The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy
A
detailed summary of Étienne Gilson’s first course of Gifford Lectures (1931)
by
Arend Smilde
I
first glanced into L’esprit de la philosophie
médiévale while putting the book up for sale
online, and soon decided not to sell it. After reading it, I felt the
experience was very much worth sharing on my C. S. Lewis website.
Presenting a summary seemed an obvious way to do so, and perhaps the most
universally useful way.
Whether
this book sheds any valuable light on Lewis’s life and work may be a matter of
debate; I think it does, and I hope to explain this in some public way sooner
or later. Meantime, here is my summary of chapters I–X for use in whatever suitable context may be
yours.
These
chapters constitute the first of Gilson’s two courses of Gifford Lectures. In French, the two courses were first
published separately in 1931 and 1932, and then in a combined and revised
edition of 1944. A full English translation was published by Charles Scribner’s
Sons of New York in 1940, now freely available at Archive.org.
Some reading instructions for the present summary are given in note 1.
Utrecht, December 2017
PDF download
· 20 pages,
A4 format
· 22 pages,
for reading on tablets and printing as
A5-format booklet
CONTENTS
I. The problem
of Christian philosophy
II. The concept
of Christian philosophy
III. Being and
necessity
IV. Beings and
their contingence
V. Analogy,
causality and finality
VII. The glory of God
VIII. Christian providence
I. THE PROBLEM OF CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY [1-16 | 1-19]1
If
“Christian Philosophy” = “philosophy as pursued by Christians”, then the term Christian Philosophy has at least a
historical meaning: it could then be properly applied to most of the
philosophical work done in the European Middle Ages. But how to define Christian
Philosophy in the abstract – independently from those who have been actually
engaged in it? The concept has been denied a meaning from several quarters: by
those historians who only perceive a
jumble of half-digested chunks from ancient philosophy; by those rationalists who think that philosophy
ceases to be philosophy precisely insofar as it becomes Christian; and also by
certain Neo-Scholastics who think
that the only Christian ever to produce a purely rational philosophy, and hence
a philosophy deserving of the name, was St. Thomas Aquinas. In fact medieval thinkers were themselves hardly
at one on this question [4|4]. Broadly, there were the two irreconcilable
positions of Augustinians (holding
that Thomism is un-Christian) and Thomists
(holding that there is, to say the least, nothing un-Christian about being
true). It might therefore seem best to abandon the whole idea of Christian
Philosophy [7|8].
History
cannot ultimately decide whether or not Christian Philosophy exists or is
possible. Nevertheless, history may serve as a fund of “facts from which to
infer concepts which, once inferred, might serve to judge the facts” [9|10].
What still needs to be found out is how
Christianity and Philosophy have actually perceived and conceived their mutual
impacts at those very moments when such give-and-take was actually
occurring [9|10].
It takes some wilful dogmatism for the
historian to deny that such impact ever occurred; or for the Christian to deny
that reason is “essentially distinct” from faith; or for the philosopher to
deny that reason is “inseparable from faith in its exercise”. “There is no such
thing as Christian reason, but there might be a Christian exercise of reason”
[10-11|12]; this is a matter of “conditions of fact” [4|5, 10|12].2 It is impossible
to deny a priori that Christians or Christianity may have altered the course of philosophical history by opening up perspectives that might have otherwise remained closed. What is
more, this appears to be what actually happened. Post-medieval
metaphysics as pursued by Descartes, Malebranche, Leibnitz, and Kant (and even
by contemporary anti-metaphysicians like Montague in his 1930 book Belief Unbound) is inconceivable on the supposition3
that nothing of philosophical significance ever happened between antiquity and
Descartes [11|13, 14-15|16-18].
The influence of Christianity on
philosophy is, in fact, a historical
reality; therefore the notion of Christian Philosophy would seem to “have a
meaning” [15|18].4 As Lessing said, “The religious
truths were not rational while they were revealed, but they were revealed so as
to become rational”.5
II. THE CONCEPT OF CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY [17-38 | 20-41]
The reality of this process –
of Christianity “providing philosophers with more rational truth than they
found in philosophy” – must have been especially evident to those who underwent
it at the very moment of their undergoing it [17|20] in the early days of
Christianity. When Justin Martyr
(† c. 165) came to Platonism
after several disappointing masters, he perceived a great improvement; but he
then went on to discover the wisdom of ancient “prophets” who had been witness
to the truth rather than demonstrating it. This seemed to Justin the only
certain and profitable philosophy and indeed the only sensible way and proper
motive to become a philosopher at all [20‑1|23-5]. Once accepted by faith, this
prophetic wisdom proved to satisfy reason like nothing else. This was not to
deny all truth to all previous philosophies; on the contrary, the concept of
natural knowledge of God and of a moral law was gladly propounded. All truth is
Christian, regardless of who speaks it; but Christian believers are in the very
best philosophical position available. First and greatest among the assets of
Christian belief is that it is an effective way of salvation [25|28]. Second,
it offers an escape from the perennial “contradictions of the philosophers” [27|30].
Lactantius
(†c. 325) conceives true philosophy
as faith-based eclecticism, or “directed reason” [28|32].6 Augustine
(354-430), too, was greatly impressed by the usefulness of believing (de utilitate credendi) “even for the very purpose of assuring the
rationality of reason” [28|32]. Much later, Anselm
(1033-1109) gave his classical formulation of the primacy of faith, Credo
ut intelligam. What
he sought was not faith through understanding, but understanding through faith.
Faith is the way to understanding – it is the (potentially successful) search
for understanding. No assurance of the rationality of reason is possible unless
reason scrutinizes the rationality of faith [29|33]. French philosopher Maine de Biran
(1766-1824), as a latter-day Justin or Anselm, represented a position that can
be summarized as intellectus quaerens intellectum per fidem
[30|34-5]. Still, faith has never been and should never be treated as a higher
form of knowledge – comparable yet more advanced. The real ascent, according to
Anselm, is from faith to understanding and then on to (beatific) vision [31|35].
It is not in its texture but in its constitution
that Christian Philosophy admits and receives revelation, or the supernatural
[32|37, cf. 37|40-1];7 revelation
is considered as an indispensable auxiliary to reason [33|37]. Philosophy
is a genus encompassing Christian Philosophy as a species. The species
comprises several sub-species which are united by common characteristics: they
have a preference for issues relevant to conducting a religious life, while
leaving other issues alone as objects of vana (or turpis)
curiositas.
The relevant issues might be described as “the
doctrine concerning God and man, and man’s relations with God”. This
guideline or program enables the Christian philosopher to achieve order and
unity [34‑5|38-9]. Likely enough, the history of philosophy would have taken a
different course if certain philosophers had not been Christians; and for all
the rational “texture” of their systems, their work is likely to bear the mark of their faith as it influenced “the conduct of their thought” [37|41].8 Tracing this influence on metaphysics may
serve as a kind of demonstration that Christian philosophy really exists.
