[0:01]The Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition.
[0:08]Part Two: The Age of Faith to the Age of Reason.
[0:13]Michael Sugrue, Ph.D. Princeton University.
[0:20]Aquinas' Summa Theologica: The Thomist Synthesis and its Political and Social Content.
[0:29]The greatest figure in the development of the medieval philosophy of Christianity, called Scholasticism, and his philosophy, which is described as Thomism, is a synthesis of the Greco-Roman and Christian traditions, which is remarkably successful in incorporating new classical pagan learning into the traditions of Christianity, which had been established in the years since the breakup of the Roman Empire. Now, Aquinas was a priest, he was an Italian Dominican, who spent most of his career teaching at the University of Paris. And while it was a general tendency in the Catholic Church to try and dominate the political and the social life of Western Europe, it was uneven in this success in doing so. It had political advances and political failures, but intellectually the Church did dominate the culture of Western Europe, particularly during the Middle Ages, and the one figure who is the kind of symbol of this success that the Church found in synthesizing Athens and Jerusalem, and bringing that synthesis to bear as a sort of intellectual foundation for the culture of the Middle Ages, Aquinas is most conspicuous and perhaps the greatest example of that sort of tendency. Now, he was in many respects an intellectual, not revolutionary, but an intellectual pathfinder, he's a sort of pioneer. In the mid-13th century when Aquinas is working, new texts, particularly texts of Aristotle are being reincorporated and rediscovered in the Western tradition, and Aristotle is the most important figure for Aquinas. In some ways people have said that Aquinas is in the process of baptizing Aristotle, and while that's an overstatement, there's a certain degree of truth in that. Aristotle is for the first time being recovered from primarily Arabic sources that have held on to the tradition of classical learning. These Arabic sources are being translated into Latin or being retranslated back into something like the original Greek, and from there it is being brought into the universities. Aquinas is most important in reading Aristotle, interpreting Aristotle, and using Aristotle for the purposes of developing and articulating a new and intellectually rigorous, intellectually sophisticated Christianity.
[2:50]Now, prior to Aristotle or prior to Aquinas, the reason why this is so revolutionary or why this is such an innovation is that Christianity since the time of Augustine had been saturated in the Platonic tradition. Clearly, Plato is the most important and influential philosopher for Saint Augustine, and from the time of Augustine and the fall of the Roman Empire, through, oh, I don't know, the year 1100 or 1200 anyway, the primary influence, the the the main connection between Christianity and Greece is to be found in the very limited number of Platonic works that are available. This is the sort of orthodoxy that is that is somewhat ossified in Catholic thinking prior to the time of Aquinas. What Aquinas is going to do is shift away from that Augustinian and Platonic tradition into a tradition that's Aristotelian. Aristotelian in the sense, first of all, that it's concerned more than the Augustinian tradition with concrete things. Second of all, Aquinas is going to be concerned with syllogistic logic. Logic and the syllogism are key ideas in Scholastic thinking. The syllogism is the medium through which the Scholastic thinker makes his arguments and articulates his views. So it has a characteristic form, which is of course, dear to the heart of Aristotle, one of the great logicians that ever lived, and certainly the one who worked out the theory of the syllogism and the idea of syllogistic reasoning. And in addition to that, Aquinas borrows a tendency from Aristotle towards system building, towards a sort of encyclopedism. Those of you who are familiar with Aquinas's great works, the Summe, the Summa Contra Gentiles, and the Summa Theologicae, can find that it is one of the most extraordinary and vast intellectual edifices you can imagine. It goes on seemingly from miles, volume after volume, question after question, covering every conceivable problem in morals and politics and theology and physics and ethics. It is a generally encyclopedic work, and I think that while this encyclopedic tendency is congenial to the mind of Aquinas, much of that tendency is reinforced by the fact that Aristotle had already attempted a kind of encyclopedic intellectual project before. So it's bringing this encyclopedic tendency to Christianity that makes the the Thomist synthesis so powerful and so important. That's certainly one of the most important things that this does. But Aquinas's borrowings from the classical tradition are not to be understood as merely baptizing Aristotle. He is a very profoundly learned figure. Aquinas knows the entire classical tradition or at least such elements of the classical tradition as were accessible and for which there were were texts in the mid-13th century. For example, most of Plato he doesn't have access to, but he does have access to things like Cicero, which is going to be very important for his understanding of natural law, and for certain elements in the classical tradition. I'd like to discuss those because they're worth considering. Um, from Plato I would say, Aristotle borrowed a surprising and kind of easy to miss element in his thinking. If you've ever looked at the Summa there, or or in other works of Aristotle or even other Scholastics, you