The Relevance of St Thomas Aquinas |
Pope John Paul II wrote: "'Let us follow the example of the Angelic Doctor' is what Leo XIII advises [Aeterni Patris]. That is what I also repeat." Any solution to the crisis of faith and thought in the Church must involve a rediscovery of Thomas Aquinas. Tim Kelly provides an authoritative introduction to the thought of Thomas of Aquino. |
When one listens carefully to what the Church teaches about St Thomas Aquinas, consistently throughout eight centuries, one can be forgiven for being alarmed. She has done something more radical, more far-reaching and serious, than simply commend him. This is summed up by Pope John XXII: "His doctrine could only be described as miraculous…because he has enlightened the Church more than all of the other doctors. By the use of his works a man could profit more in one year than if he studies the doctrine of others for his whole life".
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The Church has effectively set aside for all times a single holy doctor and saint from all the other teachers in the Church's history. But could not this breed a dangerously restricted, one-dimensional understanding of her teaching tradition? Might there not be perhaps a hint of exaggeration, an unusual lack of sobriety, in her magisterial declarations regarding Thomas? Does not the mediation of the splendour of Catholic Truth require a chorus of many voices, a synchronisation that is polyphonic and varied in its expression? After all, besides St Thomas Aquinas, we have thirty-two other doctors, thirty-two other holy teachers with eminens doctrina, insignis vitae sanctitas, et Ecclesiae declaratio (i.e. eminent doctrine, a high degree of sanctity, and official proclamation by the Church). Is it not right, therefore, and not more truly Catholic, to attend to the great harmony of the whole? Is not the Church alerting us to precisely this when it elevates to the rank of doctor the likes of the fourth century poet St Ephraem the Syrian, or little Thérèse of Lisieux, to stand alongside the mighty scholarship of Ambrose, Gregory the Great, Jerome and Augustine?
Furthermore, since grace perfects human nature and does not replace it, does not the communion of saints contain the most wondrously varied and diverse human natures imaginable, all of them proclaiming in a most eminent manner the unique and unrepeatable character of every human soul? Therefore, does not each saint, and among them each holy doctor, make a contribution to theology that is correspondingly unique and unrepeatable, and which therefore commands our attention? And so, is there not, perhaps, something a little crass in John XXII's pronouncement that we will profit more in a year of studying St Thomas's works than a lifetime studying the others?
Conformity to Christ
I wish to show that what the Church teaches about St Thomas Aquinas is ordered to something much greater than Thomas himself, and that the astonishing pronouncements of numerous popes from the thirteenth to the twentieth century about him are liberating, in the true sense of that word. I intend this reflection to lead us not only to St Thomas himself, but to allow us to interpret the meaning of his seniority, in what sense he enjoys it, and why it is beautifully consistent, even a great endorsement of the variety and richness, the multi-channelled, polyphonic character, of the living Tradition.
Within the great constellation of saints who are also holy doctors, Friar Thomas of Aquino is set apart by virtue of a certain indivisibility that exists between his theology and his holiness. Unique in all the Church in this sense, Thomas is not a saint who happened to write theology, but one pronounced holy as a theologian. He is holy in his thought. We need to pause and reflect on this carefully. It means that Thomas underwent a heroic conformity to Christ in and through his life as a thinker. In the life of this particular saint, it is precisely here, in his thinking, his writing and teaching, that Thomas was configured to the Son of God. And we should infer from this that it was precisely within this activity that he underwent his own passion and cross; itself a mysterious and powerful possibility.
We can understand this integration more easily if we recall another saint who has a similar relationship with a single activity, one considered holy as something. Saint Jean Vianney, the Curé d'Ars, became holy through the extraordinary exercising of his priestly ordination; his sanctity is inseparable from his life as a parish priest. Likewise, there are holy kings, and holy housewives, and there is one, St Thomas Aquinas, who is pronounced holy simply as a theologian. Saint Augustine, for example, the greatest of the Latin Fathers, was also a bishop, a healer, a great orator, and one who passed through from death to life in a famous conversion. All this is part of is his sanctity, the matter from which it was formed. Likewise, the Franciscan, St Bonaventure, the Seraphic Doctor, friend and fellow mendicant of Thomas and the other great medieval scholastic, was not only a great theologian but also the superior of his order, and finally a cardinal. God saw to it that he was to be conformed to Him through all these other vitally important elements of his life.
