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Aquinas and Natural Law Theory 2 – Edward Feser

May 1, 2013

As the neo-Scholastic natural law theorist Michael Cronin has summed up the Thomistic view, “In the fullest sense of the word, then, moral duty is natural. For not only are certain objects natural means to man’s final end, but our desire of that end is natural also, and therefore, the necessity [or obligatory force] of the means is natural” (Science of Ethics, Volume 1, p. 222). Clearly, the “naturalness” of natural law can, as I have emphasized, only be understood in terms of the Aristotelian metaphysics to which Aquinas is committed.

Given what was said earlier, human beings, like everything else in the world, have various capacities and ends the fulfillment of which is good for them and the frustrating of which is bad, as a matter of objective fact. A rational intellect apprised of the facts will therefore perceive that it is good to realize these ends and bad to frustrate them. It follows, then, that a rational person will pursue the realization of these ends and avoid their frustration.

In short, Aquinas’s position is essentially this: practical reason is directed by nature towards the pursuit of what the intellect perceives as good; what is in fact good is the realization or fulfillment of the various ends inherent in human nature; and thus a rational person will perceive this and, accordingly, direct his or her actions towards the realization or fulfillment of those ends.

In this sense, good action is just that which is “in accord with reason” (ST I-11.21.1; cf. ST I-11.90.1), and the moral skeptic’s question “Why should I do what is good?” has an obvious answer: because to be rational just is (in part) to do what is good, to fulfill the ends set for us by nature. Natural law ethics as a body of substantive moral theory is the formulation of general moral principles on the basis of an analysis of these various human capacities and ends and the systematic working out of their implications.

So, to take just one example, when we consider that human beings have intellects and that the natural end or function of the intellect is to grasp the truth about things, it follows that it is good for us — it fulfills our nature — to pursue truth and avoid error. Consequently, a rational person apprised of the facts about human nature will see that this is what is good for us and thus strive to attain truth and to avoid error. And so on for other natural human capacities.

Now things are bound to get more complicated than that summary perhaps lets on. Various qualifications and complications would need to be spelled out as the natural human capacities and ends are examined in detail, and not every principle of morality that follows from this analysis will necessarily be as simple and straightforward as “Pursue truth and avoid error.”

Particularly controversial among contemporary readers will be Aquinas’s application of his method to questions of sexual morality (SCG 1-II.122-126; ST II-I1.151-154). Famously, he holds that the only sexual acts that can be morally justified are those having an inherent tendency towards procreation, and only when performed within marriage. The reason is that the natural end of sex is procreation, and because this includes not merely the generation of new human beings but also their upbringing, moral training and the like, which is a long-term project involving (in the normal case, for Aquinas) many children, a stable family unit is required in order for this end to be realized.

Any other sexual behavior involves turning our natural capacities away from the end set for them by nature, and thus in Aquinas’s view cannot possibly be good for us or rational. This rules out, among other things, masturbation, contraception, fornication, adultery, and homosexual acts.

This is a large topic which cannot be treated adequately here. (I discuss Aquinas’s approach to sexual morality in detail in my book The Last Superstition.) But this much is enough to provide at least a general idea of how his natural law approach to ethics determines the specific content of our moral obligations. The method should be clear enough, whether or not one agrees with Aquinas’s application of that method in any particular case.

What has been said also suffices to give us a sense of the grounds of moral obligation, that which makes it the case that moral imperatives have categorical rather than merely hypothetical force (to use the distinction made famous by Kant). The hypothetical imperative (1) If I want what is good for me then I ought to pursue what realizes my natural ends and avoid what frustrates them is something whose truth Aquinas takes to follow from the metaphysical analysis of goodness sketched above. By itself, it does not give us a categorical imperative because the consequent will have force only for someone who accepts the antecedent.

But that (2) I do want what is good for me is true of all of us by virtue of our nature as human beings, and is in Aquinas’s view self-evident in any case, being just a variation on his fundamental principle of natural law. These premises yield the conclusion (3) I ought to pursue what realizes my natural ends and avoid what frustrates them. It does have categorical force because (2) has categorical force, and (2) has categorical force because it cannot be otherwise given our nature. Not only the content of our moral obligations but their obligatory character are thus determined, on Aquinas’s analysis, by the metaphysics of final causality or natural teleology.

Clearly, the “naturalness” of natural law can, as I have emphasized, only be understood in terms of the Aristotelian metaphysics to which Aquinas is committed. But it is also illuminating to compare the natural law to the three other kinds of law distinguished by Aquinas. Most fundamental is what he calls the “eternal law,” which is essentially the order of archetypes or ideas in the divine mind according to which God creates and providentially governs the world (ST I-1I.91.1).

Once the world, including human beings, is created in accordance with this law, the result is a natural order that human beings as rational animals can come to know and freely choose to act in line with, and “this participation of the eternal law in the rational creature is called the natural law” (ST I-II_91.2). The “natural law,” then, can also be understood in terms of its contrast with eternal law, as the manifestation of the latter within the natural order.

Now the natural law provides us with general principles by which individuals and societies ought to be governed, but there are many contingent and concrete details of human life that the natural law does not directly address. To take a standard example, the institution of private property is something we seem suited to given our nature, but there are many forms that institution might take consistent with natural law (cf. ST 11-11.66.2).

This brings us to “human law,” which is the set of conventional or man-made principles that govern actual human societies, and which gives a “more particular determination” to the general requirements of the natural law as it is applied to concrete cultural and historical circumstances (ST 1-11.91.3). Human law, then, is unlike both eternal law and natural law in that it is “devised by human reason” and contingent rather than necessary and unchanging.

Finally there is “divine law,” which is law given directly by God, such as the Ten Commandments (ST I-II.91.4-5). This differs from the natural law in being knowable, not through an investigation of the natural order, but only via a divine revelation. It is like human law in being sometimes suited to contingent historical circumstances and thus temporary (as, in Aquinas’s view, the Old Law given through Moses was superseded by the New Law given through Christ) but unlike human law in being infallible and absolutely binding.

Posted in Aristotlian-Thomism, St. Thomas Aquinas, Understanding Natural Law | Tagged natural law theory, practical reason, questions of sexual morality | Leave a Comment »

Aquinas and Natural Law Theory 1 – Edward Feser

April 30, 2013

Benozzo Gozzoli (c. 1421 – 1497) was an Italian Renaissance painter from Florence. He is best known for a series of murals in the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi depicting festive, vibrant processions with fine attention to detail and a pronounced International Gothic influence. This picture, the Glory of St. Thomas Aquinas, is now in the Louvre.

After all our examination of natural law last week reviewing the David Bentley Hart articles and Edward Feser’s criticism of them, I thought it might be good to look at Professor Feser’s writings on Thomas Aquinas and Natural Law Theory. The man has, after all, written a book on Aquinas and a wonderful one at that, “a clear, contemporary introduction (and defense!) of Aquinas’ thought which interacts with modern objections.” A sampling below:

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For Aquinas, knowing what is truly good for us requires taking an external, objective, “third-person” point of view on ourselves rather than a subjective “first-person” view; it is a matter of determining what fulfills our nature, not our contingent desires. The good in question has moral significance for us because, unlike other animals, we are capable of intellectually grasping what is good and freely choosing whether or not to pursue it. Aquinas identifies three general categories of goods inherent in our nature.

First are those we share in common with all living things, such as the preservation of our existence.
Second are those common to animals specifically, such as sexual intercourse and the child-rearing activities that naturally follow upon it.
Third are those peculiar to us as rational animals, such as “to know the truth about God, and to live in society,” “to shun ignorance,” and “to avoid offending those among whom one has to live” (ST I-11.94.2).

These goods are ordered in a hierarchy corresponding to the hierarchy of living things (i.e. those with vegetative, sensory, and rational souls respectively). The higher goods presuppose the lower ones; for example, one cannot pursue truth if one is not able to conserve oneself in existence. But the lower goods are subordinate to the higher ones in the sense that they exist for the sake of the higher ones. The point of fulfilling the vegetative and sensory aspects of our nature is, ultimately, to allow us to fulfill the defining rational aspect of our nature.

What specifically will fulfill that nature? Or in other words, in what does the good for us, and thus our well-being or happiness, ultimately consist? It cannot be wealth, because wealth exists only for the sake of something else which we might acquire with it (ST I-11.2.1). It cannot be honor, because honor accrues to someone only as a consequence of realizing some good, and thus cannot itself be an ultimate good (ST I-I1.2.2). For similar reasons, it cannot be fame or glory either, which are in any case often achieved for things that are not really good in the first place (ST I-1I.2.3). Nor can it be power, for power is a means rather than an end and might be used to bring about evil rather than genuine good(ST 1-11.2.4).

It cannot be pleasure, because pleasure is also a consequence of realizing a good rather than the realization of a good itself, even less likely is it to be bodily pleasure specifically, since the body exists for the sake of the soul, which is immaterial (ST I-II.2.6). For the same reason, it cannot consist of any bodily good of any other sort (ST I-II.2.5). But neither can even it be a good of the soul, since the soul, as a created thing, exists for the sake of something else (i.e. that which creates it) (ST 1-II.2.7). Obviously, then, it cannot be found in any created thing whatsoever; our ultimate end could only possibly be something “which lulls the appetite altogether,” beyond which nothing more could be desired, and thus something absolutely perfect (ST I-II.2.8).

And “this is to be found,” Aquinas concludes, “not in any creature, but in God alone … Wherefore God alone can satisfy the will of man … God alone constitutes man’s happiness” (ST 1-1I.2.8). That is not to deny that wealth, honor, faille, power, pleasure, and the goods of body and soul have their place; they cannot fail to do so given that we are the kinds of creatures that we are.

Aquinas’s point is that it is impossible for them to be the highest or ultimate good for us, that to which every other good is subordinated. God alone can be that. In Aquinas’s view, what is good for us is, as I have said, something that remains good for us even if for some reason we do not recognize it as good. What is good for us is necessarily good for us because it follows from our nature. As such, even God couldn’t change it, any more than he could make two and two equal to five. Here we see one important consequence of Aquinas’s view that the intellect is metaphysically prior to the will, in the sense that (as we saw in the last chapter) will derives from intellect rather than vice versa.

The divine intellect knows the natures of things and the divine will creates in accordance with this knowledge. To be sure, the natures in question exist at first only as ideas in the divine mind itself, in this sense they are, like everything else, dependent on God. Still, in creating the things that are to have these natures, the divine will only ever creates in light of the divine ideas and never in a way that conflicts with what is possible given the content of those ideas.

Aquinas’s position is thus very far from the sort of “divine command ethics” according to which what is good is good merely because God wills it, so that absolutely anything (including torturing babies for fun, say) could have been good for us had he willed us to do it. This sort of view was famously taken by William of Ockham (c. 1287-1347), according to whom God could even have willed for us to hate him, in which case that is what would have been good for us. Such a position naturally follows from the “voluntarism” or emphasis on will over intellect associated with Ockham and John Duns Scotus (c. 1266-1308), which is one of the key features distinguishing their brands of Scholasticism from Thomism.

This difference between Aquinas and the voluntarists is related to the reasons for which Aquinas’s position is, as we saw in chapter 3, immune to the famous “Euthyphro objection” to religiously based systems of ethics. The objection, it will be recalled, is in the form of a dilemma: either God wills something because it is good or it is good because he wills it; but if the former is true, then, contrary to theism, there will be something that exists independently of God (namely the standard of goodness he abides by in willing us to do something), and if the latter is true, then if God had willed us to torture babies for fun (say) then that would have been good, which seems obviously absurd.

Ockham essentially takes the second horn of the dilemma, but for Aquinas the dilemma is a false one. What is good for us is good because of our nature and not because of some arbitrary divine command, and God only ever wills for us to do what is consistent with our nature. But that doesn’t make the standard according to which he wills something existing independently of him, because what determines that standard are the ideas existing in the divine mind. Thus there is a third option between the two set out by the Euthyphro dilemma, and it is one that is neither inconsistent with our basic moral intuitions nor incompatible with the claims of theism.

Natural Goodness To Natural Law
It is but a few short steps from “natural goodness” (as Foot calls it) to Aquinas’s conception of natural law. The first principle of natural law, as Aquinas famously held, is that “good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided. All other precepts of the natural law are based upon this,” where the content of those precepts is determined by the goods falling under the three main categories mentioned above (ST I-1I.94.2). That “good is to be done” and so on might seem at first glance to be a difficult claim to justify, and certainly not a very promising candidate for a first principle. For isn’t the question “Why should we be good?” precisely (part of) what any moral theory ought to answer? And isn’t this question notoriously hard to answer to the satisfaction of moral skeptics?

Properly understood, however, Aquinas’s principle is not only not difficult to justify, but even seems obviously correct. He is not saying that it is just self-evident that we ought to be morally good. Rather, he is saying that it is self-evident that whenever we act, we pursue something that we take to be good in some way and/or avoid what we take in some way to be evil or bad. And that seems clearly right.

Even someone who does something he believes to be morally bad does so only because he is seeking something he regards as good in the sense of worth pursuing. Hence the mugger who admits that robbery is evil nevertheless takes his victim’s wallet because he thinks it would be good to have money to pay for his drugs; hence the drug addict who regards his habit as wrong and degrading nevertheless thinks it would be good to satisfy his craving and bad to suffer the unpleasantness of not satisfying it. Of course, these claims are true only on a very thin sense of “good,” but that is exactly the sense Aquinas intends.

