The Theology of Thomas Aquinas

Chapter Eighteen: Faith and Reason Follow Glory

  Eighteen Faith and Reason Follow Glory  .   , . Protestant skepticism about the theology of Thomas Aquinas focuses on his doctrine of grace. Protestants worry that Aquinas has too high a view of human nature, that grace for Aquinas is so reliable as to impugn divine freedom, and thus that humans could exact grace from God. Proof of the Pelagian defect is supposed to be Aquinas’ reliance on Aristotle , the natural philosopher par excellence. To this critique I will reply that Aquinas has so arranged things that the more Aristotelian he is, the greater is the power of grace. Chief among Aquinas’ Protestant detractors are Martin Luther and Karl Barth. Luther’s polemic against Aquinas is well known.1 Less well known are ways in which Luther might have turned Aquinas to his own purposes, had he known Aquinas better. For example, as Otto Pesch has pointed out, “In explaining Romans :,Thomas . . . does exactly that which offended Catholic exegetes so much in the case of Lu ther : without hesitation [Thomas] joins the ‘sola’ to the ‘fides,’ the ‘alone’ to the ‘faith,’ and interprets the verse to mean: the sinner receives . . . justification ‘by faith alone without works.’”2 In the locus classicus, Barth blames Aquinas for the dependence of Catholic theology on an “analogy of being” characterized by Barth in  as “the invention of the Antichrist.”3 As Barth explains, “Natural theology was able, . . . after the rediscovery of Aristotle, to get the upper hand over medieval theology, which at last and finally became apparent in the formulas of the First Vatican Council (in the canonization of  Thomas Aquinas as its supreme achievement).”4 But after Hans Urs von Balthasar ’s Karl Barth appeared in , Barth went out of his way to praise von Balthasar ’s understanding, seemed to accept the account of the analogia entis offered there, and had, by , dropped his polemic against Aquinas.5 By  Barth could write: the world which has always been around [the Gentiles], has always been God’s work and as such God’s witness to himself. Objectively the Gentiles have always had the opportunity of knowing God, his invisible being, his invisible power and godhead. And again, objectively speaking, they have always known him. In all that they have known otherwise, God as the Creator of all things has always been objectively speaking the proper and real object of their knowledge, exactly in the same sense as undoubtedly the Jews in their law were objectively dealing with God’s revelation. . . . How can the Gospel be God’s almighty power (:), if the Gentiles could exculpate themselves by saying that God is a stranger to them, that they are living in some forgotten corner of the world, where God is not God or cannot be known as God . . . ?6 The denial of God-forsakenness for the Gentiles amounts in effect to a doctrine of nature. By the end of his life, in , Barth could claim, “On the contrary , I would gladly concede that nature does objectively offer a proof of God, although the human being overlooks or misunderstands it.”7 And yet, if that were all, Aquinas’ Protestant detractors could still regard the argument that Barth accepted the validity of a doctrine of nature as mere proof-texting. Fully aware of Barth’s movement and of the texts cited above, a prominent Barthian (George Hunsinger) could still assert that Barth disagrees with Aquinas that in justification (and thus in salvation) grace actualizes a possibility inherent in human nature. Barth considers justification to be a miracle in the very sense that Aquinas rules out. Indeed, Barth must do so, precisely because he disallows a key premise articulated by Aquinas in this text, namely that “the soul is by nature capable of or open to grace.”8 Hunsinger’s complaint, too, can be disposed of. It depends on the misunderstanding of a technical term. When Aquinas uses “nature” without the possessive article, he means integral nature, which is elevated by grace.9 Otherwise, and quite rarely, he uses “natura sua,” one’s own proper nature, abstracted from the way it Faith and Reason Follow Glory  really is, suspended in grace. The soul is by nature (nature-elevated-by-grace) capable of or open to grace, or by grace is open to grace; the fact that nature is open to grace is a contingent grace that God did not need to grant yet did, just as...