TOWARD UNDERSTANDING SAINT THOMAS
M.-D. Chenu, O.P.
translated by A.-M. Landry, O.P. and D. Hughes, O.P.
Chicago, 1963
| Chapter I. The work in its milieu | Chapter II. Works of Saint Thomas and their literary forms | ||||
| Chapter III. The language and vocabulary of Saint Thomas | Chapter IV. The procedures of documentation
| ||||
CHAPTER 1
The work in its milieu
I. Biographical Note
Saint Thomas was born near Aquino, in southern Italy, in the fortified castle of Roccasecca, either at the end of 1224 or at the beginning of 1225. This was the time when Honorius III (1216-1227) was goodtemperedly maintaining, in both Church and State, the prestige that his predecessor, Innocent III, had won for the Papacy. It was also the time when Frederick II (1215-1250), at the helm of the Holy Roman Empire then extending from Germany to Sicily, was temporarily at peace with the Church through the pact of San Germano (1230). In France, Louis IX, still a child, was just about to start his long reign, at the very moment when the tide of the drama-packed crusade against Raymond VII of Toulouse and the Albigensians was turning in favor of the Capetian royalty. The Moors, despite their defeat at the hands of the Crusaders at Las Navas in 1212, were solidly entrenched in the Spanish Kingdom of Granada and still laying siege to the Christian world. In fact, the founding of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem only served to make more acutely felt the haunting shadows of Islam. Farther away, the Tartars kept on pressing, thus making clear the power and human resources of the Asiatic continent. The Christian order, which had been molded in the pattern of the geography and culture of the Roman Empire, had thought of itself as embracing all mankind and as the achievement of the “City of God” on earth. Now, Christians were becoming conscious of the facts that faith had touched only a part of the human race and that there existed a whole world containing tremendous secular resources.
Landulf of Aquino, feudal lord, was entangled in local rivalries as well as in the political struggles of the Empire. Close by him was the powerful abbey of Monte Cassino, lying right on the boundaries of the Church States and the Kingdom of Sicily. Here, in 1230, be brought his youngest son, Thomas, and offered him as an oblate. This move, at once religious and self-interested in character, recalls to mind the social surroundings and cultural climate in which, according to feudal traditions, the lad was to grow up. Meanwhile, the struggle between Pope and Emperor had resumed, more violent than ever, and when Frederick II invaded Italy, Thomas had to leave the Benedictine abbey (1239). Whereupon he was sent to the schools of Naples to begin, in the faculty of arts, a university life that would stop short only at his death. After five years spent there, and seven more of philosophy and theology at Paris and Cologne in the university studia [houses of study] of the Friar Preachers, he began a teaching career that was to unfold without break or distraction.
It is plain that Thomas’s joining the Preachers—in spite of the violent opposition of his family (1244)—was, together with the religious orientation of his soul, the factor that fashioned all his activity, considered not only from an outward point of view but, especially, from that of doctrine and motivation. This activity bad a homogeneousness whose total constancy we shall faithfully observe as a clearcut trait of his life.
In the fall of 1245, Thomas came to Paris to the convent of Saint James, then the most prominent scholastic center of the Order, situated right at the heart of the University. He was enrolled as a student of Albert the Great who was then a professor in the faculty of theology. During the summer of 1248, be left Paris to go with Master Albert who was to take charge of the new studium generale [general house of studies] founded at Cologne by the Order. He remained there until 1252, when he came back to Paris to teach and thus prepare himself for his Masterate in Sacred Theology.
The University, at this time, was the scene of a bitter struggle, due precisely to the rivalries between the seculars and religious. A strike, decided by the professors and that was to be rather long-lived, added to the effervescence. After having commented first on the Bible (1252-1254) [Torrell: He did not comment on Bible then, but started right off with the Sentences], then on the Sentences of Peter Lombard (1254-1256), Thomas received, as these incidents were taking place at the beginning of 1256, his licentia docendi [license to teach] at the instance of Pope Alexander IV who wrote about Thomas in terms of no uncertain praise. Now a master, he went on teaching until June, 1259, in one of the two Dominican schools incorporated with the University. Returning to Italy, he taught at the papal curia, first in Anagni (1259-1261) [Torrell: no evidence of Anagni; may have gone to Naples], then in Orvieto (1261-1265) [not at papal curia, but in the Dominican convent there]. From there, he went to the convent of Santa Sabina in Rome (1265-1267 [Torrell: 1268; Thomas never stayed in Viterbo]), whence he was recalled by Clement IV to work at the papal curia in Viterbo (1267-November, 1268).
In the meantime, battling had started all over again at the University of Paris. The battleground was not one of corporate rights alone but one of doctrine as well, because the spread of Aristotelianism had provoked an intellectual and moral crisis that was becoming daily more acute. Saint Thomas, whose own position had been called into debate, but whose accrediting had grown to considerable proportions, was hurriedly called back to Paris. The years that followed his return, from 1268 until Easter of 1272, were to be of an almost unbelievable fruitfulness. It was undoubtedly in answer to a request made by King Charles of Anjou, who was anxious to revive the University of Naples, that Thomas returned to the latter city and became head of the faculty of theology (1272). Invited by Pope Gregory X to take part in the forthcoming Council of Lyons, he set out on his journey in January, 1274, but he died on March 7, at the,Cistercian abbey of Fossanova.
The biography of Saint Thomas, as will readily be seen, is one of extreme simplicity. In carrying out a career completely organized around the university mode of life, he made a few journeys which took him to Paris, the papal curia, Paris again, and Naples. One would be mistaken, however, in judging his life to be merely the quiet existence of a professional person completely absorbed by his teaching and seemingly untouched by the social and political affairs of his day. The great events in his silent existence grew out of his presence at the heart of the University. The drama that went on in his mind and in his religious life, and on which the fate of Christian thought hung in the balance, had its causes and produced its effects right at the University—a university, it is true, in which all the ingredients of a civilization in full bloom were massed together, to which, moreover, Christian faith had, deliberately and authoritatively, committed its doctrine and spirit. It is, then, right at the University that Saint Thomas found, not only the technical conditions for drawing up his work, not only the polemic occasions for turning it out, but also the enveloping and penetrating spiritual milieu needed for it. It is within the homogeneous contexts supplied by this milieu that it is possible today to discover the historical intelligibility of his work, just as they supplied the climate for its fruitfulness at the time that it was born. It is not unimportant that, in the days of Saint Louis and of Frederick II, Saint Thomas should arrive at Paris at a time:
- when, in a new society just entered upon a communal era, it was in the corporate university body that intellectual eagerness and curiosity were concentrated and were to introduce Aristotle and ancient reason to Christian thought;
- when the cathedral of Notre Dame of Paris was being completed and the Romance of the Rose written;
- when, after the battle of Bouvines wherein the Holy Roman Empire and its feudal hierarchy were jointly defeated (1214), Europe was entering on a new era in which it would cease to be a theocratic entity;
- when the Moslems were hemming in the Western world by their military successes and seducing it by their science and philosophy;
- when, finally, merchants and missionaries were pushing their way into the region of Cathay and discovering the world’s dimensions and the variety of its civilizations.
- Neither is it unimportant that Saint Thomas should join the Friar Preachers in the Christian world of Innocent III and that he should find in the midst of this new religious family, at the most opportune time, an Albert the Great to be his master.
II. The New Schools
The University, with its own structure and spirit, had just sprung up in the city schools, leaving the monastic schools, tied up as they were with feudal conservatism, to their intellectual routine. Indeed, centres of culture and teaching had been the subject of a spiritual and geographical shift of capital importance that was brought about through the economic and social evolution that was making over the face of the Western world. Feudal institutions were crumbling, weighed down by a structure that was no longer in keeping with the conditions and needs of human society. A widening of commercial enterprise, an increase in the circulation of money, the reopening of the Mediterranean to ship traffic, improved technical devices, a specialization of craftmen’s skills, a rapid increase in population—all had been factors toward the gradual development of urban centres. In them, a new class of matured people bad won for itself a whole series of freedoms-personal, civic, and agrarian-with all this taking place outside the old domanial economy that entailed the serfdom of the individual and the denial of the individual’s right to associate. The exercise of authority was now no longer tied up with possession of the soil, any more than were the economic standards of the day. The crop of new elites was formed independently of the landed aristocracy; it was now a world of give and take that saw artisans and traders taking their chances, for labor was now seen as a means of getting ahead and no longer as an inferior function. Along with the factors that had brought it into existence, the old order was doomed to decay. Under that regime, social security and stability for the individual had been assured through the binding of man to man by means of the principle of “homage” which created a personal dependency both summary and advantageous, and was hallowed by an oath of allegiance. The new regime discarded private contracts of allegiance in favor of collective charters, thus ensuring the precedence of the common good over private interests and guaranteeing the jura et libertates [rights and freedoms] of all. Having secured their freedom, the Communes were not a mere association of individuals; on the contrary, they represented collective entities that held sway over the life of the individual in all its manifestations. They were persons, in the juridic sense of the word, and truly the subjects of rights.
While the passage from the feudal state to the Commune was taking place during the course of the XIIth century, men had progressively been acquiring independence in their thinking, along with a sense of personal responsibility, an urge to pursue new ventures on their own, and also that nimbleness of mind enabling man to cope with the unforeseen problems arising in a newly opened world. The city schools, now filled with students affected by the spirit of the age, carried over in their intellectual standards and their organization of studies the same aspirations that the corporations and municipal governments were embodying in the social life and organization of the cities. Simply looking at things from the outside, the fact alone that schoolmen now enjoyed the privileges of free association and of an elective system is enough to show how far the university colleges had gotten away from the old monastic schools with their restriction to the enclosure of their domain, with their commitment to a class of people that knew no traveling, with their abbatial rule based on paternalism, monastic schools, in short, that were closely dependent upon that majestic feudal system on which monastic life had laid its earthly foundations.
Thomas Aquinas belonged by birth to a prominent feudal dynasty, and family traditions would have had him a monk in the most powerful abbey of his day—Monte Cassino—where be actually passed the first period of his youth. Yet, thanks to the freedom he had won when he was battling to follow his own religious calling, Thomas entered in a pathway that would lead him to the most restless and the most representative of the city schools, lying right at the heart of the new society, the University of Paris.
It cannot, of course, be said without qualification that studies in the XIIIth century monasteries
were in a state of decay. In fact, if many a masterpiece had come out of their literary
workshops, many were still to come forth that would leave the products of the schools in their
dust. Yet, the finest achievements, whether of a personal or local character, cannot conceal
the fact that, as the century rolled along, and as the new social and cultural movement gained
ground, the monastic schools were outclassed as institutions. A decidedly different type of
people were now coming to the schools of Paris, Bologna, Oxford, and Cologne. First of all,
they arrived in numbers that quickly overflowed the cathedral cloisters, taking over for
themselves a city quarter that was to be their own and where they ruled, even in the streets
that soon rang with their noisy clatter. These new students were the type that Abelard had to
cope with, and no longer those Anselm had known in his monastic schoolroom. Further, the
new schools automatically linked up in a “university” of studies, which, in turn, became one
of the corporate societies of the new city, patterned upon the guilds. The University was now
a collective entity with juridic status, able to carry on business in the name of the teaching
profession, and thus raised to hold the rank of “office” in the city. It had the right to arrange
its life as suited its purposes, even to the point of having its own police force, so long as it did
not encroach upon the rights of the larger collective body.
Since its prime interest lay in
cultural and intellectual values, and rightly conscious of its universal dignity, it even tended
to extend its influence beyond the jurisdiction of the city or to offer advice in matters politic.
Teachers and students alike enjoyed a “status”
that was enhanced not only by the jura et
libertates pertaining to it, but also by a moral, and soon, a political prestige, the latter working
either to the advantage or the disadvantage of higher learning.
From the rue du Fouarre to the abbey of Sainte-Genevieve, the schools lined up, nearly
covering the ridge along the rue Saint-Jacques where Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas
would soon have a school of their own, open to all comers, and formally accepted as part of
the Univeisity body in whose rights and scholastic programs and public demonstrations it
would share. Into these schools came pouring a population eager to learn, no longer regarding
knowledge as a propaedeutic to monastic life but as a road to culture and an indispensable
tool for carving out a career. The faculty of arts worked itself up to a position of autonomy
that was both intellectual and administrative. The doctors and lawyers introduced their cycles
of studies. Professors and students formed themselves into corporations in order to protect
their rights and to secure their privileges.
Rivalries and personal ambitions were soon to
install themselves in their midst. There were also unsuspected problems that the financial
requirements of schooling were to raise and which the establishment of the colleges
attempted to solve. As best as could be, copies of books were multiplied by methods
unknown in the old scriptoria; and the very make-up of the manuscripts is revealing of the
needs and habits of this intellectual democracy.
It was a far cry, now, from the monastic schools where the teaching personnel, inspired only
by the love of God, and without haste, or personal ambition, or care for the morrow, prepared
the young monk for the reading of the Bible and taking part in the divine service. Even
Citeaux that had recently done so much to restore monastic life to its inagnificent lustre,
broke off from this new world. It built its abbeys far from the cities, sent its monks back to
manual labor, and reduced its program of studies to the practice of spiritual reading,
condemning dialectic and all other forms of secular learning. And when the Order of Saint
Benedict of a later date will attempt to inject new life in its studies, it will have to seek
support from outside the cloister, and by a significant redress of things, it will actually found
a “college” close to the Parisian schools.
To the new Orders, the mendicant Minors and
Preachers, was to fall the lot and policy of being at hand, at the heart of the new civilization,
and of ensuring a holy reaction to its intellectual intoxication or its moral disorders. Faced
with this new civilization on the rise, it was important that the Church be rid of its outmoded
feudal framework. Francis of Assisi and Thomas Aquinas were the two poles around which
this new Christian world revolved.
III. The Universities
The university, in point of fact, the original creation of the new order, was also a product of Christianity, perhaps the most meaningful thing, in the way of foundations, that this new Christian order could show. So much is this true that it is somewhat difficult for us today to picture a university completely stamped with an ecclesiastical character in which all resources, ranging from such matters as the conduct of its physical existence and the enactment of its police laws to the level of the highest inspirations of all its personnel, from doctors of medicine to professors of grammar, were dependent on a regime of clerics.
The historian who has seen a university of this sort taking shape in the bosom and as a result
of the efforts of the Church is not surprised to see it find its material and moral environment
subsequently supplied by that same Church. At the same time he is prepared to leave
unquestioned the fact that the statutes regulating university teaching arose from the most
varying circumstances. The condemnation of Aristotle was an act of a doctrinal order. Yet, a
number of statutes of an administrative nature authorized and soon ordered Aristotle to be
read. Faced with facts such as these, the historian will come to expect an intermingling of the
two orders and to understand that therein the way was cleared for the Medievals to give full
play to their intellectual freedom and studiousness and for Saint Thomas to set forth his own
interpretation of Aristotelian doctrines. It will not astonish him to see the papal legate fixing
the hours of courses and laying down the rules for the conferring of degrees for the faculty of
arts at Paris and the faculty of medicine at Montpellier. Nor will he think it strange to behold
Archbishop Kilwardby dogmatizing at Oxford on matters of grammar. And it was through
pressure from Rome that Thomas Aquinas, after the painful incidents of 1252-1256, was
admitted among the masters of Paris.
There, in the midst of it all, the Papacy was right at
home. To say the least, one has a false view of history, who accuses it of “hand-forcing
tactics,” when, in many instances, it was the Papacy that created the new foundations, such as
at Toulouse, Siena, and Piacenza, and when, at any event, it was the Papacy that favored the
right of association and brought about the freeing of institutions from the local conservatism
of the old cathedral schools.
Intellectual corporation of the city, the university was at the same time an official body of the Church, with its own proper “office,” and with rights and liberties that it enjoyed pursuant to charters granted by authority of the collective Christianity it meant to serve. The Roman policy of exemption, which had already been in use for two centuries in favor of the religious Orders, was now happily applied to this university government. It teamed up completely and fruitfully with the increase in exchanges and with the constant coming and going of people, which gave an international flavor to the pursuit of knowledge just as they did to commercial enterprises. The ease with which the newly-founded religious Orders could move about as well as their centralized mode of government, fitted in perfectly with the evolution that society and the Church were undergoing. Thus also it came to be that the Preachers and the Minors spontaneously became the builders of the new teaching regime whose progress and inspirations were due to the initiative of the Church.
Under the leadership of the Englishman, Alexander of Hales, the German, Albert the Great,
and the Italians, Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas, Paris was to become the intellectual
capital of the Christian world. The work of Saint Thomas is inconceivable apart from this
universalism wherein it takes on its fully meaningful relief just as it originally received from
it its component materials.
It is no mere coincidence that Brother Thomas was sent to Paris
and that he entered upon his teaching career there; rather one is led to see him in Paris as a
result of some sort of determinism brought about at once by the laws of his Order, the
directive action of the Church, and the very evolution of society.
Quite obviously, it was the faculty of theology that formed the soul of the University and that
supplied the raison d’être of the Church’s jurisdiction. Here, again, was something new: that a
body of authorized professors, invested with a licentia docendi should be given in the Church
charge and authority of expounding the revealed truths of faith. To be sure, both in theology
and catechesis, there had always been masters acting as adjuncts to the episcopal order. But
here it was a question of professors, of a school of men who were professionals in their work,
whose energies were devoted,to developing a science, and whose juridical status depended on
the corporation and was not, properly speaking, a function of the hierarchy. Theirs was an
intermediary status that was to remain non-existent in the Eastern Church—just as the latter
remained unfamiliar with scholasticism, at least in the larger reaches of that form of
knowledge. In the field of sacred doctrine, the “doctor in theology,” or the magistri [masters]
as they were collectively called, made up a sort of new department in which the teaching of
the truths of faith expressly enlisted the services of natural reason or of its philosophy in order
to bring into being an organized science, a scholastic theology. Any bettering of teaching
methods was recorded within the growth of the educational institutions. The magistri were
officially regarded as qualified to discourse on matters of faith and doctrine. Once a question
had been disputed, theirs was the office of “determining” a solution that was then accepted as
carrying authority.
They were not auctoritates [authorities] in the same decisive sense that
the magisterium of the Church is an authority, since neither their position in the hierarchy nor
the subject matter of their proper work would admit of such a ranking, but nevertheless, they
did form a true theological “source,” for the School did exist in the Church, with its proper
place beneath that of the Fathers in the realm of the faith. Saint Thomas, Albert the Great,
Bonaventure, were “doctors of the Church.”
All the foregoing serves to establish beforehand the proper setting of the masters’ endeavors and even to forecast the literary form in which their work would be molded. Theirs would be a type of teaching having its own techniques, formularies, ceremonial, its own particular audience and sort of sequestration that even the finest kind of pedagogy is unable to eliminate entirely. For theology started the process of being detached from the pastoral office. There lay a tremendous risk in such an occurrence; yet, such a hazard was in the nature of things, and in line with the laws of the progression of the mind. Genius and sanctity, or more plainly, the faith of the theologian will prevail over the craft, but the craft will remain a perfectly normal tool, and the medieval university will perfect its use to the point of refinement. And in the closely-knit techniques of this craft the work of Saint Thomas is a masterpiece. One needs only recall to mind the Contra Gentiles in any of its chapters, or again the Itinerararium of Saint Bonaventure, to become convinced that the most refined of spiritual values could be fittingly incarnate in this kind of style.
For all these reasons, then, one can readily understand why the professors of the faculty of
theology should have established close relations with those of the faculty of arts, the two
forming a single universitas magistrorum [university of masters]. The men who taught
theology had passed through the arts course before entering upon their theological studies,
and the University regulations stipulated that they should receive this preliminary formation.
This co-dwelling was soon to raise problems about the exact limitations of their respective
fields in the very proportion that the old framework of the seven arts—always a pliant tool in
Bible reading—was giving way under the pressure exercised by a philosophy in the process of
growth and whose claims no longer allowed for its being fenced in by dialectic. As we shall
see, the pivotal point in this critical period of growth was furnished by the entrance of
Aristotle on the scene, but right away we may foresee the budding of the coming crisis in the
autonomy that the faculty of arts was gaining for itself. It is on institutional grounds, then,
that conflicts were to arise, and this served only to give a greater depth and permanence to
their bitterness. Between the masters of the two faculties, oppositions sprang up; and yet
alliances were also made, to which the very set-up of the University gave sharp meaning
despite misunderstandings and compromises. Saint Thomas proved himself a rugged foe of
the Averroist Siger of Brabant, leader of the minority group in an unruly and divided faculty
of arts. Yet he enjoyed an extraordinary prestige with the personnel of the arts department. In
fact, at his death, they wrote to the Preachers a most warm letter—even today we are deeply
touched on reading it—in which they begged to have his last writings as well as the honor of
preserving at Paris the mortal remains of the master, “so good a cleric, so kind a father, so
outstanding a doctor”.
If we keep harking back to Paris, it is not only because Saint Thomas won such high standing there, but also because its University was effectively the prototype of the other new schools. It was a truly adequate product of the new society and the spiritual site of the renaissance. This renaissance was, of course, a widespread phenomenon that aroused the same enthusiasm wherever it put in an appearance. Step by step, it made steady progress. The second third of the XIIIth century witnessed the laying, at a surprisingly fast rhythm, of new foundations, whether ecclesiastical, seignorial, or communal. These establishments were not merely the offspring of superficial emulation; they resulted rather from the unrestrainable drive of the new elite creating the organisms that would provide for their development and culture. The situation was all the more meaningful in view of the fact that during the XIIth century even the most definite measures decreed by those in highest authority had practically come to nought, in the “arts” as well as in theology. Where, moreover, some outstanding success had been achieved, it bad remained local and passing in character.
At the period of which we speak, and for some time previous, however, Bologna was a worthy rival of Paris. Its corporate set-up and manner of administration were somewhat different from those of the French University. Yet, in its own proper sphere and in its own way, it was in perfect harmony with the commonly prevailing effervescence. The law city, it brought to light the Pandectes and made extensive use of the Digest. Irnerius was its shining light, just as Abelard was the shining light of Paris; and the Decretals of Gratian played the same role in its schools as the Sentences of the Lombard at Paris. At the very time that Albert the Great was teaching how to read Aristotle at Paris, Frederick II was enlisting at Bologna the specialists of Roman law in the service of his new Empire. Rome, in fact, showed as much distrust against these imperial law-experts as she did against the rationalistic philosophy of the Parisian Averroists.
Padua, mothered by the University of Bologna from which it broke off in 1222 and warmly supported by the commune, was modeled on its alma mater. Among, all the foundations of northern Italy, it is of special interest to us, because it was the center in which Albert the Great, while receiving his early formation, discovered his Dominican vocation and unearthed the first elements that were to feed his extraordinary and precocious curiosity.
At just about the same time (1224), Naples was founded in princely style by Frederick II to be
a counter-action to Bologna, grown too independent to suit the imperial taste. For a long time,
it remained in a state of stagnancy. Yet, through its location in the Kingdom of the two
Sicilies on one of the lanes of traffic between the East and the West and midway between
Islam and Christendom, it was to furnish support to the political and scholarly aims of the
Emperor. In particular, it was the scene in which the translations of the Arabian authors were
undertaken, with Michael Scot, who was favorite court philosopher between the years 1228
and 1235, supplying the greatest share in the effort—as witness his translations of Averroes.
We know that Peter of Ireland was there too and that, around the years 1240-1244, he was
instructor to the young Thomas Aquinas.
It was, however, only under Angevine rule that the
foundation was to take on university stature, and Saint Thomas, at the time, was summoned
to organize the faculty of theology. This was in October, 1272, after Charles I had invited
both masters and students of Paris to come share, as in a copious meal, in the teaching of the
restored university, where, as Charles put it, nature and city made up a setting of the richest
kind.
Paris, however, still remained, in the words of the masters who had asked for the return of the
body of Saint Thomas, “the noblest of all university cities”.
During the second half of the
XIIIth century, some decentralization became necessary, but at the time that Saint Thomas
taught there, the effects of such a process had not as yet affected the supremacy of the French
university as a leader at either the spiritual or the institutional level, at least so far as
philosophy and theology were concerned. From as far back as the last third of the XIIth
century, Paris had acted in the role of counselor to princes and prelates alike. Thus, in 1169,
Henry II of England had offered to submit his quarrel with Thomas a Becket to the assembled
masters of Paris.
From this time on, in fact, to quote an expression used by the Pope, it was
the oven in which the intellectual bread of the Latin world was baked. Elsewhere, it was a
case of feeding milk to sucklings, but here it was strong nutriment for strong minds.
In its
accumulated resources, in its teaching personnel, in its recruitment from various nations,
in
its professional and teaching organization, in its scholarly traditions, in the quality of its
methods, in its curiosity of spirit, in its creative inspiration, the University of Paris was the
intellectual center of Christendom, the domain par excellence of high culture, “the city of
philosophers”,
the new Athens.
From the spiritual and institutional standpoints, it is
impossible to conceive Saint Thomas outside of Paris. Viterbo, Rome, Naples were merely so
many episodes in his intellectual life as in his teaching career. Paris was his natural home.
IV. The Renaissance
The genesis of the institutions of learning brings us to that intellectual movement which brought them to life and in which they found the deeper cause of their emergence just as did the type of man then in the process of new birth. For it is really a “renaissance” that we are witnessing here, with the discovery of Aristotle and the assimilation of Greek reason by Christian theology as one of the high points in the procedure.
It is important, even at the risk of falling into verbal paradox, that XIIIth century scholasticism, in which Saint Thomas proved himself to be the master, be placed in its true perspective. Scholasticism originated at the very heart of an authentic rebirth, the first effort of which had been furnished at the time of the Carolingian renaissance, the later stage of which is known under the name of the XVIth century Renaissance. Each stage had its own privileged area within which its eagerness bore fruitful results. In each one also, there were flaws and setbacks that were to provoke the reactions of its successor. The most profound of disagreements between the modern and medieval revivals, however, should not blind us to the fact that the movement of rebirth was one throughout. The breaches that did appear show how delicate a task it was to achieve balance for such a rebirth in a Christian organism; they do not prove the movement to have been congenitally incoherent. In point of fact, Saint Thomas is the theologian who, by his very work, was to define the laws and conditions of its equilibrium since, with his metaphysics of nature, be established the status of human reason in a Christian regime of thought. It cannot be said that this achievement was in the nature of a simple parenthetical pause in the history of the influence of the ancient world or in the evolution of the human mind.
During the first revival, the discovery of the ancient culture, though still rudimentary, had acted on the minds of men as a kind of lure and source of inspiration. The spell of Rome, of an idealized and chimerical Rome, gives the key to the secret grandeur of Charlemagne’ s “Holy Empire.” Underlying the most novel political problems was the mystical vision of resurrecting the Roman Empire with its universal political ideal. Clustered around this myth of a new Rome, are to be found the elements of the Carolingian renaissance: the classical culture of Alcuin, the organization of the teaching discipline, and the relish for beautiful script. In spite of their weaknesses, the aspirations of this revival did open the doors of history on the era of the Middle Ages, after the Moslems had decisively upset the old geographical and political equilibrium of the world. It was at this time that, in the field of sacred doctrine, the rules of grammar applied to Scripture, began sowing the seeds of an incipient rationalism that was soon to be dangerously duplicated, when dialectic, another of the arts of the trivium, was similarly applied to the same contents of Christian revelation.
On the other hand, if, during the Quattrocento, the enticement of Antiquity animated the whole field of culture, not excluding political science and philosophic speculation, it is plainly within the twofold domain of letters and plastic arts that the great Renaissance scored its victory and lasting grandeur. The very word humanism remains forever stamped by these specialties, while at the same time, it crystallizes a conception of nature with which the Christian cannot easily accommodate himself. The Catholic reform movement of the time set up a ferocious resistance to the ascendency of the pagan ideals. Savonarola battled to save Florence from the Medici. Cajetan struggled against the Paduan brand of Aristotelianism. And if the Dominican William Petit collaborated at Paris with Lefèvre d’Etaples, his contemporary John Reuchlin was condemned at Cologne by the Inquisition.
Located between these two crossroads of history, the XIIth and XIIIth centuries do not destroy the homogeneous unfolding of the whole renaissance movement, although they do bear witness to a shift in the balance of the whole. It was within the boundaries of this second revival that the Schoolmen really found the medium needed for their labors. Luther was not laboring under a delusion when he anathematized at once the School and Aristotle. The entrance of the Stagirite into the University of Paris in the XIIIth century and the revival of Roman law at Bologna in the XIIth are the two hinges around which the “renaissance” of the period revolved. The fact that Christianity made a success of it is no reason to misjudge it under a scholasticism such as the Humanists have masked it. The use of “ancient themes” in the romances of the period, the cult of Virgil the prophet, the frequent resort to the ancient “authors,” the popularity of Ovid, the whole mess of immoral works that were condemned with Aristotle in 1277—all these factors are proof that even the letters of the period fed on the Ancients. The success enjoyed by dialectic and the newly-found treasures of Greek and Arabic science, however, overwhelmed the rise of this medieval humanism. This would seem to justify the criticisms raised against it by the men of the Quattrocento.
Still, it would be well to determine at what points the criticisms can be applied, so as to leave
to the Middle Ages, in the history of Western civilization, its own interior movement and the
meaning of its forward progress. For, only on this condition shall we be able to understand its
philosophy of nature and its theology of grace.
Here, then, in effect, were the two sides of one and the same drama that Christianity had to face as it came in contact with the newly recovered legacy of the Ancients: on the one hand, the growth of Aristotelian rationalism, on the other, the restoration, in its law and in its spirit, by the jurists of Frederick II, of the pagan Roman Empire, under the emblems of the Holy Roman Empire. Both aspects of that legacy had the same grandeur, but both offered the same threats. The acts and doctrinal pronouncements of the popes show that they were acutely aware of both the grandeur and the menace. Within the parallel facets of this drama, the work of Saint Thomas and of his confreres found its historical and spiritual dimensions.
If, therefore, it is true that we are dealing here with a process of reconquering and of exploiting the capital of the ancient civilization, both the men involved and the works that they produced will have one feature in common, whether the scene of their activity be the palace of Charlemagne, the University of Paris, or the Florence of the Medici: their genius reveals itself within the art of imitation, for imitation actually is one of the poles of the axis around which every rebirth revolves. Eye and imagination, speculative thought, instrumentation and techniques, all benefit, in the effort needed to grasp and reproduce reality, from the wealth and models that the Ancients handed down. These old treasures and models, put to their best use by those men endowed with personal creative power, are treated with the deepest reverence, and their authority has the force of law. As canons of the word or as norms of thought, they express principles that have value beyond all measure of time. In this respect, Ariosto does not rank below Alcuin, and Ronsard aligned himself with Horace, just as Siger of Brabant did with the Philosopher.
Imitation, however, does carry within itself the seeds of a burdensome dullness. For instance,
the formalism that was to develop among the Schoolmen is, at its own level, of the same type
as the servility shown by the grammarians and the men of letters of both the XIIth and XVth
centuries. In either case, “the following of the formula clogs up the movements of life.
Indeed, at the end, the precepts of the Ancients that had originally been a proclamation of the
rights of truth, are now turned against truth herself.”
Should one wish to discover whether,
in the sphere of the pure and ever free creativeness of the mind or in that of the every day
teaching procedure, any measure of protection can be found against this type of decaying
process, his search will bring results more easily within the School than among the
Humanists. The exacting demands of the mind had here gradually brought into being a
technique called the “reverential exposition” for the handling of these ancient “authorities.”
This technique was to be shamelessly used, and the Quattrocento philologers were to find
cause for scandal in it. It is a fact, as we shall see, that Saint Thomas and his contemporaries
did make a constant use of it, but they employed it on the strict principle that, for the
philosopher, rational investigation, however risky, was to take precedence over the
acceptance of authorities and the cult of the Ancients. As Saint Thomas put it: “The study of
philosophy is not done in order to know what men have thought, but rather to know how truth
herself stands.”
The divergence between the medieval renaissance and that of the Humanists is on this point profound. It is necessary that we study how this difference came about and how it made for a different handling of texts, for we are here hitting upon the core of the paradox that saw a revival movement giving, birth to a scholastic way of thinking and teaching. It is actually in this context that Saint Thomas was to find both a key to his Aristotelianism and a measure for it. His case is indeed only one among other cases of men of the Middle Ages in their attitude with regard to Antiquity. However impressive it may seem, it only serves to disclose, at the level of thought, the spirit that was common to the whole medieval renaissance movement itself.
The fact is that a movement of returning to the Ancients can stem from two types of inquisitiveness, which, if not always separate, are quite different from one another. In the one case, the Ancients are cultivated for their own sake and with the express purpose of recapturing for ourselves by dint of patient research their former greatness, their views, their beauty. Treated this way, their writings become an object of admiration, with philology acting as its tool. The human sympathy that we find here in their favor does not exist apart from a certain aristocratic distinction, indeed from an archaeological opulence. Erasmus, independent of the role he played in reviving the Gospel, is the master example of this sort of restoration.
Then there is the other case in which the ancient culture is brought back to live in a climate different from the one in which it first thrived. Even if some measure of historical accuracy be sacrificed in the process, the old is made to live anew in what is truthfully a rebirth, with processes of spiritual assimilation going on in the new organism that enable it to absorb without loss every crumb of the old. As a result, a synthesis takes shape, and provided genius takes a hand in the matter, imitation, under the driving power of creative inventiveness, is freed from the drag of its own weight.
This kind of humanism is quite different from the historical humanism of the past
which is characteristic of the Renaissance. Rather, it is a humanism of the present;
or, if one prefers, of the intransient. When Erasmus turns to consider the philosophy
of the Medievals, he no longer discerns in it the philosophy of the Greeks, any more
than he recognizes as genuine Latin, the language in which it is expressed. He is
right. Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca are no longer there in the garb they wore
in the days of their earthly existence. Yet he is wrong, because it is really they who
are there, as people still living and who, by the fact of their living, change. Indeed, it
is even because they are not as yet dead that they are so hardly recognizable. What
Albert the Great or Saint Thomas asked of these Ancients was not so much to tell
them what they had formerly been in Greece or in Rome, but rather what they were
still capable of becoming, what they themselves would have become, if they had
lived in Christian territory, in the XIIIth century. But what am I saying? They do
exist then and there; they survive. The historian who meets them in those
surroundings is constantly torn between the admiration of the depth with which the
thinkers of the Middle Ages understand them, on the one hand; and, on the other, the
disquietude that an archaeologist might feel were the low relief he was studying
suddenly to turn into a living and changing thing. Take away Plato and Aristotle, and
what will be left of the medieval philosophy? But just as the Alexander portrayed in
the Chansons de geste is a Charlemagne who leads his barons on to battle, so, and in
a much deeper sense, Plato and Aristotle live on in Bonaventure and Aquinas,
because they have adopted the latters’ faith and principles.
Under conditions of this sort, it is just as summary an over-simplification to label Saint
Thomas an Aristotelian as it is to call the Cistercian mystic Aelred of Rievaulx a Ciceronian
because the latter was delighted to transfer the whole substance of the old Roman’s De
Amicitia to his own De Spirituali Amicitia.
New wine in old skins! This is a fact that the
historian must remember when he discovers the innumerable Aristotelian threads that run
through the warp and woof of the Summa Theologiae; a fact, too, that the Thomist
philosopher must not lose sight of when he reads the commentaries of Saint Thomas on
Aristotle’s De Anima or on his Metaphysics. For it is in the latter properly medieval genre that
we find the precise and subtle point at which two purposes met: first, that of reading Aristotle
aright; and yet second, that of reaching, beyond Aristotle, the goal of philosophical truth. This
is particularly true in the case of Saint Thomas.
A renaissance of this sort, however, is not merely a restoration of Antiquity. Even granted that the return to the Ancients is more than a secondary element in the process, it still is neither the adequate cause nor the most telling sign of such a cultural rebirth. There is need for a soul in the body of rich materials thus restored to the light of day. More than that, the restoration itself is only the first effect to flow from the wants of that soul, for it is within her bosom that the glad event of the old being born anew takes place. For a long time perhaps, the newly discovered sources were accessible, but over the same length of time, unable to bear fruit, due to the absence of the spirit that had not yet moved over the waters. Let that spirit move, and it is a new world that is enthusiastically uncovered from under the old forms, with man in the midst of it all and revealed to himself for his own regeneration. Florence in the XVth century is a case in point, admirable and simple, of this sort of spectacle. But something akin to it is sketched out in the aspirations of the XIIth century clerics, as well as in the dreaming of Charlemagne’s counselors. We have previously noted from the very survey of the economic conditions of the times the unprecedented fervor with which the new generations were stirred up, and the youthful spirit of independence that gave origin to the rise of the universities. We shall soon see to what lengths of mystical excess the evangelism of the times—the movement that gave a religious prop to the work of regeneration—was sometimes brought.
It is enough, at this point, to grant the fact that, on the vast and far-flung front of culture—from the practice of beautiful literary style to the contemplation of metaphysical truth, from the development of the plastic arts to the discovery of new methods of scientific experiment—this reawakening was not uniform in nature, neither in its recapture of the old treasures nor in the spiritual initiative that it aroused. In some instances, entire fields remained inert, their doors held shut by some simple turn of fate; while in others, the incoercible power of some creative genius burst, in a single stroke, past the slow pace set by imitation. And if we pass on from the world of forms and belles-lettres to the world of thought, we meet with the most confusing turns of chance, as witness, for example, the fact that while all the works of Aristotle were recovered by the Middle Ages, the texts of Plato remained buried in oblivion. Such strokes of fortune make for all the more instability in the lines of dcmareation of culture, a domain in which, all things considered, the spirit often shows disregard for apparently the most crying of needs. If it be true that in the XIIIth century Siger of Brabant had at his disposal every textual source he needed to restore, in its most undiluted form, the naturalism of Greek thought, it is equally true, by contrast, that in the IXth century Scotus Erigena had built up, with a faulty text of Dionysius as his starting point, a splendid Platonic world.
If, therefore, the two component parts of every renaissance are such as we have stated, our attention is now drawn to finding out just what Saint Thomas harvested from the inheritance of Antiquity, but also in what way his genius transformed the Aristotelian man [without detriment to the latter’s original structure], just as grace perfects nature without violence to its original structure. Rarely, in the history of thought, is there to be found a more beautiful case in which the inspirations of a creative mind contended with the most sincere practice of imitation.
