8MmmWwiwi

THE KEY
TO THE

STUDY OF ST. THOMAS
FROM THE ITALIAN OF

MSGR. FRANCESCO OLGIATI, D.D., Ph.D.
Professor of Metaphysics at the University of the
Sacred Heart, Milan

With

a

Letter

of

Approbation from

HIS HOLINESS POPE PIUS XI

TRANSLATED
BY

JOHN S. ZYBURA

B. HERDER

BOOK CO.

17 SOUTH BROADWAY, ST. LOUIS, MO.
AND

33 QUEEN SQUARE, LONDON, W. C. 1.
1925

. ' Cb^yright igj.f
by B. HERDER BOOK CO.

11 2Π09

CONTENTS’
PAGE

The Holy Father’s Approval
NIHIL OBSTAT

F. G. Holveck,
Censor Librorum

IMPRIMATUR

Sti. Ludovici, die 24. Oct. 1925

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Original

i

Translator’s Foreword...........................................ii

Sti. Ludo vici, die 21. Oct. 1925

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of the

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THE VAIL-BALLOU PRESS
BINQHAMTON AND NEW YORK

Introduction............................................................ iv
Chapter I. The Programme of St. Thomas .
1. The Roots of the Thomistic Synthesis . .
2. The Aspiration of St. Thomas
...
3. Origins of the Life-Giving Idea ...

1
2
7
14

Chapter II. “Being” in the Metaphysics of
St. Thomas..................................................... 23
1. The Science of Being as Such .... 26
2. The Conquest of Being................................... 30
3. St. Thomas and the Validity of Our
Knowledge............................................. 38
4. The Problem ofUniversals ....
49
5. The Metaphysics ofSt.Thomas
... 60
6. Conclusion............................................. 70

Chapter III. Being in the Theodicy of St.
Thomas......................................................... 73
1. The Existence of God................................... 74
2. The Nature of God......................................... 81
3. Creation........................................................... 86
4. Divine Government......................................... 92

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CONTENTS
YAGF.

Chapter IV. Being in the Other Parts of
Thomistic Philosophy........................... <y;
1. Logic............................................................ ....
2. Psychology................................................... uh
3. Ethics............................................................ ο

Chapter XL Being and the Intellectualisai
of St. Thomas............................................... κT
1. St. Thomas the Intellectualis! . . . .1'7
2. The Limits of Thomistic Intellectualism . H·’
3. St. Thomas and the Knowledge of the In­
dividual and of History ..... 12?
4. Being and the Knowledge of Being . . L3/
Chapter VI.

Being in the Theology of St.

Thomas (Faith and Reason) .... 14°
Conclusion..............................

167

THE HOLY FATHER’S APPROBATION OF THE
ORIGINAL
Secretariat of State
His Holiness

of

The Vatican,
March 20, 1923
Illustrious Sir:
The Holy Father has gratefully accepted the homage of
your work entitled, L’Anima di San Tommaso, and has en­
trusted to me the pleasant task of conveying to you his
heartfelt thanks.
I likewise rejoice in being able to assure you that His
Holiness was pleased to admire your fine and important pub­
lication and to express his deep satisfaction that to your
preceding writings of an apologetic, moral, and literary
character, you have added this new and powerful work of
philosophic synthesis, which, while doing honor to Aquinas,
illustrates his thought in contrast with modern errors. By
this work you likewise honor the Catholic University of
which you are such a highly esteemed professor, by always
placing at the service of Christian culture and learning the
fruits—by no means slight nor immature—of your vigorous
studies and intelligence.
As a sure token of these sentiments of His sovereign good
pleasure and benevolence the august Pontiff heartily imparts
to you the Apostolic Blessing.

With assurances of highest esteem,
Yours most affectionately,
P. Cardinal Gasparri,
Secretary of State to
His Holiness Pope Pius XL
i

»w m

.

TRANSLATOR’S FOREWORD

TRANSLATOR’S FOREWORD

'4

S

The revival of interest in Scholasticism in gen­
eral, and Thomism in particular, is growing apace
also among thinkers of the English-speaking world.
This fact prompted the present rendition of a work
hailed by competent critics as a luminous introduc­
tion to the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, in all
its wealth and depth and vitality. Professor Olgiati’s excellent monograph 1 gives us the master-key
to every part of the imposing and harmonious struc­
ture of perennial ideas reared by the synthetic
genius of the Prince of Scholastics.
A like unbiassed appraisal is made by the reviewer
of the original, Professor A. E. Taylor, of Edin­
burgh University, in Mind (April, 1924, p. 217) :
“It is an exceptionally well-written and clear exposi­
tion of the notion of ‘being’ which lies at the root of
the whole Thomist philosophy. I could warmly
recommend it to any one who is trying to make him­
self acquainted with the central thought of Thomism
and wishes for a lucid introduction.”
1 L’Anima di S. Tommaso. Saggio Filosofico Intorno Alla
Concesione Tomista (Società Editrice “Vita e Pensiero,”
Milano, 1923).

The translation was submitted to the author and
approved by him in the following terms :
“I am very grateful for your excellent translation
of my philosophical essay on St. Thomas Aquinas.
While deeply appreciating its marvelous fidelity to
the original, I equally admire its discerning and ele­
gant diction. My work purposes to be a key that
may perhaps be of service to those who wish to open
the portals of the medieval castle constructed by the
immortal thinker, and subsequently to inspect it and
eventually to take possession of it. Your fine trans­
lation aims to present this key to the Englishspeaking public. I heartily wish that it may lead
to a deeper knowledge and love of the great genius
who, like a sun, sheds such lustre on the thirteenth
century.”
J. S. Zybura
Colorado Springs, Colo.
Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas, 1925.

iii

SIW'P’i

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION

The Neo-Scholastic movement, so successfully
launched by the encyclical Aeterni Patris of Leo
XIII, has continued to flourish in various countries
during these last decades, and has given a marvelous
impetus to the earnest and profound study of St.
Thomas Aquinas. Works like those of Sertillanges,
Grabmann, Pegues, De Wulf, Baumgartner, Baeumker, Amato Masnovo, Garrigou-Lagrange, and many
others, are a credit to the Catholic scholarship of to­
day. The critical editions of the works of Aquinas,
the diligent and accurate commentaries on his
Sumina Theologiea, the systematic treatises and ex­
positions of his doctrines in the domain of philosophy
and theology alike, have gone on multiplying and so
diffusing knowledge of Thomistic thought every­
where. A host of publications, for and against St.
Thomas, has served to acquaint our contemporaries
with the leading problems that occupied the soul of
this great thinker.
In the greater part of these recent works on St.
Thomas Aquinas one notes a preference for the
analytic method. To be sure, this method had its
merits. It was necessary to call attention to the
iv

theses, the theories, the several parts of the system,
just as when seeking to make a person known, we
begin by describing his life with its most noteworthy
facts and salient exploits, as well as its most minute
episodes and many seemingly negligible details.
Every point of the Thomistic conception is scru­
tinized, illumined, discussed. After the manner of
hardy explorers, the students of St. Thomas, in their
loving solicitude to trace its lines with due precision,
have not overlooked a single outskirt of this hallowed
ground.
Hitherto, however, the synthetic method has not
received the attention it deserves. It would seem
that after the painstaking and valuable researches
along the way of analysis, not enough stress has
been laid on pointing out to the men of our age the
wonderful unity of the whole system. Frequently,
even in otherwise eminent and learned works, the
manifold doctrines engross the reader’s attention
without making him feel the beauty and vibration
of the one and only spirit that breathes life into
the whole. So it happens that many, especially
among its opponents, imagine they have understood
Thomism, the while as a matter of fact the soul of
St. Thomas eludes their grasp.
The historic sense certainly never had such
ardent panegyrists as to-day. And yet it does not
abound in the matter-of-fact domain of practical
v

INTRODUCTION
Si

applications. One needs but to open certain hand­
books of the history of philosophy to get a clear
and painful impression of the downright lack of
that indispensable insight which knows how to lay
hold of unity in multiplicity—a unity, that is, which
is living, dynamic, synthesizing the various phases
of an idea or a system within the continuity of a
gradual development. As a result, the history of
philosophy becomes a collection of medallions, a
whirling dance of conceptions that follow and chase
one another and take their turn with changing
fortune and capricious unreasonableness. It is true
that the individual philosophers are portrayed with
a wealth of biographical and bibliographical infor­
mation, together with a list of the doctrines they
champion in logic, metaphysics, ethics, and so on.
But not even a question is put as to the link that
binds the parts of the system together, as to the
interpenetration that exists between the diverse
theories. Too often we lose sight of the truth that
if small minds have many ideas and but little light,—
their consciousness may be likened to a market-place,
where the most discordant thoughts pass to and fro,
prating, shouting, exchanging places and grouping
themselves with more or less disorder,—great minds,
instead, have but one idea with an abundance of
light.
The varied richness of the problems discussed,

INTRODUCTION
the great number of the conclusions reached, the
very efforts put forth to solve doubts, detract nothing
from the unity of an organic system; they are
rather the matter, the atoms to which one single
soul knows how to give form and inspiration.
There is one vital principle fashioning the manifold
branches and the several parts of the one conception
into a single organism. And it is the immanent
logic of truth and error alike that causes philosophic
systems to unfold themselves. Hence, to the eye
that looks beneath the surface, they no longer ap­
pear as scattered bits of a casual explanation, but
as gathered up within the progressive evolvement of
the original germs.
The most profound Thomistic scholars, from
Liberatore to Zigliara, from Lepidi to GarrigouLagrange, have understood with admirable insight
that St. Thomas must needs be pondered after this
fashion, that is, in the light of the most perfect
systematic unity; and this all the more because he
is the most daring synthetic genius known to pre­
modern philosophy and, indeed, to all history. A
synthesis, however, is inconceivable without one in­
spiring principle. And it is precisely the aim of this
my modest effort to take up again and develop this
method of our more eminent masters, so as to co­
ordinate the partial truths of the Thomistic concep­
tion under a single idea, which is at once the soul

INTRODUCTION

I

Ifl
1
I

of St. Thomas and the supreme explanation of his
immortal synthesis.
The focal center where all rays of the Thomistic
system meet and from which they radiate, is being, as
Cardinal Zigliara rightly pointed out. Whatever
problems were faced by St. Thomas,—from the
questions of metaphysics to those of theodicy, from
the objectivity of knowledge to the relations between
reason and faith,—all become clarified by a new
light, adds Garrigou-Lagrange, and find their solu­
tion in a constant reduction to being. In the onto­
logical order nothing exists or can exist that is not
being. In the field of knowledge nothing is con­
ceivable except through the mediation of being.
Being is the idea capable of explaining that innermost
harmony which, according to Rudolf Eucken, per­
meates the work of St. Thomas.
It has been said that by his Summae Aquinas
reared a magnificent edifice toward the azure of
the medieval heavens. We shall establish,—and the
fact will be of paramount value from the viewpoint
of history, philosophy, methodology,—that being,
like a light flooding this edifice, enables us to note
amid the sumptuous and artistic riches of this vast
and imposing structure, only one architectonic line,
worthy of the profound simplicity and consummate
unity that characterize the genius of St. Thomas.
viii

The Key to the Study
of St. Thomas
CHAPTER I
THE PROGRAMME OF ST. THOMAS

In his Geschichte des Idealismus (Vol. ΙΠ, p.
458) Otto Willmann likens the mind of St. Thomas
“to a lake-basin that absorbs the waters streaming in
from every quarter, lets sink whatever of rubbish
they bring along, so that the surface forms a clear
and tranquil mirror in which the blue vault of heaven
is solemnly reflected.” Another writer, while perus­
ing the Sumina Theologica, with the well-ordered;
arrangement of its three parts, 38 treatises, 631 ques­
tions, 3000 articles, and 10,000 objections, received
the impression of strolling through a forest, in the
calm of a serene dawn, where the singing of all the
birds,—the voices of all preceding thinkers,—are
blended into one harmonious whole.
That Thomism is a synthesis no one can doubt.
In the encyclical cited, Leo ΧΙΠ praised St. Thomas
x

2

THE PROGRAMME OF ST. THOMAS

because “he collected together, fashioned into one
whole, and arranged in wonderful order the doctrines
[of his illustrious predecessors] which had been like
the scattered members of a body.’’ On this point he
agrees with Giovanni Gentile, who in his study on
I Problemi della Scolastica e il Pensicro Italiano,
recognizes Aquinas as “the greatest speculative intel­
lect of the whole thirteenth century.”
It is of supreme importance to call to mind the
roots of this gigantic tree and the manner in which
St. Thomas set about to synthesize the entire specu­
lation that had flourished before his time.
1. The Roots of the Thomistic Synthesis

We must not imagine that the University of
Paris, where St. Thomas taught for several years, or
the age in which he lived, surrounded the efforts of
the thinker with an atmosphere of tranquillity. The
Thomistic synthesis grew up amid the keenest and
most passionate agitations, which were in a measure
the occasion of its birth.
The Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis, for
which the historian is indebted to Denifle and Chate­
lain, enables us to follow the rancorous conflicts be­
tween the professors from the secular clergy and
those from the religious Orders,—conflicts inter­
woven with such fierce clashes between the students
that the Holy See was obliged to intervene. In the

Î!

'siwiies.·

ROOTS OF THOMISTIC SYNTHESIS

3

pages of Lemmens, St. Bonaventure we have the
description of a veritable whirlwind let loose against
the Dominicans and Franciscans, and a presentment
of the difficulties that had to be overcome before
St. Thomas and his saintly friend could be numbered
among the teachers. It may well be that such
storms are reducible to the squabbles of monks or
the cross purposes of petty jealousies; but we feel
that beneath the agitated surface of this tempestuous
sea there is latent a formidable clashing of ideas.
That was the time when one side and the other gave
battle with the most intense eagerness. An incident
in the life of Albert the Great is a case in point:
after the death of his eminent pupil he does not
hesitate, despite his advanced years, to face the long
journey from Cologne to Paris for the purpose of
defending certain theses of St. Thomas Aquinas.
It was the age when the violent collision of currents
indicated that the hour had come for a solution which
would facilitate the definitive synthesis by temper­
ing the just demands of all.
As Heitz aptly remarks in his Essai Historique
sur les Rapports entre la Philosophie et la Foi de
Bérenger de Tours à Saint Thomas d’Aquin, certain
vigorous tendencies of thought could then be dis­
tinguished.
First of all, there was Augustinian Platonism,
well disciplined for battle, jealous heir of the theories

4 THE PROGRAMME OF ST. THOMAS
of St. Augustine, who was acclaimed as the supreme
master not only in theology, but also in philosophy.
These followers of St. Augustine utilized only bin
of Aristotle without, however, catching his spirit.
Ehrle, in his book, Der Aitgitsliiiisniiis it nd der Jr;·
stotclismus in der Scholastik gegen Ende des XIII.
Jahrhunderts, has shown how deeply Augustinianism
was rooted at this time. William of Auxerre.
William of Auvergne, and St. Bonaventure, to­
gether with the Franciscan Order, were the cham­
pions of this movement, noted especially for its
Neo-Platonic theory of knowledge and the divine
illumination of the soul.
By the side of the Augustinians, says Reitz, we
meet another group of a rather positive bent, devoted
chiefly to the cultivation of the natural sciences,
mathematics, and erudition. While professing sin­
cere admiration for Aristotle as a naturalist, it
followed the paths of Platonism when occupied with
philosophico-theological problems. We may call this
the current of the Augustinian Empiricists. Later,
Roger Bacon became its most famous representative.
About 1260, a new doctrinal movement was
inaugurated at the University of Paris. To under­
stand it, one must not overlook the fact that
the hitherto unknown books of Aristotle were now
brought to light and began to be studied, more
especially under the influence of Arabic culture,

Utt

ROOTS OF THOMISTIC SYNTHESIS

’5

which, among others, had had a famous Aristotelian
commentator in Averroës. From this writer, who
was their source of inspiration, a Parisian group,
small in number, but very turbulent, called itself
Averroists. Mandonnet’s classic monograph on
Siger de Brabant et l’Averroisme Latin au XIII ·
Siècle gives an excellent exposition of this current of
thought. Following in the footsteps of Averroes,
Siger of Brabant and his friends sponsored doctrines
contrary to such dogmas as free-will and Providence,
and especially the theory of the numerical oneness
of the intellectual soul in all men. Subsequently, to
save themselves from ecclesiastical fulminations, they
resorted to the subterfuge of the double truth.
Though condemned by the Church, this arbitrary
interpretation of Aristotelianism brought about a
veritable revolution in the world of culture. One
could escape neither the powerful influence of this
new spirit, nor the richness of the material it offered,
nor the perfection of its scientific technique. The
situation, as Seeberg says, was similar to that follow­
ing the invention of new methods and weapons of
defense: henceforth no one can make war without
enlisting them in his service.
Amid the clashing of so many conceptions, there
were some who cloaked their ignorance with the
mantle of mysticism and hurled their missiles of
scorn against philosophy, deeming it useless and even

6

THE PROGRAMME OF ST. THOMAS

harmful to religion. They were the men whom Al­
bert the Great described, by a phrase not at all
complimentary, as bruta animantia, blasphemantes
in iis quae ignorant.
Others had recourse to the dangerous policy of
condemnation. A provincial council of Sens, recon­
vened at Paris in 1210, had struck a blow at the
Physics and Metaphysics oi the Stagirite. In 1231,
Gregory IX moderated the verdict and announced a
provisional prohibition until these books should be
corrected. In 1277, these measures had their after­
math in the condemnation hurled against some theses
of St. Thomas by Stephen Tempier, bishop of Paris,
and by Robert Kilvvardby, archbishop of Canterbury.
Such a policy, however, could have no success worthy
of note.
It was Christian Aristotelianism that saved the sit­
uation. Initiated at Cologne by Albert of Bollstaedt,
it was perfected by his great pupil St. Thomas. The
former utilized Aristotle, as Sertillanges happily puts
it in his excellent monograph on Saint Thomas
d’Aquin, and united him to Plato. The latter, ab­
sorbing all the vital germs of Augustinianism, plant­
ing himself on the same Aristotelian ground with the
Averroists, having the greatest respect for experience
and the demands of true mysticism, feeling pro­
foundly the encyclopedic and popularizing preoccupa­
tions of his teacher Albert, assimilated Aristotle and

THE ASPIRATION OF ST. THOMAS

7

summed up in an organic synthesis the results of all
preceding speculation in philosophy and theology.
Working with a scientific method and guided by
strictly objective criteria, with the clearly stated pro­
gramme of “not allowing himself to be led by sym­
pathy or aversion for anyone whose opinions he used
or refuted, but by the certainty of truth,” with the
tenacity of a calm and lucid thinker, without lyrical
digressions or sentimental flights, Thomas Aquinas
succeeded in achieving,—as De Ruggiero acknowl­
edges in his Storia della Filosofia,—“that type of
pure science, admirable for its transparent logic and
for the organic connection of its parts, which his
Greek predecessor was the first to found.”
2. The Aspiration of St. Thomas

In the third volume of his Dogme ng eschichte,
Adolph Harnack has brought out in strong relief the
fact that, while Scholasticism was rounding out its
synthesis in the field of thought, the Church was
engaged in the same task in the various concerns of
human life. This is quite true, and it points to the
outstanding characteristic of the Middle Ages.1
In vain do we look for it in other centuries, in
which we find none of that magnificence of system­
atic conceptions or organic visions. In that epoch
1 Cfr. Maurice De Wulf, Philosophy and Civilisation in
the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 1922). (Tr.)

8

THE PROGRAMME OF ST. THOMAS

everything appeared as forming a part of this rich
and living unity. And if St. Thomas is the rep­
resentative of these times, it is because of that
synthesis which constituted his unceasing preoccupa­
tion and steadfast programme. He synthesized all
the thought that had gone before; he embraced all
reality, natural and supernatural; he achieved a
happy harmony in his own life. In a word, St.
Thomas was the synthetic genius par excellence.
As in Aristotle, so in him, the historic sense was
vivid. In De Anima (I, I. 2) he bids us “give ear
to the opinions of the ancients, whatever they may
be, because of a twofold usefulness to be derived
therefrom : to make our own whatever of good they
have said, and to shun what they have said mis­
takenly.” And in his commentary on Aristotle’s
Metaphysics (III, lib. 1) he says: “The exami­
nation of preceding authors is necessary for clear­
ing up problems and solving doubts. As in a trial
no one can pronounce sentence without having heard
the reasons of both sides, so it is necessary that he
who is occupied with philosophy hear the reasons and
doubts adduced to the contrary by the adversaries,
in order to form a strictly scientific judgment.”
This criterion St. Thomas not only stated, but
loyally followed. In his works the historian of
philosophy can discover not only treasures of in-

THE ASPIRATION OF ST. THOMAS

9

formation and ideas, but above all the method to
be followed. Besides, the very technique of Scho­
lastic exposition with the Videtur qiiod, that is, the
statement of hostile theories, was favorable to that
orderly procedure which in St. Thomas Aquinas
took on an exquisiteness quite remarkable for those
times. Thus, for his Aristotelian studies he was
not satisfied with the Latin version made from the
Arabic: to have a reliable text of Aristotle, he pre­
vailed on William of Moerbeke, his friend and con­
frère, who was a good linguist, to make a Latin
version of the Stagirite’s works on physics, meta­
physics, and ethics, directly from the Greek. And
this was done,—as he notes in De Coclo et Mundo
(I, lib. 22), not merely in order to ascertain what
others had thought, but to get at the truth. He
well understood that the historical statement of
problems is an indispensable requisite for the at­
tainment and progress of truth.
Hence, the synthesis of the conceptions of the
past must have occurred quite spontaneously to his
mind. In the process of actualizing it, he ever
maintained an admirable serenity and a state of
mind that at times urged him to excessive benignity
in interpreting different thinkers. And so he who
should have been an antagonist of Augustinian
Platonism, not only quoted St. Augustine with the

IO THE PROGRAMME OF ST. THOMAS
greatest veneration,1 but also, as von Ilertling
has noted, took over from the writers opposed to
him a goodly number of important doctrines (for
instance, that in God thought is identified with be­
ing, that He alone can create, that conservation is
a continued creation), and accepted the theories of
exemplarism, of Providence, of miracle, of evil, of
the immateriality of the soul, and so on. Not
only did he seek to cover with all possible courtesy
the exaggerated spiritualism of the bishop of Hippo,
so as to attenuate its opposition to the peripatetic
doctrines, but when treating of Aristotle, he did
not hesitate to take a contrary position on questions
in which he did not find him consonant with truth.
Fully independent in judgment, equal, nay superior
in intellectual acumen and comprehension to the
greatest geniuses of humanity, he discovered new
paths of truth and was not afraid of novelty in his
synthetic work. This is shown clearly by his accu­
rate biographer, William of Tours, who found in his
teaching “new questions,” a “new and lucid method
of research and scientific solutions,” “new argu­
ments” in his demonstrations, “new doctrines and
principles,” by means of which he solved doubts and
difficulties. It is true that Thomas took the material
for his synthesis from all preceding philosophers;
1 In the first part of the Summa Theologica the writings
of St. Augustine are cited 550 times. (Tr.)

THE ASPIRATION OF ST. THOMAS n

bat it is equally true, as will be amply shown, that he
endowed his work with a genuine and luminous
originality.
This work not only recapitulated and perfected
the results of the culture hitherto achieved, but was
extended so as to embrace all reality. The relations
between metaphysics and dogma, faith and philoso­
phy, the natural and the supernatural, were defini­
tively and lucidly determined by St. Thomas, inas­
much as the two domains,—especially in his two
Summae,—were harmoniously blended together,
while remaining formally distinct.
A modern philosopher, Rudolf Eucken, though
hostile to Neo-Thomism, well delineates this guiding
concept of Aquinas when he writes in his Lebensanschauungcn grosser Denker that, for St. Thomas,
“every degree of reality has its own law. Even the
lowest grade must have the power to develop accord­
ing to its particular character, without being dis­
turbed by the higher ones. As there is a special
kingdom of nature, so there is a recognition of the
autonomous task of natural knowledge ; and the
appeal to God in special scientific questions is con­
demned as a refuge of ignorance {asylum igno­
rantiae'). But every inferior grade must needs con­
fine itself within its own limits, and not presume to
intrude upon the higher spheres. The kingdom
of nature merely sketches what the kingdom of

12 THE PROGRAMME OF ST. THOMAS
grace, the world of Christianity, confirms and de­
velops. . . . Hence autonomy does not exclude
subordination, and the division of the domains is
completed by their being brought into harmony
within a more comprehensive totality. Then, above
the kingdom of historical Revelation there towers
another grade : the immediate union with God . . .
the kingdom of glory. . . . This gradation seems
to have solved the problem of reconciling all human
finalities and of recognizing for every domain its
proper law, without endangering the unity and order
of the whole. . . . This work called for a truly
extraordinary power of synthesis and an equally
great ability in the use of logic. In this Thomas
attained true greatness.”
Another factor aided St. Thomas to reach such
heights: he realized in his own life the harmony
visioned in his speculation. The sacrifice of his
entire self to truth was not in vain. The thoughtful
recollection as part of a holy life, the prolific inspi­
rations of prayer, the unruffled tranquillity of medi­
tation, the lectures of Albert the Great, the absorb­
ing interest of teaching and disputation,—all these
factors contributed to make him impervious to the
trivial happenings of every-day life, and enabled
him to soar boldly into a higher world, where the
sweep of his vision could embrace the vastest
horizons.

