St Aquinas on Trial
St Aquinas on Trial
Original sin, Saint Aquinas, and the rise of modern humanism
Subject Area: Philosophy/Theology
The art of discombobulating prostitutes – Explaining peccatum originale – Why cats don’t write heavy books – William the Nominalist.
The art of discombobulating prostitutes
Since this will be my first philosophical theology essay on Saint Aquinas, an introduction-cum-biography is in order. St. Thomas Aquinas is a medieval philosopher and theologian who is massively influential in the church’s history. He is a founder of Thomism, a school of thought which is an amalgam of Aristotelian philosophy and Christianity, where, I believe, natural theology takes a lot of its root.
In the Middle Ages, it is perhaps an impossible task to find anyone who surpasses Aquinas on both the depth and wealth of his thinking on Christianity – in the spirit of Scholasticism.
Born in 1225 in Roccasecca (Kingdom of Sicily) into a noble family, he attended Studium generale in Naples, where he was most likely introduced to the works of the philosophers that later influenced his work – Aristotle, Averroes, and the like.
His family intended him to follow in the footstep of his uncle and become an abbot – the head of a Benedictine monastery, Monte Cassino, the oldest one. However, at 19, he decided to join a relatively new firebrand order called the Dominican order, which promised him a much harsher life. For example, the members of the order take a vow of poverty and live in subsistence. This is in addition to the decision of breaking a family tie by not joining Monte Cassino. The family was displeased.
In his attempt to move to Rome and join this new order, his brothers kidnapped him and held him a prisoner at the family castle. According to some sources, his brothers had sent a prostitute to him to seduce him in an effort to break his spirit. This, most likely to their dismay, did not work, as he chased the prostitute away vigorously, and most definitely, discombobulating the prostitute.
In the end, Thomas’s mother, Theodora, not being able to see his son locked up for the rest of his life, arranged for him to escape to join the Dominican order. Joined, he did. And the rest is history.
St Aquinas studied at the University of Paris under Dominican scholar Albertus Magnus. And subsequently, when Albertus got a new teaching assignment at Cologne, he took Thomas along, where he reluctantly worked as the ‘second professor.’
This was the beginning of his short theological career – he died at the age of 49. He wrote the Summa Theologica, Summa contra gentiles, books on Boethius, Aristotle, several philosophy books, sermons, and the like. As I stated earlier, he has to be the most prolific medieval theologian.
Explaining peccatum originale
Now, let’s take on one of Aquinas subjects, an essential doctrine in Christianity, and a segue to the meat of this essay – the original sin. What does original sin even mean? First, Adam and Eve were created in grace, so let’s get that out of the way, which means everything was rightly ordered, where everything means everything.
Until they sinned and everything went out of the window. This led to the corruption of the flesh, so to speak. That opened the flood gates and death, and sin entered the world. There are several different positions on the doctrines of original sin, including the ‘mechanism’ of how the ‘flood gates opened,’ I wouldn’t write on that here except to say what I have said and quote Romans 5:
“Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people because all sinned —” [Romans 5:12]
Close quote.
Why cats don’t write heavy books
Next, I need to define some Thomistic terms that might make my arguments unreadable, especially for folks new to Aquinas’ thoughts – the will and the intellect. These two are the highest powers found in only rational animals.
The intellect is the power to put our cognitive faculties to use for an end, not in the sense of sense cognition which senses a particular instance of a thing, but in the sense of an intellectual cognition that can reason through things in the universal.
In other words, you don’t only see a table and sense it only as a table, but you can abstract out a form of table, what we could call table-ness, which is the quality of a thing being a table. For example, if I don’t have an intellectual cognition, it will be utterly impossible to write an essay like this one – it is not a happenstance that cats don’t write books.
For the will, it is some sort of rational appetite; it is what propels us to what we deem good. The will is the kernel of freedom. [1] ST (I Q82)
Schaeffer Charges Aquinas to Court
After a recent move because of a job change. I was forced to reshuffle and re-arrange my books and set up my bookshelves again. In the midst of so many huge books, I saw a small book titled ‘Escape of Reason’ authored by Francis Schaeffer.
I can’t remember buying a copy, so it must be one of those books I picked up for free in the bookstore in the town I lived. Anyways, it turns out that Francis Schaeffer was one of the prominent Christian thinkers in the twentieth century (I had no idea), and I was amazed to read, in this book, a criticism of Aquinas on the subject of original sin, faith and reason.
He opined, without saying it directly, that Aquinas should be considered the father of modern humanism because he put so much faith in reason, so to speak; and that because he asserted that you could get to God, in some sense, via philosophy, what we call natural theology as opposed to revealed theology.