V. The Entrance of Aristotle
By the time that Saint Thomas had arrived in Paris, at the middle of the XIIIth century, the
literature of Antiquity no longer lured the minds as it had done not so long before. Ovid, it is
true, continued to serve as a source for a few works on the art of love, and Priscian was still
law unto the grammarians. Yet, the fact that Statius was placed on equal footing with Virgil
and that Quintilian’s Institutio could show nothing better, in the way of progeny, than certain
miserable artes dictaminis [arts of composition]
is enough for one to presume that, after a
brief show of life during the XIIth century, the age of belles-lettres was cut short. Good taste
had fled the scene to be replaced by dry formalism. Peter of Blois bad long since railed
against the decay. Out of the bosom of Antiquity, philosophic reason had just been revealed,
and the promises that it gave were so dazzling that even the staunchest Christians were either
thrown off balance or deeply disturbed. It was the rise of Aristotelianism, a sensational event
in the rediscovery of Antiquity, that was to be the determining factor, both material and
spiritual, of the development of the work of Saint Thomas.
Aristotle had already been for some time a living figure in the Christian world, but his was a
particular image, that of the logician par excellence. The general esteem in which he was held
as a technician was not without the element of distrust that the spiritual-minded invariably
feel for those who use their wits in discussing words and concepts.
So long as only the
Categories and the Perihermeneias had been read—this was actively done with some
measure of continuance only from the time of the XIth century, and then with the help of the
writings of Boethius
—Christian appreciation of the manducator verborum [word eater]
remained within discreet bounds. Abelard with his intemperate lucidity, however, fostered
suspicions with the result that theologians set up an opposition. While their resistance makes
us see how tight a hold dialectics had taken on the minds of scholars, it also makes us feel the
balance and quality of mind of those masters who, like John of Salisbury, greeted the
recovery of the Analytics and Topics as the finding of an admirable art of thinking. Aristotle
began to be called the philosopher par excellence.
At this time, as a matter of fact, the Stagirite was already putting in his appearance as a
natural scientist and a philosopher of nature. By way of Sicily, but particularly by way of
Toledo, the Greco-Oriental world was being revealed to the West. Through the numerous
translations of ancient works, philosophic as well as Christian, an intense inquisitiveness was
being awakened.
Taking first rank in the interest thus manifesting itself, were those sciences
concerned with physics, biology, and astronomy. The latter were otherwise increased in their
recovered capital through the share furnished by the Arabs, at the very moment when the
knights of the Reconquista, were bringing back to the troubadours echoes of the poetry of
Islam. So it would seem to have been nature, more than reason, that Aristotle first revealed to
the minds of the West. In fact, it was the medical men who gave him his initial welcome, and
Daniel of Morley counselled those of his friends who wanted to study science to go to Spain
rather than to the schools of Paris where everything was stiffened by dialectics and verbalism.
In the opinion of the English naturalist Alexander Neckam, to recommend Aristotle made no
more sense than to bolster with a lantern the brightness of the sun. With data that were on the
whole somewhat on the disparate side, Alfred of Sareshel, also an Englishman, built up a
biological philosophy of man. In 1210, it was the libri de naturali philosophia [books on
natural philosophy] that were banned. Again in 1229, with the idea of luring clients to their
newly opened university, the masters of Toulouse published this enticing announcement:
“Here, those who wish to make a searching study into the bosom of nature, will be able to
hear lectures on the books on nature that have been proscribed at Paris.”
Finally, among the
entire works of the Aristotelian encyclopedia, Albert the Great will show special appreciation
for the riches contained in the treatises on animals.
In minds that were now on the alert for new knowledge, it was to a two-edged curiosity that the Aristotelian conception of nature was to give rise. On the one hand, running counter to the appealing, but idealistic tendencies that laid stress on the spirit—an outlook encouraged by the Augustinian tradition of thought—man’s attention now focused on the world of matter and sense, on the study of life and its laws, on the phenomena of generation. The results revealed in this appeal to experience appeared wonderful when compared to the wretched contents of the lapidaries and bestiaries. On the other hand, and bolstering the value of this appeal to experience, there was a feeling of anticipation concerning the resources of intelligibility contained in a notion of nature defined as an internal principle in every being and a cause sufficient to explain all of its operations without recourse to super-natural influences or symbolic interpretations bringing about a dissevering of the unity of knowledge. In brief, what now appeared was a world that was real, a world capable of being understood. A mother-science of physics was begotten, and from it were to spring forth till the other particular sciences dealing with nature, starting with a science of man, the science of that being whose nature was free, yet bound up with the world system that surrounded him. The thrill that men felt in discovering such a conception of nature in Aristotle points to something more than a passing renaissance. It confirms the fact that an element of capital importance had been definitely added to the scholastic system of thought which was then in its formative process. Realism, both ontological and epistemological, was this element that the new physics carried within itself. Henceforth, the very notion of science was linked up with the knowledge of existent objects.
The acceptance, however, of Aristotle’s philosophy of nature confirmed a certain absence of interest in the mathematical disciplines. True, a place had been kept for them, both at Toledo, in the Arabic science taught there, and at Chartres, where they were part of a Platonism with which their destiny seems to have been tied up in the minds of philosophers. Although the Aristotelian ordering of the sciences does fix a place for mathematics, it does not, however, lend itself easily to its development. This serious deficiency was to weigh heavily on scholasticism. In fact, the day would come when, having shut itself up in the confines of its Aristotelian science, scholasticism would openly reject, along with its excesses, the most lawful ideals of mathematical analysis, thus closing the door on a new world of thought and drawing up its own condemnation in the bargain.
Finally, along with Aristotle’s philosophy and by virtue of the latter’s very confidence in the essential understandableness of the world, a conceptual rationalism began to assert itself more and more. As a result, logic was given its true status, that of a simple tool, and a safeguard was thus provided, for the masters at least, against the pitfalls of the formalism into which the first generations of Paris university people had fallen. On the other hand, this rationalism bore the seeds of an intellectualism somewhat short in its outlook, thus threatening to restrict the permanent power of invention of the human mind as well as the sense of mystery. The latter tendency was reinforced by the techniques adopted in academic exercises, and from the first decades of the XIIIth century on, it found expression in the particular machinery of the dialectics of scholasticism as well as in the academic style so characteristic of it. The humanism of a John of Salisbury, the lyrical qualities shown by the Victorines, not to mention the rhetoric of a Hildebert of Lavardin, had disappeared. From this background was born, with its shortcomings as well as its qualities, the language of the School, the very language used by Saint Thomas.
In the new Aristotle, however, it was not simply a question of human qualities and human weaknesses such as have just been touched upon. The Christian world set up an opposition against him because he was the source of other perils, and their seriousness should not be concealed under the pretext that today the Stagirite not only has freedom of the city but also holds a position of advantage in Christian thought. Indeed, to pass over these dangers would precisely be to misjudge in advance the role that Saint Thomas played in the spiritual revolution taking place in the West.
Save for a few exceptions that were accidental in character, Christian tradition had spontaneously sustained itself with Platonic philosophy. In a religious tradition of this nature, it was already a delicate task to turn from the Platonic way of thinking to follow Aristotle on the roads opened up by his philosophy. As a matter of fact, even before it could be revealed that the two systems were incompatible, it was impossible that a breaking off from ideas that were solidly entrenched be accomplished without incidents of one sort or another. It, moreover, was apparent that the world of Aristotle was itself irreconcilable with the Christian way of conceiving the universe, man, and God. In Aristotle, there was no mention of creation. His world was an eternal one, delivered over to the clutches of determinism, without a provident God knowing anything about the world’s contingencies. His man was a being bound up with matter, subject like it to corruption, a man whose moral perfection did not involve religious values. The face of Aristotle’s philosophy was turned earthward. In fact, by its denial of the exemplary ideas, it had cut off the very road that could lead to God and had obliged the light of reason to retire within itself. Aristotelian science was playing against Christian wisdom.
Coming into contact with this self-sufficiency of reason, the soul of Christendom reacted
immediately with shock, as though it were faced with the lust of the spirit that had brought
about original sin.
Saint Bonaventure soon made himself the mouthpiece of the ensuing
resistance, in the scientific and irrefragable opposition that he directed against Siger of
Brabant and Thomas Aquinas. Resistance, however, had been in the air as early as 1210.
Under one form or another and coming from all quarters of the Church hierarchy, it
manifested itself at successive dates, in 1215, 1225, 1231, 1245, and as late as 1263, when
William of Moerbeke and Thomas Aquinas, then working together at the Roman court under
the sympathetic eyes of Urban IV, were occupied with their studies of Aristotle: the one with
a translation of the Stagirite, the other with a commentary on his text.
The point about the resistance is that it showed the difficulty that any one must encounter
who tries to set a nature autonomous in her order within the framework of a Christian
universe.
At a rather early date, however, scholars had become conscious, not only of the scientific
riches to be found in the Aristotelian encyclopedia, but also of the undeniable human value of
his thought. As early as 1231 some effort had been made at a compromise. Gregory IX had
charged three Parisian masters with the task of making corrections on the books that were
forbidden, “so that the useful would not be spoiled by the useless”.
From 1230 to 1240,
roughly speaking the program of studies included large sections of Aristotle’s text,
particularly of the Ethica Vetus et Nova.
True, the Libri Naturales were still not offered
except in very summary form, but around 1244 Albert the Great was commenting on them by
the page at the faculty of theology, and at the same time, Roger Bacon was doing a series of
questions based on the same books at the faculty of afts. In England, Robert Grosseteste, a
former chancellor of the University of Oxford and now the Bishop of Lincoln, a scholar with
immense prestige in the world of religion and thought, and, in fact, a man with a keenly alert
mind, undertook, between 1242 and 1247, to make a complete translation of both the
Nicomachean Ethics and of some of its Greek commentators.
Finally, the barriers were let
down completely at Paris. In 1252, the year when Saint Thomas began teaching his doctrine,
already conditioned by a deliberate and decisive choice for Aristotelian teaching, the
Stagirite’s De Anima was listed among texts to be used in the English natiom section of the
faculty of arts. In 1255, the whole of the Aristotelian corpus was placed on the curriculum. As
will be seen, the masters had won over for themselves a complete cycle of philosophy
teaching that went far beyond the propuedeutics of the seven arts and of the ancient dialectic.
In itself, this was enough to raise, within the institutional organization, the problem of a
philosophy that was now set free from the superintendence of the theologians. The stage was
set for Averroes.
When Aristotle arrived in Paris, he did not come alone, nor was the doctrine brought in under his name simon-pure, so that the problem raised by his entrance intoWestem thought became even more complex. Already in ancient works, and even more so in the Syrian and Arabic literature, a philosophic syncretism had injected within the corpus of Aristotle’s writings elements that were heterogeneous to it and that seemed to justify, even from a textual basis, the new orientations that philosophy and religion were taking. As early as the XIIth century, an Arabic patchwork text of the Enneads had been translated into Latin under the title of Theologia Aristotelis. Another book, the Liber Aristotelis de Expositione Bonitatis Purae (otherwise known as the Liber de Causis), done into Latin by Gerard of Cremona, was making the rounds at the same time. In an almost word-for-word reproduction, it was the vehicle of some of the theses of Proclus’s Elementatio Theologica which had, at an earlier date, been carried over into first the Syrian and then into the Arabian tongues. Albert the Great was to draw support from the Liber de Causis in his attempt to superimpose a Platonic metaphysics on Aristotle’s appeal-to-experience philosophy. Around 1270, the Averrorists of Paris thought they were borrowing from Aristotle the reprehensible doctrine of emanation that they were teaching. It was only toward the end of his career, and after William of Moerbeke had made a direct translation of the Elementatio, that Saint Thomas identified therein the Liber de Causis.
More remarkable, however, and leading to a greater compromising of Aristotle’s doctrine was
the fact that, along with his works, the abundant yield of Arabian speculation, particularly that
present in the works of Avicenna, was poured into the West through the translators at Toledo.
It amounted to the Christians facing a block of philosophical writings in which the authentic
Aristotle was shrouded, so to speak, in the folds of Arabian philosophy. The fact was given
public notice in 1210 when the first alarm was sounded and it was decreed that “neither
Aristotle’s books, nor the commentaries thereon, are to be read.”
It was precisely against
this compounded mass and the errors it contained that William of Auvergne hurled his
denunciations when he spoke of “Aristotle and his followers”.
The De Causis Primis et
Secundis was ample witness of the seductions and dangers deriving from that sort of
philosophic syncretism in which, to one’s bewilderment, Augustine and Dionysius were used
to enfold Arabian emanationism, a task they were ill-equipped to perform.
There was to be a second stage in which the Arabian influence would make itself felt, and this
time it would be in the line of an authentic Aristotelianism. Averroes, in fact, made his
appearance to swell the torrent of literature on the Stagirite’s philosophy at the time when the
latter’s moral writings were beginning to be actively circulated (due to the efforts of Robert
Grosseteste). His works were translated around 1230 at the court of Frederick II,
to a large
extent by Michael Scot who dedicated his version of the De Coelo—and this is a significant
coincidence—to Stephen of Provins, one of the three Parisian masters to whom had been
allotted the task of expurgating Aristotle. His thought did not sink into the consciousness of
scholars immediately following upon their contact with his text, true; but, all in all, the crisis
came to a head soon enough. Even though Albert the Great was not too well acquainted with
him when he was teaching at Paris between 1240 and 1248, and even when he wrote his De
Unitate Intellectus in 1256, the Arab nevertheless was singled out and denounced during the
decade that followed and that witnessed the writing of that master document—the Contra
Gentiles. It was only with the appearance of Siger of Brabant, however, and from 1266 on,
that the quality of his exegesis and the wholly rational bent of his thought were to win over
disciples to his cause in the faculty of arts. This was to be the most drastic episode and the
critical point in the restoration of Aristotle’s philosophy. Christian doctrine was then
threatened, not so much perhaps by the particular errors about the unity of the intellect or the
eternity of the world, as by the very tendency to philosophism that the masters in the arts
department startea to brandish. Saint Thomas found himself wedged in between the
Augustinian tradition of thought, now more emphatic than ever in its criticism of Aristotle,
and the Commentator with his interpretation of the Stagirite. In order to make distinctions
where they were called for, Thomas availed himself of those of the Greek commentators that
he could then lay his hands on: Simplicius, Philoponus, and Themistius. Even though he
speaks of Averroes as of one “who was not so much a Peripatetic, as a depraver of the
Peripatetic philosophy,”
In one of those rare passages in which we feel him giving vent to
angry displeasure, the fact remains that he constantly had the works of the Arab at his elbow
when he was doing his own commentary on the Philosopher. It is indispensable that this be
kept in mind if one would judge in detail his Aristotelianism. What followed is well known.
Saint Thomas was discredited in the condemnations of 1270 and 1277, and his endeavors
dismissed. The fact is, moreover, that, judging from the violence of the conflict that took
place at the time, any attempt at concealing the real issue at stake must be disallowed, for
Aristotelianism did breed rationalism with all of its consequences. How, then, can we explain
that Saint Thomas took upon himself the task of having Christian thought assimilate such an
Aristotelianism?
VI. The Order of Friar Preachers
It was in the Order of Friar Preachers that Saint Thomas found the resources he needed to enter upon such a task. Indeed, it would be more accurate to say it was due to his being a Friar Preacher that he developed that clear-sighted and courageous mastery with which he brought the task to completion. Looking at the Dominican Order, which was then such a novelty in its style of religious life, we come to detect, in its most secret implications, the hunger for regeneration that was making itself felt upon the minds and souls of men at that time. Father Mandonnet relates:
The founding of the Order of Friar Preachers was very closely bound up with the
general needs that were making themselves felt in the Christian world at the start of
the XIIlth century. Having brought religious life to a new stage of development, the
Church of Rome decided to make use of it in order to solve some of the urgent
problems with which she was confronted. Until then, the monks, vowed to live out
their lives in their own monastery, were dedicated to the work of their personal
sanctification by laboring on the soil, and by reciting the divine office in choir. The
canons regular, too, were so set up that their lives were very close to that of the
monastic regime. Neither of these groups could be used in a ministry that demanded,
above all, a Church militia that was both well-lettered and actually in contact with
the social life of the times. The Preachers, with their new type of vocation and a
mode of organization that was also new, were the answer to the needs of the new
age.
But if the Dominican form of religious life thus fitted the wants of a new age, the reason was
that, along with its Franciscan sister, it was the new age’s most beautiful fruit then ripening
under the action of the grace of God. We have already mentioned the sort of aspirations that
were then stirring up a world just emerging from a decaying feudal system. The thirst for
knowledge, the relish for freedom, the very earnest, even sometimes intemperate, pursuit of
material and spiritual wealth—all these things were embodied in the restless, but industrious,
urban classes recently liberated from the passive kind of life that people had lived as serfs.
The old institutions in the Church, both secular and regular, remained entangled in their
ancient forms and unable to understand this new generation of people and to secure for them,
in orderly fashion, those human and religious conditions necessary for their hard-won
freedoms. So far is this true that even the most justifiable of proceedings undertaken by the
new generation were not unmixed with some sentiment of anti-clericalism. The clear and far-seeing vision of Innocent III procured a happy solution when he opened the way to the
founding of new bodies of religious: brotherhoods of men, who would engage in preaching,
but whose evangelical poverty would preserve them against the seductions of the new
economic order at the same time that it freed them from the dead weight of the feudal system
The zeal of these brotherhoods turned the earthly initiatives of their contemporaries to the
service of a state of life which, up to that time, was unknown. The Friars Minor and the
Preachers were the first models of their kind of religious life. If we look into their origins,
their recruiting, their clientele, their elective mode of government, their juridic adaptability,
their freedom for apostolic travels, if, in a word, we observe the sort of sensational novelty
that they presented within the religious mode of life, we find that it was precisely their
institutional organization that furnished the connatural environment within which the social,
cultural, and spiritual effervesence of the age found both fulfillment and balance.
With
them, the monastery moved from the lonely reaches of the valleys into the center of the large
cities. This was more than a symbol.
To measure the depth of this communion of feeling between the new Orders and the world in
which they worked, one has only to note how the Friars were greeted in all circles, especially
at the University, typical foundation of the times, where intellectual emancipation was geared
to mesh with social emancipation. With a keen insight into the needs of the Christian world,
under which lay a deep understanding of the aspiratiohs that moved the men of his day, Saint
Dominic sent off his first disciples to the schools and chose to open the convents of his Order
in university cities. At Paris, the Friars were received with effectual sympathy, both by the
masters and the commune. The University, in fact, was to become a nursery of recruits to the
Order, even before the chairs they occupied there were officially incorporated.
The convent-college of Saint James, the keystone of a compact hierarchy of schools, was both expression
and sanction of the trust that the Christian world had in the intellectual rebirth which was then
in progress. Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas were to find in it the soil in which their
thought could take root, through the organic balance of a contemplative life and the state of
free receptivity which this same contemplative principle secures for the scientific fitting out
of the mind.
Let Aristotle come to Paris, and he will find at Saint James the place par excellence to make himself heard. He will not meet with a school of clerics who would attempt an expurgated edition of his works, as was ordered to be done in 1231, but rather with a company of men endowed with the intellectual and religious greatness of mind that will guarantee, under the light of faith, the renewal of his thought from the inside—the only kind of renewal that is tolerable to any philosopher. Thus, when the adoption of Aristotle into the Christian family took place, it came as a master stroke of a theology thoroughly at home in its own faith, and not as the mere consequence of a reasoned choice between rival philosophies.
Moreover, when Saint Thomas came to Paris, he found at Saint James not only proper
surroundings that were congenial for his work, but also, in these very surroundings, a man
who, by his thinking, had blazed a pioneer trial, and by his writings, had cleared the premises.
The man was Albert of Cologne, who, as far back as 1245, when master and pupil met for the
first time, already enjoyed a prestige at once extensive and debated. His purpose, and he took
no pains to keep it a secret, was to make Aristotle understandable to the Latins. In his own
words: “What I want to do is to make the different parts—physics, metaphysics, and
mathematics—intelligible to the Latins.”
He followed out his proposal both in paraphrases
of the Aristotelian texts and in disputed questions in which he could be more personal. His
Summa de Creaturis was undoubtedly the fruit of the latter effort. Approximately between
1240 and 1248, while some urged him on and others blamed him, Albert brought forth into
the schools of Paris, where one was not yet allowed to teach Aristotle officially, five
commentaries of the latter’s works in the field of natural philosophy. The Physics headed the
list that also included the De Anima. His lectures, and perhaps their publication too, created
such a sensation that Albert, to Roger Bacon’s great scandal, came to be quoted on an equal
footing with the other recognized authorities. The precautions he took to present himself as
no more than an interpreter, as well as the spirited way he replied to his detractors, only serve
to underline the boldness of his enterprise.
Yet it was a boldness aware of what this implied
insofar as method is concerned, since Albert openly vindicated the independent character of
the various lines of research according to the laws that are proper to each branch of
knowledge. “In matters of faith and morals, one should follow Augustine rather than any
philosopher when both are in disagreement. But if it were a matter of medicine, then I would
follow Galen or Hippocratus; and if the question is one of speaking about the natures of
things, follow Aristotle rather, or somebody else who is an expert on natures of things.”
Moreover, a reflexion made at the beginning of his commentary on the Posterior Analytics
shows to what a many-sided vision of the intelligibility of the world and of the progress of
knowledge his mind was open: “Not all the demonstrative sciences have been established. On
the contrary, several are still waiting to be discovered.”
Albert was the first, at the time of
reason’s first emancipation in the West, “to define the status of the sciences in the Christian
world.”
The chroniclers have preserved the record of the loving and trustful understanding that existed right from the start between Master Albert and his pupil: first at Paris, from 1245 to 1248; then at Cologne, from 1248 to 1252. It was during the latter period that Saint Thomas made a transcript of the questions on the Ethics discussed by his professor. This harmony that marked the relations of the two men was to remain to the end. It is enough to recall in what a state of emotion Albert hastened off to Paris in 1277 to uphold the recently condemned good name and writings of Saint Thomas. Yet, certain doctrinal differences between master and pupil appeared either in their conclusions or in the general inspiration of their work. It was, in fact, Albert’s ambition to fit in the spiritualistic tendencies of the Platonic philosophy with the experimentalism of Aristotle, and this goal took root in a temperament and a feeling for philosophy and theology that were quite different from those of Saint Thomas. As a result, it is hard to measure what amount of influence Albert exercised on the development of Saint Thomas’s doctrine. In any case, it is at a higher spiritual level that communion is established between such men, as the fate of their enterprise bears witness.
The part taken by Albert in the life of studies among the Preachers set a standard of philosophic work and a scientific disposition of mind that sanctioned the Order’s native position within the university movement and the cultural growth then in progress. For the Preachers, organization and doctrine were thus consolidated. From the very start of his teaching career, Thomas was carried along by the grace proper to his Order, which, in turn, saw itself truly represented in his person.
VII. The Return to the Gospel
From what has just been said, one may infer that it was not the entrance of Aristotle that was the decisive factor in the molding of the thought of Saint Thomas any more than the rebirth of Antiquity provided the elements from which the theology of the XIIIth century was shaped. This renaissance was only one of the factors in a renovating process whose vital impulse took its rise from religious yeaming, and whose ideal, among the Mendicants, was nothing short of a return to the original way of life of the Church. In the Christian world of the XIIIth century, the rebirth incorporated itself with the ideals of life as set forth in the Gospel.
That renascent and evangelical movements should thus merge should not be cause for surprise since even in times when everything points to a distressing displacement in the order of values, we nevertheless find examples in which a renaissance and a return to the Gospel succeed in working band in hand. Of this, the period of XVIth century humanism, furnishes cases in point. If renaissance implies imitation and restoration of Antiquity, this, however, as we have seen, occurred within an awakening of the spirit—that great upsurge of social, literary, philosophic, and religious forces sweeping with them the generations of the end of the XIIth century. It is time for us to examine through what means the genius of Saint Thomas, inheriting the treasures of Antiquity, wrought a transformation of the Aristotelian man [without destroying the latter’s essence], just as grace renovates human nature without doing violence to its original structure.
In the shaping of the restoration movement of that time, the Church indeed had had its share. Despite the presence of institutions that were paralyzed by the weight of the old feudal privileges and riches, the Church had nurtured earnest men who, from time to time, had cried out their exasperation against the compromising acts and vices of the clergy. The reformers, from Peter Damian’s time on, were not satisfied to play a purely negative role. They tried to make reform possible, and with this end in mind, they strove to present anew, for clerics and layfolk alike, the ideals of the pristine Church. The program they would restore was the program of “apostolic life” itself, with its community form of existence, its itinerant preaching, its teaching of the masses based on the testimony of exemplary living, and its candid type of brotherhood. In their bands, the texts of the Gospels recovered the forcefulness of their meaning, acting as the leaven of a regeneration that soon overflowed the bounds of canonical reform and acted as a stimulant to the masses of the people themselves. The “poor of Christ” and journeyman preachers sprang up on all sides, to the extent that, without any attempt at browbeating, Innocent III had to act to keep the movements in check.
It was a difficult task to bring such movements to a point of stability within the framework of
the existing institutions, especially when the motives that inspired the first workers lost their
original purity and when social and moral demands brought the Communes of the people into
conflict with the ancient society, and even sometimes with the Church. But if many of these
movements degenerated into revolutionary and heterodox sects, others achieved their proper
balance within the Church. In Francis of Assisi, a man of his age if ever there was one, the
new spirit was embodied in holiness, while Dominic, vir evangelicus [the Gospel man],
founded an Ordo Praedicatorum [Order of Preachers], in which the old form of religious life
was transformed along the lines of the constitutional set-up of the Communes and
corporations. In it, moreover, every amount of rational inquisitiveness will be practised under
the guidance of the light of faith. Joachim of Fiore had gone astray in his apocalyptic dream
of a Christian world that was to be made over anew, and after him the spiritualistically-minded jeopardized the work of reform then in progress. Yet, he was a ringing echo of the
aspirations of his time, and he had rightly anticipated the coming of an “order of preachers”
and announced that the world would witness a magnificent outpouring of the spirit. When
William of Saint Amour started hurling denunciations against the Mendicants for being the
promoters of a new Christianity, his was not a simple quarrel stirred up by his conservative
tendencies.
It is not our intent to restate here Thode’s paradoxical statements bearing on Saint Francis as
a forerunner of the Renaissance.
There is no denying, however, that, with the whirlpool of
currents marking these times, it was one and the same atmosphere that enfolded the renovatio
[renovation] taking place in the fields of culture, science, thought, and religion. In Saint
Thomas, the Friar Preacher, inspiration rooted in the Gospel became the soul of a theology
stocked with the wisdom of the Ancients. As we said before, Francis of Assisi and Thomas
Aquinas were the two poles around which the Christian world of that day revolved. This is
literally true. Notwithstanding the most serious disagreements that arose, even in doctrinal
matters, between their fraternal Orders, the two men cannot be set up in opposition to one
another, and we refuse to do so, because it was a same age that bore them.
This Gospel-inspired spirit effectively sustained and nourished theology in full flight. Once more, we must point to the fact that it was not the rediscovery of the Aristotelian texts that brought about the rise of the life-giving sap, but rather the reawakening of a faith that fed on sacred texts. Thus, while regular courses on the Physics of Aristotle were offered at Saint James from 1240 on, the convent was also extremely busy, under the guiding hand of Hugh of Saint Cher, with the great task of compiling the Correctoria of the Bible. This was an important undertaking. Although their ambition to try to achieve a revision of the corrupted Vulgate by appeal to the original texts could not succeed, the undertaking itself gives an idea of the almost unbelievable dash with which these young theologians were impelled. Yet even more than that, the same enterprise was actually begun over and over, and by different groups in both the Dominican and Franciscan Orders, the latter, however, preferring to confine themselves to the more modest method of simply correcting the version of Saint Jerome. The same Hugh of Saint-Cher also directed the composition of a word-concordance of the Bible. The first of its kind, it was based on the principle of interpreting the meaning of terms by appeal to texts and contexts. Albert the Great was among the first to make an assiduous use of it.
What interests us more than the actual results of these ventures, however, is the spirit that animated the men who undertook, them, their taste for quenching their thirst at original sources, and also their anxious faith-inspired search for appropriate tools. At this point, we cannot fail to recall similar undertakings that took place when a later movement of return to the Gospel was in progress. One has only to think of the Complutenses that were worked out at Alcala; or of the Quintuplex Psalterium that Lefèvre d’Etaples brought out at Paris. Those previous efforts, at any rate, are a significant witness to the existence of a theological method at a time when the technical study of the Scriptures was at the base of sacred teaching and held first place in the esteem of the students as well as in the rules that governed teaching.
From this point of view, more credit than is usually allowed ought to be given to Peter
Comestoes Historia Scholastica for the role it played and the repute in which it was held
during the Middle Ages. In the teaching program of the day, alongside the unconnected
glosses on the Scriptures and the systematization found in Peter Lombard’s Sentences,
Comestor’s work was the representative of “Sacred History” with its own resources that were
being deliberately sought after ever since Andrew of Saint Victor’s day. The magister in
theologia [master in theology] still remained a magister in sacra pagina [master in the sacred
page]. Within such a tradition, the work of Saint Thomas found spiritual and scientific
balance.
This movement back to original sources also extended to the writings of the Fathers. Enough will be said later about the kind of screen with which the triumph of dialectics eventually masked the reading of the patristic texts simply to bring out for the present the fact that, at this particular time, men were curious about them and labored over them with the result that their actual value in theology was revealed anew.
Along with the copies of the works of the Ancients that were so often transcribed at that
time,
our libraries also preserve the originalia [originals] of the writings of Ambrose,
Augustine, Jerome, Gregory, Chrysostom, and John Damascene; that is, complete texts, over
and above the anthologies and books of maxims, copied out and put into service. To make the
“originals” more serviceable, tabulae [tables] and capitulationes [compendia] were compiled.
It was in this fashion that Robert Kilwardby put into circulation the texts of Augustine that
would otherwise have been quite unmanageable due to their massiveness.
While no effort
was being spared to get Aristotle done into Latin, Dionysius had no cause for envy. During
the very same period, Grosseteste, who was devoting himself to that translation, also
translated into Latin several Greek works of the early Christian period, ranging from the
letters of Saint Ignatius to the De fide orthodoxa of Saint John Damascene. He composed,
moreover, a concordance of the Fathers. It would seem quite certain that around the year 1200
a number of strong theological currents, later on to be checked by the success of Peter
Lombard’s Sentences at the Lateran Council of 1215, had already based their effort on an
appeal to original sources among the Greek doctors.
Not everybody, to be sure, made the bad-humored demands for pure texts and for the role of
philosophy in sacred doctrine that Roger Bacon insisted upon. Yet Saint Thomas himself,
who turned to William of Moerbeke for help in controlling the Aristotelian versions at his
disposal, was disturbed at the faultiness in the patristic texts he was using. As the old
Chronicler tells us, he would have gladly given all the wonders of Paris for a copy of
Cbrysostom’s commentary on Saint Matthew.
As in the Catholic reform of the XVIth century, the common people were seeking an answer
to their hungering piety in the strong meat of doctrine that the clergy of the old regime were
no longer supplying. In the liturgy, the theatre, the various forms of art, they found the
nourishment that they were prepared to assimilate. The layfolk, leaning on the new religious
Orders for support of their apostolic-minded piety, reached the level of meditation of the
mysteries through the repeated recitation of the Ave, through the chaplet of Our Lady’s joys,
or through the stories of miraculous events. New forms of devotion to the Passion of Our
Lord and his Eucharistic Presence began to blossom in associations and brotherhoods. Saint
Thomas’s office of the Blessed Sacrament came as the keystone both of a devout movement
of the Christian peoples and of an abundant literature of hymns and sequences. Even in the
missionary expansion of Christendom with its aura of chivalry, we find a reminder of the
Gospel’s progressive surge in the pristine Church, as well as the stirring up of problems for
theological consideration-problems of spiritual conquest that the arms of the Christian kings
were definitely unable to achieve. Whoever it was that Saint Thomas intended primarily to
reach in his Contra Gentiles, he wrote the work at the very time when schools for the study of
the Arabic tongue were being founded by both the Dominicans and Franciscans. Finally, this
evangelical movement of the day was not even lacking in bold programs of reform. One of
these, set up by Humbert of Romans, as a matter of fact, came out of the convent of Saint
James. It was submitted officially to the Council of Lyons in 1274. So well set up was this
program that the Protestants of the XVIIth century did not hesitate to publish it as proof that
their claims were justly founded.
If, then, theology armed itself with all the accoutrement of a scientific knowledge; if,
moreover, it adopted Aristotelian reason into its own service, the motive was primarily that it
was carried forward by the exacting demands of a faith wanting to organize itself
scientifically and wanting to satisfy the aspirations of the souls in these new circumstances.
This was a hearty achievement, but it was soon to be menaced by the outlook of the
nominalists with their irreducible dualism between a naked faith and a critical system of
knowledge. Masters of the Paris of 1250 were aware of the magnificence of such an
undertaking, since they knew well the dangers that threatened its equilibrium and protested
vigorously against “those who use procedures in theology that are proper only to philosophy,
and then turn around and employ methods in logic that are proper only to theology.”
Cardinal Ximenes later on did not found a university at Alcala “in order to aid the progress of
humanism, but rather, to undertake, with the help of the ancient belles-lettres which were
such admirable tools of culture and mental enlargement, a lasting restoration and renovation
of his deficient clergy.”
In like manner, the university schools at Saint James really aspired
to further their ideal of an apostolic life and doctrine by welcoming Aristotle or Cicero and by
enlisting Greek wisdom into the service of the Gospel. The Secunda Pars of Saint Thomas’s
Summa theologiae is a true spiritual theology (as one would say nowadays) and not a mere
variation on the themes of the Nicomachean Ethics. Yet, Aristotle really lives once more in
its pages. As Erasmus clearly saw, without Christian scholasticism Greek thought would have
perished long ago: “If Aristotle is well known in our schools, it is not due to himself but to
the Christians: for he also would have perished had he not been joined to Christ.”
Or, to use
Boutroux’s expression: Christian philosophy is Aristotle’s most beautiful achievement.
VIII. The Augustinian Tradition
It would not be wide of the mark to compare the role played in theological circles by a good
number of the works of the Greek Christian doctors brought into circulation among the Latins
at the end of the XIIth century with the influence exercised over philosophical speculation by
the arrival of Aristotle during the same period. The two cases testify to the existence of the
same factor of inquisitiveness which helped in bringing about a renaissance common to both
fields and nourished in both cases by researches undertaken in Greater Greece as well as by
voyages to Constantinople. This is not the place to gather together the resources bom out of
such undertakings. Judging by the way that the West passionately seized upon certain
elements unknown in its own tradition of thought, however, it would seem that this
contribution from the East stirred up some rather violent counter-tendencies in the
controversies of the day.
In any case, what came out of the Orient represented a precious
capital not only because of the documentary data it supplied, but also because of the loads of
spiritual riches it carried for meditation of the mysteries and of the original perspectives it
offered for building a science of theology.
For example, we may note: the principle of method adopted by the Greek-loving followers of
Gilbert of la Porrée according to which concepts must be submitted to a translatio [carrying
over] “from the plane of natural reason to theology,”
the Dionysian critical analysis of the
divine names (perpetuated by Scotus Erigena),
the utilization of the theoria [contemplation]
of the Ancients for the understanding of the creative nature of God’s knowledge, the theme of
emanation from God and of return to Him in the development of the Christian economy, the
integration of broad views on the cosmos with a theology that tended at times towards
overmuch psychologizing, the inspiration derived from a Trinitarian speculation that was very
“personalistic” in its outlook. All these Greek elements, without mentioning a number of
other Greek doctrines that made Christology and the theology of the sacraments all the richer,
were well suited to leaven the somewhat ponderous dough contained in the Books of
Sentences of the Latins. Yet, on the very eve of Saint Thomas’s entrance into academic affairs
at Paris, there occurred the great incident of 1241. At that time, the Parisian masters
condemned several propositions inspired by a neo-Platonism of Dionysian vintage, and
undoubtedly many Dominican professors at Saint James were implicated.
The incident
shows the presence of some bouts of fever in the process of assimilating those magnificent
but delicate themes.
Whatever amount of inquisitiveness the recovery of Greek theology may have stirred up and
howsoever fruitful it may have been, the fact remains, however, that, during the period that
saw it gradually developing into the scholastic system, the doctrine of the Latin masters was
dominated in its principles, spirit, and structure by the theology of Saint Augustine—the
Doctor par excellence of the Latin Church and, “after the apostles, the greatest amongst
teachers of the churches.”
The work of Peter Lombard alone would be token enough of the
truth of this fact. His Liber Sententiarum was a modest but clever compilation of Augustinian
thoughts and texts—from which, however, the barbs had been eliminated—with the result
that they were pressed into service to the benefit of a classical theology. The Book of
Sentences became the manual universally used and the basic matter being taught in the
universities.
The unheard of success it enjoyed at the Lateran council of 1215 served to
determine once and for all the school tradition that would exist within the framework of
Western theology and would bar any rival attempts seeking to reinforce their positions with
help from the Greek doctors.
One could call to attention the fact, it is true, that there was a marked difference between the
strictly theological Augustinianism of the Lombard and that other form of it which, when
faced with the menacing impact of Aristotelianism, fortified itself with a metaphysics and
psychology nonetheless consistent with Augustine’s authentic line of thinking. It was
precisely the latter form of Augustinianism that Saint Thomas was to encounter at Paris. But
this important evolution, which was linked with the growth of scholasticism, in no wise
detracted from Augustine’s authority. While Saint Bonaventure, for example, was flatly
stating that his master’s positions could in no way be changed,
Saint Thomas himself, in
those very passages where he admits that Augustine was influenced by the opinions of the
Platonists, was most careful not to take exception to his texts, and he respectfully applied to
them the procedure of reverential exposition. By this time, too, thanks to the capitulatio of
Robert Kilwardby,
the works of Augustine were being more assiduously read in their
original form—at least the more important of them.
All this would seem to have refreshed
and enlarged the knowledge that theologians had of them. In any case, his writings continued
to be the basic collection upon which the university libraries were built, just as they had been
in the monastic libraries. The book-dealers at Paris always carried large sections of them on
their lists of books whose price was fixed by the University.
