How to Think Like Aquinas
Page 18
Is it likely he’s aware of this?
I doubt it.
149In his commentary on the oldest known text on this location memory technique, St. Albert the Great wrote that “some will place a church.” Well, that’s exactly what we’re going to do now!
150Summa Theologica, I, Q. 2. art. 3.
151Pope Pius X, On Modernism, in The Popes against Modern Errors, ed. Anthony J. Mioni (Rockford, IL: TAN Books, 1999), 184.
152Lipka, “10 Facts about Atheists.”
153Summa Theologica, I, Q. 14, art. 13.
154A sadly common example is found in the case for abortion, in which the end of providing the mother the choice of whether to carry a child for the remaining months of her pregnancy is seen to justify the destruction of the human life within her.
155From the Greek words eu for “good” and daimon for “spirit.” Aristotle taught a natural eudaimonistic virtue ethics, and Thomas completed and perfected it with the Christian understanding of the nature of man and the supernatural perfection of man through the graces of God.
156Pius XI, encyclical Studiorem Ducem (June 29, 1923), no. 21.
157De Magistro, third article, reply to objection 6, p. 78; italics added.
158Fides et Ratio, no. 55. See also the entry on sola Scriptura in chapter 13.
159Ibid.
160Summa Contra Gentiles, bk. 1, chap. 4. The two truths are those obtained through reason and those obtained from the faith produced by belief in God’s direct revelation to man.
161John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, no. 87.
162C. S. Lewis deftly referred to this tendency to think of old ideas as inherently inferior to our own as “chronological snobbery.”
163John D. Mueller, Redeeming Economics: Rediscovering the Missing Element (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2010), 11.
164Ibid., 17.
165Epistemology is the study of knowledge and how we know what we know (from the Greek episteme, “knowledge”).
166Jacqueline Olds and Richard Schwartz, The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-First Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009), 37.
167Ibid. This is not to imply that all Protestants think like this — or that some Catholics do not, which would be a hasty generalization!
168Cited in The Popes against Modern Errors (Rockford, IL: TAN Books, 1999), 230.
169Pope Pius XII, Humani Generis, in The Popes against Modern Errors (Rockford, IL: TAN Books, 1999), 358.
170John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, no. 43.
171Ibid., no. 46.
172A valid technique of logical reasoning that demonstrates that if an argument is followed to its logical conclusion, it leads to absurd or contradictory results.
173Alan D. Sokal and J. Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science (New York: Picador USA, 1998).
174Double Dutch is a game in which one or more persons jump between two ropes that are turning in opposite directions. If you are so inclined, try this sometime, but only with your doctor’s permission!
175As it happens, neither the old vibrating reducing belt nor reductionism really works!
176John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, no. 89.
177Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Homily at the Vatican basilica, April 18, 2005, http://www.vatican.va/gpII/documents/homily-pro-eligendo-pontifice_20050418_en.html.
178John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, no. 88.
179To his credit, this famous “science guy” later brushed up a bit on philosophy and acknowledged its usefulness. A simple Web browser search of “philosophy science guy” will lead you to the details. (By the way, I don’t come out and name names in this section, so as to avoid any possible ad hominem attacks and to focus more on arguments than on arguers — who sometimes even change their minds!)
180John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, no. 46.
181Epictetus: Discourses, Books I-II, the Enchiridion, trans. William Abbott Oldfather (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), bk. 1.27, p. 487. Oldfather speculates that perhaps Epictetus gestured toward his mouth and then his eye, since he does mention the eye in a later, similar passage (bk. 2.20). Still, he suggests that the blunt and colorful Epictetus, perhaps inspired by the rather coarse Cynic Diogenes, may have pointed in this instance to a different part of his body!
Chapter 13
Wrong Thinking about the Faith
Two Thousand Years of Heresies and Half-Truths
He [the heretic] chooses not what Christ really taught, but the suggestions of his own mind. Therefore, heresy is a species of unbelief, belonging to those who profess the Christian faith, but corrupt its dogmas.
— St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II, Q. 11, art. 1
With his own hand he vanquished all errors of ancient times; and still he supplies an armory of weapons which bring us certain victory in the conflict with falsehoods ever springing up in the course of years.
— Pope Leo XIII on St. Thomas Aquinas, Aeterni Patris
On now to the next section of the study as we move into special isms that deal not only with the nature of truth in general, of thought, or of moral behaviors directed by human reason, but also with the revealed truths of the Faith passed down from God’s revelations and interpreted by the one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church that Christ built upon Peter, “the rock” (Matt. 16:18). They are a sample of some of the most prominent heresies, popular beliefs throughout the centuries that distorted the Church’s orthodox teachings about the Faith, including the nature of God, of creation, of man, of Jesus Christ, and of His Blessed Mother. They will be fleshed out, as usual, after our five-at-a-time mini memory tours. So now let’s see where they are lurking in our memory house.
