A Bellowing Ox and a Roaring Lion - part one

What in me is dark,

Illumine; what is low, raise and support;

That to the height of this great argument

I may assert eternal Providence,

And justify the ways of God to men.

- John Milton, (1608 - 1674), 'Paradise Lost'

Does God exist? If you were to reply with the reasonable enough question: which God? medieval theologian and Christian apologist Thomas Aquinas, (1225 - 1274), would charge you with not having understood the question, given his theories concerning the nature of the divine. But how can we theorise about the supernatural? How can we know anything about the nature of the divine, except perhaps through some kind of revelation? But how can that which transcends the natural world reveal itself to creatures of nature such as ourselves? Again Thomas would say such questions display ignorance, for God is neither supernatural nor transcendent, as he explains in his 'Summa Theologica'?('Summary of Theology'), an overview of all of the principle?theological?teachings of the Catholic Church and which was intended to be an instructional guide for theology students, presenting reasoning for almost every point of?western Christian theology, covering such topics, as it follows them through cyclically, as God, Creation, Man,?Man's purpose, Christ, the?Sacraments, and then returning to God. Perhaps most renowned for its five arguments for the existence of God, the five ways or?quinque viae, the Summa is a text worth careful study albeit not for the reasons that Aquinas intended but for others, not least of which reasons is this rather intriguing question: must I know what I mean?

The principal ideas put forward in the 'Summa Theologica' are as follows:

1. People require more than philosophy in their search for truth, for certain truths are beyond human reason and are available only because of divine revelation, and theology, which depends upon revealed knowledge, supplements natural knowledge.

2. The existence of God can be proved in five ways, by reference to motion (and the necessity of a first mover), by reference to possibility and necessity, by reference to the gradations of perfection in the world, and by reference to the order and harmony of nature, which suggests an ordering being who gives purpose to the created world.

3. God alone is the being whose nature in such that by reference to him one can account for the fact of motion, efficient cause, necessity, perfection, and order.

4. God's principal attributes are simplicity, for he is non-corporeal and without genus, actuality, perfection, goodness, infinitude, immutability, unity, and immanence, but the created intellect can know God only by God's grace and only through apprehension, not comprehension.

It is no easy matter to give a summary (a summa as it were) and to comment upon Thomas's 'Summa Theologica' briefly given that it has meant and can mean many things to many people, in part due to its length, for it runs to many volumes, and in partly idue to the scope of the questions considered, ranging from abstract and technical philosophy to minute points of Christian dogmatics. The situation is further complicated because of Thomas's style, such works were common in his day, and his is only one of many which were written in this general form whereby the work consists entirely of questions, each in the form of an article in which the views Thomas considers important are summarized and then answered. Objections to the topic question are listed, often including specific quotations, and then an equal number of replies are given, based on a middle section in which he behins with 'I answer that... and which typically contains Thomas's own position, but this, in turn, is sometimes based upon some crucial quotation from a philosopher or theologian.

Out of such complexity and quantity many have attempted to derive Thomistic systems, and both the commentators and the group of modern Thomists form a complex question in themselves. Thomas was considered to be near heresy in his own day, and his views were unpopular in some quarters, and from the position of being not an especially favoured teacher in a eather fruiful and lively (yes truly so) era, he has come to be regarded as perhaps the pre-eminent figure in the Catholic philosophy and theology of the day. His stature is due as much to the dogmatization and expansion of his thought which took place, for instance, by Cardinal Cajetan, (1469?– 1534), and John of St. Thomas, (1589 – 1644), as it is to the position Thomas had in his own day. Without this further development his writing might have been important, but perhaps it would be simply one among a number of significant medieval works. The Encyclical letter of Pope Leo XIII, 'On the Restoration of Christian Philosophy', published in 1879, set in motion the Thomistic revival. The modern developments in philosophy had gone against the Church of Rome, and Thomas Aquinas was selected as the centre for a revival and a concentation upon Christian philosophy, and since that time Thomas has been widely studied, so much so that it is sometimes hard to distinguish Thomas's own work from that of those who followed him.

Part I contains 119 questions, including treatises on creation, on the angels, on man, and on the divine government. The first part of Part II consists of 114 questions, including treatises on habits and law, and in general it covers ethical matters as against the metaphysical and epistemological concentration in Part I. The second part of Part II is made up of 189 questions, and Part III contains ninety.These cover laws, the ethical virtues, and questions of doctrine and Christology. Taken as a whole, it is hard to imagine a more comprehensive study, although it is important to remember that Thomas wrote a second Summa, 'against the Gentiles', which was intended as a technical work of apologetics for those who could not accept the premises of Christian theology (or too dumb and God-forsaken to understand them in other words). The works overlap a great deal but a comparative study will not be undertaken by me here. The 'Summa Theologica', then, has as its unspoken premise the acceptance of certain basic Christian propositions, whereas the 'Summa Contra Gentiles' attempts to argue without any such assumptions.

The influence of any single philosopher or theologian on Thomas's thought is difficult to establish, and probably too much has been made of Thomas's use of Aristotle, (384–322?BC). It is true that Aristotle is quoted in the 'SummaTheologica' more than any other pagan author and that Thomas refers to him on occasion as 'the philosopher', and the availability of Aristotle's writings in fairly accurate translation in Thomas's day had a decided influence upon him and upon others of his era. Plato's, (c. 429 –347 B.C.), works as a whole were still unrecovered, so that Aristotle is one of the few outside the Christian tradition who is quoted. Particularly in psychology and epistemology Thomas seems to have followed at least an Aristotelian tradition, if not Aristotle himself, but the authors Thomas quotes with approval cover a wide range, including frequent citations of the Neoplatonic pseudo-Dionysius, (late 5th to early 6th century) and Augustine, (354 - 430). Furthermore, in a theologically oriented summa, the Bible and church tradition must play a major role, so that to sort out and label any strain as dominant is extremely difficult in view of the peculiar nature of a summa. There are positions which can clearly be recognized as Thomas's own, but the real perplexity of understanding Thomas is to grasp the variety of sources blended there and to hold them altogether for simultaneous consideration and questioning as Thomas himself did.

