Aquinas

Saturday was the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas has been a daily companion of mine for several years. I'm currently translating the Summa Contra, and read a translation of the the Summa Theologica before that. I'm always shocked by how little of St. Thomas is read in seminaries, for his method and philosophy seem to be exactly the salve needed for so many postmodern irritations. The educated churchman knows something about Aquinas' five proofs, and perhaps recalls that he wrote a good bit about angels. On the whole, though, he is condemned part and parcel with the scholastic movement as a severe and inhuman logic-chopper, in contrast to the more presentable St. Francis, who had the good sense to be something of an environmentalist, and is thus given admission to favor. (I paraphrase the form of Chesterton's biography, as will be obvious to anyone who has read it.)

Despite the caricatures, Aquinas was a patient and beneficent man, the son of aristocratic parents whom he scandalized by entering monastic orders. His professional life was as a rationalist, but he was the sort of man who wrote openly amor Dei melior est quam cognitio. He is credited with baptizing the works of Aristotle, and his metaphysics are, as far as I can tell, unanswerable even after Kant, Hume, and Wittgenstein. Aquinas is most beneficial, however, despite what one who had only heard of the five proofs would think, not as a missionary to heathens who need reasoning with but to Christians who need Christianizing. By bringing Aristotle into Christendom he makes it more Christian, especially in a world gone wild with unreason.

The greatest good a re-reading of Aquinas might work would be to re-unite the substance of the Trinity against even those Orthodox who would insist on dividing God the purifying and saving spirit from God the creator. A great deal of Evangelical fervor is so committed to the salvation God works that it might have forgotten what is the good which God would save. If one can get through the rather long first portions of his books--for Aquinas always insists on starting at the very beginning, and never hurries through any argument--one discovers that this God of pure act, being-as-goodness, etc., is in his transcendent way rather surprisingly involved in solid and dirty things like soil and bushes and human beings.

Aquinas is also as polite as he is patient in his argument. He takes for granted that to argue with a man means to argue with him on his own grounds, and every chapter of the Summa begins with a shocking sentence such as "It seems there is no God..." which would then be answered by the things men hold in common (facts, accepted propositions, they manner in which these facts relate rationally to one another), and last of all, yet somehow without disrespect, some sentence along the lines of, "Holy Scripture also confirms this." In short, he always allows that there are several paths to the truth, precisely because there is only one truth, a truth of which he is never afraid.

The trouble about St. Aquinas is that he is a brilliantly simple author who translates dreadfully. A second year Latin student could read him with ease in his own tongue, but it takes someone with extraordinary English and exceptional concentration to read him translated. This morning I read the sentence: Adhuc, Si ens in potentia, inquantum huiusmodi, natum est moveri, quia quod potest esse potest non esse; sequitur ulterius divinam voluntatem esse variabilem. That's a fairly straightforward sentence in Latin words; but in English words, the clearest it might be rendered would be To this, if being is in potency, in so far as of this sort, it is made to be moved, since what is able to be is able not to be; which would follow last the divine will to be variable.

(Don't worry, St. Thomas rebuts this idea this in the next paragraph)

We lift our glasses, rationally, to the Dumb Ox.


This is, by the way, a very good wine.