Given Thomas’s sense of the originality of his project, we can address the meaning of the composition of the Summa by asking what Thomas intended by creating this new model for theological education, and how he conceived of the content and structure of the work. Neither of these questions has a straightforward, or uncontested, answer.
When we ask what Thomas intended, we must remember that he was first and foremost a teacher. The vocation of a Dominican friar was not to sit in the chair of a magister solving questions for the sake of clever answers with an eye to writing texts for the ages, but rather to form students, especially young friars, to become theologians capable of giving good sermons, hearing confessions with accurate theological knowledge, and, if necessary, refuting heretical attacks on Christian faith. A recent line of interpretation of the Summa has argued that the Summa was intended primarily as a new way of presenting moral theology to Dominican students who would soon go forth to preach and hear confessions.32 In this view, Thomas was reacting to the older Dominican theological formation that concentrated on a moral theology centered on the description of virtues and vices, or on canon law prohibitions of sinful actions. Thomas wished to create a better theological understanding of Christian morality based on the human desire for happiness, as we find it laid out in the Secunda Pars. Thomas realized from the start, however, that it would not be enough just to write another textbook on moral theology, but that sound moral teaching could be successful only if grounded in an integral theology.
This “moral view” of the Summa explains much, but it may be misleading insofar as some might be tempted to think that the Prima Pars is a mere introduction and the Tertia Pars a kind of addendum on Christ and the sacraments. We may well imagine that Thomas came to see the need for a new kind of theological textbook by reflecting on what his Dominican charges needed to become preachers and confessors, without concluding that moral theology was the only or controlling factor in his vision for the work. Rather, as the passage cited above from the prologus suggests, Thomas had come to think that the whole of theological education was out of whack. To see why this was so, we need to look at what Thomas meant by invoking the ordo disciplinae, or pedagogical order, and why he called the subject matter of his work sacra doctrina, not theologia. To that end we need to take a close look at the first question of the Prima Pars, titled “The Nature and Extent of Sacred Teaching,” which introduces the subject matter of the whole.33
Sacra doctrina (“sacred instruction”) emphasizes the act of teaching, that is, training minds to master the modes of thinking necessary to command this particular subject matter—what the church believes and teaches. In his earlier (1259) commentary on Boethius’s treatise On the Trinity Thomas had discussed the difference between two kinds of theologia, that of the philosophers, also called scientia divina or metaphysica, and the theologia Christiana based on revelation.34 By 1266 he had altered his terminology. Although he still occasionally speaks of theologia,35 his choice of sacra doctrina to describe the content of his new work is significant. Theologia deals with a set of propositions concerning God—scientia as a set of conclusions. Sacra doctrina, however, emphasizes instruction, the generation of scientia (scientia in fieri), that is, how a master trains students to learn a subject according to proper pedagogy, or the ordo disciplinae.36 As he put it toward the end of the Prima Pars, “A master not only makes his students knowledgeable, but also teachers of others” (q. 103.6). This emphasis on teaching does not mean that content is overlooked, but if we abstract the Summa from the context of instruction and make it a text merely for reading and laying out a set of conclusions about God, we risk perverting Thomas’s purpose, whether he intended the work more as a manual for teachers, or as an actual class text for reading and commentary.