'The Apotheosis of Saint Thomas Aquinas', 1631, Francisco de Zurbarán

The first question, consisting of ten articles, is Thomas's well known definition of the nature and the extent of sacred doctrine in theology, and it opens by asking whether man requires anything more than philosophy. Thomas's contention that the Scriptures are inspired by God and are not a part of philosophy indicates the usefulness of knowledge other than philosophy. Scriptural knowledge is necessary for man's salvation, for Scripture offers the promise of salvation and pure philosophical knowledge does not. Philosophy is built up by human reason, certain truths necessary for man's salvation, but which exceed human reason, have been made known by God through divine revelation, such knowledge is not agreed to be reason; it is by nature accepted only on faith. Now the question arises: Can such revealed knowledge be considered as a science (a body of systematic knowledge) along with philosophy? Of course, such a sacred science treats of God primarily and does not give equal consideration to creatures, and this means that it is actually a speculative undertaking and is only secondarily a practical concern. And yet it is the most noble science, because of the importance of the questions it considers, and in that sense all other forms of scientific knowledge are theology's handmaidens. Wisdom is knowledge of divine things, and in that sense theology has chief claim to the title of wisdom, its principles are immediately revealed by God, and within such a science all things are treated under the aspect of God. Naturally there can be no argument on these terms with one who denies that at least some of theology's truths are obtained through divine revelation, for such a person would not admit the very premises of theology conceived of in this fashion. That is the sense in which this summa is a summa of theology intended for Christians. Since its arguments, at least in some instances, involve a claim to revealed knowledge, the Summa may be unconvincing to the non-Christian, hence the reception of grace, sufficient to become a Christian, is necessary to understand the arguments. In the Christian conception, the reception of grace enables the receiver to accept the truth of revelation. But Thomas's well known doctrine here is that such reception of grace does not destroy nature (natural knowledge) but perfects or completes it. Nothing is countermanded in philosophy's own domain, grace simply adds to it what of itself could not be known. As compared with other classical theologians Thomas believed in a fairly straightforward approach to questions about God. However, Thomas did admit the necessity of the familiar negative method, since where God is concerned what he is not is clearer to us than what he is. The proposition 'God exists' is not self-evident to us, although it may be in itself. The contradictory of the proposition 'God is' can be conceived.

In this case Thomas seems to oppose St. Anselm's, (1033/4 – 1109), ontological argument, although the opposition is not quite as straightforward as it seems. Thomas denies that we can know God's essence directly, even though such vision would reveal that God's essence and existence are identical and thus support Anselm's contention. But the ontological argument, he reasons, is built upon a kind of direct access to the divine which human reason does not have. The existence of God, then, needs to be demonstrated from those of his effects which are known to us. Thomas readily admits that some will prefer to account for all natural phenomena by referring everything to one principle, which is nature herself. In opposition he asserts that God's existence can be proved in five ways:

1. The argument from motion.

2. The argument from the nature of efficient cause,

3. The argument from possibility and necessity.

4, The argument from the gradations of perfection to be found in things.

5. The argument from the order of the world.

Without attempting an analysis of these arguments individually, several things can be noted about them as a group. First, all are based upon the principle that reason needs a final stopping point in any chain of explanation. Second, such a point of final rest cannot be itself within the series to be accounted for, but it must be outside it and different in kind. Third, in each case it is a principle which we arrive at, not God himself, but these principles (for instance, a first efficient cause) are shown to be essential parts of the nature of God. God's existence is agreed to by showing reason's need for one of his attributes in the attempt to explain natural phenomena. It is probably true that Thomas's five proofs have been given a disproportionate amount of attention, for following them Thomas goes into elaborate detail in a discussion of the divine nature and its primary attributes. Simplicity, goodness, infinity, and perfection are taken up, and then the other chief attributes are discussed before Thomas passes on to the analysis of the three persons of the trinitarian conception of God. Taken together, these passages form one of the most elaborate and complete discussions of God's nature by a major theologian and it is here that much of the disagreement about Thomas's philosophy centers, rather than in the more formal and brief five proofs.

In spite of Thomas's use of Aristotelian terms, he indicates his affinity with the Neoplatonic tradition by placing the consideration of simplicity first. This is the divine attribute most highly prized and most stressed by Neoplatonists, and Thomas concurs in their emphasis. God's simplicity is first protected by denying absolutely that he is a body in any sense, since what is corporeal is by nature subject to division and contains potentiality, the opposite of God's required simplicity and full actuality. Nor is God within any genus, nor is he a subject as other individuals are. The first cause rules all things without commingling with them. God's primary perfection is his actuality, since Thomas accepts the doctrine that a thing is perfect in proportion to its state of actuality. All created perfections pre-exist in God also, since he is the source of all things. As such a source of the multitude of things in this world, things diverse and in themselves opposed to each other pre-exist in God as one, without injury to his simplicity. This is no simple kind of simplicity which Thomas ascribes to his God as a perfection. God is also called good, although goodness is defined primarily in terms of full actuality, as both perfection and simplicity were. Everything is good insofar as it has being, and, since God is being in a supremely actual sense, he is supremely good. An object can be spoken of as evil only insofar as it lacks being. Since God lacks being in no way, there is in that sense absolutely no evil in his nature but only good.

'Saint Thomas Aquinas preaching trust in God during a tempest', 1824, Ary Scheffer

When Thomas comes to infinity he is up against a particularly difficult divine attribute. By his time infinity had become a traditional perfection to be ascribed to God, but Aristotle had gone to great lengths to deny even the possibility of an actual infinite. Without discussing Aristotle's reasons here, it can be noted that Thomas makes one of his most significant alterations at this point in the Aristotelian concepts which he does use. Aristotle had considered the question of an actual infinite in the category of quantity. Thomas agrees with him, there can be no quantitative infinite and the idea is an imperfection. Form had meant primarily limitation for Aristotle, but here Thomas departs. The notion of form, he asserts, is not incompatible with infinity, although the forms of natural things are finite. In admitting the concept of the form of the infinite, Thomas departs from Aristotelian conceptions quite markedly and makes a place for a now traditional divine perfection. Nothing besides God, however, can be infinite.