III. BEING AND NECESSITY [39-62 | 42-63]
The
term “Supreme Being”, a popular 18th-century title for God, encapsulates “many
ages of reflection on Christian teaching” [39|42]. The ancient Greeks did go
some way toward monotheism but never went the whole way. Polytheism proved
harder to eliminate (if such elimination was attempted at all) than
anthropomorphism. Wherever monotheism
was frankly accepted, i.e. in the Christian world, it was quick to take centre
stage as the principle of principles. Greek philosophy, even in its most
eminent thinkers Plato and Aristotle [40‑2|44-6], never “attained to the
essential truth which the Hebrew Bible delivers at one stroke and without the
merest shadow of proof” [43|46] – Deuteronomy 6:4.9 If there is a God, then surely He
is the only one there is: by the 17th century this was a self-evident truth
which it never occurred to anyone to put in doubt. It is “one of those rational
truths, and the first of all in importance, which did not enter philosophy by
way of reason” [44|47].
The fact is that the ancient Greeks never
attained to such an idea of God’s nature
as would have ruled out the existence of more than a single God. Thus Plato
asserted that a god’s “degree of divinity is proportional to its degree of
being”; for a Christian, there are no degrees of divinity. Plato never uses the
word “being” in a sense exclusively reserved for God; the divine is wherever
there is being [46|48-9].10 Aristotle was incurably polytheistic [48|50].
Again, in contrast, the Hebrew Bible had all along asserted that Being is God’s proper name, thus posing
“the principle from which henceforth the whole of Christian philosophy will be
suspended” [50|51] – Exodus 3:14.11
Duns Scotus (1266-1308), in De primo rerum omnium I.1, perfectly
illustrates how God’s self-revelation as “I
am who I am”, once accepted direct from the Bible, soon prods the
Christian philosopher into working his way from faith to understanding – and
from understanding God as Being to understanding God as the True, or Total, or
One and Only Being. As St. Bonaventure (1217-74) said, “this fog is the mind’s
illumination” ipsa caligo est menti illuminatio [53|53].
Christian thinkers have been aware that no human concept of being could ever exhaust the reality of this Being or,
at best, capture more than a mere mode
of being. Nevertheless, efforts have been made to find expressions for the “contents” of this “I am”. By and large, this has resulted in the two
mutually implying concepts of God’s perfection and His infinity,
developed from the idea of God’s “aseity”.12
Inevitably, this line of thinking was to
result in a new proof for God’s
existence: “To consider the non-existence of God as inconceivable only
makes sense within the Christian perspective that identifies God with Being.”
This “ontological proof” was first formulated by Anselm [58|59ff]. As he
suggested, the inherent necessity of this Being is such that it is reflected in
the very idea which humans have of Him [59|60]. However, Anselm was mistaken in
thinking that the “necessity of affirming God” is by itself deductive proof of
His existence. In fact, this “necessity of affirming God” is merely the
starting point for an act of inference to God – that is, for the proof or
argument as developed by Bonaventure, Duns Scotus, Descartes and Malebranche.
Medieval and early modern thinkers were at one in affirming “the metaphysical primacy of being” and the
resulting “identity of essence and
existence in God” [61|61]. A proper ontological proof is an “induction a posteriori from the content of our idea of God”; it intends
to answer the question, as yet unanswered by any epistemology, “what is the
sufficient cause for a being that is capable of conceiving the idea of being
and of reading there the necessary inclusion of existence within essence.”
[62|62].13
IV. BEINGS AND THEIR CONTINGENCE [63-84 | 64-83]
God
is not only Being, or the only true Being; He is immutable: a property derived from Malachi 3:6.14 On this view, all such “beings” as we may be
naturally familiar with are merely derivative, or failed or lesser forms of
being, as shown by their mutability and impermanence. This is why Aristotle
came to such prominence in Christian philosophy: his philosophy is “essentially
an analysis of becoming and of its metaphysical conditions” [65|65]. Indeed,
one of the most obvious historical instances of Christianity welcoming Greek
thought while going beyond it and deepening it is the way it radicalized Aristotle’s notion of
contingency. A distinction was introduced between essence and existence
(first mentioned by Guillaume d’Auvergne, †1249), and
God was defined as the only being whose
existence was identical with his essence. All other things exist not
because existing is of their essence, but merely because God has willed them to
exist. God has caused them not only to be what
they are, but caused them to be. They
could conceivably have not-been [66|67-8].
The reason why Plato and Aristotle never got as far as this is that they lacked the authoritative unphilosophical
statement of Genesis 1:1.15 Plato’s influence was so strong that even Jewish
philosopher Philo (who certainly knew his Hebrew Bible) failed to develop a
doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. “It seems, then, that the
Jewish religious tradition has not yielded its philosophical fruit until it got
grafted on the Christian stock” [68-9n1|439n3]. Thomas Aquinas in his countless
references to “the Philosopher” (Aristotle) never attributes the notion of
creation to him and never uses the words create
and creation in describing
Aristotle’s (or Plato’s) doctrine of the origin of the world [69|69]; he only
speaks of causing and cause. Plato’s demiurge “gives the
universe everything, except for existence itself” [68|68]. “What kept Aristotle
from conceiving creation was precisely the lack of its principle” [71|69]. This
principle once propounded, it took no particularly brilliant thinkers and no
great tradition of speculation for its significance to be perceived. It is very
much as if contingency as conceived by the Greeks was doomed to remain “in the
order of intelligibility and becoming” [72|71] until the great pronouncements “I Am That I Am” and “In the beginning
God created Heaven and Earth” got abroad; after that, contingency soon came to
encompass the very existence of
everything except God. Everything came
to depend on “the liberty of a will that wills it” rather than on “the
necessity of a self-thinking thought” [73|71]. God’s glory was proclaimed not
only by the heavens, but by the very existence of anything whatever.
Once more,16 this development was bound to affect thinking
about proofs for God’s existence.
“First-cause” arguments henceforth were to be, at least implicitly, arguments for a Creator. “The causal relation connecting nature to God is
envisaged in the order and on the plane of existence itself” [74|73]. Causes
are by definition more “perfect” than their results. Aquinas introduces his
“Five Ways” by a reference to Exodus 3:14. His First Cause is not a “Love that
moves the stars” as a final cause
(i.e. the beloved, an object of love) but as an efficient cause (i.e. the lover, a subject of love), and as one
that causes the very existence of every thing and of
all order. The proof for a Prime Mover thus comes to be, or comes to
necessarily involve, a proof for God’s existence, even while Aristotle’s words
seem to be repeated verbatim [77-8|76-7].
