CHESTERTON-St Thomas Aquinas - THE PERMANENT PHILOSOPHY
It is often said that St. Thomas. unlike St. Francis,
did not permit in his work the indescribable element of poetry.
As, for instance, that there is little reference to any
pleasure in the actual flowers and fruit of natural things,
though any amount of concern with the buried roots of nature.
And yet I confess that, in reading his philosophy, I have
a very peculiar and powerful impression analogous to poetry.
Curiously enough, it is in some ways more analogous to painting,
and reminds me very much of the effect produced by the best
of the modern painters, when they throw a strange and almost crude
light upon stark and rectangular objects, or seem to be groping
for rather than grasping the very pillars of the subconscious mind.
It is probably because there is in his work a quality which
is Primitive, in the best sense of a badly misused word;
but any how, the pleasure is definitely not only of the reason,
but also of the imagination.
Perhaps the impression is connected with the fact that painters deal
with things without words. An artist draws quite gravely the grand
curves of a pig; because he is not thinking of the word pig.
There is no thinker who is so unmistakably thinking about things
and not being misled by the indirect influence of words,
as St. Thomas Aquinas. It is true in that sense that he has not
the advantage of words, any more than the disadvantage of words.
Here he differs sharply, for instance, from St. Augustine who was,
among other things a wit. He was also a sort of prose poet,
with a power over words in their atmospheric and emotional aspect;
so that his books abound with beautiful passages that rise
in the memory like strains of music; the illi in vos saeviant;
or the unforgettable cry, "Late I have loved thee,
O Ancient Beauty!" It is true that there is little or nothing
of this kind in St. Thomas; but if he was without the higher uses
of the mere magic of words, he was also free from that abuse of it,
by mere sentimentalists or self-centred artists, which can become
merely morbid and a very black magic indeed. And truly it is by
some such comparison with the purely introspective intellectual.
that we may find a hint about the real nature of the thing
I describe, or rather fail to describe; I mean the elemental
and primitive poetry that shines through all his thoughts;
and especially through the thought with which all his thinking begins.
It is the intense rightness of his sense of the relation between
the mind and the real thing outside the mind.
That strangeness of things, which is the light in all poetry,
and indeed in all art, is really connected with their otherness;
or what is called their objectivity. What is subjective must
be stale; it is exactly what is objective that is in this
imaginative manner strange. In this the great contemplative
is the complete contrary of that false contemplative,
the mystic who looks only into his own soul, the selfish artist
who shrinks from the world and lives only in his own mind.
According to St. Thomas, the mind acts freely of itself,
but its freedom exactly consists in finding a way out to liberty
and the light of day; to reality and the land of the living.
In the subjectivist, the pressure of the world forces
the imagination inwards. In the Thomist, the energy of the mind
forces the imagination outwards, but because the images
it seeks are real things. All their romance and glamour,
so to speak, lies in the fact that they are real things;
things not to be found by staring inwards at the mind.
The flower is a vision because it is not only a vision.
Or, if you will, it is a vision because it is not a dream.
This is for the poet the strangeness of stones and trees
and solid things; they are strange because they are solid.
I am putting it first in the poetical manner, and indeed it needs
much more technical subtlety to put it in the philosophical manner.
According to Aquinas, the object becomes a part of the mind;
nay, according to Aquinas, the mind actually becomes
the object. But, as one commentator acutely puts it,
it only becomes the object and does not create the object.
In other words, the object is an object; it can and does
exist outside the mind, or in the absence of the mind.
And therefore it enlarges the mind of which it becomes a part.
The mind conquers a new province like an emperor; but only
because the mind has answered the bell like a servant.
The mind has opened the doors and windows, because it is
the natural activity of what is inside the house to find out
what is outside the house. If the mind is sufficient to itself,
it is insufficient for itself. For this feeding upon fact
is itself; as an organ it has an object which is objective;
this eating of the strange strong meat of reality.
Note how this view avoids both pitfalls; the alternative abysses
of impotence. The mind is not merely receptive, in the sense
that it absorbs sensations like so much blotting-paper; on that
sort of softness has been based all that cowardly materialism,
which conceives man as wholly servile to his environment.
On the other hand, the mind is not purely creative, in the sense
that it paints pictures on the windows and then mistakes them
for a landscape outside. But the mind is active, and its activity
consists in following, so far as the will chooses to follow,
the light outside that does really shine upon real landscapes.
That is what gives the indefinably virile and even adventurous
quality to this view of life; as compared with that which holds
that material inferences pour in upon an utterly helpless mind,
or that which holds that psychological influences pour
out and create an entirely baseless phantasmagoria.