Turning to the question of the immanence of God in the natural world, Thomas makes God present to all things as being the source of their being, power, and operation, but as such, God is not in the world. For one thing, God is altogether immutable, whereas every natural thing changes. He must be, since he is pure act and only what contains potentiality moves to acquire something. It follows that in God there is no succession, no time, but only simultaneous presence. God's unity further guarantees us that only one such God could exist. Of course a God of such a nature may not be knowable to a particular intellect, on account of the excess of such an intelligible object over the finite intellect, but, as fully actual, God is in himself fully knowable. The blessed see the essence of God by grace, for others it is more difficult. However, a proportion is possible between God and man, and in this way the created intellect can know God proportionally. This is not full knowledge, but it established the possibility for a knowledge relationship between God and man. The created intellect, however, cannot fully grasp the essence of God, unless God by grace unites himself to the created intellect, as an object made intelligible to it. It is necessary in the case of God only that, for a full grasp, the natural power of understanding should be aided by divine grace. Those who possess the more charity will see God the more perfectly, and will be the more beatified.

Here is Thomas's statement of the famous goal of the beatific vision. Even here God is only apprehended and never comprehended, since only an infinite being could possess the infinite more necessary for comprehension, and none is infinite except God. God alone can comprehend himself yet for the mind to attain an understanding of God in some degree is still asserted to be a great beatitude. God cannot be seen in his essence by a mere human being, except he be separated from this mortal life. Thomas here follows the well known 'Exodus', 33.20: 'Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live.'

For Thomas faith is a kind of knowledge, since we gain a more perfect knowledge of God himself by grace than by natural reason. Such a concept of faith has had wide implications. That God is a trinity, for instance, cannot be known except by faith, and in general making faith a mode of knowledge has opened to Christianity the claim to a more perfect comprehension than non-Christians possess. Names can be applied to God positively on Thomas's theory, but negative names simply signify his distance from creatures, and all names fall short of a full representation of him. Not all names are applied to God in a metaphorical sense, although some are (for instance, God is a lion), but there are some names which are applied to God in a literal sense (for instance, good, being). In reality God is one, and yet he is necessarily multiple in idea, because our intellect represents him in a manifold manner, conceiving of many symbols to represent him. However, univocal predication is impossible, and sometimes terms are even used equivocally. Others are predicated of God in an analogous sense, according to a proportion existing between God and nature.

In the first thirteen questions Thomas considers God as man approaches him. He then considers the world as it is viewed from the standpoint of the divine nature. Even the attributes of perfection which Thomas discussed, although they truly characterize God's nature, are not separate when viewed from the divine perspective. Now we ask how God understands both himself and the world, and the first thing which must be established is that there actually is knowledge in God. This might seem obvious, but the Neoplatonic tradition denies knowing to its highest principle as implying separation and need. Thomas admits a mode of knowing into the divine nature but he denies that God knows as creatures do. God understands everything through himself alone, without dependence on external objects, his intellect and its object are altogether the same and no potentiality is present. God's knowledge is not discursive but simultaneous and fully actual eternally. This is true because of God's role as the creator of the natural world, God's knowledge is the cause of things being as they are. God knows even some things which never were, nor are, nor will be, but it is in his knowledge not that they be but that they be merely possible.

God knows future contingent things, the works of men being subject to free will. These things are not certain to us, because of their dependence upon proximate, contingent causes, but they are certain to God alone, whose understanding is eternally above time. There is a will as a part of God's nature, but it is moved by itself alone. The will of man is sometimes moved by things external to him. God wills his own goodness necessarily, even as we will our own happiness necessarily. Yet his willing things apart from himself is not necessary. Supposing that he wills it, however then he is unable not to will it, since his will cannot change. Things other than God are thus 'necessary by supposition'. God knows necessarily whatever he knows, but does not will necessarily whatever he wills. And the will of God is always reasonable in what it wills. Yet the will of God is entirely unchangeable, Thomas asserts, since the substance of God and his knowledge are entirely unchangeable. As to evil, God neither wills evil to be done, nor wills it not to be done, but he wills to permit evil to be done, this is good because it is the basis of man's freedom. We must say, however, that all things are subject to divine providence, not only in general, but even in their own individual selves.

It necessarily follows that everything which happens from the exercise of free will must be subject to divine providence. Both necessity and contingency fall under the foresight of God. It should not be overlooked that Thomas devotes considerable time to a consideration of the nature and function of angels. Part of his reason for doing so, of course, is undoubtedly their constant presence in the biblical record. Part of his interest comes from the necessity of having intermediary beings between God and man. Having assigned to God a nature so different from man's nature, beings who stand somewhere in between are now easy to conceive. When Thomas comes to describe the nature of man, he follows much of the traditional Aristotelian psychology, which he finds more amenable to Christianity than certain Platonistic theories. Angels are not corporeal, man is composed of a spiritual and a corporeal substance. The soul has no matter, but it is necessarily joined to matter as its instrument. The intellectual principle is the form of man and in that sense determines the body's form. Since Thomas claims that the intellect in each man is uniquely individual, he argues against some Arabian views of the universality of intellect. In addition to a twofold intellect (active and passive), man has appetites and a will. The will is not always moved by necessity, but in Thomas's views it is subject to the intellect. When he tums to the question of free will, Thomas's problem is to allow sufficient causal power to man's will without denying God's providence and foreknowledge. His solution to this problem is complicated, but essentially it involves God's moving man not directly and by force but indirectly and without doing violence to man's nature. To obtain knowledge the soul derives intelligible species from the sensible forms which come to it, and it has neither innate knowledge nor does it know any forms existing independently from sensible things. The principle of knowledge is in the senses. Our intellect can know the singular in material things directly and primarily. After that intelligible species are derived by abstraction. Yet the intellectual soul cannot know itself directly, but only through its operations. Nor in this present life can our intellect know immaterial substances directly. That is a knowledge reserved for angels, but it means that we cannot understand immaterial substances perfectly now (through natural means). We know only material substances, and they cannot represent immaterial substances perfectly.

