The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason

by Charles Freeman

  Having been licensed to teach theology, Aquinas spent the next ten years in Italy, moving from one Dominican house to another, and even spending time at the papal court at Orvieto. Here he caught up with his old mentor, Albert, but also met another Dominican, William of Moerbeke, who was able to translate Aristotle for him directly from the original Greek. Some previous versions of Aristotle’s works had made their way from Greek to Syriac to Arabic to Spanish to Latin, losing much of their original meaning in the process. It was in these years that he produced his first great work, Summa contra gentiles, a defence of Christianity against unbelievers, and began the most celebrated of all his works, the Summa theologiae, a comprehensive synthesis of theology aimed at Dominican students. The second part of the Summa theologiae was written during Aquinas’ most productive period, as professor of theology in Paris between 1269 and 1272. Alongside the vast Summa (the second part alone comprises a million words) he wrote commentaries on most of Aristotle’s surviving works. He subsequently returned to Italy, to his old university, Naples, where he became head of a Dominican teaching house and continued work on the Summa.

  Here, in December 1273, Aquinas appears to have had some form of breakdown. This has been variously explained in terms of a mystical experience, complete exhaustion or as a possible moment of realization that reason was breaking the bounds of orthodoxy. He had always had his enemies, among traditionalists who resented the Dominicans and Aquinas in particular for his stress on rationalism, and among enthusiastic Aristotelians who disapproved of his integration of Aristotle and Christianity. In the year of his breakdown he was strongly criticized in Paris for his insistence on a natural underlying order of things (which appeared to deny God’s power of miraculous intervention) and his respect for the body as the sustainer of the soul. In 1274 Aquinas was summoned by the pope to a council at Lyons, where it is possible that he would have been confronted with these criticisms, but he fell ill on the way, in unknown circumstances, and died. Three years later, several of his theses were formally condemned, first in Paris and then in Oxford; the Paris condemnation lasted fifty years, and there is no record that the Oxford condemnation has ever been revoked.

  Aquinas avoided the abusive and aggressive language of the more combative theologians, believing that reason could convince on its merits. In his Summa contra gentiles, a missionary tract for those working with Muslims and pagans, he even avoids drawing on the scriptures on the grounds that his readers did not know them. “Hence we must have recourse to natural reason, to which all men are forced to assent.” (Aquinas has here reached a point where Christianity seems to have become largely divorced from the scriptures.) It is not until the fourth and final book of the Summa that he introduces those Christian doctrines sustainable only by faith, among which he includes the doctrine of the Trinity, the Incarnation and the creation of the world by God ex nihilo, “out of nothing” (the alternative view, held by both Aristotle and Plato, which Aquinas accepted he could not disprove, being that matter had existed eternally alongside God).

  While Aquinas accepted the articles of faith which had been revealed by God, he did not denigrate reason in the way many of his fellow Christians had done. Challenging the pessimism of Augustine and his followers, he presents reason as a gift of God, not a means of subverting God. A deeper understanding of the natural world leads only to greater conviction of the greatness of its creator. Rather than ignore what is to be seen in the sky, as Plato had argued, we should observe it in the confidence that it would help explain God’s natural order. God wants man to reach towards Him and has given him the means, his rational mind, to do so; in return God will reveal, as articles of faith, those things that remain impossible for the human mind to grasp. To denigrate humanity as corrupted by sin is to make nonsense of God’s creation. “To take something away from the perfection of the creature is to abstract from the perfection of the creative power [i.e. God] itself,” as Thomas himself put it. Furthermore, man’s possession of a rational mind with, inherent in its rationality, the possibility of choice ensures free will: “that man acts from free judgement follows necessarily from the fact that he is rational.” The contrast with Augustine’s view of man as trapped in self-loathing and engulfed in his sinfulness is striking. It is a contrast as much of temperament as of theology (arguably, one fed into the other). Augustine expects human beings to fail; inspired by Aristotle, Aquinas is naturally optimistic that they will use their God-given reason to find spiritual and personal fulfillment.9

  If we are to value empirical knowledge, we must also value the means by which it is obtained, the senses. In contrast to the Platonic Christian view that envisaged the human body as pulling the soul away from God, Aquinas argues, following Aristotle, that the soul and body are inexorably joined. “Plato said that the soul is in the body ‘as a sailor in a ship.’ Thus the union of soul and body would only be by contact of power. But this doctrine seems not to fit the facts,” as Aquinas boldly writes in the Summa contra gentiles. The essence of being human lies in having an ensouled body, and it is no more possible to distinguish between body and soul than between a piece of wax and the impression a stamp has made on it. Since the rational mind can only act on what it learns from the senses, the body itself should not be despised.10

