Catching Up: Q1-4 (well, really Q1)

I didn't actually notice the blog was up during most of the time y'all were active, but now that you've slowed down a bit, I can jump in.  I'm going to make some comments on the Questions y'all have already gone through, to warm up a bit.

I should be able to get through Question 1 tonight (I originally planned to do Q1-4, but then I started to get verbose).




I'm using the text from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, because Protestants do such a good job with providing clickable outlines and footnotes in their searchable etexts.

Treatise on Sacred Doctrine (Q[1])

Question. 1 - The Nature and Extent of Sacred Doctrine (Ten Articles)

Article. 1 - Whether, besides philosophy, any further doctrine is required?

Here I note only that Thomas, the famous defender of right reason's capacity to grasp almost any truth without first begging permission (so to speak) of special revelation, begins by flatly asserting that unaided reason cannot be all-sufficient--because God has specially revealed reason's need for revelation's aid. Also, the foundation of the "practical science" Article (4) is already being laid in Reply to Objection 2.

Article. 2 - Whether sacred doctrine is a science?

This one is really important:  we either believe it, or we're doing something fundamentally different than Aquinas (and most Christians up through his time) were doing when they did theology.  Do we indeed encounter the articles of faith as (1) really about the world, like moisture or gravity are about the world, and (2) really delivered to the Church from God as we have received them?  To the extent that we evade the scandal of fact-claims breathed by God, heard by the Church, shared among the faithful, we undermine the nature of sacred doctrine as a science.

And if there is no body of knowledge about the world that comes from God, how are we to teach anything but a loose collection of self-help and some nice communitarian sentiments, also available at any five-and-dime?

Article. 3 - Whether sacred doctrine is one science?

Two points of interest, here.  First, Thomas here heads off what today is a very common way for many slightly-religious people to think about their faith, and the mental picture many irreligious folk have of how religious believers "really" operate.  That is, there is "stuff we know" and then there is "other data" about particular things. See, if theology is really just the "extra data" around the edges of what unaided reason can teach us, then it doesn't necessarily have a unity of its own.  Each particular thing would stand or fall on its own, and there would be no argument from the integrity of the system to the truth of its parts.  So, for example, one might debate whether angels are properly to be studied by parapsychologists or occultists or anthropologists, but an appeal to Biblical language about angels would at best be considered raw data on par with an oral history interview with that lady doing Tarot at Barnes & Noble.  One might debate whether bioethics commissions or constitutional lawyers are best suited to decide at what developmental stages humans may be destroyed without remorse, but an appeal to dogmatic Church teaching on this matter would at best be considered raw data on par with that famous "pessary" of Hippocrates.  No, if God actually has given us a body of knowledge about reality, the integrity of that revelation itself must impose constraints upon the rest of our reasoning, aiding our reason in its fructifying work.

And the second point of interest is that Aquinas here provides the element Melancthon will later attempt to appropriate to the Lutheran cause.  Melancthon argued that, while Luther's sola fide and sola gratia intuitions were the material cause of Reformation, the sola Scriptura intuition is its formal cause.  (Here Chesterton's reminder about "formal" in his Thomas Aquinas will stand us in good stead.)  And Melancthon, I think, is indebted to Thomas for the less mangled original of that thought, which is found here:  "Because Sacred Scripture considers things precisely under the formality of being divinely revealed, whatever has been divinely revealed possesses the one precise formality of the object of this science; and therefore is included under sacred doctrine as under one science."

Now, some of us are accustomed to quickly say "and Tradition," here, but we shouldn't insert this at this stage.  Aquinas is precisely trying to make the point that the whole unified field of knowledge--the words of Scripture, the "sentences" properly derived from her, the conciliar and papal definitions of teachings consonant with Scripture, etc.--are in fact one unified body of knowledge that is revealed.  He correctly anchors this in the part of Sacred Tradition that must be precisely this anchor or nothing else, Sacred Scripture.  That is, Sacred Scripture is the formal basis for theology as a practice of reading, writing, knowing, teaching that comes from God as language--though not, by itself, the sole support of religion or the sole receptacle of knowledge that comes from God.  But Sacred Scripture is the one part whose precise function is to found and anchor the practice of knowing God by teachings verbally delivered and checked for their coherence with the whole.  So, contra Melancthon, we might say that Sacred Scripture has always already been the formal cause of the Church's theology; and I do not think the Jesus who said, "And these are [the Scriptures] that testify of me" would quibble.