In other words, the essence of the Thomist common sense is
that two agencies are at work; reality and the recognition
of reality; and their meeting is a sort of marriage.
Indeed it is very truly a marriage, because it is fruitful;
the only philosophy now in the world that really is fruitful.
It produces practical results, precisely because it is
the combination of an adventurous mind and a strange fact.
M. Maritain has used an admirable metaphor, in his book Theonas,
when he says that the external fact fertilises the internal intelligence,
as the bee fertilises the flower. Anyhow, upon that marriage,
or whatever it may be called, the whole system of St. Thomas is founded;
God made Man so that he was capable of coming in contact with reality;
and those whom God hath joined, let no man put asunder.
Now, it is worthy of remark that it is the only working philosophy.
Of nearly all other philosophies it is strictly true that their
followers work in spite of them, or do not work at all.
No sceptics work sceptically; no fatalists work fatalistically;
all without exception work on the principle that it is
possible to assume what it is not possible to believe.
No materialist who thinks his mind was made up for him, by mud
and blood and heredity, has any hesitation in making up his mind.
No sceptic who believes that truth is subjective has any hesitation
about treating it as objective.
Thus St. Thomas work has a constructive quality absent from almost
all cosmic systems after him. For he is already building a house,
while the newer speculators are still at the stage of testing the rungs
of a ladder, demonstrating the hopeless softness of the unbaked bricks.
chemically analysing the spirit in the spirit-level, and generally
quarrelling about whether they can even make the tools that will
make the house. Aquinas is whole intellectual aeons ahead of them,
over and above the common chronological sense of saving a man
is in advance of his age; he is ages in advance of our age.
For he has thrown out a bridge across the abyss of the first doubt,
and found reality beyond and begun to build on it.
Most modern philosophies are not philosophy but philosophic doubt;
that is, doubt about whether there can be any philosophy.
If we accept St. Thomas's fundamental act or argument in the acceptance
of reality, the further deductions from it will be equally real;
they will be things and not words. Unlike Kant and most of
the Hegelians, he has a faith that is not merely a doubt about doubt.
It is not merely what is commonly called a faith about faith;
it is a faith about fact. From this point he can go forward,
and deduce and develop and decide, like a man planning a city
and sitting in a judgment-seat. But never since that time has
any thinking man of that eminence thought that there is any real
evidence for anything, not even the evidence of his senses,
that was strong enough to bear the weight of a definite deduction.
From all this we may easily infer that this philosopher does not
merely touch on social things, or even take them in his stride
to spiritual things; though that is always his direction.
He takes hold of them, he has not only a grasp of them,
but a grip. As all his controversies prove, he was perhaps
a perfect example of the iron hand in the velvet glove.
He was a man who always turned his full attention to anything;
and he seems to fix even passing things as they pass.
To him even what was momentary was momentous. The reader
feels that any small point of economic habit or human accident
is for the moment almost scorched under the converging rays
of a magnifying lens. It is impossible to put in these pages
a thousandth part of the decisions on details of life that may be
found in his work; it would be like reprinting the law-reports
of an incredible century of just judges and sensible magistrates.
We can only touch on one or two obvious topics of this kind.
I have noted the need to use modern atmospheric words for certain
ancient atmospheric things; as in saying that St. Thomas was what
most modern men vaguely mean by an Optimist. In the same way,
he was very much what they vaguely mean by a Liberal. I do not
mean that any of his thousand political suggestions would suit any
such definite political creed; if there are nowadays any definite
political creeds. I mean, in the same sense, that he has a sort
of atmosphere of believing in breadth and balance and debate.
He may not be a Liberal by the extreme demands of the moderns for we
seem always to mean by the moderns the men of the last century,
rather than this. He was very much of a Liberal compared
with the most modern of all modern; for they are nearly all
of them turning into Fascists and Hitlerites. But the point
is that he obviously preferred the sort of decisions that
are reached by deliberation rather than despotic action;
and while, like all his contemporaries and coreligionists,
he has no doubt that true authority may be authoritative,
he is rather averse to the whole savour of its being arbitrary.
He is much less of an Imperialist than Dante, and even his
Papalism is not very Imperial. He is very fond of phrases
like "a mob of free men" as the essential material of a city;
and he is emphatic upon the fact that law, when it ceases
to be justice, ceases even to be law.
If this work were controversial, whole chapters could be given
to the economics as well as the ethics of the Thomist system.
