Thomism

Challenging the Averroists.

St. Thomas of Aquino in Italy, more commonly called Thomas Aquinas (1224 or 1225–1274), represents for many the pinnacle and climax of medieval philosophy, and his study has been recommended by popes from Leo XIII to the present occupant of the chair of Peter. A man large in soul as well as in body, Thomas was generally magnanimous in his writings toward his doctrinal enemies: a man must love his enemies, because they help him come closer to the truth. But he reserved his harshest words for the averroiste, clerics who upheld the teachings of Aristotle even when they contradicted the Scriptures. Thomas believed that truth is one and cannot contradict itself; therefore the dual truth system of the Latin Averroists was unthinkable. Moreover, he challenged the Averroists to debate him openly and not simply to talk with young boys (a reference to the age of the arts students and the fact that philosophy was taught in the arts faculty) on street corners.

Acknowledging the Natural World.

Thomas, who as a student at Naples got an early grounding in the New Philosophy, discerned the value in Aristotle's thinking precisely because of its naturalism, the view that there existed a natural explanation for all phenomena. For Aristotle, this world is the real world; reality is not elsewhere in some transcendent realm as in Plato's thought. Christianity, moreover, is in its essence an "incarnational" religion, the foundational doctrine being that God became man. The Christian theologian therefore needs a philosophy that gives an accounting of the natural world, including the autonomy of the human person. A world in which creatures exercise their own proper causality, even while maintaining an existential dependence upon Being itself for their being, renders more glory to God in Thomas's view. This is a radically different view than that taken by the Ash'arites, a group of Muslim theologians, who believed that it is God alone who is acting in all the causes appearing in the world. It is God causing the effect of heat in the presence of the fire or, in a modern rendering, it is God causing letters to appear on the computer screen, not the person entering the data.

TRANSCENDENCE AND IMMANENCE

introduction: Every believing Christian, as well as every believing Jew and Muslim, is obliged to hold that God is both transcendent (that is, totally other than the world) and immanent (that is, somehow present to it). To give a coherent account of this tension, however, requires a sophisticated metaphysics, indeed a metaphysics of existence. St. Thomas Aquinas, here in the eighth question of his masterpiece, the Summa theologiae, explains how God is present to the world without being a part of it, thus avoiding the extremes of deism on the one hand and pantheism on the other.

God exists in everything; not indeed as part of their substance or as an accident, but as an agent is present to that in which its action is taking place. For unless it act through intermediaries every agent must be connected with that upon which it acts, and be in causal contact with it: compare Aristotle's proof that for one thing to move another the two must be in contact. Now since it is God's nature to exist, he it must be who properly causes existence in creatures, just as it is fire itself sets other things on fire. And God is causing this effect in things not just when they begin to exist, but all the time they are maintained in existence, just as the sun is lighting up the atmosphere all the time the atmosphere remains lit. During the whole period of a thing's existence, therefore, God must be present to it, and present in a way in keeping with the way in which the thing possesses its existence. Now existence is more intimately and profoundly interior to things than anything else, for everything as we said is potential when compared to existence. So God must exist and exist intimately in everything.

source: Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae (Cambridge, England, and New York: Blackfriars, 1964), 1.8.1c. Reprinted in Medieval Philosophy, Vol. II of Philosophic Classics. 4th ed. Ed. Forrest E. Baird (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2003): 352.

Being as Act.

To claim, therefore, that Thomas worked out a synthesis between Christianity and Aristotelianism is true as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. It can also be claimed with some justification that Thomas goes beyond Aristotle, not simply because he had the benefit of Divine Revelation, but because he was a better philosopher. His core insight—that being is fundamentally an act, or, in other words, is that which makes any thing real—opens a dimension beyond Aristotle's and, indeed, any predecessor's metaphysics, just as Einstein's fourth dimension goes beyond the speculations of any previous physicist. This being-as-act enabled Thomas to account not only for the absolute transcendence of God—that God is totally other than creation—but also for his immanence—that God is present to creation in some intimate way. Aquinas thus avoids pantheism on the one hand—the view that God is all things or is a part of all things—and deism on the other—the eighteenth-century notion that God is responsible for creating the universe, but that is the end of his involvement, like the clockmaker who winds up the clock and then walks away.

An Authentic Existentialism.

The "concept" of existence is a slippery one—the tendency of the human mind is to think in terms of "things"—and it is little wonder that Thomas's theories were not fully grasped until the twentieth century, spurred by the insights of the school known as Existentialism. Most philosophers in his own time identified Thomas's naturalism with the heterodox Aristotelianism of the Latin Averroists, and when the bishop of Paris drew up his list of condemned teachings three years after Thomas's death in 1274, some two dozen of Thomas's teachings were included. Thus, paradoxically, the thinker who in time became virtually identified with Catholic orthodoxy was shortly after his death under a cloud of suspicion for heresy.

A
Rebellious Dominican

Not long after the death of St. Thomas Aquinas, members of his order rallied around his teachings and defended them against attacks from both the seculars and the Franciscans. He was, in short, the official Doctor of the Order of Preachers. There is always someone, however, who refuses to conform, and in this case it was the Dominican friar, Durandus of Saint-Pourçain. He seems to have been a personage of some note, since he was entrusted by Pope John XXII with an important diplomatic mission. For his success he was rewarded with the bishopric of Limoux (1317), a truly singular title since no one before him or after held the title. He soon abandoned that position to become bishop of Le Puy (1318), then of Meaux (1326), a post he held until his death in 1334.

His wrong in the eyes of his fellow Dominicans, however, was that he refused to become a Thomist. He believed that in everything that was not a matter of faith, one should rely upon reason rather than on the authority of any master, no matter how famous or revered. He ended up by writing three commentaries on Peter Lombard's Sentences, which is not unlike writing three doctoral dissertations on the same subject. For the first he received a warning from the order, eventually having 91 articles censured by a theological commission. His second version resulted in no fewer than 235 articles being condemned as deviating from St Thomas. His third attempt showed little amendment on his part, but by that time he was bishop (successively of three sees) and seemed no longer to care.

The reaction at his passing gives some sense of how strongly most Dominicans felt about remaining loyal to Thomas and his teachings. The epitaph of the wayward Dominican featured this piece of doggerel, inspired by the fact that the first syllable of Durandus' name is "dur," a Latin root meaning "hard":

Durus Durandus jacet hic sub marmore duro, An sit salvandus ego nescio, nec quoque curo. "Here lies the hard Durand beneath the hard tombstone, Whether he is saved or not, I don't know, nor do I care."

sources

Brian Davies, The Thought of Thomas Aquinas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

—, "Thomas Aquinas," in A Companion to Philosophy in the Middle Ages. Eds. Jorge J. E. Gracia and Timothy B. Noone (London: Blackwell, 2003): 643–659.

Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. Trans. L. K. Shook (New York: Random House, 1956).

see also Visual Arts: Intellectual Influences on Art in the Later Middle Ages