Heresies and Half-Truths 1–5 (Locations 51–55)
In the corner of the study you find a globe (51), and, zooming in on Germany, you see a disturbing scene from the late 1930s, for there is a wildly gesticulating Adolf Hitler haranguing a crowd about the “Aryan master race.” Next to the globe is yet another bookcase (52), and, odd as this may seem, you see atop it a little bed from which your friend or relative Cathy (whom you call “Cath”) has just arisen. Across the room at the doorway out of the study (53) you find a heretic with a foreign accent struggling to stick a big letter G on the doorjamb. He says to himself, “G no stick!” Upon the wall opposite the picture window hang five diplomas (54). You may not believe this, but our heretic at first tries to arrange them neatly on the wall by some kind of category but decides to rip them all down instead, saying to himself: “I cannot class them!” Lastly, we come to a picture on the wall (55) that rests over the globe, and who should be pictured there but your friend Jan’s son! (Your friend Jan has no son? Or you don’t even have a friend named Jan? That’s not a problem for our purposes. You need merely imagine them!)
The globe (51) with Hitler proclaiming Aryanism will remind us of the heresy of Arianism, which provided not only a distorted view of humanity but denied the divinity of Jesus Christ. From the bed atop the bookcase (52) we saw Cath arisen to remind us of the heresy of Catharism, held by people who thought they were pure and that the body was evil. The accented heretic in the doorway (53) said, “G no stick!” to remind us of gnosticism (though our g is silent). Gnosis, as we’ve seen, is Greek for “knowledge.” While agnostics hold that we can’t know about God, gnostics hold that they have secret spiritual knowledge. The heretic who said, “I cannot class them!” and tore the diplomas (54) off the wall is there to remind us of the heresy of iconoclasm, which held that religious icons, be they pictures or sculptures, should be torn down from their walls. Finally, Jan’s son in the picture (55) reminds us of Janseni
sm. We might imagine that Jan put that son’s portrait on the wall because she believes he is one of God’s chosen elect. Being a Jansenist, she believes that God has elected certain people to enjoy heaven and others to suffer hell, and what we do with our free will does not even enter into the picture, so to speak.
Location
Image
Heresy
51. Globe
Hitler touts Aryanism
Arianism
52. Bookcase
Cath arisen from bed
Catharism
53. Doorway out
Heretic: “G no stick!”
Gnosticism
54. Diplomas
Heretic: “I cannot class them!”
Iconoclasm
55. Picture
Jan’s son
Jansenism
51. Arianism. Arianism is named after the Alexandrian priest Arius (A.D. 256–336), who consolidated and spread widely early heretical ideas that Jesus Christ could not have had both divine and human natures, holding that Jesus was not eternally one with God but was at some point created by Him, and then through Jesus creation was completed. In a sense, the heresy is an effect of elevating reason above faith because human reason is unable to grasp fully the mystery of Christ’s two natures and that the eternal Son of God, could, at a point in time, become incarnate as man. It is because of the powerful influence of the Arian heresy that we proclaim at Mass each Sunday that Christ is “begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father,” echoing the pronouncement of the Council of Nicaea in 325 that Christ is homoousios to Patri: “of one substance with the Father.”
Of his many writings on Christ’s nature in the third part of the Summa Theologica, I’ll highlight here one that refers both to Scripture and to St. Athanasius (296–373), bishop of Alexandria and Arian’s greatest theological opponent.182 Thomas writes: “On the contrary, it is written (John 1:14): ‘The Word was made flesh’; and as Athanasius says (Letter to Epictetus), when he said, ‘The Word was made flesh,’ it is as if it were said that God was made man.”183
A form of Arianism remaining in our day is Unitarianism, though St. Athanasius argued that Arianism reintroduced polytheism, since Christ was to be worshipped as a separate, lesser god. Perhaps the most prevalent derivative of Arianism in our time is to deny Christ’s divinity and view Him merely as one among several great ethical teachers.
52. Catharism. Deriving its name from the Greek katharoi, “pure ones,” this heresy began to flourish in the eleventh century in the Languedoc region in southern France, especially in the city of Albi; hence, it was also known as the Albigensian heresy. It was a mixture of Christian and non-Christian beliefs that included a variety of dualistic beliefs, most prominent among them being that there exists a god of goodness and a god of evil. The god of goodness created spiritual things and is the god of the New Testament, while the god of evil created the material world, including the human body. Among their stranger beliefs were the permissibility of fornication, since the body was not important, and the avoidance of marriage and reproduction so as to prevent spirits from becoming trapped inside bodies.
That such thinking is diametrically opposed to the thought of Thomas Aquinas is clear for many reasons, one of the most obvious being their denigration of the body, since Thomas’s entire human anthropology and psychology are based on the nature of humans as God-crafted hylomorphic (matter-form), body-soul composites. Thomas, of course, was also a Dominican, a member of the religious Order of Preachers, founded by St. Dominic de Guzman (1170–1221). One of Dominic’s earliest missions was the conversion of the Albigensians. In a famous incident early in his ministry, he stayed up all night talking to an Albigensian innkeeper and brought him back to Christ and the Catholic Church.
