| #### 6. THE TRIUMPH OF THE CATHOLIC INTELLIGENCE: ST. BONAVENTURE, ST. ALBERT THE GREAT, ST. THOMAS AQUINAS |

| #### #### The terrible conflict of the papacy with the Hohenstaufen emperors, for all the demands it made on the attention of the popes, was not the only, nor the most important, business o f the generations that witnessed it. There was proceeding simultaneously, in the university, a stubborn intellectual contest to preserve the traditional belief of the faithful threatened with destruction in the cyclone of new philosophical ideas. Not the victory of popes over emperors, not the preservation of the sacerdotium from the regnum, but the victory of Catholicism over Averroism was perhaps the most signal achievement of all this famous thirteenth century. Will the Christian intelligence, brought up at last against the more or less complete achievement of the intellect of Antiquity, find a means of using it, or will it be itself transformed by that achievement? Such is the doubt that the conflict will resolve, such the essence of the crisis of the years 1230-1277, the most dramatic of its kind since that of the second century. The revelation of God through the traditional teaching of the Church, the spiritual appeal of Plato, the scientific strength of Aristotle, these are the forces. What the new thought held of menace for Catholicism, and what it held of promise, has already been explained. It remains to describe the battle which filled the middle years of the century, and in the short space of a general history this is perhaps best done by a few words about the leading Averroists, Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia, and by analysing, with reference to this matter, the teaching of the great thinkers on the Catholic side, the Franciscan Bonaventure, the Dominicans, Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. #### History is, no doubt, full of surprises that should not surprise us; and one of these discoveries that never ceases to be a shock is that, in past ages, human life was just as complex as in our own. What more and more dominated the life of that primary organ of Catholic thought, the University of Paris, as the thirteenth century drew towards its end, was the Aristotelian philosophy as interpreted by Averroes. "Do we not read in [Averroes'] works that nature shows us in Aristotle the pattern of the final perfection of human nature? that Providence gave him to us in order that we might know all that can be known?. . . Aristotle's writings are a whole, to be taken or left; they form the system of the written reason, so to say. . . all that we now need to do is to study again the master's theses as Averroes interprets them." [ ] These words, of a modern authority, describe very well what was then happening to many. Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia were, in their own time, much more important than later ages have grasped. [ ] #### Not the least curious feature about this situation is that it was in the theologians that the philosophers, now troubling the peace of the schools, had made their first acquaintance with Averroes. William of Auvergne (1180-1249), William of Auxerre (d. 1231) and Philip the Chancellor (d. 1236) show an understanding of the new doctrines, and a philosophical ability to deal with them, that is far beyond what any philosopher of the Faculty of Arts then possessed. It is this knowledge derived through the theologians that will be the first capital of the new Averroism -- and Siger will be largely debtor (for his basic information) to St. Thomas himself. #### Once the masters in the Faculty of Arts began to use the commentaries of Averroes on their own account, that is to say, as an aid in their own philosophical task of lecturing on the text of Aristotle, some of them speedily fell before the dual temptation to identify the Arab's interpretation with the thought of the Philosopher, and to equate Aristotle's teaching with philosophic truth itself. These masters were, it seems, clerics teaching Logic and Physics; and once they began to teach their Averroistic Aristotle without any regard either for the natural hierarchy of the sciences, or for the natural law that each science is a world of its own, once they began (in other words) to repeat the ancient error that seems eternal, and to invade the territories of other sciences, confusion was certain, and discussions that were violent; most of all were the results explosive when, in the name of philosophy, it was the territory of the theologians that was invaded. #### Siger of Brabant (1235-1281,4) is the Averroist of whose work, thanks to some recent discoveries, we know most. At the time of his first defeat -- the condemnation of his theories by the Bishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier, December 10, 1270 -- Siger was still quite a young man, ten years junior to St. Thomas perhaps. The theses then condemned are statements of particular Averroist doctrines: that the intellect of all mankind is, numerically, the one same intellect; that the human will wills and chooses of necessity; that the world is eternal; that there never was a first man; that the soul is not immortal; that there is no divine Providence so far as the actions of individual men are concerned. In he later condemnation, of March 7, 1277, theses are singled out which describe the Averroist "approach" to philosophy and the Averroist ideas about its place in a Catholic's life -- for all these Averroists claimed to be both "philosophers" and Catholics; [ ] such theses, for example, as that: the Catholic religion is a hindrance to learning; there are fables and falsities in the Catholic religion as in other religions; no man knows any more from the fact that he knows theology; what theologians teach rests on fables; the only truly wise men are the philosophers; there is not a more excellent way of life than to spend it studying philosophy. #### Siger may stand for the common enemy, against which a variety of spirits no less ardent or competent were now debating -- spirits far from agreement among themselves about the reply to some of the fundamentals under discussion. [ ] #### An apostolate of thought was no part of the plan of St. Francis of Assisi. The obstacles to man's return to God which he fought were of another order. The world which he planned to save was astray, not so much in belief as in practice; the audience to which his message went was made up of Catholics whose belief was as sound as his own, but Catholics whose spiritual progress a practical cult of self, worldliness, ambition and the attendant envy, jealousy and hates were paralysing. Nevertheless it was inevitable that, as the years went by, the apostle whom the universal charity of St. Francis inspired should turn also to the other type of Catholic whose first peril came from a constant intellectual malaise with regard to the mysteries of his faith. No less than the Preachers, the Friars