HOMO SCHOLASTICUS

Homo Scholasticus is my jocular designation for St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), finally, the sole subject of this entry. Not that he was the only scholastic in the age of scholasticism, of course, but he was by far the most important scholastic, the crowning epitome of scholasticism as such, and also, unquestionably, one of the most authoritative thinkers of all time.

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Virtually every history of philosophy places Thomas Aquinas among the preeminent philosophical figures of all time. W. T. Jones gives him several chapters, on a par with Plato and Aristotle. Bertrand Russell has a single chapter on him, but it is just as lengthy as his chapters on Hobbes, Dèscartes, and Spinoza. By such standards I might have put him in the Magnificent Shadows section, allotting him a number of entries, but I am doing no such thing, and that for a very good reason. While St. Thomas Aquinas has been undeniably one of the most influential thinkers in history, he is hardly a major philosopher of an interest comparable to the giants of Western philosophy.

The reasons for his extraordinary authority are easy to see. Comparing his biography to the biographies of other Christian thinkers, including the Saints of the Church, in the Catholic Encyclopedia, we find that this one reads like a genuine hagiography, putting him almost on a par with St. Paul the Apostle and the Saints of the Bible’s New Testament. Already during his life, his virtually supernatural prestige was growing with a certain promise of speedy canonization after his death (which, indeed, followed after the shortest allowable wait of just forty-nine years, in 1323. (For comparison, it took St. Augustine 873 postmortem years to reach the same status.) In 1368, Saint Thomas’s teaching was endorsed by Pope Urban V as the infallible dogma of the Catholic Church. (Pope Urban V: “The teaching of Blessed Thomas is the true and Catholic doctrine.”) For comparison, no similar endorsement has ever been given to any other Doctor of the Church. Ironically it was Martin Luther who endorsed St. Augustine (but by no means as powerfully), in his 1569 Tischreden: “Augustine was the ablest and purest of all the doctors.” Needless to say that by this denigration of Thomas and elevation of Augustine, Luther was disparaging his enemy the Catholic Church, while building up for his supporters a parallel Protestant authority,-- St. Augustine. {Luther’s elevation of Augustinian theology has produced, among several unhappy effects, the Protestant belief, lasting into the twenty-first century, but in a slightly modified form, in the perdition of the “unbaptized” (that is, of all those who do not know Jesus), which the Roman Catholic Church had long abandoned.}

Urban V’s sanction was repeated and reinforced in 1879 by Pope Leo XIII, who pontificated, ex cathedra, that in all Catholic educational institutions teaching philosophy, the doctrines of St. Thomas Aquinas had to be taught as the only right ones.

With such an exceptional imprimatur, no wonder that St. Thomas has long become, and remains, the most important philosopher in history, in the eyes of the Roman Catholic Church’s 1.13 billion Faithful around the world. (For the sake of fairness, I must remind the reader that the Catholic system of education has not suffered much as a result of such imprimaturs. It is still one of the best in the world, beating the American system of Multiple Choice into silly pulp, at that!)

Yet we can scarcely call St. Thomas a first-rate philosopher for several reasons. On the one hand, he is too closely conjoined to Aristotelian philosophy to amount to much on his own. Then, rather than engaging in an open-minded philosophical inquiry, all he does is he adapts his “findings” to a fixed set of pre-ordained conclusions. And these conclusions are not even his own unique discoveries, but the official ordinances of the ruling power, which is the Roman Catholic Church. Thus St. Thomas shows himself, rather, as a clever promoter of the Church’s doctrine than as an honest thinker with any claim to intellectual independence.

With all due respect, aside from adapting Aristotle’s theories to the needs of the Church, his philosophy is wholly reducible to the following homiletic poem of his composition:

Pange, lingua, gloriosi

Corporis mysterium,

Sanguinisque pretiosi,

Quem in mundi pretium

Fructus ventris generosi

Rex effudit gentium.

Wherever he finds himself capable of supporting the Catholic dogma with Aristotle’s rational authority, he does it very capably. Wherever, however, he finds this impossible, he immediately appeals to the authority of revelation, where he does not have to prove anything. This renders his job conveniently uncomplicated, and invariably rewarding; but, to his credit, even those things that are demonstrably too easy to do, he does them with an undeniable intellectual flair and with greatness. Thus, some aspects of his saintly, demiurgic reputation are actually well deserved.

Generally speaking, I do not wish to disparage St. Thomas’s legacy in any way by an unwanted impression of veiled sarcasm. He was objectively a great man, and his enormous prominence within the framework of Western civilization makes him, honoris causa, a figure of unconditionally lofty stature. But his personal philosophical greatness is incommensurate with his world-historical cultural significance, to the point that I feel no compulsion or interest in analyzing the details of his philosophy or of his theology, which stance of mine needs to be mentioned and explained, which I hope I have done with sufficient clarity.

But before I am done with this entry, I would like to bring the reader back to the concluding paragraphs of the earlier entry on Saint Augustine (City Of God) and continue quoting our old friend W. T. Jones, in his Conclusion to The Medieval Mind, which is Part II of his History of Western Philosophy. This time, he is comparing St. Thomas to St. Augustine:

"Although Thomas, as compared with Augustine, was much more humane, most of us are a long way from feeling at home with his thought. He certainly wanted to allow a measure of significance to this world and its affairs, but most people will feel that he failed to reconcile God’s infinity with man’s value. And what if by some feat of logical synthesis, he succeeded? Even so, for both Thomas and Augustine, man’s best and truest end still lies beyond this life; the world is still a great teleological structure, which gets its meaning from where it is going, rather than from what it is and does, and the final sanction for all conduct, and the ultimate criterion for all knowledge is not the concurrence of human reasons, but an authoritative text and a divine institution.

What makes Augustine and Thomas, and all other medieval thinkers, so fundamentally alike, despite their differences, is the sacramental outlook, which they shared. What makes us differ so markedly from them is that we have largely lost this outlook, and that we share the basically secular point of view of the Greeks. When we say that medieval men looked on this world as a sacrament, we mean, first, that they conceived this world to be but the visible sign of an invisible reality. And, secondly, that they conceived this world to be a sacrifice which they freely and gratefully dedicated to the all-good, all-true Giver.

That this sacramental view was a block to progress can hardly be denied. And that, in losing it, we have rid ourselves of a liability-- ignorance, superstition, intolerance-- seems equally obvious to many. What is not so obvious is that we have also lost something of value. If the sacramental outlook of the Middle Ages had issued here and there in what a modern clinician would describe as an acute psychopathology, in others it resulted in a serenity and confidence, in a sense of purpose, of meaningfulness, and of fulfillment, which the clinician must admire and look for in vain, among his contemporaries."

I hope that the reader is by now acquainted with the concluding paragraphs of my entry City Of God, and with my concluding remarks for that entry. What remains to be repeated here is that my main objection to Augustinianism and Thomism and the whole outlook of the Medieval mind is its ugly disconnect from the reality of the sacramental authority, the Church, to which they all appealed. An incredible hypocrisy took root in the Christian mind as a result, and the emerging Renaissance struck at the heart of that hypocrisy, with the unfortunate result of undermining the authority of God in this world as well, and perhaps, for all time. Here is where I see the greatest failure of Medieval European philosophy and theology, and both St. Augustine and St. Thomas, as the foremost representatives of it, take a large share in the blame for being too much preoccupied with matters of comparatively little consequence, while keeping a blind eye on the greatest problem that mattered more than all the rest of them put together.