We have spoken of a
certain retrogression in Christian thought during the later Middle Ages, and
this in respect of the theology of both the Latin and the Greek worlds. At
the same time, it was in the Latin West that this retrogression became most
clearly marked, and we have indeed noted in previous chapters how the
addition of the Filioque to the Christian Creed is intimately related to it,
and how this had its counterpart in changes in ecclesiastical organization
in the Latin West. What, though, we have not remarked is how this same
retrogression, however inevitable it may have been, yet prepared the ground
for the penetration of the rational spirit to a degree that was to produce a
revolution in European thought and to lead, in much the way that Plethon had
visualized, to the formation of a new, non-religious, even materialist type
of mentality, and to a corresponding culture and society.
How this in fact is so,
and the nature of what was involved in the revolution in European thought
that gave birth to the modern West, will perhaps become more clear if we
once again briefly recall certain aspects of the Christian tradition with
which this revolution marks a break. From the Christian point of view, the
purpose of man's life is to be perfect. This perfection is to be achieved
through a process of deification in which man overcomes the powers of
ignorance and darkness, vanity and illusion, and becomes conscious of that
spiritual principle in him obscured by the fall. Man himself is regarded as
a psychophysical whole: soul and body are reciprocal, both coming into
existence simultaneously and being mutually interdependent while in
existence. At the same time, man is not only soul and body, for he is also
endowed with a third faculty or power, which is both the image of God, or
spiritual principle, in him, and the uncreated cause of his created nature.
This cause, man, like every finite form, possesses in him from the beginning
through the very fact of being created at all, and it remains with him,
however it may be obscured, through all his temporal transformations. [St.
Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua,P.G. 91, 1340 A.] The Incarnation of the
eternal Logos in Christ is not thus an exception to, but a confirmation of,
what man is; [Ibid., 1341 A, B.] and the same may be said of the Resurrection,
for it is only in the effective realization of his uncreated nature that man
achieves his deification and, through it, that deliverance (from the death
and corruption of his merely temporal existence) in which his purpose is
fulfilled.
The realization itself by
man of his own uncreated and perfect nature is something beyond the reach of
all natural powers of soul and body, reason and sense:
It is truly impossible to
be united to God unless, besides purifying ourselves, we come to be outside
or, rather, above ourselves, having left all that which pertains to the
sensible world and risen above all ideas, reasonings, and even all knowledge
and above reason itself, being entirely under the influence of the
intellectual sense and having reached that ignorance which is above
knowledge and (what is the same) above every kind of philosophy. [St. Gregory
Palamas, in Gregory Palamas, Twenty-Two Homilies, pp. 169-70.]
This intellectual sense (áἴóèçóéò
íïåñÜ) is not, therefore, the consequence of any theoretical and
abstract speculation; it is, on the contrary, the consequence of a long
process of purification and prayer in which God is revealed in the heart.
The intellect (íïῦò) is not in this context the equivalent of the
mind or of any mental or rational faculty; it is of another order
altogether, being, indeed, precisely the spiritual image of God in man and
naturally deiform, and having its seat not in the mind but in the heart. It
is the heart which is the intellectual, or spiritual, centre of the whole
psychophysical nature of man, and the intellectual sense spoken of above,
and the spiritual discernment and enlightenment which go with it, can only
be achieved through a bringing of the mind itself into the heart; for it is
only in this treasury of thought [St. Gregory Palamas, P.G. 150, 1108 A.] that
the intellect purified and illuminated, having manifestly entered into the
possession of the grace of God and perceiving itself ... does not
contemplate only its own image, but the clarity formed in the image by the
grace of God ... that which accomplishes the incomprehensible union with the
Supreme, through which the intellect, surpassing human capacities, sees God
in the Spirit. Man then being himself light, sees the light with the light;
if he regards himself, he sees the light, and if he regards the object of
his vision, he finds the light there again, and the means that he employs
for seeing is the light; and it is in this that union consists, for all this
is but one. [St. Gregory Palamas, cited pp. 202-3 of J. Meyendorff, Le Thème
du "retour en soi" dans la doctrine palamite du xive siècle, in Revue de
l'Histoire des Religions, vol. 145, 1954, pp. 183-206.] In such a union, man
does not merely contemplate what is outside and beyond himself; he becomes
himself what he contemplates, the uncreated centre of his own proper being
in which the whole of himself, body and soul, participates, and through
which he is deified, not by the way of ascending from reason or from the
visible world by the guesswork of analogy, but by mingling unutterably
with the light which is above sense and thought and by seeing God in himself
as in a mirror. [St. Gregory Palamas, in Gregory Palamas, Twenty-Two
Homilies, pp. 170-1.]
What such a realization
presupposes is, of course, a recognition of its possibility. Unless it is
admitted, first, that God is the actual immanent hypostasis, or spiritual
cause, of man's being, and second, that man possesses some faculty superior
to the reason and all other natural and created faculties, through which he
can know that cause, then the idea of his deification is meaningless. For
this deification proceeds from God and from man's direct intuition of His
transfiguring light. In that light, man knows, in an absolute sense, both
his own divine cause, and the causal energies of all created things. If,
therefore, either the immanence of God in man, or the possession by man of
such a faculty as that indicated, is denied, then the realization in
question will be regarded as impossible; and the effect will be to shift
attention from it, and to substitute for it the idea that the purpose of
man's life, and the nature of the knowledge he may possess of God, himself,
and other created things, are conditioned by, and proceed from, the relative
and natural faculties, whether mental or sensory, which he has at his
disposal.
Yet precisely the
possibility of this realization was, if not denied, at least obscured by the
main conceptions of much Latin theology, particularly in its Augustinian and
Thomist forms. [While I am aware of the dangers of isolating, as I do in what
follows, certain more purely philosophical aspects of Augustinian and Thomist thought, this does nevertheless make it possible to indicate how
these aspects are inextricably intertwined both with St. Augustine's and St.