Minor -- for all that their organisation was by no means so favourable to this work -- turned to the new world of the universities in their passion to work for the salvation of souls. The most gifted, and the most influential, of all their early professors was undoubtedly John of Fidanza, called in religion Bonaventure. An outline of his career and of his teaching, in its affirmations and in its denials, will show how far the Catholic intellectual movement had developed since those closing years of the twelfth century when the new thought began to gain a hold on it. [ ] #### St. Bonaventure was born in 1221, five years before the death of St. Francis, at Bagnorea near to Viterbo. He entered the Friars Minor at the age of seventeen and at Paris he was the pupil of the very first of the Franciscan doctors, the Englishman Alexander of Hales who, in his old age, had crowned a triumphant career in the schools by abandoning all for the Lady Poverty. In 1248 St. Bonaventure took his licentiate's degree and for the next seven years taught in the university. His course was interrupted by the fierce attack made on the Friars' position in the university by the Masters of Arts, which was also in some measure an attack by the Aristotelians on the Traditionalists. The pope intervened, and when he confirmed the Friars' rights he named St. Bonaventure to be the occupant of the chair assigned to his order. A year later he was named general of the Friars Minor (1257) and his career as a professional theologian came to an end. #### The object of all St. Bonaventure's teaching is practical. Through theology, through philosophy, too, he will lead man to attain God and to attain Him as the Being who is supremely lovable. It is love of the object which is the motive that urges the assent of Faith. The knowledge of God we have through Faith is surer than any other knowledge, surer than the philosophical knowledge that comes through reasoning. Philosophy is, none the less, most useful to explain the truths of Faith and to justify our assent to them. Man's life is a pilgrimage towards God, and in the saint's treatment of theology from this point of view we see revealed all the simple charm of the piety of his order. In him St. Francis lives again. Everything that meets man on the road cries God to him, if man is but attentive. Faith: helped by reason reveals God in all. True it is that man does not read the message as readily as God had intended. It is the penalty of the fall that man's perceptive powers are dimmed. A special grace is necessary that man, as he now exists, may discover God. He must be formed again, purified, enlightened. Nevertheless, it remains true that the whole universe is formed to express God and God's infinite love, to be a book in which all may read its author the Trinity. The saint is not over-concerned to elaborate these proofs of God's existence from the things He has created. "The splendour of creation reveals Him, unless we are blind. His works cry ' God' to us and, unless we are deaf, must awaken us. The man must be dumb who cannot praise God in all that He has caused; he must be mad not to recognise the first origin of all, where so many signs abound." #### God is equally discernible, to every man, in his own soul if he will but look into it. Here it is not a mere reflection of God that meets the believer's gaze, not a mere trace of His power, but His very image. For the idea of God is bound up with the very simplest of our intellectual operations. Unless the idea of a self-existing being were present to the mind, man could not know anything. The image of God is naturally infused into the soul, and whoever will gaze into its depths must find God. Note, however, that it is not any understanding of God's essence, that comes in this way to the searcher of his own soul, but merely the realisation that God exists. #### In his solution of the problem how we know, the saint makes use, at the same time, of ideas that are Plato's and of others taken from Aristotle. Corporal things we know through the senses, universal truths by the intellect. The senses are necessary for all knowledge of things below the soul. To know the soul, and whatever is above it, is the function not of the senses but of the intellect and an interior light, namely the principles of knowledge and of natural truths innate in the soul. For each of the orders of knowledge there is thus its own mechanism, and if Aristotle is the distant author of the saint's explanation of our knowledge of corporal reality, for his theory of the higher knowledge he is indebted to Plato -- to Plato through St. Augustine, and to St. Augustine for the idea of this synthesis of the two. Natural knowledge has, then, a double aspect, as man is intermediary between God and things. The things that are below him he knows with relative certainty, the things above with absolute certainty, and yet in a confused way only, knowing them as he does -- not in the Divine ideas themselves -- but in the reflection of these external ideas that he finds in his own soul. #### It is then from creatures that we come to God. Our first knowledge of God is as Creator and, for St. Bonaventure, to admit the eternity of the world is to admit a contradiction. All things are created, and in all created reality matter and form are to be distinguished, in the angels, in the human soul too. The soul is thus a complete substance, and upon this doctrine the saint builds his proof of its immortality. There is not only one substantial form to each being, but several forms according to the properties of the being, several forms hierarchically subordinated to the general form and thereby saving the unity of the being. #### The work in which St. Bonaventure's thought finds its fullest exposition is his Commentary on Peter Lombard, composed about 1249-1250. Its frontal attack on the main theses of the Averroists is almost the first evidence we possess of the extent to which, by this time, they had captured the University of Paris. St. Bonaventure insists on the origin of the universe through the creative act of God. The Aristotelian theory, of a universe that is eternal, he even thinks contradictory to reason. The Aristotelian teaching on the unicity of form -- as dear to the Averroists as the theory last named -- he rejects, and he rejects with it two other tenets of that school, namely the doctrine that places the principle of individuation in matter and the doctrine that spiritual substances are simple. His general position has been summed up thus by a modern writer: [ ] "The seraphic doctor would have it that all human knowledge is profoundly religious. He admits the role of the senses and of the intellect in the process of knowing. He recognises their necessity and their value, but he considers that intellect and sense are by themselves insufficient if we are to know with a knowledge that is absolutely sure, perfect and certain. That is why he strengthens their