Acceptance of Aquinas’s general metaphysics is not necessary in order to see that this first principle is correct; it is supposed to be self-evident. But that metaphysics is meant to help us understand why it is correct. Like every other natural phenomenon, practical reason has a natural end or goal towards which it is ordered, and that end or goal is just whatever the intellect perceives to be good or worth pursuing. This claim too seems obvious, at least if one accepts Aquinas’s Aristotelian metaphysics. And it brings us to the threshold of a further conclusion that does have real moral significance.

Posted in St. Thomas Aquinas, Understanding Natural Law | Tagged Aquinas' general metaphysics, God alone constitutes man's happiness, knowing what is truly good, Natural Goodness To Natural Law, the Euthyphro objection, the highest or ultimate good | Leave a Comment »

Dante and St. Thomas – A.N. Wilson

January 30, 2013

For Dante, an objective reality existed. “There is no subjectivism or idealism in his world,” Christopher Dawson claimed; “everything has its profound ontological basis in an objective spiritual order.” Unfortunately, Dawson lamented, no one of Dante’s caliber followed him… This was unfortunate, Dawson wrote; “otherwise we might have been saved alike from the narrow rationalism of eighteenth-century Classicism and from the emotional debauches of nineteenth-century Romanticism.”

In 1215, Aristotle’s works had been banned by the statutes of the University of Paris. But largely through the labors of one supremely great and saintly intellect, Aristotle’s thought was saved for the Christian church. This figure, whose gigantic intellect rolls like thunder through the centuries reducing the tentative speculations of our modern theologians to so many squeaks on the margin, was an early recruit to Dominic’s order known to posterity as Thomas Aquinas. He was gigantic in every sense.

When Dante meets him in Heaven, Thomas is immediately recognizable because he is so enormously fat.

I was a lamb among the holy flock
that Dominic leads on the path where one
may fatten well if one does not stray off.
[Paradisio X.94-6, Mandelbaum]

He was in all senses a giant, immensely tall, and rotund. His brother friars nicknamed him the Sicilian Ox.

This intellectual Friar Tuck was one of the most brilliant and influential of all European philosophers. Like Dante, he was viewed with considerable distrust in the Church during his lifetime. In Spain, the philosophy of Aristotle had been brought by the Arab conquerors and at last translated into Latin. So too had the works of the Arab metaphysicians and mathematicians themselves. Naturally enough, the Church viewed with disquiet the arrival of so much new learning, much of which appeared to be incompatible with traditional Catholicism.

Thomas Aquinas was supreme among those intellects of his age in absorbing the new wisdom and seeing whether a synthesis of Greek and Arab insights could not be drawn into the Christian way of looking at the world. He was not alone. It was an extraordinary age, with such giants as Roger Bacon, Albert of Cologne, .known as Albert the Great, Siger of Brabant, Duns Scotus and Meister Eckhart all at work over a fifty-year period in Paris.

Older Dante scholars liked to imagine that Dante must have studied in Paris at some stage, though, in fact, no evidence can be found which demonstrates that he ever left Italy. But what could be truthfully said of the period of the second decade of the fourteenth century when Dante began to write his Comedy, when Duns Scotus had just finished and Meister Eckhart was still teaching at Paris, was that Dante was `far removed from Paris in body but very much there in spirit.

Of all these great thinkers, Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) stands out as the most far-reaching and ambitious. He did not live fifty years in the world, but he left Christianity with an intellectual armor which it had not altogether possessed before. This was not because he supplied the Church with a set of answers, so much as because he taught it — hence the extreme suspicion with which he was regarded in some quarters — the robustness to ask questions, to take the Aristotelian habit of asking questions into every single area of life, including the most basic questions about God — namely, is His existence self-evident? Can His existence be demonstrated? And does He, in fact, exist?

His works consist of many millions of words, many or most of them dictated. As has been said by one of his fellow-Dominicans, He worked himself literally to death. He had a nervous breakdown and a complete writing block in 1274 and died a few months later: This writer clearly discounts the sensationalist medieval rumor, repeated by Dante and Villani, that Thomas was poisoned at the behest of Charles of Anjou.

For this very reason, he was distrustful of what we can see as the origins of “capitalism — not merely usury, but the very notions of property were ones which he held up to question. Like most Christians of the Middle Ages, he was anti-Semitic. He believed that Jews should be forced to wear special clothing, that their money was tainted, and should not be used by Christians and that, by virtue of their having urged the Crucifixion of Christ, they were subject to a perpetual servitude.

He denounced Jewish usurers because they were usurers, not because they were Jews. A modern defender of Aquinas, presumably seeing him as less rabidly anti-Semitic than some of his medieval contemporaries, pleaded that, on the issue of Jewish worship as on forced conversion and baptism of Jewish children, Aquinas adopted a relatively tolerant position.

Thomas Aquinas was born, either in 1225 or 1227, at Roccasecca, in the region of Naples, the castle belonging to his father, Count Landulf of Aquino. At the age of five, he was placed in the monastery founded by St Benedict (c.480-c.544), father of Western monasticism, at Monte Cassino in the sixth century. In all the intervening years, between the life of Benedict and the life of Thomas Aquinas, European philosophy had slept. (‘There is no philosophy between the end of the third century after Christ, which saw the death, of Porphyrius, and the middle of the thirteenth century, which witnessed the appearance of the “Summa contra gentiles”)

At Monte Cassino, Thomas was given the equivalent of a boarding-school education, following the medieval pattern of the Trivium and the Quadrivium. In 1239, he had what was a lucky break. The monks were forced to abandon the monastery, and Thomas was sent to the newly founded University of Naples. Frederick II, deemed by orthodox Catholics to be the child of Satan, had founded this university to train civil servants in deliberate opposition to the papal-chartered universities of Bologna and Paris.

It was in every sense a freethinking university which, because of its links with Sicily where Frederick had his court, was in touch with the new learning brought to Europe by the Arabs. It was at Naples that Thomas encountered an Irishman, Petrus Hibernicus, who introduced him to the works of Aristotle. After nearly a millennium of philosophical stagnation, Europe was again reminded of what philosophy was.

Latin Europe had possessed a few bits of Aristotle — a translation of the Physics was known at Chartres, for example — but it was in the Arab world that Aristotle was known, and in the ecumenical climate of late twelfth-century Toledo that Aristotle was translated into Latin and came to be known by such intellectuals as Peter the Irishman.

From the point of view of the mature Dante, who wrote the Comedy and turned much of Aquinas’s hyper-energetic dialectic into deeply charged poetry, three things above all others need to be mentioned out of the whole eight-million-word conversation which Aquinas was having with the world.

First, the notion of ecstasy. Dante’s great poem is about a man who journeys out of the dark wood of middle life into the Empyrean itself. He is transported from earth to Paradise. Few human beings have ever claimed to do this, but one who seems to have made the claim is the Apostle Paul who, in 2 Corinthians 12:2-4, wrote to his converts in Corinth in the late fifties of our era,

I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third Heaven — whether in the body or out of the body I do not know. And I know that such a person — whether in the body or out of the body, I do not know: God knows — was caught up into Paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat.

This was an important Scriptural passage for Aquinas. He interpreted the third Heaven’ to mean the Empyrean (as Dante would do). It is the `spiritual Heaven where angels and holy souls enjoy the contemplation of God. This contemplation could, says Thomas, either be seen as an imaginative vision, such as Isaiah enjoyed (in his sixth chapter) or such as was seen by the New Testament seer in the Apocalypse.

Or it could be seen, as the last great philosopher of the Latin world before the Dark Ages (St Augustine of Hippo) saw it, as an intellectual vision. The point which Thomas emphasizes is that it is not natural for human beings to see God. St Paul was in ecstasy, a word which means being taken out of your normal state, a word which even, says Thomas, implies a certain violence. A mere man cannot see the essence of God.

In a sense, Thomas’s reflections on this strange passage from Paul anticipate the whole problem of knowledge post-Descartes, that is, how can you escape your own sense-impressions into a world of objectivity? As far as our knowledge of God is concerned (and perhaps as far as our knowledge of anything else), Aquinas, who appears to be one of those thinkers who has thought of everything, says you need to leave yourself, in the Cartesian sense, in order to know anything.

In order to know God, you need to do something like violence to nature. But although God is the beginning and the end of our intellectual journey, He is irreducible. `The ultimate happiness of man consists in his highest activity, which is the exercise of his mind. If, therefore, the created mind were never able to see the essence of God, either it would never attain happiness, or its happiness would consist in something other than God. This is contrary to faith [alienum a fide], for the ultimate perfection of the rational creature lies in that which is the source of its being — each thing achieves its perfection by rising as high as its source.

There is a paradox, therefore, at the heart of human intellectual endeavor. The thing which brings the human mind its ultimate happiness, the knowledge of God, cannot be enjoyed by the mere pursuit of the intellect. (This is why Thomas, after his `nervous breakdown, described all his philosophical works as mere straw.) Mere thinking about God, however exact and sustained, remains incomplete theology unless charged with dilectio, or choosing to be in love with God himself.

Bishop Berkeley took skepticism in the eighteenth century to its ultimate extreme by refusing to believe in matter itself. We can have no certainty of the material existence of bodies outside ourselves, only the mind of God can keep such things in existence. As a good Aristotelian, Aquinas would have thought this was nonsense, which it is, and he would no doubt have approved of another large, fat Christian man, Samuel Johnson, responding to Berkeley’s difficulty literally with a kick against a material object. (`Striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded for it, “I refute it thus“.’)

But Aquinas, as a fellow-philosopher of Berkeley’s, would have sympathized with the absurdity more than Johnson did. Aquinas devised what he called Five Ways to prove God’s existence. In asking the question whether God is self-evident, he refutes the so-called ontological proof of Anselm. God’s self-evidence can never be self-evident to us. It can only be self-evident to God. Even when Paul had been up to the `third Heaven’ and had his vision, he did not know whether his experience was in the body not. He lacked something, which is the full and perfect knowledge which is the lot of angels, says Thomas.

Our minds can operate — here he is an Aristotelian, not an eighteenth century empiricist — to grasp their own limitations. We can see that there things which, with mental equipment, cannot be known. But where-Cartesian philosopher would be tempted to subject God Himself to same set of criteria by which we judge the knowability of material objects, or objects within nature, in a Thomist view of things this is the wrong way round. It is only because of God that anything exists at all. God is the ultimate reality, and our reality only begins to take shape, like the coming into vision of material objects with each sunrise, in His light.

Later philosophers have been divided about the extent to which Thomas was successful in `proving’ the existence of God. For the present purpose — drawing a picture of the mind of Dante Alighieri, and attempting to assess the effect upon it of reading the philosophy of Aquinas — the validity of the arguments is secondary to their imaginative power.

One would note three things.

First, then, the importance Thomas attaches to ecstasy, and his interest in the journey (whether in the body or not) supposedly made by the Apostle Paul to the `third Heaven’ Dante was to make such a journey — the journey in the Comedy is a journey to Heaven in the body – and what Thomas says about this must be relevant. Dante’s journey is one of sanctification. He himself is journeying to blessedness, and he hopes his readers will accompany him. When he has been uplifted out of the present life, it is no accident that he meets Thomas Aquinas.
Secondly, having said that — and this is crucial for any understanding either of Dante’s, or of his contemporaries, way of thinking — what Aquinas was exploring in his philosophy (as was Aristotle) was objective knowledge. There is no skepticism about the possibility of knowledge (as there would be for Berkeley and Hume). The world is that which is the case. This will pose critical, as well as philosophical, problems for the modern reader of Dante.The `story’ — of Dante starting out in the middle of a dark wood and ending up in the Empyrean gazing upon God Himself — is surely an invention, a fiction? Along the way, he will meet mythological creatures such as the Minotaur and the Centaurs; he will also meet real, historical characters; and he will meet angels and figures from the Bible. How much of his vision are we to take as fiction, and how much is real? How we answer this question will depend upon how we read the whole of Dante’s life and age. Thomas Aquinas, a rigorously realist, Aristotelian philosopher, will help us here.
Third — Thomas’s philosophy of politics and law. They are not the only influence upon Dante, but they are a significant part of it. In much of his prose work, Dante is trying to explore the idea of the Good City, and the idea of the ideal political condition of the world. In this, as in other areas of life, he would change his mind radically, at least three times. When living in Florence, he was a Guelf, a supporter of the papal party against the domination of the Emperor. In exile, he became a sort of Ghibelline, and in his book on monarchy he saw the Emperor Henry VII as a universal Emperor.

Dante would have first come across these ideas in the church of Santa Maria Novella at the lectures given by Dominican followers of St Thomas. I mention them here because they clearly will emerge in his work when it comes to maturity and there is a case for noting when the seeds of an idea are planted in a writer’s imagination even if we cannot be sure when those seeds gestated.

