Category — Historical

“His epitaph is Athanasius contra mundum, “Athanasius against the world.” We are proud that our own country has more than once stood against the world. Athanasius did the same. He stood for the Trinitarian doctrine, “whole and undefiled,” when it looked as if all the civilised world was slipping back from Christianity into the religion of Arius—into one of those “sensible” synthetic religions which are so strongly recommended today and which, then as now, included among their devotees many highly cultivated clergymen. It is his glory that he did not move with the times; it is his reward that he now remains when those times, as all times do, have moved away”.

— CS Lewis, Introduction to On the Incarnation

“Furthermore, they have even sent for men who come from afar, to whom a messenger was sent; and lo, they came—for whom you bathed, painted your eyes and decorated yourselves with ornaments; and you sat on a splendid couch with a table arranged before it on which you had set My incense and My oil. The sound of a carefree multitude was with her; and drunkards were brought from the wilderness with men of the common sort. And they put bracelets on the hands of the women and beautiful crowns on their heads”.
— Ezekiel 21:40-42

Outsiders with new ideas are brought in, Holy things are treated as common and the common are given authority.

Why did the eternal Son of God become a man?

“He has been manifested in a human body for this reason only, out of the love and goodness of His Father, for the salvation of us men” [1:1]

“It was our sorry case that caused the Word to come down, our transgression that called out His love for us, so that He made haste to help us and appear among us” [1:4].

“It was impossible, therefore, that God should leave man to be carried off by corruption, because it would be unfitting and unworthy of Himself” [2:6].

“The Word perceived that corruption could not be gotten rid of otherwise than through death, yet He Himself, as the Word, being immortal and the Father’s Son, was such as could not die. For this reason, therefore, He assumed a body capable of death” [2:9].

— On the Incarnation, Athanasius

I need to take a moment to boast in my children. As a parent I often spend more time seeing my own failures than watching the fruit of the Spirit in the lives of my girls. They are 4, 7, 9 and 11.

As of late, my wife and I have been reading the Shorter Catechism to them before they go to sleep, doing a little Q&A before lights out. They love it, and rise to the challenge. We have had very long and deep talks about providence and God’s sovereignty, as well as the questions of creation, time and space.

Sometimes it is difficult to know how much has really sunk in. Yesterday, something happened that confirmed the little work we have been doing.

Our next door neighbor has a daughter named Lillie who is like a fifth sister in our family. All our girls love her and treat her like she is just another sibling. There is no doubt that she is loved on.

So, yesterday my wife overhears this little conversation between Lillie and my two oldest girls. It went something like this:

“So, Lilly do you believe that God made you?”
Lilly: “Well, I believe what my family does”.
“What does your family believe?”
Lilly: “Well, we believe there is a god, but he didn’t make us”.
“Well, Lilly, your family might be wrong. If you believe in a god, you might want to find out who he is. If he didn’t make you, then you might want to find out who did. You don’t want to leave this to chance”.

Steely love. I can learn something from my children about evangelism. They are in the war.

The articulation of the faith that is part of the heritage of Calvinism gives little ones the vocabulary and courage to say what is in their hearts.

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.