Using Aquinas to Rescue Analogical Understanding

This appreciation of the work of Norrie Clarke testifies to his stirring presence in Catholic philosophical circles during my adult life of inquiry. In fact, Norrie Clarke fairly epitomizes the way philosophical inquiry can be enhanced by a faith as staunch as it is critical. For with such a faith comes an abiding openness to following paths different from our own, confident that the ensuing interaction can help us develop the skills needed for proper discernment. Learning from others was ever part of his own way of learning from Thomas Aquinas, clearly contributing to an abiding desire to illustrate the relevance of his mentor’s way of doing philosophy. Moreover, in doing so, Clarke never took pains to distinguish Aquinas’s faith-life from his mode of inquiry; in fact, Clarke’s own way of proceeding melded the two in ways which follow the contours of Aquinas’s own inquiry, to let that medieval searcher enliven our searching today. One can only imagine how such an embodied spirit of inquiry lured his students into doing philosophy as he himself displayed.

We can best summarize that spirit in philosophical terms by twinning analogy with participation, as Philip Rolnick suggests and develops in his study comparing our work.¹ Yet as cognate as our inquiry has been over the years, we have worked more alongside one another than in concert—although a linking spirit can well be identified with Bernard Lonergan’s “quest for understanding.” I suspect that Clarke is the better teacher of the two of us, intent on developing a metaphysical narrative that will captivate students. His approach is far more traditional as well, though his conclusions seldom are. We can detect this difference by our respective takes on the critical term ‘being.’ Clarke uses it unabashedly, while I tend to shy away from it. Tracing the reasons why could be mutually illuminating, as well as offer some perspective on different ways of doing philosophy. Initially, Clarke appears to take what people came to call “the Thomistic synthesis” for granted, whereas early mentors helped me to see it as a bowdlerization of Aquinas, ironically inspired by the very Cartesian need for certitude which Leo XIII’s Aeterne Patris intended it to supplant. Some decades ago the impeccably literate commentator of Thomas Aquinas, Josef Pieper, explained succinctly why ‘Thomism’ had failed to do the work which Pope Leo XIII envisaged it doing: that is, offering a thoroughly rational, hence utterly persuasive, presentation of key facets of Catholic metaphysics and ethics. His disarming remark that the “hidden element in the philosophy of St. Thomas is [free] creation” (emphasis added and ‘free’ presumed) corroborated the suspicion of secular philosophers: that the touted distinction between “philosophy” and “theology” was quite porous.² Yet that very distinction had already been molded into a sharp separation of faculties of Catholic universities, so the damage was done: generations of students would be misled into presuming that the operative core of their faith was available to untrammeled reason. Philosophy, and notably the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, was to mediate between believers and unbelievers because that philosophy was presumed innocent of propositions depending on faith.

To his enduring credit, however, Norrie never took “the Thomistic synthesis” in that direction. And thanks to the insistence of his confrere and colleague, Gerald McCool, SJ, he knew the descriptor “Thomistic synthesis” was a thoroughly misleading and ideological misconstrual of a multifaceted response to Aquinas over history.³ Yet Clarke was never misled, since he was ever nourished by the lodestar of Aquinas himself, whose mentorship Norrie’s own work thoroughly reflected. So his work injected the master’s spirit into a purported “synthesis” to relativize its controlling “need for certitude.” Whatever was at work served to defuse any defensiveness or sense of parti pris in Clarke’s philosophical inquiry. His penchant rather inclined him to embrace other modes of thought, usually to display how the spirit of Aquinas allows one to do just that. Despite an unmistakable apologetic goal in much of his work, his unfailingly irenic spirit sought to lead others to Aquinas by invitation rather than by...