Posted in St. Thomas Aquinas, Understanding Dante | Tagged St Paul in ecstasy | Leave a Comment »

Dante, Boethius and St. Thomas – A. N. Wilson

January 29, 2013

Boethius and Philosophy by Mattia Preti, 17th century

Dante tells us after the death of Beatrice that he gave himself up to the reading of philosophy and two of the works which he studied were Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy, and Cicero’s On Friendship, in particular that passage known as the Dream of Scipio, on which Macrobius wrote a commentary. These are two of the most popular `classics’ of the medieval world and in order to understand Dante’s work (or, indeed, the medieval mind generally) one should have a knowledge of them.

Anicius Manlius Torquatus Severinus Boethius (480-524) was a Roman aristocrat who served as a government minister to the first barbarian King in Italy, Theodoric the Ostrogoth. Theodoric was an Arian Christian — that is to say, he followed the teachings of Arius, the Libyan who denied the Trinity. Boethius was an orthodox Christian, and he wrote a tract on the Trinity. It is not for this, however, that he is remembered.

He was implicated — history cannot guess whether justly or otherwise — in a plot formed by the Roman Senate and the Eastern Emperor to oust Theodoric from his position. He was put in gaol in Pavia and eventually killed by having ropes twisted round his head until his eyes popped out. He e was finished off with a bludgeon.

Although he was canonized as St Severinus, very few ever think of him this title. (The church of Saint Severin in Paris, for example, commemorates a quite different person, a sixth-century hermit who lived in a hut the site of what would become the Latin Quarter.) Our man is always own as Boethius. And he is famous for the book he wrote while he was awaiting sentence of death, The Consolation of Philosophy, a book translated into English by Alfred the Great, by Chaucer, and by Queen Elizabeth I, and which Edward Gibbon deemed `a golden volume not unworthy of the leisure of Plato or of Tully.

C. S. Lewis, in his Cambridge lectures, said that, `Until about two hundred years ago it would, I think, have been hard to find an educated man in any European country who did not love it. To acquire a taste for it is to become naturalized in the Middle Ages.

It is certainly to be recommended, if you are to become a real Dante reader, that you read Boethius. To start with, however, it is perhaps enough to know a few salient points. First, Boethius, although a Christian, devoted his last work to seeing what consolation could be derived from the exercise of pure reason. There would come a time for imploring the grace and mercy of God — when he laid down his pen in the evenings, and, presumably, when he came to face his executioners.

But the lofty purpose of his book is not to dip into the consolations of piety. It is to see how a rational person, and it must be added, a gentleman, faces up to adversity, injustice and death. In doing so, Boethius the Roman senator and aristocrat draws himself up to his full height, as it were, and he writes in the polished prose of classical Latin; he lards his text with allusions to Pythagoras, to Homer, to Herodotus and Livy, to Tacitus and Cicero. Condemned by a barbarian king for wishing to preserve the Roman Senate, he says that the documents being used to condemn him are forgeries but, `what is the point of talking about those forgeries in which I am accused of having striven for Roman liberty?

What he leaves behind, then, is the classical era’s last shout in a world taken over by barbarians. In a world where the Dark Ages have engulfed Europe, in which literacy is confined to the few (Theodoric was illiterate) and books were more and more to be found in monastic libraries or not at all, Boethius gives us the world seen through the eyes of a classically educated person. If there were to be a classical revival in our own day, there would be worse ways of starting it than by putting The Consolation of Philosophy on the school curriculum. Here are many of the tropes and types which will become commonplace in so much medieval literature, and which, fairly obviously, are central to Dante.

First, the Consolation is an allegory in which, in his distress, Boethius is visited by the figure of a woman who seemed both eternally young and very old. She is Philosophy, but we shall be visited again and again by this image, of a male figure, whether in a dream-vision or not, being visited by an allegorical female figure. Clearly, the figure of Philosophy as she appears to Boethius influences, not so much Dante’s feelings about the Lady of the Window, as of Beatrice in the Comedy.

Central to the whole book is the puzzle of how God can permit such chaos in human affairs, and how the wise person conducts himself in relation to the unpredictable mutability of things. Boethius is one of the great popularizers of the idea of Fortune’s Wheel. `Will you really try to stop the whirl of her turning wheel? He also paints the classic, as well as classical, picture of the Unmoved Mover.

By the completion of Book IV, with its exposition of how to retain an equable temper in the face of adversity, are conscious of Boethius’ debts to the classical moralists, and also of the influence he spreads over the Elizabethan poets (Spenser above all), on the Augustan moralists such as Pope and Johnson, right down to Kipling meeting with Triumph and Disaster and treating those two imposters just the same. Yet there is nothing trite about Boethius. As well as recognizing his influence in so much of later moralizers, we shall feel there is something which he possesses in common with the Vedic wisdom of India. To be wise is to become close to God’s simplicity.

In reading Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, Dante likewise puts himself in touch with one of the few classical texts widely known by medieval literates. In this book may be found a potted version of Plato’s creation myths in the Timaeus — it is the closest Dante ever got to reading Plato. Here too are the accounts of the soul’s journeys through the universe as it returns to Heaven upon death. (There is no resurrection for Cicero.)

Dante came to these classics of the educated medieval man comparatively late in life. He was old enough to absorb them, hold on to them for what would be useful to him when he came to write his masterpiece. There would always be what a wise English Dante scholar, Father Kenelm Foster OP, called the two Dantes: the classical Roman man who was, if not exactly pagan, a self-conscious continuer in the footsteps of Virgil and Cicero, and the Catholic pilgrim-poet, who would write a Comedy which was about personal sanctification in the Christian mould.

When he came to study philosophy in an informal way in Florence, Dante was perhaps inevitably made aware of the dichotomy between the two stances. There was no university in Florence, but it was not long since the arrival in the city of two comparatively new religious orders – the Franciscans, started by St Francis of Assisi some forty years before Dante was born, and the Order of Preachers, which had taken shape at Bologna in 1220-21 under the direction of St Dominic.

Both these saints, and their orders, played an enormous part in Dante’s life, and in his vision of what the Church had a chance to become. Both their orders were departures from the traditional pattern of Western monasticism, in which a man or woman took a vow to remain in one place for life. The friars, Franciscan and Dominican, were roving preachers, missionaries, lecturers, ascetics and, especially in the case of the Dominicans, intellectuals. Dominic and his order are forever associated with two movements, or episodes, which suggest a somewhat dualistic nature in his outlook and that of his friars. On the one hand, Dominic, a Spaniard who, in his thirties, toured the South of France rooting out Cathar heretics, was the leading voice in excoriating the Cathars, and one of the principal functions of the order he founded was to convert them to Catholicism.

Yet while this part of Dominic’s work must be seen by posterity as an exercise in intolerance (however calamitous we might see it would have been if the fanatical Cathars had come to outnumber Catholics or dominate the religious climate of Europe), the other aspect of the Dominican intellectual life seems to be of an opposite coloring. For with Dominic’s order will always be associated the cult of Aristotle and the growth of Catholic intellectualism based upon debate and inquiry. In Dominic’s spiritual war against the Cathars (which, as we have seen, turned into an actual war in which many were massacred), the Church authorities were only too happy to tap into his order’s resources of ascetic and intellectual strength.

With his friars’ love affair with the new learning, the authorities were less happy. Above all they were suspicious of the revival of interest in Aristotle, who denied the Resurrection of the Body and the Life Everlasting. In 1215, Aristotle’s works had been banned by the statutes of the University of Paris. `But largely through the labors of one supremely great and saintly intellect, Aristotle’s thought was saved for the Christian church.”‘ This figure, `whose gigantic intellect rolls like thunder through the centuries reducing the tentative speculations of our modern theologians to so many squeaks on the margin,” was an early recruit to Dominic’s order known to posterity as Thomas Aquinas. He was gigantic in every sense.

When Dante meets him in Heaven, Thomas is immediately recognizable because he is so enormously fat.

I was a lamb among the holy flock
that Dominic leads on the path where one
may fatten well if one does not stray off.
[Paradisio X.94-6, Mandelbaum]

He was in all senses a giant, immensely tall, and rotund. His brother friars nicknamed him the Sicilian Ox.

This intellectual Friar Tuck was one of the most brilliant and influential of all European philosophers. Like Dante, he was viewed with considerable distrust in the Church during his lifetime. In Spain, the philosophy of Aristotle had been brought by the Arab conquerors and at last translated into Latin. So too had the works of the Arab metaphysicians and mathematicians themselves. Naturally enough, the Church viewed with disquiet the arrival of so much new learning, much of which appeared to be incompatible with traditional Catholicism.

Thomas Aquinas was supreme among those intellects of his age in absorbing the new wisdom and seeing whether a synthesis of Greek and Arab insights could not be drawn into the Christian way of looking at the world. He was not alone. It was an extraordinary age, with such giants as Roger Bacon, Albert of Cologne, known as Albert the Great, Siger of Brabant, Duns Scotus and Meister Eckhart all at work over a fifty-year period in Paris.

He also, in a way which anticipated the work of mid-twentieth-century philosophers, explored the problems of existence/Being itself, questions of language and meaning from an epistemological point of view, as well as the philosophy of ethics, of aesthetics and of politics. In fact, in the post-classical world it is hard to think of any philosopher, with the possible exception of Hegel, who gave his mind to a wider range of issues. Certainly, he must have been one of the most prolific of the philosophers. His works consist of many millions of words, many or most of them dictated. As has been said by one of his fellow-Dominicans, He worked himself literally to death. He had a nervous breakdown and a complete writing block in 1274 and died a few months later: This writer clearly discounts the sensationalist medieval rumor, repeated by Dante and Villani, that Thomas was poisoned at the behest of Charles of Anjou.

Thomas was of noble, very nearly of royal, stock. He was a cousin of the Emperor Frederick II and of the Kings of France. Though regarded by Popes and traditionalist thinkers as a radical who was prepared to question everything, he was by no stretch of the modern imagination radical in politics. ‘Aquinas accepted in toto the traditional hierarchy of aristocratic Europe, as it had existed from Homeric times up to his own day; slavery, warfare, capital punishment were all a natural part of it. For this very reason, he was distrustful of what we can see as the origins of “capitalism — not merely usury, but the very notions of property were ones which he held up to question. Like most Christians of the Middle Ages, he was anti-Semitic. He believed that Jews should be forced to wear special clothing, that their money was tainted, and should not be used by Christians and that, by virtue of their having urged the Crucifixion of Christ, they were subject to a `perpetual servitude.

He denounced Jewish usurers because they were usurers, not because they were Jews. A modern defender of Aquinas, presumably seeing him as less rabidly anti-Semitic than some of his medieval contemporaries, pleaded that, `On the issue of Jewish worship as on forced conversion and baptism of Jewish children, Aquinas adopted a relatively tolerant position.

Posted in St. Thomas Aquinas, Understanding Dante | Tagged Dante and Boethius, Dante and St. Thomas | Leave a Comment »

The Fundamental Truth 3 – Etiénne Gilson

November 8, 2012

“Through this intellect, every man is a person and through the same intellect he can see exactly the same truth as any other man can see, provided they both use their intellects in the proper way. Here, and nowhere else, lies the foundation for the very possibility of a philosophia perennis; for it is, not a perennial cloud floating through the ages in some metaphysical stratosphere, but the permanent possibility for each and every human being to actualize an essence through his own existence, that is to experience again the same truth in the light of his own intellect. And that truth itself is not an anonymous one. Even taken in its absolute and self-subsisting form, truth itself bears a name. Its name is God.”
Etiénne Gilson

It does no good to praise Aristotle’s method if we refuse to follow it, and above all if we misconstrue its meaning. The last chapter of the Posterior Analytics is extremely important in this regard. Aristotle speaks there of the knowledge of principles. The assumption that they are innate is absurd, because if they were we would possess, unknown to ourselves, knowledges more certain than any demonstration. On the other hand, how could we formulate these principles within ourselves without having a faculty or power to acquire them?

What is this power? In order to satisfy the conditions of the problem, it is necessary, Aristotle says, “that that power be superior in accuracy to the knowledge itself of principles (Posterior Analytics 2.19, 99b31-34). This statement has been interpreted to make it say less than it does, but in vain, for however the agent intellect is conceived in Aristotle’s doctrine, even if it is reduced to the status of an indeterminate light and as indifferent to the intelligible apprehensions it causes, the statement of the Posterior Analytics means that this light belongs to a higher order and certitude than that of the principles it makes us know.

It is not easy to state clearly St. Thomas’s opinion on the subject, but we have to get used to a certain way of not understanding, which is nothing but a modest stance in the face of a purely intelligible object. One who understands everything is in great danger of understanding badly what he understands and not even to suspect the existence of what he does not understand.

The obscurity surrounding the origin of principles is exactly the same as that which partly hides their nature. It is agreed that in the Thomistic epistemology the agent intellect immediately conceives the principles by way of abstraction from sensible experience, and that is correct. It is added, then, that the intellect suffices for this operation, that it accomplishes it by its own natural light, without needing for its explanation to have recourse to the additional illumination of a separate Intelligence, not even, as some Augustinians would have it, to the light of God, the Sun of minds, the interior Master, finally the Word who enlightens everyone coming into the world.

And that too is correct, but it is not the whole truth. Thomas is the less scrupulous about not taking away anything from nature as, completely filled with the presence of God, like air with light, nature cannot be belittled without doing injury to the creator. Nothing can be denied to the essence of a being that God has made to be what it is.

