Aquinas was as prolific as he was brilliant. He produced more than sixty works, thousands upon thousands of pages. In one work alone, his famed Summa Theologica—unfinished when he died—Thomas posited 512 questions with 2,669 articles, and then produced proofs to dispense with more than 10,000 objections.
His organization of a problem and use of logic were dazzling—Aristotle could have asked no greater practitioner of his method. Aquinas posed a question, postulated the range of potential arguments, then systematically and painstakingly eliminated every invalid conclusion, false hypothesis, logical inconsistency, or misapplied premise until he had reduced the possibilities to just one—that which he had sought to prove in the first place. It was as if, in the densest of forests, reaching one fork in the trail after another, although he had a map (indeed, he had drawn it), he deliberately proceeded down every false path until each was exhausted, all to prove that only one correct way through the thicket existed. When trying to follow someone engaged in such an exercise, it is best not to fall too far behind, lest one risk becoming hopelessly lost. The temptation, therefore, to simply agree to certain premises in the rush to keep up, to take the guide's word for it, can be powerful indeed.
Aquinas's favorite technique for incorporating Aristotle into Catholicism was to prove that the arguments of the Philosopher and the tenets of faith were not inconsistent after all. He dealt with these issues throughout his career. A wonderful example of his method is in an opusculum (short work) called De Aeternitate Mundi (On the Eternity of the World).
Aristotle had very clearly stated in On the Heavens that “the universe as a whole neither came into being nor can it be destroyed . . . On the contrary, it is unique and everlasting. It has neither a beginning nor an end . . . and it also contains within itself time without end.” Finding a way to make that conform to Christian dogma was going to be some trick. Both Bacon and Albert had tried and failed.
Aquinas began, “Let us assume, in accordance with the Catholic faith, that the world had a beginning in time. The question still arises whether the world could have always existed . . .” Even Aquinas knew better than to try to prove logically that two contrary statements were both true, so he came at the problem from a different angle. Christian dogma said that the world was created at a finite point in time by an act of will by God, so this statement must be true, and therefore Aristotle's contention that the world was eternal had to be false. But what if it was false by coincidence rather than philosophic error? In other words, what if God could have made the world eternal had He chosen, but instead chose to create it specifically in the manner delineated by Christian faith? That would preserve the Aristotelian structure while at the same time reaffirming revelation.
And, in a clear and cogent, step-by-step process, this is precisely what Aquinas proceeded to prove.
First, he stipulated that everyone, Christians and philosophers alike, agreed that something not made by God could not have always existed. “Everything that in any way exists, cannot exist unless it is caused by him who supremely and most truly has existence,” he observed. “However, someone may hold that there has always existed something that, nevertheless, has been wholly caused by God, and thus we ought to determine whether this position is tenable.”
If, Aquinas went on, it is impossible for something caused by God to have always existed, it is either because God lacked the power to cause it—obviously untrue—or that something that has always existed for some reason could not be made, even though God could have made it. If, in turn, something God had the power to make couldn't be made, it was only because either it lacked the potential to be made—passive potentiality, as Aquinas put it—as steel cannot be made without the presence of iron ore or a two-by-four cannot be made without a pine tree, or because it was contradictory.
To demonstrate that the first alternative was false, that something could be made even without “passive potentiality,” Aquinas used the example of angels. Since God most certainly made angels even though “no passive potentiality precedes its being,” then it followed that “a passive potentiality need not precede in time whatever God may make.”
That leaves the second case, which is that God cannot make that which is self-contradictory, “just as an affirmation and a denial cannot be made simultaneously true,” or, as Thomist scholar Ralph McInerny phrased it, something cannot at the same time be “p” and “not p.” (It is interesting that neither Aquinas nor those who study him ever accept the possibility that the laws of logic do not apply to God at all, and thus the entire structure upon which scholasticism is built is unstable.) Aquinas granted that, although some great men have “piously maintained” that God can cause contradictory events, he believed that they were mistaken. In either case, Aquinas concluded that there was no contradiction between being made by God and having always existed. “It would clearly be derogatory to divine omnipotence . . . to say that we creatures can conceive of something that God is unable to make.”
Aquinas concluded De Aeternitate Mundi having proved the perilous, antiscriptural conclusion that God may well have made something that has always existed. At first blush, this is exactly what the Augustinians feared, a demonstration that Aristotle might be right and the Bible wrong. This, of course, was not at all what Aquinas had in mind, as Dr. McInerny points out. “While [Aquinas] firmly accepts as revealed truth, as a truth of faith, that the duration of the world had a beginning, that time and the world began . . . God might have done what he in fact did not do, namely, create an eternal world.” McInerny then cites the passage in Summa Theologica that demonstrates the genius of this conclusion. “The arguments Aristotle puts forth are not demonstrative in the strict sense, but only broadly speaking, since what they do is disprove those arguments of the ancients which attempted to show that the world has come to be in one of the ways in which this is truly impossible.”