Thomas's fundamental views and with that whole transition from theological
thought to secular philosophy which is the theme of the present chapter.] We
have seen that in this theology what came to hold a central position was the
notion of God as essentially identical with absolute and perfect Being:
God's Essence and His Being are one. [Cf. St. Thomas Aquinas(*), Summa Theol. i.
11. 4. ] This does not mean, it may be repeated, that God is said not to be
infinite; rather, His Infinity is regarded as totally absorbed by His
ontological nature, [Ibid., i. 7. 1] and this in such a way that no
potentiality may be admitted in Him at all. [Ibid., i. 25. 1 ad 3] On the
other hand, it does mean that Latin theologians tend to apply to the Being
of God those names, such as simplicity, indivisibility, and so on, which the
Fathers reserve for His pre-ontological nature. For if God is essentially
identical with absolute and perfect Being, no distinction may be recognized
in Him, since if there were such a distinction, then what is distinguished
would necessarily be other and less than absolute and perfect Being, and God
cannot be other or less than Himself. The Being of God is therefore of an
absolute simplicity and indivisibility, and any qualities or properties
attributed to God, such as those St. Augustine calls the principial forms,
or stable and immutable essences of things, [St. Augustine, De diversis
quaestionibus, 83, qu. 46. 1-2.] and the Fathers His uncreated powers and
energies, must be indistinguishably identified with His Being. [Cf. St.
Augustine, De Civitate Dei ii. 10.] But if this is so—and it is here that we
approach the subject of how the realization in question is obscured by the
main conceptions of Latin theology—if this is so, and if no distinction is
recognized in God such as that made by the Fathers between the absolute
simplicity and indivisibility of His preontological Essence and the
multiplicity and divisibility of His ontological powers and energies, what
relationship can there be between God and the world? Or what knowledge can
man possess either of God, of himself, or of other created things?
It was in seeking to
answer such questions as these that St. Augustine was led to posit the idea
of a soul which, in relation to the body, is not only superior to it, but
also entirely independent of it. [See É. Gilson, Introduction à l'étude de
Saint Augustin (Paris, 1931), pp. 56, 67.] Man is a rational soul using a
body Homo igitur, ut homini apparet, anima rationalis est mortali atque
terreno utens corpore. [St. Augustine, De Moribus ecclesiae, i. 27. 52.] But
this soul, although thus specified as a rational soul, has a faculty
superior to the reason, which Augustine calls sometimes the intelligence and
sometimes the intellect. It is important to remark here that the Augustinian
intelligence or intellect cannot be said to correspond to that spiritual
intellect, the deiform íïῦò, mentioned earlier, for this latter is, as we
saw, an uncreated and divine faculty centred in the heart and superior to
the psychophysical whole of man, while the Augustinian intelligence or
intellect is but a superior mental faculty of the soul itself. According to
Augustine, this intellectual soul discovers and knows all things in the
eternal essences—in, that is, the immutable truth which is in God. But here
precisely one comes up against a difficulty.
For if the eternal
essences of things—their creative, but uncreated, causal energies—are
conceived, as they were by St. Augustine, as gathered up in the immutable
mind of God and as one with His non-participable, and unknowable, nature, in
what sense can the intellectual soul discover and know all things in them?
The distinction made by the Fathers between the Essence and the uncreated
energies provided a satisfactory and adequate answer to this question: the
spiritual intellect can know things through participation in their
paradigmatic and creative energies; or, just as a stone becomes a stone
through participation in its own uncreated energy, or cause, so the
intellect would know the stone through participation in that same causal
energy. But Augustine could not admit such an answer, for he regarded the
eternal causes, or essences, as one with the Essence itself, and there
cannot be, at least during earthly life, any direct participation in, or
intuition of, that Essence by the intellectual soul: the soul, even if, for
Augustine, it is independent of, and superior to, the body, is yet a created
faculty, and there cannot be any direct relationship between what is created
and the Essence, for this would imply an essential identity of the two;
which is an impossibility. All that is possible, from the Augustinian point
of view, is for the intellectual soul to be illuminated, so to speak, from
above, and in this light, which remains separate from it, and outside it,
and in no way becomes its own nature, to perceive the rightness or wrongness
of its own rational conclusions.
These rational conclusions
are not, however, abstractions in the Aristotelian sense. The Aristotelian
abstraction is by definition derived from the sensible world, and this
implies that there is some way through which sensible things can react on
the soul and so provide it with the data from which the abstractions can be
drawn: Aristotle's sensitive soul, in so far as it is sensitive, is not
superior to the sensible body, in so far as it is sensible, and it is for
this reason that there can be a relationship between the one and the other
which allows sensible objects to act on the soul and the soul to abstract
from them its knowledge. Such a process, according to Augustinian thought,
is impossible. The soul is absolutely transcendent with regard to the body,
and there can be no such relationship between them as that envisaged by
Aristotle—the sensible object cannot, that is, act on the soul or modify it
through the sensations of the body. Hence Augustine is led to regard the
soul as possessing a sensation of its own—est enim sensus et mentis [
St.
Augustine, Retractationes, 1, c. i, no. 2.]—distinct from, and impervious to,
that of the body. This view of things is essential to Augustine because, any
direct participation of the created in the uncreated being considered
impossible, he is compelled to regard the soul as created immortal, for
otherwise it could possess no immortality; at the same time, the soul cannot
have any dependence on, or reciprocal relationship with, the body or other
sensible things, for such things are corruptible and mortal, and this the
soul, naturally incorruptible and immortal, cannot be.
For Augustine, then, man
is neither able to know things, himself included, through participation in
their spiritual essences, or causes, nor able to derive knowledge from
sensible things. What knowledge he has, or can acquire, is therefore in
himself. Man, for Augustine, is essentially his own thought, his mens. [St.