“Finalism”
(belief in final causes) may have been discredited by inexpert defenders. It must
nevertheless be realized that proofs from Finality – that is, from the
“orientation” of any mechanism – do not construe God as nature’s
Engineer-in-Chief, any more than First-Mover proofs construe God as nature’s
Power Station [79|79]. Paley’s Watch only makes sense “when we rise from the
level of making to that of creating”: the marvel in question is not this or
that particular “wonder of nature”, but the existence
of order. What is under discussion is the
causality with which God confers order,
regardless of whether we ever come or might come to understand the mechanism in
question. Christian philosophy essentially excludes all merely physical proofs
for God’s existence, only admitting physico-metaphysical
proofs, i.e. such as are based on “Being as such”.17 “In raising our thoughts to the
consideration of Him Who Is, Christianity revealed to metaphysics the true
nature of its proper object” [81|80].
Plato and Aristotle seem “not to have
discerned the plain sense of the notions which they were the first to
formulate, because they failed to deepen the problem of existence18 in such a way as to go beyond the level of intelligibility and touch that of existence”
[83|82]. However, they were on the right track, and so there was real progress
in going beyond them. They stopped on the brink of the doctrine of Essence and
Existence as identical in God and different in all the rest. This doctrine is
the fundamental truth of Thomistic philosophy and, we may say, of all Christian
philosophy.
V. ANALOGY, CAUSALITY AND FINALITY [85-109 | 84-107]
If God=Being, then why should there
be anything besides? This problem did not exist for the
ancient Greeks. (And it is an insoluble problem only for “critical idealists”
like Kant: see his Fourth Antinomy; for the “realist rationalist”19 it is evident a priori that a solution must exist.) [85-6|84-5]. If the idea of God
is to justify the co-existence of creatures and their Creator, two questions need to be addressed.
First, a conceivable reason must be found why Being should ever produce
being(s); second, the relation between the two must be somehow made
intelligible.
1.
For medieval thinkers, “being is the
very root of causality” [87|86]. Fleshing out this idea philosophically is
heavy work, but an easy and legitimate way to envisage it is the frankly anthropomorphic way: to conceive it as
analogical with how we humans can ourselves be causes, and actually are causes.
This is legitimate insofar as it would be foolish to ignore the only mode of
being which we know from the inside. The
one typically human causality is the rational
sort, which implies that man can contain within himself the representations
of possible effects of his own acts. It is indeed the only way in which a man’s
acts and products could ever be his.
For medieval thinkers, “to be” was essentially an active verb. Being was the
primary act, and all other acts were “secondary acts” [90|90], the operations
of “beings”. On this view, to create is
to cause being. All caused beings have
their being while God alone is His
being. Beings are secondary causes since they are secondary beings. Creating is
exclusive to God [91|90].
2. The reason we cannot conceive the act
of creating is that we cannot create; and there is a similar problem about
conceiving the “nature or cause”20
of creating. St. Thomas, taking up a point of Augustine, demonstrated that the
creative act can have neither an internal nor an external cause [93|91]. God’s will is not caused any more than
His Being; but His will does have an object, namely, his own Being or
perfection. His Being or perfection, as
an object of will, is his goodness.
This goodness is what God necessarily and only wills; and it is only in
relation to this will that he wills anything besides (which indeed He does) – quia Deus bonus est, sumus (Aquinas); and: bonum est diffusum sui
et communicativem [94-5|93-4]. A very notable
philosophical step forward from ancient philosophy is made here, in that
Goodness is conceived (by Aquinas) as an aspect
of being. Thus Goodness is no longer
seen as beyond being – as not
only Plato [cf. 46|48] but even the earlier Christian thinker called Dionysius
had seen it. Unmistakably, the metaphysic of Exodus is here affecting the
course of the history of philosophy. Goodness
as an aspect of Being explains how Being can find itself invited to exert its
causative power – that is, find itself caused to create. “The perfection of
[God’s] actuality, conceived as good, invites Him to communicate this actuality
freely to the being of its possible effects” [95|94].
If causality consists in a “gift of
being”, the relation between cause and effect is necessarily analogical (Omne agens agit sibi simile [97|95]).
“Being” and “caused Being” are incommensurable, and precisely therefore they
are “compossible”. “In its existence and substantially21 … the
creature is an analogue of its Creator
[98|96]. Logical thought itself depends on assuming analogies [98-9|96-7],
since all classification assumes it. Analogy, whether or not we regard it as
primitive, obsolete, sauvage,
etc., very likely reflects “certain imperious necessities of human thought”
[100|98]. Resemblance is only one type of analogy. Each of Rembrandt’s
paintings bears his stamp, regardless of its subject: it is this sort of
recognition of the master’s stroke which is involved in the search for “vestiges”
of God in His creation. Sober thinkers like Aquinas, while affirming what
Newman later called the “sacramental character of the Christian world”, would
not accept most of “the resemblances accumulated by the great meditatives”; yet he did allow himself “to see in the substance, form, and order co-essential
with things the mark of the Triune God Who is their Author”
[101|99]. Thirteenth-century Scholasticism undertook an exploration of God’s
work on different lines from the older analogical thinking, without intentions
of competing with it or opposing it. Exploring things as concrete beings rather
than symbols, it sought to express the world’s analogy to God “in precise laws
and in definite metaphysical conceptions” [102|101]. “Physical causality stands to creation as beings to Being and time to
eternity” [103|101].
The moral reason for creation is,
inevitably, found within God; and it
is a “final cause” [103|102]. It should be noted that “egoism” is a very faulty
metaphor for God’s self-love. While secondary beings will always more or less
“expand while realizing themselves”, creating
is “the act of a good which [being already perfect] has no good to acquire.”
“Giving itself” is the only mode in which it can act [104|103].22
“Born of a final cause, the universe is
necessarily impregnated with finality” [105|104]. While efficient causes are,
and will ever remain, a proper object of inquiry, the “virgin” of
Contemplation, despised as barren by Francis Bacon, ought nevertheless to keep
her primacy and indeed keep vigil over the world’s very intelligibility
[106|104; cf. 81|80]. If the question is raised whether there is any “Why” to
the world, men do well to look inward and see that man himself is “living
testimony to the presence of finality in the universe” [107|105]. This may be
considered naïve; and surely anthropomorphism often takes pretty naïve shapes
in practice. The truly desperate naïveté,
however, is in denying and ignoring finality altogether in the name of a method
– science – which has from the outset forbidden itself to take finality into
account. It is only natural that Christian thinkers felt at home with Plato and
Aristotle, and no less natural that Christian thinkers completed Plato’s and
Aristotle’s work. Christian finalism is
an “immediate corollary from the idea of creation”, and “the notion of
final cause only gets its full sense in a universe that depends from the
liberty of the God of the Bible and the Gospel” [109|106].