Article. 4 - Whether sacred doctrine is a practical science?

It is tempting to read Article 5 as the overflow of Article 4, because that "This is a sufficient answer" surely seems to cut off a torrent of words.  Aquinas is going to keep restraining those torrents, because on complicated turf like this, human words get overloaded and begin to mean too many things at once very quickly!

I think we have to do a couple of things to really get the thrust of this one.  One, we have to hear "practical science" as "merely a practical science," because that's how it would sound to someone with even an Aristotelian philosophical training at the time (and far more someone with a more Platonic background).  Thomas seems motivated to uphold the speculative nature of theology, here.

But Thomas is also right, I think, to do so--and right on his own terms.  But I think we have to be thinking of "speculative knowing" and "practical knowing" correctly with regard to their telos as human behaviors; and one way to do that is to think of Jesus' word to the Apostle Thomas, "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."  We do best when we receive as truth those things about God which God chose to use language to reveal to us, matters of faith not comprehensively accessible to unaided reason or to present experience ("for what a man has seen, why does he yet hope for?" "faith is ... the evidence of things unseen").  When we firmly and consequentially assent to all things God has revealed, then all of them shape our reason (and our practice) and become part of our participation in the Church's sacramental life and evangelizing work.  When we limit our assent to those for which we have practical experience, those which seem applicable or relevant, and regard others as in a contingent category--as though some revelation were in "suspended truth" status most of the time--then we also limit our participation in the Church's life.

OK, but why is truth like that for us, here, now?  Because theology is the science whose formal principle is a body of God-given knowledge in human language, not a human practice of getting in touch with God.  Yoga is a human practice of getting in touch with the divine--also, with one's knees, navel, metatarsals, etc.  But theology is a science from God, a thing-to-know meeting with capacity-for-knowing in the Church and those who receive her faith, and is therefore not oriented toward the reasons for which humans want to "do theology," but toward what God decided we (1) needed to know now ("in the middle") and (2) couldn't figure out for ourselves.

This body of knowledge is fundamentally "from" as well as "about" God:  if we try to imagine God contemplating it, it would include God's interactions and deliberations about action (His practical knowing) as well as God's awareness of Himself and all of His Creations (His speculative knowing).  "How humans can cooperate in being made fit to know eternal bliss" would be part of His speculative knowing, right?  Because that is neither an interaction from His side nor a deliberation about His action.  So when God shares that knowledge with us, the parts of His practical knowing that He shares are, for us, speculative (for we cannot act as God); and the parts that are speculative to God, as facts about humans, do not lose that character or cease to be part of the speculative body of knowledge when they also, for us, become life-giving conduits of practical knowledge (as we learn "how one ought to behave in the household of God").  Indeed, the practical knowledge (how humans can be configured to Christ) is anchored by and has its aim in the speculative knowledge (what humans are, who Christ is, who He fits us to see).

But now, quite unsurprisingly, we've poached Article 5.

Article. 5 - Whether sacred doctrine is nobler than other sciences?

Notice the resounding echoes at "this derives its certitude from the light of divine knowledge, which cannot be misled"!  Haec ceteraque omnia quae credit et docet catholica Ecclesia, credo quia Tu ea revelasti, qui nec ipse falli nec nos fallere potes. 

Really, this article should resolve any tension about the speculative/practical divide.  The practical cannot limit the speculative; the speculative does not fully unfold itself except to those practically engaged in seeking to know God on God's terms (which are not gnostic, shamanistic, LCWR-istic, rationalistic, or indeed jingoistic).  This speculative knowing is a higher goal than we can presently think, and will require us to exhaust all of our philosophical and moral and intellectual resources while borrowing more, and still thank God for grace to begin while begging grace to continue and to finish.  "To know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings."  "Let Him that glories, glory in this, that he understands and knows Me."