value by this ray of divine light which burns in our mind and which comes to us from Christ the Word, the God-man." #### St. Bonaventure's approach to the burning question of the defence of revealed truth against the new danger is extremely important. He is, in time, the first great opponent of Averroism; and in his attack he includes, from the beginning, several of the Averroistic theses which derive from Aristotle, and which another school of the Faith's defenders will accept as fundamental to their philosophy and to the defence of the Faith. The struggle around the Aristotelian corpus of doctrine as Averroes presents it, will soon be complicated by this inner struggle between the Catholic critics of Averroes themselves. St. Bonaventure's opponent here is St. Thomas Aquinas. #### It was St. Bonaventure's fate that he was not only a thinker. The university professor had in him talents of another kind and, in 1257, ere his courses had done much more than reveal his genius, he was taken away to rule and re-model his order at one of the greatest crises in its history. He was but thirty-six, and for the seventeen years of life that remained to him he had other cares to occupy him as well as that of the defence of the traditional belief against the forces that now menaced it. His disciples in Paris, however, kept his teaching alive, and never did St. Bonaventure himself cease to be even passionately interested in the debate, from time to time even returning to Paris to lead his party. But from the time of his election as general it ceased, inevitably, to be his first preoccupation; and, to that extent, his knowledge of the situation was no longer first hand, his opportunities less than those of one who, like St. Thomas, never ceased through all those critical years to form one of the corps of teachers and disputants. #### St. Bonaventure's doctrine had the advantage -- relative to the contest now drawing on -- that it was first in the field. Also it was in keeping with the spirit that so far characterised, not merely the Franciscan school at Paris, but the general theological teaching of the university. It was, that is to say, a faithful critique of the new philosophical world in the spirit of St. Augustine, and it reflected all the Platonic spirit that showed in the greatest of the Fathers himself. That it had, on the surface at least, a something in common with Avicenna, [ ] through Avicebron, none as yet had seen, nor does St. Bonaventure himself seem ever to have known, at any rate, the latter. The Franciscan critique was first in the field. It was, however, insufficient; and it had the further disadvantage that it was tied to psychological and metaphysical doctrines that would not stand if scientifically criticised. There had lately left Paris, at the time when St. Bonaventure's Commentary on the Sentences was in composition, the Catholic who was to answer Averroes, reconcile Aristotle and, at the same time, expose Avicenna and Avicebron too. But to understand something of the qualities that make St. Thomas Aquinas different, not in degree only but in kind, from every other Catholic thinker of his own and every century, a little must be said of his formation, and of the principal force in it, Albert of Cologne. #### Albert -- canonised so recently as 1929 -- has, ever since his own time, been unanimously styled "the Great", and this for his own achievement. [ ] Had there never been a St. Thomas to profit by his genius, he would still have been " the Great". Apart altogether from the high place he occupies by reason of his association with the more original thinker who was his pupil, St. Albert has an immense claim on the attention of history. He was, unquestionably, the most learned man of the whole Middle Ages, one of the most learned men who have ever lived. He was born in Germany, the son of one of the emperor's vassals, a generation or so earlier than St. Thomas and St. Bonaventure. Padua was the centre where his first studies were made and by the time he applied for admission into the Order of Preachers he was already known as a scholar of unusual erudition. His interests were already fixed -- the study of the natural world in all its aspects-and his wide reading made him master of all that vast GrecoArab literature pouring into France and Italy for now nearly a hundred years. Albert's mind was of the same cast as that of Averroes or of Aristotle himself. It was the world of external reality that primarily attracted his attention, and about that world he made himself, finally, as well informed as either of his predecessors. He was to be the Catholic Averroes, the Catholic Aristotle, knowing all, explaining all. This indeed was his ambition and his aim "to make all these things understandable to the Latins". In the crucial moment of the intellectual struggle the Catholic tradition received in Albert a scientist, a physicist, sympathetic not only to the metaphysical and psychological doctrines of the new learning but to its astronomy, its astrology too: no mere repertoire of carefully arranged learning, however, but an alert, critical mind, ambitious to relate the whole truth about nature known through science with the truth about God and creation revealed through the traditional teaching of the Church. Albert was that rarity indeed, the complete theologian who is also the complete scientist. #### It was in 1223 that he became a Dominican, received into the order by St. Dominic's successor, Jordan of Saxony, who, incidentally, was the great mathematician of the day. For the next twenty-two years Albert studied and taught in one convent or another of his order -- not without opposition from those less enlightened brethren whom he somewhere stigmatises as bruta animalia blasphemantes in iis quae ignorant. When in 1245 -- the year in which at Lyons Frederick II was condemned and deposed -- he appeared as professor in the University of Paris the effect was extraordinary. The combination of such secular learning and of theology had about it something of the miraculous. No hall in Paris could hold the thousands who flocked to his lectures. They were given finally in the open air, in the great space which is to-day the Place Maubert -- a name which itself is, it is said, nothing but a corruption of Place Maitre Albert. #### St. Albert's written work is contained in some dozens of huge volumes -- many of them, after all these centuries, still in manuscript. Their titles give an idea of the universality of this German Dominican's scientific interests. In St. Albert, then, there appears for the first time, what so far the intellectual development of the Middle Ages had lacked, namely a view of knowledge as a whole related to the whole universe of fact and experience. He is not just another commentator, the best equipped so far. His work is a new explanation of the universe, made in Aristotle's spirit, and according to Aristotle's method. But the explanation is St. Albert's