Shortly after Thomas Aquinas died in the Cistercian abbey at Fossanova on 7 March 1274, a message came from the theology faculty at the University of Paris asking that the body of the saintly theologian be sent to Paris for burial and veneration. Although that request was not granted, the body did eventually come to rest in France.
Thomas was buried for the first time before the high altar of the church of the Cistercian abbey in which he had died after a funeral Mass attended by members of his family as well as by fellow Dominicans and other non-Cistercians. Because the subprior at Fossanova was cured of blindness when he touched Thomas’s body and soon other miracles occurred, the Cistercians began to fear that the remains would be stolen and taken off to a Dominican resting place. As a result of this fear, the body was disinterred and reinterred at Fossanova several times during the next two years. Jealous of their treasure, the monks took macabre precautions. They ‘exhumed the corpse of Brother Thomas from its resting place, cut off the head and placed it in a hiding place in a corner of the chapel’. The idea was that, even if the corpse were taken, the head would be theirs. His sister was given a hand, a finger of which was to describe a grisly trajectory of its own. This story of reverent mutilations is a long one. By the time the canonization process began in 1319 the corpse had been reduced to bones from which the flesh had been removed by boiling. In 1368, the bones were then removed to the Dominican monastery at Toulouse where they remained until the French Revolution. They were then removed to the church of St Sernin in the same city. In 1974, the seventh centenary of the death of Thomas, his remains were returned to the Dominican church in Toulouse, where they have rested to this day.
The fate of Thomas’s literary corpus, while not so lurid, has been similarly interesting, as is usually the case with authors who lived before the advent of printing. Manuscripts were copied and recopied and handed on. Some of the manuscripts that Thomas wrote in his own illegible hand have come down to us, as well as many of those written by the secretary-companions assigned to him. Over the years since the invention of printing several editions of his opera omnia have appeared, but oddly, when we consider his importance for scholars, the critical edition launched by Leo XIII more than a century ago is still incomplete. It may not be precisely analogous to his body’s long trek to Toulouse – thought is more difficult to dismember – but it does sometimes seem that critical editions of a host of lesser medievals will sit upon the shelf before Thomas finds penultimate rest in the literary equivalent of St Sernin. For all that, there is no problem in discovering what Thomas taught, and why. Even the where and when can usually be determined.
THOMAS IN HIS TIME
The life of Thomas is easily told, although of course nearly every element of the account is subject to at least mild disagreement, including the year of his birth. Most likely this took place in 1225 at Roccasecca, in the family castle, where Thomas passed the first five years of his life before being sent, as an oblate, to the great Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino, some twenty kilometres away. Here Thomas began the study that would characterize his life. His formal education began with a solid grounding in the liberal arts – first the trivium of grammar, rhetoric and dialectic, and then the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. Later Thomas would be at pains to show the compatibility of the liberal arts tradition with the order of learning the philosophical sciences that could be gleaned from Aristotle.
In 1239 Thomas entered the university that Frederick II had founded in Naples. It was here that Thomas first encountered members of the Order of Preachers, the mendicant followers of St Dominic. The young man was attracted to the Dominicans and in April 1244 he took the habit of the order. This decision did not please his family and Thomas was subjected to a year of detention and inept dissuasion, but eventually he was allowed to go north with his new confrères to Paris. Here he continued his studies and met the formidable Dominican, Albert the Great. Three years later, when Albert was sent to Cologne to set up a Dominican House of Studies, he took Thomas with him.
Among many other things, Albert was remarkable for his knowledge of Aristotle. Indeed, he wrote a vast paraphrase of the Aristotelian corpus and a commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics while Thomas studied with him in Cologne. Thomas was given the task of preparing the text of the commentary for the stationer, his first literary effort, unless we accept the authenticity of several logical works said to have been composed when he was enduring domestic detention. It should be noted that Thomas had already been introduced to the new Aristotelian learning at Naples under the tutelage of Peter of Ireland. The indefatigable translator Michael Scot was a protégé of Frederick, and translations from the Greek and Arabic went on apace. Already in his late teens, Thomas was reading the natural writings of Aristotle. (Of course the traditional liberal arts curriculum included some logical works of Aristotle.) He clearly preferred the close commentaries of Averroes to the paraphrases of Avicenna. This openness to Greek and Arabic thought was reinforced by Albert during the years in Cologne, and by the time Thomas returned to Paris in 1252 to continue his theological studies, he had an excellent understanding of Aristotle. Moreover, Albert also gave the young friar a thorough grounding in Neoplatonism.
Some maintain that Thomas already functioned as cursor biblicus while at Cologne and date his commentary on Isaiah from this period. In Paris, from 1252 to 1256, Thomas was a ‘Bachelor of the Sentences’ – namely a student of the Sentences of Peter Lombard, a twelfth-century bishop of Paris who had sought to summarize in four books the wealth of Christian wisdom. Once the fledgling theologian had exhibited his prowess in explicating both the Old and New Testaments, he turned to Lombard’s summary. This is why we find among the works of all the great, and little, medieval theologians a commentary on the Sentences.
In the spring of 1256 Thomas was credentialled as a master of theology. For the next three years, as regent master, he occupied one of the two Dominican chairs of theology. But it was not until 1257, that Thomas and his Franciscan counterpart, Bonaventure, were actually accepted by the other masters. This was accomplished by an intervention of the Pope. The mendicants were in bad odour at the University of Paris for a number of reasons, but not least among them would have been the Dominican refusal to join the other masters when they went on strike and removed to Angers and Toulouse in 1229, staying away for two years. During his first regency, Thomas would address the charges and accusations of a theological nature that were brought against the mendicants.
From 1259 until 1268, for ten years, Thomas was in Italy, teaching in various houses of his order. He may have spent some time in his home priory of Naples, it is certain that he was in Orvieto and Viterbo with the papal curia. Towards the end of the decade, from 1265 to 1268, he was regent master in the Dominican House of Studies at Santa Sabina in Rome. This Italian period was among the most fecund of Thomas’s life.
When he left Paris, he had already written much, having polished up his commentary on Peter Lombard and produced the Disputed Question on Truth as well as some Quodlibetal Questions. Two of his better known philosophical works, On Being and Essence and On the Principles of Nature, actually antedate his first regency at Paris. The unfinished exposition of Boethius’s On the Trinity dates from the first regency. And there were other works, not least the Against Those Impugning Religion and the Cult of God, a response to critics of the mendicant orders. All that prior productivity being acknowledged, the Italian decade was none the less astonishingly productive. Thomas finished the Summa contra Gentiles, commented on Job, composed the Golden Chain, a composite Patristic commentary on the four Gospels, began the Summa theologiae and Compendium theologiae as well as the Disputed Question on the Power of God. And in Rome, before returning to Paris, he wrote the first of his commentaries on Aristotle, that on the De anima.