will find that they are often in a question and answer form. Question number one, does God exist, or is he unified or or plural? Uh, question number two and then he'll give five or six possible answers, and in the in the process of giving these answers he will refute what are called straw men. He will set up bad alternative answers and eliminate those answers, and then at the end of his process of question and answer or what what it at least is in the form of question and answer, we will come to the true answer at the bottom of that, and then after we get the true answer to his first question, what we will get is movement on to a next question. So what we see is a question and answer format. The difference between Augustine or Aquinas and Plato is that this question and answer format has been frozen. It is petrified, it is fossilized Plato. The living quality of Plato, the the open-endedness, the playfulness, all right, the the living voice has been taken out. So instead of having what what we get in Plato, living human beings asking and answering questions, involving themselves in the pursuit of the truth, what we have in Aquinas is the disembodied form of questioning, and then a series of answers, and then at the bottom of these series of answers, a very un-Platonic or un-Socratic final answer, the real answer. So I would be inclined to say that what Aquinas borrows from the Platonic tradition, besides a, you know, certain Augustinian elements, is this question and answer format. I think that's real important, and it's easy to overlook. Right? Because the the style of Aquinas is so far removed from the careful dramatic irony of Plato. A a another thing that Aquinas borrows from the classical tradition, and this is also very important, is the Ciceronian idea of natural law. In De Republica, Cicero talks about natural law as being a moral law, a normative law, accessible through the light of human reason, independent of any revelation, independent of any knowledge that is gained from Scripture or from God's revealing of himself.
[8:04]Cicero thinks that this natural law, which is clearly a stoic idea, is a cosmopolitan set of normative rules, accessible to all human beings as rational animals. And while Aquinas will not limit his conception of law to natural law, he'll add to it things like divine law and eternal law, because he's a committed Christian. What he will do is incorporate this idea as a sort of substratum of his theory of law, and this will allow him to use the stoic intellectual tradition to good purpose. In other words, it's another way of Aquinas incorporating the classical tradition. He is not merely uh the canonical interpret interpreter of Aristotle, he is in fact a great synthetic mind, in many respects analogous to Aristotle himself, in the sense that he brings together disparate elements of a of a varied intellectual tradition, and forms them into one coherent whole. So Aquinas is a very eclectic borrower. He's very self-conscious in what he takes, and he has a complete and thorough mastery of the entire intellectual tradition that leads up to him. In other words, in so far as mid-13th century intellectuals had access to the texts of the ancient philosophers, Aquinas knew them all and knew them thoroughly. In addition to that, in addition to borrowing and merging certain elements of the classical tradition, Aquinas is completely in control of the tradition of of Christian thinking that begins with of course, the Scriptures themselves, but carries through the Patristic doctors of the Church, right, the early church writers, and certainly through Augustine, and then of course, through earlier Catholic writers such as Anselm and his ontological argument, Abelard, various kinds of logicians that were contemporaries or near contemporaries of him, uh uh of Aquinas himself. So what Aquinas is doing is bringing together all parts of two separate intellectual traditions and force and not quite forcing them, but finding a harmonious, a felicitous way of braiding these things together. And the difficulty here lies in the fact that he's trying to square the circle. Faith and reason ultimately don't mesh very nicely. And I I must confess to a certain suspicion of those systems in which it all the gears are made to mesh precisely. One always has an idea that something is either being overlooked or tendentiously misread or perhaps unintentionally misread. But when sorry, I've always come away with the feeling when I read Aquinas that something is being overlooked and that in fact, this is a little too pat and in fact it works a little too well. But to give credit where credit is due, this is an amazing intellectual tour de force. Bringing together the tradition of Jerusalem, the tradition of Athens in such a way as to make it intellectually respectable and to add a new and powerful intellectual note to the development of Christianity. In some respects, the Catholic Church was harmed by the tremendous success of Aquinas because it tended to ossify the intellectual outlook of the Church. Once they got it right, it was a sort of poisoned fruit, right, which made it very hard to accommodate the new developments in modern natural science that will come after the time of Galileo. So Aquinas's achievement is more synthetic than creative. Um, he was not a he's not the sort of inventive thinker that will come up with a completely new conception of the world. He is much more like literally a Scholastic thinker that spends a great time absorbing and synthesizing a complex and not completely coherent intellectual tradition into something that makes intellectual sense, at least in so far as he's able to round off the sharp edges.
