Aquinas on Faith, Reason, and Charity

Roberto Di Ceglie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000567816
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Medieval & Renaissance Philosophy

This book offers a new reading of Aquinas's views on faith. The author argues that the theological nature of faith is crucial to Aquinas's thought, and that it gives rise to a particular and otherwise incomprehensible relationship with reason.

The first part of the book examines various modern and contemporary accounts of the relationship between faith and reason in Aquinas's thought. The author shows that these accounts are unconvincing because they exhibit what he calls a Lockean view of faith and reason, which maintains that the relationship between faith and reason should be treated only by way of evidence. In other words, the Lockean view ignores the specific nature of the Christian faith and the equally specific way it needs to relate to reason. The second part offers a comprehensive account of Aquinas's view of faith. It focuses on the way the divine grace and charity shape the relationship between evidence and human will. The final part of the book ties these ideas together to show how Christian faith, with its specifically theological nature, is perfectly compatible with rational debate. It also argues that employing the specificity of faith may constitute the best way to promote autonomous and successful rational investigations.

Aquinas on Faith, Reason, and Charity will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on Aquinas, philosophy of religion, Christian theology, and medieval philosophy.

Part IFaith and Reason without Faith

10.4324/9781003259015-2

This part examines various modern and contemporary accounts of the relationship between faith and reason in Aquinas’s thought, accounts which have been formulated since the French querelle of the 1930s. As I have already said in the Introduction while explaining that the title of this part is a provocative one, I aim to show that most of these accounts are unconvincing. Their failure is due to the influence of what I call a Lockean view of faith and reason, which makes them not consider the specific nature of the Christian faith and the equally specific way it needs to relate to reason.

1Mutually Opposing Readings of Aquinas’s View of Faith and Reason

DOI: 10.4324/9781003259015-3

In this chapter, I consider several readings of Aquinas aimed at explaining how, in his view, faith and reason relate to each other. I look at several interpreters of Thomas, from the protagonists of the French querelle of the 1930s – especially Étienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, and Pierre Mandonnet – to other outstanding scholars such as Cornelio Fabro, Anthony Kenny, and Eleonore Stump. Furthermore, given that Aquinas’s view is often seen as the most widespread view of faith and reason, I also take into consideration how outstanding philosophers of religion such as Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne, who are not scholars of Aquinas, interpret Thomas’s thought. My aim, as will emerge in Chapter 2, is to show the problems that these approaches cause. With the partial exception of the later Plantinga and perhaps of Stump, they explore how faith and reason relate to each other by excluding from the outset any reference to the specificity of faith. I mean that, for Aquinas, faith is mainly caused by God, a fact which has substantial consequences for the way faith relates to reason.

Introduction

As I have already said while introducing this book, Aquinas’s thought usually receives a variety of interpretations, which in some cases are even mutually incompatible. Concerning his view of faith and reason, some believe that Aquinas mainly focused on rational arguments rather than faith and trust in God; they argue that he took faith as propositional belief, whereas others claim that the role that trust in God played in his view should not be overlooked. An agreement seemingly emerges only because the majority of his scholars agree that Aquinas gave rise to an exemplary balance between Christian faith and natural reason. However, disagreement arises over what exactly this balance means.

In this chapter I intend to focus on some of these interpretations, starting with the debates developed by thinkers such as Gilson, Mandonnet, and Maritain on the occasion of the well-known querelle on the concept of “Christian philosophy” which took place in France in the 1930s.¹ I will also take into consideration the interpretation proposed more recently by scholars of Aquinas such as Fabro, Kenny, and Stump. Furthermore, given that Aquinas’s view is often seen as the most widespread view of faith and reason, I will explore how outstanding philosophers of religion such as Plantinga and Swinburne, who are not scholars of Aquinas, interpreted Thomas’s thought.

However, only in Chapter 2, the first section of which is devoted to examining Locke’s view of faith and reason, will I be able to make the aim of my examination of the above-mentioned readings of Aquinas clear. Once focused on Locke’s view of faith and reason, I will be able to show that there is a problem with all of these readings of Aquinas, with the exception of Stump (perhaps) and the later Plantinga (partly). They all seem to imply that the way Aquinas relates faith to reason can be understood without taking into consideration what for him distinguishes Christian faith from any other intellectual act. According to Aquinas, faith cannot be limited to intellectual assent. Love for God, which God himself grants to believers, and the related readiness to believe whatever God has revealed constitute an essential aspect of Christian faith. Excluding from consideration such a decisive aspect of faith – exclusion which is typical of Locke’s perspective – will certainly have consequences when it comes to understanding how the faithful qua faithful give rise to rational investigation.

