The Age of Faith

by Will Durant

  4. All corporeal beings are composed of matter and form; but here (as in Aristotle) form means not figure but inherent energizing, characterizing principle. When a form or vital principle constitutes the essence of a being, it is a substantial or essential form; so the rational soul—i.e., a life-giving force capable of thought-is the substantial form of the human body, and God is the substantial form of the world.

  5. All realities are either substance or accident: either they are separate entities, like a stone or a man; or they exist only as qualities in something else, like whiteness or density. God is pure substance, as the only completely self-existent reality.

  6. All substances are individuals; nothing but individuals exists except in idea; the notion that individuality is a delusion is a delusion.

  7. In beings composed of matter and form, the principle or source of individuation—i.e., of the multiplicity of individuals in a species or class—is matter. Throughout the species the form or vital principle is essentially the same; in each individual this principle uses, appropriates, gives shape to, a certain quantity and figure of matter; and this materia signata quantitate, or matter marked off by quantity, is the principle of individuation—not of individuality but of separate identity.

  3. Theology

  God, not man, is the center and theme of Thomas’ philosophy. “The highest knowledge we can have of God in this life,” he writes, “is to know that He is above all that we can think concerning Him.”79 He rejects Anselm’s ontological argument,80 but he comes close to it in identifying God’s existence with His essence. God is Being itself: “I am Who am.”

  His existence, says Thomas, can be proved by natural reason. (1) All motions are caused by previous motions, and so on either to a Prime Mover unmoved, or to an “infinite regress,” which is inconceivable. (2) The series of causes likewise requires a First Cause. (3) The contingent, which may but need not be, depends upon the necessary, which must be; the possible depends upon the actual; this series drives us back to a necessary being who is pure actuality. (4) Things are good, true, noble in various degrees; there must be a perfectly good, true, and noble source and norm of these imperfect virtues. (5) There are thousands of evidences of order in the world; even inanimate objects move in an orderly way; how could this be unless some intelligent power exists who created them?*81

  Aside from the existence of God, Thomas is almost an agnostic in natural theology. “We cannot know what God is, but only what He is not”82—not movable, multiple, mutable, temporal. Why should infinitesimal minds expect to know more about the Infinite? It is hard for us to conceive an immaterial spirit, said Thomas (anticipating Bergson), because the intellect is dependent upon the senses, and all our external experience is of material things; consequently “incorporeal things, of which there are no images, are known to us by comparison with sensible bodies, of which there are images.”83 We can know God (as Maimonides taught) only by analogy, reasoning from ourselves and our experience to Him; so if there is in men goodness, love, truth, intelligence, power, freedom, or any other excellence, these must be also in man’s Creator, and in such greater degree in Him as corresponds to the proportion between infinity and ourselves. We apply the masculine pronouns to God, but only for convenience; in God and the angels there is no sex. God is one because by definition He is existence itself, and the unified operation of the world reveals one mind and law. That there are three Persons in this divine unity is a mystery beyond reason, to be held in trusting faith.

  Nor can we know whether the world was created in time, and therefore out of nothing, or whether, as Aristotle and Averroës thought, it is eternal. The arguments offered by the theologians for creation in time are weak, and should be rejected “lest the Catholic faith should seem to be founded on empty reasonings.”84 Thomas concludes that we must believe on faith in a creation in time; but he adds that the question has little meaning, since time had no existence before creation; without change, without matter in motion, there is no time. He struggles manfully to explain how God could pass from noncreation to creation without suffering change. The act of creation, he says, is eternal, but it included in its willing the determination of the time for its effect to appear85—a nimble dodge for a heavy man.

  The angels constitute the highest grade of creation. They are incorporeal intelligences, incorruptible and immortal. They serve as ministers of God in the government of the world; the heavenly bodies are moved and guided by them;86 every man has an angel appointed to guard him, and the archangels have the care of multitudes of men. Being immaterial, they can travel from one extremity of space to another without traversing the space between. Thomas writes ninety-three pages on the hierarchy, movements, love, knowledge, will, speech, and habits of the angels—the most farfetched part of his far-flung Summa, and the most irrefutable.