Augustine, De Trinitate, xii. 1 and 2]. This mind, in itself and a priori,
contains the reflected and created copies of those immutable spiritual
essences according to which it itself and everything that is are made; and
although man can choose between following his lower reason—ratio—into a kind
of illicit and voluptuous connexion with natural forms, or following his
higher reason—intelligentia—into a contemplation of those copies of eternal
things which pre-exist in his mind—his mind contemplating its own innate and
created contents [Ibid., xii. 8. 13; 10. 15]—he can transform neither that
mind itself nor, a fortiori, the whole of himself, soul and body, through a
realization of his own uncreated spiritual principle. There is, in fact,
very little fundamental difference between man as envisaged by Augustine and
man as envisaged by Descartes, and the cogito ergo sum, implying not only
the primacy of thought over all else where man is concerned, but also its
self-sufficient nature, is, if not actually stated, at least inherent in the
very conditions that St. Augustine lays down as governing man's life and
determining his relationships with himself, the world, and God. [See St.
Augustine, Soliloquies, ii. 1. 1; É. Gilson, op. cit., pp. 50-51.]
St. Thomas Aquinas,
although he starts, like St. Augustine, with the presupposition of a God who
is essentially perfect Being, [St. Thomas Aquinas(1), Summa Theol. i. 3. 4.] is
yet led, in seeking to answer the question what and how man can know, to
conclusions which in a certain sense reverse those of St. Augustine. For in
spite of defining the soul as a form not susceptible to any admixture of
matter, [See É. Gilson, The Philosophy of St.
Thomas Aquinas (Cambridge,
1924), p. 160.] Aquinas none the less follows Aristotle in denying that forms
as such (except those indistinguishably contained in the transcendent and
essential nature of God) can subsist apart from matter. [Ibid., p. 191.] It is
therefore impossible for Aquinas to admit even the Augustinian notion that
the soul, or intellect, possesses in itself and a priori the created copies
of the principial and eternal essences, and derives its knowledge from them.
[St. Thomas
Aquinas, Summa Theol. i. 88. 3 ad Resp.] The intellect is, at
first, tabula rasa. But in that case, from where, and by what means, may the
intellect obtain any knowledge?
What must first be
remarked in this connexion is that for Aquinas, as for Augustine, the
intellect cannot derive its knowledge from a direct intuition of the forms,
or essences, of things as they exist in God. God is essentially pure Being.
But if God is essentially pure Being, He is also essentially pure Act: since
God always is, He cannot not be; and since He cannot not be, it follows that
there is nothing in Him which is merely in potentiality; for whatever is in
potentiality can either be or not be, and in proportion as God contained in
Himself some passive power, He could either be or not be. Consequently there
is nothing in God which is only in potentiality, and this means that He is,
exclusively, pure Act. [St. Thomas Aquinas, Contra Gentiles, i. 16.] Thus, all principial forms, the divine and uncreated causes of things, being, as they
are, indistinguishably contained in God's essential nature, are also purely
in act. [Ibid]. Man, on the other hand, possesses a corporeal body, and thus
shares in the pure potentiality of matter. Hence, he cannot apprehend or
intuit spiritual or supernatural realities in themselves, for the latter are
of God's purely active nature, and there can be no immanence in God of, or
of God in, anything that shares in potentiality. Therefore the direct
apprehension, or intuition, of these realities, since it would imply
precisely such an immanence, is entirely beyond man's reach. [St. Thomas
Aquinas, Summa Theol. i. 88. 3 ad Resp]. It could only be within man's reach
if he did not possess what he does possess, a corporeal body, and was,
consequently, what he is not, an angel. [St. Thomas Aquinas, Contra Gentiles, i. i6.]
With no innate knowledge,
and unable to derive knowledge from a direct intuition of the Divine, man
can in fact, according to Aquinas, only know anything by a process of
abstraction from sensible objects. This leads Aquinas to his conception of
an active and a passive intellect. The intelligible forms of sensible
objects, that which may be known, although they cannot subsist apart from,
cannot at the same time be said to reside in, matter: what is intelligible
is immaterial and cannot be participated in by what is material. There is no
intelligible nature of the creature. Thus, these forms can only be said to
reside in sensible objects in potentiality, and in such a state they are
unintelligible and cannot be known. They can, however, become intelligible,
and hence knowable, if, through something which is itself in act, they too
are reduced to act, and in the process abstracted from their sensible
objects. Thus, the soul, if it is to know anything, must possess an active
virtue which makes the intelligible form, contained potentially, not
actually, in the sensible object, actually intelligible; and this virtue is
the intellectus agens, or active intellect. [St. Thomas Aquinas, De Anima, qu. un. art. 4 ad Resp.; Summa Theol. i. 79. 3 ad Resp.]
At the same time, this
active intellect, since it possesses no innate knowledge, in itself lacks
all determination; it is, as we said, tabula rasa, a light by which it is
possible to see, but in which there is nothing to see. Hence it requires
sensible objects from which to derive something to see, and thus some
determination, and without which it would die of inanition. But it can only
derive this determination from sensible objects if there is also in the soul
a passive virtue on which the sensible objects, directly or indirectly, can
react. This virtue is the passive intellect. The soul is intelligibility in
act, but lacks determination; sensible objects have determination in act,
but lack intelligibility. The soul, therefore, confers intelligibility on
sensible objects, and in this respect it is an active intellect; and in its
turn it receives determination from sensible objects, and in this respect it
is a passive intellect.
