Praeambula Fidei: Thomism and the God of the Philosophers

Prologue

Prologue The praeambula fidei presuppose that philosophy is distinct from theology , an autonomous discipline whose arguments do not depend on the acceptance of any revelation. Of course, it is philosophy in the classical sense that provides the praeambula fidei, a search for understanding fueled by wonder that in its quest for causes rises finally to knowledge of the first cause of all that is. For Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle was the paradigmatic instance of the philosopher and his writings conveyed what the unaided human intellect can know of the divine. Philosophical proofs of God’s existence and the establishment of some of his attributes provide the content of what came to be called praeambula fidei. The phrase itself is a theological one; it is the label the believer puts on achievements first made by nonbelievers. Of course Aristotle did not see his philosophical effort as propaideutic to a further science that would be called theology because it had the revealed God as its subject. It is the believer who sees the culminating achievement of the telos of philosophy in those terms. But what the phrase praeambula fidei names does not depend on the faith of the thinker—or his lack of it. The presence or absence of religious faith is incidental to philosophical arguments as such. But believers have always had a special stake in the status of the praeambula fidei because of the implications of Romans 1:19–20. Vatican I made it de fide that human beings can, apart from grace and revelation, come to knowledge of God from the things that are made. St. Paul, both in Athens and in Rome, presupposed a knowledge of the divine to which he could relate the truth that God had become incarnate in Jesus. Acknowledgment of the existence of God removes a massive impediment to accepting the truths of Christianity. The praeambula fidei have therefore always played a role in apologetics, the discourse meant to dispose one for the grace of faith. The classical understanding of philosophy has been abandoned by philosophers over the decades that have been dominated by what is called mod35 ern philosophy. Increasingly, secular philosophers looked with a dim eye on efforts to prove the existence of God, but then, as I suggested in Characters in Search of Their Author, the possibility of any knowledge, of the world, let alone of God, has been rendered problematic by recent philosophical positions . This has made the task of the defender of the praeambula fidei more complicated. His first task must be to recover the classical view of philosophy. To do so is initially and largely a matter of showing that the positions that have sapped the foundations of classical philosophy are themselves incoherent and thus untenable. That is, the new antiprinciples do not represent a rational alterative to the principles of classical philosophy. The first task is to reestablish realism—that is, that in knowing we first know the world and not our concepts —not by proving it, since only a fool can deny it, but by showing that the denial is foolish. Undeniably, the believer is motivated to take on this task by the importance the praeambula fidei have in the teaching of the Church. In such motivation we find the foundation of Christian philosophy properly understood.  Difficulties for the praeambula fidei have not come from developments in secular philosophy alone, however. Developments within Thomism itself have had the doubtless unintended effect of enfeebling the notion of the praeambula fidei. The revival of Thomism and the rise of medieval studies, while distinct in many respects, are in others closely related. Medieval research provided ammunition for those who had to answer the charge that during the ages of faith, during the Middle Ages, for a millennium, no philosophy had been done, but only theology. A secular conception of philosophizing that was one of the products of the turn philosophy had taken with Descartes did not find itself mirrored in the Middle Ages and, arguing that this was no accident, it was eventually declared that faith and philosophy were antithetical, that religious belief is an impediment to philosophy, and that philosophy properly understood makes religious faith untenable. In response to this challenge, new thought was given to the way in which Christians engage in philosophy, to the notion of Christian philosophy. Ironically, in some cases, this led to the calling into question of the autonomy of philosophy , and therefore of the praeambula fidei. 36 The Erosion of the Doctrine [3...