Turner - Thomas Aquinas, A Portrait
Turner - Thomas Aquinas, A Portrait
Turner - Thomas Aquinas, A Portrait
DENYS TURNER
Thomas
Aquinas
A PORTRAIT
For Marie
. . . the onlie begetter . . .
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
1
Introduction
One
A Dominican 8
Two
A Materialist 47
God
70
100
145
169
Christ 189
230
267
Notes
271
Acknowledgments
I have not until undertaking this work ever given more careful
consideration to an intended readership for what I write than to
think in terms of the needs of the students I have taught professionally in theological schools in the United Kingdom and the
United States. Those students alone have truly mattered to me as
a teacher and writer. And on the whole, after many years of
teaching them I have imagined myself to have a pretty good idea
of their needs. For this work, though, Jennifer Banks at Yale
University Press called for availability to a wider and less specialist
readership, and I have had the good fortune of being able to rely
heavily on the advice as to how this might be done forthcoming
in the rst instance from Jennifer herself, from Philip King, the
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Presss sensitive and tactful copy editor, and then from a large
number of readers from a diverse range of theological and nontheological disciplines. Of necessity I could not take all the advice
offered, even if in the course of revision I have ignored none.
In the rst place, I am as grateful as only that teacher is who is
lucky enough to have the sort of class that I taught on the life and
thought of Thomas Aquinas at the Yale Divinity School in the fall
of 2011 and to benet from their feedback. I am especially grateful
to six Ph.D. students in that class working in a variety of academic
elds, not all theological: to Bradley East, Andrew Forsyth, Ryan
McAnnally-Linz, Ross McCullough, John Stern, and Eric
Weiskott. I set them the task of commenting on the version to
hand, which they did, much to the enhancement of the texts
clarity of focus.
I am grateful to three others who have had an important impact
on the genesis and completion of this book. From the very outset
of my writing of this work through to its completion Elizabeth
Trang has been generous and perceptive in her provision of
comments line by line. Her inuence was transforming, especially
at an early stage. Emily S. Kempson was the rst of two graduate
student copy editors who took turns at making of my rough drafts
a publishable book, she with a challenging gusto that caused me
much rethinking. It is, however, to Courtney Palmbush that, once
again, I am chiey indebted, for as with my previous book on
Julian of Norwich she saw this text through several stages to its
nal form with the same combination of meticulous scholarship,
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xi
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Introduction
Introduction
the main reason being that Thomas, who as a teacher was on more
or less permanent public display, deliberately hid that place from
anyone else than his confessor. The man indeed was a saint. But he
made it his business to ensure that you would not get to know
about it. In any case, he had little to hide that would arouse suspicions of exceptional holiness on the standard models of his time.
He prayed, for sure, early in the day and long, but most of the time
he taught, and when not teaching he read and he wrote, often late
into the night. Otherwise he traveled frequently within and
between Italy, Germany, and France, fullling conventional duties
as a Dominican friar, and apart from the fact that he often forgot
to eat and was somewhat overweight, that was pretty much it. His
Franciscan contemporary and friend, gentle Bonaventure, is easier
to get to know, and is the more obviously likeable saint, if just
as obviously the lesser theologian. As for the life of Thomas, theological genius he may have been. But there is not a lot of material
on the record making for an exciting hagiographical read.
The evidence of Thomas Aquinass holiness is invisible, then,
simply because he himself made sure of it. Consequently what I
have done in this little book is the only thing you can do with such
an impossible man, and that is write about that invisibility itself as
the form and evidence at once of his holiness, of his pedagogical
style, and of his writing as a professional theologian. In their
different ways, all three consist in a disappearing act, an act of selfeffacement that is itself so discreet that you could well spend your
life reading the man without noticing that all along he has been
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Introduction
missing. His life is a sort of hoax, the hoax of the genuinely humble
who will not make a fuss even out of persuading people that he is
not worth making a fuss of. He just disappears, unannounced, and
his texts appear, as if authorless.
It is against the odds, therefore, that I have tried to write about
this man, his mind, and his soul. What you miss when you fail
to advert to the trick that Thomas plays on you is, in fact, the
whole point, the whole point of the teacher, the whole point of
the theologian, and (you might as well say) the whole point of
Thomas. Thomas is a saint so that theologians might have at least
one model within the membership of their guild of a theologian
without an ego to promote or protect, who knew how to make
holy disappearing into a theological act. Of course there are
other theologians who are saints, in his own times Bonaventure, as
I say, being one. Bernard of Clairvaux, a century earlier, is worth
mentioning in Thomass connection by way of the extreme contrast
between them. Bernard is spectacular. Thomas is unremarkable.
Then too there is Augustine, rather more obviously a sinner and
then dramatic convert, but he is the last person from whom one
would learn how to disappearmuch like his theological mentor,
Paul, he writes himself prominently into nearly every work of
theology he composed. Paul and Augustine represent the fortunate possibility of sainthood for all, even for the ego-obsessed.
Then again there is Meister Eckhart, a zzing show-off, just a
little bit too self-indulgently enjoying his own talent for paradox
to be an entirely convincing preacher.
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Introduction
Introduction
can know that this was no false humility, because believing he was
a dumb ox did nothing to hold back his study, or his teaching or
his writing, the sheer energy of which is prodigious. You know
when humility is a pretense, because false humility is the excuse of
the lazy and uncommitted, or of those who are too daunted by the
demands made on them by a truthful assessment of their abilities
to get on with what they ought: so they imitate an unchallenging
form of modesty and pretend not to be up to it. Albert famously
rebuked those fellow students of Thomas for misjudging him. But
perhaps we should admit that unwittingly those students in one
respect got Thomas right. Though not a great conversationalist,
he was certainly not dumb, at any rate on paper. But he was a sort
of ox. He plods.
Thomas refused to be scintillating. His style is deadpan. There
are academics who love to scintillate; they will make anyone
(but themselves) pay the price of a particularly ne scintillation,
though the effect is, like lightning, of a ash of excessive brilliance
draining the world of color, followed by a darkness all the deeper
as a result. Thomass, by contrast, is a steadier light that is seen, not
in itself, but in what it illuminates, in the dense and polychrome
colorations it elicits from the surfaces it strikes upon, so that it is
the natural world, it is the human person, it is Christ, it is God,
that you see, not Thomas. Everyone loves to quote the Thomas
who says that it is better to cast light for others than merely to
shine for oneself, and truly the Dominican motto, contemplata aliis
tradere, the passing on to others what one has encountered in
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Introduction
ONE
A Dominican
FAMILY MATTERS
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His mother, Theodora, and Landolpho his father could understand the Benedictines. Long-established, conservative, wealthy,
fully integrated into the systems of power and patronage of the
Middle Ages, Benedictines formed part of the accepted cultural
landscape of their world. Monte Cassino, the rst of Benedicts
own foundations established in 529, was in the Ivy League of
medieval monastic communities; his parents would be doing well
for Thomas by nding him a place within such a prestigious
community of monks. It was a career trajectory of the kind that
any responsible parents could wish for a youngest son, not least
because of the extension of family inuence that would accompany his involvement there. By Thomass time the renowned
abbey represented that peculiarly medieval conation of genuine
piety and sociopolitical ambition that Benedicts communities had
achieveda mixture of motivations that came naturally to a
distinguished family like Thomass. But to the extent that they
understood such motivations were they ill-prepared for their sons
abrupt and inexplicable abandonment in 1244 of the career path
they had mapped out for him fteen years earlier.
That Thomass choice of a Dominican vocation profoundly
shocked his family cannot therefore be a surprise. It seems to have
come to his parents out of the blue, which couldnt have helped
them understand a vocational option that, as ecclesiastical career
trajectories go, was so distinctly unpromising as to be practically
suicidal. Founded by the Spaniard Domingo de Guzman (or, as
Latinized, Dominicus) in the early years of the thirteenth century
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and granted papal approval in 1216 (just eight years before Thomass
birth), the Order of Preachers turned the ecclesiastical world of
the early thirteenth century upside down. Most were at a loss to
know what to make of Dominics band of street preachers,
committed to keeping preaching and poverty inseparable and
living outside the orderly and closely governed precincts of
economically self-sustaining monastic communities typied by
that at Monte Cassino.
The problem Thomass parents would have had in accepting
their sons decision to join these Dominicans was compounded by
the difculty they, and many genuinely honest and respectable
Christians of their times, had in distinguishing these itinerant
preachers from mere vagabonds. The new preaching orders,
including also and perhaps even especially the Franciscans
founded in the same decade by Dominics friend, Francis of
Assisiwere genuinely hard to discern from the multitude of
groups and individuals that proliferated in the late twelfth and
early thirteenth centuries likewise claiming to imitate the poor
Christ. Though often justiably organized in protest at the
venality of an over-powerful, excessively wealthy, and frequently
corrupt established Church, too many of such groups and movements were themselves marginally orthodox in doctrine at best,
and at worst were little more than self-serving anarchists.
Christians of high and low degree alike wondered if many of these
movements were not simply bands of vagrant beggars making a
career out of the pretense of imitating the poor Christ. Were they
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We know, then, what provoked his familys opposition. If indefensible, it was at least understandable. But what about Thomas
himself? There is no evidence that he had made any permanent
profession as a monk when he left Monte Cassino sometime in
1239 to pursue further studies in Naples, though being fourteen or
fteen years old he was of an age when he could have done so.
In fact it seems that when at his fathers behest, and apparently
with the agreement of the abbot, Thomas left the community
of Monte Cassino for the University of Naples, he did so with
every intention of returning to the monastery once his studies in
Naples had been completed. Moreover, temperamentally Thomas
was no adolescent rebel anxious to free himself of parental inuence. In particular he valued family loyalties, believing, as he would
later explain at length, that in the order of indebtedness that
anyone owes to others, the debt owed to ones parents comes rst
and was in principle impossible to repay, for parents gave you life
itself, and nothing in life could match the gift of life. For which
reason, in the order of charity toward ones neighbors, Thomas
tells us, you are to love your parents before all others, including
even ones partner in marriage.1 What was it, then, that caused
Thomas to defy his parents wishes for him so radically?
Herbert McCabe, a great Dominican teacher and preacher of
our own times, used to say that Dominicans exist not to pray, but
to preach. We cannot say what Thomass personal motivations
were for so uncharacteristically throwing caution to the winds and
against all the odds joining up with what seemed to his family to
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that rhetoric is never mere, never idle, for if words are not
doing good they are doing harm. Dominic knew this, for he
had learned in the course of his travels from his native Spain
through the Languedoc on his way to Rome how counterproductive were the words of the worldly Cistercians whom he had
observed attempting to convert the rigorously ascetical Albigensian
heretics by preaching from the saddles of ne horses and backed
up by impressively well-funded retinues. It was in his observation
of the contradiction of word and life in the Cistercian mission in
Languedoc that Dominic discovered the genius of the Dominican
vocation to lie in the essential connection between poverty of
spirit and the effectiveness of the preached word, the rst being
the condition of the second. Dominic saw that if words always
have an effect, for good or for ill, the result depends on how
those words stood to the life lived by their speaker. So he conceived
of a community that would be at once a training ground of
preachers and a school of holiness, a place where learning how
to enesh the word was the same thing as learning how to live
by the Word made esh, particularly in imitation of the poor
Christ. Within that distinctive combination of preaching and
poverty lay the possibility of holy teaching. And that, sacra
doctrina as he called it, was what Thomas devoted his life to
when in 1244 he abandoned the stability of the monastic life
of Monte Cassino for the life of the wandering preacher with
those two newfound companions, Thomas of Lentini and John
of San Giuliano.
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THE TEACHER OF PREACHERS
Not that Thomas himself was ever particularly famous for his
preaching, though we do possess a few sermons of his whose
impassivity would put to shame some purveyors of a self-referring
histrionic homiletic of our timeand in the best Catholic
tradition his sermons are mercifully short. Although his lifes
work being that of a teacher of preachers it should be obvious,
it has somehow become easy to forget how Dominican a theologian Thomas is, how distinctively predicated on the training of
preachers is his conception of theology. While by instinct no
revolutionary himself, Thomas participated with enthusiasm in a
theological revolution that had been taking hold of the Western
Church throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in the
success of which the Dominicans had a major stake. And that
revolution was so complete by the time Thomas died that even
now it is hard for us to imagine any other meaning for the word
theology than that which Thomas and his like in the thirteenth
century have bequeathed to us.
For the theologians of our times (the majority of whom occupy
professorships in the modern equivalent of that twelfth-century
invention, the university), most of what Thomas does by way of
theology is in its external lines perfectly familiar. What he studied
in Naples, and subsequently in Cologne and Paris, would likewise
seem perfectly familiar to a student preparing for ordination in a
professional divinity school in an American private university
(though Thomas would have had no conception of what could be
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theological opinions gathered from equivalent sources in the tradition, arranged topically in the form of responses to questions of
theology. The styles of the Glossa and of the Sentences could not be
more different. Whereas the Glossa gave the (false) impression that
the Churchs reception of its scriptures had achieved the seamless,
coherent, hermeneutical uniformity of an uncontested tradition, in
the Sentences Peter gave the opposite, but equally false, impression
that every theological question was up for grabs. But there was
delity to method in Peters dialectical promiscuity. It mattered not
to him whether the topics that he assembled were genuinely open
questions continuing to be disputed in his day or whether they
were by then regarded as having already been authoritatively settled.