1.1 On the Querelle on Christian Philosophy: Gilson, Mandonnet, and Maritain

In this section, I focus on the readings of the relationship between faith and philosophical reflection in Aquinas’s works that were presented on the occasion of the above-mentioned querelle, the meetings of which were held between 1931 and 1936. Among the readings in question, I will consider those that Gilson, Mandonnet, and Maritain formulated and argued.

Three caveats need to be registered before proceeding.

First, the querelle was devoted to the concept of “Christian philosophy,” not to the relationship between faith and reason. (In the footsteps of Aquinas, reason stands here for the cognitive faculty whose aim is the search for evidence,² whereas faith is taken as the virtue by which the faithful believe – in some cases firmly – the divine revelation though no full evidence is provided in its support.) However, debates on the concept of Christian philosophy involve examination of several other pairs of concepts such as faith and reason, faith and philosophy, theology and philosophy. These pairs of concepts do not totally coincide with one another, yet they are all based on that which I treat here, that is, the relationship between faith and reason. In fact, “faith” does not presuppose theology, whereas theology usually presupposes faith. A similar relationship can be seen between “reason” and “philosophy” (the former does not presuppose the latter, whereas the latter presupposes the former) as well as between, on the one hand, “faith” and “reason” and, on the other, “theology” (theology usually needs both faith and reason, whereas faith and reason do not need theology).

Second, by dealing with the concept of Christian philosophy, the querelle was centered on a topic that is of the greatest interest to my argument. Those who took part in that querelle asked themselves if there really is a Christian philosophy – that is, if one can be influenced by the Christian faith and at the same time develop a philosophical investigation. Such an investigation should be characterized by autonomy from any authority, including the religious one. Therefore, how could it be possible for a philosopher to conduct her investigation under the influence of her religious belief? How could it be possible for this to promote philosophy, as is implied by the title of the book I have cited in note 1, Reason fulfilled by Revelation? These questions clearly show that the crucial problem for the participants in the querelle was the problem of how to reconcile faith and reason – namely, how to harmonize a sort of primacy of faith over reason with the autonomy of reason from faith.

Third, Aquinas’s thought was not the subject of the querelle. Among the participants in the debate there were thinkers, both believers and unbelievers such as Maurice Blondel, Émile Bréhier, and Léon Brunschvicg, who did not discuss the subject from the viewpoint offered by Aquinas’s thought. Therefore, the ink I am spilling on the querelle in a book concerning Aquinas may seem excessive. On closer inspection, however, it emerges that considerable attention was devoted to Aquinas’s thinking on faith and reason. This is not surprising, because the querelle can be seen as one of the outcomes of a resurgence of interest in Aquinas in France and nearby Francophone countries. This resurgence had been ignited by the single most influential papal encyclical of the nineteenth century, Leo XIII’s Aeterni Patris (1879), which was aimed at restoring the idea of Christian philosophy under the influence of Aquinas’s thought.³ This explains why, although it had initially focused on the idea of “Christian philosophy,” the querelle ended up becoming a debate on the concept of faith and reason in the light of Aquinas’s thinking. While secular philosophers such as Brunschvicg and Bréhier initially participated in the querelle, it was mainly Roman Catholics who kept debating until its end.⁴ After all, these represented the majority of the participants in the querelle. Furthermore, as was written decades later, Aquinas appeared to them as “one who had clarified the faith-reason relationship as perhaps no one else before his time.”⁵

Let me now concentrate on the querelle. It can be said that it was devoted entirely to the concept of “Christian philosophy” as proposed by Gilson in the early 1920s.⁶ Gilson explored the thinking of several representatives of the Christian tradition – especially Augustine, Bonaventure, and Aquinas. He concluded that their thinking had given rise to authentic philosophies, and not merely theologies, as was usually maintained in those years.⁷

The prevailing view, in fact, was that philosophical reflection should be seen as separate from faith. As Gilson pointed out two decades after the querelle, this view was espoused by “a great many Catholic professors of philosophy,”⁸ who had become convinced, in the wake of Descartes’s thought, that “where theology begins, philosophy comes to an end. If we philosophize, we cannot be theologizing at the same time.”⁹ Apparently for apologetic reasons, such Christian thinkers had become convinced that, as philosophers, they could deal only with rational evidence. (In this way, they attempted from the outset to reject any charge of confusion between philosophy and their personal views in matters of faith.) In Gilson’s eyes, by contrast, throughout the history of Christianity the philosophical thinking of such authors as Justin, Lactantius, Augustine, Anselm, Bonaventure, and Aquinas had been shaped by divine revelation. Gilson argued that being Christian had offered to them “a view of the world” which was “perfectly satisfying to the mind” and “incomparably more rational than the conclusions of reason.”¹⁰ Studying how such thinkers had developed their thought led Gilson to conclude that a Christian believer becomes a Christian philosopher “when amongst his [Christian] beliefs he finds some that ...