomas’s account of the Christian life, or what today is often called “spirituality,” is remarkably “material” and “embodied.” Though Thomas often operates at a very high level of abstraction, this thinking is always grounded in the sensuality that we humans share with all other animals. Because the quidditas or “whatness” of material things is the natural object of the human intellect, sense perception is a sine qua non for human cognition, not unlike the way that premises function in a demonstration.4 The very capacity for reasoning by which the intellect is able to reach up to God is the same capacity by which we can engage in such mundane activities as building houses or planting vineyards. Human activity is, in the end, not divided into mundane activity, perhaps associated with the body, and religious activity, perhaps associated with the soul. Rather, the Christian economy of salvation, as Thomas understands it, involves the transformation through grace of the entire activity of the human creature, soul and body together.

1. PRINCIPLES OF HUMAN ACTION In the second Part of Summa theologiae, Thomas begins his discussion of human activity at the end: beginning from the presumption that human activity is goal-directed, Thomas asks whether there is an ultimate goal toward which humans ought to direct their actions5 and what that ultimate goal is.6 In other words, what constitutes the ultimate happiness or beatitudo of human beings? What gives rest to the restless human heart? Along the way, Thomas considers whether a person might have several ultimate or final goals, whether all people have the same final goal, whether that final goal might consist in some external good such as wealth or honor, or fame or power, or some bodily good such as pleasure, or a spiritual good such as virtue. His conclusion, perhaps not surprisingly by this point, is that “nothing can give rest to the human will except a universal good, which is not found in any creature but only in God.”7 4

5 Super De Trinitate pars 3 q. 6 a. 2 ad 6. Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 1. Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 2. 7 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 2 a. 8 co. A similar itinerary is found in Compendium theologiae lib. 2 cap. 9. In Super Mt. cap. 5 lec. 2 Thomas uses the Beatitudes to shown the different ways 6

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Ultimate human happiness is found in God alone and thus it is God himself who is the goal of our wayfaring. Non nisi te, Domine. Having specified happiness in terms of the end that, when attained, satisfies all human desires, Thomas then turns to the activity by which the subject is happy. If our happiness is to be found in God alone, what is the nature of the human activity by which we lay hold of this goal?8 What are the subjective conditions of human happiness? Thomas again leads us through a series of possibilities to establish that happiness is an operation of the speculative intellect by which we behold the uncreated essence of God.9 This may sound somewhat bloodless and far removed from what one might normally think of as happiness. Thomas’s account of this activity by which we are joined to God, however, is multifaceted, taking account of the human person as an embodied soul who both knows and wills, who grows and develops, who lives within a community of other humans, and who is from all eternity laid hold of by God and led by grace to life eternal. One way in which Thomas parses this multifaceted nature of human action is by delineating the principles of human action. These include both the intrinsic principles of human action—the inborn capacities of the soul, especially the powers of knowing and loving, and the acquired capacities that we call habits and virtues—as well as the extrinsic principles that direct our action—the laws that guide our outward behavior and the grace that transforms us inwardly.10 By looking briefly at each of these principles we can gain some sense of how complex, and at the same time elegant, Thomas’s account of human action is.

Powers of the Soul: Knowing and Loving In Chapter 3 I discussed the nature of human beings as ensouled bodies, noting that for Thomas the soul is best thought of not as something that occupies a body, but rather as the capacity of a living being to act in certain sorts of ways. In the case of human beings, Thomas, following Aristotle, delineates five general kinds of powers or capacities of the human soul:

in which conceptions of happiness that focus on exterior things, satisfaction of the will, the active virtues, and the contemplative virtues as they can be realized in this life all fall short of true happiness. 8 9 10

Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 3 a. 1. Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 3 aa. 2–8. See Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 49 pr.

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organic life (vegetativum), sensation (sensitivum), self-movement (motivum secundum locum), appetite (appetitivum), and thought (intellectivum). Thomas presents these powers in terms of the different ways in which the activities of a living being, in this case a human, transcend the activity of a non-living being.11 Though we call these “powers of the soul,” it is worth noting that they are, with the exception of thought, ways in which the soul enables bodily actions; even in the case of the power of thought we might say that thought has to do with the activity of the embodied person as a whole. Thomas notes that three of these powers— life, sensation, and self-movement—serve as “preambles” to the other two—thought and appetite—which are of special interests to the theologian since there are the powers “in which the virtues reside.”12 Even more, these powers, transformed by grace, are the means by which human beings can be sharers in God’s own life, since “perfect blessedness consists of the mind adhering to God in himself by knowing and loving.”13 Thomas is sometimes described as an “intellectualist,” meaning that he gives priority to the intellect over the will, in contrast to the Franciscan tradition, sometimes described as “voluntarist,” which gives priority to the will over the intellect.14 While such a characterization is not entirely false, it does not give the whole picture of Thomas’s views, which are rather more complex. One way in which we might begin to explore these complexities is to look at the soul’s powers of “apprehending” and “appetite.” Humans and other animals have a capacity to apprehend things other than themselves: nonhuman animals do this through their senses alone, as when a gazelle spots a predator or a dog sniffs out some particularly noisome pile of offal to rub herself in, whereas human animals do this both through the senses and through thought, as when we grasp the concept “predator” or how the Pythagorean theorem works. Therefore we can

11 Summa theologiae Ia q. 78 a. 1. Thomas’s source in Aristotle is De Anima bk. 2, 414a 29–32, though, it should be noted, a similar division of levels of existence can be found in Augustine, City of God bk. 5, ch. 11. I translate vegetativum (literally “the vegetative”) as “organic life” since it is the most basic level at which living bodies are distinguished from nonliving bodies by their activities of reproduction, nutrition, and growth. See Summa theologiae Ia q. 78 a. 2. It should be noted that these are “types” of powers, which Aquinas goes on to further subdivide. 12 Summa theologiae Ia q. 78 prooemium. Thomas notes elsewhere that while there can be acquired dispositions (habitus) in the potentia sensitiva, these are not properly speaking “virtues” because they are not “perfect dispositions,” i.e. dispositions by which human beings are perfected qua human beings. See Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 56 a. 5. 13 Compendium theologiae lib. 2 cap. 9. 14 For one example of this characterization, see Weisheipl (1974), 258–9.

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speak of a sensual apprehending when we see or smell, or hear or taste or feel something, and of an intellectual apprehending when we come to know something that is not material, like a generic classification or the conclusion to an argument. Likewise, humans and other animals have appetites or desires. In the case of the easily-understood desire of the gazelle to flee a predator or the less easily-understood desire of the dog to smell like some other animal’s rotting remains, we have what Thomas calls “sensual appetite.” In the case of the naturalist who seeks to classify the animal she has spotted or the student who desires to understand why the Pythagorean theorem is true, the kind of desires that only rational animals can have, we have what Thomas calls “intellectual appetite.”15 Intellectual apprehending and appetite are particularly significant for Thomas, for it is through these that we not only grow in virtue but also can know and love God. Two distinct acts, which we have already encountered in Chapter 4, issue from the one power of intellectual apprehending: understanding (intellectus), in which we grasp self-evident principles and the conclusion of arguments, and reasoning (ratio), in which we work discursively from premises toward conclusions. These acts of understanding and reasoning are related to each other, Thomas says, like rest and motion: just as every motion begins from a point of rest and comes to an end in rest, so too every successful act of reasoning begins in the understanding of premises and ends in certain possession of the conclusion inferred from those premises.16 Likewise, the acts of the power of intellectual appetite might be divided into will, which is our act of desiring the good as our end, and choice, which is our act of desiring the means to attain the end that we will.17 Neither the understanding nor the will is free with regard to its object: the understanding cannot withhold assent from a self-evident or demonstrated truth and the will cannot fail to desire something that it perceives to be its highest good—beatitude or happiness.18 Choice, however, is free choice (liberum arbitrium) because it can choose different means in relation to the end willed. The analogy between intellectual apprehending and intellectual appetite gives us a glimpse of the complex ways in which the two are

15

See Summa theologiae Ia q. 80 a. 2. Summa theologiae Ia q. 79 a. 8; De veritate q. 15 a. 1. 17 Summa theologiae Ia q. 83 a. 4; IIIa q. 18 a. 3. 18 Summa theologiae Ia q. 82 a. 1. It perhaps goes without saying that this does not mean that human beings unfailingly will their true highest good, which is God; this is because their perception of what their highest good is can be skewed. See Summa theologiae Ia q. 82 a. 2. 16

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interrelated.19 If we want to address the question of “intellectualism” versus “voluntarism” in Thomas, we might approach it in two different ways. First, we can ask whether intellect or will has priority in human action. Thomas says that, “these powers include one another in their acts, because the intellect understands that the will wills, and the will wills the intellect to understand.”20 Yet there is a certain priority of the intellect, since the intellect moves the will “primarily and directly” (primo et per se) by presenting to the will its object, the “known good” (bonum apprehensum). The intellect must judge something to be good before the will can desire it. I must identify (whether correctly or incorrectly) a bottle as containing single-malt Scotch rather than a urine sample before my will is moved to desire to drink it. The will moves the intellect “accidentally” by willing the act of understanding, though even in this case the will depends upon the intellect’s apprehending of the act of understanding as itself a good.21 Because I am thirsty, my will moves my intellect to determine the nature of the liquid in the bottle, but only because my intellect has already grasped that this would be a good thing to find out before taking a drink. Thomas can therefore be described as an “intellectualist” if by this we mean that he holds that “we cannot will what we do not understand” (velle non possumus quod non intelligimus).22 As we saw in Chapter 2, this conviction that we must know a good in order to desire it, and will desire it more as we understand its goodness better, undergirds Thomas’s entire justification of sacra doctrina as scientia: we must have some knowledge of God if we are to desire God as our end.23 Second, we can ask whether the intellect or the will is the “higher” (altior) or “nobler” (nobilior) power. Here the answer is a bit more complicated. Thomas notes a fundamental difference between apprehending and appetite: in intellectually apprehending something we draw the form of the thing we know into ourselves, while in intellectual appetite we are drawn by the object of our desire out of ourselves and into that object. As Thomas puts it in his commentary on Lombard’s Sentences, “knowledge accords with a movement from things toward the soul, while love accords with a movement from the soul toward things.”24 As I noted in Chapter 3, 19

For an extended treatment of this question, see Sherwin (2005). Summa theologiae Ia q. 82 a. 4 ad 1. Contra Gentiles lib. 3 cap. 26 n. 22; cf. Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 9 a. 1; De Veritate q. 22 a. 12. 22 Contra Gentiles lib. 3 cap. 26 n. 16. 23 Summa theologiae Ia q. 1 a. 1. 24 Super Sent. lib. 3 d. 27 q. 1 a. 4 arg. 6. 20 21

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by knowing the quidditas or “whatness” of material things, human beings “bear them in mind,” and thereby “spiritualize” them and raise them to a higher or nobler level, actualizing their potential to be known and, in this manner, to exist in an immaterial way. When we desire a material thing, however, our will is drawn to it as it is in its concrete particularity. So by knowing a piece of gold I ennoble it by lifting it out of its materiality to give it some share in the immaterial kind of existence possessed by the soul, but in desiring a piece of gold I not only leave it in its material particularity, but my will comes to be as it were lodged in that materiality and thereby “degraded,” in the strict sense of being dragged to a lower level of existence. In this way, the intellect is a nobler power than the will. But matters look different when it comes to knowing and loving something that is not beneath the soul, the way a material object is, but above it. In the case of knowing and loving God, to know God, even by the light of glory in the beatific vision, is still to possess God within the confines of the finite human intellect, while the perfect love of God had by the blessed thrusts them ecstatically into the very mystery of God.25 When desired for the sake of God, even our appetite for particular material things can be ennobled. It is for this reason that, Thomas notes, “the love of God is better than the knowledge of God.”26 The picture becomes even more complex if we return to sensual apprehending and appetite—for it would be wrong to forget these, since human beings are in fact animals, albeit of a peculiar sort. One place we can see Thomas taking account of what we might think of the “animality” of rational animals is in his extensive treatment in the Summa theologiae of the passiones or, as we would say, emotions.27 As we saw in Chapter 4, with the example of rescuing my girlfriend’s cat, our emotions are neither inherently sinful nor simply morally neutral, but they can increase the worthiness of our actions if they are properly ordered by reason.28 They are the point at which embodied action and spiritual activity meet. Otto Hermann Pesch calls attention to an easily overlooked article in the Summa in which Thomas asks whether sadness (tristitia), which includes acedia or a lack of spiritual joy, can be alleviated by sleep or baths and answers that, “since every pleasure alleviates sorrow, sorrow is alleviated 25 This analysis is found in numerous places in Thomas’s writings; see Super Sent. lib. 3 d. 27 q. 1 a. 4; De veritate q. 22 a. 11; Summa theologiae Ia q. 82 a. 3; Ia–IIae q. 23 a. 6 ad 1; De virtutibus q. 2 a. 3 ad 13. 26 Summa theologiae Ia q. 82 a. 3 co. 27 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae qq. 22–48. 28 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 24 a. 3.

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by such bodily remedies.”29 Pesch notes, “because the human being as a totality of soul and body is taken seriously, we must start from the fact that what happens in the body and what happens in the soul are reciprocally conditioned and influenced. A good bodily disposition creates a feeling of pleasure and this chases sadness from the soul.”30 Once again we are reminded of Thomas’s statement that, “my soul is not me.” In light of all this, one might wonder how useful it is to saddle Thomas with the label “intellectualist.” What is clear is that all human action involves both knowing and willing, operating together in a fairly seamless manner that does not involve, to borrow a phrase from Herbert McCabe, “a kind of dry mechanical clicking back and forth between will and intellect.”31 For Thomas, the image of God in human beings involves both the intellect and the will,32 and the perfection of that image in the beatific vision involves both the intellect’s sharing in the light of glory (lumen gloriae), by which the soul is rendered “deiform,”33 as well as the “mutual penetration (mutua penetratio) through love” of divine and human wills.34 Moreover, beatitudo in the end involves not simply the soul’s glorification in the beatific vision, but the overflow of that glory into the resurrected body.35 What stands out in Thomas’s account of the powers of the soul is not the prominence that he gives to the intellect but the integration of knowing and willing and emotion. Reason has an important role, but its role must be seen as ordering and integrating the other powers, not in supplanting them.

Dispositions and Virtues Thomas notes that the word for birth, nascitura, is the source of our word “nature,”36 and in this sense our nature might be thought of in terms of those capacities, such as intellectual apprehending and appetite, knowing and loving, with which we are born. But there are also capacities that develop in human beings after they are born, and so are not in that sense “natural,” but which can become stable and lasting dispositions so as to be what Thomas calls quasi in naturam, which we might loosely translate as

29

30 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 38 a. 5 co. Pesch (1988), 230. 32 McCabe (2008), 81. Summa theologiae Ia q. 93 a. 6. 33 34 Summa theologiae Ia q. 12 a. 5. Super Sent. lib. 1 d. 1 q. 1 a. 1 co. 35 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 4 a. 6. 36 See his discussion in Sententia Metaphysicae lib. 5 lec. 5 or, more briefly, Summa theologiae IIIa q. 2 a. 1 co. 31

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“second nature.”37 While these dispositions for acting must be in accord with our nature—we cannot, for example, develop a disposition to fly without an aircraft or to know immaterial substances by direct apprehension—they allow us to act in ways that our nature alone does not. The Latin term Thomas uses for these settled dispositions is habitus—a term we have already encountered in discussing Thomas’s account of faith. It is probably misleading to translate this with the English word “habit,” since this often connotes an action that we engage in unthinkingly.38 While a habitus is a disposition that we possess whether or not we are thinking about it at any particular moment, the actions that flow from the habitus are very much intentional, inasmuch as we can will to engage in them or not.39 We might say that these settled dispositions give specificity to our more general capacities to know and to will and to feel, such that they enable us to know and will and feel in particular sorts of ways.40 For example, while human beings are born with a general capacity for language, the ability to speak one or more actual languages is something that is acquired at a later point. In this sense, my capacity to speak English is a settled disposition or habitus. Having exercised this capacity for about half a century, it has very much become second nature to me, in a way that my later-acquired and less-frequently-exercised capacity to speak Dutch has not, so that I rarely have occasion to think about my ability to speak English. But it is not quite right to treat my English speaking as a “habit” in our modern sense, since it is not something that, like biting my nails, I do unthinkingly. Though I do not precede every English language utterance with the conscious thought, “I will now speak English,” it is certainly my intention on those occasions to speak English and not to speak, say, Dutch. In other words, my settled disposition enables me to engage in the action that I will to do. Moreover, this disposition for English allows me to speak it with some consistency, with readiness, and 37 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 82 a. 1 co. Cf. Sententia Ethic. lib. 2 lec. 3 n. 1: habitus inest per modum cuiusdam naturae. 38 In Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 49 a. 2 ad 3 Thomas distinguishes between dispositio and habitus, noting that dispositio can be taken either as the genus of which habitus is a particular species, or as an imperfect form of habitus, which is less deeply engrained in the subject and thus more easily changed. Despite this, I would maintain that in English “disposition” is a less misleading translation of habitus than is “habit,” though in deference to Thomas’s distinction between dispositio and habitus I will speak of the latter as a “settled disposition.” 39 De virtutibus q. 1 a. 1 co.; Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 49 a. 3. Bonnie Kent notes that by introducing the will into his account of dispositions Thomas makes a significant departure from Aristotle. See Kent (2002), 117–19. 40 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 49 a. 4.

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even with pleasure, which is also not the case with my speaking Dutch.41 The pleasure that the disposition induces in me means that I develop not only the capacity to speak English, but also, under normal circumstances, the desire to do so.42 In other words, the disposition not only gives me a new capacity for action, but also a new appetite for that action. The settled disposition for English-speaking perfects my natural capacities in the particular context of language use. Those settled dispositions that Aquinas identifies as “virtues” perfect my nature in a more global way, in which possession of them makes me not simply a good language user (or skilled in any other particular way), but a good human being. And what it means to be a good human being for Thomas is to actualize the capacity for reasonableness, which is the distinguishing mark of the human animal, by acting in reasonable ways. Thomas writes, “A good habitus is one that is said to dispose to an act fitting to the nature of the doer [convenientem naturae agentis], while an evil habitus is said to be one that disposes to an act unfitting to nature.” Applying this general principle to the case of moral action, Thomas continues, “thus acts of virtue are fitting to human nature, since they are according to reason, while acts of vice, since they are against reason, are discordant with human nature.”43 Thomas tends to use the terms “moral act” and “human act” interchangeably to identify those actions that are in accord with reason. Virtues such as courage and temperance, which are found in the sensual appetites that we share with nonhuman animals, are only called “virtues” because of the way in which they make those appetites subject to reason.44 The virtues are those dispositions that give me a capacity to act in a truly human way and, moreover, to do so consistently, readily, and with pleasure. This emphasis on reasonableness as what distinguishes virtue from vice might seem to lend credence to the description of Thomas as an “intellectualist.” Not unlike his discussion of the powers of the soul, however, Thomas’s discussion of the virtues is subtle and complex, seeking to do justice to the realities of human moral activity. Virtues strictly speaking are dispositions of the will, or of the intellect in relation to the will, because they have to do with intentional human action.45 The virtues 41

On this last point, see De virtutibus q. 1 a. 1 co. There is always, at least in the modern world, the phenomenon of “burn-out,” as when a skilled athlete abandons the sport in which he or she has excelled. But this, it seems to me, remains the exception rather than the rule. 43 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 54. 3 co.; cf. Sententia Ethic. lib. 2 lec. 2 n. 3. 44 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 56 a. 4. 45 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 56 a. 3. 42

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not only enable us to act in an exemplary human manner, but they also help us to know and to desire to accomplish what it means to live in a fully human way. In other words, the virtues are those settled dispositions that allow the will to be drawn toward good. Even a virtue such as prudence, which is the intellectual virtue that enables us to discern the proper means by which we attain the good, is counted a virtue because of its role in the will’s movement toward the good. Settled dispositions are acquired through practice, typically under the direction of someone who already possesses that disposition, and this is no less true of virtue than of other dispositions.46 Moral virtue in particular requires gradual habituation, due to the inherent uncertainty of moral matters, in which determinations of right action involve constantly shifting judgments concerning ends, intentions, circumstances, etc.47 It is only over time and by the consideration of many examples that one can eventually acquire the virtues needed to judge and act correctly. As Thomas puts it, “it works the way that many raindrops can hollow out a stone.”48 If the virtues are those settled dispositions that perfect us qua human, then the vices would be the dispositions that lead us to fail in the task of being human, since “the vice of a thing seems to consist in its not being disposed in a way befitting its nature.”49 Because human beings are rational animals, to fail at being human is to fail at being rational and to let ourselves be ruled by our sensual appetites rather than having those appetites ruled by reason.50 One fails to be courageous, for example, either by succumbing to the impulse to flee, and thus being cowardly, or by succumbing to an ill-considered impulse to fight, and thus being foolhardy.51 We can fail to do the difficult good to which reason directs us either by running from the task or by acting precipitously. What is significant here is that Thomas interprets vice and the sin that issues from it not first and foremost as a violation of a rule, but rather as a violation of our own nature as rational animals. The vices that are the source of sinful actions are less infractions that require punishment and more defects that require repair through the acquisition of the virtues. 46

See Sententia Ethic. lib. 2 lec. 1 n. 8. For a sense of the many factors at work in determining an action as good or bad, see Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 18. 48 De virtutibus q. 1 a. 9 ad 11; cf. Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 51 a. 3. 49 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 71 a. 1 co. 50 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 71 a. 2. 51 Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 123 a. 3. 47

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The virtues that we acquire perfect us both as individuals and as members of a community—thus the importance of the virtue of justice, which surpasses the other moral virtues because it concerns not simply the good of the individual, but also the common good.52 In looking beyond our own private good to the good of the community, human beings experience what might be described as a natural self-transcendence through justice. But, Thomas notes, “a human being is not only a citizen of the earthly city, but is also a member of the heavenly city of Jerusalem, which is governed by the Lord and has as its citizens the angels and all the saints, whether they are already reigning in glory and at rest in their homeland in patria, or still pilgrims on earth.”53 The virtues acquired through practice over time are not sufficient for this heavenly citizenship. Therefore Thomas also holds that there are virtues that are “infused” in us by God through grace. These supernatural virtues include not only the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love, which I mentioned in Chapter 4, but also infused forms of the acquired moral virtues. Thomas writes, “As the acquired virtues enable one to walk in accordance with the natural light of reason, so do the infused virtues enable one to walk in accordance with the light of grace.”54 The prudence, justice, courage, and temperance of the earthly city, while genuine virtues, are still imperfect and thus insufficient for the life of the wayfarer journeying toward the heavenly city. They can account for the bravery of the soldier, but not that of the martyr; they can enable the philosopher to renounce sexual excess, but not to embrace the perpetual continence of the virgin. The insufficiency of the acquired virtues is perhaps the reason why, in his commentary on John’s gospel, Thomas includes “the philosophers who treated the principle virtues” among those who do not enter the sheepfold through the door that is Christ; such a person, Thomas says, “destroys both himself and others.”55 Despite the truths at which the philosophers might arrive, they are not trustworthy guides on the journey to the patria, not only because they know nothing of the theological virtues, but also because they cannot grasp the courage of the martyr or the temperance of the virgin.56 52

Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 58 a. 12. De virtutibus q. 1 a. 9 co. 54 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 110 a. 3 co. 55 Super Io. cap. 10 lec. 1 n. 1368. 56 In the Nichomachean Ethics Aristotle remarks, “those who say that the victim on the rack or the man who falls into great misfortunes is happy if he is good, are, whether they mean to or not, talking nonsense” (1153b 19–21). He also remarks that, “he that shuns all pleasure, as 53

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I will have more to say about the grace that is the source of these supernatural virtues shortly, but first we must look at the way in which the virtues, which are internal principles of human action, are related to law, which is an external principle of human action.

Law For Thomas, law is an external measure of human action that is in accord with reason and oriented toward the common good, having been promulgated by one entrusted with care for that common good.57 In discussions of Thomas’s moral theology, much attention has focused on what Thomas says about natural law, even though his ex professo treatment of this topic in the Summa theologiae encompasses only a single question, comprised of six articles.58 Of course, one cannot evaluate the importance of natural law in Thomas simply by means of a word-count; in a sense, the ex professo treatment of natural law simply focuses what Thomas has to say in a diffuse way about the role of reason in the moral life. At the same time, it is helpful in understanding Aquinas’s account of the moral life not to isolate natural law from other sorts of law, nor to isolate law from powers, virtues, and grace. In the Summa theologiae Thomas distinguishes four sorts of law. First, the eternal law is simply divine reason itself, which governs the world by its providence and is promulgated in the eternal generation of the divine Word.59 Second, divine wisdom is imprinted on the creatures that God providentially governs; and in the case of rational creatures this imprinting is the natural law, “by which we discern what is good and what is evil.”60 boorish persons do, becomes what may be called insensible” (1104a 7), which raised certain difficulties for Aristotle’s medieval admirers who upheld vowed virginity as an ideal. Thomas attempts to address those difficulties in Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 152 a. 2 arg. 2 and ad 2. In the end, however, it seems to me that Kent (2002) reflects Aquinas’s views accurately when she writes, “Were there no greater happiness possible, and no higher measure than human reason, the Nichomachean Ethics would be a fine guide to the moral life. As it is, Christians must regard the work as seriously flawed, not only in its ignorance of supernatural happiness and the God-given virtues ordered to it, but also as a guide to the moral life here and now” (124). I would only add the caution that “seriously flawed” does not mean “utterly without value.” 57

See Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 90. See Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 94; one might also include q. 91 a. 2. By contrast, Thomas’s treatment of the Old Law (i.e. the Torah) is spread over eight questions and forty-two articles (qq. 98–105). 59 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 91 a. 1. 60 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 91 a. 2 co. 58

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Third, while the eternal law of divine providence extends to every particular act by creatures, the natural law is a source only of very general principles; therefore there is a need also for human law, which is the reasoned extension of the principles of natural law to more particular acts, as this is codified and promulgated by a human community or its legitimate ruler.61 Fourth, because human beings have an end that exceeds their natural capacities, and because human judgments concerning particular actions are uncertain, God also provides a divine law to guide human beings to their supernatural end.62 Thomas subdivides divine law into the Old Law, which is relatively speaking imperfect, because it is based on earthly reward and punishment, and the New Law of the gospel, which is more perfect because it is promulgated by God incarnate and works through the grace of the Spirit guiding us from within.63 Thomas says that law is an external principle of human action. Law, in the form of human and divine law, clearly provides external guidelines that aid in our habituation to virtuous dispositions by enjoining acts of virtue and forbidding acts of vice.64 Natural law, while remaining an extrinsic principle because it is ultimately rooted in God’s wisdom, has a relationship to virtue that is more “internal” than other forms of law. If virtuous action is that which is in accord with reason, and the natural law is the rational creature’s participation in divine providential reason, then the general principles that are found in the natural law can serve the role in reasoning about action that premises derived from self-evident principles play in reasoning about truth. Just as every demonstration must begin from premises that are not demonstrated, and in particular must presume the principle of noncontradiction (“the same thing cannot be affirmed and denied at the same time”) in order even to get off the ground, so too natural law provides the principles from which practical reason begins in reasoning about things to be done. Corresponding to the principle of noncontradiction is the first principle of practical reasoning, “the good is what all things desire,” and from this principle flows the first

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Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 91 a. 3. Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 91 a. 4. The parallel between what Thomas says about the need for divine law in addition to human law and the need for infused as well as acquired virtues should be clear. 63 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 91 a. 5. Thomas gives a different fourfold division of law in his sermons on the Ten Commandments: the law of nature (lex naturae), the law of concupiscence, the law of Moses, and the law of Christ (De decem praeceptis, prooemium). 64 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 92 a. 1. Note that Thomas thinks this is the case with both acquired and infused virtues, albeit in different ways. See ad 1. 62

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precept of natural law: “good is to be done and evil is to be avoided.”65 In this way, the natural law provides what we might call the “raw material” upon which the virtue of prudence operates in order to draw conclusions about particular actions.66 Because the principles of natural law are quite general, when applied to the life of communities of people they must be made operational through particular instantiations of human law. Human law is therefore legitimate to the degree that it accords with right reason, understood as a human sharing in the ordering wisdom of the eternal law.67 Two things should be noted about this relationship of human to natural law. First, a human law might be related to the natural law in the way that a conclusion is related to a premise, not unlike the operation of practical reason in particular cases. Such laws are binding in the same way that natural law is binding. For example, specific rules against perjury are conclusions drawn from the general natural law principles prohibiting lying. But in some cases a human law might simply be a particular determination that is not a necessary conclusion drawn from natural law, but is one of a number of different possible ways of giving specificity to a principle of natural law. So, for example, while it is in accord with natural law that parents educate their children, the exact number of school days required is not something determined by natural law but simply by human convention.68 Such a law does not have the same sort of binding force as one that is a necessary conclusion drawn from the natural law. Second, by relating human law to natural law, and natural law in turn to eternal law, Thomas frees the idea of law from any hint of an arbitrary imposition based solely in power. Jean Porter notes that while Thomas’s account of law is strongly influence by earlier theologians, particularly Franciscans, Aquinas’s account emphasizes God’s providential reason more than do the Franciscans, and the idea of authority is less prominent. . . . By the same token, Aquinas holds that temporal laws are derived from the eternal law insofar as they are reasonable and directed to genuinely good ends. In other words, human authority

65 This, it should be noted, is not the only precept of natural law. Thomas also includes such general principles as, “one should do no harm to any person” and “evil doers should be punished.” 66 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 94 a. 2. 67 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 93 a. 3. 68 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 95 a. 2; Sententia Ethic. lib. 5 lec. 12 n. 8.