  As there are angels, so there are demons, little devils doing Satan’s will. They are no mere imaginings of the common mind; they are real, and do endless harm. They may cause impotence by arousing in a man a repulsion for a woman.87 They make possible various forms of magic; so a demon may lie under a man, receive his semen, carry it swiftly through space, cohabit with a woman, and impregnate her with the seed of the absent man.88 Demons can enable magicians to foretell such events as do not depend upon man’s free will. They can communicate information to men by impressions on the imagination, or by appearing visibly or speaking audibly. Or they may co-operate with witches, and help them to hurt children through the evil eye.89

  Like nearly all his contemporaries, and most of ours, Thomas allowed considerable truth to astrology.

  The movements of bodies here below… must be referred to the movements of the heavenly bodies as their cause…. That astrologers not infrequently forecast the truth by observing the stars may be explained in two ways. First, because a great number of men follow their bodily passions, so that their actions are for the most part disposed in accordance with the inclination of the heavenly bodies; while there are few—namely, the wise alone—who moderate these inclinations by their reason…. Secondly, because of the interference of demons.90

  However, “human actions are not subject to the action of heavenly bodies save accidentally and indirectly”;91 a large area is left to human freedom.

  4. Psychology

  Thomas considers carefully the philosophical problems of psychology, and his pages on these topics are among the best in his synthesis. He begins with an organic, as against a mechanical, conception of organisms: a machine is composed of externally added parts; an organism makes its own parts, and moves itself by its own internal force.92 This internal formative power is the soul. Thomas expresses the idea in Aristotelian terms: the soul is the “substantial form” of the body—i.e., it is the vital principle and energy that gives existence and form to an organism. “The soul is the primary principle of our nourishment, sensation, movement, and understanding.”93 There are three grades of soul: the vegetative—the power to grow; the sensitive—the power to feel; the rational—the power to reason. All life has the first, only animals and men have the second, only men have the third. But the higher organisms, in their corporeal and individual development, pass through the stages in which the lower organisms remain; “the higher a form is in the scale of being… the more intermediate forms must be passed through before the perfect form is reached”94—an adumbration of the nineteenth-century theory of “recapitulation,” that the embryo of man passes through the stages by which the species developed.

  Whereas Plato, Augustine, and the Franciscans thought of the soul as a prisoner within the body, and identified the man with the soul alone, Thomas boldly accepts the Aristotelian view, and defines man—even personality—as a composite of body and soul, matter and form.95 The soul, or life-giving, form-creating inner energy, is indivisibly in every part of the body.96 It is bound up with the body in a thousand ways. As vegetable soul it depends upon food; as sensitive soul it depends upon sensation; as rational soul it needs the images p
roduced by, or compounded from, sensation. Even intellectual ability and moral perceptions depend upon a body reasonably sound; a thick skin usually implies an insensitive soul.97 Dreams, passions, mental diseases, temperament, have a physiological basis.98 At times Thomas speaks as if body and soul were one unified reality, the inward energy and outward form of an indivisible whole. Nevertheless it seemed obvious to him that the rational soul—abstracting, generalizing, reasoning, charting the universe—is an incorporeal reality. Try as we will, and despite our tendency to think of all things in material terms, we can find nothing material in consciousness; it is a reality all the world unlike anything physical or spatial. This rational soul must be classed as spiritual, as something infused into us by that God Who is the psychical force behind all physical phenomena. Only an immaterial power could form a universal idea, or leap backward and forward in time, or conceive with equal ease the great and the small.99 The mind can be conscious of itself; but it is impossible to conceive a material entity as conscious of itself.