But the prestige of Augustine does not appear as having been wholly due to the continuous
and somewhat ancient veneration paid him. It is our opinion that it also fed on the new
enthusiasms aroused by the evangelical movement which, as we have already seen, brought
about a transformation of the Christian world during that period. All reforms in the course of
the Church’s history, it has been said, were stirred up and supported through the influence of
Augustine. Such was the case in the XIIIth century. For it was not as the result of an
improvisation relating to their institutional form that many of the new religious groups
seeking to restore the “apostolic life” turned to the rule of Augustine
—the Dominicans, we
know, did just this. Rather should we say that their choice was bound up with a resurgence of
the great Doctor’s own spirit within the aspirations and mentality of the day.
The fact is that in the West the name of Augustine stood for the highest and the purest type of
Christianity, just as his spirit represented what was the most religious in the basic sense of
that term. This outstanding prerogative enjoyed by a doctor, in the Church, displayed all its
value at precisely this time in history when human reason, howsoever legitimately, sought to
enlarge its boundaries by conquering for itself a new understanding of the world. It was not a
matter of simply achieving balance by compromise between faith and reason, but an
irrefragable need of spiritual unity. Later on, in the XVIth century, many theologians fell into
the sin of believing that they had to renounce Augustine in order to better open their minds to
an undeirstanding of the man of that Renaissance. Actually, this was a catastrophe, for it
appears that Augustine was, at times, abandoned to Luther or to Jansen. Saint Thomas, during
the medieval renaissance, rejected certain of the neo-Platonic sources of Augustine and still
remained the latter’s faithful disciple, both in theological doctrine and in the quality of his
spirituality.
On later pages, we shall often have occasion enough to show the importance of the Aristotelian tenets of Saint Thomas and how decisive they were in the development of his very theology, and even of his spirituality. Let us first describe at this point the capital inherited from Augustine and outside of which it is impossible to conceive a Saint Thomas—a capital moreover, that was the peaceful joint-possession of all the masters of the XIIIth century, supplying the homogeneous milieu within which the scholastic system of the Medievals took shape.
The Christian quality of this joint inheritance from Augustine was very pure. In fact,
Augustine’s point of departure was not a philosophy at all, either of the world or of man. It
was a concrete economy of human beings engaged in a destiny that saw them born under the
burden of a sin but ransomed by a God Who was made flesh and suffered to save them and
Who was the principle of a healing grace meted out to them according to the choice of His
free love. It is true that Augustine had discovered himself as he was reading the Enneads, but
his theology came, not from his reading of Plotinus, but from his conversion. From that event
the whole Augustinian system, both in its speculative and moral aspects, was to live on in
Christian thought and unceasingly be reborn. Due to these facts, it became possible for later
theology together with Saint Thomas, to give body to the abstract consideration of human
nature and to metaphysical essences. In point of fact, the concrete and quasi-experimental
study of the states of man, beginning with his state as viator [way-farer], brought into its own
service every form of analysis. As a result the study of man was placed within the unfolding
of history and of its sacred series of happenings.
Thus, in the Prima Pars of Saint Thomas’
Summa, the treatise on man begins with an Aristotelian-inspired analysis of human nature
(questions 75-89), but it includes, immediately following, the study of the “condition” of the
first man before the fall (questions 90-10-9), an aspect one could hardly expect to find in
Aristotles treatise peri yuchj [On the soul]. Within the moral analysis of sin, moreover, Saint
Thomas introduces as an essential, if novel, chapter a study of that mysterious original sin
which he sees as the major and permanent cause of man’s later condition. Such developments
are not simply material additions; rather, they involve the transposition of the entire
conception of man within new perspectives.
In a similar way, there is a primacy of religious intuitiveness in Augustine’s conception of God. Augustine, to be sure, did not neglect to seek in God the efficient cause of the world, but be took particular delight in studying the exemplary ideas. In such a course of inquiry so openly responsive to inspirations proceeding from the Platonic theme of participation, be was led to an acute perception of the mysterious conjunction of the transcendence of God and His intimate presence in the heart of things. In this instance, contemplation took precedence over rational explanation. It was less a matter of explaining the cosmos than of recognizing traces of the presence of God within it. The great themes of vestigia [vestiges] and imago Dei [image of God] were to find their place in the most scientific of medieval cosmologies, and only in the days of late scholasticism were they to be dropped. What we have here is the lofty soaring of an intellectual outlook in which the sense of mystery was both the condition and the criterion in getting hold of truth. This outlook settled upon a separation between functions in knowledge, with the supreme intelligibles reached by a higher reason (ratio superior) and science turned over to a lesser reason (ratio inferior), each ratio then having its own range of operations and even its own objects. Saint Thomas bent all his efforts to reabsorb this dualistic teaching within his own system. In order to guarantee the oneness of the human mind, which is reason and mystery all in one, he harmonized with the theory of demonstration the method and doctrine of analogy, by means of which he was able to extol the transcendence of God and to provide for a preservation of the deepest reaches of the human mind.
By means of his perspective, Augustine was led to see created beings less in their own proper
consistency than in their representative value. The dichotomy of res et signa [things and
signs], in which all objects of knowledge were ranged, lay at the base of his whole
methodology. Later on, it became hardly more than an artificial framework kept as a heading
in the Sentences of Peter Lombard and of all his commentators, including Saint Thomas. Yet,
this division, admittedly inadequate as a ground of classification for natural sciences, served
to retain an atmosphere of symbolism from which even the most rationalistic of the
Aristotelians were unable to escape. In the writings of Saint Thomas, this symbolism never
explicitly took shape as a conscious and systematic theory as it did in the Itinerarium mentis
of Saint Bonaventure. Nevertheless, it penetrated first his commentaries on the Scriptures and
again his autonomous works. In the latter it safeguarded around the notion of “science” all
those resources of intelligibility of a religious nature in which, paradoxically, the Aristotelian
theory of the sensible adjoined the mystagogy of Dionysius. It was only with Descartes’ age
that theology finally closed its frontiers on symbolic tendencies, leaving their use to the
“mystics” alone. The men of the Middle Ages lived in an Augustinian world. This fact will
have to be observed at that very moment when we shall come to discover in the advent of
“nature” and of “reason” the historical significance of Thomism.
If, therefore, the world is ultimately intelligible only in its relation to God, whether this relation be real or symbolic, the behavior of men, in parallel fashion, has value only through and within this framework of reference. For Augustine, morality cannot be conceived apart from religion. If the urge for happiness which is behind moral striving does not have God for its object, it becomes the source of all sorts of perversion. The rational eudemonism in Saint Thomas and the entire Aristotelian architecture of the Secunda Pars of his Summa must be completely integrated with Augustine’s dynamic mode of thinking in which the ultimate end dominates as a pervasive religious tenet, and in which the theological order, acting as a magnetic pole, frees all asceticism from a system of morals shut in upon itself.
It was not, therefore, as a result of purely supernaturalistic views that Augustine proclaimed the sovereignty of God and the absolute gratuitousness of grace even in the preparatory stages of its reception. Rather, his position rested on his general views of the relation of creatures, including the free rational creature, to their God: a God who was at once, for his creatures, the causa essendi [cause of their being], the ratio intelligendi [principle of their understanding], and the ordo vivendi [norm of their living]. Medieval Augustinianism gave body to this teaching of Augustine and to his spiritual insights, a “scholastic” body, through a metaphysics of divine causality and a philosophy of nature. This was perhaps the most beautiful synthetic piece of work achieved by medieval thought. In any case, it is the most salient feature that stands out in the works of the XIIIth century masters just as it is their commonly shared good, even when, as in the case of Saint Thomas, they separated, in their psychological explanations, the theory of illumination (wherein God is a ratio intelligendi) from the theory of grace.
Finally, we shall not be departing from religious values if we take up that other part of the Augustinian capital, namely: the sense be had of the reality of the spirit—Noverim te, noverim me [That I may know Thee, that I may know myself]. From Augustine, in fact, proceeded the never-ending interest shown by later thinkers and mystics in the problem of the soul’s self-knowledge. The Greeks had stirred up man’s inquisitiveness in regard to the world of nature. The Doctor of Christendom, on the other hand, opened it up to the world of the spirit. A number of systems, very different in their contexture, sprang forth from the latter inquisitiveness. In each one was guaranteed the transcendence of spirit, and among the spiritual beings, of the human soul which, while a nature, has that characteristic proper to it among natures that it is immediately present to itself. While not knowing itself as a thing, the soul does know itself as an active subject whose spontaneity always remains beyond the grasp of the knowledge that it has of itself.” Augustine’s theory of the mens [mind] as the image of God became the basis of the soaring mystical thoughts of the Victorines and of Saint Thomas’s theoretic psychology as well. This means, in effect, that the nouj [intellect] could no longer be contained within the scope and materials of Aristotle’s peri yuchj. All the afore-mentioned constituted a unique climate which the naturalism of Aristotle could not deteriorate and in which it took on a further dimension.
Such were the foundations upon which the Medievals built their science of man, as regards both his noetic processes and the principles of his moral life. Whatever greatly differing philosophies, or even theologies, might be built up, they all included an extoling of the following precious assets: that contemplation takes first place over all else, that wisdom is the source of man’s happiness, that his intelligence is possessed with dynamic powers. No matter how voluntaristic some of the systems turned out to be, they nevertheless respected this Augustinian intellectualism.
There is no cause for surprise, then, if looking into the fields of technique and pedagogy, we
discover that Augustine was considered by all, not merely as a master, but as the master of
Christian culture. To the latter he supplied framework and methods, materials and
inspirations. One might say that he was the forerunner of even its shortcomings. The Latin
civilization of the Middle Ages, truly a Christian product, was born out of Augustine: the
convert rhetorician who was unfamiliar with the sciences, the grammarian who was given to
allegorical exegesis, the dialectician who, not without subtleness, found in his practice of
dialectics remarkable resources for the formation of the mind and for its deepest religious
pondering.
Finally, and most important of all, at the summit of this Christian culture, he set
the place of theology, that wisdom to which philosophy and the seven arts were made to serve
as handmaids, but which also, within the realm of faith and under its guiding light, became a
science, an intellectus fidei [understanding of faith] provided with all the resources of human
reason and wide open to every object of its inquisitiveness. If Saint Thomas reabsorbed the
Platonic dualism that the followers of Augustine maintained in their concepts of wisdom and
science, he nevertheless did so in such a manner as to give fulfillment to the most deep-rooted
of Augustines religious and intellectual aspirations.
IX. Scholasticism
But is it not something of a paradox that Augustine should have become the father of scholasticism or, at any rate, that Augustinianism, whose spiritual dynamism and literary procedures seem to oppose to such an extent any attempt at systematization, could have taken body in the scholastic system with its depersonalizing techniques and its didactic forms? The problem is a thorny, if interesting one. Yet it is within the heart of this problem that we shall ultimately come to recognize the spiritual balance of the Christian XIIIth century, that we shall also come to understand, in its genesis and properties, the Augustinian affiliation of Saint Thomas the Aristotelian.
To convince ourselves of the difficulty of putting Augustine into a system, it is enough to recollect the tragic outcome of the efforts of Jansen and his followers. It is not only that Jansenism fell a prey to heresy. It so happened that, by a bitter derision of fate, its teachings and conclusions wound up at the end as flat contradictions of what Augustine had held. On the other hand, the opponents of Jansenism (I am thinking here of Saint Alphonsus of Liguori and of a few others), instead of snatching from him his ill-used treasures, fell into a moralizing that emptied Augustinian sapientia [wisdom] of its theologicaI intellectualism and spiritual unity. Actually, the latter were only building up a scholasticism devoid of Augustine, while the former, with their preoccupations touching upon the archaic, were impeaching scholasticism in the name of Augustine. Saint Thomas, by contrast, had been a true scholastic who was genuinely reared in Augustine.
Scholasticism is almost always the word used, whether with eulogizing or disparaging intent, to qualify medieval thought, in theology as well as in philosophy, and even in law and the other fields of instruction. But what does the word stand for?
Invariably, at first contact with a scholastic text, a modern reader cannot get away from the impression that he has just entered into a strange world. Even if he is familiar with the Latin language, he is baffled by any of the following: the machinery through which the author conveys his thought; the line of argument that he follows throughout; his parcelling out of his subject matter; his monotonous repeating of formulas; his ever-recurring use of divisions, subdivisions, and distinctions; the distressing impersonality of his style. Faced with this sort of situation, the modem student finds himself in a state of bewilderment which he does not easily overcome and which serves to conceal, at the outset of his study, the extreme variety of the individuals and generations that made up the Middle Ages. So true is this that he may overlook the fact that “scholasticism” is peopled with men such as Anselm and Ockham, Abelard and Richard of Saint Victor, and again that scholasticism housed the learned humanism of John of Salisbury, the Ciceronian style of Peter of Blois, the flowing rhetoric of William of Auvergne, the harmonious use of symbols of Bonaventure, the petulance of Roger Bacon, and so on. Only on the condition that one takes into account this multiple diversity which reveals an exceptional intensity of life and warns one beforehand that any attempt at defining scholasticism will be tinted with relativeness, should one agree to talk about it and to define its way of going about its business. It is necessary, however, that a description be attempted of that mental regime of medieval man, since it was within this regime, that Saint Thomas’s most personal intellectual and literary endeavors entered the record.
It is quite true that the style in which the Schoolman wrote and thought sacrificed evcrything to technique and that the latter’s austerity stripped it of any of the resources of art. Or perhaps it would be truer to say that, in his style, the Schoolman fashioned for himself a special rhetoric, in which imagery, comparison, figure of speech, symbolism, were immediately conceptualized without any catering to sensible diversion. Any figure of speech was reduced to an example or turned into an allegory, both processes in which reason crudely exploits the imaginative faculty to the detriment of its very productiveness. Hence the abstract character of the scholastic style which is all taken up with classifications, divisions, distinctions, formal oppositions, all media that favor precision in thought and in the art of discussion. Even the medieval writer of history, who could be expected to be restive with analytical processes, seemed to take delight in them. In his chronicle, Raoul Glaber establishes a series of worked-out relations between the four evangelists, the four elements, the four cardinal virtues, the four faculties of the soul, the four rivers flowing from Eden, the four ages of the earth. Glaber endeavored, through classification and allegorical analyses, to express the bidden kinships between the objects of reality. In the speculative disciplines, authors acted in the same way, but in accordance with the laws of their proper objects. Thinking was a “craft,” the governing principles of which were fixed down to the last detail.
To start with, there were the rules of grammar. Unlike today, the first of the seven arts was
not relegated to the position of a remote preparation for culture. Rather, it was looked upon as
an abiding soil, even for cultivating theology, with speculative grammar, moreover, almost
promoted to the dignity of a philosophical discipline. Medieval scholasticism remained based
upon grammar, and its attention to language was intentionally pushed to the extreme. Note
that it was not only the nominales [nominalists]—of whatever allegiance they happened to be
in either the XIIth or the XIVth century—who followed the practice. It was present even in
treatises dealing with the most substantial of philosophical and theological problems.
There
was a grammar of the “divine names” underlying the scholastic metaphysics of analogy, and
in Saint Thomas as well as in others of his day, the treatise on Trinity contains whole
questions devoted to the critical study of abstract and concrete names. Even more, it is the
whole plot of the philosophical enterprise which places trust in the correspondence between
the laws of language and the laws of thought and leans for support on the study of
signification. The movement started with Abelard but was kept alive for two centuries by
speculations on words and their properties and went so far as the nominalistic theory of
suppositio [supposition]. Through the treatises entitled De modis significandi [On the modes
of signification], was assembled a foundation for the highest of speculations. As a result, the
literal and literary interpretation of authors and of their texts gradually disappeared from
teaching, to be replaced by a logical type of exegesis. Quite plainly, verbalism could be the
disastrous outcome of such a procedure. This menace, however, does not impair the high
quality and good services of the discipline itself.
The rigidness of external forms was accentuated even more by the academic tradition within
which scholasticism developed. Scolasticus [scholastic] definitely kept, even in its
ideological meanings, the root connotation it derived from the word scola [school]. The
Scboolmen were professors. They had the professor’s typical traits and limitations; they had
his scientific qualities. Whereas the Fathers of the Church and the writers of the early Middle
Ages were occupied with a pastoral ministry in which a popular type of teaching and the
realities of every day life imposed upon their writings, both a variety of literary forms and
working conditions that were more concrete and exciting, the clerical teachers and university
masters spoke to a special type of listeners and were conditioned in their work by the
demands of their professional techniques. “Theology is the first great technique of the
Christian world.”
Even their sermons, witness those of Saint Thomas, were scholastic. The
Church herself called the greatest among them her “Doctors,” and no longer her “Fathers”.
The age of science had begun, even for the contents of the faith.
Thinking is a craft. Along with grammar, but to a greater degree, dialectic was to become the
tool suited to the thinking of the Schoolmen. This is their second trait: they were
dialecticians. Yet the word “dialectician” is equivocal, even from the point of view of its
history, covering, as it does the rationes necessariae [necessary reasons] of Saint Anselm
and the Sic et non of Abelard, the handling of the mystical theme of love by Richard of Saint
Victor and the nominalism of Ockham, the controversies of Berengar of Tours and the
dynamic qualities of Bonaventure’s Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, the angelic soaring of
Aquinas and the subtleties of a Duns Scotus. No modern has condemned with greater show of
truth or in more pitiless terms the dangers of dialectics than a XIIth century John of Salisbury.
Yet, at the time when the second part of Aristotle’s Organon was being brought to light, it
was this same exquisitely cultured John who set up a paean of praise of all the wonderful
fruitfulness of logic, proclaiming that without the Topics, the art of disputing is profitless.
Dialectic, however, had one common denominator: it was an art practiced by all, and by all
held in high esteem.
In point of fact, dialectic was first of all an art, an ars sermocinalis [art of the word], a part of
the trivium concerned with the expressions of thought as distinguished from the quadrivium
with its artes reales [arts of the real] whose objects were things. Even when the Analytics of
Aristotle, with their theory of demonstration, put in their appearance, followed by the De
anima with its psychological explanation of the processes of abstraction, dialectic held its
place as an art—the art of forging and utilizing the tools of discussion, of either convincing or
confounding an adversary. Dialectic was a technique universal in its scope. It was indifferent,
after a fashion, to the subject matter to which it was applied, and it delighted in playing for its
own sake the game of pro et contra [pro and con] in which negation is one of the moments
serving to build up, a response forcing the mind to give its assent. Hence, to raise a question
in dialectical form, or to pose what was called the problema dialecticum [dialectical
problem], was valuable for the very form in which it was cast. Even where, spontaneously,
one would have no thought for disputing, it was still the practice to raise the problem “for the
sake of the form” (a “pro forma” practice, if ever there was one). We shall see in later pages
the technical power of such a procedure to bring about an evolution in literary genre and to
build up a body of doctrines. ‘Still and all, it was a technique, and formalism was an
imminent danger as tending to breed verbiage, “garrulous loquacity,” as Giraud of Barri put
it.
That result was avoided only where dialectic remained applied to objects that are real and
fruitful for the mind—including, first and foremost, the type of object that is religious in
nature. Otherwise, in the words of John of Salisbury’s diagnosis, “...logic, if left to itself, lies
bloodless and sterile, and it does not fecundate the soul to bear the fruits of philosophy, if it
does not conceive from another source.”
Thus, when and where scholastic philosophy came
to take its own particular problems as its proper object, it became a philosophy feeding upon
philosophy rather than one feeding upon reality.
Notwithstanding the afore-mentioned, dialectic supplies science with a formidably powerful
instrument for critical investigation and the mind with an excellent form of exercise, in the
measure that, remaining a method of discussion, it does not try to moult its dress into that of a
universal method overriding the objects of every other discipline. Dialectic, moreover,
weaves itself naturally into the processes, indeed, as it were, into the very tissues of the
intellect. With medieval Schoolmen of Anselm’s and Eckhart’s caliber, it supplied rigorous
logic to even the loftiest of religious elevations, giving the lie to our false modern idea that
there is opposition between mysticism and scholasticism. In Saint Thomas, a sharp awareness
of the relativeness of methods, together with his psychological realism, held down to its role
as a tool, especially in sacra doctrina [sacred doctrine], theology, the formalism of dialectic.
In the course of the XVIth century, Capponi della Porrecta presented the Summa in syllogistic
formularies. His clapping of his master’s text into the armor of dialectic was an act of treason
against his master—and against theology!
The factor, however, that was to intensify the use of dialectic and to give to the scholastic endeavor its specific feature, was the application of it to the understanding of texts. The latter were either single treatises chosen as matter for commentaries or a selection of texts serving as the basis and proof of some speculative construct. Therein lies what we believe to be, both in theology and in philosophy, the decisive trait of the scholastic system’s mental and literary structure. It aimed at building a rational form of thinking, consciously and voluntarily working from texts it held to be authoritative. Here again, however, care must be taken against too summary and too uniform a diagnosis, since, in the actual handling of texts as well as in their evaluation, there were differences that reached even the state of equivocation. Saint Thomas did not treat a text of Aristotle as if it were a text of Scripture. Yet the procedure of working from a text was a general one, whatever the form it actually took. Scholasticism itself was to come to an end on the day when the method of authority was completely thrown overboard as a result of violent reaction against it.
We have just used the phrase method of authority, but it needs an immediate explanation. Let us first resolutely cast aside the simplistic interpretation according to which scholasticism abusively transferred the method proper to theology into the field of the rational disciplines—from grammar all the way up to metaphysics. Scholasticism, in this view, would have applied to the latter the submissive acceptance and rules that the human mind has to observe when it is dealing with the word of God. We are not questioning here the fact that in this or that author there is a contamination of this sort, in a civilization in which the sense of the sacred saturated and made everything holy, from the oath swom by the serf to the workings of the mind itself. In the aforementioned, however, there is neither the expression of a true cause nor of a general practice. Saint Thomas bent every effort at extricating the laws proper to human reason, as well as the methodological autonomy of the sciences, while applying an ontology to nature and to grace. Even the Augustinian Bonaventure cannot be said to have confused philosophy and theology.
The scholasticism of the Medievals cannot, moreover, be defined as a system intent upon subordinating intellectual life to religious life and building up a speculative system with the essential objective of bringing philosophy into immediate harmony with Christian dogma—or with Moslem dogma, if one were speaking of Moslem scholasticism. Yes, the men of the Middle Ages did pursue a particular scientific ideal, a conception of the world, according to which the resources of all the various sciences together would be committed to a superior and unique wisdom. Think what one may about this dream, just as one may think what one may about the dream of political unity, the fact remains that the design to build up a system of thought respecting as an integral part the religious problem or even a posited revelation, is not an attitude exclusive to the system of the Schoolmen. Any number of other philosophies, some deistic, some mystical, some simply rationalistic, share in this sort of preoccupation. Spinoza, for one, was certainly not a Schoolman; Leibnitz, for another, made wide the room for religious speculation. On the other hand, Origen and Augustine both professed to work out Christian dogma with the help of their respective philosophic resources; yet, they were not Scholastics.
If the Schoolmen chose to labor over texts and to practice a method of authority, the reason will be found in the internal unfolding of medieval civilization and of the means at its disposal to carry out its task. We have seen how, in the medieval West, the successive stages involved in the cultural growth of the era were ruled by the progressive, yet uncoordinated, discovery of the literary, scientific, and esthetic riches of ancient Greece and Rome. The IXth century, the XIIth and XIIIth centuries, and the Quattrocento, despite shifts in balance and interruptions, were the historical centers in this recovery. The one feature common to all these resurrections, these re-naissances, was naive curiosity aroused in the minds of men by the new treasures offered to their appetites. Imitation of the Ancients, their childlike or deliberate enchantment, now became the foundation of the new culture and, in the schools, the guiding principle of academic activity. The general run of people grew dull under the weight of imitation, but a number of men, creative geniuses, held high sway over it by the inalienable force of their personalities. Yet both the former and the latter had one thing in common—their techniques. In grammar, rhetoric, science, law, and philosophy, the auctores [authors] were the permanent source of speculation. Even the most novel inspirations were keen to clothe themselves with their accredited standing. We shall have occasion to see the kind of treatment these auctores were gradually subjected to, through the sifting process of dialectical critique, from Abelard’s Sic et Non to the expositio reverentialis [reverential exposition] so widely practiced by Saint Thomas. One can already foresee how great a relativeness we shall have to record in our survey of this treatment. Yet we are already in a position to conclude that, in such cultural wrappings, the “commentary” was the literary prototype in which all intellectual effort was to be bedded. The past, philosophical or otherwise, will have become part of current thought, through the exposition of “authentic” texts, even after the literature of questions and disputes will have swarmed over the literal commentary. In the literary whole of Saint Thomas’s works, the first and essential portion is made up of commentaries: on the Lombard, on Aristotle, on Boethius, on Dionysius. In the more personal of his works, just as in those of all other Schoolmen, each step forward is adorned with some text known to be authoritative. Hence arises the disconcerting effect on the modem eye of the textual machinery with whose help medieval thought unfolds itself. It is always a risky business to get one’s science from books (or to give oneself up to the routine of imitation). The history of scholasticism (of the Renaissance as well) and of its later decay bears this out. Nevertheless the clumsiness of later scholasticism does not lessen the value of its first discoveries, arising as they did from the Schoolmen’s unsophisticated trustfulness and their power of inventiveness.
Curiously paradoxical as it may seem, the scholastic method of authority was allied, in fact, to an extreme confidence in the power of reason. If testimony for this were required, one would need only point out the Schoolmen’s use and abuse of dialectic and of its dissecting method. Today, those who reproach them for their parrotting of authorities are the very ones to take them to task, a few moments later, for their intemperate use of reason. The problem is that of faith and reason. Let us drop the cliche’s with which XIXth century apologetics has cluttered our minds. In the Middle Ages, the matter of balance between them was completely different and was defined not from a peevish partitioning of their sovereign domains but rather from the observant bringing together of their resources and methods, both in philosophy and in theology.
A type of scholasticism will arise in which the roles of faith and reason will be reversed and confused. Everyone knows the famous passage in which Father André, the biographer of Malebranche, describes his young friend’s reaction of shock when he came in contact with the teaching methods of the day:
Since he had the habit of reflection from his earliest years, this is what he found
bizarre in the methods then prevalent in the schools. In philosophy, where everything
must be within the province of reason, he was asked to feed himself on the authority
of Aristotle; in theology, on the other hand, where the authority of God must be the
sole prop, he was invited to feed on reasons, or rather, on the reasonings of reason,
which, as a rule, are anything but reasonable. And there he stood, disgusted once
again with the School.
We share this disgust. At the same time, however, we expressly deny that Saint Thomas (like Anselm, Bonaventure, and others) had any solidarity whatsoever with this “baroque” kind of scholasticism.
Among all, Saint Thomas was the master who gave reason its due and who vigorously marked off in the life of the mind the boundaries between authority and reason. All medieval Schoolmen were motivated by a confidence in reason, which the thrusts of the enemies of dialectic—from Peter Damian to Saint Bernard—were unable to unsettle. As early as the XIth century, Berengar of Tours, after recalling the nice things that Augustine had said in praise of dialectical practice, continued:
It is surely a sign of a great heart to have recourse to dialectic in all things, because
to make appeal to it, is to appeal to reason. Consequently, since man is made in the
image of God because of his reason, he who does not have recourse to reason
relinquishes his own dignity and is unable to restore himself, from day to day, in the
image of God.
That surely is an expression of human and Christian nobleness of spirit which will later become fully conscious of its intellectual scope within a metaphysics of nature. Medieval humanism is the expression of this true naturalism. Once again Aristotle was at home in the Christian world.
To the foregoing, finally, add the power of creativeness. For anyone unable to penetrate the
arcana of medieval pedagogy, it should be sufficient to accept for a fact that the peoples of
that age had the spirit of the young. The men who built the cathedrals could hardly become
bogged down in the writing of commentaries. They built summas. As we have already said,
imitation of the Ancients did not snuff out inspiration, especially religious inspiration. The
medieval rebirth and the Gospel movement were creative movements, within the renovatio
temporis [renovation of the day] of which Francis of Assisi and Thomas of Aquino became
the masters. The word “tradition” had not yet become weighted down with meanings
consequent upon the Protestant controversies nor by the appearance of philosophies whose
model is found in de Bonald. Whatever fideistic movements arose during the era simply
served to mar the features of the medieval countenance. Whether the Medievals did little
thinking about their own dynamic qualities, and whether they were wanting in historical
sense, at times they had astonishingly strong foresights about the progressive elements that
tend to stir up the successive generations of humanity. “...We shall never discover truth if we
content ourselves with what has already been discovered... Those who wrote before us were
not our lords but our guides. Truth is evident to all, but man has not yet taken possession of
it.” These are the words of Guibert of Tournai, a modest Franciscan of the XIVth century, in
his treatise On the method of learning.
John of Salisbury had already said, “... finding comes
after seeking, and no one displeased with study can harvest the fruit of science.”
Everyone
knows the admirable formula in which Bernard, master of the younger generations of students
at the school of Chartres, united tradition with progress. “Bernard of Chartres used to say that
we are like dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants, so as to see more and farther than they
do, not as a result of our own sharpness of vision or bodily height, but because we are carried
aloft and elevated on their gigantic stature.”
When it turned its back on such axioms,
scholasticism, however magnificent its bodily structure, simply died.
Saint Thomas was a scholastic philosopher, not, indeed, because he maintained a certain number of theses that were the stock-in-trade of a philosophia perennis [perennial philosophy] nor because he endeavored to bring faith and reason into a working harmony. Rather he was such because, past master in the reading of the Ancients—Aristotle, Dionysius (Oh that be would have known Plato!)—he made all the intellectual treasures of the Ancients his own, exploiting them with the resources of dialectics. Yet Aristotle’s logic and psychology kept him from falling into the pit of vain pettyfogging. He shaped into the forms and words common in his day the most personal of his thoughts, even to the extent of giving a mistaken impression to an inexperienced reader. His Disputed Questions testify that the scholastic style is capable of fullness in literary development and forms. His much more stripped-down Summa, on the other hand, offers the masterpiece in the genre characteristic of the School—the “Summa” or systematic encyclopedia of any given science.
Saint Thomas was above all a scholastic theologian. Let us expel the idea, modern in its origin and still plaguing us today, that there was an opposition between scholastic and positive theology. Controversy against Protestantism, and later against rationalism, has brought about, as a result of the demands of polemic, a dislocation of that internal unity of theological knowledge within which Saint Thomas and his contemporaries labored—I was going to say, breathed. Saint Thomas was a master of theology, he commented upon Scripture. This doctrinal exegesis represented not only the teaching required by his office but the ground from which all vital force arose into his science. Sometimes, as was the fashion in his day, the citations from the Bible with which his writings are sown are no more than ornamental. Yet the very pith of his work was scriptural, and his theology had at its roots the Gospel movement of his day, just as it did the renaissance movement of which it was one of the effects. By facing the very demands put before him by this candid and hearty faith, Saint Thomas sought out faith’s intelligibility. By discerning within the contents of revelation an internal and objective hierarchy of truths and of their reasons for being so, he was able somehow to reconstruct in his own mind and in its own rational form the knowledge that God has of Himself and of His works. It was under the very pressure of the auditus fidei [hearing of faith] (the scientific state of which is now called positive theology) that the intellectus fidei [understanding of faith] (the scientific state of which is now called speculative theology) began and developed. Whence followed the perfect stature and spiritual richness of theology. Its fountain-head was, according to the various levels of this understanding of revelation, the trust that faith placed in the resources of human reason, extending from dialectic to metaphysics. Herein is the characteristic proper to scholastic theology, the abiding richness of the Thomistic system, the lovely fruit of the only renaissance that succeeded in the Western Christian world.
Chapter II
Works of Saint Thomas and their Literary Forms
1. Thought and Literary Form
After a presentation in general outline of the broad cultural contexts of the life-work of Saint Thomas, it may seem that it is taking things from too far afield to begin a study of his works from an examination of their literary forms. In the very measure that they are works of the mind and the expression of a philosophy and of a wisdom, do they not lie beyond the reaches of any craft? Are they not free in their means of expression? Are they not like something detached and standing at a lofty distance away from stylistic artifice and convention?
In point of fact, however, such thinking is illusory and fundamentally a psychological error about the way even the most pure type of thinking is bound up with the modest tool of language and its processes. Embodied in language, a system of thought may only thus be grasped, that is, within the very formulae it has adopted and within the structures with which it has fitted itself out. The forms and structures of language are not neutral or interchangeable garments that must, as quickly as possible, be put aside. They are the permanent support of thought, so that by examining the forms in which a mind is dressed, one has a good chance of discovering its very inner workings. As a matter of fact, even in its general features, literary form is bound up with the way a mind goes about its thinking. Plato wrote dialogues, and with him, the myth-form was a tool of expression intimately bound up with his most profound intuitions. It was a tool, so to speak, substantially one with his genius. Augustine wrote “confessions,” while Dionysius employed symbols, not as a mere literary whim, but rather to translate his own vision of the world. Saint Thomas wrote no dialogues, he wrote commentaries. He wrote no confessions, he gave us a summa. Due to his upbringing in the scholastic “craft,” he tended to expunge symbols, except for those which classroom use had conventionalized and thereby rendered neutral. All his writings were the direct or indirect outcome of his professional work as a teacher. This fact cannot be immaterial.
Within the bounds of his craft as a Schoolman, however, the writings of Saint Thomas are nevertheless diversified. It is important to recognize that they vary in technique in accordance with teaching methods themselves. One cannot read one of his commentaries on Aristotle in the same manner that one would read one of his commentaries on Scripture. His Disputed Questions contain resources far different, both in power and in quality, from those found in the exactly corresponding sections of the Summa theologiae. As a literary construction, any one of his Quodlibeta is disconcerting for the modern mind.
Let us then first examine the general procedures of exposition that were applied in the university teaching of the XIIIth century. With this as a starting point, we shall then take up the several types of works that Saint Thomas composed.
II. The Procedures of Exposition
The “style” of the Scholastics in its development as well as in its modes of expression can be reduced, as if to its simple elements, to three procedures. These followed progressively one upon the other and typify, moreover, both their historical genesis and their progress in technique. First came the lectio [reading]; from the reading was developed the quaestio [question]; from the question, the disputatio [disputation]; and in summas, the “article,” somewhat as the residue of the disputed question, became the literary component.
1. The lectio
The entire medieval pedagogy was based on the reading of texts, and in the universities, scholasticism gave this type of work institutional form and enlarged upon it.
“One who aspires to wisdom should therefore apply himself to reading, learning, and
meditation,” wrote John of Salisbury,
while Hugh of Saint Victor observed: “There are two
things in particular by which one is instructed for knowledge: namely, reading and
meditation.”
Whereas meditatio meant that by an assimilative process that was strictly
personal one tended toward a grasp of the deeper nature of things not yet well known, lectio
and doctrina were concerned with the handing over of a body of knowledge already
discovered. Whereas doctrina stood for the complex of the means of instruction, by lectio
was meant the process of acquiring science by means of the reading of texts. “Reading is the
process of becoming informed in rules and precepts, from a study of written texts.”
There
was the lectio of the master, or the magistral reading (lego librum illi); the lectio of the pupil,
or the discipular reading (lego librum ab illo); and the lectio that was done in private, or the
personal reading (lego librum).
To teach meant to read, that is: to read in the technical sense.
The professor “read” his text. The course that he gave was called a lectio; and he himself was
referred to expressly as lector [reader]. When the teaching of Aristotle was put under a ban,
the wording of the decree of prohibition forbade that his works be “read,” that is, taught either
publicly or in private, leaving open the question of their being studied by the individual on his
own.
The old monastic term lectio, as found in the 48th chapter of the Rule of Saint
Benedict, thus came to new life in a cultural and academic meaning.
If the word reading came to have this renovation in meaning, and if there was such a
broadening out of the thing it stood for a broadening far beyond the learning potential derived
from ordinary book reading—the reason lies in the recovery of the works of Antiquity and the
prodigious success that they enjoyed. Men were anxious to explore these treasures, with the
result that the latter became objects of study, that is, texts used in the teaching program of the
day. Previously, in theology, the object of study was found in Scripture, the bearer of
Revelation. The normal and in principle the necessary procedure for learning was to study the
text itself of the Scriptures. Now, however, without any rule of religious belief compelling
adhesion to their contents, other texts became the official matter in all the various fields of
instruction. These the university enrolled, little by little, in the academic programs of study
and required the book-dealers to place available copies of them at the student’s disposal for a
fixed sum.
In grammar, the auctores were Donatus whose Ars Minor and Ars Major presented in a single manual grammatical knowledge in two stages, and Priscian, whose Institutiones furnished the student with a basic text that was at once clear, solid, and abundant. In rhetoric, it was Cicero with his De Inventione, and the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium, along with Quintilian and his Institutio Oratoria. In medicine, the texts were those of Galen and Constantine the African; in law, the various books of the Corpus Juris; and in philosophy, those of Porphyry and Boethius.
Gradually, texts began multiplying. After 1215, it soon became the general practice in
theology to read the Sentences of Peter Lombard before the Scriptures. The future master in
theology was required to have done a public reading of the Sentences, as in the case of Saint
Thomas arriving at Paris, and having to exercise the office of “Bachelor of the Sentences” for
a two-year period (1254-1256). In grammar, new texts set to verse supplanted those of
Priscian: the Doctrinale of Alexander of Villedieu (1199), and the Graecismus of Evrard of
Béthune (1212). Similarly in science, medicine, and other fields, recently discovered and
translated books, like the Canon of Avicenna and the De Animalibus of Aristotle invaded the
areas. In philosophy, it was all of Aristotle, and one can discern the various stages in the
spread of his thought by the successive enrollment of his books on the program of studies.
The entrance of his De Anima on the curriculum of the faculty of arts in 1252 marked the
official breaking of the barrier that, with not too much efficacy however, had been set up
against him for some forty years. We have the tax lists that were drawn up for the stationarii
or book-dealers at Paris in 1275 (?) and 1303
and at Bologna in 1289.
These lists give the
names of the required textbooks for the various courses, along with the publications of
professors then actually teaching. Thus, even down to the material details of the institution
the regime which we have described took on concrete form. In it, thinking developed around
an auctoritas, that is to say, around some text held to be the authoritative expression on the
subject that it dealt with. This was scholasticism, the endproduct of the discovery and rebirth
of ancient learning.