VI. CHRISTIAN OPTIMISM [110-132 | 108-127]
Equating
Christianity with its supposedly world-denying tendencies and “heroes of the
interior life” [111|109] is a widespread error. Undeniably, at least since the
second century there has been such a thing as “Christian optimism”. Its
cornerstone has been Genesis 1:31: “God
saw all that He had made, and it was very good.” Irenaeus (†c. 202) clearly stated that Christian
optimism is a corollary from the Christian idea of creation [112|110]. Two
centuries later, the non-philosophical input from Genesis may well have
prevented Augustine from yielding to Neo-Platonic suggestions that evil is
reducible to matter and matter verges on non-being; Augustine refused to accept
that matter could be both bad and created. He converted the “religious
optimism” of Exodus 3:14 into “metaphysical optimism”, asserting that even the
mere unrealized capacity of matter to receive form is to be reckoned among the
varieties of goodness. Matter is good:
so it must be God’s work (contra
Manichaeans); matter is God’s work: so it must be good (contra Plotinus) [115-16|112].
The idea of creation also offers a
“solution” to the problem of evil.
Change, novelty, decay, and gradations of goodness, are all entailed by the
existence of (material or immaterial) beings,
as resulting and distinguished from Being. It is actually through spirit, not
through matter, that the thing properly called evil ever got and still gets a
foothold in the world [117-18|114].23 The dangerous possibility for created beings
to unmake themselves can become a practical reality in the moral sphere alone,
i.e. among beings who are allowed to assist their Creator in guarding against
that very danger.
Augustine’s view found definitive
expression when St. Thomas showed that the radical distinction between
creatures and their Creator is found in the configuration of essence and existence rather than in
that of matter and form. However, Augustine
already had a fully fledged conception of evil as
“the lesser good” and of good as “the subject of evil” [119|115]. He was not
denying that “that which in the rest of nature remains mere privation and
corruption” becomes misery among rational beings [121|116-17], i.e. among men.
Created “in God’s image”, they have the gifts of rationality, a will, and
liberty. Free will is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for man’s
greatest good: enjoying God. Sin is,
essentially, the free choice of any lesser good, offering “the sorry
spectacle of beings in revolt against Being” [122|118].24 The story of the Fall, as referred to in Romans
5:12,25 is yet another instance of revelation
providing a fact which opens up an otherwise closed new direction for reason to
explore. “All that is called evil is either sin or a punishment of sin” –
Augustine, Enchiridion xxiv-xxv
[124|119].
What remains to be explained is how human
free will could ever get corrupted unless it contained some corruption from the
outset – which original corruption would have to be the Creator’s work. On this
issue, Christianity may seem to cut a pessimistic figure after all, at least
when confronted with Pelagianism. However, freedom could never be real, and
could never be the good it is, without implying the real possibility of this
corruption. The relevant question is why
God should create free beings. The answer is: because they are not only the
noblest ornaments of Creation but, after God, its Final Cause [126|121].
Christianity thus remains fundamentally optimistic. The only peril threatening
a will is “the metaphysical contingence inseparable from the state of being
created – a pure possibility, without
the least rudiment of actuality, and which not only could have but perhaps ought
to have never actualized itself” [127|121-2].26 Christianity thus reduces evil to an
“avoidable accident” and relegates it “to
the margins of the fundamental good which is the universe” [127|122].
Any general depreciation of “the world”,
far from being an original and defining feature of Christianity, is rather an
error inspired by Luther, Calvin, or Jansenius
[127|122]. In contrast, Augustine’s work features “genuine eulogies of fallen
nature” [128|122]. For Aquinas,
“corrupted nature” was a contradiction in terms [129|124]. As regards human nature, the good that was
supposedly corrupted takes three forms:
1.
its constitution as a reasonable animal: this remains unaffected by the Fall.
2.
its natural inclination towards good: this is diminished, but not suppressed.
3.
its gift, by grace, of “original justice”: this is quite lost, but it falls
outside the scope of nature.
It is easy to exaggerate the extent to
which the Renaissance “discovered” and valued nature after many centuries of
undue depreciation. The spirit of Medieval philosophy, precisely because it was
a Christian spirit, was actually in deep agreement with certain positive
aspirations of the Renaissance. “The true Christian sentiment toward nature is
affirmed throughout the Psalms and in the Song of the Three Young Men in the
Furnace” [130|126]. St. Francis is
the perfect representative of Christian
optimism and asceticism as two sides of the same coin. The relevant
question about nature is not whether she is good or bad, but “whether she is
self-sufficient and whether she suffices” [132|127].27 The answer is No. “In that sense, if optimism
consists in neither denying nor accepting evil but in facing and fighting it,
then we may legitimately speak of Christian optimism”.
VII. THE GLORY OF GOD [133-152 | 128-147]
One of the
hardest problems for medieval Christian philosophers – and one on which their progress has been particularly evident –
is how created being is related to the uncreated One Being.28 In the late 17th century, Malebranche [133|129]
suggested that the great sin for creatures is independence, including all their longing and striving for it. And
indeed, the “radical contingence” of all creation puts it in a position of
“absolute dependence on the necessary Being”. This Being is the source of the
existence, the substantiality and the causality of each secondary being
[134|129]. But if all this is granted, the philosophical problem is that it is
not the whole story. Creatures are not nothing. The “secret” which both raises
and answers this problem is that it is “not
in spite of its ontological dependence that the creature is really something,
since if it is something it is so precisely in virtue of this very dependence” [135|130]. It is, surely, only in God that (as St Paul says in
Acts 17:28) we have “our life, movement and being”: but then, indeed, we have these things.
Augustine
was already keen to assert that God governs not by supplanting created things
and their efficacy but, rather, through
them and their proper operations. This leaves us with the unanswered question
how a created universe could be full of secondary causes; but in the 13th
century St. Thomas suggested that we
do better to ask how it could have been otherwise. The really odd thing for
“fecundity itself” would have been to create a universe of sterility. If
created beings are analogous to the One Being, so is their efficacy. [136|131;
cf. 103|101].
Thus far, all medieval philosophers were
agreed. However, there has also been a perennial difference between the two
metaphysical positions represented by Augustine and Aquinas. This difference
seems to stem from an underlying difference in “religious sentiment” regarding
“God’s glory” – a difference which is perhaps historical rather than perennial.
It concerns the precise extent of “the
causality and efficacy that God concedes to creatures, and, in particular, to
men” [136-7|132].