The actual process through
which this exchange between the soul and sensible objects is achieved is,
briefly, as follows. The sensible object first impresses its image
(phantasm) on the human senses (it is for this reason that the soul is
given, and united to, a body: it is only through the bodily senses that it
can come into contact with sensible objects, and thus obtain any knowledge
at all). [St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theol. i. 89. 1 ad Resp.; and i. 55. 2 ad
Resp.] Such an image impressed on the human senses is the image of a
particular thing—similitudo rei particularis [Ibid., i. 84. 7 ad 2.]—impressed
on, and preserved in, bodily organs—similitudines individuorum existentes in
organis corporeis. [Ibid., i. 85. 1 ad 3.] Therefore it is still, from the
point of view of both subject and object, in the sphere of the sensible and,
as such, still particular and unintelligible, and not universal and
intelligible. The operation of the active intellect is, then, by
abstraction, to separate the form, or proper species, of each particular
sensible object from all individual sensible characteristics, even from
those still present in the image of the object. From this point of view, its
activity is not merely one of separating the intelligible from the sensible,
the universal from the particular, but also of actually producing the
intelligible and the universal. For the sensible species of the thing to
become the intelligible form of the intellect, there has to be a kind of
transformation in which the active intellect is turned upon the sensible
images impressed on, and preserved in, the bodily organs, in order to
illuminate them, and it is in this illumination that the abstraction may be
said properly to exist. Through it, whatever intelligible element is
contained in the sensible object is abstracted from it, and this produces in
the passive intellect, and hence determines it, the knowledge of what the
images represent when considering in them what is only universal and is
quite apart from any particular or material characteristic. [Ibid., i. 85. 1
ad Resp.] Such knowledge is conserved in the memory of the active intellect,
a faculty which Aquinas has to posit in order to account for the fact that
man can retain this knowledge after his immediate observation of sensible
things has come to an end. The condition of this whole process is, of
course, that the abstraction of the active intellect which determines the
passive intellect is preceded by the impression of the sensible object on
the human senses. At the base of all knowledge accessible to man is the
sensible world, and he can possess no knowledge which does not derive from
it.
From this, two things are
at once apparent. The first is that the nature and function of what Aquinas
regards as man's supreme faculty, his intellect, are not, any more than
those of the Augustinian intellect, equivalent to the nature and function of
the spiritual intellect, or heart, of the Christian Fathers; and
consequently, as in the case of Augustine, it is clear that what is regarded
as man's supreme purpose, since it depends on what is considered as within
his possibilities, will also, and correspondingly, differ from that
envisaged by the Fathers. In effect, the intellect, as visualized by
Aquinas, is no more than a kind of extension of the discursive reason:
intellect and reason describe one and the same power. [Ibid., i. 79. 8 ad
Resp.] There is no intellectual power in man distinct from his reason, and
the mode of knowledge proper to man is reasoning or discursive knowledge.
Man is a reasoning being by definition: the form of man is his rational
soul, and every act in conformity to the reason is good, while every act
which is contrary to the reason is evil. [Ibid., ii. 18.5 ad Resp.; Contra
Gentiles, iii. 9.] The intellect is nothing but the reason itself in so far
as it participates in the simplicity of the knowledge reached by the reason
proceeding from one object of knowledge to another, from one abstraction to
another: nude et potentia discurrens et veritatem accipiens non erunt
diversae sed una ...; ipsa ratio intellectus dicitur quod participat de
intellectuali simplicitate, ex quo est principium et terminus in ejus
propria operatione. [St. Thomas Aquinas, De Veritate, qu. 15, art. 1 ad Resp.]
The second thing which is
apparent follows naturally from the first, and is that the type of knowledge
which Aquinas regards as the highest accessible to man is of quite a
different order from that of the gnosis of the Christian Fathers. As we have
seen, Aquinas regards the direct intuition of divine essences as beyond
man's reach: [St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theol. i. 88. 3 ad Resp.] the human
intellect as it works in this earthly life can know only by turning to the
material and the sensible: [Ibid., i. 87. 1 ad Resp.] Cognitio Dei quae ex
mente humana accipi potest, non excedit illud genus cognitionis quod ex
sensibilibus sumitur, cum et ipsa de seipsa cognoscat quid est, per hoc quod
naturas sensibilium intelligit. [St. Thomas Aquinas, Contra Gentiles, iii. 47]
What knowledge man can have is that which he extracts from the sensible, and
this is a created, and human, intelligible knowledge, which resembles
uncreated and divine intelligible knowledge only by comparison. Man's
intellect, the highest faculty he possesses or can possess, is, for Aquinas,
physical and created, and there can be no direct intuition by it of what is
metaphysical and uncreated. All that man can know of the latter, the limit
of his knowledge of the Divine, himself, and other sensible things, amounts,
after he has gathered together and meditated on the abstractions he has
derived from these things, to a mere collection of concepts which may be
said to have an analogical likeness to the Divine, but nothing more. And if
the supreme end of man is beatitude (there can be no question of a
deification such as that envisaged by the Fathers), this beatitude is also,
where man is concerned, created and human, [St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theol.
i. 26. 3 ad Resp.] and in any case can only be attained by man after death.
All that is accessible to man on earth is an imperfect and secondary
beatitude which consists in the study of the speculative sciences, whose
proper object is the sensible; for just as natural forms are analogous to
supernatural forms, so the study of the speculative sciences has a sort of
analogical resemblance to the perfect beatitude [Ibid., ii. 3. 5 ad Resp.;
and 3. 6 ad Resp.] To what extent this is a limitation of the full
perspective of Christian thought there is here no need to emphasize.
That, however, Aquinas
regarded the knowledge extracted by the reason from the sensible world as
the only knowledge accessible to man, and hence considered that in the
acquisition of such knowledge man's highest purpose in mortal life is
fulfilled, does not mean that he rejected the supra-rational truths of the
Christian Revelation. On the contrary, he was most careful to acknowledge
them, and even, as he thought, to protect them from the sphere of reason.
But now the whole attitude to, and understanding of, these truths has
undergone a change. According to the more complete forms of Christian
thought, the truths of the Revelation, although revealed precisely in the
historical life of Christ, nevertheless correspond to eternally present
divine realities: they are a revelation of the true nature of things and
hence, even though man may not realize it, are in no way exceptional, but,
on the contrary, entirely normal. Although they are truths which are
revealed, they are, from another point of view, truths which conceal
realities always present, realities which man, through following the pattern
given to him through the incarnation of the eternal Logos in the life and
actions of Christ, should himself realize and live. From this point of view
then, they provide the theoretical basis of a knowledge which man, through
progressive stages of realization in the mystagogical life, should make
actual and effective for himself.