THE ASPIRATION OF ST. THOMAS 13
One of his biographers, Guglielmo da Tocco, re­
lates that St. Thomas one day, while sitting at table
with St. Louis, King of France, wholly absorbed
in his own thoughts, quite forgot the illustri­
ous personages with whom he was dining. All at
once he struck the table and exclaimed : “At last
I have found the decisive argument against the
Manicheans!” This incident, says Grabmann in
his fine essay on Thomas von Aquin, induced the
superiors of the Dominican Order to give him
Reginaldo da Piperno as a companion, to take care
of him and to see to it that he did not forget to
partake of the necessary food and drink, or neglect
the demands of practical life.
Study and the disinterested investigation of truth,
—such was the supreme purpose of “the good friar
Thomas,” as Dante calls him in the Convivio.
Through this complete sacrifice of self he became
the “Prince of Scholastics” and remains to-day the
Master of the Catholic world. In him the immacu­
late purity of soul, which Plato required as a con­
dition sine qua non for attaining wisdom, was
joined to keenness and depth of mind. The writer
of the Contra Gentiles was capable of composing the
Office for the Feast of Corpus Christi and of present­
ing to the Church those sublime Eucharistic hymns
which are still in use in our liturgy. This philoso­
pher and theologian was a saint, and a great saint.

I4 THE PROGRAMME OF ST. THOMAS
This ardent admirer of Aristotle, having been
stricken by illness on his way to the Council of
Lyons, died, surrounded by monks, at Fossanuova,
—died commenting on the Canticle of Canticles!
The programme of the synthesis in culture, in the
grades of reality, in life, has never been more splen­
didly realized. Henceforth one will search history
in vain for a man who in this respect can rival
Thomas Aquinas.
3. Origins of the Life-Giving Idea

The simple and inexhaustibly prolific idea of
which St. Thomas availed himself to vivify his
conception, and which breathed life into the rich
materials he had collected was, as I have stated, the
ideæof
In the following pages this assertion
will be amply substantiated.
There is one point, however, which is too easily
passed over, even by many of those who recognize in
being the life-giving idea of Thomism. And it is
this : being, as conceived by St. Thomas, is the up­
shot of all the speculation from the beginning of
Greek philosophy down to his own time. It is the
last flower on the plant of pre-modern thought.
When the Greeks pass on from the mythological
explanation of the universe to the scientific vision
of it, the problem which at once confronts them is
that of being, or reality. And this is likewise one

ORIGINS OF THE LIFE-GIVING IDEA 15
of the first concepts to receive elaboration ; indeed,
it is the fundamental concept, inasmuch as becoming,
with the Greeks, always concerns that which exists,
and for them the act of knowing is never endowed
with a creative power ;—it does but mirror being, or
seeks to do so.
But for the Ionic, Pythagorean, and Eleatic
school, for Heraclitus, Empedocles, Leucippus, and
Democritus, for Anaxagoras himself, the reality to
be explained is nature, the natural object, and re­
course is had to air, water, fire, atoms, vow, with
a view to solving the problem.
At first glance it would seem that with the Soph­
ists the orientation of philosophic research under­
goes a complete change. Sceptical doubt culminates
in the total negation of truth, of ethics, of religion.
For the σοφοί being is unknowable. Man, accord­
ing to a phrase of Protagoras, is the measure of all
things. Sophistic dialectic and eristic buffooneries
seem about to overthrow, for good and all, the set­
ting of the problem of being; for, given the sub­
jectivity of our perceptions, the knowledge of reality
becomes impossible.
It cannot be denied that the Sophists brought
about a displacement of the center of gravity in
speculation. From the investigation of nature
philosophy passes to the examination of the subject,
but it goes no further than its surface, and loses it-

i6 THE PROGRAMME OF ST. THOMAS

self in the whirlwind of the external phenomena of
the ego.
It was then necessary to probe deeper. The sub­
ject is not to be considered merely from the side <>f
its surface life. And Socrates comes with the
admonition: “Know thyself.” Here we have
a programme that plants itself within the very po­
sition of the Sophists, but progresses in the direction
of the interior life. This life, when accurately ex­
amined, yields to Socrates the joy of his great dis­
covery, the concept, the basis of science and knowl­
edge, as the norm available to all, overcoming and
disproving the relativism of Gorgias and Protag­
oras.
Socrates divided thingsinto two classes—divine
and, human. And it must be admitted that, as re­
gards the first (τά δαι/*όηα), the formation of the
world, being in itself, he is like unto the Sophists in
pronouncing the hopeless verdict of ignoramus,
scarcely softened by the feeble ray of δό£α, or
opinion. Science (ε’τπστή/χτ?) concerns itself only
with human things (τα ά^ρώτταα), that is to say,
with what is just and unjust, pious and impious,
beautiful and ugly,—in a word, with the ordi­
nary ways and affairs of man. Here it is that
Socrates sees the concept sprouting as something
constant, immutable, universal, asserting its sover­
eignty, bringing the will under its sway, and en-

wn

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ORIGINS OF THE LIFE-GIVING IDEA 17
abling men to found their lives and conduct on
absolute truth.
Such ajjosition, precious though it be for its Recog­
nition of the validity of thought in itself, does not
allow, at least in theory, of the .study of being. In
reality, however, Socrates himself made use of the
concept also in the field he had defined as inaccessi­
ble ; and though failing to solve with it “the geome­
try of fleas” (such was the reproach of an adver­
sary), he none the less discussed the problem of the
finality of the universe.
With Plato the Socratic concept takes on the form
of idea, and the Platonic idea not only hails con­
ceptual knowledge as absolute and perfect knowl­
edge, it not only extends the reign of the concept—
hitherto confined within the limits of human conduct,
—to all reality, but it inaugurates metaphysics, the
metaphysics of ideas, to which it attributes not only
logical, but also ontological validity, and calls forth
the well-known dualisms,—so acute and embarrass­
ing,—in the domain of knowledge, of ethics, and
especially of metaphysics.
Two worlds were now facing each other : on the I
one hand was the world of ideas, of ουσία, of perfect '
reality, of the universal existing as such; on the
other, the world of “becoming,” of relativity, of ;
changeableness, of imperfection, of γετνεσκ, of the in- ϊ
dividual.

s

1

i8 THE PROGRAMME OF ST. THOMAS

For Plato, ideas are the true being,—ideas not
atomistically separated, but organically connected
“by bonds stronger than the diamond." Further­
more, for him all ideas are essential determinal ions
of the idea of being, whose internal principle of
specification is the idea of the good, the sun of the
world of the invisible, the fountainhead of all being.
In vain docs Plato seek to bridge the abyss that
separates these two wrorlds. The universal never
makes contact with the particular, but remains an
independent prototype. The theory of separated
ideas ruthlessly splits reality into two camps; it
throws a sinister light on one part of it and reduces
it to an empty shadow, imperfect and worthy of
contempt.
The Aristotelian revolution consists in bringing
about a union of the two worlds. Aristotle vigor­
ously combats the doctrine of separated ideas. He
makes the ideas come down from heaven to earth,
and puts them into the very current of reality. For
Aristotle the universal is immanent in the individual :
ideas operate in things as forces directing the proc­
ess of “becoming" and making it intelligible or
rational. The Socratic concept, after evolving into
the Platonic idea, thus becomes,—in contraposition
to matter,—the Aristotelian form, the soul of the
whole philosophy of the Stagirite.
Every part, or better, every member of the Aristo-

ORIGINS OF THE LIFE-GIVING IDEA 19
telîan system, is to be regarded from the viewpoint
of entelechy as the master-key to the entire edifice.
The doctrine of the form explains for Aristotle the
object of metaphysics and the causes of being, that
is to say, it solves the problem of being. “Be­
coming,” or the passage from potency to act in
matter, is to be interpreted in function of the form,
because that which is produced anew is a form, and
that by means of which a new form is produced
is the activity of another form. The same holds
true of finality, inasmuch as intrinsic finality is
identified with the substantial form of the specific
type. Extrinsic finality implies the hierarchy and
the relations between the forms. Transcendent
finality implies the pure form, perfect, immobile, and
moving all other forms.
In this conception the real becomes intelligible,
or, in the language of the moderns, rational. Our
knowledge is a knowledge of forms and acquired
through forms,1 and for that reason grasps the uni­
versal in the individual, the intelligible in the sensible,
the law in the fact, the reason and possibility of
being in being. Here, then, we have a science of
being as being, and of the principles of being,—in
other words, metaphysics as the science of reality, to
which the pre-Socratic philosophers had turned their
1Cfr. Eidologie, oder Philosophie als Formerkcnntnis, von
Dr. Joseph Geyser (Freiburg i. B., 1924). (Tr.)

P*

ORIGINS OF THE LIFE-GIVING IDEA 21

20 THE PROGRAMME OF ST. THOMAS
investigations. It is the science that has been
achieved through a slow but uninterrupted develop­
ment, across the crisis of Sophistic scepticism and
the contributions of Socrates and Plato. It is no
longer merely the dialectic of the concept, or the
metaphysics of distant ideas exulting on inaccessible
summits; it is, at last, the very metaphysic of being.
However, in this Aristotelian metaphysic, dominated by the conception of the form, there remains
a field of being not yet cleared up. It is that of
uncreated matter, of the individual, with its principle
of individuation in matter, and of history. With
St. Augustine new progress is made. Through the
idea of truth, the synthesis of all Augustinian specu­
lation, every part of reality becomes intelligible.
Primal matter, too, as created by God, the individual
and history as being under the influence of Provi­
dence and despite the difficulties raised by the prob­
lem of evil,—in a word, everything that exists is
a reflection of the eternal Truth. Nature, ideas,
things and their essential reasons, the single beings,
the vicissitudes of history,—all are flooded by this
light.
Dazzled by the fascinating vision that flashes on
him in his wonderful process of interiorizing,
Augustine, in his ascent of the mount of Truth,
would fain follow the debatable path that rises from

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the true to the affirmation of the real, and finds in
logical truth itself the proof of the existence of
ontological reality, of God and creatures.
This is not the place to discuss such a procedure,
which may have aided the great Doctor to throw
his Christian principle into stronger relief. I con­
fine myself to pointing out the immense distance
that had been traversed.
From the pre-Socratic philosophers down to St.
Augustine, being and the science of being appear in
one splendid development, which in this brief sketch
can be but very imperfectly presented.1 It would be
absurd to break this continuous progress. It would
be contrary to the philosophical spirit to forget
that, from the nascent investigation of reality by
the earliest philosophers, right on to Augustinianism,
there is a continuity of thought from which it is
not permissible to prescind. He who would rele­
gate the concept of Socrates, the idea of Plato, the
form of Aristotle, the truth of St. Augustine to
separate compartments,—as though they were not
phases of one and the same development,—would
show that he did not understand the history of
1 The development of the idea of being in ancient philosophy
will form the subject of a future work, in which I shall show
the unity of this developing process from the pre-sophists
down to St. Thomas, as against the opinion of those who
divide it into a Platonic and an Aristotelian current.

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22 THE PROGRAMME OF ST. THOMAS

philosophy. In like manner he would miss the truth
who failed to note how all preceding philosophy was
a preparation for the Thomistic system.
Being, according to St. Thomas, is the highest
peak reached by pre-modern thought. This simple
word “being" is a germinal idea, the fruit of a long
and slow preparation, the life-giving principle of a
new organism. St. Thomas achieved a synthesis,
not only because of the material he put under con­
tribution; the very soul of his system bears within
itself all that had inspired every philosophic genius
down to his day. To comprehend the being of St.
Thomas in the full richness of its meaning, it is not
enough to have recourse to the enlightening com­
ments of his limpid and profound Latin ; one must
also keep in view the historical development of
philosophical thought in what was its most essential
element, which, like a flaming torch, lights the way
of every great thinker and is entrusted by him to
his successor, who is to replenish it and make its
flame more brilliant, more beautiful, more intense.

h

CHAPTER Π
“being"

IN THE METAPHYSICS OF ST. THOMAS

Being, to the mind of St. Thomas, is not some· |
thing mysterious or obscure. On the contrary, it
is what our mind knows best and grasps immediately
in everything.
As soon as our intellect is aroused and comes in
contact with reality, the very first object of our
knowledge, the first concept we form,—no matter
what the thing that has impinged on our senses,—is
that of being, of something that is (το ov). We
have here an initial, imperfect, confused notion, tell­
ing us next to nothing about the constituent elements
of the real, yet, for all that, comprising them all,
down to their last determinations. Moreover, if we
penetrate its profound meaning, if we reach down
to the true reasons of being, this notion, in the most
universal and analogical unity of its content, becomes
ever more clear and distinct; it appears “quasi
quoddam seminarium totius cognitionis sequentis,”
a kind of nursery of all subsequent cognition, and
enables us to rise to the very summit of intellectual
23

4„Μ*·-*#»*»”

24

BEING

life, to the perfect Being, and thence to descend again
to all other beings.
Tn the order of knowledge, then, our thought is
enclosed between two points. At the point of de­
parture we have an initial cognition of being ; at the
point of arrival we find nothing else than a perfected
cognition of this same being. In this effort of
elaboration and attainment I can add nothing to the
concept of being that is not already implicitly con­
tained in it. To every generic idea I can add a
specific difference not included in the genus ; not so,
when the notion of being is in question : though ex5 pressing what was not formally signified before, I
* never succeed in stating or coming upon something
? that is not being. It was on this that St. Thomas
J I founded his doctrine of the analogy of being. The
notion of being, he argued, is not univocal, it is not
a genus, it does not indicate realities formally identi­
cal ; and yet, neither does it signify things entirely
different: it is not an equivocal idea. It is analogiI cal, inasmuch as God and creatures, substance and
i accidents, in a word, the most dissimilar realities,
*'■' agree in this that they are beings.
The same is found to hold good in the ontological
order.
“Quidquid est, si quid est, ens est,”—all that
exists, if existence, is being, say the followers of
St. Thomas in unison with their master. In all

THE SCIENCE OF BEING

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25

reality, actual or possible, present, past, or future,
discover, if you can, something to which this
idea of being does not apply. Strain your imagina­
tion to the utmost to find something in the domain
of reality that is not being. Impossible! We can,
of course, distinguish the various grades of being ;
we can conceive what universally follows upon all
being. But we cannot even imagine something that
is not being because the principle of contradiction
stands in the way. Whether we turn back on our
consciousness and study ourselves, or direct our
attention to sensible reality, or by way of reasoning
come to know “separated substances” (angels) and
God,—in every grade of reality we find being, something that is, something that has existence.
Here, too, the notion of being presents to us all
reality united in one single embrace. From Being
by essence proceed all other beings. In the cognitive process we take our point of departure from
being imperfectly grasped to reach a more elaborate
idea. The contrary process prevails in the onto­
logical order : here we must start from the most
perfect Being in order to explain everything that
exists or can exist.
The foregoing suffices to point out the motive for
the very numerous passages in the works of St.
Thomas,—from the De Veritate to the De Ente et
Essentiaj from the two Sumnae to his commentary

ο

26

BEING

on the Metaphysics of Aristotle,—where this pri­
macy of being in our intellect and in things existing
or possible is asserted. “Being is what the intellect
conceives first, as something most known and into
which it resolves all conceptions” (De Dcritate, qu.
I, art. I). “The . intellect naturally knows being
_and whatever essentially belongs to being as sucli,
and on this cognition the knowledge of first princi; pies is founded. . . . The formal object of the
intellect is being, just as color is the formal object
: of vision. . . . That under which is comprehended
' whatever the intellect knows ... is nothing else
than being” (Contra Gentiles, II, c. 83). “What .
is grasped first of all is being, the understanding of (
which is included in every apprehension” (Suimna
1
Theologica, I, II, qu. 92, art. 2). These quotations
could easily be multiplied.
1. The Science of Being as Such

Given this fundamental conviction, St. Thomas
had of necessity to prize metaphysics, or “first
philosophy” as wisdom par excellence, as the culmi­
nating point of knowledge, precisely because, in the
definition of Aristotle, this is the science of being
as such.
Dr. Grabmann is quite exact when he insists that
“St. Thomas Aquinas is pre-eminently a metaphysi­
cal thinker. The profound grasp, further develop-

ïië
*£||rj

THE SCIENCE OF BEING

27

ment, expert and comprehensive use of the metaphysics of Aristotle,—also for the penetration of
the theological content,—is his outstanding achievement. His teacher, Albert the Great, had paved
the way for this work. E. Rolfes calls St. Thomas
‘the greatest commentator of Aristotle’s Metaphysics.’ The metaphysical genius of Aquinas thoroughly dominates his great systematic works ; it reveals itself more especially in his teaching on God,
but is evident also in the strictly theological questions
on grace, the Incarnation, and the Sacraments. ...
It was surely not mere chance that the pupils of
St. Thomas showed a predilection for metaphysical
problems.”
All this, I repeat, is very true. But the innermost reason thereof is to be found in the soul of
Thomism. He who determined on being as the
inspiring principle of his system, was led by a logical
necessity to give preference to the science of being
as such, and to place it above mathematics, which
is concerned with reality as subject to quantity;
above physics, which studies the real in the function
of motion ; above every science whatsoever that
deals with reality from some determined and specific
point of view.
Whether the term “being” signifies the thing, the
res, essentia, quidditas that is endowed with existence, or whether it means existence itself,—actus

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28

BEING

essendi, the act of existing,—to speak of being in
metaphysics is always tantamount to speaking of
reality, that is, of that which exists or can exist.
The science of being, then, having gained the
first principles of all being, is applied to every other
branch of knowledge concerned with real being,
actual or possible. Wherever reality exists, there
metaphysics asserts its sway. It reaches out to ah
beings, and not even Natural Theology is possible
outside of it, because God, too, is being,—indeed,
He is the Supreme Being. It dominates all the
sciences and mocks him who would pretend to re­
pudiate it. In his commentary on the fourth book
of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, St. Thomas calls at­
tention to the fact that metaphysics is a branch of
knowledge indispensable even for those who would
ignore or actually despise it. Unwittingly all men
are constrained to occupy themselves with meta­
physics. For metaphysics treats of reality and the
fundamental principles of reality, that is, of being.
Hence he who wished to withdraw from its in­
fluence, would commit a sort of intellectual suicide.
He would have to say: “I am speaking, but I am
not concerned with reality; I am merely amusing
myself with chimeras.” No one can be interested
in the real and prescind from metaphysics, which
investigates the supreme laws of the real. No one
can delude himself with having understood St.

THE SCIENCE OF BEING

29

Thomas and sincerely repeat the saying that “the
tiniest pebble, a single fact, is worth more than a
mountain of syllogisms.” In the view of meta­
physics such a statement is proof positive of a total
lack of speculative acumen. It is not a question of
having being on one side and the syllogism on the
other; but it is metaphysics that gives us being,
reality, interpreted and comprehended. The differ­
ence between man and the animal, when they face
reality, is not based on the material nature of
sensation and verification; but consists in this, that
the animal observes and does not understand ;
whereas man proceeds from the observation of real­
ity to the explanation thereof, he rises from being
to the reasons of being.
In this St. Thomas was a loyal follower of Aris­
totle. He is a peripatetic more on account of the
mental habit of research and meditation than for
the sum-total of the doctrines he has taken over
and embodied in his system. The Stagirite had a
vivid sense of reality; from experience and obser­
vation he rose to The philosophical and metaphysical
interpretation of ^experiential data, thereby temper­
ing and welding the demands of empiricism and
idealism. In like manner, St. Thomas, as the faith- ,
fül continuator of the Greek master, always begins
with the positive observation of things, and then
proceeds to investigate their nature, causes, and

3θ

BEING

laws. And the merit of this method cannot be
calmly appraised except by one who reflects that in
the thirteenth century quite a different road was
followed by the Augustinian school.
2. The Conquest of Being

It cannot be denied that the mind that ponders
the writings of St. Augustine is deeply stirred and
enrapt by admiration. His metaphysics of truth
fills us with enthusiasm. The world takes on a
value quite different from that with which the com­
mon man invests it. Everything proclaims and
chants the beauty of that Truth of which earthly
being is but a pallid ray. And yet, the mind does
not rest tranquil, the Augustinian process for com­
passing truth does not satisfy it. The main line
of the great Doctor’s reasoning,—which mounts
to the supreme Truth and self-existent Being from
the eternal, immutable, and perfect truths existing
in our mind,—dazzles indeed, but does not con­
vince and is anything but safe. Christianity, with
its concept of Creation and Providence, had fur­
nished Augustine with the idea of the ontological
identity of being with truth and goodness, but
Plato and Plotinus, from whom he drew his in­
spiration, had not mapped out for him a safe and
solid road for reaching that summit ; rather, they
had indicated a misleading path. From the idea,

THE CONQUEST OF BEING

31

from the notion of truth, Augustine wished to attain
to Being. By the soarings of his heart and his
mystic genius he sought to make up for the defects
of the road upon which he had set out.
The spell which the interiorizing process of
Augustine always casts over the reader was soon
broken. In vain should we look for it in the heat
of the medieval struggle for and against the eternal
truths. Sertillanges thus sums up these conflicts:
Augustine had said that “nothing is more eternal
than the law of the circle ; nothing more eternal than
that two and three make five. If you destroy
the things that are true, truth itself will remain,
added Anselm. Is it perhaps not reasonable to
assert that universals exist outside of time and space ?
And what is more universal than truth? Of what
is true to-day it was always true that it would be so,
and will ever be true that it was so. Even suppos­
ing that truth had a beginning, or that it perishes,
nevertheless there always remains this: that in the
past or supposed future there would be no truth,
and this itself would be a truth,—so true is it that
truth is independent of everything and that it is
eternal.” Therefore Truth exists, that is to say,
God exists. From the notion of truth the transition
was made to the affirmation of Being. In this
manner was realized the great programme: “Do
not go outside (thyself). Truth abides in the in-

I

32

BEING

terior man. . . . And it thou shouldst find thy­
self changeable, go beyond thyself.”
Such reasoning, proper to the metaphysics of
truth, entrained certain consequences as to the origin
of ideas.
For Plato, Plotinus, the Neo-Platonists, Augus­
tine, and the Franciscan school, sensation played no
great part in the attainment of truth. The universal,
eternal, and immutable character of the latter could
not, in their view, derive its origin from the indi­
vidual, temporal, contingent things of sense. The
external object may arouse the intellectual soul to
understand, but it can do no more. Between sense
perception and intellectual knowledge there exists
merely an extrinsic relation, i. e., that of simple
juxtaposition.
If that were so, the activity of the cognitive
faculty would acquire a great and essential import­
ance in the genesis of human knowledge. Our
intellect would not be of a passive and receptive
character, but the soul would draw up truth from
the depths of its substance, or it would reach it with
the intervention of divine aid, or through the
medium of innate ideas, or by that divine illumi­
nation of minds so dear to St. Augustine. Such
were the consequences of proceeding along that peril­
ous road.

THE CONQUEST OF BEING

33

St. Thomas with his metaphysics of being struck
out in the opposite direction.
In the first place, he refutes all these hypotheses.
From the notion of truth one cannot pass on to the
affirmation of being, because truth implies and pre­
supposes being, inasmuch as it is an agreement be­
tween being and intellect. If there were no being,
there would be no truth. And it is futile to say
that then, at least this last assertion would still be
a truth. It would not, for this is a product of
our fancy which on the one hand imagines that
neither object nor subject exists, and on the other,
in the very act of excluding presupposes them.
The law of the circle could not be called a truth
if there were no mind to think it because truth is
an agreement between that law and some intelli­
gence. If the latter does not exist, neither does the
agreement. “Even if the human intellect did not
exist,” we read in De Veritate (qu. I, art. 2), “things
would still be called true in reference to the Divine
Intellect, given that the existence of such an in­
tellect were known. But if both intellects were con­
sidered as not existing,—an impossible supposition,
—then no ground whatever for truth would remain,”
—precisely because truth is nothing else than being in its relation to the intellect.
As to the universals, they prescind from time and

ai
BEING
34
space because they are abstracted from things and
their individual motion. But what would become
of this abstraction if there were no mind to perform
it? Eternity and immutability of truth are nega­
tive notes ; and, given an eternal intelligence, there
will also be an eternal truth. Hence we must needs
prove the existence of the former if we are to admit
the latter. From being we arrive at truth, but
from truth we cannot a priori mount to being be­
cause truth presupposes the being to be proved.
It is, therefore, unnecessary to admit innate ideas
in the human mind. Further evidence for this is
found in the potential character,—established by
consciousness itself,—of our cognitive faculties,
lower as well as higher. Our intellect is a passive
power and contains nothing except what it has in­
ferred from the senses. “Nihil est in intellectu quod
prius non fuerit in sensu.” In the Summa Theolo­
gica (la, qu. 12, art. 12) St. Thomas clearly teaches
that “our knowledge begins with sense. Hence our
natural knowledge can go as far as it can be led by
sensible things. And in his opusculum De Princi­
pio Individ uafioms he says that “the senses are the
foundation and origin of human knowledge.” Sen­
sible reality acts on the understanding by means of
the “phantasm” or the image from which the “active
intellect” forms “the impressed intelligible species.”