The ten articles that constitute the first question on sacra doctrina reveal the originality and precision of Thomas’s mature thinking on understanding faith. In order to grasp the nature of a discipline one needs to know three things: whether the discipline exists (an sit), the nature of the discipline (quid sit), and finally the method of the discipline (de modo arguendi). Thomas investigates the first issue in article 1. Articles 2 through 7 take up the nature of sacra doctrina, while articles 8 to 10 consider its mode of arguing.37
The first article asks, “Whether it is necessary to have another form of teaching besides the philosophical disciplines?” If the many branches of philosophy investigate everything that can be known, culminating in metaphysics (the divine science or theology that investigates God), what need is there for any other kind of knowing or teaching? The key to the answer, as everywhere with Thomas, is teleology—the end or goal determines the means to attain it. For Thomas, the final cause is “the cause of causes,” so if we can demonstrate that something is demanded by the final cause, we have the most strict kind of demonstration (demonstratio propter quid). Thomas does not mount a philosophical argument for God as the final end here, but, in keeping with the nature of the discipline he is investigating, cites scriptural authorities: Isaiah 44:4, proving that God is the final goal that surpasses our understanding, and 2 Timothy 3:16, concerning scripture as divinely revealed for our instruction and salvation. Since God is the goal of humanity as the “good surpassing nature” (bonum supernaturale), and no finite human mind on its own natural powers could ever attain the saving knowledge that leads to the “supernatural” God who is above all that we can know, God reveals this knowledge to humans so that they can be saved.38
Sacra doctrina is absolutely necessary for salvation. Its saving content, Thomas contends, must include not one, but two kinds of truths about God—those that surpass reason, such as the Trinity, and also those, like the existence of God, that are open to reason but that are difficult to attain and can be known only imperfectly. Without knowing that God exists, the whole edifice of sacred teaching would collapse, but the same is true for God as Trinity. While Thomas thought that some metaphysicians, even non-Christian ones, had attained knowledge of the existence of God, and while he knew that most humans had some imperfect conception of god or gods, all these convictions, from the crudest to the most profound, had no saving power. This insight displays the grandeur and the misery of metaphysics: it is the highest form of human knowing and natural contemplation, but it is always flawed and without salvific effect.
Thomas uses reason and philosophical modes of arguing throughout the Summa, but it is not a work of philosophy, or even of philosophical theology. The Summa theologiae is fundamentally a work of doctrinal theology, however much it makes use of philosophy and philosophical theology (i.e., metaphysics). Since sacra doctrina is a true science, it needs to make use of both reason and faith, of philosophical and theological argumentation. If philosophy and theology are necessary, however, they are not equally necessary—only revelation and the faith based on it are salvific. Etienne Gilson expressed the nature of this form of theology well when he said, “[I]t is of the essence of the theology called ‘scholastic’ that it appeals freely and widely to philosophical reasoning. Because it draws on faith, it is scholastic theology, but because of its distinctive use of philosophy, it is scholastic theology.”39
Thomas could not be clearer about the necessity of sacra doctrina for salvation, but his insistence raises a problem that again emphasizes the centrality of teaching and learning. If sacra doctrina is needed for salvation, does this mean that Thomas and his advanced students alone will be saved? What about the illiterate old lady in the back of Santa Sabina during morning Mass?40 Will she have to pay tuition and start a theology degree (per impossibile for a woman in the medieval church)? This reductio ad absurdum shows that all believers have to share in the activity of sacra doctrina, that is, in being instructed and learning the truths of faith to the best of their abilities. Since the source of sacra doctrina is God’s infinite self-knowledge, the difference between all our finite receptions of such knowledge, whether those of Thomas and his students or of the old lady in the back of the church, sink
into insignificance. For Thomas what they (and we) all need to have in order to be saved is willingness to be instructed.41
The stage is now set for Thomas to investigate what kind of discipline sacra doctrina is. Article 2, which asks whether sacra doctrina is a science in the Aristotelian sense, has been the source of much discussion. Many thirteenth-century theologians had investigated whether theology could be considered a science, usually answering that it was so only in an imperfect sense, because of several difficulties in squaring the strict Aristotelian notion of science as found in the Posterior Analytics with the Christian “understanding of faith.”42 Thomas was one of the few who insisted that sacra doctrina was indeed a real scientia in the Aristotelian sense. We must remember that this is far from the modern sense of empirical and experimental sciences. For Aristotle scientia is “sure knowledge through causes,” best illustrated by rigorously deductive disciplines, such as mathematics or geometry, that is, organized bodies of knowledge in which indisputable principles lead by syllogistic reasoning to necessary conclusions.43 Thomas argues that sacra doctrina does, indeed, meet the essential requirements of Aristotelian scientia in that it argues from principles revealed by God, shows the causal relationships among revealed doctrines, and demonstrates new conclusions. It is important to note, however, that Thomas does not cite Aristotle as his authority for this, but rather Augustine on “wisdom as the science of human and divine matters” (On the Trinity 14.1.3), already hinting that sacra doctrina is a science because it is wisdom.