In this spirit, at the very moment when St. Thomas in his Summa theologiae (1.84.5) places limits on the Platonic noetic of St. Augustine (qui doctrines Platonicorum imbutus fuerat) nevertheless holds the essence of the Augustinian thesis and the truth of his words. The intellectual soul knows material things in the eternal reasons, but this does not require the assistance of divine light added to that of the intellect.

The latter suffices, “for the intellectual light within us is nothing else than a certain participated resemblance of the uncreated light, in which are contained all the eternal reasons (that is, Ideas). So it is said in Psalm 4:7, “Many ask: who will make us see happiness.” The psalmist replies: “The light of your countenance is imprinted on us, O Lord.’ It is as though he said: Everything is shown to us by the very seal of the divine light within us.”

Thus, while maintaining the necessity of sensible experience at the origin of all human knowledge, St. Thomas intimately binds the human intellect to the divine light itself. It is because that light (which is the divine esse) includes, or rather is, the infinity of divine ideas (which are the divine esse) that the agent intellect of each one of us, being a participation in the divine light, has the capacity of forming intelligible concepts on contact with the sensible world. That intellect is not the divine light; if it were, it would be God.

But it is a created product of that light, and in a finite way it expresses it and imitates its excellence. Hence its capacity to discover in beings, which are also made in the image of the divine ideas the intelligible forms in which they participate. The agent intellect in itself has the power to recognize outside itself the resemblance of the first cause, which is the source of all knowledge and intelligibility.

We shall have to return to this theme after trying to grasp St. Thomas’s very special notion of participation. For the moment, let us simply examine that doctrine of knowledge such as it is; or, rather, let us attempt to do so, for how can we succeed? In one sense it begins by following Aristotle, but the genuine Aristotle who, from the level of sensation, sees empirical notions develop in an ascending induction, experience itself being the starting point of art in the order of becoming and of science in the order of being.

But above science and its demonstrations there is an intuition of principles. Because demonstrations depend on principles, they themselves are not objects of demonstration. They do not provide science with its demonstrations; science does this for itself in their light. And since their light is thought itself, in the final analysis it is the intellect itself that is the cause of science (Post Analytics 2.19).

If this is so, why are we surprised that principles do not yield their full meaning always and to everyone? Their evidence and necessity themselves constrain the intellect which they rule by enlightening it, but which submits to them for want of being able to make their certitude that of a science, which the intellect itself would cause. The only way to approach these supreme intelligibles is with respect and modesty. The various simple formulas used to dispatch them in a few words are tautologies only for those who do not try to plumb their depths.

In a second sense — already implicit in the first and nourishing it from within and giving it infinite riches –, St. Thomas follows the Augustinian way, which itself belongs to Christian philosophy. What is astonishing is that, with St. Thomas, these two ways become one in his own doctrine. Even when he happens to name them, they can no longer be distinguished, for the two have become identical.

The universe we know is henceforth composed of things created in the likeness of a God whose essence, that is to say, the act of being, is at once their origin and model. The intellect that knows these things is itself the product and image of the same God. In this doctrine, in which everything in nature is natural, but in which nature is essentially a divine product and a divine image, it can be said that nature itself is sacred. It is not surprising that the first intelligible object an intellect of this sort discerns in such a real world is the primary notion of being, and that with this origin, this notion surpasses in every way the mind that conceives it

Here is the truth dimly perceived by those who mistakenly, teach the unity of the agent intellect They are wrong in that respect, but it is true to say that Aristotle calls our agent intellect a light that our soul receives from God. In this sense it is even truer to say with Augustine that God illumines the soul, of which it is the “intelligible sun.” These philosophical disputes over: details lose their sharp edge from the theological heights we have reached. In Augustine’s view, knowing is contemplating in the soul a reflection of the Ideas; in Aristotle’s opinion, knowing is an act of the agent intellect throwing light on the intelligibility of the sensible world. The doctrines differ in structure, but in the final analysis they are in agreement: “It matters little whether we say that it is the intelligibles themselves in which the (intellect) participates from God, or that the light producing the intelligibles is participated.” [Aquinas, Tractatus de spiritualibus creaturis 10 ad 8m] In either case God is at the origin of knowledge.

From St. Thomas himself to his most recent interpreters this truth has often been lost from sight Turned to folly, it was sometimes corrupted in ontologism. Reduced, in reaction, to the limitations of an almost physical empiricism, it cut itself off from its source, which is the being of God himself. Preserved in its fullness, it offers itself as a naturalism similar to that of the Greeks, but in which, owing to its dependence on God in its very being, nature is filled with a divine energy and so to speak always points to infinitely more than what it is.

Since this is true of knowledge as well as of being, it should be enough to banish the phantom of a metaphysics based on nothing but regulative formulas. Wisdom begins with notions that are certainly abstract but endowed with a content extracted from the real world by a mind whose light discovers in forms the light itself of which our mind is an image. For metaphysics, the primary notion of being is given to us before all others; it is at the same time apprehended as such and illuminated by the light of Him Who Is, the cause of every intellect and of every intelligible object.

This datum, and the intellectual experience we take from it, is the true principle of metaphysics. All philosophical wisdom is virtually contained in the meaning of the word “is.” So we should not make it a “starting point,” as some call it We must dwell on it at length and leave it only to come back to it as quickly as possible. Being is the most universal and evident of all notions, but it is also the most mysterious, as befits the very name of God.

This is the only reason for the differences among metaphysics. As Suarez very aptly said, it is evident an ens sit (that being is), but not quid sit ens (what being is). Ens does not signify a word but a thing, and that thing is so simple that it cannot be defined but only described.

Every metaphysics presupposes a notion of being, presented for the metaphysician’s reflection, as a truth of that simple intuition which Aristotle justifies by the surpassing excellence of the intellect over the principles themselves that it posits. There is no science of the cause of science. Moreover, the controversies among great metaphysicians are fruitless as long as they oppose each other on the level of conclusions, without first confronting each other on the level of principles.

But they do not like to compare their interpretations of principles, for they have the same first principle, they only understand it differently. No demonstration will make them understand it in the same way, as we see from the fact that all the great Christian philosophies continue to exist side by side. In all of them God is being. As Augustine says, “He is ‘Is.” [Deus non aliquo modo est, sed est est: Confessions 13.31 (46)]

But for one, ‘Is’ means the Immutable Being; for another, that whose nature it is to exist (natura existendi, natura essendi); for still others being is real essence, the inner principle and ground of all the actions and operations of a subject The objection should not be raised that these are concepts of real being, not of the being of reason which is the concern of metaphysics.

If metaphysics were only directed to an abstract notion it would be nothing but a logic. As a science of reality, the first philosophy has for its object existing being, and that is why, again in the apt words of Suarez (DM 2.2.29), if there were neither God nor angels there would be no metaphysics. [DM 2.2, Vives ed. 25: 79 §29. In §30 Suarez says that if no immaterial beings existed there would probably still be room for one part of metaphysics concerning being and the transcendentals.] Everything happens as though the metaphysicians were dispersed within the same intelligible space, which is too immense for them to have the good fortune to meet each other.

There is no trace of skepticism here. We only ask not to be placed in the position of playing the role of the indisciplinatus by demonstrating that whose nature does not allow it to be demonstrated. Moreover, it can be demonstrated that the first principle is being. Even those who dispute it, as Descartes did in a certain sense, are obliged to use it. What did he assert when he said “I am”?

Finally, it is possible and even necessary for a metaphysician to relate at length the meaning he ascribes to the first principle to the contents of experience. If he can find a meaning of the word that does justice to all the properties of beings inasmuch as they are beings, and that arranges them in thought in the order they have in reality, the philosopher will give his assent to that notion without qualification, hesitation, or doubt It will be his first principle, and most certainly, because as he conceives it this notion dispenses with all the others, for it includes them eminently, whereas all the others taken together do not measure up to its intelligibility.

Accordingly, metaphysics is a science from the moment when, having laid hold of the principle, it begins to deduce its consequences; but the fate of the doctrine depends on the understanding of the principle. A true metaphysician will rarely be caught in the act of contradicting himself. At the start he must adopt his doctrinal positions, and he must meditate at length on the mind’s first approach to its formation of principles before committing himself to them. The capacity of the principle to elucidate reality under all its aspects will undoubtedly confirm its truth in the course of constructing the doctrine, but it is the principle’s own evidence, which the mind sees in the very act of conceiving it, on which its certitude essentially rests. Once the meaning of the principle is grasped, the doctrine unfolds in its light It does not make the doctrine true, it simply makes its truth evident

In teaching metaphysics, then, the main concern should not be the sequence of conclusions. Dialectic masters this so easily that it can correctly deduce all the conclusions of a principle without seeing its truth or understanding its meaning. This is the source of the impression opponents in a dispute have of always being misunderstood. And indeed they are, for each judges the other’s sequence of conclusions in the light of his own understanding of the meaning of the principles.

This is not how the good teacher of philosophy proceeds. After lengthy reflection, he says what he sees and tries to lead others to see it. For this purpose, before undertaking to demonstrate what is demonstrable, he elucidates the truth that is indemonstrable to show the evidence for it

This is a whole art in itself. As old as metaphysics, the art is so well known since Plato that there is no need to insist on it here. Starting with images, we must transcend them in order to reach, as by flashes of light, the intelligible principle. Though we only catch a glimpse of it, we can expect that this insight will arouse others to see it as well, as we proceed to an explanatory analysis of the contents of the notion. That will only happen by stepping down a little below it, every time we use our judgment to clarify its pure intelligibility. We can withdraw from it, provided that we do not for a moment lose our hold on it, as we must step back a little from a beautiful face in order to see it

The elucidation, then, should take place at the center of this intelligible insight itself. It need not be very extensive; it is sufficient for itself. As far as others are concerned, it can only lead the way to invite them to set out in pursuit Moreover, because it is linked to the simple apprehension from which the first judgment springs, it will soon run short of words, as is all too evident from what has just been said about it.

Posted in Aristotlian-Thomism, Etienne Gilson, St. Thomas Aquinas, Theology | Tagged human intellect and the divine light, Posterior Analytics, the agent intellect, the Augustinian way, Wisdom | Leave a Comment »

The Fundamental Truth 2 – Etiénne Gilson

November 7, 2012

“Not merely to learn philosophy, but to become a philosopher, this is what is now at stake. It does not involve giving up philosophy as a science; it rather involves aiming at possessing philosophy in a different and more exalted way as included in wisdom itself, to which it is in the same relation as a body to its soul. Then also does the philosophical life truly begin, and its beginning does not consist in any addition to already acquired learning; it rather looks like falling in love, like answering the call of a vocation, or undergoing the transforming experience of a conversion.”
Etiénne Gilson

St. Augustine never thought of God in any other way than in terms of essence. Commenting on the ‘I Am’ of Exodus, he explains its meaning as follows: “In fact, since God is the supreme essence, that is, since he supremely is, and therefore is immutable, he has given being to the things he has created from nothing, but he has not given them the supreme being he himself is. He has given to some more being and to others less, and thus he has arranged natures according to the degrees of their essences.”

There can be no misunderstanding this notion of God. Finite essences are arranged in a hierarchy according to the degrees of being. At the summit there is the supreme essence, which is not more or less but purely and simply the highest essence. Being the fullness of essence, it has nothing to gain or lose. The sign of its supremacy in the order of essence is its immutability. We should weigh St. Augustine’s words themselves, as he tries to understand better (perspicacius intelligere) what God said to Moses through his angel in Exodus 3:14: Cum enim Deus summa essentia sit, hoc est summe sit, et idea imrnutabilis sit … [De civitate Dei 12.2]

St. Thomas is far from denying any of this. On the contrary, he finds in these words the starting point of the fourth way (of proving the existence of God), ex gradibus quae in rebus inveniuntur (from the degrees found in things [SummaTheologicae 1.2.3]). This is all very well, and the mind can stop there. He himself, however, takes a further step. Penetrating more deeply into this summa essentia which is called ‘Is’ (Est), Thomas adds, et haec Dei essentia est ipsuin suum esse (and this essence of God is his very being [CC 1.22.7]). Thomas grants very correctly and without reservation that God is the supreme essence. He simply specifies that the sole essence God has is his being: Deus igitur non habet essentiain quae non sit suuin esse (God, therefore, does not have an essence that is not his being: Contra Gentiles 1.22.2).

This is the exact moment when we go beyond the theology of Augustine and enter that of Thomas Aquinas. The transition presupposes that we have already conceived, or that we conceive at the same time, the notion of being as an act beyond essence, or, if you prefer, that of an essence whose whole essentiality is being. Augustine had no idea of this; neither had John Damascene nor Anselm of Aosta. Alerted by Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus preferred to stay on the path opened up by St. Augustine, adding to it, in the spirit of John Damascene, the important precision introduced by the notion of the divine infinity. Ens infinitum, for Duns Scotus, is the proper object of our theology.