The soul of man is not eternal, it was created. It is produced immediately by God, not by any lesser beings, as is suggested in Plato's Timaeus, for instance. (See my article On Plato's Timaeus' - The World Soul). Soul and body are produced simultaneously, since they belong together as one organism. Man was made in God's image, but this in no way implies that there must be equality between creator and created. And some natures may be more like God than others, according to their disposition and the direction of their activities. All men are directed to some end. According as their end is worthy of blame or praise, so are their deeds worthy of blame or praise. There is, however, one last fixed end for all men; and man must, of necessity, desire all that he desires for the sake of that last end. Man's happiness ultimately does not consist either in wealth, fame, or honor, or even in power. Thomas never doubts that the end desired is to be happy, but he does deny that the end can consist of goods of the body. No created good can be man's last end. Final and perfect happiness can consist in nothing else than the vision of the Divine Essence, although momentary happiness probably does depend on some physical thing.

'St Thomas Aquinas Temptation', 1890, Edouard Francois Zier. When it was discovered that he wished to join the Dominicans (a strict Order of Preachers) Aquinas was imprisoned at the Castle of Monte Giovanni, Campano, by family members in an effort to dissuade him. At one point, two of his brothers hired a prostitute to seduce him, upon which Thomas drove her away wielding a burning log with which he then inscribed a cross onto the wall.

It is possible for man to see God, and therefore it is possible for man to attain his ultimate happiness, though of course, there are diverse degrees of happiness, and it is not present equally in all men. A certain participation in such happiness can be had in this life, although true and perfect happiness cannot. Once attained, such happiness cannot be lost since its nature is eternal, but man cannot attain it by his own natural powers, although every man desires it. Next Thomas considers the mechanics of human action, voluntary and involuntary movement, individual circumstances, the movement of the will, intention and choice. His discussion forms an addition to his psychology and a more complete discussion of the ethical situation of man. When he comes to good and evil in human action, Thomas easily acknowledges that some actions of man are evil, although they are good or evil according to circumstance. As far as man's interior act of will is concerned, good and evil are essential differences in the act of will. The goodness of the will essentially depends on its being subject to reason and to natural law. The will can be evil when it abides by an erring reason, The goodness of the will depends upon its conformity to the divine will.

In his more detailed psychology, Thomas discusses the nature and originn of the soul's passions, joy, sadness, hope, fear, and then love and hate. Pleasure, pain or sorrow, rope, despair, and fear all are analyzed in a way that anticipates Baruch Spinoza's, (1632 – 1677), famous discussion of the emotions. When Thomas comes to virtue, his opinion is largely based on Aristotle's. There are intellectual virtues and moral virtues, and to these he adds the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity Moral virtue is in a man by nature, although God infuses the theological virtues into man. For salvation, of course, there is need for a gift of the Holy Ghost. Thomas continues with a discussion of sin, its kinds and causes. Such discussion has been extremely important both to church doctrine and in church practice. Not all sins are equal, therefore, sins must be handled in various ways. The carnal sins, for instance, are of less guilt but of more shame than spiritual sins. Mortal and venial sins are distinguished, but the will and the reason are always involved in the causes of sin. Original sin as a concept is of course extremely important to Christian doctrine, and Thomas discusses this in detail.

The treatise on law is on of the most famous parts of the 'Summa Theologica', for it is here that Thomas develops his theory of natural law. First, of course, there is the eternal law of which natural law is the first reflection and human (actual legal) law is a second reflection. The eternal law is one and it is unchanging, natural law is something common to all nations and cannot be entirely blotted out from men's hearts. Human law is derived from this common natural law, but human law is framed to meet the majority of instances and must take into account many things, as to persons, as to matters, and as to times. A brief survey such as this cannot do justice even to the variety of topics considered in the 'Summa Theologica', nor can it give any detailed description of the complex material presented or of the views Thomas distills from them. The impression which the Summa Theologica gives is that of an encyclopedia to be read and studied as a kind of source book for material on a desired issue. In fact, the only way for any reader to hope to understand Thomas and his 'Summa Theologica' is to become engrossed and involved in it for himself, undoubtedly what Thomas intended.

'Thomas?is?girded?by?angels?with a?mystical belt?of?purity after his proof?of?chastity', 1632, Diego Velázquez. After driving the prostitute away Thomas fell into a mystical ecstasy and two angels appeared to him as he slept and said: 'Behold, we gird thee by the command of God with the girdle of chastity, which henceforth will never be imperilled. What human strength cannot obtain, is now bestowed upon thee as a celestial gift'. From that moment on, Thomas was given the grace of perfect chastity by Christ and he wore the girdle till the end of his life. He died at 49, though given his life of chastity it would have seemed to him much longer than that no doubt.

étienne?Henri?Gilson?(1884 – 1978), professor of the History of Medieval Philosophy at the University of Paris, was largely responsible for bringing the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas to the attention of secular scholars. Meanwhile, by calling his fellow Catholics back from the schematized doctrines found in their handbooks to the life and teaching of the thirteenth century master, he helped raise official Thomism to a new plane. Medieval philosophy was not taught at the Sorbonne when Gilson was a student, and his acquaintance with Aquinas' writings began when he undertook to explore for his dissertation the influence of medieval thought on the philosophy of René Descartes, (1596 – 1650). A series of lectures published in 1914 under the title 'Le Thomisme', the first of the five editions through which the present book has passed, is noteworthy, says its author, only as a monument to his ignorance. But ignorance of medieval philosophy was widespread, one of his reviewers denied that Aquinas had a philosophy distinct in any way from the scholastic synthesis which he shared with his contemporaries. The words 'Christian philosophy' in the English title, 'The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas', highlight the author's conviction that one can understand Thomas' philosophy only if one approaches it through the faith of the Church. Earlier representatives of the Thomist revival, eager to prove to their secular counterparts that Catholics can philosophise like anyone else, argued that Thomas' philosophy, which they closely identified with that of Aristotle, was completely independent of his theology. As a historian, Gilson challenged this interpretation, maintaining that, not indeed in his commentaries but in his Summas, Thomas philosophized as a theologian, taking up into Christian doctrine such philosophical truths as could be used to amplify and explain what God had revealed through the Church.

