-About the Author (Ignatius Insight)
-About the Author (Wikipedia)
-Author's Obituary (First Things)
Aquinas Wikipedia page.
"The intellectual dynamics of the early thirteenth century was...determined chiefly by two forces, both revolutionary and both of tremendous vitality: on the one hand the radical evangelism of the voluntary poverty movement, which rediscovered the Bible and made it the guide to Christian doctrine and Christian life; and on the other hand the no less fierce urge to investigate, on the plane of pure natural philosophy, the reality that lay before men's eyes. This latter movement in the direction of a hitherto unknown and novel "worldliness" found ammunition in the complete works of Aristotle, which were at that time just beginning to be discovered.
Both movements contained within themselves sufficient explosive force to shatter the whole structure of medieval Christianity's intellectual order. Both appeared in extremist form - theologically speaking, in the form of heresies. The remarkable thing about St. Thomas, who was exposed to these two intellectual currents while he was still a student at Naples, is that he recognized and accepted the rightness of both approaches; that he identifies himself with both; that he affirmed both, although they seemed mutually opposed to one another; and that he attempted to incorporate both in his own spiritual and intellectual life. The paradigmatic, the exemplary quality of St.Thomas is, as we have said, contained precisely in his refusal to "choose" between the two extreme possibilities. Instead he "chose" both - and did so not by merely tacking one onto the other in a mechanical fashion, but by grasping and demonstrating their inherent compatibility; in fact, by showing the necessity for fusing these apparently contradictory and mutually exclusive approaches to the world."
( 30)
"In the twelfth century....the works of Aristotle dealing with natural philosophy, together with his books on metaphysics, ethics, and psychology, became known in the West almost at once. This meant a good deal more than the addition of a few books to the curriculum. Suddenly a totally new, rounded, coherent view of the world was pitted against another more or less coherent traditional view.
What was added to the excitement was that these novel Aristotelian ideas were not entirely strange. Something had been gestating within Western Christendom of the second millennium and was practically on the verge of seeing the light - a view of the universe and life that greatly resembled the Aristotelian viewpoint. This fellow Aristotle "suited" Western Christiandom of around 1200 uncannily well; he offered to the Christian world the possibility of understanding itself. And so the result is not too surprising: this new thing, "like a wildly roaring torrent" (as Grabman, who is inclined to avoid exaggeration and is usually very temperate in his phraseology, expresses it), threatened to sweep away the dams and levees of tradition. Nor is surprising that some men should have been concerned, afraid that the coherence of tradition might be shattered by the assault of radicals infatuated by the new ideas. It is perfectly understandable that in their concern for the totality of truth their first act should have been a defensive one. After all, it was too much to expect that any man would emerge with the enormous powers of assimilation needed to establish some kind of "co-existence" between the new doctrines, no matter whether they were a thousand times true and valid, and the Old Truth." (39)
"In the history of Western thought Plato...could never be "displaced" or replaced by Aristotle, in fact, the former was never an obstacle in the way of the later. Gilson has convincingly demonstrated that. The Christian West's encounter with Plato, as it took form during the first millennium, was wholly different in structure from its encounter with Aristotle. The encounter with Plato was an encounter of two religious modes of thought; but the encounter with Aristotle was the encounter between religion and philosophy." (44)
"Several reasons can be offered as to why the world view of Aristotle, above all his theories of nature, his theories of the human soul, and his metaphysics, should have made the conquest they did. One reason, of course, is the immediately obvious intellectual superiority of their proponent. When a new idea emerges which explains and illuminates phenomena better than earlier ideas, it exerts an irresistible force. And Aristotle after all was not just some writer who has significant things to say. Aristotle was like a phenomenon of nature: a personification on intellectual energy of elemental power, within whose field of radiation fundamental problems and situations seemed to be clarified of their own accord. This has been said