1. Augustine,
much as he sang the praises of creation even in its fallen state [cf. 128|122],
remained loth to accord to nature any semblance of perfection and
self-sufficiency. In a sense, he was the progenitor of all later
“God-of-the-gaps” thinking. With Augustine, “the supernatural dependence of
beings in the order of grace and their natural dependence in the order of
existence tend to run to a strict
limitation of their efficacy” [138|134]. Our misery testifies to God’s
grandeur more eloquently than our own grandeur does, since our grandeur may
falsely suggest independency. In line with a threefold division of the problem
as provided by Aquinas, we may analyse Augustine’s view into
– a doctrine
of “seminal reasons” (a term adopted
from Stoicism and Neoplatonism): on causality in the physical domain. Augustine
suggested that God created Heaven and earth not only ex nihilo but in a single act and instant, rather than in six days
(which he took metaphorically, with the seventh day representing all history
since the creation). So-called secondary causes are mere prods for “latent virtualities” which God put into matter at the moment of
creation [140|135];
– a doctrine
of truth: on causality in the domain
of knowledge. “A created intellect cannot give being to anything necessary,
i.e. to any veritable being”, so that the fact that we do in fact attain to
necessary truths must be explained from divine illumination [141-2|136-7];29
– a doctrine
of virtue: on causality in the moral
domain. This takes the same form as the previous. “I need to receive from the
divine embrace the seeds of virtue as much as those of the sciences”
(Augustine, De libero arbitrio
II.10.29)30 [142-3|137-8].
2. For Aquinas,
each of the three doctrines had the same inconvenience: “nature herself does
nothing”. There is nothing in these doctrines to convince us that beings are
real beings and causes are real causes [143-4|138-9]. On the Thomistic view,
then,
– secondary
causes are participations in the divine causality;
– divine illumination consists in the gift, to
men, of an intellect that suffices for producing truth (while the denial of
this gift is “the foundation31
of Augustinian noetics” [145|139-40]);
– virtues are acquired by a “practical reason”
which is likewise a “participation in the divine light” [146|140].
In each of
the latter two cases, the human
intellect is “a participated likeness of the uncreated light in which the
Ideas are contained” [146|140].
Some 13th-century Augustinians responded
somewhat vigorously32 against the Thomistic view, in which God, as
they felt, receded much too far from the world and men. On closer inspection,
though, the only real difference between the two positions is that “the
Thomistic God has shown Himself to be more generous than Augustine’s”
[147|141]. In Thomism, “the notion of divine likeness comes to penetrate for
the first time to the very bosom of nature, beyond order, number and beauty,
embracing and impregnating her physical structure and annexing the very
efficacy of her causality.” Aquinas corrects Augustine in the name of
Augustine’s own principles, and “reinstat[ing] creation in the whole plenitude of its rights, because
it is from the grandeur of the work that we know the maker’s grandeur”
[148|141].
This restoration starts from the
“principle of principles” [God=Being; cf. Ch. III] with its corollary that all
secondary, created being, in whatever way or measure, is partly unrealized.
Created beings therefore always remain susceptible to improvement, i.e.
increased resemblance to God. For any creature to advance from potential being
or goodness to actual being or goodness must involve the exercise of its proper
operations. This means that creatures must resemble God in His quality not only
of Being but of Cause, too. There is a superficial resemblance here with
Aristotle’s view of things as “moving to acquire their proper substantiality”
as they imitate the divine perfection of the Unmoved Mover; in fact, on the
Christian view, causality is a result and analogue of creation and so continues
creation. To be a cause is to “serve as
an instrument in the work of creation” [150|144]. Insisting on the advance
of beings toward perfection and on their efficacy is not to detract from God’s
glory but rather to “exalt it in exalting them” [150|144]. Vilifying Nature is a philosophical error and an injustice to God.
This Thomistic assertion of a universe
which is good yet incomplete and which therefore tends to “conquer its good by
accomplishing its being” [152], and the implied “redressment”
of Augustine’s ideas on illumination and seminal reasons, lie “precisely in the
true line of Christian tradition” [152|146].33 Scriptural quotations as used by
these thinkers are not mere ornaments but, rather, clear signs of “the aid that revelation brings to reason” [153|146]. The
correction to Augustine is itself a case of advance toward perfection; the
medieval thinkers were aware of being collaborators on a single project.
VIII. CHRISTIAN PROVIDENCE [154-174 | 148-167]
Plato’s
doctrine of Providence (as found in Laws
X) is the nearest relative or precursor in ancient Greek philosophy of the
Christian doctrine. Plato insisted that nothing whatever escapes the
(ultimately benevolent) care of the gods for human affairs. Their actual
“providence”, however, consists in an inexorable set of laws which humans will
be wise to observe [154-5|148-50]. – This doctrine, while useful as a praeparatio evangelica,
was radically changed by Christian thinkers when the “fundamental relation of made things to their maker” [156|150] was
brought to bear on it. The Psalmist “feared” a personal Lord, on Whose will our
whole existence and destiny depended. This is a far cry from Plato’s reasonable
acknowledgement of an immutable mechanism [157|151]. The Old-Testament
“election of Israel” resulting from the divine will developed into the election
of all mankind34 in Christianity. The Creator’s power takes
the guise of His Fatherhood: Our Father in Heaven [158|152]. From the outset, the Christian concept of God as Providence
was firmly grounded in the notion of God as Creator: as Athenagoras
asserted in the second century, He could not be one without being the other
[160|153]).
The Platonic concept of “Ideas”, while remaining very much in
use, was likewise assimilated to Christian theology, notably by Augustine. In
his view, all Ideas are eternally present in God as immutable and necessary “expressions of the possible participations
in God” [161|154]. Therefore, since Ideas are objects of knowledge [cf.
169|161], and creation is an act of will, everything in the universe is
“foreseen, willed, ordered, and nothing happens by chance” [163|156]. Once
again, creating the world and governing it became almost equivalent.
Many centuries later, St Thomas specified
the way in which the “Ideas” were of God’s essence and served as the models for
all created things. Ideas are God’s
essence under its aspect of opportunity for created beings somehow to
participate in its perfection. As there is a vast variety of such
opportunities, there is a vast variety of possible creatures. There are in God
as many Ideas as there are creatures, representing God’s perfect knowledge of
His own existence. God Himself alone exists without any such “ideal” model for
participation. In this scheme, Ideas have no meaning except in relation to
possible creation, and all Ideas are of such things as are “susceptible of an
existence of their own” [164|158]. This is a momentous difference with the
Platonic Ideas, which exist quite independently of whether any god or anything
else exists at all. Moreover, the Christian
“Ideas” are the originals or models of concrete things, never of abstractions.