  Aristotle’s contribution in every respect was immense: one scholar has gone so far as to say, “In so far as Thomas ‘had’ a philosophy it was simply Aristotle’s . . . in so far as he thought philosophically, his thought moved in Aristotelian grooves.”11 Aristotle’s insistence on the importance of rational thought and the accumulation of empirical evidence was, of course, crucial, but even more so was his work on the nature of man. In the second part of the Summa theologiae Aquinas virtually takes over the Nicomachean Ethics, even modelling the Summa on the structure of Aristotle’s work. It is the natural instinct of man, Aristotle had argued, to develop into his final and most complete form, that of a flourishing human being capable of using rational thought at the highest level; it was this optimistic approach that Aquinas absorbed into Christianity. The end result, for Aquinas, would be a full appreciation of the nature and love of God. He also derives from the Nicomachean Ethics a belief in the importance of using reason to make moral choices; in so doing he argues, as had Aristotle, for the necessity for achieving control over the emotions without, however, denying their importance. Temperance and prudence, fortitude and justice are important virtues and should be deliberately cultivated. This realistic approach comes as somewhat of a relief after the tortured struggles that Paul, Jerome and Augustine believed intrinsic to man’s time on earth. (Aquinas’ writings may be dull, but in contrast to those of some of the more excitable Church Fathers they radiate good sense, optimism and down-to-earth practicality.)

  Aristotle had argued that it was the natural impulse of human beings to desire “the good.” Aquinas goes further. The combination of this impulse towards “the good” with the power of rational thought allows human beings to reach an understanding of what is morally right.

  There is in people an appetite for the good of their nature as rational, and this is proper to them, that they should know truths about God and about living in society. Correspondingly whatever this involves is a matter of natural law, for instance that people should shun ignorance, not offend others with whom they ought to live in civility, and other such related requirements.12

  The concept of natural law was one of Aquinas’ most influential contributions to western thought (although there are precedents in Plato, Aristotle and in Roman law). God’s law is eternal, made up of absolute precepts, and it is possible to grasp it by means of reason. Here, ironically for someone so steeped in Aristotle, Aquinas drew on Platonism; the concept of natural law, or moral law—as it is sometimes termed— has raised the same philosophical challenges that Platonism did. Is it possible to be sure of the moral absolutes or to define with any clarity the ways in which they should determine our behaviour? Though Aquinas made a distinction between unive
rsal and absolute values and those that are relative to time, place and cultures, where is the line to be drawn? Aquinas’ concept of natural law remains influential: the 1968 papal encyclical Humanae Vitae forbade artificial contraception for Catholics partly on the grounds that it was against “natural law,” here as defined by Pope Paul VI on behalf of the Catholic Church.13 Less controversially, natural law has been used as a means of defining inviolable human rights and crimes against humanity. Aquinas’ formulation of the concept of “the just war” remains crucial to modern debates.14

  Aquinas restored the relationship between reason and faith; to him, the one sustained the other. Thus Thomas could argue that articles of faith, which were by definition true as the revealed word of God, could act as the axioms from which rational thought could progress. Aquinas had, of course, no reason to foresee how much they would come into conflict after his death. To him “faith” included belief in the teachings of the Church and of scripture. So it was an article of faith to believe that “the earth was fixed on its foundation, not to be moved for ever” (Psalm 103), yet by the sixteenth century observation and reason (by Copernicus and then Galileo) suggested that it moved around the sun. The famous clash between Galileo and the Catholic Church was the result. This was the inherent flaw in Aquinas’ legacy. Empirical evidence could challenge the authority of the scriptures, but, more than this, Aquinas, perhaps unwittingly, had exposed the potential clash between reason and faith. It was impossible to allow orthodox Christian doctrine, much of which depended on faith or revelation, to be undermined by reason, and this meant that the uses of reason in the Christian tradition had to be circumscribed so as not to subvert orthodoxy. This was certainly alien to the Aristotelian tradition, where, as we have seen, empirical evidence was seen as superior to “theory.” In the event the power of orthodox theology was such that Aristotle became integrated into Christianity as Plato, Ptolemy and Galen had been, and the sheer innovatory power of Aquinas’ achievement was forgotten. It is ironic to find the seventeenth-century rationalists using “reason” as a weapon with which to attack the Christianized version of Aristotle!15

  The contrasting approaches of Aquinas and Augustine to the nature of man and the use of reason reflect the earlier contrast between Aristotle and Plato. It is perhaps a measure of the Greek achievement that both were eventually absorbed into Christianity. If there are arguably two historical Christianities, that of the early church (and even here the Gospel evidence needs to be distinguished from the theologies of Paul) and that of the imperial church, there are also two philosophical Christianities, one resting on the Platonic tradition and the other on the Aristotelian. Any study of Christianity needs to recognize these different strands of thought and aim to disentangle them from the specific historical circumstances that shaped them. In short, while traditionally theologians have presented Christian doctrine as having an inner philosophical coherence independent of events, historians, both Christian and non-Christian, are increasingly coming to recognise that it is impossible to divorce the making of doctrine from the society in which it evolved.