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depends on conformity to God’s wisdom, rather than being derived in a juridical fashion from God’s authority.69

We might say that for Thomas God’s activity as lawgiver is subsumed into his activity as nature-giver—one who bestows on creatures a particular natural orientation toward the good. As in the case of virtue and vice, Thomas sees both divine law and human law in terms of what is fulfilling to the nature of the rational creature.70 As Thomas notes in connection with the virtues, human beings are not simply citizens of the earthly city, but also of the heavenly city, and therefore it is fitting that there be, in addition to human law, which is established for the sake of worldly peace, a divinely given law, which is established in order to bring people to heavenly peace.71 The Summa theologiae lavishes much attention on the Old Law of Torah, including not only its moral precepts, but also its ritual and juridical precepts.72 The moral precepts of the Old Law are in accord with the principles of natural law, either simply repromulgating them, or giving greater specificity to them, or in some cases commanding actions that are in accord with reason, but which reason itself could never arrive at unaided.73 As such, the moral precepts of the Old Law are of enduring significance for Christians. The ceremonial precepts had a twofold purpose: to guide the worship life of God’s people in Israel and to foreshadow the coming of Christ.74 These purposes now being past, the ceremonial precepts have been abrogated.75 If the ceremonial precepts guided the Israelites’ ritual relationship with God, the juridical precepts guided their relationship with other human beings, specifically in those cases that were neutral with regard to the natural law, such as specific regulations of commerce or the institution of kingship.76 Like the ceremonial precepts, they have lost their

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Porter (2005), 184–5. See Contra Gentiles, lib. 3 cap. 129. 71 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 98 a. 1 co. 72 Thomas justifies this traditional Christian threefold division of the Old Law by appeal to Paul’s statement in Roman 7:12 that the Law is just (juridical precepts), holy (ceremonial precepts) and good (moral precepts). See Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 99 a. 4 co. 73 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 100 a. 1 co. 74 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 102 a. 2. 75 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 103 a. 3. Indeed, because they prefigure Christ, their continued practice would be an implicit denial of faith that the messiah has come; in this way, the ceremonial law is now not only spiritually dead but even spiritually deadly. See Ia–IIae q. 103 a. 4. 76 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 104 a. 1. 70

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binding force with the coming of Christ and his promulgation of the New Law.77 In one sense, the New Law is, like the Old Law, a specific code of belief and action, most clearly collated in the Sermon on the Mount.78 In this sense, Christ teaches a way of life that surpasses all human teaching. But more than simply a new code of action, the New Law constitutes a new principle of action: “the New Law is chiefly the grace itself of the Holy Spirit, which is given to those who believe in Christ.”79 It is the New Law as grace that justifies a person before God, not the New Law as code of action: “the letter, even of the Gospel, would kill unless there were the inward presence of the healing grace of faith.”80 I will have more to say about grace shortly, so here I will simply observe that the various types of law come full circle with the New Law. Thomas’s discussion of the kinds of law both begins and ends with Christ: Christ is the eternal Word who is the promulgation of the eternal law, and it is through the Word incarnate that the law of the gospel is promulgated.81 As the grace of the Spirit, the New Law combines the interiority of the natural law, which moves human beings from within, with the specificity of human law and the Old Law, and in this way it most closely approaches the eternal law. Finally, Thomas also speaks of a lex fomitis or a lex concupiscentiae— both of which name a law of sensual desire that inclines people toward sinful acts. Thomas describes this inclination as a “law” on the authority of Paul’s letter to the Romans: “I see another law in my members, fighting against the law in my mind” (7:23). In his sermons on the Ten Commandments, Thomas describes the origin of this law vividly: “Though God gave human beings this law of nature in creation, the devil has sown in them another law on top of it, that of concupiscence.”82 In the Summa he notes, somewhat more soberly, that, “when human beings turned their backs on God, they fell under the influence of their sensual impulses.”83 The law of sin takes the form of a sensual inclination, though the source of this

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Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 104 a. 3. See Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 108 a. 3. 79 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 106 a. 1 co. 80 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 106 a. 2 co. 81 Hall (2002) writes, “the treatment of laws in the Prima secundae begins with eternal law, God’s ordering of the cosmos, and concludes with God’s merciful reordering of human beings to union with God” (202). Attention to the Christological aspect of both the eternal law and the New Law would only strengthen her point. 82 De decem praeceptis prooemium (sermon 1). 83 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 91 a. 6 co. 78

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inclination is the disordering of the human person, which Thomas, following Anselm, describes as the loss of “original justice.”84 After the Fall, our will is no longer subordinate to God through reason, and our sensual impulses are no longer subordinate to our will, leading us, like irrational animals, to be ruled by those impulses. Here we can see in a particularly clear way the relationship between law and virtue, since the law of sensual desire is simply another way of speaking about vice. The purpose of positive law, whether human or divine, is to counteract the lex concupiscentiae by reorienting human beings to their true good and developing in them the virtues necessary to attain that good.85 In the case of the Old Law, as Thomas notes in connection with Galatians 3:24, we have a pedagogue that leads people to Christ and his New Law of love.86 Despite Thomas’s emphasis on reason as the measure of law, love is equally a measure. Thomas says in one of his sermons on the Ten Commandments, “for human acts to be good, they must harmonize with the standard of divine love.”87 The same idea is expressed, though transposed from the language of law to that of virtue, in Thomas’s view that love is the form of all the virtues, without which they are not perfect virtues.88

Grace In speaking of the New Law we have already begun to speak of grace. Thomas’s emphasis on the New Law primarily as the grace of the Holy Spirit operative through faith in Christ and only secondarily as the code of belief and action commended in the New Testament would seem to acquit him of the suspicion that all this talk of virtue and law implies a slighting of the importance of grace in favor of human works. Indeed, as Thomas’s views develop he comes to emphasize ever more strongly the incapacity of human beings to do anything to contribute to their salvation apart from God’s assistance. At the same time, Thomas understands the work of grace in the life of the Christian not simply as our forgiveness and acceptance by God, but also as the restoration and perfection of the image

84 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 82 a. 3; for Anselm, see On the Virgin Conception and Original Sin cap. 2. 85 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 92 a. 1 co. 86 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 91 a. 5; Super Gal. cap. 3 lec. 8 n. 178. 87 De decem praeceptis prooemium (sermon 2). 88 Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 23 aa. 7–8.

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of God within us through the infusion of grace.89 In other words, “grace” refers both to God’s gracious action toward us, which Thomas refers to as auxilium Dei (the assistance of God, called “actual grace” by later theologians), and to the reality created in us by that gracious action, which Thomas speaks of as “habitual grace.”90 Grace in this latter sense is, as the name implies, a habitus that, like every settled disposition, perfects a potential that is natural to us, while at the same time being an “accident” of our nature.91 This is related to our oft-repeated axiom that grace perfects and does not destroy nature. Were grace a substantial and not an accidental form, the gift of grace would involve our becoming a new sort of thing. Grace, however, does not involve us ceasing to be the sort of beings that we are but rather makes us more fully the rational animals that we are by nature. At the same time, lest this seems to “naturalize” grace, Thomas remarks, in commenting on Paul’s statement, “if anyone is in Christ he is a new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17), that there is a creation of nature and a creation of grace: just as the creation of our nature is ex nihilo, so too the new creation through grace “is a creation from nothing, because those who lack grace are nothing.”92 Such remarks should remind us that for Thomas the axiom that grace perfects and does not destroy nature in no way compromises the radical newness of the life of grace. In some places, Thomas distinguishes between the natural potential that a creature possesses—say, the natural potential of wood to burn or the natural potential I possess to know the contents of the book I hold in my hand—and its “obediential potency,” which is its capacity to act beyond its nature when acted upon directly by God.93 In applying this distinction to the relationship between nature and grace, we might say that grace actualizes a genuine potential in human nature, but the potential that it

89 See Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 113 a. 2: “We could not conceive of the remission of sin without the infusion of grace.” 90 Contra Gentiles lib. 3 cap. 150; Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 110 a. 1. 91 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 110 a. 2. 92 Super II Cor. cap. 5, lec. 4 n. 192; cf. Super Eph. cap. 2 lec. 3 n. 99. 93 See Super Sent. lib. 3 d. 1 q. 1 a. 3 ad 4; De veritate q. 8 a. 4 ad 13; De virtutibus, q. 1 a. 10 ad 13; Thomas does not use the term “obediential potency” in Summa theologiae Ia 105 a. 6 ad 1, but the notion is clearly present. It is striking, however, given the role of this term in later discussions of the relationship of nature and grace, that Thomas does not use the term directly in the context of discussing grace but, typically, in discussing miracles or the perfection of the angelic intellect in the beatific vision. The discussion of infused virtue in De virtutibus, cited above, perhaps comes closest.

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realizes is the potential to exceed anything that nature could anticipate, in the same way that nonbeing in no way “anticipates” being. Numerous commentators have noted a development in Thomas’s thought with regard to grace over the course of his teaching.94 In his commentary on Lombard’s Sentences Thomas spoke of grace primarily as a habitus, following the approach typical of his day, and perhaps as a reaction to Lombard’s controversial view that charity in human beings is no created thing but rather the Holy Spirit itself.95 The notion of grace as auxilium Dei, by comparison, was somewhat underplayed. For example, Thomas interprets the common medieval maxim that to those who do what is within their capacity God will not deny grace—si homo facit quod in se est, Deus dat ei gratiam—to mean that human beings, unaided by any special divine grace, can prepare themselves for the reception of grace. While there is a kind of divine assistance involved in human beings doing what is within their capacity, this assistance is really no different from God’s general providence.96 In the Summa theologiae the picture is different. Here, we find the maxim si homo facit quod in se est, Deus ei non denegat gratiam stated in one of the opening objections, to which Thomas replies that this is true, “inasmuch as he or she is moved by God” (secundum quod est motus a Deo). It is made clear in the body of this article that this movement by God is not simply a matter of God’s general providence toward creatures, but rather that God “directs righteous people to himself as a particular goal that they seek and to which they wish to cling.”97 In other words, for the later Thomas, God does not deny grace to one who does what is in him or her when moved by the auxillium Dei. Human beings not only cannot be saved without the habitus of grace, by which they love God above all things, but they cannot even prepare themselves to receive that grace apart from a particular act of divine assistance.98

94 For what follows, see Wawrykow (2005), esp. 206–9. Wawrykow makes special reference to the work of Bernard Lonergan and Henri Bouillard on the question of the development of Aquinas’s thought. See also McGrath (2005), 110–12. For a succinct account of Aquinas’s theology of grace, from a slightly different (but not incompatible) perspective, drawing heavily on his biblical commentaries, see Keating (2004), 139–58. 95 See Super Sent. lib. 1 d. 17 q. 1 a. 1. 96 Super Sent. lib. 2 d. 5 q. 2 a. 1 co.; d. 28 q. 4 a. 1. 97 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 109 a. 6; cf. q. 112 a. 3; Quodibet I q. 4 a. 2. 98 While there is a logical priority to God’s act over the created habitus of grace, Thomas is clear that there is no temporal priority, since “the justification of the ungodly is not successive but instantaneous” (Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 113 a. 7). Also, while the auxillium Dei is distinct from God’s general providence over creatures, it is not a different kind of divine act; it differs by virtue of its effect. See Bouillard (1944), 173–209.

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Several difficult questions arise when we seek to relate Thomas’s strong account of grace to the other sources of human action. First, we might ask how this view of grace is compatible with human freedom, particularly in light of Thomas’s understanding of predestination, according to which God’s election of human beings to salvation is based on no prior human merit whatsoever.99 Without delving into all the complexities involved, I would note that Thomas has already laid the groundwork for an answer in his account, discussed in Chapter 3, of how God can be the primary cause of the activity of creatures without those creatures themselves ceasing to be genuine causes. God wills his free creatures to freely accept the gift of grace. In speaking of grace as both “operating,” attributable to God, and “cooperating,” attributable to the human being, Thomas says, “God does not justify us without ourselves, because while we are being justified we consent to God’s justification by a movement of our free will.” He then continues, “Nevertheless, this movement is not the cause of grace, but the effect.”100 What was said concerning the human and divine wills of Christ in Chapter 5 can be said equally here of any human will in relation to God’s will: divine freedom should not be envisioned as in equipoise with human freedom, but rather as its enabling ground. At the same time, while grace is an external principle of action finding its source in God alone, it remains, as a habitus that I possess, a principle of my action. Even moved by God, I remain the cause of my own free actions, not unlike the way that we can say that God is the source of everything that exists without denying that fire is the cause of cotton burning or that the builder is the cause of a house. In other words, Thomas rejects occasionalism in the realm of human action as much as he does in the realm of natural causes. As to the reason why God predestines those whom he chooses for salvation, this remains in this life hidden from us within the mystery of God’s will.101 Thomas is resolute in rejecting any account of predestination that would ascribe a “motive” to God’s gift of grace—by which I mean the claim that anything that is not God could move God to will someone’s salvation, thereby in some sense determining God’s will. God as pure act is perfect in mercy. Even if we are satisfied that grace does not remove human freedom, there is a second question of whether any human action can truly be called 99 Summa theologiae Ia q. 23, esp. a. 5 ad 5: “There is no reason why God chooses these for glory and rejects those except the divine will.” Cf. Super Rom. cap. 8 lec. 6 nn. 703–7. 100 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 111 a. 2 ad 2. 101 See Super Io. cap. 6 lec. 5 n. 938.

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good apart from grace. Augustine is commonly thought to have said that all the virtues of the pagans were merely splendid vices, and though it does not appear that he actually used this phrase, one can indeed find passages in his writings that seem to endorse this view.102 Whether or not this accurately characterizes Augustine’s position in its entirety, it is clearly not the view of Thomas. Commenting on Paul’s statement in Romans that “everything that does not proceed from faith is sin” (14:23), Thomas notes that even in the unbeliever the good of nature remains, such that “when someone without faith does something good on account of the dictate of reason and does not refer it to an evil end, he does not sin.” Thomas notes that such a deed “is not meritorious”—that is, meritorious of salvation—“because it was not enlivened by grace.” Yet the act itself is still a good action.103 As Thomas says elsewhere, “the whole life of unbelievers is said to be sin, not because they sin in whatever they do, but because they cannot be freed from the slavery of sin by what they do.”104 Thomas frankly acknowledges that someone with moral virtue acquired through practice might exercise those virtues better than one whose moral virtue is infused through grace.105 An unbeliever could, for example, prove to be a more prudent ruler than a saint. This leads to a third question regarding the relationship between the acquired and infused moral virtues in those who have received sanctifying grace. Is it the case for Thomas, as Michael Sherwin claims, that the infused moral virtues “pertain to a narrow band of action: they pertain only to those actions necessary for the agent’s personal salvation”?106 This seems unlikely, for Thomas notes that while the infused moral virtue of prudence produces in some people a diligence “merely sufficient with regard to things necessary to salvation,” in other people it produces a diligence “more than sufficient, enabling one to make provision both for

102 See, e.g. City of God bk. 19, ch. 25. Of course, one can sometimes find Augustine saying seemingly conflicting things, such as when without irony he praise Cicero as “a truly great and wise man, and one who consulted very much and very skillfully for the good of humanity” (City of God bk. 5, ch. 9). 103 Super Rom. cap. 14 lec. 3 n. 1141; cf. Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 10 a. 4. When Thomas says, “not enlivened by grace” he presumably means grace as a habitus and not simply as auxilium Dei. In Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 136 a. 3 ad 2 he makes the interesting statement that the patience of the pagan in the face of persecution can be “without the help of sanctifying grace” (absque auxilio gratiae gratum facientis) but “not without the help of God” (non absque auxilio Dei). 104 Super Sent. lib. 4 d. 39 q. 1 a. 2 ad 5. 105 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 65 a. 3 ad 2. 106 Sherwin (2009), 42.

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oneself and for others, not only in matters necessary for salvation, but also in all things relating to human life.”107 In other words, an infused moral virtue like prudence is not per se restricted to what we might call “religious” activity. If this were the case, then, for example, the Summa’s discussion of the virtues in the secunda secundae would seem to be concerned primarily with the acquired virtues and only occasionally with the infused virtues, since much of Thomas’s discussion extends beyond the narrow band of acts necessary for personal salvation.108 In contrast to Sherwin, John Inglis writes that, for Thomas, “if all human actions are to have the proper teleology, then every action stands in need of infused moral virtue. . . . [I]nfused moral virtue is (ideally) to govern even the lowest human actions.”109 On this view, the secunda secundae is really about nothing but infused virtue, with attention paid to acquired virtues primarily as disposing a person toward the reception of the infused virtue. This interpretation seems more likely, at least in the wide scope of activity that it sees Thomas giving to the infused moral virtues. The secunda secundae pars, with its discussion of virtues and vices, gifts and beatitudes, and states of life, can be read as an extended treatment of the Christian life that flows from the questions on grace that conclude the prima secundae.110 At the same time, we ought to bear in mind the robust account Thomas gives of the acquired virtues, which makes it unlikely that he would see them merely as dispositive. Rather, they are true principles of good (though not salvific) human action and somehow enhance the exercise of the infused moral virtues. For Thomas the life of grace is neither a second tier added on to the natural life of human beings, nor is it something that replaces that natural life. The secunda secundae in a sense constantly oscillates between a human nature that retains its integrity and a genuinely gratuitous grace that in some way effects a comprehensive transformation of that nature, a transformation so radical that it can be called a “new creation.” The relationship of nature and grace cannot be neatly schematized, particularly

107

Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 47 a. 14 ad 1. Michael Sherwin states that this second case is not the infused moral virtue of prudence, but rather a gratuitous gift (gratia gratis data) given for the upbuilding of the Church. It is not clear to me, however, that this is the distinction Thomas is making in this passage. See Sherwin (2005), 175, note 116. 108 This question is not unrelated to that of how one understands the first article of the Summa and the salus for which sacra doctrina is required. See the discussion of this article in Ch. 2. 109 Inglis (1999), 15. 110 This suggestion is made both by Keating (2004), 155, and Hall (2002), 201.

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when we bear in mind the journey of the wayfarer toward God: we are journeying toward a fulfillment of our nature that transcends our nature. There is, I suspect, no neat resolution to this tension. Despite his reputation as a great synthesizer, Thomas is no less adept at leaving matters in a state of fruitful tension. Perhaps this is the case with the question of the necessity of grace for perfect virtue, in which Thomas seeks to maintain the goodness of creation, even in the face of sin, while at the same time stressing that the journey of the viator toward the patria is possible only through grace.

2. THE LIFE OF GRACE Having teased out the strands of the diverse sources of human action, it remains to braid those strands back together so as to gain some sense of how Thomas sees the life of grace taken as a whole. One place Thomas does this is in his sermons on the Ten Commandments, which were preached in the vernacular, probably to a lay audience in Naples.111 Here we see Thomas spelling out in short course the fundamental contours of the Christian life. Thomas prefaces his presentation of the Ten Commandments as a set of concrete guidelines for behavior with a series of sermons on love. It will be these introductory sermons that will be my chief focus in what follows. After delineating the different sorts of law, culminating in the New Law of Christ, which, as we have seen, is nothing other than the grace of the Holy Spirit, Thomas enumerates the effects of this law of grace on human beings, noting first that it causes “spiritual life” in them by making them sharers in divine love. The act of love brings the object of love within the lover and, in a sense, transforms the lover into that which he or she loves.112 Thomas says, “if we love God, we are made divine” (si autem Deum diligimus divini efficimur), in the sense that the love of God, meaning both the love by which God loves us and the love by which we love God, which through the grace of the Spirit been poured into our hearts, becomes the principle of our activity.113 In the Summa, Thomas gives a Trinitarian 111 On the difficulties of determining the date and location of these sermons, see Torrell (2002a), 51–8. 112 This is somewhat different from Thomas’s typical manner of speaking of love in ecstatic terms. 113 De decem praeceptis prooemium (sermon 2). Cf. Super Rom. cap. 5 lec. 1, n. 392. The language of “divinization,” often associated with the Christian East, is by no means absent in

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cast to this participation in divine love, noting that love is in us, “by the infusion of the Holy Spirit, who is the love of the Father and the Son.”114 Caritas is our participation in the eternal act of love that is God. Love, Thomas goes on to say, also causes us to follow God’s commandments promptly, since lovers “do great and difficult things for the sake of their beloved.” This reflects Thomas’s notion of habitus, by which one is enabled to act consistently, readily, and with pleasure. Such love is also, Thomas tells us, a defense against adversity, since “even adverse and difficult things are seen as pleasing to one who loves.” In the end, Thomas says, it is only love that leads to final happiness—“All other things apart from love are insufficient”—and it is love, and no other virtue, that will determine the degree to which we will participate in divine blessedness. As Thomas says in his commentary on John’s gospel, “one who has a more burning love for God will find more delight in the enjoyment of God.”115 The journey of the human person toward beatitude is sketched by Thomas as he goes on to discuss other effects of love: the gift of interior penitence and the forgiveness of sins; the illumination of the heart in which the lover is taught all things necessary for salvation; the gift of perfect joy and peace in possessing that which fulfills the deepest desires of the heart; and, finally, the dignity of being a free person, a friend of God, and God’s adopted heir—one who serves God out of love rather than fear.116 Though Thomas does not here invoke the classic spiritual itinerary of purgation, illumination, and union, his account seems to reflect a similar path of spiritual development: from penitential purification through spiritual enlightenment and growth in virtue to the joy and peace of union with God by adoption in Christ as God’s heir.117 One thing this makes clear is that the notion that theological and moral virtues are “infused” does not in any way preclude growth with regard to the the medieval West. Thomas’s older Dominican confrere, William Peraldus, says, “When iron is heated in the fire, it becomes fire in a certain sense, and similarly the elect will be God in a certain sense when they come to be very much like him” (“Sermon on Prayer” in Tugwell (1982), 176). 114 Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 24 a. 2 co. 115 Super Io. cap. 14 lec. 1 n. 1854. 116 De decem praeceptis prooemium (sermon 3). 117 On the development within Christianity of this threefold path, first found in Origen and seemingly growing out of similar patterns in Greek philosophy, see McGinn (1991), 117, 148–9, 172–3. In other texts Thomas draws a comparison between such spiritual development and the growth of the human body from infancy to adulthood. See Super Sent. lib. 3 d. 29 q. 1 a. 7 qc. 1; Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 24 a. 11.

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exercise of those virtues once they are infused. As Thomas says in the Summa, “it is essential to the love of a wayfarer that it can increase, for if it could not, all further advance along the way would cease.”118 As Thomas continues his sermons, he stresses that our spiritual growth in love is entirely the effect of God’s love: “the fact that we love him is caused in us by his love.”119 As we have seen, this might seems to compromise human freedom, unless we keep in focus the fact that it is precisely through the relationship of charity that the movement of our will is joined to God’s. In his disputed questions on truth Thomas invokes Aristotle’s principle that “what we do through friends we somehow do through ourselves” to argue that “free choice can accordingly have choice and deliberation not only about matters for which its own power suffices but also about those for which it needs divine assistance.”120 In his sermon Thomas goes on to mention, without some of the technical vocabulary, the dual aspect of grace as an act of divine assistance and as a habitus of the soul, and notes that the disposition toward divine love is acquired through hearing the word proclaimed, which enflames our hearts, and by constant reflection on the good things one has received from God. Love is increased in us by cultivating purity of heart—focusing our desire on God above all else—and by bearing adversity patiently.121 Regarding his first point, Thomas writes in the Summa, The love of God is unitive, inasmuch as it draws one’s affections from the many to the one; so that the virtues, which flow from the love of God, are connected together. But self-love disunites one’s affections among different things, insofar as one loves oneself by seeking temporal goods, which are various and of many kinds.122

Purity—that characteristic that so many of Thomas’s contemporaries ascribed to him—appears here as the quality of having one’s life drawn into a unity through loving God above all other things. It is precisely this detachment from earthly things so as to have one’s disparate loves focused

118 Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 24 a. 4 co. Elsewhere Thomas notes in particular that one’s exercise of an infused virtue can be hindered due to tendencies remaining from earlier sinful activity, thus the need for purgation. See Super Sent. lib. 3 d. 31 q. 1 a. 2 ad 1; Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 65 a. 3 ad 2, 3; De virtutibus q. 5 a. 2 ad 2. 119 De decem praeceptis prooemium (sermon 4). 120 De veritate q. 24 a. 12 ad s.c. 6. 121 De decem praeceptis prooemium (sermon 4). 122 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 73 a. 1 ad 3.