again and again in various ways. "The intellect in its highest manifestation," says Goethe of him. And John Henry Newman: He has told us the meaning of our own words and ideas, before we were born. In many subject matters, to think correctly is to think like Aristotle." It is quite understandable that around 1200, men in the West should decide that God had imparted to the great Greek some of His own wisdom, had endowed him with miraculous powers, and at last had taken him to Himself in a pillar of light. But it need scarcely to be said that nothing of this sort is to be found in St. Thomas. For Thomas was anything but a participant in the "excessive cult of Aristotle" which had become a fad in his time. Grabman remarks that he found no evaluations of Aristotle at all in the works of Thomas. This very restraint, to be sure, is in keeping with the Aristotelian style." (45)
"To epitomize the intellectual task confronting Thomas, and which he set for himself., I must use the image of Odysseus' bow, which was so difficult to bend that it took almost super human strength to draw the ends together. I have said that almost as soon as Thomas awoke to critical consciousness he recognized that it was his life's task to join these two extremes which seemed inevitably to be pulling away from one another. And I have labeled the extremes, in a highly inadequate simplification, "Aristotle" on one hand, and the "Bible" on the other hand. The name "Aristotle" was meant to serve as a cryptic word for natural reality as a whole, for the visible sense-perceived world of physical, material things and - within man himself - for sensuousness, for nature and naturalness, and also for the natural cognitive powers of reason, the lumen naturale. The other clue word, "Bible" was meant to include the whole realm of the supernatural: the supra-rationality of divine revelation: the reality of universe, man, and God which is accessible only in faith; the Gospel's doctrine of salvation as the norm of human life." (119)
"...God is that being Whose whole nature it is to exist, that is to say, to be the actus. God is existence itself, actus purus. Where God is concerned, it is not possible to say, or even merely to think, that a certain being exists, determined by a certain sum of characteristics, and in addition there is - perhaps necessarily - His existence, the actuality of this being whose nature is such and such. No, if we wish to speak in the most precise possible terms, without being figurative, without bending our language to meet the ordinary needs of conversation, then we must say: God's essential nature itself is actuality; He is His actuality. In Deo non est aliud essentia vel quidditas quam suum esse; in God essence and existence are not twain.
To say this is to make a revolution in the history of metaphysics; and the revolutionary was Thomas. However, this revolution became possible only as the result of further developing the Aristotelian distinction between potential being and actual being, between dynamis and energeia.
Perhaps we must also say that it was made possible by an intellectual link between the Aristotelian concept of energeia and the Biblical name of God, "I am Who Am." Gilson has pointed out that another great philosopher-theologian who endeavored to think Aristotle through, and to integrate the problems posed by Aristotle with a theology based on revelation, namely, the Jewish genius Moses Maimonides, had formulated this concept of being and of God almost one hundred years before the time of Thomas, and for the first time. Thomas, however - Gilson continues - was the first to pursue this path consistently and to the end.
No such interpretation of the concept of Being could conceivably arisen out of Platonic thinking: Plato and his followers had been fascinated, in their philosophizing, by the idea of archetypes, that is to say, of pure essences remote from all existential realization. In specifically historical terms this meant that Christian philosophy and theology before Thomas Aquinas was simply incapable of conceiving of being in this existential manner. Etienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, and other French scholars have expressly termed St. Thomas' metaphysics an "existential philosophy." "I am convinced that Thomas is the most existential of the philosophers," le plus existentiel des philosophes. "As philosophy of the act-of-being Thomism is not another existential philosophy, it is the only one." Above all, says Gilson, Augustine's and Anselm's thinking about the problem of Being was, in comparison with Thomas', completely "essentialistic." " (138)
"...because the being of the world participates in the divine being which pervades it to its innermost core, the world is not only a good world; it is in a very precise sense holy.