There is no room for uncertainty here, for he too, as was only natural, commented on the ‘I Am’ of Exodus, and in his interpretation he does not refer to the Thomistic esse but to the Augustinian essentia. Not only is God essence, but perhaps he is the only one who is. God is an entitas realis, sive ex natura rei, et hoc in existentia actuali. Or, in the language of Augustine himself, because being most truly and properly belongs to God, we should say that he is most truly essence: verissime dicitur essentia. [Gilson, Jean Duns Scot: Introduction]

So we come back to the same problem: In order to interpret the statement of Exodus, where, when, and how did St. Thomas demonstrate that, on the level of being, it was necessary to go beyond the notion of a being (ens), conceived until then as a simple notion, to divide it into two others, namely essence and being (esse), and then to assert that one of these two notions, namely being (esse), denotes within a being. itself the supreme perfection and actuality of the other? St. Thomas clearly crossed this threshold. The only question is: how did he justify it? No reply is forthcoming. If he delivered the proof, neither Duns Scotus nor Suarez understood it or was convinced by it, and they were no mean metaphysicians.

The only reasoning that resembles a proof begins with the contingency of creatures. If essence is other than being in a finite being, being and essence must coincide in God in order to preserve his simplicity.

But, as we have seen, the non-necessity of a finite being does not require that it actually be composed of essence and being. The point would be expressed no less exactly if we were to say, along with most theologians, that the actual existence of a finite substance, whose essence of itself is a pure possibility, is contingent. A finite being does not possess its existence from itself. In order to be it must receive being from necessary being, which is God. But this is in no sense a proof that in order to confer actual existence on a finite being God must con-create within it an essence endowed with an act of being which, though distinct from it, forms with it a being (ens) or that-which-has-being.

If it is difficult to find a proof of this, it is not because St. Thomas neglected to speak of it When he does talk about it, however, it is usually to say that, without a limitation of the act of being by an essence, this act will be the pure act of being and it will be infinite, that is, it will be God (Contra Gentiles 1.43.5). Thus everything depends here on the Thomistic notion of God: “We have shown (Contra Gentiles 1.22) that God is his subsistent being. Therefore nothing besides him can be its being. So it is necessary that in every substance besides him the substance itself is other than its being” (Contra Gentiles 2.52.2).

This amounts to saying that, if the essence of God is his being, everything else must be composed of being and an essence other than this being. And nothing is clearer if it has really been demonstrated that God is the pure act of being. Now, as we have seen, eminent theologians either have not read that truth in the text of scripture; or, even alerted to the fact that it was there, they have not been able to bring themselves to acknowledge it is there. They did not find it in scripture for the simple reason that it did not enter their mind.

Here we are apparently caught in a kind of dialectic, the two terms of which perpetually evoke each other. God is pure being because, if in him essence were distinct from being, he would be a finite being and would not be God. Conversely, the essence of a finite being is other than its being because if its essentia were identical with its esse, that being would be infinite and it would be God. There are external signs of this difficulty, of which it will suffice to mention one: the very widespread resistance the Thomist notion of esse meets not only, as is natural, in other theological schools, but even in the one claiming the name of St. Thomas. Aquinas. And that is curious, to say the least, but it is a fact.

The worst attitude to adopt in the face of this difficulty is to deny its existence or to banish it from the mind as an annoying’ thought The Church recommends Thomism as the norm of its theological teaching. How would it have made this choice if the doctrine in the last analysis were based on a vicious circle? The objection should not be made that here it is not a matter of philosophy but of theology. That is true, but it does not remove the problem. St. Thomas’s theology is a scholastic theology.

Its object is God, known through his word, but it tries to understand it, and it cannot do this without bringing into play the resources: of philosophy. A master must have the skill to train the servants he employs for his service, and these servants must exist and be themselves in order to render the services he expects of them. If the theologian put into play a philosophy that would be nothing but a disguised theology, as long ago Averroes very unjustly accused Avicenna of doing, he would deceive himself before deceiving others.

There is no more frequent objection made to scholasticism. Authentic Lutheranism on the one hand, and philosophical rationalism on the other, have never ceased accusing it of corrupting everything: the word of God by philosophy, and philosophy by faith in a revelation unsupported by reason. The persistent attempts of certain Christian philosophers to clear themselves of the suspicion of teaching a “Christian philosophy” have no other source than the fear of seeing themselves charged with a hybrid speculation that is neither faith nor reason: something equally contemptible to those who are concerned to preserve intact the supernatural transcendence of faith, and to those whose absolute respect for reason resists every compromise with the irrational, or, what amounts to the same thing for them, anything super rational.

Here it is fitting to recall the bitter controversies that have made Christian speculative thought so unproductive, but we should not dwell on them. First, because the controversy is quieting down. Though it was necessary at one time, it itself was an inferior form of mental exercise. Above all, however, because it is not in one’s power, speaking for the truth, to dispose minds to receive it, and lacking this, his words are really addressed to the deaf. It is good, however, to speak to oneself, to open one’s mind to the truth, and to oppose the accusation of giving way to prejudices, with the firm resolve not to entertain any of them, neither those with which we are charged, nor those with which they who impute them to us are unconsciously imbued.

After all, it is not certain a priori that all the sins against reason are on the side of those who profess to be its true witnesses and claim to monopolize its use. Too many scholastics have forgotten the true nature of philosophical knowledge because they yielded to the unfounded demands of some of their opponents. It was they, however, and not their opponents, who stood for the full use of reason in its complete independence.

We cannot admire enough the attitude of these scholastic philosophers who are well aware of having two wisdoms at their disposal and find it so easy to divide their domains. “Wisdom, or perfect science,” one of them said, “is twofold: one that proceeds by the supernatural light of faith and divine revelation, the other that proceeds by the light of human reason. The latter is philosophy, the former is Christian theology, a science supernatural in its roots and by reason of its principles. Philosophy, then, will be defined as knowledge of ultimate causes proceeding by the natural light of reason.”

These statements are completely true and they conform to the teaching of St. Thomas. They raise no problem as long as we remain on the level of formal distinction. Problems pile up,” on the contrary, if it is claimed that these two wisdoms cannot” live and work together in the same person, in the same mind. Will philosophy have nothing to say about the teachings of theology, a science whose principles are supernatural? And will theology give no thought to the teachings of philosophy, which proceeds by the light of natural reason?

St. Thomas, at least, asserts the exact opposite, for he holds so strongly the formal distinction of the two lights and the two wisdoms only to allow them to collaborate better, without any possible confusion, but intimately and without any false scruples. St. Thomas wanted to make the natural light of reason penetrate right into the most secret parts of revealed truth, not in order to do away with faith and mystery, but to define their objects.

Even the mystery of transubstantiation can be formulated in philosophical language. But the opposite relation can be established as well, for the theology of St. Thomas has the right of inspection in its philosophy, and it does not neglect to exercise it for the greatest good of philosophy. Those who claim the contrary are mistaken, and if they do it for apologetic reasons they miscalculate, for there is no other effective apologetic than the truth.

What is most remarkable in this regard is that they would like to separate revelation and reason to satisfy the requirements of a notion of philosophy that never existed. No philosopher ever philosophized about the empty form of an argument lacking all content. It is one and the same thing to think of nothing and not to think. If we mentally remove everything specifically religious in the great Greek philosophies from Plato to Plotinus, then everything specifically Christian in the philosophical speculation of Descartes, Malebranche, Leibniz, even Kant and some of his successors, the existence of these doctrines becomes incomprehensible.

A religion is needed even to make it stay “within the limits of reason.” The importance of Comte in this regard is that, having decreed that theology was dead and its transcendent God forgotten, he realized that in order to build up a philosophy whose tenets would be drawn from science, he had to look for the principles outside of science.

In order to find them, he created a new religion and substituted for the God of Christianity a Great Fetish, furnished with its church, its clergy, and its pope. The early “positivists” were indignant about this as a deviation from the doctrine, but Comte knew what positivism is better than they. They understood nothing about it, as can be clearly seen in the pitiful history of their “absolute positivism,” reduced today to a verbal dialectic whose object is science, but for whom science itself becomes incomprehensible.

For all wisdoms draw life from the highest among them, and if religion is eliminated, metaphysics dies with it, and philosophy in its turn dies along with metaphysics. Neo-Scholasticism is not immune to this malady, when it wanted to be a-Christian, it quickly degenerated into an abstract formalism whose utter boredom is bearable only by its authors, for to bore is not always boring. Sometimes it is asked with concern why this philosophy is so lifeless. The reason is that it is deliberately tied to a metaphysics that has no object.

There is a twofold mistake in saying that the object of metaphysics is the concept of being as being, explicitated in the light of the first principles. First, metaphysics does not treat of the concept of being as being any more than physics treats of the notion of becoming. If they did, these sciences would be turned into logics. Physics has to do with changing being itself, as metaphysics has to do with being insofar as it is being. We emphasize, with being itself and not only with the concept of being. Nothing can be inferred from the concept of being as being; everything can be said about being as being. But for that we must first reach it, and if we do not comprehend it, at least we get in touch with it, and then never lose contact with, it, under pain of losing our way in an empty verbalism.

The facility enjoyed by the dialectician is his greatest danger. It is always possible to begin with nominal definitions, of being, substance, and cause in order to deduce their consequences with the help of the first principle. If it cannot be done easily, it can at least be done successfully. Some even do it with the mastery of virtuosos that compels admiration, but they gain’ from it nothing but an abstract sketch of a possible metaphysics. At best, they give themselves the pleasure of picturing it to themselves after the event, portrayed all at once in a kind of synthesis that enables them to embrace it with a single glance.

But at that moment it is lifeless; they should not have gone about it like this in the first place. From this arises the deadly conflict between the mode of exposition and the mode of invention. For those who “exhibit” are very rarely those who invent; or when they are the same, while exhibiting they conceal from us their act of invention, so that we ourselves do not know how to reinvent by following in their footsteps, which is, however, the only way to learn. Then, too, when lectures are afflicted with this curse, we see students learning without understanding, while others lose confidence in their own philosophical abilities, even though the best proof of these abilities is that students at least realize that they do not understand.

These tendencies are particularly hard to explain in masters who claim to follow Aristotle’s philosophy and defend its sound empiricism against the idealism of their contemporaries. Professing in all matters to begin with experience, it is paradoxical for them to turn away from it in metaphysics, whose principles govern the whole body of knowledge. Nevertheless, Aristotle’s work is there, and if one is not interested in how it was constructed, the repeated statements of its author should be a sufficient warning of the danger.

Speaking of the absolutely primary rules of judgment, namely the principles of non-contradiction and the excluded middle, Aristotle points out that each scientist uses them as valid within the limits of his own science (Posterior Analytics. 2.11, 77a22-25). When it is a question of the knowledge of reality, one does not reason about reality from principles but in agreement with them and in their light.

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The Fundamental Truth 1 – Etiénne Gilson

November 6, 2012

Thomas is held in the Catholic Church to be the model teacher for those studying for the priesthood. The works for which he is best-known are the Summa theologiae and the Summa Contra Gentiles. One of the 35 Doctors of the Church, he is considered the Church’s greatest theologian and philosopher.

Et sic fit ut ad ea quae sunt notissima rerum, noster intellectus se habeat ut oculus noctuae ad solem, ut II Metaphysicorum dicitur (Summa contra Gentiles 1.11.2).
["So it comes about, as is said in Metaphysics 2, that our intellect is related to the most knowable things as the eye of an owl is related to the sun." Aristotle, Metaphysics 2.1, 993b9.]

Few philosophers avoid the temptation of philosophizing without other presuppositions than thought itself. Fichte yielded to it without reservation in building his well-known immense structure. No Christian philosopher has gone that far, but some of them do not conceal their displeasure when they are urged to consider and, if possible, to see a primary truth which as such cannot be demonstrated. That is why, holding the composition of essence and existence in finite beings as the fundamental truth of Christian philosophy, they could not tolerate the idea of leaving it as an arbitrary assertion and have tried to demonstrate it.

In order to avoid any confusion, let us say at the outset that the distinction (or composition) of essence and being in finite beings is indeed demonstrable under certain conditions, but it is extremely important to understand their nature.

An excellent study of the De ente et essentia reduces to three the main types of arguments by which St. Thomas establishes the famous scholastic distinction. The first, which certainly originates in Avicenna but which St. Thomas could have read in the works of William of Auvergne, is clearly set forth in De ente et essentia : “Everything that does not belong to the concept of an essence or quiddity comes to it from without and forms a composition with that essence, for no essence can be conceived without its parts. Now, every essence or quiddity can be conceived without knowing anything whatsoever about its existence. I can conceive what a man or a phoenix is and yet not know if they exist in reality. It is clear, therefore, that being is other than essence or quiddity.”

The argument is irrefutable, but what does it prove? First of all that actual being is not contained in the notion of an essence. As Kant will later say, in the notion of a hundred thalers the notion of a thaler is the same whether it be a question of simply possible thalers or real thalers . [Kant, Critique of Pure Reason A 599/B 627, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1933)]

Next, as St. Thomas explicitly says, it proves quad esse est aliud ab essentia vel quidditate (that esse is other than essence or quiddity). For an essence to pass from possibility to being, then, an external cause must bestow actual existence on it No Christian theologian or metaphysician has ever doubted the soundness of this conclusion. Because a finite being is not the cause of its own existence, it must hold it from a higher cause, who is God.