When Thomas returned to Paris in 1268 for a second stint as regent master he came into a maelstrom created by the so-called Latin Averroists in the arts faculty and the reaction to their excesses on the part of theologians, many of them Franciscans. From 1268 to 1272 Thomas produced many theological works – continuing the Summa theologiae, composing the Disputed Question on Evil and holding many disputes that became Quodlibetal Questions. But this period is of special interest to the philosopher because during it, despite his pressing magisterial tasks as regent master of theology, Thomas commented on eleven other Aristotelian works, although not all of them are complete. One need only consider such polemical works of the same period as On the Eternity of the World and On There Being only One Intellect to find the reason for this unusual moonlighting production on the part of a regent master of theology. The Latin Averroists adopted as they thought from Aristotle a number of positions which conflicted with the Christian faith; moreover they seemed insouciant about the logical position this put them in. If it is true that the world has always been as Aristotle claimed, then the Christian belief that the world and time had a beginning cannot be true – and vice versa. To their opponents, and Thomas was the most effective, the Latin Averroists seemed to be saying that contradictories can be simultaneously true. This assault on reason was bad enough, but more alarming still, they were suggesting that God proposes for our belief as true something we can know to be false.
Some theologians reacted to this by calling into question the value of studying Aristotle at all, let alone using him in doing theology. Discussion of the ‘errors of Aristotle’ occupied theologians. This reaction amounted to an acceptance of the claim that Aristotle’s doctrine, on significantpoints – the major ‘errors’ had to do with personal immortality, the eternity of the world and providence – is incompatible with Christianity. The Latin Averroists themselves were taken to concede this but they did not find it sufficient reason to reject Aristotle. Thomas’s mediating view was that the Latin Averroists were wrong on Aristotle who, when properly understood, is an unequivocal boon for the human mind as well as a powerful complement of the faith. The close reading of the Aristotelian text that we find in Thomas’s commentaries is an effort to display what the Stagyrite really teaches and the arguments which establish that teaching as true. The commentaries are in many respects at variance with the influential Arabic interpreters of Aristotle, namely Averroes and Avicenna. We will come back to the importance of these commentaries for determining the best way to characterize Thomas as a philosopher.
In 1270, shortly after Thomas’s return to Paris, there was a condemnation of the kind of Aristotelianism represented by the Latin Averroists. And it was to become clear that there were theologians who considered the teaching of Thomas Aquinas to be as heterodox as that of the Latin Averroists, but it was not until 1277, three years after the death of Thomas, with the Parisian condemnation of 219 propositions, that teachings of Thomas are found among the proscribed propositions. Clearly Thomas’s understanding of Aristotle was not standard fare either in the faculty of arts or in the faculty of theology.
In 1272, Thomas returned to Italy as regent master at Naples. He continued work on Part 3 of the Summa theologiae, composed some biblical commentaries, and preached in his native tongue, on one occasion explaining the Ave Maria. In 1274, while en route to the Council that had been called at Lyons, he fell ill and on 7 March, at Fossanova, died.
WHAT THOMAS TAUGHT
From at least 1248, Thomas devoted himself to the study of theology. Once he had become a master, he held teaching positions in theology for the rest of his life. Of course so many of the major medieval figures were theologians that it has seemed to some that nothing significant in philosophy proper went on during the Middle Ages. This charge has been made by Bertrand Russell, Will Durant and Emile Brehier, among others, and annoying as many have found this, important issues are raised by the judgement, some having to do with latter-day assumptions, others with the medieval master’s self-understanding.
The twentieth-century professional philosopher is apt to think of his discipline as not only different from theology but as immune to any of the assumptions of that benighted discipline. The theologian is in thrall to religious beliefs, whereas the philosopher starts with an unadorned mind, at square one, and follows the argument whither it goeth, obedient only to the exigencies of reason – that is, of pure reason. This charming myth has captured the imagination of many philosophers, despite the fact that it cannot account for why they raise the questions they do, in the order they do, and with the quite palpable professional passion that they do.
Such a thinker’s charge against the Christian philosopher is of course just, or can be restated so as to make it just. One who accepts Christian revelation as true will no doubt be influenced by that fact as he goes about his philosophical work. Let us call this an antecedent influence on, and the continuing ambience of, his thinking. Those who profess to be shocked by this seem to imagine a philosopher who has no antecedent convictions and no cultural ambience within which he does his professional work. Perhaps this would be possible for pure reason in East Prussia or a disembodied spirit but it is manifestly impossible for any flesh and blood human thinker. Doubtless this is why modern philosophers wearied themselves in the task of finding a method with which to disencumber themselves of all antecedent beliefs. It may seem to amount only to a Johnsonian kick but Kierkegaard’s Johannes Climacus: or De omnibus dubitandum est is the best purgative for this ailment.
Recognition of the inescapable existential setting of any human activity, including thinking, may seem to relativize all philosophical positions, as if each can be reduced back into its existential antecedents. But these antecedents are manifestly different in the case of the non-believer and believer. Does this mean that what each of them says is thought to be true only because it jibes with the antecedent assumptions of his inquiry? Are truth and falsity to mean only ‘true within the assumptions of Christian belief’ or ‘true within the assumptions of, say, reductive materialism’? That such unexamined if workaday relativism explains a good deal of the failure to communicate between philosophers has been observed by many, not least by Alasdaire MacIntyre. If such relativism were absolute, so to say, philosophical agreement, or disagreement, would be explained by features extrinsic to what is being said.
The way out of utter relativism is to maintain that, whatever one’s antecedent existential assumptions, a philosophical position must obey criteria which are public and intrinsically independent of one’s motives for philosophizing. Lord Russell set out to show that free love is morally acceptable; he was looking for arguments on behalf of that amorous position. But if his arguments are convincing only to those who share his antecedent dispositions, they may be called rationalizations and not philosophy. So too a Christian sets out to show that God can be known to exist from the world around us, prodded, let us say, by Romans 1.19. But his arguments have to hold in the public philosophical forum and be cogent to those without as well as with faith.
It seemed well to begin with this problem, the problem of Christian Philosophy, because it is often confused with what Thomas meant by theology. There are two kinds of truth about God, Thomas observes. First, truths which can be known by anyone employing his natural capacity to think about the world around us; second, truths which God has revealed about himself and which are accepted as true on the basis of a gratuitously granted disposition of mind called faith. The whole aim of philosophy, as it was begun by the Greeks, is to achieve wisdom; wisdom is knowledge of the first principles and causes; but the first principles and causes are divine. Philosophy by definition strives towards knowledge of the divine, and if it is successful, ends as theology. Truths about God do not begin where philosophy ends; they are the telos of the whole philosophical enterprise. On this basis, Thomas distinguished two kinds of theology, one philosophical, the other Christian theology. On what basis? There are two kinds of truth about God.