THE CONQUEST OF BEING

35

This, by its action on the “possible intellect,” gives
rise to the “expressed species,” verbum mentis,
or idea.
In the cognitive process, therefore, the point
of departure are the data of sensibility, and the
concept is reached through the elaboration effected
by the intellectual power. The sensible datum is
determinate and individual, but the intellect strips it
of its individualizing characters and seeks the reason
of being, the essential constituent of the thing,
the invariable and absolute essence. In this way
our mind penetrates to the very heart of reality,
‘‘ingreditur ad interiora rei,” says St. Thomas in
Contra Gentiles (IV, c. II), and. it is unnecessary
to postulate, special di vine illumination in order to
explain the genesis of higher truths. It is enough
to admit that God is the exemplary cause of all things
and that our intellect participates in the divine light.
Things are knowable in the eternal ideas of God,
not as if there existed a light through which and in
which we formally know the truth, but in the sense
that all things are imitations of divine ideas, that
is, of the absolute Being.
As a consequence, St. Thomas was prepared to
combat any attempt to prove absolute Being a prio
on the basis of the concept we have of liim. We
do not reach God except through contingent beings,

j6

BEING

perceived by the senses and elaborated by intelligence.
The famous ontological proof of Anselm found a
decided opponent in Aquinas.
St. Anselm tried to prove the existence of God
by starting from the idea we have of Him. In his
Proslogium he argues as follows against an atheist:
In our intellect there exists the idea of a being than
which no greater can be conceived. Now, that
which is so great that we can think of nothing
greater, cannot exist in the intellect alone, because
then the being that exists both in the mind and in
reality would evidently be more perfect. Therefore,
the being than which nothing greater can be con­
ceived, exists also in reality.
In his Commentary on the Sentences, in De Periy fate, in the Summa Contra Gentiles, and in the
Λ Summa Theologica St. Thomas rejects this argu­
ment. He admits that if God is thought of as a
most perfect beings lie must of necessity be thought
of as existing and cannot be represented as not ex­
isting. But from this it would only follow that
God exists in the human intellect and not that He
exists in reality {in rerum natura), unless it could
be shown that in reality, too, there exists some being
than which nothing greater can be conceived.
In the question, then, of the genesis of our knowl­
edge St. Thomas does not hesitate to declare the
Augustinian-Platonic procedure inadmissible. His

ÎHfaJit-

1

JHE CONQUEST OF BEING

37

point of departure is not the idea, or truth, but the
fact that being is perceived by the senses. The
senses, it is true, do not grasp the essence or the
existence of things because they are blind as to these
objects and as to the intrinsic, extra-subjective
reality of the object; but they present an effect of
reality to the intellect. With this material as a basis,
we affirm the reality of beings, their essential
notes, their contingent character, and finally, the
existence of a Being that is the ultimate reason of
all others and contains within itself the reason of
its own existence.
The gradual conquest of being in the domain of
knowledge is what we find in the Thomistic doc­
trine of the genesis of ideas. We are beings, the
material objects around us are beings. Through
sensation we make contact with these beings. With
the intellect we affirm them, understand the reason
of being, ascend from contingent to necessary being,
from material to immaterial beings, from the lowest
grade of being to the highest. Thus Metaphysics
attains to a concept of the ego, of the world, and
of God, by starting from experience, without, of
course, aprioristically excluding psychical facts.
This is the reason, as Professor Zamboni notes,
why the Aristotelian-Thomistic school divides meta­
physics into two parts : ( 1 ) general metaphysics or
ontology, which treats of being and its causes; and

38

BEING

(2) special metaphysics, which deals with the soul
and God, and is the application of ontology to
immaterial beings. “Metaphysics has for its proper
object, not the spiritual world, but the world of
experience. Having formed its concepts from this
world, and gained its principles, it rises to the con­
cepts of a spiritual soul and of God: hence it does
not start from the existence of the soul and of God,
and thence descend to facts, but it begins with facts
and thence mounts to the soul and to God. In the
field of cognition we proceed from the lowest beings
to the supreme Being, God.
3. St. Thomas and the Validity of Our Knowledge

This method has led many to reproach St. Thomas
with absolute ignorance of the problem of knowl­
edge, which is so much in evidence in contemporary
discussion. Thomism, it is urged, is a childish
dogmatism, which does not even touch the prelimi­
nary question of all philosophy, namely, can we know
being? That is the question, especially to-day, since
Kant has spoken. A system that fails to answer it
except in an a priori fashion, is unworthy of con­
sideration.
I grant that St. Thomas does not attack the
problem of knowledge as it is understood to-day.
But it seems to me that those who enter this com­
plaint are wrong in not asking themselves, whether

*·4&.

THE VALIDITY OF KNOWLEDGE

39

the question could have had a meaning for the
medieval thinker. To understand St. Thomas one
must regard his teaching in the light of that idea of
being which is its essential note. This is an in­
dispensable requisite for the great Doctor’s op­
ponents as well as for those of his followers who
would correct or round out his teaching.
I. According to the ideology of St. Thomas, as
Professor Giuseppe Zamboni observes in his work
on Problemi Antichi e Idee Nuove, “the senses give
us the phenomena. The sense of sight presents a
certain definite color, a certain extension; the sense
of taste, a definite savour, which we feel or have
felt. These sensations and images group and associ­
ate themselves in a fixed manner. Of an orange,
for example, the sense of sight gives me such and
such a color, the muscular sense such and such a
weight, the sense of smell this particular odor, and
so on. In other words they confront me with a
group of phenomena. When I perceive the datum,/
i. e., some particular phenomenon, with my senses, '
my intellect proceeds to consider this datum from its
own point of view and says: here is something that
exists, here is a being. The function of the senses
is to put me in the presence of something green,
heavy, fragrant; the function of the intellect is to
place me in the presence of a being. . . . ‘Intellectus
naturaliter cognoscit ens’—it is the nature of the in-

40

ί

BEING

teliect to know being. If, for example, I see a black
point moving in the air, if I feel resistance while
walking in the dark, my first thought is : Here is
something ; subsequently I say: This something has
this or that color, such and such a shape, these dimen­
sions, presents such and such physical, chemical,
biological, psychical aspects, so that I am led to say
that this hitherto vague something is an airplane,
or an eagle, or a fly or whatever else it may be. Let
us assume that it is an eagle. I study its character­
istics carefully, but at the bottom of all the ex­
perimental, scientific, mathematical researches I can
make about this eagle, will always remain the notion :
This eagle is a being, it exists, independently of
the thought by which I conceive it. The table, the
pen, the animal, the ego, exist even when no one
thinks them.” The existence of the thing, that is,
its reality independent of thought, or that energy by
which it maintains itself in the order of the actual,
cannot be properly defined. The concept of being
is at the bottom of every concept; it is the first idea
conceived by the mind when it comes in contact with
experience (external and internal) ; it is perfectly
clear in itself, and distinct from the concept of mere
presence, time, or space. Everyone says : I exist,
and understands and feels without further ex­
planation what this word means. Illud quod primo

THE VALIDITY OF KNOWLEDGE

41

intellectus concipit quasi notissimum est ens,—what
the intellect conceives first of all as the best known
of all, is being.
2. This idea of being, conceived by an original
act proper to a faculty called intellect, is abstracted
from reality, and from every grade of reality, be­
cause in effect every form of reality is being.
Color is a form of being (c’est de I’ctre, the French
would say) ; life, motion, action, sound, taste, all
are forms of being. There is not a thing in the
world to which the note of being does not apply.
The origin of this idea, then, is to be sought z
in the data furnished by sensation. But from the
fact that the process by which we form ideas starts
with sensation, it by no means follows that the
final product is of the same nature as sensation, or
that it is reducible to, and has the individuating
qualities distinctive of, sensations. The sensory
datum is elaborated by the intellect, which discerns,
intues being, the ratio entis, that is, an original
datum, refractory to a sensist interpretation, and
to be classified apart from the data of sense, because
of its special and essentially different nature.
It is not the senses that perceive being. They
merely perceive shape, weight, taste, smell, which are
then conceived by the intellect as being, as an entity.
This entity, however, is not a residue of a sensible

ri

42

BEING

nature; it is not the proper object of any of the
senses; it is not formed by any image or perception,
but is implicit in all. The act of conceiving the
sense data as being, as something existing, is tin act
of the intellect. 'This idea of being is of a nature
different from, and superior to, the sense-images
and the results of their associations; the organs of
the senses, the nerves, the cerebral and spinal centers,
merely fulfil a preparatory function in the formation
of thought. If the origin of the idea is in sensa­
tion {nihil est in intellectu quod prias non fitent in
sensu), the nature of the idea is quite different from
sensation itself. There is an essential distinction
between sense and intellect.
3. After the intellect has grasped, in the phe­
nomena of sense, this first notion of being, which is
its proper object, after it has formed this first con­
cept, contained in all the things which the senses can
offer, because all are apprehended as something that
exists, we proceed to elaborate this fundamental idea,
which at first wras confused and indeterminate.
And with the idea of being we form all the other
metaphysical ideas, whose validity, therefore, is
bound up with that of the idea of being. He who
admits that we can truly say: “something exists,’’
he who recognizes the objective validity of the
initial notion of being, cannot raise the question as
to the validity of the other ideas, for all are resolved

THE VALIDITY OF KNOWLEDGE

43

into that one. Illud ... in quo [intellectus}
omnes conceptiones resolvit, est ens.”
And so :
Essence is wh^t a being is.
Existence is the act by which a being is.
Potency is that which can be, or the capacity for
being.
Act is that which exists.
Substance is that which has existence in itself.
Accident is that which has no autonomous exist­
ence.
God is the Being that exists, and cannot not exist.
Cause is that by which being begins to be.
Effect is that which exists by virtue of another
being.
End is the reason for the existence of a being.
$The true is being in so far as it is known.
The good is being in so far as it is desired.
Becoming is the passage from non-being to being.
Matter and Form are the elements of substantial
being, which is created and corporeal.
In short, all the ideas of Thomistic metaphysics
are a development of the idea of being, and, like this
idea, bear the marks of universality and of inde­
pendence from time and space, which essentially
differentiate them from sense-images and sensa­
tions. They are not inborn but acquired, as
grounded in the idea of being. They are not seen

44

BEING

in God, in the eternal ideas or reasons, but in created
reality, where, little by little, with the patient effort
of induction and analysis, we seek to find out what
things are, what their essence and nature. In this
manner, starting from the material offered by the
senses, we ascend the mount of metaphysics and find
that this entire domain of ideas is dominated by the
one sovereign idea of being.
4. For St. Thomas, the supreme principles of
thought and reality stand in intimate relation to the
metaphysical concepts of being.
Well-known is the following passage of the
Summa Theologica (la, Ilae, qu. 94, art. 2):
“What our intellect comes to know first of all is
being, the idea of which is included in everything
that man knows. Hence the first undemonstrable
principle is that a thing cannot be affirmed and de­
nied at one and the same time. This principle is
founded on the concept of being and non-being, and
is presupposed by all other principles.”
The order in the cognitive process is, therefore,
the following : the intelligence, first of all, has the
intuition of being; on this intuition it directly founds
the principle of contradiction, the best known and
most obvious of all, and to which all the other ele­
mentary and primary principles are reduced.
Over and over again in his works St. Thomas re­
minds us that “the knowledge of first principles is

THE VALIDITY OF KNOWLEDGE

45

grounded in the cognition of being (fundatur pri­
morum principiorum notitia).” If the notion of
being is valid, so are first principles. If the former
reflects reality, then the latter are laws, not only of
thought, but also of reality, of being, because in the
last analysis they can be reduced to being and to
nothing else.
As a matter of fact, a careful consideration will
show that all principles imply the parent idea of
being :
The principle of contradiction is stated thus :
The same being cannot be and not be at the same
time.
The principle of identity says : A being is what
it is.
The principle of the excluded third teaches that
between being and non-being there is no middle way,
that is to say, a thing either is, or it is not.
The principle of causality reminds us that every
being that begins to exist, every being that does not
contain within itself the reason for its existence,
derives it from another being.
All the other principles spring in like manner
from the concept of being.
Here, again, he who admits that our intellect can
safely assert that it reaches the absolute when it
says, “Something exists;” he who grants the objec­
tive validity of the notion of being cannot consis-

46

BEING

tently stop halfway, but is inevitably drawn within
the domain of Thomistic metaphysics. If being is
not a creation of our mind nor an act of our thought,
if our spirit,—or better, the act of our thinking.—
does not create being'·, but merely recognizes and
ascertains it; if, in other words, one does not deny
the objective validity of this concept, then the prob­
lem of knowledge cannot even be raised. After a
searching inquiry' into the validity of the judgments
by which I state first principles, I find that it is not
a blind and ineluctable force which constrains me to
attribute the predicate to the subject, but that it is
the light of objective evidence which makes me look
attentively at the relations of the two terms to each
other. The connection between subject and predi­
cate is made under the influence of evidence, in the
light of the intellectual manifestation of their truth;
and the connection is made anew every time and
is grasped in its very making. From this seen con­
nection, concludes Professor Zamboni, first principles
draw that character of intrinsic necessity which dis­
tinguishes them. They are principles whose truth
does not depend on the external world of reality.
They abstract from time. They do not appear to
us as categories innate in ourselves. On the con­
trary, we recognize them as the laws of reality ; and
they are likewise the laws of our thought in so far
as they are the laws of reality. They are judgments

THE VALIDITY OF KNOWLEDGE

47

that “declare not only an unthinkableness, but an
impossibility; it is being itself that manifests itself
as subject to the law of non-contradiction,” and to
the other laws that flow from this one,—laws which
are, therefore, “the laws of being considered as
such, and which ’have a universal application
antecedently to experience. Thus is rendered possi­
ble the legitimate passage from my sense modi­
fication to the existence of the cause that produced
it.” In short, once the validity of the category of
being is recognized, we have a secure foundation on
which to raise the entire edifice of metaphysics.
There is but one way to shake and demolish it : *■,
by striking at the life-giving idea of being.1 If this
latter were subjective, as the Kantians claim, or if
being were an act of creative thought, as the Hege­
lians would have it, then Thomistic metaphysics
would be dealt its death blow. But for St. Thomas
the thing most certain was this initial affirmation of
being. For him the assertion, “I conceive some
1 Small wonder, then, that the polemics between Thomists
and Rosminians were so heated some years ago. Antonio
Rosmini was too profound a thinker not to bring out clearly
the essential importance of the idea of being. With this idea
he built up his system, and on it he based his position against
Kant. But by asserting that the idea of being was inborn in
us, he gave rise to some errors, to much confusion, and to a
thousand discussions concerning the subjective or objective
validity of the idea itself. It is worthy of notice how a
slight mistake on this point means the ruin of the whole.

4S

BEING

thing, some thing exists,” was not made lightly or
dogmatically. To be sure, he could bring forward
no proof for it : not, however, because arguments
were deficient or the thesis obscure, but because of
its intrinsic and dazzling clearness. To him it
seemed absurd that one could doubt being, so force­
fully attested, among others, by our consciousness.
“No one,” he writes in De Veritate (qu. x, art.
12, ad 7), “can assent to the thought that he does
not exist; for in the very act of thinking he per­
ceives that he exists.” And inasmuch as the entire
validity of our knowledge depends on this one single
root, being, he could neither raise nor conceive a
problem of knowledge such as the old and the new
Sceptics propound. These pretend to demonstrate
the veracity of our cognitive faculty by means of
a process which must needs presuppose it, because
they make use of the very faculty about which they
doubt.
The Augustinian tendency, as we saw, underscored the second member of the relation: being and
the knozvledge of being (or truth'), took it as the
starting-point, and tried to reach being in the name
of truth. Empiricism tended to limit itself to the
first member, being, in the name of experience and
fact, without rising to the reasons of being, that
is, to its intelligibility or rationality. Placed be­
tween these two important currents, St. Thomas

I
1

f

\
V

THE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSALS

49

took account of both. And he differed from
every one of his precursors, even from Albert the
Great, in that he knew how to compass his philo­
sophic synthesis with the notion of being,—a notion
found explicitly in the Stagirite, but reaching its
complete elaboration only in his medieval com­
mentator.
4. The Problem of Universals

The attitude of St. Thomas on the question of
knowledge is closely bound up with his position on
another problem which deeply stirred medieval think­
ers, especially from the eleventh to the fifteenth
century. I mean the question of universals.
Though Scholasticism can not be artificially con­
fined within the bounds of the conflict waged about
the problem of universals, none the less, as De Wulf
remarks in his Histoire de la Philosophie Médiévale,
and Le Problème des Universaux dans son Evolution
Historique de IX e au XIIIθ Siècle, this problem was
one of the first to be put forth in the field of pure
speculation and absorbed the greatest effort of
thought during this period. When we read the
descriptions of these conflicts, and by means of the
accurate studies and researches of to-day assist at
the disputations of that time and witness the clash
between a Roscellin and a St. Anselm, between an
Abélard and a St. Bernard, we seem to be viewing

5°

BEING

a battle in which all the resources of the keenest
genius and all the weapons of the finest dialectic
were engaged.
And that battle, far from having a purely historic
interest, is of vital importance even in our own day.
From time to time, even though under different
forms, the same problem crops up again and calls
for a solution. In the epoch of Positivism it is the
theory of John Stuart Mill and Taine, entwining it­
self with ancient Nominalism. Again, it is the
discussion concerning the value of the laws of
science. Once more, it is the distinction of Bene­
detto Croce between pure concept and empirical and
abstract pseudo-concepts. They are new phases,
as Windelband says, “behind which rises the more
general and more difficult question whether any meta­
physical value belongs to these universal determi­
nations which are the aim of every scientific anal­
ysis. There are scientists to-day,” continues the
German historian of philosophy, “who dismiss the
question of universals as having been consigned
to the scrap-heap long ago, or look upon it as a
malady of outgrown infancy. Until these scientists
can tell us with full security and clearness wherein
metaphysical reality and the efficacy of what they
call natural laws consist, we must always tell them :
mutato nomine, de te fabula narratur/’
The problem,—to indicate it briefly,—was born

THE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSALS

r

1

51

of the seeming contradiction between the universal
character of our concepts and the individual charac­
ter of things in themselves.
We perceive in ourselves the existence of uni­
versal ideas. We possess a numerous category of
intellectual representations that have for their ob­
ject being in general and the universal determi­
nations of being, independently of mattei· and of
every individualizing note;—in short, we have a
knowledge of things that is abstract and universal.
The things accessible to our senses, on the contrary,
are particular, individual, concrete. Being as an
object existing outside of us, seems to have prop­
erties totally opposed to being as an object conceived
by our mind.
Porphyry in his Isagoge raised the question about
genera and species, but offered no solution. Boe­
thius upheld two contradictory theses. The first
Doctors of the Middle Ages took the dispute up
again, and gradually there arose various schools
which are usually classified as follows :
I. Noininalism solves the seeming discord between
the real world and the world of thought by deny­
ing the existence and possibility of universal con­
cepts. There are no universal realities in nature,
nor are there universal representations in our in­
tellect. What we believe to be abstract and uni­
versal concepts are nothing, else than a word, a

52

BEING

name, a device, a label for the collective desig­
nation of diverse individuals. Our representations
are as individual as the reality that we observe.
2. Conceptualism recognizes the presence and
ideal value of universal representations in our mind,
but denies them real value. In the world of the
particular there is no common element realized in
each one of them ;—there is no universality. The
universal forms of our mind have no corresponding
real term in external nature, but are mere concepts,
produced by the mind for reasons of subjective
exigency.
3. Exaggerated Realism admits the existence of
the universal not only in our thought, but in the
reality of things. The harmony, therefore, between
the universal concept and objective reality is evident,
because the concept mirrors the real in the exact
degree of universality with which it is invested.
4. Mdderate Realism faces the difficulty : “How
can a universal representation be in agreement with
a world that contains nothing but individuals,” and
solves it thus : It is quite true that things are in­
dividual. But in the individuals we discover com­
mon notes, marks of equality, types, identical es­
sences, which, while they have no universality in the
single beings, when the intellect considers and views
them in relation to the particular subjects in which
they are op can be realized, are found to be attribut-

THE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSALS

53

able to each and ail. In other words, in the in­
dividuals there is tnit in which they agree and that
by which they difïôy ; without error the mind can
perceive the agreemert and prescind from the differ­
ence. The universal concept as such ( formaliter)
is in the intellect only ; but it has its potential foun­
dation (est fundamentaliter et potentialiter) in
things, in the external world.
This problem of the universals may be considered
from a threefold viewpoint :
1. Psychologically I can consider the general con­
cepts present in my mind, not in their finished state,
but in the process of formation. That is, I can seek
out and follow up their genesis in the human soul
in the light of the special formative laws of the
mind.
2. Logically the universal is a notion, a concept
existing in the human intellect, and by its nature
destined to be predicated of a number of things.
3. Metaphysically the universal is the common es­
sence, the identical substratum of a determinate
species, realized or capable of being realized in vari­
ous individuals.
As a result, the question of universals is essen­
tially connected with metaphysics, and its interest is
not restricted to logic and psychology. It was not
without reason that St. Thomas fully discussed this

——*^«*«*^^

54

BEING

question in Ins purely nielap jysical treatise De
Ente et Essentia. Besides, a plance at the history
of philosophy is enough to make one realize that
every solution of the problem of universals has
behind it a corresponding metaphysic of its own.
To Nominalism, for instance, corresponds the metaphysic of individualism, to quote the happy def­
inition of Windelband. To exaggerated Realism
corresponds the metaphysic of ideas or of truth. To
moderate Realism, or realistic Conceptualism, as
Canella would prefer to call it, corresponds the
metaphysic of being. And it is in relation to the
metaphysical conception of being that we must
now examine the position taken by St. Thomas on
the problem of universals.
We have stated that in the Thomistic theory the
intellect is the faculty that grasps being. Our intel­
lect seeks to fathom the reason of being. Intellect,
knowledge of being, knowledge of the reason of
being—all these imply one another.
Now, in studying beings I ascertain that there are
some reasons or natures common to different groups.
In the manifold squares that really exist, or could
exist, I note an identical nature (that of a square
and not a circle), or an identical reason of being.
All free acts that are or could be accomplished have
this in common that, no matter how completely they
may differ from one another otherwise, they agree

THE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSALS

55

in the nature of a free act, that is, in one reason
of being which is verified in each one and makes
them to be free and not compulsory acts. In all
the men of yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow, I
do not find two individuals, not even two hands
exactly alike; and yet all agree in one sole reason
of being, in one single human nature,—otherwise
they would no longer be men, but, for example, dogs,
cats, apes, etc.
At this point another question presented itself.
It is much more subtle and has to be well dis­
tinguished from the first, though some writers,
—among them De Maria,—have confused them.
The question concerns the principium indiznduationis, the principle of individuation. If the reason
of being is the same in several individuals, how can
they possibly differ from one another? How can
one conceive a numerical difference where there is
specific identity?
St. Thomas answered that the principle of in­
dividuation is not the common nature, not the es­
sential form, because this form explains the specific
identity. Much less can this principle be found in
the accidents, which accrue only after the in­
dividual has been constituted. Therefore it must
be the materia signata quantitate—matter as marked
or determined by quantity. If I take a piece of gold
and divide it into two parts, the reason of being of

5ό

BEING

each is the same, because both the one and the other
is gold, and this cannot explain the numerical distinc­
tion. Instead, this distinction finds its explanation
in matter, in the determinate quantity of matter
contained in the two pieces.
If the human intellect were not only a faculty of
being, but in its first intuition would lay hold of the
whole reality of the single things; if in this fashion
it could know being in its entirety, down to its in­
nermost depths and recesses, then, even while bring­
ing out the reason of being common to several in­
dividuals, it would see it individualized in this mat­
ter, with these individuating notes, and the indi­
vidual would be grasped in its complete singularity.
But here is the drawback : our intellect, while
truly a faculty for knowing being, is imperfect in
that it is an abstractive faculty. It does not mirror
the whole being; it does not know matter, the source
of individuation. But it abstracts from being the
reason of being common to a definite group of things.
And there is question not only of an isolating abstrac­
tion,—which, in considering a determinate object,
prescinds from one part of its reality to fix on the
examination of another part,—but of a itniversalicing abstraction. As we shall see later, when study­
ing the limits of Thomistic intellectualism, the
human intellect can not reach the individual di­
rectly ; it does not know beings except by abstracting

i ii* i >rfcy'•■iiBH

THE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSALS

57

from matter and from individualizing and differ­
entiating characteristics (Summa Theologica, la, qu.
79, art. 3; qu. 57, art. 2, ad 1 etc.). Confronted
by the' sensory datum of a group of men, circles,
and so on, the intellect abstracts from the matter
of which they consist, from their color, their di­
mensions, and directly seizes only their reason of
being, their nature, their quidditas or essence.
This reason of being, this quidditas,—by which
beings are what they are and not different, and
which does not give us the whole of an individual,
but only an essential aspect of it,—in so far as it
is considered as existing in the single beings, was
called by St. Thomas the metaphysical universal,
the direct universal, intentio prima. He called it
universal because, by abstracting from the indi­
vidualizing conditions, it could be applied to many.
He said that it existed in re, in reality, non quoad
modum concipiendi, sed quoad rem conceptam;
that is, not after the manner of our representation
(because the nature of man, for example, does not
exist as a universal, without matter and individual­
izing notes), but as to the thing represented (be­
cause in every individual man there is the nature
of man).
If, instead, this nature is viewed, not as it is
individualized in the single beings, but in itself ; if
the mind returns to the object taken in the state of

58

BEING

abstraction and considers it, as St. Thomas said,
reduplicative ut universale,—precisely in so jar as
it is universal, that is, in so far as it can be or is
communicated to many,—then we have the loz/ica:
universal, the reflex universal, the universal wcitndae intentionis, which, of course, exists only in
the mind. It is an elaboration of the concept of
the reason of being;—it is the concept of a concept.
St. Thomas had to reach his tempered realism
by virtue of his theory concerning being and the
knowledge of being. If in the groups of indi­
vidual beings,—the only ones that exist,—the intel­
lect discovers and abstracts a common and universal
nature or reason of being, then we understand how
a universal representation can be in agreement with
a world that contains nothing but individuals. In
these there exists a common reason of being, which
I can represent to myself by abstracting, prescind­
ing from matter and individual characteristics.
Its applicability to many individuals is its univer­
sality. But in the particular beings it is realized
not in the abstract, but together with the individual
notes. In this manner the vexing problem of the
universals was solved.