In other words, the man who stated that the universe “has neither a beginning nor an end” was actually supportive of Christian doctrine all the time.
WHAT AQUINAS DID HERE AND ELSEWHERE was what attorneys attempt to achieve in legal briefs—present an interpretation that both fits the facts and leads to the conclusion favorable to the client. While it may have been impossible to prove that Aquinas's arguments were wrong, it was equally impossible to prove that they were right. Not once in the thousands of pages that he produced did a conclusion of Aquinas's ever result in anything other than that which he had originally sought to prove.
Aquinas intended logical construct to be a science in itself, to remove the necessity—or even the possibility—of empirical verification. There were some significant practical consequences. Because Aquinas made no distinction between method and conclusion, many of Aristotle's scientific conclusions that were just plain wrong, such as the geocentric universe and the division of matter into earth, air, fire, and water, became cornerstones of natural science within the Christian religion. Since it was often hard to define where permissible scientific inquiry ended and the truth of faith began, all of these dubious truths were now off-limits and thus inviolable.
Although Summa Theologica is his most famous work, another treatise, Summa Contra Gentiles (Summary of the Arguments Against the Disbelievers) had a far greater impact during his lifetime.
Aquinas began the work in Paris in the late 1250s but did not complete it until 1264. It was believed to have been written, at least in part, in response to a request by a former master general of the Dominican order living in Barcelona who, “ardently desiring the conversion of infidels,” asked Aquinas “to write a work . . . that would both take away the thick atmosphere of darkness [for infidels] and unfold the doctrine of true light to those willing to believe.”
Summa Contra Gentiles was divided into four parts, the first three consisting of that which can be known by reason and the fourth devoted to that which can be known only by faith. It did not make much of a ripple in Spain—it is unclear whether it precipitated a single conversion—b
ut it caused an immediate sensation in centers of learning across the rest of Europe. It was perhaps the most lucid, organized treatment of Church philosophy since Augustine, and the name of Thomas Aquinas was on everyone's lips. It is inevitable that word of this great achievement would have penetrated even the most cloistered Franciscan monasteries in Paris.
In Summa Contra Gentiles, all of Thomas's vast powers were brought to bear—the patient enunciation, relentless logic, and unblemished piety—all to prove that which could be proved and to persuade to accept as faith that which could not. But all of Aquinas's flaws were on display as well, particularly the willingness to manipulate premise or conclusion to fit a predetermined belief.
To prove the existence of God, for example, Aquinas began by paraphrasing Aristotle's theory of the Prime Mover:
Everything that is in motion is put and kept in motion by some other thing . . . That mover therefore either is itself in motion or not. If it is not in motion . . . we must posit something which moves other things without being itself in motion, and this we call God. But if the mover is itself in motion, then it is moved by some other mover. Either then we have to go on to infinity, or we must come to some mover which is motionless; but it is impossible to go on to infinity, therefore we must posit some motionless prime mover . . . The Philosopher also goes about in another way to show that it is impossible to proceed to infinity in the series of efficient causes, but we must come to one first cause, and this we call God.
The vulnerability of this argument, and one that should have bedeviled the incisive logical mind of Aquinas, is that, while the Prime Mover might demonstrate the existence of a god, it did not necessarily prove the existence of the God. There is absolutely nothing in the logical implications of the Prime Mover that led to the Christian conception of God. Rather than confront the issue, Aquinas end-ran it.
After showing that there is a First Being, whom we call God, we must inquire into the conditions of His existence. We must use the method of negative differentiation, particularly in the consideration of the divine substance. For the divine substance, by its immensity, transcends every form that our intellect can realize; and thus we cannot apprehend it by knowing what it is, but we have some sort of knowledge of it by knowing what it is not.
This inquiring Aquinas proceeded to do in a series of chapters entitled “That in God there is no Passive Potentiality,” “That in God there is no Composition,” “That God is Incorporeal,” “That God is His own Essence,” “That in God Existence and Essence are the same,” “That in God there is no Accident,” “That the Existence of God cannot be characterized by the addition of any Substantial Differentia,” “That God is not in any Genus,” “That God is not the Formal or Abstract Being of all things,” and “That God is Universal Perfection.”
Even if each of these arguments held up under logical scrutiny, in order to differentiate the scriptural God from just any god at some point Aquinas had to shift from what God was not to what God was. In a chapter entitled “How Likeness to God may be found in Creatures,” he made his leap:
Effects disproportionate to their causes do not agree with them in name and essence. And yet some likeness must be found between such effects and their causes: for it is of the nature of an agent to do something like itself. Thus also God gives to creatures all their perfections; and thereby He has with all creatures a likeness, and an unlikeness at the same time. For this point of likeness, however, it is more proper to say that the creature is like God than that God is like the creature . . . thus the creature has what belongs to God, and is rightly said to be like to God: but it cannot be said that God has what belongs to the creature.
