Initiation Into Philosophy The Thirteenth Century byFaguet, Émile
Influence of Aristotle
His Adoption by the Church.
Religious Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas.
ARISTOTLE AND THE CHURCH.--From the thirteenth century, Aristotle,
completely known and translated into Latin, was adopted by the Church and
became in some sort its lay vicar. He was regarded, and I think rightly, as
of all the Greek thinkers the least dangerous to her and as the one to whom
could be left all the scientific instruction whilst she reserved to herself
all the religious teaching. Aristotle, in fact, "defended her from Plato,"
in whom were always found some germs of adoration of this world, or some
tendencies in this direction, in whom was also found a certain polytheism
much disguised, or rather much purified, but actual and dangerous;
therefore, from the moment when it became necessary to select, Aristotle
was tolerated and finally invested with office.
ST. THOMAS AQUINAS.--As Aristotelian theologians must be cited
William of Auvergne, Vincent of Beauvais, Albertus Magnus; but the
sovereign name of this period of the history of philosophy is St. Thomas
Aquinas. St. Thomas Aquinas wrote several small works but, surpassing them
all, the Summa (encyclopaedia) which bears his name. In general
philosophy St. Thomas Aquinas is an Aristotelian, bending but not
distorting the ideas of Aristotle to Christian conceptions. Like
Aristotle, he demonstrated God by the existence of motion and the necessity
of a first motive power; he further demonstrated it by the contingent,
relative, and imperfect character of all here below: "There is in things
more or less goodness, more or less truth." But we only affirm the more or
less of a thing by comparing it with something absolute and as it
approaches more or less to this absolute; there is therefore an absolute
being, namely God--and this argument appeared to him better than that of
St. Anselm, which he refuted.
HIS CONCEPTION OF NATURE.--He showed the whole of nature as a great
hierarchy, proceeding from the least perfect and the most shapeless to the
most complete and determinate; from another aspect, as separated into two
great kingdoms, that of necessity (mineral, vegetable, animal), and that of
grace (humanity). He displayed it willed by God, projected by God, created
by God; governed by God according to antecedent and consequent wills, that
is, by general wills (God desires man to be saved) and by particular wills
(God wishes the sinner to be punished), and the union of the general wills
is the creation, and the result of all the particular wills is
Providence. Nature and man with it are the work not only of the power but
of the goodness of God, and it is by love that He created us and we must
render Him love for love, which is involuntarily done by Nature herself in
her obedience to His laws, and which we must do voluntarily by obedience to
His commandments.
THE SOUL.--Our soul is immaterial and more complete than that of
animals, for St. Thomas does not formally deny that animals have souls; the
instinct of animals is the sensitive soul according to Aristotle, which is
capable of four faculties: sensibility, imagination, memory, and
estimation, that is elementary intelligence: "The bird picks up straw, not
because it gratifies her feelings [not by a movement of sensibility], but
because it serves to make her nest. It is therefore necessary that an
animal should perceive those intuitions which do not come within the scope
of the senses. It is by opinion or estimation that it perceives these
intuitions, these distant ends." We, mankind, possess a soul which is
sensibility, imagination, memory, and reason. Reason is the faculty not
only of having ideas, but of establishing connections and chains of
connection between the ideas and of conceiving general ideas. Reason pauses
before reaching God because the idea of God precisely is the only one which
cannot be brought to the mind by the interrelation of ideas, for God
surpasses all ideas; the idea of God is given by faith, which can be
subsequently helped by reason, for the latter can work to make faith
perceptible to reason.
Our soul is full of passions, divisible into two great categories, the
passions of desire and those of anger. The passions of desire are rapid or
violent movements towards some object which seems to us a good; the
passions of anger are movements of revolt against something which opposes
our movement towards a good. The common root of all the passions is love,
for it is obvious that from it are derived the passions of desire; and as
for the passions of wrath they would not exist if we had no love of
anything, in which case our desire not coming into collision would not turn
into revolt against the obstacle. We are free to do good or evil, to master
our evil passions and to follow those of which reason approves. Here
reappears the objection of the knowledge God must have beforehand of our
actions: if God foresees our actions we are not free; if free, we act
contrary to his previsions, then He is not all-powerful. St. Thomas makes
answer thus: "There is not prevision, there is vision, because we are in
time whereas God is in eternity. He sees at one glance and instantaneously
all the past, present, and future. Therefore, He does not foresee but see,
and this vision does not hinder human freedom any more than being seen
acting prevents one from acting. Because God knows our deeds after they are
done, no one can plead that that prevents our full liberty to do them; if
He knew them before it is the same as knowing them after, because for Him
past, present, and future are all the same moment." This appears subtle but
is not, for it only amounts to the statement that in speaking of God time
must not be mentioned, for God is as much outside time as outside space.