As a consequence, we can practically measure the upsurge of work at the universities of the
XIIIth century by noting the progress in both quantity and quality of the texts of the auctores.
Yet, at the same time, one can foresee that these same texts, playing the important part that
they did, were quickly to become a source of stagnation from the moment that the school
people limited themselves to their pages as if they contained the ultimate in science. Instead
of being the means to open the mind to a knowledge of objects, of realities, the tendency was
to consider them themselves as the “objects” of learning. Thus, science in medicine meant to
know, not the human body but the Canon of Avicenna. Knowledge in grammar was to know,
not the actual living speech of men but Priscian. Philosophical knowledge meant to learn
Aristotle, instead of trying to discover the laws that govern the phenomena of nature, and the
causes that explain all being. Away with reality, if it is not found in our books! The
commentator allowed himself to be taken in by his own game. Having lost little by little his
power of discovery, he condemned in principle anyone so imprudent as to find anything in
contradiction to his book. We know what degree of obtusion the medical doctors reached
when confronted with the anatomical discoveries of the XVth century and how the
philosophers at Padua, fanatical followers of the Stagirite, rose up in condemnation of the
theories of the new physics. Scholasticism died under the annihilating load of its texts. These
texts, riddled throughout with artificial exegesis, overburdened, tortured to meaninglessness,
were drained of every drop of live-giving sap. In fact, the very first plank in the platform of
the XVth century Renaissance was: “Back to sources,” that is to say, back to the reading of
the originals over and beyond the commentaries. Could there be any greater derision against
the School, born of these same sources? Descartes, for instance, protested that he wanted to
write “meditations,” and no longer “questions”.
Before the decay set in, however, the lectio, in itself and later in the “questions” in which
authentic scholasticism reached its triumph, had run a magnificent course. In the language of
Varro who had handed down the practice of the ancient grammatici (grammarians] as
interpreters of texts, the term lectio stood for nothing more than a modest exercise in reading.
It prepared for the emendatio, the enarratio, and the judicium, all elements of an analytical
commentary touching upon both form and content and issuing in an aesthetic judgment.
In
the Middle Ages, the lectio covered, both in surface and in depth, this whole field of study.
As the academic techniques became better established, the lectio became more and more
diversifled—ranging from the simple verbal annotation that was inserted as a “gloss” between
the lines (glossa interlinearis) or in the margins (glossa marginalis) of manuscripts, all the
way up to the ample expositio [exposition] which was a uniform and continuous commentary.
As early as the year 1215, the statutes of the University of Paris distinguished between two
ways of reading Aristotle’s texts: one read ordinarie [in the ordinary way], wherein a full
exposition was given, or one read cursorie [in the cursory way], that is, in rapid style and not
pushing beyond an understanding of the letter of the text.
Completely fitted out, the lectio unfolded in three layers of textual consideration: the littera,
which was a simple explanation of the words and phrases of the text, according to the tenor of
their immediate interconnection; second, the sensus, in which the meanings of the various
elements in the passage were analyzed and reformulated in clear language; and third, the
sententia, in which there was an endeavor to infer, beyond everything that exegesis had
brought out, the depth of thought contained in the text and its true meaning. “What else,”
asked Robert of Melun, “is sought after in the reading of a text, if not its inner meaning which
is called sententia?.”
At each layer, the quality of the exegetical work depended on the
precision and the insight of the commentator. Under its apparent limitations, the lectio, as we
shall see (in chapter IV), exhibited an astonishing degree of plasticity. Taken as a whole,
however, the method of reading tended to remain completely analytic. The text was mastered
by a successive grasp of its elements rather than in its entirety, that is as a total organism. It is
something of an embarrassment for us to see how Saint Thomas, following the fashion of his
day, breaks down, divides, and subdivides an epistle of Saint Paul. Yet, over and beyond this
parcelling of the text, be, more than the others, disengaged its general idea.
2. The birth of the quaestio
It is quite natural that, in any reading of a text, one should pause here and there before some
obscure word, or some more difficult thought, which suddenly raises questions. Where the
reading has been organized as a schoolroom exercise as was the medieval situation, these
problems, which confer contrasts in a text as it unfolds, become the occasion for active
research and more extensive elaboration. It is in this way that the medieval literary form of
quaestiones came to emerge from the lectio. Early in the days of the Church, and apart from
the running commentaries that were made on the Bible, there had already grown up a
literature of quaestiones et responsiones [questions and answers] in which particular
problems bordering upon or even overreaching the text were discussed and doctrinal research
went beyond exegesis.
The medieval lectio, in like manner, was to give rise to quaestiones
that went beyond the mere explaining of the texts, the latter, however, still furnishing the
substance with which they dealt. In these quaestiones, together with the resources of the
ancient dialectic and later of demonstrative logic, came into play the great complex of
problems instigated during the XIIIth century by the entrance of Aristotle and the new surge
of inquisitiveness in theological matters. With the “questions,” scholasticism reached the
peak of its development. In them, it found the literary medium best answering its creative
inspiration in philosophy as in theology.
At the level of the text, there were several sources out of which questions could develop. One
could be the vagueness of some expression calling for more precision; another, the clashing
of two interpretations; and still another, the opposition between two “authorities” giving
contrary solutions on the same problem. The last-named situation extended beyond the
immediate exegesis of the text. With a view to personally enlarging on a doctrine, two
contradictory texts, or even two authors, were summoned into the discussion: “... some
[various sayings of the Fathers], apparently at loggerheads with one another, giving rise to a
question,” as Abelard had expressed it.
Yet, much ground was covered after the latter’s Sic
et Non had expressedly introduced dialectic to obtain this purpose. Due partly to the
progressive demands of the mind and partly to the added refinement that was given to the
tools of speculation, the stage of textual exegesis was decidedly left behind. In its place, the
various doctrines proposed by the text were treated in themselves, and soon after, other new
problems as they gradually emerged.
Following upon this first shift in the center-line of work, a generalization of the already
developed technique came to be added. it became no longer a simple question of submitting
to research those problems already under discussion or still open to debate. Even the points
accepted by everybody and set forth in the most certain of terms were brought under scrutiny
and subjected, by deliberate artifice, to the now usual processes of research. In brief, they
were, literally speaking, “called into question,” no longer because there was any real doubt
about their truth, but because a deeper understanding of them was sought after. Theologians
as well as philosophers asked the question: Does God exist? Is the soul spiritual? Should a
person honor his parents? etc. Yet, of the question, only the form remained,
with the typical
word Utrum [Whether] everywhere, and over and over again employed.
Therein was a progress in technique of capital importance, out of which scholasticism, both in
its deep mental outlook and in its writing procedures, came to be built up. An illustration of it
may be seen in the case of the young man who can be said to have begun leading a life of the
mind when, at the time of his intellectual puberty, he starts “calling into question” (in the
sense already mentioned) anything that heretofore be had accepted in a purely passive
manner. Western reason, even in theology, had reached the state of adulthood. From this
point on, a professor was no longer an exegete alone, he was a master who, to employ the
word then in use, “determined” the questions. He did this no longer by bringing authorities
into play—a process that would only leave the mind empty despite its acceptance in
obedience and certitude—but rather by appeal to reasons that would display to the mind the
roots of things. In these very terms Saint Thomas, in his famous fourth Quodlibet (a. 18),
defined the working status of the theologian, as of one whose task it is, once he has taken
possession of the datum of revelation, to build up into a “science” the intelligibility of his
faith.
Of a generalized calling-into-question of this nature, such was the gravity, such equally the
grandeur. Yet, such was also to be the risk, for, standing next to the technique would be the
danger of dialectical formalism, due to come into play as soon as the question procedure
would become an end in itself without a further thought given to real objects in and
throughout the texts. If one should entertain any doubts about the extent of an operation of
this sort, one need only review—from the invectives of Roger Bacon to the troubled
entreaties of Pope Gregory IX
—the resistance at times angry or stubborn, at times
intelligent or obtuse, according to the writer’s temperament—that it provoked in the field of
theology, the field par excellence of authority.
3. The evolution of the question: the disputatio
It was in the nature of things that the question should detach itself, little by little, from the text
from which it had originated, and that it should come to be set up in a form of its own,
independent of the lectio. It is not our object here to follow the course of this evolution, the
successive stages of which have been shown to be, in theology: Robert of Melun’s
Quaestiones de divina pagina (around 1145), Odo of Soisson’s Quaestiones (around 1164),
and Simon of Tournai’s Disputationes (around 1201).
Suffice it to note that this achieving
of literary independence was the outward sign that autonomy had also been reached in matters
of doctrinal research and of scientific curiosity. Problems and their solution were no longer
bound up with a text.
Another feature of this evolution needs to be expressly indicated. Two or more masters,
regardless of whether they might be in agreement or disagreement, took a hand in the positing
and resolving of questions. Here again, it was normal that, in the face of a problem, divergent
views should be held. Yet, in the present case, this divergence was to be given an institutional
form in a university exercise. Things so developed that apart from the lectio, which by the
same token resumed its more simple exegetic character, special exercises were held during
which one of the masters submitted, in the presence of the school body, some question of
current interest to be discussed with his fellow-masters. Objections were raised, points
discussed, retorts flung back, with the debate finally coming to an end with the master in
charge giving his own conclusion or “determination” on the question. Picture the renewal in
liveliness in sessions of this sort and what they did for competition in research! They
produced the “disputed question”.
One recalls here the famous incident in the career of
Saint Thomas at the moment when the intellectual crisis, centered around the condemnation
of Aristotelianism, had reached a peak of acuteness at the University of Paris. Brother John
Peckham, master regent of the Friars Minor, rose up against Brother Thomas Aquinas, master
regent of the Friar Preachers, and in the presence of all the masters and bachelors, sharply
criticized “in pompous and inflated terms” the account he had just given of the Aristotelian
theory of the unity of forms.
It is difficult to say at what exact date this sort of exercise first appeared and how often it was held. One thing, however, is certain; in the middle of the XIIIth century, a master’s responsibility at the faculty of theology included a threefold duty: legere, disputare, praedicare [to read, “to dispute,” to preach]. In fact, when Saint Thomas assumed the duties of the masterate, the two types of teaching (leaving out the question of preaching) were expressly marked off from each other and set up in institutional form. It is doubtful, however, that the number of “disputations” was fixed, although the master was required to give his lectio every day. Father Mandonnet describes the sort of event that the disputation had come to be at the faculty of theology.
When a master disputed, all the morning lectures of the other masters and bachelors on the faculty were dispensed with. Only the master who was to conduct the dispute gave a short lecture, in order to allow time for the audience to arrive. Then the dispute began: and it took up a more or less considerable part of the morning. All the bachelors of the faculty as well as the students of the master who was disputing had to be present at the exercise. The other masters and students, it would appear, were left free to do so; but there is small doubt that they too showed up, in numbers that depended on the reputation of the master and on the topic that was being discussed. The clergy of Paris, the prelates and other Church dignitaries who happened to be at the capital at the time, were quite willing to attend these academic jousts that passionately absorbed the contemporary mind. A dispute was a tournament for the clergy.
The question to come under debate was fixed in advance by the master who was in charge of the disputation. Both the disputation and the day on which it was to be held were announced in the other schools of the faculty. The matters argued by one and the same master rnight vary widely, ecause, under ordinary circumstances, a professor held only a small number of annual disputations...
The disputation was controlled by the master, but, strictly speaking, he was not the one who did the actual disputing. Rather, his bachelor assumed the task of replying, thus starting his apprenticeship in exercises of this sort. The objections usually represented different currents of thought, and were first formulated by the masters present, then by the bachelors, and finally, if the situation warranted it, by the students. The bachelor gave response to the arguments proposed, and, if need be, got help from the master. Such, in a summary way, were the main features of an ordinary dispute. They made up, hower only the first part of the exercise—though the principal and most lively part.
The objections, put forth and solved in the course of the disputation without any pre-arranged order, presented in the end a doctrinal matter that stood in quite a state of disorder, resembling, however, much less debris scattered over a battlefield, than half-worked materials laid out across a construction job. That is why, in addition to this first session of doctrinal elaboration, a second one was held. It was called the “magisterial determination.”
On the first “reading” day, to use the language of the time, that is, on the first day when the master who had conducted the disputation was able to lecture (a Sunday, a feast day, or some other obstacle could prevent him from doing so on the day that followed his disputation), he went over, in his own school, the material over which the disputation had been held the day or a few days before. First, he co-ordinated, as far as the matter would allow, in logical order or sequence, the objections which had been opposed to his thesis, and cast them in definite form. These were followed by a few arguments in favor of the doctrinal position which he was going to propose. He then passed on to a more or less extended exposé of his own doctrine on the question under debate. This exposition furnished the core and essence of his determination. He wound up by replying to each objection that had been stated against the doctrine of his thesis.
This second act, following on the disputation,
was known as the determinatio
[determination], because the master determined, that is, gave an authoritative
formulation of the doctrine that had to be held. To determine or define a doctrine
was the right or privilege of those who held the title of master. A bachelor did not
have the authority to perform such an act.
The acts of determination, set down in writing by the master or an auditor, make up
the writings that we call the Disputed Questions, and the latter represent the final
part of a disputation. A disputed question, then, is not a sort of recording or a
stenographic account of the disputation itself, but rather, of the determination of the
master. Through the disputed question [as we have it], however, we are able to
recognize the objections being raised against the doctrine of the master, the bachelor,
and, when necessary, the master himself, arguing, for it in reply—and again, in some
instances, certain particularities that showed up in some disputations and which have
been preserved in the edited determination.
4. The quaestio de quolibet
A very original type of disputed question sprang forth and developed in the same style from
within that literary genre, and we modems have been even more trouble trying to get the right
idea about it. Even if it is only in a very sketchy way, an examination of the physionomy of
the disputation de quolibet, or quodlibetal disputation, as it is called, will have its advantages,
first because Saint Thomas was one of those who pioneered in its use, and again because,
through this type of disputation, it becomes possible to complete the picture of the intense
vitality animating the medieval university milieu, especially that of Paris, where it was
brilliantly successful.
Twice a year, near Christmas and Easter, in the faculties of arts, law, medicine, but especially in the faculty of theology, the masters were free to hold a disputation in which the choosing of the subjects to be debated was left to the initiative of the members of the audience, who could raise any problem they liked. In the phrase of Humbert of Romans, it was a disputation “on anything at anyone’s will” (23). The Medievals spoke of it as a “general” disputation. In it were raised the most diverse and ill-assorted questions, ranging from the highest speculations in metaphysics all the way down to the small problems of public or private everyday life. All this was left to the initiative of anyone in the audience. The multiplying of questions lacking all unity in subject and altogether unforeseeable, coming as they did from the audience, was enough to give rather a strange air to the session itself, and no less to its results which have been preserved in the master’s “determination.” This kind of session was a hard one to conduct, and many a master refused to risk himself at it, or felt satisfied when he had done so once in his career. This explains why we have so few large collections of quodlibeta.
The session began around the hour of Terce perhaps, or of Sext; in any case, quite early in the
morning, since there was the risk that it would go on for a long time. In fact, what
characterized it was the capricious and off-hand manner in which it unfolded, along with an
ever-present uncertainty hovering over the proceedings. It was no doubt devoted to disputing
and argumenting like so many others, but with this special feature that the master had lost the
initiative in bringing up the matter for discussion which now rested with the members of the
audience. In ordinary disputes, the master had announced beforehand the subjects everyone
would be occupied with; he had had time to mull them over, and to prepare them. In the
quodlibetal dispute, it was everyone’s privilege to raise any kind of problem at all. Herein lay
the great danger for the master who was host to the affair. The questions or objections could
come from every direction, and it mattered not at all if they sprang from hostility, simple
inquisitiveness, or cunning. One could question the master in all good faith, simply to know
his opinion, but one could also try to have him contradict himself, or oblige him to give his
own views on burning subjects he would prefer never to touch upon. At one time, It would be
some inquisitive stranger or some apprhensive worrier; at another, it was a jealous rival or a
curious master attempting to put him in bad straits. In some instances, the problems were
clearcut and interesting; in others, the questions were ambiguous and the master had great
trouble in seeing their full import and understanding their real meaning. Some questioners
would candidly confine themselves to a strictly intellectual level, while others nurtured some
secret thought of diplomacy or of disparagement... Anyone, therefore, willing to hold a
general disputation must have a presence of mind quite out of the common, and a competency
almost universal in its scope.
The interesting thing about these disputes was less the fullness of doctrinal exposition they gave occasion to than the incidental and current character of the questions and answers. Positions were adopted from one session to another—right at the heart of conflicts between doctrines and persons, right in the midst of the liveliness caused by the competing of different ideologies. A study of the cross-indications supplied by these conflicts and competition (the chronology of which is so precious for the historian) permits one to establish methodically the successive stages in the evolution of the problems and to grasp the immediate and precise reactions of authors. In Saint Thomas’s day, these exercises were in the best state of balance they were ever to know, for soon, at least in their written form, they were to fall into lengthiness, yielding to amplification and subtleness, and no longer giving a true idea of the living reality which had formerly given rise to them.
5. The construction of an “article”
Within this perspective of the question and disputation we have to understand, in its
construction and dynamic qualities, that unit which in scholastic works is still today called an
articulus [article]. Through this unit, the Schoolmen drafted and developed their doctrines in
their works comprehensive of a whole subject, such as, for example, their collections of
disputed questions, or their summas.
The Summa theologiae of Saint Thomas, for instance,
is not made up of chapters, but of articles.
What is an “article”?
It is an account reducing to simple elements and expressing in
schematic form for the benefit of the students all the work that was required to raise, discuss,
and solve a question under dispute. First of all and properly speaking, it is a question. Circa
primum quaeritur ... [Concerning the first it is asked ... ]: such were the words that served to
introduce an article, and here the word quaeritur [it is asked] must be taken in its technical
sense. It is charged with the same impelling pressure towards research as was the apropia
[problem] in Aristotle (Metaph., B, 1, 995a24-b4), confirmation of which we find in the
strong formulation of Boethius: “A question is a proposition carrying doubt.”
Hence the
vigorous sense of the scholastic Utrum with which, invariably and to the point of monotony,
the Schoolmen opened each one of their articles.
From this starting point, the pro and con are brought into play, not with the intention of
finding an immediate answer, but in order that, under the action of dubitatio [doubt], research
be pushed to its limit. A satisfactory explanation will be given only on the condition that one
continue the search to the discovery of what caused the doubt, Therein is the dialegesqai
(disputare). It should be well understood that in stating the pro and con the arguments are not,
at least where the technique is employed to perfection, simply lined up and juxtaposed one
after another. On the contrary, they are interlocked with the purpose of leading the mind on to
the knottiest part of the problem. Sic proceditur [In this manner does one proceed] means, we
are going to reason, to discuss. In the language of the times, arguere [to argue], argumentari
[to offer arguments], objicere [to set forth] are words all synonomous with the term
disputare, so that obiicere and objectio [setting forth] do not, in themselves and always, have
the meaning that the word “objection” today denotes. Objicere is to inducere rationes [bring
in reasons] in favor of the one or the other part; it is not to oppose a fact or an argument
against a previously established thesis. If the latter were the case, things would be reversed
insofar as the dynamics of the dialectical process are concerned. Such a reversal, harmless in
appearance, would destroy the cogency for inquiry which is pressing continuously from one
end to the other the pro and contra proposed in the quaestio, and which leads the mind on to
its highest working pitch. An objection, in the modern sense of the word, would be, in XIIIth
century style, an instantia, an obviatio, words indicating resistance. The medieval
“objection,” on the contrary, was in reference to the open quest of a problem’s intelligibility,
in-ducere rationes. We insist on this very exact attitude which has been
obliterated—annoyingly—by formalism in the case of some modern interpretations.
If we
understand things in this way, we shall avoid misinterpreting the Sed contra [On the
contrary]—as we see almost always done. The Sed contra, in itself, is the expression neither
of the author’s thesis nor of an argument borrowed from some authority as the foundation of
his own position. In itself, the sed contra is the presentation of the alternate position, an
expression of rationes quae sunt ad oppositum [the reasons which stand for the other
position].
The arguments in the second sequence are not proposed against those of the first
series; they are given in favor of the second part of the alternative, and it is only
indirectly that they are in opposition with those expressed in favor of the first part.
The part in the article which is directly in opposition with the arguments rejected
from the viewpoint of the thesis which the determination established, is the one
which contains the answers that follow the body of the article, the responsiones ad
objecta, that is, the answers to the arguments (in the sense already established)
which diverge from the thesis, no matter if they be from the first or from the second
series.
And the stage is set for the master to “answer.” Respondeo dicendum [I answer that it must be said]: the answer will contain whatever must be stated in order that the doubt raised by the question be dispelled. Herein is the body of the article in which are expounded at least the principles from which the author would solve the problem if not always the organically structured doctrine he holds. The author’s solution is called his determinatio of the question. Always the perspective is that of a disputation; and ever present in the background also, is the Aristotelian technique of diorizein [determining] and diorismoj [determination], working in depth.
The master’s answer to those of the proposed arguments that, in one part (sometimes in both parts) of the alternative, do not agree with the position be has just stated are usually given in the form of a distinction, since rarely is the opposing position simply rejected. Rather the master marks off upon what share of truth this position is founded. He distinguishes in it that aspect or that viewpoint which has been successfully grasped: Haec ratio procedit de ... [This reason proceeds from ... ]. In a way, there is an effort to embody the truth that the opposing position contains within a wider framework which, far from casting it aside, underwrites its truthfulness. This valuable piece of observation will again turn up when we set out to define through what processes of construction Saint Thomas built up his works.
Such, then, is the inner meaning of those formulas whose fate it was to become stereotyped. In historical fact, they were actually brimming with life as they were used in a disputing of questions. This same life—the very life of a mind at work—they kept in the articles drawn up in the silence of a cell. For an article is a quaestio, not a thesis, the word that was to be used in the manuals of modern scholasticism. The change in terms is in itself a denunciation of the heinous reversal to which have been subjected the exalted pedagogical methods set up in the XIIth century universities: “active” methods, mindful to keep open, even under the dead-weight of school work, the curiosity of both the student and the master.
Let us make no mistake about it. Concerning the medieval school, which was so impulsive
and tumultuous in its reactions, we have come to draw up a most miserable picture, closely-copied from the modern manuals of XVIIth century scholasticism. Therein barrenness, far
from existing to the benefit of an exacting technique, was simply the end-product of a
rationalizing that was short-sighted in its views, lacking in intuition and power for synthesis,
and stiffly collared by clerical or lay protectiveness, with the result that freedom in quest and
ardor for progress paid the price for official favors. A distressingly equivocal state of
affairs.... To read Abelard, Hugh of Saint Victor, Albert the Great, Saint Bonaventure, and
Saint Thomas in a Wolfian atmosphere, is to misconstrue their thought to the point of no
return. However deserving they may be, the Disputationes metaphysicae of Francis Suarez,
from the standpoint of intellectual formation, have no more than their name in common with
the quaestiones disputatae of the XIIIth century.
III. Classification of the Works of Saint Thomas
The foregoing describes the dress and inspiration of the literary forms—we can now say, doctrinal forms—within which the works of Saint Thomas were composed, and within which they are to be classified. The forms employed in medieval teaching did not, in effect, develop all at the same time and along a single front. Rather their development took place according to the objects studied and as the texts, which served as the basic tool in teaching, were progressively exploited. In those cases in which the text selected for teaching purposes was a revealed one, it was normal that the understanding of it should take place on the level of exegesis, of the lectio. Only little by little did questions come to be knit out of it, and, through gradual amplification, to go beyond, and finally to gobble up textual reading. When the books of Aristotle were first circulated, they were the object of a simple commentary—at a time when, after fifty years of official reading, the text of Peter Lombard was already overloaded with questions. In like manner, in the production of Saint Thomas, we find works ranging, as the case goes, from the simple commentary all the way to the independent question.
Among the works that are no more than simple commentaries making up an expositio, we have, on the one hand, those dealing with Aristotle and Dionysius, and on the other, those related to Scripture. In the first case, the books of Aristotle were, in the time of Saint Thomas, still the object of a textual lectio, whereas in the second case, the evolution [from the lectio to the quaestio] had run its course. Consequently, with the quaestio having become a completely independent exercise at the faculty of theology, teaching of the Bible was divided between a course on the text of the Bible, the latter remaining the basic textbook, and the disputation of questions. Let us immediately observe, moreover, that these expositiones vary greatly in form, running the gamut between literal commenting and paraphrasing, between impersonal glossing and original elaborating.
On Peter Lombard’s Sentences, the text of his teaching as a bachelor, and on the Boethian De Trinitate, Saint Thomas, like all his contemporaries, no longer limited himself to a simple expositio. He did go along with the text, of which he gave an analysis (divisio textus) and a summary literal explanation (expositio textus); but the latter are only remnants of the form they originally had. In reality his whole effort is directed to the study of questions whose great number and variety are wholly outside the text from which he started.
Then, we have both the ordinary and the quodlibetal questions that Saint Thomas disputed in his capacity of master.
The two summas, both the Summa contra Gentiles and the Summa theologiae, especially the latter, are linked with the literary forms we have spoken about, but they were composed and built up free of Saint Thomas’s official teaching and in reference to some external circumstances or to certain scientific needs that the author himself will tell us about later.
Likewise, in the case of his works written for occasions, there is reference to historical or doctrinal contingencies. These works show great variety in content and form and were subsequently to be grouped together under the neutral title of Opuscula.
Finally, as we have already had the occasion to state, it was a master’s duty, at the faculty of theology, to preach to his students, as well as to teach them. Saint Thomas has left us a number of sets of collationes [collations].
The foregoing grouping of his work their composition enables us to bring according to the technique of into focus the picture of the organic character, as well as of the historical conditions, of the Master’s scientific activity. It is against these general contexts that we shall have to look into each one of his works. Yet before doing so, let us examine the working conditions and the resources all his works have in common: the language, the processes of documentation, the procedures of construction.
Chapter III
The Language and Vocabulary of Saint Thomas
1. Thought and Language
Perhaps it will be thought that it is again going far afield to make entry into the thought of Saint Thomas by devoting so much attention to his language. Language is just a modest tool, and it would seem to be making some show of pedantry to attach that much importance to it. In fact, however, there are few philosophers or theologians who have incorporated the make of their minds in their vocabulary to the same degree as Saint Thomas, and as few whose accessibility consequently is found to be so organically consolidated with the literal understanding of their expressions.
In any case, it is a known fact that the textual apparatus with the help of which Saint Thomas outwardly expressed his thought is disconcerting for his modern reader. Even if the latter is experienced in Latin, it becomes disheartening for him to come to grips with a style where grammar lacks contrast, procedure is stereotyped, divisions are unending, where the output is all academic, dried out of any show of emotion, however sober, and in which the most refreshing biblical image is devitalized by allegory. As for the richness he feels is masked behind all this, he knows it cannot be reached without his coming into the technical information that alone could give body to each word and initiate him into the semantic sculpture of each concept. In brief, be is up against a prominent case wherein the language used is “scholastic” in the fullest meaning of the term, and wherein this same language characterizes at once a thought, a method, and means of expression. It is important, therefore, that this case of “scholastic” language be defined on the very grounds of that language which thus equates both method and thought.
In order to give support to the analyses we are going to undertake, let us first recall, in a summary way, a few characteristic examples of his vocabulary. These examples will serve to shed some light on both the qualities of this vocabulary and what is required to understand it.
1) Mens [mind], spiritus [spirit], anima [soul]. We have here three words used to designate the mind that testify to the willingness with which, in the XIIIth, as well as in the XXth century, philosophers tried to understand its subtle nature. One notices immediately that, in this multiplying of words to name the mind, philosophical as well as Christian themes have been woven together. Mens, spiritus, anima translate respectively nouj, pneuma, yuch, and the meaning, together with the development of each one of these Latin and Greek words, quickly reveals itself as very complex.
To start with, we have the properly Biblical theme in the Paulinian trilogy of sarx, [flesh], yuch [soul], and pneuma [spirit]. This trilogy reflects, through a reference to the spirit of Christ, the whole mystery of the fall and of the redemption of mankind. It is a strictly religious perspective, which the Aristotelian philosopher in Saint Thomas leaves aside (see his commentaries on Aristotle), yet, this perspective is involved everywhere in his philosophy of man.
With the word nouj, we have Aristotle and the problems concerning the structure of the intellect, the agent intellect, the spiritual and personal nature of intelligence, its relationship to the other parts of the soul, the substance of the mind and the exij [habit] of first principles, finally the definition of the soul. Men Saint Thomas uses the word, all his Peripatetic background is involved, and it is not an easy thing to untangle in this use the dilemma of the soul and of the spirit. Yet, with the word nouj we have still another cosmos, that of Dionysius, with his emanation of beings and their hierarchical order, his “analogy” of names, his angels as prototypes of the nouj, his mystical power. In the Greco-Latin versions of the Middle Ages, Aristotle’s nouj was translated by the word intellectus, while the nouj of Dionysius was rendered by the word mens. This Latin doublet of intellectus and mens for the one Greek word left intact, even to verbal resonance, the wide difference in meaning these words had in their respective parent ideologies. And Saint Thomas was aware of it. Furthermore, Augustine came on the scene—the originator of a mens that no longer had anything of the Oriental ontology of Dionysius and in which was expressed an intense perception of the internal workings of mental life. Here was yet another world within which the Latin Christians were to live and which, once engaged within theology, was to nourish lofty contemplation on the Trinity. Augustine’s mens is the perfect specimen of that type of Augustinian vocabulary that resists attempts at abstractive analysis. Yet the latter was the working norm in the Aristotelian philosophy of Saint Thomas.
With the word pneuma, we are at the extreme opposite of any refigious connotation. In the vocabulary of the physiologists, pneuma stood properly for animal life. Augustine used it in this sense, although not exclusively, and the Medievals followed his example. Under the name spiritus, they catalogued the phenomena that had to do jointly with body and mind. For instance, imagination, for the followers of Augustine (who were here translating Porphyry), is a spiritus, but the word is also used by them to designate breath in voice production and “animal spirits.” Yet, at the other end of the line, spiritus attains to the meaning of mens—as already in Saint Paul: spiritu mentis vestrae (Eph., IV, 23)—and designates, at the summit of anima bound up to body, that subtle and topmost part of the mind through which man can escape the limits of matter and ascend to God—the ever actual theme of the dialogue between spiritus and anima.
Anima, for the medieval philosopher, translated Aristotle’s yuch. The word, therefore, stood for something common to both man and animal. Anima was the form of a body, and it was united to the latter as to a matter which it animated and outside of which it was unable to subsist. Yet, the word was so well accredited in the language of Latin Christianity that even the truest Aristotelians used it without reservation to designate the immortal soul of man, and this, to the exclusion of the word spiritus which was not used in the translations of Aristotle.
When Saint Thomas qrrived on the scene, these words had reached the hub at which their
meanings converged. This should be remembered, not only by the philologist interested in
words, but also by the philosopher who attempts to understand them, since the philosophical
compactness of these words is not measured according to the standards of a benevolent
making of concordances. Read, for instance, the disputed question entitled De mente (De ver.,
q. 10).
2) Formatio [information]. In this instance, we have a single word that picked up in its meaning the vital powers of two different doctrines and mental outlooks. The first of these was Aristotle’s hylomorphic theory (morfh, form) with all its contexts and applications (forma [form] operating on three levels, since it is solidary in its meaning with three different Greek words: morfh used to signify the principle of being; eidoj, the principle of knowledge; and fusij, the principle of movement), and with the metaphysics it connotes within the Aristotelian theory of the four causes. In Saint Thomas, efficient and formal causality will support a doctrine of creation in which it is God’s efficiency that ensures the proper being of existing things and their intelligibility. The whole of Thomism is in here.
Formatio, however, was no less strongly centered in its meaning upon the Platonically-inspired ontology and noetics of Saint Augustine. (In the latter, both ontology and noetics were included in the explicit synonymy of the words forma, idea [idea], species [species], ratio [reason].) Formatio, therefore, referred to the doctrine of participation of ideas—of ideas that in God are perfect in their being, eternal, and creative of things but which in things other than God suffer limitation and imperfection because of their ties with matter. Yet, these ideas explain the being and intelligibleness of these same things which are copies of them and are unable to reach their own perfection except through conversion to them in a contemplation that is both creative and “informing.” The whole theory of illumination in Augustine’s psychology proceeds along these lines. In his conception of rational nature, it is through grace, conceived as a light and a power, that formatio is brought about. Without “formative” grace, rational nature remains “formless,” but through its presence it becomes in its “return” to God the image of Him. The Augustinian theme of formatio made its way through the entire medieval philosophical vocabulary. In Saint Thomas, despite the amending he gave to it with his Aristotelian background, its presence constantly animated his analyses and expressions. In Saint Bonaventure, however, a reader will find that formatio retained an accent that Augustine would more readily have recognized.
Let us add here that it was through the translators of the Aristotelico-Arabian works (Saint Thomas was the one who noted it), that the first operation of the mind, Aristotle’s simple apprehension, came to be designated by the word formatio (or informatio). This is true at least in the case of Averroes, for in the Latin versions of Avicenna’s works, Aristotle’s twn adiairetwn nohsij [intellection of indivisibles] was translated by the word imaginatio [imagination].
3) It is not only, however, the flexibility of these sensational terms that has to be perceived. One must also look into the more ordinary terms in order to got a close hold on them in their exact historical and formal meaning. Ars [art] and scientia [science] were at times used synonomously, at other times they were opposed; disciplina [teaching], on the other hand, always retained the technical flavor that Boethius had injected into it. Potentia [capacity] and virtus [power] were delicately interwoven in their meaning. Habitus [habit], sapientia [wisdom] cannot be translated into French without loss, or even falsification of sense. Probabile [probable] has become an equivocal term ever since the XVIIIth century controversies. Imaginatio had another extension and comprehension than our contemporary psychologists give to it. Intentio [intention] was one of the trickiest words in epistemology, and only recently has it been rediscovered by a few of our modem philosophers, while synderesis [habit of first principles in the practical order] remains untranslated to this day. And one could go on and on with examples such as these.
II. Medieval Latin
Saint Thomas did his thinking in Latin, but in a Latin foreign to the tongue of a Cicero or a Seneca and no less foreign to that of the Humanists who contended that they were bringing classical Latin back to life. His was the so-called “barbaric’ Latin of the Middle Ages.
Even if it be only in a very summary way, it will not be useless to locate, at its proper place within the general development of postclassical Latin, the special kind that was called scholastic. The philologists—and this is a known fact—were precisely the ones who, in their intent to divide the history of the West into periods started from the principle of language evolution. They gave for the first time the name of media aetas [middle age] to that hollow and much-decried period that extends from the classical language of Antiquity to its revival among the XVth century Humanists. The philologists of our day no longer maintain such scornful disregard. Even before looking for aesthetic values in it, they try to discover the expressive qualities of that Latin tongue which was about the only vehicle of culture during the period extending from 400 to 1400 A.D. Quite evidently, with this Western millenium, we are not on what could be called a level surface, and to speak of linguistic continuity would be only equivocal. Yet, there are at least different phases that can be discerned in the development of medieval Latin; and to mark both the extension and quality of those zones wherein its vitality shows up, will enable one to see the literary tool of medieval thought gradually taking shape.
First, we have the period during which classical Latin disintegrated: a period extending over a
length of three centuries and coinciding with the overrunning of Europe by the Barbarians.
After the Vth century, with the disappearance, at least outside of Italy, of the schools run by
the rhetors, the low Latin of the pre-Romanic koine became extremely poor in vocabulary and
syntax and even in orthography. This was true both in the case of the language written by the
literate, in which was displayed their narrow-minded conservatism, and in the case of the
language spoken by the common people, which was riddled throughout with words of
Germanic and Celtic origin. Out of the wreck, however, arose a few figures, men of whom it
would be too much to say that they were geniuses, yet men to whom intelligence had not been
denied. They contrived to transfer some of the riches of classical Antiquity into their own
products of pen, which displayed some degree of digestible pedagogy. Boethius (+524),
Cassiodorus (+about 570), Gregory the Great (+604), Isodorus of Sevilla (+636), the
Venerable Bede (735) have justly been called the “founders” of the Middle Ages.
Boethius, “the last of the Romans” and “the first one to teach the “barbaric speech” (as
L.Valla has put it), besides writing his Consolatio philosophiae in an elegant Ciceronian
style, translated and commented upon the logical works of Aristotle, thus building up a
lexicographical capital through the use of which the first creative efforts of the XIIIth century
were ensured. Cassiodorus, with his Institutiones, preserved and passed on the humanistic
content of the seven arts. By religious design, Gregory the Great was opposed to classical
culture, and he had no more the genius or linguistic mastery of an Augustine than the two
others; nonetheless, he passed on, in a tongue that was balanced, penetrating, and
understandable by both the uneducated as well as the learned, the moral conceptions that were
to serve as matter for future generations to mull over. The candid compilations (Etymologiae)
of Isodorus became an enduring encyclopedia and the source of ideologic vocabulary for five
centuries, even after the XIIth century Renaissance had provoked a return to sources and after
the works of Aristotle had been rediscovered. Finally, in Bede, whom Dante was to place at
the side of Isodorus in heaven,
there is proof of the extension to the new nations of the
practice of correct Latin and of the cultivating of the liberal arts. By writing his biblical
commentaries and his ecclesiastical history in the lay language of old, he sanctioned its use to
express what was most real and original in Christian thought. However small a figure all of
these ‘founders’ may have cut in the construction proper of the work of Saint Thomas, it is
nonetheless a fact that they were ever present at the very roots of his language and thought;
and this is something that one has to become accustomed to, if one does not wish to change
the atmosphere of his life-work.