If, on the one hand, this solution followed natu­
rally from the Thomistic conception of the reality
of the intellect as a faculty abstractive of being, on

THE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSALS

59

the other, it was a synthesis of all the other theories.
Moderate Realism, upheld by St. Thomas to­
gether with Aristotle, Abelard, Alexander of Hales,
and Albert the Great, grants to Nominalism and
Conceptualism that the universal, logically consid­
ered, exists only in the mind; and it agrees with
the metaphysics of individualism in maintaining that
in the reality of things individuals alone exist.
As to exaggerated Realism, the Thomistic theory
admits that the universal is not a name or a mere
concept of the mind, but has a reality in things them­
selves, not, indeed, as to the manner of representa­
tion, but as to the thing represented. Moreover,
satisfying the demands of the metaphysics of ideas
and truth, it distinguishes
(a) the ttnivcrsale ante rem, that is to say, the
essential ideas of things as they exist from all
eternity in the divine Mind,—ideas affirmed by St.
Augustine in his improvement on the Platonic ideas,
the eternal and immutable prototypes of phe­
nomenal realities ;
(b) the universale in re, or the metaphysical uni­
versal, immanent in things, which is the general and
eternal type (ante rem) as realized in existing or
possible individuals ;
(c) the imiversale post rem, or the logical univer­
sal, existing only in the human mind, as the abstract
concept universalized.

6o

BEING

As in other problems, so here, too, St. Thomaspreceded in this especially by his teacher, Albert the
Great—united the various currents of his time into
a single stream, vivified by the idea of being.

*

5. The Metaphysics of St. Thomas

If in the field of knowledge being is the ladder by
which we mount from the lowest rungs to the sum­
mit, in the ontological domain perfect Being is the
sole source of all other beings, so that reality does
not appear as sundered by unexplainable scissions,
but manifests itself as connected and animated by
being.
The supreme reality is God, Being toz/t court,
simply; it is that which exists and cannot not exist,
that whose essence is its existence, and therefore
full, perfect, total existence, that is to say, absolute
actuality and perfection. In this Being, in whom
there is no real distinction between essence and exist­
ence, any imperfection, change, potentiality is simply
inconceivable.
Only this Being by essence can explain, that
is, furnish us with the true reason of the uni­
verse and of all things which come within our
experience, which change, which become, and by
that token are not absolute, necessary, perfect Being,
but contingent and imperfect beings. Precisely because they are such, they are not pure actuality,

'

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1
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METAPHYSICS OF ST. THOMAS

61

but composed of potency and act, that is, they are
limited in their perfection and do not possess the
fulness of being. For this reason we must dis­
tinguish in them essence from existence. Their
essential notes do not contain the sufficient reason
of their existence. Existence is in them, but not
from them, otherwise they would be the absolute
and not the contingent, the perfect and not the im­
perfect.
Two questions can be put in regard to every being :
“Does it really exist?” and, “What is it?” These
two questions about the existence and essence of
things receive a different solution according as they
concern the necessary Being or the other beings.
In the case of the former it would be a contradic­
tion not to think of Him as existing. The essence
of the latter does not imply their existence; the
properties of a triangle, the nature of man or of a
tree, for instance, do not imply that men or triangles
must of necessity exist. The idea representing a
triangle remains absolutely the same, whether this
triangle exists in reality or not. But the idea of
the necessary Being implies the note of existence
in its very essence. That the necessary Being exists
or does not exist will, of course, have to be demon­
strated,—but not a priori. However, if He does
exist, there is in Him no distinction between essence
and existence, no composition of potency and act :

BEING
by definition lie is complete and self-subsisting
Being.
Between the beings whose existence is not of their
essence, but to whom existence “happens,” is con­
tingent {accidit esse), we can make another division.
There are beings whose property it is to exist in
themselves and not in another. Here we have sub­
stance, the subject that does not depend on another
(created) subject, the subject on which the actions,
movements, activities, changes lean and depend.
Our soul, for example, is a substance : without this
stable and lasting principle all the manifold phe­
nomena of our life would be without foundation,
root, and unity.
There are beings, on the contrary, to whose nature
it belongs to exist in another. These are the acci­
dents, distributed in nine categories. They are
rather beings of being than beings in the full sense,
because they presuppose substance, which alone is
competent of being in the proper and more true
meaning. “Ens," we read in De Ente et Essentia,
“absolute et per prius dicitur de substantiis, per po­
sterius autem et quidem secundum quid de accidenti­
bus. ’*
Of the substances, some are immaterial, others
material.
Prescinding from God, the spiritual substances
are immaterial. Because of the dominion they

H

METAPHYSICS OF ST. THOMAS

63

exercise over their acts, and because of their freedom
to act or not to act, they are given a special name,—
that of person.
The other substances in their turn are composed
of matter and form, that is, of a potential and an
actual element.
Briefly, being appears to the mind of St. Thomas
in this manner: perfect and necessary Being, con­
tingent and limited beings whose essence is distinct
from their existence; beings in themselves,—the
substances, beings in another,—the accidents; im­
material beings and beings composed of matter
and form. And in this comprehensive conception
(which sums up and rounds out the whole of Aristotelianism, with the theories of potency and act, with
the study of the causes of being,—material, formal,
efficient, final,—and the doctrine of the categories)
everything is reduced to being, in the unity of a
plan, inasmuch as all beings by participation depend
on the Being by essence.
To being as such, moreover, belong certain proper­
ties, which are always and of necessity present in
everything that exists. Without taking away any­
thing of its transcendental and primal character
from the general notion of being, these properties
nevertheless render it more applicable and richer.
These properties of being, known as transcendentals,
are three : the unum, the verum, the bonum. That

64

BEING

is to say : if a thing is one, it exists; if a thing is
true, it exists; if a thing is good, it exists: and
vice versa: if there is a being, it is one, it is true,
it is good.
Iu a well-known passage of the treatise De
Veritate (qu. I, art. 1) there are enumerated five
transcendental notions of being, for to the three men­
tioned St. Thomas adds res and aliquid. If a thing
exists, it has its nature, it is a res, it is one thing and
not a different thing. In like manner, if a thing
exists, it is not only undivided in itself, it is ununi,
but it is also divided from every other being, it is
an aliud quid, a something else, an aliquid, in the
expression peculiar to medieval philosophic Latin.
But it is quite evident that the res (thing), the
aliquid, and the unum constitute and concurrently
integrate the first great transcendental notion flow­
ing from the idea of being and applicable to every
being, that is to say, the idea of unity.
For St. Thomas, then, “ens, unum, verum ct
bonum convertuntur/' i. e., the notion of being coin­
cides with that of oneness, of truth, of perfection.
And because at first sight this thesis might seem
somewhat abstruse, it will not be superfluous to say a
word in illustration of the paramount importance
of this Thomistic position.
This position,—let us say it at once,—is the re­
sult of a synthetic vision of all preceding thought.

METAPHYSICS OF ST. THOMAS

65

As a matter of fact, Aristotle with his theory of
matter and form, had demonstrated the unity of
substance in his Metaphysics. Substance is an
individual whole, containing two essential principles,
matter and form, as directly united to each other
as the edge to the axe and sight to the eye. If
every form were done away with, there would be
no matter, and without matter, there would be no
form here below. Every substance, then, is one
in its duality. Oneness cannot be conceived as
external to being. For Aristotle, says Ravaisson,
unity and being are as identical as the concavity
and convexity of a curve. The act of being is of
itself unitary: if being is not one, then there are
two or more beings ; but in one being, despite the
multiplicity of phenomena, there is a oneness that
coincides with being.
In his study of reality Plato had stressed another
idea,—the idea of the good. The Good in the Pla­
tonic system is the soul,—if one may use this ex­
pression,—of being. It is the supreme idea, the
primordial fountain, from which all beings draw,
and of which they partake. The true reality, the
ideas, precisely because they have being, are rays
of this supreme luminous source, in which, in the
opinion of many, consists the God of Plato. Be­
ing, therefore, coincides with goodness.
However, the founder of the Academy fell into a

.là

66
scrious error: his charactci istic dualism, which lcd
him to recognize the ideas and
only true being, the only true
reason the Neo-1’latonic school, and later in a very
special manner St. Augustine, completed the teach­
ing of the Master. Under the influence of Christian
thought the sun of goodness beamed on all reality,
on every being, and a third point, that of Truth,
was brought into clearer light. The supreme Being
is supreme Truth and supreme Goodness; even­
thing that depends on this One is a ray of truth and
is a good. For St. Augustine no being exists that
is not one, and true, and good, Evil under what­
ever form,—intellectual or moral,—is only relative;
it is the privation of a natural good, but it is not an
absolute entity. The perfect Principle can create
nothing but what is unity, truth, goodness.
By this time the following philosophical conclu­
sions had been gained by the Augustinian specu­
lation :
I. Reality, being, is unity in multiplicity ; there-

2. Reality is intelligible, or, as the moderns would
say, it is rational, because it is either Reason itself
or a creation of Reason. To speak of reality and
to speak of truth, intelligibility, and rationality, is
one and the same thing.
3. Reality is perfection, either absolute or par-

. ................. .

METAPHYSICS OF ST. THOMAS

67

ticipated; therefore, to speak of reality, of finality,
of goodness, is again one and the same thing.
A metaphysic or a philosophical system is pos­
sible only in so far as the start is made from
this basis.
(a) The philosophical system must be unity in
multiplicity; the various theses form but one thesis;
the various parts are united with one another like
the members of an organism. And this is impossible
unless being itself is unity in multiplicity. The
system must mirror reality as it is; only on con­
dition that in reality itself being is unity, can we
understand that also in the systematic conception
to know is to unify.
(b) The philosophical system would become in­
conceivable if the real were not rational, if being
and truth did not coincide. Let us suppose, as a
hypothesis, that reality were irrational. This would *·
mean that the meaningless would exist. Our reason,
too, would be meaningless, and its operations, its rea­
sonings, would be a mass of absurdities. Howr, then
could a philosophy be constructed?
(c) A philosophical system necessarily means a
teleological vision of the universe, which must overcome dark pessimism and empty optimism. Abso­
lute evil would be an irrationality, and we should
fall into the preceding predicament.
The same holds true of the moral domain : the

i _ nui.

-

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68

0

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■:n

BEING

very possibility of ethics and the realization of a
moral life entail those three properties of being.
St. Thomas did not hesitate to gather up this
material worked ont by his predecessors. In his
metaphysics, too, being may be considered in itself,
or in its relation to the intellect, or in its reference
to the will.
Considered in itself, every being is one, as the
Summa Theologica teaches (la, qu. u, art. i), and
“one does not add anything to being; it is only a
negation of division: for one means undivided be­
ing. This is the very reason why one is the same
as being. Every being is either simple or compound.
What is simple, is undivided, both actually and po­
tentially. What is compound, has not got being
whilst its parts are divided, but only after they
make up and compose it. Hence it is manifest
that the being of anything consists in undivision;
and hence it is that everything keeps unity as it
keeps being.” And here St. Thomas seeks to ex­
plain how the unity of a being harmonizes with its
composition, whether metaphysical or physical. If,
for example, I observe myself, I see that I am en­
dowed with rationality, sensibility, life, corporeity,
substance. I see likewise that I am composed of
matter and form, and so on ; and yet I am one single
being. With analyses of surpassing nicety St.
Thomas examines how the various formalities or

METAPHYSICS OF ST. THOMAS

I

69

the multiplicity of component parts do not destroy
the actual unity of the subject.
If we consider reality in reference to the intel­
lect, every being is true. Indeed, of every being,
by the very fact that it is, it is true that it is what
it is. Quidquid est, intelligi potest,—everything
that exists has its reason of being. The notion of
entity implies that of ontological truth.
Finally, if reality is viewed in relation to the
will, every being is good. For St. Thomas the good
has the nature of the desirable, of that which stirs
appetency: “bonum est quod omnia appetunt,”—
goodness is what all desire. Hence he proceeds in
this manner: “It is clear that a thing is desirable
only in so far as it is perfect ; for all desire their
own perfection. Everything is perfect in so far as
it is actual. Therefore, it is clear that a thing is
perfect in so far as it exists ; for it is existence that
makes all things actual. Hence it follows that good­
ness and being are really the same,” (Summa Theol.,
la, qu. 5, art. 6).
Here, too, the Thomistic synthesis is character­
ized by being. It is being that is necessarily one ;
it is being that is of necessity intelligible ; it is being
that must needs be act, perfection, goodness. From
the notion of being flow the other notions of indi­
viduality, intelligibility or rationality, and finality.
And even in the order of the transcendentals St.

BEING

Thomas upholds this priority of being, hirst of all,
there is being, as he teaches in De Veritate (qu. 21,
art. 3, c.) ; after being, the one; then the true; after
the true conies the good, bins is so because a
thing is one in so far as it exists; it can be understood
in so far as it exists and is one; it is good in so far
as it is present to the mind not only in its speciilc
essence, but also according to the being it has in
itself.
All this is quite clear in the entirety of the Thom­
istic system. Given that being exists and that the
being which is contingent, limited, caused, in the
process of becoming, depends throughout on the
Being that is necessary, perfect, unchangeable, uncaused, the last end of all reality,—it is evident why
St. Thomas reasoned on general lines (as he does in
De Ente et Essentia concerning goodness) as fol­
lows : from the one, the true, the good can come only
what is one, true, good. But every being proceeds
from the divine unity, truth, and goodness. There­
fore, every being is one, true, and good. And in
this reasoning the source of all is always being.
6. Conclusion

If the historians of philosophy were fully aware
of this unity of the Thomistic metaphysics, they
would not stop at the usual exposition of the dual­
isms of medieval thought. The philosophy of St.

METAPHYSICS OF ST. THOMAS

71

Thomas,—we are told over and over again,—is a
perfect dualism : God and the world, soul and body,
reason and faith, sense and intellect, potency and
act, matter and form, and so on. It is, of course,
quite true that for St. Thomas God is not the world,
the soul is not the body, and so forth. But such
methods will not lead to an understanding of the
unity of the Thomistic conception ; for in this con­
ception the notion of being, in the terminology of
the School, is transcendental,—it goes beyond and
transcends every special kind of being and is found
again in each one : God is a being, I am a being,
my pen is a being, my thought is a being. Quid­
quid est, si quid est, ens est. And all these beings
.proceed from one single Being, which is the reason of
all being. In the explanation and evaluation of an
organism it is a shallow procedure to stop short at
the number of members, without grasping the unity
of the spirit that vivifies the whole.
And it is to be wrell noted that, though being
inspires the entire Thomistic system, this system
has not even a distant kinship with Pantheism.
The theory of the analogy of being cuts off every
thread by which one would seek to establish a
communication with Pantheistic views. The Be- 4
ing of God is not the being of creatures, and this
notwithstanding the fact that the second proceeds
from the first.

72

:ί

i

B (lING

Dualism, in short, is a consequence of Thomistn;
it gives us the branche.·; M the tree; but its vital
principle stands fast iti being conceived as ontologi­
cal reality. Positivistic Phenomenalism and the
modern theories of Voluntaristic Monism or of the
Spirit as pure act are the utter negation of St.
Thomas. Not indeed that St. Thomas overlooked
the rights of thought and of the will. But for him
one and the other alike are inconceivable without a
being that thinks and wills. The ontological view­
point is strenuously and constantly asserted it} every
part of his philosophical and theological system.
Being exists in itself, and not in so far as it is
thought or willed. The supreme Being, too, in
whom thought is identical with essence, the “Thought
of Thought,’’ too,—as Aristotle would have said,—
is an ontological reality. Being is the word that
sums up the whole Thomistic metaphysics. We
shall see presently what riches of development and
application it contains.

CHAPTER ΙΠ
BEING IN THE THEODICY OF ST. THOMAS

His biographers relate that St. Thomas, when not
yet five years old, was brought from Roccasecca,
the family castle of the Counts of Aquino, to the
neighboring monastery of Monte Cassino, where he
remained for some years to receive his primary
education. It was during this serene boyhood,
passed in the busy silence of the historic cloister,
that he was wont to run to the cells of the Fathers
and ask with ingenuous anxiety: “What is God?”
■ As the thought of God thus early quickened the
future constructor of the two Summae, so later, as
Grabmann has rightly established, “the center of the
Thomistic world of thought is the idea of God.
Tlie knowledge EE^~supra-rnundane, personal God
is the'superb crown ol his metaphysics. The glance
into the mysterious inner life of God . . . con­
stitutes the highest degree of theological speculation.”
It
jn
Contra Gentiles (I, c. 4), when he writes that
“almost every
phÛosopIiïcaÎ
Question tends to the
—
___-3

74

BEING IN THEODICY

knowledge of God;” and in the Summa Theologica
(la, qu. r, art. 7), that “in sacred science (theology)
all things are treated of under the formality of God,
either because they arc God 1 limself, or because they
refer to God as their beginning and end.”
But this theocentric character of the Thomislic
doctrine must likewise be studied in function of the
idea of being. In the ontological order God is the
perfect Being, and, as we saw when we explained
the conclusions of the entire metaphysics of St.
Thomas, God is absolute Being, the source of all
other things, of every degree of entity, and the
ultimate explanation of the transcendental properties
of being. In the order of knowledge it is from
being by participation that St. Thomas rises to Being
by essence. And being is the idea that explains
to him the metaphysical nature of God, creation,
and the conservation of things. In theodicy too,
we have a synthesis reached by means of the idea of
being. This we now proceed to show.
1. The Existence of God

Pi

After refuting the conceptualistic proof of God
proposed by St. Anselm, because, as we saw, he
could not approve the method of affirming being in
the name of the idea, St. Thomas explains his
famous proofs of the existence of God, or, as he de­
scribes them, his “five ways for reaching God.” We

THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

75

recall the magnificent article in the Sumina Theologica (la, qu. 2, art. 3), which has called forth a
vast literature and is being discussed to-day with
unquenchable animosity on the one side and unsubdued admiration on the other.
The validity of the Avell-known five arguments
will be fully grasped if we view them in their
historical origin and in the light of the one concept
that informs them.
I. As to their historical genesis, the power of the
synthetic genius of St. Thomas is evident also in
this matter. Inattention to this fact has led many
contemporary thinkers to attribute to the five Thomistic proofs a meaning they were never intended to
have.
The first proof, that of the immobile mover, is
the perfect and definitive form of an argument first
formulated by Anaxagoras, taken up again by Plato
in the tenth book of the Laws, and developed by
Aristotle in the twelfth book of his Metaphysics.
- -Aristotle started from the fact, established against
Parmenides, that becoming is a reality, and from
a principle, upheld against Heraclitus, that becoming
does not explain itself. But for the Stagirite the
immobile mover was not the creator of matter, but
only its ordainer; and in the interpretation of some
he was an ordainer unconscious of his function.
The “thought of thought,” happy in himself, moved

|
,7

|
1
1
|
*

BEING IN THEODICY

beings as the immovable flag on the mountain-top
sets in motion the army that wishes to reach it.
St. Thomas rounds oft and corrects this line of
reasoning: with the same Aristotelian theory of
movement,—which does not refer to local motion
alone, but to every passage whatsoever from potency
to act,—he reaches the pure act that explains be­
coming, but does not itself become, does not pass
from the potential to the actual because it is perfect
actuality.
The second and third proof from causality and
contingence are a development of the fundamental
conceptions of Aristotelian metaphysics. Aristotle,
carrying the Platonic idea over into things, had
shown the rationality of the real. The data of ex­
perience can be resolved into their rational elements.
Against Democritus and the Atomists he held that
we must go beyond the empirical ascertainment of
;
the phenomenon in order to interpret and understand
it. And against Plato he maintained that this in­
terpretation should be an explanation of the real,
and not a separated idea. From the examination of
phenomena,—and it matters little whether there is
1
question of only one or of all the phenomena of the
universe,—from the study of their essential charac­
ters we come to know that they are caused and con-,
tingent, and with an affirmation that is essentially
|

THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

77

positive we conclude to the existence of an uncaused
Cause and a necessary Being.
The fourth argument from limited perfections is
a step beyond the position of St. Augustine. By the
rays we are led to the sun, no longer, however, in
the name of an a priori principle, but by way of an
a posteriori ascertainment of reality. The ex­
istence of an imperfect reality, as the Stagirite had
previously noted, calls for the perfection that can
be its sufficient reason.
The last proof,—that from finality,—is one into
which Anaxagoras had already had an insight. It
was developed by Socrates, appropriated by Plato,
wonderfully improved by Aristotle, and finally
matured by St. Augustine through the solution of
the problem of evil.
Once more it is evident that, at every point of
his construction, St. Thomas gives us a synthesis.
And I do not hesitate to add that in theodicy, too,
—indeed, here more than elsewhere,—he inspires his
synthesis with the idea of being.
2. In point of fact, what is the idea that scin­
tillates in these proofs for the existence of God?
The five “ways” can be readily expressed in func­
tion of the idea of being.
The being that changes requires the existence of
the Being that is, and does not become. The im-

78

mobile mover is Being in its pure actuality. In the
conception of the Supreme Prime Mover there is
no other idea but that of being.
y
Contingent being,—the being that can exist or not
exist, in whose essential notes existence is not in­
cluded,—exists, has being, in so far as there is a
necessary Being, that is, a Being whose essence is
existence.
The being that begins to exist, the effect, cannot
find within itself the explanation of its existence.
If it begins to be, it was not before; and if it did
not exist, it could not give itself being. Therefore,
it owes its being to the Supreme Cause, to the Being
that has never begun to exist, that has not received
i its own being from another, that is Being a sc.
Limited and imperfect being, because of its very
’ limitation and imperfection, cannot be Being itself.
What is limited does not hold within itself the reason
of its being.
The finality of beings means the existence of a
Being that is pure intelligence.
In short, all these reasonings are founded on the
idea of being. What is more, if we observe well,
the very procedure of St. Thomas is always based
on that idea.
It was said with reason that in his five “ways” the
Angelic Doctor starts from a fact, applies a principle,
and reaches a conclusion. The fact is that of things
t

:

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BEING IN THEODICY

THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

79

in the process of becoming, of caused beings, of con­
tingence, of limited perfection, of order. The prin­
ciple is: whatever moves is moved by another; the
effect presupposes a cause ; contingent being pre­
supposes necessary being; the lower and the higher
call for the existence of the highest; order points to
an ordainer. The conclusion: therefore, God exists.
So far so good. But there is also this to be noted :
the initial fact always concerns being as given by
experience, namely, the being that becomes, that
begins, that could not be, that is circumscribed,
that indicates finality. The principle is always one
of the supreme laws of being examined in the pre­
ceding chapter. The conclusion is an affirmation
of the Being by essence, of the Being as pure act,
a se, necessary, perfect, intelligent. The point of
departure is being, and the point of arrival is Being,
by way of the laws of being. To overlook this
fact is to debar oneself from understanding the mind
of St. Thomas.
In their critical discussions of the Thomistic argu­
ments the moderns give evidence of missing this true
meaning intended by the medieval thinker. If, for
example, they are materialists, they will say that the
motion of to-day depends on that of yesterday, and
so on down the line, even unto infinity. With Kant
they will aver that if every phenomenon has its
cause in another phenpnienon^..then we can never