In the Summa contra Gentiles 1.3 Thomas writes: ‘For there are some truths about God which quite exceed the capacity of human reason, for example, that God is three and one, but there are others to which even natural reason can attain, for example, that God exists and that he is one, and others like them, which in fact philosophers have demonstratively proved about God, led on by the light of natural reason.’ This distinction between the theology of the philosophers and that of believers provides the basis for a general distinction between philosophy and theology.
Philosophy takes as its starting point knowledge that is in the public domain, which any human mind is in principle capable of knowing. A philosophical position, no matter how sophisticated, is characterized by the implicit promissory note that it can be shown to follow from what we and everyone else already know. Indeed, if this cannot be done, it is the philosopher who loses. In the Aristotelian methodology, it is assumed that latent in ordinary thinking there are certain truths of a necessary kind. Sometimes these are of breathtaking scope, such as, ‘It is impossible for something to be and not to be at the same time and in the same respect,’ and, ‘Two things equal to a third are equal to one another.’ These are such that they immediately claim our allegiance once we know what is being said. They are judgements known to be true of themselves, as opposed to being known in dependence on other truths. Acquired knowledge is such that a judgement is seen to be true because of its connection with other judgements already taken to be true. This is the nature of discourse, the Greek term for which is syllogismos. Scientia, knowledge in the strict sense, is discourse whose conclusion shares in the necessity of the premisses from which it follows. That is, not only does it necessarily follow from them – that would be a feature of any successful discursive reasoning or syllogism – but what follows is necessary, that is, it could not be otherwise. Thus science is demonstrative reasoning or apodictic discourse.
This ideal of knowledge is variously attained. Mathematics was taken to exemplify it in an obvious way and the ideal of science thus seems to be simply a suite of demonstrations. Most subject matters do not permit this, needless to say, although Thomas, like Aristotle, thought that there were constitutive demonstrations in our knowledge of nature that permitted us to speak of natural science, even though most of the reasoning in the science falls short of being demonstrative, that is, necessary. Besides mathematics and natural science, there is a theoretical science that Aristotle called theology or first philosophy, and that came to be called metaphysics. If natural science has being as subject to change as its subject and mathematics has quantified being as its subject, metaphysics was assigned being as such, or being as being, as its subject. It is in this culminating intellectual effort that the philosopher achieved some knowledge of God. This is what made it wisdom, according to Aristotle, and that is the goal of philosophizing.1
Thus when Thomas speaks of two kinds of truth about God, he is comparing the culminating achievement of philosophy as he found it in Aristotle with the starting point of Christian reflection on revelation. A believer who holds, as Thomas did, that the pagan philosopher Aristotle achieved such truths as that are included in revelation, implicitly or explicity. This is, some truths about God which are in principle knowable – Aristotle knew them – have none the less been proposed for our belief or revealed. Of course Scripture is characterized by those other truths about God – the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the like. Thomas called truths of the first kind, as they figure in revelation, ‘preambles of faith’, and truths of the second kind, ‘mysteries of faith’. He derives a very important result from the fact that some truths about God that are knowable have been included in revelation. If some of the truths about God that have been revealed can come to be known (the preambles), then it is surely reasonable to accept other truths about God found in revelation that cannot be comprehended or understood in this life (the mysteries). This is not a proof of the truth of the mysteries of faith, but rather an argument on behalf of accepting those mysteries as true.
This comparison of philosophy and of ‘the science of Sacred Scripture’ is not merely adventitious. The discourse that is found in the theological writings of Thomas is unintelligible without acknowledging the influence of Aristotle. The very first question asked in the Summa theologiae is, ‘What need is there for any science other than the philosophical ones?’ This question only makes sense to a reader already acquainted with philosophy. Moreover, the questions that are posed at the outset of sacred science are only meaningful against the background of Aristotelian methodology. To ask what the subject of a science is, what its principles are, how it should make truths about its subject known – these questions only begin to be formulated by the theologians of the thirteenth century. If one looks at the theological work on which they all commented, the Sentences of Peter Lombard, he will find no comparable discussions. Peter follows St Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine in saying that all the things considered in his four volumes are either divine things or signs of them – res et signum. This is a far cry from Aristotelian methodology.
The suggestion that a knowledge of the philosophical sciences is presupposed by Christian theology is not merely a pedagogical aside. It points us to the very heart of Thomas’s thought. From his earliest theological writings he is employing what he clearly regards as the achievements of Aristotelian philosophy in his reflection on the mysteries of Christian faith. His knowledge of Aristotle, we have noted, would have begun at Monte Cassino, been deepened at Naples and, under the tutelage of Albert the Great, become a comprehensive command of the Philosopher. Impressed as we can be by his grasp of Aristotle when he returns to Paris from Cologne and writes On Being and Essence and On the Principles of Nature and comments on Peter Lombard, that knowledge grows over the course of his career. When, in the final phase of his academic life, at Rome in 1268 and then during the second regency at Paris and continuing when he returned to Naples, Thomas produces his amazing book by book, chapter by chapter, line by line, word by word, analyses of the Aristotelian corpus, we are getting the fruit of a lifetime’s meditation on the works of the magnificent Macedonian who became simply the Philosopher. For others, this may have been merely a conventional sobriquet; for Thomas it was the literal truth.
It will be well to say a few things about some of the key Aristotelian doctrines that define Thomas’s thinking.
‘All our intellectual knowledge takes its rise from the senses.’ This fundamental Aristotelian assumption pervades Thomas’s intellectual work, both philosophical and theological. The commensurate object of human thinking is the nature of sensible reality. That is, what anyone can be taken to know are the things around us that we see and touch and smell and hear. Our ideas are in the first instance ideas of them. Since we name things as we know them, our language will reveal this priority of the sensible, the palpable, the visible. The trajectory of human knowing is a movement from what is obvious to us, though hardly most real, to knowledge of the more real but less obvious to us. Things most obvious to us are not obviously the most important things there are. The order of our learning does not match the order of things, as Aristotle took Plato to be saying. It is not subsisting Ideas or ideal Forms with which our mind is most at home, but rather with what we can grasp of the things we see and touch and hear. Knowledge of these sensible things can lead on to knowledge of the less obvious in the sensible world and even beyond the sensible world, but the order of our learning, like the priorities of our language which express our knowing, will reveal the primacy of the sensible.