[11:42]Now, in addition to these classical authors, Aquinas is also in great debt to his teacher, or to his most important teacher, Albert the Great. And this and of course, now he's Saint Albert the Great, one of the Doctors of the Church, but Albert coming in the generation ahead of Aquinas, was one of the first thinkers to try and incorporate Aristotle into Christianity, but his interpretation of Aristotle is relatively superficial. In other words, while Albert was able to incorporate some of these ideas, he wasn't able to put together the big synthesis that Aquinas was able to formulate. And in addition to having Albert give him access to uh to Aristotle and giving him access to a wide body of Christian learning, Albert the Great was very interested in Islamic and Jewish learning, particularly Islamic and Jewish Aristotelianism. So they are familiar with Maimonides and his guide to the perplexed, which is an attempt to get to navigate and to get through the intellectual mind field that is presented to the religious believer by Greek rationalism. Another powerful influence is Averroes. Averroes is a an Islamic interpreter of Aristotle that is trying to that is trying to reconcile Islam, one of the religions of the Book, with the Greek classical tradition. So what I'm driving at is something like this. During the 13th century, around the time of Aquinas and perhaps even a little bit before, the great monotheisms, Islam, Judaism and Christianity, are all reacting to the gradual rediscovery, the gradual reinfusion of Aristotle and that element in the classical tradition back into the religions of the Book. And highly intellectual Jews like Maimonides, highly intellectual Arabs or um Muslims like Averroes, are engaged in fundamentally the same project as Aquinas and the other great Doctors of the Church. They are trying to create an intellectually respectable version of monotheism, which will not lose the attention and which will not uh diminish in intellectual stature compared with this new with this new classical learning. One might be tempted to say that in the 13th century, we had a mini or premature or early version of the Renaissance. In other words, if you remember what the Renaissance is, it's a reinfusion of classical pagan learning, Greco-Roman learning, back into the Western tradition. May I suggest that this is not an event that happens in in the mid-15th century in Italy, but rather it's a gradual process that happens in the centuries after the uh after the Crusades, in which this information about the classical tradition gradually seeps back into the Western tradition. The reason why we don't as a rule note the 13th century as being a time of tremendous intellectual ferment is because the Orthodox theology, and by implication, the Orthodox political system, and the Orthodox uh social structure, you know, feudalism that's connected with it, is not endangered at least by this early infusion of Western of classical learning. Because of that fact, um we don't notice it, it isn't the same kind of explosive event in the history of the world. And the reason why we don't see an explosive result when we mix these two volatile traditions together, the tradition of Athens and the tradition of Jerusalem, is because Aristotle finds a way of pulling the fangs of the monster. He he prevents uh Aristotelian learning from being interpreted or at least he's to some extent successful in having Aristotelian learning, um, viewed as being consistent with faith and consistent with revealed religion. It would have been very easy and in fact, in 1277, um, his doctrines were at least to some extent condemned because it was thought by the hierarchy of the Church, which was committed to this Augustinian Platonic interpretation of Christianity, that Aristotle was a pagan and an a morally undermining influence. So what's important about Aquinas is that he makes Aristotle, sometimes by reading him in very ingenious ways, and sometimes by reading him in very disingenuous ways, what he does is he makes Aristotle appear to be intellectually friendly, or at least somewhat consistent with Christianity. For that reason, we don't get a break up we don't get a sharp discontinuity in the intellectual world. What we see is a merging of intellectual traditions, which looks easy and effortless, and in fact is exactly the opposite, is exceedingly difficult to do. The 15th century was unable to do it, and that's why we have the thing called the Renaissance. That's why it turns into a separate area. But in fact, it's not that in the in 14th century Italy, all of a sudden these texts are coming in and then we have tremendous political and moral and social cataclysms as a result. Rather, it's rather than being a process, the reintroduction of classical learning is a rather than being an event, the reintroduction of classical learning is a process. And one of the things that makes this process seamless and smooth during the Middle Ages is the great genius of Thomas Aquinas. Right? That's what's remarkable about this guy. I don't think we would give him high marks for creativity, but as a synthetic intellect, there's just there are very, very few that are in the same league. Aristotle himself, I think, is probably comparable.
