On Aquinas

Foreword by Sir Anthony Kenny

Herbert McCabe

• Publisher: Burns & Oates
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780860124610
• eBook ISBN: 9781441101686
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Published posthumously, this study is thoroughly rewarding and will increase McCabe's reputation as one of Britain's finest theologians of recent years. The revival of interest in Aquinas has run simultaneously with the rise of interest in Aristotle, on whose philosophy Aquinas based his own. On Aquinas is a masterly work of exposition written with breathtaking clarity. By the use of simple modern analogy Mccabe brings Aquinas's thought to life and underlines the crucial influence of Aquinas on our own contemporary thought. It is rare to find a work of philosophical exposition which is exciting to read. Even those who are unfamiliar with Aquinas will find this book gripping.

Chapter 1

Aquinas Himself

If you want to place Aquinas historically, think of him as living for about half a century almost exactly in the middle of the thirteenth century. He was born in what we now call Italy and at a time when the politics of that region were dominated by the endless conflict between the Pope and the Emperor down in the south. Thomas’s family, for part of the time anyway, were on the Emperor’s side against the Pope. One of the things the half-Christian Emperor Frederick had done was to found the new University of Naples, which was set up to train his civil servants in conscious and deliberate opposition to the papal-chartered universities of Paris and Bologna. Being in the south of Italy, it was in constant communication with the Islamic civilization of the Mediterranean, a culture immensely more sophisticated in those days than anything yet available in Christian Europe.

It is not surprising then to find that Thomas was sent at the age of about fifteen to this new university. You went to a university much younger in those days—as soon as you acquired a fairly elementary education and, of course, were fluent enough in Latin to converse with and learn from people from all over the place with different languages of their own.

At the university two things happened to him at this impressionable age which clearly determined the rest of his life. First of all he met an Irishman called Peter (Petrus Hibernicus), who introduced him to some bewildering and exciting new thinking that was filtering in from Islamic sources. A whole lot of texts of Aristotle were beginning to make their way through Naples into Europe, texts that nobody there had seen before.

Aristotle, a student and critical disciple of Plato, and a teacher of Alexander of Macedon, was a marine biologist who not only observed and classified his specimens but used the same methods in all sorts of other areas like physics, astronomy, the study of society, and of what makes human beings tick. He found time to invent logic in its modern sense, and moreover was intensely interested in what we would nowadays call philosophy of science—-questions about what it means to pursue such studies, and questions about language itself and so on. Medieval Europe was being quite suddenly hit by systematic scientific investigation and thinking. Many of Aristotle’s answers turned out to be wrong, but that didn’t matter. It was the method that mattered. This is what the young Aquinas encountered and fell in love with. One outstanding feature of it all was that it seemed completely subversive of Christianity, especially as it came through Christendom’s main enemy, Islam. This didn’t worry the Emperor too much but it must have presented an exciting challenge to Thomas. Anyway he spent much of his life painstakingly showing that if you found Aristotle right, broadly speaking, that didn’t mean you had to stop being a Christian; and indeed it sometimes helped you to express the Gospel.

That interested Thomas because of the other thing that happened to him in Naples. He discovered a house with half a dozen students in it who were banded together and calling themselves ‘preaching brethren’. They had come there to discover the new learning precisely in order to preach the Gospel and also to get new recruits. They were what we nowadays call the Dominicans. Thomas found them and their life—in those days rather austere, casually communal, democratic—very appealing. So much so that after his studies at Naples he told his family he wanted to be one of these preaching brethren—which was rather like a son of a Tory landowner in the eighteenth century telling, say, Squire Weston (in Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones) that he wanted to be a Methodist field-preacher. There was an almighty row. They didn’t mind him becoming a priest (he was evidently never going to be of much use on the battlefield), but that meant a proper priest and preferably, say, eventually the Abbot of Monte Cassino; but this begging friar thing was ridiculous.

