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The Thomist Tradition by Brian J. Shanley, O.P. (Handbook of
Contemporary Philosophy of Religion: Kluwer Academic Publishers)
provides the first comprehensive treatment of the central topics in the
contemporary philosophy of religion from a Thomist point of view. After
an overview of Thomism in the twentieth century, the remaining chapters
treat the relationship between religious claims and other truth claims,
religious language (especially analogy), theology and science, suffering
and evil, religion and morality, human nature and destiny, God, and
religious pluralism. The aim is to provide the reader with an overview
of the spectrum of Thomist positions, beginning with Aquinas himself and
then moving through his most important interpreters. By
cross‑referencing related topics, the book situates particular problems
within the larger context of Thomism. Ample bibliographical references
direct the reader to the most important resources.
The Thomist Tradition should prove valuable to students and faculty
in philosophy of religion and theology, who are looking for an
introduction to the Thomist tradition.
The Thomistic tradition takes it name from the
thirteenth‑century religious thinker and saint who is its source and
inspiration: the Dominican Friar Thomas Aquinas.' Aquinas understood
himself to be a theologian, and that is what he was. This obvious
biographical fact needs to be underlined at the beginning, however,
since it has often since been lost sight of in treatments of his
thought. The reason for this is that Aquinas also developed a powerful,
innovative, and comprehensive philosophy which has proved to be at least
as perennial, if not more so, than the theological synthesis that it was
originally designed to serve. His followers have kept both strains of
his thought alive until this day, but not always combining the same dual
expertise. Theology and philosophy have since become more distinct, and
as each has fragmented into sub‑disciplines of academic specialization,
it becomes harder and harder for anyone to master the thought of Aquinas
as a whole. Yet grasping the whole is essential to grasping the part, as
evidenced by the master work of Aquinas's mind: his Summa theologiae.
You cannot understand any part of the Summa unless you understand its
place within the whole, and much violence has been done to Aquinas's
thought by abstracting it from the larger context in order to present it
in discrete units.
For a Thomist who considers Aquinas in this
holistic way, as Shanley does, a book such as this poses a number of
problems. First, the set of topics currently considered to fall within
the domain of the philosophy of religion does not map easily into the
traditional Thomistic universe of discourse because it combines into one
philosophical discipline what Thomists would want to separate into two
formally distinct disciplines of theology and philosophy. To put the
matter another way, contemporary philosophy of religion appears to the
Thomist as something of a hybrid. Some of its standard topics and
approaches are unproblematically philosophical by Thomist lights, but
others seem to be formally theological. The template of this book and
this series thus poses a problem for the Thomist because it blurs the
formal boundaries between philosophy and theology. As much as possible,
Shanley tries to stay on the philosophical side of the line, but often
it has been necessary to bring theological issues into play in order to
explicate the logic of the Thomistic position. Shanley endeavors
throughout to make clear to the reader when the discussion crosses the
line from philosophy into theology.
Because this book involves both philosophical and
theological considerations, it would ideally require a Thomist author
with broad competencies in both disciplines. Shanley's academic
specialization is Thomistic philosophy, but as a Dominican friar he also
has an extensive training in the theology of Aquinas.
In the case of each of the topics considered in
this book, Shanley attempts to define the major issues under that rubric
that have been debated within the Thomistic tradition. Given the
holistic character of Aquinas's thought, a consideration of any one of
the topics in the book leads naturally and inevitably into other topics.
Shanley tries as much as possible to make each chapter able to stand on
its own, but in the interests of economy he tries not to duplicate
discussions; hence many cross-references occur throughout the volume.
Because the Thomistic tradition is not monolithic, as outlined in
Chapter One, Shanley offers the reader a sense of the most important
variant positions. His strategy is to begin wherever possible with the
more traditional or classical position, as defined by its proximity to
Aquinas's original view, and then use that as a baseline to explore more
creative and contemporary interpretations of Aquinas. This means that
there is quite a bit of consideration of the texts of Aquinas in this
book, which seems inevitable and indeed desirable in a work on Thomism.
Yet this is not a book on Aquinas per se, so Shanley has not gone into
the historical background to the views. Rather Shanley treats Aquinas as
a participant in an ongoing philosophical dialogue, where his views can
continue to be attractive in their original form or can become
attractive through creative reinterpretation. Shanley tries to be
fair‑minded in cataloguing the various disagreements among Thomists.
Shanley tries to give an accurate and fair account of all the relevant
schools of thought, even when not convinced of their cogency. He draws
from sources both contemporary and classic, and from various languages;
since the major audience of the book is Englishspeaking, there is
naturally a preponderance of references to works in that language.
Shanley accounts of the various topics in this book provide an initial
Thomistic orientation, not a final word, and there is ample
bibliographical information for the reader to pursue each topic further.
Shanley views his task to be like the biblical scribe commended by Jesus
for being like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new
and what is old. There is some treasure for philosophers of religion in
the Thomistic tradition, and this book provides something of a guide to
it.
Modern Writings on Thomism, 6 volumes, selected and introduced by
John Haldane (Thoemmes Continuum):
This well-chosen selection of full length
neo-Thomist texts is representative of the best English language
commentary on Aquinas and shrewd philosophical thought. Haldane has
provided a brief introduction to the selections which highlights the
originality of these authors’ efforts. The volumes should be of interest
to all who want a sense of English-language Thomism before Vatican II
and also all who seek to relish the perennial philosophical legacy of
Thomas Aquinas.
Excerpt: One effect of
the greatly renewed interest in the history of philosophy among English
speakers has been to direct their attention to hitherto neglected
periods and traditions. That in turn has resulted in a perforation of
the boundaries hitherto presumed to divide philosophy into discrete
phases. So, for example, scholars are now inclined to see a continuity
between ancient, Hellenic and early medieval philosophy, and between
philosophy and theology in these periods. Likewise, more extensive study
of modern philosophy has revealed its overlap with late scholasticism.
This has induced revisions in the understanding of the likes of
Descartes (1596–1650) and Locke (1632-1704), and it has brought nearer
to the fore figures such as Malebranche (1638–1715), Arnauld
(1612–1694), Suarez (1548–1617) and Cajetan. (1469–1534). As these
interests develop so too does the appetite for understanding traditions
now seen to be more proximate than was hitherto supposed, but one
significant impediment is the shortage of helpful secondary material.
That is beginning to be rectified with new publications, but there
already exist a number of out-of-print and little known studies that are
quite valuable but which are very difficult to obtain (many having long
been `retired' from libraries).
One area of renewed
intellectual interest is Thomism: the body of philosophical and
theological ideas that derives from the work of Thomas Aquinas
(1225–74). A quarter of a century ago this might almost have seemed
moribund, with precious little knowledge of it outside the contracting
world of Catholic seminaries and colleges. Even at that point, however,
a revival of interest in Aquinas was developing among English-language
analytical philosophers, building on the valuable work of such as Peter
Geach and Anthony Kenny (the former a convert to Catholicism, the latter
an ex-clerical resignee from it). By stages this interest has grown and
expanded into a broader concern with medieval philosophy to the point
where this is now a significant area of scholarship, testified to by the
recent creation of The Society for Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy,
and the Cambridge journal Medieval Philosophy and Theology, and by the
appearance of many articles and monographs – not to overlook the
continuing and important contribution provided from older sources such
as New Blackfriars (1920/64), The Modern Schoolman (1925),
the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly (continuing from
The New Scholasticism (1927)), and The Thomist (1939).
What have not yet
received as much attention, however, are the traditions of scholasticism
deriving from the medieval thinkers, which were further developed in the
modern period and have periodically been refreshed by engagement with
newer philosophical movements. Here again, though, there is growing
interest, particularly in the tradition of Thomism and its potential to
inform and be informed by analytical philosophy.
While there is
evermore research into the thought of Aquinas himself, and the
analytical and other neo-Thomist projects are developing, there is a
neglect of the good work done during the first half of the twentieth
century by authors seeking to present aspects of the Thomist system for
the purposes of teaching students and assisting scholars working on
Thomist issues. The current collection seeks to address this omission by
making available reprints of older texts that are especially helpful in
setting out some of the central concepts and introducing readers to
medieval and scholastic authors and sources. The quarter century or so
that separates the first and the last of the works collected here was a
period of great significance. It spanned the years between the wars,
during which the links within Europe, and between it and north America
were first severed and then re-established. The intellectual world was
in turmoil: with totalitarianism in open conflict with democracy, with
innovation challenging tradition, and with a resurgent empiricism
challenging metaphysical philosophy and itself being challenged by
existentialism. Meanwhile, within the cultural world in which Thomism
had revived and been developed, the Catholic Church was moving towards
an 'aggiornamento' or opening up of itself to the wider world,
and particularly to modern culture. It should not have been altogether a
surprise to find that the result of opening the windows to the world was
that more came in than went out. Over the longer term, however, one
might expect a balance as those outside the culture in which Thomism was
conceived and in which it was nurtured and grew to maturity come to a
better appreciation of its character and virtues. To do that they
certainly need to look to the thought of Aquinas himself; but they will
be helped in this, and in the task of seeing how that thought can be
developed, by attending to more recent work in the Thomist tradition.
The oldest of the
texts reprinted in this collection is the two-volume work by R.P.
Phillips entitled Modern
Thomistic Philosophy. This was first published in London in 1934
and 1935 by the famous Catholic publishing house of Burns Oates &
Washbourne Ltd. (Burns and Oates was the official publisher in England
to the Holy See (the Vatican), and Washbourne published the first
English translations of the Summa Theologiae and Summa Contra
Gentiles of Aquinas). Phillips was then Professor of Philosophy at
St John's Seminary at Wonersh in the English county of Surrey. First
established in the late nineteenth century, the seminary became an
associated institution of the University of Surrey in 1998.
In the opening
sentence of the first volume (The Philosophy of Nature) Phillips
describes the purpose of the book as being `to present a simple
explanation of the philosophy usually taught to Catholic students', and
later he adds that since such teaching was predominantly along Thomist
lines, it is that which the book aims to explain. What Phillips did not
need to make explicit is that the kind of education he was concerned
with was that designed to prepare men for the priesthood. St John's
Wonersh was, and is, an ecclesiastical seminary. The origins of such
institutions lie in a decree of the Council of Trent prescribing the
training of those intended for the priesthood. Unlike the religious
orders such as the Dominicans and the Jesuits who had their education
divided between novitiates (which attended to their spiritual
development) and scholasticates (which provided for their intellectual
formation), those training for the `secular' clergy were educated in
ecclesiastical seminaries which combined both functions. Often such
institutions were comprised of junior and senior branches. The former
served as preparatory or collegiate schools, and it was only when
students reached the senior seminary that they would turn to the study
of theology and philosophy. Even so, and notwithstanding Phillips's
claim to be providing a `simple explanation', readers should be struck
by the level of sophistication presumed in his exposition of Modern
Thomistic Philosophy.
In the final sentence
of the first volume Phillips describes humankind as inhabiting two
worlds, `the material and the immaterial', and this allows him to signal
the subject of the second volume, Metaphysics, as being the science
within which falls the study of immateriality. To many readers this will
seem to have about it a ring of Platonic dualism, but, true to the
tradition of Aquinas, Phillips is thinking not so much of a medium in
which exists a parallel world but rather of the higher reaches of a
single reality. For all that there may be discontinuities between
different levels and modes of existence there is but one ordered
creation – and in the Thomist scheme immateriality admits of degrees, as
for example in the progressive dematerialization of the forms of natural
objects as they are absorbed into cognition first in sensation, then in
perception and finally in intellection. As a human being contemplates
the geometry of a silver ring: that which first exists locally and
dimensively in a quantity of silver, and then isomorphically in the
structure of the sense organs, finally comes to exist non-spatially and
in universal form as the conceptual content of the thought that a circle
is a round plane figure, every point on the circumference of which is
equidistant from its centre. This power to abstract intelligible form
from material contexts and to form judgments expressing it provides one
Thomist argument for the immateriality of intellect, and thence for the
immateriality of the soul, and ultimately for its post-mortem survival.
Even so, according to Aquinas human beings, unlike angels, are not
spiritual creatures, and angelic intellects are themselves imperfectly
immaterial to the extent that they are still subject to change.
It is not reasonable
to judge the cogency of these ideas independently of understanding the
form in which they were held and developed. Phillips's work enables one
to arrive at such an understanding. The first volume begins with an
account of the genesis of philosophy in Greek antiquity and draws from
this a description of its continuing essence: unlike theology it does
not appeal to revelation or other religious knowledge, and unlike
science it is not concerned with particular kinds of causes, substances
or structures but with causality, substance and structure per se.
Recognizably Aristotelian in its scope, this approach is also optimistic
in supposing that by the light of reason it is possible to understand
the fundamentals of reality and to integrate that understanding within a
comprehensive account of its various aspects. So in Volume I, Phillips
proceeds to set out an account of the philosophy of nature, moving from
cosmology (mechanism, dynamism, matter, quantity, the continuum, place
and space, time, change, and individuation) to animate nature in general
and from there to sensitive life and thence to intellectual life. Then
in Volume II he turns to epistemology, examining the challenge of
skepticism and the status of the objects of knowledge, be they concrete
or abstract; from there he moves to the elements of metaphysics (being,
potentiality and actuality, essence, substance, causality) and so on to
the existence and nature of God, both in Himself and as cause of all
things material and immaterial. These two volumes are not only
comprehensive; they are intensive and of lasting value for anyone trying
to work their way into Thomist speculative philosophy.
It is a common
complaint of Thomists, analytical philosophers and those in the European
continental tradition of hermeneutic existentialism that modern
philosophy has been mistakenly and damagingly preoccupied with the
business of justifying claims to knowledge. While allowing that
uncertainty is intrinsic to the human search for knowledge, proponents
of these otherwise quite different schools generally reject the
Cartesian idea that the individual is in an egocentric predicament with
no direct access to the extra-mental world. For the anti-Cartesian the
question is not `do we know anything?' but rather `given that we have
knowledge, how is that arrived at?' Philosophy needs to provide an
epistemology, not as justification in the face of urgent and pervasive
doubt but as an explanation of how we can know what we evidently do
know. Although it is in line with the realist commitment of Aquinas,
Phillips's discussion of knowledge nevertheless reflects the spirit of
skeptical anxiety common in English-language philosophy in the period
between the first and second world wars.
While John Peifer
begins The Concept in Thomism
by outlining different theories of knowledge (Cartesian, Kantian and
Thomistic) and entitles this chapter `Statement of the Problem', it is
clear from the content and style of what follows that he is not really
troubled with the skeptical question save to the extent that he sees it
as bedeviling accounts of knowledge that begin inside the mind of the
would-be knower.
First appearing in
1952 as The Concept in Thomism,
the same text was republished in 1964 as The Mystery of Knowledge.
The change of title may be accounted for by the growing prominence of
epistemology in north American philosophy courses, and hence by the
demand for suitable college texts. In reality, however, the book is a
well-researched scholarly monograph on Thomistic treatments of the
structure of perceptual and intellectual knowledge drawn from the
writings of Aquinas himself, from the Dominican commentators Cajetan and
John of St Thomas, and from twentieth-century European (largely French)
interpreters such as Maritain and Gilson. One of the great merits of
this work is that it quotes extensively from scholastic sources
(translating them in the body of the work but giving the Latin in
footnotes). In this way Peifer provides readers with what is almost an
anthology of central passages in classical Thomist cognitive psychology.
The benefit of this is greater now than when the book was first
published since many of the sources he quotes have become more obscure
in the intervening years. The work also has the virtue of presenting
ideas in a form that stimulates the reader to consider whether he or she
agrees with them. It is, then, both a work of scholarship and an
exercise in philosophy. So far as the latter is concerned, the main
thesis is an elaboration of the epistemological realism advanced by
Aquinas when he maintains that concepts are abstracted from experience
of natural forms and are the means by which we think of things and not
themselves the objects of thought – save in reflection, as when we think
of the content of a concept (see Summa Theologiae, Ia, q.85, a.
2).
`No realistic
philosophy can be considered complete unless it includes a philosophy of
nature'. So reads the opening sentence of the preface of George
Klubertanz's The Philosophy
of Human Nature. This is an apt reminder of what was seen in
Phillips's work, namely the embedding of epistemology (and metaphysics)
within a broader philosophical framework. As if to emphasize the point
of connectedness he continues: `Moreover, the philosophy of human nature
is an absolute prerequisite for a philosophically grounded ethics ...
[and] the philosophy of nature is in close material contact with the
natural sciences'.
Like Phillips,
Klubertanz was writing with a student readership in mind. He taught at
St. Louis University (an important US centre of neo-scholasticism and
home of The Modern Schoolman) and he developed the text out of
lectures given there from 1949 (the book was published
Apple-Century-Crofts in 1953). Evidently Klubertanz was realistic in his
assessment of what undergraduates might be capable of, for he writes
that `only an unusual class could complete the entire text as it
stands'. The difficulty is not one of obscurity but derives from the
fact, often overlooked by more recent authors, that the `introductory'
is not the same as the `elementary'. Klubertanz makes no effort to
conceal the profundity of the issues with which he is concerned and this
sometimes makes for hard reading, but the difficulties are mostly those
of the issues themselves.
He begins with an
investigation of human nature, asking what would constitute a
philosophical account of this and relating that to the aims and methods
of experimental psychology. From there he proceeds to examine the
competing cases for considering human beings as exhibiting a unity or a
plurality of nature(s). So put, the issue may sound remote, but it is a
real and currently somewhat neglected question. Biochemistry studies
molecules, genetics investigates microbiology, physiology deals with
anatomical systems, psychology studies mental functions. What is the
relation between these sciences so far as concerns the beings under
study in which their objects are co-instantiated? Is man one or many
thing(s)?
Klubertanz develops an
updated version of Aquinas's response to those who in his own time
argued that human beings have three organizing principles: the
vegetative, the sentient, and the rational souls. Human nature is one
principle subsuming many functions. Such is the single-sentence answer,
but true to the scholastic style Klubertanz develops it methodically and
in detail, organizing his account in 185 sections contained within XIV
chapters and adding two appendices concerning, respectively,
`Philosophical Systems' (dualism, idealistic monism, materialistic
monism, positivism, sensism, philosophical Freudianism, philosophical
evolutionism, and determinism), and `Related Issues'. What is offered is
of intrinsic interest, enduring value, and could serve as a model for a
new treatment of the same range of issues.
Klubertanz's linkage
of philosophy of nature with ethics marks a sharp and intended contrast
with Kantian attempts to derive morality from the structure of pure
practical reason alone. For the Thomist, the theory of value and right
action follows from philosophical anthropology: until one knows what
humans beings are, one cannot say what pertains to their good, and hence
how they should act.
John Oesterle's,
Ethics: The
Introduction to Moral Science (published by Prentice-Hall in
1957) works on these assumptions to develop a broad account of various
aspects of ethics (its methods, its ultimate end, the nature of
happiness, the role of virtue, the conditions of voluntariness and those
of free agency, the elements of evaluation, the nature and role of law,
and the character of friendship).
