The Darkness and the Light: Aquinas in Conversation

Transcription

1 ANDREW DAVISON & JOHN HUGHES! The Darkness and the Light: Aquinas in Conversation Since the beginning of Lent term 2014, a group of graduate students have been meeting fortnightly to discuss selected questions from Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologiae. The lively and enjoyable conversations, led by Andrew Davison and John Hughes, have been a most fruitful doorway into a deeper interaction with Thomas. The following interview provides a taste of some of the discussions. The questions asked are deliberately pointed, almost polemical, in order to get the discussion going. JH It s been such a pleasure to suggest some passages of Aquinas, some familiar and others less familiar, and to read them with graduate students from a variety of academic disciplines and confessional backgrounds. AD The group has been particularly sparky, and I think that is because Aquinas hasn t been treated as a sacred oracle, but as an ideal person to think alongside. I would say that the great distinction in Thomism, to the present day, is between theologians who see him as the place to end and other who see him as an ideal place to begin. JH Yes, it s not as if this group has been like some 1920s seminary class, learning answers by rote! It s been a very creative

2 106 ANDREW DAVISON & JOHN HUGHES and open engagement with one of the most extraordinary of theological minds. So, we come to the first question that the students posed. Was Aquinas a Platonist or an Aristotelian? JH The answer has to be both, as these two readings of Aquinas are a false opposition, born of mid-twentieth-century debates, when a more Platonic-Augustinian reading of Thomas (Henri de Lubac, Étienne Gilson, Josef Pieper, Jacques Maritain) developed in reaction to the dry Neo-Scholastic Aristotelianism of an earlier generation of Thomists. But of course the opposition of Plato and Aristotle goes back at least to the Renaissance (think of Raphael s School of Athens with Plato the mystic pointing up to heaven while Aristotle the scientist points down to the world) and does have some basis in their different emphases. Aquinas does stand at a dramatic moment in the development of Christian philosophy, when the basically Platonist tradition had to respond to challenges from a revived Aristotelianism. While I tend personally to be sympathetic to the more theological readings of Aquinas coming out of the Augustinian-Platonic ressourcement tradition which has dominated in Cambridge theology (with Nicholas Lash, Janet Soskice, and John Milbank) I can t deny that for Aquinas Aristotle is the philosopher. I think his genius was to develop the (mainly Platonist) Christian philosophical tradition to respond to the challenge of radical Aristotelianism (indeed more recent scholarship shows how Plato and Aristotle were mixed up all along in their medieval reception). AD Yes, and when we consider Plato and Aristotle, and Aquinas, in comparison to other, more modern views [JH: and ancient ones!], it seems all the more short-sighted to oppose

3 The Darkness and the Light 107 Aristotle to Plato, ignoring the profound similarities of outlook. Both, after all, are profoundly realist: I think of Lloyd Gerson here, with his Ancient Epistemology (Cambridge, 2009) and the impishly titled Aristotle and Other Platonists (Ithaca, 2005). That isn t to efface the differences of emphasis between the two thinkers. But, in any case, we so often find that Aquinas doesn t slavishly follow one or the other, and the way in which he goes beyond either, or modifies either, in a direction that he thinks is more faithful to the Christian theological vision, seems to me to be the basis for his greatness and the fact that he instinctively knows what to take from which of these two philosophers. As I like to put it, Aquinas is Platonic in his structure and Aristotelian in his detail. Discussion of Plato and Aristotle in Aquinas is somewhat hampered by Aquinas own knowledge of these traditions. All arrogance aside, we have to say that today we have a much better grasp of the shape of the Platonic lineage, in particular, than Aquinas did. When he mentions the Platonists by name it is usually to criticise them, and yet his thought is shaped by themes from Pseudo-Dionysius and Augustine, to name just two sources, who are more profoundly Platonic than perhaps Aquinas could have realised. JH The point about the unity of Plato and Aristotle seems to me particularly clear in relation to ethics, as Robert Spaemann points out (trans. Happiness and Benevolence (Notre Dame, 2000)). Really the contrast is not between Aristotle and Plato, but anciently between them and the Stoics on the one hand and the Epicureans on the other; just as today it s not really about the Utilitarians versus the Kantians but about both of them versus the classical Platonic- Aristotelian-Judaeo-Christian tradition: both Plato and Aristotle are ethical realists or eudaemonists, in a way that, as the Church Fathers realised, aligns so naturally with Christianity that it seems providential!

4 108 ANDREW DAVISON & JOHN HUGHES Whether Aquinas is overly cataphatic? AD OK cataphatic, meaning apt to make positive or descriptive comments about the nature of God. This is one area of Aquinas thought where, it seems to me, his mood can change between different articles. This might follow from the impulses of his two great sources: the Bible and Christian Platonism. The former is a backstop for the possibility of revelation (but not without a sense of transcendence); the latter, especially as Neoplatonism, is more negative or apophatic (but not without a sense that something transcendent perhaps the Forms can be encountered in a mediated way). JH Yes, I think once again we can speak of the historical swinging of the Thomist pendulum. So a certain sort of reading of Aquinas dominant until the mid-twentieth century represented him as the supreme example of Christian rationalism, proving God by the five ways and so on. And yes, of course, the Summa is an extraordinary achievement of human reason, and is symptomatic of the more systematic and analytic method which developed in the new universities. Yet at the same time, the rationalist interpretation of Aquinas was very much influenced by the sort of Cartesian rationalism to which it was responding. So when many Christians (particularly Eastern Orthodox and Protestants) decided to attack Aquinas for hyper-rationalism this seems to completely miss the point. In fact, the Summa is, as we have been reminded by Pieper, Anna Williams, Denys Turner, and others, very much influenced by Christian mystical traditions (especially Pseudo-Dionysius). And for all Aquinas emphasis on the cataphatic, his doctrine of God is all about being united as to one unknown (Ia 12, 13, ad 1). AD OK, but that particular quotation becomes an objection in the ST, and one that s not completely upheld in Thomas response! I