Hotly disputed in his day was whether charity in the Christian soul
was the created work of the Spirit working its grace through the
souls natural powers, or the uncreated Spirit itself displacing
human agency. Undisputed was the existence of God. But either
way, whether it was the case that everyone, or the case that no one,
denied a theological proposition, disputed or established, every
topic was to be subjected to the same rigors of debate. For the
method of the quaestio that Peter formalized in his Sentences, with
the presentation of answers either way together with arguments for
and against each, was essentially not a method of theological
inquiry so much as pedagogical in intent, a method of teaching and
learningor, at any rate, so it became by the thirteenth century.
For by the thirteenth century, aspirant masters of theology were
required to cut their theological teeth commenting on Peters text,
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In too many ways to enumerate the Summa is different in structure and organization from the Sentences of Peter the Lombard.
Different as they are, it is possible to mistake the signicance of
those differences, too much having been made of a theological
nature of the particular sequencing of topics that constitutes the
structure and division of Thomass later work. In fact, if we are
fully to understand Thomass value as a theological innovator we
must take all the evidence together, including the fact that
he devised a number of very different structures of theological
expositionthree mainly: one in the Summa contra gentiles,
another in the Summa theologiae, and a third in the likewise incomplete Compendium theologiae. Each of these works offers a different
way of setting out coherently and compendiously the whole business of theology as a linear sequence of topics forming a sort of
curriculum of theological education.
The Summa contra gentiles is principally a work of apologetics,
designed to equip Dominican preachers with the sort of arguments and persuasions they would need in conversation with
heretical Christian and non-Christian disputantsin three of
its four books it rarely appeals to anything but rational arguments
in support of Christian beliefs, only in the fourth book showing
how the conclusions of those arguments square with revealed
biblical truth as Christians know it. Wholly different in purpose,
and because of that, also in structure, is the incomplete Compendium
theologiae, which is organized in three parts based on the specically Christian theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity,
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Christ preached, the desire to preach it yourself, and the knowledge required to preach with effect. In short, Thomas saysand
here I paraphrase his own wordsbetter than merely to shine
for oneself is to cast light for others; and so the better form of
life than the merely contemplative is contemplata aliis tradere, to
hand on to others what they have drunk from their own wells
of contemplation. The Summa is friars theology, the one scrip
that mendicant preachers must carry with them; it is a poor
mans theology, the poor Christ as theology. Friars must carry that
theology with them, as poor people do, in their heads, in their
skills, in their trainingbooks are too heavy to be carried very far
on the back.
So it is that Thomas brackets that enormous second part of
the Summa, devoted to the practice of the Christian life that
Dominicans are to preach, with a profound meditation at the front
end on the meaning of the God to whom Jesus prayed, and the
meaning of the Christ who thus prayed at the back end. For the
moral life comes from God as its source and returns to God
through Christ alone. Typically, Thomass source for this recasting
of Christian moral theology is that ill-assorted pair of bedfellows,
the Gospels and Aristotle. For Aristotle had said that if you want
to know what the good life is like, all you need do is see how
the good man lives. But Thomas, unlike Aristotle, knew what
a truly good man looked likefrom the Gospels. These are the
theological, or, one might say, contemplative wells from which
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A DISAPPEARING ACT
Thomas, I have said, is all Dominican teacher, and it is a paradoxical feature both of his teaching and of his holiness that it
consists almost entirely in a disappearing act. Whether or not he
was as physically obese as legend has it, there is yet no personal
bulk at all, no personal mass, in his teaching. In fact if anything is
massive about Thomas it is his modesty. And it is this that presents a problem for the writer who wishes to track down the
precise point at which Thomas the saint, Thomas the theologian,
and Thomas the teacher intersect. For the fact that he deliberately
hid that point of intersection from us and made a secret of it
makes Pope John XXIIs canonization of Thomas in 1323 seem
more like the canonization of a library than of a man. And
that might seem absurd, except that there is just one important
sense in which that is exactly what John XXII had done. It is a
lovely paradox, one that gets to the heart of what Thomas seems
to have wanted to hide from us behind the bulk of his writings,
that there is something intensely holy about his absence from
them. It reveals a lot about Thomas the man that his writings
tell you nothing about Thomas the man. Thomas gets himself
entirely out of the way of the act of communication. In short,
Thomas is all teachera holy teacher, and a professor of theology
as holy teaching.
If, then, so little does Thomas as a person appear in his writings
that one is tempted to conclude that it was not the speaker but the
speech-act that was canonized, this is, in fact, a truthbut only a
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his rhetorical styles are quite differentbut there is one connection in which Thomas constructs a closely parallel argument. All
Thomass imagery of knowledge is that of light, as we will see in
the next chapter. Were we brute animals equipped with bodily
senses and imagination alone, our relation with the world would be
as if we were bumping around in a darkened room, able only to
register the immediate impacts of the objects it contains. And even
if we were to become very skilled in the negotiation of unobstructed
routes in the room, we would still know nothing of what sort
of place we were in. We would be like the team of blind people
trying to reconstruct the shape of an elephant by reporting to one
another their separate sensations of touch alone. But when the
intellect turns toward what the bodily senses present it with, it is,
Thomas says, like switching on a light, and the objects are revealed
in context, and so in their meanings. We are present in and to the
room through the light intellect sheds on it, but only, Thomas
adds, in what we might call a pre-reexive way.
For my act of experiencing the sitting room is not in the same
way an object of experience as the sitting room is: or, as we might
say, in Bonaventuran spirit, the intellectual light in which we
now see the illuminated space to be a sitting room is not itself
an object of our seeing. In fact, Thomas says, in exact parallel with
Bonaventure, when we turn our gaze back upon the act of gazing
itself, it is as if we see nothing. Try to catch yourself in the act of
experiencing the world, and that self performs a disappearing act,
like an infallible sleuth who, however quickly you turn round to
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wrong. We might well say, then, that Thomas was fearlessly clear,
unafraid to be shown to be wrong, and correspondingly angered
by those among his colleagues, especially in the University of
Paris, who in his view refused to play the game on a eld
leveled by lucidity and openness equal in degree of honesty to the
requirements of the intellectual life. And yet, even in Thomass
anger there is nothing personal. His is the anger of a true teacher
observing students to have been betrayed by colleagues. It has no
more to do with self-assertion than his humility has to do with
lack of self-worth.
THE SILENCE OF THE SAINT
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we should see the incompleteness of his lifes work as itself a theological statement. For what we do know is how much Thomas
made of silence theologicallynot just in those last three months
of writers block, but throughout his twenty-ve or so years as
writer, preacher, and teacher. Nowadays, we call this theological
silence his apophaticism. We refer thereby to a powerful medieval theme of the relationship in theology between speech and
silence, of how there is an interpenetration between that of which
theology can speak and that whereof it must be silent. And
therefore we refer in Thomas to his conviction that all theology
emerges from silence, whence all faith and all holy teaching
emerge, in the way that, as a student musician once explained to
me, the silent up-beat immediately precedes the rst note of a
musical performance. And as they emerge from silence, so do all
those millions of words of theology that Thomas wrote proceed,
because they are the articulation of that same silence, in the way
that the massive structures of the medieval cathedral articulate the
spaces they enclose. And, all those words end in silence because, as
he said, it is through the Son who is the Word that we enter into
the silence of the Father, the Godhead itself, which is utterly
beyond our comprehension. For Thomas, silence is not the absence
of speech. It is what the fullness of speech demonstratesnamely
that, even at its best, speech falls short; indeed, it is only speech at
its best that truly discovers this silence. And theology at its best
discloses but the name of that silence from which the Word
proceeds, and to which it returns. Its name is God.
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his lifes work was, therefore, a form of silence that was Thomass
last word as a Dominican theologian, his response to the last and
ultimately self-denying demand that the poor Christ could make
on him. For Thomas to be the theologian he was it was necessary
that he should rate poverty of spirit above theology. And in
that nal silence of Thomas we at last see fully exposed that place
within him where the Dominican, the theologian, and the saint
intersect, and can no longer be told apart. When, therefore, in 1323
Pope John XXII canonized Thomas, what he canonized was the
aliis traditio, the handing on to othersnot, that is, the theology,
but the theological teaching act itself, both the millions of words
of seless speech and the nal, ultimately unselng, silence. For
that indeed was Thomass whole life, a holy life of holy teaching.
Better said, then, is that the Pope canonized both the words and
the silence of Thomasthat great but quiet, friendly mass of a
man, for whom the life of poverty was that of the Dominican
teacher who to the end preferred to stand out of the light so that
others might see.
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T WO
A Materialist
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THE MIND OF A MATERIALIST
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natural and revealed, above all of course from that revealed effect
that is the human nature, human life, and death of Christ. For he
who knows me knows the Father who sent me. Our natural
language is worldly, and for Thomas, the human mind by default
faces outward to the material environment. Language and mind
alike have to be stretched to reach above and beyond it.
By contrast, the Franciscan Bonaventure, his contemporary,
friend, and briey (in 125657) his fellow professor in the faculty of
divinity at Paris, thought that in the same sense of the word
natural, the natural object of the human mind was God, and that
ideas of created things exist rst in the divine mindhence, it is
from the existence of their exemplars in the divine mind that
human minds can know the natures existent in the material world.
There is an Augustinian idea at work here. Augustine had argued
that the human mind, being itself an unstably changeable creature,
would be unable to judge the changeable things of the world as to
good, better, and best by any unchanging standard (which, as we
know, it can and does do) unless it were illuminated by the
unchanging light of eternal truth which, though not of it as its
own possession, is present within the human mind.3 Likewise,
Bonaventure knew that of course the human mind could in fact
possess such genuine knowledge of the material world. But,
following Augustine, he thought we could possess that genuine
knowledge only by way of the divine light of eternal truth, the
divine ideas of created things, and that they were the minds
natural object. For Bonaventure the human mind is thus turned
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and the self from the standpoint of God; for Descartes, we know
the world and God from the standpoint of the self. For Thomas,
we know both God and the self from the standpoint of the world.
In this sense, then, Thomas is by a long way the more materialistically disposed by any measure, at any rate as to the minds natural
object. For Thomas that natural object is the material world.
HUMAN BEINGS ARE ANIMALS
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is nothing special about human beings in that they have souls. For
Thomas, God and the angels apart, anything alive in any way at
all has a soul, so that has a soul seems to him to be no more than
a synonym for is alive.
And then it is clear that there is yet another sense in which
Thomas may fairly be described as a materialist. For Thomas, the
study even of how human beings are alive begins with the recognition that a human is a kind of animal, alive with an animals life.
And like any animal I am a being essentially situated, set within a
complex of relationships with other beings that are alive, at a
number of different levels. As an animal I cannot exist without an
organic world, a world full of other sorts of life, animal and vegetable. Volcanoes and black holes have no such needs. They need
other physical objects with which to interact and impersonal
physical laws to govern their interactions. But they do not need
company, as animals do. Black holes have no family life. Neither,
at the other end of the scale of things, do angelseach of whom,
Thomas believed, realizes all the possibilities of its species, and
needs no others to be the kind of spiritual being that it is.
Unsurprisingly, then, it worried Augustinian-Platonists about
Thomas that he seemed scarcely to need a special account of
the human soul at all, and therefore would seem to have no basis
for an account of what is spiritual about human beings.
Conversely it worried Thomas about Bonaventure and the
majority Augustinian-Platonist opinion of his times that by their
account, the identity and existence of human beings were
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Thomas, however, goes further still. He does not say merely that
human beings are animals living at home in a world made for
animals. He says we are wholly animal, animal from top to toe.
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relief of it, we see and we hear and we smell, we hunt some other
animals as prey, and with others we identify danger and ght
them or ee; all those things that all animals do, we humans do.
And being alive in all these ways we are driven by natural inclinations, biologically and without consciousness, or psychologically
and therefore consciously.
For it is a natural property of living things that they tend to act
or to resist being acted upon so as to stay alive, as animals out of
hunger search for food or in fear ee danger. Hence, Thomas says,
these activities answer to natural animal tendencies and so are
good for their agents, serving their interests for survival. But when
it comes to human beings, they not only possess these tendencies
as all animals possess them, nor only act on them as all animals act.