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on God that allows one to bear patiently the sufferings of life, and even to have the depths of one’s love increased by them. Thomas concludes his introductory sermons with discussions of the commandments to love God and neighbor, including the neighbor who is our enemy. Regarding the love of God, Thomas begins by noting that this love fulfills all the other commandments and he goes on to repeat some of his earlier points concerning the requisites of love: the need to meditate on God’s gift to us of everything that we are or possess; the need to consider the greatness of God and our inability to thank him as much as he deserves; the need to reject all worldly things that would crowd God out of the soul, the way that an adulterous relationship crowds one’s rightful spouse from the marriage bed; the need to reject all sin and to confess all of the sins that we do commit.123 Once again, we see Thomas’s focus on the need to be single-hearted in our love of God, giving to God one’s heart and soul, and mind and strength, which he parses as a matter of having a correct intention of the end (heart), a right willing of the means to that end (soul), a right understanding of God through faith (mind), and right action (strength).124 Thomas conveys a strong sense of the need for human beings to love God in a way that utterly exceeds their natural capacities, but which God makes possible through grace. As Thomas notes in the Summa, “the capacity of the spiritual creature is enlarged through love, for by it the heart is expanded.”125 Love of our neighbor grows out of our love of God, motivated by our love for our fellow members of Christ’s body and in obedience to the divine command. Thomas proposes such love of neighbor, rather than miraculous powers, as the chief sign of the true disciple of Jesus. At the same time, such love is in accord with our nature, since, as it says in the book of Sirach (13:19), “every animal loves its like.” Moreover, such love is useful, since it binds the Christian community together and, by making us useful to each other, “makes everything common.”126 Here we can see again Thomas’s firm conviction that the law of grace perfects and does not destroy the law of nature and that the commandments of God lead to human flourishing by referring our actions to the common good of the heavenly city. What might at first might seem to be a utilitarian argument for charity—i.e. that such love of neighbor is “useful” for establishing a 123 124 125 126

De decem praeceptis a. 1 (sermon 5). De decem praeceptis a. 1 (sermon 6); cf. De perfectione cap. 4–5. Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 24 a. 7 ad 2. De decem praeceptis a. 2 (sermon 7).

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community—actually underscores the point we have seen earlier that the infused virtues, which are unified by supernatural charity, are concerned not simply with a “narrow band of action” pertaining to personal salvation, but rather that charity makes a difference in “all things relating to human life.” As to how we are to love, Thomas notes that you are to love your neighbor “as yourself.” This means that we do not love the neighbor as a means to our own ends, but that we desire that our neighbor flourish just as we desire ourselves to flourish. At the same time, the neighbor must be loved in the proper order of things, so as not to be loved more than God, but to be loved in relation to God [iuxta sicut teipsum debes diligere].127 This love, moreover, must lead to practical action and be persevering through adversity, which requires both patience and humility. Finally, we must love our neighbor in a way that accords with holiness, which Thomas identifies with the “beautiful love” spoken of in the Vulgate translation of Sirach 24:24: “I am the mother of beautiful love” [Ego mater pulchre dilectionis].128 This passing mention of beauty reminds us of the importance of “fittingness” for Aquinas: our love of neighbor, to be a holy love, must take its proper place within the fittingly ordered love of God, self, and others. The saint who loves well loves beautifully, and the beauty of this love exerts an attractive force on others. Of course, not all respond to the attractive force of love, so Thomas turns at the end of his introductory sermons on love to the question of how we ought to love our enemies. Though Christ commands such love, Thomas is well aware of scriptural passages that seem to enjoin hatred of enemies: “I have hated them with perfect hatred” (Psalm 138:22). In the Summa Thomas comments regarding this passage that such “perfect hatred” is a hatred of the evil itself: it is, for example, hatred of the injustice of the unjust person. But in hating the unjust person’s injustice, we love the good of justice and, moreover, love the unjust person by wishing that he or she become just, which would conduce to that person’s ultimate happiness.129 In his sermon, Thomas says that in loving our enemies we must follow the example of Christ himself, loving them on account of their human nature while at the same time hating their sin, which we do

127 For Thomas’s account of the proper “order of love” [ordo caritatis], see Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 26. 128 De decem praeceptis a. 2 (sermon 8). 129 Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 25 a. 6 ad 1.

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by wishing that their sin would be destroyed by their becoming good.130 Thomas hold that the command of love requires that we forgive when forgiveness is asked, but it is a counsel of spiritual perfection that we seek out those who have offended us to offer them forgiveness.131 He describes this perfection in terms of several sorts of “dignity” that love of an enemy gives us: of being a son of God, of winning a victory by overcoming evil with good, of acquiring friends by transforming enemies into friends, of having our prayers emulate the prayer of Christ and the martyrs, and of avoiding sin.132 While God does not command such love of enemies, Thomas presents it as an activity that is inherently attractive to the one who loves God above all else. From these introductory reflections on the law of love, Thomas goes on in his remaining sermons to discuss the Ten Commandments as particular specifications of these two forms of love. Since law must be in accord with human reason, Thomas discusses the reasons underlying the commandments, such as why the Sabbath ought to be kept holy,133 why it is that we owe our parents honor,134 and why “sins of the flesh are more shameful and less blameful than those of the spirit.”135 He also covers a number of practical issues, such as the kinds of activities that one ought to engage in so as to keep the Sabbath holy (prayer, fasting, almsgiving, listening to scripture and, for the more advanced, contemplation),136 what people are covered by the commandment to honor father and mother (parents, Church superiors, kings, benefactors, and the elderly),137 and whether an adulterous wife sins more than an adulterous husband, since in her infidelity she also deprives her husband of the legitimate children that are rightly his (Thomas says she doesn’t).138 We see in these sermons that Thomas presents the Christian life as one that is in accord with reason, even as it is one that can only be lived with the help of God’s grace. It is also a life that is lived out in highly particular ways, involving determinations regarding the praise and blame to be 130 De decem praeceptis a. 2 (sermon 9). Thomas also notes, somewhat disturbingly to many modern sensibilities, that such love is not incompatible with the execution of wrongdoers, provided one desire the salvation of the condemned prisoner as well as his death. 131 On the distinction between commandments or precepts and counsels, see Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 108 a. 4. On the question of love of enemies as precept and counsel, see Super Sent. lib. 3 d. 30 a. 2 ad 5; Summa theologiae II–II q. 25 aa. 8–9; In orationem dominicam a. 5; De perfection cap. 14; Super Rom. cap. 12 lec. 1 n. 998. 132 De decem praeceptis a. 2 (sermon 10). 133 134 De decem praeceptis a. 5 (sermon 15). De decem praeceptis a. 6 (sermon 18). 135 136 De decem praeceptis a. 8 (sermon 25). De decem praeceptis a. 5 (sermon 17). 137 138 De decem praeceptis a. 6 (sermon 20). De decem praeceptis a. 8 (sermon 24).

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assigned to particular actions. The attention Thomas lavishes on such particularities indicates that while the Christian life finds its source in the mystery of divine grace, it also has a concrete, identifiable shape. Divine law sketches this shape, but as this sketch is animated through grace it is filled in to form the clearest representation of the life of supernatural virtue, the life of the saint.139

3. FORMATION IN VIRTUE In prefacing his sermons on the commandments with ten sermons on love, Thomas makes clear that law has an important but subordinate place in his understanding of the Christian life. As I mentioned earlier, for Thomas the purpose of law is to guide people in the process of becoming good, of acquiring virtue. If human virtue is acquired through repeated action and infused virtue is strengthened in its exercise through such action, then law can be seen as providing guidance as to what actions are conducive to the life of virtue. In recent years there has been a general recognition of the centrality of virtue to Thomas’s thought, with law being understood in terms of the role it plays in fostering virtue.140 It is useful, therefore, to see how Thomas, as a friar preacher, thought of the role of concrete practices in the formation of virtue. It is one of the distinctive features of the Order of Preachers that their Constitutions do not bind on pain of mortal sin, at least with regard to particular external observances that are not directly connected to the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.141 This would include matters such as the hours of prayer, particular rules of fasting, and so forth. Though Dominicans were expected to abide by the Constitutions, and an attitude of general contempt toward them would have been seen as indeed sinful, they saw that their particular ministry of teaching, preaching, and the care of souls required a greater flexibility than would be appropriate for the monastic cloister. The priority that Thomas gives to virtue over law in his moral thinking is perhaps a reflection of his order’s practice of forming friars not so much to be obedient observers of the Constitutions as to be prudent practitioners of virtue. Simon Tugwell writes of Humbert of Romans, “It is significant that Humbert, rather than trying to tighten up the 139 140 141

Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 92 a. 1 ad 1. See, e.g. Pope (2002), 30–53. See Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 186 a. 9 and Quodibet I q. 9 a. 4.

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discipline, tried to ensure that the novices developed good habits from the outset, avoiding the company of the more frivolous brethren and learning how to make good use of their time.”142 Formed within this context, Thomas’s understands the Christian life in general more as a process of formation in virtue and less as a matter of rule-following. And if, as Leonard Boyle claims, Thomas wrote the Summa theologiae as part of a program of formation for Dominican friars, it is only to be expected that he would devote much attention to questions concerning the acquisition and practice of virtue.143 Not only was the life of the Dominican one ordered more by virtue than by law, but a theologically sophisticated understanding of virtue and vice would be particularly important for friars who had as one of their duties the hearing of confessions. In addition, Thomas’s account of the subtle interaction of knowing and loving conforms closely to the Dominican understanding, discussed in Chapter 4, of the preacher’s task of appealing to both the mind and the affections. While Thomas’s understanding of human acts as constituted by both will and intellect is hardly uniquely Dominican, it certainly fits well with the particular mission of the preaching friar. The preacher moves the will to love God by informing the intellect in the teaching of divine truth. The goal of preaching is not simply to convey information, but to bring about the affective interpenetration of divine and human love. The preacher must be formed in such a way that he can understand the complex interaction of intellect, will, and emotions so as effectively convey the gospel to human beings. In light of this, it is instructive to return to Pierre Hadot’s notion of “philosophy as a way of life,” discussed in Chapter 2, and compare the Dominican studium to the various philosophical schools of antiquity—the Academy, the Lyceum, the Stoa—that had their own particular discourses and ways of formation, but which all sought, in varied and different ways, to form those who would lead the philosophical life for the good of the polis as a whole. Hadot writes of Plato: “In order to realize his political goal, Plato thus had to make an immense detour; he had to create an intellectual and spiritual community whose job it would be to train new human beings, however long this might take.”144 Similarly, while the life

142

Tugwell (1988b), 22. It is important to bear in mind, however, that the study of sacra doctrina is only one part of the formation of the friar preacher, and that the wisdom attained through study is not identical with the wisdom that is a gift of the Holy Spirit. See Summa theologiae Ia q. 1 a. 6 ad 3. 144 Hadot (2002), 59. 143

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of the Christian is lived for the good of Christ’s body as a whole—the heavenly polis on pilgrimage—that life takes shape in particular spiritual communities. As Thomas’s discussion of the diversity of states in religious life makes clear, particular charisms, and the particular configuration of the virtues that accompany them, are developed in specific social contexts. In part this is because human beings, as psychosomatic unities, are profoundly affected by their immediate environment. Thomas recognizes, as did the schools of philosophy in antiquity, that virtues are acquired or deepened through practices, which always occur at particular times and places under the guidance of particular rules, teachers, and examples. Even in the case of the infused virtues, which are not acquired through practice, our practice can disposes us to receive those virtues and, once they are received, to develop our exercise of them.145 How we acquire or develop virtues, the specific context with its particular discourse and practice, is relevant even to the life of grace. For a sense of formative practices in the thirteenth-century Dominican context, we might look at De modo orandi, a work roughly contemporary with Thomas. This anonymous little treatise does not describe what we might normally think of as “prayer techniques” (lectio divina, imaginative visualization, etc.), but rather a series of bodily postures or actions adopted by St Dominic in his devotions: bowing his head, prostrating himself, flagellating himself with an iron chain, and so forth. Several early manuscripts of this text are illuminated with depictions of each of these “modes” of prayer, presumably as “how-to” illustrations for those who wished to emulate Dominic.146 This emulation was not a simple-minded aping of outward action, because, as De modo orandi puts it, “the soul uses the members of the body in order to rise more devotedly to God, so that the soul, as it causes the body to move, is in turn moved by the body, until sometimes it comes to be in ecstasy like Paul, sometimes in agony

145

De virtutibus q. 1 a. 10 ad 17: “Although infused virtue is not brought about through our actions, our actions can still dispose us to it.” Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 92 a. 1 ad 1: “Virtue is twofold . . . , acquired and infused. Now the fact of being accustomed to an action contributes to both, but in different ways; for it causes the acquired virtue; while it disposes to infused virtue, and preserves and fosters it when it already exists.” 146 The nine ways of prayer also seem to underlie many of the fifteenth-century frescoes by Fran Angelico and others at the Dominican convent of San Marco in Florence, the intention being that this would assist the novices being formed in the convent in their interiorization of Dominican spirituality. See Hood (1986), 195–206.

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like our Savior, and sometimes in rapture like the prophet David.”147 Thomas himself, in discussing the virtue of religio, says that “in divine worship it is necessary to use bodily things, so that the mind of human beings might be stirred up, as by particular signs, to spiritual acts by which one is joined to God.”148 This gives us some indication that Thomas operated in a milieu in which bodily practice was absolutely central to spiritual formation. According to the Libellus de instructione novitorum of Jean of Montlhe´ry, probably written in the 1270s, the first thing one learned upon entering the Dominican novitiate was a new way to walk: with the hood of the habit up and the face hidden until one had entered a room. Walking in this manner, the novice would be given a tour of the convent by a slightly more senior novice.149 This first lesson in learning a new manner of walking would perhaps be recalled later in the novice’s formation, as he learned how properly to order his affections. The Libellus de instructione et consolatione novitiorum, written by an anonymous Dominican friar at some point prior to 1283, presents the convent as an allegory of the soul and leads the novice on a meditative journey through it. As Miche`le Mulchahey puts it, the novice learns to order his soul by mystically transposing it with the convent and the community in which he dwells. Each room, each building, each officer in the convent represents a different aspect of spiritual discipline, just as on the literal level they function as the various arenas and duties of the regular life.150

One might imagine that as the novice meditates on the refectory of devotion, the oratory of sanctification, the dormitory of the soul’s rest in God, he would ideally walk through the convent of his soul with the same humility with which he learned to walk through the physical space of the convent on his first day of entry. If we think of the Dominican convent as the community in which Thomas’s Summa would have found its most natural home, it begins to look less like a speculative treatment of various doctrines and philosophical and theological questions—a detached philosophical or theological discourse—and begins to show itself as one instrument among many by which the Dominican convent, within the Dominican order, within the 147

“The Nine Ways of Prayer of St. Dominic,” in Tugwell (1982), 94. Though the actions enjoined are somewhat less pleasant than the sleep and baths that Pesch discusses, the underlying principle is the same. 148 Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 81 a. 7 co. 149 150 Mulchahey (1998), 99. Mulchahey (1998), 119.

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Church catholic, formed people for the tasks of the order in service to the Church. To adapt a phrase from Hadot, it is a discourse that is fully integrated within theology as a way of life. This emphasis on theology as a way of life might seem at odds with Thomas’s claim that sacra doctrina is a speculative scientia rather than a practical one. However, Thomas is clear that sacra doctrina is also concerned with human acts “inasmuch a human beings are ordered by them to the perfect knowledge of God, in which consists eternal beatitude.”151 Thomas’s point in calling sacra doctrina a speculative scientia is not to say that theology has no role in ordering human actions, but rather that such ordering must be determined by theological truth—thus the Summa’s contextualization of moral theology within the full sweep of Christian teaching. On this count, Thomas’s approach to philosophical and theological discourse is perhaps not quite the same as that of Pierre Hadot. It is difficult to imagine Thomas endorsing Hadot’s remark that “ethics—that is to say, choosing the good—is not the consequence of metaphysics, but metaphysics is the consequence of ethics.”152 One way to put the matter is that the characterization of Thomas as an “intellectualist” is not entirely mistaken, and he would undoubtedly balk at what appears to be Hadot’s purely pragmatic account of truth. Thomas’s understanding of truth as the conformity of the mind to reality153 indicates that there is an irreducibly “theoretical” element to his thought. The way of life of the Christian must conform itself to the truth revealed in creation and redemption in order for it to be a training of a new humanity. This is why in the Summa theologiae, which Mark Jordan calls “the pattern for an ideal pedagogy,”154 the treatment of human action in the secunda pars is framed by the account in the prima pars of the creator God and the account in the tertia pars of Christ the redeemer. At the same time, Christian truth derives its convincing force from the lives of those who live out their belief in its truth. Despite Thomas’s clear conviction that theology can be structured as an Aristotelian science, he does not think that it derives its ultimate convincing power from the force of syllogisms, for those syllogisms presume certain first principles— the articles of faith—that one accepts on the basis of the testimony of Christ and the apostles. As we have seen, this is ultimately the work of grace. At the same time, the preacher of truth also has a role to play.155 As 151

152 Summa theologiae Ia q. 1 a. 4. Pierre Hadot (1995), 283. 154 Summa theologiae Ia q. 16 a. 2. Jordan (2006), 120. 155 “Two things are required for faith: one is the inclining of the heart to believe, and this does not come from hearing, but from the gift of grace; the other is a decision about what to 153

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I noted in the previous chapter, the Dominicans, whose form of religious life was closer to that of canons regular than to either pure mendicants or monks, made their own the canonical ideal of docere verbo et exemplo: teaching by word and example. Not simply the word, the discourse, but also the mode of life of the preacher was crucial to his bearing witness. Thomas himself writes in his commentary on John’s gospel that “two things . . . are necessary for preachers if they are to lead others to Christ. The first is clear, orderly speech. . . . The second is virtue, manifested in good actions.”156 At the heart of the Dominican charism is precisely the matching of preaching and mode of life that makes for an effective witness, and Thomas’s Summa was written precisely for the task of forming such witnesses. As Thomas puts it, “nothing shows the truth of the gospel better than the charity of those who believe.”157 Finally, we must recall that for Thomas formation in virtue is ultimately conformity to Christ crucified. As we saw in the previous chapter, Christ is both an ontological and moral exemplar. Thomas writes, “in the cross is the perfection of all law and the whole art of living well.”158 This statement is worth pausing over. The Aristotelian framework, in which so much of what Thomas has to say about virtue is couched, is turned on its head in this simple phrase, making manifest the radical nature of his transformation of Aristotle. For Aristotle, the idea that “the whole art of living well” could be summed up in an instrument of torture was nonsense.159 Thomas seems to recognize this when he writes, “that a person not avoid shame when possible, and other things of this sort, are matters that seem contrary to the prudence of this world.”160 But it is not contrary to the prudence needed by the preaching friar, or by any Christian. For Thomas, this act of self-abandonment out of love is both the supreme example and the true path of human happiness. The good life for human beings is indeed the life lived in accord with reason, but it is a reason that has been transformed by the preaching of the word of

believe and comes from hearing. Thus Cornelius whose heart was inclined toward belief, needed Peter to be sent to him to point out what he should believe” (Super Rom. cap. 10, lec. 3 n. 844). 156 Super Io. cap. 12, lec. 4, n. 1634. See also Thomas’s contemporary, Humbert of Romans, On the Formation of Preachers, sec. 99–105, in Tugwell (1982), 215–16. 157 Super Io. cap. 17, lec. 5 n. 2241. 158 Super Gal. cap. 6 lec. 4 n. 371: in cruce est perfectio totius legis, et tota ars bene vivendi; cf. Super Heb. cap. 12 lec. 1 n. 667. 159 See Nichomachean Ethics 1153b 19–21. 160 Super I Cor. cap. 1, lec. 3 n. 47.

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the cross so as to become ecstatic in love. It is, moreover, Jesus’ act of suffering and crucified love that gives power to the sacraments, which are the “shape” grace takes in the Christian life and to which we now turn.161

4. THE SACRAMENTAL LIFE The Order of Preachers was from the outset primarily an order of priests. By 1227 they had been granted permission by Pope Gregory IX to hear confessions and they quickly came to understand this as integral to their mission as preachers. Friars would step from the pulpit into the confessional to complete their ministry, for, as Humbert of Romans put it, “preaching is a kind of sowing, and its harvest is gathered in in confession.”162 In other word, the preaching ministry of the friar was fulfilled sacramentally in penance. Whereas the role of the preacher is to act as an instrumental cause disposing his hearers to grace,163 in penance and the other sacraments grace is actually given. Any account of what Thomas says about the life of grace that took seriously his Dominican context would be quite truncated if it did not include some discussion of the sacramental life. Recall the two axioms that shape Thomas’s understanding of the Christian life: “grace does not destroy nature but perfects it” and “the soul is not the whole human being, but only part of one: my soul is not me.” The perfection through grace of human nature fittingly takes account of the inherently embodied character of human existence. Thomas’s writings on the sacraments everywhere reflect his general impulse to see God’s grace working with and not against the natural properties of creatures. The sacraments are therefore a resounding affirmation of the goodness of creating beings. Speaking of the outward cultus of worship, in which “certain blessings using sensible things are provided for human beings, whereby one is washed, or anointed, or fed, or given drink, along with the expression of sensible words,” Thomas notes that “it is not astonishing if heretics who deny that God is the author of our body condemn such manifestations.” Undoubtedly he is thinking of the Cathars, whose dualism

161

Otto Hermann Pesch notes that for Thomas it is primarily in the institution of the sacraments that Christ acts as lawgiver. See Pesch (1988), 307, and Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 108 a. 2. 162 Humbert of Romans, On the Formation of Preachers XLIV.541, in Tugwell (1982), 315. 163 De veritate q. 27 a. 3 ad 12.

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led them to reject the sacraments of Catholicism. Thomas continues, “They have not remembered that they are human beings.”164 Thomas often remarks that the sacraments, the outward signs by which we worship God, are instituted not for God’s benefit, but for ours. It is we, who are composed of both body and soul, who must employ material, sensual means in the worship God. While the sacraments are not the whole of the Christian life for Thomas, they occupy a central place, both as a means by which human beings worship God, who is their true end, and as a means by which God gives grace to human beings, which is necessary for them to attain their end.

Nature, Grace, and Sacrament When Thomas addresses the need for sacraments in the Summa theologiae he says there that there are three reasons why sacraments are necessary.165 The first is derived from human nature itself: we are rational animals who come to know spiritual things by means of bodily things. Since God provides for all things according to their natures, it is fitting that God would provide human beings with “aids to salvation in the shape of bodily and perceptible signs.”166 The second is the fallen state of human beings, which has turned them away from spiritual things toward bodily things.167 Like a physician who applies a medicine to the place afflicted with disease, God applies healing grace to the senses, providing not simply for the natural bent of human nature, but even for the exigencies of fallen humanity. Finally, Thomas speaks of “the general inclination of human action toward bodily things,” particularly in the sphere of religion. A human beings is, as Wittgenstein put it, “a ceremonious animal” (ein 164

Contra Gentiles lib. 3 cap. 119 nn. 3, 5; cf. lib. 4 cap. 56 nn. 2–3. Summa theologiae IIIa q. 61 a. 1. These three are taken, though significantly recast, from Hugh of St Victor, De sacramentis lib. 1, pars 9, cap. 3. 166 This applies not just to fallen human nature, but also to human nature per se. Thomas, however, believes that in Eden there was no need of sacraments, since the body was subordinate to the soul and therefore the soul was not perfected with regard to knowledge or grace by anything bodily (Summa theologiae IIIa q. 61 a. 2). This is despite the fact that Aquinas elsewhere says “what is natural to human beings is neither acquired nor forfeited by sin” (Ia q. 98 a. 2) and, as he says repeatedly, knowledge through sense perception is natural to human beings. Presumably, though this sort of knowledge is “natural,” it was not fitting in the state of integral nature for the soul to be subordinate to the senses so as to be dependent on them. 167 Adams (2009) notes that this second reason indicates that the utility of sacraments is rooted not only in human nature, but also in human history: “not only in what we are, but the state in which we find ourselves” (35–6). 165

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zeremonielles Tier) that is naturally inclined toward ritual.168 Thomas says that sacrifice, which is one of the outward acts of the virtue of religion, by which “human beings use certain things perceptible to the senses, by offering them to God as a sign of the subjection and honor owed to him,” is something that proceeds from natural reason.169 Given the natural human propensity for ritual, and the correlative propensity for superstition, God offers us in the sacraments nonsuperstitious rites by which we might worship the true God in a manner that is fitting.170 It is clear that all three of these reasons have to do with what we human beings require, not what God requires. Sacraments are acts of divine condescension to our human condition and an example of the way in which grace perfects and does not destroy nature. This connection between the grace of the sacraments and human nature can be seen in Thomas’s account of the logic of the sevenfold nature of sacraments. Ever since Lombard’s Sentences set the number of sacraments at seven, theologians tended to seek the rationale for this enumeration in other lists of seven, such as the seven deadly sin (Albert the Great) or the four cardinal and three theological virtues (Bonaventure).171 Thomas follows this approach in his earliest treatment of the question,172 and while he does not completely abandon it in later writings, he subordinates it to a different approach that focuses on human spiritual flourishing. While sacraments are remedial cures for the wounds inflicted by sin, they are also, and even more so, agents of spiritual growth and development. Thomas develops the role of the sacraments in the spiritual life on the basis of the claim that “spiritual life has a certain resemblance to bodily life.”173 That is, what we need to develop and flourish as spiritual beings finds an analogue in what we need to develop and flourish as material beings. Thus, with regard to the individual, the sacraments aid the person’s spiritual development directly (per se) by the gift of spiritual perfection through baptism, which corresponds to birth, confirmation, which corresponds to growth, and the Eucharist, which corresponds to

168

Wittgenstein (1987), 7. Wittgenstein goes on to suggest that it is this capacity for ritual that distinguishes humans from other animals. 169 Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 85 a. 1. 170 On the various ways in which the outward acts of religion might become superstitious, see Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 92 a. 2. 171 See Roguet (1999), 253. 172 Super Sent. lib. 4 d. 2 q. 1 a. 2. 173 Summa theologiae IIIa q.65 a. 1; cf. De articulis Fidei pars 2; Contra Gentiles lib. 4 cap. 58 n. 1.

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nourishment. They aid spiritual development indirectly (per accidens) by removing sources of spiritual suffering through penance, which corresponds to healing, and extreme unction, which corresponds to convalescence. With regard to the spiritual development of the Christian community as a whole, the sacraments perfect the Church through holy orders, which corresponds to the provision of leaders in political life, and matrimony, which corresponds to the propagation of the human race through family life. In other words, the sacraments are “organically” connected for Aquinas by way of analogy with the organic shape of the embodied life of the human animal: the sacraments are not simply remedies but means of perfecting through grace that which is given in nature.174 They give shape to the spiritual life in the same way activities such as birth, eating, choosing leaders, and so forth give shape to embodied human life. Although Thomas’s discussions of the need for sacraments generally focus on how sacraments are suited to our nature, in the Summa contra Gentiles he gives another sort of reason for the fittingness of the sacraments. He writes: “Instruments must be proportioned to the primary cause; and the prime and universal cause of human salvation is the Word incarnate; it was fitting therefore that the remedies through which that universal causes reaches human beings should resemble the cause in this, namely, that divine power works invisibly through visible signs.”175 This is, of course, not unrelated to the requirements of human nature (i.e. knowing things by means of signs) but it also points us to the person of the Word who is incarnate. Thomas says earlier in the Contra Gentiles that the Word is the person of the Trinity for whom incarnation is most fitting, precisely because “the Word is akin to reason” (Verbum autem rationi affine est). The meaning-making of human reason is an image of the emanation Word within the Godhead; and thus it is particularly fitting that the Word would become incarnate so that the intellective part of human beings might be perfected “by the contemplation of the First Truth.” The Word, who is the image of the invisible God, brings to

174 Thomas’s way of relating the sacraments would become very influential in Western Catholicism. The Tridentine Catechismi Romani would adopt his analogy of bodily and spiritual life to explain the sevenfold nature of the sacraments (part 2, ch. 1, para. 20). The modern Catechism of the Catholic Church’s division of Sacraments of Initiation, Sacraments of Healing, and Sacraments at the Service of Communion also corresponds in division (if not precisely in rationale) to Thomas’s scheme. 175 Contra Gentiles lib. 4 cap. 56 n. 2.