In this sense, what is called the distinction between essence and being simply means that every finite being is a created being. Now all theologians grant this, but many refuse to conclude from it that a finite being is composed of two metaphysical principles: its essence and an act of being through which it exists. It is one thing to say that the essence of a finite being does not contain the cause of its being, which is all the dialectical argument of Avicenna, taken up by William of Auvergne and St. Thomas, proves. It is another thing to say that in this same finite being existence comes from an actus essendi to which it owes precisely its actual being. This by no means follows from the above argument

Here is a good subject for meditation. Excellent philosophers and theologians have devoted their lives to the study and teaching of the Thomistic doctrine without ever suspecting the true meaning of this fundamental thesis. They have seen in it only a formula, a little more abstruse than others, for saying that every finite being is contingent and created. If nothing more than this were involved, every theologian without exception would teach the distinction between essence and existence, which we know well is not the case.

Let us move on to the second group of arguments. They are said to have the following general form: “There must be only one being in which essence and existence are not distinct, whose essence itself is its existence, because it could not be multiplied without being diversified, and there is no way in which it can be diversified. Hence being is distinct from essence in all created beings.“

Once again, the argument is conclusive, and now it results in establishing the truth of the distinction between essence and existence. Here is undoubtedly the theologians’ royal and favorite road, for if God is the pure act of being he is the only one who can be it. What would lay claim to this title would be ipsum purum esse, and this would be God. That is why so many Thomistic theologians often accuse of pantheism those who, deaf to their arguments, deny the distinction between essence and existence in finite beings. These theologians give themselves an easy advantage, for in order that their demonstration be conclusive it would first be necessary to establish that, for God, to be Being is to be the pure act of esse, whose essence is being itself. Hence the value of the argument depends entirely on the validity of a certain notion of God which, whatever its real worth, never seems to have entered the mind of many theologians, some of whom were saints.

The proofs in the third group, “drawn from the nature of created being, corroborate these conclusions.” The historian summarizes them for us with great subtlety. Since by definition it is caused by another, “created being does not subsist by itself, as the being whose essence is to exist subsists necessarily. On the other hand, being an effect cannot be a property of created being because of being itself; otherwise every being would by essence be an effect, and there would not be a first cause. Hence being an effect is a property of created being by reason of a subject distinct from its being.”

Nothing makes us see more clearly the fundamental difficulty all these demonstrations face. The proof that, because created being is not essential to being itself it can only belong to being by reason of a subject distinct from its being, presupposes the conclusion it was intended to demonstrate. For if we grant the premises of the argument, how do they lead to the conclusion that the subject of created being is really distinct from its being? Now it is precisely this and nothing else that is at stake.

Every theologian will agree that by definition a created being is not identical with its existence. It is not, because, being created, it must receive existence in order to be. But, on the other hand, for a created essence to exist it suffices that God make it exist, which properly speaking is to create it. It might be true that God cannot create a finite being without conferring on it an act of esse really distinct from its essence, but supposing this to be demonstrable; the argument has not demonstrated it.

These arguments, and all those of the same type, are alike in. presupposing the conception of being, not in the sense of a being (ens, habens esse, that which is), but rather of the act of being (esse) which, combining with essence, makes of it precisely a being, a habens esse. Now, as soon as this properly Thomistic notion of esse is conceived, there is no further problem; there remains nothing more to demonstrate.

To be convinced of this we have only to refer to the texts of. St. Thomas which his interpreter cites by way of proofs. Two things clearly stand out in them. First of all, that the notion of pure being (ipsum puruin esse) thus understood is always presented in them as something taken for granted. Second, it is taken for granted in them only because, for the theologian, it is the proper name of God. To think pure esse is to think God.

The progressive dialectic of the Summa contra Gentiles leads St Thomas to establish “that in God being and essence are the same” (Contra Gentiles 1.22). He already conceives, then, the possibility of their distinction. Now, if he does conceive it, the question is already answered. Indeed, engaged here in establishing God’s simplicity, St. Thomas must deny of him every conceivable distinction. That is what he does in demonstrating, with Avicenna, that when there is a necessary being (tertia via) it exists of itself. Now it would not exist of itself if it had an essence distinct from its being, for in this case its being would belong to that essence and depend on it (Contra Gentiles 1.22.2). More briefly, and even as briefly as possible: “Everything is through its being. Hence, what is not its being is not through itself a necessary being. Now God is through himself a necessary being. Therefore God is his being” (Contra Gentiles 1.22.5).

It is impossible to go further along the same road, for only one other operation would remain to be carried out if this were possible. This would be to prove that the necessity of necesse esse is indeed the same as the necessity of what St. Thomas calls ipsuin esse, the pure act of being, beyond essence itself, which in this unique case is as it were consumed by it. Now it must be admitted that a great number of theologians are in doubt about this notion or even dispute its validity.

As far as we know, St. Thomas himself nowhere gives a demonstrative proof of it No doubt he argues, “If the divine essence were other than its being (esse), the essence and being would thereby be related as potency to act. But we have shown that there is no potency in God but that he is pure act God’s essence, therefore, is not other than his being” (ContraGentiles 1.22.7).

This is undeniable, but the conclusion would be the same if, instead of conceiving being as the act of essence, it were simply conceived as the actual essence itself. Far from being unthinkable, such a notion of God seems to be common to all the theologians who, coming before or after St. Thomas, have adopted a metaphysics of being different from his own.

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The Ineffable Mystery of God – Fr. Robert Barron

August 21, 2012

The cloister yard of Santa Sabina where it is reputed St. Thomas walked and pondered.

After many years of exile from the courts of Egypt where he had been raised, a Hebrew man named Moses, while tending the flock of his father-in-law on the slopes of Mount Sinai, saw an extraordinary sight: a bush that was on fire but was not being consumed. He resolved to take a closer look. As he approached, he heard a voice: “Moses! Moses! … Come no nearer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place where you stand is holy ground” (Exodus 3:5). Then the speaker identified himself as “the God of your father … the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob” (Exodus 3:6), and he gave Moses a mission to liberate his people enslaved in Egypt.

When Moses asked for the name of this mysterious speaker, he received the following answer: “I am who am” (Exodus 3:14). Moses was asking a reasonable enough question. He was wondering which of the many gods — deities of the river, the mountain, the various nations — this was. He was seeking to define and specify the nature of this particular heavenly power.

But the answer he received frustrated him. For the divine speaker was implying that he was not one god among many, not this deity rather than that, not a reality that could, even in principle, be captured or delimited by a name. In a certain sense, God’s response amounted to the undermining of the very type of question Moses posed. His name was simply “to be,” and therefore he could never be mastered. The ancient Israelites honored this essential mysteriousness of God by designating him with the unpronounceable name of YHWH.

Following the prompting of this conversation between Moses and God, the mainstream of the Catholic theological tradition has tended not to refer to God as a being, however supreme, among many. Thomas Aquinas, arguably the greatest theologian in the Catholic tradition, rarely designates God as ens summum (the highest being); rather he prefers the names ipsum esse (to be itself) or qui est (the one who is). In fact, Aquinas goes so far as to say that God cannot be defined or situated within any genus, even the genus of “being.” This means that it is wrong to say that trees, planets, automobiles, computers, and God — despite the obvious differences among them — have at least in common their status as beings. Aquinas expresses the difference that obtains between God and creatures through the technical language of essence and existence.

In everything that is not God there is a real distinction between essence (what the thing is) and existence (that the thing is); but in God no such distinction holds, for God’s act of existence is not received, delimited, or defined by anything extraneous to itself. A human being is the act of existence poured, as it were, into the receptacle of humanity, and a podium is the act of existence poured into the form of podium-ness, but God’s act of existence is not poured into any receiving element. To be God, therefore, is to be to be.

Saint Anselm of Canterbury, one of the greatest of the early medieval theologians, described God as “that than which nothing greater can be thought.” At first blush this seems straightforward enough: God is the highest conceivable thing. But the longer one meditates on Anselm’s description, the stranger it becomes. If God were simply the supreme being — the biggest reality among many — then God plus the world would be greater than God alone. But in that case he would not be that than which nothing greater can be thought. Zeus, for example, was, in ancient mythology, the supreme deity, but clearly Zeus plus the other gods, or Zeus plus the world of nature, would be greater than Zeus alone. Thus the God whom Anselm is describing is not like this at all. Though it is a very high paradox, the God whom Anselm describes added to the world as we know it is not greater than God alone.

This means that the true God exceeds all of our concepts, all of our language, all of our loftiest ideas. God (YHWH) is essentially mysterious, a term, by the way, derived from the Greek muein (to shut one’s mouth). How often the prophets and mystics of the Old Testament rail against idolatry, which is nothing other than reducing the true God to some creaturely object that we can know and hence try to control. The twentieth century theologian Karl Rahner commented that “God” is the last sound we should make before falling silent, and Saint Augustine, long ago, said, “si comprehendis, non est Deus” (if you understand, that isn’t God), All of this formal theologizing is but commentary on that elusive and confounding voice from the burning bush: “I am who am.”

Arguments For God’s Existence
I have firmly fended off the tendency to turn God into an idol, but have I left us thereby in an intellectual lurch, doomed simply to remain silent about God? If God cannot be in any sense defined, how do we explain the plethora of theological books and arguments? After all, the same Thomas Aquinas who said that God cannot be placed in any genus also wrote millions of words about God. Chapter 33 of Exodus gives us a clue to the resolution of this dilemma. Moses passionately asks God to reveal his glory to him, and Yahweh acquiesces. But the Lord specifies, “I will make all my beauty pass before you … But my face you cannot see, for no man sees me and still lives” (Exodus 33:19-20). God then tells Moses that while the divine glory passes by, God will place his servant in the cleft of a rock and cover Moses’s eyes. “Then I will remove my hand, so that you may see my back; but my face is not to be seen” (Exodus 33:22-23). God can indeed be seen in this life, but only indirectly, through his creatures and effects. We can understand him to a degree, but only obliquely, glimpsing him, as it were, out of the corners of our eyes. We see his “back” as it is disclosed in the beauty, the intelligibility, and the contingency of the world that he has made.

Following this principle of indirection, Thomas Aquinas formulated five arguments for God’s existence, each one of which begins from some feature of the created order. I will develop here the one that I consider the most elemental, the demonstration that commences with the contingency of the world. Though the term is technically philosophical, “contingency” actually names something with which we are all immediately familiar: the fact that things come into being and pass out of being. Consider a majestic summer cloud that billows up and then fades away in the course of a lazy August afternoon, coming into existence and then evanescing.

Now think of all of the plants and flowers that have grown up and subsequently withered away, and then of all the animals that have come into being, roamed the face of the earth, and then faded into dust. And ponder the numberless human beings who have come and gone, confirming the Psalmist’s intuition that “our years end like a sigh” (Psalms 90:9). Even those things that seem most permanent — mountain ranges, the continents themselves, the oceans — have in fact emerged and will in fact fade. Indeed, if a time-lapse camera could record the entire life span of the Rocky Mountains, from the moment they began to emerge to the moment when they finally wear away, and if we could play that film at high speed, those mountains would look for all the world like that summer cloud.

The contingency of earthly things is the starting point of Aquinas’s proof, for it indicates something of great moment, namely, that such things do not contain within themselves the reason for their own existence. If they did, they would exist, simply and absolutely; they would not come and go so fleetingly. Therefore, in regard to contingent things, we have to look outside of them, to an extrinsic cause, or set of causes, in order to explain their existence. So let’s go back to that summer cloud. Instinctually, we know that it doesn’t exist through its own essence, and we therefore look for explanations. We say that it is caused by the moisture in the atmosphere, by the temperature, by the intensity of the winds, and so on, and as far as it goes, that explanation is adequate.

But as any meteorologist will tell us, those factors are altogether contingent, coming into being and passing out of being. Thus we go a step further and say that these factors in turn are caused by the jet stream, which is grounded in the movement of the planet. But a moment’s reflection reveals that the jet stream comes and goes, ebbs and flows, and that the earth itself is contingent, having emerged into existence four billion years ago and being destined one day to be incinerated by the expanding sun.

And so we go further, appealing to the solar system and events within the galaxy and finally perhaps to the very structures inherent in the universe. But contemporary astrophysics has disclosed to us the fundamental contingency of all of those realities, and indeed of the universe itself, which came into existence at the Big Bang some thirteen billion years ago. In our attempt to explain a contingent reality — that evanescent summer cloud — we have appealed simply to a whole series of similarly contingent realities, each one of which requires a further explanation.

Thomas Aquinas argues that if we are to avoid an infinite regress of contingent causes, which finally explain nothing at all, we must come finally to some “necessary” reality, something that exists simply through the power of its own essence. This, he concludes, is what people mean when they use the word “God.” With Aquinas’s demonstration in mind, reconsider that strange answer God gives to Moses’s question: “I am who am.” The biblical God is not one contingent reality among many; he is that whose very nature it is to exist, that power through which and because of which all other things have being.

Some contemporary theologians have translated Aquinas’s abstract metaphysical language into more experiential language. The Protestant theologian Paul Tillich said that “finitude in awareness is anxiety.” He means that when we know in our bones how contingent we are, we become afraid. We exist in time, and this means that we are moving, ineluctably, toward death; we have been “thrown” into being, and this means that one day we will be thrown out of being; and this state of affairs produces fear and trembling. In the grip of this anxiety, Tillich argues, we tend to thrash about, looking for something to reassure us, searching for some firm ground on which to stand.