and it won him, immediately, the rare distinction that his books were used as texts. For the schools of his own day St. Albert ranked, with Aristotle himself, as an authority. #### What of his attitude to the burning questions of the hour? It would seem that St. Albert was primarily a scholar, and not a polemist. The discovery and exposition of truth, the instruction of those who as yet did not possess truth, was the one concern of his life. Direct criticism of the leaders of opposing schools of thought, even of the errors they propagated, formed no part of his scheme of things. Truth in the end is victorious by its own sheer nature. It needs but to be known and error disappears. None the less, the discussion going on around finds an echo in his work, and on all the problems he gives his opinion. #### His first great service is his insistence that Philosophy and Theology are distinct sciences. More accurately than anyone so far, does he define and defend the rights of reason in theological studies, and analyse its role with regard to mysteries. Reason is not omni-competent. There are things beyond its power of knowing, of understanding, of proving. The domains of faith and reason are separate; in its own domain reason is free; Aristotle may reign there without any danger to faith. With regard to the possibilities of man's knowledge of God in this life, and to the way in which man comes to what knowledge is possible, St. Albert is most reserved, thanks here to the double influence of his understanding what knowledge is, and of the teaching of the so-called Areopagite. In this life man can never know God save "through a glass in a dark manner". God cannot be directly intelligible. What man's intellect can perceive directly, is the trace of God. God is not then directly intelligible to mall in His created works. #### What of the divine in man's own soul, and of the divine role in that intellectual operation which is the essential characteristic of the human soul? For Averroes that intellectual operation was ultimately the operation of a being that transcended the individual soul -- the soul, considered as "intelligent," really ceased to be individual. In Avicenna's theory it was only a special divine intervention that made intellection possible. The Augustinian explanation, and that of its greatest champion in the time of Albert, St. Bonaventure, was, in its effect, closely allied to that of Avicenna. St. Albert, although he rejects Averroes in the matter of the soul's mortality, yet differs in this solution of the problem of its essential activity, from Avicenna. He will not abandon the individuality of the soul; nor can he, yet, wholly reject Averroes' arguments for the singleness of the active intellect. For Albert the Great, the soul as the principle of sense life and of vegetative life is united to the body and individualised: as the principle of intellectual life it is separated from the body, for it cannot, as an individual, think in universals. #### Such is the saint's first position, the first essay in reconciling the newly-discovered psychology as to the nature of the soul with the truths of faith on the same subject. It is the work of a thinker who, if he understands the supernaturally taught truths of his faith, understands also, and to the full, the compelling force of a coherent logical doctrine of natural science. It is not, however, in the name of truths acquired through faith that St. Albert modifies Averroes. Averroes, though the greatest of commentators, is but a commentator. The saint is another, and steadied, as he studies his Aristotle, by his firm grasp of the truth that man's will is free, refusing to the heavenly intelligences any power to determine the inner workings of man's spirit, he perceives that the intellect is not so distinct from the soul as Averroes' theory presupposes. In Aristotle, individualism has a more important place than the classic commentator allows. For the moment [ ] St. Albert's thought is content to halt the march of Averroes. #### Albert's first reward, apparently, was that he was regarded in some quarters as responsible for the spread of Averroism, among the signs of which are the decision of the faculty of Arts in 1252 making obligatory the study of Aristotle's De Anima, or that which, three years later, made Aristotle as a whole the staple matter of its studies: two revolutionary changes which, in the then state of things, were tantamount to basing the whole teaching of the faculty on Averroes. By this time (1256) St. Albert had long left Paris. In 1248 he had been charged to organise the studies of his order at Cologne. The pope, Alexander IV, alarmed at the dissensions in Paris which threatened to end the university's usefulness -- dissensions between the secular masters-of-arts and the friars, related dissensions between the advocates and the opponents of the new learning - - ordered an enquiry. St. Albert at the moment was at the Curia and, as a leading authority on the question, he was commissioned by the pope to refute the theory of Averroes that was the root of the trouble. Hence in 1256 his book De Unitate Intellectus contra Averroem. The book did not however, end the greatest of St. Albert's troubles, that in his absence from Paris (1248-1255) some of those whom he had trained had developed into Averroists of a most radical kind, and were justifying the development by a reference to his teaching. Whence a resolve on the part of the philosopher to leave the academic life. The pope had desired to use him in Germany and, the saint now consenting, he was named Bishop of Ratisbon. #### At Paris meanwhile the struggle continued to rage. Not all ofAlbert's followers had gone astray. The greatest of them all, Thomas Aquinas, was once more in Paris, teaching now, and developing his own thought, no less than that of his master, to criticise Averroes and to refute the Averroists completely. There were now three parties in the arena. The Averroists; the Traditionalists who clung to St. Augustine; and the anti-Averroist disciples of St. Albert. The first worshipped at the shrine of Aristotle. The second fought the first, as Catholics on the points where the Averroist theories clashed with revealed truth, and as Platonists on the differences in philosophy. The third group was the one really critical party. It fought the Averroists with their own weapons. It used Aristotle as it used Plato and the Neoplatonists, that is to say as far as reason justified the use. Whence a certain suspicion of this group on the part of the Traditionalists -- a suspicion that was by no means lessened when the group criticised and attacked the fallacious Avicennianism latent in the Traditionalist exposition of Catholicism. This three-cornered contest filled the next twenty years (1257-1277) from the time when St. Thomas received his master's degree to the famous condemnation of his theories by the Bishop of Paris. #### St. Thomas Aquinas was born