Category — Medieval

One of the reasons for the Reformation, one that does not get the press it deserves, is the break with a ground-motive that was and is at odds with the Biblical motive of Creation-Fall-Redemption. The reigning spiritual structure of the years preceding the Reformation was expressed in the writings of Thomas Aquinas — the Nature-Grace synthesis, the child of the marriage between Hellenic and Biblical notions. The creeping specter of the synthesizing attitude is still around today. It means the end of Protestantism if it continues.

It is a fascinating fact of church history that the Eastern branch of the church has avoided this particular pitfall that has infected the Western. The Eastern theologians have put a bar at the door of Being and said, “None shall enter”. Their apophatic methodology has saved them from much of the Hellenic mistakes found in the West. This has laid them open, perhaps mistakenly, to the charge of mysticism, but the West’s rationalism has been and continues to be it’s Achilles heel — “You shall be like God” is a temptation that comes in all sorts of forms.

Semper reformanda.

Steve Bishop posted a link to Andrew Basden’s new Extreme Philosophy webpage. He offers a new title for those working through the Cosmonomic Theory. In an ongoing effort to distinguish myself from the New Calvinists and their adoption of the title “Neo-Calvinism” I am happy to take on Andrew’s new idea. Henceforth, I will now be calling myself an “Extreme Philosopher”, until such time as it becomes necessary to… change again. It is difficult not to have a bit of the tongue in the cheek when doing so though. But, the process of renaming is a good one, as it helps clarify the essential character and substance of the thing. The very act of doing it is energizing. Like a re-branding. 

Besides the fact that it helps put the confusion to rest, Andrew’s name feels refreshingly provocative. Like a base-jumping life. Maximum Philosophy could work too… Thanks Steve and Andrew!!

As an aside
One of the non-Extreme Philosophical assumptions that Andrew lists on his page is this: “Philosophy has no link with everyday life”. I sometimes wonder if this bias is based in the assumption that anything of value must have an immediate effect on things socially. Personally, the effects of philosophical theorizing may be immediate, but socially it takes time. This time element might be one of the reasons for the false assumption; we are prone to heavy pragmatism. Likewise, the transference of an idea between two people is not always immediate; very often there is more time spent in clarifying than in actually communicating the essential ideas. It seems that those who take such a blithe view of philosophy are more prone to being swept up with the zeitgeist, having not seen it coming.

Even though we might not see a social shift today or the immediate future, I believe that what we are discussing here, the Cosmonomic Idea and all of its associated implications, will be huge in ten to fifteen years. So, be ready. Guys like Andrew and Steve will be cultural heavies when that day comes. Seriously. And, my tongue was removed from my cheek before I wrote that.

Book XII

§7 “Life is the actuality of the mind, and god is that actuality, and his independent actuality is the best life and eternal life”. 

“God is an eternal and most excellent living being, so that continuous and eternal life belong to him. For that is what god is”. 

Concerning god: “If it is thinking of nothing, what is there that is noble in this? It will be like someone who is asleep. If it is thinking, but there is something else that determines its thinking, its substance will not be thought but a potency for thought, and it will no longer be the best substance, since its value belongs to it by virtue of its thinking”. 

God is “thinking upon thinking”. God is “mind” (νοῦς). 

“The mind and its object are not different in the case of things that have no matter, they will be the same, and thought will be one with the object of thought”. 

First thoughts: Aristotle has said repeatedly up to this point that matter, substance, essence, being and truth are really the same thing. And, things without matter are non-being, they do not exist. He is now suggesting that god is pure mind, and has no substance. The immediate conclusion is that, there is no god (which was Heidegger’s reading). However, he seems to be putting god into the category of pure form, as self-referential thinking. I am not certain of this, but otherwise we are left with an irresolvable paradox. But then again, perhaps this is the case. Aristotle has created a philosophy that might very well be at war with itself. It is a futility. 

If nothing else we are left with a god that is:
1. Indifferent to anything but himself.
2. Uninvolved in anything but himself.
3. Ignorant of anything but himself.
4. Distinguished as thought.

The notion that mind is non-matter, and thus one with god will be later adopted by Siger of Brabant (1235-1282), called the Oneness of the Intellect doctrine. He was accused of being a “heterodox Aristotelean”, but it seems to me that he was spot on. He was simply following Aristotle to the logical conclusion. 

Eckhart (1262-1328), another Medieval scholastic, went so far as to say that God does not exist, because God is pure intellect, which has no place in time. Again, he was simply being consistent with Aristotelean thought. 