THE MORAL SYSTEM OF ST. THOMAS.--The very detailed and
circumstantial moral system of St. Thomas may thus be summarized: there is
in conscience, first, an intellectual act which is the distinction between
good and evil; secondly, an act of will which leads us to the good. This
power for good urges the practice of virtue. There are human virtues, well
known to the ancient philosophers, temperance, courage, wisdom, justice,
which lead to happiness on earth; there are divine virtues, inspired in man
by God, which are faith, hope, and charity, and they lead to eternal
happiness. We practise the virtues, when we are well-disposed, because we
are free; but our liberty and our will do not suffice; it is necessary for
God to help us, and that is "grace."
FAITH AND REASON.--On the question of the relation of reason to
faith, St. Thomas Aquinas recognizes, or rather proclaims, that reason will
never demonstrate faith, that the revealed truths, the Trinity, original
sin, grace, etc., are above reason and infinitely exceed it. How, then, can
one believe? By will, aided by the grace of God. Then henceforth must no
appeal be made to reason? Yes, indeed! Reason serves to refute the errors
of the adversaries of the faith, and by this refutation to confirm itself
in belief. The famous Credo ut intelligam--I believe in order to
understand--is therefore true. Comprehension is only possible on condition
of belief; but subsequently comprehension helps to believe, if not more, at
least with a greater precision and in a more abundant light. St. Thomas
Aquinas here is in exactly the position which Pascal seems to have taken
up: Believe and you will understand; understand and you will believe more
exactly. Therefore an act of will: "I wish to believe"--a grace of God
fortifying this will: faith exists--studies and reasoning: faith is the
clearer.
ST. BONAVENTURA; RAYMOND LULLE.--Beside these men of the highest
brain-power there are found in the thirteenth century mystics, that is,
poets and eccentrics, both by the way most interesting. It was St.
Bonaventura who, being persuaded, almost like an Alexandrine, that one
rises to God by synthetic feeling and not by series of arguments, and that
one journeys towards Him by successive states of the soul each more pure
and more passionate--wrote The Journey of the Soul to God which is,
so to speak, a manual of mysticism. Learned as he was, whilst pursuing his
own purpose, he digressed in agreeable and instructive fashion into the
realms of real knowledge.
Widely different from him, Raymond Lulle or de Lulle, an unbridled
schoolman, in his Ars magna invented a reasoning machine, analogous
to an arithmetical machine, in which ideas were automatically deduced from
one another as the figures inscribe themselves on a counter. As often
happens, the excess of the method was its own criticism, and an enemy of
scholasticism could not have more ingeniously demonstrated that it was a
kind of mechanism. Raymond de Lulle was at once a learned man and a
well-informed and most enquiring naturalist for whom Arabian science held
no secrets. With that he was poet, troubadour, orator, as well as very
eccentric and attractive. He was beloved and persecuted in his lifetime,
and long after his death still found enthusiastic disciples.
BACON.--Contemporaneously lived the man whom it is generally the
custom to regard as the distant precursor of experimental science, Roger
Bacon (who must not be confused with Francis Bacon, another learned man who
lived much nearer to our own time). Roger Bacon, a Franciscan friar,
occupied himself almost exclusively with physical and natural science. He
passed the greater portion of his life in prison by reason of alleged
sorcery and, more especially, perhaps, because he had denounced the evil
lives of his brethren. He had at least a presentiment of almost all modern
inventions: gunpowder, magnifying glass, telescope, air-pump; he was
distinctly an inventor in optics. In philosophy, properly speaking, he
denounced what was hollow and empty in scholasticism, detesting that
preference should be given to "the straw of words rather than to the grain
of fact," and proclaiming that reasoning "is good to conclude but not to
establish." Without discovering the law of progress, as has too often been
alleged, he arrived at the conclusion that antiquity being the youth of the
world, the moderns are the adults, which only meant that it would be at our
school that the ancients would learn were they to return to earth and that
we ought not to believe blindly in the ancients; and this was an
insurrection against the principle of authority and against the idolatry of
Aristotle. He preached the direct study of nature, observation, and
experiment with the subsequent application of deduction, and especially of
mathematical deduction, to experiment and observation. With all that, he
believed in astrology; for those who are in advance of their time none the
less belong to it: but he was a very great man.
