CHAPTER XL
THOMAS AQUINAS
I. Thomas’s Conception of Human Beatitude.
II. Man’s Capacity to know God.
III. How God knows.
IV. How the Angels know.
V. How Men know.
VI. Knowledge through Faith perfected in Love.
I
With Albert it seemed most illuminating to outline the masses of his work of Aristotelian purveyorship and inchoate reconstruction of the Christian encyclopaedia in conformity with the new philosophy. Such a treatment will not avail for Thomas. His achievement, even measured by its bulk, was as great as Albert’s. But its size and encyclopaedic inclusiveness do not represent its integral excellences. The intellectual qualities of Thomas, evinced in his work, are of a higher order than those included in intelligent diligence, however exceptional. They must be disengaged from out of the vast product of their energies, in order that they may be brought together, and made to appear in the organic correlation which they held in the mind of the most potent genius of scholasticism.
We are pleased to find some clue to a man’s genius in the race and place from which he draws his origin. So for whatever may be its explanatory value as to Thomas, one may note that he came of Teutonic stocks, which for some generations had been domiciled in the form-giving Italian land. The mingled blood of princely Suabian and Norman lines flowed in him; the nobility of his father’s house, the Counts of Aquinum, was equalled by his mother’s lineage. Probably in 1225 he was born, in Southern Italy, not far from Monte Cassino. Thither, as a child, he was sent to school to the monks, and stayed with them through childhood’s formative period. His education did not create the mind which it may have had part in directing to sacred study. Near his tenth year, the extraordinary boy was returned to Naples, there to study the humanities and philosophy under selected masters. When eighteen, he launched himself upon the intellectual currents of the age by joining the Dominican Order. Stories have come down of the violent, but fruitless opposition of his family. In two years, with true instinct, Thomas had made his way from Naples to the feet of Albert in Cologne. Thenceforth the two were to be together, as their tasks permitted, and the loyal relationship between master and scholar was undisturbed by the latter’s transcendent genius. Plato had the greatest pupil, and Aristotle the greatest master, known to fame. That pupil’s work was a redirecting of philosophy. The work of pupil Thomas perfected finally the matter upon which his master laboured; and the master’s aged eyes beheld the finished structure that was partly his, when the pupil’s eyes had closed. Thomas, dying, left Albert to defend the system that was to be called “Thomist,” after him who constructed and finished it to its very turret points, rather than “Albertist,” after him who prepared the materials.
To return to the time when both still laboured. Thomas in 1245 accompanied his master to Paris, and three years later went back with him to Cologne. Thereafter their duties often separated them. We know that in 1252 Thomas was lecturing at Paris, and that he there received with Bonaventura the title of magister in 1257. After this he is found south of the Alps; it was in the year 1263 that Urban IV. at Rome encouraged him to undertake a critical commentary upon Aristotle, based on a closer rendering into Latin of the Greek. In 1268, at the height of his academic fame, he is once more at Paris; which he leaves for the last time in 1272, having been directed to establish a studium generale at Naples. Two years later he died, on his way to advise the labours of the Council assembled at Lyons.[577]
Thomas wrote commentaries upon the Aristotelian De interpretatione and Posterior Analytics; the Physics, the De coelo et mundo, the Meteorum, the Metaphysics, Ethics, Politics, and certain other Aristotelian treatises. His work shows such a close understanding of Aristotle as the world had not known since the days of the ancient Peripatetics. Of course, he lectured on the Sentences, and the result remains in his Commentaries on them. He lectured, and the resulting Commentaries exist in many tomes, on the greater part of both the Old and New Testaments. It would little help our purpose to catalogue in detail his more constructive and original works, wherein he perfected a system of philosophy and sacred knowledge. Chief among them were the Summa contra Gentiles and the Summa theologiae, the latter the most influential work of all western mediaeval scholasticism. Many of his more important shorter treatises are included in the Quaestiones disputatae, and the Quodlibetalia. They treat of many matters finally put together in the Summa theologiae. De malo in communi, de peccatis, etc.; De anima; De virtutibus in communi, etc.; De veritate; De ideis; De cognitione angelorum; De bono; De voluntate; De libero arbitrio; De passionibus animae; De gratia;—such are titles drawn from the Quaestiones. The Quodlibetalia were academic disputations held in the theological faculty, upon any imaginable thesis having theological bearing. Some of them still appear philosophical, while many seem bizarre to us; for example: Whether an angel can move from one extreme to the other without passing through the middle. One may remember that such questions had been put, and put again, from the time of the Church Fathers. This question answered by Thomas whether an angel may pass from one extreme to the other without traversing the middle is pertinent to the conception of angels as completely immaterial beings,—a conception upon the elaboration of which theologians expended much ingenious thought.