And we needn’t waste time trying to recover the trace of essences in that sort of mystic cascade of theirs whereby, losing the best along the way, they come and get all muddled up in matter. The mechanism of things is here, before our eyes; things are the principle of their movement. A man, a flower, a stone are organisms that have grown up obeying an internal law that moved them: The essence is the principle of their growth and their organization. It is a something already there, ready to explode, that moves matter from inside, and makes it grow and reveal itself: This is why we can understand it. A stone is a portion of matter that has assumed form: Together, from this marriage, an individual substance has been born. The secret of being, as Thomas was to gloss with a bold intellectual leap, is the concrete act of existing. Existing, happening are not accidents that occur to ideas, which for themselves would be better off in the warm uterus of the distant divinity. First, thank heaven, things exist concretely, and then we understand them.
Naturally two points have to be clarified. First of all, according to the Aristotelian tradition, understanding things does not mean studying them experimentally: You had only to understand that things count, theory took care of the rest. Not much, if you like, but still a huge step forward from the hallucinated world of the previous centuries. In the second place, if Aristotle had to be Christianized, more space had to be given to God, who was a bit too much off to one side. Things grow thanks to the inner force of the life principle that moves them, but it must also be admitted that if God takes all this great movement to heart, he is capable of thinking the stone as it becomes stone by itself, and if he were to decide to cut off the electricity (which Thomas calls “participation”) there would be a cosmic blackout. So the essence of the stone is in the stone, and it is grasped by our mind, which is capable of thinking it; but it existed already in the mind of God, which is full of love and spends its days not doing its fingernails but supplying energy to the universe. This was the game to be played; otherwise Aristotle wouldn’t enter Christian culture, and if Aristotle remained outside, nature and reason remained outside, too.
It was a difficult game because the Aristotelians that Thomas found had preceded him, when he began to work, had taken another path, which might even be more pleasing to us, and which an interpreter fond of historical short-circuits might even define as materialistic: But it was a very slightly dialectical materialism; indeed, it was an astrological materialism, and it rather upset everybody, from the keepers of the Koran to those of the Gospel. The man responsible, a century earlier, had been Averroes, Moslem by culture, Berber by race, Spanish by nationality, and Arab by language.
Averroes knew Aristotle better than anybody and had understood what Aristotelian science led to: God is not a manipulator who sticks his nose into everything at random; he established nature in its mechanical order and in its mathematical laws, regulated by the iron determination of the stars. And since God is eternal, the world in its order is eternal also. Philosophy studies this order: nature, in other words. Men are able to understand it because in all men one principle of intelligence acts; otherwise each would see things in his own way and there would be no reciprocal understanding. At this point the materialistic conclusion was inevitable: The world is eternal, regulated by a predictable determinism, and if a sole intellect lives in all men, the individual immortal soul does not exist. If the Koran says something different, the philosopher must philosophically believe what his science shows him and then, without creating too many problems for himself, believe the opposite, which is the command of faith. There are two truths and the one must not disturb the other.
Averroes carried to lucid conclusions what was implicit in rigorous Aristotelianism, and this was the reason for his success in Paris among the masters at the Faculty of Arts, in particular with Sigier of Brabant, whom Dante puts in Paradise with Saint Thomas, even if it is Thomas’s fault that Sigier’s scholarly career collapsed and he was relegated to the footnotes in popular handbooks of philosophy.
The game of cultural politics that Thomas tried to play was a double game: on the one hand, to make Aristotle accepted by the theological learning of the time; and on the other, to detach him from the use the followers of Averroes were putting him to. But in doing this, Thomas encountered a handicap: He belonged to the mendicant orders, who had the misfortune of having put Joachim of Fiore in circulation along with another band of apocalyptic heretics who represented a grave danger for the established order, for the Church and for the State. So the reactionary masters of the Faculty of Theology, with the fearsome Guillaume de Saint-Amour at their head, could easily say that mendicant friars were all Joachimite heretics, and wanted to teach Aristotle, the master of the Averroes-inspired atheistic materialists.
But Thomas, on the contrary, was neither a heretic nor a revolutionary. He has been called a “concordian.” For him it was a matter of reconciling the new science with the science of revelation, changing everything so that nothing would change.
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