Like Phillips and
Klubertanz, Oesterle developed his book out of the experience of
classroom teaching – in his case at the University of Notre Dame which
at that point was a relatively small institution but has since become
the première Catholic University in north America. The book's
pedagogical origin is preserved in the review questions, discussion
topics and list of suggested readings (which include references to works
of Aquinas) appended to each chapter. It is not, however, a mere student
text, for as was characteristic of authors in the Thomistic tradition,
Oesterle saw himself as having the responsibility of setting out ideas
that should appeal to all of philosophical mind, from the educated
layman to the advanced scholar. For that reason the work repays the
attention of the professional philosopher, particularly in its treatment
of the nature and role of the virtues.
In her collection of
essays Virtues and Vices (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978) Philippa Foot
writes `it is my opinion that the Summa Theologica is one of the
best sources we have for moral philosophy, and moreover that St Thomas's
ethical writings are as useful to the atheist as to the Catholic or
other Christian believer.’Notwithstanding such high praise from a
well-respected source, the fact is that a quarter of a century later
moral philosophers outside the Thomist tradition remain largely
oblivious of the extent to which Aquinas transcends Aristotle in ethics,
both in adding new elements and in exploring in far greater detail those
that Aristotle had himself identified. It is a merit of Oesterle's study
that he follows Aquinas in detailing the structure of the human virtues
and relating them to other aspects of the human psyche, principally the
passions, the will and the intellect.
The final work
selected for this set is Edward Simmons's
The Scientific Art of Logic: An
Introduction to the Principles of Formal and Material Logic (put
out by the Bruce Publishing Company of Milwaukee in 1961). The text is
again one forged in the college classroom. Simmons taught philosophy at
Marquette University (which like St. Louis is a Jesuit Foundation) and
the work appeared on the eve of the Second Vatican Council. A book
published a decade later would almost certainly have been very different
in style, emphasizing formal methods of representing inferences. The
main challenge to the sort of Aristotelian logic preferred by Simmons
and other Thomists then and earlier, is whether it is able to represent
inferences whose validity is demonstrable in the predicate and
propositional logics deriving from Frege and Russell. In recent years
Aristotelian logic has attracted a number of able defenders (see for
example Fred Sommers, The Logic of Natural Language (Oxford,
Clarendon Press, 1982)), but the interest of Simmons's study lies less
in its treatment of valid inference than in what would now be termed its
philosophy of logic.
Once again the
interconnectedness of Thomist philosophy shows itself, for Simmons
approaches inference by way of analyzing the types and levels of mental
acts. Immediately it should be said that he is not engaging in empirical
psychological speculation but is seeking to identify the necessary
elements of rational thought, showing what is presupposed by what, and
how aspects at a given level are related one to another: simple
conception as contrasted with judgment, and each with reasoning; the
inverse relationship between comprehension and extension; the universal
and the particular, the predicables, the categories, definition,
division, the taxonomy and semantics of terms, and so on. Like
Klubertanz, Simmons presents issues in a highly structured way which has
the advantage that readers can go more or less directly to what
interests them. Admittedly, much will now seem superfluous if not
misguided, but there is material of enduring interest and importance in
the discussion of the different intellectual operations, of the meaning
of terms and of the varieties of induction.
Volume 1:
Modern Thomistic Philosophy
vol. 1, `The Philosophy of Nature' by R.P. Phillips, 1934
Volume 2: Modern Thomistic Philosophy vol. 2, `Metaphysics' by
R.P. Phillips, 1935
Excerpt: The purpose
of this book is to present a simple explanation of the philosophy
usually taught to Catholic students. No attempt has been made to
introduce novel doctrines, but merely to set out, as clearly as
possible, the meaning of those which are commonly received. Since such
teaching at the present day is predominantly on the lines of the system
originated by Aquinas, it is this system, as developed by modern
Thomists, which it is the object of this book to explain. It is clear
that in a single work it would be impossible to give a full account, and
absurd to try to vindicate the truth, of the various philosophical
systems which are included under the generic name of Scholasticism ; so
that no systematic exposition is attempted of even the chief of the
non-Thomistic systems, those of Scotus and Suarez. The divergences of
their doctrines from those of S. Thomas frequently throw light on the
precise meaning of the Thomist contentions ; so that to make some
mention of them is not foreign to our purpose. Similar considerations
will apply to our treatment of those other philosophical systems which
diverge still more widely from the Thomistic plan, such as those of
Spinoza or of Hegel. It appears to be as unreasonable to expect, in an
exposition of Thomism, a full account and refutation of Hegelianism, for
example, as it would be to look for such an account of Thomism in
Hegel's Logic. Consequently, all that seems necessary to be done in this
direction is to notice the principal divergences of modern philosophies
from the Thomistic, so bringing into higher relief its positive teaching
; and, as far as space allows, to meet the more urgent of the reasons
that have been advanced against its truth.
Excerpt: The cleavage
between the Cartesian and the Thomistic traditions in knowledge is sharp
and profound. The Cartesian tradition ignores the impetus towards
realism given by nature, or regards it as a primitive inclination which
falls away under critical analysis. Hence its adherents almost
universally take as starting point the so-called Principle of
Immanence: the assumption that the knowing subject immediately attains
only his own ideas, his own conscious states or subjective
modifications. The Thomistic tradition, on the other hand, accepts the
initial impetus towards realism given by nature and holds securely to
the naturally evident objectivity and reliability of knowledge at every
level. For man would not know that he knows, unless he first knows
something; he would not know that he is a being, unless he first knew
being, that which is. Commencing with objectivity, the Thomistic
tradition by reflection, by comparison and contrast between nature and
knowledge, reaches a profound understanding of the immanence of
knowledge as regards principle, term, and object. Thomists defend
immanence, but not at the expense of transcendence. Both are equally
demanded by the facts.
Many in the Cartesian
tradition predicate an hermetically-sealed immanence, for they hold
that ideas are possessed in complete independence of the extra-mental
world, if indeed they grant any such thing as an extra-mental world.
Descartes, for example, held that he possessed all of his ideas innately
and that it pertained to the essence of the soul to be constantly
thinking. Many thinkers followed the implications of Descartes'
principles to their logical term of idealism, holding that ideas were
merely objectifications of the spontaneous and autonomous activity of
the knower. The Thomist tradition, on the other hand, sees that there is
an initial passivity in knowledge. Man is not always knowing; and when
he does pass from the mere capability of knowledge to actual knowledge,
it is only because the cognitive faculty has been enriched from without
by the immaterial reception of the form of the thing to be known.
Thought can attain things, because thought has been caused by things.
The doctrine of impressed species is at once a testimony of the finitude
and passivity of human thought, and a guarantee of its objectivity. The
impressed intelligible species are effected by a process of abstracting
what is intelligible in the sense data gained in an experimental
contact with reality.
The more modern part
of the Cartesian tradition has been especially influenced by the
distinctive twist Immanuel Kant gave to the so-called Principle of
Immanence. Kant held that the human mind was productive of the formal
part of the concept of thought. He said that the extra-mental world
merely supplies the matter or clay which is shaped by the a-priori forms
of the knower. The Thomistic tradition, on the other hand, insists that
the human intellect is passive with respect to its object. The activity
of knowing which results once the faculty has been enriched by the form
of the other in the impressed species in no way affects or modifies that
irreducible datum. The intellect is active, even productive in knowing,
but what it produces is not the thing known, but the concept of the
thing, which presents unproduced contents to the mind clothed in
conditions proper to the mind. St. Thomas distinguishes between the
productive aspect of intellection, which produces the subjective means
by which or in which its object is known, and the cognitional
attainment itself of such an object. The commentators have distinguished
between formal and objective concept to accentuate the difference
between the subjective means which the intellect produces in order to
know, and the transcendent datum which the intellect knows by those
means.
Finally, for every
thinker who begins with the immanence of thought but does not go all the
way to idealism, the transition from immanence to transcendence presents
a logically insurmountable difficulty. How show that there are originals
of which the concepts are pictures? How speak of pictures if there are
no originals? It is logically impossible to show that correspondence,
but they all tried to make the leap to transcendent correspondence by
means of some illogical stratagem or irrational feeling. Descartes did
it by resorting to the veracity of God, whose existence he had proven by
an illicit transition from the ideal to the real order. Locke did it by
an appeal to the Wisdom and Power of the Maker who enables things to
make the right kind of impression on the knower. Mâlebranche did it by
an appeal to the Bible. Leibniz' appeal is to his optimism. Kant did it
for those realities necessary for the moral order through his
categorical imperative. Even Fichte, who was such a thorough-going
idealist in his speculative philosophy, brings tran-subjective existents
back into the picture in his practical philosophy through an appeal to
the voice of conscience, which offers grounds for a practical belief in
objective reality.
The Thomistic
tradition has no need for such confession of speculative failure. It
recognizes that the transition from immanence to transcendence is
possible only for Divine Knowledge wherein Will is joined to Knowledge
in giving physical being to what is known. Man is made to the image of
God—but he is not God. Being a creature composed of potentiality and
actuality, man must be acted upon by things, at least initially, so that
he can know them. When he actually knows, man is directly and
immediately aware of a transcendent thing made present to thought as an
object. Only by reflection does he discover the inwardness of thought
and the means whereby what exists outside of thought has been made
present to thought.
Excerpt: No realistic philosophy can be considered
complete unless it includes a philosophy of nature. The philosophy of
human nature is an area where most of the problems of the philosophy of
nature occur, some of them in a crucial form. Moreover, the philosophy
of human nature is an absolute prerequisite for a philosophically
grounded ethics. Clearly, then, a knowledge of the philosophy of St.
Thomas Aquinas requires a study of the philosophy of human nature.
Nor is it an easy task
to discover and present St. Thomas's thought on man. For this
philosophic thought is contained on the one hand in summary form and
often under a deductive guise in the two Summae; on the other
hand, the Disputed Questions are fragmentary and polemical by their
nature, and the Commentaries follow an order and an emphasis that is no
longer directly useful. Moreover, where St. Thomas presumed basic
philosophical understanding and a knowledge of the pertinent evidence,
present day students, unfamiliar with both, are unable to gain much more
than a superficial verbal mastery.
Finally, the
philosophy of nature is in close material contact with the natural
sciences. The problems and questions that arise out of this contact are
dated by their very nature; the problems of this third quarter of the
twentieth century are not those of the first and second quarters, let
alone those of the thirteenth century.
Consequently, a
textbook that aims to present a Thomist philosophy of human nature must
meet many difficult requirements. It simply cannot be put together out
of snippets of texts, culled at random from St. Thomas's closely
integrated works. St. Thomas's thought must be re-thought in the modern
setting. Great effort must be made to present the basic evidences
unmistakably and in such an order that the student is able, most likely
to gain a truly intellectual and philosophic insight into human nature.
Finally, as many of the major contemporary problems must be met as is
consistent with the abilities of the author and the student and the
limitations of class time available.
Excerpt: Ethics is an
introduction to moral science in several ways. It is introductory in the
sense that the initial questions, problems, and distinctions of moral
knowledge are raised: the problem of the ultimate end, the distinction
of ends and means, the notion of virtue and the distinction of its
various kinds, and the problem of moral knowledge and prudence. These
and other matters are fundamental and necessarily prior to the
consideration and analysis of other moral and practical problems.
In a more specific
sense, ethics is introductory insofar as it precedes political
philosophy. Politics and ethics may be considered as parts of moral
philosophy, since both consider human actions as ordered to an end.
They differ in that ethics deals with actions of individual human
beings as directed to an ultimate end, while politics deals with actions
of the members of a political society as ordered to an ultimate end. In
the study of ethics we see that the realization of an ultimate end for
man demands social and political life, and in this way ethics leads to
politics.
Ethics leads also to
moral theology, and this is another way in which it is introductory to
moral science. Ethics is based on principles known by reason alone and
deals with human acts as directed to a natural end. Moral theology is
based on revealed principles accepted by faith and deals with human
acts as directed to a super-natural end, the vision of God. While it is
true that human beings need revealed moral doctrine in order to achieve
the supernatural end to which they are ordered, it is also true that
moral theology presupposes the reasoned grasp of natural moral doctrine,
for the truths of moral theology are not intelligible in a scientific
way with-out a comprehension of the moral truths available to human
reason. On the one hand, this book is written in such a way that it
easily leads to moral theology, not by confusing ethics with moral
theology, but by distinguishing ethics from moral theology in order to
see the complementary relationship between the two sciences. On the
other hand, the position is taken throughout the book—and argued
explicitly in several places—that ethics as a science is adequate to
attain truths about the natural moral order.
This book is an
introduction also in the sense that it remains, for the most part,
general in its treatment. It does not explicitly cover material
contained in what is often called "special ethics," the specific
application of moral principles and distinctions to particular problems,
as in business ethics, medical ethics, and so on. Such areas are
important parts of moral doctrine, deserving of separate and extensive
treatment. They are best treated, however, if the general, fundamental
principles and distinctions of moral knowledge are first understood in
their full exposition as covered by ethics. For many persons, then,
ethics is the introduction to more specialized areas of human activity
in which they will be professionally engaged.
Still another sense in
which ethics should be considered as preliminary is as an introduction
to the concrete order of singular action. This point needs stressing
because there is a common misapprehension that the knowledge of ethics
alone—or the knowledge of moral theology as well—should guarantee a
person's being morally good in his actions by providing complete and
certain solutions to all courses of action to be taken here and now. In
the completely practical order of singular action, each person's
rectified will is a prerequisite for good moral action. No one,
therefore, can justifiably expect ethics to make him good. On the other
hand, with a reasoned grasp of moral doctrine, one will be much better
prepared to approach his own moral situations and problems than he would
be without any understanding of moral science.
At present there are
at least four prevailing tendencies among writers in the field of moral
philosophy. One view holds that ethics is "normative" and cannot be a
science; all that one can do scientifically is to give a logical
analysis of certain moral terms. Careful analysis of terms in moral
discourse is necessary, of course, and I have sought to retain this
important part of philosophical investigation. At the same time, I have
attempted to keep such an analysis in the context of ethics as a
practical science, and not to present it as only a logical or semantic
problem. A second position adopts a purely empirical and subjective view
of ethics, as though it were nothing more than statements of likes and
dislikes. The third position offers a rationalistic and sometimes purely
theoretical view of ethics as a science. Finally, some Christian authors
tend to give a theological exposition of moral philosophy, mixing
theological and philosophical elements to a point where they are no
longer distinguishable.
My aim is to recapture
ethics as it was originally conceived to be —a practical science based
on reasoning derived from common experience, though considering
speculative truths as any science must necessarily do. I have also
sought to reassert the primary role of virtue in moral doctrine.
Consequently, I have followed closely the order of Aristotle in his
Nicomachean Ethics, thereby acknowledging that his work still
remains the best formulation of the practical science of ethics. I have
often followed just as closely the commentary on this work by St.
Thomas Aquinas, who clearly had the same opinion of the worth of
Aristotle's ethics as a science of natural moral doctrine. While I am
thus indebted to Aristotle and St. Thomas on almost every page, I have
not quoted them directly, since the soundness of what they say is
evident on the only authority relevant here—reason itself. However, at
the end of each chapter, I have given the appropriate references to
Aristotle's Ethics and to the accompanying commentary of St. Thomas. The
one exception is the chapter on law, which is drawn principally from the
Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas, though I have followed a
philosophical order in the exposition of law. Other readings are also
cited, though purely in a suggestive manner. Some of these readings are
in more or less conformity with the text itself; others are offered as
contrasting views. For the most part, the selections are chosen with an
eye to their easy availability.
Volume 6:
The Scientific Art of Logic:
An Introduction to the Principles of Formal and Material Logic by
Edward D. Simmons, 1961
Excerpt: This text in
logic is one of the first contributions to the new Christian Culture and
Philosophy Series. The book is designed generally to serve the end of
the Series, and particularly to make available to undergraduate students
and their instructors an elementary, but scientific, presentation of the
principles of both formal and material logic. The order follows the
division of logic into the logic of the first, second, and third
operations of the intellect. In each section, significant logical
relations, both formal and material, are examined. Since any scientific
inquiry requires hard intellectual labor, it is inevitable that a
scientific presentation of logic will entail some difficulty for the
student. Yet this is as it must be. Formal logic is easier than material
logic, but formal logic alone is an inadequate instrument of the
intellect for rational discourse. Since most students take only one
course in logic, it is imperative, despite the difficulties involved,
that in it they be introduced to material as well as formal logic.
Since scientific
inquiry is intellectually taxing, some might argue that the art of logic
could be acquired much more easily in an elementary course apart from
its science rather than along with it. However, the art and science of
logic are indistinguishably one. Unless the rules of logical procedure
are scientifically grounded in incontrovertible first principles of the
logical order, they cannot adequately serve as principles either for a
critique of or defense for scientific discourse. The propriety of a
logical process could not be adequately defended by an appeal to a rule
of logic unless that rule were itself self-evident or scientifically
resolved into what is self-evident. Thus, it is an illusion to think
that the art of logic could be acquired in any adequate fashion apart
from the science of logic. Consequently, this text attempts to present
scientifically the basic principles of both formal and material logic.
Its proximate end is to generate in its users an intellectual habit
which will serve as an adequate instrument for rational discourse,
especially in the other sciences.
This book is not
overly difficult, despite what has been said. The point rather is that
it is not easy — but neither is logic. It is rigorous — so is logic.
More to the point, it can be used successfully only by students who are
prepared to put some effort into their work — so too logic cannot be
acquired without effort. Every attempt has been made to make the
presentation as straightforward as possible, given the intrinsically
rigorous character of the subject matter. The opening chapter is
designed, among other things, to give the student some appreciation of
the nature and divisions of logic so as to orient him for the course to
follow. The final chapter is devoted exclusively to the nature of logic.
It is felt that at least a semester's work in logic is a prerequisite
for any penetrating analysis of the nature of logic. In both the opening
and final chapters there is a discussion of the division of logic into
the logic of the three operations of the intellect. It is according to
this division of logic that the book is divided into three parts. The
opening chapter in each part includes an investigation into the nature
of the intellectual operation from which that part gets its name. The
remaining chapters in each part take up the logical theory pertinent to
the part in question. Throughout, an effort has been made to offer
sufficient examples so that the usefulness of the logical theory under
discussion can be seen in a concrete setting. Each chapter is followed
by exercises, which are designed to assist the student to appreciate the
meaning and force of the logical theory presented in that chapter. No
teacher is ever fully satisfied with another man's exercises, and every
teacher has some of his own to offer to his students. However, the
exercises suggested in this book are varied enough, both in format and
in degree of difficulty, so that every teacher will find them to a
greater or less degree of some help for his students. It is the teacher,
not the textbook, who determines the program of his course. Any teacher
may find that there are things treated in this book which he chooses not
to include in his course. Thus, for example, a teacher might choose to
pass over the discussion of the truth-functional proposition, or,
perhaps, to omit the final chapter on the nature of logic. Perhaps some
teacher may choose to omit some of the more difficult matter in some of
the chapters. With this in mind several chapters have been ordered so
that the more difficult matter is treated separately from the rest.
Thus, in the chapter on relations between propositions, the case of the
singular proposition — which offers many difficulties — is taken up
separately. Again, since an elementary text cannot take up every
question, the author has omitted any detailed discussion of the types of
analogy and has discussed only the relations of the simply attributive
categorical proposition in the chapter on relations between
propositions. A teacher using this book may feel it necessary to
supplement it with his own treatment of the division of analogy into its
types and/or his own treatment of logically related modal propositions
or compound propositions. Nonetheless, it has seemed to the author,
after some years of experience in the teaching of elementary logic, that
the subjects treated in this book are, for the most part, those which
generally should and can be handled in an elementary course covering a
semester's time.