...beings to who freedom has been given can intensify their own existence by their affirmation as well as weaken it by their negation. We can, on the basis of our own freedom, even resist the complete actualization of ourselves. Precisely this is the concept of evil; understood in these terms, evil, like the concept of existence itself, likewise possesses "absolute" character. If existing is not only good but also holy, then the rejection of existence is not only evil but also sacrilegious, anti-godly." (143)
"Theology in the strict sense is, in its logical structure, something far more "derivative," more complicated, and more difficult than philosophy. To philosophize means to direct our gaze into the world and at ourselves and, thus holding our eyes fixed upon reality, to ask about the ultimate meaning of the whole which embraces the universe and man and God (insofar as God appears before our gaze in our contemplation of the world, or in our inner experience - within our own consciences, say). But to pursue Theology is something else again. Theology does not presuppose only the appearance of a world before our eyes, and behind it, deducible or intuitable, God, while we ourselves stand confronting this objective reality, experiencing, thinking, questioning. No, theology assumes more than this, and different things. Theology exists only on the basis of the fact that men have received certain tidings out of the sphere of the supramundane God, a message which is not already contained in the world itself, which cannot be read by querying reality and listening to its answers. What is meant by these "tidings" is that God has spoken anew and unforseeably, and in a manner audible to man. Theology, then, exists only if revelation exists. That is one prerequisite of theology, and the most important. The second prerequisite is that man not only hears these tidings but also accepts them - that is, that he believes. Theology, then, is the effort by the believer and for the believer to reach an interpretation of revelation; it is the attempt to understand as fully as possible the audible speech of God contained in the documents of revelation. Theology is doctrina secundum revelationem divinam says Thomas in the first articulus of the Summa theologica. Sacra doctrina considerat aliqua secundum quod sunt divinitus revelata.
Without revelation, then, and without it being accepted with faith, theology is not possible. But given those prerequisites, theology is possible and as a rule comes into being. This statement may sound theoretic, but its connotations are concrete, even forcefully so, and have a direct bearing on the practitioner of philosophy. Plato undoubtedly understood the sacred tradition of the myths as lore descended from a divine source, that is to say, as revelation; and he believed this lore ( "You think it a story. I think it truth"). From which it follows that the effort undertaken in the Platonic dialogues to extract the true meaning from the symbolic language of the myths is theology in the strict sense of the word.
Now the truly exciting thing is that Thomas, too, would term this Platonic interpretation of the myths theology in the strict sense. For he, along with most theologians of the Christian West, was ready to allow that revelation, the veritable speech of God, had been vouchsafed to men outside Holy Scripture. Multis gentilium facta fuit revalatio; "revelation has been made to many pagans" - this was an opinion that Thomas pronounced many times. In line with this, he saw no difficulty in assuming that the Sibyls, say, had spoken under an inspiratio divina. There is no need for us to compile further instances. But it is important for us to grasp the full implications of this concept of "Gods speech" sounding and resounding throughout the mythical tradition of many nations. It means that theology as the interpretation of that divine speech (about the meaning of the universe and about human salvation) is a perfectly self-evident matter spread over the whole breadth of mans mental life!" (145)
"Friedrich von Huegel, one of the greatest intellects of modern Christendom, has said time and again that theology, for its own health, needs the resistance of science and philosophy; that theology must brave "this savage current." "All genuine mystics have a sort of aura which shows that they really passed through fire and water. Nicholas of Cues, Pascal, and Malebranche are only three among many for whom mysticism and mathematico-physical science mutually stimulated one another and together gave the soul its depth."
In St. Thomas's opinion theology is, to be sure, the higher form of wisdom, being the interpretation of revelation. But in order to practice its own trade it needs the tools of science and philosophy. Propter defectum intellectus nostri, because of the failings of our own intellect - and the theologian must also fall back upon human intellect when he engages in theology - because of this weakness, theology requires the independently obtained information of natural knowledge; theology "makes use" of it, "presupposes it," listens to it, takes note of it, and learns from it. Seen in this light, does not the somewhat tasteless business of asking which "serves" what become meaningless?" (157)
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