We seek to alleviate our fears through the piling up of pleasure, wealth, power, or honor, but we discover, soon enough, that all of these worldly realities are as contingent as we are and hence cannot finally soothe us. It is at this point that the scriptural word “My soul rests in God alone” (Psalms 62:1) is heard in its deepest resonance. Our fear — born of contingency — will be assuaged only by that which is not contingent. Our shaken and fragile existence will be stabilized only when placed in relation to the eternal and necessary existence of God. Tillich is, in many ways, a contemporary disciple of Saint Augustine, who said, “Lord, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee.”

In 1968 a young theology professor at the University of Tubingen formulated a neat argument for God’s existence that owed a good deal to Thomas Aquinas but that also drew on more contemporary sources. The theologian’s name was Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. Ratzinger commences with the observation that finite being, as we experience it, is marked, through and through, by intelligibility, that is to say, by a formal structure that makes it understandable to an inquiring mind. In point of fact, all of the sciences — physics, chemistry, psychology, astronomy, biology, and so forth — rest on the assumption that at all levels, microscopic and macrocosmic, being can be known. The same principle was acknowledged in ancient times by Pythagoras, who said that all existing things correspond to a numeric value, and in medieval times by the scholastic philosophers who formulated the dictum omne ens est scibile (all being is knowable).

Ratzinger argues that the only finally satisfying explanation for this universal objective intelligibility is a great Intelligence who has thought the universe into being. Our language provides an intriguing clue in this regard, for we speak of our acts of knowledge as moments of “recognition,” literally a re-cognition, a thinking again what has already been thought. Ratzinger cites Einstein in support of this connection: “in the laws of nature, a mind so superior is revealed that in comparison, our minds are as something worthless.”

The prologue to the Gospel of John states, “In the beginning was the Word,” and specifies that all things came to be through this divine Logos, implying thereby that the being of the universe is not dumbly there, but rather intelligently there, imbued by a creative mind with intelligible structure. The argument presented by Joseph Ratzinger is but a specification of that great revelation.

One of the particular strengths of this argument is that it shows the deep compatibility between religion and science, two disciplines that so often today are seen as implacable enemies. Ratzinger shows that the physical sciences rest upon the finally mystical intuition that reality has been thought into existence and hence can be known. I say it is mystical because it cannot itself be the product of empirical or experimental investigation, but is instead the very condition for the possibility of analyzing and experimenting in the first place. This is why many theorists have speculated that the emergence of the modern sciences in the context of a Christian intellectual milieu, in which the doctrine of creation through the power of an intelligent Creator is affirmed, is not the least bit accidental.

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Thomists Wrestle With Common Sense — Étienne Gilson

August 3, 2012

Better known by its absence than by a definition.

Étienne Gilson (1884-1978) was a renowned French philosopher and historian of philosophy, and a member of the prestigious French Academy. He was a prominent leader in the 20th century resurgence of the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. This is part three of his essay on Realism and Common Sense.

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Thus far Liberatore’s position is beyond reproach; but it is more difficult for Thomists to say what common sense is than to say what it is not. When common sense is reduced to the communes sententias of St. Thomas, two problems inevitably arise: the first concerns the nature of common sense, and the second concerns its content. First,- its nature. Is it a new faculty attributable to reason? Or is it reason itself exercising its spontaneous and natural function? As long as you are content to speak of communes conceptiones animi, as St. Thomas was, the problem does not arise, since these “common conceptions” are simply judgments formulated by reason in the light of the principle of contradiction.

But the problem does arise when the ensemble of these judgments is attributed to a vague sensus communis. Hence the marked hesitation by Liberatore in his definition of common sense: “[Vis ilia] a natura rationali proveniens, seu ipsa ratio naturalis, prout sponte sua in ejusmodijudicia prorumpit, appelatur sensus communis.” [Liberatore, op. cit., 1:162] No formula could be better balanced, but it would be nice to know if this new common sense is a faculty of reason or is reason itself. Liberatore carefully avoids telling us, for if common sense is not reason itself we fall into Reid’s irrationalism once again; but if it is reason itself it will not serve as a replacement for that instinct for the truth with which he sought to oppose skepticism. If it is to be more than just a word, it must be something: something adapted to carrying out the specific function it was developed to perform.

Liberatore’s indecision can be still better understood if we ask just what the content of this new common sense is. A good Thomist, Liberatore begins by defining the truths of common sense as judicia haec quae Aristoteles communes sententias appellavit. This was both wise and legitimate, but his decision obliged him to limit the list of the truths of common sense to the communes conceptiones animi of St. Thomas, that is, those facts which are self-evident in light of the principle of contradiction and its immediate applications. Certainly there was nothing to prevent him from limiting the truths of common sense in this manner; in fact, his definition actually invited such a procedure, but the doctrine of common sense would then have become as useless for him as it was for St. Thomas.

If the sensus communis had been reduced to the self-evidence of principles, it would not have been able to guarantee those truths which Liberatore wanted it to. The truths he had in mind were actually those which Cicero, Seneca and Plutarch had used common sense to justify, rather than the ευαίσθητος of Aristotle and St. Thomas. Briefly, what was needed was to extend the self-evidence of the metaphysical communes conceptiones to the sensus communis of rhetoric. It was necessary to expand the first until it included the second and to consolidate the second while absorbing it into the first. I do not want to say that this is impossible, but it is not easy; and Liberatore seems to have finally come up short in the attempt.

Let us consider his examples of the truths of common sense. Along with genuine communes conceptiones are found others of much more doubtful origin: bodies exist; God exists; the human soul survives the body; the good will be rewarded and the evil punished in a future life; and others of this sort. [Matteo Liberatore, Institutiones philosophicae; prima editio novae formae]

In these statements Liberatore sees so many conclusions of natural reason, distinguishable from philosophical conclusions in only two respects. In the first place, they do not belong to any particular individual but to the whole human race. Secondly, they are spontaneous conclusions, not products of conscious reflection: “Sine artis praesidio et sola vi naturalis ingenii“. [Matt. Liberatore, Institutiones philosophicae; prima editio novae formae] I will certainly not deny the existence or the widespread acceptance of these spontaneous convictions, nor will I contest either their rhetorical and persuasive value or the considerable importance which their existence holds for philosophy.

[FootNote: The most sustained effort to integrate a doctrine of common sense into Thomism is that of Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Le Sens commun, la philosophie de 1'e'tre et les formules dogmatiques (Paris: Nouvelles Librairie National), 81-87. For him common sense is philosophy, the perennis quaedam philosophia Leibniz speaks of, but in a rudimentary state (84). Therefore, he proposes a "conceptualist-realist theory of common sense: which, it seems, can easily be drawn out of the writings of Aristotle or of the great scholastics" (85).

Naturally, Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange is unable to find a single text from Aristotle or the great scholastics to cite in favor of common sense. When he says that it "reappears" in Fenelon, he neglects to mention where it had previously appeared as a philosophical doctrine. Except for Fenelon, he -- like everyone else -- can only cite Reid and Jouffroy, after which he calmly concludes: "The scholastics expressed themselves in the same manner" (87). Who are these scholastics? The only one he cites is Cardinal Zigliara (Summa Philosophica, 1:257).

The same question arises once more. Why, if realism had always been critical, did the scholastics fail to realize this until after they had read Kant, or why, if their philosophy had always been the philosophy of common sense, did the scholastics fail to realize it until after they had read Reid? If "common sense" is truly a distinct faculty, why not show us what role it plays in the Thomistic description of the knowing subject.

If it is merely a "quality common to all men, equal in all and invariable" (87), common sense begins to break down into its constituent parts: on the one hand, first principles of the intellect and spontaneous judgments of speculative or practical reason (which are sufficiently explained by the intellect and reason without any need for recourse to a new and distinct faculty), on the other hand, confused social opinions and prejudices which rational reflection will expose as pseudo-certitudes, which no "common sense" has the right to uphold against reason.

The particular "quality" which is invoked to explain the generality of the contents of common sense points out nothing more than the essential universality of intellect and reason. It is impossible to introduce "common sense" into the Thomist synthesis without introducing a dose, no matter how infinitesimal, of Reid, and thus sowing the seeds of its destruction. Unless, of course, it is only introduced as a formula devoid of all content in order to clothe the perennis philosophia in the passing fashion of the day, which offers nothing of philosophical interest. When Bergson defines the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle as "the natural metaphysics of the human intellect", he speaks as a true philosopher. This is a profound formula which does not make natural metaphysics into a "common sense".

The general characteristics of these certitudes are their relative universality, their stability and their persistence. [Liberatore, op. cit., 1:162.] I would not even care to deny that, as the happy expression of Seneca has it, the belief of all men is an indication of or an argument for the truth. [Seneca, ad Lucil., epist. 117] The real difficulty begins when the attempt is made to assimilate such beliefs into the “common opinions” of classic scholasticism and place them on an equal plane as regards their nature and certainty.

If the certitudes of common sense are, according to Liberatore’s definition, judicia haec quae Aristoteles communes sententias appellavit, it is necessary to attribute to this formula the same narrow meaning that Aristotle himself gives it. And if this is done, it immediately becomes necessary to make at least one important exception to the universal belief in the immortality of the soul as well as to the belief in a future life of rewards and punishments.

Although he learned about these doctrines from his master Plato, Aristotle says nothing to us about them, and nothing entitles us to suppose that he numbered them among “those common opinions which serve as the basis for all demonstration”. Among such “common opinions” of Aristotle as: everything must necessarily be either affirmed or denied, or: it is impossible for something to both be and not be at the same time, the further proposition that the good will be rewarded and the evil punished in a future life would be totally out of place.

To be sure, all these formulas are rational, but not all in the same way. It is simply arbitrary legislation to group, under one “common sense”, both the knowledge of those principles whose self-evidence governs all certitude and the obscure anticipations of reason which seize upon the truth without actually seeing it. But there is more. If the certitudes of common sense are identified with the communes conceptiones of St. Thomas, can we consider “God exists” to be one of them? This presents, at the very least, a serious difficulty.

In his commentary on the De Hebdomadibus St. Thomas defines what he calls communis animi conceptio vel principium per se notum as a proposition in which praedicatum est de ratione subjecti. Now, everyone knows that according to St. Thomas the existence of God is not a proposition known per se quoad nos. If every common conception is a principle known per se, or can be immediately reduced thereto, the existence of God cannot be a common conception.

If, therefore, the truths of common sense are identified with the common conceptions of St. Thomas, “God exists” is not a truth of common sense. St. Thomas would probably reject such a conclusion if he were alive today, but not without noting that the sensus communis of Cicero and Seneca cannot be likened to the common conceptions, at least not as he and Aristotle understood them. Every common conception is part of common sense, but everything which is part of common sense is not necessarily a common conception. Common sense, such as Liberatore had conceived it, was therefore an equivocal notion whose inherent contradictions presented numerous difficulties to his successors.

Like so many before and after him, Liberatore had allowed himself to be seduced by the promise of aid which his misguided efforts seemed to offer to classical metaphysics. Endeavors of this sort always end in defeat. In order to confer a technical philosophical value upon the common sense of orators and moralists it is necessary either to accept Reid’s common sense as a sort of unjustified and unjustifiable instinct, which will destroy Thomism, or to reduce it to the Thomist intellect and reason, which will result in its being suppressed as a specifically distinct faculty of knowledge. In short, there can be no middle ground between Reid and St. Thomas.

Because they believed that there was such a middle ground, Liberatore and his successors introduced a foreign body into the structure of Thomist epistemology, and its presence is still considered a threat. To equate the obscure certitudes of common sense with the common conceptions and, at the same time, confer upon common sense the self-evidence of the latter was to introduce the most far-reaching and deplorable tendencies into philosophy.

From this moment on many authors of philosophical treatises gave in to the temptation of defending the fundamental verities of Thomism by crushing their opponents under the weight of common sense, which had only to be affirmed to be justified. Was the existence of the external world in question? Bodies exist, replied Liberatore’s common sense, and voila, the matter was settled, as if Malebranche had not considered a proof of their existence to be impossible and Berkeley denied their existence in the name of common sense itself.

The most serious problem with such a method was that by calling this false friend to the aid of metaphysical certitude the impression was given that metaphysical certitude could not do without common sense. Common sense was a poor ally, a cause of weakness to the philosophy which attempted to establish a firm foundation upon it, and its inadequacies became apparent when those who relied upon it tried to use it to prove the existence of the external world. They began by affirming it as a truth of common sense, then undertook to justify this certitude itself and, almost without realizing it, yielded to the very idealism which they had intended to refute.

The criteriology of Sebastian Reinstadler whose manual represented the purest Thomism for generations of professors and students, [Sebastian Reinstadler, Elementa philosophiae scholasticae (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1904). The description of common sense as testimonium doctrinale of the truth is found in his Criteriologia, vol. i, cf. the Elementa, 198-99] is a remarkable witness to the ravages caused by this method.