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perfection human beings, who are created in God’s image.176 It is likewise fitting that the saving work of the incarnate image should be extended through the sacraments, which are ritual signs, acts of meaning-making. One of Thomas’s arguments for the role of words in sacramental signs is that “the word is joined to the sensible sign, just as in the mystery of the incarnation the Word of God is united to sensible flesh.”177 We can see an extended “fittingness” linking the image-character of the Word to the visibility of the Word made flesh and this, in turn, being linked to the visible character of the sacraments. This not only links the sacraments to the incarnation, but allows us to understand the incarnation as itself “sacramental.” Thomas writes, “such is the weakness of the human mind that it needs a guiding hand, not only to the knowledge, but also to the love of divine things by means of certain sensible objects known to us. Chief among these is the humanity of Christ.”178 The very exigency of human nature by which Thomas accounts for the sacraments also accounts for the incarnation; the humanity of Christ becomes the chief instance of the “sensible objects” by which God’s life is imparted to us. Moreover, Thomas applies to the sacraments the same language of “instrument” that he applies to the humanity of Christ—though he notes that the sacraments are “separated instruments,” like a stick grasped in a hand, whereas Christ’s humanity is a “conjoined” instrument, like a person’s hand itself.179 Thus the sacramental ritual acts of the Church are continuous in a strong sense with the “sacramental” human acts of Christ.180 In the end, the sacraments are a fitting perfection of nature by grace not simply because they ritualize fundamental human activities such as washing, eating, procreating, etc., but because they are instruments wielded by Christ in order to give grace.

Signs and Causes In order to understand how sacraments are “instrumental causes” of grace, it is important to recognize that when Thomas comes to ask 176

Contra Gentiles lib. 4 cap. 42 nn. 1–2; cf. Summa theologiae IIIa q. 3 a. 8. Summa theologiae IIIa q. 60 a. 6; cf. De articulis Fide pars 2. 178 Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 82 a. 3 ad 2. 179 Summa theologiae IIIa q. 62 a. 5 co. Though in his commentary on the Sentences Thomas uses the language of “instrument” in connection with both the humanity of Christ and the sacraments, it is only in De veritate q. 27 a. 4 that he connects the instrumentality of the sacraments to the instrumentality of Christ. See Yocum (2004), 169–72. 180 See Summa theologiae IIIa q. 64 a. 3. Edward Schillebeeckx (1963) argued for this “sacramental” view of Christology, with ample reference to Thomas, in his Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God (1963). 177

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what sort of thing a sacrament is, he says that sacraments are a species of sign.181 Speaking of sacraments as signs is at least as old as St Augustine,182 though in the wake of the teachings of Berengar of Tours (c. 999–1088) this was a manner of speaking that generated a certain amount of anxiety, since it was associated with Berengar’s claim that if the Eucharist was a sign of Christ’s body and blood, then it could not be the reality.183 In the period after Berengar there arose the tendency, to speak of the sacraments as causes of grace or even “containers” of grace as a way of supplementing the perceived weakness in the language of “sign.”184 In Lombard’s Sentences sacraments are described as both signs and causes of grace,185 which is a way of putting the matter that Thomas takes up in his commentary on the Sentences, where he describes sacraments as being “in the genus of cause and of sign.”186 Thomas’s mature position, however, is a bit more subtle, based on the insight that sacraments do not do two different things—signifying and causing—but rather they do one thing: sacraments cause by means of signifying (sacramenta significando causant).187 To understand what Thomas means by this we might think of the difference between being a sign of something and a sign for something.188 A sign of something means, as Berengar said of the Eucharist, that the sign is a “pointer” to a reality that is something quite distinct from the sign. A sign for something is an act of signification that, when performed by the right person under the right circumstances, does not simply point to something, but actually brings that thing about. This might help us

181

Summa theologiae IIIa q. 60 a. 1. City of God, bk. 10, ch. 5. 183 Lanfranc quotes Berengar as saying: “What you assert to be the true body of Christ is what is called in the sacred writings species, likeness, figure, sign, mystery, and sacrament. These words, however, refer to a reality other than themselves, for no existing thing which is referred to another existing thing can be that to which it is referred. It is not, therefore, the body of Christ” (Lanfranc, On the Body and Blood of the Lord, cap. 20). 184 See, e.g. Hugh of St Victor, De sacramentis lib. 1, pars 9, cap. 3. The idea of sacraments as causes was of course present even before the controversy over Berengar, as in Paschasius Radbertus’s 9th-century Liber de Corpore et Sanguine Domini cap. 3, n. 1: in re visibili divinitas intus aliquid ultra secretius effecit per speciem corporalem. 185 Peter Lombard, Sententiarum libri VI, lib. 4 d. 1 cap. 4, “a sacrament is properly so called, because it is a sign of the grace of God and the expression of invisible grace, so that it bears its image and is its cause.” 186 Super Sent. lib. 4 d. 1 q. 1 a. 1. 187 Summa theologiae IIIa q. 60 a. 2; IIIa q. 62 a. 1 ad 1. Cf. De veritate q. 27 a. 4 ad 13; q. 28 a. 2 ad 12; Super I Cor. cap. 11 lec. 5 n. 669. 188 See McCabe (1987), 166. 182

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to understand why Thomas sees sacraments as “instrumental causes.”189 As Timothy McDermott puts it, “Aquinas sees the sacraments as tools of God and Christ in the spreading of grace, and in that sense also causes of it.” But the way in which they cause, the sort of tools they are, are “signtools.” Their instrumental effectiveness depends upon their sign value, in the way that the instrumental effectiveness of an axe depends upon the keenness of its blade. Again, as McDermott puts it, “The sacraments offer an ‘edge’ to Christ, as the axe offers one to the woodcutter. That edge is their ritual representation of the events of Calvary.”190 It is the sign-value of the sacraments that is the means of communicating grace to human beings. Of course, this understanding of sacraments as instrumental signs for bringing about an effect in no way makes their working any less mysterious, because the claim of the Church is that it is God who is the artisan wielding the instrument. This in itself should be sufficient to secure the mysterious and even miraculous character of the sacraments. What is not mysterious or miraculous about the sacraments is the ability of a sign to be efficacious; this is a phenomenon familiar to anyone who has ever given a command or made a promise.191 When used by God, this “natural” capacity of signs to be efficacious is perfected, such that the sacraments become effective signs of grace. Moreover, the supernatural effectiveness of sacraments presupposes their natural quality as signs: washing with water is a fitting sign of cleansing from original sin; bread and wine are fitting signs of spiritual nourishment. Sacraments do not impart simply a generic grace, but a grace that is particular to the sacrament and differentiated by its sign-value.192 As Thomas notes, “the sensible sign of a sacrament must be congruent with the representation of the spiritual effect of the sacrament.”193 This is, however, a necessity of fittingness; the connection of the sacramental sign and the spiritual effect ultimately depends upon divine institution and not on a necessary connection.194 Because they are instrumental sign-causes wielded by God, sacraments work ex opere operato: that is, they work unfailingly by virtue of the proper 189

De veritate q. 27 a. 4; Contra Gentiles lib. 4 cap. 56, n. 4; Summa theologiae IIIa q. 62 a. 1. McDermott (2007), 92–3. 191 I think, therefore, that Louis-Marie Chauvet (1995) vastly overstates what he calls the problem of “harmonizing two categories as completely foreign to one another as are ‘sign’ and ‘cause’ ” (17). 192 Summa theologiae IIIa q. 62 a. 2; q. 64 a. 2 ad 2. 193 Contra Gentiles lib. 4 cap. 59 n. 2. 194 Summa theologiae IIIa q. 60 a. 5. 190

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performance of the sacramental sign, which includes the minister having the proper intention. The phrase itself is used relatively infrequently in Thomas—mainly in his commentaries on the Sentences and the letter to the Hebrews—but the idea is clearly present when Thomas describes how even a minister without faith can validly administer a sacrament, since the intention of the minister “to do what Christ and the Church do” is present in the words of the sacrament itself.195 At the same time, Thomas does not think that the sacraments operate magically; the disposition of the recipient can hinder the effects of sacramental grace.196 Thomas explains this in terms of the three levels of sacramental reality present in each sacrament: the sacramental rite itself (sacramentum tantum), the immediate spiritual effect of the sacramental rite (res et sacramentum), and the ultimate reality of the sacrament, which is grace (res tantum). It is the immediate spiritual effect that is unfailingly brought about by the sacramental rite being performed with the proper intention, but the recipient of the sacrament must be properly disposed in order to benefit from the grace that is the ultimate effect of the sacrament. For example, Thomas says that in the Eucharist the bread and wine are the sacramentum tantum, the real presence of Christ’s body and blood is the res et sacramentum and the grace of union with Christ in his mystical body is the res tantum.197 By the words of Christ, the bread and wine unfailingly become Christ’s body and blood, but if that body and blood are received unworthily one receives no grace, and indeed sins mortally.198 In three of the sacraments—baptism, confirmation and holy orders— the immediate spiritual effect or res et sacramentum is what Thomas calls “sacramental character.”199 Thomas defines this as a spiritual “seal” (signaculo) by which one is designated and empowered for the task of worshipping God through a participation in Christ’s priesthood.200 In baptism this is a matter of incorporation into that community that worships God through reception of the sacraments; in confirmation this is a matter of worshipping God through publicly confessing the faith of the Church; in holy orders this

195

Summa theologiae IIIa q. 64 aa. 8–10. See Summa theologiae IIIa q. 69 aa. 8–9; De articulis Fidei pars 2. 197 Thomas discusses these three levels in connection with the Eucharist in Summa theologiae IIIa q. 73 a. 6. In Super I Cor. cap. 11 lec. 6 n. 698 he describes the res of the Eucharist as caritatem, per quam est ecclesiastica unitas. 198 Summa theologiae IIIa q. 80 a. 4; Super I Cor. cap. 11 lec. 7 nn. 692–4. 199 Summa theologiae IIIa q. 63 a. 6; De articulis Fidei pars 2. 200 Summa theologiae IIIa q. 63 aa. 1, 3. 196

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is a matter of administering the sacraments to the faithful.201 The “seal” that is the immediate effect of these sacraments involves the recipient being given a role in the community of the Church; it is a matter of being empowered through participation in Christ’s priesthood to offer worship to God within Christ’s mystical body. Sacramental character in no way guarantees that one will participate in such ecclesial worship, but it creates in the soul a potential for participation in Christ’s worship of the Father. This ecclesial dimension of the sacraments is reflected in Thomas’s view that the Church itself is instituted in the institution of the sacraments. Thomas writes, The apostles and their successors are God’s deputies in governing the Church, which is established [institutae] on faith and the sacraments of faith. Therefore, just as they may not constitute another Church, so may they not hand on another faith nor institute [instituere] other sacraments: on the contrary, the Church is said to be built up [fabricata] through the sacraments that flowed from the side of Christ while hanging on the Cross.202

Rather than seeing the Church primarily as a juridical entity, constituted by regulations or authority structures, Thomas sees the Church as a reality that is built up through the celebration of the sacred signs instituted by Christ.203 Of the Eucharist, which he identifies as “the consummation of the spiritual life, and the end of all the sacraments,” Thomas says, “the reality (res) of the sacrament is the unity of the mystical body.”204 Through the sacraments, God both builds up the mystical body of Christ and brings about in us a spiritual life that is inherently embodied and communal, suited to the sort of creatures that we are.

Adoro te devote Thomas lived in an era of intense devotion to the Eucharist and his own devotion to the Eucharist is widely attested. As I noted earlier, Thomas’s particular form of holiness was a sanctity of the mind, so much of this devotion is evidenced in his scholarly writings: in his subtle realism regarding Christ’s Eucharistic presence,205 in his careful parsing of the words and actions of the liturgy,206 in his identification of the Eucharist as the preeminent sacrament.207 But his Eucharistic devotion also manifests 201 202 204 206

Summa theologiae IIIa q. 63 a. 6; q. 72 a. 5. 203 Summa theologiae IIIa q. 64 a. 2 ad 3. See Congar (1965), 69–73. 205 Summa theologiae IIIa q. 73 a. 3 co. Summa theologiae IIIa qq. 75–6. a 207 Summa theologiae III q. 83 aa. 4–5. Summa theologiae IIIa q. 65 a. 3.

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itself in other areas of his life. It was after celebrating Mass on the feast of St Nicholas that Thomas hung up his writing implements and declared that he could not go on working, because “all that I have written seems to me like straw compared with what has now been revealed to me.”208 Thomas’s last words, before he received his final communion, were a profession of faith in the Eucharist and of the centrality of this sacrament to his life as a preaching friar: “I receive you, price of my soul’s redemption; I receive you, food for my pilgrimage, for love of whom I have studied, kept vigil, and labored. You have I preached; you have I taught.”209 It is perhaps in Thomas’s Eucharistic poetry that the theological and the devotional come together most seamlessly. When the feast of Corpus Christi was added to the calendar of the universal Church in 1264, Thomas composed, at the request of Pope Urban IV, the liturgical texts for the Mass and Office, including the hymns Pange lingua, Verbum Supernum prodiens, Sacris solemniis, and Lauda Sion salvatorem.210 An additional hymn or poem, not from the liturgy for Corpus Christi, Adoro te devote, is traditionally ascribed to Thomas, an attribution that is now widely accepted.211 To attain a glimpse of Thomas’s theology of and devotion to the Eucharist, it is worth pausing over this prayer text, which Jean-Pierre Torrell describes as one of the “rare vestiges of the personal life of this eminent scholar who was also a great saint.”212 According to the analysis of Robert Wielockx, the fundamental units of the text are fourteen rhyming couplets, which can be divided into two groups of seven, the first treating the role of faith in the Eucharist and the second treating sacramental grace. Within each of these sections, the first five couplets form a distinct group and the last two serve as a “cadenza” that provides a conclusion to the section.213 With these formal features in mind, we can see how the text unfolds. The first couplet opens the prayer and forms an inclusio with the fifth, indicated by the similarity of their rhymes (veritas-latitas/deitashumanitas):214

208 209 210 211 212 213

Processus canonizationis Neapoli n. 79, in Foster (1959). Tocco cap. LVIII; Gui cap. 39, in Foster (1959). See Gy (1990), 223–45. For a discussion of the question of authorship, see Torrell, (1996), 132–6. Torrell (2002a), 370. 214 Wielockx (1998), 157–74. Wielockx (1998), 159.

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1. Adoro te devote, latens veritas,

I adore you devoutly, hidden truth,

te quæ sub his formis vere latitas.215

you who beneath these forms are truly hidden.

One of the most striking features of this text is its highly personal tone: Thomas speaks throughout as an “I” to a “you,” conveying some of the fervor of his own Eucharistic devotion. At the same time, he manages to convey in this opening couplet the basic teaching of the Church concerning Christ’s Eucharistic presence: the “truth” (veritas) of Christ is found under “these forms” (his formis) of bread and wine. This is only a gesture at the doctrine of transubstantiation, but only a gesture is needed, since the core affirmation of this doctrine is indeed quite simple: Christ, who is truth itself, is present in truth, not merely in sign, under the appearances of bread and wine.216 What this couplet also makes clear is that because Christ is present in truth, he can properly be adored in the Eucharist.217 The next three couplets are grouped together by the inclusio formed by the first and fifth couplets: 2. Tibi se cor meum totum subicit, quia te contemplans totum deficit. 3. Visus, tactus, gustus in te fallitur, sed auditu solo, tute creditor. 4. Credo quidquid dixit Dei Filius:

To you my whole heart submits itself, for in contemplating you it wholly fails. Sight, touch, taste are mistaken in you, but hearing alone is safely believed. I believe whatever the Son of God has said;

nichil veritatis verbo verius.

nothing is truer than the word of truth.

The “whole heart” of which Thomas speaks here refers, as commentators have noted, to the “higher faculties” of the human person.218 Thomas echoes in this couplet the argument found in the opening article of the Summa theologiae: because we are directed to God as an end that surpasses even our highest capacities, we must subject ourselves to God in faith in order to attain that end. The creature’s inability to comprehend God, which is so fundamental to all of Thomas’s theology, comes into play here to indicate that our mind’s inability to grasp the Eucharist is of a piece with

215

The Latin text is that found in Tocco, Ystoria, cap. LVIII (with the orthography slightly modified). 216 See Summa theologiae IIIa q. 75 a. 1. 217 Summa theologiae IIIa q. 75 a. 2 co. 218 Wielockx (1998), 164.

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our inability to grasp the mystery of God itself. The repetition of totum in the two lines also hints that the totality of our failure to comprehend God requires a corresponding totality in our surrender to God, and thus becomes a pathway toward the purity of heart that grows from faith informed by love. Having spoken of the insufficiency of our highest faculties, Thomas moves to the insufficiency of our lower faculties. In the passage from the second couplet to the third, Thomas presents an a fortiori argument: if our human reason cannot comprehend God, then even more so must our senses fail. Some commentators have taken the first line of this couplet as an indication that the Adoro te is not in fact by Thomas. Reading fallitur as “deceived,” they see this line as contradicting Thomas’s clearly stated view that no deception is involved in the Eucharist.219 But while fallitur can mean “deceived,” it can also mean disappointed, mistaken, beguiled, or failed. In other words, it need not imply any trickery on the part of God, but only inadequacy on the part of our senses. Further, the second line of the couplet indicates that one of our senses does not fail in regard to the Eucharist: our sense of hearing. What does Thomas mean by this? Presumably he means our hearing the words of Christ at the last supper: “this is my body,” “this is my blood.” Applying Paul’s statement that “faith comes through hearing” (Romans 10:17) in the Eucharistic context, Thomas makes clear that knowledge of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist is something to which neither reason nor the senses, but only faith, can attain.220 This theme of faith is continued in the fourth couplet, stressing that faith is not simply a matter of believing this or that unseen thing, but rather involves believing all (quidquid) that is proposed to us by Christ because it is Christ, who is truth itself, who proposes it. What is presented “materially” in the previous couplet—belief that what appears to be bread and wine is in fact Christ’s body and blood—is here presented “formally”—i.e. faith in Christ as truth itself.221 The identification of Christ as veritas itself echoes the first couplet, making it clear that the truth that is unseen is Christ himself, the truth that is grasped through faithful hearing.

219

See Summa theologiae IIIa q. 75 a. 5 ad 2; q. 77 a. 7 co. Torrell (2002a), 371. 221 Wielockx (1998) describes this as faith’s “material object against the background of its formal object or motive” (166). 220

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The fifth couplet is linked to the first, forming an inclusio, not only by the similar rhymes, but also by the theme of hiddenness:222 5. In cruce latebat sola deitas; sed hic latet simul et humnitas.

On the cross only the divinity was hidden, but here the humanity is also hidden.

As we saw in Chapter 4, faith is intrinsically linked to hiddenness: it concerns that “which appears not.” Thomas here makes a point that he makes in the Summa as well: during Christ’s earthly life, his humanity was manifest but his divinity was a matter of faith; in the Eucharist, both his divinity and his humanity are hidden under the forms of bread and wine. This Eucharistic hiddenness, Thomas notes, is the occasion for the perfection of faith.223 The first part of the prayer concludes with the two-couplet “cadenza,” which presents us with two examples of faith taken from the gospels. 6. Ambo vere credens atque confitens,

Truly believing and confessing both,

peto quod petivit latro penitens. 7. Plagas sicut Thomas, non intueor, Deum tamen meum te Confiteor.

I ask for what the repentant thief asked. I do not look at the wounds as Thomas did, yet I confess that you are my God.

Professing his faith in both (ambo) the humanity and divinity of Christ— the two fundamental mysteries under which all the articles of faith are gathered224—Thomas joins his prayer to that of the penitent thief on the cross: “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom” (Luke 23:42). This veiled allusion to fulfillment in God’s kingdom will be unveiled in the concluding couplets of the prayer. Apart from the name of Jesus in the second cadenza, the name “Thomas” is the only proper name that appears in the prayer, heightening its personal tone.225 Thomas differs from his apostolic namesake inasmuch

222

Wielockx (1998), 161. Summa theologiae IIIa q. 75 a. 1 co. 224 De articulis Fidei pars 1: “the entire Christian faith is centered on the humanity and the divinity of Christ.” 225 Wielockx (1998), 162. 223

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as he cannot see the wounds of Christ, but he is united with him in that he shares in his confession of faith: “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28). In his commentary on John’s gospel, Thomas notes that in saying this Thomas the apostle “quickly became a good theologian by professing a true faith. He professed the humanity of Christ when he said ‘my Lord’. . . . and he professed the divinity of Christ when he said, ‘and my God.’ ” Thomas Aquinas seeks to be a good theologian by confessing, like Thomas the apostle, faith in the humanity and divinity. But the connection goes deeper. In the Summa Thomas quotes Gregory the Great in relation to the story of doubting Thomas: “Thomas ‘saw one thing, and believed another’: he saw the human being and, believing him to be God, he made profession of his faith, saying: ‘My Lord and my God.’ ”226 Like his namesake, Thomas Aquinas sees one thing—bread and wine—and believes another—Christ present in truth. In the same homily from which Thomas quotes, Gregory goes on to articulate the same dialectic between sight and hearing that Thomas articulates in couplet three: “When our minds cannot probe what they behold by sight of the thing, they may believe what they hear concerning the promise of divine power.”227 The second half of the prayer begins with a glance back to the first half and its focus on faith, opening this out to include all of the theological virtues: 8. Fac me tibi semper magis credere, in te spem habere, te diligere.

Make me to believe in you always more, in you to hope, you to love.

The presence of Christ in the Eucharist is not only known through faith, but is a source of the grace by which we grow in faith, in hope, and in love. The second half of the prayer shifts the focus from us as believers to the benefits God bestows on us in the Eucharist. Guiding Thomas’s considerations in what follows is a particular understanding of the relationship of the Eucharist to salvation history that finds poetic expression in the antiphon for the Magnificat that he wrote for the second vespers of the feast of Corpus Christi:

226 227

Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 1 a. 4 ad 1. Gregory, homily 26 on the gospels. Gregory, homily 26 on the gospels.

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O sacrum convivium!

O sacred banquet!

in quo Christus sumitur, recolitur memoria passionis eius, mens impletur gratia, et futurae gloriae nobis pignus datur.

in which Christ is received, the memory of his passion is cultivated afresh, the mind is filled with grace, and a pledge of future glory is given to us.

Alleluia.

Alleluia.

In the Eucharist, past, present, and future come together: memorial sacrifice, source of present grace, and pledge of future glory. In the Summa, speaking of the sacraments in general, Thomas says that they signify the cause of our holiness in a threefold way: the efficient cause of our being made holy, which is Christ’s passion in the past; the formal cause of our holiness, which is grace and the virtues in the present; and the final cause or end of our holiness, which is eternal life in the future.228 To use a modern term, Thomas sees the Eucharist as drawing together all of salvation history into a single moment. Taking up the theme of the Eucharist as remembrance of the passion, the ninth couplet prays: 9. O memoriale mortis Domini, Panis vivus vitam prestans homini.

O memorial of the death of the Lord, living bread that grants life to human being.

Subsequent Eucharistic theology would develop at greater length the way in which the Eucharist is a memorial sacrifice, though Thomas’s own understanding is quite clear. The Eucharist is spoken of as Christ’s sacrifice because it is both an “image” of Christ’s sacrifice and also the means by which we receive the fruits of that sacrifice.229 It is an image because the separate consecration of the bread and wine, “serves the representation of the passion of Christ, in which the blood was separated from the body.”230 This is not simply an image that helps us to remember Christ’s sacrifice; it is a memorial in the strong ritual sense of an action that makes us present to a past event and makes that event present to us. It does not simply bring Christ’s passion to mind, but it conveys to us the effects of the passion. 228

Summa theologiae IIIa q. 60 a. 3. Summa theologiae IIIa q. 83 a. 1. 230 Summa theologiae IIIa q. 76 a. 2 ad 1. Cf. q. 74 a. 1; Contra Gentiles lib. 4 cap. 61 n. 4; Super I Cor. cap. 11 lec. 5 n. 653. 229

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Evoking the bread of life discourse from John’s gospel, Thomas presents Christ given to us in the Eucharist as the source of spiritual life in us: “his body, sacramentally received, is life giving, for Christ gives life to the world through the mysteries which he accomplished in his flesh.”231 The Eucharist “is nothing other than the application of our Lord’s passion to us.”232 The Eucharist is therefore not simply a memorial of a past event, but a life-giving encounter with the living Lord here and now. This is developed in the following couplet: 10. Presta michi semper de te vivere,

Grant to me always to live from you,

et te michi semper dulce sapere.

and to me always to savor your sweetness.

Wielockx detects in this couplet an echo of the Vulgate translation of Hosea 2:19–20: sponsabo te mihi in sempiternum et sponsabo te mihi in iustitia et iudicio et in misericordia et miserationibus et sponsabo te mihi in fide et scies quia ego Dominus (“I will espouse you to me for ever, and I will espouse you to me in justice and judgment and in mercy and in compassion, and I will espouse you to me in faith and you shall know that I am the Lord”).233 Though Thomas does not to my knowledge use bridal imagery elsewhere in connection with the Eucharist, he does cite this passage from Hosea in various places to speak of the soul, or the Church, being wedded to God through faith.234 Given the important role Thomas has given to faith in the first half of the prayer, an allusion to Hosea here is certainly not impossible. Thomas prays to be made capable in faith of savoring the sweetness of Christ’s body, not taking for granted his own ability to discern, as he puts it in his commentary on John, that “this is a food capable of making people divine and inebriating them with divinity.”235 To live from the Eucharistic Christ and to savor his sweetness is to share in his divine nature, to become drunk with divinity. The theme of living from Christ is continued in the next two couplets with a striking image:

231

Super Io. cap. 6 lec. 4 n. 914. Super Io. cap. 6 lec. 6 n. 963. 233 Wielockx (1998), 167–8. 234 See, e.g. Super Sent. lib. 4 d. 39 q. 1 a. 6 ad 2; Super Io. cap. 3 lec. 5 n. 518; In Symbolum Apostolorum prooemium. 235 Super Io. cap. 6 lec. 7 n. 972. 232

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11. Pie pellicane, Ihesu domine,

Good pelican, Lord Jesus,

me immundum munda tuo sanguine. 12. Cuius una stilla salvum facere, Totum mundum posset omni scelere.

cleanse me, unclean, with your blood. One drop of which can save the entire world of all sins.