8o

i'

i

BEING IN THEODICY

come out of the phenomenal series. They will urge
that the external manifestations of profound re­
ality,—matter or spirit,—are indeed contingent, but
that the atoms or the spiritual reality are eternal
and necessary. They will point out that the argu­
ment from the final causes proves an ordainer, but
not a creator, of the world.
One and all, these are criticisms that mistake the
viewpoint of St. Thomas. For, when speaking of
being, he refers not so much to the phenomenon em­
pirically taken, to the accident, as, and above all, to
the substance. For him being is not only the phe­
nomenon that changes, that begins to be, that is
caused, that is limited, that has the end intrinsic to
itself. He is not even concerned about the length of
the series of phenomena, and says that reason alone
cannot prove that the world had a beginning. Even
if the phenomenal series were infinite, this would not
do away with the fact that being is in a state of
change and betrays all the characteristics which go
to prove that it is not the absolute.
In short, to be properly evaluated, the five proofs
presuppose an entire metaphysic. This latter in
its turn, is the synthesis of a very long speculation,
to be pondered in the light of the idea of being. As
this idea, in the mind of St. Thomas, refers to a
datum of assured fact, it precludes the confusing of
the Thomistic arguments with the ontological proof

THE NATURE OF GOD

81

of St. Anselm. Kant’s attempt to reduce the proofs
of St. Thomas to the Anselmian proof is a futile
one. It is not from the idea, but from reality, from
bçing as existing, that St. Thomas takes his start;
and the pinions he uses in his Hight are none other
than the laws of being.
2. The Nature of God

The same holds true when St. Thomas passes
from the problem of the existence of God to the
question of His nature: he never loses sight of his
great principle of being.
Not all students and commentators of St. Thomas
are of one mind concerning his teaching on the meta­
physical essence of God. However, without plung­
ing into subtle discussions, I believe that the logical
thread of the whole Thomistic system should lead
us to subscribe to the interpretation upheld among
others by Cardinal Louis Billot, and before him
admirably illuminated by Schiffini in the second
volume of his Special Metaphysics.
In what does the metaphysical essence of God
consist ?
By metaphysical essence the medieval Scholastics
meant
(a) that which primarily constitutes a being in
its entity, i. e., makes it what it is.
(b) that which is the original root, the primal

BEING IN THEODICY
source from which all the properties and attributes
applicable to the thing proceed ;
(c) that which distinguishes a being from all
others.
In applying this definition to God and seeking the
metaphysical constitutive of the Deity, the Scho­
lastics were divided into various groups. Some
placed it in actual intellection, others in radical infi­
nity, or in the exigency of all perfections, or in the
cumulus of every perfection: others assigned aseity
(cns a se) as the metaphysical nature of God; others
the supreme degree of intellectuality, or absolute
d i vi n e imm a te r ia 1 i ty.
But, writes Grabmann, if we hold to what St.
Thomas himself says about it, we must recognize
the metaphysical concept of God in absolute being.
God is the subsisting being itself, ipsum esse subsi­
stens. This is the definition, observes the Summa
Theologica (la, qu. 13, art. 11), which God gave
of Himself: “I am who am, I am Being, Jahve.
This is the conclusion,—as Aqutnas inculcates in
many other writing's,—of our speculation about God,
because it brings us to recognize that “the nature of
God is nothing else than His being” (Pc Ente et
Essentia, c. 6), that “in God His being is the same
thing as His essence” (Coninicnt. m Sent., I, (list.
8, 1. 1), and that His essence is His being: “sua
igitur essentia est suum· esse’' (Summa Theologica,

THE NATURE OF GOD

83

la, qu. 3, art. 4). In the works of St. Thomas
we can readily find proof for the assertion that all
those notes which constitute the metaphysical nature
of God appertain to subsisting Being.
In the first place, absolute being is that which,
according to our manner of conception and expres­
sion, primarily and positively makes God to be God.
For St. Thomas, as we have often repeated, to
speak of being is to speak of reality, perfection,
actuality. Hence we argue : being and actuality
coincide; but by its infinite perfection the divine
essence is purest actuality ; therefore, the divine
essence is purest being—absolute, subsisting Being, -y
All perfections, attributes, properties of God flow
from this single source. “Secundum hoc enim
dicitur aliquid esse perfectum, secundum quod est
in actu” (Summa Theologica, la, qu. 4, art. 1 ) ;
that is, the degree of a being’s perfection depends
on the degree of its actuality. Hence none of the
perfections of being can be wanting to Him who is
actuality itself, the subsisting Being.
God, therefore, is perfect because the esse sub­
sistens has the fulness of being, that is, of actuality,
of perfection.
God is the highest good because goodness and
being coincide : “ens et bonum convertuntur.” As
He is the highest being, He is also the highest good,
—just as He is Truth by essence and One by essence.

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BEING IN THEODICY

God is most simple because in what is composed
there is potency and act. But in Him who is the
absolute perfection of being, everything is, every­
thing is act; there is no potency, and therefore no
composition.
God is infinite because, as He is Being itself, He
can have no limitation in the line of being.
God is eternal because the ipsutn esse subsistens
does not become, and hence has neither a past, nor
a present, nor a future, but is. And for the same
reason He is immutable.
There is, in short, no divine attribute that does
not depend on subsisting being; and from this it is
clear why God is totally distinct from created, par­
ticipated, limited being; the latter has being, but is
not Being.
Absolute being, as Cardinal Billot and Grabmann
rightly observe, is not to be confused with abstract
universal being. “The absolute being of God means
something real, concrete, personal, while universal
being is a product of abstraction formally existing
in the intellect and only fundamentally in reality;
it results from the analysis of concepts taken from
reality, and is like the ultimate element common to
all things, and therefore predicable of all things.
In De Ente et Essentia (cap. 6) Thomas himself
has traced with precision the line of separation be-

*

<
f

|
I

I

THE NATURE OF GOD

tween divine Being and abstract being. When we
say, God is being, he remarks, we by no means
fall into the error according to which (}«><! is abstract
being. This abstract being is of such a nature that
it cannot exist in its objective reality without ad­
dition and determination, whereas, on the contrary,
no reality whatsoever can be added to the absolutely
subsisting divine Being. The ipsum esse, therefore,
distinguishes God from created being, puts Him
above all the categories of finite being, and acknowleges His absolute transcendence. This esse sub­
sistens, as the most real reality and the fulness it­
self of being, places God at an infinite distance from
the being that is abstract and devoid of objectivity.”
“If we resolve this setting of the Thomistic con­
ception of God into its historical elements,” con­
tinues Grabmann, “Thomas stands out as the theo­
logian who achieved a synthesis on a grand scale.
In his formative mind the thought of Aristotle and
the speculations of Avicenna become united, bal­
anced, and blended with Biblical ideas, with Patristic
doctrines (Pseudo-Areopagite, Augustine, Hilary of
Poitiers, John Damascene), and with views of the
early Scholastics, like Anselm of Canterbury, Ber­
nard of Clairvaux, and others. Under the skilled
hand of the master these manifold historical threads
are woven into a design of such uniformity that only

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BEING IN THEODICY

a practiced eye can detect the particular color­
ing and individual quality of these historical con­
stituents.”
It is clear, then, that also in discussing the nature
of the perfect Being, the Thomistic synthesis has
being as the word that sums up and the torch that
lights the way.
One more problem remained : the relation between
Being and beings. It is the problem of the creation
of things, of their conservation, and of the Provi­
dence of God in the world and in history. In this
field, too, St. Thomas is true to himself, He remains loyal alike to his synthetic method and his
supreme principle.
3. Creation

The problem of creation is discussed by St.
Thomas at some length in questions 44—46 of the
first part of the Summa Theologica, which I shall
follow in this chapter, with additions from the
Quaestiones Disputatae, De Potentia, and the small
philosophical work, De Aeternitate Mundi Contra
Murmurantes.
The idea of being runs through the Thomistic
teaching also on this point. For the very concept
of creation, the proof for the fact, the causes and
the time of creation are permeated by this single
thought.

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87

I. The concept of creation is reducible to the
concept of being. For, in the mind of St. Thomas,
to create is to make something out of nothing, {“ex
nihilo aliquid facere”). Creation is the production
of being as being, because it is nothing else than the
passage from non-being to being, and consists in the
origin of all beings from the Being that is absolute
and self-subsisting. It differs from human “cre­
ations,” as they are sometimes improperly called,
in which there is only the transformation of an es­
sence, of pre-existing matter through the production
of a new form. In divine creation nothing what­
ever pre-exists; the entire being is produced without
any of its elements existing previously,—the whole
being flows from the first and universal source.
Take away from this doctrine the concept of be­
ing, and it would crumble and lose its meaning. In
the concept of creation shines the concept of be­
ing.
2. We recognize the same fact when we inquire
into the proofs by which St. Thomas has shown, as
a philosopher, that the universe was created.
Aristotle had said in the second book of his Meta­
physics that that which is being in the highest degree,
is the cause of all being. In his commentary on this
passage St. Thomas says that contingent beings have
not the reason of their being in themselves, and can­
not but have been created. Had they not been ere-

BEING IN THEODICY

ated, they would no longer be contingent, but neces­
sary Being. The latter, however, is one and
unique, because necessary Being means the fulness
>1 being, perfect actuality. If there were two neces­
sary Beings, the one would not have the being of
the other, and neither of the two would be the ful­
ness and perfection of being.
So the investigation of things through their
character of contingency, changes, and limitations
reveals that they must needs have been created, and
proves the existence of a single Creator. This holds
true of primal matter as well, added St. Thomas
by way of explanation on a page admirable alike
for its depth and for that historic sense which al­
ways attended his philosophic speculations.
Philosophy, he observes, came to the conquest of
truth step by step, and gradually arrived at the con­
cept of creation.
The thinkers of antiquity, when dealing with
nature, assigned purely accidental causes to the proc­
ess of becoming, to the production of new beings,
and so remained on the surface of the problem by
explaining only accidental changes. Subsequently,
especially with Aristotle, thought went deeper. It
was now understood that there are essential changes,
that new substantial forms come into being and, by
I
uniting themselves to an identical substratum, i. e.,
primary matter, originate and produce new beings.

CREATION

89

In this manner particular agents were assigned as
causes for explaining this being, or why this being
is such and not different. I’hilosophers had not yet
reached the point of considering being as being, or
of investigating the causes of beings in so far as
they are beings, but only in so far as they are these
or such beings. When the problem was stated, it
became clear that it was not enough to find the
reason in accidental causes or substantial forms:
it was necessary to trace things to the source and
cause of the whole being. Pure potency, primary
matter, could then no longer be looked upon as
existing of necessity; for this perfectible element
creation appeared even more indispensable than for
the formal element.
Once more we have a synthesis, and that by means
of the idea of being.
3. Nor do matters stand otherwise when we seek
for the causes of creation.
St. Augustine,—whom St. Thomas quotes with
approval in the Summa Theologica (la, qu. 15, art.
i ),—had attributed such power to the Platonic doc­
trine of ideas as to say that one could not become a
philosopher and attain to wisdom unless one under­
stood them (“tanta fis in ideis constituitur, ut, nisi
his intellectis, sapiens esse nemo potest”). It is
precisely by going beyond Plato’s doctrine of ideas
that St. Thomas begins his explanation of the man-

90

BEING IN THEODICY

ncr of creation. He docs this by accepting the
interpretation of St. Augustine and even attempting
to harmonize the teaching of Aristotle will) it u'ir.
hi Aristotelis Nonnullos Libros Coinnicnt., t. g).
Plato had recognized ideas as ontological realities:
which existed in themselves, independently of hod
and of creatures. St. Augustine, instead, credited
Plato with teaching that the ideas did indeed exist
separately from things, but were identical with the
Divine Essence. And together with St. Augustine,

Aquinas upheld the necessity of placing ideas of all
things in the Divine Mind.
When one does not operate by chance, he writes,
the form produced pre-exists in us either ac­
cording to its natural being, as when one man gener­
ates another, or according to its intelligible existence,
as when the idea of the building exists in the mind of
the builder. Now, as the world is not made by
chance but by God, who acts with His intellect, the
form or the idea to the likeness of which the world
is created must exist in the divine mind.
God, therefore, urges St. Thomas (qu. 44, art.
3), is the prime exemplar of all things. In the
divine wisdom that conceived the order of the uni­
verse exist the reasons of all beings, which, though
multiplied in respect of things, are really nothing
else than God’s essence, in so far as He is the fulness

CREATION

91

of being and hence His likeness can be participated in
by the most diverse number of beings.
By knowing Himself God knows everything
else (“Pcu5 intelligendo sc intclligit omnia alia”).
■ When this divine contemplation of things is followed
by an act of the divine will, which makes things to
pass from nothingness to being, then we have cre­
ation, and its final cause is none other than God
Himself. Whereas we act for the sake of acquir­
ing some perfection, and hence for an end distinct
from ourselves, God, as the fulness of being and
pure actuality, can acquire nothing. He can only
communicate His perfection to others: as every
i creature receives its perfection from God, so it tends
towards Him as its last end.
For this reason creation is a participation and
imitation of Being. Absolute Being is the efficient,
the exemplary, the final cause of beings. As to
their origin, these owe all their being to the first
and perfect Being. As to their constitutive nature
and their entity, they are an imitation of Being.
As to their end, they yearn for Being by a progres­
sive and continuous perfective process.
4. It was on the basis of his concept of being
that St. Thomas defended the thesis of the possi­
bility of a world created from eternity. While Faith
teaches that the creation of the world took place

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Si

BEING IN THEODICY

in time, reason can adduce no decisive proofs in this
debate.
My observation of the nature of contingent things
yields nothing to convince me that they must haw
had a beginning in time. C onsidering the will oi
God, the cause of beings, I find no reason whaiever why God should of necessity have willed that
these beings begin in time. The only point that I
find certain in examining beings is, not that they
must have begun in time, but that they are
contingent. Reason, as Aloses Maimonides and the
Arabian and Mohammedan philosophers maintained,
cannot prove apodictically the impossibility of cre­
ation from eternity. Provided the existence of
Being by essence be admitted and demonstrated, St.
Thomas could come upon no apodictical argument,
—neither in Being nor in beings,—that would ex­
clude the being by participation from an existence
without beginning. Hence his position ; it seemed
bold, but was consistent with his entire system and
with all his ideas about creation, in which, T repeat,
there is nothing that is not reduced to the conception
of being.
4. Divine Government

The Being by essence cannot be conceived as a
capricious God, who, after having created the world,
abandons it to itself. Everything subsists in God,

DIVINE GOVERNMENT

93

conserved and governed by Him under the influence
of His Providence ; the being by participation con­
tinues in existence and develops in virtue of the
creative force itself, which extends to the act of
conservation and to providential governance. Such
are the well-known theses defended by St. Thomas
in his theodicy. Here, too, I propose to call at­
tention to the fact that they are nothing but the
elaboration and inexorable development of his
principal idea of being. To do this I have but to
summarize some articles of the Summa Theo­
logica.
According to St. Thomas, beings would not only
not exist if the absolute Being had not created them,
but they would fall back into nothingness if they
were not conserved in being by God. “Both reason
and faith force us to say that creatures are kept in
being by God. To make this clear we must consider
that a thing is preserved by another in two ways.
First, indirectly and through something else {per
accidens') ; thus a person is said to preserve anything
by removing the cause of its corruption, as a man
may lie said to preserve a child whom he guards
from falling into the fire. In this way God pre­
serves some things, but not all, for there are some
things of such a nature that nothing can corrupt
them, so that it is not necessary to keep them from
corruption. Secondly, a thing is said to preserve an-

t.

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à;

jî

94

BEING IN THEODICY

other directly and in itself, namely, when what is
preserved depends on the preserver in such a wav
that it cannot exist without him. In this manner ail
creatures need to be preserved by God. For the
being of ezrry creature depends on Cod, so that not
for a moment could it subsist, but would fall into
nothingness, zverc it not kept in being by the oper­
ation of the divine power.”
Such is the thesis, stated in terms of being. The
proof, too, is developed along the same lines:
“Every effect depends on its cause, so far as it is
its cause. But we must observe that an agent may
be the cause of the becoming of its effect, not directly
of its being. This may be seen both in artificial
and in natural things: for the builder causes the
house in its becoming, but he is not the direct cause
of its being. For it is clear that the being of the
house is the result of its form, which consists in the
putting together and arrangement of the materials,
and results from the natural qualities of certain
things. ... A builder constructs a house by mak­
ing use of cement, stones, and wood, . . . and the
being of a house depends on the nature of these
materials, just as its becoming depends on the action
of the builder. The same principle applies to natural
things. . . .
“Therefore as the becoming, the production of a
thing cannot continue when that action of the agent

-- “BSaS*·*8

DIVINE GOVERNMENT

95

ceases which causes the becoming of the effect, so
neither can the being of a thing continue after that
action of the agent has ceased, which is the cause
of the effect, not only in becoming but also in
being. . . . Every creature may be compared to God
as the air to the sun which enlightens it. For as
the sun possesses light by its nature, and as the air
is enlightened by having the sun’s nature, so God
alone is Being by virtue of His own essence, since
His essence is His existence, wrhereas every creature
has being by participation” (Summa Theologica, la,
qu. 104, art. 1).
It is clear, then, that St. Thomas infers the divine
conservation of the world and of all created things
from the analysis of being. It is equally evident
that another consequence of his initial standpoint is
that other Thomistic doctrine of the co-operation of
God with all free and non-free actions of His crea­
tures. "Because in all things God Himself is prop­
erly the cause of the very being which is innermost
in all things, it follows that God works intimately
in every thing” (qu. 105, art. 5). And, adds St.
Thomas (la, qu. 83 art. 1), inasmuch as God
operates in each being according to the nature of this
same being, His co-opcration with the actions of
creatures does not hinder certain human acts from
being free; on the contrary, it is precisely this that
makes them free. And so even the question of

i

:

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BEING IN THEODICY

the possibility of reconciling divine concurrence with
human freedom is solved by St. Thomas in the light
of being,—not abstract, but taken concretely in its
true reality.
I translate another article of the Sumina The­
ologica (la, qu. 22, art. 2) for the purpose of show­
ing how the same procedure was adopted by St.
Thomas in his teaching on Providence : “We must
say that all things are subject to Divine Providence,
not only in general, but even in their own individual
selves. This is clear, for since every agent acts for
an end, the arrangement of effects towards that end
extends as far as the causality of the first agent
extends. When it happens that in the effects of an
agent something takes place which has no reference
to the end, this is due to the fact that this effect
comes from a cause other than, and outside the
intention of, the agent. But the causality of God,
who is the first agent, extends to all being, not only
as to the constituent principles of species, but also
as to the individualizing principles, not only of
things subject to corruption, but also of things
not so subject. Hence all things that exist in what­
soever manner are necessarily directed by God to­
wards some end, as the Apostle says: Those that
are, are ordained of God (Rom. XIII, 1). Since,
therefore, the Providence of God is nothing less
than the fixed plan of things towards an end {ratio

.»

DIVINE GOVERNMENT

97

ordinis rerum in finem), it necessarily follows that
all things, inasmuch as they participate being, must
likewise be subject to Divine Providence.” This
Providence, he adds in article 4, “imposes necessity
upon some things, not upon all, as some formerly
believed. For to Providence it belongs to order
things towards an end. After the Divine Goodness,
which is an extrinsic end to all things, the principle
good in things themselves is the perfection of the
universe ; and this would not be, were not all grades
of being found in things. Whence it pertains to Di­
vine Providence to produce every grade of being.
So it has prepared necessary causes for some things,
so that they happen of necessity ; for others con­
tingent causes, that they may happen by contingence
(freely), according to the disposition of their proxi­
mate causes.”
In Divine Providence, then, everything is reduced
to being. He who provides is Being. The object
of Providence are beings. The reason for Provi­
dence is the dependence of beings on Being as to
their being. The manner in which Providence
works corresponds to the nature of the beings them­
selves. The government of God, by means of
which His world-plan is actualized, if not immedi­
ate,—inasmuch as it is realized through intermediate
created causes, with Him governing the lower by
means of the higher,—has, nevertheless, in its final

B.

.... .................... iinwiiiy iiitiy... ipw

WMfrr-M

98

BEING IN THEODICY

analysis, absolute Being as its alpha and omega,
even though the intermediate letters are placed by
creatures. The whole Christian theodicy, which
had already found worthy exponents among the
Fathers, is thus summed up by St. Thomas from
his single viewpoint.

T5'VC«'tT^

H3HBSHE5EK

CHAPTER IV
BEING IN THE OTHER PARTS OF THOM ISTIC

PHILOSOPHY

Not only metaphysics, but logic, psychology,
ethics, and all other parts of the philosophy of St.
Thomas are a synthesis inspired by the idea of being.
I shall restrict myself to brief indications, as I trust
that the extended discussion of Thomistic theodicy
and its reduction to a single idea has offered sufficient
proof of my thesis.
1. Logic

Beginning with logic, whose subject-matter is the
ens rationisj—being of the mind (here, too, we al­
ways meet with being),—it is well-known that
Aquinas, following Aristotle, distinguished three
operations of our mind: simplex apprehensio,
indicium, ratiocinium,—idea, judgment, reason­
ing.
“The essence of the idea as such,” in the very
apposite words of Garrigou-Lagrange, “whether
human, angelic, or divine, is to contain the formal
object of intelligence, qua intelligence (human, an­
eo

i. « «

·-

■· *

IOO

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

gelic, or divine), that is to say, being or reason of
being.”
In man alone the idea is abstract and universal,
as we shah see presently. Ihit this property of the
idea in our intelligence is not an essential constituent,
but a defect of the human mind. Intelligence as
such consists in its relation to being: obicctum
formale intellectus est ens,—the formal object of
the intellect is being, and intelligence reaches noth­
ing except from the viewpoint of being.
While the senses perceive the diverse material
elements, the idea mirrors the reason of being of
these elements, the quod quid est, the ratio intima
proprietatum,— the innermost reason of these prop­
erties. And in us the idea is imperfect, abstract,
universal, because our intellect does not embrace the
whole being of the thing, but only one aspect, the
quidditas rei materialis abstracta a notis individuantibus,—the essence of material things as ab­
stracted from the individualizing notes.
Judgment, the second operation of the mind, in­
dicates still better, if possible, that the formal object
of the intellect is being·. The soul of every judg­
ment is the verb to be, which affirms the logical
identity of subject and predicate. The verb to be
tells us that what is designated by the subject and
what is designated by the predicate are logically one
and the same being. And in this manner judgment

PSYCHOLOGY

ιοί

reunites and restores to being what abstraction had
separated.
By ratiocination, finally, we come to see the ex­
trinsic reason of being of the less known in what is
known already.
“If, then, the proper object of the human intellect,
in so far as it is human, is, as we shall see later, the
essence of material things, its formal and adequate
object, in so far as it is intelligence, is being with­
out restriction, and this permits it in a certain man­
ner to know all beings, everything that has a reason
of being” (Summa Theol., la, qu. 12, art. 4). By
simple apprehension man not only perceives the be­
ing that surrounds him, but also ivhat it is (quid
sit). By judgment he not only associates sensations
and images, but decides whether a thing is or is not
(an sit). By reasoning he gives the reason of be­
ing of what he affirms or denies (profter quid).
In each of these three operations,—concludes the
author quoted, in his commentary on the logic of
St. Thomas,—the object of intelligence is nothing
else than being.
2. Psychology-

Having established this much, St. Thomas in his
psychological doctrines infers therefrom the spiritu­
ality and immortality of the soul.
In his Metaphysics (1. x, c. Ill) Aristotle had

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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

described the three degrees of abstraction which
are recalled by St. Thomas in his Commentary on
the Metaphysics (lib. XI, lect. 3).
In the natural sciences we abstract from sensible
individual matter, though not from common sensible
matter. The chemist prescinds, or abstracts from
the particular character of this atom of hydrogen,
and searches for the properties of the atom of hy­
drogen in general.
In mathematics we abstract also from common
sensible matter and attend only to quantity, continuous and discrete.
In metaphysics abstraction is made from all matter whatsoever, so as to consider being as such, to­
gether with its principles.
Our intelligence, therefore, is wholly immaterial,
“est penitus immaterialis,” concludes St. Thomas in
the Summa Theologica (la, qu. 50, art. 2; q. 75,
passim), and in Metaphysics (lib. I, lect. 1-3; lib.
XI, lect. 3, etc.). Though the intellect depends
extrinsically on the body, inasmuch as it cannot
think without images, it is not intrinsically de­
pendent on any material organ.
We must therefore admit:
( I ) that the soul is immaterial, spiritual, because
being independent of matter in its operation, it is
likewise independent of it in its being;
(2) that the soul is immortal: its being does not

w

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depend on the body, therefore it can exist without
the body;
(3) that the soul is created by God (Summa
Theol., la, qu. 90, art. 2), because, as it does not
depend on matter in its being, it cannot depend on
matter in its coming into being.
This most intimate relation between the conception of being and the Thomistic psychology, as
Garrigou-Lagrange again remarks, is frequently
overlooked by Catholic writers. But it is only from
this standpoint that we can really get to the bottom
of all the teachings of St. Thomas. When, for
example, he faces the problem of free-will and does
not admit our freedom as regards the good in
general and the fullness of being, but recognizes it
as to particular goods, that is, as to limited beings,
—it is readily seen that he invariably puts and solves
the question from the standpoint of being.
3. Ethics

Just as the relations between God and the world
appeared to St. Thomas in the light of this idea, so
his ethics, or the relations of beings with one another
and with God, could not but be conceived by him
after the same fashion.
For Aquinas there are no value-judgments that
are not being-judgments
e., existential). His
ethics and his metaphysics interpenetrate each other

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ΤΙ fOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

in the most intimate manner,—a profound con­
nection clearly grasped by Martin Grahmann.
Every action is good in the degree in which it par­
takes of being, that is, in so far as it possesses the
requisite perfection; while the lack of this being, of
tliis perfection which is its due, constitutes the con­
cept of moral evil. The object of the will is being

under the abstract formality of goodness, just as
the object of the intellect is being in so far as true.
The will aspires to the good, to Being, never resting
satisfied until it has attained to its full possession.
Our actions are objectively good or bad, according
as we respect or not the gradation or the relations
of the various degrees of entity. Thus man must
be subordinate to Cod because participated being
is subject to Being by essence. Men among them­
selves are bound by relations which are always de­
termined by the nature of being, that is, by the human
person and by dependence on the will of God.
Finally, we may make use of other beings if, and
in so far as, we do not disturb the order called for
by the various degrees of entity. And an act is
subjectively good or bad according as we act with
the consciousness of such order. Moral evil, sin, is
a breach of the order established by the Creator;
it consists in not acknowledging in practice and
trampling upon the value of beings and their co­
ordination in reference to the supreme Being.

