Thomas Aquinas, Reconsidered. Here follows the product of a week’s reflection upon having finished G.K. Chesterton’s St. Thomas Aquinas and having wondered why I am more satisfied with this perspective than I have been with any other.

My instinctive response is to view philosophy as an expression of life itself in such a way that if you know something about the personal life of Augustine, Marx, or Nietzsche, but have not read all their books, you have a significant advantage over the person who has read every word these great men wrote, but knows very little of how they lived. This has a lot to do with my penchant to want to recover a sense of historical movement from one moment to the next. So, I am struck by the very human face Chesterton gives to the man my own tradition accused of tearing the world apart. And because of this, an exposition of the life and times Thomas Aquinas has an intrinsic appeal to me. While Chesterton’s lyrical style can only make the read all that more wonderful.

Chesterton’s account is of the Aquinas I never knew, but always had a sneaking suspicion he existed. Not as the object of our derision; instead, as the subject of our appreciation. And this, I am convinced, is the more faithful account, for we are as human as he.

Aquinas is praised for ‘making Christendom more Christian in making it more Aristotelian’ for ‘[w]hen once Christ had risen, it was inevitable that Aristotle should rise again.’ The single point that Chesterton would want to convince his reader of is that Aquinas recovered the meaning of doctrine of Creation from the hands of the Platonists by enlisting the help of an Aristotle made to submit to Christ. We are not meant to interpret this as sleeping with the enemy, a move fatal to the witness of the Gospel. No, there are much more human terms which we can characterize what Aquinas did: when the Christian Platonists were wondering about the value of material things, denigrating the five human senses, Aquinas what was at hand to defend the goodness of God’s creation.

A learned articulation of this perspective comes as a great relief to me, so much so that when I had read the book’s final words I sat for a half hour in silence. And had I not read Chesterton’s book, I suspect I would still feel slight twinges of guilt from time to time for not desiring deeply that Thomas Aquinas never would have lived and wrote what he did.

The reason for this I should think finds its roots in the Protestant predisposition to see ourselves in terms of not being Catholic. Aquinas is used simply as a foil for the greats of whatever Protestant tradition is being championed at the moment. While I would not deny the validity of many of the criticisms brought against Aquinas, my first sense is still that simply to criticize something of Aquinas’ perspective is to lift the mind of the man, or the man out of the world God brought him into—which is simply another way of affirming each generation must face its own problems and preceding generations do not have the same benefit of hindsight we possess. As Aquinas worked with the tools—intellectual traditions, cultural givens, etc.—provided him, so must we—this I take as a human given, in essence what it means to be human. We are not to so quickly dismiss him for working under the same constraints we do our theorizing under.

Aquinas is critiqued, with especially great vigor by Dooyeweerd, for tearing what God made an integral whole in two. But the truth, in fact, is rather the opposite. Aquinas might be better congratulated for mending a world torn apart. While it is true that he does divide the world into the realms of grace and nature, he can hardly be accused of purposefully separating humankind from God or detaching the material from the spiritual. Rather his great accomplishment was to invest the material realm with an inherent value it had lacked in the Christian world for quite a number of centuries. Singularly directed, Dooyeweerd’s structural critique of Aquinas’ philosophy tends to blind the observer to the significance of the contribution Aquinas made to the history of Christian thought. The point is often also missed that the two realms in Aquinas’ thought cannot even truly be called separate, for what was true in heaven was true on earth, which presupposes a single unifying and integrating order that Aquinas locates in God. It would be his successors who pried open that ontic fault line.