‘Whatever comes about as a result of a change is a composite of stuff and form.’ It is scarcely an accident that one of the first philosophical works we have from Thomas’s pen – and indeed one of the few purely philosophical works he wrote – is devoted to an exposition of the composition of natural things, that is, of things that have come to be as the result of a change. Written while he was yet a student, On the Principlesof Nature cannot be read simply as an account of what Aristotle taught. The opusculum is clearly a laying out of what its author regards as the truth of the matter. The least we can say about the end result of a change is that something which did not have a certain characteristic has come to have that characteristic. When Agatha went to Miami she was not tanned, but look at her now. Some subject which was not-P is now P. A lump of clay that previously did not have the shape of my mother-in-law, after minimal manipulation now does. Shapes and forms are ways of discriminating things, of classifying them. The term ‘shape’, forma, comes to be used to talk of temperature and texture and even place, such as Agatha’s being in Miami.
This progression and extension of terminology already exhibits a movement from the more to the less obvious. If the subject or matter of such forms as shape and temperature and weight and place is substance – a lump of clay, my mother-in-law, Agatha – the question arises as to how we can speak of substances themselves coming to be. Not just coming to be such-and-such, that is, white or light or over there, but coming to be tout court. What could be the subject of the becoming of the subject? We come to know it by an analogy, Aristotle said.
If there are substances, and if substances come to be, and if coming into being involves a subject or matter as well as a form, then we will seek the subject and form of substantial becoming on an analogy with the subject and form of accidental or incidental becoming. In substantial change, the subject cannot be itself a substance, since then the change would be an incidental one; that is, a change in which the subject acquires a form that does not account for its being a substance so much as a tanned, tired and impecunious substance. In the change whereby a substance comes to be a substance, the form must be of a kind that makes a substance to be a substance, not a form that makes an already existing substance to be such-and-such: in Florida, tanned, up to no good.
This pressing on to the principles of substantial becoming from reflections on the way things change colour and place and size and temperature is already a rich lesson in the development of philosophical terminology as Thomas learned it from Aristotle. And like his mentor, Thomas will use this same vocabulary to talk of sensing and imagining and thinking itself, and indeed to speak of the principle of life in living things. The soul is a substantial form. Ultimately, and by a vast stretch of imagination and understanding, he will be able to speak of separated forms. That is, forms of the kind with which Plato blithely began are the hard-won achievements of prolonged philosophical analyses for the Aristotelian. Along the way, thinking about thinking becomes an analysis on the model of physical becoming. Coming to know will thus be spoken of as acquiring a form, but whether in sensing or imagining or understanding, the form will be more unlike than like its physical counterpart, though sufficiently alike to form a pedagogical bridge.
These central tenets concerning progress in knowledge and the mirroring progress in language sank deeply into the mind of St Thomas Aquinas.
His Aristotelianism is not a patina over something more basic, or a terminology to express what he knows on some other basis. In learning from Aristotle Thomas does not of course think of himself as conforming his mind to another’s, but rather as conforming his mind to the ways things are, aided in the task by his great precursor, the Philosopher.
Seen from this philosophical perspective, the mysteries of the Christian faith take on an awesome character, unimaginably exceeding the range of human reason. None the less, as the distinction of preambles and mysteries in revealed truths makes clear, Thomas sees philosophy as the necessary instrument for a meditation on faith that exemplifies the Anselmian motto: fides quaerens intellectum. Faith is the acceptance as true of what the mind cannot comprehend in this life; theology is the inevitable effort to diminish the strangeness by putting what is believed into juxtaposition with what is known. Theology comes to mimic the methodology of the philosophical sciences, but this never results in knowledge in the usual sense, that is, philosophical knowledge. The starting points of theology are not truths in the public domain, but truths that God has revealed which can only be accepted on his say-so. The theologian will defend those truths against attack, he will undertake to show that nothing we know is in conflict with them, and he will draw out the implications of what has been explicitly revealed, thereby contributing to the development of doctrine of which Cardinal Newman and then Vatican II have spoken. Theology in this sense is not addressed to just anyone; it can be a vehicle of truth only for one who accepts its starting points, and that acceptance has a name, faith.
Thomas’s Aristotelianism is obvious in his insistence that God reveals himself to us through images and likenesses. Scripture is figurative and metaphorical, which is a concession to what is easily grasped by the human mind. The creator makes himself known through his creation first of all, and then through the Book, those inspired writings that come to us from the Chosen People. In Christ himself, there is the ultimate concession to our mode of knowing: God becomes man, he walks among us and speaks to us and shows us the way to salvation. And he speaks in parables and stories so that we can be led on from the obvious to the mystery beyond. The sacraments of the Church are also seen as making the spiritual palpable: outward signs of inward grace, in the phrase.
When Thomas undertook his commentaries on Aristotle, he was in part continuing a practice of his mentor Albert. If Thomas’s commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul does date from 1268 when he was teaching at Santa Sabina in Rome, it could not have been prompted by the controversies raging in Paris. But when Thomas did go back to Paris, his Aristotelian commentaries multiplied and this at a time when he was busy about the many tasks of the regent master of theology. Doubtless the spur was what the so-called Latin Averroists were making of Aristotle. Thomas had long expressed discontent with the commentaries of the Commentator and now he called Averroes the distorter rather than the expositor of Aristotle. These commentaries cannot in any way be seen as a cynical or well-intentioned effort to tailor the Aristotelian text to alien demands, shaping it so that it conformed with Christian doctrine, baptizing Aristotle. It is simply libel to say that Thomas twisted Aristotle for polemical reasons, whether the twisting is taken to be conscious or unconscious. No one who reads On Whether There Is but One Intellect, a polemical work of this period, can have any doubt about what Thomas as commentator is doing. The task proceeds on two levels, guided by two overriding questions. First, what does Aristotle actually say? Second, is it true or false? The first question cannot be terminal for Thomas, but it is the first question. In this massively impressive effort, Thomas is every bit as much the defender of Aristotle against misreading as he is a defender of the Christian faith.
SKETCH OF THE HISTORY OF THOMISM
The history of Thomism may be said to begin with the condemnation of 1277 already mentioned, and it begins under a cloud. The thought of Aristotle, which had been represented for centuries in Christian education by only a few of his logical writings, begins to be better known in its full scope in the twelfth century when Latin translations of hitherto unknown treatises are made. These translations are sometimes made directly from the Greek but sometimes represent a filtering through intermediate languages. For example, we have a description of the joint work of Christians, Muslims and Jews in Toledo, which involved the translation of the Arabic Aristotle into vernacular Spanish and then into English. As often as not, these latter translations were accompanied by the commentaries of the eponymous commentator Averroes. Avicenna rethought Aristotle at some remove from the text, and he too was translated. Works of medicine and mathematics and astronomy seemed to crowd out the authors whose authority had characterized an education in the liberal arts. The university system, which begins with the thirteenth century – we can date the founding of Paris as 1200 – provided the arena in which the adjustment had to be made to the flood of new literature arriving in Latin translation. The central intellectual feature of Thomas’s time is precisely the question of the relation between Aristotle and Christianity.
