Natura Pura: On the Recovery of Nature in the Doctrine of Grace

3. On the Impropriety of Treating Theology's Handmaiden like an Analytic

Chapter Three ON THE IMPROPRIETY OF TREATING THEOLOGY’S HANDMAIDEN LIKE AN ANALYTIC All these complexities and exceptions duly noted, the cultural fact remains fairly simple and clear. The main form of contemporary philosophical scholasticism is analytic philosophy, and it is almost entirely written in English. It announces by its name the secondary or handmaidenly role it is to play: not revealing or disclosing truth but analyzing the exigencies of what is taught or disclosed. Indeed, not a few undergraduates become disappointed by this basic and defining characteristic. They want revelations and epiphanies, but analytic philosophers seem always to be operating in the shadows, not saying immediately what is right or wrong but discussing the concepts of right and wrong so that one might approach moral questions with clarity and responsibility, not announcing what is true but investigating the nature of truth. One hears a common complaint, ‘‘empty formalism,’’ and it makes my point. Second-order technical discussions are the bread and butter of scholasticism, and students have complained of the apparent existential dryness since the days of Plato’s Academy. Rusty Reno, ‘‘Theology’s Continental Captivity’’ As is evident in the beginning of the Metaphysics, the speculative sciences concern things the knowledge of which is sought for their own sake. However, we do not seek to know the things studied by logic for themselves, but as a help to the other sciences. So logic is not included under speculative philosophy as a principal part but as something brought under speculative philosophy as furnishing speculative thought with its instruments, namely, syllogisms, definitions, and the like, which we need in the speculative sciences. Thus, according to Boethius, logic is not so much a science as the instrument of science. St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Boethius’s De trinitate Treating Theology’s Handmaiden like an Analytic  The Problem The essential role of natura in theological method, with all its ontological dynamism, density, and relative autonomy vis-à-vis the revelata, raises the stakes with regard to the understanding of nature and being.1 Following upon the theological recovery of nature, a correct and fruitful approach to the understanding of these principles is necessary within theological method. Hence, there arises the possibility that the type of thought that has flourished during the long winter of Catholic disengagement with natura, and that is circumambient in North America and Great Britain, may by default be judged a fit inheritor of, or substitute for, the office of classical Thomism. And it is indeed today often thought to be the case that analytic thought represents that contemporaneous tendency most cognate with a classical Thomism that is somehow presumably no longer itself feasible, such that analytic philosophy is taken to be ‘‘what Thomas would be doing were he alive today.’’ Such views are more common than their rarified regard for what is erroneously called analytic method in philosophy might tend to indicate. For indeed it is an error to conflate logic with scientific method, and it is an error to suppose that philosophy of nature and metaphysics are not—in the strong, Aristotelian sense of the term— scientia. Logic is employed by all the sciences—it is the propaedeutic to them all—yet no science of the real receives its total method from mere logic, and this is equally true of metaphysics and ontology of nature. This consideration moves one rather quickly to the initial problems with the suggestion that classical Thomism is no longer feasible save when re-appropriated through ‘‘analytic method.’’ First, even if (contrary to fact) this suggestion were true, the premise should be well established that in order to say with confidence that ‘‘X’’ is a development with respect to ‘‘Y,’’ we should know Y. This is immediately to establish that all claims with respect to developing the teaching of Aquinas are to be judged in relation to the teaching of Aquinas and of that school that has developed Thomas’s philosophy in its own right— which is to say, that all claims to develop Thomistic philosophy are to be measured in comparison with classical Thomism. But this requires  Treating Theology’s Handmaiden like an Analytic knowing Thomas’s philosophy,2 not to mention knowing the philosophic development of his work through several centuries of commentators from Capreolus, Cajetan, Bañez, or John of St. Thomas, to Maritain, Gilson, Yves Simon, Charles De Koninck, or...