How to Think Like Aquinas

by Kevin Vost

  Those mountainous minds of whom Thomas speaks are the teachers of Sacred Scripture who need to be “high” in the quality of their lives, so that they, like the prophets and apostles before them, will be able to pass on to others the life-giving rains of God’s wisdom. So ardently did this young professor respect and ascend to those mountains of wisdom that he himself finally came to be among the loftiest of all peaks. To this day, He sends down divine rivers of wisdom that nourish hearts and minds.

  Not even two decades passed from the day of that lecture to the time when Thomas had produced a veritable Everest of wisdom in the millions of words that his multitudinous commentaries and Summas comprise. May he inspire every one of us, regardless of our abilities or calling in life, to strive to bring all our thinking into the service of Jesus Christ by thinking more like Aquinas!

  Near the end of his life, as he knelt before a crucifix, St. Thomas experienced a vision of Christ. When Christ told Thomas that he had written well about Him and asked Thomas what reward he desired, Thomas’s answer was “Non nisi Te” (None but You, Lord).

  Might we all come to think like Aquinas!

  129See chapter 13 for details on these heresies.

  130As we noted earlier, the other three pillars are preaching, prayer, and community.

  131I can’t help but observe the parallel with the language Thomas used when visited by Sts. Peter and Paul, as we saw in chapter 6. Thomas told Brother Reginald that they “told me all I desired to know.”

  132That St. Thomas embodies the polar opposite of hiding one’s light under a basket can be seen from one of the symbols the Church has bestowed upon him, that of a blazing sun on his chest, representing the way he illuminates us to this day. (Such a statue sits to my left on my desk, inspiring me as I write.)

  133Cited in Simon Tugwell, ed., Albert and Thomas: Selected Writings (New York: Paulist Press, 1988), 355.

  Part 2

  Fathoming the Depths of Wisdom

  Prologue to Part 2

  Lastly, another crown seems to have been kept for this peerless man — that is, the way in which he extorts homage, praise, and admiration from the enemies of the Catholic name.

  — Pope Leo XIII on St. Thomas Aquinas, Aeterni Patris

  Catholicism had once been the most philosophical of all religions. Its long, illustrious philosophical history was illuminated by a giant: Thomas Aquinas. He brought an Aristotelian view of reason (an Aristotelian epistemology) back into European culture, and lighted the way to the Renaissance. For the brief span of the nineteenth century, when his was the dominant influence among Catholic philosophers, the grandeur of his thought almost lifted the Church close to the realm of reason.

  — Ayn Rand (self-proclaimed “greatest enemy of religion”), “Requiem for Man,” Capitalism

  The Practical Wisdom of Reason Seeking God

  Prudence entails choosing the right means to attain the right ends, and here St. Thomas was sublimely prudent, for his means were both reason and faith to attain the ends of both fleeting earthly happiness and, far more important, eternal bliss. Not all who profess faith in Christ duly respect our God-given capacities of reason,134 but St. Thomas did, like few others before or since. It is because of this great respect for the truths that can be derived from human reason that some, though certainly not all, enemies of the Catholic Church still acknowledge his great contributions to human knowledge. Indeed, our quotation from atheist philosopher Ayn Rand was penned decades after the one from Pope Leo XIII, and the era of the nineteenth century she wrote about was the time during which Leo strove mightily to “spread the golden wisdom of St. Thomas Aquinas.”

  Rand, unlike Thomas, did not acknowledge the ultimate compatibility of faith and reason; hence her less-than-flattering conclusion that the Church was “almost” lifted “close to the realm of reason.” Still, reason can provide the common starting ground for discussion between Christians and atheists or agnostics who do not acknowledge the authority of Scripture and the Church. Indeed, Pope Leo would write that the writings of the Church Fathers and Scholastic philosophers and theologians (St. Thomas foremost among them) would be the most likely means to draw into the Catholic Faith people who had come to respect reason alone (and indeed, it happened just like that to me!).