Of course this is a variation on a theme present from the beginning of Christianity, as Paul’s sermon at Athens attests: How does the truth revealed by and in Christ relate to truths already known by the natural efforts of non-believers and believers? In the fledgling university, the natural outgrowth of the monastic and cathedral schools, the attitude towards the new learning was ambivalent. Committees were appointed to study the matter. It was forbidden to read Aristotle – that is, to lecture on him in the classroom – but shuch prohibitions appear to have had little effect. Eventually, with the bumptious arrival of the so-called Latin Averroists, notably Siger of Brabant, at the end of the third quarter of the thirteenth century, hostility towards Aristotle comes to characterize theologians. Thomas Aquinas sought to find a way between the light- headedness of some masters of arts and his wary fellow theologians. None the less, in 1270 a set of dangerous propositions was condemned.
Roger Marston, who was there, said this of the 1270 condemnation of the unicity of form: ‘This opinion was solemnly excommunicated as contrary to the assertion and teaching of the saints, and especially of Augustine and Anselm.’ Thus we will find the ensuing struggle described as one for and against Augustinianism. We have mentioned the way the lines were drawn when Thomas returned to Paris in 1269. There was effective agreement between the youthful masters of arts, on the one hand, and theologians, principally Franciscans, on the other, to the effect that the teachings of Aristotle conflicted with Christian faith. The artists were willing to waive that, apparently, and sought to follow Aristotle while they did philosophy and to recite the creed with other Christians at Mass. For Thomas, this amounted to the claim that contradictories could be simultaneously true. He rightly rejected Latin Averroism as embodying such nonsense, and impiety. Clearly the only room for manoeuvre here was to ask whether or not Aristotle was being understood properly.
The 219 propositions contained in the condemnation of 1277, three years after the death of Thomas – the result of a committee appointed by Stephen Tempier, bishop of Paris – gave pause to some friends and enemies of Thomas. Giles of Rome, Godfrey of Fontaines and Henry of Ghent, who had been a member of the commission, expressed surprise at some of the propositions that were taken to be heterodox. The aged Albert the Great returned to Paris to defend his late pupil against the implication of unsound doctrine. Among the 219 condemned propositions, 34 and 77, dealing with the unity of the world, 27, 82, 96 and 191, on the individuation of material and immaterial substances, and 69, 218, 219 on the localization of separated substances, are taken to be aimed at Thomas. But the ante was soon to be raised.
William de la Mare, an English Franciscan, published between 1277 and 1279 a Correctorium fratri Thomae in which he undertook to show the questionable positions one can find simply by perusing the beginning of Thomas Aquinas’s commentary on the Sentences alone. At least four Dominican responses to this attack were published, called appropriately Correctoria Corruptorii – correctives of the distortions of Thomas’s teaching. These are known by their opening words or incipits. Thus the response known as the Quare, once thought to be by Giles of Rome, but now attributed to the English Dominican Richard Kampwell (or sometimes to Thomas Sutton), deals with all of the 118 points of dispute raised by de la Mare. Not only is it the most complete reply, but it contains the text of de la Mare. Another response, the Sciendum, deals with all the points but without including the text being refuted. The Circa is a response attributed to Jean Quidort of Paris, which deals with only the first sixty charges; yet another response, Quaestiones, confronts only the first thirty-one charges.
The first and most permanent effect of this controversy, which amounted to a split among the mendicants, was to solidify Dominican identification with the teaching of Thomas and to give Franciscans the character of non-Thomists, if not anti-Thomists. That the initial attack came from an English Franciscan – perhaps inspired by John Peckham, who had been close to Bonaventure in Paris and returned to England as Archbishop of Canterbury – and that the Dominican responses too were largely from Englishmen is a feature of the history of Thomism not without interest. The anti-Thomist tradition among the Franciscans would be continued by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham.
Sometime around 1286 or 1287, Rambert of Primadizzi, a Dominican of Bologna, published his Apologeticum veritatis contra Corruptorium, which takes on not only William de la Mare but such other Franciscan adversaries as Matthew of Acquasparta, Richard Middleton, Henry of Ghent and Giles of Rome. Giles, because of his defence of Thomas’s distinction between esse and essentia, was often thought to be a Thomist but clearly was not. A text of his edited in 1934, called Egidius contra Thomam, cites seventy-three alleged errors of Thomas that Giles based on the exposition of Book 1 of the Sentences alone. Giles is also known for his Errores Philosophorum, in which he contests fourteen positions he attributes to Aristotle. Godfrey of Fontaines, on the other hand, while rejecting the real distinction, defends many Thomistic doctrines.
It should not be thought, however, that Thomas was immediately and universally adopted as intellectual champion by his Dominican confrères. There were anti-Thomist Dominicans, like Durandus de S. Porciano, who was following in the footsteps of his equally anti-Thomist teacher, James of Metz; the reaction to such deviance can be said to have played the unintended role of consolidating Thomas’s position within the Order. Durandus’s opponent within the Order was Herve Nedellec. Their quarrel continued until 1317 when Durandus was made bishop of Limoux and, in the following year, Herve was elected master general of the Dominicans.
If the foes of Thomas sought discrepancies between his teaching and Christian orthodoxy, Dominicans took up the task of reconciling conflicting statements of Thomas himself. And before the thirteenth century was over, there were already compilations meant to show that Thomas had taught melius, better, in dealing with a question at different times, a passage in the Summa preferred to its parallel in the Scriptum on the Sentences.1 Such concordances multiplied and reached their epitome in the magnificent Tabula Aurea of Peter of Bergamo, an index which to this day remains one of the most useful companions to the study of Aquinas.
Jean-Pierre Torrell, O.P., points out that there were also Dominicans indifferent to Thomas; for example, Ulrich of Strasbourg who had studied under Albert at the same time as Thomas.
It is remarkable that Dante places in the same circle of heaven Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure and Siger of Brabant. The Divine Comedy takes place in Holy Week of 1300 and Dante not only anticipates the canonizations of Bonaventure and Thomas, but may be the only one who regarded Siger as their intellectual and spiritual equal. How did Dante come by his knowledge of the events that link these three? (Bonaventure’s principal function in the Comedy is to praise Dominic, and Thomas in turn praises Francis, but also plays a dominant role in the circle of the sun.) When Dante set about the plan of study that he tells us of at the end of La Vita Nuova, he is thought to have frequented both the Franciscan and Dominican houses of study in Florence; his Dominican teacher was one Remigio dei Girolami, who had studied under Thomas Aquinas during the saint’s second Parisian regency. The prominence of Thomas in the Paradiso doubtless did as much as anything else to secure his place as the leading thinker of the thirteenth century.