So, as the image of Christ radiates from St Francis of Assisi's poverty, from St Ignatius of Loyola's zeal, or from Maximilian Kolbe's ultimate sacrifice, so the Church has glimpsed a reflection of the image of Christ in the theological work of St Thomas Aquinas, with an immediacy she has not seen in the work of all her other doctors. Thomas's intellectual life was sanctified to the extent that it bore the imprint of Christ and his cross. But where, exactly, might we find this uniquely christological and cruciform dimension in his theology?
Discovering Aristotle
Saint Thomas is a theologian-saint because his work flows from a surrender to the Truth, a yielding which is heroically unconditional. We perceive the image of the crucified Christ in this very surrender, a reflection of the Son who is pure relation to the Father, entirely and perfectly oriented towards him. "Father…not my will but yours be done" (Lk. 22:42); "If I testify about myself, my testimony is not true" (Jn. 5:31); "My teaching is not mine but his who sent me…Those who speak from their own seek their own glory" (Jn.7: 16, 18). This, according to the Church, is the heroic bearing of the theologian-saint Thomas who, in and through his life as a theologian, was obedient unto death.
We can begin to understand this by considering different vantage points of his intellectual life, and we should begin by recalling some significant biographical aspects.
Today, when the intellectual debt to ancient, pre-Christian thought is so obvious and recognised in the Church, it is not easy for us to appreciate the boldness and courage Thomas needed in order to challenge the traditional (often called 'Augustinian') philosophico-theological trends of his time with the thought of a pagan thinker, Aristotle. It was certainly not through a spirit of opposition against traditional doctrines that Thomas did this, nor out of a passion for innovation. After all, no reader of Thomas would find anything but the greatest reverence for Augustine; there is certainly not a Doctor in the Church who refers to Augustine more than Aquinas does. Thomas actually took his positions for the very opposite reason: a submission, a total deference to the voice of reality, which he recognised in the work of an ancient thinker who happened to be pagan. We shall consider this in more detail shortly.
It is most likely that Thomas did not especially wish to do this; despite his certainty, and his peace in the knowledge that he worked solely for the good of the Church, it was surely with a certain apprehension that he took up the task. In the work of Thomas there is a natural propensity towards the whole, towards assimilation, towards expressing the truth from its many sides. It therefore expresses the very antithesis of disruption, and Thomas was not a disruptor. Hence, one can imagine how distressing for him were the subsequent battles that raged in his years at the University of Paris, the public and formal disputations, even culminating in the Bishop of Paris's condemnation of some of his teachings in 1277, two years after his death (officially revoked later, of course). But we can certainly see something of this intrepid spirit of Thomas in his Commentary on Job where, in response to the notion that Job's bold conversation with the Lord may have violated reverence, he teaches that truth does not change according to the standing of the person to whom it is addressed; he who speaks truthfully is invulnerable, no matter who may be his adversary. This gains particular resonance when one remembers that Thomas himself belonged to a noble family, his father being the Count of Aquino and Lord of Loretto, and a powerful vassal of the Emperor Frederick II. For indeed, this is the bearing of poverty, nothing more than the empty handed subjection of a child of God, one not little before other creatures, but one little simply before the majesty and splendour of uncreated truth. We have a prayer by St Thomas where he asks, "let me fear to offend nobody but you O Lord!" Thomas's final subjection of his work and teachings to the Church in all of these controversies, submitting it all for judgement to the bishop and the university faculty, is well known to us.