Like many other
textbooks, this is written within the context of the Aristotelian
tradition. Thus, it bears an understandably basic resemblance to many
other logic books. The rules of validity for the categorical syllogism
have not changed since they were discovered by Aristotle. We are not
scandalized, then, to find them repeated faithfully from textbook to
textbook. They are not listed differently here. Yet this text does have
several distinctively different features. As we have said, it is not
limited to formal logic. Again it aims at the acquisition of the art of
logic through the science. of logic and not apart from the science of
logic. The second part of the book includes a study of the hypothetical
proposition. Among the problems taken up in this chapter are the
following: Why cannot hypothetical propositions in the strict sense be
truth-functional? What is the significance of a truth-functional
proposition? How can symbols and even truth tables be profitably
employed both for hypotheticals strictly taken and truth-functional
propositions? In the logic of the third operation the chapter on the
demonstrative syllogism and the consideration of self-evident
propositions in the chapter on induction represent treatments necessary
for an adequate course in logic which are either omitted or given scant
attention in most logic textbooks. The final chapter, on the nature of
logic, is an attempt to investigate this difficult subject matter on a
level beyond that usually reached in logic textbooks which speak of the
nature of logic only at the beginning of the book.
The book is within the
Aristotelian tradition in the sense that, for primary sources, it owes
most to the Organon of Aristotle and to logicians who have
commented on the Organon and who have attempted to develop their
own logical theory from that of Aristotle. The chapters on the
categories, on the categorical proposition, on the categorical
syllogism, on the demonstrative syllogism, and on fallacious
argumentation owe most to Aristotle's Categories, On Interpretation,
Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, and On Sophistical Refutations.
Several chapters are indebted to Aristotle's Topics, especially those
which treat of definition, division, and dialectical argumentation. The
chapter on the predicables is first of all indebted to Porphyry's
Introduction to the Categories of Aristotle. Other primary sources
include the commentaries of St. Thomas on the On Interpretation and
Posterior Analytics of Aristotle, the commentaries of both St. Albert
and Cajetan on several of the logical works of Aristotle, and John of
St. Thomas' Logical Art.
A Philosophy of Hope: Josef Pieper and the Contemporary Debate on Hope
by Bernard N. Schumacher, translated by David C. Schindler (Moral
Philosophy and Moral Theology, 5: Fordham University Press) Josef Pieper
was one of this century's most influential thinkers. A leading Catholic
philosopher and authority on Thomas Aquinas, his writings have won a
wide audience through such books as The Four Cardinal Virtues and About
Love.
This important book is one of few extended studies
of Pieper's thought—in particular, of his contributions to a philosophy
of hope. Pieper was one of the first modern philosophers to explore the
idea of hope in human life, and Schumacher discusses his development
alongside contributions by Sartre, Jaspers, Marcel, Heidegger, Bloch,
and other thinkers.
Ranging across the
full body of Pieper's work, Schumacher systematically examines Pieper's
treatment of hope in the larger context of the debates about hope in
every major Western tradition. Pieper's originality, Schumacher
demonstrates, is to have emphasized an ontology of not-yet-being as the
foundation of hope, and to find a way to reconcile two disparate
conceptions of hope—as an individual's relation to possibility and as an
historical dimension of human life.
Schumacher looks at
hope as a virtue, one opposed by vices such as despair and presumption,
particularly as they are treated in existentialism and Marxism. He also
explores Pieper's treatment of hope in relation to the ideas of death
and immorality, and in the philosophy of history. Using the idea of hope
to examine such themes as dignity, ethics, the good, and the just,
Schumacher provides a valuable, wide-ranging introduction to a shaper of
contemporary Christian thought against a richly drawn intellectual
background.
Excerpt: The theme of
human hope has been put to a severe test at the end of the millennium, a
period characterized by a certain pessimism and accompanied by a growing
uncertainty about the future of human progress and the dignity of the
human person. We need think only of the tragedies scattered throughout
the twentieth century: Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Rwanda, the former
Yugoslavia, and so on. In an age of nuclear weaponry, we find it
difficult to imagine how those in the past could seriously affirm that
mankind was making steady and confident progress toward a better state,
and how they did not even consider the possibility that the opposite
could be the case. Indeed, Lady Hope enjoyed a certain success once she
donned the optimistic garb of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
philosophers of progress. In particular, she was viewed as the
fundamental impetus of the historical dynamism of mankind in its march
toward what Kant calls the "ethical community," or what Bloch calls the
"New Jerusalem." Toward the end of the nineteenth century, this
hope—that is, optimism about progress toward improvement, which Turgot,
Condorcet, Kant, Marx, and Comte all predicted—began to give way to the
rise of the nihilism expressed by Nietzsche, and later to the
contemporary current of nihilistic existentialism. Hope was treated as
an illusion, a vice, a poisoned gift, a curse that the gods had
inflicted upon the human being. It was described as a promise that could
not be kept, a beautiful idea bereft of any concrete reality, a folly,
an opiate, and even as the greatest enemy, the worst of evils. Certain
thinkers have even gone so far as to affirm that Nietzschean nihilism is
the epoch-defining event of the beginning of the millennium, which marks
the culmination of a universal movement.
This rise of despair
has provoked, in turn, a reaction in defense of the primacy of hope,
which occupies a decisive place at the dawning of the third millennium.
This defense focuses not only, as the philosophers of progress did, on
the relation between hope and the historical development of the human
species with a view to the end of this development, but also on the
concrete human individual in relation to his future, which is the aspect
the ancients considered in their treatment. Indeed, the majority of
contemporary philosophers who deal with this subject maintain that the
act and the object of hope are not only collective, but also personal.
Nevertheless, the
theme of hope is not a uniquely modern concern; it has been the focus of
many studies over the course of Western history. Already in ancient
Greece, one finds various attempts to define it in different historical
periods, distinguishing it, for example, from expectation and from
desire, and integrating trust into its meaning. The Fathers of the
Church and the Scholastics approach it from a theological perspective,
while some also analyze hope (espoir) as a passion. Though Descartes,
Spinoza, Leibniz, Hobbes, and Locke devote little attention to the
subject, hope reemerges once again as a theme in modern thought in the
writings of Kant, for whom it constitutes one of the four principal
questions to which the philosopher has an obligation to respond, and
also represents a concern for Hume, Mill, and Kierkegaard.
Nevertheless, Bloch
was not altogether incorrect in asserting that the theme of hope was "as
unexplored as the Antarctic" before the 1956 publication of his The
Principle of Hope. Indeed, in the history of philosophy, hope has never
been a dominant theme; it was generally treated, if at all,
"incidentally," just as it continues to be treated today among the
majority of philosophers. And yet, given the urgency of the contemporary
historical situation, which manages too often to drive people to
despair, it is surprising that such a topic would not have provoked
more reflection in philosophy, which has for its part too often and too
quickly abandoned the theme to sociology, psychology, or theology. But
hope is philosophically significant by virtue of the fact that it
constitutes a fundamental and central mode of human existence; it is the
principal driving force of the historical-temporal human being in via. A
human being without hope is like a walking corpse, which is both
physiologically and metaphysically absurd.
In fact, there are a
number of different twentieth-century philosophical analyses of human
hope that appeared long before Bloch's remarkable encyclopedic
reflection. The subject of human hope has been approached from various
perspectives: ethics, anthropology, phenomenology, politics, and
metaphysics. Some develop an ontology of not-yet-being as the foundation
undergirding the act of hope; some work out a more clearly defined
understanding of the nature of hope by distinguishing it from desire and
expectation; some discuss its status as a passion and as a virtue,
interpreting it both at the personal and at the communal level.
The purpose of the
present study is, on the one hand, to come to an understanding of the
German philosopher Josef Pieper's view of hope, and, on the other hand,
to set this view into dialogue with other con-temporary understandings.
To achieve this purpose, I did not restrict myself to the works Pieper
explicitly devoted to hope alone; instead, I took a more general
approach, and considered his oeuvre as a whole. This has allowed me
better to situate Pieper's understanding of hope within the broader
context of his thought and to bring out certain points or underlying
ontological and anthropological foundations, which the philosopher
himself did not work out in detail in the works specifically devoted to
hope. Indeed, an adequate grasp of his position requires a deep and
comprehensive reading of all of his writings. Moreover, on occasion I
had to read between the lines, which was in many cases the last resort
for grasping the most profound dimension of his thinking. "What is
self-evident is not discussed" is Pieper's watch-word; we can complement
this observation with Heidegger's affirmation that the doctrine of any
particular philosopher lies in the "unsaid in what is said." An
interpretation of a text ought also to bring out what the author sought
to express without saying it explicitly; it ought to lay bare the
fundamental intuitions that underlie his thought and run through
everything he does in fact say.
In order to illuminate
both the originality and the controversial aspects of Pieper's position
on the various issues concerning hope, I have set it in dialogue with
those contemporary philosophers who have
treated the topic
since the beginning of the twentieth century. I did not limit myself to
the authors whom Pieper himself discussed and from whom he drew
inspiration—for example, Gabriel Marcel and Ernst Bloch—but I also
included authors to whom he did not refer, and who belong to various
philosophical schools spanning several decades. In addition to the
existentialist-neo-Marxist debate, I also took account of
phenomenological, analytic, and Anglo-Saxon analyses, as well as
different psychological, medical, or psychiatric studies insofar as it
was possible. This method not only allowed me better to situate Pieper's
thought within the heart of the philosophy of the twentieth
century—emphasizing not only his unique contribution, but also his
inadequacies and omissions—but also better to understand the nature of
human hope in a systematic way.
With Marcel and Bloch,
Pieper contributed to the rediscovery of the ontological foundation of
human hope; he articulated an ontology of not-yet-being, which is
accompanied by an eschatological dimension expressing the internal
structure of human nature ordered toward a future. He thus represents in
a certain way one of the pioneers among the twentieth-century
philosophers of hope in the rediscovery, not only of the importance of
the ontological concept of human existence in via (for which he draws
inspiration as much from Thomas Aquinas and Przywara as from Heidegger)
for understanding hope, but also of the way to approach it. To be sure,
several books and articles on hope were already in existence before the
appearance of his first work devoted to the theme, published in 1935 and
showing signs of his youth. But these were either theological, or they
did not show the intrinsic connection between an ontology of
not-yet-being and hope.
It is thus
historically false to claim that Bloch and Marcel were alone responsible
for reinstating hope as a philosophical problem, or to maintain that, to
date, the philosophical problem of hope has not yet been dealt with, as
Bloch does with some presumption in the preface to his The Principle
of Hope, ignoring all of the philosophies of hope that open up with
transcendence toward the transcendent. Nevertheless, it is true that
Pieper, inspired by Marcel and provoked by Bloch, completes and deepens
his philosophy of hope only after the Second World War, when he enters
into a fruitful discussion with contemporary philosophers of hope and
of the absurd.
In the world of
philosophy, Pieper also represents something of a pioneer in the way he
understands the virtues and their importance for the total fulfillment
of the person, an approach that became fashionable only in the 1980s,
with the appearance of Maclntyre's celebrated book, After Virtue.
Just after the war, Pieper also developed a theory of leisure and
celebration, which for him is intrinsically connected to the
distinction between the attitude of theoria and that of praxis. His
notion of theoria also provides the foundation for his understanding of
human hope, insofar as hope is unable to achieve its object simply on
the basis of the individual's own resources, but also requires a gift
from the other.
Disturbed by the
shadows of history and the existential shocks of Auschwitz and
Hiroshima, in which the human being became, for the first time in
history, as Anders remarks, "the master of the apocalypse," Pieper looks
for a foundation for a philosophy of hope. He adopts a position that is
not only opposed to the nihilists who proclaim that the Nothing is
better than being and that existence is an imperfection and absurdity,
but also to the social religions that in the name of science or of
praxis promise perfect and endless happiness, the construction of the
"New Jerusalem" on earth.
This is one of the
reasons why today [in 1950], at a time of temptations to despair, it may
appear necessary to bring into view a notion of the End in which an
utterly realistic freedom from illusion not only does not contradict
hope but in which the one serves to confirm and corroborate the other.
Hope thus constitutes
one of the cornerstones of Pieper's philosophy; and yet, of the many
works that have been published on his philosophy, not one of them has
yet taken up this theme as its central focus. One finds studies on
goodness and reality, on leisure and celebration, on the university,
on the virtues in general, on philosophy and poetry, on truth, or even
on anthropology. Moreover, there have not been any works to date that
have tried to take account of and synthesize the various currents of
contemporary thought on the theme of hope. The great majority of studies
focus on one or two authors (Bloch or Marcel, to mention only the two
most important), or else they treat only the studies published in a
particular language, or remain within a particular school of thought
(existentialism, neo-Marxism, phenomenology, neo-Thomism, or analytic
philosophy).
The first chapter of
the present study analyzes the ontological foundations of a philosophy
of hope; chapters two through five treat the nature, the
characteristics, the object, the content, the reason, and the
justification of human hope, as well as contrasting attitudes; finally,
the sixth chapter explores the relationship between hope and history in
light of the ultimate end of history.
Chapter one lays out
the ontological and anthropological foundations undergirding a
philosophy of hope. On the basis of the distinction between res
naturalis and res artificialis, on the one hand, and between
a metaphysics of theoria and a metaphysics of praxis, on the
other, it is possible to inquire into the origin of human nature, as
Sartre and Pieper have done, and more particularly, to ask whether this
nature is characterized by a fully autonomous and a priori freedom or
whether by a freedom inscribed within a natural inclination toward the
complete (determinable) fulfillment of the individual. The two authors
share an anthropology in which the human being is essentially project
ed, either freely (according to Sartre) or in a manner that is both free
and determinate (according to Pieper), toward the future, the place
wherein the human being realizes his possibilities. The human being is
fundamentally possibility or project. He hopes to become or to possess
what he has himself freely projected into the future, or that toward
which he has been projected. This inclination and openness toward the
future of possibilities, which form the basis of a philosophy of hope,
have their roots in an ontology of not-yet-being (Heidegger, Bloch,
Pieper), which is in turn rooted in Heidegger's notion of the
existentiell temporality of Dasein. According to Pieper and
Bloch, the human being hopes to be able to pass from the state of
not-yet-being, that is, of minimal-being to the state of being-more or
being fulfilled. Human hope is intrinsically linked to the itinerant
condition of human existence, which thus always implies existential
uncertainty.
Once the
anthropological and ontological foundations of an analysis of human
hope have been outlined, I offer in the second chapter a definition of
the act of hope by indicating its constitutive properties, as well as by
integrating the diverse perspectives of contemporary philosophers of
hope. Here I raise the question, to what extent is human hope—which is
an intentional movement toward a good, difficult, possible, and future
object distinct from desire and expectation, and to what extent does it
necessarily presuppose an act of belief accompanied by an act of trust?
Next, I ask whether uncertainty regarding the obtainment of the object
hoped for is an essential component of the act of hope. In addition to
the analysis of the elements of fear and love that accompany hope, and
the distinction drawn between hope and optimism, I show that the
structure of hope is inherent both to the philosophical act and to
reason.
The distinction
between hope as espoir, or ordinary hope, and hope as espérance,
or fundamental hope, which is affirmed by the great majority of
authors, forms the theme of chapter three. Taking my bearings from
limit-situations, such as terminal illness, suicide, martyrdom, and
being condemned to death, which can be the occasion for the
manifestation of fundamental hope, I suggest that the object of hope as
espoir is interchangeable, that is, it changes constantly
according to circumstances, while the object of fundamental hope is by
nature unique and identical. While the majority of authors (whether
philosophers, doctors, psychologists, or psychiatrists) qualify the
object of fundamental hope in different ways, it can be defined as the
actualization and complete fulfillment of the person. Hope as espoir is
articulated through an analysis of the relation between it and the
passions (Thomas Aquinas, Hume, and Bloch), which can be accompanied by
moral virtues, such as magnanimity and humility. Fundamental hope can be
considered either as one of Dasein's first principles, or as a virtue.
It is appropriate to raise the question at this point whether the virtue
of hope must be under-stood only as a theological virtue, or, by
contrast, whether there also exists a natural virtue of fundamental
hope. The discussion of this controversial question debated among the
philosophers of hope will be followed by a description of the
relationship between ordinary hope and fundamental hope as one of
dependence and anteriority.
An exploration of
human hope entails, moreover, a discussion of attitudes that form a
contrast with it namely, presumption and despair. Chapter four will
focus its discussion primarily on the attitude of despair, that is, the
expectation of nonfullfillment, which is commonly described as
anticipated death, or a rupture with existence and corning-to-be.
Despair has its roots in the boredom of the Modems and in the acedia of
the Ancients, attitudes that are captured well in the notions of
verbositas and curiositas, which Heidegger vividly described in his
analysis of average-everydayness. In this chapter, despair is then
related to the totalitarian state of work and to leisure. The attitude
of despair raises the delicate problem of the existence of a total and
absolute despair with respect to the fundamental hope that is
constitutive of human Dasein.
I will then turn my
attention in the fifth chapter to one of the essential problems of a
philosophy of hope: death, the "anti-utopia," as Bloch describes it,
which brutally interrupts the projection of possibilities into the
future. Is human Dasein a being-toward-death or a being-toward-hope? In
order to answer this question, we will have to examine the reason for
the fundamental hope that sustains those people who find themselves in
limit situations. In this context, I will primarily set the positions of
Pieper and Bloch into dialogue with one another with respect to the
arguments they set forth in their attempt to overcome the anti-utopia of
death. In doing so, I will bring out both their common points and their
basic divergence, at the same time taking into account once again the
position of contemporary philosophers of hope in today's world.
The sixth and final
chapter is devoted to the relationship between human hope and history
or, more specifically, the end of time. A philosophy of hope is not
concerned solely with the future of the person-al destiny of the
historical-temporal individual, but it must at the same
time—particularly after Hiroshima—formulate a position with respect to
the possibility of the self-destruction of the human race. This
collective death represents a correlate to personal death. While it is
possible to affirm, as Bloch does, a transcendence of personal death,
insofar as man's historical progress continues essentially on its march
toward the "new, earthly Jerusalem," and thus in a certain way to
safeguard the principle of hope, the possibility of global
self-destruction raises the question of the anti-utopia of death in a
new way. There is no consciousness greater than that of the human race
as a whole that would enable us to transcend this "second death." Thus,
what position do we take with respect to the uncertain future of
history? This is one of the most important questions facing us today.
Does the irreducible anti-utopia that finds its symbol in Hiroshima,
that is, the death of humanity, simply wipe out the principle of hope?
Does it necessarily give way to nihilistic despair? Or is transcendence
possible in spite of everything? Will humanity ever attain Bloch's
"homeland," Kant's "ethical community," or even Teilhard's "Omega
point"? The question that is raised once again in this context, just as
it was before withrespect to personal death, is the question of the
reason that founds fundamental hope in light of the end of history:
What reason do the philosophies of progress or of nihilism offer for
affirming that every-thing will turn out well in the end, or that
everything will turn out for the worst? Is it reasonable to hope, or
ought we rather to hand the laurels to the metaphysics of the Nothing
and of despair? Will human history end in bitter defeat or nothingness?