These activities are good for human beings not merely as a matter
of natural fact. Human beings can engage in them choosing to do
so because they are good for them. Human beings characteristically, if not always, do what all animals do, but they do them for
reasons, while non-human animals do what they do because naturally caused to do so by inclination. Reasons are good or bad, they
justify actions or fail to justify them. Causes are blind to such
distinctions: they cannot bring about what they cause rightly or
wronglythey cause what they cause, like it or lump it. Causes
are dumb masters, and their effects mutely follow: reasons, on the
other hand, are articulate, they narrate the course of action. In
short, if for Thomas human beings are animals, they are animals
of a particular species: they are rational animals; that is to say, they
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are animals that act for reasons, and these actions can tell, or be
told by, stories. Human lives are narratives, they have plots.6
There is little doubt that what in all this caused trouble for
Thomas, both after his death and in his lifetime, was that it
seemed to his more Platonizing readers to be just too materialist
an account of human nature to be properly Christian. Thomas, of
course, was far from intending to deliberately scare his readership
with a polemical materialism. Indeed, unlike his younger fellow
Dominican Meister Eckhart, who regularly used scare tactics as a
homiletic method, Thomas, knowing as well as anyone how his
readership would react, made every effort to scare no one and
intentionally cultivated a reassuringly relaxed and deadpan style to
that end. Eckhart often says more than he means as a sort of shock
tactic. But once you get used to his rhetorical devices the effect of
his hyperbole wears off. Thomas almost always means exactly
what he says, but the voice is so low-pitched that it is sometimes
hard to credit how shocking he can be. To those for whom it is a
matter of Christian belief to maintain that human beings are a
higher species than brute animals, and that it is by virtue of a nonanimal part of our souls that we are thus higher, it is shocking to
say, as Thomas does in an early monograph, De ente et essentia, that
human beings are wholly, not partly, animals. His reasoning is
simple and clear: you could not say of a human being that it is an
animal at all if being an animal were merely what Thomas calls an
integral (or, as we might say, constituent) part of what it is to
be human.7 My being an animal is not a bit of me, like a leg or a
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way of explaining how I am also just one person, just one existent,
just one source (albeit generically multiple) of agency.
The second reason is more empirically grounded. Nonetheless,
it follows from the rst and, as we will see, is of enormous consequence for Thomass theology as a whole. Were it the case that a
human being possessed an animal soul really distinct from a
rational soul, then a human beings animality would be indistinguishable from a non-rational animals animality in such a way
that my exercising animal powers of perception of danger, for
example, or reaction to the stimulus of the smell of food, would be
interchangeable cognitively with those of my dog. Thomas thinks
this is simply untrue. Of course, if, both of us being distracted by
a loud noise, I and my dog turn suddenly to look in the same
direction, no doubt (since we share similar nervous systems) we
may both be described as having been startled by the noise; and
(possessing physiologically similar auditory apparatus) we will
both be correctly described as having heard the direction of it; and,
having both turned our attention to its source, both will correctly
be said to see much the same objects at a distance, and by means
of the same kind of physical organ, our eyes. We are both animals.
But otherwise than at this rudimentary level of description, everything else is different. For in me, this sensory input is mediated by
a universe of meaning available to me by virtue of language, and
unavailable to my dog for the want of it. Both of us sense danger.
But only I can sense the danger and fear it under the description
terrorist threat. And I can describe the danger that particular
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form of intellectual soul that is distinctive in being wholly vegetative, wholly animal, and wholly rational in nature, all of them all
the way through, a single form, a single form of life. And that is
where the problem was that made Thomas seem too materialistic
for Augustinian tastes. For in saying that human beings have only
one soul and that it is intellectual is to say that the human intellect
is deeply rooted in, not separable from, the animal and vegetative
life of a human person. And that is Thomass rm conviction,
albeit that it seemedand he knew ittoo unspiritual an account
of human nature to be tolerable to theologians of a Platonist cast
of mind. But that is the reason for describing Thomas as a materialist. It does justice to the way his account of human nature was
perceived by his Augustinian-Platonist opponents. And for his
part, Thomas the theologian was wholly undisturbed so to be
perceived.
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Souls are not angels. Angels are not souls, nor do angels have
souls. Only embodied beings have souls, for any soul is the life of
some body, a body alive in the characteristic ways of humans,
dogs, cabbages, and cats. It is of the greatest importance to get
this much clear if we are not to mistake Thomass account of the
soul for other accounts much more familiar than hisaccounts
much easier to understand and to some much more plausibly
consistent with Christian beliefs, especially with Christian beliefs
regarding human persons survival of death. Thomas, believing as
rmly as anyone in personal survival of death, is nonetheless sure
that Platonizing accounts of the soul are mistaken. The human
soul, Thomas says, is the substantial form of the body. Put
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when the body rots. But then you must pay the price, as Thomas
thought, of being unable to account for the unity of personhood
pre-mortem. At the very least you provoke the question of why
human persons need bodies in the rst place if their survival as
persons in a bodiless condition post-mortem is natural to them.
But Thomass rejection of Platonism is stronger still: the bare
survival of bodiless human souls would not be the survival of
persons at all. A human being naturally desires the survival of his
or her selfhood, and the soul, being part of a human persons body,
is not a whole person, for I am not my soul. Consequently even
were the soul to survive into another life, [that surviving soul]
would be neither I nor any other person.1
Which is not to say that Thomass position is without difculties. If you are as adamant as he is that I am not my soul, that my
soul is my bodys form, its source of life, and that if only my soul
were to survive death I would not, then no doubt it is easier to give
an account of the body-soul unity of my pre-mortem personhood.
But to the degree that that problem is the more satisfactorily
solved it is correspondingly difcult to see how anything of me
could survive deathin short, how personal immortality can be
defended on any grounds. There are profound, and not merely
tactical difculties here, and Thomas knows it. Knowing how
difcult it is to hold together two equally compelling truths, it is
clear which way Thomas inclines: were a choice between them
inevitable he would rather have a problem explaining how to
sustain the Christian teaching of personal survival of death than a
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THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL
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prioritization of experiences immediacy over the mediated character of meaning gets everything the wrong way round for the
purposes of understanding Thomas. And this is especially true of
that word abstraction that Thomas and Locke share as the name
of the process by which meaning is elicited from experience.
For Locke, meanings are possessed by means of concepts, or, to
use his word, ideas. And ideas are abstractindeed, the noun
phrase abstract idea for Locke is pleonastic: ideas are abstractions. But for Locke, the abstraction that yields a concept or idea
is more like an extraction than anything else. If, for Locke, you
want to grasp the idea, or nominal essence, of the human, for
example, you do so by identifying all and only those features
common to all instances of human beings thereby to elicit the
Highest Common Factor uniting all such instances into the idea
of the human. Abstraction, on this account, sets aside the variations that differentiate one human being from another, and in
effect, therefore, it thins out the concept to a degree of density that
all possess: which is little enough. On Lockes account, featherless biped would probably meet his conditions for the idea of
the human, because de facto all and only human beings are featherless bipeds. Ideas, for Locke, therefore, are what the mind grasps
of the thin tissue connecting up descriptively the individuals that
fall under them. Ideas, being abstractions, are essentially simplications, paraphrases of complex experiences.
Thomass account of abstraction reverses all this. To return to
the example given earlier, if you bump into three hard objects in a
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darkened room, you are (in Lockes sense of the word) in possession
of purely abstract impressions of them: that is to say, you have
grasped of all three objects that they possess in common the property of solidity, minus any others. But if, as we saw Thomas to say,
you then turn on a light, you see them all in the medium of much
greater complexity and variety, you experience them no longer as
abstractly tangible objects, but as furniture. You grasp their wealth
of differentiation in respect of position and color and shape and
size and eleganceor ugliness, as the case may betheir usefulness, their layout, you begin to understand the social purposes of
the room thus furnished. In short, you see a sitting room. And as
you learn more and more about what you see, you more and more
successfully grasp the meaning of what you see in the room,
precisely in your grasp of its complex variety, its diversity and differentiation; and so it is that you know what kind of room you are in,
you know where you are, and the experience is now intelligible, as
Thomas would say: you have the concept of a furnished room, a
mental and linguistic act by which you are concretely situated
within, not abstractly distanced from, your bodily experiences. And
so Thomas says that the minds forming concepts out of particular
experiences is like turning on a light: it reveals the color of those
experiences, it thickens them, reveals their depths and densities. It
does not, as Locke thought, thin experience out. Lockean abstractions are pale and effete, or, as Hume said, they are faded impressions; Thomass abstractions (if it is not wholly misleading to call
them that) are polychrome and dense.
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MATTER AND MEANING
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I alone, who is the least of them all, but many others whose
concern is for the truth, who will resist his error and counsel
his ignorance.6
Thomas wrote these words at the end of a polemical work
addressed to some philosophers in the Faculty of Arts in the
University of Paris who, in his view, were systematically misreading
Aristotle on the nature of the soul through the interpretative lens
of the twelfth-century Arab philosopher Ibn Rushd, known in
the Latin Middle Ages as Averros. Whether the so-called Latin
Averroists were getting Averros right, whether Averros was
getting Aristotle right, and whether Thomas was getting either
the Latin Averroists right or for that matter correctly reading
Aristotle himself, are issues to the side of our purpose. What is
closer to our concerns is why Thomas was so angry with his
Latin Averroist colleagues in the Faculty of Arts at Paris.7
Undoubtedly one reason is that given in the rst chapter. These
philosophical followers of Averros were, in Thomass view,
refusing to step foot into the public marketplace of writing and
debate, instead inuencing young minds by means of unchallengeable insinuation, exercising the power of the teacher over
students while bypassing the standard academic checks on its
abuse: public debate with ones peers. At one level, then, Thomas
the teacher was outraged simply at the blatant failures of professional ethics among some of the philosophers and theologians.
Plus a change.
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life, just as my vegetative and animal lives run all the way through
and up into my intellectual life. Thus it is that my vegetative and
animal life (eating, having sex) can bear sense, carry meanings,
become a discourse, become a language of human transaction. For
what else is language but the material world replete with the
human meanings that it bears, what else are human beings but
matter articulate?
But it is just at this same point that an even more dramatic
juncture is reacheda crossing of the paths that is, theoretically,
wholly surprising until you see just why Thomas insists upon that
form of moderate materialism I have attempted to describe in
this and the previous chapter. For it is just at this point where the
extreme spiritualisms of the Augustinian-Platonists and the
radical Averroists converge (a wholly surprising result, given their
mutual animosity in the thirteenth century) that, in turn, the
materialisms of our times intersect with both (an even more
surprising result). Thomass position would appear to entail the
rejection of all three, and all three on exactly the same ground,
ground which more than anything else denes the distinctiveness
of Thomass account of human life.
For if it is true that what is distinctive about Thomass position
on the nature of life merits description as a form of materialism,
yet, relative to the philosophical and commonly atheistic materialisms of our own times, his materialism stands as a critique of its
dogmatic narrowness. At its simplest, for Thomas the atheistic
materialism of the twenty-rst century and the theological
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99
FOUR
God
Deus vere [est] subiectum hiuius scientiae,1 It is God who is the true
subject of this discipline. So says Thomas at the outset of the
Summa. By contrast, talk about God is curiously unfashionable
among Christian theologians today. They seem to prefer to talk
about Christ, as if you could theologize with Christological
adequacy without standing on secure doctrinal ground concerning
God. This seems perverse, being somewhat akin to an English
persons attempting to describe to an American the conduct of a
cricket match while suppressing any indications that cricket is a
sport. The American, after all, might reasonably conclude that the
description referred to some tediously long-winded religious
ritual that devotees of most English-speaking nations2 engage in
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God, talk about the Trinity, and talk about Christ. To set talk
about Christ or the Trinity in opposition to talk about God, or the
converse, is to disrupt the most intimate of all linkages that make
up Christian teaching. For this reason, that is, because for Thomas
it is so obvious that you could never engage in Christian theology
otherwise than in the medium of these inner connections, he can
afford to let it go without saying that when he does talk about God
he does so as only Trinitarian Christians must, even if he is also
prepared to talk about God as a Muslim or a Jew does when the
occasion calls for it. Not forgetting that the structure of the Summa
is governed by its pedagogical purposes, however, and given that in
the construction of a learning curve curricular sequencing is all, in
the Summa Thomas makes a choice: he prefers to talk about God
rst, then about the Trinity, and only in the third and nal part
about Christ. Why not? After all, as Elizabeth Trang has pointed
out to me, Thomass order of theological exposition corresponds to
the scriptural order of exposition, insofar as one conceives of the
progression of books of the Old Testament through to the New as
describing a whole nations learning curve, an enormous arc of
salvation history progressively revealing the one God of Exodus to
be the one and only Trinitarian God that the Christian Church in
due course comes to believe was revealed in Christ. Why should
not the pedagogical cursus of theology map on to the historical
cursus of the revelation which is its source?
