ABSTRACT
Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae opens with a question stunning in its revolutionary character which he was the rst to ask, displays the fundamental interpenetration of philosophy and religion in his thought, and forces him to adjust their relations in a way which would have the greatest consequences both for the future of philosophy and religion and for the anachronistic representation of their past (Kerr 2002: 12-14). The rst article of the rst question of the rst part of Aquinas’ most in uential work, the one where he was able for the rst time to give theology what he conceived to be its proper order, is ‘Whether it is necessary besides the philosophical disciplines to have another teaching.’ The question assumes a true knowledge based in the natural powers of reason, asks whether this is all humans should and can know, and whether there is need and room for any other kind of knowledge than the philosophical ‘disciplines.’ Sacred doctrine sets herself the task of nding a place and a necessity for herself relative to an assumed natural human knowledge and powers that enable humans to construct a world aiming for, and in an important sense achieving, knowledge even of God. The arguments in the objections used to set up the problem establish what might be called a secular humanism provided by philosophy; this ‘secular’ world would include God as the necessary foundation to and conclusion of right reason. Revealed doctrine must justify herself in the face of an assumed philosophically constructed world. This paradigm Aquinas thus established for the relations between philosophy and supernaturally revealed knowledge is so in uential that it has become normal to look at what preceded him through it, an anachronistic distortion. Because we generally assume a world constructed by what at present corresponds to these theoretical and practical disciplines, it is almost impossible for us to appreciate the shocking character of Thomas’ question to a western Christian in the thirteenth century. The Latin West was still dominated by Augustine and by those self-consciously in his tradition who would successfully oppose Aquinas’ innovations during his life (1224/5-74) and immediately afterwards, with the result that positions he maintained were of cially condemned by the ecclesiastical authorities during and following the last years of his life (Hankey 2005: 43-5). For the Augustinians
philosophy served the quest of faith and love for intellection. When intellection is achieved, faith is explicated; it acquires the certainty possessed by reason rather than by authority, and humans intuit the content of faith. Reason had not the kind of independence from revelation that would permit it to say anything other than faith, not even something less. The notion that the teaching based on faith might have to justify itself relative to an autonomously established reason with a complete account of all that is was both unthinkable and frightening. The rst objection, the rst argument in the whole system, proposes that whatever is not above reason is suf ciently treated in the philosophical disciplines. ‘Therefore, besides them, there is no need of any further knowledge.’ The philosophical sciences providing this complete account are usually attributed to Aristotle, and indeed, the ‘Philosopher’ is spoken of in the second objection, where his Metaphysics is cited to the effect that there is a philosophical science of God. In fact, however, the philosophical disciplines with a complete account of reality are established over and against what revelation might know because of the systematization of philosophical sciences in the Peripatetic and Neoplatonic schools of later Antiquity, on the one hand, and, because of the Islamic Arabic mediation of Aristotle to the Latins, on the other. Arabic philosophy assumed this systematization and added to it an opposition between the whole content of intellect as known conceptually to the faculty of reason and that same content apprehended by representation, the power which enabled prophecy and imaginative persuasion. As Alain de Libera puts it, the Arabs mediated the texts of Aristotle to the Latins as ‘a total philosophic corpus, into which the whole of Hellenistic thought, profoundly neoplatonised, had surreptitiously crept’ (de Libera 1991: 20). Within the Islamic Arabic world the last great defender of the need for and certainty of a complete philosophical knowledge of what is was Ibn Rushd, known by Aquinas as Averroes. He called him ‘The Commentator’ because of the authority of his commentaries on the works of Aristotle. The corpus of the Arabic Aristotle as he was received by the comparatively ignorant Latin Christians was capped by works of theology confected by the Arabs out of elements taken from Plotinus and Proclus. It was not until after 1268 (i.e., during the last six years of his life) that Aquinas was provided with a Latin translation of the Elements of Theology, from which he detected the Proclean character of his Aristotle, a discovery which does not seem to have disturbed him. During the 1260s and until his death, Aquinas used newly done translations from the Greek of works of Aristotle and of the ancient Neoplatonic commentators on him. These enabled him to get back behind the Averroist Aristotle he had received and which was entrenched in the Faculty of Arts in Paris and assisted his struggle against some features of its Aristotelianism. Nonetheless, his most authoritative source of philosophical and theological ideas apart from the Scriptures was Dionysius the pseudo-Areopagite, a sixth-century mystical theologian writing in Greek, who portrayed himself as converted in Athens by the Apostle Paul and as the heir to his mystical knowledge but who was in fact a conduit of the Neoplatonism of Plotinus, Proclus, and Damascius. Aquinas was convinced throughout his life that Dionysius and Aristotle had much conceptual ground in common (Hankey 2002a:
161-5). Thomas’ Neoplatonic Aristotle was more theological than the original and thus both more easily assimilated to Christianity and more the rival to its revelation. If Averroes comes to mind in the objections of the rst article, Moses Maimonides, his Jewish twelfth-century contemporary also from Cordoba in Spain, appears in Thomas’ response. Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed was known to Aquinas from the beginning of his systematic writing. Accepting both orientations, it aimed to deal with what was opposing in the demands on a Jew who was simultaneously a conscientious follower of the Law and excelled at philosophy (Maimonides 1963: intro.). The problems of the Maimonides’ disciple resemble those of the Latin theologian most authoritative for Aquinas, Augustine (he and Dionysius share the prizes for his most numerous citations of Christian theologians). Augustine found himself with two undeniable allegiances after he was converted to philosophy, and was only able to come to true Christian faith after he had completed his journey to what Aquinas recognized was Platonism (Augustine 1993: 3. 4-7; 5. 14; 7. 1-2, 10). Signi cantly, Plotinus supplied Augustine both with a positive conception of immaterial substance and with the way to get it – interior self-knowledge. Aquinas, in contrast, adopts his way for arriving at the same end from Aristotle and from what is Proclean in Dionysius; for all four – Aristotle, Proclus, Dionysius, and Aquinas – the human soul was turned by nature to the sensible and was not capable of immediate self-knowledge (Hankey 2001: 336-41).