If so, wouldn't it make more sense to commit suicide immediately rather
than wait for the end and suffer needlessly? Or, by contrast, could we
say that the creeds of the various currents of the philosophy of
progress of the last two centuries are correct to advocate an optimism,
which holds that humanity will reach its homeland in spite of personal
death, by means of the trans-formation of the world achieved through
science and reason? Or again, is there a middle position that would
accept the possibility of catastrophe within history, and at the same
time offer a justification for hope? What, when all is said and done, is
the ultimate reason that would provide the foundation for hope, and even
for despair, with respect to both personal and collective death?
Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Etienne Gilson by Francesca
Aran Murphy (Eric Voegelin Institute Series in Political Philosophy:
University of Missouri Press) In Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of
Etienne Gilson, Francesca Aran Murphy tells the story of this French
philosopher's struggle to reconcile faith and reason. In his lifetime,
Gilson often stood alone in presenting Saint Thomas Aquinas as a
theologian, one whose philosophy came from his faith. Today, Gilson's
view is becoming the prevalent one. Murphy provides us with an
intellectual biography of this Thomist leader throughout the stages of
his scholarly development.
Murphy covers more
than a half century of Gilson's life while reminding readers of the
political and social realities that confronted intellectuals of the
early twentieth century. She shows the effects inner-church politics had
on Gilson and his contemporaries such as Alfred Loisy, Lucien Lévy
Bruhl, Charles Maurras, Henri de Lubac, Marie-Dominique Chenu, and
Jacques Maritain, while also contextualizing Gilson's own life and
thoughts in relation to these philosophers and theologians.
These great thinkers,
along with Gilson, continue to be sources of important intellectual
debate among scholars, as do the political periods through which
Gilson's story threads—World Wars I and II, the rise and fall of
Fascism, and the political upheavals of Europe. By placing Gilson's
twentieth-century Catholic life against a dramatic back-ground of
opposed political allegiances, clashing spiritualities, and warring
ideas of philosophy, this book shows how rival factions each used their
own interpretations of Thomas Aquinas to legitimate their conceptions of
the Catholic Church.
In Art and Intellect
in the Philosophy of Etienne Gilson, Murphy shows Gilson's early
openness to the artistic revolution of the Cubist and the Expressionist
movements and how his love of art inspired his existential theology. She
demonstrates the influence that Henri Bergson continued to have on
Gilson and how Gilson tried to bring together the intellectual,
Dominican side of Christianity with the charismatic, experiential
Franciscan side.
Murphy concludes with
a chapter on issues inspired by the Gilsonist tradition as developed by
recent thinkers. This volume makes an original contribution to the study
of Gilson, for the first time providing an organic and synthetic
treatment of this major spiritual philosopher of modern times.
Excerpt: This is an
"intellectual life" of Étienne Gilson. The "intellect" follows a
thematic order, but lives are chronological. I have tried to give both
chronology and thematicism their due, for certain intellectual themes
shaped Gilson's life. The thematic currents all flow from one historical
fact, the French modernist crisis. Gilson was an impressionable nineteen
year old when the modernist crisis began in France. It was like being
nineteen during the French Revolution, or like being a real-life Johnny
Tremaine at the start of the American Revolution. One can hardly imagine
a real Johnny Tremaine putting it all behind him when the War of
American Independence concluded. This book tries to show how Gilson was
marked throughout his life by his reactions to modernism…
Gilson served his
apprenticeship in philosophical realism by studying textual, historical
facts. We will see how Gilson's first, historical studies of Descartes
and Thomas Aquinas led him toward a realistic epistemology, which does
not provide its own foundation, or "script," but requires the prompting
of faith. Gilson worked as a historian for a quarter of a century before
he began writing philosophy books. Rather than noting all of Gilson's
historical writings, the book leads in with a few that best symbolize
his historical research, like his studies of Descartes and Thomas.
Chronology enables one to show how one thing leads to another, and I
have selected for description those Gilsonian histories that had some
causative influence on his philosophical thought.
In the midst of the
modernist crisis, the Parisian Gilson learned to love the new art forms
that were being invented by Picasso, the cubists, and the
expressionists. Appreciation for the modernist painters helped Gilson to
write his first truly beautiful historical book, his study of the
Franciscan Bonaventure. However much he protested the historical
accuracy of his Thomism, Gilson's own philosophy was profoundly colored
by a Franciscan spirituality that inches towards the surreal and
trans-rational. In the 1920s, Thomism became fashionable in France, its
promoters putting themselves forward as defenders of reason in their
culture war against "irrationalism." Gilson was at edge with this
self-understanding. It was in the mid-1920s that Gilson wrote his first
defense of the intrinsic urge of the natural human mind for supernatural
vision.
If this set him
somewhat apart from contemporaries like Jacques Maritain, the debate
about the possibility of Christian philosophy that took place in France
in the early 1930s made the two men friends. It also initiated Gilson's
transition from historian to philosopher. He began to argue that
Christianity can combine with philosophy, because Christians make
better realists than do their nonbelieving friends. Henri de Lubac was
almost alone in appreciating the uniqueness of this presentation of
Christian philosophy, that Gilson was staking the debate on the
heightened metaphysical reality of nature as revealed in the Old
Testament scripture, not on the epistemological foundations or
spiritual edification supplied to the philosopher by his religious
beliefs. In that debate, and in the brilliant books that flowed out of
it, Gilson used arguments that look historical but are really neat
philosophy, a philosophy of "graced factuality." It was in the
mid-1930s that America recognized Gilson's achievement as one who had
shown the unity of faith and reason. This book contends that American
Catholics saw a valuable part of the man, but not the whole. Great actor
that he was, he was well-enough attuned to his audience to know what
they could hear and what they could not. The "Loisy problem" was outside
their auditory range.
As the Second World
War approached and the drums of the French rationalists beat louder in
their support for Hitler's campaign against social modernism, Gilson
argued ever more clearly that realism is grounded, not in the epistemic
clarity of intuition, but in the simple mystery of facts. This elite
intellectual gave some energy in the mid-1930s to writing popular social
and political journalism, trying to turn the tide away from the French
dream of a new dictator who would issue the command for the entire
French population to attend the Mass. Some of Gilson's historical,
mediaevalist opinions, such as his conceptions of Averroës and Dante,
have been surpassed by contemporary scholarship. But if one sees these
writings for what they are, as products of the late 1930s, their
timeless value emerges. For now one can see what Gilson was trying to
get at, politically and philosophically, by posing Averroës as a
rationalist and Dante as an advocate of an emperor who need take no
spiritual, or moral, advice from the church.
It was not by accident
that Gilson discovered his existential Thomism in occupied Paris in
1942. It was the summit of forty years' thought about the errors of
paleoconservativism and about how to ground reason in a faith to which
the call of the transrational sounds like music. Gilson's priest
friends, like the Dominican Marie-Dominique Chenu, had followed him in
working out historical, factual, and existential interpretations of
Aquinas's thought. Others, like de Lubac, had taken his idea that grace
speaks from within nature to their hearts. De Lubac's Surnaturel
(1946) can be seen as a successor volume to Gilson's defenses of
Christian philosophy. Thus there came about, in the late 1940s, the
French "nouvelle théologie," followed almost immediately by its
condemnation. De Lubac's "intrinsicism" was stigmatized in the
encyclical Humani Generis (1950). It was at a Thomist Congress in
1950 that one of the triumphant opponents of new theologies indicated to
Gilson that L'être et l'essence had the modernist tinge. At the
very same time, the remnants of Charles Maurras' monarchist party began
a campaign against Gilson that led to the loss of his retirement
pension.
Throughout the 1950s,
a rather embittered Gilson began to move still further away from this
reactionary Thomism, with its rejection of a "graced nature," to form an
epistolary friendship with de Lubac, the disgraced author of
Surnaturel, and to write a sideways attack on what he saw as a
contemporary, political version of "extrinsicism" in Maritain's
propagandizing for world government. He did not just compose
counterblasts, but a philosophy of particularity.
He also turned the
rudder of his existential philosophy explicitly toward the mystery of
the beautiful, writing seven books about philosophy of art and
aesthetics between 1950 and 1967. The beautiful was the boundless sea on
which he sailed in these years in which, his teaching now on one side,
he could write and meditate about what really mattered. These were also
what I call "grumpy years" for Gilson; for the only aspect of the
spirituality of the Second Vatican Council with which this paradoxical
Pascalian Thomist resonated was the encouragement it gave to
philosophical pluralism. As Randolph Churchill tactlessly remarked to
Pius XII, "None of us is infallible." We conclude by briefly considering
the vivid current life of Gilson's thought within contemporary theology,
especially that inclined to theological aesthetics.
The four themes are,
in fact, continuous throughout Gilson's life; but chronologically, they
cross and recross, appear, disappear and reappear. I tell this
diachronic tale, which does not make a neatly rounded "story," because
the spiritual drama of a man's life is the most direct way of making the
philosophy accessible. Gilson might concur with Hans Urs von
Balthasar's remark that the truths of Christianity are summarized, not
in the catechisms, but in the lives of the saints.
The Ethics of Nature by Celia E. Deane-Drummond (Blackwell
Publishers) (Hardcover)
explores humanity's treatment of the natural world from a Christian
perspective. The book presents a range of ethical debates arising from
our relationship with nature,
including current controversies about the environment, animal rights,
biotechnology, consciousness, and cloning. It sets the immediate issues
in the context of underlying theological and philosophical assumptions,
and draws out broader concerns for social justice. Complex scientific
issues are explained in clear and intelligible language.
Throughout the book, the author draws on primary sources from Thomas
Aquinas, and develops her own distinctive ethical approach. This
demonstrates that a virtue ethic centered on wisdom provides the most
appropriate way to approach the ethics of nature. She has held academic
posts in both plant science and theology, giving her an ideal vantage
point from which to write.
It is the premise of this book that a Christian
approach to ethics is justifiable and offers a distinctive contribution
to moral reflection. How far the content of theology impinges on ethical
reflection has been the subject of much heated debate, for both Catholic
moral theologians and Protestant counterparts. On the one hand, there
are those who argue that we need to begin with the kerygma of Christian
faith, then move on to reflect on various secular alternatives in the
light of such beliefs. Michael Banner is a good example of this method,
drawing particularly on the theology of Karl Barth for his inspiration.
He suggests that:
the task of Christian ethics is to
understand the world and humankind in the light of the knowledge of God
revealed in Jesus Christ, witnessed to by the Scriptures, and proclaimed
by the Creeds, and that Christian ethics may and must explicate this
understanding in its significance for human action through a critical
engagement with the concerns, claims and problems of other ethics.
Given that we can
argue a case for Christian ethics to be a modified version of virtue
ethics, what particular virtues are appropriate to consider? While many
ethicists have resisted any hierarchy of the virtues, Deane-Drummond
suggests that the four cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude
and temperance developed by Thomas Aquinas give a good starting point
for reflection on the ethics of natures. The theological virtues of
love, faith and hope are the foundation of the other virtues, though in
the moral virtues prudence takes priority, in that like love it can also
be described as the `mother' of other virtues. Prudence, in particular,
is at the heart of Aquinas's reflection on moral virtue, for it is
implicit in his own method of dialectical questioning, considering all
the options available before arriving at a reasoned decision that
informs a particular way of life, a life of virtue. While drawing on
Aristotle, Aquinas's view that corruption of reason is impossible to
avoid without an act of God's grace runs counter to his position, and
indeed that of secular philosophical inquiry. Details of theological
debates about the relationship between nature and grace in Thomistic
theology need not concern us here. It is sufficient to note that Thomas
recognized the reality of original sin but refused to endorse the idea
that human nature is eradicated by sin; this would amount to
Manicheanism. Instead, something of the goodness of creation remains,
even while restricting its capacity for the good. Following Augustine,
Aquinas argued for the healing of a disordered nature by grace, but
following the Greek tradition, he also argued for the possibility of
divinization by grace. Keeping such strands together is important in
discussions about the virtues as learned and the virtues received by
divine gift of grace.
Prudence, or practical
wisdom, for Aquinas is the `mother' of all the other cardinal virtues.
In the occidental Christian view Being precedes Truth and Truth precedes
Goodness. It might be hard to imagine that prudence is in any sense a
prerequisite to goodness, since prudence in colloquial use 'carries the
connotation of timorous, small minded self-preservation, of a rather
selfish concern about oneself; hence those who shun danger do so by an
appeal to 'prudence'. In contrast, the classical approach that Aquinas
adopts links prudence specifically with goodness, and moreover there is
no justice or fortitude without the virtue of prudence. Instinctive
inclinations towards goodness become transformed through prudence, so
that prudence gives rise to a perfected ability to make choices as
related to practical matters of human reasoning. Hence the free activity
of humanity is good in so far as it corresponds to the pattern of
prudence. As such prudence is the 'cause, root, mother, measure,
precept, guide and prototype of all ethical virtues, it acts in all of
them, perfecting them to their true nature, all participate in it, and
by virtue of this participation they are virtues Truly human action is
the inward shaping of volition and action by reason perfected in truth.
However, reason is not understood in a narrow sense, it is 'regard for
and openness to reality'. Reality includes both supernatural and natural
reality, so that realization of goodness presupposes knowledge of
reality — simply good intentions are not sufficient. Prudent decisions
have universal and particular/singular components. Universal principles
are given by synderesis, which relates to the naturally
apprehended principles of ethical conduct, or innate conscience. The
love of the good is the message of natural conscience, relating directly
to natural law. Deliberation and judgment are characteristic of the
cognitive stage of prudence, while decision, volition and action
demonstrate its practical nature.
What are the
advantages of a recovery of prudence for reflection on the ethics of
nature? Deane-Drummond suggests that all aspects of the natural world
that she considers in this book do well to be approached through the
category of prudence. The particular facets of prudence that are most
relevant depend on the particular issue under consideration. Yet,
overall, the holistic method implicit in the notion of prudence through
contemplation/consideration, judgement and action is vitally important
to hold together in situations where there is a temptation to split
action from judgement. For example, accurate reflection on environmental
ethics needs due attention to policy-making, to how far such a desirable
end will be achievable in practice. Distortions of prudence may be more
exaggerated in one area rather than another, and Aquinas allows such
distortions to be distinguished by categorizing the different facets of
prudence. In the first place, the ability of prudence to be still, to
deliberate well, is a quality desperately needed in the frenzied search
for new methods and techniques in biological science that are considered
to have particular usefulness for humanity. Deane-Drummond suggests
that taking the time to deliberate and reflect and listen to others by
taking counsel does not come easily to the popular mind, concerned with
instant results and instant gratification of desires. Second, unlike
deontological approaches within Christian ethics that refer to
particular traditions that seem unrelated to practical contexts,
prudence demands full encounter with experience, including the
experience of science, taking time to perceive what is true in the
natural world. Such close attention to reality as perceived in the
scientific world involves a kind of studied attention, a listening to
the Other in nature, without trying to force the natural world to
conform to human categories. While Aquinas restricted his idea of taking
counsel to other human subjects, in the present environmental context it
is essential to try as far as possible to perceive from the perspective
of all creatures, all of whom are loved by God and under God's
providence." Third, prudence invokes not just contemplation of the
world, but positive action as well, action that has in mind the goodness
of God. Consequentialist approaches to the ethics of nature have sought
to frame decisions in terms of costs and benefits, or risks. While
prudence would include some perception of risks where they are known,
the ability to have accurate foresight depends on how far such decisions
promote the overall goal of prudence towards goodness. It is the
character of the agents that is as important as the particular
consequences of individual decisions made. Hence, the good of humanity
is included along with the goods of other creatures. While those who
are not Christian will be able to identify with the goal of goodness, a
Christian virtue ethic springing from prudence will seek to move to a
particular understanding of goodness, one that coheres with the overall
goodness for creation, as well as goodness for humanity. Deane-Drummond
argues that a Christian virtue ethic set in such a context encourages a
wider framework of reference to include the cosmic community, rather
than simply the human community.
A discussion of the
significance of prudence would not be complete without mention of the
three other cardinal virtues of justice, fortitude and temperance.
Justice is often split off from a consideration of virtue ethics, as it
is more commonly associated with rule-based ethics. Onora O'Neill
considers the rival views of justice according to universal principles,
as opposed to virtue ethics with its concern for the particular. She
believes, instead, that justice needs to be inclusive of virtues.
Deane-Drummond suggests, alternatively, from the side of virtue ethics,
that when considered as a virtue to be developed justice gives
consideration of rules and principles a proper place in an overall
ethical framework. In addition, a Christian understanding of justice
differs from that of secular philosophy, so that it needs some further
elaboration. Justice is concerned broadly with the idea that each is
given her or his due. Unlike many other virtues, justice specifically
governs relationships with others, and also unlike other virtues it is
possible to act justly without necessarily having a proper attitude
towards that action. Justice is therefore located in the will, rather,
than the emotions, keeping right relations between individuals others
and between others in community. Aquinas suggests that `justice is the
habit whereby a person with a lasting and constant will renders to each
his due'. A particular rule or pattern for prudence prescribes what is a
just deed according to reason, and if this is written down it becomes
law. One important facet of justice, as Aquinas under-stood it, is that
it acts in a general way, directing the action of all other virtues
towards the common good'
Deane-Drummond argues
throughout this book for a recovery of ways of thinking that are aligned
with virtue ethics, though situated in a broader framework of Wisdom
theology, orientated towards the good understood in terms of the
goodness of God. Aquinas used ways of thinking about the human mind that
could not take into account the newer knowledge arising from
contemporary psychological studies. It is beyond the scope of this book
to explore all areas of the vast spectrum of psychological knowledge in
relation to the development of virtues. Deane-Drummond therefore chose
to focus the question in a specific way and ask in what sense trends in
psychology challenge the possibility of moral agency that is presupposed
in virtue ethics. In addition, Deane-Drummond considers how far
contemporary psychological study actually enlarges the possibility for
moral agency and development of the virtues, arising from a deeper
knowledge of self and mental function. Prudence, in particular, involves
a process from deliberation through to action, and hence moral agency is
integral at all stages of prudential activity. What, for example, are
the particular psychological predispositions needed for valuing the
environment and how might they influence the development of virtues?
Literature on Christian approaches to environmental ethics seems to have
ignored this aspect, perhaps because of the shift away from
anthropocentrism towards holism that Deane-Drummond elaborates. However,
she argues that it is vital to come to terms with the psychological
aspects of human nature if we are to understand ways of fostering more
responsible (virtuous) approaches to the natural world. In addition,
moral agency is a far more important issue when considering ethics
orientated towards virtues compared with other ethical approaches that
focus more specifically on external duties or consequences of human
action. Psychology, situated as it is on the border of neurobiology and
social/cultural studies, can form a natural bridge between science and
religion. It is also important to stress that while some psychologists
are turning to neurobiological studies in order to help to elucidate
human behavior, others resist such a move as unwarranted reductionism.