And why is it that theologians today are so strangely dogmatic
about the sequencing of theological exposition as if alternative
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God
genuinely to disagree; rather they are just unlit ships passing one
another in the nighta fair account, by the way, of Thomass
doctrine of God and the atheist denial of someone like Richard
Dawkins, there being scarcely a proposition of Thomass theology
that Dawkins is able to formulate accurately enough to succeed in
accurately denying. Hence, Thomas appears to say, if, unlike
Dawkins, the atheists truly deny what the Christian afrms, then
they agree at least on the meaning of the contested proposition
There is a God, just insofar as they are opposed concerning its
truth. And unless their disagreement is no different from that
between those who do and those who do not like sushi, then they
respectively afrm and deny Gods existence on grounds and for
reasons, that is to say, across agreed territory of disagreement. And
it is on just such ground that Thomas sets his arguments for the
existence of God. In short, for Thomas, the existence of God is
rationally debatable, even if he knows as a matter of faith which
side ought to win. If this is the right way to read Thomass theological strategies, it is hardly surprising that so many theologians
today accuse Thomas of a form of rationalist foundationalism,
according to which the edice of faith, depending on a substratum
of rational argument, is thereafter a tilted and tottering house
built on the shifting sands of philosophy.
That much being supposed, it is unsurprising that after opening
with a few methodological preliminaries, the rst substantive
question with which the Summa theologiae begins is: Is there a
God? And the rst step toward an answer is, no more surprisingly,
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thus proved was the God invoked when, for example, they recited
the Lords Prayer. However, even the most cursory glance at the
text of those famous proofs raises some doubts as to Thomass
procedures. Within none of the Abrahamic traditions is prayer
commonly addressed to the prime mover or the rst cause,
and on the Christian side, I know of no pious Catholics who, in
despair at the failure of Mary to intercede successfully with her
Son on their behalf, tried an invocation to the necessary being as
offering better prospects for intercessory prayer. It is easy to see
when we look at those ve ways why something would appear
to be wrong with them if their character as proofs is to be judged
by standards of demonstration with which a proof is normally
expected to comply. In general, two things might seem wrong
with them. First, even if they are valid as inferences go, the
criticism can seem plausible that what they prove is hard to
recognize as the God of Christian faith and prayer. And second,
the risk of producing the sort of bizarrely technical descriptions of
God that Thomass arguments yield might have been reduced if
only he had submitted his proofs to the ordinary disciplines
of good argument, and had he explained what the denition of
God is that a successful proof would show the existence of.
Noticeably (indeed, you might almost think willfully so), Thomas
fails to do this.
Perhaps even Thomass severest critics will concede, however,
that it is unlikely he had not noticed when in the third part of the
Summa in his discussion of the nature of Jesus prayer in the garden
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ONE GOD?
It is here that Thomass doctrine of God takes what might reasonably be described as a thoroughly Muslim and Jewish turn.
Between question 3, in which he discusses the simplicity of God,
and question 26, when he discusses Gods happiness, Thomas
takes not a single step that a Muslim theologian could not take.
In particular, the emphasis on the divine simplicity and oneness is
so strong that the reader is tempted to think that Thomas is
setting himself up for theological disaster as an orthodox
Trinitarian Christian. For so emphatic is Thomas that in whichever of two ways you construe the divine onenesswhether as
absolute uniqueness (there being but one God, there is no
other), or as absolute simplicity (there is no number or distinction in God)either way, all possible hint of multiplicity is driven
out. In consequence he appears to leave no room whatsoever for a
doctrine of the Trinity: for according to that doctrine there would
seem to be required several straightforwardly numerical determinants since Christians say there are three persons in Godnot
two, not four. It was this perilously pagan emphasis on the
oneness of God that so troubled the Catholic Rahner along with
the Protestant Barth about Thomass Summa: it appeared to
Rahner that the core doctrine for Thomas is a belief-neutral
doctrine of the one God. For as they understood Thomas, the
Christian doctrine of the Trinity would seem to get a look in only
after the event, when terms have been settled with that generic
oneness.
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after all, just like my one pie for lunch, at least as far as it excludes
there being two of them.
The comparison is facile, though revealingly so. For that is
exactly how not to think of the oneness of God, according to
Thomas. It is true that Gods being one rules out there being two
or more Gods. But this is not for the reason that Gods oneness
excludes plurality in the same way as does the oneness of the just
one pie excludes there being two of them. What is wrong with
saying that there are two, or twenty-two, gods is not that you have
added up the number of gods incorrectly. A plurality of gods is
ruled out by Gods oneness because Gods oneness entails that
counting is ruled out in every way. That being so, it also follows
that in saying that the one and only God is numerably one, you
are no less mistaken than you would be in saying there are many
gods. As so often, Thomas is trying to nd a way of saying two
things that seem each to rule the other out without laying himself
open to the charge of attempting to eat his cake and have it.
Firstconcerning God, our grip on ordinary senses of oneness is
loosened. Second, if positively Gods oneness is beyond our ken,
our grip on the divine oneness is not so slack that we cannot know
what it excludes.15
COUNTING NUMBER IN GOD
God
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God
not any kind of being, not one of a kind, as if there were a kind
of thing that is a God, and there were just one of them. Thomas is
explicit: whereas Socratess being a man and Socratess being this
man cannot be identical because Socrates is but one instance of
humanity of which there are many others, Gods being God and
Gods being this God are, and must be, identical. Hence, unlike
Socrates, it is not and cannot be as just one of a kind, or even as
the only one of a kind, that God is one; but then, neither can it
be how the persons of the Trinity are counted as three. As
Thomas said, there is no counting in Godnot, as we must now
understand him to have meant, as thereby somehow prioritizing
the oneness of God over the Trinity, but as a condition equally of
non-idolatrous talk of the Trinity and of non-idolatrous talk of the
divine oneness. There can be no such counting in God either way.
The trouble with talk of persons, whether deployed of the
divine Trinity or of the divine oneness, is that by force of its natural
meaning Trinitarian theology tends to generate either tri-theistic
heresy or plain contradictory nonsense, depending on which way
you play it, just as, alternatively in the Jewish and Muslim traditions, the divine oneness generates an idolatrous conception of
God as just a special case of an individuated nature where one
individual exhausts all that natures possibilities. Christianity,
Islam, and Judaism are equally vulnerable to their respective forms
of idolatry. And Thomas knows that such a notion cannot be what
Jews, Christians, or Muslims teach about the divine oneness.
Hence, given the requirements of the respective scriptural
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are real relations, and are really distinct from each other as relations, by contrast, the tarmac-covered strip is a real entity and
is distinct from the directions north and south, not as they
are distinct from one another, but only as in general any entity
is distinct from any of the relations in which it stands. And if
you were to press this analogy on the doctrine of the Trinity
too far, you might indeed avoid modalism and tri-theism, but
you would certainly get out of it some form of heterodox
subordinationismthe doctrine that the Father is existentially
prior to the Son and the Holy Spirit, just as I-95 as entity is existentially prior to the relations that depend on it. And for Christians,
as Thomas knows, Nicaean orthodoxy plainly rules that out.
In consequence, Thomas believes that the conciliar traditions
leave no option other than to say that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
are three relatednesses, which is where, in the end, he must leave
it. It is hardly the most appealing conclusion to a doctrine of God;
there is something more than a little articially strained about the
language here, and one may well share Rahners impression that in
Thomass Trinitarian theology the constraints of technical accuracy rather take over the interests of devotion and prayer. And yet,
however strange such talk may seem, Thomas will put it that way
because only on such terms can it be said without gross inconsistency both that the three persons are really distinct from one
another, while at the same time really identical with the one, undivided Godhead. In defense of Thomas, one may legitimately say
that his responsibility as a theologian is not the preachers; his
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make their way to God beginning from the world human beings
inhabit as animals and interrogate rationally. Thomas does it in
one way, as we will see. In a very differentdirect, dialogical
rhetorical style, Augustine does so, too:
And what is this God? I asked the earth, and it answered, I
am not he; and everything in the earth made the same
confession. I asked the sea and the deeps and the creeping
things, and they replied, We are not your God; seek above
us. I asked the eeting winds, and the whole air with its
inhabitants answered, Anaximenes was deceived; I am not
God. I asked the heavens, the sun, moon, and stars; and
they answered, Neither are we the God whom you seek.
And I replied to all these things which stand around the
door of my esh: You have told me about my God, that you
are not he. Tell me something about him. And with a loud
voice they all cried out, He made us. My question had
come from my observation of them, and their reply came
from their beauty of order . . . all these messengers of the
senses report the answers of heaven and earth and all the
things therein, who said, We are not God, but he made us.
My inner man knew these things through the ministry of
the outer man, and I, the inner man, knew all thisI, in
the highest part of my soul,18 through the senses of my body.
I asked the whole frame of earth about my God, and it
answered, I am not he, but he made me.19
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lot, the totality. But the totality is not just there: it is made, she
says. She is struck by how small it is, how tenuous its hold is on
existence, thinking that it might sodenly have fallen to nought for
litelnes. Upon which she is told that it lasteth and ever shall, for
God loveth it . . .21 What is noticeable is that Julians understanding is brought not by some poets route, as Gerard Manley
Hopkins might be led, from the individuation of some particular
litel thing to God, but, like Thomas, by the metaphysicians
route, which extends from the sheer contingency of all that is
made, which is but a haselnot teetering on the edge of nothingness, to the love that alone holds it all in existence over against the
nought into which it might sodenly have fallen. For Thomas it
is not the thisness of particular contingent things that leads to
God, but the impossibility of the whole lot accounting for its existence when there might have been nothing at all, that draws the
mind to the being who holds it in existence by an act of creating
will, that is, by the power of love.
Of each and every thing, therefore, it is possible that it is
contingent. And your argument does not get you to a necessary
beingultimately to Godsimply by tracing through the contingency of each and every contingent being to its cause, because for
each and every contingent being there can be a contingent cause
just as, again, a single rope can stretch innitely into the distance,
composed of endlessly overlapping strands of nite length. But as
to the ropes contingency, its existence is a possibility only if, taken
as a whole, it is, as Julian puts it, all that is made. For if it were
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time5 his core model of Christian love, caritas, is not that of the
erotic, amor, but that of friendship, amicitia. Given the popularity
within the monastic traditions, and especially among Cistercians,
of that most erotic of all biblical texts, the Song of Songs, and given
that Thomass last illness was spent in the Cistercian monastery of
Fossanova where he died, it is not altogether surprising that the
story gained some credence of Thomass having dictated a
commentary on the Song on his deathbed in gratitude for the
monks hospitality. Nonetheless, the legend is implausible, and no
textual evidence of such a commentary has ever come to light.
For the Song is not Thomass style.6 In fact, on one of the few
occasions when he is presented with having to make the choice
between erotic love and the love of friendship as a model for the
divine love, Thomas makes his preference plain. In chapter 4 of his
Divine Names the pseudo-Denys apologizes for his use of the
vulgar and pagan language of eros in order to speak both of Gods
love of creation and of creations return of love to God. In his
defense, however, he comments that though historically eros
has indeed had a principally pagan meaning (he is thinking, no
doubt, of Platos Symposium and of his Phaedrus, but also of
erotic pagan priestly rites), nonetheless, he claims (most implausibly) that within the biblical traditions the more distinctively
Christian understanding of love as agape or charity has coincided
with eros, and the pagan overtones of the latter elided. Thomas in
his commentary on this text takes note, nods in apparent approval,
at the same time subtly reversing the emphasis: insofar as amor
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translates the Greek eros, he says, it is reducible to dilectio, translating the Greek agape.7 It is clear that in terms of emphasis
both literary and theological, it is the language of friendship that
gures the more prominently for Thomas. Correspondingly, he
appears not to share the otherwise almost universal medieval preference for the Song of Songs as a biblical source for his doctrine of
Christian love.
As far as his model of Christian love is concerned, it is, then,
friendship that wins the day for Thomas. Here again, it is the
inuence of Aristotle that is nearer to the surface than either Plato
or the Song. Remarkably, there is a theological topic in the Summa,
but also in his lectures on Johns gospel, which maps closely on to
an ethical topic in Aristotle. Noting in his Nicomachean Ethics that
the love of friends is possible only on the basis of a fundamental
equality of status between them, Aristotle concludes that there
cannot properly speaking be friendship between a Greek master
and a barbarian slave, at any rate as suchthough he adds that
insofar as master and slave are able to relate to each other simply
as human, friendship is possible.8 This latter qualication of what
otherwise would be a piece of unqualied xenophobic snobbery
plays straight into Thomass theological hands, immediately
calling to mind its reversal in Jesus last discourse, as reported in
the gospel of John. There Jesus tells his disciples: I do not call you
servants any more, because a servant does not know his masters
business; I call you friends, because I have made known to you
everything I have learned from my father ( John 15:15).