In other words, just as it says in Genesis, God must have created man in his own image, albeit an image that is an imperfect representation. When Aquinas stated, “it is of the nature of an agent to do something like itself”—a questionable premise to begin with—he once again ascribed to God dicta that should not bind the entity that he had spent all this time describing. By what reasoning should God be bound to do something like Himself? God might have created creatures with no likeness to Himself at all if He so chose. To return to his proof in De Aeternitate Mundi, the only things that God was powerless to do were those that were self-contradictory—“p and not p.” There was nothing at all self-contradictory about God, as defined in the Aquinas proofs, creating life that was in no way like Himself.
But who could say so? To deny the conclusion, or even to raise an eyebrow as to the logical progression if it called the conclusion into question, was heresy. The only way to attack Aquinas was within the accepted bounds of scholasticism—that is, to quibble over points of logic—and in this Aquinas was without peer. Other scholastics might parse him, Bonaventura might chide him for his affinity for pagan philosophers, and some of his anti-Augustinian conclusions might even be condemned—as they would be in 1277—but the fact remained that unless a critic was willing to challenge Aquinas's acceptance and manipulation of scriptural premises, his work was unassailable.
Roger Bacon would have one opportunity and one opportunity only to refute Aquinas and make the case for the pursuit of science, and it would come, fittingly, from the legacy of Frederick II.
SOON AFTER FREDERICK'S DEATH, his son Conrad had indeed raised an army and swept into Italy. The pope had immediately turned to Henry III to demand that he honor his pledge to send both money and troops to defend Sicily. Before Henry had a chance to try to beg off, Conrad, unused to the warm weather, died of fever in 1254.
That did not end the Hohenstaufen threat, however, as the Antichrist's illegitimate son Manfred, a far more serious contender, took up the fight. Manfred, whose mother was probably an Arab, was brave, intelligent, and charismatic. He was also a poet, warrior, and scholar, and enjoyed a fierce loyalty among his followers. He made significant gains in battle, moving up the Italian peninsula toward Rome.
The pope then tried to force Henry to live up to his deal by threatening him with excommunication and interdict. When Henry tried to raise the money and the army from his barons, they rebelled and in 1259 set up a council to run the country. The council could not get past its own petty bickering, however, and Simon de Montfort began to seize power, moving England toward civil war.
In 1261, Manfred remained unchecked and a new pope, Urban IV, son of a French cobbler, gave up on England entirely and turned to the much more powerful France. He opened negotiations with Louis IX, suggesting that perhaps Louis's brother, the ferocious Charles of Anjou, might be the perfect king for Sicily. Charles had already turned down the honor once, so to help Louis in his deliberations Urban promoted a number of French clerics to high positions in the Church, especially those who had been in favor with the king.
So it came about that an obscure knight-turned-lawyer-turned-cardinal named Guy de Foulques was appointed papal legate to England, an act that was to change the course of both Roger Bacon's life and scientific history.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Great Work
• • •
ORIGINALLY KNOWN AS GUY LE GROS (“Fat Guy”), Guy de Foulques was the son of a knight who had entered a monastery after the death of his wife. He grew to manhood, married, and, at first, like his father, chose the warrior life. Soon, however, Foulques discovered that he would rather persuade than slaughter and undertook the study of law. He became a noted advocate in the court of Louis IX, was appointed to the king's cabinet, and was soon a trusted councilor. When his wife died, Foulques, again like his father, abandoned the secular life and entered the Church, although not through one of the mendicant orders.
He rose in the Church as quickly as he had under Louis. Renowned for honesty, piety, and moral incorruptibility, he was appointed bishop in 1256, archbishop in 1259, and cardinal in 1261. After Urban named him papal legate, he made a number of visits to England. In late 1264, Urban once again sent him to England, where Simon de Montfort had now assumed almost dictatorial powers after defeating the hapless Henry
and taking him prisoner at the Battle of Lewes the previous May.
Montfort denied passage across the Channel to Cardinal Foulques, suspecting, not without justification, that the papacy sought the return of Henry to the throne as a means of ensuring that Church authority—and property—in England would remain undisturbed. Foulques responded by excommunicating Montfort's barons and instituting a boycott on trade with England in wheat, commodities, and wine. As wine prices tripled, many English were far more sober than they wished to be, and grumbling about Simon de Montfort's government increased. Cardinal Foulques was still in northern France awaiting clearance to enter England when Urban IV died.
The year before, just as Aquinas was putting the finishing touches on Summa Contra Gentiles, Roger Bacon had sent a secret message from Paris, probably in cipher, to Cardinal Foulques. It was delivered through an emissary named Raymond of Laon, a member of the cardinal's staff. It is not clear how Bacon and the cardinal came to know each other, whether this message was written or verbal, or even whether it was Bacon or Foulques who initiated the correspondence. In the message, Bacon proposed forwarding to the cardinal some “writing that [he was] ready to compose, but that [was] not yet written.”
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