Thomas, Thomisms, and Truth

THOMAS, THOMISMS, AND TRUTH BRUCE D. MARSHALL Saint Olaf College Northfield, Minnesota I HE GREAT, as Hegel's dictum has it, condemn the rest f us to the task of understanding them. We take our evenge upon the great, especialy upon great thinkers, by enlisting them for our own purposes, as our supporters and defenders in conflicts perhaps quite different from those in which they themselves were engaged. Thomas Aquinas was a master, virtually without peer, at the intellectual enlistment of the great, and he himself has been perhaps as widely and variously recruited as any of those to whom he devoted his own attentions. When we enlist Thomas for our own purposes with some consistency and success, the result is a " Thomism," of which there have been many, sometimes quite conflicting varieties. My article " Aquinas as Postliberal Theologian " does not propose anything so developed as a Thomism, but perhaps at most a fragment of one.1 In their responses to it, Frederick J. Crosson and Louis 1 The Thomist 53 (1989) : 353-402. The interpretation of Thomas proposed there bears a family resemblance to that of some recent Thomisms and so is not wholly without precedent. Cf. Michel Corbin, Le chemin de la theologie chez Thomas D'Aquin (Paris: Beauchesne, 1974); Otto Herman Pesch, Die Theologie der Rechtfertigung bei Martin Luther und Thomas von Aquin (Mainz: Matthias-Grunewald-Verlag, 1967) ; idem, Thomas von Aquin: Grenze und Grosse mittelalterlichen Theologie, 2nd ed. (Mainz: MatthiasGrunewald -Verlag, 1989); Gerhard Ludwig Muller, "Hebt das Sola-FidePrinzip die Moglichkeit einer naturlichen Theologie auf? Eine Ruckfrage bei Thomas von Aquin," Catholica 40 (1986) : 59-96; Victor Preller, Divine Science and the Science of God (Princeton: University Press, 1967). Reference to these Thomisms should not, of course, be taken to constitute agreement with any particular claim one of them may make. 499 500 BRUCE D. MARSHALL Roy, O.P., argue that as a piece of Thomism-as the enlistment of Thomas in defense and support of a particular contemporary view of truth, meaning, and epistemic justification-it is at best unpromising. In so doing, they indicate, at least in part, what views on these matters they think Thomas can plausibly be enlisted to support, that is, the sort of Thomism they find more convincing. Great thinkers are not, however, defenseless against our efforts to recruit them for our ends. Especially in the case of one whose thought is as ramified, precise, and historically distant as is that of Thomas Aquinas, these efforts are likely to meet with some resistance. (Indeed, we will be inclined to distrust them if they claim not to.) We may even find ourselves compelled to refashion our own ends in order not to forgo plausible appeal to his precedent and support. Sometimes different Thomisms will no doubt include purposes distant enough from Thomas's own (as best we can grasp them) that it may be impossible to adjudicate conflicts between them by appeal to his texts. But in many cases it ought to be possible to decide reasonably between competing Thomisms (that is, to decide which more plausibly enlists Thomas for its own purposes) by assessing the amount and type of resistance each meets from the text of Thomas (of course this includes the possibility that competition between Thomisms reflects unresolved conflict within Thomas's own thought). In the present case the prospect of reasonable adjudication seems much increased by the fact that the large issues with which it is concerned -truth, meaning, and justification-tend to coalesce around what seems to be a straightforward matter of fact: whether Thomas taught that persons without Christian faith, and especially pre-Christian philosophers, knew, or were even able to know, God. Crosson and Roy both argue that the implausibility of my interpretation of Aquinas on these larger issues-the linking of a comprehensively coherentist account of justification an~ a contextualist account of meaning to Thomas's correspondence notion of truth-is especially clear in its attribution to Thomas of a posi- THOMA$, THOMISMS, AND TRUTH 501 tion he manifestly rejects: that a pre-Christian philosopher like Aristotle did not, and indeed could not, know God. This seems obvious to most modern Thomisms, which, however...