in 1225 at the castle of Roccasecca, a fortress of the Terra Laboris, half-way between Rome and Naples. Like St. Albert he was the son of one of the emperor's vassals, a baron of the kingdom of Sicily, the powerful Count of Aquino. [ ] The war between pope and emperor was to be renewed before St. Thomas was out of the nursery, and it was to divide his family. Frederick 11, St. Thomas' sovereign and kinsman, influenced his early years in another way too, for after a boyhood spent at Monte Cassino (1230-1239) it was to the emperor-king's newly-founded University of Naples that he was sent. Not the least of the kingdom's debts to the genius of Frederick was this well-equipped centre of studies in which he designed that all his subjects should be trained. Frederick's own court was something of an academy where reigned one of the leading scientists of the time. This was Michael Scot, Averroist and astrologer, learned in the new Arab learning, translator of Aristotle, of Averroes and of Avicenna and, Roger Bacon bears witness, a commentator of great authority. This academic court has been described as the earliest centre of Italian scepticism, and Frederick II was one of its first propagandists. The royal foundation at Naples, it need not be said, was of a like spirit. Here St. Thomas had for his initiator into higher studies yet another Averroist, Peter of Ireland. #### In this half-Arab school he remained until 1244 in which year he offered himself as a novice to the Friars-Preachers and was accepted. As he made his way to Paris, his brothers, disgusted at this waste of opportunity on the part of the clerical younger son through whom the Church offered boundless- prospects to the family influence, kidnapped him and locked him up in the dungeon at Roccasecca. There he remained for a year with the Bible and Aristotle to while away the time. In 1245 the pope intervened and the saint was allowed to follow his vocation. The order sent him to Paris where (1245-1248) he studied under St. Albert. In 1248 he accompanied his master to Cologne. After four more years of Albert's tuition he returned to Paris where for the next seven years (1252-1259) he studied and taught and gained his degrees. From 1259 to 1268 he was at the papal court -- Anagni, Orvieto, Rome and Viterbo -- still teaching and writing. He returned to Paris, for four years, in 1268, and after a short period in Naples he died in 1274, in the Cistercian abbey of Fossanova near to Roccasecca and to Aquino, on his way to the General Council of Lyons to which he had received from the pope a personal summons. #### St. Thomas was, then, no cloistered solitary. From the day when, a boy of fourteen, he left Monte Cassino, he lived continuously in the great centres of the agitated life of the time. It was in the very midst of a turbulent academic crisis that he taught and wrote, the crisis of 1256 that threatened his order at Paris, the later crisis of 1270 when before riotous and hostile audiences he had to defend the orthodoxy of his teaching. To few indeed of the saints has there fallen so violently active a setting for their contemplation. #### The output of St. Thomas, who died before he was fifty, is enormous. In the Paris edition his complete works run to thirty- five volumes quarto. Roughly his writings lend themselves to a triple classification. First of all there are his Commentaries, the inevitable commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, a commentary on Aristotle, a third on the self-styled Denis the Areopagite, and others on Sacred Scripture. In the second class are the two best known of his works: the Summa Contra Gentiles and the Summa Theologica. Thirdly there is the mass of miscellaneous writings, among them the very important treatises on special questions, the Quaestiones Disputatae and the Quodlibetales. #### The saint is, of course, vastly learned in all the traditional literature: Holy Scripture, the Fathers -- and especially St. Augustine whom he mastered as no one else before him and, probably, as no one since, and whose greatest disciple he assuredly is -- his scholastic predecessors, his contemporaries. In the matter of the new learning, thanks to St. Albert and, perhaps to Peter the Irishman, he gives evidence time and again of a really unusual erudition. He knows all these authors in their own works -- a circumstance which differentiates him immediately from the mass of his contemporaries and, among them, from St. Bonaventure. It is not, however, to the mere weight of learning that St. Thomas owes his hard-won supremacy. His tranquil, ordered mind never ceased to grow, and, despite the racket of the never ceasing controversy, it grew in ordered peace. As a writer he is impersonality itself -- if the phrase be allowed. Never, hardly ever, in all the vast literature that is his work, can there be discovered any trace of the disputes. All is set down in a cold clear style where the words are wrung dry of any but the exact meaning they are chosen to express. The poetry of his soul, its never ceasing aspiration to God, the fire of his love for God -- these things are only to be discerned in the saint's clear exposition of the truth whence they all derived. Not Euclid himself is more distant-nor more adequate. In St. Thomas the mot juste meets the genius for whom it exists. #### The immensely valuable body of neo-Aristotelian learning as dangerous, apparently, as it was valuable, impossible to ignore as it was impossible to suppress, had found in St. Albert the erudit who was also a thinker, the erudit and thinker who was a theologian too. In St. Thomas it found still more: it found the prince of ordered thought and a thinker who, if less of an erudit than St. Albert, was supremely critical, admirably fitted to assess the materials that awaited him, and with these, and with others of his own devising, to build a new system which should finally succeed in relating philosophically God and His universe, the data of His revelation and the fruits of man's reasoning. #### The difference could not be greater between the genius of the two great minds with a sketch of whom this volume opens and closes, the intensely personal, rhetorical, psychological Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, detached, metaphysical, transparent; St. Augustine who cries his message in a hundred tongues, and St. Thomas through whose transparency Truth unmistakable peacefully looks, with final reassurance, upon those who seek. #### When St. Thomas began to write, as a young man of thirty, the tendency was universal, among all his contemporaries, to minimise the place of man in the universal scheme of things. For the Averroists it was Nature that was everything, and Nature was wholly material. For the traditional Augustinians the all-important spirit was something isolated from matter. All, for one reason or another, agreed that what worked intellectually in man was not a power proper to man as such, but a