At least as early as St Augustine Christians had connected Christ to the legend of the mother pelican who kills her chicks (in some accounts because they will not stop pecking her), grieves over them for three days, and then pierces her own breast and lets her blood flow over them, restoring them to life. Augustine notes that while some might be taken aback by the comparison of Christ to a mother bird, “he has both a father’s authority and a mother’s tenderness.”236 Though Thomas’s imagery, focusing on cleansing, seems at first glance to be, like Augustine’s, more baptismal that Eucharistic, other medieval versions of the legend seem to present the mother pelican not washing but feeding her children with blood drawn from her breast.237 Certainly the mother, whether avian or human, who feeds her children from her own body would seem an apt, albeit initially startling, image of Christ in the Eucharist. Writing over a century after Thomas, Julian of Norwich would abandon the legendary bird and state simply, “The moder may geve her childe sucke of her milke. But oure precious moder Jhesu, he may fede us with himselfe, and doth full curtesly and full tenderly with the blessed sacrament that is precious fode of very life.”238 We live from the substance of Christ’s body and blood as a child lives from the substance of the mother’s body. The reference to the single drop of Christ’s blood in the twelfth couplet echoes a statement that Thomas quotes elsewhere, which he ascribes to Bernard of Clairvaux: “the least drop of Christ’s blood would have sufficed for the redemption of the human race” (gutta sanguinis Christi suffecisset ad redemptionem humani generis).239 The totum mundum harkens back to the totum deficit of the third couplet, setting up a contrast between the total inefficacy of our human faculties and the total efficacy of Christ’s passion.240 As Thomas says in commenting on the Letter to the 236

Enarrationes in Psalmos 101, sermon 1 n. 8. On the pelican as a Eucharistic image, see Rubin (1991), 310–12. 238 A Revelation of Love, ch. 60. 239 Super Sent. lib. 3 d. 20 q. 1 a. 3 arg. 4; Quodlibet 2 q. 1 a. 2 s.c. 2. Wielockx (1998), 168 identifies the true author of this statement as Nicholas of Clairvaux. 240 See Wielockx (1998), 168. 237

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Hebrews, “Through this blood we have been redeemed, and this for ever, because its power is infinite.”241 The themes of the Eucharist as memorial of the passion and the source of the present gracious mercy of God flow together into the concluding cadenza’s reflection on the Eucharist as a pledge of future immortality: 13. Jesu, quem velatum nunc aspicio,

Jesus, whom I see now veiled,

quando fiet illud quod tam sicio? 14. Ut te revelata cernens facie, visu sim beatus tue glorie.

when will you do that for which I so thirst? That seeing your face unveiled, I may be blessed by the vision of your glory.

Like the use of fallitur in the third couplet, the language of “veiling” here has led some to question Thomas’s authorship, on the grounds that it presents the appearances of bread and wine as “disguises.”242 But such language is not entirely absent from Thomas,243 and in this context serves to highlight the eschatological tension between Christ’s sacramental presence to us while on pilgrimage and the fullness of presence we shall experience in the beatific vision, which, in light of the two halves of the poem, becomes a expression of the tension between faith and vision. The first couplet of the cadenza begins with a direct address to Jesus, heightening further the already extraordinarily personal tone. But this direct address is juxtaposed with the acknowledgment of the distance engendered by Jesus’ sacramental veiling, a distance that induces thirst in us for full union with him. Thomas says elsewhere, “We express our intense desire in terms of thirst.”244 This desire is not, however, the desire for one who is entirely absent, but rather the desire for one whom we perceive but faintly through the sacramental veil. As Thomas notes about knowledge of God in general, “in this world, any imperfect perception of divine knowledge affords us delight, and delight stirs up a thirst or desire for perfect knowledge.”245 It is the Eucharistic presence of Christ that intensifies our longing to be perfected in union with him. In the second couplet Thomas speaks of the fulfillment of faith in vision—a vision that is “beatific” because it is in this vision that we are blessed, being joined to

241 242 243 244 245

Super Heb. cap. 9 lec. 3 n. 441. Such a question is at least hinted at in Gy (1990), 256. See, e.g., Super Heb. cap. 10 lec. 2 n. 502. Super Io. cap. 19, lec. 5 n. 2447. Cf. Super Psalmos 41 n. 1. Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 33 a. 2 co.

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God in love and knowledge. “We hope to be made happy through seeing the unveiled truth to which our faith cleaves.”246 The Adoro te devote begins with faith’s perception of the sacramental presence of Christ and culminates in prayer for a vision of God that exceeds and fulfills that perception. In this way, the prayer serves as a summary not only of Thomas’s Eucharistic theology, but also the whole of the Christian pilgrimage. This is the pilgrimage that calls us to humble ourselves before the truth of Christ—a humility that is exemplified in the thief on the cross—and to see with the eyes of faith, as did the apostle Thomas. This faith is itself, along with hope and love, given to us through our sacramental participation in Christ, in which all of salvation history is concentrated into the Eucharistic event, linking us in the present moment of grace both to Christ’s historical sacrifice and the fullness of his eschatological presence. The Eucharist is both the viaticum that sustains us on our journey and a sharing even now in the bread of angels upon which we will feast in the kingdom. It was this truth present in sign that Thomas both preached and taught.

5. THE PATRIA The Adoro te ends on a strongly eschatological note. Yet there is a strange silence that today surrounds Thomas’s eschatology. Much, of course, has been written on his teleology and on the viator’s journey to God. But of the new creation, the patria itself, toward which the viator is journeying we hear relatively little from modern writers on Thomas. One might respond that little is said because Thomas himself said little, dying before completing that section of the Summa, but this ignores the fact that Thomas not only wrote at length concerning eschatological matters in his commentary on Lombard, which furnished the material for the supplementum to the Summa assembled by Reginald of Piperno, but also treated eschatology in the Contra Gentiles, the Compendium, various biblical commentaries, and in several articles of the disputed questions De potentia. So it is not the case that we have little to go on in figuring out Thomas’s thoughts on matters eschatological. Perhaps it is rather that this is an area where Thomas seems most enmeshed in his thirteenth-century context and, for that very reason, seems least useful for contemporary theological purposes.

246

Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 4 a. 1 co.

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If, however, we keep in mind the two axioms that have been guiding the discussion in this chapter—“grace does not destroy nature but perfects it” and “the soul is not the whole human being, but only part of one: my soul is not me”—then what Thomas says concerning eschatology becomes more comprehensible and perhaps even of value. In other words, Thomas’s reflections on God’s work of consummation presumes that “the final perfection requires the first perfection” and that “the first perfection of each thing is to be perfect in its nature” and that the perfection of the human soul can be had “only if it should be united to the body.”247 Whatever we end up saying about human destiny, and the destiny of the cosmos as a whole, must be plausible as a perfecting and not a replacement of created natures, and must accord with the nature of human beings as embodied. Much of what Thomas says about eschatology conforms to the standard understanding of the “last things” as these had developed in the Latin West, combining the various eschatological statements of scripture and drawing particularly on Augustine’s City of God and Enchiridion.248 In this account, souls are judged at the moment of death and consigned to their eternal fate, with some being damned, some entering immediately into the beatific vision, and some receiving further purification from their sins prior to full entry into God’s presence.249 When Christ returns as judge, at a time that no human person knows,250 there shall then be a great conflagration, in which the earth shall be purified, after which there will be a renewed heaven and a renewed earth.251 At the sound of the trumpet—which is the voice of Christ himself 252—the bodies of the dead shall be raised and their souls reunited to their original matter so as to constitute numerically the same individual.253 Then there shall be the general judgment, in which the rewards and punishments of human beings will be made manifest to all.254 The damned will dwell in an earthly place of punishment, tormented by exile from God, material fire, and the remorse of conscience, and by their punishment manifesting the 247

See Compendium theologiae lib. 1 cap. 151. See, for example, Hugh of St Victor, De sacramentis lib. 2 pars 16–18 and Peter Lombard, Sententiarum libri VI, lib 4 d. 43–50. 249 Contra Gentiles lib. 4 cap. 91; De rationibus Fidei cap. 9. 250 Super Sent. lib. 4 d. 47 q. 1 a. 1 qc. 3; De potentia q. 5 a. 6; Compendium theologiae pars 1 cap. 242. 251 Super Sent. lib. 4 d. 47 q. 2; Contra Gentiles lib. 4 cap. 97 n. 6. 252 Super I Cor. cap. 15 lec. 8 n. 1008. 253 Contra Gentiles lib. 4 cap. 80–1; Compendium theologiae pars 1 cap. 153. 254 Contra Gentiles lib. 4 cap. 96; Summa theologiae IIIa q. 59 a. 5. 248

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justice of God.255 The blessed will dwell in the empyrean heavens,256 enjoying the vision of God not only intellectually but also sensually, seeing with the eyes of their risen bodies both the human nature of the Word and the glory of God manifest in creation.257 Thomas brings to this rather standard eschatology his own particular set of concerns, only a few of which can be mentioned here. Thomas presents the beatific vision as the fulfillment of human beings, the goal toward which all truly human action strains. As I noted at the outset of this chapter, God is the goal of the wayfarer, and this wayfarer is an integral composite of body and soul. There is thus in a sense a “natural” requirement that not only the soul but also the body share in immortality through resurrection.258 We might recall that it is in the context of discussing Paul’s argument concerning the resurrection of the body that Thomas writes, “my soul is not me.” Yet there is a difference in how soul and body are glorified by the vision of God. The human intellect is united to God without any created intermediary by the lumen gloriae, which renders the soul “deiform.”259 Though Thomas does not develop a fullblown theology of theosis, such as one finds in the Christian East, he does hold that through grace we are given “a partaking of the divine nature by a participated likeness.”260 Because it is not simply the soul but the integral human composite that yearns for fulfillment in God, it is not simply the soul that shares in the divine nature, but the glory of the soul “overflows” into the resurrected flesh of the blessed.261 One might say that in the kingdom we have a reversal of the situation that obtains in this life: whereas now the senses mediate knowledge of God to the soul through their perception of God’s created effects, in the beatific vision it is the soul that mediates to the body the light of glory by which the body itself shares in God’s immortal nature. This overflow makes these bodies luminous, subtle, invulnerable, and agile—perfectly subject to the soul, as the soul is subject to God.262 Thomas’s confrere, William Peraldus, compares these 255

Compendium theologiae pars 1 cap. 174–80. Super I Thes. cap. 4 lec. 2 n. 103; Compendium theologiae pars 1 cap. 244. Super Sent. lib. 4 d. 49 q. 2 a. 2; Super Iob cap. 19 lec. 2; Super Mt. cap. 5 lec. 2 n. 434. 258 Contra Gentiles lib. 4 cap. 81, n. 2. Thomas is careful to maintain that the resurrection is not “natural” in the sense of actualizing a potential in human beings. See Super I Cor. cap. 15 lec. 5 n. 969. 259 Summa theologiae Ia q. 12 a. 5 ad 3. 260 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 112 a. 1 co. 261 Summa theologiae Ia–IIae q. 3 a. 3. 262 Contra Gentiles lib. 4 cap. 86; Compendium theologiae pars 1 cap. 168; Super I Cor. cap. 15 lec.6 nn. 980–3, 988. 256 257

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“four gifts” to the Tretragrammaton, fulfilling the prophecy of Revelation 3:12, “On him who conquers I shall write the name of God,” and notes the Gloss’s interpretation of this passage: “He will be, in a sense, God.”263 In the kingdom, God is not only known through the intellect but also loved through the will. Thomas stresses that because the beatified intellect now perceives God directly, the will is immovably fixed on God, such that it is impossible for the beatified person to will anything apart from God, just as the wills of the damned are immovably turned against God.264 Some have wondered how this could be compatible with free will. It is important to remember that for Thomas the deliberation of the will does not concern the end, but only the means to the end; the will by its nature desires the good that it perceives. In the beatific vision the “known good” (bonum apprehensum) is the highest good itself, intellectually possessed to the fullness of the creature’s capacity; Thomas says that in the patria we will know the truth of God’s existence better than we now know the principle of noncontradiction.265 Perceiving the end perfectly through the light of glory and no longer dependent on the bodily perception of God’s created effects, the will cannot but love God above all things. For Thomas it is absolutely crucial to maintain this not only for the sake of coherence with his understanding of the will’s relationship to the person’s end, but also to avoid the possibility that human beings could ever turn away from God again, an error that he ascribes to Origen.266 In Augustinian terms,267 the beatified will is non posse peccare—unable to sin—because all that it could possibly desire has been given to it, and the body, glorified and subjected to the soul, no longer serves as an unruly partner, diverting the will from love of God. The stability of the will with regard to its proper object is not seen by Thomas as removing freedom, but as perfecting it; he writes in his disputed questions De veritate, “It is due to the deficiency of a created nature that it can turn to evil; and grace removes this deficiency by perfecting the nature, confirming it in good, just as light which comes to the air takes away the darkness that it naturally has without light.”268 The will is fixed upon God not because it is constrained, but because it has been freed so as to attain the goal for which it has longed.

263 264 265 266 267 268

Peraldus, “Sermon on Prayer,” in Tugwell (1982), 176. Contra Gentiles lib. 4 cap. 92–3; Compendium theologiae lib. 1 cap. 166. De veritate q. 10 a. 12 co. See De veritate q. 24 a. 8. See Augustine, Admonition and Grace, ch. 33. De veritate q. 24 a. 8 ad 1.

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Here we can see how Thomas’s convictions concerning the graced perfection of the human being as a rational animal plays out eschatologically. For Thomas, the patria is not simply the dwelling place of souls but the place where embodied human beings dwell with Christ in his humanity in such a way that they know God perfectly and desire nothing but the divine glory that is lavishly bestowed upon them. At the same time, Thomas sees much of the eschatological language of scripture as figurative and metaphorical. For example, the “worm that never dies” mentioned by Isaiah (66:24) and Mark (9:48), since it cannot possibly gnaw at the incorruptible bodies of the damned, is interpreted as the gnawing of their conscience.269 Likewise, in Thomas’s view any mention of eschatological eating and drinking are metaphors for “the pleasure of the contemplation of wisdom and the assumption of the intelligible truth into our intellect,” since the incorruptible bodies of the saved have no need of nourishment.270 Indeed, all nonhuman organic life vanishes in the conflagration preceding judgment, since it is no longer needed for the purpose of sustaining human beings, who have become incorruptible.271 Despite what Isaiah might have prophesied, there will be neither lions nor lambs in the patria. The material creation will remain only in the form of the four elements, the heavenly bodies, and human beings themselves.272 To use a modern term, Thomas’s eschatology is a “demythologized” one that takes references to lions and lambs and heavenly banquets as metaphors pointing us toward a future destiny that escapes the powers of our imagination. As a part of this demythologizing, Thomas attempts to redescribe that future in terms that are more rationally plausible than a strictly literal reading of the figures of scripture. Unfortunately, demythologization is often purchased at the price of wedding oneself to an account of rational plausibility that is itself historically conditioned.273 This is perhaps most obvious in Thomas’s acceptance of a picture of the cosmos as consisting of concentric spheres274 containing incorruptible heavenly bodies275 moved by purely intellectual beings.276 All bodies below the sphere

269

Super Sent. lib. 4 d. 50 q. 2 a. 3 qc. 2; Contra Gentiles lib. 4 cap. 91 nn. 8–9. Contra Gentiles lib. 4 cap. 83 n. 19. 271 See Super Sent. lib. 4 d. 48 q. 2 a. 5; De potentia q. 5 a. 9. 272 Compendium theologiae pars. 1 cap. 170. 273 For brief accounts of the astronomical and physical presumptions within which Thomas operates, see Wallace (1967). 274 Summa theologiae Ia q. 68 a. 4. 275 Summa theologiae Ia q. 66 a. 2. 276 Summa theologiae Ia q. 57 a. 2. 270

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of the moon are composed of a mixture of the four elements and have inbuilt tendencies upward or downward, depending on their elemental composition. They are further affected by the motions of the heavenly bodies in the sphere above the moon.277 The blessed—both the resurrected saints and the angels—occupy the empyrean or luminous heaven, which is the outermost sphere, beyond the sphere of the fixed stars.278 This is the cosmic stage on which Thomas plays out his reflections on the new heavens and the new earth, in which all nonhuman bodies below the moon’s sphere will be reduced to their basic elements and the bodies of the blessed, endowed now with agility, subtlety, invulnerability, and luminosity, will rise to the very outer limits of the material world. The heavenly bodies will cease their motion, and time, which is the measure of motion, shall, in the words of the book of Revelation, be no longer (10:6), and human beings will have a life that is truly eternal.279 This is a vision of God’s kingdom that attains exquisite poetic form in Dante’s Paradisio, but we ought not to forget that for Thomas this was not poetic expression, but a scientifically plausible translation of scriptural imagery. This translation is, alas, not so plausible today. We cannot, of course, blame Thomas for being a man of his day, with the scientific learning of his day, nor for trying to discern what in scripture’s descriptions of the eschaton can be taken for metaphor and figure and what is crucial for maintaining the substance of Christian hope. He is in fact fairly cautious in trying to separate scriptural affirmations from scientific speculation. For example, he recognizes that among natural philosophers of antiquity there were a number of different accounts of the motion of the heavenly spheres, all of which “save the appearances” of what we can observe of that motion, and all of which might be replaced by a better account at some point in the future (as they eventually were by Galileo).280 He also notes that spiritual substances, such as the soul, are related to place in “a manner that cannot be fully manifest to us,”281 and it would seem that similar reserve could be applied when speaking of the resurrected body. In other words, Thomas was not completely wedded to the notion of resurrected saints occupying the empyrean heavens as the only way to speak of human destiny.282 It seems legitimate to think

277

278 See De operationibus occultis naturae. Summa theologiae Ia q. 66 a. 3. 280 De potentia q. 5 a. 5. See In De caelo lib. 2 lec. 17 n. 2. 281 Super Sent. lib. 4 d. 45 q. 1 a. 1 qc. 1 ad 1. 282 a In Summa theologiae I q. 66 a. 3 Thomas remarks that the existence of the empyrean heaven rests only on the authority of Walafrid Strabo, Bede, and Basil. 279

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that the same principles that Thomas applies to different attempts to understand the scriptural narratives of creation could be applied to eschatological reflection as well. He writes in his Sentences commentary: There are things that are by their very nature of the substance of faith: for example, to say of God that he is three and one, and other similar things, about which it is forbidden to think otherwise . . . there are other things that relate to the faith only incidentally . . . and, with respect to these, Christian authors have different opinions, interpreting sacred scripture in various ways. Thus with respect to the origin of the world, there is one point that is of the substance of faith: to know that it began by creation, on which all the authors in question are in agreement. But the manner and the order according to which creation took place concerns the faith only incidentally, in so far as it has been recorded in scripture, and of these things the aforementioned authors, safeguarding the truth of their various interpretations, have reported different things.283

With regard to the last things, what for Thomas is of the substance of faith is not whether or not the nonhuman creation will persist only in the form of the unmixed elements, but that “even the bodily creation will achieve a kind of resplendence in its own way.”284 What is of the substance of faith is not that the patria, toward which the wayfarer journeys on pilgrimage, is located in an empyrean sphere, but that to be blessed is to be fully alive in the presence of God, who is spoken of as dwelling in heaven, “not in the sense that he is housed in the material heavens, but to show forth the eminence of God over every creature, in the way that heaven towers high above every other material creature.”285 What is of the substance of faith is not whether or not the motion of the heavens will cease, but that the blessedness of the saints truly is eternal life, “because through enjoying God they become partakers, as it were, of God’s eternity which surpasses all time.”286 For all the truth in Pieper’s claims regarding Thomas’s “theologically founded worldliness,” his commitment to the integrity of nature and of reason, it remains the case that Thomas’s fundamental image of the Christian is that of the viator, the pilgrim who journeys toward a homeland that in this life is unseen. Thomas’s commitment to the radical form of religious life represented by the Order of Preachers is of a piece with this understanding of the place of the human person within the world. Because the world has fallen into alienation from God, we must renounce the

283 285

Super Sent. lib. 2, d. 12 q. 3 a. 1. Compendium theologiae lib. 2 cap. 9.

284

Contra Gentiles lib. 4 cap. 97 n. 7 Summa theologiae IIa–IIae q. 18 a. 2 ad 2.

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world and its love of pride and material pleasure and become wandering beggars for whom the crucified Jesus is the exemplar. But because this fallen world remains God’s good creation, we must at the same time undertake our wandering in the midst of human life—in the city, in the marketplace, in the university—proclaiming the good news of salvation in Christ. Because my soul is not me, I cannot escape the fallen world by taking up the life of the angels. But because grace heals and perfects fallen nature, I can hope that a mendicant existence is not simply the nomad’s endless flight, but is in fact a pilgrimage toward fulfillment in God.

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7 Thomas in History Thomas’s eschatology confronts us with the question of Thomas’s embeddedness within a particular time and place and its assumptions and worldview. Thomas’s life was lived out within a world in which the sun circled the earth, the planets were made of an immutable quintessence, and the actions of bodies beneath the moon were to some degree determined by the movements of those same planets. As much as we might want to ignore such discomforting truths, a correct understanding of Thomas Aquinas involves understanding his world, even—perhaps especially—those aspects of it that we find difficult or even impossible to accept. But why? Part of my answer involves my loyalty to Thomas’s two axioms that guided our reflections in the last chapter: “grace perfects and does not destroy nature” and “my soul is not me.” That is, if we are going to do theology, we have to do it as the historically embodied beings that we are by nature, which means that we inevitably speak of the mysteries of God not in tongues of angels, but in some historically-inflected human language; we know not by aeviternal angelic intelligence, but through time-bound discursive human reasoning. To grasp the thought of any thinker of the past, we must grasp it as past, to one degree or the other, because historical context makes a difference. To gain a sense of the difference historical context makes for how we read theology, I wish to offer in this concluding chapter a brief sketch in broad outline of the historical journey that Thomas’s texts have taken through the centuries since his death. By doing so, I hope to give some sense of how a figure like Thomas Aquinas must be constantly thought and rethought anew within shifting historical contexts.

1. THOMISM Though Thomas had ambitions to reform the education of Dominican friars, as witnessed by the project of the Summa theologiae, it is highly

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unlikely that he ever envisioned that there would be a school of thought called “Thomism.” Yet this is what happened. The label “Thomist” can be applied broadly, describing anyone who takes Thomas as a significant dialogue partner and who finds him more often than not helpful on a variety of questions. Typically, however, the label is applied more narrowly to identify those who hold to some determinate set of positions that are found in or derived from what Thomas wrote. The exact content of these positions is continually under dispute, and consequently who counts as a genuine Thomist is similarly disputed. Rather than attempt to settle such disputes and redraw yet again the boundary line of Thomism, I wish instead to recount the role that Thomas’s texts and their readers, particularly those who have given him a central place in their thought, have played in the centuries since his death.1 In other words, I will attempt to speak in the broadest sense possible of the trajectory of Thomism from Thomas’s day until now, and to do this in the same way that the primitive Constitutions of the Order of Preachers instructed the friars to chant the hours: “briefly and succinctly.” This will hardly satisfy specialists or polemicists, but it should suffice to give some initial sense of the “afterlife” of Thomas’s work.

Defending Thomas At the time of Thomas’s death, it was not at all clear that he would prove to be the formidable figure that he became in the subsequent history of theology. Though the masters on the arts faculty at Paris sent a letter of condolence to the Dominicans (along with a request for copies of Thomas’s Aristotelian commentaries), his former colleagues at the theology faculty were thunderously silent.2 His later significance—both for those who would acclaim him and those who would decry him—can mislead us to think that such significance was obvious at the time. Ironically, what seems to have secured Thomas’s ongoing significance was in fact the fierce opposition that certain of his ideas provoked and the equally fierce counter-opposition with which his defenders, particularly his Dominican confreres, responded. On March 7, 1277, three years to the day after Thomas’s death, Stephen Tempier, the Archbishop of Paris, issued a condemnation of 219 propositions that he claimed were being 1 For brief general surveys of the history of Thomism, see Cessario (2005), Colish (1975), Kennedy (1912), Weisheipl (2003). 2 See Upham, (2012), 515.

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taught in the arts faculty of the university.3 The arts masters Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia were the source of many of these propositions, and many of them were clearly contrary to Christian teaching, such as the proposition, “There is no more excellent kind of life than to give oneself to philosophy.” A large number of the propositions had to do with views associated with Aristotle and his Arabic interpreters; but the condemnations also covered necromancy, witchcraft, and Andreas Capellanus’s handbook of courtly love, De amore. This somewhat confusing and confused set of propositions, and the desire on the part of scholars not to run afoul of what they were condemning, would have a significant effect on philosophy and theology in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. A number of the condemned propositions were associated with Thomas, such as his view on the rational possibility of an eternal world and the impossibility of God creating multiple separated substances belonging to the same species. Tempier’s action touched off a series of condemnations in which Thomas was implicated, including one by his Dominican confrere Robert Kilwardby, Archbishop of Canterbury, who just a few days after the Parisian condemnations issued his own list of condemned propositions that included Thomas’s teaching on the unicity of substantial form.4 Despite—or maybe because of—Kilwardby’s condemnation, the leadership of the Order of Preachers rallied to Thomas’s defense. Their first concern was an intra-Dominican one, with the General Chapter of 1278 dispatching two friars to England to investigate whether any Dominican was guilty of impugning Thomas’s person or his writings.5 But the controversy over Thomas’s teaching soon became a dispute between Dominicans and Franciscans. The Franciscan, John Peckham, with whom Thomas had tangled while still alive, was Kilwardby’s successor as archbishop and reiterated his condemnations. Around 1279 another English Franciscan, William de la Mare, produced his Correctorium, which identified the dangerous teachings in Thomas’s writings and offered corrections of them.6 It soon became an official policy among the Franciscans that their friars—and then only the brightest—could read the Summa only if 3 On the controversies in the years immediately after Thomas’s death, see, inter alia, Roensch (1964), 12–19; Van Steenberghen (1991), 422–6; Leinsle (2010), 144–7; Thussen (1997); Wippel (2003) and (1995), 18–28; Torrell (1996), 298–316; Mulchahey (1998), 142–67; Lowe (2003), 49–53. 4 On Kilwardby’s views, see Roesch (1964), 173–9. 5 Mulchahey (1998), 144–5. 6 On Peckham and de la Mare, see Roensch (1964), 179–87.

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it were read in tandem with William’s corrections. This produced among English Dominicans a flurry of literary activity refuting William’s criticisms, producing some of the first Dominican commentaries on Thomas’s work.7 Meetings of the General Chapter of the Dominicans produced a series of directives commending Thomas’s teaching, culminating in 1313 with the order that not only could no Dominican dissent from Thomas’s views, but one could discuss other views only in order to refute them. The same directive required that several articles from Thomas’s writings be treated each day by the lector in each Dominican convent, as a kind of commentary on Lombard’s Sentences.8 The seriousness of the Dominicans’ commitment to Thomas can be seen in their repeated censure of one of their own, Durandus of St Pourc¸ain, despite the fact that he was a bishop and enjoyed support in higher ecclesiastical circles.9 This initial phase of controversy was effectively brought to a close in 1323 with Pope John XXII’s canonization of Thomas. Jean-Pierre Torrell notes that the spontaneous cult that began to develop around Thomas upon his death “was very quickly relayed into the mustering of the Dominican order around Thomas’s doctrine.”10 The sign of Thomas’s intellectual rehabilitation for the entire Church came in early 1325, when the current Bishop of Paris, Stephen Bourret, repealed Tempier’s condemnations, at least to the extent that they applied to Thomas’s teachings. Even prior to this rehabilitation, thinkers such as John Duns Scotus were treating Thomas as a significant interlocutor to be engaged, and criticized, but not simply as a foe to be defeated. The context of controversy that attended the origins of a “Thomist” school of thought initially involved a somewhat ad hoc defense of Thomas’s reputation rather than an attempt to pass on a system of thought found in his writings or a set of fundamental principles from which such a system might be derived.11 It is not even clear how well some of his defenders understood the positions of the man they were defending.12 Furthermore, with the exception of the controversy over the

7

Mulchahey (1998), 147. For a survey of these early Dominican defenders of Thomas, both in England and in France, see Roensch (1964). 8 Mulchahey (1998), 154–6. 9 See Lowe (2003), 1–82. 10 Torrell (1996), 320. 11 See Lowe (2003), 62–3. 12 For example, Cessario (2005), 51–2 notes that Hervaeus Natalis never quite saw the significance of the essence-existence distinction and John of Naples did not understand the notion of individuation by quantified matter.