There is thus, in this
view, no problem of the relationship of the truths of revelation to those of
the reason: the first are to be accepted as the theoretical ground-plan, if
one can put it like that, of a supra-rational knowledge which is to be
realized gradually through penetration into, and participation in, the
spiritual reality of the Christian Mysteries. The Christian Mysteries, and
human participation in them, witness to, and protect, the living and
continuous operation and incarnation of the truths of the Revelation; and
not only can the truths of the Revelation not be realized apart from such
initiation into them, but also on them is dependent any genuine knowledge
man can possess. The conclusions of the reason in itself do not constitute a
genuine knowledge. The conclusions of the reason may only constitute a
genuine knowledge, and this of a relative kind, provided that the reason
first conforms itself to the truths of a supra-rational order. There is, as
we have pointed out, an absolute, and not merely a relative, distinction
between the spiritual intellect, in the full sense, and the reason; and
while the function of the first is the direct intuition and experience of
the truths of a supra-rational, order, the function of the second is to
derive from that intuition and experience the content of the knowledge
necessary for dealing with the practical affairs of human and social life.
The idea that the reason in itself may attain to anything more than a most
relative kind of knowledge does not occur; nor does the idea that the reason
may operate independently of the truths of revelation or faith, its
conclusions being valid in one sphere, while the truths of revelation are
valid in another. Unless the reason first conforms its conclusions to the
truths of a supra-rational order; unless it is transformed through
participation in the spiritual knowledge of the intellect, it is still, like
the rest of man, captive to the powers of ignorance and illusion, and its
conclusions must be regarded accordingly.
Once, however, it is
accepted that man can have no direct knowledge of realities of a
supra-rational order, and once that distinction, central to Christian
anthropology, between the spiritual intellect and the reason is lost sight
of and the intellect is regarded as a mere natural extension of the reason,
the understanding of the relationship between the truths of revelation and
the conclusions of the reason outlined above cannot be maintained. For, on
the one hand, the truths of revelation will now be regarded as beyond the
capacity of man to realize in a direct fashion; and, on the other hand,
since the reason takes the place of the spiritual intellect as man's supreme
faculty, its conclusions in themselves will be thought to represent the most
complete knowledge of the Divine accessible to man during his earthly life.
A purely natural faculty—the reason—which is, while untransformed through
participation in the spiritual knowledge of the intellect, necessarily
subject to diabolic activity, is now regarded as the instrument of human
beatitude.
This curious reversal of
attitude gave rise to problems which occupied the attention of generations
of Western thinkers. As was inevitable, the truths of revelation were
frequently found to conflict with the conclusions of the unsanctified
reason: what is revealed by God is not likely to agree with what is
simulated by the Devil. Having, however, permitted, in the way we have seen,
a too rational approach to things to obscure certain fundamental aspects of
the full Christian doctrine, these Western thinkers were committed to
regarding the reason as a valid instrument, for the discovery not merely of
a natural and relative truth, but even of a divine and absolute truth. They
were therefore compelled by their premisses to seek for some adequate
justification both for the conclusions of the reason and the truths of
revelation, even if the former seemed to contradict the latter—some
justification for believing what their reason told them could not
necessarily be so. The only way they could do this was to divide the sphere
of revelation from that of reason, to divide faith from philosophy. Aquinas,
following on the Jewish Maimonides and such philosophers as Alexander of
Hales, Bonaventura, and Albert the Great, clearly indicates this
distinction: [See É Gilson, Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages (New
York, 1939), pp. 74-75.] on the one hand there is faith, which is the assent
to something because it is revealed by God; and on the other hand there is
science, which is the assent to something because it is perceived as true in
the natural light of human reason. These two departments are separate, the
truths of one being valid in one sphere, the truths of the other in another
sphere. Man cannot believe what he sees is true; he believes something which
he cannot see is true because God has said it. What God has said that can be
seen is not a matter of faith. Faith is the reason's assent to that which
the reason (or the intellect, the two being identified by Aquinas) does not,
and cannot, see to be true, to first principles or one of their necessary
conclusions; the reason's function is to acquire through its own activity
what knowledge it can through abstraction from sensible things, and, though
this knowledge has no necessary connexion with the things of faith, it is
nevertheless the highest of which man is capable.
Thus, the truths of
revelation, although still regarded as absolute (since God has revealed them
to man at a particular time in the historical life of Christ), are also
regarded as beyond human capacity to know; they are not thought of as
continuously revealed in the developing mystagogical life of individual
Christians, but remain as it were in heaven, the objects of angelic, but not
of human, knowledge. The things of faith, which must be believed by all, are
equally unknown by all, and there can be no knowledge about them. At the
same time, and in a way that appears contradictory, rational proof is
demanded for these things, and even for God Himself. Such a proof is found
in history—in, that is, the miracles of God, the life and growth of the
Church, and so on, as also in the fact of human and other existence. This
is, in effect, to reverse the point of view of the patristic or, generally
speaking, the full Christian tradition, according to which man's knowledge
proceeds from his direct intuition of the Divine and Its qualities, his
conclusions about his own nature and that of other created things being
derived therefore from this primary intuition of what is supra-rational and
supernatural. For St. Thomas, as for other Scholastics, the existence of God
and His qualities must be inferred, directly or indirectly, from man's
rational and natural knowledge of sensible things and of empirical facts.
[St. Thomas Aquinas, Contra Gentiles, iii. 1.]