“God knows all things, but He knows them as they are, because they are as He
knows them ... Ideas only appear with the possibility of creation and as
expressions of the relation of possible creatures to the creative essence”. The
Ideas in God are, “above all” [cf. 169n2|461n17], Ideas of individual beings,
“because they are truly real and it
is in them that accidents, species and genera subsist” [165|159].
Bonaventure suggested that the Ideas in
God are not merely “known” (as Thomas had it) but are being expressed [167|159]; Duns Scotus held
them to be “the creatures themselves as creatable by God and existing in Him by
their concepts, conceived as possibles” [167-8|160].
Such slight nuances do not hide the “fundamental unity of Christian thought”,
since they invariably affirm that “the Heavenly Father, precisely because He
has drawn forth all things from nonentity, cannot be conceived other than as a
Providence” (cf. Wisdom 14:3) [168|160]. With a divine Idea behind each
creature, God’s knowledge “necessarily
extends as far as his causality” [169|161]. That is, God sees and knows
everything – sees, indeed, every
single thing, especially individual
things. Yet since “the particular is inseparable from its order, the order of
the work [of creation] is part of the work” [169|161].
Augustine’s view of Providence receives
its fully articulated, perfectly clear and conscious expression in a passage of
St. Thomas’s Contra gentiles (III.1)
[170|161-2].
God has willed each creature; and His
will, combined with perfect knowledge, is to direct them all “to Himself”, i.e.
to make His own perfection available for participation by each of all possible
recipients. Rational creatures have a special position and hence enjoy a
special kind of providence. Men, by their nature, are rational beings and
therefore, in some measure, free masters of their own actions; by their destiny
they are, through their operations, to “attain the last end of universal nature
in knowledge and love” [172|164]. They are thus eminently capable to participate in God’s perfection. This is why
they stand to the rest of creation as an end to a means, or as an army’s
fighting troops to the auxiliary services. Also, being immortal, they are
distinguished from the rest by achieving their intended participation not only
as a species but as individuals. Again, as rational creatures they have the
privilege of some degree of participation in God’s providence, rather than
merely undergoing it as other creatures do. Human prevision stands to God’s providence as human causality stands to
divine creation” [cf. 103|101]. In fact, humans exert a modicum of governing power over themselves and the rest of
creation. “God is not just controlling man by His providence but associates man
with it”: while all other creatures “only participate in God’s providence
inasmuch as they are subjected to it” [174n1|461n25], man “is governed by it
and governs himself, and not only himself but all the rest as well. In a word,
and to say all, each human being is a person”
[173|166]. As St. Thomas says in Contra
Gentiles III.113, “All lower providence … is subjected to divine providence
as the higher one. Governing the acts of a rational creature, then, inasmuch as
they are personal acts, pertains to divine providence” [174n1|461n25]. Here the
notion of Personhood makes its decisive
appearance in Christian thought. In addition to the profound change in the
concept of Ideas and of Providence, this makes for a radical anthropological
innovation as compared with the ancient Greek idea of man.
IX. CHRISTIAN ANTHROPOLOGY [175-193 | 168-188]
Man’s intimate and radical
dependence on God, in Christian thought, marks a radical departure both from
Plato’s and from Aristotle’s account of man – in spite of much terminological
similarity. Christianity’s relationship
with both Plato and Aristotle has been fruitful but uneasy. The uneasiness
is reflected by the way Christianity’s reputation of mere world-forsaking
spirituality contrasts with its actual celebration of the body and love for
material creation as found in some of its greatest thinkers; also, in the
historical progression from accepting Plato to accepting Aristotle as the main
pagan philosophical authority.
Christianity started
out as an assertion and promise of resurrection for complete human
individuals. The immortality of the soul was not by itself an issue: the
soul might or might not be dead until the resurrection . What was preached and
believed was “the permanence and eminent value of the individual as such”, that
is, of “the concrete being, made of body and soul, which is called man”
[177|171]. The substantial unity of the human composite was thus of crucial
importance, and the question of immortality was at first subsidiary to that of
resurrection. Under Platonic influence, though, it was soon recognized that there
were “compelling philosophical reasons” for affirming the soul’s immortality.
The problem then became that of conceiving the immortality of the soul while
assuring the future destiny of the body [179|172]. Plato was strong on the soul’s immortality, but weak on man’s unity.
Augustine, while never ceasing to “affirm” this unity, was frankly embarrassed
when it came to “justifying” it [181|175]. What was certain was that a
Christian could never construe the natural unity of body and soul as resulting
from some mishap or Fall. “Since the issue was the salvation of the whole man,
Christian philosophy could hardly propose to save the soul from the body, but
rather to save the body through the soul.” Man had to be a “substantial
composite” [181|175]. How to develop this accepted idea philosophically? This
problem did not come within sight of a solution until the early 13th century,
when Aristotle’s definition of the soul as “the act or form of an organized body having life potentially” got
currency.
To be sure, Aristotle
himself had not been quite at ease about his own account of the intellect as “a
principle of operations independent of the body in its exercise and hence
superior to what would be a simple substantial form” [183|177]; and for
Christians the immortality merely of the intellect was an inadmissible
limitation of the doctrine of resurrection. Nevertheless Aristotle was strong on unity, but weak on immortality. Thus the
challenge became to rescue “the Platonic immortality of the soul and the
Aristotelian unity of the human composite” and to find a solution beyond mere eclecticism. Albertus Magnus and others did not get beyond eclecticism [186|180]).
The Arab philosophers Averroes and Avicenna, by and large, only helped to
preserve the two horns of the dilemma [184-5|178-9].
It was St. Thomas who at last provided the
combined justification for the two principles in a way which “necessarily
flowed from these principles” themselves [186|181]: and this is an exquisite
example of Christian philosophy since the
solution became more Christian precisely in becoming more philosophical
[187|182]. Avicenna taught (and Albertus more or less accepted) a definition of
the soul as “a substance exerting the function of a form” [185|180]; but this
failed to account for any necessary union of soul and body, and it is a line of
thought that leads to Descartes. In contrast, Thomas’s “soul” is “a form
possessing and conferring substantiality” [187|182], i.e. a substantial
form [188|183, 190|185, 192n1|463n19].35 This concept had always been implicit in
Aristotle’s philosophy although Aristotle himself never used it. As Thomas
recognized, even for Aristotle’s early followers some “substances” were pure
“forms”, and these forms were substances precisely in virtue of their
pure-formality: the purer, the more formal, and thus the more substantial
[188|183].36 A key issue for Thomas, then, was to show that
the human soul is a substance, i.e. that she “subsists”.37 He did show this by way of a sort of
“argument from reason”38 for the soul’s existence (or subsistence), developed
from an Augustinian argument for the soul’s immateriality (which by the 13th
century had ceased to be an issue). What Thomas argued was that “the human
intellect must be considered as an incorporeal substance in its being as well
as in its operations” [189-90|185]. This point settled, it just had to be
obvious that souls are substantial forms. They are related to Aristotle’s
“separate Intelligences” and hence to angels [188n2]39 but, within this class, substantial forms
are of the comparatively weak, inferior kind which “could not subsist save as the forms of certain bodies” [191|186].