  Therefore it is reasonable to believe that this spiritual force in us survives the death of the body. But the soul so separated is not a personality; it cannot feel or will or think; it is a helpless ghost that cannot function without its flesh.100 Only when it is reunited, through the resurrection of the body, with the corporeal frame of which it was the inward life, will it constitute with that body an individual and deathless personality. It was because Averroës and his followers lacked faith in the resurrection of the body that they were driven to the theory that only the “active intellect,” or soul of the cosmos or species, is immortal. Thomas deploys all the resources of his dialectic to refute this theory. To him this conflict with Averroës over immortality was the vital issue of the century, beside which such mere shiftings of boundaries and titles as physical battles brought were a trivial lunacy.

  The soul, says Thomas, has five faculties or powers: vegetative, by which it feeds, grows, and reproduces; sensitive, by which it receives sensations from the external world; appetitive, by which it desires and wills; locomotive, by which it initiates motions; and intellectual, by which it thinks.101 All knowledge originates in the senses, but the sensations do not fall upon an empty surface or tabula rasa; they are received by a complex structure, the sensus communis, or common sensory center, which co-ordinates sensations or perceptions into ideas. Thomas agrees with Aristotle and Locke that “there is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses”; but he adds, like Leibniz and Kant, “except the intellect itself” —an organized capacity to organize sensations into thought, at last into those universals and abstract ideas which are the tools of reason and, on this earth, the exclusive prerogative of man.

  Will or appetition is the faculty by which the soul or vital force moves toward that which the intellect conceives as good. Thomas, following Aristotle, defines the good as “that which is desirable.”102 Beauty is a form of the good; it is that which pleases when seen. Why does it please? Through the proportion and harmony of parts in an organized whole. Intellect is subject to will in so far as desire can determine the direction of thought; but will is subject to the intellect in so far as our desires are determined by the way we conceive things, by the opinions we (usually imitating others) have of them; “the good as understood moves the will.” Freedom lies not really in the will, which “is necessarily moved” by the understanding of the matter as presented by the intellect,103 but in the judgment (arbitrium); therefore freedom varies directly with knowledge, reason, wisdom, with the capacity of the intellect to present a true picture of the situation to the will; only the wise are really free.104 Intelligence is not only the best and highest, it is also the most powerful, of the faculties of the soul. “Of all human pursuits the pursuit of wisdom is the most perfect, the most sublime, the most profitable, the most delightful.”105 “The proper operation of man is to understand.”106

  5. Ethics

  The proper end of man, therefore, is in this life the acquisition of truth, and in the afterlife to see this Truth in God. For assuming, with Aristotle, that what man seeks is happiness, where shall he best find it? Not in bodily pleasures, nor in honors, nor in wealth, nor in power, nor even in actions of moral virtue, though all of these may give delight. Let us grant, too, that “perfect disposition of the body is necessary… for perfect happiness.”107 But none of these goods can compare with the quiet, pervasive, continuing happiness of understanding. Perhaps remembering Virgil’s Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas—“happy he who has been able to know the causes of things”—Thomas believes that the highest achievement and satisfaction of the soul—the natural culmination of its peculiar rationality—would be this, “that on it should be inscribed the total order of the universe and its causes.”108 The peace that passeth understanding comes from understanding.

  But even this supreme mundane bliss would leave man not quite content, still unfulfilled. Vaguely he knows that “perfect and true happiness cannot be had in this life.” There is that in him which undiscourageably longs for a happiness and an understanding that shall be secure from mortal vicissitude and change. Other appetites may find their peace in intermediate goods, but the mind of the full man will not rest except it come to that sum and summit of truth which is God.109 In God alone is the supreme good, both as the source of all other goods, and as the cause of all other causes, the truth of all truths. The final goal of man is the Beatific Vision—the vision that gives bliss.