Something similar happens when, at the end of his work On the Perfection of the Spiritual Life, he announces, "If anyone wishes to write against this, I will welcome it. For true and false will in no better way be revealed and uncovered than in resistance to a contradiction, according to the saying: 'Iron is sharpened by iron' (Prov. 27:17). And between us and them may God judge, who is blessed in eternity. Amen". This is simply the same courage to face the truth as before, courage neither unafraid of rejection nor overly eager for approval.
Known to us too is his astonishing humility at the height of his fame, the courtesy with which he debated with opponents throughout the formal disputations, who themselves later testified to this with great admiration. It appeared to them that Thomas regarded the adversary to be not any human opponent, but simply the error. Only a thinker like Thomas, they testified, could have regarded these disputes as a common striving for victory, and not victory for a particular contender, but rather a victory for truth. Only Thomas could teach, in his Commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics, that those who hold error are in a certain sense meritorious, "for error too serves to illuminate truth".
Assimilating Tradition
But these biographical episodes are but the outward signs of an inner reality in Thomas. We must turn our attention to his teaching in order to come closer to understanding the mind of the Church regarding him. When one reads Leo XIII's encyclical Aeterni Patris, the document that so ardently called for the restoration of the study of Thomas Aquinas in Catholic schools, one should notice that Thomas himself is not mentioned until two-thirds of the document has passed by. This is of utmost significance for us. Before he is named, Leo provides an account of the development of Christian wisdom that reads as a kind of pantheon of great Christian thinkers: Justin, Irenaeus, Hilary, Cyprian, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Gregory Nazianzen, Gregory of Nyssa, Basil the Great, Jerome, "the great Augustine". The significance of this is that Pope Leo places Thomas firmly within the Tradition, a reality that is shown to be infinitely greater than any one teacher. Indeed, it is crucially important to notice that the first virtue Leo identifies in Thomas is his wondrous power of assimilation, as the teacher who absorbed and presented the treasury of Christian wisdom like no other: "The doctrines of those illustrious men, like the scattered members of a body, Thomas collected together and cemented, distributed in wonderful order". For Leo, Thomas is precisely one of these men, yet one who has "increased [the teaching]" through unifying, developing and purifying what was latent in the ancient Fathers, and supplying what they lacked. As Cardinal Cajetan put it, because "he most venerated the ancient doctors of the Church, in a certain way he seems to have inherited the intellect of all". The Church has recognised that through Thomas one receives far more than merely Thomas.
Indeed, whilst with other doctors one is acutely aware, in a sense, of their own luminosity, through the theology of Thomas – renowned for its impersonality – one is led through Sacred Scripture, amongst councils, into a mysterious forum of great masters, up and down different levels of the Tradition which resound in seemingly endless polyphony: "As it is written in Holy Scripture…", "As it is said in the declaration of the Council of…", "As Augustine says…", "As Gregory teaches…", "As Damascene writes…". These are the essential cadences of his work. Thomas, one soon realises, is the most Catholic of all the thinkers of the theological Tradition.
Openess to truth
But the Church does not celebrate merely the skill of a master assimilator in Thomas. The wondrous absorption, unification and refinement of what went before him is not Thomas's essential quality. Rather, those achievements are the fruit of something prior and fundamental in him, a unique spiritual quality, or attitude, which sets him apart from not only all the other doctors of the Church, but from all the great thinkers of the Western intellectual tradition. We already touched upon this when we identified this saint's conformity to Christ to lie in his heroically unconditional surrender to reality.