The aforementioned components of these three centuries can be formulated in the following way: early medieval Latin was a continuation not of the classical language but of that used by the authors of the low-Latin period. It was heavily influenced by the Latin of the Church, of the liturgy, of the vulgate Bible, and of the Fathers. It was constantly fed—either during the patristic period or especially at the time of Gregory of Tours and after him—with words and phrase constructions drawn from the Latin of the masses and of the vernacular. Such being the Latin used in the early Middle Ages, school work and scholastic speech were destined to be permanently stamped with definite traits, namely: a taste for compiling excerpts, which finally issued in a masterpiece of this sort of literature, the Sentences of Peter Lombard, the classic manual of medieval theology; the prevalence of grammar and its techniques over rhetoric and its adornments; the multiplying of glossaries, which proved themselves to be precious instruments in concept refining and served philosophy and theology with the supporting points they needed, even in times when speculation was at a weak point; the presence of the Church in education, even in the teaching of the seven liberal arts to beginners; and finally, already discernible at the summit of these arts, a cult for dialectics that showed up even in such byproducts as the pseudo-Augustinian Categoriae, or the pseudo-Boethian Dialectica. As a result, in reading through the religious works of the period one already feels very far from the language of Saint Augustine, even in those passages wherein his expressions have been borrowed. See, for example, the wording used in the councils of Toledo in 635, 688, and 693.
With the gulf widening between the spoken and written language, Latin would no doubt have suffered even greater alteration if the awakening that took place in the VIIIth century had not recaptured its better elements through a direct reading of the auctores. The Carolingian renaissance, centered mostly on grammar and literature, tended toward a return of Latin to its sources. As a result, grammar became more correct, syntax was discovered, ideas were logically fitted together, semantics enriched. In the field of literature, a large segment of the antique works was recovered, although, through lack of information and good taste, these works were not always evaluated in right hierarchical order. Statius, for instance, was placed on an even footing with Virgil and Martianus Capella with Quintilian. Only in part were the Medievals able to free themselves from this mortgage, but it is to those Carolingian copyists and their libraries that we owe the transmission of the classical works and of the Christian works as well. Theirs was a modest work of transcription, hardly raised in stature by their being pieced together in anthologies. A typical product of this kind is found in Walafrid Strabon’s gloss, upon which one medieval generation after another was to enlarge and whose literary form even Saint Thomas was to preserve in his Catena aurea. Alcuin Eginhard, Loup of Ferrieres were notable literary rgures in their own right. Scotus Erigena, moreover, had the wide range of a great thinker, with the vocabulary and doctrine displayed in his writings still acting as a powerful ferment throughout the XIIIth century.
This cult of Antiquity developed in both language and style the practice of an imitation that
was artlessly passive—and laden with the academic dullness which imitation involves. The
recuperation itself of the ancient works suffered from this lack of creative power. Latin was
no longer a “mother” tongue. It became erudite and artificial in character in the very measure
that a lack of balance developed between a culture born for other times and the new-born
surroundings in which the peoples of the West lived. Either there was no spoken language to
correct deviations arising from artificial apprenticeship in a tongue no longer spoken, or the
written language of the day was too far away from the traditional school tongue to act as a
corrective. This is the reason medieval Latin was affected by an absence of movement, life,
and spontaneity. This Latin, however, was not “dead,” as would be the classical Latin that the
Humanists later reproduced in a servile way; it continued to evolve, and with the plastic
qualities inherent in it, it answered the needs of intellectual life.
It was to be the lot of the XIIth century to bring this Latin tongue to the height of its
perfection and to make of it, over and beyond the elements that it borrowed, an admirable
instrument for intellectual life, doctrinal culture, and religious expression. This time, the
auctores of Antiquity gave birth to more and better than copies and imitations. If the Organon
came back to life in Abelard, if Plato and Boethius were food for the scholars of Chartres, if
the various treatises De dilectione Dei [On the Love of God], in matters spiritual, were
praiseworthy counterparts of Ovid’s Ars amandi [Art of Loving], if Saint Anselm revived the
tradition of Augustine’s psychology and his religious speculations as well, if John, of
Salisbury extolled the discovery of the Topics in terms worthy of a Quintilian, it was because
Latin was not a dead language and it still had the power of embodying within itself, so to
speak, the thoughts, feelings, and desires of those who were using it.
True however, this flow of sap did not permeate all the tissues. Some entire zones, in the language itself let us understand, remained dull with the weight of imitation or artifice. No more did Christian of Troyes master his ancient sources than the poetic Arts revive Horace, William of Cbampeaux, Aristotle, or Peter Lombard, Augustine. The techniques for speculation invaded the field of dialectics, wherein lay the risk of replacing research with playful juggling. In the “battle of the seven arts,” the literary minded were often beaten without thereby any benefit to thought. Nothing substantial was gained by sacrificing form. The drama of scholasticism had its beginning right here at the elementary level of language, and the various factors which we have just analysed enable us to foresee its misadventures.
III. Scholastic Latin
The world spins on. Having abandoned the grounds of the language spoken by the masses,
Latin, little by little, lost contact also with the field of everyday living. At the end of the XIIth
century, at the same time that the urban middle class was coming of age and was turning as a
matter of course toward the living languages for the conduct of its business, art, and ventures,
the universities were also undergoing their initial organization. Latin there was pressed back
into the literary forms of those disciplines that were cultivated in their environment:
theoretical grammar, philosophy, theology, and law. The time had come when the living
powers of the mind were no longer apportioned along homogeneous lines. As a result, if
thinkers were still able to hammer out from Latin a wonderful tool for their purposes of
analysis and construction, this was only done in a narrow field of endeavor, over a period of
hardly more than two generations in extenthappily favored by a number of geniuses, Albert
the Great, Bonaventure, and Thomas Aquinas. “Scholastic” language, soon after, coiled up
upon itself, deprived of life for a long time to come. The moment has come to determine the
characteristics of this school language before going into the personal traits which it was to
have in Saint Thomas.
We have used the words “scholastic language.” The very name scholastic” points here to the first of its characteristics; it was a school language. The stages in the history of medieval Latin have led us to this conclusion, and the evolution is amply confirmed by the facts. Work in the classroom was governed by pedagogical aims, with usefulness taking precedence over literary beauty, and effectiveness for instruction prevailing over the communication of emotions. In the classroom, work tended to be impersonal in character, not of course that this lessened the qualities of the master, but the latter were subordinated to the presentation of truth and of the resources of its object. Augustine’s Confessions were not used as a teaching manual; the living qualities of his language would have been in the classroom the source of meaning-falsification of the worst kind, both in words and in thought. In the XIIIth century, moreover, the universities, just about the only centers of culture of the time, made up a sort of linguistic community with its own formalistic ways of expressing things and its own ritual—the almost exclusive practice of oral teaching had determined all this. Hence, the resulting monotony in the system of verbal signs employed in presenting arguments, making up paragraphs, dividing questions, and analysing texts. Any variation would have sounded like an ill-timed piece of oratory. It was enough to use the word Item [Again] to pass from one idea to another, or the expression videtur quod... non [it would seem that... not] to introduce, in thousands of articles, what was held on the question in an opposing opinion.
Being a school language, Latin was by the same token a technical language, that is, one
entirely controlled by the special requirements of research in a given course of study. It was
also located on the same plane of abstraction that determined the field of this same course of
study, since abstraction, according to the tenets of scholastic doctrine, was the principle
through which were distinguished and classified the various sciences. Abstraction thereby
controlled the laws of verbal signification. In Augustine, who had a dislike for abstractions
and distinctions, language was altogether fluid and responsive to the continuities, to the
radiating action, and to the fringes of the intelligibleness of things rather than to the fine
edges of concepts. Words were like sounds calling after one another, and they took pleasure
[so to speak] in passing from one discipline to another. In vain Schoolmen sought to seize
upon the sinews of the word mens, and as many as thirty-one different meanings have been
counted for the word sapientia in Augustine. The medieval philosopher, on the contrary,
sacrificed to scientific precision those ductile qualities that constant use preserves in words
where concrete realities are expressed. The triumph of Aristotelian logic made this rule of
precision a permanent one. The Schoolman never gave up trying to arrive at the proper
meaning, at the “most proper” meaning of words, just as he persisted in establishing
definitions. Examples abound in Saint Thomas. The Schoolman, moreover, took pleasure in
concocting abstract words that expressly referred to the formal aspect through which things
are such as they are. For instance, the word substantia [substance] gave birth to the word
subsistentia [subsistence] (cf. Prima Pars, q. 29, a. 2), proportio [proportion] to
proportionalitas [proportionality] (cf. De ver., q. 3, a. 1, ad 7), not to speak of quidditas,
[quiddity], haecceitas [thisness], and even of anitas
and unalitas [singularness]. Granted
that such formalizing was often pushed to the point of ridiculousness, one must nevertheless
also grant that such subtleness was far from always being without bearing on expression and
thought, as the two first examples [subsistentia and proportionalitas] testify. Need we recall
that Cajetan praised Aquinas, and justly so, because “he always expressed himself in formal
language”: Semper loquitur formaliter.
From all this arose, in the Schoolman’s use of Latin, repugnance to metaphorical language and, in general, to figures of thought and of speech, since these retain no consistency whatsoever when subjected to the most elementary abstraction. One must, however, distinguish periods and places. In the XIIth century, the various masters even in their didactic treatises preserved the benefit issuing from a creative imagination, and this gave great liveliness to their style, as may be witnessed from Saint Anselm to Richard of Saint Victor. At the heart of the XIIIth century, William of Auvergne wrote in an endless flow of words, while Bonaventure, in his Itinerarium, lit up, with some very sparkling images, the road he followed in his ascent to metaphysical heights, and he delighted in multiplying synonyms, adjectives, comparisons, and parallels. Yet, in its ambitious theory of scientific demonstration, in its tendency at putting everything in conceptual form, in its very temperament, flourishing Aristotelianism carried with it a lively aversion to the use of literary or poetic procedures in doctrinal speculation. Saint Thomas, as we shall see later, made his own the Stagirite’s biting criticism of Plato’s style, and the medieval Aristotelians considered the language used by the Platonists, including Dionysius and Augustine, as something impure, bound up with the famous theory of ideas. Scholasticism of the periods to follow was to be more and more afflicted with literary barrenness of this same type.
At this point, the case of theological speech is worthy of special consideration. Theology
would not, it seems, adapt itself to a situation of this kind, since Holy Scripture, its feeding
source, was all metaphor, parable, allegory, and example. Faith, also, the principle from
which theology issued, implied mystery in its object and loving assent to it, both of which
could not be enclosed within the boundaries of abstraction. Yet, if “sacred doctrine” was to
harbor legitimately the possibility of being elaborated in a science, it had to accept, whether
in systematic wholes or in a drafting of details, the particular techniques of human reason
along with the means and even the style that science used to express itself. Having become a
scholastic theology, sacred doctrine excluded from its literary genre pastoral exhortation,
pious consideration, and mystical confiding. The Summa was not written and cannot be read
like a sermon of Saint Bernard or a chapter from the Imitation. Cut away from anything
subjective, from spiritual life in the concrete, the Summa, as we have seen, is related in form
much more to the Disputed Question, which derives from Aristotle with his ideal of scientific
knowledge and his technique of demonstration. In this way we can explain the severity with
which Saint Thomas treated the use of the metaphor and the Platonic style.
That severity,
however, applied to them only inasmuch as they were inserted in a theology having scientific
stature. Otherwise, Augustine himself would have been condemned, and with him any
theology conceived as a wisdom crowning a spiritual experience. The austerity implied in this
technical objectiveness did not, in a Thomas Aquinas, curtail the religious powers of his
theology. Rather it served to give its style to a knowledge, which must have its place, and an
eminent one, within the many-sided whole of the intellectus fidei.
Among his peers, an
Anselm and a Bonaventure, Saint Thomas was the master beyond compare of sacred
doctrine’s scholastic tongue.
The third characteristic of scholastic Latin: the language of the Schoolmen was in good part
the language derived from efforts at translation. In order to measure the strong and weak
points of medieval Latin in the field of speculation, we have to go back to its initial indigence
in the expression of philosophical ideas. Viewed from this angle, the Western Middle Ages
exhibit one of the most astonishing phenomena in the history of languages.
It had been long
recognized that Latin lacked a capacity for expressing philosophical thought. Seneca
complained about Romans being obliged to force the sense of words when they wanted to
translate the concepts of Greek philosophy, noting, moreover, that even Plato’s on [being] had
no corresponding word in Latin.
The Latin word ens [being], was, in fact, a barbarism of a
horrible sort. The new word essentia [essence] was far from pleasing. The same could be said
of qualitas [quality] before Cicero, and of specificus [specific], subjectum [subject],
praedicatum [predicate] before Boethius. Boethius precisely, the first of the barbarians,
according to Valla, was to contribute actively in creating a Latin philosophical vocabulary,
and the unassuming glossators of the early Middle Ages offer an object of fascinating interest
in this enterprise of long duration. There were many weaknesses to be overcome: a lack of
clarity in the noun’s expressiveness due to the absence of an article, a sin of capital gravity for
a tool of logic; little shading in the verb’s expressiveness, because the aspects implied in
action could be rendered only through the use of prefixes; lack of philosophical depth in
words otherwise powerfully realistic; a disturbing deviation from the concrete to the abstract,
with a consequent disappearance of realistic original meanings; a brevity suited for juridical
formulation, imperatoria brevitas [the imperial brevity], but unfit for clear-cut analysis and
research; a syntax well-equipped, it is true, to provide a strong framework for sentences, and
precision for analysis but whose handling the Medievals were unable to rediscover. Most of
all, something had to be done to overcome that semantic indigence resulting from the very
poverty of Latin philosophical culture, especially in the days of the later Empire, whose
writers provided the Middle Ages with its immediate arsenal of literary works. Thus, one can
observe that each leap forward in speculative thought during the Middle Ages came about
through the influx of Latin translations from the Greek or the Arabic. The story of this influx
consequently takes on a place of importance in the history of the foundations of philosophy
and of theology. To confirm all this, one need only look into the story of the IXth, and of the
XIIth and XIIIth century revivals, and again, to consider the fact that it was, not Plato, but
Aristotle who was translated.
A language built upon translation is, to some extent, one that has not as yet come of age; one,
consequently, that has not reached the stage of complete spontaneity and still relies on the
original as its parent. Obviously, the expression Intellectus agens [agent intellect] had no
buoyancy right from the start. The Schoolmen suffered from this handicap; yet, after what has
just been said in the preceding paragraph, their creative powers also appear as all the more
striking. As a matter of fact, a word is not necessarily weakened in the process of translation;
translation can protect and give to a word richer meaning by its entrance into a foreign
language. The period prior to 1230 was one during which the Medievals were intensely active
at the labor of translation, proof of which one will readily find just by looking at the
unbelievable number of Greco-Latin and Arabo-Latin versions of Aristotle’s works.
This
provoked—even with the help of some of the most outlandish mistranslations and amusing
mishaps—the arrival of a multiplicity of doublets, of a taste for variants and classification of
concepts, and of etymological analyses.
Between 1230 and 1260, the manuscripts of
Aristotle were covered with glosses, which commentators jotted down above difficult words,
synonyms the fate of which was to be sealed by the law of survival of the fittest.
Technical
meanings took shape through additions to current meanings. To the Roman word cogitatio
[cogitation] twice were added meanings, that of Aristotle’s cogitativa [cogitative power], and
that of Augustine’s cogitatio [thought]. Prudentia [prudence] was used to translate Aristotle’s
fronhsij [prudence], but it meant something altogether different from Seneca’s prudentia
[prudence]. Upon passio [passion] were heaped the meanings which the Damascene and
Aristotle respectively attached to it (see De ver., q. 26, a. 3, ad 10). Potentia in the
Aristotelian sense no longer had anything in common with potentia as used by Cicero, and
the same with virtus in the Dionysian sense and virtus in its original Roman meaning. The
word ratio, already an equivocal term in the Latin of the Empire, became inflated with all the
dynamic expressiveness of the Greek word logoj.
The same can be said about forma, idea,
and species. The words generatio et corruptio [generation and corruption] conveyed an of
Aristotle’s philosophy of nature, while esse [to be] and essentia became the support of a
metaphysical edifice which would have astounded Cicero. Let the translator make a mistake,
however, and utter confusion followed. boulhsij [purpose] and qelhsij [wish], for instance,
were both rendered by the same word voluntas [will]. The Schoolmen, as a consequence,
were left in a quandary, and some theologians were no longer able to measure the role of
voluntas in the act of faith. The same thing happened over and over again in this continuous
transfer of old words to new meanings. When we come upon Saint Thomas throwing a load
of analyses upon a verbal sense-structure, let us not think that he is being artificially subtle, as
we often do because we are ignorant in scholastic Latin. Let us rather acknowledge in it a
beautiful eagerness in analyzing psychological and moral matters, a practice we appreciate in
some French moralists. With the scholastics, translating was not a passive endeavor but the
handling of an instrument alive with thoughts of the mind.
Right at the point just mentioned, the influence of the new layout of problems made itself felt,
and first in line, the religious problems that played, in the renovation of Latin, a part of prime
importance even in rational philosophy. It was not just a case in which a few hundred words
were found to answer the needs of expression for Christian dogma and worship. It was rather
a case in which a leaven permeated all human vocabulary and truly renewed it in spirit.
Particularly worthy of notice was the contribution of XIIth century authors in this creation of
a vocabulary. Perhaps there has been too little attention paid to the fact that, beneath the
Aristotelian supply of new matter, the life-giving sap flowing from their efforts was
permanently at work during the XIIIth century. From Richard of Saint Victor and William of
Saint Thierry, so much expressive power flowed that it would be a mistake to limit it to the
expression of their mystical thoughts. Let one also think about the internal transformation that
the introduction of the properly Christian notion of peccatum [sin] brought about in moral
analysis, the material elements of which had been borrowed from either Aristotle or Cicero.
In this instance, it was Augustine’s contribution which triumphed, and, even if weighted
down with rhetoric, it gave life to the Latin capital inherited from the Ancients.
Almost the same should be said about the problems that were properly of a philosophical
order. First posited by the Greeks and the Arabs, they were now being rethought by the
philosophers of the West. Well and little known masters became overexcited in trying to
fabricate new concepts. Albert the Great seems to have had the gift of an almost disorderly
flow of words for an enterprise of this sort, while Roger Bacon, a better writer, displayed an
astonishingly rich vocabulary. With the differentiating of the various disciplines, and because
the latter came from different sources and were set in autonomous contexts, it became
possible to draw up some very timely parallels between the technical words used in each
one.
Recourse to etymology, the classical procedure of the day, was a protective agent
against verbal inflation. It forced the mind back to the incipient state in which a word
embodies more closely the reality it expresses and in which it still enjoys its vivid
expressiveness.
By this creative vividness, the language of the Schoolmen differs profoundly from that of the Humanists. The Latin of the latter did, to be sure, recover correctness in its morphology and syntax, along with its literary form and aesthetic resources. Yet, the Humanists achieved this through aristocratic imitation that, except in a few cases, cut their language off from life, even from the fife of the mind. With them, grammar served only rhetoric. Humanistic Latin is a dead language. Scholastic Latin, on the other hand, remained a living language. More precisely, being isolated in the schoolroom and specialized in technique, as we have said, scholastic Latin was a language in a stage of survival. It served as the means and vehicle of a thought that went back to using a language of the past. By the very pressure of these needs, this language of the past became a currently-used, if not the commonly-spoken, language. Scholastic Latin was the living language of the university people.
When, in the course of the XVIth century, Vitoria and Melchior Cano tried to introduce into
the School the language of the Humanists, they were right in criticizing the abstract and
barbaric verbalism of their colleagues. Their attempt, however, could only be an unfruitful
one, but as such it soon served to make all the more tangible the state of exile of
scholasticism in the midst of a new world. Pico della Mirandola showed more insight when
he went about extolling, against his Florentian friends, the lingua parisiensis [language of
Paris], that is, the language of the Schoolmen. Yet, in his day, the latter had already reached a
state of decay. ‘Terhaps our ears reject their language as coarse; reason, however accepts it as
nearer to reality. Yet they, even if they were born among Latins, have had to invent a
language and not speak Latin.
IV. The Language of Saint Thomas
Having thus determined the common traits of medieval scholastic Latin, it remains for us to observe through what elements Saint Thomas gave his own personal touch to this language, and especially, to its vocabulary.
“Saint Thomas always speaks in a formal way.”
No better words could have been found to
praise a Schoolman. The statement is Cajetan’s. What does it mean? The philosophical
resources of a language (and the theological ones as well, insofar as sacred doctrine is
“scientific”) may be broken down under two headings: (1) aptness at expressing abstract data
and general ideas; (2) the capacity of voicing the deep and synthetic perceptions of the mind.
Concerning the first, scholastic language, as we have already said, was an instrument of
quality. Saint Thomas, by taste and method, excelled in the handling of this instrument. He
expressly defined that the internal order of science and its capacity to illuminate came from
its formal object, that is, from the particular type of intelligibleness (ratio cognoscibilis) that
is set up through the process of detaching a common property of things considered from one
particular viewpoint.
This abstraction was the condition for the use of terms in their proper
sense, for clarity of analysis, for distinctness in construction. Abstraction, as we know, was
the key-process of the method Aristotle had developed from his psychological theories in
which he held that man is a spirit substantially united to matter. The ever-increasing
familiarity that Saint Thomas had with Aristotle served to reinforce the clearness,
conciseness, and incisiveness that his language, like his mind, possessed by natural
temperament. If, today, the word subtilis [subtle] is decried because of the inordinate
“formalizing” of the Scotists and nominalists, that word, in medieval parlance, expressed
these qualities of language and mind which we have just mentioned. While an Augustine
endeavored to conjure up reality in expressions that would respect the latter’s spiritual and
verbal interlockings which he dared not disrupt, Saint Thomas, on the other hand, through
distinctions, aimed at extracting the proper object of his study from anything that would
contaminate it and at expressing it in the most precise terms possible. Later on, we shall come
again upon this trait of his; let us note here its stylistic conditions.
Quite evidently, with this object in mind, Saint Thomas brushed aside any figures of speech
and thought. Antithesis and alliteration were placed under ban; comparisons were strictly
controlled; metaphor and any other similar Imagery reabsorbed. In the same degree as Saint
Thomas held fast to the Aristotelian principle that anything which comes into the mind must
needs have been channelled through sensible knowledge, be limited and excused almost the
Dionysian method of symbols. Metaphor remained an infirmity. We have already remarked
upon the severity with which he judged Plato’s poetic language.
It was not without
satisfaction that be noted that this language had fallen into disuse among “moderns”.
He, at
any rate, cast it aside. In his works, it is true, a few metaphors are magnificently and prudently
treated,
yet these were metaphors which a venerable tradition had passed on and which he
took up again only to illustrate a theoretical exposition rather than to use their original power.
These metaphors had already become part of the intellectual field. In like manner, he reduced
to rational factors what the mystics had to say about mystical experience and their amplified
description of affective states, doing the same with the tropes and figures of Scripture. In a
word, Saint Thomas scissored out anything resembling literary garb. His was a language of
austere conciseness that takes a long time to become accustomed to, but then it makes one
find some otherwise excellent writers to be intolerable praters. In soberness of this sort the
imperatoria brevitas of Latin is reached, and many of the formulas chiseled out by Saint
Thomas remain forever in philosophy itself.
Saint Thomas was thereby able to carry on his analysis of philosophical concepts with rigor
and lucidity—collecting, classifying, building up meanings, ideologically and historically
most diversified. For examples of the latter, see the way in which he proceeds for the word
natura [nature],
the words passio,
habitus, sapientia, and so forth. In these examples, he
respected conjointly the internal evolution of words, including their misadventures, and the
objective connections of their meanings as well.
On the other hand—and here we have the counterpart of Cajetan’s loquitur formaliter—Saint
Thomas did not ignore the fact that words are irreducibly supple in their meanings. He even
formulated a philosophy of language proving how extremely relative he considered it to be.
He looks for the propria ratio nominis [proper definition of a name] with great care, but this
does not mean that he condemns the use of a word in its other meanings, or even in the
meanings that have been added to the word or which remain very general. On the contrary, he
recognizes that a vital unity holds these meanings together. For instance, after having
rigorously defined the famous Platonic word idea, he goes on to say: “Si ideam communiter
appellamus” [If we speak of the idea in its common sense... ] (De ver., q. 3, a. 3, in fine).
Again, when he says: “Passio dicitur transumptive” [We speak of passion by transfer of
sense... ], he is registering a customary usage, the master of true speech (De ver., q. 26, a. 3).
When he tries to explain how the word pati [to suffer] can be applied to the intellect, he turns
for an explanation to the equivocity of the word (De an., a. 6, ad 5). When be attempts to
define the deepest meaning of the word sacrament, he preserves its historical and sociological
shifts in meaning during the course of the economy of salvation. In like manner, he remarks
upon the different “connotations” of a noun or of an adjective, of the tenses of a verb, of the
flexional ending of a word, all serving to protect the fringes of meaning which the essential
sense of a word centers around itself. He even accepted the usage of words in an equivocal
meaning. After all, the lover of wisdom is primarily concerned, not with words, but with
realities.
Words change in sense from one author to another: memoria [memory], for instance, in
Aristotle and Augustine; mens in [Augustine and] Dionysius; passio in Aristotle and the
Damascene; cogitare [cogitate] in Aristotle and Augustine, and so on. The criss-crossing of
the sources that Saint Thomas consulted maintained permanently the relativism involved in
these changes of meaning. In a manner, he molded himself on the tongue of his authors to the
point where he gives the illusion that he is simply copying them, when, on the contrary, he is
transferring them into his own thought.
He did not believe that a term is so completely
adequate in expressing a concept that any rival term should be eliminated. At times, he
himself did not deny himself the privilege of using one word in place of another, or of
successively using in the same sentence the same word in two different meanings.
He feels
the inadequacy of certain terms, and with the word quodammodo [in a way], he calls to his
reader’s attention the frailty of the most classical expressions. With a quasi [as it were], he
avoided the loss of the benefit deriving from comparisons between concepts, otherwise
inexact if considered in the abstract.
More than in any other medieval author, the attributing
of names and qualities to God provoked in him a rigorous filtering of his vocabulary. On the
other hand, he showed how much words can be distended without their, on that account,
failing into equivocation. Besides, he did not reject the use of metaphorical analogy, which is
so abundant in the Scriptures and so fresh and enjoyable for one who has faith. Saint Thomas,
it is true, did not have the Franciscan soul of Saint Bonaventure, but neither did be have the
dried-out mind of the XVIIIth century Scholastics. In a nutshell, verbal clarity did not hide
from him the mystery of things. With his formaliter, Cajetan gave us only one side of Saint
Thomas.
It would be passionately interesting to examine and to draw the line around the creative powers of Saint Thomas in the field of language, after having done so around the creative powers of medieval Latin—a beautiful task still to be undertaken. To give a few samples: we believe that the phrase potentia obedientialis [obediential potency] is the perfect product resulting from the seemingly impossible transposition of the ancient word potentia to its use in the highest speculation on the relations that exist between created being and the transcendent creator. The word instrumentum [instrument] was, in a manner, rebuilt from within from data of Averroistic origin and used as the framework for analysis throughout the whole Christian economy of salvation. In the expression appetitus inquisitivus [inquiring appetite], we have a concentration of all the vigor as well as of the diverging orientations of Aristotle and John Damascene, used to define one of the cogs of human action considered in its deliberative phase. We could go on with examples of this sort.
There remains the style itself of Saint Thomas. His grammatical equipment suffered from the
same weaknesses as medieval Latin, and especially scholastic Latin. His syntax, in particular,
was a rudimentary one,
although less so than that of Albert. From this point of view, much
ground had been lost in the School since the days of Saint Anselm. Through his abundant use
of adjectives, synonyms, repetitions, it was easier for Bonaventure to reveal his unctuousness,
his humility, and his saintly ardor. In this also, the latter was closer to Augustine whose
subjective style was quite evidently unsuited to fulfil the needs of the doctrinal enterprise of
Saint Thomas. One cannot accumulate contrary gifts. To refuse to recognize, however, that in
the most abstract passages of Saint Thomas there is hidden away great religious power would
be to yield to the religious enfeeblement of a certain type of scholasticism. Granted that one is
able to find in his works only four or five passages in which he gave way to a little show of
emotion and two or three more where he displayed some amount of temper, it remains that
the spiritual compactness of his words and texts is oftentimes discernible, at least by those
who know how to see theology as his true intellectus fidei.
If, therefore, the study of the language of Saint Thomas is a task that one has to undertake, the
reason for this is not some nostalgic reaction, or the need for linguistic catholicity in theology,
or even less, some humanistic outworn taste for linguistics. Rather, the reason for it is
philological exactingness itself which, with Saint Thomas, has all the more reason to be
sought after, since in his case like in that of every master, his language is substantially one
with his thought. His language, therefore, introduces us to the very depths of his thought.
Chapter IV
The Procedures of Documentation
If we were dealing with an author of recent times, it would really be of little interest, save perhaps to gather some limited bits of erudite information, to go about inquiring into the procedures through which this author gathered his materials. It is, of course, extremely profitable to follow up the genesis of a work, to learn about both its settings and sources and to locate it within its surrounding cultural contexts. Yet, in the present instance, it is something entirely different that we are dealing with, namely: the technical laws of a type of work which all of the Middle Ages, including Saint Thomas, rested upon the support of texts-it matters not in how personal and faithful a manner this was done-which were transmitted by way of school tradition and carried the weight of authority. We have already said that this constant recourse to auctores was undoubtedly the most characteristic element of scholasticism. It now remains for us to analyse the methods used in that recourse by the Schoolmen, and, unabashed, to examine sympathetically those methods as they were put to work, in order to understand thera both in what they were and in the dialectics of the critique through which they were exploited.
I. the Procedure of Authority in the Middle Ages
Anyone who opens at random a medieval work and glances through its textual apparatus
cannot but be struck immediately by the constant citing of authors to bear witness to any step
taken by the writer. Expressions such as: Ut dicit Augustinus... [as Augustine says...] or Unde
dicitur apud Aristotelem... [whence it is said in Aristotle...] indicate the beginning of a
reasoning process and the ratification of conclusions. So much is this so that the modern
editor of a medieval text finds himself at grips with the tedious and interminable task of
having to identify the sources of the text he is editing. In just the first twelve questions of the
Summa Theologiae Saint Thomas refers to other authors 160 times: Aristotle 55 times,
Augustine 44, Dionysius 25, the Latin Fathers 23, the Greek Fathers 4, and secular authors 9.
In the whole sum of his works, citations of Dionysius occur 1,702 times. There is in all this a
fact, literary as well as doctrinal, the reasons and full significance of which are hereinafter
explained.
There are a number of dissimilar yet interlocking reasons explaining the medieval method of recourse to authors, a method further embedded through classroom routine.
To start with, there was the contingent fact that an age-long custom weighed in favor of it. The barbarian mind, during the course of its slow ascent to culture from the rains of the Roman Empire, did not open up directly to the reading and understanding of the great works of the preceding centuries. The latter, whether from the pen of a Cicero in ancient matters, or of an Augustine in Christian matters, were located at a level that the Barbarians were unable to reach. Before they actually did so five centuries were needed, with the glamor of the Carolinglan renaissance only a beautiful episode quickly buried by the Xth or “iron century.” Save for a few exceptions, in every field men of that time were content to abide by an elementary teaching that fed on by-products and was far removed from any kind of theoretical systematizing and aesthetic arranging—not to speak of the unwieldy burden of an artificial language. Anthologies of selected texts (sententiae), collections of spiritual prescriptions and of canonical decisions, compilations gradually organized into florilegia of authors or into records of doctrinal data were the authoritative means of transmitting an inheritance of some value. Yet they were also the factor through which the minds of these peoples became accustomed to the primitiveness of a literary genre in which phrases taken out of their context acquire a sort of juridical dignity having something imposing about it. All this became a background of mere material practice when outstanding personalities appeared on the scene and when antonomous scientific procedures imposed themselves. It is necessary, nevertheless, to measure the extent of its use and to recognize the formalistic ways in which it was employed. At any rate, so modest a literary genre did produce its masterpiece—an eminently representative one: the so-called but well-named Liber Sententiarum of Peter Lombard, composed at precisely the moment when the stage had been set for a well-chosen and organized array of texts to make up a body of doctrine worthy of becoming a classic. This, in fact, the Lombard’s work did. The same can be said of Gratian’s work in matters of law.
There was a second component factor. During the Middle Ages, any initiating of work in the field of teaching, as well as the whole framework of culture, was organized by clerics. That civilization was born within the Church. Cleries had by no means tried to inveigle it, but it resulted from the existing material and moral conditions easily explainable by the times. Whether at the court of Charlemagne, the monastic schools of the early Middle Ages, the communal schools of the XIIth century, or the universities of the XIIIth, initiative and inspiration came from churchmen. Teaching was polarized by religious ends. Even more than that, whatever the various subjects it dealt with (the seven arts of the old disciplina [teaching regime]), teaching was set up and ratified under the influence of the spiritual power of a Christian conception of man and of the world. It was, therefore, normal that theology should be considered the supreme science, since it was the first and supreme object of interest to these men. Theology was the science of a book, of the book of books, the Bible. Theology was such by right. Since it was the science of God, it found in this book the word of God, the revelation of God. Theology was such in fact, since the teaching of it had settled, spontaneously and without a break, upon the text of this word of God, upon the collating of the texts of a tradition which interpreted it by congealing around it. Authority, the ‘authorities” were the rule abided by in theological work. Thus from theology, the first body of knowledge to have been made up into a whole, a type of pedagogy was compounded wherein, by force of habit, the mind followed the lead of theology in the other branches of teaching. All this came about without authority becoming in any way an authoritarianism in principle, which our moderns accuse it of having been.
On precisely this point, we have a third circumstance helping to explain the Medieval recourse to authority. This type of pedagogy blended in with the procedures and techniques of a civilization which the discovery of the ancient texts had put on the alert. Within a renaissance, as we have already stated, the forward progress of medieval man’s thought was engineered, both as regards doctrinal substance and the successive stages through which it grew. Under circumstances of this sort, man’s curiosity, in whatever unrestrained fashion it was to show up, found its channel of expression within the processes of imitation. From Donatus in grammar all the way up to Aristotle in metaphysics, cultural achievement came by the texts of authors considered as the masters of right thinking and of right expression. They were “authorities,” and their texts were “authentic.”
There was undoubtedly the risk that a reading of the auctores with an eye to the aesthetie values that their texts contained would be ousted by the formalism of the pedagogues. In like manner, a direct feeding upon the originalia of the Fathers would give way to a lazy transmitting of ready-made sentences. In philosophy, finally, the authority of Aristotle would be an excuse for the mind’s not returning to the problems that the objects of reality permanently raise regardless of what part of truth may have been acquired about them. Yet, we repeat, this corrupted state of affairs of a later day did not compromise the initial state of interest to which recourse to the Ancients gave support.
One should not, in any event, end up giving a summary interpretation of this state of mind and judging it outright as if it were some product of an infantile and ceremonious passiveness. Alongside this recourse to the masters, the medieval mind was at work developing the processes of its thinking and pushing research far beyond the trajectory described by the original text. It went so far, indeed, that referring to authors soon came to mean no more than a conventional citing of them. Thus, we shall see that the innumerable texts of Augustine in the works of Saint Thomas must be classified as: references for the sake of authority, references for purely dialectical support, references for ornament. This literary procedure is perhaps annoying to the modern purist. Actually however, it was no more than an innocent practice, incidental to a highly valuable system of pedagogy. Precisely because the highly supple meaning of these auctoritates was ignored, this practice came to be made up into a frightening bogy. What, then, was the meaning, both in its actual use and in its almost unperceived evolution, of this word auctoritas when applied to a text?
When auctoritas and the corresponding term authenticus
first started being used in the
vocabulary of the medieval language, these words carried within themselves a whole past of
signification. In it, the subsequent variant senses are already discernible as implicitly
determined. In it also, these variants are already impregnated with the outright and
characteristically juridic meaning that the words originally had. An auctor among the Latins
was, as a matter of fact, a person who took the initiative in an act. More properly, an auctor in
common law was a person who transferred to another person, subject to liability of some sort,
a right for which he could vouch. A seller, for instance, was in respect to a buyer an auctor.
The guarantee itself was called an auctoritas, and a secundus auctor could in turn vouch for
the auctoritas, inasmuch as he had one or the other of the various titles which could make
him, in the low Latin terin, auctorabilis [capable of guaranteeing]. This juridic connotation of
the word auctoritas persisted throughout the Middle Ages, adding its weight to the usual
sense of auctoritas meaning dignity, and thus strengthening the precise scope that its meaning
was to have in theological language.
With the help of the superabounding documents and of the skilful classification provided by
the Thesaurus linguae latinae, we can thus extract the lines of semantic development of the
word auctoritas. Whether taken in its juridic meaning or in the wider sense of dignity,
auctoritas originally signified that quality in virtue of which, a man—whether magistrate,
writer, witness, or priest—was worthy of credit, of consideration, of credence. By metonymy,
the word designated secondly the person himself who possessed this quality. Soon after, by a
transposition of meaning from the human subject to his outward act, the word came to
designate the writing, the document in which the judgment or the decision of this human
subject was expressed. This instrument was invested with authority, or what comes to the
same, was considered authentic. This meaning, naturally, applied first of all to official
documents. The rescripts of the princes and later the ‘letters of the Popes were auctoritates,
and the Justinian Code as well as Pope Gregory will speak of the authentica et originalia
rescripta [authentic and original rescripts],
opposing them to the exempla [copies].
Already, however, it may be seen that through a new metonymy, the text itself was directly
called an auctoritas; no longer was it just qualified as having authority. The text itself which
was called to witness was an authority.
This last meaning of the word circulated among the compilers of sentences, of auctoritates
during the early Middle Ages. Auctoritas Augustini, Gregorii [the authority of Augustine, of
Gregory] did not refer to the personal worth of Gregory or of Augustine; the expression meant
a text written by Gregory or by Augustine.
Through this recalling of the meaning of the classical terminology, one sees that if the words
auctoritas (and auctor itself) and authenticus, pointed, in their etymological sense, to the idea
of origin and to that of authority,
it was in fact this second sense that held the upper hand,
at least in the stereotyped and technical formulas over which the juridie sense had more or
less spread out. Legal recognition—in this case, ecclesiastical recognition—in the final
analysis made a text authentic and officially gave it the right of abode in theological
argumentation.
It was really this recognition that the medieval historians, jurists, theologians, school teachers
had in mind when they spoke, each necording to the subject of his own inquiry, of their
“authentic” sources.
The philosophers also (meaning here, the pagans) will be considered
“authorities” in their own subject matters.
