The ground-breaking achievement in philosophy during the High Catholic Age was the revival of the study of Aristotle. Throughout the Byzantine Age, Christian theologians and philosophers gravitated toward interacting with the philosophy of Plato. His teachings on the idea of universals, the world of forms, and this material world of particulars being a shadowy reflection of the world of forms were easily translatable in Christian theology. The Byzantine preference for Plato led to a much more contemplative, mystical Christian tradition that focused much more on esoteric concepts within Christian theology. Now, contemplation and theological reflection on these undoubtedly metaphysical concepts is absolutely good and necessary—it is the fruit of Christian men and women translating the Gospel of Christ into the cultural and philosophical world around them. Yet there is more to reality than just contemplation of universals. God has created a material world of nature, and he has called it good. Therefore, with the dawn of the High Catholic Age, the revival of Aristotelian thought and philosophy led to a re-appreciation of the world of nature—of the particulars.
As with anything, change is often met with a certain amount of resistance. As the scholastics were rediscovering Aristotle, there were those in the Catholic Church who sometimes objected. And so, it is true that there were instances during the High Catholic Age in which the natural philosophy of Aristotle was banned (such as in Paris in both 1210 and 1215 AD), the fact is there was never a Church-wide ban on the study of Aristotle. In fact, even in places like Paris, such bans were often short-lived. By 1240, Roger Bacon was teaching Aristotle’s Physics, and by 1255, as Rodney Stark tells us, Aristotle’s “formerly condemned natural-philosophical treatises were required for the bachelor’s and master’s degrees in arts at Paris, as they were already or would be for most medieval universities” (Triumph of Christianity 24-25).
The point is simple: Christian scholars of the High Catholic Age vigorously embraced Aristotelian philosophy, and it changed everything. Indeed, it opened the door to a fuller appreciation of God’s natural world, and it helped further develop Christian theology in its quest to continually engage with new discoveries in the world. The very concept of theology being “the queen of the sciences” was, in fact, a concept that came from Aristotle himself. What that term means is that all the sciences—be it geology, biology, astronomy, mathematics, or anything else—are ultimately subservient to metaphysics/theology. For it is the study of metaphysics and theology that give meaning and purpose to any scientific study of the particulars within nature.
Mr. Aquinas, I Presume?
The foremost Christian philosopher of the High Catholic Age by far was the Dominican monk Thomas Aquinas. Not only did he dominate the Christian thought of the High Catholic Age, he still dominates much of Christian thought today. He is most famous for incorporating Aristotelian philosophy into Christianity—or perhaps better stated, “Christianizing” Aristotle. In doing so, Aristotle re-emphasized the goodness of the natural world, and by doing so, showed how “all of creation declares the glory of God.”
One of the things that Aquinas did was show just how far human reason could take one in one’s search for God. Aristotle had argued that one could learn about universals in the world of forms by studying the particulars in the natural world. In his “Christianizing” of Aristotle, Aquinas showed just how much the natural world could, in fact, tell us about God. By doing so, many people like Schaeffer have accused Aquinas of splitting reality into two spheres: the “upper level” of the spiritual world, with its concepts of God, heaven, the unseen, and grace, that can only be arrived at by faith, and the “lower level” of the natural world, with the visible, created, physical order that can be analyzed and measured. Of course, such accusations are misguided and misleading—there had been philosophical debates between Plato and Aristotle for 1,500 years. In the Nicene Creed, one of the first statements of faith is “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.” Clearly there was an understanding of the two aspects of reality.
Aquinas did not introduce the concept of autonomous reason. He did not say, “autonomous reason can get you to logically conclude that there is a God, but then you need revelation to know who that God is.” He said that logic and reason where unique aspects of human beings who were made in God’s image. Therefore, even though human beings are sinful and fallen, their capacity for reason and logical are still gifts from God and can still aid human beings in their search for God. A sinful person, therefore, because he is made in God’s image, can still use his God-given reason to look at the God-created natural world and thus come to a better understanding of God. Human reason is never autonomous—it is a gift of God, and can therefore help lead human beings back to God. And inversely, if one rejects God, that person is without excuse, just as Paul says in Romans 1:20: ““Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse.”
It is not a false dichotomy of “reason or revelation.” It is rather a matter of human beings using their reason to assess both the natural world and anything that God does, in fact, reveal—something that is revealed still needs to be understood, and it is our reason/intellect that does that very thing. So to be clear, this teaching of Aquinas regarding human reason is, in fact, the exact opposite of the modern, so-called Enlightenment teaching of autonomous human reason.
A Brief Lesson on Aquinas
Edward Feser has written a wonderful introduction to Thomas Aquinas: Aquinas. Most of what follows is taken from his book. I cannot begin to do his book justice, but I do want to attempt to provide somewhat of a “Reader’s Digest” version of some of Aquinas’ basic concepts that Feser helps to explain. So get ready, we’re going to jump into some philosophy here!
One part of Aristotle that Aquinas builds from is Aristotle’s concepts of actuality and potentiality (as discussed earlier in the book). Using these concepts, Aquinas argues that there is no potentiality in God, and that God, therefore, is full actuality. Another part of Aristotle that Aquinas builds from is Aristotle’s claim that everything in nature is a composite of both form and matter—a concept known as hylemorphism. Aquinas argued that although this is true for material substances, that it was possible to have immaterial substances of pure form, without matter—for example, God and other spiritual realities (again, consider the Nicene Creed that states that God, the Father Almighty, is the creator of all things visible and invisible).
Yet when it comes to the natural world, everything is a composite of form and matter. The perfection of this combination of form and matter is what Aquinas calls the essence of a particular thing in nature: what a thing is meant to be is its essence. Of course, taking human beings for example, no human being is perfectly what he/she should be—in our current state (our present existence) we are not yet what we are meant to be (essence). Aquinas said that the reason for this is that because of sin the material world has not yet been fully redeemed. We know this because there is still potentiality in nature—things are still in a state of becoming; and thus this means that all of creation has not yet been fully actualized (i.e. redeemed).
By contrast, there is no potentiality in God, because He is fully actualized and fully real. He is pure Spirit, and thus is not material, for to be material is to have potential and be susceptible to change. But human beings…that is another matter. We are in process of becoming; we are not yet fully actualized; our matter is “in potency” and it is our form actualizes our matter. Therefore, Aquinas argued that goodness is conformity to the essence of a thing—in other words, you are doing what is “good” when you are doing something that conforms to your essence, who God created you to be. By contrast, evil is the absence of the good. This leads to another observation of Aquinas: if goodness actually is what conforms to one’s essence, and one’s essence is that which is fully real, then goodness conforms to what is really real; but evil, being the absence of the good, is ultimately unreality. It cannot have being in and of itself, because existence, being created by God, is ultimately good—existence is what is real.
Like Plato and Aristotle before him, and indeed like virtually most philosophers up to that point in time, Aquinas viewed the purpose for wisdom and knowledge as the search for the ultimate causes and meaning of things. Both the study of the natural world and the intellectual inquiry of philosophy were only worthwhile if they pointed toward God and helped human beings better themselves as they searched for God.
In my next post, I will provide an overview of Aquinas’ famous “Five Proofs” for the existence of God.