single force outside mall and common to all. The new professor at first notes the quasi-unanimity, and although he does not accept the current doctrine he does not as yet see his way to reject it as erroneous. Three years or so after his first major work -- the Commentary on the Sentences -- he wrote the Summa Contra Gentiles (1259) and now his attitude changes altogether. A closer study of Aristotle's De Anima compels him to declare that the current theories of the singleness of the active intellect do not derive from Aristotle. At the same time that he deals this blow to the contemporary Averroists, he rejects also the Avicenna-Gundissalinus explanation -- to which, by now, the patronage of the mystics and Traditionalists has given enormous prestige -- that the single active intellect is God. Both theories jeopardise, if they do not destroy, the autonomy of man's thought. #### St. Thomas, knowing Avicenna through and through, knows by this time that he is really a Neoplatonist, filling up the gaps in the Aristotelian theory with deductions inspired by Neoplatonic ideas. Avicenna, quoted so often and so respectfully, in the earlier work, is now seen to be the enemy as truly as Averroes, and is treated as such. Even more sternly does St. Thomas deal with Avicebron, whom, unlike some of his contemporaries, who approve him, he knows to be a Jew. No writer is more mischievous than this last, whose mystical attraction is blinding a whole school to the consequences latent in his theory of the absolute passivity of matter. Avicebron, sacrificing man's intellectual autonomy more than most, is ultimately a pantheist and a determinist, and the more dangerous because, thanks to Gundissalinus, given so Christian a disguise. #### The great opponent for all the theologians was, of course, Averroes and, from the beginning, he is the great opponent for St. Thomas, too, who stigmatises his theories as heretical, even when he will say no worse of Avicenna than that he is erroneous, None the less, in its make-up, the mind of St. Thomas is of the same kind as that of the Spanish Moor. There are many points where the two agree -- and where they are alike opposed to the Traditionalist Augustinians whom Avicenna and Avicebron are; leading into unsuspected difficulties. They agree, for example, that matter is the principle of individuation; and that it is impossible to demonstrate the non-eternity of the world. They agree, too, in the method of their commentaries. Here St. Thomas follows Averroes, and not his own master, St. Albert -- a very notable instance of St. Thomas' independence. St. Thomas is not, as from a principle, Averroist or anti-Averroist. He is strongly opposed to the peculiar contribution of the Moor to the debate -- his radical theory of the singleness of the intellect, passive and active -- but he knows Averroes as well as his most enthusiastic follower, he understands his value and he uses him scientifically, critically. [ ] A further point in connection with Averroes illustrates St. Thomas' independence of his own master. Far more strongly than St. Albert does he dissociate himself from the Averroist Physics and Astrology, source of a determinism which St. Thomas opposed more strongly still #### The Contra Gentiles is, however, much more than a masterly critique of contemporary tendencies. It contains the first sketch of St. Thomas' own philosophy; a system which shows him as less influenced by the Arabs than any man of his time, and in strong reaction against them all. It is to end in a discovery that is all his own #### This discovery -- by virtue of which " What Lavoisier is to chemistry, that St. Thomas is to all science, to all philosophy, to all morals" [ ] -- is the simply expressed truth that the active intelligence is not single but multiple, and there is an individual active intelligence proper to each individual man, that his individual active intelligence is an essential element in each man's personality. Nay more, the soul of man, the form of man, is precisely his active intelligence. It is his active intelligence all his own, personal to himself, that makes man man. Here is indeed a basis offered to individualism! Man, each man, is a world complete in himself, and each man is a thing apart, unique, in the created universe. The theory opens out limitless fields of human rights, human responsibilities, human possibilities, to the psychologist and to the moralist. The study of man must reveal a richness and variety of life that is limitless. Routine, the inevitable routine of a mass- produced human activity, with all its deathly dullness, can never be truly characteristic, or be attributed as truly characteristic, as humanly characteristic, of man and of his effect in the universe. Of a world peopled by such creatures too much can never be hoped or expected. A deeper optimism must henceforward inspire the study of man. The creative act of God -- its wisdom, its ends-are seen in a newer light. #### The determining influence that moves St. Thomas to the mighty step of this declaration is experience, observation of the fact of life, and hard rationalist analysis of the fact observed. The mystical traditionalist explained the universe by an a priori theory of God's universal action: the materialist by a similarly incomplete theory of matter. St. Thomas, the first fully to understand what exactly that third element -- man -- is, explains the universe through God and man and matter. He is thereby the greatest of all humanists, giving, for the first time, scientific form and philosophical demonstration to a truth that others had no doubt implicitly held for centuries, but whose metaphysical basis he, for the first time, lays bare and from which he, later, will make, scientifically, all the necessary deductions. With the exposition of this theory, that the individual active intelligence is the form of each human being and the source of his moral autonomy, a good half of the Contra Gentiles is taken up. In the Swnma Theologica, the fruits of another ten years of thought and experience, the discovery is explored and exploited to the full. #### The Summa Theologica (1266-1272) is not a polemic directed against subtle erudite foes. St. Thomas, here, has not primarily in view the Arabs and their more or less conscious disciples. He is the Catholic theologian pure and simple, setting out the whole, theory of God and His universe -- and especially His creature man, -- as Holy Writ, the Catholic tradition, and human reason make it known. To the author's grasp of the nature of faith and the nature of human reason, and to his unerring delimitation of their spheres of operation, the work owes an utter and entire absence of confusion that makes it a thing apart; the hesitations, the ambiguities, the incoherency, the contradictions, that have dogged all attempts to relate philosophically God and His creatures, now at last disappear. And the saint's own great metaphysical discovery