Transcript

Lecture 5 is on St. Thomas Aquinas versus Averroes on faith and reason.

Among philosophers today, there are still Platonists, and Aristotelians, and Augustinians, and Cartesians, and Humians, and Kantians, and Hegelians, and atheistic existentialists, and theistic existentialists, and Marxists, and deconstructionists, and pragmatists, and phenomenologists, and positivists, and skeptics, but there are even more Thomists.

Why does the philosophy of St. Thomas have such staying power?

Even seven centuries later, why has his philosophy shown itself more capable of assimilating new data from modern science and from new philosophical developments such as personalism, existentialism, and phenomenology than any other philosophy?

The first reason has to be simply because it's true and because truth never contradicts truth.

And the second reason is that Aquinas combined and synthesized and reconciled or married philosophy and theology, reason and faith, better than anyone else ever did.

That's the main point I'll try to show in this lecture.

And within philosophical reason, he also combined reason's two primary ideals better than anyone else ever did.

Clarity and profundity.

Exact logic and intuitive wisdom.

analysis and synthesis, the details and the big picture.

No other philosopher who might rival him in clarity can rival him in profundity.

And no other philosopher who might rival him in profundity can rival him in clarity.

British analytic philosophers today give you clear, careful logic, but not much profundity, while continental philosophers, especially phenomenologists and existentialists, Aquinas gives you both.

Many thinkers explore the supernatural but ignore the natural, and many more explore the natural but ignore the supernatural.

For instance, the most famous of all philosophical paintings, the School of Athens, has Plato and Aristotle walking together, Plato with his eyes upward on the heavens and Aristotle with his eyes downward towards the earth.

But Aquinas explores and defends both, for one of his basic principles and assumptions is that grace perfects nature, as light perfects all colors and shapes.

God's supernatural revelation does not subvert or ignore or demean or lessen the value of the whole world of nature and natural reason.

It enhances and perfects it.

That is why faith, which is our soul's connection to God, perfects reason, which is our soul's connection to nature.

Aquinas also combines uncommon intellectual brilliance and uncommon common sense.

Like the sea, he is both clear and shining on the surface and almost inexhaustibly deep.

Like Aristotle, he habitually avoids opposite extremes, either-ors.

For, as Chesterton says, there are always at least two angles at which you can fall, but only one at which you can stand upright.

For instance, most philosophers are very intelligent, but lacking in common sense.

Most people are very commonsensical, but not very intelligent.

Aquinas is both.

Let me give you three very short examples of Aquinas' clear and simple common sense.

They are also examples of his union of clarity and profundity.

There are only three examples out of thousands.

First, his defense of free will.

He writes, Man has free will, otherwise all praising, blaming, counseling, commanding, rewarding, and punishment are meaningless and in vain.

Second, his explanation of the power of the temptations of the flesh.

He says, Man cannot live without joy, that is why one deprived of true spiritual joy will go over to carnal pleasures.

Third, one of his arguments for life after death.

He says, nature makes nothing in vain, thus man's natural desire for immortality is a sign of its reality.

St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas are certainly the two greatest Christian philosophers, the twin peaks of a mountain range of Christian thought.

Augustine is the great philosopher of love and Aquinas is the great philosopher of truth.

And there is no contradiction here, since for both thinkers these are their two absolutes.

Remember that medieval statues of Augustine always show his two hands containing the open book of truth and the burning heart of love.

And remember that Augustine's first conversion of mind was when he read Cicero's Exhortation to Philosophy and discovered that truth was absolute and devoted his whole heart to it.

Aquinas has those same two absolutes, and he shows how they are one because he says both that truth is the thing we must love the most, and that love is the highest truth.

He says that it is a greater good to love God than to know God, because we can love him totally, but we cannot know him totally.

He compares the two by observing that love shapes the lover into the form of the beloved, While knowledge shapes the object known to the mental limitations of the knower.

And that is why it is better to know a stone than to love a stone, but better to love God than to know God.

For when we know a stone, we raise it up to the level of human thought, of idea, of the human spirit.

We make it a part of our thought life.

But when we love a stone, we lower ourselves to its level.

We become more stone-like.

But when we love God, we become more God-like.