Rather than ending with the Blessed Trinity, Aristotle ends with a non-god, wholly removed from the world of men. This is where all Aristotelean imagining ends when it is truly honest and consistent. Forcing Aristotle backwards, from temporal Being to the Triune God is an impossibility. We can only end where he did if we follow the same track of thinking. Autonomous thought is a ratio abumbrata. 

Siger of Brabant (1235-1282, assassinated by an angry secretary), asserted three doctrines that put him at odds with the views of Thomas. These were: 1. The eternality of the universe; 2. the oneness of the intellect; and, 3. the Double-truth doctrine. What Siger was resurrecting was Latin Averroeism, and in many ways a return to the more basic doctrines of Aristotle. In the Metaphysics, Aristotle asserted that thought and any non-material object are really one. Now, of course, Aristotle had no real conception of a god beyond the Prime Mover, but the implications from this that Thomas recognized should be obvious- the active intellect is God.

The real trouble was the Double-Truth doctrine, which was the notion that a thing can be theologically true and philosophically false, and vice versa. This is the direction that Siger was taking Thomas’s teaching. And, this is, it seems to me, the caricature of Thomas that we have inherited, as though he is immediately responsible for the divorce of ratio et fides. However, he never intended this, but rather insisted that there is only one truth, one destination with two paths. As Chesterton says: “Beginning with the grass, I am once again bound to the Lord”. 

For Thomas, there really was only one authority: the Blessed Holy Trinity, the Creator of all things. And, the Creator mediates truth through two avenues, both of which are self-justifying. The two paths were to be subject to the one truth, as a unity of knowledge. However, the trouble is in assuming that Being precedes meaning in our temporal experience, and in fact provides a self-evident meaning through observation. This is the Hellenic notion that is so sticky, and perhaps inevitably leads to the kind of conclusions that Siger was suggesting. 

“Everything that is in the intellect has been in the senses”.— Thomas A. 

In other words, everything is mediated. The neo-Platonists argued that all the light of understanding comes from within the man, like a light that is simply turned on in the house. But Thomas argues that the knowledge we have comes in through the windows, all five of them. Well intentioned believers who argue for sola Scriptura, and a Biblical epistemology need to remember that revelation is mediated to us through the senses: it is not immediate, there are prior sensate steps that need justification. The Scriptures are the object of knowledge as much as they are the foundation or justification for knowledge. Thomas suggested, as Aristotle did before him, that thinking upon thinking is the most divine kind of thought. And, thought and its object are the same in regards to things that do not have matter. Thought must have an object, and in this case it is the object that justifies the thought, as well as the mediators between the object and the thought.

The neo-Platonist perspective failed to take this in to account, and placed too much expectation in pure reason. But, they seemed to touch upon something crucial: the inner disposition of man guides the understanding. Perhaps they only reached so far as the mind, but there is the pre-theoretical work of the Holy Spirit on the heart that creates the receptivity and submission to revelation that is necessary for real understanding. Inner light is necessary to illuminate the meaning of Things and the Word. The basic hermeneutic of Scripture and of the natural world is based in a heart that is fitted to take them in. “I see trees walking” is the beginning of hermeneutics. 

Chesterton writes: “Because the Faith was the one truth, nothing discovered in nature could ultimately contradict the Faith. Because the Faith was the one truth, nothing really deduced from the Faith could ultimately contradict the facts”. 

The difficulty is understanding the facts, when the ens is an elusive and mysterious thing. Can we ever really get a grip on the “facts”, apart from categories and analysis? Thomas had confidence that regardless of whether we start with Faith or facts, we would come to the same truth. Siger took up the path of pure facts, and ended up rejecting truth. Thomas’ thesis was, in this way, a very fragile thing. He had always intended and expected the marriage of the two paths. 

Started reading Chesterton on Aquinas. Chesterton put all the professionals to shame. His is a marvel of compaction and precision. Any way, here is a great summary of the ethos of the 13th century and of the Middle Ages generally. 

“Nobody can understand the the greatness of the 13th century, who does not realize that it was a great growth of new things produced by a living thing. In that sense it was really bolder and freer than what we call the Renaissance, which was a resurrection of old things discovered in a dead thing. In that sense medievalism was not a Renascence, but rather a Nascence. It did not model its temples upon tombs, or call up dead gods from Hades. It made an architecture as new as modern engineering: indeed it still remains the most modern architecture. Only it was followed at the Renaissance by a more antiquated architecture. In that sense the Renaissance might be called the Relapse. Whatever may be said of the Gothic and the Gospel according to St. Thomas, they were not a Relapse. It was a new thrust like the titanic thrust of Gothic engineering; and its strength was in a God who makes all things new”. 