If such were the menning, gencsis, and use of the “authorities,” and such were the customs
out of which grew the generalized use of them, then it appears that we cannot see in them the
exact medieval equivalent of what we call, since the XVIth century, the argument of tradition,
that is, the argument established through a consensus of witnesses unanimously testifying
throughout the centuries in favor ofa doctrine of faith. Here more often than not, in Saint
Thomas as well as in his contemporaries, it is one author who is cited, one text that is brought
to witness, without consideration of time and place and without any intention of establishing
a dossier. Citing, furthermore, swings between a testifying to a matter of faith as such and a
simple illustrating of a pre-elaborated thesis. In a usage of this sort, let us not go looking for a
witness to what we today call “positive theology,” except in sporadic cases and when the text
explicitly deals with polemic matters. The medieval practice of the auctoritas is both a more
extensive and a more summary one.
For example, in the psychological analysis of the
assent to faith which he builds up from Augustine’s text: “To believe is to think with
assent,”
Saint Thomas develops what had been a lofty perception of his master. He does not
try to prove a thesis with a collection of texts from the Fathers, which at any rate have no
reason to be called in at this particular point. When he establishes that theology is a science (I,
q. 1, a. 2), he quotes a beautiful text from Augustine. His demonstration of the thesis,
however, both in its structure and in its conclusion, is wholly outside the thinking of
Augustine for whom the very word science has another range of meaning. Saint Ambrose is
called in to testify that charity is the form of virtues. (II-II, q. 23, a. 8), but he never
considered the problem in these terms. The Dionysian axiom: Bonum est diffusivum sui
[Goodness is self-diffusing], a classical authority if ever there was one, concentrates within
itself a deep metaphysical intelligibility, and it need not provide itself with sufferance from
other sources. Saint Thomas enumerates seven sacraments, seven gifts of the Holy Spirit,
eight beatitudes, eleven passions, eight integral parts of the virtue of prudence (by combining
the “authorities” of Plotinus Macrobius, Cicero, and Aristotle; II-II, q. 48). Needless to say,
the basic authorities invoked in each case are completely heterogeneous as regards their
origin, their value, and their truth. Examples like these could be multiplied.
The medieval auctoritas is much more supple in its application than the modem argument
based on tradition, and it is not required to fulfill the same scientific objective. Thus, one can
discern, side by side with unmistakably positive references (which, to be sure, can be used in
theological documentation), appeals to authority that are purely dialectical in character and
other citations that are simply ornamental. The latter classification, proposed a number of
years ago for the citations of Saint Augustine (and which must serve as the basis of a study of
the mighty Augustinian-Thomistic problem),
can be extended to the citations of Dionysius,
Gregory, Scripture, and even, all things being equal, of Aristotle. The same classification can
also be improved upon through a concrete observing of how the “authorities” were handled.
The texts referred to in the treatise on baptism, for instance, have been distributed into
citations serving as sources of problems, as pure ornaments to the text, as sources of a
doctrine, as proofs of a doctrine, as confirmations, as explanations, or as justifications of
some assertion or another.
This is enough to show how relative the citation procedure can
be.
It was within this same context that, in order to meet the renewed and broadened problems
raised by speculation, the practice began during the third quarter of the XIIth century of
gathering and (a bit later of quoting side by side with the “authentic” sayings of the Fathers)
the sententiae modernorum magistrorum [sentences of the modern masters]. Therein we have
a new source of relativism. The typical example of this new practice was the anthology
known under the title of Liber Pancrisis: “Herewith begins the Pancrisis book, that is, the all-gold book, so qualified because herein are contained the golden sentences or questions of the
saintly Fathers Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose, Gregory, Isodorus, Bede, and of the modern
masters William, bishop of Chalons, Ivo, bishop of Chartres, Anselm and his brother
Radulfus”.
In his Eulogium, a repertory of texts concerned with the various explanations
given about the Incarnation John of Cornwall quoted concurrently from both sources “in
order,” in his words, “that the lighter armor of the Doctors of these times be a prelude to the
mighty wedged-formations of the Saints” (c.3; P.L., 199, 1053),
and after having brought in
the auctoritates sanctorum [authorities of the saints] (ch. 2, ibid., 1048-1050), he gave the pro
and con auctoritates magistrorum [authorities of the masters] (ch. 3 and 4, ibid., 1050-1056).
Saint Thomas later wrote: “According to the exposition of the ancient saints, according also
to the magisterial exposition, the sin against the Holy Spirit may be said to be...” (De malo, q.
3, a. 14, ad 2).
If the magister was vested with a quality of this kind, it was because he had officially received, at least from the start of the XIIth century, a canonical mission through the conferring upon him of the title of master or doctor. The license to teach after his examination for the masterate was for him the real ground of a right that he exercised when he “determined,” that is, when he gave a doctrinal, one might say, a doctoral solution to a question that had been raised. The institutional development of the universities at the start of the XIIIth century cleared the way for the emergence of this right of determining and enlarged upon it. The lecturing bachelors, meanwhile, had absolutely no claim to it.
Not only the more eminent personalities among the masters, in virtue of the high degree of
their learning, became accredited and won for themselves the assent of the theologians who
came after them. The same became true also of the magistri in a body, as little by little a
relative unanimity was set up among them on a question under dispute or on a definition.
Their opinion, often expressed under anonymous cover, then prevailed.
It became the
“accepted” opinion, without, however, its imposing itself as would an “authority.” Thus, it
became customary to speak of a sententia magistralis [magisterial sentence], a definitio
magistralis [magisterial definition], a glossa magistralis [magisterial gloss], a via magistralis
[magisterial way], and even—through a transition in application that was almost abusive of
the word
—of an auctoritas magistralis [magisterial authority]. Thus a whole new field of
possible references was developed to support the steps taken as work went along. They were
given usually without any names affixed and, more often than not, reduced to the form. of an
expression of opinion rather than presented through the explicit quoting of a text. These
references, at least in part, were those announced by the word quidam [some], which
anonymously called to mind the controversies of the contemporary masters and located the
latter at a level completely different from that of the ancient positions.
Thus, with these dicta magistrorum [sayings of the masters], we are little by little getting
away from the auctoritates, since they were not accredited on a par with the sancti [saints].
While the auctoritas was, in a way, law in itself and had to be accepted, the magistrale
dictum [magisterial dictum], on the contrary, had no constraining value and could be rejected
without scruple. “This is a magisterial gloss and is of little worth,”
Saint Thomas wrote, as
he dropped the gloss of a certain master. When, with his customary benevolence, he found
something acceptable in the texts of Hugh of Saint Victor on the contemplation of the first
man, he, nevertheless, went to the pains of declaring: “Although the sayings of Hugh of Saint
Victor are magisterial. and do NOT have the cogent power of an authority, nevertheless...”
Peter Lombard, the “master” par excellence, did not escape this dosage of approval and these
restrictions—as witness the lists circulated throughout the Middle Ages that contained more
and more of these propositions in quibus non tenetur Magister [in which the Master is not
abided by].
Roger Bacon protested with acrimony against the credit shown to Alexander of
Hales and Albert the Great who, simple “masters,” were nevertheless adduced and quoted as
“authorities” at the University of Paris.
Two other terms were also used for collective reference, and in thern, as a matter of fact, may
be witnessed the development of problems that took place as scholasticism progressed during
the course of the XIIIth century. These collective names, the antiqui [ancients] and the
moderni [moderns], refer us to two very different generations of the aforementioned magistri
or quidam. Sometimes, under these words, the reference is to the Ancients—the Greeks in
philosophy, the Fathers in theology—and they are opposed to the Moderns. In most cases,
however, in the technical sense that these categories then take on, moderni refers to an
immediately preceding or to an almost contemporaneous generation of masters, while antiqui
refers to those of two or three generations before. This is something worthy to be noted by
those who wish to follow up the genesis of problems. Thus, the antiqui, for Saint Thomas, are
the generations of masters who were on the scene from the dawn of the University of Paris to
the decade of 1220-1230 and on whom had fallen the task of drawing up a synthesis that the
documentary efforts of Peter Lombard and the dialectics of Abelard had prepared. They
quickly became obsolete, however, through the intellectual revolution brought about by
Aristotelianism. One could identify the “moderns”—Robert Grosseteste, for
instance—through their contacts with the new philosophy.
These references are valuable
since they enable one to restore to their concreteness problems that Saint Thomas presents in
abstractly formulated status quaestionis [states of the question].
Finally, to complete this inventory of the complex equipment at the disposal of the master in
the documentary system and authoritative method then in vigor, there was the division
through objects offered in the categories: sancti, philosophi [saints, philosophers]. The sancti
are the Fathers of the Church (the word Patres [Fathers], in XIIIth century vocabulary, refers
rather to the members of a council) whose testimony holds sway in religious matters. The
philosophi are the non-Christian thinkers in whom reason finds masters; worthy of being
heard, even though they are excused, on the grounds of the autonomy of their science, from
giving the last word on the destiny of man and on the whole conditioning of his existence. It
happens that the word theologi [theologians] replaces the word sancti in that couplet, but in
both cases, the vocabulary is itself revealing of the difference between their objects and their
methods.
All this use of the auctoritates falls under the critical judgment of Saint Thomas in
consequence of his formal distinction between knowledge by faith and knowledge by reason.
If, he says, in the realm of revelation, the authority of the word of God is decisive because it
is here a question of supra-rational truth, in the realm of science, authorities do not have the
same quality, and their value is a “very weak” one. They lead one only to assent in belief and
can only have dialectical scope in the debating of opinions.
Even more than that, a pupil
who, in his study of scientific theology, would limit himself to the exclusive acceptance of a
solùtion as determined by the authorities would be left deprived of any actual understanding
of the problem in question.
The severeness of this diagnosis is in vivid contrast with the
superabundant use that Saint Thomas makes of these auctoritates. This very disproportion,
however, helps us to perceive both the state of mind and the literary habits he brings to his
work.
II. the Technical Handling of Authorities
We are now in a position to understand the handling of tbis authoritative documentation, along with the rules that controlled it. There is more precision to these rules than it would seem at first sight, and although they are not always explicitly formulated, they reveal themselves to have been generally employed and decidedly effective in practice.
During three or four centuries, then, a modest understanding of problems had come about
through the means of textual defloratio [defloration].
This picking of flores [flowers] from
the works of the ancient writers had resulted in the compounding of anthologies of sententiae,
from which originated Peter Lombard’s Liber Sententiarum. The latter work in turn—without
this taking anything away from other enterprises—became the driving force behind the
development of medieval theology. Already, however, the discreteness in form and spirit that
showed up in this master work was the outcome of a lively intervention on the part of keen-minded critics in handling sententiae. Through his Sic et Non, Abelard had brutally raised the
problem of their interpretation, a problem that definitely had to be raised due to the serious
deficiencies of these texts in which abounded imprecisions, inconsistencies, unilateral
solutions, polemical assertions, all the drawbacks, in a word, pertaining to quotations plucked
out of the historical, literary, and doctrinal contexts that gave them a meaning. Abelard
fearlessly insisted upon the role that should be played by dialectics in solving the problem.
Yet, from their being engaged in the use of dialectics, rules of interpretation asserted
themselves, and XIIIth century teaching used them and amplified the scope of their activity. It
will be sufficient for our own purpose to see that they were centered around the principle of
concordia auctoritatum [the concordance of authorities], which was the governing rule in
both theology and law (cf. Gratian’s Concordia discordantium canonum). Therein we shall
come upon both the method and principles Saint Thomas applied in his exegesis of the
Fathers. The understanding of his works requires that we learn what they were both in
themselves and in his day—guarding all the while against the false preoccupation of making
of him a forerunner of the historical method.
1. “Most often it will be easy to bring most controversies to a solution, if the use of the same
words in different meanings by different authors can be defended.”
One recognizes here the
famous text in which, in the Preface of the Sic et Non, is formulated the most fertile rule in
the Abelardian method. This method systematically proclaimed that the philosophy of
language should be applied to the interpretation of texts, with considerations on grammar,
rhetoric, psychology, and pedagogy thrown in to shed light on the process. What we have here
is the phenomenon of multi-signification studied in modern sernantics. The entire art of
scholastic interpretation starts from this principle, and Saint Thomas is a master in this art.
The then currently-employed formula became: Sed hoc multipliciter dicitur... [But this is said
in a multiple sense... ]. Caught in between two texts contradicting one another, Peter Lombard
wrote: “In order to get away from this apparent contradiction, we say that the word
unengendered is used by Jerome in one way, by Augustine in another...”
Examples such as
this abound in medieval works. In the hands of Saint Thomas, the major terms that he uses in
each one of his treatises undergo a treatment in which he distinguishes: Communiter...
proprie... propriissime dicitur [It is commonly... properly... most properly said]. For a typical
case, let us refer to his analysis of the concept of imago [image], which the Greeks apply to
the Holy Spirit while the Latins refuse to do so: “But because it is presumptuous to go against
the so-clearly expressed authorities of such great doctors, we can as a matter of fact say
that...”
2. In line with this rule of critical interpretation, the scholastics bring out the fact that, within
the varying meanings that words undergo, the sense given to them in everyday use may be
playing against their proper meaning. This is a delicate situation for the speculative thinker
who is trying to express concepts in rigorous terms. As Abelard had formerly done, Saint
Thomas states expressly that common usage must be given priority,
even if it means
sacrificing the exactness of a translation.
3. One of the laws that Saint Thomas applies most intelligently is the observing of the style of
an author, his modus loquendi [way of speaking], which refers us to his grammar, his
imagery, his manner of conceptualizing things, and to all that is included in the literary genre
he employs. We know to what extent modern exegesis, Biblical as well as philosophical, has
benefited from the resources supplied by the literary-genre theory. In however summary a
way he may have done so, Saint Thomas did make good use of these resources, particularly in
his interpretation of Dionysius and Augustine, whose Platonic style could not but strike the
Aristotelian in him and be a source of embarrassment, if we can put it that way, when he tried
to adopt texts of this kind into the flow of his thought. For instance, he begins his
Commentary on the Divine Names with an exposition on the difficulties of an exegesis of the
Dionysian texts. The first of which comes from. “the style and the way of speaking that the
Platonists use, since the moderns are not accustomed to it.
Quite rightly, he sees in this
“style” a consequence of the very manner in which the Platonic thinking is done.
He
likewise observes in the case of Augustine: “This way of speaking is the usual one with the
Platonists whose doctrines Augustine was imbued with; having failed to take this into
account, his words have been for some an occasion of falling into error.”
The case of Holy Scripture comes up at this point—with its metaphorical language, its literary genres, its semitisms. This case, however, has provoked a series of problems and a proliferation of methods, all of which should and will be studied by themselves in a later chapter dealing with Saint Thomas, the expositor of Scripture.
4. In some cases, Saint Thomas probes deeper into the style of an author, going so far as to
disjoin the latter’s expression from the thought expressed. For instance, he is inclined to
interpret Aristotle’s criticism of some of Platos doctrines as bearing upon the latters
formulation of them rather than upon the underlying thought. “Aristotle, accordingly, is not
objecting here against the sense conveyed by Plato, but against the words used by the
Platonists, lest they lead someone into error.”
5. In other instances, on the contrary, it is the very thought of the authors—even of the sacred
doctors—that is caught up in the web of historical relativism. Being, in fact, solidary. with
their sources, the auctoritates also partake in the latters condition of contingency. When
Augustine, disciple of Plato, sets about philosophizing, he thinks and speaks the same way
Plato did. The Fathers are unanimous in their faith in the Scriptures, yet each comments upon
it in different manner according to the philosophy in which he was reared. “They are not
against one another, they diverge one from another,”
but indeed, their case is a very delicate
one.
The expositors of Holy Scripture differed from one another according as they
foIlowed the different philosophers who taught them their philosophy. Basil, for
instance, and Augustine, and many more of the saints follow the opinions of Plato in
those philosophical matters that do not regard the faith. This is why they assert that
the heavens partake of the nature of the four elements. Dionysius, on the other hand,
follows Aristotle in almost everything, as becomes evident to anyone looking into
his books...
It sometimes happens that their disagreement is masked by the expediency of making them
look like simple reporters of the opinions they are stating—another procedure of the
Abelardian method. “In many of the doctrines that pertain to philosophy, Augustine makes
use of the opinions of Plato, repeating them rather than asserting them as his own.”
“The
other saints have handed this down to us, not as if they were asserting it, but as using what
they had learned in philosophy; what they say, therefore, has no more authority than the
sayings of the philosophers whom they follow, except in this that they are exempt from any
suspicion of infidelity.”
In cases like these, it would undoubtedly be better, then, to confess
their divergence, and Saint Thomas consents to it. “Should we want to reduce the opinions of
different thinkers to agreement, a thing, however, which it is unnecessary to do, then it can be
said that the authorities... are to be expounded...”
6. The following is a rule not quite so scabrous, based this time on the homogeneity of the
thought of an author. When a text lends itself to ambiguity, it is the context (circumstantia
litterae) that determines its meaning. “In that canon, we do not have an assertion, but rather a
question, as may be understood from what surrounds the letter of the text.”
“The words of
the Philosopher are understood as applying to the intellect in act, in accordance with the
context of what has been said before.”
Not only the immediate context may supply this
rule; outlying contexts can do the same, whether they are parallel passages,
or contexts
provided from within the same system of thought—the interpreting, for instance, of a text of
the De Anima by recourse to some element contained in the Metaphysics.
7. Abelard had looked into those cases in which a critical examination of texts radically solves the problem of their disagreement. Their inauthenticity, or again the corrupt state in which they present themselves or are translated, brings about their dismissal. Saint Thomas makes use of this resource, and he shows an acuteness of perception that, as we shall see later, gives him the opportunity of purifying his Aristotelian, as well as his Augustinian, sources.
8. These rules and practices tend, with more or less effectiveness, to bring out what an author intends to express, and consequently the historical meaning of the text. There are cases, however, in which the expositor gives up this meaning; yet he is both unwilling and unable to put aside the auctoritas he is confronted with. What should be done in cases like these?
With this question, we are hitting upon one of the most curious and one of the most
knowingly-used practices of the medieval method of textual treatment. The auctoritates have
to, be accepted, particularly in theological argumentation where they supply a traditional and
decisive-in-itself support. Yet, these authorities display inadequacies, imprecisions,
divergencies. They are, moreover, to be inserted within homogeneous thought constructions
having their own systematic requirements. The solution, then, is to “interpret” them,
exponere. “An authority,” Alan de Lille writes in a pleasant vein, “has a wax nose, which
means that it can be bent into taking on different meanings,”
and he concludes that, in
theological work, the intervention of reason is a necessity. These men, imbued with
“authorities,” whose reason, however, enjoys fine health, know what it is all about.
Knowingly and, one might say, as a matter of principle, they make every effort at treating the
“authentic” texts in the aforesaid manner, smoothing out the roughness of their lines, refining
the vocabulary used in them, rectifying the improper senses they contain, giving precision to
the solutions they offer. All this is called exponere reverenter [to expound reverentially], a
respectful act that in the actual practice of exegesis goes far beyond the well-wishing
sympathy every author bas a right to expect from his interpreter. Exponere reverenter: one
should not entertain any illusions about the pious euphernism herein expressed. What it
amounts to is an effective retouching of a text, or a noticeable redressing of it, or again a
discreet deflecting of its meaning. No medieval thinker, moreover, is duped in the process.
When Saint Thomas goes about transposing into his Aristotelian vocabulary the
psychological descriptions of Augustine, he knows well that Augustine cannot, on account of
this, be treated as if he were a Peripatetic.
Some moderns, we must admit, show less circumspection. They are sometimes taken in by
the game when, not without precipitation, they find in this delicate method of textual
concordance a oneness of meaning that the XIIIth century thinkers had not seen in it. Anyone
is completely removed from their mental outlook, who holds, in their name and as being the
only exact historical exegesis, an interpretation that they avowedly and intentionally place in
the service of their own personal synthesis and, when the case warrants it, in the service of a
truth of faith clumsily expressed here or there by this or that Father. The medieval
theologians, at any rate, have good reasons—from the standpoint of their subject of study, as
well as from that of method—for proceeding in this way.
Yet, leaving aside their particular
case, the same procedure is the rule commonly employed in the faculty of arts by the
glossators of Priscian or of Boethius.
Most of all, it is the procedure followed by the jurists
who are accustomed to treating texts in such a way as to extend, without losing the
advantages ensuing from their venerability, their juridically stimulating power to other
highly-developed social or administrative realities. This practice is one in which interpreting
is tendentious. Yet, it is one the modern law masters recognize as being both expedient and
legitimate from the standpoint of method, since this sort of casuistry belongs to the scientific
methods applied in the elaboration of positive law.
During the Middle Ages, as may be
seen, the theologians and the jurists work along the same lines in their partially related
disciplines.
Passing up the examples that could be picked from the innumerable instances in which,
implicitly and in actu exercito [in actual practice], the theologians apply this method of
“reverential exposition” to their authorities, let us give a few texts taken from the XIIIth
century authors
in which, explicitly and in actu signato [with actually worded purpose],
they express both the rule and the principle of this deferent treatment.
There are quite a few patristic texts in which the verb generare [to engender] is improperly
employed when speaking of the divine essence. Faced with this problem, Alexander of Hales
has this to say: “To all the authorities which apparently state that the word to engender is
suitably applied to the [divine] essence, there is a common answer: it is that all of these
authorities use improper and emphatic, that is, overstating, language, which should, therefore,
be interpreted”.
In connection with this same terminology employed in Trinitarian theology, Saint Thomas
remarks in the same way: “The holy Doctors have sometimes expressed more than the
propriety of their statement allows. Statements of this ‘kind, therefore, should not be extended
but interpreted”.
He makes a similar statement in connection with the Incarnation:
“Statements of this sort are not to be extended as if their meaning were a proper one; rather,
they are to be piously interpreted wherever they are used by the sacred Doctors.”
About the Christology of Saint Hilary, Albert the Great writes: “Some say that Hilary
retracted these words, and, in my opinion, this solution is [would be?] the better one. Yet
since I have not seen the book of his retraction, it is necessary therefore, to use force upon his
words in three places...”
“To do violence” to the texts is the way we were tempted to
translate vim facere. Bacon testifies that the procedure has become universal in the schools:
“The catholic Doctors now (1267) installed in the more important places of study have
publicly changed many of the sayings of the Saints, piously interpreting them with a thought
to saving as much as possible of their truth.”
He speaks again of “correcting Aristotle
through a pious and reverential interpretation.”
Now here is how Saint Thomas explains himself on this procedure and justifies it from the standpoint of theology. One can see that he and the others of his day knew what it was all about, at least in principle. One can see also to what extent one would be going astray in believing that they were lacking in perspicacity or laboring under illusions running counter to historical truth.
The sayings of the saints are found to contain certain things that seem dubious to the
moderns. In my estimation, this comes from a twofold reason. The first is that the
errors arising about the faith furnished the holy doctors of the Church with the
occasion of being more circumspect in their imparting of the matters of faith, so as
to eliminate those errors that had arisen. This is clear from the fact that the holy
doctors who wrote before the error of Arius did not use so explicit a language
concerning the unity of divine essense as did the doctors who came afterwards. The
same thing happened with other errors appearing in explicit language not only in
different doctors but in one who is outstanding amongst them, Augustine. Hence, in
the books that he published after the rise of the Pelagian heresy, he speaks more
cautiously about the power of free choice than he did in his books published before
the rise of the aforesaid heresy. In the latter, where he was defending freedom of
choice against the Manicheans, he came out with certain statements that the
Pelagians, the adversaries of divine grace, took up in defense of their own error.
There is no cause for astonishment, therefore, if the modern doctors of the faith after
the rise of various errors, speak about the doctrines of the faith with more caution
and in, so to speak, better filed-down words. What they are trying to avoid is heresy
of whatever kind it may be. Consequently, if, in the sayings of the ancient doctors,
we find certain statements that are not worded with as much caution as is practiced
by the moderns, these statements are not to be treated with contempt or cast aside;
nor, however, are they to be extended in their use. They must, on the contrary, be
interpreted reverentially.
Father Mandonnet calls attention to this text of capital importance, and he comments upon it in the following words:
Thus, Saint Thomas is not in the least ignorant as to the general fact that dogma
undergoes development, nor as to the divergence of positions which we find
amongst the Fathers and even within the doctrinal career of Augustine himself. This
is, for Saint Thomas as it is for us, the historical viewpoint. Yet when he is acting as
a philosopher or a theologian, he is not writing history; he is building up a system
and doctrinal expositions whose aim is truth in itself. In line with this, when, along
his way, he comes upon the opinions of the Fathers, he leads them round and reduces
them to the meaning that he himself holds, by interpreting them in the sense that his
own system and ideas have taken on. Instead of saying that the Fathers are more or
less mistaken, or that he thinks along other lines, he expounds them reverenter, as he
terms this manner of acting.
This peculiar technique, even more than the other rules spoken of above, brings us now to determining what were the meaning and scientific implications of this recourse to “authorities.”
III. History or Dialectic?
When Abelard composed his table of discording authorities, he developed his work in two successive approaches, the effectiveness of either stimulating the other. His first effort consisted in bringing these texts out into the open, following this up with rational proceedings aimed at working them out in detail. The more integral data-investigation was in the first approach, the more inciting this sincere probing proved to be for the second, calling for the vigorous force of dialectics to go to work—in contrast with a lazy submissiveness usual in textual perusal. Within these correlative approaches was contained the efficacious equilibrium destined to control the whole of theology’s history. If every science, for it to profit in its systematic construction, requires a previous investigating of its datum, if again, for the benefit of the very momentum of its reasoning processes, every science renews itself inasmuch as it returns to an examining of this datum and experimenting upon it, in the same way, and a fortiori, theological science, that science of the gratuitous revelation of God, must be built up from a revealed datum. The more scrutinizing, the more taking stock, the more savoring of the texts theology does, the more avidly will it draw itself up to its understanding. Authorities and reasons are one in their dependency upon one another; documentation and speculation interlace with one another in the oneness of sacra doctrina. Just because Abelard, from the examination he made of the authorities themselves, insisted upon a place being kept for the use of reasons, does not make him a rationalist, even if he did give in to some intemporate verbal blasting. The requirements of his method foreshadowed the elaborate XIIIth century scholasticism.
The fact remains, however, that Abelard’s investigating of the authorities—a remarkable
piece of text recording—shows a definite bent toward dialectics, the latter being called upon
to insert reasoned unity into these so-easily and ill-assorted texts. Will not the dialectical
techniques weigh down sornewhat the process of data registering, and will they not be
conducive to textual telescoping? In the above-stated rules drawn from the Sic et Non and
from the consciously applied practice of Saint Thomas, the role of historical criticism shows
up in a fine light.
Yet, rationalizing devices can be quick to take root, and not always with
legitimate cause excepting perhaps for some extrinsic reason more expedient for
systematizing purposes than for an exhaustive inquiring into the whole area of the revealed
datum. How does Saint Thomas work out these two approaches?
First, comes the approach of Saint Thomas toward the requirements for gathering data. He is actively at pains to gather the documentation available to him in his day and to enlarge upon it. There is no question that this is the case where Scripture is concerned, which he comments upon ex officio every day (see chapter VII on Saint Thomas and the Scriptures). The same is true for his patristic texts and, in his philosophical readings, for basic philosophical texts. It is enough for our purpose to give here a few instances, referring the reader to the qualified monographs for detailed information on the subject.
In connection with the foregoing, two facts stand out massively. Twice in his career, Saint
Thomas had the actual opportunity of handling and working upon dossiers of patristic
“authorities.” First, upon Urban IVs request (therefore between 1261 and 1264), he undertook
an unbroken gloss on the four Gospels with texts that he picked out from the ancient
Christian writings—from the XIVth century on, this gloss was called the Catena aurea.
Secondly, upon the same Urban IV’s proposal, he answered, through an interpretation of
ambiguous texts, a patristic dossier of Greek texts that went against the dogmas of the Latins.
This answer was entitled Contra errores Graecorum. These two works have been put to
critical examination many a time since the XVIIIth century, and again even recently.
Today,
the consensus is that these works were very well done and that the reservations made about
them do not touch upon the critical principles judiciously expounded therein but rather upon
certain results unavoidably linked up with the instrumentation and the procedures of the day.
In them we find Saint Thomas attentive at identifying auctores and their works, at noting
down explicit and anonymous references, revealing defective translations, extending the
inquiry to new sources, and more especially, having recourse to the Oriental tradition. “I have
had the expositions of the Greek Doctors translated into Latin.”
These are so many traits
proving that he had a discriminating sense of the investigating that had to be done.
The extent of Saint Thornas’s inquisitiveness is testified to, not only by the picturesque
anecdote in which he told his students about his desire of having Chrysostom’s homiliary at
his disposal,
but much more and right at the heart of his theology, by his Dionysian sense of
God’s transcendency, his Augustinian outlook on the primacy of beatitude, his Cyrillian
theandricism, the realism of grace he took from. the Greeks, his well-balanced Christology
inspired by the Damascene. AU these fine fruits had issued from the rich documentation
furnished by the Greek Fathers and worked upon anew since the end of the XIIth century.
The same is true in philosophy where his keenness of perception reveals itself in his obtaining
William of Moerbeke’s assistance to penetrate the Greek commentators (Simplicius,
Philoponus, Themistius) [Torrell: He used, but had not requested or met Moerbeke], or to
revise the translations of Aristotle himself, and again, in his using assiduously the
commentaries of Averroes.
In respect to the authenticity of the works at his disposal, he rules out, among many others,
the De spiritu et anima, a work that imposed upon the Augustinian heritage, and the De
causis, another work that disorientated the Aristotelian system as a whole toward a
neoPlatonie metaphysics. He recognizes that the latter writing attributed to Aristotle is in fact
the Elementatio theologica of Proclus.
As regards the correctness of the texts, he controls
one version by another in the Dionysian as well as in the Aristotelian works. He inquires on
different occasions about original Greek readings.
He turns to the commentators to make
the right choice from amongst variant readings. Thus, his work on Aristotle turns out to be, as
we shall see, one of literal precision that surpasses, in exegetic quality itself, the
commentaries of Averroes.
One must admit, there remain shortcomings whereby Saint Thomas is a master of his times,
those times in which the compilation method in particular had finally overwhelmed—after
being its fortunate result—the reading of what was called originalia, that is, the reading of the
works themselves in their enlivening completeness.
By taking them out of their context and
through selections oftentimes open to question, the sentence-compilers had reduced the texts
to stock phrases, preserving them as in herbariums. No longer were the sources looked into;
refined dialectics had replaced invigorating rending, formulas had become conventionalized,
words enhardened in their meaning. John Damascene is judged severely because of a word he
uses (I, q. 36, a. 2, ad 3), when recourse to a neighboring text would have perfectly explained
it. Bonaventure quotes Augustine’s precious De utilitate credendi eleven times, but it is
always the same text that is quoted (10 times), taken no doubt from a florilegium. In fact,
three anthologies often prove to be the too easy-to-reach immediate repertories: the Gloss,
Peter Lombard, and Gratian. The Trinitarian and Christological concepts of the Greeks are
sometimes ill-treated because their original meaning is not grasped.
The advantages attendant upon John Damascene’s analysis of the human act are lost because
his translator has perverted the distinction, basic in it, between qelhsij and boulhsij,
and a
similar accident has blurred the traditional description of acedia.
In philosophy, the
formulas expressing the Dionysian metaphysics of participation lose their sinew when the
Aristotelian distinction between the formal and efficient causes is introduced,
while the
stating of the Augustinian theory of illumination dissolves away when the theory of
abstraction arrives on the scene. In the theology of the Incamation, the texts of Saint Cyril
have weighed on one side of the scale, without their always having been firmly established in
themselves and in their context, while the formulas used in the Council of Constantinople
(553) have commanded assent, without being given those shades of meaning which a
qualified measuring of its “authorities” would have required. These are shortcomings that no
one can deny and that have already been classified as such.
Passing on to the work Saint Thomas does in the field of interpretation, we note that he has
the historical meaning of texts, obtained through an inquiry into the intentio auctoris
[intention of the author] prevailing, in principle, over the exploitation of them through the use
of dialectics. It is striking to see to what extent he is preoccupied with fixing this intention
which he discovers by looking into the contexts, the parallel passages, the literary genres, the
sources of thought, systems as a whole. Whether it is Augustine, Dionysius, Anselm, and
more especially Aristotle, whom he is studying, Saint Thomas is wont to expressly summon
in their intentio.
This scems to be a trait characterizing him among his contemporaries. It
must be admitted, however, that the method of “reverential exposition” so frequently and
consciously used, as we have seen, implies some check to the intentio criterion, something
like a means of escape from the avowed historical meaning. The two procedures do not
always perform within the limits of their own competency.
This leads us to discerning the precise ends that control his reading of texts and authorize him
in using these texts—over and beyond a pure and sole exegesis of them—within a doctrinal
undertaking, whether this undertaking is an authentic tradition (that of the Church in
theology) or whether it is a personal systematic whole. Therein the Abelardian dialectics
resumes its role, beyond history. When, for instance, we read that Augustine, in a certain
passage, is engaged in a controversy against the Manicheans and that this is the factor
warping his thought, so far we have a case of historical exegesis. Again, when we read that
Aristotle is referring to the theories of the first philosophers of nature and that, in his
controversy, he is looking only at one side of the problem, this is good exegesis. When,
however, concerning a certain word used by Augustine (for example, the role played by
concupiscence in original sin), or concerning a certain statement made by Aristotle (for
example, the pure act is non-provident), a distinction is brought in which these thinkers have
not foreseen, more precision is undoubtedly being given to a truth, but the attainment of their
genuine thought is being given up. Well then, Saint Thomas says (and here is the famous text
whose meaning we should like to establish at the close of this chapter): “The study of
philosophy is not done in order to know what men have thought, but rather to know how truth
herself stands.”
Taken absolutely, this text—in which is magnificently underlined, together
with the unrestricted grandeur of truth, the spiritual freedom of one who attempts a conquest
of it—would seem to flout both exegesis and history. It is easy, however, to see what it meant
in the mind of Saint Thomas if one ponders the exegetical exactingness that he showed when,
in philosophy, he carried out his Aristotelian enterprise, the way he reacted in favor of the
literal sense in Scripture, the intense curiousness he manifested, in theology, concerning the
revealed datum and the “authorities” in which it is expressed. He did all this, moreover,
without prejudice against the mind’s appetite for understanding whose rights he upholds
against a certain type of positivism (“If a master determines a question on the strength of bare
authorities, his listener... will leave, empty in mind”).
Aristotle and Augustine really live
anew in Thomas Aquinas, but it is Thomas Aquinas who, via Aristotle and Augustine,
adheres to timeless truth.
Such is, in principle, the way in which Saint Thomas has exegesis and pure thought, the datum and the constructed, correctly interlocking. If, in fact, his dialectical tools do at times prejudge about texts, it becomes a matter in which each case has to be examined according to circumstances. The inserting of speculation within the tissues of a text, in other words, the engaging of reason within an “authority” is always a delicate problem. This problem, however, we shall examine in the chapter that follows, in which it will be the first case studied within Saint Thomas’s procedures of construction.
Chapter V
The Procedures of Construction
I. Thought and Methods
When judging the caliber of a mind, one should not lessen the all important role played by the contents of its thinking. Quite obviously, its greatness is measured through the very truths which it grasps and expresses. It would be a mistake, however, to treat this truth-object of the mind outside the ways and means through which precisely it conquers these truths and builds thein up within itself. Right within the capturing and the holding of truth, methods and objects are so solidary one upon the other that it becomes impossible to reach an understanding of a system of thought if this system is not expressly seen from within that inner light through which it has bit by bit been perceived, built up and unified in the mind. The surest way of understanding the truths proposed by a living mind is to follow the various steps it takes as it makes its way from its initial intuitions to its final constructions. In this sense, there is no Thomism outside the thought of Saint Thomas.
It, therefore, becomes necessary—setting aside any conventionalized form of interpreting the thought of Saint Thomas—to turn once again to its living sources and to penetrate into the very begetting of his system. This time, however, our quest will no longer be centered upon the material elements brought into play according to the uses and customs of the times. We must discover within the literary apparatus used in his day the inner initiatives of his mind as he set about implementing his initial perceptions and building up his understanding of objects. In this stage of our inquiry, we shall be looking into the inner life of Saint Thomas, at least into that rational part within which a system of thought is elaborated, especially if the author is a Schoolman. How then does Saint Thomas go about doing his work?
At this point, we shall examine only his personal works. His commentaries belong to a very well-defined literary genre from which construction proper is excluded; the latter will have to be studied for itself further on in this book. But we shalllook into his personal works in their entirety, including those whole blocks of questions which unfortunately in practice have only too often been set aside because of the modern system of distributing subject-matter or due to a shift in the importance of problems. We are thinking, in particular, about many portions of the Second Part of the Summa having for us a twofold interest: methodological as well as doctrinal, since the analysis of moral matters is therein developed through means that differ considerably from the theoretical constructions of other treatises.
This is an observation of major import, inciting us to take note, in the present case as well as in many others, of the near indefinite diverseness of the procedures of analysing, reasoning, and dialectical research employed by Saint Thomas. Reducing the articles of a Summa to a schematic compass may be of some convenience in the hands of pedagogues; on the other hand, it ruins the mind’s living suppleness and it masks the variety of methods which reason must inevitably employ. Counter to this sort of leveling, we shall take delight in observing this variety and suppleness that came be satisfactorily classified under the theoretical headings fumished by the rational operations of analysis and synthesis. Our task will be one of discovering and describing that variety and suppleness in the concrete and hardly-conscious performance of a living intellect, striving—in actu exercito—after understanding in its multiple objects.
II. Dialectical Exegesis
Inserting a speculation within the tissues of a text is, we have said, one of the steps that characterizes scholastic thought. This step is a modest one; nevertheless, through it there is a progress from authority to reason, and through it, therefore, is marked off an already noticeable stage in the elaboration of a theology, or of a philosophy based upon the ancient masters. Let us take a close look into the various ways of applying the method, for many articles of the Summas or the Disputed Questions come under this literary genre, which is far removed from formal syllogizing.