This almost idolatrous
attitude to creation and to natural and human history is demanded by the
premisses we have been discussing: the assumption that the eternal and
extratemporal nature of the truths of revelation is entirely beyond man's
intuition, and that the only knowledge he can possess of it is the
analogical and conceptual knowledge derived by the reason from the data
provided by the sensible world, will automatically have the effect of
shifting the focus of attention away from the contemplation of these truths
on to the sensible world, from the supernatural to the natural, from vision
to observation; and hence the sensible and natural world, and history as
part of it, will acquire an interest quite out of proportion to that given
them in normal times. The facts of nature, just as the facts of history, are
the starting-point of that process of abstraction through which the
intellect receives its determination, is brought from potency to act, and
thus, to the extent possible to man, knows God and achieves beatitude. In
the case of both nature and history what is sought for is rational proof of
the Divine. For since the direct intuition of, and participation in, what is
supra-rational is now regarded as impossible, not to believe that such proof
is valid would be tantamount to condemning man to a state of insurmountable
ignorance concerning his life and destiny, and hence to open the door to all
manner of doubts; and it was precisely in order to frustrate such a
development that it became necessary to insist, in a novel way, on the
validity of the rational proofs for such things as the existence of God and
His essential attributes, the existence of the human soul and its
immortality, and even, at a later date, for the Roman See to issue an
official anathema against all who shall say that the One true God, our
Creator and Lord, cannot be certainly known by the natural light of human
reason through created things. In this treating of a relative knowledge,
what Plato would call opinion, as if it were absolute, not only is a purely
natural and individual faculty, and one which, like the rest of natural man,
is subject to the prince of this world, regarded as capable in its own right
of demonstrating the existence of the Divine; but also the Divine Itself
appears to be considered as subordinate in certain respects to rational and
natural categories.
This divorce of revelation
and reason, metaphysics and science, implicit in the philosophy of St.
Augustine and fully recognized in that of the Scholastics, both indicates to
what extent the theoretical basis of the Christian realization was weakened
in the West by the nature of much Western medieval theology itself, and also
prepared the ground consequently for the whole revolution of thought which
was so to modify Western society and culture. In fact, already in the work
of Aquinas was a complete restatement of an Aristotelian theory of
knowledge. With it went the conception that the sensible world, that of
nature, possesses a logical structure in and for itself, the observation of
which could lead—was indeed the only method that could lead—to man's
acquiring a notion of divine realities; for these, it is thought, are
indicated in the logical order of the created world. God is entirely simple,
eminent, and transcendent; as such, in the ontological order He surpasses
the whole created world, and, consequently, the whole logical order of
things; and since human knowledge is limited to the logical order, He
entirely surpasses our knowledge and is incomprehensible. At the same time,
although participative and intuitive knowledge of God is thus beyond our
scope, we can nevertheless know God in the logical order, that alone to
which our knowledge refers, by analogy. Causes are in a certain manner
reflected in their effects; therefore, since God is the cause of the created
world, of the logical order, we can in a certain manner know Him in it:
those logical characteristics we can discern in nature, such as measure,
form, and order (modus, species, ordo), [St. Augustine, De natura boni, iii.]
which reflect what our reason tells us must necessarily be the ontological
perfections of a God who is perfect Being, will give us an analogical
knowledge of God. We can know the analogy, the logical characteristic of the
created effect, without knowing the cause, the ontological perfection of the
transcendent God. The analogy is the means through which a thing is
indicated; what is indicated is itself unknowable.
These assumptions, that we
can have no participative and intuitive knowledge of God and that,
consequently, our only possible knowledge of Him is an analogical knowledge
derived from the sensible world, had the effect, as we remarked, of shifting
attention from vision to observation, from the inward presence to the
outward present: as another philosopher, Adelard of Bath, could put it: I do
not detract from God, for everything that is, is from Him, and because of
Him. But [nature] is not confused and without system, and human science
should be given a hearing on those points which it has covered. [Adelard of
Bath, Quaestiones Naturales, c. 4.] The metaphysical question, about why
things happen, gradually gave place to the physical question, about how
things happen, and this, it was felt, could be answered by a correlation of
the facts—by any means, logical or mathematical, that was convenient.
Indeed, what became important now was precisely a systematic theory
according to which the sensible world could be observed, and through which
the validity of the conclusions derived from such observation could be
demonstrated; and this already in the Middle Ages was achieved by uniting
the experimental habit of the practical arts long present in the West with
the rationalism of Scholastic philosophy. Before the end of the Middle
Ages—before, that is, the opening of the fourteenth century—the ways of
thought we have been noting had made possible the formation of a systematic
theory of experimental science understood and practised by enough
philosophers for their work to produce the methodological revolution to
which modern science owes its origin. [See A. C. Crombie, Robert Grosseteste
(Oxford, 1953), passim.] And it did not involve a great step for Descartes
and the buccinatores novi temporis of the seventeenth century when, adding
fresh confusion to old misunderstanding, they took the new science out of
the now purely theoretical and abstract framework of Christian metaphysics
and reversed the situation by placing metaphysics within the framework of
science itself.
For if Descartes may be
called the father of modern scientific rationalism, he owes this title to
the fact that tendencies long present in the West, and which had already
produced such manifestations of their presence as the philosophical
developments of which we have been speaking, find through him their full
expression. Seen in the perspective of these developments, the chief step
taken by Descartes consisted, first, in formally according to the mind the
independence of the Divine which it had in fact long since in all but name
exercised; and second, and more important, in attributing to its norms an
absolute prerogative in the matter of truth and knowledge. There is, indeed,
a curious inner dialectic linking the thought of Augustine, Aquinas, and
Descartes. Augustine had asserted the independence of the mind in relation
to sensible things, regarding its knowledge as innate, but had insisted that
it was only in the light of the eternal essences themselves that it could
perceive the rightness or wrongness of its ratiocinations. Aquinas, on the
other hand, asserted the independence of the sphere of human knowledge from
that of what he called angelic knowledge, but had insisted that, while the
latter is entirely transcendent in relation to the former, human knowledge
itself is dependent on sensible objects, and cannot exist without them.