5 The Darkness and the Light 109 come back to the point about revelation, and that we need to move beyond the opposition of cataphatic and apophatic as if one had to be one or the other. Aquinas has a very positive view of what we can know about God, primarily because of revelation, yet he will also write that even in relation to revealed things, God is only ever known qua human modes of knowing. We might posit that he is therefore simultaneously more rationalist and more intellectually circumspect than the traditions that might typically criticise him on this front. JH Fair point! Some of the negative readings of Aquinas do rather over-egg the pudding. Both metaphysically, because of analogy, and Biblically, because of grace, he is definitely more cataphatic than for example Maimonides. And I think you re right that the two come together. It s not like the so-called negative theology of Kant, where reason is all too clear and God all too obscure. Rather for Aquinas, both the darkness and the light go all the way up and all the way down, as it were. AD So he says that even when it comes to revealed things we only know as far as we re led by the hand by the senses and that there is a mystery to the most humble natural thing: he points out that the house fly intrinsically exceeds human knowledge. JH Exactly! As much as I might prefer Platonic readings of Aquinas, this point about us only knowing things through the senses is one where Aquinas is at his most Aristotelian. Although I would say that this is in fact part of his properly radical Christian materialism and particularism, which is in fact a use of Aristotle against certain of Aquinas own contemporaries who stood for an extreme Aristotelianism (the Latin Averroists, who believed that God could not know material particulars). Aquinas, as a Christian, insists that every hair of our head is numbered.

6 110 ANDREW DAVISON & JOHN HUGHES AD And that point about a certain negative dimension or mystery to even the most mundane things rests upon his Platonism. The deepest truth about anything is the truth of what it receives from God, which is the basis of its unfathomability. This absolutely fundamental, indeed precisely constitutive, reception is what we mean by participation. That is one of the more Platonic elements to Aquinas doctrine of creation, which Pieper (again) helped us see, and Louis-Bertrand Geiger and Cornelio Fabro... JH...and Catherine Pickstock and Rudi te Velde more recently. I believe you might have a book on that very topic in progress. And it s also worth saying that it seems to me that the mystical element to Aquinas is more about the darkness of our batlike sight in the face of God s dazzling light, rather than some proto- Derridean celebration of darkness in itself. God is absolutely knowable, even if only to himself. In this sense, Aquinas is certainly cataphatic! Whether Aquinas category of analogy is an unsatisfyingly vague middle ground between univocity and equivocity? AD Well, as someone who would single out Ia 13, the question on analogy, as just about the most profoundly perspective-changing, indeed life-changing, texts that I have read over the course of my life, I m not going to agree that it is either unsatisfying or vague. JH I think it s actually rather a perverse and counter-intuitive obsession with the univocal that finds analogy so threatening that it has to collapse it into either equivocity or univocity, rather than taking Aquinas at his word. AD We should be clear, here, what these terms mean: if we use words univocally, then we use them in exactly the same sense (like a bungalow and a palace both being a dwelling ) and if we use them

7 The Darkness and the Light 111 equivocally, then we do not mean the same thing (like the bark of a dog and the bark of a tree). Analogical language spans different usages with a mixture of similarity and difference. This all matters for what we mean when we use words such as good or being in relation both to creatures and to God. For me, analogy isn t some middle ground between equivocity and univocity; it s about affirming that human knowledge of divine things is both possible and that it is simultaneously always human, and therefore is not complete not complete, that is, in comparison to God s own knowledge of himself. I should add, that I don t see Ia 13 as primarily an exercise in the philosophy of language as some discrete topic. JH Exactly! Analogy completely depends upon a particular view of creation, and that question is just about the best place in Aquinas to see that vision spelt out. Analogy is participation. AD Yes. And I wonder whether we should say that analogy is not placed between the other two concepts in terms of affirming something of both of them, but rather by way of a sort of twin negation. In fact, it is realist against equivocity, and humble against univocity. Against equivocity, analogy affirms the realist angle: there is a real revelation of God s perfections in the things that he has made, since an effect bears some trace of its cause. Then analogy is also insistent on humility against univocity: we necessarily have a human, creature-taught, understanding of what words mean, so when we say that God is good which is true we can only mean that in a human, creature-taught, sort of way, which means that God is good does not align seamlessly with the apple is good. JH The genius of Aquinas is perhaps especially his doctrine of creation, his account of how things are in God and God in them, which the theory of analogy points towards. This may seem like a purely philosophical point, but actually I would argue that Aquinas metaphysics are at their most radically Christian here, deeply shaped

8 112 ANDREW DAVISON & JOHN HUGHES by the doctrines of the incarnation and the Trinity. But that s what we hope to move onto next.