We raise ourselves up to a more superhuman level.

However, when we know God, we know him by human analogies and in human terms, so we drag him down to our meager level, so to speak, because our knowledge is so limited.

For instance, we speak of God as changing from being our enemy to being our friend when we convert and repent.

But God does not really change, only we do.

As the sun does not move around the earth, as it seems to, the earth moves around the sun.

Augustine and Aquinas both believe that both truth and love are absolutes and merit our unlimited and absolute allegiance.

We should never compromise either, because they are what God is made of, so to speak.

They are divine attributes.

And they are the respective objects and ends and perfections of the two powers of the soul that constitute the image of God in us, the intellect and the will, the head and the heart, the power to know and the power to love.

That's probably why God gave us two great philosophers, not just one, and he gave us two sexes, not just one.

Augustine is the supreme champion of love and Aquinas is the supreme champion of truth.

Augustine has a radically misunderstood reputation as a kind of puritanical killjoy because he converted out of the same sexual addiction that most people in our society have.

They have converted into that by their embrace of a sexual revolution.

Similarly, Aquinas has a radically misunderstood reputation as a head-in-the-cloud intellectual that can be understood only by other intellectuals.

This is simply not true.

In fact, once you understand a few key terms in his technical philosophical vocabulary, which comes from Aristotle, Aquinas is one of the simplest and clearest and easiest to understand philosophers who ever lived.

Surprisingly easy to read and understand, and always commonsensical.

That's the main point of the best book ever written about Aquinas, G.K. Chesterton's St. Thomas Aquinas the Dumb-Ox. Dumb-Ox was what Aquinas was called by his fellow students because he seldom spoke in class.

That was not because he understood nothing, but because he understood almost everything.

I can't resist the temptation to prove my point from the words of Aquinas himself instead of using my words, but that will entail reading to you a whole page from Aquinas just to show you how clear and simple he is.

It's about the topic I want to center on, about the relation between faith and reason, religion and science, theology and philosophy.

I take time to read it all because it addresses and refutes the most popular superstition of our culture about the historical change between our age and that of St. Thomas, which is the idea that the history of our modern civilization since Aquinas It centers on the ever increasing war between science and religion.

This is a totally fake war without a single casualty.

That claim may sound surprising, but when, instead of talking about the two vague abstractions called science and religion, when we ask the question, which dogma of which religion has been disproved by which discovery of which science, and when did that discovery happen, name the scientist and the discovery and the data or the experiment or the calculation that logically disproved the religious dogma, when we ask that question, we find that no one has ever answered it.

So, it is deeply relevant to our times and our culture for us to center on Aquinas' argument that faith and reason can never contradict each other.

And that assumption is the foundation of the vast enterprise of his lifetime of work, to show that the two massive and complex bodies of thought, on the one hand, everything known by faith is supernaturally revealed in Christian theology, and on the other hand, everything proved by natural reason alone Here's a quotation from the beginning of his shorter Summa, the Summa contra Gentiles, which means the summary against the unbelievers.

The first part of the quote is about the absolute priority of truth.

He writes, The end of each thing is that which is intended by its author, but the author of the universe is an intellect.

The ultimate end of the universe must therefore be the good of an intellect.

This good is truth.

Truth must consequently be the end of the whole universe.

And the consideration of the wise man aims principally at truth.

So it is that, according to his own statement, divine wisdom testifies that he has assumed flesh and come into the world in order to make the truth known.

For this was I born, and for this I came into the world, that I should give testimony to the truth.

Next comes a distinction between two truths.

Aquinas will vociferously oppose the so-called double-truth theory of his contemporary, Sieger of Brabant, Here, Aquinas distinguishes between two ways God made truth known, namely by reason and by revelation, and two ways we can know the truth, by faith and by reason, but not between two truths.

He says, The way of making truth known is not always the same.

There is a two-fold mode of truth in what we profess about God.

For some truths about God exceed all the ability of the human reason, that is, to discover, to comprehend, or to prove.

Such is the truth that God is triune.

But there are some truths which the natural reason is able to reach.

Such are that God exists, that he is one, and the like.

In fact, such truths have been proved demonstratively by the philosophers It is fitting that both of these truths be proposed to man by God for belief.

