In this plan he showed an extraordinary amount of good sense and (master of theological refinements) a great adherence to natural reality and earthly equilibrium. Mind you, Thomas did not aristotelianize Christianity; he christianized Aristotle. He never thought that with reason everything could be understood, but that everything is understood through faith; he wanted to say only that faith was not in conflict with reason, and that therefore it was possible to enjoy the luxury of reason, emerging from the universe of hallucination. And so it is clear why in the architecture of his works the main chapters speak only of God, angels, the soul, virtues, eternal life; but, within these chapters, everything finds a place that is, more than rational, “reasonable.”
Within the theological architecture you understand why man knows things, why his body is made in a certain way, why he has to examine facts and opinions to make a decision, and resolve contradictions without concealing them, trying to reconcile them openly. With this Thomas gave the church once more a doctrine that, without taking away a fraction of its power, left the communities free to decide whether to be monarchist or republican, and it distinguishes for example among the various types and rights in property, going so far as to say that the right to property does exist, but for possession, not use.
Or, in other words, I have the right to possess a building, but if there are people living in hovels, reason demands that I grant the use to those who do not possess the equivalent (I remain owner of the building, but the others must live there even if this offends my egoism). And so on. These are all solutions based on equilibrium and on that virtue that he called “prudence,” whose job was to “retain the memory of gained experience, to have an exact sense of ends, prompt attention to situations, rational and progressive investigation, circumspection of opportunities, precaution in complexities, and discernment of exceptional conditions.”
It works, because this mystic who was so eager to lose himself in the beatific contemplation of God to whom the human soul aspires “by nature” was also alert, in a human way, to natural values and respected rational discourse.
It must be remembered that, before him, when the text of an ancient author was studied, the commentator or the copyist, when he came upon something that clashed with revealed religion, either scratched out the “erroneous” sentences or marked them with a question mark, to alert the reader, or else they shifted the words to the margin. But what did Thomas do, instead? He aligned the divergent opinions, clarified the meaning of each, questioned everything, even the revealed datum, enumerated the possible objections, and essayed the final mediation. Everything had to be done in public, just as, in his day, the disputatio was public: The tribunal of reason was in operation.
Then, if you read closely, in every case the datum of faith came to prevail over everything else and led to the untangling of the question; in other words, God and revealed truth preceded and guided the movement of secular reason. This has been made clear by the most acute and affectionate Thomas scholars, like Etienne Gilson.
Nobody has ever said that Thomas was Galileo. Thomas simply gave the church a doctrinal system that put her in agreement with the natural world. And he won, at lightning speed.
The dates are explicit. Before him it was asserted that “the spirit of Christ does not reign where the spirit of Aristotle lives”; in 1210 the Greek philosopher’s books of natural history were still forbidden, and the ban continued through the following decades, as Thomas had these texts translated by his collaborators and commented on them. But in 1255 all of Aristotle was allowed. After the death of Thomas, as we mentioned, there was an attempt at reaction, but finally Catholic doctrine was aligned along Aristotelian positions. The dominion and spiritual authority of Bene-detto Croce over fifty years of Italian culture was as nothing compared to the authority Thomas displayed by changing in forty years the whole cultural policy of the
Christian world. Hence Thomism.
That is to say, Thomas gave Catholic thought such a complete frame that, since then, Catholic thought can no longer shift anything. At most, with the scholastic Counter-Reformation, it developed Thomas, gave us a Jesuit Thomism, a Dominican Thomism, even a Franciscan Thomism, where the shades of Bonaventure, Duns Scotus, and Ockham stir. But Thomas cannot be touched. Thomas’s constructive eagerness for a new system becomes, in the Thomistic tradition, the conservative vigilance of an untouchable system. Where Thomas swept away everything in order to build anew, scholastic Thomism tries to touch nothing and performs wonders of pseudo-Thomistic tightrope walking to make the new fit into the frame of Thomas’s system. The tension and eagerness for knowledge that the fat Thomas possessed to the maximum degree shift then into heretical movements and into the Protestant Reformation. Thomas’s frame is left, but not the intellectual effort it cost to make a frame that, then, was truly “different.”
Naturally it was his fault: He is the one who offered the church a method of conciliation of the tensions and a nonconflictual absorption of everything that could not be avoided. He is the one who taught how to distinguish contradictions in order to mediate them harmoniously. Once the trick was clear, they thought that Thomas’s lesson was this: Where yes and no are opposed, create a “nes.” But Thomas did this at a time when saying “nes” signified not stopping, but taking a step forward, and exposing the cards on the table.
So it is surely licit to ask what Thomas Aquinas would do if he were alive today; but we have to answer that, in any case, he would not write another Summa Theologica. He would come to terms with Marxism, with the physics of relativity, with formal logic, with existentialism and phenomenology. He would comment not on Aristotle, but on Marx and Freud. Then he would change his method of argumentation, which would become a bit less harmonious and conciliatory. And finally he would realize that one cannot and must not work out a definitive, concluded system, like a piece of architecture, but a sort of mobile system, a loose-leaf Summa, because in his encyclopedia of the sciences the notion of historical temporariness would have entered.
I can’t say whether he would still be a Christian. But let’s say he would be. I know for sure that he would take part in the celebrations of his anniversary only to remind us that it is not a question of deciding how still to use what he thought, but to think new things. Or at least to learn from him how you can think cleanly, like a man of your own time. After which I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes.
1974
The Comic and the Rule
Of the many questions that make up the panorama of problems connected with the comic, I will confine myself to just one, for reasons of space, and will take the others for granted. The question may be badly formulated; it may even be contested as a question. Nevertheless, it is, in itself, an endoxon that has to be borne in mind. Crude as it may be, it contains some germ of problematic truth.
The tragic (and the dramatic)—it is said—are universal. At a distance of centuries we still grieve at the tribulations of Oedipus and Orestes, and even without sharing the ideology of
Homais we are distressed by the tragedy of Emma Bovary. The comic, on the other hand, seems bound to its time, society, cultural anthropology. We understand the drama of the protagonist of Rashomon, but we don’t understand when and why the Japanese laugh. It is an effort to find Aristophanes comic, and it takes more culture to laugh at Rabelais than it does to weep at the death of the paladin Orlando.
It is true, one may object, that a “universal” comic does exist: custard-pie-in-the-face, for example, or the braggart soldier falling into the mud, the white nights of the husbands frustrated by Lysistrata. But at this point it could be said that the tragic that survives is not only the equally universally tragic (the mother who loses her child, the death of the beloved), but also the more individual tragic. Even without knowing the accusation against him, we suffer as Socrates dies slowly from the feet toward the heart, whereas without a degree in classics we don’t know exactly why the Socrates of Aristophanes should make us laugh.
The difference exists even when contemporary works are considered: Anyone is distressed in seeing Apocalypse Now, whatever his nationality, whereas for Woody Allen you have to be fairly cultivated. Danny Kaye did not always make people laugh; and Cantinflas, the idol of Mexican audiences in the ’50’s, left us non-Mexicans cold; the comedians of American TV are not for export (no one in Italy has ever heard the name of Sid Caesar; Lenny Bruce is equally unknown), just as our Italians Alberto Sordi and Toto cannot be exported to a number of countries.
So, in reconstructing a part of the lost Aristotle, it is not enough to say that in tragedy we have the downfall of a person of noble condition, neither too wicked nor too good, for whom we can in any case feel sympathy, and at his violation of the moral or religious code we feel pity for his fate and terror at the suffering that will strike him but could also strike us, and so finally his punishment is the purification