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nature of evangelical poverty, the controverted propositions were primarily philosophical in nature: that is, it was not for the most part Christian doctrine that was at issue, but questions of cosmology, anthropology, and metaphysics. Though the worry was often about the theological implications of these philosophical views, this still created the impression that what was most distinctive, and therefore most significant, about Thomas’s thought were such issues as the unicity of substantial form or the real distinction. A concern over too narrow a focus on philosophical questions is perhaps reflected in the admonition of the Dominican General Chapter in 1280 that, “Lectors and Masters and other Brothers must apply their minds to theological and moral questions rather than to philosophical and curious.”13 Despite this admonition, the concern to defend Thomas on controversial philosophical questions would have a determinative effect on the self-understanding of Thomism. As the different positions of Thomas were forged into a system in this controversial context, Thomism emerged as a school of thought that was distinguished from other schools of thought primarily, albeit not exclusively, by its philosophical positions.

Commentary and Controversy Romanus Cessario identifies the Defensiones theologiae Divi Thomae Aquinatis of Johannes Capreolus (c. 1380–1444) as a notable turning point in the Thomist tradition. It is still a “defensive” work, presenting and answering objections to Thomas’s positions from Scotus, Durandus, and others. At the same time, it follows the order of Thomas’s commentary on Lombard’s Sentences and thus offers a comprehensive treatment of Thomas’s theology rather than the earlier piecemeal approach of defending specific “propositions.” It gives the beginning of a synthesis of Thomistic thought.14 Later in the fifteenth century, the Summa theologiae began to be used as a textbook, initially in Germany, and commentaries based on the Summa began to appear.15 Other notable interpreters of Thomas in the late Middle Ages included Henry of Gorkum (c. 1378– 1431), Denis the Carthusian (1402–71), and Peter Crockaert (c. 1465–1514). Of these three, only the last was a Dominican, indicating the spread of Thomas’s influence beyond the Order of Preachers.16 At the same time, we

13

14 Quoted in Congar (1968), 142. Cessario (2005), 60–1. See Goris (2002). 16 For a discussion of Thomas’s influence outside of Latin scholasticism in the first centuries after his death, including among Byzantine and Jewish thinkers, see Upham (2012), 512–14. 15

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ought not to imagine that Thomas was the only option on offer for Catholic thinkers. There was also a significant Albertist school in Cologne and a Scotist school, as well as the moderni, who followed William of Ockham and his nominalist views. The first part of the sixteenth century was dominated by the upheaval of the Protestant Reformation. Not unlike some other humanists of the period,17 Luther (1483–1546) had little regard for Thomas or any other scholastic theologian, seeing them as more loyal to Aristotle than to the gospel. Writing of transubstantiation, Luther describes this doctrine as the product of the “Thomistic—that is, the Aristotelian church,” and then proceeds to deride Thomas for misunderstanding the very Aristotelian philosophy that he was so intent upon employing : Aristotle speaks of subject and accidents so very differently from St. Thomas that it seems to me this great man is to be pitied not only for attempting to draw his opinions in matters of faith from Aristotle, but also for attempting to base them upon a man whom he did not understand, thus building an unfortunate superstructure upon an unfortunate foundation.18

In other words, in employing Aristotle to speak of the sacraments Thomas distorts both Aristotle and the gospel. For Luther, perhaps the worst havoc wreaked by Aristotle among scholastic theologians was with regard to their understanding of the Christian life and the work of grace. Luther writes, “Virtually the entire Ethics of Aristotle is the worst enemy of grace.”19 In particular, Luther rejected any notion of growth in virtue and the perfection of nature by grace in favor of the notion of “alien righteousness,” in which the sinner is justified not by any transforming effect of grace, but by sheer divine acceptance based on union with Christ through faith.20

17 Marcia Colish (1975) notes, “Among the majority of humanists, all scholastics were equal in the sense of being equally obnioxious” (440). Cessario, however, cautions that one should not underestimate the intellectual contribution that scholasticism made to humanism, particularly in Italy. See Cessario (2005), 64; see also O’Malley (1974), which suggestions that humanists often praised Thomas better than they understood him. 18 Luther, On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, in Luther (1959), 29. 19 Luther, Disputation Against Scholastic Theology n. 41, in Luther (1957), 12. 20 Jennifer Herdt (2008) writes of Luther, “participation in the divine life is no longer understood as requiring transformation of the human person, but is understood in almost physicalist terms as Christ’s presence ‘inside’ the sinner, who is otherwise alien to, and alienated from, God” (178–9). Herdt recognized Luther’s affirmation of a need to grow in faith, but shows that for him this takes a highly paradoxical form, given his rejection of human agency in matters concerned with salvation (See Herdt (2008), 184–9).

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It is not clear how much of the writing of Thomas Luther had actually read and how much of the “Thomism” he knew was transmitted to him through later scholastics, such a Gabriel Biel, who were more indebted to Ockham than to Thomas.21 Whatever the depth of Luther’s knowledge of Thomas, it seems clear that they understand the theological task in fundamentally different ways. Otto Hermann Pesch has characterized this difference as one of intellectual “style”—between Thomas’s “sapiential” approach and Luther’s “existential” approach, by which he means that while Thomas “strives to mirror and recapitulate God’s own thoughts about the world, men, and history, insofar as God has disclosed them,” Luther attempts to “reflexively thematize” his experience and confession of faith within theological discourse itself.22 Keeping in mind that both Thomas and Luther saw theological study as a preparation for the task of preaching the gospel, we should consider how such “stylistic” differences might grow out of divergent understandings of the preacher’s task. For Luther, the preacher must move his hearers to abandon all reliance on human agency and embrace Christ in faith, whereas for Thomas preaching—and indeed theology itself—is an element within the practice of the cura animarum—the care of souls—which presumes that salvation involves not simply faith’s turning but also the mind’s conformity to divine truth and the consequent growth in hope and love and the infused moral virtues.23 The theological visions of Thomas and Luther, while perhaps not entirely irreconcilable, involve quite different understandings of what the effect of a truly evangelical proclamation should be upon its hearers. One of Luther’s most significant interlocutors was the Dominican Thomas de Vio, known as Cajetan (1468–1534), who stands out as the preeminent commentator on Aquinas. Cajetan’s commentary on the Summa theologiae assumed such stature that it was included along with the text of the Summa in the first printed edition of Thomas’s Omnia opera, the so-called Piana (1570), and is included in the edition of the Summa produced by the Leonine Commission in the nineteenth century. He brought to the study of Thomas many of the tools of the new humanistic learning that was flowering in Europe at the time, including a deeper philological approach to the text of Aristotle and a Latin style that harkened back to classical models.24 Cajetan sought to be loyal to 21 22 23 24

See Mu¨hlen (2002), 65–86. Otto Hermann Pesch (1970), 76–7. On Thomas’s understanding of theology as cura animarum, see Boyle (2000), 141–59. Leinsle (2010), 273.

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Thomas, but was not afraid to introduce new terms and distinctions in order to clarify what seemed to him obscure. Also significant in this period was the so-called school of Salamanca. This included the Dominican Francisco de Vitoria (1483–1546), who was a student of Peter Crockaert and is often seen as crucial in the development of the theory of international law by bringing Thomas’s thinking on natural law to bear on questions that arose in the context of the emergence of nation states and the colonial expansion of the European powers. Domingo de Soto (1494–1560), who ended his career as a teacher at Salamanca, was the Dominicans’ official theologian at the Council of Trent and was one of the sources of Thomist influence at the Council (the claim that the Summa was placed next to the Bible on the altar during the Council is, however, a pious fiction). It is perhaps in recognition of that influence that in 1567, Pope Pius V proclaimed St Thomas Aquinas a doctor of the Church. Melchior Cano (1509–60), like Cajetan before him, showed the fruits of humanism in both his Latin style and in his knowledge of patristic theological sources.25 His De locis theologicis, published posthumously, abandoned Thomas’s quaestio format and might be thought of as one of the first full-scale treatises on Thomist “theological method.”26 The Carmelites of Salamanca, while seeking to adhere strictly to the thought of Thomas, also abandoned the quaestio in their multivolume Cursus theologicus—a cooperative effort, involving multiple authors and stretching over the course of more than eighty years (1631–1712).27 Spain was also a center for Jesuit engagement with Thomas’s thought.28 Ignatius Loyola (1491–1556) had made the Summa theologiae, rather than Lombard’s Sentences, the basic theological textbook for his new Society of Jesus. Among Jesuit commentators, Luis de Molina (1535–1600) and Francisco Sua´rez (1548–1617) stand out. Sua´rez is notable for the vastness of his erudition and for the highly original way in which he combined Thomas’s thought with other currents flowing from late medieval scholasticism, particularly Scotus. Because of this willingness to combine Thomas’s views with others, the Jesuit tradition of Thomism is often referred to, sometimes dismissively, as “eclectic Thomism.” Molina is known primarily for the controversy that his views sparked between Jesuits and Dominicans. In order to secure human free will against the views of some of the Protestant reformers, Molina posited that God’s 25 27

Cessario (2005), 73–4. Couture (2003), 618–19.

26

Congar (1968), 163–5. See Leinsle (2010), 293; Cessario (2005), 76–8.

28

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“middle knowledge” (scientia media) of the use that human beings would freely make of the gift of grace was the basis on which God bestowed or withheld that grace. Dominicans fiercely rejected this view, which they saw as semi-Pelagian at best, in favor of the view of Domingo Ba´n˜ez (1523–1604) that God knows free human acts precisely as their effective cause and therefore does not simply concur with the human being’s acceptance of grace, but is the actual moving cause of that acceptance.29 The conflict was never really resolved but simply ended by a decree of Pope Paul V in 1607 that prohibited the two sides from accusing each other of heresy. John Poinsot (1589–1644), known as John of St Thomas, was the preeminent Thomist theologian in the first half of the seventeenth century. He is significant not only for his Cursus philosophicus and Cursus theologici, but also for his interpretation of what constitutes the nature of theology as a science. John held that a conclusion drawn either from two revealed premises or from a revealed premise and a premise known by the natural light of reason can by considered to be “virtually revealed” and that “speculative” theology is precisely this science of virtually revealed conclusions. As we saw in Chapter 4 concerning Christ’s acquisition of knowledge, Thomas does often bring together premises known through revelation with those known through natural reason, but John of St Thomas takes us considerably beyond Thomas’s understanding of theology as scientia. As Yves Congar notes, “Theology is no longer simply defined in the terms of St. Thomas by the fact that it orders and constructs Christian teaching in its principles and conclusions, but by the deduction of new conclusions.”30 The task of understanding the truths of the faith so as to be able to communicate that understanding effectively to others was now seen as the purview of “positive” theology (so-called because it deals with those revealed premises that one must posit). Speculative theology— which is what Thomas was taken to have been engaged in—became a matter of using the data of faith to advance theological knowledge by drawing conclusions that, if not formally revealed, were virtually revealed. The rationality of theology as a speculative scientia was no longer seen as being primarily in aid of its communication of saving knowledge through preaching and teaching, a matter of handing on to others the fruits of

29 For a survey of various positions on these questions during this time period, see Leinsle (2010), 323–46. 30 Congar (1968), 159.

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contemplation; rather, it was a method of drawing formally valid conclusions from the data of faith. Though there are anticipations of this understanding of theology as a science of conclusions in thinkers like Cano and Ba´n˜ez, with John of St Thomas we see, if not an end point, at least a significant coordinate in the development of Thomism as a school of thought. In a way, John’s understanding of speculative theology was the natural product of a process of evolution in an environment of intense intellectual controversy—first in the defense of Thomas against his critics, then in the defense of Catholic theological positions against Protestant critics, and finally in controversy with other Catholic schools of thought in seeking a response to the exigencies of the early modern world, whether this be new notions of human freedom or new scientific discoveries. What in Thomas was an unfolding of revealed truth became in early modern Thomism a project of construction. Once the project was clearly defined, Thomists of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could carry it out in with great, and occasionally grim, industry. Even committed Thomists tend to speak of this later period of one of “decline” or even “decay.”31

Contesting Modernity A third phase of Thomist development was marked by a new set of opponents, which we might gather under the loose label of “modernity.” What is often called “neo-Thomism” was promoted within the Church as a response primarily to certain modern philosophical positions that were seen as individualist, relativist and materialist. Pope Leo XIII’s 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris, which might be thought of as the charter of neoThomism, says, Whoso turns his attention to the bitter strifes of these days and seeks a reason for the troubles that vex public and private life must come to the conclusion that a fruitful cause of the evils which now afflict, as well as those which threaten, us lies in this: that false conclusions concerning divine and human things, which originated in the schools of philosophy, have now crept into all the orders of the State, and have been accepted by the common consent of the masses.32

Bearing in mind the recent loss of the papal states, as well as the growth of “laicism” or secularism throughout Europe, Leo sought the root causes in a modern philosophy that had rejected the possibility of a higher, revealed 31

See Kennedy (1912), 699; Weisheipl (2003), 51.

32

Leo XVIII (1879), 98.

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truth. Leo offered a lengthy paean to Christian philosophy, including such luminaries as Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Athanasius, Chrysostom, Augustine, Boethius, John of Damascus, as well as the scholastics. He praised Thomas, however, above all the rest as one who “supplied invincible arms” with which future generations could rout the foes of truth.33 He therefore exhorted the bishops of the Church, “to restore the golden wisdom of St. Thomas, and to spread it far and wide for the defense and beauty of the Catholic faith, for the good of society, and for the advantage of all the sciences.”34 Of course the appeal to Thomas as an antidote to modern errors did not spring fully grown from the head of Leo XIII. Particularly in Italy and Germany, a revival of Thomism had been underway, spearheaded not by the Dominicans but by the Jesuits, newly restored in 1814 after forty odd years of suppression. Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio (1793–1862), Matteo Liberatore (1810–92), and Joseph Kleutgen (1811–83), all members of the Society of Jesus, might be thought of as the intellectual architects of Aeterni Patris.35 Taparelli had been the teacher of Leo XIII, and Liberatore and Kleutgen are thought to have had a hand in the encyclical’s drafting. The encyclical reflected their view that the thought of Thomas was an antidote to the subjectivism and individualism of modern philosophy. Kleutgen in particular contrasted the philosophy and theology of scholasticism with the forms of Catholic theology in Germany that had been influenced by idealism. The encyclical also reflected their understanding of Thomism primarily as a philosophical system, albeit one in the service of theology. In the wake of Aeterni Patris, there emerged what was now described variously as neo-Thomism or neoscholasticism (the interchangeability of the terms indicative of a tendency to identify scholasticism with Thomas), understood as a philosophical system with theological resonances created by Thomas Aquinas and transmitted though the commentarial tradition—a system that was an alternative to modern philosophical systems. Emerging in a combative mode, neoscholasticism was, as P. J. Fitzpatrick notes, not particularly receptive to the potentially 33

Leo XVIII (1879), 109. Leo XVIII (1879), 114. For the background to Aeterni Patris, see McCool (1977) and, particularly for the German background, Inglis (1998), 17–167. McCool and Inglis concur in some of their negative criticisms of neoscholasticism, but Ingles is to my mind more astute in his criticisms of the way in which thinkers like Kleutgen unwittingly accepted some of the modern philosophical assumptions of those he saw as his opponents. Similarly, see Fitzpatrick (1982), 843. 34 35

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positive things that modern thought had to offer: “the creative function of the understanding, the relation of arguments about religion to the setting of religious belief, the role of language and of social instruction, the historical setting of philosophical speculation.”36 Thus the neoscholastic revival that flowed into and out of Aeterni Patris—the subtitle of which was “On the Restoration of Christian Philosophy”—focused on Thomas primarily as a philosophical resource. No less a committed Thomist than Jean-Pierre Torrell has remarked, “The great tragedy of the neo-Thomist digression (which has not yet come to a full stop) is to have made St. Thomas more of a philosopher than a theologian.”37 At the same time, theological work that looked to Thomas as a guiding light was not entirely absent. In particular, one of Kleutgen’s students, Mathias Scheeben (1835–88), incorporated Thomas along with the Greek and Latin Fathers into a creative, and occasionally idiosyncratic, dogmatic synthesis. Scheeben seemed to imbibe not only the content of Thomas’s theology but also Thomas’s intellectual verve, which was lacking in some neoscholastic theological exercises.38 The immediate fruits of Aeterni Patris included the setting up of the Leonine Commission to produce a critical edition of Thomas’s works (a project as yet incomplete), the founding of new academic journals, and the propagation of neo-Thomist thought in education. This last began with the only partially successful attempt to replace the eclectic philosophical education offered at the Jesuit’s Gregorian university in Rome with a strictly Thomistic one. It culminated with the 1917 Code of canon law’s instruction that the education of priests in both philosophy and theology should be in accord with Thomas’s “method, doctrine and principles” (canon 1366.2). Though religious orders such as the Franciscans tended to look to their own scholastic sources, particularly Bonaventure and Scotus, there was a strong incentive to read these thinkers in such a way as to make them as much as possible sound as if they agreed with Thomas. Aeterni Patris offered neoscholasticism as an antidote to modern thought, but it did not forestall what has come to be called the Modernist 36

Fitzpatrick (1982), 842. Torrell (2011), 184. The reaction of some neoscholastics to Scheeben’s theology is perhaps indicated by the 1912 Catholic Encyclopedia entry on him, by Joseph Wilhelm (1912), which along with some basic biographical and bibliographical information notes, “Very few minds were attuned to his; his pupils were overawed by the steady flow of his long abstruse sentences which brought scanty light to their intellects; his colleagues and his friends but rarely disturbed the peace of the workroom where his spirit brooded over a chaos of literary matters” (vol. 12, 525). 37 38

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Crisis. This term covers a complex series of events in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the interpretation of which is still contested today. Suffice it to say that many Catholic scholars found a revived scholasticism insufficient for meeting the intellectual needs of the day and sought to employ for apologetic purposes precisely the philosophies of the modern world that neoscholasticism was intended to keep at bay. For example, Maurice Blondel (1861–1949) wrote, “Thomism seems to many an exact but, if I may so put it, a static account.” He gave neoThomism credit for its rigor and consistency, but saw it as dwelling in splendid isolation from the questions and thought forms of modern people: “Once a man has entered this system, he is himself assured; and from the centre of the fortress he can defend himself against all assaults and rebut all objections on points of detail. But first he must effect his own entrance.”39 What was needed for entry, Blondel and others claimed, was a keener sense of the historical conditioning of human thought and a reconnection of theological truths with the religious and spiritual lives of Christians. Blondel was a highly sophisticated thinker, and one prone to somewhat obscure modes of expression, and while his criticisms of scholasticism aroused suspicion among Church officials they did not result in his condemnation. Others, who were more sweeping in their condemnations of scholasticism and more radical in their proposals for reconstructing Catholic belief to meet the needs of the modern day, did not fare so well.40 Blondel’s call for a greater historical consciousness and a connection of doctrine to spiritual life became, in the hands of less adept thinkers, an historical relativism normed only by the spiritual needs of a particular time and place, or at least so it appeared to Roman authorities. In the 1907 encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis Pope Pius X condemned “modernism”— presented there as a coherent school of thought, not unlike Thomism or Scotism—for a combination of arrogance and ignorance: these very Modernists who pose as Doctors of the Church, who puff out their cheeks when they speak of modern philosophy, and show such contempt for scholasticism, have embraced the one with all its false glamour because their

39

Alfred Blondel (1964), 146. Loisy, while a seminarian, tried to read the Summa theologiae on his own, commenting later in his life, “The speculations of Saint Thomas on the Trinity . . . had upon me the effect of a huge logomachy . . . [and] left, as it were a void.” Quoted in O’Connell (1994), 16. 40

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ignorance of the other has left them without the means of being able to recognize confusion of thought, and to refute sophistry.41

In the wake of Pascendi a number of leading figures associated with the attempts to accommodate Catholicism to modern thought, including the Jesuit George Tyrrell (1861–1909) and the secular priest Alfred Loisy (1857–1940), were excommunicated and efforts were redoubled to enforce neoscholastic philosophy, the antidote to modernism, in the education of priests. Not unlike Aeterni Patris almost thirty years earlier, Paschendi identified the root issue as philosophical, not theological: it was the abandoning of scholastic philosophy as a foundation that caused the modernists to build such a shaky theological edifice. Moreover, like Leo XIII, Pius X identified scholasticism with Thomas: “above all it is important that the scholastic philosophy we prescribe to be followed is to be understood as that which St. Thomas Aquinas has handed on to us.”42 In order to clarify the fundamentals of proper philosophical doctrine, in 1914 the Congregation of Studies issues the Twenty-four Thomist Theses: a document that sought to define true Thomist philosophy in terms of a proper ontology (eight theses), cosmology (five theses), psychology (eight theses) and natural theology (three theses).43 These theses followed the interpretation of Thomas that had characterized the Dominican tradition—stressing the metaphysics of act and potency, the real distinction between essence and existence, and the unicity of substantial form—and caused something of a crisis for the Jesuits, who followed the more philosophically eclectic tradition coming from Sua´rez. In 1917, Pope Benedict XV approved the Jesuit view that while the Twenty-four Theses represented a valid interpretation of Thomas, one who claimed to be a follower of Thomas need not defend them all.44 Still, for a certain sort of Thomist, sometimes referred to as a “strict observance” Thomist, the Twenty-four Theses were the standard against which one’s Thomism was properly measured. This was certainly the case for one of the greatest Thomists of the first half of the twentieth century: the Dominican Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange (1877–1964). For him, the Theses were so conceptually bound together that the denial of any one of them would amount to the denial of all, and 41

Pius X (1907), 636. Pius X (1907), 640. Cf. Pius X (1914). 43 For the Latin text, see Denzinger-Scho¨nmetzer (1965), nn. 3601–24. For a brief account of the content of the theses, see Kerr (2007), 3–5. 44 See Periera (2003), 161–2. 42

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the denial of the theses would undercut the possibility of any demonstration of God’s existence by means of natural reason, which had been dogmatically defined by the First Vatican Council.45 During the over fifty years he taught at the Angelicum in Rome, he defended a Thomism rooted in the commentarial tradition of the Dominicans as the true interpretation of St Thomas. “Cajetan’s glory lies in his recognition of the true grandeur of St. Thomas, of whom he willed to be the faithful commentator. This recognition was lacking in Sua´rez, who deserted the master lines of Thomistic metaphysics to follow his own personal thought.”46 In addition to Garrigou’s own work as a commentator on the Summa, he also sought to effect a creative synthesis of Thomist theology and Carmelite spirituality, which indicates that his thought was not entirely as sclerotic and unimaginative as some critics have claimed. The negative impression that some have of his theology is perhaps related to his somewhat combative personality and his fierce engagement in theological disputes with his fellow Catholic theologians as he sought to further a Thomism that would keep the forces of modernity at bay.47 The concerns that had ignited the Modernist Crisis had not disappeared; many Catholic thinkers still saw a need for a more positive engagement with modernity.48 This was often undertaken, in contrast with many of the so-called modernists, not by rejecting Thomas, but by reinterpreting him in such a way that he could serve as a positive resource for engagement with modernity and not simply a fortress into which one could retreat. Assisting these rereadings of Thomas were the historical investigations into Thomas and medieval scholasticism more generally that had been undertaken in the wake of Aeterni Patris. Figures such as E´tienne Gilson (1884–1978) in the history of philosophy and the Dominicans Marie-Dominique Chenu (1895–1990) and Yves Congar (1904–95) in the history of theology presented a more highly differentiated view of medieval thought, helping to dispel the impression given by Aeterni Patris that there was a single scholasticism of the High Middle Ages of which Thomas was the exemplar. Along with Chenu and Congar, the Jesuits Henri de Lubac (1896–1991) and Henri Bouillard (1908–81) suggested that the commentarial tradition had not always developed Thomas’s thought in

45

46 Garrigou-Lagrange (2006), 312–15. Garrigou-Lagrange (2006), 314. See Peddicord (2004). 48 For a gallery of brief portraits of twentieth-century Thomists, see O’Meara (1997), 176–92; for a more in-depth discussion of (mainly) Thomist theologians, see Fergus Kerr (2007). 47

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a helpful way and that a return to Thomas himself might provide a better resource for contemporary theologians. In addition to offering a richer depiction of Thomas’s context, these thinkers raised again the question, which had been a neuralgic one in the Modernist Crisis, of the place of historical context and development in theology. Furthermore, the very depiction of Thomas as a figure engaged in a positive manner with the intellectual currents of his own day emboldened Catholic philosophers and theologians to engage more positively with modern thought. One major strand of this engagement was the effort to reconcile Thomas with post-Kantian thought, often identified as “transcendental Thomism,” which included Joseph Mare´chal (1878–1944), Karl Rahner (1904–84) and Bernard Lonergan (1904–84). All of these thinkers, in various ways, sought to incorporate the Kantian emphasis on the human subject’s contribution to knowledge, in contrast with the emphasis on objectivity found in strict observance Thomism. At the same time, they offered these views not as rejections of Thomas, but as interpretations. In this sense, they were very much post-Aeterni Patris thinkers: one’s theological project had to be cast as a development of Thomas’s thought in order to make a claim to legitimacy as Catholic theology. Yet they also showed the variety of directions in which Thomas could be taken. Pius XII’s encyclical Humani Generis (1950) was widely seen as a backlash on the part of the Roman strict observance Thomists.49 But while it chilled the theological climate somewhat, it could not stop the proliferation of hyphenated-Thomisms—transcendental-Thomism, existentialThomism, phenomenological-Thomism, and so forth—which were a way of acknowledging Thomas’s central place in the tradition while engaging in dialogue with a variety of modern philosophies. In the 1960s the “Thomist” half of these hyphenated phrases began to whither. While reference to Thomas is not entirely lacking in the documents of the Second Vatican Council, he takes his place alongside a much greater number of biblical and patristic sources, the fruit of the ressourcement or “return to the sources” that had been underway for several decades in Catholic theology. Though the Council reaffirmed the place of Thomism in the education of both clergy and lay people, it would not be inaccurate to say that there was a dramatic collapse of the vast enterprise of neoscholasticism. Karl Rahner, in the years following the Council, commented on the “strange silence on the subject of Thomas

49

For the background of Humani Generis, see Komonchak (2012).