Deane-Drummond includes scientific discussion of psychology from the
more biological through to the more cultural end of the spectrum,
without presuming any superiority of one over the other, but in order to
open up the debate about our biological and psychological human nature
and moral agency. However, while strides are being made to relate
contemporary psychology to theology, it is disappointing how sparse is
the attention being paid to the possible ethical implications from a
Christian perspective. Christian ethics is not alone in presuming the
freedom of human agency. While it would be impossible to do this
enormous field justice Deane-Drummond intends to use illustrative
examples of psychological literature in the light of philosophical
discussion on the topics in order to ask what this might do to the
elaboration of moral agency and thus the real possibility of the
development of Christian virtues. Of course, Deane-Drummond has explored
what virtues mean from a psychological perspective. However, she
suggests that taking this approach would merely enlarge our
understanding of what it means, for example, to develop wisdom from a
scientific point of view. Deane-Drummond intends to probe those areas of
psychology that are becoming increasingly popular and take on the form
of a myth, in much the same way that genetics could be said to have
acquired mythological status. An ethics of nature needs to be robust
enough to face this challenge and show how, far from reducing human
behavior to scientific analysis, contemporary movements in psychology
can, instead, enliven the way we think about ourselves, our identity and
who we are both in distinctiveness and in kinship relation to other
creatures.
After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism by Fergus Kerr (Blackwell
Publishers) (Paperback)
Written by a leading theologian, this new account of the writings of
Thomas Aquinas and their interpretation by modern commentators reflects
the major revival of interest in his work.
After Aquinas makes available in one volume all the
material necessary for a rounded appreciation of Aquinas's work and his
enduring influence. As well as revisiting Aquinas's own work, Kerr
brings together a range of views that have previously appeared in
disparate places, thereby exploring alternatives to the standard
understanding of Aquinas's writings. This book therefore represents a
major revisionist treatment of Thomism and its significance, combining
useful exposition with original, creative thinking.
After Aquinas will become essential reading for all
undergraduate students and scholars interested in the work of this great
theologian.
This book is one of the most fascinating and
informative books on Thomas to come along in some time. Kerr focuses on
the period beginning with Pope Leo XIII's endorsement of Thomism as a
bulwark against post-Cartesian modernism and subjectivism, and the
division of Thomism into Transcendental (essentially Kantian-informed)
and Existential (anti-Kantian and anti-modern) factions. He shows how
modern Thomism has been shaped by, and is thus largely a product of,
reactions to modern thinkers, such as Descartes, Kant, Heidegger and
other thinkers. He successfully destabilizes the conventional view of
Thomas as important mainly for his theistic proofs (the "five ways") and
natural law theory, not only by arguing that Thomas's arguments are
essentially unintelligible apart from his larger theological purposes,
but that these purposes change the way we understand even his
philosophical importance. The Thomas that emerges in Kerr's account
makes an interesting dialogue partner with contemporary thinkers such as
Martin Heidegger and Karl Barth. Furthermore, he holds his own against
Barth's misguided claims that Thomas's concept of "nature" doesn't take
sin seriously, or that his notion of divine "simplicity" is idolatrous,
or that his concept of "analogia entis" is the invention of Antichrist!
The Thomism that emerges is strikingly at odds with that which we often
encounter in the secular or Protestant "textbook traditions," where
Thomas's God is a barren "First Cause" or abstract "immutable
substance," for example. Once we understand what Thomas means, Kerr
argues, we see that his God is so dynamic that He is more accurately
defined by verbs than by nouns! Kerr offers chatty, and sometimes
wickedly naughty behind-the-scene peeks into controversies that have
shaped modern Thomism, such as the very personal controversy between
Garrigou-Lagrange and de Lubac. He also apprears to be thoroughly
conversant with recent non-Catholic theology (for example, such as the
work of the Lutheran theologian, Robert Jensen, or the New Finnish
interpretation of Luther's notion of justification as close to the Greek
idea of "theosis"-- an idea for which Kerr finds some parallel in
Thomas's view of sanctification). He is, of course, intimately familiar
with the usual suspects--the Catholic standards (Gilson, Chenu,
Maritain, Von Balthasar).
Excerpt: The hard question is to account for the
rival ways of reading Thomas. The mid-nineteenth-century revival of
interest, primarily in his supposedly Aristotelian philosophy, was
intended to put it to use in containing and eradicating the supposedly
Cartesian/Kantian subjectivist individualism by which Roman Catholic
thinkers were then attracted. This use of Thomas, as we saw in chapter
2, remains effective in the context of analytic philosophy. It may,
however, soon have to deal with a threat from medieval scholarship:
anachronism is always a risk when one calls on earlier thinkers to
refute current arguments. Anyway, the standard outsider's view of Thomas
owes everything to Leonine Thomism: at worst, `arid Aristotelianism', at
best a combination of natural theology and natural law ethics which
satisfies some and repels others.
On the inside, so to speak, among those educated in
institutions where Leonine Thomism was all but mandatory, it was being
rejected by the 1920s. Initiated by such remarkable interpreters as
Pierre Rousselot and Joseph Maréchal, many students of Thomas concluded
that Cartesian/Kantian philosophy could not be outwitted by being
regarded as a total mistake; rather, Thomas had to be reread in the
light of modern philosophical considerations. The `Copernican
revolution' inaugurated by Kant, in his focus on the active role of the
knower and the autonomy of the moral agent, turned out, in this
rereading, to be anticipated in Thomas's conception of the natural drive
of the mind towards truth and being. Far from being a supposedly
empiricist epistemology, with the 1 mind being conformed to things in
the world, Thomas viewed every act of knowing and choosing as implicitly
knowing and choosing the truth and goodness which is the mystery of the
divine being. This generated transcendental Thomism.' Kant's analysis of
experience is `transcendental', in the sense of getting behind actual
experience to lay bare the conditions which make it possible at all.
This reading of Thomas disclosed the a priori conditions that Thomas
took for granted in his understanding of human experience: namely, that
in every act of knowing and loving the human being is tacitly and no
doubt mostly unwittingly growing closer to (or further away from) God.
In a somewhat different way, theologians of the
same generation, notably Henri de Lubac, reconnected Thomas's thought
with the patristic tradition: in short, as we saw in chapter 8,
retrieving his under-standing of the human spirit as created in the
divine image and naturally desiring the face-to-face vision of God which
of course can be granted only as a gift. This puts an end to the
two-storey view of grace and nature, setting the two over against each
other, in favor of under-standing human life under divine grace as the
perfection of human nature. Opponents of this view feared that human
nature as always already graced, human reason as always already
anticipating beatific vision, and human desire as always already
fulfilled in charity, smoothes out the tensions and contradictions and
risks allowing nature, reason and desire to collapse into grace, faith
and charity – or, by naturalizing the latter, turning Christian life
into a form of secular humanism.
In his book on Karl Barth, Hans Urs von Balthasar
rejected `sawdust Thomism' in favour of de Lubac's retrieval of Thomas's
doctrine of natural desire for God. Balthasar's main concern, however,
was to put Thomas's thought back into the context of the entire Western
meta-physical tradition, understanding this as repeated disclosure of
the divine goodness, truth and beauty, consummated in the
self-revelation of God in the Christian dispensation of grace. Above
all, Balthasar sought to bring out the importance of Thomas's insistence
on the distinction in creatures between their nature and their
existence, or, rather, on the complete absence of any such distinction
in God.
Thomas, we may agree, is a transitional figure:
later than the monastic theology and sacramental sense of the world
which we find still in the early thirteenth century, earlier than the
fourteenth-century developments that opened tensions and contradictions
between nature and grace, reason and faith, and so on, leading
eventually to the rejection (in the West) of Aristotle and Christian
Platonism. It is not easy, nowadays, to believe in the harmony of reason
and faith for which the High Middle Ages, or at least Thomas Aquinas,
were once celebrated. It remains an option, on the other hand, to take
Thomas either as a key figure in the development of modern theology or
as primarily a continuator of pre-modernity. He can be read as
inaugurating modern philosophy of religion, but only if his conceptual
apparatus, and in particular his understanding of causality and
substance, are assumed to anticipate the standard modern view. If, on
the other hand, he has a notion of agent causality, and of
self-diffusive substance, we find ourselves on a different hermeneutic
line altogether.
Similarly with his conception of moral theology as
principally an ethics of divine beatitude, and with his conception of
sanctification as deified creaturehood, we are once again reading Thomas
in the light of theological traditions he inherited, rather than in that
of modern and in particular post-Reformation problems.
Sometimes, no doubt, this or that interpretation
must be regarded as simply mistaken. On the whole, however, more complex
factors are at play. For those who have been trained in analytic
philosophy, and are inclined to accept Frege's principle that `existence
is not a predicate', Thomas's talk of `Being' will (as Anthony Kenny
says) be `sophistry and illusion'. On the other hand, for those who
believe Heidegger's grand narrative about the forgetfulness of Being in
the metaphysical tradition, Thomas's talk of `Being' will either be
`idolatry' or (with Balthasar) the wonderful exception to Heidegger's
rule. While there are recent attempts to show that analytic philosophy
and hermeneutic/deconstructionist philosophies are not as radically
incommensurable as they look, it seems unlikely that students of Thomas
from these rival traditions will ever take each other very seriously,
let alone come to any common understanding.
Perhaps we should rescue Thomas from philosophy
altogether – but then, after all, he is a great philosopher, indeed that
is one of the sources of the ambivalence of his thought. He is a
philosopher and he is a theologian, and we are never going to agree
where to put the emphasis.
In short, as some readings of his natural law
theory seem to show, incommensurable yet equally plausible, Thomas's
thought, perhaps over a range of issues, contains within itself the
Janus-like ambiguities that generate competing interpretations which can
never be reconciled. Working out a doctrine of God and of creation in
conjunction with Jewish and Islamic metaphysics, a Latin theologian in
the new university environment referring all the time to great monastic
theologians of the Eastern Church, a Catholic theologian haunted by
Catharist dualism, more concerned to protect the faith of friends in the
arts faculty against Islamicized Aristotelianism than to avoid alarming
his colleagues in divinity with his Aristotelian insights – all along
the line Thomas's work, we may surely say, offers readers today little
of the `synthesis' and `equilibrium' for which it was widely admired 50
years ago, but, on the contrary, reveals a loose-endedness in its
constantly repeated discussions of finally unresolvable problems:
`straw', Thomas called his work, in comparison with the knowledge of God
for which he hoped and prayed; sketches, we may say, that he made in the
course of his long and involved journeyings.
The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas edited by Norman Kretzmann,
Eleonore Stump (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy: Cambridge University
Press) (Hardcover)
As always, Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump deliver another masterful
work together. Each of these writers are experts in their philosophical
field of Medieval Metaphysics and philosophy. For anyone interested in
gaining a better grasp of one of the greatest philosophers in the
history of philosophy, this volume will certainly help. Kretzmann and
Stump have edited this volume and included some of the preeminent
Thomistic philosophers of the last 40 years. Chapters cover Aquinas'
thoughts on ethics, metaphysics, Aristotle and Aquinas, Aquinas' theory
of knowledge, law and politics and theological issues. Thus, the
essentials of Aquinas are here in one volume. Moreover, his is an
excellent work for those who would like to dig deeper and gain a more
thorough understanding of Aquinas, or for those who would like to simply
be "peeping Thomists" and get a small glimpse of what Aquinas espoused.
Among the great philosophers of the Middle Ages Aquinas is unique in
pursuing two apparently disparate projects. On the one hand he developed
a philosophical understanding of Christian doctrine in a fully
integrated system encompassing all natural and supernatural reality. On
the other hand, he was convinced that Aristotle's philosophy afforded
the best available philosophical component of such a system. In a
relatively brief career Aquinas developed these projects in great detail
and with an astonishing degree of success. In this volume ten leading
scholars introduce all the important aspects of Aquinas' thought,
ranging from its historical background and dependence on Greek, Islamic,
and Jewish philosophy and theology, through the metaphysics,
epistemology and ethics, to the philosophical approach to Biblical
commentary. New readers and nonspecialists will find this the most
convenient, accessible guide to Aquinas currently in print. Advanced
students and specialists will find a conspectus of recent developments
in the interpretation of Aquinas.
By gathering up some of the top Aquinas scholars in the field,
this volume presents the major topics of Aquinas' work in a lucid,
considered, and (most importantly) easily understood way. While
certainly not comprehensive (that is not its aim, and after all, the
book would be another 500 pages at least), any potential Thomist scholar
would be greatly served by this volume. Not only do the various authors
give the reader a general overview of Thomas' thought and development,
they also introduce some of the disputes going on within academic
Thomist studies. As such, this volume is a good starting point for those
interested in Aquinas, be it an academic interest or an desire to learn
about the life and thought of a Doctor of the Church.
Admittedly, one should not try and delve into this book with no
previous background into Thomas' thought. It does presume some level of
familiarity with the terminology Aquinas gained from Aristotle, as well
as from the Church Fathers and others. Given this, a general background
in philosophy and/or patristic/scholastic theology should suffice for
most of the work.
Aquinas by Ralph M. McInerny (Polity Press) (Paperback)
A briefer but no less authoritative introduction to the life and
central Aristotelian significance Aquinas, McInerny provides deft look
into the central contemporary significance of the philosopher and
theologian, with a definite leaning toward the philosophical. This book
is a lively and highly accessible introduction to the thought of Thomas
Aquinas. While primarily a theologian, Aquinas' conception of theology
presupposed an autonomous philosophy. This book concentrates on his
philosophy while making clear its openness to theology as reflection on
Revelation.
As a philosopher,
Aquinas is fundamentally Aristotelian. Like Aristotle, he sees
philosophy as emerging from the ordinary thinking of ordinary human
beings (and philosophers when they are off duty). Philosophy does not
initiate certain knowledge but prolongs it by perfecting the instrument
of thinking and expanding its content. The quest for wisdom, like that
for happiness, is an inescapable fact of human existence. This book uses
key and crucial texts to describe the trajectory of Aquinas'
philosophical thought from the analysis of changeable things through the
reasoned awareness that to be and to be material are not identical to
such knowledge as we con have of God. This brings Aquinas to the
threshold of Christian faith.
"Aquinas lived in a
time of remarkable intellectual and religious ferment. His thought,
which Mclnerny following John Paul Il describes as an implicit
philosophy, articulates not just for his own time, but for all times,
the philosophical principles implicitly operative in human nature. In
his new primer on Aquinas, Ralph Mclnerny manages the impossible. He
gives us Aquinas, his times, the core of his philosophical teaching, and
the significance of his continued contribution to philosophy and
theology. With the deft style of the novelist and the clarity of a
seasoned teacher of Aquinas, Mclnerny provides a marvellous path into
the thought of the greatest of Catholic teachers.” -Professor Thomas
Hibbs, Department of Philosophy, Boston College
"Mclnerny is perhaps
the most important Catholic philosopher of his generation. While many
limit philosophy to textual exegesis or formal logic, Mclnerny, in the
spirit of his immediate predecessors Etienne Gilson and Jacques
Maritain, still regards philosophy as the pursuit of wisdom, speculative
and practical. Steeped in the history of philosophy, Mclnerny is a
reliable guide to Aristotle and Aquinas and their commentators through
the ages. He writes not for colleagues down the hall or for the
appreciation of a handful of specialists but to be read by those who
share his appreciation of antiquity or who seek an intellectual compass
in stormy times. Translated into many languages, his work rightly
commands a global audience. For its freshness, Aquinas will only enhance
Mclnerny's status as a major interpreter of the Angelic Doctor." -Professor
Jude P Dougherty, Dean Emeritus, School of Philosophy, The Catholic
University of America
Excerpt: There have
been many efforts to characterize the shapes and forms of Thomism as the
Leonine revival crested. I propose a threefold division: transcendental
Thomism, existential Thomism, and Aristotelian Thomism.
-
Transcendental
Thomism may be roughly characterized as based on the belief that
the Kantian critique is justified. Consequently, if Thomism is to
gain a hearing from a world in which that view of Kant is shared, a
postcritical Thomas must be fashioned. Marcechal can be considered
the father of this movement, which includes such figures as Karl
Rahner and Bernard Lonergan, all Jesuits. Maurice Blondel's
influence on Henri de Lubac is a variant of transcendental Thomism.
To simplify even further, transcendental Thomism, having abandoned
epistemological realism, seeks to find in the workings of the human
mind warrant for objective truths. This type of Thomism is favored
by theologians rather than philosophers, as even its proponents
acknowledge.
-
Existential
Thomism, while it bears some incidental relation to post-war
Existentialism, is based upon the conviction that the real
composition of essence and existence in everything but God is the
clef de voute
of Thomism. Etienne Gilson and Cornelio Fabro are the giants of this
school, but there are significant differences between them. What is
shared is the assumption that the distinction of essence and
existence provides a warrant for metaphysics without any dependence
on a philosophy of nature. Peculiar to Gilson is his insistence that
the order of theology is the order of philosophy for Thomas and that
his relation to Aristotle is ultimately antagonistic. In the eyes of
critics, existential Thomism, in its final Gilsonian phases, is the
abandonment of philosophy in favor of a Christian philosophy
indistinguishable from theology.
-
Aristotelian
Thomism is exemplified in Part II of this presentation. It seems
to me clearly to be the most faithful and fruitful approach to
Thomas. Moreover, by emphasizing the autonomy of philosophy – though
of course for the believer philosophizing is never separate from his
faith – it is better able to enter the wider philosophical
marketplace. Of course, Aristotle is not in the ascendancy in
contemporary philosophy, though he remains a permanent point of
reference. Obviously, there are merits in the other approaches to
Thomas, and it is a mark of Aristotelian Thomism that it is always
on the qui vive for such merits since it aspires to assimilate in
the principled way of Thomas himself.
It may be noted that
theologians often complain that there has been a tendency to make Thomas
into a pure philosopher and ignore the fact that he was by profession a
theologian. The counter concern is also heard, that stressing Thomas as
theologian has the unfortunate effect of estranging him from ongoing
philosophizing. The answer to both these concerns is to be found in
Thomas himself, as the discussion of the relationship between
philosophy and theology.
If we have learned
anything in the past few decades it is that our ability to foresee what
lies around the corner of time is severely limited. Who would have
thought in the heyday of Thomism, at the midpoint of the twentieth
century, that the wholesale abandonment of Thomas's doctrine by
individuals and institutions lay just ahead? That abandonment, if that
is not too strong a term, has had the effect of releasing Thomas into
the wider scholarly and philosophical scene, into the public domain. No
longer is a person's interest in Thomas taken as prima facie evidence
that he is on the verge of conversion to Catholicism – always of course
a consummation devoutly to be wished. Unprompted by ecclesiastic
approval, any number of philosophers have been drawn to the texts of
Thomas. Medieval studies has continued its amazing advance into the
third millennium, but not all interest in Thomas is of a historical
nature. Interest in Thomas is to be found in the most surprising places.
We seem to have entered a phase of its history that could be called
freelance Thomism.
Once there were
graduate programs fashioned to lead the neophyte into the arcana of
Thomas's thought, programs that were, ut ita dicam, both
Gilsonian and Maritain-like in their aims. Nowadays, many graduate
programs in philosophy feature a Thomist, even two, sometimes as exotic
novelties, often on the zoological principle followed by Noah in filling
the ark. But even if there be but one, breeding occurs and a new
generation of freelance Thomists is generated. Their sires – or dames –
are sometimes remnants of the Leonine Israel long since dispersed. But
as often as not these professors are autodidacts rather than disciples
of a master or mistress. Once Thomists had organizations and journals
and meetings in which to disagree with one another. Now there is
something like a secret handshake by which the scattered devotees
acknowledge one another.