This point must first be shown concerning the truths that are open to the inquiry of reason, for it might seem that since such a truth can be known by reason, it was superfluous for God to reveal it to man through supernatural inspiration.

But if this truth were left solely as a matter of inquiry for human reason, three awkward consequences would follow.

The first is that few men would possess the knowledge of God, for there are three reasons why most men are cut off from the fruit of diligent inquiry which is needed for the discovery of such truth.

Some do not have the physical disposition.

Others are cut off from this pursuit by the necessities imposed on them by their daily lives.

And finally, there are some who are cut off by laziness.

The second awkward effect is that those who would come to discover the truth about God would only reach it after a great deal of time.

The reasons for this are several.

There is the profundity of this truth, and there is also the fact that in youth, when the soul is more swayed by the passions, it is not in a suitable state for knowing such lofty truths.

The third awkward effect is this.

The investigation of human reason usually has errors in its use, With the result that many would still hold in doubt things that have in fact been truly proved, especially since among those reputed to be wise, each one teaches his own brand of doctrine.

It was beneficial, therefore, that the divine mercy provided for instructions to believe by faith even truths that human reason is able to reach, so that all could easily share in the knowledge of God without uncertainty and without error.

And the truths that human reason is not able to reach are also fittingly proposed to us for belief.

For no one tends with desire and zeal toward something that is not known to him.

But men are ordained by divine providence to a higher good than human fragility can experience in this present life.

That is why it was necessary for the human mind to be called to something higher than the human reason here and now can reach.

So that I would learn to desire and tend with zeal toward something that surpasses the whole state of this present life.

Now, this logical and theoretical explanation of God's strategy is then supplemented by a psychological and practical one.

Aquinas writes, Another benefit that comes from the revelation to men of truths that exceed human reason is the curing of presumption, which is the mother of error.

For some have such a presumptuous opinion of their own ability that they deem themselves able to measure the nature of everything.

In their estimation, everything is true that seems to them so, and everything is false that does not.

In order that the mind might be freed from this presumption and come to a humble inquiry after truth, it was necessary that some things should be revealed to men by God that would completely surpass his intellect.

And then comes a kind of manifesto or charter for Christian philosophy that refutes the 18th century Enlightenment idea famously summarized by Alexander Pope in his Essay on Man, when he said, C.S. Lewis replied to that that the proper study of mankind is everything, especially God.

And St. Thomas, quoting Aristotle, says pretty much the same thing.

He says, There was a certain Simonides who exhorted people to put aside the inquiry into divine things and apply their talents to human occupations.

He wrote, He who is a human should know human things, and he who is a mortal things that are mortal.

Against Simonides, Aristotle says that man should draw himself towards that which is immortal and divine as much as he can.

And he says that although what we know of the higher realities is very little, yet that little is prized and desired more than all the knowledge we have about less noble things.

And now comes the bottom line, that these truths can never contradict each other, that there can never be any true war between true science, including philosophical science, and true religion.

Aquinas writes, Now, although the truth of the Christian faith surpasses the capacity of the reason, nevertheless those truths that human reason is by nature endowed to know cannot be opposed to the truth of the Christian faith for two reasons.

First, what the human reason knows by nature is so true that it is not possible to think of such truths as false.

He is thinking of such truths as 2 plus 2 equals 4, that the immortal is greater than the mortal.

Nor, he says, is it permissible to believe as false that which is known by faith in divine revelation.

And since only the false is opposed to the true, as is clearly evident from their definitions, it is impossible that the truths known by faith should be opposed to the truths that human reason knows by nature.

A second reason is that whatever is introduced into the mind of the student by the teacher Now, the knowledge of principles that our human reason assures us of by our very nature have been implanted in us by God, who is the author of our nature, and these principles are therefore also contained in the divine wisdom.

Hence, whatever is opposed to them is opposed to the divine wisdom and therefore cannot come from God.

Therefore, that which we hold by faith as divinely revealed cannot be contrary to that which we know by natural reason.

Finally, from this comes what may seem to many people today an apparently far too optimistic practical conclusion or corollary, but it's one which logically and necessarily follows.