The present work is a detailed exposition of Thomas'philosophy against the full background of Greek, Christian, and Arabian thought. But special attention is always given by Gilson to points at which Thomas went beyond his predecessors. This appears in each of the three parts into which Gilson divides his book: God, Nature, and Morality. Gilson plunges the reader at once into what he considers Thomas' greatest contribution to philosophy: his revolutionary conception of being. Aristotle had, indeed, pointed the way when, in his analysis of substance, he affirmed that matter owes its existence to form and that form exists only in conjunction with matter. Aristotle, however, had failed to answer the question of how existence can arise from what does not exist. Had he pursued his analysis he must have arrived at existence as 'the ultimate term to which the analysis of the real can attain'. Thomas, in insisting that forms, by which matter is actuated, are themselves actuated by existence exposed the inadequacy of earlier essential ontologies and for the first time presented an existential ontology. Much of Gilson's book is devoted to showing the consequences of this metaphysical innovation. One result is that God is no longer defined as Perfect Being or as Pure Act but as 'the act of being that He is'.

'Like whatever exists, God is by His own act-of-being; but in His case alone, we have to say that what His being is is nothing else than that by which He exists, namely the pure act of existence'. A further result is that the existence of God cannot be proved, in the strict sense, and that the five ways are not to be understood as a demonstration but rather as 'a search beyond existences which are not self-sufficient, for an existence which is self-sufficient and which, because it is so, can be the first cause of all others'. A chapter entitled 'Creation' serves Gilson as a transition from the doctrine of God to the doctrine of Nature. The notion that everything in the world depends upon God both for its nature and its existence was foreign to the Greeks, and one of Thomas' major achievements was his doctrine of concurrent causes, by which he combined the Christian doctrine of dependence with the Greek assumption of a self-sustaining cosmos. God causes everything; but he does so in a manner that preserves the potentiality and actuality proper to each thing. In this way the creature's autonomy is secured and the groundwork is laid for a doctrine of natural law.

Thomas' moral philosophy, based on his philosophy of nature, is not to be confused with what is commonly called Christian ethics, for in the Summa Thomas treats the theological virtues (faith, hope, and love) separately from the moral virtues (prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice). The law for every creature is a function of that creature's nature. Lower creatures obey it unconsciously, human beings, endowed with reason, have to 'find out what they are so that they may act accordingly' As a moral philosopher, Thomas gave full scope to all types of human fulfillment, showing princes, merchants, scholars, artists-persons of every type 'at grips with the problem of doing well whatever they have to do, and above all with the problem of problems, not to ruin the only life it is theirs to live'. Much of his practical philosophy parallels that of Aristotle. Still, there are differences, as when, in considering justice, Thomas internalizes and personalizes what for the Greeks remained primarily a civic virtue.

In his concluding chapter, 'The Spirit of Thomism', Gilson opposes Thomas' existentialism to that of S?ren Kierkegaard, (1813?– 1855), and Martin Heidegger, (1889?– 1976), but finds in it affinities to that of Blaise Pascal, (1623 – 1662), as preserving the ineffability of the individual against the tendency of reason to stop at the level of abstract essence. Viewed in this way, his philosophy is not limited by what the human mind knew about the world in the thirteenth century, no more, by what it knows in the twentieth. 'It invites us to look beyond present day science toward that primitive energy from which both knowing subject and object known arise'.

D. J. O'Connor, (1914 - 20120, in a work on Aquinas and natural law, abstracted Thomas Aquinas' views on ethics from the rest of his philosophy and undertook to interpret and criticize them in the light of contemporary philosophical assumptions. The longest chapter is given over to the problem of natural law, but others provide enough background material to make the book a suitable introduction to Aquinas' thought, which, as the author points out, has proved of interest to many contemporary philosophers who do not share his religious beliefs. In a time when, as O'Connor writes, 'fashionable and influential moral philosophers have abandoned objectivist theories of morals', Aquinas' views offer a special challenge to the critical philosopher. O'Connor does not linger over the problem of faith and reason. The only way that one could support the claim that certain truths are divinely revealed would be by producing historical evidence, such as miracles. Although Thomas says that miracles 'nourish faith by way of external persuasion', he falls back at last on grace, which, he says, is the 'chief and proper cause of faith', moving a person to assent inwardly.

This prompts in O'Connor the usual question as to how one is to judge between the claims of rival faiths. Felt conviction, he says, is not a sufficient criterion. We shall find that O'Connor raises the same objection to the theory of natural law that he brings against religious belief. All objectivist theories of morality, he says, rest on moral intuition, which is merely a private feeling, allowing of no independent test. There are, according to O'Connor, two kinds of moral intuitionism. The modern kind likens moral awareness to sensory awareness and implies that moral qualities are 'objective and directly knowable features of experience'. The analogy breaks down, however, because there is no 'acceptable and public test for resolving disagreements' about moral qualities, as there is about, say, whether a thing is yellow or merely appears so. The older kind of intuition, which underlies the theory of natural law, O'Connor finds more difficult to refute since it does not imply that moral judgments are self-evidently true but that there are self-evident moral principles, and that particular judgments are derived from these by syllogistic arguments. This kind of intuitionism raises all the questions which have traditionally divided empiricists from rationalists and nominalists from realists. O'Connor argues that if one is to maintain that moral judgments can be proved to be correct, he must present us, first, with a list of the principles which he holds to be self-evident, and second, with a set of rules by means of which he proposes to deduce secondary moral truths from the former. As to the first, O'Connor points out the ambiguities involved in calling any proposition self-evident, and shows that the ones which Thomas offers as examples ('good is to be pursued and evil is to be avoided', 'one should do evil to no man') are tautologies, true in virtue of the meaning of their terms.