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Summa, solus Deus deicat, only God can make us godlike.9 Thus,
from a comment typical of Aristotles chauvinistic Greek hauteur,
Thomas provides the foundations of his doctrine of grace, the
entirely free gift of friendship with God, the life of God shared in
friendship with human beings.10
It is this model, moreover, that provides some of the crucial
distinctions in Thomass doctrine of grace. There is of course the
grace that comes with and within the friendship that obtains
between God and creatures, the grace that ows from and sustains
that friendship over time in growing intimacy, sanctifying grace,
as Thomas calls it, the grace that actually transforms our lives, as
all friendships do.11 But prior to that there is the grace of justication itself, that is to say, the instantaneous, one-off foundational
act of grace that is the originating gift of friendship, within the
economy of which alone the work of grace that sancties us can
operate. That originating gift of friendship, of course, is the
Incarnation, Gods becoming a human being so that, in Christ,
human beings may become God. This is the primordial work of
Christ, the source of all grace. And for us it is absolutely necessary
work. For only action that is already the work of grace can enable
us to merit the grace that makes us holy: ungraced free human
agency is powerless to merit the grace of justication; and only the
grace of justication can merit the grace of sanctication.
Nonetheless, human freedom and grace mutually interact, and
Thomas explains how this gift of initial justication works in
dialogical partnership with the free consent of the human will, and
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itself the work of grace. Therefore, because there are no conditions not of graces making to impede its work, the action of
grace is infallible. And yet because the free consent of the
human will is precisely what grace does bring about, its action is
not coercive. As in another context Dante had Piccarda in
Paradise say: en la sua volontade e nostra pace.15 It is in the
divine will that is our peace, because it is in the divine will that is
grace that our free consent to it is itself grounded. The very
freedom of our consent to grace is itself the work of the grace it
consents to.
It is here that we encounter the center of gravity of Thomass
mind, in the paradox that the divine will for human beings is
infallible, being dependent only on a free consent to it that that
divine will itself creates. It is clear that Thomas is constrained to
speak thus paradoxically, because his central model for the work of
grace is that of friendship. On one side that friendship between
God and creatures can only be pure gift. Since it cannot be
deserved, its being undeserved is no impediment to its being
received any more than it is an impediment to its being offered.
On the other side, it can be friendship that is offered only if the
free choice of it comes with the offer. Hence, so that that offer of
friendship is unimpeded by any conditions on the human side,
God has no alternative but to build freedom on the human side
into the gift itself as the condition of its reception. Therefore if it
is true that all the work is the work of grace, including the freedom
of consent to it that is its condition, it is just as true that all the
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work is done by human free choice, for that is precisely what grace
creates in us. Not otherwise than if both of these propositions are
true would it be possible to speak of friendship between God and
human beings. For friendship is inconceivable without that
equality and reciprocity.
Infallibly but not coercively God effects the work of our
salvation through the offer of the shared life of friends: that is all
that grace is, utterly irresistible, utterly free, a friendship infallibly
brought about by means of human free choice enabled to share in
the divine life itself. For whom is that a paradox? Todays theologians are caused much anxious frenzy of mind by such words. By
contrast Thomas is calm. Why is he so unfazed? And why are we
so disturbed? The answer to the rst is that Thomas understands
love. The answer to the second is that we do not.
GRACE AND FREEDOM
ruling out human free choice. Such a world would be sinless therefore only because inhabited not by humans but by automata,
puppets on strings manipulated by God. For the human actions
that God causes to be done cannot, by virtue of Gods causing
them, be free human actions, that human action of mine being
free of which I alone am the cause, and not God. Therefore, for
the free-will defender, Thomass afrmation of the infallibility of
grace and his denial of its being a form of coercion collapse into
contradiction: insofar as God infallibly causes it, an action cannot
be free, it is coerced. Insofar as it is free, God cannot be the
cause of it. Unfailingly efcacious grace and human freedom are
mutually exclusive, either the one or the other.
Thomas clearly thinks otherwise. Nor does he simply assume
otherwise. In fact, in the course of understanding why Thomas
rmly rejects the equivalents in his time of the free-will defense
we are brought back to one of the reasons why Thomas began his
principal systematic works with the doctrine of God itself. For
what to Thomas seems so deeply wrong, and perhaps even shockingly so, with all such argument strategies as that of the free-will
defense is the ill-considered nature of its conception of God, most
especially in its construction of Gods relationship to human
agency. One can begin to see why, for Thomas, the theological
learning curve needs to start where it does in the Summa, given the
sort of erroneous consequences that, in his view, ensue from the
failure to get things right from the outset in the doctrines of God
and of creation.
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sufcient to explain the teas being spilt. But it cannot be the case
that insofar as the action of spilling the tea was caused by your
jogging my elbow to just that extent it was free. To just that extent
it was determined by your action. It was free to the extent that I
was anyway in the course of spilling the tea, so that had you not
jogged my elbow I still would have freely done it.
Now according to Thomas, of any free human action the cause
can only be God and the unconstrained will of the agent. It follows
that you will construe Gods being the cause of the whole action as
standing to that actions freedom in the same way as your jogging
my elbow stands to itnamely as excluding itonly on a quasiidolatrous reduction of Gods causality to the standing of a created
cause. Gods action in the world is not a sort of cosmic elbowjogging, so that where space is occupied by the divine action
freedom is evacuated from it, and vice-versa. That is a theology
that misplaces the either/or for one and only one possible reason,
namely that in effect, if not in intention, Gods causality, whether
as Creator or giver of grace, is construed as if it were just an innitely scaled-up creaturely agency. And this is what seems in the
free will defense to be so out of line with Thomass conception of
the relationship between the freedom of Gods action and the
freedom of human agency.
For as to any natural causation, it is true that no natural cause
can cause an effect unless God sustains the whole action in existence through his creative power. It is true of anything at all that
exists, as the creed of Nicaea puts it, visible and invisible, that
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unless God causes it to, it does not exist; unless God causes it to,
it does not act. But when God is said to cause a natural cause to
effect what it does, this is not as if to say that God suspends the
natural law governing that causes efcacyon the contrary, Gods
action in virtue of which heavy objects fall is effective because of
Gods sustaining the laws of gravity that are alone sufcient to
explain why they do so. So, Thomas concludes, you could say that
God brings about natural effects by means of natural agents
effecting what it is in their nature to do, as if those natural causes
were instruments of his will, unfreely acting as servants of their
masters willnatural causes are Gods tool kit. But as to our free
actions, the relation of divine to human causality is quite otherwise. God cannot cause my acts of free choice by means of any
natural cause as his instrument, because, as we have seen, if any
natural cause other than my own will brings about my action then
it follows that that action is not free. Hence Gods creative power
exerts itself upon my free actions only directly, that is, as unmediated by any natural cause: or, as one might put it in the more
appealing language of Augustine, Gods action is too intimate to
me, too within me, too close to my deepest freedom, to stand in
any kind of coercive relationship to it. For God is more within me
even than I am to myself17which is, after all, but another way of
saying what Thomas himself says, namely that God is the cause of
the freedom with which I consent to his infallible agency.
Therefore, of my free actions only God and I can be the cause, and
in every case both God and I are the cause of them.
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That shared life of friends is made possible by the grace of justication given in Jesus act declaring us henceforth to be his
friends. But the shared life of friends is made actual by the grace
that makes us holy; not only do friends know one anothers business, they love one another and all else that they love with a
shared love, loving with a single will; and they place their trust in
one another in the pursuit of the objects of their love. Human
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being four feet square: as Thomas says, you cannot make any sort
of comparison between things that do not belong to the same
genus. But, as between God and creatures there is no possible
semantic space to which they both belong; creature and Creator
are too different to stand in relations of mutual exclusion, there
being nothing they differ as. Or, as Thomas puts it, In the case of
God, you must deny that he belongs to the same genus as any
other good thing, not [merely] that he belongs to a different genus.
This is because he is outside any genus and is the origin of every
genus. And so he is compared to other things only as transcending
them (per excessum).30 Either/or simply cannot come into it,
because to allow mutual exclusion a role in the relationship just is
to bring God down to the level of a creature, to place God and the
creature in a common generic class of comparison. Or, even more
simply put, to do that is idolatrously to assign God to the standing
of just another, perhaps exceedingly powerful, creature, in fact to
the standing of a creature so exceeding all others in power as
crushingly to overwhelm their freedom to the point of its extinction. What is wrong with the free-will defense, then, is that it
rules out all alternatives as if reduced to two: a God who is a
hands-on interfering busybody crushing out human freedom,
or else a hands-off Deist God whose relationship to the
world is evacuated of presence and power just where what human
beings do has any meaning and value, that is, where they are
most free. God as the author of our freedom, as the Anglican
General Confession has it, has no place in such a scheme of
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It would be impossible to overestimate the importance of friendship in Thomass moral theology, and the role that friendship
plays in his theology of grace. The central paradox of grace, for
Thomasit is perhaps one of the most distinctive and best
known features of his theologyis that we do not know our own
natures except through the knowledge that comes with what on
the hierarchy of existence ontologically exceeds nature, namely
grace. For, on account of the Fall, nature has become insufcient
to achieve that which is the goal of its own, natural, being. Well
known is Thomass having said that grace perfects nature. It is,
however, possible to be misled by this formula, and there are those
who have been misled by it, supposing Thomas to mean that
human beings can know of natures insufciency to its own ends
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independently of grace, and, since they can know of what they are
missing, they can desire it: hence, in that sense human beings can
naturally desire the grace that supplies the missing perfection.
This cannot be what Thomas means. Thomas is clear: anything
we could naturally know that we need in order for nature to
achieve its own ends would have to be naturally available to us too:
it could not be the case that grace answers to known natural need,
because what is by nature required must itself be of the natural
order that requires it, and therefore not grace. For grace is the
free gift of divine friendship that exceeds not only any actual
human power to achieve; it exceeds any power of human imagination to conceive, attainable or unattainable. In short, grace cannot
answer to natural need as naturally known; for if it did it would
not be grace.
Nor will it do to say that while grace does not answer to natural
need, it does answer to the needs of a fallen human nature, as if it
were that because of sin, and because we are creatures fallen, grace
is demanded because our natures demand to be restored to their
innocent condition. At any rate, Thomas does not believe this: in
fact, the objection is obvious, grace being, in name and nature,
gratuitous, it cannot be demanded by anything, except in a purely
hypothetical sense: if we are to be saved then only grace can save
us. As we will see in Chapter 7, for Thomas the fall is a human
predicament which imposes absolutely no obligation on God to
do anything about. Fallen as we are, without grace we have no
right to anything but to stew in our own juicein fact, fallen as
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we are, we hardly even know how far we are fallen; at best we can
know that ours is a predicament, our ignorance of its nature being
itself an aspect of that self-same fallen condition. For ours is like
the condition of the person who is self-deceived: not only is he
self-ignorant, he has somehow managed to hide from himself how
it is that he is himself the cause of that ignorance and that he has
a reason for remaining in it undisturbed. Therefore, for Thomas it
takes grace to know that we are in need of grace; and it takes
grace for us to know that there is a possible condition to which
nature is restored, a condition far beyond the powers of nature
even as they were before the Fall. It is in that sense that, for
Thomas, nature is perfected by gracenot as if, knowing what
we want, human beings are by grace given the gift of it, but rather,
not knowing what we want, the gift of grace reveals to us the
depth and nature of our need, a need that, as heretofore we were,
was unknown to us.
Grace, therefore, does not exactly answer to our desire, as if we
knew what our desire is. Grace answers to desires that only it can
arouse in us, showing us what it is that we really want: grace is pure
gift, the gift we could not have known that we wanted until we
were given it. For grace does not merely solve the problem of the
gap opened up by the Fall, restoring us to where we were before
Adams sin. It goes far beyond and above that, calling us into a
friendship which is surplus by an innite degree to the solution
required. We need to come to know this, and to live by the knowledge that everything transacted between ourselves and Godthat
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Our real wants are for us, Thomas adds, a kind of law, in that they
are normative for us somewhat as a law obliges, butand now we
have to reintroduce the wordnaturally, meaning here principally that our real wants are normative not as imposed by decree
externally, but arising from their being constitutive of what it is to
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our natures are not so far deformed by sin that we cannot know
these needs and wants simply as those of our desires that are truly
human. It is thus that are they normative, for it is as natures
demands that they are the commands of the God who made us so.
Consequently, at this highly general level, to know what to do, and
to know that it is to be done, it is enough, Thomas thinks, to know
that answering to such desires just is to answer to the call of our
natures as made by God. Hence our natural desires are in themselves divine summons to action and response. To be truly human
is, then, in a loose manner of speaking, to know a natural law.
And so in calling natural desires a law Thomas is primarily indicating that they have an imperatival character, and not a merely
factual anthropological one: the truest facts discoverable by us
about being human are also demands made on us to become
human. For that, being truly human, is what will make us happy,
because that is what we really want.