Capreolus, the so-called princeps Thomistarum, entitled his chief work Defences of the Theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas, which gives us, according to Cornelio Fabro, a good sense of the Thomistic school of the fifteenth century. Capreolus died in 1444. Peter Nigri, a Hungarian who wrote a summary of Thomistic doctrine, Clypeus thomisticus, died in 1492, and Peter of Bergamo produced in the sixteenth century a Tabula Aurea which is the first index of Thomas’s writings and to this day an indispensable tool for the student of Thomas. In the sixteenth century, in Dominican houses of study, the Summa theologiae replaces Lombard’s Sentences, and there begins the long tradition of commentaries on the theological summae of Thomas. There is the great commentator on the Summa contra Gentiles, Sylvester of Ferrara, to be followed by Cardinal Thomas de Vio Cajetan, eventual master general of the Dominicans, who had been the papal envoy to Luther, and whose commentary on the Summa theologiae is contained, to the consternation of Etienne Gilson, in the Leonine edition of that work. Banez and John of St Thomas give testimony to the extraordinary authority Cajetan acquired as an interpreter of Thomas.
It is thanks to the Belgian, Peter Crockaert, the teacher of Francisco de Vitoria, the eventual glory of Salamanca, that in the sixteenth century the Summa theologiae came to replace the Sentences of Lombard as the work to be commented on by fledgling Dominican theologians. With Banez and Francisco de Vitoria, the centre of gravity of Thomism shifts to the Iberian peninsula. Vitoria (1483–1546) is praised, and sometimes chided, as a source of modern theories of rights. He is the hero of an interesting little book called A Spaniard at the UN.1
THE THOMISTIC REVIVAL
It is said that when Gioacchino Pecci was elected Pope in 1878 at the age of sixty-eight, the electors were determined not to have a reign as long as that of his predecessor, Pius IX, who had occupied the See of Peter for thirty-two years. As if to prove that God has a sense of humour, Leo was to reign for twenty-six years. Pio Nono was a liberal who became conservative as a result of disturbing political developments, not least the loss of the papal states. But it is unfair to narrow his concerns to political ones; his misgivings about the times were far ranging. On 8 December 1864 he published the famous Syllabus of the Principal Errors of Our Epoch.1 There are eighty in all and the first eighteen deal with pantheism, naturalism and rationalism. Errors 19 through to 55 deal with the Church and its relation to civil government, but many of the items are quite doctrinal. Indeed, Cardinal Newman’s brief against Liberalism appended to his Apologia pro vita sua is not unlike the Syllabus both in target and in tone. Be that as it may, the document makes it clear that the pontiff did not think things were going well in the modern world. Nowadays, in the wake of ‘the failure of the Enlightenment project’, this censorious attitude will not surprise. Prominent among the errors condemned by Pius IX were those which saw an inevitable conflict between religion and science, to the detriment of the former. It is this perennial theme of the relation between faith and reason that Leo XIII takes up in his encyclical of 4 August 1879, Aeterni Patris. This document officially launched the modern Thomistic revival.
Etienne Gilson succinctly states the aim of the encyclical: ‘Aeterni Patris prescribes that Christian philosophy, as contained in the works of Thomas Aquinas, should be taught in schools in conformity with the teaching of the Church.’2 Pius IX had discerned a fatal discrepancy between dominant intellectual trends and the teaching of the Church. Leo proposes that a true philosophy, and thus one in accord with both reality and revelation, can be found in Thomas Aquinas.
Leo begins by speaking of the teaching office of the Church, particularly of the popes, and then makes an indictment every bit as sweeping as that of his predecessor. ‘The supreme pastors of the Church have always thought it their duty to advance, by every means in their power, science truly so called, and at the same time to provide with special care that all studies should accord with the Catholic faith, especially philosophy…’ (n.1) What is the source of the evils that afflict the modern world? ‘… false conclusions concerning divine and human things, which originated in the schools of philosophy, have now crept into all the orders of the State, and have been accepted by the common consent of the masses.’ (n. 2)
If the trouble stems from false philosophy, it can only be countered by true philosophy. In a series of discussions that may remind the reader of Newman in The Idea of a University, Leo speaks first of what the faith has to gain from philosophy and then of what philosophy has to gain from association with the faith. It is not until halfway through the encyclical that Leo, after having sketched the intellectual activities of believers from the Fathers on, dwelling of course on Augustine, mentions Thomas Aquinas. ‘Among the Scholastic Doctors, the chief and master of all, towers Thomas Aquinas, who, as Cajetan observes, because “he most venerated the ancient doctors of the Church, in a certain way seems to have inherited the intellect of all”.’ (n. 17) Thomas’s teaching accordingly is seen as the epitome of Christian philosophy; he is regarded as the best of a kind, not as unique. This championing of Thomas is not meant to be detrimental to his great predecessors, contemporaries and successors.
Leo was as concerned with the condition of Christian schooling as he was with the errors in the wider culture. There were antecedents of this turning to Thomas as a way to confront the philosophical errors of the day, but there is little doubt that by the early nineteenth century Thomas had all but disappeared from the Roman schools.1
From this starting point in 1879, the Thomistic revival – which turned into a resurgence of Catholic interest in the Middle Ages that was destined to spill over into the academy at large – fanned out over Europe and the Americas. Chairs of Thomistic studies were founded, as that at Louvain which had the future Cardinal Mercier as its first occupant; societies were formed, journals founded, critical editions begun. The critical edition of the works of Thomas which is called the Leonine after its patron Leo XIII was inaugurated: it remains unfinished to this day, although the work continues. It is ironic that medieval authors other than Thomas fared better in the hands of their critical editors. Introduction, summaries, simplifications, explanations and developments of the thought of Thomas Aquinas proliferated. If the first impact was fittingly felt in seminaries and ecclesiastical colleges, the Thomistic revival would count among its leaders such laymen as Jacques Maritain, Etienne Gilson and Charles DeKoninck. In North America, thanks largely to the Jesuit colleges and universities scattered across the continent, and to the University of Notre Dame beloved of Chesterton, young men and women took on Thomism as part of the intellectual patrimony of their faith.
The success of the Thomistic revival – and it continued unchecked until the opening of Vatican II in 1962 – was far from a triumph of uniformity of thought. From early on it could be said of Thomists what Dr Johnson said of the Irish: They are an honest race; they never speak well of one another. To the time-honoured odium theologicum was added an odium philosophicum, with Catholic philosophers sometimes seeing one another as a greater menace than the philosophies the revival had been meant to counter. There were, in short, types of Thomism.
