Thomas Aquinas's Summa theologiae

by Bernard McGinn

  Gilson’s recovery of the core of Thomas’s metaphysics was not an individual breakthrough, but was part of a general movement among students of Aquinas in the 1930s and 1940s. Other investigators of Thomas and the Summa also freed themselves from the essentialist interpretation of Thomas’s view of being found in the classic commentators and early Neothomism to realize that not only was the act of existence the heart of the Dominican’s view of reality, as Gilson affirmed, but also the notion of participation in existence (something he neglected) was a key to unlocking Thomas’s understanding of God as creator. Among the first in the field was Joseph de Finance, whose book Être et agir dans la Philosophie de Saint Thomas (Existence and Action in the Philosophy of St. Thomas) was written 1927–38, but not published until 1946 due to World War II. As he put it in the Preface to the second edition, “On the Thomist notion of esse, after many converging studies the agreement seems about to be realized today. More and more clearly the original contribution of St. Thomas is located in the relation of esse as existential actuation and of esse as a fullness limited by essence.”34 De Finance recognized that this limitation of esse was a form of participation, but it was left to several other thinkers to work out more detailed evaluations of how Thomas incorporated Platonic and Neoplatonic participation themes into his metaphysics. Cornelio Fabro published La nozione metafisica della partecipazione secondo San Tommaso d’Aquino (The Metaphysical Notion of Participation according to Saint Thomas) in 1939. A somewhat different view of Thomist participation was put forth by L.-B. Geiger in his La participation dans la philosophie de S. Thomas d’Aquin (Participation in the Philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas) published in 1942.35

  The historical and metaphysical retrievals of Thomas’s thought from the 1930s and 1940s are to be distinguished from another movement in the modern reception of Thomism, one more radical, which sought to put Thomas into conversation with modern philosophy, especially the Kantian philosophy of the turn to the subject, as well as the emphasis on intuition and action found in the thought of Bergson and Blondel. This attempt to create a conversation between Thomas and modern philosophy was anathema for Garrigou-Lagrange, as well as for Maritain and Gilson: If Thomism gave away its objective sense of external reality founded on sense knowing, how could it not succumb to the subjectivism and relativism that popes from the early nineteenth century on had feared would be the end of Catholic truth?36 Early in the twentieth century some Jesuit philosophers and theologians began to wonder if it might be possible to investigate what Thomas had to say about how the human subject attains truth, that is, to start with Thomas’s a priori, or fundamental, conditions for knowing, even when these were not always explicitly set out by Thomas himself, in order to create a dialogue with the subjective turn of modern philosophy. In their view, Thomas’s epistemology, investigated from within the framework of the critical method, might provide a way out of the impasse between modern philosophy and Catholic thought. This approach came to be called “Transcendental Thomism,” though the name was not created by its supposed proponents.37

  The beginnings of this new form of Thomism can be traced to 1908. In that year the Jesuit Pierre Rousselot (1878–1915) published his dissertation L’Intellectualisme de Saint Thomas (The Intellectualism of Saint Thomas).38 For Rousselot intellectualism is “the doctrine which places the supreme value and intensity of life in an act of the intellect,” but this was not to be conceived of, as so often with the classical Thomists, as abstractive concept formation and deductive reasoning. Rather, true Thomist intellectualism is rooted in the primacy of contemplation, that act by which the mind’s dynamism is directed to the beatific vision. Rousselot summarized this by saying, “Intelligence, for St. Thomas, is the faculty of the real, but it is the faculty of the real only because it is the faculty of the divine.”39 Rousselot says that God alone realizes the identity of pure idea and living spirit in a supreme act of intuition; human knowing, tied to material reality but directed to the intuitive grasp of God as its end, strives to simulate and supplement the perfection of intuitive knowing through the formation of concepts and the creation of science, system, and symbols in human speculation. In this original book Rousselot refrained from investigating what Thomas had to say about the act of judgment, but he soon sensed that he had been mistaken in this omission by reading the articles of a fellow Jesuit, the Belgian Joseph Maréchal (1878–1944), who taught at Louvain.

  Maréchal was trained in biology and empirical psychology, as well as philosophy and theology. The important paper that influenced Rousselot’s later work, published in 1908 and 1909 and titled “The Feeling of Presence in Mystics and Non-Mystics,”40 was an attempt to show that a philosophical analysis of the nature of human knowing is needed to complete and correct the findings of empirical psychology concerning mystical states of intuition of God. Maréchal’s argument rests upon his analysis of the a priori conditions for the possibility of a judgment of presence, which is also a judgment of reality. For the Belgian Jesuit, “The judgment of reality is a synthesis which is not justified solely by itself,” but is rather rooted in the nature of the human mind as a “faculty in quest of its intuition—that is to say, of assimilation with Being, Being pure and simple, sovereignly one, without restriction, without distinction of essence and existence, of possible and real.”41 At this point, Maréchal, not surprisingly, footnotes a number of texts from Aquinas, and, indeed, he closes off the article with the statement, “We judge that the hypothesis is psychologically acceptable. And this was of old the opinion of St. Thomas Aquinas. We have hardly done more than interpret his doctrine.”42