Finally, Descartes not only reasserted Augustine's claim that the mind and
its knowledge are independent of sensible things, but he also carried to its
extreme the independence attributed by Aquinas to human knowledge in
relation to angelic knowledge by dismissing the latter altogether and by
attributing the characteristics of angelic knowledge, those of the spiritual
intellect, to the human reason itself.
This last remark needs
perhaps to be made more clear, especially as it throws into relief the whole
change in understanding produced in the West as a result of the developments
we have been considering. We have seen that, according to the Christian
tradition, the knowledge of the spiritual intellect is intuitive, innate,
principial, and independent of external things. It is a knowledge which
comprehends things in a truly universal sense, not through knowing their
abstractions, which is what constitutes universality for Aristotle and
Aquinas, but through knowing them as it were a priori by knowing their
divine principles, and this not in an abstract or conceptual way, but by
participation. These divine principles, in the light of which the intellect
knows external objects, are creative or operative energies, causes through
which things are made; and what is seen in such a cause is not something
drawn from external objects and transported into the knowing mind, but is
the creative Spirit itself according to which things are brought into, and
sustained in, existence. Such knowledge is entirely supra-rational and, what
amounts to the same thing, supra-individual; where natural, rational, and
individual man is concerned, in whom the spiritual principle is obscured,
and who is thus subject to the darkness and illusion of his psychophysical
self, its acquisition presupposes the awakening, through struggle,
purification, and prayer, of the spiritual principle: it is dependent on the
grace of God. Rational and natural knowledge, that of which man is capable
without such spiritual grace, is not merely a lower and relative kind of
knowledge it is also unregenerate in the sense that it will reflect the
influence of the powers of darkness and illusion to which unregenerate man
himself is subject.
When, for reasons we have
seen, it was held to be a theoretical impossibility for man to acquire such
spiritual knowledge of the kind just indicated, it was as an immediate and
necessary consequence also assumed that the only knowledge accessible to him
was precisely that of the rational and natural order; and since this is a
mental knowledge, the mens, or mind, considered as a rational faculty, came
to be regarded as man's chief organ of knowledge. Or to put this another
way: from the point of view of Christian metaphysics, man is regarded as a
trinity of spirit, soul, and body, of which the last pair form a composite
of the created order, while the first belongs to the divine and uncreated
order; from this other point of view, however, man is regarded solely as a
duality of soul and body, of which it is said that the soul is created
naturally immortal and the body mortal, the first sometimes opposed to the,
second, sometimes thought to be independent of it, but joined to it during
mortal life, or sometimes superior to it, but using it for its own purposes.
Moreover, this soul is described as a rational soul, and as the equivalent
of the mind; and if a third faculty is attributed to man, and this is given
the name of intellect, what is signified is not a spiritual intellect of a
supra-rational and uncreated order, but merely a higher aspect of the
rational soul itself, and hence still something which is created and which
operates only within the logical and natural order. In other words, it is
implied that man possesses no spiritual intellect, and that the mode and
type of knowledge proper to such an intellect—intuitive, innate, principial,
and independent of external objects—is not therefore within his reach; for
what is within his reach is limited to the rational and logical order only.
Where Aquinas is concerned, this supra-rational mode and type of knowledge
is attributed to the angels, and it is said that man does not, and cannot,
possess an angelic intellect.
What, consequently, is
meant by the remark that Descartes attributed to the human reason itself the
characteristics of the angelic intellect may now be gathered: he attributed
to the human reason itself a mode and type of knowledge that is intuitive,
innate, principial, and independent of external objects. On the one hand he
no longer demanded that a condition of understanding what is true, even in
the rational and logical order, is the mind's conformity to the truths of a
supra-rational order; and on the, other hand he no longer asked that the
external object should first impose on the mind its own law before the mind
can acquire knowledge about it. On the contrary, he regarded rational
propositions, the clear ideas which the reason grasps through its own innate
powers, as in themselves axiomatic; it is these that for him form the
principles of scientific explanation, and provide the measure and rule of
the external world itself. The object grasped in the concept itself is what
is real, independent of both the divine and the sensible world; reality is
reduced to the predestined scale of scientific conceptual explanations.
Thus, thought breaks with everything but itself, and forms as it were a
closed world no longer in contact with anything but itself. And if its
concepts, opaque effigies interposed between it and both divine and sensible
things, are still for Descartes representations of a real world, it only
remained for these concepts themselves to be mistaken for reality—and in the
end not even all of them, but only such as were capable of direct
application in the practical and material sphere—and the revolution in the
intellectual life of the West which, seen in its most general terms,
consists in replacing the values of the Christian tradition by those of a
purely rational outlook, is complete.
It would be out of place
in this context even to try to indicate all the multiple consequences of the
formation of this scientific and rational mentality. Two of them, however,
it is relevant to observe. The first, and most immediately apparent, is the
growth of individualism. Again, it is by reference to Thomist thought that
this process can best be perceived. For Aquinas, the active principle of
individuality is the form, and this, where man is concerned, is the
individual human soul. It is the constantly renewed succession of individual
human souls which assures the continuity of the species and makes it
possible for the degree of perfection corresponding to man to be continually
represented in the universe. Matter is the passive principle of
individuation and, while it exists only in view of the forms and has no real
being without them, without it there could be no multiplicity of these
forms. Thus, the individual is unique by definition: where man is concerned,
each human soul is unique. This means that the intellect, which Aquinas
identifies with both the reason and the soul, is also particular to each
man: there is, for instance, no single active intellect common to all men.