Unlike the higher kinds, souls are spiritual substances which are merely
dazzled and struck down when confronted with “pure intelligibles”,
so that they cannot apprehend them. All the same, souls are at least “open to
the intelligibility involved in matter” [191|186]. This means that if a soul is
to get in touch with the world of bodies, it needs the intermediation of a body. Thus these lower-order
substantial forms become, since they must
become, the forms of bodies.40
A man can therefore
not be equated with his soul. This substantial form – the human soul – “is only
a part of man”. The intellect, an incorporeal substance, is the form of the
human body [190-1|185-6]. For St. Thomas, man is not a fusion of two substances
producing a third. The thinking or feeling subject is not a man’s intellect or
sensibility, but a man. On the basis
of this observation (which is indeed an observation,
not an inference or deduction), Thomas asserts that there is a single human substance, which “owes its whole substantiality
to that of its soul” [192|187] – “a complex substance which owes its
substantiality to only one of its constituent principles” [193|188].
X. CHRISTIAN
PERSONALISM [194-213 | 189-208]
The Greeks, never denying the
reality of the individual, opened the way for Christian recognition of the eminent worth of the human person. Even so, a
great deal of speculative effort was still required for a philosophically
justified “metaphysic of the person” to arise from the metaphysical principles
which Plato and Aristotle had certainly had “in their hands” [195|190]. For Plato, the various degrees of
excellence as found in various human individuals are all a matter of fuller or
lesser participation in the ideal type of humanity – which is their single
common reality. For Aristotle, the
individual alone can be said to properly exist;41 nevertheless, the multiplicity of passing
individuals is a mere substitute for the unity of the species, which endures
even while it does not “subsist” [196|191].
This depreciation of the individual soon came under attack from
many Christian thinkers. One early example is Athenagoras. Having shown that
the resurrection of the body is neither impossible to God nor unworthy of Him,
he pointed out that man’s final cause – contemplation of God’s perfection and
of the beauty of His works – necessarily implies that there is an afterlife in
which it is achieved. Nor could it be achieved by a disembodied soul; and this
means that the body is going to be resurrected. The Christian gospel required
that the human individual became “the protagonist of a drama which is that of
his own destiny”. Neither our existence nor our non-existence is in our power.
Such foreseen, willed, elected and
indestructible existence of the individual was wholly alien to both Plato
and Aristotle. It represents an original contribution to philosophy which
Christian thinkers found themselves constrained to make if they were to give a
rational justification of Christian hope [197|193].
This thought was further developed along two lines, each of
which consisted in an attempt to solve a problem inherited from Aristotle. The
simpler and less satisfying solution was the one proposed by Duns Scotus [199|195]. For Aristotle,
individuality resulted not from an individual’s “form” but from its “matter”.
The form was literally speci-fic, “making the species”, and
therefore was invariable – otherwise it would make no species. The insoluble
problem here was that matter can’t begin to have its individuating power unless
it has (to some extent) already been “formed”, i.e. individuated. Introducing
individual differences on the part of the forms spelled ruin for the unity of
the species. Duns Scotus, as an heir to this problem and aiming to rescue the unity of the human species, actually ended up
profoundly modifying the notion of that unity. On his view, the soul is
never a soul but always this soul, essentially individual and as
such conferring individuality on the whole man. Human individuality was thus
assured: the individual’s humanity was not.
St. Thomas avoided
this outcome by sticking more closely to Aristotle while maintaining his notion
of the soul as a “substantial form” [cf. Chap. IX]. For St. Thomas, a man
is an individual because he cannot subdivide into smaller units each of which
partakes of its (human) nature. The individuality (“in-divisible-ness”) is
compatible with man’s composite nature as body and soul if this composite
nature is seen to result from the substantial-form nature of the soul. Without
human bodies, there are no human individuals; yet it is not the body which
confers dignity on the individual, or defines its originality [204|200]. Matter is the principle of individuation in man as in any
individual, but matter is not, in man, the principle of his individuality. “The soul is an
individual form, although not precisely as
form,42 and it is the subsistence of this individual
form which, bestowing its own proper existence upon matter, permits the
individual to subsist” [205|200-1].
In further defining this peculiar type of individuality, the
concept of personality is indispensable. Boethius, in a treatise on the
two natures of Christ, had supplied the seminal definition of a person as rationalis naturae individua
substantia. Reason is the key
element in the kind of dignity that is called personhood; Liberty is its key practical consequence. In man, “the actuality of
the reasonable soul, in communicating itself to the body, determines the
existence of an individual who is a person, so that the individual soul possesses personality as by definition”
[208|202]. The usual relation of means to end, as obtaining for other
individuals with respect to their species, is reversed in the case of man as
conceived by St. Thomas. Nature’s aim
(or the human species’ aim) is here “the multiplication of human individuals”
[209|203] rather than the endurance of
the species. The person “is constituted in being and exists in virtue of
the sole fact that an intellect, a principle of free determinations, is united
to a matter so as to constitute a rational substance” [209|203-4].43
For medieval thinkers, “to be a person is to participate in one
of the highest excellences of the divine being” [210|205]; yet in modern eyes
the medievals may seem to have done curiously little
to develop the idea of human personhood. They developed the concept of
personhood mainly with regard to God, not least to the God of Exodus 3:14 (cf.
Bonaventure on John 8:38, Ecce personalis distinctio: Exodi tertio, ego sum, qui sum).
St. Thomas asserted that persona significat
id quod est perfectissimum
in tota natura (S.T. I.29.3 Resp.) [211|206] – and
clearly no ultimate perfection was to be achieved in earthly conditions.
Personhood with respect to man is therefore usually discussed in terms not of
free action but of rationality, both
theoretical and practical.
Conclusion
of Chapters I-X: “If it is to Scripture that we owe our having a
philosophy which is Christian, it is to the Greek tradition that Christianity
owes its having a philosophy at all” [212|207]. The spirit of medieval philosophy may be usefully
identified with the spirit of Christian
philosophy, at least as a way to distinguish it from its esteemed predecessor.
The distinction is surely relevant for purposes of interpretation.
NOTES
1.^
Page numbers in the French edition (deuxième édition revue, Paris
1944) are followed by those in the English translation by A. H. C. Downes
(Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York 1940). Since I read the book in French and
summarized it from that text, most of the quotations in the present summary are
given in my own translation, although some are taken verbatim from Downes’s
version or partly brought into line with it. The difference in chapter size
between the two versions reflects the difference between a layout with
footnotes (French) and one with endnotes (English).