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Aquinas,” and lamented the loss of interest in Thomas and the fact the theologians were reading his books more than they read Thomas.50 Thomas remained a philosophical and theological authority among Dominicans, though the commentarial tradition was often neglected and even denigrated. But even some Dominicans seemed to remove Thomas from the central role he had in their order since the fourteenth century. The career of the Dominican theologian Edward Schillebeeckx (1914–2009) is instructive and, in some ways, typical of post-Conciliar theologians. He was schooled in the phenomenological-Thomism of Dominicus De Petter and later the more historically-oriented Thomism of Chenu, who directed his doctoral dissertation on the sacramental economy of salvation in Thomas’s theology. For the first part of Schillebeeckx’s career as a theologian, his work took the form of a phenomenologically-inflected, historically-informed Thomist engagement with modern culture. In the 1970s, however, the references to Thomas seemed to drop away as Schillebeeckx became preoccupied with hermeneutics and began a massive project of Christology based in (primarily German) historical-critical scholarship of the New Testament. Though his earlier immersion in Thomism no doubt continued to shape his thinking in a variety of ways,51 neither Thomas nor later Thomists played much explicit role in his theology in the decades after the Council. The pattern seen in Schillebeeckx’s career was repeated in countless theologians of his generation. For younger theologians, educated after the Council, Thomas was at best one figure among many, and Thomism as a school was largely passed over in silence. If Thomas was of any interest, it was often simply as an early example of openness to secular learning and new intellectual developments. In the past thirty years, however, there has been a revival of interest in Thomas.52 On the philosophical front, those looking for a way out of dead-end debates between deontologists and utilitarians in ethics have turned to Aristotle and Thomas as exemplars of a virtue-based approach to ethics. Thomas has also found an appreciative audience among analytic philosophers who value his careful attention to language and logic, as well as the alternative he provides to mental representation approaches to

50

Rahner (1975), 3. See, for example, the remarks of Viviano (1982) in which he faults Schillebeeckx for remaining too wedded to Thomas’s soteriology. 52 For three surveys of recent scholarly engagement with Thomas, see Pesch (2002), 123–63; Kerr (2002a),165–86; and Torrell (2008), 177–202. 51

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knowledge. Among theologians there has been a corresponding interest in Thomas’s moral theology and, more recently, a renewed interest in what Thomas says on such dogmatic topics as the Trinity, Christology, and sacramental theology. There have also been a number of Protestant scholars who have drawn upon Thomas as a source that they hold in common with Catholics.53 Thomas has not returned to anything approaching the dominance he had among Catholics in the decades following Aeterni Patris, and interest in the commentarial tradition is currently miniscule, but it is also clear that Thomas remains a figure to be reckoned with. Whether Thomas could or should return to the central place he held prior to the Second Vatican Council is a disputed question. No less disputed is the question of what form of Thomism, from among the many forms that it has taken through the centuries, is best suited to the theological tasks of today.

2. THOMAS, THEOLOGY, AND HISTORY Even a brief and succinct survey of the uses to which Thomas has been put in the centuries since 1274 suffices to suggest an irreducible diversity within the family of “Thomism.” The concerns and contexts that shaped the readings of Thomas undertaken immediately after his death or in the early modern period or in the middle of the nineteenth century were quite different from each other. Indeed, they were quite different from Thomas’s own context and concerns; even the first generation of Thomists had a context—the controversies emerging in the wake of the condemnations of 1277—and a concern—defending Thomas’s thought—that were different from those of Thomas himself. It is simply a matter of intellectual honesty to recognize this. Yet the exercise of reading Thomas in historical context, the exercise in historical theology I have undertaken in this book, is not without its attendant difficulties. First is the question of definition: what exactly do we mean by “historical theology”? The term itself implies that we should think of this primarily as a species of theology and not of history. That is, historical theology is something different from the history of theology. While the history of theology can claim to be purely descriptive (bracketing, of course, the question of whether anything is ever purely descriptive), historical theology 53 For a study by a Protestant theologian that places Thomas in dialogue with Karl Barth, see Rogers (1999).

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cannot avoid questions of normativity. That is, historical theology not only tries to describe correctly what a thinker like Thomas Aquinas says, but it also must grapple with the question of whether Thomas himself is correct in what he says. To use the terms that Richard Rorty employs to describe how philosophers relate to past thinkers, we might say that historical theology, as distinct from the history of theology, involves not only “historical reconstruction,” which attempts to give an account of a past thinker in terms to which the thinker himself or herself would accede, but also “rational reconstruction,” which redescribes a thinker in our terms, updating and even correcting his or her thought in light of subsequent developments. Historical reconstruction seeks a deep engagement with a thinker that avoids all anachronism, while rational reconstruction is frankly anachronistic, inquiring, for example, into how one might appropriate the thought of Augustine or Aquinas in light of Newtownian physics or Darwinian evolution. When these two forms of reconstruction are placed in dialectical relation, they enable the practice of what Rorty calls Geistgeschichte, which asks what we might call “meta-questions” concerning the formation of a canon: Who are the significant thinkers? What are the significant issues? How do we narrate intellectual development? Within the dialectic of historical and rational reconstruction—the play of historicism and anachronism—the Geisthistoriker is simultaneously aware of his or her distance from the past as well as engaged in a process of narrating continuity with that past. This Geistgeschicte, however, must in turn be enriched, Rorty notes, by a fourth genre, “intellectual history,” which places the history of ideas within a larger narrative context of material culture and social movements. This ensures that Geistgeschicte does not remain simply a narrative of disembodied ideas, but of a living, embodied, communal tradition. It also ensures that in the task of historical reconstruction we do not take the shortcut of simply translating past concepts and terms into what seems to be their modern equivalents. It forces us to confront fully the strangeness of the past, as well as our own historical situatedness.54 Historical theology, as a genre, must involve all four of these subgenres, lest it fail to be fully historical or fully theological. It must involve a deep engagement with thinkers of the past in all their material particularity and intellectual strangeness, while also asking normative questions regarding both the cogency of such thinkers’ positions as well as the opportunities and oppositions one faces in appropriating those positions in one’s own

54

See Rorty (1984).

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context. So, for example, in the case of Thomas one must seek to grasp how his arguments regarding God as first mover, or Eucharistic presence, or eschatology are related not only to Aristotelian physics and cosmology but also to the experience of a culture that thinks of planets as immutable bodies and most animal species as eternally fixed. Moreover, we must also attend to the particularity of Thomas within his own times, the particularity of a Dominican theologian who pursues theology for Dominican ends. At the same time, the historical theologian must ask whether and how the strangeness of Thomas’s context can be overcome. How do we read him not simply as a strange figure of the past, a thinker pursuing exclusively the ends of his particular religious community, but as a living voice within a broad and ongoing tradition, a voice that we can understand and from which we can learn? Second, at least since the modern Thomist revival associated with Aeterni Patris, there has been a strand of Thomism that has been highly suspicious of the relativizing tendencies of historical methodologies. Many Thomists, while willing to see Thomas’s beliefs about the planets or animal species as mere adventitious accidents of his thought, relics of an outmoded worldview, have felt a need to draw a line at Thomas’s more “metaphysical” commitments to such terms and concepts as form, matter, act, potency, substance, accident, etc. To claim that these too were historically determined notions would be to open the door to the sort of relativism endorsed by the modernists. Others, beginning in the 1930s and 40s, were more willing, based on their historical reconstruction of Thomas’s thought and milieu, to see even his commitment to Aristotelian metaphysics as something that was part of his historical context and subject to, in Rorty’s terms, rational reconstruction in light of our own, quite different, worldview. This approach was part of what was described pejoratively by its opponents as la nouvelle the´ologie—a description that was itself indicative of the fear that any appeal to historical change would turn out simply to be a way of abandoning the perennial truths of Thomism and facilitating modernist innovation. Theologians associated with la nouvelle the´ologie such as Marie-Dominique Chenu and Henri Bouillard, keenly aware of the variety of systems of thought present within the Christian tradition, sought the continuity of theology not in conceptual formulations but in terms of faith in a “revealed-given” (Chenu) or an “affirmation” of a fundamental theological truth (Bouillard), which could

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be and had been expressed in a terms of a number of different philosophical systems down through history.55 For example, in his little 1937 book Une e´cole de the´ologie: Le Saulchoir, which describes the theoretical underpinnings of the program of study that he and others had designed at the Dominican studium in Paris, Chenu argues strongly for a historical approach to Thomas, against what he sees as an overly-rationalistic “baroque scholasticism” that eliminates, “the sense of mystery, the taste for research, and even the capacity for wonder that keeps the mind open to progress.”56 For Chenu, what Thomas offers his modern-day confreres and the Church as a whole is not a timeless system, but “a body of master-intuitions, which are only embodied in conceptual frameworks on the condition that they there retain their living light and are submitted to an ongoing confrontation with an always-richer reality.”57 This always-richer reality is what he calls “the revealed-given” (le donne´ re´ve´le´)—a reality that is given to human beings in the economy of salvation and therefore accessible not through metaphysics but through exegesis and historical inquiry informed by faith. By conceiving of theology as faith in statu scientiae58 and by focusing on the historical and cultural contingencies shaping the character of that scientia, Chenu sought not only to distinguish philosophy clearly from theology, but also to rejoin theology to spirituality. Chenu sees theological systems as expressions of the master-intuitions underlying traditions of spirituality. For Chenu, “a theology worthy of the name is a spirituality that has found rational instruments adequate to its religious experience.”59 What we modern people share with a thirteenth-century scholastic like Thomas is the “revealed-given”; where we differ is in the historical context in which we receive that revelation, a difference of context that gives rise to diverse religious experiences, diverse spiritualities, and thus diverse theologies. The role of historical theology is to discover within the time-conditioned spiritual experience of the great theologians of the past the masterintuition by which the truth of the revealed-given is grasped, an intuition in which we can share, albeit in our own time-conditioned way. It is only when we, by historical reconstruction, attend to Thomas’s positions as he himself articulated them, and place those views within “the whole human fabric” (tout le tissue humaine) in which Thomas labored, that we can know how to proceed, by the work of rational reconstruction, to think of how 55 56 58

See Chenu (1985), 130–4, and Bouillard (1941), 216. 57 Chenu (1985), 156. Chenu (1985), 123. 59 Chenu (1985), 130. Chenu (1985), 148–9.

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Thomas’s positions might be relevant in our context. As Chenu puts it, “It is not in being uprooted from its time that a work will appear timeless; we do not attain eternity by expelling time from our lives, but in taking it with all that it contains up toward the eternal.”60 Similarly, in the conclusion of his 1941 work Conversion et graˆce chez S. Thomas d’Aquin, Henri Bouillard reflects briefly on the significance of his project in that book: to interpret Thomas’s understanding of grace and conversion by making use of the tool of critical historical scholarship. Thomas’s position on the need for divine assistance to prepare oneself for grace develops over his career not only because of his discovery of Augustine’s late anti-Pelagian writings but also because of his deepening appreciation of Aristotelian philosophy. Specifically, Thomas moved to a more thoroughly Augustinian position on the need for grace by conceiving free choice and divine grace along the lines of Aristotle’s account of matter and form: just as matter cannot receive a form without the proper disposition, and cannot dispose itself to receive that form, so too the soul cannot receive grace without the proper disposition, and likewise is incapable of disposing itself.61 Bouillard claims that the young Thomas and his predecessors had fallen inadvertently into that which might be described as semi-Pelagianism, in part because of the limitations of their knowledge of Augustine. Moreover, when Thomas sought a way out of semi-Pelagianism and toward Augustine, it was with the aid of Aristotelian philosophy and categories like “matter,” “form,” and so forth—that is, with the aid of what seemed to him the best philosophical tools available to him at the time. A deeper grasp of Aristotle, impossible prior to the thirteenth century, makes possible a new formulation of Augustinian theology. This shows us, Bouillard says, that “theology is therefore tied to a time, tied to a history, at the same time exposed to their risks and capable of progress.”62 Bouillard was not afraid to draw the clear implication of this historical approach: the greatness of Thomas is not that he found in Aristotle the perfect conduit of perennial philosophical truth, but that he found the right tool for his particular moment, the tool that enabled him to affirm the primacy of grace in justification. It is this affirmation that is fundamental and constant in the history of theology, not the particular conceptual categories in which it is made. Historical reconstruction of Thomas’s theology of grace makes us aware that “in the rich heritage that [medieval thought] has bequeathed to us lies

60

Chenu (1985), 169.

61

Bouillard (1941), 212–13.

62

Bouillard (1941), 223.

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obsolete explications, old schemata, dead concepts”63 and therefore the theologian’s task necessarily involves rational reconstruction as well, as a way to affirm Thomas’s theology of grace from within the worldview of modernity. It is hardly surprising that a neo-Thomism that was born in confrontation with modernity would look suspiciously upon such proposals, which not only employed modern historical methods but also were quite explicit in their goal of using those methods as a prelude to reconstructing Thomist thought in such a way as to reconcile it with modern modes of thought. Yet not all criticisms were rooted simply in a reflexive fear of modernity. Chenu and Bouillard both tend to speak of the religious intuition or affirmation, inasmuch as it is common to Christians across time, as somehow floating free from particular language and concepts. As they present it, the theological task is not simply a matter of translating past propositions into a modern language, but rather of stripping from the affirmation the historical accretions of a past conceptual scheme and incarnating that affirmation in an entirely different conceptual scheme. In an essay entitled, “La Nouvelle Theologie ou va-t-elle” (“Where is the New Theology going?”—the short answer to which question is “straight into modernism”), Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, amid various dyspeptic remarks, makes the quite cogent point that it is hard to identify continuity of intuition or affirmation without some sort of conceptual continuity.64 How do we know that we are sharing in the same master-intuition or affirmation as Thomas if his conceptual scheme and ours are incommensurable? Garrigou’s answer is that there must be a single true conceptual scheme, albeit one that may be expressed in a variety of languages. This would mean that the differences between Thomas and us uncovered by historical reconstruction are, in important matters, purely linguistic, and call for simple translation, not rational reconstruction. Yet are our only two options either, on the one hand, a preconceptual intuitive affirmation that can be clothed in a variety of incommensurable conceptual schemes, or, on the other, a single, ahistorical conceptual scheme? It is simply undeniable that there are changes, sometimes very rapid and radical changes, in the way that human beings think and speak about the world. To use Bouillard’s example, when Thomas speaks and thinks about grace in terms of a form inhering in matter, he is speaking and thinking in a manner quite different than Augustine, and in a manner

63

Bouillard (1941), 224.

64

Garrigou-Lagrange (1946), 128–9.

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that is unfitting, if not impossible, for us who do not employ such terms in the comprehensive way that Thomas did. Yet the very fact that we are capable of understanding what Thomas wrote indicates that he is not talking in a way that is entirely opaque to us. Our very capacity to register our differences from Thomas presumes a fairly broad backdrop of shared beliefs, ideas, concepts, etc. Perhaps we do not need to posit some ahistorical thing, whether a preconceptual experience or a perennial conceptual system, in order to account for our ability to understand Thomas and to profit from what he has to say.65 Perhaps all we need are the activities of historical and rational reconstruction, carried out against a thick description of the material and intellectual culture within which Thomas labored, with attention paid to how Thomas fits into the overall story we tell of the Christian tradition as a whole. Finally, to what degree can we find something like historical theology in Thomas himself? To put it another way, should historically-minded Thomist simply think about Thomas, or can they think in some sense with Thomas? Though Thomas lived long before anyone spoke of “historical theology,” his understanding of human nature is not entirely ahistorical: the key metaphor of human beings as viatores, as well as his understanding of the rational process by which embodied knowers come to knowledge, imply that temporality, and therefore history, is part of the very structure of human existence in this life. With regard to the history of salvation, Thomas divides history into three eras—before the law, under the law, and under grace—and recognizes that the possibilities of human belief are somewhat different according to these different eras. In his own practice as a theologian he was more attentive than many of his contemporaries to the wider historical context of past theological utterances, seeking out, for example, the Acts of the Christological councils, so as to better understand their teachings.66 At the same time, we cannot entirely recast Thomas in a modern, historicist mode. In his commentary on Aristotle’s De caelo, he comments at the end of his gloss on Aristotle’s survey of past opinions concerning the duration of the world that the question of how these past opinions were understood by those who propounded them “is not of much concern to

65

Inasmuch as I understand it correctly, this is the point Donald Davidson is making in his essay, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” in Davidson (2006), 196–208. 66 On the questions, both of Thomas’s relationship to issues of historicity and of historical aspects of his own practice as a theologian, see Torrell (2008), 131–75. On the former question, see also Maurer (1979).

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us, since the pursuit of philosophy is directed not to knowing what people have thought, but what the truth of things is.”67 The task of historical reconstruction seems more pressing to us than it did to Thomas, perhaps because we feel more keenly than did he the reality of historical distance and the need for a disciplined encounter with that distance in order to arrive at the truth of things. In other words, maybe our awareness of historical contingency is itself a historical contingency, and in this matter Thomas might serve us best not as a model of historical inquiry, but rather as one who reminds us that in our historical inquiry it is still the truth of things that we are seeking. We know that the same color will appear differently to us, depending upon the background against which it is set. Part of what I have attempted in this book is to see how Thomas appears when set against the background of the methods and aims of the thirteenth-century Order of Preachers. There are of course many other backgrounds against which his thought might be set: the medieval university, the struggle between pope and emperor, the encounter with Islam, and so forth. Depending on the background, different aspects of Thomas’s thought stand out more vividly. By trying to think through Thomas’s intellectual achievement in terms of the Dominican task of the care of souls carried out through the handing on to others of the fruits of contemplation I hope that I have, without saying anything radically new, given a somewhat different picture of Thomas than that which readers might be used to: a Thomas whose project is more “evangelical” than philosophical—or perhaps philosophical in order to be evangelical—a Thomas for whom Jesus Christ is the one thing necessary, a Thomas who for all his affirmation of the world’s goodness is still a restless wayfarer who yearns for God’s kingdom. This is certainly not everything that could be said of Thomas, but I hope that within its limits it is something that is true to Thomas and useful to others. Marie Dominique Chenu wrote, “This beautiful form that is the intellectual style of Saint Thomas is not a pure form; it was born, it lived, it attained its perfection in matter, and therefore in a time, in a climate, in a context, in a body.”68 Likewise our own forms of thinking are inextricably joined to the matter of our own day and context. And yet we, from within our own limits, can still learn from Thomas, not because of a shared intuition or a common unchanging conceptual system, but because we share with him the disciple’s task of following Christ and traditions of

67

In De caelo lib. 1 lec. 22 n. 8 (no. 228).

68

Chenu (1985), 173.

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reflection on how to carry out this task. If nothing else, the reading I have tried to offer of Thomas, which takes seriously his Dominican context and his evangelical purpose, seeks to highlight the fact that Thomas Aquinas is more than simply a body of thought, a systematic concatenation of perennial truths. Thomas is a fellow viator with us through history, one who sought, through his preaching and teaching, to put his great intelligence and learning at the service of the gospel. That we can learn from him still today how to be better followers of Christ through handing on to others the fruits of contemplation is an indication of Thomas intellectual greatness, but it is even more a sign of the glory of God’s grace manifested through his life.

Bibliography WORKS OF THOMAS AQUINAS In the left-hand column is the shortened version of the title that I have used in the footnotes and on the right is the most common full Latin title as well as the bibliographical information on an English translation, where one is available. For the Latin text I have for the most part relied on the online Corpus Thomisticum (http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/), which is based on the work of S. J. Busa Roberto. Unlike the official Leonine edition, it is more or less complete and is readily available to anyone with an internet connection. In general, the method of citation in the notes follows the usage of the Corpus Thomisticum, though for the biblical commentaries I have added the paragraph numbers found in the Marietti editions. In some cases, particularly the sermons on the Creed and the Ten Commandments, I have consulted other Latin editions. The English translations I have listed are of varying quality and one is always well served by double-checking the Latin. Many translations in the text are my own, and I have freely altered existing translations where necessary for accuracy or accessibility, without noting this in each instance. Compendium theologiae

Contra Gentiles

Contra impugnantes

Compendium theologiae ad fratrem Raynaldum. ET: Reagan, R. (trans.) (2009), Compendium of Theology (New York: Oxford University Press). Liber de veritate catholicae Fidei contra errores infidelium seu Summa contra Gentiles. ET: Pegis, A. et al. (trans.) (1955–57), On the Truth of the Catholic Faith (Summa Contra Gentiles), 5 vols. (New York: Doubleday). Liber contra impugnantes Dei cultum et religionem. ET: Proctor, J. (trans.) (2007), “Against those who attack the religious profession” in St. Thomas and the Mendicant Controversies: Three Translations, M. Johnson, ed. (Leesburg, VA: Alethes Press).

318 Contra retrahentes

De aeternitate mundi

De articulis Fidei

De decem praeceptis

De ente et essentia

De perfectione De potentia

De principiis naturae

De rationibus fidei

De spiritualibus creaturis

Bibliography Contra doctrinam retrahentium a religione. ET: “Against those who would deter men from entering religion” in Proctor (2007). De aeternitate mundi. ET: Vollert, C. (trans.) (1964), “On the Eternity of the World” in St. Thomas, Siger de Brabant, and St. Bonaventure, On the Eternity of the World, 19–25. Mediaeval Philosophical Texts in Translation, 16. (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press). De articulis Fidei et ecclesiae sacramentis ad archiepiscopum Panormitanum. ET: part 2 only in Collins, J. (trans.) (1992), God’s Greatest Gifts: Commentaries on the Commandments and the Sacraments (Manchester, NH: Sophia Institute), 83–100. Collationes in decem praeceptis. No complete print ET; digital ET by Kennedy, J. and Collins J. at http://dhspriory.org/thomas/TenCommandments.htm. De ente et essentia. ET: McDermott, T. (trans.) (1993), “Essence and Existence” in Aquinas: Selected Philosophical Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 90–113. De perfectione spiritualis vitae. ET: “The Perfection of the Spiritual Life” in Proctor (2007). Quaestiones disputatae de potentia. ET: Shapcote, L. (trans.) (1952) On the Power of God. (Westminster, MD: Newman). De principiis naturae ad fratrem Sylvestrum. ET: “Matter, Form, Agent, and Goal” in McDermott (1993), 67–80. De rationibus Fidei ad cantorem Antiochenum. ET: Fehlner, P. (trans.) (2002), On Reasons for Our Faith against the Muslims, Greeks and Armenians (New Bedford, MA: Franciscans of the Immaculate). Quaestio disputata de spiritualibus creaturis. ET: Fitzpatrick, M. C., and Wellmuth, J. (trans.) (1949), On Spiritual Creatures. Mediaeval

Bibliography

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Philosophical Texts in Translation, 5 (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press). De unione Verbi Quaestio disputata de unione Verbi incarnati. No print ET; digital ET of aa. 1–4 by West, J. at http://www4.desales.edu/~philtheo/loughlin/ATP/index.html. De veritate Quaestiones disputatae de veritate. ET: Mulligan, R. et al. (trans.) (1952–4), Truth. 3 vols. (Chicago: Regnery). De virtutibus Quaestiones disputatae de virtutibus. ET: Atkins, E. M. (trans.) (2005), Thomas Aquinas: Disputed Questions on the Virtues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Expositio Peryermeneias Expositio libri Peryermeneias. ET: Oesterle, J. (trans.) (2004), Commentary on Aristotle’s On Interpretation (Notre Dame, IN: Dumb Ox Books). Expositio Posteriorum Expositio libri Posteriorum Analyticorum. ET: Berquist, R. (trans.) (2007), Commentary on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press). In De caelo In libros Aristotelis De caelo et mundo expositio. ET: Larcher, F., and Conway, P. (trans.) (1964), Exposition of Aristotle’s Treatise On the Heavens. 2 vols. (Columbus, OH: College of St. Mary of the Springs). In De divinis nominibus In librum B. Dionysii De divinis nominibus exposition. No ET. In orationem dominicam Expositio in orationem dominicam. ET: Shapcote, L. (trans.) (1937), “Our Father” in The Three Greatest Prayers: Commentaries on the Lord’s Prayer, the Hail Mary, and the Apostle’s Creed (London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne), 101–60. In Physic. Commentaria in octo libros Physicorum. ET: Blackwell, R. J. et al. (trans.) (1999), Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics (Notre Dame, IN: Dumb Ox Books). In Symbolum Apostolorum Expositio in Symbolum Apostolorum. ET: Ayo, N. (trans.) (1988), The Sermon-Conferences of

320

Lectura romana Quodlibet

Rigans montes

Sentencia De anima

Sententia Ethic.

Sententia Metaphysicae

Sermons

Summa Theologiae

Bibliography St. Thomas Aquinas on the Apostles’ Creed (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press). Lectura romana in primum Sententiarum Petri Lombardi. No ET. Quaestiones de quodlibet. ET of quodlibets 1 and 2: Edwards, S. (trans.) (1983), Quodlibetal Questions 1 and 2. Mediaeval Sources in Translation, 27 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies). Principium Rigans montes. ET: Tugwell, S. (trans.) (1988), “Inaugural Lecture (1256)” in Thomas and Albert: Selected Writings (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press). Sentencia libri De anima. ET: Foster, K. and Humphries, S. (trans.) (1994), Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima (Notre Dame, IN: Dumb Ox Books). Sententia libri Ethicorum ET: Litzinger, C. I. (trans.) (1993), Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: Dumb Ox Books). Sententia libri Metaphysicae. ET: Rowan, J. P. (trans.) (1995), Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Notre Dame, IN: Dumb Ox Books). There is no critical Latin edition of Thomas’s academic sermons, though one is in preparation by the Leonine Commission. An English translation of that text has already appeared: Hoogland, M.-R. (trans.) (2010), Thomas Aquinas: The Academic Sermons. The Fathers of the Church, Mediaeval Continuation, vol. 11 (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press). The numbering of the sermons in the notes follow that that translation. Many, but not all, of the Latin texts are available at corpusthomisticum.org. Summa Theologiae. ET: Fathers of the English Dominican Province (trans.) (1912–36), The

Bibliography

Super I Cor.

Super II Cor. Super I Thes.

Super I Tim.

Super Ave Maria

Super Col.

Super De causis

Super De Trinitate

321

Summa theologica. 2d, rev. edn. 22 vols. (London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne); also, Gilby, T. et al. (trans.) (1964–73), Summa theologiae. 60 vols. (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode). Super primam Epistolam ad Corinthios lectura. ET: Larcher, F. et al. (trans.) (2012) Commentary on the Letters of Saint Paul to the Corinthians (Lander, WY: Aquinas Institute). Super secundam Epistolam ad Corinthios lectura. ET: Larcher et al. (2012). Super primam Epistolam ad Thessalonicenses lectura. ET in Larcher, F. and M. Duffy (trans.) (1969), Commentary on St. Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians and the Letter to the Philippians (Albany: Magi Books). Super primam Epistolam ad Timotheum lectura. ET in Baer, C. (trans.) (2006), Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistles to Timothy, Titus, and Philemon (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press). Expositio Salutationis angelicae. ET: “The Hail Mary or the ‘Angelic Salutation’,” in Shapcote (1937), 163–72. Super Epistolam ad Colossenses lectura. ET: Larcher, F. (trans.) (2006), Commentary by Saint Thomas Aquinas on the Epistle to the Colossians, D. Keating, ed. (Naple, FL: Sapientia Press). Super librum De causis expositio. ET: Guagliardo, V., Hess, C., and Taylor, R. (trans.) (1996) Commentary on the Book of Causes. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press). Super Boetium De Trinitate. ET: Maurer, A. (trans.) (1987), Faith, Reason and Theology: Questions I—IV of his Commentary on the De Trinitate of Boethius. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies); Ibid. (1986), The Division and Methods of the Sciences: Questions V and VI of his Commentary on the De Trinitate of Boethius.