What is lacking in
this diaspora is any sense of representing a minority view, an odd
specialty tolerated by the dominant secular trends in philosophy. It
remains a mark of the Thomist that he does not consider himself to be
engaged in a kind of philosophy. A remark-able statement of that
conviction can be found in John Paul II's Fides et Ratio, the
Aeterni Patris of our times. The pope begins, as presentations of
Philosophy 101 often do, with the observation that philosophical
questions, far from being the puzzles of the sophisticated few,
represent large issues no one can fail to face sooner or later. In that
sense, everyone is a philosopher by dint of being a human being. But
then the question of the variety and rivalry of philosophical systems
is raised, and the encyclical suggests something extremely important. It
is not simply that there are certain questions no human person can fail
to ask. There are shared answers to those questions.
Although times change
and knowledge increases, it is possible to discern a core of
philosophical insight within the history of thought as a whole.
Consider, for example, the principles of non-contradiction, finality and
causality, as well as the concept of the person as a free and
intelligent subject, with the capacity to know God, truth and goodness.
Consider as well certain fundamental moral norms which are shared by
all. These are among the indications that, beyond different schools of
thought, there exists a body of knowledge which may be judged a kind of
spiritual heritage of humanity. It is as if we had come upon an implicit
philosophy, as a result of which all feel they possess these principles,
albeit in a general and unreflective way. (para. 4)
In Part II (chapter
18) we spoke of the pre-philosophical starting points or principles that
Thomas assumes as already known and as non-gainsayable. Surely this is
what is being referred to in the passage just quoted. It continues:
"Precisely because it is shared in some measure by all, this knowledge
should serve as a kind of reference point for the different
philosophical schools." This is a succinct statement of the attitude
that seems to characterize Thomists now as before. If I have been
successful in presenting Thomas's world view in Part II, the reader will
understand why the more or less technical vocabulary that is developed
is anything but a jargon, some patois that separates the speaker from
the mass of mankind. All philosophers long to be intelligible, perhaps,
but the recognition that such intelligibility requires a warm and
continuous relation to the knowledge every human person at least
implicitly has is not universally recognized. It is the boast of the
Thomist, alas often undercut by his practice, that what he puts forward
in argument is the efflorescence of what Fides et Ratio calls "implicit
philosophy."
Discovering Aquinas: An Introduction to His Life, Work, and Influence
by Aidan Nichols (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company) offers a lively
and authoritative
introduction to the life, thought, and ongoing influence of this
singular churchman.
This book could not have come at a better time. After a lengthy period
of declining interest in Aquinas, we are starting to see a Thomistic
renaissance, including a renewed appreciation for the way Aquinas's work
so brilliantly weaves together philosophy, theology, spirituality,
revelation, and ethics. As Nichols writes, "It is because of the
wonderfully integrated character of the wisdom of Thomas Aquinas —
integrated not only as supernatural with natural but also as "thinking
with love" — that the church in our day should not leave him as a fresco
on a wall but find inspiration from his teaching and example."
By means of writing as felicitous as it is insightful, Nichols
chronicles the compelling facts of Aquinas's life, explores the major
facets of his thought, establishes Aquinas's historical importance, and
shows why many today are regarding him as a vital partner in current
debates about the future of Christianity.
Truth in Aquinas by John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock (Radical
Orthodoxy: Routledge) Provocative and sophisticated, Truth in Aquinas
challenges all those with an interest in contemporary Christian thought
to attend once more to the significance of this key medieval thinker.
Milbank and Pickstock present an important re-evaluation of a
fundamental area--truth--in the work of Aquinas.
In this book, Milbank
and Pickstock present a wholesale re-evaluation of the thought of Thomas
Aquinas. They claim, against many received readings, that Aquinas's
philosophical account of truth is also an entirely theological one. His
understanding of truth as adequatio is shown to be inseparable from his
metaphysical and doctrinal treatment of the participation of creatures
in God as esse; from his theory of the convertibility of the
transcendentals as mediated by the transcendental `beauty'; and from his
Christology and theology of the Eucharist. This vision is remote from
the assumptions undergirding modern accounts of truth as correspondence
or coherence or redundancy. Since these accounts are all in crisis,
Milbank and Pickstock ask whether Aquinas's theological framework is not
essential to the affirmation of the reality of truth as such.
Compelling and
challenging, Truth in Aquinas develops further the innovative
theological project heralded by the publication of the seminal
Radical Orthodoxy (Routledge, 1999).
Excerpt: One can
detect four main attitudes toward truth in contemporary thought. The
first is a doubt as to the possibility of truth altogether; the second
is a confinement of truth to practice rather than theory; the third, a
confinement of truth to theory rather than practice, but a theory so
esoteric that only a tiny minority is privy to it; the fourth promotes,
in the face of the first attitude, a fideistic affirmation of some
religious truth or other.
In the case of the
denial of the possibility of truth, this can take many different forms.
Sometimes truth is regarded as an unnecessary term because it is held to
denote simply an affirmation of what is the case. But if this `what is
the case' is not held to be true, then it reduces to what appears to be
the case, or is held to be the case for certain practical purposes.
Sometimes, again, truth is regarded as strictly relative to a certain
set of cultural assumptions, and where the latter is regarded as
arbitrary, then relativism or conventionalism ensues, with the
consequence that there is no truth in any absolute sense. Finally, the
same approach can receive an ontological extension, in such a way that
even natural arrangements in time are regarded as aleatory. There may be
temporary truths of fact, in the sense of contingent events of relation
between things, including a relation to human under-standing, but these
facts do not arise according to truth in the sense of a coherent logic.
For this position, the only truth that remains is the truth of the
aleatory itself, which is enthroned as a positive value.
For this first
position, then, either truth is inaccessible, or else reality itself is
not amenable to notions of truth. In the latter case, one has a full
theoretical nihilism, whilst in the former case, one has a kind of
practical nihilism.
The second position is
an elaboration upon one version of the first. It holds that if truth as
correspondence to reality is either unavailable or meaningless, then
this is no cause for despair, because truth belongs much more naturally
to practical rather than theoretical activity. Sufficient truth for
human purposes is available in the successful attainment of humanly
sought ends. Such attainment discloses to us a certain reality outside
of which lies only vain speculation. However, this attitude drains truth
of its connotations of the indefeasible, and of its sense of value. The
first consequence follows, because if human achievement provides us no
clue as to what is ultimately the case, then it is no more than a
fleeting and contingent set of contrived circumstances Such
circumstances may be true for a time, as truths of factual occurrence,
but can in the end prove not true at all. For while, certainly, human
access to truth can only be time-bound, if truth has no connotations of
the eternal and abiding, then it is hard to see why it is called truth
at all.
The second consequence
follows because if the only measure of the truth of a practice is its
success, then anything that works is regarded as just as good as
anything else, so long as it works also, without regard for any
judgement as to the inherent desirability of what has been constructed.
In this fashion, truth becomes detached from the good. Furthermore, the
criterion of success ushers in a bad infinite, for when is one to decree
that a process has reached its ripeness? The boundaries of truth so
understood perpetually recede, and can only halt by dint of the
imposition of an arbitrary assertion of will. So here again a truth
confined to time proves elusive within time.
The third position, by
contrast, possesses an unbounded confidence not just in the truth of
natural science, but in its ability to provide a true ontology rather
than merely a very limited disclosure of certain aspects of reality
lending themselves to manipulation and prediction (as the present
authors would rather assume). Here the truth of science resides not
merely in the success of its operations, as for the second position
above, but rather in what those operations are held to reveal. In this
way, truth is here an entirely theoretical matter and this is all the
more the case because truth as a property of the way things are is seen
to be entirely indifferent to the goodness of things and to their beauty
and value for human beings.
It is characteristic
of modern natural science that it will hold something to be true which
is extremely counter-intuitive and often remote from what people think
to be the case, and indeed from what they are capable of understanding.
This imposes a gulf between the everyday world and the ironic gaze of
the scientific sage from the height of his privileged insight. Truth,
therefore, of the most ultimate kind has here become the property of an
élite, by the same token that it is freed from its traditional
convertibility with the good and the beautiful. Increasingly, this cold
truth is regarded as the only truth, and society, to the detriment of
democracy, allows its guardians to take vital decisions which the rest
of us can scarcely comprehend.
The fourth position
can be regarded as essentially reactive. In the face of secular
skepticism, pragmatism and positivism, many religious people tend to
take refuge in the notion that there is nonetheless another source of
truth enshrined in certain texts, practices and traditions. Ironically,
for these texts, practices and traditions to acquire absolute authority
outside the workings of human reason, they have to be regarded
positivistically, in a fashion which mimics scientific positivism
itself. The irrational strangely colludes with the most vigorously
reduced rationalism, and often one finds that various fundamentalisms
and fideisms are able happily to coexist with, and even to reinforce,
the technoscientific capitalism of our day.
Against the background
of the above delineated crisis of truth, the present authors have
undertaken a new reading of Aquinas's understanding of truth. We have
turned to Aquinas because, in his writings, one can discover an entirely
different approach to truth which allows one, first of all, to recover
correspondence without a sense of redundancy; secondly, to regard truth
as at once theoretical and practical; thirdly, to demonstrate that all
truth is a matter of faith as well as reason, and vice versa; and,
fourthly, to indicate that truth is immediately accessible to the
simplest apprehension, and yet amenable to profound learned elaboration.
The first chapter,
`Truth and correspondence', seeks to show that the notion of truth as
correspondence is in crisis only because it is taken in an
epistemological rather than ontological sense. Usually Aquinas himself
has been read anachronistically according to the canons of epistemology,
and read this way, he has nothing to offer contemporary thought.
However, we seek to show that in Aquinas, correspondence indicates a
real ontological proportion between being and intelligence in a
perspective where these are regarded as transcendentally convertible.
For Aquinas, within the human modus, there is a distinction between
intelligence and being, and yet also an unfathomable link between them
which we dimly discern according to an act of aesthetic judgement. This
perspective ensures that truth does not simply reduce to our mode of
apprehension of what is the case, as is bound to occur on the
epistemological model for which the intellect is accorded no necessary
ontological dignity, but is merely supposed to mirror a reality itself
indifferent to being comprehended. This possibility of retrieving truth
as correspondence, and therefore truth itself in a strong sense, is
however indissociably linked with Aquinas's theology and metaphysics of
participation.
In the second chapter,
it will be shown how Aquinas's general theory of truth applies both to
his understanding of the operation of reason and to the operation of
faith. We will argue that, contrary to usual readings, reason and faith
in Aquinas represent only different degrees of intensity of
participation in the divine light of illumination and different
measures of absolute vision. And, furthermore, that reason itself
requires faith because it already presupposes the operation of grace,
while, inversely, faith still demands discursive argumentation and is
only higher than reason because it enjoys a deeper participation in the
divine reason which is direct intuition or pure intellectual vision. In
this way, Aquinas offers no support to those who claim that there can be
a philosophical approach to God independent of theology, but neither, on
the other hand, does he offer support to those who demand a confinement
to Biblical revelation independent of the Greek legacy of metaphysical
reflection. Rather, it will be shown that, for Aquinas, revealed
theology supplements metaphysics with history and requires a completion
of the theoretical ascent to truth with a meeting of the divine descent
in liturgical practice.
The commencement of
this descent is at the Incarnation. In the third chapter, it will be
shown not only how, for Aquinas, truth is only restored for fallen men
by the hypostatic union, but also how this restoration involves certain
ontological revisions in excess of their occasion: namely the conjoining
of an ontic event with esse ipsum and a kenotic elevation of the
sensory over the intellectual, and more specifically the sensory as
touch. In Christ, this new sensorial access to truth is something one
both contemplates and reproduces through the enactment of the
sacraments.
This double relation
to Christ corresponds to the way in which, for Aquinas, truth in God is
both something envisaged and something actively performed by the Father
in the Logos. Because we participate in this truth, for us also it is
something that we see as a reflection of the invisible in the visible,
and, at same time, something that we construct, as-it were unwittingly,
through our artistic and liturgical attempts to praise the divine.
Seeing and making are combined in the mutuality of touch which is most
intensely taste; and the Eucharist, as foretaste of our beatitude, newly
discloses to us that this supreme intuition is itself also a `touching'.
In the fourth chapter,
the nature of this liturgical completion of truth is elaborated. Here it
will be shown how we have a certain anticipation of the beatific vision
in this life because God descends in the Incarnation and its
perpetuation in the Eucharist to our immediate sensory awareness,
wherein alone we enjoy intuitive understanding. In this fashion, it is
the lower reason which is required to educate our higher reason,
although this new priority of the sensory is accompanied by a linguistic
and emotional play between presence and absence. For Aquinas's Catholic
position, the most abstruse intellectual reflection on truth passes into
the more profound and ineffable apprehension of truth in the Eucharist.
In this way, there is no gulf for him between the most elite and the
most common.
Summa Theologica
One can find the entire
Summa Theologica online but this useful CD-ROM
Edition is easier to use and search.
St. Thomas Aquinas and the Summa Theologica
CD-ROM Edition (Harmony Media) This CD-ROM is a collection of
several of the works of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225 - 1274), also known as
the "Angelic Doctor" and honored as the Patron of Catholic Schools.
Because of his clarity of thought and massive systematic theological
output, St. Thomas is considered the greatest theologian in the Church's
history. Hence the importance of a software product devoted to his work.
The core of this program is the Summa Theologica,
which is still referenced in the major works of theology today including
the new Catechism of the Catholic Church. The entire English Dominican
Fathers' translation of the Summa is included here, not merely major
portions. The user will be glad to find that all inter-textual
references are hyperlinked as are all biblical references linked with
the Revised Standard Version of the Bible: Catholic Edition. Some of the
references have been modified to match the verse ordering of the current
biblical translation.
The goal of the CD-ROM was to understand the
Catholic faith as St. Thomas Aquinas did. While the Summa Theologica
provides the strong doctrinal foundation, the Holy Bible and the Bible
Commentary provide the necessary counter-balance of Divine Revelation.
This CD-ROM includes:
- SUMMA THEOLOGICA: The Summa Theologica is organized into three
main parts. They are accordingly named, the First Part, Second Part
and Third Part. The First Part focuses on God Himself and as
Creator. The Second Part is divided into two sections: Part 1 God as
the end of Man and Part 2 Man's return to God. The Third Part looks
into Christ who is the way of man to God.
Each part is organized into treatises, questions and articles. For
example, under the Treatise on Sacred Doctrine, there is one
question. That question is addressed in ten articles or points of
inquiry. St. Thomas then addresses those articles by first
explaining the main objections (OBJ) to his point, then providing
his answer (I answer that) and replying to the objections (Reply
OBJ).
- COMMENTARY ON THE GOSPELS: In the Catena Aurea, a Commentary on
the Four Gospels, St. Thomas collects portions of the works of the
Fathers of the Church, edits and synthesizes them into a single body
of scriptural commentary. Organized by each of the four Gospel
writers, the Catena begins by putting forth the verses to be
analyzed and then takes each verse phrase by phrase and provides the
early Fathers' insights into the passage.
- PRAYERS AND HYMNS: In the Prayers and Hymns of St. Thomas Aquinas,
six of the Angelic Doctor's purported works are presented in both
the English and Latin translations.
- SUMMA EXCURSION: In the Summa Excursion, a main point from each
question is presented and then illustrated with photos and art.
References to the main document are hyperlinked at the end of the
excerpt.
- HOLY BIBLE: The Revised Standard Version: Catholic Edition is
presented here as a particularly appropriate choice for a companion
Bible. The RSV is usually the source chosen for references in Church
documents and most recently, the new Catechism of the Catholic
Church.
The Ethics of Aquinas edited by Stephen J. Pope (Moral Traditions
Series: Georgetown University Press) "A remarkable set of in-depth
background essays by scholars of erudition, balanced judgment, and
clarity of thought. . . . This is a rich and unparalleled resource for
scholars of theological ethics." Lisa Sowle Cahill, Monan Professor of
Theology, Boston College
In this comprehensive anthology, twenty-seven
outstanding scholars from North America and Europe address every major
aspect of Thomas Aquinas's understanding of morality and comment on his
remarkable legacy.
The opening chapters of
The Ethics of Aquinas introduce readers to the sources,
methods, and major themes of Aquinas's ethics. Part II of the book
provides an extended discussion of ideas in the Second Part of the Summa
Theologiae, in which contributors present cogent interpretations of the
structure, major arguments, and themes of each of the treatises. The
third and final part examines the legacy of Thomistic ethics for the
twentieth century and today.
These essays reflect a
diverse group of scholars representing a variety of intellectual
perspectives. Contributors span numerous fields of study, including
intellectual history, medieval studies, moral philosophy, religious
ethics, and moral theology. This remarkable variety underscores how
interpretations of Thomas's ethics continue to develop and evolve—and
stimulate fervent discussion within the academy and the church.
Recent years have
witnessed a remarkable revival of interest in the ethics of Thomas
Aquinas. Scholars have produced books and articles on the life of
Aquinas, his spirituality, and his understanding of the relation between
faith and reason, nature and grace, reason and faith, and other
theological themes. Moralists have writ-ten on his accounts of human
acts and agency, happiness, the will, the virtues, and various special
topics. Some authors provide brief and very general overviews of
Thomistic ethics, but none offers a comprehensive treatment of the basic
moral arguments and content of Aquinas's major moral work, the Second
Part of the Summa theologiae. This work intends to fill this lacuna.
This book addresses a
fairly wide audience. It intends to attract the attention of experts,
but also to assist readers who are interested, but not necessarily
specialists, in the moral thought of Aquinas. Its essays complement, but
do not substitute for, a careful study of the primary texts.
The chapters in this
volume reflect a variety of intellectual perspectives. The contributors
come from numerous fields, including intellectual history, medieval
studies, moral philosophy, religious ethics, and moral theology. Some
authors have spent a lifetime working with specific texts of Aquinas,
others draw from Aquinas as one among a number of resources that help
address their primary concerns with contemporary moral issues. As a
whole, the contributors to this volume represent a spectrum of
viewsabout the meaning and contemporary normative significance of
Aquinas's moral thought. They certainly do not comprise a single school
of thought. This variety underscores the way in which Thomistic ethics
continues to be the scene of lively intellectual development.
The citations in the
essays come from a variety of Thomistic texts (including various
different texts of the Summa). Some scholars use the latest critical
editions made available by the Leonine Commission; others draw from
alter-native standard editions such as those published by Marietti. Each
author furnishes an English translation of the words of Aquinas in the
body of his or her chapter; readers who wish to consult the Latin texts
can find them in the notes.
A word about the
structure of the volume is in order. The initial chapters introduce
readers to the sources, methods, and major themes of Aquinas's ethics.
These orienting essays will be especially helpful for readers who have
less familiarity with Aquinas's theology than some others.
The second, more
lengthy, part of the book provides an extended discussion of the
treatises presented in the Second Part of the Summa. Aquinas himself did
not divide the text according to "treatises," but, for the sake of
clarity and order, we use this conventional system of demarcation. These
chapters are not exactly "commentaries" in the sense of a line-by-line
explication of texts; our authors do not provide any critical discussion
relating to the establishment of reliable texts, or much in the way of
philological and grammatical analysis. They seek only to present cogent
interpretations of the structure, major arguments, and themes of each of
the "treatises."
