The Philosophy Of Aquinas

Robert Pasnau, Christopher Shields

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000304374
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book introduces Thomas Aquinas's own principal fascinations in philosophy: rational theology, metaphysics, human nature, philosophy of mind, and value theory. It offers an introduction to his overarching explanatory framework in a distinctive deployment of an approach familiar from Aristotle.

1
LIFE AND WORK

By all the accounts of his contemporaries, Thomas Aquinas was a strange and driven man. One former student who came to know him well described how "he seemed to live almost in a trance. He so devoted all his energies to God's service as to be utterly detached from this world even while dwelling in it." All who knew him described his single-minded pursuit of the word of God through prayer, study, teaching, preaching, and writing. From an early age, we are told, "he shunned all frivolous conversation as far as possible" (Foster, pp. 130, 26). As an adult, when meetings with his fellow friars drifted into topics not pertaining to God, it was his custom to leave the room immediately. At the start of his first extended masterpiece, his Summa contra gentiles, he declared it his task "to clarify the truth that the Catholic faith professes, to the extent that I can, while eliminating conflicting errors." Then he quoted Hilary of Poitiers: "I am conscious that I owe this to God as the chief duty of my life, that my every statement and expression speak of him" (SCG 1.2.2/9).

The fruit of this marvelous dedication and abstraction is the more than eight million words that Aquinas left us. The sheer quantity of this work is enough to display his single-mindedness. Over twenty years of work, he wrote more than eight times as much as Aristotle, himself a reasonably prolific author. At the height of his productivity, Aquinas was writing an astonishing four thousand words a day. Every page displays his constant focus and drive: there is always the sense that he is going somewhere, pushing on toward the unified theological worldview that was his life's project to articulate. As an Aristotelian, Aquinas accepted the Nicomachean Ethics' conception of happiness as the ultimate end of human life. As a Christian, however, he reconceived that notion in terms of a union with God, which for him consisted in an intellectual understanding of God's very nature. For human beings in this life, no such thing is possible; we see God obscurely at best. Every moment of Aquinas's adult life, and every word that he wrote, had as its aim to dispel the darkness of his and our lives arid lead us to the glory of eternal life with God. In the service of this ambition, Aquinas constructed a philosophical edifice as impressive and monumental as any before or since.

1.1 Early Years

None of this could have been foreseen from Aquinas's origins. Born in 1225 (or thereabout), Thomas was the youngest son of at least nine children born to Landolfo and Theodora. The family was wealthy, with ancestral estates in the Aquino region of southern Italy, halfway between Rome and Naples. Thomas himself was born not in the town of Aquino but in the family's castle at nearby Roccasecca, which can still be visited today. The name "Thomas Aquinas" (or "Thomas of Aquino") thus refers to his family rather than to his exact birthplace. Until the sixteenth century, when governments began to decree that every person take a surname, it was common for Europeans to have just a single name and to make further distinctions when needed on the basis of place of origin or father's name. (Single names remain very common in many parts of the world today.) Since "Aquinas" is not a surname in the modern sense, some prefer to refer to Thomas Aquinas by his given name, "Thomas." But we follow the standard practice of using the toponym "Aquinas" as if it were his surname, a practice as common in earlier times (for instance, in Shakespeare) as it is now.

Although legend has it that Theodora, while pregnant, received a prophetic announcement from a local hermit of her child's future fame as a Dominican friar, the Aquino family had very different plans for their child. As was customary for the youngest sons of aristocratic families, Thomas was destined for the Church. His parents hardly intended, however, that he would join one of the new mendicant orders, such as the Franciscans or the Dominicans, whose members took strict vows of poverty and sought to adopt the lifestyle of Christ's disciples. Instead, the six-year-old Thomas was sent, along with his nurse, to a nearby Benedictine monastery—the famous and powerful Monte Cassino. In the eyes of his parents, a position of influence at Monte Cassino would be a great achievement for both the son and the family. Yet, as the plans of parents are wont to do, this one fell apart. While studying in Naples as a teenager, Thomas fell in with the Dominican friars in that town. That newly founded organization of priests described itself as the Order of Preachers: their lives were dedicated not just to poverty and abstinence but also to the pursuit of knowledge, always with an aim to further the work of preaching, teaching, writing, and in general saving souls. This orientation coincided perfectly with Thomas's own values, and at the age of nineteen—before finishing his studies at Naples—he joined the Dominican order.