A first group of articles offers an interpretation of texts—philosophical, literary, scriptural, patristic—in which the content is broken down into rational categories mostly borrowed from the Aristotelian system. In this process, we pass from an expression in experimental, intuitive, affective, or rhetorical terms to an intellectualistic formulation in which the intelligible elements that the former contains are brought out and organized, at the risk of reducing the emotive power or the helpful paradox present in the original text. When, for instance, Saint Paul declares that “virtue [power] is made perfect in infirmity” (2 Cor. 12:9), Saint Thomas, in order to preserve the idea of rational power that he attributes to the notion of virtue, reduces this “infirmity” to the feebleness of the physical and sensitive powers alone, whether or not the impact and the mystical bearing of the Pauline formula lose their vigor in the process (I-II, q. 55, a. 3, ad 3; II-II q. 123, a. 1, ad 1). [Kenny: Or is Thomas adhering to a patristic interpretation of the passage?]
Many treatises in Saint Thomas begin in like manner. Therein, he avails himself of a
traditional saying in which he recognizes as present one or the other of the following: the
genus and specific difference of a definition (see the definition of the notion of person
according to Boethius, I, q. 29, a. 1); the four constituent causes of a reality (the definition of
virtue according to Augustine, I-II, q. 55, a. 4); the proper qualifying of a psychological state
(the notion of habit according to Aristotle, I-II, q. 49, a. 1); the material and formal aspects in
a human act (the definition of sin according to Augustine, I-II, q. 71, a. 6); the integral
expression of all the component elements of a thing (the definition of virtue according to
Augustine, De virt, in com., a. 2; the definition of scandal, II-II, q. 43, a. 1); a psychological
analysis capable of supporting a definition (the definition of justice according to the jurists,
II-II, q. 58, a. 1); a specific trait pertaining to a special virtue (the definition of fortitude
according to Cicero, II-II, q. 123, a. 2), etc.
It goes without saying that an elaboration of this kind overruns the limits of sheer exegesis. It implies, together with the use of preestablished categories, the contribution of a personal reflexion. It can even happen that, in certain cases, the original text is so far exceeded that its only remaining purpose is to furnish the material occasion for an extensive build-up. Within the following text of Heb 11;1, for instance, “Faith is the substance of things to be hoped for, the evidence of things that appear not,” Saint Thomas locates the extremely complicated elements that make up the notion of faith, recognizing all the while that these elements are far from being formally expressed therein (II-II, q. 4. a. 1). Similarly, he finds in a word used by Augustine the specifying character of the assent of faith, by reference to the Aristotelian classification that he is using (II-II, q. 2, a. 1). Many times, to co-ordinate two rather different perspectives in the theology of the Incarnation, for instance, he exploits, far beyond its original meaning, the notion of instrument (organon) borrowed from, the still rather summary observations of John Damascene on the subject, and he uses it to determine what causal role Christ-the-man plays in sacramental life (see in III, q. 64, a. 3, the remarkable article in which he declares the two conflicting opinions to be right). Elsewhere he throws completely off keel a classical notion—one adorned with all of Augustine’s prestige at that—by inserting it within a different context. This he does with the notion of ratio superior et inferior in the philosophy of mind (De ver., q. 15), and with the notion of concupiscence in the theology of original sin (I-II, q. 82). One would be mistaken in judging this practice to be only cases where recourse is had to dialectical expedients (for instance, when he says that original sin is concupiscence materialiter [materially speaking]). Such an interpretation would be to minimize the original vigor of a profound conceptual and organic transposition which the apparatus of dialectics is summoned to foster.
In the same manner, he brings out the value and, as it were, weaves within the fabric of rational analysis those descriptions given by the moralists who now and again spontaneously word them in a language expressing a rich experience, if not always an intent so subtle as he sees in them. Thus, Aristotle furnishes the essential circumstances present in any human act (I-II, q. 7, a. 3); John Damascene and Gregory of Nyssa, the varieties of sadness (ibid., q. 35, a. 8), fear (q. 41, a. 4), anger (q. 46, a. 8); Plotinus (Macrobius), the ideal progressive development of the virtues (q. 61, a. 5); Cicero, the elements integral to fortitude (II-II, q. 128, a. 1); Saint Gregory, the “daughters” of the vices: vain glory (q. 132, a. 5), gluttony (q. 148, a. 6), lust (q. 153, a. 5), anger (q. 158, a. 7), and so forth. The same is done with the classification adopted in Christian tradition for the ten moral precepts, the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, and the eight beatitudes. The three Scriptural narratives concerned with creation, the ancient law, and the life of Christ are, in a similar way, the source supplying whole blocks of questions and articles in the Summa (I, q. 67-74; I-II, q. 105; III, q. 30-58), thus preserving in a theology of the most speculative kind a biblical content and atmosphere.
Likewise, we shall cull the passages in which Saint Thomas adopts from one of the ancient writers and makes his own a beautiful text, packed with insight yet somewhat obscure because of its compactness, and subjects it along the very lines of its contents to an elaborate amplification. It is a practice in the grand style. For an example see the way in which he comments upon this text of Saint Hilary: Esse non est accidens Deo [For God, to be is not an accident], in In I Sent., d. 8, exp. textus: De pot., q. 5, a. 4, ad 3; Quodl. II, a. 3; Quodl. XII, a. 5.
It would be an easy thing to bring in a large number of examples of these cases wherein exegesis is overstepped. Let us simply notice the cases in which two texts divergent in source and climate are combined or brought together in reinforcement of one another within a unique construction that evidently their original materials did not forecast. Aristotle, for instance, and the Roman jurists co-operate in the definition of justice (II-II, q. 58, a. 1); Boethius and Aristotle reveal the two different aspects pertaining to happiness (I-II, q. 3, a. 2, ad 2); Ulpian and Isidorus of Seville are brought to agreement in the definition of the laws of nations (II-II, q. 57, a. 3).
III. Analyses, Definitions, Images
[1. Analyses]
Many articles thus founded upon the exegesis of a text develop into psychological, moral, and metaphysical analyses very different in type. Yet they are all done in such a manner as to reveal the concrete unity of a reality beneath the mind’s analytical endeavors. In their descriptive part, with or without indication of the course being followed, these analyses unfold through the insertion of rational viewpoints with the help of which order, and therefore, intelligibleness, is introduced within the phenomena undergoing study. Thus, in the psychological treatises of the Prima Pars, an analysis is made of the vegetative faculties, followed by that of the external senses, the internal senses (qu. 78), and then of the other powers. Thus especially, in the Secunda Pars, there is an analysis of the emotions and passions, followed by one of the virtues and vices, according to their variety, and ranging from the wider categories of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance, right down to the lesser categories to which the latter spread out. Moderns would be surpised to see how attentive Saint Thomas is at analysing the physiological and psychological effects of anger (I-II, q. 48), and the tension felt by the contemplative as he sways between delight and sadness (II-II, q. 35, a. 5); how attentive he is also at observing what makes the difference between cruelty and brutality (II-II, q. 159, a. 2, based upon Seneca), what the psychological clements are that make up contrition of the heart (III, q. 85), and so on.
This is the place the speak of those articles wherein the objective sought is to distinguish between the different species of anger (I-II, q. 46, a. 8), sadness (I-II, q. 35, a. 8), fear (ibid., q. 41, a. 4), and the various effects of law (ibid., q. 92, a. 2), and so forth. In these articles, it is not a purely inductive method based upon concrete observation that is brought into play, although a great number of sharply-observed points are therein gathered; we have, rather, an a priori analysis of the reactions which appetite is apt to undergo when faced with good and evil. It is fro within this analysis that the treatise on passions finds its subject-matter distributed.
It is, however, especially in this context that justification is found for the partitioning of moral life’s resources within the broad schema supplied by the distinction between the integral, subjective, and potential parts of the cardinal virtues. This schema is an abstract one, to be sure, or artificialis [artificial], to we the word employed without disparagement: by the Medievals. Yet, it is a schema furnishing, within a much more supple framework than would at first appear, a spiritual and intelligible location for the various qualities of the soul, and, therefore, one already determining their meaning and their contexts. The key-article about this schema is the one in which its machinery is described and then applied to the virtue of prudence (II-II, q. 48, a. 1; for the virtue of fortitude, see ibid., q. 128, a. 1; of temperance, ibid., q. 148, a. 1). Concerning this partitioning of the virtues, it is important, for the sake of exegetical soundness, to take a good look at both its scientific quality and its delicate relativism; see, for instance, the other competing sources of classification in the case of the virtue of justice (II-II, q. 80, resp. ad obj.), or, in the case of religion, how the latter virtue is attentively encompassed within the bounds of justice, yet, to how great an extent it oversteps these bounds (II-II, q. 81, a. 5, and ff.; In De trin., q. 3, a. 2).
It is not our task, however, to examine the contents of the latter treatises. Rather we must
insist upon the method of analysis applied in them, one that is not without recalling to mind
many a step characteristic of the phenomenological method. The detecting of structures in
objects and the investigating of essences in things are therein managed by reference to a sort
of consensus issuing from what is most objectively, most universally, most immediately,
valuable in mankind’s experience. One would be mistaken in seeking to oppose in them a
psychology based upon observation as against one based on metaphysics, or to cast aside the
former in the name of the latter. What we have here is an all-inclusive psychology, one
refusing to set itself apart from moral science, and even from theology, since its goal is to
shed light not only upon the nature but upon the concrete condition of man as well.
In this
instance again, Augustine and Christian experience step in to give the Aristotelian materials
and method another dimension.
This concern for disceming the structure of the various components of spiritual deportment and for characterizing them from the standpoint of moral issues directs Saint Thomas in his insistent search to find out on what score each virtue is specifically a virtue: just how, for instance, gnome, or that ability to judge prudentially on the basis of the higher principles, notwithstanding the bypassing of the immediate rules, has the characters of virtue (II-II, q. 51, a. 4), or again just how magnanimity is a special virtue located within the field of fortitude (ibid., q. 129, a. 4). The saine concern shows up when he is determining why fear (I-II, q. 41, a. 2), anger (ibid., q. 46, a. 1), or the like, are special passions. The same type of analysis and the same exactingness are found where the question of the “distinction” between sins is being studied (ibid., q. 72. See the whole question).
This quest of the mind for insight into what specifically distinguishes the various objects is at
the root of the choice explicitly made by Saint Thomas concerning the meaning that should be
given to the classification of the cardinal virtues. This classification is not primarily
dependent, as was thought: by many at the time and by Saint Thomas himself in his
Sentences, upon a consideration of the four general conditions whose presence is a requisite
for an act to be virtuous. It is rather the express result of a distinguishing between four special
matters within each of which an original type of virtue comes into being, within each of
which is contained the formal ground of a rational good to be sought after (I-II, q. 61, a. 4). It
is upon this principle that Saint Thomas builds up the key articles of all his treatises on the
virtues wherein he subtly goes looking for—far over and above the pious “adaptations” with
which the moralizing preachers are wont to be satisfied—the deeper reasons securing an
intelligible and intelligent framework for human conduct. It, therefore, becomes imperative
that the firm design meant for these articles be preserved in them and that it be well discerned
what, in their drafting, represents their true content and what the “adaptations”
that Saint
Thomas sometimes records in simple reverence to oratorical or school traditions. True, this
practice raises a difficult problem. The spirituals, on the one hand, give in readily enough to
an extolling of the all-inclusive value of humility, patience, poverty, and purity; on the other
hand, the theologian in Saint Thomas has in mind the determining of the cardinal points from
which is started, under the impulse of grace and aiming to serve it (see I-II, q. 61, a. 3, obj.),
the build-up of a rational order. Consequently, the dynamics present in either analysis are
different. It would seem that, in the latter, the “Christian” virtues are doomed to be consigned
within the subdivisions of a classification. There is herein a neat problem, namely: to see how
Gospel-inspired thinking can become food-stuff for a moral theology that aims at being
scientific. This problem, however, we shall not go into. Our purpose was only to establish a
characteristie type of article construction especially present in the Summa.
The expositions wherein the end-product of analysis is an inserting of an external or intemal
reality within one of the categories or predicaments are to be considered as belonging to the
same line of procedure.
As an example, because of its historical fortune and of its
theological bearing, let us cite the case of grace defined as an accidental form appertaining to
the genus of quality. The practice, however, is a classical one, applied in all fields, especially
in that of the life of the mind. The first principles of this life, for instance, whether in the
order of knowledge or in the order of action (synderesis), are presented as depending upon a
habitus (I, q. 79, a. 12); the same goes for the gifts of the Holy Spirit (I-II, q. 68, a. 3). Free
choice, on the contrary, and what it involves, must be considered as sufficiently accounted for
if viewed from, the angle of a pure faculty, a potentia (De ver., q. 24, a. 4; see in this article
the very interesting way in which the debate with the opposing thesis is conducted); and so
on. In another sector, we touch upon one of the most profound traits of Saint Thomas’ method
of thinking when we see him building up hope, the Christian virtue, from an analysis of hope,
the passion, as his starting point (De spe, q. 1, a. 1). We understand, then, why Saint Thomas
and his contemporaries so insist upon elaborating these categories. Today, the latter are no
longer in use. No longer do they spontaneously offer themselves to our minds as having
technical value and evocative power. Whatever our opinion about them, they must be
reinstated in accordance with the terms of the latter twofold resource, if many an analysis is
not to be reduced to a mere dialectical schema and deprived of its living flesh. The Greck
Aristotelians, the Arabic philosophers, the theologians of the West, all made the four species
of quality an object of their study, and Saint Thomas who at first held there was only a
difference in degree between a habitus and a dispositio, finally pronounced the two to be
specifically different (I-II, q. 49, a. 2, ad 3). When one perceives that the habitus theory is the
factor governing the whole of his psychology of the virtues—whether intellectual, moral, or
theological—and that in particular his ethics is one, not of casuistry and precepts, but of the
“virtues” and of the interior life, then one can no longer be giving too much importance to the
analysis of these categories (De virt. in com., a. 1; I-II, q. 49 and ff.). Joking à la Molière
about the difference between the form and the figure of a bat may serve to mark off the limits
within which the procedure can be legitimately used, but it should not ruin the principle of it.
In however summary a way it will be done, we must underline the particular character of
another type of analysis, one which develops around the perceiving of the transcendentals,
irrespective of all the categories. The prototype of this sort of analysis is contained in the
opening article of the disputed question De veritate (q. 1, a. 1), in which precisely, the
transcendentals are tabulated, with being, considered as the object of a concept, furnishing the
point of departure. A replica of this article is given at the beginning of the De bono (De ver.,
q. 21), in which the “reducing” of the other transcendentals to that of being is carried out in a
manner differing entirely froin the logical analysis employed in the case of univocal
notions.
It would be going beyond our purpose to undertake the study of the nature of
metaphysical knowledge that is based upon analogy in both its method and its object. It must
be asked of the reader of Saint Thomas, however, that he preserve attentively both the
procedures and the atmosphere present in these and similar developments, constantly resisting
the threat of a rationalistic interpretation of these procedures and respecting throughout that
ontological mystery wherein the obscurity inherent in the notion of existence is preserved in
the science of being. In them, there is, implicitly at least, one dimension more than found in
the texts of Aristotle, which, nevertheless, are the basis of these articles of Saint Thomas. The
observing of this is a matter of capital importance, and a delicate one to handle as well, for it
is of the order of the mind. Without yielding to the temptation—opposed by Saint
Thomas—of reserving for this transcendental and immanent universe an extra faculty
conceived of as freed from the procedures employed by ratio [reason], one must nevertheless
discern that, within the knowledge of this field of intelligibility, some characteristics are
specific to an appropriate conceptualization of it and that it has its own proper dynainic
power. There is a logic of the analogous, a “dialectic” upon which the Platonic method has
left its mark. The “degrees” of being, the “ways” to demonstrate and to know God or to
discover his presence are not, travelled upon as the routes of the philosophy of nature.
As
he closes that analysis of the metaphysical structure of concrete reality, wherein he is led on
to pronouncing that in God essence and existence are identical, the metaphysician in Saint
Thomas finds himself in the midst of a religious atmosphere, and none other than biblical
expressions then find their way under his pen to express “that sublime truth!” (Cont. Gent., I,
c. 22). Who will bespeak the spiritual intensity conveyed, over and above the categories he
uses as a philosopher and as a theologian, in this exclamation wherein he discreetly gives
himself away?
[Kenny: as if Thomas was covering himself up and pretending!]
Likewise, the whole method of theology would have to be presented if we had to set about
examining how Saint Thomas proceeds in establishing and analysing those human concepts
that are transferred to the knowing of God and His ways of managing the eternal and the
temporal. That examination would bring us from directly-revealed concepts such as those of
generation, verb, mission, sacrament, to the metaphysical concepts of substance, person,
cause, instrument, and the like. In this field, the analogia entis [analogy of being] does its
work at the heart of an analogia fidei [analogy of faith].
Faith can put to her use all the
techniques of reason, but she subjects the objects and tools of it to a purifying process such as
meets the demands of the mystics. It is actually in a climate of mystery that these analyses
unfold, and therein success is achieved through negation. The process is less conductive to
illusion of knowledge than is the use of superlatives. “It is as to one completely unknown that
it [the soul] is united”, Saint Thomas writes, in the wake of Dionysius.
True, in the
language of Saint Thomas, the superlatives and the negations used by Dionysius lose the
color they had in their Oriental rhetoric, but his treatment of the “Divine Names” is not
reduced to one of human grammar because of it. Nothing would be more deceiving and
nothing more intellectually perverse than to move among these theological texts, and not all
the while maintain oneself under under the secret communicative action of the word of God
and as under the spell of contemplation. The rational structures of these texts can be the same;
the light that promotes them has first placed our mind within another world.
[2. Definitions]
Any sort of analysis, whether it is the psychologises inductivelyconducted type of observation
or the theologians critique that ends up in negation, tends to being condensed in a definition.
The building up of a definition is one of the traits of the scholastic method, and it is one of the
perfect types of articles found in the Summa of Saint Thomas. We have here au operation of a
major kind, the manifold procedures of which we must now examine. It would be a task not
lacking in difficulty, nor again one undertaken without naïveté, if one were to attempt to
apportion the processes that Saint Thomas so spontaneously applies within the compass of the
some 300 processes of construction ‘ critique, and verification that Aristotle’s commentators
have counted in his art of definition.
We shall only propose a few reflexions likely to
provide fuller benefit from the reading of Saint Thomass texts, as well as a reflexive
understanding of them.
Let us note first of all that in his “hunting down” of definitions, Saint Thomas brings into play a combination of suppleness in procedure and of tenacious concern for exactness. To present in its debita forma [due form] an otherwise already exact and precise definition is to fashion a work stamped with truth. Here is one of the notable cases of that technicalness we have said to be one of the traits of scholastic thought. As an example, let us bring in the case of justice (II-II, q. 58, a. 1). While he accepts as his own the authorized definitions, the one handed down by the jurists, the other by Aristotle, Saint Thomas devotes all his efforts at rebuilding them so that they be correctly understood, ut recte intelligantur. He operates in the same way when he is defining virtue (I-II, q. 55, a. 4), faith (II-II, q. 4, a. 1), (the Dionysian) hierarchy (In II Sent., d. 9, q. 1, a. 1), and so on. “Explanations,” of course, are necessary; they do not replace a definition worded in correct form, and to establish one is to prove ones self not only a good professor, but a good philosopher.
This hunting down of a definition begins with an analysis of the very names of the realities
that are to be defined. The artfulness that shows up in these nominal definitions is a surprising
one-surprising in its effectiveness as well as in the sometimes ingenuous foundations upon
which it rests. The analysing of the various meanings of a word makes use of a capital
amassed from observation or tradition. The critical handling of this capital is already, under
modest appearances, a noteworthy achievement of intelligence. The latter should not be
reduced to what is to be found in an ordinary Larousse dictionary; oftentimes the die has
already been cast when the meaning from which a reasoning process has begun is indicated.
The two sources of these various word meanings are etymology and common usage. Even
when he accepts, like everybody else in his day, the famous etymological meanings set forth
by Isodorus, Saint Thomas sees and oftentimes expresses what an assortment of resources can
be supplied by these linguistic sources for denominatio [denomination] and, therefore,
definition. We are here in the field of ‘Wordlogie” (Sprachlogik), that typical discipline
which stands at the point of juncture between grammar and logic and in which the XIIth and
XIIIth century masters were schooled.
“Intention, as implied in the sound of the name itself, signifies to tend to something else...”
“The name mind has been taken from the word to measure...”
“Properly speaking,
conscience is not a power, but an act; and this is clcar both from the formal meaning of the
name and also from those things which, in the common way of speaking, are attributed to
conscience...”
“Free-will, if the force of the word is taken into account, denotes an act, but
through the use that has been made of it in language, it has been drawn to mean that which is
the principle of an act...”
Thus, the proprietas vocabuli [proper meaning of a word], that
precious quality through which words convey intelligibility (ratio nominis), is either limited,
confirmed, or corrected by usage.
Since usage reveals their intended signification this is a
richer source for their being understood than their original meaning can be. “The etymology
of a word differs from its meaning. For its etymology depends on what it is taken from for the
purpose of signification, whereas its meaning depends on the thing to which it is applied for
the purpose of signifying it. Now these things “sometimes differ”
(II-II, q. 92, a. 1, ad 2; see
ibid., q. 57, a. 1, ad 1, wherein it is said that “It is usual for words to be distorted from their
original signification so as to mean something else”).
Without going into an account of the methods of denominatio employed and pointed out by
Saint Thomas in his elaboration and critical appraisal of definitions,
let us call attention to
the important procedure wherein the uses of a word are classified and end up in a
determination of the word’s proper meaning. Thus, he arranges in orderly fashion the senses
of the word passio, used in an extremely wide range of meanings in the various philosophies,
and finally comes to the word’s use propriissime [in its most proper sense], which defines the
field of the various passions (I, q. 79, a. 2; I-II, q. 22, a. 1; De ver., q. 26, a.3). This procedure
does not imply that the common meanings or the less proper meanings of a word are
discarded as not belonging to the field of true knowledge; they also reveal a portion of the
intelligibility in things.
In principle, there is only one definition of an object. This is the one wherein the defined
object’s essential properties, its quiddity, have been adequately expressed. An object,
however, can be exactly, if not totally, defined either by one of its properties, or by one of its
causes, or by one of its principles.
De facto, Saint Thomas draws up his definitions by
determining either a thing’s proximate genus and specific difference—this is the perfect, but
rarely achieved, type of definition—or its four causes (for example, his definition of virtue, I-II, q. 55, a. 4), or the elements that serve as a thing’s principles (for example, his definition of
faith, II-II, q. 4, a.1), or a thing’s sole formal. or final cause (see his gloss on Aristotle’s
famous text in which the definition of a house is given: De an., I, 1, 403a30), or finally the
properties from which one ascends to the essence of a thing as from an effect to its cause (for
example, any passage wherein he defines the soul).
In all these cases, one should, for the benefit of doctrinal insight itself, closely examine the
steps that are taken one after another as the methods for discovering and verifying definitions
are being applied. Among them, the method of division stands out in the opinion of Saint
Thomas
as being the most adapted one (for instance, amongst the various acts of assent, the
case of the act of faith in II-II, q. 2, a. 1). In Saint Thomas, however, as in Aristotle himself,
one will note that there is a wide margin—one of relativism and of vital flexibility—between
his theory concerning the laws of definition and his actual application of them.
[3. Images]
Let us add to this compass of the methods of analysis, and contrasting with the techniques of
definition, the use made of comparisons and metaphors. It is a pretty well lknown fact that,
except for a few slight differences, following in the pattern set by Aristotle’s principles, and
probably because his genius was related to that of the Stagirite, Saint Thomas considers
imaginative procedures as very inferior resources where the philosophers work is
concerned.
This is why he criticizes the method and the style of Plato who is always
expressing himself in figures and symbols;
why, also, he underscores the difficulty one
meets in interpreting the texts of Dionysius who makes use of the Platonic method and
style.
Even if he had not made reference to these imposing personages, however, he
undoubtedly would still be tempted to consider the use of images as nothing more than an
artifice giving the appearance of truth and as conducive to illusion. In point of fact, it does not
seem that Saint Thomas was blessed with an imagination endowed with the quality of
creativeness for this type of figurative expression; in his works one finds nothing that would
reflect the outside world in which he lived. His temperament was in keeping with the
principle upon which he founded his censure of the imaginative process. In contrast with a
Bonaventure, for instance, he is, within the School, the master whose genius is the most
divested of literary trappings. His power is elsewhere—let us not hide its limitations; it
resides in that utter soberness and unemotional objectivity sought by the pure light of
intelligence. It is in this manner that a diamond is cut. No doubt if looked for, an original
image could be found coming forth from his pen.
In the majority of cases, however, it is
from the sources of his thought, especially the religious ones, that he borrows comparisons
and metaphors, analogies and symbols. Would it be possible, indeed, for a theologian to break
away completely from the evangelical style? The reader of Augustine and of Dionysius
cannot, for sure, empty their wondrous images of the true spiritual riches they contain and
which it is perhaps impossible to conceptualize. As a result, it is the method of image
treatment that then takes on interest, and, one could say, the stripping of them rather than their
splendor.
Here are some of the classical images Saint Thomas employs:
the image of movement and rest as figures of ratio and intellectus (De ver., q. 15, a. 1; I, q. 79, a. 8), or in an abbreviated form, the pursuing of a course portraying the work accomplished by the mind in its searching out of causes (this image is from Isaac of Stella);
the image of the point and the line, the latter as virtually contained in the point, or again that of light as containing the colors; both images as figures of the relationship that exists between divine essence and created beings (De ver., q. 2, a. 4; la Pars, q. 14, a. 6; in the ad 4. of the De veritate article, there is an extensive critique made about the comparison founded on colors);
the image of circular movement as a figure of contemplation (we have here the famous Dionysian image; see II-II, q. 180, a. 6);
the image of seeing as in a mirror, used in the analysis of the intellectual knowledge of the singular as present in the phantasm and founded upon the continuity that exists between intelligence and imagination;
the image of the sun and its rays, a Dionysian image par excellence, illustrating and supporting the notion of participation (In II Sent., prol.), but also calling for a rigorous distinguishing as to the way this image can be used (In I Sent., d. 43, q. 2, a. 1, ad 1; In De div. nom., c. 4, lect. 1; De pot., q. 3, a. 15, ad 1; I, q. 19, a. 4, ad 1; etc);
the image of art and the artist, a comparison so offert utilized to support the analysis of divine action (I, q. 44, a. 3; and many other passages).
Then there is that whole train of images picturing love, utilized, for instance, in attempting to seize the mystery of the Holy Spirit. In each and every one, an effort, oftentimes an exacting effort, is made at purifying the image, with the result that the latter becomes the victim of the very office it is called upon to render.
The image most frequently recurring, because the most spontaneously arising, is the analogy
of light used in describing intelligence. The latter is oion to fwj [like a light], to use the
words of Aristotle.
There is nothing original in this image if one considers it in its primitive
state for it represents an inheritance that men of all civilizations have drawn from. The
manner, however, in which philosophers avail themselves of its resources varies in the
extreme. Aristotle, Augustine, Dionysius, Avicenna discover these resources each according
to the horizon of his own insight, while the Christian Middle Ages increase their action
twofold in the case of the “light” of faith.
Things arc carried, to the point at which this
image finally becomes entirely conceptualized, with the result that, henceforth in philosoplùc
parlance, the word itself refers directly to that which. was compared to, it. The word no longer
implies a metaphor; de plano [outright], it designates the mind.
Such a devoiding of the
figurative power of words is the normal and accepted outcome of Saint Thomas’s
philosophical style.
In theology, however, certain analogies, even after having undergone the process of intellectualization, play an inspirational and constructional role, broad in its importance. For example, the image of the sacrament conceived of as a remedy, a Christian theme if ever there was one, was, during the XIIth century, and is, in effect, the factor directing a whole way of conceiving the economy of the sacraments. It is of great importance to see in what manner Saint Thomas deals with it. His thought is to reduce the concepts issuing from it and the images branching out from it to a more comprehensive view of the sacramental order, without, on this account weakening the evangelical inspiration of the image in the process. The image of ransom, which is biblical in its origin, but with juridic elements appearing in its framework, undergoes in the same manner an extremely penetrating critical analysis.
It has been justly observed that an attentive examination of the images employed by Saint
Thomas would open the way to a genuine deeper penetration into the understanding of his
thought. This is an indication, therefore, that these images should be reinvestigated, imagined
anew, in line with the outlook customary to the medieval mind; that they should be followed
up in their refined, suppled, interknit forms; that they should be freed from elements alien to
what they would convey; that they be dematerialized. It is the pursuing of ideas through
conceptual discourse that is always occurring anew, even when one would think one had
finally reached the intuition of a thing over and beyond the glimmer of the image
employed.
IV, Distinctions
There would seem to bc no reason for treating the technique of distinctions apart from that of analysis, since distinguishing is the tool usually utilized whenever analysis, in any of its forms, is undertaken. However, even if the distinguo [I distinguish] is a normal procedure employed by reason and a condition for the mind’s achieving precision, it is nevertheless a fact that this procedure is justly considered a characteristie trait of scholasticism. In point of fact, in Saint Thomas as well as in the thinkers of the entire School, the practice of distinguishing is a constant one. There are articles that are expressly built on an Uno modo... Alio modo... [This can be considered in two ways: in one way...; in another way... ]. Objections are answered in such a manner that the full significance of the solution offered in the body of the article is almost always weighed through a distinction. Finally, within the very tissues of the reasoning processes, one finds terms and propositions narrowed down in their meaning by means of distinctions.
Let us abandon to their fate the excesses of the low Scholastics who replaced by formalism even the soundest form of analysis. It remains that, exploited as it was within an art of thinking, the art of distinguishing is revealing of a philosophy, or to put it in a better way, is revealing of a well-defined philosophic turn of mind. One can become aware of this by lining up a comparison between this method and Augustine’s. With the latter, things are not primarily distinct from one another; they are linked up in an intricate system of relationships, interlocks, analogies, and even of symbols. They are, like sounds, calling one after another. Unity, rather than distinction, is the factor governing them. When sought after to excess, the distinguishing procedure would end up dislocating reality. Augustine’s is a philosophy of participation wherein attention is focused on beings in their “degrees” rather than in their autonomy, in the exemplary reasons according to whieh they are fashioned rather than in the internal causes that explain them.
Scholastic logic, on the other hand, is one concerned with the determining and the identifying
of things. Its main work is to arrive at a definition prepared or established through the
apparatus of distinctions. To experience the difference, one need only examine the treatment
that the Augustine-styled texts undergo in Saint Thomas’s exegesis of them. Thought is
decanted and a scientific quality is achieved, but to the detriment of the spiritual and even
literary aura that expanded their immediate signification. It is with this in mind and putting all
of one’s acumen, and respect as well, to the task that one should read anew those Disputed
Questions that are so Augustinian in their substance: the De mente (De ver., q. 10), the De
magistro (q. 11). the De superiori et inferiori ratione (q. 15).
It is not just a question of
precise but inadequate formulations given to a thought still remaining primitive in its very
richness—as some scholastics, not without disdain for Augustine, sometimes appear to assert.
It is, without doubt, a question of a mental attitude that has built up its own methods of
analyzing reality. Abelard was the first master to be aware of this, and with his Sic et Non, he
remained the protagonist in the art of distinguishing. With the re-appearance of Aristotle, this
art was provided with all the resources needed to make it a lofty science of the mind. The
French word subtilité [subtlety] has acquired—and blame the low scholastics for it—a
meaning ringing of the pejorative, but in the language of the Medievals, the word subtilis
[subtle] referred to a neat quality of the mind.
Subtilis. This epithet traditionally describes Duns Scotus. This fact gives us the opportunity of measuring just how far-reaching distinctions can be within a medieval system of thought. If Scotus is subtle, it is no doubt because, in connection with the philosophical and theological techniques used during the Middle Ages, he was the author of the distinctio formalis a parte rei [formal distinction existing in things] and thus became the patron of the formalizantes [formalizers], that is, of those thinkers who discern, within the unity of a concrete reality, a number of formalitates [formalities], really distinct from one another and objectively existent. De facto, the system of Scotus can be said to rest upon, together with his theory of the univocity of being, his famous formal distinction. When the Thomists rejected it, maintaining that there were only those distinctions which Saint Thomas had known (the real distinction and the distinction of reason), they revealed the importance that a type of analysis and of abstraction assumes in the structuring of psychology and metaphysics.
The scope of a distiction will also be measured by observing its repercussions in the elaboration and the balance of a system. While, for instance, Axistotle’s paramount distinction between substance and accidents dominates his philosophy, Saint Thomas by going deeper into the matter with his distinction between essence and existence has modified not only the catogorial scheme but the very soul of metaphysics as well. In psychology, the Aristotelian distinction between what is more knowable in itself and what is more knowable for us—developed by Saint Thomas through his analysis of the modus intelligendi [mode of knowing] proper to man within the hierarchy of spiritual beings—becomes the ordering principle of his noetics, and beyond this, the factor explaining the very possibility of a supernatural order.
Similarly, with the help of a correct distinction, Saint Thomas gives another twist to a problem. or gently ruins an adverse position. The center-line of Augustine’s theology of concupiscence undergoes a complete shift of position when a distinction is brought in whereby it is given a “material”, and not a “formal” role in original sin (I-II, q. 82, a. 3). In another instance, Saint Thomas holds that the soul of man knows all things in the rationes acternae [eternal reasons], but in the sense that they are the principle of knowledge and not the object known. As a result, it is Aristotle and all his experimentalism that come on the scene replacing Augustine and his Platonism (I, q. 84, a. 5).
Let us bring this section to a close by,making a few observations on this art of distinguishing.
The XIIIth century masters rather rarely avail thernselves of those distinctions that can be
drawn from, the broad categories of logic, for example: per se... per accidens [in itself... by
accident], materialiter... formaliter [materially speaking... formally speaking], in genere... in
specie [generically ... specifically], and others of the sarne kind. These distinctions, if used as
pass-keys, would be no more than the clichés of a pure formalism. Albert the Great
oftentimes gives vent to his anger against those who, in explaining the realities of nature,
would rely on the commonplaces of logic rather than on their proper causes.
One should,
therefore, look for the physical and psychological realism that is the basis upon which
distinctions are founded and through which the conditions of a sound and effective use of
them are guaranteed. Picking at random an illustration from a reading of Saint Thomas, we
can mention those texts wherein he analyses the limits of one’s consciousness regarding one’s
possession of charity (this he does when he is answering, in the form of distinctions, the
objections which open article 10 of De ver., q. 10. Note, however, the dialectical character of
the distinction brought forth in the 8th answer, wherein it is just a question of unraveling a
pun). In the Third Part of the Summa (q. 64, a. 3), there is offered an admirable piece of
textual architexture wherein the most realistic spirituality spontaneously issues from the
distinctions brought forth in the analysis of the Christological character of the sacramental
regime.
Under penalty of grave misinterpretation, distinctions must be examined and maintained within the perspective and the context in which. they were worked out. Even more care must be taken not to allocate them within a sort of classification wherein bracketing becomes all the more worthless as its use is multiplied. Subdistinctions are rare, and they are valuable only inasmuch as the original distinction has already hit upon the formal elements of the reality undergoing scrutiny. The necessity of all this is linked with the most rigorous laws that govern the mind as it goes about doing its work of definition and division.
One should likewise maintain distinctions in the authentic state they had when they were first proferred. The partitioning of concepts under the threefold heading of univocal, equivocal, analogous, is not without some weakening of the original analysis wherein a distinction was made between two categories: the univocal and the equivocal, with a further discerning between equivocity a casu [by chance] and analogwj [by analogy]. Classifying the types of Christian contemplation as being either intellectual (as in theology), or acquired (as in meditation), or infused (as in the passive states issuing from the gifts of the Holy Spirit), is to make use of distinctions that are clumsy and alien to the language and thought of Saint Thomas.
In any case, the exegete should not succumb to the temptation of dwelling upon the
distinction which. he is analyzing, as if this distinction represented his own or his author’s
final effort. Rather should he re-unite its divided elements in order to recover, in its concrete
unity, the reality that a necessary, valid, but temporary, abstraction has broken up. The benefit
of clearness begotten of this abstraction will be decisively attained only inasmuch as a return
is made to this synthetic unity. “Distinguish to unite.”
V. The Discursive Activities of Reason
[1. Proofs]
Cursus causae in causatum [the progress of a cause toward its effect]: this phrase coined by
the Xth century Jewish philosopher, Isaac Israeli, is taken over by Saint Thomas. Through the
metaphor it contains, he expresses, as does the author of it, the movement talking place
within an intelligence that is incarnate in matter and is, therefore, at one with time and space.
Reason is the name of this type of intelligence compelled to act by means of a discursus
[discourse].
Every one of the operations we have just analysed, from the operation of
simple description to that of perfect definition, is accomplished and can be accomplished only
by means of this “course” from one intelligible to another. Any attempt at observing how, in
Saint Thomas, the discursive understanding of things actually works would be an enterprise
without end. Moreover, attempting a rigorous classification—even if done by recourse to
Aristotle—of the various forms of this discursive procedure would be an artificial
undertaking. Once again, therefore, while remaining within the bounds of discretion as far as
uncovering theoretical schemas in Saint Thomas’s style of thought is concerned, our task will
be one of noticing its extrerne mobility, which shows up everywhere from the dialectical
question right up to the demonstration of science.
“...from the dialectical question right up to the demonstration of science...” Ponder each one
of the extremes herein expressed: the one, at the very beginning of mind’s awakening to a
problem where her approach to it is by means of a first sic et non; the other, at the end of
mind’s acquiring her weighty and definite certainties. Between these extremes, the field is
vast, with an abundance of forms of expression showing up in it. All of them generate
inferences that lead the mind on from one position to another; all combine in different
ways,
sul-logoi, in which the syllogism, whether dialectical or scientific, furnishes the
most organic type. It would be of little interest, however, to limit ourselves to a sort of formal.
analysis of Saint Thomas’s reasoning processes, ranging from the enthymeme or abbreviated
syllogiom to the sorites or to the dilemma,
Rather, we wish to look into the intellectual
tonality present in these procedures and thus obtain experience in perceiving the ultimate
coherence that exists between the truth of established conclusions and the fulness of the mind
that produces them. To repeat, the articles of the Summa are not just so many little inert
blocks, they are the expression of a thinking mind gradually bringing out the intelligibleness
that springs out of things.