ETHICS

IO5

Goodness and virtue, on the contrary, consist in the
observance of the order flowing from the nature of
being.
In his political teaching Aquinas is far from
being aphoristic, but with a keen sense of reality
founds his theories on the actualities of human life,
so much so that many principles of his philosophy
of law and many social and political doctrines are as
fresh to-day as ever. On the very nature of man
he grounds the origin, the motive, and the necessity
of social authority as presented in the father of
the family, the head of a community, or the sover­
eign of a country. In discussing the rights and
duties of property he formulates principles that still
have the greatest actuality. Well may we ask: to
what is due all this richness and depth of ideas?
To his constant application of the concept of being.
To any one who views the systematic construction
of St. Thomas as a whole, this concept cannot but
appear as one of essential importance.

THE PRIMACY OF THE INTELLECT 107

It is the aim of this chapter to investigate whether
St. Thomas adopted and championed such an intel­
lectualism, to trace its limits, and above all to dwell
on our knowledge of the individual and of history
in the Thomistic conception,—so as to show how
St. Thomas solved all these problems in reference
to being.

CHAPTER V
BEING AND THE INTELLECTUALISM OF

ST. THOMAS

1. St. Thomas the Intellectualiste
To-day the term “intellectualism” smacks of dis­
dain and condemnation on the lips of many philoso­
phers. It is often hurled against St. Thomas, as
though he had given us a system of empty, static,
cold abstractions, wholly inadequate for the richness
of reality and history.
At times, however, the word is used to indicate
the primacy of thought over action,—and it is in
this sense that I use it here, guided by Pierre Rousselot’s excellent work on L·1Intellectualisme de SaintThomas. It is the intellect and not the other facul­
ties of the mind by means of which the intcllectualist
seeks to reach a profound penetration of reality.
The intellect alone thinks, and it alone can give us
truth. The will, too, and action and life are objects
of knowledge, with which they are intrinsically and
organically connected ; but they cannot usurp the
intellectual function, for this is reserved to our
rational energies.

There is no doubt that St. Thomas asserted the
primacy of the intellect.
In his teleological vision of reality he upheld a
like primacy in man’s last end, in the future life ; it
was evident that with such a goal to reach, the pres­
ent life, too, would have to be suffused with the
same light.
As in the hypothesis of a purely natural order,
the supreme happiness of man would have been intel­
lectual, though not supernatural (De Anima, qu.
17—20), so after the elevation of man to a state su­
perior to his nature, the vision of God, the con­
templation of infinite Being face to face,—which
constitutes the supernatural happiness of Heaven,
—is an intellectual act. The essence of beatitude
consists in an operation of the intellect; it is through
it that the will finds its joy and repose attained in
the end (Summa Theologica, la Ilae, qu. 3, art. 4).
In the Thomistic system, observes Rousselot, the

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io8 INTELLECTUALISM OF ST. THOMAS

intuitive vision, this gracious gift of Heaven, sets
the crown of supreme triumph on intellectualism
as conceived by St. Thomas. Paradise is the
victory of thought. Being in its infinite grandeur
is seen intuitively. This knowledge makes us eter­
nally happy, because now we no longer strain to­
wards something not possessed (which causes the
sense of privation and pain), but have the tranquil
possession, the immobile act, the full repose. In
the view of St. Thomas beatitude cannot consist in
an act of the will, where Scotus placed it. For the
will is an appetitive force, which tends towards
an object ; and in so far as it tends, it is moved, it
desires; hence privation and unhappiness. In the
intellectual act alone do we have the attainment of
the end, possession, perfect joy. And so the intel­
lectualism of St. Thomas is assured even for Para­
dise.
In this world, of course, knowledge, thought, has
an immense value and an indisputable primacy over
action and will.
To the mind of St. Thomas the idea, knowledge,
is of inestimable worth also in the natural order.
Even when there is question of the lowlier sciences,
he who despises them, despises humanity ( i Meteor.,
IV, lib. I.; De Trinitate 6, i). All knowledge in
itself is of the genus of things that are good; evil,
in so far as it is the object of knowledge, is good

THE PRIMACY OF THE INTELLECT 109
because “it is a good thing to have a knowledge of
evil” (De Veritate, 2, 5, 4; and 2, 15, 5). If
science and art are subject to the moral law as to
their exercise, they are independent of it as to their
specification. (Summa Theologica, la llae, qu. 21,
art 2, ad 2; qu. 57, art. 3; Ha Ilae, qu. 71, art. 3,
ad i ; 6 Ethica, lib. 4; 1 Polit., lib. 11). The pri­
macy and extrinsic excellence of speculation are in­
variably affirmed. And in the Contra Gentiles (HI,
cap. 25), after repeated eulogies of thought, St.
Thomas proclaims : “The practical arts are ordered
to the speculative, and similarly every human opera­
tion to intellectual speculation as to an end.”
Will and action are not undervalued, but sub­
ordinated.
First of all, every really human action is satu­
rated with intellectuality. We are truly men when
we strive to act in conformity with our rational
nature, by subduing our animal instincts, and im­
pregnating being and action with thought. This
victory over the body by means of the mind, this
penetration of the idea into the field of practical
activity, sums up the entire moral teaching of St.
Thomas : man’s goodness consists in living according
to reason. Then we have the axiom, fundamental
in Thomism : “Nil volitum nisi praecognitum,”—
nothing is willed unless it is first known. Thought
goes before the deliberation of the will and before

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INTELLECTUALISAI OF ST. THOMAS

fulfillment ; and the more an action is illumined by
the light of thought, the more voluntary and, there­
fore, the more free it becomes. In commenting on
the seventh chapter of the Epistle to the Romans
St. Thomas expressly says: “Because intelligence
■moves the will, willing is an effect of knowing.’’
Without intelligence there would be no will. “Ignoti
nulla cupido,”—men do not desire the unknown.
And the w’hole Thomistic philosophy teaches us to
be concerned above all about ideas, about the head.
Of little avail is a howling mob or a cackling crowd;
it is the idea that counts. It is the idea that rules
the world because it guides the will. St. Thomas
was so profoundly cominced of this that he did
not hesitate to assert that the sacrifices of men of
action, of priests having the care of souls, though
necessary labors, were less noble than the work
of the scholar and the thinker. The former are
“quasi -manuales operarii,”—like manual laborers,
the latter are the architects.
The will, after all, is nothing else than the incli­
nation that follows upon intellectual apprehension.
It is the intellective appetency, the faculty that
tends towards the object after it is known. Volun­
tary operation has, therefore, an essential reference
to the intellect.
To be sure, the will in its turn moves the intel­
lect, as our consciousness testifies. Daily the will

THE PRIMACY OF THE INTELLECT m

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bids the intellect to reflect or not to reflect on a given
object. But there is a difference not to be over­
looked: the intellect moves the will quoad specifica­
tionem actus, i. c., by inducing it to the performance
of this or that particular action. The will, on the
contrary, moves the intellect only quoad exercitium
actus, i. e., whether to apply itself or not to the con­
sideration of the object.
This, however, holds good in the domain of
action. When there is question of performing an
internal or external act, the will intervenes to fulfill
a trust of its own, which, however, is well circum­
scribed. But when truth and the task of cognition
are concerned, the intellect alone is competent. The
w’ill can and should apply the intellect to the study
of truth. It can and should order the necessary
moral preparation and the removal of all obstacles
that stand in the way of calm and clear vision ; and
this preparatory phase, to use the words of Plato,
calls for all possible fervor, for the whole soul. But
the truth is grasped by a purely intellectual act.
Appentencies, tendencies, sentiments, will, human in­
stincts, emotion, heart, action,—all these have no
cognitive task to fulfill ; they are not competent
in the domain of knowledge as such. As one does
not reason with his feet, so neither does one think
with his heart. In the final analysis, it is intellect
alone that judges. It will have to take account of

limit IL

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INTELLECTUALISM OF ST. THOMAS
c' crylhing- else, action included.
It may be infhiI need by passions that will deprive it of the necessary
serenity. But it is not the will, nor life, nor adieu,
that can give us truth.1 On the contrary, to judge
of life and of action, thought is necessary; as
thought controls the data of sense, so it examines
the value of life and action.
Without intelligence, free-will itself would be in­
conceivable. The animal is not free because it can­
not judge its own judgment and is ignorant of the
reason thereof. Alan is free because he has knowl­
edge, and his will is proportioned to his intellection.
An object is willed as it is known by the intellect and
proposed as desirable; it is loved or shunned if, and
in so far as, it is understood to be lovable or unde­
sirable. For this reason we are not free in regard
to the good that is presented to the mind as the
absolute good, and as lovable under every respect, so
that it cannot be judged as being other than such;
the universal good calls forth a necessary love, and
the will cannot but be carried towards it. 1 lence all
must needs desire happiness,—even the suicide, who
seeks peace in death. Nor are we free, as P.
Mattiussi well says, when those natural movements
of the will take place in us which precede reflection
and betoken the apprehension of some object under

1 Cfr. Heinrich Rickert, Philosophie des Lebens (Tübingen,
1922). (Tr.)

THE PRIMACY OF THE INTELLECT

113

the appearance of a pure good, of the lack of atten­
tion to defects and contrary qualities. We are free
only when we have freedom of judgment. Con­
fronted by a good that we apprehend, not as absolute,
but as desirable from one viewpoint and undesirable
from another, the will can so influence the intellect,
that,—when there is question of judging a thing
in reference to practice and not speculatively only,
—it fixes on this or that judgment. It is not the
object, then, that determines the will; nor do the
motives bring this about ; “instead, it is for the will
to determine itself : it may, if it so pleases, consider
even the greater good in so far as it is defective and
non-compelling (because not absolute), and the
objectively inferior good in so far as it is desirable
and conducive to well-being, Thus it can choose
between two things equally good; it can give pref­
erence to the inferior as between two unequal ones,
—not precisely because it wishes the inferiority of
the one as compared with the other, but because it
regards this as the opportune choice.” 1
Here an objection might be raised: If thought
guides action, if will presupposes intellect, is it not
true, after all, that knowledge is there for the sake
of life, and not as an end in itself? Does not the

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1 Cfr. the chapter on Self-determination in The Problem of
Evil and Human Destiny, Zimmer mann-Zybura, St. Louis,
1924. (Tr.)

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114 INTELLECTUALISM OF ST. THOMAS
Summa Theologica teach (Ila Ilae, qu. 182, art. 1)
that, “though the contemplative life is more excellent
in itself, nevertheless under given circumstances the
active life is to be preferred because of the demands
of the present life; thus also the Philosopher says
that philosophizing is better than enriching oneself,
though the latter is better for one in need.”
But this should not mislead us. Aristotle had
announced a twofold programme : “Science for the
sake of science” and “Science for the sake of life.”
In this matter, too, St. Thomas reached a synthesis
consonant with Christian thought and frankly intellectualistic.
I le does not deny that one must think in order to
act, and act well. Quite the contrary. Put at the
same time he observes that thought and action are
not the supreme aim of man here below. His ulti­
mate end is the intuitive vision of God; in other
words, it is an intellectual act by means of which we
shall have achieved the possession of Being. Faith
and reason, grace and natural means, philosophy,
theology, practical life, religious, political, and civil
activity,—all these must be subordinated to that end.
Intelligence, therefore, which is the root of all our
activity, is likewise the goal to which our activity
leads us. It is the alpha and the omega. Hence
we must acknowledge that if by intellectualism one

THE PRIMACY OF THE INTELLECT

us

means the primacy of the intellect, no one was ever
more an intellectualist than St. Thomas.
Nor could he be of a different mind who in his
Contra Gentiles (IV, c. 11) and in numerous pas­
sages of his other works describes being as an ascent
toward intelligence, as a succession of ever higher
forms which, through a process gradually leading to
an ever greater inwardness, culminates in the intel­
ligent being.
As a matter of fact, from inanimate bodies, where
there is nothing but the action of one body upon
another, we pass on to plants, in which emanation
proceeds from within, inasmuch as they move them­
selves and not only things external to themselves.
For all that, plant life is imperfect because the ema­
nation, even though proceeding from their innermost
soul, ends ip the flower and the, fruit which detach
themselves from the tree; the beginning, too, of this
emanation, the tree’s moisture, is drawn tip from the
earth by means of the roots. In animals emanation
begins from without, from the sense-stimulus, but
ends within, in the imagination and the memory.
Here the beginning and the end of emanation belong
to two different things because no sensitive power
can reflect upon itself, and the emanation always
takes place from one in the other. Finally, “there
is the highest and most perfect grade of life, that

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INTELLECTUALISAI OF ST. THOMAS

of the intellect, for the intellect turns back upon and
can understand itself.” Though, as we shall sec,
there are various grades of intellectual life, intel­
lect always has this characteristic, that its operation
is in the highest degree immanent. It is not an
extrinsic action; nor is it an immanent action that
begins from without and ends outwardly; nor one
that begins from without and terminates inwardly:
it is an action that has its beginning and end within
itself.
Intelligence, therefore, is the highest grade of
life; it is a life and what is *most perfect in life.
Through intelligence we are not only we, but we en­
rich ourselves. Life means the acquisition of
another through a principle of immanence. By
living, other beings unite themselves to us ; but while
in the vegetative life they unite themselves to become detached, while in the sensitive life (Lib.
Sent., IV, Dist., 49, q. 3, art. 5), sense is only superficially united to things, the intellect, on the contrary, ‘‘pertingit usque ad intimam rei quidditatem,”
—reaches down to the innermost essence of being,
assimilates all being, and quodammodo fit omnia,—
in some certain manner becomes all things (Contra
Gentiles, I, c. 44 ; II, c. 47 and 98; Dist., c. 3, q. 1,
art. 4; Summa Theologica, la, q. 26, art. 2). The
intellect is the faculty assimilative of being and the
faculty capable of reflecting upon itself and of

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THE PRIMACY OF THE INTELLECT

117

understanding itself. And this constitutes the
highest perfection of being.
“Being,” St. Thomas teaches (De Anima, lib. 5),
“is twofold, material and immaterial. Through
material being every thing is merely what it is ;
this stone is this stone and nothing more. But
through immaterial being, which is ample and as if
infinite because not limited by matter, a thing is not
only what it is ; in some way it is all beings like­
wise.” And elsewhere (3 Opusc., 25, c. 1) : “The
human soul in some certain manner is everything,—
anima humana quodammodo est omnia.” There
is in it a certain infinity which does not destroy its
unity. And it is this intellectuality, this ability to
become all things, that defines spirit, mind as differ­
ing from matter (Cfr. De Veritate, I, qu. 14, art. I ;
De Causis, lib. 18).
The dignity, the worth of a spiritual being, con­
sists precisely in this. We are not only we ; we do
not only vegetate ; we do not only come in super­
ficial contact with our environment : by thought we
embrace all things. Thought, intelligence,—this is
the greatness of spirit, of mind, this the final aim of
everything. The true purpose of nature is spirit ;
nature is an appendage of spirit; the body is there
for the soul ; material beings are of the nature of
means ; only intelligent, subsisting beings have the
nature of an end. And the ultimate and supreme

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INTELLECTUALISAI Ob' ST. THOMAS

end, the beginning of all beings (which arc created
in so far as they are conceived) is the Being who
is identical with J lis thought.
With such a conception of ontological reality, how
could St. Thomas have hesitated for a moment to
be an intellectualist ?
2. The Limits of Thomistic Intellectualism

While St. Thomas admits the primacy of intel­
ligence, he must not, however, be taken for an
idolater of the human intellect and of rational knowl­
edge. His intellectualism has its well-defined limits
because for him, as Rousselot has shown, human
intelligence is not intelligence as such (ut sic), that
is to say, perfect intelligence, but rather the last in
the series of intelligences.
In the same chapter of the Contra Gentiles (IV, c.
2) in which he explains the various grades of life,
after singing the praises of intellect, St. Thomas
adds: “Sed in intellectuali vita diversi gradus in­
veniuntur, ”—there are various grades in intel­
lectual life. There is the human intellect, the angelic
intellect, the divine intellect. The first, though able
to know itself, takes the beginnings of its knowledge
from what is external, and cannot understand with­
out the phantasm, the imagination. The second
knows itself by means of itself, but its intellection is
not its being. The third reaches perfection because

LIMITS OF INTELLECTUALISM

119

in God “non est aliud intelligere et aliud esse,"—in­
tellect is identical with being.
There are, therefore, profound and radical differ­
ences which render the various kinds of intelligence
irreducible, also as to the relations between the
intelligent being and the intelligible object; for ex­
ample, while in God mind posits and creates objects,
in us the object is known, not created, by the act of
thought. “Supremely ridiculous” (2 Metaph., lib.
1) to the mind of St. Thomas was the opinion of
Averroès that there was an equality between the
human capacity for comprehension and the intel­
ligible in itself (that man could know all that is
knowable), because of that oneness of the active
intellect in all men which was championed by the
Arabian philosopher.
Above human knowledge, then, there can be and
there actually are,—according to St. Thomas,—
other kinds of knowledge, more perfect. Our soul
is the lowest in the series of intelligences and par­
takes less of intellectual power than the others :
‘‘intellectus animae humanae est infimus in ordine
intellectuum” (Contra Gentiles, II, c. 16).
The supreme ideal of intelligence, according to St.
Thomas, would be intuition, regarded by the Schol­
astics as that immediate act of the intellect which
lays hold of the innermost truth of a thing with the
shining clearness of perfect evidence. Knowing by

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INTELLECTUALISM 01’ ST. THOMAS

way of intuition,—or, as St. Thomas expresses
himself. grr intuitum simplicis veritatis,—consists
in the intellectual grasp of being by an immediate
knowledge, with an intimate penetration of the real,
which is seized in itself, without any process of
reasoning.
We have an experience of such intuition in the
knowledge of our ego when we return, double on
ourselves. It is not a complete intuition because we
grasp neither the nature of our being nor its entire
history ; however, it is an intuitive not a discursive
knowledge of our existence, of the existence of our
habits and our acts. By a most simple act of intu­
ition the divine intellect knows all things in the most
perfect manner. Therefore, it knows also the indi­
vidual in himself, in his complex reality, origin,
worth. We, on the contrary, as the last in the
series of intelligences, have no such faculty here be­
low because our soul, united as it is to the body,
can not reach the idea except through the medium
of sensations involving space and time. We know
by abstracting our concepts from the things of sense,
by prescinding from matter, space, and time, and
later returning to apply the acquired universal idea
to the reality given by sense. What intuition effects
by a simple, immobile, comprehensive act, we must
accomplish by manifold means: “quod non potest
effici per unum, fiat aliqualiter per plura,” said

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121

Aristotle (2 Coel., lib. 18). And so what is one in
itself,—say, Peter,—our knowledge represents by
means of multiplicity (animal, rational, with such
and such individual characteristics). AVhile intu­
ition grasps unity in itself, we cannot reach being
except by bringing several ideas into connection,
that is, componendo et dividendo. As the man,
we read in Contra Gentiles (Til, c. 97), who sees
that one word alone does not fully express the idea
in his mind, multiplies and varies his words so as to
explain the idea in many terms, so our manner of
knowing expresses what is one and simple by means
of diversity and dissimilarity.
The human intellect, then, attains to knowledge :
(l) By way of the abstract concept, which does
not express the whole of a being, but only one aspect
of it. Therefore, the abstract concept does not de­
form reality. As Mercier writes in his Critériologie
Générale, “there are in this man differentiating notes
not comprised in the abstract concept of man; but
there is nothing in the concept of man that is not
truly found in this man. The abstract concept is
inadequate to the particular types it represents and
of which it is affirmed. The very word abstraction
points to an operation that does not embrace the
whole, but detaches something from the whole.
Hence it would be inexact to say that the abstract
concept is not true to reality, but falsifies it. It

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INTELLECTUALISM OF ST. THOMAS

represents things incompletely, bnt it represents
them truly.” Abstrahentium non est mendacium,—
abstractions do not lie.
(2) P>y means of laws, axioms, principles hav­
ing an essential reference to the rational animal, in­
asmuch as they are products of our own mode of
knowing,—the lowest in the order of intelligence.
Being exists prior to the laws, and these are but the
suitable means for embracing it. Certainly, these
laws are valid in the domain of cognition because,
even in their universal character, they are laws of
being; however, they do not lead to the knowledge
of the whole being, but of one side of it only.
(3) Ey means of reason (ratio) or the reason­
ing process. According to St. Thomas, intellectus
is to be well distinguished from ratio and intellective
intuition must not be confused with ratiocinium, or
discursive reasoning. They differ from each other
as the perfect and the imperfect, as unity and the
multiple, as eternity and time. It is the imperfection
of our intellectual knowledge that is the cause of rea­
soning. '‘Rationale est differentia animalis et Deo
non convenit nec angelis,”—the rational differenti­
ates the animal (in man) and is not proper to God
and the angels. “Defectus quidam intellectus est ra­
tiocinium,”—reasoning is a certain defect of the in­
tellect. “Necessitas rationis est ex defectu intellec­
tus,”—reasoning is necessary because of a defect in

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123

the intellect. (Cfr. Summa Theologica, Ha Ilae, qu.
83, art. to, ad 2; qu. 49, art. 5. ad 3; I, qu. 58. art.
3; I, qu. 79, art. 9; Contra Gentiles, 1, c. 67 and 68;
2, i Dist., 25, qu. I, ad 4). After all, the certitude
of reasoning depends in the last analysis on intel­
lective intuition : “certitudo rationis est ex intellectu”
(Summa Theologica, Ila Hae, qu. 49, art. 5, ad 2).
(4) By means of science,—another indication of
the weakness of our intelligence. If the latter were
intuitive, there would be no need of scientia. “Est
enim aliquid scientia melius, scilicet intellectus”—
for there is something better than science, namely
the intellect or intuition.
For St. Thomas scientia is the specific perfection
of ratio. In the absence of simple and intuitive
intellection, it is the best form of speculation avail­
able, though it partakes of the defects of ratio:
“omnis scientia essentialiter non est intelligentia,”—
every science essentially is not intelligence, intuition.
In the mind of St. Thomas, science has a meaning
different from that attached to it by the moderns.
For him it is the investigation of the profound
causes of being. It does not stop at phenomena,
but goes down into the very depths, to the essences.
For St. Thomas the scientist is one who knows es­
sences. To speak of science is for him to speak
of finality (teleology), precisely because nature and
end are identical. By means of wide induction and

5
INTELLECTUALISM OF ST. THOMAS

KNOWLEDGE OF THE INDIVIDUAL 125

repeated ascertainment we reach the definition of a
thing, its essential characters, and come to know
what a thing is. Then, by way of the deductive
process, we rise from general principles to laws and
scientific systematization. Science, therefore, con­
siders the reason of being in things, their connection,
their relations, but is not concerned with individuals.
There is no science except of the universal. Science
does not give us the whole universe, but a logical
skeleton of it, endowed with absolute certainty and
perennial validity.
Besides scientia there were for St. Thomas the
artes, such as agriculture and medicine. The arts
and systematized industries are not pure specu­
lation ; though they can furnish the material for
speculative study, they are not reducible to scientia,
properly so-called, because they are not interested in
quidditates, in zvhat a thing is, but in the phenomena
of sense,—with practical utilization, not knowledge,
as their aim.
St. Thomas admitted that there was wide room
for hypotheses when, in studying matter, we pass
from essence to phenomena with a view of explain­
ing or foreseeing them.
Abstract and universal concepts, principles, reason,
science,—such are the means by which the human
intellect, as differing from other higher intelligences,
strives to reach the knowledge of being.

Being is in itself what it is and has an ontological
reality of its own, independently of the act of our
thought or will. Our knowledge of being depends
on our being, limited and imperfect as it is. It was
also this distinction that determined the Thomistic
theses concerning the knowledge man can have of
the individual and of history.