SIN
And that would be all well and good were it not for sin. Because
of sin, however, human desire is an opaque palimpsest, layer upon
layer of obscuring experience masking what it is that we truly
want. If prayer is the hermeneutical tool that can thread its way
back to what we really want, to the normatively desirable, it is
because it is grace that has rst caused in us the desire from which
that prayer arises. Knowledge of our human nature is for us the
work of grace, it is knowledge of a new creation that is made
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possible only by grace. Raw nature does not any longer exist; for
like John Henry Newmans haunted man who, having once seen
a ghost, can never again be as one who has not seen it, so it is with
us: redeemed as we are, we are haunted by sin and by innocence
lost, and we can never again be as once we were, naturally whole,
innocent, unfallen. Thomass moral theology, therefore, could not
in the end be grounded in anything beyond some abstract generalitiesand certainly not in any of the necessary detail of a moral
life to be livedif all we had available to us by way of means of
moral discovery were some conception of human nature hypothetically constructed on a model of how matters would have
stood with us had Adam not sinned. Such a hypothesis is too
diluted a moral brew to serve at the moral party.
For human nature as an abstract, theoretically constructed,
counterfactual conditional has no independent moral power except
as a prelapsarian standard of natural wholeness by which we might
at best measure the degree of our fall. But otherwise than as a
onetime real condition, now only as an ungrounded abstraction,
raw human nature in its original state no longer gures as morally
normative, for it is, as it were, no longer sufciently morally visible.
Our human condition is no longer that of innocence; nor yet is it
the condition of the fallen but not yet redeemed; it is the condition
of those who, having fallen, are now redeemed by grace, of those
who having collapsed beneath the level of the human are restored
immeasurably above it. Raw human nature is lost as anything
more than normative generality. Within the dramatic maelstrom
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there should be anything at all other than God, but there is something other than Godthe world as we have it.4 There is no
necessity that the world as we have it should be the sinful world
that it is, but that sin abounds is a fact.5 The world being replete
with evil, there is no necessity that God should provide any remedy
for it, but God does.6 For there to be a completely satisfactory
remedy for sin there is no necessity that the second person of the
Trinity should become human esh in the person of Jesus Christ,
yet just that is the remedy.7 There is no necessity that the incarnate
word of God should die on a cross executed at the instigation of
his own people, but die on a cross he does.8 There is no necessity
that, being dead and buried, the incarnate word of God should be
raised from the deadbody, soul, and divinityon the third day,
yet raise his Son from the dead is what the Father does.9 There is
hardly any proposition at all central to Christian faith that is a
demonstrably necessary truth; there is nothing at all distinctive to
Christian belief that could not have been otherwise than it is.
Christians believe to be true a great number of revealed facts. But
as Christians, they can appeal to very few natural necessities and
to none of a logical kind. How then, on terms that require of
scientia the demonstration of necessities, can Thomas maintain
theology to be scientia when nearly all the beliefs of Christians
recited in their creedal formulae are, on Thomass own terms,
contingenttrue only because willed by the free will of God and
out of no necessity of any kind? That in fact the world was created
in time is, therefore, by no means the only belief of Christian faith
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that might have been otherwise; on the contrary, that they might
have been otherwise is a general characteristic of the propositions
Christians hold to be true being a matter of faith.
In Thomass time the question of the logic of Christian doctrinal
belief arose most signicantly in the form of a question about the
incarnation, stimulating a debate initiated by the work known as
Cur Deus homo? composed by Anselm, the eleventh-century prior
of the Benedictine abbey of Bec in Normandy, later to become
archbishop of Canterbury. The question Why did God become
man? is tricky, because single in form as it appears to be, it is in
fact a double question. For, prior to any possible answer given in
terms of divine reasons for the incarnation, there is a question
concerning the nature of the explanation-seeking word Why?
What sort of answer is possible to that question?
Medieval theologians, Thomas included, ruled out any answer
to the question Why? in terms of strict necessity. The world that
God has created, the world exactly as it has turned out, did not
have to be just so; much that turned out this way could have turned
out another way. It is not even as if sin were necessary and unavoidable. A world of free human beings that is not only as a matter of
fact without sin, but is one willed by God to be sinless for all eternity, was for all medieval theologians not only, as we saw, a logical
possibility. It was an actuality. Medieval believers knew such a
world existed and hoped one day to inhabit it themselvesthey
called it heaven. So if the worlds being sinful is the result of no
necessity, does that mean that its being a sinful world is just a fact,
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that its so happening to be that way is just the way things went,
events lacking rationale, happening willy-nilly and therefore not
conceivably a matter of systematic enquiry, no object for scientia?
And does that contingency of historical events as they have
turned out entail that it is impossible even for God to have foreseen that things would turn out as badly as they did because sins
are free actions, and that which can be foreseen must be determined by antecedent causes and so not free? But if that is so, are
we not then forced back into the position we have already seen
Thomas to reject, according to which the incarnation is a divine
response provoked by what freely, and therefore contingently,
happensa sort of Plan B, since Plan A failed so miserably almost
from the starting gate?
WHY THE INCARNATION?
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acting as referee. Truth and Justice argue that the human condition is no worse than the human race deserves given its sin, and
that justice, which ought to be done and ought to be seen to be
done, can be served only by leaving human beings to the fate that,
after all, they chose for themselves. Mercy disagrees, arguing that
because she reigns in heaven, she should by right also reign over
the human race on earth, which longs for her regime of forgiveness. Peace, however, steps aside from the disagreement between
Truth and Justice on the one hand and Mercy on the other, and
demands an end to the contention between them, for in heaven
there should be no such disharmony. Peace therefore appeals to
the adjudication of Sovereign Wisdom, who, acknowledging the
claims of both parties, decrees the only possible way to accorde
all thise to gidre [to get agreement between all parties together]
and for a nal dome [judgment] in this matire is if be made a
gode deth of man; so that [that is, so long as] one be founden with
outen synne that may and wole innocently and for charitee suffer
deth for man. The problem is, of course, that no such wholly
innocent man is to be found, and, upon being consulted, Reason
concludes that the way to handle the situation that best ts the
case (is most conuenient, skilful) is for the second person of
the Trinity to become incarnate and redeem the human race, not,
as it were, by a general decree of pardon from above, but by initiating a movement of human beings back to God from within
their catastrophic condition. Thus the best solution is in the
hands of the Son, who by offering his own life destroys the power
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of death. And whanne resoun had saide this verdyt the fader
seide it was his wille that it schulde be so; and the sone gaf [gave]
gladly his assent therto: and the holy gost seide he wolde worche
[work] therto also.
Though far from being his style, on one score Thomas would
have approved of the theological thrust of this narrative, which is
that if any such metaphorical representation could do justice to
the rationale of the incarnation, it is that of a conclusion arrived at
as the result of deliberation concerning what is the most appropriate or tting (or in Loves words, skilful or conuenient)
thing to do. The character of genuine debate between equally
compelling divine attributesJustice and Truth, Mercy and
Peaceas to the most appropriate action concerning the human
race aptly represents the fact that the Anselmian Why? demands
no necessary and constraining reasons to be found anywhere down
the line of events that make up salvation history: the decision has
the contingency of narrative rather than the necessity of logic. The
options are all open. There is no necessity in that the world was
created, none in Adams sin, none in the choosing of the chosen
people, none in the incarnationbut only, linking them all, the
free choice of the will of a God who is, Thomas says, maxime liberalis, absolutely free-handed, doing everything simply as the
expression of the divine goodness, and, as it were, out of the sheer
joy of doing it. Nothing God does is done propter suam utilitatem,
as if in response to a private interest of Gods own, but only because
God is just plain good.11
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that of a God attempting to catch up with events that have got out
of hand, not that of a supreme governor of the universe acting out
of overwhelming and all-foreseeing knowledge, scientia. For
Thomas, on the contrary, the whole sequence was foreknown and
foreordained in a single act of knowledge and will from all eternity. Of course, what in God is a single, indivisible, eternal act of
providential willing, a willing that is maxime liberalis, the entirely
free expression of the divine goodness and so an act of sheer generosity, is for us experienced as history, as a contingent narrative
sequence, as one event following the othercreation succeeded by
the fall, the fall succeeded by a prophecy to Abraham of a savior to
come, the choosing of a prophetical people to whose prophecies
Christ comes as fulllment, who is then sacricially killed, raised
by his Father from the dead, and sends the Spirit of them both to
his followers of whom Thomas numbers but one. Thomas the
theologian knows the story to which he belongs is that which
makes sense of him; but it is also a story that, as theologian, he has
to attempt to make sense of for himself and for the church. It is his
task as theologian to work out the logic of the historical sequence
as in some way revealing, piecemeal, that which in God is but a
single, undivided, and eternal act of love. But if it is a sequence, if
it is history, indeed if it is what later comes to be called salvation
history, then well it may be that it is no sequence generated out of
any necessity of nature, for it is the free love of God that generates
it; but neither is it just history as one damn thing after another,
having no rationale, for it is the work of an all-knowing wisdom.
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refrains from doing so that he has in some way failed? What is the
vocabulary that truly expresses the courage of the rst that does
not entail a false implication of cowardice in the second?
Thomas opens his discussion of the incarnation in the third
part of the Summa with the statement that, granted God willed
our salvation, his Son did not have to become incarnate; one
imperious click of the divine nger and thumb would have done
the job. Still, it was conveniens, tting, that he should stoop so
low as to become man.17 He goes on to explain that what counts as
tting is relative to the thing so described, for what ts a certain
kind of thing is what belongs to it as a matter of its nature.
Reasoning, for example, is a tting way for human beings to
employ their minds since they are of a rational sort. But Gods
nature is to be good. Hence, anything is ttingly done by God that
belongs to the nature of the good. The next step is to quote the
pseudo-Denys to the effect that it is the nature of the good to
communicate itself,18 and from that it follows that it is in the
highest degree tting (pertinet) that the highest good should
communicate with creatures, and most especially (as Augustine
says) that the highest good should be so joined with created
nature as to be one person, three ways uniting Word with soul and
with esh.19 Thus Thomas.
As it stands, however, the case may seem ill made. To say the
least, the comparison between the way in which it is tting that
rational beings should reason and the way in which a perfect
goodness would ttingly become personally united with human
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diffusion of lightit does so, he says (in the Latin text that
Thomas was using) non ratiocinans aut preeligens, without deliberation or prior choice, just as a light source cannot but shed
light: again, implying that the incarnation was not to be thought
of as merely the sort of thing you might expect of the divine goodness, but was rather the necessary expression of it. The statement in
the Summa referring to this passage is, however, if taken in isolation, just too compressed to be otherwise than misleading. As is
often necessary when encountering Thomass shorthand references to other texts and authorities, cross-referencing is essential
because taken for granted, and so with this casehe clearly
expects the reader of this citation in the Summa to refer to his
commentary on the same passage in the Divine Names. There
Thomas claries, remarking that the pseudo-Denyss comparison
between the necessity of the suns shedding light and the necessity of the incarnation has value only up to a point, and then only
when one makes an all-important distinction. It is true that the
sun simply cannot help shedding light because that is its nature.
Hence, even were the sun to have the power of deliberation and
choice in other matters, its shedding light or not shedding it would
not be subject to that power. Whereas in the case of God, it is true
that it is in the nature of the divine goodness, simply because it is
in the nature of goodness as such, that it radiates. Yet not only
does God possess the powers of intellect and will, unlike the sun
more than that, the divine intellect and will are, unlike those of
any rational creature, identical with Gods nature: so you cannot
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Christ
Christ
Christ
Christ
Christ
Christ
Christ
Christ
that being so, it is a necessary means but certainly not the point of
the friars vocation that they live lives of absolute poverty.28 In fact,
Thomas says, it is a confused and thoroughly wrongheaded
reading of the preaching of Jesus to suppose that voluntary poverty,
which Jesus certainly commended, should take precedence over
the fundamental commandments of the Law, which are the love of
God and love of neighbor. The poverty of the poor friars, he adds,
has no merit whatsoever except insofar as it serves the interests of
charity, which it does precisely insofar as it frees the friars from
impediments to their preaching. It is in that preaching that
consists the particular charism of love and solidarity with their
fellow creatures, the solidarity, the conversatio, that is distinctively
theirs. But in that service Thomas robustly defends voluntary
poverty as a lifestyle directly serving the distinctive mission of
preaching and teaching.
Likewise in the Summa, now responding to later attacks on
mendicant poverty in 126869, Thomas argues that Jesus life
shows us how a mission of preaching requires freedom from the
responsibilities of property ownership:
It was appropriate that when in the world Christ should lead
a life of poverty. Above all because this was all of a piece
with the task of preaching which, he said, was the reason he
had comesee Mark 1:38: let us go into the neighboring
villages and cities there to preach, it was for this that I came.