322

Super Eph.

Super Gal.

Super Heb.

Super Io.

Super Iob

Super Mt.

Super Philip. Super Psalmos

Super Rom.

Super Sent.

Bibliography 4th rev. edn. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies). Super Epistolam ad Ephesios lectura. ET: Lamb, M. (trans.) (1966), Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians. (Albany: Magi Books). Super Epistolam ad Galatas lectura. ET: Larcher, F. (trans.) (1966), Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians (Albany: Magi Books). Super Epistolam ad Hebraeos lectura. ET: Baer, C. (trans.) (2006) Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press). Super Evangelium S. Ioannis lectura. ET: Weisheipl, J. A., and Larcher, F. (trans.) (2010), Commentary on the Gospel of John. 3 vols., intro. and notes by D. Keating and M. Levering. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press). Expositio super Iob ad litteram. ET: Yaffe, M. D., and Damico, A. (trans.) (1989), The Literal Exposition on Job: A Scriptural Commentary Concerning Providence. (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press). Super Evangelium S. Matthaei lectura. ET: Kimball, P. (trans.) (2012), Commentary on the Gospel of St. Matthew (Dolorosa Press). Super Epistolam ad Philipenses lectura. ET in Larcher and Duffy (1969). In psalmos Davidis expositio. No print ET; partial digital ET by McDonald, H., Loughlin, S. et al. at http://www4.desales.edu/~philtheo/ loughlin/ATP/index.html. Super Epistolam ad Romanos lectura. ET: Larcher, F. (trans.) (2012), Commentary on St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans (Lander, WY: Aquinas Institute). Scriptum super libros Sententiarum magistri Petri Lombardi episcopi Parisiensis. No complete ET; parts translated in various anthologies.

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ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL SOURCES In the footnotes I have cited ancient and medieval works by the standard book and chapter divisions. Below I have listed English translations where these are available. Abelard (2011), Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, trans. S. Cartwright (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press). Al-Ghazali (2000), The Incoherence of the Philosophers, trans. M. Marmura (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press). Anselm (1998), Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works, trans. and ed. B. Davies and G. R. Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Aristotle (1984), The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Augustine (1938), Concerning the Teacher and On the Immortality of the Soul, trans. G. Leckie (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts Inc.). Augustine (1950), Admonition and Grace, trans. J. C. Murray, in The Fathers of the Church vol. 2 (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press). Augustine (1984), City of God, trans. H. Bettenson (London: Penguin Books). Augustine (1987), On the Predestination of the Saints, trans. P. Holmes et al., in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, first series, vol. V (Edinburgh: T&T Clark). Augustine (1991), Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Augustine (1991), De Trinitate, trans. E. Hill (Brooklyn, NY: New City Press). Boethius (1918), Contra Eutychen et Nestorium, trans. H. F. Styewart and E. K. Rand, in The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy (New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons). Bonaventure (1934), Commentaria in IV libros sententiarum Magistri Petri Lombardi in Opera Theologica Selecta vols. 1–4 (Florence: Quaracchi). Bonaventure (1964), Breviloquium in Opera Theologica Selecta vol. 5 (Florence: Quaracchi). Catherine of Siena (1980), The Dialogue, trans. S. Noffke (New York: Paulist Press). Foster, K. (trans.) (1959), The Life of St. Thomas Aquinas: Biographical Documents (Baltimore: Helicon Press). Fry, T. (ed.) (1980), The Rule of St. Benedict 1980 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press). Gregory the Great (1990), Forty Gospel Homilies, trans. D. Hurst (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications).

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Hardy, E. (ed.) (1954), Christology of the Later Fathers (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press). Hugh of St Victor (1951), On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith (De sacramentis), trans, R. J. Deferrari (Cambridge, MA: The Medieval Academy of America). Hugh of St Victor (1961), The Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor: A medieval Guide to the Arts, trans. Jerome Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press). Ibn Gabirol (Avicebron) (1987), The Fountain of Life: Fons Vitae, trans. A. Jacob (Stanwood, WA: Sabian Publishing Society). Ibn Sina (Avicenna) (2005), The Metaphysics of The Healing, trans. M. Marmura (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press). John of Damascus (1958), The Orthodox Faith in St. John of Damascus: Writings, F. Chase (New York: Fathers of the Church, Inc.). Julian of Norwich (2006), A Revelation of Love in The Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. N. Watson and J. Jenkins (University Prark, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press). Lanfranc (2009), On the Body and Blood of the Lord, trans. M. Villancourt (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press). Lehner, F. C. (ed.) (1964), St. Dominic: Biographical Documents (Washington, DC: The Thomist Press). McElrath, D. (1980), Franciscan Christology: Selected Texts, Translations, and Introductory Essays (Saint Bonaventure, NY: The Franciscan Institute). Moses Maimonides (1974), The Guide of the Perplexed, 2 vols., trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press). Paschasius Radbertus (1581), Liber de Corpore et Sanguine Domini (Louvain). Peter Lombard (2007–2010), The Sentences, 4 vols., G. Silano, trans. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies). Savage, A. and Watson, N. (ed. and trans.) (1991), Anchoritic Spirituality: Ancrene Wisse and Associated Works, trans. Anne Savage and Nicholas Watson (New York: Paulist Press). Tocco, Guillaume (1996), Ystoria sancti Thome de Aquino, ed. C. Le BrunGouanic (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies). Tugwell, S. (1982), Early Dominicans: Selected Writings (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press).

SECONDARY SOURCES Adams, M. M. (2009), Some Late Medieval Theories of the Eucharist (Oxford University Press, Oxford). Aertsen, J. A. (1992), “Truth as Transcendental in Thomas Aquinas,” Topoi 11, 159–71.

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Index Abelard, Peter 3, 5–7, 12–13, 146, 154, 218 accident 70–1, 87–8, 90, 117, 125, 133, 191, 192–3, 199, 247, 296, 310 act and potency 50, 70, 85–8, 90, 95–6, 97, 100, 115, 117, 121–2, 204, 235, 238, 247–8, 284, 304 Albert the Great 25–6, 28, 49, 174, 184, 202–3, 207, 266, 296 Albigensians (see “Cathars”) Alexander of Hales 12, 21, 184 Ambrose of Milan 168 Ancrene Wisse 216 angel(s) 14, 25, 58, 69, 89, 98, 109, 118, 130, 141, 145, 151, 152, 203, 240, 247, 287, 289, 291 Anselm of Canterbury 136, 143, 161, 201, 212–13, 215, 218, 245–6 Aristotle 4, 5, 10–12, 25, 32, 33, 34, 42–3, 44, 49–54, 57, 58, 63, 67, 68–73, 74, 76–7, 80, 84–7, 89, 91, 93, 95, 96, 97, 99–107, 108, 111, 122, 123–4, 127, 141, 144, 153–4, 158–9, 162, 164–5, 168, 174–5, 188, 227, 231–2, 237, 240–1, 254, 263, 293, 296, 297, 307, 312, 314 Arius, Arian 156–8, 160, 195 articles of faith 53–4, 60–1, 145, 149–51, 174, 262 arts faculty, University of Paris 11, 25, 33, 34, 108, 175, 292–3 atheism 91 Augustine of Hippo 7, 8, 17, 49, 51, 60, 62, 66, 72, 98, 124, 128–9, 130, 131–2, 145, 159, 167, 180–1, 209, 213, 217– 18, 225, 232, 250, 269, 280, 283, 285, 301, 309, 312, 314–15 Aule´n, Gustaf 206 Averroes 23, 63 Avicebron (Ibn Gabirol) 124 Avicenna (Ibn Sina) 50, 73, 89, 90, 118, 136–9, 141, 144 Ba´n˜ez, Domingo 299, 300 beatific vision 128, 129, 134, 140–1, 145, 229, 235–6, 259, 281–2, 283–5 Christ and 202–4

beatitude / happiness 59, 128, 145, 183, 204, 223, 230–1, 232, 233, 236, 241, 253, 262, 263–4 beauty 166–7, 171–3, 175, 256 Berengar of Tours 269 Bernard of Clairvaux 146, 168, 280 Blondel, Maurice 303 Boethius (Ancius Manlius Sevrinus Boethius) 4, 27–8, 89, 111, 191, 301 Boethius of Dacia 33, 108, 293 Boland, Vivian 49, 175 Bonaventure 32, 53–4, 77, 184, 202–3, 205, 266, 302 Bouillard, Henri 248, 305–6, 310–11, 312–14 Boyle, Leonard ix–x, 29, 30–1, 259 Cano, Melchior 298, 300 canons regular 8, 16, 222, 263 Cajetan (Thomas de Vio) 298–9, 305 Capreolus, Johannes 295 Cathars / Albigensians 16–17, 107, 126, 200–1, 205–6, 224, 264–5 Catherine of Siena 181 causes four Aristotelian 85–7, 90–1, 95, 104–5 instrumental (see also “Jesus Christ, humanity as instrument”) 119–20, 147, 165, 173, 264, 268–71 ministerial 49 secondary 50, 69, 118, 119–20, 198, 249 Cessario, Romanus 183, 207, 216, 294, 295, 296 Chauvet, Marie-Louis 270 Chenu, Marie Dominique ix, 1, 4, 9, 24, 36, 162, 305–6, 307, 310–12, 313, 315 Chrysostom ix, 168 Church apostolic ideal 8 in biblical interpretation 65, 279 gratuitous gifts and 251 mystical body 210, 211–12, 214, 217 sacraments and 267, 271, 272 Colish, Marcia 296 Comester, Peter 3 Congar, Yves 299, 305–6

338

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contemplation ix, 75, 169, 173–4, 257, 286, 299–300 convenientia (fittingness) 67, 128, 160–5, 167, 171–3, 180, 182, 185–7, 198, 205, 212, 213, 238, 256, 267–8, 270 Copleston, Frederick 111 cosmology 99–100, 119, 286–7, 310 councils Chalcedon 153, 189, 314 Ephesus 189, 314 Lateran IV 17 Lyons 35 Nicaea 149 Trent 298 Vatican I 305 Vatican II 306–8 creation (see also “God, relation to the world”) 49–50, 70, 107–19, 122–3, 133, 137, 154–5, 181–2, 198–201, 205–6, 226, 247, 252, 286, 288 Cyril of Alexandria 188, 196 Damascene (see “John of Damascus”) Davidson, Donald 314 Davies, Brian 115 devil, demons 144–5, 183, 212, 218–19, 245 Diego of Osma 16 Dionysius the Areopagite 32, 46, 49, 66, 73, 136, 180–1, 195 disputation 10, 12–14 divinization / theosis 252–3, 284 Docetism 201, 203–5 Domingo de Guzma´n (St. Dominic) 15–18, 46, 175, 224, 260 Dominicans (see “Order of Preachers”) Durandus of St. Pourc¸ain 294, 295 Emery, Gilles 159 eschatology (see also “beatific vision”) 126–7, 281, 282–9 esse / existence (see also “God, existence of”) 50, 70–1, 87–91, 98–9, 109–12, 116–24, 156, 191–4, 235, 294, 304 essence (see also “God, essence of ” and “quidditas”) 63, 69, 89–91, 93, 98–9, 113–14, 131, 294, 304 eternity of the world 33, 72, 96–7, 108–11, 293 Eucharist (see also “faith, Eucharist and”) sacrifice 209–10, 278–9, 282 salvation history and 278

presence of Christ 271, 274, 277, 281 Eutyches 157, 189–91, 192 faith (see also “articles of faith”) act of 143–8, 165, 167 aesthetics of 167, 173, 175 definition of 144, 162 Eucharist and 275–7, 279, 281–2 fittingness and 161–2, 171 merit of 143–4, 147, 152, 250 object of 60, 148–50, 161, 167, 174 reason and 43–4, 50, 62, 74, 77, 79–80, 83, 92, 102–3, 108–109, 140–1, 150, 151–60, 296–7, 299–300, 311 Fitzpatrick, P. J. 301–2 five ways 92, 94–101, 102, 107, 117, 122–3, 140, 163, 198 Francis of Assissi 77 Franciscans 15, 17, 18, 19, 21, 24, 124, 165, 168–9, 201, 207, 223, 232, 243, 293–4, 302 Frederick II 10, 23–4 friendship 215, 216–17, 225, 237, 257 Fulk of Toulouse 17, 19 Garrigou-Lagrange, Reginald 129–30, 132, 141, 205, 304–5, 313 Geach, Peter 96, 112, 128, 135 Ghazali, Abu Hamid al- 120–2 Gillon, Louis 226 Gilson, E´tienne 43–4, 74, 305 God (see also “Holy Spirit,” “five ways,” “Trinity”) essence of 93, 98–9, 115, 129–31, 141, 150, 154–5, 231 existence of (see also “five ways”) 47, 56–7, 89, 91–3, 106, 115, 139, 144, 192, 285, 304–5 human beings’ knowledge of 47, 56, 60, 69, 78, 83, 92–4, 96, 131, 137, 139–42, 143–4, 148–50, 157, 174, 200, 234, 235, 262, 281, 284–5 human language and 35, 94, 115–16, 134–9, 155–6 knowledge of 59, 80, 102–6, 113, 148–9, 151 omnipotence 109, 133, 213 perfection and simplicity 79, 98–9, 103–4, 110, 115, 117–18, 121, 122, 134–41, 148–9, 155–6, 162–3, 181, 249 as pure act 89, 96, 108, 115, 121, 163, 249

Index relation to the world (“mixed relations”) 114–19, 181–2, 197–8 Goldberg, Rube 148 Goris, Harm 159 grace freedom and 147, 200, 249, 254, 285, 298–9 moral virtue and 246, 250–2 as habitus and auxilium 247–9, 250, 254 merit and 210–11 nature and (see also “natural desire for God”) 1–2, 9, 37, 61, 118, 141, 150, 174, 187, 203, 229–30, 247–8, 251–2, 255, 265–8, 283, 285, 289, 296 sacraments and 265–72, 278 Gratian 5–7 Gregorian Reform 8 Gregory the Great 66–7, 168, 277 Gregory Nazianzus 203 Grillmeier, Alois 179 Guthrie, W. K. C. 101, 102, 104, 164 habitus (see “virtue as habitus” and “grace as habitus and auxilium”) Hadot, Pierre 75–6, 259, 262 Haldane, John 166 Hall, Pamela 245 Harnack, Adolph von 201, 206–7, 222 Herdt, Jennifer 296 heresy, heretics 16–17, 48, 61, 97, 151, 157–8, 189, 264–5 hierarchy 46, 117–19 history God’s actions in (see also “God, relation to the world”) 78, 150, 163–4 incarnation and 186–7 theology and 306, 308–14 Thomas’s sense of 314–15 Holy Spirit (see also “Trinity”) 7, 51, 78, 160, 224, 226, 229, 242, 245, 248, 252–3, 259 Hugh of St. Victor 1, 2, 6–7, 111, 146, 202, 265 Humbert of Romans 19–20, 84, 146, 170, 209, 258–9, 264 Ignatius Loyola 298 Ingles, John 251, 301 Innocent III 10, 17, 222 intellectus 146, 233–4

339

Investiture Controversy 2 Islam, Islamic thought (see also “Avicenna”) 5, 11–12, 25, 28, 78, 89, 120–2 Jerome 19, 168 Jesus Christ act of existence 191–4 creation and 198–201 communicatio idiomatum 194–6 divine and human knowledge of 152–4, 158, 201–4 Docetism 201, 204 humanity as instrument 196–8, 208, 219–22, 225–6, 267–8 hypostatic union 188–94, 197, 202, 208, 215, 226 incarnation of 50, 53, 149, 152, 157, 180–3, 226–7, 267–8 as mediator 207–210 as mother 280 motive and timing of the incarnation 183–7 mysteries of the life of 204–6 passion and death 172, 205, 209–20, 278–9, 280–1 resurrection 125, 220–2 as teacher 51, 209, 222–6 theandric activity 196–7 as viator (wayfarer) 204, 226 John of Damascus 111, 196, 198, 301 John of St Thomas (John Poinsot) 299–300 Johnson, Mark 21 Jordan, Mark 262 Judaism, Jewish thought (see also “Maimonides”) 11–12, 25, 61, 68, 89, 91, 124, 295 Julian of Norwich 280 Kenny, Anthony 95, 99, 126 Kent, Bonnie 237, 241 Kerr, Fergus 180 Kierkegaard, Sren 37, 97 Kilwardby, Robert 18, 124, 223, 293 Kleutgen, Joseph 301 knowledge, human (see also “God, human beings’ knowledge of ” and “Jesus Christ, divine and human knowledge of ”) 68–9, 71, 85, 93, 112–14, 115, 122–3, 127–8, 151–2, 153–4, 159, 164–5, 232–6, 265

340

Index

Lambert, Malcolm 198 Landulf of Aquino 22–3 law (see also “sin, law of ”) defined 241 divine 242, 244, 258 eternal 241–3, 245 human 242, 243–4, 245 natural 186, 241–5, 298 New 65, 224, 229, 230, 242, 245–6, 252 Old 186, 218, 241, 242, 244–245, 246 virtue and 242, 246, 258–9 Lear, Jonathan 68, 71, 102, 104, 122 Leo XIII ix, 300–1, 304 lectio 3–4, 10–12 Liber de causis 34, 50, 73 liberal arts 2, 11, 84, Liberatore, Matteo 301 Lindbeck, George 98 Loisy, Alfred 303, 304 love / caritas (see also “virtue, theological”) 144–5, 210, 213–17, 219, 225, 226–7, 234–5, 246, 252–7, 263–4, 285 Lubac, Henri de 130, 305–6 Luther, Martin 296–7 Maimonides, Moses 50, 89, 90, 108, 120, 136–9 magistri, masters 3, 9–14, 20–1, 33, 162, 168–9, 174–5, 292–3 Mare, William de la 293–4 McCabe, Herbert 36, 68, 71, 125, 128, 158, 236 McCool, Gerald 301 McDermott, Timothy 119, 270 McInerny, Ralph 42–3, 44–5, 74–5, 76 mendicants 14–15, 18–19, 21, 23–4, 26–7, 33, 69, 169, 289 metaphor 46, 63–4, 65–6, 116, 194, 214, 286 Modernist Crisis / Modernism 302–4, 305–6, 310, 313 Molina, Luis de 298–9 Mulchahey, Miche`le x, 30–1, 32, 34, 81, 84, 261 Naples, University of 10, 23–4, 34–5 natural desire for God 128–34 Neoplatonism (see also “Plato, Platonism”) 25, 42, 49–51, 73, 76 Neoscholasticism (see also “scholasticism”) 301–3, 306–7

Nestorius, Nestorian 157, 189–91, 192, 195 O’Callaghan, John 159 O’Connor, Flannery xi O’Malley, John 296 Order of Preachers (Dominicans) 9, 14–22, 24–6, 27, 28–32, 37, 46, 47–8, 55, 59, 67–8, 77, 81, 84–5, 126, 165, 167–8, 170–1, 174–5, 207, 209–10, 223–4, 258–64, 288–9, 292–5, 298–9, 310, 315 Origen of Alexandria 253, 285 Panofsky, Erwin 171–2 Paris, University of ix, 2–3, 9–11, 20–1, 26–8, 33–4, 42, 46, 49, 174–5 Paul of Tarsus (St. Paul) 18, 29, 37, 42, 61–2, 63, 126, 204, 221–2, 227, 244, 245, 247, 250, 260, 275, 284 Paris, University of ix–x, 2–3, 9–11, 20–2, 25–8, 33–4, 42, 46, 64, 174–5, 292–3 Peckham, John 124 penance, sacrament of 13, 59, 212, 215, 222, 264, 267 Peraldus, William 32, 253, 284–5 Pesch, Otto Hermann 94, 212, 220, 235–6, 264, 297 Peter Lombard 6–7, 12, 26, 30–2, 53–4, 118, 135, 190–1, 202, 205, 212, 248, 266, 269, 283, 294, 295, 298 Peter the Chanter 10, 12, 14 Philip the Chancelor 11 philosophy 11, 41–5, 55–7, 61–2, 70–81, 83–4, 159, 259–60, 293, 300–2, 303–4, 314–15 Pieper, Josef 69–70, 72, 74–6, 77, 107–8, 113, 288 Pius V 298 Pius X 303–4 Pius XII 306 Plato, platonism (see also “neoplatonism”) 5, 57, 68–9, 72, 76, 103, 104, 117–18, 124, 125–6, 127, 181, 259 Porter, Jean 243–4 poverty 8, 15, 16, 19, 208–9, 223–4 preaching 8, 10, 14–22, 27, 31, 35, 37, 47–8, 54–5, 77, 84, 91, 147, 165–75, 209–10, 223–4, 226, 259, 262–4, 297 Preller, Victor 94

Index quaestio 4, 12, 298 quidditas (whatness) 69, 71, 89, 94, 98, 112–14, 122, 134, 230, 235 Rahner, Karl 306–7 Reginald of Piperno 27, 32, 35, 37, 141, 169, 282 Roland of Cremona 20, 71–2 Rorty, Richard 309, 310 Rule of St. Augustine 8, 17 Rule of St. Benedict 18 Sabellius, Sabellian 156–8, 160 sacra doctrina / holy teaching / theology 27–8, 30, 44, 46–7, 49, 52–68, 73–81, 83–5, 95, 135, 143, 145, 148–52, 164–5, 173–4, 193, 259, 261–2, 291–2, 299–300, 301, 308–16 sacraments (see also “Eucharist” and “penance, sacrament of”) 126, 183, 209, 264–5 character 271–2 Christology and 267–8 need for 265–6 number of 266–7 as signs and causes of grace 268–72 salvation (see also “Jesus Christ”) economy of 160–1, 167, 185–6, 230, 307, 311 incarnation as 196–7 paschal mystery 222 promotio boni and remotio mali 164, 182–3, 185, 207 redeption 218–19 sacrifice of Christ 209–10, 217–18 satisfaction for sin 201, 206, 212–17, 219 sapientia, wisdom 46–9, 51, 54, 59–60, 62, 77, 78–9, 83, 131, 207, 209, 223, 241, 259, 286, 297 Scheeben, Mathias 302 Schillebeeckx, Edward 268, 307 scholasticism (see also “neoscholasticism”) 3, 76–7, 171–2, 296, 304, 305, 311 Schoot, Henk 200 scientia 51–5, 58–61, 63, 77, 80–1, 92, 145–6, 160, 161–5, 262, 311 scripture 3, 6, 10, 12, 14, 29, 30, 33, 34–5, 47, 53–4, 56, 61, 62–7, 72, 149–51, 155–6, 159–60, 167–8, 185, 186, 210, 217, 224, 283, 286–8 Scotus, Blessed John Duns 184–5, 294, 295, 298, 302

341

sensation / senses 1, 62, 69, 102, 112, 124, 126, 128, 140, 202–3, 232–3, 265–6, 275, 284 Sherwin, Michael 250–1 Siger of Brabant 33, 108, 293 Silano, G. 7 sin (see also “salvation”) effects of 213–14, 216, 218–19 impossibility for the blessed 285 law of 245–6 original 186, 265, 270, 289 Soto, Domingo 298 soul (see also “unicity of substantial form”) 11, 98, 123–2, 126–8, 133, 155, 190–1, 193, 229–30, 260–1, 264–5, 272, 283–4, 286, 312 powers of 231–6 Southern, R. W. 1, 2, 6, 212 studia, Dominican ix–x, 21, 25, 29–31, 34, 84, 259 Stump, Eleonore 193, 201 Sua´rez, Francisco 205, 298, 304–5 substance 88–91, 110, 117, 125–7, 192–3, 198, 280 teacher, role of 46–51, 54–5, 69, 80–81, 172, 188 Taparelli, Luigi 301 Tempier, Stephen 33, 292–3, 294 Tertullian 212 Theodora Carraciola (mother of Thomas) 23, 24 Thomas Aquinas, life of canonization 294 condemnation 292–4 death 36, 273 “dumb ox” nickname 25–6 first Parisian regency 27–8, 50 holiness of 36–7 house arrest 24–5 inception as a master 27, 46, 51 Naples studium 30, 34 Santa Sabina studium 29–32, 34 second Parisian regency 33–4, 174–5 silence 35, 37, 141, 273 student at Monte Cassino 23–4 Thomas Aquinas, works of Ador te devote 273–82 Catena Aurea 29 Compendium theologiae 133, 189, 203, 282 Contra impugnantes 27 Contra retrahentes 25, 33

342

Index

Thomas Aquinas, works of (cont.) De aeternitate mundi 77, 109–11, 114 De articulis fidei 149 De decem praeceptis 35, 129, 169, 170, 242, 252–8 De ente et essentia 74, 89–90 De perfectione spiritualis vitae 33 De potentia 32, 282 De principiis naturae 70–1, 85, 89 De rationibus fidei 208–9 De spiritualibus creaturis 32 De unione Verbi 33, 192 De veritate 27, 51, 221, 268 De virtutibus 33 In De divinis nominibus 44 In orationem dominicam 35, 169–70 In Symbolum Apostolorum 35, 169 Lectura romana 30 Pauline Commentaries 29, 34, 63, 126 Quaestiones de quodlibet 27, 34 Rigans montes 46–9 Sentencia De anima 32, 34 Sententia Metaphysicae 103, 105–6 Sermons 27, 168–9 Summa contra Gentiles 28, 77–80, 93, 94, 119–20, 133, 179, 189, 197, 221, 267, 282 Summa theologiae ix–x 22, 29, 30–32, 33–34, 45, 55, 67–68, 78, 92, 148, 159, 173, 179, 187, 188, 189, 191, 204–5, 207, 221, 235, 241, 244, 248, 259, 262, 292, 297, 298, 303 Super Ave Maria 35, 169, 170 Super De causis 34 Super De Trinitate 27–8, 50 Super Ioannis 29, 33 Super Iob 27, 66–7 Super libros Sententiarum 26–7, 29, 58, 135, 191, 203, 205, 216, 220, 248, 268, 269, 271, 295 Super Matthaei 27 Super Psalmos 34

Thomism 291–308, 310, 313 Torrell, Jean-Pierre 22, 24, 26, 29, 32, 33, 171, 175, 192, 207, 212, 220–1, 273, 294, 302 transcendentals 166 transubstantiation 274, 296 Trinity 27–8, 150, 154–60, 168, 189, 195, 219, 252–3, 267, 304 Twenty-four Thomist Theses 304–5 Tugwell, Simon 15, 24, 33, 258–9 Tyrrell, George 304 unicity of substantial form 124–7, 293, 295, 304 van Steenberghen, Fernand 41–2, 44, 78 viatores (wayfarers), human beings as 145–6, 241, 252, 254, 282, 288–9, 314, 316 virtue acquired 231, 232, 236–40, 242, 250–1, 258, 260 as habitus 144, 232, 237–8, 253 infused moral 240, 242, 250–1, 253–4, 256, 258, 260, 297 theological (faith, hope, love) 144, 145, 183, 240, 253–4, 277, 282, 297 Vitoria, Francisco de 298 Waldensians 9, 165 Walsh, Liam G. 229 White, Victor 31, 55, 98, 140 Wielockx, Robert 273, 275, 279, 280 Wilhelm, Joseph 302 William of Auvergne 11 William of Auxerre 11, 52–3, 54, 58 William of St. Amour 27 William of Tocco 23, 24, 26, 29, 172, 179 Williams, C. J. F. 193, 200 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 265–6