124

3. St. Thomas and the Knowledge of the Individual
and of History

Among the pressing demands of modern philoso­
phy, all athirst for concrete knowledge, one fre­
quently hears a ringing protest against the medieval
period on the score that its speculation, teeming with
the spirit of Greek intellectualism, had lost ail taste
and aptitude for the individual and for historical
development. The serene and dazzling splendor of
pure, fixed, and immutable abstractions diverted
attention from the study alike of the world of sense,
which was looked upon with disdain, and of develop­
ment and history.
It is said that the greatest exponent of medi­
eval thought, St. Thomas, as Rousselot points out,
not only repeats the old formula that “science has to
do with the universal,” but “asserts that knowledge
of the particular is not a perfection of man’s specu­
lative intellect.”
No doubt can exist on this point, says Rousselot.

126

INTELLECTUALISM OF ST. THOMAS

In the Summa Theologica (la, qu. 12, art. 8, ad 4)
St. Thomas teaches that “the natural desire of the
rational creature is to know everything that bch>nys
to the perfection of the intellect, that is, tbc sy

and genera of things and their reasons. . . .
know the rest, such as particular things and the
thoughts and facts connected with them, does not
belong to the perfection of the created intellect, nor
does its natural desire go out to these things.”
(Cfr. also Illa, qu. 2, art. 1). For St. Thomas the
particular is excluded from the dominion of scientific
certainty because it belongs to the uncertain and
indeterminate field of sense and contingence. Even
God Himself, whose Providence extends to every­
thing, including particular beings, primarily looks
upon the nature, the specific essence, as more noble
than the flowing and passing reality.
This, the objection continues, was treasonable to
the new breath of life brought by Christianity.
With the desire of blending Greek intellectualism
with Christian doctrine, St. Thomas completely
trampled under foot the teaching of Christ.
In point of fact, Christianity was constantly pre­
occupied with the individual. The value of every
soul, ransomed by the blood of a God, plays an im­
mense part in the Christian conception. The dogma
that Providence extends its care to the tiniest in­
sects, to the single birds, to every hair on our head,

KNOWLEDGE OF THE INDIVIDUAL 127

was another affirmation of the importance of the
individual. Moreover, in Christian dogma and
ethics the fall of Adam, the preparation for the
Redeemer, the Redemption, the Communion of
Saints, evince a concrete, dynamic vision of reality
and a vivid and penetrating sense of history.
Quite different was the abstractive and static
vision of the universe. According to St. Thomas
there is an essential order in the harmonious series
of the species, per se. But among the individuals
of the same species there is but an accidental suc­
cession, holding no interest for the mind. The
pre-eminence of the quidditative concept imposed on
St. Thomas a static conception of the world. A
subtle contemplator of the invisible and of essences,
he lost interest in the world of sound and color
and in the course of history,—matters which consti­
tute the great preoccupation of modern mentality.
Such, briefly, is the indictment brought against
Thomism from many sides to-day.
I do not wish to enter here upon a critical exami­
nation of contemporary currents of philosophy, but
shall confine myself to the exposition of the thought
of St. Thomas concerning the idea of being.
Aquinas never denied that the better kind of
knowledge would be that of the concrete individual,
not of the abstract universal. “Cognoscere singu-

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128

INTELLECTUALISM OF ST. THOMAS

laria pertinet ad perfectionem nostram,”—to know
the singular is part of our perfection, he says in his
Summa Theologica (Ta, qu. 14, art. 1 1 ). Intuitive
knowledge, the intuitus that has a most complete and
immediate perception of being and concentrate-all the
various determinations of the object in its indivisible
unity, is, in his opinion, the better form of knowl­
edge. And God, as he teaches in Contra Gentiles
(I, c. 65), knows individual things in this manner.
“Deus cognoscit res alias a se, non solum in univer­
sali, sed etiam in singulari,”—God knows not only
the essence in a universal manner, but the principles
that constitute this determinate essence as it exists
in the individual; hence ITe knows this matter, this
form, these individualizing notes.
Yet, we know but too well that our cognition is
not as perfect as the divine: and the reason of this
is to be found in our nature.
In the view of St. Thomas, man, on the one hand,
is a soul united to the body as that body’s form,
on the other, material things have matter as their
principle of individuation. Because of these condi­
tions of fact, it is impossible for the intellect to
apprehend the singular, the individual, directly:
‘'impossibile est singulare ab intellectu apprehendi
directe.”
Our knowledge begins with the senses, which give
us the singular, the phantasm or imagination-image ;

KNOWLEDGE OF THE INDIVIDUAL 129

this is always individual. The intellect, in elabo­
rating this sensory datum, abstracts, prescinds from
individual matter and grasps the form, which is not
the principle of individuation, but can repeat itself,
be multiplied an indefinite number of times, bor
our intellect to reach the individual directly, it would
have to know what exists in individual matter, in so
far as it exists in such matter, that is, with its indi­
vidualizing principles. However, as we have no
direct intellectual knowledge of matter, we can di­
rectly reach only the universal.
As a result, the abstraction whereby we grasp
being is not exhaustive of being itself; we do not
lay hold of its singularity, which is undivided from
real being and is its intrinsic constitutive determina­
tion.
And yet, it is the individual that we wish to reach
because it is the true and only reality. How, then,
do we go about it? After having taken hold of the
particular by sense and imagination, and abstracted
the form by prescinding from matter, we again turn
our intellect to the imagination-image, the singular
of sense, and apply to it the universal of intelligence.
And so we say: Socrates (this individual given by
sense) is a man (the universal idea), is white, and
so on. Unable to apprehend the individual directly,
we do so indirectly by uniting the abstract universal
to a certain number of accident-perceptions ; thus we

130

INTELLECTUALISM OF ST. THOMAS

obtain a synthesis that givc> us what is one with the
co-operation of the manifold {quod non potest peri
per unum, fiat aliqualiter per plura ). This synthesis,
though it docs not enable us to know the whole of
Socrates, helps us to discern the particulars for
practical purposes.' Hence “we know the singular
by a kind of reflection, inasmuch as the intellect, by
apprehending its intelligible object, returns to the
consideration of its act and of the intelligible species
which is the beginning of its operation, and of the
origin of that species; and so it comes to the con­
sideration of the phantasms and of the singular
which the phantasms represent.” In other words,
“our intellect can know the singular indirectly, and
as it were by a kind of reflection; because, even after
abstracting the intelligible species, the intellect, in
order to understand, needs to turn to the phantasms
in which it understands the intelligible species. . . .
Therefore it understands the universal itself directly
through the intelligible species, and indirectly the
singular represented by the phantasm. And thus
it forms the proposition, Socrates is a man” (Summa
Theologica, la, qu. 86, art. i).
Psychological observat ion shows this to be con1 On the question of our knowledge of the individual in the
Thomistic conception see the various articles in the Summa
Theologica, la. qu. 84, 85, 86; De Anima, 20, ad x in cont.;
Comment. Sentent., IV, dist. 50, qu. I, art. 3; 7 Metaph., lib. 14,
art. 34; Contra Gentiles, I, c. 65.

WiPWPRI

as

KNOWLEDGE OF THE INDIVIDUAL 131
sonant with what always takes place in our cognitive
processes. With the senses I perceive a circle or
several circles; my intellect conceives the idea of a
circle and knows it directly ; to have an intellective,
and not merely a sensitive knowledge of this circle.
1 must apply the universal idea of a circle to this
particular figure. In like manner, I have an intel­
lective knowledge of this person, in so far as I know
that this individual, perceived by my senses, is a
man, white, musical, tall, wise, etc. It is to be noted
that in such knowledge the single ideas and their
synthesis are such as can readily be repeated of
other persons, real or possible: “O portet, si singu­
lare definitur, in eius definitione poni aliqua nomina
quae multis conveniunt,”—in the definition of the
singular it is necessary to use some terms which are
applicable to many (7 Metaph., lib. 14). We are
always moving within an indirect knowledge that
never grasps singularity, but represents the individ­
ual in a manner that is incomplete, though practically
useful.
To conclude : St. Thomas does not deny that our
intellect in its present state knows individual beings.
On the contrary, he expressly teaches that we arrive
at a knowledge of the individual, not indeed by a
direct, but by an indirect cognition. And as to the
senses, he attributes to them the apprehension of
the individual, and this particular apprehension by

i32

INTELLECTUALISM OE ST. THOMAS

the sensitive faculty serves him later to explain the
action of the practical intellect, which, acting other­
wise than the speculative intellect, does not limit
itself to the contemplation of truth, hut what it
apprehends it directs to action. It is the union of
sense and intellect, corresponding to our nature as
matter informed by mind, that gives rise to this our
special kind of indirect knowledge of the individual.
As St. Thomas himself brings out, it is not re­
pugnant for the individual to be intellectually known
in so far as it is individual, but in so far as it is
material, because intellectually we know nothing ex­
cept in an immaterial manner (immaterialitcr) by
prescinding from matter and the individualizing
notes. Hence the objection that “our intellect
understands itself, and yet there is question of some­
thing individual,” is answered by Aquinas thus:
“Si sit aliquid singulare et immateriale, sicut est
intellectus, hoc non repugnat intelligi,”—the singu­
lar that is at the same time immaterial can be known :
we have an intuitive and indiiddual knowledge of
the acts of our ego because our soul is spiritual.
Direct sense knowledge of the individual, di­
rect intellective knowledge of the universal, intuitive
and individual intellective knowledge of our ego,—
such briefly, are the theses of St. Thomas in this
matter.
After what has been said it is clear how baseless

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is the accusation that St. Thomas undervalues the
individual. He would welcome the ability of reach-

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ing it intuitively, concretely, directly, as God reaches
it; and were he living to-day, he would envy those
who claim to have such knowledge, lie did but
establish that, in the present condition of things, our
intellect has not got this ability, and he believed that

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his opponents had no more knowledge of individual
beings than he.
The same considerations hold good as to history
and the knowledge of the process of becoming.
The importance of this process is not overlooked
by St. Thomas. On the contrary, in his Physics he
makes his own the forceful expression of Aristotle:
'Ignorato motu, ignoratur natura,”—if movement
is ignored, nature is ignored. But his great principie is that “there is nothing to hinder an unchangeable knowledge of changeable things.’’
God, for example, because not subject to time and
embracing with His Being the past, present, and
future,—all history,—knows immutably whatever
becomes because He sees it in what Boethius calls
the “tota simul et perfecta possessio,”—the perfect
possession that is whole all at once.
We, too, despite the imperfection of our intellect,
can catch the flow of beings with our abstract concepts because in the concrete, individual, and changeable determinations of reality there are some common

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134

INTELLECTUALISM OF ST. THOMAS

reasons, some intelligible forms, some essential
notions which are and remain substantially un­
changeable, and into which philosophic abstraction
resolves the concrete datum. It is quite true that
there are beings iu the world that arc perennially
undergoing change. Hut is not the concept of
“change” which 1 ascertain in all changing things
the same? May it not be truly applied to all
changes,—past, present, and future, real and pos­
sible? Again, in every· man I find different indi­
vidual notes and observe an unceasing development,
a perpetual change. Hut does this do away- with the
fixed and unchangeable truth that all these human
persons, whether taken one by one, or each in him­
self during the Aarious moments of their fieri
(becoming), have an identical reason of being, the
same human nature in virtue of which they' are men
and not irrational animals ? Does the fact that
every free act is different and develops successively',
contradict the other fact that the notion of a free
act, as inferred from real and changeable actions, is
fixed and immutable ?
Of course, by such an abstractive process I do not
succeed in getting history, change, phenomenal being,
in all its rich complexity: here, too, I have recourse
to the intuition of my Ego and of my soul, to the
help of the senses, to judgment, and so on. Here
too, “quod non potest fieri per unum, fiat aliqualiter

KNOWLEDGE OF HISTORY

135

per plura.” Our inability to know' reality perfectly
destroys none of its characteristic notes.
Therefore, two points of view must be carefully
distinguished in the teaching of St. Thomas: the
ontological and the logical, the object known and the
manner of knowing it, the cognitum and the modus
cognoscendi.
As to being in itself, i. e., the ontological reality,
St. Thomas is far from rejecting the teachings of
Christianity about person, the human individual,
Divine Providence, history, etc. The spirit of Chris­
tianity, or, to use Laberthonnière’s phrase, le réalisme
chrétien,—Christian realism,—is by no means op­
posed to Greek and Thomistic intellectualism in what
has reference to being, to the object of knowledge.
In the ontological problem a follower of Aristotle
is not called upon to tread under foot the rights of
individuality, or the fact of change, or the historic
sense. Quite the contrary. The only difference, if
any, between him and a defender of the theory that
all is movement (“universal mobilism”), is this: in
the various categories of changeable being Thomistic
Aristotelianism recognizes a reason of being, an
essential principle, which remains substantially iden­
tical throughout all accidental changes. But in this
there is nothing repugnant to the Christian spirit or
to the exigencies of history. If by a static view of
the universe is meant a philosophy that discovers

136

INTELLECTUALISM OF ST. THOMAS

common aspects in the flow of things, then it is
clear that such staticism neither rejects the develop­
ment of things nor contravenes Christianity. This
explains how St. Thomas could uphold his theses
concerning Divine Providence as directing indi­
viduals and history. “Providentiae ordinem,” we
read in De Peritote (5, 4), “in singularibus ponimus
etiam in quantum singularia sunt,”—the order of
Providence holds good in regard to individual beings
also in so far as they are individual.
In the logical order this principle prevails: “cog­
nitum est in cognoscente ad modum cognoscentis,
—the thing known is in the knower according to the
mode of the knower,”—z. e., the manner of the
knower’s being determines the manner of his know­
ing.
God, the perfect Being, has a perfect knowledge
extending to all individuals, to their being and be­
coming. 'khc divine cognition embraces beings and
their history in all their immense richness down to
their inmost depths, and their significance in the
process of development, characteristic alike of the
single individuals and of their totality. And as the
actions and manifestations of the single beings are
a fruit that grows on the tree of their own nature,
as it exists in the concrete, God, concludes St.
Thomas, knows the single individuals through their

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BEING AND KNOWLEDGE OF BEING 137

essence, their species ; nor is any other procedure con­
ceivable.
Man, because his nature consists of a soul united
as form to a body, has an imperfect knowledge,
which, while not false, is far from being complete.
His abstractive intellectual cognition, conjoined with
the sense-knowledge of the particular, seeks to
grasp and understand the individual and history
without ever exhausting the object of its study.
And the “naturale desiderium” of human intelli­
gence, the desire, that is, which we have in so far
as we are endowed with our actual nature, cannot
be different. When we yearn to know the individ­
ual and history directly and intuitively, we strain
for a knowledge that surpasses our ability. This
yearning is holy, if you will, but it is not natu­
ral, not in keeping with what lies in our nature’s
power.
4. Being and the Knowledge of Being

From all that has been said, the one idea inspiring
Thomistic intellectualism and its limits now stands
out in all its limpid clearness.
Whoever, like St. Thomas, conceives being as an
ontological reality not created by an act of thought
or will, but, on the contrary, conceives the act of
thought and will as implying and presupposing the

i

INTELLECTUALISM OF ST. THOMAS

BEING AND KNOWLEDGE OF BEING 139

being of him who thinks and wills, cannot confuse
these two questions :
(a) the question of being:
(b) the question of the knowledge of being.
Such a distinction would be meaningless in a
philosophy which, like the contemporary metaphysics
of mind, denies the being that is not a creation of
thought and admits thought itself purely as an act.
But in the system of St. Thomas this distinction
was imperative; and, given this point of departure,
the inexorable consequences had of necessity to fol­
low.
The intellectualism of St. Thomas consists in
viewing intelligence as the highest form of being,
whether in God, in whom being is identical with
understanding ; or in created reality, where there is
an ascent from being to intelligence ; or in man,
whose being and nature depend on his own intelli­
gence., which tends to the possession, i. e.} the knowl­
edge, of Being.
The limits of Thomistic intellectualism arise from
the fact that, while being is always individual and
(excepting the perfect Being) has a history·, our
knowledge of being, because incomplete, is marked
by the characteristics we have described.
Here, too, the whole question concerns being and
the knowledge of being. And all who seek to fathom
the intellectualism of St. Thomas without losing

themselves in the labyrinth of theories of knowledge,
should never let go of the Leitfuden that alone
offers guidance and safety, namely, the leading-line
of being.

i38

CHAPTER VI
BEING IN THE THEOLOGY OF ST. THOMAS

(faith and feason)

When one follows the anxious researches made
from the fourth to the thirteenth century into the
relations between philosophy and theology, faith and
reason, scientific and dogmatic truths, the natural
and the supernatural, one is astonished alike at the
efforts put forth by the human mind and at the un­
certainty' of the solutions reached.
What relations exist between philosophic thought
,-md the dogmatic teaching of the Church? This
fundamental question took on different aspects with
different thinkers, branching out into a thousand
either debatable points. Some asked themselves
whether it was permissible to apply the results of
metaphysical speculation to theology? While opin­
ions differed on this preliminary question, many
illustrious theologians maintained that even the most
sublime mysteries, such as that of the Most Holy
Trinity, could be demonstrated by reason alone.
Some claimed the ability to prove only the existence
140

ZISSSESar/jgipwrT· πι

FAITH AND REASON

141

of this mystery {an sit), while others were confident of being able to give the most exhaustive explanation of it, and to answer the question quomodo
sit, how it is. Some, again, denied to the human
mind, endowed with merely natural resources, the
power of reaching the inaccessible regions of dogma;
others, finally, as against the hardihood of the theological rationalism of the day, outlined a theory of
analogy, inasmuch as created things cannot offer a
perfect term of comparison for the Creator. Discussion followed hard upon discussion. The famous
question whether the same truth can be simultanéously known and believed by the same individual,—
“utrum idem possit esse scitum et creditum"—
found two solutions. Some held that there was
•
·
·
nothing to hinder us from contemplating one and
the same truth at once with the eye of rational
evidence and with that of faith. Others found
this to be a flat contradiction. And this controversy
brought keen intellects face to face with doubts as
to the very possibility of a rationabile obsequium,
—a reasonable submission to faith. If faith was
demonstrable and demonstrated, they said, one had
of course to believe ; but in that case the act of
faith lost all freedom of assent, and therefore all
merit. If on the contrary, no solid and convincing
proofs were available, the act of faith did indeed
remain free and meritorious, but at the same time

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TFII' THEOLOGY OF ST. THOMAS

signalized an abdication of the rights of rational
thought.
During the whole of this age-long discussion,
the two orders—the natural and the supernatural,
the rational and the superratioual—were frequently
confused, with disastrous consequences. Men did
not know how to trace clear and precise boundary­
lines between metaphysics and dogma, between phil­
osophy and theology. It often happened that the
theologian encroached on the territory of the phil­
osopher, and vice versa. And if the theologian
dared to deny the worth of reason, the philosopher
pretended to prove revealed, superratioual truths
by intrinsic arguments.
The first one to bring together all that was true
in the assertions of his predecessors and to blend it
into one harmonious conception by means of his
principle of being, was St. Thomas. He furnished
a definitive solution of the problem with the valuable
aid and encouragement of his teacher Albert the
Great. As Th. Heitz has clearly shown, in the
work cited above, Aquinas took up the materials
elaborated and prepared by others under many diffi­
culties. He knew how to utilize these materials for
the doctrinal construction of his Summac, where
philosophy and theology, metaphysics and dogma,
while remaining formally distinct, concur in one
vast synthesis. Henceforth his doctrine on the

FAITH AND REASON

143

relation between faith and reason became classic
and official in Catholic teaching.

I

The main currents that preceded the Thomistic
synthesis on this point were three :
(a) The first was unable to solve the problem of
the relation between metaphysics and dogma owing
to an initial error that undid and rendered well nigh
impossible every attempt at a solution. I refer to
the Augustinian theory of the divine illumination
of our minds. If the ray of faith and that of
reason are nothing but one direct illumination pro­
ceeding from the primal Light, then the edifice of
philosophy and that of theology are irradiated in an
almost equal manner. There will be a quantitative
difference. William of Auvergne said that phil­
osophy “is not a perfect illumination of souls, but
may be compared to a feeble light,” the while faith
is a brilliant luminary. At times, as in the case of
Hugh and Richard of St. Victor, we find rational
knowledge so conditioned by the illumination that
one could not say whether that knowledge is super­
natural, or whether revelation is being lowered to
the level of reason.
The Augustinian theory of knowledge perforce

W*»i

144 THE THEOLOGY OF ST. THOMAS
weakened the distinction between the domain of
revelation and that of reason, reducing it to a ques­
tion of more or less, without marking any precise
limits. This becomes evident when one reads the
writings of Hugh of St. Victor. In likeness to
reason, “divine grace itself is an illumination; the
very gifts [of the Holy Ghost] are lights of the
grace which illumines those who partake of it; and
every grace comes down from one sole source, and
every illumination from one only light, and the rays
are many, but the light is one.” Other Augustinian
writers call all natural knowledge a revelation from
God, the first truth in the logical order. These
assertions can, of course, be given a mild interpre­
tation, inasmuch as reason,—the lumen rationis,—
can justify the expression “natural revelation,” to
be well distinguished from supernatural revelation;
but such phrases created confusion and obscurity.
It would be interesting to study in the writings of
St. Bonaventure how the essential rôle which he
assigned to subjective illumination had the effect of
making him waver when tracing the practical limits
between reason and faith, philosophy and theology,
even though his keen mind had noticed the formal
principle of the distinction.
The problem to be solved was one of relations.
Hence it implied the necessity of first making clear

FAITH AND REASON

145

the implications of the two terms whose relations
were to be investigated. It would become possible
to conceive the harmony of reason and faith as soon
as one knew precisely what was the field of reason
and what the domain of faith. Only after know­
ing how faith and reason differ, could one say how
they become united. Instead, the Augustinian
school, though defending with might and main the
importance of a union between them, overlooked
the moment of distinction.
(b) Another tendency too exclusively stressed
the rights of faith, forgetting that in a question of
relations between two different fields, neither of
them should be undervalued or neglected.
When, for example, I open the works of St. Peter
Damian,—his De Sancta Simplicitate Scientiae In­
flanti Anteponenda (that holy simplicity is to be pre­
ferred to the science that puffs up), and his De
Monachis qui Grammaticam Discere Gestiunt (on
monks who would fain learn grammar),—I meet
with an exaggerated aversion to philosophy, which
is looked upon as a wisdom that “comes not from on
high, but is earthly, animal, diabolical.” And in one
of his smaller works, Plato and Pythagoras, Euclid
and Aristotle are ridiculed with a vengeance : quaerant peripatetici,” he says, “latentem in prof undo
puteo veritatem,—let the Aristotelians look for truth

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THE THEOLOGY OF ST. THOMAS

i» a deep well . .
like the rustic in the story,
who looked for the moon down there, while it was
shining in high heaven.
Peter Damian, the valiant man of action, vas not
alone. More than two centuries later William of
Auxerre feared to apply reasoning of the natural
order to theology, just as William of Champeaux,
famous for his part in the conflict about universals,
had had a holy horror of introducing dialectic pro­
cesses into theological discussions ; when face to face
with knotty questions and torturing difficulties, he
preferred to answer, simply : “This must be left
to the judgment of God.”
Among the leading representatives of this ten­
dency are St. Bernard, Lanfranc, and, in a certain
sense, St. Anselm of Canterbury, notwithstanding
his great merit of having prepared the full flowering
of Scholasticism. To be sure, St. Anselm cannot
be charged with exaggerations like those mentioned ;
however, though applying reason to the study of
faith, he does not leave the battle-ground delimited
by his well-known programme: “Credo, ut intelligam.”
To interpret this principle correctly, it must be
remembered that for the discussion of theological
problems in general and for the study of mysteries
in particular, St. Anselm required the dispositions
of a good will joined to staid habits and a Christian

FAITH AND REASON

147

life. Only after having conic to love the faith with
a pure heart, can one proceed to study it ; only after
the credere can one pass on to the intclligere. But
“here/’ notes lleitz, “intelligcrc docs not mean the
absolute evidence of the philosopher, but rather the

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THE TIIEOLOGAZ OF ST. THOMAS

bats of dialectics, incapable of discussion in the light
of day, and then, like Abelard, straying in the dark­
ness of a thousand errors.
(c) This feeble light of reason was given an
enthusiastic and almost exclusive preference by
another school, which had Averroës for its founder
and Siger of Brabant for its foremost representative.
Averroës made his obeisance to the Koran—
but with a proviso : when there was a question of a
demonstrated truth contradicting the Koran, it was
imperative to interpret the latter conformably to
philosophy, though the people were to hold to the
literal sense. Similarly, Siger of Brabant, though
protesting· his respect for the teaching of faith, de­
fended divers theses contradicting the fundamental
truths of Christianity, and resorted to the subter­
fuge of the double-truth theory.
That religion is of supernatural origin, or that
the individual soul is spiritual and immortal was,
for the Averroists, false in philosophy, because of
the principle of circular succession, the eternal repe­
tition of events, and the single active intellect
(God) existing in all things; but it was true in the­
ology and for faith. This rendered an internal
cleavage of the mind inevitable : the mind was called
upon to welcome as divinely imposed revelation doc­
trines that were said to be in sharpest contrast with
the results of scientific research; under the pretext

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FAITH AND REASON

149

of invariably submitting even to a faith contrary to
reason, these men sinned in favor of the latter by
that exclusiveness which those of the second current
practiced in favor of revealed truth.

