In the earlier Middle Ages, when men were busy putting together the ancient matter, the personalities of the writers may not clearly appear. It is different in the twelfth century, and very different in the thirteenth, when the figures of at least its greater men are thrown out plainly by their written works. Bonaventura is seen lucidly reasoning, but with his ardently envisioning piety ever reaching out beyond; the personality of Albert most Teutonically wrestles itself into salience through the many-tomed results of his very visible efforts; when we come to Roger Bacon, we shall find wormwood, and many higher qualities of mind, flowing in his sentences. And the consummate fashioning faculty, the devout and intellectual temperament of Thomas, are writ large in his treatises. His work has unity; it is a system; it corresponds to the scholastically creative personality, from the efficient concord of whose faculties it proceeded. The unity of Thomas’s personality lay in his conception of man’s summum bonum, which sprang from his Christian faith, but was constructed by reason from foundation to pinnacle; and it is evinced in the compulsion of an intellectual temperament that never let the pious reasoner’s energies or appetitions stray loitering or aberrant from that goal. Likewise the unity of his system consists in its purpose, which is to present that same summum bonum, credited by faith, empowered, if not empassioned, by piety, and constructed by reason. To fulfil this purpose in its utmost compass, reason works with the material of all pertinent knowledge; fashioning the same to complete logical consistency of expression.
Therefore, it is from his conception of this summum bonum as from a centre of illumination, that we may trace the characteristic qualities alike of Thomas and his work. His faith, his piety, and his intellectual nature are revealed in his thought of supreme felicity. Man’s chief good being the ground of the system, the thought and study which Thomas puts upon the created universe and upon God, regarded both as Creator and in the relationships of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, conduce to make large and sure and ample this same chief good of man. To it likewise conduce the Incarnation, and the Sacraments springing therefrom; in accord with it, Thomas accepts or constructs his metaphysics, his psychology, his entire thought of human capacity and destiny, and sets forth how nearly man’s reason may bring him to this goal, and where there is need of divine grace. In this goal, moreover, shall be found the sanction of human knowledge, and the justification of the right enjoyment of human faculties; it determines what elements of mortal life may be gathered up and carried on, to form part of the soul’s eternal beatitude.
Thomas’s intellectual powers work together in order to set his thought of man’s summum bonum on its surest foundations, and make clear its scope: his faculty of arrangement, and serious and lucid presentation; his careful reasoning, which never trips, never overlooks, and never either hurries or is taken unprepared; his marvellous unforgetfulness of everything which might remotely bear on the subject; his intellectual poise, and his just weighing of every matter that should be taken into the scales of his determination. Observing these, we may realize how he seemed to his time a new intellectual manifestation of God’s illuminating grace. There was in him something unknown before; his argument, his exposition, was new in power, in interest, in lucidity. On the quality of newness the wretched old biographer rings his reiteration:
“For in his lectures he put out new topics (articulos), inventing a new and clear way of drawing conclusions and bringing new reasons into them, so that no one, who had heard him teach new doubts and allay them by new arguments, would have doubted that God had illumined with rays of new light one who became straightway of such sure judgment, that he did not hesitate to teach and write new opinions, which God had deigned newly to inspire.”[578]
His biographer’s view is justified. Thomas was the greatest of the schoolmen. His way of teaching, his translucent exposition, came to his hearers as a new inspiration. Only Bonaventura (likewise Italian-born) may be compared with him for clearness of exposition—of solution indeed; and Thomas is more judicial, more supremely intellectual; his way of treatment was a stronger incitement and satisfaction to at least the minds of his auditors. Albert, with his mass of but half-conquered material, could not fail to show, whether he would or not, the doubt-breeding difficulties of the new philosophy, which was yet to be worked into Christian theology. Thomas exposed every difficulty and revealed its depths; but then he solved and adjusted everything with an argumentation from whose careful inclusiveness no questions strayed unshepherded. Placed with Thomas, Albert shows as the Titan whose strength assembles the materials, while Thomas is the god who erects the edifice. The material that Thomas works with, and many of his thoughts and arguments, are to be found in Albert; and the pupil knew his indebtedness to the great master, who survived him to defend his doctrines. But what is not in Albert, is Thomas, Thomas himself, with his disentangled reasoning, his clarity, his organic exposition, his final construction of the mediaeval Christian scheme.[579]
In the third book of his Summa philosophica contra Gentiles, and in the beginning of Pars prima secundae of his Summa theologiae, Thomas expounds man’s final end, ultimus finis, which is his supreme good or perfect beatitude. The exposition in the former work, dating from the earlier years of the author’s academic activities, seems the simpler at first reading; but the other includes more surely Thomas’s last reasoning, placed in the setting of argument and relationship which he gave it in his greatest work. We shall follow the latter, borrowing, however, from the former when its phrases seem to present the matter more aptly to our non-scholastic minds. The general position of the topic is the same in both Summae; and Thomas gives the reason in the Prologus to Pars prima secundae of the Summa theologiae. His way of doing this is significant:
“Man is declared to be made in the image of God in this sense (as Damascenus[580] says) that by ‘image’ is meant intellectual, free to choose, and self-potent to act. Therefore, after what has been said of the Exemplar God, and of those things which proceed from the divine power according to its will, there remains for us to consider His image, to wit, man, in so far as he is himself the source (principium) of his acts, possessing free will and power over them.”
Thereupon Thomas continues, opening his first Quaestio:[581]
“First one must consider the final end (ultimus finis) of human life, and then those things through which man may attain this end, or deviate from it. For one must accept from an end the rationale of those things which are ordained to that end.”
Assuming the final end of human life to be beatitude, Thomas considers wherein man as a rational creature may properly have one final end, on account of which he wills all that he wills. Quaestio ii. shows that man’s beatitude cannot consist in riches, honours, fame, power, pleasures of the body, or in any created good, not even in the soul. Man gains his beatitude through the soul; but in itself the soul is not man’s final end. The next Quaestio is devoted to the gist of the matter: what beatitude is, and what is needed for it. Thomas first shows in what sense beatitude is something increate (increatum). He has already pointed out that end (finis) has a twofold meaning: the thing itself which we desire to obtain, and the fruition of it.