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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.
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