is related to ethics in a way that makes the new work a new kind of thing. #### This is apparent if the Summa Theologica be compared, not with the work of St. Thomas' contemporaries merely, but with his own earlier book that is a commentary on Peter Lombard's classic text. Examination, even a cursory examination, of the table of contents of the Summa shows at once that St. Thomas has, in his book, added a whole series of entirely new chapters to the body of theological teaching. The end of the Pars Prima [ ] is a very catechism on the metaphysics of the Active Intelligence. Then in the Prima-Secundae there are no less than seventy-one quaestiones where all is new, plan and detail alike, occupied with the psychological justification of the new theory, and through it giving a new scientific value to the theory of the morality of particular acts. There are, for example, the elaborate analyses of intention, choice, deliberation, and consent, [ ] questions that St. Bonaventure, to take but one example, never touches at all, and in the discussion of which St. Thomas is a pioneer. Perhaps even more striking, and more eloquent at a glance, is the general comparison set out by Fr. Gorce between the scheme of the Commentary of 1255 and that of the Summa. Nothing so shows how greatly the study of human nature is enriched by St. Thomas' grasp of its fundamental reality, how rightly he might claim to be the very prince of humanists. In matter of Theodicy the Summa has seventy-three questions, as against the sixty-one of the Commentary; in the discussion of man's relation to God, one hundred and eighty-one against seventy-three; in the discussion of man, his psychology and his morality three hundred and twenty-nine against thirty-six. More particularly the saint has twenty-six questions, entirely new, in the Summa, on God's government of the world. Where the Commentary has seventeen distinctions [ ] on the morality of particular acts, the Summa has two hundred and four. On the essence of the human soul and the foundations of moral philosophy -- the end of life, human acts, the passions, the virtues -- the Summa has again seventy questions where the Commentary has not a single distinction. St. Thomas is the creator of a new philosophical, theological humanism. He is indeed sui generis. #### It is a theology where every aspect of being is envisaged from the point of its relation to intelligence. For St. Thomas God is the Being who is eminently Intelligence, the created universe the perfectly balanced production of the Divine Intelligence. Whence a new strength of optimism, that informs the whole of St. Thomas' outlook, as he describes and discusses God, His creation, the story of man, his origin, his turning away from God and the great system by which man returns to God. The creation, the fall, the incarnation and redemption, the Church, grace and the sacraments -- each is in its own place; and without the possibility of confusion the whole vast panorama of Revelation is surveyed scientifically and rationally. #### The Summa Theologica is the greatest book ever written. It has about it the eternity of the metaphysical. It is as relevant to- day as it was to those who first read and studied in it. But, given the passionate discussion among all the saint's contemporaries on the theory that underlay the whole exposition, whether it is really man who thinks and acts, lives and is immortal, the Summa, for the generation in which it was written, should have been all-conquering, among the Catholics at least. It was, however, nothing of the sort. The supreme triumph of the Catholic intelligence was greeted by a storm of opposition and criticism which, inevitably, all but destroyed its usefulness, outside the saint's own order for years and even for centuries. #### The source of this opposition was the theological faculty of the University of Paris. Here the methodology and the practice traditionally associated with the name of St. Augustine still reigned supreme. It was a tradition by no means ignorant, or scornful, or suspicious, of philosophy. But in philosophy it was anti-Aristotelian; and in so far as it had found anything sympathetic in the new Greco-Saracen [ ] movement, it had found it in Avicenna and Avicebron. The naturalist, physicist and astronomical aspects of the movement -- all that derived from its study of Aristotle's Physics (the features which, for the faculty of Arts were, of course, the crowning glory of the movement) -- were abhorrent to it, thanks to the atheistic tendencies of so many of the Arab physicists, and of some of their thirteenth century disciples. The mentality of Averroes was repugnant to men of that tradition, and that of St. Albert little less so. St. Thomas could hardly look for favour from the faculty of Theology, appreciative as he was of the new physics and of the new psychology. #### Still less would he appeal, to the theologians, as a critic of the pseudo-mysticism of Avicenna. Here he had to encounter a second opposition -- namely from the Franciscan theologians, disciples of St. Bonaventure. It was an Englishman, John Peckham, a future (and very famous) Archbishop of Canterbury who, at the moment, led this school. Platonism was, on the face of it, a deeply religious philosophy, with close affiliations to Catholicism in its doctrines of Providence, of moral judgement and retribution, and in its general insistence on the reality and primacy of the spiritual Aristotelianism, on a first examination, was the least religious of all the great philosophies. In a combination due to the theological genius of St. Augustine certain Platonic theories had hitherto reigned unchallenged. Of this Augustinian Platonism the Franciscan school was a very strong fortress indeed. Avicebron, and Avicenna too, because of their multiple affinities with this Augustinian Platonism had been leading influences with all these early Franciscans, from Alexander of Hales at the beginning of the century to Peckham at its end; Avicenna seemed a useful counterfoil to the unmystical and rationalist Averroes. Whence, by the time the Summa Theologica was in course of composition (c. 1266-1272), certain philosophical doctrines, of Platonic and Neoplatonic alloy, were assumed as necessary to the rational defence of Catholic truth -- such doctrines as that of the plurality of forms, of the complete substantiality of the human soul, of the supremacy of the will among the soul's powers, and the doctrine that it is by a participation in the Divine knowledge that man's intelligence comes to its knowledge of natural truths. #### To theologians to whom this was truth, St. Thomas had all the appearance of being a dangerous rationalist, infected with the spirit of Averroes, a most unspiritual iconoclast denying even the possibility of all those semi-emotional hopes and aspirations to an immediate union with God in this life as a thing natural to man. St. Thomas could not be right and the Itinerarium