Aquinas says, from this we deduce the following conclusion.

Whatever arguments are brought forward against any of the doctrines of the faith are conclusions that are incorrectly and illogically deduced from the first principles of reason that are embedded in our nature.

Such conclusions do not have the force of proofs, and such arguments must be either only probable or logically fallacious, and therefore there always exists the possibility to answer them.

This last point does not mean that any one individual can answer all the questions.

It's reason, not reasoners, that is trustable.

There's nothing wrong with the sword, the instrument, but with the swordsman, the user.

Aquinas' argument means simply that no argument can prove any essential dogma of Christianity to be false, because it is not false.

And falsehood and truth are mutually exclusive.

But truth and truth are not.

For truth cannot exist with falsehood, only with truth.

So, faith can marry reason, but truth cannot marry falsehood.

It is significant that Aquinas' opponents usually attack him for two opposite and mutually exclusive reasons.

First, that he is too humble in his estimation of human reason, and too reliant on faith in divine revelation.

And second, that he is too optimistic about human reason's ability to disprove every possible argument against every doctrine of the faith.

But if God exists, then the humble conformity of our fallible mind to his infallible mind is utterly rational.

That answers the first objection.

And, on the other hand, if the faith is true, it can never be proved to be false, since falsehood and truth are opposites.

That answers the second objection.

Aquinas is history's greatest matchmaker between two of humanity's greatest enterprises, faith and reason.

When we speak of this marriage, we are not speaking of the marriage between the psychological act of faith, or believing in God, and therefore in all that God reveals, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the psychological act of reason, that is, of understanding and judging and proving.

The two psychological acts cannot marry or mate, Any more than cats or dogs can.

Believing and proving are an either-or.

If we can prove a truth by reason, we don't need faith to come to know it.

And if we do need faith to know it, that's because reason is insufficient to know it.

No, when Aquinas marries faith and reason, he is marrying the objective contents of the faith and of human reason.

The objects known by both, rather than the subjective acts of believing and proving.

He's showing that all the truths known by faith, on the one hand, the whole of the Christian faith, and all the truths known by reason, on the other hand, fit into the same real world without any contradictions, since truth cannot contradict truth.

Now, this marriage is an enormous enterprise because both the bride and the groom are enormous.

The faith includes all the truths revealed by God.

The Trinity, the Incarnation, God's attributes, creation, Divine Providence, God's Love, Salvation, the Last Judgment, Heaven and Hell and Purgatory, the Church, the Sacraments, the Theological Virtues, the Mystical Union and the Beatific Vision, Sin and Salvation, and Justice and Mercy, and God's Commandments for Individuals and Societies, the whole package infinitely more complex and mysterious and beautiful than a Gothic cathedral.

In fact, more so than the entire natural universe.

And what we can know by reason is also enormous, because it includes, well, everything we can know by common sense, by all the sciences, and by good philosophy.

And philosophy includes logic and methodology and metaphysics, form and matter and substance and accident and essence and existence and being and becoming, and cosmology, space and time and matter and the four causes.

and anthropology, soul and body and reason and will and passions and immortality and freedom and epistemology, senses and intellect and abstraction and universals and particulars and the nature of truth and the refutation of skepticism and subjectivism and ethics, good and evil and right and wrong and obligation and conscience and duty and the four cardinal virtues and the natural law and social ethics and aesthetics and philosophy of history and politics and education and, well, everything.

Marrying these two sets of ideas is like marrying two galaxies.

The only reason Aquinas undertakes this enormous task is that he knows at the outset that it is possible, because he knows the one foundation of all truth, which is God.

As philosopher Arthur Holmes said, all truth is God's truth.

Now, let's move from this main point, this general principle about faith and reason, Aristotle's works had just been rediscovered after being lost for centuries during the Dark Ages, and it was clear to Aquinas that Aristotle was the greatest philosopher who had ever lived.

But Aristotle contradicted Christianity on at least three important issues.

First, he apparently proved that the universe could have no beginning, but was eternal, not created.

Because nothing can come out of nothing.

Second, that the soul was not immortal, but mortal, since it was the form of the body.

And third, that there was no such thing as divine providence, because a perfect God would know and love only perfect objects, only what was worth knowing and loving, which was only himself.