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Let us develop this point further now. Thomas's deference not only to all the voices of the Church but to wherever wisdom is found, captures not merely his essential Catholicity but more importantly his unmatched transparency, his radical openness to objective truth. His philosophical thought is the best place to perceive this. There, what one notices first is that Thomas's work resists any compartmentalising, any locating within an identifiable school. It is true to say that in the work of Aristotle Thomas recognised the voice of reality more frequently than in any other thinker (to the extent that he would refer to him simply as "the Philosopher") but we could not possibly call Thomas an 'Aristotelian'. He engaged the work of this thinker with complete freedom and independence. His treatment of Neo-Platonic texts is a sign of this, as are his criticisms of Aristotle (who, interestingly, when he is deemed to be mistaken, is no longer regarded as "the Philosopher" but simply as "Aristotle"). Saint Thomas's thought is so unencumbered by a school, or by any restrictive boundary whatever, that we cannot even say he composed a kind of philosophy. It is for this reason that his response to the natural world became the philosophia perennis of the Church. This is not because he composed a philosophy that, among all the other rival kinds, the Church somehow favoured, but because through him we are provided with an understanding of reality which is, in a manner of speaking, pre-philosophical, the perfectly universal "implicit philosophy" that John Paul II proclaims in Fides et Ratio (para. 4). Just as real philosophical questions are universal by dint of human nature, and are not the puzzles of a sophisticated elite, so there are shared answers to those questions, truths capable of being understood and stated, "a body of knowledge which may be judged a kind of spiritual heritage of humanity".
John Paul II even lists some of these: "the principles of non-contradiction, finality and causality, the concept of the person as a free and intelligent subject, with the capacity to know God, truth and goodness" etc., and he goes on to say that it is "as if we had come upon an implicit philosophy, as a result of which all feel they possess these principles, albeit in a general and unreflective way". It is precisely upon these that Thomas begins, at these pre-philosophical starting points, and then leads us to where these starting points unavoidably take us. "This knowledge", John Paul II declared, "should serve as a kind of reference point for the different philosophical schools".
Indeed, philosophy since Descartes amounts to a fundamental turning away from the "implicit philosophy" that Thomas expounds. One may take as an example the issue of epistemology, of how we come to have knowledge of things. While Thomas, with his utterly simple epistemological realism, makes clear the primacy of the senses in human knowledge, and teaches that our ideas are abstractions or generalisations from the singular things our senses grasp, Descartes and those following him wonder if anything outside the human mind can be safely said to exist at all. For them, we first know not what our senses behold to be, but rather our knowing; hence, we cannot know a thing as it is in itself, but only as it is in our minds. This works as an example of a theory so alien to fundamental human experience that it would never have occurred to anyone beyond a sophisticated, intellectual elite. It leads eventually to relativism, which denies the existence of any objective truth at all.
Body and essence
The theme of the goodness of the whole of creation, fundamentally connected with the above problem, might serve well as a way of perceiving the essential characteristic of St Thomas's doctrine. The great intellectual battles and controversies in which Thomas was embroiled were based upon the question of man, which naturally affected the question of how we should understand created reality as a whole. For the sake of our inquiry, let us briefly state the points of contention. Whilst Thomas taught the unity of the substantial form of man (this one form being the soul), the prevailing 'Augustinianism' accepted several form-giving principles in man. Thomas also asserted that all our knowledge, including the spiritual, and even our knowledge of God, took its starting point upon sense perception, while the traditional Augustinianism of the time claimed that spiritual knowledge was independent of sense perception. At first sight, this might seem like a dull and even trivial intellectual contest that has no wider purpose or interest for the world at large. Yet for Thomas, and in fact for Christendom itself, it involves nothing less than the saving of God's creation from a kind of annihilation. Thomas's first thesis is so very crucial because it affirms that the body belongs to the essence of man. It means that in man there is not one aspect of him which is somehow the 'real' part (i.e. the soul) and another separate element – the body – which serves as a kind of instrument or prison house which it would be better not to have. Rather, a man's body belongs to his very essence, so that the real man is not the soul alone but precisely this unity of body and soul.
Thomas's second point is dependent on this. It means that the spiritual soul of man is not the ultimate bearer of his knowledge, but rather the whole man is; man in his totality, man the incarnate spirit, the ensouled body. Human knowledge, corresponding to this unified conception of man, is like man himself: an indissoluble unity of spiritual and corporal principles.