  Maréchal’s lifting up of the act of judgment as central to Thomas’s intellectualism was to bear fruit in his massive five-volume “Notebooks” (Cahiers) titled Le point de depart de la métaphysique. Leçons sur le développement historique et théorique du problème de la connaissance, published between 1922 and 1926. Volume 5, bearing the title Le Thomisme devant la philosophie critique (Thomism in the Face of Critical Philosophy), sought to mediate the conflict between Thomist realism and Kant’s insistence that the human mind can never attain real things (noumena), but knows phenomena only as received in the transcendental categories of space and time. For Maréchal the noumenal, or real, character of the finite essences affirmed in the act of judgment is revealed in the dynamic structure of the very act of affirmation, which is directed toward Absolute Being as the goal of its nature. Gerald McCool sees a close affinity between the positions argued by Rousselot and Maréchal: “Both of them felt that, properly understood and consistently applied, Kant’s transcendental method could vindicate a Thomistic metaphysics of man and being. Maritain and Gilson, on the other hand, remained firmly convinced that Thomist realism and post-Cartesian epistemology were radically incompatible. Any attempt on the part of a Thomist to ‘go in Kant’s door and come out his own’ was completely misguided.”43 Maréchal’s engagement with modern philosophy, however, was to bear fruit in other Jesuits who were influenced by the Belgian and sought to rethink aspects of Thomas’s thought within a modern context.

  In the late 1930s the Canadian Jesuit Bernard Lonergan (1904–84) began work at the Gregorian University on Thomas’s understanding of operating grace (gratia operans). Lonergan published his dissertation as a series of articles in the American journal Theological Studies in 1941–42 and later in book form.44 Through a meticulous analysis of Thomas’s developing thought on grace and freedom culminating in the treatment in the Summa, Lonergan was able to show that Thomas’s theory “stands as a higher synthesis to the opposition of later theories,” that is, the warring sixteenth-century views on grace and freedom found in the schools of Dominican Banezianism and Jesuit Molinism. Lonergan’s engagement with Thomas’s doctrine of grace was part of a more ambitious rethinking of the Dominican’s teaching on knowing that Lonergan said was inspired by reading Maréchal’s Cahiers. The first fruits of this came in another study of Thomas, this time devoted to his understanding of verbum, the inner
word of understanding which, Lonergan argued, is the center of Thomist epistemology and crucial for grasping his Trinitarian theology (Ia, q. 27). Once again, Lonergan argued that Thomas achieved a higher viewpoint that was able to combine an Augustinian phenomenology of the subject with an Aristotelian psychology of the soul.45 Lonergan admitted that his argument put together scattered materials found in Thomas and so he described it as “Thomistic but hardly Thomist.” One can see the background in Maréchal when Lonergan says that his analysis of the act of judgment shows that “this act consists in a grasp of the native infinity of the intellect; for on the one hand, Thomist thought does stress that native infinity, and, on the other hand, from such infinity one can grasp the capacity of the mind to know reality.”46 Lonergan’s retrieval of Thomas on the act of understanding was the basis for the development of his own cognitional theory in his masterwork, Insight. A Study of Human Understanding (1957), a work that is not about Thomas in any direct way, but, Lonergan insisted, was a development of Thomas’s epistemology within the contemporary philosophical context.

  Lonergan’s contemporary, the German Jesuit Karl Rahner (1904–84), took a different route to his version of what he once called “‘transcendentally-tainted’ philosophical Thomism.”47 Rahner’s earliest writings were on mystical theology, but in the mid-1930s, while studying philosophy at the Jesuit house at Pullach, he recounts, “I read with extraordinary eagerness and great care the fifth volume by Joseph Maréchal, S. J., Le point de depart de la métaphysique.” Rahner claims that this encounter was at the origin of what others later called “transcendental philosophy and theology,” so that, “To the extent that this Maréchalianism stems from Thomas and to the extent that Maréchal again and again tries to prove his thought through Thomas, I can say that Thomism formed my philosophy and, at a step removed, my theology.”48 Not everyone was convinced about the authenticity of this reading of Aquinas. When Rahner went off a few years later to study philosophy at Freiburg under Martin Heidegger and Martin Honecker, the thesis he prepared on Thomas’s theory of knowledge, specifically on what the Dominican meant by “conversion to the phantasm” (Ia, q. 84.7) as integral to human knowing, was not accepted by Honecker due to its radical interpretation of Thomas. Completed in 1936 and published in 1939, this work, Spirit in the World (English version 1967), is rightly seen as central to Rahner’s later immense output. Rahner did not intend to write a historical study of Thomas, but rather a reliving of Thomas’s “philosophy as it unfolds,” which, not unlike Lonergan, pushed Thomas beyond what he explicitly says, but in a direction that the author still claims is what Thomas would have said in the post-Kantian philosophical world.