It would be easy to show that, in this matter, he was a prophet as well
as a philosopher. He foresaw from the first the peril of that mere
reliance on trade and exchange, which was beginning about his time;
and which has culminated in a universal commercial collapse in our time.
He did not merely assert that Usury is unnatural, though in saying
that he only followed Aristotle and obvious common sense, which was
never contradicted by anybody until the time of the commercialists,
who have involved us in the collapse. The modern world began
by Bentham writing the Defence of Usury, and it has ended after
a hundred years in even the vulgar newspaper opinion finding
Finance indefensible. But St. Thomas struck much deeper than that.
He even mentioned the truth, ignored during the long idolatry of trade,
that things which men produce only to sell are likely to be worse
in quality than the things they produce in order to consume.
Something of our difficulty about the fine shades of Latin will be felt
when we come to his statement that there is always a certain inhonestas
about trade. For inhonestas does not exactly mean dishonesty.
It means approximately "something unworthy," or, more nearly perhaps,
"something not quite handsome." And he was right; for trade,
in the modern sense, does mean selling something for a little more
than it is worth, nor would the nineteenth century economists have
denied it. They would only have said that he was not practical;
and this seemed sound while their view led to practical prosperity.
Things are a little different now that it has led to universal bankruptcy.
Here, however, we collide with a colossal paradox of history.
The Thomist philosophy and theology, quite fairly compared
with other philosophies like the Buddhist or the Monist,
with other theologies like the Calvinist or the Christian Scientist,
is quite obviously a working and even a fighting system;
full of common sense and constructive confidence; and therefore
normally full of hope and promise. Nor is this hope vain
or this promise unfulfilled. In this not very hopeful
modern moment, there are no men so hopeful as those who are
today looking to St. Thomas as a leader in a hundred crying
questions of craftsmanship and ownership and economic ethics.
There is undoubtedly a hopeful and creative Thomism in our time.
But we are none the less puzzled by the fact that this did
not immediately follow on St. Thomas's time. It is true that
there was a great march of progress in the thirteenth century;
and in some things, such as the status of the peasant, matters had
greatly improved by the end of the Middle Ages. But nobody can
honestly say that Scholasticism had greatly improved by the end
of the Middle Ages. Nobody can tell how far the popular spirit
of the Friars had helped the later popular medieval movements;
or how far this great Friar, with his luminous rules of justice
and his lifelong sympathy with the poor, may have indirectly
contributed to the improvement that certainly occurred.
But those who followed his method, as distinct from his
moral spirit, degenerated with a strange rapidity; and it was
certainly not in the Scholastics that the improvement occurred.
Of some of the Scholastics we can only say that they took every
thing that was worst in Scholasticism and made it worse.
They continued to count the steps of logic; but every step of logic
took them further from common sense. They forgot how St. Thomas
had started almost as an agnostic; and seemed resolved to leave
nothing in heaven or hell about which anybody could be agnostic.
They were a sort of rabid rationalists, who would have left
no mysteries in the Faith at all. In the earliest Scholasticism
there is something that strikes a modern as fanciful and pedantic;
but, properly understood, it has a fine spirit in its fancy.
It is the spirit of freedom; and especially the spirit of free will.
Nothing seems more quaint, for instance, than the speculations
about what would have happened to every vegetable or animal
or angel, if Eve had chosen not to eat the fruit of the tree.
But this was originally full of the thrill of choice;
and the feeling that she might have chosen otherwise.
It was this detailed detective method that was followed,
without the thrill of the original detective story.
The world was cumbered with countless tomes, proving by logic
a thousand things that can be known only to God. They developed
all that was really sterile in Scholasticism, and left for us
all that is really fruitful in Thomism.
There are many historical explanations. There is the Black Death,
which broke the back of the Middle Ages; the consequent
decline in clerical culture, which did so much to provoke
the Reformation. But I suspect that there was another cause also;
which can only be stated by saving that the contemporary fanatics,
who controverted with Aquinas, left their own school behind them;
and in a sense that school triumphed after all. The really
narrow Augustinians, the men who saw the Christian life only as
the narrow way, the men who could not even comprehend the great
Dominican's exultation in the blaze of Being, or the glory of God
in all his creatures, the men who continued to insist feverishly
on every text, or even on every truth, that appeared pessimistic
or paralysing, these gloomy Christians could not be extirpated
from Christendom; and they remained and waited for their chance.
The narrow Augustinians, the men who would have no science or reason
or rational use of secular things, might have been defeated
in controversy, but they had an accumulated passion of conviction.