Thomas goes beyond Aristotle in how he conceived of scientia as an analogous term, one capable of being understood in a variety of ways. Several shifts in meaning from Aristotle are important to note. For example, Aristotle allowed for “subalternate” sciences where one body of knowledge depends on premises known from another (e.g., for ancient thinkers music depended on mathematics), but sacra doctrina is a science subordinate to a science we cannot know, namely, God’s supreme, nondiscursive self-knowledge. Another difference is that in Aristotle’s view sciences were either speculative (i.e., contemplative) or practical, directive of action; for Thomas, sacra doctrina, although primarily speculative, is both speculative and practical (a. 4), that is, it deals essentially with God and secondarily with human actions.
It is clear that sacra doctrina is an unusual “science,” one that while it may fulfill the basic premises of Aristotle’s view of science as sure knowledge, stretches Aristotle beyond what he would have recognized. The reason for the unique nature of sacred teaching is manifest in article 6, which is the key to the whole first question: “Is Sacred Teaching Wisdom?” In order to understand why sacra doctrina is wisdom we can turn to Thomas’s earlier Summa contra Gentiles, where he offers a reflection on the vocation of the Christian theologian in the first two chapters. Considering the theologian as the student of divine wisdom, Thomas says,
Just as it is proper for the wise person especially to meditate on the truth about the First Principle and then to consider other things, so too he has to attack the falsity contrary to it. This is why it is fitting that the twofold task of the wise person (sapiens) is proclaimed by the mouth of [Divine] Wisdom in the passage cited (Prov. 8:7): to speak the divine truth that has been meditated upon … , and to attack any error against truth. (SCG I.1)
All of Thomas’s writings, but especially the Summa theologiae, were attempts to fulfill his vocation of a teacher of wisdom.
Wisdom is a fundamental theme of biblical teaching enshrined in the Wisdom literature of the Old Testament and especially in Paul in the New Testament, who often contrasts the wisdom of this world with the wisdom of God (Rom. 8:6; 1 Cor. 1:20–21, 2:6). Aristotle had identified wisdom in the philosophical sense as the habit of knowledge that puts things in their proper order (sapientis est ordinare et non ordinari).44 Augustine also made much of wisdom, especially in books 12 and 14 of On the Trinity, where he treats the superiority of divine wisdom over the science of earthly things. Thomas’s teaching on wisdom is an original synthesis of these sources.
Sacred teaching is wisdom, Thomas says, because “it belongs to the wise person to order and to judge” (art. 6), a constant theme in his teaching.45 Ordering and judging are rooted in the essential act of wisdom, that upon which all its ordering and judging depend, namely, contemplation: “Wisdom considers [i.e., contemplates] the very object of happiness, the highest intelligible being” (IaIIae, q. 66.5, ad 2).46 Aristotle analyzed wisdom as the intellectual habit that orders and judges all the disciplines, but Thomas also found this teaching in Paul, who said, “The spiritual person [i.e., the wise person] judges all things” (1 Cor. 2:15).47 A science does not establish its own principles, but as sapientia sacred teaching not only establishes its principles from revelation, but also explains them insofar as it can, defends them against attack, and judges the first principles and conclusions of the other sciences. As wisdom, it also orders all the principles and conclusions of revealed teaching, connecting the truths to each other and arranging them in the best way to achieve the goal to which they are directed, the pursuit of eternal happiness.48 Since wisdom puts things in order, and all ordering is effected in relation to an end or goal, the whole teleological structure of the Summa is the expression of Christian sapientia. Such wisdom follows the model of the most perfect form of movement, circular motion, by beginning from principles, arguing to conclusions, and returning to the principles with deeper understanding.