From the moment the problem of idealism is mentioned there can be no doubt concerning this author’s position nor the ease with which he will vindicate it, for he defines idealism as an error, which makes its refutation much simpler. “Idealism”, writes Reinstadler, “is the error of those who, rejecting the trustworthiness of the senses and the common sense of all, deny or cast doubt upon the existence of bodies.” [Reinstadler, op. cit., 1:172]

The refutation of Berkeley and Fichte presents no problem to this champion of common sense, for their positions contradict common sense: “In idealismo refutando non est cur tempus teramus: ejus enim doctrina sensui communi tam aperte contradicit, ut nemo sit, qui absurditates ejus facile non detegat.” [Reinstadler, op. cit., 1:174] Against Fichte it will suffice to invoke the testimony of the inner sense, which assures us of the passive character of our sensations. As for Berkeley, it is evident that our sensations come to us through our sense organs and that they are not produced in us immediately by God.

These two arguments would have carried weight if Fichte and Berkeley had not already conceded both of them, for Fichte searched at length in the ego for the opposition which the ego creates, and Berkeley took care to establish that our sense organs are themselves ideas. Moreover, these arguments fail to reach the heart of the matter, for if you wish to argue on the basis of common sense it will be necessary to first ask why, since common sense is universal by definition, Berkeley and Fichte were the only two men deprived of it. And after that question has been answered we must also explain why their lack of common sense has given philosophers so much food for thought. What is most remarkable, however, is that, despite the offhand manner in which Reinstadler treats this question, his common sense itself does not escape unscathed.

For it too is subject to the law which requires that every refutation of an error founded upon the consequences of that very error must inevitably fall back into the same error from whose consequences it took its starting point. This can be seen quite clearly in the arguments marshalled by Reinstadler against idealism, for, although said to be drawn from the purest common sense, in fact they reproduce the exact arguments by which Cartesian idealism tried to avoid its own proper consequences: “Experimur enim nos sensationes saepe habere, quando nolumus, non habere et contra saepe, quando maxime eas volumus.” This is one of the principal supports of the Cartesian proof of the external world, and it enjoys a remarkable popularity in contemporary neo-scholasticism.

[FootNote: A detailed comparison of Descartes' and Cardinal Mercier's texts can be found in Le Realisme methodique, 18-3z. The argument seems to have been popularized among modern scholastics by J. Balmes, La Philosophie fondamentale, bk. 2, chap. S. However, Balmes was uneasy as to the possible consequences of his attitude, as can be seen from the beginning of chap. 6. In contrast, the argument was adopted without hesitation by J. S. Hickey, Summula philosophiae scholasticae, 4th ed., (Dublin, 1915); 1:212. For Reinstadler's text, which we have just cited, see the following note.]

Of course this argument proves nothing, since the facts are explained equally well by Berkeley’s thesis that our ideas are the language the Author of nature speaks to man. Even before Berkeley, Malebranche had already noted that if one accepts occasionalism and the vision of God which results from it, the existence or nonexistence of the external world is a matter of indifference as far as the content of our thought is concerned. If our sensations come to us from God, they are as independent of our will as if they came from an external world of bodies. This is why Descartes, foreseeing the possibility of an absolute idealism, had completed his proof by adding that a God who himself causes our sensations while allowing us to believe that they were caused by an external world of bodies would be a deceitful and therefore imperfect God, a contradictory and impossible concept.

One can but marvel at the docility with which Reinstadler and other scholastics followed Descartes down this blind alley: “De actione Dei immediata in nobis nihil omnino conscientia refert“, and: “Repugnat enim Deum, veritatis amantem et infinitate bonum, creaturam suam rationalem in errore invincibili his in terris perpetuo • velle detinere.” [29 Reinstadler, 174-75. The author refers, for further information on this point, to Frick, Logica, 19off., and to Mercier, Criteriologiegenerale, 352ff. Cf. J. S. Hickey, Summula philosophiae scholasticae, loc. cit.]

Whatever the intrinsic merit of this argument, it is easy to see why Descartes used it, for he had proven the existence of God before the existence of the external world. God is able to guarantee the external world in a philosophy that uses the idealist method, but it is truly surprising that a scholastic realist for whom the existence of God is proven by means of the external world should, at the same time, undertake to prove the existence of the world by means of the existence of God. Such an attitude is not even eclecticism: it is sheer intellectual chaos.

How could they fail to see the results of such a method? If it is truly divine veracity that guarantees the reliability of our sensations, the existence of the external world is no longer self-evidently certain and can in turn only be guaranteed by the existence of God. But then how can God’s existence be proven from the existence of the external world, since before being sure that there is an external world we must first be sure that God exists? There is no escape from this dead end.

Whoever sticks a finger into the machinery of the Cartesian method must expect to be dragged along its whole course. For, after all, as soon as the problem of the existence of the external world was presented in terms of common sense, Cartesianism was accepted. Descartes never denied that the existence of the external world was a common-sense truth. On the contrary, he expressly affirmed that it was, positing this truth as a moral certitude that for the most part suffices for the needs of life.

Only a hyperbolic doubt would ever question it. The problem was to transform this common-sense certitude into a metaphysical certitude. This is why, forced by his method to deny that the existence of the external world is evident, he had to undertake its proof. To reduce realism to the level of common sense is to reduce it to the status of infraphilosophic knowledge, and this is what Descartes did first. He then borrowed its arguments to free himself from the impasse in which he found himself.

Now, nothing prevented the realist Reinstadler from holding that the existence of the external world is self-evident. Descartes had been mistaken in this matter, but he, at least, had been philosophically mistaken and sank in his own ship, whereas Reinstadler sank with him but in a ship which was not his own and upon which he had no right to embark.

Perhaps. some might be surprised that we attach so much importance to the fact that the contradictory nature of these attempts dooms them to failure. The reason we do is because, although devoid of any philosophic value, they are in a certain measure responsible for much of the contemporary controversy concerning the possibility of critical realism. By the very scorn which it inspired in the better interpreters of Aristotelian realism, common-sense realism sent them in the opposite direction; or rather, since they were deceived as to principles, their horror at this pseudophilosophy induced them to invent false classifications for which there was no need.

[FootNote: This preoccupation is evident, for example, in Msgr. L. Noel, "L'Epistemologie thomiste", in Acta secundi congressus thomistici internationalis (Taurini-Romae: Marietti, 1937). There, Msgr. Noel opposes certain adversaries whom he leaves unnamed, but he tells us that these "excellent minds" contest "the necessity and even the legitimacy of epistemology" which, in their eyes, is a useless exercise foreign to the thought of Aristotle and St. Thomas, and even "necessarily ruinous" (32). I admit that I do not know who maintained such a position, and I regret that I do not know who it was who said that it is necessary "to reject all epistemology, to extricate ourselves from the 'problem of knowledge', which is nothing but a false problem, and to renounce any intention of attempting a rapprochement between the scholastic and modern points of view, which can only result in confusion; rather, we should point out their honest differences so that clarity may result" (32).

The problem is, having only recently used the expression "honest disagreement" (Le Realisme methodique, 82), I must ask, with some uneasiness, am I the one in question here? The least reference to the authors responsible for these positions would have reassured me. Whatever the truth of the matter may be, I must be permitted to reiterate that the disagreement between Msgr. Noel and myself has nothing to do with a denial of the legitimacy or necessity of epistemology but with the method which he follows in his epistemology.

I cannot accept Msgr. Noel's position that epistemology has priority in relation to metaphysics or, as he would say, that "the ontological theory of knowledge is logically posterior to epistemology" (art. cit., 58. Cf. 45, art. 1). What I am asking for is a realist epistemology within metaphysics. If Msgr. Noel objects, "It is hard to see what could be put in place of epistemology, and certainly there must be something with which to oppose idealism" (32), I will simply reply that the conflict is not between realism and epistemology but between realist epistemology and idealist epistemology. True, we need something with which to oppose idealism, and that something is realism.]

If ever there was a naive realism, common-sense realism was it. In reaction to it, these philosophers announced that they intended to adopt a philosophical attitude in these matters. Their realism was therefore styled “critical realism”, as opposed to the naive realism of common sense.

[FootNote: "Immediate realism is inevitable because it is an obvious fact beyond which it is impossible to proceed further. This does not mean, however, that Thomist realism should be a naive realism; on the contrary, it is a realism which is perfectly well aware of its basis in reason, and that is why it truly deserves the name `critical'." (R. Jolivet, Le Thomisme et la critique de la connaissance [Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1933], III).

Thus, immediate realism is a self-evident fact based upon reason and therefore is an immediately critical fact. Even if we were to resign ourselves to using this bizarre terminology, we would still have to ask why the reasons which form the basis of this self-evident fact are couched by preference in terms of a “critical doubt” (117), a “realist cogito” (91) and a “realist critique” (30). It would seem that “critical realism” is just another name “generally applied to Thomism” (29). But since when has this been so? Can the expression be traced back beyond Kant?

Or should we say that Thomism performed the critique of knowledge for centuries, just as M. Jourdain wrote prose, without knowing it? To avoid making Thomism into a naive realism it has been transformed into a naive criticism which was unaware of what it was doing until it donned its new Kantian clothing. This is hardly progress.]

That is all the more clear-sighted among them wanted to say, and it must be admitted that they said it, but it would have been better to have said it differently.

[Footnote: This is what the following lines of Msgr. Noel suggest: "They [the ancients] did not hesitate to affirm common sense realism as a postulate; they had thought out the fundamentals of the position, although still only in a rough outline….” Art. cit., 32. As for the above, it should be noted:

1) that to posit the existence of the external world as self-evident for man is not the same as regarding it as a postulate. A postulate is not self-evident; what is self-evident is not postulated, it is seen.

2) It should also be observed that Msgr. Noel’s formula simply equates reflective knowledge and critical knowledge; if this were true, critical realism would be the same as philosophical realism, and there would be no point in even using the word “critical”.

The same remark applies to those excellent pages devoted by J. Maritain to the reconciliation of philosophy and common sense (Elements de philosophie, 6th ed. [Paris,1921], 87-94). I can think of nothing to add to what he has said; it clearly appears that for J. Maritain philosophical knowledge requires a reflection upon the givens of common sense, which is what the critic does (90; 3, a; cf. 91; b, 2) and also what the philosopher does. Thus, it is easy to see why J. Maritain insists upon using the term “critical realism” (Les Degres du savoir [Paris: Desclee, 1932], 137-58). He concludes by asking: “After these explanations, will M. Gilson finally be convinced that the objections against the possibility of a critical Thomism are not insurmountable, and that the concept of a critical realism is not self-contradictory, like the concept of a square circle?” (156).

To which I simply reply that if critical knowledge is the same as philosophical knowledge, a philosopher who defends any epistemology does it as a critical philosopher, but the word “critical” adds nothing to the concept of philosophy. So it is true that within the philosophical order the expression “critical realism” will either lose all distinct meaning (in which case it will not be self-contradictory), or else it will signify a certain manner of posing the problem, which consists of admitting that realism can be a postulate but denying that it is immediately self-evident. The general thesis of the present work is that as soon as “critical realism” acquires a distinct meaning it becomes self-contradictory.]

This mode of expression supposes that “critical” and “naive” are opposites, as if whatever is not naive has the right to be called critical. At this rate all philosophy would be critical by definition, since all philosophy involves reflection. Certainly it is possible to take that position, but it is unnecessary to express oneself in that way. Moreover, such language involves many drawbacks. It is unnecessary, for if it is true that the mode of knowledge proper to common sense is infraphilosophic, naive realism cannot be elevated to the level of philosophy.

Therefore, there is no reason to use the expression, as if it were necessary to distinguish, outside of philosophy, between a realism that is naive and one that is not. If it is naive, realism is simply not philosophy; if it is philosophy, realism cannot be naive. Aside from the fact that neither Aristotle nor St. Thomas did, we need not style ourselves critical realists for the simple fact that we are realists of the reflective sort, which is the manner of philosophy itself. So let us say that we hold a philosophical realism and, since the problem only arises among philosophers, content ourselves with calling it realism, plain and simple.

For not only is there no need to use the expression “critical realism”, it also presents serious drawbacks. If it were merely a matter of protecting Kant’s rights to the word “critical”, we would hardly take the trouble. The word belongs to everyday speech in its usual sense of “to judge”. Therefore, all philosophy has the right to use it, even in a philosophical sense, provided only that a distinct meaning corresponds to the use to which it is put.

This is what Kant did when he decided to call his idealism “critical”, as opposed to all other forms of idealism and, consequently, of philosophy. If a realist intends to reclaim the title for his own doctrine or wants to use this term to signify that his realism is conscious of its foundations, justified by reflection rather than the spontaneous certitude of common sense, either “critical realism” will simply mean “philosophical realism” or else “critical” will acquire a meaning distinct from “philosophical”. In the latter case, experience shows and reason proves that it will become necessary to justify realist conclusions with the help of an idealist method. It is precisely this question, whether the latter approach is intrinsically possible, that we must examine.

Posted in Etienne Gilson, Philosophy, St. Thomas Aquinas | Tagged Aristotle, common-sense certitude and metaphysical certitude, communes conceptiones animi, communes sententias, critical knowledge and philosophical knowledge, critical realism and Thomism, Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, irrationalism, Liberatore, naive realism and common-sense realism, Sebastian Reinstadler, St. Thomas the existence of God, Thomas Reid | Leave a Comment »

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