Preachers of the word of God, if they are to give themselves
216
Christ
217
Christ
Christ
and wage earning by any other means can only distract from the
core mission. Only total poverty and dependence on alms freely
given can guarantee the freedom of spirit on the back of which
alone the poor Christ can be convincingly preached.34
THE POOR CHRIST AND SIN
Christ
and the same person could be fully and truly human if at the same
time that person was truly and fully divine, and this for one reason
above all: it would seem that the afrmation of the divine personhood of Christ would have to exclude his being human in any
sense of the word human that actual human beings are able to
recognize if that divine personhood of Christ must exclude the
very possibility of Christs sinning. For sin, or the proneness to it,
seems to be one of the most universal of all human phenomena,
something you can count on in human beings if you can count on
anything at all human. In fact, some deeply embedded instinct
seems to get in the way of taking seriously the Letter to the
Hebrews, for we are inclined to think that we could not recognize
ourselves in anything but a nature prone to sinfulness; we think
that sinning simply comes with being human, that human beings
tend to sin in the same sort of way that parents as a matter of
course tend to love their children. That instinct causes us not to be
surprised that people sin, hence an explanation of the fact that
human beings sin seems otiose, and anyway, an explanation of so
general a fact would itself seem to have too general a character to
be an explanation of anything in particular. You might need, and
you might be able to offer, a reason for the particular sin of a
particular person, because that might be surprising. But it can
seem too much a matter of course that people sin to require special
explanations of the general tendency. And yet though there are
Christian theologies that seem to work from the assumption that
human sinfulness is natural, even they must face the fact that
220
Christ
deeply embedded in the Christian traditions is a doctrine of original sin that seems to offer just thatan explanation. Why? Why
should it be thought that any such explanation is required?
We understand Thomass theology only when we understand
why he thinks that an explanation is indeed required. For Thomas,
it ought to be surprising that human beings sin. We ought to need
an explanation of why they do so. Even if humans were statistically just as likely to sin as they are to love their children, it cannot,
for Thomas, be right in the same sense of the word natural to say
that human beings naturally sin as that they naturally love their
children. To nd oneself puzzled by the words of the Letter to the
Hebrews because the exception of his sinlessness seems a very
drastic limitation upon Christs solidarity with us; to nd oneself
wondering whether Christ could really have known what it is like
to be us if he does not experience sin, as it were, from the inside; to
imagine that one of the solidarities in which human beings share
is solidarity in sin because we all do it and so understand one
another in our sinning; to conclude, therefore, that it is a restriction on Christs solidarity with us that he is absolutely sinless, for
a Christ who could not sin would seem not to share our human
nature in its concrete actualityall this is, for Thomas, getting
things upside down.
In fact it is just such thoughts that the doctrine of original sin
is good for tearing us away from. The human predicament that is
sin may be pervasive, but it is not natural. It is an unnatural catastrophe disruptive of, not undergirding, our solidarities. Because of
221
Christ
Christ
the only politics which answers to the grim facts of human nature
as it really is. To which Platos response is that what Thrasymachus
describes is far from the politics of the real. On the contrary,
his is the political realization precisely of a twilit world of illusion,
a politics powerfully imagined in Republic as the political routinization of ickering shadows projected on the back wall of an
ill-lit cave.36
Likewise, the casual theological identication of fallen human
nature with human nature as such ignores what is manifestly
intended by the author of Hebrews, for whom Christ alone can
perfectly communicate with us because he is perfectly, indefectibly, human; it is precisely because he is free of sin that the intimacy of Christs solidarity with our sinful selves is unhindered,
and in him the view of what we truly are is uncluttered by the
obstructing impedimenta of sin; and so it is precisely because we
are dehumanized by our sinfulness that our solidarities with Christ
and with one another are so tragically awry, and in consequence,
our relationships, personal and political, beset by fantasy and illusion. For Thomas, Christ is more intimately human than we are,
not less; closer to our true selfhood than we are; in closer solidarity
with us because he is without sin, not distanced from us on account
of his innocence, as we are distanced from ourselves by sin, from
one another, and from God. Once again, then, voluntary poverty
nds its way back into the picture. For the truly human is perfectly
visible in Christ precisely because his is a humanity that has no
need for the cluttering baggage of possessions, and so his humanity
223
Christ
can come into plain viewecce homo, says Pilate with unwittingly
accurate truth of a naked Christ. By contrast, our humanity is
obscured by the apparatus of neediness, hence of acquisitiveness,
with which we seek to disguise our human inadequacies from
ourselves. Voluntary poverty is the friars way back into the full
humanity that is visible in Christ, a humanity whose unobstructed
visibility in their lives is an essential condition of the effectiveness
of their mission to preach, as it was of Christs. The poverty of
Christ, therefore, is what allows us to see that he was indeed verus
homo, truly humanindeed, the only truly human. Thus the
Dominican Thomas and his Dominican Christ.
THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST
Christ
Christ
Christ
Christ
Christ
the one person who was and is Jesus Christ was and is both fully
human and fully divine, and, just as at the personal level Thomass
Dominican poverty was a practice of ditching the clutter of
possessive impedimenta that would have obscured his vision of
Christ, so as theologian he needs to clear away the logical clutter
that will mufe the clear doctrinal voice of the conciliar decree. In
the clear, uncluttered vision of Christ he can see humanity made
whole, and in that humanity made whole is seen the imago Dei.
Christs humanity is how his nature as verus Deus is revealed. And
Christs poverty is the revelation of Christs humanity as verus
homo, an entirely unencumbered human being. It is in the imitation of that poverty of Christ alone that that vision and that life,
the claritas of the theologian and the sanctitas of the Dominican,
become one in the person of Thomas Aquinas. And the chief
visible clue as to the nature of his holiness consists in his being,
like Christ himself, a completely uncluttered man.
229
EI G H T
case is that both are food, the one sustaining life for a time, the
other sustaining life eternal.
Hence, as Thomas says, you have to regard the words of consecration not as grammatically descriptive, otherwise you nd yourself in conceptual tangles of this sort. Again, Thomas is relying on
a standard grammatical distinction, and on nothing especially
theological. When one morning the president of Yale University,
feeling particularly cheerful at the state of the universitys investments, emails the university community with the message Today
is a university holiday, he makes a holiday of today. He does not
rst, truthfully, refer to what at the time of uttering the word
today is a workday and then redescribe the workday as a holiday,
as if university presidents had the power by at to change propositional truth-values at whim. If that were the grammar of Richard
Levins utterance the utterance would, as Thomas says, be false
(and the Yale presidents power more like that exercised by a
Goebbels, that of tricking people by means of propagandistically
redescriptive goebbeldegook, into believing what is false). Richard
Levin is clear: in declaring today to be a university holiday he
makes this day a holiday, only thus making the description holiday
true of today. Presidents of Yale University have that power.
Thomas is just as clear: if what is changed is the meaning of the
foodand it is, for what once was bread is now the body of
Christthis is because from the character of the bread and wine
as food is elicited its real meaning as the body of Christ. The
utterance, Hoc est . . . corpus meum, is not only signicativum sed
241
etiam factivum, it not only says something, it does it.6 Through the
divine agency the bread and wine made of human hands are
drawn into the world of Christs kingdom, and thereby, though
everything that you can see, touch, taste, and smell remain characteristic of bread and wine, and so they retain their power to signify
food and drink, now their reality is changed into the food of the
Kingdom, which is the body of Christ: and that cannot be seen.
For Visus, tactus, gustus, in te fallitur / Sed auditu solo tuto creditur
(Sight, touch, and taste are in thee deceived / What says trusty
hearing? That may be believed, as Gerard Manley Hopkins rather
eccentrically translates Thomass hymn Pange lingua gloriosi,
composed for the ofce of Corpus Christi). Truly, then, what is
eaten is food. Truly, then it is bread. But now for the faith that
comes from hearing, as Paul says, it is the true bread, the bread of
heaven, the body of Christ. That is what it really is. And Jesus
commanded his disciples to eat it ( John 6:53).
REAL PRESENCE
dislocated, such that presence as sign and real presence must needs
be opposed to each other? We will, however, get nowhere with
Thomas on the Eucharist unless we can bracket out what, for him,
would have been an entirely misleading way of construing the
real and the sign as terms of contrast standing in such mutual
exclusion.
EUCHARISTIC PRESENCE AND THE PRESENCE OF
THE RESURRECTION
of its nature walk through closed doors, and Jesus body is not a
human body if it is not materialindeed, if it is not material it is
simply not a body at all, just a ghost. Therefore, Thomas says, it
cannot be on account of his bodys being raised that Jesus can walk
through a closed door, but only by way of the sort of miracle that,
as he maintains, has been wrought in the case of some of the saints
pre-mortem. In short, as an indicator of the nature of Jesus body
of resurrection, there is nothing relevant in Jesus being able to
walk through closed doors.12 The key point is that, raised or not,
the essential properties of human bodies remain continuously the
same between their pre-and post-resurrection conditions. For
otherwise, how could it be said that the raised body of Jesus is the
same body as that of the Jesus dead on the Cross if, in the relevant
sense, the raised person of Jesus lacks the essential properties of a
body in the rst place?
Rather than confusing us about the nature of the human body
by the introduction of a very odd, conceptually indefensible,
special case of it, the resurrection ought, on the contrary, to clarify
what we mean by the human body by revealing to us something
deeper, something we might otherwise not have understood, about
the bodys true nature, about its reality. For our bodies are how we
are present to one another. Our bodies are how we speak to one
another. We might say, the human body is the human persons
extension into language. Herein is a further consequence of
Thomass materialism, now about language, his position being
plausible enough. For what else but human beings are capable of
248
not less, than before his death: again, he insists, this presence of
mine is not that of a ghost.
Now to say all this is to cast some doubt on a contemporary
assumptionone which, I should say, can look more like a prejudiceconcerning the authority of immediate personal experience.
If we are to understand Thomass theology of the Eucharist, it is
important to set this prejudice aside. We are inclined think of
personal experience as possessing an authority insofar as it is
unmediated by anything so impersonal and distanced, and therefore vulnerable to challenge, as are doctrine or ritual. This is the
sort of wishful thinking which has some imagine that to have met
the person of the historical Jesus would have been ultimately decisive, immediately convincing, at any rate by comparison with the
historically distanced gure we nd in the scriptures, or in the
doctrinally and theologically mediated reality of the Eucharist or
service of prayer. It is that same wishful thinking that leads others
to be more excited by the witness of the Shroud of Turin, or the
experience of the Holy Places, or to place above all priorities the
quest for the historical Jesus, than by their own, often uninspiring, experience of Christian worship. It is there, in more theological form, in the thought that such is the priority of the personal
and immediate experience, that faith itself has to be recongured
as being a kind of immediate and personal experience.
In which case we should remind ourselves that all four witness
accounts of Jesus life make it plain that in his pre-mortem immediacy Jesus was not all that convincing. More perceptive people
251
than most Christians are had serious doubts about his credentials,
thinking some of his claims for himself pretty outrageous, and
most honest people could not see in him that revelation of his
Fathers will that he declared himself to be fullling. In fact, in the
end, hardly anyone but his mother and a few other women could
see anything in him but discouragement and disappointment. So
we should not count on our having been any better impressed by
Jesus, had we been there to meet him in person before his death,
than we are by meeting him in person in the Eucharist after his
resurrection. After all, Thomass apostolic namesake was not especially commended for being persuaded by the visible evidence that
Jesus was raised; on the contrary, to his face he was compared
unfavorably with those whose encounter with Jesus was, if indeed
personal, all the same mediated by faith, as necessarily it must be
while he is raised to his Fathers kingdom, and we, as yet, are not.
For Thomas Aquinas, unlike Thomas the apostle, to prefer the
experience of Jesus as he was before his death to the Jesus of faith,
or to prefer the unrecognized gure who explains the scriptures to
the disciples on the way to Emmaus to the Jesus who upon being
recognized in the breaking of the bread promptly disappears from
sight, is to have misunderstood the meaning of the resurrection
itself; it is to prefer the world of human experience to the kingdom
of faith. And in his Reportatio on Johns gospel, Thomas notes that
this is the signicance of Jesus words to Mary Magdalene, who,
nally recognizing Jesus in the garden after the resurrection,
reaches out to touch him. Whereupon Jesus somewhat
252
If, then, the answer to the question, what does the Eucharist
signify, is the risen body of Christ, the question remains: in what
sense does the Eucharist effect what it signies? For words spoken
make a new reality out of an old reality, the words of consecration
254
at Mass do what they say, the outcome of the words being uttered
is that what were formerly bread and wine are now the true body
and blood of the risen Christ, ascended into heaven. But what
happens that brings this outcome about? The answer for Thomas
cannot, as we have seen, be the Zwinglian nothing happens to
the bread and wine. For, on Zwinglis account, what happens
happens not only for, but only to the baptized Christians who in
faith receive the bread and wine as a sign of a reality, though those
elements cannot be said themselves to possess the reality of which
they are the signs. For Thomas, unlike Zwingli, something
happens to the bread and wine themselves, they are changed
into the body and blood of Christ. But what sort of change can
this be?