Mentis ad Deum be, in what relates to man's natural activity, an accurate description whether of fact or possibility -- for there is no direct road of knowledge, independent of the senses, by which the soul can naturally journey to God. St. Thomas ends for ever, along with the a priori proofs of God's existence, all the theory of intuition and innate ideas and the mystical structure that is built upon it. The world is not an open book where the natural reading of man directly reads God. #### It was Peckham who, in person, led the attack; but behind Peckham was not merely the memory of St. Bonaventure's teaching, but St. Bonaventure himself, General, for a long time now, of the order of Friars Minor, and Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church to be, tending more and more -- with, before him, the spectacle of the growth of Averroism since 1250 -- to a position that suspected the usefulness of philosophy at all in theological discussion, and ready to qualify St. Thomas' teaching of the unity of the substantial form as "insanity." The new movement of repression envisaged all who were suspect of sympathy with Averroes and the new physical theories of nature, Roger Bacon, for example, Siger of Brabant and, along with these, St. Albert and St. Thomas. #### The first signs of the coming condemnation were the two university sermons of St. Bonaventure preached in 1267 and 1268. The second, particularly, was a refutation of all the theories, later stigmatised in the sentence of 1270. It is noteworthy that the philosophical errors refuted in this sermon are refuted, not by philosophical argument, but from the teaching of Sacred Scripture. Reason is not to be trusted too much. Faith and mysticism are safer guides. [ ] #### To St. Bonaventure's new critique of the role of reasoning in theological study St. Thomas made no direct reply. He simply continued in his chosen way. In 1270 it was proposed to condemn fifteen propositions as Averroist errors, two of them -- that the substantial form in man is one, and that all spiritual beings (e.g. the human soul, the angels) are simple -- doctrines maintained by St. Thomas in opposition to the tradition that the Franciscans still defended. At the more or less ceremonial discussion of Easter that year, amid riotous scenes where Peckham led the opposition, St. Thomas very boldly defended his teaching on some of the points on which he was most attacked. In the event, the two Thomist propositions were omitted from the text of proscribed doctrines but, at the end of the year, at another public debate, the violent scenes were renewed. The discussion turned on the theses that had been condemned and on those, upheld by St. Thomas which had escaped condemnation. [ ] The zeal of his sincere-minded opponents was, of course, directed to prove, out of St. Thomas' own argumentation, that he was no less an Averroistthan those whom the condemnation had affected. With a courage and a peacefulness that astonished even his own religious brethren, he continued steadily to fix the undeniable limit between the condemned errors and his own intelligent defence of the Faith. #### The troubles were, however, not yet over. St. Thomas still clung, for example, to his theory of the soul as the one substantial form of the body, and a new campaign began, directed to force a condemnation of this untraditional novelty as Averroistic. At Easter, 1271, the question was even raised whether reason had any place in theological study at all, or whether theology should not rather be determined simply by authoritative declarations. In 1272 the saint left Paris for Naples -- never again, as it happened, to return. The next year St. Bonaventure launched a direct attack on the essential theses of St. Thomas' position in theology, unity of form, simplicity of spiritual substances, theories about the faculties of the soul, and about beatitude. #### Both the great adversaries died the next year (1274) [ ] but the discussion continued. The faculty of Arts, which considered St. Thomas, theologian that he was, the glory of the university for his defence of reason, had petitioned that his body might be brought for burial too the university. It was perhaps as a reply to this that the theologians, in 1277, chose the very anniversary of his death (March 7) to publish, unhindered now, its condemnation of his doctrine. The pope, John XXI - - himself as Peter of Spain one of the most distinguished lights of the university world [ ] -had demanded of the Bishop of Paris a report on the state of the university. Official enquiries had resulted in a rounding up of errors and of their professors. A vast episcopal decree of condemnation was the result, running to 219 theses. [ ] They cover every conceivable error deriving from the theories of Aristotle and his various commentators, and errors of other kinds also. Among them, inserted by his adversaries, are some of the characteristic and fundamental theories of St. Thomas. A few weeks later the condemnation was repeated in England, and here the person responsible was one of the saint's own brethren, Robert Kilwardby, Archbishop of Canterbury, a scholastic of the pre-Albertine period of his order's studies. #### This time the opponents of St. Thomas had gone too far. The reaction was immediate, led by St. Albert who still survived in a green old age. But the debate continued, nevertheless, and it was only the canonisation of St. Thomas fifty years later (1323) that really settled, for many of his opponents, the question of his orthodoxy. [ ] #### For us St. Thomas is so eminently all that is Catholic Theology and the philosophical teaching officially sanctioned by authority, that it is not easy to grasp the fact (and its implications) that he the one original theological thinker of the first rank that his age produced, was not for his own age -- nor for those which immediately followed -- the all-overshadowing genius we universally revere. The great men of his own day -- for the orthodox -- were St. Bonaventure and St. Albert; and St. Albert's prestige was from his scientific knowledge and it did not profit greatly his philosophy, nor that of the gifted pupil he then overshadowed and by whom, since, he has himself been so eclipsed. Catholicism had human nature not been free to do otherwise, should have united around the stupendous genius of St. Thomas. The hour had indeed given to its witless trust the key to all the centuries, But it was not until too many of the critical years had gone by, irrevocably, that the saint came into his supremacy. The repudiation of 1277 set others to preside at the capital of Christian thought for the next two hundred and fifty years. Not St. Thomas but Ockham is to dominate the fourteenth century; and the Nominalist criticism, that will produce whatever of a theologian Luther was is to develop unchecked by what alone could really have checked it, a general understanding of the realism of St. Thomas. ####  |