  Decades ago, I stumbled across a most unusual and surprising tribute both to the power of reason to draw people to the Faith and to the powerful example of St. Thomas Aquinas. Yesterday, I reread it. There, in a collection of what was voted by science fiction writers as the twenty-six best science fiction short stories of all time (up to its first publication in 1970), I found “The Quest for Saint Aquin” by Anthony Boucher, penned in 1951.

  To make a short story shorter, in a futuristic world, post nuclear holocaust, the government is run by technocrats, and Christianity has been outlawed. Believers, priests, and the pope himself must conceal their identities, much like the early Christians in Rome, who secretly met in houses or in the catacombs and communicated their shared belief through subtle symbols. The pope hears stories of a powerful saintly man named Aquin who had converted many to the Church through the matchless power of his logic. His body is rumored to lie incorrupt in a secluded mountain cave not far away. The pope sends a priest named Thomas to investigate, transported there by an intelligent, speaking robotic donkey with legs as well as wheels, since the roads had so deteriorated.

  A little theological discussion ensues on the way, and the robotic donkey declares to Father Thomas that it has a perfectly programmed logical mind that cannot make the error of believing in God.

  When they find the apparently incorrupt body of Aquin, the robotic donkey crushes the skin on one of his hands and reveals to Father Thomas that the “saint” was actually a robot! The robotic donkey encourages him to report to the pope that they found the incorrupt saint, since his mission is to draw people into the Church through such miracles. Father Thomas, however, refuses to do so, declaring, “Faith cannot be based on a lie,” and here is where his insights get quite interesting:

  “Now I understand the name of Aquin,” he went on to himself. “We’ve known of Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor, the perfect reasoner of the church. His writings are lost, but surely somewhere in the world we can find a copy. We can train our young men to develop his reasoning still further. We have trusted too long in faith alone; this is not an age of faith. We must call reason into our service — and Aquin has shown us that perfect reason can lead only to God.”135

  As the story goes, the robot Aquin truly had been programmed with perfect logical reasoning capacities. It knew that it had been built by man but reasoned that man, its maker, could not have made himself and must have been created by God. Therefore, deducing that his duties lay to man, his maker, and to his maker’s Maker, the robot Aquin spent all his energies converting people through unassailable logic to belief in God and the Catholic Church!

  As for the actual arguments of St. Thomas of Aquinas that lead inevitably to confirm God’s existence and essential attributes (e.g., oneness, changelessness, omniscience, omnipotence, eternity), they are especially powerful because they start with simple observations available to anyone and they point to the necessity of God’s existence, even if we grant the point to some philosophers that the universe always existed. Thomas knew from revelation that God created the universe, but he believed that reason alone could not decide the matter. Aristotle, for example, believed that the universe always existed, but he also believed that reason proved that God must exist to sustain it.

  St. Thomas’s arguments are, in logical terminology, a posteriori, based on observable facts, rather than a priori, beginning with theoretical assumptions.136 He goes on briefly in the Summa Theologica to lay out five arguments based on things that are evident to our senses when we look at the world. By the observations that (1) things move or change, having as yet unactualized potent
ials, (2) there are effects and causes, (3) things exist for a time and then perish, (4) there are varying degrees of goodness or perfection in things, and (5) there is ordered or purposeful behavior in nature, Thomas shows that there must exist (1) a first or unmoved mover that is completely actualized and unchanging, (2) a first or uncaused cause, (3) a necessary being that cannot not exist, (4) a perfection of being from which lesser degrees of goodness flow, and (5) a first and final cause that provides for the order and governance of the entire universe.

  Bearing in mind that he grants the concession for argument’s sake that the universe always existed, you will see that his arguments are not dependent (as many modern critics suppose) merely on time and do not require a chronological regression. The great chains of causation, perfection, order, and purpose require a prime mover, a first efficient cause, a necessary being, an ultimate formal cause, and a final cause for their existence, not merely sometime in the past, but at this very moment and at every moment. “We live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28) right now through the grace, love, and power of an eternal God.