Here we glimpse that special attitude of openness, or reverence for reality in all its aspects, that characterises the thought of Thomas. Here we see God's work, in all its totality, accepted and affirmed. Thomas does not attempt some special glorification of those elements that might seem especially 'religious' or 'spiritual', or any subtle disparaging of those that might seem poor or lowly, but accepts the whole and proclaims its goodness. Man, in all the truth of his creation, be it the light of his natural reason, his five senses, indeed all the powers of his being, is caught up into a great totality which alone can satisfy the true Christian conception of the Universe. Even today Christians are prone to adopt attitudes that are essentially contrary to these truths, contrary to the truth of the Creator-God, contrary to the consequences of the Word made Flesh.
We should close with reference to the other mighty dispute that involved Friar Thomas in Paris, namely his debate with what is known to us as 'Latin-Averroism', named after Averroes (1126-1198), one of the great Arabian commentators on Aristotle. This movement, which emerged within intellectual circles of the Church, severed the interconnection between faith and reason, theology and philosophy, maintaining the complete sovereignty of philosophical thinking over faith. In fact, detached philosophical thinking was considered by the Latin-Averroists to be the highest human activity, which could find for itself the true and final wisdom, discoveries that would completely satisfy man's search for the answers to the ultimate questions of existence. If religion was for the unlettered multitude, philosophy was for the chosen few, and for the mind of the truly enlightened, philosophy superseded religion. We can see in this secularisation of thought the forerunner of the Renaissance, of modern philosophy and science, and even all the horrors of the regimes of the twentieth century.
Christ and wisdom
Thomas's teachings are the perfect antidote to these temptations, for we find in him both a profound confidence in the power of the human reason coupled with a vivid consciousness of its limitations. In the first place, as he says in his Commentary on Colossians, the "Christian can neither seek nor find a wisdom outside Christ", and in the Summa Theologiae, a "single divine grace exceeds in its existential value, the whole of the natural universe". But in philosophy itself, whilst Thomas regards the human mind to be capable of true knowledge he also regards that knowledge to be profoundly inadequate. Very few students of Thomas perceive this essential quality of their master, the silence and reverence for mystery that pervades his work. A superficial understanding of him leads to the opposite impression, of a man who has constructed an enclosed system of knowledge, a giant classification of conclusions to all our questions.
In a certain sense the very opposite is true. There has been no thinker who has expressed the inscrutable mystery of God as consistently as Thomas ("this is what is ultimate in the human knowledge of God: to know that we do not know God", he teaches) nor even the inexhaustibility of created reality so strikingly as he ("the essential grounds of created things are unknown to us"; "philosophy cannot even succeed in finding the essence of a single fly", he says). Thomas takes human reason to its furthest possibilities, to the boundary beyond which merely created, human reason can shed no light, and reverently goes no further. As one philosopher put it, "In the work of St Thomas all ways of creaturely knowing have been followed to the very end – to the boundary of mystery".
Perhaps we are now able to understand a little more the mind of the Church's Magisterium regarding St Thomas Aquinas. We do not have the scope here to reflect on many other aspects of his thought that would shed more light for us on why, in the words of Pius IX, the Church has adopted his teachings as her own. We have omitted to mention, for example, Thomas's teaching on the holy Eucharist, which might even be his greatest achievement of all. Yet we are in a position to say now that the Church looks upon Thomas differently from her other great doctors for at least three crucial reasons. Firstly, because his holiness and his scholarship are almost indistinguishable, meaning that his thought attained an objectivity and purity that is uniquely heroic among all the Church's holy thinkers. Secondly, because of the astounding interweaving of the theological wisdom of the earliest Christian centuries with the philosophical heritage of the Greek world he achieved, the Church finds in Thomas a conduit of both her own treasury of wisdom and the deepest thought of antiquity. And finally, and this is a fruit of his sanctity, because of a unique openness and range of perception that even forbids categorisation, despite the term 'Thomism' that is commonly used to designate his doctrine.