This course of the mind from one intelligible object to another covers more or less ground. It
may be a simple matter of unfolding a concept and making it more explicit, but it may also be
a matter reaching as far as demonstration itself, wherein from two pre-known truths a third
effectually follows. The latter, indeed, is the creative operation of that knowledge called
science, in which mind discovers the necessary connections present in the nature of things
and obtains a total explanation of their properties. It can be foreseen that so lofty an ideal, in
which Greek rationalism in its entirety has been inserted, will not be realized in each article of
the Summa. Neither the objects call for it, nor does the life of the mind have the need of it.
Even in those articles where the deductive form of reasoning is preservedand this does not
happen so very frequently we are far from having in each instance a syllogism that deals with
a necessary object and is productive of science. Let us not conceive the steps taken by Saint
Thomas as if they were all shaped on the prototype found in the Analytics; let us rather see in
them an application of all those resources described in Aristotle’s Topics as being an art of
invention and of discussion. That author was right who recently vindicated the role played by
opinion in Aristotle’s epistemology.
The probabilism of the casuists, moreover, should not
be allowed to cast discredit upon “probable” knowledge, one that shows up so valuable in the
ordinary course of thinking, and the only one conceivable in certain vast domains of thought.
The first effort to be made, therefore, must be one of discerning within the uniformity of reasoning structures—and guarding against the temptation of putting everything in the same boat—the proper understanding and certitude procured by this or that piece of reasoning. This discerning, quite evidently, must take into account the two great types of demonstration: demonstration propter quid [by cause] and demonstration quia [by effect]. The demonstration of the immortality of man’s soul has neither the same stucture, nor the same tonality, nor, in the end, the same evidence as does the demonstration of the union in one substance of soul and body. (The proof of this lies in the fact that the two demonstrations face in opposite directions when they are placed in relation with the dynamics of the pristine Aristotelianism, which furnishes to the second its governing principles while it places a hindrance upon the first.) The dialecties of beatitude (Cont. Gent., III, c. 25-48 and I-II, q. 2, a. 1-8) unfolds from starting points and with overtones differing greatly from the physical foundations and the speculative steps from which the five proofs of God’s existence take their departure. The analysis of transcendentals such as true (De ver., q. 1, a. 1) or of good (ibid., q. 21, a 1) cannot be broken down to the form of a correct syllogism.
It is no less important to examine what lies beneath and supports the premisses—especially the major premiss. It oftentimes happens that the intelligible content in them is derived from adopted, yet hardly explicit, positions, and also at times simply from axioms (see below, 186-188). The intellectualistic theses concerning beatitude (I-II, q. 3, a. 4), or about the nature of the act of imperium [cornmand] (ibid., q. 17, a. 1), are backed up with formal demonstrations. Yet underlying them is implied a certain conception of mind, a certain understanding of human conduct, from which the major premiss in these demonstrations receives its depth of meaning but which. supporters of the voluntaristic position are unable to penetrate. He who does not willingly ponder these underlying resources condemns himself to perceiving in these proofs only their carcass, not their inner light.
If it is true that demonstration draws its entire forcefulness from the discovering of a “proper cause” through “proper principles” (I Post Anal., 2, 71b9-11), then it follows that the reader should devote his efforts to unearthing in the texts the manner in which this discovering is achieved. Rarely is this ideal schema of demonstration realized. More often than not, the apparatus used in demonstrating extends through a number of arguments drawn up through recourse to the various aspects of the objects involved, and unfolding either in a simple sequence of them or in a manner meant to achieve their convergence. When such is the case, one should ascertain, through an exact determination of the principles from which. they start, what value the individual arguments have and how they are brought to mesh together. The bounty of examples to be culled testifies to the complexness of even the smallest problem.
Serviceable in achieving the aforementioned discerning are the multifarious arguments brought forward to establish a proof, which one should not forego using by comparing them, either in parallel works, or in their immediate contexts. Thus for the proof of the unicity of God: the most simple exposition of it is given in question 11, a. 3 of the Prima Pars, but various, even complicated, forms of it are presented in the first book of the Summa contra Gentiles, in chapter 42. In the De ente et essentia, the real distinction between essence and existence is demonstrated through proofs initiating from, different elements, and in some instances, through secondary channels of thought. One should neither give up when only one argument is given nor take delight in a compilation of arguments. In any case, one should respect the formal value of arguments even if it is only a relative one. A Saint Augustine or, in Saint Thomas’ day, a Bonaventure, readily goes into reasoning arrangements that are disconcerting, into arguments that are parasitic, using literary forms that are completely different, with each one having its own value and its own role. No one of them should be interpreted as compromising the other, for the very spirit of their authors and users would then be affected. Let us foster within ourselves apprehension lest the genius of such thinkers be levelled off through academic treatment.
Among the various types of demonstration an altogether original place must be allowed for
those wherein internal structuring is peculiar to a certain metaphysical way of proceeding,
such as in the proving of the existence of a perfect being through an inequality in the degrees
of being. A dialectic of this sort, which stands at the summit of a metaphysics of
participation, can no doubt find expression in the form of a syllogism. In reality, mind is here
performing in a more simple and concentrated way, for here we are touching upon that point
at which man’s intelligence is formally functioning as a properly transcendent nature, no
longer as simply a reasoning intellect.
This brings us to evoking, as opposed to the type of demonstration wherein a step-by-step advance through an intelligible field is recorded, those syllogisms that are purely expository in character. These, in reality, are much more “displayings” of an intelligibility that is already there. In them, progression is marked not so much in the order of a perception of the steps that are taken, even if some amount of pleasure is shown in the displaying of them, as in the order of a becoming aware of a reality that was present right from the beginning. In these instances, Saint Thomas is proceeding in the manner of the Platonic-type thinkers, of a Plotinus, an Augustine. Aristotle is no longer his master in logic.
The questions that are inspired by a formal sic et non are not always brought to a solution
through demonstrations. Due to the most diversified of reasons the first of which is that the
objects undergoing study do not require a demonstration, more often than not arguments and
their conclusions remain within the limits of the probable (in the Aristotelian sense of the
word). The latter is a vast, a variegated domain in which, seemingly, the mind should feel ill
at case, but in which, in reality, the mind proves her true keenness and her finest balance. Let
us grant that we have a sign of this in the case of Saint Thomas,
of Saint Thomas the
theologian especially. If, in fact, there is a knowledge in which objects do not always require
a demonstration, it is really that of theology in which the objects of the entire Christian
economy are subject to the pleasure of the Divine will and not governed by some internal
necessity. As a matter of fact, each treatise: on Christ, on the supernatural in man, on the
sacraments, begins, in each phase of its development, with a so-called argument “by the
appropriate.” This sort of argument does perhaps mold itself upon the syllogism, but it would
be very naive to go along with its syllogistic form without measuring both the compactness
and the type of intelligibility of which this argument admits.
As regards the mystery of Cod
Himself, Whom no contingence touches upon, then it is the very transcendency of the object
itself—over and beyond the relationships implied in the facts of creation and
redemption—that strikes our intelligence with absolute impotency and forces it to build,
within faith, nothing more than arguments by the appropriate: “...a reason is introduced, not
as furnishing a sufficient proof of a principle, but as confirming an already established
principle, by showing the congruity of its results...”
It is impossible to reduce to the Aristotelian categories and criteria these “arguments by the appropriate” used by the medieval masters (Aristotle would not have treated them without contempt). The two broad classes in the field of opinion are the contingence of objects and faith in authority—not to speak of the role of doxa [opinion] in passing a judgment of existence on material beings. These classes, by the intervening of the revealed transcendent object, have in each case, right within their deeper spiritual reaches, been rent asunder far too much not to be strained over and beyond the limits of their original competency. The very soil of these two processes of argumentation is different. Notwithstanding their similar underlying techniques, therefore, their sap rises and their fruits ripen within an altogether different climate of intelligibility. The “necessary reason” for the fact of the Incarnation, to use the words of Saint Anselm, develops human resonances that set off, for understanding both the nature of man and the mystery of his destiny, illuminating powers having more value than the surest geometrical patterns conceived by the mind. Let us perceive with satisfaction to what depth (and not to what virtuosity) Saint Thomas penetrates in discovering, ordering, dressing up these internal suitabilities which he unfolds concerning all of the episodes of the Christian economy. Indeed, therein is a fruit of that true contemplation implied at the very roots of theological science. Anyone scamping all this and pursuing in subtle distinctions what is rational in the mysteries, would be proceeding in a direction opposed to true theology as well as to the real work accomplished by Saint Thomas in his thinking.
Suitabilities do not thereby become less rational. How delicately balanced everything comes out! There are seven sacraments. This is the fact, one to which the searching theologians have just recently been awakened and that the Lateran Council of 1215 has explicitly formulated into a dogma. Now, this fact is a datum in the raw, one that a traditional positivistic theology would be content to record, for there is so little “reason” to put down at seven the number of symbols that efficaciously produce graces—unless one dawdle in treating seven as a sacred number. Yet reasons there are! In the course of a man’s life and in the building up of a Christian community, there are seven constitutional (if we may so speak) circumstances in which the grace of Christ must take hold of a man in order to divinize him in those points upon which his life hinges (read III, q. 65, a. 1). And to measure the intelligibility present in the argument brought forward by Saint Thomas, compare it with that other suitability which. his predecessors, Albert and Bonaventure, and the others since Hugh of Saint Victor, abide by, seeing in the seven sacraments the seven cures for the seven characteristic sins. In their case, the sacramental economy is one of reparation, while for Saint Thomas it is over and beyond reparation, a framework designed to promote divine life within the make-up of man as a person and as a member of the community. His is a theological intuition ranging afar, and with consequential effects extending to the least “ad 3” in his treatise on the sacraments.
Another example may be taken, this time not from the cycle to which the fact of Incarnation
belongs but from the cycle of the mystery of God’s nature wherein eternal necessity prevails.
God thinks Himself in the production of a word; God engenders a son; God is not outside the
metaphysical laws of love; and so forth. These are universal laws of the mind brought in these
cases to the supreme degree of their effectiveness, thus rendering for us the mystery of divine
life not only acceptable but harmonious, not only harmonious but intelligible and organic.
Richard of Saint Victor had reveled in harmonies of this sort, and Anselm had said of them
that they were “necessary”.
Thomas, more master of himself as he pushed further into the
scope of concepts, reduced them to “manifestations”; in his words: Congruunt rationes
[There are appropriate reasons]. Therein lies a type of “proof” differing entirely from
demonstration, not a demonstration shorn of its value through the application of it to mystery.
The mind remains in disproportion with mystery, but once mystery is posited many an
inferred particular comes to the fore (here, for instance: To think is to bring forth a word)
revealing itself verified in a matchless prototype when applied to God in his Trinity. Anyone
having failed to perceive this has never been in communion with the grand theological
realization of Saint Thomas and of his like.
In an entirely different order, there is no necessary link in the “demonstration” that over and beyond the virtues and within the economy of grace in us there are gifts that are granted us. Even more than this, the revealed datum furnishes us with only meager bits of information that would start the mind searching on the subject. Yet, these meager beginnings are picked up through an observing of the dynarnics present in all mental life, something that Aristotle had already brought to notice. Working from so powerful an analogy, the mind builds within the unity of spiritual life two specifically different types of habits and activities, narnely: the virtues and the gifts (I-II, q. 68, a. 1)
It is not only in theology, however, that “arguments by the appropriate” are set to work. The
knowledge of the universe and of man does not deem unsuitable recourse to these resources
of understanding. These range from purely imagined, poetic, almost verbal, suitabilities right
up to others so well in harmony with objects that reason allows herself to be led on to a
cordial adherence to them. They should be pondered in fairness of mind. When Saint Thomas
is establishing the existence of free choice, he does not proceed to do so through
psychological analyzing or metaphysical reflecting on the nature of the mind; or to put it in a
better way, he simply prepares the way for such modes of argumentation by presenting a
comprehensive view of the world and the hierarchy of beings within it. The order of the
universe calls for the presence of a category of beings that are gifted, at the summit of a series
of increasingly worthy activities, with the capacity of acting by themselves by means of an
internal judgment which they pass on their actions (De ver., q. 24, a. 1). With the help of this
procedure Saint Thomas oftentimes locates man and defines his condition as one of a nature
composed of mind and matter, which lies at the point of juncture where two worlds meet.
The most typical case of this proof taken ex ordine universi [from the order of the universe] is the one that he brings forward in demonstrating his thesis that angels are specifically different from one another. When it is a question of individuals in a species, there is no essential order between them, a fact explained through the shortcomings of the inferior being which, metaphysically speaking, cannot be entered into an order. Yet if we go higher up in the scale of beings, a clear-cut order must prevail as we come closer to the principle of the universe. The angels, therefore, are species co-ordinated with one another according as their being is more or less perfect, and no longer by some accidental clement that they would share (De spirit. creat., a. 8, secunda ratio). If one were to weigh this argumentation by strictly logical standards alone, one would find it loaded with gratuitous assertions; yet, through its being located within a Weltanschauung, it obtains scope and suggestive power.
Of greater interest for us and for the whole of theology is the famed “demonstration”
according to which a supernatural order must of necessity exist if man is to achieve complete
happiness. Prior to entering upon an analytical exegesis of it, one should measure the breadth
of that metaphysical vision which Saint Thomas invites us to share with him.
It is that of a
well-ordered universe wherein every nature can attain to its own perfection only inasmuch as
it is linked up with the nature immediately above it, and not through its internal powers alone
(II-II, q. 2, a. 3). The laws governing this perfecting subalternation define both the gratuity
and the coherence of the supernatural order, its appropriateness, as we say today.
Whether the procedure employed be one based upon analogy or upon an harmonious envisioning of the universe, arguments of this sort achieve value insomuch as they reveal over and beyond the external suitabilities first recognized in the beings under consideration their internal coherent structure. It is as far as this that one must push the inquiry into them, if a correct reading of the texts is to ensue. These arguments are then seen as leading to a true understanding of reality. In the end, and at least in principle, they would attain to the quality of a demonstration and to the good results deriving from the latter. For instance, when the (contingent) fact of creation and the (supercontingent) fact of Incarnation are placed within the setting of the Dionysian theme of participation, it becomes apparent that they are the offspring of supreme Good’s riches. Thus again, if humanity be considered as a unique individual of whom we are the members, it then becomes logical that original sin should be transmitted to all of us (I-II, q. 81, a. 1). At recurring intervals, theologians are lured into the perilous situation wherein mystery is emptied of its mysteriousness. An attractive temptation indeed, wherein theological reasoning attains to its glory, and to its limits as well. Unfortunate the theologian who has not experienced it!
Should the use of the terms: Necesse est... [It is necessary that ... ], Oportet... [One must...], Evidens ratio... [An evident reason ... ], be considered as an indication of the thrust Saint Thomas assigns to these arguments? More often than not, he uses the adjective conveniens [appropriate], the meaning of which he oftentimes had the occasion to define (See I, q. 32, a. 1, as regards the cycle of the mystery of God, and III, q. 1, a. 2, as regards the cycle of the Incarnation). Here and there, however, the words necesse or oportet pass into his phrasing, but it is not necessary that the meaning of these expressions be pressed. The School was always haunted by Anselm’s necessariae rationes, but the masters, like Anselm, upheld these bold conceptions and necessary relationships only within the realm of mystery wherein faith had led them.
2. Axioms
An argument’s comprehensiveness in intellectual content bas its source in the major premiss, or at least in the principle to which. the argument refers as it goes on unfolding. If this is true, then emphasis must be laid upon those pieces of reasoning that are entirely regulated by and encompassed within propositions expressing a category of judgments that are very general in character, not demonstrable in final analysis, accepted for their intrinsic clearness, and expressed in abstract and imperative formulae giving an inkling of both the vast reaches to which they extend and their worth for the mind’s understanding of things. Supremum infimi attingit infimum supremi [The highest in a lower order attains to the lowest in a higher order]; Primum in unoquoque genere est causa omnium illius generis [The first in any one order is the cause of all the others in the same order]; In quolibet genere id quod maxime dicitur est principium aliorum [In any given order, that which. is said to be supreme is the principle of the others in the same order]; Quidquid recipitur ad modum recipientis recipitur [Whatever is received, is received affer the fashion of the recipient]; Ordo agentium respondet ordini finium [Ordering in agents corresponds to ordering in ends]; and so on. What we have here are axioms (dignitates in the Latin translation of the Greek word; communes animi conceptiones [common conceptions of the mind] in the language of Boethius). They are the support and soul of many major texts of Saint Thomas and of many of his broad systematic perspectives.
These propositions, dressed in atomic formulations, run the gamut between the peremptory
theorem, which is at one with the internal coherence of a system of thought, and the
commonplace statement, more closely knit in words than scientifically effective. Quidquid
recipitur ad modum recipientis recipitur. In neo-Platonic thought, this axiom was a
fundamental law in the theory of participation employed to explain cosmic coming-into-being
(See In De causis, prop. 12: Causa est in causato per causati modum [a cause is in the caused
object after the fashion of the caused object]; see also In De div. nom., c. 5, lect. 1). The same
axiom, however, can also be a vague common sense statement applicable to any kind of
recipient. The handling of an axiom is a delicate thing, therefore, all the more delicate that the
precise meaning of it must be set forth, not as in the manner of a term being defined, but as in
the case of a judgment. The meaning of a term is established by reference to other terms with
the help of which it can be defined and thereafter singled out as having a given meaning,
taking into account the part convention plays in any vocabulary. A proposition, on the other
hand, expresses an act of judging wherein the mind commits: herself. Her committing herself
may be necessary only hypothetically. It is necessary that this or that proposition be accepted
if this or that demonstration is to be carried out (this is the modern meaning of the word
axiom, or again the case in scholastic arguing ex suppositione [from hypothesis]). This
commitment can be an unqualified one, however, even if the proposition is not subject to
demonstration. In this case, the commitment arises from a complex of perceptions controlling
a systematic whole. Many of our medieval axioms have an evidently neo-Platonic coloring
and origin; it is within the perspective of the system—the Dionysian system, for
example—that they normally operate.
To be sure, use of them can be made outside the
system, but to avoid ambiguity the reasons for their being presented as imperative must be
given and the points upon which their imperativeness has bearing, determined. Saint Thomas
explains the genesis and dynamism of the hierarchy that exists in the powers of the soul
through a recourse to the neo-Platonic axioms pertaining to the doctrine of emanation and to
the theory of contact between hierarchical, orders (In I Sent., d. 3, q. 4, a. 3; I, q. 77, a. 7; q.
78, a. 2). The Aristotelian principle: Ab uno primo et simplici non procedit nisi unum [From a
prime and simple unit only a unit proceeds] (Phys., VIII, 6) is made to regulate the dialectics
of the one and the many in the explanation of the creative emanative process, but this is not
without its ambiguous feature (De pot., q. 7, a. 1, obi. 1; q. 3, a. 4, c.; q. 3, a. 6, ad 22).
Ars
imitatur naturam [Art imitates nature]. Herein is expressed a generalized and converted-into-a-principle induction. It is a most valuable one. Yet, to use it as an axiom in defining the
duties of a prince (De reg. princ., I, 12 [Torrell: not authentic work]) is not equal to a
recourse to the specific principles deriving from an analysis of moral and political matters (II-II, q. 47, a. 10-12).
Only with great discrimination, therefore, should one turn to those lists of axioms that were rife during the period of lower scholasticism and are still today in schoolbook indices. Mindful of this, however, one will never be too appreciative of their value for understanding things. Wherever Saint Thomas begins an article with one of them, the practice should be to meditate upon them intensely.
3. “Re-solutions”
We must locate, within the same Platonic zone, another type of discursive activity, one
contrary to demonstration. A demonstration unfolds from within a deductio [deduction],
wherein a predicate is drawn by way of analysis from a containing subject, since that
predicate is part of the subject. One may, in a contrary manner, start from the contents of a
subject and go back to their necessary prerequisites, to the conditions that make them
intelligible. In this case, the process is one of reductio [re-duction], wherein is revealed
something completely different from what is implied in deduction. It is, in the strict technical
sense, a resolutio [re-solution] through which thought, in actual possession of a complex of
objects, re-possesses what makes them one and is led on even to the contemplation of
being.
We had occasion in speaking about metaphysical analysis to underscore the originality and
exacting demands of a mental operation of that sort. We come across it anew in the present
context from another angle, and we deem it indispensable to lay stress upon the way it
operates and is structured. Saint Thomas, it is true, did not leave us a description of its modes
of operation as he did in the case of syllogistic deduction; but he did make use of it, knowing
clearly all the while what made it original.
The major instance of it found in his works is the case of the transcendentals, with “re-duction” leading us to the notion of them and furnishing the proper tool for their analysis. Take, for example, what the transcendentals the true and the good mutually imply. The good implies the true. As an end, it is a form and, therefore, a knowable reality having its truth in the category of true objects. The true, on the other hand, implies the good; and de facto, as term of the operation of the mind, the true is, for the mind, a good (See De malo, q. 6, a. 1; De ver., q. 21, a. 1).
Light is shed upon the dialectics of human action through the same process of a “re-solution”
to the depths of man’s will. The will seeks out the immediate end of its acts by virtue of the
effectiveness of a supreme end, with the result that the particular goods it pursues take on
their value from within this all-encompassing willing that leads us to happiness through their
acquisition. The least action performed in pursuit of some particular good is laden—in its
intelligibleness and in its realization—with the very will urging us on to the pursuit of the
absolute. Therein is found the measure of its moral tonality. The pleasure deriving from the
love of a particular good—condemned by the Jansenists as a cupiditas [coveting] because
they think of it as rendering asunder the love of the universal good—encounters its
legitimacy, its forcefulness, its pureness, through this “re-duction” from within, through this
striving for depth over and beyond its concrete realization. The entire beginning of the I-II (q.
1 and 2) is a pointed illustration of this method.
The most remarkable application of “re-ductive” analysis is the one found in the five “ways” through which Saint Thomas proves the existence of God. Starting from a “metaphysical fact,” either the fact of coming-into-being, or of the ordering in agents, or of contingency, or the others, he goes back to its necessary prerequisites and finally to pure Being. The entire dialectics of essence and existence the two distinct from one another in created being, whence arises the latter’s ontological deficiency; one with the other in God Who is Ipsum Esse [Being Itself]—unravels according to the technique and within the atmosphere of resolutio. We see, then, to how great an extent the God of Aristotle and the God of Saint Thomas differ from one another as regards both the technical approach to them and the degree of their spiritualness. This is due to the fact that the Aristotelian proof, concluding to the existence of a prime mover, ontologically segregated from all the rest, differs from the Thomistic way which. leads on to Ipsum Esse subsistens [subsistent Being Itself] Whom the existence of things, by the very fact of their deficiency, reveals as present. A religious act, which should never be masked behind a rational construct, is implied within the latter intellectualistic resolutio. Therein, dialectics and contemplation maintain an association graced by mutual fondness within a very exalted experience.
History—the history of Greek thought, but the history of Western thought as well—reveals to
what extent the bearing of the resolutio or reductio method is bound up with a system
disapproved of by Saint Thomas. It was the ingenuously and violently neo-Platonic Scotus
Erigena who had put the word resolutio into circulation, to designate an operation of the mind
just as essential as the three other operations of dividing, defining, and demonstrating.
Saint
Thomas criticized the generalized usage Ibn Gabirol made of the via resolutoria [re-solving
method].
Before him, Albert the Great had denounced, as being at the origin of David of
Dinant’s pantheistic errors, the method of “re-solutions” to the absolute and simple One.
Once more, we observe that systems cannot monopolize the treasures they exploit, nor even
their methods. Resolutio, the soul and technique of the return to God, or if one prefers, of the
quest for the absolute, is not bound up with the dialecties of the Ideas. It is the very method of
transcendental reflecting, even in a realistic philosophy wherein the sense of the concrete
supports the loftiest contemplation, for it is the method whereby transcendentals become
knowable within a world of becoming and of time. This is not Plotinus, it is not Aristotle,
even when they are right there on the scene. It is Saint Thomas in one of the most personal
pieces of his methodology.
4. Refutations
We cannot end the description of the various types of discursive activity found in Saint
Thomas without drawing attention to a final element included, in his work. It is secondary,
since it is instigated by external factors, yet its presence is nonetheless revealing of the bent of
his mind. What reactions are registered in his text when controversy arises through opposition
from his associates? How does he conduct a discussion and undertake a refutation? If one
takes into account the fact that there is a congenital connection between scholastic thought
and the Sic et Non method, a sector dealing with the latter questions then takes on great
importance.
The reading of Saint Thomas’s works confirms the testimony concerning his temperament that, his contemporaries tell us, was made up of great self-possession, mental and moral serenity, a somewhat heavy calmness in social contacts, and to crown it all, a freedom of spirit embedded in contemplation. All his life, from his first day to his last, Saint Thomas fought a relentless battle: either, in the unfolding of the general undertaking of his life, to constitute a science of theology with the help of all the resources of Greek thought; or in the varions episodes connected with: the entrance of Aristotle upon the scene (in particular, when, with Siger of Brabant, the crisis was reaching its most extreme point), the development of theology (the “three opinions” on Incarnation, the question of the structure of the sacraments, etc.), the evolution of institutions (in particular, the new forms of religions life and of the apostolate). All this battling cannot but have constantly made its mark upon his work. Yet, his work nevertheless remains free, in content and in form. If we were studying the works of Saint Thomas the polemicist, we would have to look closely into both the episodes and the undertaking just mentioned. Our purpose, however, is only to bring out the traits that characterize his mental performance under circumstances of this sort.
Without giving the lie to what we have said, let us first record a few heated utterances coming
here and there from his pen, They thrust us briskly right at the heart of the January 1256
controversy, which almost turned into an open battle, since it was under the protection of the
royal archers that the college of Saint James was able to go on with its university teaching.
Saint Thomas writes of his opponents: “It is not enough for them to feed on their own iniquity
or to bring hurt to their neighbors; but once they have come to hate something, they have to
defame it all over the world and inseminate their blasphemies everywhere.”
The same kind
of bitterness reappears in 1269-1270 against the pestifera doctrina [plague-bearing
doctrine]
of those who would ruin, together with his Order, the Gospel movement whose
truth and accrediting he was establishing. Well-known is the expression he uttered against
Averroes who was compromising Aristotle: he, the par excellence Commentator, was potius
depravator [rather, a depraver].
One could, furthermore, make up a list of opinions, held on
various subjects, described by him as “frivolous,” “ridiculous.”
The fore-going having been recorded—with some amount of humanly-motivated
pleasure—the fact remains that, in Saint Thomas, contact with an opponent takes on the
aspect as of a dialogue wherein the thought of the other, far from being barred from the search
in progress, is made a part of it. This happens, in the case of the Ancients, of the
“authorities,” no doubt due, as we have seen, to the pre-decided course of interpreting them
benevolently, which is what reverential exposition.” implies. There is more to it than that,
however. In the case of the contemporary William of Auxerre, Albert the Great, Bonaventure,
and others, he tries, in his own mind, to be sensitive to the reasons for their holding their
opinion, examines the grounds upon which they based it, and marks off the boundaries within
which it works, leaving us with a precious distinction in the bargain. The opponent is thus
enabled to have his say in the dialogue, since he sees that the share of truth he had perceived,
is adopted, since also he finds it inserted within a more ample synthesis wherein it is properly
balanced.
“Brother Thomas,” as his biographer Tocco declares, “refutes an opponent as one
would instruct a disciple.”
He does it through that interior enlightening which he himself
describes in Augustinian terms in his De magistro. Things are really so. Consider, for
example, those grandly-dealt-with questions in the De veritate: the one on ideas in which the
Dionysian themes are introduced (q. 3); the other on mental life wherein Augustinian
inwardness is dealt with to its own satisfaction (q. 10); still another on the immanence of the
transcendentals in which one is made to benefit from the efforts of the Platonists (q. 21, a. 5);
and so many others, within the interplay of discussion, in which, in one way or another,
opposing opinions are given their fair share. “Hence both sides of the question were truthfully
held in Ancient opinions, and both have a share of truth” (written about the human structuring
of faith, II-II, q. 1, a. 2).
Most often, these words of an article: Per hoc patet responsio ad
objecta [By this, the answer to the arguments is clear], are more than a simple recording of
reflexions bordering on the question; they introduce within the body of the thesis those
elements judged to be true in the opposing thesis. “The arguments for both sides of the
question contain a share of truth”
(III, q. 64, a. 3, about the role played by the humanity of
Christ; in the article, the contribution of Greek theology is taken in and given structure).
Note that there is no mental laxness passing into such a procedure. Statements are clear;
argumentation is close. As elsewhere, the same rigid compaetness is present. Truth, in the
charity of his mind, is the factor ruling over the hardest kind of charity to exercise.
VI. Genetical and Historical Accounting
Saint Thomas’s entering into the thought system of another is not with him, as we were just saying, a matter of easy-going benevolence. On the contrary, he is working in a positive way at reaching the understanding of this thought. We have proof of it, in a more extensive field, in those passages wherein he posits, develops, and solves a problem by examining its historical genesis throughout the flow of solutions offered by successive philosophers up to his day. There are, in fact, a number of articles or disputed questions that offer themselves as a dynamic account of the stages that man went through in his quest for solutions, not as a static piece of research on an object. What we have in mind are not the passages in which status quaestionis are often established through the enumeration of opinions, but rather the texts wherein it is intended to arrive at the internal intelligibleness of systems—even if they are judged to be erroneous—by means of an understanding of problems and of their evolution. The following are the most remarkable instances of this sort of procedure.
The two main points wherein Christian thought drew up lines of firm resistance against the
philosophy of Aristotle were the creation of the world and the spirituality of the soul. Within
the treatment of the latter Saint Thomas discovers the context in which the Stagirite engages
problems, making clear the limitations of it, yet accepting at the same time the true values it
contains. “[Aristotle] did not proceed from that consideration whereby the origin of the
universe is understood as coming from God, but from that consideration whereby an agent is
thought to begin acting through movement, which is something that pertains to a particular
cause and not to the universal one. And on account of that, to prove the eternity of the world,
he draws his arguments from movement and from the prime mover’s immovability.”
“Aristotle proceeded to a study of the intellect from the starting point of its resemblance to
sense.”
Observations on Plato and successive Platonic systems are presented along a similar pattern.
In their case, however, pressure develops in an opposite direction. The desire is to preserve,
over and beyond the condemning of the system as a whole, the admirable truths that inspired
Augustines doctrine and furnished Christian thought with the metaphysical dimensions of his
noetic system. The text in De spirit. creat., a. 10, ad 8, is a famous one; one should bring out
its framework and measure the depth of meaning revealed in its developments and intuitions.
In another passage, Augustine’s entire dialectics of the moral issue is qualified, with its
limitations, in these words occasioned [by a citation from Augustine]: “Augustine, in this
passage, is speaking of human nature, not as it is considered in its natural being, but as it is
ordered to beatitude.”
Broader in perspective and perfect in their discerning are the texts in which Saint Thomas
describes the stages of development of Greek thought, especially as regards the metaphysics
of being which he pushes all the way up to the demand for a creator (see De pot., q. 3, a. 5; q.
3, a. 17; De spirit. creat., a. 5). He writes in the Summa: “The ancient philosophers gradually,
and, as it were, step by step, came into the knowledge of truth.”
The errors in the metaphysics of forms and qualities are explained away by the various
temptations that the mind encounters in the illusions of language and imagination (De virt. in
com., a. 11). The seduction exercised by spiritualistic pantheism is not without deep
psychological motivation (Cont. Gent., I, c. 26). Augustine invented the expressions:
“matutinal knowledge” and “vesperal knowledge” in order to subtract time from the Biblical
narrative on creation (De ver., q. 8, a. 16).
The developments that the efforts of the heretics
marked off and occasioned, introduce, likewise, in Cont. Gent., I, chapters 28-39, the
dogmatic notion of hypostatic union.
Saint Thomas, in brief, perspicaciously puts to work Aristotle’s principle of methodology:
“He who considers things in their first growth and origin... will obtain the clearest view of
them.”
The principle is a valid one in mental life as well as in the nature of things. It does
not mean that Saint Thomas is proceeding, in cases such as the foregoing, in the manner of
the pure historian, treating philosophies as if they were events. He is a philosopher. Yet, his
sensitiveness to mental coherence, to the laws of research, to the internal dialectics of
concepts, to the relativeness of systems, provides him with one of historical sense’s finest
qualities; one which Albert the Great, even though he was more curious and erudite,
possessed nonetheless to a much lesser degree.
VII. Intellectus et Ratio
“Intellect is the beginning and the end of reason.”
As we reach the end of these unending,
yet always incomplete, analyses, we find it difficult to overcome a feeling of disappointment.
After having accurnulated trait upon trait to such a great extent, we know for certain that we
have not made our way into the living suppleness of Saint Thomas’s mind. The more we
bring out, in its diverseness, the internal performing of his reason at work, the more we feel
compelled, in order to seize upon it correctly, to push beyond it, right into the intuitions from.
which it arises and obtains justification. Maritain writes. “... it is essential to Thomism that it
require whatever has to do with its construction and ‘machinery’ to be rigorously
subordinated to the immanent activity and the vital movement of intellection; it is not a
system, an artifact [artefactum]; it is a spiritual organism. Its inner connections are vital ties
where each part exists by the existence of the whole. The principal parts are not initial parts
but, rather, dominant parts or central parts, each one of which is already, virtually, the
whole.”
The same is undoubtedly true of every great thought, but in the case of Saint
Thomas the didactic apparatus masks, to a greater degree than in others, the presence of his
spirit. One must pursue, therefore, by dint of slow and tenacious maturing, the broadranging
intellectual views he bas working within his constructions and avoid abiding by the
anatomical structures he used, howsoever exact the latter may be. All his theses in
anthropology, for instance, are controlled, over and beyond demonstration of any kind, by two
or three master perceptions on man’s condition. There is all the more reason for doing the
same in the areas of theology, wherein communion with mystery encompasses every effort at
conceptualization, with organic options taken, after prolonged contemplation, on the unity of
the word Incarnate, on the absoluteness of grace, on the iealism of the sacraments, etc.
In order, on some points of cardinal importance, to avoid a reduction of the system’s internal
pressure to a sic et non dialectic—an otherwise precious expression of this pressure—the
hidden coherence present in a twofold intuition must needs be attained. Such is the case, right
at the heart of the problem of creation, with the intuition of the sovereign independence of
God and that of the metaphysical value of reality; or again, in the conception of human
nature, as regards the harmonizing of mind’s freedom with its being enmeshed within the
universe. It is over and beyond reason and its reasoning that intelligence’s understanding
takes place.
From this fact proceed both the determinism and relativeness of the system in Saint Thomas and his doctrine. Determinism of the system: all parts entering in the construction are dependent upon one another; no concept obtains its full meaning except by reference to the whole. The commentator, the good commentator, excels at discovering these connections. Even more than that, he may at times, led on by the necessity in concepts, seem to be pushing further into the logic of the system than did his master—a redoubtable undertaking! On the other hand, we are not dealing here with a closed universe, if, precisely, understanding remains in submission to spirit, to that spirit which, even in the constructing of the system, has revived it with elements beyond their foreseeable potential in universes foreign to it. Thus we have seen the Aristotelian Saint Thomas adopting the neo-Platonic resolutio, or feeding upon the great Augustinian themes pertaining to interior illumination (just as today we see a certain philosophy combining the Cartesian mathematization of the world with the Hegelian dialectics of history). In Trinitarian theology, he adopts Augustine’s points of departure and basic concepts, all the way down to, and including, the theory minimizing appropriations; yet, as in the contemplation of the Greeks, he sees the eternal processions as the principle whence creatures proceed. He is not yielding to concordism, to be sure, nor to eclecticism, for his thought stays firm, as it remains one; but even in his faithfulness to Aristotle, his vision was focused beyond Aristotle, just as his faith looked down upon the best theologies, theologies ever inadequate compared to the revealed datum. At times, he is the very one who reveals these transfers from another system to his own. “Thought,” Maritain continues in the text quoted above, “makes no personal choice among the elements of the real; it is infinitely open to all of them.” Perhaps one could look, here and there by way of counter-proof, for the “seams” that remain after the spirit has moved on. I am thinking, for instance, about certain details in the text of the famous question De ideis, in which a creature’s individual relations to God must respect the metaphysies of the One.
It is precisely by its spirit that a philosophy, or a theology,
is timeless and permanent while
the systematic elements in it are one with sources and historical contexts: those mediating
agents needed, all the while, to reach, transmit, and preserve that spirit.
Time is not alien to
thought, therefore, and the temptation to define the essence of Thomism through formulae
independent of the works and contingencies within which it has expressed itself, runs the
risks involved in any abstraction. Spirit and realization are made to be one when, in reality,
they are two. To guard against the peril of this abstracting, one’s effort should tend to the
concrete perceiving of mind’s performance in the most modest of its incarnations and the
most accidental of its associations:
A condensing, within the mind of a genius, of an enormous amount of duration, which as it pushes farther back into the past, keeps ramifying and spacing out almost without end, but which, in the creating of a work, is collected together, unified, and then projected in the manifold richness of the works that pour forth from it. This inner duration, which condenses so much of the past, is quite different from the outer time of its expression... As Mr. Bergson has suggested, if Plato had been born in another time, his thought would have been the same, though he would have written not a line of what he has written...This inner duration [of a philosophy, of a theology] is the future that every doctrine carries within itself, and forecasts, and covets; this future, for example, is all the revivals of Platonism [of Thomism] which make it possible to say that the history of Platonism [of Thomism] is not yet over. These revivals are never fresh starts; they are themselves creative; they reproduce the same doctrine, but in a new atmosphere; and in the progress and the repeated attempts they make, they tend to give effectiveness to that operation which no historian has a right to formulate in the abstract, namely: the separation of the essential from the accidental, through which the fecundity of the Platonic [Thomistic] message is brought to light.
We cannot think out a great doctrine such as Plato’s, or Descartes’ [or Saint Thomas’], in its depth, without having the feeling that, in it, something is coming to an end and sornething is coming to a start; without seeing that a doctrine of this kind endeavors to step outside the bounds of duration and almost to eliminate time. Failure in this effort shows itself when, on the one hand, a doctrine comes to grief in a closed system that enbalms it like a corpse ever to remain unmoved; when, on the other hand, a doctrine’s actuality and opportuneness make it one with the hour fleeting by. The success of it is seen in a doctrine’s power of expansion which, is not the result of a tradition holding it down, but of a rebirth and revival withstanding moral, social, and economic change.