Throughout his life, Aquinas wanted nothing more than to live as a Dominican friar: poor, celibate, and scholarly. When students later asked him whether he would like to own all of Paris, he is said to have replied that he would rather own a copy of John Chrysostom's sermons on the Gospel of Matthew. (By the time he wrote his commentary on Matthew, he had a copy, which he quoted from 215 times.) To the end, he stubbornly refused titles and offices that would bring prestige and power at the expense of his scholarly calm. Still, though no life could seem less likely to yield interesting biographical material than one of poverty, celibacy, and scholarship, in fact Aquinas's life was full of strange and fascinating events. When he was a child, for example, a lightning strike killed one of his sisters (as well as horses in the stable below) while he slept nearby The most famous and dramatic event in his life occurred just after he took his vows as a Dominican. A decade earlier the friars in Naples had had a bad experience with another young nobleman: having recruited him into the order, the friars lost him to his enraged family, who broke into the priory to take him back. Eager to avoid a similar scene with their newest recruit, the Dominicans attempted to sneak Aquinas out of Italy. His mother, having heard what her youngest son was proposing to do, went down to Naples to dissuade him. Arriving too late, she went up to Rome, but again she was too late. As a last recourse, she sent an urgent message to her older sons to intercept Thomas on the road north of Rome. They did so and brought him back home to Roccasecca, where he was forced to spend a year in the family castle—not exactly imprisoned (he was allowed visitors and could move about freely) but effectively grounded.

No doubt Aquinas made good use of this year at home, even without a teacher. Early biographers report that he studied the whole Bible thoroughly and memorized Peter Lombard's Sentences, the basic textbook for university studies in theology. They also report that during that year he managed to persuade his eldest sister to join a religious order herself. But it seems that not all of the family took the earnest youngest son so seriously It is easy to imagine the glee of Thomas's older brothers when they arranged for a prostitute to visit him in his room, and their even greater glee in hearing of his reaction (see §9.2 for the whole story). In any event, it became clear after a year that Thomas was not going to be deterred, and he was allowed to rejoin the Dominicans and journey to Paris, the intellectual center of Europe.

1.2 A Young Scholar

Thanks to generations of scholarly research, we have a fairly firm idea of where Aquinas lived throughout his life and when he wrote his various works. Beyond that, however, we know very little for certain about what he was like, how he spent his time, and what happened to him along the way. Unlike Augustine or Abelard, he never wrote about his personal life, even in passing, and left no personal correspondence. Consequently, everything we know is based on either the testimony of others or what we can deduce from his scholarly writings. From the writings—both their content and an analysis of early manuscripts—we have learned a great deal about the order in which Aquinas composed his various works and about where he was living as he wrote them. As for the testimony of others, these stories largely come from the records of his first canonization inquiry, in 1319, almost half a century after his death. Accordingly, if some of the stories we tell here seem incredible—better suited to hagiography than biography—the reader might do well to resist crediting them. We ourselves do not believe every part of the legend. Still, this is the story of Aquinas, as we have it, and it seems well worth telling.

We can be fairly confident that Aquinas's family did force him to spend a year at home after his first attempt to join the Dominican order, and that in the end they relented and allowed him to leave for Paris. It is not entirely clear how he spent the next three years, from the latter part of 1245 into 1248, but we can be sure that he would have feasted on the vast intellectual opportunities offered at the University of Paris. In his early twenties now, Aquinas seems to have spent these years completing the liberal education he had begun in Naples, perhaps studying the seven classic liberal arts (logic, grammar, rhetoric, arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, and music) and certainly studying philosophy. In the middle of the thirteenth century the study of philosophy was becoming virtually synonymous with the study of Aristotle. Although it is uncertain what Aquinas would have been exposed to during his first stay in Paris, he clearly had the good fortune of coming on to the scene just as Aristotle was assuming his prominent position as "the Philosopher"—which is in fact what Aquinas and other scholastics customarily called him. Throughout the earlier Middle Ages the main logical writings of Aristotle had been studied as one of the central pillars of a liberal arts education. But the bulk of Aristotle had been lost to the Latin West for centuries, until commentaries and Latin translations began to appear in the twelfth century.

From the ninth century, Latin had been a dead language in the sense that it was no one's native language. Nevertheless, it was the lingua franca of medieval Europe, the universal language of both clerics and scholars, and translations—from Greek, Hebrew, or Arabic—were always into Latin. Very few in the West knew Greek or Hebrew, let alone Arabic, and Aquinas shows no signs of having made any effort in this direction. He always wrote and taught in Latin, although when living in Italy he preached sermons in his native Italian. As a result, Aquinas and his contemporaries were almost entirely dependent on the availability of Latin translations of the great Greek, Islamic, and Jewish philosophers. Thanks to just a handful of industrious scholars (such as Aquinas's contemporary and fellow Dominican, William of Moerbeke), this work was gradually becoming available to the Latin West.

Of all this material, the most exciting of all was, of course, the work of Aristotle. In the early part of the thirteenth century, Aristotle and other non-Christian philosophers were regarded with a great deal of suspicion. Indeed, a Church council in 1210 prohibited any lectures, public or private, on Aristotle's works of natural philosophy. This edict was reaffirmed by the pope in 1231, but by the 1240s it seems to have lost its force (by being forgotten rather than explicitly overruled), and by 1255 a statute of the Paris Arts Faculty mandated the study of all Aristotle's major works.

