This year marks the seventh centenary of the death of Thomas. Thomas is back in fashion, as saint and philosopher. We try to understand what Thomas would do today, with the faith, culture, and intellectual energy he had in his own day. But love sometimes clouds the spirit: To say that Thomas was great, that he was a revolutionary, it is necessary to understand in what sense he was one. For, though no one can say he was a reactionary, he is still a man who raised a construction so solid that no subsequent revolutionary has been able to shake it from within—and the most that could be done to it, from Descartes to Hegel to Marx and to Teilhard de Chardin, was to speak of it “from outside.”
Especially since it is hard to understand how scandal could come from this person, so unromantic, fat, and slow, who at school took notes in silence, looked as if he weren’t understanding anything, and was teased by his companions. And, in the monastery, as he sat at the table on his double stool (they had to saw off the central arm to make enough room for him) the playful monks shouted to him that outside there was an ass flying and he ran to see, while the others split their sides (mendicant friars, as is well known, have simple tastes); and then Thomas (who was no fool) said that to him a flying ass had seemed more likely than a monk who would tell a falsehood, and the other friars were insulted.
But then this student that his companions called the dumb ox became a professor, worshiped by his students, and one day he went out walking on the hills with his disciples and looked at Paris from above, and they asked him if he would like to be the master of such a beautiful city, and he said that he would much prefer to have the text of the Homilies of Saint John Chrysostom; but then when an ideological enemy stepped on his foot he became furious and in that Latin of his that seems laconic because you can understand it all and the verbs are exactly where an Italian expects them, he exploded in insults and sarcasm that sound like Marx when he is lashing out at Mr. Szeliga.
Was he good-natured, was he an angel? Was he sexless? When his brothers wanted to prevent him from becoming a Dominican (because in those days the cadet son of a good family became a
Benedictine, which was something proper, and not a mendicant, which would be like entering a serve-the-people commune or going to work with Danilo Dolci), they captured him as he was on his way to Paris and shut him up in the family castle; then, to get the crazy notions out of his head and turn him into a respectable abbé, they sent a naked girl, ready and willing, into his room. And Thomas grabbed a firebrand and started running after her, clearly meaning to burn her buttocks. No sex, then? Who can say? Because the thing upset him so much that afterwards, as we are told by Bernard Gui, “Women, unless it were absolutely necessary, he avoided as if they were serpents.”
In any case this man was a fighter. Sturdy, lucid, he conceived an ambitious plan, carried it out, and won. What then was the field of battle, what was at stake, what were the advantages he achieved? When Thomas was born, the Italian communes had won the battle of Legnano against the empire fifty years earlier. Ten years before his birth England received the Magna Charta.
In France the reign of Philippe Auguste had just ended. The empire was dying. Within five years the seafaring and trading cities of the north would join to form the Hanseatic League. The Florentine economy was expanding, about to issue the gold florin; Fibonacci had already invented double-entry bookkeeping; the flourishing medical school of Salerno and the law school of Bologna were a century old. The Crusades were in an advanced state; in other words, contacts with the East were in full development. Further, the Arabs in Spain were fascinating the Western world with their scientific and philosophical discoveries. Technology was making great strides: There were new ways of shoeing horses, driving mills, steering ships, yoking oxen for bearing burdens and plowing. National monarchies in the north, and free communes in the south. In short, this was not the Middle Ages, at least not in the popular sense of the term. Polemically, we might say that if it weren’t for what Thomas was about to do, it would already be the Renaissance. But Thomas actually had to do what he was going to do if things were then to proceed as they did.
Europe was trying to create for itself a culture that would reflect a political and economic plurality, dominated, true, by the paternal control of the church, which nobody called into question, but also open to a new sense of nature, of concrete reality, of human individuality. Organizational and productive processes were being rationalized: It was necessary to find the techniques of reason.
When Thomas was born, the techniques of reason had been operative for a century. In Paris, at the Faculty of Arts, they still taught music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, but also dialectic, logic, and rhetoric, and in a new way. Abelard, a century before, had been there; for private reasons he was deprived of reproductive organs, but his head lost none of its vigor. The new method was to compare the opinions of the various traditional authorities, and decide, according to logical procedures based on a secular grammar of ideas. Linguistics, semantics were being employed; scholars asked themselves what a given word meant and in what sense it was used.
Aristotle’s writings on logic were the study manuals, but not all of them had been translated and interpreted; few knew Greek, except for the Arabs, who were far ahead of the Europeans both in philosophy and in science. But already a century before, the school of Chartres, rediscovering the mathematical texts of Plato, had constructed an image of the natural world based on geometrical laws, on measurable processes. This was not yet the experimental method of Roger Bacon, but it was theoretic construction, an attempt to explain the universe through natural bases, even if Nature was seen as a divine agent. Robert Grosseteste developed a metaphysics of luminous energy that suggests partly Bergson and partly Einstein: The study of optics was born. In short, the problem of the perception of physical objects was broached, a line was drawn between hallucination and sight.
This is no small matter. The universe of the early Middle Ages was a universe of hallucination, the world was a symbolic forest peopled with mysterious presences; things were seen as if in the continuous story of a divinity who spent his time reading and devising the Weekly Puzzle Magazine. This universe of hallucination, by Thomas’s time, had not disappeared under the blows of the universe of reason: On the contrary, the latter was still the product of intellectual élites and was frowned upon. Because, to tell the truth, the universe of terrestrial things was frowned upon. Saint Francis talked to the birds, but the philosophical foundation of theology was neo-Platonic.
Which means: Far, far away there is God, in whose unattainable totality the principles of things, ideas, stir; the universe is the effect of a benevolent distraction of this very distant. One, who seems to trickle slowly downward, abandoning traces of his perfection in the sticky clumps of matter that he defecates, like traces of sugar in the urine. In this muck that represents the more negligible margin of the One, we can find, almost always through a brilliant puzzle-solution, the imprint of germs of comprehensibility, but comprehensibility lies elsewhere, and if all goes well, along comes the mystic, with his nervous, stripped-down intuition, who penetrates with an almost drugged eye into the garçonnière of the One, where the sole and true party is going on.
Plato and Aristotle had said all that was needed to understand the problems of the soul, but the nature of a flower or of the maze of guts the Salerno doctors were exploring in the belly of a sick man, and the reason why the fresh air of a spring evening was good for you: Here things became obscure. So it was better to know the flowers in the illuminated texts of the visionaries, ignore the fact that guts exist, and consider spring evenings a dangerous temptation. Thus European culture was divided: If they understood the heavens, they didn’t understand the earth. If somebody then wanted to understand the earth and not take an interest in heaven, he was in big trouble. The Red Brigades of the period were roaming around: heretical sects that, on the one hand, wanted to renew the world, set up impossible republics, and on the other hand, practiced sodomy, pillage, and other horrors. Reports might or might not be true, but in any case it was best to kill the lot of them.
At this point the men of reason learned from the Arabs that there was an ancient master (a Greek) who could supply a key to join these scattered limbs of culture: Aristotle. Aristotle knew how to talk about God, but he