But as I hope to have indicated, as soon as we even utter the name 'Thomism' we may be guilty of making certain false implications, of assuming a framework, a 'system' of propositions, that are absent in his work, almost miraculously so. Thomas has not handed down to us an 'ism' that we place beside the myriad 'isms' of the intellectual heritage of the West. Because of its richness, its unparalleled flexibility, its openness to what is, we simply cannot compress his doctrine in this way. The Church places such authority in this single teacher not because she regards him as an individual 'great thinker' or sees in him, as the secular world would express it, the 'man of genius'. Rather, she sees in the intellectual endeavour of this saint a work of God, a unique moment of grace, a sanctification of the human intellect that enabled a certain mendicant friar of the thirteenth century to be miraculously receptive to truth.
Through the thought of this holy teacher the Church sees something greater than she can in any one member; she glimpses something of the beauty bestowed on her by Christ; through St Thomas she perceives something of her very self.
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When one listens carefully to what the Church teaches about St Thomas Aquinas, consistently throughout eight centuries, one can be forgiven for being alarmed. She has done something more radical, more far-reaching and serious, than simply commend him. Let us take some time to listen to what she has to say to us about him.
"His doctrine could only be described as miraculous…because he has enlightened the Church more than all of the other doctors. By the use of his works a man could profit more in one year than if he studies the doctrine of others for his whole life" (Pope John XXII).
"St Thomas is the most brilliant light of the Church, [whose works] are the most certain rule of Christian doctrine…by which he answered conclusively numberless errors" (Saint Pius V).
"His theological doctrine, accepted by the Catholic Church, outshines every other as being safer and more secure" (Saint Pius V).
"His teaching above that of others, the canonical writings alone excepted, enjoys such a precision of language, an order of matters, a truth of conclusions, that those who hold to it are never found swerving from the path of truth, and he who dares assail it will always be suspected of error" (Pope Innocent VI).
"Pursue with energy [St. Thomas's] works, more brilliant than the sun and written without the shadow of error" (Pope Benedict XIII).
"In the works we have written on various points, after we had diligently perused and examined the opinion of the Angelic Doctor, we adhered and subscribed freely to his ever admirable doctrine. We candidly confess that, if there is anything good in our books it must be ascribed wholly to such a great Teacher rather than to ourselves" (Pope Benedict XIV).
"[Those who depart from the teaching of Thomas] seem to effect ultimately their withdrawal from the Church…As we have said, one may not desert Aquinas, especially in philosophy and theology, without great harm; following him is the safest way to the knowledge of divine things…If the doctrine of any other author or saint has ever been approved at any time by us or our predecessors with singular commendation joined with an invitation and order to propagate and defend it, it may be easily understood that it was commended insofar as it agreed with the principles of Aquinas or was in no way opposed to them" (Saint Pius X).
"All who teach philosophy in Catholic schools throughout the world should take care never to depart from the path and method of Aquinas" (Saint Pius X).
"The eminent commendations of Thomas Aquinas by the Holy See no longer permit a Catholic to doubt that he was divinely raised up that the Church might have a master whose doctrine should be followed in a special way at all times" (Pope Benedict XV).
"We so approve of the tributes paid to his almost divine brilliance that we believe Thomas should be called not only Angelic but Common or Universal Doctor of the Church. As innumerable documents of every kind attest, the Church has adopted his doctrine for her own…It is no wonder that the Church has made this light her own and has adorned herself with it…It is no wonder that all the popes have vied with one another in exalting him, proposing him, inculcating him, as a model, master, doctor, patron, and protector of all schools" (Pope Pius XI).
"Just as it was said of old to the Egyptians in time of famine: 'Go to Joseph', so that they should receive a supply of corn to nourish their bodies, so to those who are now in quest of truth we now say: 'Go to Thomas' that they may ask from him the food of solid doctrine of which he has abundance to nourish their souls unto eternal life" (Pope Pius XI).
"'Let us follow the example of the Angelic Doctor' is what Leo XIII advises [in Aeterni Patris]. That is what I also repeat." (Pope John Paul II).
[Taken from the Latin Mass Society's February 2006 Newsletter.]