St. Thomas Aquinas by G. K. Chesterton is unique among Aquinas biographies because it seamlessly blends a discussion of his life with an introduction to his thought. Some books treat merely of his life and many more go into detailed explanations of his thought over several hundred pages. Chesterton, however, manages in less than two hundred pages to give us an accurate portrait of Aquinas the man while lucidly explaining the rudiments of his thought. "I have taken the view," he writes in the Introduction, "that the biography is an introduction to the philosophy, and that the philosophy is an introduction to the theology; and that I can only carry the reader just beyond the first stage of the story."[1] In other words, what Aquinas' believed was downstream from who he was, and the best way to begin grasping the former is to have an even better grasp of the latter.
With this in mind, Chesterton begins by comparing St. Thomas with St. Francis of Assisi. While St. Francis played a major role in developing the Catholic devotional life, St. Thomas played a major role in developing the Catholic intellectual life. Since both lives are crucial to the life of the Church and to mankind in general, we need holy men and women to show us how to live them. Sometimes we need an exemplar of the devotional life and sometimes we need an exemplar of the intellectual life. According to Chesterton, a nineteenth century starved of romance by the Enlightenment embraced St. Francis while an early twentieth century starved of reason by Romanticism is looking to St. Thomas.[2] It is therefore as a guide to healthy reasoning that Chesterton interested in St. Thomas and this is the St. Thomas he attempts to display to his audience.
Born to a noble family related to the Holy Roman Emperor and the King of France, St. Thomas could have had everything he desired on earth. Since he showed an inclination for religious matters, his family decided to educate him at Monte Cassino and arrange for him to become Abbot of that distinguished monastery. Young Thomas, however, decided to become a Dominican Friar, much to the consternation of his family who locked him up in one of their fortresses. So passionate was he about his vocation that he chased away with a firebrand a prostitute whom his family had sent to tempt him. Having somehow escaped from his fortress prison, Thomas arrived in Paris where he enrolled in the classes of St. Albert the Great. Regarded as a "dumb ox" at first because of his size and taciturn nature, his simple solutions to complex problems soon shocked his classmates and St. Albert himself. Together with St. Albert, he would turn Catholic philosophy away from Platonic separation of Forms and matter toward Aristotle's progression from matter to form.
The Church Fathers had adopted Plato's theory of Forms as the rational basis for their belief in God because they regarded God as the personification of each ideal Form. This system failed to provide an effective counter argument to dualists who believed that the material world was evil and only the world of Forms was good. By turning to Aristotle and treating the material world as the matter from which the mind abstracted form, St. Thomas proved that it served as the gateway to the spiritual. Chesterton regards this development as a revolution that changed the course of Catholic thought forever.
Chesterton regards St. Thomas' establishment of the reality of abstract concepts as one of his greatest achievements. By doing so, the Angelic Doctor avoided the extremes of those who doubt the senses and those who trust nothing but the senses. The senses feed the material world to the mind which abstracts the essence of each object from sense information. This leads the mind to regard God as the One Being in whom essence and existence are One because every other essence participates in His existence. Once we know God as our efficient and final cause, we can regard man as a person with dignity because "man must bear a likeness to God in the way that effects bear a likeness to their cause."[3] Chesterton regards the errors of his time, on both extremes, as efforts to pretend that some aspect of reality does not exist, so that they do not have to arrive at God. As a result, they also fail to arrive at the truth about man. Only St. Thomas takes mental processes to their logical conclusions and arrives at what Chesterton calls "the permanent philosophy."
As one commentator writes, "The genius of Chesterton's St. Thomas Aquinas lies in his unerring intuition that what makes the 'perennial philosophy' truly perennial is its capacity for anticipating each novel twist of sophistry by which intellectual pride attempts to evade the reality of God."[4] By introducing us to the absent-minded theologian who was also a practical realist, Chesterton attracts us to the paradoxical but very real earthiness that leads us upward to eternity. He thus gets to the heart of St. Thomas' whole belief system in a few short chapters.
[1] G.K. Chesterton, introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 18.
[2] G.K. Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 25.
[3] Jason Lloyd, "Let There Be Justice: A Thomistic Assessment of Utilitarianism and Libertarianism," Texas Review of Law and Politics 8, no. 1 (2003), 249.
[4] R.V. Young, "Chesterton's Paradoxes and Thomist Ontology," Renascence 49, no. 1 (1996), 76.
No comments:
Post a Comment