Thomas, for whom it is a rule that whenever at all possible the
theologian should use plain vernacular Latin rather than technical
jargon, is here lost for a word in any language to describe what
happens. He is forced to borrow an invented term of art, transubstantiation, that gets its sense uniquely from within the constraints
of eucharistic theology itself, a word that has no sense in any other
context and is therefore a purely technical term. As such technical
terms go, transubstantiation is more like the physicists quark,
a term invented for an explanatory purpose and having no meaning
otherwise than in that purposes service; it is less like a term that
has a meaning in ordinary usage and then is adapted to a technical
purpose in physics, like force. It is of importance to understand
that, for Thomas, transubstantiation is merely a term of art, doing
255
has been since the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century. For
in the sense that the term exists solely for the purposes of explaining
the singular case of eucharistic change, and otherwise serves no
explanatory purposes, theological or secular, it is clearly a term of
art, a device of explanation of a purely technical kindthe word
transubstantiation has no meaning whatsoever outside of the
explanatory context for which it was devised.
It does not follow that the word is meaningless mumbo-jumbo,
as some were inclined to say in later centuries (for example
Hobbes), even if the very fact that the term of art has to be
invented does indeed show language to be under exceptionally
severe pressure. The word virus was not meaningless just because
for forty years or so nothing answering to that name was observable: the term did its explanatory work even in 1844 just because it
stood for the precisely denable conditions that would have to be
met by whatever it was that explained the transmission of puerperal fever. Just so, Thomas maintains, is the case with the word
transubstantiation.
For these reasons I think there is little prospect of making clear
what Thomas has in mind by way of answer to the question what
kind of change is effected by the Eucharistic action? so long as we
conne the terms of any explanation to the makeshift language of
transubstantiation. I am inclined to the view that, measured
against the standard of positive contributions to our understanding
of the sacrament, Thomas would have been indifferent to the
matter of whether the term transubstantiation is used or not, and
259
same two events, handling the ball and tackling, not different in
any respect from the fouls that within the rules of soccer are
routinely penalized, were, within the narrative of rugby, its invention, inventing, that is, a whole new world of meaning, inventing,
therefore, not just a new game, but with it, a new language game.
Two things are of the utmost importance in the account of the
relationship between these differing descriptions of the same
events. The rst is that a real change has taken place such that the
rst description, soccer fouls, is true of the initial state of affairs,
and the second description, legitimate rugby moves is true of the
subsequent state of affairs. For the events to be described as fouls
you need to presuppose the rules of soccer that prohibit them. To
describe them as legitimate moves, you need to presuppose the
game of rugby that they invent. There is real change here: the
soccer foul of handling the ball becomes the rugby move of passing
it from hand to hand; the soccer foul of tripping an opposing
player becomes the legitimate ploy of tackling.
But if there is real change here it is not of the sort where one
event causes another within a common context of meaning, as the
causal mechanics of the cows digestive system cause grass to
become beef. Grass and beef belong to the same world of organic
matter and organic change. What changes when rugby is invented
out of soccer are, far more radically, the worlds of meaning to
which the events in 1823 belong. If, as I have put it, soccer and
rugby are not just games, they are languages, then what happened
in Rugby School in 1823 was that one and the same set of actions,
264
266
EP I LO G U E
267
Epilogue
Epilogue
Epilogue
escapes our attention. But try as he might, the very trying gives
him away. There is, after all, a secret of Saint Thomas. It lies at the
intercrossing of the theologian, the Dominican, and the saint. But
that intersection does not occur in some hidden place. The truth
is exactly the contrary. The secret of Thomass holiness is hard to
see not because it is hidden somewhere, but because it is everywhere obvious in the Dominican theologian, so that were you to
look for it here rather than there, the holiness in one place, the
theology in another, you would miss both. The holiness of Thomas
is a theologians holiness, the holy teacher invisible otherwise than
in the holy teaching itself. And that, if there is one, is the secret of
Saint Thomasquite the most obvious thing about him.
270
Notes
ONE. A DOMINICAN
1. ST 1a, q1 a7 corp.
2. The United States being the unlucky exception.
3. ST 1a, q1 a7 corp.
4. See Karl Rahner, The Trinity, trans. Joseph Donceel,
introduction, text, and glossary by Catherine Mowry LaCugna
(New York: Crossroad, 1997), pp. 1521.
5. It is true that the chapter of his Proslogion in which the argument
is introduced is in the form of a prayer. But when Gaunilo responds
on behalf of the fool he attacks Anselms case in respect of validity, a
property the possession or absence of which is relevant only to what is
offered as proof. Anselm responds not by saying that such attacks are
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
Further Reading
Rather than providing within the text of this book detailed annotation
of the works of Thomas relevant to the issues raised, here I provide references to the more limited primary sources on which I have relied in
writing it. I include but few references to secondary material. This is not
because I have not needed them myself in the past, but because in my
view it is far better to consult such works having engaged in a rst
encounter with the primary sources directly rather than as mediated
through the lter of (often contentious and always contended) interpretations. And in that class of interpretations I of course include my own.
REFERENCING THE WORKS OF THOMAS AQUINAS
The works of Thomas on which I have drawn in writing this work are
of four general kinds: systematic and comprehensive treatises, for
example the Summa Theologiae; collections of questions disputed in the
university and formally written up, including the Disputed Questions on
285
Further Reading
Virtue in General; polemical works, such as On the Unity of the Intellect
Against the Averroists, and On the Eternity of the World; and scriptural
commentaries, such as the so-called Reportatio on the gospel of John,
so-called because it is a record of Thomass lectures on Johns gospel
delivered in the University of Paris, taken down by students and (in this
case partially) edited by Thomas himself. References to these works take
the following forms.
1. Summa Theologiae. This work (abbreviated for reference purposes as
ST) is divided into three parts, of which the second part is further
divided in half, the work being usually published therefore as four
volumes: the rst part (in Latin, Prima pars shortened for reference
purposes to 1a), the rst part of the second part (Prima secundae,
or 12ae), the second part of the second part (Secunda secundae,
or 22ae), and the third part (Tertia pars, or 3a).
Each part is divided in turn into a series of questions or topics,
of which there are, for example, some 102 in the rst part, and 114 in
the rst part of the second partthus question 109 of the rst part
of the second part (On the necessity of grace) is referenced as
ST 12ae, q109.
These questions are subdivided into a series of articles, the article
being the basic unit of substantive theological discussion. Thus, within
question 109 of the Prima secundae, there are 10 articles, reference to
which takes the form of ST 12ae, q109 a1, or a2 or a3 and so forth. Every
article is headlined by a question in the form Whether it is the case
that . . . followed by a theological statement with which Thomas either
agrees or disagrees. Thus, ST 12ae, q109 a1 is headed by the question:
Whether it is the case that there is no knowledge of truth without
grace, to which Thomass answer will turn out to be that genuine
knowledge is possible without gracebut his answer is hard won
and not arrived at before he has gone through an elaborate process of
dialectical debate, the structure of which is as follows.
286
Further Reading
First Thomas sets out in a series of argumentscommonly, as in this
case, three but sometimes as many as four or vethe case for the
opinion on the question to hand to which he is opposed, the so-called
objections. Next, he declares in a single statement his opposed opinion
(sed contra, or but as against this view), supported usually by a
quotation from some major authority, theological or philosophical. In
12ae q109 a1 the appeal is to the Retractions of Augustine. There follows
the main part or body of the article (corpus in Latin, abbreviated to
corp.) in which Thomas sets out his own opinion together with
accompanying arguments in its favor, followed by responses in turn to
the objections put forward in support of the opposed view. Each of
these responses begins with reference to the rst objection [or second
or third as the case may be] it should be said that . . . (in Latin, ad
primum dicendum est). Hence the reference to the main part of
Thomass argument about grace and knowledge of the truth takes the
form: ST 12ae, q109 a1 corp. When Thomas responds to the second of
the three objections to his own view the reference takes the form: ST
1a-2ae, q109 a1 ad2.
Disputed questions. These are collections of questions, subdivided
into articles, each of which is structured as above but devoted to a
single general topic, such as the collections On Truth or On Evil.
Most such compilations gather together questions and articles
composed over a long period of time and are not written through as
a single continuous treatise. References to these questions take the form
of Disputed question on truth (in Latin Quaestio disputata de veritate)
q2 a2 corp.
Polemical works. These are generally written through in more recognizable and less dialectical modern form as longer or shorter monographs, divided into parts and chapters, as in the case of On there being
one intellect. Modern editions and translations will often add line or
paragraph numbering.
287
Further Reading
Biblical commentaries. The chief biblical commentary referred to in
this monograph is Thomass Commentary on Johns Gospel, which is organized on a typically medieval principle of subdivision of the text. In
Thomass time the numbering of verses of Scripture had not yet been
standardized, though chapter divisions roughly corresponding with
modern ones were more or less universally accepted. Commentaries such
as Thomass on John further subdivide chapters into small units of two
or three verses at a time, and the commentary is organized as a series of
lecturae (readings) on these groupings of verses.
SOURCES BY CHAPTER
Chapter One
288
Further Reading
introduction to the theologian, though it is worth noting that he himself
says that Chestertons is the best short account of the man and his
thought. The inuence of the late Herbert McCabe on my reading of
Thomas will be obvious to all who know his work, and those who do
not know it ought to. Otherwise, a rst read for absolute neophytes
who want a short, sharp, clear, and accessible tour of Thomass thought
will nd it in Fergus Kerrs Thomas Aquinas, a Very Short Introduction
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), though for those looking
for something at once relatively brief but more technically detailed
perhaps the best of combination of the two available in English is
Simon Tugwells introduction to the selected works of Thomas in
English translation contained in the volume Albert and Thomas, Selected
Works in the series Classics of Western Spirituality (New Jersey: Paulist
Press, 1989).
Chapters Two and Three
289
Further Reading
Fabian Larcher, O.P., and Daniel Keating, in the online version edited
by Joseph Kenny, O.P.
Chapter Four
290
Further Reading
Chapter Seven
For the liturgical texts (in Latin with English translation) of the feast of
Corpus Christ composed by Thomas in 1264, see http://josephkenny.
joyeurs.com/CDtexts/CorpusChristi.htm#1. The antiphon O sacrum
convivium composed by Thomas for the liturgy of that feast is a poetic
resume of ST 3a, q60 a3 corp. On transubstantiation and the real presence
of Christ in the Eucharist, see ST 3a, q75. On sacraments in general, see
ST 3a, q60, especially aa 1 and 2; on eschatology and its relation to the
Eucharist, see the Commentary on the Gospel of John, chapter 20, lecture 4.
291
Index
21, 47, 91
Alexander of Hales, 21
11214
Augustine, Saint, 4, 3638,
1078
14243
(medieval)
Aquinas, Saint
293
Index
Averros (Ibn Rushd), 92
Council of
Benedictines, 9
Cologne, 19
thought, 83
224, 228
Charity. See Love
form, 50
Democritus, 51
294
Index
Denys, Pseudo-, 147, 16667,
2057, 209
eschatological meaning of
deception, 17677
effect, 24246;
transubstantiation, 25465;
holiness, 1718, 45
Fall, 16971
Francis of Assisi, 11
Franciscans, 3, 48. See also
Bonaventure, Saint
15460, 16465
209
Friars, 1418
Empedocles, 51
De ente et essentia, 272n7, 273n10
Geach, Peter, 77
condemnation in Paris, 49
Glossa ordinaria, 2122
295
Index
150; and merit, 150; and
of theology, 1012;
foundationalism, 1036;
supererogatory, 171
Guigo II, the Carthusian, 11, 15
Heathcliff, 227
Henry of Ghent, 21
Homer, 2
oneness incomprehensible,
242, 267
14243
Incarnation: as conveniens,
as supererogatory, 20410
296
Index
Fifth Lateran Council on, 76;
7476
companation, 240
on, 9199
Richard
Meaning: Locke, 85; and matter,
Abstraction
self, 3839
5254
place, 14
13, 1618
297
Index
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus,
prayer, 17274
3133
18588
Nicholas Love, the logic of the
incarnation, 199204
128, 131
Palmbush, Courtney, 272n6
Reginald of Piperno, 41
Reincarnation, 75
of Christ, post-resurrection
16263, 23132
Pieper, Joseph, 28889
Sacra doctrina, 18
Sacraments: performative
signs, 24445
298
Index
Sadness, cures for, 14546
28687
explanatory hypothesis,
20410
transubstantiation
lectura, 281n3
Super I ad Corinthios, 273n1,
27374n2, 28990
Shakespeare, William, 2, 7
Tempier, Stephen, 4851,
59, 97
Theological language:
loss of humanity,
22124
transcendence, 16667
Protestant, 15354;
propositions rationally
undecidable, 19499;
Thomass methodological
separated soul, 79
1924
299
Index
persons of Trinity as
God: oneness of
condemnations of Tempier
Tri-theism, 12224
Thomas of Lentini, 8, 18
Transubstantiation, 25460;
eternity of demonstrable
undecidable according to
Thomas, 19293
22627
300