St. Thomas Aquinas, Selections from the Summa Theologica

The past three months have been a blur. Though I enjoy having a job---or rather, though I enjoy the perks that come with having a job, such as free time and disposable income---the regularity makes it easy to lose track of time; hours become days, days become weeks, and soon enough, you haven’t updated your blog since St. Anselm. But it’s not only my job that’s kept my blog stagnant. After the archbishop of Canterbury, I decided to read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, an undertaking that took about six weeks. I vacillated between writing and not writing a post about it; I certainly had enough thoughts about the book to do so, though I didn’t take many notes. (It’s hard enough to carry that book places, I couldn’t be bothered to bring a pen, too.) After that, I had a couple non-starters: the Poetic Edda and Rumi both presented difficulties, mostly due to my unfamiliarity with the cultures they came from.

When I came back to my reading list, I was confronted with St. Thomas Aquinas, whom I had been excited to read because he’s a big deal in Christian theology and because he was so important to Dante (whom we will discuss next time) and Joyce (whom we will discuss in a couple decades when I reach the early twentieth century). Unfortunately, I didn’t take very good notes on Aquinas, and I will explain why with the following series of excuses.

First, the Summa Theologica, the subject of today’s blog post, is, for lack of a better word, a beast. Aquinas’ project is in a totally different ballpark than, say, Anselm’s, which only sought to prove the existence of God. Aquinas, on the other hand, gives five separate proofs of the existence of God, and that happens within the first hundred pages of the couple-thousand-page Summa (of which, I read about 400 pages). The fact is that the Summa was intended to be, as the name suggests, a summation of the whole of Catholic theology. And unlike our colloquial use of “summation,” Aquinas meant that he was going to explicitly derive every major belief in Christianity from either the Bible or the works of past philosophers and theologians. So it’s a doozy.

Secondly, the Summa is dry. I’m not just talking textbook-prose dry. Every single section of the Summa follows the same format: it begins with a question and several (incorrect) answers to that question; then, there is a statement to the contrary, which usually comes from, like I said before, the Bible or another philosopher; then, Thomas asserts his position based on that statement; finally, he responds to each of the erroneous answers in light of the true answer. This style makes his points incredibly clear, though incredibly dull.

Finally, the Summa is cumulative. Many answers depend upon and make use of previous answers. Often, individual questions are specific to the point of being mysterious: why would Thomas ask such a strange question? The answer to that is always, Because he’s going to use it later. This is a criticism I've heard about math textbooks as well, where certain results are proven without any motivation only so that they can be used later on in a larger, more obviously important proof.

Because of all these excuses (and more!), this will be a fairly short blog post, and structured a little bit differently. In that it will have no structure. Ahem.

Despite all my bitching, one must be in awe of the Summa and also of Thomas. (It seems that people usually refer to him by his first name rather than his last, so in order to seem cool, I will, too.) Just imagine: the Summa consists of some 100-odd questions in its two parts; each question is made up of articles, usually between five and 10; each article contains some erroneous arguments that must be refuted, usually two or three. That gives us between 1,000 and 3,000 arguments that he alone collected, considered, and refuted, with evidence. This, more than anything that we’ve come across so far (except maybe Plotinus’ Enneads), is worthy of being called a magnum opus.

Aside from revolutionizing Catholic philosophy, why is Thomas important? As the editor of my edition, Anton Pegis, writes, Thomas’ philosophy marked “the first decisive encounter between Hellenism and Christianity.” But John, you’ll say, haven’t there been lots of encounters between Greek philosophy and Christianity? Isn’t that what you’ve been telling us, you asshole? Yes, it is, but I'm not wrong (probably). Other religions, specifically Judaism and Islam, have had fruitful encounters with the Greeks; and Christianity has, as well, with Augustine’s encounters with neo-Platonism. But it isn’t until Thomas that Greek philosophy is truly used.

Here’s what I mean. While Augustine found a structure for his thoughts in neo-Platonism, Thomas was in dialogue with Plato and Aristotle. To him, Plato came as close to truth as could possibly be reached by a pagan; that is, by someone with no access to divine revelation. Plato’s problem, Thomas argues, is that he reached conclusions about being by thinking, by using his reason, which is a part of his being. This method fails, as Pegis writes, “by as much as the human reason or human abstract thought is powerless, by itself, to apprehend and to know the conditions of actually existing things. For, according to St. Thomas, there are many and profoundly important aspects of existence that thought alone or the reason alone cannot know about things.” So not only has Aquinas evaluated the merits of Plato's philosophy, he has criticized his methods for being insufficient.

Where does Aristotle come in? Traces of the Philosopher (as Thomas reverently refers to him) are everywhere in the Summa: the argument for the existence of God based on the existence of a “prime mover;” the refutations that depend as much upon the Aristotelian corpus as they do upon the Bible; the very structure of the Summa as a logical, cohesive catechism all borrow from Aristotle. In fact, one might say that Thomas is not simply the first decisive encounter between Hellenism and Christianity, but between Aristotelianism and Christianity.

But he doesn’t only converse with Aristotle and Plato. The influence of the Islamic philosophers, particularly Averroes, is evident as well. Consider his argument that “it was necessary for the salvation of man that certain truths which exceed human reason should be made known to him by divine revelation.” This sounds like something we’d hear from the Islamic philosophers, who emphasized the power of revelation to supplement human reason. Moreover, he writes, “the mode of knowledge follows the mode of the nature of the knower.” Recall both the Islamic philosophers and Maimonides, who stressed that not all truths can be and should be revealed to all people; to each person is revealed what he is capable of knowing.

The most important thing I personally discovered in terms of Thomas’ philosophy is his belief in natural law. This is something that we haven’t really seen yet. Maimonides mentioned that the law given to the Israelites was not the end-all-be-all law, but merely a transitional law that is closer, but not equivalent to the true divine law. But Thomas’ natural law is different. Essentially, natural law is a set of moral and ethical principles that can be derived by human reason. Without reference to any god or gods, one can unequivocally say that killing another person is wrong. This law is ultimately related to the divine prohibition against murder since all human reason comes from God, but it can be conceived of without divine revelation.

That’s pretty much it. I assure you that the next post on Dante will be much more comprehensive. I’ve already transcribed my notes, and damn, there are a lot of them.

Stray Observations

• Food for thought from Pegis: “We are bound to say that the European man became a thinker after [Thomas and also after] he ruined himself as a knower; and we can now even trace the steps of that ruination–from Augustinian Platonism to the nominalistic isolationism of Ockham to the despairing and desperate methodism of Descartes. For what we call the decline of mediaeval philosophy was really a transition from man as a knower to man as a thinker.”

• Thomas also does the thing a lot where he says, “Such and such abstract concept has n distinct forms” and goes on to list those forms (a) as if this mysterious number of forms is exhaustive and (b) as if he’s a living Buzzfeed article or something.

• He proves that there is not "greatest evil" because, simply, there cannot be two first principles. It's like a proof of uniqueness following several proofs of existence.

• Habits are active powers that, through repetition, overtake passive powers that were previously in place, and become the new passive powers. Makes sense. Also, sounds like Aristotle.