Also, we should go ahead and point out that this "speculative, and also practical" nature of theology in Thomas is fairly obviously of a piece with the "faith and morals" language commonly in use today.  These are the matters on which the Church has special, particular, authoritative insight; and her insight in the second is a necessary adjunct to her role as learner and teacher of the first (but not itself its telos; the Church is not a moral influence seeking arguments to support her, but a body of those faithful to a body of knowledge revealed by God, which includes "moral science").

Article. 6 - Whether this doctrine is the same as wisdom?

Reply to Objection 1.  Re-read it.  Re-read it whenever some sloppy catechist has a roomful of folks wondering whether truth is whatever some imaginary "scholarly consensus" takes an imaginary secret ballot vote on.  Re-read it some more.  That sentence is gold.

Seriously, that is a one-sentence summation of all that Thomas has said so far.

Article. 7 - Whether God is the object of this science?

Readers steeped in Modern Western Philosophy will have finally started reading at this question.  Up to now, they just heard a bunch of boilerplate religious mumbo-jumbo (having their ears full of mumbo-jumbo, they easily hear unfamiliar things in those familiar tones).  This, however, sounds like a proper bit of Enlightened Skepticism(tm) at last!

But really this is anything but.  What Aquinas here has to deal with is the difference between saying that a body of knowledge is (a) unified and (b) about [some particular] reality, and saying that a body of knowledge is only a body of knowledge if it is an already complete body of knowledge.  He is, in fact, here defending the principle that theology is not founded on the kind of false claim to total knowledge that is the starting-point of post-structuralist criticisms of the tradition of "onto-theology" in Western philosophy.  Theology does not begin by saying that we fully comprehend God; it begins by saying that God has given us some number of truths about Him, that we do have them in human language, and that they are true about Him.  This is, of course, why Thomas properly began with the body of knowledge in human language as the formal basis of the science of theology, Sacred Scripture.  Notice also, however, that "the articles of faith," not merely the raw text of various scriptures, are the materials of the science.  Again, Thomas begins with the formal basis in order to establish properly, rather than to delimit, the scope of Sacred Tradition.

Article. 8 - Whether sacred doctrine is a matter of argument?

 And, once again, I find that I have already poached all my comments about Article 8 in my comments about Article 7.  Except to say that Q1A8 is one of my absolute favorite passages in all of the Summa, and indeed Q1A8-10 are the bits of Thomas I cite most frequently (and use in my teaching of allegory and allegoresis).

Article. 9 - Whether Holy Scripture should use metaphors?

In the continuing warfare against dualism that defined the Dominican founding, this defense of Scripture's use of concrete images and tropes actually has more significance than we probably detect.  Obviously, nobody serious about Scripture doubts that Scripture includes elements that are not mere reference-discourse (words pointing to things and events).  However, some do find--and I think this is the more important matter of this Article--that this appearance of "accommodation" means that Scripture must not be what, for theology to be theology in the sense Aquinas is approaching the subject, Scripture is.  No, says Aquinas, because obviously whatever degree of condescension is required for God to reveal Himself in human language must have been accomplished--or else, as he says in Article 8, this whole discussion is moot.  We really cannot have a meaningful theology discussion with those who do not believe God can make Himself definitely and authoritatively known in speakable, writeable, teachable true words--most durably, the words of Sacred Scripture.

Article. 10 - Whether in Holy Scripture a word may have several senses?

"The multiplicity of these senses does not produce equivocation or any other kind of multiplicity, seeing that these senses are not multiplied because one word signifies several things, but because the things signified by the words can be themselves types of other things. Thus in Holy Writ no confusion results, for all the senses are founded on one---the literal---from which alone can any argument be drawn, and not from those intended in allegory, as Augustine says (Epis. 48). Nevertheless, nothing of Holy Scripture perishes on account of this, since nothing necessary to faith is contained under the spiritual sense which is not elsewhere put forward by the Scripture in its literal sense."

My man, Thomas.  My man.  [contented sigh]

Now to go sleep.