When he tried to run off with the friars his family even kidnapped him and locked him up—rather like Squire Weston did with Sophie. But in the end, like Sophie, he had his way and went to do his studies amongst the friars—partly at Cologne under Albert the Great, another biologist and also excited by Aristotle. When he had finished there he was sent to Paris, where he instantly became embroiled in the furious infighting caused by the new friars, a sort of ‘militant tendency’ you might say, trying to infiltrate the rather conservative academic establishment. It didn’t help that they came partially equipped, it seemed, with a lot of pagan (Averroistic) Aristotelian views. It helped even less that they were also seen as papal agents trying to subvert the academic independence of the university. Finally the faculty went on strike but by papal pressure Thomas was introduced into the chair of theology, essentially as a strike-breaker I’m afraid.

From then on he spent his life in teaching but also doing various political jobs and was concerned both with the ecumenical movement of the day—reconciliation with the Eastern churches—and with the intellectual and pastoral strategy to be used against the threat of Islam.

In the 1260s when Aquinas was in his forties and at the peak of his form he did a stupendous amount of work, writing commentaries on Aristotle and writing most of the Summa Theologiae as well as biblical commentaries. He worked himself literally to death. He had a nervous breakdown and a complete writing block in 1274 and died a few months later. After his death some of his work was condemned by the Church in Paris and in Oxford and nobody was allowed to read him except with a specially written commentary explaining it all away. In fact for half a century almost nobody did read him except his own brethren. Then, as is the way of it, he was rehabilitated and recognized as one of the great masters of medieval thinking. He was also canonized. At the first session of the Council of Trent, which was dominated by Dominicans, it is said that the Summa was placed on the altar beside the Bible. I don’t know whether this is true but it would certainly have shocked St Thomas very much.

Then nobody read him again for a long time because the Renaissance had happened and European thinking began to be based on that other devout Catholic, Rene Descartes; there was rationalism on the Continent and empiricism in Britain, which culminated in the liberal bourgeois Enlightenment, and excellent as this was in many ways none of it had much in common with the Aristotelian tradition. Then the intensely conservative Roman Church of the nineteenth century, terrified by the Enlightenment, went back and dug up St Thomas because they thought he might provide the intellectual framework they needed to hold the crumbling fabric of Christianity together. They invented ‘Thomism’, a specially conservative version of his thought insufficiently liberated from Cartesian questions, and it turned out to be a weapon that twisted in their hands. For it led to a new critical historical study of Aquinas. The new study of the text of Thomas proved if anything more corrosive of the Catholic establishment than even the Enlightenment had been. It was corrosive from inside. Thomas, it emerged, took the Fathers of the Church seriously and took scripture seriously and had a disturbing view of the Church and the sacraments that had been forgotten for centuries or dismissed as Protestant. This development, in the hands especially of the French post-war Dominicans, the new Jesuits, and the Benedictine liturgical revivalists, was the major intellectual power in producing Vatican II in the 1960s, which, amongst other things, put paid to what had been ‘Thomism’.

So I suppose we are back again now to a familiar situation in which it is mainly, though not of course exclusively, his brethren who read Thomas. They have in recent years been joined by a quite new crowd, the secular philosophers who have been rediscovering Aristotle and the whole tradition and once again finding it more exciting than anything hitherto available in Europe; they find Aquinas’s approach very congenial indeed. They have also been joined by quite a crowd of non-Roman Christians. I noticed that in a recent dictionary of Christian theology there are more references in the index to Thomas Aquinas than to anyone else except Jesus; he easily beats both Paul and Luther.

Chapter 2

Living Things

Life, says Thomas Aquinas in his commentary on Aristotle’s book on life, the De Anima, is essentially that by which anything has power to move itself-—taking ‘movement’ in its wide sense. ‘Life⁵ is a word used in several different senses, but related ones. It does not mean the same thing to say that a buttercup is alive and that a tiger is alive, but it is not by a mere accident of the English language, or a pun, that we use the same word ‘alive’ in both cases. ‘Alive’ is used, as Aquinas would say, analogically, just as ‘love’ is used analogically in ‘I love a good rare steak’ and ‘I love my country’. In every case, though, at whatever level we are using the word ‘life’, we are speaking of what at some level has the power to move itself, not just to be at the mercy of others. In this tradition living things are auto-mobiles, self-movers. And in this tradition having an anima or ‘soul’ (a term which is also, of course, used analogically) means being, at some level, able to move oneself. All auto-mobiles, at whatever level, have souls—at some level of the word ‘soul’. So, in this way of talking, potatoes and cockroaches have souls.