The most famous figure in this Aristotelian revival was another Dominican friar, Albert the Great (c. 1200-1280), who was more famous in his lifetime than Aquinas himself. Over the course of his career, Albert worked through virtually all of Aristotle's writings, composing extensive commentaries and paraphrases on their every aspect and introducing this material into his explicitly theological work. Albert's groundbreaking efforts played a crucial role in medieval Aristotelianism, both in their own right and in their influence on Aquinas. In 1248, in his early twenties, Aquinas had the great fortune of being assigned to join Albert in Cologne, where a new Dominican center for theological study was to be established. The next four years were crucial in formulating Aquinas's mature intellectual outlook. Under Albert, he continued to study Aristotle's philosophy and began the intensive study of theology that would fill the rest of his life. His first biblical commentaries probably date from this period.

Cologne appears to be where Aquinas's brilliance was first widely recognized. Large and stout (yet impressive and handsome, according to some sources), Aquinas was a quiet student who must have kept his thoughts to himself during those first years in Paris. In an oft-told incident at Cologne, a fellow student offered Aquinas help with a difficult text. After humbly accepting the help, then watching the student begin to falter, Aquinas began to explain the text himself, leaving the other student amazed. A similar incident was said to have led Albert the Great to his oft-quoted remark that "we call him the Dumb Ox, but the bellowing of that ox will resound throughout the whole world." In 1252, Albert was asked to nominate a student to go back to Paris and begin lecturing on Lombard's Sentences, the last stage on the long road to becoming a master of theology. Albert chose Aquinas, and after some hesitation the Dominican authorities agreed.

It is no wonder that the authorities hesitated, and that Aquinas himself felt overwhelmed by the assignment. At the age of twenty-seven, he was two years younger than the minimum age statutorily required of a so called bachelor of the Sentences. Moreover, he was far younger than any earlier Dominican in that role, most of whom (including Albert himself) had been in their forties and had studied theology and the Bible for a much greater length of time. Nevertheless, Aquinas was said to have been a tremendous success. As an early biographer put it: "God graced his teaching so abundantly that it began to make a wonderful impression on the students. For it all seemed so novel—new arrangements of subject matter, new methods of proof, new arguments adduced for the conclusions; in short, no one who heard him could doubt that his mind was full of a new light from God" (Weisheipl, p. 70).

Aquirias's first major works date from this period. His massive commentary on Lombard's Sentences contains all the major theses that distinguish him as a philosopher and theologian. Though he would develop his ideas more fully and clearly in later works—and for that reason they are more often studied—he established the basic contours of his thought at a remarkably early age. It seems to be during these years that Aquinas wrote two short treatises, On the Principles of Nature and On Being and Essence, both at the request of fellow friars who were struggling to understand some basics of philosophy. (These two treatises are the focal texts of Chapters 2 and 3.)

1.3 Master of Theology

In 1256, Aquinas received the University of Paris's highest honor, the Licentia docendi (or doctorate), which permitted him to become a master of theology Again, he was too young—he should have been at least thirty-five—but he was nevertheless chosen for the honor over other candidates. And also as before, Aquinas was apprehensive. We have the story that he attempted to decline the offer, only to be reminded of his vow of obedience, and then prayed, tearfully, for the knowledge and grace that would be required of him. That night, an elderly Dominican friar appeared to him in a dream, offering not just encouraging words but even a topic for his inaugural address. The address he gave—before the assembled faculty of the university—would reflect these concerns. After describing the demands of the position he was assuming, he concluded:

Although no one is sufficient for such a ministry by himself, in his own right, still he can hope for sufficiency from God: Not that we are sufficient to think anything by ourselves, as if by ourselves; rather, our sufficiency comes from God (II Cor. 3.5). Still, we ought to seek it from God: If someone needs wisdom, let him ask God [... and it will be given to him] (James 1.5). Let us pray for Christ to grant it to us. Amen. (Torrell, p. 52)

With these words, Aquinas was hoping for more than just intellectual inspiration and guid...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 LIFE AND WORK
• 2 AQUINAS'S EXPLANATORY FRAMEWORK: THE FOUR CAUSES
• 3 AQUINAS'S METAPHYSICAL FRAMEWORK: BEING AND ESSENCE
• 4 GOD'S EXISTENCE AND NATURE
• 5 THE ORDER OF THE UNIVERSE
• 6 THE HUMAN SOUL AND THE HUMAN BODY
• 7 SENSE AND INTELLECT
• 8 THE GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE
• 9 ETHICS
• Glossary
• Catalog of Works
• Index