The third part of this
volume examines various aspects of Thomist ethics in the twentieth
century and beyond. Some of the contributors to this section trace
various movements within Thomist moral philosophy and moral theology in
the last century, others take a more prospective view of future
developments of Thomist ethics. These chapters make it abundantly clear
that far from being a monolithic and static moral theory, Thomism is a
tradition of inquiry that continues to experience the same kind of
development that marks other such traditions.
The Thought of Thomas Aquinas by Brian Davies (Clarendon Paperbacks:
Oxford University Press) Thomas Aquinas was one of the greatest Western
philosophers and one of the greatest theologians of the Christian
church. In this book we at last have a modern,
comprehensive presentation of the total thought of Aquinas. Books on
Aquinas invariably deal with either his philosophy or his theology. But
Aquinas himself made no arbitrary division between his philosophical and
his theological thought, and this book allows readers to see him as a
whole. It introduces the full range of Aquinas' thinking; and it relates
his thinking to writers both earlier and later than Aquinas himself.
This book is intended for scholars and students of theology, philosophy,
and medieval thought.
This book represents a long overdue modern comprehensive presentation of
the total thought of Aquinas. While traditional studies of Aquinas
invariably deal with either his philosophy or his theology, Davies
introduces the full range of Aquinas's thinking, relating it to writers
earlier and later than Aquinas himself. The book will be of considerable
interest to professional theologians and philosophers, as well as to
those with particular interest in medieval thinking. It is designed to
be accessible to the general reader who has no specialist knowledge of
medieval thought or professional training in philosophy or theology.
To study the Summa
Theologiae- to do some Summa-wrestling- requires a good grasp of
traditional logic, a thorough grasp of Aristotelian-Thomistic
metaphysics, and some Thomistic natural philosophy. Understandably, very
few have this background, and that is the beauty of Davies' book.
Believe it or not, the Summa Theol. was meant for beginners. It's not,
but Davies' book certainly is. Davies assumes nothing more than a desire
to understand St. Thomas and his greatest work.Davies' writing is both
lucid and luminous, just like the fellow Dominican who's thought he is
writing about. The Southern writer Flannery O'Conner once wrote (in
Wise Blood) that "Thomism usually comes in horrible wrappers."
Unfortunately O'Connor never had the pleasure of reading Brian Davies.
On Evil (De Maleo) by Thomas Aquinas, translated by Richard
Regan, introduction and notes by Brian Davies (Oxford University Press)
(Paperback)
The De Malo represents some of Aquinas' most mature
thinking on goodness, badness, and human agency. In it he examines the
full range of questions associated with evil: its origin, its nature,
its relation to good, and its compatibility with the existence of an
omnipotent, benevolent God. This edition offers the Leonine Commission's
authoritative edition of the Latin text with Regan's new, clear English
translation and an extensive introduction by Brian Davies.
Excerpt: Prospective readers of the De malo
may expect to find in it an extended discussion of what is nowadays
commonly called "the problem of evil." That is to say, they might expect
to find Aquinas dealing directly in it with questions like "Does evil
show that there is no God?" or "How can belief in the reality of evil be
reconciled with belief in the existence of a good, omniscient, and
omnipotent God?" But should the De malo be read as an essay on
"the problem of evil' in this sense? The most accurate and short answer
to this question is "No." For Aquinas in the De malo never
attempts to defend belief in the existence of God. Throughout the text
he takes it for granted that God certainly exists. And he never tries to
show that we can consistently believe both that there is evil and that
God exists. His discussion proceeds on the assumption that evil and God
are both somehow there to be talked about. But his treatment of evil in
the De malo, and what he says about it in other works, can still
be read as engaging with what I am calling "the problem of evil." And we
need to be clear as to how this is so.
To begin with, we need to note that there are some
popular ways of approaching the problem of evil of which Aquinas does
not avail himself. In particular, so I need to stress, he makes no
attempt to show that the evil we encounter is something permitted by God
for a morally sufficient reason. Also, so I must emphasize, Aquinas
never tries to argue that evil arises by virtue of causes over which God
has no control. Those who believe in God's existence despite evils
occurring often suggest that these evils can always be viewed as
necessary means to a good end and that God is morally justified in
allowing them or in bringing them about. They often also argue that much
occurring evil consists in or derives from the bad moral choices of
creatures and that God is therefore not to be blamed for it. But this is
not how Aquinas thinks. Why not? Partly because he does not think that
the goodness of God is that of someone always acting with morally
sufficient reasons. But also because he does not think that the choices
of creatures derive from them as opposed to God. Or, to put things
another way: God, for Aquinas, is not a good moral agent; and, for
Aquinas, the choices of creatures always show forth the action of God,
not his permission of actions that somehow arise only from agents other
than himself.
With respect to God's goodness, Aquinas's point is
not, of course, that God is immoral or submoral. Rather, it is that God
cannot be the sort of thing we have in mind when we allude to agents
acting (or failing to act) with morally sufficient reasons (i.e., for
the most part, people). As we have seen, Aquinas has a lot to say on
moral agency. But he does not take what we have seen him to think about
this as applicable to God. For him, God is good not because God, like a
virtuous human being, is well behaved, but because God is the source of
all creaturely goodness which, in turn, reflects (in all its diversity)
what God is by essence eternally. Or, in Aquinas's words:
Goodness should be
associated above all with God. For goodness is consequent upon
desirability. Now things desire their perfection; and an effect's
perfection and form consists in resembling its cause, since what a thing
does reflects what it is. So the cause itself is desirable and can be
called "good," what is desired from it being a share in resembling it.
Clearly, then, since God is the primary operative cause of everything,
goodness and desirability belong to him.
For Aquinas, created things are made by God, and
they all seek to be themselves (they seek their good) by acting in
accordance with what God intends (has in mind) for them. For this reason
Aquinas suggests that, in seeking (tending to) their good, creatures are
manifesting a kind of blueprint in the divine mind, that "all things are
said to be good by divine goodness, which is the pattern, source and
goal of all goodness." As he sees it, this means that they are seeking
God. For their goal is something that lies in God as their maker. God is
that by virtue of which there is something instead of nothing. So he is
the ultimate maker, the ultimately desirable, the ultimate good. He is
the omega because he is the alpha. He is the end (what is desirable)
because he is the beginning.
So what does God's goodness therefore amount to in
detail? Aquinas does not claim to know. For, as we have seen, he takes
God to be fundamentally incomprehensible to us. It is clear, however,
that he does not take God's goodness to be that of something like a
human being acting in the light of moral considerations. He certainly
thinks that terms signifying human moral perfections can be predicated
of God. He is clear that we can speak of God as just, truthful, or
loving, for instance. But words that designate moral perfections in
human beings do not, for him, signify God's moral integrity. They
signify what flows from God and what must be somehow in God if God is
the source of the being of things. But they do not signify moral
attributes had by God as some of his creatures can be said to have such
attributes. For Aquinas, therefore, questions like "Does God act with an
eye on morally sufficient reasons?" or "Is God well behaved?" are
irrelevant when it comes to thinking about God and evil (they are
effectively like asking whether God always takes care to keep himself
fit, or whether he does enough to provide for his retirement). They
spring from confusing the Creator with his creatures.
As for Aquinas on choices independent of God, we
have already seen how Aquinas thinks on the matter. For, as I noted
above, even free human actions are, for Aquinas, caused by God. A
popular line of reasoning frequently advanced in discussions of God and
evil runs thus:
- Much evil is the result of what people freely choose to do.
- It is good that there should be a world with agents able to act
freely, and a world
- containing such agents would be better than a world of puppets
controlled by God.
- Even an omnipotent God cannot ensure that free people act well
(for, if they are
- free and not puppets controlled by God, what they do is up to
them).
- Therefore, much evil is explicable in terms of God allowing for
the possible consequences of his willing a great good.
But this "free will defense," as it is usually
called, is simply unavailable to Aquinas, given his account of God as
the source of the beings of things and given how he applies it with
respect to the actions of reasoning, creaturely agents. For him, there
is no such thing as a real creaturely choice that is not caused by God.
How, then, does Aquinas view evil in the light of
God's existence? What, positively speaking, does he say about the
problem of evil? If we take what we find him maintaining in the De malo,
and if we read it together with his other writings, the main points he
makes are these:
- God cannot be thought of as a creative cause of evil since evil
always consists of absence or a failure to be.
- All things created by God are good (considered as real or actual).
Indeed, they are nothing but good since God (as Creator) makes
things to be and since something is good insofar as it exists (is
real or actual).
- Things are had insofar as they fail in some respect. The failure
in bad things cannot be thought of as creatively caused by God,
though things may sometimes fail because God is bringing it about
that other things do well (because God is bringing some good about).
- Moral evil occurs as free, rational agents turn from what is
actually good in order to pursue other goals. As with all evil, its
"reality" is that of failure. And it is not something creatively
made by God.
- All that is real when evil comes about is caused to be by God, who
is the source of all good.
What Aquinas means by these theses should be
relatively clear from what I have written above. Here, therefore, the
point most worth stressing, perhaps, is that Aquinas's contribution to
discussions of the "the problem of evil" is essentially a negative one.
For it is mostly concerned to stress that God does not creatively make
evil to be.
At the same time, however (and bearing in mind what
he does not want to say on the matter), Aquinas's approach to the topic
of God and evil is a rounded and distinctive one. And it is grounded in
a whole way of thinking about a variety of questions, not just those
that might naturally occur to someone reflecting on what is nowadays
often meant by "the problem of evil." Aquinas turns directly to some of
these questions in the De malo. And, though it is only in other
writings that he deals more directly with the rest, his discussions in
the De malo frequently hark back to or presuppose what he says
elsewhere. For this reason, as for others, the De malo is one of
the works of Aquinas to which readers might most profitably be directed
as they seek to understand him in general.
Scripture and Metaphysics: Aquinas and the Renewal of Trinitarian
Theology by Matthew Webb Levering (Challenges in Contemporary
Theology: Blackwell Publishers) (Hardcover)
In this major contribution to contemporary theological and philosophical
debates, Matthew Levering bridges the gap between scriptural and
metaphysical approaches to the triune God.
Levering's argument
rests upon St. Thomas Aquinas's understanding of theology as
contemplative wisdom. Taking us through Aquinas's theology of God as One
and Three, he demonstrates that Trinitarian theology should be a
spiritual exercise assisting our movement from self- to
God-centeredness. Crucial to the spiritual exercise is the contemplative
appropriation of biblical revelation, which, Levering argues, has to be
joined to a correspondingly rich metaphysical analysis if the "God" who
is revealed is to be understood in a non-idolatrous fashion. In chapters
that broadly follow the structure of Aquinas's treatise on God in his
Summa Theologiae, Levering engages with a wide range of contemporary
theologians, biblical exegetes, and philosophers.
Excerpt: For Aquinas,
Trinitarian theology is ultimately ordered to contemplative union, and
so at the outset we can note that his Trinitarian theology is not
isolated from his doctrine of salvation. In the Eucharistic liturgy, in
which the whole Mystical Body shares in Christ's sacrificial fulfillment
of Israel's Torah, Christ's members (as the perfect Temple) manifest
God's name by worshipping the Trinity. By sharing in the self-emptying
form of Christ, revealed by the Spirit in word and sacrament, Christ's
cruciform members already mystically "see" the Father. This liturgical
union with the Trinity is contemplative, although as a liturgical union
requiring the active holiness of Christ's members, Christian
contemplation is not thereby bifurcated or cut off from Christian
action. As the Fathers and medieval theologians recognized, the
contemplative liturgical union with the Trinity that is enjoyed by
believers whose faith is formed by charity, is expressed theologically
in contemplative and metaphysical modes.
The goal of this book,
therefore, is sharing in the Church's manifestation of God's "name" by
renewing the practices of theological contemplation. The first chapter
of the book treats sacra doctrina, the sacred teaching or wisdom that is
knowledge of God and all things in relation to God. This chapter argues
that appropriating the revealed sacred teaching has always demanded,
even for the biblical authors, metaphysical questioning. Indeed, the
practice of metaphysical questioning constitutes a spiritual exercise
that purifies from idolatry those who would contemplate the
self-revealing God. This unity between rational investigation and
contemplative beatitude finds wonderful expression in St. Athanasius's
understanding of human sharing in the divine image:
They would be no better than the beasts,
had they no knowledge save of earthly things; and why should God have
made them at all, if He had not intended them to know Him? But, in fact,
the good God has given them a share in His own Image, that is, in our
Lord Jesus Christ, and has made even themselves after the same Image and
Likeness. Why? Simply in order that through this gift of God-likeness in
themselves they may be able to perceive the Image Absolute, that is the
Word Himself, and through Him apprehend the Father; which knowledge of
their Maker is for men the only really happy and blessed life.
The alleged opposition
between metaphysics and salvation history in theology founders when
confronted with this understanding of salvation (in history) as holy
contemplation, an understanding shared by Aquinas.
The remaining chapters
continue in systematic fashion the book's discussion of divine "being"
with various theologians, most importantly St. Thomas Aquinas." The
chapters span the themes contained in Aquinas's treatise on God in the
Summa Theologiae 1, qq.2–42. While not directly treating q.43, on the
temporal missions of the Son and Spirit, the bookengages this topic by
emphasizing the scriptural and soteriological foundation of Aquinas's
theology of God." Chapters 2 and 3 address God in his unity, in dialogue
with Jewish and Christian theologians whose concern is that Aquinas's
account of God's "attributes" (what one can say about God as one)
distort, in a supersessionist and onto-theological manner, the one
living God revealed as YHWH to Israel as narrated in the Old Testament.
Chapters 4 through 7 then explore aspects of the theology of the
Trinity. Chapter 4 asks whether the Paschal mystery of Jesus Christ is
revelatory of the Trinity in such a way as to constitute an analogy for
the Trinity. This chapter inquires into the modes by which we understand
the "distinction" of Persons in God. The fifth chapter extends this
topic by directly considering Aquinas's account of the "psychological
analogy" as a means of under-standing the Persons as subsisting
relations. In both the fourth and fifth chapters, at stake is whether
Aquinas's analogy for understanding the Trinity is grounded sufficiently
in God's revelation in Scripture."
The sixth chapter
turns to Aquinas's description of the Persons of the Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit. Here the theologians in light of whose work I contextualize
Aquinas's views are biblical exegetes. Aquinas's description
of the Persons can
seem far from the narrative reality that one meets in the New Testament
and in the "biblical theology" practiced by contemporary biblical
exegetes. This chapter inquires into whether Aquinas's highly
metaphysical (speculative) account treats the themes of "biblical
theology," and if so, what is gained by Aquinas's nonnarrative approach.
Lastly, the seventh chapter addresses the movement in theology towards
developing a metaphysics that is properly theological, in other words a
Trinitarian metaphysics. After examining the work of proponents of this
development in light of classical Jewish and Muslim concerns, I argue
that Aquinas's nuanced analysis of the relationship of "essence" and
"Persons" accomplishes the main goals of proponents of "Trinitarian
ontology," without creating the conceptual and interreligious problems
that Trinitarian ontology creates. Aquinas's approach retains the
integrity of the Old Testament revelation while fully displaying its
integration into Christ Jesus' definitive revelation of God.
In short, the book
aims both at reordering contemporary Trinitarian theology and at
identifying further "signposts," as Walker Percy might put it, along the
contemplative path marked out by God himself in Scripture and tradition.
I hope to show that by following a path of contemplation (grounded in
the active holiness that sharing in Christ's salvific fulfillment of
Israel's Torah involves), Trinitarian theology remains fully inserted
within Christ's salvific fulfillment of Israel's Temple, where God's
name, against the idols, is manifested.
Knowledge and Faith in Thomas Aquinas by John I. Jenkins (Cambridge
University Press) offers a revisionary account of key epistemological
concepts and doctrines of St. Thomas Aquinas, particularly his concept
of scientia (science). It proposes a new interpretation
of the purpose and composition of Aquinas' most mature and influential
work, the Summa theologiae, which has traditionally been regarded as a
work for neophytes in theology. John Jenkins' comprehensive and original
study will be of interest to readers in philosophy, theology and
medieval studies.
Excerpt: The questions of Thomas Aquinas about knowledge and faith are
not ours. Twentieth-century philosophers have tried to find in Aquinas
answers to our questions, but with predictable results: his detractors
have found him either confused or simple-minded, while many of his
supporters have tended to assimilate his thought to one or another
modern philosophers. Both, I contend, have misunderstood his thought. We
cannot find our questions in Aquinas's writings because the interrelated
cluster of epistemic concepts denoted by the terms he uses – such as
cognitio, intelligere, notitia, credere, opinio, fides and especially
scientia – differ in varying degrees from our concepts of cognition,
understanding, knowledge, belief, opinion, faith and science. Thus when
Aquinas raises broadly epistemic questions, he does so in a different
conceptual framework, and in this framework a different set of
propositions is considered unproblematic, and another set is open to
question. There are undoubtedly affinities between Aquinas's questions
and our own, and many of his concerns are quite similar to ours. Still,
I want to argue, in an important sense which has not been fully
appreciated in the literature, Aquinas asks different questions and
pursues different ends in his inquiries. My particular concern in this
work will be with the central notion of scientia in Aquinas, and how
this concept plays a role in the scientia of sacred doctrine, the
scientia of Christian theology which is based upon faith and presented
in Aquinas's magnum opus, the Summa theologiae...
In the first chapter of this book I examine Aquinas's understanding of
Aristotle's notion of scientia (in the Latin translation Aquinas used),
as this is presented in Aquinas's commentary on the Posterior Analytics.
The Aristotelian view as presented in this work and in Aquinas's
commentary is complex and not easily summarized. A noteworthy feature of
this account, however, is that a condition for perfect scientia of some
predication is that not only must one know the cause of this predication
being true (in the Aristotelian sense of formal, material, efficient or
final cause), but one must also know the cause better than its effect.
The reason for this rather stringent requirement is that, for perfect
scientia, one's awareness of the cause must eventually become the cause
of one's awareness of the effect.
This condition for scientia, which seems strange to modern ears, has
important implications for the process of acquisition of scientia within
a certain field. To acquire such scientia two stages are necessary. In a
first stage one becomes familiar with the fundamental concepts within
the field and discovers the causes, and thus becomes able to say which
causes bring about which effects. In addition to this, however, a second
stage is also required which will make the causes sufficiently well
known that they become the foundation of one's thinking in that field,
and one's knowledge of the causes becomes the cause of one's knowledge
of the effects. To use an anachronistic example, consider a car mechanic
who knows very well that when octane is combined with oxygen and a spark
is applied, combustion occurs. He may even be able to recite the cause
of this; he may have learned, through reading it or being told, that
octane reacts with oxygen because it has the chemical structure of an
alkane hydrocarbon. However, though he in some sense knows the cause of
octane's combustibility, he does not have scientia of this fact until he
becomes so familiar with the respective structures of hydrogen, carbon
and alkane hydrocarbons such as octane that his knowledge of octane's
combustibility flows from, is caused by, his knowledge of these chemical
forms. The second stage in the acquisition of a scientiais meant to
bring about the required familiarity with the cause in a field. Its
purpose is to induce habits of thought, intellectual habits, in virtue
of which a person's knowledge of the cause becomes the cause of; the
epistemic grounds for, his knowledge of the effect. Its purpose, that
is, is to make one's thinking in a particular field mirror the order of
causality.