This does not mean—as I think it would mean for, say, Teilhard de Ghardin—that potatoes and cockroaches have an elementary form of consciousness or an elementary form of what evolved into human consciousness. (I say I think this is what he meant because I find that grasping what Teilhard meant is often a matter of guesswork.) To say, in the traditional manner, that cockroaches have souls is not to say that they have feelings rather like us or that they have ‘animal rights’. It is just to say that they are living things, unlike, say, lumps of lead or tape recorders. Cockroaches are self-moving in a sense that tape recorders are not. They are not self-moving in the sense that I am, for in my case self-moving has reached the very high level of freedom and creativity, of being responsible for my actions and character; but they are self-moving all the same. So cockroaches are alive, cockroaches have souls, because they are auto-mobiles. It is therefore time we thought about cars.

Most people do not think that cars are alive. Most people draw a sharp distinction between, say, cars and cockroaches. Now is this blind prejudice? Why should these auto-mobiles be arbitrarily excluded from the realm of living things? And, while we are on about it, what about computers? Or is it just that we have it wrong; perhaps being alive is not to do with being auto-mobile?

Well, me, I come down on the side of saying that cars are not alive because they are not truly auto-mobile. Let us see why.

All living things that are self-moving, at least in the sense of moving physically, must be, as Aristotle pointed out, complex. They have to be made up of parts so that when one part moves another the whole thing moves the whole thing. A leopard is self-moving because the action of one part of it, the brain, which is an action of the leopard, moves another part of it, the legs, which is a movement of the leopard. So it is an action of the leopard (using its brain) that causes a movement of the leopard (using its legs). It is leopard moving leopard—it is self-moving. Now all this depends on both brain and legs being parts of the leopard, so that an action of the brain is not just an action of this lump of grey matter but is also an action of the whole leopard; and similarly with the movement of the legs. This implies that if you amputated the leopard’s leg, separated it from the whole to which it belongs, it would become a different thing altogether. Before the amputation, if you were so ill-advised as to punch the leopard’s leg you would simply be punching the leopard: that is what it is you would be punching. After the amputation you would not only not be punching a leopard, you would not even be punching a leg. A detached leg is not a kind of leg, as a dead cow is not a kind of cow or a forged five-pound note is not a kind of five-pound note. And this is not just because we mean by the word‘leg’ something that is a functioning organ of the animal; it is because in the living beast the leg is a functioning organ of the animal. It is because we think this that we think the leopard is self-moving and thus a living thing. It is because we do not think that the wheels of a car are, in this sense, essentially functioning organs of the car that we do not think that a car is alive. I mean we think of the leopard as the natural unit of which the legs and brain are essentially parts; being a part-ofthe-leopard is what it is for the leg to be what it is; it has its existence as what it now is by being a part of the leopard. The whole leopard, so to say, comes first. The parts are secondary. If the leg ceases to be part of the leopard it will turn into something completely different, as mutton is something completely different from a sheep. So a leopard is alive because it has organs which exist as what they are precisely by being organs, being functioning parts of a prior whole.