Contrasting the philosophic system of Aquinas with that of John Duns Scotus, we are able to distill a second critique brought against the epistemological foundations of Aquinas’ thought. These two men can be contrasted like day and night. Aquinas was a Dominican, whereas Scotus was a Franciscan; Aquinas grounded his theology in the rational intellect of God, Scotus in God’s will; the Angelic Doctor assumed the shape of God’s mind, his thoughts, were impressed on the minds of human being, the Subtle Doctor did not. A simple illustration will serve to highlight the difference: the zebra, which shares a similar physical shape with a horse. One can say that Aquinas is on the side of common sense in simply assuming that a zebra is no a horse, which he does. Scotus, however, wants to go further than the self-evident comparison by appearance to figure out why a zebra is not a horse, for he is not certain. Aquinas believed that the categories of zebra and horse existed both in the mind of an all-knowing God and the human mind. Another way of stating this is that humanity shared in God’s intellect, what God knows humankind can come to know. The corollary to statement, however, leads us to some troubling conclusions; for if this is the case, what human beings know ‘truly’—however truth might be ascertained—must be what God knows. To the person with confidence in their mental faculties the Lord’s way are no longer mysterious. In this light, Scotus’ thought comes into focus. His conviction to preserve the autonomy of God’s will drove him to question the basis for Aquinas’ common sense. Significantly, he did not question common sense itself; he still assumed that there existed a concord between the realms of grace and nature, only one that could not be explained in human categories. Chesterton argues that Aquinas’ position holds that God had created us for the life in his world, thus cynical or skeptical conclusions don’t really make good sense. The same can be said for Scotus; and as with those who followed Aquinas, Scotus’ followers would also question this realist presupposition.

I have already confessed my dissatisfaction with the structuralist critique because of its tendency to blind the observer to the continuing historic significance of Aquinas’ thought by making him the philosophic equivalent of the ‘token black man’ in a movie. The epistemological critique seems to me to have more substance to it, for the simple fact that it does not diminishes the man. One might say pride comes before the fall; and that presuming to know the have or know the mind of God as Aquinas did is the worst pride of all. But one is still left with Aquinas the man—no greater or lesser than any other who has ever lived. Indeed, Dooyeweerd’s structuralist critique should itself be criticized for failing to address the same trouble Aquinas landed himself in when he posited that humankind participated in the mind of God. Much like a person who solely uses the structuralist critique, I think it safe to say Aquinas could not appreciate the positions of those he debated with in terms of historical progression. (An example of this will be offered in a moment.) Where Aquinas saw the human mind participating in God’s mind, structuralists to quickly assume the Scriptures can be used in the same way. The telling of history suffers; and that humankind was created in, with, and for history loses much of its meaning.

As a grand conclusion to his already illustrious career, Aquinas debated with Siger de Brabant in Paris the double nature of humanity, spiritual and natural. This man, like the rest who fell under the titles Averroist, Ockhamist, or Nominalist, has been for a long time regarded as philosophic skeptics, destroyers of truth. Only this is unfairly done, unless Protestants want to lump Martin Luther, a self-titled Ockhamist, with the lot of them or Catholics deny their Franciscan heritage. Instead, it might be better stated that he, along with the others, was searching for a new way to reconcile faith and reason, one that didn’t simply assume a concord between the two; and that what was perceived to be skepticism was in fact the work of a committed to accounting philosophically for God’s truth. Siger’s argument had been that what was true in heaven need not be true on earth, and vice versa, a conclusion that may be drawn from Scotus’ thought as well. The content of the argument does not concern me here; what followed for Aquinas does. Chesterton writes, ‘He had returned victorious from his last combat with Siger de Brabant; returned and retired.’ ‘[I]n the abyss of anarchy opened by Siger’s sophstiry of the Double Mind of Man, he had seen the possibility of the perishing of all ideas of religion and even of all idea of truth.’ I will take exception here with Chesterton's portrayal of Brabant when I say, indeed, from Aquinas’ perspective it must have seemed so. So, ‘[h]e resumed the strict routine of religion, and for some time said nothing to anybody’--as if to acknowledge through his actions that nobody has the final word. Hence my frustration with my own tradition's tendency to use Aquinas as a foil for its own position, as if a structuralist critique is the final word.

What follows is perhaps the most profound statement of humility I have ever encountered. Chesterton continues,

His friend Reginald asked him to return also to his equally regular habits of reading and writing, and following the controversies of the hour. He said with singular emphasis, “I can write no more.” There seems to have been a silence; after which Reginald again ventured to approach the subject; and Thomas answered him with even greater vigour, “I can write no more. I have seen things which make all my writings like straw.”

We read that when he died, Aquinas’ confessor, who had been with him, ‘ran forth as if in fear, and whispered that his confession had been that of a child of five.’ The fear must have been from seeing such a powerful mind having lost its abilities, though I think it was misplaced.

I can not help but think of Christ’s words recorded in Matthew 18. rich