Two other problematic ideas, both somewhat more technical and philosophical, came from the Muslim philosophers' synthesis of Aristotle and Plotinus, the founder of Neoplatonism.

In the Islamic world, philosophy was centuries ahead of Christian philosophy, having had both Aristotle and Plotinus long before Western Europe did.

According to this Neoplatonized interpretation of Aristotle that prevailed among Muslim philosophers, especially Avicenna and Averroes, The first agent of all human thinkings was a single active intellect below God, but above individual human beings.

In other words, when we know any timeless truths, we do not each have our own active intellect, but we receive these ideas from the single active intellect that was also, according to the latest and most fashionable astronomical science of the time, the angel that accounted for the movements of the moon around the earth.

There's a lesson here about not making one's philosophy dependent on the always-revisable latest theories in the current science, no matter how popular they may be.

On all five of these issues, Aquinas had to take on and refute the greatest mind that ever lived, and he had to do it by reason alone, not just by asserting by faith that God had revealed that Aristotle was wrong, because that would not be a marriage but a separation.

He had to prove it, and that's exactly what he did.

But the crucial point is the fact that Aquinas charged into the battle instead of retreating from it.

The strategy he used to win the battle is important too, of course, the arguments, because rational argument was still in those days at least believed to be a road to truth, as with Socrates, and not just a victory, as with the Sophists.

But the most important point is that Aquinas preserved the whole basic enterprise of the faith-reason marriage against the threat of divorce.

The divorce did not happen until later, especially in modern times.

For Aquinas, there were three possible responses to this crisis in the marriage of faith and reason that came from the philosophy of Aristotle.

We could call them fideism, rationalism, and synthesis.

Let's look carefully at these three options, because they remain the three options today in our culture, though they come from other sources than Aristotle.

Aquinas was apparently the contradiction between divine revelation and Aristotelian reason.

Two of the three responses, fideism and rationalism, appeared in Islamic philosophy in the centuries earlier than Aquinas, and these two are the most popular today in our culture as well.

There was no third option, no Aquinas in the Muslim world, to marry faith and reason as Aquinas did.

And that is why most Muslim philosophers to this day fit into one of these two camps, as do some Christian thinkers, mainly Protestants, but also some Catholics.

We could call them fundamentalists and modernists, if we like sloppy slogans.

More exactly, they are irrationalism and rationalism.

Irrationalism sees reliance on reason as either worthless or impious and renounces it.

Among eighth-century Muslim philosophers, this was the option taken by al-Ash'ari and the Asharites.

It was taken in reaction against the earlier attempt of al-Kindi and the Mu'tazilite school to use reason to interpret and understand and defend the Qur'an.

But al-Ash'ari taught that no attempt should be made to marry philosophical reason and faith in the Qur'an, and the ultimate reason for that was his theology of voluntarism, the priority of the will rather than the reason, not only in man, but first of all in God.

That God's will is so free that it is not subject to reason at all, and that therefore an act is good only because God wills it, not because of its own nature, as we can know that nature by reason.

In other words, that with God literally might make right.

So we should feel no desire to rely on reason because God himself is irrational.

There is no natural moral law known by reason, according to the Asherites.

Another reason why the Asherites thought that reason was worthless was because they said that all events in nature are directly and immediately and supernaturally caused by God, And that what seem to be natural causes, which we could investigate by natural reason, are only occasions for God to act by sheer power and will.

For instance, when fire burns, it is not the fire, but God that makes the heat.

And when I will to move my hand, it is only God, not I, who moves my hand and my will.

This was later called occasionalism, and it undercuts human reason, both in theology and morality, and also in physical science.

The other answer that appeared in the Muslim world, which was not popular among ordinary people, but was popular among the elite philosophers, could be labeled rationalism instead of irrationalism.

It came above all from Averroes.

Averroes responded to the crisis of reason versus faith, Aristotle versus the Koran, not by correcting Aristotle, as Aquinas did, nor by ignoring and forbidding him, as the fundamentalists did, but by using Aristotle to correct the orthodox interpretation of the Qur'an.