Such were the three theories devised in the course
of centuries. It cannot be denied that each one contained a considerable portion of truth. The Augustinians were quite right in upholding the harmony
between faith and knowledge, between the two rays
of the one sun. The Anselmians did not choose a
mistaken position when they aligned themselves as
the champions of dogma, theology, and the faith.
The Averroists were not wholly in the wrong in vindicating the worth of human reason and demanding
for it the highest respect.
None of the three theories, however, gave exprèssion to the full truth. The first did not specify in
what precisely consists the distinction between faith
and reason, philosophy and theology. The others
distinguished too much and sacrificed faith in favor
of reason or reason for the benefit of faith.
Then came St. Thomas, with the way prepared
for him by Albert the Great. In the midst of tenJ
dencies so disparate, he furnished a solution for
every difficulty, respected every legitimate demand
of reason and faith, and so arrived at the definitive
doctrine. By tracing the line of demarcation be-

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tween metaphysics and dogma, he pointed to the
unity in distinction, with that limpid clearness which
is the hall-mark of truth.

II
To reach a solution of the problem Thomas
Aquinas had no thought whatsoever of dethroning
reason or debasing metaphysics. The latter was al­
ways regarded by him as the most estimable of all
human sciences, and the least of its conquests had
more value in his eyes than the greatest certainty in
other fields. Besides, it was metaphysics and nat­
ural theology (not to be confused with the theology
of revealed truth), that mounted up to God, whether
from contingent beings to the Being by essence, or
by the synthetic, deductive method,—by way of ne­
gation, excluding every imperfection from God; by
way of affirmation, attributing to God every essential
perfection {simpliciter simplex') found in the things
that surround us, by way of transcendence or emi­
nence, which raises the perfections attributed to God
to an infinite degree.
The respect, therefore, that is due to reason was
not even remotely a matter for discussion ; immedi­
ate or mediate evidence, compelling assent and gen­
erating in us intrinsic certitude of a truth, consti­
tuted the light of this domain.

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FAITH AND REASON

151

St. Thomas observed, however, that we cannot al­
ways exult in the inward joy of such rational evi­
dence concerning truth. There are judgments that
leave us in perplexity and make us suspend our as­
sent by doubt. There are likewise judgments to
which we adhere though we are not quite sure, and
which, therefore, do not possess true certainty, but
belong to the field of opinion. Finally, there are
cases where the will determines intelligence to ad­
here to a proposition, not because the latter is evi­
dent, but because it is attested as true by testimonies
worthy of respect. In such cases we have faith.
Let no one suppose that faith is necessary only ,
for divine things. Quite otherwise. Faith admits
as certain a fact or a doctrine when the intellect does
not see their evidence, but is influenced by some other
motive to adhere to them. Thus if an explorer as­
sures me that in the heart of Africa there is a city
hitherto unknown, I make an act of faith by believ­
ing his words, provided it is evident to me from
other sources that he is a serious and trustworthy,
man. Moreover, adds St. Thomas, social life is
made possible to a great extent by this very fact of
faith, as St. Augustine had previously declared in
his De Utilitate Credendi. Education, the school,
pedagogy are founded on the principle of Aristotle:
“oportet addiscentem credere,”—the learner must
take things on faith. In the field of natural truths,

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152

THE THEOLOGY OF ST. THOMAS

too, the ignorant must believe the learned, be he
scientist or metaphysician. And every act of faith
means an act of homage to him whom one believes:
not the evidence of what he says, but submission to
his authority, is the formal principle of human faith.
The same holds true of divine -faith. The truth
of faith is not scientific truth; the first is admitted
because of the authority of God, the second, because
of the intrinsic connection grasped by intuition or
reached through demonstration. In divine faith,—
as the Summa Theologica teaches in phrases that
were later incorporated, with slight changes, into a
solemn definition of the Vatican Council,—one be­
lieves, “non propter rationem humanam, sed propter
auctoritatem divinam/'—not on account of human
reason, but on account of divine authority. And it
cannot be admitted that the same truth may be sim­
ultaneously known and believed; that is, considered
from the same point of view, it cannot be the object
of faith and of knowledge for one and the same
mind : “de eodem secundum idem non potest esse
simul in uno homine scientia nec cum opinione nec
cum fide, alia et alia tamen ratione.”
To give us a clear idea of what faith is, St.
Thomas distinguishes its material object, its formal
reason, and its subject.
I. The material object of faith,—that which is

FAITH AND REASON

153

believed,—is not the irrational, but the superrational, made manifest to us by revelation. This
comprises two classes of truths : some which con­
cern God and surpass the faculties of human reason ;
others which reason, too, could reach. That there
are three Persons and one Nature in God is an ex­
ample of the first class ; the existence of a First
Cause is an example of the second.
That there is a domain of divine reality above the
capacity of our mind appears quite evident. For we
rise to the knowledge of God from the things of
sense, and these enable us to know that God exists,—
quia est, not what His substance is,—quid sit. Be­
sides, there is a gradation also in intelligences ; the
angelic intellect is more powerful than ours, and the
divine more than that of the Angels. Hence, as it
would be silly for a tyro to brand as false the teach­
ings of a philosopher because he cannot understand
them, so it would be a much greater folly if a man re­
fused to accept revealed truths because he cannot
fathom them with his reason. Besides, are we not
ignorant even of many properties of material things?
How much greater must be the insufficiency of our
reason in regard to the supremely excellent sub­
stance of God ! (Contra Gentiles, I, cap. 3 ; Summa
Theologica, la, qu. 1).
It was expedient that there should be a Revelation
alike of divine truths that surpass reason and of

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154

'11 IE THEOLOGY OE ST. THOMAS

those which it can discoxer.

If these latter had not

resulted: first, but few would come to know (hero
because inferior talents, the cares of practical lite, or
indolence would debar many from studying them:
secondly, even those who attained to a knowledge
of these truths would do so only with much time and
effort; finally, many would remain in doubt because
human speculation is frequently commingled with
error. For ail these reasons it was befitting that
God in his mercy should make provision by revela­
tion also for truths which do not exceed the power
of reason, as otherwise only a few could acquire
them, and that only after a long time and with the

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admixture of some errors.
Still more persuasive are the arguments for the
truths that exceed our mental powers. It was right
that God should reveal them : first, because man had
been raised to the supernatural order and must tend
to God and to a possession of God that exceeds the
estate of our minds ; therefore, the revelation of this
end was necessary, otherwise its desire and its at­
tainment alike would have been impossible ; secondly,
by means of revelation we have a more complete and
truer knowledge of God; thirdly, we become aware
of our littleness and feel the great limitations of our
mental endowments ; finally, we are urged on to

FAITH AND REASON

155

things immortal and divine (Contra Gentiles, I, cap.
4 et 5; Summa Theologica, la, qu. 1).
2. The formal motive of faith, as we have stated,
is not the evidence of the truth proposed, but the
authority of God, who is the first truth. Faith does
not consist solely in admitting a thing as true ; other­
wise the devil, too, who admits the Divine Trinity,
would be making an act of faith and, therefore, an
act of virtue. It consists in giving assent to a truth
in so far as it is revealed by God. The act of faith,
then, is an act of homage to the Deity, and it can be
repeated indefinitely. It is a virtue, and it is free be­
cause it depends on the will ; it is elicited by the intel­
lect, but it is enjoined by an act of free-will.
3. Finally, the subject of faith are not the bare
natural faculties. These are elevated and aided by
supernatural grace. Hence the formula proposed by
St. Thomas as a summary of the act of faith:
credere Deum,—to believe God and His Revelation,
—this is the material object of Faith ; credere Deo,—
to believe on the authority of God’s word,—this is
the formal object ; credere in Deum,—to direct our
belief to God,—this is the tendency of the intellect
moved by the will towards the last end.
But, it may be urged, does this domain of the
super-rational really exist?
It does, answers St. Thomas. It is reasonable

i56

THE THEOLOGY OF ST. THOMAS

and obligatory to believe. Our assent to revealed
dogma is far from being an act of levity, d'hough
unable to demonstrate the intrinsic truth of a dogma
(otherwise we should no longer have faith, but sci­
ence), we nevertheless have an abundance of argu­
ments to prove the fact of revelation and to know its
content. These arguments form the motives of
credibility, leading to the conclusion that ours is
a rationabile obsequium—a reasonable submission.
Thus the act of faith is, on the one hand, reason­
able and obligatory, on the other, free and meritori­
ous. The motives of credibility do not give us a
scientific knowledge of the dogmas, but they do give
us the certainty that God has revealed these dogmas.
Thereupon the will, under the gentle movement of
grace, urges the intellect to assent,—not, however,
according to the greater or less clearness of the
proofs, but solely in submission to and by reason of
the authority of God, who can neither deceive nor be
deceived.
Thus far we have described the act of faith in its
essential difference from the processes of reason.
But the human mind does not rest satisfied with
merely cataloguing the teachings of the faith. It
arranges them into a system, elaborates and develops
them, and draws from them further conclusions as
from first and fundamental principles. In this man­
ner faith forms the basis of theology, this true sci-

\
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FAITH AND REASON
157
ence—more speculative than practical—which has its

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sources in revealed dogmas.
In relation to theology, philosophy has an ancillary function. Philosophy, namely, est ancilla theologiae in the following sense : first, in so far as it
demonstrates the preambles of faith, such as the ex­
istence of God and the fact of revelation; secondly,
in so far as by apt analogies and an accurate elaboration it explains faith, illustrates it, and presents its
doctrines in a systematic form ; thirdly, it solves the
objections of adversaries by pointing out their falsity or weakness, by dispelling the alleged contradic­
tions in dogma and mystery, by showing, that is,
that the super-rational is not the irrational. Philosophy, then, is the way to faith, the means for theo­
logical construction, the powerful defense of faith
itself.
In thus conceiving the relations between theology
and metaphysics, the medieval theologian combined
the two constructive methods which, in their development in the course of centuries, were destined to give
rise to positive theology and to speculative theology:
that is to say, the method of authority, based on
Sacred Scripture, which deductively demonstrates
that this or that truth is revealed; and the dialectic
method that simplifies and develops the truths them­
selves.
It was, then, not a disdain for philosophical stud-

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ies that prompted St. Thomas to regard them as
“quasi famulantes,” as servants of the theological
sciences, but solely his lucid vision of the co-ordina­
tion between the activity of reason and the realm of
faith. One and the other were respected by him ;
but their union was conceived as possible and fertile

in results.

III

In this problem, too, the Thomistic synthesis
should be analyzed in the light of the idea of being,
which serves to illuminate the position of the /\.ngclic
Doctor also as against the attacks of the natural­
ism of to-day. Pierre Rousselot understood this
when in his L’Intellectualisme de Saint-Thomas he
observed that the master thought which makes for
unity everywhere and combines philosophy and the­
ology in an indissoluble synthesis, may be formu­
lated as follows: “Intelligence is essentially the
sense of the real, of being; but it is a sense
of the real only because it is a sense of the
divine.”—“In Scholasticism,” he adds, “there is one
paramount question,—one might almost say, one sin­
gle question,—namely, that of the acquisition of be­
ing. Only by facing the medieval thinkers from

FAITH AND REASON

159

this side can we come to understand the quality of
their thought.”

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It will be well to make some observations on the
relations between metaphysics and theology, as ex­
plained by St. Thomas in his commentary on Boe­
thius’ treatise De Trinitate and in his Summa The­
ologica.
I. According to the Angelic Doctor, reason clears
the way for faith. The ways of faith and the ways
of reason, though different, are united. Their dis­
tinction, their diversity, does not do away with their
union. How is this to be understood?
For St. Thomas the intellect is the faculty by
which we apprehend being,—“captatrice de l’être,”
as the French put it, and as we have explained at
some length.
However, in the present state of things, our in­
tellect grasps being only through the medium of ab­
stract concepts, which give us but one side, not the
whole of reality. Moreover, as a result of the union
of soul and body, the proper object of the human in­
tellect are the things of sense, in which it seeks and
finds the quidditas by abstracting from the individ­
ualizing notes. There is for us no special science
of immaterial beings; these elude our immediate in­
tuition and we can apprehend their existence only

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160

THE THEOLOGY OF ST. THOMAS

through their effects. Athirst though we are tor re­
ality, for being, we can reach but a small portion of
it. The greater part escapes us, and would be de­
nied to us for ever if we had only the abstractive in­
tellect as instrument of cognition.
Revelation throws open a region of being which
reason cannot explore. Faith projects a ray of light
into a domain which the feeble sight of human intel­
ligence could never discern, may, not even suspect.
Considering the lack of intrinsic evidence for the
truths proposed to the believer, faith seemingly
thrusts us out into the night ; but in reality it plunges
us into a fruitful darkness, where we may contem­
plate the starry heavens which we otherwise could
not see at all.
Philosophy and dogma alike, metaphysics as well
as theology, are at one with each other in this : they
are the means for knowing, for grasping being. In
the first case we lay hold of it by reason, in the sec­
ond by faith. One process of acquisition does not
exclude the other. In his commentary on Boethius’s
De Trinitate (qu. 2, art. 3) St. Thomas well says:
“Lumen fidei, quod nobis gratis infunditur, non de­
struit lumen naturalis cognitionis nobis naturaliter in­
ditum,”—the light of faith, infused as a gift of
grace, does not destroy the light of natural knowl­
edge implanted in us by nature. The supernatural
is not the annihilation, but the sublimation, the ele-

FAITH AND REASON

161

vation of the natural. Grace perfects and presup­
poses nature. The light of faith does not do away
with, but acts as a complement to, the light of na­
tural knowledge.
Therefore, when confronted with the double-truth
theory, the meek St. Thomas was roused to a holy
anger. Writing his treatise De Unitate Intellectus
contra Averroistas against the Quaestiones de Anima
Intellectiva of Siger of Brabant, he more than ever
made clear his unshakable conviction as to the worth
of intelligence and reason, whose laws are the laws
of being, and for this reason cannot conflict with the
manifestations and supernatural revelations of Be­
ing furnished us by faith.
There will come an hour for the human intellect
when both reasoning and faith will be as "straw for
the burning”; it is that hour when it will attain to
the vision of God, when in the bliss of contemplating
Being as He is in Himself, the intellect will have
reached the highest peak toward which, like alpinists,
we are laboriously climbing to-day.
Abstractive intellect, faith, beatific vision are three
steps that lead us gradually to the possession of be­
ing. Being is the one and only final object of our
intellectual efforts. The diversity of the ways,—
each one of which is a continuation of the other,—
does not destroy the identity of the longed for goal,
i. e., Being.

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2. Reason elaborates the material of faith and
constructs the theological system. This truth was
not only asserted, but carried into practice by St.
Thomas. The immortal proof of it is his Sumina
Theologica, w herein, starting from the data of reve­
lation, the Dominican Doctor raises up a sacred ca­
thedral, for which metaphysics,—we had better say,
the conception of being,—had furnished him the nec­
essary material.
I shall limit myself to the treatise De Incarnatione,
found in the third part of the Summa, which in re­
cent years has had a brilliant commentator in Car­
dinal Louis Billot (De Cerbo Incarnato : Commen­
tarius in Tertiam Partem S. Thomae}.
Faith teaches that the second Person of the Most
Holy Trinity became man to redeem us from sin.
Jesus Christ, the Redeemer, is the Man-God. In
Him there are two natures and one Person. He
suffered and died for us.
Let us touch upon a few points and see how St.
Thomas develops this theological treatise with the
conception of being as a basis.
Was the Incarnation necessary? It was, if divine
justice was to be satisfied in a full and condign man­
ner. Through sin being had offended Being. The
gravity of an offense is measured by the dignity of
the person offended ; but as it was the infinite Being
that had been offended, the offense was in a measure

FAITH AND REASON

163

infinite {quodammodo infinita). Therefore, an in­
finite reparation was required of sinful man. The
problem seemed insoluble : the finite being cannot
make an infinite reparation. The Incarnation solves
the difficulty through the reparation of the Man-God
which proceeds from a Being of infinite dignity.
But how are we to conceive the Hypostatic Union ?
In what manner can we admit a Man-God? God,
says St. Thomas, is Being by essence. The essence,
the nature of God is His very existence. In the
creature, on the contrary, the nature or essence does
not contain within itself the note of existence, which
in no way changes nature, but makes it to subsist.
Now God, Being, instead of creating a human na­
ture subsisting by a limited existence proper to it,
creates one which, assumed by the Word, subsists
by the divine Existence. In Jesus Christ, then, we
have two natures, the human and the divine ; but
only one existence and hence only one person,—the
Existence and the Person of God.
If human nature subsists by the existence of the
Word, we understand how Jesus Christ could live,
suffer, and die as man, and how at the same time
His actions and sufferings had an infinite value.
And it is by starting from the fact of the Hypostatic
Union that St. Thomas solves all the questions of
his treatise, which could not be fully understood
except by one familiar with Thomistic metaphysics

164

THE THEOLOGY OF ST. THOMAS

and with its doctrine of being, The same can be
said of the treatise De Trinitate and of all the
other parts of the Summa Theologica.
3. Finally, reason refutes the objections raised
against faith. This point, too, cannot be made clear
without keeping in mind that the laws of rational
thought cannot be repudiated by the laws of any
reality whatsoever. To him who attempts to find
contradictions in dogma, St. Thomas, far from an­
swering with the unhistorical phrase, credo quia
absurdum, shows that the absurdity does not exist
except in our false interpretation of revealed truth.
And even when there is question of the dominion
of faith, he does not hesitate to use the process of
reason and metaphysics, because these, though not
perfect because they do not give us the whole of
reality, are none the less valid because they are the
assured principles of being, of reality.
In the face of such a conception what value can
the objections of present-day Rationalism have?
When, for example, Idealism alleges that revelation
is opposed to reason, we acknowledge that the diffi­
culty is insoluble from the viewpoint of modern
philosophy. If our will or our thought creates
everything, if there is nothing that is not an act of
the thought immanent in us, it is clear that no reve­
lation would be conceivable which would not be a
creation of the subject, a manifestation of the sub-

FAITH AND RE
ject to itself. However, if being is not created by
us, but only known by us, if in its multiform reality
it surpasses our mind, if our intellect is too feeble to
acquire it completely and to exhaust it, what con­
tradiction is there between reason and revelation?
The latter, far indeed from being in antithesis to
the former, cannot but be welcomed by it with de­
light, and one and the other sibi mutuam opem
ferunt, are mutually helpful in the attainment of
reality, of God, of Being.
It would be quite easy then to show that to the
mind of St. Thomas, there was no opposition be­
tween truth and truth, between metaphysics and
dogma, between nature and grace, because as created
reality was for him but a participation of being, so
supernatural life could be nothing else than a fuller
acquisition of reality, or of Being itself. I?or the
great Doctor, “philosophy was not to be a provisional
scaffolding for theology, destined to disappear when
the edifice was completed; but (as Eleitz expresses
himself in a happy simile), it was to be considered
rather as a portico, whose columns and main parts
are carved in the solid and shining marble of evident
certainty. To this portico of philosophy,—though
having of itself a sufficient reason of being,—sacred
theology adds a temple, making use of its own
principles of construction, different from those used
by the builders of the portico, and, because of their

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THE THEOLOGY OF ST. THOMAS

relatively obscure certainty, comparable to blocks of
rough granite. Thus the original portico of rational
knowledge becomes a part of, and the entrance to,
the vast sanctuary of Christian wisdom.”
Within the elegant portico, resplendent with the
beauty of Greek style, and within the vast basilica,
there shines in the night of time the bright lamps of
Being, lighted respectively by rational thought and
by the hand of the revealing God.
When the night will have passed away and the
brightness of the eternal day irradiates the minds of
men, these lamps will be extinguished and their place
taken by the one single intuition of the beatific
vision, by means of which we shall exult in the
contemplation of Being as He is (sicuti est).

CONCLUSION

Being as an ontological reality,—such is the clas­
sic thesis of Thomism and of medieval philosophy
generally. It was slowly elaborated during a pro­
cess of continuous ripening. The genius of St.
Thomas gave it all the development and finish of
which it was susceptible, ensouling with it a world
of discoveries and doctrines, and presenting several
centuries of profound speculation in the organic
unity of a system.
All who wish to penetrate to the very heart of
Thomism must ponder the thought of St. Thomas
from this point of view, which, in my judgment,
is the key to his whole system. Indeed, it would
be highly profitable, especially to-day, to insist on
this point, for it enables us to evaluate the work
of this great thinker in its true meaning. Like­
wise, if I mistake not, this same idea ought to make
its influence felt also in the manuals and publications
on Scholastic philosophy. For now and then, in the
statement and proof of the various doctrines, they
fail to arouse the feeling that these doctrines are
as the notes of one musical composition, the cantos
167

i68 THE THEOLOGY OE ST. THOMAS
of a single poem, the members of an organic whole,
the development of one sole germ rich with an in­
tense vitality.
It is this concept that fixes the place of St.
Thomas—as compared with that of his predecessors,
contemporaries, and successors,—in the history of
culture.
Those who went before,—from the very dawn of
philosophic investigation down to his time,—now
no longer appear to us in a tumult of theories, in a
clash of ideas, as a chaotic group of individuals,
but as representatives of a continuous preparation,
culminating in the formation and magnificent flower­
ing of the two great Summae of Aquinas.
It was no mere caprice that led Leo XIIΓ to
choose St. Thomas from among his contemporaries
and so many distinguished medieval philosophers as
the teacher of Catholic schools. No one before
or after him succeeded in recapitulating ancient and
Christian thought in a synthesis so vigorous as that
which underlies his philosophy of being.
What is more, St. Thomas championed this phil­
osophy with such depth and lucidity as to become
its foremost standard-bearer and, therefore, the
leading Catholic adversary of modern philosophic
speculation, at least as it is being generally inter­
preted.
From the Middle Ages on, according to an opinion

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CONCLUSION

169

quite common to-day in well nigh all philosophical
schools, philosophy has been one continued effort to
strike at and destroy the soul of Thomism. St.
Thomas, though he never denied the rights of the
subject, could not conceive an act of thought or will
without a being that thinks and wills; consistently
with his conception of being, he did not even dream
of placing the center of the universe in an ego living
within us, whose only reality would be its activity,
and whose activity would not mean an ontological
reality. Therefore, all modern and contemporary
systems of philosophy declare an implacable wvar on
the Angelic Doctor and his theory of being. It is
the new conception of the world by Humanism and
the Renaissance, which pits against being the glori­
fication and divinization of the subject, i. e., man con­
sidered in himself or in his relation to nature. It is
the Cogito, ergo sum of Réné Descartes, with a hint
of the oneness of thought and being. It is Spinoza
with his immanentistic method in philosophy. It is
Berkeley, according to whom being is unthinkable
except in relation to the thinking activity. It is
Immanuel Kant with his synthesis a priori, or the
subject that creates being. It is Fichte, Schelling,
and Hegel who are inexorable in their desire to ob­
literate the residues of being in Kantian philosophy,
—the caput mortuum of the Critiques—so as to
reduce all reality to the knowing subject. It is,

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THlf THEOLOGY OE ST. TIIO.M VS

not to mention others, the attempt of the post-Hegelian school in Ttalv. from Spaventa and Jaja to
iovamii Gentile, who seek to

reality and logically arrive at the thesis of the
identification of history and philosophy, nay, of
history and the history of philosophy. In short,
against the philosophy of being, modern philosophy,
—as Gentile has well expressed it in his Teona
Generale del Pensicro conic Atto Pure,—began to
affirm “simply, with all discretion, this modest but
pressing need, that thought be considered as some­
thing, though later, in probing the concept of this
need to the bottom, modern philosophy felt the
necessity of affirming thought not simply as some­
thing, as only an element and, so to speak, an
appendage of reality, but rather as the totality or
absolute Reality.”
It is not my task here to attempt a critical ex­
amination of modern thought.1 Nor do I wish to
investigate its contributions to truth and how they
can be assimilated by Thomism, according to which
1 I by no means accept such an interpretation of modern
philosophy. As I have begun to show in my work on L’Aninia
dell Umanesimo e del Rinascimento (Milano, Società Editrice
“Vita e Pensiero,” 1924, Vol. I, pp. 890) and in my essay on
La Storia della Filosofia Moderna e la Ncoscolastica Italiana
(ibid., 192s), the speculation developed from the end of the
Middle Ages onward is orientated towards concreteness, and
by this very fact differs from pre-modem thought, which is

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CONCLUSION

I/Ι

also the domain of phenomena and the life of the
subject, though not the all, are none the less a reality
and belong to being. My one intention was to por­
tray with scrupulous fidelity the soul of the Thomis­
tic system, and to show how, as compared with later
philosophies, it furnishes the key for the solution of
the fundamental problem on which depends the fu­
ture of philosophic thought.
based on abstraction. The two processes, far from being
mutually exclusive, can and must complement each other.
This view is summarized in Fr. Zybura’s forthcoming book on

Present-Day Thinkers and the New Scholasticism.