Article 6 says that sacra doctrina makes use of philosophical sapientia, which judges and orders things from the perspective of the highest cause as known from creatures (Rom. 1:19 is cited), but that it depends primarily on the higher wisdom of the Bible “in relation to what is known to God alone about himself and communicated to others through revelation.” Thomas, however, distinguishes this form of revelation-based wisdom that can be cultivated by study (per studium) from the highest wisdom, the gift of the Holy Spirit, by means of which believers come to know divine matters through connaturality (art. 6, ad 3). There are then three kinds of sapientia, with the sapientia that is sacra doctrina occupying a middle position between the acquired natural wisdom of metaphysics and the infused wisdom that comes from the Holy Spirit.49 The ordo doctrinae and ordo disciplinae set forth in the Summa form two sides of a sapiential ordering based on the revelation found in the Incarnate Word.50 Sapientia is central to understanding what Thomas intended in writing the Summa.51
Having established that sacra doctrina is the highest sapiential science, Thomas turns to how sacred teaching functions in the last three articles in question 1. Science in the Aristotelian sense is “argumentative” (argumentativa), that is, it uses reason to argue from principles to conclusions. Sacra doctrina is also argumentative (art. 8), but once again with a twist. For Aristotle, the supreme human science of metaphysics depends on principles that are inherent in human knowing, such as the principle of contradiction (i.e., that something cannot be both true and false under the same aspect at the same time). Human thinking presupposes but does not prove these essential truths. In the case of sacred teaching, however, the human mind accepts truths on the authority of God revealing, although these truths are by no means self-evident (e.g., that the one God is a Trinity of persons). Having accepted these truths as principles, the sapiential theologian can defend them against attack and deduce further insights for believers. Hence, sacred teaching argues in different ways for different audiences. In the case of those who do not accept revelation, it can only rebut arguments that the articles of faith are totally incoherent or contradictory. With those who accept revelation, but have gotten some of its teaching wrong (“the heretics” for Thomas and his contemporaries), it can argue from the articles held in common to the truth of those under dispute. Finally (and most important), for believers, its arguments make manifest the implications of faith, following the Augustinian program of “faith seeking understanding.”
Thomas sums up his conviction about the importance of reason for sacra doctrina in th
e famous formula: “Since grace does not take away nature but perfects it, it is necessary that natural reason serve faith, just as the natural movement of the will serves charity” (a. 8, ad 2).52 A passage in his Commentary on Boethius’s “On the Trinity” puts it this way: “Those who make use of philosophical teaching in sacred teaching by redirecting them to the use of faith do not mix water with wine, but rather change water into wine.”53 Thus, in its form of arguing sacred teaching uses both principles based on authority, which in the case of a revealed science are the strongest kind, as well as principles from philosophy, though these are external and only probable in matters of faith. Nevertheless, in each mode Thomas makes use of the mind’s inherent dynamism to move from premises to conclusions. What he does not advert to in this discussion, perhaps surprisingly given its importance throughout the Summa, is the distinction between arguments concerning revealed truth that can be considered necessary (ex necessitate) and arguments from fittingness (ex convenientia). For example, it is a revealed premise that Jesus Christ is fully God and fully man. Hence, it follows by logical necessity that Jesus must have both a divine will and a human will. However, there is no necessary proof for the fact of the Incarnation itself. God did not have to become man. Given that the Incarnation is revealed in the Bible, however, sacra doctrina allows the believer to explore fitting reasons for why God chose to take on human nature.
Finally, sacra doctrina is scriptural, that is, it is based on the authority of God found in the Bible (aa. 9–10).54 Thomas uses sacra doctrina and scriptura interchangeably in question 1. If God’s revelation is the efficient cause of sacred teaching and salvation the final cause, the instrument revelation uses to convey this knowledge is the Bible, the written word of God. Here another problem surfaces. Sciences in the Aristotelian sense make use of textbooks that are rigorously logical (think of Euclid’s Elements), but the Bible is filled with stories and metaphors—scarcely a “scientific” book. But, Thomas responds, it is quite fitting for God to use metaphors and corporeal language in conveying his message, both out of necessity because the Bible is directed to all people (not just philosophers), and because it is useful for drawing people to the knowledge of higher intelligible realities through lower sense images (a. 9). But there is an even deeper reason, as shown by the two citations of Dionysius that appear in article 9. Dionysius was aware not only that metaphorical language was necessary out of condescension to our human way of knowing by concrete realities and images, but also that it was important for indicating God’s transcendence. Employing philosophical terms like being and goodness and the like might tempt the theologian to think that these concepts can give us knowledge of God’s essence. No, says Thomas, this kind of philosophical language “Tells us more about what God is not than what he is; likenesses of the things that are farther away from God give us a truer sense that he is beyond what we say and know of him” (a. 9, ad 3). The true wisdom of the theologian is to know that he or she does not know. Paradoxically, the fact that sacra doctrina is essentially scriptural also shows that it is fundamentally negative.55
Thomas Aquinas's Summa theologiae Page 5