In Thomistic studies, the name Aristotle stands for Philosophy. When they deemed him “The Philosopher” the scholastic Medievals intended him as the representative of the discipline as a whole; he is it, and it is him. At least this was the case in the University of Paris in the 13th century. As Pieper points out: ‘The name “Aristotle” was meant to serve as a cryptic word for natural reality as a whole, for the visible, sense-perceived world of physical, material things and — within man himself — for sensuousness, for nature and naturalness, and also for the natural cognitive powers of reason, the lumen naturale.’ This cryptic system was understood as distinct from the “Bible”, or revelation as a co-equal “whole”. 

The problem, in my mind, is the scholastic misunderstanding of the “Bible”. There is an assumption that “Aristotle” is necessary because in one way or another, an empirical approach to knowledge of the world cannot be justified by the Creation-Fall-Redemption ground motive of Scripture. Thus, an addendum is necessary. As Pieper says: “Thomas’ resolute worldliness set him apart from the spiritualistic, symbolistic unworldliness of the age’s traditional theology”. 

Thomas failed to recognize the fullness and philosophical foundation of Scripture for man’s life. Pieper suggests that for Thomas and others, “Aristotle” was not foundational, but rather an accessory to knowledge. However, the reductionism inherent in Aristotle eventually gained ground in Biblical studies. Rather than an aspectual approach to “things”, which would have taken into account a symphonic view of reality, “Aristotle” was absolutized as the determiner of what constitutes philosophy, of what in fact constitutes material existence in toto. 

Above all, Thomas was a teacher. His pedagogical method reflects a real understanding of the development of the student. This included a Socratic, question and answer approach too learning (not simply catechism, but actual discussion), which assumed the dignity and the recognized abilities of the student. 

Discussing Thomas’ method, Pieper writes: “Teaching…presupposes that the hearer is sought out where he is to be found. Thus teaching implies proceeding from the existing position and disposition of the hearer. Nor can that position be determined abstractly in advance, or fixed once and for all; it must be located in its own historical context, determined concretely for what it is. The hearer’s counter-arguments must be taken seriously and the elements of truth in them recognized…The teacher, then, must proceed from what is valid in the opinions of the hearer to the fuller and purer truth as he, the teacher, understands it”. 

This is reflective if the heuristic approach to knowledge used in the Lyceum: beginning with particulars, an abstracted, universal knowledge is attempted. The individual is assumed to possess knowledge of some kind, as we are all informed through our own experience of the world around us, and that from birth. We all “know” something, and this something is the basic starting point of continued learning. The teacher’s business is to discover the beginning spark and to nurture it to further understanding. Analogical learning, from one thing of the uni-verse, to another thing.

Thomas sought, as Aristotle before him, to get at the essence of a thing, to see as it “is” and not in relation to anything else, ie, a duck is a duck is a duck. This is the defining mark of all Hellenic philosophy: being precedes and determines meaning. Of course the question “What determines being?” has yet to be answered. 

As part of a graduate Medieval Church history course, I am doing readings on Thomas Aquinas, the “Dumb Ox” of the Roman church. One of the readings is Josef Pieper’s book, “Guide to Thomas Aquinas”. Pieper asks the question: “What, in short, is the greatness of Thomas that has made him doctor communis of Christendom?” Originality is not the answer, and Pieper’s explanation reveals the key to understanding the essential quality of Thomas’ work. “What is classical is not, properly speaking, original”. Recognizing the synthesizing quality of Thomas’ work, Pieper says: “Thomas was neither Platonist nor Aristotelian; he was both”. Disregarding the question of the possibility of this assertion, Thomas was essentially Hellenic in his most basic understanding of man and the world.  

In 1918, Thomas’ approach was incorporated into the Codex Juris Canonici which directs the educational branch of the Roman church to teach all priests in accordance with the “method, doctrines and principles of Thomas Aquinas”.

The basic religious motive of the heart cannot sustain the presence of two impulses; although the aspects of experience may coincide with one another given the imago Dei. “Socrates was a man” is true for me, and for Socrates. But, when I begin to ask the question, “What is man?” the resulting answers will be quite different. Poetically we might sound the same, existentially we may taste the same food, but once we get into prose, the ground will shift beneath our feet. 

I look forward to reading more.