There was an Augustinian monastery in the North where it was
near to explosion.
Thomas Aquinas had struck his blow; but he had not entirely settled
the Manichees. The Manichees are not so easily settled; in the sense of
settled forever. He had insured that the main outline of the Christianity
that has come down to us should be supernatural but not anti-natural;
and should never be darkened with a false spirituality to the oblivion
of the Creator and the Christ who was made Man. But as his tradition
trailed away into less liberal or less creative habits of thought,
and as his medieval society fell away and decayed through
other causes, the thing against which he had made war crept back
into Christendom. A certain spirit or element in the Christian religion,
necessary and sometimes noble but always needing to be balanced
by more gentle and generous elements in the Faith, began once more
to strengthen, as the framework of Scholasticism stiffened or split.
The Fear of the Lord, that is the beginning of wisdom, and therefore
belongs to the beginnings, and is felt in the first cold hours before
the dawn of civilisation; the power that comes out of the wilderness
and rides on the whirlwind and breaks the gods of stone; the power
before which the eastern nations are prostrate like a pavement;
the power before which the primitive prophets run naked and shouting,
at once proclaiming and escaping from their god; the fear that is
rightly rooted in the beginnings of every religion true or false:
the fear of the Lord, that is the beginning of wisdom; but not the end.
It is often remarked as showing the ironical indifference of rulers
to revolutions, and especially the frivolity of those who are
called the Pagan Popes of the Renaissance, in their attitude
to the Reformation, that when the Pope first heard of the first
movements of Protestantism, which had started in Germany,
he only said in an offhand manner that it was "some quarrel
of monks". Every Pope of course was accustomed to quarrels among
the monastic orders; but it has always been noted as a strange
and almost uncanny negligence that he could see no more than
this in the beginnings of the great sixteenth century schism.
And yet, in a somewhat more recondite sense, there is
something to be said for what he has been blamed for saving.
In one sense, the schismatics had a sort of spiritual ancestry
even in mediaeval times.
It will be found earlier in this book; and it was a quarrel of monks.
We have seen how the great name of Augustine, a name never mentioned
by Aquinas without respect but often mentioned without agreement
covered an Augustinian school of thought naturally lingering
longest in the Augustinian Order. The difference, like every
difference between Catholics, was only a difference of emphasis.
The Augustinians stressed the idea of the impotence of man
before God, the omniscience of God about the destiny of man,
the need for holy fear and the humiliation of intellectual pride,
more than the opposite and corresponding truths of free will or
human dignity or good works. In this they did in a sense continue
the distinctive note of St. Augustine, who is even now regarded
as relatively the determinist doctor of the Church. But there
is emphasis and emphasis; and a time was coming when emphasising
the one side was to mean flatly contradicting the other.
Perhaps, after all, it did begin with a quarrel of monks;
but the Pope was yet to learn how quarrelsome a monk could be.
For there was one particular monk in that Augustinian monastery
in the German forests, who may be said to have had a single
and special talent for emphasis; for emphasis and nothing
except emphasis; for emphasis with the quality of earthquake.
He was the son of a slatecutter; a man with a great voice and a
certain volume of personality; brooding, sincere, decidedly morbid;
and his name was Martin Luther. Neither Augustine nor the Augustinians
would have desired to see the day of that vindication of the
Augustinian tradition; but in one sense, perhaps, the Augustinian
tradition was avenged after all.
It came out of its cell again, in the day of storm and ruin,
and cried out with a new and mighty voice for an elemental and
emotional religion, and for the destruction of all philosophies.
It had a peculiar horror and loathing of the great Greek philosophies,
and of the scholasticism that had been founded on those philosophies.
It had one theory that was the destruction of all theories;
in fact it had its own theology which was itself the death
of theology. Man could say nothing to God, nothing from God,
nothing about God, except an almost inarticulate cry for mercy
and for the supernatural help of Christ, in a world where all natural
things were useless. Reason was useless. Will was useless.
Man could not move himself an inch any more than a stone.
Man could not trust what was in his head any more than a turnip.
Nothing remained in earth or heaven, but the name of Christ lifted
in that lonely imprecation; awful as the cry of a beast in pain.
We must be just to those huge human figures, who are in fact
the hinges of history. However strong, and rightly strong,
be our own controversial conviction, it must never mislead us
into thinking that something trivial has transformed the world.
So it is with that great Augustinian monk, who avenged all
the ascetic Augustinians of the Middle Ages; and whose broad
and burly figure has been big enough to block out for four
centuries the distant human mountain of Aquinas. It is not,
as the moderns delight to say, a question of theology.