  Reason functions at its highest level when it leads us to the God who created us and sustains us, but it also has many additional useful functions in God’s service in the practical acts of our daily lives, which is the stuff of the virtue of prudence. Before we examine examples of how reason can be led astray through logical fallacies in chapter 11, let’s take a logical and reasonable preliminary step by looking at logic and reason themselves.

  Being Logical, Practical (but Not Clinical, Cynical, Fanatical, Radical)

  If you are as old as I am, you will remember “The Logical Song,” by the band Supertramp from the 1970s. Here the singer laments how he was taught to be “logical, practical, clinical, and cynical” and more at school, but he is left with a burning question and pleads “Please tell me who I am.” G. K. Chesterton once wrote that the madman has not lost his reason; rather, he has lost everything but his reason. He has lost his sense of wonder, meaning, and humanity. We see this in the scientism of our day, which posits that the scientific method holds the answers to all meaningful human questions (though it happens to have nothing to say about what makes life meaningful).137 Reason, then, and the scientific instruments and methods it employs, cannot by themselves supply our ultimate goals and ends, but they can be exceedingly useful means to reach the kind of truths that are within their powers. Let’s look at some of the fundamental characteristics of logic, reason’s most fundamental instrument.

  Logic is the science of reasoning, the structure, principles, and methods of producing valid arguments that, if our starting premises are true, will make clear the further truths they imply. Along with such fundamentals as metaphysics (the study of being) and ethics (the study of virtue and morals), logic is another essential branch and the indispensable tool of philosophy. Aristotle was its most profound pioneer and expositor, known as “the Father of Logic” by some and as “the Philosopher” by St. Thomas, who embraced and employed Aristotle’s logical principles of reasoning in everything he wrote about. Indeed, in regard to matters of faith that may elude our unaided powers of reason, St. Thomas would write with exuberance:

  For when a man’s will is ready to believe, he loves the truth he believes; he thinks out and takes to heart whatever reasons he can find in support thereof; and in this way human reason does not exclude the merit of faith but is a sign of greater merit.138

  Thomas also wrote that humans are the only creatures we know of who acquire truths through the sequential steps of logical reasoning. As we saw in chapter 8, animals, lacking rational, intellectual souls, cannot understand and reason like man. Angels, on the contrary, are spirits without bodies. Their thought does not depend on information starting with any bodily senses and progressing in stages to the intellect but is characterized by the instantaneous knowledge of intuition.

  Although logical reasoning is a step-by-step process, it is founded on a very few fundamental, self-evident principles we can grasp through our human powers of understanding, such as the law or principle of noncontradiction, which holds that “a thing cannot be and not be at the same time in the same respect.” In other words, nothing can be both true and false or be what it is and what it is not. This is self-evident because we simply cannot think otherwise. If one were to argue, “But a thing can be both true and false at the same time!” one would be arguing that that statement itself is true and not false! The law of noncontradiction is founded on and stated positively as the law or principle of identity: “A is A,” a thing is what it is, and not also what it is not in the same sense at the same time. Another is the law of the excluded middle, which holds that if a proposition is true, its negation must be false. There is no middle ground between truth and falsity. With foundations such as these, we can monitor our logical-reasoning processes to make sure these principles have not been violated, in which case our reasoning would be in error.

  Indeed, Thomas explains that God, as Truth itself and the source and font of all truths, does not violate these principles. God would not and could not, for example, exert His power to make it so that something that happened in the past did not happen, for to do so would mean that something that truly did happen did not, that what was true is now false.