As to the second, O'Connor credits Thomas with recognizing the problem, as when he distinguishes between the logical deduction of conclusions and the practical application of principles, for instance, one concludes that one must not kill from the principle that one should do harm to no man, but one applies the principle that the evil-doer should be punished by determining a suitable penalty. As O'Connor understands him, Thomas held that only the method of logical deduction preserves the force of natural law. On this ground we may ask how Thomas was able to leap from the principle that one should do harm to no man to the conclusion that one should not kill-this being the very claim which a defender of euthanasia or suicide would reject. 'And in general, no conclusions can be obtained, by derivation, from the master principle, 'Good is to be done and evil avoided,' without the help of other more disputable propositions'. Thus, despite its strong prima facie appeal to common sense, Thomism cannot stand up to modern criticism. 'The rise of natural science, mathematics, and formal logic' has made clear to us both the limits of rational argument and the kind of evidence we can appropriately use as material for reasoning. Thomas, O'Connor states, 'had the bad luck to be born too early'. Underlying his theory of law is the claim that morality must be based on metaphysics, more precisely, that knowledge of man's duties must be derived from knowledge of man's nature. The notion that there are natures or essences to be grasped by intellectual intuition, however, is unacceptable to modem man. The objection of David Hume, (1711 - 1776), to any reasoning which attempts to derive moral conclusions from factual premises applies to the theory of natural law. O'Connor allows that Thomas is in a better position than most philosophers to meet this criticism because he has grounded his account of moral dispositions in a description of human nature. We do, in fact, tend to apprehend as good those things to which our nature inclines us, but once more, says O'Connor, the principle is useless unless we are shown in detail which inclinations entail which duties. The relation between natural law and positive law is not discussed by O'Connor, except in the conclusion, where he mentions a kind of minimal natural law, developed by H. L. A. Hart, (1907 – 1992), according to which certain facts about human nature (man's vulnerability, his need for society, his limited power and foresight) make necessary certain rules for living. However, says O'Connor, although Hart has made natural law uncontroversial, he has done so by extracting from it 'the mainspring of morality'. No reasons are contained in it why anyone should act in a particular way.

'Saint Thomas d'Aquin', Fontaine de Sagesse' ('Fountain of Wisdom'), 1648, Antoine Nicolas

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I answer that:

I went into some detail concerning Thomas Aquinas' 'Summa Theologica' and finished with examples of the kind of critical responses it provokes. Now that you have read it, did anything there strike a chord? Can you remember any point that was made? Has anything registered at all? Anything that you found particularly striking and that you wanted to chew over? Anything at all? Let me alert you to a certain trick that Christian theologians and apologists like to employ albeit I know you are too smart to fall for it. Bishop Robert Barron, (1959 -), is an American prelate of the Catholic Church and YouTuber whose videos I have watched and at the end I am left feeling that I have just heard nothing at all. He likes to recount how Dominican priest and theologian Herbert McCabe, (1926?– 2001), used to engage with a number of atheists in the course of his career as a 'public intellectual' (as Barron describes him) and typically he would allow his interlocutor to present his opening statement detailing precisely why he did not believe in God. And McCabe would respond, I completely agree with you, the God you are dismissing I would dismiss too. Theologian N. T. Wright, (1948 - ), has regaled us with a personal anecdote concerning an encounter with a young undergraduate when he was chaplain at Oxford University. He explained to Wright that he need not expect to see a lot of him because he just does not believe in God, to which Wright asked him what he meant by God, and upon hearing the young man's account he responded by informing him I can assure you I don't believe in that God either.

So if a theologian or Christian apologist ever asks you what you mean by the God that you do not believe in ask them to give an account of the God they do believe in first. Barron claims that atheists are helpful in clarifying what the true god is not as they expose and undermine new forms of idolatry. Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach, (1804 -1872), which curiously Barron cites as the father of modern atheism, argued that God is a projection of our idealised self-understanding, a simulacrum of God made in the image of man, precisely what the Bible would call an idol, and for Barron such atheists as Feuerbach display idolatry. 'Assemble yourselves and come; draw near together, ye?that are?escaped of the nations: they have no knowledge that set up the wood of their graven image, and pray unto a god?that?cannot save'. ('Isaiah', 45:20). As Protestant reformer, (and hence not someone Barron quotes from but he could have done in this context, and again curiously and I do not know if this was deliberate or a mistake but he attributed this statement to John of the Cross, (1542 – 1591)), John Calvin, (1509?– 1564), said hominis ingenium perpetuam, ut ita loquar, esse idolorum fabricam, ('the human heart is a perpetual idol factory'). Note the equivocation at play here over the word 'idol', necessary if one is to charge an atheist with idolatry. Calvin continues: 'So it goes.[Foreshadowing Kurt Vonnegut? (1922 – 2007)] Man's mind, full as it is of pride and boldness, dares to imagine a god according to its own capacity; as it sluggishly plods, indeed is overwhelmed with the crassest ignorance, it conceives an unreality and an empty appearance as God. To these evils a new wickedness joins itself, that man tries to express in his work the sort of God he has inwardly conceived. Therefore the mind begets an idol; the hand gives it birth'.

According to Barron one misunderstanding that conditions everything atheists discuss is that God is a being among many, one cause amidst the range of contingent causes, a reality in the world whose existence or non-existence can be determined through rational, which for them means scientific investigation. qualitatively different dimensions of reality. Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, (1941 –2002), had asserted that given they are about qualitatively different dimensions of reality, science and religion should be considered to be two distinct fields, non-overlapping magisteria, whose authorities do not overlap (John Locke, (1632?– 1704), albeit an empiricist, said something similar in 'The Reasonableness of Christianity, as Delivered in the Scriptures', 1695. It is entirely reasonable to believe in the resurrection of Jesus and to be a Christian, indeed, a truly scientific thinker who did not believe it would be irrational, given the limits of human understanding and what the mind is capacitated to know).