In chapter two I argue that in the Summa theologiae Aquinas adopts the
Aristotelian notion of scientia, or at least something quite close to
it. The structure of the scientia of the Summa theologiae, sacred
doctrine or Christian theology, differs from other forms of scientia
which humans can have, for in it humans participate in God's own
scientia. The principles of this scientia are the articles of faith
which have been revealed by God and accepted in faith. Although these
principles cannot be fully understood and must remain mysteries in this
life, and although this scientia transcends many of the limitations to
which other scientiae are subject, sacred doctrine is properly a
scientia subject to the fundamental conditions of an Aristotelian
scientia.
In chapter three I draw the consequences of the preceding analysis for
our understanding of the Summa theologiae and sacred doctrine. There I
argue that the Summa was not written for neophytes in the study of
theology, as has been widely thought, but was a pedagogical work for
very advanced students who had come to the second stage in the
acquisition of this scientia. That is, it was intended as a work for
students who were already familiar with Christian theology, its concepts
and principles, and the philosophy it presupposes, but who stood in need
of the intellectual habituation by which the principles in the field,
the articles of faith, become the foundation and cause of their thinking
about matters in this field. Thus the Summa theologiae offers a synoptic
view of the field which, as much as possible, moves from causes to
effects so that the proper habits of thought are instilled.
My interpretation of Aquinas on scientia and sacred doctrine raises a
question about his view of how we apprehend the principles of the
various scientiae. If one's knowledge of principles is to be the cause
of one's knowledge of conclusions, and if scientia is to be a practical
ideal for inquiry and pedagogy, it must be a practical possibility for
us to know the principles of the scientia and to know them better than
its conclusions. In chapters four to six I take up this question. In
chapter four I give a general sketch of Aquinas's account of our
apprehension of the principles of scientiae which are not based upon
divine revelation, but on natural human cognitive powers. Aquinas, I
contend, held views according to which the required apprehension of
principles in these scientiae is at least possible.
In chapter six I consider assent to the principles of sacred doctrine,
the articles of faith. Against the standard interpretations, I argue
that Aquinas did not think that this assent is inferred from any
conclusions of natural theology, nor that it is due to a command of the
will which overrides a lack of evidence. Rather one is able immediately
to apprehend these propositions as divinely revealed. To prepare for
this, I consider in chapter five the nature of grace, which elevates our
natural powers, and the theological virtues and Gifts which are due to
divine grace.
In the final chapter, I take up two final objections to my reading of
the Summa theologiae as a whole and the sort of intellectual virtue
which it was trying to instill. This will provide an opportunity to
review the way we can acquire the scientia of sacred doctrine. The
perfection of this scientia, which is the highest wisdom, is only
attained after one's life on this earth when he enjoys the vision of the
divine essence and knows other things through God's essence. In this
life, however, we can attain an inchoate realization of it which will
help us attain the perfect state. I summarize just how the Summa
theologiae is meant to instill the imperfect state.
"Philosophy in the ancient world began in wonder," Henry Frankfurt
recently observed. "In the modern world, of course, it began in doubt."
One might add that the philosophy which began in wonder sought wisdom,
while that which began in doubt sought indubitable, or certain, or
reliable information about the world. If we take philosophy in its
classical sense, as the love of and search for wisdom, the whole of
Aquinas's thought, even his Christian theology, can be called
philosophical. And, in this wider sense of philosophy, the whole of
Aquinas's thought stood within the ancient philosophical tradition.
Aquinas was, of course, distinguished from earlier pagan thinkers in
that he believed the wisdom philosophy sought could not be fully
attained by strictly natural human powers, or in this world. He learned
much from his reading of Aristotle and Aristotelians, but his
fundamental concern was to understand and articulate a Christian wisdom.
This wisdom could not be had through natural, human reasoning, but was
possible only through Christian faith and through living a life informed
by love of God and neighbor, a love which is realizable only if God
elevates us beyond our nature. According to Aquinas's Christian vision,
we attain perfect wisdom in heaven, when we will see God as He is (Mt
5:8), and know all other things in and through our grasp of divine
essence. Then we will know perfectly, even as we are known (I Cor.
13:12). Indeed, then we will be like God, for we will see God as He is
(I Jn 3:2).
My contention, then, is that we distort Aquinas's thought if we remove
it from this ancient philosophical tradition and try to find and make
central the issues of modern philosophy. A further consequence of my
study will be that we miss the impetus and tenor of his thought if we
consider elements of it apart from the specifically Christian wisdom
which is its end, its Lelos. Aquinas's writings have, I believe, been
subject to both sorts of distortion.
My concern in what follows, then, will be with understanding certain
pivotal aspects of Aquinas's thought, particularly his concept of
scientia and the nature of his project in the Summa theologiae. I will
not try to argue whether Aquinas is right or wrong, whether ultimately
his views can be defended or whether they must be rejected. As was said,
scholarship on Aquinas has often been hampered because scholars were too
quick to try to defend his views as viable in the contemporary
philosophical debate, and failed to understand them fully. We shall find
that simply to understand Aquinas on several key points on which he has
been misunderstood will be quite enough to occupy us in the following
pages. A sustained and systematic critique or defense of Aquinas's views
must be the subject of subsequent work.
Nevertheless, although my concern will be limited to the historical or
interpretive question of what Aquinas thought, I hope it will be of some
use to those interested in the viability of contemporary Thomism. Since
the end of the Second Vatican Council the influence of the central
figures of twentieth century Neo-Scholasticism – such as Maréchal,
Maritain and Gilson – has waned. But in their place has arisen some
excellent work on both understanding and developing Aquinas's views. My
hope is that my efforts will aid this strand of contemporary Thomism.
Among Neo-Scholastic Thomists we find a tendency to define Thomism by
some set or core of unalterable doctrines. Difficulties arose, however,
when someone argued that one or more of these doctrines was not in fact
in Aquinas's writings, or was in fact false. Alasdair Maclntyre has
argued that a better way to think of Thomism is as a tradition. A
tradition is defined with respect to a certain language, shared beliefs,
institutions and practices. In the course of time debates, conflicts and
inquiries lead those working within a tradition to modify and revise not
only the doctrines under consideration, but also aspects of the shared
language, background beliefs, institutions and practices. Nevertheless
the continuity of debate and inquiry makes for the continuity of an
identifiable tradition. If we understand Thomism as a tradition, we can
see how we can critique or modify certain doctrines of Aquinas, and yet
still remain faithful to the tradition.
Certainly there is much in Aquinas's thought which contemporary
thinkers, even contemporary Thomists, will find untenable in light of
subsequent scientific, philosophical and theological developments. It
would truly be miraculous (in Aquinas's sense of this term) if, given
the work of the past seven hundred years, that were not the case.
However, I believe that any careful study of Aquinas's views will reveal
much that is philosophically and theologically suggestive, true and
profound. The most viable contemporary Thomism is one which takes its
start from Aquinas's texts, but subjects Aquinas's claims to critical
examination, and develops and revises them in light of this subsequent
criticism and inquiry. It is this sort of work which constitutes a
Thomistic tradition. It is hoped that my effort to reach a better
understanding of this medieval Master will also illumine possibilities
for the Thomistic tradition.
Dialectic and Narrative in Aquinas: An Interpretation of the Summa
Contra Gentiles by Thomas S. Hibbs (Revisions: a Series of Books on
Ethics: University of Notre Dame Press) investigates the intent, method,
and structural unity of Thomas Aquinas's Summa Contra Gentiles.
In this innovative study Thomas S. Hibbs goes against the grain of most
traditional interpretations of the work, which claim it serves a
missionary or apologetic end, and argues that the intended audience is
Christian and that its subject is Christian wisdom. In the process of
making his argument, Hibbs also demonstrates that the Summa Contra
Gentiles is the most important of Aquinas's texts on the relationship
between faith and reason, theology, and philosophy.
Since the prologue to
the Summa Contra Gentiles has been the focus of nearly all the debates
over the work, Hibbs begins with an examination of it and the
controversies it has provoked, and tests various interpretations of the
prologue in light of the actual text. He then goes on to suggest that
the method of the Contra Gentiles is dialectical and that its unifying
principle is provided by the narrative structure of scripture. The next
chapters are devoted to each of the Contra Gentiles' four parts and
Hibbs argues that any interpretation of the first three books must
consider how the order of Aquinas's discussion is driven by a series of
dialectical encounters with received opinions, especially those of
Aristotle and his commentators. Hibbs further demonstrates how attention
to the dialectical method of the work has two advantages: first, it
enables readers to avoid misinterpretations of Aquinas's positions on
various issues, and second, it allows the reader to recapture something
of Aquinas's original pedagogical intent. Dialectic and Narrative in
Aquinas also reveals how the dialectical method of the Contra Gentiles
is crucial to Aquinas's project of subordinating philosophy to theology,
and in the concluding chapter Hibbs considers in detail the narrative
unity of the Contra Gentiles and brings themes from Aquinas into
conversation with contemporary work in genre theory.
Aquinas
on Aristotle: Dumb Ox Books' Aristotelian Commentary Series:
Dumb Ox Books
Dumb Ox Books'
Aristotelian Commentary Series: Dumb Ox Books makes available long out
of print commentaries of St. Thomas Aquinas on Aristotle. Each volume
has the full text of Aristotle with Bekker numbers, followed by the
commentary of St. Thomas, cross-referenced using an easily accessible
mode of referring to Aristotle in the Commentary. Each volume is
beautifully printed and bound using the finest materials. All copies are
printed on acid-free paper and Smyth sewn. They will hold up.
Commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics by Thomas Aquinas, translation
and introduction by John P. Rowan. Preface by Ralph
McInerny. (Dumb Ox Books' Aristotelian Commentary Series: Dumb Ox Books)
(Hardcover)
Of all Thomas Aquinas's Commentaries on Aristotle, that on the
Metaphysics is in many ways the most intriguing. For most of the
twentieth century, Aristotelian studies were governed by the claim of
philologists that the Metaphysics is a compilation of disparate
materials, probably made by someone after Aristotle, and that the order
of the books cannot be taken to represent any literary unity. Indeed,
the internal contents of the books were said to represent materials of
different date and purpose. Furthermore, presumed aim of these
treatises, and indeed of philosophy generally, the acquisition of
wisdom, receives in the Metaphysics two radically different accounts. Is
God the object of Wisdom or is wisdom the most comprehensive view of the
natural world? Is the science Aristotle is seeking in the treatises an
ontology or a theology?
In marked contrast to such imaginative accounts, the net effect of
which is to discourage rather than to encourage reading of the work,
Thomas Aquinas finds the twelve books he comments on wonderful for their
order, both overall and in the minutest detail. His reading is governed
by what he takes to be the clear sense of the text, his interpretations
keep close to what Aristotle actually said, his account is breathtaking
in its acuity. Thomas's commentary belongs to the great tradition that
was broken - one hopes only temporarily - by the rise of philology,
which a cynic has described as the effort to read a text without
understanding it. Any student of Aristotle can appraise Thomas's
interpretation since its measure is the text of Aristotle.
This edition reproduces the translation of John Rowan as well as his
introduction, but in a single volume, rather than in two. The Leonine
critical edition of the text will soon appear; in the meantime, as it
has for most of this century, the Marietti edition, on which this
translation is based, can continue to be help to those who wish to learn
from "the master of those who know."
Commentary on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics by Thomas Aquinas.
Translation by C.I. Litzinger, O.P. Foreword by Ralph McInerny. (Dumb Ox
Books' Aristotelian Commentary Series: Dumb Ox Books) (Hardcover)
Thomas Aquinas was introduced to the "New" Aristotle at the University
of Naples and, after becoming a Dominican, studied under Albert the
Great at Cologne and edited Albert's commentary on the Ethics of
Aristotle. Throughout his career, Thomas exhibits a more-than ordinary
interest in the philosophy of Aristotle and an ever deeper appreciation
of it. Nonetheless, it was relatively late in his short life that he
composed a dozen commentaries on Aristotelian works, spurred on,
doubtless, by the controversial use to which Aristotle was put by those
in the Faculty of Arts at Paris who are variously called Latin
Averroists or Heterodox Aristotelians. These commentaries are among the
most careful, helpful, and insightful ever written on the text of
Aristotle. It is sometimes mistakenly thought that in them Thomas was
somehow "baptizing" Aristotle, wrenching his thought into conformity
with Christian doctrine. No one who reads the commentaries could long
entertain this libelous view of them.
The translation of Thomas's Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics
made by Father Litzinger has long been out of print. It is here
reprinted in a somewhat altered form. The translation itself stands as
Litzinger produced it , but the presentation of the Aristotelian text,
with accurate identification of Bekker numbers as well as the mode of
referring to Aristotle in the commentary have been changed so that the
commentary can function better as a Commentary.
Commentary on Aristotle's De Anima by Thomas Aquinas, translation by
Kenelm Foster, O.P., and Silvester Humphries, O.P. Introduction by Ralph
McInerny. (Dumb Ox Books' Aristotelian Commentary Series: Dumb Ox Books)
(Hardcover)
The commentary Thomas Aquinas completed on Aristole's De Anima is thougt
to be the first of some dozen such commentaries that he wrote toward the
end of his short career. He may have produced the work in 1268 while
teaching in the Dominican house of Santa Sabina in Rome. Shortly
thereafter he returned to Paris where he was swept into the Latin
Averroist controversy, at the centre of which was the proper
interpretation of the De Anima.
Avicenna and Averroes, the great Arabic
commentators, read the De Anima in such a way that intellect was taken
to be a separate substance and not a faculty of the human soul. Some of
Thomas's contemporaries, Masters of the Faculty of Arts, accepted the
Avicennian and Averroist interpretations as good money and thus came to
old positions incompatible with their Christian faith.
What is the correct reading of the De Anima? This
commentary, composed before Thomas was caught up in the contemporary
controversy, sets out to understand what it is that the text teaches.
Many students of Aristotle have come to see this commentary as
indispensable to reading the text aright.
Commentary on Aristotle's Physics by Thomas Aquinas, translation by
Richard J. Blackwell, Richard J. Spath and W. Edmund Thirlker
Introduction by Vernon J. Bourke. (Dumb Ox Books' Aristotelian
Commentary Series: Dumb Ox Books) (Hardcover)
Review pending
The Philosophy of William of Ockham: In the Light of Its Principles
by Armand Maurer (Studies and Texts, No 133: Pontifical Institute of
Mediaeval Studies) Every philosophy is sustained by a number of
elemental principles that give it cohesion and unity. Ockham's is no
exception. The principles of the divine omnipotence and the rule of
parsimony of thought known as 'Ockham's razor', and others like the
principle of non-contradiction, help to shape the entire range of his
thought. Many of his conclusions on matters as diverse as God's
knowledge, will and power, on creation and the causality of natural
things, and on human intuition and morality are reducible to them. These
principles are not unique to Ockham but were common to all the
scholastics. Yet it is precisely in confrontation with the views of his
predecessors and contemporaries such as Scotus, Henry of Gent, Aquinas
and Chatton that the particular force and character of his thought are
revealed. Over and again he sets each principle to powerful use, but
allows no single one of dominate, or to yield all its consequences.
Martin Heidegger once declared, 'Every thinker thinks but one single
thought'. The original and focal point of Ockham's thought is the
singular or individual thing (res singularis), as common
nature (natura communis) is the central conception of Scotism,
and the act of existing (esse) is of Thomism. With Ockham the
traditional conjugations of being come to signify the thing itself in
its ineluctable unity. The concept of being is univocal, standing for
and signifying individuals. A being is radically diverse and
incommunicable, differing from every other being not only in number but
also in essence. Indeed, an individual thing can no longer be said to
have an essence; it is an essence. Ockham takes his place
among the great philosophers because, like them, he drew out all the
implications of his insight. He remains a seminal thinker: his denial of
common essences, his emphasis on language in philosophical discourse,
all anticipate significant developments in modern philosophy.
The
Catholic Tradition by Thomas Langan (University of Missouri Press)
"This is a remarkable work. There are few who possess Langan's
historical knowledge and philosophical depth. His reading of the past is
informative, insightful, and provocative, all at once. . . . Anyone who
wishes to know what Catholicism is, friend, foe, or uninformed Catholic,
will find this volume a veritable treasure."--Jude P. Dougherty
In his Tradition and Authenticity in the Search for
Ecumenic Wisdom, Thomas Langan argued that the close interaction of
traditions in today's society calls for methodical critical
appropriation of the beliefs fostered by the principal traditions. He
also promised to demonstrate by example how such appropriation could be
accomplished. In The Catholic Tradition, Langan successfully
fulfills that vow by showing how a tradition--the Catholic--has shaped
his own outlook.
In this comprehensive study, Langan examines the
history of the Catholic Church and the origins of its teachings since
the Church's conception. Although committed to the Catholic religion,
Langan does not obscure the Church's failings as he lays out the
fundamentals of the Catholic faith.
He provides insight into the great Christological
councils, discusses the differences in the spiritualities of East and
West, and portrays the crucial roles that the pope and bishops played
during the Middle Ages. He incorporates the thought of Augustine,
Aquinas, and medieval Catholicism as he traces the rise and decline of
Christian Europe, the great issues raised by the reform: priesthood, the
Eucharist, spirituality, and Church structure.
Satan has no greater triumph, Langan asserts, than
when Catholics, who are recipients of the Good News of God's universal
love, allow selections from their tradition to be turned into
sectarianism and ideology. This balanced history of the Church as human
reality faces such perversions squarely. But despite betrayals by its
own across the centuries, the Catholic tradition, with its origin at
Sinai, remains the oldest and largest extant religious institution.
In a last section Langan offers a unique overview
of the church's present situation, its strengths and weaknesses, the new
movement and the challenge of the "new evangelization."
The Catholic Imagination in American Literature by Ross Labrie
(University of Missouri Press) In this well-written and comprehensive
volume on Catholic writing in the United States, Ross Labrie focuses on
works that meet three criteria: high intellectual and artistic
achievement, authorship by a practicing Roman Catholic, and a focus on
Catholic themes. Labrie begins with a discussion of the Catholic
imagination and sensibility and considers the relationship between art
and Catholic theology and philosophy.
Central to Catholic belief is the doctrine of the
Incarnation, wherein human experience and the natural world are
perceived as both flawed and redeemed. This doctrine can be seen as the
axis on which Catholic American literature in general rests and from
which variances by particular authors can be measured. The optimism
implied in this doctrine, together with an inherited American political
consciousness, allowed a number of Catholic authors, from a culture
otherwise perceived as outside the American mainstream, to identify with
a political idealism that granted dignity to the individual.
Counterpointing this emphasis on the individual,
though, is the doctrine of the church as an intermediary between God and
humanity and the belief in the community of saints. In concert with the
doctrine of the Incarnation, these teachings gave Catholic writing a
communal and prophetic dimension aimed at the whole of American society.
Separate chapters are included for each of the
writers considered so that the distinctiveness of their works is
elucidated, as well as the unity and the rich diversity of Catholic
American writing in general. Some of the authors considered are Flannery
O'Connor, Walker Percy, Allen Tate, Robert Lowell, Thomas Merton, and
Mary Gordon.
A concluding chapter examines the significance of
the corpus of Catholic American writing in the years 1940 to 1980,
considering it parallel in substance to the body of Jewish American
literature of the same period. The Catholic Imagination in American
Literature fills a distinctive place in the study of American
literature. |
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