  Onward Now into the Deep

  You’ll recall from our introduction Thomas’s advice to Brother John: when seeking truth, to “enter by the narrow streams, and not go straight to the sea; for difficult things should be reached by the way of easy things.” Perhaps you have noticed that this book is structured according to Thomas’s advice. We began with simple, commonsense maxims, and developed them in short chapters. As Father White observed in his commentary on Thomas’s letter: “Only in the last paragraph of his letter does St. Thomas deal with methods of study in the strict sense, with purely intellectual procedures.”139 The paragraph to which he refers starts with the maxim: “Do not place value on who says what, but rather, commit to your memory what true things are said.” And yes, you are correct, that was the material of chapter 7. From that point on, as we delved into such things as the nature and perfection of intellectual powers, such as strategic memory and conceptual understanding, our streams got wider, our chapters got longer, and we had to put on our thinking caps.

  Well, part 2 is for you stalwart readers who have made it this far downstream and are willing now to jump into some deep intellectual seas, further building your powers of memory while using your powers of reason to grapple with misuses of reason and distortions of faith, with logical fallacies, distorted ideologies, heresies, and half-truths that wreak so much havoc in our world. So then, I invite you to join me as I navigate our ship of thought and study into some deep, sometimes turbulent seas. With St. Thomas at our ship’s helm, we will certainly reach the shores of newfound knowledge.

  134See “Fideism” in chapter 12.

  135Anthony Boucher, “The Quest for Saint Aquin,” in Science Fiction Hall of Fame, ed. Lester del Rey (New York: Avon, 1971), 475.

  136This a posteriori approach (reasoning from the facts of the world to the existence of God) is found in Scripture. See, for example, Romans 1:20: “Ever since the creation of the world his [God’s] invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.”

  137See “Scientism” in chapter 12.

  138Summa Theologica, I-II, Q. 1, art. 10.

  139Aquinas and White, How to Study, 26.

  Chapter 11

  Reason Gone Wrong

  A Guide to the Logical Fallacies That Lead Reason Astray

  Again, if we are to avoid the errors which are the source of and fountain-head of all the miseries of our time, the teaching of Aquinas must be adhered to more religiously than ever.

  — Pope Pius XI, Studiorem Ducem

  To reason is to advance from one thing unders
tood to another, so as to know intelligible truth. . . . Reasoning, therefore, is compared to understanding, as movement is to rest, or acquisition to possession.

  — St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, Q. 79, art. 8

  It’s Hard to Reason Carefully about Things You Cannot Remember

  Of course you remember that “repetition is the mother of memory.” Further, you might recall that I claimed our memory methods will allow you to come to know whatever you choose to remember “forward and backward.” So then, it’s time to see if you are still able to recall the themes of the ten precepts of our chapters that we first memorized in chapter 7 in our memory house’s foyer. Do you still have them all? If not, rehearse some more, including rehearsing them backward. Can you work your way back through the mentalist failing in his trick in the drawer of the cushioned bench (location 10) to remind us of the precept of not seeking things too high for us; the overfull cupboard on a base with no ledge sitting on the cushion (9) to remind us of the admonition to fill up our cupboards of knowledge to the brim; the book standing under the power generator in a mirror (8) to remind us of our powers of reading, and of understanding; the tooth admired by Mnemosyne in the chandelier (7) to help us remember to commit cherished truths to our memory; Christ surrounded by saints in the center of the foyer (6) to remind us to imitate Him and those who follow Him; that entangling globe at the gun rack (5) to remind us to avoid worldly entanglements; the portrait on the wall (4) with the friendly and not-so-friendly men to remind us of the benefits and perils of friendliness to study; Thomas within the cell and the wine cellar as we peer out through the glass panel (3), reminding us to love to be in our study cells if we would be admitted to the wine cellar (or chambers of the king, if you prefer); the hands on the doormat (2) folded in prayer, emitting sparks to remind us of the power of pure prayer; and finally, Teddy Roosevelt at the front door (1) speaking slowly and carrying that big stick with a heart and a brain painted on it to remind us to “speak slowly and carry a big heart and mind”?