Richard Dawkins, (1942 - ), is scornful. Science, he believes, can and must adjudicate God's existence concerning certain cosmological questions. As he wrote in 'The God Delusion': 'What expertise can theologians bring to deep cosmological questions that scientists cannot? In another book I recounted the words of an Oxford astronomer who, when I asked him one of those same deep questions, said: 'Ah, now we move beyond the realm of science. This is where I have to hand over to' our good friend the chaplain'. I was not quick-witted enough to utter the response that I later wrote: 'But why the chaplain? Why not the gardener or the chef?' Why are scientists so cravenly respectful towards the ambitions of theologians, over questions that theologians are certainly no more qualified to answer than scientists themselves?'

Dawkins characterises the Christian position thus: 'The God Hypothesis suggests that the reality we inhabit also contains a supernatural agent who designed the universe and - at least in many versions of the hypothesis - maintains it and even intervenes in it with miracles, which are temporary violations of his own otherwise grandly immutable laws'. And he cites theologian and Christian apologist Richard Swinburne, (1934 - ), in support of this claim. 'What the theist claims about God', said Swinburne, 'is that he does have a power to create, conserve, or annihilate anything, big or small. And he can also make objects move or do anything else…He can make the planets move in the way that Kepler discovered that they move, or make gunpowder explode when we set a match to it; or he can make planets move in quite different ways, and chemical substances explode or not explode under quite different conditions from those which now govern their behaviour. God is not limited by the laws of nature; he makes them and he can change or suspend them - if he chooses'.

For Barron however such conceptions of God make possible Dawkins' comparison to belief in God to belief in the flying spaghetti monster, a fantastical imaginary being for which there is not a trace of physical evidence, just like God in fact. God is thereby compared to some agent or entity in the universe operating alongside other agents or entities and we can explain worldly phenomena through natural causes. God is thought of as dwelling within or alongside the cosmos and is vulnerable if I may so put it to scientific explanation, He is susceptible to causal influence (Barron refers to God as He but do not you have to be an organism to have a gender?) presiding over humanity like an authoritarian dictator, an idol of the worst type. Whereas Aquinas, in the Summa, question three that deals with divine simplicity, states: 'When the existence of a thing has been ascertained there remains the further question of the manner of its existence, in order that we may know its essence. Now, because we cannot know what God is, but rather what He is not, we have no means for considering how God is, but rather how He is not. Therefore, we must consider: (1) How He is not; (2) How He is known by us; (3) How He is named'.

It can be shown how God is not, by denying Him whatever is opposed to the idea of Him, That is to say, composition, motion, and the like. Aquinas distinguished res significata and modus significandi, the thing signified and the diverse ways of signifying it. Aquinas opts for the negative path, when speaking of God he takes away from God whatever belongs to creatureliness. We can speak of God's goodness without knowing what we mean when we use the term, to say God is eternal is to say he is not in time, He is immutable because he does not change in the creaturely manner, to say he is spirit is to say he is not marked by matter. Deus absconditus, divine hiddennes: 'Truly You?are?God, who hide Yourself, O God of Israel, the Saviour!' ('Isaiah', 45:15).

The God who brought the finite universe into existence cannot be an ingredient in the universe, He is other in a way transcending all modes of otherness discoverable in creation, be it spatial difference, modal diversity, different species, variations in speed or temperature, and so on. Theologian Kathryn Tanner,?(1957 - ), has asserted that God is not simply other but otherly other. For Nicholas of Cusa, (1401 – 1464), God, though radically not the world, must still be seen as the non?aliud, the non other. (See my article A Geometry of the Absolute). Aquinas refers to God not as ens summum, the highest being, but as ipsum esse subsistens, the subsistent act to be itself, the sheer act of being itself, God is an infinitive not a noun, for if God were the highest being then He could be categorised alongside other beings, but God cannot be placed in any genus, even that of being. And creatures are analogues of God's mysterious modality of existence, the divine manner of being is simplicitas, simplicity, whereby there is no distinction between essence and existence. He cannot be defined for that would imply limitation. He does not fit into any gaps in any scientific account of things, He can never be an object of scientific investigation nor defined by an enquiring mind.

'Triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas over the Heretics', 1489 - 91, Filipino Lippi

The objective is of course to present God in a sophisticated way, for Christian apologetics is not concerned with convincing anyone that God exists but rather to give Christianity an air of intellectual respectability. But they cannot have it both ways. God is not being but the sheer act of being, or he is an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent, all loving being that has laid down a set of moral rules that have to be followed, although Christians will disagree on what they are or which are the most important, a being that answers prayers and that sent his son into this world of dismal creatures (ourselves) that we might be saved (from?). I usually eschew resorting to bringing up some standard fallacy that is learnt in Philosophy 101 and that is trotted out when objecting to an interlocutor's position, the issues are usually more complicated than that, but maybe (or maybe not) here there is an instance of the motte and bailey fallacy, named after a style of castle built upon a mount called a motte, overlooking a courtyard known as the bailey, the bailey served as a tiny, walled village complete with kitchens, shops, and barracks and which is difficult to defend against attacks, but upon being attacked the bailey's residents could retreat to the high, fortified motte which is easier to defend. Motte and bailey fallacies begin when someone presents a controversial, hard to defend point, the bailey, and then, upon having that position challenged, the arguer substitutes the weak point with a more defensible one, the motte.