  Despite the condemnations of his work soon after his death, Thomas’ brilliance was soon recognized; by 1316, when his works were still banned in Paris, the process of canonization began. Normally two miracles were required as evidence of God’s power working through a potential saint. Those produced for Thomas were scarcely convincing. On his deathbed it was said he had asked for herrings, unknown in the Italian seas, and sure enough in the next load of fish produced by the local fishmonger there were indeed herrings. As it transpired that the witnesses had never seen herrings before and could not be sure what they had seen, the case faltered. It was left to the pope, John XXII, to break the impasse: “There are as many miracles as there are articles of the Summa.” Thomas was duly acknowledged as a saint in July 1323. Thus the power of words and independent thinking were once again given a status that they had almost lost.

  Epilogue

  It has never been part of the argument of this book that Christians did not attempt to use rational means of discovering theological truths. 1 The problem was rather that reason is only of limited use in finding such truths. Any rational argument must begin with axioms, foundations from which an argument can progress, and proceed to conclusions on which all concur. Pythagoras’ theorem starts from a right-angled triangle—the important point being that any conceivable right-angle triangle can serve as the “axiom” from which the theorem is proved—and ends with a proof which is logically irrefutable at any time or in any place. This is the essence of mathematical logic. Similarly, empirical evidence serves as axioms from which inductive proofs are made, although the empirical evidence which exists will always be provisional.

  So where are the axioms from which theology can progress? Attempts by Thomas Aquinas and others to provide self-evident principles from which logical argument about the nature of God could progress collapsed as soon as it became clear (in the Enlightenment, for example) that there was no agreement about what these principles might be (as there had to be if they were “self-evident”!). One can talk of the revelation of God, but, as the Montanists showed, anyone can claim to have received a revelation from God, and there is virtually no way of assessing what is a valid or invalid revelation. In practice, revelation does not prove susceptible to reason because there is no way through which it can be assessed by reasoning minds. The result is that in the churches there was soon a battle for control over what counted as revelation, and the Montanists were among the casualties. The scriptures are often cited by theologians as the primary source of “axioms.” However, when one puts together the Gospels, the letters of Paul, the Book of Revelation and the Old Testament, there is no sense of a coherent “axiomatic” basis on which to build theological truths. As any study of, say, the Arian dispute shows, the different sides to the conflict drew on different texts to “support” their argument. Again the churches had eventually to assume control of how scripture was to be interpreted, in effect so that interpretations never conflicted with what became established as orthodoxy. Even Thomas Aquinas, one of Europe’s most outstanding champions of rational thought, had to suspend reason when it conflicted with orthodoxy.

  So the point being made here is not that the Christians did not attempt to use reason but they could never reach agreed truths, any more than there could be, in practice, an agreed formulation of what is meant by Plato’s “the Good.” The evidence of Christian disputes shows conclusively that reason failed in achieving any kind of consensus, and, in fact, like other spiritual movements in the ancient world, Christianity splintered as it settled into different cultural and philosophical niches across the empire. The important question to answer is why Christianity was different from other spiritual movements in the ancient world in insisting that Christians throughout the empire should adhere to a common authority. This was the aspect of Christianity which was truly revolutionary, even if the fact is often overlooked in histories of the church. The common adherence to the message of Christ, both in his teachings and in his death and resurrection (and the need to control Christ in face of the many other spiritual movements which appropriated him), provides much of the answer, but it also seems to have been important to define the boundaries of what it meant to be Christian in a society many of whose values Paul had told Christians they must reject. Christians did not have the distinguishing physical and cultural marks of Judaism; they had to create these marks and enforce them in the highly fluid spiritual world of the Greco-Roman empire. Crucial to the establishment of authority in the early church was the emergence of the bishop and the consolidation of his position within a hierarchy of bishoprics based on the doctrine of apostolic succession. Ultimately this, and not reasoned argument, was where authority rested. Even though the hierarchy remained a loose one, authority rested here and not on the fruits of reasoned argument.

  Increasingly, the history of the early church is being written in terms of diversity rather than unity of
belief. Most communities were remote from each other. The varied cultural and religious traditions which shaped local theologies—now more fully recognized with the ever growing number of early Christian inscriptions being found and published— coalesced with the lack of axiomatic foundations to make doctrinal certainty impossible. When the bishops of Rome adopted Latin rather than Greek for the western church in the fourth century, they distanced themselves from the ancient centres of Christianity and destroyed any chance of asserting their primacy over the Greek world. As we have seen, orthodoxy eventually had to be imposed from above.