Now the reason why we do not think a car is alive is, I think, because we assemble a car from bits which already exist as what they are; and we do not think they turn into something completely different by becoming parts of the car. They are not parts of the car in the sense that legs are part of a leopard. In this case the bits are prior to the car. One striking illustration of this is that while we can dismember a leopard by taking the bits apart, we cannot assemble a leopard simply by adding the bits together. But a car is secondary. It is simply an assemblage of already existing things that have been put in contact with each other. The units in this case are the bits and the car is only a quasi-unit by courtesy of our construction and our culture and our language. It is because this is what we think about cars that we think they are not alive. If you belonged to a primitive and blessed community that had no cars, and thus you knew nothing about how cars are assembled from hits, and if you came across one for the first time you would almost certainly think it was alive (as dogs, perhaps, think cars are alive as they go chasing after them). When you learnt more about it you would realize that it was not. What you would learn is that the car is not really a natural unit but only a quasi-unit so that you cannot say literally that the wheels are organs of the car. They just act as though they were organs of the car; the car is an imitation animal with imitation organs. It is just because the engine is not literally an organ that the action of the engine is not literally an action of the whole car, so that when the engine moves the wheels it is not literally the whole car moving the whole car. It is not literally a case of auto-mobility. It is one thing, the engine, moving other things, the wheels, with which it happens to be in contact. (Of course neither the engine nor the wheels are natural units either: they are themselves quasi-units constructed from more primitive natural substances.)

Now, of course, all this account depends on accepting the idea of ‘natural units’ as distinct from quasi-units that are assembled from them. But this is the way that we do in fact think and talk. We speak as though we were familiar with natural units and we distinguish between them and other things. I don’t mean, of course, that we are not, for various reasons, allowed to reclassify the world in ways that cut across its natural units; but all such ways of behaving are parasitic on our normal perceptions and normal ways of talking about things. Nor do I mean that our so-called common-sense way of talking of the world is always a reliable clue to what the natural units are; for, after all, we use language mainly not to explain the world but to change it.

I do not know how to give an account of the way we have come to divide up our experienced world into what John Locke would have called ‘natural kinds’ or natural units; it is evidently an extremely important part of the business of living with things and interacting with them in all sorts of ways. It seems to me that the idea that we are completely free to reclassify the objects of experience in just any way at all, or (what is the same thing) to use just any names at all to express what is to be a unit in our world, rests on the idea that we are simply spectators of something that stands over against us called the ‘world’, and we are at liberty to put just any kind of grid we like between the world and our eyes. In fact we are not just spectators, we are involved with and have to cope with things. And recognizing the natural units is part of coping.

So one of the things we have in mind when we say that cockroaches are natural units and thus alive in the way that cars are not natural units is that cockroaches are, and have been, natural units quite regardless of ourselves. There were cockroaches busy being individual natural units before humankind evolved—and, I am told, they will probably go on after we have blown ourselves to bits. Cars evidently have to be assembled by us; cockroaches do not.

But what about synthetic life? Quite apart from genetic engineering, could we not assemble a car complicated enough to be living? We already have computer-controlled cars which do not need a driver. They can detect roadways and obstacles and cope with other traffic by themselves. It would be a small thing for them to have a mechanism by which they would seek out and collect their own petrol and so on. There seems no reason in principle why such a machine should not be able to collect together the necessary materials and construct exact reproductions of itself, which of course would then set about making reproductions in their turn, just as with DNA molecules. We would then have a machine which could move around, feed itself, and reproduce itself. Would we not say that it was alive? I think we quite probably would. We could claim to have synthesized life. But notice that we would only be inclined to say it was alive just to the extent that it does not need to be synthesized, to the extent that it has an ancestry rather than a manufacturer, to the extent that it does reproduce itself independently of us, to the extent that it is no longer an artefact but is self-moving and self-reproducing and lives a life of its own. And this, I think, shows that we were right to contrast being alive and being assemb...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Forward
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Aquinas Himself
• Chapter 2: Living Things
• Chapter 3: Things and Facts
• Chapter 4: Sensation, Language, and Individuals
• Chapter 5: Change, Language, Reasons, and Action
• Chapter 6: Narratives and Living Together
• Chapter 7: Meaning, Understanding, and Making Decisions
• Chapter 8: Emotions and Inclinations
• Chapter 9: Action, Deliberation, and Decision
• Chapter 10: Deliberative Reasoning
• Chapter 11: Prudentia
• Chapter 12: Interior Senses I
• Chapter 13: Interior Senses II
• Chapter 14: Moral Virtues I
• Chapter 15: Moral Virtues II
• Index