The Protestant theology of Martin Luther was a thing that
no modern Protestant would be seen dead in a field with;
or if the phrase be too flippant, would be specially anxious
to touch with a barge-pole. That Protestantism was pessimism;
it was nothing but bare insistence on the hopelessness
of all human virtue, as an attempt to escape hell.
That Lutheranism is now quite unreal; more modern phases of
Lutheranism are rather more unreal; but Luther was not unreal.
He was one of those great elemental barbarians, to whom it
is indeed given to change the world. To compare those two
figures hulking so big in history, in any philosophical sense,
would of course be futile and even unfair. On a great map like
the mind of Aquinas, the mind of Luther would be almost invisible.
But it is not altogether untrue to say, as so many journalists
have said without caring whether it was true or untrue,
that Luther opened an epoch; and began the modern world.
He was the first man who ever consciously used his consciousness
or what was later called his Personality. He had as a fact a rather
strong personality. Aquinas had an even stronger personality;
he had a massive and magnetic presence; he had an intellect that could
act like a huge system of artillery spread over the whole world;
he had that instantaneous presence of mind in debate, which alone
really deserves the name of wit. But it never occurred to him to use
anything except his wits, in defence of a truth distinct from himself.
It never occurred to Aquinas to use Aquinas as a weapon.
There is not a trace of his ever using his personal advantages,
of birth or body or brain or breeding, in debate with anybody.
In short, he belonged to an age of intellectual unconsciousness,
to an age of intellectual innocence, which was very intellectual.
Now Luther did begin the modern mood of depending on things not
merely intellectual. It is not a question of praise or blame;
it matters little whether we say that he was a strong personality,
or that he was a bit of a big bully. When he quoted a Scripture text,
inserting a word that is not in Scripture, he was content to shout back
at all hecklers: "Tell them that Dr. Martin Luther will have it so!"
That is what we now call Personality. A little later it was
called Psychology. After that it was called Advertisement
or Salesmanship. But we are not arguing about advantages
or disadvantages. It is due to this great Augustinian pessimist to say,
not only that he did triumph at last over the Angel of the Schools,
but that he did in a very real sense make the modern world.
He destroyed Reason; and substituted Suggestion.
It is said that the great Reformer publicly burned the Summa Theologica
and the works of Aquinas; and with the bonfire of such books this book
may well come to an end. They say it is very difficult to burn a book;
and it must have been exceedingly difficult to burn such a mountain
of books as the Dominican had contributed to the controversies
of Christendom. Anyhow, there is something lurid and apocalyptic about
the idea of such destruction, when we consider the compact complexity of
all that encyclopaedic survey of social and moral and theoretical things.
All the close-packed definitions that excluded so many errors
and extremes; all the broad and balanced judgments upon the clash
of loyalties or the choice of evils; all the liberal speculations
upon the limits of government or the proper conditions of justice;
all the distinctions between the use and abuse of private property;
all the rules and exceptions about the great evil of war; all the
allowances for human weakness and all the provisions for human health;
all this mass of medieval humanism shrivelled and curled up in smoke
before the eves of its enemy; and that great passionate peasant
rejoiced darkly, because the day of the Intellect was over.
Sentence by sentence it burned, and syllogism by syllogism;
and the golden maxims turned to golden flames in that last and dying glory
of all that had once been the great wisdom of the Greeks. The great
central Synthesis of history, that was to have linked the ancient
with the modern world, went up in smoke and, for half the world,
was forgotten like a vapour.
For a time it seemed that the destruction was final.
It is still expressed in the amazing fact that (in the North)
modern men can still write histories of philosophy, in which
philosophy stops with the last little sophists of Greece and Rome;
and is never heard of again until the appearance of such a
third-rate philosopher as Francis Bacon. And yet this small book,
which will probably do nothing else, or have very little other value,
will be at least a testimony to the fact that the tide has turned
once more. It is four hundred years after; and this book, I hope
(and I am happy to say I believe) will probably be lost and
forgotten in the flood of better books about St. Thomas Aquinas,
which are at this moment pouring from every printing-press in Europe,
and even in England and America. Compared with such books it
is obviously a very slight and amateurish production; but it is
not likely to be burned, and if it were, it would not leave even
a noticeable gap in the pouring mass of new and magnificent work,
which is now daily dedicated to the philosophia perennis;
to the Everlasting Philosophy.
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CHESTERTON-St Thomas Aquinas - THE PERMANENT PHILOSOPHY