53. Gnosticism. Gnosticism, deriving from the Greek gnosis for “knowledge,” is a very early heresy with Greek, Jewish, and other ancient Middle-Eastern philosophical and religious roots and branches. It held itself as a special form of knowledge that recognized the evil of matter and the goodness of spirit, as would Catharism centuries later. This, of course, runs directly counter to the goodness of creation repeatedly proclaimed in the book of Genesis (1:10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31), not to mention the Incarnation of Christ. Gnosticism also runs directly counter to the thinking of St. Thomas Aquinas, as G. K. Chesterton once stated with such elegance:
Nobody will begin to understand the Thomist philosophy, or indeed the Catholic philosophy, who does not realize that the primary and fundamental part of it is entirely the praise of Life, the praise of Being, the praise of God as the Creator of the World.184
54. Iconoclasm. This is the heresy of the icon (image) smashers who gained prominence in the Eastern Church in the seventh and eighth centuries. Some cite the influence of the then-new religion of Islam, in which any kind of picture or sculpture of the human form was considered idolatry, although some earlier Christians held similar views. At its peak in the eighth century, many monasteries and churches were pillaged, and religious art was destroyed, along with the relics of saints. In a sense, iconoclastic history repeated itself in the sixteenth century in parts of continental Europe at the time of the Reformation, and also in domains under the sway of King Henry VIII, self-proclaimed head of the Church of England, when monasteries and churches were looted and destroyed or converted to Protestant houses of worship after the religious art was removed.185
Within this author’s lifetime, iconoclasms of sorts have arisen, at times within the Church; for example, when new churches built in the later decades of the twentieth century grew increasingly bereft of religious art. Sadly, we see the literal destruction of the art and architecture of Christianity and other religions in parts of the Middle East by radical Muslim extremists. Further, within our nation at the time I write, we see icons, especially statues, of prominent, though imperfect political figures in our nation’s history being literally smashed or removed by those who consider themselves far more morally enlightened than those imperfect figures from our nation’s past.
Those who think like Aquinas should consider his recommendation on the perfection of memory to form corporeal images of even abstract spiritual concepts because, “spiritual impressions easily slip from the mind, unless they be tied as it were to some corporeal image, because human knowledge has a greater hold on sensible objects.”186 The mnemonic images we are employing in this book are mental icons of sorts that help us grasp and hold on to important concepts bearing on our intellectual and spiritual life.
Icons of religious art recognize as well that the human intellect is fed by and uplifted toward God by the evidence of the senses. Catholics do not worship the statues in our churches or homes any more than we worship the pictures of our loved ones that we hang on our walls or carry in our wallets.
Beautiful statues and other religious artworks feed our senses, stir our hearts, and enkindle our love by reminding us of the greatness and love of the God whom those icons were crafted to magnify and glorify. Those who think like Aquinas will turn to Scripture as well for passages wherein God commanded the construction of religious icons (Exod. 25:18–20; 1 Chron. 28:18–19), including a symbolic foreshadowing of Jesus Christ (see Num. 21:8–9 and John 3:14).
55. Jansenism. Jansenius (Cornelius Otto Jansen; 1585–1638), was the Catholic bishop of Ypres in Flanders (now part of Belgium). In his book Augustinus, dedicated to St. Augustine, he argued that salvation came solely to the elect (those predestined by God to receive His saving grace), that free will played no role in salvation, and that Christ died not for all but only for the ele
ct. These views bear some resemblance to the Calvinism of the Protestant John Calvin (1509–1564). In a bull of 1642, Pope Urban VII forbade people to read Augustinus, since it promoted doctrines that had previously been condemned by the Catholic Church. Nonetheless, Jansen’s followers erected a Jansenist church in Utrecht, Holland, in 1723, and it exists to this day.
Heresies and Half-Truths 6–10 (Locations 56–60)
Last, but not least, we will deal with our final five heresies. At location 56 we find a chair before a computer armoire — the chair on which I sat when this memory house was first constructed. Years ago, my study was relocated, and now I write from a more spacious desk designed just for writing, and it sits in another room. That is just a fact to put things into context, but now we must move back into the old study and into the realm of the imagination if we are to remember this last batch of heresies.
Now, upon said chair (56) sits not me but a rather large manatee holding a key. (Are you familiar with these “sea cows” that rather look like hefty porpoises or tusk-less walruses?) True to fact, in the armoire (57), where once sat a computer, now sits a TV, and it sometimes displays commercials for all kinds of cures and medications. We will imagine that a commercial on the screen is touting a new wonder drug that cures both mononucleosis and foot and mouth disease. (In fact, since it will cure either foot, we’ll think in terms of feet and mouth disease.) On another bookcase (58), next to the armoire, is a bundle of twigs, strings, and such stuff that you conclude must be a nest or an ism. Why use an abstract thing like an ism? Perhaps we’ve been memorizing so many isms that everything’s beginning to look like one! If you’re not happy with this suggestion and are familiar with Homer’s wise old character Nestor, just picture him sitting on that bookcase as you exclaim in less-than-perfect grammar, “Nestor is him!” Moving along now to a last portrait on the wall (59) next to the doorway out, you see, for some reason, a painting of an aging pelican. And now to the last stop on this memory tour. You open the study’s closet door (60), and out springs an opera singer who loudly belts out a solo with words that she reads straight out of Scripture. You surmise that perhaps she is singing the psalms.