Wisdom, Law, and Virtue: Essays in Thomistic Ethics

Chapter 3: St. Thomas, Metaphysics, and Human Dignity

Chapter 3 ST. THOMAS, METAPHYSICS, AND HUMAN DIGNITY What separates us irreparably from [modern science] is the Aristotelian (and common sense) notion of Substantial Form. . . . Descartes rid nature of it. They understand nothing anymore since they forgot Aristotle’s great saying that ‘‘there is no part of an animal that is purely material or purely immaterial.’’ It is not the word ‘‘philosophy,’’ it is the word ‘‘nature’’ that separates us from our contemporaries. Since I do not have any hope of convincing them of the truth (which yet is evident) of hylomorphism, I do not believe it is possible to propose our hypothesis to them as scientifically valid. —Etienne Gilson speaking of ‘‘la science moderne’’ in a letter to Jacques Maritain, September 8, 19711 Introduction The Christian does not depend on philosophy for his conception of human dignity. That is too serious an issue to be left to mere philosophy. As the common doctor of the Church, St. Thomas Aquinas, teaches in the very first article of his Summa theologiae (ST), there is need for a doctrine over and above philosophy, a doctrine revealed to us by God. The primary reason for this need is the very goal that God has in view for the human being, a goal that surpasses the human mind’s capacity to conceive.2 The magnitude of human dignity is properly grasped only in the light of that destiny.3 Thomas further teaches that even as regards what philosophy can tell us about God and our relation to him, we need divine revelation of the truth, because the philosophical truth is so difficult of access.4 Still, there is philosophical access to the natural dimension of our relation to God, and to the natural dimension of our dignity. That access is  St. Thomas, Metaphysics, and Human Dignity  metaphysics or ‘‘primary philosophy.’’ In 1967, Mortimer Adler published a book entitled The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes.5 He did so because the distinction between the human being and the rest of animal reality was becoming blurred. If that was so in 1967, it is even truer today, when Peter Singer, from his Princeton chair in bioethics, can advocate infanticide and champion ‘‘animal liberation.’’6 In this situation, the Christian believer and all humankind have a right to as much help from natural knowledge as can be supplied. In the present chapter, I wish to suggest something of the importance of metaphysics as a mode of knowledge that provides a basis for judgment concerning fundamental human dignity. Historical Background By ‘‘metaphysics’’ here, I mean the consideration of things from the viewpoint of their being beings.7 So to know things is one of the great achievements of the human mind, one that we can observe having been carried out historically in different cultures, but that has been most fully accomplished in the writings of Thomas Aquinas, following in the tradition of Aristotle.8 A conception of the human being is very much a part of the metaphysical endeavor.9 The early Greek philosophers developed a materialist conception of the human being. They held that although we ordinary folk take death very seriously and give it a special name, still it is really just an alteration in what is the true substance of things. For example, the philosopher Empedocles of Acragas10 posited four fundamental ‘‘roots’’—earth, water, air, and fire—which Aristotle interpreted as having the status of smallest particles.11 Empedocles says: ‘‘There is no birth of any of mortal things, nor any end in baneful death, but only a mixing and an exchange of the things that have been mixed.’’12 And: ‘‘But men, when these have been mixed in the form of a MAN and come into the light, or in the form of a species of wild animals, or plants, or birds, they say that this has ‘‘come into being’’; and when they separate, this men call sad fate. The terms that Right demands they do not use; but through custom I myself also apply these names.’’13 The conception developed by Plato, as we see in his Phaedo, focused on the mind of man. Indeed, it did so to such an extent that the presence  Wisdom, Law, and Virtue of the mind in the human body was seen as a form of punishment, the body being adjudged an unsuitable environment for the mind.14 Intellectual cultivation...