  Rahner and Lonergan had distinctive theological agendas that can be distorted by grouping them under the umbrella of Transcendental Thomism. Rahner learned from Thomas that theology necessarily implies philosophy, but his use of Thomas might be described as piecemeal, a picking and choosing of Thomas, especially in cases where his insights had been forgotten over the centuries. Rahner was also ready to criticize Thomas, for example, in relation to the setting and development of Aquinas’s Trinitarian theology in the Summa. Lonergan, on the other hand, insisted that his subsequent philosophical and theological writings were developed out of insights he gained from reading Thomas, although he claimed that the Thomism of the future would need to be radically recast in the light of the shift from the static and ahistorical “classical worldview” inherited from Aristotle that shaped much of Thomas’s thought to the historical mindedness of the present, a shift he described as the transition from logic to method. Both Rahner and Lonergan abandoned the imperialistic Neothomism of Leo XIII and even that of Maritain and Gilson in favor of a pluralistic conversation among many philosophical and theological voices. These two major figures of twentieth-century Catholic theology cannot be understood without attention to how Thomas and his Summa helped shape their thought.

  The third of the Catholic theologians who dominated the middle and late twentieth century was the Swiss Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–88). Despite the fact that von Balthasar wrote an impressive study of Thomas’s view of charismatic graces and contemplation,49 his thought was much less formed by Thomas. Von Balthasar’s great contribution was a massive trilogy of multivolume works: The Glory of the Lord treating theological aesthetics in seven volumes (1961–69), Theo-Drama on divine and human action in five volumes (1973–83), and Theo-Logic in three volumes (1985–87). Theo-Drama contains von Balthasar’s sustained reflections on Christian doctrines, but given how different von Balthasar’s ordering of Christian doctrine is from Thomas’s Summa theologiae, it is somewhat surprising when the introductory note to the final volume says, “Following Aquinas, we have tried to erect theology on the articles of faith (and not vice versa).”50 In his treatment of “Metaphysics in Antiquity” in volume 4 of The Glory of the Lord, von Balthasar supports Thomas’s metaphysics of the act of being (actus essendi) as representing a decisive shift (kairos) from ancient thought that both “opens our eyes to the truth that God is self-subsistent being but … also closes our eyes and forbids us to cling to what we have seen.”51 Von Balthasar, however, was scarcely a Thomist.

  The new theological voices that surfaced in the 1930s and 1940s had a key role in the Second Vatican Council that met between 1962 and 1965. The original documents for the sessions prepared in Rome according to the usual Neoscholastic theology were mostly rejected out of hand, so commissions of bishops and theological experts prepared new draft documents that would reflect the church’s attempt to fulfill Pope John XXIII’s desire for an “updating” (aggiornamento) of Roman Catholicism’s relation to contemporary society.52 Thomas Aquinas was not forgotten, cited 734 times in the Decrees and Documents of Vatican II, far more than any other authority (Augustine is next with 522 citations). Vatican II was a pastoral rather than a dogmatic council, one based not on confrontation with modernity, but on an attempt to reach out to people of good will. Above all, it was not set forth in the rigid scholastic language of deductive certainty based on irrefutable principles, but on a dialogical language of rhetorical engagement. It is not surprising that with the Council the Neoscholasticism, especially in its Neothomist variety, that had appeared so powerful even in the 1950s vanished almost overnight—it had been hollowed out from within for decades.

  The decade following the Council down to 1974, the seven hundredth anniversary of the death of Thomas Aquinas (and also of Bonaventure), was a time of turmoil and contention, both in the Catholic Church and in Western society, as witnessed in the reaction to the papal ban on artificial birth control in 1968 and the radical student upheavals in Europe and the United States in 1968–69. Serious differences of opinion and cultural divides were created then that are still strong today. These have had their effect on Thomism and the reception of the Summa, but in ways that may still be too present to be fully understood as yet. A curriculum based on (or pretending to be based on) Thomas Aquinas rapidly disappeared from Catholic higher education, but this did not mean that the study of Thomas was at an end. The monolithic Thomism that Leo XIII and his followers hoped would stem the tides of atheism, rationalism, subjectivism, fideism, and other errors faded both in official Roman Catholic teaching and in the world of scholarship. On the official side, papal support was still offered for Thomas, but within a theological world that admitted a pluralism of approaches to the understanding of faith. The anniversary of the deaths of Thomas and Bonaventure was greeted by a host of celebrations, conferences, and jamborees held throughout the Catholic world. The number of pages produced in the publications from these events certainly surpassed that of the Summa itself and added much to what we know about Thomas, his world, and his thought.53 Nevertheless, few of the authors of these studies were still holding up Thomas as the cure for all the ills of the modern world. Even Pope Paul VI, who sent a letter titled Lumen Ecclesiae to the Master of the Dominican Order for the event, did not do more than recommend “authentic fidelity to Thomas” for t
he saint’s own order.

  EPILOGUE

  It would take a long chapter to try to do justice to the varieties of Thomism and the forms of reception of the Summa theologiae that have proliferated since the anniversary of Thomas’s death in 1974. Though Neothomism seems dead, many other forms of Thomism are alive and well, as Neothomism’s end sparked a new generation of historical, philosophical, and theological retrievals of the Summa, so varied as to defy generalization. Thus, Fergus Kerr recently referred to “the diversity and incommensurability of the available interpretations of Thomas’s work” as a characteristic of our time.1