In other words, this Muslim rationalist assumed, as did al-Ash'ari, the irrationalist, that there were real contradictions between faith and reason, between the Qur'an as divine revelation and Aristotle as the highest achievement of human reason.

And this is the key assumption that Aquinas denied.

In making that assumption, Averroes, unlike Al-Ash'ari, corrected the Qur'an in the light of Aristotle instead of vice versa.

Averroes did this, and many later Christian and Jewish rationalists like Kant and Spinoza did it too, by making the truth of his Islamic religion esoteric instead of exoteric, understandable only by the elite intellectuals, not by ordinary people.

He distinguished three different levels of people, and taught what was later called a theory of double truth, or more exactly, for Averroes, a triple truth, three different and incompatible levels of truth.

The vast majority of men fit into what he called men of exhortation, who lived by emotion rather than reason, and who should be given ideology, oratory, and rhetoric rather than philosophy and logic.

The masses believe the Quran and interpret it literally, and we should be content with them, and with that, because that's the best they could do.

We could see them as intellectual three-year-olds who believed in a literal Santa Claus, and rightly so, because it made them more happy and more good, and they couldn't understand anything higher than that.

The elite few at the top are what Averroes called the men of demonstration, that is, philosophers who can understand logic and demand logically certain proofs everywhere, even in religion.

They understand Aristotle, and they understand that Aristotle's reasons cannot be topped or refuted.

They therefore interpret the Quran symbolically, and not literally, in every place where it contradicts Aristotle, especially regarding the four most important contradictions between Aristotle and the Quran that we defined earlier, the creation of the universe, the immortality of the individual soul, and divine providence and knowledge of our detailed little individual lives.

and also about the individuality of the active intellect.

In between these two classes of men, between the religionists and the philosophers, Averroes put the theologians, whom Averroes said are satisfied with inconclusive arguments, arguments from fittingness, merely probable arguments.

And these people think that they have supported their faith with reasoning.

But it is the reasoning of children.

The theologians attempt to blend faith and reason, and that can only lead to confusion, says Averroes.

Averroes claims that he is a good Muslim and believes everything in the Qur'an, but he claims that all the prophets of the Qur'an, including Muhammad, were sent to teach truth symbolically to the masses, not rationally to mature philosophers.

While Aristotle knows the mind of God better than these.

Averroes is the prototype of modernist Christians.

The only difference is that the thing today that trumps divine revelation and demands that it be reduced to mere symbolism and not literal truth is not Aristotle, but at least three other things.

The first is not modern science, but scientism, which rejects the supernatural, which is like rejecting the existence of biological males because of its vastly improved knowledge of females.

The second is modern secular humanism, which defends human pride and criticizes Christian humility, the secret of all the saints.

And the third, and the most rapidly effective of all, is the sexual revolution, which rejects the 4,000-year-old moral philosophy common to Judaism and Christianity whenever it comes to anything sexual.

The philosopher in the Christian West, who taught essentially the same thing in Aquinas' day as Averroes, was Ciger of Brabant, In other words, truth is relative.

so that both the philosopher and the theologian had the right to say, well, that's your truth, but not my truth.

That's not an old 13th century heresy.

It's a very modern orthodoxy among the secular elite.

Aquinas was consistently polite and bent over backward to find some truth in the many errors of all his opponents.

But his attitude towards that idea was not only uncompromising, but vociferous and even personal.

Because there was no Aquinas in the Muslim world, the irrationalism of the fundamentalists and the rationalism of the modernists were the only two alternatives.

And fundamentalism became the reigning orthodoxy among most Muslims and remains so today.

But largely because of Aquinas, though not only through him, mainline Christian philosophy has staked out a middle way, an alternative which accepts both reason and faith and reconciles them.

That's why I read that long quotation from Aquinas, because it defended the foundational belief of the whole mainline enterprise of medieval Christian thought, that all truth comes from a God who does not deceive anyone, or teach mutually exclusive truths to two different levels of mankind, or speak out of two sides of his mouth, but a God who is the single author and authority behind all truth.

The issue ultimately is not just about faith and reason, about how man knows truth, but about truth itself and about God, because God is truth.

Aquinas was God's great warrior, the Saint Michael the Archangel in the world of thought.