Although it would be possible to see the variety of responses to Thomas in terms of the centres which produced generations of scholars – the Angelicum and Gregorianum in Rome, Louvain and the Saulchoir in Belgium, Toulouse in France, Salamanca in Spain, and, in the new world, Toronto, Laval and the Catholic University of America, it is more con venient to view the matter abstractly (and also somewhat chronologically). It is the differing estimates of the role of Aristotle in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas that produces the most interesting varieties of Thomism.
ARISTOTLE AND AQUINAS
That St Thomas Aquinas was influenced by Aristotle and that the saint’s philosophy and theology are characterized by the assimilation of Aristotle are commonplaces there would seem to be no need to repeat. Reformers deplored this pervasive influence of Aristotle almost as much as Thomas’s own contemporaries had, but no one contested that ubi Thomas, ibi Aristoteles est. Nor would it enter anyone’s mind today to deny this manifest case of intellectual filiation and discipleship. Rather it is the nature and character of the connection that have become the subject of changing estimation.
Not so very long ago, there was a hyphenated entity much heard of, Aristotelico-Thomistic philosophy. Tracing the gradual disappearance of that phrase would tell much about the changing estimate of Thomas’s intellectual relation to Aristotle. Those like Gredt who composed an influential handbook of Aristotelico-Thomistic philosophy often seemed to assume that ‘Aristotelian’ and ‘Thomistic’ were simple synonyms as applied to philosophy. It is a nice question whether, during this period, Aristotle was much read independently of Thomas’s comments on and uses of the great pagan’s ideas; a case could be made that often things peculiar to Thomas were blithely attributed to Aristotle. Among the causes explaining the phrase’s falling into disuse are two major ones.
The more important, within Thomistic walls, was the increasing insistence on the non-Aristotelian elements in the Thomistic synthesis. The work of Little and Geiger and Fabro drew attention to the influence of Platonism and Neoplatonism on Thomas, and the test case was participation. Although Aristotle, in criticizing Plato, had dismissed participation as an empty metaphor, and Thomas in commenting on the dismissal had not demurred, none the less the notion of participation pervades the work of Thomas.
Plato had posited ideal entities as the only adequate objects of knowledge worthy of the name. To know something is to possess a truth which is unaffected by change and time. But whence come such eternal truths? Let us say that you, as the result of years of study, have become the acknowledged expert on the earwig. (Of course you will want to speak of the many species of earwigs, but bear with me.) You have produced the definitive work on earwigs dedicated to friends, Romans and countrymen. Comes now a perky nephew who asks where the earwigs are of which you wrote so authoritatively. Have you kept them? You smile indulgently and then grow a little sad. The moment has arrived when the old must tell grim truths to the young. You tell the child that all the earwigs with whom you spent the best years of your life are long since gone to that bourne from which no earwig returns. All dead? All dead. Then what is your book about, dead earwigs? You explain that your subject is not this or that earwig, but the earwig. And where is he? Plato would not want to say that you know the set of existing earwigs, or the set of no longer existing earwigs, nor of course the set of not yet existing earwigs. Your book is of timeless value. But what is its subject if not all those individual earwigs with such a precarious hold on existence?
The nature of earwig. The ideal of earwig. That which it is to be an earwig. As for this earwig and that, they are and are what they are with reference to the ideal timeless earwig which is neither of them. It is this relation that Plato called participation. Aristotle thought it was based on a mistake – and Plato showed misgivings of his own in the Parmenides. As has been mentioned, Thomas accepts Aristotle’s rejection of participation. And yet participation pervades the work of Thomas.
Almost from the beginning of the Summa theologiae, participation occurs and not as a marginal matter but central to the plan of the work just as it is definitive of the being of creatures. What kind of Aristotelian is this, one might ask, who so enthusiastically embraces the key idea of his mentor’s chosen philosophical foil? And look at the sympathy with which he comments on Pseudo-Dionysius and Proclus, in the Book of Causes. When students of Thomas confronted this, they felt that important features, perhaps the central feature, of Thomas’s thought, had been obscured by talk of Aristotelico-Thomism. Indeed, there were not lacking thosewhoseemedtobepushingforitsreplacementbyPlatonico-Thomism.
So that was one thing. The growing sense that Aristotle had been oversold as the mentor of Thomas and that in the process essential elements of Thomism had been overlooked.
A second unsettling factor was the revolution in Aristotelian studies brought about by the introduction and then the wholesale pursuit of the genetic or evolutionary approach to the career and writings of Aristotle. If Aristotle became a critic of Plato, the question arose as to when Plato’s pupil turned from the master’s approach and devised the empirical, naturalistic approach associated with the name of Aristotle. The publication of the fragments of Aristotle’s lost works in the mid-nineteenth century did not convince even their editor of the authenticity of the fragments. Why not? Because their outlook was so manifestly Platonic. But others did not see in this an impediment to accepting the fragments as authentic. All one needed to do was assign them to that part of Aristotle’s life when he was a Platonist. After all, the Macedonian lived in the Academy nearly two decades until the death of Plato. Take him to be Plato’s most precocious disciple. He began writing while still a member of the Academy, while still in agreement with Plato on Ideas, the nature of man, and so on. With age came creativity and intellectual autonomy so that when he left the Academy to found the Lyceum his lectures became the treatises that have come down to us – the treatises that since the first century have been taken to be the quintessential Aristotle. In them we find the anti-Platonist into which Aristotle eventually developed.
What Werner Jaeger did was to locate the development from Platonist to non- or anti-Platonist in the treatises themselves, first in the Metaphysics, then in all the others. There followed a flood of alternative and competing and mutually incompatible accounts of Aristotle’s development but any of them alone and all taken together decisively shook a reader’s confidence that, when picking up the Metaphysics, he was confronting a literary whole. But what then to make of Thomas’s commentaries on Aristotle, which insist on the inner order of the treatises, not just generally, but in the finest detail, the Metaphysics emphatically among them?
The situation was somewhat analogous to that which confronted Thomists in the matter of their master’s interpretation of Boethius. Pierre Duhem, a formidable scholar, had claimed that the diversum est esse et id quod est axiom of On the Hebdomads was nothing else than nothing else than distinction familiar from Themistius as well as Aristotle – one they expressed in rerms of an infinitive preceded by a definite article and a substantive term in the dative: to einai antbrop – whereby the nature and the individual whose nature it is are distinguished. But Thomas clearly reads Boethius as speaking of a distinction between that which exists and its existing. What to do? One would have expected Thomists to take a close look at Duhem’s argument and see if it was decisive. Not a bit of it. Almost without quibble Thomists accepted the claim that Boethius had meant something quite different from what St Thomas had said he meant.1 And was not the same sort of creative reading going on in the commentaries on Aristotle? Rather than dismiss the commentaries or excuse Thomas for his ineptitude, Thomists began to devise exotic theories of what a commentary is and ended by praising rather than blaming Thomas for misinterpreting texts.
