Aquinas Against the Averroists: On There Being Only One Intellect

Part 4. Interpretive Essays

P F A R o U ~ IInterpretive Essays I Faith and Reason As the text ofthis polemical opusculum makes clear, while Thomas is outraged that fellow Christians should take the position he attacks to be compatible with their faith, his chiefconcern is to discuss the status ofthe human soul on a terrain that the believer can share with the nonbeliever, the mere philosopher. The whole ofthe first and longest chapter turns on the text ofAristotle: What precisely is Aristotle's teaching? Is Aristotle's teaching true? The text in question is Aristotle's On the Soul. We saw in the Introduction that Thomas composed a commentary on that workperhaps the first of his dozen Aristotelian commentaries-most likely prior to returning to Paris and entering into the fray ofLatin Averroism or heterodox Aristotelianism. Moreover, he produced a Disputed Question on Spiritual Creatures at roughly this same time. The Disputed Question is an overtly theological work, the product of one of the principal tasks of a magister regens. Of course, Thomas did not wait until the end ofhis career to discuss the soul. For important discussions ofit, we can go to the commentary on the Sentences or the Summa contragentiles, to the Summa theologiae, as well as to dozens ofother places in his vast literary production. The highly relevant questions 79-119 ofthe first part ofthe Summa are thought to have been written between the end of 1267 and the end of 1268. The Disputed Question on the Soul may also date from just before Thomas's return to Paris in 1269. Our concern in this section is to underscore one ofthe great divisions within that literature, that between the theological and the philosophical writings. I 155 156 I PAR T F 0 U R IHow Do Theology and Philosophy Differ? The vast majority of Thomas's writings are theological-commentaries on Scripture, the commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, the disputed and quodlibetal questions, the summaries of Christian doctrine. Indeed, this is so much the case that it is sometimes overlooked that, unlike most other theological masters-except , ofcourse, his teacher Albert the Great-Thomas also produced a significant number of philosophical works. There are some logical works attributed to Thomas. There is The Principles ofNature, a succinct presentation ofAristotle's teaching on the constitution of things that come to be as the result of a change. On Being and Essence, a metaphysical treatise of brevity and depth, can be read as a companion to book 7 ofthe Metaphysics. Thomas's commentary on Boethius's De hebdomadibus is arguably a philosophical work. He also wrote a commentary on The Book of Causes, a precis derived from Proclus. And, remarkable achievement , there are a dozen commentaries, not all of them finished, on Aristotelian treatises. It may seem that a sufficient workaday difference between writings that we would recognize as philosophical and those that we would call theological is that the latter make reference in a more than passing way to Christian doctrine, whereas the former do not. Thomas once put it thus: With respect to creatures, the philosopher and the believer are concerned with different things, since the philosopher considers what belongs to them given their proper natures, for example , that fire leaps up. The believer however considers only those things in creatures which belong to them insofar as they are related to God, for example, that they are created by God, are subject to God, and the like.1 That is true enough, roughly, but Thomas would insist on a more formal statement of their difference. It is best to begin with the notion ofan argument. Ifyou seek to persuade another of the truth of a certain claim, one way to do so would be to show that it is closely tied to other things your interlocutor already knows to be true. Your effort then consists in linking what you are proposing to what your addressee already knows so that the only way that one can reject your proposal is to abandon what one already knows to be true, something that you are confident one will not choose to do. This is particularly the case because, with a recalcitrant interlocutor, you would try to take matters back to things so obvious that to deny them would be Pickwickian at best, irrational at worst. 157 I Interpretive EssayslFaith and Reason Thomas learned from Aristotle this technique of looking...