At the same time, the Thomist intellect, being merely an extension of the
discursive reason and not corresponding to the spiritual intellect, or
heart, cannot participate in what Herakleitos calls the Logos common to all:
it cannot surpass its particularity and individuality through the intuition
and realization of the realities of a supra-rational and supra-individual
order, of a metaphysical and uncreated order, and hence become universal. It
remains confined to its particularity and individuality, and such
universality as it can achieve derives, as has already been remarked, from
the abstractions it makes from the sensible world. In other words, the
individuality of the knowing subject is not transcended through the
realization of a supra-individual reality, but is limited by its dependence
on the sensible world for any knowledge it may acquire: a condition of its
knowing anything is that it remains open to external objects and allows
those objects to communicate their own images to it.
Thus, while for Aquinas
there can be no question of surpassing individuality from, so to speak,
above, there is the necessity of restricting it from below: the individual
human mind, if it closes itself within itself, will die of inanition, since
a very condition of its determination is its capacity to receive from the
outside world impressions that provide it with the material upon which to
act and allow it to make those abstractions which determine it. When,
however, with Descartes, the human mind was declared independent of external
objects for its knowledge, even this restriction from below on individuality
was removed. The individual human mind is now regarded not only as the
arbiter of knowledge, but also as entirely self-sufficient; it possesses its
own conclusions within itself, and it is these which determine not only its
own reality, but also that of everything else. There is no principle of
truth or judgement higher than the entirely subjective and self-sufficient
individual human reason. What this reason grasps most easily and most
clearly is true. What we, as individual rational human beings, understand is
valid. And here is to be found the assumption on which Protestantism, the
Enlightenment movement, modern democracy, and much else besides, are based.
The second of the
consequences of this new mentality which it is relevant to observe in this
context is the complement of the first: the growth of the quantitative
collective spirit, principally in a national and, more recently, an
international form. To begin with, however, it may be remarked that the
principles of Christianity are quite incompatible with such a spirit, being
neither national nor international, but, which is an entirely different
matter, universal. The Christian doctrine is rooted in realities which are
independent of any quantitative collective organization in the temporal
sphere, and although their realization, from the human point of view, can be
only at a particular time and place—whenever, and wherever, the Spirit is
effectively present in real beings—such realization has nothing to do with
categories of a social, ethnological, racial, international, or any other
similar character. To put this in other terms: where the chief end of life
is held to be that achieved through participation in the Divine locally
manifested in the mystagogical life of the Church, loyalty is primarily to
the Church, and hence to what is essentially of a spiritual nature, and
there can be no question of substituting for this loyalty, or of
subordinating it to, purposes of a collective nature in the sense indicated.
The self-assertive and centrifugal tendencies of local temporal powers will
be held in check and neutralized through the common recognition of
principles and values of a spiritual and qualitative order, and the unity
which is a consequence of this will derive, not from material interests,
such as property, but from a sense of sharing in a common framework of
spiritual values. And it was to such a sense of sharing in a common
framework of spiritual values, in this case embodied in the Christian
tradition, that medieval Christendom owed its unity, of the significance and
nature of which we have spoken.
The rational mentality, on
the other hand, is quite incapable of realizing a principle of unity through
inner communion in a spiritual order, for the simple reason that, as we have
seen, it cannot surpass the natural and logical order. It is therefore
compelled to substitute for this inner principle an external principle of
unity that is no more than an abstract representation of the former. Yet not
only are such abstract representations ultimately subjective in nature,
since the reason which makes them is a purely individual faculty; but also
there can be no spiritual or qualitative difference between one such
representation and another. Hence, what will determine the acceptance of one
rather than of another on the historical plane will be of a temporal and
quantitative nature only. From one point of view, the assumption by the
medieval Papacy of a temporal power, resulting in the organization, along
quasi-secular lines, of the Western episcopate into a system of government,
centrally directed and controlled, concerned to preserve the unity of
Christendom, is already a manifestation of this mentality which seeks a
principle of unity, not through inner communion, but in an external, and
abstract, representation of unity; and, as such, it was bound in time to
give rise to other manifestations of the same nature. For the fact that the
Papacy had become the representation of the principle of unity in the
temporal sphere, and that that of which it was conceived to be the principle
of unity was a temporal Christian society, meant that its claims would be
challenged by other such representations claiming to unite under their
control other such temporal collectivities; and these latter claims could be
considered quite as valid or invalid as those of the Papacy, both, from the
exterior and only point of view accessible to the rational mentality, being
merely temporal and therefore quantitative in nature. The revolt of the
various temporal rulers in the later Middle Ages against the Papacy was not
so much a revolt against the spiritual power as the consequence of the fact
that the Papacy, having assumed a temporal power, was, as such, invading the
spheres of authority of other temporal powers, and claiming to rule, in the
name of its own larger and more general collectivity, their smaller
collectivities; and this revolt in its turn was to introduce others in
keeping with the further advance of the rational and individualist mentality,
essentially centrifugal and self-assertive.
The loss, therefore, in
the West of a universal and qualitative unity deriving from participation in
a common framework of spiritual values was to result in the end in the
substitution of a multitude of abstract and quantitative unities. Each unity
was of a different and rival character, since each was based on varying and
mutually exclusive ideas not only of what represented the principle of unity,
but also of what was to be achieved through the unity: this latter might be,
for example, the consolidation under a single rule of all the churches, or
of peoples inhabiting a particular geographical area, or possessing a common
language, or even merely sharing common cultural, political, economic, or
class interests. Loyalty was now to such quantitative concepts, and these
would themselves reflect more and more entirely individual, selfish, and
material interests, whatever the ideal guise they might assume.
Individualism and collectivism are opposite sides of the same coin, and
their growth in the West can be traced back to the same rationalizing spirit
which led to the break-up of the medieval Christian ethos and to the
formation of modern Western society and culture. And if that growth has been
marked in the West by a progressive alienation from the Papacy, at least one
of the reasons for this is that the Papacy is the sole authority in the West
which, in the name of principles of a supra-individual and supra-collective
nature, is in a position to absorb all lesser individualistic tendencies
under the rule of a single impersonal individual, all lesser collectivities
into a single and allembracing collective whole.