2.^
French: “conditions de fait”.
3.^
A supposition apparently found
in Hamelin, Le système d’Aristote
(1920).
4.^
French: “La notion de philosophie chrétienne a un sens, parce que l’influence
du Christianisme sur la philosophie est une réalité.” Downes translates un sens as “a real meaning”.
5.^
Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts
(1780), §76: “Man wende nicht ein, dass dergleichen Vernünfteleien über die
Geheimnisse der Religion untersagt sind. – Das Wort Geheimniss
bedeutete, in den ersten Zeiten des Christentums, ganz etwas anders, als wir
jetzt darunter verstehen; und die Ausbildung geoffenbarter Wahrheiten in Vernunftswahrheiten ist schlechterdings notwendig, wenn dem
menschlichen Geschlechte damit geholfen sein soll. Als sie geoffenbart wurden,
waren sie freilich noch keine Vernunftswahrheiten;
aber sie wurden geoffenbart, um es zu werden.” It is to be
noted that while Gilson rendered Lessing’s geoffenbarte Wahrheiten as vérités religieuses, the term has further morphed into “great religious
truths” in Downes’s translation. Also, Lessing’s words um es zu werden
and Gilson’s correct rendering as afin de les devenir are rendered as “that they might become so” in
the published translation.
7.^ Downes translates l’oeuvre de sa constitution [32] as “the work of its construction”, and la constitution [37] as “the
constitution”.
8^.
French: “la conduite de leur pensée”. Gilson seems to mean the same
as when he spoke of un exercice chrétien de la raison
or “a Christian exercise of reason” [10|12]. Cf. C. S. Lewis on Anselm, Descartes and the Ontological Proof in
his essay “The Language of Religion”. But exactly how to define and distinguish
texture and conduite?
9.^ “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.”
10.^
And, as C. S. Lewis might have added, Plato conceived of the Good as “beyond
Being”.
11.^ “God said to Moses, ‘I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the
Israelites: I am has sent me to
you.’”
12.^ From Latin aseitas,
“of-himself-ness”; cf. a se
< > ab alio.
13.^
French: “quelle est la raison suffisante d’un être capable de concevoir l’idée
d’être et d’y lire l’inclusion nécessaire de l’éxistence
dans l’essence.” Downes’s translation is doubly and seriously
amiss: “If … we seek the sufficient reason of a being capable of conceiving the
idea of being, and there read the
inclusion of essence in existence, we are dealing with a question which must remain an open one in any
epistemology” (faulty parts here italicized). Gilson’s text seems itself
ambiguous about the precise antecedent of y
in et d’y lire
(“and of reading there”).
14.^ “I the Lord
do not change.” Perhaps also James 1:17, “Every good and perfect gift is from
above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change
like shifting shadows.”
15.^ “In the beginning God created the heavens
and the earth.”
17.^
French: “Être en tant qu’être”.
18.^ i.e. the question
how things could exist without being permanent.
20.^
Also, “the why of creation” – le pourquoi de la création
[92|91]. In what follows here, Gilson does not take up this “similar problem”
as one which is at all distinguished from the first. It does get a fuller
treatment in Chapter VII.
21.^
French: “dans son existence et substantiellement.”
22.^
French: “l’Être … ne peut plus agir que pour se donner.”
23.^ Cf. C. S. Lewis: “There’s nothing
specially fine about simply being a spirit. The Devil is a spirit” (Perelandra, Ch. 7).
24.^ Cf. C. S. Lewis: “a solecism against the
grammar of being” (The Problem of Pain,
Ch. 3).
25.^ “… just as sin entered the world through
one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because
all sinned …”
26.^ Downes translates the last clause as: “…a
possibility that not only could have remained unactualized but ought to have
done so.” The full sentence in French reads:
“Le seul péril qui menace une telle nature [i.e. une volonté], c’est donc la
contingence métaphysique inséparable de l’état d’être créé, une pure possibilité, sans le moindre rudiment
d’existence actuelle, et qui non seulement aurait pu, mais aurait dû ne jamais
s’actualiser” (with a note giving
a quotation from Augustine’s Contra Julianum). On contingence see
also Ch. IV [66|67-8].
27.^
French: “si elle se suffit et si elle suffit.” Downes here
translates la nature as “the world”.
28.^ The question has been left partly
unsolved (see note 21, above.)
29.^
French: “…tout jugement vrai suppose une illumination naturelle de la pensée
par Dieu.” (It seems that naturelle
is out of place here: p. 143 has phrases l’étreinte divine and l’illumination divine in apparently parallel positions
and functions.)
30.^
Cf. C. S. Lewis’s “argument from reason” and “moral argument” and his habitual
presentation of them as twin arguments.
31.^ French: “le fonds même”.
Perhaps fonds should be fond.
33.^
French: “sont exactement dans l’axe de la tradition chrétienne.”
34.^
French: “élection de l’humanité tout entière” [158]. But is this
actually a Biblical concept? Or is Gilson conflating Israel’s “election” with
the “calling” or “promise” which came to be extended “to the ends of the
earth”? “Universal election” seems a contradiction in terms.
35.^ The same term, although it is a key term
in the present exposition of St. Thomas’s thought, seems to be used in a
different sense in the passage on p. 183|177 about Aristotle’s “intellect”,
where this intellect is said to be supérieur à ce que serait une
simple forme substantielle
(“superior to any mere substantial form”) and hence a problem if man is to be
conceived as a single unified being.
36.^ A substance is “something that subsists”;
cf. Thomas, Summa Theologiae.
I.75.2 Sed contra: “Natura ergo mentis humanae … etiam est substantia, scilicet aliquid subsistens.”
37.^ In this context, it is hard to see how
the meaning of subsist differs from
that of exist.
38.^ The name first used for C. S. Lewis’s
version of this argument by its critic John Beversluis
(C. S. Lewis and the Search for
Rational Religion, 1985), and given some further currency by its defender
Victor Reppert (C.
S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason, 2003).
39.^ This note is not included in Downes’s
translation.
40.^
See C. S. Lewis’s miniature anthropology in the penultimate poem of The Pilgrim’s Regress, last stanza,
where the term “substantial form” appears. Characteristically for Lewis, he is
mainly concerned to note one advantage of the human condition over the angelic.
41.^ Not, apparently, to “subsist”.
42.^ Cf. 205n2|465n6], “…human souls … are not
individual as forms, but only as subsisting and forms of this substance which, apart from matter, would not exist.”
43.^ Downes’s translation. French: “se trouve posée dans
l’existence du seul fait qu’un intellect, principe de déterminations libres,
est uni à une matière pour constituer une substance raisonnable.”