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Thomas Aquinas
PHILOSOPHY IN AN HOUR
Paul Strathern
Contents
Chronology of Significant Philosophical Dates
Thomas Aquinas died on 7 March 1274, and ascended to heaven. Forty-nine years later he became a saint; and in 1879 Pope Leo XIII pronounced that Aquinas’s work was ‘the only true philosophy’.
Aquinas thus made a break with the great philosophical tradition of getting things wrong. This sets him apart from all other philosophers (and perhaps even from philosophy itself). Indeed, there would seem to be nothing more to say on the matter. Unless, that is, you happen to believe that our thinking has made some advances since the era of the Children’s Crusade and the chastity belt.
Being the subject of many a sickly hagiography, filled with winsome anecdotes and unquestioning acceptance of much metaphysical twaddle, has done little for Aquinas’s philosophical reputation. All we see is a shadowy figure amongst the incense clouds of theology. It is difficult to discern the finest philosophical mind in Europe for a thousand years (since St. Augustine). Yet Aquinas is unquestionably of this stature.
In order to appreciate Aquinas it is necessary to distinguish, as far as possible, between his theology and his philosophy. The former is absolutely correct on all counts, and beyond question. (Anyone who doubts this courts instant excommunication and the prospect of an afterlife in a third-world-style region devoid of modern domestic conveniences.) Philosophy, on the other hand, is something whose truth is open to question. This is what makes philosophy what it is.
Even in Aquinas’s time there was an implicit difference between theology and philosophy. Both conducted their arguments in a similar fashion – by deduction, reason, logic, and so forth. But in theology such knowledge was based upon the revealed truth of faith. The first principles of theology were supported by a belief in God. Philosophy, on the other hand, required no such belief. It began from first principles which were allegedly ‘self-evident’. These relied upon our apprehension of the world around us and the use of reason alone.
In practice, of course, theology and philosophy often overlapped – especially in the religion-dominated civilisation of the medieval era. Such a state of affairs may appear quaint in these godless times, but in fact our thinking is reduced to an uncannily similar state. Modern philosophy merely papers over the divide between theological and philosophical thinking. Even to philosophise, we must start with a belief in something – basic assumptions, which remain beyond our ability to prove by reason. For example, a belief in the coherence and consistency of the world, without which there could be no scientific laws. But surely this is just quibbling? Isn’t this what ‘self-evident’ means? It’s obvious the world is coherent, even if we have no way of proving it. Not so. Modern quantum mechanics, which deals with the behavior of subatomic particles, has neither coherence nor causality. This is of course science, and it is possible that we will soon come up with some overall theory (a theory of everything, say) which will overcome such apparent inconsistencies. But this is not the point. Under present conditions a belief in the ultimate consistency of the world is no more justifiable than a belief in God. In fact, this remains true under any conditions.
Which brings us to another relevant comparison. The late twentieth century is almost unimaginably different from the medieval era. The contemporary mind in an advanced technological society bears precious little resemblance to a medieval mind. Some philosophers and scientists have even begun to question whether these two individuals share such a thing as a common humanity. They argue that there is no such thing, only an ever-evolving species. For them, the concept of ‘humanity’ implies such outmoded entities as a ‘soul’, an unvarying ‘human condition’, a ‘consciousness’ which eludes scientific pinpointing, a belief in the uniqueness of ‘individuality’ and such – notions which have no place in a world of Darwinian evolution, DNA, cloning, and similar miracles which have contributed to modern self-understanding.
In which case, what possible relevance has Thomas Aquinas to us? The simple souls who cannot accept such an extremist scientific view – obstinately clinging to the notion that Hamlet, Faust, and even Dante still have something to say to us – will need little convincing. Those who believe that we are in the initial throes of an unprecedented era of human development (amounting to a fundamental evolutionary transformation) will need more persuading. But a case can be made. Progress in the six hundred years between Aquinas and the start of the twentieth century was to all intents a leisurely amble. By the end of the twentieth century this has quickened to a headlong dash. If we consider that the worldview (or mindset) of Aquinas has become an irrelevancy over the centuries, how much shorter before ours too joins the scrap heap? If progress is a film sequence, must every present frame be regarded as the only picture we see? ‘Serious’ modern thinkers may regard Aquinas much as we regard early Chaplin. How long before our thought processes are regarded like knockabout farce? Or might the cliché banana skins and saccharine sentimentality of Chaplin still have something to say to us?
We see our age as the greatest in human history (a delusion shared by many previous ages). Ours is a time of seemingly unending originality, yet such protean dynamism is not a necessary characteristic of great eras. Amongst the most long-lasting and stable civilisations, upon which vast intellectual and material resources were lavished, were those in China and medieval Europe. Here stasis was achieved, and with it a stability that enabled the development of structured thought and intellectual embellishment to an unparalleled degree. Dante’s Divine Comedy was perhaps the finest poetic construction humanity has yet produced, and the certainties it embodied were part and parcel of the medieval age. The vast gothic