  Consequently all ethics is the art and science of preparing man to attain this culminating and everlasting happiness. Moral goodness, virtue, may be defined as conduct conducive to the true end of man, which is to see God. Man naturally inclines to the good—the desirable; but what he judges to be good is not always morally good. Through Eve’s false judgment of the good, man disobeyed God, and now bears in every generation the taint of that first sin.* If at this point one asks why a God who foresees all should have created a man and a woman destined to such curiosity, and a race destined to such heritable guilt, Thomas answers that it is metaphysically impossible for any creature to be perfect, and that man’s freedom to sin is the price he must pay for his freedom of choice. Without that freedom of will man would be an automaton not beyond but below good and evil, having no greater dignity than a machine.

  Steeped in the doctrine of original sin, steeped in Aristotle, steeped in monastic isolation and terror of the other sex, it was almost fated that Thomas should think ill of woman, and speak of her with masculine innocence. He follows the climactic egotism of Aristotle in supposing that nature, like a medieval patriarch, always wishes to produce a male, and that woman is something defective and accidental (deficiens et occasionatum); she is a male gone awry (mas occasionatum); probably she is the result of some weakness in the father’s generative power, or of some external factor, like a damp south wind.111 Relying on Aristotelian and contemporary biology, Thomas supposed that woman contributed only passive matter to the offspring, while the man contributed active form; woman is the triumph of matter over form. Consequently she is the weaker vessel in body, mind, and will. She is to man as. the senses are to reason. In her the sexual appetite predominates, while man is the expression of the more stable element. Both man and woman are made in the image of God, but man more especially so. Man is the principle and end of woman, as God is the principle and end of the universe. She needs man in everything; he needs her only for procreation. Man can accomplish all tasks better than woman—even the care of the home.112 She is unfitted to fill any vital position in Church or state. She is a part of man, literally a rib.113 She should look upon man as her natural master, should accept his guidance and submit to his corrections and discipline. In this she will find her fulfillment and her happiness.

  As to evil, Thomas labors to prove that metaphysically it does not exist. Malum est non ens, evil is no positive entity; every reality, as such, is good;114 evil is merely the absence or privation of some quality or power that a being ought natural
ly to have. So it is no evil for a man to lack wings, but an evil for him to lack hands; yet to lack hands is no evil for a bird. Everything as created by God is good, but even God could not communicate His infinite perfection to created things. God permits certain evils in order to attain good ends or to prevent greater evils, just “as human governments… rightly tolerate certain evils”—like prostitution—“lest… greater evils be incurred.”115

  Sin is an act of free choice violating the order of reason, which is also the order of the universe. The order of reason is the proper adjustment of means to ends. In man’s case it is the adjustment of conduct to win eternal happiness. God gives us the freedom to do wrong, but He also gives us, by a divine infusion, a sense of right and wrong. This innate conscience is absolute, and must be obeyed at all costs. If the Church commands something against a man’s conscience he must disobey. If his conscience tells him that faith in Christ is an evil thing, he must abhor that faith.116

  Normally conscience inclines us not only to the natural virtues of justice, prudence, temperance, and fortitude, but also to the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. These last three constitute the distinguishing morality and glory of Christianity. Faith is a moral obligation, since human reason is limited. Man must believe on faith not only those dogmas of the Church that are above reason, but those too that can be known through reason. Since error in matters of faith may lead many to hell, tolerance should not be shown to unbelief except to avoid a greater evil; so “the Church at times has tolerated the rites even of heretics and pagans, when unbelievers were very numerous.”117 Unbelievers should never be allowed to acquire dominion or authority over believers.118 Tolerance may especially be shown to Jews, since their rites prefigured those of Christianity, and so “bear witness to the faith.”119 Unbaptized Jews should never be forced to accept Christianity.120 But heretics—those who have abandoned faith in the doctrines of the Church—may properly be coerced.121 No one should be considered a heretic unless he persists in his error after it has been pointed out to him by ecclesiastical authority. Those who abjure their heresy may be admitted to penance, and even restored to their former dignities; if, however, they relapse into heresy “they are admitted to penance, but are not delivered from the pain of death.”122