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10. Reading Augustine through Dionysius: Aquinas’s Correction of One Platonism by Another
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10 Reading Augustine through Dionysius Aquinas’s Correction of One Platonism by Another Wayne J. Hankey Nothing presents more problems for those who would enter the mentality of the medieval philosophical theologian than the task which has been set for this volume. Trying to judge the influence on Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine of one of his authoritative ancient sources requires us to surrender, at least provisionally , what we think we know about the authority in question. As heirs of Renaissance and modern philology, and of the modern constructions of the history of philosophy, we will almost certainly have a different, perhaps even opposed, view of the source than a medieval theologian would have had. Ironically, our problem increases with the greater sophistication of the scholastics of the later Middle Ages because their sources became more rich and the mediations of what they understand about their authorities became more complex. In the twentieth century, we have become aware of how much in form and content moderns impose when they construct their “histories” of philosophy —though mentioning Aristotle, Theophratus, Augustine, Proclus, Simplicius , Averroes, and Aquinas’s De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas reminds us that the activity itself is part of philosophy and theology in antiquity and the Middle Ages. Our oppositions, for example, between Plato, Platonism, and Neoplatonism will not be made by as well informed a historian as Aqui- nas. In this he is following one of his most authoritative sources for the history of Platonism, Augustine. Both of them knew a good deal about Platonism but, with the exception of the Timaeus for Augustine, neither seems to have known the dialogues.1 More importantly, in contrast to the tendency in modern histories, Aquinas follows the ancients who seek to make philosophical differences complementary and to see the historical movement as providentially guided. Without reducing them to one another, Aquinas will tend to incorporate the more kataphatic and intellectualist Augustine for whom we know by turning to the ideas in the divine Word within the systematic structures developed by theurgic and apophatic Neoplatonism, where the human soul is turned decisively toward the sensible and material. Thus, Proclus, mediated most authoritatively by the pseudo-Dionysius, helps construct the frame within which Augustine will make his crucially important contributions .2 Perhaps, most importantly, although Aquinas is careful about the degrees of authority of different kinds of texts, he has little—which is not to say no—sense of the differences between genres, so texts of very different kinds are treated as if they were equally sources for conceptual propositions which figure as positions within the scholastic dialectic. We may indicate something of these problems and complexities by brief examples in respect to the three most important intellectual authorities for Thomas, all of whom are crucial to this paper: Aristotle, Augustine, and the pseudo-Dionysius.3 1. On Augustine, see Stephen Gersh, “The Medieval Legacy from Ancient Platonism,” in The Platonic Tradition in the Middle Ages: A Doxographic Approach, ed. Stephen Gersh and Maarten J. F. M. Hoenen (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2002), 24–30; and F. Van Fleteren, “Plato, Platonism ,” in Saint Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. A. Fitzgerald (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999), 631–54; on Aquinas, see R. J. Henle, Saint Thomas and Platonism: A Study of the “Plato” and “Platonici” Texts in the Writings of Saint Thomas (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1956), xxi; and my “Aquinas and the Platonists,” in Gersh and Hoenen, eds., The Platonic Tradition in the Middle Ages, 279–324. 2. See R. D. Crouse, “Augustinian Platonism in Early Medieval Theology,” in Augustine: From Rhetor to Theologian, ed. Joanne McWilliams (Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1992), 109–20; Giulio D’Onofrio, “The Concordia of Augustine and Dionysius: Toward a Hermeneutic of the Disagreement of Patristic Sources in John the Scot’s Periphyseon,” in Eriugena: East and West, ed. Bernard McGinn and Willemien Otten (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 115–40, is a useful survey. On their fundamental differences and the assimilation of Augustinian conceptions to a Dionysian logic, see W. J. Hankey, “Dionysian Hierarchy in St. Thomas Aquinas: Tradition and Transformation,” in Denys l’Aréopagite et sa postérité en Orient et en Occident, ed. Ysabel de Andia (Paris: Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 1997), 428–38. 3. For more on how Aquinas treats the history of philosophy and how he understood Aristotle and Dionysius, see my “Thomas’s Neoplatonic Histories: His Following...