For these and other reasons the notion became widespread that the relation between Thomas and Aristotle was a far cry from that suggested by the old phrase Aristotelico-Thomistic. To be sure, we find many references to Aristotle in Thomas, we find the invocation of doctrines, the quoting of phrases. Confronted with these, we should not consult Aristotle for guidance on what Thomas is saying. Far better to see what Thomas means, how he is using the doctrines or language of Aristotle for his own purposes. It is almost as if Aristotle were a language Thomas used to make independent points of his own. And the notion grew that this was somehow one of those medieval practices we oddly find so odd: attributing to authors things they have not said.
It cannot be ignored that some Thomists began to reveal an anti- Aristotelian animus and seemed intent on dissociating Thomas entirely from Aristotle. The idea seemed to be that often Aristotle had meant the direct opposite of what Thomas said he meant and thus appeal to Aristotle was not only unhelpful, on the above assumption about the nature of commentary, but positively dangerous.1 Gilson warned his readers that, for Aristotle, whatever exists necessarily exists and therefore cannot be created. How could an uncreated world become part of an account of reality that took the world to be radically contingent, caused all the way down, made not simply to be this or that, to alter, but to be in the first place? Aristotle thus became an absurd element in Thomism.
An oddity of this period was that the commentaries of Thomas on Aristotle continued to be consulted for the light they shed on the text. Aristotelian studies themselves evolved beyond the evolutionary approach and in several ways. Sometimes philosophers, noting the chaos reigning among philologists, said, in effect, let’s just read the Metaphysics and the other treatises and see what happens (for example, D. J. Allan,2 Marjorie Grene3). They didn’t so much refute the philologist as ignore him. But there were those who confronted the claims of such as Werner Jaeger head on and argued that what Jaeger wanted to conclude did not follow from his premisses. Finally Giovanni Reale produced a magisterial interpretation of the Metaphysics as a unitary work4 and buttressed this in his Italian translation of, and comments on, the Metaphysics.
Aristotle began to be read again, as he had been for centuries, as the author of a number of treatises, each of which was assumed to be more or less a literary whole – one had to take into account their origin as lectures, of course – and thus as ordered internally as well as to one another. Of course this did not produce uniform interpretations of Aristotle. Disputes of a small and great kind continued to rage, but the manner of their resolution is once more that of the great tradition of Aristotelian interpretation, from the Greek commentators, through Boethius and the medieval commentators, to the Renaissance and modern students of Aristotle up to 1912. It was not part of such discourse to resolve a difficulty of interpretation by imagining a phrase interpolated from elsewhere and gumming up the works. There was more likelihood of talk of inconsistency than development. How reconcile the statements about substance in the Categories and in the Metaphysics? Maybe they can’t be reconciled but it was not necessary to see the one as an advance over, or backsliding from, the other.
Quite recently Bertrand Dumoulin1has reopened the evolutionary approach in a book that can scarcely be ignored. Moreover, he provides us with the criteria of interpretation relevant to his enterprise. But he presents a far more unified Metaphysics than anyone in the Jaegerian heyday; moreover, he invokes the commentary of Thomas Aquinas without apology as casting precious light on the text.
A second subsidiary source of difficulty had to do with the accessibility of Aristotle to St Thomas Aquinas. There is only the flimsiest evidence to suggest that Thomas himself knew Greek and it must be assumed that he was wholly dependent on Latin translations of the treatises. Thanks to the progress of the Aristoteles Latinus, we can compare in critical editions the various Latin translations Thomas had at his disposal and the internal evidence of the commentaries as to the ones he used.
The assumption of the following selections is that the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas is fundamentally Aristotelian. Thomists who felt that this committed him to a naive realism that had been discredited by the critical turn devised a transcendental Thomism meant to gain Thomas credence with contemporary philosophers. The textual bases for this interpretation are slender and in any case its chief aim is to fashion what is conceived of as a more defensible philosophy than the one friend and foe alike find in Thomas; for these reasons it does not provide a good basis for a selection of texts.
Perhaps the most prominent interpretation of Thomas Aquinas in recent years is existential Thomism. Earlier we mentioned a number of scholars who maintained that there is no counterpart in Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas’s talk of esse or the actus essendi. But the role of esse is taken to be central to Thomas and thus productive of a radical difference between him and Aristotle. The saying that Thomas’s metaphysics was radically different from that of Aristotle became commonplace. As it happens, no one has ever succeeded in showing, in methodological terms accepted by Thomas Aquinas, in what this formal or radical difference consists. It is far more defensible to say that the science of metaphysics formulated by Aristotle, with being as being as its subject, is formally the same metaphysics that Thomas develops. That development notably takes the form of finding an Aristotelian place for doctrines which are Neoplatonic in origin. The regulative role that Aristotle plays in Thomas’s commentaries on the Book of Causes and On the Divine Names makes this clear.
Is this a reversion to Aristotelico-Thomism in the pejorative sense? Not at all. Rather it is an insistence on the methodological continuity between the Aristotelian base and the subsequent developments in Thomas’s philosophy.
My first reaction when I was asked to prepare this volume was that there was no need for it. There are several extremely good collections of Thomas’s writings available. In making an analysis of these in order to prove my point, I found myself thinking of another, and as it increasingly seemed to me, a better way of setting out the thought of Thomas. The idea grew on me that a collection that followed the chronology of Thomas’s career had much to commend it. The following collection is guided by these two notions. A reader may be surprised at this, given the insistence on the role of Aristotle in the thought of Thomas. After all, the commentaries on Aristotle come late in Thomas’s career, beginning in 1268, and come to an end, with his writing generally, in 1273. A moment’s thought indicates that this is not a problem. Thomas’s close study of Aristotle does not begin with the commentaries, it reaches its culmination in them. From his earliest writings we find him handling the thought of Aristotle with confidence. Misgivings about Averroes and Avicenna are there almost from the beginning. And we find among his earliest writings Thomas’s presentation of key philosophical doctrines that are set forth as both Aristotelian and true.
There is an old maxim, passed on by Pico della Mirandola: Sine Thoma, Aristoteles mutus esset: without Thomas, Aristotle would be silent. The phrase is a signal tribute to the commentaries. But the reverse of the claim is also true, and true throughout Thomas’s career: Sine Aristotele, Thomas non esset.