The arguer can then claim that the bailey has not been refuted, because the critic refused to attack the motte. An atheist says, there is no (empirical) evidence for a God that intervenes in human affairs or in the activities of this world. The sophisticated theologian retorts, dumb atheist, educate yourself about the true nature of the God that we Christians believe in, He is not a bearded man in the sky, nor any kind of being, he is the pure act of being itself. Fair enough, the atheist can then say, God is not a being, God is the pure act of being itself. I believe in your God, and I am happy to do so because the pure act of being itself would care not a whit what highly evolved primates (ourselves) get up to in their bedrooms. The objective of course is to make the question of whether God exists a nonsensical question. But by defining God in a manner thus difficult to refute (the motte, although the difficulty arises from the definition being no more than a mouthful of air) what then are Christians praying to? 'Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy?against?the?Holy?Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men'. ('Matthew', 12:31). What does that mean? How can one blaspheme against the pure act of being itself?

And what of the negative method? Where God is concerned what he is not is clearer to us than what He is. Therefore we can say what He is not. This certainly accords with an infinite being, sorry, an infinite pure act of being, for negative facts are infinite. An actual infinite that Thomas denies can exist. God is not a tree frog, and so on. But in philosophy negative facts are no straightforward matter. If propositions are made true in virtue of corresponding to facts, then what are the truth-makers of true negative propositions such as 'God is not a tree frog’? Bertrand Russell, (1872 - 1970), argued that there must be negative facts to account for what makes true negative propositions true and false positive propositions false, but others, favouring greater parsimony with regard to their ontological commitments, have endeavoured to avoid them. Ludwig Wittgenstein, (1889 – 1951), rejected them since he preferred not to entertain the notion that the sign for negation referred to a negative element in a fact. Raphael Demos, (1892 – 1968), endeavoured to eliminate them by appealing to incompatibility facts. David Armstrong, (1926 – 2014), appealed to the totality of positive facts as the ground of the truth of true negative propositions. L. Nathan Oaklander (1945 -) and Lisa Miracchi have suggested that the absence or non-existence of the positive fact, which is not itself a further fact, is the basis of a positive proposition being false and therefore of the truth of its negation. And so it goes on. And on ...

And what of the notion that we can speak of God's goodness and so on without knowing what we mean when we use the term? Must we know what we mean? I am reminded of G.E, Moore's, (1873 – 1958), 'naturalistic fallacy' in?ethics (this is why I don't like resorting to bringing up so-called 'fallacies' in philosophical debate), that is, any endeavour to define the word?good?in terms of some natural quality, that is, a naturally occurring property or state, such as pleasure (though the argument applies to the supernatural also, the endeavour for instance to define?good?in terms of something supernatural, for instance 'what God wills').

The 'open-question argument' it came to be known as, a theory of ethics based upon intuition (something analogous to divine revelation?) and it captured the imagination of philosophers during the first half of the 20th century. But how did that happen? Intelligent, well educated people happily discussing amongst themselves something that makes no sense. Suppose for instance I show you my pen, and then ask you: 'is that good?' Surely you would want to ask: 'good for what?' Or 'good for whom?' If good is indefinable is not all use of the word merely empty chatter? Is not speaking of God's goodness without knowing what is meant by the term equally empty chatter?

'As a highly Pagan poet said to me', said G. K. Chesterton, (1874 - 1936), 'the Reformation happened because people hadn't the brains to understand Aquinas'. Does Aquinas understand Aquinas? Do Thomists? Must they know what they mean?

'Whether the angel guardian ever forsakes a man?', asked Thomas. 'It would seem that the angel guardian sometimes forsakes the man whom he is appointed to guard...?On the contrary, The demons are ever assailing us, according to 1 Peter 5:8: 'Your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, goeth about, seeking whom he may devour'. Much more therefore do the good angels ever guard us... the guardianship of the angels is an effect of Divine providence in regard to man. Now it is evident that neither man, nor anything at all, is entirely withdrawn from the providence of God: for in as far as a thing participates being, so far is it subject to the providence that extends over all being'.

'This dumb ox will fill the world with his bellowing', Albertus Magnus, (1200 - 1280), Thomas's teacher, is reported to have said in response to other of his students calling Thomas a dumb ox on account of his quietude.

'I think that the fundamental way in which we know Christianity is true is through the inner witness of the Holy Spirit', said Christian apologist, William Lane Craig, (1949 - ). 'I do not think that arguments and evidence are necessary in order for faith to be rational, or for you to know that God exists and has revealed himself in Christ. So I would say that the fundamental way we know Christianity is true is through the witness of the Holy Spirit and reason and argument then can confirm the Spirit's witness'. It would be better then if he did not present his terrible arguments for the existence of God, so terrible one would be tempted to think he is a closet atheist. Thomas himself said that one does not believe on account of arguments but on account of first truth, that is, God revealing himself, faith is not an act of philosophical knowledge, or probabilistic reasoning. Faith is not based upon philosophical or historical inquiry. Faith is a form of cognition not of this world, (?), it is literally a supernatural act born in us by the grace of the Holy Spirit. The spirit of truth works deeply inside of us always in coordination with the educational activity of the church outside of us. And it is the Holy Spirit who illumines our minds and who moves us to receive what the church teaches as the word of the living God. Were Christian apologists not to take account of this they would be much frustrated when people do not believe on account of their arguments. So would it not be better then for Aquinas to merely have spoken the word of God and moved people to the faith rather than discredit the faith with poor arguments? On the other hand, poor refutations of poor arguments, such as Dawkins presents against Thomas's arguments for the existence of God, can make such poor arguments seem stronger than they are. Hence when Christian apologists (for instance, Edward Feser, (1968 -), or Thomist YouTuber Matt Fradd) declare that atheists misunderstand Thomas's five proofs for God's existence, by atheists they mean Dawkins. I propose to go through all five arguments, assuming the role of the roaring lion, appropriately enough, the adversary, taking on the bellowing ox, Thomas, and we will see who comes out on top, albeit Thomas has the advantage of having his motte to retreat to, God is the pure act of being itself and so on. Let the siege commence.

To be continued ...

'Saint Thomas Aquinas', Antoni Viladomat, (1678-1755)