Here is Schaeffer:
“In Aquinas’s view the will of man was fallen, but the intellect was not. From this incomplete view of the biblical Fall flowed all the subsequent difficulties. Man’s intellect became autonomous. In one realm, man was now independent, autonomous.” [2]
Close quote.
Elsewhere he said, “with the coming of Aquinas we have the real birth of the humanistic Renaissance.” For the rest of the book, he highlighted how increasingly nature was removed from God and how modern humanism was birthed.
Having just come in contact with some Aquinas work in recent years and finding it extremely valuable, I find this criticism interesting and at the same time unsettling. So, I asked myself, what did Aquinas, in fact, teach.
It appears to me that Aquinas taught the opposite of what Schaeffer claimed he taught. First, let’s start from the Fall; in his treatise on sin and vices, he says (I will read Aquinas gently, he can be hard to follow):
“As a result of original justice, the reason had perfect hold over the lower parts of the soul, while reason itself was perfected by God, and was subject to Him. Now this same original justice was forfeited through the sin of our first parent, as already stated (Question [81], Article [2]); so that all the powers of the soul are left, as it were, destitute of their proper order, whereby they are naturally directed to virtue; which destitution is called a wounding of nature…through sin, the reason is obscured, especially in practical matters, the will hardened to evil, good actions become more difficult and concupiscence more impetuous.” (ST I-II Q85.A3)
As such, one is forced to ask, where does Schaeffer get the idea that Aquinas said that the intellect was not affected?
On the question “whether it is necessary to believe those things which can be proved by natural reason?” He added:
“For human reason is very deficient in things concerning God. A sign of this is that philosophers in their research, by natural investigation, into human affairs, have fallen into many errors, and have disagreed among themselves. And consequently, in order that men might have knowledge of God, free of doubt and uncertainty, it was necessary for Divine matters to be delivered to them by way of faith, being told to them, as it were, by God Himself Who cannot lie.” (ST II-II Q2.A4)
And then this bit, where he came out and said even though the intellect is damaged, it cannot be damaged beyond repair:
“Now sin cannot entirely take away from man the fact that he is a rational being, for then he would no longer be capable of sin. Wherefore it is not possible for this good of nature to be destroyed entirely.” (ST I-II Q85.A2)
On the contrary, and as such, what Aquinas taught was that Grace perfect Nature, in the English of our century – faith perfect reason. Reason in the things of the Lord cannot stand alone; reason can lead us to God, only up to a point. Once again, this is Aquinas on the treatise of Grace:
“Hence, we must say that for the knowledge of any truth whatsoever man needs Divine help, that the intellect may be moved by God to its act ... We always need God’s help for every thought, inasmuch as He moves the understanding to act.” (ST I-II Q109.A1)
Close Quote.
William the Nominalist.
Rather than placing the rise of humanism at the foot of Aquinas – following Richard Weaver’s thinking in ‘Ideas have consequences’ – the blame might be placed at the feet of the nominalist view propounded by William of Ockham. (I used might because I am generally reluctant to place such monumental influence on one individual)
The reader might know of Ockham via his Ockhams’ razor principle, but we are here to fry a bigger fish, so let’s start by unpacking what universals and particular means.
There are individual things, and there are things that are common to the (individual) things. The former is the particular, while the latter is the universals. A person, for example, is a particular, whereas humanity is the universals. A cat is a particular but a cat nature or, if I want to be naughty, cat-ness is the universal. The universal are the things that define the particular – the particular get its nature from the universal, etc.
Prior to Ockham’s time, the predominant view was that both the particular and the universal existed. However, Ockham came along with his nominalist view that, actually, universals don’t exist – they are just mere verbal constructs that make our life easy, that kind of thing.
Notice that what is being abandoned here are forms shared by things that are of the same kind. So, before we go too far with the analysis, it behooves me to say that formal causality and teleology (as defined in Aristotelianism) is already sacrificed – cut and dried!
What more? If teleology – the explanation of things in terms of their final purpose – is thrown out of the window (namely, God is the author and the finisher of our faith). Nothing else will remain. Humans will be forced to develop their own teleology, hence modern humanism, moral relativism, etc.
In addition, and to conclude, the upshot of the nominalist view is that the intellect is weakened since it’s the intellect that posits the reality of the universals.
And, alas, in that view, all we could trust is that given to us by our senses, and by extension, theological truths, even in its broadest sense, can only be known through faith. The reader must contrast this view with Aquinas’s ‘Grace perfect Nature’ proclamation.
Ockham appears to me to be Schaeffer’s culprit – Aquinas is the wrong guy.
In the final analysis, reason can lead us to God, and faith perfect reason.
Bibliography
[1] St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, First Part, Question 82: Of the will. Link
[2] Francis Schaeffer, Escape from reason Pp 11
[3] Ibid. Pp.10